Bear Grease - Ep. 306: The Bird Hunter

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

In this special episode of the Bear Grease Podcast, Clay Newcomb shares an extended version of the keynote speech he delivered at Pheasant's Forever's Pheasant Fest & Quail Classic on March 8, 2025. He tells the story of his grandfather Lewen Newcomb, a man who lived a life of principle and consistency and a passion for quail hunting that never diminished even when bird populations declined in his region. His love of the outdoors and passion for hunting left a lasting and undeniable impact and is carried on in and through the life of Clay to this day. If you have comments on the show, send us a note to [e-mail] Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and YouTube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. First Lights fieldware 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 field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. Today's podcast is notably different from a typical documentary style barageries that we usually put out every other Wednesday. I was recently asked to be the keynote speaker at the Fesent Fest banquet where we celebrated Quel Forever's 20th anniversary. And it might seem odd that they'd ask me to speak because I don't own bird dogs or travel the country wing shooting. but I'd like to share with you bear grease folks a slightly elongated version so it's not the actual speech it's a little bit longer

but I want to share that speech with you and I think that you'll understand after you hear it why they asked me to speak I'd say this story is deeply personal and I titled it the bird hunter my name is Clay Newcomb and this is the Bear Greece podcast where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight and unlikely places and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American made, purpose-built, hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. I'd like to tell you a story. On the morning of September 5th, 24, I awoke from a dream so vivid I felt like that I had actually been with him. When I got up, I wrote down what I experienced. I dated it. I told Misty about it and I actually

called my mom and dad. He had died on Christmas night, 2013, but on that September morning, over 10 years later, I felt like that I had actually seen him. The man in the dream was a schoolteacher, a pastor, and a bird hunter that I knew very well. And the shadow and echo of his life has never left me. And right now, I'd like to tell you his story. His name is one you've never heard of. Nothing was ever written about him. There's no existing film of his dog training.

But the ripples of his life are still in motion today. In the eyes of his peers, perhaps his life was mundane and normal. But it would never be disputed that his life was nothing, if not noble, disciplined, and others focused. The man in my dream was Lewin-Nukum, known to me as Papps. He was my grandfather, and he was a bird hunter and a dog trainer deluxe. He lived a life of dedication and passion for quail hunting until the day he died, and his story is foundational to my story,

because before I ever hunted a bear, deer, or turkey, or rode a mule, I was by default of quail hunter simply by blood. Some of my first memories of engagement with wild places were overgrown fields with long-legged pointers leaving tracks in the frost. Bird dogs and quail hunting would be the relational conduit that transferred to me a value system that went far beyond the boundaries of being a bird hunter. However, the thing about Lewin's life that stood out to me that would come to almost haunt me and inform the way that I lived my life, was how he spent the last 35 years of his life in silent grief as Bob White quell populations near his home were reduced to almost nothing. I think this story will be familiar to a lot of people in America. Papps even into his late 80s, he trained bird dogs and often hunted five days

a week with no intention of finding birds. I remember as a kid being so impacted by watching Papps that I would pray for the quail populations just even as a kid. I wouldn't realize how much this impacted me until I was an adult, and I didn't want the same thing to happen to me with the wild beast that I loved. But this story isn't a story of loss. It's one of incredible gain, and to understand his story and my story, I'd like to take you way back, probably even back a little further than you might think.

My great, great, great, great, great, grandfather Thomas Newcomb came out of Kentucky in the 1830s and settled in the east-west running ridges of the Washington, Washington, they'd settled in Montgomery County in the community of Bumblebee. And Thomas begat Thomas Joseph, who begat Robert, who begat Oscar, who in 1919, begat Lewin Anderson, Newcomb, who begat Gary Believer Newcomb in 199. My dad, who begat me. And I was born approximately 23 miles east of Bumblebee in 1979, just barely in time to overlap the fleeting glory days of the southern Bob White Quail and the grand hunting culture that surrounded it. I wouldn't have recognized it at the time,

but there have been few wild beasts that have defined an era of the American sportsmen more than that little whistling bird. but I've got to admit my relationship with Mr. Bob White is complicated. From me, flow's massive respect, even all of the birds, but I've found their presence on the landscape irreplaceable in their absence life-altering. The flutter of quail wings brings to me an uneasy feeling of an Eden lost. No other wild beast in my lifetime has caused such heartache,

which created in me a foundational hegemon of the fragility of wild game, causing a gun shyness to give my heart to any wild beast, especially a dadgum ground-nesting bird. But it sure didn't keep Lewin from loving him or me. Lewin wouldn't have known it, but the date of his birth would be consequential in many ways. He spent his teenage years living through the Great Depression, building an attitude of resilience, simplicity, and contentment that would brand his life.

