00:00:05 Speaker 1: Today's podcast is notably different from a typical documentary style bear Grease that we usually put out every other Wednesday. I was recently asked to be the keynote speaker at the pheasant Fest banquet where we celebrated Quel Forever's twentieth anniversary. And it might seem odd that they'd ask me to speak because I don't own bird dogs or travel the country wingshooting. But I'd like to share with you bear Grease folks, a slightly elongated version, so it's not the actual speech. 00:00:36 Speaker 2: It's a little bit longer, but I want to share. 00:00:39 Speaker 1: That speech with you, and I think that you'll understand after you hear it why they asked me to speak. I'd say this story is deeply personal, and I titled it The Bird Hunter. 00:01:03 Speaker 2: My name is Clay Nukem, and this. 00:01:05 Speaker 1: 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 FHF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the place as we explore. I'd like to tell you a story. On the morning of September fifth, twenty twenty four, I awoke from a dream so vivid I felt like that I'd actually been with him. When I got up, I wrote down what I experienced. I dated it, I told Misty about it, and actually called my mom and dad. He had died on Christmas night twenty thirteen, but on that September morning, over ten years later, I felt like that I had actually seen him. The man in the dream was a school teacher, a pastor, and a bird hunter that I knew very well, and the shadow and echo of his life has never left me. And right now I'd like to tell you his story. His name is one you've never heard of. Nothing was ever written about him. There's no existing film of his dog training, but the ripples of his life are still in motion today in the eyes of his peers. 00:02:45 Speaker 2: Perhaps his life was mundane. 00:02:47 Speaker 1: And normal, but it would never be disputed that his life was nothing if not noble, disciplined, and others focused. The man in my dream was Lewin Nukeom, known to me as perhaps he was my grandfather, and he was a bird hunter and a dog trainer deluxe. He lived the life of dedication and passion for quell hunting until the day he died, and his story is foundational to my story because before I ever hunted a bear, deer, or turkey or road of mule, I was, by default of quell hunter, simply by blood. Some of my first memories of engagement with wild places were overgrown fields with long legged pointers leaving tracks in the frost. Bird dogs and quall hunting would be the relational conduit that transferred to me a value system that went far beyond the boundaries of being a bird hunter. However, to think about Lewin's life, that stood out to me that would come to almost haunt me and inform the way that I lived my life was how he spent the last thirty five years of his life in silent grief as Bob White quell populations near his home were. 00:03:56 Speaker 2: Reduced to almost nothing. 00:03:58 Speaker 1: I think this story will be familiar to a lot of people in America. Perhaps even into his late eighties, he trained bird dogs and often hunted five days a week with no intention of finding birds. I remember as a kid being so impacted by watching paps that I would pray for the quail populations, just even as a kid. I wouldn't realize how much this impacted me until I was an adult, and I didn't want the same thing to happen to me with the wild beast that I loved. But this story isn't a story of loss. It's one of incredible gain. And to understand his story and my story, I'd like to take you way back, probably even back a little further than you might think. My great great great great great grandfather, Thomas Nukeomb came out of Kentucky in the eighteen thirties and settled in the east west running ridges of the Washington Mountains of Arkansas. They'd settled in Montgomery County in the community of Bumblebee, and Thomas begat Thomas Joseph who begat Robert who begat, Oscar who in nineteen nineteen begat, Lewin Anderson Nukomb who begat Gary Believer Nukom in nineteen forty eight. My dad, who begat me and I was born approximately twenty three miles east of Bumblebee in nineteen seventy nine, just barely in time to overlap the fleeting glory days of the Southern Bob White quail and the grand hunting culture that surrounded it. I wouldn't have recognized it at the time, but there have been few wild beasts that have defined an era of the American sportsman more than that little whistling bird. But I for God to admit my relationship with mister Bob White as complicated from me flow's massive respect even all of the birds, but I found their presence on the landscape irreplaceable. In their absence life altering, the flutter of queill wings brings to me an uneasy feeling of an eden lost. No other wild beast in my lifetime has caused such heartache, which created in me a foundational hegemon of the fragility of wild game, causing a gunshinness to give my heart to any wild beast, especially a dad gum ground nesting bird. But it sure didn't keep Lewin from loving them or me. Lewin wouldn't have known it, but the date of his birth would be consequential in many ways. He spent his teenage years living through the Great Depression, building an attitude of resilience, simplicity, and contentment that would brand his life. He