00:00:05 Speaker 1: I don't know where I got this. I don't know what drives Amanda to jump out of bed and a frosty morning and go several miles back in the mountain to sit there in a tree all day. 00:00:16 Speaker 2: This is our third and final Deer Stories episode of twenty twenty three, and we are now in the core of the best white tailed dates on the calendar, and to stoke the fire, we're going to tell some wild stories. One from the big Mountains of East Tennessee, couple from Kansas. We're going to talk about some decoyed bucks, some coyotes and bucks, some deer doged bucks, and a two hundred inch buck, and one straight up deer hunting lie. The connector of all these stories in all three episodes we've heard is the passion, respect, and a true appreciation of deer hunting translated through the voices of these hunters. What a privilege it is to be a white tail hunter and we're living in its heyday. After this podcast, we're going back to our regular documentary style stories, So enjoy this last episode before we start learning hard stuff and digging deep again, cracking into this American hunting culture. We've found ourselves embedded in. But that being said, our stories carry the culture, our values, and our future. I really doubt you're gonna want to miss this one. 00:01:29 Speaker 3: It was a weird deal, just an old majestic buck like that, you know, lived this whole life and it was just my buck of a lifetime. We start taping this deer well we ran out of tape. 00:01:48 Speaker 2: My name is Clay 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 gory of Americans who lived 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. Henry Sioux Song is eighty years old and from the rough country of East Tennessee. And if you've never been there, trust me, it is some rough country that rivals anywhere on this continent. Mister Henry stands among an elite class of humans healthy enough to pursue their passions into their eighties. But perhaps even more unique, his internal drive for his passion hasn't decreased. His fire burns hot. The man bubbles with infectious energy. When I went to mister Henry's home, he led me into a large room filled wall to wall with deer heads, and I mean big deer. He grinned like a possum meating red ants while describing how he and his sons had taken all these deer with archery gear. Many came from Tennessee, others came from the Midwest. The bucks ranged from basket racks to stacks of one fifties and one sixties, all the way up to a two hundred and twenty inch giant. He had one buck with a twenty seven inch spread on the wall. I asked mister Henry to tell me his most memorable story, which was difficult, but this is the one that he picked. Meet mister Henry. 00:03:38 Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety one is when I first found sign of this big buck. It was deep in a Cherokee National Forest. It began when my son and I went there and hunted a couple of years. He wound up killing a one hundred and thirty four inch eight point I think, and another big buck that they called slew Foot because he was crippling one leg, which made I guess that leg or the other leg. When he made a scrape, it was a lot bigger than it should be. So we got to going back in this area and packing in and staying, you know, three days at a time. We come out. First year when I found the sign of the big buck, we didn't get him. The acorn crop wasn't real good. Second year, same thing. I found the sign, knew there was a big buck there, but again the acorns weren't real good. Probably he had some rubs the size of a ball capot six seven inches through quite a few of Then comes the third year, and we had been to Illinois looking for some deer sign and my son was all enthused about going to Illinois, and I thought, I can't go to Illinois. 00:04:57 Speaker 3: Nick. 00:04:58 Speaker 1: I found about forty crapes on one ridge back there, and the mountains are pretty steep back in that end. On the crest of the ridges, it's where the deer makes scrapes, and I also feed on acres sometimes. The sign that he made would be two miles long. He said, if I go back there one more trip with you, will you then go to Illinoise. I said, yeah, you give me one more change. I said, let's go back there and see if we can't get him. So we went back and put our little pufp tin up packed ten put her pup tin up. It was October the twenty eighth, nineteen ninety three, went hundred trees stands, and the next morning, just a crack of daylight, I heard something that i'd heard before, and it was a deer having his horns in limbs over his head. There was a clicking sound. A lot of people heard it. Then he came out the top of a ridge and I could see the top of his rack. I had never seen the deer before, but I knew he was big. By studying the sign, you can tell a lot, but the sign by the track and the scrapes, by the damage he does. So he came out this ridge and he had two scrapes underneath the tree I was in, and I thought, well, maybe he will go straight ahead. If he does, he's too far to shoot. But he didn't. He turned down the ridge comes straight to the scrapes. I shot him when he's standing right below the scrape, within ten foot of the tree, right down through the between the front shoulders. He ran out the ridge about seventy five eighty yards turned down the ridge and went out of my sight. So I sat there for a little while, and I knew immediately it's been several years ago. It's the biggest deer I'd ever seen, both horns and body wise. So I got out out of the tree, went down there, and the direction he run. I didn't try to follow the blood trail, but I knew why I could pick it up. But when I got down there, I was looking up on the size of the ridge looking for him, and looked down and he was right under my feet dead. One thing that I thought was really interesting. I finally found my son. He got out out of the tree about eleven o'clock and come back to for with camp and I told him, I said, I got him. So we started pulling this deer at twelve o'clock. We put him on the four wheeler at nine o'clock at night. That's how That's how tough it was to get out. It was just I mean, it was just so far back, you know, in a remote area, but we got him out. So it was just an absolute huge deer for the high a mountain, Yeah, you know, amazing in this part of the country. Scored one hundred and fifty five inches and it's only got five eighths of a niche deduction on the whole rack. That's that's kind of an amazing thing too. I've never seen one that close. That's just that's you know, that's just one of the stories. He's hanging right here right now. I don't know where I got this. I don't know what drives a man to jump out of bed and frosty