The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 371: #vanlife #akmoose

Episode Date: September 26, 2022

Steven Rinella talks with Clay Newcomb, Dirt Myth, Loren Moulton, and Chester Floyd. Topics discussed: Recording from the inside of a cargo van in motion; creeper vans; the premier of MeatEater Season 11; how to watch Mark Keyon's new show, Deer Country; the unfortunate technicality that kicked our Campfire Stories: Narrow Escapes and More Close Calls off the New York Times bestseller list; how to support our friend and First Lite colleague, Duke Wasteney, recover from his house fire; help the WY corner crossing guys in their civil case and read MeatEater's article on why the $7M damages charge they face is absurd; Clay's "Hey Bear!" song; more instances of fishing phones out of pit toilets; when a moose crosses the road; trusting the process and sitting for nine days; shooting bulls based off brow tines; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater Merch See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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First Light. Go farther, stay longer. Okay, are we good yep we're recording what kind of van is this now why didn't steve sound as loud as ours we are in a ford sprinter from enterprise i don't think it could be a ford sprint well i don't know ford whatever the hell sprinter type van cargo though no seats except for the front and back front and passenger steve what are you ready to start hold on steve we're trying to get something on your voice there's a knob broken off of this that i didn't see um what where's the cord here going to Steve's. This is Steve's right here. This one, and that is the one without the knob. Man.

It's a lot harder to podcast in a van down by the river than you would think. You got to change that too, right? Oh, there it is. Steve's in. Okay, Steve, talk again. You turned me off, Chester.

Now you should be good, right? Not romantically, but just. Can you hear us now? No, I can't hear anything. Really? You don't hear me. Well. Oh, here we go.

You got to. Tess, look at some new snow in the hills. 92 miles to go. No, more than that. Oh, on fuel. Fuel and to the next gas station. Take one down, pass them around. Oh, on fuel. Fuel and to the next gas station. Take one down, pass them around. 91 miles to go.

To go in the van. Is it on? Still a little hot, huh? It's on? Well, it seems hot to me. Try it now again. No, my thing's on. Well, you just turned it off again.

Are you recording? There you go. Are you there, Phil? Are we recording? Yes. A little up on him. Just a you just turned it off again. Are we recording? There you go. Are you there, Phil? Are we recording? Yes. A little up on him. Just a tiny skosh. Halfway.

Test, test, test. There you go. Are we rolling? We are recording and rolling. So this can all be in the show. It'll help. Yeah. Okay, everybody.

Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast. Now, everybody needs to realize we struggle hard. We struggle mightily to bring you, you know, 52, 53 episodes a year of quality programming. And in my mind, that quality programming, there's two things that go into that. On one hand, good quality content, right? Stuff, well-considered thoughts, you know, news that keeps you up to speed. I don't know, good entertainment, right? So you learn stuff. Two is we strive for good audio quality, which is impossible right now

because Chester keeps messing with my thing. Look at that dad look with the gloves. Steve, I will apologize, but I'm really trying here. You're peeking, which means that your little levels are hitting the red line. Chester's in the back of a van. We're on a road trip right now. I'm trying to set it up. I'm trying to set it up.

Fit like it's a special episode, and you keep turning my thing down. Technical difficulties. We're crossing Cathedral Rapids. We try very hard to bring you a quality show that sounds good. That's why we have Phil the engineer and we have our studio and everything. But it just so happens that right now

circumstances have worked against us. And I checked with our beloved producer, Corinne, and we need to roll with this. We are recording the show. My apologies to you on audio quality. We are recording the show in a van driving through interior alaska so if you imagine alaska and you go all the way east where it butts up to yukon territory and then you go pretty much dead nuts between top and bottom north to south that's about where we're at driving down the road in the new kind of van that I think it, like, like vans. What do they call these vans?

Everybody calls them a Sprinter. But this is a Ford. Yeah. It's a rental Ford van. A creeper van. It's a cargo van. It's not a creeper van. No windows.

These are not. No seats. No. Because, like, a creeper van is like my old van. This is like a high-end van podcast van. This is the cool guy van these days. It's like these days it's the kind of van where people go stay in their van for a summer and have a van life experience.

Yeah, it's pretty nice. I kind of want one of these for fishing. You can tow your boat. No, you just drill holes in this and then drill holes down through the ice. We'd call that a tuber mobile. We're on a road trip in Alaska.

We're recording the show from here. It's the same show, same titillating subject matter, but we're just in a van. I was just explaining to the boys, off to the left, we have some beautiful snow-capped mountains. I was explaining to the fellas here that we're joined by Laurenuren molten driver uh clay newcomb is here chester floyd and uh fan favorite dirt myth howdy howdy uh i was explaining to the boys that on this drive

which i've done a number quite a number of times over the years, on this drive at this time in the evening, this time of year, if one takes a speedy glance down all of the gravel roads coming into the highway, you will often catch grouse out pecking grit.

But, we haven't seen any yet. But I'll keep you listeners apprised on that situation i'll point out another thing is i did this drive one time with my son coming back from caribou hunting and we saw seven grouse and my son pointed out that every grouse we saw was on the left side of the road wow was he sitting on the south side of the road no he was on the left side? The south side of the road. No, he was on the right side. I was, but that's how it went, and it was true. And once I reviewed it in my mind, he was correct.

Sharp kid. Well, yeah. Observant. Almost a little rain man-y. Not him, the observation, but I appreciated it. So a couple things to get into up top here as we as we cruise along um oh this is good so this i'm pretty this this is exciting and a little bit of a proud thing for me we have a whole new season of meat eater coming up soon season 11 of meat eater what we are able

to do now what we're able to do now, we just filmed the end of the season. Coming back from that right now. What we're able to do now is we are going to, here's a little TV business tidbit. We've always, so me and my original partners at 0.0 and now our our company meat eater we've always owned um we've always owned our shows right we've only ever licensed our shows out meaning like normally if you make like normally if you watch tv show on cable tv or whatever uh the distribution channel owns the material so a production company will make a show for someone, and then once you produce it and make it,

it's like a contractor who makes a house for someone. Like you hand over the keys to the house, you never walk back in there again, right? And then the distributing platform owns the material. We've always owned Meat Eater. We've only ever licensed our show out. So we are able to now do something that's pretty cool. We're able to do our sort of first window on our own platform.

So when we kick out the new Season 11 of Meat Eater, the first place we're going to kick it out is we're going to kick it out on our own website so at the meat eater.com is where you'll be able to go watch the show early first before it appears anywhere else and that'll be coming up pretty soon and i'm excited about that meanwhile over at youtube mark kenyon's uh deer country show has launched a few episodes are already out. The show runs through mid-October. Go find it at the Meat Eater YouTube channel. Steve, he came and hunted with me.

I think the episode's out. The one you hear it, Clay Newcomb's in it. Yeah, he came down to Arkansas, man, and killed a deer. Public land. Excellent. Yeah. So tune into that. Public land. Excellent. Tune into that.

Folks are loving that. Mark Kenyon's Deer Country on YouTube at the Meat Eater YouTube channel. Another thing is, even though we're on a road trip through Alaska for a couple hours here, and Lauren observed that we have enough gas to get us to the next gas station plus one mile.

Yeah. 99 miles to delta junction and uh the tank said 100 miles to go excellent uh here's a little uh show business tidbit our oh it's so frustrating when campfire stories volume one came out so it's was Meat Eaters, Campfire Stories, Close Calls. When that came out, it instantly was a bestseller. And it was a bestseller on a bunch of platforms, but then it made the New York Times audiobook bestseller, which is a weird thing for an audiobook, and I'll tell you why. Most books that make the New York Times bestseller list in audio are

books that were print. So a big book will come out in print and it'll become a big bestseller in print and then the audio will hit and that print thing kind of generates a little bit of buzz, right? And the audio hits and the audio does correspondingly well. It's exceptionally hard to break into the audio book bestseller list with an audio first book. But Meteor's Campfire Stories Close Calls did just that. Now, we just released, this is very aggravating. We just released Meteor's Campfire Stories, Narrow Misses and More Close Calls. Now we have intimate transparency

into the sales of this thing. We know how it's doing. It very much earned its position. Well, hear me out. It very much earned its position. We're on the edge of our seats, but we don't have seats.

But carry on. No, you're actually, no, they're sitting on duffel bags. In the bag of, man, I'm riding shotgun so I can watch for the grouse. And it had the numbers. It earned its spot on the list, but it got flagged for this reason by the New York Times, as the best anyone's been able to explain to us. There was an over-concentration of sales from a particular source. It seems as though the over-concentration of sales from a particular source was those crazies over at apple the folks who brought you the iphone

okay and where they you know historically the vast majority of podcasts are listened to is at apple too many of our listeners bought their copies from this single source. Now, if it's a print book, the New York Times will put an asterisk next to the title and point out that something fishy has gone on, and they'll asterisk it like it might have had a big single sale or a bulk purchase or something weird or someone trying to buy their own book onto the bestseller list by ordering a ton from a weird bookstore somewhere. Understood. We have no such anomalies, no kind of weird

sales, no kind of any purchase that would happen. Our number one place we sold? Apple. And they docked us for it. Docked it. And because with audio they don't do the asterisk marker, you just get kicked off the list.

What we're going to do, so irritating, we need to go and turn around and repair it. So we're going to stick another. I didn't really want to do this. We're going to put our probably my favorite story. No offense, Clay. No offense taken. Probably my favorite story from Narrow Misses and More Close Calls.

We're going to tack it on to the end of the episode. Oh, this episode? Yeah, we're going to put it on here because that helps a lot. Now keep in mind if you heard the Cameron Kirkconnell story where the guy shoots his buddy through the fin to save his life, here's a story.

It has to do with a guy shooting himself. It is a harrowing, very touching story. Instead of a guy saving his buddy's life by shooting him through the fin underwater, a guy's dog saves his life. You're going to hear the story. And then hopefully you'll be so inspired that you'll go out

and we'll make this October list. When you get this though, there's still hours worth of material you haven't heard. You're just getting like a smattering, right? But we're going to stick that on the end of the show here to help move that thing along.

