The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 240: Good Myths Die Hard

Episode Date: September 28, 2020

Steven Rinella talks with Seth Morris, Spencer Neuharth, and Janis Putelis.Topics discussed: MeatEater Season 9; bears for Trump; finally, Spencer's squirrel nuts article; Steve creating his own myths; how Seth should approach mentoring Steve on how to flesh beavers; catch and keep ethics; JT Van Zandt knowing where all the little spots are; taking down a nilgai; Jani's journals; hydrogen peroxide hot tips; how single side clip binos reign supreme; Jani's special Michigan hat with ear flaps; Steve's oral sound FX for the sound a clip makes; tagging bucks and bulls; tracking animals with drones and dogs; loading two mule deer halves into a sack on a horse’s back; all the post-hunt logistics; duct taping skulls; high elevation challenges; butchering with a cleaver and rubber mallet; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with Onyx. Giannis, did you hear what happened to Brant's boat? No. You haven't heard this? No. I'm talking to Danny, my brother. This is our good buddy Brant Waterfowl Biologist

from Anchorage. Danny says, oh yeah, Brant matt carlson are out hunting and hunting moose in my boat and he said you'll notice i said my boat and i said what happened to brant's boat and him and danny were fishing cohos on the river and he said they're just in the like worst possible spot where there's this big tree across most the river and he said just ripping current through there and brant's daddy said he's glad he was nowhere near the tiller or nowhere near the center console for this but brant's like rafts around in front of this big overhanging tree and somehow snags something and pulls out you know that stupid

dangerous little safety feature yeah where you pull that rip cord you're supposed to hook it to your life jacket yeah or your wrist yeah I think it's more I think it's like pepper spray bear spray it's almost like I'm more scared of bear spray than bears and I'm almost more scared of those things than I am just because if it's not clipped in then you can't run the engine

yeah so which is where i can see where the story is somehow i don't understand how he somehow uh pulls that thing out engine just stops and Danny says he turns and here comes this tree branch trying to get this little thing up and back in there and shit and his boat's gone he said it hit like they had a bunch of all their gear everything they had with them Danny said he had time to jump clear that boat well he said for a minute he said

even as it was filling you could kind of control how it was flooding by how you leaned and where you put your weight but it was no stopping it did he climb out onto the tree he climbed out on the tree yeah danny so the tree is like out of the water and then has a bow in it and goes under you know they always do this sure it's like out of the water then it's under the water and then it's out of the water danny where he hits he's in he's gets in a spot where he can get out on the tree and leap the area but he said branch is hanging on. With waders on. With waders on and no wading belt. He hasn't read the Meat Eater Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival

because if he had, even though it hasn't been released yet, you can order it now on Amazon. He'd hear a big mouthful about putting your belt on. Danny said those waders were just ballooning out. Am I right that he said he had to ditch the waders to get out of there? I don't remember that. Hanging on to the tree.

By this time, the boat's gone. Gone like under the tree? Underwater. It's stuck on the tree still. Engine. Pinned. They got a buoy. Yeah, they're going to go back and get it once the water goes pinned pinned they got a buoy they yeah they're gonna go back and get it once the water goes they tie a buoy to it i wonder if that's an thing you can claim on insurance i asked him if he uh tied his name wrote his name on the buoy or anything you know but he said no this is the buoy tied to it underwater pinned they're waiting for

the water to go down and try to get their, at least get the boat and engine. Engine's going to be. He said they didn't lose anything other than like a rod or two. He lost all of his stuff. I thought Danny said he got it all back. No, that's right. He found some of it in back eddies and whatnot,

but I don't think he found it. I thought he said all they lost were like a couple rods. I think Brant lost three or four rods. Danny thought he said all they lost were like a couple rods. I think Brant lost three or four rods. Danny lost a rod. How far were they from the put in? Way the hell up. So they just flagged someone down and got a ride out?

Do you remember how they got out of there? I know they were way up because I remember the name of the tributary. The tributary is up a ways. I fished this river with them quite a few times over the years. I don't remember how they got out of there. I don't know if you said. Not quite a few, a few. Man, that's how those accidents go, man. Just from like happy fishing day into all of a sudden it's just terror.

Yeah. He said it took him a minute to figure out. He said the engine just stopped, you know, and he turns. He's like, this isn't good. So they were like already close to that snag. They just come around it, and he says, real fast current, and they're going up, and all of a sudden, just like the last thing in the world you want to happen.

Yeah, and he said you could kind of run around for a minute. It was like, and kind of like control where the water you know but he said there's no and then he said you know he got off to the beach and then had to try to you know half help try to get brant out of the water i'm going to give brant a call and console him a little bit didn't scare scare them off rivers. He's out. They were out. It's a good story though. It is. I'm glad they're both safe.

We were on that river one time. This is a funny story about that river. We get to the takeout and we'd been up, we'd gone up duck hunting and he's got my brother, Brant's doesn't, my brother has another river boat. It's got a go devil on it. You know, like it's like an, my brother has another riverboat. It's got a go-devil on it. It's like an 18 foot aluminum flat bottom

with an air-cooled, it's a Briggs and Stratton golf or lawnmower engine, right? That powers this big long shaft. And we're going up in the dark. Well, explain the go-devil, because I mean, it's

air-cooled. Yeah, you could run it across wet grass. It's air-cooled, and it's a big stainless steel shaft that goes back. They come different lengths, but you can get them that go back shorter ones. I think this has got about a six-foot shaft on it. Yeah, roughly. But they're made so that when the boat is pushed over, say, a log, that shaft is at such an angle, and there's, I guess what, I don't know if they call it a skeg-to on that shaft, but that is made so that the propeller will just bounce over said log as it comes across it.

So you can basically, like in the south, they'd run them a lot, and they literally run in inches of water that's sometimes closer to mud than it is water. Yeah. And the thing about being air cooled is like if anybody's ever run a normal boat motor, it's cooled by the water. Like there's an intake that sucks up river water, lake water, ocean water, and that cool water coming in is cycled through the engine. So you have to have some water just to cool the engine. But with an air-cooled engine, you don't need to worry about that. And as you're holding the tiller, you're doing – holding the tiller is more like three-dimensional.

Is that the right word? It's more three-dimensional. When you're holding the tiller, you're not only controlling like side to side. Yeah, you're working on two axes. Yeah, that's controlling side to side. Yeah, you're working on two axes. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to say. You're working on two axes. When you hold the tiller, you're working on side, side, up, down. So you're digging it in, lifting it out.

Anyhow, I remember this day because we were going up duck hunting, and it was dark, darkish, and running through. And I remember holding that tiller and going through a hole that had some salmon in it. That must've, I don't know, it must've been real thick in there. And it was just like, you can feel them hitting that shaft coming out, like the shaft going over the tops. But anyways, we get down after we duck hunt, same place, get down to that takeout. And there's a dude down there pretending to be the world's dumbest tourist boy golly you can fish and hunt ducks in there holy smokes

let me see one of them ducks right and we're just like you you know, entertaining him and amusing him. After a point, he opens up his jacket and pulls it out, and it's a badge. Oh, was he a warden? Yeah. Let's see your licenses. Oh, shit. Yeah. Yeah, he'd be like, you think that's cool? Look at this bald eagle I shot, you know, or whatever.

I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, I thought that was some shrewd game warden in alaska um they don't they don't it's troopers so so like in most states you got cops like regular you know state police county sheriff various municipal agencies yeah Yeah, counties. In Alaska, it's like troopers, state troopers. There are state troopers who specialize in like a wildlife division, but they're troopers. They're kind of, they can do whatever they want. I mean, any game warden can kind of like,

you know, any game warden can make an arrest for drugs or whatever, or assist and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, in Alaska, it's like troopers. There's not, the enforcement arm isn't part of the Fish and Game Agency. The enforcement arm is part of the state police agency. It was a trooper. Youth Duck opens for us Saturday.

I will be taking my kid. We shot a bunch of skeet last weekend. Taking them out for ducks. We'll put our blind out tomorrow. I plan on it being very low pressure. Yeah. He was telling me about how his arm was sore and a little bit bruised up from all the skeet shooting he did, but I think he was being very careful to not overemphasize it or spend too much time on it.

Because he doesn't want to get downgraded back to the.410. Yeah, that or that someone would just be like, yeah, well, you know, maybe we don't have to go yet. He's not letting it get in the way. He's like, even though my arm hurts, I'm going to go shoot ducks. Yeah, I can't wait, man. I feel like the ducks aren't really acting like ducks yet.

I don't think they know what hits them on a youth duck opener. No. You don't even see them flying around right now. They just kind of like... Oh, I saw them stacking into a cut wheat field two days ago. Oh, you did?

Yeah, it got me all excited. They just feel like they're just kind of like laying around a pond right now. Yeah. They're definitely not as active. They're like people at the beach. A month from now. Is what it looks like.

Yeah. I'm curious to see how that goes. Finally, another quick thing to touch on. Oh, two things. Some guy sent in a picture. I don't know if this is me. I think this made the news a little bit. There's like this bear running around with a collar on it.

And the bear is famously tame. And apparently it's so tame that someone managed to go up to the bear and put a Trump 2020 sticker on his radio collar. Really? Whoever it is, these researchers are now trying to they're now gunning for whoever was up like basically handling their bear wow that's crazy yeah like he lured i don't know i don't know how you pull that off he lured it in with some food put a bumper sticker on its radio collar. Oh, shit.

There's a $5,000 reward to find the person. Spencer's got the picture right there. That had to have been some drinking going on. Is it a crime? Harassing wildlife, maybe? It must be to put a bumper sticker

on a bear. I don't know. Who's putting out the... What state was it? North Carolina. Who's offering the reward? I don't know. Biden?

I'm reading about this right now. You get another five grand if you swap it out with one of these stickers. Yeah, I just have a feeling there is no bear anywhere carrying a Biden sticker. Spencer, real quick before we get started. You finally published, this is the last we'll ever discuss it. Okay. You finally published a Skrull Nuts article. Mm-hmm.

You know, I was thinking about this morning at the gym? They play that stupid show at the gym where the guys try to make up full-on make-believe shit to argue about sports. On ESPN. They full-on, like a producer,

makes up a thing to argue about. For 15 minutes, I can never tell what they're saying because the volume's off, but I can like read what's on the thing. Subtitles. Apparently for 15 minutes, they're arguing about like, does some, how important is it that some team wins the third game of the season series? And they get dressed up in suits to talk about this, which is the weirdest thing.

These guys wear the fanciest ass suits to argue about make-believe sports stuff. And here we are, the reason I bring this up, here we are talking about squirrels biting the nuts off of squirrels, and we're able to pull that off in t-shirts. The difference is too that like um this is real animosity that we have for them it's like they're inventing uh a side of the argument to argue but this is real though oh i'm sure they assign it i'm sure like they're like okay you uh you uh you act like it doesn't really matter if they win the third game, you know? And you over there, you'll act like it really does matter. That's what I'm saying.

