00:00:05 Speaker 1: He's fix to come out, and he did. He just come right on around that tree right there, and Clay, he just walked out there. It is like shooting down that floor right there. There ain't even a huckleberry bush between me and him. 00:00:19 Speaker 2: We've found ourselves in the heartwood dates of mid October. With every sunset, the earth is tilting north, making the days shorter, the shadows longer, and the whitetail bucks are on their feet more. For deer hunters, this is the absolute best time of year, and if you're not one, it might be hard to understand this deep, almost DNA level desire to be in the woods during this ephemeral window of opportunity. This is the second episode in our twenty twenty three Deer Story series. We've got some voices you'll recognize and some new ones that you won't. These seven storytellers represent a vast swath of these ways in which people love to hunt whitetail deer. We've got bow hunts, musloader hunts, running deer with dog hunts, hunts with bucking horses, and a traditional archery. Giant on public land, actually a couple of giants on public land. As a matter of fact, every story on this podcast is from public Land. This, My Brothers and Sisters, is the celebration of North America's greatest pageant, the White Tailed Deer Season. I really doubt that you're gonna want to miss this one. And hey, meet Eater. Season twelve is up on meat Eater's YouTube channel. That's right. You can watch Stephen Ranella's Meat Eater the original episodes on meat Eater's YouTube channel. And right now you can watch my Alaskan black bear hunt where I killed a bear by swimming up on it in a wetsuit. And it's not too late to get stocked up on the best whitetail gear in the industry at First Light. A percentage of all sales of our specter Camo, that's First Light's tree stand whitetail camo, which I believe is the best tree stand camo made goes to the National Deer Association. 00:02:11 Speaker 3: We got it that old deer, and when we got we got the horses. 00:02:14 Speaker 4: That's probably the first time we ever put a deer behind the I. 00:02:18 Speaker 3: Don't know why we've done that, but we put it behind the cantle. 00:02:21 Speaker 4: That was the first and the last time because where we got the camp that's where everything south on us. 00:02:38 Speaker 2: My name is Klay Nukem, and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land. Presented by f HF gear, American made purpose built hunt and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged. 00:03:03 Speaker 5: As the places we explore. 00:03:12 Speaker 2: Our first storyteller is my dad, Gary Believer nucom. There are no black panthers in this one, but a year hasn't gone by since nineteen ninety seven that I haven't thought about this hunt or heard Dad tell it. Some stories are just iconic. They seem to brand the hunter and his sphere of influence for life. The brand can be a celebration of success. Other times it's a reminder of failure and what not to do. But sometimes a story becomes almost mythical, like a supernatural encounter. This one is like that, And you can't fake one of these or try to make one happen. They happen on their own. 00:03:54 Speaker 6: Here's the Believer, one of my favorite deer stories. I guess because it took so much effort to get to this deer or these deer. I didn't know this particular deer was there. I just knew there was big deer there. There's I found only one real big rub a lot of deer signing, just one little compact area. 00:04:19 Speaker 5: And this place is hard to get to. 00:04:23 Speaker 6: And I was so serious about this area that I bought two decoys. I bought a big buck and I bought a bedded dough. My theory was to call the deer in and have it come to that decoy, and then I'd be taking it home with me. I'd been up there a lot, or I've been in that area a whole lot, and I knew a lot about it, but I wasn't sure how long it would take to get back in there. So I left one morning at about eleven o'clock. My objective was to time it and go, okay, I'm gonna have to leave even my pickup two hours, early hour and a half, early three hours. 00:05:04 Speaker 1: Whatever it took. 00:05:05 Speaker 6: And so I treated it exactly like a hunt, except I didn't take a decaway with me, which was a mistake. But I had clean clothes. If you know some of my other hunts, I'm not like Clay. I felt like I put so much energy into it. I didn't want any of my you know, I didn't want something that I had a little control of to give me up. So I had my scent locked stuff in a bag, but I had it clean clothes in a trash bag that had been aired out. I went into the area. Yeah, it was two and a half hour trip for me to go in there. I got within a distance where I knew it wouldn't affect the stand, and I took all my clothes off, sprayed down, even put clean boots on. 00:05:51 Speaker 5: I mean I did everything. 00:05:53 Speaker 6: I did just about everything you could do to be as sent free as possible. Then I slowly moved into my stand and already had my stand up. And it was an old ambusher, which is fourteen feet high, and all you know, there just wasn't a good place to put it. It was real hard to find a tree in the right spot. In the tree I found had a V in it, so my back, instead of leaning up against a tree, had a V to my back opening. The reason I was there there was isolated sign in this one little spot. 00:06:30 Speaker 5: You could walk a. 00:06:31 Speaker 6: Mile to the left, a mile to the right, a half a mile just you know, any direction, and this spot had tremendous sign. So anyway, I was timing all this stuff and I got up in my stand. And when I got up in my stand, it was three o'clock. So if I left the house at eleven, I'm in my stand at three. I mean that's a four hour trip. So I mean, I'm figuring I'm what to get up at one or two o'clock in the morning to go hunt this deer. So I get up in the stand and I had my rattling horns and I had my grunk call. And I've never been able to duplicate this. I tried over and over and over again. Never could. But I started calling, and I started rattling, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I mean, I was so into it that I never could replicate it. It was just something about the environment, knowing where I was, all this hot sign and there was probably a deer within here and distance, and so I was just banging my horns just as hard as I could. And I had a call that I've never heard anybody except one guy ever mentioned it. The call has been good to me, and the call is well I