00:00:05
Speaker 1: To the deer hunter.
00:00:06
Speaker 2: The ebbs and flows of nature’s calendar become built into our lives. We’ve become fixated on small temperature changes, length of day, the changing visuals as summer shadows shift to the long shadows of autumn leaf color. The date is November the fifth, which is undoubtedly one of the top ten days from encountering a big buck on his feet in the daytime on a calendar with three hundred and fifty five other options. One of the first big bucks I killed with my bow was on November the fifth, and the date will never leave me. We’re about to listen to five storytellers, and three are thematic in that it’s a buddy telling us story about his other buddies mishaps, which is one of my favorite genres. The other two are just top shelf deer stories with monster bucks hitting the dirt. I really doubt that you’re gonna want to miss this one. And don’t forget to check out season thirteen of Stephen Ronella’s show Meat Eater on the Meat Eater YouTube channel. And don’t forget to get your live tour tickets in the cities that aren’t sold out. It’s gonna be a great show.
00:01:23
Speaker 3: I was just fixing to touch the trigger on release, and they busted loose. And when they broke loose, the loser come running straight at me, and he run right past me, and he run four steps of me. Well, when I turned back around, the one hundred and sixty one inch dear will stand in four steps from me. And I was afraid when I turned to arrow loose that my arrow wasn’t going to clear the bow.
00:01:55
Speaker 2: My name is Clay Nukem, and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we’ll explode things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we’ll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American made, purpose built hunting and fishing gear that’s designed to be as rugged as the place as we explore. Our first story is from my friend Matt Taylor. He grew up on a chicken farm, has a master’s degree in business. He’s an outstanding father, and he’s in his late forties and can probably run a forty yard dash in under five seconds. But most importantly, Matt is a lifelong deer hunter, and he’s gonna tell us the highlight stories of their public land camp that he’s been a part of for over thirty years.
00:02:59
Speaker 1: Yeah. So my name is Matt Taylor, and I’ve been hunting down on the Washtall Mountain of Arkansas for really all my life. But some of the stories I’m going to tell are related to a camp that I’ve been a part of for Right at thirty years, I joined this camp. I was working for a guy and his nephew went to work for us. His name’s Russell, and he went to work for us, and Russell’s about my age, and we got to be good friends and started going dere hunting with him and join his camp. At that time, it was one camper which was his dad, Ernie. Ernie had an old camper and it was just a family camp and there would be I don’t know seven eight of us sleeping in that old camper and we’d wake up in the morning camper full of smoke from Ernie cigarettes, and I mean full of smoke, chain smoking while he’s cooking his breakfast. But it was just that kind of camp. Eventually I got my own camper and the camp got a little bigger and I had kids, Russell had kids. We raised our kids going together kind of every fall, going to deer camp together, and it’s a big part of our lives. But Ernie’s now in his late seventies and Ernie always had a pack of hounds. We dog hunt during the rifle season. And Ernie and his one of Russell’s boys, Levi, were hunting together and they had a good dog race going. Russell was out there with them. They got on a good deer. Ernie cut off the race, him and Levi and he he said, bucks kind of stepped out and it was mostly hid behind a tree. His head was sticking out and I think he was going to try the next shoot or something. He raised up and fired, and he said that deer went to jumping and hopping and flipping and bouncing off the ground like you’ve never seen a deer act like that before. And he’s kind of panicking, you know. Jack another shelling and on thirty thirty and fired again, and when he did, the deer hit the ground and Ernie he always cut their throat. He’s kind of an old school You got to bleed him out, you know. When he kills a deer, he sliced their throat, bleed him out.
00:05:07
Speaker 4: Will him leave.
00:05:08
Speaker 1: I get up there, and the deer’s laying there still kind of kicking around a little bit, and Ernie gets up there. He gets his pocket knife out and slices his deer throat and that’s the end of that. Well, Russell comes down there. They’re all happy about it. One of the deer’s antlers broke off. Ernie said, yeah, I want to hit the ground. I guess it broke one of its antlers off. So, uh, they loaded up, take it down back to camp, hang it up. They start skinning it, and Russell’s helping him skin it, and they’re looking for the bullet wound. And there’s there’s no bullet in this deer in its body anywhere. And they skin it and and they’re looking it over close, I mean, not nowhere, not in the neck, not in the head, nowhere, and uh, they get to looking and there’s a there’s a kind of an indenttion in the base of the antlers. And Russell starts kind of putting two and two together here and he finds an indention, kind of a broken spot in the very base of the antler. He’s like, you hit that deer right there, And then he takes the broken off part of the antler and kind of reconnects it and there’s another hole there. His first shot hit the base of that deer’s antler and kind of knocked it crazy, and it’s flipping and jumping around. He fires another shot, hits it in the antlers again and shot its antler off, and that’s when it stunned it enough to lay down two shots to the antler. Never touched a hair on this deer. The only reason the deer’s dead because he slices his throat like that deer. If he had no it would have eventually got up and run off and been five. So he killed a deer without ever hitting it in the body. You know, Ernie’s funny. He probably doesn’t even still have the antlers. Antlers never meant nothing to him, never had a deer mount hanging in his in his house. Hunt is all his life, you know, just a mountain man, deer killer. But he loved to high hunt things