Yeah. When the cameras are off there, they're not, like, continuing this argument. It's not like this in real life. No, but it kind of made me feel like I should get a really nice suit and come down here in a really swanky suit and talk about stupid stuff. Those wardrobes, I believe, are provided by, you know, if you

watch the credits. Yeah, and this is just me guessing, but I'm guessing that there's probably companies that are trying to get into those spots where, you know, you could provide a suit or two to the guys that do what oh that explains a lot man because it's pretty always got different little outfits oh yeah they're cutie

they're like little barbie dolls like super snazzy yeah that's you gotta be right i never thought of that that makes me actually feel better about it anyway so you finally put the squirrel nuts thing to rest me saying that me saying that I've always heard that pine squirrels bite the nuts off all the squirrels. Lots of people have heard that. And your official thing now is what? They do not do that. I'll give you credit in two places here.

Please. First place I'll give you credit is that this is a common belief. I was wrong about that. You even found where it might stem from. Common belief? I had thought that everyone believed this because Steve believed it. And then they had heard Steve say it on the podcast, right? And then it became a thing.

He thought it could all be traced to that. Sure. Steve was creating his own myths at this point. Which I might do sometime. I was wrong though. We got emails from Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Montana, everywhere in between saying that, oh, no, my uncle told me this. My neighbor told me this. My hunting mentor told me this. So it was like a fairly common belief that this happens.

And you found reference in the old book. Yeah, I did. The predates. Yes, 1956 in the Singing Wilderness. This is the oldest written source that I could track down of it. The book was inspired by Lake Superior's beauty, and it had a whole chapter. And who's the author? Dedicated to red squirrels.

It was written by Sigurd Olsson. Are you aware that I won the Sigurd F. Olsson Nature Writing Award? I'm not. You didn't know that? No. This is good full all comes around stuff though yeah that's actually when i won it i was actually taken out his i was uh laureled is that a word and his uh i was i was uh rewarded the reward award in his old stompa grounds i like it and

i have olsen nature writing award so when I saw that article I felt the kinship trade I felt a kinship but also betrayal I cigarette said that secret secret said that this was a I G U R D he had a whole chapter dedicated to red squirrels he's kind of like Aldo Leopold who never got real famous never got as famous and then isn't isn't in his time you know but isn't uh he didn't kind of like hit the mark he didn't kind of hit the afterlife jackpot quite like leopold did fair sure yeah so he had a whole chapter dedicated to red squirrels and in that chapter he said i also know that owls like them as well as martins, and that they can throw the fear of death into the larger gray squirrels

should they invade through the convenient medium of castration. Damn right. So that was what he said in his book. That's the oldest written source I could find. So I talked to John Kaprowski. He is the dean at the Hobbs School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming. Prior to that, he had written three books on squirrels. He's won awards for his work on squirrels.

Had those books then won the Secret F. Olsen Nature Writing Award? I don't know about that. I don't know, man. But if there's a dude that's written three books on squirrels, we might consider having him down. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I would consider him like the authority on squirrels. I wish Corinne was here.

He just moved to the, he went from the University of Arizona. Oh yeah. We're in contact with this fella. We're in contact with him. Great. Great. I think he'd be a good resource. Yeah. I'm going to do a football episode.

That's five, like a five pack. So I talked to him and then I also talked to Jonathan O'Dell, who's a small game biologist for the Arizona Game and Fish Department. Who happens to be a tree squirrel grand slam holder. That's right. So not only is he passionate about squirrels enough to work with them in his job, but he's also, what he thinks might be one of the first. He's so passionate that he also shoots them. One of the first people to have North America's squirrel slam, which is killing all eight species.

Eight? That's a lie, though. You can take it up with him. Well, all eight. What about the Delmarva fox squirrel? You can't hunt the Delmarva fox squirrel. Maybe it's like the eight huntable ones. Yeah, sure. He needs to fix up his language.

You need to fix up your language. He wouldn't say that if he's a squirrel man. Okay. So I talked to those two folks. They both said this doesn't happen. That's not a reality. They've like watched mating bouts.

They've, you know, dedicated their life. He's seen squirrels have sex a hundred times. Oh, yeah. In the wild. John Kaprowski said that he has spent tens of thousands of hours in detailed behavioral studies watching red squirrels. Red squirrels. Yes. Yeah.

He said this doesn't happen. But so another place that I'll give you credit, Steve, is that there is like good reason for believing this, right? Like red squirrels are pretty feisty. And then it's also common to kill like impotent squirrels that are males uh but what you're really seeing there is when you think you kill the squirrel that had its nuts bitten off is that for part of the year when they're not doing the squirrel rut when they're not breeding they'll absorb their testes like up into, I don't think you'd say their abdomen, but they absorb it up into their body. And then that, that sack shrinks.

Okay. So oftentimes you have. That's what happens to Seth now. Only when it's cold. That's right. Oftentimes you have some male squirrels running around that don't have visible testes. And then young of the year squirrels don't usually develop their testes until their first birthday. So you'll see a lot of male squirrels in the woods that appear to not have testicles, but it's not because they got bit off.

And you think Sigurd Olsson or whoever. Oh, you know, it's pretty good. I'll tell you another squirrel myth. You think Sigurd Olsson shoots a gray squirrel, inspects its genitalia, sees that it's missing its scrow, and says to himself, there's only one thing that could explain this. A pine squirrel, also known as a red squirrel, has eaten his testicles. I would also imagine that he was not like the source of this, right? Like he had heard it from his granddad and so on. But now we're going to put an end to that.

You know how it's often said, you're going to tell me, oh, it's not often said, but it is often said that Boone, Daniel Boone, would hunt squirrels by barking them. Are you familiar with this? Yeah. I'm familiar in a way that, like, I've seen squirrel calls. No, no, no. Barking them. It's a shot placement strategy.

Oh, like shoot next to them. So as not to damage the meat of the squirrel. Yes. You get a squirrel plastered against a tree. And you hit the tree. You shoot the tree. Right where the squirrels make a contact with it. So that he is concussed. And he was probably doing this with a musket ball, right?

No, he would have had a rifle. He would have had a rifle. Okay. He would have had a rifle he would have had a rifle okay he would have had a kentucky rifle but not a shotgun no but he would have been shooting like a rifled flintlock rifle okay well the feller that claims to have done that with boone he even says like what river they were on and what year it was and that boone loved to eat squirrels and loved to hunt squirrels and would bark the squirrels later historians looked and boone wasn't even in that state that year so it's like did the guy you know

did he mess it up or just lied about yeah was it john philson i don't know did he mess it up or just lied about it? Yeah. Was it John Filson? I don't know. Did he mess it up? Was he just being like he had heard something and wanted to attribute it? I think there's an endless amount. Just bullshit. I'm not saying it's bullshit, but when we were kids, we used to take all kinds of ball bearings and wrap them up in masking tape and shoot them off our slingshots, thinking that we would create a shotgun-like effect if you hit a tree near a squirrel or bird.

I think there's like an endless amount of fact-checking you can do with stuff like Boone and Crockett and Hugh Glass and all those folks that it's just like, it's hard to even start down that wormhole because it would just like never end. Mm-hmm.

I like it though. I'm glad that you finally put some effort into that because it made some gravy. I don't know because I still... When we're talking about strange human behaviors, Rick Smith, the cameraman,

likes to say, there are 7 billion people on this planet. So am I surprised that someone did that? No. Now I'm like this. You're telling me that somewhere at some point in time a red squirrel's never bit another squirrel? Well, it's not common. Jonathan O'Dell, the squirrel slam holder, did say that.

He's like, the squirrels will get tangled up, and they'll bite each other, and they'll wrestle, and it gets violent. He's like, they won't intentionally go for the testicles, but there's probably been instances where they get the testicles. Yeah. Boy, that's a good time to sneak in there and kill a whole pile of them. You see all the time on like Nature's Metal and those Instagram accounts where squirrels will get their nuts hung up on like feeders and fences and stuff. I'm sure they eventually rip them off. Yeah.

Well, and then somebody commented on your Instagram post, Steve, and they said, well, I don't know. We live in an area that used to have a lot of gray squirrels. And then red squirrels moved in and all the gray squirrels disappeared. Furthering that they do actually castrate them. Rather than just displace them. Right. It's not like white tails.

I saw that. Some guy's like, someone white tails displace mule deer. They're biting all their nuts off. I was that guy. I wrote that. Oh, that was you? Alrighty, alrighty, alrighty. Alright, what we're doing now, we're in honor of or in celebration of the ninth season, our ninth season, which is a five-pack of episodes.

There's more episodes coming up soon. Of Mead is out on Netflix, available for viewing now. And so every time we launch new episodes, we get like a bunch of questions. And oftentimes we get a bunch of the same questions. Like people watch it and certain things percolate through the collective brain. And then this time around, we went and solicited those

questions and then we commissioned uh spencer here to come in and ask those questions and to answer the questions we have people who are very very close who are all present for all production seth you didn't miss any did you you, Seth? Nope, not last year. I was there for everyone. Seth is there. Seth, now that I have my own fleshing beam. Oh, when I gave Travis Barton the welder, this is the first fleshing beam stand he's ever worked on.

He does a lot of decorative stuff. You gave him my stand. He wanted to see your stand. Yeah. To replicate it for my fleshing beam. What do you think? You know how the tensioner on your adjustable part? I told him to turn that into a hand crank.

So he didn't need to get out a hex head wrench to do it. That's a good idea. But then he thought, what if that bolt has sentimental value? So he's producing a whole new T-bolt. Oh, nice. With a T-grip on it, and you'll still have the sentimental bolt on your thing. It's not sentimental at all. Now I'm going to have my own beam, and Seth's going to mentor me.

Yep. What's the originator beam? Did you make it? His old man made it no my old someone made my old man had it made by i don't remember who someone actually might have been my buddy rusty fetzer his dad might have done it i don't remember who welded up the stand i think it was my buddy's dad he's a great welder you know what Travis Barton thinks That he used in the construction Of that stand

He thinks there's like a hex Shaped shaft He thinks that that's off an old chisel Might be I don't remember who welded it He also thinks it's very dirty Oh it's covered in fat and Blood He commented on mold he

commented on what he might catch from that thing i don't clean it yeah okay so where were we oh yeah are you like happy or intimidated that i'm getting into beaver fleshing well i'm not intimidated yet because i still have to teach you how to do it but no it's it's good because uh you know what how many beers we catch 30 or yeah that's daunting when you got 30 in the freezer so it's nice to know that you could do half of them you know and there's a part of a mentor mentee in the sort of uh trajectory a mentor-mentee relationship, there's sort of like a playbook of how those relationships work. There comes a part in a mentor-mentee relationship

when the mentee, me, actually turns against the mentor. Why? It's just like a thing that happens. And there's that saying. You can study this. You can study this. Where are we at in that relationship i thought you were gonna say where the mentee gets better and starts teaching the mentor stuff no he becomes like dismissive of probably like some kind of psychology about like they don't like to behold they don't like to feel

beholden yeah so then they need to get to a to a point where they have like outshined or – yeah, there's a part of that. There's a part where we will turn against one another. There's a saying. Probably flesh in different areas of the office. Yeah. From like Seth's perspective. Seth would be like, I taught him everything he knows. And now he acts like he came up with it.