didn't stand me, and I mean, I'm pump man. I mean I am, I am read alert in the zone, but I gotta have a deer in front of me or beside me. I can't stand up and turn. You know, I'm gonna tell you. I had something happen to me when I was young, and it just heights, just scared me to death. So I knew I wouldn't be able to stand up and turn and shoot through that v And so all of a sudden, I hear a deer coming and I'm thinking, I thought, specifically, that is a six point buck, and I am not gonna shoot it. 00:08:41 Speaker 7: And he was. 00:08:42 Speaker 6: Making guess what the exact call I was making, except he was just a little shorter. He was going, and I was going, you know, I mean, it's just a note or two off. So finally he'd come from a long ways, I mean, he started grunting way off. And when he finally came in to my backside, I could tell, when it was already too late to try to get myself situated to shoot, that it was gonna be a big one. And when he stepped in at about thirty five or forty yards, his ears were laying straight back, his hair was standing straight out, and he was ready to kill something. And if I'd had a decoy out there, I feel sure be one like you see on YouTube where they just take that sucker down. And so when he pulls up and he doesn't see anything, he pulls in right behind me instead of coming around. He's like he stops, kind of cools off a little bit, thinking what and he comes exactly behind me. I could see as his antlers were up in the short trees, you know, you could see his body, but you couldn't see his horns, even though I'd seen his horns. 00:10:06 Speaker 7: His horns were. 00:10:06 Speaker 6: Real tall and narrow, you know, maybe sixteen seventeen and it spread maybe fifteen, but they were tall with a lot of points. And all of a sudden, he was just gone, you know, he slipped out there. 00:10:23 Speaker 7: I didn't hear him leave, didn't see him leave. 00:10:27 Speaker 6: The unique thing about the hunt to me was that call and the fact that I was in such a frenzy myself. I mean I started to get down and charge you. So it was just to me, it was just the environment I was in, I think had a lot to do with my emotions, because when you looked around. You just don't see stuff like I was seeing. I mean, the woods were different, the woods were different, and you just knew you were in a special place and at a special time, and that there was a chance a really big buck was going to come in. 00:11:13 Speaker 2: As my dad has told this story through the years, it was clear his encounter with this giant buck while bow hunting on public land marked him, and honestly it marked me too. I've been chasing this exact hunt, trying to have one just like it in the same spot for over a decade, and it hasn't happened yet. Dad and I talk about this buck all the time. You got to remember that in nineteen ninety seven, outdoor TV had really just started, and people just didn't rattle in that many bucks outside the Midwest. And that story plays in my mind like a real memory, almost like it happened to me. It's pretty great to have your own podcast so you can cherry pick the stories you want to tell. But I'm sure you've got stories like this in your family from the people that have influenced you. Hopefully this will remind you to keep them alive. 00:12:06 Speaker 6: One of the. 00:12:07 Speaker 2: Best parts of the last several falls for me has been going to Andy Brown's. 00:12:10 Speaker 5: House to hear deer stories. 00:12:12 Speaker 2: Last episode, he told the legendary story about his father in that nineteen fifty six Chevy with the gray door. After that, I asked him if he had any good dear calling stories. Here's two that he rattled off in short order. 00:12:29 Speaker 1: One great story with that was me and Steve Phillips and Wayne Pate. We went in on top of it was opening day of Muzsload and we got in there. Of course, it's a long ways in there where you got to go. We go all the way top of the mountain and then we'd split up and I'd go east and them boys go west. Anyway, we pulled up there and we got out and they went to a peddled around getting their stuff good, and I said, boys, I'm out of here. And so I just took off out of game trail, going kind of over on the south side of them, and I got maybe fifty yards from camp, and I went in to my sneak mode and I just take two or three steps and it was still I just take two or three steps and I'd grunt and i'd listen, I'd stand, I might stand three or four minutes, and I just two or three deliberate steps sat through there. Anyway, I had probably made it one hundred yards. And I pulled up there and there's some kind of a flat holler really, it runs off the south side of the mountain there, and I pulled up there and I grunted, and when I did, I heard that deer get up and I just stood there and I grunted again, and all of a sudden just snapped pop, and I looked and here he come, and it was a really good eight point. He had those ears laid back and he was just stiff laking it and just walked right up there. And and when I shot Stephen, Wayne went, oh, they're still at the drug. They had even left the drug, you know. Anyway, But I had to be a deer killed there within fifteen minutes right there, you know. But I did the same thing one time. 00:14:06 Speaker 5: I was over on. 00:14:08 Speaker 1: And Steve was with me that morning. We went in there at the food pot at the divide up there and kind of went back west. And I don't know if you've ever been in there, but there's four or five virgin pines right there on the side of the mountain. Everybody ought to go to look at them, because they're them big. I mean them that they left, you know. But anyway, I pulled right in on top of the mountain, and when you get in there kind of back west, it gets leggy. There's a lot of rocks there on top. At that time, I had an old Hawker's buzzloader that my brother in law had put together. That thing shot round balls. I mean you could shoot squirrels with the round balls. But no, no, that wasn't good enough for Andy. I had to give me some buffalo balls, that dude, you know. And so I bought this that's a new thing out then, four hundred greand buffalo balls, you know. So I get them. I take them up around was living on a racetrack road. This is back in the eighties, mid eighties, and so didn't even get to shoot it. So I took it out up there afo the house threw out a I think it was a milk jug out in the in the shale pit up there after dark in the headlights, and shot at it with a to see if it would hit, you know. But