like that. But it wasn’t that big a deal to him. He didn’t like keep the antlers to show him off and tell the story. It’s just another deer. Let’s see another story. Russell’s nephew Cody has been hunting with us since he was a baby. I remember Cody being like three four years old hanging around the deer camp and the biggest buck I ever killed. I’ve got a picture of Cody holding that deer when he was maybe six or eight. Well, he’s a grown man now. I guess this was probably five six years ago. I think Cody was roughly twenty five years old the time. He’s camping with us, and uh, we’re having a good camp, killed some deer and it’s the end of the end of the week and it’s time to break camp. Well, I had this year of tanner ride powder. I had bought some from my son and his buddy that went up with us. They’re young teenagers, maybe twelve thirteen years old, and in the middle of the day, we’d go hunt in the morning and they’d target shoot with like twenty twos and stuff in the middle of the day, killing time before we’d go hunting in the evening and just kind of honing their skills to give them something to do. Well, I’d bought this tanner ride I’d heard of it. People shoot it, it goes boom, and thought that’d be fun for them. We’ll do some of that. So I mixed it up. I guess it’s if I remember, it’s two powders. You mix it up and then you put it out there, and if you shoot it, it explodes. The more you put out, the bigger the explosion. Pretty big explosion. Yeah, I mean it’s scary you but uh, we mix some little bags of it and we’d like hanging on a tree or something. They’d target shoot and see if could shoot it and make it go boom. Well they did that several times at the end of the camp, and quite a bit of it left, and I’d already mixed it together. So it’s like caring around a stick of dynamite. And I didn’t I didn’t want it. I’m I’m gonna pour it out or something. I didn’t know what to do with it. I asked Cody, I said, you want this. He said, no, I don’t want it. I said, well, throw it away. I guess he took it. We’d had a fire that morning. It was cold and a pretty good fire and uh, still a good bed of coals in the fire pit. Well, Cody kind of walks around on the edge of the camp where we’re all packing up and he barely got Well, let me back up. Cody was sporting a brand new hunting vest, and I’m real proud of this thing. Like he’d spent some money and got him a real nice on fist, had extra pockets on the front. What not. Carrous powders were moslea or hunting. He’s wearing that thing and we’re done hunting, He’s still wearing. He’s real proud of it. Well, Cody takes that powder, that tanner Ride powder and walks around the edge of the camper and I don’t know where he’s going. I think, I think he’s gonna dump it out. He literally stands over that fire pit and just drops it in, thinking I don’t know that it’s gonna burn like paper. It was the biggest explosion I’ve ever heard in my life. Shook the camper, shook the earth under my feet like I thought. I thought somebody dropped a bomb on us, and it scared everybody in camp. And I look up and Cody comes around the edge of the camper. You know that movie Home Alone where Marv gets shocked and he’s like smoking and trembling walking around.
00:10:36
Speaker 4: That was Cody.
00:10:37
Speaker 1: He comes shaking walking around, feeling for where he’s going. He can’t see. There’s not a hair on his face. It’s all burnt off. That new vest he was sporting completely melted. All all the muster pirate ex powders went off in his vest. He scorts, and he’s smoking, I mean smoke coming off of him. I desperately wanted to reach for my phone and start videoing, but I was afraid.
00:11:05
Speaker 4: He was really hurt. I couldn’t do it.
00:11:08
Speaker 1: I wish now I had a golly. I’ve never seen anything like it. I don’t know how he didn’t die from this explosion. Like I’m assuming it knocked him down. He’s not real sure. It was so commatic at the time, Like I said, he couldn’t see, his eyes were all messed up. We had to give him sunglasses. His eyes were burning, and we flushed him out as best we could, and he couldn’t drive, He couldn’t do anything. We had to take him off down the mountain. His sister’s nurse and we took him home and she looked him over, and I think he ended up going to the er and getting some treatment and being okay. But he had to regrow the hair on his face and everything else. It was quite the move to drop a bomb in a fire. So the worst part is that wasn’t the end of the self destructed for Cody. The very next year, then we’re having a good camp and Russell kills a deer and uh, well, Cody in the off season had purchased a brand new side beside. He’s real proud of that, kind of like the best of the year before the Oh this nice side beside. So Russell shoots this deer and comes back to camp and he’s like, hey, Cody, let’s take your side beside down and get this deer. It’s a little office rough road. We can get that side beside in there and get it. And so they load up and they go down and get this deer and they get down there and the deer is still kicking, and Cody’s like, you sure this thing’s dead, and Russell said, oh, it’s fine, just grab it. It’ll be dead by the time we get it loaded up. Well, Cody reaches around to get the back legs and rustle the front of the deer. They drag it over and start to load it, and this deer just kicks with all its force, all its might kicks Cody right in the eye with this sharp part of its hood.
00:13:00
Speaker 4: Knocks him plump down.
00:13:02
Speaker 1: And he gets up whining, and Russell’s like, come on, let’s load this deer. And he’s like, he’s again feeling around. He can’t see. There’s blood coming out of his eye. I mean, it got him good. And Russell looked up to think, oh, he really is. So they somehow get this deer loaded up. Of course, Cody can’t see again, so Russell hasts to drive and they getting aside beside and they head back up the mountain the camp and they pulling the camp there and they go download the deer and the deer’s not there.
00:13:36
Speaker 4: What happened here?
00:13:37
Speaker 1: So they Cody doesn’t go back. Russell goes back. The deer’s laying in the middle of the road. It flopped out somehow and finally.
00:13:44
Speaker 4: Is really dead.
