The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 348: Eating Walrus and Whale with An Igloo Boy

Episode Date: July 11, 2022

Steven Rinella talks with Seth Kantner, Janis Putelis, Ryan Callaghan, Brody Henderson, Seth Morris, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Topics discussed: Growing up in a sod igloo; when bears make sense and humans don't; all of Seth's books and his latest, A Thousand Trails Home: Living with Caribou; getting married on the day of Custer's death at The Little Bighorn; when a bear gets into a car for snacks, locks himself inside, then expires from the heat; the most complete 35,000-year-old baby mammoth ever found; the Blue Tarp Tribe; The Living Light Rainbow hippy people destroying public land; Project Chariot; traveling by dog team; race relations in the Arctic; growing up afraid of The National Park Service; lining up with the seasons; the fish of a million names; sheefish through the ice; on the bone; the freezer as a prolonged wasting machine; a lunch of dried caribou and raw bowhead muktuk; dipping fat in fat; snow ice cream; fermented as a euphemism for rotten; how Alaska's proposed Ambler Road construction project is an horrific threat to wildlife, the Brooks Range, and native culture; the complexity of native corporations; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Presented by First Light, creating proven, versatile hunting apparel from merino base layers to technical outerwear for every hunt. First Light. Go farther, stay longer. All right, man. Super special guest today. every hunt. First light. Go farther, stay longer. Alright man, super special guest today. We're joined by Seth Cantner who I've been wanting to have on for a long time. Writer, photographer, commercial fisherman, hunter.

Born in a sod igloo in Alaska. Or a cave. Raised in a sod igloo. Go ahead. Well... fill in the gaps um sadly enough it's true i um when i uh finally was able to find a girlfriend in my uh middle ages i uh she started saying i was born in a cave and i was like no it was, it just had a tunnel and a dirt floor. And I went to a lot of work to describe how it was in a cave, and now I'm sort of accepting that.

A lot of mice running around on the floor and dark and caribou hairs and everything. Caribou hides to sleep on and caribou furs to wear and caribou mucklucks. And that's, I guess, why I ended up writing about caribou. Yeah. So. They say right what you know about.

We're going to get into his book. You got a lot of books though. Three books now? Four books? I think it's five or six. Yeah. One's a children's story. But I first became aware of you when Ordinary Wolves came out.

That was my first book. That was your first book. Novel. I wrote it as a novel so I could tell the truth about Northern Alaska and Inupiaq villages and being a white boy in the native communities I grew up in. And I didn't really tell the Alaska that people are used to and had a hard time finding a publisher because of it. Oh, you did? Oh, absolutely.

I got $1,500 advance after 10 years of trying to get it published. You're kidding me. Yeah, oh, yeah. But that book got around a lot, though. To a certain extent, yeah. But, yeah, it kind of shocked people. I was always irritated as a kid reading about, well, I didn't want to read about Alaska. It was super boring.

We had so much, you know, bear licking the axe or, you know, every wolves outside hauling at the dogs. And so to read about Alaska was super boring. And, um, and, uh, when you did, it was all glamorized and bullshit. And so when I wrote about it, uh, that country, I wanted to kind of describe the, the real stuff, you know, um, which had to include, you know, drunks with AR-15s and stuff that maybe the New York houses didn't want to hear about Alaska and expected you to leave out. Yeah, that was my first book. It took me probably 20 years of trying to get to that. And then you followed that up with shopping for porcupine.

Yeah. People wanted a memoir. And I didn't realize it was weird to grow up in a sod igloo and, uh, and be sort of separated from people. And, uh, I expected a lot from humans. We didn't see him very often and, and we would sort of run barefoot up the hill and tell my parents, travelers, that was the word for people.

Are you serious? Yeah. Oh, whoops. I almost said the wrong word, but anyway. Um, yeah. Travelers. It was a big deal back then cause they brought the word for people are you serious yeah oh whoops i almost said the wrong word but anyway um yeah travelers it was a big deal back then because they brought news of other villages usually any pack hunters and um and uh we just saw people the least of you know most animals and um some bears super common grizzly bears show up but but people were not. So I could go on and on about all this.

But anyway, I didn't realize until partway through my life that I was sort of in between white and native and in between sort of human or nature and humans. And then when I did go out into this, what we called the white world, it was incredibly difficult to understand why people didn't make sense, which now I've accepted that they don't,

which is a lot easier once you accept that. But at that point it was like, well, bearish to me makes sense. And then also there's that whole thing where when you're armed and dangerous as a, you know, igloo boy, I never went anywhere without a, uh, very few places without a gun. And, um, it was kind of like a shovel, you know, you don't think of it as a, um, all this stuff about guns now is weird, but it was more like shovels. Yeah. So take your shovel. And so to me,

the idea of like everybody being excited about a bear being dangerous is such a weird concept compared to what about humans? I mean, they're so fucking dangerous and weird and unpredictable. And bears generally, especially like a you know well i could tell you a lot more people own guns because of humans than they do because of bears my worldview is horribly warped and i'm just at 57 i'm finally realizing that well we'll get into that okay then you followed you followed up most recently. Well, this is, I love this book, man.

A Thousand Trails Home, Living with Caribou, which like kind of moves outside of just general, I mean, there's a lot of general broad experience. You talk a lot about growing up, but it gets, I mean, it gets into the sort of biology, the biology of Caribou along with the cultural significance of Caribou. It really paints like a really in-depth picture and what i like about it is you can't talk about i shouldn't say you can't reading the book one realizes you cannot talk about caribou without talking about people

absolutely yeah which is pretty indicative of everything we have going on with uh the modern world um i just i can't stand that to a certain extent it's like i want to protect uh the wild land up there and and which is you know me protecting my lifestyle but you you got to turn your focus to people which is a painful thing you know i want to focus on caribou and bears and wolves, but it all goes back to the people and them arguing over, you know, more and more resource conflict and who gets to hunt what. And, um, so it was a really hard book to write for me because I didn't know what to say. And I, I guess to a certain extent, I still don't. And I did the best I could to go back and describe, you know, the whalers coming and, and what that meant for, uh, for natives in Alaska and, and, and very quickly what it meant for caribou, which was, you know, the whalers coming and, and what that meant for, uh, for natives in Alaska

and, and very quickly what it meant for caribou, which was, you know, um, um, almost wiping out the herds and, um, and then to, and that was, that had to do with, uh, firearms coming. And then nowadays we have, um, basically this big influx of, uh, of,ux of technology, cell phones, communication. So if a caribou swims across the Kobuk River, people know pretty quickly. And so there's all these boats and semi-automatic guns. is starting to look like it did in 1875 when rifled muskets and then repeating guns first arrived in the Arctic. It's this danger zone for us wiping out animals with our technology. So that's confusing. But the thing I really wanted to do with this book was describe my love of caribou,

which started with meat and furs and utilitarian use, and then this idea of being out on the tundra and having this, you know, thousands of caribou come, um, across the, across the tundra towards you and that companionship on the land. So, you know, all these different forms of greed, I think, where you like, uh, you know, caribou roasted ribs and you like the, the warm furs, but you'd like the companionship of this animal too and um and what it would mean to be on a on an empty land if yeah if we mess up you know that's one of the things we're going to cover off on some stuff but one of the things i want to get into is the

long line just as an outside observer who enjoys just spending time in alaska as a tourist you know uh the long line of things that all seem to be competing to be the thing that in alaska as a tourist you know uh the long line of things that all seem to be competing to be the thing that ruins alaska uh meaning it was white people it was the snow machine it was the bolt action rifle it was the bush plane it was if you ask buck bowden it was in reach devices oh yeah yeah that's some it's been getting ruined a long time yeah that's If you ask Buck Bowden, it was in-reach devices. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's been getting ruined a long time. Yeah. That's interesting.

And I think it was before this started, you were talking about these are the good old days. And in some ways it really is because I like to say, you know, regardless of the crazy amounts of change we've had in climate and because of vegetation and then just kind of, we're kind of buzzing with technology up there now. Lots of times I'm out on the tundra, you know, I just came from spending breakup.

I never saw a human, you know, for almost a month and just animals and trees and tundra. And so the land in some ways is is uh we're the ones who've really changed yeah um and um yeah anyway i always like writing about it i have this impulse to to describe that uh the inupiaq people and the land and the connections and how we used to live, I guess, is focus on every animal when it's fat. The Inupiaq were fixated on fat for survival. So I grew up, if you came home with a skinny caribou, you were significantly more disgusting than a serial rapist or any other kind of criminal because you brought home the skinny caribou. And you laugh, but it's not funny.

And, you know, all that was back to survival. And the fat just kept your dog team and your family and yourself going. And I hate to tell you, but I got a cooler muck tuck here next to my ankle that I'm going to pull out here in a minute and change. Alaskan sandwich package. So here's what I want. We'll need some cold weather afterwards. I'm not seeing that outside right now. Get the muck tuck ready.

And we're going to talk about a couple things that we're going to come back come back in and when we jump back in we'll talk about caribou fat okay all right uh all the first light solitude kit is now uh is now windproof they added in a windproof membrane so tried and true sanctuary line back in stock now was out, but now it's back in stock. And what's even better about the sanctuary line for whitetail hunting, improved wind proof membrane. Okay. You can officially declare that. So the solitude vest, solitude jacket, solitude bib,

sanctuary 2.0 jacket, sanctuary 2.0 bib. Check them out. If you want to kill big, huge whitetails and not be chilly. Oh, so Seth is officially married. Yep. Now, when you set your date, did you realize that you'd set your wedding date for Custer's death? No. Never occurred to you?

Nope. Dude, the minute you told me you were getting married that day, I was like, oh, that's the day Custer died. And I know exactly what I'm going to talk about when I officiate the wedding. Nope, never occurred to me. Didn't occur to me that it was a Canyon Ferry walleye derby either, but you know how you love when you learn. That like served to you on a silver platter. Oh, I couldn't believe it when he told me that.

The next day I went to, we had like a, you know, very Catholic like memorial for my grandpa's passing, which happened about 10 years ago. So I drove over to Billings, saw the fam, had this deal. And my stepdad was walking around being like, you know what happened this weekend, right? I was like, huh, interesting. We're at a memorial for someone who passed away and somebody is bringing up the death of George Armstrong Custer, which was geographically much closer to where we were. Yep. And the day prior, we were at a ceremony celebrating the union of two people and you brought up George Armstrong Custer. And it just kind of made me think, what would be the more appropriate venue?

Seth's wedding. There's confusion because Little Bighorn is July 25 and 26. But Custer got killed on 25. And it was just kind of like a skirmish over on, what the hell is his name? June. Sorry, June 25, 26. You're going to confuse people. And it was just like a little bit of a skirmish going on on the 26th. But yeah, man. Couldn't June 25, 26. You're going to confuse people. It was just like a little bit of a skirmish going on in the 26.

But yeah, man. Couldn't believe it, Seth. A couple of my ancestors went down with old George Armstrong Custer. The Hendersons represented on that fateful day, Seth's anniversary. You think they had an idea what they were getting into? Well, I don't know. It happened a long time ago. You know what really threw me for a loop last night seth what's that uh you know how you and chester think you're

all the shit on catching walleyes yeah i was going fish i was going fish for fish with chester last night well he's probably which makes me feel like i could be like no no makes me feel like i could like be in there tying you guys at the tournament. What we need to do is get two boats. Fish for fish. Two boats. You and someone else. Me and Chester. I'm in. And that's how we'll figure out who the best

wall I'm in is. I'm in. Did you guys limit out? We limited out on our top end fish. Meaning you got one over 15 inches. When we do this head to head tournament. Yeah, but it's hard to limit out on the low end fish. What are you like 20 of them or something like that? When we do this head to head

tournament though, prior to we need to go through Seth and Chester's boat and divvy up all the good shit. So we're on equal footing. We can do that. We're in my boat. We're in my boat when I went fish for fish with Chester. My neighbor got a goose egg.

Oh, he did? It was rough. I heard you were getting them on plastics. Some. Where'd you hear that from? Steve's not into sharing tournament tips i heard that from from chester i got my first one on a leech i was drowning oh yeah my my talk chest my barrel leeches that i gave chester to take along with them uh real quick speaking of chester and weddings when i get to chester's

house to pick him up there's like a chaos at his house because his wife's wedding ring fell out. The diamond fell out of the ring onto a gravel driveway. Oh no. We sat on our knees for probably 15 minutes. He had it kind of down to like a circle about a yard wide.

