Bear Grease - Ep. 416: This Country Life - Paige's Hunt, Snow, and Bad Boar Coons

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

It's no secret that snow and ice can disrupt the lives of people who don't get a lot of it. Brent's no different, and it may affect him more than most. He's snowed in at his studio and talking about a smorgasbord of things today that may or may not go together. You'll just have to listen and see what we mean. It's random stories time on MeatEater's "This Country Life" podcast. Shop This Country Life Merch Connect with Brent and MeatEater MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips Subscribe to the 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 Trotlining 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 from the Storemore Studio on Meat Eat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcasts that Airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some stories to share. Pages Deerhunt, Snow, and Bad Boer Coons.

I couldn't tell you what the theme of this week's show is. There are three elements that I talk about, and the last two are similar, but also different. After I wrote it and read it, I looked at my computer like it was speaking a different language. Sometimes I just get to rambling, and when I slow down long enough to catch my breath, 30 minutes have gone by. That's probably the most accurate way to describe it. this effort. Anyway, you tell me, but I'm going to talk about snow, coon hunting, and rough old coons. But first, I'm going to tell you this story. This week's story comes from this country life

listener, Paige Harrison. Page stays busy working a couple hours south of our nation's capital in the 10th state to join the colonies in rebellion against those tea taxing buffoons over in England. It's also in that same state of Virginia that her story takes place. Now, Paige commented something very nice when she introduced this story to me, and I quote, The stories you tell highlight the good in America. Well, Paige, we can always use some of those. So in your words and my voice, here we go. I grew up hunting a farm in Southern Virginia that my dad and his buddies hunted my entire life. In their words, we've brought a tractor-traggler load of deer out of there.

That farm holds a lot of hunting memories for me, and I killed my first deer there, and I have a lot of memorable stories and genetics plays a big part of the story I want to share. In 2010, my first year of college, I came home for Thanksgiving week. My dad and I hunted hard that week, sitting in box blinds each morning, evening with no luck. It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving, my last evening to hunt until winter break. My dad said, let's do something different that we haven't done in a while and get in a box blind together. My dad and his friends built all the box blinds on the property and most of them were built to sit two people. The secondary rut was in and the deer were moving early.

A couple of doves walked out and my dad commented that I should probably stick my gun out and just in case. Sure enough, mature buck was right behind it. You have to remember, my dad and his best friend built all the box blinds, and these are not box blinds put together by your average Joe. My dad's best friend comes from a family of carpenters. These blinds are sturdy and built to a precise measurement, and that measurement is not for a girl who's 5'4.

I get the crosshairs on the buck and I'm no longer sitting in the chair but squatting with my gun resting out the window. Dad whispers to pull my leg under me and sit on it, so I shifted to stand and try to calm my heart rate. Thank goodness that buck was interested in the doze. With my leg under me now, I had a perfect rest to get the crosshairs on the biggest buck I'd ever had the chance to kill. I exhale and I drop him in the field. Dad and I are super stoked that our idea of sitting in the stand together paid off. This is the largest deer that I've ever killed and Dad got a front row seat. That deer still hangs in the house that I grew up in.

Now, you fast forward eight years later to the same Saturday weekend that my boyfriend comes to my parents' house after Thanksgiving so we can all hunt together. I was lucky enough to take the whole week off. Once again, Dad and I hunt every morning and every evening. The second morning, fogs settled across the field, and I can see a tall white rack walking the woods edge, but it is not quite light enough to shoot. I hunt that deer for three days after with no other sightings.

Saturday morning comes around, and Dad comes up with another idea to change our luck. We get breakfast at the local donut shop before heading to the farm. Only this time, my boyfriend and I get in the same box blind. The tall white rack buck steps out of the woods and to eat acres. I'm nervous, and this is the biggest buck I've seen since my Thanksgiving deer of 2010. I have to shift around in the stand and settle my leg again.

I take the shot, and to be very honest, it wasn't my best work. We know the deer is hit good. We bump him while we were tracking it, and know that we just need to leave the area and give it more time. I was gutted. This is now the age of GPS tracking callers, and later that afternoon, my dad gets a call from one of the local hunters.

