The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 021

Episode Date: October 30, 2015

Bethel, AK. Steven Rinella talks with Janis Putelis, Mike Washlesky, and Korey Kaczmareck from the MeatEater crew. Subjects discussed: Nunivak Cup'ig Eskimos; Texas pride; jumping out of helicopters while snowboarding; the circumpolar distribution of blue mussels; muskox wool; the Arctic explorer Robert Peary; Mickey Mouse boots vs. bunny boots; the poet and novelist Sadaam Hussein; gear list for a Nunivak Island muskox hunt; Russian fur traders; the subsistence lifestyle on Nunivak Island; seal skin hat-buying misadventures; feeling like an ecological participant vs. an ecological voyeur; and putting into words why you sometimes just want to go right back out and do the same hunt all over again. 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.

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Prime viewing for you. All right, thanks for joining the Meat Eater Podcast. We're recording in a very teeny-sounding hotel room in Bethel, Alaska. Bethel, Alaska is in western Alaska. Specifically, it's where the Kuskokwim River flows out into the Bering Sea. Just north of here, you've got the Yukon River flowing out into the Bering Sea. And so the delta that these two things form, people say it's the Yukon River flowing out into the Bering Sea. And so the delta that these two things form, people say it's the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta or YK Delta. It's way

bigger than the delta made by the Mississippi flowing to the Gulf of Mexico. It's actually, the YK Delta is bigger than the state of Louisiana. It's a huge tundra delta. And this area is predominantly, there's 6,000 people in Bethel. It's predominantly native Alaskan, Yupik, Eskimo. We're coming from an island, Nunavak Island, which is 40 miles out into the Bering Sea. The island's about 40 miles by 60 miles, approximately. And that's Chupik Eskimo out there. And the only Chupiks, like Chupiks just live on Nunavak. There's 200 people on Nunavak Island in a town called McCoriuk. And that's where we're coming from.

We're just out there hunting muskox. But speaking of how big the YK Delta is um we're here with mike wash lesky you've never done one of these mike have you well we kind of tried to do one on anchors i didn't have a hot mic yeah yeah mike's done him but his mike has done him but his mic wasn't on so kind of no and we were asking mike mike's from texas and this morning we were asking mike if why is texas so into the thing about how their state's so big but it's not the biggest state it's like texas fits inside of alaska but texans are always like yeah it's a big thing but it's like no other second place thing acts like it's the first place thing. I think it's because it was its own country.

So that's the claim to fame, I guess, to a certain degree. It's the biggest in the lower 48. I guess you could just say that. Yeah, but it's... It's probably carrying over from when... When it was the biggest. From before Alaska became a state. And then it was.

Okay, what's a sports team that used to be good, now they suck? Like the Packers? Did the Packers ever used to win? Did they always win the Super Bowls in the old days? I feel like they did. They've been great. Okay, so people, the Packers don't run around being like, yeah, number one, champion, right?

It's like you used to be. You're not now. Now you're just like a team. You guys are just like a state. Texas has a lot of pride. Yeah. It's like you used to be, you're not now. Now you're just like a team. Yeah. You guys are just like a state. Texas has a lot of pride. Yeah. I mean, people get tattooed.

I mean, how many tattoos you see of like, you know, Massachusetts on somebody's shoulder? Well, here you tattoo 907 on your arm. Is that the area code? It's a single area code state.

Like Wyoming, Montana. So what happens whenever there's another area code and you happen to have that tattoo? You do slash, then you're the next three numbers. It's like a two-point number. Also, so Mike's a camera operator and still a photographer, and works with us on the show media.

We're actually coming from filming an episode of media. And we're also joined by Giannis Boutelis, who, who, you know, is always hanging around. It's always kind of murmuring in the background there. And then Corey,

how do you say your last name? Kutchmark or Kutchmark or Kazmaric. Which do you like? Depending on the day. It's like, if you want to tell someone how it sounds, it's chasmeric. If you look at it.

Corey comes from a big state. 646 miles wide. Montana. What's super interesting about Corey, tell him what you used to do before you started being a cameraman. I'll tell him. Corey was the dude. Corey's one of the dudes that jumps out of a helicopter with a snowboard

and goes down a big, huge mountain that looks like you're going to die. Talk about that just for a quick second. I've been snowboarding for like 25 years, and I think my favorite kind of snowboarding is big mountain snowboarding. So I used to compete. Big mountain? Big mountain. Big mountain.

Sorry, I got a little bit of a cold. But, yeah, I competed at a professional level traveled around big mountain snowboarding and i one time i asked cory we were hunting and i asked cory if there's ever been a mountain that other dudes would go down on their snowboard and he wouldn't go down and at the time he said no you never seen a dude go down a hill and then you said there's no way i'm going down that hill i could go down the hill there might be routes where right now my age i'm only 39 but that's old for a snowboarder to be jumping off 50 60 foot cliffs yeah you know k2 or uh i don't know everest would be one that i would question but if it's that low elevation i could probably make it down okay you know it's the elevation that will get you on those mountains what do you mean i mean just the air the air yeah you could just be

snowboarding and just pass out you know is that right, yeah. Hey, what is it? What's the death zone? 20, what is it? 25,000, I think. So do you snowboard downhills where... Oh, I do want to talk about snowboarding for a minute. Do you snowboard downhills where if you fell, you would die? Yes. Yeah, I do that a lot lot so you have to keep upright yeah you don't want to fall or usually it's you're exposed so if it's steep enough where you can like

fall and you start getting momentum it's the ragdolling effect you when you're going ass over heels all the way down the mountain, you know, and then that's when you will probably die of trauma or go over a cliff or, you know. So you don't want to. Smack into a tree. Or trees. Did that happen a lot? I mean, do you see that like. That was all the time.

Well, I mean, like during a competition. Oh, during competitions. He can't get to the bottom of the hill for all the carcasses laying everywhere. There are some deaths in that competitive scene. It's just unfortunate, but you are at risk. It's a time of day. You wake up. It's competition day.

You're at the top, and you're going to push your limits. And some people try to go a little past their limits, or some people just mess up off takeoffs and maybe land in an oncoming rock or cliff because you're looking at it from the bottom with your binoculars, this mountain face. And then you have to go up top and kind of turn that whole vision 180 in your head because you're going to go down the mountain now. So you're flipping the image and you have have to remember, like, this rock, this tree, this four-foot tree. You know, three feet to the left, I've got to take off there, and it's going to be a 10-foot wide landing,

and then I've got to take a hard left here because this is a, you know, there's either trees or another 40-foot cliff. So you've got to, like, it's a little puzzle you put into your head, and then, you know, you're at the finish line, hopefully. And how fast are you going? I mean, it's depending on uh your route route finding are you judged on speed uh it's not really speed you know the the judging criteria was line choice which the line you pick going down the mountain control your fluidity your aggressiveness and um style sounds like a lot of like pretty arbitrary stuff it's like figure skating yeah you know best but what speed would you hit oh you can hit easy you know you points point to shoot for a long period of time you can be going 50 easily.

So do you go on these mountains, like, sight unseen? Like, you're like, here's your mountain, figure out the map, and then you've never actually done the route. Yeah, true. That's at the high level. The low level, they'll let you go onto the face, ski around, look off things. You know, that's called an inspection day. You get one run through, and you get to find your route. And that, you know, it's pretty explosive skiing when you can go see where you're going.

So these guys are just flying down the mountain. But when you have a, there's actually a contest, the world tour is in Haines, Alaska this week. And would you normally be at that right now? I followed that tour. I used to snowboard on that tour for two years and I've worked it probably like four years worked it as a as a cameraman. Yeah, yeah So yeah, you just it's just the adrenaline thing. It's like hunting like probably Sheep or something I would say. Yeah.

I hunt, but I'm not like these guys. You know, not like Steve, those who are listening. But, you know, you get that same adrenaline rush, probably. Chasing sheep, walking these cliff edges, trying to find the sheep, probably. And you don't want to fall here with your big pack on. Yeah. Because if you do, you're going to get messed up way in the backcountry. And it kind of brings... Me and Mike peeked over a couple edges.

