The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 102: El Surpriso: The Grey Ghost

Episode Date: February 5, 2018

Douglas, AZ- Steven Rinella talks with Ben O'Brien of Yeti and John Snow of Outdoor Life, along with Dirt Myth and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects Discussed: Listener corrections; Dirt Myth's issues with deodorant, tobacco-free dip, and wrist watches; how Coues deer got their name; Farrah Fawcett, Pamela Anderson, and Coues deer; the Gates Test; feeling deeply uneasy in a foreign country; banana chips, donk, and moose chips; dealing with reticle wobble; figure eights and recoil drift; getting a bunch of Cholla cactus thorns into your hand; the saga of El Surpriso; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. Welcome to 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. All right, man.

The first thing we're going to do is talk about ButcherBox. Now, these guys deliver healthy, 100% grass-fed and grass-finished beef, free-range organic chicken, and heritage-breed pork directly to your door. All the products are humanely raised. They're free from any added antibiotics or any added hormones. You can think of ButcherBox as your neighborhood butcher for a modern America, and they give you free shipping anywhere in the lower 48. If you order now, you're going to get $10 off your order plus some free bacon. That is if you use the code MEATEATER at checkout. So you go to butcherbox.com, use MeatEater at checkout, get your money off,

get your bacon, and you can cancel anytime with no penalty. Give it a try. This is going to be very difficult what I'm going to do right now, because I need to talk about a bunch of things that are unrelated to what we're talking about, and they're unrelated. There's no relation between them, but I want to have it come off seeming really flowy right like a little like it flows like it's all together but it's hard like for instance first off there's a correction that sam houston did not die at the alamo we were conversing about this the other day on a show, and we were talking about who didn't die at the Alamo, how Davy Crockett,

there's a rumor that Davy Crockett did not go down in a valiant fashion and actually surrendered at the Alamo and was executed. And someone, I don't want to name names, someone speculated or suggested that Sam Houston might have died at the Alamo. And a lot of very angry Texans wrote in.

This guy, whose name is Sam, from Texas, USA, says he did not, in fact, die at the Alamo. He was not at the Alamo. He was not at the Alamo. He was the general of the Texas Army. He was not at the Alamo. He gets fired up. Says Sam Houston then went on to a career in the Texas legislature and was a governor of Texas at the time of succession from the Union to the Confederacy.

And he refused to pledge allegiance to the Confederacy and was removed from the governor's office. Sam Houston National Forest, he died near there and is now named after him. And this guy says, speaking of permissions, we have plenty of permissions in Texas if you want to come hunt. Now try to relate that.

Imagine the trouble of trying to relate that to this. Another guy writes in to say, he's all worked up um no this is about dirt this is oh i get that in a minute he's all worked up about us saying someone's speculating that the wolves in washington state had rolled in from yellowstone but idaho had two reintroductions 95 and 96 in the frank church and he says that it probably makes a hell of a lot more sense that the wolves coming into Washington are coming out of BC and originating from the Frank Church reintroductions. Yeah, I'm surprised. He says that he ought to know best because he was a wolf biologist in Idaho. Now runs timber to table guide service. What's that, Yanni?

I'm surprised we mixed that up because I thought that we've talked to people that have said that exact thing on the podcast about those Washington wolves coming from Idaho and BC. No, they didn't. Now, another one real quick. This guy has a beef with me saying that the introduction of fossil fuels is what saved whales because the market for whale oil collapsed. He goes down to say that's a bunch of bullshit. He says that the peak whaling was the 1960s, not the 1860s. He said in the 1960s

almost 700,000 large whales were harvested commercially. And then shows like Flipper, an album of whales singing, some other stuff all came. Whales got real zeitgeisty and came the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

So don't be talking about fossil fuels and what electricity is saving whales. He says that's what did it. And he also likes to point out how effective that was because he says the blue whales along the coast of california are now at 97 percent of their carrying capacity this guy's a phd salmon biologist he says he hopes i'm right about pebble mine finally the last little unrelated thing that i want to talk about but here's where i'm gonna try to pull off some slick segues um dirt yep a guy wrote in wanting you to know that there's a um there's a dip that has no tobacco in it and he thinks that you ought to be using it and um let me see if he

has any extra information about it. No. He just thinks you ought to be using tobacco-free dip. I've tried that. Oh, yeah. Black buffalo, tobacco-free dip. Like herbs and... You like herbs in other situations. Yeah, but Nick's team's got a hook.

You believe in herbs. I do, but nicotine's got a hook. You believe in herbs. I do, but not when it comes... Tinctures. Yeah. And tinctures are trumped by nicotine at all costs when you're addicted. It's just that hook, you know? But like... I know it's not.

But tobacco-free dip probably has the nicotine, right? No. Oh, it doesn't? No. It's just the guy saying like if a dude was saying i'm addicted to uh or like i'm getting all facts i drink too much beer and then someone would say oh drink everclear because then you're getting the thing you're addicted to without all the stuff that's giving you the problems you're having or like cal saidCroix's are the placebo beer, so the fizzy.

Helps you get away from it. So you have no interest in taking this guy's advice and trying it. No, I appreciate it, but I've been down that road. Buffalo, dip-free dip. They need to market that different. Black Buffalo, I don't know. Can I ask you a couple more questions? Oh, yeah.

Watch this segue. Earlier we were talking about corrections, and you recently had your eye your vision corrected yep um can you talk about that touch on that because now you're like a game spot and son of a bitch i'll tell you a sentence i never thought i would say in my whole entire life and it's this dirt glassed up a buck that i just got which if you'd asked me a year ago if I would ever say that sentence, I would have said it's impossible. You said, not unless he has some crazy surgery on his eyes or something.

He got LASIK and he says he got the GameEye special package. Yeah, it was a bonus option. So what's it like? It's like being born again, but not really spiritually. Well, I think it puts me back to the standard playing field. I was hindered prior with the glasses now i can see just as the average man so what's it like to glass now that

you can see it's a way do you like do you enjoy it yeah it's way it's definitely way more uh satisfying because i can i can see those tiny little you know gray ghosts because you're into it now oh yeah i always have and i wanted to actually since we're on the topic because you brought that up this trip taking out the filming aspect too was a big part of that even though stills is engaging like being able to like you know pick and choose that was a big part to be able to i always want to glass with you guys yeah but he takes stills and he does motion claims to have that love and potion exactly and today i or this trip i got to cut out the film and so i got a glass more with

you guys and got to see and you enjoyed it oh i loved it i will say though that spot in that buck had nothing to do with my uh with my glass and skills just a matter of tenacity just looking the shotgun effect really just like i mean I'll look over there for a minute. I don't know, maybe I'll look over that way for a minute. And all of a sudden, there's the box. Yeah. Yeah. So it is nice.

No, it's extremely satisfying, the glass up a critter. And I can see it is, there is a big difference now with the LASIK, being able to look through the binos. Can I ask you one last question? Mm-hmm. Then we'll move on um a minute ago i was asking dirt about uh his feelings on deodorant he doesn't like to wear it but he was pointing out not that he has like some hippie dippy aversion to aluminum now which drives a lot of people to smelliness but that that and he says it's laziness but i pointed out that he's the least

lazy guy i know and he said because he has priorities yeah and life and he focuses on the things that matter and putting deodorant on is on that list yeah and the cost the cost efficiency of that too yeah but before that's that's a lie because before i'm two dollars every six months no because before a guy suggests Dirt try a different kind of tobacco, and Dirt says, I have a good job. I use Coke. No, it is. It's just one less thing to clutter up your day-to-day routine.

Deodorant. Yeah. I'm lucky that the gal I live with doesn't mind my musk. She likes it. I don't know if that's the case, but she doesn't mind it, so I get away with it. We started thinking that dirt's like a subspecies of javelina. Hold on.

Before you get into the javelina thing, I just want to add to that because the other thing that you sort of remove, I think, for daily efficiency, which kind of irks me a little bit, is your lack of watch. Oh, yeah. But do you like to know what time it is? I love to know what time it is, but I just ask Yanni. But I want to know why.

Well, that is kind of a hippy-dippy reason. It is a hippy-dippy reason. You have a hippy-dippy reason to not have a watch? Oh, Steve's going to love this. But you were born on a cattle ranch. No, I... Miles City, Montana. I've tried watches, and they throw off they like make

my arm hurt i don't know if it's uh i don't know if it's electronics or really yeah so it throws out my imbalance yeah there's an imbalance you should wear one on each wrist so you detect an imbalance like in the force when you're wearing yeah exactly it Yeah, exactly. It disturbs my charge, my positive or negative charge. I just, yeah, it hurts my wrist. So that's, and another thing I don't have to purchase, I guess. Dirt Knight has called in a couple of coyotes just to look at him. Oh, that was awesome. Not many guys do that.

Late afternoon, too. I mean, fairly warm and sunny. He was 20 yards away. That was really cool. I'm going to move away from you now. Is that all right? Yeah. I mean, I'm just saying I'm going to move off the topic of you just as a person.

Yeah. Because I want to introduce other people. All is well, yeah. Oh, I'd like to take a minute first to welcome you guys to me and Yanni's hotel room. It's nice, isn't it? It's very nice. It's a wraparound couch. Yeah.

Jon Snow, can you explain yourself? Oh, man, I've been trying to do that for years. Yeah, I don't mean like in that way. Yeah. John Snow, can you explain yourself? Oh, man, I've been trying to do that for years. Yeah, I don't mean like in that way. No. I work at Outdoor Life Magazine. I'm the shooting editor there. I do the guns and shooting coverage for the magazine. I've been there since 2001.

Oh, I didn't know it was such a long time. Yeah. But when you talk about being in other forms of journalism but that's been your main deal for for for that many years i can't do the math yeah no i'm it's it happens when you get older man all of a sudden you've had a bunch of jobs for a long time but no outdoor life has been the most consistent gig of my career i kind of did the thing a lot of young journalists do jump around from place to place. That's Ben's phone song that comes out in the morning. Yeah. House of Pain, baby. House of Pain.

So, yeah. So, I joined the staff there in 2001, moved to New York City because that's where they were based. And, you know, that was the third time I worked in New York City professionally. And I always knew I have a shelf life in New York. And I managed to weasel my way into the shooting editor position. It's got to be like a great diaspora of outdoor life folks out of New York. Like, does anybody from outdoor life live in New York anymore? Yeah, we still have a couple of editors there. But it's always a tension because obviously the the people that we have on staff and want on staff are

avid outdoorsmen and uh trying to pursue that in new york city is just a lot more difficult especially shooting bullets all around writing about it oh yeah no and and that's what happened i i finally went to my bosses and said look i can't do justice to this job and be in New York. And they said, well, where do you want to go? And I said, Montana. And they said, hey, that sounds great. Here's a big pay cut. Go have fun.

Let me do some quick calculations. John, can you real quick explain what a shooting editor is? The shooting editor is the guy who handles all the firearms and shooting skill coverage. So, you know, I talk about guns. I review them in the magazine. I try to take some of the increasingly technical stuff that's happening in our world and make it accessible to people. So I try to give people kind of some leverage on what these different technologies and terms are. And obviously just to help make people better shots.

And it's kind of a cool deal. I'm only the fifth shooting editor in the history of the magazine. But there's always been one. Yeah, pretty much. They stick around. Yeah, they do stick around. There'll be another song. Stick around.

Stick around. Stick up. Calm down. Stick down. It's like arterial plaque. We hang in there until we have outlived our usefulness. Yeah. Ben O'Brien.

Hey. You've been on the show before. Yeah. How many times? Once. Just the one time. I remember you did a great job, though. Well, it was a year ago, so I'm a different person now.

So I may screw this one up. And that was in Nevada, and right now we're sitting in Arizona. That's right. Tucson, Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. Don't know much about this place. Do you care to explain yourself at all? Hey, you want to see a transition?

Check this out. Get it. No, let me save it. Well, now I got nothing. You get ready, though. I'm ready. This is going to blow your mind. Well, basically my resume is I was once on the Meat Eater podcast.

And that's really all I got. Now, I'm the hunting marketing manager for Yeti. Formerly, and well, currently, if I imagine to be a journalist. I used to work at Peterson's Hunting Magazine. Before that, NRA's American Hunter. Some digital and print journalism. And yeah, that's it. And we talked about this before, so we don't need to get into it too heavily.

But once upon a time, you wrote about sports. Sports with balls. Ball sports. Ball sports. Sweaty balls sometimes. Yeah, round and oblong. Balls, different shapes. You wrote about games.

Games, sports, things that you don't know much about, I guess, at this point. No, I struggle in that area. Muhammad Ali is somebody that you know. Yes, I'm familiar with his work. At some point, I did aspire to write about sports, and then I figured out that that was a shit job. Can I revisit with you just real quick? Even though I didn't want to write about sports, and then I figured out that that was a shit job. Can I revisit with you just real quick? Even though I didn't want to talk about it, I do want to revisit one thing you mentioned to me.

Once you got to sort of peel back the curtain into the world of professional athletics, it lost something for you. Of course it did. Something was not what you envisioned it to be. Well, you know, you grew up on the East Coast. I think it's not particularly just an East Coast thing, but on the East Coast and those major cities, Boston and New York and Baltimore, there seems to be just a proclivity for sports. I mean, like that's part of your identity. That's part you grow up like, hey man, what do you do? Who are you? Like, I'm Ben. I'm a Ravens fan.

I think I'm married. I think I might be married. There's a kid somewhere. You just, it's part of your personal identity. And for me growing up, I would, you know, go to sleep as a little kid, listen to the Orioles game on the radio. Like, that's part of our identity as my family and just who I grew up around. And so, when I was 21 years old, of a sudden i'm covering this thing like i'm inside of the i pulled back the curve how so

young i was an intern at a at a magazine but did you go to you finished up regular college right yeah this was my senior year in college okay so i finished i was an intern at a regular magazine they just said hey would you like to go be the beat writer for a while? We think you got some good skills in that area. I was like, yeah, sure. So you just had pure raw talent. Yes, pure raw talent. So they sent me there, and I went there. I remember walking into the locker room the first time and being so nervous.

I was 21 years old. Most of the players aren't much older than me, but most of the other reporters and writers were six times my age. That make sense they're old they're old people maybe three three let's go three no six yeah they would have been 120 years old dudes writing about sports math not being the position and uh anywho they're old i. And so you go back there and you realize that these people that you center your identity around their efforts, right? I mean, because the Ravens or the Orioles or whatever sports team, they're not much more than just a collection of people doing a game, playing a game. And so if those folks are that important to you, then they've got to be some kind of you know idol or or somebody you can look up to and so at that point um i started to meet them hang out with them and interview them and and

observe them and their professional sense and personal sense and i realized that most of them were nowhere near idol status like they didn't not that they didn't deserve it but they just not who they were they just hit a ball and we just decided that that was somehow culturally important which to me after i saw back behind the curtain i thought what a silly thing to to think this is culturally as a society something we should worship or cheer for whatever and um and then i just realized if i take this as a career i will never get to write about what i'm doing or I'll never get to write about my own personal experiences. I'll be just writing about what this rich baseball player is doing, whether I respect him as a person or not.

And then I realized, oh, shit, my career has got to go a different direction because this one sucks. And it did. And there's a lot of miserable middle-aged sports writers that just live. They get all the negative stuff that the athletes get, like the travel and the long hours and crazy schedules. They get none of the accolades. None of the, they get no, none of the money, none of the pretty girls. It's just nothing.

It's like the opposite, the antithesis of what this person gets. So I quickly, I was introduced to the fact that you could be a writer and also write about hunting um i was like oh that seems better let's do that because i hunted you know hunted my entire life so i guess that's part of the reason i'm here yeah it is yeah um what age were you when you quit doing it probably 22 23 so you peeled back the curtain like you really curtain open early yeah and i had i had some internship and then a job with the washington post right around the time they were making the digital transition so then i became kind of a digital editor where that was my became my calling card you know knowing a little bit about the digital editorial space

and so a buddy of mine was like hey i'm working at the nra at this magazine called american hunter and i'm leaving it i think you'd be pretty good at it if you don't like the sports thing so he's like i don't want the job perhaps you might like it i know your job now sucks so yeah that was right when i was 23 so i got in the industry early i mean i'm'm 30. I've been in nine years. Seems like a lot longer than that, but yeah. And then moving along, we have Dirt Myth. Yep.

You don't mind me interrupting you from what you're doing there, Dirt, do you? I'm getting you some photos. To introduce you? Yeah. And then finally, the Latvian Eagle, Giannis Petelis. Good evening. Watch this transition. This show is actually about Coos Deer.

Now, Coos Deer got its name from the historian and botanist Elliot Coos, who I just read died in Baltimore, where Ben is from. Whoa!

I wonder if he was an Orioles fan. He was before that. He was before that he was before that um i read too that he used to believe in levitation he believed that objects would now and then just inexplicably levitate but i've seen some coos deer do some gnarly movements some magical movements so elliot coos we've talked about this before about some touchness because this is like a deep dive we're gonna talk about desert whitetails the gray ghost known as coos deer elliot coos So, Elliot Kuz, we've talked about this before, but I was going to touch on this, because this is like a deep dive. We're going to talk about desert whitetails, the gray ghost, known as Kuz deer. Elliot Kuz probably pronounced his name Kaus, but he took a liking to this mysterious little desert deer.

He was given his name, and now people say coos and when you say coos half of people get uh real mad and write you a mean letter saying that it's cows cow johnny you know this better than i do what's the other way that people like to say it yeah cows okay elliot i don't know if elliot cows said cows or cows no chris denham who i've said before has written the word coos more than any man on the planet besides perhaps elliot coos says that he will say coos deer till the day he dies but he points out that elliot the naturalist and historian and levitation believer and Baltimore die person would have pronounced his name Kaus.

