Add beaver dam demolition to the list of off the wall things Brent has done so far in his tenure as a human. Seems only natural that someone who’s lived a life of adrenaline-filled danger would enjoy blowing up stuff. There’s something wrong with this guy. We’re fighting otters and dodging falling debris on this week’s This Country Life podcast.
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Welcome to This Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Rieves. From coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living. I want you to stay a while as I share my stories and the country skills that will help you beat the system. This Country Life is proudly presented as part of Meat Eater's podcast network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast the airways have to offer. All right, friends, pull you up a chair or drop that tail gate. I think I got a thing or two and teach you trapping in TNT. Trapping a controversial subject in some places these days, but like it or not, trapping was and continues to be an important and effective method of predator nuisance, animal control and land protection. As a kid, I followed my older brother Tim around, learning the dudes and the don'ts, just like he followed our uncle Dob around learning from him. Now you've heard me talk about Uncle Dob before. He wasn't our uncle, just a longtime family friend that, like the rest of us Reeves boys, would rather hunt, fish and work a condition none of us ever really got under control. Trapping in beaver control stories. This week on Meet There's This Country Life podcast. The first I'm going to tell you a story. It was the winter of nineteen eighty five, and while I was enrolled in college at the University of Arkansas at Monticela, I worked as a nighttime and weekend dispatcher and jaylor at the Warren Police Department. In a town less than seven thousand people, there wasn't usually a whole lot happening on Sunday mornings, So when the entrance door swung open with a bang and a mud covered man stepped up to the window of the radio room kind of startled me. He was soaked from head to toe, tracking mud all over. The trustee polished floors and was staring at me with an exaggerated look of desperation. This man needed help. Had he been involved in an accident, been in a fight, witness some type of tragedy. I had no clue, but I didn't know that in the time it took me to get out of my chair and hurry to the window, he seemed to be hanging on by a thread. Sir, you all right, I need a game warden. A game warden. That's not what I was expecting to hear. He could have said anything, but the last thing I expected. He him to say, was I needed a game warden? I asked him again, are you okay? He said, man, I'm tired. We're all tired, but I need a game warden and tell him to bring a cage. I never seen this man before in my life, but I knew he was sincere about what he was talking about. But it's six am on a Sunday morning. I'm fixing. I had to wake someone up, so I have to have a little more information before I do. I said, you said that you were all tired of somebody outside. Yes, my trapping partners. Well, none of this was making a lot of sense, so to answer the questions I was bound to get when I woke the game boarding up, so I told the man I needed to go with him outside, me the folks that they were there with him, and get a little more information about what was going on. I wasn't sure a game board is what this guy needed. I was thinking a bath and a psychiatrist would be more help to him. Anyway. I followed him outside and there stood his two accomplices, both disheveled, muddy, soaking, wet, and bleeding. Now they weren't oozing blood, but they were covered from head to toe with pretty significant cuts and scratches in their All their clothes, and I mean all of their clothes look like they'd been in a fight with a weed eater and lost. One man was wearing the remnants of a pair of rubber boots, the tops of which had been shredded. The only thing that appeared to be holding on his feet was a round of duct tape that he wrapped around each shin. These guys look like they've been eaten by a kyoti and crapped off a cliff. Whatever had happened was serious, and these boys were traumatized from it. Okay, man, now what's going on? Why do you need a game warden? The man with the taped on rubber boots spoke up, We need one to give us a tag for this otter. I looked around. What otter? The one in this wooden box in the back of the truck. He motioned toward the back of his truck, and I walked over to see a plywood box about three foot square, had a hinge lid on the top, and it was secured with a hasp and a padlock. You got an otter in there barely? Okay, Well, why do you need a We need him to pay us our hundred dollars for an otter. Yes, this otter wanted. My feeble attempt at humor was lost on these guys. I thought it was funny. They did not. Why is a game warden going to give you one hundred dollars? He told me. The game and Fish is trading Missouri otters for turkeys. For every live otter we bring in and turn over to the game and Fish Arkansas gets a turkey and we get one hundred dollars. Well, how'd y'all catch him? We trapped him? How'd you get him in the box? Fellas that I'm not really sure. It seemed to go on forever. There was a little bit of sadness in his voice. Well, tell me about it. We had him on a catch pole and took the trap off his foot, and everything was going fine up to that point. The cable was running around his chest, right behind his front legs, and I had it set where just hold him and not squeeze him. I didn't want to hurt him. The plan was to take the trap off his foot, pick him up, and drop him in the hole in the box and hit the tension release on the catchpole and removed the cable. Well that's not what happened, no, sir, not