00:00:04 Speaker 1: Welcome to This Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves from coon hunting to trotlining 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 from the store More Studio on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast that airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some stores to share. The Missouri Turkey turnaround. This one was quicker than a hiccup. I'm off to Missouri on my annual pilgrimage, and it was probably the most successful one I've ever been on. Mission plan, mission initiated, mission accomplished. It's good when a plan comes together, but sometimes you miss more than you hit when it does. Y'all ready to hear it, because I'm ready to tell it. Let's go. I said goodbye to the girls on Sunday a little before noon. Aley and her contemporaries had been skipping the light fandango for the past two days. At the State House Convention Center and Little Rock. It was wall to wall Seguins, Eyelashes, dance Moms in loud music with enough bass bumping out of the speakers to rattle the windows of the airplanes flying overhead. I was ready for a lesser noise level and wondering if the six hour drive in front of me would be long enough to regain one hundred percent of the seventy five percent of my hearing capacity. Only time would tell I hate leaving my girls. They say I have foumo, an acronym I was happily ignorant of until recently. But a fear of missing out isn't what it is at all. I actually like hanging out with those gals, but also like hunting turkeys, and outside of chasing them on the terra firma of my ancestors in Southeast Arkansas, Missouri is my favorite place in which to do it now. I just talked last week about how much fun I've been having the last few years in Alabama, which is all true. I just have such a history with those folks up there and believed or not specific spots, even particular trees. I'm currently building that in Alabama, and I pray is that I have a long enough run there in the future that I've had in Missouri in the past. But the direction my nose was pointing now had me rolling north from the natural State towards my friends the Knee myres. For the uninitiated, I've been hunting in Missouri for the better part of thirty years. I've done more than one podcast where Toby and Mary were the highlights of the subject matter, and this one, well, it ain't no different. The brevity of the hunt is one that had me back home and my family in a very short amount of time, but it also cheated me out of our traditional visit that would stretch over several days and meals. Every year, we just sit and talk about our lives and our children and families, showing reverence for those who have passed on but are with us in spirit. While we talk of them, our past adventures with them, recall all the things that we miss about them and some that we don't like. The time my dad put so much salt in the fish meal, I felt like I was slow dancing with Lot's wife before we got to the ice cream. Those are the things that built our relationship that I originally came for the turkeys and wound up staying for the people, all of them. We've supported each other through good times and bad times, and they are people that you don't have to talk to every day or even every week. We all lived six hours from each other, so there there's always a communication disconnecten we're not all together, but the love we have for one another never diminishes. It is the sweetest grape on the vine. Now, I've never not felt at home in their home or in their company. Now what started out as a meeting with my dad and Toby over Walker Hounds all those years ago was growing into something far beyond being casual acquaintances. We are family, and I could go on and on about the instances that built our relationship into what it is today, and I'm sure I will in future episodes, just as I have in past ones. But tomorrow is the Missouri opener, and I'm still forty five minutes away from Toby and Mary's house. When something catches my eye. As I'm traveling as fast as the low allioals up a highway in central Missouri, I look out across the bottom field, bordered by a creek on one end and flanked by a ridge on the back, and see two gobblers out in the middle. They were a couple hundred yards away from the den of traffic that floated in both directions and had decided that they hated each other. There was a literal karate clinic taking place in the middle of that forty acres. I watched in beats per second as I fought the urge to turn around and go back. Traffic was heavy and supper would be ready once I got there. I didn't want to keep them waiting, so I pressed on. At six twenty four that evening, I was stepping out of my truck into Toby's driveway and I could smell the ribs before I crossed the threshold of the front door. I gave Mary a big hug and took my spot on the couch next to Toby's chair, and we caught up on recent events, talked about dogs and eventually turkeys, while the Sacket brothers handled their business on television with fists and forty fours. There are two locations within the confines of this planet that we all called home that are a sure bet for Cowboy TV at any point during the normal waking hours. My friend Benny Hargrove's place next to the Coon Camp in Arkansas and the Kasa Daene Meyer in Missouri. I don't think I've ever walked in either place to see anything else playing. When Benny or Toby were in possession of the remote, it's like they turned to that channel, yanked the knob off the console, and chunk it out the window. No worries for me, though, I enjoy a good horse opera as much as anyone. We eventually turned our attention to the Victials and supper. Once we were done, we navigated back to the living room, and we wound up up end of the night. Around ten