I don't know how people started, how it became popularized to call it Coos, but people get pissed when you do it. Just like people get pissed if you say cows deer. It rolls off the tongue maybe a little better. Cow's deer? Coos or cows? No, Coos.

Because if you tell people cows deer they're gonna think you're talking about a deer cow yeah which i don't know what it is but i don't like the sounds of it maybe that's it maybe it was just developed over a confusion we call it something else we could pronounce it another way many people though i mean when you get outside of the state of Arizona in the lower 48, I mean, you're talking about maybe a percentage of the population that actually knows that this deer exists. Yeah, it's a dinky, dinky amount of mugs who are interested in whether it's coos or cows.

But it's a white-tailed deer. And these white-tailed deer can be found in the Sky Island mountain ranges of Arizona. When we talk about Sky Island mountain range, what it means is you have, like, you know, these vast tracts of flat desert punctuated by these mountain ranges. And these mountain ranges, the higher portions of these mountain ranges, have a slightly more temperate climate, a little more precipitation. And these little whiteted deer live out there running around in saguaro

cactuses and ocotillo cactuses. They're out in the desert, in the mountain desert. There's some in New Mexico, but the Coos' motherland is Old Mexico. Which, if you want to talk about transitions, we were just talking about the war that helped

establish that border between us and mexico command when i brought up sam houston oh dirt where you oh no yeah you weren't here when i was yeah yeah no that's another transition yeah another yes where in the world is dirt no prior to that though yeah dirt there there was explained to someone how we're talking about whether or not who knew spanish and who knew And Dirt clarified that he hadn't even learned English really well yet. So, he wanted to give him a little more time on Spanish. Because he was wondering if we were looking at a peacock and he was surprised that it hadn't been predated yet. Predated.

Once you learn the Dirt Myth language, though, you can. can you are you knew what i was talking about completely you're not consistent by what words actually are there you're able to just like make your point clearly by just making up whole new things to make up what you could have said preyed upon yeah with that that in and of. That's way too many syllables. If this guy doesn't have time for deodorant, he does not have time to say prayed upon. Let me lift my stinky arm to look at my non-watch. Moments

are wasted. Sam Houston. Desert Whitetails. Mexico, is this fair? Yanni's experience with Desert Whitetails runs deeper a little bit yeah is what fair what are you asking me like that mexico's like where it's at oh yeah i was just talking to my good buddy tyler on the phone it was he's living tucson

recommended some restaurants and he's leaving on saturday i think to go down he's hunting with uh beto next week so the beto's getting tags for him and his dad. And I was talking about how good the hunt was. And he's like, yeah, bro, that's why you go to Mexico. It's kind of like, it's just a whole different ballgame. You know? Like, you just grind it out in Arizona, and you go to Mexico, and it's, I'm trying to figure out how to make an analogy. It's like fishing where, I don't know.

You're trying to find an analogy of where something's not that great and then where it's real great. Yeah. Midwest whitetail? The same thing. Yeah, I'm with you. Largemouth bass fishing in Michigan. In my mom's lake.

In your mom's lake. Which would be not that great. Out in California or down in the southeast in most lakes. Good job. That's a good analogy. Good save.

Now, a couple things. It takes me a while. Desert whitetails are dinky little deer. What do you think a big buck? We're just coming back from hunting desert whitetails

in Mexico. And we got some nice bucks what are those big bucks way not much over 100 pounds yeah and the thing i like most to talk about outside of talking about daniel boone is talking about bergman's principle and bergman's principle principles way of explaining why a mammal species will tend to gargantuanism. It'll tend to be biggest in the northern extreme of its range and smallest in the southern extreme of its range. And it's speculated this might have to do with heat retention and heat dissipation, where when you've got these whitetails that weigh, in Alberta, they're like 250 pounds,

they have lower surface area so they have more ability to hold in heat and then and then a 90 pound whitetail has more surface area per unit of weight and he's able to dissipate heat one theory about why bergman's principle is true there's exceptions like mule deer considered an exception to bergman's principle is true. There's exceptions, like mule deer are considered an exception to Bergman's principle, but generally, it's just like small in the south. And so these white tails are dinky, dinky little deer, but they're like in miniature form. Because a big, huge, giant coos buck scores what?

Like what's the coos equivalent of a 200-inch white tail? 200-inch white tail? But 200-inch whitetail? That's a rarity, right? That's not as rare anymore. 200-inch whitetails happen every year. People kind of make them. They grow them. Do you know that there's a guy I heard about recently

that actually puts out medicine for his whitetails? Yeah. I'm talking, they're beyond putting out like supplements their antlers they're medicating deworming deworming medicine in the summer and the feeder you're putting out feed with medicine for your deer and growth hormones or growth supplements yeah why not no one's doing that for coos deer down in Mexico. No. These are all natural.

Not yet. Survivors. It's like Pamela Anderson and Farrah Fawcett. A coos is Farrah Fawcett. A Texas whitetail is Pamela Anderson. I get it. I'm following you. I'm natural artificial oh they're both hot see you want to talk about analogy yeah like 200 inch free range white tail is probably like uh

okay but give me a more realistic number when we we're talking, and I want to back up because when we're talking about the numbers, there's like a way, there's an agreed upon way that you measure deer antlers, where you take various circumferences and lengths and dimensions and yada, yada, and you add it all up and you take that number and say, he's a blank inch thing. Now, there's like lingo, right? Like if you shoot a 200-inch mule deer, it's a big one. A 400-inch elk is a big one. A 180-inch ram is a big one.

Yeah, a 120-inch coos deer is a big one. Is a big one. In Alberta, in a big, huge, giant... Well, the biggest whitetail buck ever was killed in alberta was 200 plus inches so the same way that their body is half the size or less than half the size to put i can put it a little more perspective jay killed a few years ago um like a 136 inch i believe coos deer he's somewhere right in there at a time he was number eight in the all-time boone and crockett book the big eighth biggest you know buck that's ever been

entered into the boone and crockett record book yep okay and mark canyon can barely get excited about a 130 inch regular white tail that right. Let me ask you this question. Okay. Is the desert whitetail the only whitetail, and this is a legit question because I don't know, that doesn't have hunters or land owners managing the land to propagate their species? Think about all whitetails on our continent

alberta iowa texas the keys deers a little bit a little dinky whitetail that are that are protected um but it just strikes me is that the desert whitetail is akin to the mule deer in a way that it just lives in wild places wild ass deer And nobody's planting alfalfa fields and crop rows. Is that right or wrong? I would have agreed until this past week. But that's not a food plot. Yeah, that's not a food plot for Coos deer. Okay, let me back up.

I want to walk through the whole damn story. Right. And I was trying to lay a little background by talking about Elliot Coos and levitation and everything. You were doing a good job. And Dirt's deodorant. but let me lay a little more background i there's something i don't know i'm sure a lot of people write in to clarify i don't know that mexico has the equivalent of going down to a gas station and buying a hunting

license no okay not that i know in the u.., we have publicly owned wildlife. If you own property and a deer lives on your property, that's not your deer. You can control access to the deer, but it's not your deer. Tags and stuff, I'm speaking very generally because there's many exceptions to this. Tags are generally sold by government agencies. They come from government agencies or they in they they come

from government agencies and they get distributed in different fashions that we'll not get into right now in mexico if you're a landowner you say to the to the government biologists in your state um they come out and do a survey on your ranch on your est, now that we all know an amazing amount of Spanish. They come out to your estancia to do a survey, and they'll take into consideration what all has been predated or not. And they will issue this landowner. They'll say, this landowner is allowed to kill, what would be a normal number of tags?

They give out maybe four or five. Yeah. I mean, I think sometimes it can be a lot more because... It can be? Yeah, I think it could be... It seems very conservative. It could be double that. It does seem conservative, but I think some of the ranches are big enough where it's double that.

The ranch we were on this year had five. And it had tens of thousands of acres, though, didn't it? No, nine. No? Shitloads of acres. Well, it was roughly, what, four by ten miles? It was, yeah. Four by ten miles, the government comes out,

and they give the guy a handful of javelina tags and a handful of whitetail tags, coos deer tags. He can do with them what he wishes. We happen to have a friend, a very admirable figure, admirable, that's a hard word to say for me, figure named Jay Scott, and scott has a lot of relationships um he and his partner dar colburn colburn and scott why does dar get his name first that's kind of guy jay is i think jay's just such a good guy so dar colburn and jay Jay Scott run Colburn and Scott Outfitters,

and they have a bunch of relationships down in Sonora, Mexico, and they broker you getting tags, and you get a Coos Deer tag for about a couple thousand dollars. Yeah. They do a lot more than that. I mean, they got to go scout the – they got to find the ranch first, then go scout it, make sure it's got some roads you can get around on, make sure it's got a house you can sleep in.

But we've also just camped on Coos Deer ranches down there. We have, but I think that was of our own admission. Yeah, but some of the drives are so long. You can drive for hours on one of these places on really awkward mountain roads so um jay guides coosdears but also facilitates dudes who want to do do-it-yourself trips on these big estancia's and jay will help you get hooked up with a place where you can buy a coosdear tag and then buying the coosdear tag usually comes to the understanding you're going to be sleeping somewhere on the ranch but you got to go down across the border you got to go you're flirting with the the border here right and that turns a lot of people off you're like taking your vehicle down and crossing in

into a land that many people feel is intimidating myself included like you're going from douglas arizona into agua prieta mexico and hunting along the u.s mexico border out in some wild ass country yeah i mean if you watch you know regular cable news you think that or sicario as you're down there camping out and hanging out you know it's like every night it's 50 50 whether you're not you're going to be beheaded. Yeah, and don't have to do a vat of acid. We discuss that a lot. I've been down there now five times, I think.

Yeah. You know what's funny? I had a shirt maybe misplaced, maybe stolen once. I misplaced a lot of shit, so I still haven't ruled out that I just lost my shirt. We've never had anything remotely sketchy but i still feel sketched out going through the process without intimidating process without for this trip specific the first time i've done it without the pretense it would have been just a

normal you wouldn't thought nothing other than oh if no one said be scared yeah you would have gone through it and you'd be like what what's scary that was easier than canada yeah but but on the other hand i mean even for veteran guys going down there you were like we got to be here you can't be here after dark it was like american werewolf in london like you don't mess around with i don't want to be there after dark yeah no but it went smooth but some of it bitches beautiful down there man gorgeous country the only thing that shocked me were the amount of mangy dogs just roaming around eating trash and shitting in the street yeah i told my kids when we're in mexico my kids are always like where do these dogs come from yeah i'm like it's just a thing it used but it used

to be like this in america when i was a kid everybody's dog just ran around then americans got sick of that two things my brother contributes at all the clinton presidency bill clinton became president kids all kids started having helmets out when they rode a bike and the dogs vanished like he doesn't understand the link but he noticed that it all happened at the same time so free roaming dogs free roaming dogs went away kids parents all bought them helmets to ride their bikes. And then it was just like a thing that everyone agreed upon at the same time. You know what it was?

It was the first internet boom. Everybody was suddenly communicating their fears. Yeah. I'm just guessing. I have no idea. I like it. Your dog's going to get run over. Your kid's going to crack his head open.

Ben, you're a little bit younger. Did you grow up? Were you wearing a helmet when you learned to ride a bike? I have to tell you. No. No. What else, little kid? They would have killed you if you had a helmet on.

Get beat up. You would have gotten beat up. Only guys that rode motorcycles wore helmets. And only half of them. Yeah. They would have killed you if you showed up at school with a helmet on. Well, that's the beauty. Mexico hasn't had that transition.

No. You can still ride a bike. Which transition is that? Either of them. Yeah, Well, that's the beauty. Mexico hasn't had that transition. No. Which transition is that? Either of them. Yeah, yeah. Back to the dogs. Dogs hang out. Kids don't need to wear helmets. We saw some dogs today that pissed.

I could still smell those dogs. Is it interesting to spend any time on the process of going through the border? Yes. Oh, heck yeah. John, would you like to walk us through the process as a guest? The New Jersey cat lady, she should go to Agua Prieta and do some work. That's the place for her. I mean, if you're a New Jersey cat lady and you want to feel good about yourself,

instead of sending that bullshit check to PETA every month or year, go to Agua Prieta. That's all I need to say. Go there, you'll know what to do. Just bring a hose and some shampoo. There'd have to be a start. Some jerky. Some of that deworming stuff

they're giving away to us in Texas. We got a letter about New Jersey cat ladies and the guy was saying as much as we like to joke about New Jersey cat ladies, he says, you're not far off. He says, an animal rights activist, if you're going you're not far off. He says an animal rights activist. If you're going to make this sort of composite picture of an animal rights person,

it is a woman who lives on the coast and owns pets. 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 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 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. John, can you walk us through the process of coming into mexico slick transition yeah it is it's a little it's a little different because it's serious you know real serious no no one laughs doing it no no no one's last snicker you know we we drive up there in our big white van which instantly just feels sketchy anyway just having a big white rental van and uh it's all that camera equipment pointing at us yeah all of a sudden there's like these flat like you don't even have to stop there are no humans there it's just you're being recorded it feels like a dozen ways well that's the u.s government yeah that's no i mean we haven't even have to stop. There are no humans there. It's just you're being recorded, it feels like, a dozen ways. Well, that's the U.S. government.

Yeah. No, I mean, we haven't even gotten to the Mexican part of it yet. Yeah, but what are they taking pictures of before? Well, the thing is, well, did you see the guy today? He had the little old-school digital camera taking a picture of, like, the little VIN plate. On the Mexican side. On the Mexican side.

It was weird. And I was like, that's an antique digital camera it was pretty weird so yeah anyway so you get you get these pictures taken on the u.s side and uh and then we just had to make sure that you needed a form we have one of the things you do when you go abroad particularly firearms or other expensive equipment, is you fill out these 4457 customs forms. And they essentially are just proof of ownership. A lot of times guys are like, oh, it's a gun license or a registration thing. That's not what it is.

It's saying, I owned this stuff when I left America. That's right. I owned it when I left America so that when you come back, you can't be accused of having purchased some presumably high ticket item or otherwise. Tax free. Tax free. And then sneak it back across.

So, you know, you have this form. Yacht even knows the number of the form. Yeah. John did. John did. 4457. He said that. Yeah.

There you go. So anyway, we kind of breezed through that. That worked pretty good, except there are customs folks, nice people, all of them, but they were a little confused about the forms. I noticed we had to educate them a little bit. Yeah. We were like, no, you require me to have this. He's like, I do, yes.

They just wanted to give the blank form and not stamp it or fill it out well you know i noticed today there was some training going on while we were getting back into the states and i'm guessing we're kind of at the beginning of hunting season so maybe if there's some you know new people there they just haven't had or people who moved down from a different border or a different area whatever sure that was good yeah i need that that was yeah but it was it was kind of one stop for us at the u.s i then very quickly get to the mexican side and it gets confusing mostly because none of us can understand what anybody's saying but uh you know we go in there we get our tourist visas to start with. We have a vehicle. You got to register that. It's a little complex.

You know, complex? You guys are talking dirt. Yeah, dirt knows what you're talking about. It's almost like you're going to get predated in there. That's what's going to get you. It's almost like you're going to get predated in there. No, predated. Predated.

And the thing is, Giannis, somebody's got to give him props for his administrative acuity. I mean, it is unbelievable. Like, he knew this thing from, like, you know, one point to the next. There's a reason I hang out with Giannis. And again, that's all from Jay, you know? So when you do this hunt with Jay, I mean, you guys saw the letter, the document that he sent us. He's got it lined out in, what did you say? It's like 24 steps.

Well, I was reading this Word document, and I thought, well, page 4 has got to be it. Jay put a lot of time into the document of how to go across the border. That document's useless. Completely useless. Because no one else is following the protocol. I wanted to share the document with the people. Have you read Step 19? That's what we're on right now.

Because Step 19, you say this, and then I say this. You're not saying that. That document makes your user agreement for your iPhone look like a haiku. That thing was just impenetrable for me. Oh, I thought there's certain things in there, like Jay has certain

tips in there. For instance, Jay's like, anticipate a lot of hubbub about the weight of your vehicle. Which we encountered. Which we encountered. And Jay even has a trick that you go and make, if you have a trailer, let's say you had a trailer you made yourself. Go and get a stamping machine and make a thing that says the weight and go put it in a hidden place on your trailer and then go down there and act like you're looking around and discover the weight stamped on the thing because that'll help you prove the weight of the trailer but he doesn't want you to

put the like if it's a really heavy one he doesn't want you to put the real heavy weight right isn't there like a number there's's 1,700 pounds. There are thresholds of weight. And we got caught up on how much our creepy van weighed. All that candy in there. Free candy. Yeah. You got to paint the picture a little bit.

I mean, you're in a place. I mean, it's literally the size of this hotel room. Maybe even a little bit smaller, right? And there's three windows. Three banks of windows. Banks of windows banks of windows at the mexican border right there's three doors in that place you kind of go in there and you got to go to one window tell me you want the tourist visa go to the other window to pay for it

and then you come back no you forgot a step you just got 18 you're going to get it you're going and show your tourist visa a guy's yep, that's a tourist visa. He sends you to pay a dude to photocopy it. Then you go to pay for it. Then you go back and show the guy that you did all that, and he katoonk. And he stamps you. He stamps you. Then it's time to move on to your rig, and you're shooting irons.

Yes. That's right. So we visit with the police there at the end. We were a confused about where to go yeah cop comes out he's like yep that's a gun that's right and uh and a van except except we we did have that very sweet lady that very sweet police lady when we went there they thought yanni was guapo guapo ke guapo ke gu. She's handsome. She's how dirt was El Stinky. But she liked it. She did like it. The musk.