And he knew like what should be the center of the circle. And we spent about 15 minutes removing pieces of gravel one at a time out of that circle and then chesapeake's like oh we should probably go fishing i'm like man you want to stay if you want to stay and look for this diamond i'll stay and look for the diamond i don't care and he's like no we'll go fishing so i'm like you should look up on the internet how to find a diamond in the gravel um i told him just to search where is my diamond but uh i uh i messaged danielle and told her to go out at night with a headlamp well that's chester learned so chester was waiting he was gonna when we got back he was gonna go out with a light and spend this night looking for the thing but then danielle came back his wife came, and got some other friend to look.

And he got a really bright light and was able to find the diamond. And he found the diamond in areas that we had cleared. We declared it, like, we went out in an ever-expanding gravel removal circle. And the diamond was within what we had... Cleared out. You know, searched, so to speak. Can we hit leeches real quick? Yeah.

I was talking leech trapping with Steve. I would talk with Jay Siemens about leech trapping. Well, I did. I just watched his YouTube videos. I don't think you're in a good spot, though. I think you're in a stupid area. Well, according to the wide world of internet, that seems like as good a spot as a lot. I'm going to bounce around and look.

But I would go to where my kids get leeches on them when they swim. Yeah. I got a spot for you because I wet waited in there for all of three minutes and came out with five leeches stuck to me. Oh, I like that. That's great. And my kids got it. But I mean, you guys do understand that the spot I hit

is about a half a mile from my house and the spot that you guys are talking about, right? It's a long ass ride. So I'd like to like start at the center of the circle. Yeah, you could order five pounds of leeches for what it would require to go around. That's what I was going to say. There's a guy in three forks that just gives them away.

But I made a- Oh, that's where my spot is. Well, this guy For 25 bucks you get more leeches Than you use all summer 50 bucks a pound It's like gold dude it's like morels The leeches you were using last night were from him

He gets them from Minnesota So are you just chucking in a chunk of Old meat or something every once in a while To keep these things alive Are you trying to keep them all summer They'll live for months without that yeah they live i just keep the water yeah you flush in the water you just gunk up your water no pro leach keepers do put like something in there i can't remember what i don't know let me you know i'll tell you why i don't know how to catch them

real quick my dad one of my dad's best buddies was a guy named ron spring and he owned spring sporting goods and later he sold spring sporting goods but he remained uh he was a commercial bait fisherman so you got commercial fishermen right but he was a commercial fisherman that caught fishing bait and he he had a team of people that tied flies he had a team of people that tied flies. He had a team of people that tied spawn sacks. He was a leech trapper, a wiggler trapper, raised red worms, leaf worms, crawlers. He did everything, supplied all the live bait. He got to be in his early 80s and I wanted to profile him for a magazine. And I pitched the magazine and got the green light to profile him. And when I approached him in his eighties, he said, no, cause these are trade secrets. Oh, I love it.

Yeah. That's awesome. Couldn't believe it. Uh, he ate so much fish out of the great lakes that, um, they would every month or every, no, it was every six months. He'd go to university of Michigan to do tests on heavy metal contamination and, um, like testing his mercury and all that shit. So he'd go down there and they'd give him a list. They'd be like, okay, you got to go to the store, right? You need two dozen eggs, two liter bottle of Coca-Cola, pound of butter, three avocados, whatever, right? And they'd give them a list.

And then they'd wait a couple minutes and they'd be like, okay, what do you got to buy at the store? And that was like the kind of shit they were testing with them. And he told me, and I'll quote him, he said, Steve, I wouldn't have remembered that list if I never ate a piece of fish at all. So he felt like it was biased. But I'd be like, but you don't know. The point I want to get out on this podcast, though, is I built my leech trap, went out to a spot nobody has any business of going into, threw my leech trap out and somebody came by there are a

couple people watching right they sabotaged it yeah they cut they cut my line what which is really stupid because they left like i used an old uh line spool and put some fly line backing on there what they think what they think you were doing? Well, I think they were probably even more confused when they took a look at a little tin full of, you know, old beef liver, but they left that out there. They left the trash out there, but they just cut the line and then took like the section

of line attached to the reel. So anyway. Hold on a minute. you left the whole reel out there well yeah because i had a line oh you're gonna reel it in yes yeah because you know it's all boggy no no i'm with you yeah you don't got to worry about the thing all tangled up and shit yeah and i'm on in like full flip-flop mode i I'm not carrying my muck boots around. They just took the, yeah, I don't, it's very confusing, but no leeches. But they stole the reel

or not stole the reel? They stole the line off the reel. And left the reel. Yeah. God, such a like finicky thief. Well, again, I think they probably

had an idea of what was happening in their mind. Or you had a set line. Maybe. I don't know. Yeah. Not a single leech.

Not a single leech. But I'm going to keep broadcasting out from home here. So people of Bozeman. When you get ready, I'll turn you on to a hot spot, man. People of Bozeman, you find something soaking in a local settling pond around here it's not hurting you let it be don't touch it or we get one of those people that can speak to the dead and we go go talk to ron spring yeah that'd be karen start setting that up all right the first meat eater medium podcast put out the vibe it's a great space for a seance, honestly.

I got to tell you a horrible story about Ron Spring real quick. One of my greatest moments of shame. We were fishing. My dad caught a big northern, and it was real cold out, and it froze. And so later my dad said, hey, do you want to catch a big northern? And I was like, yeah. So he threw me the big northern and i caught it and i told ron spring i caught a bit whatever the hell inch northern

and it felt so bad i later called him back and said i didn't actually catch it like he thought i was little that was my birthday that's my birthday to boot. Oh, that's a good one. Steve-o. A black bear. This is a crazy-ass story. Reported by our friends at USA Today. I was so pissed. I texted Spencer this morning. I was like, how does USA Today know about this and we don't know about it?

He's like, because they got 4,000 reporters. A black bear in, what state was this? Tennessee. Tennessee. A black, a guy, okay, a black bear gets a closed car open. Yeah. Which is not unusual. They figure out how to get in. What is unusual is what happens next.

It's a hot ass day. He gets a door open, gets in the car, and starts eating scraps, but the door closes behind him. It gets up to 100 degrees that day and kills the bear inside. 140 in the car? 140 degrees in the car, and the bear died inside the car of heat, like what happens to people's dogs. Yep. And the weird part is then the Fish and Game Agency uses it as a chance

for people to not leave bear attractants out. I'm like, I don't know that some shit in your car, which is closed, counts as leaving bear attractants out. Yeah, you'd have to keep your car awful clean. It's a little bit of a stretch.

My truck is littered with bear attractant from all the crumbs and shit my kids leave in it. Everybody's cars. I just don't count that. I don't count like your car in your driveway closed as being like being not bear safe. Yeah. You'd have to run a pretty sterile car.

But I get the sentiment. They think the thing got in there. This is weird. He was in his car at 10 a.m. And he found the bear dead at 7 p.m middle of the damn day yeah 95 ambient temperature there's a picture of the bear kind of limp yeah well that's a rough way to go yeah that's a bad way to go another baby i mean it's like every other day when we get to seth in a minute here

He'll be able to speak to this Not you Seth It's going to be a confusing podcast Seems like every other day this happens A miner, a gold miner in Yukon The Yukon territory of Canada Found a 35,000 year old Mummified baby wool mammoth

That thing is so well preserved That thing is badass found a 35,000-year-old mummified baby wool mammoth. That thing is so well-preserved. That thing is badass. Just looking at that picture. With a big snout. What do they call that? A proboscis? What is that called? They named him Nunchuga.

Trunk. Nunchuga. 140 centimeters long. I mean, it looks just like a little emaciated baby mammoth laid out on a blue tart. Yeah, like everything else. When people find something in the far

north, there's a high likelihood it'll wind up laying on a blue tart. You ever come across anything cool like that? You guys are making me laugh because years ago I started calling myself part of the blue tarp tribe.

We lived along with South Tent City along the edge of the Cotswold there's North Tent City and South Tent City but we discovered blue tarps I think this is about 30 years ago and take four pieces of plywood, nail them together and put a blue tarp over it.

The only thing is, you look funny because the light, you know, under a blue tarp. So anyway, we were the people of the blue tarp. But speaking of mammoth, I brought Corinne a little chunk of mammoth ivory. No way! I told her, be careful because it's very addictive searching for ivory. You just. That's a chunk of a mammoth tusk.

Yeah. That's cool. And that blue is Vivianite. It's a mineral that sort of deposits into, soaks into the ivory. And so it's. Damn, man. Every time you find a piece of ivory,

it's different color, either real dark or brown or. You didn't say in that, did you? Not at all. No. It's remarkable. It feels like polished. Where do you find something like that?

Along a river? Well, it's getting complicated nowadays because I think the state no longer wants you picking it up and the, and the feds don't. And on native land, you know, if you're not native, you're, you're not supposed to, it's, it's more, it's more complicated. I don't know the laws about, you know, uh, mean high water, you know, sea level along the shores, but people go along the shores looking and, um, um, it's very common to find, uh, I shouldn't say very common. You hear, oh, so-and-so found a seven foot tusk or, or whatever. And I was down the coast looking and, uh, somebody just found a tusk and, um, I was

searching this melting permafrost bluff and came across this big round thing that I chipped out and it was a turd, um, mammoth turd. And so I saved myself by saying, I don't need the tusk everybody finds tusks it's not very many people find mammoth turds and so I carried it around in a ziplock for a while and then sent it to the university they never thanked thanked me for my shit. It was super disturbing. I never did hear back. But anyway, yeah, searching for mammoth ivory is super addictive. And we find these big molars.

Those are pretty common to find. Actually, I should have brought a picture of one of those. But yeah, it's really fun. They say this one was the best one found on the continent yet. And it had its last meal still in its stomach. Guess what it was eating, Yanni? Circus peanuts. It was eating grass, Yanni.

Good one, Cal. Nebraska is introducing a... You can read about this at TheMeteor.com. Conservation Wildlife Management. Nebraska introduces controversial July elk season. Damn. Hmm. Crop damage.

Better have the freezer ready. Yeah. People are bent out of shape. Other people are not because they're just sick of losing corn crops. They're working with landowners to lower elk herds in cropland areas. Colorado used to have a spring-summer crop damage hunt. The elk are spending their summer in the cornfields. Yeah.

And not dispersing until the corn is picked. Yeah, it's a private land only hunt. Even landowners have to pay like 10 or 5 bucks to get a depredation tag. And then it's open to residents and non-residents. Um, but you need to have prior permission from a landowner in the areas that they're carrying on the hunt in order to, uh, purchase a tag. I mean, am I wrong? Maybe you know, Cal, like it seems like this is a

part of the state where they don't even really want a bunch elk running around in the first place. And that's typically how, you know, like the good folks at our MEF can, can tell you like when they go in, when they used to go in and do, uh, reintroductions of elk, it is, there's a very serious plan in place. Like these things, we want them to stay in between these highways in this type of habitat because they're, they're planning ahead for this type of conflict. I think there's only about 3,000 elk in the, in the whole state. And, uh, you know, a July hunt with cows carrying calves and little soft horned bulls running around isn't as much, uh, uh, isn't very romantic compared to the way we all want to picture hunting elk.

Um, but I, this can be effective for the folks are catering to here. Is it going to be too effective? I think that's what some audience members were writing in and kind of nervous about. Yeah, well, that's, I mean, that's like the great thing is like when it gets in any of this stuff with like, well, there's too many, like according to who? Right. Yeah. I've waited my whole life to, you know, whatever, some person in Nebraska be like, I've waited my whole life to hunt an elk in Nebraska. It's native elk range.

He thinks it's too many because they're getting in his corn. I don't think there's nearly enough right so it's like you're always gonna have that right like according to who car insurance companies crop insurance people yeah uh the the ornamental uh landscape industry who and we were people that don't want lime disease disease. We were talking about this before the podcast too. It's, there's all just as Steve's pointing out a lot of different stakeholders and the,

the really one of the few stakeholders that I actually care about are the folks who were like farming that ground. Well, you know, during this huge period of elk being non-existent. Yep. And now somebody decided to put elk out there that are causing significant damage to the way they're making a living. And their whole business is based around, or, you know, was based with the idea of this type of competition not being part of the business plan.

