Bear Grease - Ep. 242: This Country Life - Eating What You Hunt

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

From reptiles to rodents, we're talking about all of what could wind up on your supper table. Brent's sharing a story from his brother Tim's kitchen and telling about some friends of his up north who are making the most out of their trapline. Come on in, it's supper time on MeatEater's "This Country Life" podcast. New England Naturals Riley DeBow New England Naturals Jake and Riley DeBow Subscribe to the MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Connect with Brent and MeatEater MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop This Country Life Merch 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 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 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.

Eating what you hunt. I have always been a fan wild game, and eating what I chase in the field has at times it's been just as rewarding as the pursuit. Nothing beats the tug of a big bluegill on your line except maybe how it tastes coming out of the hot peanut oil. We're talking about eating the game we're after, and some of that may not be on your menu. But first, I'm going to tell you a story.

20 years or more ago, Michael lived not far from my brother, and was about the same age as my nephews, Will and Matthew, who were separated only by about three years. It wasn't uncommon for him to get off the school bus at their house and play ball or ramble around the countryside as country boys tend to do, and when school was out, they'd have bicycle track worn paths back and forth on the gravel road that passed by in front of both their houses that were, oh, mile or so apart. Around mealtime, they would all be magically appear at one another's house to be invited to sit down and eat. The internal clock of young boys ticking down the minutes to supper time is highly accurate

regardless of their location or activities. It's like a silent dog whistle to a sheep dog. They start making their way toward the source of the call from way down in the creek bottoms or out of the barn just in time to smash a gallon of milk or sweet tea and devire a double helping of whatever was coming off the stove or out of the oven. This would be the case the last time Michael would pull up his chair at my brother Tim's house. Tim walked out of his house one afternoon and as he stepped off the porch, he narrowly missed

being bitten by a huge timber rattler that was laying at the foot of the steps. A short time later, one of them was no longer amongst living and minus his skin. The incident didn't scare Tim as much as it made him. mad, especially with his sons ripping and running all over the country, so he decided to get the last laugh and eat it. After cleaning old Jack no shoulders, Tim cut him up and my saint of a sister-in-law, Barberjene, fried him on the stove like you would fish. It was a big snake, and there was plenty to go around. And with the timing of a Swiss watch, Matthew, Will, and their friend Michael came through the door just in time to see her pull the last bit of snake from the hot grease.

The talk went to the incident of how they were all about to sit down and eat what Tim had found crawling in the yard only an hour or so before. Well, Michael said he couldn't stay. Mama told him to be home at a certain time, and the hour was fast approaching. Out the door and on his bicycle and in a cloud of dust, Michael made his way home. Tim and the rest tried the snake and didn't much care for it. I remember Matthews saying it was chewy, thus ending the eating a snake story. Or so they thought.

A few days later, Michael was once again down at Tim's and playing with the boys. No mention of snakes or supper or anything had transpired in the meantime. Barberjene had fixed supper and walked out on the porch to tell all three of them, to come eat. Matthew and Will shot inside like they were starving while Michael just made his way toward his bicycle. Barber to see, Michael, are you hungry? He said, yes ma'am. He said, well, come on in and eat. I fixed plenty. He said, no, ma'am, that's okay. She said, I thought you said you were hungry. Michael said, I am. But I don't ever know what y'all are going to be eating down here. And that's just how that happened. Eating what you hunt and the critters we perceive.

just goes hand in hand. Catch a mess of fish, cook a mess of fish. Shoot a mess of squirrels. Fix a mess of squirrels. Almost exclusively, I hunt and fish for the skillet. I enjoy the taste of whatever I'm trying to hem up long enough to get it scint, battered, baked stew, or fried. After all, that's why our species started hunting in the first place.

I can hear the caveman talking now. Hey, bud. See that taradactyl flying over yonder? Yep. Let's kill it with a rock and eat it. Bro, that sounds radical. Count me in. The next morning, Fred and Barney are setting out a dozen lizard bird decoys and

waiting on sunrise at the local tarpid. That's how it all started. Probably. Well, my version of it anyway, and my family hasn't slowed down since. Or so you'd think. But you'd be wrong. Contrary to what one would assume, my dad, Buddy Reeves, a country born and raised rural houndsmen, horsemen, and well-known pursuer of squirrels

who would easily be ranked near, if not at the top of the list for total numbers of squirrels being given a 22-calibre headache. He wouldn't eat one had he been starving, slapped to death. Neither would my uncle Jimmerie, nor my aunts or first cousins on my father's side. I took a pole of Three generations of the reeves side of the family tree. My aunts, my uncle, siblings, and cousins. 30% of them eat squirrels. We were all raised right there, more or less, within a rock chunk and distance of each other,

and seven out of ten would not eat a squirrel if they were hungry. And that kind of knocks in the head, the old adage of country folks having country ways, yet hear me and my brothers and all our children sit waiting on the next big mess of squirrels to be brought to the table. Every one of them will smash the sack of a cook squirrels, except my two girls. Bailey's 12 and tried them last winter when I fried up a big mess for supper. Now, I knew my wife Alexis wasn't going to eat any, but she did try it and said,

that's as far as she wanted to go. Our daughter, Bailey, followed suit, but I think her judgment was biased by her mother's hard pass and the fact that she's at the age where girl's stuff is more appealing to her than her crusty old papy's diet. To her credit, though, she loves bear and deer meat. Can't get enough of it. Now, our son, Hunter, who's 26, can and has eaten his weight and fried squirrel and squirrel and dumplings all his life.

