transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:05] 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 Stor-Mor Studio on MeatEater's 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. Reckless Abandon and Divine Intervention. The trip I have waited on since last April took place last week. It's a homecoming of sorts for me with those folks down there in Fort Deposit, Alabama. Since we were going to film it this year as part of a special film that's going to be coming out next year about a Browning shotgun, I was hoping it was going to be something special. Had a feeling it would be. Had no idea it was going to turn out like this. Let's get started. My now annual trip to Alabama is in its second year. It's a hunt I look forward to, not just for the excellent turkey hunting, but more so for the fellowship and the camaraderie that you just can't get from texts and phone calls or FaceTime meetings with folks that you like. Nothing compares to sharing a space with good friends with no distractions like a turkey hunt can generate. Reed Barganier is the mind behind Reed's piano news on Instagram. A talented musician with a great sense of humor who puts to music the calamity and folly of people who find themselves in precarious situations either by their own ineptitude or as hapless victims of circumstance. Only the good Lord knows what's taking place in his mind. Anyone who's met him knows that in his chest beats the heart of a servant. He is a good man, a good friend, a good son, a good husband, a good father, and a good neighbor. He can cook as good as anyone you've ever met. And if it weren't for his signature proboscis that points slightly northeast as he navigates north, and his compulsion to wear his hats and backers, you'd swear he was perfect. For a better picture of how our relationship began, go back and listen to episode 315 of This Country Life, entitled North Carolina, A Place in Alabama. It'll give you the rundown on how I've come to love that land there and those people as my own. Last week, I lit a shuck out of Arkansas, and didn't stop until I got to the airport in Birmingham to pick up my good friend, Dave Gardner. Dave is a photographer and a cinematographer by trade. I've spoken about him at length on here before. He was the cat that followed me around in Northern Manitoba last October filming and photographing my moose hunt with Craig McCarthy. That endeavor will be released this November as part of the MeatEater film series 12 and 26. Dave is a professional through and through, and he made a statement while we were hunting that really hit home with me about his chosen career and work ethic. We were talking about job interviews, of all things, and he said that with him being a contractor, someone who sits by the phone waiting for a producer to call him and offer up an assignment, that every job he's owned is actually an interview for the next one. This trip was going to be fun, but it was serious, and we both had a job to do, an important job to showcase a character in this story we were telling on this hunt that couldn't speak for themself. The protagonist of this story we were trying to tell through film wouldn't be yours truly. It was going to be a 101-year-old Browning shotgun. I got that shotgun back in March and talked in detail about it, and the folks I got it from in episode 436. It was made in 1925. It has a barrel with an improved modified choke, which means it shoots a little tighter pattern than a modified, but not as tight as a full choke would. Now, in turkey hunting, the tighter the choke, the better your chances of killing the turkey. I had chosen to incorporate this shotgun into a scenario it typically wasn't meant for. Not with that barrel choke anyway, and by doing so, I had put some extreme limitations on my strategy. My suspicions were confirmed when I test fired it with Austin Foster and his band of Untouchables at the Rocket Ridge Ammo Company a month ago. That 16 gauge Brown and A5 is a classic bird gun, but not turkey birds. In the south, or at least my part of it, when you say bird hunting, people automatically assume you mean quail hunting. Turkey hunting is its own special category. For birds, you want a pattern that is dense enough at 20 to 30 yards to be lethal on quail after the adrenaline-filled rush of the cubby rise. Quail are like doves, they're hard to hit, but they're easy to kill once you do. Turkeys only require one pellet as well, but it has to be in a kill zone about the size of Sherlock Holmes' pipe. That's why a tighter pattern is preferred over a more open pattern. A pattern produced by the shotgun I was towing with me to the Barganier Home Place in South Central Alabama. We got to call him in close to have a chance. This whole project is going to hinge on how close we can get that turkey to us. That's what I told Dave as we discussed and drove to the ancestral home of the Cates family. Eric Cates, who prefers to be called by his nickname, Happy, has allowed me and the Barganiers to stay at his family's home place that was part of a presidential land