Yeah. So, I mean, it is a little bit complicated. But what were you saying? Were you there for an hour? 45 minutes? It's complicated. It's intimidating. You know, I'll point out. Yanni pointed this out to me, and I hadn't really taken notice of it. Some of our fellow countrymen are in there acting very huffy about how annoying it was,

but then they don't speak the language. It'd be like if you worked somewhere, and a guy comes in blabbering to you in a foreign language and acting annoyed, then acting annoyed with your protocol. Especially when you're carrying guns into a country where you don't. Yeah, listen. I just want to show up down here with guns and shit and not speak the language and just come on in. Put a mint on my pillow.

Where's the concierge? Yeah, it's very simple. I want to take all my shit and my weapons and go down and kill animals and bring those animals back home out of your country, and I don't want to have to answer all these questions in a language that is not uh the one i speak are you saying you haven't heard of el segundo amendamento no what is that the second oh dude man he caught me not knowing spanish as well as i knew it but i found everybody in this room

is is is across various international borders in various ways, right? Mm-hmm. I've found the most effective way is to read those 38 steps that Jay has and understand that, like, park by the great building and walk 100 yards,

that's the shit you generally ignore. The stuff you talk about, like the actual pinch points where they're going to get you, just know those pinch points, and otherwise, just be quiet. Stand in line. Put your card there.

When they ask you a question that you can understand, you answer. And eventually, you get through it. If they ask you for money, you give it to them. That's all. I don't know about that. Because I've seen some times down there crossing that border when people wanted money. And then when a Spanish speaker steps in on your behalf, they wave the feet. I've seen that several times.

But if you don't have a Spanish speaker to step in on your behalf. Then you're just going to have, yeah, there's no, you have no. And in our case where they said, well, your van weighs too much. And they said, step in this other line. And I thought, well, they're going to. The heavy van line. The heavy van line. And I thought, well, they're going to take it.

They're going to go out to the van. There's going to be some kind of giant, you of giant machine to weigh this thing and measure it. And they just wanted more money. Well, is it time to introduce our fixer who helped us? Beto. Beto. Beethoven. Beto helped us.

Yeah. A large man. So Jay, Scott, and Dar Colburn worked with. Yeah, can you explain this part? Because I don't want to mess it up. With Beto? Yeah. Beto's like a dude they hunt with.

Yeah. My buddy Tyler that I was just talking to, he's like, we're hunting with Beto next week. We haven't hunted with him for a long time. We used to hunt with him all the time back in the day. So he's been hunting with Jay. Hunting, guiding, slash. Mucho euros. Yeah, like 20, 30?

No, 23. 23 years. That's what years what he said yeah it's a long time you had you thought you had met him many years ago yeah and um yeah he's basically like what you know in the production business we call a fixer for jay like he's on the mexican side and he's just you know running errands and doing business. I think now he's also helping Jay find new ranches to lease and making friends with new ranch owners, getting more tags lined up.

He set him up with us to help us once we got to the border, get us to the ranch. Then he hunted with us, helped us with cleaning skulls, butchering meat, getting around. When we were driving down, you guys don't mind if I move away from the whole, I think we got the point with the border crossing. Have you guys read The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy?

Yes. Oh, yeah. The border trilogy. Read every Cormac McCarthy book Yes. Oh, yeah. The Border Trilogy. Read every Cormac McCarthy book you can get your hands on. Yes, sir. Because you'll find all the keys, including I have found keys to marriage in there, which I've pointed out before. There's a sign, when you get a little bit out of Agua Prieta, that says...

I didn't see it, but you guys described it to me. It's an American flag with an X through it. It's an official, actual sign, through it. It's an official actual sign, not graffiti. What's it say? It had a... I can't remember now. It said USA. Slashed out.

Slashed out. But it had a couple of the things. No hassle. Oh, no hassle. Leaving no hassle zone. Leaving no hassle zone USA. It's still very ambiguous. We should have taken a picture but it to me it meant like

you're in it yeah if you get luck someone dicks you now it's your fault good good luck because you're in no man's land best of luck and it looks like no man's land to be yeah looks like something would describe in one of his books and we get down to the estancia the ranch big ass ranch and it's got a how like an empty house sorry to interrupt one last thing about the border oh no it's important because you get through all that bs i'm trying to be i'm always trying to be aware of the listener and his his tolerances yeah yeah no for sure yeah um you check the guns with the mexican police then we also have to go and check the guns with the mexican um federales and it's simple it's simple it's gonna sound funny but you park at a gas station you take your guns across the street and literally walk

into an army base and go under a little uh hut you know a three-sided structure with a roof on it and uh dude comes out and wants to check your um the serial numbers on your gun versus the serial numbers that are on your what do you call that like a gun permit gun permit i guess takes a look at your passport yeah sometimes it takes two hours sometimes it takes 15 goes into another room with all that stuff. Yeah. Comes back, signed. Shakes everyone's hand.

You're on your way. Those guys were very friendly, but they were also spun up wearing body armor. Oh, yeah. Oh, because they have shootouts down there, man. Their rifles were loaded. They were ready. But what I want to mention, though, is the stark difference of when you leave that border and you roll into Agua Prieta. And there's a moment there where you're like, I'm in a different place. Even though I could reach out and touch the fence, it's like you are just in a different land.

Yeah. Yeah, and immediately it's humbling, and you also become thankful for having the opportunity and being able to live in America. And for everything we have, because immediately you're in a place where you're like, this looks rough. I think of two things. One, when you get across that border, I felt this ruthlessness about my surroundings. The structure is not there for your safety like it right it's just rubble and just trash and destitute and desperation just felt ruthless it felt like something could pop up at any minute and tear you down it's a matter of percent yes why that's all perception that's all there wasn't people running around pointing guns at us that's Something could pop up at any minute and tear you down. It's a matter of perception.

That's all perception. There wasn't people running around pointing guns at us. That's not. But the perception, of course, is that this represents danger. It seems like a place you would have had to have traveled a long ways to get to. But in fact, you could throw a rock from Walmart, from the Douglas Walmart, and hit that. You could hook a rock from walmart yeah from the douglas walmart and hit that you can hook a rock and land it over in the zone and every american with an opinion on immigration not that we need to go there but every american with opinion on immigration should see that you just need to see it and however that helps you formulate an opinion it does contextualize

contextualize that thing it gives you just a perception of what it really is and you can see the wall you can and what's funny about the wall there is you can see through it which i think is some kind of weird irony that you can see through the wall it's like a series of bars and you can look through it and see the taco bell and the mcdonald's and the walmart and the best western and the Walmart and the Best Western and Douglas. I would look through the other side and see the rubble piles and the trash-ridden creek beds and all the other stuff on that side. Who was, it's not Bill Buckley, but who was the conservative think tank guy that was affiliated with the Heritage Foundation?

Bennett. Remember Bill Heritage Foundation. Bennett. Remember Bill Bennett? Bill Bennett. He's involved in politics. Bill Bennett always talked about the Gates test. When you open the gates, do people tend to come in

or go out? And he liked that America always passed the Gates test. Always. North Korea? Doesn't seem to pass the case does america always pass it on the northern boundary i think on the northern boundary it's sort of you know okay do this before you go down this path i want to get back to hunting coos deer real quick you do this let's have a let's have a day every year where you can come into America and leave, and we'll count everyone here, have the day, and then recount.

Oh, guaranteed. Yeah, total. I thought you were going to tell me that somehow you're going to come up with a lesser number the next day. No, no. The interesting thing about that border, too, is there's people who go back and forth from those two realities every day. That's the thing.

Yeah. They go back and forth to grocery shops. To buy parts, buy car parts. Well, there are kids who are going to school on one side and live on the other. Yeah. And so it's like an insane reality. And which one do you hold up as the fair one

or the one that's more real? Back to Sam Houston and how he set those ideas. Well, that ebb and flow also just shows that even though there's a wall there and a border there and all this stuff that we went through is that there's, they're kind of two parts to something that's together. I mean, it's sort of, there's a relationship there that you can't just pretend doesn't exist. Well, that's, we were talking,ve and i were talking about how ironic you know

how we felt at some level getting on the u.s side you felt some sort of calm and safety right yeah it's the country you live in yeah it's like oh familiar thank god i'm safe now but you're just as likely to pull into a parking lot and get robbed right there in douglas maybe not just that's true maybe not just as likely but it can happen i remember one about that and i think that doug i i remember reading something like douglas is one of the like per like size it winds up that douglas is one of the safest cities in america well everybody every american who works there half of them have to work on border security yeah yeah they're all they're all back but yeah i mean but but that the reality is that going out at night at two in the morning and a bar in Douglas is still – it's not without danger.

Yes. But your feeling is that now you're in this safe zone, which really is just your perception of being on one side of the wall. Yeah, you can't check your brain when you get back into the U.S. and act like, no, I have liberty to just – But you feel that. To lay out naked on the side of the road at 3 in the morning and do stuff like that. At least I'm not aqua-primitive. With all my money laid out on me. But you feel like there's some of that calmness that you get from familiarity and safety and all those things.

But in reality, that's relative to where you are in America. So I don't know. But certainly visually, you know when you cross that border. And you feel it. There's something about the dogs. The dogs. We saw one mangy dog with its head in a trash can

and the back end was brown with shit and dirt and the front end was white, probably cocaine and sadness. And it was chewing on a piece of old diaper. So, Coos Deer. We get down to the place we're staying. Thank you, Ben.

I feel like Corwin McCarthy's here among us. Get down to Hunt. There's an empty ranch house where we're able to set up shop there's a lot of people coming and going it's hard to tell what their function is and that's one of the things i talk about all the time like when i'm when i'm in america and i see people i'm like oh that's like the drunk uncle figure right or i see someone walking down the road there's like a look and i'll look and be, that seems like a guy that broke down.

That seems like a guy who had so many DUIs he can't drive anymore. That seems like a guy who's walking his dog. You know what I mean? You just know when you're really familiar, but just a couple miles across the border, you see people and you're like, I can't for the life of me imagine what this person is doing walking down the road and the place we're staying has peacocks chickens turkeys that are very clearly across between the

goulds turkey the goulds wild turkey and domestic strains and there are many goulds turkeys out in this place and we start a hunt day, right off the bat. We went all glass in that night. Mm-hmm. Took a quick little tour of the ranch, and our tour was hindered by a razor that didn't work. So we were going to try to drive the whole border of the ranch. We kind of did a half of the north border,

and then kind of called it quits and went back. So my GPS track that i had on when the when it's a big rectangular ranch my gps track after a tour of the ranch described a very small triangle was our tour it was like an incomplete tour and that night we went and perched up on some glass and knobs and started seeing a lot of coos deer yeah and so it's this weird whirlwind that happens because you wake up and you go through this sort of like bureaucratic nightmare and then you drive through a town that makes you just feel like deeply uneasy influenced by what you hear about the border wars, right?

Just like all these apprehensions you have, not being welcome, feeling there. Then all of a sudden you're out in kind of a wilderness. What, 50 miles south, 30 miles south? Somewhere in there.

I was thinking about that actually, like on that ranch, because it hasn't been hunted commonly. But they hunt for the pot. Let me say it again. It hasn't been hunted by people who are really hunting. Yeah. But the vaqueros will hunt for meat.

But on that same note though, that close to the border, that not being a national park or, you know, like a sanctuary of sorts, we were probably, I mean, the area that we walked and the land we saw, we were very, we weren't, there hasn't been many people have walked around on that landscape. It's like wilderness yeah but you know what it passes it passed kind of two tests or two things that sort of always strike me when i'm in a wilder place one is just a blazingly brilliant night sky oh yeah no night no light pollution oh i mean no light pollution just the stars just stunning up above and then um a little less so. The stars were really the highlight, but that quiet, that sense of silence.

You do get it. There's not even a lot of aircraft noise. No. Dead quiet. I don't think I saw an airplane all week. It was weird. Just the blimp. The border blimp.

My brother was recently telling me about, you talk about the brilliance of the night sky. He was telling me there's so many planets, right? Like an estimate of planets that we can kind of like figure out. It's a number, like one, but with 24 zeros. That's a lot yeah he says that when you understand what that number means he said somewhere there is an eight foot tall furry thing that smuggles shit in the spacecraft in the spaceship statistically yeah he's, I'm open to any and all ideas if there are that many

planets. A one with 24 zeros on the end of it. Somewhere is a Wookiee. In a ship called the Millennium Falcon. Well, too, even today when you were calling in that coyote, and I mentioned not night

necessarily but the wind reminded me of like old westerns john ford westerns yeah you just like are back in time there's a couple differences like it's like a wilderness but very heavily degraded by cattle yeah the riparian zones it's just it's like the gloves are off on cattle yeah there's no kind of like effort to fence to to like heavily degraded riparian zones and there's a limited water it's dry dry country so anything that might have water is like hammered by cattle. And every square inch of the place is cattle country. It's like, it's shitloads of exposed rock, like outcrops and mountains, lots of cactus and lots of, you know, ankle to knee high grass.

But all of it grazed. And on top of that though, I mean, I would guess maybe Gianannis knows better that that area we were in we had a river going through there so in theory where we were was probably a more water rich it was the most water i've seen anywhere down there that i've hunted yeah and it still dries up meager say in there yeah like natural you actually see flowing water? That was the most water I've seen anywhere. Well, we saw a great heron down there. Yeah.

Saw wood ducks. Saw redheads. Redheads. We saw... I saw mallards. You saw mallards? We saw a mountain lion, two bobcats, hundreds of deer. Not a lot of quail, though.

I thought there'd be more quail. Not one quail. Jacks. I saw a quail. I saw a quail though i thought there'd be more not one quail jacks i saw a quail john i saw a quail morning doves morning jack rabbits one cottontail cottontail numbers down two gray squirrels how many times were you on a glassing titter on a high ridge or something you look across and you could see where one pasture was grazed fence and then there's those tall yellow grasses oh and lots of javelina lots of javelina but the but with as far as the cattle goes very low stocking ratios like like not tons of cattle just like

little scatterings on because the country's so dry but good looking cattle for that region from yeah yeah a way to think of this country i was thinking about how to describe it because it's rough on it's rough hiking because it's it's loose it's all lava there's a lot of loose rock it's it's some of the worst hiking i've ever experienced yeah imagine a scree field and i don't know if all of our listeners know what a scree field is but it's basically where like on the side of a mountain you just have a bunch of like rubble it's kind of just it's it's basically eroding off the side of the mountain but imagine that scree field has just enough dirt in there to produce grass that's what i feel like a lot of this is like it's rocky it's loose it's like kind of always wanting to slip off in a road

but there's enough dirt in there that there's grass you know what i think about it like there are very few landscapes on earth that i'm familiar with where it's way better to walk uphill than downhill it is much i'm like normally you're like sweet we get to go downhill now i am jerry like damn it now we gotta go downhill because going downhill on loose lava rock. Marble rock. Yeah. Going uphill is just nice. It's relaxing. Going downhill is kind of like almost like roller coaster mode.

Very difficult to be stealthy. There happens to be every tree and bush with a thorn. Everything's armed. Everything's armed. Everything wants to prick you. The tall stuff is ocotillo, which is a thorn. Looks like a bunch of bull whips all bound together with thorns on them.

Then you got mesquite, oak, juniper. In the bottoms, you have some big cotton. Are you sure it's juniper and not cedar? It's a cedar, I think. I ain't seen any juniper berries. I was looking for that. There are ain't seeing juniper berries i was looking for that once we kind of had this

there are many kinds of juniper i believe it's a juniper yeah and i think a lot of people call cedar yeah i would like to look into it though i'm sure someone right now is already writing an email and i welcome it and i will read that some bitch when we get it yeah what else is there? There's what we call sentry plants. Sentry plants. Yeah. Yucca.

Yucca. Lots of yucca. Lots of cactus. Troyer cactus. Troyer cactus. Troyer cactus. So the first full day of hunting happens, and I strike out, out onto the land with Ben O'Brien and dirt. And we climb up on a knob, and right away just start seeing deer.

Like a surprising number of deer. More than I thought. I've watched you hunt Coos deer. I've watched some other folks hunt Coos deer and talked to a lot of folks about it. And it seemed to me like the rule of thumb is you see few deer and there aren't many big ones. And we pretty much scratched those two off the list in the first two hours. I threw up my knockers and it was just like deer, deer, deer, deer, deer, deer, deer. Yeah, exactly.

It's like yeah but to be up it's such glassable country because it's very open and yellow grass and you get up on a knob and you put down a little pad to sit on and i got a tripod i put my razors on the tripod and it's just like like yanni says it makes a noise as you glass. It's like, zing. Laser. Zing. Zing. Zing. But we're on this. He's like just picking off deer. But we're on this giant glass of tit.

I don't know what the elevation gain was, but it's generally. Dirtwood know probably exactly. I mean, it seemed like. How high was that knob from valley to tit? How high? That first knob. Yeah. No, the knob that I named

the Donk Buck location spot. Yeah, I'd say 400 feet, 500 feet. Off the valley floor. And you're talking about a river valley with a pretty prominent river bed. And it's all about 5,000 feet above sea level.

Yeah, you're starting relatively high. And you can see, how many miles could we see? Many. Well, I could see all the way to the U.S. border. Yeah. Because you can see the blimps that are in. You can see the surveillance blimps that are in the U.S. Yeah, if it wasn't for the cuts in the mountains

and the different variations in terrain, you could see everything. But we could see. It's a corrugated land. Not even corrugated implies some kind of order. It's like the literal version of a topographic map. It just looks. It's just got lines and divides and just things you can't see into

and shadowy ridges and just places that little hell holes. Little hell holes. High spots. Choppy. Yes, choppy. Choppy could be good. Yeah. You're not getting a lot of places.

