Bear Grease - Ep. 307: This Country Life - Turkey Hunts and Turkey Hunters Remembered

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

In this episode Brent’s sharing a story from early on in his turkey hunting career, which made that one day long ago great  for him and bad for his host. Two listener stories reflect the respect we show those who serve and you're not going to want to miss them! We’re kicking off turkey season 2025 on MeatEater’s “This Country Life” podcast.  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 Light's 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.

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.

Turkey hunts and turkey hunters remembered. Spring is here and so is turkey season. The first step for me in the new year of chasing critters for the freezer and there's no better way to kick it off and chasing turkeys. I'm going to share some of your stories that you've sent into me, two, in fact, that celebrate service. But first, I'm going to tell you one of mine. The story I'm about to tell you happened a long time ago.

I was still relatively new to turkey hunt, but I hadn't missed a season of killing at least one and most times two, which was the limit then in Arkansas. But one thing I had never done was to get a turkey on opening morning. It was as if it took me a few days to get warmed up. I've always been told that unless you get lucky right off the bat, that it takes two or three days to get a new piece of ground figured out how the turkeys use it if you've never hunted it, before. There was no on-ex available on your cell phone.

Coincidentally, there was also no cell phones. Some of you may not believe this, but if you wanted to take a picture or something in the woods, you had to tow a camera with you. I know. Crazy, right? Cameras were just something else that would be in the way.

And if I was going to have my picture taken with a turkey I'd just clobbered, I'd have it taken on the porch when I got home. Now, I'm answering e-mail, checking in with my friends who are hunting and taking pictures and videos left and right documented just about every aspect of the hunt, good or bad. Boy, am I glad I didn't have one rolling that morning?

It was opening day and I was hunting as a guest with a guy who shall remain nameless. The only clue to his identity is that he was a turkey hunter, a good turkey hunter. Who had the patience of Joe? He could sit all day in one spot having only heard a single gobble or no gobbles at all for that matter and remain there knowing that turkeys used that area, a tactic he used to put a bunch of turkeys in his freezer. I've always called that process deer hunting turkeys.

It's my least favorite way to hunt them, barely beating out and not going at all, which as the years progressed, the line between them becomes even more blurred. But this was open in date, and he and I were standing on the edge of a gravel road on his farm, waiting on Goblin Time. We've been there for half a thermos of coffee. You turkey hunters know how long that is. We were way early, not because we had to beat anyone to the spot, because we were so excited we left the cabin about the time we probably should have been waking up.

He may have been a patient man, but it was open in date, and our mission was to get me my first opening day turkey. The morning was cool with no wind and crystal clear. You could see every star in the sky, and the sun was still 20 minutes from beginning to glow. We heard a train horn blowing that was miles and miles away from where we stood, and if a turkey gobbled anywhere on those 700 acres, we'd hear him. And one did, and it surprised us both.

But he'd answered that train, and the songbirds had yet to make a peep. My friend said, I know right where he's at. He's roosted at the crossing. Let's go. And with that, I followed him off the gravel road onto a sandy woods road that made no sound as we each walked a tire rut correcting our course when we felt the grass under our boots that was growing on each side of the lane. He'd walked that road countless times in the dark, and I could vague.

see his silhouette as I followed a half a step behind him. The turkey was roosted near the creek, and after about ten minutes of slow walking in the dark, I could faintly hear water running through a little shoal. We had to be close. My friend stopped and I almost bumped into him in the dark. He took a hold of my arm and guided me to a white oak tree that was five yards off the road.

The creek had been flooded two weeks before, but was now back in its banks. The high water had flushed all the leaf litter downstream, and we didn't make a sound as we walked on nothing but bare earth and short grass over to that tree. He left me in the best seat in the house and took up a spot across the road on the other side away from me, hidden in a patch of underbrush and greenbriars. He was absolutely invisible. Goblin time came and that joker let the world know who was running the show in that bottom.