would turn twenty two years old in nineteen forty one, precisely the time when our country called for brave young men to arise, and he responded to that call, joining the Navy, where he led a team of seven men who operated a single gun on an American battleship fighting in Okinawa and the Philippines. We wouldn't know it until after Perhaps's death in twenty thirteen, but he won a Bronze Star for heroism in action. No one knows exactly what he did, but he once told me with his own mouth that he was credited with shooting down an enemy aircraft, but he completely left the war medal out of the story. We found that out after someone gave us a news clipping at his funeral. But in a display of humility to a nine year old boy, he confided in me that he wasn't sure if he and his team actually had shot down the plane. He wasn't interested in stolen valor. He was mainly interested in people and bird dogs. After the war, he moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, east of Bumblebee, and in nineteen forty three married my grandmother, Emmaline, known to me decades later as Mimi. As many people did in these poor soul othern states, they chose to leave to make a living, So, like the Beverly Hillbillies, they loaded up and moved to Port Chicago, California, in nineteen forty seven to find work. It was in California in nineteen forty eight that my father Gary was born. But it was also here that something happened that would define Lewin's life more than the Great Depression, the accolades of war or ground nests and birds. In a revival meeting in the late nineteen forties, he got saved and his life was radically transformed. 00:08:32 Speaker 2: He looked and. 00:08:33 Speaker 1: Acted different, and words spread about his experience to the point that people literally just wanted to come meet paps and look in his eyes. 00:08:42 Speaker 2: After they heard his story. 00:08:44 Speaker 1: And I don't know the details, but shortly after this he believed that God communicated to him that he and his family should move back to Arkansas, which he did, and that's a decision I'm forever grateful for nothing against California. 00:09:00 Speaker 2: It would be in. 00:09:00 Speaker 1: Arkansas that he would raise his family, be the first in his lineage to go to college, and he'd become a biology teacher at a public school, and in the early nineteen fifties he became a Pastor Paps would be known in his community as a man of impeccable integrity who studied the Bible with passion and discipline. He spent multiple nights per week for decades visiting the sick at the local hospital, which he viewed as a core tenant of his faith. And it would also be in the early nineteen fifties, when he was in his early thirties, that he got his first bird dogs in the beginning of the American glory days of quail. One of his first dogs was named Elvis. I bet if you track back, you'd find somebody in your bird hunting lineage that had a dog named Elvis. It would still be thirty five years before I'd ever hunt with Paps. But during this time he went to a training seminar in Oklahoma put on by Delmer Smith and perhaps became a master bird dog trainer, training small numbers of dogs, always registered pointers in English setters, always having dogs and training, rarely selling a dog, but giving them away to the right people. To say that bird hunting and dog training was his hobby would be a slap in the face of his discipline, seriousness, and passion. It was a lifestyle it was part of who he was. My first memories of hunting with Paps were in the late nineteen eighties. I was under ten years old and he was in his late sixties. To go with him was a big deal, maybe even a little bit risky, not because he was unsafe, but because he was known to walk grown men to death in his daylight till dark death marches in search of birds, and many well meaning hunting companions were lost to the cold, to the heat, or just playing weariness of heart, following who many of them called Brother Nukele. 00:10:54 Speaker 2: Few people could hang. 00:10:55 Speaker 1: With Paths, and you knew it was cold when he broke out his long underwear. It was like he was made of tempered steel and rawhide. As a young boy on that first hunt, rising what seemed like weeks before daylight, my grandmother would make us sausage, biscuits, gravy, and eggs, and it was here that Paps tutored me and the finer things. If a man raised in depression era Arkansas, sorgum molasses mixed with butter and put on a biscuit with a tall glass of buttermilk was his filet mignon. The molasses I loved the buttermilk I could not tolerate. My grandmother would make us blowney sandwiches on whitebread wrapped in aluminum foil for our lunch. She even wrapped our cokes and foil too, which I never quite understood, but somehow I knew it meant that she loved us. He took me Honting, near the home place of Robert Nukem, his grandfather, which the house then was nothing more than a falling down oakombe built on rock pillars. I wish I could remember what Paps told me about Robert. He said something about him. It was minimal, but it summed up the man's life in a sentence. I don't remember what he said, but it planted in me in awareness the brevity of man's existence. Who lives at the mercy of the voracious appetite of time, rolling over men, reducing