Bear Grease - Ep. 43: Bear Grease [Render] - Nine Miles In Reverse and Raccoon Camp

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

On the episode Clay and the guys are at raccoon hunting camp in East Arkansas with Brent Reaves. Michael Rosamond, owner of Sunspot Lights, joins the crew to discuss the last podcast “Where the Red Fern Grows” (part 1). Clay starts off by telling three stories of his early days Coonhunting including his misstep in dog his first hound partnership, the time the transmission went out and when he had to walk to his old English teachers house at one a.m. Brent also discloses his coonhound fund in elementary school - it had an odd twist. At the end of the podcast talk about the impact “Where the Red Fern Grows” by Wilson Rawls. It’s a fun Render for sure.Connect with Clay and MeatEaterClay on InstagramMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop Bear Grease Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee 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. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is a production of the Bear Grease podcast called the Bear Grease Render, where we render down, dive deeper, and look behind the scenes of the actual Bear Grease podcast. Presented by FHF Gear, American Made, Purpose Built, Hunting and Fishing Gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. Dan's instinct for where his mic should go is like really off.

That's the story of my life. Dan, every time we put on microphones, he's like, you can tell he thinks he's about to get in trouble. He kind of braces. He left the gate open. It doesn't make eye contact. He doesn't make eye contact. And then I look at him and he won't look at me. And his mic is like jammed up in his nose.

And like every time he breathes, it sounds like a rhinoceros. I'm nervous. I'm looking down. I know. A lot of times when we're sitting at the world headquarters, I hear breathing and then I'll stop and say, is that me? And I'll hear it and I look and I'm watching everybody. You're watching their nostrils.

Who is it? He's usually Dan. I look up and there and I see. I'm watching his chest go up and down. You're like, it's Dan. It ain't me. Not this time. Oh, my.

Watch of mouth breathers. Well, welcome to the bear grease render. Is that what this is? Yes. I feel like I need to explain what the bear grease render is because if somebody hears like, man, the bearerish podcast is awesome. Need to listen to it. And they come to a render, they may not know what it is. They may hear Dan breathing profusely through the microphone.

The bear grease render. Or brushing his microphone with his mustache. Yeah. Oh, gosh. The bear grease render is the secondary part of the bear grease podcast, which, Isaac, why don't you tell them what the bear grease podcast is? Uh, it's a, it's a storytelling podcast. It's a documentary, nice, man, I was going to introduce him as a guy that works on me as the assistant producer of Barryrees. The Barry Grays podcast is a documentary style podcast.

Yes. It's taking things forgotten, but relevant. Yes. Uh, anthropology, history, stories, biology, human history, human psychology. I once heard it described as, what else, Dan? I once heard it described as things that you can. get excited about. Yes.

So that's what the bear grease podcast is every other week. And then there's the render. And it's a very well-produced. And then the render is when we break down, we render down.

And render is a metaphor. Render, the word render is a metaphor for what you do to bear fat to make it into bare grease. So you render it down, you melt it down, apply heat. And so the bear-greece render is where

we talk about the previous week's podcast. Okay, with a just kind of an eclectic group of people, different people every time, usually. There's some people that are consistent. So welcome to the Bear Greece Render. And on this render, we're going to talk about the podcast that came out last week called Where the Red Fern Grows, Part One, the peculiar life of Wilson Rawls.

So we are right now near the town of Augusta, Arkansas. Is that correct? Yep. Augusta, Arkansas is in the Delta region of Arkansas. I've spent quite a bit of time in the Delta region of Arkansas this year, duck hunting, and then now we have come to what has become known as Coon and Squirrel Camp with Brent Reeves, hosted by Brent Reeves.

Good to be here. Glad you guys are here. This is actually we can thank Dan for this. You're welcome, boys. We can. Yep. Was it three or four months ago? I make it a life goal not to thank Dan for anything.

Three or four months ago, we're finishing a render at the World Head Corps And he said, man, we need to get together and go cune-hut. And that's all it took. He lit the fuse and bang, here we are. I'm like the spark that lights y'all's souls on fire. Yeah. And good, I had a good idea. So we're here for two nights.

We got here yesterday on a Friday. We cune-hunted last night. We'll talk about that. We squirrel-hunt a little bit this morning. And then we're going to cune-hunt tonight. Squirrel-hunting a little bit is foreshadowing. It was a little bit. It wasn't.

It wasn't a lot of squirrel hunting. It wasn't a lot of squirrel hunting. Hey, I want to start off before I introduce everybody. I have a story to tell you guys that is relevant to the Coon Hunting series that we're doing because Coon Hunning has been a fairly substantial sector of my outdoor life. Okay. And when I was in the ninth grade, my good friend, Nick Cunningham, his dad, came to us.

We're 14-year-old boys and said, I think you boys should get coon dogs. And I had never coon hunted before. And they took us coon hunting

with, so Nick's uncle had coon dogs or his cousin had coon dogs. We went coon hunting with his cousin. And I remember

we were hunting in National Forest and he had two blue ticks, Tresa and Trooper. And Tresa was real coon dog. And we rode hunted back in the in the long drainage of the Wachita Mountains.

Washetal Mountains run east and west, long east-west running ridges. So the roads travel either the tops of the mountains or the bottoms of the mountains along creeks. And so there's long stretches where there's just roads going by creeks. And so you road-hunted your dogs at night. Turn the dogs out in front of the truck and just drove down the roads. And your dogs just hunted like quail dogs, you know, out in front of the truck. The dogs struck. And I really don't remember the sequence of events.

but the dogs ended up on a, the coons, typically, if they're on the creeks, they go right to the top of the mountain and tree. And I remember that Teresa and Trooper treed on top of that mountain, and we walked up there. And at this point, I still didn't think much about coon hunting. You know, I was just going out in the dark with these dogs and it was cool.

But nothing was that unique about it. Man, when I saw those dogs treed and we shot that coon out, and those dogs ended up at the bottom of the mountain after the coon kind of jumped out and it was like the most exciting thing I had ever been a part of in my life and I was like

I think I'm gonna get into this and then Nick's dad came to us and said hey y'all need to have some coon dogs y'all need to get some coon dogs he went to the Arkansas Democrat Gazette and the printed version of the Gazette which all there was at that time and there was a litter of blue tick registered blue tick coon hounds for sale

about an hour away from where we lived on New Year's Eve about 1994 I think we drove in the Cunningham's like total like mom minivan kind of van hour and a half and bought a pair bought a we were going to buy one dog and when we got there the dogs were the dogs were $100 a piece and Jeff Cunningham knew that how to roll. He picked out the dog we wanted. We started to walk away. He turned around and he said,

I'll give you $50 for another dog. And the guy said, deal. And so... Who got the $50 dog and who got $100? Jeff paid $150 for a pair of dogs. I remember when we got back in the truck, Jeff said, I could tell that family needed an extra $50. They were like, and it was New Year's Eve.

He said, those kids will have a better Christmas. I'll never forget that. He actually said that. That's good stuff. Wait, doesn't New Year's come after Christmas? Does I say New Year's? Christmas Eve. Okay. I didn't want it. That changes everything. I'm sorry. Did I say New Year's Eve?

Yeah. It's okay. It's okay. It's okay. Christmas Eve. It was Christmas Eve, 1994, pretty sure. Incredible. And we get these dogs. And then here's where I'm going to speed the story up a lot. Okay. We named the dogs Macy and Maddie. My dad, Gary Newcomb, wanted me to name them after the president, during that time. We won't mention his name

after his wife and daughter, but we're not going to mention their names. And I said, Dad, that's a bad idea. So we named the dogs Macy and Maddie. They were registered blue ticks. And we raised the dogs, and they were never very good.

They just weren't. They just weren't great dogs. We didn't know what we were doing. We didn't get to hunt them very much. And I started getting Coonhound Bloodlines magazine. and I started seeing all these big awesome pictures of stud dogs in Coonhound Bloodlines magazine. I still have the picture that I ripped out of the magazine of East Tech's Blue Thunder, who was in Center, Texas, which is a six-hour drive from where I lived.

And I was a junior in high school, and I said, Dad, I need to go to Center, Texas. I'm buying a pup out of East Texas Blue Boomer. and it was a beautiful picture. Like, I ought to find it and put it on Instagram. Gary Newcomb and I, this dad was a good dad. He was like, okay, I'll drive with you down to Texas. We drive to Texas, pick up a pup. I name him Newcomb's Washington Blue Thunder.

It's a mouthful. And this caused a major breakup with me and Nick. Really? Why? We worked this out back in the day. But I didn't handle it right. Like, I owe Nick an apology, which I apologize to him, but I'll do it again publicly. I wanted to get out of our pair of dogs. I was like, these dogs aren't for me, but we were partners.

And so we got, like, mad at each other. He got, he kind of got upset with me. And I was in the wrong for even just, like, you know, bring it up. And so, or, you know, like trying to get out. Like, you just bailed on the dog. Yeah, I bailed on the dogs. You left him as basically like a single. single parent.

Are you a deadbeat dad? Exactly. And that's why I want to officially apologize to Nick. And so I remember, like, I talked it over with them. And anyway, it was kind of like a big deal. And anyway, I ended up getting this dog. And I still feel bad about that. So, sorry, Nick.

And East Texx Blue Thunder. No, no, excuse me. Newcomb, Southern Washington, tall blue thunder. Never made much of a dog, but he... What a name. He had a heck of a name. So you ditched your former spouse.

Mason Maddie. In favor of the new shiny thing, which didn't turn out to be much any. Exactly. Oh, man. Never saw that coming. Yeah. And then East Texx Blue, no, not East Texx, Thunder. He incessantly barked in a dog box.