His dogs found my deer. As soon as we get up to the deer, dad and I realize that this deer is related to the deer I killed in Thanksgiving week 2010. The antlers were just too similar. The two biggest bucks of my life, were killed hunting with two most important men in my life and both deer from the same bloodline. That boyfriend later became my husband. My family no longer gets to hunt that farm.

The patriarch of the family passed away and his kids sold the property. The deer stories from that farm live on, just like the genetics of those bucks. My dad received a picture of a buck killed on that farm three years after my second deer. and sure enough, that deer had to be related to mine. A farm will always hold a special place in my heart. Plus, it has given us a truckload of stories to tell. And my hope is that one day, I will have a farm to take my little girl hunting so she can create her own stories.

Thank you for sharing the hunting stories of an average hunter like me. It is a joy to listen to them each week. And according to Paige Harrison, that's just a good. how that happened. Well, Paige, you may be an average hunter, but something tells me you're an above-average human, exemplifying the traits instilled in you by your father and your grandfather. Your story could have been one of loss and lament for a place that you can no longer go, yet you chose only to speak anecdotally of it to describe your desire to have a similar place

to take your daughter, like your father took you. That's the real story here, and one that not only highlights the good stories of America, but also good Americans. Thank you for sending it in. Old Man Winter has blanketed by Homeland of Arkansas with what I referred to as Winter Yankee Rain. Not really, I just made that up, but I have no clue how you folks up north handle all this snow all the time. The other day I texted a picture of a black coyote my brother Tim's nephew, Daniel Bryant, caught to Steve Ronella.

I claimed Daniel is my nephew too. But anyway, after looking at the picture of the black coyote laying in the grass, Steve jokingly said, that's pretty cool. But you pansies don't even have any ice or snow to deal with down there. I shut him up by responding, that's why we live here. Snow is pretty to watch falling outside the window. in the evening while the fireplace provides the background music of pops and crackles and the hiss and the burning wood.

And the next morning, it's fresh and pure as you inhale that frigid air and take the first steps from the threshold outside, your feet poking holes in the blind and white of the freshly carpeted yard. And then your 75-pound coon hounds past you over to his favorite spot, a spot your wife has descriptively named Pooh Corner, and not after A.A.A. Melon's beloved teddy bear of the same name. What that dog does over there in that most aptly named area of the backyard is no different than how I see what old man winter has done to Arkansas.

How rude. Snow hits differently down here. I know folks who look forward to skiing on it and snowmobiling through it and for it to push elk and other critters down to lower elevations. I get it. Y'all need it, and I'm glad. someone does. I ain't one of them.

Now, I love a good snow day as much as anyone else. Even two or three are good. But by day number four, if this stuff is still here, it starts cramping my style because nothing else here can deal with this stuff either. When the temps in Arkansas start dipping below 30 for extended periods of time, the coons and the squirrels stop moving for the most part and just wait out the freeze. That means they don't move very far from the den if they move. at all, and they sure ain't moving much at night, which is the coldest part of the day.

I remember a big snow event a few years ago when old whalen was still a youngster, and me and my pal, Rex Whiting, wanted to go coon hunting in the snow. Shadow was a Rex's hound, and actually I wanted to go hunting and convinced him to go with me, and by convinced, I mean I begged and guilted him into it. I called him on the phone. Rex, let's go hunting. night. He said, are you drunk? No. I want to go coon hunting. I'm tired of sitting in this house. So we ain't going to treat no coons on the outside of the tree. There's eight inches of snow on the

ground and they're all dined up. It's 25 degrees outside. I said, I know how cool would it be to have a picture of wailing the shadow with their paws up on a tree in the snow. I'll tell you how cool, Rex. Really cool. He didn't say anything for a few seconds. and then he said, you really want to go. And I said, I am going. You going to make me go by myself? I could hear him let out a sigh that spoke volumes about his poor decision to answer the phone when I called, something that has held firm ever since.

