The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 147: Tough-Assed Questions, Vol. 2
Episode Date: December 17, 2018Bozeman, MT- Steven Rinella talks with Ryan Callaghan, Ben O’Brien, Seth Morris, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects discussed: pony walls and pony play; the bird as a Michigan hello; e...ating kangaroo tail again; Jani’s heart; do Australians think America is weird?; Why does the Latvian Eagle have so many nicknames?; the 50/50 acceptance split of this show’s closing song; chamber sealer corrections; best loads for squirrels; what does “a thinking man’s chicken wing” mean?; grizzlies eating llamas; an illegal tag shuffle; and more.Want to win a signed copy of the MeatEater Fish and Game Cookbook? We're giving away a copy per week until Christmas. All you have to do is sign up for the MeatEater weekly newsletter. Click here to enter.Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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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, underwear-less.
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You can't predict anything. Whatever state you guys are from, are you from the west or east side of the state?
West.
West side?
Where I'm from, like where I grew up.
The state you were born in.
I don't even care what it is.
East.
The east?
Yep.
West.
And you were born, no, kind of.
You're right, dead nuts. No, we're not. Not even kind of. So kind of you're right dead nuts no we're not not even
kind of so you think you're west michigan southwest michigan yeah that's what we call it i'm not
talking about i'm not talking about i know i'm not talking about latitude sure but when someone says
where is kalamazoo in west michigan i say southwest. Yeah, I don't know about that. Oh, my God.
Get a map out.
Oh, I know where it is.
I just don't know if it has the West Michigan sensibility.
The reason I'm bringing this up is because,
remember we talked about how you guys didn't grow up flipping off your buddies as a way to say hi.
No.
Okay, because hear me out.
Have you ever met anybody else that said,
oh, yeah, we said oh yeah check this out
what brought up the conversation about the michigan hello which is the middle finger
is we were talking about the some guy was saying man you should like it's bad to say mugs and this
guy had to be australian because we just use mugs like hey friend you know friendo um it's more like hey friendo where it's like
friend with a little little jab in there um he was saying oh that's horrible thing to say and
so we're looking up like what mugs means in different places i think it means something
kind of awful in australia and in this discussion one guy wrote in to say like man i would never
take any advice from people in Australia.
In Australia, their Michigan hello or their mugs is to call everybody the queen mother of all swear words.
The C word.
That's right.
One day, my little boy made a list of all the naughty words he knew.
He's a public school kid made a list on a board on a plank out in the garage with a sharpie
a list of all the naughty words he knew and i said you know what you almost got them all but
there's one i will never tell you he's dying to know what it is he even knows what letter it
starts with but i will never divulge they use that word as a salutation so this other guy was
saying plus you know he brought up like swearing
allegiance to the crown he brought up all kinds of reasons why he wouldn't take advice from an
australian about how to speak to people but in talking about the middle finger it turns out that
we get a letter from a guy who clear like just without any prompting clarified that he's from
western wisconsin and then we got a guy who wrote in about the middle finger and he clarified these from western wyoming so i was wondering if in every state there's this weird
phenomena where in every phenomenon where in every state people that live in the west half of that
state flip people flip their friends off as a way to say hi this guy in western wisconsin said it was
so prevalent he said that if his buddy didn't flip him off when he's driving by he thinks
something was wrong it was pretty prevalent the guy must be mad at him yeah western washington i
i mean maybe it was just my jackass friends but i feel like that was completely ubiquitous
yeah another thing about the bird the guy from western
wyoming said we really differentiated between putting your thumb out or not
and like you might put your thumb out and give the bird to your buddy and it was kind of like
the exclamation point on it yeah it was like it meant something different and he said it's like
the old man bird which had your thumb in.
He was saying he got in the habit of doing it so much
that one day he flipped his old man off
and his ma whooped him.
She was from the eastern part of her state.
Didn't realize.
Guy rode in.
It's kind of a moot point now.
But a dude rode in being like,
man,
he's talking about Secretary Zinke leaving his position.
And he's saying, oh, you know, you never got it right.
And you handled Zinke with kids' gloves.
I don't want to dwell on this. I'm just going to say, dude, wait and see his replacement.
And then come tell me that I handled Zinke with kid's gloves.
You'll be looking back at the good old days real soon, perhaps.
Guy wrote in to say that this year, no, that in Mississippi,
remember we talked about, Yanni, we talked a lot about
whether people can actually tell tell how old bucks are and letting bucks walk and all that kind of stuff
yeah when we're talking with mark canyon yeah he wrote in that um we were talking about like
like growing up in michigan like no one ever shot everybody always just shot spikes and forkies
every buck but he's saying like in mississippi it's he says it's a
different he's been it's a different situation down there this is old data this is 20 2014 2015
in mississippi 74 of the bucks killed in mississippi were aged so like that's not you
guessing they were aged at three and a half years and older. 74% of the bucks.
For you numbskulls, almost three quarters of the bucks in Mississippi are borderline mature bucks.
Three and a half and older.
Dude, man, that's way different than a lot of places.
Changing all the time.
Well, we think it's way different, but do we have that kind of data from other places?
I would love to go find it.
I would love to go find, like when I was a youngster, I would love to go find,
when did I shoot my first buck?
Like back in the mid 80s right i would love to know when i was just like a teen like a young
teenager entering into my teens i would love to know and those in that collection of counties
or statewide in general i i would say those 70 i was the opposite i would say it was 75
and this is just me pulling this out of the out of thin air but i bet it was 75 were one and a half or just spikes and you know fork spikes
little sixes we thought a big buck was just a year and a half old it had a bigger because they'll
throw an eight point rack you know they'll throw a michigan eight so we got that was a big buck
but maybe you were being fooled, too,
that maybe there was basket racks, 6s and 8s,
that were actually 3 1⁄2 years old.
No.
Just genetics weren't into playing those.
Yeah.
No.
I don't think so.
But how can I really defend my position?
Because I don't have any.
The material is out there.
I was just looking at a sweet collection of maps
that a dude sent in that was um it was
going back into the 1920s 1930s 1940s and showing what parts of the state of michigan were opened
and closed for deer hunting and there was big periods of time like you know when all the animals
got wiped out there's big periods of time when there would only be like a little block of the state open.
Like they'd have a deer season.
The entire southern third of the state would be closed to deer hunting.
And it would just, you know, every year they'd be like, just bounce around as they were trying to recover deer.
You'd look at something very similar in your own lifetime if you went and looked at turkey.
You know, how turkey seasons
filled in as turkeys were recovered uh guy wrote about this you guys ever hear this that there's a
i don't know if this is true he says there's a cover scent that basically functions like
vicks vapor rub when you're a little kid would you mod rub vicks vapor vapor rub on your chest yeah so you'd get like it like waft up yeah he says there's a cover scent that's like menthol
and it's just meant to throw off a deer's ability to know what's going on man i've heard of stuff
like that and i just don't really end up giving much credence to pretty much anything on the scent
control so the deer rolls and he's like whoa bro I can't smell anything. It's just mixed vapor.
It's just like swamping their senses.
I mean, maybe there's something.
You haven't heard of this?
I've heard of all sorts of stuff like that.
And I don't think I really even register most of it.
Is that the stuff that's supposed to smell like cookies or whatever?
No, he said it smells like menthol.
He's asking me or us what we think of it.
I don't even know enough about it.
I wish Mark Kenney was here.
Yeah, I've never heard of that one.
You know, if you're listening right now,
send your question to Wired to Hunt.
Dude, you'll get 30 minutes on, like,
you'll get 30 minutes because you'll know about it.
I guarantee Kenyon will, like, know about it
and have some kind of opinion on it.
In the ongoing listing and collecting of shit that makes turkeys gobble guy wrote in he
was out hunting one time got all sick started puking rolled into dry heaves and gobbled up a
bird dry heaving out in the woods his buddy called he says his buddy called it and killed it a train
engineer says that he can get him to he can get him to shot gobble with his train
whistle says but it's so damn loud you can't hear the birds but he'll see him out in the field blow
the whistle and see him stick their neck out and gobble even though you can't hear it he's up in
his train engine so dry heaves and train whistles uh yannis's heart here's a good yanni gets i only
forward yannis like a very small percentage of people concerned about his heart. You get any good tips off that?
Well, you know, there were so many after my recent clarification,
which I felt like I did a good job of saying, I'm feeling good, folks.
But people care about you.
I know they do.
But we got quite a few emails being like, oh, man, I know exactly what's wrong with you.
You better call me or this, that, and the other.
So I felt like I might have somehow miscommunicated
and not given off the appearance that I'm fine.
I'm doing good, and I feel comfortable with the situation.
And so, yeah, one of the guys that wrote in was like,
dude, you got to call me.
So I did.
So I chatted up i got like a you know like a a um
what do you call when you go back like a like a checkup um follow-up from a guy a doctor out of
great falls was it a doctor that called you that you want email yeah oh so a doctor said call me
yeah that's yeah and so it's good to know doctors because i email doctors every week where i got a question no for sure and it was good because i basically ran through everything and he's like
sounds like you're right on track you're you're uh you know you've done all the tests that i would
have recommended and you you understand what's going on i'm glad that you're on the aspirin today
and the only thing i would say is that don't wait until you're 65 to go see your
cardiologist again maybe check in just a little more often always nice to have a second opinion
totally dude you need to have doctors in your pocket man i'd like to have a doctor in each
back pocket at all times because i because the first day a guy wrote in and yeah i don't know
about like i hope he's not listening. No, it's fine.
He wrote in and he's like, his buddy has to go down some kind of emergency and get an MRI.
And the MRI machine is backed up.
Okay.
So he's got to wait. And some doctors like, hey, as long as you're waiting, let's do the x-ray first to see if there's any metals to verify there's no
metals.
Like they'll add,
cause you know,
the MRIs are magnets.
It'll draw the metals out of you.
So if you got implants and stuff,
they have steel,
but,
but,
and he says that,
thank goodness.
Thank God he did the x-ray because his body had inadvertently swallowed a piece of shot that was residing in
his stomach and that that mri would have drawn the shot right out through now yeah for sure
that's i verified that with my doctor friend d no d the doctor I should call D right now. So I wrote back and said, well, because he said it was from eating turkeys.
And I'm like, but you were using steel shot for turkeys?
You sure you weren't using like copper plated lead?
Mm-hmm.
Or brass plated lead?
They have both, I think.
Because the magnet wouldn't draw on lead.
Then, and then I emailed my doctor buddy, Dr. D, to ask her, the MRI wouldn't pull, like it has to be something with iron in it for the magnets to pull it.
And she's like, yeah, and that's why it's standard procedure to always check people with x-rays to make sure they don't have any metal.
And then the dude wrote back and said, yeah, in fact steel they were hunting turks with steel shot so it'd be pretty interesting to have that bb drawn out of your body a little pinhole you would it would now the
thing that would worry me call that interesting huh i would like it just for the story if it got
drawn straight out but let's say it got sucked by a magnet
let's say they put the magnet in top of your head pulled through your body and drew it that way
man that's not interesting no but just a straight shot just like bounce across every vertebrae as
it runs up your spine and then right through your cranium your Through your cranium. I don't know how strong the magnets are, but I felt that it'd be.
You were just hoping for like maybe through the liver.
No.
Man, you'd hope they'd shut it off when you started screaming.
I don't know how fast it draws that thing in.
I need to call.
Point being, it's nice to have doctors you can call up and ask good questions to.
No, here's another example of that.
