00:00:05 Speaker 1: Welcome to this country Life. I'm your host, Brent Rieves from coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living. I want you to stay a while as I share my stories and the country skills that will help you beat the system. This Country Life is proudly presented as part of Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast the airways have to offer. All right, friends, pull you up a chair or drop that tailgate. I think I got a thing or two to teach you. Dogs, hogs, and submarines. Those of us who value the companionship and love of a good dog are many now. You spend enough time with them and they'll fill your head and your heart with some great memories. I talk to folks all the time about my dogs, and I listen to stories about theirs, and you can tell which ones that have really made it impact on them by the way they look when they talk about it. We're gonna talk about a couple today that will forever be at the top of my list as favorites. But first I'm gonna tell you a story. Zach was a giant black labrador. He belonged to my brother Tim and was about as big as a lab gets. He was a monster, and the good Lord chiseled him out of patience and brains. He was smart. Tim had trained him on the basics of obedience and retrieving, But that dude possessed an abundance of inherent natural ability of what made good labs great labs. You've heard me say before that just about any kind of utilitarian dog that there desire to go and do what theyre bread to do is an untrainable treat. Just because the dog is a Labrador doesn't make him a good retriever, just like having a coonhound doesn't make them a coon dog. There's a big difference. A coon hound is a breed category within a group of hunting dog breeds. A coon dog is a title given by hunters to a specimen from one of those breeds that consistently strikes a track, follows it to a tree, and barks so you can find him and the coon You can see beautiful specimens of each breed of sporting dog every Thanksgiving when they have that Westminster Dog Show on TV. We hardly ever miss it. They have some beautiful beagles and retrievers and coonhounds and bird dogs. They are the epitome of what all those breeds are supposed to look like. Height, weight, earlength, gate, stance, color, and build are all judged according to a set of list of requirements. Some of them may even be good hunting dogs. They obviously possess the outward traits of the breed. Unfortunately, that's not how it works in the real world. They not only have to look the part, they have to be able to perform it. The show dogs are what one of my old football coaches would say when describing an athletically built player with zero ability as looking like Tarzan but playing like Jane. Well, Zach not only looked like Tarzan, but he played like Tarzan. And King Buck had a baby. If you don't know who King Buck was, look that dog up. Anyway, Zach not only looked the part, but he played the part as well. Add in the mixture that he was a perfect family dog, and you get Zach. Zach was in his prime in the mid eighties, and he was a constant companion of any of the Reeves Boys' activities as long as Tim was there, whether it was Me and Tim or Tim and his two boys, Matthew and Will. Zach was a fixture on every outing and adventure. I recall a time in the summer that truly dim illustrated Zach's patience with children. This is what made him such a great family dog. We were shooting clay targets in front of Tim's house. It was in the middle of the summer and duck season was still a couple of months away. Matthew and Will were watching and helping load the skip thrower, playing in the dirt, and just doing what boys do. Will, the younger of Tim's sons, was around I guess around five years old, and was standing safely behind everyone as we took turn shooting. Now, Will didn't miss a lot. He paid attention to everything, but he didn't make a lot of racket and could easily entertain himself. But I remember him catching my eyes I waited for my turn to shooting. He was staring at Zach, who was standing in front of him at Tim's side on the firing line. Zach, as I failed to mention, was a male dog. His name was a context clue, but for the sake of the side story that I'm on right now, that fact needs to be understood completely. Also, it was extremely warm and inn keeping with how nature has provided that dogs of Zach's persuasion keep some of their parts cool by allowing them to distance themselves somewhat from their normal anatomical position. Zach was a big dog, you remember, Zach had a noticeable amount of his anatomy that needed cooling, and that was what caught Will's attention. I watched Will as he watched the south end of Zach. He was seemingly hypnotized, like he was watching the pendulum of a grandfather clock, swinging back and forth, back and forth. I could see the wheels turning in his head and the confused look on his face as he wondered what he was looking at. He slowly walked forward, and before I could stop him, he reached out with his right hand and he took hold of Zack's swinging and he squeezed. Zack never made a sound. His hind end lowered a couple of inches, and he froze. A normally