00:00:05 Speaker 1: Welcome to This Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves from coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living. I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences in life lessons. This Country Life is presented by Case Knives on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast the airways had off. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tail gate. I've got some stories to share eating what you hunt. I have always been a fan wild game and eating while I chase in the field, as at times it's been just as rewarding as the pursuit. Nothing beats the tug of a big bluegill on your line, except maybe how it tastes coming out of the hot peanut oil. We're talking about eating the game we're after in some of them that may not be on your menu. But first, I'm going to tell you a story. Twenty years or more ago, Michael lived not far from my brother Tim and was about the same age as my nephews Will and Matthew, who were separated only by about three years. It wasn't uncommon for him to get off the school bus at their house and play ball or ramble around the countryside, as country boys tend to do, and when school was out, they'd have bicycle track worn pass back and forth on the gravel road that passed by in front of both their houses that were old mile or so apart. Around meal time, they would all magically appear at one another's house to be invited to sit down and eat. The internal clock of young boys taking down the minutes to supper time is highly accurate, regardless of their location or activities. It's a silent dog whistle to a sheep dog. They started making their way towards the source of the call from way down in the creek bottoms or out of the barn, just in time to smash a gallon of milk or sweet tea and to fire a double help in the whatever was coming off the stove or out of the oven. This would be the case the last time Michael would pull up his chair at my brother Tim's house. Tim walked out of his house one afternoon and as he stepped off the porch, he narrowly missed being bitten by a huge timber rattler that was laying at the foot of the steps. A short time later, one of them was no longer amongst living and minus his skin. The incident didn't scare Tim as much as it made him mad, especially with his son's ripping and running all over the country, so he decided to get the last laugh and eat it. After cleaning old jake no shoulders, Tim cut him up, and my saint of a sister in law, Barbageing, fried him on the stove. You would fish. It was a big snake and there was plenty to go around, and with the timing of a Swiss watch, Matthew, Will and their friend Michael came through the door just in time to see her pull the last bit of snake from the hot grease. The talk went to the incident of how they were all about to sit down and eat what Tim had found crawling in the yard only an hour or so before. When Michael said he couldn't stay, Mama told him to be home at a certain time, and the hour was fast approaching. Out the door and on his bicycle and in a cloud of dust, Michael made his way home. Tim and the rest tried the snake and didn't much care for it. I remember Matthew saying it was chewy, thus ending the eating a snake store or so they thought. A Few days later, Michael was once again down at Tims and playing with the boys. No mention of snakes or so up or anything had transpired. In the meantime, Barbijean had fixed supper and walked out on the porch to tell all three of them to come eat. Matthew and Will shot inside like they were starving, while Michael just made his way toward his bicycle. Barbara, see, Michael, are you hungry? He said, yes, ma'am. He said, well, come on in and eat. I fixed plenty. He said, no, ma'am, that's okay. She said, I thought you said you were hungry, Like I said, I am, I don't ever know what y'all are gonna be eating down here. And that's just how that happened. Eating what you hunt and the critters we pursued just goes hand in hand. Catch a mess of fish, cook a mess of fish, shoot a mess of squirrels, fix a mess of squirrels. Almost exclusively, I hunt and fish for with the skillet, I enjoy the taste of whatever I'm trying to hem up long enough to get it skint battered, bake, stew or fried. After all, that's why our species started hunting in the first place. I can hear the cavem in talking. Now, Hey, Bud, see that pterodactyl flying over yonder Yep, let's kill it with a rock and eat it. Bro That sounds radical. Count me in. The next morning, Fred and Barney are sitting out a dozen lizard bird decoys and waiting on sunrise at the local tar pit. That's how it all started, probably well my version of it, anyway, and my family hasn't slowed down since, or so you'd think. But you'd be wrong. Contrary to what one would assume, my dad, Buddy Reeves, a country born and raised rural houndsman, horsemen, and well known pursuer of squirrels, who would easily be ranked near, if not at the top of the list for total numbers of squirrels. Being given a twenty two caliber headache, he wouldn't have eaten one, had even been starving slapped to death. Neither would my uncle jimm Ray nor my aunts are first cousins on my father's side. I took a pole of three generations of the Reefs side of the family tree, my aunts, my uncle, siblings, and cousins. Thirty percent of them eat squirrels. We were all raised right there, more or less within a rock chunking distance of each other, And seven out of ten would not eat a squirrel if they were hungry. And that kind of knocks in the head the old adage of country folks having country ways. Yet hear me and my brothers and all our children sat waiting on the next big mess of squirrels to be brought to the table. Every one of them will smash the sac full of cook squirrels, except my two girls Bailey's and tried them last winter when I fried up a big mess for supper. Now I knew my wife Alexis wasn't going to eat