them to dust in their life into a sentence. To this day, I rarely passed an old, falling down home without thinking about the people that lived there, often wondering if anyone even remembers their names. Perhaps remembered Roberts though. As we hunted, we walked sage grass covered cattle fields and I followed Paps in his army green briar briches while he shouted commands to a long legged liver spot porter that would have curled the hair of a lesser dog. Later in my life, at Paaps's funeral, a family friend told me that he never knew how a man so kind could scold a bird dog so harshly. He demanded performance. Perhaps told me that a dog's name should be one syllable and project from the chest, not the mouth. Acceptable names were like Buck, or Goldie or Elvis. I never fully understood what an unacceptable name would be, and sometimes I felt like some of his names had two syllables, at least one and a half. At lunch, we sat on the tailgate of his red two wheel drive S ten with the wooden dog box in the back, and ate our lunch. I never saw the man eat a blowney sandwich without laughing out loud as he called it preacher's ham. It was a hat tip to the life of poverty of a poor country preacher. The humor of the joke never lost its luster to him, and he said it to me each time, laughing out loud, as if he nor I had ever heard the joke before. On that first hunt, we didn't find any quail, but I'll never forget picking up out of the dirt of a cattle trail a beautiful, white, fully intact stone point an arrahead. The images frozen in my mind in perpetuity. I wouldn't have realized it, but this would be the moment that my fascination with the deep antiquity of human hunting in North America started, which carries on in my work today on the Bear Grease podcast. We lived about an hour and a half from Paps, but he would come to Mina to hunt with Dad and I and of all the grandkids. He noticed in me in interest in bird hunting, and when I was in the sixth grade in nineteen ninety two, he gave me something that impacts my life to this day. There was a dog named Lucy. She was a fully trained registered English center. She was three years old, white with a black head, and had been through the lew And Neukom training Academy. The beauty of where we lived was that we had access twenty seven acres behind our house that was a grown up field dissected by multiple grown up fence lines that oddly held multiple covees of quail. It was kind of an anomaly, maybe even a microcosm of the glory days of quail. 00:15:14 Speaker 2: But I couldn't hunt it. I just had permission to roam it. 00:15:18 Speaker 1: Roam it we did between nineteen ninety two and nineteen ninety six. They're telling how many different times we pointed and flushed those covees, and then we'd go after the singles. Those quail had nightmares about Lucy and I. We kept them on the run, but never killed a single one. It was during this time that Paps gave me a book on the Delmer Smith method of training, which I read cover to cover. I got a long check cord with a brass buckle, and I still used this foundational knowledge of animal training on my mules, squirrel dogs, and coon dogs today. Soon, perhaps this confidence in me grew, and he gave me another dog, a black handed pointer puppy named Nick, from the bloodlines of a dog called Fiddler's Ace. I didn't know anything about the dog, but he sounded really good. The goal was for me to train Nick myself, and I tried, but like so many things in life, moments are fleeting and dreams died easier than they realized, and after four years of bird hunting, I gave Lucy and Nick back to Paps. Always felt like I failed the old man and my efforts with the bird dogs, and I felt bad about it, but I never picked up that it bothered him. He knew it was like fighting an incoming tide. There just weren't any birds. Without birds, people didn't need bird dogs. I wish so badly Paps could see what's happening today in quail conservation, and how in many parts of the country wild quail are coming back due to the efforts of many people in organications like twel Forever. After I gave back the dogs to Paps, we still had a yearly hunt. I only remember actually finding birds one time. It was February nineteen ninety six or nineteen ninety seven. I was around seventeen and perhaps was seventy seven, and we turned Loose's dog Goldie, out on a small logging road that divided a clear cut on public land in southwest Arkansas, where my dad had flushed a big covey of quail. The little butterscotch setter had hunted in front of the truck for less than a quarter mile before her run turned to a catwalk and her nose lowered. Her tail went from making big circles to small circles to a staunch as an O Sage fence post as she'd locked down on point, like her body had been suddenly filled with concrete. I'm not sure who was more surprised, me, Paps or Goldie. We jumped from the truck and scrambled to load our guns. Paps's voice changed octaves and he whispered as he gave me precise instructions on how to approach the pointed dog. I wished his instructions from my life had been a straightforward I used to ask him questions I was afraid to ask my dad, like is it okay to chew tobacco? I dabbled with that dirty voodoo for a few years, but his non confrontational wisdom to quote stay away from