And another news bit a former podcast guest duke wastany who works for first light he's been on the show before he's been on this show before uh the dude was out he drew a bighorn tag dude was out hunting bighorns and him and his wife they lost their home there was they have a condo and part of a condo complex whole damn thing burnt to the ground everything he had is gone uh we've been we've been driving people toward a gofundme site so if you happen to be out there and you in your you remember being uh you know doing athletics with uh duke or hunting with du Duke or you know Duke from when he used to be a customer service rep at First Light. He always liked that guy. We have a GoFundMe set up. GoFundMe.com. It's Help Duke Wasteney, W-A-S-T-E-N-E-Y, Recover from a House Fire at GoFundMe.

And we've been trying to drive some folks there. Let me say something about Duke. Can I tell them about Duke just a little bit? Please. Duke is an eccentric, incredible, great guy. He's like 5'7", probably weighs about 140 pounds, is an ultra marathon runner.

An animal. He can run 100 miles. A former Division I runner. An animal. He can run 100 miles. He's a former Division I wrestler. And he ran track. He was a bull rider. And he is an absolute hunter of hunters. The guy, and just a great guy. I mean, you can't,

there's never been somebody that met Duke that didn't like him. And so it's pretty tragic that he lost his house. And yeah, so just trust me. You'd like Duke, and you'd want to give him some money. Moving on to the Wyoming Corner Crossing. Thanks for that, Clay. Moving on to the Wyoming Corner Crosser case update.

This is interesting. Part of this deal, we had the, this is also, like Duke was a former podcast guest we had the guys if you're not familiar if somehow you haven't been listening to the show and you're just catching this one now we've covered extensively including having like the the defendants came out from missouri to be on the podcast the wy Wyoming Corner Crossing case, where some guys used a ladder to cross from one piece of public land onto another

piece of public land. They had to cross where the two corner sections meet. Never stepped foot on private land. But they were in for like some second or whatever, however long it takes you to jump over a little step ladder. They were in the airspace of a rancher.

They got criminal. They got a criminal trial. They had to go to a jury trial, a criminal jury trial. In the criminal trial, they were found not guilty. They were found that no trespassing had occurred. Woohoo, Lauren.

Hold on real quick. Got to pass. We just blew past a Nissan Rogue. Get out of the way, Jack. Oh, you know what? Here, remind me of the new song in a second, but let me finish this corner crossing deal. So we're going to hype that song before it's even written.

Really? Oh, yeah. Okay. Listen, you've got to hype that song before it's even written. Really? Oh, yeah. Okay. Listen, you've got to piss on your post. So, in the Corner Crosser case, the defendants came on the podcast after they were found not guilty in their criminal trial. If you remember back, though, remember back to O.J. Simpson. There was once a famous football player named OJ Simpson who killed his wife and a waiter with a knife.

And if you remember, he had his criminal trial and then when he was acquitted, the glove don't fit, right? You gotta acquit. He then turned around and had his civil trial. And he was found guilty

in the civil trial. And the judge baked all this symbolic stuff into his punishment. And when they had the trial and the guilty verdict and all that, it was basically like they're saying, you committed the crime. Now you have to pay. He never paid the families the money, but he lost his civil trial. The owner of Elk ranch in wyoming who's got a real case of the ass against the corner crossers is now pushing for a civil trial and

this is interesting he is claiming seven million dollars in damages from four Missouri hunters who used a stepladder to cross from public land into public land on a surveyed corner having never actually stepped foot on his land that

cost him seven million in damages for them being in his airspace. $7 million. That seems high. Well, you know why? Here's why it's $7 million in damages. Because they had felt as though that ranch and all the public land on it was private

and it seemed like that because no one could go on it now they're like well now that the public land is public it's not my private land well the the private land lost some value in their mind because they thought it was valuable how they had public land that no one could use right right and now they're saying the damage is i used to have all this extra acreage that i didn't pay taxes on and didn't actually buy but i had exclusive to it now i don't own that i don't kind of quote own that anymore any joe schmuck can go on there and hunt elk and that's putting me out seven million dollars i don't like that thinking. I had heard a really interesting rumor,

and it hasn't been corroborated, that I was to be subpoenaed for this. Really? Yeah. Very interesting story there. Now, their legal defense fund, the Corner Crossers Legal Defense Fund, I'll just tell people this.

It's short money right now. They're short some jingle. I just was checking some emails and I know Callahan, our own beloved Ryan Callahan, is fixing to take some of the money that we have in our land access initiative kitty. He's doing like a property

shopping thing where we're hoping to buy land and turn it over for public access. uh he's hoping to draw a little money from our pool to kick in on the legal defense fund but they're a little short on the legal defense fund and hoping that they don't wind up uh that it's seven million in damages for four Missourians having their shoulders go through the air over your place for a couple minutes. I know people who've had their house broken into that didn't get that kind of damages. This is something that Chester's going to be quaking

in his little boots back there. What do you have on your feet, Chester? barefoot wow two well he's quite he quaked in his boots so hard his boots fell off uh we put out a call for polygraph examiner we have a lieutenant for the detroit police department works in homicide he's a polygraph examiner for the department he will come out and test people for us he has the equipment just let him know works in homicide. He's a polygraph examiner for the department. He will come out and test people for us. He has the equipment. Just let him know.

So that's happening. Now, what are we testing him for? Who stole my cooler of fish at work. Oh, really? And I wasn't even going to get into this letter. That's why Chester was here. You think it was Chester? You want to know why Chester's quaking in his boots?

He did it. A guy wrote in. I'm going to say something after Steve gets done talking. We had a guy write in that he's already solved the mystery. Based on what we discussed in the past, he feels that Chester failed to put it in the freezer. Oh, and it's a cover-up. Once it rotted, because he left it laying somewhere,

once it rotted, he dumped the rotten contents out through the cooler because this happened to him. This happened to him in a different cooler gate. Yeah, but he don't know Chester. Yeah, but I wouldn't lie about that. Well, we'll find out when you do the polygraph. So can I talk now? I learned this about polygraphing.

Let me tell you what I learned about polygraphing. You start out with some real softballs. And you listen up, Chester. You listen up. When this guy comes, you're going to see that he starts out with some real softballs. He's going to be like, what's your name? I'm not very good at hitting softballs. And he'll be like, is one of your names Chester the Molester?

Then he'll be like, where'd you grow up? Then I'm going to chime in, where's the fish, man? And we'll find out. And you know what I'm going to chime in, where's the fish, man? And we'll find out. And you know what I'm going to say? I don't know. We will tell. I've got a hot tip on how to beat a polygraph. I'm going to polygraph the driver.

Yeah, go for it. Because he was probably one of the disgruntled parties who felt like some of that fish was his. Was this a white fish? Hawaii fish. Steve, I've got a question for you. Some got, am I? Yeah, my fish got stolen.

I've got a question for you. Come look in my freezer. Did you ever grab fish out of that freezer? No. Okay. Well, then. And I'll take a polygraph. Yeah.

Okay. Well, so I talked to Bree the other day, who is our CEO's assistant. Executive assistant. And I went in there and dropped stuff off in that cooler. And I don't know what else it would have been because it was in that same time frame. She saw me put it in there. I'm going to polygraph her. She said, yeah, I remember. How certain are you, Bree?

Yeah. Here's the other thing. You don't know who else I'm going to polygraph? Just because I know what it's going to score. It's going to score perfect. I'm bringing my neighbor Pottery Pat, and I'm going to polygraph him because Pottery Pat was with me when we discovered the theft. I was

like, Pat, you don't need to worry about fish, bro. I got fish coming out of my ears and I take him down to the office to get my fish. Or there's some weird... You're missing a whole cooler. Cooler fish. We recovered the cooler. Cooler's there, but it's empty.

Oh, you got to solve that. I think it was a, well. Chester. No. I can't even eat fish. Chester's allergic to fish. That's a good point. Chester's allergic to fish.

Oh, forgot about that one. Which makes it even weirder. Even weirder than you take it. Steve, how come you. You know what? I'm going to polygraph him about the fish allergies. How come you. I'm going to be like, are you really allergic to fish?

Like, how much? I can't wait to get this polygraph. Wait, he's not allergic to tuna. Yeah. Anyways, from Detroit Homicide, dude, this guy is going to be one of them hard-boiled detective types. And he's going to put the screws to Chester, man. Hey, before he comes, I want to tell you in private my hot tip on how to beat a polygraph. I can't say it on the air, man.

No, because I don't want all these people learning. I wouldn't mind knowing. It's too big of a hot tip. Steve, you have to take that test, too. Absolutely. Yes, then Clay can't give you any tips. Oh. That's a good point.

I'll give everybody in this van a tip. Just tell me the tip right now. Well. If we all know, then it'll all be equal. Because they kind of like, my understanding is they kind of fine tune it. Well, okay. So they ask you softball questions that are the truth. And so they get a baseline reading of your.

Oh, I see where this is going. It's in your voice. Lie about the truth. Because your name is Steve. I'll be like, uh-uh. It's in your voice. And something about it bumps up. You know, there's like a baseline.

I don't even want to know this. This guy says that you hold a water bottle under the table, an empty water bottle. Got it. And when you tell the truth, you squeeze the water bottle so that, like, intensity comes out of you even when you're telling the truth unseen. I got a water bottle. Well, no, I got a hot tip. It's a water bottle. It's a spitter. truth. Unseen. I got a water bottle.

I got a hot tip. It's a spitter. I got you. I have a hot tip for polygraph examiners. My name's Clay Newcomb and I squeezed it. Did you see my forearm flex? My name's Clay Newcomb. Now that his gums kind of receded.

Here's a hot tip for polygraph examiners. If you're given a polygraph exam, make sure they don't have a water bottle under the table. That's a hot tip. That's how polygraph examiners can beat people who are beating the polygraph. The guy who told me that, that technique was used to win a big buck contest where a polygraph was used. Moving on. Hey, folks.

Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our northern brothers get irritated. Well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there

OnX is now in Canada the great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right.

We're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more.

As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Let's break from this. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. I'll bring everybody up to speed. A lot of major developments. We have a very exciting guest coming on the show. Really? Who's involved. Really?

Coming on the show? Involved. Did they shower up before they came? He's going to come on the show. We're going to be able to answer a lot of questions about this. But in the meantime, today, Clay, you sing the chorus as much of the chorus as we have. Okay. And then we'll all do the chorus so people can get the chorus twice.