Rarely does he answer immediately, even now, years later. I usually just text him and wait for him to evaluate my ridiculous scheme, giving him a departure time, and whether he shows up or not. at the appointed time is what I get my answer. He said, come get me. We'll be ready when you get here. After I got him in the truck, we took off for 20,000 acres, a public hunting ground that was an hour's drive away,

bypassing the 6,000 that was less than 15 minutes from the house. Go beg or go home. I chose to go beg. Rex, you wanted to go back home. 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 Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. The hour of trip took us an hour and a half as I sped along at a blistering pace never exceeding 40 miles an hour. The ruts in the snow and ice along the highway were safe enough at a manageable speed,

and when we got there, Rex finally seemed to be as excited about the trip as I was. Looking back now, on the 19th day of February in 2021, his renewed enthusiasm may have been more to do with surviving the drive over and realizing that if we froze to death on this hunt, at least he died doing something that he loved. He also told me that if we wound up in a survival situation, he's Shadow and Whalen were going to eat me first. We cut the dogs loose and just like Rex predicted,

we'd never made a tree. Nothing was moving except for us. We turned loose in a couple different spots where we usually had good luck in striking a coon. I remember Whaling and Shadow both opening up a couple times, but nothing more than cold trailing, like extreme cold trailing. And before we left hunting that night, I'd filled my insulated dog box with fresh hay and covered all the vents to preserve heat, but not so much as to keep air from getting in and out.

And when Whalen and Shadow were warm as biscuits when we cut them loose after riding an hour and a half in the back of the truck, and when we loaded them back up after our feudal attempt at Tree and Acoon in the snow, they had the heat stoke back up and were sound asleep by the time we got back home. Both of them stay in the night inside their respective homes where Whelan continues to reside. in his off hours and where Shadow did for the remainder of his life. It was fun, and I was glad we went. It was crazy it was to go, but I was even more excited to get home and dig into a bowl of gumbo that Bailey and I had made earlier in the day.

It was good and warm to my innards, and outside of spending time with my friend Rex, the best part of that day was getting home and reheating myself with Bailey's Vittles. Now, you fast forward 315 days, one hour and 57 minutes later, and me and Michael Roseman, Noel Goodwin, and Hunter Gullick are hunting in the ice and snow once again. Now, how do I know how accurate that is? It's very accurate because I used the time and date stamps on the videos that I took back then, and I'll show them both on my social medias of what I'm talking about here.

But we were hunting purely out of not wanting to stay at home. We'd had several days of iced up roads and not being able to go anywhere. And when the opportunity arose to get out of the house, even for a low percentage hunt to be successful, like once again chasing coons and well below freezing temperatures, we went anyway. We made some dead trees. And if you can't see the coon in there, it's more or less a push.

You'll, you'd never know for sure if it was actually there or not. So there's no praise for the dog, the reward that he's looking to get by tree. in the coon in the first place. You can't reward your dog for something you think he did good, no more than you can correct him for something you're not sure he did wrong. You can't find the coon by looking into the den, you just have to leash him up and move on.

It's like it never happened. And in the training arena and progression of your dog, the only value it has is showing them that the only time they're going to get praised is when they've done everything right. It encourages the dogs to be. sure and confident in the tree that they declare where the coon is. Every time you go, you want the dog to have the opportunity to learn something and to have a positive experience.

And sometimes that positive experience is just not tree where a coon ain't. But on one of the last cast of the night, Wayland came treed and sounded more than a little excited. I videoed it as I walked to him and when I got there, I could see the coon at the base of an old dead tree that had been hollowed out. It was big enough for the Coon to get into, but it didn't go anywhere from there. Anyone that's ever hunted with whaling or listening close on here when I talk about how much of a tough guy he is knows first and foremost he ain't. He's the kind of guy one of my old football coaches would describe as looking like Tarzan but playing like Jane.

He ain't no fighter. He's as accurate of a dog that I've ever seen, but a tough guy, nirp. Let me tell you about a night when Michael's dog, Heck, backed off his pugilistic endeavors a few notches, and I can't say as I blame him. It has nothing to do with snow and all to do with a bad coon, but you folks that have been here a while know how my brain works or doesn't work. Anyway, I just thought of this, so I'm going to tell you about it before I forget it. It was a couple years ago when Michael and I were hunting just off the cash bow.

