Bear Grease - Ep. 269: This Country Life - Opportunities

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

Opportunity knocks in some form all the time. How we handle it sets the course of our daily lives. Taking advantage or choosing to abstain can have big and long lasting impacts on you and those around you. We’re talking about the choices we make and how we deal with them this week 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.

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.com.

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 Nives 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.

Opportunities. Life is full of choices, and every day those choices lead us down the path of the rest of our lives. That sounds kind of deep, but it's true. We determine our path by what we choose to do with the opportunities that are presented. I'm going to talk all about it, but first, I'm going to tell you a story. This week's story comes from Marshall Day, a 19-year-old lifelong resident of Story County, Iowa. Story County is located in what could be the bull's eye of the state of Iowa. 98,566 Iowans live there amongst 574 square miles of freedom.

That's 171.7 people per square mile. That's not too bad. Everybody would have plenty of room, and as long as you didn't run into that .7, fella, you'd probably be able to sleep good at night. Anyway, in Marshall's words and my voice, here we go. Recently, my dad and I applied for Colorado tags as a group. We didn't draw the elk tags, but when the unclaimed tags came out, there were some black bear tags available.

We thought why not? It's cheaper than an elk. It sounds like a whole lot of fun. And after two days of driving, we made it to the National Park campsite just down the road from where we had been spotting water. water holes on the map. The next day, we drove up to the trailhead, near some water holes, we wanted to check out and started hiking.

It was fairly easy hiking at a low incline, and with the top has got to be around the next being, mindset, we eventually found ourselves two and a half hours up the mountain. We sat there for a bit, and then we followed our map the rest of the way to the waterhole. We didn't see any sign at first until I saw a big pile of bear scat. We thought that was promising, and judging by the amount of scat, the bearer was pretty big. Now, we found a big old flat rock to sit against about 100 yards up the hill from the waterhole, and we waited. We saw a satellite bull come through in the middle of the day, and then around 6 p.m., I looked over my left shoulder to see a little ball of brown fur coming towards us. I pointed it to my dad, and I saw three more that were coming with him.

we quickly realized it was a sow with three cubs. Surprisingly, the mama looked to be less than 100 pounds. She wasn't big as nothing. And we couldn't believe something so small could make a pile as big as what we saw. My dad started taking pictures, and when they got about eight yards away from us, we realized they had no idea that we were there,

and they wanted to be right where we were. Now, realizing this, my dad yelled, Hey, Bear, and the mama looked up. saw us and ran back down the hill. One cub ran past my side on a rock just less than two yards from me. One ran past my dad, and then the other one just sat there looking at us for a couple of seconds before running back down the hill after his mama.

We were both super excited, and our hearts were racing because that was both of our first experience with a bear in the wild. Now, after that, we sat with the rest of the afternoon and saw five mule deer, and I heard of 18 Elkhormor. We watched them and we could hear the bull bugle. And we just basked in God's creation.

That right there was worth the whole price of admission. The next day, we didn't see anything until we were driving out that night and saw a big black bear in the middle of the road. He ran off up the mountain, so we decided that's where we wanted to be when the sun came up. So on the third day of that hunt, we found a trail that went up that direction. direction and we took off. It was thick and it was steep, but we were seeing acorns and berries and lots of bearscad. Constantly encouraged by the sign we kept going. After two and a half hours, we found ourselves only half a mile from our vehicle, but up 1,000 feet in elevation. We came up to a spot that leveled off into a bench about 200 feet from the top, and there was a big, muddy puddle.

We walked up to it and there was bare tracks all around it and wouldn't you know, more scat. And we found the perfect ambush spot on the ledge above the waterhole and right about then we realized we'd forgotten to fill our own water bottles. We were too far up to go back so we stayed there with the little water that we had, the sun beating down on us all day, giving us sunburns. It was pretty quiet day, and we hadn't seen anything for quite a while, and around six that evening, the nature called, so I stood up and turned around to water the plants. No sooner had I turned around, my dad started fanically whispering my name, Marshall, Marshall, Marshall.

