Speaker 1: I don't know where I got this. I don't know
Speaker 1: what drives Amanda to jump out of bed and a
Speaker 1: frosty morning and go several miles back in the mountain
Speaker 1: to sit there in a tree all day.
Speaker 2: This is our third and final Deer Stories episode of
Speaker 2: twenty twenty three, and we are now in the core
Speaker 2: of the best white tailed dates on the calendar, and
Speaker 2: to stoke the fire, we're going to tell some wild stories.
Speaker 2: One from the big Mountains of East Tennessee, couple from Kansas.
Speaker 2: We're going to talk about some decoyed bucks, some coyotes
Speaker 2: and bucks, some deer doged bucks, and a two hundred
Speaker 2: inch buck, and one straight up deer hunting lie. The
Speaker 2: connector of all these stories in all three episodes we've
Speaker 2: heard is the passion, respect, and a true appreciation of
Speaker 2: deer hunting translated through the voices of these hunters. What
Speaker 2: a privilege it is to be a white tail hunter
Speaker 2: and we're living in its heyday. After this podcast, we're
Speaker 2: going back to our regular documentary style stories, So enjoy
Speaker 2: this last episode before we start learning hard stuff and
Speaker 2: digging deep again, cracking into this American hunting culture. We've
Speaker 2: found ourselves embedded in. But that being said, our stories
Speaker 2: carry the culture, our values, and our future. I really
Speaker 2: doubt you're gonna want to miss this one.
Speaker 3: It was a weird deal, just an old majestic buck
Speaker 3: like that, you know, lived this whole life and it
Speaker 3: was just my buck of a lifetime. We start taping
Speaker 3: this deer well we ran out of tape.
Speaker 2: My name is Clay Nukem, and this is the Bear
Speaker 2: Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
Speaker 2: for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
Speaker 2: story gory of Americans who lived their lives close to
Speaker 2: the land, presented by FHF gear, American made, purpose built
Speaker 2: hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged
Speaker 2: as the place as we explore. Henry Sioux Song is
Speaker 2: eighty years old and from the rough country of East Tennessee.
Speaker 2: And if you've never been there, trust me, it is
Speaker 2: some rough country that rivals anywhere on this continent. Mister
Speaker 2: Henry stands among an elite class of humans healthy enough
Speaker 2: to pursue their passions into their eighties. But perhaps even
Speaker 2: more unique, his internal drive for his passion hasn't decreased.
Speaker 2: His fire burns hot. The man bubbles with infectious energy.
Speaker 2: When I went to mister Henry's home, he led me
Speaker 2: into a large room filled wall to wall with deer heads,
Speaker 2: and I mean big deer. He grinned like a possum
Speaker 2: meating red ants while describing how he and his sons
Speaker 2: had taken all these deer with archery gear. Many came
Speaker 2: from Tennessee, others came from the Midwest. The bucks ranged
Speaker 2: from basket racks to stacks of one fifties and one sixties,
Speaker 2: all the way up to a two hundred and twenty
Speaker 2: inch giant. He had one buck with a twenty seven
Speaker 2: inch spread on the wall. I asked mister Henry to
Speaker 2: tell me his most memorable story, which was difficult, but
Speaker 2: this is the one that he picked. Meet mister Henry.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety one is when I first found sign
Speaker 1: of this big buck. It was deep in a Cherokee
Speaker 1: National Forest. It began when my son and I went
Speaker 1: there and hunted a couple of years. He wound up
Speaker 1: killing a one hundred and thirty four inch eight point
Speaker 1: I think, and another big buck that they called slew
Speaker 1: Foot because he was crippling one leg, which made I
Speaker 1: guess that leg or the other leg. When he made
Speaker 1: a scrape, it was a lot bigger than it should be.
Speaker 1: So we got to going back in this area and
Speaker 1: packing in and staying, you know, three days at a time.
Speaker 1: We come out. First year when I found the sign
Speaker 1: of the big buck, we didn't get him. The acorn
Speaker 1: crop wasn't real good. Second year, same thing. I found
Speaker 1: the sign, knew there was a big buck there, but
Speaker 1: again the acorns weren't real good. Probably he had some
Speaker 1: rubs the size of a ball capot six seven inches
Speaker 1: through quite a few of Then comes the third year,
Speaker 1: and we had been to Illinois looking for some deer
Speaker 1: sign and my son was all enthused about going to Illinois,
Speaker 1: and I thought, I can't go to Illinois.
Speaker 3: Nick.
Speaker 1: I found about forty crapes on one ridge back there,
Speaker 1: and the mountains are pretty steep back in that end.
Speaker 1: On the crest of the ridges, it's where the deer
Speaker 1: makes scrapes, and I also feed on acres sometimes. The
Speaker 1: sign that he made would be two miles long. He said,
Speaker 1: if I go back there one more trip with you,
Speaker 1: will you then go to Illinoise. I said, yeah, you
Speaker 1: give me one more change. I said, let's go back
Speaker 1: there and see if we can't get him. So we
Speaker 1: went back and put our little pufp tin up packed
Speaker 1: ten put her pup tin up. It was October the
Speaker 1: twenty eighth, nineteen ninety three, went hundred trees stands, and
Speaker 1: the next morning, just a crack of daylight, I heard
Speaker 1: something that i'd heard before, and it was a deer
Speaker 1: having his horns in limbs over his head. There was
Speaker 1: a clicking sound. A lot of people heard it. Then
Speaker 1: he came out the top of a ridge and I
Speaker 1: could see the top of his rack. I had never
Speaker 1: seen the deer before, but I knew he was big.
Speaker 1: By studying the sign, you can tell a lot, but
Speaker 1: the sign by the track and the scrapes, by the
Speaker 1: damage he does. So he came out this ridge and
Speaker 1: he had two scrapes underneath the tree I was in,
Speaker 1: and I thought, well, maybe he will go straight ahead.
Speaker 1: If he does, he's too far to shoot. But he didn't.
Speaker 1: He turned down the ridge comes straight to the scrapes.
Speaker 1: I shot him when he's standing right below the scrape,
Speaker 1: within ten foot of the tree, right down through the
Speaker 1: between the front shoulders. He ran out the ridge about
Speaker 1: seventy five eighty yards turned down the ridge and went
Speaker 1: out of my sight. So I sat there for a
Speaker 1: little while, and I knew immediately it's been several years ago.
Speaker 1: It's the biggest deer I'd ever seen, both horns and
Speaker 1: body wise. So I got out out of the tree,
Speaker 1: went down there, and the direction he run. I didn't
Speaker 1: try to follow the blood trail, but I knew why
Speaker 1: I could pick it up. But when I got down there,
Speaker 1: I was looking up on the size of the ridge
Speaker 1: looking for him, and looked down and he was right
Speaker 1: under my feet dead. One thing that I thought was
Speaker 1: really interesting. I finally found my son. He got out
Speaker 1: out of the tree about eleven o'clock and come back
Speaker 1: to for with camp and I told him, I said,
Speaker 1: I got him. So we started pulling this deer at
Speaker 1: twelve o'clock. We put him on the four wheeler at
Speaker 1: nine o'clock at night. That's how That's how tough it
Speaker 1: was to get out. It was just I mean, it
Speaker 1: was just so far back, you know, in a remote area,
Speaker 1: but we got him out. So it was just an
Speaker 1: absolute huge deer for the high a mountain, Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: amazing in this part of the country. Scored one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty five inches and it's only got five eighths
Speaker 1: of a niche deduction on the whole rack. That's that's
Speaker 1: kind of an amazing thing too. I've never seen one
Speaker 1: that close. That's just that's you know, that's just one
Speaker 1: of the stories. He's hanging right here right now. I
Speaker 1: don't know where I got this. I don't know what
Speaker 1: drives a man to jump out of bed and frosty
Speaker 1: morning and go several miles back in the mountains to
Speaker 1: sit thereunder a tree all day. Except none of my people,
Speaker 1: as far as I can find out, fish or hunted.
