00:00:05
Speaker 1: Welcome to This Country Life.
00:00:06
Speaker 2: I’m your host, Brent Reeves.
00:00:09
Speaker 1: From coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living, I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences and 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 podcasts that airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I’ve got some stories to share. The weight of the weight. From the shot to recovery can be an absolutely excruciating amount of time. And this one actually started eight moons ago in the frigid northeast of February’s Pennsylvania. Talked to John Pantuso, my friend that works for Case Knives, and I asked him if he would be interested in.
00:01:01
Speaker 2: Shooting a bear with his bow.
00:01:04
Speaker 1: Told y’all all about that last week, and I also promised you the second part was coming now. So, without further ado, in my voice and John Pantuso’s words, here we go.
00:01:25
Speaker 2: Back in February, Brent.
00:01:27
Speaker 1: And I were in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania for the Great American Outdoor Show. One night after the show, we were hanging out at the Airbnb just shooting the breeze when out of nowhere, Brent hits me with this. John, would you ever shoot a bear with your bow? And I think it immediately started giggling a little bit. And I said, I mean, yeah, definitely. I remember texting my wife that night saying, I think I might be bear hunting with Brent in the near future. Well, fast forward a few months and I get a call from Brent confirming my suspicions. He was putting together an Arkansas bear hunt and asked me if I’d be comfortable being on camera during the hunt. Thankfully, with my job at Case Knives, I’m on camera pretty frequently talking about our newest products, but.
00:02:19
Speaker 2: I knew this would be different.
00:02:21
Speaker 1: I was definitely nervous about this exciting but pretty intimidating opportunity. I’ve been watching Meat Eater from the beginning, so getting the chance to be part of a filmed episode from one of my all-time favorite shows was a lot to take in. I’ve known Brent for a few years now and if I knew anything it was that he was going to make the whole experience fun and easy.
00:02:46
Speaker 2: I knew I had nothing to worry about. I was also relieved when I found out who would be filming the hunt.
00:02:54
Speaker 1: The hunting industry is a funny thing. It’s a Huge industry, but at the same time, it can feel really small. A few years back, Drew Stecklein had done some incredible video and photo work for Case, and for the last several years, Drew and my colleague Tom Taylor, and I would meet up with each other in Las Vegas during the SHOT Show to grab.
00:03:15
Speaker 2: Dinner and catch up.
00:03:18
Speaker 1: Over the years, Drew has become a good friend of mine, so when I found out he was going to be the one sitting in the tree with me and documenting this whole experience together, I was genuinely excited. Knowing I’d have someone I already trusted behind the camera made a huge difference, and I knew that he’d make me comfortable and keep things fun. After we got the initial plans together and I knew the dates I’d be heading south from my home in Bradford, Pennsylvania, I shifted my mindset into getting ready for this hunt. I spent most of the summer practicing with my bow and getting reps in from the saddle I’d be hunting out of, As the days ticked by, I knew the hunt was getting closer and the excitement really started to kick in. Brent had given me access to the moultry cameras over the bait, and the frequency and size of the bears coming in were unreal and much different than what we see in northwest PA. I figured that I’d be swarmed by bears every day and might have an opportunity on day one.
00:04:20
Speaker 2: Man, was I wrong. but we’ll get into that later.
00:04:26
Speaker 1: I flew into Little Rock two days before the season started, and from there I met up with Drew and the other cameraman, Dave Gardner, and we hopped in a rental car and drove a few hours to meet Brent at the first cabin.
00:04:39
Speaker 2: And once we got settled.
