60 Minutes - Sunday, February 10, 2019

Episode Date: February 11, 2019

A former bank robber is now a successful law professor. Here's Steve Kroft with a story of redemption. Sharyn Alfonsi reports from Franklin County, Mississippi - where a chess program is changing the lives of high school students - their parents - and the community. Scott Pelley shares the story of Lauren McGoughof -- a woman who hunts game -- with eagles. Those stories on tonight's "60 Minutes." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. This episode is brought to you by Square.

You're not just running a restaurant, you're building something big. And Square's there for all of it. Giving your customers more ways to order, whether that's in person with Square Kiosk or online. Instant access to your sales, plus the funding you need to go even bigger. And real-time insights so you know what's working, what's not, and what's next. Because when you're doing big things, your tools should too. Visit square.ca to get started. You're a professor at one of the finest law schools in the country. Is that something that you thought you would be able to do? No.

It makes me laugh hearing you say it out loud, because there are days where it doesn't make sense to me, and I've lived it. Here's why. Professor Sean Hopwood is a convicted felon who spent 11 years in federal prison and is a foolish, reckless 21-year-old in Nebraska listening to a friend with a really bad idea. He said, what do you think about robbing a bank? And most people would have laughed that off or said,

maybe we need another beer or anything other than, that sounds like a great idea, which is what I ended up saying. Until several summers ago, the ancient game of chess was still mostly a mystery to the folks of rural Franklin County, Mississippi. What's this called? So imagine everyone's surprise when a tall stranger arrived from Memphis to bring chess to the country. I was like, what? Why would somebody come down here?

Two years later, a chess boom was underway in the unlikeliest of places. People said that country kids couldn't learn chess. And? He showed them wrong. We proved them wrong. In Mongolia, hunters partner with eagles in a tradition that goes back thousands of years. One of the best at this is Lauren McGow from, of all places, Oklahoma City. This is the most ancient form of falconry in the world. It blows my mind that it's even real. It's like something out of Lord of the Rings, but you can do it. We built a camera harness to learn what it's like to fly like an eagle.

I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. What's your next adventure?

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and has been named one of the 2019 World's Most Ethical Companies by the Ethisphere Institute. The freedom to go after whatever is next for you? That's the power of Pacific. Ask a financial professional about how Pacific Life can help give you? That's the power of Pacific. Ask a financial professional about how Pacific Life can help give you the freedom to do what you love, or visit www.pacificlife.com. Jailhouse lawyers are prisoners who manage to learn enough about the law while incarcerated

to help themselves and other inmates with legal problems. We get letters from them every week. Tonight, we're going to reintroduce you to Sean Hopwood, who is arguably the most successful jailhouse lawyer ever, having had one of his cases argued before the U.S. Supreme Court while serving a 12-year sentence for armed bank robbery. Since his release, he's built up an extraordinary resume as a legal scholar and has been published in top law journals. We first met him last fall at one of the nation's premier law schools, where he's become its newest professor. A tale of redemption as improbable as any you're likely to hear. Question one is, was there a constitutional violation?

In his first semester at Georgetown University, Professor Hopwood is teaching criminal law. Were the first statements unlawfully obtained? Yes. The irony isn't lost on him or his students, who know that he's a convicted felon and that less than a decade ago was an inmate at the Federal Correctional Institution in Pekin, Illinois. You're a professor at one of the finest law schools in the country. Is that something that you thought you would be able to do? No. It makes me laugh hearing you say it out loud because there are days where it doesn't make sense to me, and I've lived it. So I can see why it doesn't make sense to hardly anyone else. It's easier for me to imagine you as a Georgetown law professor than it is for me to imagine you as a bank robber. Well, that's because the bank

robber has long been dead and gone. Hopwood was born here 42 years ago in the small farming community of David City, Nebraska, surrounded by cornfields and cattle. He was a bright, cocky, stubborn kid from a solid family, and he hated rules. A good athlete and a miserable student who won a basketball scholarship to Midland University and partied his way out of it in one semester. He drank himself through a two-year hitch in the Navy, then added drugs to the mix when he returned to David City, working in a feedlot. How much has David City changed? He was broke, unrepentant, and frustrated that things weren't going his way. So this is where it started. One night he got a call from a friend asking him to come down to the local bar for a drink

and listen to what turned out to be a very bad idea. He said, what do you think about robbing a bank? And most people would have laughed that off or said, maybe we need another beer or anything other than that sounds like a great idea, which is what I ended up saying. Really? You know, I don't think either one of us thought that night that we were going to actually do it. It sounded exciting. It sounded exciting.

