The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 293: Snakebite

Episode Date: October 4, 2021

Steven Rinella talks with Jordan Budd, Ryan Callaghan, Phil Taylor, Corinne Schneider, and Janis Putelis.Topics discussed: A squirrel poaching story from Missouri; Clay Newcomb's method of dunking and skinning squirrels; Jani's big sheep hunt; is it a dick move to shoot a collared animal?; MeatEater's Auction House of Oddities is stacked: A Bucky Bowl, Jani's first pheasant tail, Luke Combs' signed guitar, and many other way cool originals; an ancient projectile point found inside a Mississippi alligator's stomach; flagging tape revisited and the toilet paper alternative ; the Snort-Rattle Bite Controversy; two very tiny holes; a desiccated Snort ear; debridement, the super fancy word for the act of picking at scabs; a bald eared, hun-hunting pup; chasing turkeys on a tricycle; booking hunters off Craigslist in highschool; Jordan's dall sheep hunt story; how to book hunts with Jordan in Nebraska; freedom mounts; 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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First Light, go farther, stay longer. You listeners will have to bear with us for a minute. Cal, I want to tell a story about one of my college teachers. But it has to do with your story you just told. Cal just shared a story that involved a man unloading a tractor

tire. Is that fair? Yeah, very fair. When I was in college, I took black and white photography one and black and white photography two. When I took black and white photography two, the teacher had real world photography experience because he had a job at one point in time

documenting insurance fraud. His greatest work accomplishment was he was working a guy who was out on a permanent disability with a back injury. And so he stakes out, right? And it turns out that the man was a monster truck enthusiast. And my teacher got images of him loading and unloading an entire round of monster truck tires

out of the back of his truck. That is not good for your back. And he would approach the tailgate and he would grab, he would bear hug the monster truck, lock his fingers through the rim and then lean back and haul the tires around.

And that was his greatest moment as an insurance fraud photographer. Phil, what do you think of that story, Yanni? He got him. Phil, can you play a breaking news sound? Okay, as we're sitting down here, picture this. I'm here in the studio, and we're doing a little pre-show banter, and I get a text message from my friend Guy Zuck.

39 minutes fresh. This is five minutes ago, so what's that add up to? 44. 44 minutes fresh. So what's that add up to? 44 minutes fresh. Okay. A massive squirrel bust. Thanks to a concerned citizen, Missouri Department of Conservation agent, MDC, Missouri Department of Conservation conservation agents, Brad Hadley and Eric Long, were able to make contact with a large group of non-resident squirrel hunters in and around Current River Conservation Area. 16 non-resident squirrel hunters.

The group of 16 had been hunting for two days and harvested 471 squirrels. Look at that, Corinne. 151 over the possession limit. We did the math. It's 15 squirrels per day. But the bag limit's 10 a day. How is 10 a day not enough for you?

There are five over each. That is a generous scroll limit. Very. I don't know what to say. The picture is... What state was this in? Missouri. Missouri. The picture...

You'd think you were looking at... I initially thought I was looking at someone who's dying in wax and traps. On closer inspection, just because of who it came from, on closer inspection, I would think I'm looking at a bunch of like mink. But the squirrels are all soaking wet. No, but they look like they don't have their hair on them. Like they've been. I disagree. No?

The tails are like pointy. One second there, Yanni. I'm going to hand it to you. I have my own super phone too. It looks like that kind of like hairless cat or dog. There's like no hair. No, they're just sopping wet for some reason. Oh, they might do that Clay Newcomb, you know the Clay Newcomb deal where you dunk them

in a bucket and then skin them? I didn't know. Keeps hair down. Okay. Keeps hair from getting... Well, as I proved, it's just as clean to skin them than dunk them in a bucket and then skin them? I didn't know. Keeps hair down. Okay. Keeps hair from getting, well, as I proved, it's just as clean to skin them than dunk them. But he dunks them. Then that's it.

And then that's what he's dealing with is something as unsightly as that. But their tails aren't poofy. Their tails are like, like rat tails. Because they're soaking wet. So they grabbed them by the whiskers and dunked them from the head in. Right.

When you get out of the shower in the morning, Corinne, and you look at yourself. So there are 151 squirrels over the allowed possession limit. All were cited for possession of over limit of squirrels and warnings were issued for failure to keep wildlife separate and identifiable. Meaning that's my pile, that's your pile, that's your pile. Again, laid out like a drug bust. and identifiable. Meaning that's my pile, that's your pile, that's your pile. Mm-hmm. Again, laid out like a drug bust.

Woo! Yeah, oh yeah, laid out like a drug bust. Non-resident squirrel slaughter in Missouri. Joined today by Jordan Budd. Jordan, what do you think about all that?

What's up, man? You know, don't know much about squirrels. We're squirrel hunting. Haven't done it. Seriously? Seriously haven't. Yeah, but you're born in Nebraska.

I know. You guys got tree squirrels, don't you? Yeah, for sure. When you were a little kid, you just didn't go hunting stuff? Yeah, but rabbits. Oh, okay. Yeah, did the rabbit thing. And coyotes and then big game.

Never got a squirrel? Never got a squirrel. Are you even like squirrel curious? No. Do you get a lot of them on your place? No, I kind of am. Yeah, there's a lot of them out there. What kind of squirrels?

I'm looking at Yanni. I just look at Yanni. I turn my attention to Yanni just to read his facial expression. Oh, yeah, because we might have to go and do a little hunt with Jordan at her place if there's some virgin squirrel hunting to be had. There definitely is. Do you know if they're greys or fox squirrels? Couldn't tell you. Are they rusty

colored? They're rusty colored. Like a small house cat? Yeah, they're pretty big. Jordan, have you ever got an awesome invitation like that? Somebody doing you the favor of taking you out to your own place to hunt your own squirrels? It's your lucky day. It is.

I will come out and hunt your place. We can show you like five different ways to skin them and clean them. We'll teach you the clay nuke them, dunk them first method. Yeah. The pants and the shirt and pants method. Oh, that's a great method. The tail method. All the methods.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that'd be good. Depends on how many squirrels you got over there. Yeah. Cal, Calahan's here. Yes, sir. Phil, he was late.

Corinne, fresh off her first antelope hunt. Did you know that it was mildly Controversial when I requested that that chair Be put in there I never get over there But I see people enjoy themselves Over there what was controversial Just like one of those things like of You know the opportunity cost

Of me going and picking that chair up Or whatever I don't know Listen man I had to ask for that chair 15 Times this guy's high on his own supply after after his uh fucked up deer stand calendar was a huge success and now he's just tearing it i'm just revisiting every time i've been wrong yeah you'd almost think it was that the calendar didn't do well and i was going back to try to find other examples of being right but this just inspired me to point out other times in my life and i've been correct You'd almost think it was that the calendar didn't do well, and I was going back to try to find other examples of being right.

But this just inspired me to point out other times in my life when I've been correct. Never doubt me again. Like about that lazy boy. Yep. Oh, my gosh, Yanni, a giant sheephead is here. Yes. No, there's one more being in the room. Oh.

Oh. Oh, a snort. Oh, yeah, and Cal's dog, fresh off of almost dying. We're going to cover cover that is that true or is he making it up man i've been around a lot of dead and dying animals and that dog that i was like okay here we are i was like oh well i guess it was a short run but it was a good run type of thing oh yeah yeah we'll get to that we'll get to how that dog almost died. Goodness. But Yanni, big horn, cheap skull. Yeah.

Double B for Yanni P. B stands for broomed. Yeah, double broomed. But big horns are always, explain what broomed is. But I mean, big horns kind of run broomed. I don't know if that's true. That's true. Really?

Yeah. Oh. I think some of the biggest ones still have their lamb tips. I saw a lot of unbroomed rams. No, they get to a certain size and are just broomed. Oh, okay. I didn't know. like the fact that what I've been staring out the most is this kind of chunk of gelatin

collagen yumminess that's still stuck to the nose of this thing. And I keep thinking about just sucking that thing off of the hair. If we were roasting this head right now. It's freshly killed, so

it hasn't been trimmed up i just i got the eyeballs out that's about as far as i made it it's nine years old nine years old which uh in in your unit your circumstance where's that put this ram like if the biologist buddy said uh where this lies in the in the pack as far as population goes there was one other ram that i saw that i hunted that was probably 11 or 12 years old wow and then there was probably four or five that were in this guy's range and then younger rams so not that many for how much country there was to look at you put some miles on did we yeah i don't know if there was like i can't say like oh it's like a minimum of 10 miles a day but one day i did 23 seriously but that was because i had to go out to the trailhead

and pick up Charlie Williams, the photographer, restock food, grab my rifle, and then come back in. Got you. Yeah. And that might have been the mistake I made, which might have cost me the ram I called it. Mr. Big Nuts. The chocolate ram.

Oh, the chocolate ram, not Mr. Big Nuts? No. They all have big nuts. No, I know. They really do. Oh, kettle bell. Yeah. It's like a pineapple hanging down there.

Yeah, so the approaches were long to get into the sheep country. There's a lot of private property in the area, and just to get into where they are in this range, you got to circumnavigate some private, which makes the approaches long. When you were bouncing from like one peak to the next peak, did you oftentimes have to go down and cross drainages or was it just like a long ridgeline that you're hunting on? Definitely wasn't ridgeline running like we've done in Alaska. Isolated chunks of habitat. No, the ridgelines are long, but they're unnavigable without maybe a very skilled mountain climber

like Garrett Smith could probably make it along there if he had his equipment with him but you just can't walk up on the ridge and then just walk down the ridge. Because it's just interrupted by spires and stuff. So you're just steep, loose, rocky. Your efficient line was like a zipper, like a big zigzag.

Like going out to points to look back versus... We were basically just going up into drainages, looking up, maybe climbing up one side to look across and then coming back out the drainage, looping around a ridge, going up the next drainage and repeating. Oh, that

makes miles. Were they mostly in the alpine or were they in the timber? They were definitely um some one of the advice that was given about that unit was to definitely keep your eyes like on the timber line and in the timber as much as you can i mean there's a certain point where you're like you don't think they're going to be down where the elk are where there's aspen meadows and stuff you know so i think when people said looking at timber they were talking like okay the top half of the ridge is rocky the bottom if you split the bottom half half of it's like open timber and then

it goes full timber like look in that open timber you might see them and uh you know because the vegetation changes so much just in there in a thousand feet right like in that lower timber where i found the rams before the season started i mean when you look at the pictures it's like they're feeding in this like lush jungle very green you know a lot of you know on them shoulder to head high vegetation but then they climb a thousand feet and there's nothing over two or three inches tall. Got it. Just rocks. So how many days did you hunt? Well, I know that you found one before. Yeah, I found a group of rams before scouting.

Then you gave it a slip on the opening day. Yeah. Well, a couple of days before opening day. Oh, was it? Okay. Yeah. When I saw him, I knew it was too good to be true. I'm sitting there looking at a ram that you could,

I mean, he was in the easiest spots of easiest spots that I saw the whole week. And it's three days before season. And I'm just like, there's no way. There's no way that ram's gonna be standing in that little, I call them pastures. You know, an elk, I feel

like feeds in a meadow, and so does a deer. But when I was looking at these big green avalanche shoots, I was like, I couldn't call it a meadow. I does a deer but when i was looking at these big green avalanche shoots i was like couldn't call it a meadow i felt like it was more like a pasture because that's where like a sheep and a goat feeds right they like feeding the pasture i was just like there's no way he's gonna be sitting you didn't want to call it a little grassy bowl they weren't bowls when you're you were doing like the mental gymnastics did you try to like reason as to why that group disappeared were you like maybe they got my smell.

Maybe they saw it. Maybe they were more nervous than I thought. That's the first thing your buddy Steve said when I said I hadn't seen him in a few days. Did you spook him? Well, as much as I can, it was a text message. Yeah. So I think that you need to do a very neutral reading. Did you spook him?

That's better. But no, I meant it like the way you said it first. Yeah. Yeah. That's the inflection I felt when I read the text. Are you fucking this up? Would be the translation in your head. Exactly.

Yeah. When Siri reads your text messages that's what that's what i think what he's trying to say is yeah did you get too anxious and decide to just you know go pretend shoot him and then ran him off the country what i was getting at in my text i wasn't getting at you i was getting at like is it probable that you'll find it yeah yeah meaning if you spook the hell out of it then then you might have been like, ah, that's never going to work. I feel like these sheep don't get a lot of human pressure. They don't get hunted that much, right?

You have a couple of tags a year. This year, there was three tags in the unit. I think we often, as hunters, know, put on these animals that like, Ooh, they're so elusive. It's the most evasive species out of all of them, where I think a lot of times, especially like these bighorn sheep, they're not trying to hide from us. They're just being sheep. They're doing their thing.

