00:00:05
Speaker 1: Welcome to This Country Life.
00:00:06
Speaker 2: 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. Page’s deer hunt, snow and bad boar coons. I couldn’t tell you what the theme of this week’s show is. There are three elements that I talk about, and the last two are similar but also different. After I wrote it and read it, I looked by a computer like it was speaking a different language. Sometimes I just get to rambling, and when I slow down long enough to catch my breath, thirty minutes have gone by. That’s probably the most accurate way to describe this effort.
00:01:10
Speaker 1: Anyway you tell me.
00:01:11
Speaker 2: But I’m going to talk about snow, coon hunting and rough old coons. But first I’m going to tell you this story. This week’s story comes from This Country Life listener Paige Harrison. Page stays busy working a couple hours south of our nation’s capital in the tenth state to join the colonies in rebellion against those te taxing buffoons over in England. It’s also in that same state of Virginia that her story takes place. Now, Page comment is something very nice when she introduced this story to me, and I quote the stories you tell highlight the good in America. Well, Page, we can always use some of the so in your words and my voice, here we go. I grew up hunting a farm in southern Virginia that my dad and his buddies hunted my entire life. In their words, we’ve brought a tractor trailer load of deer out of there. That farm holds a lot of hunting memories from me, and I killed my first deer there, and I have a lot of memorable stories, and genetics plays a big part of the story I want to share. In twenty ten, my first year of college, I came home for Thanksgiving week. My dad and I hunted hard that week, sitting in box blinds each morning and evening with no luck. It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving, my last evening to hunt until winter break. My dad said let’s do something different that we haven’t done in a while and get in a box blind together. My dad and his friends built all the boxblines on the property, and most of them were built to sit to people. The secondary rut was in and the deer were moving early. A couple of dos walked out, and my dad commented that I should probably stick my gun out the wind that just in case. Sure enough, my dere buck was right behind me. Now yet to remember, my dad and his best friend built all the box blinds, and these are not box blinds put together by your average joe. My dad’s best friend comes from a family of carpenters. These blinds are sturdy and built to a precise measurement, and that measurement is not for a girl who’s five foot four. I get the crosshairs on the buck, and I’m no longer sitting in the chair but squatting with my gun resting out the window. Dad whispers, pull my leg under me and sit on it. So I shifted the stand and try to calm my heart rate. I thank goodness that buck was interested in the doze my leg under me. Now I had a perfect rest to get the frosshairs on the biggest buck I’d ever had the chance to kill. I exhale and I drop him in the field. Dad and I are super stoked that our idea of sitting in the stand together paid off. This is the largest deer that I’ve ever killed, and Dad got a front row seat. That deer still hangs in the house that I grew up in. Now you fast forward eight years later to the same Saturday weekend and my boyfriend comes to my parents’ house after Thanksgiving so we can all hunt together. I was lucky enough to take the whole week off, and once again, Dad and I hunt every morning and every evening. The second morning, fog settled across the field and I can see a tall white rack walk in the woods edge, but it is not quite light enough to shoot. I hunt that deer for three days after with no other sightings. Saturday morning comes around and Dad comes up with another idea to change our luck. We get breakfast at the local doughnut shot before heading to the farm. Only this time, my boyfriend and I get in the same box blind. The tall white rack buck steps out of the woods and to eat acres. I’m nervous and this is the biggest buck I’ve seen since my Thanksgiving deer of two and ten. I have to shift around and the stand and set on my leg again. I take the shot and be to be very honest, it wasn’t my best work. We know the deer’s hit good. We bumping while we were tracking, and know that we just need to leave the air and give it more time. I was gutted. This is now the age of GPS tracking callers. And later that afternoon, my dad gets a call from one of the local hunters.
00:05:48
Speaker 1: His dog’s found my deer.
00:05:51
Speaker 2: As soon as we get up to the deer, Dad and I realized that this deer is related to the deer I killed in Thanksgiving week twenty ten. The antlers were just too similar. The two biggest bucks in my life were killed hunting with two most important men in my life, and both deer from the same bloodline. And that boyfriend later became my husband. My family no longer gets to hunt that farm. The patriarch of the family passed away if his kids sold the property, The deer stories from that farm live on, just like the genetics of those bucks. My dad received a picture of a buck killed on that farm three years after my second deer. Sure enough that deer had to be related to mine.
00:06:41
Speaker 1: The farm will always hold a special place in my heart.
00:06:44
Speaker 2: Plus it has given us a truckload of stories to tell, and my hope is that one day I will have a farm to take my little girl hunting so she can create her own story. Thank you for sharing the hunting stories of an average like me. It is a joy to listen to them each week, and according to Paige Harrison.
