The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 257: The Burrito Buck

Episode Date: January 25, 2021

Steven Rinella talks with Brandon Butler, Matt Desrosiers, Chase Millemann, Duke Wasteney, Seth Morris, Ryan Callaghan, and Janis Putelis.Topics discussed: When an arsonist is caught on trail cam; Steve trying to take credit for Luke Comb's "Better Together"; creating a big foot hunting season; the "build not bought" movement; catching whoever poached a nanny mountain goat with a crossbow; when neighbors suspect you're BBQ-ing a neighborhood dog; makeshift-grills; Cal's sister birthing Cal's niece; the #landback movement; crossing international borders with shooting irons; lard; high highs and low lows; seeing the grip and grin fade; Seth’s first coues deer; how dang dry it was; Steve's suggestion that folks watch the "Five Came Back"; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Presented by OnX Hunt, creators of the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters.

Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. Hey, right off the, right up top, right off the bat, the you know, on the couple, on an episode ago or two or, no, an episode ago we launched the

what's that called, Seth? Brandon Butler's Cabin Burned Down by Poacher GoFundMe. That's a hell of a name. The GoFundMe site is called Brandon Butler's Cabin Burned Down by Poacher. Yeah. And we gave everybody a heads up about this GoFundMe that was put together for our friend Brandon Butler, whose cabin was burnt down in mysterious temporal proximity. How do you like that sentence?

In mysterious temporal proximity to him having reported a local poacher who he eyewitnessed trying to jack light deer night before deer season opened. So Butler's buddy puts up this gofundme site and um you uh you kind generous folks out there have been kicking in heavy duty and the thing's up to nineteen thousand seven hundred and sixty eight dollars yeah 423 donors now butler pointed out that he had his place insured but he had all of his heirlooms and stuff in there and he also had a lot of stuff that he uses to host people and do river trips

and there's that good dude that tries to do good stuff with his place. There's been like a major development in this deal so we wanted to have him come back on not just to talk about the money and he didn't set this thing up. His buddy set it up. Did I clarify that? His buddy set it up.

But he's going to share this kind of interesting development around this case of his place getting pretty much smoked down to the ground. Brandon Butler, real quick, man. Glad you could join up with us real quick here. We'll probably have to check in with you multiple times as this whole

deal plays out with your place getting burnt down, but give us as much as you can give us right now about the latest. Yeah. It was hard not to tell you guys everything I knew last time and all your listeners and the readers of Patrick Durkin's article, the outpouring of care and support has been overwhelming. So first of all, thank you guys so much for the opportunity to share the story. I also want to clear up real quick, you know, in the article that I did with Patrick, I had a number of people reach out and say, it sounds like he classified the whole area as guilty. And of course that wasn't my intentions. I mean, you guys have been down there.

Uh, anybody that's followed my work knows how much I poured into try and support that area. And I have lifelong friends that I've made down there and I love that area and they're absolute salt of the earth people. Uh, what I was talking about was a very local subculture. So when I was talking about the culture, I was talking specifically to my little neck of the woods. So to everybody in Southeast Missouri, Shannon County, Missouri, you know, I'm, I'm trying to stand up against the people that have, you know, held everybody down, held all the good people back. So it wasn't a blanket statement.

So with that out of the way, I had game cameras up, multiple game cameras. And I even set kind of a dummy camera out where I knew people would see it. The chip was missing from that camera. But the arsonist did not find the two cameras I had pointing at the front and the back of the house. And they pulled the chip from the dummy camera. They did. And they thought they had, they thought they had gotten away with it by pulling the chip from my trap

camera. And they did not find the two cameras that I had in the woods. So I've got the suspect on camera, walking to the house, carrying a rifle and a bottle of accelerant. And then I've got them walking away from the house, carrying just the rifle. And you can see fire coming out of the back window. So he has broke out the back window and lit it from there.

He's in jail now. He showed up to his probation meeting. This guy was in prison for meth and firearms previously. He's got about four pages of arrest records on what we have here in Missouri called CaseNet, where you can look up what somebody's done in their lifetime. And it's going to be front page news in that local newspaper this week coming out. And it all is tied to the poaching situation. Now, this guy's got multiple poaching violations that he's been arrested for in the past on his case net, but he wasn't in the truck that night. It was actually three women. to figure out who these people were and got to the shooter who was a girl and I'm not going to use their names, but it was a girl from St. Louis and then Corey's father's girlfriend. So that was the tie. Essentially, he was going to be the hero for, I guess, these women that, uh, came down the road at eight 30 at night and, and poached, but there's, you know, two of the, or all three now have, have confessed and, and

gave a sworn statement and all three got tickets for, uh, artificial light, uh, after dark or after hours and firearms from a V or hunting from a vehicle. So they all three got three tickets and that's the whole, the whole poaching story. This guy's he's on a no bond warrant right now in, in jail. And if everything goes well,

he'll he's facing four different felonies and hopefully he'll be reunited with his old chums in the state pen here real soon. When you torture dudes place, what is that called? Well, it's arson, arson. I'm really pushing and hoping that this becomes a federal case. I literally just met with the Lieutenant Governor of Missouri, Mike Kehoe, two hours ago in the Capitol to talk about the situation and what I've learned from law enforcement down there. It's just a real hard place to be a law enforcement officer. There's so much public land. It's so remote and rural. There's no cell service across most of the county, but I'm trying to make a case to the Department of Conservation and the Conservation Commission that law enforcement doesn't need to be divided out

equally. So right now, in most cases in Missouri, we have two conservation agents per county. I kind of liken it to, we have more law enforcement in urban areas than we do in rural areas when it comes to city and state police. We need more law enforcement as far as conservation and conservation agents in these rural areas than we need in, say, St. Louis or Kansas City. So hopefully there's going to be a change made that will readdress the resources being applied to where they're most needed, which is in some of these Southeast Missouri counties. And then I've gotten a commitment from the Lieutenant Governor to explore a potential task force, joint task force with multiple law enforcement agencies.

And my next step is to talk to an old Senator friend of mine, who's now on the parole board to ensure that this guy's parole is, uh, is, is, is revoked. And he goes back to prison on that as well. And then I'm, I'm working some channels to a couple of us congressmen that I know well, who cover those counties. And we're just making sure that this person goes away for a long time because I have, I've been reached out to in the last 24 hours by three other families that have had their house burned down within five miles of mine in the last year and none of them had cameras unreal and and there's been no arrests there's been no arrests made so it would only be speculation but it sounds pretty coincidental. Did those folks feel like those incidences were some sort of retaliation or did they have any idea of a cause?

One guy had a run in with a known associate during muzzleloader season last year. And then his cabin was torched. And it was his grandfather's cabin. It was hand built. He didn't have any insurance on it. He lost so many of his grandfather's possessions as well. Guy's name was Dwayne. Man, I've met so many strangers in the last like 48 hours that have reached out.

Oh, I can imagine, man. You know, stories about the same sort of things happening in other states and across different parts of Missouri, you know, and it, I told the Lieutenant governor, it's, it is painful to tell this story about a place that I came to love so intimately. And you guys saw that when you were there, you know, I was, I had you there because I wanted to show you and your fan base, like how great this area is. And it's, it's underserved in notoriety, the natural resources and the wildlife and the fish. It's, it's such a great area. And there are good people there, but everyone down there lives under the same cloud of fear that if you,

if you stand up for what's right, we're going to burn your house down. And in my case, I stood up for what's right and they burned my house down. So there my case, I stood up for what's right, and they burned my house down. So there's some reality to it. And it's a shame that this is going to cause other people to not go down there, and it's going to hurt the economy down there. And it's all because of a few bad apples. Well, man, I appreciate you coming on to catch us up on it. And when a couple more things shake out, I'd like to have you back on again to fill us in.

And then earlier we touched on what was going on on the GoFundMe site, which is great to see. So, Brandon Butler, thanks a lot, man. As whatever part three, you let us know when you think it's time to come back and fill us in on where shit stands now. Then, then now, you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, thanks again for your guys' support. It's been overwhelming, so thank you. Yeah, man, take care. Okay, we got a couple,

we're still reeling from the pandemic here. I'm now, you've had it, right, Seth? Yep. Me and Seth have had it. We're still reeling from the pandemic here. I'm now. You've had it, right, Seth? Yep. Me and Seth have had it. We're survivors. Yanni and Cal, you guys have not. As far as you know, haven't had it. No.

No. Have any of you guys had it? Our remote guests? Nope. Nope. Nope. Can you guys introduce yourselves? Duke, go ahead first because you're on the left of my screen.