It sounded like easy money that we didn't have to work for. Something that fit with where my mind was at at the time, which was a reckless, immature, foolish 21-year-old. It wasn't until months later when they started scouting locations that Sean realized they might actually do it. So this is one of your banks? It is. This is the third bank. The idea was to stick up very small banks in tiny towns like Gresham

where there was no police presence and little risk of armed confrontation. We wanted to get in and out of the bank as quickly as possible, not hurt anyone, grab as much money as we could, and run. And that's basically what we did in all five bank robberies. Eventually, the FBI put out a composite sketch and began closing in. In July 1998, he was apprehended in this Omaha hotel, ten months after his first robbery. When they arrested me, they searched my car and found $100,000 in cash that was directly traceable to the bank I had just robbed, and multiple guns and a scanner and binoculars. They had you. They had me. And they would have him for a long time.

When he entered the federal penitentiary in Illinois in May of 1999, he was 23 years old. Was it dangerous? Of course. In part because there's not a lot for the inmates to do. He doesn't talk about the things that he witnessed and experienced in federal prison. He doesn't want his family to know, and he sees no value in reliving them, except for the job he landed in the safety of the legal library, which every federal prison is required to have. And for the first six months I worked at the prison law library, I didn't hardly touch the books. They were big, they were thick, they were intimidating. What was the spark that got you to start opening the books and They were big, they were thick, they were intimidating. What was the spark that

got you to start opening the books and looking at them? Self-motivation. It all started with a Supreme Court ruling that Sean thought might help him get his sentence reduced, and it ended with him assisting other prisoners with all sorts of cases. I spent two months working on my own case, researching, and I was never able to get any legal relief for myself the entire time I was in federal prison. But you were for other inmates. I did. Lawyers had made really bad mistakes,

and it really cost their clients sometimes, you know, a decade or two in federal prison. Inside the walls at Pekin, he won the respect of fellow inmates and discovered that he had an aptitude for something, the law. I would be sitting in my cell reading a federal reporter, which is a compendium of federal court of appeals cases. And I would just read that cover to cover as if it was a novel, just for fun. Was it fun? I think the law is fascinating. In what way? It was like a big

puzzle for me. Three years into his prison term, he got an opportunity to show just how much he learned when John Fellers, a friend and fellow inmate, asked Sean to appeal his drug conviction to the highest court in the land. He came to me and said, would you take the case and would you file this petition to the Supreme Court? I said no, absolutely not. Why? His case was very complex and I didn't think I could do it, but John was very persistent.

He would spend months working day and night on the petition. It required him to master the facts of the case, understand the statutes and legal precedents, identify the errors made by lawyers and judges in the appeal process, and then craft an argument in the language of the court before mailing it off to Washington. Did the Supreme Court know that the brief had been written by a prisoner? The first hint would have been the fact that it was typed on a typewriter. I don't think law firms in 2003 were using typewriters to knock out Supreme Court briefs. Four out of nine Supreme Court justices must agree for a case to be heard.

That year, more than 8,000 petitions were filed. 74 were accepted. One of those was written by Sean Hopwood. And one morning, a friend of mine came running and screaming my name, Sean, Sean, Sean. And what he had was a copy of the USA Today. And I read the article and it said that the court had granted John Feller's case. What went through your mind? I was shocked. I was shocked that the court had granted the case and that I had done something that, you know, lawyers wait their whole lives to do and done it the first time.

It's not that unusual for prisoners to file their own petitions. What is freakishly unusual is for one of those petitions to be granted. Seth Waxman, a prominent appellate lawyer and the former Solicitor General of the United States, is not easily impressed. But when he was asked to argue the Feller's case before the Supreme Court, he said he would do it only if Sean Hopwood would work from prison as part of the team. I wanted him to be involved because I was really curious. It seemed actually almost inconceivable that somebody with his level of education and his level of exposure to the life of the law could actually write a much better than average cert petition. So this would have been good for a Washington lawyer.

