00:00:05 Speaker 1: Welcome to this country life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves from con hunting to trot lining and just general country living. I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences and life lessons. This country life is presented by Case Knives on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast the airwaves have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some stories to share. Pocket knives, squirrels, and Father's Day. It's Father's Day again, and I'm gonna talk about two significant events in my life. The big story took place over forty days with glimpses of the past. It'll all makes sense when we get to it. But first I'm gonna tell you this one that has literally taken generations to tell. As we celebrate those folks in our lives, both past and present, who either biologically or lovingly earned the rank and privilege historically afforded fathers, I want to talk to you first about a recent honor bestowed upon my family that could not have culminated at a more appropriate time than right now. Now. I've told you all about it before, but if you're a new listener, let me do a quick summary of how we got here and the story I'm fixing to tell this Country Life podcast number two, which aired on April twenty eighth, twenty twenty three, one hundred and eleven podcasts ago I talked about the stuff that I told in my pockets, everything from pocket watches to pocket knives, not casually but matter of factly mention a particular brand of life that's near and dear to my family and has been for the last six generations. I had no ulterior motives, just real, organic, off the cuff comments. Now that brand of knife was the exclusive brand you'll find on any of us at any given time. There are families in Deer, the Fords and Chevrolets, John Deere and Massive Ferguson tractors, or Duke's mayonnaise, even a particular weather man. But in our family the brand of knife was and his case, knives of Bradford, Pennsylvania. Me mentioning that during the second episode that aired of this Weekly Struggle didn't light the fuse on my family's relationship with the good folks at Bradford, had merely fanned the flames that have been burning for over one hundred years now. Someone and I don't know who it was, but God bless them whoever it was, heard that episode and brought it to Case's attention. Now, through that slight introduction, we fast forward to where we sit now, with the wr Case Company being a spot answer of this show, an absolute fairy tale of a story that put me in a place where my name is associated with an iconic American company building products by hand every day that are used by Americans every day all over this country, doing the task required for putting in an honest day's labor, like the three generations before me did. Now, before folks start rolling their eyes and say, oh, Brent's doing a commercial for a sponsor, let me stop you right there. I have one hundred percent total control over what I say on the show. And not only does meat eat or not even make suggestions on the content need of this case. In fact, they both prefer I talk less about them so people don't get the impression I'm over here selling used cars like Junior samples. I get to talk about the things I like hockeyknives or one of them. So with that said, let me get to the meat on this bone. Last week, the Case Company and metiatter released a knife that is the Brent Reeves signature. Many traffic, months and months of planning and meetings resulted in a deep red bone handled pocket knife that is the same color of the first pocket knife I ever remember my dad carrying. It means a lot to me and my family, and none of it would have been possible had it not been for you, You faithful folks who listen every week and the ones who take the time to write reviews, share the podcast with others and send in the best stories that I get to share, and you show up at events just to visit and talk about the different things that we all love to talk about. I get emotional talking about this object made of metal and bone, not because of what it is, but by what it represents. It's all of us together, from Cleveland County, Arkansas, and McKean County, Pennsylvania, to every home, job, or car where you're listening. Now, we're all in this together, and from the bottom of my heart, I thank you all, and you you are just how this all happened. Father's Day a day set aside to honor the dads out there. In my case, it's the guy who, above all else taught me how to have fun. A few of those times have been shared with y'all here lessons I learned, both from observations and from his direct instruction. The following is the story I wrote not long after my dad passed away. It's a detailed diary of strong remembrances of different days during his stay in the hospital, and those days were long and tenure short abbreviated. When does the communication between whoever was fortunate enough to be sitting in the room with him when he came to mixed in between the hospital references as a hunt that comes to mind anytime squirrels are mentioned, and it was running through my mind as we raced toward what would be his final night on earth. It remains a core memory of my understanding of the love my father had for me and the pride he had in me, both things that he was adamant that I know now. He could be upset with me, he mad at me, even disappointed, but he always made me know how much he loved me, something I've tried to emulate with the folks. I love that's not just limited to family, and not just by actions, but telling them too, Just like he did. I wrote this story on in a few days after the seventh of September in twenty eleven, with no intentions of anyone outside of me ever reading it, and it skips back and forth in time, making perfect sense to me as I wrote it. The events freshened my mind and on my heart. As the one who saw it all as an eyewitness, My hope above all hope is that it'll translate here for you. The phone woke me out of a sound sleep. I had