grant that was signed by President James Monroe on the 21st day of February in 1822. That document hangs on the entrance of the wall of that old home, a fitting declaration of the Cates early American history of that land whereby invitation from that legacy of the pioneers, I would now be enjoying the fruits of their lineage of efforts and struggle. Reed was working on getting supper ready when David and I rolled into the old homestead. It looked even better this time. And I took up residence in the same room as last year. And after supper, we devised a plan for the following day. A plan like most turkey plans that come unraveled around daylight. And this one would be no different. We heard several turkeys and all of them were a long way off. None were where we thought they'd be or had been seen on Reed's mow tree cameras the day before we arrived. It is the way of the turkey. They are the wind. We couldn't get on turkeys to save our lives that first day. We hunted all day long and made tracks upon tracks for nada. That night at supper, we made more plans, all of which put us on the outside edge of being where we needed to be. Turkeys were gobbling good, just not where we were, and it went on for the rest of the day. And that night at supper, we made another plan. Actually, Reed said, why don't we just drive into where the turkeys are? He said, look, there's been no pressure on the other end of this place, and even though we'll be kind of driving by turkeys, they ain't using our spots, and there's more turkeys back there that we can't hear. It was a bold move, and I liked it. Reed's sons, Barnes and John David, along with his father, Dr. Paul Barganier, rode into camp that afternoon. I was glad to see all three of them. It's through Doc's and Reed's generosity that I'm able to access this beautiful piece of Alabama. And Barnes and John David, those youngins might as well be mine, I swear. Felt like I was going home when I got there. Well, remember that plan of Reed's that I liked? I liked it all night and right up until the next morning when we drove along the logging road through the middle of that clear cut. When I thought about all the turkeys, I knew we were driving past, I wanted to throw up. We parked, got all our stuff together, and had 45 minutes to wait before daylight. It was all I could do to stop second-guessing myself. After all, turkey hunting is one decision after another, and the next one hinges on the last one. It's like one of those pick-your-own-adventure stories where you choose the path the main character takes, ultimately decided in their fate and the story you were told. The difference between that and turkey hunting is that if you don't like the outcome, you can't go back and redo the same story. You've got to start all over again on a different turkey or a different date. Daylight slipped in quicker than I thought it would, and with the red birds singing good morning, the turkeys started gobbling. The first one sounded off, and each of us pointed in a different direction. My left ear was stopped up, so I was depending on Dave and Reed to pinpoint the gobbles. They pointed in opposite directions. I pinched my nose shut, and I blew so hard my feet nearly came off the ground, I could hear again. Turkeys were gobbling in opposite directions, just staggered enough that I could tell that Dave and Reed were right. We chose one out of the five or six we heard, and started after him. First obstacle, cross a deep, steep bank creek that had four inches of liquid Alabama flowing down it. We found where the deer had been crossing, and one by one, we slid down that bank and crawled up the other side. Waiting for us was the edge of a clear cut, with a couple fingers of uncut wood sticking out into the opening. That would be our avenue of approach, and we'd have to be as careful and quiet as possible because that gobbler was roosted right on the edge of that clear cut less than 400 yards away. We put the starvation sneak on him, and after about five minutes, all three of us, having never been in that spot before, slipped into a natural blind of gum and bowdark trees with the turkey bellering off that limb at 200 yards. He pitched out into the clear cut, and a goblin really took off then. He was more or less the same distance from us on the ground, but while he was walking around just out of sight in front of us, he was telling the world he was a turkey. He answered me several times with immediate and loud gobbles, but he answered everything else too. Jakes yelping, crows, owls, and distant gobbles. We could hear several other turkeys gobbling with him, and eventually had a pair sounding off to our right. They were headed in our direction, but more toward him than us. They all met up behind some brush and started duking it out, and I would have loved to watch that, because it sounded like a real Donnybrook taking place less than a hundred yards out there. Course yelping, wings flapping, fighting purrs, gobbling, everything but a bell ringing to start and stop the boxing was taking place out there. It only lasted a minute