Bear Grease - Ep. 266: This Country Life - Deer Hunting with Dogs

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

Brent's waxing nostalgic about chasing deer with hounds and describing how it was standard operating procedure where he was from. He tells how his camp used to do it and relates a story from his brother Tim on one of his first experiences deer hunting in front of hounds.  It's deer season and time to cut the pups loose on MeatEater's "This Country Life" podcast. Hurricane Relief: https://www.redcross.org/donate/cm/onxmeateater-pub.html/ 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 the airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some stories to share.

Deer hunting with dogs. Deerhunter with dogs is faded from the spotlight over the past 30 years that at least it has around here. There's some great stories and lessons and cutting a pack of hounds loose and listening to them putting a white tail through his paces. We're going to talk about some of them, but first, I'm going to tell you a story. This story comes from a fellow y'all hear me talking about all the time, my older brother Tim.

I'll have him on here one day, telling stories himself, but until then, this will have to do. So in Tim's words and my voice, here we go. It was 1970 and I was 12 and finally big enough to deer hunt by myself, sort of. I'd always wanted to use a rifle, but rifle hunters at the time were looked upon like they were sort of nuts. I grew up deer hunting with a Browning A5 that held a buckshot. and slug combination that I lost many hours of sleep over trying to get the right

combination in the magazine we we used dogs back then and if they ran a deer by me I needed a buckshot first for close range then slugs in case I missed up close three double-all buckshot followed by two slugs in case he was still amongst the living them rifles will shoot a mile son you don't need one they're dangerous. You could shoot a deer miss and kill someone over in the next county. That's what they told me. That's what my dad told me.

So there I was, stuck with buckshot and slugs to deer hunt with until I was married. Except for one time. It was December deer season and way before the curse of leased land when you could hunt anywhere on timber company land. And I wanted to go deer hunting. Dad said his friend Raymond was going to run his dogs, and he would put me in a spot on the upper pot latch row. We were in Uncle Jim's house talking about all of it, and Uncle Jim asked me if I wanted to use his 30-30. Well, I thought to myself, I am a rifle man, and I need that Winchester 30-30. I'll show these old folks I ain't going to kill nobody.

I looked at Dad and he said, you need to tote that shotgun. I started whining. And I come from a long line of winers. Dad caved in, and Uncle Jim let me have that 30-30. A short while later, I was sitting on a pile of logs on the side of the road, on the timber company road, close to Crane's Lake, when Raymond's dogs jumped a deer, and they headed in my direction. Dad was parked about 150 yards behind me, sitting in the truck,

letting me, quote, unquote, hunt by myself. And as the dogs got closer, I stood up with my thumb on the hammer of that lever action rifle. Soon enough, a humongous eight-point buck jumped out in the road right in front of me no more than 35 yards away. I pulled that hammer back and sent one to him. I missed two things that day. That buck and my opportunity for my first deer with a rifle. If I killed anything, it had to be someone. in the next county, but if I did, we'd never heard about it.

But I had to listen to my dad all the way home. Son, if you just used that shotgun, you'd kill that big old buck. On and on. I come from a long line of folks that will say, I told you so. And he did for the rest of his life. And according to my brother, Tim, that's just how that happened. Now, I can testify myself to that last statement of Tim's that I read. As our father got older, he softened that into saying,

now, son, you do that any way you want to. But if it was me, that translated into, if you don't want to hear about this for the rest of your life, you better do it the way out. Deer hunting with dogs was at one time the way people in my part of the world hunted deer almost exclusively. Camps fed and cared for packs of hounds all year for the opportunity to cut them loose when firearm deer season opened. Any number of dogs from groups of two to pins of 20 plus would be managed and conditioned throughout the year for the big hunt that happened at the beginning of each November.

Second Saturday of November would see the majority of the state's modern gun deer season opener now, but there was a time when it opened on Mondays and, and schools did not. Deer Seasen was eagerly anticipated as Christmas, and while I can't testify to the rest of the school districts, in Arkansas, I can vouch for the Warren School District. Yours truly was serving a 12-year sentence of being forced-fed everything I wasn't interested in learning about aside from football and girls.