anyway, anyway, I get up there and I did the same thing wind was right in the face, coming out of the west, and I just started easing out the side of the mountain there, just grunting, and you could see it's pretty you know, it's legy, and you can see good. I got out there, probably one hundred yards out the top there, and a deer went to blowing at me back west, and I thought, of that, dear, and it's not blowing at me. Can't smell me. The wind's right in my face, you know. And so I just kind of sat down there. It wasn't real comfortable. It's pretty steep, and I just sat down and kind of back up against the rock there. I grunnder time too, and that wood wise and I was sitting there and I thought, I'm gonna ease just a little feather right there, a little better spot, little flatter. I just got up and just walked out there, not much further than where you're sitting there, and I runned it again. And when I did, right on top of the mountain, right there, just right above me, right through the rocks, that buck deer was standing where I was sitting. Of course there I am gun this way. The deer's not. He come right out through the rocks right down. I mean he was standing where I had just left. 00:16:22 Speaker 5: And I thought, oh crap. 00:16:24 Speaker 1: So he just standing there and he was looking for me. And about that time he just started off and there was a I'd say it was a spotted oak blowed down on the side of the mountain there. He just went right in around that thing and just went to walking in front of me. And of course he's fixing to come out, and he did that. Dude, he just come right on around that tree right there, and Clay, he just walked out there. It is like shooting down that floor right there. They ain't they ain't even a huckleberry bush between me and him. I mean, just right there, you know. And I just raise up and I said, oh boy, you have had it this time, you know. And I just pulled it there and when I touched the trigger, when the smoke cleared, that old deer is still standing there looking just like that. 00:17:13 Speaker 5: Dude. 00:17:14 Speaker 1: He ain't even budge, you know, he just standing there looking it. I'm going a whole crap, So I get my stuff. You know, you're shaking like a leave and you're trying to you know, mu's had powder, you know what I'm trying to get the powder, and that dude stood there till I got my ram rod on my ball, and then he just wheeled and right off the mountain he went. And in the rest is history, he's still going north. But I mean a big buck deer, I mean a bigot. So I get back down to the truck and Steve said, was that you shot? And I said yeah, He said what was she? And it? 00:17:49 Speaker 5: I said, Man, I shut it. 00:17:50 Speaker 1: A big buck deer up there, And I said, I mean, I don't know how I missed that dude. I mean he's a little downhill, you know. So I had a piece of this paper in the in the truck. I went out there and I stuck it on a bush and I backed up what I thought was about right about thirty yards, And when I touched the trigger, about a foot high and about sixteen inches to the ride, I blow a limb off that bush. I shot over the course, I do. I shot over him because you utter they're gonna leave, you know. But that's the way hunting goes. 00:18:20 Speaker 5: It's like. 00:18:23 Speaker 2: Those are good stories. Andy. There are few things as exciting as grunting and having a big buck respond, and few things as crushing as missing a buck you know that you should have hit. I'm not sure how someone can claim to have lived a full human life unless they've missed a big white tail they should have killed. Now, that's not true. That's a blanket hyperbolic and inaccurate statement. But you get the point. It's irrationally crushing. 00:18:52 Speaker 5: To miss a big deer. 00:18:54 Speaker 2: And Andy told me that the feeling doesn't get any better over the years. Most things here with time, but miss bucks just don't. Our next story is told by my new friend John Harrison. He's eighty years old and he lives in northwest Arkansas. When I was getting my truck worked on the other day, he told me this story, and then he took me into his house and showed me the sunfaded mount of a handsome eight point buck on the wall. It's sure wasn't his biggest buck, but it's the one he wanted to talk about. He's kept a written record of every hunt he's been on since nineteen eighty. He showed me the three ring binder. I told him that his story about that eight point was a bear Grease style story, and though he'd never heard of a podcast, I told him I wanted to record it, and so we did. Here's a short one, but a good one for mister John Harrison. 00:19:56 Speaker 6: Okay, my name is John Harrison. I was born and raised in the Boston Mountains. I have a deer story. It's not a huge deer, but it was happening. 00:20:09 Speaker 5: Men. 00:20:10 Speaker 6: My brother in law had got up one morning and went hunting. I was down on one bench. He was up on the next bench, and we jumped this deer off of the bench he was on and it come down with me. But he was shooting at it, and he knew where I was, so he wasn't shooting toward me because I knew where he was. And this deer came down and when it saw me, it turned and went back toward him, and I began shooting, and the deer was running little ways and dropped. So we both congregated around the deer. 00:20:48 Speaker 5: Looked it over. 00:20:49 Speaker 6: Well, it looked like I had shot it because it was shot in the left side instead of the right side. But he thought he killed it, and I said, okay, fine with me. I didn't really care who killed the deer. And so we got the deer out and he took it and had it processed, he had the horns mounted. It was the first deer we'd ever killed at our cabin, and about long that same not that winter, but the next following year winter. He called me one night and he said, John, come and get you deer. I said, what do you mean, come and get my deer? He says, my wife sole a steak in the skillet, and the bullet fell out in the skill it and I looked at it and it was your bullet. So it's your deer. You can come and get it. And so I said okay, And he had it completely already mounted there everything. So I went and got it and brought it home, hung it on the wall, and that's where it's been ever since nineteen seventy two. I believe got a free maun al of the deal. I let him keep the meat and I took the mounted head. 00:22:15 Speaker 2: That was a good story, mister John. I appreciate how easily you were able to let go of a buck you honestly thought was yours, but how quickly you took it back when the truth came out in the skillet. That's the way things work in the backwoods. 