00:00:00 Speaker 1: Yeah. My name is Clay Nukeleman. This is a production of the Bear Grease podcast called The Bear Grease Render, where we render down, dive deeper, and looked behind the scenes of the actual bear Grease podcast, presented by f HF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. Dan's instinct for where his mic she goes, it's like really off. Then every time we put on microphones, he's like, you can tell her he thinks he's about to get in trouble. Kinds it doesn't make it doesn't make eye contact. And then I look at him and he won't look at me. And his mic is like jammed up in his nose, and like every time he breathe it sounds like a rhinoceros. I'm nervous. I'm looking. I know a lot of times when we when we're setting that in the World Headquarters, I hear breathing and I'll stop and say, is that means they're out here? And I look and I'm watching everybody watching. Usually I'm watching his chest go up and down, like, oh, well, welcome to the Beargrease Render. What this is. Yes, I feel like I need to explain what the burgary S frender is because if somebody here's like, man, the Beggars podcast is awesome, I need to listen to it. And they come to a render, they may not know what it is. They may hear Dan breathing profusely through the microphone the Bgaras Russian his microphone with his my stache. Yeah, the Bargery surrender is the the the secondary part of the Burgrease podcast, which Isaac, why don't you tell him what the Beargrease podcast is? Uh, it's a it's a storytelling podcast. Is the guy that works. The Bargaras podcast is a documentary style podcast, Yes, taking things forgotten but relevant. Yes. Uh, anthropology, history, stories, biology, human history, human psychology. I once heard it described as things that you could get excited about. Yes, So that's what the Bargaries podcast is every other week, well produced. And then the render is when we break down, we render down and render a metaphor render. The word render is a metaphor for what you due to bear fat to make it into bear grease. So you render it down, you melt it down, apply heat and so the Bargreasur Render is where we talk about the previous week's podcast. Okay, with this kind of an eclectic group of people, different people every time, usually there's some people that are consistent. So welcome to the Beargrease Render. And on this render we're gonna talk about the podcast that came out last week called Where the Red Fern Grows, Part one, The Peculiar Life of Wilson Rawls. So we are right now near the town of Augusta, Arkansas. Is that correct? Yep? Augusta, Arkansas is in the Delta region of Arkansas. I've spent quite a bit of time in the Delta region of Arkansas this year duck hunting and then now we have come to what has become known as Coon and Squirrel Camp with Brent Reeves, hosted by Brent Reeves. Good to be here, bad you guys are here. This is actually we can think in for this. You're welcome boys, we can yep, was it for anything? Four months ago we're finishing a render at the World Headquarters. Heed said, man, we need to get together and gokuna and that's all it took. He lit the fuse and bang, here we are. I'm like the spark that that lights y'all's souls on fire. Yeah, so and good had a good idea. So we have We're here for two nights. We got here yesterday on a Friday. We kun hunted last night. We'll talk about that where you scure hunt a little bit this morning, um, and then and then we're gonna coon hunt tonight. If the score hunting a little bit is foreshadowing, it was a little bit, it wasn't. It wasn't a lot of Yeah, it wasn't a lot of It was a little scure hunting. Hey, I want to start off before I introduce everybody. I have a story to tell you guys that is relevant to the coon hunting series that we're doing because knut has been a fairly substantial sector of my outdoor life. Okay, And when I was in the ninth grade, my good friend Nick Cunningham, he his dad came to us, we're fourteen year old boys, and said, I think you boys should get coon dogs. And I had never coon hunter before, and they took us coon hunting with So Nick's uncle had coon dogs or his cousin had coon dogs. We went coon hunting with his with his cousin, and I remember we were hunting in National Forest and he had two blue ticks, Teresa and Trooper, and Teresa was real coon dog, and we we road hunted back in the in the long drainages of the Washtall Mountains. Washtall Mountains run east and west long east east west running ridges, so the roads travel either the tops of the mountains or the bottoms of the mountains along creeks, and so there's long stretches where there's just roads going by creeks. And so you road hunted your dogs at night, turned the dogs out in front of the truck and just drove down the roads and your dogs just hunted like quail dogs, you know, out in front of the truck. The dogs struck, and I really don't remember the sequence of events, but the dogs ended up on a The coons typically if they're on the creeks, they go right to the top of the mountain and tree, and I remember that Teresa and Trooper treat on top of that mountain. We walked up there, and at this point I still didn't think much about coon hunting, you know, it was just going out in the dark with these dogs and it was cool, but nothing was that unique about them. Man, When I saw those dogs tread and we shot that coon out and those dogs ended up at the bottom of the mountain after the coon kind of jumped out, and it was like the most exciting thing I had ever been a part of in my life. And I was like, I think I'm gonna I think I'm gonna get into this. And then Nick's dad came to us and said, hey, y'all need to have some coon dogs. You'll need to get some coon dogs. He went to the Arkansas Democratic Gazette and the printed version of the Gazette, which all there was at that and there was a litter of blue tick raish your blue tick coon hounds for sale about an hour away from where we lived. On New Year's Eve, about I think, we drove in the cunning Hams like total like mom mini van kind of van hour and a half and bought a pair of bought a we were going to buy one dog. And when we got there, the dogs were The dogs were a hundred dollars apiece, and Jeff Cunham knew how to roll. He picked out the dog we wanted. We started to walk away. He turned around and he said I'll give you fifty dollars for another dog, and the guy said deal, and so Jeff paid a hundred fifty dollars for a pair of dogs I remember we got. When we got back in the truck, Jeff said, I could tell that fan needed an extra fifty bucks. It was they were like and it was New Year's Eve. He said, those kids will have a better Christmas. I'll never forget that. He actually said that New Year's come after years, say New Year's Christmas Eve? Okay, I just I didn't want. I didn't didn't want. Okay, changes everything. I'm sorry. Did I say New Year's Eve? Christmas Eve? It was Christmas Eve? And we get these dogs. And then here's where I'm gonna speed this story up a lot. Okay. We named the dogs Macy and Maddie. My dad, Gary Newcomb, wanted me to name them after the president during that time. We won't mention his name after his wife and daughter, but we're not going to mention their names. And I said, Dad, that's a bad idea. So we named the dogs Macy and Maddie. There were registered blue ticks and um and we raised the dogs and they were never very good. They just weren't They just weren't great dogs. We didn't know what we were doing. We didn't get to hunt them very much. And I started getting uh coon Hound Bloodlines magazine and I started seeing all these big, awesome pictures of stud dogs and coon haum Bloodlines magazine. I still have the picture that I ripped out of the magazine of East Texas Blue Thunder. Who was in who was in uh uh Center Texas, which is a six hour drive from where I lived. And I was a junior in high school, and I said, Dad, I need to go to Center Texas. I'm buying a pup out of East Texas Blue Boomer And it was a beautiful picture. Like I I had to find it and put it on Instagram. Gary Newcomb and I this is dad was a good dad. He was like, Okay, I'll drive with you down to Texas. We drive to Texas pick up a pup. I named him Newcomb's washing Tall Southern Blue Thunder's Mouthful. And this caused a major breakup with me and Nick. We we worked this out back in the day, but I was I didn't handle it right like I owe Nick an apology, which I apologized him, but I'll do it again publicly. I wanted to get out of our pair of dogs. I was like, these dogs aren't for me, but we were partners, and so we got like mad at each other. He got he kind of got upset with me, and I was in the wrong for even just like you know, bring it up and so you know, like trying to get out, Like why didn't I just the dog? Yeah, I failed on the dogs basically like a single parent exactly. And that's why I want to officially apologize to Nick. Um. And so I remember, like I talked it over with them and in in anyway, it was kind of like a big deal. And uh, anyway, I ended up getting this dog and I still feel bad about that. Um, so sorry Nick. And uh, East text blue Thunder no, no excuse me, Lucole Southern Washington. Blue Under never made much of a dog, but he he had an active name. So you ditched, You ditched your forma in favor of U the new shiny thing, which didn't turn out to be much any exactly. Man never saw that coming. Yeah, and uh and then East texta blue No, not East texta Thunder. He incessantly barked in a dog box, like, I could not get him stopped. And we didn't have electronics back then, and so anyway, we uh, you know, he just like it pretty much. If he wasn't hunting, he was gonna be barking the entire time he was in the box. I couldn't get him stopped. I mean I could. I tried every trick in the book, couldn't get him stopped. And Um, Anyway that I said all that to say that Nick and I when we hunted together with our dogs, we had to kind of infamous coon hunting run ins that we talked about this day. The first one as we were driving his dad's old truck called the Gray Ghost, and we were hunting out in the National Forest and we were sophomores, so we would have been like sixteen. We drove out, we got nine miles away from our camp and the transmission went out on the truck and we're there were no cell phones, no nothing, you know, just like back in the night you didn't have cell phones. She did, no communication. You're just walking out, you know. But we found out that the truck would drive and reverse. Serious we it would not drive forward, but it would drive and reverse. And we drove nine miles back to camp in reverse. We took turns because our next hurt automatic automatic turn. Okay, I'm I know I'm hugging the I'm doing a monologue here, but I just couldn't help it. Um. And so the second thing that happened was one night after we played a basketb All game. It was late at night, I mean we got done with a basketball game, like at ten o'clock and it was late in the winters after the first year. So was in January February. We jumped in Nick's dad's truck. Nick's dad is great man, still is a good guy. And um, he had an extended