I assumed he was teasing me because the last time we were hunting in Colorado, I was doing the same thing when some elk came out. I turned around to see a bear coming. to the waterhole. I quietly got my gun, my shooting sticks in position, and right as I was getting settled in on the bear, he turned away. Staring at his behind, I didn't have a shot, and the bear hadn't moved, and my dad couldn't see him,

but was wondering why I was taking so long to shoot. Put my crosshairs on the bear, and I waited. Finally, he turned just enough, and I pulled the trigger. My shot rang out, and the bear stood up, and tumbled through the muddy water, fell down, and he was dead. My legs started shaking from the adrenaline as my dad, and I celebrated. We got down to the bear, and we took pictures, and we got him quartered and skinned out, and I have to give a shout out to my amazing father, who not only let me shoot first,

instead of shooting the bear himself while I was turned around, but he skinned and quartered the bear for me and took all the meat in his pack while I took the head. head and the hide. He really is the best father I could have, raising me to follow God and love the outdoors, and I just couldn't ask for a better dad. After getting the bear broke down and packed in our bags in the dark, we started the steep hike down. I've been out of water for over an hour and a half, and now dad was very low. The hike down was harder than the hike up, and we were carrying lots of weight in our packs, and it was dark. Finding our two weeks, we were down, man, it wasn't easy.

We almost got stuck multiple times and at one point we stopped on the mountain to take a breather. I was wondering if we would ever make it off that mountain at all. Halfway down, ran out of water. It'd be another two and a half hours of stumbling down through the thick brush before we finally made it back to the vehicle, dropped our packs, and started chugging water. We gave thanks for a successful hunt

and more importantly for getting down, safe and sound. We went out the next day for Dad, but we didn't see anything. But I thank him every time I tell that story and will, for the rest of my life, for putting my experience above his and letting me get the bear. He really is the best father I could ask for. And now with some bear meat in the freezer and a great story to go with it, bear hunting might just become a yearly thing for us. And according to Marshall Day of Story County, Iowa, that's just how that happened.

That story is right on theme today with what I'm talking about, which is taking an opportunity seeing where it goes. I got a feeling, Marshall, that as you get older, the best part of that hunt ain't going to have anything to do with a bear or who got to shoot it first. It'll be more about the opportunity you had to spend time together, and y'all did it. Thanks for sharing, buddy. 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 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 Siller. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Opportunities come along every day in one form or another. And what we do with them can determine the direction of the moment, the day, or the rest of your life. Some we may never know the circumstances of based on our decisions.

A lot is left up to fate or the grand design, and unless you're reading a fictional book like the ones they call choose your own adventure, you'll never know what might have been, what you avoided, or what you gained in the totality of the circumstances. You can look at the obvious example of, say, skipping out on going to the movies and watching a scary show, you can say, well, I didn't get scared because I didn't see it. But could you have met a new friend, ran into an old acquaintance, found a $5 bill, who knows? You could have had nightmares. it seems to me that if a hurricane in the Gulf can be theoretically caused by the flutter of a butterfly's wing on the other side of the planet, possibilities are literally limitless. Now, I think back on different times when opportunities and choices arose in my life

and how the decisions I made, even the ones that seemed so inconsequential, continue to have a measurable impact on my existence and those around me. I often get asked what was my favorite part of my law enforcement career. Was it wearing a uniform or when I worked undercover? It's hard to really say with absolute certainty because each was vastly different. But I always say working undercover and give this analogy for the reason why. When I was wearing a uniform and working patrol, I was reacting to situations that arose. If I sitting on the side of the highway working radar,

someone had to come by me violating the traffic laws before I acted. The same with answering calls that came in through dispatch. There had to be a report of a situation requiring an officer to direct their attention and go to wherever that report described as needing the police. In other words, we just waited around for something to happen. Obviously, patrolling throughout the jurisdiction in a marked car ever vigilant has a place in deterrent crime and buffoonery. but it's hard to quantify how much because we can only estimate the percentage of crime

that's being reduced by the presence of a marked police car in a particular location. The same for speed enforcement. The goal of writing speed tickets is to get folks to slow down. If you get them to slow down, you automatically reduce accidents and property damage and injuries and fatalities. But how much is reduced is only an estimation because there's no algorithm you can use to get an exact figure. Crime and accident statistics are all subject to comparisons to the same areas using past reporting data and averaging out the differences. I know it sounds boring, but I'm going somewhere with this. When I worked undercover narcotics, I could lay my hands on a tangible and measurable amount of drugs that we'd seized that would not stay on the streets.

I could look and review at the end of the year at what we've done and say unequivocally that what we'd seized and measured down to the, the Graham was adjudicated through court and destroyed and it wouldn't hurt nobody. I could see what we've done as opposed to what analytical probabilities estimated we did. That, to me, was the difference between reactive law enforcement waiting for a call to come in versus proactive law enforcement, which was us going out and purposely targeting individuals who were in a drug trafficking business. We were working hard in long hours and season opportunities as they came up to do our due diligence of fighting the drug problems in our district. In doing so, we missed time at home.