00:22:32 Speaker 1: That's good one. 00:22:34 Speaker 2: Our next story is meat Eater's own Tony Peterson with the Wired to Hunt podcast. There are a few people in the country as well traveled or more successful on public land for whitetails than Tony. I have a lot of respect for him as a whitetail hunter. Tony's from Wisconsin, which is a serious deer hunting state, and this wild hunt takes place on some crowded public land in Nebraska. 00:23:00 Speaker 5: Here's Tony, Man. 00:23:02 Speaker 8: It was kind of like a scene out of a movie. My hunting partner and I were standing there in our cameo beside our tents, drinking some instant coffee eating a donut when the cavalry arrived, I mean truck after trucks started to pull into the campground, and we were pretty surprised, even though we probably shouldn't have been because it was November seventh, but seeing all those hunters driving in made us just scramble to load up our packs and start hiking up a bluff toward a ridge top. 00:23:29 Speaker 5: It's just covered in you seerpa grass and kind. 00:23:32 Speaker 8: Of dotted with islands of cedars, and we knew that the pressure in the creek bottom from all the new arrivals would be intense, so we figured we'd outwork our competition and go hunt above them. 00:23:42 Speaker 5: And when we got to the top. 00:23:43 Speaker 8: We were sweaty and winded, but we could also see headlamps kind of just bobbing their way through the bottom way below us, and we also saw one headlamp following us, so we decided to wait and chat with him. And we never caught this dude's name, but he was from Michigan, super nice and happened to be hunting a spot right between where my hunting partner was going to set up and where I was going to set up, you know, so essentially any buck running the ridge was going to have to dodge some arrows. It was an ideal, but it was public land hunting during the rut, and I hung my stand in the dark, you know, in a barely big enough cedar, and I settled in way before first light, and when it finally got light enough to look around, the view was incredible, except for the fact that I couldn't see any deer, and I could see a of a lot of the Nebraska countryside. I figured it was just due to the influx of hunters, you know, the presence of so many people that had pushed the deer out. 00:24:39 Speaker 5: Still, it was prime time. 00:24:40 Speaker 8: The weather was cold, it was overcast, it was relatively still, and I kept thinking, you know, something's going to work its way through from the neighboring private fields to go bed on public. 00:24:51 Speaker 5: What I didn't. 00:24:52 Speaker 8: Expect was to go from daydreaming about deer activity to hearing an extremely loud and awful close grunt. It caught me totally off guard, like so much so that I stood straight up and I looked to my left. 00:25:04 Speaker 5: We're standing I don't know, like. 00:25:05 Speaker 8: Maybe sixty yards away was a dough and that old girl had me pegged. I mean, she was just on me, which isn't so bad in and of itself, but I could also see three stark white racks in the brush around her, so it wasn't a great feeling. And they weren't little racks either. So when I say, you know, in that moment, I felt dumb, imagine any time in your life where you felt dumb, and then multiply that by like a million. To have a hot dough that close with three bucks on her tail, and to get busted by such a rookie move, it was so frustrating, and the dough and I we had a staring contest for what let I don't know, felt like forever, but it was probably only half of a minute or so. And what broke the spell and was absolute music to my ears was a grunt. And as soon as that first buck grunt it because it couldn't take it anymore, the second one grunted, and then it was like a harrissela white antlers going around that dough, and she shook her ears, looked toward the edge of the bluff and took off, and as soon as she did, it was pure chaos. The first buck to follow her was all of one hundred and forty inches, and while I got him to stop long enough for me to shoot, I didn't name at all. 00:26:20 Speaker 5: I mean, I just lost it. 00:26:21 Speaker 8: I was so keyed up with buck fever that I stopped that buck and I just drew and shot, and that arrow went way over his back and she dropped below the ridge. He followed and I reloaded. The second buck was I don't know, probably one hundred and twenty inches, so not as big as the first one, but definitely no slouch on public land. I drew on that deer and I gave him my most desperate murp and just watched as he trotted right through and dropped out of my life. 00:26:49 Speaker 5: He never stopped, and. 00:26:50 Speaker 8: That meant two thirds of the bucks around me were well out of range and not likely to return anytime soon. But that's also when I heard a rustling in the grass, and so the last buck making a potentially fatal mistake. Instead of following the rest of the year down the trail, he cut out and around, which brought him right past my stand. When I say things happen fast, I mean it. The whole thing was a blur of activity that was about to culminate in a close shot on a really, really good dear if I could get. 00:27:21 Speaker 5: Him to stop. 00:27:22 Speaker 8: So when that ten pointer trotted past the base of my tree, I murped him too, and he did stop at like seven yards while standing quartering away. And I'd like to say that I took my time and I settled my pin and executed a perfect shot, But the truth is I have no idea what I did. I was on the edge of even being in the same world as that buck by that point, and all I know is that everything felt really good, even though it unfolded so fast. So when he took off after that shot, I thought I saw him going over apple cart on the edge of the bluff, but almost immediately the second guessing settled in. I tried to sit down. I tried to settle down, but I was shaken so bad I couldn't I couldn't do anything but hold onto my bow and the tree, just try to remember how it had gone down, try to fill in the blanks, and after a while I finally got to the point where I could glass my arrow in the grass, and the magnified. 00:28:16 Speaker 5: View made me feel so much better. 