Baker's Branch

  Author’s Note: When I first came to Sand Springs in 1966 to teach school, there was not a more iconic place in town than The Pioneer Barber Shop located just south of Second and Main on Main. Roy Bowman and his son Roger cut hair there, Roy, I think, from the 1920's until his passing in the 1980's. Roger served a hitch in the army right out of high school in the late 1950's, came home and started cutting hair and was doing that when I arrived. I honestly believe that every serious sportsman in Sand Springs (and a good many of the city fathers and other outlaws) got their hair cut at the Pioneer. Many limits of quail and bass were shot, caught, and eaten inside its narrow confines. I came to love the place. Often I went there when I didn't need a haircut. I wasn't the only one that did that. Count me in. Take me home country roads. One day while there, Roger, for no apparent reason, asked me what I liked about teaching. I told him it wasn't for the money. I...

  Were it possible, you could not order up out of a catalogue a worse week, weather-wise, to hold a muzzleloading deer season than the one just ended on October 30. Hot, hot, hot. Swarms of mosquitoes, fat, sassy, and full of my blood. No rain. Not a shower. Hunters all over this state are desperate for rain. The only deer Brian Loveland and I were seeing were a half hour before dark in the middle of green fields, materializing mysteriously, and seemingly just standing up and feeding as if they had been bedded where they stood, in the middle of the fields all day waiting for dark in order to feed. Then, I think, they laid down again about five in the morning to get ready for yet another long, hot day. Brian and I talked about it one evening in camp around dinner, one out of cans and zip-locs, no fire, before turning in. “So, what do you think?” I asked, fishing as cold a diet coke as I could find out of the ice chest, “What’s our chances?” “I don’t know. It’s too hot for ...

  There is not a finer sport for those that like the drift of feathers in the air than a good hot dove shoot in the waning days of hot, hot summertime. It’s a different hunt than a duck hunt in December, or a quail hunt in November. Before the infirmities of age, and its accompanying medical machinery, overtook me, I spent the greater part of my late summer dove days in southwestern Oklahoma, the land of the purple sage, twisted mesquite, shimmering cottonwoods, and no water. Desert country, if the state has any. The doves love it. Plenty of harvested wheat on the ground to eat, windmill tanks for water, and all those mesquites to nest in and make more doves for Conrad to shoot. For many years I bunked in the old Nance Hotel in “downtown” Granite. The Nance was a place right off a Hollywood, western movie set, complete with varnished wooden handrails and columns leading up wooden stairs to a series of small, sparsely furnished, but neat-as-a-pin, rooms; spectacularly clean. E...

  Nobody knows what a bullet, or an arrow, is going to do after it leaves the firing line. They think they do, but they don't; not 100 percent. Any rifleman or archer with experience will tell you that magic bullets, and arrows, exist. Conspiracist authors, most of whom have had no practical experience with firearms themselves, book learned though they may be, like to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald could not have killed the President, and wounded Gov. Connally with just one bullet; that somebody else had to be involved. They are wrong. They are wrong, but I don't care. All of that is history, and the Warren Commission got it right. I just continue to be amazed at the stories I hear concerning both bullet and arrow trajectories, and the strange things that happen related to same. A story Dave Hladik told me the other day regarding his bow hunting son, Clint, put me to thinking about it. I think I shot the first falling dead duck Clint ever saw. It fell at his feet where h...

  Editor's Note: I am Conrad's brother, I do play poker but I'm not that good. Otherwise I'd be paying somebody else to post these articles. I have a brother that plays tournament-grade poker. He’s good. I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever won a game of hearts or spades, or even old maid. Fish? The card game? I don’t think so. I do know that in any of those games you have to play the cards you’re dealt. Doing that, sometimes you have to build a hand out of nothing. In that regard, poker can be a very creative enterprise. Same as fishing. When Dave Hladik, from Mannford, and I dropped my boat into the water at the Prairie View ramp late this past week, we found the water in Lake Keystone high, muddy, and wind tossed. I’ve said for years I cannot catch a fish on a north wind, but that’s the hand we were dealt. I still play it at every opportunity. On the water, still within swimming distance of the ramp, we started sorting through our hand, keeping this card; thro...

  There’s this thing about muzzleloading for deer that both the new to the game as well as the old (that would be me) forget. Black powder does not produce one-half the knockdown power that modern smokeless powder does. “Dead deer” get up and run away all the time during black powder season. The biggest part of a black powder firearm’s knockdown power comes from the weight of the bullet coming out of the end of the barrel. Even at that, the “stopping” power of even a seemingly overlarge bullet is not to be trusted. The minimum legal bullet size of a muzzleloader in Oklahoma is .45 caliber. Most use fifty cal. as an absolute minimum bullet choice, and it does an adequate job. Most of the time. During the American civil war, many rifles, on both sides, were launching .68 caliber bullets, horrendous junks of lead when held in the hand and looked at dispassionately, in the direction of soft tissue lined up in unwavering company fronts. The results were devastating. Ask General Pick...

    Here’s what I know about bird migration: Next to nothing. Maybe a little less. I’ve been reading about it (studying?) since I was six years old. That was when in Charlestown, Maryland, smack on the edge of Chesapeake Bay one “city” block from our house, I spotted what I came to know as a black and white warbler on the side of a tree down by the water where I was fishing. It was close enough that I could see all of its dramatic markings, so close that I had the feeling I was holding the “new” (to me) bird in my hand. I didn’t know what kind of bird it was, nor did Miss Wright, my teacher, when I asked her about it the next day. She handed me a bird I.D. book, showed me the index, made me promise to bring it back (which I did), and I took it home, not knowing I had begun a lifelong journey that continues to this moment. Well, think about it: You are reading about it, my interest, as we speak. So it’s still going on, right? I had only just begun “The Adventures of Dic...