Time with our children, friends, and families, and it was a heavy cost in the end for all involved, especially the little ones who had no choice but to accept the hand that they'd been dealt. I talk about this only because the pathway we take. affects not only us, but everyone around us. It doesn't have to be negative either. I mean, the decisions I made good and bad all led me to where I am today, and the same for you too. And I hope you're in as good a place as I am.

Now, let me tell you about a place I was in a couple weeks ago. I was hunting with a friend and was getting to his house late before heading to the stand the next morning. I was relying solely upon his knowledge of the intel, He'd been gathering the weeks prior to my last minute announcement that I was coming to hunt. His past 20-plus years of hunting there wasn't hurting my chances either. It was after 10 o'clock when I got there that night, and my friend Quentin was waiting up for me. We sat in his living room until nearly midnight going over a multery cell cam picks until we came up with the plan.

The plan was for me to go and climbing a stand where we didn't have a camera. Wind direction, his history of encounters, how the land laid forming a great travel corridor, and mainly a gut feeling from Quentin convinced the both of us good enough that that was the spot for me to sit. And I knew where several other stands were located because I'd seen them the previous spring when he and I were turkey hunting up there. The one that I was going to try and find the next morning, the dark cellar from a point he'd shared with me on Onex. I had never been there. I admit that not having seen it in the daylight had me a little anxious as I made the half-mile walk from my truck up to the area where the stand was located.

There are good deer on this farm, and I didn't want to contaminate the area with my scent any more than I had to by walking all over creation, trying to find a lock on stand that I'd never seen, and it was manufactured purposely not stand out. I had my tree saddle in my back. packed just in case I couldn't find it quickly. I picked out a tree from the map we'd studied the night before sitting in his living room that while I couldn't tell how good it looked from the ground or if it even offered any concealment or a place to hide and shoot, but it was going

to be a starting point for me to find a tree that I could get into if I didn't immediately find the stand he'd hung earlier in the year. There wasn't any in reflective tape or marked trails that led to the stand, so in my mind, I decided as I approached the area where it was supposed to be that I just climbed the first tree that I thought the stand would be if I hung it myself. I crossed the corner of that field and I stood 30 yards at the edge of the woods looking into the darkness of the hardwood timber with a red-laced headlight. I take comfort in the fact that the deer struggled to see most shades of red. I call that red light my cloaking device.

and I'm reminded every time I say that around my friend Michael Roseman who makes the headlight I'm talking about. The same light that Steve Renella likes so much that he bought seven of them from Michael for his friends and family. I say my red-liz light is virtually invisible to deer. Michael laughs and says, they can still see you, dummy. Well, that's true. They can still see me because they have excellent night vision.

But if I use the wind to my advantage, like I had that morning, I take my time keeping noise to a minimum like I had that morning and use a walking light that they won't see from a distance the chances are higher I can get into my hunt spot undetected like I had that morning. It's my cloaking device, Michael, leave me alone. Well, I didn't see a stand hanging, so I checked the map again on my phone and I walked toward what I thought was the tree that I'd pick out while sitting on Quentin's couch. As I got closer, I saw the climbing steps that were strapped to the tree. I followed them up the trunk and I found the platform. Bingo. I'm in business.

I took it as a good side after I climbed up, my anxiety was lessened with each pull the rope as I hung my backpack and my bow. I settled under the seat about 45 minutes before daylight. I'd rather be an hour early than a minute late and that applies to everything. I had three days delegated at the last minute to bohunt. It was a last minute decision after I got home from being in Louisiana, Tennessee, and eastern Arkansas over the past two weeks. My girls were headed to the in-laws in Texas, and I was scheduled to hunt here in Arkansas, but it was insanely hot for bo-hunting where I'd planned to go.

I hung a camera over there a couple of weeks ago, and the mosquitoes were so bad that I knew they'd still be bad and too bad for me to sit comfortably in the tree. All the activity, according to the camera, was at night because of the heat. So, what was a boy to do? Only one thing to do. Go where the mosquitoes ain't, and that was a few hours north, Quentin's house. I'd taken an opportunity. I'd made a bold decision.

On a whim, I'd driven six hours the evening before, and was now, as silly as it sounds, sitting in a tree in the dark, waiting on daylight that was still another 30 minutes away. There wasn't a bird chirping, there wasn't an owl hooting, there wasn't dang sure it wasn't no mosquito buzzing. There wasn't a sound at all, not one. Just silence. Eventually, the sun started rising in the east and the woods started waking up.