00:28:18 Speaker 8: I could see red swaths of blood covering the yellow grass, and it looked like the shot was as good as I hoped. So I texted my hunting partner that I thought we were in for a drag, and he responded that I could just make that a double since he had arrowed an eight pointer about the same time I had shot my buck, and while recovering my dear a buckets scored just under one sixty. It has just cool palmation through his main beams took about thirty seconds. My hunting partner shot was less than ideal, but we managed to get my buck back to camp and then sort out his blood trail to get his deer as well, and then later as we were butchering both of them in camp, that Michigan hunter from the morning came trudging down the hill with a great eight point on a deer cart. So we went three for three on one ridge in one morning on public land. It was honestly one of the wildest and most memorable hunts of my life, and not just because I killed the biggest dear in my career. 00:29:17 Speaker 2: Those are the kind of mornings you never forget, and we chase those kinds of moments every year, but they're extremely rare. That was a good story, Tony. Our next storytellers. You'll recognize their voices if you listen to the last episode. It's Dale Craig and Travis Ross. You may remember Dale Craig's apple rolling story and then Travis killing a buck in front of Louisdale and Charlie Edwards dogs. These guys are from western Arkansas and they're about as good a hunters as there are. They're going to tag team this story about a horseback deer hunt that went really well until right at the end. 00:30:01 Speaker 4: We left out that morning wait before daylight. It was the first morning a gun season. First morning frosty, one of them good mornings. We ride in there, about four miles, tie the horses up. I headed up there to what we call the double gaps. I climbed the mountain. I get up there and I propped up against the tree. I mean, I had just got there and I heard this, the deer coming from down. And it is a deep, deep canyon, and it was something you wouldn't You wouldn't believe a deer would even go go off and come up. It was so steep and rough, and uh, there's not even many big trees growing in there. They're just it's just black jack and rocks, and the little black jacks, you know, they don't get six eight inches thick, you know. But then and one of them deer running through that junk like that, they make ten times more noise. It sounded like a whole heard a deer coming up, and they run and it was a big old dough come out first. She run right up thirty feet from me and just I mean saw me and just locked up and was looking at me and I The buck was probably fifty yards behind her. And then about that time he shows up he just he didn't know anything was going on. He was zeroed in on that old dough. He ran up right up to that dough. And you know when then win an old buck nose, there's something going on. If you've ever watched them there, they just all of a sudden, they'll just kind of hump up a little bit, their little tails starts fuzzing out, and he started doing that. I already had my gun up, but I just I put the crosshairs right behind his shoulder, just a few inches behind, and I squeezed that gun. And when I did, I mean that both of us. Deer took off the side of the mountain, and I thought I missed that deer, and I both at another shell in there right quick and shot. And that time he didn't go three steps. He went down and a little bit Travis, he shows up over there. You didn't even think it was me shooting. But I usually don't shoot twice, because you. 00:32:09 Speaker 3: Shot twice, you never shoot twice. And we got it that old deer. 00:32:12 Speaker 4: And when got the ass and got the horses, rode back up, rode back to the top of the mountain, and that's probably the first time we ever put it deer behind the camp. 00:32:21 Speaker 3: I don't know why we've done that, but we put it behind the cantle instead of in the front. 00:32:26 Speaker 4: It worked real good until we got the camp. Well, I think one reason we did that because it was up on top of that mountain. It's a sleep over there. You got them deer, if you got them in front of the sadle, you got to hold on to them, even if they're tired, you got to kind of hold them, and you know you're going off and you know it's it's it's pretty tough sometimes getting off the side of a big old mountain like that. So we put that one behind us behind Yep, that was the first and the last time because when we got to camp, that's whe of everything went south on us. 00:32:58 Speaker 3: Yeah, we got back there and we saw putting her horses away as me and my brother was with us. I know my boy was there. He's played riding with one of us. Anyway, Dale stepped off little big Cody and we had horses tied around there and they snap unsaddling. He took his knife cut one side of them strings holding that deer on. Well, he just that deer just went wopping, just hit on the ground. 00:33:20 Speaker 4: Yeah, I cut it. I cut him loose on that one side, and I wouldn't expected him. He just fell off, just flopped over. So Cody, he's got a deer hit the ground beside him, tied to him by a back leg or both back legs, and the way he goes. Well, he stepped over to see what was going on. And he wasn't a bronchy horse now. He just stepped over to see what was going on, and it started pulling, and it was following me, and then he thought. 00:33:45 Speaker 3: Further he went the more that old buck was chasing him, and it just round and around, and we had horses upside down, in backwards and underneath, horse traded goose necks and everywhich way was just throwing throwing a fit. And I told my boy, I said run, I said, get out of here. And all of a sudden he just took off like this little cotton top, running off the hill. He's about five years old. He was cutting for tisa, getting away from all that list. 00:34:11 Speaker 4: I finally I just jumped on that deer and I cut it loose. So we got the deer cut loose. 00:34:16 Speaker 3: Run. 00:34:16 Speaker 4: Everything was all right, it's a wonder somebody here and it got run over and stomped and oh yeah. 00:34:25 Speaker 2: That sounds like a rodeo. And if you've never been in the midst of a horse fit, as Travis described it, the power, energy and the flight response felt by most is a wild sensation. It's kind of a sense of helplessness. But a good hand keeps a level head and knows what to do to calm the situation down. But I don't think these guys cared much because they killed a big buck that morning. Our next story is told by Stony Edwards. Does that name ring a bell? Stony is the son of Charlie Edwards and the nephew of Louis Dale Edwards. Stony was on the Genuine Outlaws series talking about his dad and uncle. This story would mean more to you if you listen to those episodes starting at episode fifty one. This is a little more history about their deer camp and Louis Dale Edwards last buck. Here's Stony Edwards. 