00:13:45
Speaker 1: Well, he got it back loaded up, brought the camp well. Cody man, he’s suffering his eyes swollen, bloody, scraped up and he’s left handed and it’s left his left eye. We got a lot of hunting to dude left, and he’s just all upset, you know. They can’t see, he can’t hunt so we do around there. We don’t have a first aid kit, but somebody had a roll of electric tape and we taped up some paper towel or something fashion him up an eyepatch so we could at least cover that IXU. It was hurting as a bad and he starts practicing shooting right handed up the next day. And I don’t know if he ever did or not, I don’t remember, but man, he had some tough times for a company years their camp. Yes, we’ve had some wild times that camp, but man, we’ve had some really great times in the past couple of years in particular for me have been exceptional because my two daughters who are now seven and eleven, June and Kate, they’ve been hunting with me. I started them out at four years old. They go hunting with me and they just love it. They love deer camp and they love going out in the woods. And June’s actually shooting a now. She actually killed two deer last year and we were hunting and just had a special time in the woods. I bought our tripod because she can’t really hold the muzzloader up by herself. She’s pretty small, and man, she killed one dough and the next day we had a big buck come in on us, and Kate spotted it first, and we’re all excited, but it came where the gun wasn’t pointed and there was no way where three of us sitting on the ground and we’re like twenty yards from this buck and he works as great. He’s rubbing a little tree there and I can’t believe it and see this, and I can’t figure out a way to get June to shoot this deer and point at it, and it’s just getting closer, and I finally had to scoop up the muzzloader and shoot it myself. But it was I look over and June’s got tears in her eyes with excitement, like no part of her was disappointed. She’s just incredibly excited. Both girls wearing it special. And then this year, very similar thing. We’re hunting on the opposite side of the mountain, but the same general area, and we hiked down about a half mile in before dark, hunting a good old logging road with some scrapes in it, and we get out there and we shoot a kyout first thing. I can’t pass a cout. I just shoot them when I se him, and we kill that thing. And then twenty minutes later here comes a big buck. And the problem is it was supposed to be June shooting again, but she forgot her tripod in the camper this time. So I’m the shooter and this big buck comes by and these we shot it and got it, and it was just incredibly special. And this time it’s funny. This time it was Kate that had tears in her eyes with just pure excitement and joy. But the two of the big my top five bucks I’ve ever killed, back to back years with those girls with me, it was pretty special. And just you know, we built so many memories with the kids in the woods, you know, whether it’s my kids or Russell’s kids, and now Russell’s kids having kids, and it’s just something we’re going to continue and have a family camp and something I wouldn’t trade for anything.
00:17:19
Speaker 2: Those are some good stories, Matt, and I find it interesting that of all the years and all the good deer that you guys have killed, that these are the iconic stories of your camp. Continuing on with this theme and my favorite genre of stories, our next story is from Gary Farmer, who lives deep in the Central Ozarks. He’s a farrier, a horseshoer, a professional auctioneer. He’s a lifelong squirrel dog trainer that has probably killed as many gray squirrels over a tree dog as any living human. But he’s also a veteran deer hunter that has killed stacks of public land white tails. But when I came to his house one cold evening in late October and asked for his favorite deer story, he told me this one about a beloved member of their camp named Teddy. These guys have all hunted together for decades, for like their whole lives, really, and they used mules, and this story involves one of Teddy’s good ones, a good mule, that is.
00:18:30
Speaker 5: Last year, was all af there deer hunting, and someone want to make a drive, and we don’t hardly do that Anyhow, two three lined up on the shridge, kind of scattered out and going to make a drive. So I got the worst far the deal, well maybe not the worst part. Teddy ended up getting horse park, but he wrote his mule around a bench, and I went down farther down, and I’d never been through there, and I’ve been back in that country on and off all my life.
00:19:03
Speaker 4: And it was straight up.
00:19:05
Speaker 5: And you’d go a little ways and it’s leveled, and then it dropped straight back then and just deep holler. Anyway, we go to the shridge making this drive, and I pop out on this ridge. You know how it is sometimes in deer season early some days it’s fairly warm.
00:19:22
Speaker 1: I had too many clothes on.
00:19:23
Speaker 5: It’s warm, and I just laid back there, had my cap off, and it’s hot. I was laying back there a minute before I walked out of there, and I saw Orange coming with Teddy on his mule, and he rode down there, and I laid there and talked to a minute, and I got up and I said, well, bring it out here, and he moved his foot out of the stirrup and he said, get on. Let’s see if she’ll ride double. And I said, now I just walked and all come on, and I said no, really, I just seemed to walk.
00:19:57
Speaker 4: He said, are you scared? And when he said that, I just stuck my foot.
00:20:02
Speaker 5: Stirrup, reached stove and grabbed back of the saddle and I said, Teddy, this ain’t going to work. I said, I can tell by her eye, and he said get on. I wrote her a million mile and when I crawled on her, she went to hogging, went to bucket.
00:20:19
Speaker 4: She was trying to buck.
00:20:20
Speaker 5: She couldn’t really buck hard with both of us on there, but she was trying. I said, turn her uphill, was turned downhill and anyway, he turned her uphill, and I had nothing to hold on to but him, and I honestly thought if I just if I was off, she quit. I didn’t even try to stay on, just a couple of licks, and she kind of throwed me, and I kind of I didn’t even really try anyway, But oh my gosh, she went to buck. And then now I’m talking, she was raring. I thought she’s gonna flip over backwards on him.
00:20:58
Speaker 4: What I thought?
00:21:00
Speaker 5: She was just raring straight up. And then this I called a bull lunch, just like that this he wrote her, I don’t know, four or five or five or six licks, and she threw it and you could see two hundred yards down this point, and she left out and she bucks the entire way. Them saddle bag those saddle bags were slapping one another, and he had a had like a forty four magnum stuck in the scalber and about a little over halfway down that point, you couldn’t hardly pull this gun out of that scalbel. When he would get down hunting and.
