Bear Grease - Ep. 419: This Country Life - Squirrel, It's What's for Dinner

Episode Date: February 6, 2026

From a listener's story about passing down the appreciation for wild things to Brent's first solo squirrel hunt, this week's This Country Life is sure to be one of your favorites. As a bonus, the recipe of how Brent's mama fried all the squirrels she nor his dad would eat is in here along with the reason why neither one would partake. Get the grease hot! We've got squirrels to fry. 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, and 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. Squirrel. It's What's for Supper.

We're going to be hunting and eating squirrels this week, and I've shared my fish cooking recipe on episode 11, and how I cook a coon on episode 217. There's a lot of ways to prepare squirrels, and the recipe I'm sharing here today is simple, and it was on a very special occasion. I'm going to tell you just how my mama did it, but first I'm going to tell you this story.

This one was sent in last June by this country life listener John Perkins. John is a civil engineer in Albertville, Alabama. John sharing his story of growing up with an older parent and was inspired to send it in after listening to Episode 333 of this country life titled Pocket Knives, Squirrels, and Father's Day. Now that's all the lead in you get. So in John's words in my voice, Here we go.

I recently listened to your father's day podcast about your dad, and I'll admit I had to stop what I was doing and shed a few tears as the story had so many similarities to my dad. My dad was born in 1929 in Lamar County, Alabama. He married my mama when he was 17 and she was 16. They quickly had my oldest brother and three other siblings through the years and when finally at the age of 47 in 19. 1777, my mother brought me into this world.

Growing up, I always felt a little embarrassed by my parents' age as they were older than some of my buddy's grandparents, but my dad's huge personality and his love for hunting and fishing in the outdoors and his willingness to share it with anybody made me a lot of friends growing up, several of which I spend regular time with in the woods to this day. At some point in my younger years, I realized that I most likely did not have as many years as most young men would have with their fathers due to our age difference. So I spent many hours with him in the field. Much of the time was spent behind his huge pack of beagles chasing rabbits, running walkers and blue-tick hounds after deer. Most especially, we followed tree and fice and rat-terror squirrel dogs around the hardwood bottoms of the Butta Hatchie River.

We lived on 70 acres in the middle of 10,000 that we had permission to hunt on, so there was no shortage of space for my Tom Sawyer-Won-Bee lifestyle. My first memory of hunting with my dad was at age three. Now, he took me and the dogs on a short walk around the house on a squirrel hunt. We traveled no more than half a mile, and one of my short legs got tired of crawling over long, and waiting through briars. My daddy put me on his shoulders to carry me the rest of the way home.

200 yards from the house behind the old quail pen my dad built to raise birds to train his English pointers. Jack, our best tree and fice, treeed the last squirrel of the day. Dad pulled me off his shoulders and sat me on the ground in front of him, and he helped me line up a shot on the squirrel with his little brown and 22 short semi-automatic, which somehow I miraculously hit. The squirrel toppled out of that water rope for Jack to retrieve. And that day set off 23 formative years I got to spend with my dad.

We followed the hunting seasons throughout the year, starting with doves in September and ended with squirrels and rabbits in February. Deer, coon, and quail were thrown into the middle. And when hunting seasons ended, we focused on catfish and handfish in our local rivers and lakes and grew a 10-acre garden every year. I wouldn't change my youth for anything that I could imagine. But my dad had a stroke in May of 2000. He stayed in the hospital, mostly unresponsive until June

when he passed away around two months later with my mama by his side. For ten years after that, I barely hunted or fished. It just didn't seem right with it. without dad, either being there with me or having him around to tell about the experiences that I'd had. I went to college, and I got a degree in civil engineering. I started a family and settled down into a domesticated life. Finally, I felt the pull of nostalgia for the old days starting to creep in.

I had started still hunting for squirrels again, and after a few deer hunts, I knew it was time for me to get busy living. I found a great houseman with an awesome bloodline of Tree and Feiston and bought a pup in March of 2010. Perkins Delilah Jane, DJ for short. And by October of that year she had treated her first squirrel and we killed over a hundred before she turned a year old. She helped reignite the love of the outdoors for me.

And I've since spent the last 15 years getting a lot of young folks into hunting. and getting to take some awesome trips with my friends and family to as far away as Canada and Alaska. In fact, I'm planning to fly out at the end of July to Anchorage for a two-week salmon and halibut trip while living out of a tent. All because of a great dad and a 20-pound squirrel dog that got me back where I belong. And according to John Perkins, son of Mr. Ralph Perkins, that's just how that happened. And there's so many things to take away from John's story, taking advantage of the time you have with someone, and passing along the traditions that they taught you to the next generation,

and sharing the things you love with others who love it too. That's good stuff, John. Now, thank you for sending it in. Neighbor, how long has it been since you had a steaming plate of fried squirrels? Well, that's too long. Now, for you more seasoned listeners, that question may sound a little familiar. That was an old wolf-brand-chilly commercial that I altered a bit to fit my narrative of one of my favorite things to eat. And that's fried squirrels.