morning and go several miles back in the mountains to sit thereunder a tree all day. Except none of my people, as far as I can find out, fish or hunted. An old man in North Carolina. When I was twenty eight years old, I got acquaint which sold me a used bow he had in three wooden iras for twenty dollars, and that's where I started. I think maybe I shot at a deer that year, but a friend of mine went with men. Someone asked him, as you see a deer, He said, yeah, Henry shot at one. He said, how close was it? He said, well, it kissed him. I missed him. I found an old tree stand back in the mountains and got up in it. Said I didn't have a tree stand, and for the first three or four years, I didn't have a tree stand. I finally figured out I could take an old Coca Cola case that they used to put bottles in it up in a tree. It made a pretty good stand. So that's what I hunted off over too through a year. But it's been many years ago. But it's something you get into that you love and you just get it in your blood. A lot of times when I go back in the mountains, I like to go back there in October and watch the leaves fall when they all turn. And I've always thought there's something magic in the mountains. You know, it's kind of magical to watch boomers. You know what a boomer is. Okay, a boomer is a little squirrel. They're fastest green lighting and they live about five thousand feet elevation in the mountains, and I like to watch those play. They're fast. I like to watch squirrels bear all the animals. I mean, it's just magic for me. Once you get in your blood, you can't get it out. You've got to go every year. But that's the story of my favorite buck from the place in the Turkey National Forest. 00:09:57 Speaker 2: Are you as passionate about bow hunting now as you were when you were in your thirties every bit. 00:10:02 Speaker 1: So probably the reason that is is I know what's coming to an end. 00:10:08 Speaker 3: You know. 00:10:08 Speaker 1: I've been forciate enough to hunt some some people had a lot of respect for over the years. And one of my one of my good friends, was ten years and ten days older than I am, and he told me one day, he said, there'll come a day when you'll have to stop, and it'll be it'll be tough on you. He said, happen to me, it'll happen to you. And I know that's true. Yeah, but I still love to go back in the mountains and I can still do it and probably will till something happens. Give you an example. Last year, I was in the remote area. I called and I was on top of the mountain. It takes about an hour to get up there, up a tree, and a fella came by and he finally spotted me, and he stopped by and apologized for, you know, affecting my dear honey. I said, man, I haven't seen anything, and he said, I believe I've seen you here before and I said, yeah, I've hunted here for many years. And he said how old are you? And I said I'll be eighty my birthday and he said, man, I can't believe it, he said. I said, you don't have to say anything. I know how lucky I am, you know. But when he left, he said, you know it's amazing. He said, come on top of this mountain and see an old man up a tree that's seventy nine years old. But I've been lucky. Maybe the reason that I go to the High Country's course he's taking care of me. 00:11:34 Speaker 2: Mister Henry is a special man, full of energy, passion, and a love of white tailed deer hunting that rivals any I've encountered. To my knowledge, he's never been interviewed about his hunting. He never cared to be, but he's been extremely successful as a bow hunter in Passing. He told me that once some knucklehead had spread a rumor in the community that those Sioux song boys were killing all these deer at night. He chuckled and told the numbskulled naysayer, they're hard enough to kill during the daytime. I can't imagine trying to kill one at night, As if to say, we're not as good. 00:12:13 Speaker 4: As you think we are. Buddy, but I appreciate it. I thought that was pretty witty. 00:12:18 Speaker 2: Mister Henry, thanks for sharing your story with us. Our next story is told by my friend Aaron Stanfel. He was on our first Deer Stories episode and told about going to the bathroom and calling in those two deer. Here's a short story about two wild days in Kansas with his brother Andy. 00:12:43 Speaker 3: My brother and I are in Kansas two thousand and nine, on his birthday, November the tenth, we were hunting a huge beanfield and we had decided that we were going to try to decoy a deer in for the first time. So when we uh, we bought us a primos I don't remember. I think his name was Bucky Little primost Bucky Dick coming to a green bag. We set it up at the edge of the beanfield, and we'd watched enough videos we knew to turn it kind of turning towards us in the tree. You want to do that because if a deer's coming in, you want the deer to come around your decoy because he'll always come in and face him headfirst. He won't ever approach another deer from the back. So we knew if he come around to the front. 00:13:28 Speaker 1: We'd have a. 00:13:29 Speaker 3: Broadside shot the deer with We put this bucky dikoy up eighteen yards in front of us. We was both in this big cedar tree. Here steps out a beautiful, beautiful nine pointer out of the corner of the beanfield, probably about I don't know, one hundred yards. It was kind of walking away, but it stopped and it saw the decoy. And when it did, it immediately immediately through its ears back straight backwards and just bristled up and kind of just hunched over and just stiff legged all the way across the field. It was the most dramatic, the most exciting thing that I've ever witnessed. Comes all the way into the decoy. I had to close my eyes. I'll never forget I had my eyes closed. I was just trying to get my thoughts together. I was like, I have got to keep it together right here. 00:14:18 Speaker 4: I was so. 00:14:19 Speaker 3: Nervous, I was shaking. It comes around the head of the decoy and it just throws its head and it knocks the whole head off of the decoy just out there on the ground. Well, when it did, the deer just stood there, still run off. It just stood there like, what in the world, you know, And my brother's like, Aaron, what. 00:14:37 Speaker 4: Are you doing? 