Deeply incised. Yeah. You're not getting a lot of places. Deeply incised. Yeah. You're not getting a lot of places in a straight line. No. Easily. When you look at a gully, it's hard to imagine what way the water would flow. Because it's so confusing. Oh, you look at a gully from 100 yards away,

and you have no idea the depth or the severity, the canyon-like-ness that it might have like you just have no idea you might go across that gully in a hop skip and a jump or you might walk up to it and go it does not look it does not look like country where you would get cliffed out but there's many times but you can't because a deer will walk into what you think is a little dinky depression, never to be seen again. Or a bush on a wide open hillside walks into that, and you look over like, hey, there's a deer,

and you look back, and it's gone forever. Never to be seen again. Never to be seen. The ghost. Well, that was a dinky. That's because they're in communication with Chewy. No, I thought with Chewy, though. It's actually a portal.

That's what I was saying. I was saying they all have trap doors. They just pull a rope, and then they're in Chihuahua. The green goes around to us. Sorry, John, I cut you off. No, I was just going to say that was the thing that kind of surprised me and was a lot of fun. I mean, it's obviously an optics-intensive way of hunting.

You know, you've really got to. Oh, it is glass. But the landscape down there, there was so much variety. I mean, it's not a monotonous landscape at all. I mean, between the different types of rocks and grasses and cuts and elevations, it's just, you know, I was never bored looking at this stuff. And there's a gradual shift as you head west. There's a gradual shift from more of a gentler open

grassland kind of environment in the nine miles to a much more rugged almost semi-mountain-y kind of country we struck out upon the landscape, started spotting up all kinds of deer

and then all of a sudden, pop! here's a little buck, a little dinker buck, like a Michigan 6. And coos deer, like real serious coos deer guys, this is a little bit of a digression. Real serious coos deer guys like Jay Scott don't count the brow time, and they only count what it has on one side i once posed to another serious

coos gear coos deer guy cody nelson from outdoorsman's does a spike have zero antlers and he said no a spike is a spike i said so is a fork a spike since you don't count the first one he said a fork is a fork a spike is a spike a three is a two isn't that how they do elevators in england do they like the first floor is zero or something oh i'd be all messed up i don't know i'd like sweet around the first floor but we're not no uh we just call them all. We preface it by saying Michigan and then say the number because it's just like we're adding them all up. If it winds up being an uneven number, like a five by four, we'll just say a Michigan nine. What would an Arizona Cousier guy call a four by five?

Three by four. Oh. Dude, that is ridiculous, man. You just take what it actually is and you minus one on each side and there you go. The formula. Then they do the same thing on mule deer. Yeah, because you don't count

brow tines on mule deer. These aren't mule deer. These are whitetails. You count brow tines on a whitetail. I hear a keyboard. I hear a keyboard. I hear a few keyboards right now. You know why you don't count them on mule deer?

Because most mule deer don't have them, and when they do, they're dinkers. Yep. A whitetail, the longest tine on that son of a bitch's head might be its brow tine. Speaking of long brow tines. The donk buck. The donk buck. Good one, Ben. ben yeah i'm learning so gold star we're up we move the the little dinker buck we're looking at the michigan six is agitated about something below him that's out of our view he's stomping he's puffing up and we both think that

he's got a coyote or a bobcat down below him because he's acting like how they act. His tail is up at some level, too. We've actually seen Coosbeer Bucks chase bobcats, like literally go chase after and run after bobcats. And he looks like he's dealing with a problem like that. But after a while, we realize his posturing and stuff, and all of a sudden a pair of doe ears all of a sudden pokes up and realize he's worked up about other deer

and it's not like he's running in there to chase other deer away but he's kind of like on the he's like on the out he's like oh dude i want to get in there so bad but i can't get in there is what it looks like and we get to thinking that there's a big stomper out of sight. Wasn't that kind of our primary motivation? Well, yeah. And his posture looked like a buck that was circling another buck. He came around that bush. Remember, he came around on the top side of this ridge.

He came around like he was posturing to fight another buck. We thought, well, for sure, there's a big one bigger than him that he's not he's not going straight after so why not go take a look so we move around to the chief commander of all glass and knobs and get up on there hoping that it's going to allow us to peer down into this box zone, but you couldn't see into his zone. But we do get to looking across the valley and dirt and just deer all over the place and dirt myth all of a sudden just randomly happens

and just decided to point his binoculars over in a direction and lo and behold, a deer. He takes off his game spooking sunglasses his blue mirrored sunglasses that are designed to scare away animals here's a pro tip if you go to the gas station and they have these sunglasses with blue mirrored lenses that may reflect in the sun to look like two fucking disco balls hanging off a tree don't buy those but unless you want to pick up the chicks but dirt those are like those are like legit costas right oh no those are

five dollars yeah he told me there's a gas station see so they were gas i gotta clarify two things though on at this how come when i had those half off costa things you didn't buy new costas because there's still a hundo or something crazy. Yeah, but you got to watch your eyes. You have those gas station ones. But your brand new eyes, and you just got all fixed up. No, you're right. You're right.

You bought those at a gas station? Yeah. They look like high quality. I know, right? And they feel, I mean, they're polarized. I can see. Yeah, they surely are polarized. It's like a rainbow- kind of looks at you. It's like you're being blinded by an electric blue rainbow spotlight.

Smoke signals to the other group. Anyway, he takes those off and he glasses up a buck. But I got to say, there's two things right here I got to interject. One, Ben was telling a story, I think, that brought out the buck. It was a story of such interest yeah it was that the buck came out the animals all gathered the bucks like bullshit and then two i did i didn't know what i saw but i did and you'll back me on this as like wait ben hold on one second i want to hear more of this but i think i wasn't sure but there's something special yeah there is something special about he's like i think i spotted a giant yeah and i don't know anything

about who's there and i pull up the spotter and get on this thing pretty quick and i was like well i gotta tell you that i i have no education in this in this opinion but we should shoot that yeah you should go chase that and i put it so what up yeah're glassing, what you do is you're glassing through knockers, preferably on a tripod. Dirt uses a walking stick. But you put the knockers on a tripod. I was running 10s. 10X, meaning it's 10 times the magnification of your regular naked eye. And then what you do is you see a deer and you can just kind of like there's a there's a something

about their shape their relative size to other deer that might be nearby the heaviness of the neck the way they walk just everything there's just something like you look you're like that's a buck yeah oftentimes you'll also see antlers they get the sway in their belly it's just like you just you look at enough of them, you just know there's a buck, at which point I'll grab out my spotting scope. So you're always going back and forth, like knocker, spotter,

knocker, spotter. That being said, at some distances, I'd say roughly, approximately 1,500 yards and farther, when you just have the 10s or even 12s on them, you're like, man, the body suggests a buck, but I just don't see antlers. And then when you just have the 10s or even 12s on them you're like man the body suggests a buck but i just don't see antlers and then when you put the spotting scope on them you're like not only is it a buck but man like a nice buck nice boy like they're just not big critters i mean yeah the

spotter i was using is uh it's like like like big i mean it a big, heavy spot, like an 85 millimeter objective lens. This is like a sizable thing. Throw that up, and I look at this right away. Because we talk about box, early on, you're talking about a box being a dinker box or a shooter box.

It's just sort of like, no one really knows at which point, there's a point at which they're just like, heavy, dark antlered, right? Mark, can you just say like mature bucks? Yeah. We're not the type of coos deer hunters yet where we could just immediately be like, oh, we have 110, yes, or 110, no. You know, you just kind of like yes or no because of the way he makes you feel. I think that we call them that when they have that mature look,

that they're dark, heavy antlered bucks with a whole bunch of tines on them, we're generally saying, like, ooh, that looks like a shooter buck. It's probably about 100 plus. Yes. Even though we don't know the number, but know the number but i'm just saying if you're gonna apply another two like there's a point at which a buck all of a sudden you're looking like that son of a bitch is the man well it's a big buck there's a few things right he's maybe wider than his ears he's got long brow tines maybe his threes are his g3s are as long as his g2s

you know there's like little and jay you know j Jay told us that if he's got an 8-point frame and he's got an extra kicker or two or he's got some junk going on, that's a shooter. If he's more than an 8-point, that's a shooter. A lot of times. There's just little things.

You say, oh, he's wide enough. He's wide enough. There's a type of Kuz guy, though. There's a type of Kuz guy who probably doesn't happen fast. He sees the buck and he's got to do a long analysis. For us, it's like

in a second right like shooter buck because you don't know because it's just something about it you just know it's worth going after but i look down at the buck and i'm like let's go but ben's i think just you know let's not both go someone's gonna stick around and i was like to ben i was being all gracious oh you go get him ben and ben's being around and i was like to ben i was being all gracious oh you go get him ben and ben's being all gracious to me like oh no i would never and you know why steve i would never so we sliced a piece of summer sausage and marked one side of the summer sausage and flipped it and i won the flip but can you go more into yeah i mean summer sausage in quotations actually oh donk so because we're calling it the donk buck

we gotta have a donk buck because my brother uh every year for christmas gives out um sometimes two things sometimes three things always he gives you a bag of banana chips that he made in his food dehydrator and he always gives you a summer sausage that he made from his deer elk, and he calls it donk. Or we've just come to call summer sausage donk. I'll leave it to you to figure out why one might call summer sausage donk. No casing, though. Some years.

I should point out how he makes it. So it's a fermented sausage. He ferments it in his fridge for a while. And when you do it, when you ferment it, it gets doughy. So he rolls out his donk and smokes it uncased. So it's an uncased donk. It's nice. It is good donk.

It's really good, yeah. And in some years, he'll give you moose droppings that you can burn as incense. Because he likes the willowy smell of them. This year, it was just banana chips and donk and so i took a piece of said donk and gouged one side and you had to call gouged or smooth and i won the toss and i got to go after dry bag and he had a red dry bag. And I had a white game bag. And we devised a system

by which we would very cleverly say green means go, red means stop. Interesting. And hung it up in a mesquite tree so that while doing my long stalk

I could look and if I glassed back to the Donk Buck location point I am now alone. I'm by myself. And saw green, Ben was telling me the buck hasn't budged. Everything's cool. If i glassed up and saw red i would then look at ben wave a game bag at ben ben would realize that i'm looking at him

through my spotting scope of binoculars and ben would then gesture with another system that would tell me what direction the buck went or forget about it. And I would only gesture the buck's movements. Not what you want me to do. Not what I wanted you to do. A very clear system. Clear system. And it's challenging because I was up there trying to spot you guys

with the binoculars while also making sure that buck didn't sneak down the ridge. Because if that buck moves, you never would ever quit hearing about it. No. Because it happened to Dirt on another Coos deer hunt. Last day. Where Dirt was supposed to keep an eye on a buck. Oh, yeah. And it went behind a tree.

And it's like, Dirt, just watch the tree. And we came back. Dirt was like, never moved. It's still back there. Nervous. Well, that deer is still there today. It's been nervous. It slipped out on him. Nervous. Well, that deer is still there today. It's been last year. It slipped out on him.

It slipped away. Well, because in that – But that was before he had his eyes fixed. Well, look at him now. He's just like, I don't know. I see nothing but light and dark. I didn't hear nothing. Now, in that, the important part of that plane is that I needed to know where you were at all times.

So you're walking across a sun-kissed ridge, behind trees, behind this. Found a drop antler. Found a drop antler that I was standing on. Nice one. And so every time I'm looking at you, I'm thinking about how I'm going to screw that buck's walking out of that bush and into the next bush, and I'm screwed. And every time I'm looking at the bush, I'm thinking you're probably going to change your plan and go and into the next bush, and I'm screwed. And every time I'm looking at the bush, I'm thinking, you're probably going to change your plan and go down to the riverbed, and I'll never find you again.

So I have this very stressful situation going on up on the old tit. We go down the hill, cross the creek, get on a little finger ridge, take the finger ridge up, and start getting in the zone. I'm looking, and it's green, green, green. Not green grass. The grass is dead as hell hell but i'm looking at the green bag the green means go thing and also we jump up a little bucket of dough and they run like they're gonna run through and when when you spook deer if you're stalking a deer and you spook other deer that run through the deer, what will often happen is the deer will get carried off with the other deer. If these guys are that upset about something, I'm leaving too.

And we spook the buck and the buck and they run off over the hill and I'm like, damn, there goes that. But I wait and look and the green means go is still green. And Ben had watched it all play out. Oh, and those deer ran from wherever you spooked them, which was probably 500 yards away from that bucket behind that bush, dipped down over the ridge he was on, ran right towards him, pulled up at about 10 yards, cut back up the hill, and we're gone.

He never budged. He never budged. And at this point, I'm thinking, I pulled a dirt. At some point, this buck snuck out of this. He slipped out of this bush because if he was in there, he would have been gone. Because, of course, a buck like that's going to see two deer freaking out and he's going to do do some similar he's going to stand up and look around and

and move places and get to a safe spot or whatever this deer just stayed and there's a magical thing that happens when you're when you're going after something you spotted far away in spot and stalk hunting where you like you spot it far away and have to sneak up on it where you have like an understanding of the landscape that is far from yeah right it's like you can understand it from a perspective and it's sort of and it makes sense to you spatially but when you get over there it's like this it's this alternate reality like this is not how you envisioned it but this is one of those cases when that did not happen i got there i was like because there's some orangish like these orange round patches of a different kind of vegetation a different grass everything lined up and once i saw the green and i started getting the zone i'm like this all makes like like magically somehow

worked out this is all understandable still. Here's that thing I remember. Remy Warren will take cell phone pictures before heading off on a stalk he takes cell phone pictures through the spotting scope or whatever? Of the area. However he does it. Depending on how far away it is. He takes cell phone

pictures of where he's headed so that later when he gets close to you and you're like damn it I I cannot. This is not how I pictured it being over here. He'll refer to his cell phone pictures. And he'll be like, oh, there's a dead snag that I didn't think to log. But I'm always trying to get in my head like, okay, there's a sentry plant. There's a this.

There's a that. There's a rock shaped like this. Just as little reminders but it still doesn't work but this time it did i get over i'm like oh this is like everything's exactly like how i pictured it and there's the bush that that buck is hiding under and ben's telling me green and so it's like somehow i'd made it all the way over there and was perched up 200 yards above him with a green bag and knowing the bush. But not seeing he was still buried, right?

He was still tucked away. And it's been an hour at this point since we've seen the deer. And it's almost like a non-story. I started creeping over, creeping over, creeping over, and I had my little shooting fork on my tripod and creeping, creeping, and more and more of the bush was coming into view and eventually and i knew it probably happened because i was like i was in very tight like the outdoorsman's boys they say when you get within 300 yards of a coos deer's zone

he's gonna know you're there he's gonna bust you and i was well within his in his zone and um or like you gotta be extra caught. It's like when you get within that 300-yard zone, it's time to really buckle down and pay attention to what you're doing. And pretty soon he stood up because he sensed something wasn't right. And it was just, blouch. And that was it. Big, huge, giant bark.

I got to say, too. Like a real honest, big, huge, giant buck. I got to say, too. Like a real honest, big, huge, giant buck. Gorgeous. The donk. The donk buck. The donk buck. On that note, like you're saying that it worked out. I'll put a picture of that up in the show notes if you want to look at the big, huge, giant buck.

The difficulty of seeing an area through optics and then trying to pick it out when you get there i feel like and this is more a question you guys actually that ranch because maybe it's hunting the coos deer something in the mix makes it even more difficult to judge distance and like space where we just were the last week than yeah other areas Because stuff that's close is actually farther away than you think it is. Stuff that's far away is much closer than you think it is. Yeah, because they're so small.

There's a division that happens at around 600 or 700 yards. Where any deer you see, how is that son of a bitch 400 yards away? It seems like he's 200 yards away, but a knob, a rock, a mile away, you're like, that must be a mile away. In fact, it's a half mile away. Yeah.

So it's like a distance-y kind of weirdness. Yeah, so would you like to share any details about your buck? That's unexplainable. That happened multiple times this week. That knob you shot your buck from, John, I was like, that's a couple hundred yards. He's like, nope, 300. I was like, oh, looks close. And then Ben and I were looking at a bug.

We're like, that is so far away. We range it 1,400 yards. We could never get there in a full day. It'll take us hours to hike there 1,400 yards. I can't begin to understand it, like why that happens. Barry Lopez talks about it in the Arctic and Arctic Dreams about how distances, like he talks about people, he talks about a hunter stalking a grizzly that turns out to be a marmot.

I always talked about like prairie. We weren't on a prairie, but prairie depth perception. I never had it. He's stalking up an antelope in Wyoming, crawling across the prairie, and look up like, y'all, he's 200 yards, and he's 500. And he's 100 yards. You think he's 800. I don't know.