it eventually took lifelong route. He always used to tell me that God will lead you step by step, Clay, just like he did me. To this day, I still take comfort in those words, and I say the same thing to my kids. And I haven't forgotten that Goldie is on point. But I just want to tell you one more story that showed Paps's input into my life. He told me the same story on multiple occasions that was such a high octane Solomon like parable that as an adult, I've wondered if he actually did this or if this was an old story told by a lot of different people that he just repeated to me. But I've never heard this story anywhere else, and I've come to the conclusion that he was the one that actually did this. The story is about two roosters, one old and one young, that he had on the farm when he was a kid. The older white rooster was the top dog and literally ruled the roost, dominating the younger but bigger rooster that was daily put in his place by coming in runner up during the pair's daily spur and contest. Young Lewin always thought that the young rooster could probably whip the old one, but he just didn't know that he could. One day, perhaps decided to put his theory to the test, so he caught the old white rooster and covered him in black soot, changing his color temporarily to charcoal gray, making him unrecognizable to the young rooster. Perhaps then pitched the old rooster back into the chicken yard, and a young rooster, not recognizing him and believing it was a new rooster, promptly came over and in a whizbang tussle of feathers, spurs and clucks, the young one whipped the old one with ease. The old rooster must have been in shock at the youngster's confidence, and as the soot slowly faded back to white, the young rooster remained dominant the pair's entire life. Like Solomon passing the sluggard's field and noting the work ethic of the ants, perhaps his parable almost didn't need explanation. It's clear that our biggest enemy is often our own self confidence, and much of life is simply an exercise in renewing our minds. This I have never forgotten, and I've also not forgotten that I'm telling you a story about us walking up on a covey of birds. He always told me, on the covey rise to pick out one single bird and block it out with the end of the gun barrel and flow through it. Don't stop as you squeeze the trigger, and when it falls, just move on to the next one. I think that's what he learned on that gunship in World War Two. We eased forward, Paps with his bret of twelve gauge and me with the Remington eleven hundred and twenty gauge, ready for the explosion. Just as I passed Goldie on my left, and perhaps was just on the other side of Goldie, a sound like someone opening a bottle with the hoof beats of one hundred horses erupted. As the covey rose. At least twelve birds got up before us. Pap shot twice. I shot three times, so five shots total were fired and three birds fell. In all these years. It was the only covey we'd ever found while hunting together. But Paps didn't take credit for hitting any of the birds, Just like the enemy planes in World War Two, he insisted that I'd killed all three, which I'm pretty sure to this day that I didn't. 00:22:19 Speaker 2: I honestly don't know. 00:22:22 Speaker 1: I don't know if he just wanted to believe that his grandson had knocked down a triple on wild birds really on one of his only covey rises. Five or six years later, in two thousand and two, when Perhaps was eighty three years old, we went back to the same block of public land. Perhaps was still hunting Goldie, now in the final leg of her life, but we all kind of knew it was Perhaps's final leg. 00:22:49 Speaker 2: Two. 00:22:50 Speaker 1: We didn't find any birds that day. As we walked through a clearing, I noticed the shed of a white tailed deer lying on the ground and kind of like that stone point. I picked it up, showed it to Paps, and I took the horn home. Using the sharping marker, I wrote on it Clay and Paps Nucomb Bird Hunt two thousand and two. I wouldn't have known it at the time, but that would be the last time that I hunted with him, and it would be the beginning of the end of Paps's hunting. My first cousin, Greg Sheets, lived close to Paps, and not long after I found that shed horn. While driving to work, Greg noticed Paps's s ten pulled off the side of the road near an overgrown field that he often hunted, and Greg passed all the time. Seeing passed his truck there was normal, but what caught his eye was that Goldie was by the truck with no Paps. 00:23:47 Speaker 2: It was a hot day. 00:23:49 Speaker 1: And Greg, slightly alarmed, turned his truck around and got out, called for Paps, and he said that Goldie took off out into the brush. Greg followed Goldie, who led him straight to a briar thicket where Perhaps was tangled to the point that he couldn't move. The day was heating up, and Greg said that Perhaps was coherent, but it looked like he'd been there for several hours of fighting briars, and he just sat down. 00:24:21 Speaker 2: He just couldn't fight him anymore and he was just awaiting his fate. 00:24:26 Speaker 1: Greg went in and cut him out, got Perhaps home and safe. I'm grateful that Greg turned around that day, but not long after that Perhaps couldn't drive anymore. 00:24:38 Speaker 2: And I think you can predict the rest of the story. 