The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 041: Daniel, Wyoming. Steven Rinella talks with Janis Putelis, Chris Gil, and Garret Smith from the MeatEater Crew.

Episode Date: August 5, 2016

Subjects discussed: the untouchedness of certain animals; hunting hats, radical lefty hats, and hats that say hello before you do; making smoked bear hams; the fishy taste of coastal bears; beaver tasting notes; Chris Gil's grey rabbit meat; Chupik eskimo and seal oil; the mountain man era; what would happen at the mountain man rendezvous; company trappers vs. free trappers; today's equivalent of a mountain man; why Janis is done promoting squirrel hunting; beaver tail belt buckles and eel skin wallets; the richest man in America; Daniel Boone, Jim Bridger, Laramie, Jed Smith, John Colter, Hugh Glass, Jed Smith, and more badasses. 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 meat. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We call it the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Okay, we're outside of Daniel, Wyoming.

And you know what we were talking about earlier? I had looked at, I was looking at this, a grip and grin picture where a dude had shot a bighorn sheep. And it had a collar, it had a tracking collar on it. And I got to talking about how there's no way in hell I would shoot a big game animal that had a collar. Because what I like about animals is their untouchedness. The idea that they haven't been touched. They're wild.

And to get one that was wearing like a collar, I'd be like, oh yeah, but someone was messing with them probably not far from here. Giannis pointed out, tell them what you pointed out about ducks. I didn't point that out about ducks. I thought you did. No, it was Chris. You did sound like him. The bands on ducks, yeah ducks Because it's cool for dudes to wear the necklace right

Yeah so That's Chris Gill You were born in Grand Rapids Yep Chris Gill who's never joined us before Was born in Grand Rapids Where I went to regular college Where I went to the end of regular college.

Where'd you go to college? Ferris State University. Big Rapids. We used to try Beaver up there. You know about Chippewa Lake. Chippewa Lake, Haymarsh. Oh, really? Yeah, we used to catch muskrats and beaver in Haymarsh. I did like Dinker Northern Pike in a canoe

in Haymarsh. But I liked the atmosphere better than chipotle we'd hit it on in the ice through the ice oh yeah and we looked for uh morels up there and didn't find them but i had this gal i was kind of dating a little bit who was bosnian and we were out looking for morels and she found a deer fawn really i mean this thing looked like it had just fallen out of a doe slimy no but fresh so anyhow i was saying man there's no way in hell i'd ever shoot an animal wearing a collar was it are you sure was you the point of this out i i think so i said it i'm not you know someone pointed out

well why is it good or fun or cool to shoot to get a duck with a band it's i can't explain it just is i would like a duck with a band seems mysterious to me not just that it invites mystery because you're going to find out information about it and it's probably was banded hundreds if not you know potentially thousands of miles away that's exciting a elk or a deer wearing a big collar i don't know man there's no way in the world i would shoot it because it just wouldn't feel like well it's not like then next time you go elk on you're gonna like throw the collar you're gonna like strap it on your backpack or put it on your neck and that way when you run into somebody they're like oh dude you got that one with the collar, you strap it on your backpack or put it on your neck. And that way when you run into somebody, they're like, oh, dude, you got that one with the collar on it, I see.

What would you do? You can't leave it laying because that's like – No, I know. But like the guys with your lanyards and the bands, everybody puts them on their lanyards. It's kind of like a status thing, you know, like how many little duck bands you have on your lanyards, right? Yeah, that's what I'm saying because duck bands are cool.

Tracking collars on big game animals are uncool. Yeah. But like I was saying, I think it would be cool if, say, you did shoot that cowhawk or whatever, and you thought, oh, yeah, she must have just been trapped right here, or they dropped her out of a helicopter right here, let her go. But then you found out that, no, she was trapped 300 miles from here. And then you got all this interesting information from her. Still wouldn't like it can't i'm not acting like it's rational i'm not acting like i

can explain it clearly i'm just saying when i see and i have seen a handful of in my life and i'm sure you have too because i like to thumb through hunting magazines where you see a fella could be a woman i just don't think I have seen that. A fella, you know, with a thing wearing a big, like those big white collars. My thing I always think is, it's just, I'm like, that's weird. Don't like that.

Not that I don't like it for him. That's great, great. Fantastic. But for me. It kind of feels domesticated. I got a question for you. Does it relate in parallel, just thinking about it, to like you're in this beautiful mountain scene and you stand atop this rock and you're like, man, this is great. I'm probably the first guy here.

And you look down, there's like an old Dr. Pepper can or something. Yeah. So it's like you thought you were in this place of, you know know of i don't know what to call it yeah i'm just saying so if you look down and found some old and i have some old ass cartridge where the brass is actually corroding and you look and it's like a make that you've never even seen before that's cool yeah if i look down and see a mountain dew can that's not cool but an old one but does it it has to be some old ass mountain dew for me to think it was cool just i don't know how long they've been making mountain dew does it speak to initially you brought up that like an animal

that's been you know messed with or had been handled it gets rid of that sense of like yeah elusiveness and it would be the same with finding that yeah there's certain like yeah when you get an animal i mean i had this conversation with someone recently when you get an animal you're taking possession of it i pointed this out to another person who likes to hunt in fact it's my brother i point out like when you take an animal you take possession of it i mean legally it becomes your property and he's yeah, just don't think about it that way. I don't think like, oh, now it's mine. He goes, I have access to it, but I don't think that I've taken possession of it. It doesn't feel like that to me.

But in some way, yeah, I would feel that. Like an animal wearing a tracking collar with a tag in its ear, I would feel like somehow it would be more like i got it at the yard sale it was a shared thing then then then that it was like this thing that that are that he had lived this life and this was his collision with a human yeah does any part of you think about like but maybe it doesn't but affect like harvesting that animal does that affect the research that whatever agency is doing on that species that i don't know but i know that yes yes and no i imagine sometimes they put the thing on there and it's you know it functions for a amount of time in the styles function i remember uh when they

at one of the points when wolves were in fact delisted and they had some wolf seasons they were asking people to not to try to avoid shooting collared wolves because they were getting a lot of valuable information off of collared wolves and And that it was actually helpful in figuring out predation, elements of predation from livestock and other things. And there was a saying like, don't get the ones with the collars. There might be cases where people want the collars back. And it's not like this is something that happens. It was just a conversation we had.