And those two exceptions were not necessarily in that order, but getting out of school for Deer's season was something we could haul. Oh, get behind. It was a hunting culture and recognized by the community of folks who lived there as a social norm. Church was on Sunday, and the menfolk were hard to find around town on opening day and the week of deer season. You didn't have to be a hardcore hunter either to participate in the opening gun deer hunt. There were a few who didn't participate. My maternal grandfather, Finisly, who I've spoken about on here before, he was not a hunter.

He was fully in support of anyone who did it. He just never got the hankering. But the rest of us, we got his portion and took up the slack of anybody else. A lot of the big camps back in the day would have dog pens where they kept their dogs year round. Some would serve as a caretaker throughout the year by feeding and watering them and taking them on hunts during the off-season to keep them in shape. Members would take turns with that responsibility. Now, they weren't shooting deer,

during the off-season, just keeping the dogs up to speed on what was expected of them and training new ones that they were acquired and brought into the pack. I was never a member of one of the big camps where members were from all over the community with a big pen full of hounds out back. It was always a small family camp of in-laws and brothers and nephews and cousins. Females were as welcomed as any of the rest of us. they just chose not to hang out at the camp outside a family night when everyone brought food and we all gathered for an evening of fellowship and vittles.

That was their choice. And we didn't continue to practice running deer dogs, more or less dropping out of that practice in the mid-1980s. Now, you back up over 200 years and you'll find records of settlers and adventures roaming through Arkansas with some kind of utilitarian canine that assisted in hunting games. The regular listeners of this channel may have heard about a settler from Kentucky living in Arkansas around 1818, who had a dozen hunting dogs, one of which he gave to a German novelist, who'd sailed to the new world to seek adventure, finding a lot of it right here in the natural state when it was in its most natural state.

The Kentuckyan gifted Friedrich Gerstocker, one of his hounds during his hunting, adventures through the region. The man claimed the dog was an excellent turkey dog, and it would chase turkeys until they flew into a tree. Then he'd tree the turkey by barking until the hunter arrived. An old, old Gerstock took that dog and cut him loose, and he jumped a deer chasing him clean out of sight. Friedrich never saw him again.

More than likely, that dog went back to the last place he saw his original owner and trailed him back home. If hunting in familiar territory, many hunting dogs would return home if they separated from their hunters. I don't feel bad for old Gerstock on losing that dog. He eventually ended up with a more faithful hound that stuck by him through some interesting times, and his name was Bears Greece. Sound familiar? Now, in the late 1880s, a native North Carolinian and current at the time, Arkansas-U.S.

Representative Poindexter Dunn hunted with a renowned Mississippi bear killer, Robert E. Bobo, and his famous pack of 14 dogs, and they were hunting here in Arkansas. After a successful four-day hunt, tallying over a ton of bear and deer meat, it was apparent to everyone involved that Bobo's hounds were just as advertised. The politician offered Bobo a section of land. That's 640 acres for his 14 dogs and Bobo declined. Bobo's hunting partner, Jim Dunn, no relation to the representative, traded six of his dogs to the legislator for half a section of land or 320 acres.

The old Jimbo later sold that ground for $3,500, which is north of $100,000 today. Those were some good dogs. If you've listened to very long, you've heard me expound on a few dogs of my own, apparently my coon hound old whalen. But before whaling, there was Anna. My black lap. Her retrieving abilities were second to none. She was a solid of a hunting companion as you could have.

And that peeled in comparison to her duties as a member of the Reeves family. I know I've told this story before, but it's a story I like to hear myself. And it fits when I'm talking about the value of hunting dogs. Anna was a gift to me from a very good friend who'd received her as payment on an overdue tree plant job that my friend who wasn't a duck hunter had done for a guy who happened to be a professional dog trainer. I recapped that portion only to emphasize the value of this dog as a fully trained to work in retriever. Her bloodline was impeccable and her demeanor and personality was what anyone would want in a dual-purpose hunting and family pet.

She wiped out that $4,000 old to my friend, and he in turn gave her to me, where he knew that she'd be put to good use. Anyway, I had her a couple of years at this point, and lots of people had hunted with her at my brother and I's guide service. One guy in particular from the start, right after his arrival with his group to our camp,

wanted to buy her. I repeatedly told him no, over and over again, to the point that after two days of it, I began avoiding one-on-one conversations with him for having to hear his pleas for me to sell her. But Dad always told me to never put a price on something that I didn't want to sell because someone would pay it. I found that out on the day they were leaving when that cat came up to me and said, I'm asking you again to name your price for Anna. Frustrated, I blurted out $6,000.