00:07:07
Speaker 1: That’s just how that happened.
00:07:10
Speaker 2: Well, Page, you may be an average hunter, but something tells me you’re an above average human, exemplifying the traits instilled in you by your father and your grandfather. Your story could have been one of loss and lament for a place that you can no longer go, yet you chose only to speak anecdotally of it, to describe your desire to have a similar place to take your daughter like your father took you. That’s the real story here, and one that not only highlights the good stories of America, but also good Americans.
00:07:49
Speaker 1: Thank you for sending it in, Old Man.
00:07:59
Speaker 2: Winter has black at my homeland of Arkansas, with what I referred to as winter Yankee rain, not really, I just made that up. But I have no clue how you folks up north handle all this snow all the time. The other day I texted a picture of a black coat my brother Tim’s nephew, Daniel Bryant, caught to Steve Vanilla. Now I claim Daniel is my nephew too, but anyway, after looking at the picture of the black coat laying in the grass, Steve jokingly said, that’s pretty cool, but you pansies don’t even have any ice or snow to deal with down there. I shut him up by responding, that’s why we live here. Snow is pretty to watch falling outside the window in the evening, while the fireplace provides the background music of pops and crackles and the hissing of burning wood. And the next morning it’s fresh and pure as you inhale at frigid air and take the first steps from the threshold outside your feet poking holes in the blind and white of the freshly carpeted yard, and then your seventy five pound coonhound runs past you over to his favorite spot, the spot your wife has descriptively named Pooh Corner, and not after AA Mellon’s beloved teddy bear of the same name. What that dog does over there in that most aptly named area of the backyard is no different than how I see what old man winter has done to Arkansas. How rude snow hits differently down here. I know folks who look forward to skiing on it and snowmobiling through it, and for it to push elk and other critters down to lower elevations. I get it. Y’all need it, and I’m glad someone does. I ain’t one of them.
00:09:46
Speaker 1: Now.
00:09:46
Speaker 2: I love a good snow day as much as anyone else. Even two or three are good. But by day number four, if this stuff is still here, it starts cramping my style, because nothing else here can deal with this stuff either. When the tempts in Arkansas started dipping below thirty for extended periods of tie and the coons and the squirrels stopped moving for the most part and just wait out the freeze, that means they don’t move very far from the den if they move at all, and they sure ain’t moving much at night, which is the coldest part of the day. I remember a big snow event a few years ago when Old Whaling was still a youngster and me and my pal Rex Whiting.
00:10:25
Speaker 1: Wanted to go coon hunting in the snow.
00:10:28
Speaker 2: Shadow was Rex’s hound, and actually I wanted to go hunting and convinced him to go with me. And by convinced, I mean I begged and guilted him into it. I caught him on the phone. Rex, let’s go hunt tonight, He said, are you drunk? No, I want to go coon hunting. I’m tired of sitting in this house, so we ain’t gonna tree. No coons on the outside of the tree. There’s eight inches of snow on the ground and they’re all dimmed up. It’s twenty five degrees outside. I said, I know, how cool would it be to have a picture of Wailing and Shadow with their paws up on a tree in the snow. I’ll tell you how cool. Recks really cool. He didn’t say anything for a few seconds, and then he said, you really want to go? And I said, I am going. You’re gonna make me go by myself. I could hear him let out a sigh that spoke volumes about his poor decision to answer the phone when I called, something that has held firm ever since. Rarely does he answer immediately, even now years later, I usually just text him and wait for him to evaluate my ridiculous scheme giving him a departure time, and whether he shows up or not at the appointed time is what I get. My answer, he said, come get me. We’ll be ready when you get here. After I got him in the truck, we took off for twenty thousand acres of public hunting ground that was an Irish drive away and bypassed in the six thousand that was less than fifteen minutes from the house.
00:12:03
Speaker 1: Go beg or go home. I chose to go beg Rex. He wanted to go back home.
00:12:18
Speaker 2: The hour trip took us an hour and a half as I sped along at a blistering pace, never exceeding forty miles an hour. The ruts and the snow and ice along the highway were safe enough at a manageable speed, and when we got there, Rex finally seemed to be as excited about the trip as I was. Looking back now on the nineteenth day of February and twenty twenty one, his renewed enthusiasm may have been more to do with surviving the drive over and realizing that if we froze to death on this hont At least he died doing something that he loved. He also told me that if we wound up in a survival situation, he Shadowing Wayaling, We’re going to eat me first. We cut the dogs loosing just like Rex predicted. We never made a tree. Nothing was moving except for us. We turned loose in a couple of different spots where we usually had good luck, and striking a coon. I remember Wailing and Shadow both opening up a couple labs, but nothing more than cold trailing, like extreme cold trailing. And before we left Hunt that night, I’d filled my insulated dog box with fresh hair and covered all the vents to preserve heat, but not so much as to keep air from getting in and out.