Speaker 1: An old man in North Carolina. When I was twenty
Speaker 1: eight years old, I got acquaint which sold me a
Speaker 1: used bow he had in three wooden iras for twenty dollars,
Speaker 1: and that's where I started. I think maybe I shot
Speaker 1: at a deer that year, but a friend of mine
Speaker 1: went with men. Someone asked him, as you see a deer,
Speaker 1: He said, yeah, Henry shot at one. He said, how
Speaker 1: close was it? He said, well, it kissed him. I
Speaker 1: missed him. I found an old tree stand back in
Speaker 1: the mountains and got up in it. Said I didn't
Speaker 1: have a tree stand, and for the first three or
Speaker 1: four years, I didn't have a tree stand. I finally
Speaker 1: figured out I could take an old Coca Cola case
Speaker 1: that they used to put bottles in it up in
Speaker 1: a tree. It made a pretty good stand. So that's
Speaker 1: what I hunted off over too through a year. But
Speaker 1: it's been many years ago. But it's something you get
Speaker 1: into that you love and you just get it in
Speaker 1: your blood. A lot of times when I go back
Speaker 1: in the mountains, I like to go back there in
Speaker 1: October and watch the leaves fall when they all turn.
Speaker 1: And I've always thought there's something magic in the mountains.
Speaker 1: You know, it's kind of magical to watch boomers. You
Speaker 1: know what a boomer is. Okay, a boomer is a
Speaker 1: little squirrel. They're fastest green lighting and they live about
Speaker 1: five thousand feet elevation in the mountains, and I like
Speaker 1: to watch those play. They're fast. I like to watch
Speaker 1: squirrels bear all the animals. I mean, it's just magic
Speaker 1: for me. Once you get in your blood, you can't
Speaker 1: get it out. You've got to go every year. But
Speaker 1: that's the story of my favorite buck from the place
Speaker 1: in the Turkey National Forest.
Speaker 2: Are you as passionate about bow hunting now as you
Speaker 2: were when you were in your thirties every bit.
Speaker 1: So probably the reason that is is I know what's
Speaker 1: coming to an end.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: I've been forciate enough to hunt some some people had
Speaker 1: a lot of respect for over the years. And one
Speaker 1: of my one of my good friends, was ten years
Speaker 1: and ten days older than I am, and he told
Speaker 1: me one day, he said, there'll come a day when
Speaker 1: you'll have to stop, and it'll be it'll be tough
Speaker 1: on you. He said, happen to me, it'll happen to you.
Speaker 1: And I know that's true. Yeah, but I still love
Speaker 1: to go back in the mountains and I can still
Speaker 1: do it and probably will till something happens. Give you
Speaker 1: an example. Last year, I was in the remote area.
Speaker 1: I called and I was on top of the mountain.
Speaker 1: It takes about an hour to get up there, up
Speaker 1: a tree, and a fella came by and he finally
Speaker 1: spotted me, and he stopped by and apologized for, you know,
Speaker 1: affecting my dear honey. I said, man, I haven't seen anything,
Speaker 1: and he said, I believe I've seen you here before
Speaker 1: and I said, yeah, I've hunted here for many years.
Speaker 1: And he said how old are you? And I said
Speaker 1: I'll be eighty my birthday and he said, man, I
Speaker 1: can't believe it, he said. I said, you don't have
Speaker 1: to say anything. I know how lucky I am, you know.
Speaker 1: But when he left, he said, you know it's amazing.
Speaker 1: He said, come on top of this mountain and see
Speaker 1: an old man up a tree that's seventy nine years old.
Speaker 1: But I've been lucky. Maybe the reason that I go
Speaker 1: to the High Country's course he's taking care of me.
Speaker 2: Mister Henry is a special man, full of energy, passion,
Speaker 2: and a love of white tailed deer hunting that rivals
Speaker 2: any I've encountered. To my knowledge, he's never been interviewed
Speaker 2: about his hunting. He never cared to be, but he's
Speaker 2: been extremely successful as a bow hunter in Passing. He
Speaker 2: told me that once some knucklehead had spread a rumor
Speaker 2: in the community that those Sioux song boys were killing
Speaker 2: all these deer at night. He chuckled and told the
Speaker 2: numbskulled naysayer, they're hard enough to kill during the daytime.
Speaker 2: I can't imagine trying to kill one at night, As
Speaker 2: if to say, we're not as good.
Speaker 4: As you think we are. Buddy, but I appreciate it.
Speaker 4: I thought that was pretty witty.
Speaker 2: Mister Henry, thanks for sharing your story with us. Our
Speaker 2: next story is told by my friend Aaron Stanfel. He
Speaker 2: was on our first Deer Stories episode and told about
Speaker 2: going to the bathroom and calling in those two deer.
Speaker 2: Here's a short story about two wild days in Kansas
Speaker 2: with his brother Andy.
Speaker 3: My brother and I are in Kansas two thousand and nine,
Speaker 3: on his birthday, November the tenth, we were hunting a
Speaker 3: huge beanfield and we had decided that we were going
Speaker 3: to try to decoy a deer in for the first time.
Speaker 3: So when we uh, we bought us a primos I
Speaker 3: don't remember. I think his name was Bucky Little primost
Speaker 3: Bucky Dick coming to a green bag. We set it
Speaker 3: up at the edge of the beanfield, and we'd watched
Speaker 3: enough videos we knew to turn it kind of turning
Speaker 3: towards us in the tree. You want to do that
Speaker 3: because if a deer's coming in, you want the deer
Speaker 3: to come around your decoy because he'll always come in
Speaker 3: and face him headfirst. He won't ever approach another deer
Speaker 3: from the back. So we knew if he come around
Speaker 3: to the front.
Speaker 1: We'd have a.
Speaker 3: Broadside shot the deer with We put this bucky dikoy
Speaker 3: up eighteen yards in front of us. We was both
Speaker 3: in this big cedar tree. Here steps out a beautiful,
Speaker 3: beautiful nine pointer out of the corner of the beanfield,
Speaker 3: probably about I don't know, one hundred yards. It was
Speaker 3: kind of walking away, but it stopped and it saw
Speaker 3: the decoy. And when it did, it immediately immediately through
Speaker 3: its ears back straight backwards and just bristled up and
Speaker 3: kind of just hunched over and just stiff legged all
Speaker 3: the way across the field. It was the most dramatic,
Speaker 3: the most exciting thing that I've ever witnessed. Comes all
Speaker 3: the way into the decoy. I had to close my eyes.
Speaker 3: I'll never forget I had my eyes closed. I was
Speaker 3: just trying to get my thoughts together. I was like,
Speaker 3: I have got to keep it together right here.
Speaker 4: I was so.
Speaker 3: Nervous, I was shaking. It comes around the head of
Speaker 3: the decoy and it just throws its head and it
Speaker 3: knocks the whole head off of the decoy just out
Speaker 3: there on the ground. Well, when it did, the deer
Speaker 3: just stood there, still run off. It just stood there like,
Speaker 3: what in the world, you know, And my brother's like, Aaron, what.
Speaker 4: Are you doing?
Speaker 5: Shoot the deer? Shoot the deer, And.
