The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 003

Episode Date: February 20, 2015

Mission Fatima, Bolivia. After 8 days of hunting and fishing in the jungles of central Bolivia with the Tsimane people, Steven Rinella talks with Phillip Baribeau, Dan Doty, and Janis Putelis from the MeatEater crew. Subjects discussed include: the moral complexities of eating a monkey; the pain of getting stung by bullet ants; fishing for dorado, maturo, surubi, and sabalo; western influences on indigenous South American tribes; dugout canoes; the late Mississippi comedian and storyteller Jerry Clower; various guns and bows; 19th Century fat cats; trying to determine the meaning of inscrutable hand gestures given by indigenous hunters; how much the Tsimane love monkey meat. Mentioned links and notes: -Watch: MeatEater Crew Eats Monkey Stew -Jerry Clower reference "too much like folks" -Interview with Marco about his jaguar's story will be posted at a later date. -MeatEater airs on Sportsman Channel Thursdays at 8pm e/p -To watch episodes of MeatEater instantly, use code MEATEATERPODCAST at checkout to get $5 off any volume on meateater.vhx.tv Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless because I'm wearing my swim trunks, from the jungles of Bolivia. and we've been out in the jungle jungle for how long oh eight days eight days nine days and we're back now stranded in a Catholic mission

out in the jungle because the plane couldn't fly we're a couple hundred miles due north of santa cruz bolivia um on the flight out here you just pass like a hundred miles of uninterrupted jungle yeah probably a lot of like slash and burn ag so much so that the sky is you know low visibility due to smoke but then you eventually get out of that and just fly over jungle and you land here there's no road system here there's a there's an airstrip and it's just a native community the tribe is called chamane it's chamane territory and we've been up we went up a river with a bunch of chamane guys hunting and fishing we've been up there just getting some good stuff some bad stuff happening to us. Now we're back here stranded.

It's hot. No one's wearing their clothes except Doty, who's got his, one of his. Doty buys those T-shirts. I don't know if you've ever been to, like, gas stations in Montana or places where they sell those airbrush. Or it'd be, like, a full moon and, and like some wolf's heads or like a well this this one's special this is a

this is a winged Native American on top of a winged horse and it used to say Idaho it's a pegasus no the horse isn't winged it's not? no

oh no but no it's behind the horse sort of racing a giant eagle it's cloudy and there's a horse sort of racing an eagle with a winged um plains warrior this used to say Idaho I once buried accidentally buried

this shirt in the on a beach on Lake ponder a in Idaho for three months I lost it one night swimming and then came back three months later found it buried in the sand did you go digging for it no No, I tripped. I found it. Wow. So we have a ton of ground to cover. We've got to talk about getting bit by bullet ants. We've got to talk about eating monkey meat. A giant catfish called the maturo. We've got to talk about eating unfathomable quantities of dried salted meat.

Rotten sometimes. Sometimes rotten. First I want to say who's here. Philbert Baraboo out of Bozeman, Indiana is here. Friends call him Phil. And he's a, what do you like to go by? Cinematographer? Sure. Philbert's a cinematographer. Is it Phillip

for real or just Phil? Phillip for real. Phillip is a cinematographer based out of Bozeman, Montana. This is the first time he ever came out with us. This whole reason we're here, like why we're here is we were doing a meat eater episode. And then Giannisis putellis um who is no longer long tongue yanni he's now yanni chimani based on his um ability to excel at jungle craft here in chimani territory particularly he started out very strong shooting native bows these guys in chimani

make their bows let's introduce everybody and then just get into it what do you think i was just wrapping it up oh okay geez well so yannis is here and that concludes and of course dan dought's here, media producer, director, man of all things. And these bows, how do I even start with talking about the Chimane Indians, Amer Indians? It's a good term, you know in Canada you'd say First Nations people, right? In Alaska you say Native Alaskan. In the US we say Indian, Native American. Sort of the proper term down here is Amerindian.

Is that actually proper though? I think so. I'm not sure. I've only ever heard you say that. Amerindian? Yeah. Really? Yeah.

I haven't heard that very often. What do you hear? Indigenous. Really? Yeah. I haven't heard that very often. What do you hear? Indigenous. Indigenous. Indigenous? Yeah. I think an Amerindian is an indigenous South American. I could be totally wrong. Maybe. I don't know. Indigenous South Americans. The name is Chimani. Now, my

understanding is that they came up, like, there was another people here some time ago. Some hundreds of years ago in the Chimane came up these rivers and down like through warfare I assume colonize these river systems here and whoever they pushed ahead of them they pushed out and there's legend that there's still like there's probably this legend a lot of places but some of these guys talk about legend or warnings that up some of these rivers the

headwaters of some of these rivers in this area there are still uncontacted peoples called the ancient ones that they call the ancient ones it would be that the Chimane pushed them out the Chimane lived by small garden plots so they live in homes built entirely of native materials. So like a bamboo type framework, thatched roofs. They have garden plots where they grow plantain, pineapple. Yucca. Yucca.

Fruit. Lemons, no limes. Papaya. Papaya. Guava. Papaya. Guava. lemons no limes papaya papaya guava guava a plant called barbasko barbasko which they use the poison fish and they draw their protein largely from the river they have some modern forms of fishing where they have access to nets they have access to monofilament

and hand lines, but they kill a lot of fish using bows and arrows and they kill a lot of fish using something we'll talk about in a minute, they poison fish with this stuff called barbasco. But anyways on the surface level what we were doing is we were coming out here with these guys who are establishing a business, trying to establish a business, have established a business, taking people up to target, it's called dorado. And a dorado is this big, it's in the same broader grouping as piranhas where it has these really pronounced teeth and a strong jaw up front but

it's a very robust fish that'll take a fly right they're aggressive passivorous fish and they'll bitch slap a fly so it's kind of like the new it's like sort of like the new frontier of fly fishing is to come out come down to the jungles in south america and try to catch a dorado dorado means gold you also hear them called golden dorado, these big golden fish. They almost kind of resemble salmon structurally. Thick. I mean, these fish got shoulders on them. Very powerful

fish. Chimane like to eat them, but these guys are trying to establish a catch and release thing where dudes like westerners will come out to try to catch one. Frankly, going I couldn't really I mean I've caught the things before in Argentina I couldn't really I wasn't that excited about the prospect of coming out and catching them but what intrigued me was just the river

travel where you're going up into areas that these guys are pushing up into areas up this river here that we're on where like the Chimane haven't even been. You know, they go way up to the headwaters of this river. So it was a really interesting journey. And also the other thing that intrigued me a lot was hanging out with the natives. Because they bring all their stuff to, you know, to hunt and fish. And so we did a lot of that. And the fishing, frankly, was sucky.

Yoss was a fishing guide for a long time. What would you say about the fishing, Yanni? The fishing conditions were terrible. Conditions were terrible. I mean, we saw, as far as, like, turbidity levels, I don't know exactly how they measure them, but I think they, like, lowered, like, a white plate on a rope, you know, down into the water.

And then at one point you can, you know, still see the white plate. And I'd say the best that we saw. That a test yeah to test turbidity and the best that we saw i'd say if it was like an eight inch white plate was maybe a foot yeah and that might be generous you know they test tenderness on meat nope this thing called the warner bruntler sheer force test we'll save that for another podcast um it rained like holy hell so anyways yeah to to bring it into everyone's terms as a fishing guide if i would have come and seen uh conditions like this you would most likely just turn around and uh take folks back to their hotel or whatever but But here we come. And offer them a discount in the future? No.