or two, and finally I caught glimpses of turkeys moving from left to right around 60 yards. Then I saw the strutter, the dude we were after, the obvious newly crowned champion of the clear cut. He cruised by a little over 50 yards full of desire and confidence, traits of which I only possessed one. I had the desire to fill his right ear full of number 10 TSS, shots similar in size to a teaspoon full of death-dealing yearling ticks. Alas, I didn't have the confidence that I could do it with a shotgun built for a more intimate range. My own prophetic words today from two days ago echoing through my cranium. We got to call him in close to have a chance. There he was, but he wasn't close. Not close enough anyway. Here's one of the multitude of great things that I love about working at MeatEater. What you see is what you get. There ain't no redo's, no do-overs. Folks like Dave that capture all the hunts and events have one opportunity to get it right, and so did I. Whatever is going to happen is what you're going to see. Good, bad, or indifferent, it is what it is, period. I'm no actor. I can't play a part. When my wife Alexis tells me to stop acting like an idiot, I always say, I'm not acting. This is just me. So whatever happened next was going to be all on me, and that turkey was too far to shoot, and away he went. All of them. Enough goblers to make a deep bench basketball team. Gone quicker than they'd got there, and it was 8.30. The last two and a half hours had run the gamut of emotion ending with sadness. That wasn't all bad. Yesterday, we hadn't even been at the party. At least today, we were on the dance floor. We were just still a long way from the band, or so we thought. We scouted around a half-acre circle from where we were sitting trying to figure out a better place to sit should the same thing happen in the morning. The winner of the fight led the big group of turkeys off to the west. The two that had rolled in the fight and got a whooping had drifted off to the north. I told Reed and Dave that I wanted to move 150 yards in the direction that that pair went and find a good spot to sit and just listen for a while. It was a little before nine when we sat down in the uncut portion of the woods and I gave it to ten before we'd move. I called a couple of times over the next 45 minutes, not very loud, not very aggressive. The last time was just a little before ten and less than 200 yards away, a gobble changed my whole disposition. That's how fast it can change and that's how fast it did. We were back in business. I moved up about 25 yards with Dave right behind me, Reed hunkered down to my right in a little bowl that sloped down toward the edge of that clear cut. I called again and they answered immediately. They were close and they were coming. Dave saw them first at 80 yards, their silhouettes taking form as they slipped in between the shade of trees and bushes that stood between us. At 70 yards, they froze and Dave could see them staring motionless toward where they'd heard my calling. Finally, I picked them out and watched as they came out of strutting, angled toward us, but not at us. This wasn't going to be a slam dunk. They weren't going to come charging in like they didn't know what a butt whooping was. They'd each just had one less than two hours ago. And it appeared they remembered they didn't like it. I could clearly see that they were both long beards. Now, I just needed them close enough. I had a range finder in my chest pack, but I hadn't had time to check anything with the fast move we made to get set up in that new spot. I can estimate yardage pretty good, but it was going to be critical to get it right with the Brown and Bob White blunderbuss I was totin. When turkey hunting is hard, there ain't much harder. When you're trying to film a turkey hunt and it's hard, that's a whole other level of struggle. Now, three people means two extra opportunities for the turkey to see something wrong, like I need some help in that department. It wasn't gonna take Pythagoras to figure out the angle of their approach, wasn't gonna bring them in our laps, but I was fixing to have to do some ciphering to see if they were gonna be close enough for me to try. How far are they, Dave? 40. That ain't 25, but it ain't far from 35. If they keep that angle, I think he's gonna be close enough to try. I just need one of these number tens to hit him anywhere in his neck bone or his brain bucket, just one. Now, that ain't too much to ask. I was following him with the gold beater that at A5, when he stepped from the shadows into a spotlight of sunshine and Dave whispered in my ear, I'm on him. And he might as well have said, Brent, pull the trigger, because that's what I did. That A5 bucks, but I held true to the target and I saw him hop off the ground at the shot and run away, disappearing back the way he came. And I ran after him, not like I was gonna catch him because before that empty shot shell hit the ground, I knew I had misjudged the distance by getting caught up in the moment and trying to will something into reality that was