Speaker 3: I'm like, hang on, I gotta get this together. I
Speaker 3: was like, I can't even draw my bow back. I
Speaker 3: was shaking so much. And anyway, I finally got drew back,
Speaker 3: made a great shot on the deer and it expired
Speaker 3: right there in the middle of the bean field. Still
Speaker 3: probably the most exciting hunt I've ever been and just
Speaker 3: the way that he came in was just incredible. The
Speaker 3: next evening, my brother said, hey, let's do that again.
Speaker 3: Let's get in the same tree. We'll do the same thing.
Speaker 3: There's gotta be another deer in there. So we did
Speaker 3: another really nice deer, probably one hundred and thirty five
Speaker 3: inch ten pointer, come out the far other end of
Speaker 3: the beanfield, probably four hundred yards, just had his look
Speaker 3: through the binoculars to see it. My brother said, Aaron,
Speaker 3: there's a big buck. He's like, snort, wheeze addy, So
Speaker 3: I just sh you know, really loud. He heard it,
Speaker 3: and he come running all the way across the beanfield,
Speaker 3: saw the decoy, exact same thing, come in head first
Speaker 3: to the decoy, and he made a fantastic shot on
Speaker 3: the deer. We filmed the whole thing. We killed bucks
Speaker 3: back to back nights over at Decoy, and but we
Speaker 3: snort wheezed that deer and it was it was so
Speaker 3: such a good hunt.
Speaker 2: That's some good hunting. I asked Aaron if he had
Speaker 2: any more memorable stories. He hesitated for a moment and
Speaker 2: said he'd like to tell one. It's really more of
Speaker 2: a confession than a story. The two other guys that
Speaker 2: he's gonna mention here are mutual friends of ours, Scott
Speaker 2: Brown and Lucas Austin. And this story is not Bear
Speaker 2: Grease approved, mister Aaron, but I'm pretty sure everybody's gonna
Speaker 2: enjoy it.
Speaker 3: I got a funny one. I don't know what year
Speaker 3: it was, it had to have been nineteen ninety eight
Speaker 3: or nineteen ninety nine. That's when I met all the
Speaker 3: Meana bunch, and I'd invited them to come over and
Speaker 3: have a deer camp with us over on some public
Speaker 3: land here in north of Arkansas. And Lucas Awsen and
Speaker 3: Scott Brown they had been out driving around scouting for
Speaker 3: the deer camp, and they came back to camp and
Speaker 3: it was a tough year. I hadn't found any sign
Speaker 3: at all to even hunting. They came back to camp
Speaker 3: and of course, I you know, I told him that
Speaker 3: I knew the woods like the back of my hand.
Speaker 3: You know, I knew every ridge over there.
Speaker 5: I knew well.
Speaker 3: They came back to camp and they said, man, we
Speaker 3: have flat out found him. Said, we have found this
Speaker 3: ridge that is just covered in deer, sun, white oak,
Speaker 3: acorns all over the ground. I thought, man, really we're
Speaker 3: at said, you know over there, and they described exactly
Speaker 3: where it was at, and I said, yeah, I've got
Speaker 3: to I've got a tree stand. I've never told this
Speaker 3: for I've never I don't think they're even told brown.
Speaker 6: See.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've got a tree stand on that ridge. They said,
Speaker 3: you've got to be kidding me. We didn't see one.
Speaker 3: I said, yeah, I do. I said I've got one
Speaker 3: up there the top. And I didn't have a tree
Speaker 3: stand there. And they thought, man, that was should have known.
Speaker 3: You know, Stanfield is gonna be have He's already figured
Speaker 3: found out. So they went somewhere else. The next day,
Speaker 3: I whilled in there at daylight and I hadn't been
Speaker 3: in the tree ten minutes, and the big ol'd dough
Speaker 3: come in there and I shot her, and I don't
Speaker 3: think I ever told them. We've called that liar's ridge
Speaker 3: to this day. I'm not proud of it, but that's
Speaker 3: just how it happened.
Speaker 2: Aaron, that was downright dirty, brother. I'm glad you finally
Speaker 2: got that off your chest. Confession is a powerful tool,
Speaker 2: and I think you owe Scott and Luca deer. The
Speaker 2: way I figure it, twenty years of compound interest on
Speaker 2: a doe deer, by my calculations, equals one hundred and
Speaker 2: thirty five inch buck. You owe both of them both
Speaker 2: one hundred and thirty five inch deer. Don't lie to
Speaker 2: your hunting buddies, Okay, I'm going to tell the next story.
Speaker 2: This was the first big buck that I ever killed.
Speaker 2: This is one of my most memorable hunts. It was
Speaker 2: October the twenty fifth, nineteen ninety eight. And that's an
Speaker 2: important date because as a deer I've learned that dates
Speaker 2: are very important, and it's something that I remember pretty well.
Speaker 4: Of the deer that I've killed, I could tell you the.
Speaker 2: Date of almost every one of the big bucks, and
Speaker 2: it started with this one.
Speaker 4: I was nineteen years old.
Speaker 2: I was coming back to my hometown from where I
Speaker 2: was going to college my first year of college at
Speaker 2: Arkansas Tech University, I was going back to hunt with
Speaker 2: Dad on some scrubby public land that we grew up hunting.
Speaker 2: This land was primarily pine plantation. There was a lot
Speaker 2: of forestry going on there, so there were a lot
Speaker 2: of clear cuts, but they would leave the hardwood timber
Speaker 2: along the riparian zones along the creeks, and in late
Speaker 2: October when the acrons were falling, that's where you'd find
Speaker 2: the deer wherever you found the oaks, which was along
Speaker 2: the creeks. This was the spot that my dad and
Speaker 2: I had hunted a lot in years previous.
Speaker 4: It was a place we called blue Bucket.
Speaker 2: First time Dad went in there, he saw a blue bucket,
Speaker 2: and so from then on it was called blue Bucket. Basically,
Speaker 2: it was a narrow strip of hardwood timber with two
Speaker 2: clearcuts on either side, and the clearcuts met and the
Speaker 2: timber narrowed down into a point, and right at that
Speaker 2: point was where Dad.
Speaker 4: Had found multiple big scrapes.
Speaker 2: And he had been in there scouting in the middle
Speaker 2: of the day the week before, bumbling around and actually
Speaker 2: heard a deer coming, got real quiet and still and
Speaker 2: watched this big buck come through the mill around in there,
Speaker 2: which was really unusual to lay your eyes on a
Speaker 2: big buck while you're scouting. And for whatever reason, that
Speaker 2: next weekend, Dad didn't want to hunt in there. He
Speaker 2: probably just wanted me to have the good spot. But
Speaker 2: I went in there and hung a stand within twenty
Speaker 2: yards of this scrape. I went in early on the
Speaker 2: morning of the twenty fifth. There was a frost on
Speaker 2: the ground. It was just the perfect morning. At this
Speaker 2: time in my hunting career, I had killed several deer
Speaker 2: with a bow, but I had never killed a mature buck,
Speaker 2: And honestly, I had never seen a mature buck from stand.
Speaker 2: And this is also a time when we didn't have
Speaker 2: trail cameras, we didn't have cell phones, and I might
Speaker 2: hunt a whole season to get an opportunity at one
Speaker 2: spike buck. Well, as the morning came on about forty
Speaker 2: five minutes after daylight, about the time you feel like
Speaker 2: you ought to be seeing some game, I hear something
Speaker 2: coming in behind me in the leaves.
Speaker 4: I hear walking. I get ready.
Speaker 2: I turn around, and here comes a coyote and he's
Speaker 2: zigging and zagging through the trees, mousing hunting, and he
Speaker 2: starts hunting all around these oaks that are just raining
Speaker 2: acrens that my deer are about to be at. The
Speaker 2: kyote gets in right close to this big scrape, and
Speaker 2: I didn't hesitate, and I still don't hesitate to this day.