00:04:40
Speaker 1: In, we got a chance to meet Jeremy and Andy, who are two of the best people I’ve ever met. Since you can start baiting bears a month before the season starts, Jeremy and Andy had been busting their tails getting our spots baited and ready to go. I had so much fun getting to know them throughout the week and I’ll always be thankful for the effort they put into making this hunt what it was. After an incredible serving of bear chili and cornbread from Andy and her mama, Miss Alma, we hit the hay and got some rest for the week ahead. Our first real day of filming got the show on the road. Brent and I got our bows sighted in and Then we headed over to Jeremy and Angie’s house to grab our bait and get our stand set up for opening day. As someone who comes from a state where baiting anything is illegal, I was blown away by the amount of work and effort that goes into making it happen. And, as we learned during the hunt, there are no guarantees you’re even going to see a bear over bait. I learned a lot about bears during my time in Arkansas. one of the things that caught me off guard was the hunting schedule. I’m used to chasing whitetails and spring gobblers when you’re waking up at four in the morning to be ready and hit the woods by daylight. Well, this style of bear hunting takes place in the heat of the afternoon and runs through the evening until dark. So the morning of the first day brought me right back to how I used to feel on game day during my glory days of high school football. I was nervous, excited, and paced about three miles around the cabin waiting to head into the woods. Another thing I learned about bears and baiting specifically is that once the acorns, or acorns as the southern folks call them, once they start dropping, the bears gravitate toward that natural food source instead of the cookie dough and other scrumptious items that we had in front of us. Our first setup was about 20 yards from the bait with a little pond off to the left, and of course, we noticed the acorns starting to fall. Now, Drew gave me a whole catalog of funny sayings to take home that week, but one of my favorites happened on the very first sit. We watched an acorn fall to the ground and made eye contact, and without missing a beat, Drew goes, You want me to get down and throw that back up in the tree?
00:07:07
Speaker 2: Huh.
00:07:10
Speaker 1: Well the first day didn’t result in anything but we had a great day just being in the woods and getting our bearings on what this style of hunting was going to be like. Second day was much of the same. We still had plenty of hope with multiple days of hunting ahead of us but the pressure of even seeing a bear well that was slowly starting to creep in. And after not seeing anything the first two days and after moving to a different cabin that was closer to our hunt spots we decided to switch over to another spot that Jeremy and Andy had. Andy’s mom, Miss Alma, shot a beautiful brown-colored face bear from the spot, and there were still some big bears coming in during the day, so we decided to give it a try. After another day of seeing a whole lot of nothing, I caught a glimpse of a bear way off in the distance as we started losing shooting light. I was shaking like crazy, partly from the excitement and partly from the fear that it might come into the bait when I didn’t have enough shooting light. I didn’t have to worry about that, though. As I watched the bear disappear, I heard my very first death moan from another bear. A text from Jeremy confirmed it, and Andy had shot a nice bear on the adjacent ridge across the canyon. That was her bear that we heard. It was a sound I’ll never forget. After we helped Andy retrieve that beautiful bear she harvested, we got back to the camp and started figuring out our plans for the next day. We’d be attending the World Championship Squirrel Cook-Off, and as excited as we were for that, we were definitely starting to feel the time of our hunt slipping away. The cook-off was a blast, and I met a ton of great people and got to try all kinds of wild game food. About halfway through the event, Drew and I snuck away and headed back to the stand we’d hunted the day before, and once again, the result was pretty much the same.
00:09:12
Speaker 2: Nothing.
00:09:14
Speaker 1: Now, the pressure was real. One day left, and we hadn’t even had a real encounter from the stand. The most frustrating part was knowing we were in great spots with tons of bears all around us. At some point, though, the animals have to cooperate with you. We had seen dozens and dozens of pictures of huge bears just coming in when we weren’t there. Now, on the last day, we made one final attempt at a different spot. Drew and I got in around 10 a.m.
00:09:50
Speaker 2: Got in our saddles, and got situated.
00:09:53
Speaker 1: And the hours ticked by, and the heat was absolutely relentless.
00:09:59
Speaker 2: We had seen pictures of a.