Even for a licensed appointed lawyer representing a federal prisoner, you would say, wow. Waxman won the Feller's case before the Supreme Court in the unanimous decision and became Sean's mentor during his final six years in prison. When a former Solicitor General of the United States says that you did a good job writing a brief, that has an impact, especially when you're surrounded in this environment where prison guards are telling you every day that you're worthless and you don't amount to anything. Did you win some more cases? I did.

I won another case in the Supreme Court. I won a case in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. And I won cases mostly on resentencing motions for federal prisoners and federal district court cases kind of all over the country. He found a purpose in life. And when Ann Marie Metzner, who had once had a high school crush on Sean, began writing letters and paying him visits, he started to think he might have some kind of future when he got out. But he knew there were huge obstacles ahead.

Did you decide you wanted to be a lawyer while you were in prison? I did, but I didn't think I could. I had had countless number of lawyers tell me I could not go to law school. And even if I could, I would never get licensed by any of the state bar associations, given my crimes. When he was released to a halfway house near Omaha in 2008, he had never seen an iPhone, never been on the Internet, and was computer illiterate. But as if by miracle, he saw an ad for a document analyst at Cockle Legal Printing, one of just a few companies in the U.S. that helps attorneys assemble briefs for the Supreme Court.

Andy Cockle and his sister Trish Pilotti remembered that Sean showed up for his interview in ill-fitting clothes with a rumpled letter from Seth Waxman and an 11-year gap in his resume. We work with attorneys every day, all week long, that are trying to get their case granted, and none of them do. And this guy comes out and says, I had two of them granted. And so that, yeah. Did you believe him? No. I thought he was delusional. But his story checked out, and they gave him the job.

You're glad you hired him. Oh, yeah. It was sad to see him go. He spent three years with the Cockles in Omaha, completing the undergraduate degree he'd begun in prison and continuing to impress the lawyers he worked with. With their help, and against all odds, the University of Washington Law School took a chance on him. He won a full scholarship

from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and upon graduation was admitted to the bar. How did you do in law school? Surprisingly well. You were already a lawyer. Well, I mean, it was a new experience doing well in school. He did well enough to land a prestigious clerkship with the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the second most important court in the country.

The idea that a convicted bank robber was going to go work for Janice Rogers Brown, a very conservative judge on a very important court. Surprising in the absolute sense? Yes. In the context of who Sean Hopwood is and what he was setting out to do. Not that surprising. A year later, it led to a highly competitive teaching fellowship at Georgetown Law's Appellate Litigation Clinic, where he did so well, the faculty awarded him a position as a professor of law.

How hard is it to get a job teaching law at Georgetown? It's very hard. Professor Stephen Goldblatt is the faculty director for the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown Law. To have somebody who's a credible voice, who actually lived the experience, who understands what it's like to spend a day in prison, much less 11 years, is highly unusual. So I think this was a unique opportunity to get somebody for whom there are no others

out there and that the potential was enormous. Along with his other accomplishments, Sean Hopwood also got to marry that girl from David City, Annie Metzner, who is now a law student herself. They have two children. Are you surprised how this has turned out? Yeah, yeah. I had no idea of what the future would hold for us. Neither one of us had any clue that all these wonderful things would happen. Thank you. Hopwood's main interest now is criminal justice reform.

He's an advocate for shorter prison sentences for most crimes and more vocational training, drug treatment, and mental health counseling, which are often nonexistent. Prison is not the place for personal growth. We warehouse people and then we kick them out into the real world with very little support and hope that a miracle happens. But somehow all the things stacked against you, you were able to do it. Yeah, it was people that helped, that went out of their way to provide grace to me

that made the difference. Chess has been around for 1,500 years, but until several summers ago, the ancient game was still mostly a mystery to the folks of rural Franklin County, Mississippi. Few had ever played chess before. Many confused it with checkers. A chess board was as out of place in the county as a skyscraper. But as we first reported in March 2017, that all changed when a tall stranger arrived from Memphis to bring chess to the country with the belief that the game could transform a community. He was initially met with bewilderment.

Who was this 6'6 outsider and why would anyone come to Franklin County to teach chess? Two years later, a chess boom was underway in the unlikeliest of places. Tucked deep in the southwest corner of Mississippi lies remote Franklin County, where the trains don't stop anymore. Half the county is covered by a national forest. The other half, it seems, by churches. This is the buckle of the Bible Belt. 7,000 people live here and no one's in a hurry. There are only two stoplights in the entire county and one elementary school. What's this called?