He would turn 22 years old in 1941, precisely the time when our country called for brave young men to arise. And he responded to that call, joining the Navy, where he led a team of seven men who operated a single gun on an American battleship fighting in Okinawa and the Philippines. We wouldn't know it until after Paps' death in 2013. But he won a bronze star for heroism in action. No one knows exactly what he did.

But he once told me, with his own mouth, that he was credited with shooting down an enemy aircraft. But he completely left the war metal out of the story. We found that out after someone gave us a news clipping at his funeral. But in a display of humility to a nine-year-old boy, he confided in me that he wasn't sure if he and his team actually had shot down the plane. He wasn't interested in stolen valor. He was mainly interested in people and bird dogs. After the war, he moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, east of Bumblebee, and in 1943, married my grandmother, Amalene, known to me decades later as Mimi. As many people did in these poor southern states, they chose to leave to make a living.

So like the Beverly Hillbillies, they loaded up and moved to Port Chicago, California in 1947 to find work. It was in California in 1948 that my father Gary was born. But it was also here that something happened that would define Lewin's life more than the Great Depression, the accolades of war, or ground nests in birds. In a revival meeting in the late 1940s, he got saved and his life was radically transformed. He looked and acted different. And words spread about his experience to the point that people literally just wanted to come meet Papps. and look in his eyes after they heard his story.

And I don't know the details, but shortly after this, he believed that God communicated to him that he and his family should move back to Arkansas, which he did. And that's a decision I'm forever grateful for. Nothing against California. But it would be in Arkansas that he would raise his family, be the first in his lineage to go to college, and he'd become a biology teacher at a public school.

And in the early 1950s, he became a past, pastor. Paps would be known in his community as a man of impeccable integrity who studied the Bible with passion and discipline. He spent multiple nights per week for decades, visiting the sick at the local hospital, which he viewed as a core tenet of his faith. And it would also be in the early 1950s, when he was in his early 30s, that he got his first bird dogs in the beginning of the American glory days of quail. one of his first dogs was named Elvis. I bet if you tracked back, you'd find somebody in your bird hunting lineage that had a dog name Elvis. It would still be 35 years before I'd ever hunt with Papps. But during this time, he went to a training seminar in Oklahoma put on by Delmer Smith,

and Papps became a master bird dog trainer. Training small numbers of dogs, always registered pointers in English setters, always having dogs in training, rarely selling a dog, but giving them away to the right people. To say that bird hunting and dog training was his hobby would be a slap in the face of his discipline, seriousness, and passion. It was a lifestyle. It was part of who he was.

My first memories of hunting with paps were in the late 1980s. I was under 10 years old, and he was in his late 60s. To go with him was a big deal, maybe even a little bit risky, not because he was unsafe, but because he was known to walk grown men to death in his daylight till dark death marches in search of birds. And many well-meaning hunting companions were lost to the cold, to the heat, or just plain weariness of heart, following who many of them call Brother Nukum.

Few people could hang with paps. You knew it was cold when he broke out his long underwear. It was like he was made of tempered steel and raw hide. As a young boy on that first hunt, rising what seemed like weeks before daylight, my grandmother would make us sausage, biscuits, gravy, and eggs, and it was here that Paps tutored me in the finer things of a man raised in Depression-era-Aransas. Sorghumalil, molasses mixed with butter and put on a biscuit with a tall glass of buttermilk was his filet mignon. The molasses I loved, the buttermilk, I could not tolerate.

My grandmother would make us bologna sandwiches on white bread, wrapped in aluminum foil for our lunch. She even wrapped our coax in foil too, which I never quite understood, but somehow I knew it meant that she loved us. He took me hunting near the home place of Robert Newcomb, his grandfather, which the house then was nothing more than a fallen-down oak home built on rock pillars. I wish I could remember what Papps told me about Robert.