They live up in the rocks where they are hard to find, probably not just for me, but probably for mountain lions and, you know, whatever other predators are out there too. That's like their safety, right? So they just walked to, the thing was he was hanging out with another fairly mature ram and then five young rams. So I kept thinking like, man, if they stay together, one of those is going to pop out. Like it should be pretty easy to find seven rams somewhere. And they just went to a place that I don't think I looked. I mean, I can show you some pictures right now,

but this country definitely, like, when we were at the bottom in the drainages, sometimes you were looking over 3,000 feet to the top, you know? And there's just so many boulders and little ledges and like, almost like these canyons on the hillside that like, or it's like a spire, like a little ridge that just forms in the rocks. And there might be a little grassy bench back there. And if they're in there feeding for a day, you sat there for 12 hours and glass the hell out of it. And they never popped out. you just don't know that being

said i feel like especially you know charlie williams was there uh taking pictures and he would grab the binos when he was done taking pictures and at some point you gotta trust your glassing and just be like you know what we pounded this thing for a morning an evening another morning and all the time in between we're gonna have to move on and go look somewhere else maybe we'll come back like my plan was to basically just do a circuit because i knew roughly the ridge and maybe a half of another ridge where they should be and after i cleared them out i was just gonna restock go right back in the whatever 15 miles and restart the process you know

and just loop around i like that idea it's a good good good for the mental game too it's like it's a good plan yeah yeah if you let enough time go by where you can muster up some level of excitement yeah you know you mean between looking at the same between visits yeah yeah because it does. It never fails. As soon as you move to the other side of the ridge, you're like, and you don't see them there.

You're like, ah, they're back there. We should go back. We know, I know they're there. They're out right now when we're not there. And if you'd never like hiked the country too,

you'd be so much more confident in your glassing. Right. Cause through the glass, it flattens out so much, right? And it's like those, uh, been using those eight, those 18 by 56 is the big vortex ones. I love those things. And I just like glue into them and your eyes

are relaxed and man, you just get this feeling like, oh, I covered it. But then like you walk something and you're like, eh. Yeah. Yanni used to say when he was glass and um he imagined a laser sound that was the noises vinyls were making when he was glassing so how many so then what happened you lost track of everybody and then you just entered when i found that group of seven there was actually a group of five

that were only like 400 yards away and this was the interesting thing and they were there was some collared rams in the group. This whole unit has less than 100 sheep in it. When you start doing the math there's probably roughly 20 to 25 rams in there.

In Colorado they have to be half curled to be legal and so there's probably a dozen to 15 legal rams out of those you know six seven that are like this guy like seven eights or for full curl ish and um you know in that eight to nine maybe older um range So you're not looking for a lot. So yeah, before the season, I'm looking at 12 Rams. I mean, looking at, you're looking at half the Rams in the whole unit, which is pretty cool. But I was asked, I know people that are, um, work for Colorado parks and wildlife and doing my research for the hunt. I, you know,

talk to the regional wildlife biologists and the um the local game warden and everybody's like have a great hunt and if you can please don't shoot one of the collared ones like we got a lot of time and money invested in it five-year collars were and they just started this study we're gonna get a lot of data points off of them. And so, of course, this five-pack has two collars in it. We started calling them the chain gang. Because their other buddy with them has a scar on his chest. So you know what we nicknamed him. No, I don't.

Scar chest? Just scar. Oh, okay. Keep it short and easy. But I swear they were following me i mean we would leave one drainage and hike for a day like we'd go and look at one another side of the hill and then hike all the way around be looking i mean and again to them it's just a hop skip and a jump to move a mile or two and go over the ridge but like we'd be in a totally new zone and we'd be in a totally new zone, and we'd be like, oh, sheep, get all excited.

And you're like, it's the gang of five again. So I would have, because it's legal to shoot a collared ram. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there was a nice one. But we've talked about it. I was like, man, these things are tainted. Man has already touched these and shot these once. Yeah, they're touched. They're tainted.

We've had this conversation many times, right? Yeah, I'm going to bring up an important part. Unsolicited. So I was down in Owyhee County helping my buddy Jim with his very, you know, once in a lifetime California bighorn sheep tag. And glassed this group of nine rams this is in Idaho in Idaho yep south extreme southwest Idaho and one of which and definitely like the oldest ram in the in the group um both by just like body configuration and horn size is collared. Hmm. And, uh, um,

for, you know, the second trip ever, I'm packing around that, uh, somewhere device. Hmm. And I'm sitting there like, uh,

and, and my buddy Jim's like, boy, that collared Ram, that collared Ram, you know, like he's definitely like, it's got his interest,

right? He's starting to talk himself into it. Right. And so I, unbeknownst to him, I like send a text message out to Idaho Fish and Game, friend of mine. And I just said, hey, is it a dick move to kill this? This is where we are. And this is, and we're looking at a collared ram.

Uh. And, uh, you know, a couple hours go by and I get a response that says, not a dick move, kill it. Oh. Huh. Yeah. So just, just a different program going on over there. I don't know if you remember when we were kind of covering the,

the do's and don'ts of collared animals. Uh, Florida was doing, the state of Florida was doing a mortality study and they were doing a wh-tailed deer mortality study and they had a thing saying like if you're hunting and see a collared deer don't shoot it because it's collared but don't not shoot it because it's collared try to like ignore the collar and make the decision you'd make in the absence of the collar and then do what you would otherwise do because they're trying to determine like what kills deer just consider if everyone just really badly wants a collar you're gonna be like my goodness these deer just get whittled away and if no one will touch it you know you

don't get an accurate representation of how do you die. So as we sat there, this buddy of mine, Jim, he's 67 years old, doesn't pay attention to a single thing we do. So he has not heard

this conversation before. But unsolicited, he's like, after he gets excited about this ram and wants to like, it's 96 degrees, wants to go across this god awful Canyon up the other side and go like chase

this group into the side Canyon, which part of your brain is like, Oh, they just went in there and they're just going to be there. Waiting. Right. Waiting for us. Where the other side of your brain is like,

those things are gone. They're like, this is the end of the line, boys. We're going to this canyon. That's as far as we go. And so unsolicited, Jim's like, what do you, what do you think about killing something with a

collar on it? He's like, it's like somebody already got to it first. Oh. And there was like that argument of like, it's tainted. You should have said, well, Jim, people sure do like shooting them banded ducks.

Yeah. We can make a necklace out of that or get a copy of that collar for you. You can wear it around your neck. Well, I was thinking these sheep also had double ear tags. Oh. So then I was going these sheep also had double ear tags. Oh.

So then I was going to take those ear tags and run a necklace, take like a duck on her. I like it. Hmm. Yeah. Isn't that funny? I'll tell you a story. Ronnie Bame got a banded goose, and when he turned it in,

it was banded where he got it oh that's not nearly exciting it had been like just banded where he got it jordan as your uh your sheep hunting experience just been in mexico um mexico i filmed a stone sheep quite a while back and then a lot of Wyoming bighorns. Yeah. Yep. Do you guide Wyoming bighorns? No, I just film. You just film the hunts.

Yeah, I film. And then I shot that doll sheep in August and that's been my sheep hunting experience. Yeah. So you're pretty much the most prolific sheep hunter in the room. I would not say that. Did you see pictures of Jordan's doll, Ram? The quietest and most prolific sheep hunter in the room. What's that tell you?

All right, so tell us what happened now. So, yeah, we looked and looked and looked and kept running into that, you know, the five pack and decided to, there's a couple of different ways we could have run. It was just one was just, we were decided we're going to push either push up way up into this drainage into country we hadn't been into yet and start looking. And it was quite pretty amazing, man.

Like these mountains, I had hunted in them quite a bit, um, when I lived in Colorado, but just, I hadn't been in these parts. And there was definitely parts where you're like, you felt like you were in Alaska, just like big sub ridges that were just crumbling, you know, hanging little glaciers all over the place. And like I said, country that was, you can't just walk over, you know, you're like, well, if we want to get back there, you have to go all the way down and come up the drainage and, you know, really like root finding, you finding you know anyways instead of doing that we decided to back out and then climb the next ridge over

and then just glass back it was a huge glass it was like two miles you're looking from point to point which is you know you're looking for an animal it looks like the rocks that it's sitting in it's a long ways away you know so started, we did a lot of just one eyeballing through the spot and scope. Anywho, we climb up there, we glass 12 hours, whatever it is, daylight to almost dark to the point where I'm like, I'm done. We didn't see anything. Charlie, let's go make camp. So we're walking make camp. We were kind of on our shoulder and we're walking across a bowl towards a bench where I think we could find a flat spot.

I just happened to look up and 800 yards away on the horizon very dusky light I see something out of place. Glass. I'm like, holy shit. It's a ram. Then right as I'm looking at him another ram pops up behind him and then they quickly, before we can get a spot and scope or anything out on them,

they kind of drop towards us and go left and disappear. So we watched the hillside till dark to make sure nothing. Pretty much made camp right there in the morning. Watched the hillside for maybe the first 30 minutes. I wanted to let the light come up because we had the advantage where the light was going to, the sun was going to come up at our backs. And I figured if we're going to walk towards them, it'd be good. You know, maybe we'll get a slight advantage if they got the sun in their eyes. Hike up, pretty much leave the trees, hike up from, I don't know.

We must've been camping above 11 because I ended up shooting him at like 12.5. Wow. So we hike up a thousand feet to where we last saw him and see that there's, they had kind of, and looking at the, you know,

on X map on the phone, I could see that they had kind of fed into these draws, what looked like maybe little Abbey shoots. And I figured there was grass in there, you know? And I figured that we had seen other sheep kind of doing

the same thing like feeding down into these avi shoots in the morning feeding back up and then find a place amongst the rocks to spend the day so we get to the first one and kind of wrap around the hill through pretty big talus you know some stuff that's as big as a car the smaller stuff if you get one of those little runs you know it might get a little smaller like, you know, some stuff that's as big as a car, the smaller stuff. If you get one of those little runs, you know, it might get a little smaller, like baseball, you know, size and kind of creep around. And I can see like the first Abbey shoot kind of open it up in front of me. And I'm looking for the grass and, you know, there's a roll of hill in front of me. And I'm always preaching this, like, you know, take your time. Cause they could just be just over that hill. So one step at a time, scan the whole thing, take another step. But I keep ranging the far side of the chute and I'm getting to where

the far side of the chute's like a hundred yards, 80 yards, 70 yards. I'm like, this is going to suck because if they're in here, I'm going to step on them. And then we're going to have a covey of sheep blowing out of here. And I'm going to be forced to make a decision, you know, which I didn't want to make one like that. Well, luckily they're not in that one. And the country kind of opens up down below us. It's almost like two shoots kind of met and kind of bowled out a little bit. And I figured if we went down just a little ways, like 50, a hundred yards, we would be able to kind of look into this other shoot from, from down and kind of look back up into it. And that move is all it took. We got down there and I looked across and this Ram was actually in quotes, you know, looking at me, he might've just been like facing my direction when I first

saw him. And, uh, then he had four other Rams with him, figured they were new Rams. Well, part of my mind saying they're new rams then the other part of my mind that really wanted to kill big the big chocolate ram is like that's him he looks chocolate he's by himself he's got fairly good drop it looks like it's going like i'm running all these things through my mind but what really like just like completely flipped my brain was that i looked at the four pack next to him and i saw a ram with a chip out of its horn. Did I tell you this? No. Okay, so the chocolate ram was running with another mature

ram that had a giant chunk missing out of his... Like just very identifiable. So we named him chocolate and chip. That's cute. That's what I thought. We had all kinds of names. We also started calling the big one Willy Wonka

and we were going to go find him at the chocolate factory and I happened to be running with a photographer named Charlie so it was just really all everything lined up you know anywho at that point my mind's like dude that's it that's the chocolate ram you need to kill him

and I kind of just went into like auto mode. And it was, I wish we could have filmed that because the next like two minutes that it took, once I was like, okay, I'm going to kill him. It was quite comical. So I go to jack around in and I have my mag just packed full. And sometimes I feel like when it's packed full,

it just, they don't want to feed quite right. And I think I jacked it too slow instead of just really running the action. And so I get the one halfway in, but then the one underneath it was trying to climb in there with it. And I'm like, ah! And so I just dropped the mag and just get all the bullets out of there.

So then I pitched whatever it holds, four bullets, I think, off to my right in the rocks. Man, I'm on this rock that's like, it's a big rock. It's like, I don't know, half our table here. It's like two by four feet. It's kind of sloped, pitched against the hill. I'm trying to get my bipod on it.

I actually had to come back on it so that the bipod could drop lower, you know, but my gun could still clear the top edge of the rock. My feet are way above my head, the position I'm trying to get myself into. So I'm trying to like half, like use my backpack to like support my ribs, but have it so that it's supporting my rear of my gun too. And all week we've been brushing, busting so much brush that every couple days i was like clearing out my chamber and my barrel because i just felt like pine needles and stuff were dropping in there

so when i put a bullet back in i now go to close it i feel it gets kind of sticky and i'm like oh it's not going to close all the way you know so i pull the bolt back real quick i try just to like you know fingernail that cartridge and it's like stuck i'm like son of a bitch you know so I pull the bolt back real quick I try just to like you know fingernail that cartridge and it's like stuck like son of a bitch you know so I got the bench made out I'm trying to like you know wiggle it I'm just turning the gun you know right side up drop the bolt out I'm banging

on the recoil pad trying to get this thing to come out because I don't want to fire it thinking that there's oh man it's like autopilot and then just like full-on flustered. And Charlie's like up the hill a little bit. So, you know, I think he was excited too about it. He just melted into the rocks and didn't want to either help or make the situation worse.