No, just cancel the trip and just take it. Yeah, because, no, you know that fishing is going to be very, very, especially fly fishing, you know, where the fish really need to be able to see a fly. But in our case, it took us four days, five days to just get to our location. So it's not like you can just turn around at that point. With promises of water not only clear, but, like, crystal clear and blue turquoise. days to just get to our location so it's not like you can just turn around at that point with promises of water not only clear but like crystal clear and blue turquoise vodka colored when this

river is clean it's it's uh we saw pictures and videos of it just like paradise oh yeah i saw a picture it feels amazing and what the thing is down here you're trying to coincide when you come down to fish you're trying to come the dry season because when it you know it's underneath all the vegetation in the jungle and on the beach is just this red mud kind of nasty mud clay clay right so when it rains the river just turns red reddish brown yeah rust it turns rust color and you can't see shit right so in the moment we uh witnessed numerous landslides that big ones big one big enough to kill people no definitely big enough to bury you car sized rocks that one was a car size rock for sure and certainly enough mud and one like one big uh sploosh that it would could you know muddy out a river of 500 CFS, no problem.

And to do this trip properly, you want to come down during the dry season. And we thought, I was under the impression it was dry season. Then we got down here and it was kind of, well, it's over the tail end of the dry season. And it rained all the time and mudded everything up. But we're getting out of ourselves. So to get to this place, what you do, I went Seattle to Houston, Houston to Lima, Peru, Lima, Peru to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, overnight in a hotel. Then we got on some Cessnas, like chartered Cessnas.

What was it, like four, no? Six. Six-seat Cessnas. And flew out to a very rough airstrip, kind of hacked into the jungle a couple hundred miles away. So two and a half hour direct flight, flying. You land this little airstrip. From here we got into a bunch of dugout canoes. These boats are sweet because they,

most of the local guys are building one just for personal use like family use they just use a tree so their whole rat their whole boat is just huge from a tree like a dugout very very long boats narrow yeah very narrow very long boats looks like you had to be have a lot of you know control and discipline to ride these boats without flipping them we're these bigger ones you think they're made that way i got a question for you they're made that way for efficiency for traveling up and down a river so you can i think it's most boat most boat you get out of the tree man yeah i would say it's a practical thing so if the tree was bigger they would have a um like a greater ballast maybe i don't know the answer that's a good question these boats are like you see some on the water I'm not exaggerating say they're

20 inches wide you see six seven people big mommy look imagine like a big long skinny tree hollowed out but the ones we were in we climbed into four boats that the base like the hole was one tree tree, but then from the same kind of tree, they cut planks and make the boat taller. Well, you're thinking our boats are 20 inches wide? I don't know. Some of the ones you see on the water are 20 inches wide. No, our boats are wide enough to set up like a lawn chair in it. You put a ton of weight.

So we were running how many guys in the boat? Eight, nine, ten even at times. You know, that many dudes plus plus very small amount of gear and they're pushed by these air cooled engines that resemble a Go Devil or a Mud Buddy but they're made in Thailand. It's like an air cooled engine mounted on a Honda motor with a accompanied in Thailand with a very unfortunate name of KKK who builds the shaft in prop and so it's like this Thailand company KKK puts this what's got like a six-foot shaft a very very small propeller on news to run the rivers the maneuverability these boats is so piss-poor you got to have a dude up front with push- pole because you're not going to steer to some bitch so you got a guy in the back with this long long boat i mean like well over 20 feet long

and a six foot shaft on the back with a teeny little prop and and one or two dudes up front push pulling and a guy in back to help push pull to run these rivers and so we all pile into this stuff and travel up river and along the way you pass these communities and these communities um are all chimane and they might have the biggest one was uh kuchisama it's called kuchisama there's like a hundred and some people living in it not right in the right not right in the village but in the larger kuchisama area i think it was like 15 families 150 people or something like that yeah basically like if you go up river so maybe if you go up river 10 miles as the crow flies which is 25 river miles you go up you pass these small little villages these native villages and they get more sort of not they seem to get a little more non-western non-westernizer like fewer western

influences as you go up river and the last one you come to is at the this they're all most of them are at tributaries last one there's this tributary called pachene and there's a town there pachene and it seems to kind of be like a family it is it's one it's one extended family pachene run by a man who likes to pull a cordon. Very intoxicated man, as we found. And then once you pass Pachena, there's nothing upriver. You go up, and it just gets wilder, and you get into the mountains. So you start out, and you're in flat ground, and you start climbing up in the mountains.

The first day we went up, so we went up and camped. You're pushing upriver. Got up, traveled all day again. Camped. Realized that the Chimane dudes or someone, the blame fell on them, but I think it's more complicated. It's like definitely more complicated than that. Someone forgot something back in town. The fishing poles.

Someone forgot some fishing rods. Not all of them, but some of the fishing rods back in town. When I say town, I mean the mission we started, we flew into. And I forgot my little fan too. That was the real reason. Don't even forget his fan. So we had to stop for a day and send some shmodyin' guys down. So, but there's how many, there's four of us, two, you know, like Western educated Bolivians. One lives in the U.S. who run this organization. And then a grand total, we started out with 15 Chimanes and picked up two more Chimanes in another village.

So a horde. We were like the old days. We were like back to the 19th century expedition. Like, we're like when Roosevelt went to Africa to hunt, and they had 100-and-something porters carrying the stuff to hunt. It was like that. It felt a lot, oftentimes, like a school field trip. Like when everybody got moving and going, I mean, walking down those trails, there were a lot of heads to count.

It felt to me like a 19th century exploration. That too. It's like a dude with a pimp helmet and someone handing him lemonades the whole time while all these native dudes carry everything around. Yeah, there's a lot of people. There's a lot of ways. It was by far the biggest expedition that we've ever...

I mean, we've done some larger expeditions, but not... Part of it's a question of efficiency, too. It wasn't especially efficient no of an expedition the only time having that many dudes came in handy was uh packing up camp like they could get camp packed up pretty quick but then there's like a lot of people with nothing to do but they're all having a good time because they're getting paid and they're getting to go somewhere cool and it's better hunting and fishing than it is at home or certainly has the potential to be a lot better hunting and fishing than it does at home and Or certainly has the potential to be a lot better hunting and fishing than it does at home.

And then these guys might grow up and live their whole lives on the river, but have never gone up the river as far as we went. I'm kind of glad there was that many, though. Because just in the sense of meeting that many different guys. Because it was handy to have them around when we were drinking at night and just getting to know them. But I was made uncomfortable by it at first because it's, it's like when you envision, like, impoverished people from other countries thinking about Americans, right, you're sort of almost coming down and, like, living, like,

probably their worst suspicions. Like, dudes who stand around watching you carry their stuff around for them and it just made me a little bit uncomfortable because like you want to be self-sufficient and have someone be like yeah you know we're from america world's most powerful country richest country carry my stuff you know just so this is awkward for me but at the same time how can you fall to do it for wanting to make some money man and in the end the end, in the end, all this resolved. In the end, all this is great. And we made some good friends despite a humongous language barrier because the Chimane, some of them speak a little bit of Spanish, but the Chimane speak Chimane. The guys we're

with who organized, semi-organized the expedition, they speak Spanish. And so you're getting, for us English speakers, Dodie speaks Spanish a bit. you're getting, for us, English speakers, Dodie speaks Spanish a bit. We're getting everything sort of third story. So anyways, we start at the river. We spend the afternoon traveling. Camp on the riverbank. Okay.