00:14:38 Speaker 5: Shoot the deer? Shoot the deer, And. 00:14:40 Speaker 3: I'm like, hang on, I gotta get this together. I was like, I can't even draw my bow back. I was shaking so much. And anyway, I finally got drew back, made a great shot on the deer and it expired right there in the middle of the bean field. Still probably the most exciting hunt I've ever been and just the way that he came in was just incredible. The next evening, my brother said, hey, let's do that again. Let's get in the same tree. We'll do the same thing. There's gotta be another deer in there. So we did another really nice deer, probably one hundred and thirty five inch ten pointer, come out the far other end of the beanfield, probably four hundred yards, just had his look through the binoculars to see it. My brother said, Aaron, there's a big buck. He's like, snort, wheeze addy, So I just sh you know, really loud. He heard it, and he come running all the way across the beanfield, saw the decoy, exact same thing, come in head first to the decoy, and he made a fantastic shot on the deer. We filmed the whole thing. We killed bucks back to back nights over at Decoy, and but we snort wheezed that deer and it was it was so such a good hunt. 00:15:54 Speaker 2: That's some good hunting. I asked Aaron if he had any more memorable stories. He hesitated for a moment and said he'd like to tell one. It's really more of a confession than a story. The two other guys that he's gonna mention here are mutual friends of ours, Scott Brown and Lucas Austin. And this story is not Bear Grease approved, mister Aaron, but I'm pretty sure everybody's gonna enjoy it. 00:16:21 Speaker 3: I got a funny one. I don't know what year it was, it had to have been nineteen ninety eight or nineteen ninety nine. That's when I met all the Meana bunch, and I'd invited them to come over and have a deer camp with us over on some public land here in north of Arkansas. And Lucas Awsen and Scott Brown they had been out driving around scouting for the deer camp, and they came back to camp and it was a tough year. I hadn't found any sign at all to even hunting. They came back to camp and of course, I you know, I told him that I knew the woods like the back of my hand. You know, I knew every ridge over there. 00:16:57 Speaker 5: I knew well. 00:16:58 Speaker 3: They came back to camp and they said, man, we have flat out found him. Said, we have found this ridge that is just covered in deer, sun, white oak, acorns all over the ground. I thought, man, really we're at said, you know over there, and they described exactly where it was at, and I said, yeah, I've got to I've got a tree stand. I've never told this for I've never I don't think they're even told brown. 00:17:23 Speaker 6: See. 00:17:23 Speaker 3: Yeah, I've got a tree stand on that ridge. They said, you've got to be kidding me. We didn't see one. I said, yeah, I do. I said I've got one up there the top. And I didn't have a tree stand there. And they thought, man, that was should have known. You know, Stanfield is gonna be have He's already figured found out. So they went somewhere else. The next day, I whilled in there at daylight and I hadn't been in the tree ten minutes, and the big ol'd dough come in there and I shot her, and I don't think I ever told them. We've called that liar's ridge to this day. I'm not proud of it, but that's just how it happened. 00:18:10 Speaker 2: Aaron, that was downright dirty, brother. I'm glad you finally got that off your chest. Confession is a powerful tool, and I think you owe Scott and Luca deer. The way I figure it, twenty years of compound interest on a doe deer, by my calculations, equals one hundred and thirty five inch buck. You owe both of them both one hundred and thirty five inch deer. Don't lie to your hunting buddies, Okay, I'm going to tell the next story. This was the first big buck that I ever killed. This is one of my most memorable hunts. It was October the twenty fifth, nineteen ninety eight. And that's an important date because as a deer I've learned that dates are very important, and it's something that I remember pretty well. 00:19:06 Speaker 4: Of the deer that I've killed, I could tell you the. 00:19:09 Speaker 2: Date of almost every one of the big bucks, and it started with this one. 00:19:16 Speaker 4: I was nineteen years old. 00:19:18 Speaker 2: I was coming back to my hometown from where I was going to college my first year of college at Arkansas Tech University, I was going back to hunt with Dad on some scrubby public land that we grew up hunting. This land was primarily pine plantation. There was a lot of forestry going on there, so there were a lot of clear cuts, but they would leave the hardwood timber along the riparian zones along the creeks, and in late October when the acrons were falling, that's where you'd find the deer wherever you found the oaks, which was along the creeks. This was the spot that my dad and I had hunted a lot in years previous. 00:19:58 Speaker 4: It was a place we called blue Bucket. 00:20:01 Speaker 2: First time Dad went in there, he saw a blue bucket, and so from then on it was called blue Bucket. Basically, it was a narrow strip of hardwood timber with two clearcuts on either side, and the clearcuts met and the timber narrowed down into a point, and right at that point was where Dad. 00:20:21 Speaker 4: Had found multiple big scrapes. 00:20:24 Speaker 2: And he had been in there scouting in the middle of the day the week before, bumbling around and actually heard a deer coming, got real quiet and still and watched this big buck come through the mill around in there, which was really unusual to lay your eyes on a big buck while you're scouting. And for whatever reason, that next weekend, Dad didn't want to hunt in there. He probably just wanted me to have the good spot. But I went in there and hung a stand within twenty yards of this scrape. I went in early on the morning of the twenty fifth. There was a frost on the ground. It was just the perfect morning. At this time in my hunting career, I had killed several deer with a bow, but I had never killed a mature buck, And honestly, I had never seen a mature buck from stand. And this is also a time when we didn't have trail cameras, we didn't have cell phones, and I might hunt a whole season to get an opportunity at one spike buck. Well, as the morning came on about forty five minutes after daylight, about the time you feel like you ought to be seeing some game, I hear something coming in behind me in the leaves. 00:21:34 Speaker 4: I hear walking. I get ready. 00:21:37 Speaker 2: I turn around, and here comes a coyote and he's zigging and zagging through the trees, mousing hunting, and he starts hunting all around these oaks that are just raining acrens that my deer are about to be at. The kyote gets in right close to this big scrape, and I didn't hesitate, and I still don't hesitate to this day. I learned with predators that if you're going to shoot one with a bow, you can't hesitate. You just have to make up your mind before they even get there that you're going to shoot a coyote if it's legal, and it was. By the time he got into the open, he's like ten feet from this big. 00:22:14 Speaker 4: Scrape and I pull back and shoot this coyote. 