No size reference. Yeah, but in Arctic Dreams, he also talks about a guy who thought he was looking at a walrus once. A blackhead and two white tusks. What he was actually looking at a walrus once a blackhead and two white tusks what he's actually looking at is a headland of rock with two glaciers coming down the side coming down it the depth perception yeah for me for me on this hunt you know a lot of it was just the foreignness of the landscape you know where i live i'm not looking at century plants i'm not looking at ocatillos all

the time i'm not looking at these things and so my ability to kind of get a feel for the distance is pretty bad and plus as a shooting guy a gun guy i mean most people's you know i'm i'm lost at sea without a range finder in terms of precise shooting and i think most people vastly overestimate their ability to correctly identify a yardage oh you mean unaided yeah yeah unaided you know and this was this was certainly a case i mean i was fooled time and time again with the distances on this yeah how many times was it was there a pinnacle or a pyramid ridge with 10 different fingers that were going in different directions and some of them were fully shaded some of them were half shaded them so they made them look deeper than they might have been and you thought oh that's that's a thousand yards and turns out to be 1500 or 2000 and the other thing

is everyone here has spent their whole life looking at normal whitetails yeah so you got that right fixed in your head but these things are half the size yeah yeah yeah and a way to put that perspective we're looking at john's head when you brought your head out it's in the back of the ranger there i mean that full grown mature buck's head if you take off his antlers it looks like a fawn yeah regular white tail fawn i mean just about short the skull is smaller than a shoe petite nose on it you know yeah all right man i'm begging everyone to go check out a pair of danner stronghold work boots if you want to see what the future of work boots looks like now danner's been around for 85 years in the Pacific Northwest,

cranking out quality boots. They come out of a logging and exploration background, so everything they do has some deep roots to it. Each of their boots is handmade to hold up in unforgiving conditions and live up to Danner's unyielding standards. That definitely applies to the Stronghold, which has legendary quality and durability and heritage built with modern construction technology and materials. It doesn't matter if you're out hiking on the trail, exploring the city, or better yet, busting at work. You can count on the Stronghold to offer enough room for comfort but maintain a sleek profile. It is tomorrow's classic available today, the Stronghold Work Boot. For strength that starts right where you stand, go to Danner.com, find your local store, and take a gander at the Stronghold.

Support for today's show comes from HelloFresh. Now, HelloFresh is a meal kit delivery service that shops, plans, and delivers your favorite step-by-step recipes and pre-measured ingredients. So you can just cook, eat, and enjoy without any kind of annoying meal planning or grocery shopping. You go online, you make your order, you choose your delivery day, and everything gets sent right to your door in recyclable, insulated packaging. And you got multiple plans to choose from, ranging from classic, veggie, family. I checked it out. I was blown away by how good it was, how easy it was to do. And I actually learned a handful of cool tricks because they got great procedures built into it. If you want to get $30 off your first week at HelloFresh, just go to HelloFresh.com, enter the code MEAT30.

That's M-E-A-T 30. That's HelloFresh.com, offer code MEAT30, and get $30 off your first week at HelloFresh. Very teeny. Is there a weird... I'm going to get deep again on you. Go for it. We can absorb it.

That two Coronas. All hopped up on Corona. Corona extra. Came from Mexico. There's just a weird... You were talking about it when I shot my buck. Just a weird beauty to those animals. Their coloring is such a difference. They're sleek

sleek the gray ghost the gray ghost but they didn't have their gray winter coats yet no not a lot of them because the gray ghost becomes very gray soon they were more like a brown ghost still very go apparition like but they weren't the gray i saw both i definitely had i was glass and dough sometimes where you could tell one was definitely a browner shade of deer and one was a grayer shade of deer. Because the donk buck still had a red tail. Yeah. He didn't have his gray coat. Yeah.

He wasn't the gray ghost. A transition almost seemed to happen just in that seven days as far as. Yeah, the rut started. Yeah. Al Giganto had like a red tail too. Same. Same. Had a red tail too. Same. Had a red tail.

Johnny? John and I were hunting together all week. I think on the third day, was it the third or fourth day? We struck off. The ranch is divided by the highway. We struck off to the east side of the highway. Which goes like four miles in. And that was different.

Which goes like four miles in, like a pie shape. Yeah. I wish you guys would have gotten to see it, because it was definitely interesting to see different topography, like all long ridges running the whole length of that four miles, and much less vegetation. Still a lot of grass, but not as many ocotillos, oaks, cedars, junipers, whatever you want to call it.

Just open, you know. When we get up there, we're on time this morning, where we needed to be at daylight. And John and Beto are looking one direction. I go and look over the other ridge, and it's so open I felt like there. And, John, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like you felt like you were seeing everything that was there to see. You weren't like, oh, man, there's all these hidden pockets where these deer might be.

They're so open that in the first 20 minutes I had 20 deer, which is unheard of for a coos deer hunting, I feel like. I had never seen that many deer in one morning because they're all in the open. They weren't hiding. And we saw one. I thought it kind of sucked over there, even though you shot a nice buck. Well, yeah. Let me finish.

So we saw what we thought was a shooter buck, and it was on the neighbor's property. Beto got us permission to go on the neighbor's. We started hiking towards it. And before we started hiking, I'm telling Beto exactly where it is and how far we're going to go to go around where the buck is to get on the backside to look into where he went into. And he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, no problemo. That's what Beto likes to say. No problemo.

I'm like, all right, let's go. So we go across one good canyon and up to this side. And I'm like, all right, Beto, over there, see that? That's where the buck was. We need to get on the back side where you see there was some manzanita trees or something. I'm sorry, that's not right. Mesquite trees. Manzanita is like a...

Is it a tree? What do you call manzanita? Like bush. Bush. There's no manzanita there. There's mesquite trees and he's like oh that's where that buck was yeah too far we just turn around and basically start heading back towards john and uh from there on out i think we glassed up we had kind of a long afternoon

session and we and beto glassed up but maybe a buck and two does right yeah it definitely it definitely got slower it was great looking country though yeah like you said we had these long ridges that we could kind of a lot of them you could see on both sides of them and down pretty deep and that was kind of in contrast to the other side of the ranch where you had all those mystery pockets it felt like this topography revealed itself a little bit more. At most, you're only looking at 50% of what's there. Exactly, and what it revealed was no deer for me. Beto definitely felt like...

Is he pretty good at glassing? Oh, yeah, he definitely glassed up. Beto's good? Yeah, he glassed up a lot of deer. He felt like lower density, but possibility for El Gigante for sure. That means the giant, I believe. I don't speak Spanish.

In English. So we burn up the afternoon, and then come evening, John and I decide that we're going to cut across a canyon to another ridge that we can't get the ranger to and then basically sort of still hunt walk peering down into these small bowls and have beto pick us up at the bottom of the ridge well we get all the way over there it takes us i don't know 30 minutes it wasn't like a monster hike but it was you know some effort we crawled up this hillside that where we waded through cat claw that was it It wasn't like

this stuff that was like the knee high and kind of space where you can kind of pick a path. I mean, it was nipple deep and thick. Just... Piercing your nipples. Screw it. I gotta just plow through it and just take it like a man. You know? Covered in deer

shit, though. A lot of deer poop on that hillside. We saw those coyotes up top too that's right we get to the top Beto calls us on the phone he's like nope I don't know how he had figured it out if he was over there working Google Earth on his phone

but he's like the road that's on that ridge that you guys are on I can't get to it it comes from another ranch you guys are going to have to come back can't get over to you guys and we're like all right well we're gonna hunt out here anyways so we continue hunting down the ranch down this ridge looking both sides and uh did we see we didn't see a single other deer i don't think right no yeah we i saw the badger monkey no yeah we yeah. We glassed up a coat of Monday.

That was cool. Just a single. I seem like you usually see them back. Yeah, little groups, three or four, a whole shitload, you know. But it was getting later. It was definitely not quite sunset, but getting close. And we basically had, we were at a spot where we could see a couple bowls. We just didn't have, where we were hunting,

it wasn't just the giant vistas where you'd want to just sit and just spend three hours glassing. You know, you kind of had to keep moving because you were just seeing 300 to 400 yards, and then you'd have to just pop over the next knoll and see another bowl that was 300 to 400 yards and just keep on. Yeah, the ridge kind of zigzagged. Yeah, the ridge had an S curve to it which was nice because

you got a new vista you got a new vista every time it's like skiing down a hill it's been a pretty lame ski run the way we were going it'd be more just like the skiing the skiing happened later yeah that's right we did some skiing yeah john's self-arrested need that whip we uh we have like one like we have like we're like okay we got enough time like go over and like let's pick one more bowl we'll go and sit there and we've been looking at this stuff we couldn't quite see so we had a um the ridge sort of had a false bowl in it that we had to like cross at the head of and then we'd be on a spot where we could you know glass some new country can i point out this is not how you're supposed to hunt coos deer yeah although even jay was telling me that this ranch in general because

of its choppiness he's like you guys might just have to move around a little bit more and you're right Jay did say that. Maybe 30 minutes on each glass and knob. Yeah. Just to cover it because there's no way. There's just not the knob to sit on where you can just see it all. And I don't know what held you up, but I'm like, yeah, let's just go over here. And we maybe only had to go 80 yards.

We're going to sit down. And for some reason, you stayed back. I don't know. Maybe you just put some gear away in your pack or something. Could be just that I'm fat and slow. But yeah. Or you had some gear to put away. Or I had some gear to put away.

Yeah, and he's like, yeah, maybe you had some gear to put away. Had to do some push-ups. We weren't running anywhere. We were just glassing wherever john was coming from so yeah tripod or something i was just looking down that other but uh yeah i creep over there and luckily i had my creeping hat on and uh because it's so easy to do and we've all done it where you just like walk right up to the edge of that ridge and peer over. You're like, oh, shit. A bunch of white tails blowing out of there.

Exactly. I just crept over there and peeped over the edge. There's the buck. Staying there, not far away, 100 yards or less. He's looking away from me. I glass him. I'm packing eights and twelfths because I like to have my eights on my chest for this exact situation. But I like to have the twelfths when I'm sitting down and starting to laser at distant hillsides.

See, my plan was to go down with tens and twelfths. But some insane baggage handler, dude, I pulled out my twelfths, packing, and hadn't realized the last time I came home, it looks like someone must have taken a fork truck and drove over my 12s. I had to send them back to Vortex to get them fixed. Like bent eye cups and stuff. Yeah, but the metal. I don't know what happened. It was like something bad happened coming home from somewhere, and I didn't realize and just put them back where they belong. Right.

So I was only down there with 10 Solamente. That's all it goes. Is that right? Yeah. 10s only? Yeah. C. Oh.

Wait, wait. So I'm feeling pretty lucky to have caught this buck, and he's a good-looking buck. Yeah, because you were way within his zone way i'm in there but i can tell he's something's got his attention below him he's like very fixated on something down below i look over my shoulder and 80 yards away i can kind of see john coming and i'm like what on earth is at this moment why is he way back there not right with me doing push why is he doing push-ups back there now exactly this is not the time i'm not sure if you heard me counting i've

done 100 push-ups back here so i'm watching the buck and he's motionless staring down the hill i'm like all right i've got some time and finally john i see john and i'm like giving him the waving my arms come on come on come on the universal gesture that means i found a buck yeah and i think he sees me i go back to looking at the buck and i watch the buck for another 10 seconds i look back at john and john's like still like kind of creeping towards me and i'm like no like now you know and obviously you hadn't seen my first gestures because you would have been running i I think. Right, but the other thing I'll just point out is that you seem to forget that you had a deer tag yourself. Yeah.

And what did you do when you started chasing the deer? You left your pack and your rifle. Yeah, as soon as I saw the deer, I took off my pack in which I had my rifle strapped to it just to be ultra lightweight and sneaky. Yeah, because you wanted to sneak up on the deer without a rifle. Is that how you hunt Coos deer? Where was your pack? When I saw him, I just dropped it.

Oh, okay. Just thinking that I was going to be. Because you were thinking you're not going to be the guy that shoots. Yeah. That's like seeing a delicious steak and dropping your fork and walking over to it. No, because he's thinking he's not the guy that's going to shoot. Yeah, I'm going to give John the opportunity. I don't know why.

I just like to do that. You know, I mean, I thought we were hunting buddies. Like everybody was hunting. Like everybody was hunting. It wouldn't matter if it was you or Steve or Ben. I would have

been like, come here. Yeah. Well, actually the subcontext of this is both. I'll let him finish the story, but basically neither of us wanted to be done hunting. So he tried to trick me into shooting this deer. It's only day three. A big, nice buck. A big, nice.

Not a big, huge, giant buck, but a big buck. Well, you know what? I never saw the animal though. I mean, this is part of the thing. So he's sneaking up there and he's gesturing me over like he's on fire and I've got to put him out. And okay, I creep up there and he's like,

the buck's right below us. He's like, can you shoot offhand at 75 yards? And I'm like, yeah buck's right below us. He's like, can you shoot offhand at 75 yards? And I'm like, yeah, I can do that. Can you? I'm like, can you? He's like, well, I can see the buck. And I'm like, I can't.

Because he's six inches taller than me, and he's downhill from me, and the whole. Very handsome. Very wigwapo. Wigwapo. Just ask the border ladies smells nice more importantly sneaky and very and very because the buck while we're doing this the first time being gracious to each other the buck moves across the hill and lose sight of him and so we had to

then back off the ridge a little bit and we we'd circle around maybe 40, 50 yards, and start to do the peak over again. And at that point, I'm thinking, like, I screwed the pooch. Because I got lucky the first time. How in the hell am I going to creep over now, and at 70 yards, pick him up before he picks us up? Yeah. I would be thinking that would be hard to do.

Especially when you're up above him, because deer, like, they don't like people being above them or below them. Luckily, whatever was below them, when we peek back over... What was below them? I don't know. Never saw it. A doe?

Maybe a doe. Ike Turner once said, if they're ever going to catch me, they're going to have to bait that trap with a word that starts with P. It could have been... Possum. It could have been

a doe down below him. But he was leaving that. Whatever was bothering him, he was leaving it. So I don't know. It strikes me that you should have had some donk. It should have flipped. I would have said, let me get some donk out and a knife,

and I'm going to cut off a coin and gouge one side, and we'll settle this like men, like friends. We didn't have time for that. We were in tight. So anyways, we pick him up again. We can range the tree behind him. It's at like 130-something, and he looks to be a good bit closer so i i you know i thought he was well we ran down there after him it only took us seconds to run down after we after i finally hit him it took you seconds it took me about four minutes okay

but i was running so yeah finally john's like yeah you could shoot my gun i'm like okay you want to twist my arm too much i'll shoot your gun at this buck. Why are you guys swapping out guns now? Because I left mine. I left my pack. How far away? Just 50 yards. Oh, okay.

But again, we're 70 yards from this buck. But you know the thing I always say. It's not going to last forever. Never leave your pack. That's true. Never leave your pack. That is great advice. Because you just don't know how this is going to wind up.

You don't. You don't. I thought I was going to force John into shooting this buck. It didn't work for me. I want to just get some clarity on something. I feel like you, John, are trying to say that there's something else going on and it wasn't just Yanni being generous about who's shooting at the buck. Yeah, I mean, I think we were both having a really good time on this hunt

and, you know, we were being, at least I was being a little selective. We had seen... So you think Yanni was like, this looks like a great buck for you, buddy. No, no, no. No, actually, I'm not going to accuse Yanni of that. I don't think he was trying to like, give me a sub Yanni buck, but I do think, but I do think that he was in guide mode all of a sudden, like just conveniently leaving his rifle elsewhere and, you know, wanted me to pull the trigger so he could keep hunting and you know how it is when you don't get to carry around a rifle anymore

yeah and for me i was having i can't overstate you know like like all of us you know i get to hunt a lot of places and this kind of hunting, this beautiful country, this glassing intensive, uh, thing looking for these elusive creatures. And they are, they're wary animals. I mean, some of like your hunt, you know, you got up on them. Perfect. But man, that's not how it usually plays out. Definitely not. You know, well, I put out a hundred coos here five times and I've gotten two.

Those are long trips, week long trips. There you go. And there was another example from the day before when yanni got his deer and you know i was up on a big knob we were watching i spotted a pretty good buck about 700 yards away and yanni had gone off to check out a ridge on his own and you know he was probably at least a good thousand yards from that buck and when he was working his way back over toward my position, that buck popped up his head, looked at Yanni, and didn't panic, but was like, you know what?

That cushion doesn't feel good to me, even from a thousand yards. Got up out of his bed, was looking at him, and he had a little buck buddy with him. They just kind of slowly ambled and drifted away. You know, and that there just shows you these are very wary, smart creatures. The gray ghosts. The gray ghosts. Yeah.

And the day before I shot my buck, you had spotted a good buck, and we put the stalk on him, kicked up a deer that went right by the buck we were trying to kill, and instead of this buck just laying there watching him stream by, he's like, well, if they're running, I'm running run into you see you later there's two kinds of bucks in this world there's bucks that see everybody running around getting all excited and they're like that is a good way to get shot running around getting all worked up about nothing i'm gonna lay tight. Yeah. Shot or at.

Yeah, when I see the problem and I determine that it really is a problem, then I will decide to move. And then there's bucks who are like, if something's bothering them, I'm going to play it safe and act like it bothers me too. And trust that they, right?

And I think each type of buck can get killed by his own perspective the buck i got should have been the kind of buck who sees trouble and says me too not the kind of buck who says i'm gonna wait and see how this plays out before i go burning all my calories up for nothing because if i ran every time someone ran all i'd ever do is run around. I think I'd be shot by a gun by now. So anyhow, there you are. There we are. And I take John's gun.

And like I said, 70 to 80 yards. And I got to shoot off pan because there's a bunch of grass. Like crouch down, you can't even see the deer. If you kind of get in a semi-crouch, you can see his head you stand up the full eagle yeah you can pretty much see his body but even then there's some stuff and so i like look through the scope i'm like man there's too much stuff i crank up the scope a little bit and there's still too much stuff crank up the scope a little bit more and i can finally like pick the lane through the stuff, right? Instead of it being all fuzzy, I can now see a few. It was Ocotillos mostly.

I could see a lane. And you know how when you crank, as you crank the scope up. Your aim gets worse. It's short ranges, yeah, right? Maybe, John, you can speak to why that happens. Because you realize just how shaky you are. How much shake you have, right? Yeah, and there are a whole bunch of reasons.