00:21:39
Speaker 4: Try to take it out.
00:21:41
Speaker 5: This gun come out of this scalber, and I’ll guarantee you it went eight foot there, and it was just doing like this. They turned to Somersault and I kept my eye on that, and I asked him, I said you okay, and oh, I said.
00:21:56
Speaker 4: I said, I’m gonna get your gun.
00:21:58
Speaker 5: So I headed down there and I picked his gun up, and I said, we’ll never see that mule again.
00:22:07
Speaker 4: Anyhow. And a little bit.
00:22:09
Speaker 5: Something caught my tension. And she was above me, coming back around the hill, and he was hobbling up through their toward her. But after I thought about it, she was going back the way he’d rode her an inch from camp around.
00:22:23
Speaker 4: That’s why he had came.
00:22:25
Speaker 5: That’s why she was made that circle and was going back. Well, he got her caught and he got back down there, and I said, are you okay?
00:22:34
Speaker 4: And he said, I’ve.
00:22:35
Speaker 5: Messed my shoulder up, I’ve runned my shoulder and I’ve broke my ankle. I said, you got a broke ankle. He said yeah, And I said, my goodness, you want me to try to get a side beside or four or down here and get you.
00:22:53
Speaker 4: And he said, I’ll be all right.
00:22:56
Speaker 5: But anyway ended up he didn’t have a broke ankle, but he had to have surgery on his shoulder.
00:23:02
Speaker 4: Well, and he’ll have trouble with it. It’ll never be right.
00:23:06
Speaker 5: All from Ascimated ride double And I could tell when I went to get on that mule hit the just the look could give Melvis eye.
00:23:14
Speaker 4: I knew, I knew that.
00:23:21
Speaker 2: That was a good story Gary. And as a follow up, that just happened last year. And Teddy is in his mid sixties and he did hurt his shoulder, but not enough to keep him from going to the log woods every day. Old Teddy is tough and if he had his turn, he could probably tell a few good stories on Gary too. But we’re gonna jump off the theme of ratting out hunting buddies and just hear a straight up good deer hunting story from a man that’s well known in many bow hunting circles. His name is Richard Fought. He’s an accomplished public land bow hunter and this one is about some fighting bucks.
00:24:01
Speaker 3: Yeah, I’m Richard Fault from down here in Lone Oak, Arkansas. Man, I’ll tell you about this this buck I killed off the ground. Remember my nephew, Nathan was he was twelve or thirteen years old, and we was headed into a place on one of the WMA’s and we hunt here on the river.
00:24:18
Speaker 4: And it was mid November.
00:24:21
Speaker 3: It was actually the youth hunt was going on in Arkansas on some of the WMA’s and that’s the reason we was in this particular one. We were bow hunting in there. There was not a youth hunt on it. He wanted to bow hunt instead of gun hunt, so that’s what we were doing. He was a full moon night, so we were gonna hunt midday. I wanted to be in stand midday. So we get to the place we’re gonna walk in at and I actually had left. I had been in her scout a couple of days earlier and had left a climbing stand he had under a log back there, so I didn’t have told it in if I wanted to hunt there. We was gonna walk mile mile on a quarter or something like that. In well, we get about three tenths of the mile from the truck. Now, Nate, you got a picture Nate. Nate is Nate at this time. It’s four foot tall and he’s sixty pounds, and he’s got a climbing stand on his back and it’s hitting his heels about every time he stops.
00:25:04
Speaker 4: I think there was an old man stand, that’s what it was.
00:25:08
Speaker 3: And I mean, he’s a little bitty fellow and he’s walking behind me and he’s clicking, he clacking, and well, the wind’s blowing real hard. So as we’re walking in, we get about three tenths of a mile from the truck and I look up and I see one hundred and fifty inch dear. He’s twenty two twenty three inches wide. I actually killed, had had already killed one hundred and sixty three inch buck in there just across the road from there. That was twenty three inches wide. So I mean he was in that caliber of buck, not quite as good, but really good buck. And he was he was he was coming straight at us, and he was about thirty yards off to our left, and he hadn’t seen us. And I just eased Nate down on the ground. I kneel down on my knee and I pop mcquiver. For whatever reason, I used to pop my quiver off every time I got ready to shoot or was shooting. So I pop mcquiver off and I knocked an arrow. Well, the buck got up sixty or seventy yards of us, and he kind of ered awful. I had seen some big scrapes out there, and I went to put my quiver back on, and I thought, man, I said, let me, I said, I told Nay, I said, you just stay right here. I said, I’m gonna slide right out there and see if maybe I can can see that buck. Maybe he went to work scrape when was boring real hard, when was in my favor, I thought this is gonna work. You know, it could work out if he’s out there. So I start sneaking out there and I get thirty five forty yards from Nate, and I see this buck or a buck, and he’s on his knees and I’m like, why is he He’s on his front knees and I’m like, what’s he doing?
00:26:32
Speaker 4: Well about that time, he.
00:26:33
Speaker 3: Just gets shoved backwards and it’s two bucks fighting. It’s that buck that I had seen, and what turned out to be one hundred and sixty one.
00:26:42
Speaker 4: In is buck. These two bucks are fighting, So I just clo.
00:26:46
Speaker 3: They’re forty yards forty five, so I just start I draw and start walking towards them. I don’t know how big the buck is that he’s fighting. I just know that he’s winning the fight. So at this point, whichever one of these two bucks gives me the shot, I’m gonna take.
00:27:01
Speaker 4: Man.