But it would have been really nice to have someone there to be like, dude, just chill out for a second. Take a deep breath. So the thing finally falls out, you know, and I sit there and take the bolt out, flip the gun backwards, put a big puff of air through it, like blow whatever was in there out of there, put my gun back together. And every, you know, 10 seconds I'm glassing

just to make sure that their herd's not running off. And get all set up, just decide to put one bullet in there it's all it takes right and i'm like okay just take a deep breath and when he gives you like a good broadside shot you know it's like of course he just like immediately gives me a broadside shot there was no like breathe into it it was just like there's a broadside shot. There was no like breathe into it. It was just like, there's a broadside shot. But I did range and I did dial, which was really sweet. It was 320 yards. I think I had to dial either.

I think it was four MOA. It was really nice just to hold dead on. But it was funny that I only had one bullet in because he kind of spins. I get on him pretty quickly again, like in seconds. And now he's facing me. And I'm not seeing blood. I can't see him wobbling. And I'm like, you better shoot him again.

So I click. Because I had cycled, you know, but there wasn't another bullet in there. And right when I clicked it, he started tumbling down the hill. Huh. Yeah. And then it was a solid 30 minutes and very emotional phone calls and celebration, you know? Calling the wife. But did you have like a little tension though?

Like, because he tumbles away from you, right? Yeah, kind of. Where you were like, did I make the right decision? Parallel. Or you were already like. No, like, did I make the right decision? Parallel. Or you were already like. No, you mean did I make the right decision on shooting him? Right, because now like your once in a lifetime hunt's over. Oh, yeah.

No, for sure. No, I was 14 days into it. And so. Ready to be done. No, you're right. I mean, it's totally bittersweet, man. Like, you're like, because then you're just like looking around. You're like, I might not stand on this mountain ever again in my life. Yeah, sure.

What's going to take me to 12,500 feet again in these beautiful Colorado mountains? It's bittersweet, man, no doubt about it. In general, I want to touch on this. You probably felt it this summer going on your first doll sheep hunt, I assume it was your first one. But just the pressure from the moment we were all sitting in the airport together when I got the phone call from Hunt and Fool and they're like, you got a sheep tag. And like from that moment, that pressure mounts and it's, you know, I thought, oh, it'll kind

of go away once I'm in the field and I'm on, I'm in the hunt, but it doesn't, it might change, but it's still there. So in a way, like killing him, all of a sudden the pressure's gone, right? You're no longer a guy with a sheep tag. You're just another hunter that now has an elk tag and a bear tag in their pocket. It's kind of nice. But you do become a guy with a sheep. You do become a guy with a sheep.

Instead of a tag, you have the tag. Right. And there's a difference, right? And so much advice, good advice that comes through, but pressure about finding the right one and if you're going to even find one or be successful, you know? And sure, I'm lucky to have a job that's like, yeah, seasons a month long. Don't take the whole month, but if you really need to, you probably could. Seasons a month long feels long. I need to, you probably could. Season's month long? Feels long.

I don't know. You know. Feels lengthy. My gal's awesome, and she's, you know, happy to see me go on big adventures like this. But, you know, that's a long time to take. So, you know, looking back on it, I'd say it all happened just right. That's cool. Two weeks of spending, man, unreal weather,

like 70 degree highs, 40 degree nights. We were packing a tarp and didn't even set it up half the time. We would just sleep under the stars, you know? And that's, I kept telling Charlie who's, for him, it was his first time ever in any kind of Alpine country. So he's just blown away by the whole thing, you know? And I'm like, yeah, usually when you're up here at 11,000 plus, it's like when you see the clouds starting to form and build at 11 a.m.,

you're like, okay, we have two hours, and then we need to be descending. And, you know, because anybody that's spent an afternoon in a thundershower at 11,000 feet plus, nobody wants to do that again. Yeah. You're looking like down at the lightning. Oh, it sucks. Yeah. And when the thunder booms, it's like, it consumes you, you know? But we had zero. I mean, we had like literally 10 raindrops, a few clouds here and there. Yeah. When I reset for the final push in there, which only actually ended up being a couple nights, but I only went in with a base layer and my uncompagrated puffy. That was it for top layers.

No rain jacket, no mid layer. The only thing I've been using my mid layer for is to build my little pillow like I like to do. And I'm like, I can survive without that, you know. No gloves, no beanies, just using the hood on the jacket, you know. Oh, nice. Super nice. That's America for you. Is it?

Yeah, you think they're doing that in Tehran? It's perfect. Yeah, 40-pound pack, you know, when we were, and that was with food in the end, with five days of food. That's great. It's beautiful. Yeah, it was quite the experience. With five days of food. That's great. It's beautiful. Yeah. It was quite the experience.

I'm on a high. I'm on like a sheep conservation high. Coincidentally. Which would lead me to believe it won't last. Well, no. I did a thing called the landmark form, which I think I've mentioned to you when I was a kid. Oh, you did landmark? Yeah. You know about landmark? I did landmark, yeah. Yeah did a thing called the Landmark Forum, which I think I've mentioned to you when I was a kid. Oh, you did Landmark?

Yeah. You know about Landmark? I did Landmark, yeah. Yeah. Was it good for you? It was interesting. We'll have to discuss that. It's a, you know, Tony Robbins.

Oh. It's like a, it's a, you know. I know Tom Robbins. Self. You don't know Tony Robbins? No, I'm joking. Motivational. Yeah, I'm aware of it.

So it's kind of like that kind of thing. But I think there's a choreographer or something named that too. Might be. I didn't know about him until Zero Dark. Ballet? When Zero Dark Thirty came out, they're riding a helicopter and someone asked someone what he's listening to. He says, Tony Robbins.

I thought he's listening to like a choreographer. Then I looked it up and realized that it's a motivational dude. Yes. So when you go do like a landmark forum thing, at least that's how it was for me,

you go there for like a weekend and you leave there and you're like going to conquer the world, you know, and you're with a group of people that are all like very positive thinking at that point.

But as you go back to the regular world and the regular, you know, downers of the world, it kind of, it slowly fades away. So that's where I feel like I'm at with the sheep hunt. But coincidentally, a town nearby where I was at is doing a big media project around the sheep that live in and amongst them. You know, propagating them, keeping them around for the future.

They've, they see challenges like a lot of, you know, Western towns, lack of winter range, too much development, et cetera. So they contacted me to get a interview for the, like the hunters perspective, which was great. And I was, you know, happy to help out. That leads into, we packed out the whole cape on this animal. And... I sense a great segue coming. Good. From me or from you? No, I feel like you're building one up right now.

Oh, oh, oh. My original plan... You picking up on it, Jordan? I don't think so. He's laying groundwork for a big segue. It ain't about rattlesnakes. I hope I'm not going to let you guys down. It ain't about rattlers.

My original plan, we packed out the whole hide, and Charlie and I are now experts in full sheep capes. But I'm just going to Euro the head because I've said this before, and it just happened when Tracy, our colleague, was in here. People look at that thing, and they're like, wow, that's cool. I'm like, yeah, pick it up. And it hasn't failed yet. When someone picks that thing up, they are in utter awe.

Yeah. And then they feel the denseness and the weight of it all. So anyways, I just want to have a Euro mount. Yeah, so you want to be able to pass it around. Yeah. Through the little bit of sheep hunting that I've done, I've come to know that sheep hides are highly valuable. Once they're tanned, you're allowed to sell them.

I'm guessing that people buy them because theirs got messed up because their sheep tumbled 1, thousand feet off a mountain or whatever. Someone cut a bunch of holes in it as they were trying to make the hide. Maybe the hair slipped because, you know, who knows, whatever. But they're like, you can get thousands of dollars sometimes. Yeah, with very little effort, I sold a doll cape for a thousand bucks or 1200, something like that. We sold a bighorn cape. We only called one person and sold the Bighorn Cape for 600 bucks. And that was like one phone call and no actually

looking for a purchaser. Yeah. So I was thinking at first, well, let's just tan it and then we'll put it on the old meat eater. Auction House of Oddities. Auction House of Oddities. And talking to Garrett Long and talking to the taxidermist, they're

like, you know, we might be able to raise a little bit more money if we just turn it into a full sheet mount and do a replica of your horse. And is this the taxidermist I feel like it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Same one. So he's very happy with us mentioning him in the last podcast. John Hayes Taxidermist. John Hayes Taxidermy, yeah.

And anyway, so we don't know exactly what's going to happen yet with that hide and all of it, but the plan is to somehow sell it for as much money as we can and then hopefully donate it directly to a wild sheep, either Habitat or reintroduction, whatever it might be, project. Love it. Nice. They make casts, so they make, like, replica casts.

Yeah. Unbelievably good. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing, like, the colors and everything. So anyways, get a replica made of it, get them stuffed with the replica head on there, and sell them. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew! Our northern brothers get irritated.

Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking.

That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the 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 hand-picked 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. Pointing out the segue thing. I'm going to talk about that real quick okay uh oh another item in the meat eater auction house of oddities that's your segue yeah it was set up perfectly

um meat eater uh season 10 part one is on netflix now starts out with i think the first episode is uh antelope hunting with luke combs cool so we're launching the auction house of oddities uh at the same time as the new season comes up right because we've been talking about this auction house oddities for a long time. It's going to be a rolling thing, and here's some of the things that will go into the... So as the Auction House of Oddities, it's live now? The Auction House of Oddities

is live now. It is. Money raised for the Auction House of Oddities will go into our access enhancement initiative. What's it been called historically land access initiative the land act not access enhancement initiative the land access initiative we get there both ways i think anyway it'll go into that and that becomes a pool of funds that then cal will look

at various projects and figure out what to do with the pool of funds, access initiative things. So we've done the Shiloh pond thing, um, done some stuff around, raise some money recently in a different, uh, thing around supporting our States, um,

private land, public access program. We're going to raise a whole bunch of money with this thing. If you go on the auction house now, Yanni's thing isn't there yet. The sheep's not there. But we have a signed guitar from Luke Combs. And Luke used the guitar in concerts, right? That's correct.

So a signed guitar from Luke Combs, country star. The giant Bucky Bowl. So Mike Buckboden, who's been on the show, been on this podcast, he was in the Close Calls audiobook. He's been on Meat Eater a couple times. He made us a giant Birch Burl bowl. That bowl is in the Auction House of Oddities right now. We have a bottle of skunk essence that me and Seth extracted from skunks with a hypodermic needle.

I was going to use it in an act of vengeance. I haven't identified a target. So if you've identified your act of vengeance, I have a target for you. Oh, Yanni has a target. Never mind. It's too late. You'll have to bid on it, Yanni,

because right now it's pinned to the outside of my garage. I had it in our guest house, but my wife could smell it in there. So I pinned it to the outside of my garage. We're going to re-bottle it, and you can buy an ounce of pure Montana skunk essence. Bought a needle from a syringe for injecting cattle. You know what I'm talking about, Jordan. I do. But instead of injecting something, we took something.

Other way. Suck that skunk smell right out of there. A meat crafter knife. What'd that dude sell one on eBay for? $1,500 or something crazy like that? Oh, yeah, about that. It was $1,300 or $1,500 or $1,600. A what knife?

Yeah. We did a limited run knife with Benchmade called the Meat Crafter. Oh, yeah. And they were, I don't know, people complained about how expensive they were. But some dude just sold one on eBay and it had like 41 bids

and went for $1,500 or $1,600. There was something like... It's crazy. He was excited to get the knife. He had the knife. And then was like, boy, I just have this nice knife sitting around. I should just try to get my money back out of it.

And then he felt so guilty with how high a price the knife brought. That's right. He wrote in a letter. He felt bad. He wanted to donate the money. As we talked about it, it got him feeling guilty. And then he wanted to donate a bunch of the money to a conservation group. He was looking for guidance on how to spend it.

Which I'll tell you, if that's not a good indication of the quality of folks we have intermingling with us, I mean, come on. Those are awesome people. Also in the auction house is the tale of Yanni's very first pheasant.

If you're a fly tire or just a person. And don't think that that's necessarily an old pheasant because I only killed my first pheasant two falls ago. Oh.

Brand spickity-do. Yeah. And whoever buys that thing, you can check it out and put it on your wall for a little bit, but you should also tie some flies out of it, I think. Yeah, tie some pheasants. Or you could- Tie some pheasant tails. Press it to the front of your very own cowboy hat.

There you go. Sure, yeah. You know, you're one of those folks. Probably want to tie some flies. And there's the season 10 package. So if you watch the show, the first five episodes, which are up now, we pulled items from those episodes. Okay?