that night, Mary programmed the coffee pot for me to kick off in the morning at five, and when I stepped out of my room, fully dressed and ready for battle, I heard the heating element in that contraption started churning room temperature tap water into two hundred degrees of liquid. Wake your butt up. That's gonna be the name of my signature coffee. Whenever someone decides they want me to endorse it. Well, I pardoned me a cup. I dropped in enough raw honey to give it just a hen of flavor, and loaded up the side beside For the short trip down the road. I moted through the oaken gate forwarded a small stream and negotiated my way to the edge of the bottom on a two track pasture route that I had ridden and walked countless tids, parting next to a ceizer that has swelled in heightened volume over the years and has served as my jumping off point for nearly three decades. I stood there alone many times, and with a bunch of different folks over that span of years, Hunter Curtis, Jacob, Isaac Clay, Dave, Toby, Emily and Peyton, just to name a few. I don't go to these places without thinking of the time spend with each of them there in some fashion or another. I was going to go down in the bottom well before gobling time and stand near where I'd planned to sit that morning. I sent Toby a mold tree camera and ask him to put it where he thought would be a good spot so I could get an idea of the turkeys and what they were doing this year. He put it next to a creek crossing where the bottom corner of the pasture led up to a ridge where the turkeys have been roosting since I started hunting there. Did I need a camera down there to tell me what was going on? Nope? Show didn't. Did I enjoy watching the video clips as they chimed in on my phone, allowing me to be somewhat of a of a participant of the action a month before I'd arrived. You bet, I did say what you will about game cameras. You can be for them or against them. I don't care. But I enjoyed seeing all the animals on there as much as I do what I'm after. I was gonna be there regardless of what that camera caught. It's where I go every year, and the pictures that came in or didn't wouldn't have played any role on where I was going to be standing on opening the morning. I was gonna be where I've always been for the last few years, by sixty yards from where Toby planted that camera. I pulled my double from the case in the back seat, the four ten that weighs about as much as a BB gun, and I dropped a rocky Ridge Turkey torpedo in each barrel and slipped down the hill into the darkness. The moon was high overhead and walking was easy and quiet. I made it to the edge of that past u one hundred and twenty yards east to where I wanted to be, and fifteen minutes ahead of time that I wanted to be there when it was cool, and I'm sure I could have seen my breath had I had anything other than the moon lighting my way. And I cranked up behind me out of habit I stopped in midst tried to see if a turkey would answer, even though I thought it was way too ready to hear one. There he was, and he was in a place where I'd heard turkeys many times over the years, the same tree. I'd be willing to bet that tree served as an as an audio landmark for me, and I knew how far it was from the corner of that field, and that would be my barometer or how far I could hear one. It would help me estimate distance to other turkeys should I have to move or reposition. I'd consciously whittled that distance down once they got on the ground, allowed for the terrain and wind direction, leaf growth that would naturally dampen the sound as it made its way to my ears. I crept forward even more deliberately now as round one had gone to me. He'd given away his location and I hadn't made a peep a roosted, ain't roasted, as they say, But I knew where he was, and he didn't have a clue that I was there or that I meant to kill him before the day was over. It was twenty minutes before six, and I needed to find a comfortable place to sit, just in case this went longer than I was guessing it would. The last two years, I called up and killed four turkeys in a row within one hundred yards of that spot, three for me and one for someone else, and all but one of them before seven am. Beautiful creek bottom with fresh water, surrounding by rolling hills and ridges, with plenty of nestinge cover, and pastures full of bugs and natural ground. I've said, I've said it often of several places that if I was going to take a pencil and draw a picture of the perfect turkey habitat, I draw it just like this little farm, my hone in Missouri. Now, are there other places just as good or better for producing numbers the turkeys? I imagine there are? But the perfection of that place doesn't only come from the ridiculous number of turkeys I've watched to make their final flop there. It comes from all the stories around them, most importantly from the people who were in those stories. But this morning it was just me and I forded the creek at the shallow water crossing without making a sound. Gobbler was really riving up now, and there were a few other turkeys in different directions joining them. As I picked out a spot next to the creek and settled on one that I'd never set beside. Light was coming fast now. I was facing west and my back was to a red oak that would take three grown folks to reach around. The ground had been swept clean of limbs and leaf litter from a flash flood that had taken place a week before, and the undergrowth between me and the creek was the same height as me. Sitting down in front of me, starting after about ten feet was a bull dozed lane running north and south that had been made all along the west end of that property over a year ago. It was now covered in green grass that allowed for extra ground for cattle to