00:13:30
Speaker 1: And when Whaling and Shadow were warms biscuits, when.
00:13:33
Speaker 2: We couldn’t loose after riding an iron half in the back of the truck, and when we loaded them back up after our feudal temper tree and a coon and the snow, they had to heat stoked back up and were sound asleep by the time we got back home. Both of them stay in the night inside their respective homes, where Whaling continues to reside in his off hours and where Shadow did for the remainder of his life. It was fun and I was glad we went. It’s crazy it was to go, but I was even more excited to get home and dig into a bowl of gumbow that Bailey and I had made earlier in the day. It was good and warm to my enters, and outside of spending time with my friend Rex, the best part of that day was getting home and reheating myself with Bailey’s victuals now. You fast forward three hundred and fifteen days, one hour and fifty seven minutes later, and me and Michael rosemand Nold Goodwin and Hunter Gullock are hunting in the ice and snow once again. How do I know how accurate that is? It’s very accurate because I used the time and date stamps on the videos that I took back then, and I’ll show them both on my social media’s of what I’m talking about here. But we were hunting purely out of not wanting to stay at home. We’d had several days of ice up roads and not being able to go anywhere, and when the opportunity arose to get out of the house, even for a low percentage hunt to be successful, like once again chasing coop and well below freezing temperatures. We went anyway. We made some dead trees and if you can’t see the coon in there, it’s more or less a push. You’ll you’ll never know for sure if it was actually there or not. So there’s no praise for the dog, the reward that he’s looking to get by tree and the coon in the first place. You can’t reward your dog for something you think he did good, no more than you can correct him for something you’re not sure he did wrong. If you can’t find the coon by looking into the den, you just have to leash him up and move on. It’s like it never happened. And then the training arena and progression of your dog, the only value it has is showing them that the only time they’re going to get praised is when they’ve done everything right. It encourages the dogs to be sure and confident in the tree that they declare where the coon is. Every time you go. You want the dog to have the opportunity to learn something and to have a positive experience. And sometimes that positive experience is just not treating where a coon ain’t but on one of the last casts of the night, Whaling came tree and sounded more than a little excited. I videoed it as I walked to him, and when I got there, I could see the coon at the base of an old dead.
00:16:16
Speaker 1: Tree that’s been hollowed out.
00:16:18
Speaker 2: It was big enough for the coon to get into, but it didn’t go anywhere from there. Anyone that’s ever hunted with Whaling or listening close on here, when I talk about how much of a tough guy he is, knows first.
00:16:31
Speaker 1: And foremost he ain’t.
00:16:35
Speaker 2: He’s the kind of guy one of my old football coaches would describe as looking like Tarzan but playing like Jane.
00:16:42
Speaker 1: He ain’t no fighter.
00:16:44
Speaker 2: He’s as accurate of a dog that I’ve ever seen, but a tough guy.
00:16:48
Speaker 1: Nurp.
00:16:49
Speaker 2: Let me tell you about the night when Michael’s dog, Heck backed off his pugilistic endeavors a few notches. And I can’t say as I blame him. It has nothing to do with snow, all to do with a bad coon. But you folks that have been here a while, I know how my brain works or doesn’t work anyway. I just thought of this, so I’m gonna tell you about it before I forget it. It was a couple of years ago and Michael and I were hunting just off the cash bow Wailing and the heck were scalding a coon track down through the bottoms, and the water was low.
00:17:20
Speaker 1: At that time, and the coon seemed.
00:17:22
Speaker 2: To be crossing from bank to bank, back and forth that will, trying to throw these dogs off his track, but it wasn’t working. Michael and I kept talking about how this coon ought to be running.
00:17:34
Speaker 1: Up a tree.
00:17:35
Speaker 2: We could tell the dogs were close to him just by the way Whaling was barking. Whaling he ain’t the kind of dog that barks a lot on the track, which has nothing to do with whether or not he’ll tree, But you can easily tell how hot the track is by how he’s barking and the rhythm and the pace at which he does it. And using that as our barometer, we were guessing. They could almost see a long story short that coon didn’t want to run up a tree.
00:18:02
Speaker 1: Some of them don’t.