Like, I could not get him to stop. and we didn't have electronics back then. And so anyway, we, you know, he just, pretty much if he went hunting, he was going to be barking the entire time he was in the box. I couldn't get him to stop. I mean, I tried every trick in the book. Couldn't get him to stop. And anyway, that, I said all that to say that Nick and I, when we hunted together with our dogs,

we had two kind of infamous coon hunting run-ins that we talk about to this day. The first one was we were driving his dad's old truck called The Grey Ghost, and we were hunting out in National Forest, and we were sophomores. We would have been like 16. We drove out, we got nine miles away from our camp, and the transmission went out on the truck. And there were no cell phones, no nothing, you know, just like back in the night, you didn't have cell phones, you did no communication.

You're just walking out, you know. But we found out that the truck, would drive in reverse. I'm stead serious. It would not drive forward, but it would drive in reverse. And we drove nine miles back to camp in reverse. We took turns because our neck's hurt. That's the reason you got the automatic paw or automatic turn on your neck.

Okay. I know I'm hogging the, I'm doing a monologue here, but I just couldn't help it. And so the second thing that happened was one night. After we played a basketball game, it was late at night. I mean, we got done with the basketball game like at 10 o'clock, and it was late in the winter. It was after the first year. So it was in January, February.

We jumped in Nick's dad's truck. Nick's dad's great, man. Still is. Good guy. And he had an extended cab, long bed, full-sized Chevrolet pickup. I mean, the thing was like 18 feet long. Two-wheel drive. We went out in National Forest and went on.

on a section of road that's pretty remote that goes from one community to another community, but it's basically like a one-lane road for about six or seven miles. And we're road hunting the dogs, and we decide, you know, the dogs get away from us, and we don't know where they're at, and we decide we need to turn around.

Well, we decide we can just turn around right here in the road because we couldn't find a place to turn around, and so we start doing like the 14-point, turn in the middle of this basically one lane road with an 18 foot truck and the truck just absolutely gets wedged in between the two banks of the road i mean like the bumper is up on the bank in the front and the bumper is up on the bank in the front front and back and i mean just like all of a sudden it's just like we are stuck bad and have to eat old thunder so this is we were still hunting macy and mattie at this time

This was pre-pre-fall-out. And so we're right in the dead middle of this road. So we could walk either way, but we feel like the closest way to walk is to walk to the east is what it would have been. And it's several miles to a little community, a little rural community. And we knew that one of our English teachers lived in that community. His name was Mr. McMasters.

And so we just take off walking. Was the plan to just walk through town the middle of the night calling for Mr. McMaster? It's not a town. It's like a community, meaning there's like four houses, like surrounded by National Forests. So you got a one and four shot that you get? We just knew that Mr. McMasters lived in that community. You're either going to get Mr. McMasters or you're going to get shot. Yeah.

And so we walk and I don't know how long it took us, but, you know, several miles through the dark. and we get to Mr. McMaster's house around 1 a.m. And he is, he was our ninth grade English teacher. And he was like, just like the nicest man in the world. And so, you know, we were nervous to knock on the door. And we were, you know, I remember it was like, who's going to knock? You'll be. And I'm like, you're going to knock.

He's going to kill us both. And so anyway, we go up the door and knock. And we hear rustling around. And, you know, we knock louder and we hear more. wrestling and we hear Mr. McMaster's wife say, who's there? And we go, it's Nick and Clay from school. Our truck stuck. We need some help. And she just goes, okay. And the next thing we know, Mr. McMaster's just like springs out of the door, like fully dressed. Hey, boys, what do y'all do? It's great to see you, boys. What are y'all up to? And he was, and we're like,

got our truck stuck. And he's like, oh, no problem. I got my four-wheel drive. We'll just go in there and get it out. And so Mr. McMaster drives back in there, gets us unstuck at one in the morning. And then we drive home. Get home at four in the morning. I remember that.

Anyway, that was the story. Did you find the dogs? We got the dogs. They met us on the road on the way to McMaster's house. Okay. So the dogs were with us when we went back. So we had to load the dogs up and Mr. McMaster's truck to get back.

Did he get it? Or did you have to like, You know that book, Where the Red Fern Grows? We were doing that. Oh, man. He was an English teacher. He for sure would have known about where the red friend grows. That feels like a missed opportunity.

Yeah. Can you get him on the second part? I wrote a poem about Coon Hutton when I was in a ninth grade in his class, and I still remember a phrase of it. I'll tell you later. Hey, we have two sort of guests. Today we have Michael Roseman with us. So this is part where we're going to introduce a guest.

Michael Roseman. Hello. Man, good to see you. Good to see you. Good to be here. Michael's a Coon Hunter. Michael's a friend of Brent Reeves. And so we got Daniel Rup, Josh Spillmaker.

Present. Brent Reeves. Isaac Neil. Uh-huh. We'll get back to Michael. Isaac, uh, did John O'Isa, works with me? meat eater now. Is that an appropriate way to say that? I don't know.

I don't know. Yeah. It's a true story. Yeah. Isaac is helping me a lot with Bear Greas right now. He's, uh, he is, he's, uh, come alongside and is helping with, uh, just every part of the Bear Gris podcast. So that's a big deal. I'm a chief

facilitating officer. Yep. CFO. I like it. Quite a title. Facilitating whatever. Maybe you can clean this mess up. Yeah. Yeah. So Isaac is a photographer, videographer, lives in Springfield, Missouri. An all-around good guy. So they brought in a fixer is what they did. Yeah.

They were like, Isaac, go in there. Yeah. Fix it. Fix it. Fix it. So Michael is a lifelong coon hunter. Yes. And you have a light company called Sunspot Lights.

Yes. That's how I know you. Right. Yeah. um brant tell us about sunspotlights because you're going to be better at it than me they help you see it in the dark man they really are i got here's how i got introduced to it my buddy ricks who's painfully obvious and absent from the from this but he's on his way up he's going to be here in time to help us eat fish here later on but he was wearing he was wearing one we started hunting and and you know Rex and i met he drove up in my yard, pulled up in yard one day. I was out there cleaning out my dog box. He wanted to know

what kind of dog I had. You know, people didn't live in my part of the country, either duck hunter, they either got labs or coon dogs, one of the other. And it turns out that's right after I first got whaling. And we became, he's a old coon hunter. And we became friends. And he was wearing a sunspotlight. And he said, I need to introduce you to Michael, a friend that lives up at McCray. I thought, McCray, that's just right up the road. He's like, yeah, he'd It makes these lights. We started hunting together and became friends. It's a good quality product made right here in the old USA.

Yeah. Right in the old backyard. Well, listen. I go up and watch Michael work. He does. He doesn't help, though. I sit in there and watch. My wife likes him for some reason, though.

She lets me. Suspicious. Yeah. He sits on that side of the room with her, too. She's the boss. He's been trained to manipulate people. Always sit with the boss. I'm still not entirely convinced Brent isn't undercover.

Oh, he is. A double undercover agent. I thought that's the first time there. There's so many layers. One day, he's going to flip out his badge and be like, Clay, all this time, I really wasn't your friend. No. It was after you. Undercover game warden.

And I've got you. I got a question. Would you describe it more as a light company or a hat company? Well, I can sell lights without hats. I've only seen the hats. Well, it'll come off. Can you paint a picture for people who haven't seen your lights? When you say you got a light company, could be a lamp.

Tell us about a coon light. Tell us what a coon light is. So we made the first cap light is what you guys are referring to. In 2009, I made it for another guy. It was called the smart light. Then in 2010, I started Sunspot. and it's um used to we had what you know wait a minute describe the first thing you said that the cap light so what do you mean like a soft cap so no so it's a totally totally enclosed

self-contained system with the battery and the head of the light on the helmet or a soft cat because used to when i walked to mr mcmaster's house i was carrying a four pound battery pack on my belt You had a with a wire that went up to a hat that had my light. That's how, because Coon hunters need massive superpower light. Yes, I started with a car battery and a backpack. Really? Really. You needed some serious light.

Yeah, we were serious about it. I'm talking a 12-volt truck battery and a backpack hooked to a giant sunspot, spotlight. It was called a sunspot. That's where the name of the company come from when I was a little kid. Hmm. And so, okay, so that's what you mean by the... Batteries have much improved, by the way.

Well, batteries and LED lights. Okay, so describe the modern Sunspot light, like, because a lot of people wouldn't know what a Coon light was. So it has a battery box on the back, cord attached to a head on the front. We make them with switches to control different LEDs on the head and on the battery box either way. It's like a hard, it looks like a hard plastic ball cap.

A bump cap. A bump cap. Well, there's many ways to wear. Basically, the light is designed to ride on your head. Correct. And there's multiple ways it can ride on your head. It can ride on your head and what I'd call a hard hat or a bump cap or a coal miner's hat. It looks like a coal miner's light.

My great grandpa was a lead miner and he has, we have his helmet. It looks exactly like that. Yeah. We still make them on a belt also. Oh, do. So we'll take that same battery box, put it on a longer cord. You can put it on your belt. Some guys get headaches from helmets or hats or whatever, and we'll put it on a long cord, the head, and they'll just throw it over their shoulder and use it in their hand like a flashlight.

Hey, listen to this. Okay, I think there's a big market for non-coon hunters to use the lights that we use as coon hunters. Because people that are interacting with wild places, I don't know if y'all know this, but typically it's dark about as long as it's daylight in this part of the world, especially on the solstices. and this is getting deep. But if you're hunting, you have to interact with nighttime. You shoot your white-tailed deer hunter, you're walking in the stand before daylight, you're tracking deer in the dark. If you're like me, I wear my light every single day, feeding my dogs, messing with my mules at night. I mean, really, every single day I put on my koon light and use it.

So everybody thinks they know what a good light is. That's not a koon hunter, and they don't. Yeah, I can't tell you how many times I've run over stumps in a boat going into the duck woods. Yeah. Like, I didn't see that coming. So two years ago, we started making a light for duck hunters. It's called the Ben Oak light. You wore it last night.

Mm-hmm. So that light on the headband, I didn't know if you knew that or not. I made that one also. That's awesome. So I own all of Sunspot, and I have a partner on Ben Oak. That's awesome. Yeah, so it's two brands. I want to get into specifics of it, but let me tell this.