If there has ever been a show enough boss gobbler we were listening to him that morning, he wasn't just gobbling, he was commanding. Singles, doubles, triples, he was telling us all how the cow hit the cabbage. I heard him pitch down early and hit the ground less than a hundred yards away. It was still pretty dark, and it kind of surprised me. He'd actually been roosted directionally just to the right of where my friend was sitting but across the little creek. Off to my left, I saw hen after hen further back of the woods gliding towards me like

black stealth fighters and landing without a sound just over a little rise and right where I thought that gobbler had landed. Now, I knew my friend couldn't have seen them from his position, but it didn't matter. I didn't need to tell him. He wasn't going to move or spook anything anyway. He was as hid as hid can be. The only thing visible on him was from his. nose up as he sat in the middle of those bushes.

I heard the gobbler drumming and after a minute or two, I saw the top of his fan shake every time he did. The moments in between the vibration of his pulmonic puffs, his fan drew closer and closer as he slowly strutted his way toward the crossing and where we sat waiting for him. Now more out of habit than necessity, I clucked at him with my mouth call and he gobbled so loud that I felt it as much as I heard it. His fan disappeared and his head took its place over the small rise in the road as he walked on a mission to see who was calling to him from across the creek.

I could see several hens now as they made their way following him toward what was fixing to be his last attempt to cross that creek on his own. He stepped up on the other side of the creek 20 yards away. his head a foot above the hens that were pecking the ground behind him who were still unseen by my hunting partner. I had the beat of that Belgian browning on his noggin since he dropped his fan and started smiling at me. Once I saw there wasn't a hen close enough for me to hit, I uncorked one and that joker cut a backwards flip in the road he just walked up.

Boom! Then, pandemonium. Like a covey of quail, hen turkey, blew out of there in the direction that they'd arrived except for one. She flew from directly behind where that gobbler had fell and made a B-line straight at my buddy, gaining both altitude and speed with every beat of her wings. I could see my turkey as I jumped up from my spot running towards where he was flopping and caught the image out of the corner of my eye as my friend raised up his shotgun

and shot that hen out of the sky like it was a mallard duck. Four steps of low. later I was standing on the neck of my first opening day gobbler. I looked back across the creek and my friend was fighting through the briars and I saw him jump over part of a tree top and looked back at me, both arms pointed skyward in the air in triumph. His turkey mask hiding his face, but blowing back and forth as the flopping turkey under his foot stirred up the wind with leaves and feathers.

I grabbed that gobbler by the feet and I held him up in the still dawning day that was just now light enough where you could see down through the woods. My host was 25 yards away, arms still pumping vigorously toward the heavens, laughing in celebration when he looked over at me and saw me holding that gobbler. I'll never forget the happiness in his voice when he said, You got one too? Or the disappointment is all the air left his body when I said, yeah, but mine has a beard. He ripped off his headnet, picked up that hen and went, oh no.

He never knew the hens were there. And at that time, hens could be taken legally in the fall, but not in the spring. He could barely see the gobbler through the bushes when I shot, and he thought I missed when the hen flew right over his head from where the gobbler had been standing. It was the perfect storm to mess up, but mess up he did. It was a long walk back to the truck, even though the distance was short. He congratulated me on my opening day gobbler, but didn't really start talking until he got to his house

when he called and turned himself in to the game of fish. It was an expensive admission to an honest mistake, but it was the right thing to do. It was a lesson in making sure everything you're seeing is what you're actually seeing and even a patient man can get caught up in the moment. And that's just how that happened. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road.

I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag. And there was a 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. This first account is from this country life listener, Aaron Shaw. Aaron lives in Ada, Oklahoma. Long time this country life listeners should recall that Ada, Oklahoma was the site of the horse sale that brought Ken's reward into my life. He was a nefarious wannabe bucking horse that tried to kill me. Anyway, Aaron is on the yonder side of 32 years old and works in the oil field. He says that his favorite hunting story is this one.