improbable at best. No, I was just running away. Running away from Dave, running away from Reed, but mostly running away from the realization of making such a bad decision. We looked for an hour, never found so much as a feather from that turkey. I stood where he was standing when I shot it, and arranged back to the tree where Dave and I had sat. 41 yards. Brent, you idiot. I was sick to say the least. We watched the footage, and I'm confident that turkey is still being a turkey right now. It was the missed opportunity to show the restraint and better judgment that bothered me more than anything. My hunt was also getting toward the end, and it had taken us three days to get a turkey within 40 yards. How in the world was I going to make that happen with what was left? The next morning we were back, parked in the same spot, but of course there were no turkeys on the edge of that clear cut. They were all gobbling just in different directions. We sat up on one that never answered me and eventually shut up. We decided to make our move back toward the truck, and before we headed that way, we heard a turkey gobble past where we'd park and not far off the road that we'd driven through the clear cut on. We could hear them playing his day from the truck out in the middle, but couldn't see them because of the treetops. We figured them to be no more than 250 yards. We cut that distance by about 50 as we crawled up to the edge through the thorns and the briars that lined the edges of that clear cut. We listened to them for an hour as they gobbled sporadically and answered my call in about 75 percent of the time. Dave snuck out and finally found them with his binos and I crawled out to see them as well and there they stood in full strut, walking around in circles like they were on a hot wheels track not budging from their spot. About every 20 minutes afterwards, one of us would crawl out and check to see if they were still there. After an hour and a half, they finally disappeared after not coming an inch closer. Were they the dynamic duel that I'd called up and shot at? There's really no way to know for sure, but they showed no interest in coming to a hen that they couldn't see. And there had been zero goblins from where they'd roosted that morning that all that happened. And the distance from where they were to where the other two had been was less than 400 yards across that same clear cut. If you made me bet on it, I'd say the chances were greater that it was them than it wasn't, but who knows? Anyway, we faced south toward where we'd last seen the goblins and we started strategizing on what to do next. To the south and west were the wide open clear cut. To the east was a deep steep bank creek that bordered the clear cut and an open field further south. That was the plan. Get in the creek and try to slip up and find where they were. I had arranged where they were before we left and marked it on my own ax. We bailed off in the creek and eased our way downstream looking for a place to crawl out and see what we could see. After about 150 yards, I had to read my shotgun and crawled and climbed my way to the top of the bank, scanning all I could see, trying to find where they'd gone. I didn't see anything. I slid back down the bank, grabbed my shotgun and pushed further another 100 yards. The bank was really steep here, but there was a bit of a slope that made it a little easier to climb. I came up on top and a small patch of switch came. The gobblers were feeding right out in front of me. I arranged them at 72 yards and watched as they got a little edgy and came out of the strut and slowly fed on to the south. I slid back down. I told Reed and Dave what I'd seen and we moved another 200 yards down that creek to find the first decent place we could climb up and take another look. As I started up the bank, Reed stuck his hand out to take my shotgun just like he'd done the other two times. But for whatever reason, I said, I got it. I started climbing and I have no idea why I took it with me. I hadn't before and Dave wasn't there with the camera because if you remember, we weren't there just to kill a turkey. We were there to film a turkey hunt and if it doesn't happen on camera, it doesn't happen. I struggled to get to the top and I stuck my left hand in a fire ant mount as I slowly crested the rim of that creek bank. That got a little Western. I looked back to tell them to look out for it should they climb up there to see Dave crawling up behind me. Well, I poked my head over and I realized that we were going to come up in that field that had knee-high grass in it and there wasn't a tree in sight other than one to my immediate right on the edge of the creek bank and another one 15 yards away to my left south of me. And it was 10 yards out from the creek. You couldn't have drawn a worst place to try to call a turkey from. There was no cover to hide us. And every turkey on that side of the creek could see there was no hen there from a quarter of a mile away in any direction. This is when I hit the absolute lowest point of that hunt. I'd missed one at 