cab, long bed, full size Chevrolet pick up. I mean, the thing was like eighteen feet long, two wheel drive. We went out in National Forest and went on a a section of road that it's pretty remote that goes from one community to another community. But it's basically like a one lane road for about six or seven miles. And we're road hunting the dogs and we we decide, you know, the dogs get away from us and we don't know where theyre, and we decided we need to turn around. Well, we decided we can just turn around right here in the road because we couldn't find a place to turn around, and so we started doing like the fourteen point turn in the This is basically one lane road with an eighteen foot truck, and the truck just absolutely gets wedged in between the two banks of the road. I mean like the bumper is up on the bank in the front and a bumper is up on the bank in the front, front and back, and I mean just like all of a sudden, it's just like we're stuck bad. And so this is we were still hunting Macy and Maddie at this time. This was prey and so we're right in the dead middle of this road. So we could walk either way, but we feel like the closest way to walk is to walk, you know, to the to the east is what it would have been. And it's several miles to a little community, a rural, little rural community, and we knew that one of our English teachers lived in that community. His name was Mr McMasters, and so we just take off walking. Was the plan, to just walk through town the middle of the night, calling for Mr McMasters. It's not a town, it's like a community, meaning there's like four houses like surrounded by national for us. So you got one that we just knew that Mr McMasters lived in that community. You're either gonna get Mr McMasters or you're gonna get shot. Yeah, And so we walk and I don't know how long it took us, but you know, several miles through the dark, and we get to Mr McMaster's house around one am, and he is he was our ninth grade English teacher, and he was like just like the nicest man in the world. And so, you know, we were nervous to knock on the door, and we were you know, I remember it was like, who's gonna knock? And I'm like, you're gonna knock. And so anyway, we go up the door, knock, and we hear wrestling around, and you know, we knocked all louder and we hear more wrestling, and we hear Mr McMaster's wife say who's there, and we go it's Nick and Clay from school. Our truck stuck. We need some help, and she just goes okay, and the next thing we know, Mr McMasters just like springs out of the door like fully dressed. Hey, what do you do. It's great to see you and he was, and we're like, we've got your truck stuck, and he's like, oh, no problem, I got I got my four wheel drive. We'll just go in there and get it out. And so Mr McMasters drives back in there, gets us unstuck at one in the morning, and then we drive home, get home at four in the morning. I remember that. And uh, anyway, that was the story. Did you find the dogs? We got the dogs. They met us on the road on the way to McMaster's house, so the dogs were with us when we went back. So we had to load the dogs up and Mr McMaster's truck to get back. Did he get it or did you have to, Like you know that book where the red Fern Grows? We were doing that. Oh man, he was English teacher, I know for sure would have known about where the red friend growth. That feels like a missed opportunity. Yeah, can you get him on the second part. I wrote a poem about coon hunting when I was in the ninth grade in his class, and I still remember a phrase of it. I'll tell you later. Um, hey, we have some we have two sort of guests today. We have Michael Roseman with us. So this is part where we're gonna introduce guests. Michael roseman Man, good to see you, Good to see you, good to be here. Michael's a coon hunter, Michael's uh friend of Brent Reeves, and uh so we got Daniel Rupe, Josh bill Maker, President, Brent Reeves, Isaac neil h. We'll get back to Michael Isaac. Did you know Isaac works with meat Eater? Now? Is that appropriate way to say that? I don't know, I don't know. Yeah, it's a true story. Yeah, Isaac is helping me a lot with Bargeras right now. He's uh, he he is, He's uh, come alongside and is helping with just every part of the Burgers podcast. So that's a big deal. I'm the Chief Facilitating Officer yep, CFO, quite a title, facilitating whatever. Maybe you can clean this mess up. Yeah, So Isaac is a Isaac is a photographer, videographer, lets the Spring film Missouri and all around good guy. So they brought in a fixer, is what they did. They were like, Isaac, go in there, fix it, fix it. So Michael is a lifelong coon hunter and you have a light company called sun spot Lights. That's how I know you. Yeah, um, Brent, tell us about sun spot lights, because you're going to be better at it than me. Sit in the dark man. They really are. Here's how I got to introduced to it my buddy Rex, who's painfully obviously and absent from the from this, but he's on his way up here. He's gonna be here in time to help us eat fish here later on. But he was wearing he was wearing when we started hunting. And you know, Rex and I met. He drove up in my yard and pulled up in the yard one day as iut there clearing out my dog box. He wanted to know what kind of dog I had. You know, people didn't live in my part of the country either duck hunter. They either got labs or coon dogs, one or the other. And turns out, right after I first got Whalen and we became he's an old coon hunter, and we became friends. And he was wearing a sun spot light and he's and h he said, and he introduced you to to Michael, my friend lives up at McCray. McCray that's just right up the road. He's like, yeah, he makes these, he makes these lights. And we started hunting together and became friends, and it's a good quality of product made right here in the old US of eight. Yeah, right in the old backyard. Well, listen, I go up and watch Michael work. I said he does. He doesn't help that said. My wife likes him for some reason, though, so he sits on that side of the room with her too. She's been trained to manipulate people always. I'm still not entirely convinced Brent isn't undercover. Is a double undercover agent. And I thought that there's so many layers. Now one day he's gonna flip out of his badge and be like Clay all this time. I really wasn't your friend. It was after you undercover. I got a question, would you describe it more as a light company or a hat company? Well, I can sell lights without hats. I've only seen the hats. Well, and come off. Can you paint a picture for people who haven't seen your lights? When you say you gotta light company, could you tell us about a coon light? That was what a coon light is. So we made the first cap light is what you guys are referring to. In two thousand and nine, I made it for another guy. It was called the smart light UM. Then in two thousand and ten, I started sun Spot and it's UM used to we had what you wait a minute, described the first thing you said that caplight like a soft cap. So no, so it's totally totally enclosed system, self contained system with the battery and the head of the light on the helmet or because used to. When I walked to Mr McMaster's house, I was carrying a four pound battery pack on my belt. You had a with a wire that went up to a hat that had my light. That's how because coon unders need massive superpower light. Yes, I started with a car battery and a backpack. Really really you needed some serious light. We were serious about it. I'm talking to twelve vote truck battery and a backpack hooked to a giant sun spot spotlight. It was called a sun spot was what That's where the name of the company come from when I was a little kid. And so okay, so that's what you mean by the batteries have much improved by the way, well, batteries and led lights. Okay, so described the modern sun spot light like because a lot of people wouldn't know what a coon light was. So it has a battery box on the back, cord attached to a head on the front. We make them with switches to control different L E D s on the head and on the battery box. Either way, it's like a hard It looks like a hard plastic bumbcap, a bump capump. Well, there's many ways to where basically the light is designed to ride on your head. There's multiple ways that can ride on your head. It can ride on your head and what I'd call a hard hat or a bump cap or a coal miner's hat. It looks like a coal miner's light. Like great Grandpa was a lead miner and he has we have his helmet looks exactly like that. Yeah, we still make them much better belt also, so we'll take that same battery box, put it on a longer cord. You can put it on your belt. Some guys get headaches from helmets or hats or whatever, and we'll put it on a long cord the head and they'll just throw it over their shoulder and use it in their hand like a flashlight. Hey, listen to this, Okay. I think there's a big market for non coon hunters to use the lights that we use. As coon hunters because people that are that are interacting with wild places. I don't know if y'all know this, but typically it's dark about as long as it's daylight this part of the world, especially on the solstices. Um and uh and this is getting deep. But if you're hunting, you have to interact with nighttime. You shoot your white tailed deer hunter, you're walking in the stand before daylight. You're tracking deer in the dark. If you're like me, I wear my light every single day feeding my dogs with my mules at night. I mean really every single day. I put on my coon light and use it. So everybody thinks they know what a good light is. That's not a coon hunter, and they don't. Yeah, I can't tell you how many times I've run over stumps in a boat going into the duckwoods, Like I didn't see that coming. So two years ago we started making a light for duck hunters. It's called the ben Oak Light. You wore it last night, so that light on on the headband. I didn't know if you knew that or not. I made that one. Also. That's so I own all of sun Spot and I have a partner on beIN oak also two brand's lights. I want to get into the specific specifics of it, but let me let me. Let me tell this. I was at a camp I won't name any names, Rustin Johnson, but he Rustin Johnson Um. Ruston was like, I love rust Um. He was like, man, I got a light that is bright. It is bright, Clay, You're not gonna believe this light. This light isn't outibly bright. And I was like, really, it's pretty bright and he was like, yeah, man, it's bright. It's bright. And I said, I bet you in my truck. It's not as bright as my coon light. And he was like yeah, whatever, And I was like, let's go outside right now. I was in the dark and he turned on his light and then I turned on my sun spot light and it was a it was a light they had made for hog hunting or something, and it was just it. It was a bright light, no doubt, but it was like night and day. And I was just like, Bros, you don't know what you're talking about when you talk about lights until you talk. So like, I'd like to circle back on that first experienced coon hunting last