He said something about it. him. It was minimal, but it summed up the man's life in a sentence. I don't remember what he said, but it planted in me in awareness the brevity of man's existence who lives at the mercy of the voracious appetite of time, rolling over men, reducing them to dust in their life into a sentence. To this day, I rarely pass an old falling down home without thinking about the people that live there, often wondering if anyone even remembers their names. Paps remembered Roberts, though. As we hunted, we walked sage grass-covered cattle fields,

and I followed Paps and his Army Green Briar Bridges, while he shouted commands to a long-legged liver spot pointer that would have curled the hair of a lesser dog. Later in my life at Paps' funeral, a family friend told me that he never knew how a man so kind could scold a bird dog so harshly. He demanded performance. Paps told me that a dog,

name should be one syllable and project from the chest, not the mouth. Acceptable names were like Buck or Goldie or Elvis. I never fully understood what an unacceptable name would be, and sometimes I felt like some of his names had two syllables, at least one and a half. At lunch we sat on the tailgate of his red two-wheel drive S-10 with the wooden dog box in the back and ate our lunch. I never saw the man eat a bolognaut without laughing out loud as he was. He called it preacher's ham.

It was a hat tip to the life of poverty of the poor country preacher. The humor of the joke never lost its luster to him, and he said it to me each time, laughing out loud as if he nor I had ever heard the joke before. On that first hunt, we didn't find any quail. But I'll never forget picking up out of the dirt of a cattle trail, a beautiful, white, fully intact stone point. an air ahead. The image is frozen in my mind in perpetuity.

I wouldn't have realized it, but this would be the moment that my fascination with the deep antiquity of human hunting in North America started, which carries on in my work today on the Bear Gries podcast. 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 Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. We lived about an hour and a half from Papps, but he would come to Mina to hunt with Dad and I. And of all the grandkids, he noticed in me an interest in bird hunting.

When I was in the sixth grade, in 1992, he gave me something that impacts my life to this day. It was a dog named Lucy. She was a fully trained, registered English setter. She was three years old, white with a black head, and had been through the Lewin-Nukham Training Academy. The beauty of where we lived was that we had access to 27 acres behind our house that was a grown-up field, dissected by multiple grown-up fence lines that oddly held multiple coveys of quail. It was kind of an anomaly,

maybe even a microcosm of the glory days of quail. But I couldn't hunt it. I just had permission to roam it. And roam it, we did. Between 1992 and 1996, no telling how many different times we'd pointed and flush those cubbies, and then we'd go after the singles.

Those quail had nightmares about Lucy and I. We kept them on the run, but never killed a single one. It was during this time that Papps gave me a book on the Delmer Smith method of training, which I read cover to cover. I got a long check cord with a brass buckle, and I still used this foundational knowledge of animal training

on my mules, squirrel dogs, and coondogs today. Soon, Paps' confidence in me grew, and he gave me another dog, a black-handed pointer puppy named Nick from the bloodlines of a dog called Fiddler's Ace. I didn't know anything about the dog, but he sounded really good. The goal was for me to train Nick myself, and I tried. But like so many things in life, moments are fleeting, and dreams die easier than they're realized.

And after four years of bird hunting, I gave Lucy and Nick back to Papps. I always felt like I failed the old man in my efforts with the bird dogs, and I felt bad about it. but I never picked up that it bothered him. He knew it was like fighting an incoming tide. There just weren't any birds. Without birds, people didn't need bird dogs. I wish so badly Papps could see what's happening today in quail conservation and how in many parts of the country, wild quail are coming back

due to the efforts of many people in organizations like Cuell Forever. After I gave back the dogs to Papps, we still had a year, yearly hunt. I only remember actually finding birds one time. It was February, 1996 or 1997. I was around 17 and Paps was 77 and we turned loose his dog, Goldie, out on a small logging road that divided a clear cut on public land in southwest Arkansas where my dad had flushed a big cubby of quail. A little butterscotch setter had hunted in front of the truck for less than a quarter mile before her run turned to a catwalk and her nose lowered. Her tail went from making big circles to small circles to as staunch as an Osage fence