Well, I mean, do they need any context for how this song was written? Yeah, okay. So if you're approaching an area that you think there might be a bear in it's customary to yell stuff and a lot of times people are at a loss for what to yell and you'll just yell hey bear yeah well one time we had had a run-in with a bear and then everybody's trying to scare the bear the bear is already in amongst us people are trying to scare the bear by yelling hey bear and i said it's stop saying bear unless you see the bear because i can't tell if people are like hey a bear yeah hey bear yeah so i was like no more hey bear um just whatever go yeah yeah uh so but today we were doing we were doing hay bear to to approach

a kill site we were approaching a kill site where we had stashed to meet and we were doing hay bear to approach a kill site. We were approaching a kill site where we had stashed some meat. And we were doing hay bear just to give a bear a chance to run off. Yeah. And Clay, we started to write a song about it. And Clay came up with just a ripper. Just a ripper. Great little jingle. And we've got a lot of the parts of the song.

But Clay kind of came up with the what do you call that in a song it's it's the it's the chorus the verse the hook the chorus i'll tell you the chorus yeah the chorus okay clay hit it with the course so hit it good so we're walking we're walking down the hill me steve and chester and we said hey bear what you gonna do when we come and take that moose meat away from you hey bear what you gonna do when you come to the moose meat away from you oh dude i gotta make a solid goal what you gonna do when we take that moose meat away from you and then i wrote a really really great part that they're trying to cut out of the song because they're trying to cut me out so you can keep the guts and hide but you can't have the meat i got family to feed dude dude the sun is coming up and the super cubs are coming down gotta get back to mama we're headed for town hey bear what you gonna do when we take that moose

meat away from you. Moving down. We did have the one that we said, hey bear, I'll make a deal with you. Oh, that's right. You can keep the guts and hide. And that's as far as we got. Yeah, we'll work it out. I'll make a deal with you. I'm going to sing it if we get it all together.

I'm going to sing it in Georgia. The song is about our moose hunt. That's what it's about. If I have time to write the rest. I've never played an instrument in my life, and I can't sing. I'm joking. If Chester has time to work on it with Clay, Chester's going to play it when he opens for Trampled by Turtles in Atlanta, Georgia on December 1st.

Yeah. 10th. Buckhead Theater's first. December 1st. Steve's going to be on the synthesizer. First. December the 1st. Steve's going to be on the synthesizer. Six days before the Pearl Harbor anniversary. Chester. So if you're sitting there saying to your husband,

oh, you know, Pearl Harbor anniversary is coming up in six days. You'll be like, oh, shit. Chester's playing tonight in Atlanta. He's opening for Trampled by Turtles. And he's a French dad. He's got Chester. There are a lot in Chester. Up to 45 minutes.

Whoa. I told Chester about the curse of the opening act. I have been trying to implore Chester. The grouse, you see it? I didn't see it. No windows. Right side of the road, apparently. Yeah, they switched over from the other side since a couple years ago.

Chester, I was telling him, I said nothing personal, right? Yeah. No, you said that before you went into this. I said we're sitting in a seat tent, had the wood stove cranking. Which usually means it's very personal. It's very personal. It's tight. It's warm. It's warm.

It's tight. A lot of wet clothes drying out. It puts a lot of steam in the air. Things get intimate. And I said to Chester in this warm, steamy environment, I said, Chester, nothing personal, buddy. But, and I hate to say it to you, Chester. Remember, I said all this.

I really laid it out. People aren't there for the opening act. Some are. Maybe just my mom and dad. Yeah, some are, but most ain't. And what you don't want to do. No, no. What you said was a great descriptor of it.

You said people typically have the attitude of just enduring the first act of live music. Waiting for it to start. They're just enduring it. I just recently got to go see Chappelle. But he was doing this thing with John Mayer. So I'm sitting there waiting for Chappelle, but I got to listen to John Mayer sing songs. I don't want to do that. I want to get to the Chappelle part.

And I'm like, hey, hey. and my wife's like oh i just love him so you know uh so your advice to him was yeah that's my advice i never got to my advice my advice was six songs keep it tight tight. Keep it tight. Because you know what? They're going to give you the benefit of the doubt. No, I like that advice, Steve. Keep it tight. No one's going to be like,

you could have people won over at 24 minutes that you've really, really lost at 45 minutes. Just professional advice. We've covered publishing. Diminishing returns. You've got to find that professional advice. We've covered publishing. Diminishing returns. You've got to find that sweet spot. We've covered publishing. You know what I'm going to try to do? Here's what we'll try to set up between now and then.

We'll try to get a call in. Are you comfortable with this? I don't know what you're going to say. We'll get Luke to call in to the podcast. And we'll just put the question to say. We'll get Luke to call in to the podcast. And we'll just put the question to Luke. Yeah, this is good. If you agree,

go with what he says. So how do you fill that 45 minutes if you just mic drop and walk off the stage? He gets up, he leaves them hot and bothered, and he walks off. And you also advised him to play strongly on his true, authentic Wisconsin roots.

Yeah. Like, just stay true to himself. The Hey Bear song. OK, Use Carlot. Yep. So here's the thing about the pit toilet deal, and this is where it really gets rich. After we got the... After we covered the mysterious case of a man who dropped his phone into a vault toilet at a fishing access site in Montana.

Something stripped down, get this, he stripped down buck naked. Okay. And climb down into the vault where he got stuck. Oh, I forgot this little important detail. Man, that sounds awful. Did I say his phone fell in there?

Yeah. His phone fell in there. Naked? Totally naked. That is gross. Him in his birthday suit. Nothing between him and the Lord except the outhouse. Oh, it's not going to end well.

Down in the pit toilet, and he was rescued. Now, we put out that we really were dying to get anyone we can to cover this more thoroughly important news item. And we have a phenomenal podcast guest teed up. People are going to be on the edge of their seats. Is it the guy who fell in? The edge of their seats. You get it? When they hear this harrowing account of being stuck in a fishing access toilet vault.

After we covered that, we got an email. If you go on my Instagram, at Stephen Ronell, you'll find a very intriguing picture of a young woman, a cheery young woman, half in and half out of a toilet. Like the toilet top, add about her waistline, and she's trying to fish her phone out with her feet. God, I would... They were able to recover the phone with a grabber,

as they described. They found someone with a grabber. We also got a sign from a... Bumpy road. We got a sign from a pit toilet thing in Canada where it's like things you're not supposed to do in the pit toilet. And one of them includes someone standing there with a fishing rod fishing in the toilet. And it came from a guy who the joke came from when they found a guy who was trying to use a fishing rod and a weighted hook.

To recover something. To recover his phone out of the pit toilet. Man. Okay. of the pit toilet. Man, dude. Let the phone go. We get a letter from Northwest New Jersey where they have in one of, he doesn't say it, but he says it's one of New Jersey's

best walleye lakes. There's a state park and they have a car top boat launch. So not the kind of boat laundry back trailer into the water where you can unload canoes and small craft. Okay. Best walleylings.

And they have a pit toilet, a state park and a pit toilet there. Now here's where this gets interesting. This individual's friend is a local firefighter. They get a call on their system about a man stuck in the owl house. They think it's a joke and don't respond.

They think it's a prank call. Oh, man. The call comes across again and again, at which point they're like, Really? Maybe a guy is stuck in the tunnel. They run down there with their fire truck equipment. They find a grown man, stark naked, stuck up to his chest in the seat-based portion of the toilet. Why the nakedness? He probably didn't want to get his clothes all full.

Get your underwear full. Somebody else's. This gets rich. Fishing access sites. They question him. What happened? He says he was attacked by another man and stuck in there. What?

Shouldn't laugh. That's a bad story. Let's listen. Why did this seem fishy to the first responders? Well, his clothes were folded up on the floor and his phone was on top

of the stack of clothes. There's a woman pacing around out in the parking lot. They ask her if she has any relation to the man in the thing and if she knows anything about it. She says, he called me to help him.

But where did I just say his phone was? On top of the clothes. He doesn't have access to his phone. No, he's stuck. He's stark naked in the toilet bowl. Did he call before? They lube him up with warm water and dish soap.

Still cannot free him. They then pry the seat off the vault top. And he goes into an ambulance. Wearing the toilet. Wearing. This is from a firefighter. They're like, bring out the heavy duty Dremel. He goes into an ambulance wearing the toilet seat.

This sounds like a cartoon. Well, here's where the story gets interesting. It already is. Further questioning reveals that this man is a fetishist and that the curious woman pacing around was involved in this man's fetish. Yeah. So a fecal freak. Oh, gosh.

I don't want to say it because it's a family program. Fecal freak. So point being, the guy says, to sum up, he's just like, man, beware if anyone gets stuck in a toilet bowl. So it might be the kind of thing where we need to bring the polygraph to this interview. Wait, he's coming? The fecal freak's coming on the show?

No, no, no. That's a guy in New Jersey. This is just a heads up. All right. We got 25 miles to empty. Yeah. Give us a road update, Lauren. We've got the law pulling somebody over up ahead of us.

Yeah. That's probably us. Oh, they're going to pull us over? No, no. We're good. Delta Junction's last sign I saw, 37 miles in our fuel to empty is 25. Wow. Are you kidding me?

Is Sam ahead of us? Maybe you should. Sam's ahead of us. She could tow us. Let's see. Let's do some rubbernecking here. We've got to slow down because there's some action. Yeah, first of all, slow down for the officer.

Get some better MPH. Dang, man. Very intriguing story. A couple of corrections. Doves in Iowa. We had a lot of corrections and stuffves in Iowa, we had someone, a lot of corrections and stuff that I screwed up

and other people screwed up that I kind of want to get to. Doves, Iowa's had, we were talking the other day about how Iowa for a long time didn't have a Dove season and we were wondering

if they had gotten themselves a Dove season going and someone said, you know, Idaho's had a, sorry, Iowa, my bad has had a dove season since 2011. So starting in 2011, Iowa got

their dove season put in place and they've been having great they've been having great duck hunts since then. Barring a bunch of emotionally charged reactions to the legalization. I'm so distracted by the law enforcement action.

That's a correction. We question whether they ever got it. They've had it. They've had it for over a decade. Here's another one. This is one I caught someone said and for whatever reason I didn't feel like jumping on them. A guest said this and I didn't feel like jumping their case about it but i even knew it was wrong the size of a snake that it's a myth that a small snake has more

it's a myth that it's like getting zapped by a small snake is more deadly more venomous because they like can't control there's like this thing that they can't control how much venom they're giving you. And an older one can control and so getting zapped by a young rattlesnake he can't, she doesn't have a good shut off valve and gives you more venom.