But no, no, no. Seth is saying, I taught him everything he knows, but I didn't teach him everything I know. So he's going to hold back now, knowing that you're going to turn on him. Seth, if you... Go ahead. I was going to say, I'll keep some real hot tips that I won't share with him. He's going to teach me his signature stroke, and then I'm going to tell people that I made up that stroke. The only problem is you went with a different fleshing also i went with an ensemble yeah we'll

have to see how that is i'm skeptical seth uses the famous um necker yeah but i've been here i was reading on little comment sections about the necker ain't all that anymore yeah maybe maybe it's not i bought an ensemble by, it's made by like Dexter. Those fellas have been in the beaver processing business for about a couple hundred years. Maybe they got something going on. I don't know. Seth, if you get up in the morning, I got a question for Seth. You get up in the morning.

This is from a listener. This is from Yanni's brain. You didn't do any heavy partying it's just a regular old morning you get yourself a cup of coffee and you got your mindset on fleshing a beaver you put on your apron

everything's there I'll point out that this never happens this never ever happens what's the length of time it'd take you just to knock one out it very much heavily depends on the size a big beaver takes a shit length of time it'd take you just to knock one out? It very much heavily depends on the size. A big beaver takes a shitload of time. Like how much time?

I think I did, the last time I kept track, I did one big beaver per hour. On the board. That's like flesh and put on the board. Those guys in Minnesota that we're going to hang out with. They ain't too bad. No, those guys in Minnesota we're going to hang out with this year.

He says it's, I think he says 10, 10, and 10. 10 to skin, 10 to flesh, 10 to get it on the board. 30 minutes start to finish. I didn't know about this adventure. You guys cut me

out of they're better than me it's a dude i met in uh what the hell's that town name some towns way up in northern minnesota where guys would trap a lot of beavers bemidji they got the number one ducks unlimited college chapter way the hell up in bemji. I met those kids and they gave me a Ducks Unlimited College Chapter hoodie. Up in Bemidji. Anyways, I met him. This guy is Joe Beaver. It's not his name. His name is Mike, actually.

This guy's name is Joe Beaver and I want to go out there. One of my problems, though, with speed on fleshing right now is my knife is dull. And you won't let me sharpen it. Well, I'm afraid. Yeah. Spencer, how interested do you think people are in this conversation? I think fairly interested. Oh, really?

Yeah. I don't want to bore them. Especially since it stretches beyond the podcast, right? There's videos of you guys fleshing Instagram posts. The problem with Yanni's question is Seth never has woken up and fleshed a beaver. I've done that before. He fleshes beaver at night if you cajole him. He likes to flesh around six, around five or six o'clock.

I shoot my rifles in the morning, flesh the beavers in the evening. That's how it goes. He kind of gets in the mood mid-afternoon, late afternoon sometimes. I was going to say, I've seen him here in the office all times of the day. Well, mostly because I'll get the beavers out in the morning, let them thaw,

and then by evening they're ready to flesh. That's a good explanation. So, that's how that works. Yeah. All right, let's do a season nine question.

First question. What was the full conversation like between Jesse and JT arguing over keeping that tanker redfish? Danny? We showed it. I think we did a really good job of showing what it was. There wasn't much more to it. JT's kind of like, yeah, you know, usually I let him go,

but if you want to keep it, please do. Jesse's like, yeah, I do. JT stuck a knife across his gills and that was the end of it. Yeah, I think that JT, he's torn. JT Van Zandt, he's torn.

He's in different directions because he's a guide, so he wants you to have fun. He recognizes that it's a good fishery that's well-managed, but he's cognizant of not being abusive of that. And I think that he lets far more go than he keeps. He's leery of killing them, killing them and throwing them in the kua just for the sake of doing that. You know? Yeah, it's not something he promotes.

Yeah. But when it's, you know, I think that he gets on board with keeping a fish if he knows that it's going to be treated well respectfully and consumed quickly then i think it makes him feel better if you said what i want to do is get it and then freeze it and then put it in my freezer and then wait a year and then throw it out because it's freezer burned i think the jesse or i think the jt would be very, very not cool about it. All right. I know it wasn't JT style, but did you all consider Wade fishing when you did the episode in Rockport? That is not, not JT style.

You're saying it is JT style. He does like to do that. And I have done that with him. It wasn't warm while we were down there. So that probably played into it. But no, he'll get out and chase them on foot. If you want to have a hell of a... I don't know if you've seen it. People have seen his show.

If you want to have a hell of a good day of fishing, go book... What's he call his outfit? It's like JT Van Zandt. Rockport, Texas. Yeah, I don't know if he has a name of the outfitter. I don't know if he does either. JT Van Zandt, Rockport, Texas.

Redfish and sea trout. I would suggest going when he says you ought to go. Because I've gone when he says you... I've gone when he says... He guides all the damn time. I think he does one month a year or something. He doesn't guide. But he guides all the damn time. He takes like, I think he like just one month a year or something. He doesn't guide. But he'll kind of tell you, like we've gone out when he was, when he said,

yeah, we will find fish, but it's not like the best time of year. And then we went out when he said, this is the time to go. And holy cow, man. JTVanZan.com. That's where you can find them, book trips. Were you there when it was supposed to be good dude you have never seen fish like what we saw when we were filming that episode i've never seen fish like that we one time we weren't even really filming anymore

man we're like we kind of like got our most we put some of it in we kind of got everything we wanted to do done. We were heading out one day and like the wind had switched or something. And there's like this channel. He guides this real flat stuff and it's just like channels and flats and, you know, how do you describe it? Very intercoastal.

Yeah. Intercoastal, like estuary type water, you know, that's sandy, shallow, lots of grass poking up everywhere here and there, and just little braids and channels and islands and maze-like. I mean, you could get lost in there in a heartbeat, and it opens up into little bays and stuff that if you don't know how to get out of it and then the water drops out of the tide boy you could be there for the tide cycle

and this dude knows like what the fish are doing man and he we're kind of done for the day and heading out and the wind had switched and so it's blowing water i think that's where i was like blowing water into these channels because the fish like to find current. And the current can come from a variety of ways, like tide, wind, whatever. And we get into this spot and we pull over. And it was like, I'm not, it was just. Every cast.

It was every cast, but to this point. I actually had more fish than casts at one point. I was at 11 fish and 10 casts because one of the times I just had my, I took the fish off and had my grub in the water and a redfish grabbed it. So that put me 11 fish, 10 casts. I've never seen anything like it, man. Like, and then you're out there with him you think you think like holy cow this place is full of fish but i think it's probably quite plausible

you go down and rent a boat and not get shit either oh yeah but he just knows like what's going on and this little spot right here right now like or later in the day this little spot or they're not in this little spot which must mean they're in this little spot and it gives you the illusion that like any moron could go in there and catch a bunch of fish right on the next episode when you were chasing nil guy and the guy told you to shoot again did it go against your beliefs and that he thought in that he doubted that you had great shot placement the first time did you feel obligated to shoot again when he told you to no no but you're like you're highly um impressionable in moments like that and and uh so i think that same question pointed out like that you were, there's two. So we had multiple guided trips in this episode.

So we were guided by JT Van Zandt. We were guided on that Neil guy deal. And the Neil guy deal was we like kind of like we sort of through social connections knew a social connections had a connection to a ranch. And the ranch does allow some guided hunting on there. And the guy that owns the place, like, coming out to hunt, I'd prefer that one of our guides went out and accompanied you guys. He knows what's up. The guy was totally cool.

The guy was not, like, obstructionist at all, very knowledgeable. And those Nilgai are famous for not dying when shot. And you have really thick, thick brush. It's like you get up high on something. It's just like this, like eight, I don't know how tall, just this very thick brush extends for, you know, miles and miles and miles. And that guy was saying, you hit them wrong and they make it in there. He goes, once they get into that brush, I get a sinking feeling.

He's like, they reiterated, they don't bleed well. They have a very thick hide. He just was paranoid about losing them. Yeah, I believe you even shot the heart, didn't you? I shot the top of the heart right off. And there was almost no blood. And this thing, dude, it got up and ran. So he had already set it up.

Very, very knowledgeable dude. He had already set it up that, like, very, very knowledgeable dude. He had already set it up, like, listen, man, these things get in the brush and they vanish. Yeah, he said multiple times, shoot until you can't, you're either down or they're in the brush. Yeah, and he said, you go and look and you don't find blood. He goes, I just, like, you know, we do everything we can do. But he said, it's just. So when he said do that no i didn't i mean i was he was there he was there to be helpful and was helpful and was totally cool so you had no regrets about pumping two in him no plus the thing's huge

i mean i think if you were out hunting pronghorn or something and and you can see every which way for a million miles and you're hunting an animal that's famous for like not taking a hit very well then i would have not done it but when you got a guy that kind of he's devoted his life to the whole thing and the guy says shoot i think you probably ought to shoot Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated.

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slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Alright, does Steve write a journal day to day to narrate the show or does he just watch the footage and write something up after yanni keeps a journal just yanni yep just not that kind of sometimes uh seth helps yeah

but uh yeah during every day we sort we keep a log that uh has just the the major happenings of the day and what time that they happened. So it is sort of like a journal. So you kind of know what went down in the day. And then if there's something that happens, like an interesting conversation or a moment, let's just say a nil guy gets shot. You know, you write down that at 12.05, nil guy got shot.

And then there was a butchering scene afterwards and so on and so forth. And also you take note of conversations and whatnot even yeah for sure yeah no especially good ones you know and because those are the ones that go really well when you then we turn those notes into a document called producer notes which we hand off to the editors and it's sort of like a roadmap for the editors because they watch the footage and even though though you'd think as much as we roll that they would be able to watch the footage and have a great idea of what happened, but it's just not that way.

I mean, what they see is, you know, 10% of what actually happened. And so they need sort of like a roadmap and an outline to understand what went down over the course of a shoot. Is that how it's always been or did it evolve to become this? No, I was trained to do that.

In terms of the VO writing, when the editor, so the editor gets it, we usually have a conversation, Janio will lay out what's up. An editor still has a lot of freedom to kind of find what they want to find in there, but then the editor will put in something called scratch vo because they sort of need to like create a bed for vo that doesn't mess up the pacing so by the time i write the actual vo um you're typically aware of like what kind of chunk of time what kind of chunk of time you're filling there. And, um,

then it goes like through a thing called, there's a, we do a process that has a rough cut and a fine cut, but I'm usually like when it comes to actually like writing the stuff, I'm usually filling in, um, writing over the top of something that the editor knows ought to be addressed. And that's how that process goes.

I'm actually curious on what you use for bags that you keep meat in when you're, when it's in your pack. Also, do you just put your backpack in the washing machine to get the blood out? I'll take the blood out. No, Yanni will take the blood out one. Cause he's, he's got a whole thing. Okay. I'll take the blood out. No, Yanni will take the blood out one because he's got a whole thing.

Okay. I'll take the bag one. When we take an animal apart in the field, we use breathable game bags. So when a quarter or a leg, a back strap, a rib slab, boned out meat, whatever, it generally goes, generally speaking, goes directly from the carcass to a bag. Unless there's a nice, unless there's no bugs around and there's a nice place to hang it while you work. You know, you might have a little stob sticking off a tree and you could hang a cord around there and let it do its thing and dry it out.

Yeah, or sometimes we'll make like a, almost like a trellis. Yeah. You know, out of some fallen logs and let it out. Cause it is nice for this reason that to let some of the blood either drain off of it, if it is super bloody or, uh, and even to let the meat

just kind of get like that air dry crust on it, you know, before you put it into the game bag. Yeah, that that's not, and if it's the winter time, you know, there's usually always a way to do it. Sometimes you're in a place where everything's just grubby and sandy. Like when we were hunting oryx this year in New Mexico, there'd been like no, everything's just dust and sand and bugs. And it just goes into a breathable bag. I used to use a type of bag. A lot of people use them. I think they're just inexpensive.