00:27:01
Speaker 3: I’ll walk twenty yards of these deer, and I mean they’re after they’re shoving back and forth, back and forth, and I’m at full draw, and the one hundred and sixty one inch dear is shoving the big eight point that I had seen or nine point whatever it was. He was an eight or nine he undred fifty inch year And when they when he when he gets him stopped, when that, when that smaller buck gets him stopped, I was fixing the turned arrow loose on the smaller buck. I didn’t have a shot at the buck ended up killing. But when he I was just fixing to touch the trigger on release, and they busted loose. And when they broke loose, the the loser come running.
00:27:40
Speaker 4: Straight at me.
00:27:41
Speaker 3: And he run right past me, and he he run four steps of me, and for whatever reason, he caught my attention, and I turned my head with him. Well, when I turned back around, the one hundred and sixty one inch deer was standing four steps from me. He had he would chase him, he’d, you know, was I guess running him off? But he was standing four steps of me. And I was afraid when I turned the arrow loose that my arrow wasn’t going to clear the bow. So I think, I want to say, maybe I leaned back when I went to shoot. I shot the deer right in the chest and the arrow went in about fletching deep, and he just he just stiffened up, and he made a big grunt.
00:28:20
Speaker 4: Well, blood started pumping out the end of my knock.
00:28:22
Speaker 3: It’s shooting out the I had a light up knock at the time they had first come out, and it was shooting naft the hole in that knock. And he turned to run out there about ten yards and fell over. Well, I look up and that other buck that had run off is standing twenty two or twenty three yards from me, trying to catch his breath.
00:28:39
Speaker 4: And I don’t have an arrow.
00:28:40
Speaker 3: And it was one of those situations where I could have killed two deer one fifty plus that day, had I would not have left my quiver laying on the ground back there with Nathan, and Nathan got to watch the whole thing from being hunkered down behind me back there.
00:28:58
Speaker 2: That was a unique expert car. It’s Richard one that most of us will never see. And it’s incredible that you had your nephew with you. And I’m sure that this put you in the legendary uncle column for life. Great story. Our next story is from my friend Wailing Blinds from the Ozarks. He’s a gunsmith, a mule and horse trainer, and a turkey farmer, but also a lifelong deer hunter. This is the story of an encounter with a true mountain monster while he was holding a brand new gun.
00:29:31
Speaker 5: It was two thousand and two. Most of our hunting we’d done off the back of mule. We grew up running dog running Beagle’s dad was always a dog man, and when we shut that down, Dad couldn’t sit, so me and him we’d just ride and hunt off for mules.
00:29:49
Speaker 4: That summer I had bought.
00:29:51
Speaker 5: It was a Rempedon seventy six hundred and thirty six with a scope point first scope gun i’d ever had. I’ve always hunted with a windchest leve rection thirty thirty. Every deer I’ve ever killed has been with that gun. Well, I’d bought this all six and me and Dad started to leave the house that morning and I come backing that gun out and he said, son, he said, you don’t need that with us riding. I said, no, We’ll see an old dough so I can at least get to kill me a dough.
00:30:22
Speaker 4: He said, all right.
00:30:23
Speaker 5: Well, we’d been riding public ground is on up in the morning. We’d been riding for a while and hadn’t seen anything, and we was riding along and we heard something coming and there was a door come off the hill, I mean, just like a streak. We knew buck was after, so I just jumped off my mule, didn’t tie him up, just dropped the reins and I run back. We’d just passed was riding an old logging road and we’d just passed a fork and I run back down there to the fort and kind of cut over the hill. And when I stopped, I heard a deer coming and looked and it was a big forking horn. I let him go by me. I kind of run on over the hill to get where I could see the next bank blow me and the only thing I figured is this deer heard me and thought I was the little buck chasing the door still, because he come up the bank right before I got to where I cold see over the break. He stopped behind the city tree and I had one hole I could see through, and I just seen it was the biggest buck I’ve ever seen. I throwed up, put the crosshairs right on his shoulder, pulled the trigger and he took off. Well that always taught me, do you want to see him fall? So I just took off running and got around where I could see and I stopped and I could still hear him grunting as he was going away from me, and I thought, well, not good. So I slowed down then and looked for blood. Nothing, And I was sick because, like I said, this was the biggest buck OUT ever seen. I didn’t know what he was others in it was a really big deer. And that’s what I told Dad, because he said, well what was it? And the only thing I had compared to I’ve got an uncle that’s killed some he’s killed some good deer, and I’m talking one hundred and forty to one hundred and fifty inch deer and I said, he’s bigger than anything Uncle’s got.
00:32:20
Speaker 4: On the wall. That’s the only thing I compared to. Of course, everybody laughed. I told my uncle what I’d said. He got a kick out of that.
00:32:28
Speaker 5: But got home and because I had shot this gun a couple of times before I went, and it shot good, and I got home shot it didn’t even touch the paper. Being the first gun I’d ever had with the scope one, I knew nothing by the scope. Well, the scope mountains ended up being loose. You could turn the scope inside the mounts. There’s no tellings where I hit. I’m just glad I didn’t cripple him. But anyway, so it was. It ended up being I think nine days later before I got a chance to go back. My wife life at the time hadn’t started hunting much. She had went with me a time or two. So the morning that I was gonna be able to go, and I was going to walk back in there, it was a couple of mile walk to where I had seen him, and so I asked her if she wanted to go, and she said, yeah, she’d go with me. So we walked back in there and it was it’s a pretty good height in rough country, and we got back in there and just sat down on the ground.