even close. The second that foothole trap come off, he went berserk. You ain't never seen nothing like it, he told me. He bit the catch pole in half quicker than anything he'd ever seen. He said, it was like I had Bruce Lee on the leash and he was beating us all up with a pair of nunchoes. It's the biggest otter I've ever seen. He gnawed, and he called Lloyd's boots off so fast that when he jumped he can try to get away. He stepped out of both of them. Lloyd told his boots back to the truck in his hands. The next forty five minutes were painful. I kept him in the wire catch, but we couldn't get him in the box. Should have made the hole bigger. I'd lift him off the ground and try to lower him down in that hole, but he just standing there over that whole, snarl in the bite and trying to kill him. These boys were in a bad way. I said, well, how'd you get him in there? He said, Lord pitched him one of his boots, and as soon as he jumped on it. He threw his coat on him, wrapped him up, and stuck him down in there. I said, that's why Lord ain't wearing a coat. Yep, the otter got it. I said, well, at least you got your boot back, Lloyd. What's left of it? He said, all right, I'm gonna call the game and fish and they'll be sending someone out here pretty quick. I bet is the otter injured anyway or anywhere. He looked healthy when we last saw him. Fair enough. I said, he's a bigger hunh. He said, it's the biggest one you've ever seen. How big is he? Man said he's pushing thirty pounds. Wow. Okay, well crack that, open that lid and let's look at him. I want to sing, fellas that do what I said, open the lid. I want to see this thirty pound odd. Well. They all looked at one another and back at me without saying a word. Then he said, mister, I've always tried to do right by the law, but listen to me when I say this. I ain't opening that box up for you or nobody else. If my grandma walked up here right now, that's been dead over twenty years and say, crack that lid open. I want to look at him. She'd hand me one hundred dollars before I got the key out of my pocket. And when you call the game, Horden, don't worry about having him bring a cage. He can have this one. And that's just how that happened. From the sixth grade on and off through junior high. In high school, I ran it trap line before school. Now. That meant that while all the other kids were still sacked out in the old bed, Old Briddley was walking through the woods and creeks checking traps. I never had out more than two dozen at a time, but checking that many traps, resetting and running down coons that had pulled my drags off, that took some time. And there were several mornings that I was running across the field with a coon or two to throw in the barn and run and catch the bus before it took off. I never missed it, but there were a couple of close calls. I look back at that now and I think, would I let my kids do that? Well, the answer is yes, if I felt they were as competent at it as I was. And that's the difference. I may have been eleven or twelve when I started doing this on my own, but I had several years experience following my brother around and watching and helping him. There's so many things to learn, and all of it I still used today. Tim would have me looking at tracks and how they came down a bank or a creek edge, and tell me to look at it and see why coon would walk that way. Why would he walk over some things and around others. He never told me the answers until I answered right. He always made me think about it. I got pretty good at it, and after a while I figured out that they usually just travel the path of least resistance and that keeps them near their food source and close to an escape route. By paying attention and asking questions, I learned a lot about how coons get around in the world, just out there doing their thing, and that eventually led me to try and fox and Bobcat. I never really got good at those. Him was a whole lot better at it than I am. As a matter of fact, I've only caught one bobcat in my life, and that was four years ago. Beaver and Otter was a whole other deal. And I never targeted Otter specifically because at the time I was really getting into trapping and getting good enough to start making a little money at it. The fur market went billy up. Only reason anyone was trapping during that time was either because they'd done it forever and didn't want to quit, or they were doing nuisance trapping for landowners and timber companies. Tim even contracted for a while doing some nuisance trapping for a timber management company. And while he was doing that, I went to work for Georgia Pacific in the forestry department as a timber spotter. Now, if you don't know what that is, allow me to elaborate. Georgia Pacific owned thousands of acres of timberland in South Arkansas, and it was my job, along with several other crews, to select cut tracks of land for the contracting laggers to come in and harvest the timber. Now, this is when I was working with mister Leon. I'm sure most of you remember him. If you don't check out episode one twenty seven, Know Your Trees. That's just one of a handful where I've talked to about mister Lyon. But we would get our orders from the forester who was over our district, and we'd either be painting landlines or checking behind laggers to make sure they were utilizing the resource, or spotting new tracks to cut. We carried a tree marking spray gun that would paint a stripe at eye level that could be seen, and then another stripe on the bottom where the stump would be to ensure the trees we marked were the ones that were getting cut. But my favorite, my favorite thing we did was beaver control. We had a couple of different folks that GP contracted to trap beavers and I'd go with them sometime checking traps and