There's nothing to that. That's a wives tale. And I was wrong about that. Another thing you talked about me being wrong about is i we were talking about someone's bringing up if you uh go to change your motor oil and if you pour your used motor oil out in the dirt are you just putting it back where it came from meaning it came out of the earth and so you're just putting it back into the earth where it belongs the answer to that is no.

Yeah, of course not, right? And I made a thing like, if I take rattlesnake venom and put it on your food, am I just putting it back where it belongs because it'll get back into the earth? And someone pointed out that I might be. That's very faulty logic. And he points out that I might be, that's very faulty logic. And he points out that snake venom would most likely not impact a person if ingested.

Now, that might warrant, that's more of a call for expertise. Yeah, don't try that at home. He doesn't say, he's just saying that that logic is faulty, and it's like it's meant to be administered into muscle tissue, right? Right. And that you're ingesting rattlesnake venom, right, whatever. So it would be great if a snake expert, I imagine this would be something that would be right up Heffelfinger. Oh, did you know Heffelfinger got kicked off Instagram?

Did he really? Yeah. Why? You know, he keeps saying he doesn't know why, but I don't know. He does a lot of shooting tournaments. Like, they kick them off for shooting. Legally shooting his gun at a shooting range. I don't understand.

Wow. It's horrible. I think he's trying to find out what happened. I guarantee you, I know who can answer the question. They banned his account. But Heffelfinger, Instagramless Heffelfinger um who knows everything about everything i bet you he can answer to us why uh if if like what is up with ingesting rattlesnake venom clay you know a guy that knows yeah yeah we we need dr chris jenkins from georg Georgia to answer that for us. Incredible herpetologist.

Do you want to hear this? So a guy wrote in, snake size plays almost zero role in how bad a snake bite can be. The largest role in how bad a snake bite is, I'm quoting from the person that wrote in. Very informed gentleman.

The largest role in how bad a snake bite is depends on when the snake last fed. If you are bitten by a snake that fed within the last day, then you get almost no venom. And if the snake hasn't fed in a week or longer, you will get a very nasty bite. That's good to know, man.

Again, I don't know. If we were taking a vote of whether that is always true, I would. Well, you got a herpetologist that's going to come and tell us. Can you get us feedback from the herpetologist? Is that because when they eat? I just don't think that's, well I'm not answering because we're doing corrections. Stuff we got wrong. I need to know because I got a bad snake problem at the 14, Steve.

What's that? I got a bad snake problem at the 14 on a river place. What kind of snakes you got, Dirk? Rattlers. Are they Western Diamondback? Yeah. Like real bad. Really?

So I need to know if I'm feeding them, maybe it's not as bad. If you're feeding them, just turn some rats loose every couple weeks. Here's one for you guys. You guys got to pay careful attention. I'd like this to be like a quick panel discussion. I caught this news story is all over the place, but there's a moose draw in the British Columbia Caribou region. Caribou, not spelled like how we spell Caribou. We spell Caribou C-A-R-I-B-O-U.

This is Caribou, C-A-R-I-B-O-O. So British Columbia's Caribou region. They had a moose draw. Okay? And this guy's party, him and his friends, were very excited to have drawn moose tags in their chosen area. First year they ever went into the lottery.

The BC government had increased tag allotments this year. And they put in and they drew. and he's here these articles these are articles that people have sent me but i haven't heard anybody impact from that recently a couple of articles have come out regarding the indigenous nations of the area so the first people's nations of this particular area in British Columbia,

asking hunters not to come and hunt in that area. Their claim is that the government's population studies are incorrect and the tag amount should not have been increased this season and there's not enough for them to hunt and other people to hunt too. However, he goes on to say, drawing these tags seems like it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience something amazing and grow as hunters ourselves. Having the request to abandon our tags definitely feels like a dampener on the situation. I would be interested to hear your opinions on where the responsibility lies,

whether it falls on the hunter who drew a tag or the government who issued them. I don't even think of it that way. I would think of it this way. Your governmental game management agency is the law of the land. Yep. They issued you a legal tag. If you wish to go, I would go. I would not bow

to any kind of public pressure campaign to make you feel unwelcome in doing something that your government has allotted you the opportunity and way to draw the tag to go moose i would not listen if there's not a suitable population there someone might go like oh they got it all wrong who better to know then it's like let's say they do have it a little let's say let's say they're off a little bit. Whose work do you view? If you view it from a standard, contemporary,

Western, scientific-based principle of game allocation and wildlife counts, who do you think is doing a better job to determine that they're wrong? Nobody. I would go. Absolutely, I would go absolutely i would go yeah well i think the if a person were trying to be super responsible and look at both sides of

it i mean i would want to say where where is where is the the indigenous nation getting its information biological information and say why are your studies different than theirs? Like, where's the credential for this? You know what I'm saying? Well, why do you feel that that – how did it all of a sudden be that we have three miles to empty? Uh-oh. Yeah, three miles to go. That's according to the computer in the car.

We're probably 15 miles. But we're still – We're still into your podcast headset? According to the... Steve, I agree with you. I'm just saying it'd be interesting to see why these people are saying this. Like, what is their reason? I don't think it's because why would they want to deal with more people in their area?

Right, right. Yeah. I mean, we can assume that. Yeah. I mean... If there's a legal play that they're that there's a legal play that they're gonna make i'd make make it in the courts i wouldn't make it with this i like right don't make it with this request to people and like ruin their time yeah yeah and i'm and i'd be very very

uncomfortable with the idea of i'd be very uncomfortable the idea of sorting out in a sort of, like, bring in some kind of, like, historical context into sort of who gets and doesn't get to go hunt in the area and that you're supposed to not only go to your game management agency, but also go and check and make sure it's cool with everybody else before you go hunting. You know what? I bet you there's a lot of people in Canada that wish you didn't hunt at all.

Should you listen to them? If you heard a call, animal rights people have asked hunters to not go hunting, would you be like, oh, I better not go? Of course not. Of course someone doesn't want you to go. We got lucky, boys. We're at the Silver Fox Roadhouse

convenience store where gas is available before Delta Junction. Okay, we're back in a minute, ladies and gentlemen. $8 a gallon. That's a price. 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 on x is now in canada the great features that you love in on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones aerial imagery 24k topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right.

We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light,

Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet.

Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. All right, we're back. Full tank of gas. That was a hell of a gas station. Whoa. Whoa, we're almost tripped. That was a hell of a gas station. Yeah.

So the first thing I knew, I'll tell you the first thing I liked about it is we walked in and I saw that there was a guy putting on a, for youngsters, putting on a trapping seminar. Like you saw a brochure for this? They had a brochure. It was for area youngsters who wanted to earn a little extra jingle um and he was going to talk about uh martin lynx and wolverine wow and then we got to talking with the woman who ran the place and they had a lot of furs for sale they had some interesting taxes there i mean clay talk about you and so clay Clay made a little video. Basically, it was a nice little gas station,

and they had a very strong display of what I would call PDT, public display of taxidermy. And so on the Bear Grylls podcast, we did a whole podcast road trip dedicated to PDT. We went around looking for gas stations that still had taxidermy displayed in them, but this place had a brown bear, a full-body muskox, a full-body bison,

full-body bear, full-body wolverine, had doll sheep, had lots of furs for sale. It was a great store. Great store. Great people. I'd like to hit you with a little detail. Near here, they there used to be a military presence here, but it was heated up for quite a while.

Prior to that, they had introduced bison that actually came out of Montana. They put them on a train in Montana, took them by rail. Can't remember how this went. Like, took them by rail to Seattle, then put them on a ship and sent them by ship to Whittier. And then from Whittier, they went on a train, eventually went on a truck,

and they turned them loose around Delta Junction. Wow. Which is 100 miles away, by the way. And I noticed they had a lot of pictures in there. They had a lot of pictures in there from the Delta hunts. Oh, that's what you were saying. So you can still draw a tag to hunt those bison in Delta Junction. Now, when I did the Copper River buffalo hunt,

what's interesting is that herd, once the military started establishing a stronger presence, they had too many buffalo and they were trying to get rid of some. So they just dumped some here and there. They put some out in this farewell area and they one day put them on a truck and drove a bunch of them out to

a place called the Slana Road at the Slana Mine and turned some 20 of them i can't remember now with how many they turned out and they just did what's called a hot release so if you're doing wildlife releases you'll hear a cold and hot a cold release is where you take animals and bring them to a release site okay let's say you're trying to establish them in some mountain range you know you bring them out there and put them in an enclosure on site and feed them there and get them used to the area okay yeah and then one day you leave the door open okay and they'll they kind of one day oh wow they can wander out but they're already sort of

they feel safe they've been around there. They're more inclined to stay local. A hot release is you just bring something in and you're like, everybody out. Just drop the tailgate. Drop the tailgate. They did a hot release near the salon of mine.

And then they lost track of those animals for a decade. People thought they died, got eaten by wolves, whatever, and eventually they turn up 100 miles away. And that's that copper hunt that I wrote about in my Buffalo book and the Copper river hunt. And you can still apply for those permits today. Wow.

And that's all out of this. So in that gas station, all those, that whole room full of dead buffalo laying in the snow. Yeah. That's all Alaska hunts. Yeah. That's neat. Hell of a gas station. Silver Fox.

Clay, why don't you take over from the bag of the van and tell people a little about what we've been up to and some of your impressions of it. Yeah. And you don't need to go into harrowing detail, but just, yeah, what what you think about that we've so we have been in Alaska on a 10-day Alaskan Yukon moose hunt there's a moose right there close the road there's a moose crossing the road cow-calf unit oh it'd be bad

coming through that windshield Wow ooh we got a cow and a calf we got a guy stopped in the road. He was flashing his breakers for us. Big bull coming across the road. Big old bull should come out running across the road. Wow. So we've been in Alaska for 10 days. We just...