night, it became immediately apparent why you need a bright light. But can you describe that to somebody who hasn't been What do you mean why we need one? Yeah, well, I mean just it's just highly specific. You get to the tree, you're looking for a tiny object that has is it looks like a tree branch's camouflaged like a tree branch, and you're just trying to catch the smallest glimpse of him whatever. Third up, Yeah, yeah, I mean you're just like you're you're participating in a hunting practice that takes place at night, and you know you might as well just be able to just light the world up. But what these coon lights have, like Michael makes, is they have multiple multiple variables. So like you can turn on a walking light, which is like in in the click very easy click of a twist of a knob, it goes to a walking light, which is a really wide soft light that it's made for walking out of the woods, and it uses less battery. How long will your typical light run with just the walking light running? Like how long? So we give burn times and I would tell you that I would say fifteen hours on the walk light, but that's how long it will be bright. It'll start deeming after that it'll probably burn twenty two before it goes out. Okay, so twenty two. Think about if you left a flashlight on your house for twenty two hours, I mean it would burn out. This light off a single charge would run twenty two hours. You could walk out of the woods if you just left it. If you left it on and went to bed and you woke up, it would still be bright. Now, the the full beam when you turn it onto spotlight, Now that you're not using that all the time, so you don't need that full power. But what would be the burn time on like full high beam, same thing we advertise seven if full power, it starts to d M after that and it'll go about twelve before it's dead. I mean, that's incredible. And so I take my coon lights on back country hunts, Like when I go away back in the mountains in Montana and I see guys carrying the little little little head lamps you know that the things see their toes in their tent, And I'm like, that's the only thing you got to get out of here if we have to get out of here in the middle of the night. And they're like yeah, and I'm like, you're not as smart as you look and like, look at this and I step out of the tent. Yeah, I think the thing for those of us that are not a depth coon hunters with that have the trained I to find them in the in the tree. The thing I like about is the model that that some of you guys had on last night has a laser pointer. Yes. We started putting a laser on them a few years because I'm like, where is it? Where is it? Where's there? Like right here? Click and yeah, put a really neat feature on the light. You click a single button and it puts a green laser out so you can point out stuff from a long distance. But he's right there. So now I'm a big fan coon lights. And and really I mean for this in the sales pitch for sun Spot, I mean, but it's like I just love them, use them all the time. It's a great light and um yeah yeah, and so it's there there. There are a lot of companies to make coon lights, you know. I mean there's a lot of and a lot of them are good. There's a lot of there's a lot of great lights. Yeah, there's a lot of great lights. Well, okay, let's talk about her hunt last night before we go down any further. We went coon hunt last night and we're down in the delta. There's a lot more raccoons down here than in the mountains. Yeah, and a lot of water, a lot of water. So we we cut loose. The sequence of a coon hunt would be you go out typically right it dark. We were out a little bit later last night because we didn't get here, but typically right it dark, and uh, we had We were hunting four dogs, two walker dogs and two of my plots. So we turned all four dogs loose at the same time in an area that we believe there be to be raccoons close by, and that that understanding would just come from years of hunting. And it's not rocket science. There's a lot of coons on the landscape, but coons like water. Coons like hardwood timber in the winter because a lot of acorns and different things still on the ground that they're eating. And so you know, you guys just knew, Hey, this block of hardwood timber by the river, it's gonna have coons. Well, we actually cut loose there last night because it had least a chance for us rounding. Yeah, a lot of water and would you say, the conditions were just about perfect for a hunt. Hey, if y'all had him in coming in front of the fireplace at exactly So Michael brought it up. We did a meat Eater film deal last February, like with snow ice Mgeddon in Arkansas and we were out there with Michael Lanier, were on mules squirrel hunting in the snow, gonna go coon hunting that night. And I had turned to Michael. We weren't treating any squirrels, and I said, Michael, we're kind of at a moment when there was a decision of like what we were gonna do, which way we're gonna go? And I said, Michael, what would you do if we weren't here, if it was just you? And he said, I wouldn't be here. And I was like, great point, Let's say you were here and you're just by yourself now. So, yeah, it's tough conditions thus ice on the ground, you know, And and um, yeah it was. It was cold. I think it was twenty seven we cut loose. It was twenty five before we get done. And it was normally Michael to tell you, normally it gets below freezing. I couldn't down here. They just don't stir much. Now, the thing we got going for us was this is probably the peak of the rut and of the coon rut. And because of the ice on Wednesday and that being Friday, they've been dend up, you know, not going anywhere because of how cold it is for about three days. So they're going to stay in the dance along. They're gonna have to get out a little bit. You add that into being the rut, and you know, we think we one of the trees we think had a you know, pretty good a sound that was in season in there, and that kind of was like the perfect storm and the terrible and terrible conditions and we were able to make some trees last night and look at some coons. Can we treat five coons? Last night? Saw five coons? Didn't we? Yeah, we actually saw we made more trees and salt coons and we did Dan trees. Was what I figured we all thought we would do. You know, honestly, I figured we'd make dens and slicks. We'll make we'll make Dan trees. And I figured we'd make the slicks because the walkers. But I feel like you need to do a whole series goes, that's a low blow. Don't start disambiguating the language of coon hunting. Yeah, you're talking about dens, slicks trees. Clay would probably have a better handle on the slick tree. I figured he could describe them. Yeah, so a dent tree is a hollow tree. So your dog will often tree a dent tree and you don't see the coons. You can't kill in tree is bad. It's like dog gone. It's got a hole in it. It means the coon's up in the hole. Now, Billy Coleman, and where the red fern grows, And because where the red fern grows is out of graphical, we can only assume Woodrow Wilson Rawls, who served three terms in prison, would have also cut down a tree. Yep, it would have cut down a tree. But we don't do that anymore. Some people do. I have friends that will. Now I've tried to smoke them out. Yeah, we've smoked them out. I have a friend that carries a hatchet and he'll cut a hole in a dn tree to be able to look in it and see if as Yeah, a dent tree isn't marketable timber anyway. I think of it more of you know, just like good habitat, you know, and now they have another hole to go on. Yeah, no, I'm off for cutting a hole in it. It's I'm on private land, just reeled their home. Man. So so den trees I gotta yeah, I got a good dent tree story, but um, a slick tree. A slick tree. Well, first of all, okay, if we're talking about coon hunters, we got to talk about how den trees are often the the often dogs will tree on den trees and we all know that there's probably not a coon in there. Often dogs that are no good. It's true, it's true. So you go to a dent try and it's kind of like did your dog go backwards on this track? Because like a coon could come out of the tree, out of a den and leave, and then your dogs hit the trail wrong. Go to the dent tree, smell a bunch of coons, sing and be like tree and so it's always really nice. Like last night happened twice where we were able to look in a hole and see a coon and dentry, which is which is pretty good. So that's kind of the dent try thing. So when you when you's like oh, it's a dent tree. You're kind of like, Okay, how many dent trees your dog tree on all the time? Okay, slick trees. And you heard me give a sucker punch to these two guys a minute ago, and then they sucker punched me back. See, there's stuff going on that normal people don't even know what's happening. Hunting POLITI yeah, big time, big time. So the coon hunting world is very opinionated on the types of dogs they like to use. Okay, and by far the most popular breed of dog, it's a walker tree dog walker coon. I mean, like, Michael, would you say eighty percent of the coonhound world dogs are walkers and then the other it's like six breeds of tree dogs would would be the other. Sure for people that competition hunt, probably of those are walker dogs. A big majority of the rest are not. For the guys that just simply pleasure hunt, um, a big majority of those are blue ticks, black and tans, that sort of thing. I've always kind of liked that that that term pleasure hunting. It seems kind of like old school. Yeah, it's kind of like, uh, thatwards just pleasure hunting. It's a good descriptive though, I mean, like, why are you coon hunting? Fun? I guess I can get pleasure around of pleasure hunting just to pleasure walkers. And Brent and Michael have walkers and fine pair of walk Both of them are yeah, nice hounds. They're beautiful dogs. I wouldn't say whoa, whoa and waterfowl. It's like a lab, right labs the default. Yeah, and then you got other breeds. I had a chassis and what I would have a half breed dog. Yeah, it's like me a little bit different. Yep. It's style. Yep, yep, it is style. So a slick tree is when you're dog trees and by trees, that means he indicates that he believes a coon to be in this tree. So that means he would go to that tree and bark up, and and you'd go to the tree and there's no coon in it, like like clearly, like you can see the whole tree. There's not a hole, not a nest or anything. There's no leaves that you can see the whole tree, and you're confident Hu that coons like the size of a nickel or the reasons First, what are the reasons for a selectory one. A dog just simply gives up. They've tackled a track that they can't finish. Uh, there's enough scent here that it interests them. They know that their owner wants them to tree, so they give up in tree right here, and they're not right. Um. Other times there's been if you've deer hunted for the people of deer hunt, if you watched a coon in the daytime, move around there, up this log down, up this tree down. They leave a lot of scent all over the woods. And