If you spend enough time outdoors in East Texas, you learn real quick that the land and the weather make the rules. One minute it’s quiet and still, the next it’s slinging rain sideways or dropping limbs big enough to change your plans. We’d just had one of those storms roll through, and that’s where this story starts—three men, two hounds, one busted fence, and a storm trying its best to wash us off the face of Texas. Somewhere in the middle of all that mud and misery, a young man’s whole life turned a corner he never saw coming. 

I invited two friends to hunt that night. Some guys organize golf foursomes; I like to invite men who are strangers to one another to come coon hunting with me. You pick the right men, throw open the dog box, and let the woods work their magic. One friend was Caleb—late fifties, soft‑spoken, semi-retired oil man I’d known for about twenty years. The other was Brady, mid‑thirties, owner of a concrete business he’d built from scratch fifteen years earlier. Both hard working and successful in their own right. 

We waited for the good Lord to conclude the light show and for the clouds to spit out their last bit of attitude. It was 9:00 p.m., and the boys were getting antsy—along with the dogs. I told them we’d load up and head toward the back of the property, a good twenty‑five‑minute ride in the side‑by‑side.  

Eli and Ranger, my bluetick and treeing walker, stood in the back of the UTV with their noses lifted high, bodies vibrating with anticipation as we rolled through the property. 

On the ride out, Caleb started asking Brady more about his concrete business. Brady didn’t brag. He was humble and answered plainly. He told Caleb he’d started with a single non-working 1988 Mack DM690 mixer he’d purchased on payments. He rebuilt that truck in the heat of a Texas summer, visiting job sites in his spare time searching for work. 

Back then he handled everything himself—bidding, pouring, finishing, invoicing, collecting. Now the payroll was bigger, but the load on his shoulders hadn’t changed near as much as it should have. 

Caleb and I listened as Brady shared more about his business. He’d had some big wins earlier on that gave him the momentum and financing he needed to expand, and he did just that, ultimately purchasing 2 competitors to form a monopoly of sorts for the entire county. The poor kid hadn’t slowed down, and it showed.  “Fifteen years running your own business, and concrete no less” Caleb said. “That’ll age a man twice as fast as office work.” 

Brady gave a tired laugh and nodded. 

This is why I love bringing folks together out here. The woods shake the stiffness out of the conversation. There’s might be some posturing every now and again but there’s no pretending. The darkness, the mud, the bugs, the unfamiliar ground—it all strips you down to your honest self. 

Brady had five trucks and thirteen full-time guys. “I’ve been trying to get to 20 guys, but I just can’t seem to get more than a dozen or so good ones at a time.” Brady said. “Do these workers come to you with experience or are you providing a training program?” Caleb asked, both of us already knowing the answer. “Most come with experience and I link them up with a buddy to help fill-in the gaps. It doesn’t seem to matter much though. My customers still expect me on every job, of course. So I’m always there to supervise and teach them when I can.” 

I glanced at Caleb and he gave a gentle nod before responding. “Brady, do your customers expect you on every job? Or is it that you think they do, because that’s what you expect of yourself?” 

Brady didn’t answer right away. The silence of the woods set in and went to work. 

We crossed into the tree line. I parked near an old split‑rail gate where I left Caleb and Brady as I walked into the woods another twenty yards and turned Eli and Ranger loose. 

The storm had knocked the air clean. Within ten minutes they were treed. “Tree Ranger,” Caleb said jokingly when it was clear Ranger might actually be up in the tree, his bark carrying through the quiet. 

As we made our way to the tree, Caleb told Brady he’d been in the same spot years before—working like a mule, hoping success would just show up because he was worn out enough to deserve it. “Took me too long to realize hard work without a plan is just exhaustion with better branding,” he said, half laughing. Brady didn’t say much, but you could tell the words landed. 

By this time the dogs were driving hard on that tree, convinced they had the largest coon in Texas. They were close enough and loud enough that I didn’t bother turning on the GPS, and within 10 minutes we were on them. As we approached the tree, I shined my red light around for a quick scan before I leashed the dogs. Caleb and Brady did the same, and within seconds the dogs heard a chorus of “I got ’em.” The thing was, we were all looking at different coons. There were six yellow‑green eyes pointing back at us—a sow and her two kits. 

“Biscuits and gravy it is,” I said, my signal that we’d leave the coons treed and reward the dogs back at the side‑by‑side with a dog biscuit. 

About that time Caleb said, “Let me give this thing a shot, the box said it was irresistible,” and he started blowing on a squaller he’d recently picked up. No sooner did he start than those eyes, especially one set, started rustling around where they sat, about forty feet up in a mess of branches. Within a few seconds she was on her way down to investigate, kits following slowly behind, then all three slipped back into the limbs again. 