The second conversation. Can I just add one collar story here yeah i want a collar story i once passed on a cow with a collar on it so you know what i'm talking about yeah totally no she totally got the free pass but just happened to run into the game warden who'd been working this country for many many years yeah mentioned this to him and he says and this is about 2010 he says well that's interesting because the last time we did any collaring on elk there it was all adult cows that we collared and it was in the late 80s hmm i was like well that was awesome to hear because like you hear about cows getting old,

but to hear about a cow, sure enough, she could have been migrated from some other collaring study from way far away. But in that general area, with those two kind of facts put together, it was saying that that cow is 20-plus years old. There was a big collaring study going on along a proposed highway route in alaska where they're trying to punch they've been trying to punch in the road for a long time there's a lot of resistance to this road but one thing they're doing is they're doing a eis environmental impact

statement and so they had a bunch of different animals collared in the area because they're trying to figure out movement patterns and predict the way in which this road might impact animal migrations they had a collared moose fall into a crevasse and die a collared grizzly scavenged the collared moose's carcass fell in there with it and died. And it was later scavenged by a collared wolverine. Now that is a bunch of collaring. That's a collision of collars is what I would call that. The second thing we were talking about is Yanni's t-shirt company. He's like, think about doing this retro thing.

Explain that. He wants to make old-timey. When you were a kid, how old are you? You're 36? Seven. 37. I'm 42. Gil?

27. So you might not even remember these kind of hats. Yeah. When I was 10 and you went out to go sledding, you not even remember these kind of hats. Yeah. Like when I was 10 and you went out to go sledding, you put on a certain type of hat and it had a ball on top. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it fit a certain way. Yeah.

And it was designed a certain way. Yanni wants to start making those that are like hunt to eat. So you can wear them hunting. Yeah. No. No. Hunter's orange hat. That's the thing.

It's like, you know what it should be called it should be called like look at me instead of hunting i don't think you should make a retro hat well i don't understand why just because i want to make a hat that you can like wear a little bit of style out into the woods so you don't have to be forced to like wear like the goofy orange stuff that is currently made out there. Because it's the law to have the orange on. Yes, it's the law to have the orange on, but it doesn't say that it also has to be goofy and shitty. Oh, you're going to make it Hunter's Orange?

Yes. You know what hat I liked? I still don't like it, but that makes it different a little bit. I think you should make a hat. My grandpa Kenny used to hunt and he's like the only person in my family that used to hunt. And he used to wear like a big trucker hat that had flaps on the inside that would fold down. But the whole thing was just like really padded. And it was real old-timey and vintage.

Yeah, it's like the whole hat was almost made out of like a foam. Yeah, there was foam on the inside of everything. I think I had a foam. Grandpa Kenny. Grandpa Kenny. Yeah. That name makes him sound like he had that hat. Right? Yeah.

Because if you were like my grandfather Theodore, or my grandfather Parker. He didn't hunt shit. So anyhow, talk about your invention there, what you got going on. My Hunter's Orange hat? Yeah. Yeah, you got going on. My Hunter's Orange hat? Yeah. Yeah, it's going to be a Hunter's Orange hat.

It just has a little more style than what's currently available. Are you going to have it with that thing they do on those old hats where the design makes it look like it was cross-stitched in? No. No? I don't think so. I could go full on like the Alps kind of Swedish slug team. Would you like that one with the little tassels hanging down?

No, that's the Andes. Andes, I'm sorry. No, I don't like that. Because I look at that and I think that when I see someone wearing one of those, I make an assumption that they're so left wing that I would have a hard time hanging out with them. It just seems like a vegan- hat an l an andy's hat our good friend joe rogan were one of those and i told him just that i told him you look like a radical you look like the radical left when

you're wearing that hat you know not that that's bad i don't care i got a lot you know kept his ears warm it probably did uh yanni's uh hunt to eat you guys came out with a lot, you know. Kept his ears warm. It probably did. And Yanni's Hunt to Eat, you guys came out with a commemorative, you guys came out with a t-shirt for BHA where you're giving proceeds. 100% of the proceeds. You're not even taking out the cost of the shirt. You're taking out the cost of the shirt. Yes. So all the

proceeds go to bha it's not like this one percent bullshit you're like 100 yep from that one shirt so yanni just cut him a check for 700 bucks you haven't even sold them that long yep well we we had a booth at the bha rendezvous there um at the beginning of april and um so thanks for everybody that supported us. But yeah, like all the profits we made, we ended up being in basically a $700 check to BHA. Now, a lot of business fellas would think like, man, I should have just been selling the other shirts

because then I would have kept all the money. Are you looking at this as, are you like playing the long game? Are you playing the long game, thinking that this will in the end make you money? Or are you playing the game of like, I just want to support conservation? Oh, both, definitely.

Yeah. Trying to be business smart and do the right thing. 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.

Whew! Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. 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. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast.

Now you, 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. We'll be right back. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the to the OnX Club, y'all. Yep.

Another thing I wanted to bring up. We just ate beaver. Damn, that beaver is good. It was delicious. It's like it's really good. Yeah.

A little more on that. No, because that's going to lead into a whole other thing. I want to talk about another thing we just ate. I had some bear meat, a coastal black bear, and I had one last big chunk of my freezer, and I did a wet brine for four days, salt, sugar, water. It's a very simple wet brine. I was trying salt, sugar, water. It's very simple. I was trying to do it at the same time I was trying to.

I was kind of like in charge. I was largely in charge of my little kids for a couple days, and that doesn't happen to be very often, all three of them. And so at the same time, I'm trying to really keep that whole thing moving along. I was also trying to make a bear ham, so I made a simple wet brine, salt, sugar, water, wet brine it for four days put it my smoker a pellet you know pellet grill smoker started smoking the piss out of it ran out of the pellets put in my oven kind of forgot about

in the oven came back found it it had gotten up to like 180-some degrees inside. Cooled it off, put it in the Ziploc, brought it down to Wyoming, and that son of a bitch tastes like salmon. Good smoked salmon, though. It tastes like fish jerky. It's like those bears eat so much fish, it just is in them. Sometimes I don't mind it, but sometimes, what did you think of it, Chris? You haven't eaten a whole shit pile of bear meat in your life, have you?

Man, that might have been the first bear I had, I think. Unless we had it on another trip. But I thought it was crazy. Oh, it tastes like fish. Yeah, you eat it and you think you're eating salmon, but you know it's red meat. Yeah, it tastes like fish jerky. It tastes just like fish jerky. Because's like smoked salmon, but red meat. I can't believe the brining alone didn't kill it.

It's in there. It reminds me of something that happened another time. Coastal Bear killed early June. I can't believe I haven't really thought about this earlier. We killed a Coast bear early June and borrowed my neighbor's smoker up in Alaska. Smoked a bear ham in there, whole damn leg, femur and everything. Smoked a bear ham in his smoker. And we were eating it.

And I went to him and said, man, you need to clean that smoker and we were eating it and i went to him and said man you need to clean that smoker out because it's so caked up with smoked salmon grease and whatnot that it molested it contaminated my bear ham he says i've never smoked a fish in that smoker. You don't know what you're talking about. And I now realize it was just that fishy taste that the coastal bears get. And maybe this is smoking because the same bear that you smoked,

I did at least two or three recipes with it. I wonder about that too because I've eaten a whole bunch of it. We were eating it as meat candy, pot roast. I don't know like smoking it enhances the fish flavor did you like it gary made a burrito out of it yeah i really liked it i couldn't stop i was just thinking could you conjecture smoke fish made a smoked fish jerky burrito. With beaver, too. Oh, you put some beaver in there? Oh, yeah.