graze along the fence's perimeter, as well as being a perfect travel way for deer and turkeys, and the reason Toby had placed that camera there in the first place. To my right a few feet was the edge of the creek, and five yards further across the creek was the edge of the pasture where I'd watched so many turkeys over the years meet their maker. The one I was here now was but a scant two hundred and fifty yards directly in front where I was sitting. He was my focus, and everything I would do over the course of the day would be in direct relationship to what was currently taking place on that limb where that turkey was gobbling. Twenty minutes passed by, and I caught a glimpse of a hen and heard her when she cackled and flew off a roost into the field halfway between me and that gobbler. He answered her, and I followed suit with a series of soft, sleepy yelps that pulled a double gobble out of him as well. Then a minute later I did it again, wrapping it up a little ladder until I imitated her cackle and flying down by patting on my chest like flapping wings. He double gobbled in response. I clucked back at him, and he cut me off. He gobbled quite a lot, and I took note of other gobblers in different directions that I heard as well, each one was logged in my mind as to their approximate location, and I've been chasing them up there for so long that I pretty well knew where they were when they sounded off, not just the general direction. I played it pretty conservative with the calling purrs and clucks for what I did most, and the yelps were never aggressive. He answered to cluck it in the purn more than anything, and it cut the distance to less than two hundred yards, which put him in a small field of less than half an acre. Now, I have seen this many times before. If the gobblers venture more than halfway into that little field, they're more likely going to come the whole way. But if they strut and gobble on the other end, waiting on the hen that was calling to them but wasn't coming, they'd drift west for a ways, eventually go up the ridge to the south. I'd smashed one on camera up there a couple of years ago that started out right where this one had. That spot where I'd done it was a short walk from the nest I'd built this morning. If I had to, I could make that play and be setting in that spot five minutes. But that's that's not what I wanted to do, not this year. I've talked about him on the last few episodes, and you even heard my nephew, his grandson tell a story about him last week. My turkey hunting mentor passed away this year right before Turkey season opened in Arkansas. The box call he made me that I've talked about several times recently was in my vest and I've used it in Alabama a couple of weeks before, and I had it at my side when I filled that tag, and in honor of him, mister Billy Bryant, I was gonna hunt the whole season, just like he would have coached me to do, and just like he'd showed me starting out forty one years ago, Slow, conservative, patient, and deliver it that turkey had answered me more times than I could keep up with. I had pictures of multiple gobblers on that camera that was just off to the left. They used the laying at different times of the day. The time stamps on the pictures proved that from the past month, and so did my personal observations of the last nearly thirty years. I was in a good spot, just hunted the way mister Bright would That goble had been on the ground now for quite a while and had gobbled at the other end of the field about a billion times. At one point, I thought I heard one gobble behind me in the edge of that field that I was setting beside. I was well hidden from anything further than twenty yards away, so I eased up on my knees and took a good look behind me. Nothing. I didn't see anything in any direction. I watched back that way for a minute or two, and then I slipped back down into my comfortable Heidi hole, focusing my attention in the direction of the joker that had started this whole thing off well over an hour ago. Eventually, he drifted back further west, just like I'd seen him do more times than not. It seemed to be a natural course of action for him. I was a little disappointed, but I wasn't discouraged. I passed the time watching birds with my binos and would call with some soft purrs and clucks every twenty minutes or so, sometimes waiting thirty minutes between calls. Never aggressive, just nice, relaxed and easy. I had until I killed one or Mary got tired of feeding me to get it done. Throughout the morning, I hear goble way off, but nothing close, and one got fired up around nine thirty that I guessed to be north of me, less than a quarter mile. Toby sent me a text about the same time, wanting an update. I told him what I was hearing. He was working and didn't immediately respond. By the same time, I got a text from a friend of mine, Jim bo Elliott, who was hunting that morning as well back in Arkansas, and a few others. No one was having any luck, but they were all seeing turkeys, just couldn't get them to commit. Watching them walk away with hens was the common thread. One guy was hunting a few miles from me on his farm in Missouri. He asked me if I was going to go after the one I was here. Now. I've hunted with him before, and we're both prone to get up and chase the turkeys that are most vocal. Not this time, though, I told him no, I was in a good spot and I wasn't going anywhere. At ten that morning, I did a little light yep and followed by some purs and soft clucks. I know what time I did it because I'd waited until then to call. Ten minutes later, my friend sent me a message says, Hey, what time are you rolling out? And I could tell he was getting hungry. We'd made the plan the day before to meet up for breakfast after each of