if the dog maybe has a little trouble trailing because of one just ability or to sink conditions, they may wind up on a tree that doesn't have a coon in it. Uh. There are dogs that will grab a tree because another dog comes in and trails too close to them, and out of pure competition, just grab a tree. There's several reasons this slick tree and see the whole idea of a dog tree and two is it's bred into them to want to bark at the base of a tree based upon the scent of the game that there that they're running like that. A tree dog or a tree hound is a specially bred dog like what's so interesting is is that doesn't work out in nature. That is a human specific thing bred into them. Because if a if a wolf trees a squirrel and stays under there for eight hours barking at that squirrel like he's gonna die, this is a This is a human influenced breeding of these dogs. And so the end goal to finish for that dog is to tree. And so that's why I like he might tree if he gives up, like he's like, okay, I gotta finish this track. I'm just gonna tree. Or he knows that he gets praise from his owner when he trees, and so he'll tree. That's probably the number one problem is people not quite understanding what they're doing when they're training a pup. They you've seen me last night petting heck when he treat uh, Well if you do that too much for a dog that doesn't completely understand what's going on, Well he thinks, well, I'm gonna go out here and tree and get pettied. So here I go, come pet me. So yeah, you also got variations of that. You know, dogs are like people, you got different personalities, and they accept praise and and punishment different ways. You know when is a clown. I think I can beat him with the two before for doing Not that I've ever laid a hand on him, but I could do that. In the next minute, he's like, Okay, let's that was fun. Let's go do something else. And some dogs you can look at and get on to them verbally and they're done for the evening and they just cowered down. So a lot of it has to do with being able to recognize the personality of a dog. Now you can talk to ye to look at the dog and say that was adequate. Your dogs was adequate. How long have I hunted with Whalen? Uh going on? It's over two years? Yeah, look a little over two years. He's the most accurate dog I've ever seen. Um, I don't think I've ever seen These are big words. Sorry, hunters don't do this to each other. Michael So is beautiful. It is a beautiful moment. He doesn't hardly make a slick tree, and I mean I can I can count on one hand in two years the amount of slick trees I've seen you make, and he hardly ever trees a dent. Try that we can't get some kind of looking that dentry believe no, I find it. Yeah, stop our phone in the bottom took a picture of coon's in there, that kind of thing. He's the I've hunted for going on thirty five years. He's the most accurate dog I've ever seen. How would he compare to Clay's dogs. Clay's dogs tree one time last night didn't had a coon, so they're d yeah, and they were there on the one that got pulled out. They're still a hundred percent. Yeah. I have seen Wayland slick tree more than I have Claysed dog. So given the conditions last night, you were expecting a lot of dens and slick trees. Do you slick? Do they slick tree more on a slow night? Did they have more false flags or so they would slick tree more on a night that the sinning conditions weren't great and they were not great last so we were expecting more of that, but we ended up having a good Would I would expect that out of most dogs, I wouldn't expect that out of the two they got hunted last night. At the same time, they still do it sometimes, and if they were going to do it, last night would have been the night to have done it, Michael, how much? How much? Give us an overview of the the what a coon dog? Okay, a couple of things, but the the high end of what coon dogs go for, which which will be exorbitant, and we'll make us all go what but then all so bring it down to how an entry level thing like how could somebody get into coon hunting? Give me like a span of the economics of coon hounds because it's kind of mind blowing. So I have some parallels between them and mules. This is all changed in the last five years. So this has changed quite a bit in the last five years. Up until five years ago, a high end competition coon dog, proven winner or someone that knows what they're doing, if seen him and have complete confidence that he's gonna win thirty thou dollars um, who has that much money? Raise your hand in this room. If you do way more people than you believe, all eyes, all heads down, just raise your hand. In the last four or five years, there's been some people come into the game that in the competition end of it, that there's been coon dogs sold for over a hundred thousand dollars. Now, where are these guys making their money back? They are not. Okay, they're not. They're not. Would someone spend money? Let me let me so with a lot of luck, they can make their money back. When was that hunt? The Jarvis Unfree's Memorial hunt was three weekends, so four weekends ago. Four thousand dollar entry fee. Wow, sixty four dogs in the hunt, and you would think, oh man, there's no way that's going to fill up. It filled up so fast that they had a second sixty four dollar sixty four dog hunt on the same night. So they hunted a hundred and twenty eight dogs, two separate hunts, four thousand entry fee per dog. First place paid a hundred thousand dollars. Wow. There and there are there, yes, several of them. They're hunting for a truck right now in Texas to night's finals. Uh, there's a group of guys that have gotten together. They go all over the country and they give away trucks for first place. Entry feed on those hunters are a thousand dollars. I think, can you can you bread a dog and get money out of it? Yeah? I'm thinking, like, there's no money in study dogs. I mean, you're not gonna make a living in a stud dog. Let's put it that way, not that you couldn't make money. Okay, So that's that's the ultra high end. And I think it could be compared to like race horses. Like you look at a horse, like how much the horse cost. It's like, well, you could spend a million dollars on a horse or ten million, but you could also go down there and probably buy a pretty good broke horse for you know, well pre COVID, post COVID out the roof, you still buy puppies for three d bucks or so you can buy a well bred coon hound puppy. Yes, yeah, I gave two hundred fifty dollars for oil. Yeah, so this is not they're not financial significant financial barriers to entry into coon honey. I mean you heard Michael say what a good dog Brent's dog has become, and you paid two dollars for that dog. Yeah. I raised heck on his mother and his father. Yeah. So your dog's names Heck Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I bought his I bought his sire, and I bought a half sister to him, who I sold back to the owner and got his mother in on the deal. So I've always raised my own dogs. I've hardly ever bought a puppy, having having until now you're doing You're in the competition world. Though you're doing some competitions, some nothing like I used to. I can't with my business, um, so I can't go out here and it's it's a competition, so there's people. Well, it gets heated every once in a while, so you're Michael only does Yeah, So you're in a sport where most of it is judged with what you hear is going on. So it's easy to have a miscommunication with someone else about what's going on, or just a complete disagreement on what's happening. So I hear what's going on, and you hear what's going on, that doesn't mean that we have the same opinion of what's going on. So you're basically doing the same thing at a competition hunt. And I can't go out there and sell all these guys coon hunting lights and um stick up for my dog in a competition and make people mad. At the same time, I want to just I don't want to get into the details of competition hunting. We may do that later at some point, but basically on a competition coon hunt, that could some people might hear that and be like, wait a minute, we can't you know, that might go against like North American male of wildlife conservation in some way, Like but a competition couon hunt, no, no, raccoons die. You're not even allowed to firearm on the ground. So this is not about so in in the movie, in the book where the red Fern grows, And this is probably the way competition coon hunts started is it literally was who can bring back the most dead raccoons And that hasn't taken place in a long time. These competition hunts. Raccoons don't die. It's it's really an artifact of of the meat hunts because you're just seeing which dog can tree the most coons, the fastest, and the most kind of clinical textbook away for a coon dog to operate essentially like you you want a dog that I mean, it seems simple. Like if you go coon hunting with really good dogs, like like Heck and Whalen last night, you're like, what's the big deal? Sure? I mean for real, we literally turned the dogs loose in the dark and in ten minutes we're looking at the coon and we're looking at you know, Heck tree and a coon. Well, what you don't know is that these are really good dogs. So the other option is you go out in the twenty five degree weather with ice and all this. You turn loose your dog and he bumbles around for forty minutes and go there and runs the deer and makes a big loop and trees for ten minutes. You start walking towards him and he leaves the tree and chases an armadilla. I mean you you you feel in the story of what goes wrong on a coon hunt and you hunt for five hours and don't see a coon. Last night, we're hunted for two hours, two and a half, three hours and bad conditions, saw five coons, you know, saw some pretty good dog work. So that was like, very good. Is it safe to assume at a competition they don't do it on the honor system? Man, that you don't want me to talk about competition coon hunting, So I'm not We're not going to get into the system. They're called are you serious. You just go out and you're like, yep, well listen, okay, I'll talk. See you're doing what I told you we couldn't do. Okay, we're not going to talk about this Isaac, we're not going to talk about this. We can talk about it's a it's a good I can just open it up just a little bit, but really, I don't want to get into the rules of it. Basically, they're very prescribed rules. There is a judge and competition coon hunting, by my assessment, and I think everybody in here would agree that would know is as much about the handler as it is the dog. I mean, like I could I could have the best dog in the world and know very little about the rules and not be very good and go out and get beat by an average dog with a really good handler. So it's a game. Does each handler have a judge? You're still asking questions. You're just trying to get out judge hunting most of the time. Yeah, that's the one said that coon hunters aren't vaccinated against lyon. Oh they're not, all right, So what you mentioned about the dog bumbling