Right. And so I do have some sympathy for those people that all of a sudden now here's this big X factor that is growing like crazy on the landscape. Yeah, and it probably seems like pretty academic when you point out to them that they used to be here. Like define used to. They weren't here when my grandpa first turned the ground over. Right. So what's used to mean yeah yeah down there on the

river they're pulling um uh musk ox out of the riverbank you know they used to be here it's hard 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, you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team.

Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. One last thing before we get back into our

esteemed guest. Brody's got a report. How do you feel about hippies, Steve? Dude, listen. I like them. Define. We need a definition, though. Well, when did a hippie ever do anything bad to me?

I don't know. Never. Some people. Like, if I could pick it and have it be that most of the world was hippies, I'd be like, fine. They don't like to hunt, generally speaking. When I wake up in the morning, the last thing I'm on the lookout for is hippies i'd be like i don't fine they don't like to hunt generally speaking like i like when i wake up in the morning listen when i wake up in the morning the last thing i'm on the lookout for is hippies my buddy in grade school had a shirt that he'd wear all the time that said hippie smell and he was always very quick to point out that the shirt doesn't say how they smell yep

uh my daughter i don't know if you know this, but Gilligan's Island hats are in style for little kids, little girls. Little bucket hat things, yeah. I call them Gilligan hats. Now I call my daughter Gilligan, which pisses her off. I called her Clyde. I used to call her Slim, and I called her Clyde. Now it's Gilligan. But hers has a ammonite muscaria, like the fly agaric.

What's a hallucinogenic? Oh, yeah. And it's got that little hallucinogenic jungle frog on it. No way. I was like, you know, Rosie, your hat's got twin hallucinogenics on it. She doesn't know what a hallucinogenic is. Shut up, dad. That's interesting.

Who got that for her? She bought it on Amazon. No way. What? Yeah, because she's like, I thought it was like a frog in a, it's like a Gilligan's Island hat, and she thought it was a frog in a mushroom. And I said, you know what that mushroom is, and you know what that frog are? She's on Amazon. I saw a t-shirt.

Like an $8 Gilligan's Island hat. I saw a t-shirt with those mushrooms on them, really big ones covering the whole back. And it said, make America giggle again. Sure. Getting back to the- I like that. Now this is when hippies come for you. Well, yeah. I got the dog people.

Now the hippies are going to come for me. There's a particular brand of hippie called the Rainbow Family of Living Light. They've been around since 1970. I used to live in Boulder. We see these people all the time panhandling. And this group of people has what's called a rainbow. How did you know that they were from this group? Because they have rainbow gatherings.

Yeah, you just know. Have you ever lived in a state that was having a rainbow gathering going on? I know, but Brody just said I lived in Boulder and I'd see them all the time panhandling. No, there'd be like... Did they have a banner? Because there's a residual effect. They're there months before the gathering and then it takes a month to disperse. It's a huge deal when the rainbow gathering comes to town.

Right. Were you in Missoula? Oh, yeah. There's like a group that were called the Rainbow Children in Boulder. It was like a known group of people. Anyway, they have this deal every year where they, they call it a rainbow gathering where they get together on a public land and it's generally thousands of people. This year's gathering was planned for Adams Park, which is north of Steamboat Springs on the Medicine Bow Route National Forest. And they're thinking up to 10,000 people will gather.

Not just people. Rainbow people. That sounds like a Care Bear countdown. And there's been like an increasing concern about what kind of impact this is going to have on public land. Oh, when they did it near Missoula, man, it was like a biohazard. Yeah. Yeah. And this is like an area that's an important elk calving ground. It's like very pristine public land.

And so there's been calls to, uh, kind of shut this thing down. And generally speaking, when you have like a, an organized event on public land, you need a permit for it. And the,

that's never like the rainbow gathering has never been a permitted, like sanctioned event. No. Um, and the forest service took the step of closing California park, which is near Adams park where the event is going to happen. I'm not sure why they didn't close Adams park where the event is happening, but they did shut down an area near the gathering. And, uh, there's already been some arrests.

Like people are already gathering there. The event hasn't taken place yet. It will have happened by the time this this podcast airs but there's already been arrests for various things um let's see here i used to peel logs with a dude named barefoot and he'd go to the rainbow gathering every year and he carried around uh when he went there well he always carried it around he carried around a black powder pistol revolver. It doesn't. And that was like his personal protection. It doesn't surprise me. They've already had arrests for damage to natural resources, interoperable equipment, narcotics possession, or distribution, aggravated assault on a peace officer, felony possession of a firearm.

So it doesn't seem like very hippie-ish to me. Well, here's the deal, man. You know how dog people don't like you even though you're a dog person you won't get feedback because the hippies aren't touchy i don't know they're not touchy people i'm expecting some feedback now i i did this thing with clay on clay's podcast and we were talking about how beekeepers are touchy people. Because they all just got into it, and they're all in a swing and dick contest to be who's most into it. And people who, enthusiasts who grew up doing like nothing, and then they start doing something, become touchy. Right.

Hippies aren't touchy. You won't get feedback from hippies. Yeah, they don't do anything in the first place. You got people who live their whole life not knowing about some souped up breed of bird dog. And all of a sudden they're like, Joe bird dog. They're going to be touchy. So I say this thing about beekeepers. And then what did I make the mistake of looking at social media comments?

There's a comment from this guy like, you don't stand up for hunters. You don't stand up for the second amendment. You don't stick up for hunters because you want them all to go away so you can have all the area for yourself. Did I click on his thing? Beekeeper. We'll see. We'll see.

I think they should be getting a permit for this. I mean, the amount of damage that 10,000 people can cause. Just by walking through an area. The human waste, the litter. I've seen what 30 people can do to my backyard in the past few days. Do you work for Bass Pro Shops? No.

What is with the Bass Pro Shops hat? They sent these to the office. Oh. I thought he walked out to get married. He'd have that hat on. Seth is wearing a Bass Pro Shop hat. Looks good on you. Why don't you ask Brody if he works for Onyx?

I don't. A little roundabout way, he does. Okay, if you don't know what the Rainbow Gathering is, and you want an idea, and this will touch some people in our sphere and piss a few folks off. If you've ever been in a town where there's a three or five day fish concert, that'll

give you a taste of folks gathering pre-concert and taking days to get out and have like a very, very noticeable look to them. Well, it takes those guys three to five days to do one tune. I just want to go on record before we leave this subject. I want to go on record saying this. I support hippies because I just don't see where the problem is. But I don't support the rainbow

gathering on public land. Sure. Perhaps I was generalizing. In the old days, they went to a guy's farm. Yeah. Outside of New York City. I don't like public land rainbow gatherings, but like I said, man, when I wake up in the morning, the last They went to a guy's farm. Yeah. And outside of New York City. I think they should go back to that. I don't like public land rainbow gatherings.

But like I said, man, when I wake up in the morning, the last thing I'm on the lookout for is a hippie doing something to me. I especially like the disenfranchised ones that don't vote. I'm not worried about them doing something to me. Because they bitch. I'm worried about that land that's getting messed up. They don't vote. They don't sway. It's like, I don't care.

They're probably not good for the economy. They strike me as people that don't listen to podcasts, so they're probably not even going to know that you're saying this. No, not this podcast. They hang out on Reddit. Listen, we're ready to move on. All right. Seth Cantner. We're going to start out with, what are we going to start out with?

It's our Alaskan sampler platter. Yeah. Oh. We're ready, man. Are you? Yeah. Oh, gosh. Still, I'm kind of uncomfortable with this hippie thing because my parents were accused

of being hippies. Your parents lived out in the middle of the woods. Well. Did they have 10,000 guests? Not at all. I think they were trying to get away from people, but they were, I think they were hippies and none of those people that went north with them smoked or drank, but they were, I think they were hippies and none of them, those people that went north with them smoked or drank or, um, but they did, uh, I guess not cut their hair as often as other people.

I should, I should say. Well, I went on record saying that I got no problem with hippies, so I'm cool with that. We're at, we're talking specifically the rainbow family of living light. What do you think Seth made him hippies? Yeah, why do you feel? Because your dad came up north as a caribou biologist, right? No, he was born and raised in Toledo and was trying to get away from Toledo and then Catholic school. And so he went to, 17 years old, went to the territory, Alaska and, um, and,

uh, applied for college, um, and then studied, uh, uh, zoology and biology. And then along came Project Chariot where they were going to bomb, use nuclear weapons to bomb a harbor up in the northern part of Alaska. So he got a job studying caribou at that point. Because they were trying to do baseline work on what that, they were trying to do baseline work on what, you should explain, like, once we get into our sampler here, you should explain Project Chariot. I had, like, heard of that, but until I read your book,

I didn't really understand the details of it. It's, you know, right now I'm fighting the sampler road that they want to build through the brooks range from uh the pipeline road to you know basically where i live and so they want to come all the way across yeah and i equate that as dropping a bomb on the native culture and the way of life and the in the wilderness country there um but in the 50s uh united states had all these nice new weapons and then nobody to drop them on, hydrogen bombs and atomic bombs. And so they started this plowshares program, which was hypothetically to do peaceful work with nuclear weapons. They build a canal, a new Panama Canal. And so they decided,

well, Alaska Territory would be perfect place to, let's make a harbor with five or six nuclear weapons. And that was near where I grew up. I wasn't born then. And so my dad ended up going north from Fairbanks, where he was working as a biologist up to the Arctic to study the effects of radiation on caribou. Other people were studying walruses and native use of the land and food and resources there. And it was touch and go. Alaska became a state in 1959. And so right in there was this giant alleged economic opportunity to get nuked.

And so there's a lot of people were for it. And, of course, the natives were not because they were about to get their backyard bombed. But for a while,, their voices were, were sort of, um, muted and, um, but anyway, it was stopped. Um, and, uh, that didn't happen. It certainly would have, my life would have been totally different if they bombed, uh, uh, Northwest Alaska to make it a, a better place.

Have you ever seen images of the craters they made in Bikini Atoll? Absolutely. It's unbelievable, man. It looks like the blue hole. And at that time that, I'm going to lose my numbers here, but the radiation that was, there was so much fallout from the Americans and

Soviets testing weapons that caribou were kind of radioactive because they eat lichens. The primary favorite food is this lichen that absorbs. I'm forgetting the cesium-1. I can't remember that at this point. But anyway, one of these isotopes that would leach out of the atmosphere. Lichen would absorb it and caribou would eat it. And then, of course, our whole focus was fat. So we would eat tons of caribou that are bioconcentrating this radiation.

And fats store that. Yeah. And then if you have a bear, if a bear eats the fat, and we're all excited about rendering out bear fat and making whatever we made with the bear fat. So, um, um, at, in my young life, uh, the, uh, the people that went North with my parents, um, they were tested and I guess they were like you're describing earlier, super high in, uh, in radiation living out this, uh, semi hippie. Sorry. Um, this, uh sorry, this wilderness, strange white people living in the wilderness.

We never use the word wilderness. We're scared of that word, but I'm using it now. But living out off the land and then far higher than somebody in Chicago probably on the glow in the dark scale. Yeah, like seemingly the most pure, sort of like the most pure food, most pure existence. What do you mean when you say you guys didn't like the word wilderness? Because you didn't like federally designated wilderness or what?

In my life, as things were changing fast, a pipeline was being built, which made the Native Claims Settlement Act was necessary. So the land up there would have title ownership. Somebody could say who owned what, so then we could start tearing it up. And at that time living out, we just thought of, um, we were people on the land. We cut wood for firewood. We hunted, uh, you know, bears for skins and fat or whatever. And, um, and we didn't, it wasn't wilderness. We were there.

Yeah. And the, and the natives, uh, had no, this was home. They knew, you know, had a name for every slough and lake and, and sandbar where you caught this and that. And so it wasn't wilderness in our mind. And the only time we heard that word was when strange white people landed and started talking

about what we were not allowed to do. Um, so wilderness was a dangerous word. Um, and, uh, at some point I was five or 10 years ago, I was asked to talk about, uh, you know, uh, what the wilderness act meant to me. Of course, I was asked to talk about what the Wilderness Act meant to me. Of course, I'd never heard of it. And I was there with four tall white ladies, twice as tall as me. And they were describing this very interesting effects of the Wilderness Act. If I remember correctly, one was from Chicago.

