Bear Grease - Ep. 153: THIS COUNTRY LIFE - Dog Stories

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

We all like to hear a good dog story and Brent has some good ones for you this week regarding our favorite four legged hunting buddies. We’re chasing coyotes, ducks, and even talking about a turkey dog too. Throw a stick of stove-wood on the fire, sit back, and tune your ears to MeatEater’s This Country Life podcast.  Connect with Brent and MeatEater MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop Bear Grease Merch https://gootf.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

First Light's fieldwear collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days in real use. Hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season. Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new fieldwear gear at firstlight.com.

Welcome to This Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves. From Coon Hunting to Trotlining and just general country living, I want you to stay a while as I share my stories and country skills that will help you beat the system. This Country Life is proudly presented as part of Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast the Airways have to offer. All right, friends, pull you up a chair or drop that tailgate. I think I've got a thing or two to teach you.

Dog stories. Nothing will pull at your heartstrings, make you laugh, aggravate you, or make you proud quicker than your dog. Since the first wolf slipped up to the fire and didn't try to eat to folks that was camped there eons ago, to this morning when I walked outside to feed old whaling, dogs have been our faithful companions that love us unconditionally, even when we don't deserve it. It's all about our hunting buddies this week, the four-legged ones, on Meat Eaters' This Country Life podcast. But first, I'm going to tell you a story.

My dad was a very well-known wolf hunter, and yet he had never actually seen a wolf in his life. It's just what folks in South Arkansas called coyote hunting, and the hunting part was all about whose dog was leading the pack. The object was not to kill the coyote, but to run him. And I guess I need to put this in context for all the coyote lovers out there, if there are any, which I doubt there are. And if you're listening to this of your own free will and not being forced under some kind of government-sponsored enhanced interrogation technique, if that's the case, you might as well go ahead and fess up because this ain't going to get no better.

But running a coyote just means your hounds are trailing the scent of where the coyote is being. Just like a coon hound trailing and barking after a coon that's been walking down the edge of a creek and follows his scent trail to whatever tree he eventually climbs, my dad's running dogs were just smelling and barking on the trail of the coyote. They may never get close enough to even hear him trotting through the woods, and the coyote may slap get away from them by zigging when the dogs are zagging. I don't need any hate mail from the folks picturing Wiley Coyote running through the desert with his ribs showing and his tongue hanging out. That ain't how it works. As evidence, all for Exhibit A, the Red Man Coyote Story. I was just a young and my dad and I were standing on a timber company road

that ran north and south one evening in the fall of the year. It was about 15 minutes before dark, and we'd just cut the dogs loose. about six of them, out to the west of the road. One of his dogs had struck the scent of a coyote from the back of the truck while we were driving. That's not unusual for a good dog to do that, but this dog was exceptional at it. He was a bona fide, straight up, running Walker Foxhound. Now, y'all going to think I'm messing with you, bringing the word fox into a story about coyote hunting that we call wolf hunting that ain't actually hunting. But this is where I'm from, and we're pretty much.

making up the rules as we go along. Anyway, it was the time of day when headlights were no good, but the light from the sun wasn't much better. But you could still see in the open, but out in the woods, it was dark. Like I said, the dog, old Red Man, started barking in the back of the truck, and we were going down the road, so when we stopped, Dad said, dump them all. So I let the tailgate drop and those hounds poured out of there like tea out of a picture. Red man was leading the pack and they headed due west straight away from us with all of them barking every breath.

Dad said old red man's got him and the rest of them are going to put it on him. The dogs were sure enough sanding the rails and moving directly away from us just as fast as they could go. Every one of them bawling and barking as loud and fast as they could. Now less than two or three minutes and they were getting a pretty good way out. there, but boy, it sounded good. We were smiling at each other, listening to the race, me trying to guess which dog was which, and Dad telling me if I was guessing right, they'd gone about as far as we could hear them when something caught my eye about 200 yards away, and I looked down the road. It was a straight section of road that you couldn't see either end of from where we were standing.