around and leaving trees and and chasing armadilla's, there are guys that have an absolute ball out there doing that, and that's fine. Yeah, it's just not my thing, you know. Yeah, but they're they're a big majority of people that just love to be out there at night with a dog and haven't really matter what the dogs doing. It is a social sport. Um. So you know last night we didn't. I heard this mentioned on the render about the duck hunting, that it's a social thing that you don't have to be quiet. You don't. You don't coon hunting either. I mean, these guys never shut up last night. At one point I said, now, you got to understand, we're trying to hear these dogs bark a little bit. Oh, somebody said last night it just seems too easy, damn and Joshua trout fishing the whole time we were out there. YEA, give it up, boys, let's listen to this now. And so yeah, that's a great place to like swing the conversation back to why I have always of coon hunt and I've done you know, I've been in probably less than ten competition coon hunts and and enjoyed them in their own right for different reasons. Was never very successful at it, and couldn't expect to be with only doing it that amount of time. But the pleasure hunt a coon dog goes right back to what you see in the book where the red fern grows and it is there is there's a magical connection between a person and a hound that is undescribable. It's in our DNA. It literally, I mean you go back to our original conversations in the Burgers podcast about dog domestication, and I mean like there's deep science, deep human psychology and science about our connection with dogs that's just bizarre. Like you just kind of wake up as a human one day born and you just love dogs. And you're like, well, why don't I love chipmunks, Why don't I love ostriches? Why don't I have a rhinosters in my house? And you're like, don't ever question why you have this incredible connect connection to this dog. I'm not crying talking to you have this incredible connection to a dog. And it's like it's like very deep, very real, very biological, very all this stuff. And so to be able to hunt with a dog, it's just fun. I mean, it's just it just doesn't even make it doesn't even make sense, And um, I guess I'm feeling I just thought, I guess now makes sense. Y'all were there, y'all are amazing coon hunters, We had amazing dogs. I thought I was just an amazing coon hunter. I thought, I'm just really mean this, see me the way I pointed my sunlight. But before Josh Spilman you mentioned you mentioned the connection with that dog. Um, So competition coon hunting is about pride and recognition and me wanting you to recognize how good my dog is. That's what it's when it when it comes down to everything, is not the money. It is for some people, but normally it's not about the money. It's about recognition. So I wouldn't carry anything about competition coon hunting and say winning the world championship if no one knew about it. So it's about getting my dog on the front of the magazine, getting on the website. That's when it bulls down to it. It's about recognition for your coon dog. And you know, and I don't want to throw competition coon hunters under the bus too much because I think there's a there's a possibility for a pure motivation inside of any kind of competition, you know. I mean, and there's some guys that are probably doing it for you know, some guys would say it's for the dog. You know, it's too it's recognition that you know, this dog is a top notch dog. And for him to be recognized. But but I get it as too, as exactly what you're saying. Well, and the problem with competition hunting is the same reason that they go. It's about pride. So if I have this much pride in this dog and you say, oh, your dog left that treat, No he didn't. You know, So Rex been asleep on the couch over there. Um I met Rex almost thirty years ago. Competition coon hunt. That's how I met Rex. Rex introduced me to wait Land over there, and uh, I mean that that's how it goes. That's how we build relationships, is is through people that we know. And I would have never known Rex without competition coon hut Yep. It's definitely a passionate group of people that uh that love it. Yeah, And that's so people. It's always interesting interacting with people kind of on a broader level about coon hunting. People are surprised to hear that people even coon hunt anymore, like in Arkansas and in different places maybe it's a little bit more known that people coon hunt, but you get it into more urban areas and sometimes people are like, people still coon hunt. And and that's why this book where the red Fern Grows in the movie. And this whole idea for this podcast is so interesting to me that and I said it in the introduction to this this podcast, was that this was the one time that this super niche thing did a three six, three sixty slam dunk on pop culture and made him love it. And I the reason I got interested in this is I had a friend of mine, um that moved to Arkansas from Los Angeles, California pretty much, and he he he told me that he read Where the Red Fern Grows at his high school or maybe his grade school in in California. And I was, I was like, what, I thought this book was a regional phenomenon. I thought it was just like a small thing, and said, you read that in your school in Los Angeles and he was like yeah, And he was fascinated, and he had all these questions and he wanted to go coon nothing with me, and so I took him first month he lived in Arkansas, and I mean, this guy had never interacted with hunting in any way, and he had all kinds of questions about the book. He was like, the raccoons really like shiny things. There's a part in the book where where Billy catches a coon by putting the shiny object in a hole in a log and then the coon puts his hand in there, and he's got little little traps that that the coon pull his hand out, and uh, you know, we talked about that and we well, and then it happened again with another guy from California. Well, he was on the podcast Andreas I'll Tie You from Meat either. He told me, he just said, man, I love that book so much, and and that's why made me do a little more research and then realized kind of what a big deal the movie was in nineteen seventy four. I mean, that was like a major that would essentially be like, I mean, I don't know what what's a famous movie today. I don't even know where the Red Fern grows iron Man? Iron Man? Where the Red Fern Grows was basically the Iron Man of nineteen seventy four is This was produced by Walt Disney. This was a major motion picture. This was like a big deal, went across the country, movie theaters all across the country. Um, and I think, honestly, I think there's a pattern inside of it. And I alluded to it and said it in the podcast. But we are very interested as hunters and I am as a hunter, in preservation of a lifestyle that is, you know, we believe is beneficial to wild places, wildlife and people in families and economy. Like there's like, yeah, yeah, you'd have a hard time, like given too much of a painting. Hunting really in a negative picture and when you look at this broad scale thing. But we know that the culture in general in this country is leaning towards movement away from some of these things. And so what Wilson Rawls did was he encased a lifestyle that involved hunting into a very human story that was relatable to people. And people all over the country related to Billy Coleman on a human level and they were like they empathized with him, and inside of that empathy for another human, they accepted his lifestyle. And that's just do you see what I'm saying. Yeah, well he took that, He took a subject that just happened to be wanting some dogs and and applied the lesson of working wanting something so bad that was pure and work can hard. For two years I think in the book, just save up enough money to be able to get something and succeed at a dream. And you could apply that anything learning to ride a bicycle, Daniel, there's still hope that, but anything like that, use that handlebar most day stabilization, you know, it could it could be whether it's since you know, studying in school or learned to play the guitar, draw or whatever. Yeah, he he said hisself a goal. He worked beyond measure too to succeed. And the hardships that he faced along the way. And there's so many the story and we're gonna get into it more on the second podcast with Sean Tutan, the professor at the University of Arkansas. The narrative of that movie is really quite complex. It moves in and out of conflict and resolution, conflict resolution from when when the Pritchard boy dies when he falls on his ax oh man spoiler in nineteen seventy four. Yeah, if you hadn't seen this movie yet, you better watch it. Yeah, the Pritchard boy dies. Um, they go to the coon hunt and Grandpa breaks his ankle and then he you know, ends up winning the hunt and then the hunt the money from the hunt is actually what funds his family to leave the country and go to the city, which is the most heartbreaking part of the whole thing for me. For real, It's like doggun it. I thought his criminal record was I heard your heartbreak when you found out about that. Tell you what do you mean when he found out that Wilson Rawls had a criminal record? Yeah, did anybody else? I mean, nobody knew that wasn't so what was the time frame? But it was when he was when he was young man. He first went to person in Oklahoma in nineteen thirty threes. When he went to nineteen yeah, nineteen thirty threes, when he served time great depression, larceny of domestic foul. He said he was stealing a chicken eat. He stole a chicken to eat. And you don't know. The second reason could have easily just been a parole violation. The third reason was breaking and entering. Man. That could have been he got in an old building to go to sleep. I mean, you don't know what right, we don't know. So he in the speech that you put on there, he said his mother said he was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. Uh, well, I would imagine that all three of those times he was probably in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yeah, yeah, you know that was so interesting to me. And I found it out like while I was interviewing Sean Tutan. I mean, that was the first I expected him to say, Man, Wilson Rawls was born in Oklahoma and was just upstanding man and he's buried over by talk and he's like, well he served three prison terms. And and then when I went to research it, it was very difficult to find that information, like to actually get like hard information, which made me and I communicated with Professor Tutan and I was like, do you know it is? I mean I see this, but like, do you have more information? And he was like not really, And that's when I was like, okay, well we got to confirm this before and what you wouldn't know from the podcast, and this is why the Burgers render is the rent that this is why this is we're rendering it down. I called the Oklahoma Department of Corrections. They never called me back. So it's a little bit of a