Buck, do me first? Yeah, why not? Just say what you do, all that kind of stuff. Okay, yeah, my name is Duke Wastonique, a customer service rep over here at First Light. Yeah, answer phone calls eight hours a day, five days a week. Got a big old mule deer this year that was nice yeah if we have time i'd like to i'd like to add i was talking to uh josh prestine this morning about this they're like it is quite amazing that you can call first light it's just regular old joe hunter you got some questions about gear and a dude that hunts i don't even you never gave me an actual number duke but i'm gonna go ahead and throw it out like 200 days a year for mule deer maybe 250 that's includes scouting looking and all that am i right am i approximately right yeah but you still

have a job right what the hell is your guys vacation policy man well see that's just the thing man like that's your guys end of this business get better vacation than our end of the business? No, these aren't full days. Oh, okay. Just like as in skiing, if you go out and take a couple runs, it counts as a day of skiing. So when he makes a quick jaunt three miles into the woods in the morning just to look at a deer for 15 minutes and then makes it back to work by 8, that counts. Okay, let me ask you.

I got a couple things we got to do, Duke. I don't want to go into too great a detail. You got a nice deer this year. We don't need to talk about where or anything. Had you ever seen that deer before you got it? Yeah, quite a few times. I actually missed that thing twice. The year before.

Oh, I see. Knew it quite well. Now, let me do... Hold on, real quick. I want to finish my thought. The point of it being... Oh, that wasn't thenew it quite well. Now, let me do... Hold on, real quick. I want to finish my thought. The point of it being... Oh, that wasn't the thought? That you can just, like, you're going to get customer service from a dude that is just

like an absolute backcountry mule deer professional expert, whatever you want to call it. Yeah. You're not just like getting just some rando that just learned the first light line recently and is going to recommend that you use the middle of the road base layer because it should work for all things. Duke's going to really dive in and just give you a top level service from a lot of experience. Give you the straight dope from a real person. Yeah. I just, I don't know. I can't get over it. I mean, how many other companies can say that they have someone with that kind of experience and success doing customer service for them?

Hey, dude, did you know this? Never mind. I was going to quiz you on something that's in the news, but that's not fair. Okay. Phil changed my screen around. Chase, now it's not left to right anymore. Now it's like you guys are like, I don't know what you call that. It's just different.

Chase, go ahead. What do you do? Chase Milliman. I run operations for First Light Meteor FHF. All right. And I think it's worth noting that from Duke's introduction that Cal thought his name was Buck for half the trip. So let's get that out in the open.

Which if you know the Monkey Wrench gang, it's a great little crossover, I feel. Yeah, I'll point out, these guys are on and joining us remotely. They're all down in Ketchum where First Light is based because they're just coming back from Seth, Yanni, Cal, Duke, who you just met,

Chase, who you're meeting, Matt, who you haven't met yet are all just returning from the the Sonora Cousier trip that I was unable to go on because I was afflicted that's all what else do you have to say for yourself Chase?

not a whole lot that's about all there is to say about me on the on the work side you got a uh you you got like a wife girlfriend uh i do not have a wife girlfriend we'll hook you up man yeah i do have a girlfriend oh i haven't hooked anybody up in a long time man i'm kind of itching to hook somebody up uh okay and then matt my name is matt derogers i'm the that's it product line manager for derogers something matt d uh i answered all of them now but uh i manage western big game product line at first sight all right uh okay we gotta take care of a couple things one i wanted to

share with you guys yanni and set, did you know that on a past episode when we had Luke Combs and Dan Isbell on? Yep. And they were just releasing that tune that they played for us? Yep. I think we even had them playing that tune on Instagram or something.

We definitely recorded it. Better together. Yeah. Kylie just told me it just hit number one yeah it did so i sent uh luke and dan a text yesterday like saying how uh congratulating them and saying how i had such proximity to that to them their process of writing the song that i felt a little bit like i had written it and dan isbell wrote back and said that's in keeping with you being a hunting tv host and that you always take credit for shit you did not do which hurt which hurt man i told him he's hitting a little close to home with that

shit man yeah he's pretty sharp that guy i think he i think he might i think maybe uh all of our talk about everybody likes to ask you know if it's so much harder um hunting with a crew and i would point out that we scare more but we spot a hell of a lot more you know this is a lot much harder hunting with a crew. And I would point out that we scare more, but we spot a hell of a lot more, you know, this is a lot more eyeballs looking around.

So Cal, do you know what's up with the, I wanted to tell people about this Oklahoma deal. Yeah. I mean, it's like kind of like, but this is a real politician. There is a real life politician. Like elected to office.

Who I can only imagine is acting on behalf of a very, very niche part of his constituency. And he's introduced a bill to get the Oklahoma Fish and Wildlife to institute a legal Bigfoot hunting season. Yeah. Now, if he's been pressured by a constituent, we hear from this constituent because people don't realize Oklahoma is a real sleeper Bigfoot locale. Oh, I did not know that. I didn't know that either. Everybody's always thinking it's like Oregon, Washington, Michigan's out in the peninsula, Pacific Northwest.

I know I'm naming wildly different places. But no, but they all have something in common. It's kind of like that northern, thick, some wet. Wet, dank. Yeah. Bigfoot country. Yeah. Bigfoot country. Yeah. So I'm sure the serious Bigfoot hunters are like many hunters thinking when a specified season

opens up, it's not to protect the resource. It's going to exploit the resource even more because new regulations often draw a lot of new eyeballs, right? Oh. So I'm sure the resident Bigfoot hunters in Oklahoma are really shaking their heads that the spotlight's being put on them. Yeah, it's like a spot burn.

Yeah. Oklahoma spot burn on Bigfoot hunting. The dude, the Oklahoman that wrote us a lot of nasty letters. Do you remember when we had, you remember Laura, was it Krantz? Krantz. Krantz. She did this whole podcast on like Bigfoot people, and we had her on to talk about Bigfoot people. And it got this Oklahoma dude super fired up and wrote us a bunch of letters.

And he's a Bigfoot person. And they hunt Bigfoots. And he wrote in letters about them shooting guns at things they heard off in the woods and whatnot at night, but they haven't gotten one yet, and he wants to be able to kill it so he can be like, put that in your pipe and smoke it. That's right. He wants a dead one, but I think they want to not get in trouble when they get one

or have anybody take it from them. Yeah, I'm hoping that if there is a season, then there will also be a license or a tag. That's part of the bill that's covered in Section 1, in fact. Does it have a price? I believe the price would be set by Oklahoma Wildlife Conservation Commission. But it does say a season and a license.

Because I'm hoping it could just be like a boon to the department as in some extra revenue. But I also don't want it to promote more of what you just described. Shooting that stuff running off through the woods at night? Mm-hmm. Hominids? Shooting it. Shooting that stuff running off through the woods that night? Hominids. Shooting at sounds in the night. Well, yeah, because it was... He's like, the minute I saw I had two legs and was standing upright, I started shooting.

Two years ago, was it the state of Michigan? Somebody hit somebody. No, that was here. Oh, that was Montana. Yeah. A guy put a big foot suit on and jumped out on the road to spook someone and got hit and killed. Whoa. Yeah, and that son of a bitch driving would have thought he had like a real Harry and the Hendersons moment, man.

Can you imagine like that poor guy? We should find that person and get him on the show. Hopefully the season is closed during Halloween. Mm-hmm. And any other hunting season. Yeah, that's the world coming to. I want to talk real quick. What's this fellow's name again?

Mertz? Oh, yeah. I have his letter right here right now. It is John Mertz. John Mertz. Oh, you found it. What? Okay.

My wife sent me a picture of the letter. Oh. Like I asked her. Now, why do you think that the spearing decoy that John Mertz made for you is somehow superior to my spearing decoy that he made for me? Well, in my very minimal dark house spearing experience. Yeah. I've had great luck with red and white.

And mine, because of the Latvian colors, Latvian flag colors came red and white. And it just like, you know, like did you ever catch fish on like the Red Devil Spoon? Oh yeah. It's that color combination. There's a very popular surf casting rattle plug surface thing that's classically red and white.

That's right. Redhead, white body. Yeah. Can't think of the name of it. I think that mine is this color. See, they were all customized. He sent Cal one that has a mustache. It's a cute little burger a cute little that's nice it's like a san

juan worm mustache glued on to the front i think mine i didn't i never made up if it ain't chartreuse it ain't no use but i think maybe i was like quoting it and he heard me say that even though that's not my saying i believe it's you know i i it, but I didn't come up with it. But I'm going to use this thing this weekend. And I just had Travis Barton, the fancy fireman welder, who normally welds like stuff for nice houses, handrail and stuff. But I keep telling him that's bad for his soul. And that he needs to do like weird hunting and fishing welding projects to keep him like in touch with his true self.

