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 and 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 podcasts that airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some stories to share. Deer tails matched and missed. First of all, thank everyone who purchased one of the RNT meat eater collab duck calls with my signature on it. They are all gone now. So if you didn't get one, you got to rob somebody to find one. But this week we got deer tails on the menu. Got a story coming from a listener in, in Indiana. That is incredible. You're going to miss. I got pictures to prove it. There'll be on social media and show you that that'll, corroborate his story. It's pretty good. And then you've got one that just happened for me here in the last couple of weeks that I'm going to share to round the show out. But we've got a lot to talk about. So let's get to the fire and let's get started. This story of mine that feels so unbelievable, I often have to provide photo evidence to prove that I'm not making it up. The discovery that I made in a sporting goods store a few years ago is just wild. I believe the odds of this happening are far fewer than one in one million. I am an adult, on-set public land hunter. Since moving to college and discovering that public land exists, I have learned that I have had a bad case of the disease called what's over the next hill. The day I discovered Onyx, it was all over. My approach to their business model has been shut up and take my money. I wish I could pay to keep those maps a secret. Just joking, sort of. Anyway, with my phone in my hand, I have put the miles on, and I mean miles, like I'm worried about needing to figure out an oil change for my legs at this point. If you're a public land hunter here, I likely have sunk into my waist in your cattail marsh. Lost my range finder in a thicket that your big bucks bet in, and I definitely have waved hello to you on your trail camera. The point is, I've got the itch to explore, mostly because you never know what you're going to find. In all of my wonderings, this national forest has stood out as a special place to me. Is it game rich? No. No. But the tens of thousands of contiguous acres of hardwoods and hills often summon me to explore. This particular story of discovery begins in April of 2021. I was on a weekend turkey adventure. It was an hour before daylight and I was hiking my way up to the spine of a ridge when I discovered what would later become a wild token of incredible chance. Under the beam of my headlamp, lying perfectly oriented, was the largest shed antler I'd ever found to date. Now, you may be expecting some enormous antler with points all over the place, but the antler itself was not what makes this discovery special. Though I will say it does have very distinctive G3, which is longer than the rest of the tines and leans forward at an angle that catches your attention. It's awesome, and I love it. That day I joyfully tied that shed antler to my pack and proceeded to walk 11 miles without hearing a single gobble. That antler came home with me and lived proudly on display. It became one of my favorite showpieces. I'd point it out to my friends and family when they came to visit. Throughout that summer I would inspect the topo maps and speculate about where this deer might be living. Knowing he was out there had me in that general area early the next fall, but as usual, the call of the unknown got the best of me, and I soon left the area for the rest of the season. I would never see this deer in the flesh. I would never send an arrow through his vitals. But one year later, the stars would align again for me and this deer. The next fall, the fall of 2022, I had decided this was the year to make the purchase of a lightweight saddle system. Screaming shoulders under the weight of a lock-on and sticks are a pretty good salesman. I did some research and I found a system that fit my needs and my budget and I set off from my house to drive to the only location I could find in the region that had this particular system in stock. The drive was over an hour away. After some wishful meandering through the unrelated areas of the store, I eventually ended up in the archery section. Now, this is where I found the climbing sticks, the platform, and the saddle setup that I was looking for. I was inspecting them when a kind salesman walked out from behind the archery counter and asked me if he could help. Now, typically, I like to keep to myself while shopping, but this guy, he was very kind, so I told him I was looking for a lightweight system for hunting public land. And he perked up and he began showing me various accessories and weight reducing options. Everything he talked about fit the genuine needs of a public land hunter. I suspected that he hunted this way himself. We talked about gear for probably, oh, a good 20 or 30 minutes. And suddenly now we had become borderline hunting buddies. He told me that he had gotten into hunting a few years before. I love helping new hunters so I told him if he was up for hunting public land I had some pretty good spots that he could check out. I quickly learned he was new but he was also pretty serious about it. He smiled and told me that the public land