Steve and I guided a orthopedic surgeon in
colorado this accompanied accompanied right we're doing a fundraiser that's right so we weren't
being paid for this but yeah we hunted with them and uh i was always wondering what the actual name for what I call,
refer to the pelvic crest on a deer,
which is like when you kind of break open its back legs and you slice away
the meat and you've got what looks to me very much like a crest like piece of
bone.
You cut both sides of it.
Yeah.
And you pull it out.
And just because I was,
I don't know,
I was writing something about that,
doing that process. And I thought, well, I don't know, I was writing something about that, doing that process.
I thought, well, I might not be calling it the right thing. So figured bone guy.
Or a speedy surgeon.
Yeah. He didn't know off the top of his head, but he did a little bit of digging and quickly found
out that it is called the symphysial crest.
Is that right?
Yeah. So I was right with crest. It's just not-
Halfway there.
Yeah. So it is in the pelvic area.
You know what a butt crack is called?
Oh, technically, no, I don't.
The gluteal crease.
Oh.
I like that.
That makes sense.
I like that a lot.
It just sounds so less personal than your butt crack, right?
You guys ought to introduce yourselves real quick, by the way.
Yeah.
And what you do here, Sam Lundgren, Associate Editor at Meat Eater.
And Morgan Mason, same, Associate Editor over here.
Good stuff, guys.
Yanni, real quick while you're on it.
Mm-hmm.
Are you at liberty to talk about what's happening over your place tonight?
Or no?
Sure.
Oh, because it'll be long gone by then.
Yeah.
What, are you worried that a party's going to be crashed?
No, you might not like to talk about stuff that's happening at your house.
Oh, yeah, I hear you.
I've been thinking about that lately too,
about how much, you know, being that we're out in the public eye more and more and more
and how much of that stuff you keep private.
But no, I'd love to talk about it.
Would you like me to?
Sure. I wouldn't have talk about it. Would you like me to? Sure.
I wouldn't have brought it up.
We're doing a little winter solstice festivities,
which is going to involve...
Pagan rituals?
Yeah.
Yeah, Yanni's into it.
They celebrate pagan stuff.
I'd say the biggest reason we're actually doing this and that my wife's interested in doing it Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, Yanni's into it. They celebrate pagan stuff. Yeah, totally.
I'd say the biggest reason we're actually doing this
and that my wife's interested in doing it
is the tradition of it.
Yeah.
So we've done it three or four years now,
and whoever's with us over the holidays,
we sort of...
It's not always on the winter solstice,
but even if we're...
We might do this at New Year's sometimes
because you're kind of celebrating
new year's ish type stuff right the ending of one year beginning of another whether you want to do
that on the winter solstice when the days start becoming longer it's more logical yeah for sure
the gregorian how does that how you say that the gregorian calendar it's more logical i don't know
because that's just some arbitrary like like new year's should be right now exactly yep yeah either
last night or tonight yeah it's kind of nice to think about that isn't it when you realize that
that like tomorrow the day is going to be a little bit longer i spent like 10 minutes i spent 10
minutes explaining this to my kids but third thinking is they're like they want it to be real
dramatic yeah you gotta move i was like no it'll be like you know like
every day it'll be like sub a minute right and they thought for a minute i had their hopes up
where they thought all of a sudden tomorrow's gonna be like hotter and balls light out till 10
p.m oh yeah that's funny uh but and you guys days, the Latvians, correct me if I'm wrong here.
In the old days, the Latvians would get a hunk of molten lead and fire it into a bucket of water.
Yeah, and we were thinking about doing that, too.
And I think we've just, we just sort of ran out of time.
I'm still contemplating going by and grabbing a bunch of fishing weights.
We used to melt lead with blowtorches.
Get in there and huff that.
It's good for your brain.
Yeah, totally.
You guys tracking what we're saying about throwing lead into a bucket?
I am not.
You know in some cultures you take a chicken and kill the chicken
and lay its guts out and watch how the guts squirm
and then you can tell the future?
I've heard of it.
Well, Latvians, they like to take a hunk of molten lead
and throw it into a bucket.
Then you pull it out of the bucket and you get a candle going.
And you throw a shadow of your lead shape because it makes a wild shape.
You throw a shadow of that off the wall, off a candle, take a gander up there, and then see what's going to happen.
Yeah.
Everybody else.
It's like, we're going to get eaten by a large monster.
Yeah.
For everybody that's like seven years and younger,
it's usually that.
And there's always a lot of boats.
For some reason, like a chunk of melted lead
that's just recently been reformed into a solid,
a shape that it, or the shadow that it often throws
is some sort of boat-like thing.
Because everybody's going on a cruise next year.
Or it could just be like something.
If you predicted for me, if I throw my lead,
and I throw a shadow up on the wall, and I look yonder,
and I see a boat, and someone said,
man, I think over the course of the next year, you'll be in a boat.
I'd be like, I think you're probably right.
I got a feeling you're right.
I went to a summer solstice party
at an environmental historian's home who's been a guest on this show dan flores and he had the big
you don't really have a spot for this he had a sundial
on a rock okay so he could you know track the shadows throughout the year it was
pretty cool and then right at the appropriate time everyone would uh at the time that he would
call he would say that this party was a collection of elite he said it was an elite group of hard
players meaning an elite group of hard partiers.
And everybody would be pretty partied up.
And at the appropriate time, you would all dance.
Like the shadow of the sundial throws in a certain direction.
So as the summer goes on, days get longer, longer, longer.
And you would dance in a reverse direction of the course
that the shadow was taking.
And everyone, you know, all liquored up and everything,
and you're all dancing and whooping and hollering around the dial for quite a long time.
And it was like you were collectively harnessing your energies
in order to send the sun back in the direction.
It's like reverse the time stream.
Send it back.
Yeah.
That's an interesting state of mind.
Yep.
Summer solstice party.
I mean, you know, it wasn't like,
I don't think people thought that they were like
literally reversing the course of the sun,
but it was a celebration of, it was like.
What is actually going on, right?
They're saying that like there's going to be less sun now
and we're sort of going to help that along.
Yeah, like it's getting too. too much too much you need to throttle her
back a little bit and so you'd send the sun back down and it was a way of anchoring i think it's
just like a nice way of anchoring your calendar yeah i like it yeah we tonight oh you know there's
something about your heart i was supposed to bring up.
Go ahead, Bobby. I don't want to get so far away
from your heart that I lose my point.
Okay.
Go ahead. Throwing lead.
We're not going to throw lead.
Is that what they call it?
How do you say it in Latvian?
Throwing lead, or whatever the term would be.
I think it is.
I think it's
mest... Whatever the term would be. I think it is. I think it's messed.
Messed.
Good job.
Does your pop have the deal
where he's like
doing the signs on the body
like he did up
with the caribou hunt?
No.
Like blessing the rifle?
No.
That's just for kids,
you know.
Okay.
But no,
messed Svino
I think is what it's called.
I think it's to throw lead.
Mest svino?
Svins is lead.
I thought it would be more like la-da-da-da-da-da.
Yeah.
Like most other Latvian words, it kind of sounds like that.
So what's the process with the lead?
You boil it down in something and just like have a pot of water?
No, so you just like have like a pot that you got at Goodwill
that you're not going to use for anything else besides this
and throw in uh
yeah where do you guys keep the crucibles
and a bunsen burner um yeah you just melt it down and then when it's in a liquid form you just take
it and hold it right over the bucket of cold water and one fell swoop yeah the key is to do it fast
and all at once,
because if you drip it in there,
you can imagine what you get.
That makes sense.
You're going to see boat shapes,
like with all that weight coming down,
like how the water reacts with it.
But I think people see the water,
and it puts them in a boating frame of mind, too, perhaps.
See both of that.
My old man had all the paraphernalia
for dealing with lead.
He had those sweet little,
what is that material? It's like cast, but it's not like picture like uh it looks god i can't think of the word but it's uh
you know like the super heavy cast iron things with a little spout on them yeah and you get
like the little tippers and everything yep and we go down we had that we had the
we had the molds to make your own fishing sinkers but we'd go down and get all of our lead out of
the at the rifle range down the road we had a rifle range about a mile and a half we could
ride our bikes down a road that we dubbed dead dog road because strangest thing for a long period
of growing up you'd look in the ditch off that road and would often be able to find dead dogs.
We could never solve the mystery.
Or magazines of a certain genre would be like what you'd find in this ditch.
So we'd call it like our road at the end and then dead dog road to begin and down dead dog road.
You go left into the shooting range.
And we would would without doing
any kind of things like putting flags up and whatnot to notify people that we were down there
we would go down with the sand of the sifter and sift out bullet lead and use that to pour up our
own sinkers in our sinker mold but bullet lead there's additives in there. So normally when you bite a fishing sinker, it's soft.
But when you'd bite our sinkers, you would hear your teeth go.
Every time, because there was all those hardeners in there, man.
It was a nasty fishing.
It was a bad fishing experiment, man.
Yeah, it was horrible sinkers, horrible sinkers.
But we never thought to go get tire weights,
which most people who want to melt some lead up. That's what we always used. My we never thought to go get tire weights. Yeah.
Which most people who want to melt some lead up.
That's what we always used.
My dad and I used to make.
Nice soft lead.
Buzz bombs and stuff like that.
Tire weights.
Yeah.
What's a buzz bomb?
It's a long kind of diamond shaped casting lure for salmon that you can just huck a country mile off the beach.
Oh, yeah.
Because you guys were like Pacific Coast.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yes. We did a lot of you were throwing them casting for salmon mostly pinks and silvers but you'd run into kings time
to time yeah oh man long along the west coast of would be island where i grew up when the pink
salmon run was on like you you could go out to certain places and see a thousand people stretching
for a couple miles down the beach just talking
buzz bombs and when you threw a bird down the beach they knew you were just saying hi
one time when i was doing that i drilled a seagull out of the air with a buzz bomb when there was
you know 500 people with inside of me and they all thought i did it on purpose when the worst
thing was like i was kind of like oh there's a seagull coming by i didn't think in a month and
you know a million chances how would you do it on purpose there's seagull coming by i didn't think in a and you
know a million chances how would you do it on purpose there's no way you do it on purpose
you a thousand bucks right there's no way you're gonna knock a seagull out but speaking of flipping
the birds there are some people who thought that was pretty uh pretty bad idea of me to do and
and thought you did it on purpose thought i did it on purpose but i had to fight that thing all
the way in pin it down unhook it it was pretty unpleasant with that oh not only did you hit it but you hooked it yeah you got you tied into them yeah
if you're pulling drag oh yeah yeah it was up in the air then down in the water and squawking
it's not horrible without an audience but it probably becomes horrible with an audience
yeah worse about it well i've found throughout the course of my life that catching shit on fishing gear
that isn't fish is generally unpleasant.
Yeah.
Turtles.
Yeah, it's never any fun.
Never.
Yeah, we dealt with the pelican once.
I still need to get back
to why I brought up your heart.
Yeah.
We got off of what we're going to be doing tonight.
Oh, because...
No, you're having a solstice party.
I just explained the... Yeah, winter solstice.
I'm coming up with my boys. My daughter can't
come. Oh, you guys are coming.
That's good to know. I don't think you invited me. I think
you invited my wife. I invited your whole family.
But you guys didn't RSVP.
Really? I'm glad we know now.
I'm coming up with two boys. Alright. We're ready
for you. But what we're going to do, just so
everybody knows what Steve will be doing and what he was
doing on the evening of the 21st, we're going to
have a bonfire. Throwing chicken guts.