I was at a camp. I won't name any names, Ruston Johnson, but he, Ruston Johnson. Reston was like, I love Rustin. He was like, man, I got a light that is bright. It is bright, Clay. You're not going to believe this light. This light is incredibly bright. And I was like, really?

It's pretty bright. And he was like, yeah, man, it's bright. It's bright. And I said, I bet you my truck, it's not as bright as my coon light. And he was like, yeah, whatever. And I was like, let's go outside right now. I was in the dark. And he turned on his light.

And then I turned on my sunspot light. And it was a light they had made for hog hunting or something. And it was just, it was a bright light, no doubt. But it was like night and day. And I was just like, bros, you don't know what you're talking about when you talk about lights until you talk to a coon hunt. So like I'd like to circle back on that. First experience coon hunting last night. It became immediately apparent why you need a bright light.

But can you describe that? to somebody who hasn't been. What do you mean? Why we need one? Yeah. Well, I mean, just... It's just highly specific. You get to the tree.

You're looking for a tiny object. Way up in a tree. That has... Looks like a tree branch. It's camouflaged like a tree branch. And you're just trying to catch the smallest glimpse of him or whatever, 30 or 40 feet up. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, just like you're participating in a hunting practice that takes place 100% at night. Mm-hmm. And, you know, you might have... as well, just be able to just light the world up. But what these Koon lights have, like Michael makes, is they have multiple, multiple variables. So, like, you can turn on a walking light, which is, like, in the click, a very easy click of a twist of a knob,

it goes to a walking light, which is a really wide, soft light that is made for walking out of the woods and it uses less battery. How long will your typical light run with just the walking light running. Like how long? So we give burn times and I would tell you that I would say 15 hours on the walk light, but that's how long it'll be bright. It'll start dimming after that. It'll probably burn 20 to 22 before it goes out. Okay. So 22. Think about if you left a flashlight on at your house for 22 hours. I mean, it would burn out. This light off a single charge would run 22 hours.

You could walk out of the woods if you just left it. If you left it on and went to bed and you woke up, it would still be bright. Yeah. Now, the full beam, when you turn it on to spotlight, now that, you're not using that all the time. So you don't need that full power. But what would be the burn time on like full high beam? Same thing. We advertise seven at full power.

It starts to dim after that and it'll go about 12 before it's dead. I mean, that's incredible. So I take my coon lights on backcountry hunts. like when I go way back in the mountains in Montana and I see guys carrying in little little headlamps that they can see their toes in their tent and I'm like that's the only thing you got to get out of here if we have to get out of here in the middle of the night

and they're like yeah and I'm like you're not as smart as you look and I'm like look at this and I step out of the tent and you burn a hole through the Nemo yeah I think the thing for those of us that are not adept coon hunters with that have the trained eye to find them in the in the tree the thing I like about is the model that that some of you guys had on last night has a laser pointer oh yes we started putting a laser on them a few years ago because I'm like where is it where is it where is it and they're like right here click

and yeah put a spot's a really neat feature on the light you click a single button and it puts a green laser out so you can point out stuff from a long distance you can be like he's right there so no I'm a big fan of coon lights and and really i mean for this isn't a sales pitch for sunspot i mean but it like i just love them use them all the time it's a great light and um yeah yeah and so it there there are a lot of companies to make coon lights you know oh several level i mean there's a lot of and a lot of them are good there's a lot of good companies oh there's a lot of great lights yeah there's a lot of great light well okay let's talk about our hunt last night before we go down any further we went at coon hunt last night and we're down in the delta there's a lot more raccoons down here than in the mountains i've

been telling you that oh yeah and a lot of water a lot of water yeah a lot more water to weigh then so we we cut loose the sequence of a coon hunt would be you go out typically right at dark we were out a little later last night because we didn't get here but typically right at dark and uh we we were hunting four dogs two walker dogs and two of my plots so we turned all four dogs loose at the same time in an area that we believe there be to be raccoons close by. Yeah. And that, that understanding would just come from years of hunting and it's not rocket science.

There's a lot of coons on the landscape, but coons like water, coons like hardwood timber in the winter because a lot of acorns and different things still on the ground that they're eating. And so, you know, you guys just knew, hey, this block of hardwood timber by the river, it's going to have coons. Well, we actually cut loose there last night because it had the least chance. for us drowning. Yeah.

A lot of water. And would you say the conditions were just about perfect for a hunt? That was the worst conditions. Absolutely not. Hey, if y'all hadn't been coming, we wouldn't have been kicked up in front of the fireplace at the house. Yeah, exactly. So Michael brought it up.

We did a meat eater film deal last February, like with Snow Ice Mageddon in Arkansas. And we were out there with Michael Lanier. We're on mules, squirrel hunting in the snow. going to go coon hunting that night. And I had turned to Michael, and we weren't treating any squirrels. And I said, Michael, we were kind of at a moment

when there was a decision of, like, what we were going to do, which way we were going to go. And I said, Michael, what would you do if we weren't here? If it was just you. And he said, I wouldn't be here.

And I was like, great point. Let's say you were here, and you were just by yourself. Yeah. No, so, yeah, it was a tough condition. last night ice ice on the ground you know and and it was about 25 degrees yes it was cold I think it was 27 we cut loose it was 25 before we got done and it was normally Michael will tell you normally it gets below freezing Coons down here they just don't stir much now

the thing we got going for us was this is probably peak of the rut and of the Coon rut and because of the ice on Wednesday and that being Friday they've been dined up you know not going anywhere because of how cold it is for about three days so they're going to stay in a den so long they're going to have to get out a little bit you add that into being the rut and you know we think we one of the trees we think had a you know pretty good a sow that was in season and there and that kind of was like the perfect storm and a terrible and terrible conditions, and we were able to make some trees last night. And look at some coons.

Yeah, we treated five coons last night. Saw five coons, didn't we? Yeah. Yeah. We actually saw, we made more trees and saw coons and we did den trees is what I figured we all thought we would do. Honestly, I figured we'd make dens and slicks. We'll make, we'll make den trees. I figured we'd make the slicks because of the walkers, but I feel like you need to do a whole series.

There he goes. That's a low blow. Don't start. Disambiguating the language of Coon, hunting. Yeah, talk to me. Talk to me. Dens, slicks, trees.

Claib would probably have a better handle on the slick tree. I figure he could describe them better. He's seen more of them. I don't see very many of them myself. Yeah, so a den tree is a hollow tree. Yeah. And so your dog will often tree, a den tree, and you don't see the coons. You can't kill it.

The den tree is bad. It's like, dog gone, it's got a hole in it. It means the coon's up in the hole. Now, Billy Coleman, and where the red fern grows, and because where the red fern grows is autobiographical, we can only assume Woodrow Wilson Rawls, who served three turns in prison, would have also cut down a tree.

He's hung up on that. Yep. He would have cut down a tree, but we don't do that anymore. Some people do. I have friends that will. Now, I've tried to smoke them out. Yeah, we've smoked them out.

I have a friend that carries a hatchet, and he'll cut a hole in a den tree to be able to look in it and see if he has a coon. Yeah, yeah. A den tree isn't marketable timber anyway. Right, right. I think of it more of, you know, just like good habitat, you know. Well, now they have another hole to go on it.

Yeah, no, I'm off for cutting a hole in it. I'm on private land. You just remodeled their home. Man, so den trees, I got a, yeah, I got a good dent tree story, but a slick tree. A slick tree. Well, first of all, okay, if we're talking about Coon hunters, we got to talk about how den trees are often the, the, often dogs will tree on den trees and we all know that there's probably not a coon in there

often dogs that are no good do that it's true yeah it's true so you go to a den tree and it's kind of like did your dog go backwards on this track because like a coon could come out of a tree out of a den and leave and then your dogs hit the trail wrong go to the den tree smell a bunch of coons and be like tree and yeah so it's always really nice like last night happened twice where we were able to look in a hole and see a coon and den tree, which is pretty good. So that's kind of the den tree thing. So when you,

when you're just like, oh, it's a den tree, you're kind of like, okay, how many den trees your dog tree on all the time? Yeah. Okay, slick trees. And you heard me give a sucker punch to these two guys a minute ago, and then they sucker punched me back. See, there's stuff going on that normal people don't even know what's happening.

Yeah, coon hunting, politicking. Yeah, big time. Big time. So the Coon hunting world is very opinionated on the types of dogs they like to use. Okay. And by far, the most popular breed of dog is a Walker tree dog. Walker Coon. I mean, like, Michael, would you say 80% of the Coonhound World dogs are walkers?

Close. Probably 80%. Yeah, close. And then the other like six breeds of tree dogs would be the other 20%. Now, for people that competition hunt, probably 80% of those are Walker dogs. Yeah. A big majority of the rest are not. For the guys that just simply pleasure hunt, a big majority of those are blue ticks, black and tans, that sort of thing.

Yeah. 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 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 Felps. I think you'll be glad you did. And you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers

who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. I've always kind of like that term pleasure hunting. It seems kind of like old school. Yeah. It's kind of like, just pleasure hunting. It's a good descriptor, though. I mean, like, why are you co-hunting?

I guess I can get pleasure out of it. Pleasure hunting. Just a pleasure. So walkers and Brent and Michael have walkers. Yeah, it kind of reminds me. And a fine pair of walk. Both of them are nice hounds. They're beautiful dogs.

I wouldn't say that. I didn't say that. Whoa, whoa. In Waterfowl, it's like a lab, right? Lab's the default. Yeah. And then you got other breeds. I had a chassis and whatever.

You would have an off-breed dog. Yeah. It's like me. Just a little bit different. Yeah. Yep. It's style. Yep. Yep. It is style. So a slick tree is when your dog trees, and by trees, it means he indicates that he believes a coon to be in this tree.

So that means he would go to that tree and bark. Yep. And you'd go to the tree and there's no coon in it. Like clearly, like you can see the whole tree. Yeah, there's not a hole in there. There's not a nest or anything. There's no leaves. You can see the whole tree and you're confident. Uh, there's not, either that coon's like the size of a nickel or there ain't one in there.