And it's in a package called the season 10 package. In that string of episodes, you'll see me and Yanni and Clay Newcomb hunting raccoons with the hound dogs, Clay's dogs, and we get a raccoon. And Mingus. Don't leave him out. Raccoons and Mingus. That raccoon's hide is back from the tannery. That very raccoon is in the season 10 package.

The backpack I wear all throughout, the Stone Glacier backpack I wear all throughout the season is in the Season 10 package. In the season, I use two FHF bino harnesses, a brown one and a blaze orange one. Both of those are in the Season 10 package. Clay Newcomb's Rossi 410 Wild West 6-shooter 410 gun, I think is what they call it, is in the season 10 package. You'll see Clay shoot a squirrel off his mule with that gun. Clay's Rattlin' Antlers from the Texas Deer episode is in the package. I actually broke a tine off.

If you're watching the show, you can see the tine fly off into the bushes. Those Rattlin' Antlers are in there. And we talk about those Rantlin antlers. And the antelope skull that I kill on the episode with Luke Combs is in the season 10 package. And you'll know it's guaranteed because it's a weird ass looking antelope. So when you watch, it's like, that's a weird antelope. And when you get the box, you'll be like, that's the same damn antelope.

They didn't like slip some. The coon, I could see you being like, I don't know, man. Maybe they pulled a fast one with the raccoon. But I would look at bullet placement. The antelope skull is dead nuts. No fast one. There's no fast one anywhere in here, but there's no possibility of a fast one. I got.

Think about that. You got my carving knives in there on that list that you got? They're not. Yeah, but they're down It refreshes It refreshes all the time Yeah, I think it's important to know As Corinne's notes here say

There's many auction phases So, items go up They sit for two weeks And then another block of items goes up We have original artwork, all kinds of stuff coming up We have stuff clear into December This is just like The initial Another block of items goes up. We have original artwork, all kinds of stuff coming up. We have stuff clear into December. This is just like the initial thing.

And then stuff comes in. Pete Alonzo, baseball player. He's sending in a bat and a helmet signed. Bat and a jersey. Bat and a jersey signed. Some dudes from the Pittsburgh Steelers are sending stuff in. Thanks, Joe. Yep.

Signed jersey. I have a commissioned piece of artwork that I'm getting of wolves ripping the guts out of a buffalo that's still standing there. And when that's done, a print will go into the Auction House of Oddities. But we also have original artwork. Kelsey Johnson, original bighorn sheet painting. That ought to tickle Yanni's

fancy. You know, I'm thinking about, you know, people want to do mounts or replicas or whatever. I'm thinking about asking her to... Paint it? Yeah, or maybe just sketch it. Maybe just do like a black and white of that ramp standing on the side of that mountain.

And then we'll put a print of that in the auction house of oddities. And maybe you on that rock with your gun pointed in the sky trying to do it. Banging it. Live rounds laying next to you. As for that guitar, here's a quick – he's not in the studio with us right now, but here's a quick convo with Luke about the guitar just so you know what you're getting into when you go donate on this.

Okay, Luke, tell everybody about the guitar. Hey, man, we got some guitars in my manager's office when somebody calls go in rip a couple tunes on it myself sign it send it in uh so bid away man all right there you have it go to the meat eater auction house of oddities and find a guitar been played by Luke Holmes up for auction now and And remember the $5,000 deal. And Chester comes and plays that guitar too. Sing something, Chester. Hooyip. Hooyip. Hooyip.

There it is. There it is, man. There it is. And remember, when the auction is closed, the winning bidder on Luke's guitar can decide to kick in an extra five grand. And Chester the divester, formerly known as Chester the tester, Chester the molester, Chester the investor, who then divested and became Chester the Divester. Chester will hand deliver the guitar to your door and sing that crazy coyote song he's always singing.

Hoo-yip-a-hoo-yip-a-hoo. And the cowboy says, If that's not worth five grand. Listen, it's going to be a quick trip. It's going to be weird. It's going to be weird for everybody. But Chester's going to come into your house. He's going to sit down. You can have any people

you want to have over and over. Chester will sing that song. And the coyote says, whoop, whoop, whoop. You're going to have the nicest person in the world. Nice guy in the world sitting at your house. If you got dirty dishes in the sink, I guarantee you'll do them. You'll probably do them. He's going to walk out of your house. He's going to walk out of your life. He's going to

go back to the airport and go back to where he came from. But you'll know when he's coming. You can invite people over and Chester will play Luke Combs' guitar. If you got snow on your walk, he'll shovel it. That's not the first time Chester's played one of

Luke's guitars. That's right. You will see in the season if you haven't watched it already that well, Luke played some music, but a bunch of guys sat around playing Luke's guitars and Chester did. John Prine's, Cal, you weren't there. Yeah. Can't remember what it was. Yeah.

Fish and Whistle? No. No, it's, oh, shucks. Peabody's Coltrane. No. No. We'll come back to it. It's a finger-picking song.

He picks it. Oh. We'll come back to it. Phil, you know what? Let's find out what it is. Will you just plug that song in? Yeah. And plug me in saying it like I've remembered?

Yeah, sure. Hey, everybody. This is Chester the Divester, formerly known as Chester the Investor. And this is the song. It's All the Best by John Prine. So you drive a Chevy. So you drive a Chevy Say you drive a Ford Say you drive around this town Until you just get bored

Then you change your mind There's something else to do Then your heart gets bored With your mind and it changes you It's a doggone shame It's an awful mess I wish you love I wish you happiness

Because I wish You all the best. Our very own Samantha Bates declared Chester the nicest person in the world. That prompted me to wonder who was second. I got to four and still hadn't made the list and I gave up. I was like, okay, but who's the fourth nicest person? And I was like, I don't remember. Did I make the top three?

I'm sorry. That's why you have kids, at least for the first 10 years of their lives. They'll always give you that number one spot. On that subject, if you watch the new episodes and have a question about what you're seeing, or about Chester the Divestor, I wish I would have thought of that. Who or about Chester the Divestor. That's the best. I wish I would have thought of that. Who thought of Chester the Divestor?

That was actually Phil, right? No, no. Didn't you think about that? Listen, I wish I could take credit. It was not me. I don't know who it was. It would have been on brand for you to come up with that. I felt like we talked about that before. I wrote it, but then I was like,

I thought that it was in my head. I thought that when we talked about it. No, Chester the Divestor is brand new. That's great. Uh, if you have questions about what you see on the show, write in, um, to, to our, uh, our man, Corey, to reach him, meat eater at the meat eater.com. Uh, I don't know if subject line just put a question mark or something, and then we'll get to that question.

Uh, Jordan, what do you think about that auction house? It looks pretty stacked. subject line just put a question mark or something and then we'll get to that question uh jordan what do you think about that auction house it looks pretty stacked really i like that that should be a slogan for it it's stacked it's stacked yeah sounds good here's a crazy ass news story um hang tight jor we're gonna get to you okay big time uh i don't understand this story what about it i just don't know like i don't get it so some guys just killed a 13 foot 5 inch alligator 750 pounds eagle lake close to the mississippi louisiana border they bring it to a processor okay processor goes to butcher the gator. This processor always likes to take a gander

and see what is in the stomach. You following, Cal? Oh, yeah. What are you doing? What am I doing? You following along or are you doing something different? Are you not entertained? He likes to look in the stomach contents.

Cal already knows the story He always finds bones, hair, feathers And he finds stones But in this one he finds Some unusual stones It just doesn't make sense This alligator Has in his stomach

Two stone Projectile points. Well, no one. They don't know that the other one is a projectile point. Yeah, but it's a... It is pointy. Sorry. Yanni knows.

Take it away, Yanni. I was just adding a little bit. But yeah, I think it makes total sense. Explain to me how that makes sense. An anthropologist estimates that that projectile point style was from 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. Correct. And you should know

that alligators don't live that long. But it says that they... Because he's got no pockets. When he finds it, he's got no pockets. Where else is he going to keep it? Maybe it was in the water bottom. They...

Of course it was. Yeah. But they take in rocks for the same reason that birds do. If you read the whole article, right? They use it to grind up... Well, Corinne and I got to talking. Were you not entertained, Steve?

Listen. Listen, man. You don't think that's true? No, I didn't have time to read the whole article. He's cringing, I got to talk about something. So, I think it's coincidental that he happened to grab, but it's not so coincidental, because it might happen to a chicken too,

that they picked up a very small bird point and mistook it for a small piece of gravel and put it in their gizzard. But chicken only lives five years. Alligators live, come on, 40. Really? Wow. Oh, I was even thinking longer.

Some of these critters are really old. Yeah, the one in Florida that they've been pumping up, I want to say that they've been pumping up. Uh, I want to say it was like 40 some. Huh? So he is,

he has, uh, ingested lots of rocks over the course of his life or her life. I don't know if it was a female, um, alligator, but, uh,

so, you know, I don't know if it's hundreds or whatever, but like, there's a higher likelihood that he's gonna have a projectile point in his belly than a uh than a chicken right here's what you're like but it's still it's uncanny it is especially that there's two of them so you play like you're an alligator okay and you walk out and go pick up a handful of rocks and

then we'll check what you got okay it's like what are the odds it's gonna be like oh look i picked up an arrowhead yeah it's uncanny well it's so uncanny in fact that we're covering it here today well it's really nuts that there's two of them yeah we hope no one lied but you know no you'd want to know where he's hanging out. Eagle Lake. I don't know what the territory is. I'm getting on a strap on my snorkel and going there and have a look. There you go. Let's hope you don't get eaten by an elk.

The piece is like a teardrop shape. It's called a plummet. And scientists don't know exactly what purpose they serve, which is interesting. Fish and sinker. That's what it looks like. That's my belief. That's what they thought. You think it's like an ancient.

Yeah. I think it's an architect. It's got two holes in it, but the holes don't go all the way through. It's very heavy. I should have read that article. Interesting. Dude, I'd be doing such a better job as a host right now if I'd read that article. I'd be tearing it up.

I'd be like, one would think it was a fish and sinker, but the holes don't go all the way through. But instead, I'm like, it's a fishing sinker. Oh. You guys remember what, so a stomach rock, which is what we're talking about. Okay. Versus a rock that's already been through the stomach. Which is called what? Well, it's gastrolyte or gastrolith.

And one is currently in the stomach, while the other one is passed through the stomach. Is that right? Yeah. That's a good trivia question right there. Did you know that from reading the article? No, I knew that because that old outfitter buddy of mine that I'm always talking about had some gastro... Gastro-lites. Can't remember which one's which.

That's the problem. It's like slag tights and slag mites, man. Right. Yeah. Which one's which? Exactly like that. Tights. Tights are hanging.

Are hanging, right? From the ceiling. And mites are going up. So thusly, a rock that has passed through the stomach is a gastrolith. Or gastrolite. Can't remember. But yeah, that's the name for him. Great story, though.

I'm going to go read it afterward. Great. I feel like I'm fairly checked out on it now. So the American alligator. Okay, great. I feel like I'm fairly checked out on it now. Oh. So the American alligator, there's some odd balls to this, but we're typically like a max of 45 years of age. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, you know, one thing I kicked around was like, we always call them dinosaurs, right? It's like living dinosaurs.

Sure. Living fossils, whatever. And, uh, they like, yeah, they do exist in the fossil record, but like the American alligator that was here during the time of the dinosaurs was like 35 feet long. Hmm. It was a little different. It was just. Big old arrowheads. Yeah, exactly.

Did they, do you know if they travel far distances in their lifetime or stay relatively local? Because then maybe Steve will go check out that water bottom. Yeah, no, home bodies. Yeah. You know, they move with high water. Hmm.

There's a clue. So they disperse like kind of similar to beavers eagle lake yeah see me running around the arrowhead necklace even though you know where i've been i don't want those megalodon teeth too yeah there's so much i'll bring you one yeah thank you uh we covered i'm gonna try to do this one quick we covered how uh like seeing orange surveyor's tape out in the woods and how it's, I think it's unsightly. So we always like tear it off and put it in your pocket.

Got a couple of letters from people pointing out why that's a stupid idea. A surveyor. Uh, so someone from the forest service guy from the BLM talked about, don't just indiscriminately rip down surveyors tape. It's often there because we're doing work. We're like marking timber. We're laying out trail corridors.

We've paid people to go in and place said orange tape. And you responded with, well, that's not what I was talking about. And that, yeah, I, yeah. So Stan corrected. And then they also had some examples of when they've put up a bunch of orange tape for a purpose and paid to get it put there and then they come back and it is because someone done them the favor of taking it down so bear that in mind only if it leads to a wallow should you if it leads to a wallow or you watch it for 10 years and it sort of starts to fade and turn white. And drip onto the ground somehow.

And maybe it's time to pick it up. But then there's also apparently biodegradable flagging tape. Yeah, that'd be great. Which person encourages folks to buy instead of the plastic? Well, way back in the hunter safety days, they always said, consider using toilet paper for flagging. Yeah. Because then that, that degrades over time.