00:18:03
Speaker 2: And when he’d run as far as he wanted to, he squared up and commenced to duking it out with both of them. Normally, that’s where the story ends. The coon meets his demise, and like Jerry Klower said, you know, the coon does have the option of whooping the dogs and leaving.
00:18:22
Speaker 1: But Heck has.
00:18:24
Speaker 2: Caught a lot of coons on the ground and had them smoked by the time we got there, on more occasions than I can count. Whaling he ain’t ever killed a coon by himself that I can remember. He’s hemmed up plenty that didn’t have a chance to climb a tree or want to, and he scrapped with him some and held them there until I got there. But he ain’t going to run off, and he ain’t.
00:18:47
Speaker 1: He ain’t no.
00:18:48
Speaker 2: Killer or prone to waiting in there by himself either. Hunting with Heck has always boosted his bravado to the point that he’ll dip his biscuit in the coon’s gravy if Heck goes in. Firon has everything going in the right direction. Safety first, that’s Whaling’s motto. Well, we heard the fight when it started, dogs barking and snarling and growling and baying, and continued long past what it should have been, to the point that Michael and I looked at each other and said, oh lord, they got a hog baite in there. Now Our dogs ain’t hog dogs, and a hog can have an inexperienced dog or a well experienced dog needing stitches or buried.
00:19:30
Speaker 1: In short order.
00:19:32
Speaker 2: We started hustling to get to them, and they were a little over three hundred yards away. About halfway there, Whaling went quiet, and now all we could hear was heck, and I ain’t gonna lie. I was getting a little sick to my stomach. I’ve seen dogs get hurt bad by hogs, and every scenario for my dog being quiet now ended with me having a long and sad drive home. Then, a little over fifty yards into the I think it where all the barking had been taking place, Whaling met us on a narrow briar line trail. He was a blooded and muddied mess from one end to the other. And if a dog had ever had a man, I’m glad to see y’all look.
00:20:14
Speaker 1: On his face, it was him.
00:20:18
Speaker 2: Michael and I quickly checked him for obvious injuries, but only saw some scratches in.
00:20:22
Speaker 1: A bleeding ear.
00:20:24
Speaker 2: We were relieved they had to hear coon growling instead of a hog grunting, and finished making our way to where hec and the coon were as We broke into the opening, expecting to see a freshly deceased or soon to be deceased bandido. We were greeted by what looked like a crime scene, and it was all coming from a bite wound on Heck’s ear. That coon didn’t weigh ten pounds and it wasn’t as big as a house cat. Tack and Whaling together outweighed by one hundred and forty pounds, but he’d given them all they wanted, plus to the point Whaling decided to leave and go find an adult. Heck stayed, but I swear if he’d had any energy left, I think he’d have.
00:21:05
Speaker 1: Followed Whaling out.
00:21:07
Speaker 2: There wasn’t a dry or clean spot on either one of them, and the ground where they stood had been churned into mud that was too thick to drink, it too thin to plow. They had agreed to just disagree as to who among them was the toughest.
00:21:21
Speaker 1: But Michael and I we knew.
00:21:25
Speaker 2: We leased Heck of as he and that coon and now Wailing again just eyeballed each other. Like the final scene, and the good and the bad and the ugly. Both of those hounds internally relieved that we were walking them out of there, instead of allowing that coon to kick their butts any worse than he already had. Walking them away from a live coon, as you live, a pretty big chore, But not that time. Every now and then we’ll run into one of those old bad ones, and did so again. Just a few weeks ago. Heck and Whaling had bade a coon across the lake well over two hundred yards away. When Michael and I walked up on the opposite side, we could hear that coon growling and snarling between Heck and Whaling’s barking, there’s no way to get to them, and easily confirming across the lake with our spotlights that they were dealing with a coon. We called them to us, and they came after only one hollow. That water was cold, but they both bailed in and swam straight to us like a couple of well trained labradors. I said, Michael, ain’t it good to have a dog.
00:22:32
Speaker 1: That will mind like those two will?
00:22:35
Speaker 2: He said, yeah, it is, And ever since that she lacking, they took over on the bible of that time. They seemed to mind a lot better when they’re scared. He has a point. Now, I never know where I’m going. When I start one of these, I can only tell you about where I’ve been, and I hope you enjoyed it. Check out my Kansas cowld hunt with decoy dogs on the Meatate YouTube channel that’s up right now.
00:23:02
Speaker 1: It was a lot of fun and.
00:23:03
Speaker 2: There’s some old footage that I shot way back in twenty and seventeen. No one has ever seen it, and I think you’ll enjoy it. Until next week. This is Brent Reeves. Sign it off.
00:23:15
Speaker 1: Y’all be careful.
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