But do you think you get the omega-3 from the fish after it is processed through the bear? You know what I'm saying? Yeah, no. That's a very good question. I would like to know. Yeah. One time, we were down doing those species of fly they call them flying carp the the the asiatic carp that have gotten into the mississippi and ohio rivers um there's like

the big head carp the silver carp which we call the flying carp anyways we're down bow fishing for these things and there's they're trying to figure out what to do with all these damn carp and this guy had this thing set up where he was taking the fish and and like basically cooking them down shredding them and kind of drying them through this weird process to make fish oil and he gave me some of that to sip but i was sipping that fish oil and it does it's like that's very similar so that is the taste so it might yeah it's got to be that it might be that the fats that his fats have incorporated those kind of like fish oils is what we're tasting in that bear maybe yeah maybe this is super good for you man yeah so that's like a multivitamin almost that bear

that's a good way of looking at it yeah i'm gonna take that home and give it to my kids because they don't know that they don't know that like regular meat red meat is not supposed to taste like fish so since they don't know that i bet i give it to them i bet they'll walk around eating it and think that it's really good because they won't know to think it's weird you know when does that happen when you think it's weird because it wasn't weird to me you know i mean you don't think it was weird that you're eating red meat that tastes like dead salmon no but i think maybe because you foreshadowed that it you know could have that flavor but oh you know i mean you wouldn't have otherwise come up with it no i may have thought it was odd if you hadn't been like you know this tastes very fishy yeah but it wasn't weird once i you know, this tastes very fishy. Yeah. But it wasn't weird once I, you know, knew what to expect.

The other thing we were eating is the beaver. Garrett, give me your, like, what's your take on the beaver? Had you eaten that growing up? No, I'd never had. Not that I knew of. You know, maybe my dad did the same thing. Maybe we ate it and I thought it was beef because it tasted very much like a, you know, big game or beef pot roast. Yeah. So maybe, but no, it was beef because it tasted very much like a big game or beef pot roast.

Yeah. So maybe, but no, it was really good. You liked it? Yeah, I did. Loved that beaver. Chris? Incredible. Incredible beaver.

What about it? Give me some more. I wasn't- You're saying that Miss Gill wouldn't like it unless it was cut up. You'd have to trick her. You'd have to trick her because she doesn't like all the graphic bones and tendons and all that shit. Yeah. So you got to like shred it. Knuckles hanging.

You just got to pull it off the bone first. You just got to pull off the bone. But she doesn't eat a lot of red meat. So you got to... There's a whole thing you got to trick her with. As part of this, talk about what happened with your rabbit when you were cooking up rabbit. Oh, yeah. at first as part of this talk about what happened with your rabbit when you were cooking up rabbit oh yeah so i didn't kill the rabbit but i got a rabbit from uh our kentucky trip and i took it home and i was like feeling all confident about cooking wild game and the first step in this

recipe that i found for braising it was to brown it and I like hadn't browned any meat before. So I go to brown it and I don't do it long enough, which I've since today learned how to do it. And it just ends up kind of looking gray. And then I braised it and then it just got grayer. And then I pulled it out and it's like, you know, the back ham on it and it's just like a bone and really great meat. And she just was not into it. And that she was already kind of like not into the idea of eating it and then that just totally

like pushed her over would she be into gray beaver you'd have to cut it off though you'd have to you'd have to really trick her man actually you know what i think if you put barbecue sauce on it we're both that way like we'll put pretty much eat anything barbecue on it yeah yeah but yeah you'd have to you have to trigger but you were digging it i loved it i thought it was great it's like beef like the consistency and like the texture was like a beef pot roast but it tasted like it had like like a little twang in it like a good twang yeah a little wild laid up yeahang. Yeah, like a little wild laid up in it. Yeah, yeah. So it was like a very intriguing taste. Yeah.

What did you think about it, Yanni? Yeah, it was delicious. Every time I've cooked it up to that point, I think I've masked it more because it was in a stew. I've done Kentucky burgoo a few times that had beaver in it. I've had it in sausages. But this was nice because we really got to you know taste it for what it is and it was just you know carrots onions potatoes a little bit of red wine in there and you just there's no way someone could call it out yeah i'm eating beaver i was pointing out to the

fellas here that during the colonial period in america or in the colonial period in America, or the colonial period in the New World or North America, when the Spanish and French had a big early presence here, they had okayed it. Because a beaver has a scaly tail and lives in the water, they had said you can use it as a fish substitute for your Lenten meals. Which just strikes me this is so peculiar but i think they had people here in a in a difficult situation where they just weren't it was hard to be observant if you didn't have access to fresh fish you know so you could be like in the desert southwest right you might not have access to fresh fish but you get canyon bottoms full of beavers and they're like yeah you know feel better about yourself eat some beaver where we're at right now is what is how many miles six

seven miles i think seven is a crow flies from the confluence of the green river and horse creek and it's the site of the it's one of the mountain man rendezvous sites so of i can't remember there was a dozen rendezvous 15 15 rendezvous six of them were at this place where we're at so we're trapping beaver turns out to be we're trapped a beaver within eyesight of the mountain man rendezvous place and the favorite mountain man food a favorite mountain Man food was beaver tail. Anyone who reads about Mountain Man reads that, and you see it around. And we used to debate what it meant, like what exactly it meant and how you cooked a tail.

And I was up in your old stomping grounds, Big Rapids. I used to go up to Big Rapids my brother was he he went to four colleges by the time he finished regular college and went to two more for other later degrees but one of them was big rapids and i would go up there in december and january and we would trap beaver through the ice and we had i left the beaver laying around somewhere at his place, and they were drinking beer and got to talking about this whole beaver tail thing and cut the tail off a beaver and just stuck it in the oven for a while. Pulled it out of the oven, messed around it,

and they're like, I just don't get what this is all about. I don't see that it's edible. I don't understand what it means. And then we honestly had this idea that when they said that the mountain men like to eat beaver tail, we're like, it must mean they like to eat beaver hams or beaver thighs. So we started stuffing those down into a crock pot and cooking them, and it was surprisingly good.

Then I later learned that it is the tail, but you've got to get like a beaver in the fall, and he's got a big, thick tail, and you stick his tail next to a fire, and the skin on that tail bubbles off, and you can scrape it away, and underneath there is what I can, the best way to describe it would be like gristle on a steak, just white, fatty gristle, and it's hard to picture it being good unless you think about what it would be if you just were not getting any oils or fats in your diet. Like you're eating lean-ass meat all the time, and you're not putting olive oil on everything and putting butter on everything.

