Bear Grease - Ep. 179: THIS COUNTRY LIFE - Dogs, Hogs, and Submarines

Episode Date: January 12, 2024

Brent's talking about some close calls with his four legged pals in this week's episode. From hungry Labradors to caving Treeing Walkers, it's canine pandemonium on MeatEater's This Country Life podcast. Connect with Brent and MeatEater MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee 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.

Dogs, hogs, and submarines. Those of us who value the companionship and love of a good dog are many. Now, you spend enough time with them and they'll fill your head and your heart with some great memories. I talk to folks all the time about my dogs and I listen to stories about theirs. And you can tell which ones that have really made an impact on them by the way they look when they talk about it. We're going to talk about a couple today that will forever be if the same. top of my list as favorites. But first, I'm going to tell you a story. Zach was a giant black Labrador. He belonged to my brother Tim and was about as big as the lab

gets. He was a monster. And the good Lord chiseled him out of patience and brains. He was smart. Tim had trained him on the basics of obedience and retrieving, but that dude possessed an abundance of inherent natural ability of what made good labs, great labs. You've heard me say before that just about any kind of utilitarian dog that their desire to go and do what their bread to do is an untrainable trait. Just because a dog is a Labrador doesn't make him a good retriever. Just like having a coon hound doesn't make them a coon dog. There's a big difference. A coon hound is a breed category within a group of hunting dog breeds.

A coon dog is a title given. by hunters to a specimen from one of those breeds that consistently strikes a track, follows it to a tree, and barks so you can find him and the coon. You can see beautiful specimens of each breed of sporting dog every Thanksgiving when they have that Westminster dog show on TV. We hardly ever miss it. They have some beautiful beagles and retrievers and coon hounds and bird dogs. They are the epitome of what all those breeds are supposed to look like.

height, weight, ear length, gait, stance, color, and build are all judged according to a set of list of requirements. Some of them may even be good hunting dogs. They obviously possess the outward traits of the breed. Unfortunately, that's not how it works in the real world. They not only have to look the part, they have to be able to perform it. The show dogs are what one of my old football coaches would say when describing an athletically built, player with zero ability as looking like Tarzan but playing like Jane. Well, Zach not only looked like Tarzan, but he played like Tarzan and King Buck had a baby.

If you don't know who King Buck was, look that dog up. Anyway, Zach not only looked apart, but he played the part as well. Add in the mixture that he was a perfect family dog and you get Zach. Zach was in his prime in the mid-80s and he was a constant companion of any of the Reeves boys' activities as long as Tim was there, whether it was me and Tim or Tim and his two boys, Matthew and Will. Zach was a fixture on every outing and adventure.

I recall a time in the summer that truly demonstrated Zach's patience with children. This is what made him such a great family dog. We were shooting clay targets in front of Tim's house. It was in the middle of the summer and duck season was still a couple of months away. Matthew and Will were watching and helping load the skeet thrower, playing in the dirt and just doing what boys do. Will, the younger of Tim's sons, was around, I guess, around five years old and was standing safely behind everyone as we took turns shooting.

Now, Will didn't miss a lot. He paid attention to everything, but he didn't make a lot of racket and could easily entertain himself, but I remember him catching my eyes I waited for my turn to shoot, and he was staring at Zach, who was standing in front of him at Tim's side on the firing line. Zach, as I failed to mention, was a male dog. His name was a context clue, but for the sake of this side story that I'm on right now, that fact needs to be understood completely.

Also, it was extremely warm, and in keeping with how nature has provided that dogs of of Zach's persuasion keep some of their parts cool by allowing them to distance themselves somewhat from their normal anatomical position. Zach was a big dog, remember. Zach had a noticeable amount of his anatomy that needed cooling and that was what caught Will's attention. I watched Will as he watched the south end of Zach. He was seemingly hypnotized.

like he was watching the pendulum of a grandfather clock swinging back and forth, back and forth. I could see the wheels turning in his head and the confused look on his face as he wondered what he was looking at. He slowly walked forward and before I could stop him, he reached out with his right hand, and he took hold of Zach's swinging, and he squeezed. Zach never made a sound. His hind in lowered a couple of inches and he froze. A non-normally expressionless dog, Zach slowly turned his head back to see what had captured him,

and I could see the horror of the situation encapsulated on Zach's face. His eyes bugged nearly out of his head, yet showing no signs of aggression or panic. I was scared to move for fear of startling Zach into biting Will, and as quickly as if it started, Will slowly released his grip on Zach's person. Will walked away, curiosity satisfied, and resumed playing into the dirt. He never said a word.