00:35:24 Speaker 7: Well, I'm Stony Edwards. Charlie Edwards was my dad, Louis was my uncle. We've been running dogs in the same exact woods my family has for one hundred years. A lot of people probably don't understand running dogs, and we do it different than others do. We all meet up at camp or we're at camp, everybody spreads out and they go get in the gaps in the mountains, and I mean, we walk wherever we've got to to get to a gap we think the dogs are going to run through. One of my favorite things in the world I make the deer drives. I go with the dogs sometimes. I all average three or four miles every morning just on foot in the mountains. I know where the stands are. I can turn loose just about anywhere, and I walked straight to wherever you said you was going that morning. But I've been doing this since I was six years old. Some of those stands are for our older members or not too far off the road. For the young ones. They get to go that two miles to get in there to a gap. That's usually where you kill the best deers. In there two miles. Nobody wants them stands. It's a long ways to drag one out. But we'll go in there and we'll sit till eleven thirty twelve o'clock and everybody will come out and we'll move our operation to another spot the road. Hunting thing for years at our camp was I mean, it was taboo. You bull, you shoot one off road, you're in trouble. And I say this, with all the lawless things that I know have been done over the years, that one seemed like one of the most minor ones. But that will sure get you a buttcheering from Dad or Uncle Wood up here camp. I mean, between Uncle Ludell and Dad and me, when we get to camp, we probably averaged about forty to fifty dogs. We could keep them fresh that way. Dad almost always had some MutS. These dogs could be anything from catahou occurs to part Australian shepherd walker beagle mix. I mean, and somehow or another, one of them dogs would always outrun the good ones. And I usually turn four to five dogs loose at a time. Makes the sound pretty ear when they're running. I mean, I can get a race with two dogs some of them. I can get a race with one dog. But a lot of times if you've got four or five dogs, you'll hear them split. They've jumped a couple of deer, or they've jumped a whole herd that's running and a buckle split off. A lot of times them dogs if you hear them split If you'll remember I talked about my little lemon drop dog. A lot of people talk about a dog that'll only run a buck. Now, I ain't gonna say she'll only run a buck, but if he splits off, she's gonna be on it. And of course the smell is different. She did it. I know she did it three times last year. I don't know if a person that's never hunted with dogs, it's hard to describe. I know a lot of them have turkey hunted, and the adrenaline rush you get when you're turkey hunting, it's a lot of the same rush. You hear them dogs coming. You don't know where the deer is gonna come from. Somewhere the direction of dogs are. But if you're in these mountains, everything echoes so to bad. You can't tell if they're coming up out of this holler, or they're coming up out of this holler, or what they're gonna do next. And you don't never know how far ahead of the dogs the deer is. 00:38:57 Speaker 2: If here's Stony's story of Louis Delle's last buck. We're sitting at the family's cafe in Big Fork, Arkansas. There's bucks all over the walls, but there's one big main frame eight point it's hanging directly across from me, and it's the buck that we're about to talk about. 00:39:17 Speaker 7: You know, me and Uncle Udell. We're standing there today. He killed this buck and we'd heard them dogs. Well, we're standing looking at man. From where we're standing, you can see nearly the whole length of it. We're listening to the dogs way back into the east of us. And he told me right then, he said that dear'll come out at the coral down there. Well, that coral is four hundred yards west of us down there. Neither one of us have gun, they'll shoot that far. And we stood there for a long time, watching listening to the dogs running, and we were pretty much done. Today it's eleven o'clock in the morning. Everybody's coming off their stands, and we kept listening to them. And directly we've seen that buck pop out down there trail, right where he said it would. And he had told me that a million times as the first deer I ever seen come out of there. But that deer come out and it turned and run right straight at us. Well, I'm not exaggerating on the four hundred yards, and I know that deer run over two hundred yards of it back to us and us standing there, well, we had grabbed guns and I had a thirty thirty. That deer wasn't gonna get close enough for me to even aim at it good. And he had a little six milimeter. He had started shooting. But we're listening to them dogs and they were still only about halfway out of the mountain, and he'd laid down and took rest. And that deer running there and turned broadside and he shot and it didn't kick, it didn't flinch. I thought he missed it, you know. And he's hollering at me, shoot that thing. I said, I got a thirty thirty, will shoot it anyway. And I raised up there and I shot. I seen where my bullet hit and it didn't even make it to the deer. And he wouldn't shoot again. I kept telling him shoot again directly. That deer just started going weak in the knees and dropped right there. I don't know if it was that little bitty bullet didn't affect him that much, you know, I'm used to when I hit them, they they're gonna go down a little bit. Anyway, he said, well, let's go get it, and I said, oh, wait a minute. Well, them dogs, three of them's pups. They're July and Walker mixed dogs, and their mama was with them. I had four dogs coming out and we sat there and listened to them. In twenty minutes after we shot that deer, I see the dogs pop out down there at the crall. I mean, they're that far behind that deer. And they turned and the boy, they come right straight to him, and I said, okay, let's go get him. Were by the time we got over there, they had eat had a corner of him, and I got him leashed up, and Uncleude I said that that was one of the prettiest races I ever heard. And I said, oh, that's just because you killed the deer, you know. And he's like, oh, I think you hit that deer. And I know I didn't hit the deer. I said, you hit him that first shot. Anyway, I got the dogs leashed up and he was holding them and I gutted it, fed them some liver, and we got it loaded, and he was so proud of it. And by this time he already had to mention. So I was worried more about how many more years this if we got before you know, he can't do it anymore. I told him, I said, you need to get that one mounted though, I said it might be the last good and you kill and I'd like to have it. And we sent it off and got it mounted. But turns out it was the last one and killed. 