I never remember not eating them, but neither my mother nor my dad would have at one had they been starving slap to death. The stigma of their animal order being too much for either of them to overcome. Come, me, I have no issue with squirrels as long as they have hair on the tails and they don't get wet. Any deviation from a fuzzy tail and dries a bone, and I'm out as well. I'll eat it, but I ain't picking up a wet one before it gets skinned. Both of my parents nestled firmly in the squirrel nest of musophobia. It's reasonable to see where my aversion to rodents comes from, and I've said it a million times. I ain't scared of rats in mice.

They just creeped me out to the point of wanting to jump off a bridge to get away from them, or if it came down to it, throwing one of my kids at one to keep it from getting near me. I exaggerated that last part, maybe. Not, no, not really. But I don't like rats or mice, but squirrels ain't neither one of them. And as long as they have bushy tails and stay dry, they're good to go. Now, how did I get to eat them so much as a young and when neither parent would eat one? they fixed them for me

and they had something else just like now in my house but in reverse I fix squirrels and Alexis and Bailey they eat something else now would I like for them to eat them of course I would am I sorry it works out that all the squirrels

I fry are going to be at by me of course I ain't so why do we eat them the short answer for me is they taste good I'm very proud of my heritage and where I come from and the only thing more southern to me than a plate of fried squirrels, biscuits, and gravy is

nothing. Not one thing. If I was blindfolded and carted around in a van for three days and sat down at a table in an undisclosed location and told the guests where I was by the meal they served me, and that meal was fried squirrel, mashed taters, biscuits, and gravy, my first thought would be, after I eat this and escape this place, I'll probably be close enough to the house to walk home. But why would I want to leave? I mean, really.

The reality is I could have been anywhere in the eastern half of the United States from the Gulf Coast to Canada and over to the Atlantic Ocean. That's where the great squirrel lives. And Syrus, Carolinzes, can be found in every corner of Arkansas. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. 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 backwood. 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. People outside of the squirrel circle think about folks eating squirrels as only associated with economic hard times and the Great Depression or poverty stricken areas where people are forced to eat them because they can't afford to eat nothing else. I know this because I'm married to one of those people and by those people I mean squirrel snobs. She accused me once of growing up like the people she saw living on Little House on the Prairie.

Now, I would have preferred gunsmoker bananas The horses were faster and there was more gunplay But I took it as the compliment of which she didn't intend I eat squirrels because I like the way they taste And there ain't a lot of trees out on the prairie to shoot squirrels out of anyway I saw a headline for a lead story one morning several years ago that said Coming up hear the near-death survival story Of a lost man having to eat squirrels and berries for several days

until he was rescued. Hmm. Rescued? From what? If someone pulled me out of a place where I was eating squirrels every day, I call that kidnapping. I have no idea how old I was when I shot in my first squirrel, six or seven, I'm sure, but I remember as plain as if it happened this morning, the first squirrel I ever shot out hunting by myself.

In 1978, I was 12 years old. and in the sixth grade. Squirrel season in Arkansas now opens in May and runs to the end of February, but back then it didn't start until October. It was cool that morning, and I remember walking down an old road across the creek north of chicken houses on our farm. Brown and yellow leaves were floating down across the view in front of me, framed by hardwoods on either side of that old lane that I was slipping down.

A cool breeze brushed across my face as I carefully. picked my steps, avoiding twigs and mud holes that lay in the dim ruts that lined the way. Being as quiet as I could, watching for movement on the ground and in the trees for anything, it resembled a squirrel. Every gust of a breeze would bring water oak and pin oak leaves and acres raining down all around me. And I stopped and I made sure it was the wind knocking the acres down and not a squirrel. Then the breeze died down for a moment, and I froze, straining to hear a squirrel, shaking leaves, barking, or loudly gnawing on an acre. You'd be surprised how far you can hear that.

Then 25 yards in front of me, I saw a single acre and bounce in the middle of the right-hand rut of that old lane. That's all I needed to know. As if my life depended on it, I started slipping up that old dirt road. walking just like my brother Tim which showed me slowly stepping with the outside part of my heel first, then rolling my foot forward, keeping all the weight on the outside of my boot,

cutting my footprint by nearly two-thirds before slowly flattening out my foot, redistributing the weight and the pressure, then repeating the process with the other leg. With a little practice, you can teach yourself to do some show-nough Daniel Boone slippage. and as a youngan, I literally used to practice how to do that.

It's a technique I still used today. But the water broke from where that acorn dropped and stood in that old patch of woods for a long time. And to an 11-year-old boy, it was as big as a skyscraper, especially when that boy had never seen one. As I got closer to where the acorn hit the ground, I saw the one that I thought had fallen. It was half chewed and missing the acorn cap.

The cream-colored meat on the inside. being the object of that squirrel's attention, but with so many within easy reach of wherever he was in that tree, it might take a while before I ever saw him move. I saw a limb shake in a nearby tree and started to go in that direction, but why would I leave a squirrel to go find another one? I already found this one, slipped right up under where he was. I just needed to sit down and wait for him to show himself.