00:33:25
Speaker 4: Oh.
00:33:26
Speaker 5: I took my one Chester thirty to thirty with me. The autsie kept putting the corner and sold shortly thereafter. I took my lever gun and we sat down and like everybody, I’d been watching hunting videos and I’d never done a lot of calling or anything. I had to grunt too, and I just watched somebody. They was talking about doing a sequence like a buck chasing a dough just man, man, man and drag that last one out. And as soon as we sat down, I’d done that. And we hadn’t been there ten minutes, and we were sitting where there were two fingers running off into a deep canyon. It wasn’t right where we seen him. It was within a quarter probably. I just found a good It was a good oat flat where a couple of logging roads come together. It was a good looking spot. But anyway, were sitting there, and the best way I can describe it, because he come up out of that canyon. He was on a ridge just a little ways over from us, and he looked like he reminded me of an old tom Gobler. He come up out of there, just walking slow and looking. He come probably fitture sixty yards up that ridge and got behind some brush. I couldn’t see a hair on him. I owed it all to my wife because she could see him. If I’d been by myself, I would have messed up because I was wanting to see him, and I knew it the same deer.
00:34:52
Speaker 4: I mean, he’s the frame he’s got. There was no doubt.
00:34:55
Speaker 5: And he come up and I don’t know how long he stood there. It felt like for it was several minutes. But I would want to call or move to where I see him, and she would say, he’s looking at us, or he’s looking this way. And I was sitting there and I was getting pretty shook up because I was wanting to do something.
00:35:18
Speaker 4: And finally she said, he’s moving.
00:35:20
Speaker 1: Well.
00:35:20
Speaker 5: When he moved, I seen him, and he turned and just started coming and he was going to be a broadside, maybe forty yards, and I just, of course, I had the gun that I had complete faith in then, and I started tracking him and I said to myself, he’ll stop in that hole, I’ve got him. And he stopped right in that hole, looked up the hill. I pulled the trigger He never flinched, he never moved, he didn’t do anything.
00:35:53
Speaker 4: I thought I missed him. Of course I was about to panic.
00:35:57
Speaker 5: I jacked another shell in when I did, he just turned and started walking over the hill, and I did not want to shoot him in the hips, but I was fixing too and all of a sudden he just humped up and fell over. I mean he never he never acts like he was hit nothing. And we sat there for a little while. I was having calmed down because it was I was a little nerved up. And when we got up and headed down there, he got bigger the closer we got. And we got down there to him, and which he’s ended up being one hundred and seventy three and some change is what he is. He’s a main framemate fourkid back times, got kickers. But the most impressive thing is to me, he’s got mass. He’s six I don’t remember now, six and something at the basis, but he holds it all the way out because he’s like four and a half at the tips. All these times are really massive. And I was just in shock because I mean it’s the biggest thing I’ve ever seen. He’s the biggest body deer I’ve ever seen too around as far as the country. And at the time, we always drug stuff out. We didn’t court them up and all that. So we heard drugging probably two miles back to the rig. I mean, we’d dragg him for waves and we’d sit and talk. We’d dragged for waves, set and talk. At one point we were sitting there talking a little buck walked up on us while we were sitting there talking and we finally it took a while, but we finally got him out. And my first stop was my uncle when when I had to go over his house and go home, and I said, hey, come out here and look at this, and he said, you wasn’t lying. He said, that’s he said, probably the biggest deer I’ve ever seen come out of this country.
00:37:48
Speaker 4: And it was.
00:37:50
Speaker 5: It was quite the deal. It’s I don’t hunt him for the horns anyways. I just enjoy hunting and hunting for the meat. But it was quite an adventure for sure.
00:38:01
Speaker 2: Whalen’s buck truly is a giant one hundred and seventy inch plus mainframe eight point. It is a monster. And for the record, Whalen’s wife was listening in when he told me this story and confirmed that it happened pretty much the way he described. In our next story, We’re gonna turn back to my favorite theme of ratting out hunting buddies, but this time the one being ratted out is Jordan bliss It’s dad Boat. Jordan is a good friend of mine and a true big buck killer from Mississippi. He’s gonna tag team this story with Backwoods University’s own Lake Pickle, and they’re gonna tell this story together. Lake also works for Onyx and if you need a discount code for your next upgrade, use bear Grease lowercase one word. Here’s Jordan and Lake ratting out Bow Blissed.
00:39:02
Speaker 6: So this is one of the most entertaining, slash quickish, slash successful deer hunting trips I’ve ever been on in my life. So by the weekend in Illinois in twenty and sixteen, so Lake Pickling myself were working at Primo’s at the time. We had very very little off time and it was approaching rut time in the Midwest around the first week in November, and had zero plans of going anywhere.
00:39:29
Speaker 4: But it looked like we were going to get.
00:39:30
Speaker 6: A three day weekend, and I told Lake I was like, hey, man, I got a place in Illinois that we can go hunt.
00:39:38
Speaker 4: Do you want to go?
00:39:39
Speaker 6: And Lake was like, heck, yeah, I’m in. And anyway, the backstory behind the farm in Illinois. Been hunting there since I was fifteen. My dad was actually up there at the time, and on the way to Illinois, I prepped Lake for my dad.
00:39:56
Speaker 4: So this hole ride up there.