Throwing lead. No chicken guts.
Bonfire.
We're going to drag a Yule log around the house.
We're going to sing some songs.
How do you guys feel about that?
My wife thinks that Americans in
general are very uncomfortable with
singing songs in public. Oh, yeah.
I hate it increasingly
unless it's like it used to be way more common seems like yeah like i was just reading in the
paper some article the other day that like christmas caroling is like this thing that
used to it's like we used to do it every year when we were kids yeah mrs babcock would organize it
yeah and sure you kind of hated it but i think as you do it more, you kind of realize the benefits of it.
I don't know.
I feel like singing makes you feel good when you do it,
and it's just interesting that Americans really don't like doing it.
Well, no, because I always sing my song,
Yanni, Yanni, Chimani.
I sing that all the time.
Yep.
We sing a lot, O-Hun.
But no, when my kids have a birthday,
and there's people over
and it comes down to sing the birthday song,
I'm never stoked to sing the birthday song.
Yeah, that's not the kind of singing I'm talking about.
I know what you mean, though.
It seems like it used to be a lot more common
than it is now.
So we're going to stand around the bonfire,
sing a few songs,
sing some songs while we're pulling the Yule log around.
And then the real,
well, that's part of the tradition
in the whole Winter Solstice thing. the tradition and the whole winter so how big is
the yule log we gonna like need a team oxen or what no you know it'll be you just had your house
redone you're gonna drag a log through it after no around it oh around around it you do it three
times you know to basically bless the house and you know get rid of evil spirits and get it ready
for the next year you're gonna lose a lot of people on that hill. I know. We have a corner, man, where there's not a lot of space.
You just put up a rope.
You put up a rope people can hold on to.
Yeah.
Little carabiners they can clip into every time they come around the house.
When it's done, you go to the bonfire, and then we have an axe.
And you can either, you know, to everybody there,
express in words what you're chopping into the log,
or you can just keep it in your own head.
But the gist of it is that you're chopping the shitty things from the prior year,
the demons, the dragons, the battles, the hurdles, negative stuff, whatever,
and you're chopping it into the log.
Out of your body into the log.
That sounds cathartic.
And then.
I don't buy that. And then you pick up the log goes into the log. That sounds cathartic. And then, I don't buy that.
And then you pick up, the log goes into the fire.
I feel like every guy with a wood stove
does that every time he chops.
He's like, son of a bitch.
Exactly.
But here, hold on a minute now.
How is it that you're chopping it into it?
I feel like what it should be, it's symbolic.
I think it should be that you knock a chunk out of the log.
The log is your everything.
You come in at a 45, come in at a reverse 45, knock out a little chip.
That's the, right?
Throw that in the fire.
Toss that in.
Well, those chips will be lying there.
So if that's how you want to do it, you can throw a little chip in there for sure pretty subjective on the approach on this like you just have your
angle know what you want to do yeah totally i'm sure there's some you know crazy real traditional
pagan latvian that'll say no we're doing it all wrong but uh i need to get back to you why i
brought up your heart but yeah real quick you guys would paint those buzz bombs huh yeah how would you paint
them usually uh bubblegum pink what kind of paint i mean just like rust-oleum and i said
different stuff like i remember i was into powder coating stuff for a while but i can't remember if
i was doing that for my steelhead jigs or buzz bombs i i don't i don't honestly remember but like hard enamel
yeah stuff because you'd be banging it on rocks and all sorts of stuff i paint my own halibut
jigs and that's always a letdown man yeah yeah it chips off so damn fast you gotta do it stays good
yeah because then you're trying to put glow in the dark on there right right like powder a lot
of times if you're just jigging halibut it's good but as soon as you start banging rocks for yeah
halibut are typically over a sandy bottom yeah as soon as you're like banging rocks for
ling cod or banging rocks for rockfish then you pull it up it's like all that hard work
he's got like a lead jig again yeah but i also kind of like ones that are a little battle scarred
i've always uh always thought that it needs like a little bit of seasoning before something's
fishing well especially with jigs like once it once there's a little bit of chip maybe it makes it give a little bit more of a
realistic pattern or something i don't know i haven't noticed that i think that's in your head
but what's in people's head is important man yeah i think so i used to hate talking with people
about hunting gear and fishing gear and then they'd like something stupid and i'd be like man
i think that's stupid and then they'd say well it works for I'd be like, man, I think that's stupid. And then they'd say, well, it works for me.
And I used to not like it, but now I understand it and like it.
Yeah, I talk to people about that all the time,
that what you're fishing is less about having it right from objective standards
and more what you're confident in.
That's what I say all the time with
steelhead it's like pick a no don't pick like the fly that you know some professional things you
should pick pick the one that you're confident in the one that you're going to feel like you're
fishing well all day feel that like is working for you and and and have that sense of find that
sense of confidence yeah and that's what's going to catch you fish,
not trying to rely on somebody else's expertise.
Yeah, like this year, man, it's funny you bring that up
because this year I tried a whole new kind of flutter jig
for jigging halibut.
And we traditionally always use just classic lead heads,
but, I mean, they're 16-ounce lead heads, right?
Like just a big lead head with a big j hook coming out of it and on
that you put you know like your classic just like you're rigging up for smallmouth bass but
everything's like way bigger you got like a 10 inch grub body on it not 10 inch six eight inch
grub body on it yeah and i switched to a flutter jig and at first you're fishing it and you're not
fishing like you are when you're fishing something you love.
But then, I want to, on day one, late on day one of halibut fishing, smack two very nice halibut.
Then, you should see me fishing that jig.
Yeah.
Then, you're playing for keeps, man.
I'm sitting up there just jigging, jigging.
Not like, you know, you're in it.
Because you're like oh this thing
works then you're fishing seriously so it's self-fulfilling right it definitely is it takes a
while it takes a while to develop that with uh new patterns techniques all sorts of stuff and some
there's a lot of things that i've just never gotten past it i was like i never figured out
how to fish this never worked for me i've got probably boxes full of flies and and lures that
i tried one time i was
like i'm not really feeling it never really stuck it out long enough to make it work because
sometimes you just default to those things but then sometimes like that you're just like oh shit
that's me that's me with any kind of um surface bait yeah i just like i just like, oh man, surface baits.
Oh, I have a, this last spring I took my dad to Wisconsin on a muskie trip and a friend had told us to get this, this new fancy surface bait called the Whopper Plopper.
I was like, well, that's the dumbest name I've ever heard of.
And then I saw it and I was like, well, that's the dumbest looking lure I've ever seen. And it's, it's like, it's like a Zara spook, kind of like a, like a, just like a cigar
bait, no lip, no nothing.
But the back end has like a little fin and it goes blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah, spinning around.
And you know how noisy muskrats are when you're swimming.
Yeah, exactly.
Real noisy.
They're just like throwing water everywhere.
But the wounded ones are.
Yeah.
And so I just, I just couldn i just i just couldn't i just
couldn't handle it but he went and bought five of them of course and and then first day he landed
like a six pound small you gotta get a loan from the bank to buy five musky plugs yeah seriously
he got a he got a huge smallie on it the first day and then a big musky on it the second day and
then after he caught that his first musky on this bait that I didn't think was going to work,
he busted out another lure that I had even less confidence in called the
suicide duckling.
Okay.
Literally it looks like a rubber duck.
These guys should get a job naming hot sauce.
Yeah,
absolutely.
This literally looks like a,
a,
a duckling.
It's,
it's,
it's fairly fishy.
It's like head down.
It looks like a duckling running away, which definitely does make a lot of commotion it's got propellers for the feet and
it's got treble hooks sticking up all over the place and i was like you gotta be kidding me he's
like i bought this i bought this lure i think it's awesome i want to fish it he and he just
loves harebrained ideas for different stuff he fished that thing for 10 minutes and landed a 40
inch muskie right at the side of the boat really guy can pick lures yeah or he just fishes them with confidence yeah
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i know folks that swear by those two definitely. Definitely the Whopper Plopper.
Both of those things, man.
I am completely bought on it.
Until last summer, Yanni and I didn't know.
Maybe you did.
I don't think you did.
We didn't know that muskies were all of a sudden in fashion again.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
That there's like fishing game agencies establishing them.
Well, yeah, because my grandpa was a muskie fisher. oh yeah yeah that there's like fishing game agencies establishing them well yeah because
like my grandpa was a musky fisher my mom that was my mom's my mom's father maternal grandpa
uh he liked to fish crappie like to fish musky but he was fishing musky in native water
right go up in north wisconsin and stuff and fish musky um and that was like his thing but i didn't know that
they're making all these like super breeds of muskies and cutting muskies loose and all these
lakes where they weren't traditionally been and all these like sterile hybridized muskies that
just get bigger and bigger and bigger and never reproduce and it's like a big thing management
practices when they're trying to get rid of a carp or suckers or put in hybridized
yeah sterile muskies exactly because they'll they'll create a cool fishery they get really big
but you know they're not going to breed they're not going to like you know eat themselves out
of house and home like pike or actual muskies were yeah we got we've got tigers all over montana
people get real fired up about catching them yeah definitely monstrous when i
was a little kid we did we fished this lake for bluegills called wolverine lake pretty heavy
and um they had tiger muskies in there but they were all dinkers when i was a kid the assumption
was they were going to someday be hogs you just catch dinker tigers uh reason i brought your heart
up guy wrote in which is a doctor here he He was talking about your... In an email about your heart,
he pointed out that he had to take beta blockers.
Yep.
He says that the medication has had
an interesting and unintended side effect,
which has made him immune to buck fever.
Oh, that makes sense.
He gets excited about seeing deer,
but he never gets that feeling
like his heart's about ready to jump out of his chest.
He's got that calm, steady hand.
Because he's taking medication specifically meant to prevent tachycardia.
That's right.
Man, you're going to get a lot of listeners jumping on the beta blockers.
He says, I'm no super hunter by any means, but when this buck in the picture below came into view in October. I was cool as could be.
Yeah, no, I could see that,
but quite a few doctors have told me and all agreed that beta blockers also,
young people don't like them
because they slow you down so much.
There's like, for taking them,
you just have a constant lethargy.
Oh, slow you down in that way.
Yeah.
I don't know, like they take the peaks and valleys.
They take the peaks out of life.
No, no.
Physically slow you down.
Yeah.
So, if you're hiking a hill, you'd probably have to, just because your heart's not responding
to what your body's asking of it.
So, you'd have to stop more often.
Oh.
Yeah.
So, you're feeling what this guy's saying don't oh yeah
this isn't psychosomatic no no i've yeah no i've had the beta blocker chat you know with anybody
i've talked to about about taking it so if you're really symptomatic and it's bothering you and a
lot of people like that like i had an anxiety from having those you know the symptoms but once i was
told that there's nothing to worry
about, I was able to just put it out of my head. And when it happens now, I'm like, okay, it's fine.
And I go back to sleep or just go on with my thing. A lot of people can't do that. And the
anxiety just builds and builds and builds. And so they're going to take beta blockers to deal with
it. If it was happening to me twice a day, I'd probably be taking beta blockers to deal with it if it was happening to me twice a day i'd probably be taking beta
blockers because you just get sick of it yeah then just get into some kind of hunting where
you don't need to do a whole lot of walking but you need to do a whole lot of keeping calm
sounds like white tail hunting yeah totally yeah man started living in a tree stand
um guy rode in talk we remember talking about shooting
squirrels shooting squirrel nests when you're a little kid to try to rustle them out or like to
try to get them i like how when we were squirrel hunting the other day your boy was like he's like
just want to make sure but uh we can't shoot the squirrel nest right yeah with no problem
yeah he like anyone independently it's nice when someone like independently discovers something
that definitely occurred to him why not just go ripping a couple rounds up in each and every one
of these nests and then we'll climb up there and have a look we'll climb up there and see what we
got uh this guy's saying in some there's states that have explicitly state i haven't looked this
up but he says there's states that explicitly state you cannot shoot
into a squirrel nest.