At Prison Whales? Yeah, I put one in for two. I wasn't about to snowboard down. Yeah, I was just like, Steve, you can go ahead and look over that edge. I'm cool right here. So let's go way, way back. I'm going to go way back in time for a minute here. During the Pleistocene

epic, you had musk ox all the way, like, there's a term, circumpolar. Like muscles, like the blue muscle you eat when you get muscles in a restaurant. The blue muscle is circumpolar. There's a band of latitudes around the globe that that muscle exists at.

Way back during the Pleistocene, the European Stone Ages, where you got humans spread around, but still a long time ago, muskox were circumpolar. They were all through the Arctic, but way down, man. There's cave paintings of muskox

down in france so crow magnan people stone age europeans were hunting for muskox if it's any indication that they used to paint the stuff they hunted on cave walls from 30,000, 35,000 years ago, you had muskox way down there. Interestingly, by the time anyone, due to under our current understanding, by the time any human being stepped foot in the Western Hemisphere, or stepped foot in North America, muskox only existed in North America, it seems, by that point in time. When the Russians first started dicking around in the Arctic and Americans were coming up,

not quite Americans yet, but were coming up into the Arctic, they were running to Muskox all through Alaska, the Canadian high Arctic into Greenland, like everywhere. But they whittled away at them and whittled away at them. And they, by about 1820, muskox were gone from Alaska, extirpated. You'll often, if you're reading about what happened to all the muskox, and that's like, let me back up one quick second. A muskox is a big, woolly animal

with like a horn boss where his horns drop down and sort of gold on the side of his head and curl out. Like what's that haircut we were saying? I can't. Like, is it a Betty page? Yeah. No, it's like little Debbie on a little Debbie snack cake. Yeah. Yeah if you've ever eaten a Little Debbie, what are some of those Little Debbie deals? Remember those? She was a big sponsor of Ding Dong. Ding Dong. You ever eaten a Ding Dong? It's like a musk ox's horns

are sort of plastered over the top of his head and dropped straight down into candy cane hooks. They got real woolly coats. In fact, they produce a wool called kiviot, and it's supposed to be X times warmer than any other kind of wool on the planet. A big bull might be six, seven, 800 pounds. And they live in coastal Arctic regions. You'll read different things. You'll read like, oh, the Russian fur traders wiped out the muskox. You'll read like, oh, the Russian fur traders wiped out the muskox. And then some people will point out the Russian fur traders didn't actually

wipe out the muskox. Natives wiped out the muskox operating on behalf of Russian fur traders who wanted the meat and the hides. So whatever it was, Russians came in flashing big money around and people shot the muskox out. Peary, like when you hear about Arctic explorers, you hear about the guy named Peary. Some guy sat down and figured out how many muskox did Peary's expeditions alone account for. And Peary killed 600 muskox to feed his expeditions. The Arctic explorer, Stephenson, he's always eaten muskox. We'll get into why it's easy to wipe out muskox and how you could probably wipe out muskox the second time if you felt like

it within about five months, five or six months if you felt like it. They're not difficult to find, but they wiped them out of Alaska by the mid-1800s. Then in 1930, I'm just giving you some background here. In 1930, they brought 30-some Muskox from Greenland, one of the places where they hadn't been extirpated. So like the super remote shit Muskox never got killed out of. They never got killed out of Greenland. And I think like Banks Island, the Coronation Gulf area, the way Canadian high Arctic stuff, they never got wiped out of. So in 1930, someone was like, man, we should get some muskox back. They went to Greenland, got some muskox, and eventually put those muskox out on Nunavak Island in the Bering Sea, which is off western Alaska. And they dumped them out on Nunavak Island.

They just let them start reproducing. And it wasn't much time at all. They had hundreds of the things. So at that point in time, like as late as 1965, the only muskox that existed in the U.S., besides for a captive zoo specimen here and there, was the population on Nunavik. They went out and caught some of those in the 60s

to start an experimental herd in Fairbanks where they wanted to start messing around with this idea of using it as an agricultural product where you'd raise muskox to get the wool kivyat, and you'd have economic development in rural areas. That seems to have kind of gone nowhere. As that herd on Nunavik expanded, they kept, or grew in numbers, they kept peeling off some to start all these herds. And now if you look at a map of Alaska and where muskox live, they're kind of like back to everywhere they would have been. You got them on Seward Peninsula,

the first muskox I ever seen, the first time, the first three times I ever ran into muskox was all hunting caribou on the North Sl slope. They got muskox on the north slope around Prudhoe Bay. They're around, and that's kind of how they came to be. So hunting opportunities are extremely limited for muskox. The hunt I did, the state of Alaska, the hunt I just did, the state of Alaska calls it like DX003. It's a hunt unit you apply for. It's a tag that's good from February 1 to March 15th on Nunavak Island. And it has, I don't know, it's about a 9% chance of drawing the tag. They're giving out fewer and fewer tags right now. The herd's not doing great on Nunavak. I think this year they gave out 20 tags for the winter hunt, and then, I don't know, 5 or 10 tags for the summer hunt.

The spring hunt they call is the March hunt, and it's cold. So did you choose Nunavak specifically, or are there other draws in different areas of the city? This year, Nunavak is the only draw a non-resident can put in for. So, like, the way Alaska will run hunt is Alaska has over-the-counter stuff, which is just over-the-counter stuff. Tag, you're going to buy. You can buy it the day you want to go hunting. They have registration hunts, which are first-come, first-served, open to residents.

Then they have, like, a tier one draw, which is a resident draw. Then they have just, like, the drawing hunts. And so if a non-resident wants to put in for a muskox tag, so if you don't live in Alaska and you want to hunt muskox, right now Nunavak's your only option. You can go up to Northwest Territories and just buy permits from guides. But if you want to hunt here, that's it. Nunavak Island. I was awarded one of the tags several years ago and wasn't able to

go. And I never thought I would have had another chance. It's almost not even fair that you can draw it and draw again. Like a lot of stuff's not that way. If you draw a buffalo tag in Alaska, that's it for the rest of your life. If you draw a toke sheep tag, it's it for like four or seven years I don't know why they let you keep cracking on muskox it's not fair but I did it and I got a second tag and went back we just got back what was interesting was that the locals on the island had to it was a first come first first come first serve basis it's really a tag on the island even you know are the 200 people there It was a first-come, first-served basis. It's ridiculous.

To get a tag on the island. Even, you know, out of the 200 people there, I think one of our guides was saying, Raymond, that he stood in line. He was the first one there, and he was two days early. Stood in line two days to get a tag. Yeah. So, yeah, tags are always distributed.

Like, generally, I shouldn't say always. Registration hunts are you go online and get the tag. Some of you have to go into the actual office and get a tag. So you might have a registration hunt where you got to go to Bethel, Alaska to pick up your tag, right? And that really limits it to dudes in Bethel because people aren't generally going to fly to Bethel to pick up a tag. The residents, the Chupik on Nunavak Island, every year get allocated some number of tags.

This year, I think it was five cow tags, five bull tags. There's 200 people that live on the island. It's not online. It's that a dude from Alaska Department of Fish and Game flies out there with the tags and hands the tags out to the first guys waiting in line. So Raymond was saying the same people seem to get the tags every year. So he went and waited in line two days in a row this year so that when the guy that showed up, he got a cow tag for a muskox. Yeah, and he's out there right now.

He's out there today. He's probably out butchering a musk ox right now. Yeah. And that's a subsistence hunt for him. There are a lot of musk ox hunts in Alaska where it's a registration hunt and you have to destroy the head of the musk ox. You have to saw the horns in half.

Really? They have those for moose too. Yep. They don't want you doing the hunt. They don't want a trophy dude coming out to do the hunt. So they make it that, sure, you can go get the registration thing and hunt the muskox, but you don't get to keep the head. You got to destroy the head. I read an article about a guy who was involved in the game commission

in Alaska who tried to pull a fast one. And he, because you can buy handicrafts from indigenous people. Like, you know, people were trying to sell us seal hats, right? You can't buy a seal skin from a native Alaskan. Like, you can't buy a seal skin from a Chupac, for instance, because of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. But if that individual takes that seal skin and makes something out of it, you can buy it from them. Like you can buy carved ivory, but you can't buy raw ivory. So could they give, so say, this is a square seal towel. That's the thing.

That's what I, people wonder about that all the time. I don't know, somewhere it's spelled out. But anyway, some guy had gone and said, well, I'm going to go do a registration muskox hunt. Kill my muskox. Give the head to a native woman. Have her do a carving on it. And then buy it back from her. And they determined that that violated the spirit of that law.