Looks like cheesecloth called Alaska game bags. I think there's various companies that make them. But the thing about them is that the flies can lay eggs through the fabric. Uh, and some dirt passes through them but they're inexpensive and they're disposable but now um we use them reusable fly proof breathable bags you might think of it as sort of a very lightweight souped up pillowcase with a drawstring on it goes into those. And then I keep in my pack at all times. I buy contractor bags by the box. So 50 or whatever.

And I just keep a contractor bag in my bag and the bottom, the very bottom of my backpack is always a contractor bag, which can be used for setting stuff on. You can make a poncho out of it, whatever. But when I put it in my pack, I, I line my pack with the contractor bag, put the game bag in there, and then you don't want to leave it in there for, you know, days on end, but for a couple hour hike or whatever, that's what I do. Cause I just get so sick cleaning my damn backpack all the time. So I line it with a contractor bag. And then when I get where I'm going, I promptly

take the breathable game bag because that's not breathable. Take the breathable game bag back out. If one does get blood all over their pack, which is inevitable. Yeah. Well, and there's another system too, which I use this year packing some of my bull off the

hill in Colorado. And I ended up just using the Stone Glacier Load Cell, which it took me a while to understand that that's literally what it's meant for. It's basically their version of a game bag, but it fits perfectly on that load shelf, right? Oh, you're talking about the actual bag. Yeah.

Like I used to even in the beginning. Oh, you said load cell. I thought you said shelf. I got what you're saying. Cell. Yeah. Like I used to even in the beginning. Oh, you said load cell. I thought you said shelf. I got what you're saying. Cell. Yeah. And it basically looks like almost like a roll top dry bag because it's got a roll top on it, but it's not meant to be a waterproof bag. It doesn't have tape seams. So if blood is still coming out of your meat, it's meant to be able to leak out and for air to go through the fabric. Yeah. No flies going to lay in it. But it's just the perfect shape that when you pack it full,

it's plenty of meat to carry. It's going to be heavy. I mean, you're going to have 60 pounds of meat if you fill it to the brim, maybe more. But it just fits in that load shelf just perfectly. And you could also put the contractor bag with the game bag inside of it in that load shelf too. But there, the load shelf itself is coated in like this

waterproof fabric. And then the fabric that's on the backpacks inside that faces your back on the outside is also waterproof. So any blood that goes towards the backpack doesn't go through it, doesn't get to your gear. It doesn't really soak in. Sometimes the edges will get some blood that happened to us in Colorado. And I think as long as you get to it, like the day of or the next day, all I did was had like a bowl of soapy warm water. And I found a scrub brush under the kitchen sink where we were staying. And I put 10 minutes of elbow grease into it and then hit it with the hose and my pack was clean. If it was super soaked, I guess you could take it off and run it through the wash, but I think the key is to get it to it quickly. Now, I have also in the past, which works pretty slick, is I think what you were talking

about earlier is used hydrogen peroxide to cause the blood to kind of foam and bubble up. And then you just basically dump that on there, scrub it, rinse it off, dump some on there, scrub it, rinse it off. And that'll help pull blood out of fabric. Oh, you know, it's interesting. We, when we were caribou hunting this year,

my boy got a, one of those red legged flies in his, against his eardrum. It was making him nauseous. Like it just flew in there. Yeah, it was affecting his balance and making him nauseous. And put hydrogen peroxide in there. Holy shit, did that thing come out of there in a hurry.

Like bubbled him right out. Nice. Did your son know what was going on? Oh, yeah. Whoa. He didn't like it one bit. You just happened to have some peroxide with you? No, because we were at, we were boning out meat back at the bush pilot strip.

And a woman there was like, I came running in with him and I was going to try to get it out with water. And she's like, no, put hydroperoxide in there. And one drop of that shit in that bug was out of there, you know, bubbled. That's a hot tip. That is a hot tip. Yeah, that dislodged him in a hurry, man. Was there panic from father and son there or just son? No, I wouldn't say I panicked.

I mean, I didn't think that we were going to never get it out of there. I was eager to get it out of there. I was eager to get it out of there, though. Before we leave the subject, be careful with hydrogen peroxide because I think you can leave it on fabrics too long and it could actually start to eat away at your fabric.

Yeah. The thing I found, too, is people think they got their pack clean and they didn't because you lay it out in sun and your pack stops smelling and then the minute it rains, The thing I found too is people think they got their pack clean and they didn't. Because you lay it out in sun and your pack stops smelling and then the minute it rains. Oh, yeah. It's like, you didn't get that clean. Yeah.

And that's a bad smell, man. Yeah. Now, Stone Glacier's got a, they have a real nice tutorial video if you need to know how to clean a pack well. I noticed you guys are only running one clip off your binos instead of one on each side. Damn straight. What's the reason for that? Paul Lewis thinks we're goofy for doing that. Oh, he does?

He's way wrong. Explain to me better what this listener is referring to. Okay. I use, everyone I hang out with It's the best one out there In the old days You just wore your binoculars around your neck Okay

And then came the days of the Then came the days We used to do binals around your neck Then you'd go to the drugstore and get surgical tubing Oh And run surgical tubing around your back And clip it into the connection point where the binal harness, where the neck strap is, so that when you're creeping up

on a deer or whatever, the surgical tubing keeps your binos from bouncing around. Little innovators over there at the Rinella camp. Well, no, we sold the idea, and we'd also put a Prusik. You'd have that surgical tubing tie into a piece of paracord, and there'd be like a little Prusik knot around that paracoid, so as you took layers on and off, you could cinch up and down. We kind of stole that idea somehow. Then came the vinyl harness.

No, you're forgetting the elastic band harness that everybody ran for a long time. Oh, yeah, it looked like a pair of suspenders. Yeah. Yeah, what was that company that first made those? I had one of those things. Maybe Butler Creek? Yeah, I think it was Butler Creek. But I mean, everybody made them eventually.

Yeah. Leupold would have one. It looked like suspenders, yeah. Bella's had them. But yeah, and they were better than just running the neck strap with the surgical tubing. Then came. I want to quick talk about the custom. I got sick of it.

Back before I had a binal harness, I got sick of that feeling on my neck. I took an old pair of neoprene waders and cut a very healthy chunk of neoprene and made a custom neck strap so that I had neoprene wader material. Then I stitched in my nylon webbing into that. And that was comfortable. Very comfortable. Sounds comfortable. And then I had the surgical tubing thing.

But then, then came the suspenders, whatever the hell they call those. I think a lot of hunters are still stuck on that evolution. Oh yeah. There's still guys. No, there's guys that much prefer the suspenders, whatever the hell they call those. I think a lot of hunters are still stuck on that evolution. Oh, yeah. Those guys that much prefer the suspenders. Yep. I saw a bunch of dudes this weekend wearing them. Yeah, I think the one thing that they have is that there is no lid, and so they are more accessible, right?

If you're hot in on a stalk, you know. But as soon as the dust kicks up and it starts to rain or snow, man, you can't see anything through your bars. Yeah, or you go to climb over a barbed wire fence and it gets hung up because they still flop around. They do flop. But if you're out there mixing it up and stuff, just get a harness. Yeah.

It's like a little pouch. It's a little pouch. We've got, like, I use them. Our camera guys like them so much. They started using bino pouches just to keep their gear in. And then they started running around even in cities working on other projects. Like Moe would be in some restaurant filming No Reservations or Parts Unknown with a bino harness on with his camera gear in it. FHF now makes a chest rig.

Yeah. And the camera guys like those because you can fit all manner of garbage and a camera in it. Yeah. Like when Mo Fallon discovered one, he goes, I can't believe I've gone through my whole life wasting that piece of real estate on my chest. Yeah.

Like it hasn't done me any good. Now it's like my storage area. But if you have a bino harness and don't clip them in, you'll be like Giannis. Giannis was jumping over a Creek one time and his binos fell out of his bino harness and they weren't clicked in. Well, no, because i was using a less thought out of lower quality was

using a magnet kind no it had a clip in the front i'm not going to mention the brand but there was no tether option oh at all i couldn't even tell if you wanted to no it was just a clip in the front and that was the other thing. So you had to have that thing clipped. Remember those things? They fell out twice. Yeah, fell out into a raging creek. Yeah. Hunting bears and we looked and looked and best we

can tell they're in the ocean. It was a rager, man. Yeah, a little bit of a bummer, man. We were like feeling around in the, any little pools down below him i mean you could jump this thing almost and we're like palming around rolling your sleeves up feeling around in little pools and then to go to the next pool and feel around and be like what's got me in the next pool in the next pool and feel around it's just why it was just wide

enough and raging enough that we took our packs off and threw them across and then like you know people would just kind of stand on the far side when you jump to grab your arm and pull you over but it was raging enough that had you just cannonballed into it you would have gone for a ride yeah for sure sucked him away so that wouldn't happen to him had he clipped in but why clipping one one side instead of both? It's way better. That's what the question is. It's way better. Because it hangs. The way they're clipped in on an FHF system is coming off the shoulder straps that go

up and over your shoulder. Into those, into the adjustment section, there's a very thin but strong piece of, I don't know. Webbing. Webbing that's connected to a small clip. And there's one on each side. And then the, you know, male end of that, I think it's male on your shoulder strap and the female end you attach to the binoculars themselves.

And so binoculars have two attachment points. The harness has two attachment points and you clip them in. We do one. For a bunch of reasons. The one I usually think of is that there's often times when you want to share your binoculars with someone. And instead of unclipping two, you just unclip one, pass them over. But that seems like something unique to you guys.

Yeah, it's- How often are you out with somebody that doesn't have binos? I'm going to beat Paul Lewis's ass. So there's two of them on there. There's two of them on there. I don't care what kind of stuff they taught him in the cops. I'll take them. There's two of them on there because like Yanni said,

people are like, well, they must need two because there's two sides to binoculars. But I always put my binoculars on a tripod. My kids are always like, give me the binoculars, give me the binoculars. Why go like clip, clip? It's only meant to keep you from losing it. But I feel like the sharing of binoculars is something that's like sort of unique to when you're with cameramen that don't have binos. Or when you're with –

Okay. And putting them on my tripod. I just don't need to do two. And when it is hanging there, I like how it hangs. Is there a preferred side? Like if you're left handed versus right handed? Right hand side. I would never do it on the left side.