So imagine everyone's surprise when Dr. Jeff Buelington showed up at school to teach the kids of Franklin County a new subject, chess. So everybody say, checkmate. Checkmate. Before Dr. B came to town, had you played chess before? I didn't have a clue how to move the pieces or nothing. All the time I saw it was on TV. Donovan Moore, Braden Farrell, Parker Wilkinson, and Benson Sheck-Snyder didn't know what to make of Dr. B, as he's known, when he first appeared in 2015.

What did you think of Dr. B when you first met him? The 12-foot man. The 12-foot man. Whenever he came into the room saying he was planning on teaching us chess, I was like, what? Why would somebody come down here? In the middle of nowhere. You're a logical guy and it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. If there are people there, it's not nowhere. This is somewhere. It's just a somewhere that doesn't get a lot of attention. Jeff Buelington was lured to Franklin County by a wealthy benefactor who wishes to remain anonymous.

The benefactor had seen how Buelington had molded chess champions in Memphis in one of the most distressed zip codes in America and wondered if chess could take hold in the country. Where can you put the king? He convinced Buelington to give a few demonstration lessons in Franklin County. Does that stop him from coming here? Afterwards, I was asked, hey, what do you think? Do you think these kids have it? Could you have a chess program here? Yeah, of course. They're as smart as any other kids I've ever met. Motivated by the challenge, Buelington signed a 10-year contract

with a benefactor and left the city for the country. What is he doing? He's x-raying the king. Buelington has taught chess for the better part of 25 years. What's so wonderful about the bishop and why might we think of it as an archer? Like for instance, he may not be a grandmaster, but he's a master of using chess to tell a narrative, especially with beginners. This is a story about a little girl and a stranger and the little girl's daddy. Elizabeth and the Stranger is just my adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood to the chessboard.

Elizabeth needs to get down here to E1, where school is, where she'll be safe. It involves just simply teaching how a pawn moves and a king moves. Oh, no. Is she going to make it? I told you this is a bad idea. I remember my partner in this project saying to me,

we'd have maybe 12 kids playing chess. And he didn't know what to expect. And how many kids do you have playing chess right now? Well, a couple hundred. Hey, how are you? Students flock to Buelington in part because at heart, he's one of them. He grew up in rural Indiana and identifies with kids who have to feed the chickens, count tarantulas as pets, and have different tastes in food. What do you like to eat? Fried

rattlesnake. Fried rattlesnake? I go to my house, If we ever find a rattlesnake in a course of like a week or so, you're getting some fried rattlesnake. Buelington's opened up a new world to his kids. This is a famous game by Morphy against Count Isoward and Duke of Brunswick, who's played in Paris. This is Paris. We teach history. We teach geography. We teach science. We teach math. We teach it all using the chessboard. Bobby Poole is a part-time preacher and a full-time assistant chess coach for Buelington. Poole says there were doubts that Buelington could succeed in Mississippi. All the statistics, everything you look at, you know, Mississippi is the poorest, it's the dumbest, it's the fattest. We know that the rest of the nation has that conception of us.

People said that country kids couldn't learn chess. And? He showed them wrong. We proved them wrong. Proof came in 2016 in Starkville, where Buelington's team of mostly elementary school kids from Franklin County faced off against much older high school players at the Mississippi State Championships. Rebecca Griffin was in the fifth grade. What was their reaction when they saw you, a little fifth grader, sitting across the

table from them? One of them started bragging to their friends about how he got easy pickings. Is that a little scary, playing somebody who looked that much older than you? I didn't really think about it until somebody told me you played a guy with the beard. You guys roll in and they say who are these kids right? They were basically like trying to say we were a joke because we were kids but after the game we usually beat them and they were like very shocked. Don't you guys feel bad you beat all those older kids? No not at all. I don't want that to make me seem like a cruel person but I'm I really am just okay with crushing people's spirits. In the end, Franklin County dominated the state championships. What happened is a bunch of hillbillies beat the snot out of a bunch of

really highly educated, sophisticated people. So that's what happened. Mitch Hamm was among the many parents in Starkville. He thinks the victory served as a milestone for Franklin County's kids. That was very sobering for them to suddenly realize, wow, we are good. So them having the realization of their own potential was a beautiful moment. How did the teachers, the other teachers react? Over the course of my career in teaching chess, people say things like, I did not know that he

could do something like that. Or even something as simple and as crass as I did not know he was smart or she was smart or something like that. What does that tell you? It tells me some people got it wrong, that some kids have been underestimated or written off for reasons that are false. Chess has helped Buelington's players see there's more to themselves than they've seen before. Chess is like something that I'm really good at for once. Has it changed you at all?