any, but she did try it and said that's as far as she wanted to go. Our daughter Bailey followed suit, but I think her judgment was biased by her mother's hard pass and the fact that she's at the age where girl stuff is more appealing to her than her crusty old pappy's diet. To her credit, though she loves bear and deer meat, can't get enough of it. Now our son Hunter, who's twenty six, cannon has eaten his wait and fried squirrel and squirrel and dumplings all his life. He loves them. But let's go back in time when the oldest daughter, Amy, who at the time was a little younger than Bailey is now. She literally survived on chicken and cold hot dogs right out of the ice box, nothing else. It's a period of time. I like to call her chicken strip era will. Being the diabolical father that I am, I know that if she ever tried squirrel but she'd like it. So I stopped by the local KFC one day and got them to give me a box that the meals come in, and I took it home. I put some leftover squirrel legs in it that I brought home from the camp and sat them on the kitchen counter. Y'all know what happened next. She saw the box, asked if she could have the leftovers, and went around, no squirrel leggs like a ducking on on a roast in there, Daddy, this is the best chicken I've ever ate. She couldn't get enough of them. I don't remember how many she had, but it would have been a good accounting of herself at a camp full of lumberjacks. Look on her face when I told her what it was was the best part. She was like she'd been a gut shot with a cannon full of squirrels. A few months later, I'd get her again with some frog legs, same thing, ate them like a hungry hostage. Does you find out what they were? And all of a sudden ooh, I don't like those? Well, all that is funny, but it shows the bias that we all hold for what we consider to be normal food and how something looks, and not based on how something tastes. I laughed at seeing an animal rights organization's online ad once showing a photo of a puppy and a piglet with the words why I love one and eat the other, to which someone replied, because only one of them is filled with bacon? What about birds? As a society, we eat chicken with reckless abandon We eat it weekly in some form or another. Here my girls don't want ducks, doves or quailed. They'd rather eat chicken. Chickens are everybody as nasty as creature as you can get. Don't get me wrong. Chicken is one of the many food items you could bait a trap with and catch me every time. No one loves chicken more than me, no one. My nephew, Thomas, more specifically, my great nephew, came over for supper last Sunday after church. Thomas is my brother Tim's grandson. I fried up a bunch of fish and some gator bytes for him and his gal pall Emma. At the last minute, I realized Emma wasn't a fish or a gator eater, and we like Emma. So I chunked the old stand by chicken nuggies in with the gator and when everybody pushed away from the table, we were all sporting big smiles and full bellies. Now, I'm sure there are folks out there that don't like chicken, but I'm not sure i'd like to be around them. Chicken is the great common denominator. I want to get someone to try something new. Hit them with the old It tastes just like chicken routine. It never does. That's the old bait and switch that we used to earn someone's trust. Want me to try something, Tell me a taste like antelope or grilled coon. I'm all in fellow, but I've always had an affinity for a while gaming the food that is associated with the South I more or less felt it was my duty to eat it. I know that may sound superficial, but stay in true to the culture of my Raisin has always been important to me. Even though the squirrel eating skipped the generation in my family. My mama wouldn't need it either, but she did fix it for us kids, and we all loved quail. It was a treat to go shoot some early in the morning and come back for her to cook up a big breakfast with fried quail, taters, eggs, biscuits, and gravy. The last breakfast of that was when I was in high school and the quail were disappearing. And she also fixed the ducks that Tim and I brought home, and she made a labor intensive duck and rice dish that would rival anything for the love of humanity. It's good, but ducks and quail are are beautiful birds. In the esthetics of how something looks plays into how it's perceived, especially in food. Don't even get me started on wild versus domesticated turkeys. I'll save that for another day because having to argue the advantages of wild over pen raises enough to put myself into a self induced coma. My dad also didn't care for deer meat. Again, all of his offspring subsist in some degree off wild game, with Tim and I leading the charge. I can't tell you why he preferred farm stock groceries over wild game. In the spring and summer, we ate fish too, and three times a week we happen to be staying at the river fishing. We ate it every day, and not once did I grow tired of it, and neither did he. But my great grandfather, the man who raised my dad, ate squirrels like there was no tomorrow. I've heard my dad tell stories about Grandpa taking the tablespoon on his pocket knife and with a swift blow, cracked the heads open of a cooked squirrel and eat the contents of their brain bucket like it was canny. Me. I draw the line at a squirrel shoulders, I'm not eating anything above that mark or from in between his tiny derido shaped ears. There's also a convenient reason for that. Squirrel brains can kill you like dead, graveyard dead, like groundhogs are bringing you your mail for eternity dead. That reason is called crutch felled Jacob disease CJD for short, which is a variation of mad Cow. Now this all came about in the mid nineteen nineties. Went over a four year period, eleven unfortunate souls in Kentucky all contracted CJD. The only link between them was that they had all ingested squirrel brands. They had