That's one of them, that perception of wobble when you crank it up. I shoot most things at very low power, all things considered. You actually had a good, you're explaining it now, you actually had a pretty good reason to turn up your power a little bit. But the problem is that you get that extra amount of wobble, so you start to overcorrect and just kind of almost on a subconscious level second guess yourself. The second thing is the higher you go up in that magnification you're shrinking your field of view so when you take that shot and you lose your sight picture under recoil

you've made it much harder for yourself to find it again to reacquire exactly and you know you when you hunt enough that being able to get a sense of what that animal has done after the shot can make a huge huge difference so yeah i mean lower magnification is uh is the way to go and part of it is you know you shoot enough you learn to trust your crosshairs you know at at 4x for example it's a good like general kind of power to keep a scope on. You know, if that, even though the crosshairs look like it's dominating the deer's vitals, you know, our eyes have a really great ability to kind of just center those things symmetrically. You know, if you get it in there and you just trust in it, it's going to work.

That is the point of aim. You don't have to jack it up to 12 power or whatever the top end is you're not really making things more accurate in fact you're kind of setting yourself up for potential problems by doing that i walk around with mine on very low often thinking because if you kick something up or something all of a sudden is right there in your face you can find it in a hurry absolutely i don't crank mine up until i'm like laid down, ready to shoot, and it's a long shot. Then I'll crank it up.

Yeah, if you need that extra magnification, you will always have time to dial it up. So it's, you know. You never need a whole bunch in a hurry. Nope. But you oftentimes need not much in a hurry. Absolutely. So there you are.

There I am. With too much power and I am seeing the wobbles so this is gonna get interesting this is the little trick that you try that doesn't work very good well it eventually worked but i had read somewhere that i don't i forget who it was might have been vans wall my buddy yanni Vanswole. That as opposed to just trying to put the crosshairs in the middle and then trying to hold them there and fighting the wobbles, it's sort of better to come into the zone and sort of pick a direction to be moving through where you want to hit

and then squeeze the trigger. Right? When you say right, do you mean do I understand or agree? I understand. Okay. I missed twice doing whatever I'm doing.

Bouch! Bouch! And then the third time, I just took maybe a little bit deeper breath and hit him. How is this buck letting you be that close? Blouching away and racking rounds.

I wish I had that. I had bucks looking at me 350 yards away the whole week. To Yanni's credit. He didn't know we were there? Was it dusky? Light was dropping, but to Yanni's credit he didn't know we were there was it dusky very light light was dropping but to yanni's credit he worked the bolt on the gun quickly it's not like he shot and then

waited a few seconds he's like he's working a lever action yeah he ran i i i think he knew he was just kind of giving the deer a couple extra chances i don't know what it was he's like jerry clower man no i mean look man i missed twice i mean full on i mean if that buck would have ran on the first one i don't i mean who knows maybe he would have run 100 yards and stopped and i would have been able to take a knee actually you know i can tell you why you missed i know why you missed because he wasn't aiming at it right well there was that but i There's that, but there's other things. When I handed him the rifle, you know, I said, look, the trigger pull on this is fairly light, you know, and, you know, so I think what happened is as he's bringing it up,

you know, he's starting his little trigger press sort of as he's doing his quail pull through a rising teal or whatever it was, and I think he just tripped the trip the trigger a little too quick because it's got a fairly light crisp trigger on that gun i'm gonna start calling it even though he doesn't remember where it came from i'm gonna start calling it the yanni that that method that method that way to miss is called the yanni okay so but john speak to that there is some right we've talked about this you said it's maybe not like pulling through but you said there's like a figure eight thing where as opposed to like

trying to hold one i introduced a figure eight into this you instead of holding one spot it is better to sort of cross the bullseye the part of the thing is is that you can't hold it when you're shooting offhand unsupported you cannot hold those crosshairs dead steady right you just flat out can't do it so you're going to be dealing with reticle wobble if you try to hold it straight on like we're talking about typically what you get is that figure eight motion that you're talking about and that naturally happens that naturally happens and what you have to do is you have to be comfortable with that not get essentially train yourself not to be nervous about it and learn to shoot when that figure eight is crossing where you want what you're doing actually what you're doing isn't fully wrong you know i i would say it's 75 yards on a deer size thing though you

can pull that thing up and you have enough time just to kind of snug that thing into your shoulder, you know, and it will steady there for a second, focus hard and shoot. Like you don't have to overthink it. You're, oh, go ahead. Yeah. But that idea of coming up with the idea is to come up and stop. And I don't know, maybe you guys kind of know that trick from bow hunting too. You know, that's a bow hunting way of dropping your pin, you know,

settling your pin on an animal. You go and stop. You know, you either pull it up onto the animal or drop it down, and that's a way to kind of get your pin steady. So there is some precedent for that technique. But honestly, at that distance, you just want to put it on it and shoot the damn thing. Where my figure eight thing, that description is ron layton um was a door gunner in vietnam and he likes to talk about the problem with running that m60 out of the door was that it

would drift from the recoil and he learned to control the drift shooting his M60 by giving into it. And he said he would always run figure eights over his targets. Ye hate to be a target of bronze. Yeah, him running figure eights over you? Yeah, and of course at 600 rounds a minute too, you've got some extra leeway there, too. Yeah. You're not buying the ammo.

So all of a sudden, whap! So yeah, third one hits him. Yeah. There wasn't that much time. He was so close. It wasn't. It was. Yeah.

And we can tell his ass end drops, and he's kind of like like, going away from us, and he disappears almost instantly. And kind of turkey-esque style, I just, you know, take off, barrel down the hill. As though going after a hit turkey. Yeah. Because last thing I saw was him, like, moving away, and it kind of looked like he might still have his front legs, you know.

And after missing twice, you know, wasn know wasn't like fully confident about my head feeling cocky but we run down there and he's stone cold dead double lung graveyard dead graveyard as jerry clower would say oh my god it looked like the blood trail looked like somebody took a gallon of red paint and just, you know. Third time is the charm. 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 a 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,points and tracking that's right you were always talking about uh we're always talking about on x here on the meat eater podcast now you um you guys in the great white north can 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 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. If mine was a big, huge, giant buck, yours was a big, huge buck.

Yeah. He's a nice buck. A little teensy bit not as big, huge, giant as mine. I couldn't be any happier. We will put pictures up to show. No, I would happily trade you right now. I always like, I was talking about this with Ben. It's kind of nice to incrementally build up

to, you know, to bigger animals because you kind of always have like the next step to look forward to, you know?

Once you shoot the 200 inch mule deer, you may never get to see another one that big, let alone shoot it one day. Yeah, I had to reset. Yeah.

I had to reset and now I'm going back down the other direction. I'll shoot. I climbed up, now I'm climbing down. I'm going to start the other direction i'll shoot i climbed up now i'm climbing down i'm gonna start with forkers and work my way back up to 200 um so yeah the story gets a little we make quick work of uh chopping them up get them into backpacks and uh you remember we crossed this canyon earlier to get over there to this ridge we're hunting.

Well, we're now maybe half mile down the ridge. And Beto and the ranger are right across from us. He was able to move the razor down. Yeah, he was able to move down his ridge. And, I mean, we can see him. 700 yards away. 700 yards away. Because we had done the sight and go thing on the GPS,

which really quickly is basically you point the GPS and lock a direction towards a target. Then you range find it so you know exactly how far it is. And you can put those two pieces of data into your GPS and project the waypoint so that later, whether it's an animal or a ranger or whatever, you can find it. So we're at the top of this hill.

I'm like, yeah, John, let's just bang off this thing right down across the canyon, up the other side. Slick as you please. Yeah. Well, we get down after going through Ocotillo and Coah. We get down to a bench, and all we have to do is cross what looks to be a little bitty canyon and up the other side, and we're back in the Ranger, driving home. And we start looking at the edge of this canyon,

and it's like a pretty steep drop-off. But then we find a little crease. I'm like, well, you know, Mother Nature's little crease. She just creases right down. The Ma's crease. Well, we get down in there, and it gets steeper and steeper. And when there's the rocks that are trickling below us, they're kind of rolling, rolling, and then there's the rocks that are trickling below us are kind of uh rolling rolling and then there'd be a second pause then they hit the bottom and uh so it's not looking

good and i kind of peel off to the right a little bit to see if i can find a way down and all of a sudden i hear like oh shit you know and i look over and John is now sliding down this little crease and I'm like, please dear God, stop. Do not want John to go over the edge. Did you grab something finally to stop or just dig your heels in?

No, I clenched the ground so tightly with my butt cheeks that you were able to grab a rock it was like abs what happened was we're on it was a very steep i don't know what the grade is on that but this is the we alluded it to we alluded to it before with like the scree like the marble like quality you know this is kind of like rotten ground, you know, I mean, just the dirt's loose. And I had, uh, managed to dislodge a pretty good, like about a pumpkin size boulder behind me that took my legs out from under me. And, you know, I was, and I ended up, I don't know, I probably only slid 20 or 25 feet, but man, it lasted a long time. And, you know, just whatever,

I just clotted everything to stop and and did it before i went down and over the edge and at that point i i lost enthusiasm for uh for yanni's navigational instance yeah he's usually pretty good so we went up and down not far but 100 yards in each direction nothing looked like it was going to get any better it just looked like we were just on top of this canyon basically with you know steep walls and instead of going the exploratory method any farther we decided to let's take 15 minutes and walk back up the hill we just came down and walk basically exactly the same way out that we had come in because we know that we can do it won't be any surprises just

follow the little red line on the gps who's carrying all the buck meat i was and i gave john all my gear okay um and uh yeah so we did that and about two and a half hours later we caught up with beto and uh drove home yeah thought by then, by the time you guys got back, I thought you'd been beheaded and dissolved in a vat of acid. The only explanation here is that. That was the most stressful part of the trip for me. I was like, should we just make dinner for us? Even without a detour, it would have been a good hour pack job.

Well, it's rugged country. And it's funny because we got back and finally got within striking distance of the Razor, saw the dim, dim headlights on that thing. The headlights on that thing are like on a Model T. I think you said it's like driving my candlelight. It was sort of like mood lighting. And I thought for sure, I was like, salvation is at hand. You know, there's the razor.

And we jump in this thing. And, you know, I sort of just, I like driving those things. So I'm sort of appointed myself as the designated driver. And we take off and I go maybe 20 yards. And I all of a sudden hit this ditch that damn near flips the thing. Yeah, it drops like two wheels into a ditch where the wheels don't touch the bottom of it. We're kind of high-centered.

Luckily, those things – it was a six-wheeler Ranger, and you put it into six-wheel drive and it climbed right out of there. It's kind of one of those deals where you're like, oh, the adventure's over. We're heading home. A minute later, you're like, God damn it. I'm telling you, it's ruthless country, man. There is no

escape. It is raw, rugged country. That's a huge part of the appeal of it. I now need to install a sort of montage. I'm going to tell a quick story that serves the function of a montage in a movie. Ben and I have grown curious about the southwest corner.

Ah. The wild corner. The southwest corner. The wild corner. And we head in there and just start tearing in a new one with the binos and find like the homeland ben said i feel like we're now in their bedroom or something like that yeah when we sat down on the first glass of tit i felt like unbelievable amounts of deer i felt what and box running every which way yeah to refer to the to the location of the donk buck tit as kind of like overlooking their

lands by the time we got into the middle of the southwest corner we were on the back porch yeah we were there we could smell yeah we could smell we're in there in the southwest quadrant yes i also want to add in this montage there's also a moment after which we encounter a buck in another area called El Surriso. And we grow very interested in El Surriso. That's Spanish for the surprise. We leave. Of course it is.

We grow interested in the Surriso, El Surriso, bump them, get up on a way high perch and devote a whole day to trying to relocate them don't get sick of looking at that area and decide to explore the southwest quadrant go back to the southwest quadrant discover buckland the next day decide to go back and maybe try to find Elsa Prizo again because he's still haunting us. At which point John and Yanni move into

the Southwest Quadrant. Shangri-La. They find two that is loaded with bucks and other deer. And then more stuff happens. And then we decided to go back into the Southwest quadrant and really

tear it a new one where everybody's going in and we're going to glass the Dickens out of it. John. Well, you were getting frustrated with me, I think. No. A little bit. I hadn't punted with you.

No, but the thing is... Oh, because you're Mr. Picky. Because you're Mr. Picky. All I hear about is all the giant bucks these guys see. Here's Steve. He's like, how far away was that deer? He's always a 105-inch deer. How far away was he?

1,000 yards. What's wrong with that? I love it. What? It's like, Mr. Shooting Editor, I thought you could shoot. Yeah, it's like just all these barks wandering around. Lob them in there. Louch it up. I have to admit, I was loving this

hunt so much. I just didn't want it to be over. And I feel like time bore you out. Is that something you can say you were proven right i was i was proven right well here's what happened is is that that first time that yanni and i encroached on your guy's country you know we did see a couple of really intriguing bucks and there was this one buck matter of fact as soon as i saw him, I was like, that's El Gigante. I think that's him. And I got super excited about him.

And Yanni sort of put him in his spotting scope. Because I didn't have a spotter. I just had my 15 power binoculars. Hold on. Did you guys introduce Gigante? I'm just trying to move stuff along. I did the montage. I'll get you into Gigante. I don't want to get into El Gigante. Well, I brought

in that there's El Surprizzo, El Gigante. I don't want to get into El Gigante. I brought in that there's El Surpaiso, El Gigante. I did a montage sort of thing, and now here we are because this can't be six days long. Yeah. So anyway, I see this one good buck,

but Yanni sort of talks me out of it, to be honest. He's like, yeah, he's okay. When you guys named him a misleading name, when I heard the Century Buck, I thought it meant that you could glass bucks for a century and only find one that looks like this. I thought he was 100 inches.

But it turns out the Century Buck just happened to be raking his antlers on a century plan on a century so i'm thinking wow a once in a century occurrence it's like a 500 year yet john still can't commit to going after the box this cow's deer levitated across the plane so i'm like this guy doesn't even want a once in a century bunker. No, I did. I got super excited about him and I think I saw him later that day and I made

a move on him to go after him. He was chasing a doe and I got just the barest glimpse of his antlers and I'm like, I'm going to go make a move. So I moved off the knob and did the quick up and down and tried to find him and couldn't.

And then later that evening, we saw another nice buck up on the hill. I made a move on him. The normal buck. No. His name was the normal. Crab Claw. That was Crab Claw. Well, me and Ben had identified Crab Claw.

Yeah, so this was Crab Claw, and I got to within 350 yards of him at absolute last light, but he was, I didn't get, because I didn't have the spying scope, I didn't get the greatest look at him. He was bedded, facing away, and I couldn't tell if there was vegetation, so I had to not go after it. But then the next morning, ended up connecting. The next morning, last day. We're on day six now. We're at,

you know, Ben and I still don't have our tags down to the wire, down to the wire. We take, so we're going to take the, the, the secret road in or the better road. And so we take the better road in to get into a better spot and put the

full court press on Buckland, put the full court. So we go in there to get into an even better spot than we've been and ended up right back where we were before somehow. This was Yanni's fault. I want to point out, every time you step out the door, what time we usually take off out of there, try to leave at 6? You're going to go spend, you're going to be on a glass of knob until 6.

Yeah, it's an all-day pull. Every time you step out the door, you're going to spend 12 hours on an old glass knob or multiple. I mean, all of us spent 72 hours hunting coos deer in one way, shape, or form. 72 hours on the knob. That'd be a good name of a book.

On the knob. There was a man on the knob between two tits. And you call them knockers. Binos? Yeah. Yeah, and you see your buddy's got a nice pair of vortexes. I go, nice knockers.

Nice pair of knockers. Knockers like binoculars. It's short for binocular. I'm just trimming out the knock. But binocular. Knockers. Knocks, knockers. Knocks, knockers. Knocks, it's like this.

I recently met a guy who runs Lions in Mexico, and I heard him. It's like how language works, right? And I heard him talking about, he would describe, he would see a Lion track, and he'd say, I thought he was saying, that's a Mondo track. I thought he knew a spanish

word mondo was a spanish word that means like toad or pig or something big it'd be a fun game to go around the room can i do two like can i do a triple digression. Hold the thought about Mondo. When I was in college, I read a paper where a sociologist had men in a room, had a group of friends from a fraternity in a room, and tasked them with listing all the names they knew for male genitalia. And likewise, took a bunch of sorority sisters and tasked them with generating a list of all the terms they knew for male genitalia the male list was things such as the emperor kojak the president the commissioner and the female list was things of a much it was more like like um like

like disgusting diminutive like lacking terms that lacked power and authority. So, but anyhow, the guy, I thought he was saying a Mondo. So we started saying Mondo. One day I'm like, hey, what does Mondo translate to exactly? He says, I'm not saying Mondo. I'm saying Mongo as in humongous so knockers like knocks makes sense but things just change over time like someday i'll explain the word tigs yeah it's just gonna never know what tigs meant it's just this long evolution

of a couple different terms where it becomes tigs so so we're so we're in mexico right yeah we're in mexico on coos deer and long days with nox with nox on the tits yes okay so we get back up here last day and uh the latvian eagle strikes again we're kind of looking over this we're looking we're looking over this country the latvian lover but it's very firmly now the latvian eagle the latvian eagle and uh he's like i think i see him you know or i see him you know the century buck and i take literally about a half second look through my knocker knockers am i using it right your knocks my knocks your knockers my knocks so i take a half second look through my knocks and i just sort of

have this like visceral identification that's him and i start packing up my stuff and to get make a move on it i'm going like i am i am just i am dialed in i'm ready to go yanni's still like well i think it's him whatever i'm going gone and uh take off got dirt with me yeah i remember asking like are we moving you're like no i'm gonna go kill that buck i was like oh okay yeah so end up uh crossing over to another um tit that's closer to him and i had kind of been on this country i was really excited because these are on a little shoulder on a little shoulder and the thing is interesting is that on the one hand we see how wary the coos deer are but on the other hand they do have a pretty tight home range i don't know a lot about their biology but it doesn't it seems like they have kind of a kind of a tight area that they sort of yeah coos deer lore is like full of of of like stories

that kind of marvel at their fidelity to a little patch of ground but they got like a little spot where they live their life in what seems to be a vast area yeah and then i guess we lucked out in that sense because i had stomped on that hill where we had first seen him pretty hard the day before. And usually, you know, hunting deer, you think I've kind of spoiled this spot a little bit or I've stirred it up a little too much. Which I'm always worried about that. Yeah. I mean, it's always that nagging doubt. And yet there he was just right back where we had seen him before.

