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Speaker 1: Welcome to This Country Life. I’m your host, Brent Reeves from coon hunting to trotlining and just in general country living. I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences in life lessons. This Country Life is presented by Case Knives from the Store More Studio on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast the airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I’ve got some stories to share. Lessons from where the red Fern grows. Well, this was going to be a little different this week. I’m talking about a book. A book that I’ve read I can’t tell you how many times, but I was reminded of it the other day and I haven’t been able to quit thinking about it since. Join me at the fire. I’m going to tell you all about it chapter two, paragraph too. I was ten years old when I first became infected with this terrible disease. I’m sure no boy in the world had it worse than I did. It’s not easy for a young boy to want a dog and not be able to have one. It starts gnawing at his heart and gets all mixed up in his dreams. It gets worse and worse until finally it becomes unbearable. Sound familiar? Well, that passage is from my all time favorite book of Where the Red Fern Grows. And I was a grown man with grandkids when I found out it was classified as a children’s book. A children’s book? Are you kidding me? I read that book in elementary school, and I don’t think it was part of the curriculum. It was a book I got out of the library after seeing the movie on TV for the first time nineteen seventy seven. I was the same age when I saw it as the character Billy Coleman in the movie. Now why am I talking about this book today? I tell you why. A week or so ago, I was sitting on the couch one Sunday morning when my oldest daughter Amy sent me a text, Dad, do you think Trip is old enough for us to read Where the Red Fern Grows? To him? Well, Trip is my grandson and he’s seven. In case y’all are wondering, I have to admit, I asked her if he was five or six, and she laughed and said, Dad, he’s seven. No surprise there. I still think of her as being five of her own self anyway. Knowing what I know now, I said no, it was written for kids nine and older. I went on to say that I want him to have a better understanding of what coon hunting is before you read it to it. Now, I surmise that some of that is probably me wanting to take him with me when I go hunting, and my lamenting for the opportunity to read it to him myself, rather than give them my blessings to read it to him in my stead. Reading that book to my youngest has been more or lesser tradition, one that stopped with Bailey three years ago when she was ten and lost interest after a few chapters. No worries though the subject matter isn’t for everyone, and while I could sit and read it now with the great anticipation of turning the next page, when I know almost word for word what’s on there, it just didn’t appeal to her. So I gave it up silently, and when she didn’t ask why we weren’t reading it, I knew I’d made the right decision, as painful as it was for me. During mine and Amy’s conversation about my favorite quote unquote children’s book, I told her it was the second greatest book ever written, And just like the actual greatest book ever written, there’s not a quote or a lesson from any passage that applies any more to children than it does for adults. My son in law, Colin said, the first time his mother read it to him, he was nine or ten, and when he commenced a squalling, he didn’t stop until he went smooth the sleep sitting in her lap. He also less has already also added that his grandmother had passed away not too long before he read it, so that may have played a role in how he perceived it and how upset he got. But from that paragraph I read to you when this struggle started, it described a boy’s longing for something that seemed unattainable. A pair of redbone puppies cost twenty five dollars each. Now Billy learned that from finding an outdoor magazine some fishermen had left behind. In the depression era of Oklahoma Ozarks, where this story is set, the average income was less than three hundred dollars a year. Fifty dollars was two months salary, and it took two years of him saving to get enough money that magazine sent him on his journey of working toward the goal of getting his coonhounds. Wilson Rawls’s fictional story started me on mine. I learned that lesson myself not long after seeing the movie. Irregardless, if Billy Coleman could sell fur to get his hounds save up his money, so could Brent. What it took him two years to do, I accomplished in one winter. However, I didn’t just run out and set some traps and wait for the money to come rolling in. And I had to buy some traps first, traps of my own, not from my older brother Tim’s cash. Being newlywed, he was trapping to supplement his own income and didn’t have the luxury of living at home with Mama cooking his meals like I did. Nope, I was gonna earn money trapping. I was gonna have to invest my own funds. A dozen one and a half single spring victory traps would cost around twenty dollars in nineteen seventy seven. It takes a lot of farm chores to make twenty dollars. When most of my wages were covered in the form of groceries, my papoff slide was the outlier in this equation, even though he wasn’t a hunter himself or cared much for dogs. However, he was an excellent grandfather, and as I’ve stated here before, he was the sole benefactor of my as he called it, walking around money. I worked on the farm for him, and I got a dozen traps with Tim’s toot lich. I started laying still totally on my own. I did my own skinning. The only thing he helped me with was taking me to the fur bire money in hand, I waited for some puppies to come up for sale. Now Billy Coleman was writing letters back and forth with some folks in Kentucky that were selling redbone puppies. I was waiting on mister Lloyd Corker down at the Corker’s feed Story in Warren, Arkansas, to tell my dad when he had a new litter tree in Walkers. I never knew why Wilson Rawls, the author of that story, had Billy longing for a redbone hounds, when the dog from his childhood that helped inspire the whole story was a bluetick named Rowdy, a real dog that he would hunt the river bottoms