Makes sense.
He's talking about, he did it once when he was a kid
and
I don't know how
the squirrel flopped out or he climbed up and got
it out, but he took it home to his
grandma and his grandma was pissed.
And she was yelling at him.
She cooked the squirrel still, but she was yelling at him she cooked the squirrel still
but she was yelling at him and she said that's like someone shooting you in your home
which i don't want someone to shoot me no matter where i'm at yeah so if they're out on the branch
or is like somebody shooting in your yard and that's all right yeah it's like oh it's chill
man i was outside when i got i was asking for it um one last thing before we get into some uh before we get into
some uh things that are more questions in nature but a guy was saying he's got this idea he's come
to think of uh you know with people right you have like you have like high class and you know you
have class there's a class structure in america right there's like blue everybody talks about
blue collar and and affluent.
He views deer.
He thinks that the deer that live on public land are blue-collar deer
because they've got to put up with all the bullshit, man.
Like getting shot at.
Chased around nonstop.
Yeah, and then there's the high-class deer that live down in the private land.
Nothing bad ever happens to them. Slowly walking around, immune head up i don't know how i feel about that
feeding all manner of times through the day so so is it white collar people who are hunting white
collar deer and blue collar folks like us on public land he says he's worked his theory up
he's running by a few people everyone doesn like it. His wife thinks it's stupid.
He says he's still trying to work on it.
But the basic outline of it is there's blue-collar deer,
and they're stuck on public land.
All right, Yanni, what do you got?
There's some merit.
Some merit there.
I think it warrants mention.
Yeah. All right. Some merit there. I think it warrants mention. Yeah.
All right.
Here's one.
It's not on the big list I let you guys all look at,
so this is a surprise question to you,
but I think it would be pretty easy.
A friend of mine, Patrick Rodin,
he's already sent me an email telling me what happened here,
and so we have the follow-up already.
But at the time when he wrote this, his cousin ran into a situation that he had no real knowledge on.
He was wondering if we could weigh in.
His cousin killed a large doe.
And they had cold temperatures, so he decided just to hang it with a hide on and leave it.
Out in the woods are in his garage.
Probably at home.
He didn't say where, but he says he hung it and then he got to his place to butcher.
So after picking it up, he realized that the face of the deer had been slightly chewed on.
And I saw the picture and it looked like pretty much half of the muzzle
had been chewed off. So he's got it hanging
by the hocks. Yeah. He's got it hanging by the
gambrel. Okay, his cousin thought
it was a raccoon, maybe an opossum.
Could have been a dog,
coyote, could have been all kinds of critters, really.
That's why I'd like to know where this is.
Because if it's in his garage,
and his dog's in the garage, I've got it
narrowed down.
Case solved.
It wasn't your ma.
Sounds like it was out in the woods and then he brought it back.
Now his cousin felt that he couldn't eat it because of this.
What?
Because he's...
The dead deer had rabies.
Because there was a risk, possible risk, feeding it to his family.
And at the time, he was going to plan on just burying everything and returning it back to the earth.
Oh, my God.
That's wanton waste.
That's wanton waste.
He's got a deer, a gutted out deer hanging.
And something chews on its muzzle, and he's going to bury the deer?
Even if the thing that chewed on its muzzle had rabies.
It was a vampire.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The deer's blood isn't circulating.
I mean, unless you're planning on doing like head cheese with that deer,
which like most people don't do, like there's absolutely no reason.
It got chewed on by a rabid animal.
Or a hungry one.
Rabies is mostly eradicated.
This is a dude looking to get rid of a deer.
Certainly there is that possibility but i think you guys should to us it seems like so well of
course but i think to a new hunter you could see that and definitely be turned off and wonder like
okay no which yes it could happen yeah yeah because i had a coyote eat on a or probably
could have been a pack coyotes eat on a cow or probably could have been a pack of coyotes,
eat on a cow elk one time that was left in the woods a little bit too long.
Okay.
And I came up to it and was like, I wasn't worried about, like, I was going to contract
something, but I was definitely like, what do I do here?
Like, what?
How much do I cut away?
I'm factoring in.
I'm putting, like, heavy emphasis on the fact that it's it's muzzle
yeah for sure now if he said it ate all like eight half of each back ham i would trim
i would definitely trim around that yeah yeah that's a different situation yeah
okay yeah so i'm not gonna i don't think it's a stupid question it's my point yeah so
patrick patrick had a chat with him and they they uh who's patrick a buddy of mine oh yeah
he's giving us some so this is from within your social circle that's why you're being so
that's why no no no he's uh he's like an acquaintance through Meat Eater. Okay. But they came up with the solution to can the whole thing.
And then by pressure cooking it, everybody felt comfortable that there was nothing.
So, yeah.
So, you're saying every time you open a jar up, you're like, well, boys, this meat's rabid.
But I canned it.
Was it? rabid but but i canned it was it what's pressure cooking gonna do different than any other kind of cooking isn't listen it's all in the guy's head right but he didn't waste the animal it didn't
have to go back to the earth oh no god bless him i think he's a real winner. Disinfected deer. I think he's a real...
I think...
I'm happy with the outcome.
Okay, I hope you guys
don't feel like I wasted your time.
No, not at all.
That's a great question.
That's a great question.
And we get a lot of questions
with people in situations
that I feel are less obvious,
such as having...
It's typically coyotes,
having coyotes,
coyotes,
eating hunks of your stuff.
And then people often wonder like,
well, what do you do?
That tells a story about my brother
that had a bear getting messed his situation all up.
That buried all that meat?
Buried a bunch of the parts.
He walked around digging it all back up,
took it down to a creek, gave it it a bath and went home and ate it yeah nothing wrong with it that dude eat anything and it wasn't a rabid grizzly bear
i don't know if he had he never got it tested but yeah i mean i don't think it crossed his mind
this is a guy that takes little bits of trim and puts it in a tupperware container
and puts it in his microwave for his dog but ends up putting salt on it and eating himself
one for you one for me
oh yeah i i told you right that he was when we were in the tent this fall together he was telling
me that he felt feels like tender meat and tender food
is a fad that is going to go away yeah well there are cultures that would agree with them are there
yeah don't you remember the chupac the chupac eskimo they were saying that the parts they
liked are the chewy parts they talked about meat being too tender of the caribou that's right yeah
they like the you know unlike uh every animal all the ungulates have it but it's real exaggerated on like moose
and stuff that like there's if you picture something spine like let's picture something
that's got a real obvious hump uh like take like a moose right and when you got the spine
you got the blades that come up off the spine those are called the thoracic And when you got the spine and you got the blades that come up off the spine, those are called the thoracic
processes. When you
got an animal like that and you go to the highest
thoracic process, like on
a buffalo, those things be
20 inches long.
Moose got
a big thoracic process. And then off
that, there's that cable. It looks
like a yellow cable,
giant tendon that runs from, that's fixed into those things,
runs along the top of the neck, and basically holds that head up.
They were talking about liking to eat that thing.
What?
You don't remember this?
Sometimes I feel like you're not paying attention to stuff.
I vaguely remember having a conversation about enjoying the the tougher cuts with those
boys yeah like callahan's throat roast and stuff yeah which is a tough cut chewy cuts um and there
are a lot of people who like prefer those chewy who like that chewy cut so i think matt could be
onto something or matt could have been born into the wrong culture matt's wife was explaining to me how matt is he's in his tent he's in his teepee tent with his stove
going so he's got like a collapsible seek stove and he's in there cleaning up a skull
an elk skull just on during a snowstorm and all the little scrapings that he's cutting off, he just lays it flat onto the stove.
Like no pan, no oil.
And just lays the chunks of meat out onto the stove.
That's a good idea.
And then just as he works, that's what he has for a snack.
You want to talk about some tough bits, man.
Right, yeah.
That's the muscle they use a lot.
He likes a chewy bit. i feel that yellow cable's
got to be the chewiest thing ever yeah i wonder if that's something that they're just like kind
of chewing on to pass the time they're chewing on the cud yep they talk about like and they cook
some chewy meat if you remember because they kind of like boil they boil but not for long. Just boil meat.
Yeah.
Remember that?
I do.
I remember not being real impressed.
They like flash boil the meat.
Well, because they like to chew. They like to chew.
They like to cud.
Here's a good one.
Have you noticed a difference in the taste of a fall black bear and that of a spring bear?
Yes.
Yeah, a big difference man and again it depends on we're gonna rule
because everything gets squirrely no let's keep it open to the let's keep it open to nuance here
if it has access to marine resources meaning if it's a bear that feeds on salmon and dead seals it finds washed up on the
beach and whatnot, I feel that they're better in the spring, especially fall bears that are on
salmon. There are many, many exceptions. People are going to write it and be like,
it's not true, but they are perceived. Black bears feeding on salmon are perceived as being borderline
inedible. And in those marine areas, when bears in the spring are feeding real heavily on
vegetation, beach rye, various things they find, and even little crabs and stuff from under the
rocks, they're regarded as being much more palatable and better than fall bears i think that that becomes reversed for other reasons
when you're talking about bears that are not have access to marine resources such as salmon runs
because in the fall they're eating a lot of mast they're eating a lot of berries they're putting
on a good layer of fat.
They have very good fat for making lard,
and I think they're better in the fall.
But I would suggest that it doesn't vary as much with interior bears.
Not as much variation.
Because, I mean, I've eaten a number of different spring black bears
from Montana that were just fabulous.
Couldn't ask for anything better.
Yeah, there's no off-taste in meat, but you don't have
they're not as robust and fatty.
Right. And bear fat's good.
Yeah, but they'll still carry a pretty healthy layer
of fat sometimes in the spring.
You've seen them good and fatty in the spring?
Yeah.
I can't think of ever getting one you could actually
render lard off in the spring.
But the spring's a big window too, right?
I remember I got one on April 17th, which is early. You can hunt them to mid-June in Montana. Yeah the spring's a big window too right i remember i got one on april 17th which
is early you can hunt them to mid-june in montana yeah there's some units and the guys up in canada
they're hunting them into june by that time he's at two months to eat yep so you can be packing
out some weight another guy wrote and he says does bear lard go bad yeah lard goes bad now lard by
definition you've rendered it right so you've gotten the impurities out and you got the water out but i wound up just as a test when i the the the the animal that i wrote american
but they're kind of like the animal i wrote american buffalo about my book i i rendered a
bunch of um he had a real orangey fat on them because they like, you know, process the carotene and things and they get like a nice orangey yellowy fat in late summer.
It's my understanding of how that works.
And I rendered a bunch of it out and made a bunch of basically beef lard because that fat's good.
Oh, yeah.
That fat's like beef fat.
It's not like tallow.
It's not like tallow. It's not like venison. It's not like the waxy venison fat,
which varies in quality throughout the country
and time of year, I believe.
But their fat's good.
You can leave the fat on and grill it, and it's good.
Does it have kind of the same color as duck fat?
Yep.
Oh, cool.
Yellowy-orangey.
I did not know that.