Speaker 2: I learned with predators that if you're going to shoot
Speaker 2: one with a bow, you can't hesitate. You just have
Speaker 2: to make up your mind before they even get there
Speaker 2: that you're going to shoot a coyote if it's legal,
Speaker 2: and it was. By the time he got into the open,
Speaker 2: he's like ten feet from this big.
Speaker 4: Scrape and I pull back and shoot this coyote.
Speaker 2: He drops right there, right in the heart of where
Speaker 2: the deer activity is supposed to be. There's a dead
Speaker 2: coyote laying there. I realize I got to do something.
Speaker 2: I climb out of the stand. I dragged the coyote
Speaker 2: over to the creek within sight of my stand and
Speaker 2: throw it in the water so it's submerged in the water,
Speaker 2: so that a deer wouldn't be smelling the kyote. But
Speaker 2: still there's kyote blood and scent all just right around
Speaker 2: where the deer going to be I think my morning's
Speaker 2: probably shot. Climb back up in the tree about an
Speaker 2: hour later, so now it's probably around eight point thirty.
Speaker 2: I hear something coming. I hear steady walking, steady, loud walking.
Speaker 2: It's so loud that I think it's a cow because
Speaker 2: there were free range cattle on this public land, or
Speaker 2: I think it's a man. Typically a deer is gonna
Speaker 2: walk and stop, walk a little bit and stop. This
Speaker 2: was just steady for fifty sixty seventy yards, just steady
Speaker 2: and loud. And I get to the point where I'm
Speaker 2: not even excited anymore. I'm just waiting for a man
Speaker 2: to pop out or a cow. Well, my eyes are
Speaker 2: just fixed on where I think this sound's gonna pop up.
Speaker 2: And man, I look up and there's the biggest buck
Speaker 2: I have seen from the stand in my whole life,
Speaker 2: probably the biggest deer.
Speaker 4: I've ever seen.
Speaker 2: And he proceeds to walk right past where that coyote was,
Speaker 2: right past the coyote blood stand in the middle of
Speaker 2: that scrape, and go to work in that scrape. Well
Speaker 2: about the time he gets there, I get to full
Speaker 2: draw and I'm shooting a Matthew Zmax, which was a
Speaker 2: brand new bow to me, and it had a very
Speaker 2: distinct valley, which means at the pinnacle moment of the
Speaker 2: draw cycle it drops into its let off very quickly.
Speaker 4: And so that's great.
Speaker 2: But I was having trouble though, when I would relax
Speaker 2: a little bit too much right before the shot and
Speaker 2: the bow would jerk down and.
Speaker 4: I'm at full draw.
Speaker 2: The biggest buck I've ever seen is working a scrape,
Speaker 2: which this is something I'd only seen on television, and
Speaker 2: I'm about to shoot this deer at twenty yards and boom,
Speaker 2: the bow jerks down and I have this fast, erratic movement.
Speaker 4: I just know that the buck has seen me.
Speaker 2: I close my eyes and I just barely crack him open,
Speaker 2: expecting to see a tail running off.
Speaker 4: And the buck has not seen me.
Speaker 2: But he's now done working his scrape and he's turning
Speaker 2: and he's leaving.
Speaker 4: I draw the bow back. The deer is now at.
Speaker 2: Thirty three yard it's quartering away, and he stops out
Speaker 2: there and I touch off the trigger and the arrow
Speaker 2: just arcs into one of the most beautiful shots I've
Speaker 2: ever made. The Arab just buried up to the fletching
Speaker 2: behind the last rib on a steep quartering shot and
Speaker 2: the deer runs off.
Speaker 4: So it's eight thirty in the morning.
Speaker 2: I've now got a coyote in the creek and I've
Speaker 2: shot a big buck. And we didn't have cell phones.
Speaker 2: I couldn't call my dad. He was gonna come back
Speaker 2: at eleven o'clock that morning. It's a really unique feeling
Speaker 2: that I had never fully felt before. When when you've
Speaker 2: killed a big deer but you hadn't recovered it yet.
Speaker 2: It's a unique experience of the mind, soul, body, spirit.
Speaker 2: There's chemicals flowing, there's emotions flowing. That's hard to describe.
Speaker 2: I don't know that you could describe it to a
Speaker 2: non hunter, that feeling that we get. And I just
Speaker 2: paced up and down the road, paced up and down
Speaker 2: the road for two and a half hours, and at
Speaker 2: about eleven ten, Dad pulls up and he said he
Speaker 2: could tell when he saw me in the road that
Speaker 2: something special had happened. And I say, Dad, I've killed
Speaker 2: a big buck.
Speaker 4: We go track the deer. The deer hadn't run fifty
Speaker 4: yards and it's the biggest deer I've ever killed. It
Speaker 4: was a very mature buck.
Speaker 2: It had to have weighed at the upper side of
Speaker 2: what deer in that region would weigh. I mean, it
Speaker 2: was a big four and a half five and a
Speaker 2: half year old buck. We took a bunch of pictures,
Speaker 2: and I remember we took a picture down to the
Speaker 2: local bow shop in my hometown and hung that picture
Speaker 2: up on the wall. And I remember what a deep
Speaker 2: sense of accomplishment that I felt, as I was one
Speaker 2: of the people in the community that year that killed
Speaker 2: a really nice deer with a bow, and I remember
Speaker 2: the local paper took my picture, and at the time
Speaker 2: I wouldn't have realized how meaningful that was to me
Speaker 2: and how much that influenced me.
Speaker 4: He had a double white throat patch.
Speaker 2: He was a nine point that scored one hundred and
Speaker 2: twenty six inches, and that buck hangs in my office
Speaker 2: to this day. That was a memorable buck that hooked
Speaker 2: me on those white oak acres for life and made
Speaker 2: me love October twenty fifth. At the time, I didn't
Speaker 2: understand the larger significance of that date, but in general,
Speaker 2: many of the best hunters I know will say from
Speaker 2: October twenty fifth through about November the tenth are the
Speaker 2: best days of the classic Midwestern type rut. I'm sure
Speaker 2: you understand that peak breeding can be slightly to largely
Speaker 2: different regionally, but in many places white tails live. October
Speaker 2: twenty fifth is when it starts getting good. In October
Speaker 2: twenty fifth, nineteen ninety eight is when deer hunting started
Speaker 2: getting good for me. Our next storyteller is my colleague
Speaker 2: meat eater Casey Smith of East Texas, CA. C. Smith
Speaker 2: and Tyler Jones have a YouTube channel and a podcast
Speaker 2: called The Element, and I'd say these boys are pretty
Speaker 2: radical whitetail hunters. Case likes to run and gun, and
Speaker 2: this story is about a very unique ground hunt and
Speaker 2: the great planes that produced Casey's biggest whitetail Meet.
Speaker 4: Casey Smith.
Speaker 5: Now, I have a habit of being confident, or what
Speaker 5: some might call reckless when chasing deer round on the ground,
Speaker 5: and that comes from a good place, I feel like.
Speaker 6: I mean, I always try to be a real optimistic guy,
Speaker 6: and I always like to think that I have what
Speaker 6: it takes to go out there and shoot a big buck.
Speaker 5: Not always the case, but I feel.
Speaker 6: Like you just can't approach it from a position of doubt, right,
Speaker 6: it just doesn't work out, And in fact, A lot
Speaker 6: of this comes from the fact that we us up
Speaker 6: so much.
Speaker 5: Tyler and I have been trying to.
Speaker 6: Shoot big deer on the ground for quite a few
Speaker 6: years now, and at the beginning, we used to get
Speaker 6: so hot broken because we would just fail all the time.