No, longer. Well, we've been in Alaska for... Let me bring that bull out. 12 days. And... Yeah, we've been listening to that for 12 days. Yeah, we've been listening to that for 12 days. It's a good call. That's not the Meg. They'll bring them out. So this was a true wilderness hunt. Not wilderness with a capital W, wilderness with a lowercase w. We flew back and uh were dropped in an area that was known to have moose it's not a guided hunt so it's a do-it-yourself hunt steve ranella and i both had tags

in our pockets um and i have actually had you saying deltas 100 miles well the, you're saying Delta's 100 miles away. I don't know what the hell you're talking about. Fairbanks is. Yeah. Fairbanks is 100 miles away. My mistake. I'm going to say that I've not moose hunted, though I have had an Alaska moose tag before once while I was on a brown bear hunt. I had a moose tag. But so we were drop camp, dropped out. We backcountry camp camp for 10 days we would wake up every day walk out to different calling points on the mountain this you hunt these moose during the

moose rut and so you're trying to sound like a cow moose call these moose in steve is an experienced moose hunter has been on lots of wow i mean you've you've been on lots of hunts i've been on like i've been on a number of moose kills over the year been on moose hunts but i have a lot to learn so basically you're you're put into an area and the challenges that you're running into when you're moose hunting is that you cannot realistically transport that moose much more than a mile from your camp and that could be broken i mean that depends a lot on yeah there's a lot of variables but in general most people you you're trying because you you've got to haul this potentially 1,500-pound animal back to your camp, back to whatever your transport is.

So whether you're hunting on a river. We were hunting in a flying area, so we would have to get all this moose meat back to an airstrip. Can I chime in for a minute? Yeah. I don't even need to ask, really. I'll just do it. I quickly want to touch on this this moose packing situation steve that's because you got you got a bunch of camera guys willing to carry meat they're not willing you gotta you gotta cajole them into it no i'm willing i'm always i like you guys are

stoked about it but i don't know about three miles i will you haven't heard what i'm gonna say do i need to stop this van all about three miles. You haven't heard what I'm going to say. Do I need to stop this van? Who's driving? Wait a minute. Do I need to stop this van and come back there? Hey, stop the van. Let me tell you something. I just want to tell you, the most

I've moved one is we moved to bowl three miles, but that was five people. And it was downhill. Oh, okay. That's an important detail. And it wasn't like bad downhill. It was like nice, not like a 45-degree incline, which would be misery.

Yeah. It was like a downhill. Gentle slope. So it really matters in terms of walking conditions. But a lot of times moose are in really boggy areas or you're out on tussocks, like Tussocky Tundra. And oh, it can be horrible. Walking on tundra is very tough. in general moose hunting circles if you went out and found a hundred good moose seasoned moose hunters i would say that uh you would probably find a general consensus of people that are they're willing to move them maybe about a mile or so but no one's gonna like it right i have a friend that used to guide moose and sheep

he is hard think of how hard hunting doll sheep is the miles you got to put on you're walking 10 miles 15 miles a day it's like it's it's brutal he quit moose hunting because he said and i'll quote him he said i am never gonna move one of those swamp donkeys again and he said, and I'll quote him, he said, I am never going to move one of those swamp donkeys again. And he said to me, every hunter you book is all about how he's going to help you pack that moose because every single time they make a half trip and you take six and a half loads. Was that buck? No. So I just wanted to give a little context.

Just put a little extra meat on the bone in terms of moose packing. That's a real consideration that was new to me when you're hunting an animal this big the first thing you said when you beheld one is you said that is bigger than my mule yeah yeah hey for real the so well we're cutting to the chase no no no they don't know i'm talking about we could have found one okay well i want to come back to that if i went dead in the bushes well i'll come back to that hurricane but so so basically for for 10 days steve and i hunted we would sometimes hunt together sometimes we split up and went to different calling points and you're trying to hit the moose rut when the moose are responsive to cow calls and to raking. Essentially, there's two types of calls that you're doing.

You're raking with basically to sound like a bull raking his horns. A plastic. Can I butt in? Yep. You're right. I have seen people rake with canoe paddles. I've seen people rake with a fiberglass bullhorn. I've seen people rake with a fiberglass bullhorn. I've seen people rake with a caribou antler.

I've seen people rake with a dried moose scapula. But never have I raked with something I like as much as an empty one-quart motor oil plastic motor oil can with the bottom cut off. I don't know how I feel about it. It works. So what Steve did was, and he was shown this by a gentleman that we met. Well, a bush pilot who doesn't like heavy stuff in his plane. I was walking around with a hunk of plywood. He's like, what the hell are you doing with that? who doesn't like heavy stuff in his plane i was walking around the hunk of plywood he's like the hell you doing that he didn't want that

thing in his plane yeah my little scrap he took a pocket knife and cut the the the bottom off of a like a valvoline oil can or not can oil bottle and then steve stuck about an eight inch sapling into the the nozzle and basically had an oil an oil bottle with a handle and you would use that to rake and it sat that that oil bottle sounds like the horns yeah the horns of a of a moose raking against the trees and what we learned over the week there's three moose really oh yeah i'll be done when you guys made it we only had windows in the back of this van we don't have windows back here we'll tell you about it but so you're calling your your female moose calling and you're raking and basically that's what we did for 10 days.

And we had very little response to our calling for much of our time. And it's been told to us, and what we saw was that the rut was an odd display in terms of timing of when things really started kicking off. And we were seeing plenty of bulls. We were seeing some good bulls. We were seeing some good bulls. They weren't responding to our calls. And a lot of people would say, well, why didn't you just go to them? Steve, do you want to talk to them about why you wouldn't just go to a bull that would be in a place that we would see?

Because when I message in reached a few people back home, I said, man, we've been watching a bull a mile away. And their first response was, go get them. Of course. That's what I'd tell them. I'd be like, what are you guys, lazy? Yeah. Are you babies?

But why couldn't we do that? You're dealing in, if you're not familiar with hunting in Alaska, well, let me start this out by saying, I'll put it this way. My brother Danny lives in Alaska. And whenever he comes down to hang around in Montana, he's always just blown away by walking around in dry grasslands. And he'll threaten to move down to Montana or Wyoming now and then as he puts it to just get a break from the wet ass

brush. You're dealing in there's a very low in interior Alaska. This is not an area where I'm an expert, but I've just been around quite a bit. For someone who doesn't live here, I've been around, like, I've had a great fortune to experience a lot of parts of the state. In the interior, there's very low biodiversity.

I was explaining to this, I think, this morning or yesterday or something. Where you can learn, like, six trees and shrubs and seem like a vegetation master because you got there are many species of willow but you got willow you got dwarf birch you got aspen right alder you got alder okay um and you got you know like a you got high bush and low bush, blueberry, cranberry. But you have a lot of shrub. And then you got spruce stands. But the shrubs that are here, the willow, the dwarf birch, the young aspen, particularly something that comes in after a burn, is just thick.

And you always look at it. If you're flying over the country eyes like oh i'm gonna run over there and run down there and go through that until you get in it a lot of times from the area you're like what it must be like waist deep you're thinking right it's probably waist deep that's what it looks like it's not man you it's it's it's 8 feet high. It's 10 feet high. It's 12 feet high. And for a lot of it, you're walking through it and parting it with your hands. Yeah, you're making it. You're walking.

It's like you're doing the breaststroke. Yeah. You're going. Your hands are out. You spread. You walk through. Your hands are out. You spread.

You walk through. But there's topography here where we're at. It's not steep. There's some steep parts, but there's topography. There's hills. And there are little open pockets in the brush here and there. Maybe there's a little area that's predominantly blueberry, and it is knee high. But this is like a little half-acre opening.

And there's a hill. So you're on one side of a valley looking across the valley and there and some little gap in the vegetation like oh there's one okay and then you'll sit and look back in that spot for the next three days and never ever find that thing again yeah and the thing is you're gonna go over there but the thing is, you're going to go over there, but the thing is, you can't, like, you quite literally, I mean, you just get lost in it. And we'll have a story to back up how bad it is. Yes, that was a good story. You just get lost in it. Two, because the probability of success, and not everywhere, there's a lot of places you can hunt moose up in the alpine

where it's it's mostly knee high mostly waist high vegetation and you can actually make a play on animals but in this area it just with the brush you can't here's the other thing doing a stalk on one or an approach on one you have a pretty low probability of success because it's so hard to navigate and hard to find anything and even if you do get up on it you're in eight foot tall stuff right so you could let okay let's say it all works out and he and you call you get to into his area you get 200 yards away you call him in he comes into 30 yards you know what you've never seen him you've never seen him um and so it's like oh great congratulations you called the bull and never even saw it yeah so low probability success but you go in there and you're going to be spooking moose you didn't know were there because all the time you're like oh there's a moose then you never

see it again yeah all day you stay right in that same spot can't find them they're just in there and you don't know they're there so you go in you're going to spook a bunch of moose you're going to leave scent all over and what your strategy is you're operating out of an area where you're up high and you're in lower like you're you're hunting purposefully in a low in a low vegetation area because your long-term plan is you're going to call them out of all that thick shit up where you can see them, up into your opening. If you go down there rummaging around all the time,

you're spooking them and you're leaving scent everywhere and you're doing things that aren't going to work out and then by doing things that don't work out, you're just going to be pushing more moose away and making the thing that you're actually trying to do, which is call the bull up out of the stuff, you're making it harder. This is the rule everybody gives you.

Everybody you ask who hunts this way in these kind of areas, like, here's my tip. Don't move. Don't walk around. I got a friend. Their spot, they called it Prison Ridge because his friends are like, he won't let us even move. Yeah.

We got to sit against the same tree for 10 days. And they told us, they said, trust the process. Trust the process. And the process is you call, you rake and the way i described it steve was when you call a white-tailed deer or you call a duck or you call an elk you're looking to get for the most part an immediate response and you you see that animal you hear a vocal response from that animal and you get a read on it moose hunting sometimes you're making calls that may be responded to two or three days from now. Yeah.

I mean, because a moose could hear you and be so far away. They have such incredible hearing. And we saw that with our own eyes. We saw their hearing with our own eyes. And I'll explain that this week so many times because these moose would be a mile away. Two miles. 100% a mile away. They would turn and look.

They would turn and look at us when we called at them. We have an episode where we called in one from about three miles away. Incredible. Yeah. It took three days, though, too. But the thing with these moose is they're like these lazy. No, that bull took a morning. We watched him come the whole way.

Oh, I was thinking Yanni Sr. No, that took, yeah. A couple days. Yeah, he just showed up one day. Yeah. When a moose isn't fired up, which we saw a lot this trip, we'd see him stand up. We'd see him feed 30 yards, and then they'd lay down. And you'd watch them all day, and some of them moved 200 yards.