Yellowy-orangeyy like kind of a not great
looking like imagine orange that has like a not super just yellowy orange okay gotcha leave it
at that i rendered a bunch of it out because yeah there's a lot of it on there um and then i kept
one i liked having it so much that i didn't jar it and seal it pressure seal it or anything i just kept it in the jar and i must have kept that stuff for seven i kept one little pint-sized jar just for
just because i'd like to have it in my fridge i like looking at it um over time it was like this
beautiful color in the beginning and over time it just turned kind of gray and eventually i thought
some out and it had gone rancid it had gone rancid and if you leave that's
like one of the things like you if you leave so he's talking about bear lard which has been rendered
but if you leave fat on a bear in your freezer it will it will go south on you in your freezer
you need to trim that stuff off when you freeze bear meat but i don't know what it is about that
fat but salmon fat goes bad in the freezer.
Oh, it sure does.
There's a lot of stuff that goes wrong
with salmon in the freezer.
I think that fat in general,
most freezers aren't keeping it cold enough
to preserve it.
The only reason I know that
kind of, and I feel like it would
work with wild game fat
and does work with wild game is because an uncle of mine owns a place where they sell Dippin' Dots ice cream, I believe is what it's called.
I hear about that all the time, but I don't really understand what it is.
Yeah, I've never tried it myself either.
But it's so high in fat, I guess, that they they had to put in when they became a purveyor of
this product they put in a freezer that's the first time anyone's ever said purveyor on this show
i guarantee it i like that that uh it's got to be kept at like minus 30 or something instead of just
zero like a normal commercial freezer is or whatever and he
killed an elk and he's like yeah man six years later still eating on that thing and i swear it
was like every bit as good as it was you know six months after it because he had a high class freezer
yeah because he felt like it was keeping it so cold and just preserving it that much better yeah
those dip and dots are a weird consistency i could see how you'd maybe have to do something different
so you just take him like a one roast per christmas and that was it seriously i'm through an elk in six months go ahead yanni or anyone
um yeah well we all decided that this um was a good question and this guy actually prefaced
his question with i'm hoping that it's the question of the century. Yeah, I don't need to hear that. That's a high bar. I don't need to hear that.
Keith, I can tell you that it's not.
But we're getting a laugh out of the way you're presenting it.
So he asks, let's say you're on a budget,
and God comes down and holds a gun to your head.
Okay.
And for tracking. And God comes down and holds a gun to your head. Okay. And forces you to choose between high-end boots or high-end glass, meaning optics.
I'd turn around and grab that gun out of his hand so fast.
Yeah.
But let's just say.
I don't think it's—
Oh, you're saying it's not fair.
It depends on what you're doing.
You're saying God's not being fair with that question?
No, I don't want to do that. I don't want to's... You're saying it's not fair. You're saying God's not being fair with that question? No, I don't want to do that.
I don't want to blaspheme.
Yeah.
But I'll say that I got to know more.
I got to know what you're up to.
If you're a chucker hunter, boots.
Good point.
Good point.
Let's say big game.
Let's say Western big game.
Optics for me, man.
Optics.
I feel like I like nice boots, but you can get a good pair of boots for less than you can get a really expensive pair of boots.
That's a good point.
Yeah, you just keep wearing out cheap boots.
The disparity is not as much.
And if you had to, you could hunt in bare feet and make some moccasins.
Yeah, and the thing is, too, if you buy right on Nox.
Lost you.
If you buy a pair of Vortex Nox, you get great Nox.
They're not going to kill you on cost.
And even if your house burns down, they they replace them as long as you got something to
show for them yeah you still got the lanyard and even the most expensive boots i've ever had in my
life they still last me like a season and a half but you can't wear out boots and send them in
you can wear out knocks and send them in you can with some companies i sent in a uh sent in a pair
last year and they rebuilt them for me for like 30 bucks.
Oh, rebuilt.
Yeah, that's true.
Just put new soles on them.
They didn't put a new sole on them for me.
That was like another like 125 or something.
I was like, yeah, these will just be my shit kickers.
Schnee's Pack Boots you can send in to get redone.
And like White's Pack Boots you can send in to get redone.
These are Kenetrex.
Yeah. Got you. Okay. so you can a little bit but not the same way you're not bringing them back to
100 i'm still not giving it on the fact that it just really depends but in general let's say okay
so my life the way my life is like what i do all the things i do man it's really tough because it just really depends
i said a thousand times i've yeah but god's got a gun to your head right now man well i know that's
that's why it doesn't like equivocation let's go let's go to last weekend squirrel hunt pretty
mellow walk about nox right you're still gonna. I could have been out there in flip-flops. I wouldn't have liked it.
A bit.
Even kind of.
Morgan, you're with Knox, too?
Yep, I'm on the glass.
Sorry, Keith, good question, but not the best of the century.
To be the question of the century, you're only going to live,
like all of us in this room, we'll touch into our early eighties and we'll die.
So that would have to be,
you didn't even get a full century when it's all said and done.
Generally,
he's saying that he would have had the,
so in all your entire life,
that that would be the best question.
Like you're on your dying bed.
I need to know.
You're dying.
And like someone says, you know, in all these years, man, like, you know, as you fade out of consciousness, what was the best question you've ever heard, right?
It's a really obscure hypothetical I came up one time and emailed to a podcast.
Yeah.
It's kind of like the ever debatable question.
People are expecting him to be like, what's the meaning of it all?
Or like,
is this really the end
or is it only the beginning?
But he'd be like,
God has your boots.
You got to lean down into his ear to hear it
or into his mouth to hear it.
What are you saying?
Okay, here's one.
Why are some squirrels tougher than others?
I think it's age.
Definitely. Why are you peeking over my area? I think it's age. Definitely.
Why are you peeking over my area?
Because I want to see what you're working off of over there.
I'll show you.
Why are some squirrels tougher than others?
Are you getting frustrated with what's on my area?
No.
Not at all.
He was cooking up some buffalo hot legs.
Kudos to him.
He's cooking up some buffalo hot legs from the Meat,
Eat, or Fish and game cookbook available now and uh and he's noticing how some are real a real bite and some are just
phenomenal and he says it doesn't seem to be related to size i think i believe that it's
a function of age well is he is he assumed he reassuming that he shot all those squirrels in one outing?
Because if one was sitting in the fridge or freezer longer,
he could understand why the meat would have aged.
Good idea.
Yanni's going to start a thing.
Can I talk about this?
I think so.
I don't know what you're talking about.
For questions like this for
questions like this where you go you get the question you're like yeah there's got to be more
to the story yeah yanni's gonna start a thing called ask the eagle where you get where when
when you're like what really happened because it'll be like someone will be like, oh, you know, I was out,
and a guy shot at me, and I shot at him.
Who was right?
It'll be like, I just got to have to get him on the phone
to find out a little more.
So this would be a good thing for Ask the Eagle,
because then you can dig in and get him on the phone
and find out what exactly.
Because he might not know to ask the right questions.
Yeah, there's a lot of factors that go into that kind of stuff that can be pretty easily missed.
I didn't start to pay attention to aging until a couple years ago.
Oh, I'm not saying aging.
Age.
Yeah, yeah, no, I agree.
Yeah, I'm addressing both, I suppose.
Because in Escoffier's cookbook,
Le Guide Culinaire,
he says that he only will cook a rabbit
if you can tear the
rabbit's ear like paper.
You should just be able to grab it like you're ripping paper.
It's true.
Young rabbits,
like a young cottontail or a hare,
when it's dead, you can grab its ear
and you should be able to go like this and you can tear the ear. That's a young cottontail or a hare, when it's dead, you can grab its ear and you should be able to go like this
and you can tear the ear.
That's a young rabbit that is okay to cook.
And he could afford to be picky.
I mean, he's like a chef of kings, man.
My brother's first rabbit would have been perfect for that.
He was chasing a rabbit around a brush pile
for like 45 minutes
and he probably had 10 holes in his ear.
From the brush?
Well, no, from him shooting a.22 at it and missing and just hitting his ears. So it was like perforated. brush pile for like 45 minutes and he probably had 10 holes in his ear from the brush well no
from him shooting a 22 at it and missing and just hitting his ears so i was like perforated so then
yeah he might have had a false positive yep uh does scoffier mention what he did with the rabbits
that whose ears he couldn't rip he probably would have ground them up and used them for dog food no
he would have ground them up and used them in in p no he would have ground them up and used them in
in pates and to make canals and stuff like that would be my guess but for these you know for his
preparations of like whole muscle preparations he'd like to be able to tear the ear and then
you knew you had a nice tender specimen i might start doing that and then i'm just gonna turn my
other rabbits like kevin murphy did into uh brats it's
not a bad idea because man those were good yeah rabbit brats yeah white brats dude you gotta ask
i forgot about those rabbit brats yeah those were delicious son of a bitch we should put that in the
cookbook what kind of spices you throw in there like what's the flavor profile oh man i don't know if i can remember off the top of my head oh like just for brats yeah well for those yeah like white pepper
coriander there's a bunch of things you put in brats yeah people put mace in their brats yeah
that pretty classic beer bratty you know not italian not you know there's no spice, mild beer-brotty kind of flavor.
What else you got?
I got a list as long as you are.
Speaking of eating wild game, he says it's a wild game logistical question.
He hasn't found a definitive answer to after a decent amount of research which is so i'm
just guessing that nobody's written a blog post about it i've searched high and low he's not the
library looking up the car he opened up the card catalog how much wild game do you think it takes
to feed a family of four and then specifically he asked you guys keep track of
how many animals you and your family eat in a given year it's hard to answer just depends on
your habits right like uh well let me give you for instance i was having this conversation with brody
here you got family of four very strict wild game diet
Brody's got through
a cow moose, a cow elk and a buck
that's like eating at home
and when you're eating at home
he throws down heavy on game
a variety of small games thrown in
I kind of look at it because I get to do a lot
I get to do a fair bit like, you know, I get to do like a fair bit of,
it's harder for me to answer because we fish a lot,
small game a lot, but then the other thing is,
is we, when we're out, like most of my hunting
is when we're out filming the TV show.
And so then we have a crew and with our crew,
we divide out.
So like if we get an elk you're
like oh there's an elk but then it's it's a sixth of an elk or a fourth of an elk when we divide out
for because we split out for the crew yeah so i never get like an accurate count and then i also
get a lot of stuff from buddies right where buddy mine will whatever buddy mine will get a wild pig
and he'll be oh you know here here's a pig leg and and then later i'll catch some salmon and i'll be oh bro here's a couple
salmon flays so it's like i never like look at it in terms of but brody has a good count but that's
that's not extreme but it's pretty that's a lot yeah but it seems like a lot, but I don't think it is. I know that before. Because he's devoted. Yeah.
Before I had kids, because kids and meat eater kind of started at the same time for me.
But prior to that, my wife and I would go through two elk, no problem, every year.
And it wasn't like, you know, we ate elk, but it wasn't like we were trying to eat elk five times a week you know
just like what we when we ate red meat that's what we ate but it was no problem to go through
two two cow elk yeah it depends on how you're cooking too because if you get like if you're
sitting high on the hog right and you got a full freezer which is how i look at it i just always
watch in my freezer levels but
you know if you're sitting pretty you might be doing things you're doing like big roasts
if you're sitting thin you might be making like fajitas or something right where it's
you take like a you could have family of five so you get one pound of like a one pound
roast out and make like a dish that that has like the nice flavor and it's fun
and everything and it's like a wild game dish right but it's not like you're sitting down and
laying out big rolls where people are eating wedges off that thing so it just depends so much
yeah i feel like i've heard like one guy can take down an elk throughout the year. That's kind of the ratio.
