Baker's Branch

  Hunters and fishermen are at least as interesting as the things for which they hunt and fish. Here's one way: Size matters to nearly the whole lot of them, and in a myriad of ways. In that grouping, I should be considered no different than any of the rest. Were people not interested in who caught the biggest string of fish, bass tournaments never would have been. Want to know the best bullet size for deer hunting? Ask me 'n “Joe.” I guarantee you I'll say one thing, and Joe will say another, and on and on it goes. For years I carried in my truck a set of postal scales I picked up at a flea market. I used them to measure the body weights of game birds, particularly quail, but also pheasants and prairie chickens. I still carry in my truck a spring scale and a steel tape to measure the weight of turkey gobblers (hens, too, in season), as well as spur lengths. I haven't held a quail in my hand to weigh (let alone eat) for years, would that I could. Show me a quail t...

  Look yonder across that winter wheat field, is that a turkey? ‘ Bout two hundred yards? Well, by golly, I think it is. He’s standing there looking over here. See that neck, fire engine red, stretched high? Oh, yeah. He sees us, alright.  That winter wheat is a beautiful emerald green fabric glistening in the sun, rippled by the wind. Yes, the wind. That danged wind. I swear it has blown non-stop for three solid weeks; first from the north, then from the south. Take your pick. Pick your poison. It doesn’t matter. In this country, in the spring, the wind is going to blow.  The wind in this country messes with the hunting and fishing. Here lately, the older I get, I’ve noticed my body has taken a sort of leaning-set, left to right, noticeable if you walk behind me and watch me walk. It doesn’t matter. The harder the wind blows, the harder I hunt and fish. I’ll topple over one of these days, leaning into that wind, and that’ll be it. I wouldn’t live anywhere else.  Loo...

  A lot has been written about a wild turkey’s ability to see things, and rightfully so. Make even the slightest wrong move at the wrong time and a wild turkey’s eyesight seems to be able to see through concrete walls.   A wild turkey’s power of visual resolution, or that of any bird for that matter, has been estimated to be upwards of eight times that of humans. I believe it. I think they can see the whisker roots of uncamouflaged, male faces shaved yesterday, and know them to be human. Yes, I do.   That being said, not enough has been said about a turkey’s ability to both hear sounds long distance, and pinpoint within one yard the exact origination point of that sound. It is yet another characteristic of the species that makes you think that given their inability to scent danger, they would otherwise be unkillable in a fair chase hunt.   One time Jerry Ballard of Hominy and I were chasing gobblers up on the old Dixie Oil Lease up in the wild, Big Osage just a...

  Sometimes you get your hat blown off when you hunt turkeys. It gets windy occasionally in this country in April. Getting your hat blown off is probably better than what happens to the turkeys, it suddenly occurs to me. I don’t like hunting turkeys in the wind, anyway. Do you? I was put to thinking about windy weather turkey hunting by a report Adam Webster and his eight year old son, Lane, delivered to me in my kitchen this past week. Lane’s my grandson. His dad had him out on his first youth turkey hunt, way out west in wild Woodward County. Their orders concluding the hunt were to report to me regardless of the hunt’s outcome, and that’s why we were all sitting around the kitchen table. There’s no such thing as a fruitless turkey hunt. Something, I said something, happens on every turkey hunt, and I wanted to hear all the details. I already knew they hadn’t killed a turkey, as they hadn’t come dragging one into the kitchen. Fine. Tell me what else happened. Every hour spent hun...

  I was upriver a few weeks back, the Cimarron River, fishing for striped bass with Leon Mears of Mannford. We found them, and caught them on swimbaits, in all the regular places you would expect at this time of the year. Leon has been catching them in those places for years.  For me, there were several interesting features to the trip, not least of which was the water temperature. In one spot it was 49.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Both stripers and sand bass spawn in water at, or near, 55 degrees, and, remember, I said we there several weeks ago. That would be January, and several of the female bass I cleaned that night had eggs, and one male a fully developed sperm sac.  No matter the date on the calendar, the fish were obviously taking their cue from the temperature of the water; probably from the amount of daylight available in the sky, and who knows what else. Like I said, to me it was interesting, and very instructive as to where to go when to catch fish in Lake Keystone. ...

  Lake Keystone’s water clarity at this writing is as good as I’ve seen it since before last May’s floods. It’s as good as it gets all the way to the dam, and the fishing it provides shows it. Stripers, catfish, sand bass , and crappie are definitely coming on strong, with the first two species mentioned actually leading the charge ahead of the sandies and crappie. That’s a little different than what we expect in this country, somewhat the reverse order, but that could easily change this week with predicted warmer air temperatures.   Some of us have been jug lining  both major arms of the lake, baiting up with live shad, and bringing in some nice blue cats up to thirty-five pounds out of that blue water. Where’s the frying pan? Got grease?   Jack Test and his boys of Guymon, drove down to my place for dinner the other night, and a wild two day outing on the Cimarron Arm of the lake. Jack, his son Bryon, and grandsons J.B. and Jacob, and friend Jim Mattocks, lined out...

  I may have bought the last gun I am ever going to buy, I'm not sure. I mean, I'm 86 years old, right? There has to be a "Last Gun" in my life, right? The cheap part of me (small) is trying to guess when that time is nigh that I will buy a gun and die before I have time to "powder" it up. It's important. Why leave a bunch of quality tools lying around that my heirs get to use, and I don't? Selfish? Sure, call the cops. Cheap people could never be drug addicts, but they might buy guns. I'm guessing, no experience here, that no crack or heroin addict ever plunked down the Big Green and worried if they would live to use up all of the product. It would seem that gun buying is a mania that filters more through the brain than it does the liver. I have two guns, both rifles, that belonged to two different Great Grandfathers in my family. That would be Grandpa Schaeffer (Augustus) and Grandpa Vollertsen (Fritz). Both guns are well over a hundred years o...