Speaker 6: And it got to the point where it was like, well,
Speaker 6: we might as well go out there and chase him,
Speaker 6: because we're gonna mess it up anyways, Let's not put
Speaker 6: too much into it, don't overthink it, just go after him.
Speaker 6: And somehow, some way that actually produced like a level
Speaker 6: of confidence and we started.
Speaker 5: To get a little bit better at this.
Speaker 6: Well, we are up in a plain state, and I
Speaker 6: am just having a dog of a time.
Speaker 5: I mean I didn't have any place to hunt, and
Speaker 5: the wind direction changed on me.
Speaker 6: I couldn't hunt that property and didn't know if I
Speaker 6: even wanted to anyways.
Speaker 5: Because I already bumped all the deer off of.
Speaker 6: It, and that was about the only piece of public
Speaker 6: ground that I had access to in the area.
Speaker 5: So I was just kind of in a tight spot.
Speaker 6: Well, we did the thing that we always say we're
Speaker 6: not gonna do, and we hit the phones and started
Speaker 6: calling landowners, and sure enough, Tyler pulled one out man,
Speaker 6: just like one of the.
Speaker 5: Best bro moves you can imagine. He called up this
Speaker 5: guy who he'd.
Speaker 6: Had a contact with a few years back and somehow
Speaker 6: got us some permission on an awesome piece of ground.
Speaker 6: I end up staying up practically all night long, sick,
Speaker 6: going to the bathroom multiple times, just as bad as
Speaker 6: you can imagine, for about.
Speaker 5: Eight hours being sick. That's what I was. Well.
Speaker 6: Round about two thirty in the morning, I finally think
Speaker 6: I had my last episode and I get to lay
Speaker 6: down for about two hours get some rest. But I
Speaker 6: set my alarm for four forty five or whatever it was,
Speaker 6: because I mean, it's November seventh. I cannot miss this day.
Speaker 6: It is one of the best deer hunting days on
Speaker 6: the calendar. Alarm goes on off, roll over, get out
Speaker 6: of bed. Me and my buddy Greg head out that morning.
Speaker 6: We're running late, but it's better late than ever whenever
Speaker 6: you've been sick, and it's an awesome day of hunting,
Speaker 6: and sure enough, beautiful morning, frost everywhere, super steell, just
Speaker 6: that great crisp feeling that we all love as deer hunters.
Speaker 6: We decided to park the truck and just kind of
Speaker 6: hike down the hill and do something I don't really
Speaker 6: like to do very much, but I'd call it an
Speaker 6: observation sit.
Speaker 5: I have my bow with me, but I'm not gonna
Speaker 5: do too much.
Speaker 6: I don't think I'm just gonna try to be out there,
Speaker 6: maybe try to kill something that night off of what
Speaker 6: I'd learned that day, and we hike down, go to
Speaker 6: glassing and looking around. I do have my rattling andlers
Speaker 6: with me just in case. Sure enough, I can see
Speaker 6: a deer about eight hundred yards away, maybe a little closer,
Speaker 6: I don't know, and I watch him. I'm a by nose.
Speaker 6: I can tell it's a buck. And then he's following
Speaker 6: this fence line and he's starts to get about as
Speaker 6: close as he's ever going to get to us. And
Speaker 6: if he continues on, he's going to start to get
Speaker 6: further away, about five hundred yards out.
Speaker 5: I said, why not.
Speaker 6: I get my rattling antlers, start hitting them together as
Speaker 6: hard as you can, and the sound carries. I see
Speaker 6: that deer whip his head around, and at that point
Speaker 6: in time, it's like, oh my goodness, this just went
Speaker 6: from who knows what to like this could happen, and
Speaker 6: sure enough that deer does a oneint eighty jumps the fence,
Speaker 6: and at that point in time, it's full fledged hunt mode.
Speaker 6: We're en rolling terrain and this buck is coming up
Speaker 6: trying to get the winds. That's what they do when
Speaker 6: you rattle at him. They try to go smell and
Speaker 6: see what's going on. See if they know those deer
Speaker 6: just have a safe approach to the situation. So I
Speaker 6: run down the hill about eighty ninety yards and get
Speaker 6: set up right on the back side of this rise
Speaker 6: so that this deer will come up and be looking
Speaker 6: where I was, not where I am, And sure enough
Speaker 6: I kind of can see the top of his back
Speaker 6: over the hill. He drops down where I can't see him,
Speaker 6: and we just get ready to get hunkered down. I
Speaker 6: get up on one knee, get my bow in my hand,
Speaker 6: ready to go, and all I see is brow times
Speaker 6: pop up over the sage. Somehow, some way, probably my
Speaker 6: sickness helped me hold it together, because I didn't have
Speaker 6: enough energy to be overly excited. And this deer's looking
Speaker 6: and he's got the sun in his eyes. He can't
Speaker 6: see us just standing there on the ball open prairie right.
Speaker 6: He takes a couple more steps forward and then kind
Speaker 6: of locks it up and looks at us. And somehow,
Speaker 6: some way I had the boldness as that deer's looking
Speaker 6: at me at like thirty yards at full draw, I
Speaker 6: give him a light snort wheeze, and that's enough to
Speaker 6: make that deer say, you know what. I don't know
Speaker 6: what that is, but I don't like what he said
Speaker 6: to me. He takes two steps forward. I grunt stop.
Speaker 5: Him, squeeze my release, and Pap just ham this thing.
Speaker 6: And I knew right away it wasn't my greatest shot,
Speaker 6: but it was very lethal in the vitals. And we
Speaker 6: watched that deer run out about one hundred yards, do
Speaker 6: a semicircle.
Speaker 5: And then lie down. And I watched him until his.
Speaker 6: Antler's laid down on the ground, and from there it
Speaker 6: was just pure elation. I just could not believe I'd
Speaker 6: had the night I had, and it turned into the
Speaker 6: day that it did. This buck is awesome. He's a
Speaker 6: mainframe ten twenty one inches wide. I haven't measured him
Speaker 6: out all the way though, so I don't know exactly
Speaker 6: what he'd score, but I'd say he pushes right at
Speaker 6: that one hundred and sixty mark and he's got split
Speaker 6: brow time. It's just a beautiful, beautiful deer, excellent representation
Speaker 6: of what a mature buck looks like on a plain state.
Speaker 5: And I just could not be more thankful.
Speaker 4: That was a good story.
Speaker 2: Casey way to tough it out, take a chance with
Speaker 2: the rattling, and make the absolute most of an opportunity.
Speaker 4: That was some good hunting.
Speaker 2: And I'd say out of a hundred whitetail hunters wouldn't
Speaker 2: have killed that buck. The only other one that would
Speaker 2: have probably would have been your buddy Tyler Jones. These
Speaker 2: element guys have a way of doing this kind of
Speaker 2: stuff a lot. Our next story is told by a
Speaker 2: man that I have known since nineteen ninety eight and
Speaker 2: I consider him the real deal.
Speaker 4: His name is.
Speaker 2: Hooch McDonald, and he's what i'd call a bonafide dog man.
Speaker 2: As you've heard, I love to celebrate the diversity of
Speaker 2: ways in which we hunt deer in America. Hooch is
Speaker 2: from a region of Arkansas where dog hunting is alive
Speaker 2: and well, he's going to spend some time telling the
Speaker 2: inns and outs of running deer with dogs. Some of
Speaker 2: it might surprise you. Here's old Hooch.
Speaker 7: My name is James McDonald, but most folks call me hooch.