I said, Dad, look yonder. The coyote just walked out in the road. I was standing at the right front fender of the truck and dad was standing right beside me. He said, where? I told him right there in the road. He's coming this away. He still didn't see him. Dad, right there, he's coming straight to us. Son, I don't see him. I thought maybe he'd gone blind because he was standing so close to me that I could feel him behind me. Dad, he's right there. I could hear his feet clicking on the gravel and pointed at the coyote that was now less than 50 yards from us. He was just trotting toward us. He was just trotting toward us in the right-hand run of that road like he's riding a bicycle. Dad said, that's that young dog that we turned loose.

I didn't say a word. That was a coyote, and I know I didn't turn one of those loose. Well, as he got closer, the coyote was passing by us literally within arm's reach. Dad reached out and put his hand on my chest and mashed me up against the truck and kicked a tight coyote to move him on down the road. He never changed gears. We were laughing. high-fiving and re-telling each other that story that we'd both just witnessed.

It was incredible. While all that was happening, that pack of wolfhounds that we thought were burning the hair off of coyote started getting a little louder and looping around to the south. It took them about 20 minutes, but they came out on the road right where I saw the coyote come out and were kicking rocks as high as a six-rail fence when they passed us hot on his trail. Hot on his trail. Yeah, right. That race lasted about three hours before he finally gave the dogs a slip, and we caught them all not far from where we turned them loose. Man, that was a fun night,

and we got to see something and share something pretty cool that we both talked about for the rest of his days. And that's just how that happened. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag. And there was a pool of blood.

Oh, my God. He doesn't have a head. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper. From cold case files to whispered suspicions. From remote mountains to frozen backwoods.

Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments, and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season two of Blood Trails premieres April 16th.

Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever. you get your podcasts. I never get tired of hearing dog stories, and I never get tired of telling them. I come from a long line of folks that use dogs to put food on the table. We're dog people, and there has never been a time in my life that I didn't have a quality hunting dog or some flavor, whether it was a dug dog, a squirrel dog, or a coon dog. Obviously, my dad, my Uncle Jimmy Ray, and my brother Tim, it was just something that we did. Any of us could have opted out at any point, but why in the world would we have wanted to?

There's nothing outside of my family that equals the joy and satisfaction I get from hunting a well-trained dog, especially one that I trained or had a hand in training. I know there's folks that don't have the time or the ability to do the training themselves and love the companionship and the thrill of the hunt, just like the folks that train their dog. There's just a little extra bump on the proud meter when you're the one helping your dog see the light and the purpose for his being. It strengthens the bond between you even more

because you have both figured out that you can trust each other. You show him what you want done and how you want it done, and the dog trusts you to praise him when he does it the way you've taught him. Tim and I were duck hunting and biometer with some clients many years ago, back when you could commercially hunt there. And my black lab Anna was our retriever. Anyone that had the good fortune to hunt with this dog would tell you that she was something special. I was reminded of this story by hearing my friend in Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame member Jim Ronquist

talking about a similar thing that happened to him with one of his labs. Jim is a world champion competition duck caller, but better than that, he's a heck of an outdoorsman. And beyond all that, he's just a dang good fella. And when he told this story, it reminded me of this one. We were having a good hunt with good groups of ducks working into the hole we were hunting. We'd boated in before daylight. We found a likely spot that we'd hunted before and with the forecasted wind, and when shooting time came, so did the ducks. We were smashing them pretty good, which is my favorite way to do it.

Get the hunters in some ducks, let them shoot their limits fast, and get back to the camp to fix dinner. watch a little football, take a nap, whatever. It was setting up to be an easy day. We were just four ducks short of a six-man limit, and Tim and I had our limits, and the four clients, they lacked one duck each. So Tim and I were done shooting. We were just calling, working the ducks,

and I was handling Anna. Now, these boys were not the best shots, but the ducks were working in the decoys so good that they were really having to work, hard not to hit them when they came in the hole. Those last few ducks always seemed to be the biggest struggle. I added the pressure of strongly encourage them to shoot only greenheads, which was supposed to make them take their time and shoot what they recognized as being a Drake Mallard.