00:39:58
Speaker 7: Granted, Jordan and at the time didn’t know each other that well at all, and I’d never met his dad, bow Blissed, And this whole ride from Central Mississippi Illinois, I’m getting this low down on bow Blissed and his hunting antics. And Jordan told me he said, he is arguably one of the most unsuccessful deer hunters I’ve ever been around. And he will shoot at something every day, but he’s not going to hit it. And I’m laughing at his story, but I’m also assuming that he’s kind of joking a little bit, like I didn’t think he was being serious. But anyway, we get up there that evening and get ready because we’re going to start hunting the next morning, and the first morning we just have to be kind of go where Bow wants us to go because we hadn’t had a chance to look at anything yet, and so he puts me on this big cut cornfield and I’m like, all right, you know, I can see a lot. It’s rough time, it’s Midwest, it’s early in the morning, and I hadn’t seen much of anything, and it was probably somewhere between seven thirty and eight am.
00:40:58
Speaker 4: And I look up across the end.
00:40:59
Speaker 7: There’s like a finger rid shooting out of this cut cornfield and I see a big buck, I’m talking one hundred and fifty plus inch deer running across this open cornfield. And my first instinct is he’s chasing the dough. And then I look and the buck stops and he looks behind him, and then he takes off running again.
00:41:16
Speaker 4: I’m like, that’s that Buck’s not chasing a dough. He spooked.
00:41:19
Speaker 7: Next thing I know, I see a person who is bow blisted walking across this open cornfield, and I’m like, what is this man doing. It’s it’s like eight o’clock in the morning and it’s rut time, and he just spooked that deer. What’s going on? Come to find out, Bo had seen a dough that morning and had emptied his quiver and lost two eras and had one lodged in a tree and was walking back to the truck. And so that was my That was my introduction to Jordan’s father, and that was our morning hunt. And I was like, holy smokes, Jordan wasn’t lying. But anyway, Jordan, that kind of cartells us into what happened that afternoon.
00:42:01
Speaker 6: So we find out after that morning hunt that my dad has procured a new farm to hunt. He tells us that he is not interested in hunting it at all because it is way too thick. Man, there’s briars and brambles. He can’t see nothing. And my dad is the type of guy he wants to be able to see. And you know, as us as hunters, we kind of know deer like thickets. But it’s way too thick for him to hunt. He said, man, y’all can have that place. It ain’t no good, ain’t gonna see nothing there. I look at it on on X and I’m like, this farm is sitting in the right spot. And that afternoon, Lake and I decide to go hunt that particular property. Well, this is where the story even gets a little bit better, because Lake and I it’s a little creek bottom and he’s on one end of it and I’m on the other find little pinch points to hunt best we could. First time walking in this proper and not seeing a whole lot. It’s getting about prime time though. I mean it’s five ash o’clock, about thirty more minutes a daylight left, and I can hear Lake on the ridge over across the creek bottom rattle and working four hundred yards three hundred yards apart, give or take.
00:43:17
Speaker 7: Then I was up there giving it like the full blown. I mean, you got to think I’d been able to hunt the Midwest in a while. So, I mean, like, I don’t know how hard I was hitting those antlers together, but I was giving it full board, you know. So when I initially got that text from Jordan that he could hear me radling, I was like, that’s one talking about you know.
00:43:32
Speaker 4: I’m like, they’re hearing me now.
00:43:34
Speaker 6: And I hear him rattling. I text him like, is that you radling? He’s like yeah, and uh I was like, well, I heard you. And it wasn’t thirty seconds later I look up to my left across this little crp looking field and there’s a buck walking kind of towards lake, but kind of angling at me as well. And he’s a nice buck, mature buck, big body deer. And immediately get pretty wound up, and the deer’s coming. He hops the fence about seventy yards from me, and I snort wheeze at him, and the deer ends up turning and coming directly at me. And keep in mind too, this first time we’ve ever hunted this piece of property. So I walked in there, and I didn’t want to stink up the area and make too much racket and run the deer out. I ended up getting in a tree, like the only tree I could fit my climbing stand on, and I’m about seven or eight feet in the air. It’s as high as I could get. And the deer ends up walking directly within ten yards of me, and I shoot him. I hit him good, and I’m all fired up.
00:44:38
Speaker 4: And I taxt late.
00:44:39
Speaker 6: It’s like I just shot one. He was coming to your rattling.
00:44:42
Speaker 1: Well.
00:44:42
Speaker 7: Then I find out that Jordan shot this bucket awesome. I’m like, man, that’s cool. So I get down, we go find the deer, and the funniest part of all of it, other than it was pretty sweet that Jordan had shot it really could buck, you know. And as we get down there and he Jordan caught his dad. So Bo gets over there and he is keyed up because at this time Jordan has killed this deer and we’ve been up there for less than twenty four hours. And with all the seriousness and in his tone, he was like, man, you know, this is Bow talking to Jordan. He said, you know, I’ve let y’all. You know, I’ll let y’all come up here and hunt my new honey hole. Y’all gonna have to vacate this place now. It’s my turn to hunting.
00:45:23
Speaker 6: The place was too thick for him to hunt. Hey didn’t want nothing to do with it. We went in there and we killed us a deer, and all of a sudden we get kicked out. And that was the fastest, most entertaining hunt we’ve had.
00:45:41
Speaker 2: At some point we may have to have a rebuttal from Bow blissed himself. I know Lake and Jordan pretty well, and sometimes they’re hard on people. But I don’t blame Bo for kicking them out of his new honey old. I mean, just you know, how it was discovered is kind of irrelevant. To the fact that it was discovered as honey hole. But our final story is a little bit different and you’ll find it doesn’t have much to do with deer. But it’s told by a unique guy by the name of Father Stephen Gadbury. I mean, his first name is not father, but you’ll get you’ll get what I mean.