It has. My grades have gone up. Your grades have gone up? Oh my gosh, it used to be medium, low Bs, now they're A's and high Bs. I feel like chess could take us anywhere, but it's not about where it takes us, it's about how far it takes us. In 2016, only seven of the 93 graduates from Franklin County High School went on to a four-year college. But every chess player we spoke to plans to attend college someday.

It's really shocked me how far he's came. Jennifer Rutland is Brayden's mom. She runs the First and Main Cafe, one of the few places in the county that serves a hot meal. She believes her son won't be flipping burgers for a living. Is it fun to see your kids dream a little bigger than the county line? Yes. So big that it's almost like, Brian, come on, get real. Yeah. You know, it just gets so big. You always want to see your kids go further. And I think chess can be a vehicle to take them there.

You know? This gives them a window at a young age that, hey, there's a whole world out there. I don't need to set my goals at making $8 an hour. I need to set my goals at whatever I want them to be. Chess has filled a social void and given Main Street a pulse. A new chess center opened right in the middle of Meadville, the county seat. Do you feel like chess has made the community more hopeful?

Certainly parts of it, yeah. Right, I mean, this flower hasn't bloomed yet. It's just starting to, right? There's a lot yet to come. The chess center has become like a beacon in the county. Each day after school, kids who have the desire and aptitude receive more instruction from Buelington. So what does black do?

They've become so immersed in the game with its infinite number of possible moves that when these students finish playing chess, they go home and play more chess. Can the best chess player in the world come from Franklin County? Maybe. Absolutely. It's super possible. Before they could take on the world, they would have to face the nation. We'll take care of them. 33 of Franklin County's chess wonders and their parents gathered in the school parking lot. Now we're coming back, right? To begin a 10-hour journey to Nashville for their biggest test yet, the national championships. As day...

Queen G7, excellent. ...turned into night, Buelington and his students were lost in what they call the chess dimension. Where are we? I don't know where we are. We're just in the middle of it. We're in the middle of problem number nine. That's all I know. Preparing in their own language. Knight d4, attacking the queen and threatening queen takes h3, check. For what lay ahead, a weekend of intense chess.

More than 1,500 players from 644 schools gathered in a giant ballroom at Opryland. Please shake your opponent's hand. For seven rounds of chess over three days. Every grade, K through 12, was vying for a national title. The best teams come from the best schools in New York City. And two hours into the tournament, it appeared as if little Franklin County was overmatched. After round one, the kids from Mississippi had lost 30 of their first 32 games. You know, it's a real struggle and they're going to learn to struggle

at this level and they're learning that they have to struggle at a different level than they ever have before. What's the feeling when you walk in here as a player, as a coach, as a parent? It's a deep agonistic experience, right? Deep, agonistic experience. Yeah, it's real, true competition based on skill alone, right? You look around and you can see it in the parents' faces as much as the kids, that there's something significant at stake here. Nervous parents from other programs tried to sneak a closer peek into the ballroom, desperate for any news. After their shaky start, Franklin County's players

bore down, taking more time, probing for openings, watching for threats. A Buelington mantra played in their heads, let your opponent show you how they'd like to lose. Today's the last day, it's the hardest day. By Sunday, with the final two rounds looming, Franklin County's fifth and sixth graders were hovering near the top ten. Everybody needs to fight for those points today. We need them very much. Parker Wilkinson, Braden Farrell, and Benson Sheck-Snyder all delivered for Franklin County. That left Donovan Moore, who was mired in a two-and-a-half-hour struggle against a higher-rated opponent from Kentucky. On the verge of victory, Donovan was asked for a draw.