And I'm like, you know, and this is a deal, right? It's, it's the morning, it's cool. They're up and on their feet, you know, and pretty soon they're going to be going to ground. They're going to be bedding somewhere more or less, although the rut had kicked in too. So, you know, that was sort of the X factor, but that's always the worry. So I saw him, I just, I just took off dirt and I made the traverse across to this next knob down a saddle. And I had already scouted a shooting location. I knew I, where I just took off dirt and I made the traverse across to this next knob down a saddle. And I had already scouted a shooting location. I knew I, where I wanted to shoot him with.

I had looked and seen a spot that had fairly bare ground up there to avoid, you know, uh, Yanni's grass. Yeah. Yanni's grass situation. And, uh, got up there, got on him, laid my pack down, raised him at 407 yards. He was walking to the right and I gave him a bleep. I mean, just awful.

I'm not a calling guy. I'm never going to win a contest or anything like that. Johnny does pretty good. Remy's very good. I think in that moment, though, nobody's really trying to make a really realistic deer sound.

You're just trying to make any sound that makes him go, what was that? Remy can make a really realistic deer sound. You're just trying to make any sound that makes him go, what was that? Remy can make a legit buck noise and you make a pretty good one. Really? Yeah, do yours. Like that? The man? You did it last night. Oh! When he was like full on... When you're trying to get a buck to turn or stop,

I go, hey! Which kind of has the same effect. Please cut that sound and use it in the start selling the game calls just yada a drunk laugh anyway my point is i'm not trying to pretend like i have some great like call but i what bleed out this sound and he stops and and kaboom 407 yards one shot i cut actually was an interesting shot i ended up taking a little high through the shoulders and it went into kind of the no man's land you know that dreaded when you're archery hunting you you know that

dreaded no man's land shot and that's that's where that bullet went and it totally it grenaded you know through his shoulders i mean it took both of his shoulders right out but he was still alive when we got over to him he wasn't going anywhere we had watched him a little bit through the glass and yanni at that point was like yeah i still see him flopping around out there so we we moved over there pretty quickly and i uh you know i dispatched him with my knife and and uh guy is just beautiful great buck the century buck the century buck and the the hoof oh he had a crazy curly hook yeah like what happens to people they don't cut their fingernails your fingernails have to curl yeah yeah he had he had this one like little velociraptor little raptor toe

cup toe on him snorts cocaine with it. That's good. If you see John, he'll have it around his neck. I'm going to make it. He's going to start wearing deep V t-shirts. I'm going to stop shaving my chest. Yep. See you at SHOT Show. Get a thatch worthy of that thing.

So yeah, great, great, great hunt. Yet another, yet another, not not big huge giant buck like mine but another big huge buck no he's definitely not as big as yours no and and early i mean you shot that thing and the sun had barely hit that hill yeah the sun had barely hit ben's right cheek well when i when i got redder and redder throughout the day yeah i got locked i got into the mode you know what that feeling's like though when the switch just clicks and you're like all of a sudden like just everything is just focused on it and that's that's what i felt as soon as as soon as i saw his antlers i'm just like go you know i was explaining to ben the other day um about like how days pass out there is like

you imagine the way a day goes like a like a like a dimmer switch where you like gradually right and any second is sort of imperceptible from the second pass because it's just happening slowly gradually like don't it's like pre-dawn darkness and then it's all of a sudden gets a grayness and then there's like light and it's kind of like midday and you keep slowly gradually like don't it's like pre-dawn darkness and then it's all of a sudden gets a grayness and then there's like light and it's kind of like midday and you keep slowly gradually and it fades i feel like out here it's um it's like clicky yeah it's like it's pre-dawn darkness and it goes click it's all sudden like right morning and then it's like click and it's also like scorchingly hot and then they're like click and it's's like click and it's also like scorchingly hot and then they're like click and it's evening and click and it's dark it just happens like yeah and there's a feeling

that hits at 10 a.m like someone does a they throw the mid like at 10 a.m you're just like duh oh shoot now i gotta stay here for four hours getting boiled by the sun and wait for them to throw the next switch, which makes all the deer come back out. The funniest part is the difference in the shade. I mean, you know, you can imagine deer's movement because when you're in the shade, you feel like, oh, that's calm and comfortable.

There's a little breeze. Ooh, yeah. And then you go out into the sun and you're like, oh my God, who lives here? Why would you live in this is there a watering hole and the shade's like two feet yeah and you go back into the two foot wide piece of shade oh god yeah yeah and that's but that's the narrowness of the shade the narrowness of the shade because there's no big trees that are small the narrowness of the shade is what allows you to

keep i think it's what allows you to keep spotting deer all day exactly because you can't you get a little shade patch you're like i remember someone talking about watching uh antelope get shade from phone poles and they just move like that to catch the only to catch shade from being a phone pole and then moving to stay in that little shade line from a phone pole and it's like a sundial you're moving every couple of minutes and so i think that that's like always causing i remember like looking at a doe bedded in a little bit of shade and coming back 15 minutes later and she was gone like oh yeah because her like her shade patch is gone now she had to get up and hey it's funny on this hunt is this first time i ever realized how much our movements were similar to the deers you know we were and jay's advice of 30 minute 30 minute

30 minute that was during deer movement time you know when deer on their feet you got to keep moving you got to see new country glass new country because the deer up and moving and and uh you can get eyes on them but when they go to bed you stay put you go to bed too you get under the shade tree and you glass them up and see if you can get lucky and you're hoping that yeah that some doe is going to stand up to shift it's going to make a buck be like oh my god what's she doing and he stands up to he goes to play grab ass and then you got she moves he follows her and all of a sudden like there's a buck yeah but then you got to jump on them because you know where they are and they're going to stay in that pocket shake off to new territory right so this was the first time it

struck me just because we did spend 72 hours doing this that there is this you know you're mirroring the movement of the animal yeah for good reason yeah it's a good observation so there you are ben benny o'brien ben o'brien capital o capital b l ben no no yeah yeah apostrophe in there put a little more hash mark um it's time for your box story yeah Should I go all the way back? If you want. This is going to probably be a two-part podcast. I think it's fair to go back. You know... Uh-oh.

Settling in. He says, you know, in a justice position, I'm leaning forward. I was a kid. I'm leaning forward and gritting my teeth like Yanni driving the van. You know, like when you see a deer and you immediately know that it's over and above what your expectations might be. Like when I met my wife.

Yeah, for what a deer could look like. You know, when you meet a hot lady or whatever, and you maybe just see like the backside of her head, you turn around, whoa, that's going to work for me. We saw this buck called El Gigante. Now, he didn't have a name prior to us seeing him, but I named him El Gigante because, yeah, the gigante means, I believe,

the giant in Spanish. Mark, can you be so excited about all these fuck names? These fuck names. Okay, when did it become gigante as opposed to gigante? Because I like gigante. I like it.

It's like El Gigantico. Gigante to me sounds more like Picante. Yeah, Gigante also sounds like it could be like a salsa company. Yeah, something like that. I like it to sound authentic. Anywho, this is two days prior to, this is post-El Surprizo, but prior to the Johnny and Yanni team going back to the southwest corner it's our honey hole our honey hole to this point we have relocated yeah to this this point we have

yet to discover that the honey hole has honey i mean we were kind of sniffing around there was a hole it's so it smells sweet at this point but we don't know if there's honey in there or not and so we get deep in the hole and we're and we're hunting and we spot this buck he's across across the south he's to the north what is he northeast about um three quarters of a mile from our main tit when we first got in the southwest corner and so we're chasing this buck we're trying to find him in the shade of the day we're crabrab Claw. Old Crab Claw. So Crab Claw, he's a nice eight point, but he's only got crabs on the end of his main beam. Chase and a doe.

Chase and a doe. He gets up in some shade, and we think he's going to be bedded in this little pocket in this cut of this ridge. We're going to get over there and find him, and it's going to be perfect because he's going to be bedded down in the shade of the day, and we'll have plenty of time to set up.

He'll be on an opposing hillside eye level with his inside. And we have yet to explore the southwest corner. we don't really know what's going on we just know there's a buck over that direction and we need to go get him so we get down we're hiking we get over there we adjust we know on a lower shoulder of a hill on the ridge across from where we think crab call is and we see we can't see in there and because i tend to think about think like a bow hunter i tell steve let's roll let's get off this hill let's get on the hill he's on and charge over the hill and just just surprise him and give him and just shooting just shooting just send one is that how bow hunters think he just starts shooting arrows over that direction i just volley charge like this quiver's got five errors for a reason yanni and and so we go over there long story short we we

were headed over there and we spooked this buck he jumps up out of another another cut on the same hill that we didn't see he jumps up goes over the hill oh back up what yeah yeah on the way you're a spooked crab claw yes we did you didn't think it was crap a little but i'm telling you that's who it was oh you're talking about that part of the time yeah you're right all right sorry we go around this the same uh pyramid hill that crab we thought crab claw was on well some cows had gotten into his bedding area and i believe he ran around the hill and bedded on the side where we didn't know that he was their bedding area got like marauded by what's the call when the military takes over your stuff and uses it uh common common deer yeah they're better got commandeered

by a group of black angus who are really really dainty, quiet animals, I find. Without resistance, yeah. And so we're, Steve, I see a shed. Steve goes down to get it. We're on a side hill, this big Ocotillo Pyramid Ridge. And I look over and I see this buck jump up, big, wide buck jump up, and over the hill he goes. I mean, he was on the.

He waited until we were in there shaking hands with him. He was 70 yards, and we're standing there talking. We walked past him. mean, he was on the... He waited until we were in there shaking hands with him. He was 70 yards, and we're standing there talking. We walked past him. Yeah, we walked past him. Picking up shed antlers. He jumps and runs. Well, we decide the best thing to do is just continue with our plan,

bomb into the shady area where we think the crab claw buck is. We're not sure what buck we just jumped. We get up there. It's full of cows and devoid of deer. So we proceed to decide that must have been him. It's way too. It's 100 yards away from where we saw him. And Dirt and Steve proceed to take a two-hour nap.

There was good shade up there. Well, here's what happens. As long as I sleep on my back on a tilt, I will have what we call a nappy. But if something happens and I move to my side, it becomes a slumber. Yeah. And I don't know what happened. I remember taking my net gator and quadruple folding it to block out the light, which is a mistake. And I was laying on my back.

And you get that kind of feeling when you're laying on your back that you're going to choke on your own tongue or something. I think I rolled to my side and all of a sudden woke up and I thought it was around noon and it was 2. It was 2. I slept for 5 minutes and then sat there and watched them sleep for the next hour and 55. Ben had weaved a basket from the jumper.

I had glassed every hill. I'm very sorry about that. It wasn't about noon. I did not mean to drag that out. And we woke up and it was about noon, so I was like, it's 2. Eating their sandwiches. Turn their scopes to full power. Had a lot of time.

And anyway, we'll speed this up. We take our nappy time. Slumber. It accidentally turned into a slumber. And now we're hunting hunting we're like we gotta we gotta dial this thing up and find some deer we screwed this screwed the pooch on this one i admittedly was too aggressive i only skews deer so we get going up we just go up the hill under the very top of the tit we're sleeping on and start glassing and immediately it's like doe buck doe buck doe buck buck i know we're trying to move quick but i gotta add one quick thing yeah the area we were going look there was no perch that would allow you to peer down into their zone

no and in those situations you'd have to be like act like it never happened and wait till they get up and maybe they'll move into an area where you put a move on or you want to make the mistake of thinking you're going to find some secret perch and you're moving around and bumping them and like oh maybe there is in fact you know so anyways well it turns out we're we're up to the northeast of this quadrant and and to the west of us at this point is a dry creek bed with some pools of water. And so I feel like the deer started collecting in there. As soon as it's maybe 2.30, Steve's been awake for half an hour. We're un-groggy, everybody.

We start, we get our nocks out, and we start glassing and immediately pick up a bunch of deer. Well, not long after that we see old crab claw who we just spooked maybe seven eight hundred yards away across this canyon chasing a doe across this sunlit knob and we're like we got to get over there and cut him off so we start hustling down this into the bottom of this creek up past the socotillo flat onto his shoulder and are going around this ridge trying you know trying to figure out where this where crab claw may chase this doe to and this time i swing my head over and

i look down on the same sun-kissed ridge that we originally saw crab claw chasing the doe and i see a buck full-on chasing the doe just nose down and I look and my immediate reaction was, that's a giant. And I said out loud, that's a giant. And everybody looked over there and it was obvious that El Gigante lived. There's a couple things I want to interject real quick. No, these are essential bits. Yeah. Because a lot of issues around the identity of El Gigante versus the identity of the century buck. There's a lot of questions around. Yes.

It's controversial. Yanni always warns people away from observing a deer from behind and thinking it's big. Because he says all deer look big all big bucks look like big huge giant bucks from behind also in mexico there is a lot of catholic iconography hanging around the walls where people are have halos did you you notice that? Yes. This buck was haloed by intense setting sun that we're also being blinded by. And if there was a sound

that accompanied my seeing El Gigante, it would be Woo! Because I'm looking at him from behind and he is illuminated as though wearing a halo, as though being blessed by the heavens. Yes.

And I said, yep, that's a biggin'. Or something to that effect. Something to the effect of, I'm telling you, we start glassing. I thought I was looking at a world's record. I thought I was looking at El world's record. I thought I was looking at El Gigante. Still could be. And listen, we'll get to that here in about two or three hours. But Gigante was there, right?

This is El Gigante, this deer. He's a big old eight point with his huge mainframe and his main beams wrap way around and up in the front, which makes him look like some kind of giant 12-point. Like he's got extra antlers. I thought that deer has six antlers per side. So by Arizona standards, five. Five by five.

And photo evidence later revealed that, no, he has four per side. So four per side side but the most analyzed the zapruder film the dirt film the most and he's 300 yards away at this point insutable distance of blazing sunlight blasting and the setting sun is in our eyes and so i'm laying down trying to get on some packs and shuffling around this deer is chasing the stow up this ridge and he's going to go down into this bottom and be gone. Well, the entire time that I'm trying to put my pack down and get my rifle set up, I hear dirt in my left ear going,

oh, my God, oh, oh, my, oh, oh, oh. And my right ear, I hear Steve going, wow. Oh, wow. He is a giant. And I'm over there going, no pressure, wow. He is a giant. And I'm over there going, no pressure, boys. I want to point out, we once saw a buck that had

gotten, apparently, had just been struck by a car. And so it had an antler that had busted off and was hanging down across its face and under its jaw. And when I spotted it, I said to Yanni, it's a buck of a lifetime. Because I just saw something that I didn't understand. Yeah.

And later, Yanni's like, buck of a lifetime, huh? A forky who had just been run over. It depends on what lifetime. Anyway, at this point, I'm feeling like feeling like holy this is about to get real i'm going to get this thing in my scope and he's he's he's trailing this doe and he's not stopping for much i get him in my scope the sun is is whiting out most of my field of view i can't see anything i'm shuffling around i'm trying to get a different pack to get settled i want to make a clean shot on this deer he's he when he stops he's facing completely away so i got the texas

hard shot and that's it and at one point we move across the hillside to try to get a better shot i have to get reset up we're all fumbling around you're practicing incredible restraint yes at one point i i had him in the scope, perfect, and he just was. And thinking at the time, this is a world record deer, I could have either shot him in the neck or up the ass, but I chose, I just think, look, I'm not, I respect a deer that big too much just to throw some lead over there and see what happens. And so we practice that restraint.

We go around the corner, shuffle back up, get set up again. We're glassing him, and the setting sun is just getting worse and worse and worse, and this could have probably been a five-minute time frame, and by the time he comes back up the hill after his doe and into the mesquite, he's in shadow, we're in sun, and I can't see a damn thing and so now steve get takes off his hat and starts holding it right above to shade the sun right above my scope and now we're doing the dance i'm like a little bit left a little bit left right right right and what's worse is that everything's so bright but he's in a dark little hidey hole behind layers of vegetation gone and i saw his doe going

up the hill and i'm like he's gonna come after that doe but it was just like pitch black at one so at this point you can't even range it so we had ranged close to where he was about 350 and so that's the guess but you can't range it because you can't get your binos focused on the deer for the sunlight and just like all these deer, you're on a clock. He's going to disappear eventually. He's not coming back out. And so I get set up, I find him and we sit there for what feels like an hour, but it was probably 10 minutes where he's standing behind a yucca completely in the shade. And me and Steve are doing the, move that hat to the left, move it to the right. Every time he moves, every time I move that sun sneaks under his hat brim and into my scope and I can't see anything. Eventually I get lined up on this deer and he

needs to take one step. Well, he sees us now because we're over there rolling around like idiots. And he sees us and he's not going to take that step unless he's sure. Well, 10 minutes goes by. Dirt's got him in the binos. I got him in the scope. Steve's trying to, my leg's asleep asleep i'm sure parts of you you know your leg or something was asleep and he takes one step and now i have this shadow of this deer and i'm right on him i start pulling i let it fly and as soon as i let it fly whiteness in the scope the sun hits back on on the scope, and I can't see anything. And now I get off the scope.