40 yards. I'd halfway spooked these we were after. And now, when we'd finally gotten in front of the direction that they were going, there was no place to hide. And that's when I heard Dave whisper, Brent, don't turn around. There's a turkey behind you. Do you have your shotgun? Yes. How far is he? Less than 100 yards. What is it? It's a gobbler. What's he doing? Then Dave in a voice that can only be described as perplexed said, he's coming at us. Then he said, I think he's behind that tree for me. Turn around. I did an about face sitting in the tall grass with my left leg hanging off the bank of that creek, pointed my quail gun toward a tree that was positioned in the only direction from where I sat that could remotely hide me from a turkey. A foot in either direction in that goblet would have seen me turn around. Hey, what's he doing? He's still walking this way. You're going to see him in a second. And in a matter of seconds, I'd gone from the lowest of lows to the adrenaline rush of knowing something was about to happen in the next few seconds. And I would determine if it was good or bad, just like before. The goblet stepped out from behind that tree at what I assumed was 35 to 40 yards. I'd failed miserably at estimating that distance on the missed shot in the woods. And the only place harder to judge distance is in the bald open, where you don't have any reference points except the turkey itself. Now, if you can see a gobbler's eyes clearly, he's probably about 40 yards or less. That's the rule of thumb. And I could see his easily and they were getting bigger with every step. I still didn't understand everything I knew about what was happening. I hadn't called. This turkey was all by himself. He'd never made a peep to let us know he was anywhere close. And he had the whole of Alabama to walk on and he was walking straight to the end of my quail gun. I told Dave I could see him and cut my eyes over to make sure he was in position to film, but he'd been filming since he told me there was a turkey behind me. I remember every few seconds him saying I got him. Let me know he had him in the frame. I followed that turkey's head with a bead until he broke 20 yards and I whispered to Dave I'm fitting to kill him. I heard him say okay and with the slightest pressure on the trigger, I sent everything Austin Foster had packed in that 16 gauge shell at that turkey's nose. I had already made the statement since the calamity of the miss but on the next opportunity should we be blessed with one? I was going to run it to the plug and do my dead level best to send the next one over the River Jordan. I felt the mechanical beauty of John Moses Browning's invention as that blast pushed the barrel backward and the bolt ejected the spent shell. The turkey didn't flop. Instead, he wobbled, stretched out his wings and started to run. I remember audibly saying, oh no. As I followed him, I sent him another round in a matter of only a second or two, and that one rolled him up and in a flash, I was standing with my right foot on his neck as he spurred through my britches cutting the inside of my right shin. The wave of relief that washed over me was intense and emotional all at the same time. The relief in accomplishing what we'd all set out to do when we planned this hunt about this old shotgun late last year. The realization that I'd shot this turkey less than a stone's throw from where Reed's son Barnes had taken his first deer only a few months ago. The connection and the relationship I'd built with the Barganier family and having my friend Dave there filming and sharing yet another grand adventure, each one seemingly trying to surpass the previous. But now Reed had joined Dave and I as I stood over that turkey still wide-eyed from the adrenaline struggling at grasping what had just taken place. I looked at them both and said, Jesus and John Browning killed this turkey. I didn't have nothing to do with it. That land, that land that the Barganiers have roamed for generations and the legacy that we were all playing and writing the history of this 101-year-old Browning shotgun. A shotgun of unknown origin that was acquired in pieces and destined for the parts bin and the scrap heap, considered useless until William Robert saved it. Now the first chapter is complete and documented for all to see. The next part will be written this fall over Pointing Dogs and the explosion of a cubby rise. This winter is Mallard settling to the decoys and flooded timber, places it was meant to see and shine once it got there. Then next year, someone else will take possession of this shotgun and continue writing and living its legacy. We will never know the wonders this old Belgian maid Browning has seen before now, but we will be present for its future, following where it leads and enjoying the journey along the way. Good stuff. Thank you all so much for listening to Clay, Lake, and me here on the Bear Grease channel. Remember, that 16 gauge Browning will be up for grabs next year. Details will follow. Until next week, this is Brent Reed signing off. Y'all be careful.