00:22:18 Speaker 2: He drops right there, right in the heart of where the deer activity is supposed to be. There's a dead coyote laying there. I realize I got to do something. I climb out of the stand. I dragged the coyote over to the creek within sight of my stand and throw it in the water so it's submerged in the water, so that a deer wouldn't be smelling the kyote. But still there's kyote blood and scent all just right around where the deer going to be I think my morning's probably shot. Climb back up in the tree about an hour later, so now it's probably around eight point thirty. I hear something coming. I hear steady walking, steady, loud walking. It's so loud that I think it's a cow because there were free range cattle on this public land, or I think it's a man. Typically a deer is gonna walk and stop, walk a little bit and stop. This was just steady for fifty sixty seventy yards, just steady and loud. And I get to the point where I'm not even excited anymore. I'm just waiting for a man to pop out or a cow. Well, my eyes are just fixed on where I think this sound's gonna pop up. And man, I look up and there's the biggest buck I have seen from the stand in my whole life, probably the biggest deer. 00:23:44 Speaker 4: I've ever seen. 00:23:45 Speaker 2: And he proceeds to walk right past where that coyote was, right past the coyote blood stand in the middle of that scrape, and go to work in that scrape. Well about the time he gets there, I get to full draw and I'm shooting a Matthew Zmax, which was a brand new bow to me, and it had a very distinct valley, which means at the pinnacle moment of the draw cycle it drops into its let off very quickly. 00:24:12 Speaker 4: And so that's great. 00:24:15 Speaker 2: But I was having trouble though, when I would relax a little bit too much right before the shot and the bow would jerk down and. 00:24:23 Speaker 4: I'm at full draw. 00:24:24 Speaker 2: The biggest buck I've ever seen is working a scrape, which this is something I'd only seen on television, and I'm about to shoot this deer at twenty yards and boom, the bow jerks down and I have this fast, erratic movement. 00:24:39 Speaker 4: I just know that the buck has seen me. 00:24:42 Speaker 2: I close my eyes and I just barely crack him open, expecting to see a tail running off. 00:24:48 Speaker 4: And the buck has not seen me. 00:24:50 Speaker 2: But he's now done working his scrape and he's turning and he's leaving. 00:24:56 Speaker 4: I draw the bow back. The deer is now at. 00:24:59 Speaker 2: Thirty three yard it's quartering away, and he stops out there and I touch off the trigger and the arrow just arcs into one of the most beautiful shots I've ever made. The Arab just buried up to the fletching behind the last rib on a steep quartering shot and the deer runs off. 00:25:21 Speaker 4: So it's eight thirty in the morning. 00:25:22 Speaker 2: I've now got a coyote in the creek and I've shot a big buck. And we didn't have cell phones. I couldn't call my dad. He was gonna come back at eleven o'clock that morning. It's a really unique feeling that I had never fully felt before. When when you've killed a big deer but you hadn't recovered it yet. It's a unique experience of the mind, soul, body, spirit. There's chemicals flowing, there's emotions flowing. That's hard to describe. I don't know that you could describe it to a non hunter, that feeling that we get. And I just paced up and down the road, paced up and down the road for two and a half hours, and at about eleven ten, Dad pulls up and he said he could tell when he saw me in the road that something special had happened. And I say, Dad, I've killed a big buck. 00:26:14 Speaker 4: We go track the deer. The deer hadn't run fifty yards and it's the biggest deer I've ever killed. It was a very mature buck. 00:26:23 Speaker 2: It had to have weighed at the upper side of what deer in that region would weigh. I mean, it was a big four and a half five and a half year old buck. We took a bunch of pictures, and I remember we took a picture down to the local bow shop in my hometown and hung that picture up on the wall. And I remember what a deep sense of accomplishment that I felt, as I was one of the people in the community that year that killed a really nice deer with a bow, and I remember the local paper took my picture, and at the time I wouldn't have realized how meaningful that was to me and how much that influenced me. 00:27:00 Speaker 4: He had a double white throat patch. 00:27:03 Speaker 2: He was a nine point that scored one hundred and twenty six inches, and that buck hangs in my office to this day. That was a memorable buck that hooked me on those white oak acres for life and made me love October twenty fifth. At the time, I didn't understand the larger significance of that date, but in general, many of the best hunters I know will say from October twenty fifth through about November the tenth are the best days of the classic Midwestern type rut. I'm sure you understand that peak breeding can be slightly to largely different regionally, but in many places white tails live. October twenty fifth is when it starts getting good. In October twenty fifth, nineteen ninety eight is when deer hunting started getting good for me. Our next storyteller is my colleague meat eater Casey Smith of East Texas, CA. C. Smith and Tyler Jones have a YouTube channel and a podcast called The Element, and I'd say these boys are pretty radical whitetail hunters. Case likes to run and gun, and this story is about a very unique ground hunt and the great planes that produced Casey's biggest whitetail Meet. 00:28:25 Speaker 4: Casey Smith. 00:28:28 Speaker 5: Now, I have a habit of being confident, or what some might call reckless when chasing deer round on the ground, and that comes from a good place, I feel like. 00:28:38 Speaker 6: I mean, I always try to be a real optimistic guy, and I always like to think that I have what it takes to go out there and shoot a big buck. 00:28:49 Speaker 5: Not always the case, but I feel. 00:28:51 Speaker 6: Like you just can't approach it from a position of doubt, right, it just doesn't work out, And in fact, A lot of this comes from the fact that we us up so much. 00:29:01 Speaker 5: Tyler and I have been trying to. 00:29:02 Speaker 6: Shoot big deer on the ground for quite a few years now, and at the beginning, we used to get so hot broken because we would just fail all the time. And it got to the point where it was like, well, we might as well go out there and chase him, because we're gonna mess it up anyways, Let's not put too much into it, don't overthink it, just go after him. And somehow, some way that actually produced like a level of confidence and we started. 