And all three of you are like this. I can't even. No. I used to be, but I went back to two. Just because I like it better. I like when they're hanging. A couple times, you know, if you don't button up your harness,

and you bend over, they can fall out. If they're clipped on the right side? Yeah, no, they fall out and they'd just be clipped to one and it'd do the old swing around. When they fall out... Does this happen to you? Yeah, when they fall out... Do you get hurt? No. When they fall out. Did you get hurt? No. When they fall out and there's two,

it just plops out and it's still hanging right there. What's the next question? I thought that was a silly question, but I'm in. I like that. I don't mind unsnapping the two little clips to put them on my tripod. I go so far as to get rid of the other clip. I take it off the bino and I unthread it

out of the harness and put it in a place where I put all of them. Top drawer, left cabinet. Toward the front. All those things are sitting there. I had a little collection. I should just take them back to FHF and let them rework. Make a new set. When you were hunting in Wyoming,

what hat was Giannis wearing? I believe they must be talking about my stormy chrome oh there's a good story about this stormy chrome there is oh yeah well that was the one prior to that but uh yeah it's a stormy chrome it's a uh I don't know it's a Michigan hat yeah it's a Michigan hat you see a lot of ranchers wearing a lot of the ranches wear like the more like wooly version which has like much deeper ear flaps that come all the way down it kind of covers the that's a Michigan hat. You see a lot of ranchers wearing them. A lot of the ranchers wear like the more like woolly version which has like

much deeper ear flaps that come all the way down. It kind of covers the nape of your neck. But yeah, I like it. It's made out of wool. It's warm.

It's got like, it's got a short brim so it doesn't really get in the way when I'm wanting to shoot my rifle. No, it's a good hat, man. You really like that hat.

Yeah. I've had a couple. But the first one I had one time, I was – I think I saw the game one pulled over, so I pulled in behind him just to chat, see if I could work out some game location info out of him. And he – I must have – I was wearing the hat, and he said, you know, that next season you might want to get a new

chromer because that one ain't quite Hunter's Orange anymore. But I mean, it was five, six years old, and I think just being a dyed wool fabric, Colorado sun beats it up. And I'll point out that I don't let it just ride around on my dashboard. I looked it up, and they are out of Michigan, and their tagline is the original winter cap. I don't let it just ride around on my dashboard. I looked it up and they are out of Michigan and their tagline is the original winter cap. I don't know about that. Beaver. Beaver was the original winter cap.

All right. Someone says I need to know what the detachable tripod gun mount was on the Wyoming hunt. Spartan. That's a good bipod mount. Very good bipod mount very good bipod mount what how it works is that you in the old days you'd get a the count the springs on them yeah you want to mention the company's name no they make a great product yeah harris harris i used to have those man you get into like an alder choked hellhole though those springs they are they are prone to some snagging they're not good for thick brush but

anyways and you they're very stable though and you'd like but it stays you put it on there and it's on there the bipod for the most part you know you don't like take it on and off throughout the day but uh the Spartan bipod is like a very nice good bipod and what you do you don't like take it on and off throughout the day but uh the spartan bipod is like a very nice good bipod and what you do is you put like this attachment on the forearm of your firearm and then it you replace your front swivel stud yeah so the thing you use like that little screw stud that you use to put your sling on you take that out screw in the attachment point for the bipod. And then that plate, that attachment plate,

has another hole that accommodates your sling. Then you carry in your pocket, in a holster, in your pack or whatever, the bipod prongs. And it's a magnetic fitting. It's very satisfying. No, it goes like click. Maybe a clunk. Imagine, it goes like. Maybe a. Try like a.

Imagine like a suction. With a funk. At the end. Not like that. Not like. It's like. Yeah. That's it.

That's it. That one was too moist. Does he go with you on every hunt? Yeah. Well, no. Some. Just depends. Anything dry. Open. Anything. Any kind of open country stuff yeah but if i was sitting you know out of hunting in a deer blind i i don't imagine i would

tote it around yeah if i think there's going to be shots over 200 yards then i'll definitely have it with me they they make a thing where you can put it on a tripod too. So, you know, you can be standing. You don't always have to be prone. You can clip it into a tripod and be standing or whatever. It's a very nice product. Oh, and you can do that with any tripod head? Like they just have like a quarter 20 attachment? Yeah, I think it's called the Davros head or something.

It's made for going on tripods and they make their own tripod. Oh, but you got to have the whole head. It's just the head. It's made for going on tripods and they make their own tripod. Oh, but you got to have the whole head. It's just the head. It's not, it's very simple. Small little head that you can screw on to like cord 20. Hmm. To look into that.

All right. Why do you use zip ties instead of electrical tape to attach your tag to an animal? I have no idea. I have no idea. I've had great luck with them I carry zip ties in my kit Until Wyoming Until Wyoming

That was like part of the episode That's not what happened It wasn't the zip ties fault Oh no it is what happened Oh that's what he's getting at Yeah like what if that happened if you had electrical tape I can't remember the details No

That deer took a tumble when we were trying to... Didn't... Yeah. I don't know, man. It kind of slid down the hill. I feel like the zip tie failed. That's right. The zip tie broke off.

Yeah. It was a real steep slope, and instead of, like, dragging the deer, the deer kind of was... It was one of those situations where instead of dragging deer, the deer's dragging you. Like, once you got it out of its final resting place, it was just going. Snow covered, very steep, icy hillside. And it slipped out of my hand.

Yeah, and it slid down the hill a little bit through some scree rock. Yeah, and a rock or something busted the zip tie. Yeah. And then we looked and looked for it in the dark. And then came back. And I was going to, you know, I was going to, I was like figuring out we're going to try to contact Fish and Game. It had been validated. So we're like making a plan on how to contact the Fish and Game agency and say we have an untagged deer.

So he's like simply lost the tag. And then went back in the daylight and scoured around and found the tag. But yeah, no real reason why. And that didn't change your mind either? Like you'll still be carrying zip ties this year? It wasn't until this gentleman, I'm assuming it's a gentleman. It wasn't until this gentleman flagged it in my head that I realized that I finally put it together that that might be better to use electric tape. Yeah, it's a tough one. I don't carry both usually in my little kit that, you know, rides in my backpack along

with me all the time. But I just feel in my head right now that I'd have more uses for the three or four zip ties that I usually pack in there than I would if I had the little mini roll of electrical tape. I usually have a little mini roll of duct tape in there, which I could use for that too. I keep it wrapped around my cigarette lighters. Some states tags, though, if you put tape on them,

would totally destroy them. Yeah. That's kind of the other thing about this. Yeah. When you go to peel the tape off, you're going to screw your thing up, especially now that more and more states are going where you print your tags at home.

Yeah. You're not going to duct tape that on there and take it off again. You got to put it into a little baggie and then duct, and then. Yeah, it was a zip tie. I have. I've used everything from paracord, tied it on there, taped it on there, med tape, duct tape, black tape, zip ties. I don't know. It seems like a lot of tags actually have two holes that are just the right size to slip that eight or 10 inch zip tie or paracord through there.

They're punched for a zip tie. I used to use a big pin when I lived in Pennsylvania. You put the tag through the pin and then stick it through the ear. Like a safety pin? Yeah, like a big safety pin. Bucks and does? Yeah. Yeah.

See, for us, it's usually not a problem because if we butcher in the field, I mean, I usually... Oh, I forgot that's my reason why. I usually don't attach anything because legally, you don't have to attach it until you're moving the carcass.

And so usually everything's chopped up and quartered and we usually find, if you need to have evidence of sex, we find the bag that has the testy in it and then attach the tag to it inside the bag and close the bag. You know. That's another argument for

zip ties. Is on Antlerless Game, I zip tie my tag to the gambrel. To the Achilles tendon of the animal. I think a lot of states should take, should learn a lesson from Alaska. Alaska doesn't, except for metal locking tags, which you need, non-residents need, you validate your tag and keep it on your person they don't make you go through the sort of

like it seems silly that you need to fasten it to the thing anyways if it's with the person who has the thing in their possession why can't they just keep it all nice and clean in their pocket well i think that yeah what we're talking about here in five years is probably going to be pretty archaic because pretty soon it'll all be on your phone. Yeah. Has the crew ever thought about using drones to scout for deer? We talk about it all the time, but it's becoming increasingly illegal.

But we do talk about, like the other day we were having this conversation, hunting moose and real thick willows. And I was like, man, no wonder Alaska made drones legal because imagine you can fly a drone up and find all the moose. And our camera guy was like, man, no wonder Alaska made drones legal. Cause imagine you can fly a drone up and find all the moose. And our camera guy was like, I think that like the res just, I think that seems like, and he's, it does a lot of drone work for all kinds of reasons. Different kinds of stuff from like real estate stuff to wildlife stuff. But, um, he's like the resolution and the usage he goes it just doesn't really

work that way i don't know that i believe that it doesn't work that way because there are cases of people finding elk and moose and stuff with drones but it's it's illegal in 20 some states now he's crazy to think that wouldn't work rick smith imagine antelope on that countryside and you fly that thing up and do a 360 pan you don't think you'd see the herd of 20 out of half mile i should argue with them yeah i guess it all depends some of those like a lot of those when you're shooting like landscapes with the drone a lot of those lenses are real wide yeah so when you look straight down it's just like you don't know what you're looking at. The animals are, if you're hot, if you're too, I guess if you're low enough, you could see them.

But at that point, they're going to hear the thing. But the question was, have we ever done it? Have you ever thought about doing it? We've definitely talked about how it's illegal and if it ought to be and how helpful would it be anyway and in what cases have they been abused. So beyond thinking about it, we've spent quite a bit of time discussing this subject. All of the states that ban drones are the states where drones would actually be helpful. Places with a lot of open country. We never fly drones on hunt days.

Yeah. When we're out shooting these shows, all our drone stuff is days that we're not hunting. For that reason? Just so there's never any confusion. Right. Yeah, there's no regulations about flying a drone like for say in Mexico, but there's no way you're going to find like a coos deer with a drone.

I don't care. You're not going to find one. Do you ever use tracking dogs to find injured game? I have not used a dog that is trained and kept for the sole purpose of finding game in order to find game. I have not either. But I think, I feel like we're going to be seeing more and more of that. And I actually have a guy offered me one who lives near where we're hunting in Wisconsin in November. And he has a Drothaur, or however you say those fancy dogs from Germany. And so, yeah, if we have a bad hit, then we'll try it out.

Why didn't you try tracking your Colorado bull that night because the best hope was that the bull would lay down and when you get a hit on something and you don't hear it like crash down and die or watch it crash down and die um you don't want to pressure it because if it is injured and runs off a ways and it's not being pursued, your hope is that it lays down and dies. Once you get a sense that something's not immediately mortally wounded and you start pursuing it, you will be bumping it out of its bed.

And if you bump it out of its bed and scare it, it will cover a distance in minutes that it might otherwise cover in many hours. And if it's not bleeding sufficiently to follow its progress, you will lose it while it's hauling ass away from you. When if it just lays down and dies, you have a good chance, a better chance of finding it because you're at least in the right area and you haven't sent it off into the next County. So following that, once you get down and take a

look and you're like, this isn't going to go well, don't pressure it. Give it time. Regardless, you shouldn't really pursue anything for an hour. And I wasn't there. You were there with, I don't know, two, three guys with you. But what you got to remember too is that blood trailing, man, it is mentally and physically exhausting. If you're like really on a hard blood trail, two or three hours of that, I've seen it,

man. People just start falling apart because you're just not used to putting that sort of effort with your, I don't know if it's your eyes and having to stare like that and look and the emotions that you're going through, but it's a lot of work. And so, you know, you shot him towards the evening and you guys spent, I'm, a couple, three hours on it and then decided to bail. I mean, it's a smart move to do because, like you're saying, you want to let him rest, but you get some rest yourself, and then in the morning, you're nice and fresh, and all of a sudden those pin drops that you might have missed at night

under a headlamp, the next morning you can see them and find them. We spent a few hours, but we didn't move 100 yards. And there's also all these little indicators you get. There's little indicators you get when you're on something that's got a bad hit where you either see things, you either reconstruct things and realize that, oh, no, we're in good shape. It's going to die. Or you start putting the pieces of the puzzle together and you start getting a sense that it wasn't a mortal um that

is not mortally wounded or there's a good strong likelihood that it's not mortally wounded and that would go by kind of like how the blood much blood, the patterns that the blood falls, the coloration of the blood, what might be with blood. Does the blood fall on its own or does it only get brushed off when it brushes against branches? When it brushes against branches, how high on the branch or low on the branch is the blood? Does it look oxygenated? Does it have little chunks of muscle in it? What's the coloration of the hair where the hit was on the ground? What were the sort of mannerisms or the movements of the animal post-hit?