fence post as she locked down on point like her body had been suddenly filled with concrete. I'm not sure who was more surprised. Me, Papps, or Goldie. We jumped from the truck and scrambled to load our guns. Paps's voice changed octaves and he whispered. as he gave me precise instructions on how to approach the pointed dog. I wished his instructions for my life had been as straightforward. I used to ask him questions I was afraid to ask my dad,

like, is it okay to chew tobacco? I dabbled with that dirty voodoo for a few years, but his non-confrontational wisdom to, quote, stay away from it, eventually took lifelong route. He always used to tell me that God will lead you step-by-step clay, just like he did me. To this day, I still take comfort in those words, and I say the same thing to my kids. And I haven't forgotten that Goldie is on point, but I just want to tell you one more story that showed Papps's input into my life.

He told me the same story on multiple occasions that was such a high-octane, Solomon-like parable that as an adult, I've wondered if he actually did this. or if this was an old story told by a lot of different people that he just repeated to me. But I've never heard this story anywhere else, and I've come to the conclusion that he was the one that actually did this. The story is about two roosters, one old and one young that he had on the farm when he was a kid. The older white rooster was the top dog and literally ruled the roost, dominating the younger but bigger rooster that was daily put in its place by coming in runner up during the big. Pairs daily spurrin contest.

Young Lewin always thought that the young rooster could probably whip the old one, but he just didn't know that he could. One day Papps decided to put his theory to the test, so he caught the old white rooster and covered him in black soot, changing his color temporarily to charcoal gray, making him unrecognizable to the young rooster. Paps then pitched the old rooster back into the chicken yard, and a young rooster not recognizing him and believing it was a new rooster promptly came over

and in a whiz-bang tussle of feathers, spurs, and clucks, the young one whipped the old one with ease. The old rooster must have been in shock at the youngster's confidence, and as the soot slowly faded back to white, the young rooster remained dominant the pair's entire life. Like Solomon passing the sluggard's field and no doubt. the work ethic of the ants, Papp's parable almost didn't need explanation. It's clear that our biggest enemy is often our own self-confidence, and much of life is simply an exercise in renewing our minds. This I have never forgotten, and I've also not forgotten that I'm telling you a story about us walking up on a covey of birds. He always told me on the

covey rise to pick out one single bird and black it out with the end of the gun barrel and flow through it don't stop as you squeeze the trigger and when it falls just move on to the next one i think that's what he learned on that gunship in world war two we eased forward paps with his beretta twelve gauge and me with the remington eleven hundred twenty gauge ready for the explosion just as i passed Goldie on my left and Papps was just on the other side of Goldie, a sound like someone opening a bottle with the hoofbeats of a hundred horses erupted as the Covey rose. At least 12 birds got up before us. Papp shot twice. I shot three times. So five shots total were fired and three birds fell. In all these years, it was the only Covey we'd ever found while.

hunting together. But Papps didn't take credit for hitting any of the birds, just like the enemy planes in World War II. He insisted that I'd killed all three, which I'm pretty sure to this day that I didn't. I honestly don't know. I don't know if he just wanted to believe that his grandson had knocked down a triple on wild birds, really on one of his only Covey Rises. Five or six years, years later in 2002, when Papps was 83 years old, we went back to the same block of public land. Paps was still hunting Goldie, now in the final leg of her life. But we all kind of knew it was Paps' final leg, too. We didn't find any birds that day. As we walked through a clearing, I noticed the shed of a white-tailed deer lying on the ground. And kind of like that stone point,

I picked it up, showed it to Papps, and I took the horn home. Using the sharpy marker I wrote on it, Clay and Paps Newcomb Bird Hunt, 2002. I wouldn't have known it at the time, but that would be the last time that I hunted with him. And it would be the beginning of the end of Paps' hunting. My first cousin Greg Sheets lived close to Paps, and not long after I found that shedhorn, While driving to work, Greg noticed Paps's S-10 pulled off the side of the road near an overgrown field that he often hunted and Greg passed all the time. Seeing PAS's truck there was normal, but what caught his eye was that Goldie was by the truck with no Papps. It was a hot day, and Greg slightly alarmed, turned his truck around, and got out, called for Papps, and he said that Goldie took off out into the breath.