where he had been cutting his teeth in the national forest was his location of interest. This fall there there was a particular spot he felt was worth investing some time and then he pulled out his phone from his pocket and searched for an image and turned the screen to me while saying, look at this shed antler I found just this spring. My eyes widened with total and utter disbelief. I looked at him with shock and with a bit of confusion. He stared back at me, and I looked him straight in the eyes, and I said, I know exactly where you found that. He gave me a strange look of amused disbelief and said, how could you possibly know? And I said, because... I have the other side. Now, he just looked at me, and I think he thought I was a bit crazy or something. What he didn't know is that I immediately recognized that unique long and slanted G3, and I had looked at that antler almost every day for a year and a half. That was the other side. I was positive. We had a match in set. I said, pull out your map, and he opened Onyx on his phone and set it on the counter. and he was giving me a very strong look of skepticism. But his eyebrows raised and his eyes widened as I proceeded to zoom in towards the ridge where I found my antler two springs earlier. I dropped a pin on that exact location I had stood at in that cold pre-dawn of April of 2021. He looked back in disbelief and said, you've got to be kidding me. I found mine 300 yards from there. He dropped a pin 300 yards at the bottom of the ridge. Now, we're talking about a random dot on a map in the middle of tens of thousands of public land acres. Purely timbered acres, mind you. The odds, they just seemed impossible. Took out my phone and began digging through the photos until I found the pictures I took that day that I found it. And there it was. The identical opposite side. Identical mass at the bases. Short brow tines curved inwards. G2 shorter than the uniquely long G3s with the odd forward leaning angle. And each beam adorned with a short G4 to finish off the 10 point frame. It was downright unbelievable. Now, there was one problem, though. I found my shed in April of 2021. He found his sometime in the spring of 2022. As I realized this glitch in our equation, he stopped me from discounting the discovery when he said that the shed he found had about a year's worth of weathering. One quick glance at his pictures confirmed that to me as well. There's simply no other explanation than the unbelievable truth. Sure enough, a public land, remote as they come, mature Indiana whitetail buck dropped his antlers about 300 yards apart, which would be found about 365 days apart by two strangers who would meet 100 miles from where those sheds were found and just so happened to strike up the right conversation and realize they found the matching set. What are the odds? I mean, really, what are the odds? It's almost an impossible story, but the facts and the photos don't lie. The day we both agreed if one of us ever killed that buck, we would write the story and submit it to a magazine or something, and we still keep in touch. to this day. I think that buck is probably dead and gone by now, but the story is worth sharing. I guess the moral is to get out in the woods and see what the crazy stuff that happens to you. And according to Brant Taylor, that's just how that happened. Well, thanks Brant for sending that in and sharing it with the rest of us. But by the way, the chances of that happening was 100%. Because apparently It did. Thanks for sending it in, buddy. I pulled out of my driveway on the 23rd of October, pointed to Cowcatcher North, and painted the road red until I rolled into a friend's farm in Kansas nine and a half hours later. I was there to film a deer hunt with my colleague and the most argumentative human of Latvian descent I know, Giannis Patelis. The idea for this project came to light a couple years ago when Giannis and I were duck hunting in Kansas and driving to the hotel from the airport. Giannis remembers it as being a casual conversation where he anecdotally said, I need a place to hunt up here in Kansas. And he said my response was, I got a guy. His idea was for us to film each other. We'd apply for tags and take turns hunting and filming. The only issue that arose was that he drew a tag and I didn't. Two years following my reported flippant remark, I was driving to a big whitetail land to watch someone else kill a deer while I could have been hunting somewhere else. I recall it more of a waterboarding situation than I only agreed to and it under torturous duress. The text thread between me and Janice says otherwise, but who knows what. What to believe anymore with all this AI stuff that's floating around? Anyway, there I was, cruising up the blacktop with nine hours completed on my trip and scanning the cornfield edges and timbered creeks for giants that I know that live there. I had a pelican case full of camera equipment and enough clean drawers to last me a week before having to hit the washeteria and hoping in my heart that Giannis could get the job done in a couple days so I could move one state over and down to hunt deer myself. But as Robert Burns said, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. This plan