And you get a sense of like, yay or nay. I mean, sometimes you'll see something, you know, like you're hit by a bow and you'll start, you'll go poke your nose in there down the 10 yards down the trail. And it looked like someone had two cans of red spray paint going through the woods, going out each side. And then I'm not too worried about everybody hanging around for three hours waiting because you just know what's going to be waiting for you there. You got something that's punched through both lungs. And every time it's heartbeats, it's shooting out an ounce of blood out of each side. And then you're like, let's go. Someone else wants to know, aren't you afraid that scavengers or insects will damage the carcass when you leave an animal lay like that? Absolutely.

Not insects. Just rot from heat. Just, they got all the guts in them. That stuff generates a ton of heat. Generates heat like even when they're dead. They got so, it's like big guts of

lawn, wet lawn trimmings in their stomachs. It just creates heat. They rot. The first place they rot is around the ball joints on their back hands and just spreads from there. Yeah, man. And then, and then not so much bugs right away, but, but, uh, bears, coyotes.

Yeah. It's all everything, all this stuff, man. It's hard. You can't be all like rigid about it. It's like all this stuff is like, well, there's this, but then there's that. Well, there's this, but then there's that. There's this, but then there's that. And then you factor it out and try to make a call.

It's never like, I know exactly what needs to be done, boys. It's more like, ah that it's kind of what it sounds like someone writes I want to hear you discuss the efficiency and ethics around using bows and muzzle loaders efficacy is lower because you can't shoot them as far and they're less forgiving so but efficacy efficacy is a hard thing to talk about because there's like

i don't know i guess f like a rocket propelled grenade would have tremendous efficacy. You'd probably get like, there's probably like military weapons, I suppose, like very, very high caliber. I don't know, like truck mounted machine. I don't know.

There's like ways to get efficacy that borders over into a, um, borders over into an overkill situation or the efficacy is so high that not many people will be able to have the opportunity to go try hunting. Yeah. Too many people are too good. And if everybody's filling their tags, then a lot less people are going to get the opportunity to go hunting. Someone could say there's great efficacy in being able to use night vision.

A high powered rifle with night vision. You can get up, get close. They don't know you're there. You get great clean shot placement. Great efficacy. We should allow people to hunt at night with night vision because it's better efficacy. We should allow people to hunt at night with night vision because it's better efficacy. You know, at a point,

you have a finite resource and the ability to, the ability for a bunch of people to go hunting relies on the fact that not everybody's going to get one. It feels like you just answered this, but somebody asks, why doesn't Colorado let you use a scope on your muzzleloader for that elk season?

They're just trying to, I think, my guess is they're trying to widen the gulf. They're trying to widen the gulf between firearm and muzzleloader. Yeah. I mean, they're trying to keep it a primitive weapon, which is why muzzleloader seasons were

came out in the first place I believe right it's like they're a little bit better than a bow but they're not a modern firearm right it gives you a chance to have more seasons more opportunities like you're creating opportunity. Hey, folks.

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onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Someone else says, after your Colorado hunt, are you still an advocate for muzzleloaders or are you less likely to support them i have absolutely no problem with muzzleloaders um i have no problem with muzzleloader seasons i actually appreciate as much as it didn't work out for me i appreciate colorado's efforts to keep muzzleloaders as a sort of distinct weapon class um muzzleloader tech if you had to say if it's there's muzzleloader technology out there you know there's some very some phenomenal muzzleloaders. There's guys that are getting 300-yard accuracy out of scope muzzleloaders.

So, yeah, I applaud it. Pennsylvania has a muzzleloader season where it has to be a flintlock. It's got to be like the hammer. There's a piece of flint that strikes a piece of steel and shoots a little spark into a hole which

ignites the gunpowder. They go, psh. Yeah, I grew up doing that. It's fun. Did you ever kill a deer doing it? Yeah. Oh, you did it with a muzzleloader? At one point, I had killed more deer with a muzzleloader

than bow and rifle combined. But what about with a flintlock? Yeah, all flintlock. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. I've never even shot an inline muzzleloader until I moved out here. Oh, okay. Yeah, if I was ruler of the United States, all of game laws,

I would make them all muzzleloader seasons like that. Yeah. Flintlock, iron sights. They're fun. Loose powder. Yeah, loose powder, and we'd melt down lead and make our own balls. By loose powder, indulge me for a minute there, Spencer. So if you went and looked at it, we were talking about Daniel Boone.

Daniel Boone, he had a rifle that was spiraled barrel, so it was rifled. He had a rifle that was rifled. He would take a powder horn and pour loose gunpowder, gunpowder, down his barrel. Then you would take a patch of cloth and put bear grease on it and nestle a lead sphere into that greased piece of fabric and cram that down the barrel. And that's your ball, your wadding, and your loose gunpowder. And you'd compact compact that and then the firing mechanism was a little piece of flint that would strike a little piece of metal and shoot a

spark into a hole well you'd prime it so it's like there's a flash pan yeah there's a flash plan with like 7g or 5g or whatever like a finerder. Yeah, like we used, I think it was like 2F in the barrel and 3F in the pan. I think your Fs are too low. Or yeah, maybe 3 in the barrel, 4 in the pan or something like that. Yeah, so when you hear it, it was just a flash in the pan. What you're saying is. The flint hits the frizz and causes a spark. The spark falls into the pan and ignites the powder in the pan, which goes through the touch hole and ignites the powder in the barrel.

A lot can go wrong. A lot can go wrong. And there's a lot of time. And there's a lot of time and a lot of room for flinching. Yeah, you got to hold your bead because it goes like boom. Yeah. Boom. Yeah, you gotta hold your bead because it goes like boom. Yeah. Boom! Yeah.

I got a question about Daniel Boone. Can I finish my point real quick though? Now what those things are is now you got like a little cake of powder that you can just carry around in your pocket. Yeah. Or a pellet even. Yeah, so it's like and there's no greased piece of fabric.

You got a conical-shaped bullet that's shaped just like a bullet. It rests inside a piece of plastic, which is a sabbit. And then you can have powder that isn't even powder. It's like, and then you have a primer that is like a little cap that you carry around, and when you touch that trigger, you know that son of a bitch is going off. I mean, it's just going off. And you put a scope on top. If you go watch our Maryland Sika episode,

you'll see us hunting with these setups. You're up there like, when I see one, I'm getting them. And that's not the feeling you get with an old-style muzzleloader. No. Not at all. Is it a known fact that Boone did not measure his powder? I don't think that they measured the powder in just reading accounts of how people did. I think they free poured and eyeballed.

I don't think they were measuring their, I'm sure that at times maybe during a shooting match or whatever, they would measure their powder, but you read many accounts of just like, I think it's just something you did all the time, your whole life. The same way when you're putting salt on something you're cooking, you know,

I think they just open that horn up and knew what they were looking at you measure like how many hundred grain charges until you just kind of like you could dump it out on the table and he'd be like that's 100 grains that's 100 grains that's 100 grains and freeport okay someone says i totally respect the idea of not taking a different elk in colorado but why did you not spend the rest of the trip looking for the one that you wounded? It's a great question. Needle in a haystack, man. Yeah, it's a great question.

I don't even know what it would have been. I don't know what doing so, what it would have been. I don't know what it would have, what doing so, what it would have begun to look like to like stay out and try to find. Yeah. Good question. No answer. Yeah. I don't know if you'd be looking for a

dead animal or looking for a live one that's, you know, hold up somewhere with a wound on its, you know, chest or shoulder. But yeah, it's a good question. I don't know. Someone says, hello, Latvian Eagle slash long Tong Yanni slash Latvian lover. I would love to know more details about the

distance and specifics of the deer drive in Wyoming because that shit happened quick and it looked like a real crack shot. I think that was my favorite part of season nine, was seeing an executed deer drive in the backcountry like that. That was special. That might be the only one that ever gets executed ever anywhere. No, I'm sure there's a listener that has a hole

that they drive deer out of all the time. But no, that outfitter, Stuart Peterson, he's been on that hillside, on that mountain quite a few times. And if you could see the whole mountain, I think we did a pretty good job in that diagram kind of showing where there was timber and where there wasn't. But the diagram is great because it showed the diagram first. I was like, well, this is oddly specific. And then it goes back to showing like the hunt. And I was like, oh, that's because they made it very specific. Totally. Yeah.

No, I mean, there was a very, and we had glassed this strip of timber, numerous occasions in the prior, you know, five or six days looking for deer in there. And it did not look like much and it looked like it was just a strip of raggedy you know wind blown uh i'm guessing fir trees you know a lot of that stuff that they call the shin tangle um that they call it shin tang shin tang yeah because it tangles your shins when you walk through it just It just grows low because it's just got to be trying to grab onto the rocks because this strip of timber was just on basically a giant scree slide hillside that went on for 1,000 yards either direction and hundreds of yards up and down until you either made the ridge or you actually dropped down into like the main timber, which would have been, you know, below tree or at tree

line. And, uh, he just knew that they hole up in there. And that morning we had bumped deer that had headed that way. So he thought it was a pretty good chance to be deer in there. And again, he had executed this drive prior to doing it that time. He told us a couple stories about other hunters that had sat where he was sending me. And where I went to, we had already spent a couple of days sitting and looking at deer in the bowl below us, on a ridge across from us. So I had a pretty good familiarity with when he was explaining to me where to go with what it looked like and what I was going to see there. And I knew what he was talking about

when he was talking about game trails that wrapped around that hill and where they went. Because again, I'd been sitting above them for a couple of days. So it didn't happen much faster. I mean, there was enough time that the photographer and I walked to the spot that might've taken five to 10 minutes. We set up there. There was enough time for me to kind of like I did, I set up like a long range shooting position. If they kind of came out low and got farther, I needed a better rest. And then I had a sort of a shorter range shooting position where I use my tripod and I had a V attached to the top of it where I was going to shoot, you know, a hundred yards or less or whatever.

Um, and I sort of explained that to the camera a few times and we were like, all right, now it's time to wait. We'll see what happens. And it probably wasn't more than five or ten minutes and you gotta remember when a deer is pushed on a drive they move so quick through that country that the the pusher is probably just standing at that deer's bed when you shoot even though you might be a thousand yards away from it i mean that's how fast they move from that spot to where I was. There's a good chance that Stuart had just gotten to those beds and said, ah, look at that, there was some deer bedded here, and then he probably heard me shoot. You know?