00:29:26 Speaker 5: To get a little bit better at this. 00:29:29 Speaker 6: Well, we are up in a plain state, and I am just having a dog of a time. 00:29:34 Speaker 5: I mean I didn't have any place to hunt, and the wind direction changed on me. 00:29:39 Speaker 6: I couldn't hunt that property and didn't know if I even wanted to anyways. 00:29:43 Speaker 5: Because I already bumped all the deer off of. 00:29:45 Speaker 6: It, and that was about the only piece of public ground that I had access to in the area. 00:29:50 Speaker 5: So I was just kind of in a tight spot. 00:29:53 Speaker 6: Well, we did the thing that we always say we're not gonna do, and we hit the phones and started calling landowners, and sure enough, Tyler pulled one out man, just like one of the. 00:30:05 Speaker 5: Best bro moves you can imagine. He called up this guy who he'd. 00:30:09 Speaker 6: Had a contact with a few years back and somehow got us some permission on an awesome piece of ground. I end up staying up practically all night long, sick, going to the bathroom multiple times, just as bad as you can imagine, for about. 00:30:28 Speaker 5: Eight hours being sick. That's what I was. Well. 00:30:34 Speaker 6: Round about two thirty in the morning, I finally think I had my last episode and I get to lay down for about two hours get some rest. But I set my alarm for four forty five or whatever it was, because I mean, it's November seventh. I cannot miss this day. It is one of the best deer hunting days on the calendar. Alarm goes on off, roll over, get out of bed. Me and my buddy Greg head out that morning. We're running late, but it's better late than ever whenever you've been sick, and it's an awesome day of hunting, and sure enough, beautiful morning, frost everywhere, super steell, just that great crisp feeling that we all love as deer hunters. We decided to park the truck and just kind of hike down the hill and do something I don't really like to do very much, but I'd call it an observation sit. 00:31:31 Speaker 5: I have my bow with me, but I'm not gonna do too much. 00:31:34 Speaker 6: I don't think I'm just gonna try to be out there, maybe try to kill something that night off of what I'd learned that day, and we hike down, go to glassing and looking around. I do have my rattling andlers with me just in case. Sure enough, I can see a deer about eight hundred yards away, maybe a little closer, I don't know, and I watch him. I'm a by nose. I can tell it's a buck. And then he's following this fence line and he's starts to get about as close as he's ever going to get to us. And if he continues on, he's going to start to get further away, about five hundred yards out. 00:32:08 Speaker 5: I said, why not. 00:32:11 Speaker 6: I get my rattling antlers, start hitting them together as hard as you can, and the sound carries. I see that deer whip his head around, and at that point in time, it's like, oh my goodness, this just went from who knows what to like this could happen, and sure enough that deer does a oneint eighty jumps the fence, and at that point in time, it's full fledged hunt mode. We're en rolling terrain and this buck is coming up trying to get the winds. That's what they do when you rattle at him. They try to go smell and see what's going on. See if they know those deer just have a safe approach to the situation. So I run down the hill about eighty ninety yards and get set up right on the back side of this rise so that this deer will come up and be looking where I was, not where I am, And sure enough I kind of can see the top of his back over the hill. He drops down where I can't see him, and we just get ready to get hunkered down. I get up on one knee, get my bow in my hand, ready to go, and all I see is brow times pop up over the sage. Somehow, some way, probably my sickness helped me hold it together, because I didn't have enough energy to be overly excited. And this deer's looking and he's got the sun in his eyes. He can't see us just standing there on the ball open prairie right. He takes a couple more steps forward and then kind of locks it up and looks at us. And somehow, some way I had the boldness as that deer's looking at me at like thirty yards at full draw, I give him a light snort wheeze, and that's enough to make that deer say, you know what. I don't know what that is, but I don't like what he said to me. He takes two steps forward. I grunt stop. 00:33:56 Speaker 5: Him, squeeze my release, and Pap just ham this thing. 00:34:01 Speaker 6: And I knew right away it wasn't my greatest shot, but it was very lethal in the vitals. And we watched that deer run out about one hundred yards, do a semicircle. 00:34:12 Speaker 5: And then lie down. And I watched him until his. 00:34:16 Speaker 6: Antler's laid down on the ground, and from there it was just pure elation. I just could not believe I'd had the night I had, and it turned into the day that it did. This buck is awesome. He's a mainframe ten twenty one inches wide. I haven't measured him out all the way though, so I don't know exactly what he'd score, but I'd say he pushes right at that one hundred and sixty mark and he's got split brow time. It's just a beautiful, beautiful deer, excellent representation of what a mature buck looks like on a plain state. 00:34:45 Speaker 5: And I just could not be more thankful. 00:34:49 Speaker 4: That was a good story. 00:34:50 Speaker 2: Casey way to tough it out, take a chance with the rattling, and make the absolute most of an opportunity. 00:34:57 Speaker 4: That was some good hunting. 00:34:58 Speaker 2: And I'd say out of a hundred whitetail hunters wouldn't have killed that buck. The only other one that would have probably would have been your buddy Tyler Jones. These element guys have a way of doing this kind of stuff a lot. Our next story is told by a man that I have known since nineteen ninety eight and I consider him the real deal. 00:35:21 Speaker 4: His name is. 00:35:21 Speaker 2: Hooch McDonald, and he's what i'd call a bonafide dog man. As you've heard, I love to celebrate the diversity of ways in which we hunt deer in America. Hooch is from a region of Arkansas where dog hunting is alive and well, he's going to spend some time telling the inns and outs of running deer with dogs. Some of it might surprise you. Here's old Hooch. 