Whalen and Heck were scald in a coon track. down through the bottoms and the water was low at that time and the coon seemed to be crossing from bank to bank back and forth at Will trying to throw those dogs off his track. But it wasn't working. Michael and I kept talking about how this coon ought to be running up a tree. We could tell the dogs were close to him just by the way Whelan was barking. Whelan, he ain't the kind of dog that barks a lot on a track, which has nothing to do with whether or not he'll tree him.

but you can easily tell how hot the track is by how he's barking in the rhythm and the pace at which he does it. And using that as our barometer, we were guessing they could almost seem. A long story short, that coon didn't want to run up a tree. Some of them don't. And when he'd run as far as he wanted to, he squared up and commenced to duking it out with both of them. Normally, that's where the story ends. The coon meets his demise and, like Jerry Clower's, said, you know, the coon does have the option of whooping the dogs and leaving.

But heck, heck, has caught a lot of coons on the ground and had them smoked by the time we got there on more occasions than I can count. Whalen, he ain't ever killed a coon by himself that I can remember. He's hemmed up plenty that didn't have a chance to climb a tree or want to, and he scrapped with them some and held them there until I got there, but he ain't going to run off and he ain't he ain't no killer or prone to wading in there by himself either. Hunting with Heck has always boosted his bravado to the point that he'll dip his biscuit into Coon's gravy if Heck goes in first and has everything going in the right direction. Safety first, that's Whalen's motto. Well, we heard the fight when it started.

Dogs barking and snarling and growling and baying and continued long past what it should have been to the point that Michael and looked at each other and said, Oh, Lord, they got a hog bait in there. Now, our dogs ain't hog dogs, and a hog can have an inexperienced dog or a well-experienced dog needing stitches or buried in short order. We started hustling to get to them, and they were a little over 300 yards away. About halfway there, Waylon went quiet, and now all we could hear was heck, and I ain't going to lie. I was getting a little sick to my stomach. I've seen dogs get hurt bad by hogs, and every scenario for my dog being quiet now ended with me having a long and sad drive home.

Then a little over 50 yards into the thicket where all the barking had been taking place, Whalen met us on the narrow briar-line trail. He was a blooded and muddied mess from one end to the other, and if a dog had ever had a man, I'm glad to see y'all look on his face, it was him. Michael and I quickly checked him for obvious injuries, but only saw some scratches and a bleeding ear. We were relieved then to hear a coon growling instead of a hog grunting and finished making our way to where heck of the coon were. As we broke into the opening, expected to see a freshly deceased or soon-to-be-de-be-de-boat, we were greeted by what looked like a crime scene, and it was all coming from a bite wound on Heck's ear.

That coon didn't weigh ten pounds and wasn't as big. as a house cat. Heck and Whaling together outweighed him by 140 pounds, but he'd given them all they wanted plus to the point Whalen decided to leave and go find an adult. Heck stayed, but I swear if he'd had any energy left, I think he'd have followed Whelan out. There wasn't a dry or clean spot on either one of them, and the ground where they stood had been churned into mud that was too thick to drink and too thin to plow. They had agreed to... just disagree as to who among them was the toughest. But Michael and I, we knew.

We leased heck up as he and that coon and now wailing again, just eyeballed each other like the final scene, the good and the bad and the ugly. Both of those hounds internally relieved that we were walking them out of there instead of allowing that cune to kick their butts any worse than he already had. Walking them away from a live coon is usually a pretty big chore, but not that time. Every now and then we'll run into one of those old bad ones

and did so again just a few weeks ago. Heck and Whelan had bait a coon across the lake well over 200 yards away when Michael and I walked up on the opposite side. We could hear that coon growling and snarling between Heck and Whelan's barking. With no way to get to them and easily confirming across the lake with our spotlights that they were dealing with a coon,

we called them to us and they came after only one holler. that water was cold, but they both bailed in and swam straight to us like a couple of well-trained Labradors. I said, Michael, ain't it good to have a dog that'll mind like those two will? He said, yeah, it is. And ever since that shalacking, they took over on the bio that time, they seemed to mind a lot better when they're scared. He has a point. I never know where I'm going when I start one of these, I can only tell you about where I've been. And I hope you enjoyed it. Check out my Kansas Coy Hunt with Decoy Dogs on the Meat Eater YouTube channel.

It's up right now. It was a lot of fun. And there's some old footage that I shot way back in 2017. No one has ever seen it. And I think you'll enjoy it. Until next week, this is Brent Reeves. Signing off. Y'all be careful.

On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping 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 backwards. 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 two of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.