What was Clay saying? Oh, I'm just a moose out here. Oh, me and Dirk, we had some observations. Yeah, we saw some lazy moose. We were kind of putting some words to their lives. But, no, so we'll go ahead, Chester. What were you going to say? Well, I was just saying you were talking about how you're expecting to, you know,

they might come in a day later, and I just wanted to point out, like, if they're not fired up and rutting like that one that Steve called from three miles away over a day later and i've just wanted to point out like if they're not fired up and rutting like that one that steve called from three miles away over a whole over a day right they're moving slow and we saw a lot of slow moves yeah once dirt and i saw a moose basically stay at a hundred square yard area for a full day like from daylight pretty much till dark and hearing your call occasionally yeah look up. Like I said, I'm very much a moose novice, but I had someone who was very

much a moose expert. He used to guide and was very successful at moose hunting. Still active now. He was putting I don't care about those ones. They don't exist to me. He's looking for a hot one.

I'm looking for the right bull in the right mood. There's a lot of bulls that aren't in the right mood for me, and I don't care. If he doesn't play the game, he lives. He's like, if I'm watching the moves two miles away and he doesn't care, I don't care about him. I'm here for the big one that wants to play. Yeah. And that's why I'm here 10 days.

But it's hard when you sit there for nine days. Yeah, so we sat for nine days and could not find a moose that really wanted to play. A couple of times we made some stalks on moose where... They were kind of playing a little bit. They would come to you 100 yards and you'd have to go to them 1,000 yards. A fired-up bull will walk.

They have a very plodding, deliberate walk, but they'll start swinging their head. They kind of swing it to the rhythm of how their feet strike. As his right front goes forward, his head swings right. He's just doing this big head sway like a display. And he'll be going, hmm, hmm,

hmm. We one time, it wasn't until yesterday that we got one to sway his head maybe twice. Yeah. Yeah. And then walked our direction. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But he does it. He's swaying his head. And then walked our direction. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But he,

I was like, he's swaying his head. It's turned on. And he just walks off. Yeah. Eating willows. And after that, the whole group morale was just frustrating. In the dumps.

You guys trust the process for the first, what, five days? Dude, I trust the process. I trust it. You do. But how did it break down?

It broke down a little bit. Sure. I trusted the process. I put immense faith in the process. Keep telling the story, Clay. Well, we... It's a challenging hunt because you feel like you need to be doing something. If you're elk hunting,

you're pounding the mountains, calling, you're moving, you're doing stuff. You're bringing it to them. You're trying to go to new areas. When you're moose hunting, you're locked. Like this guy said, you're locked in a prison. You're trying to call these bulls to you. And what we learned is that it's kind of a combination that we found success in was you got to go to them a little bit,

but you still got to call them into you well there's peculiar i want to point out just there's peculiarities of of a fly-in drop-off hunt right if you're doing a river trip for moose you can call a new place every day right so you're kind of like trying new stuff right it doesn't make any sense to go call for a half hour yeah but you can be like, let's do a six-hour set and then next day, next day, next day. If you're hunting out of Argos or ATVs, right? Let's try here.

We'll try there. We'll try there. We'll spend a day calling here. You know, whatever. If you just get dropped on an isolated airstrip somewhere and you have no way to move, you can't move from the simple fact that you can't go have a spike camp three miles away

because of how you can get that moose back to the airstrip. Right. So that kind of feeds the process. It's like you're by sort of fact constrained. Right. And have to deal with that. So how best do you play that situation? You play it by being very

gentle on your spot because you got a spot. Right. And you call over long periods of time. And long story short, the ninth,

the tenth day. The tenth day. It went into actual ending. We'll start with the first story from that morning, Steve, is that we had split up that morning. I went to a spot, saw the team with me. We spotted a bull and spotted two bulls. Steve came over, and we got Steve, brought him over, and we watched these two bulls with two cows, called to a bull.

He looked at us, turned and went the other way. We watched the bull bed. Shook his head in a promising fashion. Looked promising. A little sway. We watched a bull bed. Oh, you better tell everybody what a legal bull is. Okay, so the other constraint in all the regulations for legal bulls would be different in different places,

but we were hunting in an area that for non-residents of Alaska, we had to shoot a bull that met one of two requirements, which would be either 50 inches wide, which would be the widest point of that rack, or have four brow tines, which you'd have to look up what the brow tine- On one side. On one side. And so you'd have to look up what a brow tine of a bull is,

but it's pretty simple. So he had to be 50 inches wide or have four brow tines on one side, which we found was a pretty tall order because we saw a lot of immature bulls. And to someone who didn't know moose hunting, man, you'd see a 45-inch bull out there. He'd look like a giant. And not all 50-inch bulls have four brow tines.

And not all four brow tine bulls are 50 inches. But in all honesty, there's a loose correlation. Yeah. You know, if someone tells you they killed like a 60-inch bull and you look at a picture, I'm guessing it's going to be four, five, six. But then some guy will kill a 60-inch bull with two brow tines. Right. But generally, the bigger they get, the more brow tines they throw.

And it's very difficult to judge a moose based upon its spread, and it's a serious game violation. If we had shot a moose that was 49 inches wide, that's like a major violation. I mean, you're getting your animal confiscated. You're getting citations. So they take that stuff real serious. And so Steve coached me on spread,

but pretty much we decided we were only going to shoot bulls based off of four brow tines because that is very easy to distinguish. Unless the bull's just ridiculous. Yep. And there's certain ways that the antlers, some moose antlers, the paddles go up and are really vertical. Some moose antlers, the paddles lay flat and are really vertical some moose antlers the paddles lay flat yeah guy you know there's a thing that eyeball to eyeball they're 10 inches right so you could look and

you'd be okay i got 10 inches then you gotta imagine that on the outside of that you got that spread twice more on both sides on each side each side. Be like, okay, you might do that. And then people got all kinds of stuff like if he turns his head, how does his antler tip pass over his hump. What else we hear? A guy saying like 30 years. When the erect ears of a bull that's facing you, a full-grown moose has ears that are 30 inches,

and his ears are 9 inches long. 9 to 10 inches long. All kinds of little things. But as my brother Danny put it to me, when doing these things, leave some wiggle room. Meaning it's got to be just ridiculous. Like a ridiculous bull. Or for sure for brow times yeah yeah it's it's very shooting them off brow times is real comfortable shooting them off with

it's sketchy it's dicey you know uh steve i read an article in bowhunter magazine one time um where the editor of bowhunter misjudged a bull i mean he wrote this article it was a good article where he misjudged a bull and it was like 49 inches and he had to turn himself in this was a this was a good stand up dude yeah yeah anyway he wrote about it it sounded heart it sounded really bad man they all look big man they do they do so we split we that moose shook his head this is the last day i got all excited started yelling at everybody whisper yelling yeah yeah yeah and i said maybe i think it was at that point or maybe it was a little earlier that day or the night before i said steve there's gotta be a point when we just got to kind of say it's too late to shoot a moose

because how are we going to get him out? Because the way this works is – go ahead. I'm sorry. And he said, I will figure it out. That's what I say when people are saying annoying stuff to me. I'll just be like, I will figure it out. Yeah, but Steve but to my defense i i've never done this before and now i have doing it i would would have a little bit different

opinion well because what happens is on these hunts you have to schedule when you leave yeah and so we knew we had to leave on saturday morning and so on friday after like friday late morning we see this bull bed we. We spook one from our calling. We see one bed. I don't think that's what happened. Well, he was. That's before two things. There's two bulls together.

We kind of lost track of one. Took one's temperature with some calling. He shook his head two, three times and then fed his way away from us. We're like, did we play it too hot? Did he wind us? Yeah, wind was bad. Because we'd lost track of the one bull. Later,

a while later, we realized the other bull is right there. I think that bull had got whooped by that bull or wasn't getting anywhere with those cows. And then we asked the moose expert, if you spook a bull and he wins you, will he walk away feeding on Willow? He's like, no, he's just going to be getting out of there. He's not going to feed his way out of there.

I think that bull came in, checked out those cows. They were the bull. The bull's giving them no quarter. And he moseyed. I know you don't think that. No, no, I do. No, no, I 100% do. I just meant our Colin pushed him away.

That's all I'm saying. Our Colin pushed him away for whatever reason. And so it's late in the morning, the last day. Plane's coming tomorrow morning. It's 11 o'clock in the day, and we all of a sudden regain sight of a big bedded bull that is not brow tie and legal but we believe have reason to believe he's potentially over 50 and we dive bomb in that bull is not bedded bull was standing and we go into the brush, go into thick brush, go on to try to find this bull.

We know it's going to be a tall order because you get inside there and you can't see. You're trying to find an opening where you could shoot. And we always had elevation on these bulls because we're up on a ridge and so you can kind of see down into the jungle. Well, when you get in the jungle, you can't see very far. Imagine a tick on your dog's back. Wading through the hair.

Two ticks. That's me and Clay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm going to get to the good part of this story, which was we know where the bull was when we left. It took us probably 30 minutes to get to our new vantage point. We had to take a cockeyed route because of the wind.

Yeah, and these moose don't move much, so we assume that he's going to be right where we left him. We get into the dog hair thick willows and aspen. We can't see, can't see, moving, moving, moving, making noise, winds blowing, and we come to what I believe is probably within gun range of where the bull was. You know, we're inside of 400 yards and there's a spruce about as big as dirt's calf. And, uh, and I say like the brush is high. I say, Hey, I'm going to climb up that spruce and see if I can see down into the draw where the bull was just so we can get a bead and

see if he's still there. So I shimmy up a little spruce about probably eight feet, just enough to get me over the top of the willows. I thought you were going to bend it for sure. It was, yeah, it wasn't the best tree, but it was the only tree. And I'm looking down to where the bull was and he's not there. He's gone. And so I stay up there for probably a minute or two and I'm looking down to where the bull was, and he's not there. He's gone. I stay up there for probably a minute or two, and I'm looking, looking. Finally, I turn to the guys and say, I don't see the bull. I think he's gone. I think we've spooked him.

I think he's left. Then I'm looking out 400 yards. I draw my gaze in, and all of a sudden, I see the bull bulldozing through the willows at 50 yards probably. Coming to the noise of us busting all that brush. He heard us coming down the mountain. And again, going back to the idea that breaking brush is a communication method with these moose. They hear it. They know it. And he was coming to fight us. breaking brush is a communication method with these moose. They hear it. They know it.

