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Speaker 1: Welcome to this country Life. I’m your host, Brent Reeves from coon hunting to trotlining and just in general country living. I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences in life lessons. This Country Life is presented by Case Knives from the store More Studio on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast that airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I’ve got some stories to share Brooklyn Bradford and Butterflies. For all you folks who thought old Brentley was done telling turkey stories, guess what he ain’t. This one’s going to be more about the people in the stories than the turkeys themselves. But it’s gonna wind up twenty twenty six. Anyway, the whole turkey season that is so joined me at the fire and let’s get started. Two years ago, a week or so before Thanksgiving, I was in New York City, standing near Rockefeller Center, looking down on the skating rink where Bailey and Alexis and a whole herd of our friends and their children were scratching up the ice. Only like wide eyed tourists from Arkansas, can I abstained from participating in that struggle. Walking on flat level ground is a big enough challenge for me. Why would I want to add any degree of difficulty to that by attempting it on ice with shoes fashioned out of brogans and meat cleavers. No, not mean. And as I stood there, propped up against a building where Kate Spade was selling shoes that cost more than our plane fare from Arkansas, I watched the people going by sightseers just like me, most not dressed like me, or that sounded like me, but fueled my imagination and desire to be funny. And in doing so, I filmed myself saying this, well, go I don’t live and say nobody within a mile of me killed the turkey last year. Little did I know that erroneous declaration from two years ago would come full circle this last spring in Alabama. Remember a few episodes ago when I was chasing turkeys with Reed Duval, who is the CFO of Turkeys for Tomorrow. Well, Reed and I were talking about how their membership was growing all over the country and they had a chapter referred to as a flock in New York City. I told him about I told him about that little video I filmed while I was up there, and he laughed, saying, as crazy as it sounds, that I might have been on less than ten miles to the south and across the East River from where I stood poking funded all those city folks is Brooklyn, New York. Within the two point six million people rubbing elbows on the sidewalks of Brooklyn lives a man named George lilacccus. George is a first generation American born in Brooklyn following his parents’ arrival from Greece. Years before I discovered George. The way people meet folks these days, and it was on Instagram. I started following the TFT Gotham Spurs, which is the first turkeysh for Tomorrow’s flock in the state of New York, and while I was checking out their page, I saw a post highlighting a handmade of Brooklyn Bon’s wing Bone call. Now, one thing led to another, and with a peaking curiosity that could have killed the whole liter of cats, I started looking at the beautiful handmade yelpers and message the Instagram page of Brooklyn Bones, inquiring about him. Well. George introduced himself through direct messages, and in short order we agreed the scheduling online meeting to visit Old George hit the ground running in nineteen seventy two, and growing up he participated in the narchery at school. He was introduced to hunting by his father Paul, and bow hunting by his uncle Mike. They hunted the Catskill Mountains, and George killed his first buck with a bow when he was eighteen. The next year he’d smash his first turkey, and when that happened, George found out what his true passion was in the outdoors. Weekends holidays throughout his childhood were spent on the beaver Kill River, a forty four mile free flowing trout habitat known as the birthplace of American dry fly fishing. George’s parents have had a weekend home there for many years now, and it was from there that many of George’s hunting and fishing adventures would kick off. I was waiting for him to tell me that his father, his uncle, or some crusty old New York mountain man taught him how to make calls when he was just a young man, and that he’d been making them now for many years. That’s what the calls on his page look like artfully turned pieces that looked like they were better suited for display than in a hunting vest two years ago. George has been making wingbone calls for two years. He’s made a living following in his father’s footsteps in the auto repair business, and his accent is like no other turkey hunter. I know he can probably say the same about me, But folks usually find their calling if they keep looking around and paying attention. And I have no knowledge of George’s day job expertise, but if his mechanic and skills or anything like his call making, the fellow would be hard pressed to find a better garage to fix his car. We talked for an hour or more about hunting and heritage and family. It was an absolute joy for me to spend some time listening to him tell me about how his family came to the United States and the living that they carved out for themselves. Now, to me, George’s family story is the great American success, storing faith, the family, hard working and the determination to succeed. Challenge anyone to find me a better recipe for success than that. Now, back to that asonine statement I made about being the only fellow within a mile of Rockefeller Senator that killed the turkey last year. Had the scaffolding for that big Christmas tree not been in place at that time, on the backside of that skating rink between me and the Comcast building, I could have seen the relief carving above the main entrance of the world famous thirty Rock skyscraper. In nineteen thirty three, when that building was completed, the biblical inscription from the Book of Isaiah, chapter thirty three and verse six was permanently affixed, and that verse reads, Wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times, two virtues that escaped my thought process as I pushed record and turned that phone toward my stupid face. Now, had I had sense enough to do a little research, I might have found George while I was in New York and visited with him face to face instead of over the internet. Don’t check him out. He was going to put the link in the show description. And that’s just how that happened. I had