00:10:00
Speaker 1: Good bear with a V-shaped patch of white hair on its chest, so we figured if that bear came in in front of us, that was the one we wanted to take. At three o’clock on the dot, Drew whispered that one was coming in. I slowly turned my head and saw the bear that we’d been waiting on making its way toward the bait. But it didn’t go to the bait. It beelined straight past it and got downwind of us. I watched it pick its head up and saw the awesome white patch on its chest. Then I saw its nose working, pointing right at us. I knew our wind was busted. The bear took off and I texted Jeremy about what happened and he responded with, It’ll be back. Two and a half hours later, I was in the saddle with my knees against the tree. It had been a long day in the heat, and by that point, we had sat for a total of 31 hours in three different spots that week.
00:11:03
Speaker 2: Then out of the corner of my eye, I caught some movement.
00:11:06
Speaker 1: It was the same bear, coming in exactly the same way it had earlier. What felt like an eternity was really only a matter of minutes. The bear came in and got within 17 yards. I pulled back and I let it fly, and my initial reaction was that the shot wasn’t that good. Unlike a deer, a bear’s target is more toward the middle of the middle and one fist forward. Well, I hit the middle of the middle, maybe a tad back. We could see from the tree with our binoculars that the arrow had passed clean through, and we gave the bear as much time as we could, then climbed down about an hour and a half later. We called Jeremy and he came and picked Drew and I up. And then we headed back to the cabin. At that point, we didn’t tell Brent what had happened. We wanted to make sure that he had a clear head for the last few hours of his hunt. And here is where Brent stops telling my story and starts telling his. Dave and I left the camp every morning knowing we had some really big bears in the area. In fact, we all did. While the bait barrel attendance grew more frequent, it also had our target bears incrementally showing up later and later as each day checked off the calendar. Dave and I had bears on our bait all week, multiple in fact, just none I wanted to shoot. Young boars with a couple years more growth would be excellent representations of Ursus Americana found in any part of North America, even equal to the giants that roam over around the East Coast. I can’t wait to see the footage that Dave Gardner captured as we hung in that big oak like a couple of oversized acorns that, coincidentally, were beginning to fall from all the white oaks within earshot of our bait barrels. In the past, that would literally pull the plug on a bear bait, and bear activity at the barrel would all but flatline. Not this year. It didn’t really seem to bother them. So we forged ahead, setting hour after hour, seeing bear after bear, waiting on the right one to come in just a few minutes earlier.
00:13:26
Speaker 2: Even one in the waning light.
00:13:28
Speaker 1: Before shooting hours ended would be welcomed. One encounter we had was a 250-pound boar with a big old pumpkin head with a crease right down the middle. He was 10 yards away, broadside, well before dark.
00:13:43
Speaker 2: We let him go.
00:13:45
Speaker 1: He was a good bear by any stretch of the imagination, but we’d set a standard from the start and we weren’t going to compromise. Each day started and stopped much the same, Dave and I climbing up to our perch, waiting an hour or so and witnessing a parade of black bears coming in and out of bow range until dark. And sometimes, even before we could get down, a big one would roll in only to slip away when Jeremy came.
00:14:12
Speaker 2: To pick us up.
00:14:14
Speaker 1: Minutes later, once we were back at camp or even just down the road, Moultriat would get active and one or all three of our target bears would stroll in and spend the night feeding on our bear buffet.
00:14:29
Speaker 2: Dave and I were in.
00:14:30
Speaker 1: Bears every day and had multiple opportunities to tag out well before the last day of our hunt, which is where we now find ourselves in this story. I’m not going to lie and say I wasn’t feeling some pressure. Anytime I’m filming a project like this, regardless of the financial investment, there is a pressure to deliver a true and accurate documentary of the hunt. But sometimes, to loosely quote the Scottish poet Robert Burns, even the best laid plans of mice and men can often go awry. I passed the same or another equally impressive 250-plus pound boar on the last afternoon, 30 minutes before dark. I didn’t regret passing him for one minute and had resigned to the fact that the 2026 was going to have me eating a tag sandwich from the most enjoyable Arkansas bear hunt I’d ever had. And then I heard Dave say, there’s a good one. And he wasn’t kidding. Standing 25 yards away and slowly getting closer was a good bear with a big old noggin and a belly like a whale. I guessed him to weigh well over the other bears I’d seen and passed and was gonna job a hole in him as light faded and shooting hours got close to ending. I picked a spot, settled my pin on him, and at a little over 15 yards, the arrow surprised me when it left the string and the hit sounded good to me. I had every confidence that I had just watched a soon-to-be-dead bear run away from our stand. It listened for a death moan, something Not every bear does, by any means, and admittingly, hard thing for me to hear. But clear evidence of a bear’s ultimate death that we didn’t hear anything. I’ve killed more than one that didn’t do it, so I wasn’t concerned, at least not right then. I sent John and Drew a text, and now is when John’s story kicks back in. As it started getting dark, I got a text from Brent saying that he was going to call me.