Just tent camp on the riverbank. Wake up. Spend the whole day traveling upriver. Tent camp on the riverbank. Realize that something was forgot. So these guys get scolded in a way that I felt was inappropriate. And some of them are sent back downriver to retrieve these rods. We then spend 24 hours waiting for them to run all night and all day to come back up to that point.

There was a rainstorm that night. Thunderstorm. Big storm. Big storm. Yeah. What was cool, though, about their run that was interesting is like the next day we're in camp or they show up at some point and we're like, man, where did all these big sabalos come from?

And as those boys are running all night long they had these fish sabalo which we should talk about but yeah just jumping in the boat yeah there's this herbivorous fish here called sabalo and it's sort of the base of the river so it's like the fish that everybody eats is sabalo all the big fish eat sabalo and the natives eat a ton of sabalo a ton of them and they're everywhere man it was funny because we were going up and janice was trying to think he's like i think i've seen these fish before where some dude goes out at night and shines a light and the fish all start jumping out of the water.

When these guys get back from going down to get the rods, we spent the whole day dicking around camp. When they go back to get the rods, they come back and they got a mountain of sawblow. And I'm like, what the hell were they doing? How were they catching them all? And just apparently all these sawblow jumped in their boat while they're running down river at night. And a big sawblow would be up to like, I don't know, three pounds, four pounds.

There's a hell of a lot of sawblows as long as your hand. There's a lot that are big. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada.

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Did we even bother traveling upriver that night? We did. We had a very short run of about two, maybe three hours. Traveled upriver again, camped down the bank. At this point, we've been dicking with fishing, and no one's caught a thing yet. Okay. Nothing. I think we had one bite.

Remember that one bite I had and the fish got off. That's right. We threw a cast net, caught some saw blow at a cast net. Wake up the next day, travel all day again, and reach as high as you can get the boats on the river. They call it a heeses. A heeses, which is like a pepper. It's a pepper. Yeah.

And they just used to grow up there and grow pepper. And that's kind of the end of the line. You're not going to get a boat anywhere beyond that. Even though there's still a shitload of river up above, you're not going to get a boat past that point. By then, we're how many days into this? Four. I think it's the fourth day we got to main camp. So four days to get there, we realized we only got three or four days to be there.

And the river, even though it's like supposedly oh yeah how you go clear it gets all that just river looks like garbage mud so we plan out right well we can't fish so the first thing we're gonna do is go out in the jungle to hunt with the chimane now in bolivia it's like technically this is something I have to look into more. It's sort of illegal to hunt, but everybody hunts. There's just no, like hunting is completely unregulated, okay? Because the indigenous people have still, I don't say like complete autonomy. Yeah, the way it was explained to us is just that nobody, I don't know if it would be legal autonomy, but it would just be like they get to do what they do.

There's no regulated hunting. So there's no seasons. There's no bag limits, right? It's like up for the people to decide what they do. These guys like to hunt at night. They primarily hunt at night with flashlights, with bows. And it seems to be that recently what the technology has been rolling in is break open shotguns and 22s oh yeah double deuces they got 22s two of the guys two of the older guys that were kind of like seem like pretty experienced i want to say woodsman pretty experienced jungleman

this is dude marco and his dude alberto when we picked this guy alberto up in one of the upper villages he when i bought a bow from him and i'll talk about these bows real quick they make bows This is dude Marco and this dude Alberto. When we picked this guy Alberto up in one of the upper villages, he, when I bought a bow from him, and I'll talk about these bows real quick. They make bows entirely in native material. So the actual bow is one piece. It's not laminated. It's just like one carved piece.

There's a plant. They make fibers from a plant. And they weave it for a string. The arrow is a reed with a foreshaft. And the reed's soft and they, what do you call that, like the string? Like serving. There's serving on each end of the shaft made from another plant that they weave into a string, a thread. A cord.

And wrap it. They fletch it with different feathers. Either curacao or we saw, what else did we see? Toucan? Was it a toucan? I think so. I think it was a toucan. Some feathers on the toucan.

The bow and the tip are made of bamboo, some form of bamboo. Yeah, there's a shaft. There's like a chute on bamboo they make a tip from. And everybody carries the same collection of arrows. They'll carry a couple fish points, which are like these long, thin points with barbs carved into them. And when you say long, they're probably close to two feet? The whole damn arrow is 18 inches, two feet. The whole damn arrow is four feet tall.

Yeah, it's definitely the longest arrow you've ever seen. And the point is made long because you're gonna be shooting fish in shallow rocky water constantly dulling it and so that you can quickly resharpen and be back in the game so i'm guessing one of those points lasts a lot of shots 50 shots that's what i was most impressed by those fish points and the hardwood and how easily they would pierce a fish and how even maybe better than metal it is just because you can sharpen oh yeah that was really impressive to me we had been out with these guys you know these other like indigenous hunters in in guyana and they had they probably started with the same setup i imagine their bowls are very similar but they were running they had hog wires so like that heavy fencing and they would pound

fish points out of hog wire and put a barb in them with a file um but you realize that their system was a little bit reliant on man-made materials and these guys it's just not like all shit from the jungle um same with the boats so everybody's get up like every dude that's got a bow walks around with his bow and he's got four or five arrows two or three fish points he's got a blunt tip which is like a foreshaft that's thinner than the end of a pool cue with a big wooden blunt that looks like something you use the like when you're when you're making a mojito like that thing you use to mash the mint leaves up and then a big game point or land animal point which is a big it looks like a spear point when you look at it it's actually

bamboo and it's sharp as shit and you can shoot it and then shave off a little bit and sharpen it and it's like a spear point no metal whatsoever and this dude i was asking him how far how much penetration he gets on something like a tape here and tape here might be three four hundred pounds thick skin he said he'll get four or five inches of penetration at that point if you don't hit it in the heart you will will not find it. So you can imagine the shotguns are pretty popular. When we picked this Chimane Alberto up, he was packing. I bought a bow from him. He was packing another bow with two fish arrows,

and he brought a 16-gauge Russian-made shotgun. It looked like it was made eons ago. The butt plate said Bacall, like Lake Bacall. And all the shotguns said it was made in Russia. I don't think it even said 16 gauge on it. I didn't see it. And he had a homemade strap made from some

quicksilver strap like the surf company. So we get there and we're like, he's like, we're like, when do you want to go hunting? And he wants to go hunting

at five o'clock. So we mess around, get a late start and me and Dane don't even start following this dude Alberto and this dude Marco.to this dude marco marco's got a bow he's got his fish points his spear point is our thing and we start walking

we don't get i don't know we didn't get very far into the jungle maybe 10 minutes at the most i'd say 15 minutes and there's these little orange things on the ground that look like a you know look like dried apricot like dried apricot quarters laying on the ground and marco turns to me and i couldn't tell if he's making a symbol to me we can't talk these guys at all right it's all just gestures well do you can use a little spanish barely though we can figure some stuff out he turns me and makes a gesture like i think he's making a gesture like aroma like he's sort of running his hand up to his nose as though he's like if you were trying to cook something and bring the smell of what you're cooking up to your nose but i now think wafting wafting a throw motor for him i now

think he meant the stuff likes to eat the fruit and there was kind of a smear on a leaf like a shit like smear and he touched that and smelled it. And then they start looking up in the tree. And there is a monkey. A red monkey. Red howler monkey. A red howler monkey up in the tree. And you felt like the monkey spooked a little bit, don't you?