just left the Shepherd Hill’s cutlery store in Lebanon, Missouri. Now it’s spelled the same way you pronounced Lebanon, the country that sits north of Israel and is the only thing keeping the Mediterranean Sea from Washington flip flops off the folks in Syria. But I found out real quick that you don’t pronounce it the same way in the show me state. If you do, someone actually a bunch of someone’s will email you with the proper pronunciation and make fun of you until you get yourself squared away. It’s leba none period. Anything different will get you beat up. But anyway, I was tooling west down I forty four, keeping up with the flow of traffic, looking out for the buckets exit to snag some beef turkey from my daughter Bailey, and I had a freshly skinned turkey in the cooler. I threw punch two hours early. I was feeling good about that new case knife I just purchased from myself. I needed a new one. Then I thought about the invitation I’d gotten from my friend jimbo Elliott the turkey hunt with him at his place back in Arkansas and not all that far from where I live. Well, I rang him up and we made a plan to get after him the next morning. That took him minute, but the next morning, when they started gobbling, they were kicking off in three different directions. And none were very close. We stood in that same spot four days before and had enough turkeys to fill the basketball team within a quarter mile in any direction, of course, that was before the season opened. Finally we heard one in the same zip code, and after he teased us for thirty minutes, strutting and gobbling two hundred yards away, we watched him walk out of our hopes and dreams with a hen who wanted no part of sharing her feller. We moved with him, only to be completely ignored while listening to another. One fire up a half mile away on the other side of the truck, and we made the pilgrimage to his area. We found a comfortable spot and we waited, and for an hour we heard nothing. I called every twenty minutes or so, nothing loud or forceful, just medium purs and yelps. Three turkeys had slipped in on me this spring, and none of them had done it early. When we initially sat down at nine, I told Jimbo, let’s just get comfortable. We’ll hear him. At ten, he gobbled two hundred and fifty yards further to our east, and I looked at my watch as we were getting up to move toward him. It was nine fifty eight. I wasn’t feeling smug about my prediction, more like it was just another validation of what my turkey hunting mentor mister Billy Brown, had drilled into my head, that patients will kill more turkeys than anything else. Jimbo and I eased our way toward the goblin turkey, who was sounding off every little bit. We got sat down and hid. I pushed a soft cluck and purr out to him, and he responded immediately and every so often, moving closer with each gobble. He was just out of sight over the lip of a ridge, and we estimated him to be no more than sixty yards away. A hen started fussing at us and let him back down the ridge, where he went silent. Five minutes or so, he gobbled again, and we confirmed with on acts that he was at the bottom of the ridge, probably two hundred yards a little further east. He started moving and gobbling his way north, and Jimbow and I compensated with the terrain by repositioning about fifty yards as well. Now that put us on top of the ridge with a good view of the slope. I figured that gobbler would use to come to us. It wasn’t wide open by any means, but with the rise and elevation from where we sat and where the turkey was, he wouldn’t have time to get jubis of not being able to see the hen that calling to him until he was plenty close enough for jim Bow to shoe his brain off. I put Jimbo twelve yards in front of him at two o’clock. The timber was smaller, so we each picked out a spot that had several trees close together the hide of silhouettes. Plus I warned him out front shoot the turkey. I was his guests and was just thankful to be there. The turkey kept engine northward, and we were separated too far to whisper or even talk real soft. So Jimbo and I were sending on xpens back and forth on our phones where we thought he might be trying to just trying to figure out where he was going. I started looking at the possible approach routes from the pen that Jimbo had sid talking it over in my head, I imagine that turkey coming up a pipeline that ran east and west and bordered us to the north. I followed along that map with my eyes, and I guess the easiest route to come into our location would be kind of behind me. Like about seven o’clock, the turkey gobbled again at the bottom of the ridge. Still is in this way northward, but a little bit closer, you could tell. I glanced in his direction. Then I turned to look behind me at the imaginary route I was expecting him to take to get to us, and I saw three gobblers sneaking in like they were going to try to rob us. They were forty yards and closing fast, walking steady, with the purpose of not letting the dude that was making all that racket at the bottom of the hill know what their intentions were. My shotgun was laying in my lap and I was twisted as far as I could go back to the left. Jimbo was facing the opposite direction to my right front, and as far as I knew, he didn’t have a clue what was about to happen behind him. I wasn’t sure myself because the turkey is plenty close to kill and my shotgun was still laying in my lap. For a brief second, I thought they were going to skirt around. Now had they done that. I was just going to keep still on, just hoping Jimbo would hear him coming and eventually be in a position to shoot one another. That thought hadn’t quit bouncing around in my craning m when the lead gobbler hung a left and started tracking straight toward me in one fluid motion, I raised my shotgun to my shoulder, aimed, and pulled the trigger, missing him slick as a gut at twenty three yards. Being used to failure from a young age, I was unfazed, and I pumped another turkey bomb into my son’s old age seventy that I had chosen to take with me that day. Less than a second later, and before old Sneaky Pete could get his running shoes laced up, I sent him another one, catching him in the back of the nogget. Now, in the meantime, Jimbo had become suddenly aware of the calamity that had turned a tranquil morning of purposeful silence into an unplanned and surprised explosion of shotgun blasts and flapping wings. It happened so fast a cat wouldn’t have had time to let his behind