So in Aaron's words and my voice, here we go. In 2015, my best friend since high school, Jake, was a member of the United States Air Force and deployed to various countries in the Middle East. Communication was sketchy in some of those places, so I didn't get to hear from him much in the nine months that he was gone. But he got in touch with me right before he came home in April and told me that what he really wanted to do once he got home was turkey hunt. Well, I jumped at the chance, and two weeks later, we were headed out with. to try and fool some old Rio Grande's. I hadn't killed a turkey yet in my hunting career, and I was excited to try,

but my main goal was to make sure that my friend got one for all that he did serving our nation overseas. The night we arrived, we set up camp on a block of public land. Our camp consisted of a fire and ice chest full of groceries and the truck that would serve as our sleeping quarter. Next morning, after a long night of catching up in storytelling, we set up on a timber line overlooking a swath of grassland dotted with big hilly mounds. We had the decoy set up and I started to call on my pot call and after about 20 minutes we got an answer.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck like it still does when I hear a turkey gobble and I could almost taste him. Just when we thought he was coming straight to us, he hung up out of sight and way out of range. I looked over at Jake and asked him what we should do. Well, he said he didn't fly halfway around the world after missing both duck and deer season to fly back and not get a turkey. Let's go get him. We left the decoy and took off in hot pursuit, going from hill to hill, calling as we went. And that turkey answered every time.

He started to get louder but was still out of sight. I spotted a dry creek bed about 50 yards ahead of us, and decided that was going to be our ambush point. I steered us towards it and flung myself, my gun, and the call down in the shallow creek bed with Jake in hot pursuit. Now, we're both well over six feet tall, so we had to drop to our knees and crawl in position on the other side and peek over the edge to see if we could spot that gobbler. I told Jake to get his gun ready. The way I was positioned, the only thing I could see was the rocks and grass right in front of my face,

but I dared not peeked my head up for fear spooking that turkey. I stayed low and I kept on calling on that pot call. The turkey's gobbles got louder and louder, so loud that at any moment I was expecting him to be in the creek standing right between us. And just when I thought what wasn't going to happen, it happened. I jumped up grabbing my gun into my utter dismay, saw a very much alive turkey at 15 yards. I drew down on him and had that Joker dead to rights, but I hesitated.

I wanted my friend to make this shot, as I was wondering what was taking him so long to shoot again, and before he got out of there, I let loose one shot just as he took flight and disappeared over the grasslands, my attempt clearly missing its mark. I turned my buddy and shouted, how could you miss? He was so close. He looked back at me, smile and said, I didn't miss. The first one was. the first one, that's what I realized. There was a dead turkey with one wing sticking up in the air as if waving to me to show me my own foolishness.

But no shame or anger ever hit me, only elation at my friend's accomplishment. We jumped and hugged and hooded and hollered all the way back to the truck. A week later, I sat with his family around the table and we shared that bird. Now we go turkey hunting every year together. The birds are scarce in that area where we hunted, and I still haven't pulled the trigger on one, but next time he's calling, and I'm behind the gun, and according to Aaron Shaw of Ada, Oklahoma, that's just how that happened. And I hope will happen this spring, Aaron.

Good luck to you and Jacob. Thanks for your service. But it's Aaron's time to pull the trigger. The next offering comes to us from a man named James Davis, who's rambling around up in Jacksonville, Illinois. James has made a career out of serving others and sent me this one last November, and I'm sure it was after a lot of deliberation.

Stories like these are special, and I've waited to share it until now. So in James's words and my voice, here we go once more. I've kept this story to myself for a few years now as a keepsake or honored memory, but as I sit around the campfire here at Deer Camp in Shannon County, Missouri, I felt compelled to share it. I'm not sure if you will share it, but I think you might enjoy it and appreciate it in similar ways I have.

Today is Veterans Day, 24, but I'd like to take you back to the spring of 2019. I was and still am a paramedic after leaving the Sheriff's Department four years prior, Although I was not new to being a paramedic, I was fairly new to this department in the area that I was currently working. My partner at the time, while from that area, was brand new to EMS, and we were to say the least, quite the pair in that ambulance, him telling me turn here and slow down for this and that bump and me directing him on new and current EMS field operations and procedures. But one of the things required by ambulance crews is to take terminal. ill patients home from the hospital for their end-of-life care. This particular day, we were called early in the morning around 4 a.m. to take a man home

on hospice. Me not knowing the area well and my partner not really ready to spend the last moments of a person's life with them, I elected to treat the patient as long as he wouldn't get us lost way out in the country where the man lived. We walked into a hospital room filled with loved ones. Clearly had been a very emotional night for everyone. It was our job to make this last trip home as comfortable as we could. Not only for him, we did our best to comfort the family as well. Our patient was awake but unable to speak due to his cancer.

