Baker's Branch

                  I don't know if ol' Cliff was a witch, a "diviner", or just plain lucky, but what he did down yonder that afternoon on the campus of East Central University spooked me plenty. I was a kid, barely eighteen, working my way through college with a summer job on the school maintenance crew, and already had more on my plate of a natural sort than I could understand.          I didn't need anything supernatural cluttering up thought processes still in the early stages of development, but," it was", as they say," what it was", or was it? You tell me.        Out of all the people on The ECU campus Cliff was by far and away the least "educated", even less than me. I had at least graduated from high school. Cliff? I'm pretty sure he never got much past the eighth grade, if that far, yet he knew things that nobody else on campus knew, even the maintenance crew boss, a scrawny...

                          Grandma Howell bought two hundred leghorn chicks a year knowing that in a good year only a hundred or so would survive. Then we ate them. One at a time, spaced out over the better part of a year doing it.          Fried chicken dinners down at grandma's in Little Dixie did not come in succession, they came in well spaced intervals making them all the more gratifying. Garden green beans with cream sauce and pearl onions, mashed potatoes and cream gravy, fried okra, pickled beets and butter milk biscuits. Sweetened iced tea so cold it made your teeth hurt washed it all down.        Dessert? Well, yes. Peach cobbler from her small grove, or maybe a blackberry cobbler picked from vines growing wild down where her one cow, a Guernsey, grazed making milk, cream and butter without even realizing it.        Grandma raised...

                David Campbell called me the other day to let me know that he'd placed a hog trap of some sort on his deer lease with the expectations of catching a porker (he had seen plenty of signs lately while searching for morels) and did I have any ideas on how to butcher and prepare same for a meal. Well, yes I did.        Back in the 80's and 90's I spent nearly every weekend in season guiding goose and crane hunters on a giant cattle ranch in West Texas. It was a six hour drive from my home here on the Branch for which I began counting the hours for my Friday getaway about every Wednesday. In a place where the buffalo once thronged, I now guided city boys for morning waterfowl hunts so that I could have the afternoons to myself. It was like handing a box of Blue Diamond Strike-Anywhere-Matches to a pyromaniac.        I hunted everything except deer, the rancher's favorite, and soon found...

                   To me the best part of a turkey hunt has always been the long walk between daylight and dark. There is an adventure ahead of you, where or when is anybody's guess. Maybe right over there in that long string of cottonwoods lining the creek where the night before a whole drove flew up to roost, hens clucking, gobblers gobbling, marking the evening's first coyote opening up way out yonder.          This guy, you may or may not have known a long time, squats in the dirt in front of the pickup with a short stick in his right hand, his truck keys in his left and begins to draw a map in the dirt with a flashlight gripped in his teeth to make things "perfectly clear".        "Right here", he says, making the first line in dirt the texture of flour and the color of ocher, "is the creek, where the turkeys is 'bout three hunnert yards yonder. There's a small herd of Angus u...

              Yeah, we're here today, but our winter birds are leaving as they do every year about this time. We feed and watch birds out here on the branch all winter, looking forward in September, even, for northern species that won't arrive until around the beginning of archery season. The summer birds, the ones that arrive every year to feed out of the same feeders, arrive around May 5 in a journey that brings them all the way north from Central America.        Earlier than that, almost exactly April 15 every year, the warblers (dozens of different species) arrive from even further south, the Caribbean, and also Central America, all part of a fantastic ticking ecological clock wound, maybe, at about the same time we were, who knows. Snakes? Lizards? Oh, yeah, almost exactly April 15 every year, about the time the turkeys are gobbling real well.        It'd be hard for me to guess how many time...

                                                                                                                                                         There's a reason we live way out here on Baker's Branch, Pam and me. We wanted to "get away", and we did. Back in those days she trusted me, and saw things pretty much all my way for no apparent reason. We were both young and foolish. She matured, I didn't.         When it came time about 1976 that we started thinking about building a house of our own, she let me choose the place and the type of home. The lot I selected on Lak...