You get where you just want that oil. Similar to the Eskimos when they're seal oil. Yeah. Yeah. that oil similar to the eskimos when they're seal oil yeah yeah we're out on noon yeah we're on nunavak and they're saying that which is an island out in the bering sea and we're with some what what's their the chupics yeah chupics chupic eskimo and then someone's gonna call in and be like oh no it's not eskimo that's a negative negative word. I asked the dudes, what should I call you? Do I call you an Eskimo? He's like, what in the hell else would you call me?

Didn't he? Oh, yeah. In my whole life, I'm like, the Eskimo, like Eskimo hunters, be like, oh, it's a derogatory term. Don't say that. It's like, well, apparently someone hasn't told this guy because this guy, I said, like, you sure it's not Inuit? And he was like, nope.

Morascomos. Tupac. Anyhow, they were saying you can starve to death on tomcod. And people have. But if you dip it in oil, seal oil, you're fine. Stay alive. That's interesting with the oil there because didn't they wait till all the oil was out of their salmon to smoke them but that was because it would because it would dry faster that was yeah

that was some other issue where yeah that was a weird thing i don't think we've ever talked about this so they you know usually when you target target fish, like when you're targeting salmon, the best quality a salmon is ever going to be in, like his highest quality he'll be in is before he goes up a stream to spawn. So he's at his most fit state, the highest fat content state, because once he enters the river and starts going up the river, he's not going to be eating and he's going to deplete. And a really long river like the Yukon or these other rivers where the fish is going to travel hundreds and hundreds of miles, they're particularly fatty when they go up. And so those are great fish at the mouth, real fatty. So generally that's what people want.

But yeah, these dudes are telling us that they don't fish chum salmon until the chums go up and spawn out and kind of start dying and drifting back down river and then they like to catch them because they dry better in their climate because they don't smoke they just hang it to dry and they live in a cold ass wet ass place and the oily fish never dries right it's an interesting trade-off though when you're obviously lacking those calories that you're just toting around a bottle of seal oil buckets of it and they just drink it or they dip dip stuff in it yeah we went out with them and caught tom cod through the ice and they'd take and just shave like the whole damn fish you know it's frozen

because like the minute you catch this frozen rock solid they take it in the house frozen and just slice little like sushi slices off of the tom cod and then you take the tom cod still frozen and it looks it's about the size of a i mean it's like what are those little square like those wheat thin crap i don't know like a cut like a piece of wheat fish, and then they dredge it in that oil, and it's a peppery oil, man, like very peppery. Do they spice it or just naturally? No, man, that's all they do. They were saying the kids have gotten into soy sauce,

but it wasn't their scene. The older people don't like it that way. Were they salted or anything? Nothing, man. Huh. And they were protective of it. We were trying to get off the island with some seal oil. We were like, well, come on.

Reach out. Ask some friends. Please. We left with no seal oil. I think a lot of that might have to do with them being leery about the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Like, they're exempt from Marine Mammal Protection Act, like they're exempt from Marine Mammal Protection Act. And there's probably a lot like, you know, there's a lot of restrictions on who take, you know, like white guys or general Euro-Americans can't hunt marine mammals.

They can hunt marine mammals as indigenous people. So what I took away from that is there might be like a leeriness to be taking byproducts from marine mammals and doing something that might be construed as bartering with them or putting them into other people's hands perhaps. With those seal hats that they were trying to sell, spall under that. That's a good point because they would try to sell seal hats. they were trying to sell. Oh, that's a good point.

Because they would try to sell seal hats. Yeah, what the hell? I don't know. I don't understand it. Yeah, that's definitely not it. Because you could leave with a seal hat. Matter of fact, we got off the plane there, and there was a dude leaving with a seal.

A white guy leaving with a seal hat. I don't know. Expensive seal hat, too. Oh, go ahead. Well, what's better? Beaver hat or seal hat i don't know expensive seal hat too what's up oh go ahead well what's better beaver hat or seal hat like just because we've been talking a lot about i like to me a beaver hat's better a seal hat is pretty that's a flashy hat yeah depending i think what was the the ones that we were looking at buying were like a spotted seal, maybe. And so it was literally like this bleach blonde with black spots.

So very flashy. It's like a look at me kind of hat. Yeah. The locals had, I think, harbor seal. Ring. Ring seal. Yeah. So it was almost more like the be Beavers, like a brown undertone with kind of like just a light highlight

to the tips of the hairs. Way more low-key, you know? That's the one we were kind of trying to search out, but it didn't happen for us. Yeah, it's hard. Like, they can pull it off. The Eskimos can pull it off. But I don't know if he made it up but ronnie bame always said

to me when i worked for him when i was younger he said uh never wear a hat that has more personality than you do and there's another thing saying like never wear a hat that says hello before you do and i feel like i can have on a beaver or muskrat hat that i caught my own like if i'm gonna wear fur it's gonna be because I caught it, right? I'm not going to go buy fur from some other dude. It's like I'm not going to buy meat from some other guy and bring it back home. So I feel like I can have on a fur hat that I caught the fur and I can feel like I'm not, the hat's not saying hi before me.

You know? It's a close second yeah but to have that kind of white seal hat with the black spots on it that's some bitch is saying hi from way way far away yeah you can't shout it loud enough because no one's gonna be like oh it's a seal hat they're gonna be like what in the world is that yeah but yeah about the mountain men so here's what a mountain man was now you got like i find that a lot but do you guys are you guys clear before we had this conversation are you guys clear on what a mountain man was well i didn't realize it was an era specific yeah it's not some jackass on tv

it's not some jackass on like a reality's not some jackass on a reality TV show who pretends to be doing mountain man-y shit. There's no more mountain men as they were. Here's the thing. Now, when people who don't know what a mountain man was talk about mountain men, they think it's like a hermit in a cabin. But in fact, mountain men were the most well-traveled,

widely-traveled individuals of their era. A mountain man, let me just lay out what a mountain man was first. The mountain man era, okay, we did the, the U.S. made the Louisiana Purchase. We bought the western U.S. under the Jefferson presidency. 1804 to 1806 was the Lewis and Clark Expedition. They went out, they had a handful of mandates about some various routes they might find

to get across the country, opening up trade things. There was some talk that they might find woolly mammoths, and that was of interest to Jefferson. But one of the main things was fur trade, establish connections for the fur trade, suss out what's going on with fur trade opportunities out west. One of the guys with them was a dude named John Coulter.