You know, not. I mean, it did, but slowly. I think right when we first saw it, it was basically just sitting right there, maybe 15 yards up in the tree. And it slowly... Yeah, I don't know how spooked it was. Maybe it was spooked, but I didn't feel like it was booking.

I felt like it was just sort of ambling away, maybe. I don't know. I want to say, too, man man these dudes are in tune these dudes i have lived kind of in the same place their whole life they're super in tune what's going on and when you're out in the jungle if you're not i haven't spent much time in the jungle at all it's bewildering how much sound there is it's deafening there's all these sounds going off they don't give a shit about most of the sounds then we hear one sound like this and they're really interested in that even though it's like 100 yards away. I'm like, they got like,

whoa, what was that? They like that fruit, and then shortly after they look out the tree and there's this holly monkey, and this holly monkey starts kind of leaving the area. And the dude with the shotgun goes after it. I'll let Dodie tell us what happens next. Yeah, well, yeah. It's too disturbing for me to talk about. I didn't actually find it that disturbing. So we saw the monkey, and my first thoughts obviously were... You guys have to turn around and look at the light. Oh, look at that thing.

Look at that. Describe that. Somebody, Yanni, describe that picture. We've been watching it for probably three hours, and it's been just constantly this evolving giant thunderhead off in the distance. We're in a very flat country, so it's a very big sky. And off in the distance, there's a giant thunderhead that takes up probably 30%, 40% of the skyline.

You know, it looks like as if you had a veil. Like a veil, and behind it, we're shooting off flash bulbs. That's incredible. That's probably why we're here. That's probably the storm that kept us here today. But the lightning is almost constant. It's just moving through this giant thunderhead, illuminating different sections of it.

And there's still pieces of sun illuminating one edge of it. It looks like that cloud in the movie Ghostbusters. It does. It looks more like that. Or it movie ghostbusters big dark solo cloud and then the state pop comes in yeah we're some hardcore jungle shit out here so anyways here's this monkey here's a monkey here's a chimani with a shotgun and uh so i've all i'm thinking about first of all is just getting one clean shot of that monkey in the tree, which I was able to get several. So it wasn't bucking.

It was there. It was red. It was obviously a howler monkey. I would say it was aware of us. Yeah, no. I agree. It wasn't. It thought it was probably best to take off.

Yeah. It wasn't making noise, though. And it wasn't moving especially fast because I think probably within 30 seconds. It was 30 seconds, I'd say, from when we saw it until the shot happened and he had very left the tree he moved one tree over and came down closer to us so now a holler monkey i think if you were standing up in the holler monkey stood up he's not gonna reach your waist not even close i don't think like just above knee height maybe yeah to the top of his, if he's standing next to you. Long tail.

And, yeah, so, well, I think they looked to Steve first to see if he'd shoot it. Steve did not want to shoot the monkey, but Steve quickly said, shoot it. Yeah, I had a bow with me. I had a compound bow I brought down. I didn't even know if I was going to use the thing, but I feel like it helped sort of in a Communication way you know Like fellow hunters kind of stuff

But there's no way I went down like I'm not going to Like I vowed a long time ago to not hurt Monkeys It's like where I draw a line But Alberto the Chimani hunter has no problem hurting monkeys And in fact he loves to eat monkeys And they all do It's one of their favorite

Their favorite food it seemed to me was was the uh what's the small the spider monkey which they call marimono this one they call maniche which is that red howler and i mean it was just you know like i have now filmed probably i don't know 50 animals getting killed and and it was simple. There was a monkey in the tree, and there was a shot, and it took probably 10 seconds. I feel like maybe it was clinging on or something. Yeah, but what happened? What happened? What do you mean?

What first fell out of the tree? I didn't see that. Oh, I saw that. You saw that? Yeah, I saw it. Well, the monkey gets hit. It was just like hitting a squirrel up a tree with a shotgun, where you he's gonna come down but you're not correct you're winning like he's still kind of hanging on and out geez man bats lightning bugs lightning bolts out comes a baby monkey

that's riding on the monkey the baby monkey falls hangs up in the brush you saw that first you saw that come down i saw the monk I saw the baby monkey come right out of the monkey oh shit I didn't see that it was packing around a little baby there's a happy ending to this but the baby monkey falls down out of tree then the big monkey comes down on tree and then it kind of howled like a holler monkey a little damn so these guys are tickled pink about that and they pick up the big monkey pick up the baby monkey come up have a smoke pack some coca leaves and then cut the the bottom of the tail off which i missed on camera unfortunately i didn't see it yeah so

this dude alberto they're smoking and these guys are into their substances, man, from everything I saw. They like alcohol. They like cigarettes. And they chew coca leaves. And coca leaves are what I developed quite a fondness for, too, just as a physical act more than anything. But they, coca is cocaine. Cocaine comes from a coca leaf, but it's like a chemical process, I gather,

to make cocaine out of it. But it's legal down here to have coca leaves and the chimane and dhoti says all over south america like working class people native people just pack their gum full of coca leaves it's just mild not just gum though cheek it's not gum like chewing tobacco in the states it's like it's like a giant and they call it a bolo because it's a ball they form it looks like a cue ball in your cheek yeah definitely it numbs your tooth it numbs your cheek and numbs your tooth but i couldn't really tell what it does you really didn't feel anything i couldn't it's it's not more than having like an espresso no definitely not i'd say even a little smoother than that but you're missing the the other important part is that they activate the alkaloids in it by baking soda.

So a very basic substance. Yes, basic substance. You take baking soda, you dip your finger in it, and then you kind of rub it on the inside of the bolo. And that tastes good. Oh, it does. I was scared of that shit at first. Towards the end, I was packing some. These guys run a racquetball.

I was running a golf ball with bacon soda. And they also drink alcohol to activate it. So we're out with these dudes in Alberto Marco. I'll interrupt this monkey thing for a minute. I think they got one water bottle. I'm just pouring sweat. Don't be sweating so bad you thought something was wrong with it. I did.

I thought I was fucked up. Don't thought he was dying. So I said, no, I'm sweating too like that. Meanwhile, I'm just drinking water. I drank all my water within an hour. And these guys got one little 16-ounce bottle that looked like it had been washed up on the beach. And it's full of what I think is water. And every time they stop, they swap a swig.

And all of a sudden, I'm thinking, man, these guys don't drink any water at all. They're just like barely going through this one bottle and I realize it's the stuff that's like tasteable what is it it's called singani it's a great we're drinking it right now it's a liquor made out of grapes it's kind of like a very strong grappa in Italy but it's made but they like it too because it releases more of the alkaloids from the coca leaves so anyway they shoot the monkey have a smoke have some more coca leaves have some alcohol then marco walks over to a tree and cuts a thong like cuts a string of tree bark ties it around the monkey's chest right below his arms and his monkey

you're used to animals to have six or eight teats this monkey is nursing and this monkey has two tits right where humans tits are and they look like humans tits and it has a human's vagina wraps the string around its armpits wraps string around its waist and runs like across his shoulders takes a little extra string to tie the baby on there, and we head off into the jungle. I think it's worth mentioning that... Oh, the tail thing. The tail thing and just like

there was a moment, more than a moment of sort of shock and sort of, you know... I was shocked by it. That's what I mean. You were shocked by it. No, I was shocked by it. I don't mean to sound casual about it. I had gone, and the question, I had been out to dinner with some friends a couple nights before leaving, and we were talking about the trip, and I was saying, I understand these boys love spider monkeys.