expressionless dog. Zack slowly turned his head back to see what had captured him, and I could see the horror of the situation encapsulated on Zack's face. His eyes bugged nearly out of his head, yet showing no signs of aggression or panic. Now I was scared to move for fear of startling with Zack and the bite and Will, and as quickly as if it started, Will slowly released his grip on Zach's person. Will walked away, curiosity satisfied, and resumed playing in the dirt and never set a word. Zach turns. Zach turned back around and slowly sat down at the hill on Tim's left side. Zach was a chump at family life, and he loves those boys. 00:06:58 Speaker 2: As just as much as we all love. That's why he got to go everywhere that we went, and it was usually only an arm's length away when we were doing something, which leads me back to the story I started telling way back at the. 00:07:11 Speaker 1: Beginning of this. Sometime around that time frame, after dark and maybe even the following winter, Tim and I were skinning a wild hog we'd killed down in the bottoms. It's a pretty good bar hog that we'd caught and cut sometime earlier. I'm going to talk in depth about wild hogs in the future, but for right now, all you need to know is that a bar hog is a boy hog minus a couple items that make him a boy hog that had been removed by us the previous winter after our squirrel dogs had bade him up down in the bottoms. So we had this hog hanging in a pecan tree in Tim's backyard, and we were removing his hide in strips. It's an easy way to skim the hog if you're not intending on cooking him hole, which we weren't. I remember he was a fat rascal, and some of that fat was nearly as thick as your fist. Between the meat and the inside of his hide. The hair on that hog was coarse, thick and jet black, the same color as Zach, who sat beside us watching the whole operation. He was licking his chops, and Tim cut off a piece of fat and chunked it towards Zack and he caught it in midair. And every time we'd cut off a little chunk, we'd lob it over to him and he caught it. Every one of them. The bigger, longer, thicker strips of hide and fat we piled up on the other side of the tree, away from where Zach was sitting. They never whimpered, wined, or made a sound. The only thing you heard was the occasional chump when we blindly tossed the chunk hog fat in his direction. We were skinning that hog in the dark except for the truck lights, and Zack was as black as a shadow. Anyway, Now we got that hog skin quartered on ice, and we loaded all the guts and the skin in the back of the truck and we haulted off for the couch and the buzzards to take care of the next day. I just lived down the road from Tim then, and we were meeting early the next morning to go duck hunting on the Sleek River. Tim picked me up and was Zach sitting in the middle between us and his old truck. We headed out. We didn't have a far drive, and we were just tooling along when the most mild odorous stitch I've ever had the displeasure of smelling punched me in the nose. Sweet Jesus, Tim, what did you do? He said, I didn't do that. What is wrong with you? It was horrible. It was worse than anything I'd ever experienced. I'd been in the Army basic training in the gas chamber, when they make you take off your mask to fill the effects of the gas, and so you'll trust that your mask works. That was nothing, absolutely nothing compared to this. We rolled the windows down, let that cold, frigid air rush in and allow both of us to see through the tears of agony. I still thought it was him, and he still thought it was me. With ten minutes left after our ride, Whamo, there it was again, Oh the silent killer, and this time it was even worse. I thought I was gonna die Before I could get the window rolled down. Tim was driving all over the road, trying to roll his window down, cover his nose and mouth and cuss at me while trying not to breathe. Now, this hunt had started off terribly. We weren't even out of the truck yet. I felt like if I hadn't been so weak from the fumes, that I had just bailed out going down the highway and just took my chances with the laws of physics instead of counting on hold of my breath to save my life. Both windows were down and there was no relief. Whatever it was it was being manufactured in the cap of that truck, and it was gonna kill us all if we didn't get it stopped by Now, I thought, if it is Tim, he was a lost cause and there's no saving him. I'd yet to have children, I still had something to live for. Oh the humanity. My eyes were burning. I can't breathe mercifully. I felt the truck slow down and make the sharp turn into the parking spot. We both had the doors open on his old truck before the wheel stopped rolling that gum. It was cold outside, but man, that air was fresh and clean. I looked through the cabin, saw Tim standing in the door, just as I was on the other side of the truck in the dim glow of the interior light. And then I saw Zack. I'd forgotten about Zach. He'd been like the invisible man during the turmoil of the darkness. I had totally forgot he was with us. But there he sat, motionless in the middle of the bench seat, looking through the