He was a hunter for them. They didn't even get back, so they were gone 1840 to 1806. They didn't even make it back to St. Louis, and John Coulter ran into some other mugs going back up the Missouri as the Lewis and Clark Expedition was coming down the Missouri. And John Coulter was excused from the expedition and went back upriver to trap Beaver. Historians kind of regard that as the beginning of the mountain man era

1806 the mountain man era kind of came into full bloom where there was a very organized trade of beaver pelts kind of came into full bloom in the early 1820s um that was like the heyday of the mountain man era and the whole thing petered out 1840 at that point a couple things were going on historians kind of argue about it but a couple things are going on one beavers have been really whacked back hard really trapped out so it was becoming not quite worth the chase to give an idea how good the chase was at a time there's a story about a group of mountain men. They would call themselves a brigade of mountain men. There were 20 of them.

The winter of 1823 to 1824 trapped the Bitterroot Mountains. There was 20 guys. They had 200 and some traps, and they pulled 5,000 beaver, which was an absolute fortune. That's the heyday there's another guy who was working a lone trapper a lone mountain man working the san francisco river arizona and he caught 500 and some beaver in a winter that's a fortune by 1840 beaver were petering out and the price was plummeting because what they were using the beaver for is they're making wool felt to make felt hats silk had become fashionable and so the demand for beaver pelts had collapsed and that was the end of that mountain man era

you had two kinds of mountain men you had company trappers who were basically contract trappers and you had free trappers and and you had free trappers. And people generally regard free trappers as being the cool ones. They went out on their own or with a partner, trapped, sold their beaver to the highest bidder at a thing called a rendezvous. And there were, you were just researching this, Yanni. 15, yeah. There were 15 rendezvous. 18.5 to 18 1840. So a rendezvous would be dealers would come out from the east

and truck out all kinds of guns and axes and kettles and buttons and needles and saws and axes and butcher knives and calico and flints, lead, powder, all kinds of shit that a person would need. They would truck it out from the eastern wagons. You know, at the very first one, they didn't truck out a single drop of alcohol. Why is that?

They were afraid of people getting too drunk? No, I think it was just a straight-up mistake. Oh, really? And they never made that mistake again. That would have been a bummer rendezvous. Yeah. Because picture, okay, so when the rendezvous happens, the dude trucks out all the equipment,

and they meet just in a high, they just meet in a mountain valley somewhere. They'd meet in the summertime. They meet up in a high place where there's plenty of feed for horses because hundreds of people are going to turn up there. They would come. It would be an established period of time. All these trappers who'd been working the Rockies,

east of the Rockies, the main stem, main spine been working the rockies east of the rockies the main stem main spine of the rockies west of the rockies everyone would convene at this pre selected location to trade in their beaver for goods and money mostly goods then they would fan back out to trap again for a lot of these these guys, free trappers especially, that was the only human interaction you had outside of the group of guys you trapped with. And they would party their asses off. And we're at doing a little beaver trapping at the main rendezvous site,

which was called what? Daniel. They call it, but what did the mountain men call it? Horse Creek? Daniel. They call it, but what did the mountain men call it? Horse Creek? Or did they call it? Because they would winter, the mountain men would winter in Jackson Hole.

They'd oftentimes winter in places that had a little bit of inversion type quality like low valleys that stayed kind of nice. But they would meet here and I don't know what they called this particular rendezvous site. Cache Valley, Utah was a rendezvous site um maybe just the upper green river upper green they had more rendezvous here than anywhere else and the last rendezvous was here so that's what a mountain man is now if you did a composite drawing of your average mountain man, he was a dude, he was like a guy who grew up on a farm

in, you know, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, grew up on a farm, had a lot of wanderlust, and heard about fortunes and adventure to be had, and made his way out into the wildest place imaginable at the time, having no real idea what he was getting into, and came out with a very high likelihood of having a violent death at the hands of Native Americans who did not take kindly to this imposition on their hunting lands.

Many, many, many mountain men were killed by Indians. A handful were killed by grizzlies. Some were killed by each other. Some were just killed. No one really knows. You know the Laramie Range here in Wyoming? Laramie was a mountain man. He hadn't even been out one year.

Got killed. Some Indians killed him. Cut a hole through the ice in the beaver pond. Stuffed his body down in there. His buddies didn't find him. Then he wound up with a town, a mountain range, and and a river named after me he'd just shown up in town everything he got around here named bridger he didn't do anything else besides come out he wasn't like uh he wasn't no he didn't have any big discoveries jim bridger probably the most famous mountain man. Bridger Pass,

Bridger Bowl, Bridger Canyon, Bridger Creek, Bridger Montana, Bridger Mountains, Bridger School, Coulter. For a while,

Yellowstone was called Coulter's Hell. Now it's Yellowstone. Hugh Glass just had a damn movie made about him there was like uh you know it was some there were some swash uh some swashbuckling mugs and they did some extraordinary feats they're some of the coolest people i mean they were the you know the first guys to do everything the first guys to go everywhere out of wanting to trap Beaver. And now you get people like, oh, I want to be like a mountain man,

and they think that you'd live in a cabin and be hermity. I'm like, no, if you wanted to be a mountain man, here's what you would do. People would be like, oh, I would have been a mountain man had I been alive then. Okay, you're alive now, so let's find your equivalent your equivalent would be that you're going to go down to brazil and travel up the amazon river for several months until you are eventually kind of like walking off into the jungle. That's the equivalent.

Or that you would go to, this might be a better equivalent. You would go to Afghanistan. You'd go to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, not speaking the language, and go wander around up there hunting that's a mountain man move that's the equivalent it's not you have a little cabin and you you know make your own bunk bed it's just like it read books all winter do you know what i'm saying it's like they were the most well-traveled if you look at a map of where Jedidiah Smith, where Jed Smith, where all he went. So he's the first guy to cross.

He's the first guy to reach the Pacific by crossing the Mojave Desert. Gets over there. Gets imprisoned. No, gets over there with a bunch of guys. They trap a whole ton of beaver in California, Sacramento Valley. Get raided by Indians. Kill a bunch of Jed Smith's guys. Steal all of his beaver pelts.

Goes in, gets held prisoner by the Spanish. The Spanish sends some guys out to try to recoup some of his beaver pelts. Gets those, doesn't get to bring them home. Gets sent back over the Rocky Mountains. Winds up getting killed by some Comanche at a waterhole, oh, mauled by a grizzly, so his buddy sewed his scalp back on, and he always wore his hair long because he was embarrassed about the scar on there, zigzagging back and forth across the country, going places no one's ever been before.

Wanderlust. And openness to other cultures. Because a lot of these guys would go and wind up taking Indian wives, joining Indian tribes, learning new languages. And now we have this idea that mountain men are like these xenophobic agoraphobes

who, you know, don't travel around and experience new shit. Do you know what I'm saying? That's all they did. Tough dudes, man. Tough dudes. Wanderlust. Yeah, it seems like almost the beaver

were the vehicle for the exploration like the exploration was the priority oh yeah and that they could make money was like i don't think yeah it's hard to say but i don't think anyone's like you know i've run all the numbers and the best way for me to get rich is to go out and get my head cut off by some you know yeah by some black feet so it was convenient for a wanderlust type of spirit that beaver was a high-demand commodity. Yeah. Allowed that exploration.