I'd grown up in Colorado and et cetera. And, and then along comes my turn. I went last, you know, and I was like, Oh, we were, I don't know. We were always scared when we heard the word wilderness. It was, uh, it was, uh, you know, white people coming from somewhere else and, and, um, terrifying us. Yeah. Yeah. We were, my family, speaking of hippies, sorry, but they did. You know, reading your book,

man, I kind of got like a mild hippie vibe off your parents, but I didn't get a total hippie vibe off your parents. Well,

because they were like hunters and trappers. Sure, but my dad has devoted his life to avoiding a steady job. Does that count?

No. Oh, okay. Hippies do not, in my mind. We're talking about a very hard to define term. In my mind, playing by your own rules is not owned by hippies. Okay, okay. So I don't know. I don't know any.

I didn't know anything that you guys were talking about. I'm talking about people who love anything you're saying. I'm talking about people who, first and foremost, when looking for an explanation to an unanswered question, if you told them

there's a conspiracy that, they're like, well, that's what I believe before you finish the sentence. Okay. That's like a primary attribute. I guess we weren't. Yeah.

We weren't hippies, but. It was that timeframe though, right? Yeah, it definitely was. I think the people that were doing sort of that. They're part of the back to the land. They're like the extreme edge of the back to the land movement. Yeah. It was, I mean, barefoot kids and living in a cave i mean yeah so um i guess you i don't

know what to call it it was home really nice but he was but but your old man here's what i'm trying to i just like in understanding your biography like i don't want to go back all the way to toledo but your old man became like your father right became familiar with the area that he would homestead and claim through that through the caribou work right or my mistake um sort of yeah so he got done that uh summer uh working with uh other biologists and he had spotted the sod igloo on the coast right next to the ground zero where they were going to bomb. And he got his stuff and went to live there for the winter. And when he got there, typical of, you know, when you get home and you find a porcupine in your house or whatever, there was a native couple who had decided they were going to spend the winter there. And so my dad was like, oh, well, you know, he's not going to invade their territory.

It was an abandoned sod house. But they were like, oh, they couldn't really speak English. But they thought, yeah, the old Inupiaq extreme generosity is important. And you're about to spend the winter in a sod igloo as big as your average bath room. And they said, you should stay. So along comes this white guy who's going to sleep on their floor for the winter. And, and so he, uh, spent the winter hunting for this couple. The man had, you know, one leg and the woman was, um, uh, not young. And, and so, um, here's this energetic young white guy that wants to learn the old ways

and was willing to go out every day to hunt for the dogs, dog teams, and the people. And so he got, I think I would just say, terribly enamored with the old Inupiaq way of life, just the connection, the hunting every day, harsh life, but simplicity, I guess. And so, you know, he went back to Fairbanks and more or less, you know, got my mom, and they went north and built a sod igloo and started that life. Um, which was, uh, you know, using caribou sinew for thread and, and sewing muck lucks out of steel, um, tied in caribou and, um, just the old ways we just had dried fish for

lunch and, and seal oil and, and, uh, uh, whipped caribou fat. I could go on and on. That was the life. You guys, when you were a kid, you guys traveled by dog team, didn't you? Yeah. But was that like a conscious decision to do something an old way? Because you were sort of, like your age would have been where dog teams were definitely on the way out. Absolutely. in old way? Cause you were sort of like your age would have been where dog teams were definitely on the way out. Oh, absolutely.

I was born in 1965 and it was like dead nuts on the arrival of snowmobiles. Yeah. And pretty quick into that, my dad got rid of his, uh, his dogs and, and I think it was bothering him shooting, uh, you know, a hundred caribou a fall for, for dog food. Um.

Is that what it would take? Uh, well that was people food and dog food, but, um, yeah, it was, um, and they didn't have, they didn't have much when they arrived, so they didn't have fish nets webbing, you know, to, to catch fish. Oh, so they were very reliant on caribou. Yeah.

And, and, and everybody was, uh, uh, I shouldn't say everybody, you know, the villagers were way ahead of my family as far as catching fish. Pretty quickly we got fish nets. And then my dad got a snowmobile, archaic Bolins with the track in the front and a seat that drug behind on wooden skis. And it was a terrifying machine. And then I think we didn't have dogs again until maybe I was eight. I wanted to have dogs.

And so, uh, I got dogs and built my own sled and started using a super small dog team for, uh, uh, trapping and, um, we didn't have neighbors. So, uh, you know, my dogs were kind of my friends. I mean, they weren't allowed in the house or anything, but, um, um, hunting and every day every day and trapping and all that was, you know, what I did. We was kind of substitute for going and seeing your neighbors or whatever. You said, so you didn't have neighbors. How did your parents like learn all those skills? Were they learning from locals or trial and error?

I've got to get back to the hippie thing for a minute. Oh, yeah. During about the time I was four, a bunch, I think there was as many as maybe 15 or so people living in little Sod Igloos around us. So we did have a brief time of neighbors. These were what we call. It's called the hippie commune.

Yeah. Yeah, these are what we at home call white people. And so outsiders. Did you refer to yourselves as white people? Yes, but it's a weird mix because when I'm out on the country, even now with my friends, if you lift up your binoculars and you're like, hey, you look like white people, that's how I grew up. So it's weird to be standing with your Inupiaq friends and they're like, hey, how come there's white people over there? And there's me. And so I kind of, I don't know, I guess as Sarah Palin would say, I shuck and jive.

I don't know where that fits in, but myself, where I fit in, it's hard to, I mean, I feel white, outsider-ish a lot. And then other times I'm like, hey, I don't, you know, I get uncomfortable when I see this outsiders. But I really want to explain that it's just sort of a sloppy term like so many other things. Sure. And part of that, you're talking about hippies, it's a loose, you can accuse somebody of something and not really be careful with it. And so there's a lot of comedy involved in the village. Some, um, um, uh, black guy showed up, a school teacher and, and the, um, the kids were calling him a honky. Um, and, uh, and it was just, they didn't know. Um, and so they just knew that was

a term. Yeah. I've been called that a ton of times, you know, and for, you know, everything, you get called everything. But I guess that if a person, let's just say an Asian person showed up, they'd be referred to as white people, which is just a euphemism, a broad euphemism for outsider. Does that make sense? So it's almost become a joke in a way. It's a sloppy term. But anyway, so I grew up kind of a weird mix of that where if somebody looks at you a mile away through the binoculars, you're one thing,

and then you walk over, oh, you're, you're into the, you're a local, you know, didn't recognize you. That was a long-winded explanation of the tip of the iceberg as far as race relations at home. But yeah, anyway, so my parents went north. I think part of that back to the land movement, but at that time we're so focused on it that it's almost like in the villages, the Inupiaq population was looking forward at modernity, blue jeans and plywood and and whatever else and my family was you know actively looking back and and saying oh yeah we'll stick with kerosene lamps or or um were you guys regarded by native alaskans as like did they sort of like recognize the movement your family was part of was there enough of that going

on that they're like oh there's these white people showing up on the landscape trying to sort of like act like how we lived 25 years ago yeah things are complicated i want to catch you for a second because uh you said something about your family went there and claimed a homestead and all that my parents didn't claim the land because they wanted to be like natives the natives didn't have ownership of land um and so my parents actively didn't claim the land which was a huge mistake but they didn't do the homestead no and then very quickly that that ended um and uh and then they found out their mistake because we were on the BLM burn list and they were going to come if they could get our sod igloo to burn, which is doubtful because it was sort of damp. But, um, they were burning people's cabins out at that time.

And, um, these hippie squatters. Um, so I've never, uh, owned the land. And now I think I'm the last person in Alaska who has a National Park Service permit to reside where I was born and raised, which is some rider that I think Senator Ted Stevens put into ANILCA, the Native Claims Settlement Act. So your daughter will lose that spot? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That's the idea. Yeah. Which is not. your daughter will lose that spot? Yes, absolutely. Yeah. That's the idea. Yeah. Which is not.

Your daughter will lose that home. Yeah. Yeah. Which is home to her too. And then, you know, to get back to. So if you die, they destroy it. Yeah. That's the idea.

Yeah. I think I'm supposed to, when I'm about 90, I'm supposed to destroy it before I die. That's really your last act. Hey, make sure before you die. Well, that's why I'm always picking up my trash. Otherwise I'd just leave it on the ground. It's just going to be all the more work when I'm dying, you know? No kidding, really?

I didn't realize that you guys didn't do, I just, I don't know why I assumed that they did the homestead act. Because then I noticed that, like, you still hang out there and your daughter hangs out there. Yeah. I just, you know, I just spent a break up there, you know, not very long before coming here. You know, never saw a person the whole time. And it's, in a lot of ways, it's like the, you know, it hasn't changed that much. You know, my companions are caribou and bears walking around, et cetera. But then in other ways, there's a lot of, you know, land claims and permits and rules.

Alaska, you probably know this, but it's real weird that way. Up there in the Arctic, there's a ton of rules written on paper about that land, but the paper is far away somewhere else and we don't know anything about it. Yeah. Kind of do what we used to do. That tees up a question. Oh, sorry, Brody. Oh, I was just going to ask, did your family, when you were younger, did they have like

interactions or run-ins with federal officials, like trying to get you to move? Yeah, that was some, yeah, the BLM first, but then to yeah that was um yeah the the blm uh first but then more of that was the the precursor to the national park service was was showing up and pretty terrifying you know uh plane land on the ice and these big white guys walk up the hill and start telling us um that basically we were you know, might have to move. And that's what I grew up with. Lots of- Like fear of the parks. Yeah. Yeah. Fear of, yeah, lots of things. But I would say that the natives had that too. I mean,

they did. You've got thousands of years living on the land here, and then a plane comes, and they say what you can't and can't do, and it just all sounds very confusing until the plane flies away, and then it's not confusing anymore. It's like, we'll just forget that happened. What, okay, when you mentioned when you were young, and you guys were living off caribou and you had a dog team, was there a regulatory structure in place at all? Like, if a family's going through 100 caribou, I mean, you're not out putting metal locking tags on the things. Like, was there any sort of regulatory structure in place that you were aware of in those days?

Okay, so me, I was a little kid, you know, just chewing on a bone or something. So now I wasn't aware. Yeah. Um, my dad may or may not have gotten a hunting license. I assume he would try, but I don't know how you'd go about it because Juno is, you know, about as close as Miami. Yeah. Um, local people certainly didn't get hunting licenses.

And it was just such a weird idea that you'd have to get a license to hunt. I'm trying to come up with an analogy, but. No, I understand the analogy. What I'm, I'm asking like a very, I'm asking like a very, like, I'm not talking about perception. Did the state of Alaska have some. I'm saying, had I gone, had i gone to juno okay and i had said and i had said i'm living where you let's say you had gone your dad had gone to juno i'm saying what was whether it was regarded or not regarded and i'm not like saying that it should have been or i can't answer that

real easy i have no idea yeah okay uh no i i think um yes there was uh game management units already set up i think and and if you went down to the 40 mile herd or something there was probably uh bag limits and and more accessible yeah and everybody was supposed to get a uh a hunting license and i think as a so-called outsider or whatever, if you had flown to the Northwest Arctic, you probably would have had a limit of such and such amount of caribou. Locally, I don't think there was limits. I think you could shoot cows, calves, bulls, as many as you wanted. Yeah. when they had a photosensus where they fly over and the caribou aggregate in the middle of July where there's at times 100,000 or more in a tight mass, they would take pictures of those.

You count the caribou in the picture. That's a short version of the photosensus. And in the 70s, they came up with this very, very low number of, I'm going to say 75,000 caribou for the Western Arctic herd. And they promptly cut us from unlimited to one per hunter per year. No, really? Yeah. Which was, in my book, I use this analogy of like, you'd be allowed one blueberry. So you've, you know, you've always picked blueberries and then suddenly you're only allowed one blueberry. So you've, you know, you've always picked blueberries and then suddenly you're only allowed one.

And people were, you know, terrified and confused. And then we, that, at that point we were, we, not me as a kid, but my dad was issued this little locking silver thing, which was very fancy, nice piece of metal with some numbers on it. But people didn't always click that thing together because you needed to carry it when you got your next caribou.