I look back. I can't see anything. Dirt says, looks like it hit under him. And he wheeled around and ran up the hill, tail up. As healthy as he was a minute ago. As healthy as he was a minute ago. El Gigante ran off into the sunset and uh we were just at that point i was sure i made a good shot but i was i was pretty sure it was a difficult situation like there wasn't any

distance was the distance questionable was questionable the you know my field of view was questionable it was all just kind of not the best situation and you get like it happens to me you get where because you think it's a big one you right yes if you're all trying to fill a doe tag you'd be like yeah it's not gonna take that shot let's just go find them when i previously taken the more ethical route of like oh he's you know and to me it's being broadside is more important than than you know yeah those other factors and so at that point i feel like well i've i've i was comfortable with my trigger pull i didn't yank on the thing i held perfect i felt good about the shot i felt ethical

at the time when i pulled the trigger like the all the factors being what they were i got the best out of the best scenario well i mean whatever i did shoot under him or whatever it was i i would i would guess that he was 385 and and i was holding for 350 and shot under but we got to go check for blood so we go down this ridge up over the sunny ridge he was on down to the bottom and up over the next ridge and steve's in front of me i'm behind, and Garrett's behind me. And Steve, I'll let you take it here because I want to hear your. We get up to where we think it is, and all of a sudden I see a deer's head,

and I think that it was wounded and has now jumped up. And he's 15 yards away in the tall grass. It's going to get away. And I'm saying, shoot him in the neck, shoot him in the neck, shoot him in the neck. Because I think it's him. And Ben is behind me a little bit. Throws up his rifle. Steep pitch.

A lot of grass. Throws up his rifle. Bounce! And the deer just runs away even healthier now. Almost charged up by the fact that we're just... The most amazing display of athleticism I've ever seen. He levitated over into the next quadrant. Yeah, Denelia Gould levitated out of there.

But he's saying shoot him in the neck, and I look up, and I see ears. I thought it was like one of those things like there's nothing to lose because you've already wounded him. Yeah, and so I took two steps forward, and I'm thinking the same thing. I've got to get a bullet in this animal again and finish him off. So I kind of went to where I knew his ears were and went down to where I thought his neck wasn't shot, basically into the grass just to get one in him. And that didn't connect.

And then we scoured the area for hair and blood. And it was gone. And he was as healthy. We determined that he was, fact exceedingly healthy exceedingly healthy and the walkout was was interesting because you kind of go through the motions of i missed a deer was a giant it's a world record buck and it was two hours without proper communication yeah from our pickup yeah and plenty of time to think we we had the two hour three mile hike out in nasty country which led to fast forward the next morning i feel like i've had my

chance at el gigante you want to move back to i want to go back to el surprise because i want john to get a chance because i effed up my chance so i'm thinking it's only fair to let someone else back into the into the honey hole because i gotta you know there needs to be some sort of reset based on my failure to get it done what should probably have been done in that case. So I think in all fairness, I can't just hog this area or this buck because I had my shot at him. I've got to give somebody else a shot. That's kind of an interesting question, though,

because there are all these unspoken dynamics in a deer camp, you know, in terms of who shoots when and kind of courtesy. That's why you flip chunks of donk. Yeah. Flip and donk. You have a donk flip. You've got a situation where, you know, Yanni wants me to shoot

and I don't want to, you know, I mean, both for, and again, everything I think is motivated by good, like very positive feelings, but it's interesting, this code. I would never write the rule. I would never write a code down like that, but I would say it's whatever I feel in the moment, whatever I feel like is right based on that situation and that set of circumstances. But wouldn't you say the code exists even though i don't think it is written right

well i think that when you hang out with if you're with someone you hang out with all the time you just have established it like if you don't let's say you're with people you hang out all the time and you don't want to drive you're sick of driving you just be like dude i'm not freaking driving i'm not driving and people be like okay cool i'll drive if you're with people you don't know you can't come down the parking lot and be like tell you one thing i'm not driving yeah yeah you're with people you don't know, you can't come down the parking lot and be like, tell you one thing, I'm not driving. Because then you're going to get marked as an a-hole, right? So you've got to be like, oh, you know, well, I could drive. And people are like, well, I don't know.

I mean, do you want to? Well, I'm not dying to drive. But, I mean, if you really don't want to drive, I suppose. I mean, I'll kill Gigante. Yeah, so it's a matter of whether you've been around each other long enough. But I think it is important in those situations to talk about. I brought this up before. My brother, carrying moose is hard. My brother, when Danny, I keep mentioning my different brother,

but my brother Danny, when they go on moose trips, hunting out of their boats, they like right off the bat. Let's agree. How far are we going to carry a bull? So that when we all split up, we know off that river corridor. Yeah. Someone can't come back to camp and be like, I was really tempted and shot one five miles off the river. And lay that on everyone so that everyone now needs to spend all those days

carrying the bull they're like what are we going to make it is it a mile is it two miles is it three miles and when we make the rule don't violate the rule exactly don't come tell me you shot some bull and now i'm going to devote my whole trip to carrying your bull yeah i mean that i mean that and with moose i mean you've got a big thing you've got to do that. But there's a, I don't know, I guess I find it interesting, this sort of, there's a graciousness. Yes. Yeah. Because nobody here, there's nobody here that this is a once, it's a once in a lifetime in a way, but you also understand that this is a unique opportunity that we all get fairly frequently. This is something that I know that there's no reason for me

to have any inkling of selfishness in regards to the giant coos deer that I saw. First, it's not my right to have that because I don't have any history with it. I haven't earned anything in regards to that deer. There was a lot of luck based on on the discovery of and me pulling the trigger so i i i feel like as decorum states give someone else a chance to have that same piece of luck because you know yeah and i've i've probably harmed in my missing the deer harmed his chance to to have his chance to see it and shoot at and so he's going in probably handicapped by my failure at some level so and that's how i just go through those feelings and when you're successful and somebody's hunting an area and then you jump back in and hunt it and shoot a

deer that they never saw there's some guilt there right because you didn't work as hard to pick apart an area and discover any discovery yeah there's like the same plain simple rule of like if mom was happy happy everybody's happy and i always kind of feel like i know how i'll come out at the end of the hunt if i don't have a deer like you know it'll be just fine yeah but if like someone else doesn't have a deer i'm like i'm gonna have like the the sympathy for that and i almost would rather not have that and just be like i didn't get a deer bummer everybody else did though sweet let's go home that's a perfect you know transition to the deer i did kill because this is what two days later now we'd go try to get el surprizo and then the last day, which is yesterday,

we decide we're going to full-court press the southwest corner. John gets a century buck. John gets a century buck. We put the moves on a new, brand-new buck. Yeah. We'll call him brand-new. We haven't named him yet. We're going to call him the previously unknown buck.

Previously unknown buck. Steve and I go up on a tit and sit all day in the sun and the shade and have that experience of just your eyes eyes are bleeding you've looked over this country a million times you can't look behind another damn bush and see another damn single doe walking around with a fawn um you just don't want to see it anymore you want to see the thing you're after like and i was getting a little bit just kind of groggy and frustrated and tired of sitting under a damn bush and cow shit. And we finally see, we'd sat there all day on the same knob from about 7.38 to what time was it? 3.30?

Yeah, around there. 3.45? So when Steve spots this unknown buck around the same knob as we'd hunted the the first hunted the crab claw buck we we start getting after him and i'm what is his nose up the keister's of four does of four does i'm in john's situation i'm in fully in kill mode we're gonna get across this ridge and kill this deer and it has to happen now or it's not gonna happen so there's like a the the intensity is up. And we pack up and we start going down this hill. We're going and we're doing the old baby deer walk on the freaking lava rocks, you know, twisting your ankles and turning your knees

and just trying to put your hand on a bush or down here and trying to get down this hill. And I'm in the lead and we're going down this slope towards the river bottom and my right foot slips out my left foot goes in the air my left hand goes back to brace my fall as we all probably did three or four dozen times during the hunt my left hand goes straight back down and into what do they call it a chola cactus cholla cholla choloolo. A Cholla cactus, which sports many hundreds of sharp-ass, pointy thorns. And I got to say, I look down at my hand, and it's not yet bleeding,

but I can see that there's probably 150 or as many as you could fit on one guy's hand, thorns sticking out of my hand. And my first thought is, this is going to hurt real bad in a second, but it doesn't hurt right now. My first thought is, what time is it? By the time you get all those thorns out, it'll be dark. Yeah, so my first thought is, 150 is a lot. What time is it? Because how quickly can I get these things out of my damn hand?

One of them is like almost all the way through my finger. The other one is stuck in my wrist in like a vein. You pull on it and like one of my eyelashes move. There's some shit going on in my hand. But my thought, my first initial thought was how much time is there left? Because this is an impediment to me getting the old this new buck that's showing up so steve starts trying to pull these out and as he starts to pull them out he gets them in his in his hand and now i'm trying to pull them out and

as i pull them out of my left hand they're getting stuck in my right hand and so eventually it just has to i just start yanking these things out and i get them mostly if not all out of my hand now there's blood everywhere and uh steve even took the time to call us on the radio to be like ben fell into a cactus and he's got blood everywhere it's not looking good and he's saying to me like that's that's going to hurt later. You're fucked, man. That kind of deal. And I was feeling it. The ones in my wrist, when I pull on them, I'm telling you, my pinky nail just twitched.

It was attached to some nerve or something. So anyway, I finally get all these things out. I remember there's one big burr under my pinky that I just had to close my eyes and do one of those, like, ripping the shark tooth out of your thigh. And after you got bit, rip that thing out and stood up and like, let's go. I guess we got to go.

It sucks. So we get down the hill and up the other side and we're up on this road and about 300 yards from where we know this buck to be. And we start, we, I immediately look over to Steve and you'd feel the wind in the exact wrong direction. It needs to be for us to kill something.

So we get around close to where we might be able to see these deer. And of course, there's what, five or six does in a small bucket between us and the country. Yeah, way more deer than we thought. Way more deer. Going the wrong direction. The wind is wrong. There's way more deer than we thought. It kind of seems like my hand is throbbing.

It seems like there's like the hunt is kind of gasping for air like this is it's over we're just kind of playing around at this we're not gonna kill this isn't real we're not gonna actually hunt this deer and i'm thinking it's over but we're still gonna go through the motions to go try to find this thing we get going up this ridge where we know the deer's on we spook a few more does and fawns look around there's no deer like i think you probably knew steve that that thing's gone yep 30 minutes before we because of the smell and because the number of deer bailing through where they went so we get up to the top of the ridge where to look around to see maybe if he's still hanging around chasing does and he's

not there so i kind of sit down and what yanni said came to my mind like everybody else got deer and i didn't that's awesome like if it's if somebody wasn't gonna get deer i'm glad it's me and i don't have to you know feel bad for anybody else working their ass off and i'm sitting there thinking at least i got mine and you're sitting there thinking that donk flip you're one donk flip away from sitting on that sun so i'm sundowning on a mexican mountain like watching this sun go down like what a beautiful sundown this is fantastic i didn't get a deer but what wonderful experiences i've had here with my friends and getting all you know if i had a journal i wrote in it and then i hear steve hey hey hey come here i go up the hill to where he is and he's like they got a buck spotted yanni's

gonna come down to meet us if we get if we go really quick we can get him i was like oh yeah right right right if we go quick we'll just run down the lava rock mountain then i'll fall another fucking cactus and i'll die for this deer but anyway we get going down the hill we're gonna do it right we're going through those motions because you have to um even if you think it's over so we start getting down this one ravine up the other one getting the same ridge yanni was glassing from he comes down the hill he comes striding down the hill looking confident as ever and i immediately look at him like okay i think he's got some confidence and there's a plan to maybe make something happen yeah we were we were what 660 ish yards away right that's those deer from the initial yeah garrett spotted two does and 10 minutes later i went back to glass these does

and one's running you know across the hillside yeah you go oh i wonder what's that what that's all about and sure enough buck yeah and at this point it's what it's last shooting light is 5 30 maybe it's 505 that's something in that range yeah there's not much definitely past sunset and i've given mentally i've kind of given i already had that sundown moment, so I'm like, this is just, you know, a little extra overtime. You know, whatever, fine. It's a nightcap. It's a little nightcap.

Yeah. We'll just jawn over here, and I'll scare some more deer, and then we'll go back to America. And so we get going over there, and I could just see, and Yanni's, like, determined. And that's another thing like you start hunting with a group of people and you know that they're determined for at for their everyone to get buck and everybody to have success and like that determination is like okay well yeah maybe

maybe this can happen it's happened to me before so we start getting over there we get over to the to the area where the buck is yanni gets pointed in the right direction we get over to the area where the buck is. Yanni gets pointed in the right direction. We get over to just a small ridge that's kind of covered in some cedars and some mesquite where we're kind of covered a little bit. I lay my pack down. He lays his pack down. I put the rifle pointed to where Yanni thinks the buck might be. Well, at this point, it's like dark.

Looking through the scope, you can see shadowy figures that look like deer and trees and but there's enough light in the scope to make a shot ethically and every minute that's getting you're working on a ticking clock just like you're talking about that dial it's already clicked over to the dusk i mean it's clicked and we're looking at this doe and yanni spots this doe at 220 yards and we're waiting for the buck to kind of run up behind the doe right yanni yeah i mean we're just i mean at least we had eyes on a beer yeah we're you know hoping that the buck's around there somewhere and he's going to show himself before it's you know pitch black i look to the left of where this deer is this that deer runs off the

ridge we're looking at i look to the left as it runs i see another doe coming up the same ridge to our left at about 200 yards and i go to get back on my gun just thinking maybe this buck is behind and as i'm getting in the scope yanni goes there he is he's right there he's right there he's right there yeah he's following her he's going the same path as she was nose down just getting after her i get on the scope i find him there's that tall yellow grass is she's kind of shrouding my scope i can still see fine but i've got this yellow haze between me and this deer i get him in the scope and i'm following him and yanni starts making that noise what's that sound like that one i started with it and then it was like

and then i'm like hey he stops once but he didn't stop for us but a split second i think he heard hey and he's like really are you yelling at me i'm trying to i'm trying to chase this doe around so i'm on him at this point. I'm tracking him. I'm moving around the grass. I don't have the best view of this deer. Yanni gives him another hey. He turns around. He's cornering severely away.

I put the crosshairs on him. I feel good. Boom. Pull the trigger. Again, lose everything, and it's over. I got a shot off. And then immediately after I pulled the trigger, I thought, wow, I got a shot off at a deer i feel good about it holy wow that in and of itself is yeah it was only 200 yards so it wasn't too far away yeah and it was it was you know a good shot he was you know quartering away completely standing still i had you know a good field of view with

a deer and uh yanni said i think i heard it hit he spun and went downhill and those are all things you want to hear when you shoot at something so we went over and looked and we came over the hill and i'm thinking if i miss this deer that only adds to the pain of the fact that el gigante is running around here somewhere you got 150 cacti in your hand yeah i got 150 cacti and that thing's throbbing and i'm still i look down at my hand every once in a while with the headlamp and i could see that there's more thorns in there that i haven't pulled out so now i got some more work to do we get over there and that in that deer's laying 10 yards from where i shot at him 20 yards and

he's dead and it took me probably till we got back to the ranger and we packed them out, skinned them up and packed them out to be like, wow, that happened. From the sundowning ridge to the dead deer was about 20 minutes maybe, 25 minutes. And then another hour and a half to the ranger. And those two hours, the entire structure of the hunt and what you think about it changed. And that's why it's awesome that's why hunting is great because that can happen and it did potentially nameless buck or potentially maybe the normal buck we saw a buck yanni and i saw a buck the day before down in that zone we were hunting him i mean we were in there glassing up trying to find that buck

normal we called the normal buck because he was a nice just a nice normal looking eight michigan michigan eight so that's the story and that was um i think for all of us like we were all involved in that one we weren't all involved in steve's we weren't all involved in yanni's or john's but we were all involved in some way in mine so that's a pretty good way to yeah and then 16 or so hours later i was singing that uh neil diamond song they come into america as we went through customs and i was singing i'm free and i was singing and i like and i like i was like really i like the petty i like the petty tribute because we just lost tom petty great american um but i didn't really get like why free falling free because i didn't hadn't thought it through yeah oh yeah we're just like crossing the border and

i went i'm free and he started which i switched to lee greenwood's proud to be an american but it felt a little heavy-handed. A little bit much. It wasn't like, I mean, we've been out hunting. It wasn't like we're coming back from warfare or something. We've been out enjoying ourselves. So I stuck with Neil Diamond. I thought the free-falling was a good tribute to Ben's experience. Yeah, that was more of a tag team thing. Well, I was sitting beside Yanni when he let out free-falling,

and he was very confident. He was like, and I'm free. And after he said free, he's like, oh, crap. Yeah. The next word is falling, and that's not what I was going for. Chatted it up with some customs guys who were fun to deal with. Fans. Yeah, there we are.

I had a Dirt Myth song stuck in my head. I just had to throw that in there. Is he man or is he myth? Dirt Myth. Dude, perpetually Dirt Myth song stuck in my head. I just had to throw that in there. Dirty Man or Dirty Myth. Dude, perpetually I had that song stuck in my head, being the guy that wrote it and all. One last quick thought. Nephi, you know. Nephi's not in the room.

I'm addressing Nephi out there in the lands. You know that that's not true. I said I don't like any politicians because I was being hyperbolic. And I was talking smack like it's an American thing to talk smack about not liking any politicians. I like quite a few of them, including you know who I'm talking about. I love that man. So don't get prickly. Thanks for listening. 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 and on x are available for your hunts this season now the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones aerial imagery 24k topo maps waypoints and tracking you can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.