Yeah. If you want to go on, let's say you want to go on a hunt, like a doll sheep hunt, you know, you'd like the idea of the doll sheep because of where he is. Yeah. In large measure. Yeah. If he was somewhere else, he wouldn't be as interesting.

That's where he is yeah in large measure yeah like if he was somewhere else he wouldn't be as interesting that's where he is what would be what would be the vehicle that would take you into unknown places in afghanistan and pakistan that's a good question you know would it be like just there's this wing in it like would it be like the mercenaries i mean even though there's a political and a like violent attachment yeah but it pays i heard it pays well yeah and it gets me to this place that you know yeah you're drawn yeah that's a good point you're drawn yeah there's the idea there's the outward justification of yes you could get very wealthy just like a lot of guys who are contractors and you know mercenaries not a word yeah i mean it's definitely the right word that they don't no one refers to themselves as a mercenary yeah but sure the contractors that go do work there yeah it pays really well there's also a really good chance

you might be the head cut off yeah but you're drawn to it yeah you see some stuff you want to see otherwise but that's always kind of burned my ass about the way people use the term mountain man. It's not like what a mountain man was. 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. You're irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there,

OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. 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. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you, 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 onx x maps.com slash meet on x maps.com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all i'm getting to something about that about them eating the beavers. They're good campers.

Yeah. Unbelievable campers. When I think about, when I think about the feats of the mountain men or like even Daniel Boone, who was sort of like a precursor to the mountain and like Daniel Boone went over the Cumberland gap, like through a pass in the mountains, went down to the Kentucky territory,

was gone on a two year hunting trip trip most of it by himself gone so long he was making his own gunpowder out of bat guano that he found in caves and you think about i can't even imagine sleeping in cane breaks trying to walk across down trees to not leave tracks because he knew that the you know that he was very likely to get killed as a trespasser. And you think all that, and you go like, but he did it without a flashlight. Like when it got dark, it was dark. And the mountain men, all that crazy shit they did, and everybody trying to kill them and getting killed by, like no flashlights.

I can get like, yeah, they did it in mocc in Mach. I was like, okay, I understand that. It's the lack of a flashlight that blows my mind. You can never be like, what was that? In luck. You got to be like, what was that? I don't know. We're never going to find out. It was 10 feet away, but I can't look over there.

Oh my God, that must have been nerve wracking, man. Paranoia. You were saying that earlier, right? They just must have existed in like such a state of paranoia all the time yeah and Garrett you had that point PTSD like oh yeah yeah that was good

like Garrett was right cause get on to the I think the way to wrap all that in is how we guys talk about the PTSD the mountain man is because you were saying how when it was all said and done if they if they had a couple good years and they were smart they would just go back to virginia buy themselves a farm and live fat right yeah the richest man every time about john jacob astor's like astor plays in

new york the richest man in america and some people argue the richest man in the world at that time was the guy who got involved in the beaver trade he went out spent some time out figured out that got involved with the fur company figured out that there was a thousand a one thousand percent markup on beaver hides sold in europe got to thinking that that's where the money might be became the richest man in America off beaver pelts. I think he also reversed that markup to the goods that came from East to the rendezvous. I think that was a similar markup. Yeah.

I've, I've read that, that the, that what they were paying for a hatchet and stuff was absurd. Shrewd businessman. Anyways, after five or 10 years of sleeping in willow thickets and floating mats of grass,

then when you're hanging out just farming in Virginia, man, you just don't fit in anymore, baby. No, I think so. Yeah, so Garrett brought his idea of PTSD because we were talking about what happened to John Coulter. So Coulter, he was part of the Lewis and Clark expedition, was the first guy to pass the Yellowstone Park. When I keep saying the first guy to do this and that,

I'm taking a very Eurocentric approach. I'm talking about my Euro-American ancestors or that aspect of my culture. Surely Native Americans have passed the Yellowstone National Park, but the first Euro-American to do it was John Coulter. They called it Coulter's Hell. There's also another thing that Coulter's name is attached to,

which is Coulter's Run. Coulter and another guy were trapping beaver near Three Forks, Montana, and they got caught by the Blackfeet, and Blackfeet filled his body full of holes, chopped them all up, cut his guts out, cut his balls off, smeared his guts and balls on Coulter, got them all red with blood, and then gave him a run and head start, and then they all chased after him to go catch him and kill him.

And Coulter's version of it was he was running so hard that he ruptured a blood vessel in his nose and pretty soon had like prodigious amounts of blood coming out of his nose he was running so hard and he could hear a guy right behind him and when he spun around his sight like the sight of him with so much blood he's already a mess and blood just gushing from his nose the sight of him like startled the guy so bad that he was able to kill that guy overcome him and kill him and then he ran and legend has it he hid up in a beaver lodge went in a beaver lodge entrance of an old lodge and got up under there and hid and they looked for him and looked for him and looked for him and never found him. That's Colter's run.

And then there he is, no gear, no clothes, no gear, and crawled his way back to help. I told that story, and Garrett brought up this idea of PTSD. How could you live through something like that? And they had no terminology for it, but how could you live through something like that? And then you're supposed to go back east and go to the PTA meeting. Yeah, be a gentleman, marry. And that got us talking about A.B. Guthrie's fantastic mountain man book, The Big Sky,

which is where people call Montana Big Sky Country. It's A.B. Guthrie's book, The Big Sky. It's a very well-researched, though fictional, tale of a mountain man and he has that he comes out west and lives this life and he goes back and he absolutely does not fit in and winds up getting himself into tons of trouble and it's like that he's like he's a this amazing hero here but he goes back and he's a damaged man he's damaged back east just so used to a different culture and different way of being how long did he live which guy uh well i guess i want to know about both coulter and the guy in the story oh the guy in the story it winds up being that he there's another book where he

becomes a guide because a lot of the mountain men became guides so right when the mountain man era ended the oregon trail was getting going a lot of those guys they knew all those passes and all those routes and they knew a lot of the languages and knew what was a good idea and what was a shitty idea and uh they became guides bridger became a guide many of them became guides some went back to farm some became guides some became businessmen some became guides. Some went back to farms. Some became guides. Some became businessmen. Some became ranchers. Some went into the Oregon's Willamette Valley

and started orchards. A variety of things. But guiding and the frontier guide and to be a frontiersman was something that came out of... Kit Carson had been a mountain man. Wild Bill Cody had been a hide hunter. But but not a mountain man but a hide hunter um so yeah you got into other lines of work bridger did some actual guiding recreation a recreational big game hunter from germany who came out and made a mess all right the gore guy named gore by the last name gore he actually wore his welcome out he came out and made a mess. Oh, right. Gore.