Sure.
But it's subjective, like how you're eating.
Absolutely.
Yeah, but I think that one person who's a dedicated wild game eater puts the elk in the freezer, and you got like a...
With that, you could probably even be having a little breakfast sausage now and then. And when someone says an elk, that could be as little as 65 or 75 pounds of meat.
If you shoot a calf.
250, 300.
Yeah, exactly.
So big variance there.
Yeah, I'm going to get better at that.
You know who I'm going to ask and we'll bring this up again.
You can't get better at it.
There's no answer.
We gave the answer.
No, because listen, what you could do is by weight.
Oh, I would love to know that.
You could very easily just have a scale in the kitchen,
and every time you go to cook, you just weigh it,
make a little note somewhere, and at the end of the year,
you tally it up and say, you know what?
We ate 300 pounds of elk, 30 pounds of turkey.
That'd be a great idea.
Perch fillets, be like, oh, there's two pounds of perch fillets.
2019, starting soon.
Write it down.
There you go.
Let's do it.
Yeah, that'd be cool, man.
Have a little list.
You take it out, weigh it, write it down, and then you'd be like, oh, so we ate 70-some
pounds of venison, 13 pounds of perch fillets, six pounds of catfish fillets.
And then if you wanted to, you could take average.
0.25 pounds of sea cucumbers.
Averages of all those animals.
And then you could say, I ate roughly.
X pounds of wild game.
Two elk and roughly four turkeys.
Yeah, man, because I feel like I could,
not a stuff I kill, I mean, I'm mostly cooking for one.
I could eat wild game breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the year and still have game left over.
Yeah.
Then you got like social media personalities who, there's no, you can't account, there's no possible way to account for all of the stuff they kill.
And they're like,
wild game, bro, wild game, bro.
And you realize, dude,
you shot thousands and thousands of pounds of meat.
Where'd that all go?
Donated.
Yeah, you wind up like,
it's just like,
I know enough to know when,
like I know enough to know
when I see something a little fishy
and then you kind of know enough to know when you...
Yeah, I don't know.
Nothing but tenderloins all year.
I've had people level that at me.
Last year, I killed a bull elk, a cow elk,
and two mature mule deer bucks,
and that's way more than one man can eat in a year.
But I went home a couple times and filled my Yeti 105 to the brim and gave it to my
parents gave it my cousins gave my uncle and you party with it yeah exactly smoke some and party
with some it's a fun thing to do and then like do some charcuterie just like kind of like play
around with some experiments of what you want to do absolutely and none of it's going away when i
live in seattle i practice a lot of wild game diplomacy with the people around but that with that kind of thing i would uh because i i lived around a bunch of people
that had no connection to like it's kind of a little connection to fishing like absolutely
no connection or idea about hunting and um and i'm thinking primarily of my three most immediate neighbors, and I would bring them a lot,
but I would bring them not so much, sometimes frozen,
but I would bring them recipe-ready stuff.
Not like you're trying to dump some frozen game bag
full of hairy trim off on someone's doorstep,
but I would bring them like
here's the thing right it's trimmed here's what i would suggest you do with it i'll text people
a recipe you know here's a fish fillet i pulled the pin bones and and it was it was cool man so
yeah yeah i do do a lot of i do give and receive a lot of uh wild game gifts but here's another way to approach answering it let's
say you take a turkey so you got you you're you and your husband you and your husband you shoot a
turkey and you're going to cook for you and your husband i think that you have each lobe of the breast is a meal or two for you and your husband
the two drumsticks depending if you're like if you're made let's say you make soup with the
two drumsticks there's a couple of meals a few meals for you and your husband and you smoke up
the wing pieces and add them to a gumbo or whatever
and there's like an additional part for the meal or you take all of that you got a big old tom that
tom weighs 20 pounds you take all that you want to make breakfast sausage out of it you wind up
with like eight pounds of turkey meat you cut in a substantial amount of pork trim so you put in four pounds of pork trim you make a 12
pound batch of apple turkey breakfast sausage out of the meteor fishing game cookbook say um
and then you fry up little patties for your breakfast and stuff you can eat it 25 times
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Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all.
There's lots of great ways to stretch it out like that.
What's next?
You got one?
You said you had a list a mile long.
Yeah, but why don't you hit me one of yours?
I can keep going.
I'll do one.
Lots of questions about this.
What are those little things that are on the end of y'all's shooting irons?
That's what he says.
Is it tape?
Do you just shoot through it?
Does it affect the bullet?
Why is it even there?
Yes.
All of the above and no.
So it's yes and no.
I'll start with the yeses.
Yes, it's tape, but it could be any number of things.
It's common practice if you're around mud, if you're around a lot of rain, especially rain that could become freezing rain.
Snow.
That you're around snow. snow the year-round snow um you could get things that get into the that obstruct your barrel
by getting into your muzzle um and and it's a good idea to keep that stuff out you can keep
it out there's thousands of ways of doing this they make some guys will use finger cots which
is a little condom looking prophylactic looking little dealy you
know what prophylactic means just means disease prevention device something that prevents disease
um doesn't necessarily mean a prophylactic how we how you'd use it uh put a finger cot over your
barrel i don't like those because they break and they seem to get brittle when it's super
cold out and they just don't last that long. Or you can take like a little piece of a Ziploc baggie
or anything and place it over the muzzle and wrap a piece of medical tape, which is what I do quite
often over it. Electrical tape, you put a piece over it and then put a wrap around it to keep it from peeling off i mean there's a
thousand things and it's just to keep junk out of there yeah the thing i think people are really
afraid of that can cause real trouble and injury i've never had a barrel blow up from numbers from
and obstruction but the stories you hear would be that you got a bunch of wet snow in there or you got a bunch of
water in there and then it got cold and it froze and like formed a block of ice that was like
adhered to the walls of you know the inside of your barrel or you know the the inside of the
bore and you could potentially blow your gun up yeah because the amount of pressure that can build up in there either that or like a wet mud
like a clay mud or something like that yeah the stories you hear most or something got in there
and froze solid but i've never had it happen but i just do it because why it's so easy to do it and
there's no negative like why not do it if you're in a place that's real wet nasty yeah and i've had i've i've been asked this question a number of times because
i've always my whole life i've put electrical tape around the barrel of a gun i mean my dad
taught me that when we first went deer hunting so it's always seemed like normalest thing in
the world but a lot of friends have asked me about that and people are always well does that mess
with your bullet flight does that slow it down like man i really don't think so like you know rifle blast the muzzle blast that
tape's probably gone before the bullet even gets there yeah this last trip home i went down and
talked to a buddy he's like friend of mine from high school and he turned into a kansas highway
patrol state like swat sniper okay and i asked him specifically on that and he said that like
the gas is pushing forward, knocks that out
way in advance to affect that bullet.
There's nothing wrong with that.
I've talked to all manner of
high-end shooters
who would know enough to know
and the consensus for sure
is that
it doesn't do it.
Early on, when I
first got on to doing that,
if I had something heavy, like electrical tape,
I would oftentimes, if I was in the moment of truth,
I'd oftentimes catch myself reaching up there to peel it off,
just out of a little bit of nervousness.
But yeah, I've shot through it many, many times.
I haven't done a lot of,
I haven't done like a rigid round of range testing on it.
It'd be interesting to do it.
It'd be interesting to do it.
It'd be interesting.
But I just,
there's so many people whose opinion I trust,
who I've talked to about it,
that it's,
Yanni's got opinions.
Why are you sitting there though?
So quiet.
No,
I mean,
I can just say that I've tried it at the range and I've shot the same size groups shooting through tape as I have,
you know,
just with a,
without tape on my,
there you are.
So. Be a fun little video to shoot.
Yeah, for sure.
There's people that have done it on the old YouTube.
Oh, I'm sure.
But, yeah, it's the way to be, man.
Keep it protected.
Okay, your turn.
You guys got a burning one here? Yeah yeah i got one i'd love to talk about
go for it sam yeah i was looking at this one this guy says i joined instagram recently and
i've already seen a few instances of anti-road hunter sentiment of course it shouldn't matter
to an ethical law by any hunter what others think but i was curious what exactly counts as road
hunting on the extreme one could strictly define it as someone who drives around all day
glassing from the truck or ATV, rarely leaving the car until an animal is found.
Is this actually illegal in some states is a parenthetical clause,
but there's a spectrum here.
I wonder where the line is typically drawn.
Hmm.
You want to start?
I'll start.
I don't give a shit.
Go ahead. This is coming from a guy that does a fair bit of road hunting. you want to start i'll start i don't give a shit go ahead
this is coming from a guy that does a fair bit of road hunting
meaning like like he's right it's hard to define if the other day we were out uh
me and yanni were out messing around and we stopped a vehicle rolled the window down and we're glass and some sandstone outcrops for cottontails.
I mean,
let's be straight.
If we'd have found one,
we'd have gone after it.
Yeah.
Sure.
So it's like right there.
There's a spot.
I want to go check for cottontails.
Not long from now.
And my,
and, and what I'm going to do before I get rolling
is I'm going to go and check a bunch of little willow bottoms
that I could pretty much look out the window
to see if they're tracked up.
I keep a window mount and my spotting scope in my truck
so I can just roll down the window,
mount up the scope and look out.
But is that scouting or is that hunting?
Well, I was damn sure hunting the other
day when i was looking for cottontails on those these outcrops because if i would have found one
i would have got out i would have got we'd have got the kids out and gone and went after it and
we'd have glassed it up from the rig i think when people use road hunter in a in a negative way it
would be like uh slinging the rifle out the windows out the window i'm shooting out like
shooting out of it which is illegal so it's illegal to shoot out of your truck depending
it's illegal to shoot out of your truck if you're on a maintained road so you can't shoot from across
from the right from the legal right away of roads so i think when people talk about a road like when you if someone uses road hunter
negatively i think it's like someone whose hunt plan okay their hunt plan is to drive around
heater blasting um yeah eating chester fried chicken they bought the gas station
knocking that back with the plan being that they're going to find something and shoot it from out the truck window uh laws be damned i don't know like that's
what comes to my mind well and there's a lot of western hunters who who don't want to shoot a deer
or an elk more than quarter mile from the road because how the hell else are you going to get
back to the house and everyone looks like you a road. You could be driving along,
headed to a place that you intend to begin walking.
I've had this turkey hunt.
Driving to my turkey hunt spot.
I remember one time I was with my late buddy, Eric Kern,
and we're driving to our turkey hunt spot.
We cross over a drainage,
and we look and see some turkeys.
Right? We were actually actually in truth be told we were actually heading to a place where we we hunt turkeys in a place where you had to you had to to hunt it
realistically you had to hike in and sleep out but it wasn't like we like we see these turkeys
and we just pulled over and went and started to try to work the birds so someone'd be like oh
there's a bunch of road hunters but you you know, it's funny you mentioned it.
At the moment you caught me, sure.
A friend of my dad's when I was growing up,
I remember we were turkey hunting in eastern Washington.
And I remember him saying, oh, even if I saw a 30-pound tom from the truck,
I'd never shoot it.
I'd never shoot an animal I spotted from the truck, ever.
That he spotted from the truck.
Yeah.
That's because you're not hunting.
You're not out on foot.
And that was just like, that was his own like ethos around it.
I'm just saying.
Yeah.
I would never block a fella from having his own.
Everybody sets up their own guardrails.
Right.
Absolutely.
But I mean, I've done that.