Yeah. People be like, now why would that guy poop up in that tree? Cal's dog almost died. Talk about that, Cal. So it's all controversial and like the more I read into it,

more controversial. There's controversy? Yes. So like flat out So it's all controversial and like the more I read into it more There's controversy? Yes so like flat out From multiple sources oh Dogs don't die from rattlesnake bites okay it's like oh it's an anomaly If a dog all my years being a vet only had one dog die and that got bit right on the throat And uh it was an airway issue not It was a swelling airway issue. And then, um, the treatment side of envenomation gets, uh, even gets into some controversy as well as like, uh, anti-venom and, uh, the production of anti-venom type products on the market are very limited and they're very expensive and do they work?

And it's been pretty fascinating studying up on this stuff because it all comes down to these biological factors that like we'll never know. Got it. It's like the dog. So my dog, for instance, uh, I've been around a lot of dead and dying animals and I'll tell you, uh, I was seeing many signals and signs where I was like, okay, prepare yourself. This is, this is, this is going this direction. I've seen Cal lose a dog. Yeah.

Damn near. It's not, it's not. I don't take it easy. I'm a sissy when it comes to those dogs. And so Snort got bit right on the ear, which is. It wasn't as bad as what's happening to it right now as Grinch tries to lift it into her lap. It was less traumatic. She's like, I'll take the rattlesnake, to be honest with you. It was less traumatic.

Oh, that's just so good. And so this dog may, her biological system, she may be like a little more predisposed to react to anticoagulants, which rattlesnake venom contains an anticoagulant. And she bled profusely. Like it's a highly vascular area. Ears bleed like crazy, but this like bled to the point where I had serious trouble stopping it. Bleeding out of the fang holes. Yes.

Or did it like swell up so much that blood was coming other places? Well, eventually both of those things. But I mean, think of how tiny rattlesnake fangs are. Like we're talking like little tiny pinpricks. Yeah. Mm-hmm. But the, you know, necrotic factors in venom made the meat around those little tiny pinpricks start to deteriorate fast.

And then, uh, the swelling was almost instantaneous. And, uh, she started bleeding out of another spot on her ear and developed like this giant pus pocket. And then the hair was like,

come like actively falling, like actively falling off, like slipping off her ear. This is all in what kind of amount of time? So she got bit just a little prior to 11 a.m. And she ran back to me at heel and had one little drop of blood on her ear. So you didn't even know that she'd been bit? I didn't. I walked over to confirm that it was in fact a rattlesnake,

even though I was like, I know what this is. Because you saw her ear bleeding. Yes. So I was walking out. She was within my line of sight, but I wasn't paying attention to her. I saw her turn go yep oh i see okay and come back to me but you knew where to go look yeah in a very casual fashion but the thing is like i was well within even my poor hearing distance of the snake and the snake

hadn't rattled or anything like that which kind of leads into this other conspiracy theory of rattlesnakes. It's like people are selectively harvesting snakes that rattle. So if you're an indiscriminate rattlesnake killer, you're finding snakes that rattle and then killing those snakes, leaving the snakes that do not rattle. And they think they're driving natural selection.

Yes. There's all sorts of stuff out there i i would i would like you to take that one to half a finger i i will i think the half a finger will say like it don't quite work that way i i will tell you i will tell you man there's there's an endless amount of people that care about their dogs um so there's a lot of service to be done on the hows and whys of this stuff i i want to keep. You should write a pamphlet. Be like, so your dog got bit by a rattlesnake. Yeah.

Can I interest you in a pamphlet? Because people love pamphlets. So ears start swelling up. What you do, or the standard operating procedure for a rattlesnake bite victim is make them calm, reduce the heart rate. Ideally, you're going to have that bite area below the heart.

Mm-hmm. And, and like go ahead and use ice if you can. Hold on, the bite area below the heart? Below the heart. So it's not like you're the R-E-S-T type acronym or RICE rather, rest, ice, compression, elevation. Yeah. No one ever tells you to lower something down. Right.

Right. Huh. So you want to like use gravity to keep the venom far from the heart and the lungs. No shit. Really? Yeah. Yeah. So. And did you cut an X and suck the venom far from the heart and the lungs. No shit, really? Yeah. Yeah. So.

And did you, did you cut an ax and suck the venom out, Cal? No, no, I didn't. I mean, part of me was like, do I just go full Western here and cut this ear off right now? Yeah. Um. Yeah. But then. Hmm.

I determined that if the dog's going to die, I'd much rather her think that it was the snake that killed her than me. Yeah. She'd go to the grave being like, that son of a bitch, man. Yeah. Thought we were friends. We had a good thing going. So, yeah, it took nine hours to get her to the vet. Because you were way the hell out.

Yeah, way, I mean were way the hell out yeah way i mean way the way the hell i mean like gates and flat tires and busted trailers and all this like horrible comedy of errors that just like you know and you just feel guilty because you know it's your job to take care of these things so by the time she got to actual medical care, she had kind of gone through these spells of being like very much not okay to, oh, oh, the dog's kind of acting fine to then very much not like, oh, I recognize this.

This isn't good. So then, um, ultimately how I got the bleeding to like subside a little bit is I got a, uh, a quick clot package, like dug that, that was like my last thing. I used every bit of material in my first aid kit and, uh, and got that like plastered to her ear, her ear plastered to her head. Uh, and keep in mind like that ear is like, if you, if you like waved a feather on that thing, that dog would like scream as if she was being skewered. And, uh, it was just horrendous deal, but we had this situation where she was like kind of going into shock.

So, uh, had a super highly elevated heart rate, had lost a bunch of blood. The, her overall, um, ability to coagulate her blood's ability to coagulate was basically like not existent at that point and then like things just kind of got more complicated we were nine plus hours out from when she got hit by the snake a lot of folks that you talk to you say like anti-venom is the most effective within two hours and then you have this like law diminishing returns and it's very expensive stuff um and a dog this size she's 47 pounds she she probably would have been hit with like four doses of anti-venom and they're 400 and the the type that she had is not like the crazy expensive stuff and it's still 400 and some dollars a bag so this is ivy um solution that's that's pre-frozen

so we kind of have this this talk of like should she actually get this stuff? It's like hard to get. Some years it's just like non-existent. Um, it's, it can be kind of controversial because it's like places that have money can get it. Mm-hmm. Um, cause you know, but it also, it's like a supply and demand thing too. It's like places that don't have a lot of money, probably don't have a lot of people

that are going to pay for it anyway. Yeah. Um, and so, you know, I, I got her up to Sun Valley Animal Hospital in, in Haley, Idaho, where, uh, my previous dog that, that you mentioned, the big fish, uh, received care and I really liked those folks. So, um, I got her up there after calling,

going through towns and calling vet offices and having people be like, nope, don't bring her here. Because of what? They were just like, yeah, doctors went home. I'm like, really? I don't understand. Why would they not want the dog in there? I just don't.

I don't know. I do not know. You're like, my dog got bit by a rattlesnake. It might be dying. And they'd say, no room at the inn. Yep. They're like, ooh, sorry. That's so weird.

Like too much for them to deal with. Too much for them to deal with too late in the day. Jeez, they must not take whatever the Hippocratic oath is or something for dog people, man. But I mean, also keep in mind, there's a lot of folks that I've talked to who are like, oh yeah, dogs don't die from, from rattlesnake bites. Right. And it's like, oh, well overblown. And I bumped into a cowboy on the way out.

Super nice dude. Who's like, hey, how's it going? Cause I told you we trespassed through this ranch to do that sheep hunt. And, uh, so I like, I felt obligated to stop and talk to this guy even though it's the last thing i wanted to do like hey dog got bit by a rattlesnake he's like oh yeah one of my dogs got bit earlier this year um god i wish i could remember the exact words he used but they were fantastic but little cow dog about the size of snort anyway got bit bit on the leg, um, which as you can imagine, the legs a lot easier to keep below the heart than the ear is.

And, uh, he's like, yeah, I got, uh, real serene for a while or something like that. It was interesting choice of words, but the dog got a real, real mellow for a while. Then she lost a bunch of flesh, but now she's fine. You know, and that, he didn't even consider trying to get that dog all the way out of there to a vet. And that does happen quite a bit. And everybody thinks their dog's super special. I obviously think this dog's very special. But from what I saw.

I don't think that my dog's special. No, come on. So, uh, I got to take Snort home with an IV bag full of fluids. Uh, and my, my place in, in Ketchum was vacant at the time. So I got to run up there and camp out on the floor, which is exactly how I moved into the place in the first place. You slept at the vet? I would have slept at the vet.

I was like, oh, here's the deal. If you guys aren't going to monitor overnight. Oh, I'm with you. I will. So, but they sent me home with an IV bag and gave me the math on what they wanted to. With the anti-venom stuff in it. Not with anti-venom at that point.

Because like we have this talk and there's this discussion of like where she's at, like near shock. The number one thing that we need to do is reduce your heart rate. Okay. There are some side effects that are possible with anti-venom and it could be negative enough to kill the dog in the state that she's in. I'm with you. It's possible.

Mm-hmm. And then we had just like this horrible night where I was trying everything I could to make the dog comfortable. The dog's like very much uncomfortable. Doing like a lot of, again, like dying dead dog things, like trying to get up and move and then quitting.

And then like, oh, remembering that it had to and move and then quitting and then like oh remembering that it had to be somewhere and then quitting and all these things so eventually i uh unhooked her from the iv and she just crawled out laid on my chest and i was like all, like this is the way you want to go out. This is the way you want to go out type of thing. And, uh, we both slept for like an hour and a half. And at this point, her head is swollen, like all the way up, like one eye is totally swollen over. Um, she's in a lot of pain, a lot of discomfort. Her neck is fully swollen down into her chest. And then anywhere where that edema is, where that swelling is, is also very, very sore, like, and she's like screams to the touch of it. And, uh, yeah, it was just, just crappy.

But then, uh, I get up and the, the folks at the vet office were awesome. And they're like, yeah, we just come in at 8 a.m. So brought her in. And then they gave me their phone numbers too. They're like, yeah, check her heart rate every hour. And if it hits 200, call me and we'll come down and see what we can do type of thing. Yeah. And so, you know, dogs have fast heart rate and, and I'm digging around for femoral artery

trying to get her pulse. And it's just like very feathery and just like not a good, not a good strong feel to it. And it's just ripping. And so I'm spending like 40 minutes checking a pulse, right? Because I'm like trying to do averages to see like where we're ending up. And eventually get her down to the vet. They have, it is the busiest vet's office you've ever seen.

There's people fricking everywhere seen there's people freaking everywhere it's super busy and they basically just like clear us out a spot in the middle of like this all-purpose room where it's like business administration going on in this corner uh docs writing notes on their animal patients in this corner there's a little uh clinic table and then like snort and i just sitting there and every 20 minutes somebody swings in they're like okay how we doing and um her body's not absorbing any of those fluids she's not really drinking she's really not wanting to eat anything she's not she's got no outs you know no she's not peeing she's not pooping even though like they like ultrasound her bladder and she's like yeah she should really want to pee

um to the point where they were gonna uh try to catheterize her but they didn't want to you know like that's not a painless process. And, uh, but they can't put her under cause that could kill her too at that point. And then they're, they're constantly like analyzing her blood. And what was really, really wild is her blood becomes so protein deficient that it's actually like sucking the, the protein out of her muscles. And so it is just the wildest thing, man. In, in 24 hours, she has like lost noticeable muscle mass around her hips. And it's, and she's like a bony you know like looks like a neglected dog and um and at that point the doc uh because as you guys know i like to ask a lot of questions the doc comes in and she's like hey i researched this study on otters, mustelids, where they found, you know, benefits to anti-venom out to the 24-hour period.

She's like, I think we have to try it at this point because her blood is just like not good. And again, like her body's not absorbing any of the fluids in the, in the IV. So like all the things and she won't eat and drink and all this stuff. So nothing's really going our way. Um, so I'm like, yeah, you know, let's give it a shot. And so it was just really, really wild. That one bag of anti-venom, you could kind of see like almost immediate effects. And it was really funny. Like all the people at the vet clinic would like keep bringing by treats like different dog treats so we had like cat food and cat treats and super fancy like paleo dog treats and all you know down to like just fat you know like beef trim fat dog you know like canned dog food stuff all the things and everybody would be

like well maybe she'll like this and maybe she'll like this. And the dog's like, not into any of it. And then she starts like eating a little bit. And then you could kind of trick her with some Pavlovian type responses. So like, if you drop dog food on the floor and your dog's like, Oh, got to get that.

So I could like drop some dog food in front of her and it'd be like, ting, ting, ting on the table. And she'd be like, ah, and eat like a piece of kibble. And it'd be like, tink, tink, tink on the table. And she'd be like, ah, and eat like a piece of kibble. And it'd be like a piece of kibble and a piece of kibble.