would be no different. The temperatures were in the 80s, and while the moultrie pigs we were getting showed three great bucks with one of them being beyond exceptional, they were all moving only at night. cameras were on feeders and while we weren't hunting them directly even though it's legal there to do so our goal was to catch them cruising for chicks not unlike how you could have caught either one of us back in the day now they'd have got me at the feeder no doubt about it but there's only so much we can control in those things that we had in the bag we were on prime land we were proficient with our equipment and the time of year was what we'd selected as best The temperatures were the outlier, and if praying for weather worked for me, we'd have had a lot more rain back home than we did. We would just have to adjust, knowing that at any moment, the rut could kick off regardless of the temperatures. The big boys would be moving. And our answer to that would be to sit all day, every day, which we did for nine days in a row in some fashion. Nine days. Nine 13-hour days spent mostly in a tree with a blindsit added here and there for good measure. We hunted six different locations and based our locations on the fresh sign that we saw with the trail cam pictures giving us direction of travel and clues to the bedding areas. After all, pictures only tell you what's walking in front of the camera and the time that it did. 117 hours almost shoulder to shoulder with another human being, can be trying in the best of times. If you add in bugs and heat and poor hunting conditions and the stress of trying to produce a filmed hunt, it can make for an unenjoyable experience. I can report, however, that this wasn't the case with my friend Yanni. He can worry a sitting hen off a nest with his constant second guessing of our choice of hunting location and tactics, and his alternative thinking and questioning of every subject we covered over the time that equaled three work weeks we spent together during those nine days. And while he questioned everything, he respected everything as well. We would agree to disagree on topics, and when we climbed out of the tree and after supper, when all the footage from the day was downloaded, we would retire to our rooms eager for the next day and another opportunity to share the experience together. We would see less than 10 deer during our sits during daylight hours, but we did have one encounter that I will never forget. It was our second or third day of hunting when we slipped midday into an area. We thought our number one target buck was using this place to access the central part of the property. We'd chosen a pinch point to place a camera. It was a pond levee about 30 yards long with water on the north side and a and a 30 feet deep ravine on the south side. At the base of the levee on the low side was a bathtub-sized seep holding crystal clear water. Now, we'd been standing there for several minutes as Yanni got the camera activated and set with a strong south wind, carried our scent out over the pond to the north, and I heard some rocks clattering down below and looked over the edge to see the biggest buck I'd ever seen that close alive on the hoof standing up to Vamoose. He was the giant whitetail that we'd been seeing, and I was looking at him as if I were sitting in a tree as he bolted from below me down the ravine and out of sight. Moments before, I'd been filming a fresh scrape with the camera oriented in that direction, and time will tell if I accidentally captured him bedded before he broke and ran. I can only hope that I did. Alas, it was not to be. And Yanni's hunt, at least my participation in it, ended without me filming him sending an arrow toward anything other than a target. I packed my things and I headed to my next stop a little over four hours closer to home. And there, things would change for the better. A cold front arrived and with it came rain, a refreshing sight to behold after months of not seeing any back home and it was finally starting to feel good. like deer season. For the next six days, I'd be flying solo, hunting by myself with no one to argue with other than myself. And after about a day and a half, I was starting to miss the Latvian litigator. He kept things going and helped pass the time while the deer activity crawled along at a minimum in Kansas. But now the daylight activity had picked up immensely, and all the local reports I was getting said I had arrived right on time. I started seeing bucks from the very first sit, and by the third day, I had seen more deer with antlers than I had total deer the previous night with Yanni. Right time, right place. It makes a difference. I also was trying something new, something that I'd only done the week before with Yanni, and that's using a deer decoy. We had a great encounter with a small buck in Kansas with Dave Smith's posturing buck. I can't wait to see the footage of it I shot while the Live deer squared off with a fake one. He pawed the ground and fuzzed up like a wire brush before eventually moving on his way after his challenge wasn't accepted. Toting all this stuff around limits the practicality of it, especially when you're doing it by yourself. So it was the second day of a