Yeah. There's several reasons for a sleep tree. A little lepricon coon. What are the reasons for a slick tree? Uh, one a dog just simply gives up. They've tackled a track that they can't finish. Uh, there's enough scent here that it interests them. They know that their owner wants them to tree.

So they give up in tree right here. Yeah. And they're not right. Um, other times there's been, if you've deer hunted, for the people of deer hunted, for the People of deer hunting, if you watched a coon in the daytime move around, they're up this log down, up this tree down. They leave a lot of scent all over the woods. And if the dog maybe has a little trouble trailing because of one, just ability or two sink conditions, they may wind up on a tree that doesn't have a coon in it.

Yeah. There are dogs that will grab a tree because another dog comes in and trails too close to them and out of pure competition, just grab a tree. There's several reasons to slick tree. And see, the whole idea of a dog treying, too, is it's bred into them to want to bark at the base of a tree based upon the scent of the game that they're running. Like that, a tree dog or a tree hound is a specially bred dog. Like, what's so interesting is that doesn't work out in nature. That is a human-specific thing bred into them. Yeah.

Because if a wolf trees a squirrel and stays under there for eight hours barking at that squirrel, like he's going to die. This is a human-influenced breeding of these dogs. And so the end goal, the finish for that dog is to tree. And so that's why he might tree if he gives up. He's like, okay, I've got to finish this track. Well, I'm just going to tree. or he knows that he gets praise from his owner when he trees and so he'll tree. That's probably the number one problem is people not quite understanding what they're doing when they're training a pup.

You've seen me last night petting heck when he treeed. Well, if you do that too much for a dog that doesn't completely understand what's going on, well, he thinks, well, I'm going to go out here and tree and get petted. So here I go, come pet me. Yeah, yeah. You also got variations of that. dogs are like people. They get different personalities and they accept praise and punishment different ways.

You know, Wayland is a clown. I think I could beat him with a two before. Not that I've ever laid a hand on him. But I could do that and the next minute he's like, okay, that was fun. Let's go do something else. And some dogs you can look at and get on to them verbally and they're done for the evening. Yeah. You know, they just cowered down.

So a lot of it has to do with being able to recognize the personality of a dog and how you can talk to. Yeah, I know. To look at the dog and say, that was adequate. Your dog is to get all the validation. That was adequate. You're performing to par. How long have I hunted with Wayland? Going on.

It's over two years. Yeah, a little over two years. He's the most accurate dog I've ever seen. I don't think I've ever seen. These are big words. Sorry. Coon hunters don't do this to each other. Go on, Michael.

This is a beautiful moment. He doesn't hardly make a slick tree. I mean, I can count on one hand in two years of the amount of slick trees I've seen he make. And he hardly ever trees a den tree that we can't get some kind of look in that den tree. You believe. No, I find it. Yeah, I know. It's right.

The den tree that you believe in. Stuck our phone in the bottom, took a picture, Coon's in there, that kind of thing. He's the, I've hunted for going on 35 years. He's the most accurate dog I've ever seen. How would he compare to Clay's dogs? Clay's dogs treeed one time last night and had a coon, so they're 100%. They're 100%. Yeah.

Oh, and they were there on the one that got pulled out, so they're still 100%. Yeah, 200%. That's an extra. Maybe they have been. Yeah. I have seen Wayland Slick Tree more than I have Clay's Dog. So I guess three are the most accurate dogs I've ever seen. I tip my hat to you, Clayboat.

So given the conditions last night, you were expecting a lot of dens and slick trees. Do they slick tree more on a slow night? Do they have more false flags? So they would slick tree more on a night that the sinning conditions weren't great and they were not great last night. They were terrible. Yeah. So we were expecting more of that, but we ended up having a good. I would expect that out of most dogs.

I wouldn't expect that out of the two they got hunted last night. Sure. At the same time, they still do it sometimes. And if they were going to do it last night, it would have been the night to have done it. Michael, how much, give us an overview of the, the, what a coon dog. Okay, a couple of things. The high end of what coondogs go for,

which will be exorbit and will make us all go, what? But then also bring it down to how an entry level thing, like how could somebody get into coon hunting? Give me like a span of the economics of coon hounds. Because it's kind of mind-blowing. So. And I have some parallels between them and mules.

This is all changed in the last five years. So this has changed quite. quite a bit in the last five years. Up until five years ago, a high-end competition coom dog, proven winner or someone that knows what they're doing,

have seen him and have complete confidence that he's going to win, $25,000 to $30,000. Wow. Who has that much money? Just raise your hand in this room if you do.

Way more people than you would believe. Everybody got their hands. Yeah. All eyes, all heads down. Just raise your hand. Nobody's watching. I'll see you. Daniel Rup raises his hand.

No surprise. I need it. In the last four or five years, there's been some people come into the game that, in the competition end of it, that there's been Koon Dog sold for over $100,000. Now, where are these guys making their money back? They are not. Okay, they're not. They're not making their money back.

So why would someone spend that much money on that dollars? So let me, let me, so with a lot of luck, they can make their money back. When was that hunt? The Jarvis-Umfrey's Memorial Hunt was. was three weekends ago, four weekends ago, $4,000 entry fee, $64 dogs in the hunt, and you would think, oh, man, there's no way that's going to fill up. It filled up so fast that they had a second $64, $64 dog hunt on the same night. So they hunted $128 dogs, two separate hunts, $4,000 entry fee per dog, first place paid $100,000.

Wow. And there are, there are, I love it, man. They're $6,500. Entry. Yes, several of them. They're hunting for a truck right now in Texas, tonight's the finals. There's a group of guys that have gotten together. They go all over the country and they give away trucks for first place.

Entry fee on those hunts are $1,000, I think. Can you breed a dog and get money out of it? Stud dog. Yeah, I'm thinking, like, horse racing. There's no money in stud dogs. I mean, you're not going to make a living in a stud dog. Let's put it that way. Not that you couldn't make money.

Okay. Okay, so that's the ultra high end. Ultra high end. And I think it could be compared to like race horses. Like you look at a horse, like how much a horse cost? Yeah. It's like, well, you could spend a million dollars on a horse or 10 million. But you could also go down there and probably buy a pretty good broke horse for, you know, well, pre-COVID, $1,500.

Yeah. Post-COVID out the roof. You can still buy puppies for $350 or so. You can buy a well-bred cune-hound puppy for $1,500. $350 buck Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. I gave $250 for Whalen. Yeah. Really? So this is not, they're not financial,

significant financial barriers to entry into Coon Honey. I mean, you heard Michael say what a good dog, Brent's dog has become,

and you pay $250 for that dog. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I raised Heck on his mother and his father.

Yeah. So your dog's name is heck. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I bought his I bought his sire and I bought a half-sister to him who I sold back to the owner and got his mother in on the deal. So I've always raised my own dogs.

I've hardly ever bought a puppy. Right, right. Having it until recently. You're in the competition world, though. You're doing some competition. Some, nothing like I used to. I can't with my business. So I can't go out here and it's a competition.

There's beat people and make people mad at you. Well, it gets heated every once in a while. So you're- And Michael only does the $6,500 increase. That's all. Yeah. Yeah. So you're in a sport where most of it is judged with what you hear is going on. So it's easy to have a miscommunication with someone else about what's going on or just a complete disagreement on what's happening.

So I hear what's going on and you hear what's going on. that doesn't mean that we have the same opinion of what's going on. Yeah. So you're basically doing the same thing at a competition hunt. And I can't go out there and sell all these guys' coon hunting lights and stick up for my dog in a competition hunt and make people mad at the same time. I hear you. So.

Yeah. I don't want to get into the details of competition hunting. We may do that later at some point. But basically on a competition at coon hunt, that could get some people might hear that and be like, wait a minute, we can't, you know, that might go against like North American Mall of Wildlife Conservation in some way. Like, but a competition coon hunt, no no raccoons die. You're not even allowed a firearm on the ground. So this is not about, so in the movie, in the book, where the red fern grows, and this is probably the way competition coon hunt started is it literally was who can bring back the most dead raccoons.

Meat hunts. And that hasn't taken place in a long time. These competition hunts, raccoons don't die. It's really an artifact of the meat hunts because you're just seeing which dog can tree the most coons, the fastest in the most kind of clinical textbook way for a coon dog to operate, essentially. Like you want a dog that, I mean, it seems simple. Like if you go coon hunting with really good dogs like Heck and Wayland last night, you're like, what's the big deal?

Sure. I mean, for real, we literally turn the dogs loose in the dark, and in 10 minutes we're looking at the coon, and we're looking at, you know, heck, tree and a coon. Well, what you don't know is that these are really good dogs. So the other option is you go out in the 25-degree weather with ice and all this. You turn loose your dog, and he bumbles around for 40 minutes and go over there and runs a deer and makes a big loop

and trees for 10 minutes. You start walking towards him, and he leaves the tree and chases an armadilla. You fill in the story of what goes wrong on a coon hunt, and you hunt for five hours and don't see a coon. Last night, we hunted for two hours, two and a half, three hours, and bad conditions, saw five coons, you know, saw some pretty good dog work.

So that was like very good. Is it safe to assume at a competition they don't do it the honor system. Man, you don't want me to talk about competition coon hunting, so I'm not. We're not going to get into the honor system. They're called the honor rules. They're called honor rules. Are you serious?

Yeah. You just go out and you're like, yep. Well, listen, okay. I'll talk about it. Do they have a judge follow around? See, you're doing what I told you. We couldn't do. Okay.

We're not going to talk about this, Isaac. We're not going to talk about it. Listen, this out works. I got something else we can talk about. No, no, it's a good. I can just open it up just a little bit, but really I don't want to get into the rules of it. Sure.

Basically, they're very prescribed rules. There is a judge and competition coon hunting by my assessment, and I think everybody in here would agree that would know is as much about the handler as it is the dog. More so. I mean, like, I could have the best dog in the world and know very little about the rules and not be very good and go out and get beat by an average dog with a really good handler. So it's a game.