And I said, I will not shoot a monkey. I would rather shoot a person than a monkey. Because I just like in the words of Jerry Clower, they're too much like folks. And to see that monkey get shot not only that but the way it was carrying around its baby and also that it had breasts,

human breasts and a human vagina and a semi-human face disturbed me. I later ate the monkey. Some of it. But it disturbed me no end. And I was a little rattled by it. But then it's like,

I'm not going to tell these guys what, it's your favorite food. Yeah, to elaborate on that, not only is it their favorite, it is a delicacy. They like it better than deer. They like it better than paca. They like it better than beef.

They like it better than beef. Dude, I asked them a hundred times to have it translated. What's the best food? What's your favorite food? It's the monkeys. Yeah. Spider monkey, holler monkey.

Because it has more taste. That's what was translated back to us. It's because it tasted like flavor or some more. Like there was something to it. And the cool thing is this guy, Alberto, he pulls out. These guys all carry little kitchen knives. If you were going to have a kid draw the classic kitchen knife, that's what they all carry. A lot of carbon steel.

They'll have it from a paring knife side or whatever. No sheaths. They just put the knife in their bag. Pulls out this little paring knife and cuts an inch of the monkey's tail off and buries it and i thought i thought it was an offering which isn't outlandish to think because they later explained us we would have had a better trip had we given more offerings of alcohol cigarettes and coca leaves to the river we would have had a better trip so he buries the monkey's. Later we find out you buried the monkey's tail. You cut the monkey's tail off so that the next monkey you kill doesn't get hung up by his tail in the tree.

Which is good. Which makes me think American squirrel hunters should cut the front feet off. And Giannis came up with this idea. Tell me what you're going to do the next time you kill an elk. You remember saying this? Put the grass in their mouth? No. He said, no, he was going to splatter the blood all over the place. Oh, to leave a better blood trail, man.

And then we take off into the jungle, and I don't think anything more happened. No, not like of note, but I think i think after that i probably had my favorite moment in meat eater filming history which was sitting in the pitch dark with those two guys on the top of the hill in jungle just like wondering what the fuck is going on you know just it was that was my favorite you mean just listening to him talk no well that yes sitting in the, that and sitting in the dark

hearing the noises of the jungle and hearing the noises of the hunters and just like just really soaking in that moment. Because that's not something you get to do. You know, no matter what. I've been in the jungle a bunch of times, but being with those guys in an actual, very authentic you know, looking for

game moment was pretty fantastic. I really enjoyed it. It's scary too, you know it's just an edge of like, you know, looking for game moment was pretty fantastic. I really enjoyed it. It's scary, too. You know, it's just an edge of, like, you don't know what you're sitting on. You don't know what's going on. You've got all these thoughts of spiders and snakes and all this shit, but you're just sitting right on the ground in the jungle. It is.

It's a little bit scary, but also beautiful. And it's like, because you can't tell what the shaman are saying, you know, they could be, like, telling a story like, well, anyway, so I went down, I went back to Verizon, and they told me that the phone had gotten wet. I mean, maybe they were talking about something like that, but it feels like they're talking

about something different, and the language is like, who here, and this comes from a place of love, who here would like to mimic the sound of the shaman talking? I think Phil does that well. It's kind of like... Yeah.

But not goofing on it. I mean, it really is like... Super quiet. Born of the jungle. Really quiet. Like I later said, it's like the words fall to the jungle floor.

Yeah. You know? You know when you're out in the woods and you hear some dudes talking and laughing and shit? You would not ever in a million years be out in the woods and hear some Chimane dudes way off. Very quiet.

They don't talk loud by the river when they're fishing. It's very guttural. They're just like... It's awesome. They could be talking about the most banal stuff, but it feels like they're talking about some ancestral hunting business. I got the sense that they were just saying super simple things, too. I mean, I have no idea if that's true or not. But they'll stop and gesture about trees and stuff a lot.

Yeah. And not carry on a conversation, but just like sharing information. And then they would use their flashlights now and then but now they stop and just like just like listen and yeah and the jungle's deafening man the yeah it's worth to mention again the volume of the jungle at night is just it's mind-boggling he i was very on edge the night that i spent you know filming you guys, it was like you're on the trail, it's daylight, it's like, all right, it's woods. You're just in the familiar woods. Doesn't matter if it's Montana or Bolivia, you're in the woods. These are woods. And then it got dark. And every time

I stepped six inches off that trail, man, it's just like my adrenaline just pumped up just a little bit. Just, you don't know. Do you think there's any place in the United States that has as loud of a night woods like down south or or anything there's got to be around florida or something possibly it's loud but it can't be like this i've been around i've been yeah i don't mean to sound like a blowhard but i mean i've been to a ton of places and i never thought this place is loud the next night here right yeah yeah the next night we go out nothing of note really happened during the day nothing happened that day no fish were caught the next day we go out and we'll say when you're walking on the trail they're large kind of looking off your best interest there's so many things out there they're gonna mess you up there's some

snake did you ever catch what that snake was? No, I don't know what it's called. I thought that it might have been the Bushmaster, but I don't believe so. It's a little green, skinny green snake is the worst kind. Most dangerous thing out there. There's some spiders that will mess you up good. And there's this little critter called a bullet ant that's like, how long, an inch and a half long? Two inches. So we get to talking about how we're going to go out and sit a salt lick at night with flashlights

and we leave before dark again and start walking through the jungle and nothing really happened no no no what am I saying we got after a bird I missed a bird a couple times with my bow each one of you missed?

Marco missed with his bow. Alberto shot it with a shotgun and missed it. But it's this small bird, a guan. They really want it. They call a lot of birds pava, which is Spanish for turkey. They know the names of them, absolutely, but they refer to them generally. The same way you might say game bird i guess they refer to grouse you think yeah yeah maybe like yeah you use like the word grouse right and

there's obviously a bunch of species of grouse they use pava and it's like bird that is good to eat and of these pava there could be any number of birds black and crested curacao and the guans i don'tans. I don't know anymore. I don't know anymore. There's a couple of guans. We get after one of those. Beautiful bird. They wanted it real bad.

That turns up nothing. And through Chase's bird, we kind of wind up. I can't tell. Do you think we ever got this? This night, the first night when I was meeting Doty, then the next night we go out,

it's me and Phil Baraboo. Do you feel like we got to the salt lake? You have no idea what's going on because you can't communicate with the dudes you're with. It seemed like we were because he broke branches. We got to this little creek bed, like small creek bed. And he broke branches like a shooting lane. Yeah, that's what I felt. I felt like he was setting up for me.

And then they both came up. We found a log, and we sat on the log like you would wait for any other kind of hunt. That's what I felt like he was setting up for the night. And then they both came up. We found a log, and we sat on the log like you would wait for any other kind of hunt. That's what I felt like. I felt like, oh, he's clearing a little shooting lane. And we kind of get away, and we got flashlights, but it's still daylight out. Just getting dark. And the night before, I noticed every time we stepped over a log, they would examine the log and then take the bow tip and kill these big-ass ants on the

log and I got the sense I mean everything moves there everything's alive is you never run out of new kinds of bugs I got the sense that they don't like that kind of hand and we're sitting there and I think it was just cuz I just turned my light light on, maybe. I came over, and all of a sudden I realized there's six of these big-ass ants around us. And you got it first. Yeah. Yeah, I got it. It was on my shirt. Well, I was worried because we were sitting there, and I was worried they climbed up under my shirt.

And so just as I went to look, it stung me right on the basically first knuckle, my first finger. And I probably screamed a little bit. Dude, it hurts. And it stung like a bitch. And it basically, it was like a, it was a bad bee sting. But I didn't know what to think. I mean, initially. Yeah, initially.