How does he feel about that? He believes me that it's true because he just made us two pike spears. Chase over at First Light, he's going all the way to Kamchatka to fish for steelhead and to ensure that he can go all the way across the world and have a successful trip i'm going to paint him up some chartreuse beads to guarantee some fishing success for him that's nice yeah when i call those beads aren't making the trip cal oh. Oh, Cal made you a special

bead and you're not going to bring it with you? What's the deal, Chase? You need a little background here. There's like, he's going to catch these steelhead that only live there. It's like the steelhead trip

of all steelhead trips to go over to far east Russia and fish the Kamchatka. And he is going to stick to like some purist type techniques and would rather only catch 20 with purist techniques than a hundred by fishing a plastic bead and it's a research trip where every fish is uh you know weighed surveyed scales taken and tagged and released okay um and so it really behooves if he fished a bead a little bit yeah that's what i'm saying like if that was the case to go and catch a whole shit pile of them right i mean he can sit and catch them and be selfish you know but he's going

to kamchatka for research i don't want to do the species a disservice by not fishing your beads but there is a certain amount of recreation that's involved in this trip as well it's it's it smells a little bit like that uh back to the oh when i called um travis barton what's the name of his what does he work under uh barton fabrication fabrication dude the spear is a work like a work of art when i called him and i said like hey uh and asked about his familiarity with pike spears he pointed out that he grew up in minnesota and when you were in metal shop all anybody made was pike spear pike spears but pike spear making has changed where now people use those like uh

cnc you just cut it out of plate steel you don't like sharpen up barbs and weld the whole thing together. It's like a freaking handle. And then you get a piece of like 10 inch by 16 inch plate steel and cut the whole. Is that how he did it? Oh. Yeah, he has the CNC machine, right? Dude, it's like a gorgeous, gorgeous. Did you give him like specs to work off of or did he find him on the internet or

i sent him a photo of my buddy's spear that he likes a lot and i sent him the sort of recipe but when i'd done that he'd already been online researching it and then didn't use the didn't use the design i sent him he used the design that was very similar but uh and he even put like a little decorative twist and what oh it's like it's a freaking gorgeous spirit you know that guy he likes to run the hashtag built not bought oh travis does yeah i know that so in like without trying to be he's very much like at the forefront of a uh like a movement in across our country and maybe the rest of the world, like a very green movement to limit big manufacturing. People just making stuff at home with what they have.

Stuff that lasts. He embodies that without actually, he certainly doesn't think of himself at the forefront of some green movement. I didn't know built not bought yeah that's good stuff man it is ties in well with what's going on on yanni's side of the street whereas brand new appliances are oh crap in the bed yeah i don't think it's you know i can tell you i'll happily tell you we'll tell you the guy that came to fix my samsung range said ah the one

company i would have told you not to buy from is Samsung. I'm like, oh, okay. Really? You got some dud appliances from Samsung? Just one. But in general, he was just telling me that from what he sees, there's very much a

planned engineered obsolescence. Obsolescence, yeah um he's just like if i if you don't have it he's like i recommend right now you go online and get yourself an extended warranty because like you know every appliance now has like a digital display of some sort and he's like on the oven it is literally right above the part where the heat is escaping the most well guess what it gets cooked all yeah it gets cooked he's like what? So it gets cooked all the time. Yeah, it gets cooked.

He's like, so these, I replace these boards all the time, two to three years into the appliance. And it doesn't matter if you spent $800 on your range or 5,000, that thing is going. So that's the appliance you had that's bad. And you bought a brand Spickity New. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that wasn't what went bad on us for us it

was the uh base the um the the the element that heats up the oven that like starts the the heating process but that's what's going to happen next yes oh man i feel terrible you're getting screwed over by those guys i used to run their phones yeah for a while, I had this thing called Samsung White Glove Service. You remember that? I do. Yeah. We were dialed. It was like for celebrities,

but apparently they made it down to D-list celebrities in their celebrity list because I got white glove service, which is pretty nice. But then I gave up on them altogether. Dude in New York. I kind of want to talk about this. It's a good one. Oh, well, let's first talk about this.

So some guy in Idaho. Cal? Yes, sir. Do you know about this? You talking poachers now? Yeah. Tell everybody about this. Just because you got Idaho.

You used to live there uh are you first light fellas familiar with the big idaho uh poacher that just got busted here oh they caught him the the guy that killed the mountain goat nanny with a bunch of practice practice bolts from a crossbow no but chase this is up in your old neck of the woods uh guy a shot or sorry i shouldn't say a guy a a suspect shot a mountain goat with to me it looks like a like probably not a hunting style crossbow, but the bolts, which are the short little arrows that people fling out of crossbows, um, were, uh, stuck in this mountain goat, this nanny female mountain goat. And they're, they're not, uh, a hunting setup at all. They're, they're target bolts. So no, uh, made for targets,

not for, uh, effectively and, and, you would call it, killing something. And Idaho Fish and Game was forced to euthanize the Nanny Mountain Goat. And. They haven't caught the dude. They have not caught the person. So if you know someone, here, I'm going to figure out how to solve this. If you know someone with a crossbow, they like to call them, like, instead of having it, like, if you're, like, crossbow enthusiasts, they like to have it be that there's horizontal bows and vertical bows.

Mm-hmm. that there's horizontal bows and vertical bows. If you know a vertical bow enthusiast and you knew they had some practice bolts, and then one day you... No, no, no, horizontal. Horizontal bow enthusiast. Sorry. If you know a horizontal bow enthusiast who had some practice bolts,

and then one day you noticed that he had three fewer practice bolts than he had previous you might have a clue yeah practice bolts are like a yellow shiny gold color he's shaking his boots right now shaking his boots. 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. Well,

if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that

include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team.

Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Here's another one, Cal, i feel like you know about i think this is an interesting one a guy in new york i feel bad for this guy kind of a guy in new york is barbecuing up a barbecuing up a canine and apparently the some version of the police show up

and confiscate a hunk of his whole canine that he's grilling up to send it off to Cornell to find out if he is cooking, as he says, a coyote, or, as neighbors suspect, a dog. It is illegal to cook a domestic dog. However, the state of New York says it is legal to at least have it in your possession or do what you want with a coyote carcass, hide or pelt. You actually found this out, that it is illegal to cook a domestic dog dude i'll tell you falls under i'll tell you a

hell of a lot more i know about this than that falls under the uh like domestic animal or animal abuse i'm i'm missing mixing two abuses up there uh yes, animal abuse. Now, when I, here's something that happened, I thought that I'll share. A million years ago, when I was writing a story for Outside about. Animal cruelty. Sorry, that's what the word I was going for. Now. Animal cruelty. Yes.

A million years ago, when I was writing a story for Outside about the consumption of dogs in Vietnam. I had a line in the draft of my article that I submitted where I had some line like to the effect of, you know, everybody knows it's illegal to eat a dog in America. And the fact checker kept pointing out that where are you, show me that it's illegal to eat a dog in America. And I'm like, oh, I just assumed. I don't know. I didn't actually find that somewhere. I was just young and stupid at the time and younger stupider and then once i had to actually look into it it's illegal in california it's illegal in new york other than that there's no there's not a prohibition on eating your dog you could eat your

dog right now the the area it falls into is like is consuming a dog necessarily rolled into animal cruelty but like if your own dog whatever got if you ran over your own dog in your driveway there's nothing saying you can't consume that dog yeah there's probably i don't think there's any rule against euthanizing your own dog right so no um what this one of the things this brought up is it was like why is it uh why is it not possible to buy dog meat in america and when i was doing working on this article and i wound up talking to some usda inspectors and stuff and it was like you're just never going to get a um you're just not going to get an inspected facility. You're not going to get like the USDA.

You, you're not going to get them to come inspect, um, and certify that product. Right. So that would be what would block someone from trafficking and dog flesh, but it wouldn't be any kind of, in most states,

it wouldn't be any kind of other prohibition. There's nothing that says you can't do it. It's just no one's ever gotten set up to do it. So this dude, he says, have you seen, there's no pictures of, speaking of,

I'd like to have this guy on the show. Have you seen any pictures? They searched around to see if anyone had reported a dog missing that fit the sort of stature and girth of this dog. Which I thought was great. And they couldn't turn up any reports of people searching for a canine in the area that fit this general make and model, if you will. Yeah. They're like, he was kind of cooked. But I don't know.

I thought this was something interesting to bring up because the coyote, the only coyote I ate was while we were hunting coos deer in Mexico, and you guys just got back from hunting coos deer in Mexico. How's that for a transition? That was, that was good. I'll tell you one thing about that transition is it's premature. Because, because I'm not ready yet. So I couldn't figure out if the guy got his meat back or if.