with at night and read and tell stories to during the day. But the first lesson gleaned by me from mister Raws’s fictional story was that, like Billy, I had to labor to put myself in position to be able to afford a dog. I did that, and one day my dad told me to get my money and get in the truck. We were going to the feed store, a trip to town and a small loan from Dad to make up the difference. And I walked out of that feed store grinning like a mule eating sawbriers, told them a seventy five dollar Restroe Tree and walker puppy in my arms like it was a baby. What I had watched in the span of a ninety seven minute movie was going to take a lot longer in real life, And I had no idea how hard it was going to be. The book and the movie describing and demonstrate the rigors of training a pair of hunting dogs, getting a tree dog started as a bigger test than it seems. If you’ve never trained a hound, having too to train does more than double the work. I’d say it triples it at least as individual. As you’re dealing with two dogs, you put them together as juveniles, and they create a whole other persona that you won’t find when they’re separate. It takes a patient and talented trainer to handle two it once, and most times they’re looking for the one that’s quickst to show the promise. Once that’s determined, the slower one to develop. Now he going to find another home, at least that’s the way it usually goes these days. Then doing that, you have to spend time with that dog, and through a video montage of growth trials and tribulations you can see that carried out in the movie and read about it in the book. I saw the movie first and then I read the book. You’d think that by doing it in that order, the real that played in my head as I read along would show the people from the movie is each character. But for me, that’s not how it worked, not for this one, And I really don’t know why that is. Maybe it’s because ident find more closely with the task at hand and the end goal of the struggle Billy was going through more so than than the people within the story. I knew what it was like to experience the want of a hunting dog as a child because I was I was, I was one longing for the for the same thing Wilson rawl so accurately described in the book. While I was reading it, I guess to me there was no Billy in that story. There was there was on living me. Even to this day, I find myself thinking back to those days when that book is mentioned or something triggers aroundom memory. I’ve got a young hound named Jesse that I’m sure some of you are wondering about. Well, she’s finally getting the attention she deserves, and I’ll give an update on her a little later this summer. But that story that that story details the struggle involved in training a dog and is a premium metaphor for any hard fault, goal or task. Patience when dealing with a young dog is paramount. To give them the benefit of the doubt. There will be times when I think this clown just ain’t getting it. But maybe it ain’t them. Maybe I’m not communicating it well enough for them to understand. My father, Buddy Reeves, was a dog man. He had a well deserved reputation for some of the best tree dogs around and had the best a mountain cur named Peanut. I’ve told you about it before, but I was sitting beside him on the front porch one afternoon while the last mountain curR he owned, Buck was stretched out sonning in the front yard taking a nap. The old Buck was a jam up tree dog and had mannerism similar to Peanut, even though they were not of the same lineage. We had a company that had stopped to visit after seeing us on the porch. We were wiling away the afternoon in the cool of the approaching fall, enjoying each other’s company in this sudden change in temperature. The conversation was naturally about dogs, and the man asked Dad how he always wound up with puppies that made good squirrel dogs. His immediate answer was, I can just about tell you which puppy and the litter is gonna make before they get their eyes open. That man laughed at him and said, well tell me so, I’ll know. Now, I’ll tell you. I was wondering my own self because this was going to be as big of a newsflash to me as it was the man who stopped by. Now, my Dad never broke his gaze from Buck, who was laying like a in a coma like state of relaxation. His breathing so measured, I had to watch his belly close to make sure he was still doing it. And then Dad said, with the most obvious answer that was so simple profound, all in the same sentence. It’s answer to the question all prospective hunting dog owners want to knows contained in a five word statement, fact the one that gets hunted. My father was a Tier one master of quick wit and sarcasm, but he wasn’t being either when he said that the pupp that gets the chance to bond, learns how to communicate and develops trust with his human, when all things are equal, will have a distinct advantage over those with limited opportunities. I’ve always thought, and have told countless people, that if I have a dog of any kind, that I want to perform a task for me, and the dog just can’t seem to understand what I want him to do. Maybe it ain’t the dog. Maybe I’m not telling him what I want him to do in a way he can understand. For the last fifteen thousand years, it has been in and canines to do what we wanted to do, and they want to please us. We just have to be able to properly tell them where the red fern grows and my Dad’s front porch are great examples of recognizing the limitations may have to do more with us than the dog. Priceless lessons we can apply not only to dogs, but to everyone we come in contact with. Billy made a deal with his hounds that if they treat a coon, that he do the rest, no matter what. And in the book they treat one in a huge sycamore tree, and Billy, true to his word, gnawed on that tree with his chop axe for two days, ultimately to exhaustion, before a sudden gust of wind finished the job for him. Loyalty was the lesson, and blistered hands and aching back, hunger and despair were the price paid to learn it. It was also very odd, is that loyalty. It was a two way street. His hounds were recognized that he was holding up his end of the bargain. They stayed with him while he worked on the seemingly impossible task of getting that coon out of that tree. A