windshield like he was the only one there, before burping loudly and throwing up a congealed glob of hog fat and hair that nearly made me faint. It was Zack pulling the old sneaky pizza on us. Apparently he used his black coat as a cloaking device and was slipping to the other side of the tree in the hog skinning last night and filling his belly up with a pork fat weapon of mass destruction. Poor fella had to have been suffering with all that on his stomach, I know. We were. Tim cleaned the floorboard up as best he could, and we went hunting. The buddy of ours came out a little later and hunted with us in her little makeshift blind and I told him when he got there, you better watch that dog. And he said, why will he bite or is he gonna try to get my cheese and crackers to him? And said, oh, he won't bite you, and he probably he probably ain't real interested in eating nothing right now. We put him down wind to the dog, and it didn't take long before Zach started passing gas again, but this time with Tim and I both upwind. It was funny, Oh man, the look on his face. I'm sorry, Gerald, but that's just how that happened. Billy Coleman starts out in the story where the Red Fern grows as an adult that rescues a hound, and while nursing it back to health, he remembers and tells the story of his journey with a pair of hounds when he was ten. The format in which it's told is somewhat reminiscent of this podcast. I pick a subject and talk about it and tell stories relating to it that I remember from my own experiences. It was also quite possibly the best introduction to hunting and hounds for folks who knew nothing about it. And as I've said before, it also let the fuse of desire for kids at that time to long for a puppy of their own and to chase and tree coons with them. And I was one of them two generations later, and that story in book is still inspiring people now. I talk to folks all the time that reference it to me. Someone will ask a question about the book or a dog that they've heard me mention on here, and it will get the storytelling and memory machine going. I was thinking the other day about a recent trip with a group of friends and old whaling. Whaling is my Tree and Walker coon dog, and you've probably seen pictures of him on my Instagram, heard me talk about him on here. But we were coon hunting last year and had three or four hounds out running in the White River bottoms. It was coonhound pandemonium with dogs, Tree in here, and they're at a pretty fast pace. Had we been walking, and we'd have been in for quite a trick. The coons had the running shoes on that night and were making the dogs earn their keep. Seemed like we had a dog running a good track in every direction, which isn't a bad thing at all since we were all, you know, riding four wheelers and cyber sides. But these dogs were leaving the country these coons. Summer treeing a mile apart and picking our way to the trees through the river bottoms can take time when you're avoiding slews that are too deep to cross and a flat full of cypress needs that will get you hung up. We've been to several trees, and my garment trackers showed whaling headed back into an area that we treated lots of coons in. The display map on the garment shows you the track the dog is making from the signal it receives from his tracking collar. You can tell by looking at the picture. It's literally painting pretty well. If a dog is running a coon, or chasing something off game like a deer or a coyo deer, or just about anything else. The dog is following the coon's feeding patterns, and having been a student of coons and my own eating patterns for the last fifty seven years, I can tell at a glance what's going on. Couple that with knowing how my dog runs a coon, and the sounds he makes when he makes them tells the whole story. The story Whaling was telling right then was that he was chasing a coon and was getting close to the bandido that was made in the tracks. With no other dogs closed that were running a track that hot, we headed toward the area where Whaling was making such a fuss. The group of us stopped our four wheelers and side besides when my trackers said we were about two hundred and fifty yards away from Whaling. According to it, Whaling was moving in our direction, and according to his barks that I could hear, he was getting close to the coon. He was barking more and more excitedly. The tempo was picking up, and you could hear the drive and determination in his voice. Two hundred yards away now and he has loud. He locates with a big long ball, and I say, tree Whaling, he's got him. Boys, let's go. We started all the ATVs and drove the short distance down a wood road that led to within a few yards of where my trackers showed his location. Now, normally you can hear him barking over the engine noise when you get that close, but when we pulled up, it said like he was a quarter of a mile away. Well, that's weird. My tracker says, he's fifty yards off the road. We all pile out of our machines and walk to where my tracker says he's supposed to be. Now whaling is barking is even more intense now, but he sounds like he's getting further and further away. It took us less than