Does each handler have a judge? You're still asking questions. You waited into this. I'm just trying to get out. No, one judge. One judge who is hunting most of the time. Yeah. That's the tough part.

So you have... Remember how you kidding? One said that coon hunters aren't vaccinated against lion? Yeah. They're not. All right. So what you mentioned about the dog bumbling around and leaving trees and chasing armadillos, there are guys that have an absolute ball out there doing that.

Yeah. And that's fine. Yeah. it's just not my thing. Yeah. But there are a big majority of people that just love to be out there at night with a dog. It doesn't really matter what the dog's doing. It was awesome.

It is a social sport. That's right. So, you know, last night we didn't, I heard this mentioned on the render about the duck hunting, that it's a social thing. Yeah. That you don't have to be quiet. You don't, you don't coon hunting either. I mean, these guys never shut up last night.

That's a dang true. I told him. At one point I said, now, y'all got to understand. We're trying to hear these dogs park a little bit. Oh, somebody said last night, this just seems too easy. Dan and Joshua trout fishing the whole night time we were out there. Coon hunt. I'm like, give it up, boys.

Let's listen to this dog. So, yeah, that's a great place to, like, swing the conversation back to why I have always loved coon hunt. And I've done, you know, I've been in probably less than 10 competition coon hunts and enjoyed them in their own right for different reasons. was never very successful at it and couldn't expect to be with only doing it that amount of time. But the pleasure hunt, a coon dog,

goes right back to what you see in the book where the red fern grows. And it is, there is, there is a magical connection between a person and a hound that is undescribable. It's in our DNA. It literally, I mean, you go back to our original conversations in the Bear Grays podcast about, dog domestication.

I mean, like, there is deep science, deep human psychology and science about our connection with dogs that's just bizarre. Like, you just kind of wake up as a human one day, born, and you just love dogs. And you're like, well, why don't I love chipmunks? Why don't I love ostriches? Why don't I have a rhinoceros in my house? And you're like, don't ever question why you have this incredible connection to this dog. Again, Joe, good thing about rhinoceros.

I'm not crying. I was talking to the fast. You have this incredible connection to a dog, and it's like, it's like very deep, very real, very biological, very, all this stuff. And so to be able to hunt with a dog is just fun. I mean, it's just, it just doesn't even make, it doesn't even make sense. And I guess I'm feeling, I just thought, I guess now it makes sense. Y'all were there. Y'all are amazing coon hunters.

We had amazing dogs. I thought I was just an amazing. coon hunter. I was like, I'm just really good. You thought, because you were there. I mean,

dang. This is easy. You see the way I pointed my sunlight? Yeah. I just that coon before Josh Spillmaker.

That's what I said. I beat Josh. You mentioned, you mentioned the connection with that dog. Um, so competition coon hunting is about pride

and recognition and me wanting you to recognize how good my dog is. that's what it's when it comes down to everything it's not the money it is for some people but normally it's not about the money it's about recognition so i wouldn't carry anything about competition coon hunting and say winning the world championship if no one knew about it so it's about getting my dog on the front of the magazine getting on the website that's when it boils down to it it's about recognition for your coon dog and you know and i don't want to throw

Competition, cream hunters under the bus too much. Because I think there's a, there's a possibility for a pure motivation inside of any kind of competition. Sure. You know, I mean, and there's some guys that are probably doing it for, you know, some guys would say it's for the dog, you know. It's recognition that, you know, this dog is a top-notch dog and for him to be recognized. But I get it. I see exactly what you're saying. Well, and the problem with competition hunting is the same reason that they go.

It's about pride. So if I have this much pride in this dog and you say, oh, your dog left that tree, no, he didn't. You know, so Rex been asleep on the couch over there. I met Rex almost 30 years ago, competition coon hunt. That's how I met Rex. Rex introduced me to Wayland over there. And, I mean, that's how it goes. That's how we build relationships is through people that we know.

And I would have never known Rex without competition coon hunt. Yep. Yep. It's definitely a passionate group of people that love it. Yeah, and that's, so people, it's always interesting interacting with people kind of on a broader level about coon hunting. People are surprised to hear that people even coon hunt anymore. Like in Arkansas and in different places, maybe it's a little bit more known that people coon hunt, but you get into more urban areas and sometimes people are like, people still coon hunt?

And that's why this book, where the red fern grows and the movie and this whole idea for this podcast is so interesting to me that, and I said it in the introduction to this podcast, was that This was the one time that this super niche thing did a 360 slam dunk on pop culture and made them love it. And the reason I got interested in this is I had a friend of mine that moved to Arkansas from Los Angeles, California, pretty much. and he told me that he read where the red fern grows at his high school or maybe his grade school in California and I was like, what? I thought this book was a regional phenomenon.

I thought it was just like a small thing. I said, you read that in your school in Los Angeles? He was like, yeah. And he was fascinated, and he had all these questions and he wanted to go cunutting with me. And so I took him. First month he lived in Arkansas. And I mean, this guy had never interacted with hunting in any way.

And he had all kind of questions about the book. He was like, do raccoons really like shiny things? There's a part in the book where Billy catches a coon by putting a shiny object in a hole in a log. And then the coon puts his hand in there and he's got little traps that keep the coon for pulling his hand out. and, you know, we talked about that and we, well, and then it happened again with another guy from California. Well, he was on the podcast, Andreas Atay from Meat Eater. He told me, he just said, man, I love that book so much. And that's what made me do a little more research and then realized kind of what a big deal the movie was in 1974.

Yeah. I mean, that was like a major, that would essentially be like, I mean, I don't know, what's a famous movie today? I don't even know. Where the Red Fern grows? Iron man. Iron man. Where the Red Fern grows was basically the Iron Man of 1974. This was produced by Walt Disney.

This was a major motion picture. This was like a big deal. Went across the country. Movie theaters all across the country. And I think, honestly, I think there's a pattern inside of it. And I alluded to it and said it in the podcast. But we are very interested as hunters, and I am as a hunter, in preservation of a lifestyle that is, you know, we believe is beneficial to wild places, wildlife, and people in families and economy. Like there's like, you'd have a hard time, like, given too much of a painting, hunting really in a negative picture.

And when you look at this broad scale thing, but we know that the culture in general in this country is, is leaning towards movement away from some of these things. And so what Wilson Rawls did was he encased a lifestyle that involved hunting into a very human story that was relatable to people. And people all over the country related to Billy Coleman on a human level. And they were like, they empathized with him. and inside of that empathy for another human, they accepted his lifestyle.

Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah, well, he took a subject that just happened to be wanting some dogs and applied the lesson of working, wanting something so bad that was pure and working hard for two years, I think, in the book to save up enough money to be able to get something and succeed at a dream. and you could apply that to anything. Yeah.

Learning to ride a bicycle, Daniel, there's still hope for that. But anything like that. Use that handlebar mustache. Stabilization. You know, it could be whether it's in, you know, studying in school or learning to play the guitar or draw or whatever. Yeah. He set himself a goal.

He worked beyond measure to succeed. and the hardships that he faced along the way. And there's so many, the story, and we're going to get into it more on the second podcast with Sean Tutan, the professor at the University of Arkansas. The narrative of that movie is really quite complex. It moves in and out of conflict and resolution, conflict and resolution from when the Pritchard boy dies,

when he falls on his axe. He what? Oh, man. in 1974. Yeah, if you hadn't seen this movie, you better watch it. Yeah, the Pritchard boy dies. They go to the Coon Hunt,

and Grandpa breaks his ankle, and then he, you know, ends up winning the hunt. And then the hunt, the money from the hunt, is actually what funds his family to leave the country and go to the city,

which is the most heartbreaking part of the whole thing for me. For real. It's like, doggone it. I thought his criminal record was I heard your heartbreak when you found out about that. Tell you what do you mean? When you found out that Wilson Rawls had a criminal record. Yeah, did anybody else?

I mean, nobody knew that. Yeah, it blew my mind. So what was the time frame? Well, it was when he was young, man. He first went to prison in Oklahoma when he was 20 years old. 1933 is when he went to 19, yeah, 1933 is when he served time in Oklahoma. Great Depression. Yeah.

Great Depression. Larsonate of domestic foul. He was stealing a chicken to eat. He stole a chicken to eat. And you don't know the second reason could have easily just been a parole violation. The third reason was breaking and entering, man, that could have been he got in an old building to go to sleep. I mean, you don't know what was. Right, we don't know the story.

So he, in the speech that you put on there, he said his mother said he was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, I would imagine that all three of those times, he was probably in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yeah. Could it just have easily been anybody. Yeah. You know, that was so interesting to me. And I found it out, like, while I was interviewing Sean Tutan. I mean, that was the first.

I expected him to say, man, Wilson Rawls was born in Oklahoma and was just upstanding man. Yeah, Sunday school teacher. And he's buried over by Talakawa. And he's like, well, he served three prison terms. And then when I went to research it, it was very difficult to find. to find that information, like to actually get like hard information,

which made me, and I communicated with Professor Tutant, and I was like, do you know, is, I mean, I see this, but like,

do you have more information? And he was like, not really. And that's when I was like, okay, we got to confirm this before. And what you wouldn't know from the podcast,

and this is why the Bergerich render is the, this is we're rendering it down. I called the Oklahoma Department of Corrections. They never called, me back. So it was a little bit of a dramatic setup. You got the answering machine, but they never called back.

They still haven't called me back. But I was able to, I mean, 100%, I believe 100% confirmed through records that we were able to find online. I actually joined Ancestry.com and looked up his records. And there is a picture of Wilson Rawls, 20 years old, on a, with a handwritten prison, like, card. And that's where it told all the stuff. You know, like, 5'10 and a quarter, 148 pounds,

smoker, vaccination scar on his left arm. It just, like, told it all. And, I mean, it was, like, legit. Like, that was really his record. And, and again, not that that mattered. It's just interesting that he wrote this book that was so deep in character. And that an autobiographical book, you kind of get to go back in and write the things that, you know, you just rewrite your story kind of the way maybe you thought it should have been or wanted it to be.