00:35:46 Speaker 7: My name is James McDonald, but most folks call me hooch. I've been hooch since before I was born. They call me hoos because of my grandpa. He passed about a month before I was born. It's not real shit. Which of these were the cause of me being hooch. But he was a moonshiner for one, and hooch is a slang for moonshine, so that's one one thought. And then my dad wanted to call me hoot after one of his uncles. And then they think that my grandpa just couldn't really get hoot out and he kept saying hooch, so when they lost him, and then I came along right after, the name stuck. Deer hunt in the South with dogs is a complete social event. There is no sitting in a tree by yourself watching sign feed Paul whatever. It's buddies and lots of camaraderie, storytelling, bull crap, you know, messing with each other. I mean, that's that's what makes it fun. And a typical day for us we start off a little bit before daylight. Either somebody will pick up breakfast and bring up there, or we'll get together early enough and we'll cook breakfast, and then about daylight we load dogs and then we all gather around and we decide who's turning and loose for one and where we're going to turn loose. 00:37:15 Speaker 1: And then the. 00:37:15 Speaker 7: Way we do it is we have crossings that we've known for years. Deer tendy use the same crossings. Like if we go into this block of woods, there's top three escape routes, but then there's others that you know. Sometimes they run up to that escape route and smell somebody, hear something, and they turn and go the other way and shoot out one of the other side routes. So we try to cover everything. Rarely do we cover everything well. The dog man, whoever's turning and loose, decides where he wants to go, and he usually ram rods the whole drive. People will speak up and say, you know, I want this stand if nobody else does, and then once everybody decides where they're going, he turns loose just cast the dogs. That's the way we hunt Some people down in the sandy country, they'll put them on a track, but we just kind of cast into the bedding areas acorn flats, lots of buck sign in places, you know, that's where with hot scrapes, and then the dogs are turned loose. Our style of dogs, for the most part, will coal trail. You know, they'll start barking some when they smell something. Once they get that deer up and running, they really get fired up, make lots of noise, and that's when it gets exciting. I have always had dogs with tree blood in them, whether it be trem walker's, red bones, blue ticks, even some English here and there. And the reason I like that is the tree dog always runs the track. He doesn't run the wind like some of these running dogs will. Some of these running dogs when they cross the road, they may be fifteen to twenty yards down the road, down wind from where the deer. The tree dog is almost always within a few feet of where the deer crossed. 00:39:05 Speaker 4: And tree dogs are always trashy. 00:39:07 Speaker 7: Anyway, right, And there's something about a tree dog that they just they just sound different. You have a oh no, I don't have yeah, just gray dogs. We don't care about papers. When people bring registered dogs sometimes and they don't pan out like they're supposed to. The running joke is he didn't want to cross because he's afraid to get his papers whip. Once the dogs get the deer up and they're running, they're making lots of noise. You know they're gonna eventually I may circle some, but they're gonna eventually kind of line out and head hopefully towards one of our standards. So that's when that standard's life gets exciting. You can hear the dogs getting closer and closer, and then brush starts breaking, your heart starts pounding, Your adrenaline is going through the roof because you don't know if it's gonna be a yearling, a dough or a twelve. The only thing that I have experienced that compares to running dogs is working a turkey in the spring. 00:40:08 Speaker 2: It's interesting that Stony Edwards used the exact same analogy of spring turkey hunting. I wanted to ask Cooch about a potential stereotype about running deer with dogs. 00:40:19 Speaker 4: Here's what he said. 00:40:21 Speaker 7: Okay, So to address the statement from a lot of the world about dog hunters are lazy, that couldn't be any further from the truth. Dog hunting is three hundred and sixty five days a year, twenty four hours a day. Really, you've always got dogs to tend to. You've got a feed, water, vaccinate, vet bills. It's definitely not just for those six weeks a year. There's training raising puppies because everybody, everybody in the business, they want to raise their own dogs. Okay, so there's so much involved in running deer with dogs, and it's not just you go out there and turn some dogs loose and deer run everywhere and you go to shooting. It's not the best way to then the herd. You will kill far more deer send in a tree. It is more about the time with your buddies. 00:41:21 Speaker 2: Who's has done a good job of explaining the context and how to of hound hunting, and to reiterate his point about it being a difficult way to hunt, not an easy way to hunt. Let me say this, if I killed a big buck in front of dogs, it would be equivalent to me as if I had killed it with traditional archery equipment or some other self limiting method of hunting. To many people, the only sporting way to kill a deer is when it's being pursued by dogs. 00:41:49 Speaker 4: Think about that for a minute. 00:41:50 Speaker 2: It's an interesting perspective, and I say that only to help us all, including myself, enlarge the way that we view the world and take a little walk in another man's shoes. I'm going to turn it back over to Hooch for him to tell one of his most memorable hunts. And you're gonna hear him talk about road crossings, but it's essential to know that they're running on gated private land. 00:42:18 Speaker 4: Okay. 00:42:18 Speaker 7: So one of my most memorable stories with dogs. It takes place December third, nineteen ninety nine. It was actually reading day when I was enrolled in Arkansas Tech. So the friday before our final exams, well, I chose to go deer hunting. It was a little bit stormy that morning, so we didn't get to We didn't get to hunt right at daylight. Let me back up just a little bit, because I had hunted the weekend before, and we had made this same drive and I was standing up on the crossing and you could see off in the draw a little bit, and I was standing up on a saddle on the end of the mountain and the dogs were coming, and boy, I thought they were coming out to me. 00:43:05 Speaker 5: My heart was pounding. 00:43:06 Speaker 7: I could hear the brush breaking and then the brush breaking got really loud, and then all of a sudden it started going away. So I run over to the edge and stand up on a stump where I could see, and I got two or three glimpses, and all I could see was. 00:43:21 Speaker 5: Antlers, Like, oh my goodness. 