Initially, it was like a bad bee sting. Initially, and I think. Bee sting times what? No. Times two? 1.5? Yeah, it wasn't like crazy. Not like a honeybee, but like a hornet.

You know like a bad bee sting where you're like, that stinks. Yeah, you would have thought it was a hornet for five minutes. Beyond, like you can't just say it's smart. It's worse than it's smart. Oh, no. It's like, you don't think about something else. Right. You would be like, ah!

You're like, what? Yeah. I mean, something something is thrown on the beat on the neck by a bee last night I would have reacted about the same way in the first five minutes of a bullet ant gotcha yeah but those bees were like a tenth of when you say no I'm saying the initials a yeah yeah initials app was be like it quickly becomes nothing like a bee, but the initial zap is bee-like. But before you go into years, so as a cameraman, I got stung.

I knew Patrick, who is one of the guides here, had kind of mentioned everything that bites and stings, and I remember him saying bullet ant, and I didn't know if it was bad or if it was just like a bee sting or whatever. And so they're asking me, are you okay? And I'm like, yeah, it hurts, but I got to keep shooting. We're here for a good amount of days.

But they're asking if it's okay, but we can't, they're gesturing, are you okay? Yeah, and I'm just like, whatever, I'm going to roll with it because we're out here hunting. We got to do this. So, and then all of a sudden, you yell out a yell. Well, he at this point said, let's go. So we, there was enough bullet ants here where we abandoned the plan to hunt the lick so they were aware of the bullet ants at the oh yeah they are isn't it funny that we got stung and they didn't

know they were aware of the bullet ants when I turned my light on I had to turn the light on and was like wow after you both got bit Phil gets zapped they're like let's go we start walking and I get zapped on the ankle through a neoprene sock geez and then I'm I don't like I have a very low tolerance for pain and we make it out to the trail and he I don't know what's going on I was like I got hit by a lionfish one time and I hadn't read up on on it. So it's like you get hit, and you're like, I know that it hurts, and I can handle all that, but I don't know what this means for me, right? Is it like getting bit by a rattlesnake?

Like, do you go to the doctor now? Is the trip over now? And the guy, Marco, gestures to Phil. Explain the gesture. He looks at me. so Steve got stung in the ankle I got stung in the knuckle so he first looks at me points to where I got stung on his hand and gestures up his hand up his arm too much to his heart saying basically this poison is gonna to go to your heart. He runs like a line, like excruciatingly slowly, this line up your arm to your heart. And we're like, I don't really follow what exactly that means.

And then they go to Steve and do the same exact thing from his ankle, but it basically ends up his ball sack. Yeah, so he's like, points of film, then it'll go to his heart, and to me it's a ball sack. So does that mean we die now? We've got these two guys both looking at us with concern. Very concerned.

Very concerned. They start looking around in the trees and come back with a four-inch chunk of vine. And the vine, when you cut it open, resembles almost like ginger root. Exactly. And he takes his knife and starts scraping and pulping the contents of the vine

and packing it on our bites. And then he kind of says, like, vamo, like, you know, time to go, let's go, time to go, and points that we need to go back to our camp or go deeper into the jungle. And at that point I realized that we weren't going to die because he was like, pick whichever one you want. We still had no idea what this meant and what.

And now it's like intense arthritic joint pain. Wouldn't you say? Burning and throbbing. I got to say something here. Because you also called back on the radios. We had a radio on. This was a while later. That was an hour later.

Oh, was it really? Yeah. Really. And I don't even know why we didn't think about it. I didn't realize we had the radio still way later. But that was the moment that I realized you were from the Midwest, Phil, because you kind of got, like, the radio call, and you go, like, you copy, you copy. You go, yep.

You go, like, oh, hey, just checking in. How you guys doing? I'm like, oh, we're good. What's going on? No, we were an hour into it and at that point It wasn't it was way beyond like it wasn't intensifying. I definitely was just like, you know what we called I was thinking there's no way I can sleep with this level of pain Mm-hmm. That was where I was at at that point in

Marco in Alberta had lost all interest in our bites We somehow wound up way ass back in the jungle on the edge of the river laying there on these huge boulders these huge boulders on this river we shine for some fish and then we're all laying out on these rocks actually before that you got to mention the benadryl oh so we took ibuprofen and benadryl, which knocked our dicks in the dirt, man. We couldn't even stay awake. We were out in the jungle the middle of the night. Couldn't stay awake.

Go down to the river, and the minute we arrive at the edge of the river, Albert will shine his light in the river, and I'm not kidding you, there's a fish's tail at the surface. You can't see it three inches into the water, but there's a fish's tail. So Marco real quick loads his bow. The fish arrow pulls back. The fish tail vanishes, and then they decide that we will now lay on the riverbank, on the rocks,

in the dark for an hour. At which point, and smoke cigarettes and eat coca leaves, at which point I'm like, there's no way I can sleep with this level of pain. And I'm really sleepy from taking the Benadryl. And I remember that we had a CB or a radio.

There's no way they'll hear us there's no way we can communicate back we're a long ways away the canyon must be straight there because loud and clear it's conveyed to us that it just hurts like a bitch and then goes away and shortly after

it went away, the pain when we got back that night at 11.55 we got back that night at 11.55, we got stung right at dusk. At 11.55, I couldn't remember which foot got hit. Like, gone. The bullet ant.

You still have your bite though, Phil, right? Yeah, you can feel a little bit, but it's not bad. It was never explained to us what he meant with the ominous hand gesture up the arm and leg. Which almost made me puke when he did that. Yeah, then Phil got nauseous and he couldn't tell if he was nauseous from the news or nauseous from dying. Might have been the news because he's here with us now.

I can't quite tell now If I'm jealous I think No I am I can't tell I am jealous I'm glad it happened Oh I'm super glad it happened

I'm jealous of you guys There's a I was on a river in Peru once And the tribe that That was there They're writing a passage For their kids Like when a boy is 15 or 16

They They Like build a Pillowcase And they put like 7 or 8 Bullets in it And then they build a pillowcase and they put like seven or eight bullet ants in it. And then they tie that pillowcase around his forearm for like an hour. Oh, yeah.

And he gets bit, like hit multiple times for an hour. And that's their rite of passage into manhood. One of the rites of passage. That'll do it. Wow. Yeah. Doty's got more jungle experience and more sort of like indigenous you know. A little bit

not a ton. I've spent some time in Ecuador and Peru doing some stuff but I can count the number of days I spent in the jungle on my hands and toes.

I mean legit jungle. Yeah. You know like real legit jungle. It's scary. The third night we went out I'm skipping all

the fishing parts but the third night we go out we started out at the other end we started out way'm skipping all the fishing parts but the third night we go out we started out at the other end we started out way ass out in junks we'd gone off to fish all day and we got a couple big ass catfish maturo or toro caught a dorado um and it's just getting dark when it's time to go back. And Giannis and I, the whole dang crew there, like all 80 of us are out there, but we decided to be the first guys down the trail.

Everybody else will follow later. And we started down the trail, and right off the bat, again, bam, monkeys. They couldn't have cared less about these monkeys. Yeah, they were a different species i don't even know if we clarify what they were cappuccino cappuccino cappuccino yeah we didn't learn from them what it was but they're like well there's a monkey by the way i'm thinking well you boys sure oh we gotta back up hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join.