Or how much did they confiscate from him? How much they confiscated. To me, the couple articles I read, it sounded to me like they took the entire meal. Oh, they took his whole thing. Which would make sense. How does that matter? You can't do that to somebody. Well, yeah. Imagine somebody comes up and takes the rack of ribs off your barbecue.

And they're like, listen, these may or may not may not be a person so we'll get back to you i wouldn't be real happy about that no i like how the article points out like now that a journalist will include like a detail that is a like a telling detail and you can tell that they it's very important to the person covering this, that it was a makeshift grill. Yeah, I read that too. It's like, like there's sort of, there's saying something there. I think the journalist and this fellow's neighbors are probably on the same page. They're like, there's more than likely nothing going on here, but for some reason I don't like

this person. Yeah. And I'll know that it seemed to me to be a makeshift grill, not like a super nice grill. Weird dude cooking some weird ass meat, some makeshift grill. It really paints a picture. It's like incriminating

yeah and he's using the hashtag caught not bought and what was the other one yanni the made it not built not bought built not bought caught he's doing a little caught not bought and built not bought at the same time the neighbors couldn't stand who does he think he is he's he's mixing up all his hashtags man there's a hashtag i want to get into cal i don't know if we feel like getting into it right now you tell me if we wait or not there's one more thing i want to talk about big giant colons oh mega and that guy that got his uh testicle torn out of his scrotum. We'll talk about that in another one. I didn't hear that one.

It has to do with it. So, horse riding story. But I do want to quick touch on this colon deal. And do we want to talk about the hashtag that was brought up in conversation around who the woman that president now president Biden has put forth as his nominee for the interior secretary oh the not specifically about her but about the movement that could be a big talking point yeah do we want to get into that now or later i think it's a it's a fascinating topic um we may as well kick it off it's not gonna be the last time we hear about no because what we should do is do it for real later yeah yeah okay tell everybody just just the vagaries yeah so um our

it's an appointed position she hasn't been um confirmed confirmed yet thank you uh deb holand uh who's out of new mexico she's from a pueblo in new mexico yeah uh on her bio it says 35th generation new mexican which i think is is cooler than hell um hard to calculate uh hard to calculate for sure but it you know around montana it's like you you open conversations like second generation oh yeah god fifth generation, you know, around Montana, it's like you, you open conversations like that. Dude, I'm a second generation. Oh yeah. God. Fifth generation.

Yeah. You know, I mean, I, I was just telling somebody, you know, it's like, oh yeah. Yeah. Nephew for Christmas. My sister Courtney popped out a, or a niece for Christmas. And, uh, you know, it's like. Plummet. Your sister popped out.

My niece. Your niece. Yes. Yeah. Uh, and I'm like, ah, that's, you know, it's like. Hold on a minute. Your sister popped out. My niece. Your niece. Yes. Yeah. And I'm like, ah, it's, you know, like. But you thought it was your nephew. Well, the nephew was present. But, you know, it's like fifth or sixth generation.

When she was pregnant, was she like, I'm pregnant with Cal's niece? They held off on identifying the sex. Oh, okay. Really? Yeah. They did it old fashioned? Yeah. Wow.

And yeah, I'll be the first to tell everyone that my sister does a very, very consistent and good job of working the Catholic guilt on roping me in more firmly into family affairs and i keep saying we'll wait till they get older and i'll give them a bunch of stuff and we'll be able to go do things which i think she thinks you should get started earlier yeah

but i i don't know really how to do that we're not no i i was with you one time when we took a a little nephew of yours fishing yeah so that's jay that's courtney's son my nephew yeah and so that sister had a uh a daughter yeah you were like i thought you were like full-fledged uncleing yeah thank you it's intermittent uh yes i have i have i have um moving on uh so anyway um are you gonna tell us what the hashtag is land back which is the land back movement right and there's conversations and this has been going on we got got to be clear about, right, that it, go on. If you don't clarify the point, I'll make sure to clarify the point. The point is,

is give the land back to the natives. Yeah. Which would be the inhabitants of, in our case, North America, within the United States, prior to European, Europeans setting foot on the soil and and spreading disease and claiming big chunks of other people's property for ourselves um fascinating subject it is a quagmire

um unless you think that all uh native americans were on the same same team same page and uh they all know who like identifying who occupied what at what time what at what time yeah because later like you know that that um you know the the sue had displaced a group from the black hills and presumably they had displaced another group from the black hills and oh yeah and and yeah just like the mixing of races religions and and who's leading who i was just reading a great book that old martin heinrich told me to look up which was lost city of the monkey god and they in a relatively small area the the empires that rose and fell in a pretty small area in a pretty small amount of time yeah when we were caribou hunting he told me about that book yeah pretty pretty neat

um so yeah land back would would be the hashtag and and it's it's a really interesting one and um it's it's going to be coming up a lot i i my guess is it's going to be coming up a lot presumably the land back is not coming from the private sector presumably it would come from public land it would be coming from public land yeah or that's the pieces that are most like obvious the most obvious target would be that you would do public land right so it'd be federally managed lands yeah i was you know i was swapping emails with cal about this yesterday and i pointed out that well one cal pointed out that it's very awkward conversations yeah it's hard for a bunch of white dudes to sit and act like we got a handle on covering it from all angles but i was thinking that and i put this to cal oh the thing i wanted to clarify before i even

say my thing is that it's presumptuous it's like a it's it's like if biden's interior nominee um is uh what's the word you use would be a clear from an indigenous culture if she's confirmed um it'll be the first native american interior secretary uh and it's known that she has um voiced this perspective or is sympathetic to this perspective in the lead up to this, this appointment and confirmation. She hasn't said, my thing is going to be laying back. It's just like articles I've read about her to try to get a sense of, um,

as soon as the appointment came out, like I was very much rooting for Martin Heinrich. That'd be like the, in my mind, the dream that'd make this all worthwhile. The dream interior secretary, in my view, dream that'd make this all worthwhile the dream interior secretary in my view because uh i like where he's at environmentally and he's like very friendly to hunting and fishing when that didn't happen i was like who's this person um i wasn't that familiar with her and

i remember people like like journalists speculating on what might be her priorities and the two of them that were that i read about were both alarming to me would be uh land back so taking public land and handing it to sovereign groups and that someone was speculating that moving more public lands over into renewable energy production. So wind and solar moving away from not that I'm like, not that I'm excited about the drawn fossil fuels from public land, but I'm definitely not excited about

turning them all into wind farms. Yep. Uh, and so I was like yeah but there's no indication from her what like you know there's no indication from her that that is going to be her priority it's just speculation but i think that it's going to put i was saying it's the cow that if the if the land back movement is that it'd be like oh no the obvious thing that you would give back would be to give federally managed public lands, so lands that belong to all Americans,

regardless of race, creed, religion, whatever, like they're all of ours, we all have a say in them, that you would hand them to groups that are sovereign nations, to tribes that are sovereign nations, and not subject to all federal things, is going to put organizations, public land protection organizations like BHA in a very weird position. Yes.

Potentially, right? How do they not, how does it, how would it not become weird for them to be consistent? They'd have to say, no, we don't believe in the transfer of public lands to private groups. Yeah. I mean, correctly. Right. Consistent, they'd have to say, no, we don't believe in the transfer of public lands to private groups. Yeah, I mean, correctly. You're right. So the sovereign nations, from what I see right now, and to be very, very clear, I've got a ton of education to do on this. And this is a great, great way to kickstart it. And Deb Haaland or Haaland.

Haaland. Haaland. uh, Deb Halland or Haland, Haland, Haland. Uh, if you're listening or somebody in your, uh, office is listening, we'd love to have you on and get your information, your, uh, two cents on all this stuff. But, um, yeah, you would, man, as a board member for BHA, I would be anti-transfer of public land or sale of public land to a sovereign nation or sovereign entity, uh, just like we have been. I don't, I don't know. I just don't see a situation where we couldn't be, I could see a possibility where we, you know, I get to a point where we have much more input from many more groups on sacred sites sites with uh you know huge importance and, and coming up with a better way to, you know, have access while protecting those areas, bringing more people to the table, which is something that gets

regurgitated all the time, have more voices, have better conversations. Um, but that doesn't mean it's not something we need to do but an outright transfer like land back begin with like land back to who yeah i could see a way it would kind of like i don't know how i feel about it yet right in a large measure, it would depend on scale. I'm just bringing up New Mexico because Halen's from New Mexico. Like Bandelier National Monument. So it's like an ancient Pueblo National Monument site.