Zach turned back around and slowly sat down at the hill on Tim's left side. Zach was a champ at Family Life, and he loves those boys just as much as we all loved him. That's why he got to go everywhere that we went and was, you know, usually only in arm's length away when we were doing something, which leads me back to the story. I started telling way back at the beginning of this. Sometime around that time frame, after dark, and maybe even the following winter, Tim and I were skinning a wild hog we'd killed down in the bottoms. It's a pretty good bar hog that we'd caught and cut some time earlier.

I'm going to talk in depth about wild hogs in the future, but for right now, all you need to know is that a bar hog is a boy hog minus a couple items. that make him a boy hog that had been removed by us the previous winter after our squirrel dogs had bait him up down in the bottoms. So we had this hog hanging in a pecan tree in Tim's backyard and we were removing his hide in strips. It's an easy way to skin the hog if you're not intended on cooking him whole, which we weren't. I remember he was a fat rascal and some of that fat was nearly as thick as your fist between the meat and the inside of his hide. The hair on that hog was coarse, thick, and jet black. The same color as Zach who sat beside us watching the whole operation.

He was licking his chops and Tim cut off a piece of fat and chunked it towards Zach and he caught it in midair. And every time we'd cut off a little chunk, we'd lob it over to him and he caught it, every one of them. The bigger, longer, thicker strips of hide and fat, we piled up on the other side of the tree away from where Zach was sitting. He never whimpered, whined, or made a sound. The only thing you heard was the occasional chomp when we blindly tossed a chunk of hog fat in his direction. We were skinning that hog in the dark except for the truck lights, and Zach was as black as a shadow anyway.

Now, we got that hog skint, quartered and on ice, and we loaded all the guts and the skin in the back of the truck, and we hauled it off for the couch and the buzzards to take care of the next day. I just lived down the road from Tim then, and we were meeting early the next morning to go duck hunting on the Saline River. Tim picked me up and with Zach sitting in the middle between us in his old truck, we headed out. We didn't have a far drive and we were just tooling along when the most mild odorous stitch I've ever had the displeasure smelling punched me in the nose.

Sweet Jesus, Tim, what did you do? He said, I didn't do that. What is wrong with you? It was horrible. It was worse than anything I'd ever. experienced. I'd been in Army Basic Training in the gas chamber when they make you take off your mask to fill the effects of the gas and so you'll trust that your mask works. That was nothing, absolutely nothing compared to this. We rolled the windows down, let that cold, frigid air

rush in and allow both of us to see through the tears of agony. I still thought it was him and he still thought it was me. With ten minutes left in our ride, whammo! There it was a little. There it was again. Oh, the silent killer, and this time it was even worse. I thought I was going to die before I could get the window down. Tim was driving all over the road trying to roll his window down, cover his nose and mouth, and cuss at me while trying not to breathe. Now, this hunt had started off terribly. We weren't even out of the truck yet. I felt like if I hadn't been so weak from the fumes that I'd have just bailed out going down the highway and just took my chances with the laws of physics instead of counting on holding my breath to save my life.

Both windows were down and there was no relief. Whatever it was, it was being manufactured in the cap of that truck and it was going to kill us all if we didn't get it stopped. By now, I thought if it is to him, he was a lost cause and there's no saving him. I had yet to have children and I still had something to live for. Oh, the humanity. My eyes were burning. I can't breathe. Mercifully, I felt the truck slowed down and make the sharp turn into the parking spot.

We both had the doors open on his old truck before the wheels stopped rolling. Dadgum it was cold outside, but man, that air was fresh and clean. I looked through the cab and saw Tim standing in the door just as I was on the other side of the truck in the dim glow of the interior light. And then I saw Zach. I've forgotten about Zach. He'd been like the invisible man. During the turmoil of the darkness, I had totally forgot he was with us.