That's what it would take for her to leave here with you. And that joker never batted an eye. He said, will you take a personal check or do you prefer cashiers? He got me. I was a deputy sheriff at the time working on a poorly equipped and overworked and underpaid department. And $6,000 was nearly a third of my yearly salary. And he was serious. But I wouldn't.

I crawfished on him and I told him no. I escorted him to his vehicle to get him gone. Dogs are valuable. Good ones even more so. So I get it. When Representative Dunn offered that section of land from Mr. Bobo's dogs, I doubt that I'd have made that deal either. 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 car, all, 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 did, and you'll find out that the Steve Renroll.

Ainella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. Dear dogs, at least in my part of Arkansas, were a big percentage of the running Walker breed. The cousin to my hound, Whalen, who's a tree in Walker. I remember introducing my wife, Alexis, to my dad when we were dating, and at his house, his cowd dogs were across the road in the pen, raising all kinds of ruckus when we pulled up. and Alexis asked my dad what kind of dogs he had. And he said, running walkers. She said, running walkers.

They need to make up their minds what they're doing. But those dogs were just about the standard for all deer camps in our area, with the exception of being the folks who'd feed anything that would chase and bark at a deer and the beagle folks, which is what our little camp did for a few years. Tim's brother-in-law who's looked upon as being a brother to us both, Joe Bryant, was the keeper of the beagles. And before we built the structure that is the current B&R deer camp,

we hunted out of an old army tent that I described in detail back in episode 151, aptly titled Deer Camp. Real original, I know. Anyway, if you were running dogs, you were the designated as the captain of the hunt. and you decided when and where to cut them loose, depending on where the folks sat in the stands, were located along the wind direction, and most likely avenues of escape that the deer would take from the barking hounds.

If this type of hunting is foreign to, you need to understand that deer being shot at ain't necessarily the one being pursued. It's the deer on the edges of all the commotion that slip away to avoid the hounds that usually wind up getting tagged. Also, they're not like. to catch the deer that they're chasing. There ain't a deer dog in the country that can run through the woods

and think it's fast enough to catch the deer. I'll bet on the deer being chased a hundred times out of a hundred to live to see another day. It defeats the purpose. Anyhow, we don't want the dogs to capture. We want someone sitting on a deer stand to have an opportunity for a shot at him. Here's how it worked. The night before we'd gather at the fire after supper to decide if we were running dogs the next day. If we were, we all picked stands, and Joe would decide where he was going to cut them loose

based on our locations. After breakfast the next morning, we'd all head off to our selected spots, and Joe would go back to his house and load the dogs, usually about an hour or so after daylight at an appointed time, he'd cut them loose and follow them through the woods, hooping and hollering them on their way to jump a deer. It was so much fun sitting on a stand and watching the woods for deer and watching the clock for the time to start listening for the dogs to jump. We liked Biggles because the land we hunted

was relatively small compared to the other camps and Beagles didn't push deer as fast as the big hounds do. Also, the race lasted longer. Take a beagle a long time to cover the same amount of ground as a big hound, and man, it really sounded good. I remember one particular morning that we had gotten a good frost. The air was cold and crisp and at 7.30, Joe was scheduled to cut the dogs loose.

I was north of the camp, less than a quarter of a mile on a stand we'd called the salt lift. We poured out some rock salt from an old stump a few years before, and it had leached into the ground, and the deer craved salt in the fall of the year because of a sodium deficiency. They create that deficiency by you plants high in water and potassium throughout the summer. And they dug a hole out around that stump about a foot deep and a couple feet wide, so I was in a pretty good spot, regardless if the dog pushed a buck by me or not. Joe had both dogs, Izzy and Nuggy, on Leeds, and he left the camp, heading east, got to the corner of our property, and the neighbors, which lay east and south of our own.

He pointed the dogs north, cut them loose, hooping them up and getting them out in front of him through a small thicket. Both of them opened at once, and you could hear their voices ringing out through the woods as they told us all to get ready. They were trailing the deer. We were all holding out for a big buck, but you never really knew what the dogs were actually running. It was a 50-50 chance if they were on the trail of a buck or doe, and really the percentage was higher that they were chasing the dough.