it in my hand before the second ring was done, and nearly twenty years of being a police officer, anytime the phone rings after bedtime, it could only mean one thing, something is wrong. And the caller ID said it was my aunt Diana, my dad's youngest sister. She'd never call this lad unless it was an emergency, and by being her, I immediately knew it involved my dad. She said, Hey, I'm on the way to Pine Bluff. Your dad is in the er. He said, had some type of spell, and I think they said something about life support coming to full alert. I told her we're on the way. It was cold. As we made our way through the cane thicket, Buck would turn his head to grab a bigger bite of switch cane leaves, all the while holding a steady course Dad had set for him. As we closed in on peanuts, barking, Dad, if this twenty two was to start shooting all by itself, would you want me to just chunk it over yonder? An acceptable, silly question for an eight year old boy to ask, No, son, I just pointed out there until he ran out of shells. But I don't expect it to do that, though me neither. I was just asking, all right, let's kill this squirrel. Now. When we get up here, you slide off, run around the other side of that tree, away from me and Buck, and I'll wait for Jerry over here. When he gets here, all the commotion will put that squirrel on your side of the tree and you can kill him. Yes, Sir. I buried my head in the middle of his back. I squeezed my eyes shut, and I held on as tight as I could to his waist. As we entered the green brier portion of that thicket, the sharp thorns grabbed the toe of my boots as I pinched him as far as I could behind Dad's legs to keep the briers and vines from pulling me off the back of that saddle. I knew we'd broken free from the thicket when the scratching sound of the brier scraping across that leather gun scabbard subsided and peanuts bark grew louder. I peecked around the right shoulder of the strongest man in the world, and I saw peanuts bobtail wagging into blurs. He barked and circled a huge oak tree, searching for the squirrel that he knew was there. I pulled my hands out of Dad's warm coat pockets and slid like a snake off the back of that huge buckskin horse. I no sooner hit the ground one. Dad handed me the twenty two, and I ran past Peanut and the tree, picking out a spot on the opposite side where I could see most of the tree, and waited for that squirrel to move. Your father has had a stroke. Only time will tell how significant the damage will be. Now complicating all of this is our inability to give him the medication that thends his blood regulates his heartbeat. He's stable, but the next twenty four hours will play a critical role in the rest of his life and its quality. I looked at my wife with a blank expression as we stood in the hallway of the hospital after our chance meeting with the neurosurgeon that had only hours before operated on the strongest man in the world. Thank you, doctor, was all I could muster. I'm not sure if Alexis said anything to him or not. I recall her squeezing my hand as we walked back toward the waiting room, where nearly every one within my immediate family, close friends and distant family, and some folks I'd never seen in my life waited and supported one another. We prayed together, we laughed together, we cried together, but mostly we just sat around and loved my dad in each other, and we waited. Every day, work, go to the hospital, go home, work, go to the hospital, go home. Wait and wait and wait and remember. My eyes strained to see where I couldn't and watch for the tiniest movement that would give my quorus location away. Look in the forks, watch up the tree and out. Look for his ear it looked like a little triangle sticking up. Or looked for his tail to switch. You'll you'll find him. I repeated Dad's instructions over and over in my mind as I followed to the letter what he'd been teaching me, Peanut and barking his plea for me to find him, and Jerry rode up on his horse and around to my side of the tree scrambled a gray squirrel, just like my dad said he would. Two weeks after he went in to the hospital, I saw his eyes blink and then he looked at me with the prettiest blue eyes I'd ever seen. Hi, Dad, I've been missing you. He focused on my tired, smiling face and he winked at me. I love you, son, he whispered, I love you to Paul. He squeezed my hand and that had been holding his for the last thirty minutes or so, and I squeezed back. I talked to him for a good while. He watched me as I talked to him, listening intently as I spoke. In the case, he'd have an expression of understanding and calm, reassuring me that he knew what I was saying. Of the details of that conversation will remain between Dad, me and the Good Lord who blessed me with one of the few cognitive windows during that forty days we spent at the hospital to communicate with my dad, just him and me. But the gist of it was I was gonna try hard to take care of his grandkids and his daughter in law, and I could tell he was tired. So when we finished talking, I told him I loved him, and he squeezed my hand. He winked at me again, and he drifted off to sleep. I seem Dad, I see him the squirrel of inch his way toward a big fork on my side of the tree. Each time I settled a crosshair of the scope on his head and prepared a fire, he'd inch out of my sights and short spurts a few inches at a time. I could see the hollow limb above the fork where I feared he was going, and I raised my aim just below where I thought he'd enter that hole. Dogs barked, and Jerry and Dad both shook small saplings from where they sat on their horses, keeping the noise of the limbs and the leaves on the opposite side of the tree from me, and the squirrel held my aim above That squirrel trained on the spot where I hoped he'd stop before we crawled into his waiting sanctuary. We just finished supper when my phone rang with my aunt Diane again. Hello, Hey, it's breathing. Isn't very good? Doctor says y'all better come on, we're on the way. I said it