00:43:24 Speaker 7: So now back to that Friday morning, we'd decided we were going to make the same drive, and me, I'm always thinking, so I watched, I had watched what he done the weekend before. I thought, you know, I'm not gonna stand on the road. I'm gonna get off the road down there in the draw. So even if he does come up and cross the road, I'll still have a shot adding But if he doesn't, then you know I'll get a shot at him down there. Well, I got off down there and found me a good stump where I could sit and see seventy five eighty yards in any direction. And I heard him when they started hooping and turned the dogs out. When just a little bit the dog started trailing, and just a little bit longer they jumped, and I could tell, you know, they were coming my way. 00:44:11 Speaker 5: Well, they they. 00:44:12 Speaker 7: Come up there and started up the draw I was in, and they got almost to me. And then kind of turn and started going away, and I thought, well, this is over. And then I looked down, looked down the draw, and here come a book. Okay, so I guess. I guess he had turned a circle quite aways in front of the dogs and then come back to me. So I'm watching. I'm just catching glimpses, and I can tell it's it's a really good book. Well, he gets on up there about sixty yards and I started following him with my rifle and watched him through the scope and he hits an opening and I squeezed the trigger and nothing happened. I mean, he kept coming, so I squeezed the trigger again, and then I thought he went down, but I wasn't sure. And then all of a sudden, here comes another buck. That's a really nice book. He turns. I didn't know it at the time, but he watched the buck in front of him fall, and so he turned and started going the other way, and then there was another buck behind him. Well, they went out the other draw, and when they hit the other cross and I heard my dad shoot, there was another guy standing there with him, and I guess the third buck had ran to him and heard him shoot. After all that happened, I went back up. I didn't I didn't even go look. Right then I went back up the hill, got on the radio and found out that they had killed the two bucks over there, and I went down there. 00:45:40 Speaker 5: Shoot. 00:45:40 Speaker 7: I got fifteen twenty yards from it, and I could see antlet's sticking up over the grass, like, oh my goodness. He ended up being a nine point. That gross scored one point thirty two, which at the time was a giant to me. And the buck my dad killed he was low one twenties, and then the other one was just a five point. 00:45:59 Speaker 5: But you know, backstraps or backstraps. 00:46:02 Speaker 7: We all got together, put them all up on the dog box, took a picture, and even the guys that didn't pull the trigger, they've got the biggest grin because it's not it's not I killed a deer. When it comes round the dogs, it's we killed the deer. 00:46:20 Speaker 2: That feeling of it's not I that killed the deer, but we killed the deer. That stuff is pretty unique to dog hunting. I love the solo aspects of tree stand bow hunting, but a group experience with like minded people, it's hard to top. 00:46:38 Speaker 4: That was a great story Hooch. 00:46:41 Speaker 2: Our final storyteller is Aaron Stanfil's little brother Andy, And just because he's little doesn't mean that he doesn't kill a lot of big bucks. And I mean, and he's just like a normal sized guy, so you know, he's not little. And it turns out he's actually killed bigger deer than Aaron. These guys are deer hunters. I'm telling you. This is the story of the hunt for a giant Kansas buck they. 00:47:05 Speaker 4: Called Daddy Rabbit. 00:47:07 Speaker 2: I've forgiven Aaron for lying to Scott and Luke, and so he and Andy are going to tag team on this one. 00:47:15 Speaker 3: So I'm Andy Stanphil and I'm here with my brother Aaron Stanfhil and our cousin has family in Kansas. So we've been going up there bow hunting for This would have been our twenty third consecutive year. So it all starts back in around two thousand. We slowly, you know, started getting permissions from farmers here and there, and in the early two thousands we had a lot of land that we could hunt. Well, what happened was our cousin, Jared, his grandpa bought a farm in the fifties. It's an old homestead place, and since then his son was living there on the place. And I remember one day they told us, said, hey, boys, if you guys will come up, put a big spread out in the yard some spring, we'll have the whole commune, the whole church crowd, congregation come over there after church. So me and Adians, our buddies gotten jered. We had much fried crappie, whild turkey, all the desserts. I mean, we laid out a spread now and the whole congregation showed up after church. And next thing, you know, that next year we had a lot of land to hunt. So it's been been good built. It's just it's a second home to us. This particular farm, like I said, didn't have very many trees on it really, so Aaron hung his stand on the north end of it. And everything that we have we share, you know. We we put the tree stand in together, we trim and everything out. You know, we anticipate every every stand that we put in, we anticipate you on a big deer there. So we go to the north side and we put that stand in. I go to the south end and we hang another set over there, both of them in big cedar trees, big bushy cedar trees. We try to always hunt out of a cedar tree, try to always have a hole on our left side so we ain't got to get up. Both of them were fantastic sets. So in twenty eighteen, right off the bat, I mean, we had numerous shooters on that north end and one of those was a just a giant, non typical deer. It's hard to say, one of the biggest body deer that we had hunting Kansas in twenty three years. So just a giant of a deer. He was so big that his rack, you know, it was just about thirteen inches wide. That he was so massive, but his rack just didn't look that big because he was such a big buck. But lots of trash on his bases, lots of horns everywhere. I mean, over the two years timeframe, we you know, had hundreds of pictures of this deer and we estimated him, you know, one seventies one eighties Somewhere in that ballpark November the second of twenty and eighteen, I had the deer at thirty five steps with a dough got behind two big hedge apple trees on me and I couldn't get a shot at him. I tried everything I could do to get him in there, and he just wouldn't leave her. And he was he was one special animal. We didn't get him killed in twenty eighteen, and then fast forward to twenty and nineteen and you didn't draw a tag days, which was heartbreaking. I'm sure God