They left those, just like we showed in the diagram, they left that little strip of timber and just wrapped right around the horn of that ridge and didn't drop down, didn't really come up, and then came basically right underneath me. And as far as the crack shot goes, I saw him coming from a ways. The photographer that with me is, he's a great photographer, but just hasn't done too much work with us yet. And so it was happening fast. That deer was coming and it was in a lot of, a lot of small trees. It was hard for him to pick up, but, um, that deer was walking pretty slowly by the time he finally got over to me. And I think I shot him at like 60 or 70 yards. It was really a pretty easy shot.

On your muley, it sounded like you were sawing through the brisket. If so, have you ever tried sawing right next to it where the ribs attach? It's all cartilage, and it's way easier even on elk. W-A-A-A-A-A-Y. Way easier. So much easier. Making a point there. Was that for me?

For either one of you. I know what he's talking about. Yeah, it's easy to cut over there but here's the thing when you come up with your gutting incision i'm going up the middle anyway the hair is real short along the brisket and so i cut there and then i cut there with my saw which is i don't i don't view it as very hard and then you can just kind of open it up and it's like opening up center based in the middle and you can get in there and cut the esophagus and and uh trachea and everything and gut it and you can't go down to the side but then the other thing is when i take the rib slabs off this way they're

symmetrical but sure especially if someone had skinned it all the way back i might just go up the side like that yeah i guess on a deer i don't know we might shave away that brisket and just throw it into the grind pile but uh i don't know, we might shave away that brisket and just throw it into the grind pile. But I don't know why it looked hard because I think zipping through the brisket of a deer is usually pretty dang easy. Yeah, it's easy enough where I don't really think about it being a thing. How did you feel when you were looking for your tag and you came back and found that the guide had cut your deer clean in half? Did you see it as disrespectful to your kill absolutely not these guys we're hunting with some guides landon and stewart peterson crooked sky outfitters and these guys are like phenomenal hunters very hard workers but they are like they're horsemen they're packers if you like a big

part of their job is they are packers they know how to move things from point a to point b what be it people or materials on horses he has a way to carry a mule deer where you got a horse with a pannier on each side, and he knows where to cut it so that that front half and back half weigh the same. When you're loading horses, it might not seem like this would be an actual thing. A pound matters. The panniers on a pack saddle, they're balanced there. They're setting there balanced. There's some lashing and stuff, but primarily, like, if they're out of balance, it's not going to ride.

So he goes up to the third rib, whatever the hell he is. He cuts the deer off at the knees, goes up to the third or fourth rib, whatever, cuts the thing in half, knows how to tilt its head over to make up the difference, puts it in the pannier, and he knows that that mule deer is now cut in two halves the way the exact same amount. I'd never seen that before, and I thought my eyes were deceiving me in the episode. I thought someone else had killed the deer in the time that they had last shown your mule deer,

and then when they came back to it, because there was like two halves of a mule deer there. Yeah. We were trying to get, I mean, it was, I would have liked to have taken part in that process, but as you saw, like,

we already had a snowstorm. It was very late at night. I was trying to find the deer tag. Everything soaked. He just, no, I thought it was genius.

I didn't know about that trick. You guys weren't familiar with that? Cutting them that way so they weigh the same? First I'd seen it. No, then he cocks the head over the top of the the crossbars there and out of there yeah if disrespect if there could somehow be disrespect in getting something out cleanly and effectively um i don't i don't see it and they leave the hide on just to protect They leave the hide on to protect the meat

Which is pretty common with horse people Because you're not Horse people they're not always trying to find ways to make everything light So they're able to do It's like making everything light and compact And transportable isn't like their primary focus Like they know how to use the horses For what they're best at

So a lot of horse guys leave hide on stuff Because then you get home, skin the hide off, and it's all clean underneath. They use it like in substitute of a game bag. Then they oftentimes aren't looking to turn things into like a thousand bags of stuff. Two is fine. Those guys are good dudes, man. They know their business very well. Someone wants to know, can you cook mule deer ribs the same as whitetail ribs?

You sure it wasn't the opposite? Well, either way, can you cook them the same way? Oh, cook the mule. Same question. Yeah.

Anything, anything, any kind of ribs. Doesn't matter. Someone's wondering how you got the meat home from wyoming i'd love to hear a little more about your post hunt slash post field dressing logistics yeah um i did the same thing just recently on my colorado elk hunt we've been flying traveling with empty yeti hopper coolers but we drove to wyoming yeah we just drove

oh i forgot we drove those deer home caught them in a lie you're right you're right you know what that question there was some there was some more to that question that spencer skipped over that was asking if we had checked him in on the flight well because i knew that you didn't fly from wyoming to montana that's why you Montana. That's why I skipped it. But I think this guy wants to know how we do it. Yeah, how we do it when we do fly. So, yeah, like those guys are saying, on that particular one, they just went home probably just about that way.

Mine was quartered because we packed it off the mountain, but it probably just went into a cooler. Anyways, for flying. Or road trips. So, for flying. Or road trip. So for transporting. For transporting. Yeah. I'm going to get into the flying because this works pretty slick.

But anyways, those Yeti Hopper soft-sided coolers, we get the meat cold. If we can freeze it, we freeze it, but it's usually just like large muscle chunks, not fully processed. It doesn't look like it's going to go right into my freezer. I'm just trying to get it cold. So literally on my last hunt, the meat came off the mountain, boned out. I took it to a processor cooler and I said, how much is it going to take for me just to store it here for a while? He said, X amount, whatever it was per day.

So it was in there for three or four days. The day before we left, I went and picked it up and just shoved giant chunks of meat into these Yeti hoppers as full as I could get them and zipped them shut. Now, they're heavy. They're overweight. So you have to pay for that on the flight home. Now, you're forgetting a couple steps here. Okay. You hadn't gone into Ziplocs.

Nope. And then you hadn't lined the hopper with a contractor bag. Nope. Okay. I had cooled, clean, not bloody, just meat. Do you mind me stepping in here? That had been sitting on a wire rack, getting air circulated around it, like in a nice meat cooler, right? One thing that's going to get you in trouble.

Yeah. Oh, I learned this't i hesitate to even tell people this someone from alaska airlines was telling me they can't they won't ditch stuff based on smell it has to be an overpowering odor okay i was like really she's like yeah we can't it just like if something smells we can't like decide to get rid of it did you but what she said we can do anything dripping blood right it's it's okay to not handle it so that's what i've heard too i like to line the hopper with a good contractor bag put my meat in there and then zip tie or electric a good contractor bag, put my meat in there, and then zip tie or electric tape that contractor bag shut.

Because I've heard from multiple airline people that anything dripping bodily fluids. Definitely. Is okay to like find its way to like the dumpster. Yeah. And like I said, this is a particularly particular instance where I knew the meat was just extremely, I don't want to say dried out, but like I said,

it's been laying in a cooler with air going around it with a fan for three or four days. Like I just, until you froze it and then thought it out, then it would probably have juice or blood or whatever you want to call that stuff from the cells breaking down that it would leak. One of the rules she told me? Yes. If you strip the velvet off antlers, let it dry.

Because she said if someone touches that antler and gets that blood on their hands, they don't have to handle it. That's a good tip. But speaking of antlers in a head, this was going to be a real conundrum. Because that same shop, I'm like, well, they did like the skull cleaning, like a quick European mount. Like, how much is that? You know, I'm thinking I'll just pay for it. No big deal. Well, they wanted 350 bucks.

To freedom mount a skull? Yes. And I'm like, all right, I'll figure something out. You have got to be kidding. What's the world coming to? Seems like that's going right. So I had, I had pretty much a head that had been sat in the garage for four days now. And it was, you know, kind of clean that I'd pulled the eyeballs out and pulled some meat off of it. Brain's still in it. Actually, we had to pull the brains out because it's CWD. We didn't know if we had to. I think we actually checked and you didn't have to for that. There are some places, don't want to make this confusing, but there are some places where you have to be very careful

about transporting brain matter, bones, and different parts of animals across state lines, and even from unit to unit in different states. So if you're going to do that with any kind of meat, read the regs closely. So I thought that was going to be the case. So we took, we pulled the brain out, but I still had like this kind of semi, wasn't rotten yet, but just a bloody meaty head had some dirt on it. And you can't just walk into the airport like that. So I took some shop towels, like basically a blue paper towel, kind of put it on there, wrapped a little bit of duct tape on there to

hold that on there. Then I took a, just a regular old grocery sack, like a, you know, the small one. If you just go and get a few things from the grocery, wrap that around the head. Then I went balls to the wall with duct tape and covered the whole head and turned it into like a piece of art that just looks like a skull covered in duct tape. Now that was fine for that. It was contained, right?

Did you get garden hose or pipe insulation then? Yeah. So then I went and got a, it was perfect. It was like, they sell like, I didn't know, eight and like 10 foot chunks of garden hose. And you cut about, I don't know, four or five inches of garden hose and stick it onto the end of a tine.

And then basically just, you don't even have to tape the top part, the open part above the tine just to keep the garden hose onto the tine. You tape that up and they want you to do that so it's not sharp because if they put a head with tines into the bottom of a um airplane and someone tosses a you know a piece of luggage on top of it could very well go right through it right so you're protecting other people's stuff by taping that yeah or that plane goes down and all of a

sudden that antler comes crashing up through the floor of the plane. Right. You get a time before you burn up. So anyways, yeah, I checked that, and the guy had zero questions. Just like put a tag on it and stuck it in. It was interesting. They loaded it. It was the very last piece of gear to go onto the plane.

I say gear, luggage. Yeah. She walked it over and handed it to the person. Didn't even ride the conveyor belt. They took care of my antlers very well. That's great. Yeah. It's nice when people are like that.

Yeah. Because coming in with something like that, you're always a little bit like, what am I running into? Flying home, my kids care, but we come in and they're like, welcome. Welcome. Well, they're Anchorage and Alaska Airlines. They're used to that. This is in Fairbanks. Yeah, you can come in there with a polar bear.

They're like, well, please wrap his claws in something. When we flew home from Sonora, you guys just carried those bucks on. Just a small little buck. I've seen people get turned away. Oh, really? I've seen people get turned away.

I saw the other day, speaking of flying with stuff, I saw the other day a guy getting a major, major fight. He was fighting with the TSA guy so bad. He had speed loaders. So he had a hard case with his pistol stuff. He's some kind of competitive shooter I could tell by all of his shirts and guys he was with.

And you're supposed to like, when you fly with ammo, you're supposed to fly with ammo in its original box or a container made for ammunition. Yep. He had a hard case with his pistol. In it, he had all of his ammo loaded into speed loaders and the tsa guy's like no and he's like i fly all over you know the first thing you say to anybody

is you talk about how much you fly all over the place right i fly with this deer head everywhere i go never before but he lays that on him and this guy's like not giving an inch the dude gets so heated that all of a sudden two cops come and one cop comes and stands back like to survey the situation right another cop goes out to engage with the dude and it was the most genius piece of policing i've ever seen because you could the cops like wants to here's a guy standing here like a pistol in an airport, right? Arguing over speed loaders, and he's getting heated up. Yeah, and this guy can shoot good. So the policeman comes up, and the policeman's like, the TSA dude's basically his colleague. They both work in the same airport.