He loves them. Let's go back in time when the oldest daughter, Amy, who at the time was a little younger than Bailey is now. She literally survived on chicken and cold hot dogs right out of the icebox. Nothing else. It's a period of time I like to call her chicken strip era. Being the diabolical father that I am, I knew that if she ever tried squirrel, but she'd like it.

So I stopped by the local KFC one day and got them to give me a box that the meals come in, and I took it home. I put some leftover squirrel legs in it that I'd like it. I'd brought home from the camp and sat him on the kitchen counter. Do y'all know what happened next? She saw the box, asked if she could have the leftovers, and went around no squirrel eggs like a duck gnawn on a roastern here. Daddy, this is the best chicken I've ever ate.

She couldn't get enough of them. I don't remember how many she had, but it would have been a good accounting of herself at a camp full of lumberjacks. Look on her face when I told her what it was, was the best part. She looked like she'd been a gut shot with a cannon, full of squirrels. A few months later,

I'd get her again with some frog legs. Same thing. Ate them like a hungry hostage until she found out what they were, and all of a sudden, oh, I don't like those. Well, all that is funny, but it shows the bias that we all hold for what we consider to be normal food

and how something looks and not based on how something tastes. I laughed at seeing an animal rights organization's online ad once showing a photo of a puppy and a piglet with the words, Why I Love One and Eat the Other, to which someone replied, because only one of them is filled with bacon. What about birds?

As a society, we eat chicken with reckless abandon. We eat it weekly in some form or another here. My girls don't want ducks. doves or quail, they'd rather eat chicken. Chickens are about as nasty every creature as you can get. Don't get me wrong. Chicken is one of the many food items you could bait a trap with and catch

me every time. No one loves chicken more than me. No one. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy

to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. but when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to.

I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you'd be glad you'd did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. My nephew, Thomas, more specifically, my great-nephew, came over for supper last Sunday after church.

Thomas is my brother Tim's grandson. I fried up a bunch of fish and some gator bites for him and his gal-pal Emma. At the last minute, I realized Emma wasn't a fish or a gator eater. We like Emma, so I chunked the old stand-by chicken nuggets in with the gator, and when everybody pushed away from the table, we were all sporting big smiles and full bellies. Now, I'm sure there are folks out there that don't like chicken, but I'm not sure I'd like to be around them. Chicken is the great common denominator. Want to get someone to try something new, hit them with the old.

taste just like chicken routine. It never does. That's the old bait and switch that we use to earn someone's trust. Want me to try something? Tell me it tastes like antelope or grilled coon. I'm all in, fella. But I've always had an affinity for wild gaming the food that is associated with the South. I more or less felt it was my duty to eat it.

I know that may sound superficial, but staying true to the culture of my raisin has always been important to me. Even though the squirrel eating skipped a generation in my family, my mama wouldn't eat it either, but she did fix it for us kids, and we all loved quail. It was a treat to go shoot some early in the morning and come back for her to cook up a big breakfast with fried quail, taters, eggs, biscuits, and gravy. The last breakfast of that was when I was in high school and the quail were disappearing. She also fixed the ducks that Tim and I, brought home and she made a labor-intensive duck and rice dish that would rival anything for the love of humanity it's good but ducks and quail are beautiful birds and the aesthetics of how something

looks plays into how it's perceived especially in food don't even get me started on wild versus domesticated turkeys i'll i'll say that for another day because having to argue the advantages of wild over pin raises enough to put myself into a self-euvre induced coma. My dad also didn't care for deer meat. Again, all of his offspring subsists in some degree off wild game with Tim and I leading the charge. I can't tell you why he preferred farm stock groceries over wild game. In the spring and summer, we ate fish two and three times a week. If we happen to be staying at the river fishing, we ate it every day, and not once did I grow tired of it and needed it heat. But my great-grandfather,

The man who raised my dad ate squirrels like there was no tomorrow. I've heard my dad tell stories about grandpa taking a tablespoon or his pocket knife and with a swift blow cracked the heads open of a cooked squirrel and eat the contents of their brain bucket like it was candy. Now, me, I draw the line at a squirrel's shoulders. I'm not eating anything above that mark or from in between his tiny Dorito-shaped ears. There's also a convenient reason for that. Squirrel brains can kill you, like dead, graveyard dead, like groundhogs are bringing you to your mail for eternity dead.