He said no. His opponent snapped, the tension of the event bursting to the surface. Donovan Moore eventually won, boosting Franklin County's fifth graders to number eight in the country. Making their debut to the stage, Franklin County Upper Elementary. The sixth graders placed 10th, two grades in the nation's top 10, only a year and a half after Jeff Buelington first showed up to introduce chess to a small county in Mississippi. One thing that I don't think I say enough is thank you. I was thinking the same thing.

For teaching us all this. What are they capable of? Somewhere in the top three, at least. You think you can stick it out for eight more years from Franklin County? I won't even think of it as sticking it out. What do you think of it as? I think of it as doing what I want to do, being in a place I like to be. Falconry, the art of hunting with birds of prey, was born in the forbidding Altai Mountains of Central Asia. As we first told you last year, hunters there still loft golden eagles into the sky

in a partnership of man and bird that predates recorded history. We say man, but in truth, one of the best hunters in Mongolia today is a woman from Oklahoma City. Lauren McGough took us to one of the most remote places on Earth to meet the hunters who trained her. And before the next few minutes are through, you will know what it's like to fly like an eagle. The Mongolian steppe is the greatest expanse of grassland unaltered by humankind. It endures because human existence has narrow odds between the widest climate extremes on earth, 104 degrees in summer, 50 below in winter.

Nomads depend on the animals that yield nearly all of their food, fiber, clothing, and fuel. And one of the oldest bonds in nature is an alliance of survival among hunters, horses, and golden eagles. This is the most ancient form of falconry in the world. This is where it all began. It's the cradle. So several thousand years ago, we don't know precisely when a man saw an eagle catch a rabbit or a fox and had the ingenious idea to hunt in partnership with it. It blows my mind that it's even real. It's like something out of Lord of the Rings, but you can do it. Lauren McGough was in high school when she dedicated her life to raptors. She traveled with us to the place she calls the cradle.

Six thousand miles led us first to the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar. This civilization conquered the known world in the 13th century. The Mongols ranged from Asia to Europe, the largest contiguous empire of all time. From here, we flew another 800 miles to Bayan Olgi, where Mongolia, Russia, China, and Kazakhstan meet. This was the end of the road, but not the end of our journey. We crossed the open steppe, past wild Bactrian camels with two humps, a vanishing species with only about 1,000 left in the world. Our destination was a camp of nomads, people who introduced Lauren McGough to the Golden Eagle. They hadn't seen her in two years. It feels like I never left. Just in a few minutes of seeing everybody. Such a magical place.

Now, how did a woman from Oklahoma end up out here in Mongolia? Well, I read a book on falconry and it's like the fire was lit. I just knew I had to do it. And as I was researching, I went to the library and I found this old book that had black and white photos of eagle hunters from Mongolia. So, you know, this beautiful shaggy horse and this man with a giant eagle and a fox pelt on his horse. And it just looked like the most incredible thing. And I thought, I have to, I have to see it. I have to do it. At the age of 17, her father, a former Air Force stealth pilot, brought her to Mongolia. Lauren returned five years later with funding from a Fulbright scholarship. Then she earned a Ph.D. based on her work with the eagle hunters.

These are the people that can talk to animals because they have relationships with goats, sheep, horses, camels, eagles. They have intimate knowledge of where snow leopards are and foxes are. There's no agriculture here because the land's not arable. So they've ingeniously learned to domesticate animals and then build these unique relationships with wild animals. It's a relationship that she learned from people who endure the life of 19th century ranchers. They are Kazakhs who make up just 4% of Mongolians. They have no running water, no electricity.

They survive on meat and milk and burn dung as fuel. The nomads live in clusters of a half-dozen families or so. The boys mine the flocks while the men ride in search of foxes to make furs for sub-zero survival. In all the years you've been doing this, what have you learned about these animals? A hunter named Chukan gave us an answer we never saw coming. As they said in the old times, if the horse makes your name famous in a race once a year, the eagle makes your name famous a hundred times a year. If I gift to people many foxes, they will say it was Chukan who gifted us the foxes. Eagle hunting is more about your name being spread far and wide among the people. So if eagle hunting is about the ego of men, we wondered how they saw

Lauren McGow. Did you have any doubt that a woman could hunt with an eagle? Oh, he said, we've never had a female eagle hunter. Why did your brother take her in? She came from a world far away. She had her mind set on learning to hunt with the eagle. Her motivation came from deep in her heart. We just couldn't say no. When Lauren first came to Mongolia, it took her two weeks to catch an eagle she could call her own. How do you catch a golden eagle? Yes, so you have a dead hair that you lay out with a crow or a raven staked nearby, and you encircle it in a net.