dramatic setup. You got the answering machine. I still haven't called me back, um, but I was able to I mean one percent, I believe one confirmed through records that we were able to find online I actually joined ancestry dot com um and looked up his records and like, there's a picture of Wilson Rawls twenty years old on a with a handwritten prison like card, and that's where it told all this stuff, you know, like five ft ten and a quarter hundred forty eight pounds smoker vaccination scar on his left arm. Um, and uh, it just like told it all. And I mean it was like legit, like that was really his record and um. And again not that that mattered. It's just interesting that he wrote this book that was so deep in character, and that an autobiographical book, you kind of get to go back in and write the things that that you know, you just rewrite your story kind of way maybe you thought it should have been or wanted it to be. Yeah, it was just so interesting, I think. And the professor that you interviewed said he was probably trying to teach young boys basically how to not be him at what he was and do the things that he did to get him in prison, you know, whatever it was. It kind of made me think because I remember very clearly reading that book in school, and then of course I remember seeing the movie and when the Pritcher boy dies. You know, that's such a that really it's like, wait a minute, thought I was watching a Disney movie here, you know, and all of a sudden because like, well, I thought we were hunting coons and somebody's dead. This is crazy, and I guess I thought, my goodness, like what if? And there's no way to know. But you know, I feel like each one of us looks back on our past and there's these things that we wish we could undo or take away, like parts of ourselves, so we wish would just die, you know. And I wonder if as he was writing that story, he was kind of coming to grips with a part of who he was that it seems like died and came to an end, because eventually he was he was married, he had a family. He did all this talking to all these kids and wrote overcame as kind of being ashamed of being a writer and wrote these books. Yeah, yeah, I wonder if on that line, the Pritchard's dying like they were. Man, he did such a great job of making you hate the Pretchers. I'm glad my last name is not Pretcher. I knew those kids. I knew that several growing up. Do you know that that book? I don't know, So it didn't influence everyone like it influenced me. I wouldn't be setting right here right now without that book. So we well the movie. I've seen the movie as a as a kid. Before me and my friend setting, we would spend the summers when we got out of school. The day we got out of school, we went to his grandmother's house and we lived in a tent on the pond of the bank or the bank of the pond for the entire summer, and we hunted and we fished, and that's all we did all summer long. We would go to her house once a week, whether we needed a bath or not, and take a bath. Well, we watched the movie at her house, and we decided we won't need to be coon hunters. That's what had zero idea of how to do it. Uh, looked in the paper, tried to find puppies for sale, didn't have a ride to go get anything. I went to work at the sawmill that was down the road and saved up our money to get dogs for both of us. Before we did that, we're setting out on the front porch and there is a blue tick coonhound walked across the front yard in front of us, no collar on, no nothing, Walt Disney there, I don't know, but they were like released a blue tick. So so we gathered this thing up and we hunted him for a year and never seen a coon. But we hunted almost and I was in So we hauled this thing around on a rope. We had no idea what we were doing. We were afraid to cut him loose. We're afraid we'd lose him home. Yeah, Frady to go home. We had him on a tin foot horse rope and that thing run more armadilla and deer. We were scratched from one end to the other. And I told my friend, because my best friend growing up, still my best friend. I told him, I said, we have to turn this thing loose. I am beat up, I'm scratched on my face, on my arms. We have to turn him loose. And we turned him loose and never seen him again. Okay, now they were like there was like a three month period. Came back. But in that time is when we were carrying. We were a lot tougher. Carried the car battery on our back with the spotlight and UH had a little to cell rayovact flashlights that we walked with and shine the trees with that spotlight. He made two trees. He treated a house cat and he treated a tree that um after watching the movie, we thought, you know, coon's just look, it's easy to put the light up there. They don't look. We looked at that tree for probably two minutes. He was like lion dog. And the way we went, you know, that's a good point, man, when we look at a tree. I mean sometimes you look at a tree for a long time, circlet circlet, circlet, circlet, circlet, and then you're like, there it is, yeah, right out in the wide open. But that led into a life of coon hunting. That led into a life where I build hunting lights and that's what I do for a living now. And meeting Rex and meeting Brent and sitting here with you guys would have never happened. Without that Book's what I'd be doing making. I'd probably be a Meganaire right now. Pretty amazing. Actually, we talked about this a couple of months ago and I hadn't I don't know how I made it through school without ever reading this book. And so I I was doing the buzz building the deck, and so I got the audio book and listened to it, and uh it was great, yeah, man, and I loved it. I was disappointed in Disney in the movie. It would have been so easy to have set a tree in a field with a hollow uh fence post instead of whatever that was, they had to ghost Cooney and that that ruined the movie for me. After every yea, so there there was. I may get into it more on the on the next podcast, as I interviewed Stuart Peterson, who was the childhood actor who's Billy Coleman. It's real hard for me not to want to tell you all about him. But that's what the next podcast is gonna be about. Super interesting guy and super interesting kind of sub story. But yeah. So in the book, they the ghost coon climbs up a tree and then drops into a hollow fence post, and so the dogs tree on the tree, and then the guys get there and they go, let's slick you know tree again the ghost coon. Well, in the movie that they tree by an old building. And I mean, and when I saw it, even as a kid, I was like, come on, Pritchard boys, the old ghost coons in that building. I mean, you know, he was obvious, and so he was going from the tree into this old building. And then Billy's like, you notice that in the movie. I mean, you know, like Hollywood's got speed stuff up. You can't do stuff in real time. They get to the tree, they shine their light. He ain't there ghost two dollars and there, and Billy's like, oh, well, shuts you learned it. Here's your two dollars. And I'm like, shining that tree ye around this thing. I want to send up the bat signal. How many people got into gambling from this book? Because you bet that the podcast he did that to me. He may only be six years old, but I hold that him response, you bet your truck, some guy. I'm worried about it. There's a hotline for people like you. Oh man. Yeah. So, so the book has a couple of different places where the story is different. I'll tell you where I got hung up on the movie. In the book, and this is pretty serious. In the in the movie, excuse me. In the book, the big Pritchard boy sees old An and old Blue fighting and and Pritchard goes, I'm gonna kill that red bone and he grabs Billy's axe and takes off running to go kill Billy's dog, and he falls on the acts, which is Nope, he reached out and grabbed his leg. I watched the movie. You fell right into my track. In the book, he didn't do that. That's what I'm saying. That's my point. So in the book he runs and he trips and falls on the acts, which I always thought it was an unlikely accident. I mean, I probably set up by like a Southern mother influence. Southern mothers are always very fairful, highly unlikely mom. The acts you couldn't hardly cut up the and it's sticking straight up when I fall down. In the book, Billy has nothing to do with the death. In the movie, Billy Coleman reaches out and trips him and he falls on the acts. Terry manslaughter. Boys. I'm not a lawyer, but when I saw that, I was like, oh, dang, I haven't seen the movie. Well, and then okay, and then they go to the The movie really is well done for nine, but they go they go to the I mean the next scene coming out of the woods, after the pitcher boy dies and you know he's dead. And in the movie Billy tripped the boy and he falls on the acts. The next scene, the whole Coleman family is by a gray side in the rain, just pouring rain. I mean, like you just feel sorry for and they're just standing there in the pouring rain, and you see the Pritchard family who they were set up as this like kind of like bad family. And Tuton, Professor Tuton did a good job. He said, what's cool about literary mechanisms is you don't really know what's happening inside of you until someone tells you, and you're like exactly, but you feel terrible for the Pritchards, these like bad people, you know, quote bad people that had these little boys that he just hated. But then when they died and he saw his mother and his father and they're standing there in the rain by this grave side, you just have empathy for them. And then the Coleman family is setting back from the grave like they're not right up, they're not like crowding the family, but they came to pay their respects. And when they're walking back to the wagon and the pouring rain, Grandpa says to Billy, Billy, this wasn't your fault, this was just an accident, and I was like, Billy, it actually was your fault. And that's where that's where walking back with my son and been like, son is going to be tough with you while you're there, I come visit. So the biggest disappointment for me from the book to the movie was the cutting down of that tree for the first con. Yeah, so the movie it was he spent one night, they're cutting that tree down, and the book he spent it was days. His promise to those dogs to get that coon. That was the whole thing of the book was his promise to those dogs. And uh, he spent all that time cutting that tree down. In the you know, they have to make it happen, So they spent one night in the movie. But well, and that's part of it that I never understood with Wilson raw As is. Um it seemed like a poor family like that would have had a gun number one and number two, you cut down a tree with a coon in it? Is that coon not gonna hit the ground and run up another tree, clay? Could you just not ruin everything? Well, this is the thing. Though they were poor and bullets cost money, they cost nothing for that boy to swing that ax right, But what I mean do you think people really did that? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, But I mean, is the coon not just gonna run up another tree, No, not if you have a good killed all to catch him on the ground. Yeah. So oh yeah easy. So my uncle's grandmother uncle's side, they grew up as sharecroppers here in East Arkansas, and you know, their dad would give them three or four shales to go squirrel hunting, and they better come back three or four squirrels. You know, they didn't waste shals. They didn't. You know, if you could get him out jump the mount. People used to climb trees all the time. That was the thing to do, was to climb the tree and kick the coon out. They just didn't hardly carry. Yeah, okay. So it's so the preservation of ammunition or not having a gun pretty pretty realistic. I mean, I knew it could happen, but I was just like, man, it seems like even a poor family would have a singamore tree the size of the one they was. We're just gonna call it good and go find them. But he made a promise. That was the point of the world, was the promise that he made that the dogs and you saying that Michael May helps me make more sense of why at the end when the dogs die spoiler, he's done. Or listen to the podcast. Wait a minute, this is the podcast. Didn't you feeling lightheaded some fixer? No, I mean that helps me makes sense of why at the end and when the dogs pass away, he's done. Like it was more than he It was more than I love coon hunting dogs. Those dogs well, and so people, that is a you know, people, why do you want to hunt coons? I don't want to hunt coons. Coons is what my dogs hunt. I love my dogs. That's what it's about. Mm hmm. Coons has just happened to be the game if it was squirrels or possums or whatever. That it's about. Dog work is seeing a dog work. What I think is interesting too. And I tried to say this in the podcast and what you'll hear it more through this. But we live in such a modern time with all the technology that absolutely surrounds us and dominates our lives. And I like cultural artifacts. So cultural artifact would be like why that a competition? Why we like to tree a coon? It's kind unusual. It's like what why, Well, and you go back and there was a time when that coon hide was extremely valuable monetary value also sustenance value for different families just eating coons back in the day, and that built such a strong thing inside of rural culture in the South and mid South different you know, wherever they coon hunted, that a coon dog was highly valued. It was highly valued. And so today you go might ask some kid over here that is connected to rural culture, be like, it's a coon dog, good or bad? Like you know, and they would be like, good, very good. Why I don't know, it's a coon dog. It's a it's that's good. I mean, I'm breaking it down like to the simplest terms. That is a cultural artifact of a time when a coon dog could literally change your life. And then it's also interesting to see like the modern version and of that and like when when I look at my life and survey my life and all the incredible times that I've had hunting raccoons with hounds, the people that I've met, the things that I've done that have that has made me go when I see a coon dog, I'm like, that has value, because what else are you gonna do on a Friday night. I mean really for the last seven years. And I was out of coon hunting for a good part of my adult life. So just in the last like seven eight years, I got back into coon hunting. And literally, I'm like calculating, of the hundreds of times that I've taken my kids and other people coon hunting, what would we have been doing? I mean, like, what would you have been doing on a cold, icy Friday night in February. And I mean the truth is probably a family would have been sitting around watching the television or and it's like, no, we were out engaging in an adventure. You're engaging in, you know, riding trucks, doing stuff, working together. Like, man, I love yelling at kids to go get dogs. If there's a kid around me and I've got dogs, I'm like, get that dog and put him in the box and then go get those dog called. I mean, I just I don't even know. I don't even care who the kid is. He may be the neighbor, he may not even be going with us, and I just have this instinct to be like, get that kid's hands on that dog's collar. And what age did you read the book? Were you in elementary school? No, I can't. I don't think. I'm not even sure. I read the book when I was a kid. I think we started off watching the movie. That's what we did. We read it, and I remember we were I have very few memories of school, but I do remember reading it in school and then watching the movie in class. Yeah, I think it was the sixth grade when I read it. I think most elementary schools do it like fifth grade, but I think it was the sixth grade. But I remember how it affected me at the time. It was it was culturally significant to me because of Conan being big where I grew up, you know, and I knew people and had coon dogs, and me wanting one so bad. I could identify with Billy in there. I think you and I talked about it. The other thing, Well, it was identified so much with it because I turned eleven when we were when I read the story. No, it was one of my favorite years. I turned eleven and read the book, saw the movie. I think it came out on TV about that time, and then I had to have a coon dog. I talked to my daddy, said you gotta earn it. So it's like I told you, I didn't go through the depression. We weren't having to hunt to feed our families. We hunted because we enjoyed it. We eat a lot of the game that we that we hunted. But I identified so much with it that he said, you earned the dog, You earned the money, you can buy the dog. So I worked there. We worked on. I grew up on a farm, so I'm making um a wage there for a different task I would do, and he provided the majority of the money. But I can remember going to school right had to be finished that book, and I put a jar on my desk and I wrote on Salt Disney here for this, No, but I watched this. I put a note in there that said, contribute to the Brent wants a Coon Dog fund. Well, I got one donation. One girl in my class and her name was Amy. She dropped a quarter in there, and I told her, I said Amy. When I grew up and getting married and I have a daughter, I'm gonna name her Amy. My daughter is named Amy, Yes, sir, And it was from that are you at all in touch with Amy? Five or six years ago? Think it's really creepy you name After actually introduced her, I said, this is Amy. Was with. I thought you were going to say, Amy introduced your daughter to her. This is a girl. Remember a coon drop tree on Amy's head? Do you remember the sixth grade? And I told you that a quarter And she looked at me and smiled and said, I absolutely do not. She couldn't recall it. I said, I was gonna kill the interest of the story. But this is Amy right here. I thought you were gonna say. I thought you were gonna be like Amy, because you've donated to my fun the first raccoon hide that I get, I'm going to donate it to you. I mean, I thought it was gonna be something. I thought you were gonna say. Five years ago. I bumped into her and she said, my name's Mamie. Hey, here's okay, here's the biggest question. I mean, did you get a dog? I did? I did seventy five dollars. We bought it from man Rantom feed store there and Warren where up and we hunted him, started training him. Was he a good dog? He? I think he had he had potential to be something, but he wounded up getting stolen. But the biggest adventure I had with him was no, he was a walker, a couple of kids ended up with the dog for a couple of months, and my dad says, we're gonna take him over. We'll take him over to a spot I know he's got a bigger symmetry. And we took it overs on a farm a friend of ours. And we drive up. We drive up, we're pulling up and the headlights are shout on that cemetery and man, it looks I mean it's like Christmas lights. There's coon's all and it's five or six coons in there. Oh man, oh yeah. So we get at and we get the pup out. We turn him loose, and he's just bumping around. He don't know what he's doing. He's running around the tree and around us and back and forth. And I told my dad, I'm a climbing friend. Shake some of them coons that shake a coon. Now, Well, I climbed up in the tree. I gotta grabbed the limb up up the tree, I go, and I started shaking him out. Man, he just raining coons for like three minutes, bam bam, bam back and as soon as they hit the ground, he's barking right back up the tree. They come. They're calling I thought that big old so I thought I'm dead, you know, and hunt I came my dad say this, hang on, son, just hang on. And but that was that was the most adventure we had with him. But he hunted good and uh, but he got out of being somebody picked him up and never saw him again. So several several dogs through the years, blue Tick included, and but by far, this one that I have now is it's been the best. I bought my first one for seventy five working at that sawmill. We was like the going price for we. We we got ours for after Jeff Cunningham negotiated. That's actually probably pretty accurate because I got my dogs in ninety four. Y'all probably got your dogs in the seventies early at DOUN like like not good coon dog puppies had gone up by about because that man wanted a hundred dollars for a pub. We negotiated for two for one fifty. They've been depreciating. Talk to me, what do you mean, Well, Billy Coleman paid fifty bucks for two pounds, you know, nifteen thirty would be hundred dollars today, Well you can, you can. I'm just saying I feel like they're going downhill. Well there's there. It's it's just the tragedy of the commons um. Coon dogs have not stayed up with inflation. I wish coon I wish mules and coon dogs would would like like paste with like carrots, fir or like a bag of yeah milk, Yeah, but it does. They don't because you put a gallon of milk in front of me, especially his chocolate. If you could have a slick train walker or a gallon of chocolate milk or a gallon of chocolate offer. I don't know if they heard it. I said it really loud a couple of times. I offered Michael five dollars for his dog last night. He didn't take it. And then I offered Brent five dollars for his dog and they didn't take it. I mean, I don't know, that's that's a lot of money where I came from. I believe Brent's response was for what part of my dog by a partnership just that they don't have. Are you interested in selling a partnership in your dog? You can have the part that eats this is okay, remember Clay's last partnership with dogs. I'm sorry, man, I need to call him. This is like, it's like figuring out you served three prison terms. Maybe one day you will wow and they'll be like, can you believe you never talked about it? He just kind of on your Wikipedia page. Well and they but then, but what I said was maybe he did talk about it and we just didn't know. I mean, I don't claim to be a Wilson Rawls, you know, like expert. So maybe he did. He just didn't in those channels I gave him that. That's not something you jump up and tell everybody every conversation that you have in an elementary school. It's