Um, and, um, yeah, I think this, yeah, there's lots of different ways of seeing things, but I, I suspect the care of the state of Alaska missed some caribou in their photoynthesis. And I also suspect that at that time, with the introduction of, you know, more mini-14s and not too long after that, AR-15s with rapid shooting, small caliber bullets. And then snowmobiles had just arrived which was changed you know our relationship immensely with the with the natural uh world uh i suspect like you didn't need to wait for caribou to come to you there's a feasible way to go yeah yeah and go further and faster and so i suspect there was two things going on there was that the caribou were dropping in numbers and the state

might have missed some but it was a good time to wake up and say okay maybe we need to um not just shoot every caribou we feel like at all times all seasons you know yeah so it was just a little rough the way it went about Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love in on x are available for your hunts

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to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. You fish commercially now. Yep. What is the fishing?

You described when your family was, what is the fishing, you described when you're, when you, when your family was living out on the land, you described a need to get like, like learning how to get nets and fish. What was that fishing? And then what is the fishing you do now professionally? Oh, wow. Interesting.

Yeah. So, um, um, I say, you know, when we get done commercial fishing, we go back up river and immediately set all our nets for, for, uh, non-commercial. But, um, my dad and, um, mom, I guess, fished out of Kotzebue in the late fifties, I think it was, or 1960, right around then. And there was a, a cannery. Um, I think you got, uh, 35 cents a fish and they made $100 for the season or something. And so people kind of discovered fishing was, it was real hard to get cash then.

It was either trash. You're talking like netting whitefish or netting salmon? Salmon. Okay. And so they didn't fish for another 12 years in that fishery. Went up, you know, we lived up the river, up the Kobuk River, which is like 150 river miles from Kotzebue, where the fishery is. So they never fished again until, I think, 1974. My dad built a plywood boat, and we went down and lived in a tent and fished 1974.

And they grossed like $4,000 or something, which we had never heard of that much money before. He built the boat up where you live? Yeah, in Ambler or near the village of Ambler and ordered marine plywood and et cetera. And then took the boat down river. Down the river, yeah. It's maybe 200 miles down the river and across Kobuk Lake. And then you guys camped on the beach. We camped 10 miles across from Kotzebue at a fish camp.

And back then, if you wanted green American cash, there weren't too many ways of getting it. And commercial fishing was one. Fishing was becoming, uh, the price was great then. It was like 50 cents a pound for salmon, which is, it's not even, that's about where we're at today. And. And you guys using like drift gill nets?

Uh, set nets. Okay. Uh, hang your own nets and, uh, and set, we're allowed 900 feet of it. And you guys using like drift gill nets? Set nets. Okay. Hang your own nets and set, we're allowed 900 feet of it. And you guys were sitting here talking about fishing earlier and I didn't understand a gosh darn thing you were saying. Nothing.

But my idea of sport fishing is to set six or 900 feet of, I'm joking about the sport, but I love commercial fishing. It's super exciting. And especially when the fish are hitting. 900 feet of set net effective? Yeah. So when your parents were commercial fishing. It's super exciting. And especially when the fish are hitting. 900 feet of satin, that effective? Yeah. So when your parents were commercial fishing,

were they doing it themselves or working for? No. Okay. So I didn't answer either one of your questions, but so we would, we started doing that as a, as a way to, uh, we'd trap in the winter. My dad would make, uh, dog sleds or, or snowmobiles, um, sleds that people towed

behind their snowmobiles, sort of like a dog sled for cash. And then in the summer we'd go down and commercial fish for cash. And it was all pretty feeble, but would end up with, you know, some actual money. But they're running their own operation. Yeah.

Everybody's doing their own thing. Small, super small boats. And then come late August, we would put the dogs and the family in the tents and head upriver. My dad's boat was like 24 feet long, 35 horse, three days of holding the tiller to get home. And then unload the dogs. And then we would spend the next 11 or 10 and a half months at our house, pretty much staying home. Cause he didn't want to buy gas and, and travel. We would go to Ambler, the closest village, 25 miles away, but we would go,

oh, once or twice a winter and, you know, once or twice by boat. And, and so there at home, uh, back to your original question, as soon as we got home, we put nets out and started once again gathering fish. And that's late summer. Yeah. And then at that point, caribou would be crossing. So we would get a couple to eat and dry and whatever. You just, oh, if there's caribou, well, we need food.

But we would kind of hold off on the winter supply of caribou until late September when it's cold enough because we didn't have electricity. So we didn't have a freezer. So everything had to line up with the season. And every season involved hunting different things, when they're fat, when they taste good, when the fur is good, and then when you can keep it. And there's just really no use in boating home on August 27th and shooting a bunch of caribou because the flies were out and it was too warm. What was the, you guys do at home, you do whitefish or salmon or what?

Along the river there is grayling, trout, which would be Arctic char, salmon, shefish, pike, mud shark, which is a burbot. You guys call those mud sharks? That's a great name. Yeah, I don't know. I got, it's a very confusing fish. It's a fish of a million names, dude.

I didn't know about that name. Yeah. That's a great one. Well, at home we call them Tiktaalik, which is. Oh, really? That's the Inupiaq word. And so that's kind of. What's the Inupiaq word?

Tiktaalik. You can find it in my book. And so. I have a hobby of, I collect burbot names. Oh, yeah. Oh, well, they're such a great fish. I love hooking them. We hook them through the ice in October, November at night, lay on a caribou hide and look,

slowly freeze ass as you're. When I told someone, I have a brother that lives in Anchorage When I told him that you were coming to do a show And he said He told me if you can get one thing Out of this You need to get out of this an invitation To fish she fish through the ice

Oh yeah absolutely He was like strongly encouraging me To lean on you for that opportunity He just did that Like before he came here He was strongly encouraging me to lean on you for that opportunity. He just did that before he came here. Yeah, I just said Annette to bring her a fish. I guess maybe I should have brought you one, but I assumed you had already. No, he wants you.

He wants me to make you take me rodding and reeling for she-fish through the ice. Well, we just use a stick with a line. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. But the open water she fish is like. He fishes those. I mean, washing them jump and stuff, right? Yeah. But he thinks that the epitome of she fishing. They're not in it for the sport.

The epitome of she fishing. He likes she fish. Right. But the epitome of she fishing would be to she fish through the ice. I guess I kind of agree. I have a hard time with the hook and line thing that you cast and tangles up. No, no, no, man. Just drop it down.

Yeah, I know. Hold on a second. Somebody takes your hook or hooks on a willow. I was listening to you guys, and I know it's fun. We used to do it, but I'm not good at it. But hooking through the ice, uh, to me makes more sense. Um, cause you got a stronger line and you

got, you gotta make sure the hole's big enough. Otherwise you can't get it. The she fish are big. Yeah. They get up to what? Like 60 pounds or bigger maybe? I don't know. I don't weigh things or stuff like that, but

they're big. Yeah. I'll show you a picture here afterwards, but yeah. How many feet long is a big she fish? Probably four. Oh, wow. Out of, a, at all those different. It's like a souped up white fish, man.

They're a white fish family. I think, I think so. Yeah. At all those different fish that your family would catch in late summer, like what was your favorite? We really liked what we called trout. Arctic, that's arctic char.

And it's arctic char. At that time, we didn't know that. And we called them either a mean trout or a nice trout. And the mean trout is when it spawned out and it's kind of bright. They get real bright. And long and skinny. And of course, back to fat, which is very important. If it wasn't fat, it was, you know, dog food.

And so the mean trout were skinny. And we thought they were different trout. And it turned't fat, it was, you know, dog food. And so the mean trout were skinny and we thought they were different trout and it turned out they're not. They're just, they go for 18 months without eating and spawning and stuff. Yeah. And trout are, arctic char are amazing fish. Not 18 months without eating, but like.

I think it pretty much is, but you'd have to check with the experts. Oh, you mean once they run? Well, we're going to lose track of this whole show if you start talking about the chart. Let's leave the archer on the table. I do got a question for you. The fish, the varieties of fish you would net in August, you were able to dry those fish. Yeah, we start trying to dry them.

It was hard because we were not yet people of the blue tarp, which is really important. Smokehouses, right? Yeah. We always had fish racks, but trying really important. Smoke houses, right? Yeah. We always had fish racks, but, but trying to cover them and what to cover them with. But is that because the blue tarp wasn't around yet? Yeah, it wasn't around yet.

Everything was pretty, it's, it's shocking to think about how different it is with all this, the shit we have nowadays. Sure. It's like plastic bags. Well, where are you going to get those 50 years ago? That brings me to a question too about, and sorry to regress a little bit, but about your dad deciding, at some point he decided to try to make some American cash.

Yeah. Was that like a dilemma for him? No, he wasn't a hippie in the sense that he didn't want cash. He just didn't want a job. I see. Um, and to him, a job separates you from life. He wanted to live and be out on the land and stuff. And so if, uh, you know, when lynx became very valuable, we trapped lynx. Um, uh, he didn't like bothering the wolves much, which was a personal thing, maybe because they were hunting much like he was, you know, walking a lot and out on the land every day. But, um, we trapped Wolverine and, and, uh, when foxes, when they first got there, foxes were worth nothing.

And then as an eight year old, I trapped some foxes and sent them to, uh, gosh, was it called Goldbergs? I'm trying to remember now. But anyway, one of the fur buyers. And I got like 60, 90 bucks a piece. And my whole family took notice. And we trapped foxes for the next. Because you guys needed money to buy gas or tools or whatever. It wasn't to put it in the bank.

Yeah, yeah. whatever it wasn't the crazy to put it in the bank yeah yeah it was crazy thing was we um i mean we made our own dog collars and harnesses and sleds and toe lines and we anything that was what we called store-bought was very suspicious and the family had to have a big discussion about whether you're going to spend any money, which was the final answer was no. So you might as well not have the discussion, but, but they did order, um, um, they did order stuff. It was real, uh, long process to, you know, basically get to the village, take an envelope and mail it to. But you probably, I mean, you probably, you guys probably bought a stove, cookware, white

gas, right? Yeah. White gas for sure. Kerosene, um and, you know, coffee and sugar and flour. And then as the years went by and we started commercial fishing and had money, you know, they'd order potatoes from Palmer, Alaska. And we plant a garden, so we grow that potatoes also. But then vanilla for, you know, making snow ice cream and powdered milk. And we just more and more stuff. But nothing like just walking in a store and filling your shopping cart.

My parents were pretty much like don't waste was, well, they were, you know, they were Depression-era people. They grew up in, my dad, you know, at the end of the depression and World War II. Um, and so there was already that pretty strong don't waste. And then you go far enough North and trying to get a, uh, a pound of butter was a complex experience. And so as kids, which you, if you're hippies indoctrinating your kids out in the wilderness so-called wilderness you can um tell them oh don't use that don't use that and don't cut string and no you're not allowed to use any nails but if you find a bent one we'll discuss whether you're

allowed to have it um so um yeah it was a lot of everything was sort of in this don't waste, but you certainly were, caribou hides, that wasn't in the, you use those for whatever you want. That was your blue tart? Yeah, that was, yeah. Well, yeah. So anything you want to do with a caribou hide was pretty much open season. In your book, I'm surprised by the amount of, this is going to segue into you giving us some of that food you got there, but the amount of boiled meat you guys eat. Just boiled joints and boiled feet and boiled, like a lot of boiled meat. Not a lot of deep frying.

No. Going on. Yeah. In the Arctic. No. Yeah, it was a lot of, and you know, the local thing is like caribou soup is just as standard as is. You catch a trout at home and you give it to an elder, they're going to make soup out of it with the skin on and all the bones and stuff. And certain people are like, oh, that's not what I would have done with that fish.

But, yeah, maybe that was a certain amount of ease or you got the wood stove going anywhere. Well, you talk about the way so, because like you guys described taking sort of like caribou pelvises. Oh. And just put that pelvis in a pot and boil it so he could. Oh, I'm getting ready to insult white people. I can't believe at home, if you leave the bones, well, let's just back up here. At home, we look at the rear end of the animal caribou to see if it's fat.

And we kind of joke that the white guy or the outsiders are looking at the ant end of the animal uh caribou to see if it's fat and we kind of joke that the the white guy or the outsiders are looking at the antlers oh yeah we're not looking at the antlers we're it's got to be fat and then um the fat is you know maybe back fat or or stomach fat or or whatever a chalk you know the the lacy, uh, fat around the, um, the intestines, but, um, the bones are where the, the flavor and the fat is. And so there's just so many stories of, um, you know, some old, uh, Inupiaq, uh, elderly woman just disgusted with her, um, daughter bringing home a white boyfriend and he goes out hunting and brings home the antlers and they're just like you know what's wrong with this guy and then um and then the other sort of uh standard

story is um this outsider handing uh elders or somebody respected handing them a chunk of meat without a bone you know how come that guy's so stingy? Yeah. Like, yeah. When we think about that, you're going to bring someone something nice. You're going to bring them a backstrap. Yeah. All trimmed up.