It's managed as a monument. It's geographically defined to be sort of around this monument site. It's not like hundreds of thousands of acres, but it's this site. I could see situations like that, like very specific. I could see where you could get a majority of americans on board with these like very specific sites that had direct relevance to people that own them significance to people that own them like the site of you know wounded knee like you uh devil's tower whatever like like very specific spots that had religious

significance and that you would hand over administration or whatever of these to their prior you know arguably rightful owners yeah pompeius pillar would be a great example yeah right next door and i could see that you would have one reception that the public, Americans, might perceive that differently than, say, Yosemite. We're taking all of Yosemite National Park and giving it to its prior owner. Yeah, or all of Hudson's Bay. Yeah, or Manhattan. Manhattan, exactly.

We're going to go right to the start, right where it all started. It's Bay. Yeah. Or Manhattan. Manhattan. Exactly. We're going to go right to the start, right where it all started. It was Manhattan. Yep. Or Plymouth Rock. And, you know, that state, that's not going to go. Right. But, so, Pompeii's Pillar, great example, right? Like, right now, there's a cultural site.

There's, you know, all sorts of infrastructure set up for education. And I went and walked around it over Christmas and Pheasants Forever has a bunch of ground in the monument. And I hunted my way with the dog to the no hunting sign. Jump defense. Threw my shotgun over the shoulder, you know, broke it. Eventually there were some other folks around. I just didn't want to deal with anything.

And I was using an over and up, one of those Weatherby over and unders. Yeah. So I just broke the thing in three parts and threw it in my backpack. So you didn't look like you were up to no good. Right. And then just, you know, toured the site, read

all the signs that I wanted to see. My grandpa's got a rock over there. He used to do some education tours on medicine at Pompey's. And, uh, and then snapped her back together and hunted my way back out to the track. That's great.

And it's like, but do we have to give up any of that? Oh. You know what I mean? It's a very small site. Yeah. You know? Pompey, Pompey.

So Sacagawea, Sacagawea, Sacagawea, who was the, I don't know, I don't think they were married. The, yeah, the sort of wife of a guide that was hired by lewis and clark on the lewis and clark expedition and the guide wound up being like a kind of i think he's kind of worth his reputation was he's pretty worthless but his wife sacagawea um who was with child right she was was was her child born pompey was born along the Lewis Clark trail. Yeah. Charbonneau. Yeah.

Charbonneau. Was the pops. Had a bad reputation, but his wife, who I think was snake, if I'm not, if I'm not mistaken, uh,

Sacagawea, wanted to be like very valuable. What do you mean? She was snake? I think she was snake Indian, wasn't she? No. Or she had,

she was, had been born with the snake and it had been, uh, had been born. look it up real quick. She was born snake and had been kidnapped by another tribe and raised in another tribe but knew certain

landmarks around her tribe in which she was born. She proved to be very valuable around some navigation and has been celebrated ever since is like the only even though she wasn't formally a member i don't even think she's getting paid like her old man was getting paid and he was a i guess worthless but so she's been honored ever since as being this like the only female member and i think so like, like,

well, they had a slave with them to York who wasn't paid, but he was given his, he was gifted his freedom after the expedition. She died in obscurity, Sacagawea, but she has this kid. They named the kid Pompey and they got to a pillar.

It is prominent pillar along the Yellowstone, like a sandstone pillar that sits there. Clark goes up and carves his name. And that's all. And for a long time, prominent pillar along the Yellowstone, like a sandstone pillar that sits there, Clark goes up and carves his name. And for a long time, it had always been billed as the only visual marker of the Lewis and Clark expedition. It was where Clark...

I've gone up and looked at it. You can still go up and look. It's a damn name from 1805 or 1806, whatever. It's carved in that freaking rock. Very nice penmanship. And he named the rock Pompey's Pillar, Pompey's Pillar. And then later, interestingly, Custer,

they had a shootout right below that, below that, below that spire 70 years later. Hmm. Yeah. So, uh, Shoshone or Shoshone, uh, and from the, uh, Lemhi zone. But who was she raised by? Which, so, uh, member of the Lemhi band of the Shoshoni tribe. She was kidnapped by the Hadatsa and then sold to Charbonneau.

Oh, he bought her? So she's like a slave. Yeah. Think about that, Phil. Do you know all this? Yeah, I knew most of it. I feel like most, if you were a wife, a Native American wife, I mean, you were pretty much a slave back then, right?

To a white trapper? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I don't know, man. You ever watch Jeremiah Johnson? That was a movie. I'm aware. That's probably one of the ones I slept through in middle school.

I'm sure I'd love it now, Steve. I'm sorry if I offended you. All right, we're going to put the colon on hold. Cal, you know with your little report about who, Cal's like totally engrossed now. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I'm sure we're going to get an overwhelming load of emails in. As Steve said when we started this conversation by email yesterday um very aware that we're a

bunch of white european men talking about this stuff and um very interested and very uh looking forward to seeing how these conversations evolve on the land back movement yeah we just gotta get the right people to talk about it with us yeah exactly because on one hand i want to not talk about it but on the other hand you know you don't want to be like i'll tell you what these people ought to think we're acknowledging it exists and we're acknowledging that we need more info yeah corinne will find us the right people to talk about it yes all right now old mexico now i missed out on the trip because I was afflicted with COVID, C-19. Which I got lucky and it didn't do anything bad to me. But how was it, man?

Was it like the greatest thing in the world? That generally is the hunting highlight of my year. I saw that you said that in an email to one of these fellows. And that didn't surprise you, did it? Partially, I guess. I mean, I know that it's like top tier, but I didn't know that it was like the number one highlight. You thought it was trapping golf course muskrats with Seth? No.

I mean, that's hard to top, but Mexico's pretty cool too. Yeah, man. It's a, you know, it's funny. Somebody in the group, I think Matt D said to me, he said, this is my first international hunt. And I don't ever really look at it that way because you can look into america yeah but half the stuff you see is in america yeah we're so close to the border that you can see the the the border blimps um but uh it does put it in perspective it is an

international hunt and no no you can't you can't deny it no deny it. No, it makes it all that much more special. Yeah, but the fact that you drive over and then it's only like 45, I don't know what the hell it is. Would you consider any less or more international if you drove into British Columbia and went stone sheep hunting?

I would consider it equally un-international for some reason. I don't know why. It's a North American hunt. When Iational for some reason. I don't know why. It's a North American hunt. When I hear like an international, I don't know. It's just stupid. I don't know why.

That's very much. That's another country. Yeah, they're intercontinental hunts. Yeah, I'm mixing up intercontinental with international. I think that's probably the root of a lot of issues at customs for both Canada and Mexico with American hunters traveling. There's part of your brain that just says, listen, your job's just semantics. Yeah. You're right next door.

Yeah. I can throw a rock over the border let's not act like i'm far away from my house exactly i live right up that way um and he kind of when we started going down to to sonora years ago uh there was always a little tension because i think we started going like after things went after the border got where it started to develop a reputation uh the we were dismantling cartels it was leading to a lot of strife beheadings yeah i was leaving to a lot of turf wars violence was kind of like boiling over. And it was like a little unnerving.

Yeah. Even though, I don't know how many times we've been down there, nothing has ever happened, ever. Yeah, not even kind of. Did you, were you guys a little edgy? Driving down and being around? No, and because I'm probably coming on trip number 10 down there, every time you go, you get more and more comfortable. But I think that's a good question for the guys from First Light

if they felt that edginess at all. Well, two of the dudes from First Light, I think, spent a lot of time in Mexico. Yeah, I've driven down to the tip of Baja and back a couple times and spent a spent a bunch of time down there so um first time taking firearms across which was a little different but uh wasn't it was it was pretty mellow for the most part yeah I'd agree with that I thought the checking the firearms in was kind of the most interesting part of it but otherwise I don't think I think you get down there and you realize it's people, too.

You know, like no one's looking to give you a hard time, really, per se. I felt pretty safe the whole time. Duke, you, too. No fear of safety whatsoever. Or lack of safety. Yeah, I mean, I do feel like it went pretty smooth. Um, that was the first time I'd ever personally traveled anywhere with a, with a firearm. And so, um, I mean, you guys helped, helped me. I think it went pretty dang smooth. Yeah. But when you got across the border, you weren't like all of a sudden worried about getting abducted by a drug

cartel and possibly held for ransom? Uh, no. That's interesting. It must just be different times because that was definitely in our heads when we went for the first time. My first time I thought about it but I thought about it a lot but

I mean this time, this trip was my second time down there and it was like not anything near the first time the one time that i got most nervous was just when we were staying in a place along the highway we're along like a very busy road and i don't know why but but like nothing happened. Nothing happened. There was one kid that just had a shady personality about him. And he might've been the nicest, like best, you know, law abiding kid citizen ever. No. But he had, he had a, a tinge of shadiness.