Squirrels were jumping from limb to limb. Birds were singing and I was straining for the first sign of a deer moving in any direction. I was also looking around at the location of that stand, and I swear, Quentin hung that joker in the exact place I would have. Either I was as smart as him, he was the smart as me, or neither one of us knew anything about how deer moved along pinch points through the woods following the terrain. At 7.30, a turkey gobbled like it was spring less than a hundred yards in front of me. and I could hear turkeys yumping all through the woods in front of me, and while I was soaking in all that turkey entertainment, I heard a leaf crunch behind me.

I glanced over my shoulder, and there walked the dough the size of a yearling giraffe, just as relaxed as she could be. I guessed her to be 25 yards behind me. I couldn't swear to it, because I left my range finder sitting on the tailgate of my truck, along with my binoes and everything else, I towed in my harness.

Had I had enough sense to remember, I'd have known it was 25 yards, because I'm not sure if everyone else does this or not, but I memorize every distinctive feature all around me and get the yardage to it. I know some of you're saying, everyone does that, you idiot. But I'm not sure if they do or not. Not like the way I do. I sing it. I use a tune in my head, and I put the words to it as yardages.

a lot easier for me to remember in that way than it is gum tree 25 yards bigger gum tree 34 yards pile of leaves 21 so on i do it clockwise in order from starting at the 12 o'clock position which is directly in front of the stand regardless of the direction then i go 360 degrees all the way around it i don't memorize many just the ones that naturally catch my attention when I look in that direction, five or six of them at the most, but I need a range finder to do all that, and I didn't have one. That was an opportunity missed. But I played football long enough to know what ten yards looks like, and imagining ten-yard

increments laid out in front of me, I guessed the trail I'd walked over that was behind me to be two and a half of them. And my most favorite math teacher on this spinning orb that we call home, Miss Brenda McDonough, doogle, you can check my figures, but I think that adds up to 25 yards. I was confident it was, and a later measurement with the rangefinder would prove I was spot on at 25.1 yards. But that would come later, and this was now. And as all of this was playing out inside my cranium, that deer trail, the football

overlay, I imagine intersecting with the trail, the dinosaur of a doe that had just passed behind me, stopped and looked back the way she came. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Y'all know what that means. Something else is coming. Now, I figured it was a yearling deer, and I was half right. It was a deer, but it weren't no yearling. I immediately guessed him to be a hundred and forty-plus buck,

and I never looked back at his antlers. I grabbed my bow, got it and the arrow I had waiting on that rest, and slipped them both around the left side of that tree as the buck went behind some brush on the right. He stayed right in her tracks, just walking slow and stopped in the clear spot there was on that trail, 25 yards behind me, and just looked at that doe who was starting to walk slowly away. I don't even remember doing it, but the next thing I know, I'm at full draw with my 20-yard pen right at the top of where that buck's lungs would be with my finger resting on the trigger and I couldn't pull it. This was a chip shot, and I couldn't turn that arrow loose because of a limb the size of my little finger that branched out and covered his vitals. For a moment, I thought about trying to thread the needle and immediately remember the time I tried that in Kansas on an absolute giant. I hit a limb that I didn't see to send my arrow into orbit and that deer on a fast train to Georgia.

So I followed him at full drawl until he once again, walked out from behind all the trees and all the limbs and stopped dead still, quartering away, 45 yards. Or was it 50 yards? Or was it 48 yards? I didn't have a yardage song to sing because I didn't have my range finder that I needed to write it with. I'm not seeing a limb and missing the deer is one thing. Misjudging a distance and missing one is another,

but the granddaddy of them all is guessing wrong and making a bad shot on him. That is the most egregious error of all and the easiest to avoid. You don't take that opportunity as one way to look at it, and I think that's the wrong way to see it. You take the opportunity to not make a bad shot, and you wait for another day. I waited two more days, and I never saw him again. But the year ain't over, and he's still there.

We get pictures of him occasionally. He ain't going nowhere, and neither are we. We met that morning because he took an opportunity to chase a female, and I took the opportunity to find a cooler place to hunt. We parted ways having no interaction other than one of us feeling richer for just being there. Be a good deal if all our encounters went that way with everything. and especially everyone. Thank you all so much for listening to me here on this country life

and Claibos' Baggery shows. There's all kinds of stuff you can listen to today, and if you're hunting something else to add to the rotation, we've got a lot of good stuff here at Meat Eat Eat, from outdoor trivia and country music and some show-nuff-how-to episodes on all the things that we love to do. You can find something that you'll like. I bet you will.

Until next week, this is Brent Reeve. Signing all. 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 and 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.