I'd be like, just a little teeny carving on the bottom would be fine. Write your name on the upper pallet. The one that sits on the wall. So the biggest thing, coming up to go out and hunt musk oxen, what else should we say? What else is important to establish about musk oxen? They taste good. Talking more about that boss,

I read that the horns and then the skull beneath it to where the brain cavity starts is eight to ten inches is that right muskox bash heads when they it's like sheep do yeah like when bighorns are bashing heads it sounds like a 22 rifle in fact I was out hunting one time and thought a guy kept shooting a gun and later realized it was two bighorns cracking heads. I saw a bighorn ram a tree one time. I counted. He rammed that tree 75 times, and I quit counting. Are you serious?

75 times in a row. A bighorn sheep can withstand 40 times. A bighorn sheep can withstand the amount of power to his head 40 times greater than what would fracture your skull. Why do you think he was in the tree for practice? Just getting pumped up, I guess. It's his time of year. It was September.

They don't rut until November. Was he like a football player just banging his helmet? He was banging a ponderosa pine. All his buddies must have did the same thing because his ponderosa pine looked like someone had been hitting with a baseball bat for about three years. Yeah, it was nuts.

So they got what's called a horn boss where the horns are like on top of their head. It's like if a girl who's got thick old hair splits her hair down the center

and makes a braid or like a ponytail on each side. Yeah, almost like a pigtail. That'd be like a hair boss. And the horn boss is just this amorphous blob of horn that sits up there. And as the bowl gets bigger, it grows bigger and bigger. And that thing's polished off like someone took a palm sander to it. It looks kind of like an ass.

It does. Yeah. Not off anyone I know. No.'s ass like in that it has a gluteal crease it has a crack yeah um beautiful animals when you when you're reading about musk ox because musk ox like live in the arctic and the real woolly people always be like an ice age relic but all animals that we know about today with the exception of perhaps the mule deer are ice age relics i never i think people say that because it's woolly but like why don't people say human beings the ice age relics like we were alive during the ice age or you might say the field mouse.

No, it's just because it still lives in a Ice Age-like climate. Is that what they mean? I think so, yeah. You remember the lead up to the Iraq War? I was reading that Saddam Hussein had published several books of poetry and novels. And I would always say, Saddam Hussein, the poet novelist. You know? It's like in conversation Saddam Hussein the poet novelist

his country is being invaded but yeah like everything's the Ice Age relic but that might be what they mean that it's out on the tundra which would mean you'd have to say a vole the Ice Age relic he still lives on the tundra you know

it just looks like a throwback to like that's what it is you think you're looking at a mammoth yeah that thing had hair on it the one we butchered the muskox we butchered had hair on it it was over 18 inches long short of of a horse's tail, nothing has hair like that. 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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aerial imagery, 24 K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team.

Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Yeah, it was very interesting to see him standing there and then actually moving, running. And it's almost like they had a skirt around him. And that hair almost seemed like it was close to the ground. Almost hits the ground.

Almost hits the ground. The writer Peter Matheson, who wrote a book about, like, there's some natives called muskox, not the Chupac, but some natives called muskox umimac. Peter Matheson wrote this book. It's sort of like a magazine article that turned into a book that he wrote.

And he relates that wool, the way it sways. He talks about it, reminds him of chain mail moving. And he also has a line where when they're in tall grass, the grass coming up from the ground and the wool coming down from the animal meet in a way that makes it hard to sort of distinguish where one ends and one begins. So kind of like they're just gliding across the... Yeah, as the animal moves.

They do seem to glide, like they're on wheels almost. Super woolly. And I remember when I was working on my Buffalo book, I remember reading it. They did this study where they took different animals. They had a Scottish Highland cattle, a Tibetan yak, and a buffalo, and put them in Connex containers and started lowering the temperature to find out at which point the animal's metabolic rate went up

in response to the drop in temperature. It would basically be like when you started shivering and getting not relaxed. I think they had an Angus in there. He tapped out at like 10 degrees. The Scottish Highland cattle tapped out. The Tibetan yak tapped out. The coldest they could get that Connex container was negative 40, and the buffalo was still relaxing.

But I'm telling you, muskox would smoke that thing. You can't find his body. You know what I'm saying? When he's laying there dead, you can't get your hand to where it's touching leather. Like where you'd part it. Like if you're looking at your dog to find ticks, you can't do that with a muskox.

You can't find him underneath there. It's really hard to tell what is in there. You know? Very thick. What'd you guess that? We were just packing that. We checked in the hide already at Alaska Air. How much did that hide weigh? Yeah, I threw it on the 85, I think.

Yeah, the hide, no hooves on it. So this is a hide cut from the ankle, skinned out and clean skinned. I mean, not a scrap of fat or meat on that hide. That hide weighed 85 pounds. Well, the layer of skin, too, is super dense, too. Way thick, fat, fat, fat leather. Yeah. The biggest thing, I'll say this, like, as we get into this discussion about musk ox, I just want to cut right to the main primary point.

And leading up to this hunt, not the primary point, but just something, this is going to tee off a whole other conversation. Leading up to this hunt, I was talking to this dude who was saying, it's not really a hunt. It's like an experience. And when we were out, I had observed to someone how all animals have like a vulnerability that we exploit when we hunt them. You know, deer are suckers for alfalfa and shelled corn, right? Turkeys, when they're breeding, they're very vocal, right?

Everything. Sure. Kind of find their weakness and that's how we hunt them. Ducks are gregarious, right? Ducks want to be around other ducks. So you play that against them. You make sounds that sound like a duck. You put out some fake ducks.

Duck can't help himself. He's got to go check it out, you know, generally. The thing you exploit on the muskox is they just got nowhere to go, for one. And they'll bunch up when they're threatened. They'll bunch up and stand around. And it's easy to see how dudes wiped them out. They got nowhere to go.

You know. And they can't really put on miles very fast. Like not that fast. Not like most stuff can put on miles. So this guy was saying the Huntsmore of an experience and I can say that it is and I would almost haven't done it now. I would almost say

that it is, and I would almost, having done it now, I would almost say that it's not really a hunt, but what makes it, like the hunting the animal, I wouldn't say it's really like a hard hunt. What makes it what it is is the conditions you're dealing with. And getting to the place you're going to and being in the place you're dealing with. And getting to the place you're going to and being in the place you're going to is tough. Like, how would you guys sort of describe the cold and wind? Oh, it's full tundra.

Negative 25 below with that wind. Wind chill. What was the coldest time we saw i think it well negative it was negative 10 no wind chill yeah that's just that was just air temperature yeah well the winds with it yeah yeah yesterday it was i mean there was gusts like to 30 and so i just i mean i think who knows what the wind chill was probably like negative 25 i mean it was cold you're in the middle of the bering sea so the humidity level is way high yeah it's like the comparing michigan 10 degrees to montana 10 degrees that michigan 10 degrees is way but this is way different yeah like this island is not

it's hard at times when we're fishing cod tom cod through the ice I couldn't tell when I was on land or on ice. Yeah, it's all just a big white blanket that's undulating. It's like, I feel like, why aren't we kind of drilling a hole over the dirt? And you realize that you are out. It's like, there's no real protective buffer on land. No vegetation. I mean, there's tundra, but nothing to block the wind. The wind howls, man. The funny thing is, they've got sand dunes, but they're made of snow.

Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. It's nice and soft, but those are snow dunes blasted by the wind. They just move just as a sand dune would on the beach, but it's just white, blistering cold. I was wearing just just this is just to go stand around i was wearing bunny boots bunny boots are like government issue cold weather korean war boots which are rated to negative 63 degrees fahrenheit yeah which you know we should go ahead and just jump in and promote some bunny boots because if anybody does any cold weather activities and need some cold boots you're not

going to really hike too far in spend the 60 to 100 bucks get some military surplus bunny boots and you will not be disappointed there really isn't no one makes a boot that can go no one makes an equivalent there is no equivalent and the other thing is it's sealed rubber. So like we always warm ice fishing because you can't, you can fill the boot up with water, but the water can't get to the insulation. It's, it's wool sealed between rubber. Bunny boots, like bunny boots, are these big-ass white boots that actually have

a pressure valve on the side that you need to, like, open when you're flying so you don't burst the boot. When I was a kid, they were five bucks. I mean, we just had bunny boots, man.