00:24:47 Speaker 1: That shed Horn from our last hunt hangs in my office today, but it's right beside a watercolor painting that I did for Perhaps when I was a senior in high school and I'd painted one of his best dogs that he ever had that was on point. It was from a beautiful photograph that someone took. It was an English setter named Snipper, just on full point. When I painted it. I gave it to Paps, and that painting hung in his office from nineteen ninety eight until they moved Paps out of his home into assisted living around twenty ten. Mimi had passed away in two thousand and seven, and I'll never forget seeing Paps cry as he walked down the aisle to say his final goodbye to the love of his life and a woman who was so influential in mine. Having a grandparent in your life is so powerful because you get to see played before you the stages of your life that you know will someday happen to you. I'd like to close by telling you about the last two conversations that I had with Paps. The first happened in the all of twenty thirteen, just before he died. At the time, he could hardly hear, so you had to yell at him to get him to understand. And I'd recently been on some public land, that same public land where we found those birds, and I'd found some more birds, and I came in and I set close to Paps and I said to him, Paps, I saw a big covey. 00:26:23 Speaker 2: Of birds the other day. 00:26:25 Speaker 1: And his eyes lit up, and he said, you did. And this teed him up to tell an anecdote. I've heard my whole life. When he talked about his dogs, and without segue, he said, my old dog Goldie, I believe if you'd cracked her head open, a covey of birds would have flown out. Every time he'd say this, he'd do his he haul laugh, which I wish I had a recording of. That laugh was one of a kind. He kind of had a he haw and donkey vibe that was guaranteed to draw a smile from anyone within the earshot. The last conversation I had with him is kind of complicated. I do not understand the mechanics of the spirit realm or the depths to which the dreams of men create reality. But if I lay unconscious and a doctor could peer into my mind and heart and ascertain the last time I actually saw Paps, the last time my spirit registered that I had engaged with him, I'm confident that they would say it was on the morning of September fifth, twenty twenty four. Do you remember the dream that we started this story with. I approached Paps and he was strong and vibrant. He wore a bright blue shirt, and he had some type of treatment to his ears, and he could hear really well. He swayed slightly as he stood, and I walked up to him and I shook his hand, and in the climax moment of this short interaction, I said one thing to him. I said, Paps, I've been burned hunting, That's all I said. And I saw that excitement and passion in his eyes that branded me as a child, and the dream was over. True story. It happened just like that. It's like I just wanted to engage with him one more time. Surely there's something powerful, even supernatural, in the fluttering wings of a Covey rise that connects the hearts of men who witness it together. It has the power to link generations and an unbreakable bond that no man made thing can do. 00:28:34 Speaker 2: It did that with Paps and Eye. 00:28:38 Speaker 1: In two thousand and eight, the youngest of my wife Misting Eye's four children was born. We felt like that he should be named in honor of Paps, so we named him Shepherd Covey Nukem. The name shepherd essentially means pastor someone who cares for people, like Paps did, and the name Covey is a direct reference to Paps's love of quail, but equally an admonition to our son to not live in isolation, but to integrate himself deeply into the lives of family, friends, and his church community for life. Today, Shepherd is seventeen and is growing into a fine young man. His life just barely overlapped with paps. But I have no doubt that the legacy of integrity, spiritual pursuit and love of wild places is going to carry on through him and all my kids. That's the same passion that perhaps had for wild places, quail and bird dogs is the same energy that fuels my life and career today. He died on Christmas night twenty thirteen at the age of ninety four, would have little understanding of what I would do with my life, but I know this conservation movement in the research urgence of Quail would have made him proud and probably would evoke his passionate he hauled laugh. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease and Brent's This Country Life podcast. 00:30:23 Speaker 2: I hope you enjoyed this. 00:30:24 Speaker 1: This was something unique and really personal to me, and I know a lot of you probably have similar stories about your grandparents. But really, in this context, the point of this story is that watching Pahaps grieve about the loss of quail the last thirty five years in his life really fueled my. 00:30:47 Speaker 2: Interest in conservation. Even as a kid. I was like, man, I hope this doesn't happen to me. 00:30:53 Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening, for supporting what Brent and I are doing down here. Keep the wild places wild because that's where the quail live too.

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