But there he sat motionless in the middle of the bench seat looking through the windshield like he was the only one there before burping loudly and throwing up a congealed glob of hog fat and hair that nearly made me faint. It was Zach pulling the old sneaky pizza on us. Apparently, he used his black coat as a cloaking device and was slipping to the other side of the tree during the hog skinning last night and fished. filling his belly up with a pork fat weapon of mass destruction. Poor fella had to have been suffering with all that on his stomach. I know we were. Tim cleaned the floorboard up as best he could, and we went hunting. A buddy virus came out a little later and hunted with us in our little makeshift blind.

I told him when he got there, you better watch that dog. And he said, why? Will he bite? Or is he going to try to get my cheese and crack? Tim said, oh, he won't bite you. And he probably ain't real interested in eating nothing right now. We put him downwind of the dog. And it didn't take long before Zach started passing gas again.

But this time, with Tim and I both upwind, it was funny. Oh, man, the look on his face. I'm sorry, Gerald. But 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 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 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 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, IHeart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Billy Coleman starts out in the story where the red fern grows as an adult that rescues a hound. And while nursing it back to health, he remembers and tells the story of his journey with a pair of hounds when he was 10. The format in which it's told is somewhat reminiscent of this podcast. I pick a subject and talk about it and tell stories. relating to it that I remember from my own experiences. It was also quite possibly the best introduction to hunting and hounds for folks who knew nothing about it. And as I've said before, it also let the fuse of desire for kids at that time to long

for a pup of their own and to chase and treat coons with them and I was one of them. Two generations later, and that story in book is still inspiring people. Now, I talk to folks all the time that reference it to me. Someone will ask a question about the book or a dog that they've heard me mention on here, and it will get the storytelling and memory machine going. I was thinking the other day about a recent trip with a group of friends and old Whalen. Whelan is my tree and walker coon dog, and you've probably seen pictures of him on my Instagram, heard me talk about him on here, but we were coon hunting last year and had three or four hounds out running in the White River bottoms.

It was coon hound pandemonium with dogs tree in here and they're at a pretty fast pace. Had we been walking and we'd have been in for quite a trick. The coons had their running shoes on that night and were making the dogs earn their keep. Seemed like we had a dog running a good track in every direction, which isn't a bad thing at all since we were all, you know, riding four-wheelers and cybersides, but these dogs were leaving the country with these coons. Some are treeing a mile apart And picking our way to the trees Through the river bottoms

Can take time when you're avoiding sloughs That are too deep to cross And a flat full of cypress needs That will get you hung up We've been to several trees And my Garmin tracker showed Whalen Headed back into an area That we'd treated lots of coons in

The display map on the Garmin Shows you the track the dog is making From the signal it receives from his tracking collar You can tell by looking at the picture it's literally painting pretty well if a dog is running a coon or chasing something off game like a deer or a coyote or just about anything else. The dog is following a coon's feeding patterns and having been a student of coons and my own eating patterns for the last 57 years, I can tell at a glance what's going on. Couple of that with knowing how my dog runs a coon and the sounds he makes when he makes them tells the the whole story. The story Whelan was telling right then was that he was chasing a coon and was getting

close to the bandito that was making the tracks. With no other dogs close that were running a track that hot, we headed toward the area where Whalen was making such a fuss. The group of us stopped, our four-wheeler's and side-by-sides when my tracker said we were about 250 yards away from Whalen. According to it, Whalen was moving in our direction, and according to his barks that I could hear, he was getting close to the coon. He was barking more and more excitedly.

The tempo was picking up and you could hear the drive and determination in his voice. 200 yards away now and he is loud. He locates with a big long ball and I say, Tree Whaling. He's got him, boys. Let's go. We started all the ATVs and drove the short distance down a wood road that led to within a few yards of where my trackers showed his location.

Now, normally, you can hear him barking over the engine noise when you get that close, but when we pulled up, it sounded like he was a quarter of a mile away. Well, that's weird. My tracker says he's 50 yards off the road. We all pile out of our machines and walk to where my tracker says he's supposed to be. Now, whalen is barking is even more intense now, but he sounds like he's getting further and further away. It took us less than 30 seconds to travel the 200 yards from where he was, so loud and now he sounds like he's traveled nearly a half a mile away.