00:16:43
Speaker 2: I had a feeling that he’d had some success.
00:16:45
Speaker 1: And when I answered, he started telling me that I needed to meet him at a spot to help him look for a bear that he’d just shot. After sharing my excitement for him, I told him that I had stuck one a few hours earlier, and his reaction was pure gold. We all met up, and after looking at my shot replayed on Drew’s camera, I was relieved to hear that the experienced bear hunters around me were confident that my bear was probably dead in the woods already. But until I got my hands on it, the anxiety over that shot wasn’t going away. We went and looked for Brent’s bear, and after finding a little bit of blood, the search went cold. Jeremy is a hound hunter and has dogs. that he uses the blood trail game on the occasion anyone in his circle of friends might need one. So we left there and went back to where I had shot mine, since it had been a few hours since that shot, and we found some good blood. But again, the trail went cold after about 15 yards. Now, Cody brought the hounds, and we cut them loose looking for mine, and it only took him a few minutes to find it, less than 50 yards from where the blood trail had stopped. As soon as we got to the bear, we noticed how stiff it was. That gave me an incredible sense of relief, knowing that it had died quicker than we thought after the shot. Any hunter knows the emotions that come with something like that. It was an incredible old dry sow, and she had a beautiful coat to go along with that white patch on her chest. A perfect first bear for me, and I’m still pinching myself that I got to harvest one of these wonderful animals. All in all, this was one of the coolest weeks of my life. Not only was the whole thing recorded for a media film, but I got to meet so many incredible people along the way. Honestly, some of my favorite memories were the ones that happened off camera, just hanging around the camp with the guys and everyone else who was part of this journey. I’ll always be thankful for this experience, and I honestly couldn’t think of a better way to harvest my first bear. And according to John Pantuso, that’s just how that happened. Nice job, John. But now we’ve got my bear to find. And we all, and when I say all, I mean all. Besides John, Drew, Dave, and yours truly, Jeremy, Andy, Cody, Brittany, Cameron, and Gracie drove back to my stand with cameras rolling and two hounds in tow and rendezvoused at the small amount of blood that we’d found 50 yards from where I’d shot. Now, my arrow had passed clean through and was stuck in the ground. Very little blood was on the fletching, which isn’t all that unusual, especially for a bear wearing a lot of fat like that one. It can sometimes clean the arrow as it leaves, wiping away all the evidence of a well-placed shot. A quick sniff of the arrow from stem to stern proved that the shot wasn’t in the guts. Regardless of how you wipe it or what you wipe it with, bear guts will leave its malodorous clues all over the arrow, and you don’t need a sniffer as big as mine to determine if they’re there. We cut the dogs loose and in short order they began to follow the trail leading from the blood in the direction Dave and I had heard him leave. They were heading toward the place where we’d figured the bears were spending the majority of their time. The terrain was steep and unforgiving beyond that bench and had anyone set out to design a more remote place for bears to live and thrive, they’d have been hard pressed to improve on that one. It was literally covered in bear trails, beds, and sign. They bait the bear after another 175 yards or so against a big rock bluff, but couldn’t hold him there once we got close. Cody, Dave, Drew, and I got there quick, and I got a look at that bear in my headlight from less than 30 yards away. No doubt it was the same bear. His big old belly extended below his knees, and that blockhead he was toting was a dead giveaway. Relieved and awash in disappointment all in one moment. Relieved and identified him without a doubt as being the same bear I shot and disappointing in seeing that apparently my shot hadn’t been as good as it had sounded. Reviewing the footage before we ever set out to look for John’s bear didn’t tell us anything. There was a small tree convened at a place between Dave’s camera and the bear that wasn’t between me and the bear. Everyone was in agreement that the sound was not the audible pop of a gut shot which the odorless arrow shaft corroborated.