Oh, you just try to keep it. You're not going to bring them like the moose's knee, which is what you guys are after. So, but seriously, I mean, now I cook a lot with a, not soup, but a Dutch oven with, you know, put some oil in it and sear the knee. Real quick, is your fuel mostly wood to make heat and to cook?

Not anymore. No. I mean, propane's an amazing thing. I see. Nowadays, everything has changed. You know, I have a place in Kotzebue with electricity, so I have freezers there. So when I come down from upriver where I don't have any of that, I'll bring meat and store it in a freezer.

And storing meat in a freezer, I don't know if you guys know about this, is amazing. A little familiarity. I once talked to a guy that he's actually a friend of mine and for his graduate work he was doing um he was doing sort of this hundred year survey of of hunting magazines and one of the things that he really took note of is just the way the conversation changed when freezers became a thing i mean just changed it changed everything about people's perspectives on deer hunting. Once every Joe Blow on the planet

had a freezer in his house. Because the whole filling the freezer, that's like a new, relatively speaking, that's a new concept, right? It'd be that you got a deer and you had to figure out what you're going to do with that deer right now. Absolutely. And I really value living seasonally.

So I'm going to go home and start commercial fishing, which means that I bring home a seal bit salmon that I can't sell, you know, seals are working them. And so I eat salmon like all summer, but come August, end of August, people are like, oh, how many salmon do you put in your freezer? I'm like, one. And even then I sort of begrudge it because it's not going to be fresh. And I'm kind of sick of salmon by then anyway. And then heading up river, hoping to start eating caribou and whatever else.

And I like that seasonal connection to your food. And so a freezer is handy to save food and not waste, hypothetically. But I kind of like just eating what's in season. Yeah. Well, a lot of hunters and anglers use their freezer as a prolonged wasting machine. Oh, fuck, I'm so glad to hear you say that. It's like it's a way that you can get something and then put off the waste for two years. The out of sight, out of mind.

And then when it's five years old, you're like, oh, I can throw it out now. Yeah. You're like, ah, freezer burn. Oh, I'm so glad to hear you say that. And you know, that bugs me most about, you know, many things, but at home there's, it's this conveyor belt to wasting because then you,

especially something like she fish, which you mentioned, people love to go out and hook them through the ice really close to town. And they're, what do you do if you get a sled load of she fish, you know, and you can leave some, I'm joking, but I actually wrote a proposal to make it illegal to leave them on the ice when you, you know, you head home.

Is that a thing? Oh, absolutely. But, and the state passed that proposal. So now it's illegal to leave your, you know, spare fish there. But people bring them home and they put them in the freezer. There's so many, you know, cause you can catch a

lot of big fish. And, and so I'm thrilled to hear you mention the, that the freezer is, you know, a wasting device. Oh, it's one of hunting and fishing's many dark secrets. Yeah. It's like the old, like, I'll put it in my

freezer, then later I'll throw it out. Yeah. And I won't feel, for some weird reason, I won't feel bad about it in two years. The same goes, you know, if you get 60 geese and don't get around to plucking them and stick them in the freezer, you pull out. I've never done that because I'm very fanatical, but I see people pulling out geese that are not plucked and not gutted and in the freezer.

Oh, is that right? Yeah. That's an extreme there. Scary. Okay, what do you got in front of you, man? I got to know. So I don't know if you're, I don't want to scare any of your listeners, but so that's fermented whale bowhead meat.

Fermented. This is fresh muck tuck, which is bowhead, the skin, and blubber. I don't know how scary you want to get. Do we need some? No, I like this. I've had this and like it, but I haven't had that. This is walrus. Kind of the same idea.

The skin. This has still got the hair on it, which looks like unshaven one of your neighbors. But the same idea as muck tuck. It's the skin with a layer of flubber. What else do I got here? Oh, this is for Corinne. This is her share oh this is you you touched on this one is walrus right here is is you touch on this earlier set but like the the walrus and the whale it's this stuff that was was given to you or yeah yeah yeah cuz so. So this right here is, this is just salted or raw or what?

It feels firm. That's cooked. This is cooked walrus. This is raw. This is raw. Damn it. So this is dried. This is cooked walrus.

This is dried caribou. So at home, my kind of standard lunch would be dried caribou and either seal, dipped in seal oil or more likely bowhead muck tuck, which is raw. Very often the beluga muck tuck, smaller whale, same idea, is cooked. But the, you guys cook the walrus? The skin, yeah.

It's got some blubber and skin. My experience with trying to cut walrus skin is you wouldn't get too far if you didn't cook that. What do you mean? Kind of bulletproof? Mm-hmm. Oh, but you guys eat the hair like I just did, right? Well, I don't know.

I always did, but I got to tell you, the old... Wow. Dude, I have never had anything like that in a long time. I need to try the combo. Holy shit. You're going to like this. It's very fresh and simple. Wow.

Try that one. So you're eating the caribou with the fat? Yeah. It's super good. Hmm. This other stuff. Give me a photo. Rody's not afraid.

He's doubling down. Dude, that walrus meat is something, man. There's nothing like that on the planet. Holy cow. And this is bowhead? Yeah, that's bowhead, yeah. I don't want to say I like it. I don't want to say I don't like it.

I'm just saying there is nothing like that. So, Steve, the first time I had. It's like if a deer was made out of fish. The first time I had this walrus was, we were camped at fish camp. One floated in. So the hunters go out and shoot them. And I hate to say this, but a certain amount of time to get the tusks. But if they sink, they stay down for a while. then the, the gases form in the stomach, they float up

and then they, then they're floating in the ocean. They come ashore. Um, so one came ashore, seagulls are on top, pooping on it and everything. And it's all sunburned and rotten on top while underneath the cold water kept it fresh. And the know the the natives knew that so they towed it ashore and somebody claimed the tusk i don't remember that part but so they cut that um it's called coke the that's what the the local word coke you've probably had many a coke in your life um but that's what they call this skin part of it so they cut that off that floating dead the corpulent walrus and and and got a third of a drum you know 55 gallon drum to cook boiling water over a campfire and then cook that well my brother and I were barefoot kids you know fish camp

there we walked down and they said you want to try some and we thought it was the best thing ever what you just uh yeah had um wow i'm not convinced that this is as fresh as that was um that's fermented whale meat you want to get into that i want to try the non-fermented way i do want to try it but i want to cleanse my palate i i think with the whale with the fresh whale meat. Yeah, let's recap on the bowhead, right, which is what you're about to have. Brody, what are your thoughts on? I mean, it just tastes like fat, really. I don't even think it even tastes like fat.

It's pretty neutral. Yeah, neutral. So that demarcation between the black skin and where the blubber starts, there's a tough layer. Oh, that's good. And you can tell how cool you are when you're given a muck tuck. If it's really tough, that layer, you are given a section of the whale that's not as desirable. And often when I—

I'll back up again. Say that again. I'm sort of joking, but, um, I, I joke that if you're not, if you're not cool, you get the tougher, uh,

uh, portion of the whale. You know what would go real good with this? Salt. Yeah. Little tea. That's why that's, I brought some.

That's, that's why you eat it with the caribou, Steve, the dried caribou. Cause it's salty. I can tell you what, I'm not a water's man, but I'm a up, man. That is really good. That's why you eat it with the caribou, Steve. The dried caribou, because it's salty. I can tell you what. I'm not a walrus man, but I'm a bowhead man for sure. That's good. Maybe I have some delayed effects from my last round of COVID,

but I'm not opposed to the walrus at all. Do you guys ever- Yeah, it's great. Dude, I eat that whale meat all day long. Do you ever render that fat into an oil? Absolutely, yeah. Damn. I like that bowhead. day long. Do you ever render that fat into an oil? Absolutely, yeah. Damn. I like that bullhead.

So that layer of rubber is super thick. And so people render a lot of seal oil and store it in buckets and jars. And we used to always use wooden barrels, which I think is- To store your seal oil? Yeah, I think it's healthier, actually, than buckets. Just for that sheer... Can I try a piece here? I'm going to do it, but to be honest with you, man, I'm a little bit chicken shit about the fermented whale meat. Okay. But what's this?

Oh, no, no, you don't want that. You already had it. Now, the raw whale meat is phenomenal. Yeah, I want to try the fermented stuff now. I'm calling it meat, but it's fat and skin. So this is... I didn't think this was the way it was supposed to be. I wasn't as excited, but this is still frozen. Is it okay to put that on the cutting board?

Oh, yeah. That's fermented whale meat? No, this is beluga, basically skin. Okay. I don't know. It's not cooked. I usually- You don't like it or do you like it?

I didn't. Well, here's the section. This is the flipper. So you can see the outside and then super sinewy section. I like it better than walrus, but I don't like it as much as bowhead. I love bowhead. I wonder if you

just got like a slightly tainted chunk of walrus, because I think it's pretty good. Tell you what, man, I wouldn't let a bowhead get by me. Seth, what size portion when you said you eat that for lunch, Seth? Sadly enough, I wolf wolf down a lot of fat, and I fight to not be a skinny white boy. I just don't seem to put on weight. But, yeah, I eat a lot of fat all year round.

And when my daughter was young and her mom would go to work, she was like three years old and she'd sit and have lunch with me. And I would catch her dipping whale blubber in bear fat. And I was like, you're supposed to have some dried meat with that, not just fat dipped in fat. Well, what's that there? I wanted you to try that dried caribou, did you? I haven't had that. I want the dried caribou. Oh, you eat it with this. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'll tell you try that dried caribou, did you? I haven't had that. I want the dried caribou.

Oh, you eat it with this. This is how it. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'll tell you what, a little rock salt on there. So dried caribou and this is the bowhead skin and this, that's how thick his skin is? Or is that cut down?

Nope. That's how thick the skin is, but the blubber would be like, you know, way thicker than that. I love it how it's like a little exclamation point or something. Yeah. That bowhead fat melts in your mouth, man. Oh, it's good, man.

Actually, here's just a. I think my kids would like the bowhead, but they wouldn't like the walrus. It's not too far removed from like a beef fat. That's just a chunk of blubber. No. And that's, I don't, I like both, but this is the simplest.

Just slice this up, eat it with dried meat. And I don't know how to answer your question, but probably there's a, I don't know, I might eat a half a cup. And then the local tradition is then to have maybe pilot crackers and jam and tea or coffee. And that was kind of the lunch we'd have. We'd have dried pike, dried whitefish uh, trout, which is harder if it's fat, dried she fish. Um. Dude, that little combo of the dried caribou and the bowhead.

Oh yeah. That's good. Oh yeah. That's lunch. Um, but shoot, I keep forgetting what I want to make. What are the crackers? The pillow, pillow crackers or? Uh, sailor boy pilot Sailor Boy Pilot Bread.

Pilot Bread, that's what it is. You hear so many Alaskans talk about that, and I built up a high expectation of what Pilot Bread would be, and I finally got some. I'm like, that's what they're talking about all the time? Is it like a salt chain or what? Yeah, and it's kind of a big cracker. But why do you guys eat so much of that?

Because it preserves well? Well, I joke that pilot bread is actually Inupiaq food. It's been so adopted by the culture that, I don't know, you just get used to it. It's like eating, you know, why don't you eat muktuk every day? And so that's, how could you survive without it? That's a hard to draw a tag. I could get pilot bread, but I can't get that. But I'm just saying, it's just funny, like rural Alaskans and the whole pilot bread thing.

And it's like, it's kind of like a bland, thick. Yeah, I don't even think it's salted. Well, I don't think it is. You're getting your protein from the caribou. It's like a salty cracker with no salt. It's a carb. I'm taking offense. I don't care if you don't like the walrus.

I love it that you guys love it. It's just funny because when I had it, I was like, well, that's what they're talking about? When we lived in Fairbanks, yeah, immediately. Like the first time I went to the grocery store, getting some of these. But after those 10 months living up there, I didn't miss it when I left Alaska. Were you, did you guys have many sweets at all? Or was that like the. Yeah, that's very interesting.