Yeah. But if he was hanging out with you guys on a shoot for whatever reason on some property in the U.S., from what he has described to me, he probably would have been like, man, I don't like leaving my stuff around that kid. Oh, absolutely. I don't give a shit where he lived. And I was pissed because Steve made to sort of like, not that it was necessary or even inferred, but to sort of like make everything just completely good. Steve made me give my pocket knife to the guy.

Because he really wanted a knife. Seems like if we don't give him your knife, Yanni, then who knows what's going to happen. Give him your knife. Nah, I just got mine 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 it makes it that they can't join, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking a high and titty there,

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onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Yanni, what's a burrito buck? Burrito buck. That's the buck that we killed on the last morning of the hunt. So we're kind of going backwards here, starting with the last day. I'm just looking at what you wrote down.

Yeah, we can start there. What happened to us, too, is that we got a – it's really kind of odd. The story starts earlier no the day before um on the radio we use radios there to communicate both just you know between hunting parties and then to also during the hunt to help us re-find deer that we've spotted from long distances well i'm on the radio with somebody, and some other dude chimes in. And it was sometimes because I didn't know the guys from First Light

that well, and I didn't know their voices. Barking. I'm like, who is this? Now, do you know who you're talking to? This is Giannis. I'm trying to talk to Seth, not Matt D. So identify yourself. This guy's like, oh, man, sorry. We're just on the same

channel. We're down in Escanada and we're just heading back to the border. I'm like, oh, okay. I'm like, you guys were crews there, hon? Yeah. He goes, I'm like, how'd you guys do? He goes, oh man, dad killed 115 and we killed 295. I'm like, oh man. And when he said that, I'm like, does he think he knows me? Because he just like said, dad, like, I, you 95s. I'm like, oh man. And when he said that, I'm like, does he think he knows me? Because he just like said, dad, like I, you know, like I'm supposed to know who his dad is,

you know? So they, they had a decent hunt. I think they went three for four, but he asked me how long we're hunting. I said through Sunday or no, through Saturday, going back on Sunday. He goes, oh, well, did you hear the military is closed on Sunday?

And for everybody listening, you have to check your guns in when you go to Mexico with the police and the military, the federales. And you check them with the U.S. dudes. Yeah, and then leaving, you go through the same process. And you get a signature or a stamp on this gun permit on the way out that says you are now leaving with the same weapon. And, uh, if you don't have that signature and stamp, you, you legally can't cross the border. And, uh, so I'm like, Oh, you know, we're supposed to leave that day. So we've got to change plans. So, uh, we figured out that we had to leave a day early. Luckily the military is going to still be open until 5 on Saturday so we could hunt

the morning. So we get that all figured out, but we are now... And you found this out from some dudes driving on the highway that you picked up on your radio. Yes. Yes. And then I confirmed... That's valuable. I confirmed with our fixer, Selsa.

And confirmed with her. And so, yes, it with her. And, uh, so yes, we, we, yeah, it was, it was very, uh, um,

what's the word? Not coincidental, but fortuitous. So, uh, so when he said, dad, this is the guy,

you know, no, it just like, some people do that. Yeah. It was, it was moving along pretty quick and, you know,

we had hunting to do. And, and so anyways, we're feeling the pressure now where we're cut by a half a day of hunting, you know, at least, you know, maybe a little bit more. So anyways, last morning, everybody's hunting hard. Cal has a tag unfilled and so does Chase. And so we split the groups up evenly, chase and Seth and I go to a spot where we had seen some deer maybe the day before. And Seth had seen a little rut party where usually you see like a couple does or a doe getting chased around by two or three bucks. And we're

going to go to that same area and see if, a branch antlered buck had shown up in that area. Can I interject real quick? Yeah. I feel like those rut parties move. They certainly can, yeah. I feel like a lot of times there's a rut party, and then you go there the next day, and the rut party is elsewhere, man. Right.

I used to think like, oh, I'll go there tomorrow, but they just pop over the hill. Sure. Anyways, so you go back to the rock party. There was also a lot of does there. Gotcha. Yeah. I mean, we had like, what, five, six, seven does in this one little basin.

Yeah. And, or I mean, literally one hillside. And they were holding tight. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Seth had seen a couple of small bucks. He had heard another very deep guttural grunt.

That's interesting down there. You hear that down there, man. Yeah, it's crazy how much you hear the grunts. Yeah. And anyways, we pop up on the knob, Seth's looking that direction, and because we're near another zone that we like to hunt, I just go to the other side of the knob,

maybe 75 yards away, and just figure we'll glass all directions, and first buck that pops up, Chase is going to go after and uh it didn't take but you know it was such a pretty morning the layers were so nice in the distance of the mountains and the sunrise i actually took two minutes to snap some uh iphone pictures and uh it was just so nice. Then I put my binoculars up and thought to myself, look where you've been seeing the most deer. And I looked on that one hillside and it didn't take like a half a sweep. And I'm like,

Oh, there's a buck. Call everybody over and chase like, looks good to me. Let's go. So we bail off the hill and, um, we make it like a hundred yards from Seth.

Seth's going to stay back and, and, uh, we're, and keep an eye on the buck. And we make about 100 yards down the hill, and we spook another buck. I'm like, there's a buck. Get ready.

And I look back at Chase, and he's doing the thing where you're grabbing at your shoulder, where you're looking for where your rifle strap is, your sling. And then you're like, ah, it's not there. So he hustles back up the hill, goes to get my rifle, and he had to borrow my rifle. Oh, yeah, because we were, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Rifle shortage. Yeah.

It was hard to go kill him without a rifle. In my defense, I hadn't carried a rifle the first few days, so I got pretty comfortable with that program. And I'm glad that buck popped up or it could have been a real problem. Yeah, we might have made it a long ways down that hill and yeah he remembered so we make it down there um we get in we're sort of creeping up on this like low bench that's underneath the hillside the buck's on and uh you know seth's kind of telling me less where he's seeing the buck. I can see this little draw that Seth's describing for me. We're three to 400 yards away. And I'm,

I'm feeling very confident. It's like, we found a buck, we made the stock and we refined him. And now we're within shooting range. Right. So it's like, you're like still a little anxious,

but you're like feeling that, like you're starting to get like those visions of grandeur. I like to's like, you're like still a little anxious, but you're like feeling that like you're starting to get like those visions of grandeur. I like to call them where you're like, you're like imagining taking the grip and grip photo. You're like this just might work out. Yeah.

Yeah. We might have another buck dead here shortly. And, um, at that time, I think he's like three 50 ish and we've, I spot him and he's this little shade patch, and he's like wide out in the open. And we've got like a nice shooting lane to him, and I'm like, okay, I got him. Chase is like, okay, cool. I'm going to take my time. I'm going to get super comfortable, you know, make the shot.

I'm like, yeah, that's the right thing to do. Like, you know, let's not rush this. Like, we've got a big open hillside ahead of us. Like, we're going to get a shot. Well, sure enough, that bugger, like right as Chase is getting settled in, walks behind a tree and like an hour goes by. And there's like, he just feeds in a spot where Seth's like probably sitting up there thinking like, why are they not shooting? Oh, that's the most frustrating thing. From our angle, we couldn't see a deer, like nothing. Seth's like, yeah, he's just right there, you know, looks broadside to me.

And we just had like absolutely nothing. So we just like stay on him, stay on him. Seth and I are talking about, you know, what trees we're looking at to make sure that like when he pops out, we'll be in the general vicinity. You know, Chase has the gun dialed to the proper range. Well, the buck like hooks up with the doe, where she was probably there the whole time, but we finally see the doe, and she starts moving up the hill.

He's following her, and he proceeds to move up the hill and never stop in an opening and just disappears out of our lives. Gone. Goes up and over the top. Up and over the top. That takes maybe five to ten minutes as he makes this move.

Feeds a little bit, but basically follows her up and over the top to go to the shady side of the hill. Out of your lives. Out of our lives, man. So we went from feeling pretty dang good about the situation to the lowest of low because it's the last morning. Now it's like 9 a.m. We made like a call

that the hard out was going to be 10 because we had to go and pack and make it to the military, you know, by five. And we're just bummed, man. You know, it's just like, it's the gut punch. You know, everybody's been there

and you like, like I said, you could see the grip and grin. And now you're just like, oh, man, I don't feel so good. But there's like a silver lining because everything happened that morning so quickly that we hadn't got our little burrito in. Now, you've been down there. You eat like, sometimes you eat burritos for dinners, but most of the burritos go down as breakfast slash lunch burritos because every morning Lupe builds you

or if there's a different cook there, but Lupe, we've had last couple of years. We love her. She builds you like some version of a bean, potato, meat, bacon, maybe just some eggs in there, some salsa, whatever, burrito, you know, with you.