before it was all over. It was an unexpected rush of adrenaline that ramps up now thinking about it a month after the fact, almost as much as it did when it happened. I’m blessed with wonderful invitations to hunt places with even more wonderful people. Jim Bow is one of them, and another invitation would have me in the northeast. Last week hunting with my Case family in the Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania. I stayed near Bradford with my friends John and Audreyanna and Pantuso. Audreyana is a teacher down the road in Smethport, and John is a marketing manager for the wr Case and Sons Cutlery company. And people think I have a cool job. I couldn’t imagine being in an office surrounded by case knives all day every day. I’m looking around my office now, maybe I can. Anyway, John invited me out and I went. Tom Taylor, also with Case, would join us on the first morning, and by the third morning we’d covered a lot of miles with John’s dad Bill, gotten hot tips from his uncle John, gon fly fishing with his brother Andy, and heard turkeys every day but one. On two separate occasions, we had public land gobblers, almost close enough to shoot, but just out of sight, following Hens to a safer venue. On the evening before the last day, I was treated to supper with John, Tom, and a pair of septuagenarians and for the uninitiated, that’s someone in their seventies. Tom and John are part of an everyman golf club that meets once a week to pair up and play around golf with other members. This week they were paired with these two Italian Americans who were straight out of Central Cash. One minute after joining this force and supper, I knew why they wanted me to meet him. Loud, boisterous, and unapologetically Italian, these two guys have been best friends since the first grade, and seven decades later they were still side by side, trading jabs, laughing, and entertaining the whole clubhouse. They were a stereotypical pair of Italian American friends who valued each other’s company, telling me of adventures they’d shared before I was born, and asked me what my childhood was like and the things that I did occupy my time back in Arkansas. That in itself was worth the trip, but I still had one more day. The next morning before the sun ever had a chance to peek over the mountains. John and I were standing in the dark with his friend, Kevin Winshell, Kevin’s alignment, working hard to keep the lights on up there. Before that, Kevin was working hard to keep us free in the Marine Corps there. Humble and gracious to a fault, Kevin took us to one of his spots on public land, a place he’s been keeping tabs on since before the season opened, a place he’s been saving for when John and I got there. Now, I’ve said it before that the gift of turkey is something special. Just being allowed permission to hunt a person’s private property that doesn’t hunt is an expression of generosity. To follow Turkey’s on public land, waiting to chase him with friends, one of which he’d never met. That’s beyond a lot of folks understanding, but not Kevin’s. Turkey gobbled on the roofst and we took off in his direction. And for the next six and a half hours we chased that gobbling monkey from the bottom of the ridges to the top of others. John put some Jedi juju, won’t even call him down a ridge and across the creek only to have him hang up just out of sight with a gaggle of hens. It was one of the best hunts I’ve ever had where no one walked out with a turkey. It was done around one point thirty, and I wasn’t disappointed. I was elated that I’d gotten to spend that time with my good friend John and my new friend Kevin. That evening we all collected at Kevin’s family’s cabin just across the state line in New York. Kevin grill Burger’s and hot dogs and something I’d never heard of, sausage made from leaks that he’d gathered from the same mountains we’ve been chasing turkeys on. It was good. Kevin’s wife, Jackie, is a school teacher in New York, not far from where they lived, just north of the state line. Besides educating all the little folks with the regular studies, Jackie tax monarch butterflies abandon ducks, except it ain’t. Instead of catching the butterflies in the wild and crimping an aluminum band around their legs, jacket and a whole bunch of other folks volunteer at their own expense to buy the supplies go to the training raise the caterpillars and place a small coated sticker on their wings before they release them to start their journey to Mexico. If and when they recovered, there’s a code on that decal where you can report that number to monarchwatch dot org. The data is all compiled from there, and the research determines the best avenues to study and help protect this beautiful creature that has been on the decline for the past two decades. I asked her to tell me about it, and the joy she had on her face as she detailed her and especially the children’s involvement, was incredible to see educators educating outside the mandated curriculum for the common good, showing how even something as whimsical is a butterfly is important. It shows a reverence for nature and helps build a foundation for stewardship for all creatures. Check out the Lincoln the show description for more information. Reeve’s gonna put it in there for you. But Kevin’s family was there. John’s family was there, and I was there, Grandpa’s and Grandma’s sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, grandchildren, and a dog. Kevin built a fire and for about three hours the kids played in fish while the rest of us sat and visited and watched. It could have just as easily been in Cleveland County, Arkansas, but we were nine hundred and eighteen miles northeast as the crow flies from where I grew up. I say it all the time, and I’m gonna keep on saying we’re more alike than different, and if we look harder for the things that are similar, the differences will work themselves out. Can’t help to do it. I’m grateful and beyond blessed to be able to travel all over this great nation and Canada, and I’m so thankful to be able to be able to bring these stories and these people to you each week. And it’s because of your support that I can thank y’all so much. Sharing these stories and writing reviews is a great way to help the cause, and I appreciate all the folks that have done it. And that goes for Bear Greece and Backwards University too. Until next week, this is Brent Reeves. Sign it off. Y’all be careful
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