There was two reasons for this. The most important was conservation. But not shooting hens, we were returning mama ducks to the nesting grounds to raise more babies next year. The second reason was to make our clients pay attention and focus on one particular duck to shoot. Instead of getting all amped up when 50 more ducks dropped in through the timber and were hovering over the decoys, landing literally all around them. I've seen them run their shotguns to the plug, aiming at nothing in particular, and hitting the same. But the quicker they got their limit, the quicker we got out of there letting the ducks rest and me and Tim rest too.

We counted and recounted ducks. Yep, four ducks short of a six-man limit, and the mid-morning lull of no ducks flying had just begun. Now we wait. It's getting close to 10 o'clock, and I'm hungry, and we could have been done two hours ago if these clowns could shoot. Anna sat beside me on her dog stand, her eyes ever more on the watch for ducks.

She'd retrieved every duck that morning that we killed, except for two or three that fell so close to where we were standing that we just picked them. up and hung them on the stranger. None of them fell further than 40 yards, and she made quick work of them in that knee-deep water. I saw Anna jerk her head and start tracking toward the sky, and a moment later, Tim started calling. I looked over at him, and I saw where he was looking, and they were both laser-focused on

six ducks as they passed overhead. I could easily see that group had four drakes and two hens. All right, boys, shoot the drakes, I told them. Me and Tim went to work on to calling those ducks in, kicking water to put some movement in the decoys, and when the ducks were facing away from us and standing dead still when they passed over the hole, checking out whether or not it was safe to come in. Now, I'm telling the clients where they are the whole time. They're behind us at 6 o'clock.

They're getting lower. Y'all be still. Circling around to the west. Three o'clock. Y'all get ready. Twelve o'clock. Here they come. Go to work, boys. Well, they commenced the shooting, and three drakes fell as dead as the duck could die,

belly up in the decoys and a couple of them paddling at the air with the little orange feet. The two hens climbed out of there like they were headed to the moon. I recounted the ducks floating in the water. How many did we get? Tim said all the drakes fell, but I only saw three. The hunters were hooping and hollering for getting their limit, but I couldn't find the last duck. I looked at Anna and she was stone cold froze on her seat, stared out to the right of the hole, and that's when Tim said,

Yonder goes a cripple. He pointed in the direction Anna was looking. I knew then she'd seen it, and I sent her off on a straight line in the direction she was looking. She left that stand like it was on fire and was bounding through the water like she was on a rail and a perfect line cast in the direction I sent it. A couple of the hunters that were standing close to me

got my attention away from her by slapping me on the back and shouting how cool that was and how much fun they'd had. They were already getting their cameras out. That'll give you a clue as how long ago it happened. They brought cameras, not phones. I turned back toward Anna and the ripples that she'd made in the water were all about gone. I told them to be quiet and listen, and they didn't. They were still all excited and understandably so. After the second time I told to be quiet. I got rude and I said, hey, y'all shut up. I don't know where my dog is. Well, I couldn't hear a thing. No crashing through the water like I'd heard when she left. I walked out toward the direction that she went, but the film that covered the surface of the water

had closed back together and the sunken leaves that kept her from leaving a mud trap. I called her and nothing. I whistled and nothing. She was a well-trained professional. She was a well-trained, duck dog. It wasn't like she was just a Labrador and looked apart. No, sir. She was the real deal. I whistled again trying to blow the pee out of that roer going your dog whistle and nothing. Boats were starting to come down to bio and out of the woods so the noise they made was drowning out any hopes of hearing her in the water. Twenty minutes went by. Tim and the other hunters had everything loaded in the boats. I'd made a big loop out in the flooded timber looking and calling for and nothing.

I walked back to where they were and we started making plans of how we were going to all split up and start looking for. I had no idea how I was going to explain this to my kids. They loved her more than they loved me. I was sick to my stomach and I hated the fact that I'd even brought her. I heard a racket in the absolute opposite direction from which she'd left on that retrieve and I saw a flash of gray about as far as you could see down through the woods. we all froze.

As it got closer, I could see that it was the top side of a mallard Drake's wing, and it was sticking straight up in the air, moving through the flooded timber like a shark's fin on top of a pinball, bumping into bushes and ricocheting off trees. Anna had a locked-down grip on that crippled duck, and when she caught him, his wing folded over her eyes. She was slowly but surely making her way back to me with that duck her mouth, unable to see a frazzling thing.

