Baker's Branch

  During deer season, Brian Loveland of Sand Springs and I eat home cooked meals in a 12 x 14 wall tent. Well, the tent is our home for the duration of the season, and that's where we cook our meals. I really think that TV cook, Emeril, would fit in, in our camp. He's about the only yankee I've ever thought might be able to get his brain wrapped around redneck ways. It's just a feeling. I could be wrong about that, but you watch him throw handfuls of this, and handfuls of that, into a pot and yell, "Bam!" when he does it, and you get a sense of something redneck a slick, New York TV producer can't cover up. Like I said, I could be wrong about that. Certainly, in a good, downhome deer camp, you should not expect to find any measuring spoons, or measuring cups. Meat thermometers? Croutons? A little lemon zest? White wine? Good grief. Call your mommy, will 'ya? All of our food up on the wild Arkansas River is heart horrible, and fried the same as Grandma ...

  I was digging for treasure. I knew where it was. Way down in there. I found it, too. All the way to the bottom.  Pam came out into the garage and looked over my shoulder. “Well?”, she asked.   “Look at this!” I said, holding up my prize for examination. “And more! Two tenderloins and four sirloins. Not a bit of freezer burn anywhere. Like new, even if a year old. Man! I’m charcoaling them tomorrow.”   Maybe yours doesn’t, but our freezer holds treasure from year to year that escapes being eaten, and we eat game and fish out here on The Branch a lot. If you aren’t careful, it escapes to the bottom of the freezer (somehow) uneaten, in perfectly good condition, hidden covertly by new “draftees”.   You must dig for treasure. He who seeks, finds.   I already had a new deer from the recent muzzleloading season, with the prospect of more to come during the high power season. I wasn’t just searching for treasure, but more room as well. You’d think our f...

Some of the field sports carry way too much drama. Deer hunting is one of them. I like saying that because it’s true, and, of course, we’re right in the middle of the “Big Deer Season” right now. Sometimes we need to back it off a couple notches, if you catch my drift. Hunter success on deer in Oklahoma the last time I checked is somewhere close, but still below, 50 percent. Hunter success on squirrels? Hoooo, boy. If you count success as one squirrel headed for the pan, and I do, then the success ratio is somewhere pretty close to 100 percent. “Eat more squirrels,” the deer would probably say.  The daily limit on squirrels is 10, either fox or gray species, with 20 allowed in possession. That’s a lot of meat, in case you haven’t bagged up any squirrels lately and have forgotten how quickly 10 bushytails will overfill a gallon Ziploc bag.  The squirrel season is the longest annual hunting season in Oklahoma, lasting from May 15 through the following January 31. Even so, we are...

  The wall tent is up, tucked snugly into an old corral about 500 yards off the main channel of the Arkansas River just south of Ponca City. The cots are set, mattresses laid, and the good cold weather sleeping bags unrolled for the mice to play in when we’re not there. The tent is fine, tight against the wind, and easy to warm with the sheepherder. The old sheet metal wood burner is leveled, a stack of fine white ash cut to stove specs, split, and stacked just inside the tent flap away from the rain and snow. We hope it snows, we hope it rains, just to let the world know Brian Loveland and Conrad are on their own hook, warm, dry, and ready for Osama. The food supply, enough for Cox’s army, takes up two pretty good-sized ice chests and has in it deer meat from last year’s hunt, the makings for ham, eggs, biscuits, two or three different kinds of stew, cinnamon rolls to heat on the wood burner with tin foil, potatoes, onions, you name it, and jugs of milk so cold it will make your t...

  There’s something big and hairy roaming that country down yonder between Wister and Broken Bow along the Kiamichi River and State Highway 259, alright. One day this past week it was Stacy Gibson, Brian Loveland, and me.  Well, I’m not as hairy as I used to be, and you couldn’t count Brian as such, either, except he sports a pretty good beard to make up for that which he used to carry topside. And Stacy… well, Stacy is as wild and hairy as he ever has been, born and raised in a country, LeFlore County, full of mountains, myths and muscadine grapes, all of which is what we had come for.   Mountains are geological upheavals of the earth’s crust, often placed in inconvenient locations where travel is concerned. Myths are stories that are… well, maybe true, maybe not. Muscadines are wild grapes that ripen all over that country at this time of the year, make the best jelly imaginable, and in the early days of this country’s history saved the colonists from total “tee-tota...

  I collect what I call “lost and found” stories like some people collect old coins, pocket knives, or antiques. They’re not all that common. Generally, you lose something, and it stays lost. But not always. The retrieval of something dear, causes poor rednecks (I am one) to shout with joy; maybe even shed a tear of happiness, so sparse are their personal belongings. Rich people can afford to lose things of value, so easily can they replace them. There’s more where that came from, right? Not out here on Baker’s Branch. Alan Karstetter gave me another lost and found story to add to my collection the other day at daylight out underneath the Highway 64 bridge on Lake Keystone. Alan, Snook Pollard, David Campbell and I were fishing for stripers just as a peach-colored sunrise was topping the The Keystone Ancient Forest to the east of us. It went sorta’ like this: “Conrad, you won’t believe what happened right here about a week ago.” “What.” “Snook hung a nice fish, maybe a ...

  It was hot. One of the few times it has been hot this summer and not raining.  Eddie Bostic and his father Hyman and I had found a piece of speckled shade to cool off in next to the truck where we were unloading paving stones the size of door mats. Hyman didn’t need the stones in his yard anymore.  I did, as a mud-free walkway to the storm shelter during tornado season. Hyman, 87, had insisted on being on the receiving end of the stones coming out of the back of Eddie’s truck and into his hands where he stacked them in two, waist high piles just north of the north wall of my house.  Hyman Bostic is a marvel. I have known him since his twin boys, Eddie and Michael, played bluegrass for me at my house. I had them in class at Page somewhere back in the 1960’s. The kids at school laughed at their “hillbilly” music, but the boys knew I liked it and used to bring it over to the house, hoping for an “A” maybe.  Since then, the boys have played that music on s...