our hunts, and at ten fifteen I sent him, I'm just gonna stay Awhile at ten eighteen, I was answering a message to the group of folks that I hunted with back at Arkansas, jimbo Elliott being one one of them. He bought the coon hunt that I donated to the Greenbriar ffa banquet. They are all a bunch of clowns, and I was laughing at some of the buffoonery that they were sending back and forth. When I heard them, I moved only my eyes and I looked up over my readers to see one gobbler strutting and one standing beside him on the other bank of the creek. Now, when a turkey is inside forty yards, you can clearly see their eyes. This is a good rule of thumb to use to check whether or not they're close enough to shoot. But did you know the turkeys have eyelashes. Well, they do, and you can see them if they're within thirty feet of you, and I could see all four pairs of these. My reading glasses were on my face, my phone was in my hands, and my shotgun was leaned up against the tree beside me. Put it there when I was checking the turkey that I thought i'd heard behind me, and I mean never set it back in my lap. I didn't panic, but I did think, oh Lord, I'm in a tight spot. Or where those turkeys had walked up to was the only place that close to me that I could move and not be seen. There were vines and limbs and bushes on the opposite bank right where they were that had me completely hid, but opening up that I could clearly see about seventy five percent of them. Strutter drummed again, and his lieutenant stood guard at his side while he did it. I dropped my phone in my lap, slowly deliberately removed my glasses with my left hand while retrieving my shotgun with the right. Now, they obviously didn't have a notion that I was there or what was about to happen. I remember controlling my breathing and measured breaths. They could easily hear anything I did from that distance, and being that close it wouldn't take a lot to bugger them out of the county. Slow was fast and fast it's slow, a refrain playing in my head from the days I spent with a select few others token guns looking for bad guys in dangerous places. Now used my shotgun to my shoulder, never taking eyes off either one of them. The strutter was facing south and his cohort to his immediate right, on the opposite side of it. I recognized them from the molitary pics I had of them. The strutter was always following the other, and while they both were big turkeys with big, thick bears, the strutters was noticeably a bit bigger. The double settled into my shoulder as the sight picture came into view, and I pushed the safety off with my thumb. The bead of my shotgun was in full focused level and zeroed on the Strutter's head that was tucked into a red, white and blue target. The index finger of my right hand slipped inside the trigger and settled on the one that would uncork the right barrel with the prescribed amouth of pressure. Then, as that turkey spun every so slowly to his left, his head lit up with the daffled sunlight that filtered through the canopy of the very tree I was leaning against. I paused and downloaded that picture, that beautiful display of color, into my already overflowing catalog of Missouri memories. Then I filled his right ear hole full of number ten tux and steel. He dropped out of sight and his buddy jumped up off the ground about two feet. Then for the next fifteen minutes he walked around, clucking and poking the recently deceased until he grew tired and just walked away. I looked at my phone to check the time. It was ten forty. Toby had sent me a message his response to me telling him that I'd heard a gobbler at nine thirty. And he sent that response about ten twenty four, and he said, I year, they will come down to where you are. I did a little ciphering, and he'd sent that message about the time that I pulled the trick. Well, these are the ones I heard north of me almost an hour ago. Or did I really hear one behind me earlier that snuck in from the east. I have no idea. I heard the drumming. I looked up. There they were. He was a big mature showed me state gobbler that could have easily weighed twenty five pounds or more had I weighed, but he had one in a quarter inch spurs and a ten and a half inch beard and a six inch beer. From the time I first heard him gobbling until I pulled the trigger, I'd been hunting for four hours forty minutes. I was sad that it was over, but glad I'd done it in the style that I'd been taught. Snapped a picture of that turkey, and my box called that mister Brian. That made me. I packed up what a little i'd unpacked the night before, or met my friend who lives there for lunch that i'd been texted, and headed home. In terms of success, this trip was the tip of the spear minimum time away from home, expense for traveling, food was nominally best, Lodging was exemplary. My friends Toby and married, so from a business perspective, the ROI couldn't have been better on the social end and lacked of lot to be desired. I hated to be done so quick, even though it would allow me to get back to my girls in Arkansas sooner than expected. Jimbo Elliott called me back on my way home and invited me to hunt with him at his place the following morning, less than an hour from where I live. I accepted the invitation, and as I sometimes say, that's a story for another day, as in next Friday. All right, that's enough. Turn this thing off and get outside. Find that friend that you ain't talked to in forever, read a book, do something, share this podcast with them, or y'all get together and watch it over on YouTube. On there, you're going to see some photographs and some of the people in the places that I talk about. So next week this is Brent Reeves, Sign it off. Y'all be careful.

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