And he was coming to fight us. He thought we were another moose coming into his territory. Well, there was, so I was watching this from above. Yeah. There was a cow, too, that had moseyed in the right direction of where you guys were, and he was actually on her tail following her. And I think that brought him in close enough where he was like, now he can hear what he thinks is another ball, and that actually helped. Because he was thrashing, brushing.

Yeah. And so I go, oh, he's right there. He's 50 yards, 50 yards. And I actually was – my instinct was to stay in the tree, Steve. I was going to just stay in the tree and let you shoot him. Because you were scared. I thought he was just going to walk right up. And Steve was like, well, get out from the tree.

And so I come down. The moose keeps coming. And by this time, the wind, I mean, this time he's probably inside of, was he 30 yards, 40 yards? Oh, yeah, I'm just right there. Couldn't see him, but you can see the trees he's knocking over. And the wind just swirled when he was that close. And the moose spooks. And the way you the the moose spooks and the way you know a

moose spooks is you never see him again things are hot he's coming in you see the brush moving and it is incredible of all the hunting that i've ever done in my life i would say that watching a bull moose wade through the willows bobbing his head like that 30 yards from you intentionally making noise is one of the most i'm not gonna i don't know if it's intimidating or exhilarating his head his head's tall in your head yeah it's like jurassic park it's like a 17 hand mule with big antlers coming at you and uh so we spooked that bull but he responded to us we learned a little bit the hunt is over man we've been doing this for nine and a half days it's now noon yeah steve raised down in the middle of the willow brush and takes a nap he's so frustrated

like we don't even walk back i throw up the orange flag up on the tree. Yeah, we had a signaling system back to the people on the hill. All is lost. And literally, we're like, man, this has been fun, but we have been beat to the pulp by these moose. And we go back up the hill. And I make a pot of percolator coffee. Oh. We go back to our camp. And I remember being in the tent with the guys

the camera crew because we filmed this you'll be able to see this on uh can we tell them where it's going to be i already did weren't you paying attention the intro did you season 11 we're gonna it'll it'll do this yeah so this window yeah we'll be on meat eater season 11 which you can find on the meteor.com and we were in tent, and the guys asked me, they said, hey, have you talked to Steve? Do you even think we're going out? And I said, I doubt we're even going to go out. Like, I mean, I thought we might go for a little walk,

but we really didn't have time to kill him. And it was raining. I mean, everything was saying game over, boys. Yeah, because we had been doing this for so long. And it was raining. I mean, everything was saying, game over, boys. Yeah, because we had been doing this for so long. Well, at 416, after Steve had given Chester quite a bit of input about his live show in Atlanta, Steve says, hey, I want to go walk up to the Porcupine, which is the head of a big holla that we named the porcupine.

And I said, well, I'll go with you. And so when I went, then it caused the producer of our show to go, well, the camera guys should go too. And so Dirt and Lauren pack up their camera gear and they come with us. Willingly and joyfully. And Sam and I grab a.22 and go chase ptarmigan. I had just indulged in some wonderful beef stroganoff peak instant meal thinking, this is my dinner.

And this is where the story gets good can i one little nuanced thing because we all acknowledge we did it everyone left their most of their shit in there or most of their stuff in their tent it's like i light my load up this is gonna just be a sunset like reflection walk yeah i did the opposite i wore my my slippers for camp and uh loaded up the lenses i hadn't used for a while thinking oh yeah we're going to the porcupine we're going to sit there some mackerel get some time lapses finish this deal out yeah well i mean what we're talking about is only like a few hundred yards from our camp but it's just a way to call into a valley yeah so we go for a while because we got like two valleys that kind of head up off our ridge.

And we're going to go call the valley where not a lot happens. Yeah. The porcupine is not the place you wanted to go. We looked into that valley for nine days and have only seen a couple of cows. Yeah. Grizzly bear. We went there just because we hadn't been there in a few days. Yeah.

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Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Can I tee this up for you? Yeah. So, we're walking on a ridge, Sam and I, shooting ptarmigan. We're shooting at them and talking loud. And we're

walking along and we come to a chair, Lauren's glass and chair, and no one's sitting there. Hmm. What happened? So what happened there? So we were sitting there glassing, and we were actually probably looking for a bear

that we had seen on the side of this hill a few days before. Not even to hunt it necessarily, just to look. Yeah, we just knew there was a bear on this side of the hill eating blueberries. And Lauren all of a sudden says... Oh, wait, I've seen the article. Okay. Yeah, Garrett had it far off. Dirt saw a moose that had to have been four miles away.

Cooking. Going across an open barren tundra such that when Steve pulled up his binos and looked at it, he said, that's an Argo. That thing is moving so fast. That is an ATV or an Argo. And it was just buzzing across the landscape. And Steve pulls up the spotter, and it's a bull. And he is moving.

And Steve said, that bull you could call in. That bull's cruising. That's what we've been looking for. These bulls just lounging around, not responding to calls. We need bulls that are moving, that are serious about the rut. So we see what we call the Argo bull. Within minutes, Loren says, there's a bull. Or he says, there's a moose down in the valley below us.

And it disappears into the willows. He wasn't even sure it was a moose, it was a moose we start looking directly we see a small probably two-year-old moose come out and we were just all pretty surprised hadn't seen moose there we say oh my there's a moose let's call at him so we called the moose and directly we see a bigger moose a mile away. Well, 1,247 yards away. So not quite a mile. In play a couple days prior, we were thinking up until that point. Right.

Say that again? What? That distance. Yeah, that distance. Maybe an hour prior, we were thinking there was no play. Right. There's not going to be an opportunity. I mean, we're...

That's not what I thought. We've now got two hours of daylight left. Dude, that was rare. Oh, no, no, no, wait. I don't want to be misunderstood. No, I'm saying we were raring to go. There was no doubt about going. Oh, no, no, I'm saying at camp, though.

At camp, before we went out. Oh, we thought we were raring to go. There was no doubt about going. Oh, no, no. I'm saying at camp, though. At camp, before we went out. Oh, we thought we were just done. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, sure. Yeah. No, I knew game on when we stopped. So we finally see a legal bull because the young bull wouldn't be legal.

He wouldn't be 50 inches or have four brow times. We see a big, huge paddle sticking out 1,247 yards away. And we call at it. Put a spot and scope on it. And I was like, plenty of route times. Legal bull. And so Steve and I look at each other and basically are like, let's go. Nothing to lose.

We've got nothing to lose. It's the last two, three hours of the season. The season ends today, not just for us, but moose season in this zone. We're going to go down shooting. So we barrel off the ridge. We know we've got to close the distance. We think if we can get inside this bull's bubble, he might respond. But we're going into thick willows,

so we know that we're going to lose visibility of him. It's going to be difficult. And we probably gained 300 yards on him. Steve calls. to be difficult and we probably gained 300 yards on him steve calls but what you forgot to mention when we put eyes on that bull as far away as he was and they can hear for miles as far away as he was you couldn't ignore the fact that he was holding stock still with his head pointing in our direction. Not budging. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He was interested because we had been calling at that little bull to see what his response would be. Right. And there was reason to believe that he was like, huh, what do I hear? Yeah. Not for sure because there's plenty of moose that are looking at you and it's coincidence.

But he was looking our way. Yeah. Yeah. So we dive off the mountain, and I know what we were all thinking, is that every step we go down this mountain, we've got to go back up it. But, man, this is the last chance we've got and we get we gain probably 300 yards on the bull steve climbs up a spruce about probably 10 12 feet to get vantage to look down into the willows and we're expecting if the bull has responded to our call to see him

coming through the willows because we've got a little bit of elevation on him and sometimes and he's in the hole and he's in an open creek bottom yeah and you can see their horns on a big bull sticking up out of some of this stuff and we see nothing and steve's tree climbing days paid off because he zipped up that sucker yeah i'll point out that was a dead tree too that's particularly perilous yeah yeah i was seeing a man this could go bad before well he was raking and breaking stuff on purpose on the way up the tree because we were he was calling to that bull while he was going up breaking limbs stomping limbs and uh basically after about 15 minutes I kind of look at Steve and shrug my shoulders and just like, I don't know. I guess he's not responding. And then Lauren goes.

Okay. There's more to the story. Okay. I was about to get credit or something. You'll get your credit, buddy. I could see the one thing I could see real clear was out past where he was. Right. And I'm up in my tree.

Is that a moose in the road? No. Sorry, it's right at the roadside. I'm a little jumpy. So, there's an important part here. Yeah, yeah. He's standing by a little little spruce patch an island spruce patch yeah and oddly everything beyond that is was burned off and not grown up good i know that he hasn't gone left right or away from us right because if he did i would see him yeah yeah from the tree i'm like i could tell you if you divide the world into like

into like directions coming off that thing whatever the hell north south east west i was like he didn't go south let's say we're to the north he didn't go south he didn't go west he didn't go east because that's the three places i could tell if he went there yeah and he wasn't any of those places and our direction was thick willow so if he came our direction potentially we wouldn't so i'm like i don't know i don't know what happened but i can tell you where he didn't go he didn't go in any of the bad directions. Right. And we got down, and I started heading downhill, trying to find an opening. We got to an opening. And then, not even heat praise on Lauren. Lauren says, hey, I just heard some brush cracking over to the left

kind of to the east and uh sure enough steve says i thought i heard something too now i'm half deaf so i i didn't hear it at first and sure enough it we hear a distinct crack again that we know is not just a tree falling and we know there is a bull moose coming in. So Steve and I gather up. And he's come halfway up that hill. Yeah. He's come 1,200 yards, or this bull has, in a matter of probably 15 minutes. All the while, you guys have been calling and raking.

We've been calling and raking. And he was coming to meet us. Yeah. We didn't know it. And sove and i crouched behind the log and all of a sudden we see the brush splitting and we see the treetop swaying and man i'll go back to i've been in a lot i mean killing white-tailed deer killing gob goblin turkeys, killing bears. Man, I don't know that much compares with seeing a big bull moose wading through stuff coming to you. Yeah, just the top swaying, like something big is coming.