That reason is called Crutchfield Jacob disease, C.J.D. for short, which is a variation of mad cow. Now, this all came about in the mid-1990s when over a four-year period, 11 unfortunate souls in Kentucky, all contracted CJD, and the only link between them was that they had all ingested squirrel brains. They had all died within a year of contracting disease too. Man, it's terrible. Since that time, cases have been reported

in several states, including New York, Alabama, West Virginia, Mississippi, as well as here in Arkansas. I've never fancied myself a squirrel brain eater, regardless of my family history or the nostalgia associated with it.

Conveniently now, I can add impending doom to that list and for that reason, I'm out. I'll eat just about anything. My friend and colleague Spencer Newhart made a whole meat eater series a while back called Pardon My Plate. He had different folks on each week eating things that most folks wouldn't normally associate with Suffertown like a coyote, skunk, goldfish, and a muskrat, just to name a few.

Folks out in Dorchester, Maryland have a whole festival every year dedicated to eat. muskrats and crawfish. I may have to slip out there next year and check it out for myself. I ain't never had a muskrat, believe it or not, but I can flat more put a hurting on a sack of mudbugs, which brings to mind something else you can get out of a beaver pond and take home and put in your belly besides muskrats, crawfish, and giardia. Castor Canadensis, the North American beaver,

official state bird of Canada. I've read story after, story about mountain men, Indians, and settlers eating beaver meat. I've never had a hankering to, although I have scint a jillion of them in my lifetime when I was trapping and helping Tim with his trap line, but some of my friends up in New England are making a dent in the beaver population and their grocery bill. Jack Debo and his wife Riley have built a business around the fur market and have been teaching beavers how to ride in the back of their truck for the last seven years. They have all the social media platforms including a YouTube page filled with

great how-to content that is simple and easy to follow along and downright entertaining, from setting his traps to catch and cleaning and preparing the fur. It's New England natural. You've got to look it up. The Deboes are living close to the land and lots of time up there. The land is covered in snow, but that's when Jake and Riley shine the most. Not only are they keeping the beaver population and other fur-bearing critters in check, but they also were putting meat up for the winter. Beaver meat. I talked to Jake recently, and he told me that Beaver makes up about 50% of their diet.

They eat it in one form or another anywhere from two to three times a week. He also told me that if the average deer hunter knew how good beaver was to eat, they'd all be duking it out for trapping permits like folks did back in the seven. when the fur market was strong. The Debo's fix it just like you do deer, bear, and beef for that matter. Backstraps and sirloins in the back legs for the crock pot. Their dog gets raw ground beaver every day. This cuts their yearly dog food bill in half, and it's great for the dog.

I'm paying almost $70 a bag for my dog feed. I think old Whalen might need a little beaver meat. Now, you'd think, well, they must have grown up eating it. I know I did, but just like me, you're wrong. When they first got married, they decided to try it. Their goal was to live close to the land, and by utilizing the meat, they were adding to their trap line yield. A beaver is a lot like a hog when you get one.

But the only thing you can't eat on a hog is the squeal. It's about the same when it comes to eating old bucky. Riley says it compares to lamb, and she feels. fixes it with mint chutney. I acted like I knew what that was, so maybe Jake wouldn't figure out how little I know about anything. Jason Ellsworth, what in the world is mint chutney? And would it be good on cornbread?

I need to know. Stat. Seriously, though, these folks are putting out some great content that's very educational and well worth the effort to look up. My gal Riva is going to help you out and include a link to Jake and Riley's New England Natural's Instagram. and YouTube pages. It'll be in the show description where you listen to us from. That's good stuff. And proof that a country life in New Hampshire is just as important and

relevant as one in Arkansas. I've been saying it since the beginning that we can all live a country life regardless of our zip code or whether we live outside or inside the city limits. Jake and Rowley Debo live over 1,500 miles northeast of my friends Keith and Lee Brandon in southeast Arkansas. Leave the Deboes in New Hampshire, and you'll travel over 2,000 miles west and northwest of my friends, Craig and Melanie McCartney's Ranch in central Manitoba, Canada. They live their lives much like the Deboes, the Brandons, and the Reeves. There's a ton of space and people between those three points on our side of the beach. planet, I'd say the chances are good that there's many more folks out there doing their best to make their way, just like we are.

Those are the folks I want to be around and the folks I'm looking for. They're my people, and together we can turn the tide on those that are fighting to take away what we all stand for. It comes right down to it. There will be more folks out there with more similarities to our own than differences. We just have to talk to each other. each other long enough without getting mad to find out what they are. That's going to wrap it up for me this week.

Thank y'all so much for listening to me in that turkey calling contest cheating mule-skinned Hillbilly who puts mushrooms in his chili, Claybow Nukem. We both really appreciate it. Elk season is right around the corner and Jason Phelps and Dirk Durham are busy as cats in a sandbox over at Cutting the Distance podcast. Those boys know their stuff And if you're ready for some elk content Get yourself over there and check it out

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 pool of blood Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit Blood Trails is a True Crime Podcast born in the outdoors doors. 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.