My dad said that eating all that protein and fat made you greatly desire sweets. And so he would, uh, we get done with some giant, um, meal of, uh. I noticed you got Mediterranean, Mediterranean sea salt. That was at the hotels. My dad collects salt along the shore.

We would get done with a big meal of, you know, boiled caribou meat or something and then start getting a hankering, large hankering for sweets. And my dad would take powdered snow, you know, fluffy snow, dairy gold powdered snow, you know, fluffy snow, uh, dairy gold powdered milk, sugar and vanilla and start whipping it up in the corner and ah, snow ice cream's great.

It's just like dairy cream. And we'd have that. After reading your book, I wanted to make it for my kids, but never got around to it. You need that real fluffy, uh, uh, uh, cold dry snow. Yeah. That falls almost like cottony snow.

Yeah. Super nice. And, um, yeah, we'd have that every night. Yeah, that falls almost like cottony snow. Yeah, super nice. And yeah, we'd have that every night. Yeah, it's so sweet. Yeah, sounds great. So the fermented whale is a fat? Eat the fermented stuff, Cal. Oh, have you already had it?

No. Oh, yeah. No, I'd like to try some. It's time to torture you guys. Well, yeah. So will you explain why this is part of the diet versus what we just had? You sure it's not that woolly mammoth dropping? Oh, well, no offense, but it's, you're going to think it is.

It's bad. You're really selling it. Like bad. You know, the crazy thing is my daughter just begged this guy from Point Hope to bring her some. She loves this, but. Oh, really? Yeah. I'm telling you what, my new favorite food is your jerky and your muktuk, but I'm like not into this.

That's fermented whale meat there, raw, frozen. So what's the process of fermenting that? It's not. Well, we had cold stretch. It's not. It's not. Like, I actually found that less remarkable than the walrus.

Small piece. I think you got to try the walrus again. It's not a big deal. Yeah, let's give him some more walrus. Steve, I think you got to try the walrus again. I'm good. Because I think you got a funky piece because I thought it was, I had a couple pieces.

Did you eat the hair and everything? Yeah, yeah. Didn't want to be rude. That fermented, so explain the process on the fermented stuff. Well, it depends. You know, we ate a lot of frozen fermented fish when I was a kid. And chemically. Is it like legitimately fermented?

Well, it's just. Did you have the fermented candlefish? I hear that's quite the culinary experience. Haven't, uh, I don't know what a candlefish is, but. Oh, hooligan. Hooligan. Oh, yeah. I haven't had the fermented.

I've dried. Uh, so let's get back to, uh, in the fall we were, we would come, uh, you know, set our nets and, uh, be drying fish. And then it would reach a point where, um, I guess it was cold enough, uh, that the flies were not gonna blow things. And so then we just start, uh, dumping, uh, wash tubs of fish in the grass, try to line them up so they weren't, uh, crisscross cause you need to chop them apart when they're frozen and then cover them with grass. And I don't know how we kept the bears away then, but I guess we had dogs and guns, but, um, and then, um, that would, uh, ferment.

You could use a different word if you wanted to. Like rot? Yeah. Yeah. And, um, and, um, then, uh, after it got cold, uh, which used to happen sort of consistently in, in late September, the ice would freeze and, uh, freeze and we'd separate those fish and then store them all winter. And then we would have lunch that was very similar to this, which would be dried meat, dried fish, pike, white fish, and other dried meat, and then frozen, raw, fermented trout, she fish, white fish.

And you take your bow saw, you know, and saw it like you're cutting a log into what, like you'd fry steaks, those were super cold, frozen. Bring them in, put them on a cutting board and then peel the skin off and then just eat those chunks, cut it in chunks between the bones there. So with the pike and the whitefish, are you cutting the pieces so thin you just

chew the bones right up? I guess. I feel like we also kind of went around the bones because you can see everything pretty clearly. And when you say that you catch fish and you lay them out in the grass and you just, because you don't want them to freeze together. And they'd sit there some number of days

before they froze. Oh yeah. Like weeks, weeks. Okay. Yeah. And then eventually you just pile them up. Yeah. And then we put them on a cache.

Sort of like. You had to put them up on a log cache for the winter because otherwise. And they're sort of fermented. Yeah. Or like. Yeah. Like most people would look at it and be like, that fish is kind of rotten. Totally.

Yep. Rotten fish. Yep. totally yep rotten fish yep hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

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Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Why not it? Just a desired taste? Yeah. Adds flavor to it? Yeah. But then we would eat, like grayling, we would

jig through the ice after the ice froze in the fall. We would set nets under the ice to catch white fish for people and dogs and hopefully trout under the ice too and she fish. And then jig for grayling next to your net because the whitefish are spawning and eggs are coming out. So the grayling would swarm there.

We would jig there and then we would eat the grayling frozen raw. So it was the same idea as the fermented frozen fish, cut them up and they're super good. I, if you said, you know, do you want fried grayling or frozen raw? I definitely want the frozen raw. Really, man, fried fresh grayling is fantastic.

That is a tasty fish. We ate, what was it? Frozen thin sliced tom cod with seal oil. Dipped in seal oil. That's good stuff. So that's the same idea. Well, the seal oil is like, I like the frozen tom cod because it's just like, it's thin slices.

It's so like clean tasting and it's frozen and it's just kind of, it's refreshing. The seal oil adds a whole other element to it, man, where it's like a very peppery, like a very, I don't know, like a spicy oil, man. I thought it tasted, I thought we said it tasted like cantaloupe almost, didn't it? I don't know, like a spicy oil, man. I thought we said it tasted like cantaloupe almost, didn't it? I don't remember that. Well, I think you guys did pretty well because what I'm finding with sea oil now is it's often kind of strong. Oh, I thought it was strong.

Strong, strong. I think when they used to use wooden barrels to render it, it did a better job of making sort of a fresh tasting oil. I wasn't a coastal person. So we were known as, you know, up the river inland as having crappy oil because it was a, you know, you're lower on the totem pole as far as trading and you had your jar of oil that was from last year as opposed to the seal you got yesterday or whatever. But a lot of this stuff, I have to be careful culturally, not say the wrong thing, but I feel like a couple generations back, the elders had, I thought they did a better job of it. So I end up now with seal oil that I often am not as excited about the flavor as when I was a kid. And some of that's me. I notice I'm getting more squeamish. We used to, my parents would, we'd get a muskrat or many muskrats and cook them up and

we'd eat the feet and tail and everything. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that. When you say you guys are eating the tails, I don't get it. Well. What are you eating off the tail? I need to tell you about raising kids. If you don't tell your kids not to eat the butthole or the head or the tail or the lips, they will. And, and especially if you did tell your kids like it's time to eat and you open the soup pot and there's the entire, you know, gutted, but the rest of the muskrat there, uh, while the tail's fat and chewy and, uh, great.

So there's a, there's enough under that skin between the skin and the bones of the tail, you guys are nibbling off like a layer of fat and meat that's in there. Yeah, yeah. And it's like the yield's got to be really low though. Yeah, but wait a minute.

What else would you do with the tail? Just cut it off and fling it in the willows? Yeah. No, put it in the pot. Yeah. Um, and the same thing with, with beaver, like springtime, the ice would go out and, and beaver send their teenage, uh, kids out to find new homes. Um, and so along the be, uh, river springtime, the ice would go out and beaver send their teenage kids out to find new

homes. And so along the river would be, we would, my brother and I would paddle in our little kayaks that my dad made and we would shoot beaver and muskrat with a 22. So you skin out the beaver, save the hide and then cook the feet and head and tail and everything else. Yeah, but the tail on a beaver, man, that's got a lot of fat in it. Did I mention? I'll try the muskrat tail. I just can't really picture it. I've handled like quite a pile of them, you know.

Yeah, well, I mean, like I say now, I probably would, I don't really need muskrat fur. And I can't remember the last time I got would. I don't really need muskrat fur, and I can't remember the last time I got one. Actually, I just think after I ended up with my first girlfriend and later my wife from—we're not together anymore, but living along the river, I started being more careful of like, oh, I should cut that off. And, oh, I don't think she would be that excited to have the head grinning out of the pot at her. And, um, well, I mean, I knew she wasn't. Um, and so I started my long road to being more squeamish, but as a kid, my parents were just like, that's what we're having for dinner and fight over the tail. And then, of course, beaver, beaver over the tail was the favorite part. Yeah.

Yeah. Tell me about the, tell me about this road situation you're involved in here. Probably in the early 1900s, they built a Kennecott mine down by McCarthy and built a railroad from Cordova across the glaciers and up and got copper. They got that copper and then they started looking for more. And so right about the time my parents went to the Kobuk Valley, there was a cabin above our place called. Did a rod thing pass through McCarthy? Nope. Nope. Okay.

Sorry. Sorry. I'm being long winded, but there was a cabin that we always called the Kennecott cabin and we didn't sort of put these pieces together, but that was that mining company coming up the Kobuk and had discovered or knew about previously discovered copper up the Ambler River and in those mountains. But in the Kobuk watershed. Yeah, absolutely.

And so all these years, Senator Murkowski, Senator Stevens, all these people have tried to figure, were trying to figure out how to access that, but it's pretty remote. So they talked about a railroad from Fairbanks. Like access in the way that they could get the ore out. Yeah. And so now there's been this steady push over the years that has built to crescendo now

where they've got the EIS kind of mostly through. It's a little complicated, all that. But they're wanting to build a spur road off the pipeline road, 200 miles sort of straight west from the pipeline road. Through, not through the gates of the Arctic National Park, and then hit the head of the Kobuk and end up at basically Kobuk Village, which is a village at the furthest up the Kobuk River. It would be a 200-mile industrial corridor that would then open, the Brooks Range, and then put these many giant open pit mines at the head of the Kobuk

and the Maniluk and Kokolekta, Kanambla, all these rivers that flow into the Coburg. And also sort of bring this tidal wave of technology that would change the Inupiaq way of life, which has already greatly changed, but sort of finish it off with technology and money and influx of people. And the final thing is change hunting greatly as far as resource conflict and then back to the technology. But then the Western Arctic herd is just this sort of flowing river of caribou that was almost half a million caribou 20 years ago and has dropped now to just under 200,000, 188,000, I think.

And so in fairness on that, though, I mean, that's like a wildly cyclical population of animals that goes up and down with great frequency. I mean, don't you agree with that? I do agree with that. It's a very complex subject because right now there's, locally, there's a lot of effort put into keeping so-called outsiders from coming up to hunt. But to me, it makes no sense if you're not looking at your own actions. So at home, there's a kind of a, this is stereotypical. I'm speaking in broad terms, but at home, there's this feeling that outsiders damage the herd, but locals don't.

And at home, there's more of us locally we have more guns and more boats and and um and the herds falling as we're you know we have more um more stuff to hunt them with and more access and ability and then there's a a push to build this road at the same time and, and, um, get more high paying jobs and, and all that. So what was the, what's the general, um, I'll point out that anything like this, my, I was gonna say my reflex, but it goes beyond my reflex. Uh, I'm always going to be on the side of habitat and I'm always going to be on the side of wilderness, even though you don't like that word. I'm okay with it now because it's pretty handy.

I'm always going to be. People are like, well, you have a house and all that. I'm like, okay, if I get to a point where I don't have a house, maybe I'll have this conversation with you. Right now, we're not going to win every fight, but I'm always going to be on the side of wilderness. I'm always going to be on the side of wildlife. I'm always going to be on the side of wildlife habitat. But what are the people like your neighbors? Okay. Like what,

like if you had to gauge, I'm sure there's a lot of sophisticated polling in Alaska about the project, but what's just sort of the, like the, the mood on the street as you live your life up and down this vast Kobuk drainage. That's a complicated question. There's.

I would argue that the culture has a lot of fatalism. Built into it. 10,000 years ago. You just sort of had to let nature do what it did. You couldn't really control a lot. And hopefully the. The uber and whales and caribou showed up. And if they didn't.

Well. Too bad. Starvation. And so they didn't, well, too bad. Starvation. And so I think fatalism is a cultural norm. And then along came the, I'm going to call them white people, and sort of were kind of pushy as far as, you know, saying what you could do, moving in, change of culture. And so locally locally there's just these uh this dual fatalism like these outsiders are going to come take what they want there's nothing we can do about it um separate from that is a huge cultural change where you know uh

living off of hunting and fishing is uh dling rapidly, and the young generation really likes their phones and their toys and their stuff. And so who wouldn't want a very high-paying job running heavy equipment or something? Sounds like fun. And then Alaska, this is a complex thing, but it was divided up into regional native corporations. The native corporations paid dividends to their native shareholders. Can we pause just for me to explain this for a minute? Yeah. You've touched on this earlier.