So the eagle, on migration, looks down and sees this hare that only a crow has possession of, and it thinks, I can easily bully that crow out of that rabbit and have a free meal to myself. So it comes in, and when it tries to grab the dead rabbit, the net unfolds around the eagle. The eagle is taught to feed at the hand of the hunter, and as long as the meals are regular, the eagles are calm, content, and come back for more. They perch on the hunter's arm with a rawhide leash called a jess tied to their legs.

They train the birds with a fox pelt tugged by a rope. This is what happens when the eagle zeroes in on a fox. After the bird makes the kill, the hunters ride in, strip the pelt, and give the meat to the eagle. It's a technique well over a thousand years old. We may not know exactly when it started, but you don't have to be here in Mongolia very long to figure out why it began. In an area as vast as this, with game so rare,

it helps to have a hunting partner that can see seven times better than a human and cover all of this at about 50 miles an hour. What is that like? The eagles were kind enough to show us. We custom built a soft rubber camera harness and learned how to fly. Golden eagles are abundant all around the northern hemisphere. In terms of survival as a species, conservationists call golden eagles an animal of least concern. This is a 10-pound bird, which don't be fooled if that doesn't sound like a lot. They have hollow bones and they're mostly feathers, so 10 pounds on a bird is an enormous bird.

They have a six-foot wingspan. They have a six foot wingspan. They usually have lovely amber eyes. And the name golden eagle derives from the beautiful golden feathers on their nape. And then the rest... Around the neck. Yes, around the neck. They're incredibly effective at killing, which is what they're built for. I mean, they're a modern day velociraptor, a perfect product of evolution. I will never be tired of a golden eagle flying. Every time, it thrills me. The eagle's talons can close on its prey with a bone-crushing force of 900 pounds per square inch. A fun fact that is no fun to know. Come on, sweetheart. Perfect.

Okay. Very good. And then go ahead and stand up. And then to secure the eagle, place your jesses between your thumb and the rest of your fingers. Right here. Yes. Okay. The noise that the eagle recognizes is ca. Okay. Ca. All right. Whenever you're ready, just take off her hood. Remove the hood? Yes.

Ca. Oh. Ca. Ca. Oh. Good girl. Oh, God. What a feeling.

Notice she said, good girl. The only eagles worthy of partnership are female. They're larger, stronger, better hunters. Ironic, since the human partner is traditionally male. Of all the eagle hunters you've known, how does Lauren rate? How good is she? She is at the same level as men. She could compete with them.

Lauren, at 31, is considered one of the best falconers in the world. She has brought the ancient ways to Oklahoma, where she rehabilitates raptors and trained with her own eagle named Miles. What is the career of one of these eagles? So an eagle is trapped first year, second year, maybe third year on its migration. And then it has a time with an eagle hunter, which could be as short as a year or as long as six, seven, eight years. Eventually, they return that eagle back to the wild. It is part of the tradition to let them go? Yes. They firmly believe that an

older eagle should be in the wild. What do you say to some people who might watch this and think that the eagles are being abused, that they shouldn't be caught? I would encourage anybody that has doubts to go out with a falconer. In this country or in the United States or anywhere, we only encourage their natural instincts. The only difference is you are right there. You have a front row seat to see this incredibly million-year-old predator-prey relationship. Do you worry that one day there will be no more eagle hunters? A hunter named Uni told us, no, it's an essential art that Kazakhs are born with.

Since Kazakhs have come to the earth, they have been practicing this tradition. It will not disappear. Also, each of us has a young person that we teach, like this boy. It passes from generation to generation. What's at stake if this tradition is lost? This is where man first figured out that he could have a relationship with a raptor.

And what a loss would it be for humanity if it was gone? We can take an individual eagle and bring it from the spectrum of wild all the way to tame and then wild again. And we get to see what they're capable of up close and in person. Man, if that understanding of eagles and animals were to leave, that's not a world I want to live in. The boy named Becca is the hope of his family's traditional world. He's learning horsemanship and falconry. And it was with Becca that we discovered the most endangered species on the steppe, the nomads themselves. There may be only 300 eagle hunters left, a rare breed of eagle.