Greg followed Goldie, who led him straight to a briar thicket, where Papps was tangled to the point that he couldn't move. The day was heating up, and Greg said that Papps was coherent, but it looked like he'd been there for several hours fighting briars. And he just sat down. He just couldn't fight him anymore, and he was just awaiting his fate. Greg went in and cut him out, got Papp's home and safe. I'm grateful that Greg turned around that day. But not long after that, Papps couldn't drive anymore. And I think you can predict the rest of the story.

That shedhorn from our last hunt hangs in my office today. But it's right beside a watercolor painting that I did for Paps when I was a senior in high school. And I'd painted one of his best dogs that he ever had. that was on point. It was from a beautiful photograph that someone took. It was an English setter named Snipper, just on full point. When I painted it, I gave it to Papps, and that painting hung in his office from 1998 until they moved Paps out of his home into assisted living around 2010. Mimi had passed away in 2007, and I'll never forget seeing Papp's cry as he's. he walked down the aisle to say his final goodbye to the love of his life and a woman who was so

influential in mind. Having a grandparent in your life is so powerful because you get to see played before you the stages of your life that you know will someday happen to you. I'd like to close by telling you about the last two conversations that I had with Papps. The first happened in the fall of 2013 just before he died. At the time he could hardly hear so you had to yell at him to get him to understand. And I'd recently been on some public land, that same public land where we found those birds, and I'd found some more birds. And I came in and I sat close to Papps, and I said to him, Paps, I saw a big covey of birds the other day. And his eyes lit up and he said, you did. And this teed him up to tell an anecdote I've heard my whole life when he talked about his dogs. And without segue,

he said, my old dog Goldie, I believe if you'd have cracked her head open, a covey of birds would have flown out. Every time he'd say this, he'd do his he-haw laugh, which I wish I had a recording of that laugh. It was one of a kind. It kind of had a he-haw and donkey vibe that was guaranteed to draw a smile from anyone within the earshot. The last conversation I had with him is kind of of complicated. I do not understand the mechanics of the spirit realm or the depths to which the dreams of men create reality. But if I lay unconscious and a doctor could peer into my mind and heart and ascertain the last time I actually saw Papps, the last time my spirit registered that I had engaged with him, I'm confident that they would say it was on the morning of September 5th,

24. Do you remember the dream that we started this story with? I approached Papps and he was strong and vibrant. He wore a bright blue shirt and he had some type of treatment to his ears and he could hear really well. He swayed slightly as he stood and I walked up to him and I shook his hand and in the climax moment of the short interaction I said one thing to him. I said, perhaps I've been bird hunting. That's all I said.

And I saw that excitement and passion in his eyes that branded me as a child. And the dream was over. True story. It happened just like that. It's like I just wanted to engage with him one more time. Surely there's something powerful, even supernatural in the fluttering wings of a covey rise that connects the hearts of men who witness it together. It has the power to link generations and an unbreakable bond

that no man-made thing can do. It did that with Papps and I. In 2008, the youngest of my wife, Misty and I's four children, was born. We felt like that he should be named in honor of Papps, so we named him Shepard Covey Newcomb. The name Shepard essentially means pastor, someone who cares for people like Paps did. And the name Covey is a direct reference to Paps' love of quail,

but equally an admonition to our son to not live in isolation, but to integrate himself deeply into the lives of family, friends, and his church community for life. Today, Shepard is 17 and is growing into a fine young man. His life just barely overlapped with Paps. but I have no doubt that the legacy of integrity, spiritual pursuit, and love of wild places is going to carry on through him and all my kids.

That same passion that Pabbs had for wild places, quail, and bird dogs, is the same energy that fuels my life and career today. He died on Christmas night, 2013, at the age of 94, and would have little understanding of what I would do with my life. But I know this conservation movement and the resurgence of quail would have made him proud and probably would evoke this passionate he-haul laugh. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease and Brent's This Country Life podcast. I hope you enjoyed this.

This was something unique, really personal to me. and I know a lot of you probably have similar stories about your grandparents. But really, in this context, the point of this story is that watching Papp's grieve about the loss of quail the last 35 years in his life really fueled my interest in conservation. Even as a kid, I was like, man, I hope this doesn't happen to me. Thank you so much for listening and for supporting what Brent and I are doing down. here. Keep the wild places wild. That's where the quail live too. First Lights fieldware 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 fieldware gear at firstlight.com. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.