hunt in a location where I was actually parking my truck within 150 yards of where I was hunting. With my saddle set up already in place, Toting that decoy in for the first afternoon session would be a breeze. I had action from the very beginning with smaller bucks posturing and moving into the buck head on, making decoy placement and orientation the most important aspect of using one. I learned a lot watching those deer. They ain't cheap by any means, but it's built solid, and it's not something that I would use on every occasion just from the logistics of it, but it proved itself to me. and I admittedly was a skeptic of using one from the beginning. Now I can think of several scenarios and places where using one could be a distinct advantage. Anyway, that's my thoughts on deer decoys. It was fun and certainly has a useful place in a proper setting and time. The best thing that decoy did for me was to focus the real deer's attention away from me. I finally had a mature buck that I decided to let all the air out of after watching him for two days in a row bully other smaller bucks around in the little open flat where I was hanging 15 feet off the ground. There was a huge red oak that was dropping acorns like they were on fire, and every deer that came within earshot of the bouncing oak tree eggs was hopping the fence to come over and grab a jawful before easing on down the deer trail. I had seven different bucks come through one afternoon, and the one I kept passing showed up like he was on a carousel at the county fair. He was a good buck by anyone's standards. but there was a bigger one in the area that I knew from my buddy's cell camera and from him seeing him a few hundred yards down this travel corridor the evening before. I was content with watching this one walk in and out of bow range, even though it got more tempting with each of his visits to try to job a hole in him. On his final official visit, the day before I came home, I watched him walk into less than ten yards of the tree I was sitting in. His attention focused solely on that decoy, the same way he had been with the small bucks that were there before I ever deployed the decoy. His ears laid back, his nose tilted forward, looking like a hood ornament, oblivious to the skullduggery that could have taken place as he stomped around that little opening like a playground ruffian. Shooting him at ten yards would have been too easy. It was after he left and came back an hour later, with the only gal in that part of the country that was entertaining suitors, that I decided to add him to the hit list. I had ranged every tree and place so many times that it was like looking at a football field every time I looked around. Here he comes back, and she's leading him to his demise. She hopped the fence and walked within 15 yards of me, ignoring the decoy as she fed. I saw him watching her from the opposite side of the barbed wire, and I knew it wouldn't be long before he joined the party. He hopped that five-strand fence like it wasn't there, and she met him halfway, putting him now a little over 20 yards. They made a dash at her, and she trotted away, and he was moving away from my spot, and I saw where he was going, and I knew when he hit that open, he'd be sub-40 yards. That's my limit. I came to full draw and decided that I'd let him tote warm If he stopped in that clearing, and he stopped, quartering away, perfectly, watching her every move, I let the 40-yard pin settle on where I intended to watch my arrow disappear, and at the exact moment I felt the trigger go slack against my finger, he stepped to his right, and I witnessed my arrow buzz by him sticking a dirt bank beside where he was standing. It would have been a laser through his vitals had he not stepped away. It would have also been a lot easier shot had I chose to take it when he was 40 feet away instead of 40 yards. Oh, well. I mean, I wasn't sad. That's what I get. I'd had a half a dozen opportunities to shoot him over two days at less than 25 yards and had passed them all up. In a way, I'm glad I missed him. It's that old adage of never passing something on the first day that you'd gladly take on the last. I had just lived that. I had plans to stay two more days, and that night as I got ready for bed, I received an old video from my daughter Bailey. She's 14 now, but she was, I don't know, about six when she recorded the video that she sent me on Alexa's phone. I was napping on the couch, and she was laughing. telling me to smile while she filmed me. In that instant, I knew I had missed enough. I heard that voice, that sweet little voice, and two more days wouldn't matter, and a hundred more bucks wouldn't matter either. It was time to go home. Now, my bow season isn't over by any means, and hunting season for me is just getting started. But my real joy comes from being with the folks that I love the most. And even though that I enjoy and love the folks and my friends in Kansas and Missouri, being with the ones here at home is where I really find my joy. Thank you all so much for listening to Clay, Lake, and myself here on the old channel. And until next week, this is Brent Reeves signing off. Y'all be careful.

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