On the opposite side of that old road, where the tree was was an equally old fence. The posts were split rails, and the fence had passed being rusty many years ago. It sagged in places and was hidden in others by trees in the passage of time. The metal of the net wire was slick, dull, and dark, having more or less been blued by decades of rust. I leaned back against a fence post, a post that was at least as old as my grandfather, and as sound as the day it was split and setting the ground. That acre had hit the ground 15 feet in front of where I was now sitting.

And the angle I was looking up into that tree was steep, so I leaned back like I was on vacation with a Stevens model 9478 single barrel 20-gates laying across my lap. Hunting by myself made me feel grown, responsible, and trusted to be safe and do the right thing. I was basking in my newfound independence stared up into a big fork in that oak tree that hung out over the road when something caught my attention. Was that a squirrel? I strained to see focusing all my attention on the space where those two huge limbs separated, each going their own way in the race for sunlight.

That must be a knot right in the middle. That wasn't a squirrel. Looked like a squirrel's head, kind of, but it didn't move. It couldn't be a squirrel. I never took my eyes off that spot, imagining if it had been a squirrel, all I'd have to do is ease my shotgun up and cocked the hammer, aim, and squeeze the trigger.

Then I heard another limb shaking. I turned to see a squirrel three trees over, jump to another limb and disappear from view. I look back to the knot and the big fork above me, and it was gone. Hey, where'd that knot go? Was I looking in the wrongs, spot? No, that's the biggest fork in that tree, and it's right above where I saw that

acre fall. I look back to where I'd seen the squirrel that other tree and saw nothing. I look back toward the fork just in time to see another acre and falling on the same path as the one before, and I followed it to the ground. It had been chewed on too. I looked back up in that tree, and the knot had reappeared, except this time it was poking halfway out in the middle of that fork. Look it down at the acorn. It had just dropped. I slowly shouldered my shotgun, never taken my eyes off that squirrel. I cocked the hammer and shot. Bark flew off that fork all around where I'd seen that squirrel, only to realize he was gone.

It seemed like forever, but just a moment later, that squirrel followed suit of both acres he dropped and rolled off that limb and landed right in front of me. The only thing between him and a hot skillet was his hide and a half a mile run back to the house, and I couldn't wait to show him off. I'd had a bunch of squirrels before that one and a million squirrels since. But I've never had one that tasted as sweet as that one did. I skinned him out and mama fried him for my supper with biscuits, mashed taters, and gravy made from the renderings. And this is how she did it.

As soon as I got back to the house and got him skint, we dissolved about a tablespoon of salt and a mixing bowl of water and threw his naked carcass in there. And there he sat all day soaking in that bowl in the ice box or as you're sophisticated as referred to it, the refrigerator. I've heard folks say that soaking wild game and salt water takes the gamey taste out of it. Well, I ain't no chef, but I know what a brine is and soaking a squirrel in salt water is brine in the meat. What it does is help breaks down some of the proteins that make the meat tough to chew and soaking it overnight works best. It also cleans away any blood, which may cause what folks refer to as a gaming taste.

I don't think I've ever eaten anything that was gaming. I've never really understood that term. Things taste different. Fish is different than chicken. That's different from pork or beef. Things taste like what they taste like, but anything wild or different is labeled gaming. But whatever. Anyway, my mama took that squirrel out of that bowl.

and wrenched him off and quartered him up, and then she dried the parts off with some paper towels. She would then roll him in flour. She'd seasoned with salt and pepper, then dunk him in a bowl of buttermilk and a beaten egg. Then she'd roll and powder his fanny once again in that flyer and lay him in a cast iron skeleton that had a half-each lard waiting on him with the thermometer peeking around 325 and 350 degrees of America. Once the crust on the cooking side resembled the gold and brown. a fried chicken, she'd turn him over and do the same on the other side. As far as how long per side, I don't know, I guess about five minutes on the first side

and maybe a little less on the other. I don't know. It seems like it takes forever to get it done, especially when you like squirrel as much as I do. But internally, the temperature you're looking for is about 160 to 165 degrees. Anything over that and you risk making it tough, which is the opposite. instead of why you soaked him in the salt water to begin with. I remember seeing that plate with all four quarters laying on there with a buttered biscuit and a mashed tater's cutter with gravy mama made in the skillet with the grease and the rindrons

from where she fried that squirrel. I challenge anyone for a better tasting gravy than that made after frying a mess of squirrels. For me, it is distinct and stands above all others. Now that was my supper. That was my reward for killing my first squirrel by myself, and it was a feeling that I remember as well or better actually than anything I did yesterday. But then nothing I did yesterday even came close to killing that squirrel on my first solo hunt. I love everything about this, every bit of it.

I hope y'all would like it too. Keep sending those stories into my TCL story at the meat eater.com. Share the episodes you think other folks might enjoy that you hear on the Bear Gris channel, whether it's me, Clay, or Lake, or all three of us. Until next week, this is Brent Reeve, signing off. Y'all be careful. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts.

Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. but when I run this 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.