And this year Lupe was packing some fatties. These things were, I think some of the times were like double the size of the normal burrito. Like filling up a, like a quart size baggie, two of them, like stuffed, big burritos. We've had at least two, sometimes three of these every single day. We're on like day six now. So Chase and I are sitting there not feeling very good about ourselves. I'm like, hey, you know what? We didn't have our burritos yet today.

Let's have a burrito and we'll just like keep an eyeball on this hill and maybe something will pop out. There was a doe there. There was a buck. I tell Seth on the radio, I'm like, hey, just keep watching the hill if we're going to have a burrito. Can you tell me roundabout where you are? Yeah, I'm in, basically

in the drainage that Mark Canyon killed his buck. But we're like up drainage, upstream 800 yards. And we're down on a bench and looking up at the big, kind of the bigger, farthest left yellow grass hillside.

That bench where we lost that buck that one time. Yes. Yeah. Before you move on, Yanni, when the buck that you guys saw go up over the top, he like, as I'm following him go up over the top, another buck appeared. He like kicked up another buck. So there was all of a sudden two nice bucks on the hillside. Yeah.

I left, I left staring, I left Seth staring. I gave him my 18 by 56s. Yep. Um, so Seth, Seth's looking through those things and you know where I messed up, man. I gave you my post too. And then I was trying to get my binos on a tripod yeah at the bottom of the hill and i didn't have that capability and god

does that burn yeah you've been used used to staring at them through the uh you know on a tripod and all of a sudden you got to go into like some rinky dink balancing on your head, on your tripod head. It sucks. So, yeah. Hey, Chase, you weigh in here anytime you feel it's necessary. But so we're like, yeah, we'll have a burrito. So we're munching away on our burritos, kind of talking about how we're getting sick of eating burritos. Was there any chopped up onion in that burrito? That one didn't have any chopped up onions, I don't think. It was still sick of eating burritos. Was there any, uh, chopped up onion in that burrito?

That one didn't have any chopped up onions. I don't think. Yeah. It was still a dang good burrito. Uh, a lot of us agree that like with you and me, that after a week of eating Mexican food, as much as we love it, the first four days, five days on that last day, you're kind of like, you're like ready to switch diets. You know, Cal on the other hand just says he could just keep eating. He just goes deeper and deeper.

Yeah, just, yeah. I get that anywhere I go, anywhere I go. I dug out my second burrito of the day for lunch. This is after I'd showered and got ready to hit the road and do the march back across the border. And I will admit that that burrito did not go down quite as, that one left a little something to be desired. Yeah. So you found the other side of it.

Yeah, I did. The other side of your burrito love. Uh-huh. So Chase and I are stuffing our faces, munching away, kind of having a conversation, you know, while bits of tortilla are spitting out between our lips. And we had seen a spike since the big buck left over already on the hillside. So we're like, oh, okay, there might be some deer up there.

A few more bites of the burrito go down. And Chase looks up. He's like, well, there's a buck. I'm like like holy shit i'll look up there and get my binos on him and he just happened to be stopping a spot where he's like almost pretty much visible with the naked eyes i put the binos on him real quick and you know with a mouthful burrito i'm like and uh which i said shoot that buck and uh, uh, you know, he gets down on his gun, the bucks like kind of in half, like I'm chasing the old scent of a doe move, you know, where like, it doesn't look like he's going to be

sticking around long. Right. He's not just sitting there feeding. He's like, nose to the ground traveling. And because we had just gone through the whole exercise of watching that other buck move across the hillside, every single marker or visual marker on that hill, whether it was a big white snag with the black burnt gash on the front of it or the two white rocks together, the tall ponderosa that's sticking up over the horizon, all that stuff had just been recently talked about. So as this buck's now moving across the same landscape, it's very easy to communicate. Your whole vocabulary is square.

Yeah, I'm like, remember where we lost the buck? across the same landscape, it's very easy to communicate. Your whole vocabulary is square. Yeah. I'm like, remember where we lost the buck? Like, get your gun on the meadow below those rocks, dial your scope to, you know, whatever it was, 6.5, and, you know, get ready. The buck's going to be there in two seconds. And the second funny punchline part of this story is that earlier when that other buck was going up the hill, I kept trying to stop him in little openings and say, hey, or like that.

And nothing was working. He was just following this doe. So this time the buck walks into this opening. And I might have set a record for loudest. Because I amplified it with my hands and just gave it a, you know, I might as well just yelled. Hey,

yeah, which works totally. And that bugger just freezes up like a statue in the middle of that opening. And it was like looking down the hill, you know, what was that? And, uh,

again, we were ready because we had just gone through the same thing so chase already had like a nice rest set up and he was able just to get in right behind his backpack and he had the you know bipod on his gun and uh we had the range dialed and uh one shot and i saw the bullet hit and he ran roughly i don't know 40 50 yards kind of downhill one of those runs where his head's moving faster than his legs his front legs can keep up you know and uh fell over dead and uh we're like sweet that worked out we both looked down we were kind of bummed out to see that both of us had sort of thrown plopped our half-eaten burritos like they could have landed on six others five other

sides but they both landed with like the filling down into the oh both of them dirt yeah and so you kind of pick it up and look at it it's just not as advertising it was as it once was but uh yeah that's the story of uh chase's burrito buck. Coosier hunting, in my mind, comes down to finding them. It's the fun part of it. It's the challenging part. It's the part that you get good at. It's the part that frustrates you that you're not good at. It's like finding them.

Did you having a bunch of newbies down there, these three fellers, hadn't done it before, how would you sort of grade them? Oh, man, top notch, some of the best. As a matter of fact... Like they blow J. Scott away.

Not quite that good. But a couple of examples of that, the first day, Chase, he's got a pretty good Spanish vocabulary, so he and I rolled around in the vehicle with one of the cowboys, the local ranch cowboys, to kind of go over some fence lines and make sure where we could and could not hunt and kind of talk about where he's been seeing deer. And we had a little time left over that first evening.

And so we just stopped at kind of a rando spot to a glass a little bit. And, uh, Chase picked up a deer before I did like right then and there. And, um, then, uh, I was going to say Chase spotted his own deer that he ended up killing the buck. Uh, so did Matt, right? Seth? Yeah. Yeah. Matt spotted his buck. Yeah yeah I was hunting with Seth

and Matt and uh you know he picked up his own deer so yeah man I'd say overall the the they did a uh amazing jobs first time cues deer hunters and then did you uh the weather was a lot different than what we've seen a fair bit in the past. I wouldn't say a lot. No. Got hot. It was really good the first two days where it was cold, deer on their feet most of the day, and then it got hot. And I can't say that it got any hotter than it's gotten. Because I think in years in past, we've had lulls too.

And you definitely realize that like cooler temps, cloudy days seem to have the deer on their feet more, make them easier to find. Um, if, if like our killing success, you know, has any,

uh, is an example of it. The first two days that were the coldest, we killed four bucks and then we killed one buck the next four days of hunting, um, that were hotter. So, um, yeah, but i wouldn't call it abnormal

yeah i was so jealous man just freaking jealous i was so jealous i didn't know if i should like i kind of felt like just hoping you guys didn't get anything like and something bad did happen traveling like not like bad bad but like pretty bad i can see you wishing that on like yanni and i but not on oh no when i was having a mind movie about it it was more than you guys it was you guys or would i just hope that you had a great trip yeah i think that if we would have had a bad hunt it wouldn't have um bode well for you because i think that you want to go back next year and you want to hear good things about that ranch and go back to that ranch and have and be able to think about it for a year that like there's we saw some

big bucks that we didn't kill they're gonna be alive next year yeah but it could also be like this like let's say you went it was no good then it'd be like the year steve couldn't go we weren't able to really pull it together might be how you viewed it right our big toe i didn't realize to what degree he really made the hunt you know stuff like that the gear conversations around the dinner table at night were definitely lackluster without your presence really how much did you guys talk about how you wished i was there was that like a thing that would come up like at least hourly at least a half dozen times a day so if there's 12 waking hours in a day,

I'd say, you know, every two hours. You'd be like, God, do I wish. Yeah. I wonder how Steve's doing. That old guy. He sure makes this trip. Yeah. We finally had to ban the topic from conversation outright.

Yeah, it was getting kind of weird, you know. Seth, you got your first coos deer? Yep, first coos deer buck. You got basically my, like. Your buck. Seth was going down there as a photographer, but then all of a sudden he turned into a hunter at the last minute when I couldn't go. Yeah, which. Did you like sharing a gun?

Oh, it was like the best experience ever. Because you wanted to carry it. Cal carried the gun. He ended up spotting the deer. And he was like, do you want to shoot that deer? And I was like, yes. And he handed me his gun that he had been carrying. We made like a little sneak on it to get in a position.