also the kind of thing that if if you are a public figure that everybody loves and you wrote this great story that's really compelling, that people don't want to dwell on. They want to kind of forget well, and it probably just wasn't relevant. You don't think so those kids saying it happens so long ago that he came into the elementary schools and stole those kids chickens, Well, I think about it. If he went to prison for if he went to prison for stealing a chicken, he wasn't the only one. It might have been something that was fairly common. You know, my grandpa spent a little time in prison. I just have a feeling that if you serve three prison terms for that kind of stuff, there's some shady stuff going on in other places. Well, but remember him talking about even in the clips that I used, which I used like four minutes of an hour long speech, that would have been like his polished version of his life. And he said, in all those years I spent rambling around from city to city, and I was like, yeah, you're stealing stuff, chicken. I mean, I'm not making it up. I mean, I'm I'm just the messenger. But I hope it came through and and I believe it did. I mean, I respect him because of the the path that he eventually led his life do so. I mean, to me, it's like a thing to be celebrated. And I think probably during that time it wasn't. I think today, because of the nature of technology and the communication, you couldn't hide something like that. He came to the chicken and he stole it, and he made the right there. Well, and the point being about like this tip day and ages, you couldn't hide something like that, so you'd have to confront it, and you'd say, Man, I used to live a rough life and then, but I celebrated today. So it's celebrated today that you overcame that back then that people didn't want to know about it. Let's not talk about you being a thief. That's okay. We just won't bring that up because of their sorted past. Bump bump bum. You know, and Brent have a sorted past. That's all we can't talk about. I thought this was a safe place, guys. Do we just kind of gloss over the part where he mentions that he was working for the nuclear Yeah Commission, He was a construction worker for the nuclear Commission. Yeah, you talk to me. I'm just assuming that there'd be a background check on a project like really nuclear fel I feel like they were doing some background checking as soon as they started messing with nuclear stuff for a guy out there. They don't or we wouldn't be here, okay, mm hmm. Man Woodrow Wilson didn't he have the coolest voice in the world, though, I recognized that off of the movie, like they didn't like. I think in the credits of the movie it says that he narrated it. I didn't realize that he didn't do it, and you immediately pick up like that's Wilson rawls and um, yeah, but I mean he lived through a difficult time that we didn't. We'd have lived through. And you will not die of hunger when there are chickens running around that you could take. So I was surprised. I would like a little more detail on that, Like how do you go to prison for stealing chickens? Someone had connections, he stole a chicken from someone that knew someone probably Yeah, well, I mean it's chickens plural. It could be twould like today to go to prison for stealing chickens, like in a one time incident, you'd have to like steal like a chicken truck and like you think it was a sting operation. They had an animatronic chicken. I've seen what those game wardens do with deer. Yeah, I have like a chicken out in the yard bouncing up and down. Yeah, I got you, sucker, and you pull in grab it and then the sirens come on. I hate to bring us up. This is a big segue, but we had a massive chicken crisis at our house this weekend. New from Farm Oh it was major and involved my dogs. Uh. We had this big snow and ice and you know, really extreme temperatures and we have Misty has chickens. She loves her chickens like way more than a human should love a chicken, and um, it's it's hard for us because of how much she loves those chickens and us die. If you had a romantic setting on your sun spot headland, I would shine it away from the chicken, not like the though well yeah no she didn't. She was afraid of him. But no. So so we had real extreme temperatures and usually we end up shutting the coop a little bit after dark because if you shut it, you can't shut it try because the chickens don't go in there. You gotta shut it, like right it dark, or like maybe right before you go to bed. You're like, hey, go out there and shut the chicken coop, And so like at ten o'clock at night, she was like, hey, do you mind shutting the chicken coop? And I was like okay, And so I walk out there and we I think we had like fifteen chickens and they were like five in there, and they were like feathers just a trail of feathers, and I just go, dot, got it. I'll walk back in and I go, hey, something something got your chickens, and she just was like, oh no. And uh so I take Tim over there, Tim the squirrel dog, and he is so tuned into you know what I want from him. I don't know what it is. I think maybe it's a coon or a fox, That's what I think it is. And I get over there and I see him put his nose on the ground and start smelling, and I start sicking him on it, you know, just like get him, get him, get him, get it, getting him excited, And sure enough he takes off trailing and goes out kind of buy our garden around and he gets on a track and it's barking on the track and I think, dad gum, he's gonna trail whatever that is up. So I go get Fern, and which is my plothound, which is supposedly a a dog that won't run off game, which is not true. Uh. And I take Fern over there and I turned her out right at that chicken coop and she doesn't strike, she doesn't bark, and I pretty much know it's not a coon at this point, because if it's a coon, she would just struck out of there. And she just kind of ambles around. But I acor on it, like I'm like, come on, get get get get get it. And she hears tim and sure enough she starts trailing and barking, and off they go. And I had my phone with me and I text everybody, and you know, I kind of just want to miss you to feel good. And so I'm like, we're on the track, babe, you know, Like I'm like, we're after him, him and Fern. We'll find those twelves. And they they run across the road and up on a ridge and make a loop and circle back around and come over right by my neighbor's house. And I text my neighbor. I have good neighbors. Text my neighbor and I say, hey, I just turned loose my dogs on something that kills our chickens and they're over by your house. He text me back and he says, I'll get my A R. Fifteen out. I'll be on the porch. I love the guy literally said that, and uh and and so the dogs run past his house and they're trailing, and finally the track just kind of peters out and they're going to play. So I can't get to and thereby road, and so I call him back. Well the next night. My neighbor also has some traill cameras set up like that, send pictures to his phone. And uh, it was a black panther, A black panther, good one. That was a good one. That's why you're here. And and he had a picture of a kyo. Yeah it was. I'm pretty sure the chickens are dead. There's a tin of chickens in his mouth. Or fox wouldn't killed tin chickens. That would have come back ten nights and killed one a night, yeah, yea. Or a mink would get in there and kill them all and leave him. And but so the moral are the stories your dogs trashy? Yes? Absolutely, And that's where Stan died. That's why where the red friend grows. A real coon dog wouldn't have struck a mountain lion because he was trashy. I'm all about having a multipurpose dog at different times. I would love it if my dog well. And and and they have got after bobcats a couple of times that I've known about, which is legal to run in our stay. I'd love it if they had trashy multipurpose. What does he run whatever he wants? I mean, it's it's obvious what it happens. He swaps on the very first coon tracks he crosses, but he will run something off. I mean, did you mark that down? Do you realize it's been recorded? Michael I freely admitted it before the first time he said it. I was like, I'm white, like I didn't hear that. Next time, I'm gonna be be ready for and recorded. But it's not he said it. Oh man, So chickens, Wilson rawls, coon dogs, trashy coon dogs. We've really covered it here. This is this has been really insightful. Um, speaking of black panthers meat either now we have our our believer black panther hat out. Yeah, I'm gonna get one. I like that. Hey, and I'm not trying to hype the market, but I'll just tell you if you're gonna get when, you better get one because they already sold out of Burgery's hats real. Yeah. Yeah. So we ordered a big number of them the first time, and we sold out in like a week and they were like, Okay, Well, let's order twice as many. They ordered twice as many of that number, Like we were really, we're not doing this on purpose, Like I'm I'm like, how many do you think your mom to choose? Bottom? The other day? And she was wearing one front words and back. So she's she's bought a lot of them, but it's not support. She's scalping them look up. Yeah. Yeah. And so anyway, they sold out of the double amount, you know, a couple of weeks ago when I started posting about those, those happened like two weeks. So doesn't have someone that projects sales. It's it was just a gamble. We didn't know how much they were gonna sell. But this time they're reordered and they won't be back in for like another I think like two months. And then and they bought some of this time that I mean, I don't have to give them away. They're gonna flood the market. Price is gonna drop nopet in two days. You better buy him quick. Embarrassed to admit it. But the first time they ordered ten, this time they ordered twenty. Hey, you's be surprised at the text messages I get. I got a message from a guy the other day. That is a friend of mine, and um, he held up his phone on an airplane and took a picture and there was a guy like a couple of seats up wearing a Burger's hat backwards. And I said, did you talk to the guy? And he was like no, I couldn't you know. By the time he got out, it was kind of over and um, trying to think of a people all the time are sending me pictures of bargers, people you know, but no, So now it's it's great. I really appreciated by buying the hats and wearing them and supporting what we're doing. But you better get those believer hats quick. That's all I gotta say. Can anybody else here? Rick snoring but me? So we have a coon hunter over here. I hadn't mean dead asleep. Oh man, Hey, this has been fantastic, Thanks guys. Closing thoughts, Dan, anybody, Michael, Josh looking forward to tonight? Tonight? Yeah, we're going if it's raining or not. I don't want to hear it. I mean, I'm such a good hunter. We're gonna see so many coons. Yeah, we set you up for real disappointment. You've got to deliver tonight. Deliver the mail, all right, guys, next time. See like

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