Speaker 7: I've been hooch since before I was born. They call
Speaker 7: me hoos because of my grandpa. He passed about a
Speaker 7: month before I was born. It's not real shit. Which
Speaker 7: of these were the cause of me being hooch. But
Speaker 7: he was a moonshiner for one, and hooch is a
Speaker 7: slang for moonshine, so that's one one thought. And then
Speaker 7: my dad wanted to call me hoot after one of
Speaker 7: his uncles. And then they think that my grandpa just
Speaker 7: couldn't really get hoot out and he kept saying hooch,
Speaker 7: so when they lost him, and then I came along
Speaker 7: right after, the name stuck. Deer hunt in the South
Speaker 7: with dogs is a complete social event. There is no
Speaker 7: sitting in a tree by yourself watching sign feed Paul whatever.
Speaker 7: It's buddies and lots of camaraderie, storytelling, bull crap, you know,
Speaker 7: messing with each other. I mean, that's that's what makes
Speaker 7: it fun. And a typical day for us we start
Speaker 7: off a little bit before daylight. Either somebody will pick
Speaker 7: up breakfast and bring up there, or we'll get together
Speaker 7: early enough and we'll cook breakfast, and then about daylight
Speaker 7: we load dogs and then we all gather around and
Speaker 7: we decide who's turning and loose for one and where
Speaker 7: we're going to turn loose.
Speaker 1: And then the.
Speaker 7: Way we do it is we have crossings that we've
Speaker 7: known for years. Deer tendy use the same crossings. Like
Speaker 7: if we go into this block of woods, there's top
Speaker 7: three escape routes, but then there's others that you know.
Speaker 7: Sometimes they run up to that escape route and smell somebody,
Speaker 7: hear something, and they turn and go the other way
Speaker 7: and shoot out one of the other side routes. So
Speaker 7: we try to cover everything. Rarely do we cover everything well.
Speaker 7: The dog man, whoever's turning and loose, decides where he
Speaker 7: wants to go, and he usually ram rods the whole drive.
Speaker 7: People will speak up and say, you know, I want
Speaker 7: this stand if nobody else does, and then once everybody
Speaker 7: decides where they're going, he turns loose just cast the dogs.
Speaker 7: That's the way we hunt Some people down in the
Speaker 7: sandy country, they'll put them on a track, but we
Speaker 7: just kind of cast into the bedding areas acorn flats,
Speaker 7: lots of buck sign in places, you know, that's where
Speaker 7: with hot scrapes, and then the dogs are turned loose.
Speaker 7: Our style of dogs, for the most part, will coal trail.
Speaker 7: You know, they'll start barking some when they smell something.
Speaker 7: Once they get that deer up and running, they really
Speaker 7: get fired up, make lots of noise, and that's when
Speaker 7: it gets exciting. I have always had dogs with tree
Speaker 7: blood in them, whether it be trem walker's, red bones,
Speaker 7: blue ticks, even some English here and there. And the
Speaker 7: reason I like that is the tree dog always runs
Speaker 7: the track. He doesn't run the wind like some of
Speaker 7: these running dogs will. Some of these running dogs when
Speaker 7: they cross the road, they may be fifteen to twenty
Speaker 7: yards down the road, down wind from where the deer.
Speaker 7: The tree dog is almost always within a few feet
Speaker 7: of where the deer crossed.
Speaker 4: And tree dogs are always trashy.
Speaker 7: Anyway, right, And there's something about a tree dog that
Speaker 7: they just they just sound different. You have a oh no,
Speaker 7: I don't have yeah, just gray dogs. We don't care
Speaker 7: about papers. When people bring registered dogs sometimes and they
Speaker 7: don't pan out like they're supposed to. The running joke
Speaker 7: is he didn't want to cross because he's afraid to
Speaker 7: get his papers whip. Once the dogs get the deer
Speaker 7: up and they're running, they're making lots of noise. You
Speaker 7: know they're gonna eventually I may circle some, but they're
Speaker 7: gonna eventually kind of line out and head hopefully towards
Speaker 7: one of our standards. So that's when that standard's life
Speaker 7: gets exciting. You can hear the dogs getting closer and closer,
Speaker 7: and then brush starts breaking, your heart starts pounding, Your
Speaker 7: adrenaline is going through the roof because you don't know
Speaker 7: if it's gonna be a yearling, a dough or a twelve.
Speaker 7: The only thing that I have experienced that compares to
Speaker 7: running dogs is working a turkey in the spring.
Speaker 2: It's interesting that Stony Edwards used the exact same analogy
Speaker 2: of spring turkey hunting. I wanted to ask Cooch about
Speaker 2: a potential stereotype about running deer with dogs.
Speaker 4: Here's what he said.
Speaker 7: Okay, So to address the statement from a lot of
Speaker 7: the world about dog hunters are lazy, that couldn't be
Speaker 7: any further from the truth. Dog hunting is three hundred
Speaker 7: and sixty five days a year, twenty four hours a day. Really,
Speaker 7: you've always got dogs to tend to. You've got a feed, water, vaccinate,
Speaker 7: vet bills. It's definitely not just for those six weeks
Speaker 7: a year. There's training raising puppies because everybody, everybody in
Speaker 7: the business, they want to raise their own dogs. Okay,
Speaker 7: so there's so much involved in running deer with dogs,
Speaker 7: and it's not just you go out there and turn
Speaker 7: some dogs loose and deer run everywhere and you go
Speaker 7: to shooting. It's not the best way to then the herd.
Speaker 7: You will kill far more deer send in a tree.
Speaker 7: It is more about the time with your buddies.
Speaker 2: Who's has done a good job of explaining the context
Speaker 2: and how to of hound hunting, and to reiterate his
Speaker 2: point about it being a difficult way to hunt, not
Speaker 2: an easy way to hunt. Let me say this, if
Speaker 2: I killed a big buck in front of dogs, it
Speaker 2: would be equivalent to me as if I had killed
Speaker 2: it with traditional archery equipment or some other self limiting
Speaker 2: method of hunting. To many people, the only sporting way
Speaker 2: to kill a deer is when it's being pursued by dogs.
Speaker 4: Think about that for a minute.
Speaker 2: It's an interesting perspective, and I say that only to
Speaker 2: help us all, including myself, enlarge the way that we
Speaker 2: view the world and take a little walk in another
Speaker 2: man's shoes. I'm going to turn it back over to
Speaker 2: Hooch for him to tell one of his most memorable hunts.
Speaker 2: And you're gonna hear him talk about road crossings, but
Speaker 2: it's essential to know that they're running on gated private land.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 7: So one of my most memorable stories with dogs. It
Speaker 7: takes place December third, nineteen ninety nine. It was actually
Speaker 7: reading day when I was enrolled in Arkansas Tech. So
Speaker 7: the friday before our final exams, well, I chose to
Speaker 7: go deer hunting. It was a little bit stormy that morning,
Speaker 7: so we didn't get to We didn't get to hunt
Speaker 7: right at daylight. Let me back up just a little bit,
Speaker 7: because I had hunted the weekend before, and we had
Speaker 7: made this same drive and I was standing up on
Speaker 7: the crossing and you could see off in the draw
Speaker 7: a little bit, and I was standing up on a
Speaker 7: saddle on the end of the mountain and the dogs
Speaker 7: were coming, and boy, I thought they were coming out
Speaker 7: to me.
Speaker 5: My heart was pounding.
Speaker 7: I could hear the brush breaking and then the brush
Speaker 7: breaking got really loud, and then all of a sudden
Speaker 7: it started going away. So I run over to the
Speaker 7: edge and stand up on a stump where I could see,
Speaker 7: and I got two or three glimpses, and all I
Speaker 7: could see was.
Speaker 5: Antlers, Like, oh my goodness.