I've done that too.
My deer camp this year, the first day we drove out there, we saw enough bucks between our
campground and the trailhead that we all could have tagged out in the first hour of the first day we drove out there, we, we saw enough bucks between our campground
and the trailhead that we all could have tagged out in the first hour of the first day. And none
of us took a shot because we were just getting out there and we're just like, ah, this isn't,
this isn't how we, this is now we pictured it. Isn't the experience we were looking for. So I
think that's what it comes down to for some people so i wouldn't i wouldn't begrudge folks who you
know don't feel comfortable walking around a lot to back roads of montana driving around trying to
figure out where the deer are and then get out and do it do it right but you know personally
i like to be a couple miles back with a backpack on glass and feel like I'm, you know, engaging with the environment.
The other day I was taking my, I had all three of my kids and we were going out to sit for
whitetail does.
Um, and we had a pop-up blind set up 150 yards from where we could park.
And right away we pulled up.
Lo and behold, out pops from windrow, out pops a bunch of does in range.
And we still got the back of the truck open.
My boy was very interested in us
getting this taken care of right here and now and i didn't because it wasn't
what i was trying to demonstrate to them yeah we had gone and put up a pop-up blind we're talking
about the need to be sitting and quietly waiting and how all this worked and that that they would
come out to feed at night and right and then all of a sudden he was pissed but was like no because this isn't like i'm
showing you a thing and this isn't what i'm showing you i'm not showing you this right right
um if it had been like the last day of the season and we'd put in our time and we're going back
after our last morning hunt and out pops them out of the windmill right down the road it would
have been it's just a different situation it's like and it's like it's not like something
that you can explain or or or prescribe to another individual and be like oh no here's what you
shouldn't shouldn't do it's just like uh it's just you're always just running in your head man
you're always running in your head yeah Yeah, I always encourage people to just, you know, try wandering around.
Because I know.
Learn a little woodsmanship.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, to me, that's what's fun about hunting is the exploration aspect of it.
And so many people just don't feel like they can, you know, know how to break down an animal that they can't drag to the truck.
Or know their way to, you know, how to figure out how to't drag to the truck or or know their way to you know how to figure out
how to get back to the truck and yeah i mean i understand that but encourage people to learn and
say that it might deepen the experience the other thing about that makes me uncomfortable
is that different people have different abilities yeah and people have a lot of people have pretty
serious disabilities man so you're like oh yeah road hunters road hunters they're no good it's like you know what there's a lot of people
i mean they don't have the luxury man yeah because of any number of things age physical condition
disabilities so it's like i i hate to like you know to act like oh like the the i hate to to
act like there's these like broad condemnations
of behavior that exists out there when it just is like you know it's almost like you gotta know
what's in their heart yeah i'm supportive of people getting out hunting yeah it's hard to
know what's in someone's and and honestly like if if there's guys doing that i mean it's that's
not really affecting what you're doing if you're're hiking, you know, deep into a wilderness area. I mean, if anything, they're proving your point
that, you know, getting far back, getting away from the road is beneficial because a lot of,
a lot of people do hunt from the truck. A lot of people hunt for the truck who
wouldn't even admit that they hunt from the truck. Yes. So it's, I think, doesn't affect me as long as they let me get by them
when they're creeping up a forest service road at five miles an hour
thinking they're sneaking up on shit.
They are.
You've been off quiet.
I've seen it.
They are sneaking up on stuff, man.
It can be a tactic that works know do they take out like a
prius or something that's that's that's silent under a certain rpm i don't know it's like the
old rancher man that drives like animals never scared of the ranch truck right because the ranch
truck just drives all over the ranch every day but uh yeah as long as it's legal. I mean, I've done, I've done, I wanted to say my fair share,
but I dabbled in shooting some deer literally out of a truck
where it was legal to do that.
Where?
Once you're on private property?
No, in like you said, unmaintained roads, you know, in Nebraska.
And it was novel at the moment, but by the time like my third doe was dead
this is back when they had a booming deer population we had lots of doe tags to fill
um it's like okay that was enough of that you know i'm gonna go take my rifle for a walk just
out stacking them up like cordwood in the back of your truck yeah yeah exactly and like the first
two evenings it was like wow never thought you know just because i didn't grow up you know you couldn't do that in michigan right
some guys use some guys love to see road hunters because they're like oh man you know that area
you're going to go there and you're going to think it's super crowded but it's all road hunters
just cruising the roads so don't worry about it meaning that there's still you're gonna
this has the appearance of being overplayed yeah just like over the ridge but it's not overplayed
because the minute you like hike down in some little spot that's that you can't see from the
road that's a big thing that's a big thing with antelope oh absolutely they're like a big thing
with antelope hunting there's i think there's a lot of people who have the mistaken notion because
it seems like you're in flat open country that feel as though when you take gander out across the landscape i can see all of it they
feel like they're seeing it and you're just not there are so many dips in pockets and it's just
like you could outwalk that stuff like i don't care if you look and you see like i can see clear to you know yonder mesa you don't head toward that mesa in the same direction you're finding
all kinds of animal that you do not see and so it's um yeah i'll oftentimes get out like think
you've seen it all from the truck when we go to get out and hunt the same country and have a very
different experience start bumping animals along the way. Have a very different experience than what you thought
you were seeing when you're looking out. Unless you're looking out
in a salt pan, you don't know what's
going on.
Ready for another one?
What's this fella's name?
Before I get to that one,
Chuck's wondering what your uh
thoughts on the flick jeremiah johnson are i mean i've talked about that it's great one of the
greatest movies ever made damn straight greatest movies ever made the ending of that movie is one
of the saddest things um One of the saddest,
most contemplative exchanges
ever captured in American cinema.
Loaded with symbolism.
Wonderful movie.
There's a little,
little,
a corny moment,
a corny moment or two
that I wish they would have
chopped out.
Splashing around the creek trying to catch a trout and that and i'm particularly thinking like the great character
bear claw chris clap one great character played by grandpa walton um uh little little corn pone
you know but my god does that movie wind up just being like being a pretty profound movie about
loneliness i need to re-watch it can you show it to your kids yet wow no i'm glad you just brought
it up if i'm gonna holiday movie holiday movie well you know it might like it might there's parts
of it that would confuse them a little bit there's there's some there's death you know there's like
death and insanity and stuff in there
that might be confusing to kids,
but they can hack it pretty good.
In terms of kids, I'm usually in favor of...
I'm usually a little ahead of the...
I get them rolling on stuff earlier than you're supposed to
in terms of what you expose them to.
Kind of going explanations with them.
Opens up good conversations, man.
Opens up good conversations. Yeah up good conversations yeah i'm not like one of those i mean they've got you know there's i'm sure there's
like a lot of great parents who are very you know want to have like the world's all innocent and all
that and i don't know i don't know what you get from painting a picture of the world being all
innocent children what's that naive children's what you get personally that's my feeling on it
but i have but but again you know if i could have had parallel lives and raise some
one way and raise some the other day and then compared them at the end i don't have that luxury
so it's just gut instinct and i don't want to dog on any parent who who who i don't want to dog on
parents who are real protective but no we kind of roll out the ugly realities and the beautiful
realities um with that said, I would show them,
but I have not yet.
It's a profound movie.
I think it's a profound movie
if you look at it in the right way
and pay attention to the things that are said.
Especially the end.
When he's cooking that rabbit.
That's going to be a tough-ass rabbit.
The way he's cooking it.
I'm not picturing that scene.
Just a skinned-out rabbit stuck on a skewerwer it's probably been 10 years since I've seen that
you're gonna be chewing
and the thing is
he's cooking a rabbit on a spit
and I'm telling you
he goes and tears off a piece of that rabbit
he like tears off his shoulder
off that cottontail
and I'm like bullshit you braised that
rabbit yeah yeah maybe he was lathering it up with something he had a raft and foil and then
he's just putting a final little singe on it but he's yeah he's cooking he's cooking up a rabbit
me my buddy ben freed and we were little kids would cook cottontails that way and i'm telling
you man but he's cooking he's got a high above the buddy Ben Friedman, we were little kids, would cook cottontails that way. I'm telling you, man.
But he's cooking.
He's got it high above the flame.
He's got the right idea.
But he tears off a hunk and throws it to Bearclaw Chris Clapp. And Bearclaw Chris Clapp observes how he's learned to cook rabbit very well.
But still, I wasn't buying it.
Lance wrote in, and he says,
Hold on, what are you going to say about Jeremiah Johnson?
Why did you ask the question?
I gave the answer.
Why don't you have an answer?
I got nothing to say about it.
Why'd you pick it?
Because I thought it'd be interesting to hear your answer.
Doesn't it specifically ask Steve's opinion?
It does, actually.
Oh.
I mean, I think it's a good movie.
I couldn't articulate it like that
and I haven't
digested it
quite to the point that you have.
He's coming up from the
Mexican War.
He's damaged goods.
He's got PTSD,
what they'd call it now. You gather
he's been damaged from the war.
Comes up the trap.
But he's too late.
The beaver market already collapsed.
It's a sad movie.
If you're listening properly, it's a sad movie.
Anyone would know it's a sad movie.
But there's some good stuff.
So we got one from Kevin, and it's one you guys have already touched on but it's about bird hunting and like how to pull shot and like being scared about giving people who are just getting
introduced to the uh to wild meat um so it's firstly after cleaning 10 or 15 birds of my own
prior or with no experience i got a lot better at the process. However, no matter how to go about it, he's still finding shot in the birds. And he's wondering, is there a reliable
way to like give this bird meat to people without having shot in it? So the first thing I would say,
like I've been like a lifelong bird hunter out in Kansas. And one technique that I just found
was like taking the birds whole, putting them in water and like sprinkling in like a couple teaspoons of salt.
And like when that shot comes in and hits the bird and hits the feathers, it will like bring the feathers along with it in most cases.
And what I found is if you put it in overnight in the fridge, like that salt water will actually pull the shot and the feathers out of there.
I don't understand how that happens.
I don't know either, but like it brings it to the surface in most cases.
And so I just pluck it right off the edge of the bird, toss it away.
It's not foolproof.
It doesn't pull all of them, but it brings a lot of them up there.
Otherwise, you just got to breast the bird out, massage it down, find the BBs in there,
maybe slice it up and then take the carcass and use it for stock.
Some birds you can hold a breast chunk up to a bright light
and you can see the shot.
Yeah, if you breast it out, for sure.
It's a working man's x-ray.
Get yourself an MRI machine.
Yeah, run through the MRI.
Yeah, no serious bird hunter does that.
I was on MRI.
You know, we talked about getting the feathers out,
but a great trick is to take a toothpick.
Mm-hmm.
And sometimes you can pull a shot, too, if it dragged a lot of feathers or hair into
a cottontail.
You put a toothpick in there and twirl it, and you'll pull the hair, squirrels, anything
like that.
You'll pull the hair out, and oftentimes you'll pull it out, and you'll have a little bit
of shot.
It's like locked up in there.
Yeah, because picture like a comet.
You know, haley's come
twain was born the year the haley you know the haley's comet comes every 75 years he was born
was born the year it came and predicted that he would come in with the comet and go out with the
comet and went out with haley's comet really yeah anyways picture a comet when you see a picture of
a comet and it shows like the rock and it's got the flames that
kind of wrap around the front and trail out in the back yeah like a shot goes in there like that
dragon hair like flames yep and you put it in pull it out that's the noise it makes
but the brine one man i don't it worked for me i don't know i don't know if it's like something
with the osmosis or like i don't know like when like brine or salt like it does draw
things out of the meat but i i don't understand i don't understand how that would actually expunge
the shot like i was just brining it loose well no i'm thinking that it's bringing in the salt
water right like it has to equal and it's bringing in the salt water, right?