Five bucks a piece. Now they're what? 120. Yeah, something like that. And they got, like, instructions written on them. It says, like, double lace to hold that. And they got like instructions written on them. It says like double lace to hold firmly.

And then it says open valve when airborne. And they're white. They're great. I mean, you can't. Yeah, nothing. Nothing. I mean, running on them was terrible. They sweat, though.

Yeah, you sweat. They're not for walking, man. People call them Mickey Mouse boots, too. But then I was hearing, like, there's something The Mickey Mouse are the black ones. I didn't know this until recently. If you see black bunny boots, which are Mickey Mouse boots, they're not, I thought it was just you could get them in black or in white, but black is not as cold rated as white. Black's negative 20.

White's negative 60-something. I think it think it's negative which is one of the few things in life that's actually true because like when someone tells you sleeping bags rated for negative 10 they're lying that's a survival rating though yeah the comfort rating is probably like 20 yeah survival rating like i always go i don't know i carry a sleeping bag that's probably like i'll generally go 10 or 20 degrees off of what they're saying is the rating for me it's my legs get cold yeah anyways these boots are legit warm ass never been had such comfortable feet out in times like that. So yeah, so I'm running around in like thick Merino blend socks, bunny boots, Merino LJs,

then like a REI kind of sweat panty thing, down pants, then like the new first light bibs, what do they call them? Sanctuary? Which are some heavy, nice bibs.

Synthetic insulation. Then I got a merino base layer, a merino hoodie, a fleece shirt, the same first light type sanctuary jacket, then a giant down puffy, a neck gaiter, a face mask, another face mask, a fur hat, gloves, and beaver fur mittens. And goggles. And goggles. And at that point, you're feeling pretty bulletproof. Like you're just not cold. Did you get cold ice fishing?

No. Oh yeah, my feet did because i was kneeling for so long yeah and by then i'd sweated up my boots my boots are sweaty right now um it's just cold man like you know i mean that's the coldest i've i mean the coldest to this point that i'd ever experienced i think was when we were in Montana for elk and that was like I think it was like five when we were in the wall teepee tent the teepee tent yeah I mean at night but when we were out in the in the environment hunting and stuff I mean those are the coldest temperatures I'd ever experienced and so I'd never I this is the first time I've ever felt negative temperatures yeah but what was wicked about it's almost more wicked in Montana because you got to move you got to climb right Nunavik's flat right and you're on snow machines so you can get all bundled up and if you're conservative dude when we when we walked a little ways i was pouring sweat man but out there

when it's so cold if you watch those guys they have like the the chupac man they have like a you don't see a lot of people jogging around town they're like very purposeful movements man you're playing in the head like there's this this tentativeness pervades about what the weather's doing i remember like the day we got there a kid had gone out he was going out on a snow machine to fish he's going to fish Dolly Vardens. And he was coming back and I'm like, we were like, oh, you got fishing?

He said, we called it off. Because they had seen some, some kind of weather thing. You know? Anybody else like would have been like, ah, let's go anyways. But just like a, you know, deep respect for the weather, man.

Oh, yeah. Like you do stuff when the weather says it's okay to do it. Yeah. You know? I mean, they weren't even. And not bashful about it.

It's not like they don't try to act like, those dudes don't try to act like, like we'll try to act like, hell, I'm going anyway, man. Can't hold me back. You know? They're like, no, the weather's no good. I'm not going. We're going the weather's right. Because they know how much it sucks.

Because they know, man. the weather's no good. I'm not going. We're going the weather's right. Because they know how much it sucks. Because they know, man. It's ridiculous, man. Yeah, nature will put you on your ass in an instant. Oh, it's deadly. And they're traveling long distances on snow machines. So you might be like, oh, yeah, they're hunting off snow machines. But it'd be kind of like saying, yeah, but dude, you're hunting out of a truck. Because you drive to where you start hunting.

They're hunting 50 miles away, 25 miles away from the village. So you might think like, you might all feel like proud of yourself because you hike in a mile to where you hunt. But if you're hunting 26 miles from your house and you drive in a car 25 miles and then walk one mile and feel proud of yourself because you walked a mile to where you hunt, I don't know, is snow machining 26 miles in negative temperatures like that gravy? No, not at all. It's really not.

It's a difficult place to be out in. And that really plays into how you hunt. It's like a difficult place to be out in, you know? So there's this sort of like, uh, they're like in that cold, you're not accustomed to it. And then being out and you're in a strange place and it's sea ice, which looks like, not like a frozen hockey pond. I mean, it's just like a jumble of ice piled up is out there in the wind. I don't know, you get like this,

I don't want to say like a feeling of danger, but you get a feeling of, as an outsider, you get a feeling of being on the edge of something. It's like another planet. Yeah. It is. And the guys that live there are not flippant about it. They're probably more, not paranoid, more cautious.

You know. Respectful. Oh, then we would be, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, until you gain that respect. So do you think if somebody said, okay, go hunt a muskox, and they just dropped you there, you know, obviously you wouldn't have the same approach as you do now having done it.

Just start beating the ground. Yeah, just like, well, I'm going to go walk over there and look around and find them and get them. It's hard to picture how you'd do it. Yeah. You would just have to travel just like Arctic ski explorers do now. You'd have to travel with a sled behind you on skis, and you'd have to be packing, you know, whether it's Arctic ovens, or I don't know what.

Yeah, alcohol stove. There's no wood to burn. Yeah. You travel with an alcohol stove. Like, we have an Arctic oven tent, and we got a thing called, like, the Heat Pal 5500. It's like a sailboat heater. Burns denatured alcohol.

But to keep warm in those conditions, you're going to be going through a at least a quart of alcohol a night well how are you gonna get everything back if you get one it's like yeah then here's this 700 to 700 pound bull laying there and you snow you you skied 30 miles out of the village 40 below they're excited if they can find a muskox within 12 miles of Mikoryuk. Let's talk about Mikoryuk for a minute. When the Russians first made contact with the Chupik, they said there was 400 people living on Nunavak

in something like 17 villages or something. Yeah, that's what I read. People were living at every river mouth. now there's 200 people in one village later so i think they go to some of those old villages now and now they're just then now they're just called fish camps yeah oh is that what they meant by fish camps okay yeah once like church a church came a school came, people got centralized. Later, someone came and estimated there were 700 people living in far fewer villages and far more people after the Russians

first made outside contact. So now everybody in Mykoriuk, everyone on the island lives in Mykoriuk. There's about 200 people. It's just like on a spit of snow out on the Bering Sea. And what's interesting about it is

it's like they still live very... I mean, everybody's got a TV, right? There's electricity. Surface-level stuff, like very modern existence. But underneath it is that it's still subsistence lifestyle. They hunt seals. They hunt walrus. They do subsistence lifestyle. They hunt seals. They hunt walrus. They do subsistence fishing.

They eat stuff that Americans won't eat easily. Like chum salmon. You know how people are always talking about fresh salmon? They don't catch their salmon. They fish chums for food, for human consumption. They fish chums after the chums have spawned. And they look like hell. They got fungus all over their fins.

Then they net them and eat them because the less fat on the fish allows it to dry faster. They eat dried fish dipped in seal oil a lot, which is something we ate kind of. One day after we hunted muskox, we went out to fish a fish called tomcod. I mean, how close were we to the bank? 20 feet. Just like took forever to drill. We had a dull spud. I don't even know if you caught it. It was basically like trying to spud a hole in a drinking straw, man.

It's like a hunk of metal. Like crowbar. I mean, I guess crowbar would be even sharper. Crowbar's way sharper. Yeah, it was blunt. Two feet, right, of ice? Two feet of ice. I mean.