had a plan for that. So in October the eighteenth, nineteenth, when we first went up yep, so he was all over our camera, you know, he basically beds in there. That was his betting. So the last part of the week we finally got our north wind and it got really really cold. So on the morning of October the twenty fourth, I'm laying there in bed and we're both wide awake, and we both know that this is the morning we've been waiting on. It's high pressure, he was there the night before, he was there the night before, and it's cold and we've got a north wind. And even though I didn't draw a tag, I wasn't gonna miss that week. We're always up there together, there's four of us, and we camp all week. And I was up there all week just itching, you know, but just helping everybody else and camping and so my alarm goes off and Aaron's already awake. I was like, Aaron, you think there's any way you can get up there with me in that tree? Because we had a camera and we used to film with one of our hunts, and because we thought it was going to go down, we talked about that for a little bit. Looking back on it, but we probably made the right decision because we'd probably made a lot of racket that, you know, early morning. But so I got up super early and walked out through this cedar thicket and as in eaters eat all cedar thickets, it's easy to get lost. And I didn't want to shine a flashlight. I was trying to go, you know, super quiet in there. Sure as the world I got turned around a little bit. I actually made a small circle on the north side of my tree, and I just I could not. I mean, all the trees looked the same. I was like, this is not happening, you know. And I finally got my bearings, found my tree, and just so it started breaking daylight, I hear some deer get up. So this dough comes in. She's a very mature dough. I mean she was, and it's the very same dough that all of our game camera pictures have shown. He's always been with this dough that's you know, four or five, I mean, the power dough. Super rare to see a giant white tail get with a dough that early in the year. But he was with her when we pulled cards. He was with her. So I recognize her, you know, right off the bat as she's coming in. So she walks in there, you know, twenty yards away from me, and I don't see him, and she keeps on walking out and she gets you know, thirty or forty yards away from me, and I look back and all I can see is this cedar limb just thrashing in the woods back there, and so I got pretty worked up, and I knew it was him, and he's just taking his sweet time, and he's falling that dough about sixty seventy yards away, and he finally gets in there and takes the very same travel path as what she did and gets in their broadside. You know, I always try to compose myself, and I had plenty of time to think about it. Dad had always told me, you hunt hard, and when the opportunity arises, you know, you do your part. So I pulled my bow back and he was there broadside, and I made a really good shot on him, and he ran and take. He took a little circle and it came right back underneath my tree. Right I'm standing, and uh, he slows down right there underneath me, and I'm just looking straight down on him, and he's walking very very slow. He walks over there and it takes a little circle about fifteen or twenty yards away from me to my left. I've killed a lot of deer and I've never seen a deer do this, but he just like an old cow, would you know. He puts his hind legs down, puts his front elbows down just and he lays down perfect. He doesn't fall over. His front two hoofs are straight on the ground when he laid down, and he just kind of leaned his head over on a cedar tree. And I've got pictures of that. It was just like, you know, it's just his time, and he just it was a weird deal. Just an old majestic buck like that, you know, lived his whole life and it was just my buck of a lifetime. And uh, I got over there and usually I text and call and and I didn't. I climbed down and I went over there, and man, it was emotional for me. And uh we nicknamed him Rabbit, uh after Daddy Rabbit, after our cousin, Jared's grandpa that's had such a big part in our lives up there. You know, it's his farm and he had just passed away, and uh see, yeah, it was an emotional deal. I just cried, cried around a little bit and called Aaron, called Dad and they came over and we all dragged it, dragged it out together. And it's just a special moment for all of us, you know, And that's just what it's all about. I mean, and we've done that numerous times, you know, on smaller deer, you know, if you're all there together, and that's what's all about. And man, I couldn't. I couldn't drew it up any better. So we got back to the cabin. He's like, man, what's this thing score? And we started putting the tape together. And we'd bought one of those new at Walmart. They saw those little orange tapes. Trophy take, trophy take. You kind of rip it there and you rip it off. What's all we had and we'd never used it before. So we start. We started taping this deer. I did I'm going to did it. I tape you know here and there. When we ran out of tape, tape just went to two hundred inches, we ran out, it ran out getting the spread, so ended up being of course, I had to officially score and ended up being two of three and six eighths. 00:55:12 Speaker 2: Killing a two hundred inch dear is an experience. The vast majority of whitetail hunters will never experience the history that they had with this buck, and the fact that Andy's brother and father were able to be there was unique and unforgettable. 00:55:26 Speaker 4: That was a good story. 00:55:42 Speaker 2: This brings to conclusion our Dear Stories episodes this fall, and I already miss them. I'm gonna miss talking to all these folks until next year. I really hope that you have a great fall and make some great memories in this ephemeral window of time when we chase whitetail bucks. 00:56:02 Speaker 4: Really, I wish you the. 00:56:03 Speaker 2: Best of luck this fall, and I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. Please leave us a review on iTunes and share our podcast with the worst whitetail Hunter you know and tell them that, tell them play. 00:56:18 Speaker 4: Said, share it with the worst. So here it is. 00:56:21 Speaker 2: I'm just kidding, but be sure to check out First Light's white tail hunting gear. They make the best whitetail gear in the industry, and if you want to actually try some on, you can go to any Shields store in America and you'll find a First Light section. 00:56:37 Speaker 4: This is new. I look forward to 00:56:39 Speaker 2: Talking with everyone on the Render next week, and now it's time to go kill a big buck.