getting the beavers out of there. But the best part was when we scheduled beaver down blowing days. Everyone knows that beaver's dam upstreams and this causes the water to back up the stream, flood out into the woods, and eventually kill the timber, either by flooding or the beavers gnawing them down to using the damn. They're amazing creatures and I love them, but they're a costly lot when it comes to growing timber to maturity, and that was the business we were in. So if we found a beaver pond we'd walk it out until we found where the dam was located, mark it on a map, and when the contractor showed up, we'd put in explosives and get to work. Times were different, remember, and if you had a current driver's license and a legitimate reason to have it, you could go to a construction supply business and buy explosives. Beaver control was a legitimate reason. The training was pretty intense. I remember the contractor telling me cut the fuse long enough for you to light it and get to safety. Well, how long is that? I asked him. He said, how fast are you? And that was the end of the training. So while I hated math in school, I was constantly doing it in my head while we waited around beaver ponds and dug out holes in the dam, the stuff full of explosives, and planned our escape routes before the big boom. Cotton Mouths were a constant reminder that there were more dangerous things out there besides us and the explosives, believe it or not, And those jokers were always where I wanted to be. I wanted to poke my hand to dig out a spot to put some of the tovex. Tovex is the explosive that we were using. It was just another thing to have to keep up with. It was in the spring of the year and the rain had flooded out a huge creek bottom that we'd planned the log that summer, so in order to do that we had to find the dam. It took us a couple of days of walking and wading and hunting it up, but we eventually found it. One of them. Anyway, turned out there were a series of dams along this creek that they had worked on for years. It was an absolute marvel of ingenuity and engineering. The structures that they build. They looked so happenstanced, but they are anything but accidental. Every little twig, every little limb, every load of mud is specific to that portion of the dam and its purpose, and we were there to blow it up. The largest of the dams was about six feet high on the downstream side and nearly one hundred yards long. It was massive. The water had backed up and flooded what we estimated to be about thirty acres of timber. The timber was showing signs of an extreme stress, and if we were going to salvage any of it before it died and righted away that beaver dam had to go. Now, looking at a topo map and knowing the country and how the woods drained in that area, we knew there would be no ill effects downstream by turning all that water loose. There were slews and creeks and boughs that all led to the river like a highway system. But how much water are we talking about. Well, in a one acre pond that's four feet deep, you're looking at over six hundred and fifty one thousand gallons. Now, y'all feel free to check my mouth. If it's wrong, don't send me you hate mail, Copernicus take it up with the nerds at Google. So you get the picture that we're dealing with a lot of water, a lot of water. We walked out in the middle of the dam on the downstream side with a grubbing hole in a sack full of explosives. We rigged three sets of four sticks of tovax, placed them out in a twenty yard chain, and connected them all with a debt cord so they would all detonate at the same time. We put out plenty of fuse. He let me light it, and when that fuse ignited, I checked my watch, and we left there like we were late for work, giggling like a couple of kids with anticipation that what was about to happen. We'd already picked out our spot, two big pennoak trees that stood side by side that would have had us about seventy five yards away from the blast zone and at angle where we could watch the show in relative safety. I want to know how to make time stand still, estimate the length of time it takes for a burning fuse to set off an explosion. We waited and waited and waited, and nothing. I looked at my watch. Surely had been a minute. By now, fifteen seconds had gone by, and what seemed like forever would only be an additional fifteen seconds. I was staring intently at that smoke drifting from the burning fuse. The contract was smoking a cigarette, staring in the other direction, like he was waiting on a school bus. Did it go out? He looked at me and said, you want to go check it? No, sir, I don't. He looked back down through the bottles and took another big drag off his cigarette. Finally, he looked over me and said, fire in the hole. As non shalocked, as he would say, past the biscuits. I poked my fingers in my ears, and I peeked out around that big, massive tree, just in time to see a tranquil spring morning turn into arm again. Mud sticks and water were raining down all around us, and the sound of the water rushing through that fifteen yard gap in the dam was louder than the explosion. Fish were pouring through the opening like crazy. I wish that brought a dip net. It took a while for that thing to drain, several hours. In fact, we'd blown the dam at about ten am, and at three in the afternoon we decided the creek was safe enough to wear across. Now, why would we be waiting across the creek Because the spot we picked a hide from the explosion was on the wrong side. That's why. Oh well, live and learn. Thank y'all for listening and for helping us spread the word about our show. If you haven't and you know someone that might enjoy, send it to him. Remember which side of the creek you're own. And until next time, this is Brent Reeves signing off. Y'all, be careful