Or you had liked it had been. Yeah. It was just so interesting. I think the professor that you interviewed said, he was probably trying to teach young boys basically how to not be him at what he was and do the things that he did to get him in prison, you know, whatever it was. and it kind of made me think because I remember very clearly reading that book in school and then of course I remember seeing the movie

and when the preacher boy dies you know that's such a that really it's like wait a I thought I was watching a Disney movie here you know and all of a sudden it was like wait I thought we were hunting coons and somebody's dead this is crazy and I guess I thought my goodness

like what if and there's no way to know but you know I feel like each one of us looks back on our past and there's these things that we wish we could undo or take away, but parts of ourselves that we wish would just die. You know, and I wonder if as he was writing that story, he was kind of coming to grips with a part of who he was that it seems like died and came to an end because eventually he was married, he had a family, he did all this talking to all these kids and overcame as kind of being ashamed of being a writer and wrote these books.

Yeah. 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 bed. 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 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th.

Follow now on Apple, I Heart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, I wonder if on that line, the Pritchard's dying, like they were, man,

he did such a great job of making you hate the Pritchard. From the very good... I mean, I'm glad my last name's not Pritchard. I knew those kids. What's that? Yeah, I knew several of those kids.

Growing up. Yeah. But you know, that, book, I don't know. So it didn't influence everyone like it influenced me. I wouldn't be sitting right here right now without that book. So we, well, the movie. I seen the movie as a kid before I read the book. Me and my friend sitting, we would spend the summers when we got out of school, the day we got out of school, we went to his grandmother's house. And we lived in a tent on the

pond of the bank or the bank of the pond for the entire summer. And we hunted and we fished. And that's all we did all summer long. We would go to her house once a week, whether we needed a bath or not, and take a bath. Well, we watched the movie at her house, and we decided we wanted to be Coon Hunters. That's what had zero idea of how to do it. Looked in the paper, tried to find puppies for sale, didn't have a ride to go get anything. Went to work at the sawmill that was down the road and saved up our money to get dogs for both of us. before we did that, we're sitting out on the front porch,

and there is a blue-tick cune hound walked across the front yard in front of us. No collar on, no nothing. Was Walt Disney there filming this? I don't know, but... They were like, release the blue tick. Here's a little hillbilly. So we gathered this thing up,

and we hunted him for a year and never seen a coon, but we hunted almost every night. Somebody's listening to this right now going, and I was in McRae. in 1978, and I lost my blue tick. So we hauled this thing around on a rope. We had no idea what we were doing. We were afraid to cut him loose.

We were afraid we'd lose him. So we had him on a 10- Go back home. Yeah, afraid he didn't go home. We had him on a 10-foot horse rope, and that thing run more armadillo and deer. We were scratched from one end to the other. And I told my friend, he's my best friend growing up,

still my best friend. I told him, I said, we have to turn this thing loose. I am beat up. I'm scratched on my face on my arms. We have to turn him loose. And we turned him loose and never seen him again. Okay. Now they were like, there was like a three-month period when old boy was gone.

When he came back, he had a rope wearing on his neck. But in that time is when we were carrying, we were a lot tougher. Carried the car battery on our back with the spotlight and had a little two-cell Reovac flashlights that we walked with and shine the trees with that spotlight. He made two trees. He treated a house cat, and he treated a tree that after watching the movie, we thought, you know, Coons just look. It's easy. Put the light up there.

They don't look. We looked at that tree for probably two minutes. He might have been up there. He might have been there and not. He was like lion dog and the way we went, you know. That's a good point, man. When we look at a tree, I mean, sometimes you'll look at a tree for a long time. Circle it, circle it, circle it, circle it, circle it, circle.

And then you're like, there it is. Yeah, right out in the wide open. But that led into a life of Coon Hunting that led into a life where I build hunting lights. And that's what I do for a living now. And meeting Rex and meeting Brent and sitting here with you guys. Would have never happened without that book. Yeah. And there's no telling what I'd be doing.

I'd probably be a millionaire right now. Pretty amazing. Actually, we talked about this a couple of months. ago and I had I don't know how I made it through school without ever reading this book and so I I was doing so I was building the deck and so I got the audio book and listened to it and uh it was great yeah I'm a good girl man and I loved it I was disappointed in Disney and the movie it would have been so easy to have set a tree in a field with a hollow uh fence fence post instead of whatever that was they had to ghost cooney and that that ruined the movie for me after I read

So there was, I may get into it more on the, on the next podcast as I interviewed Stuart Peterson, who was the childhood actor, who was Billy Coleman. It's real hard for me not to want to tell you all about him. But that's what the next podcast is going to be out, super interesting guy. And super interesting kind of sub-story. But, yeah, so in the book, the ghost coon climbs up a tree and then drops into a hollow fence post. And so the dog's tree on the tree. and then the guys get there and they go

it's slick, you know, it's a slick tree. Again, the ghost coon. Well, in the movie, they tree by an old building. And I mean, and when I saw it, even as a kid, I was like, come on, Pritchard boys, the old ghost coons in that building. I mean, I, you know.

Yeah, it was obvious. Yeah. And so he was going from the tree into this old building. And then Billy's like, do you notice that in the movie? I mean, you know, like Hollywood's got speed stuff up. You can't do stuff in real time.

They get to the tree. they shine their light. He ain't there. The ghost coons out there. Give me your $2, Billy. And Billy's like, oh, well, shucks. You earned it. Here's your $2.

And I'm like, shine that tree. Yeah, we got eight minutes, palp. I'm saying everybody. Where's the Sunspite light? Boys surround this thing. We're going to send up the bat signal. How many people got into gambling from this book? You bet that kid on the podcast, $52.

He did that to me. No, you. Now, he may only be six years old, but I hope. hold that him responsible. You bet you're trucked some guy. I'm worried about you. There's a hotline for people like you. Problem gambling.

Oh, man. Yeah, so the book has a couple of different places where the story's different. I'll tell you where I got hung up on the movie and the book. And this is pretty serious. In the movie, no, excuse me, in the book, the big Pritchard boy sees all. old Dan and old blue fighting. And, and Pritchard goes, I'm going to kill that red bone. And he grabs Billy's axe and takes off running to go kill Billy's dog.

And he falls on the axe. He trips him. Which is, nope. He reached out and grabbed his leg. I watched the movie. You fell right into my track. Exactly. In the book, he didn't do that.

No, he didn't. No. That's what I'm saying. That's my point. Yeah. So in the book, he runs and he trips and falls on the axe, which I always thought it was an unlikely accident. I mean, probably set up by like a Southern mother influence. Southern mothers are always very fearful.

You're going to trip. Highly unlikely things. Hail yourself on that axe. You know, mom, this axe, you couldn't hardly cut a piece of wood with this. What are the odds that it's sticking straight up when I fall down? Yeah, it's a hundred percent. So in the book, Billy has nothing. nothing to do with the death. In the movie, Billy Coleman reaches out and trips him and he falls on the axe.

Billy Coleman, he goes to prison. Involuntary manslaughter, boys. I'm not a lawyer. But when I saw that, I was like, ooh, dang. I haven't seen the movie. Well, and then, okay, and then they go to the, oh, that's, the movie really is well done for 1974, for sure. It was.

But they go, they go to the, I mean, the next scene coming out of the woods after the pitcher boy dies and you know he's dead. And in the movie, Billy tripped the boy and he falls on the axe. The next scene, the whole Coleman family is by a grave side in the rain, just pouring rain. I mean, like, you just feel sorry for him. They're just standing there in a pouring rain. And you see the Pritchard family, who they were set up as this kind of like bad family. And Tutan, Professor Tutan did a good job.

He said, what's cool about literary mechanisms is you don't, really know what's happening inside of you until someone tells you and you're like exactly but you feel terrible for the Pritchards these like bad people you know quote bad people that had these little boys that you just hated but then when they died and you saw his mother and his father and they're standing there in the rain by this graveside you just have empathy for them and then the Coleman family is set back from the grave like they're not right up they're not like crowd and the family, but they came to pay their respects. And when they're walking back to the wagon and the pouring rain,

Grandpa says to Billy, Billy, this wasn't your fault. This was just an accident. And I was like, Billy, it actually was your fault. That's where, that's where, Philly, you'd be in church. I mean, if I've been walking back with my son, I'd be like, son, prison's going to be tough for you. I'll love you while you're there. I'll make you a cake with a file. I'll come visit the entire block.

So the biggest disappointment for me from the book to the movie was the cutting down of that tree for the first coon. Yeah. So the movie, it was, he spent one night there cutting that tree down. And the book he spent, it was days. It was a year. It felt like a year. Multiple days. That was his promise to those dogs to get that coon.

That was the whole thing of the book. Yeah. was his promise to those dogs. And he spent all that time cutting that tree down in the, you know, they have to make it happen. So they spent one night in the movie. Yeah. Well, and that's part of it that I never understood with Wilson Rawls is it seemed like a poor family like that would have had a gun, number one. And number two, you cut down a tree with a coon in it.

Is that coon not going to hit the ground and run up another tree? Clay, could you just not ruin everything? Well, this is the thing, though. I'm asking my coon hunters here. They were poor, and bullets cost money. It didn't cost nothing for that boy to swing that axe. That's right. Right.

But, I mean, do you think people really did that? Yeah. Oh, yeah. But, I mean, is the coon not just going to run up another tree? No, not if you have a good kill dog. To catch him on the ground. They catch him on the ground. Yeah.

Because the dog not run a coon. Oh, yeah, easy. So my uncles, grandmother, uncle's side, they grew up as sharecroppers here in East Arkansas. And, you know, their dad would give them three or four shells to go squirrel hunting, and they better come back with three or four squirrels. Right. You know, they didn't waste shells.