So you can see that he can't alienate the TSA guy. And he comes up and explains that in defending the TSA guy, you can tell he doesn't agree with the TSA guy. But he said, we have a job of interpreting. In a situation like this, we interpret the situation, we interpret the law. And it's for courts to figure that out later. But in the moment, we need to make a judgment call. This is the judgment call this man has made. Then the guy's still getting heated up.

This police guy takes the guy's speed loaders and says, I will get these held for you. And when you're coming through town again, I'll come and bring them to you. You let me know. Here's my business card.

Dude calmed right down. Nice. didn't fly with his speed loaders the cop like soothed everybody out i even gave him like a nice job as he's walking away because this dude was getting heated up man and he came and just dissolved that shit nice like dissolve that shit that's great great. Was there ammo? They were loaded you said. Instead of having his pistol rounds and boxes he had them in all these speed loaders. Right. And I don't know why it never occurred to the guy

just to like, but you're screwed in the airport because you can't go take all the ammo and throw it in the trash can. They're not going to let that fly. No. But I'm surprised if he had needed those speed loaders like say for the competition that maybe he was flying to that he would have kept those and just... I knew he was going home. Oh.

He was headed home. No, it was a great bit of policing. It was good. Everybody saved face. No one was like... Yeah. Nice. Then I saw that same police guy again later in the airport, and I almost went up and said something to him again, but I started thinking he'd think I was creepy.

In the making of all nine seasons, how many times has the camera crew scared off an animal you were hunting? Only once. All the animals. All the time. What was the once? I'm joking. They spook a lot of them, but they spot a lot of them.

It's a real thing. They spook a lot and spot a lot. Are they carrying binoculars? Oh, they get into it. Yeah. We got some camera guys that have become very enthusiastic about glassing. Everybody spooks a lot. We spook them.

We spot them. They hear them. It'sooks a lot. We spook them, we spot them, they hear them. It's tough with a bunch of dudes. There's a lot of complications. There's a lot of good that comes out of it. A lot of eyeballs, man. You don't got to worry about missing something that comes close by. What are you doing differently with the cinematography this season?

It has a different feel, but in a good way. I'll let Yanni handle that one. The answer is nothing. If you felt that way and saw something, you can certainly send me an email to the info at MeatEater. Is it info?

Do we have that? Spencer, you know. What do they send emails to when they send them to general email inbox? I don't know. I don't know how those all get there. Well, how do you get a... It's like contact ad or something like that.

Just hit the contact page on the website. A lot of good stuff comes together. But I can tell you that, you know, just about everybody that we worked with on that season has been working with us for quite a few years. And just through tweaks and polishing, it gets better and better, hopefully. Always changing, always upgrading and changing equipment. And then you like to think that people just get better at what they do.

Yeah, I think people just get better. The editors get better. Everyone's just growing. There's a thing that happens, too, is that the camera operators that you use a lot, this probably isn't what this person's getting at, but the camera operators that you use a lot start to get a real sixth sense. They kind of understand, like they start to understand how animals, like they understand how the situations play out,

how the interactions play out. And just through exposure to it, I think get a sense of, of also body language that people have. Right. And, and, and,

and they get like, they kind of like meld into it in a better way. And they sort of know, you know, for instance, like if the importance of kind of like tying in a person and an animal, right? So if you're like, oh, there's a deer over there, right? That rather than showing the hunter and then showing the deer and showing the hunter and showing the deer, they kind of get where they position themselves to get the hunter and the deer in the same shot. Right. And that just comes from exposure and seeing these things happen again and again. And also from a good relationship between the, the, the, the host or talent or guests or whoever, and the shooter where they start to really understand, you know, if you hunt with someone all the time, like a buddy, you just kind of know

what they're thinking and doing you know like you're walking along grouse hunting and you don't say like okay we'll stay roughly this far apart and you know and whatever you just without talking you just understand what each other's up to um you don't just then wander off and leave the guy you know uh so just through that proximity i think a lot comes out of that um that could lead perhaps to some of what they're talking, what they're noticing. And I imagine also just like equipment and getting better at your craft. Behind the scenes, what are your meals like and your snacks like before obtaining fresh meat? Just depends, man.

All depends. just depends man all depends yeah if we're hunting out of a uh like a house that we've rented or staying at someone's place uh we we rarely base out of a hotel so we usually like to base out of a place where we can cook our own meals and in that case i mean it's not too different than what uh you might be having at home for dinner i mean we usually have spaghetti night and we have taco night you know it's just pretty broad night we i mean it's definitely stuff that that i can and and seth can cook up quickly um you know because after a long day of hunting last thing you want to do spend a bunch of time in the kitchen so stuff that we can whip up quickly i was going over just with chestnut molester last night yeah Yeah. He's charging meals now.

You got to go simple. Yeah. He tried to go too complicated one time. I know. Got to go simple. You got to. People are tired. It's late.

Yep. And we often bring, we'll bring our own meat. We were talking about that too. Yeah. If you're going to travel with some empty Yeti hoppers, you might as well pack in a couple roasts and stuff. But some trips we do all freeze dry, like maybe instant oatmeal in the morning,

all freeze drying for lunch, just like have a thing of mayo, have some cheese, have some salami and flatbread. Very simple. A bunch of granola bars. Now on the Wyoming hunt, we had a full on cook.

Yeah, they were cooking. It was an outfitted trip, so they did outfitter meals. Yeah, which at first we weren't going to do, but then I figured, you know, they'll give us more time to focus on the hunting, come home again tired. I mean, because- Full meals.

Full meals, yeah, because that night you killed your buck. I mean, you were in like four, five hours after dark. Mm-hmm. You know? Come back, someone made all kinds of cool food. Oh, yeah. I think we put on weight. They made ham.

We put on weight during that trip. I think it's a game changer when someone else is cooking because we don't have to worry about it. Gives us a lot more time to do other things. What's it like to pack out an elk at elevations above 10,000 feet? And are there noticeable physical differences between elk at lower elevations and higher elevations? Man, it doesn't even have to be 10,000 feet, man. If you come from sea level uh 5,000 feet might be very arduous and a tough pack

out i still don't hear people i can't think of a conversation where someone was factoring elevation above just distance you know you talk about like you man, by myself, I don't think it would, I think it would be irresponsible for me to kill an elk more than a mile from my truck. I've never heard someone say, um, hunting by myself, it would be irresponsible for me to kill an elk more than a mile from my truck at said elevation. Like I just don't, it's a real thing and it factors in, but I don't know that I hear people, maybe they should pay attention to that

because it's a major, major issue. It is. But if anything, at 10,000 feet, most places during archery elk season, and then as you get later, it'll be even more to your advantage, but it's going to be pretty cool. Like above 10,000 feet, there's not a lot of days that are actually going to,

you take care of your meat and get it hung on the north side of the tree, that it couldn't hang there for two or three days and be just fine, giving you plenty of time to do the actual work. In terms of the difference of the animals, I don't know that a layman isn't going to look and know, but there's no way. There's not a difference. There's no way there's not a difference in fitness between some crazy elk in Colorado living at 10,000, 11,000 feet and an elk living at 2,000 feet.

There's no way there's not a difference in that the 10,000-foot elk is not going to smoke smoke the 2,000 foot elk in a race at 10,000 feet. I mean, how would it, you know, there's no way. It's got to be just like anybody else. Like you live at high elevation, you learn how to perform at a high elevation. But I don't, you know, I'm not going to like dissect one and be like, look at this. See, he's got a. Did you learn anything watching Jesse butcher the nil guy? Yeah, quite a bit.

Cooking more than butchering. But the biggest thing I picked up from him butchering that I now do is that cleaver rubber mallet, man. Yeah, the cleaver trick. Like, I always knew about it, you know, and I'd seen it. But, like, to really see someone who's good at a rubber mallet and a cleaver it's nice man i started doing that even in my kitchen cleaver and a rubber mallet it's just very precise feeling because a lot of people take cleavers start just wailing away at stuff but when you put that blade right you would want it and then give it a love tap with a rubber mallet. It's so precise.

Well, I think too, I've like messed up a cleaver too, because when you're whacking bones with a cleaver, that blade cannot withstand that, those impacts and you end up like really ding in and like putting full on waves in your blade edge. Especially with grandpa's old carbon. And it's probably not meant to do that. It's meant to be used the way Jesse was using it. That little love tap with a mallet, dude. I was doing deer ribs one, even on just a home cutting board.

I was like, because I usually hacksaw my ribs shorter, but I was like, what the hell? And you take that cleaver and lay it on there, nice sharp cleaver in that mallet. It's just like, oh, it's satisfying, man. So that was one of the biggest things. But mostly I learned from him cooking. I mean, he's just like a thousand times better of a cook than I am. When you're hunting in Wyoming and your guides wouldn't do anything on the Sabbath, what would have happened if you guys still had tags to fill?

Oh, they wouldn't have cared if we'd gone hunting. We would have been hunting. Could have you used the horses? No, no. Their horses rest on Sunday. Oh, it's everybody. Well everybody well no they don't if you're with those guys then you want to go do something they're not going to care if you said hey i want to go fishing they'd be like go go that's why we packed my buck out on foot yeah and on our backs what about the cook

i can't remember what i believe that their employees took the sunday off too yeah i don't i don't imagine that uh i don't imagine that they would say that we are going to take the day off and we'd prefer that our horses take the day off but then the an employee of theirs would be obligated to work but then again she certainly made breakfast and dinner for us that day yeah because i think like just eating you know know? I mean... Yeah. Yeah. You've got to draw the line somewhere.

I can't remember. Yeah, I can't remember. But no, they're very observant of their religion in kind of an admirable, respectful way. And it would have never been that we could have done whatever we wanted. And they're quite upfront about it. It was totally cool.

I actually appreciated it. On the Wyoming hunt, how many horses were with you in camp? I don't know, man. Close to 20, I bet. It's not like one-to-one, though. Like one human to one horse. No, because they had pack animals. Then we got crew.

We had a huge string because of all the gear and packing in pelican cases and shit. Yeah. I don't think it was 20. No, probably closer to 15-ish, I'd guess. They probably each led a string of four or five, and then plus all of us. Yeah, solid 15. There's a lot that goes into that horse business, man.

My sister-in-law knows a lot about horses. She knows more about horses than she can even begin to tell you because it's not even things that, you know what I mean? Like the same way when you're talking to people, you're making all these calculations and observations about their personality and stuff. And then later you said like, Oh, I got,

you know, you can't be like, I like him because you know, this, this, this, and this, you just don't think about it that way. But people that are around horses, man, they look at a horse and they just see something that I don't see. There was a lot happening under the surface. And to keep all those horses moving in the same direction and stuff without getting all worked up and pissed off, it's something, man.

They were hardworking dudes. They would be up well before us and go to bed. Wait, I've just taken care of the horses. I mean, that was a lot of horses to take care of yeah you got to draw licenses to hunt in that area but i'm telling you man um i would without hesitation in terms of like getting your money's worth and having someone work like i without hesitation recommend doing a guided hunt in terms of like someone that like wants to hunt hard and is

willing to put in the time and those guys are hard workers last question it's probably the most common question that media got when will there be part two soon soon early 2021 right soon soon soon soon coming soon thank you spencer good work spencer seth thank you absolutely i start thanking good work set i start thanking people in an awkward way all the time thank you janice you're welcome thank you good work yanni thank you steve thank you Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada.

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