all died within a year of contracting disease too. Man, it's terrible. Since that time, cases had been reported in sir states, including New York, Alabama, West Virginia, Mississippi, as well as here in Arkansas. I've never fancied myself a squirrel brain eater, regardless of my family history or the nostalgia associated with it. Conveniently, now I can add impending doom to that list, and for that reason I'm out now lead just about anything. My friend and colleague Spenser new Hearth made a whole meat eater series a while back called Pardon My Plate. He had different folks on each week eating things that most folks wouldn't normally associate with suppertime, like a coyote, skunk, goldfish, and a muskrat, just to name a few. Folks out in Dorchester, Maryland have a whole festival every year dedicated to eating muskrats and crawfish. I may have to slip out there next year and check it out for myself. I ain't never add a muskrat, believe it or not, but I can flat more put a hurting on a sack of muddy bugs, which brings to mind something else you can get out of a beaver pond and take home and put in your belly. Besides muskrats, crawfish, and Giardia castor canadensas the North American beaver, official state bird of Canada. I've read story after story about mountain men, Indians and settlers eating beaver meat. I've never had a hank or two, although i have spent a jitian of them in my lifetime when I was trapping and helping Tim with his trap line. But some of my friends up in New England are making a dent in the beaver population and their grocery bill. Jake DeBow and his wife Riley had built a business around the fur market and have been teaching beaver's how to ride in the back of their truck for the last seven years. They have all the social media platforms, including a YouTube page filled with great how to content that is simple and easy to follow. Long and downright entertaining, from setting his traps to catching, cleaning and preparing the fur. It's New England natural. You got to look it up. The debos are living close to the land and lots of time up there. The land is covered in snow, but that's when Jake and Riley shine the most. Not only are they keeping the beaver population and other fur bearing critters in check, but they also were putting meat up for the winter, beaver meat. I talked to Jake recently and he told me that beaver makes up about fifty percent of their diet. They eat it in one form or another anywhere from two to three times a week. He also told me that if the average deer hunter knew how good beaver was to eat, they'd all be duking it out for trapping permits like folks sit back in the seventies when the fur market was strong. The debos fix it just like you do deer, bear and beef for that matter. Backstraps and surloins in the back legs for the crock pot. Their dog gets raw ground beaver every day. This cuts their yearly dog food bill in half and it's great for the dog. And I'm paying almost seventy dollars a bag for my dog feeding. I think old whaling might need a little beaver meat. Now you think, well, they must have grown up eating it. I know I did, but just like me, you're wrong. When they first got married they decided to try it. Their goal was to live close to the land and by utilizing the meat they were adding to their trapline yield. A beaver is a lot like a hog when you get one. About the only thing you can't eat on a hog is the squeal. It's about the same when it comes eating old Buckie Riley says it compares to lamb and she fixes it with mint chutney. I acted like I knew what that was, so maybe Jake wouldn't figure out how little I know about anything. Jason Ellsworth, what in the world is mint chutney? And would it be good on corn bread? I need to know stat Seriously, though, these folks are putting out some great content that's very educational and well worth the effort to look up my gall Riva is going to help you out and include a link to Jake and Riley's New England Naturals Instagram and YouTube pages. It'll be in the show description where you listen to us from that's good stuff and proof that a country life in New Hampshire is just as important and relevant as one in Arkansas. I've been saying it since the beginning that we can all live a country life regardless of our zip code or whether we live outside or inside the city limits. Jake and Riley Deebo live over fifteen hundred miles northeast of my friends Keith and Lee Brandon in southeast Arkansas. Leave the de Bos in New Hampshire and you'll travel over two thousand miles west and northwest of my friends Craig and Medale McCartney's ranch in Central Mauntito, over Canada. They live their lives much like the Debos, the Brandings, and the Reeves. There's a ton of space and people between those three points on our side of the planet. I'd say the chances are good that there's many more folks out there doing their best to make their way just like we are. Those are the folks I want to be around and the folks I'm looking for. They're my people, and together we can turn the tide on those that are fighting to take away what we all stand for it comes right down to it, there will be more folks out there with more similarities to our own and differences. We just have to talk to each other long enough without getting mad to find out what they are. Now, that's gonna wrap it up for me this week. Thank y'all so much for listening to me in that turkey calling contest. Cheating mule Skinner, hill billy who puts mushrooms in his chili clay bowl nukem. We both really appreciate it. Elk season is right around the corner, and Jason Phelps and Dirk Durham are busy as cats in a sandbox over it Cutting the Distance podcast. Those boys know their stuff, and if you're you're ready for some ELK content, get yourself over there and check it out. Until next week. This is Brent Reeves signing off. Y'all be careful

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