They didn't, you know, if you could get him out, jump him out. People used to climb trees all the time. That was the thing to do was to climb the tree and kick the coon out. They just didn't hardly carry a gun. Yeah. Okay. So the preservation of ammunition or not having a gun, pretty realistic. I mean, I knew it could happen, but I was just like, man, it seems like even a poor family would have a gun.

And now a sycamore tree, the size of the one they was chopping on. Yeah, I got a gun. We're just going to call it good and go find another. But he made a promise. That was the point of the book. The deal was the promise that he made to the dogs. And you saying that, Michael helps me make more sense of why at the end when the dogs die. Spoiler.

He's done. Have you not read this book? watching this movie? He's just an idiot. Or even listen to the podcast? Wait a minute. You listened to the podcast, didn't you? Feeling lightheaded.

Some fixer. I mean, that helps me make sense of why at the end, when the dogs pass away, he's done. Like, it was more than, he was more than I love coon hunting. He loved those dogs. He loved those dogs. Yeah. Well, and so people, that is a, you know, people, why do you want to hunt? Coons. I don't want to hunt Coons. Coons is what my dogs hunt. I love my dogs. That's what it's about.

Coons has just happened to be the game. If it was squirrels or possums or whatever, it's about dog work. You know, what I think is interesting too, and I tried to say this in the podcast, and you'll hear it more through this, but we live in such a modern time with all the technology that absolutely surrounds us and dominates our lives. lives. And I like cultural artifacts. So a cultural artifact would be like why that a

competition, why we like to tree a coon. It's kind of unusual. It's like, why? Well, and you go back and there was a time when that coon hide was extremely valuable, monetary value. Also, sustenance value

for different families, just eating Coons back in the day. Yep. And that built such a strong thing inside of rural culture in the south and mid-south, different, you know, wherever they coon hunted, that a coon dog was highly valued. It was highly valued. And so today, you go might ask some kid over here that is connected to rural culture. He'd be like, is a coon dog good or bad?

Like, you know, and they'd be like, good, very good. Why? I don't know. It's a coon dog. That's good. I mean, I'm breaking it down to the simplest terms. That is a cultural artifact of a time when a coon dog could literally change your life. And then it's also interesting to see the modern version of that. And like when I look at my life and survey my life in all the incredible times that I've had, hunting raccoons with hounds, the people that I've met, the things that I've met,

the things that I've done that has made me go. When I see a coon dog, I'm like, that has value. Because what else are you going to do on a Friday night? I mean, really, for the last seven years, and I was out of Coon hunting for a good part of my adult life. So just in the last like seven, eight years, I got back into coon hunting. And literally, I'm like, calculating of the hundreds of times

that I've taken my kids and other people coon hunting, what would we have been doing? I mean, like, what would you have been doing on a cold, icy Friday night in February? And, I mean, the truth is, probably a family would have been sitting around watching the television. Yeah. Or, and it's like, no, we were out engaging in an adventure, engaging in, you know, riding in trucks, doing stuff, working together. Like, man, I love yelling at kids to go get dogs. If there's a kid around me and I've got dogs, I'm like, get that dog and put him in the box.

And then go get those dog calls. I mean, I don't even know. I don't even care who the kid is. He may be the neighbor. He may not even be going with us. And I just have this instinct to be like, get that kid's hands on that dog's collar. At what age did you read the book? Were you in elementary school?

No, I can't. I don't think I, I'm not even sure I read the book when I was a kid. I think we started off watching the movie. That's what we did. We read it. And I remember we, I have very few memories of school, but I do remember. reading it in school and then watching the movie in class okay yeah i think it was the sixth grade when i read it i think most elementary schools do it like the fifth grade i think it was

the sixth grade but i remember how it affected me at the time it was it was culturally significant to me because of koon hunting being big where i grew up you know and i knew people that had kundo up and me wanting one so bad i could identify with billy in there i think you and i talked about it the other day yeah tell me that well it was um i identified so much with it because i turned 11 when we were when i read the story i thought you skipped 11 no it was one of my favorite year i turned 11 read the books all the movie i think it came out on tv about that time and then I had to have a coon dog. I talked to my dad.

He said, well, you got to earn it. So it's like I told you, I didn't go through the Depression. We weren't having to hunt to feed our families. We hunted because we enjoyed it. We eat a lot of the game that we hunted. But I identified so much with it that he said, you earn the dog, you earn the money, you can buy the dog. So I worked there.

We worked a lot. I grew up on a farm. So I'm making a wage there for different. task I would do and he provided the majority of the money but I can remember going to school right after we finished that book and I put a jar on my desk and I wrote on a piece of Walt Disney here for this no but I watch this I put a note in there that said contribute to the Brent wants a koon dog fund no way well I got one donation well girl my class and her name was amy she dropped a quarter in there and I told her I said Amy when I grew up and get married and I have a daughter

I'm going to name her Amy. My daughter is named Amy. It's 31 years old. No way. Yes, sir. And it was from that. Are you at all in touch with Amy, the original Amy? Five or six years ago.

Wow. Does she think it's really creepy? You named your daughter after her? I told her I actually introduced her. I said, this is, Amy was with me. I thought you're going to say, Amy. You introduced your daughter to her and said, this is your namesake. I said, this is a girl.

Right on her. Right. dropped out of a tree on Amy's head. Do you remember the sixth grade and I told that I was going to name my daughter? Because you gave me a quarter and she looked at me and smiled and said I absolutely do not. She couldn't recall it. I said, well, it's going to kill the rest of the story, but this is Amy right here. Oh, my gosh.

I thought you were going to say, I thought you were going to be like, Amy, because you've donated to my fund, the first raccoon hide that I get, I'm going to donate it to you. I mean, I thought it was going to be something like that. I thought you were going to say five years ago, I bumped into her, and she said, my name's Mamie. I didn't go to school with you. Hey, here's, okay, here's the biggest question. I mean, did you get a dog? I did.

I did. $75. We bought it from a man who ran a feed store there in Warren, where I grew up, and we hunted him, started training him. Was he a good dog? I think he had, he had potential to be something, but he wound up. up getting stolen. But the biggest adventure I had with him was, no, it was a walker. A couple of kids with a team. There was a walker. I know a guy who ended up with a dog for a couple months. My dad says, we're going to take him over, we'll take him over to a spot. I know he's got

a big persimitory. And we took it over his on a farm, a friend of ours, and we drive up. We drive up, we're pulling up, and the headlights are shot on that per symmetry. And man, it looks, I mean, it's like Christmas light. There's coons all in. It's five or six coons in there. Coon eyes glow. Oh, man. Oh, yeah. So we get out, we get the pup out, we turn him loose, and he's just bumping around.

He don't know what he's doing. He's running around the tree and around us and back and forth. And I told my dad, I said, I'm going to climb up and shake some of the coons out. Shake a coon out. Well, I climbed up in the tree. I got to grab the limb up the tree out go, and I started shaking them out. Man, it is raining coons. For like three minutes, just bam, bam, bam, bam.

And as soon as they hit the ground, he's barking and right back up the tree they come. They're crawling all over me. That's a good training opportunity. Oh, God, I thought that big old sound. I thought I'm dead. You know, I hear my dad say, just hang on, son. Just hang on. But that was the most adventure we had with him.

But he hunted good, but he got out there and somebody picked him up, and I never saw him yet. So I've had several dogs through the years, blue tick included. and but by far this one that I have now has been the best. I bought my first one for $75. I'm working at that sawmill. Seems like the going price for Coon Dog. 75 bucks.

What's what we got ours for after Jeff Cunningham negotiated? That's actually probably pretty accurate because I got my dogs in 94. Y'all probably got your dogs in the 70s, early 80s. Yeah, a little bit older. It would have been 1970s. So, like, like not good Coondog puppies had gone up. by about 25%

Yeah. Because that man wanted $100 for a pup. We negotiated for $2 for $150. I feel like they've been depreciating. Talk to me. What do you mean? Well, Billy Coleman paid $50 for two hounds, you know.

$25 a piece in 1930. It'd be $1,500 today. That's also fixed. Well, you know, you can buy puppies for $1,500. Yeah, you can do this. I'm just saying, I feel like they're going downhill. Well, there's, there, it's, It's just the tragedy of the commons.

Coond dogs have not stayed up with inflation. No. I wish cune, I wish mules and coon dogs. And coon lights. Coon lights would like go, like, pace with, like, carrots, per se. Hmm. Or like a bag of, yeah, milk.

Yeah. Yeah. But it does. They don't. That's because you put a gallon of milk in front of me, especially if it's chocolate milk. If you could have a slick train walker or a gallon of chocolate milk, or a gallon of chocolate milk all day.

Yep. All day for a slick tree milk. I did offer, I don't know if they heard it. I said it really loud a couple of times. I offered Michael $500 for his dog last night. Yeah. He didn't take it. And then I offered Brent $500 for his dog and they didn't take it.

I mean, I don't know. That's a lot of money where I came from. I believe Brent's response was for what part of my dog. Yeah. By partnership. Just the... Are you interested in selling a partnership in your dog? Yes.

You can have the part that eats. Let's do this. Remember Clay's last partnership with dogs. Oh, yeah. He will leave you. I'm sorry, man. Wow. Wow.

I need to call him. This is like, it's like figuring out you serve three prison terms. Yeah, exactly. Maybe one day you will. Wow. And they'll be like, can you leave? You never talked about it. He just kind of...

On your Wikipedia page. Well, and they... But then, but what I said was maybe he did talk about it and we just didn't know it. I mean, I don't claim to be a Wilson-Raw's, you know, like, expert. So maybe he did. He just didn't in those channels. I gave him that out. That's not something you jump up and tell everybody every conversation you have.

In an elementary school. It's also the kind of thing that if you are a public figure that everybody loves and you wrote this great story that's really compelling that people don't want to dwell on, they want to kind of forget. Well, and it probably just wasn't relevant. you don't think so with him being with all those kids? I'm just saying it happened so... Yeah, what if he came into those elementary...

I get what you mean. It's so long ago. That's what I mean. What if he came into the elementary schools and stole those kids' chickens? Well, think about it. If he went to prison for stealing a chicken... If he went to prison for stealing a chicken, he wasn't the only one. It might have been something that was fairly common.