My tracker has an option for a compass display that shows the face of a compass and an arrow that shows the direction and the distance from the handheld device to the collar that's being tracked. I followed it from the Woodrow we were parked on to where I was now standing, and the compass was spinning around on the display indicated that I was standing on top of of whaling, but there was no whaling to be seen. People were talking, looking around for him and trying to figure out why he sounded so far away. Now, whalen had trailed this coon through the bottoms along a big water-filled slew.

And I was standing 35 yards from the edge of the slew. I ask everyone to be quiet and listen. According to my device, I should have been standing right on top of him. They got quiet. Whalen kept barking. And I realized my tracker was right. I was standing on top of him. He was under the ground.

I told everyone to start looking for a hole, but there was none to be seen. I was in a panic trying to figure out how I was going to get him out of there. Now, if you follow this podcast or my Instagram, you know that that dog is a valued member of this family. To my wife Alexis and my daughter Bailey, he may be more valued than the coon hunter. I've never taken that survey for fear of getting my feelings hurt, so going home without him was a no-go. It just wasn't going to happen. He obviously chased that coon in there and had him bade, but how in the world did he get in there, and how in the world was I going to get him out?

I've seen him bay coons in beaver lodges and then holes dug in the side of a creek and slew banks, but to have him 35 yards away from the water's edge on a flat barren ground was a new one on every. one there. I'm thinking how long is it going to take me to dig that dog out with his pocket knife while someone goes up to the farm shop several miles away and gets a shovel. I shine my light back toward the edge of the slew and I saw a ripple in the water. Now unless there's an overflow with the river pushing out into the woods over its banks, slu's don't have current, so the water should be still. With us being there with no other dogs and all the commotion going, on there shouldn't be any animal activity making the waves.

I ran over to the spot on the edge of the slew and I laid down looking over the bank. The water was less than a foot below the edge of the bank and with my headlight I could see a six-inch gap between the top of the water and the top of a big hole that ran straight back up in there about six feet. My heart sank. I couldn't hear whaling any better here than I could when I was standing right on top of him, way back up in the woods. It looked like it was just a washout, but hoping against all hope, I started calling him.

The barking stopped after a few minutes, and it was stone, cold, silence. Here, whaling, here. Come on, son. Here. There wasn't a sound. There wasn't a ripple in the water. There was nothing but gloom hanging in the air, and I whispered a prayer,

Lord, please let this dog come out of there. I looked around for the million of time while I laid there on the bank for another entrance into what I thought was going to be Whelan's grave. As I looked across the slew on the other side, I saw another ripple push out across the top of the water. And I followed it back across several others and looked back into that hole up in that bank just in time to see a set of coon dog eyes pop up from under the water. He was swimming to me with nothing but his eyes above the water. in a small gap between the water and the top of that tunnel. And when he poked his head out from underneath the edge of that bank, I grabbed his collar and pulled him up on the bank beside me.

My friend David McDaniel's got a picture of it, and I'll share it so you can see it on my Instagram. Good night, nurse, I was glad to see that dog. I will never forget that feeling of seeing that set of green glowing eyes sticking up above the water like a periscope. on a submarine. Now, whaling, he was just as happy and proud to be there and treated it like it was just another tree coon. And to him, I suppose it was. I turned him loose from that spot, after I about petted all the hair off of him, and we hunted on through the night with my friends

and all the other dogs, but my mind kept going back to that moment that I thought all hope was lost and that he was lost. I still think about it, and it's a good, lesson from me. I'm telling you this story now, and that old coon dog I thought I'd lost forever is laying at my feet sound asleep. He's a living, breathing, and loving example that all is never lost, and with a little faith, you can see the light in the darkest of tongues. I thank you so much for listening, and I really appreciate the time you give me each week to talk about this country life of mine. It's a good one, and I'm very good one. And I'm very much. I'm a very much. I'm I'm proud to share it with.

Until next week, this is Brent Reeves. 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 bed. 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 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 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, IHeart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.