Slowly chiseled a hole. You couldn't have pulled a can of beer up through that hole. But it started wide. By the time that son of a bitch got through the bottom of the ice you couldn't have shoved a beer can through it and that was the second hole the first hole just petered out yeah i hit dirt right yeah oh yeah we chilled we chiseled another hole and got down to the ice ended that dirt there's no like water column underneath the ice so he go drill a second hole and he's got a rig where he's got a stick with some line wound around two dowels punched into the stick

at a perpendicular angle to the dowel. And there's a handful of beads on there and a banana. So it's like it runs from the monofilament to a barrel swivel. Then there's like five or six beads. No, a banana weight. Then five or six beads and a banana weight then five or six beads and a big ass rusty dull treble hook he lowers that thing down that hole i'm like come on dude that ain't gonna work and out pops a tom cod within seconds yeah it was so fast we sat out there and caught 30 tom cod just like sometimes it's fast you can pull them out of the ice and it was right with

the tide right i mean the the uh yeah he said like tide tide fluctuations affected and whenever the tide changed you could hear like boulders and stuff moving under an ice there was a dull thud yeah stuff moving kind of resonating through the ground this This dude that we, like when you hunt the Nunavak hunt, you have to hire a guide. Or you have to hire what's called a transporter. Because the only way to get on Nunavak is you have to land on native land. Most of the island is, what's the refuge? It's the Yukon Cusco Quim Delta National Wildlife Refuge. So, Yana, speak to about the land ownership issues.

Who owns what, where we could hunt, where normal dudes can hunt. Because it's kind of interesting. Yeah, because we always have to get film permits to hunt public land. It usually costs us anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000 for a week-long shoot to be on, to be filmed publicly. Because it's a commercial use permit. Yeah, because we're going to take the footage and then sell it. This was a National Wildlife Refuge, which we've had permits before in the past, but what we didn't realize is that on Nunavik, most of the refuge is wilderness as well.

And so they don't really give out commercial film permits or any kind of commercial permit on wilderness too much. But you can guide hunters out there. Yes. Kind of just like you can in the Bob Marshall. This is a side note to what I think is like a seriously bullshitty thing on part of the federal government is that you can get a permit in the Bob Marshall wilderness area to every day, march up 20 tourists

on horseback, load them onto rafts, raft them down the river, have a giant base camp set up at the trailhead, generators running, hauling in horse feed, every day all summer long. And that's A-OK. Commercial use. But two dudes and a camera can't go in there. It's such bullshit. They are reworking the rules and the regs and the regs yeah but you want to talk

about high impact use i hear you i think those those rules are written for back in the day when any when basically if someone was going to come to film it was going to be like a big hollywood production yeah setting up fake western towns yeah and they're like no we don't want that understandable now it's different because you can go in there and film a show like you just said with a couple guys a couple cameras yeah because like an outfitter and i'm not i'm not hacking i'm not saying the outfitter shouldn't be able to do it but an outfitter could be like he's got wall tent camp set up every which way packing in dudes on horses right setting up full-on little villages out there electrified wires to keep grizzlies out stacks of hay cuttingwood. And you can't be out there with a backpack and a handy cam.

Do they still make handy cams? You can't be out there with a backpack and a camera. You can, as long as you're not going to... Yeah, but we're talking about commercial use. The guys that run those rafting companies where they're hauling in 30 people every day to float down rafts aren't out there for charity. No.

It just seems like it just strikes me as being not fair there's a case to be made and we're going to work on it we're going to get a film permit so these at the refuge they're actually reviewing their film permit process and so we couldn't even apply for a permit right so we can't film the whole the the new the the the tupac this is something I don't even want to get into, but native communities are organized into corporations in Alaska. It's not like the reservation system in the lower 48. Native communities, through the Native Claims Settlement Act,

which is put in under Carter, have corporations where native community members are shareholders in a corporation and sort of their world is run as a corporation they own this big long strip across the north shore of nunavik yeah it's like anywhere i think from like one to three miles from the shoreline inland for how many miles does that thing run i think about 30 basically from mccoy to nash harbor and uh when i applied when i first applied for the permit trying to get it and i had some spots that that our james whitman our uh outfitter had told me we're gonna hunt the dude came back and said oh well all that stuff's on nema corporation land so you guys can film there as much as you want as long long as NEMA will let you. And so they did.

We paid a trespass fee, and they signed a location release for us. And we basically had to find a muskox on that land if you guys were going to get to see us hunt muskox. Which is a big chunk of land, but it's like... Right. big chunk of land but it's like right from what we later found out is that as the season progresses there's muskox like a couple miles from town the first day of the hunt you know when the first dudes come in and then as those animals are hunted hassle they just move farther south farther south which is basically just getting away from a coric and so by the time we were the last group on the island to hunt muskox yeah no one was out there hunting when we were out there.

No, I think there was a couple of locals. Yeah, doing their hunt, but there was no more. The day we actually got out, some dudes were leaving on a snow machine to go hunt a cow. Yeah. They blew past us. One of those guys had rain bibs on him. He was ready to butcher. The client that James had previous to us killed his muskox

based on the southern tip of the island, 50 miles, one direction away from town. Was it 50 miles just out? Yeah. 50 miles back. I thought that was combined. That would have been brutal. No, man.

He did 100 miles on a snow machine that day. Yeah. So thank goodness. We probably found the only bull yeah I was doing some serious praying you know I don't pray too often but I was praying that we could find who were you directing them to

just the universe you were praying to the universe for muskox to be on Neiman land bull muskox what's way more interesting than hunting muskox is hunting walrus. And these guys go out. When the ice starts to break up in late spring, they go out and hunt walrus. They cruise around in their boats trying to find walrus that are hauled out on the ice flows.

And a walrus weighs 2,000 pounds. And they kill him with a .223. In the head. Bray was going to go kill his cow muskox with a.223. Yeah, in the head. He said, you hit that walrus right. And he kind of showed me where you

got to hit it. He said it just crumples. And he hunts seals the same way. Hit him in the head with a.223. Close range. And pile them up. And then you jack that walrus up on the ice if he falls in the water and you start chopping up a 2,000 pound critter.

Oh, so they butcher it on the ice? They don't haul it on the boat? I guess that would be impossible. I'd like to get involved in that. Yeah, we really wanted to. Unfortunately, we were just a little too early. Sounds like the seal in the water or something is going to burn another month. Yeah, so we went out and fished these tomcots,

and he was showing us a traditional thing they eat where, like a tomcot is about, if you're familiar with lake perch, tomcot is as big as a lake perch. Looks just like a damn cod, but it's like the size of a perch, you know, like 8, 10 inches, 12 inches for a big one, big fatty. And they take a, they freeze, I mean, the fish freezes rock-ass solid the minute you pull it out of the water. But they take the fish, take a Ulu knife and cut, not fillets, just shave off pieces of the fish, frozen rock solid, and then just dip it in seal oil and eat it. And our guide's wife, our guide was born out there. Our wife is, you know, Chupacan was

born there. She was saying that her father had explained that if you just lived on tomcod, you would starve to death. But if you ate tom Cod dipped in seal oil, you could stay alive. And I asked her if that was something that in his generation was a reality, and she said, oh, yes. Like they could at that time were still just in her father's lifetime, face starvation. She had a picture of her father hanging on the wall dressed completely in skins you know boots up now the most common skin item you see is seal skin hats which yanni actually

bought no i actually almost we close. This wasn't our style. Yeah, I was just flashed. I looked and said, Jessica doesn't want to talk about a seal skin hat. No, no. I have no problem at all sharing the story. You know, it's pretty interesting. It was a tense negotiation. Yeah, it was.

So, Tia, one of you guys talked. One of you guys. I wasn't even there. I was sick. Yeah, Steve was laid up. Yeah, I had gastrointestinal issues much of the time I was out there. Tapering off right now. When we got into town, everybody's wearing these great-looking seal-skinned hats.

Ray's got a beard. No, ribbon. Ribbon seal. Ribbon seal, yeah. skin hats you know ray's got a beard no ribbon ribbon seal yeah which he said is a rare seal to run into a big ass rare and uh james is wearing a uh bearded bearded so that's kind of what we've seen oh and in town here in bethel we had seen some beaver hats steve's rocking a new beaver hat cory and i are like all right cool when's the next time we're gonna be on that's old beaver hats. Steve's rocking a new beaver hat. Corey and I are like, all right, cool. When's the next time we're going to be on another band? That's an old beaver hat. You guys were on the hunt. I mean, you're like, you guys were out. What's up with that?

Yeah, you guys were cute in the fur hat. We pulled people over on the streets and asked them if we could take a picture of their hat. Where'd you get that from? What's that made out of? And then we tried it on. Yeah, the Korean dude selling $28 hamburgers, he had an amazing fur hat. And he said he paid $300 for it. And I'm like, you got ripped. But then I realized he didn't get ripped at all.

