Bear Grease - Ep. 161: THIS COUNTRY LIFE - Trapping and TNT

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

Add beaver dam demolition to the list of off the wall things Brent has done so far in his tenure as a human. Seems only natural that someone who’s lived a life of adrenaline-filled danger would enjoy blowing up stuff. There’s something wrong with this guy. We’re fighting otters and dodging falling debris on this week’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.

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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.

Trapping and TNT Trapping, a controversial subject in some places these days, but like it or not, trapping was and continues to be an important and effective method of predator, nuisance, animal control, and land protection. As a kid, I followed my older brother Tim around learning the do's and the don'ts, just like he followed our Uncle Dob around, learning from him. Now, you've heard me talk about Uncle Dob before. He wasn't our uncle, just a long-time family friend, like the rest of us Reeves boys, would rather hunting fish and work,

a condition none of us ever really got under control. Trapping and Beaver Control Stories this week on Meadeers' This Country Life podcast. But first, I'm going to tell you a story. It was the winter of 1985, and while I was enrolled in college at the University of Arkansas at Monticella, I worked as a nighttime and weekend dispatcher and jailer at the Warren Police Department. in a town less than 7,000 people there wasn't usually a whole lot happening on Sunday morning, so when the entrance door swung open with a bang and a mud-covered man stepped up to the window

of the radio room, kind of startled me. He was soaked from head to toe, tracking mud all over the trustee polished floors and was staring at me with an exaggerated look of desperation. This man needed help. Had he been involved in an accident? been in a fight, witnessed some type of tragedy, I had no clue. But I did know that in the time it took me to get out of my chair and hurry to the window, he seemed to be hanging on by a thread. Sir, are you all right? I need a game warden.

A game warden? That's not what I was expecting to hear. He could have said anything, but the last thing I expected him to say was, I needed a game warden. I asked him again, are you always? Okay? He said, man, I'm tired. We're all tired. But I need a game warden and tell him to bring a cage. I never seen this man before my life, but I knew he was sincere about what he was talking about. But it's 6 a.m. on a.m. on a Sunday morning. I'm fixing to have to wake someone up, so I have to have a little more information before I do.

I said, you said that you were all tired. Is somebody outside? Yes, my trapping partners. Well, none of this was making a lot of sense, so to answer the questions I was bound to get when I woke the game warden up, so I told the man I needed to go with him outside, meet the folks that were there with him and get a little more information about what was going on. I wasn't sure a game warden was what this guy needed. I was thinking a bath and a psychiatrist would be more help to him. Anyway, I followed him outside, and there stood his two accomplices, both disheveled, muddy, soaking wet and bleeding. And they weren't oozing blood,

but they were covered from head to toe with pretty significant cuts and scratches in all their clothes. And I mean all of their clothes looked like they'd been in a fight with a weed eater and lost. One man was wearing the remnants of a pair of rubber boots, the tops of which had been shredded. The only thing that appeared to be holding him on his feet

was a round of duct tape that he wrapped around each shin. These guys looked like they'd been eaten by a coyote and crapped off a cliff. Whatever had happened was serious and these boys were traumatized from him. Okay, men, now what's going on? Why do you need a game warden? The man with the taped on rubber boots spoke up. We need one to give us a tag for this otter. I looked around.

What otter? The one in this wooden box in the back of the truck. He motioned toward the back of his truck and I walked over to see a, A plywood box about three foot square. Had a hinged lid on the top and it was secured with a hasp and a padlock. You got an otter in there? Barely. Okay.

Well, why do you need a game warden? We need him to pay us our hundred dollars. For an otter? Yes. This otter wanted? My feeble attempted humor was lost on these guys. I thought it was funny. They did not.

Why is a game warden going to give you $100? He told me the game of fish is trade in Missouri otters for turkeys. For every live otter we bring in and turn over to the game of fish, Arkansas gets a turkey and we get $100. Well, how'd y'all catch him? We trapped him. How'd you get him in the box? The fellow said, I'm not really sure.

It seemed to go on forever. There was a little bit of sadness in his voice. Well, tell me about it. We had him on a catch pole and took the trap off his foot, and everything was going fine up to that point. The cable was running around his chest right behind his front legs, and I had it set where it would just hold him and not squeeze him. I didn't want to hurt him.