So then, um, yeah, she started kind of coming around on that stuff. And again, like it's really wild. So she got bitten probably 95%. She got bitten by a great basin rattlesnake which the state of idaho

doesn't even recognize as like the snake for that region but and and like the research that i did you know it was really like surveys from like 1985 as far as rattlesnakes go and and in 1985 talking with dr bob reed who we've had on the show, he's like, yeah, that's what those surveys would have said. Because we weren't quite into dividing out what rattlesnake is what at that point. And so the anti-venom that she got isn't even based off of the venom that she received but like from what i saw like that's the thing that like turned things around um but that's the you know it's like a generalized serum basically like you take this very general venom and this very general venom from these two different snakes and then you combine them in a sheep and then

you take the antibodies that that sheep makes and then you create anti-venom off those antibodies but uh all that was just yeah incredibly interesting and and uh you know it's like we had like this monumentous occasion when like myself and this vet tech uh sarah walked the dog around and all of a sudden she peed and peed and peed and peed and peed and it was like a holy shit moment you know i was like oh my god thank god like something good happened yeah you know and then yeah just like lots of rest and then it was like a holy shit she ate something like voluntarily and then um it was just like this really wild recovery scene of like she's doing better than expected after doing worse than expected for like this big crash.

And then it was like, okay, now we can worry about her ear, like the actual site of the wound. And like, it was like this attitude of like, boy, it'd be great to save the ear,

but if we don't, who cares? She's got to. And then one of the vets took, took a look like this very seasoned vet takes a look at it, and he's like, just cut it off. Like, ah, just. He's like, well, you know, there's a lot of good,

like I think there's some good stuff there. And keep in mind, I mean, it's black. Like the ear is black. It's like crispy on the edges. It's got this huge pus fluid pocket in the middle of it. Um, it's, you know, like really black around the bite wounds.

Like if you touch it with a little antiseptic cloth, like skin and hairs like sloughing off of it. And, uh, and the, this vet, Dr. Heidi Wogue, who was awesome, um, she's like, hey, you know, there's, there's some good

meat here and stuff. The senior vet, the most senior vet's like, you can take care of that thing for a month and we'll still have to cut it off. It'd be good for the auction house of oddities, man. Jeez. Desiccated snort here.

And it was like, so you got to be a nurse for a month and you don't know. I'm like, yes. Yeah. Sign me up. So you're still in that phase right now. Still in that phase right now. But like. Obviously you're going to keep the year now.

Right. Yeah. Like that. The puss pocket started draining um there's a debridement is a super fancy word i learned for picking at scabs yeah um so there was a lot of like gently cleaning the ear and getting rid of like excess stuff and then um yeah i mean it looks awesome now and and it's just kind of like a big bald ear yep and uh i see bad dogs can't tell stories everybody yeah be like let me tell you what this jackass put me through because the dog get to the part where like overhears you talking about cutting its ear off right right like and then guess what cal uh yeah be so much better coming from the dog so now like really right now i'm like the most worried about having a bald eared labrador retriever and like freezing cold water and air temps in January. Yeah. Put a mitten on there.

Right. A whole head mitten. Um, which, yeah, which all roads lead back to Garrett Smith, Dirt Meth. He was like, hey, call this buddy of mine. And he's got, uh, this company called Rex Specs. And, uh, I'm going to get a set of, uh, hearing protection, tactical hearing protection for her, which is like a head muff that has two big pads on it. Yeah. And he said he can remove one of the pads for hearing and I can keep the other one on there on the bad ear for insulation.

Yeah, that's good. I wouldn't have thought of that. But yeah, if you go out and like, you know, sub zero temps, man, that dog's ear is going to be cooked. Yeah. Not cooked. The opposite of cooked. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Wow. Yeah, so that's kind of the saga snort. And then. I got a call from Cal while this is all going on, and he just told me to keep my mouth shut. Yeah. He's trying to control messaging. Yes. Yes.

You got like three podcasts out of it. Well, I got text messages from steve that are like hey call me hey you alive hey are you okay like oh my god it's like a better call um yeah so but you know all i've been talking about is this dog, like going and hunting with this dog and stuff. And so it was like. Oh yeah, man. So, but now, so we had like our first like serious training day yesterday and got back to letting her know that even though she's very special, that doesn't mean that she's not going to be disciplined. And then the day before that, we took a real long walk, and she found a covey of three Hungarian partridge. Didn't have any shells in my gun for the first two birds that got up.

Managed to get a shell in the chamber for the third one and shot it. And she retrieved it, and that was our first bird of the year. Awesome. Yep. Youth duck of the year. Awesome. Youth duck coming right up. Yes. Yes. Yes. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX

are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always

talking about OnX here on the MeatEater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll

gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked 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 x club y'all okay jordan hi steve um you ever been bit by rattlesnake no i was trying to find a good

segue i have not but you grew up on a cattle ranch in nebraska yeah where there are a lot of rattlesnakes you do see a lot of them around. Yeah. Yeah. I remember going like when I was little, we'd go over, there was a couple of dens that were in like along the creek bottom. There's like some pine trees, like rocky outcropping type stuff that they like. And there was a couple pretty established dens.

And I remember going in and. Sure shit we're hunting squirrels. No. Freed up a lot of time. And, uh, yeah, dad would just shoot them with like 22, uh, with a 22 with birch hop. At what time of year? A lot of them.

Oh, that was like in the springtime. Yeah. And then in the fall time too, I think. Are your folks still in the cattle ranching business? they're still there on the family place you weren't drawn to that though yeah we'll go back i'll go back i think like you'll become a cattle rancher yeah i think oh really yeah oh that's good i do yeah yeah i think so but are your folks surprised he became a hunting guide yeah i think my dad thought i was like maybe didn't know exactly what i was getting into and when i i think when i told him like hey this is what i want to do he

was kind of like you like doing that but are you gonna like doing that for like a long time hold on he was concerned that you wouldn't enjoy it or he was concerned that you were being frivolous he was concerned i wouldn't enjoy it. I liked hunting so much, he was afraid I was going to overdo it, burn myself out. Got it. Yeah. Does he like to hunt?

Yeah. What town in Nebraska is all this happening in? This is in Rushville. Okay. Northwest corner. So we're just by Chadron. How old were you when you started to hunt? Oh, man.

I shot my first deer when I was 12. I couldn't even tell you how old I was uh i shot my first deer when i was 12 i can't i couldn't even tell you how old i was when i like shot my first rabbit it's a little 22 but i couldn't have been i don't know eight is that too young no no i think it was like then yeah eight and then there's pictures of me with a uh cork gun when i was really little like trying to shoot turkeys out the window and whatever. Did you get any? I don't think so. Lots. Yeah.

Apparently there was a time I was on a tricycle chasing turkeys down the driveway with a cork gun over the handlebars. Oh, got it. Yeah. So, but tell like more clearly tell folks about your guiding business before we kind of really cover off on how you got into the whole thing. Yeah. So yeah, it's called Running Water Hunting.

I started it basically when I was in high school. Took a little hiatus over my college years and then went back to it. Based out of Northwest Nebraska on our family cattle ranch, I lease a couple of ranches that surround us as well. And, yeah, we just hunt deer, turkeys, and not really antelope anymore. But yeah, that's basically it. How'd you get started in high school? So I kind of just picked it up. So I grew up with always having other hunters around because like my, you know, parents

would have family, friends or whatever come out and they were always from out of state they would come out and there's like a yearly deal and i think i would just annoy them mostly um but i always wanted to go and they would reluctantly take me i think and then we had an outfitter from town that leased the place for a little while so then he was bringing people and i would do the same thing i would just go down and like hang out with them type of deal and then were you bummed about that that that was your hunt spot but then now someone was leasing it yeah that was an issue at one point especially when i got older but dad was always very like hey this is a stipulation. Like my kid's going to hunt type of a deal. Yeah.

So. Are you the only kid? I have two younger sisters. Okay. Yeah. But I'm the oldest of three. So, so we, uh, yeah, I started doing that. And then when that outfitter left, just decided

it really wasn't his thing. Then I thought I can do this. And when I was a senior in high school, I booked hunters off of Craigslist, which sounds like a really safe thing to do. So what year are you talking about? This would be 2011. Okay.

Yeah. And 2011, 2012. And so I remember there was like these two dudes, I think from like Missouri, really nice guys booked for like a thousand bucks came out. But when you say Craigslist, you ran an ad. Ran a freaking ad on Craigslist. Yeah.

As a high schooler. Very stupid. And the ad said what? I think it was just like five day whitetail hunt in Nebraska. With a high schooler. Call me up. I don't know if they knew that. Very interesting.

Did you run it like on the national Craigslist? I think so. Honestly, I don't even remember. No, I think it was just in the Nebraska panhandle, like section of the Craigslist, you know? Yeah. And then. It said like five day whitetail hunt yeah five day whitetail hunt with a muzzleloader like would you charge a thousand

bucks did you put that down yeah that's hilarious yeah with your phone number yeah my phone number and they called me forget about allowance money they're gonna be great yeah or this is gonna be really bad allowance money yeah you tell your parents you know that dishwashing deal uh-uh yeah i got a business now i'm buying the dishwasher yeah i'm buying the dishwasher yeah so yeah they came out how many calls did you get when you ran the ad dude i don't even remember i think i mean those were like the only two guys I think called and they're like hey is this legit and yeah I wish I remembered that more what'd you say I just like told him the rundown like hey I think this is what kind of what I told you like this is what the deer like to do this is how we like to hunt them like you have a place to stay meals are on you and yeah come hang out did you put them up yeah yeah we have a uh this is my class schedule we call it yeah seriously that yeah that so you had to play you had to play some

serious hooky to do this whole thing oh yeah well we so i started i always started um i tried to start the hunts on like get get the guys in on Friday. Go like show them around. I would hunt with them Saturday, Sunday. And then they would kind of have the, like. The feel for the place. Kind of feel for the place. And then I would send them on their own for like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. While you ran off to school. Texting them in class and stuff.

Yeah. Like keeping track. It was very crazy. Yeah. That's so like enterprising. Well, the scary thing is like, I just didn't think there was anything wrong with that. You didn't have any kind of,

I mean, you had to like no licensing or anything. No, well, you don't have to have guide licensing in Nebraska. I got you. Were you ever in class and getting a text message that's like, hey, come help us track this thing? I don't think that happened, no. They each shot a buck, I i remember and it died like right

next to their like easy to get to and they were happy customers yeah they were super pumped i still have them on facebook i think so those are your first two clients those are my first two clients yeah where did it go from there that That's a great story, man. Yeah. So right when I graduated high school, we had another, like an outside outfitter come in and offer us up. And that's when I just. Oh, you got displaced again. I did get displaced. And that's when dad was like, you need to focus on college instead of probably this situation.

And how do you argue with that type of deal, I guess. So I did that for, went to college and then. Studied what? So I studied ag business. Okay. Yeah. And so I went. Not deer business.

No. So then this is where it gets interesting because when I was in that same like senior year when I was trying to start this outfitting business I was also really intrigued with like filming and doing that kind of thing and so I'd started writing for like a little self-filmed website and so started kind of my media business if you will then, then as well. And when I got to college, I started filming buddies and like just putting together little videos. And I was at a show and there were some guys like the Prefurt's that have like the blue like ranch equipment. It's like bucking shoots and stuff like that at the rodeos. They have a company producing ranch equipment yes yeah

yeah it's called the whole company is called pre-fert and i have a cousin that is a rodeo judge knew them brought them in they had just started their own tv show at the time for hunting um and so kind of got in with those guys and then they knew of this other company out of Cody, Wyoming that's like a gun manufacturer and they I saw them at a show at a hunting show where we were actually trying to sell hunts for this other outfitter that at least our place and I just went up and like started talking to them and the guy's like if we ever look for a videographer we'll let you know and of course i'm like never gonna hear from them and they called me in like august that year and wanted me to film start filming sheep hunts for the show in wyoming because they were guiding crazy i mean how many sheep hunts they going on um that i mean so that first year, I think I filmed three, two or three.

And then the next year, I think I filmed like six in Wyoming. And then, yeah, just like some other elk and deer hunts as well. Because those guys were guiding and they had clients that wanted it filmed or what was it? Yeah. So they had a rifle manufacturer and so they were sending, like their rifles on hunts with people and one of the guys that owned it also owned an outfitting an outfitting business yeah i see yeah and so it was like a big marketing deal yeah yeah different hunters all the time yeah but you started documenting those trips yeah yeah so i started doing that so i went through

the my first year of college and then my second year, I went through my, see how this go. I started my second year. I was just about ready to start my junior year of college, my junior fall. And they, um, offered me this thing like to go and like film for the fall. Well, I'm like, I can't do both. I can't go to college and film. And I don't think dad was very happy at first with that decision either, but I just like dropped all my classes in college. Really?

Went and filmed. Yeah. For the show for the first fall. And then I went back to college for that spring. And then that's it. I haven't been back. Your parents pissed? I need to finish.