No. Dude, a bag of bad Ziplocs up here is $8. Mayonnaise. A jar of mayonnaise is $12. Which is... That's insanity. If you want to ride a cab across the street,

it's $20. Double. Double, triple. Everything's three double. Yeah, as a guy explained, a cab driver was trying to explain how expensive. Where was the cab driver from? He was Korean. Yeah, most of the cab drivers we're finding are Albanian.

Korean or Albanian. It was a Korean segment of the cab driving population. He was trying to explain how expensive everything was and explain to these guys that it's not double. It's three double. That was our catchphrase for the hunt. What was I going to ask you guys to talk about? The hat. The hat.

So we basically are told that a relative of someone's can make these hats for us. We're like, sweet. We'll make you a seal hat. Seal hat, you know, beaver trim. So we're literally looking at one hat thinking like, all right, this is the hat. We're getting made. And it's like very like, okay, you guys sure you want it? We're like, yeah, cool.

We're kind of asking like, should we have it? And it's a very muted. The seal skin is very muted on the one you're looking at. Yes. It's like a dull gray, some black markings. Yeah. It's a muted color. It's real subtle.

You would hunt in it. And as they age, the hair stands up on the skin itself. It has a blonde, kind of a fuzz to it almost yeah dirty blonde though dishwater blonde kind of brownie blonde brownie blonde so three or four days into it we're told that hey both the hats are ready let's go you guys need to go over there they take your hat size too right by measurements no no no we didn't do that you didn't because they got a pair i was a little nervous about that. It was basically like, yeah, you want large, medium, or small. Oh, that's right.

So we tried on a few other hats and said, okay, this is large. I'll probably be small with it. Yeah, that was the most nerve-wracking part was, is it going to fit? So when he said you're supposed to go over and look at the hats. No, no, no. We need to go over and buy the hats. They're ready for you to buy. You put your order in.

And so I've been looking in 2012 i lived in fairbanks i saw a lot of these hats there as well too i almost bought one there it's the same the same hat seal hat with the beaver trim some of them had like a almost like a the thicker wolf lining you know that would give you a little more uh you know wind protection so i've been in the market because I feel like sitting on a really high glass and tit when the wind's howling, like you glass forever wearing that hat. Yeah, I should point out there is no hat warmer than a fur hat. Yeah.

Like it hasn't been matched. Like no one has matched, like my beaver fur hat, it's like no one has matched that beaver fur hat. No one has matched that with a synthetic material. It's like the subtropics. It's just like... You can't hear anything. You can't hear anything.

You're not going to hike in it. Anyways, we walk a couple minutes across the back alleys of McCoyick and into another house. No cameras allowed, we were told. And there are these hats and they are spotted seal. So it's like this blonde, bright blonde base with basically black splotchy kind of polka dots. It's like leopard.

Almost leopard-y. Yeah. And instead of being like a natural beaver on the, I don't know what you call that part of the hat, but it's basically the forehead. I don't know if it's an accent or if it's actually technically does something and maybe it keeps your forehead warmer, but it's a second layer of beaver on the hat.

But it's dyed black, like dyed shiny black. Does it say tourist on it right it said gaper i think and uh you know mine was i don't know it trimmed in rabbit yours is cory's is trimmed in something that couldn't be identified by anybody in the room did not know what it was made out of tell that part of the story because that's interesting. Yeah, so we're like looking at them now and we're like, man, this is not what we thought we were getting. And like, I want a

seal skin hat. I want to wear it. I want to pay $300. Yeah, it looked like something like Liberace you would have ordered. Someone in Aspen. Yeah, some gal. A female in Aspen is not going to wear a seal skin hat. Oh, yeah.

This one. This one? It's very stylish. I mean, it's beautiful. No, I mean, just because the whole thing, because they know that a seal had died. They like furs. Do they? Fur wears.

Oh, yeah. Oh, all right. I'll stay incorrect. Doesn't matter. Yeah. So, anyways, we've entered this sort of contractual verbal agreement by having these hats made for us. Well, when you first walked in there, she was just like, oh, I worked nonstop.

She was shaking her hands. And she was elderly. And she was just like, I've been working nonstop for two days to make these hats for you to make sure that you got them before you left. So I mean, the pressure's on now. It like these are yours top ball off we just we were getting ready to actually go shoot outside to cat you know just shoot shots of mccory we're in like full down triple triple double no three double down layers bunny boots and everything walk into this house and now we get into this uncomfortable situation in like you know just as many clothes as you could possibly have on and we are sweating

bullets and finally i just have to be like look i don't want to disrespect you we need to get out of this situation and with enough talking she finally offered up that said hey i don't want to discount it for you don't buy them at a discount i can sell them somewhere else and we basically ended it with that it was a miscommunication. Well, then her husband comes in. And everything, he kind of found a nice resolve. That's right. And he comes in and he introduces himself.

And then he sits down and he's like, what's wrong with these hats? He's like, what's wrong with you guys? Why don't you like these hats? He was offended that they didn't like them or they didn't want to purchase them. Yeah, you boys wanted to. He's like, what's wrong with these hats? These perfectly fine you put them on you boys want a seal hat you got a seal hat you know when you get one you know the moral of the story is if you want a ribbon seal hat you gotta say ribbon seal exactly you're exactly right you are exactly right or bearded

seal beard yeah and then she had a lot of other things. There is definitely a little feeling of like, okay, remember, we're in a very small town of 200 people. We're on an island. We are outsiders. We need to play this very well. We want to get out of here. With some diplomacy, yeah. Yeah, but I understand, too, because these hats are not cheap. No, $300 a piece.

$300, yeah. So just so listeners realize, we're talking about a $300 hat. And for $300, you should get what you want. Yeah. Because certainly, it's vastly inflated. The dude that wanted my... A that wanted my a guy wanted one of my rifles a 17 caliber rifle and when I talked about

how maybe I would pry his seal skin hat out of him for it he didn't act like that was any kind of sacrifice on his part whatsoever you know I think seal skin hats grow on trees the spotted ones apparently

but they're sweet looking man yeah when they're done riding the official ones are badass yeah either way

Corey and I are still seal skin hatless yeah I just wish we could have identified what was the

interior of yours, Corey, because Richard, he kept saying, is this made of dog? I think it was dog, some sort of dog. Another thing they got going on out here, which is cool, is you go, so there are no native, Nunavik has no large native land mammals. For native animals, native land mammals, they have a variety of small voles and things. Arctic fox, red fox, that's about it. I think a red fox is the biggest native land land mammal they have out there but

for for a long time though they've had a herd of reindeer and they have muskox and muskox while they were in like historically they were inland they weren't doesn't seem that they were actually on nunavik they were inland but they weren't on the island. The island at one time had mammoths and all kinds of stuff, but when the sea levels were much, much lower, but when the sea levels rose and the Bering Sea, which is very shallow ocean, was just like a grassland step environment. They had many animals, water level rose, things turned to tundra eventually. No big stuff out there, but now they got musk oxen and reindeer. And they, you know, reindeer is like, the term reindeer is sort of a, like a reindeer is a Eurasian caribou. People talk about different species of caribou, woodland, mountain, barren ground.

But geneticists don't even really draw a distinction between reindeer or the European caribou and the caribou that we have here. But they have a reindeer population. So seed stock of the animals came from Europe. And they're like a domestic critter out there. They don't do any agriculture. They just feed on tundra. They live a wild life. I guess what makes them domestic is they round them up with snow machines and slaughter them.

And where they do their slaughtering is about maybe like three and a half, four miles from the village. And they slaughter reindeer on what is the biggest lake on the island. And the lake's frozen solid. And again, you wouldn't know you're on a lake. It just looks like snow everywhere and flat stuff, but you're on a lake. They built these big driveline fences, like funnel fences. They go out on snow machines and push the reindeer out onto this ice. Shoot all the reindeer in the head with a, I'm assuming with a.22 or.223 apparently. Kill all the reindeer. And then everybody in the village buys reindeer.