reward for Billy from them and the culmination of effort. Now, on a personal note, I’d have patted old well and on the head, telling him good boy, and we’d have taken off from there to go for tree another one. But that’s just me. It’d be hard to tell the story without pointing out, at least to me, that the lessons within this book, in this movie are all rooted in love. It seemingly falls from the pages all over the floor if you hold the book spine up. Love is what that whole thing is about, and drives every facet of the story from the first page to the last. From the time Billy picks those puppies up from the station, He’d already loved them, just the idea of having them was overwhelming. I’m going to read to you now another passage. This one is from chapter five. It is the day Billy picks up his puppies from the train station, and the moment in my mind that represents the closest thing to the overwhelming feeling of unbounded love to having children that a child can experience. On arriving at the depot, my nerve failed me. I was afraid to go in. I didn’t know what I was scared of that I was scared. Before going around to the front, I picked in a window. The station master was in his office looking at some papers. He was wearing a fun little cap that had no top in it. He looked friendly enough, but I still couldn’t muster up enough courage to go in. I cought my ear to see if I could hear puppies crying, but I couldn’t hear nothing. Bird was chirping. It was a yellow canary in a cage. The station master walked over and gave it some water, and I thought, anyone that is kind of birds surely wouldn’t be meaning to a boy. With my courage built up, I walked around to the front. He eased myself past the office. He glanced at me and turned back to his papers. I walked clear around the depot and again walked slowly past the office. Glancing from the corner of my eye saw the station master looking at me and smiling. He opened the door and came out on the platform. I stopped and leaned against the building, yawning and stretching his arms. He said, it sure is hot today, doesn’t look like it’s ever going to rain. I looked up at the sky and said, yes, sir, it is hot, and we sure could do with the good rain. We need one bad up where I come from? He asked me where I lived. I told him up the river Aways, you know. He said, I have some puppies in there for a boy that lives up on the river. His name is Billy Coleman. I know his dad, but never have seen the boy. I feared he’d be in after him today. On hearing this remark, my heart jumped up in my throat. I thought surely was going to hop right out on the depot platform. I looked up and I tried to tell him who I was, but something went wrong. When the words finally came out, they only sounded like like a squeaky old pulley on our well. When Mama drew up a bucket of water, I could see a twinkle in the station master’s eyes. He came over and laid his hand on my shoulder. In a friendly voice, he said, so you’re Billy Coleman. Aw’s your dad. I told him Papa was fine and handed him to slip my grandpa had given me. Well, they sure are fine looking pupps. He said, you’ll have to go around to the freight door. I’m sure my feet never touched the ground as I flew around the building. He unlocked the door and I stepped in looking for my dogs, and I couldn’t see anything but boxes, barrels, and old trunks and some rolls of barbed wire. The kindly stationmaster walked over to one of the boxes. Do you want boxing all? He asked. I told him I didn’t want the box. All I wanted was the dogs. How are you going to carry him, he asked, I think they’re a little too young to follow. I held out my gunnysack. He looked at me, and he looked at the sack and chucked in. He said, well, I guess dogs can be carried that way as anything else, but we’ll have to cut a hole in there from the stick to the head through so they so they won’t smother. Getting a claw hammer, he started tearing off the top of the box. His nails gave way and board splintered. I heard several puppy whimpers. I didn’t walk over. I just stood and waited. After what seemed like hours, the box was open. He reached in, lifted the pups out, and set them down on the floor. Well, there they are, he said, What do you think of I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. All I could do was stare at it. They seemed to be blinded by the light and kept blinking their eyes. One sat down on his little rear and started crying. The other one was waddling around and whimpering. I wanted so much to step over and pick them up. Several times I tried to move my feet, but they seemed to be nailed to the floor. I knew the pups were mine, all mine, yet I couldn’t move. My heart started acting like a drunk grasshopper. I tried to swallow and couldn’t. My atom’s apple wouldn’t work. One pupp started my way. I held my breath on he came until I felt a scratchy little foot on mine. The other pup followed, a warm puppy to him, caressed my sore foot. I heard the station master say, well, they already know you. I knelt down and gathered them in my arms. I buried my face between their wiggling bodies and cried. The station master, sensing something more than just two dogs and a boy, waited in silence. There is so much more to talk about that I believe I could do a whole series on this book alone. But there are some listening right now that while they may have heard about the book, they ain’t never read it. There’s also some young people that listen, and I’m so grateful and thankful to have their ears for a few moments each week. I haven’t done this in a while. I’m giving you all an assignment homework if you will read this book or listen to the audiobook instead of watching either version of the movie. Let Billy and every character fit the ones you imagine in your mind. As you read, you’ll find that what each of those characters represents in emotion, good or bad, is way more important than what they look like. Let me and Miss Reeven know what you think about it and what, if anything, speaks to you the most. Man, I sure hope you enjoyed this one. I know I did. It’s like visiting with a childhood friend. It’s a simple story with such a wonderful, wonderful message. Till next week, it’s me and Old whitealing sing. Y’all be careful.
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