And I shot cross canyon at 272. It was like a magical sneak too. Cause we ranged. Put you right where you needed to be. From where we spotted the deer and it was four or something. And then, uh, three and a half minute, five minute sneak was 272.

Yeah. I mean, it was great. Not one of those aggravating sneaks where you do a lot of sneaking and you're like, oh, 413. Yeah, I can't see it from here. Ah, 409. Yeah. Yeah, it was great.

So I shoot the buck. We watch the buck die. And we sit there and talk about it for a little bit. And then Duke and I drop, like we drop off the hill and I hand the gun back to Cal and he continues to hunt. It's like having a, like in the old days when you had a guy to carry your gun. Yeah. Yeah.

So I had his gun for like maybe 10 minutes. And this was an important deer too. It was first morning, first day. And I mean. Got it right over with, huh? Yeah. Yeah. It was just like, get the ball rolling, you know?

It was great. That first one uh and then we hiked out of there switched locations the so that was like right up the dozer cut outside of the ranch where you could drive if you had vehicles capable of getting there but we just hiked out of the ranch um which works great anyway other side of the creek or the. Other side of the creek. Yeah. And then topped off our water, drove back up into the zone where I've gotten a couple bucks now. And Seth found a great glassing knob that we hadn't been to before. And Seth spotted a buck that Duke wanted to go after. And I'll give Duke a lot of credit here too,

because the, it was a, you know, I mean, relocating after you move is a lot of times easier said than done. And he took off down our mountain went across the the drainage started going up the other side and he was like okay yeah i got him okay well that worked out got that taken care of but also like very good decision making skills on on old buck duke's part because was like, that's a good buck.

I'll shoot that one. And off to the races, essentially. Great, man. Yes. All right, so real quick, what do you guys, like, you guys, like, thumbs up, thumbs down on Hunt and Cousier? Did you guys meet Jay Scott? Yeah.

Yeah, he's a good dude. What's just, what's your guys' what's your guys about as much fun as you can have what's your guys uh like uh just one at a time there i know it's hard because you're remote but what's your give your sort of high level impressions of the whole deal um i thought man between the country and and doing it in Mexico, like the folks down there on that ranch, um, and the coos deer themselves, I thought it was about as much fun as you can have on a hunting trip. Honestly, I, I see why, um, guys try and do it every year. Loved it. Yeah. I would, I would echo Chase. I think, uh, just echoing what he said. And I, I personally enjoyed the, the

disconnectivity of the Hacienda and all that. You're kind of just only focused on the hunt and there's, there's not a lot of service or electricity or anything to really distract you. So I felt like it's kind of refreshing in a way to just focus purely on that. Yeah. Matt, Matt speaking of the, uh, the lack of electricity and the lack of because there's cell signals and stuff. Well, the, no, the, if you remember the, uh, the lack of electricity and the lack of, because there's- Cell signals and stuff. Well, no, if you remember the, uh, the house is, is set up on a solar system, but the solar system has been, um, down, I think we've been there three years.

I think it's been broken three years. And so like one day we had like an hour of, uh, electricity after dark. And then the following six days, it was, uh, it was just like, you know, living back in the day. Oh, really? Yeah. Flashlights and candles. Flashlights and candles. Yeah.

Duke, did you end up, uh, throwing a tape on the buck that you shot? You know, I haven't yet. I plan on doing that here in the next couple days though just just out of curiosity um but i i have not yet yeah it'd be interesting it'd be great to get uh mats as well just just because mats is a little whiter uh just just helpful references. Yeah. Yeah. Giannis's buck is a great, great buck. Like the, you know, just like the frame visually, everything is, is, uh, kind of like that next class. Oh yeah.

I know it was badass, but he broke one of his antlers off. Yeah. And, oh, I, to me, I was like, oh, that's an awesome buck. That's an awesome buck. And then, uh, we met up with some of jay scott's guys on the u.s side of the border we had to drop some stuff off to them and they're like boy that would have been a good one just like oh because it was because it was busted really referencing the busted portion but it was like kind of dismissed their focus more on what's not there than what is there right

that was the way i took it anyway yeah well yeah Well, yeah, I'm glad you guys are back, man. I'm glad nothing too bad happened to you. I'm glad you got all that action. That's good stuff, man. That's good stuff. Thanks.

Oh, we'll try to go next year. We'll let you shoot first. Yeah, that's a good idea. It's still a magical trip, man. It is a good one. Yeah, that's great. Real dry this year. Not much. Oh, yeah, that's an interesting point to bring up success has been there in years past uh so dry that the

oaks there i don't know exactly what brand of oaks they are um but it's a they gambles i don't think so they're not lives or gambles? Either way. Well, I think it is a live oak. Oh, but that's a variety. I thought the live oak is like a group of oaks. Yeah, I'm a little in over my waders on this one. But when I just think of live oak, I just think of an oak that doesn't drop its leaves, you know, that has literally, you know, it acts more like a.

Yeah, I'm being a dumbass. I'm going to cut that part out. Coniferous. It acts like a coniferous tree almost. It just has green leaves year round. And I can't remember if the oaks at my in-laws on the coast of North Carolina, they call them live oaks. I can't remember if they drop them.

Anywho, probably 50% of the oaks on these hillsides were red and brown with dry, brittle leaves. From drought. Yeah. were red and brown with dry brittle leaves from drought yeah and interestingly they weren't spending any time on the yellow grassy hillsides like they like to do feeding like if you saw them there cal made a good point it's just like they were just traveling across it and uh we saw deer full on like on their hind legs uh matt actually saw my buck just like on their hind legs. Uh, Matt actually saw my buck just like on his hind legs feeding inside of a small oak, just

picking acorns off the oak. Um, and then the manzanita also we realized produces some sort of a berry or fruit that they like to eat. Cause we saw quite a few deer, like just in the manzanita head on the ground for five, 10 minutes at a time, just slurping up something at the base of those bushes.

Great. I'm glad you guys added to the body of knowledge. Mm-hmm. 21 species of oak occur in the Sonoran Desert region. Yeah, so that kind. Yeah. But here is the thing that we would be paying attention to this year is good water years, they don't need to drop any leaves.

They'll stay green and poor water years they'll shed their leaves and so we definitely saw way more evidence uh those leaves turning and dropping so all right boys all right first light guys thanks man i was bummed that you couldn't be up here. I didn't know you weren't here until I walked in here and you weren't here. I thought you were here. Yeah, I wish we could have made it, but hell of a trip. Yeah, everybody's got to get themselves some vaccines and whatnot, and we'll get together and talk about it.

All right, everybody. Cal, we'll continue to dig in on this. I want to cover more of this. I want to talk about the Land Back deal. All right, everybody. Cal, we'll continue to dig in on this. I want to cover more of this. I want to talk about the Land Back deal. Yeah, me too. It'll be a good conversation. We didn't get to talk about that giant colon.

When we talk about it on an upcoming episode, what I'm going to look into as part of that conversation is do you remember that supposedly Elvis' colon was full all kind of cheeseburgers and stuff you know i'm talking about that was always a rumor that i always heard was it was but it was john wayne too wasn't it he was full all kinds of cheeseburgers i thought that he had a similar 40 pounds of red meat or something yeah right yeah a pack full of burgers i didn't know that i do know that um you want to see a – this is my concluding thought. You want to see a freaking documentary.

Have you watched Five Came Back? That's the five different directors? No. It's a documentary about five directors who were directors or became directors who served in World War II and about the impacts of that on their careers. And then there's five contemporary directors that are kind of telling, like Spielberg,

are kind of telling the story of these individuals. And it's like heartbreaking, heartwarming. It's a phenomenal documentary. It's about film, war, everything. But in it, it was pointed out, John Wayne did all those John Ford movies. ford is one of the directors they cover okay they also cover the guy that did uh um frank coppa who did it's a wonderful life which tanked so bad it bankrupted the production company which is crazy yeah tank Tanked. It's a wonderful life. He lived to see it do what it did.

But John Ford, you know, made all those movies with John Wayne. John Ford was a veteran. John Wayne wasn't a veteran. And the movie talks about how they used to kind of like humiliate on set. All the veterans would kind of humiliate John Wayne. Flying leathernecks. Always acting like a, always playing these roles where he's like a soldier. And a symbol for. Yeah. Flying leathernecks. Always acting like a... Always playing these roles

where he's like a soldier. And a symbol for... Yeah, and he wasn't. And these dudes were. And they tease him because they say he didn't know how to salute right. Never learned how to salute right.

It's a good movie, man. All right, everybody. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. See you, fellas. See you guys. Thanks, guys. Thanks, guys.

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