00:46:22
Speaker 8: Okay, Stephen Gadbury, pastor of Saint Thurisa Catholic Church in Little Rock, Arkansas. So as I just I’m pastor of a big church in Little Rock, so always doing ministry, always preaching the gospel. This story today is about one of my best friends, Jesus, but it’s a different Jesus. It’s a Spanish speaking Jesus. His name is Jesus. So a couple of Jesus is in my life. So I’m a lucky guy for that.
00:46:48
Speaker 4: So Haesus and I we go back many years.
00:46:51
Speaker 8: We’ve hunted for a long time, and the funnest parts of our hunts is the most random human things that happened in the middle.
00:46:57
Speaker 4: Okay, So we all have these.
00:47:00
Speaker 8: Human experiences of you know, stubbing your toe or hitting your shin on the coffee table, or you know, you know, getting a gnat in your eye or something, or sneezing, silly things that every human does, but for whatever reason, they’re just kind of funny, these natural reactions. So this one of the trips that we went on, one of these adventures was we laugh about san kudos and calambrees. So sankulo is this mosquito, but I think san culo sounds like a really cool word in Spanish. So we still laugh about these sankulos from this trip that we went on, and on the same trip we still laugh about some calambrees. A colambre is a cramp. We all hate both of those things, right, we hate sun coulos. We hate mosquitos, and we hate cramps.
00:47:50
Speaker 4: We hate colabites.
00:47:52
Speaker 8: Like there’s nothing fun about eavy of those about mosquitos or cramps. So this this trip we went on, i’ll you know, not to well the story and everything. We both got some sweet bucks. So the points not the animals that we got, but how we got to those animals. It was a new property. We had to go and scout it out. And as we’re scouting over these ridges and over these saddles, a couple of hollers that we wanted to check out we find this creek down at the bottom and we start following it. We’ll find an amazing sign, amazing sign, and Hazus and I are talking. We’re chit chatting the whole time, like, you know, quietly because we were actively hunting at the time. But hey, look there’s some Look at that sign there, there’s a scrape there. Look at that rub. There’s you know, a path they’ve been coming to the water. Here the crossing there.
00:48:38
Speaker 4: We get it.
00:48:39
Speaker 1: And we.
00:48:42
Speaker 8: At this point, like we’re walking through this grass on the side of the creek. It’s probably knee high, knee to waste time. And I’m right in front of Jesu’s maybe four steps in front of him. He’s falling behind me. And at one point I stopped and I turned around to whisper to him, like, hey, I think I think I think we have something up here. I don’t know if it’s a buck or a dobe, but I just saw something. So I turned around and I tell him that. I’m like, hey, we got something up here. And then he’s like, okay, I said, he’s.
00:49:11
Speaker 9: And I couldn’t quit laughing because he just started speaking in tongues or something.
00:49:18
Speaker 3: He’s what is good.
00:49:21
Speaker 8: And by this point, like he can’t even look at me, he can’t talk, and he’s still coughing doing this. After probably twenty seconds go by, he catches his breath and like connects me talk and I don’t know what’s going on.
00:49:37
Speaker 4: I said, he’s just what lappened?
00:49:38
Speaker 1: He said?
00:49:39
Speaker 4: He said?
00:49:40
Speaker 9: He said, I sucked him askuit in my throat. Its just something so silly, it’s so stupid. But he was talking like Daffy Duck. And so for the rest of that afternoon.
00:49:50
Speaker 4: We couldn’t quit laughing about that. Though.
00:49:59
Speaker 8: We finally get back to camp that night, we’re just we’re exhaustive from going NonStop. Jesus is a big guy, and as we you know, we get to bed in the bunk room at the camp there and around two am or so, I hear this ruckets next door or not next door, like across the bunk room. So in the in the bed next over, and uh, and I’m thinking, like, oh my god, Zus is having a heart attack. And so like I jump up and I’m like, us, Jesus, what’s going on? And he’s not talking to me. He’s just squirming in the bed, and I’m thinking, oh God, my best My best friend’s dying. And then and then finally he just he stops and everything gets calm, and my brain isn’t happy because I’m not thinking like, oh, he’s okay, Like I’m thinking that that’s it. And then he looks over at me and smiles, and I’m like, what is going on?
00:50:51
Speaker 1: He said?
00:50:52
Speaker 8: He said, I got a cramp in my leg and I couldn’t and I couldn’t talk or do anything. And the calimbitis that was the second thing in that trip. It was the next day that both of us hammered just some sweet bucks. But to this day we still laugh about san Kudos and Calumbitis, about the mosquitos and the crabs, and it was from that adventure that azeus and activity.
00:51:21
Speaker 2: It’s the stories, the memories, the meat and the antlers that all combined to make deer hunting so special. All of us here on the Beargrease Feed hope that your neck deep in big bucks this November. Making memories with friends and family that will last lifetime, and truly encountering nature in a unique way and seeing it in all its glory, I’d say equally important this November. It’s worth it to evaluate the opportunity that we have as American hunters and not take any of this access we have for granted. It seems like every week somebody’s trying to sell off our public lie for trying to put a road through America’s finest remaining wilderness. I’m proud to be someone who values true wilderness and the protection of public lands, and I’m also proud to be with a company that I think is truly fighting for American public lands and hunters. And say what you will, but I see nobody doing more for American public lands. To my friends and colleagues, Ryan Callahan and Steve Rinella, that’s this way I see it. But we cannot thank you enough for listening to Bear Greece Brins, this Country Life podcast and Lakes Backwoods University. Keep the wild places wild, because that’s where the bears live.
Read the full article here