You know, my grandpa spent a little time in prison for stealing a chicken. I just have a feeling that if you serve three prison terms for that kind of stuff, there's some shady stuff going on in other places. Well, but it happened. You remember him talking about even in the clips that I used, which I used like four minutes of an hour long speech? It would have been like his polished version of his life. And he said,

In all those years, I spent rambling around from city to city. And I was like, yeah, you're stealing stuff. Oh, my. Old chicken thief, Wilson, Raw. I mean, I'm not making it up. I mean, I'm not the messenger. It's your fault, Billy Coleman. But I hope it came through, and I believe it did.

I mean, I respect him because of the path that he eventually led his life to. So, I mean, to me, it's like a thing to be celebrated. Sure. And I think probably during that time, it wasn't. I think today, because of the nature of technology and the communication, you couldn't hide something like that. He came to the chicken and rode and he stole it, and then he made the right there. Well, and the point being about like this type day and age is you could. and hide something like that.

So you'd have to confront it. And you'd say, man, I used to live a rough life. And then, but I don't anymore. Well, that's celebrated today. So it's celebrated today that you overcame that. Back then, people didn't want to know about it. That's right. Yeah, let's not talk about you being a thief.

That's right. We just won't bring that up. Well, that's why we like Brent and Dan because of their sorted past. Bump, bum, bum. You know. Dan and Brent have a sorted path? Oh, we can't talk about that. That's another.

I thought this was a safe place, I'm triggered. Do we just going to gloss over the part where he mentions that he was working for the nuclear commission? Yeah. The atomic energy agency. He was a construction worker for the nuclear commission. Yeah.

Talk to me. I'm just assuming that there'd be a background check on a project like that. I doubt it back then. Really? No. No. Nuclear. I feel like they were doing some background check and as soon as they started messing with

nuclear stuff. For a guy out there. We're not even sure. or something? No. They don't or we wouldn't be here. Obviously. Well, okay.

Man. Woodrow Wilson, wasn't he have the coolest voice in the world, though? Yeah, he did. I recognized it off of the movie. Like, they didn't, I think in the credits of the movie, it says that he narrated it.

Yeah, I didn't know that. I didn't realize that. I didn't know that. Well, you listen to it, and you'll immediately pick up, like, that's Wilson Rawls. Yeah. And, yeah.

But, I mean, he lived through a difficult. time that we didn't live we'd have a absolutely live through and you will not die of hunger when there are chickens running around that you could take guarantee you. Certainly. So I was surprised I would like a little more rick a sea detail on that like how do you go to prison for stealing chickens?

Someone had connections. He stole a chicken from someone that knew someone. Probably. Yeah. Well, I mean it's chickens plural. It could have been 2000. We don't know. Like today to go to prison for stealing chickens, like in a one-time incident, you'd have to, like, steal, like, a chicken truck.

Yeah. And, like... They happen to have chickens in it. You think it was a sting operation? They had an animatronic chicken. I've seen what those game wardens do with deer. Yeah, I have, like, a chicken out in the yard, bouncing up and down. Yeah.

I got you, sucker. And then you pull in, grab it. And then the sirens come on. Yep. Yeah. In 1930. Man, I hate to bring this out. This is a big segue.

We had a massive chicken crisis at our house this week at Newcomb Farm. Oh, really? Oh, it was major. It involved my dogs. Oh. We had this big snow and ice and, you know, really extreme temperatures. And we have, Misty has chickens. She loves her chickens, like, way more than a human should love a chicken.

And it's hard for us because of how much she loves those chickens. And because they die. If you had a romantic setting on your sunspot headlamp. I would shine it. away from the chicken. Do you not put it on those chickens? She did not like the captain, though. Well, yeah, no, she didn't.

Yeah. She was afraid of him. But, no, so we had real extreme temperatures. And usually we end up shutting the coop a little bit after dark because if you shut it, you can't shut it too early because the chickens don't go in there. So you got to shut it, like, right at dark or like maybe right before you go to bed, you're like, hey, go out there and shut the chicken coop. And so, like at 10 o'clock at night, she was like, hey, do you mind shutting the chicken

coop and i was like okay and so i walk out there and we i think we had like 15 chickens and there were like five in there and they were like feathers just a trail of feathers and i just go dog got got it i walk back in and i go hey something something got your chickens and she just was like oh no and so i take tim over there tim the squirrel dog and he is so tuned in to you know what i want from him. I don't know what it is. I think maybe it's a coon or a fox. That's what I think it is.

And I get over there and I see him put his nose on the ground and start smelling, and I start sicken him on it, you know. It's like, get him, get him, get him, getting him excited. And sure enough, he takes off trailing and goes out kind of by our garden around. And he gets on a track and is barking on the track. And I think, dad gum, he's going to trail whatever that is up. So I go get Fern, which is my plot hound, which is supposedly a dog that won't run off game, which is not true. And I take Fern over there, and I turn her out right at that chicken coop.

And she doesn't strike, she doesn't bark. And I pretty much know it's not a coon at this point. Because if it's a coon, she would have just struck out of there. And she just kind of ambles around, but I sick her on it. Like I'm like, come on, Farn, get it, get it, get it, get it. And she hears Tim, and sure enough, she starts trailing, barking. And off they go. And I had my phone with me, and I text everybody.

And I, you know, I kind of just wanted to Misty to feel good. And so I'm like, we're on the track, baby. You know, I'm like, we're after them. Tim and Farn. We'll find those 12 chickens. And they run across the road and up on a ridge and make a loop and circle back around. and come over right by my neighbor's house and I text my neighbor

I have good neighbors text my neighbor and I say hey I just turn loose my dogs on something that killed our chickens and they're over by your house he takes me back and he says I'll get my AR 15 out I'll be on the porch

I love the guy literally he said that and so the dogs run past his house and they're trailing and finally the track just kind of peters out and they're going to a place I can't get to and they're by road and so I call them back.

Well, the next night my neighbor also has some trail cameras set up that send pictures to his phone. It was a Black Panther. It was a Black Panther. Good one. That was a good one.

That's why you're here, my son. That was a good one. And he had a picture of a coyote. Yeah. I'm pretty sure it was a coyote. So all the chickens are dead. With 10 of them. A coyote with 10 chickens in its mouth.

Yeah, a Coon or a fox wouldn't have killed 10 chickens. They would have come back 10 nights and killed one a night. Yeah, yeah. Or a mink would get in there and kill them all and leave them laying. And so the moral of the story is your dog's trashy. Yes, absolutely. I'm going to say 100%. And that's why Dan died.

That's why old Dan died. He was trashy. Right back into where the red friend grows, a real coon dog wouldn't have struck a mountain line. He died because he was trashy. I'm all about having a multi-purpose dog at different times. I would love it if my dog, and they have got after Bobcats a couple of times that I've known about, which is legal to run in our state. I'd love it if they had a multi-purpose.

What does he run? Whatever he wants. I mean, it's obvious. Whatever's there. He swaps on the very first Coon tracks he crosses, but he will run something off. Do you mark that down? Do you realize this is being recorded, Michael? Oh, I freely admitted.

He's admitted before. The first time he said it, I was like, I'm like, I didn't hear that. Next time, I'm going to be ready for it and record it. But it's, it's suspect. He said it. Oh, man. So chickens, Wilson Rawls, Coondogs, crashy coondogs, we've really covered it here. This has been really insightful.

Speaking of Black Panthers, Meat Eat Eater now, we have our believer, Black Panther hat. Yeah, I'm going to get one. I like that. Hey, man, I'm not trying to hype the market, but I'll just tell you if you're going to get one, you better get one. Because they already sold out of Beargree's hats. Really? Already? Yeah.

Yeah. So we ordered a big number of them the first time, and we sold out in like a week. And they were like, okay, well, let's order twice as many. They ordered twice as many of that number. Like, we were really, we're not doing this on purpose. Like I'm, I'm like, how many do you think your mom, Judy? I don't even have one. Jiu Jiu Jiu's bought all of them.

I saw Jujis the other day and she was wearing one frontwards and back in the same time. So she's, she's bought a lot of them, but it's not support. She's scalping them. Yeah, she's putting them up on eBay. $35 on eBay. She's no dummy. Just look up, yeah. Yeah, and so anyway, they sold out of the double amount.

You know, a couple weeks ago when I started posting about those hats. In like two weeks. So does meat eater have someone that projects sales? Well, it was just a gamble. We didn't know how much they were going to sell. But this time, they're reordered, and they won't be back in for, like, another, I think, like two months. Wow. And they bought somebody this time that, I mean.

They'll have to give them away later. They're going to flood the market. Price is going to drop. Nope. They're going to sell out in two days. You better buy them quick. Clay's embarrassed to admit it, but the first time they ordered 10. This time they ordered 20.

Hey, you'd be surprised at the text messages I get. I got a message from a guy the other day that is a friend of mine, and he held up his phone on an airplane and took a picture, and there was a guy like a couple seats up wearing a bearerese hat backwards. And I said, did you talk to the guy? And he was like, no, I couldn't. You know, by the time he got out, it was kind of over. And I'm trying to think of a...

People all the time are sending me pictures of a bearerese... people, you know. No, so, no, it's great. I really appreciate everybody buying the hats and wearing them and supporting what we're doing. But you better get those believer hats quick. That's all I got to say. Can anybody else hear Rick snoring but me? So we have a Coon Hunter over here that are asleep on the couch.

I mean, dead asleep. Oh, man. Hey, this has been fantastic. Thanks, guys. Closing thoughts, Dan. Anybody, Michael, Josh? Looking forward to tonight. Yes.

We're going to Koon Run tonight. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're going if it's raining or not. I don't want to hear it. I mean, I'm such a good Coon runner. We're going to see so many Coons. Yeah, we set you up for real disappointment last night. We've got to deliver tonight.

Deliver the mail. All right, guys. Next time. See you later. 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.

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