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onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Before the bullet ant thing, the night we get back with the mama monkey and the baby monkey, we're like way down the monkey. We want to film cooking the monkey. They go down the river. We're like, you can go ahead and gut it. So we go down the river. They go down the river and film cooking the monkey. They go down to the river. We're like, you can go ahead and gut it.

So we go down to the river. They go down to the river and they gut the monkey and pull out the kidneys, heart, and liver, and intestines. And flush the intestines. Turn them inside out. Put them on a stick. And they ask if they can eat the baby monkey. And this baby monkey isn't as long. I'm looking right now at a water bottle.

If you stretch this monkey out, he's not as long as a water bottle. It's like a little kitten. Like a kitten. They take the baby monkey, burn his hair off real quick, cut him into... I don't know.

Quarters. They basically head him and quarter him cut him into I don't know quarters they basically head him and quarter him and fry him in a wok little arms little head it's a feat look whatever

it's they fried him up in a wok it was disturbing yeah he got to walk him out on his plate you don't need to sugar coat it

for westerners for westerners it is a very, very shocking picture. You know, we are just not accustomed to anything like that. It's shocking. It's disturbing. But to them, they were so excited, so stoked. Yeah, they fried the baby in oil the next day of cooking the whole monkey they take the monkey hold by the tail wave it over the fire and burn all the hair off the monkey then they scrape with the machete then they go down the river and clean the monkey

then he kind of cuts all the joints just enough where you can break the joints so open like you're opened up what would be like your uh ball joints at the top of your femur cut the knee joints a little bit cut the elbow joints a little bit took some vines did you use bark or vine for for which pot to bind the monkey trust it he trusts the monkey with either bark or vine yeah i think he might use bark yeah cut more of those ropes from the bark and trust the monkey and then they build a rack up over the fire you notice they always stack their logs perpendicular. Like their fires, they like lay the logs, no I'm sorry, not, no, they always stack them parallel.

They just lay a bunch of big logs parallel to the fire. They got a rack over it. Trust the monkey and then say he's going to smoke that monkey eight hours, six hours. Smoked the monkey for six hours, then just chopped it up into little pieces, and they made monkey soup, thickened, so water, monkey, and plantain, and salt.

Yeah, but the plantain, they like scraped with a spoon. It was very cool to see. Green plantain. Green plantain scraped real fine, and then, so it became more like a meal, because it became kind of a thickening agent,

or a gravy almost. It was almost like monkey and cornmeal, corn mush, and grits, right, but made out of plantain, skin on it. And it tasted like, I struggled. I couldn't think of what it tasted like. Now if I had to say it tastes like something,

it tastes like a smoked turkey drumstick with a very thick skin. These boys eat everything. They couldn't get through the skin. I didn't see anybody try to eat the skin. You can make a football out of that monkey skin. There's no meat anywhere. I mean, there's meat, but it's thin pieces of meat. Whatever piece I got had, like, I got a good, like, mouthful of flesh when I took a bite.

I don't know what it was. I'll tell you what, it was good, though, man. It was good. Very mild. The only thing was alarms. They threw the brain and the spinal column in there. And you always hear about diseases that may jump from monkeys. But I think most of that happens in Africa.

That's just a general thing. Yeah. You're warned to not eat much spinal column fluid or brain. So I still am a little alarmed. I was alarmed by the monkey. But I'll tell you what. The monkey was legitimately good. And it didn't taste like anything. And you can see monkey was legitimately good. And it didn't taste like anything.

You can see why people like it, because it doesn't taste like anything. I mean, it tastes good, but you don't eat it and think it's like... I know, these guys are laughing at me. I'm like, now, if I've never served monkey in secret, I'd be like, that's monkey. I feel like I know now what monkey tastes like. They like the brain out of there they eat the head there was there's a for me a lesson there just in general about being a meat hunter you know and somehow you know the perspective of seeing these guys doing what they normally do

and just comparing it to us killing a deer in minnesota in Montana it was it was an eye-opening experience just to just to eat it and know that it was not any different than anything that we ever do yourself no there was no like ew well all 17 guys lined up to get monkey and they were lining up like if you you know if you had a bunch of dudes you hang out with over your house and you made chili and you're like chili's ready and everybody came to get some chili it was just like that yeah it wasn't like oh man we're eating weird now it was like awesome man he made chili his chili is so good the difference being is we had to be strict about them not eating it before we were like they wanted to eat it that

first night and they almost did yeah they almost did we had to basically protect this monkey so we could film it yeah doing the chili thing i don't mean like um like it was blasé i mean like uh you're hungry your buddy made like great chili i mean like excited but not like oh you know yeah i almost feel like it was more like if you were serving up tenderloin there It was that kind of excitement. Yeah, you're right. I was just saying chili marks was something you ladle out. Yeah. Marco ate his.

He uses a banana leaf, a plantain leaf to make a spoon, man. I feel like we need to give that guy more credit. We need to build him up a little bit. Marco was like... Yeah, you'll hear in his hunting story, though, the oh yeah throwing that thing hey i can't spoil it but yeah so third night out yeah marco's like marco kind of emerged as he looks older but he's my age one year older me he's 41 and um but it looks like a solid 51, 55 maybe even. Very hard hunter. Weathered, you know, dark skin.

Traditional haircut. Later told us that, later recounted this story to us about a jaguar he killed. Only when prodded did he bring this up, but a jaguar he killed that he has some hunting dogs. And he was out hunting one night and a jaguar killed his dog and he killed the jaguar and it was a pretty fascinating story

if you go to themeateater.com we'll be posting that interview we might even put the interview on the show somehow yeah I think we should

I think too we will so you see this other monkey in the tree and they could give a shit about this monkey and I kind of like I'm like they're looking at me and i'm like well shoot the monkey so i make the universe like pow pow noise and he kind of didn't care one of marco grabs the shotgun goes off in that direction and uh you said he had a shot oh yeah i followed him we could see the monkey

jumping up through the tree branches you could see like a full silhouette again you know nighttime you could but against the sky still had just enough light where you could see the full silhouette of the monkey he points at it kind of gets his light like you know positioned with the gun pointed at it and then just was like let's go yeah they didn't want that kind of monkey we go down the trail a little bit, and Marco's walking point with the shotgun. Alberto's behind him with the bow. I'm behind Alberto with a bow. And Giannis is behind me with a camera. And all of a sudden, you'll see him.

They get tuned in, and he knows something's going on. And all of a sudden, Marco's got his light, his flashlight, and his shotgun. Alberto stops, and Marco kind of goes ahead and tells him that he's going to shoot. And bam! You know, with his 16 gauge, a little buckshot. And again, it's amazing because there's no way that we had any idea that there was a critter in that. I never heard of it.

Shit. He shoots and it's like he hit Godzilla. The noise. I thought it was a tape here. Something big. I mean, it sounded like a horse could have been running through the jungle at that moment. Loud. I'm like, holy.

I didn't know what was going to happen. But what happened was he hit a red brocket deer, but he was too far out front and just hit the tip of his nose with buckshot. So his nose was kind of perforated with four or five buckshot wounds. Not fatal at all and the deer for whatever reason runs up onto the trail kind of like in the middle of us all and stops i pull out an arrow and i can't see a thing i pull out an arrow and try to sight it down the side and hit the broccid deer through the back leg. The broccid deer runs off in the jungle.

Then someone's trying to light it out, and I shot it through the back end of the rib cage, and then it expired. This deer, I don't know how to describe that deer. Kind of low to the ground, very small. What do they call it? Basso? Wasso. It's like the size of a fawn. I feel like a whitetail fawn in Michigan.