You know better than me, so correct me where I get this wrong. During the Carter administration, there was a lot of undecided, there was a lot of like undecided questions about who owned what parts of Alaska. And you had a lot of like, they didn't have, they don't have the reservation system in Alaska like they have in the lower 48. And they started to, they wanted to come to some finality about certain land areas and so they started to formally like divide up the state and one of the things they did differently than they did in the 1800s in the lower 48 is when making settlements with native alaskans um they built corporations and oftentimes multiple what we might think of as tribes or multiple groups of native Alaskans will belong to a native Alaskan corporation. They'll have a board of directors, and they have a chunk of land,

and they run that chunk of land like industry, mineral extraction, timber extraction, whatever. And that income produces payments to shareholders the same way if you are a stockholder in a in amazon and you draw dividends or whatever is that good or not good um that's uh a good start so it wasn't the carter administration that was a nilco which set up uh like the national parks and stuff. So previous to that was ANCSA, Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which I think Nixon signed. And that set up the corporations. It gets incredibly confusing from there. And don't quote me on any of this. Hopefully you're not recording this. But the native corporations do have the land as a, you know, for resource extraction, et cetera. But they also were given a big chunk of change that they can invest in like a company that provided toilet paper to the troops in Iraq or all sorts of other things. And so like the North Slope Regional Corporation has done very well on oil and gas.

Some of the other ones, almost like the Alaska permanent fund might've invested in, uh, whatever, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Um. So, so the, on the North slope, for instance, they've taken oil revenues and diversified their portfolio and invested in.

Presumably, you know, I'm not. Same way a pension fund might go around and invest in stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Presumably. And, and so, um, what happens back to the Ambler road is that, um, uh, people, is that the native corporations are for profit.

And so they're kind of like a corporation saying, oh, this is a good idea. We want this. This will provide jobs and will also pay you separate from your job, native corporation dividends. So in that sense, like, wow, what a great deal. Um, and then separately they say, uh, we'll protect your subsistence hunting and fishing. Uh, you know, there's talk of like limiting the road that the road will never be open to outside traffic, like the hall road, the pipeline road was, which is now open. Yeah. And so there's the, it would take, uh, you know, hours and hours and hours just to touch the tip of the iceberg on this, but those are the propaganda for the road.

It's hard if you're actually paying attention to, say, this billion-dollar road and then many open-pit mines, which I know would lead to more roads and more mines, is not going to damage the caribou herd or the, or the subsistence hunting or the quality of the water or anything. Well, I think fishing in itself, right? Like all the different spawning species of fish that you mentioned,

right? And, and just small streams, this road as it's perceived would, would have to go over. Yeah. 3000 small streams? Something like that. And many major rivers and et cetera.

It's a, it's a, um, a giant industrial corridor into the, into the Brooks Range, which it's hard to, if you don't know the Brooks Range, it's hard to explain just how wild that is, but. Well, it's imagine a mountain range the size of California. Okay. Yeah.

With, with no people. With no road, with no road crossing. No road, no roads. And yeah. And then. If you're going up the pipeline road and you, you know, and you wander off to the west, you'd be like, you'll hit another road in Siberia.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot, like there's a lot of parallels between this road and the Pebble Mine where you had, and the Pebble Mine, you There's a lot of parallels between this road and the Pebble Mine. In the Pebble Mine, you had a lot of diverse groups that pushed back against the road. Is that happening? Well, I'm so glad to hear you say that because it's been super frustrating to me over the last decade that Pebble Mine is so known.

And people have stickers and hats and every other. Dude, it was well marketed, man. Yeah. And meanwhile, from my point of view, the Ambler Road is much, much more detrimental. We don't have the Bristol Bay fishery to say, well, millions of dollars in red salmon harvest potentially could be damaged. We have, you know, the fishery that I've fished in for 47 years that makes very little money. And we have the she-fish that, you know, the most she-fish don't live everywhere. And so we have the she-fish population there.

We have these incredible, long huge rivers that are you can dip your cup in the water and but but how do you equate that to value and say like well dipping my cup in the value in the water feels good to me but but oh this road would bring jobs and so it's a hard argument and it's not been publicized at all let alone on on the Pebble. And I would say it's, I don't want to do the apples and oranges thing, but it's at least as important as Pebble, and I would say much more so. Where, you gave me a hoodie. Did you design that hoodie? Not that one. And I got to admit, you know, I went to Cordova to do a book reading and somebody came up to me and gave me a shirt that said no road Cordova.

Didn't say anything about protecting your food or anything. And I asked people and they were trying to stop a 30 mile road. I think it was. Oh, I'm not familiar with it. But so I wore that around, and then I was like, I got to make some of these that say no road ambulance. And a lot of the time up home, I feel like the Lone Ranger. I mean, people know I'm against the road, but locally,

this is getting back to before we started talking about the Native Corporations and Land Claims Act. But locally, people have that fatalistic attitude, but they also have this, you're not supposed to speak out. You're supposed to just, you know, keep to yourself about if you're against the road, you just, you're not supposed to talk about it. And, um, and so I'm this lightning rod, this lone ranger, uh, you know, trying to stop the road, but I don't, people come up to me in private and say, you know, can I have a hoodie and thanks and whatever, but in public, uh, people are not speaking out. Um part of that is that the native corporation, you know, potentially would provide jobs and you won't, you know, if they're going to build the road, maybe you'd want to be one of the people with it.

You don't want to anger your neighbors. You don't want to, there's all the normal reasons that humans might or might not speak out. And so I think there's a lot of people who are against the road, but it would be hard to quantify. It would be hard to get them to speak out. Meanwhile, the propaganda machine is sort of grinding forward, saying all the goodness the road would bring.

A lot of jobs. The animals will actually like it. Yeah, yeah. Because the caribou, someone got that famous picture of caribou getting shade under the pipeline. Oh yeah, yeah. No, they like it. Well, and then.

They go there to get shade. Think of how much easier it is for a caribou to run down a road versus over tussocks. So the north of Akatsubi on the coast is the Red Dog Mine, which was established probably 25, 30 years ago between Kaminco Native Mining Company and the local native corporation, NANA. And they have a 52-mile state road from the mine

to the coast, the port site. And it's very, very popular at home. It's brought people high paying jobs, which is a whole nother subject, what that does to hunting and people's lives and stuff. But that road doesn't lead to, you couldn't drive from Miami to- It's not on the road system. It's to. It's not on the road system. Yeah. It's a road that's not on the road system. And then, but caribou come down that coast, the Western Arbor Curd hits that road at times. And the fishing game collars, radio tracking collars show that that stops the caribou for extended periods of time

or potentially keeps them from migrating further south. And that's a little road, a short road that is a little speck along the coast there compared to this road that would come off the pipeline road north of Fairbanks and then 211 miles east-west. So as far as the caribou migration, the effects could be catastrophic, really. You can't have a herd of, you know, Serengeti-like animals roaming over giant areas and then slowly cut back on that area without something happening. Yeah. And I guess I wanted to say another thing about the migration. So the migration has changed greatly in the last 10, 20 years. And we got really spoiled in my young life where August, September, October, all in there comes this flood of caribou coming through the yard, you know, thousands of caribou. Oh, I don't want to get one tonight.

You know, I got a Band-Aid on my thumb. I'll get one in the morning. You know, I got a bandaid on my thumb. I'll get one in the morning. You know, whatever. There's just so many caribou flooding through to now where these last falls I've seen like zero or a cow and calf 18 miles away or something. And that's the migration not happening or delaying. All different things are taking place. And it's super warm in the fall. Um, there's more hunters on these rivers, uh, local hunters driving boats. And then the final thing, which I mentioned before that people like to, uh, uh, blame

the lack of migration on, which is fly-in outside hunters, which are coming in on super cubs and stuff to the leapfrog north of us. So it's a very contentious issue when you mix the resource conflicts with the development and all that. Yeah. And the lands claim stuff stuff which is super confusing too well with the industrial development i think that you'll uh look back on the piss and match between outside hunters and locals as the good old days that's interesting yeah and uh you know i

recently met um people that talked about uh oh, working together and stuff. Locally, we don't really have a reason to work together because you can, this is going to sound mean, but the locals can kind of go to the federal government and say, you know, protect us. Because Adelka said on federal land, there would be a, uh, subsistence preference for, for local hunters. Um, so. Yeah. Uh, I don't want to get into it, but I think that's been grossly exploited. Oh yeah.

I think take, I think there's a lot of bullshit with taking, um, there's been like a lot of overreach I feel on the part of like, really like blaming small amounts of outside hunters for these like huge macro issues about caribou. I think it's just, it's like just sticking it to people. I don't disagree with you. Um, but I think that most, uh, groups on planet

earth, uh, have long used whatever they can to their advantage. Yeah. Most. Yeah. And so. Or all. Or yeah. Yeah. I was trying to soften the edges on that, but yeah. And so that's in place right now. I put a proposal into the board of game to limit the number of caribou that myself and others up there were allowed to get because I thought it was ludicrous. If we're saying we live subsistence, we should be allowed to do whatever we want and outsiders shouldn't be allowed to do anything. And so what about taking a look at

ourselves and trying to make our subsistence activities more responsible? Um, why do we need to be allowed, you know, five caribou a day, every day of the year? Um, when we're, uh, uh, worried about the caribou herd. Yeah. And it's the, it's the dude that comes in and gets one. It's like blowing the whole thing. And so I got horribly shot down on that. Um, um, but I, I think it's coming. I mean, I hope it's coming. I think as, as, uh, people who live there and care about that spot, I'm one of them. And, and, um, well, I don't know. I do think there's a local attitude of, um, uh, locals can't hurt the resources. It's only outsiders and, and, uh, all that needs to change. I'm sorry to say.

I'm sure I'm going to have some people that give me some flack over that. But our local way of treating the resources has gotten a little out of hand. And then if we do want to blame the outsiders, which is great fun and really feels good. To every group out there. We need to clean up our act as best as we can. Seth Cantner, three things. How do people find out, what's the best resource for people to find out your perspective on the road?

And then what's the best way for people to find you as a photographer and author and to find your work? I have a website, which apparently is hideously unkempt. And I don't do much. I don't know how to do computers very well. But anyway, I have a website, SethKantner.com. That's S-E-T-H-K-A-N-T-N-E-R.com. And on there, I have a few of my thousands of caribou photos and my books and a few of my articles.

Nowadays, I think everybody, well, you mentioned Googling how to find a diamond out of a ring. I thought that was pretty interesting. I don't Google much at all, but you can Google me and you'll end up with these articles I've written, books I've written, and then op-eds about the Ambler Road, which some of them I've been pretty happy with. I recently had a crazy opportunity to meet Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland, and I wrote about that. And these are sort of boiled down. I try to make the Ambler Road issue as, you know, it's complex, but I try to clarify it in a thousand words for people.

My books, my most recent book, This Thousand Trails Home, Living with Caribou, is available on there if you want me to ship you one and sign it however you want. But then you got to pay for postage. So there's other sources. My publisher on that is a nonprofit, Mountaineers Books out of Seattle, and they are strong advocates of environmental protections and the use of the outdoors. And so ordering from them, I imagine Mountaineers.org potentially makes more of the money go to a good cause. Um, but my publishers have all been nonprofits and, and haven't, uh, uh, I say I make enough money from writing to pay for

beer, but it just keeps going up. Uh, yeah, 110, $110 in Kotzebue for five, six packs. And so that's become a little challenging. And that's not some kind of goofy Yanni beer. That's probably just regular old beer. Is it hoppy? How citrusy? Yeah, you might have to start brewing your own over the winter or something. Oh, well, no comment.

I think it's a felony, but up there. All right. Seth Kantner, author most recently of the phenomenal book, A Thousand Trails Home, Living with Caribou, and many, many, many, damn near all the themes we covered in today's episode will be picked up. Stay tuned. Wednesday's drop.

You'll see how Seth Cantner does on the trivia show. And Spencer probably will throw him a bone. You're like, what is Seth Cantner's favorite color? He'll probably throw him

some kind of bone. But stay tuned. Game on, suckers. Coming up. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

Now, the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.