This year I think the going price is $250 for a reindeer. That's just like what they pay. So that's what a community member pays to access one of the reindeer that's owned by the community. And there's some commercial slaughtering going on too, where some guy is shooting reindeer and then shipping the meat out. So they butcher these reindeer out on the ice and they're just pulling meat off them. All the heads, all the horns, all the hides are just laying out on the ice. Spring comes, ice melts, and all that stuff just goes into the

lake. They've been doing this for decades and decades and decades. And I think if you wanted to make the weirdest video ever, you would go to that lake and snorkel around or scuba dive around filming decades worth of caribou or decades worth of reindeer skulls and horns accumulated on the bottom of a tundra lake where nothing breaks down boneyard under one nothing breaks down there it's pretty cool I mean that's what tundra is. It's just like vegetation that doesn't decompose. You know, it is probably the creepiest place on the planet. You couldn't wade through there. No.

No. It is just. So the ice is covered with slaughtered caribou bits and pieces. And like you go out there and it's just like red fox and arctic fox just a coming and going out there the arctic fox coming off the sea ice the red fox come off the island i got one of each red fox and a arctic fox and um whitman was telling me that in the old days when arctic fox is worth 100 bucks he'd just sit out there in a little hut shooting Arctic fox and selling them. Another thing he did for business, we're talking about fishing tomcod, he would call into Bethel here, find out who wanted tomcod, and he'd sell frozen tomcod for $2.50 a pound. Catch them through the ice, freeze them, send them by air to Bethel.

We didn't catch $5 for of tom cotton at that price. You know. Now they fish halibut commercially out there. 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.

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waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team.

Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Did you notice any of the, did you see any of those big, the big antler piles with the skins and stuff? There was holes that either the Arctic or the Red Fox had dug underneath the piles. So essentially just had a little. Little dens.

Little den and they just like, you know, probably just sit there and just like take a little snack from the roof and just take a nap and just wake up and just like eat from underneath. Yeah, just like the, and the stuff is frozen. Everything's frozen so rock hard, they must just rasp that stuff off. I don't know that I'll ever, I would be shocked if when I'm like dying, okay? Okay, too.

Yeah, I've been telling people lately, I don't want to get in this too long i just want to point out if if like at whatever age my kids are old enough where if i died a tragic death it wouldn't screw them up psychologically how old is that like how old you got to be how old your kids need to be that you dying tragically has a greatly reduced chance of screwing them up psychologically 18 adult yeah adults yeah adults so i got a one month old right now and I'm 41. So at age 60 roughly you're going to start

at age 60 I'm going to go die on K2. So when I'm laying there dying if you if I'm laying there dying as a man who's been to Nunavak Island twice

I'll be shocked. Mike's going back. If I Island twice, I'll be shocked. Mike's going back. If I go back, I'll put in one. I enjoyed my time there. I enjoyed my time there. I'm very glad I went there to have that experience. It's an animal I've always been curious about.

It's a landscape that I'm curious about. I've read a lot about the Bering Sea and the Arctic. I've been around some areas. I'm glad I went. But one, you are, you would never overcome outsider status. You're not Tup not stupid you got money no but you could marry in possibly and if you lived there i think you'd overcome outsider status yeah maybe not with everybody but you're still the white guy i mean they said that there was there was like oh yeah there used to be a white guy that lived here for 25 years but i don't hold i it. I don't hold it. I'm not even saying that as a negative, man.

I totally understand it. Oh, well, everybody's like family. I mean, it's literally like one giant family that lives on an island. Yeah. I totally understand it. I just don't know that I'm dying to go back. Well, for the seal or for walrus. I would go back to hunt walrus.

I would go back to go. I can't hunt walrus. I would go back to be present for a walrus hunt. I would go back to be presentrus. I would go back to go. I can't hunt walrus. I would go back to be present for a walrus hunt. I would go back to be present for a seal hunt to witness it. But I'm not going to apply for DX003, the muskox hunt. Not because I didn't like it or that something's wrong with it. It's just like it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Not legally, but like spiritually or something.

It's like a once- a lifetime thing now for me like if i go down you know and hunt national forest land right all i when i walk out of there all i want to do is go back and hunt again but i didn't get that feeling hunting muskox yeah that's a good point i felt like um in large measure uh i felt like an interloper out on the muskock i i just felt yeah i didn't feel like uh um i didn't feel like an ecological participant i felt more like an ecological voyeur is that because of the challenge? Yeah. It's just not a kind of hunting that I'm interested in doing.

I mean, I'm glad I went. It's not a kind of hunting I'm interested in doing. Well, it's kind of like if, you know, I'm going to go see the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Once you've done it, what, are you going to go back and see it again? Yeah. I mean, you know, you did. You really did, yeah. Right. But, yeah, but it feels like

that but um but most things like a lot of hunting doesn't feel like that to me you know like i'm dying to get back up in the brooks range and hunt moose well because that's going to be a different adventure in time you don't know what's going to happen yeah i mean this is kind of predictable you know what that's right that's right you know if you went back and hunted muskox it'd be the same thing there's no i mean the only thing that would be surprising is if you got caught in some nasty weather and got stuck out overnight, you know, in the tundra and had to do some Arctic survival. I mean, that would be. Yeah, which has never happened to our, you know, guide. They're cautious.

Doing it. Right. Yeah, because they respect the land because they know it. But there's more to it because even with something as small and simple as like the gray squirrel, you're looking forward to your next gray squirrel hunt. Absolutely. Yeah, I think there's no mystery. When those boys

go out, when they get a good weather day, they're going out and a musk ox is going to die. You know. You got 400 musk, there's like 400 musk ox out on the die. You know. You got 400 muskox. There's like 400 muskox out on the island. The island's huge.

Like, you know, I keep saying it's an island. There's no denying it's an island. But you're saying the island's at its widest point, close to 70 miles. Same size as Long Island. Roughly. Okay. So it's an island, but it's giant, right? Giant.

But you got 400 muskox out there. There's nowhere to really hide. When they go out, they're going to get a musk ox. If the weather's good. So it's like, I don't know, man. It'd be like, I guess it's like going to the bar. Like when you're single, there's sort of an adventure to going to the bar that probably doesn't exist going to a house of ill repute. You know what's going to happen.

It's kind of like buffalo hunting outside of Yellowstone. Yeah. Almost the same thing. I put in for that tag every year. But once I draw it, I don't know if I'm going to, I mean, I put it in for it all the time. But yeah, it's like, they're either there or not. If they're there, you're going to kill one. But they're not hunting for novelty.

They're hunting for food. Who? The locals on Nunavut. Oh, I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about me. Right, right. For them, it's, yeah, it's a subsistence harvest. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm talking, I'm trying to put into words why sometimes I'll come back from a hunt and all I want to do is go do it again. Like, for instance, that hunt we did in the, like, hunting coos deer. Yeah. When were we down there? December. Beginning of December. All right.

Sign me up, man. Yeah. I'm ready to go. I didn't even get a deer. And therein lies the catch. Maybe that. I'm ready to go. I didn't even get a deer. And therein lies the catch. Maybe that's why I want to go. Because there's a level of uncertainty. But it's not like this is a secret.

Because you can go on Alaska Department of Fish and Game's website and go look at success rates. So every year they give out X number of tags. Let's say on a typical year they give out 30 tags. You go look and it'd be like, they issued 30 tags, 22 dudes actually showed up. And most of it would be like 21 killed a muskox. So going into it, you're like, all right, you set aside a week.

And the reason you're setting aside a week is you're trying to get a good weather day. We got lucky and had, like we had a day, we got stuck in Bethel, couldn't even fly, it's a little bit complicated, but we couldn't have flown to Bethel.

We couldn't have flown out there even that day. Couldn't even have flown out there. Definitely could have hunted that day. Had another day when it wasn't good to hunt. Had it later. But the day we got there, just so happened we got there, it was a good hunt day. Had another day when it wasn't good to hunt. Later. But the day we got there, just so happened we got there, it was a good hunt day. And when those boys loaded up those trailers and those snow machines, there was no doubt what was going to happen that day. We were killing the musk ox. But I don't know, man. If I went to my mom's house right now on September 15th, opening day of Squirrel,

and I call Mrs. Zeldinrust, and I said, Mrs. Zeldinrust, can I come home to hunt squirrels on your place? Not only do I know I'm going to get a squirrel, I'm going to get the daily bag limit of five. It would take an act of God for me to not get five. That's enjoyable to me. So is it that? I don't know what it is. I'm going to kill five squirrels. Absolutely. If I'm out of Miles City and we're going to go hunt cottontails, we're going to kill cottontails.