It does get shot often during hunting season. I mean, one of those deer you can pick up with one hand, but it just had a little more plumpness to it. So it was the size of a fawn, but it had the plumpness. But it had the appearance of a sexually mature deer. A fawn during hunting season? I was going to say more like a newborn. No, not that small.

Way smaller. Yeah. Really? Way smaller. It wasn't like a little, you know how you see those in the fall? It would be if you shot a deer on like, if you shot a deer September 20ember 20 a white tail not a november fawn no way a small deer but robust it had a mature look to it but small reddish color had a tail reminiscent of a white tail but proportionately i felt had shorter legs. Yes. Definitely wasn't as leggy as our white tails.

They drag it up the trail, and I can't remember. There's a term for it. I can't remember what it is. It's where you gut something. I learned the term in Scotland. You gut something from the diaphragm back. So he made just a hole big enough to get his hand in and gutted everything from the diaphragm back,

meaning the intestines and the stomach, and discarded them. Didn't hang on to them. Cut a string from tree bark, tied it around its waist and around its shoulders. Just behind its shoulders? Yeah. Bloody as all get out, and then throws it on his back and headed out. Nothing more important happened that night. Nope.

You got to give a visual image of Marco, though. Yeah. Oh, yeah. What's interesting is that, like— Through their night vision of what this guy is. We are running full long-sleeves pants and shirts, you know, buffs to protect our necks and and not just for the sun but because of biting stinging things bugs and these boys as soon as they get on the trail at night everybody just takes their shirt off and you know it's just and marco has a very bruce lee like look you know 41

years old wiry cut and when he put that it's like a it is bark basically he takes off of a tree it's a strand of bark it's maybe like an inch and a half two inches wide ties a couple slip knots in it to hold on to the deer and then it's just the perfect size where the it doesn't go across his shoulders but it comes over his head and like the strap is right across his chest just above his nipples yeah i don't even carry duffel bags like that right and the gears below your clavicles kind of across your shoulder yeah and lean into it yeah and the deer's hanging basically just above the small of his back and uh that was the end of it we knew at that point that was the end of it i kind of thought well from what i had

heard it was like oh you'll kill something and then the boys are going to keep hunting because you're out there you're going to keep hunting but what would tip this off is that the whole way the next hour of the hike back to camp it was constant chimani jibber jabber and steve and i were joking it's like you know we think they're talking about hunting this that and the other but they're probably just catching up on the river gossip yeah so we get back in that deer day they do deer totally totally different they quartered they quarter the deer and cut the head off at the neck but leave all the skin on. They cooked, and then they got their smoker rack and they cooked the deer with the hair on it.

They smoke it with the hair on it. So you just like literally cut the deer up and you don't pay any attention about hair side down, meat side down for For how many hours? Too many. A lot. They cooked it on that smoker so long that what the shanks wound up being like in a dry way where the shank was the delicate

part. They're like, here's the best part. He strips that hide off the shank and was pulling little pieces of meat out of there because there's so much gelatin in there that they were still kind of moist and tender. Everything else was just leather. That reminded me of a smoked turkey leg to me. That venison shank tasted like smoked turkey, I thought. And they'll leave it on the smoker and they'll pull it off the smoker and it gets swarmed in bees in a way You wouldn't believe

In general all their cutting methods cooking methods Just a lot rougher than what we're used to Like I said, they don't waste anything But we also just have learned to take so much more care in the preparation of it all and I'm not saying bacteria standpoint yeah and they're not taking care of it but like yeah I'll tell you what though they and they cook the hell out everything but that wasn't was to say well isn't my feeling on in summation is is unappetizing is what they're cooking might look to an outsider they relish it more than you relish

your food i would say yeah they're more excited about than you are about your dinner tonight one thing i thought was really cool was that the that night actually both the night of the monkey kill and the deer kill was to me almost the same exact vibe in an american hunting camp where they were just absolutely celebrating their hunt like they were just happy as shit you know they had some drinks afterward they were beaming the entire camp was happy everybody huddled around the butchering you know we had those two big ass catfish too yeah no it was just it was just like it was a pure celebration everybody was retelling the story of ste, you know, using the bow and how fast he shot. You know, Steve's out here with a Hoyt carbon spider, you know, the top, the best of the best, basically, out there as far as monitoring compound bows.

Showing these guys that bow, you might as well, like someone said, you might as well be like an alien showing them your spaceship. Blown away. might as well like someone said you might as well be like an alien showing them your spaceship blown away oh it was it was almost like the first like what you imagine it was like when the plains indians or any american indian saw a uh rifle yeah it was really shot first shot at that six foot diameter log at 10 yards blown away man this whole Bolivia trip and we've only scratched the surface we talked about one aspect of it we're gonna turn into three shows three episodes 22 minutes per episode. There's a lot of material, man. And I'll tell you what, coming out of it, I have not a changed perspective, but just a really enhanced perspective where it is fun

and very educational and inspiring and beautiful to spend time with indigenous peoples who have a lineage on the landscape that's unbroken. There are many Western influences. We were with these guys that are shocked on that, flashlights. But all that stuff winds up seeming very superficial to be out with people who are on the land which is intact you know this particular place I know there's a ton

of degradation of rainforest all over the you know the latitudinal lines that have rainforest and it's a huge environmental concern a a huge conservation concern, but here in this corner of the world, you can have the experience of being out in an intact rainforest, intact jungle, largely untouched, with people who've been knocking around here forever, hunting the things they've always hunted, and in ways the way they've always hunted them, and it really is, despite everything biting you,

and the heat and the sweat and just the pervasive uncomfortableness, is, as a hunter, very inspiring, very uplifting. I would say we're coming on, having made about 60 episodes of Meat Eater, or more at this point, and I would say whatever're coming on having made about 60 episodes of Meat Eater or more at this point. And I would say whatever you need to do to get your eyes on these shows, because there's something here that's pretty special. Just the depth of the character and both the place and the people that we were with, that I think it's going to be something to really keep an eye out for

yeah so we air the shows not only to turn this into a big ad for the show but we air the show the sportsman channel um and i'll tell you what whatever we come up with and whatever we put forward involving this monkey and everything no one there will mess with it. The cool thing about the network we're at is they don't screw with us at all. We can run things that are shocking and you know things you're not gonna see anywhere else because someone would pull it but we'll run it and Thursday's 8 p.m. or go to meateater. Is it tv.vhx or vhx.tv? Meateater.tv.vhx. Is it?

Yeah. If you put in Meat Eater Podcast you get five bucks off any purchase of shows. You can go there and stream them and download them.

It's a great way to watch it. The best way to watch is just to watch it when it comes out. If you can't watch when it comes out go and download your stream at meateater.vhhxd or just go to the meat eater.com

and you'll find all kinds of stuff and all kinds of ways to watch but these are going to be special shows man um you'll get a glimpse of the lifestyle that has been here a long time but maybe um won't be here for much longer i'm not sure sure. We'll have so much content, I think, here, too, that we'll definitely be throwing up some web specials and putting stuff on the YouTube channel. So it's always good to keep up with the Meteor website because there's always little interesting tidbits. It's a bummer we can't get them into every show,

but at least we get to put them out on the Internet somehow so people can check them out. Yeah, like Marco's jaguar hunting story. Yeah. Alright, we're hoping that we're going to get picked up by this airplane tomorrow. If not, we'll be doing another podcast tomorrow.

Let's end it with the gemonic thank you. You shoulda pie. You shoulda pie. You shoulda pie.