00:42:55 Speaker 2: That was a good story. Stony and continues to put some perspective around running deer with dogs. If you're in western Arkansas, go eat at Stoney's Cafe. It's called the Big Fork Mall. You won't be able to miss it, trust me, and the food is top notch, no joke. There's a Louis Delle and Charlie wall with a bear Grease podcast plaque on it hanging in the restaurant. Let me know if you swing by over there. Like I said before, there aren't that many places left in the country where you can still run deer with hounds, And as long as I'm still breathing, I'll be standing for those areas to remain open to it. Some of y'all may remember that on the ceiling of my office, the ceiling hangs a painting of an eighteen hundred's English fox hunt. 00:43:46 Speaker 5: There are men. 00:43:47 Speaker 2: Wearing fancy red jackets riding white horses, and the ground is crawling with walker fox hounds. Women and children are picnicking in the background. It's a beautiful scene. The reason the painting hangs on the ceiling is because for all practical purposes, real English fox hunts are pretty much gone or at least extremely rare. That thing no longer exists on the earth. That's why it's on the ceiling. That society let the prevailing trends of culture and power take it away. It just went out of style. And again, this isn't about if you like using dogs or not. It's about traditional use practices and not letting the shifting baseline of societal norms affect something as primitive as humans hunting with hounds in a very regulated, highly managed system. I do not run deer with dogs, and I'll never own a deer dog. I just feel like we need to stand up for our fellow hunters, even if they hunt differently than us. I just really love the diverse ways that we can hunt deer. And speaking of diversity, this next story is on the opposite end of the spectrum from running deer with dogs. I've been influenced by a wide variety of deer hunters. The Old Believer was a public land compound bow hunter fixated on finding white oak acorns with deer droppings underneath the canopy. That was his specialty. I was close friends with a family of dog hunters and killed some deer in front of dogs with guns. But when I was in my early twenties, I was introduced to a man named David Albright. I'd never met anybody quite like David. He was a traditional archer and a bow yer. He made his own bows, and he was driven by a pace, frequency, and dedication to process that was foreign to me. I was compelled and challenged by his descriptions of shooting a bow instinctively. David killed his limit of deer each year on some rough, tough, mountainous public land with long bows. He made himself. Not only was he an excellent hunter, he was a craftsman. As a young man, I remember thinking, now, that's the way to kill a white tail deer. David was inspirational to me, and the self imposed limitations that he placed on himself seemed so high. It was almost like an unachievable feat. He gave me my first long bow and lessons on instinctive shooting. I was never as dedicated or as successful as David, but his influence set me on a journey with traditional archery that I'm still on to this day. David's now seventy two years old, and honestly, he's hunting about as hard as he ever did. I'm very proud to introduce you to David Albright. 00:46:39 Speaker 9: Okay, my name is David Albright. I came to Arkansas forty two years ago from Chicago, which is not where I grew up. I grew up in Indiana, went to Chicago when the economy got poored work construction hung in for six years, couldn't take it any longer, and moved to Arkansas and from there life was life. I started deer hunting here in Arkansas. I never hunted deer in Indiana or Illinois. I really really got to like it. Started out gun hunting, started muzzle load hunting that was a lot better, and then started bow hunting, and that's when I really started learning about deer. You got to watch him. You had to watch him gun hunting. You'd see you deer for a minute or two and shoot it. Bow hunting, you may watch it for an hour and it walks away. So that was a good deal getting into bow hunting. And I had one compound bow and hated it. I killed my first deer with the bow with it. So I dug out an old ree curve I had bought when I was eighteen, started shooting it and had a buddy that had a long bow, so I played with it a little bit and bought one for myself. Shot it for a couple of years and wanted something else and started reading about building on bows. 00:48:14 Speaker 2: David started building his own long bows in nineteen ninety one. I asked him why he loved traditional archery so much. 00:48:22 Speaker 9: I guess gun hunting it was a great way to start hunting and learn the basics. But it was just over so fast that when I started bow hunting, everything slowed down. You know. I would see deer that if I had been rifle hunting, would be dead. I'd have it gutted back at the house, butchering it, but instead bow hunting, I'm still sitting in the tree watching that deer, learning what it's doing. And that's basically it. I mean it was just more fulfilling for me to be forced to learn to hunt so close to the animal that I could kill it with a primitive weapon. The average deer that I've killed over the years, my average distance is probably fifteen yards. Twenty eight yards was the longest, and eight yards was the closest. And that's real exciting to me to try and be quiet enough and not screw up anything you're doing. And when they're that close, you can't do anything wrong. I mean, if you turn your shoe and it squeaks, they look up at you immediately they pinpoint you. So I've made all those mistakes and learn from them, but it's just really fulfilling to get that close and to pull off the shot and make the shot without screwing up. 00:49:57 Speaker 2: I came to David's shop with one store you on my mind. There's a rack euro mounted land on the stone fireplace mantel. It's got G two's over thirteen inches long and G three's over ten. It would be an incredible deer anywhere in the country, but for mountainous public land in the South. Killed with a bow he made himself. It's a lifetime achievement. I wanted to hear that story. 