Speaker 7: So now back to that Friday morning, we'd decided we
Speaker 7: were going to make the same drive, and me, I'm
Speaker 7: always thinking, so I watched, I had watched what he
Speaker 7: done the weekend before. I thought, you know, I'm not
Speaker 7: gonna stand on the road. I'm gonna get off the
Speaker 7: road down there in the draw. So even if he
Speaker 7: does come up and cross the road, I'll still have
Speaker 7: a shot adding But if he doesn't, then you know
Speaker 7: I'll get a shot at him down there. Well, I
Speaker 7: got off down there and found me a good stump
Speaker 7: where I could sit and see seventy five eighty yards
Speaker 7: in any direction. And I heard him when they started
Speaker 7: hooping and turned the dogs out. When just a little
Speaker 7: bit the dog started trailing, and just a little bit
Speaker 7: longer they jumped, and I could tell, you know, they
Speaker 7: were coming my way.
Speaker 5: Well, they they.
Speaker 7: Come up there and started up the draw I was in,
Speaker 7: and they got almost to me. And then kind of
Speaker 7: turn and started going away, and I thought, well, this
Speaker 7: is over. And then I looked down, looked down the draw,
Speaker 7: and here come a book. Okay, so I guess. I
Speaker 7: guess he had turned a circle quite aways in front
Speaker 7: of the dogs and then come back to me. So
Speaker 7: I'm watching. I'm just catching glimpses, and I can tell
Speaker 7: it's it's a really good book. Well, he gets on
Speaker 7: up there about sixty yards and I started following him
Speaker 7: with my rifle and watched him through the scope and
Speaker 7: he hits an opening and I squeezed the trigger and
Speaker 7: nothing happened. I mean, he kept coming, so I squeezed
Speaker 7: the trigger again, and then I thought he went down,
Speaker 7: but I wasn't sure. And then all of a sudden,
Speaker 7: here comes another buck. That's a really nice book. He turns.
Speaker 7: I didn't know it at the time, but he watched
Speaker 7: the buck in front of him fall, and so he
Speaker 7: turned and started going the other way, and then there
Speaker 7: was another buck behind him. Well, they went out the
Speaker 7: other draw, and when they hit the other cross and
Speaker 7: I heard my dad shoot, there was another guy standing
Speaker 7: there with him, and I guess the third buck had
Speaker 7: ran to him and heard him shoot. After all that happened,
Speaker 7: I went back up. I didn't I didn't even go look.
Speaker 7: Right then I went back up the hill, got on
Speaker 7: the radio and found out that they had killed the
Speaker 7: two bucks over there, and I went down there.
Speaker 5: Shoot.
Speaker 7: I got fifteen twenty yards from it, and I could
Speaker 7: see antlet's sticking up over the grass, like, oh my goodness.
Speaker 7: He ended up being a nine point. That gross scored
Speaker 7: one point thirty two, which at the time was a
Speaker 7: giant to me. And the buck my dad killed he
Speaker 7: was low one twenties, and then the other one was
Speaker 7: just a five point.
Speaker 5: But you know, backstraps or backstraps.
Speaker 7: We all got together, put them all up on the
Speaker 7: dog box, took a picture, and even the guys that
Speaker 7: didn't pull the trigger, they've got the biggest grin because
Speaker 7: it's not it's not I killed a deer. When it
Speaker 7: comes round the dogs, it's we killed the deer.
Speaker 2: That feeling of it's not I that killed the deer,
Speaker 2: but we killed the deer. That stuff is pretty unique
Speaker 2: to dog hunting. I love the solo aspects of tree
Speaker 2: stand bow hunting, but a group experience with like minded people,
Speaker 2: it's hard to top.
Speaker 4: That was a great story Hooch.
Speaker 2: Our final storyteller is Aaron Stanfil's little brother Andy, And
Speaker 2: just because he's little doesn't mean that he doesn't kill
Speaker 2: a lot of big bucks. And I mean, and he's
Speaker 2: just like a normal sized guy, so you know, he's
Speaker 2: not little. And it turns out he's actually killed bigger
Speaker 2: deer than Aaron. These guys are deer hunters. I'm telling you.
Speaker 2: This is the story of the hunt for a giant
Speaker 2: Kansas buck they.
Speaker 4: Called Daddy Rabbit.
Speaker 2: I've forgiven Aaron for lying to Scott and Luke, and
Speaker 2: so he and Andy are going to tag team on
Speaker 2: this one.
Speaker 3: So I'm Andy Stanphil and I'm here with my brother
Speaker 3: Aaron Stanfhil and our cousin has family in Kansas. So
Speaker 3: we've been going up there bow hunting for This would
Speaker 3: have been our twenty third consecutive year. So it all
Speaker 3: starts back in around two thousand. We slowly, you know,
Speaker 3: started getting permissions from farmers here and there, and in
Speaker 3: the early two thousands we had a lot of land
Speaker 3: that we could hunt. Well, what happened was our cousin, Jared,
Speaker 3: his grandpa bought a farm in the fifties. It's an
Speaker 3: old homestead place, and since then his son was living
Speaker 3: there on the place. And I remember one day they
Speaker 3: told us, said, hey, boys, if you guys will come up,
Speaker 3: put a big spread out in the yard some spring,
Speaker 3: we'll have the whole commune, the whole church crowd, congregation
Speaker 3: come over there after church. So me and Adians, our
Speaker 3: buddies gotten jered. We had much fried crappie, whild turkey,
Speaker 3: all the desserts. I mean, we laid out a spread
Speaker 3: now and the whole congregation showed up after church. And
Speaker 3: next thing, you know, that next year we had a
Speaker 3: lot of land to hunt. So it's been been good built.
Speaker 3: It's just it's a second home to us. This particular farm,
Speaker 3: like I said, didn't have very many trees on it really,
Speaker 3: so Aaron hung his stand on the north end of it.
Speaker 3: And everything that we have we share, you know. We
Speaker 3: we put the tree stand in together, we trim and
Speaker 3: everything out. You know, we anticipate every every stand that
Speaker 3: we put in, we anticipate you on a big deer there.
Speaker 3: So we go to the north side and we put
Speaker 3: that stand in. I go to the south end and
Speaker 3: we hang another set over there, both of them in
Speaker 3: big cedar trees, big bushy cedar trees. We try to
Speaker 3: always hunt out of a cedar tree, try to always
Speaker 3: have a hole on our left side so we ain't
Speaker 3: got to get up. Both of them were fantastic sets.
Speaker 3: So in twenty eighteen, right off the bat, I mean,
Speaker 3: we had numerous shooters on that north end and one
Speaker 3: of those was a just a giant, non typical deer.
Speaker 3: It's hard to say, one of the biggest body deer
Speaker 3: that we had hunting Kansas in twenty three years. So
Speaker 3: just a giant of a deer. He was so big
Speaker 3: that his rack, you know, it was just about thirteen
Speaker 3: inches wide. That he was so massive, but his rack
Speaker 3: just didn't look that big because he was such a
Speaker 3: big buck. But lots of trash on his bases, lots
Speaker 3: of horns everywhere. I mean, over the two years timeframe,
Speaker 3: we you know, had hundreds of pictures of this deer
Speaker 3: and we estimated him, you know, one seventies one eighties
Speaker 3: Somewhere in that ballpark November the second of twenty and eighteen,
Speaker 3: I had the deer at thirty five steps with a
Speaker 3: dough got behind two big hedge apple trees on me
Speaker 3: and I couldn't get a shot at him. I tried
Speaker 3: everything I could do to get him in there, and
Speaker 3: he just wouldn't leave her. And he was he was
Speaker 3: one special animal. We didn't get him killed in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 3: and then fast forward to twenty and nineteen and you
Speaker 3: didn't draw a tag days, which was heartbreaking. I'm sure
Speaker 3: God had a plan for that. So in October the eighteenth, nineteenth,
Speaker 3: when we first went up yep, so he was all
Speaker 3: over our camera, you know, he basically beds in there.