calmly. The weather had been hot and windy and humid over the past month and a half. This night it was unseasonably cool, wind wasn't blowing, and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. Yeah, the stars were everywhere. When we walked outside. I called my brother Tim as we were getting in the car. I asked him you headed to the hospital. He said yes. I said, was the wind blowing when you walked outside? The question that he kind of caught him off guard. He said, do what I said, the wind? Was it blowing when you walked out to leave? He said, I didn't notice why. I said, it wasn't blowing at my house. It's cool tonight, the first night since dad's been in the hospital. It's been worth a deurn to run his dogs. You can hear a hound bark from Myles tonight. Dad's going hunting, brother. And for a second it was only silence, and then Tim said, well, I'll be he sure is drive safe, don't be in a hurry. I'll see you there, and I love you just a little more, just a little more, I remember saying to myself as I caught a glimpse of the squirrel as he entered the side picture of the bottom of my scope. I had a rock solid rest on a dogwood limb that was the perfect height for the shot I was fixing to take just a little more. And with that thought, the squirrel sprinted the last two feet before I could even realize it, and he disappeared into that home. I raised up from that rifle and looked at Dad and Jerry, who were laughing now at the expression on my face as I looked back and forth from my hole in the tree to where they sat watching me. Now, this is not how I'd had all this worked out in my mind. He was supposed to stop just before he went in that hole, and I'd squeezed the trigger and getting him with one shot and making the strongest man in the world proud of me. I imagine doing it all over again. As I heard Dad tell me to get back on the horse, I relived watching that squirrel out of the corner of my eyes. He ent slowly toward where I had that rival aimed below the hole in that tree. I braced the rifle back on that dog wood limb. I oriented the barrel toward that hole, placed my cheek on the stock, and took aim. As I done just prior to the squirrel making his escape. I settled the crossairs on the imaginary squirrel, wishing I had had another chance at him. When it was replaced by a real one, I didn't think about it. I pushed his safety off. I pulled the trigger and sent that squirrel toward the ground with a head shot, and Peanut caught him in mid air. Before I had time to realize that, another squirrel came out of that hole and stopped in the same spot. He met the same fate, except this one landed on the ground with a thud. I picked him up. I retrieved one Peanut had caught, and I carried him both to my dad, who was grinning bigger than Jerry or me. We tied him on the sack, and in one pull he swung me up on the back of his saddle. He called Peanut and we headed off to find another one. That was good. Brent, I thought you'd done let him get away, and then you got to both of them, riding the nogging. I'm proud of you, son. I was less than five minutes from the hospital, driving faster than I should have been when Tim called me. Tim lived a lot closer and would have been easily there a few minutes before us. I knew what he had to say even before I answered Hello. He said, he's gone hunting. Dad's gone hunting. I remember thinking it was a good night for cold hunting. I bet you could have heard a hound bark for miles. We buried my father in the family cemetery that bears our name in Cleveland County, Arkansas, along side my great grandfather and my grandfather. It's been fourteen fathers days without him, well without his physical presence. He's still here. I see him in my children. I see him and my brother. I see him and me sometimes, and sometimes he catches me a little by surprise when I do. Several months ago, I got word from friends of mine that they were going to be first time fathers. During those conversations, I told them both that only when they held their babies would they know how much their dads love them. I talk to them both after each blessed event, and they wholeheartedly agree that's the way it goes. That's the natural order of things. The events of our existence that make worthwhile our being where we are, they're all around us for us to see, to hear, and participate in until they aren't. We just have to look up from what we're doing to see it. Some times, this podcast was supposed to be delivered to Riva three days sooner than it was because of a baseball game, a game that our oldest daughter Amy and our son in law Colin got tickets for all of us to go, and after the game, my six year old grandson Trip wanted to spend the night with us. So I kicked a self imposed deadline to the curb and took off a day from the computer to go to the ball game, to bring my grandson home, and set up to midnight watching Spider Man and answered an endless belt fed machine gun of questions, most of which I could answer. I missed a lot of those from his mama because I let other things get in my way. A mistake got vowed I wouldn't make twice. Just a little time. That's all it takes, is just a little time. Paul, Why is whaling bark so loud? When are they gonna fix the hole in that road? Why is giraffe spelled with a g? It ain't goud raft? All great questions coming from the mind that looks to us for direction, safety, honesty, and love. It's really just a conversation. It's a back and forth search for interaction between generations, and it's okay for us to say I don't know the most important part is just being there for them to hear you say it. Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there who, whether by blood or choice, are answering questions, but mainly just for standing still long enough to hear them. Bear Greece, render this country life. And now the Backwoods University is dropping on this feed. There's something for everyone, and we sure appreciate all this. Until next week. This is Brent Reeves signing off. Y'all be careful, don