00:50:25 Speaker 9: This was on the river, and the reason I was hunting there that year is kind of like this year. There weren't a lot of acorns anywhere else, and along the river, you know, it's more moist and trees do better, and there were acrens there. And I went to a spot I've walked within seventy five yards of one hundred times and never walked into that little strip of woods. It's real thick, and it just never crossed my mind that that would be a place to hunt. But I decided to walk it out anyway, and I found a real distinct deer trail. Going through it, I found some big tracks and some big buck droppings, had a lot of dough track dough droppings, and I I started looking around. All the trees were small, and I had just about give it up, and I saw this one tree that was probably not quite twelve inches in diameter, not a very big tree. So anyway, I set up on this tree, got up in it and looked around, and it's so thick there I just had a three foot diameter hole to shoot to the trail here, maybe a two foot hole here, and then over here there was about a maybe a six or seven foot long strip of the trail open. 00:51:52 Speaker 2: David had hunted in there a few days before and saw some does feeding on acorns, which he would have shot if they'd have been closer. He was encouraged and decided to go back and sit again on this rainy morning. 00:52:06 Speaker 9: That hunt almost didn't happen. I got up that morning and it was raining, so I turned away a chinnel and watched, and you could see that it was just about past us. I mean, we were on the right, on the verge. So I went ahead and got all my stuff together, took my time. I got to stand probably an hour and minutes later than I would have had it not rained. And when I got to stand still, water dripping out of the trees. I mean, the kind of day you really wonder if you should be bow hunting or not. Probably hadn't been on stand thirty minutes and two doughs came in. They weren't on the trail, they were beyond it, probably thirty yards from me. They were feeding on the opposite side of this big oak tree. And I kept watching them, and I stood up and got situated and ready to make a shot. But they were just too far, but they were feeding my way, and they got maybe two about twenty twenty two yards, and both of them at the same times heads bobbed up and turned to my right. I didn't know what was going on. I turned my head and looked, and here came this huge buck, just slowly meandering on the trail right towards me, and I just I nearly passed out. I just I couldn't believe it, and I had no time. I mean, he was twenty yards from me and just a steady slow walk, and he was looking at the dos. And when he got to about oh ten yards, he was behind cover. You know, I kind of cup and realized I needed to turn, and I did, and as he was behind that cover, I got the bow up and ready. When his nose come out, I drew the bow and as he cleared the cover, I looked at the spot behind his shoulder and let it go and it drilled him perfect. There was a little bit of the fletching sticking out the entry side, and he bolted right away. I heard the arrow snap. Another ten yards, I heard another snap. But anyway, he runs, makes a curve and goes out of sight. I thought I could hear a crash, but I wasn't certain. The woods was pretty quiet because it was so wet, and a squirrel started raising cane in the same spot and just went on and on for about five minutes. He never stopped, just chatter, chatter, chatter. So I thought, man, I hope, I hope that means that that deer's down over there. After I got control of myself where I thought I could climb down without falling, I eased down the ladder. I mean, it was a great hit on my side and at eight yards and I was fourteen feet to my foot platform. Pretty good I angle, I figured it. You know, it came out low on the opposite side, so I expected a really really good hit and a lot of blood. So I continued around following his tracks and a little bit of blood. But like I say, nothing like I expected. I expected a lot of blood. And I got around pretty close to where I had heard the squirrel and I could see one ant or sticking up and I was just like, oh my gosh. I mean, it seemed like it was a knee high, you know, sticking up the out of the scrub. So I walked up to it and looked at it and knelt down, gave thanks for it, and I just I was dumbfounded. I mean, I never expected to kill that big a deer. I mean from stand I have never seen that big a deer until that day. 00:56:27 Speaker 2: The deer was a mainframe nine point that I scored myself at one fifty five and five eighths. It's just a magnificent buck. It's got an eighteen inch spread, twenty four inch plus main beams and thirteen inch g two's. The best part of the story is that it couldn't have gone to a more deserving and appreciative hunter. I hope you're taking note of the diversity of stories on this series inside the spectrum of hunting. Dog hunter who runs deer with dogs and shoot him with a rifle couldn't be much further in terms of strategy from a traditional archer making his own bows and hunting out of a tree stand. However, I believe that they're a lot more alike than they are different. They're both dedicated live, eat, and breathe white tailed deer, but their biggest similarity is their passion for a specific way of doing it in the grand scheme of mankind and the incredible diverse possibilities of interests that a person might have on planet Earth. These guys, a dog hunter and a traditional archer, are basically fraternal twins. In today's world, it's so powerful for us to put aside our differences and cling to what unites us. In this case, it's the love of the white tail deer. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. These stories series are some of my favorite I really enjoy going out and sitting with these people face to face and hearing their stories. 00:58:05 Speaker 5: I love it. 00:58:07 Speaker 2: If you're looking for the best white tailed gear in the industry, check out First Life, and if you're near a shield store, you can go and try on all our gear at their stores. I hope you get out into the wild this week and chase the deer. Remember we're living in the heyday the white tailed deer. 00:58:25 Speaker 6: Honey, have a great work.