Gore. Gore by the last name of Gore. He actually wore his welcome out. He came out and just killed hundreds of everything. He was like a dude. They named a beautiful mountain range after him in Colorado. Yeah. They did? He was like a dude going to Africa times like about 1,000

when he came to the Great Plains. Did the terminology come from his, like, you know, gory or gore? I definitely don't think so. That proceeded to him. Yeah, I definitely don't think that was it. That's kind of ironic, though. So doing all this and led up to us having some beaver meat tonight. And beaver meat is like, I feel like if someone worked at it, I think that someone could promote it and popularize it.

Because it's a completely, like right now, fur prices are low. So the value, value you know they used to sell beavers for wool felt nice up beavers for fur garments beaver prices are like they're not they're they're essentially valueless right now like the the cost of fuel and the cost of equipment you could never recover it no matter how many beavers you caught because it takes time to skin them and flesh them and dry them. It's just like they're not worth the pursuit. But that's a good question, though.

So it's legal to barter and sell the fur of a fur bear. Would it be legal to do that with its meat? That I don't know. I'm saying this because I'm so far beyond the statute of limitations, but when I was young, when i was in high school in college i would sell beaver and muskrat meat to sled doggers i doubt that i was breaking a law wasn't for human consumption um but i would sell the meat to sled doggers. They would give me, I think this guy would give me five from five to seven

for a beaver carcass and like $2 maybe, one or $2 for a muskrat carcass after I took the hide. So I'll get the hide, sell the hide for $5, $6, $4, and then turn around, I could sell the carcasses to the sled dog racers.

And they would grind them up and give them to dogs. And this guy insisted on a race, he fed beaver meat to his dogs on a race. He said they raced better on beaver than anything else. He'd give them a lot of horse and stuff other times, lame horses. He'd butcher the horse, bone it all out, boil it up, and feed that but on when on a race beaver meat he said they just tore it up on beaver what was that getting at though before that no maybe how long coulter lived did you answer that? No, I did that, but something about eating beef.

Make it popular. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like someone could promote it and keep promoting the idea of a very underutilized resource. That if you lived in a good beaver area and you got yourself a fur hiver or a license, you could fill your freezer with beaver meat and eat beaver and live off beaver meat in your family not have to buy commercially produced meat eat beaver meat and then get everyone you know a sweet beaver hat and beaver mittens and that could be like your deal you know people be like oh yeah he's a big

white tail guy he's a big turkey guy be like he's a big turkey guy. I'd be like, he's a big beaver guy. And just be that your deal is trapping beaver. Why is it that it's not like that? I don't understand why. And like people, like before this trip, I was like, yeah, who the hell eats beaver? And I feel a lot of people feel that way. Like why is the beaver? But it used to be so common. Yeah.

Think about what I was saying about the Catholic church. Yeah, it's so weird that now it's like this thing. They try to do that with the nutria. Try to get it to catch on one of the reasons might be that beaver has for legal purposes been regarded as a fur bearer so if you're a guy with a small game license out hunting you're not allowed to shoot a beaver because like animals have legal method to take the legal method on take is it's like listed as a fur bearer you have to be a licensed fur harvester then you have to follow legal methods to take and usually you got to catch in a trap

well you can't just hunt it you said canada right they can yep there's a lot there's many places there's many places and many peoples that are allowed to shoot but in the lower 48 i don't know well it's funny because like Colorado, in their kind of like bullshitty wisdom, banned trapping. They didn't want fur trapping. So they banned fur trapping. But anyone who's got a damage complaint, so they used to have regulations

about how to take animals. Now, anyone who gets a damage complaint and they hand them out like candy can kill beavers any way he wants to kill them. So now, anyone who wants to get rid of beavers yeah you can get if your buddy goes and files for the damage complaint thing in colorado you can go out and hunt beavers at 22 but it blow up dynamite so it's like they gave up sort of a regulated pursuit in favor of mayhem in the name of being humane. Well, what I was curious about is,

is beaver more common as a food in Canada because it's more accessible? Native cultures? Yeah. There's this Richard K. Nelson. There's an anthropologist named Richard K. Nelson. He wrote a great book called Make Prayers to the Raven about the Koyukon people

on the Koyukon River yeah man big thing for them is to eat beaver they had some interesting theories too they didn't think that you should you know how everyone now I guess it's been a long time how long has it been that everyone's been like really thirsty that everybody always talks about being dehydrated

and everything that wasn't like a thing when we everybody always talks about being dehydrated and everything? That wasn't a thing when we were kids. No one was dehydrated when we were kids. I didn't start drinking water until my dad got kidney stones. It's way off topic. But when he got kidney stones, past kidney stones, and it was somewhat caused by dehydration at a very young age, he was like, drink your water.

But before that, he didn't drink water. No one needed to drink water. That was a singular event. My father did not need to drink water. When he got a headache, he didn't go like, oh, I must be dehydrated. It was like, they were just fine. I mean, he fought his way across Europe during World War II. Then all of a sudden, everybody got dehydrated.

Do you know, George Carlin talks about this? He's like, when did everybody get so damn thirsty? They all carried canteens. Yeah, but it wasn't like now. Now there's this thing where everyone blames everything on dehydration. I'm guilty of that. No, I'm guilty of that. Look, yeah.

I'm always pushing you to drink more water. I'm drinking water right now. I got rum in it, but I'm drinking water now. So, yeah. What was I getting at about this? At some point, it was about that book in Canada. It's such a hard time tracking my own thoughts. Oh, that they had the Koyukan warn people, don't drink too much water,

especially if you're a hunter, because water only goes downhill. And a waterlogged log does not float well. Therefore, don't be eating, don't be drinking water. Some interesting parallels there. Yep. They were worried about people drinking too much water that did not do you good. You're not going to go up a hill fast if you drink a lot of water that shit goes downhill and they had another thing they're like no man would shoot a bear

that's not in its den it's you're a pussy if you do that a real man goes down in the den and kills the bear while it's sleeping yeah that's you hook a rope to it or a cable to it and drag it out with a snow machine and then kill it. Because anyone, any chicken shit can kill a bear out walking around. What's this tribe's name? That's interesting. The Koyukan. Koyukan. So Richard K. Nelson spent a lot of time with them.