“Well, that got their attention,” Brady said. Caleb kept working the squaller, but the eyes were gone. 

The dogs were already leashed and we were standing twenty yards back from the base. Brady was handling Ranger and I had Eli. We were all looking up, trying to find where those beady eyes had snuck off to. Out of nowhere, Ranger blew a gasket and bolted toward the tree so fast that Brady didn’t have time to grip the leash. Eli followed suit, but I had him secured. 

Ranger looked like Michael Jordan dunking from the free throw line, lunging towards the tree at full speed convinced he could reach the top. The three of us instinctively shined our headlamps on Ranger and, by default, the tree, and that’s when we saw all three coons making their way down the trunk, almost to the first row of branches only 15 ft off the ground.  

Brady and I both took off toward Ranger. He beat me there and grabbed Ranger’s leash. By this time the three coons had made their way down to that first row of branches, assessing the situation and no doubt waiting for Caleb to start making that sound they couldn’t get enough of. 

Brady apologized as he handed me Ranger’s leash. I told him, “Not now—let’s get gone before one of these things jumps on us.” No sooner did I utter the words and one of the kits lost its footing, slipping but still hanging by both front legs on a fork in the branches. Brady and I saw the kit hanging and took off as fast as we could.  

By the time we reached Caleb he was still laughing. “Y’all want me to tug on this thing some more and see if they’ll follow us back to the house?” he asked. Brady shook his head, laughing harder than he had all night. He said he truly believed they’d have jumped if Caleb had kept it up. 

We loaded the dogs and eased the side‑by‑side toward the next turnout. As we crept past the north pasture, I heard Brady say, “Jake… are those cows supposed to be there?” The answer to which is almost always emphatically, No! 

A massive limb had come down and busted two sections of  wood pasture fencing clean apart. Wandering on the wrong side of that fence were twelve of my cows, spread out like they were sightseeing before curfew. I told him with little room for doubt, “no Sir, they are not” as I rushed to get closer. 

We hopped out just as a low thunder rolled across the sky. Epic timing. 

The three of us quickly surveyed the damage while also getting into position to start wrangling the dozen cows back into the pasture. Caleb swung his headlamp across the pasture, away from the tree line. “Well, Jake, we’ve got ourselves a visitor,” he said. Then he squinted. “Actually… man you got a whole pack of em’ up there. I count at least 6.” 

Standing about seventy‑five yards out in the mist, was a pack of coyotes, fixated on the cattle like those coons were Caleb’s squaller.  

I told Caleb to keep an eye on them and watch his side of the broken fence, while Brady and I rounded up the cattle. Once we had them contained and back on the right side, I told them I’d head back to the barn and grab what we needed. “I’ll go out into the pasture in-between the coyotes and the cattle. Brady, if you’ll watch the fence line, we should be alright,” Caleb said. They retrieved their rain gear from the side-by-side, and I handed Caleb my CCI Velocitor storage container, which had about 30, 40 grain copper-plated hollow points left inside it. “If you can, hold your fire and I’ll put ’em down when I get back with something that packs a little more punch.” 

As I pulled away, I was thankful it was these two. I hated to put them to work, but if there were any fellas I knew that didn’t think a thing about the work that was ahead of us, it was these two gentlemen. I was blessed. I’d be fixing a fence in the rain past midnight instead of coon hunting, but I’d be with two rock-solid individuals, outside, enjoying this beautiful land God gave us.  

I was a couple hundred yards into the roughly 2.5-mile trek back to the barn when trouble started. I wanted to go fast, but the rain was picking up—light, steady, just enough to wake up the mud. As I eased through a set of deep, flooded ruts, I went heavy on the gas to keep from bogging down, and the engine sputtered. I glanced down, and the realization hit me like a southbound heifer: I hadn’t bothered to check the fuel gauge. 

The engine coughed twice and died shortly thereafter, leaving me in the dark with a decision to make. On foot, with two hounds and that East Texas mud, I knew it’d take me every bit of an hour and a half to get back to the barn. We didn’t get cell reception out here, and it wouldn’t have done me any good seeing as how I’d left my phone at the barn. I had another unit I could drive back so I was good there, but it would take 20 minutes to wrangle up some barbed wire and other supplies, then another 25 minute ride back the guys. What would Caleb and Brady think if I was gone for over 2 hours while they were stuck watching cows and wolves in the rain? 

I stood up to gather the dogs and that’s when a single shot boomed somewhere off in the dark—deep and heavy, way bigger than the .22 I’d left with Caleb. Maybe a .30-30. Maybe a .308. Hard to tell at that distance. I froze, and listened. Ranger and Eli were tense, focused, just as surprised as I was to hear such a large rifle, out here, and at this time of night. Then two more shots snapped back through the trees, faster, lighter… and those sounded exactly like my .22.