Speaker 3: That was his betting. So the last part of the
Speaker 3: week we finally got our north wind and it got
Speaker 3: really really cold. So on the morning of October the
Speaker 3: twenty fourth, I'm laying there in bed and we're both
Speaker 3: wide awake, and we both know that this is the
Speaker 3: morning we've been waiting on. It's high pressure, he was
Speaker 3: there the night before, he was there the night before,
Speaker 3: and it's cold and we've got a north wind. And
Speaker 3: even though I didn't draw a tag, I wasn't gonna
Speaker 3: miss that week. We're always up there together, there's four
Speaker 3: of us, and we camp all week. And I was
Speaker 3: up there all week just itching, you know, but just
Speaker 3: helping everybody else and camping and so my alarm goes
Speaker 3: off and Aaron's already awake. I was like, Aaron, you
Speaker 3: think there's any way you can get up there with
Speaker 3: me in that tree? Because we had a camera and
Speaker 3: we used to film with one of our hunts, and
Speaker 3: because we thought it was going to go down, we
Speaker 3: talked about that for a little bit. Looking back on it,
Speaker 3: but we probably made the right decision because we'd probably
Speaker 3: made a lot of racket that, you know, early morning.
Speaker 3: But so I got up super early and walked out
Speaker 3: through this cedar thicket and as in eaters eat all
Speaker 3: cedar thickets, it's easy to get lost. And I didn't
Speaker 3: want to shine a flashlight. I was trying to go,
Speaker 3: you know, super quiet in there. Sure as the world
Speaker 3: I got turned around a little bit. I actually made
Speaker 3: a small circle on the north side of my tree,
Speaker 3: and I just I could not. I mean, all the
Speaker 3: trees looked the same. I was like, this is not happening,
Speaker 3: you know. And I finally got my bearings, found my tree,
Speaker 3: and just so it started breaking daylight, I hear some
Speaker 3: deer get up. So this dough comes in. She's a
Speaker 3: very mature dough. I mean she was, and it's the
Speaker 3: very same dough that all of our game camera pictures
Speaker 3: have shown. He's always been with this dough that's you know,
Speaker 3: four or five, I mean, the power dough. Super rare
Speaker 3: to see a giant white tail get with a dough
Speaker 3: that early in the year. But he was with her
Speaker 3: when we pulled cards. He was with her. So I
Speaker 3: recognize her, you know, right off the bat as she's
Speaker 3: coming in. So she walks in there, you know, twenty
Speaker 3: yards away from me, and I don't see him, and
Speaker 3: she keeps on walking out and she gets you know,
Speaker 3: thirty or forty yards away from me, and I look
Speaker 3: back and all I can see is this cedar limb
Speaker 3: just thrashing in the woods back there, and so I
Speaker 3: got pretty worked up, and I knew it was him,
Speaker 3: and he's just taking his sweet time, and he's falling
Speaker 3: that dough about sixty seventy yards away, and he finally
Speaker 3: gets in there and takes the very same travel path
Speaker 3: as what she did and gets in their broadside. You know,
Speaker 3: I always try to compose myself, and I had plenty
Speaker 3: of time to think about it. Dad had always told me,
Speaker 3: you hunt hard, and when the opportunity arises, you know,
Speaker 3: you do your part. So I pulled my bow back
Speaker 3: and he was there broadside, and I made a really
Speaker 3: good shot on him, and he ran and take. He
Speaker 3: took a little circle and it came right back underneath
Speaker 3: my tree. Right I'm standing, and uh, he slows down
Speaker 3: right there underneath me, and I'm just looking straight down
Speaker 3: on him, and he's walking very very slow. He walks
Speaker 3: over there and it takes a little circle about fifteen
Speaker 3: or twenty yards away from me to my left. I've
Speaker 3: killed a lot of deer and I've never seen a
Speaker 3: deer do this, but he just like an old cow,
Speaker 3: would you know. He puts his hind legs down, puts
Speaker 3: his front elbows down just and he lays down perfect.
Speaker 3: He doesn't fall over. His front two hoofs are straight
Speaker 3: on the ground when he laid down, and he just
Speaker 3: kind of leaned his head over on a cedar tree.
Speaker 3: And I've got pictures of that. It was just like,
Speaker 3: you know, it's just his time, and he just it
Speaker 3: was a weird deal. Just an old majestic buck like that,
Speaker 3: you know, lived his whole life and it was just
Speaker 3: my buck of a lifetime. And uh, I got over
Speaker 3: there and usually I text and call and and I didn't.
Speaker 3: I climbed down and I went over there, and man,
Speaker 3: it was emotional for me. And uh we nicknamed him Rabbit,
Speaker 3: uh after Daddy Rabbit, after our cousin, Jared's grandpa that's
Speaker 3: had such a big part in our lives up there.
Speaker 3: You know, it's his farm and he had just passed away,
Speaker 3: and uh see, yeah, it was an emotional deal. I
Speaker 3: just cried, cried around a little bit and called Aaron,
Speaker 3: called Dad and they came over and we all dragged it,
Speaker 3: dragged it out together. And it's just a special moment
Speaker 3: for all of us, you know, And that's just what
Speaker 3: it's all about. I mean, and we've done that numerous times,
Speaker 3: you know, on smaller deer, you know, if you're all
Speaker 3: there together, and that's what's all about. And man, I couldn't.
Speaker 3: I couldn't drew it up any better. So we got
Speaker 3: back to the cabin. He's like, man, what's this thing score?
Speaker 3: And we started putting the tape together. And we'd bought
Speaker 3: one of those new at Walmart. They saw those little
Speaker 3: orange tapes. Trophy take, trophy take. You kind of rip
Speaker 3: it there and you rip it off. What's all we
Speaker 3: had and we'd never used it before. So we start.
Speaker 3: We started taping this deer. I did I'm going to
Speaker 3: did it. I tape you know here and there. When
Speaker 3: we ran out of tape, tape just went to two
Speaker 3: hundred inches, we ran out, it ran out getting the spread,
Speaker 3: so ended up being of course, I had to officially
Speaker 3: score and ended up being two of three and six eighths.
Speaker 2: Killing a two hundred inch dear is an experience. The
Speaker 2: vast majority of whitetail hunters will never experience the history
Speaker 2: that they had with this buck, and the fact that
Speaker 2: Andy's brother and father were able to be there was
Speaker 2: unique and unforgettable.
Speaker 4: That was a good story.
Speaker 2: This brings to conclusion our Dear Stories episodes this fall,
Speaker 2: and I already miss them. I'm gonna miss talking to
Speaker 2: all these folks until next year. I really hope that
Speaker 2: you have a great fall and make some great memories
Speaker 2: in this ephemeral window of time when we chase whitetail bucks.
Speaker 4: Really, I wish you the.
Speaker 2: Best of luck this fall, and I can't thank you
Speaker 2: enough for listening to Bear Grease. Please leave us a
Speaker 2: review on iTunes and share our podcast with the worst
Speaker 2: whitetail Hunter you know and tell them that, tell them play.
Speaker 4: Said, share it with the worst. So here it is.
Speaker 2: I'm just kidding, but be sure to check out First
Speaker 2: Light's white tail hunting gear. They make the best whitetail
Speaker 2: gear in the industry, and if you want to actually
Speaker 2: try some on, you can go to any Shields store
Speaker 2: in America and you'll find a First Light section.
Speaker 4: This is new. I look forward to
Speaker 2: Talking with everyone on the Render next week, and now
Speaker 2: it's time to go kill a big buck.