I'm going out there next week to fish catfish. We're going to knock the hell out of them. Is it not fun now? Dude, I know we're going to catch catfish. I don't know. It's a mystery. Maybe it was the serenity wasn't there. Loud snowmobiles. Bumpy travel.

Cold. No exercise. Maybe you're not in the driver's seat. It might be a guided hunting. Because think about it like this. Say you've gone out there and it wasn't that you had to land on

native land. And it was just you could just have a pilot who's got a plane on skis. You could fly around. You can't hunt the same day you fly. You flew around, found a herd, put down somewhere a couple miles or a mile away, so you're not going to disturb them.

Set up camp, and then out on foot. You'd be like, I'm coming back coming back dude that was a blast you know it's just the mechanics of the hunt itself just yeah how long we've been talking for you we're at an hour plus all right it's all you guys paid for is one hour we're gonna log out um any concluding thoughts mike texas is big mike just wants to clarify just how big texas is Any concluding thoughts, Mike? Texas is big. Mike just wants to clarify just how big Texas is. I wish you best of luck in the muskox draw next year.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, when you give your concluding thoughts right now, tell us where you're at on doing the muskox draw. To be able to take part in it as a – you know, you bring up some good points. no no screw what i said i'm just talking i don't know what i'm talking about i can't subtract those from my brain they're already in there um i don't know i i mean like you said it is a once in a a one lifetime kind of thing to do and it'd be nice yeah because i you know we took part in it so i have you know the whole operation stuff and so it's less of a mystery so maybe i don't know if that's a bad thing or a good thing.

But to do it yourself, I think, would be kind of cool. I'd like to come, you know, bring my dad. And, like, you know, be able to share in that experience. It's a great experience. Because, I mean, there's no place that I've been to that's more, I mean, save the, you know, southern slope of the Brooks Ranch when we were there. Just vast, open, just it's bleak, but it has its own really sharp-edged beauty to it.

And there's something about the landscape that is just so, I mean, like I said, it's like it's another planet. Yeah. And you'll never see, I mean, stuff like that doesn't exist in Texas. It has its own topography. As big as it is. As big as it is. It doesn't have that. It doesn't have arctic tundra. It doesn't exist in Texas. It has its own topography. As big as it is. As big as it is. It doesn't have that.

It doesn't have arctic tundra. It doesn't have snow dunes. So to be able to experience that vicariously to bring somebody else there would be pretty cool. Having the knowledge of being there and taking part in their community and stuff. And just in a cultural sense being able to see how other people live. That's what's so great about this job is you get to go to all these different places and experience all these different people and stuff. And that's rewarding in itself beyond the animal.

So you're making me feel like a dick now for what I said because everything you're saying is. No, because I was trying to talk. You're shaming me. On my own podcast. I was trying to speak to just the hunt. I know, just the hunt, yeah. Culturally, I loved it.

Okay. Yeah, granted, the hunt is its own kind of beast. No, and you hit the nail on the head. It was the mechanics of the hunt. Yeah. We can let that one lay rest.

But yeah, being there, dude eating frozen tomahawk dipped in seal oil. There are a few places. Is this your wrap-up, or is Mike still doing his wrap-up? You know, right now it's just putting that, the chances of actually drawing that tag, I mean, it would be more of just like, yeah, let's see what happens, you know, throw it on the wall, see if it sticks. And then I would have to like, okay, you know, if I did draw a tag, okay, is this really going to happen?

And then there would be a whole other process of like thinking about that and if I actually pulled the trigger on it. But, you know, right now in just like a far off, not real like a far off not real place like yeah sure it might be kind of cool but definitely not definitely not for the you know the challenge of the hunt for sure no yeah i feel like there's few places in the united states of america that are as exotic in both like landscape and culture and activity and animal is what we just experienced. That's true. Put all those things together. Where else are you going to go to really like get that far out of your comfort zone across the board like that?

Yeah. Not necessarily comfort zone, but just like what you know about I mean even at the airport here in Bethel dudes are talking you know some dialect of Eskimo like it's the real deal you are way out here in Eskimo it was shocking to be with

people who are speaking Tupac yeah like you know these people are like into James we touched on the tom cod in the seal oil james whitman's wife really never really hung out with us too much didn't really eat with us even as paying clients like around the dinner table when we busted out that tom cod in the seal oil she was in it and was like this this stuff's the bomb. She had a whole fish before you even got the first bite. It's cool.

Would you put in for the tag? Not yet. Give me your concluding thoughts. I'm very excited to add, I think, species number 10 to my freezer with that 50-pound box. Oh, we didn't talk about the meat. 50-pound box of meat that you so generously shared. Rich, rich, very good meat, but very rich. Yeah.

Fatty meat. It's good. We ate some. It was great. The ribs were good. Yeah, we ate some ribs that were tasty. We ate pond. No, we ate diaphragm.

What else did we eat? I think that's tasty. We ate pont. No, we ate diaphragm. What else did we eat? I think that's it. This is raw. Raw. Rich, fatty meat. We wound up with easy. We have over 200 pounds of meat. My box weighed in at 60-something.

60? Yeah, so we're each going home with 60 pounds of untrimmed meat. No bone. Untrimmed, but bone. Yeah, but you'll probably yield 40. I got a sack of Tom Cod. Me and Corey got a sack of Tom Cod, too. My kid's going to be eating shavings. So is that your concluding thoughts? It is.

Corey, concluding thoughts? I had a great time. I mean, the experience, and I agree with everyone on the cultural aspect of it, was amazing. I think that the imagery that is going to stick in my mind the rest of my life is like pulling alongside, you know, paralleling the muskox running and looking off the snowmobile thinking, wow, you know, this is like Jurassic Park or something. You know, where's the saber-toothed tiger now? But, you know, that animal's just like gliding on the tundra. It is wild. See, that animal took him to the Ice Age.

He was right there. Dude, it did me too. I know I was hacking on the Ice Age thing, but when I looked at him, I'm like, if I was just sitting here, if you said to me, like if I somehow lost my position in time, okay, you somehow could be confused where you were

in the space-time continuum. And you sat me down with my binoculars on that glass and tit, and I looked out, I'd be like, well, there's a mammoth down there, is what I would think. I had talked about this a couple times out there. When I first saw muskox, it was the first time I went caribou hunting.

And we drove up to hunt caribou. We didn't hire, we just did it with a canoe and a truck. It was the first time I'd ever hunted in alaska and this way it was 15 years ago i knew that there was a thing called the muskox that existed but i couldn't have told you if it existed there still or not or where i knew it was just like i knew it was a creature right and all of a sudden we're looking at something through our binoculars. You know, it was like looking across some talk about confusion in space,

time continuum. It really was like, I wasn't like clear what I was looking at. I could be like, Oh, there's a musk ox. But I'm like, but what is a musk ox?

Like, where are they right now as a species? Right. Am I seeing the last one? You know? Like, what am I looking at? It's just there's not a lot of awareness about that animal. An Ice Age remnant.

Because it's an Ice Age remnant. It's like the Norway rat. Corey. Yeah, I mean, overall, a beautiful trip. Really? Yeah. Those old ice shanties, just sitting on the edge of the Bering Sea like that. Sunrises, sunsets were amazing. I think we got lucky with the weather.

Really, we had five days straight of partly cloudy to sunny days. You had to have liked watching me jack those tomcat up through that hole in the ice. Oh, yeah. That was inspiring for you, probably. I think making the hole was the best. I don't know, man.

It wore out, it wore a hole through my beaver mitten, man. It did? Yeah. It wore a hole through my beaver mitten. It's worked for those holes.

Four hours. Four hours of hole pounding. All right, Yanni's giving me the old wrap it up. Thanks for listening. Say thanks for listening and laughing and I'll shut up. Paul Diaz can use Klausie at this. I love Benocti.

All right, signing out. Meteor podcast. Tune in next time. Hey, listen up. This sounds like an advertisement, but it's not. It's different than an ad. I need you guys and gals that listen to go check out the Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering, and Cooking Wild Game, which is written by myself and some people from the Meat Eater team and a collection of the best hunters from around the

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