I think starting in the 60s, but definitely in the 70s, spent a lot of time with them and wrote about their relationships to food and relationships to different animals and their feelings about different animals, what animals they felt were smart and what ones were good to eat and what ones were bad to eat, like a very elaborate taboo system. I think, you know, this is something I talked about a bunch of times where I think that we use the word taboo in a somewhat derogatory way. We talk about other cultures that we think less of us like,

Oh yeah, they have all these taboos. We're, we're full of taboo. We don't use that term. We're like, we have ethics or, you know,

we have taboos. We have a taboo system. Like for instance, we have a taboo against eating dog. No one articulates it that way, but we have a dog taboo. We have a house cat eating taboo to, an outside perspective, they'd be like, those people have a bunch of taboos. They won't eat dog. Because more people in this world live in a country where it's common to eat

dog than don't. So somehow in our taboo system that we've established, we have gotten the idea that you don't eat beavers. North America's biggest rodent. I feel like people have that idea about squirrels too. You took the thought out of my head. People are like, oh, squirrels are dirty. What do you want to eat those for? Yeah. Really?

You eat those? They're good, man. It tastes good? I was shocked. I don't even want to promote it anymore because I love my quiet squirrel woods. I love eating my squirrels. I'm over promoting it.

I did my two years of promoting it. I'm going to shut my trap and just take it away from myself. And you just found the Shangri-La. Yeah. We're not even going to talk about it. Giannis just found. What state is it in?

No one. Listen, if you took, you could take Kevin Murphy and tell Kevin Murphy, you draw me out the primo squirrel locations of this country. And this is a man who has devoted his life to the squirrel he wouldn't know to even go near this spot with a pen if he if you said shade in the primest squirrel country in the world he wouldn't he wouldn't come within 100 miles of it it's all Yanni's fat and greasy squirrels it's all Yanni's

Yanni has discovered giants we texted the picture to Kevin Murphy and you don't get it a lot because that dude spends some time outside and he has nobody to be jealous of but he replied with I am very jealous he calls male squirrels bucks you'll get one and be like it was a buck or what's he called

female not a doe bucks and sows maybe yeah I think so yeah I know I think it's born sow born sow yeah yeah what was amazing about that squirrel hunting day and I told you I think sow. No, I think it's boar and sow. Boar and sow? Yeah. Yeah. What was amazing about that squirrel hunting day, and I told you, I think I called you from the location, and we had hit that spot at daylight like a good squirrel hunter would, did a big loop, spent an hour in there, three of us, did not see a squirrel, saw some sign, come back at like 11 o'clock in the morning. Do the same loop. And we almost killed 20. Yeah, what's up with that? It's nice.

No pressure. I would say what they're feeding on, but I feel like it would be risky. Could give up the spot. Yeah. Maybe. Because if you described where they're nesting and what they're feeding on in a very astute listener kevin murphy yeah and i remember when he saw that picture he was already getting in there trying to talk about he had noticed some background

evidence and was trying to deduce a little bit about what was going on to talk about he had noticed some background evidence and was trying to deduce a little bit about what was going on there i remember he had some comments about a type of tree in the background this has nothing to do i'll throw this out there because it's going to throw people off i just met a dude in kansas who they hunt squirrels out of uh pecan orchards that's got to be a good eating squirrel yeah he said sometimes it's just ridiculous with them and he said permissions aren't any problem because people got it they don't want to lose their crop i think he was calling them pecans i grew up pecan pecan pecan i think it's like a mason dixon line thing yeah garrett what's your concluding thought or thoughts man i don't

care well it'd be similar to the squirrel with the beef with the beaver all these farmers and ranchers are you know they're a nuisance yep they're paying people to get rid of beaver yeah so get paid eat it when you're done make a belt buckle out of the tail that's my concluding thought yeah garrett's old man has a beaver uh belt buckle for like 20 years 30 years or something beaver tail belt buckle he told me about that when your old man told me about yeah i mean he still wears it i got like a image of it it's just like the tail you know stitched onto a metal belt buckle just like you would leather yeah i like that man that nice

scaly black yeah no i No, I'm going to, my concluding thought is going to be a thing about that. It's a parable. My brother, I think we were both, when my brother was living in Bozeman, I was there for a while, kind of living with him and helping him with his work.

And he had this friend who had gone to Hawaii years before, had gone to Hawaii on a vacation, and while in Hawaii bought himself an eel skin wallet. So a wallet made out of eel skin. That wallet served him nicely for seven years. He later had occasion to go back to Hawaii. He calculated out how many years he figured he had left on earth, divided that by seven,

and bought that many of those eel skin wallets. Oh, my gosh. So he's set. You know what? That's my concluding thought. I might make a beaver tail wallet. Two. Well, I don't know.

It's a kind of a small wallet. How long has he had it? 20 years? You know what? How old are you? You're not that? Yeah, you might make two and a half to get you through the rest of your life. I'm halfway done being alive.

No. Yeah, I am. 42, I'm halfway done being alive. If you eat beaver and squirrel and stuff you go 95 yeah maybe but no it's like it's like really something i think a lot about is being halfway done being alive chris concluding thoughts i don't know man i got a couple no do you have all you want man i don't care uh my biggest one is brown your meat before you roast it that way your meat doesn't turn out gray and gross what's your next one i'm you got me i'm i'm hooked now man i want to hear more

oh man that i thoroughly enjoy eating rodents and i didn't think i would but i really like it keep them coming uh don't give Garrett sugar before bed. Oh, yeah. Garrett gets something called night terrors, where you'd be sleeping in a tent. You might be sleeping in a tent down in Mexico, way, way up in the mountains, where nothing really makes that much sense.

And you go days out seeing someone. When you do, it's like a dude riding way far away on a burrow and you don't quite know what he's up to he's got like a sack and a machete and then in this atmosphere derrick or uh garrett has night terrors in which he starts going oh my god sugar sugar is the catalyst for those night terrors i like it man i think it's i think it's enjoyable have you figured out what the like the safety is to get him out to get to get him to come catalyst for those night tears. I like it, man. I think it's enjoyable. Have you figured out what the safety is to get him out? To get him to come back?

No, I just yell his name. And then sometimes, like you woke up in the middle of one, right? And you were kind of there and you almost hallucinated or something. Yeah, I remember talking to you. We were like 50 yards away. Yeah, his night tear was that an avalanche was sweeping through the tent.

Yeah. Yeah, sugar, man. Yes, don't give this guy a ding-dong when you're out camping. Yanni, Kahoot and Dot. Oh, man. Take two, I don't care. Just all the interesting things I learned. I've got limited experience trapping beavers.

Well, you didn't learn any technical skills. I mean, I was doing a pretty piss-poor job. Yeah, but I learned how hard it was. We had basically 20 sets for a beaver, which does not a mountain man make. Up until now, I had been around it. Like you said, it's like, oh, someone

set two, caught one, set one, caught one. Yeah. You could just see around it like you said it's like oh someone set two caught one set one caught one yeah um and you just see how you could get into it just so much to learn and think about and strategize and oh yeah my concluding thought was going to be that the anticipation of you know going to bed when you have sets out is equal to like you know you're going to go big game hunting. Yeah. It's exciting, man. All right.

So Daniel from nearby Daniel, Wyoming, eat beaver. Eat more beaver. Thanks for tuning in.