I met her halfway and took that duck from her. Man, I was glad to see that dog. I was worried to death, but she wasn't. She was doing her job and loving every minute of it. We walked back to the hole in when we got there, she hopped up on her stand ready to go again. I was needing a cigarette, and I didn't even smoke. It's times like these that stick in your head forever.

I can show you right where we were hunting. The tree I was standing beside, the tree Tim was standing beside, or at least where the stumps are now. And I remember the great sense of relief I felt when I saw her coming back with that duck in her mouth. Man, it's a bond you build through living life together, not just hunting. The ups and the downs, the successes, and the near failures, watching your kids play with the dog in the yard. You've heard me talk about peanut, the world's greatest squirrel dog.

that was my hairy little brother and my father's favorite son. He would play chase with us and hide-and-seek. I remember one time we were all chasing him, and he took off behind the house with us in tow. He circled around and was heading back toward the front yard, so some of us doubled back to catch him and cut him off when he rounded the other end of the house, while some of us continued to follow him.

We met each other in their front yard, but there was no peanut. Where'd he go? We only lost sight of him for a second or two, but apparently that's all he needed to disappear. We called him and looked all around the house, going back and forth, but we couldn't find him. Then someone looked up, and he was sitting on the roof of the house just looking at us, and if a dog could smile, that rascal was smiling big. My dad's truck was parked at the edge of the carport, and the tailgate was down. Peanut jumped up on the tailgate, onto the toolbox behind the cab, then on top of the cab, then on to the roof.

And I suppose was just sitting there watching us running around the yard looking for it. A dog's life mirrors my own in some degree, I have to say. I like to have fun. I like to be around the folks that I love. I get excited at meal times. I like to take naps. I like to hunt every chance I get and go with someone that I care about and share it with them. Did I mention naps?

Kids and dogs go together like biscuits and gravy. Kids and grown folks, too, can learn a lot about loyalty, friendship, and unconditional love just by having a good dog. I read a quote that said, having a dog will bless you with many of the happiest days of your life and one of the worst. Well, that's true. And when they leave us, man, it's hard and it's sad. But I look back at the memories and the stories I have about Anna and Peanut and a whole host of others and it doesn't make me sad. When someone asks about a dog and I don't tell them how they died, I talk about how they lived and all the adventures are the funny things that we shared. Just last Saturday I was sitting in my truck waiting on daylight so I could hit the woods and go squirrel hunting.

I was catching up on my messages and I read one from a guy up in the Appalachian mouth. who had recently lost one of his turkey dogs. That's right, I said turkey dogs. I remember reading an article about turkey dogs when I was a kid in some hunting magazine, and more recently, Dr. Seth Bynum wrote a good one that you can read at the meat eater.com entitled How to Hunt Turkeys with a Dog. The point of me bringing either one of those subjects up is you can train a dog to hunt anything. And if you put in a little effort, you can find folks that will help you get it done,

Or if you can't, they'll do it for you. But back to the fellow that lost his dog. While I was reading his message, I was immediately back hunting with Peanut and Anna, both of which have been gone now for years. Peanut when I was just a kid and Anna ten years ago. But I wasn't sad. It made me happy thinking about them.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a little wistful thinking about both of them, but how much would I be missing to do? if they hadn't been in my life. Some would say nothing because you can't miss what you never had, but I look at the pictures that that man sent me, and I can see myself in him sitting in camo with his dog and their turkey. Both of them looking proud to be in each other's company, the hunter looking at the camera, and the dog looking at him.

That paints a bigger picture, and one that pretty well describes the true relationship between hunters, and hunting dogs. Now, thank you so much for listening, and I appreciate y'all sharing this podcast. I'd like to say a special hello to Miss Michelle Baldwin's English class at Cherokee High School in Cherokee, Oklahoma.

Man, that's almost smack dab in the middle of the U.S. of A. And if anyone knows the country life and how good it is, it's the great folks in Cherokee. This is Brent Reeves, signing off. Y'all be careful. First Lights fieldwear collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days in real use. Hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters.

No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season. Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new fieldwear gear at firstlight.