Cancer is horrible. We got the patient loaded and as we transported the band to his home, he could see outside and I watched him staring out the windows of the back of the ambulance, almost as if he was recalling some memory of that field over there or this curve in the road from his life spent traveling up and down that road. We arrived at the man's home. His family was already there and waiting for it. It was a beautiful old ranch-style farmhouse with a grand porch that overlooked a green grass bottom and creek.

The sun was just coming up over the trees when we got there and there was a slight chill in the air. We made sure to have plenty of blankets on him as we removed the stretcher from the back of the ambulance and began to slowly ease our way up the ramp of the porch where a big sliding glass door was open, waiting for his return. The man's wife had instructed us to bring him in this way before she left the hospital. As we got to the door, I froze. The wall of this room that I could see into was a striking memorial to this man's life, his hunting and personal life.

Turkey fans and beards adorn the walls from floor to ceiling, antlers near a coffee table with pictures of what had to be friends and family with turkeys and deer of every size. A few shadow boxes were mixed in between the beards and bucks. This man was a veteran, 173rd Airborne, just like my dad. who had taught me to hunt. A faded deputy's jacket hung on a hook near the door. This man wasn't just a hunter. He dedicated his whole life to service and the people he held close.

More family began to pour out of the house as if the floodgates had opened. I turned my partner, I told him, go back to the ambulance and yelp the siren one time, one short time, just once. He looked at me as if I was on fire. Again, I said, go back to the ambulance. Yelp the siren just once. As I said before, it was spring. And I couldn't imagine a more beautiful spot to turkey hunt if I had planned it myself

than this man's land that stretched out behind his home. My partner did as he was told and went back, and one short yelp, he blasted that siren. It wasn't a second later that. gobbler hammered back from down in the bottom, as loud and as clear as any turkey I have ever heard, even today. And when he started, he didn't stop. Gobble after gobble after gobble, thundered through that bottom, echoing off the hills as if to tell the world he was there and to welcome this man home. As I turned back to the patient, he was smiling as big as a bobcat,

a small tear in his eye. He reached out and he grabbed my hand as a way of saying thank you. We brought him inside and his whole family was in tears. I understood. This man who had been the bedrock of this family was passing away and as beautiful as it was to be surrounded by the ones he loved, they were losing so much. It made me think of my dad and what losing him might be like

and thankful I haven't had to go down that path yet. We set our goodbyes and left quickly and quietly to let the family have their moment. As we pulled away, the man's wife came running out to thank us one more time. She told us how her husband loved to turkey hunt and how their sons had wished their dad could hear a gobble one more time, and without knowing, we had made that wish come true. She asked me if I hunted and I said yes. and she gave me her contact information and told me it would be a pleasure to have me hunt their land. I hadn't hunted since moving back to Illinois, but the next few years I took her up on the offer until I got a new job at a new department. I can tell you for certain that every time I heard a gobble on that farm, I swear I could feel someone sitting next to me.

I never killed a turkey out there, even though I had plenty of chances. Deep down I felt like those birds were strutting and gobbling for a great man of service was no longer there. And it's days like today, this Veterans Day, that I remember those moments, those who served and still served. As I wait for the rest of our hunting group to arrive at camp in the Missouri Deer Opener, I'm thankful that my dad will be with me this year. I'm going to ask my dad to share a blind with me,

just to pad up the memories to tell his grandchildren how their granddad, also a man of service himself, loved his family in the outdoors, just as that man did so many years ago. Well, James Davis, Jacksonville, Illinois, can't thank you enough for sending in that beautiful tribute. You got me in the fields, buddy. And I know while I was reading that, that I thought of several folks, men and women alike that have lived a life like his.

And to all of them, we all owe a bit of things. God, country, family, and self. It really is that simple. For me, anyway. Thank you all so much for listening. You know, Meat Eater's Turkey Week starts next Monday. And the turkey calling competition has me going up against a really good writer, but a mediocre turkey caller and even worse, Al Hooter.

So keep that in mind when you're voting on which one of us is better. I won't say his name, but his initials are S as in Steve and R as in not Reeves. Until next week, this is Brent Reeves. Signing off. Y'all be careful. 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 fieldwear gear at firstlight.