Like it has to equal, and it's in that brine.
That's what's going on, right?
Is that the brine is penetrating the meat because it has to become equal
between the two states of liquid in the meat and then just the liquid that's in there, right?
Yeah.
So maybe it's pressure.
Maybe if it's just pulling in, then it might be,
and it's going in through those pores or whatever,
it just might be sort of plumping up and then pushing
out. Kind of like popping a pimple.
That's another way to get shot out
is just pimple popping.
That's how you guys, I might talk about this before.
We one time got a moose
we were
20 miles, we flew in
on a raft trip so we flew in
off a highway up
20 miles up a river in order to then
float back to the highway this is up in alaska and right where we landed the furthest point we got
from any i mean you're nowhere near any kind of permanent structures we killed a moose that
someone had shot in the butt with a shotgun long ago is all healed up in there but all these shotgun
pellets i picture him him you know they move quite
a distance throughout their life i picture him getting into someone's garden or something
what size shot was it very small it looked like seven and a half or eight shot all over under
his skin man oh that's gross was it all no it was like yeah yeah it was totally healed up that's
interesting totally healed up and it was just like you could just see it you know that meniscus like not a meniscus but like that what do you call it man
like the like right under the hide it's kind of sticky dermis whatever that like the when you pull
the hide away it's sticky right yeah like the fascia it was just like the the bb's were just
in there and they were kind of like healed up in there a little bit huh and the hide didn't have
any kind of there's like a discoloration on the hide but the the holes and the hide were gone
wonderful it was like a guide giving it like the uh get out of here get out of camp the old
ryan callahan smell me now you know he's like smell me now mister now it seems like a real
alaskan move to shoot a moose in the ass with birdshot to get it out of your garden. Yeah, for sure. Should we hit another one, Yanni?
Yeah, I think we got one more.
Time for one more.
This found one I kind of liked.
We could answer.
If you had to choose one antlered game recipe
to help introduce kids to a wild game,
what would it be and why?
Oh, I know exactly. See, it it's tricky i was just thinking about it's tricky because my first thought was well it'd just be freaking taco night
man because you can serve regular old american tacos with ground up cat meat in it and everybody's
like sweet tacos but that's not necessarily helping introduce your kids to wild game maybe the idea of it yeah
because you could feed them a beef taco and say yeah man you're eating elk and the kids are like
great i'm eating elk so they're okay with the idea but i think you're disguising the flavor
if you're actually yeah exactly so if you're actually sort of like trying to be like
hey this is what wild game tastes like i think you're gonna have to be a little more nuanced
and sort of pick something that is wild gamey,
tastes like wild game.
You could pick it out as wild game,
yet the kids are going to like it.
The other evening, I served,
just happened to have a very small,
like bottom round roast off of an antelope.
Wasn't going to be enough meat,
so we also had two whitetail dough tenderloins. And I can tell
you that it was all sliced up. It had been done like we do the perfect roast, which you
can find in the Meteor Wild Game cookbook, the recipe there, how to make the perfect
roast. I cooked all three of those pieces the same way. Seared them up, olive oil, salt
and pepper, finished them in the oven, sliced them up.
To what town? seared them up olive oil salt and pepper finished them in the oven sliced them up i yanked them at
like 125 ish that's what i usually go chili no no man once i let them rest they rise at five to
eight degrees and it's their money anyways that i put a little bit of each on everybody's plates
and it didn't take them long to be like to know that the one's a little bit of each on everybody's plates, and it didn't take them long to know that the one's a little bit smaller
and rounder.
That was the good-eating one.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
They're all over that tenderloin.
The bottom round off the antelope was awesome too,
but it just didn't have that melt-in-your-mouth-ness of that tenderloin.
I don't know.
I'd go with that, that man because you definitely know you
can taste that you're eating wild game it's got salt and pepper on it that's it but it's good
it's really good so go the prime cut i guess is my simple prime cut i put up a thing on instagram
about this but not long ago i had some uh mountain lion tenderloins and i did like how we i did like like doing the
perfect roast as described in the meteor fishing game cookbook which is available now um seared
them seasoned them salt and pepper seared them fired into my oven but i was kind of running a
little bit behind schedule and like with little kids you gotta get the show on the road right
because people gotta yeah they want to time the mess around you gotta get them to bed
so i pulled them out i was kind of trying to rush things pulled them out and you can't eat
mountain lion rare you got to cook it you got it you know you got to cook it to 160 pull it out and
i was like damn it was it i pulled it too quick still a little you know you don't want to explain
that to your wife that everybody the kids all got trichinosis so uh i had a bottle i was like how am i gonna get this done like
instantaneously because once i made i i was trying to roll it and i'm like man you shouldn't roll
that you know and we had mild we had mild barbecue sauce um in the fridge a bottle of mild barbecue
sauce in the fridge and i just put like a few glugs of that where I had a quarter inch of barbecue sauce in the bottom of the same skillet that I'd seared it in.
And I put those slices and just simmered them in barbecue sauce.
Because I'm just trying to get it done and get everybody fed.
Man, they loved it.
Loved it.
But my kids have eaten so much stuff, they don't even, it doesn't register.
You could tell them.
They don't have the apprehension because they never had the luxury of,
or I shouldn't say the luxury.
They've always had the luxury of just eating everything.
So they're not suspicious of anything.
They wouldn't know.
You could tell them the craziest thing in the world,
and they wouldn't know to think it was weird. So it's not like you're overcoming prejudice but they that was a dish they loved and it makes me
think of remember that blackberry dish i cooked a little bit which had that sauce that was made
out of basically melted brown sugar yes and you serve it over rice yeah i believe we call it meat
meat candy dude kids love that dish man we put that on the website at some point in time i don't think it's
still there we need to revamp that recipe yeah it's basically like making mongolian beef um
you know that's my brother was trying to make my brother who came up with the recipe was like
messing around trying to make like some dish from pf chang's or something you know
his kids got hot on the mcdonald's and uh he started cooking halibut
just like how they make chicken mcnuggets and they thought they were eating chicken mcnuggets
wow dude speaking of some good fried fish um i had somehow ended up with i don't know if it was
from a shoe that we did or if you gave it to me but the tony c's standard fish breading dude i ran out of
just my whatever you know seasoned flour that i normally have i didn't have any corn i saw the
box sitting there and so i went with that and man just seasoned just enough but not too much i was
really impressed that's why it pisses me off when you talk up old Bay. Dude, I'm a big fan of Old Bay myself.
You're from the West. I know.
They're two separate seasonings.
I'm not saying
one is better than the other.
I view it like when it comes to
seasonings that you can buy at any
grocery store in America, there's two
kinds of people. There's kinds of
people who think you can lump everyone into two categories.
Yeah.
There's two kinds of people. There's kinds of people who think you can lump everyone into two categories. Yeah. No.
There's two kinds of people, man.
What if you're feeling
like you want to be
authentico Spanish
or Mexican?
What if you want that flavor?
You can't,
you're not getting that
out of Tony Caesar all day.
Then if I'm doing that,
then you know what?
No,
it's not the only thing I eat.
I'm just saying like we,
it was framed up
as an either or.
I think it was a listener question.
That might have been, but I'm not falling into that trap.
Okay.
Well, when we got in that argument about Tony C's,
someone from the Tony C's family, Sacheray,
everybody writes in, oh, you're going to say it this way.
I just say Tony C's.
And I've talked about it before.
For a reason I don't understand
when I was in college
or called Uncle Tom's.
I have no idea why.
They sent me a care package.
And in it,
in it was like a marinade.
And I cooked some golden-eyed ducks
out of that marinade.
Oh, right.
You said those came out really good.
So,
but yeah, it's a good breading
yeah it's a lot more fun to me you know you really ought to learn how to make your own
and i know you do but it's it's like for there's a lot of good breadings out there
yeah well i don't know a lot of times a lot of times those store-bought ones have that real like
i'm gonna call it msg flavor but i don't know if that's what i'm saying maybe they're just
over salty is what i'm trying to get at,
but I just feel like I can taste something that I don't like.
It's just too much usually.
Where I felt like this one, I was like, wow.
I was pleasantly surprised that they had an over seasoned, an over salted.
Got you.
You know what my old man bought by the case?
I didn't have fried fish that wasn't made in this seasoning.
He bought frying magic.
I remember that stuff.
Blue box.
He bought frying magic by the case.
And he had a cupboard in the garage where he kept peanut oil and frying magic and paper towels.
Nice.
It was like his stash.
When your mom did those, you were describing how she used to do uh chicken thighs and like she'd
do them in the pan and then finish them in the oven yeah very good you do and squirrels good
that way yeah and i was thinking that uh my uh that was frying magic great okay it was okay
because i want to say wasn't there a product called like shake and bake oh yeah people did
the same exact recipe with yeah she would work it up and i should call her to double check but i feel like she would work it up with frying magic and she'd do squirrel
same way same breading start in the pan then she'd take a big sheet pan and line it with foil
and put all those squirrel eggs on there and and throw it in the oven and you can cover it too
that's kevin murphy he covers it and then cooks it in 300 to help
tenderize it. A little moist
heat.
You guys got anything to add to the
introductory log game?
I'm on your line
of thought. Primal cuts, nice and
tender. Just keep them as plain as possible
but season them up just a touch.
Don't let them dip the shit in ketchup, man.
My old man had a ketchup.
We were allowed to dip deer heart in ketchup.
We couldn't dip normal deer meat in ketchup when I was a kid.
Yeah.
We definitely have like a, this is an okay ketchup and mayo meal.
For some reason, my kids freaking, they're just as happy dipping in mayo as they are ketchup.
But we definitely run rules. We're like nope this one nope you just you're just gonna eat and when i was a kid i just put ketchup on everything doesn't matter you've grown out of that you do
that yep but you've grown out of it oh yeah i still like i still like ketchup quite a bit but
i definitely don't don't put it on my deer steaks. Yeah. I have another buddy who I guided with for quite a few years,
and I was just the guy that would often cook in camp when there was no cook
and clients were out or whatever, and we'd just be hanging out.
And oftentimes I would spend a bit of time cooking up something,
and then he'd sit down and bust out the giant ketchup bottle
and just over the whole plate, man.
It kind of would hurt my heart a little bit, you know?
I'm like, I guess if that's how it is, that's how it is.
Need to take your beta blocker.
Oh, last thing real quick.
Last thing real quick.
The Meteor live tour, man.
Live tour.
Go to themeateater.com.
You'll find tickets. You'll find all the links to get all your tickets
we got shows coming up various things coming up you have to go look i'm not gonna bore you with
all the details right now but stuff coming up most of it's already been announced tickets are
available uh reno salt lake city sacramento cleveland kalamazoo schaumburg which janice
pointed out is basically chicago houston dallas port, Seattle, Lander, Wyoming, Austin, Texas, Boise, Idaho.
Meet Eater Live Tour.
Get your tickets.
That's my concluder.
That was a good concluder.
I don't have one today.
You boys got a concluder?
I'm all good.
Anything you were hoping to wedge in there?
Any little snubs?
Anything bad you wanted to say about Yanni?
I'm interested in what's going to happen tonight over at the house.
Oh, throwing lead and guts?
Yeah.
Dragging the Yule log.
Next time. you along next time Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.
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