Baker's Branch

  My grandson, Lane Webster, and I might’ve been coming around a bend of the Nile, full of crocodiles and reeds, in our little petit dhow (boat), but we weren’t. We were in my sixteen-foot, aluminum, runabout, coming around that northside bend of the Highway 51 rip rap, just east of Freddie’s steakhouse in Mannford. All fishing trips start out as adventures, and then adventurous memories. It’s why some of us go. We don’t need more fish. We haven’t yet eaten all we have in the freezer. Daniel Boone didn’t keep westering just to find more land. He was bored with the sameness that collected behind him everywhere he went. Me, too. You round that corner I just mentioned, and look due east, straight down the line of rip rap, and you will see two medium-sized cottonwoods, the only trees there for a quarter of a mile, growing right out of the rocks; the trees themselves a marvelous metaphor for the tenacity of all living things. In the shade of those two trees, some sort of gamefish ...

One day this past week, early, before the water got high and ridiculous, I picked up a few crappie while tossing a chartreuse and marabou jig as I walked the banks of Baker's Branch near my house.  It'd take a stick of dynamite to find a crappie in there now, but at the time of which I speak they actually seemed to be heading for the bank to spawn. I was picking them up in about five feet of water. Then it started to rain.  The fish were not large, about three-quarters of a pound, but were beautifully decked out in spring spawning colors of pearl white, lavender green and blue, and their fins edged in velvet black. There is not a prettier fish swimming than an Oklahoma crappie in springtime, not even a rainbow trout, and if we're going to sit down at the table with them, I'll give you 10 rainbows for every crappie you slide my way across the fish cleaning table.  I had about six or seven on a chain stringer I towed along with me, and felt pretty confident that in that l...

  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. ...