00:21:44
Speaker 2: Could it have been too far forward?
00:21:47
Speaker 1: Maybe, but I would have lost the farm betting that it wasn’t. Regardless, the pair of hounds baited them again near the bottom of the canyon and to the bottom we went, slipping, sliding, and going from tree to tree as we descended into the depths of the Ozarks like I have never seen in Arkansas. A bear going downhill is still a good sign of a mortal wound, even though I had.
00:22:11
Speaker 2: Seen no indication of one when I saw him.
00:22:14
Speaker 1: The first time. Our second encounter was even less encouraging. Twice they baited him, and as we pinballed our way to the bottom of that canyon, after the fading barks of the trailing hounds, they started up the other side.
00:22:30
Speaker 2: The side just.
00:22:31
Speaker 1: As steep as the one we’d just come down, the bear increasing the speed he was leading the dogs as we watched it on Cody’s Garmin tractor. We’d come well over a mile down into the darkness, and now the dogs were trailing out of here and around and over a ridge more than two miles away. The realization setting in that my shot on that bear wasn’t as good as I thought. It would be another five hours before the dogs were caught, Cody having stayed with them for nearly every step.
00:23:02
Speaker 2: I seriously don’t know how he did it. Absolutely. one of the toughest humans I know.
00:23:09
Speaker 1: But with no evidence of ending at a dead bear, the track was terminated. The first bear I’ve ever sent an heir at that I didn’t recover, a burden that I will carry forward as long as I live, the weight of which will encumber every notion on when to let loose the next one until I’m no longer able to do so. It is the responsibility of each of us who hunts to practice and practice until the muscle memory and repetition of each on-target backyard session transitions into real-time success in the field. No matter how many repetitive 10-ring errors in preseason or even on the day of that sit, it all comes down to that one shot and any deviation from perfection can lead to catastrophe.
00:24:02
Speaker 2: My only solace is believing.
00:24:03
Speaker 1: That bear is still there in the mountains, although I have no guarantee. No 100% positive ID that the bear I obviously wounded will survive other than the years of experience among all that were there that would lead a reasonable person to conclude that he would. Regardless of all that, I do not minimize my ethical responsibility to take ownership of the event and report it to you here as being no one’s fault but my own. I didn’t hit a limb this time. I just made a poor shot. I think John said it very well in the last paragraph of his story that he sent me about our hunt together when he said, After a while, they made the tough call that Prince Bear was going to live to see another day. As gutted as I was for him, I also had a ton of admiration for the way he handled it. As hunters, we do everything we can to make an ethical shot, but sometimes even the best of shots can yield an outcome that we don’t expect. John had a ton of clarity in an emotion-filled rollercoaster week of hunting. He saw that what we thought was a marginal shot dropped his bear in less than 100 yards to hearing described what we all assumed was a fatal hit turn out.
00:25:26
Speaker 2: To be anything but with mine.
00:25:30
Speaker 1: Despite my contribution or lack thereof, I couldn’t have been more proud to be a part of John Pantuso’s first bear. He’s one of the most giving people I know, a true gentleman, and a class act. He is my brother, and we will forever share his triumph just as we share my failure, the dichotomy of which keeps the balance of perspective and focus on what to do what not to do, and why those lessons matter. You’ll be able to see this film next year when it comes out in the 12 and 27 series.
00:26:08
Speaker 2: I can’t wait to show it to you.
00:26:10
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening to all of us here on the Bear Grease channel. And until next week, this is Brent Reeves signing off.
00:26:18
Speaker 2: Y’all be careful.
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