No, I don't think so. Not now. You're going to go finish now? I've done okay. No. I don't think so. Not now. You're going to go finish now? I've done okay. No. Yeah, what's the point now? Probably nothing. Do it when you're like 80.

Yeah. If you get bored. Mm-hmm. You don't actually want to sit in a class now, man. No. Once you get a taste of not sitting in there, you're not going to go sitting there. Yeah. So I ended up going, this goes back to the hunting a little bit the air

the outfitting business the um that outfitter that came in from the outside um kind of have had a falling out and he moved on falling out with um just kind of some landowners in the area just like wasn't meshing type of deal so he he moved on and then we had didn't have anybody coming out to the ranch anymore. Well, by that time I had taken a full-time position with that TV show and Cody. So I had moved. And so then I started running water hunting, like officially as an LLC. And I just booked people in as semi-guided.

And they would come in. I would like have all the tree stands set and whatever during the summer and run cameras as much as they could. And then my dad would just kind of show them around like, Hey, this is where you park. Um, I would send them on X pins with, um, where to go basically like where the stands were set. Yeah.

And then I just ran it as a semi guided for those couple of years. And then I ended up quitting the TV show and I moved back to Nebraska and. Why'd you quit the TV show and I moved back to Nebraska. Why'd you quit the TV show? Just to go focus on other stuff? Yeah, it was just time to go. I had been there full time for two years and actually filming with them for like four seasons and it was just, I'd run its course. You were like on a salary? Yeah, I was on a salary for a couple years and going to eight to five job kind of sucks.

That was an eight to five job? It was, yeah. It was an eight to five job kind of sucks that was an eight to five job it was yeah it was an eight to five and then like i would film and then when even when we weren't filming like i was still expected to be in the office just doing all the post production and yeah yeah i would do like everything that i filmed i pretty much did all the post on and then you know there was a couple other people that worked in there as well but yeah there was a lot of there was a lot of downtime that i didn't really need to be in there you know yeah and i just wanted to uh get back and i guess help dad with the ranch too a little bit and just it was just time to move on so did your folks play hardball with you at all were they like now jordan

this is like a reasonable cut for your folks as far as like uh you don't get to just charge money and we don't get a piece of the pie yeah no i pay a lease for sure oh so they don't give you like a hand they don't give you like a friendship deal oh i think that i get a friendship okay but you're still paying yeah absolutely yeah yeah i wouldn't get a free ride for sure and then like i go back now and i helped dad like hay all summer so then i think there's a little bit of trading that goes on for like work for at least you know but then you kind of like you gradually start doing like more guiding though right yeah more i mean like more involved once you were back more involved yeah then that's when i started

doing like fully guided including the meals being there all the time and i mean essentially being able to charge more for that um and how are you finding how did when you went back to start doing it more seriously how would you find customers or clients honestly a lot of it was word of mouth um still put some i've gone away from craigslist but i have put a few ads on ebay before and that's actually a pretty good way of generating some some things there and then there was just other like guide fitter i think is a website yeah and a lot of a lot of that but most of it's like repeat people or just word of mouth how many people can you hunt every year i take for deer i take like 12 total is what i like to take like 12 between 12 and 15

between archery muzzleloader and then the rifle season have you got them all yourself sorry oh no you're fine um Um, I had, yeah, I had before. I do have a kid that's going to guide for me this fall to help me out a little bit. Last year was crazy. I just like,

I had still have the media business and then the hunting business. And it was all very much like back to back. I'd get back from a film trip on like a Friday as the other hunters were rolling in. And then we'd start guiding on like a Saturday or something like that. And it was just, it was too much. So I, I got a guy in to help this year. Some of the logistical stuff. If you had to split, if you had to decide between doing the media business and the hunting guide business, what would you do? Oh, no, let me, let's do a

three-way. You had to do like cattle, hunting guide, show business. and whatever you picked you had to stick with the rest of your life oh man i would say meaty business because really i think so huh go on uh i don't know that's a hard one steve hard one, Steve. They're all pretty split. They're all pretty split right now in my life anyways. Yeah. Evenly split. But yeah, the media stuff, I think mostly because that's where I do like all my Western hunting type stuff. Oh, I got you.

That's where I get to. Because it keeps you out and engaged and doing new stuff. Yeah. It's like takes me all over, which is kind of cool. So yeah. So do you freelance for people now? I do. Yeah.

So my, the ranch name is Running Water Ranch. And so I spun off of that with Running Water Hunting and then I did the same with the media. So it's Running Water Media. Got it. Yeah. How far into the future are you booked on the whitetail hunts? This year's full. That's pretty, that's pretty much it.

Um, I've got some people that are always like come back year to year. So archery is usually fairly full. Muzzleloader is usually really full. I think two years ago you killed some giant whitetail during muzzleloader, didn't you? With Avery? Yeah.

Yeah. We, he was like, they scored him. He's like 178 or something like that. Yeah. That's a big whitetail. 180, yeah. I think he'd be, be. Yeah, it's a big whitetail. 180, yeah. I think he'd be booking lots of folks with 170 inch whitetail. Coming, falling out of your pockets.

They're everywhere. I wouldn't say falling out of my pockets. I really try to like, I really try to be like conservative with selling some of these hunts. Like, especially on the size and stuff. Just, you know know like we do have some mule deer too and our tags are good for either but there are some guys that have called me and said i want a 180 mule deer bust and i'm kind of like yeah you don't want to come here then just because it's not that's not fun selling things like that i I don't know. It's interesting. Like that outfitter that Lisa

placed at the time, like we would get handed, I guided for him as well. And like, we would get handed people that you don't, it took me a while to realize you don't really know what they got sold. You just know what you're supposed to be guiding and what's out there. Yeah. And it's really awkward after the first. When they have a set of expectations that you would never give them. Yeah, absolutely. It's really awkward. So I try really hard not to do that.

Right. You'd be like, that's a really good deer. And I'd be like, what deer? Yeah, exactly. They're like, well, we're all the big deer. I had that conversation. So it wasn't very much fun. I can imagine.

Yeah. It wasn't good. So I try to stay very much in the, we like to keep a small, like, tight-knit, you know, group when we're there. Like, four people tops is all we'll take at a time. Mm-hmm. And... So it's intimate. Yeah, I don't want, like, a huge camp.

I want it more to be, like, I don't want to say more like family, but kind of more of, like, a... And you're in there cooking and everything too? I did cook last year a little bit. Yeah. Wouldn't say it was great Steve but it got the job done. Yeah. Yep. So yeah we're including all that. I saw a thing recently on

maybe it wasn't recently. I don't know scrolling through your social media stuff. You had a thing where you weren't posting trail cam photos anymore. Oh yeah. What's that all about? Oh we had a deal. I mean I have your social media stuff. You had a thing where you weren't posting trail cam photos anymore. Oh yeah. Yeah. What's that all about? Oh, we had a deal. I mean, I have a theory.

Yeah. We just had a deal where it was like, I think we were, we were posting a lot of pictures and I think people, people were like moving in on the neighboring ground that technically isn't supposed to be getting hunted, but they know nobody's really out there. So they. Yeah. I can totally picture it yeah so yeah i don't know because that's kind of like an advertisement thing for if you're a deer guide

right yeah do you view that by putting up what you're seeing on trail cams do you view that as like a marketing thing or is it just because you're interested in it uh putting yeah just like me posting trail camera pictures yeah i mean are you doing that to show people like, Hey, here's what's going on. Here's what's going on. Like this year type of deal. Like, yes. Um, but it does have a little, there's a, another edge to that sword. Which is you advertise.

Yeah. You just, then people like around know what's there and there's places that you can kind of slip in like from the back or whatever that's i don't know the nicest way to say that just like poachers trespassing yeah big deer make people do stupid things yeah it does so yeah that was pat dirt cool right that story big deer make people stupid. Hmm. So now what, when you're filming, who do you work for? Do you have clients that they're going hunting and they want to document the hunt and you'll hire on to go document their hunt?

Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. So yeah, there's a lady I filmed for the last couple of years has bought like governor sheep tags. Um, I'll go film her on those. Um, like rockslide.com is a website that I've written for, for a long time. And they wanted to start doing like, you know, just doing good films of their hunts to help, I think with their, you know, brand and image and stuff. So I'll go do those. Um, crispy boots have done some stuff for, um, but yeah, it's just things like that. Kind of whatever companies I'm, I'm involved with if they need somebody to go with them or to take product pictures or whatever, I can go. Gotcha. I can go help. Yeah. Uh, Oh, go ahead. I was going to say,

how'd you flip that from cause you it sounds like you're behind the camera, you're guiding, but you just got done with a pretty special hunt where you got to be behind the gun. How'd that, how'd you flip that one? That got flipped. Yeah.

So that was a deal through Sig Sauer who I started working with a couple of years ago. Yeah. And so they've got, they've got a rifle coming out that we wanted to do. It's, um, we wanted to do a hunt, like kind of around what the rifle was intended for. And it's just a really lightweight packable

rifle. And so, uh, kind of threw a pitch out like, Hey, this is what this thing is made for. Like, why don't you send me on a sheep hunt and they're like well we might be able to make that happen and it like worked within you know however and you were like suckers yeah i still can't believe it that's great i still can't believe it so that's what we did in the brooks range yeah south slope yep got an out outfitter that I actually found the hunt in January. He had had a couple cancellations. Found it off Craigslist? Yeah.

No. That one was word of mouth too. It was? Yeah. Did you have fun doing that? Yeah, it was awesome. It's totally coincidental, but I was looking into some hunts in the Brooks Range,

talking to some people, and the Brooks Range right now is not in good shape. I should say the sheep in the Brooks Range are not in good shape. There's a lot of not good shape sheep units in Alaska right now. Is that right? Just some bad, string of bad winters.

But you're like the sixth person that I've talked to that had an unbelievably good sheep hunt in the Brooks Range this year. I don't know if I would say it was like unbelievably good. Right. Well. It was basically the opposite of like yours for weather and whatnot. It sucked for most of it, but it was fun.

Did you see any other rams besides the one you killed? Yeah. I mean, I saw probably six legal rams. Did you really? Over six. Yeah. What the hell's wrong with that sheep hunt? We saw them all like two days before season the day before season yeah and then like we found one in the middle that we ended up blowing a stock on and then the one that i ended up killing at the

end was with another legal ram so yeah but we just had a bad string of weather it was low visibility yeah yeah for pretty much the first day was good, and we had a ram that we'd been watching the previous two days give us the slip and thought, no worries, like, we're right where their home is, like, we're going to just pick through here and find them. And then the next day it was pretty much like 0-0 on visibility and raining for, I think, until like like five six o'clock that night and then the next day was a whole day in the tent the day after that was most of the

morning in the tent we got to move a little bit and it broke that afternoon we ended up finding a ram that was super cool but we just like the way that we had to go in on him um we couldn't see exactly i didn't think we couldn't see exactly. I didn't think anyways we could see exactly where they were bedded once we got around into the top and just took a lot of time to do that. It's just moving in that country is hard, as you know. And they ended up going through a saddle underneath of us as we were trying to go through the saddle to them. So we basically passed each other and i think we were like 200 yards from them but it was so steep that you just couldn't

see you know how those hills like have a lot of creases in them and they ended up busting out so that was and i told the guide i was like i've blown a lot of stocks that one was the worst yeah thing hurting one that i've ever had but uh yeah then we spent the next it was like the next three days in the tent and it was just oh isn't that just the most frustrating thing on the planet oh man yeah burned up a lot of inreach battery on that on that deal so yeah we had that we were doing that one time sheep hunting and no one brought a book but my brother bought a had thought to bring a book And there was three of us, and he cut his book

In thirds And since it was his book, he got to read front to back I had to like start in the middle And then get my third later So he had to read it like in Portions, you know But man, sitting in a tent is painful It sucked

I mean, I don't know. I think we've done, what, three doll sheep hunts together? And I feel like that's been a part of every single one. But every time it makes you mad. Oh, yeah. But you got to go in expecting it, you know? I mean, that's why you go for 10 days because five of them you probably can't see anything. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. probably can't see anything yeah yeah exactly and it it got to a point where like even if you wanted to you know like the guy told me he said uh i don't know most he said most of my clients he's like we would have left three days ago because it was just like like they would have got burned out yeah they would have got burned out but where are you gonna go like you know walk to the airstrip but it's, they can't come get you. Right. You're just going to like stare at wherever that is. And yeah.

