Baker's Branch

Women are weird. Oh, yes they are. I don’t care what you say, and it’s a personality trait that seems to cross species lines, turkeys to humans, for example, and vice versa. For years, fifty, now, I have had as much fun with hen turkeys during the spring gobbler season as I have had with the gobblers, even. We look at one another and hear music that nobody else does. We dance, maybe, where nobody else can see us. It’s personal. For years I met gobblers like I did belligerent men in the bars of my youth, where I acted an idiot, and somehow kept my name out of the paper. You never heard about it, and family honor shamed me back into “line” before you could have; no credit to myself. In the spring, you better mess with the mail “bar” turkeys only (you will get into some fights) unless you want to go to jail, but the women turkeys are going to mess with you anyway, whether you want them to or not. Think of the Kardashians, and those “Party Girls Down South”. Well, maybe you do want...

  Keystone was high, muddy, and getting higher one day last week when David Campbell of Sand Springs and I put my boat in the water off the Prairie View Ramp in Mannford. We had planned on a black bass/crappie combo until we spotted the rising red line of the wild Cimarron River. We had to re-shuffle the deck and cut the cards, again. When you’re retired, life is full of pleasant options. It was David’s idea to fish the rising water right in front of a tiny waterfall chuckling and gurgling into the back of a little inlet where I had caught many a bass and crappie before. He thought it looked “good”. “Well, yeah,” I said, it looks good, but it’s a bait fishing spot. You got a bucket of minnows or a can of worms on ya’, I didn’t see ‘em when we launched the boat.” “Right here, buddy,” he said tossing me an ancient looking, small jar crammed full of Berkley Gulp artificial bait worms. The jar label was nearly worn gone. I opened the lid. The artificial worms positively looked real, li...