thirty seconds to travel the two hundred yards from where he was so loud, and now he sounds like he's traveled nearly half a mile away. Well, my tracker has an option for a compass display that shows the face of a compass and an arrow that shows the direction and the distance from the handheld device to the collar that's being tracked. I followed it from the wood road we were parked on to where I was now standing, and the compass was spinning around on the display indicated that I was standing on top of whaling, but there was no whaling to be seen. People were talking, looking around for him, trying to figure out why he sounded so far away. Now whaling had trailed this coon through the bottoms along a big water filled slow and I was standing thirty five yards from the edge of the slough. I asked everyone to be quiet and listen. According to my device, I should have been standing right on top of him. They got quiet, Whaling kept barking, and I realized my tracker was right. I was standing on top of him. He was under the ground. I told everyone to start looking for a hole, but there was none to be seen. I was in a panic, trying to figure out how I was going to get him out of there. Now, if you follow this podcast on my Instagram, you know that that dog is a valued member of this family to my wife Alexis and my daughter Bailey. He may be more valued than the coon hunter. I've never taken that survey for fear of getting my feelings hurt, So going home without him was a no go. It just wasn't going to happen. Now, he obviously chased that coon in there and had him bathe, But how in the world did he get in there, and how the world was I going to get him out? I seen him baycons in beaver lodges and then holes dug in the side of a creek and slow banks, but to have him thirty five yards away from the water's edge on a flat, barren ground was a new one on everyone there. I'm thinking, how long is it going to take me to dig that dog out with his pocket knife? While someone goes up to the farm shop several miles away and gets a shovel. I shine my light back toward the edge of the slough and I saw a ripple in the water. Now, unless there's an overflow with the river pushing out into the woods over its banks, slows don't have current, so the water should be still. With us being there, with no other dogs and all the commotion going on, there shouldn't be any animal activity in making the waves. I ran over to the spot on the edge of the slough and I laid down looking over the bank. The water was less than a foot below the edge of the bank, and with my head light I could see a six inch gap between the top of the water and the top of a big hole that ran straight back up in there. About six feet. My heart sank. I couldn't hear Whaling any better here than I could when I was standing right on top of him, way back up in the woods. It looked like it was just to wash out, But hoping against all hope, I started calling him. The barking stopped after a few minutes, and it was stone cold silence. Here, Whaling, here, come on son here. There wasn't a sound, There wasn't a ripple in the water. There was nothing but gloom hanging in the air, and I whispered the prayer, Lord, please let this dog come out of there. I looked around for the men of the time while I laid there on the bank, for another entrance into what I thought was going to be Whaling's grave. As I looked across the slough on the other side, I saw another ripple push out across the top of the water, and I followed it back across several others and looked back into that hole up in that bank, just in time to see a set of coon dog eyes pop up from under the water. He was swimming to me with nothing but his eyes above the water, and a small gap between the water and the top of that tunnel, and when he poked his head out from underneath the edge of that bank, I grabbed his collar and pulled him up on the bank beside me. My friend David McDaniel's got a picture of it, and I'll share it so you can see it on my Instagram. Good night, nurse. I was glad to see that dog. I will never forget that feeling of see in that set of green glowing eyes sticking up above the water like a periscope on a submarine now wailing. He was just as happy and proud to be there and treated it like it was just another tree coon, and to him, I suppose it was. I turned him loose from that spot after I bout petted all the hair off of him, and we hunted on through the night with my friends and all the other dogs. But my mind kept going back to that moment that I thought all hope was lost and that he was lost. I still think about it, and it's a good lesson for me. I'm telling you this story now, and that old coon dog I thought I'd lost forever is laying at my feet, sound asleep. He's a living, breathing and loving example that all is never lost. And with the little faith you can see the light in the darkest of tones. I thank you so much for listening, and I really appreciate the time you give me each week to talk about this country life of mine. It's a good one and I'm proud to share it with you. Until next week. This is Brent Reeves said, and af y'all be careful.

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