The plan was to take the trap off his foot, pick him up, and drop him in the hole in the box, and hit the tension release on the catch pole and remove the cable. Well, that's not what happened. happened? No, sir. Not even close. The second that foothold trap come off, he went berserk. You ain't never seen nothing like it. He told me he bit the catch pole in half quicker than anything he'd ever seen. He said it was like I had Bruce Lee on a leash and he was beating us all up with a pair of nun chokes. It's the biggest otter I've ever seen. He gnawed and he called Lloyd's

boots off so fast that when he jumped and tried to get away, he stepped out of both of them. Lloyd toad tilted his boots back to the truck in his hands. The next 45 minutes were painful. I kept him in the wire catch, but we couldn't get him in the box. We should have made the hole bigger. I'd lift him off the ground and try to lower him down in that hole, but he'd just stand there over that whole snarling and biting and trying to kill us. These boys were in a bad way.

I said, well, how'd you get him in there? He said, Lord pitched in one of his boots, and as soon as he jumped on it, he threw his coat on him, wrapped him up and stuck him down in there. I said, that's why Lloyd ain't wearing a coat. Yep, the otter got it. I said, well, at least you got your boot back, Lloyd. What's left of it, he said.

All right, I'm going to call the gaming fish, and they'll be sending someone out here pretty quick, I bet. Is the otter injured anyway or anywhere? He looked healthy when we last son. him. Fair enough, I said. He's a bigan, huh? He said it's the biggest one you've ever seen. How big is he? The man said he's pushing 30 pounds. Oh, wow. Okay. Well, crack to open that lid and let's look at him. I want to see him. The fellow said, do what? I said, open a lid. I want to see this 30 pound otter. Well, they all looked at one another and back at me without saying a word.

Then he said, Mr. I've always tried to do right by the law. Listen to me when I say this. I ain't opening that box up for you or nobody else. If my grandma walked up here right now that's been dead over 20 years and said, crack that lid open, I want to look at him. She'd hand me $100 before I got the key out of my pocket. And when you call the game horden, don't worry about having him bring a cage. He can have this one.

And that's just how that happened. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hundred 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 hit.

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 backwards. 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. From the sixth grade on and off through junior high and high school, I ran a trap line before school. Now that meant that while all the other kids were still sacked out in their old bed,

old Briddley was walking through the woods and creaks checking traps. I never had out more than two dozen at a time, but checking that many traps, resetting and running down coons that had pulled my drags off, That took some time. And there were several mornings that I was running across a field with a coon or two to throw in the barn and run and catch the bus before it took off. I never missed it, but there were a couple of close calls. I look back at that now and I think, would I let my kids do that? Well, the answer is yes if I felt they were as competent at it as I was. And that's the difference.

I may have been 11 or 12 when I started doing this on my own, but I had a half. but I had several years' experience following my brother around and watching and helping him. There's so many things to learn, and all of it I still used today. Tim would have me looking at tracks and how they came down a bank or a creek edge and tell me to look at it and see why a Coon would walk that way. Why would he walk over some things and around others? He never told me the answers until I answered right. He always made me think about it.

I got pretty good at it. And after a while, I figured out that they usually just travel the paths of least resistance, and that keeps them near their food source and close to an escape route. By paying attention and asking questions, I learned a lot about how Coons get around in the world just out there doing their thing. And that eventually led me to try and fox and bobcat. I never really got good at those. Tim was a whole lot better at it than I am.

As a matter of fact, I've only caught one bobcat in my life, and that was four years ago. Beaver and Otter was a whole other deal. And I never targeted Otter specifically because at the time I was really getting into trapping and getting good enough to start making a little money at it, the fur market went belly up. The only reason anyone was trapping during that time was either because they'd done it forever and didn't want to quit or they were doing nuisance trapping for landowners and timber. companies. Tim even contracted for a while doing some nuisance trapping for a timber management company, and while he was doing that, I went to work for Georgia Pacific and the forestry department

as a timber spotter. Now, if you don't know what that is, allow me to elaborate. Georgia Pacific owned thousands of acres of timberland in South Arkansas, and it was my job, along with several other crews, to select cut tracks of land for the contracting loggers to come in and harvest the timber. Now, this is when I was working with Mr. Leon. I'm sure most of you remember him. If you don't, check out episode 127, Know Your Trees. That's just one of a handful where I've talked about Mr. Leon.

But we would get our orders from the forester who was over our district, and we'd either be painting landlines or checking behind loggers to make sure they were utilizing the resource or spotting new tracks to cut. We carried a tree-marking spray gun. that would paint a stripe at eye level that could be seen, and then another stripe on the bottom where the stump would be to ensure the trees we marked were the ones that were getting cut. But my favorite, my favorite thing we did was beaver control.