So at the airstrip eating freeze dry. Yeah. Three days. Yeah. So finally it was like, it was the eighth. No, it was the seventh day of the hunt. We woke up to snow, but everything was like clearing off and it was starting to get nicer and made our way down the spine. And we were

starting to figure out our exit strategy. Cause that was a, that was a Wednesday and we were getting picked up on a Friday morning from the airstrip and we're still a ways away from the airstrip. And so we're on on this ridge like right up in the rocks with the sheep our guide finds four rams across the valley on another mountain and he's like i think we can he's like i don't know if we can get there and back to the airstrip but that's kind of our only option so he's like it's up to you like i think we can get there and get this all done but or at least get close to him or we can stay up here and keep picking around trying to find sheep but he's like either way we have to be at the airstrip

friday morning so at eight o'clock so you like figure out you know kind of what you think we should do and i'm, I would rather go after those sheep and all of our eggs were going to be in that basket too. Like it was a little bit lower on the mountain. Um, they were, they were probably the only sheep in that little, that mountain that we could see. So I was like, I'd rather go over there and screw it up and not get one, then sit up here and wish we would have went so he's like eff it we're going and it was like we left there at five o'clock had to go through the brush line and then back up through the brush line and all that and we got we were a thousand yards from the sheep at 1 a.m

and they were still bedded where we left them last time we saw them so that was nice and uh so we threw out sleeping bags on a really steep hillside and just tried not to freeze to death and it was light enough that we could start like kind of moving and you could really tell which ram was which at like 4 30 in the morning this thursday this thursday morning yeah so we watched him for quite a while and it was like, of course, the coldest night that we had was when we just threw sleeping bags on the ground and like didn't have anything. It's like when the storm breaks and it's really clear outside and nice. Yeah. It was cold.

Super cold. And so we watched him for a while. They ended up bedding out on this like rock cliff thing. We weren't going to be able to make the approach we wanted, but was kind of getting down to crunch time like we need to move and do something so we came up with this we came up with this plan moved in um and then our we had a our packer we left back and he was supposed to be giving us hand signals and we never could see him but it turns out he could never see the sheep either so that i guess all worked out um but we moved in and knew what do you think was going through his head like do i just doing good yeah yeah that's tough i don't know um but yeah we just had like pretty a couple pretty

defined like rock outcroppings that we were pretty sure we could get to and be like 200 yards from the ramps or so but we could never see them the whole way over so we're just hoping that they're going to be there and we like snuck through and all those rocks are like you know how they are just they don't have a home they're like yeah always you know rolling making a lot of noise so we just tried to be as quiet as we could and i remember it was like this big rock slab that had a crack through the middle of it and the crack was probably like two foot wide and the guide poked his head through and i remember being like he didn't have any he didn't you know I expected him to see him really

fast and he didn't move and I'm like oh they're gone like they backdoored us or whatever like they're out of here and about that time he put his head down and he said oh shit 100 yards and I was like all right we're close and close. And, and, uh, they were just, they were just moving out. And so it was four Rams pretty much in a row, uh, in a line. And they were just like moving across the rocks. And it took the guide a little while to figure out like which one there was two legal Rams. Um, the one that I really liked and the one he thought was the oldest, his lamb tips really flared. and that was obviously you know that's super cool so he finally told me which one he was and then he was just calling out

i remember he was calling out ranges he would just be like 180 200 210 220 and i'm thinking like that little fold that they ran was not really that big. I'm like, if they stay away, like pointed directly away from me the whole time, like I'm going to not going to get a shot. Like we're going to get this close. I'm not going to get a shot at him. And about that time it was like 220, I think was the first shot.

He just kicked a little bit, a quarter in the way. And I put it like right in the last rib and it came out his armpit. And then he was, that was my sheep. Great, man. It was cool. It was super was super cool what are you gonna do with that it's gonna be a full body for the auction house of oddities we're kicking a dog here yeah have you ever had jesse we will bring you a dog's ear. Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep fighting a doll sheep? Full body mount? You could.

That's a dream hunt, man. Just go and knock it out on the last day like that and have the whole adventure. Yeah, it was awesome. I mean, that's really how everybody wants their hunt to play out. There's just not... In hindsight, they do.

In hindsight, they they do not everybody cal there's plenty of people i think that would say you know i'll kill him on day one blow the steam off my cup of coffee jordan if you do a if you do full body how do you have to carry that animal out you can't you can't i mean what do immediately? Oh, just a full body mount. So we just skinned him. Like we just took all the hide. Instead of only doing like, you know, like a half, like for a shoulder, we took the whole, took the whole hide. You skinned him in the field and then.

Yeah. Okay. Get it. Yeah. And we packed him out and we got back to the airstrip at 3 a.m. Really? It was Friday morning before we left. Catch a little five-hour nap plane lands

yep it was pretty really no kidding tight yeah the old buzzer yeah and then the plane like of course the first like really nice day was probably the day i shot him but the next nice day was like at least the plane could come in uh the other option was we were gonna have to walk to the river which was like gosh i don't know it was probably like another eight miles from where we were gonna have to walk to the river which was like gosh i don't know it was probably like another eight miles from where we were and then i guess hope that the clouds would be high enough there that they could get in but yeah it was nice they they got in the the guy landed at like seven in the morning and uh he had brought the packer and the guide like a bunch more supplies because they had somebody rolling in like a couple days later.

Yeah. So they were just going to stay up there. And he brought him a half case of beer, and when he took off and took my camera guy back, me and the guide just like cracked a beer and looked at whatever it was, and I was like, yeah, it wasn't that bad. But it was kind of miserable in the moment. Oh, that's great.

Were you pretty beat up afterward? Your feet and everything? Or were you pretty used to that? Like I was pretty good, but that, no, I shouldn't say I was pretty good. Yeah, it beat the hell out of me. Did you lose a bunch of weight? Just those last couple. I don't think I lost a bunch of weight, but we weighed my pack when we got back from the pack out.

And there was like some other guys that I went with and we all kind of got back at the same time they were weighing their packs and my camera guy's like you better weigh it like just to just to see and I'm like I bet it was like 80 pounds like it's it was heavy but it was like whatever I made it it was 102 I was like yeah no wonder and my I couldn't feel my toes for like a week and a half 102 pounds I don't ever want to do it again Steve Hold on Carry 100

Just carry that much That's smart That's a PSA for everybody Because I just hung out with my buddy in Colorado Who did not get to join me at all On my sheep hunt And one of the big reasons is because he's battling bulge discs that are most likely

from years of packing a lot of meat so kids Jordan just did it, she made it out alive but man, don't over pack your back and battle that for the rest of your life doesn't kill you to go back for a second trip but so are you addicted

and you're trying to work every single angle you can to get back up there for another one? Yeah. I don't know. We'll have to see how the doll sheep one goes, but I'm going to start putting in for bighorn a little more seriously now.

And I'm not sure where my sheep hunting will go now. If people want to go check out, how do people go find the video, you know, the video you guys made? So that is going to be, I think that's going to be out in January and that will be like a first

light, uh, six hour kind of combo. Great. Deal there. So yeah, first light sent the videographer, which was, it was his first mountain trip ever. Oh, really? Yeah. They sent you the seasoned pros, huh?

Couldn't find any. Yeah. Yeah, you got to book him well in advance these days. Yeah, it was kind of short. It was kind of short notice, but he did fantastic and didn't complain and probably kept me in better spirits. So they can find the video through Sig Sauer and First Light. Yep. Yeah.

It probably won't be done until like January. Yeah. I'm guessing. And then what if someone wants to come book a deer hunt with you? Ooh. So runningwaterhunting.com is the website. You can kind of get the full rundown there and then just really through my Instagram at Jordan Budd.

And what's the Craigslist ad heading for the most part? I've moved away from Craigslist. Moved totally away from Craigslist. Yeah, I have. I think that's probably the smart thing. Spell out the Instagram deal, because you got like a little underscore or some shit in there, don't you? Oh, I do have a dot. Jordan.bud.

Yeah. Yeah. But people will find you. Yeah, they should, hopefully. And then you guys book turkey trips. Book turkey trips. 2022 is pretty full already. Yeah.

What kind of turkeys you got there? People are really purebred Merriams. Okay. So that's nice. Like native Merriams? Yeah. Yeah. Not the hybrids.

We're out of the hybrid zone, so. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Super white tips. What do you like better? The guy in turkey hunts or guy in deer hunts? Oh, deer hun cool. Yeah. Super white tips. What do you like? What do you like better? The guy in turkey hunts or guy in deer hunts? Oh, deer hunts for sure. Not a big turkey person.

No? No. That's stupid. Do you don't like squirrels? Do you don't like turkeys? I never said I didn't like squirrels. I just haven't dove into squirrels. Man, I'm going to come out and hit them squirrels and turkeys.

Do you like hunt your whitetails on the ground more than in a tree? Or where, how do you define yourself as a whitetail hunter? Uh, archery wise, like from a tree is nice. I think, um, we can hunt them on the ground where we're at. It's just, we're hunting them a lot, like coming

from, uh, bedding to like their food source and vice versa and a lot of that is through open pretty open country like open rolly it's really hard to do but it's doable to get to get close to them when they're when they're doing that so like muzzle loader and rifle like absolutely that's the way i'd like to do it um like we blind hunt for muzzle loader and we can for rifle honestly we haven't really had to for rifle because we usually fill like on the first day or two um but for muzzleloader like i really prefer to be on the ground but we'll put you in a blind if it's applicable um and i think it is it's like a very very effective way especially with uh you know a lot of our clients

are coming from back East. They haven't really stocked anything before. So it's all really like new and that like ambush style of stocking is really fast paced and it's. Trying to get out ahead of stuff. Yeah. Too much sometimes. So.

Do you have a, do you, do you know about deer that at the end of the year, even though you got all those clients at the end of the year, the deer gives you the slip, like you never find it? Or do you usually, if it's out there, you're going to find it? Usually if it's out there, we're going to find it. But like that deer that Tanya Avery shot that you were talking about a few years ago, I found him, I had one trail camera picture of him. And then after I got the trail camera picture, I went in to try to, to glass him and he popped out of a cornfield and was walking along it. So I saw him, that was like mid August and we didn't see that deer again until we killed him December 2nd.

Oh, okay. So there's a little mystery out there for you still. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. They definitely like those big ones, especially like they know how to, they know how to slip around, especially like right in the middle of season. It seems like later season in December when everything's really coming into the fields and it's like a major food source, it seems like they, we get a lot of bucks show up at that time of year and a lot of new deer that

I've never seen before, which is kind of cool. But you guys also get some pretty good, like still get some rut activity early December, don't you? Yeah. Yeah, we do. Yeah. That can be a really good time, um, for that rut activity. And then like, you know, Nebraska's rifle season runs right in the middle of rut, of the rut, pretty much that third week in November. So yeah, we can, uh, yeah, we can hunt the rut a lot. I mean, it's pretty much September, September 1st through December 31st. You can be hunting deer in Nebraska.

Man, I think you're going to book up. I think you're going to book up some trips, man. Off the show. I hope so. It's really fun. I'm telling you, like the, the hunt's fun. Like we see a lot of deer usually. Um.

And you'll like, you'll like cook them a burger or something. Yeah. I'll cook you a burger the crock pot is my friend make a little chili what's the jordan bun specialty where you're like 100 on tuesday night you're gonna like dinner because i'm cooking my uh pulled pork i would say yeah yeah not bad she'll throw in a free pulled pork sandwich. Yeah. When you book a trip now. Yep.

I think you're going to book some trips up. I hope so, man. It'd be a. When people come out, you help them, you get all their meat packaged up or to get it all set so they can bring it home with a processor or whatever. Yeah. So the last, in the previous years, we haven't had a processor around. So we usually just help them like quarter it and get it ready however they can get it home with them whether that's like mostly it's just

like we try to debone it and do like all the things for cwd and and whatnot um but we just put it in a cooler and they check it on the plane with them or yeah we've like got it frozen completely solid before and shipped it. Yep. Do things like that. And then they want to do something with their head that they bring it home or you have a person you bring it to. So a lot of people have just been like, do they like doing the Euro mounts? Yep. That's been really popular.

So I've got a buddy I went to high school with. I call them freedom mounts. The freedom mounts? I like that. Remember how they had to rebrand French fries during the Iraq invasion? No. Oh, yeah. Freedom fries. Yeah. France wouldn't get on board with the Iraq invasion

so they rebranded French fries as Freedom Fries. I don't like calling them Euromounts. We really taught them. Oh no, that changed their tune. Yeah, for sure. I don't like calling them Euromounts. I like that. Freedom Mounts.

So if you'd like Freedom Mount mounts, I've got a buddy I went to high school with that's in town that does a bunch of them and then he'll, he'll get them done and ship them to you. So then we don't have to like worry about the brain

matter and all that stuff. It can be kind of really easy, like a painless deal for the getting everything back to them. Great. Book a hunt with Jordan Budd, man. Yeah, that would be awesome.

She doesn't overbook the place. No. It's good hunting. Get you all squared away. It's fun. Yeah. You're not mean to them. No.

No. Not most of the time. She hesitated. She might be a little mean to you. She's like, oh. If you move too much. She might be a little mean. I don't know.

And tell everybody again where they can go find you. Probably Instagram is the best place at jordan.bud on Instagram. And I think that's it. Runningwaterproductions.com is my media business. And tell the outfitter business again. Runningwaterhunting.com. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me, man.

I hope you get some business. Let's go, people. I hope so get some business. Let's go, people. I hope so, too. All right. Thanks, everybody. 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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