That was still during the time when shooting the dough wasn't actually considered a sin, but it was frowned upon to the point that the older hunters wondered if you'd ever make it past St. Peter because you had killed one. Fortunately, we've all learned that having a more balanced ratio of bucks and those makes it a better and healthier population to deer. Anyway, from over half a mile away, the cold air allowed me to hear Joe's faint hollering and the Beagle's strike. Game on.

Beagles travel about as fast as a man can walk through the thickets over logs and crossing creeks and whatever is going to happen ain't necessarily going to happen fast. There's going to be plenty of time for the anticipation of trying to figure out if the dogs are coming toward you or away from you. Are they running or pushing a buck by you? Is someone else going to shoot first?

All of these things are going through your head at a hundred miles an hour while you're watching for movement straining to hear a limb break or leaves crunching from an approaching deer. This morning was no different except five minutes into the race, I heard the dogs turned toward me. A short while later, I heard the unmistakable sound of deer moving toward me through the dense second-and-thgrowth hardwood and pine saplings that limited my view in some places to less than 20 yards.

The limbs and bushes shook as the deer brushed up against them, and I knew it was only a matter of seconds before whatever kind of deer it was stepped into the opening in front of that salt-licked stand. My rifle at my shoulder and every bit of my senses tuned to what I was hearing and almost seeing the expectation of a big buck stepping into the opening right in front of me had my heart pounding in my ears. I could hear Joe a lot better now as he and the beagles made their way to my stand, all the while the deer that was so close and still unseen stood within easy range but still in the

cover of the thicket. My imagination started to run away with me. Had I not heard what I knew to be a deer getting close? It wasn't like I'd never heard that sound before. No, I was positive I'd heard a deer walking. But did it go back the way it came? No, that would have been toward Joe and the dogs. I started to doubt everything I'd observed up to this point

when all of a sudden a doe and a yearling broke out of cover and stood looking at me from 15 yards away. I let out a sigh of disappointment and saw my breath in the cold air drift right straight to them. Now, it was clear to me then that they'd smelled me as they'd gotten closer and stopped just short of breaking out of cover to weigh the odds of weather to continue, go back toward the racket that had pushed them there in the first place. I lowered my rifle and they shot across in front of me, headed west in a bigger hurry than they'd been in just a few minutes before. The Biggles were getting closer now, and I could hear them clearly as they followed the scent trail of two deer that they just ran out in front of it. It was funny listening to them and hearing them as just as plain as day and then hearing their barks and bawling muffled as if they were suddenly a hundred yards further than they actually were.

When I saw them coming down through the woods, I saw the reason why their barking sounded different. The timber had been cut in there the previous spring and it had been a particularly wet year. The loggers had put those big flotation tires on all their skitters and some of the ruts that they left were really, really deep. And they caused those little beagles to drop slap out of sight when they reached them. It sounded like they'd fallen in a well only to pop up on the other side, unfazed, and determined as ever to gain some ground on an animal

that they couldn't have caught if they'd been riding a motorcycle. It was hilarious and in a lot of ways much better than killing a deer. I caught the beagles and was still laughing when Joe got there. We laughed about that together for a long time afterward too. He's gone on ahead of the rest of us. But we're going to laugh about that again one day when I see him. And I really look forward to that time. That's a little bit about deer hunting with dogs.

It may not be the preferred way of hunting these. these days as we opt for the most covert ways to get within range of one. But it definitely has a place, especially in our legacies as hunters and sportsmen and women. The stories we tell about those days are important. They're important to hear and be remembered, more so for the folks that involved than any of the deer ever taken. We got some extra video content dropping Monday, November the 4th, on the Meat Eater Potty. Network YouTube channel of me and my pal and colleague Austin Chili Cleverad. Like I always say, don't be cool, be chilly.

I think you'll enjoy it. Now, something even more important is Meat Eater's partnership with Onex and donating $20,000 to hurricane relief for our brothers and sisters who are still reeling from the effects of the hurricanes. If you'd like to help through our site, you can donate through the link. that Reeve is going to include in the show description. Man, it's important. We really need your help. Thank you all so much for listening to this country life and Claybo's bare grease and render shows.

We truly appreciate it. Very much. Until next week, this is Brent Reeve. Signing off. Y'all be careful. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps Game Calls and 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 did, and you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action.