We had a couple different folks that GP contracted to trap beavers, and I'd go with them sometime checking traps and getting the beavers out of there, but the best part was when we scheduled beaver damn blowing days. Hmm. Everyone knows that beaver's dam up streams, and this causes the water to back up the stream, flood out into the woods, and eventually kill the timber either by flooding or the beavers gnawing them down to using their dams. They're amazing creatures, and I love them. But there are a costly lot when it comes to growing timber to maturity, and that was the business we were in.

So, if we found a beaver pond, we'd walk it out until we found where the dam was located, mark it on a map and when the contractor showed up, we'd put in explosives and get to work. Times were different, remember, and if you had a current driver's license and a legitimate reason to have it, you could go to a construction supply business and buy explosives. Beaver control was a legitimate reason.

The training was pretty intense. I remember the contractor telling me cut the fuse long enough for you to light it and get to safety. Well, how long is that, I ask you? He said, how fast are you? And that was the end of the training. So while I hated math in school, I was constantly doing it in my head while we waited around beaver ponds

and dug out holes in the dam to stuff full of explosives and planned our escape routes before the big boom. Cotton mouths were a constant reminder that there were more dangerous things out there besides us than the explosives, believe it or not. And those jokers were always where I wanted to be or wanted to poke my hand to dig out a spot to put some of the Tovex. Tovex is the explosive that we were using. It was just another thing to have to keep up with.

It was in the spring of the year and the rain had flooded out a huge creek bottom that we'd planned to log that summer. So in order to do that, we had to find the dam. It took us a couple of days of walking and wading and hunting it up, but we eventually found it, one of them anyway. turned out there were a series of dams along this creek that they had worked on for years. It was an absolute marvel of ingenuity and engineering. The structures that they build, they look so happenstance, but they are anything but accidental.

Every little twig, every little limb, every load of mud is specific to that portion of the dam and its purpose. And we were there to blow it up. The largest of the dams was about six, four. feet high on the downstream side and nearly 100 yards long. It was massive. The water had backed up and flooded what we estimated to be about 30 acres of timber. The timber was showing signs of extreme stress and if we were going to salvage any of it before it died and rotted away, that Beaver Dam had to go. Now looking at a topo map and knowing the country and how the woods drained in that area, we knew there would be no ill effects down.

downstream by turning all that water loose. There were slews and creeks and bios that all led to the river like a highway system. But how much water are we talking about? Well, in a one-acre pond that's four feet deep, you're looking at over 651,000 gallons. Now, y'all feel free to check my math. If it's wrong, don't send me, you hate mail, Copernicus. Take it up with the nerds at Google. So, you get the picture.

that we're dealing with a lot of water. A lot of water. We walked out in the middle of the dam on the downstream side with a grubbing hole and a sack full of explosives. We rigged three sets of four sticks of tovex, placed them out in a 20-yard chain, and connected them all with the debt cord

so they would all detonate at the same time. We put out plenty of fuse. He let me light it, and when that fuse ignited, I checked my watch and we left there like we were late for work, giggling like a couple of kids with anticipation that what was about to happen. We'd already picked out our spot. Two big pin oak trees that stood side by side

that would have had us about 75 yards away from the blast zone and at an angle where we could watch the show in relative safety. Want to know how to make time stand still? Estimate the length of time it takes for a burning. and fuse to set off an explosion. We waited and waited and waited and waited and nothing. I looked at my watch. Surely it had been a minute by now.

Fifteen seconds had gone by. And what seemed like forever would only be an additional 15 seconds. I was staring intently at that smoke drifting from the burning fuse. The contractor was smoking a cigarette staring in the other direction. like he was waiting on a school bus. Did it go out? He looked at me and said, You want to go check it?

No, sir, I don't. He looked back down through the bottoms and took another big drag off his cigarette. Finally, he looked over at me and said, Fire in the hole. As nonchalantly as he would say, past the biscuits. I poked my fingers in my ears

and I peaked out around that big mass of tree just in time to see a tranquil spring morning turning to Armageddon. Mud, sticks, and water were raining down all around us, and the sound of the water rushing through that 15-yard gap in the dam was louder than the explosion. Fish were pouring through the opening like crazy. I wish that brought a dip in it. It took a while for that thing to drain, several hours, in fact.

We'd blown the dam at about 10 a.m., and at 3 in the afternoon, we decided to creek was safe enough to wait across. Now, why would we be waiting across the creek? Because the spot we picked to hide from the explosion was on the wrong side. That's why. Oh, well, live and learn. Thank y'all for listening and for helping us spread the word about our show. If you have it and you know someone that might enjoy them, send it to them.

Remember which side of the creek you're on, and until next time, this is Brent Reeve, signing off. Y'all be careful. 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 full of blood.

Oh, my God, he doesn't have a hit. 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 backwards. 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 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, IHeart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.