You're just knocking huge trees and shaking them. And he's coming for you, and you're going to have to. It's like there's a gorilla coming. Yeah. And then. I's a gorilla coming. Yeah. I always think Jurassic Park. You guys remember that? The velociraptors coming in. Yeah. Just parting all the... I was thinking the dinosaurs coming. Well,

we see a bull. We see his shape through the trees. And we're raking. I started grunting a little bit. And Steve and I both have a tag, and I know that Steve wants to kill a big bull moose and has been on many trips. And I will say this of Steve Rinella,

is that he is always letting other people shoot stuff that he's on hunts with. That's true. Yeah, don't tell that to Ryan Callahan. Well. Except for Cal. Except for Cal. Sorry, Cal. So this bull's coming, and I say, Steve, shoot this bull.

And he says, no, you shoot the bull. And I said, if it's a big bull, you shoot the bull. And then directly, a small bull appears 20 yards from us. I stepped it off today, and it was under 20 yards. Really? Where that little guy came in. 19 yards. And a young, immature bull steps out, and I go, man, it's not legal.

I can see it better than Steve just because of where I'm at. And Steve goes, I can't believe it's that small bull. And so it's fun that we're 20 yards from a bull that came in. Our hearts are racing. But it's a bummer that it's a small one. Well, the bull's standing still. And kind of directly behind him, you can still see the brush cracking and moving back behind him and i don't know who if it was lauren or dirt or who but people said there's there's

another bull coming i think steve heard it too yeah i hear him back there right now and and so we know that this one has got to be the big bull that we saw. And so we're crouched behind a log, and I say, Steve, it's a big bull. You shoot it. And he says, no, Clay, you shoot the bull. And so I say, okay. And me and Dirt jump up and move about 10 feet behind a spruce stump that had uprooted, and it was a perfect cover. I laid my gun right in the Y, and, man, here comes this,

what to me is a giant bull moose. Still very dense. Like, what visibility is like 15, 20? Yeah, you couldn't see very far. And so now there's a 30-inch bull moose, and then this giant, what to me is a giant bull moose, 20 yards from us. I've got the gun up.

He comes through an opening, but there's a lot of limbs and i realize that i'm gonna have to shoot through limbs and he he continues to move and gets to 19 yards i shoot through some brush hit him the shoulder moose goes down on his back end shoot him again moose goes down and we got a big bull moose goes down on his back end, shoot him again, moose goes down. And we got a big bull moose on the 10th day. At 630. At 630 in the evening, it gets dark about 8 o'clock. And I heard the two shots from above, and I'm like, I can't believe it. Like, I couldn't believe it. Just the whole week we had been trying so hard.

And then it finally came together on the last day. And I'll say, now this is where I'll get back to what Steve said earlier when I said this thing's bigger than my mule. That moose was about as big as a 17-hand mule in my assessment. Monstrous animals. I mean, just. big as a 17 hand mule in my assessment uh monstrous animals i mean just yeah you can't even especially when they fall on the trees like that i mean you can't even kind of move them no no i mean you just gotta start you skin them up the back and just get get whatever side happens to be facing up skinned off yeah you're not like, roll them on his back and gut them out and not in that kind of cover.

Yeah. So we had airplanes coming at 730 in the morning, and it's 630, and we've got a moose down. But good for us. He was only about 850 yards from the airstrip, but uphill probably 1,000 feet of elevation gain probably. Yeah, I would say. And so we had a good team with us the camera guys chester samantha bates was with us so there were six

how many of six six of us six of us i was impressed with how i mean i was impressed with that hump but also the reaction to the time sensitiveness of, you know. Man, we had that sucker boned out in a couple hours. When that kind of stuff happens, as much as you know how much work it's going to be, it's very exciting at the same time because you're like, we're going to be up until midnight. They had a fire going down there. It's just like a cool moment. Yeah. Yeah.

Living, baby. going down there it's just like a cool moment yeah yeah like my favorite moment of the trip and we're all there boning out the meat and putting it in game bags and pack it out and yeah big old fire i learned a new recipe when you bone out of the shoulder scapula stand the scapula up next to the fire until the meat's all kind of whatever little bits are on there charred a little bit and then you scrape them all off with a knife and eat them i mean you're saying bring salt right oh we didn't have yeah salt would have made it 10 times so the reason you make a fire you make a big fire for it helps for light but also to keep grizzlies away yeah because when you're in alaska and you kill a moose you're immediately a grizzly target so we did a lot of whooping and yelling

and it's it's comforting too when you're out there in the dark just it's nice to warm up and have a fire and another thing so we bag all this meat up and the planes fly it out the next day one of the things that before this trip i'm like how are we gonna get all this meat back usually we throw it in like yeti you know soft-sided yeti coolers and like fly back with it all but you can't really do that with a moose too much we've done it it gets real pricey yeah yeah so we found and hard to deal with so we found a guy who's got a business that revolves around getting people's meat back to the states and he he's it's a alaska trophy express and he he just picks up your meat from

whatever locker that there is it's tim i think his name's tim and he'll pick it up, and he's going to drive it down to Arkansas. So we got frozen game bags. Yeah. He's got the skull. He's got a sweet shed I found, and we'll keep you updated. And he's going to pick it up and bring it down in a refrigerated truck. Yeah. Yeah, so Alaska.

Say the name of it again. Alaska Trophy Express. yeah yeah so alaska alaska say the name alaska trophy express so if you're ever i was very impressed here with the guy on how communicative he he was he talked to me on the phone today i felt i felt very certain that he was going to take care i was very concerned about my antlers i mean it's like dude you're gonna take care of these for me or the whole thing oh yeah you don't want them getting busted. Or just, like, not ever seeing them again. Yeah, get stolen or busted.

Very nice guy. Yeah, Tim was. That's wild. We were talking about getting out there. You go from, you know, flying from Montana and Arkansas to be in out in, I don't know how many miles out into the wild country without any establishment. And the transition is so quick.

You almost can't process where you're at. And I was just thinking it's only 24 hours. We were skinning a bull moose last night. 24 hours ago, we were skinning a bull moose next to a fire in the wilds of inland Alaska. Now we're in a van doing a podcast. Just crossed the river. Just crossed the river.

Yeah. It was a good trip, man. Good trip. I had come to peace with not getting one. Yeah. That stuff bugs me, but it never bugs me. know it bugs me yes yeah it tears me up a little bit but i'd come to peace so i was like man we had a hell of a trip yeah and i thought chester said you think we did it again we would have got one and i'm like yeah because i learned enough where i was like i learned enough

where i think if i could do this over again, we would. It's a lot of work to get up there. It's a big commitment. You're away from family. It is kind of a bummer when you go up there and sit there for nine days. We're there for the entire season.

It's pretty... It's an interesting Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting hunt. To sum it up, it's like bring some books. Yeah. Bring a zero degree bag. I learned that the hard way. Yeah.

You can't. No matter what, you're going to underestimate the cold. Because you're just sitting, man. We're there on some days like 90 100 humidity you know lows in the 30s and you're just sitting sitting sitting sitting it wears on you yeah lauren how far are we away from fairbanks we're getting close now. We're probably another 40 miles away. Not too bad. Good.

All right, ladies and gentlemen. It's getting dark. Sun is setting. Sun is setting. The whole grouse thing didn't happen. Still driving. Closing in on Fairbanks, Alaska. We love you all Nighty night

Hey man Hey man Lucy by Vince Merritt. This story came to us from Vince himself. He submitted it to us through email, and then we had a hard time getting hold of him again after his submission. He wrote back to say quote luckily my lifelong friend and hunting buddy michael is a bit a lot more computer savvy than i

although i have an email account i just recently set it up and had no idea the unbelievable amount of junk emails one can acquire i would much rather talk in person if that's possible unquote you'll see why vince feels that talking is a strong point because he is a vivid somewhat immaculate storyteller his attention to detail Is pretty astonishing I also like how he's able to talk about Shooting himself Without any real self-consciousness Or shame He just takes it as something that's matter of fact My dad

Liked to brag that he got through World War II Without ever getting scratched By a bullet Only to come home and get shot in the foot hunting rabbits. I've heard countless stories of shooting accidents out hunting, but I'd be being dishonest if I didn't admit that some of them are just kind of funnier or they're just so weird and they have this tone to them that when you hear them you kind of want to laugh we all know the story where dick cheney shot his friend in the face while hunting

quail and it should be said that the most common hunting injury like gun related hunting injury is that you get shot by a shotgun a lot of people feel that big game rifles with the requisite blaze orange, that that's where the danger lies. But it's not as bad as shotguns. I recently heard a story from a friend of mine about a very rotund man that he knew who was out hunting rabbits. This guy gets down on his hands and knees to check under a junk car, and any rabbit hunter will know that rabbits like to hide under junked-out cars

for whatever reason, realizes that he can't get back up. He doesn't have that kind of mobility. So he grabs his pump-action 410 shotgun by the barrel to use it sort of like a cane or walking stick. And with this gun as a support manages to get himself back up on his feet but he gets the muzzle of the shotgun under one of his fat rolls and he's kind of lodged on it and can't get himself up and off it so what he decides to do is kick the stock of the shotgun in order to kick it out from under his gut when he kicks it it goes off

and his gut fat absorbs the full force of that 410 load no injury to his internal organs a couple years ago on the meat eater podcast we got kind of wrangled into this discussion about what we call accidental discharges right it's when your gun goes off and you didn't mean it and the marine wrote in to say there's no such thing as an accidental discharge there are only negligent discharges where these stories lose their humor is when you get into fatalities or permanent injuries recently someone recommended to me a book called dying to hunt in montana and a large section of that book is devoted to firearm fatalities many of them self-inflicted accidents. I got a couple pages into that book and had to put it away and never opened it back up again.

It was just too upsetting to imagine those things happening to my friends or particularly to my kids. It's not all a joke. The story you're about to hear could have easily, it almost did, turn into one of those deeply sad and tragic stories. But we all know that this is called Close Calls. So ultimately, it's about triumph. My name is Vince Merritt.

November 5th, it was, of 2005, I was duck hunting in a little lake up in northern California where I live, 10 or 15 minutes away from my house. Me and a couple of buddies of mine were going to go out and jump this lake and see if we could kill any birds. I parked about three quarters of a mile away from where I was going to launch. My little boat got out of the vehicle, and it was cold. We'd had a good storm that weekend.

Left a dusting of snow on the ground, and figured it'd probably push some birds down. I stopped about 100 yards short of the lake. I was just going to drift down the creek, time it so I could hit the lake just at shooting time. A flock of birds came in and sat down right at the mouth of the creek. So foolishly, I loaded my gun up. It was an old A5 Brownie, and it was my dad's gun,

who had just passed away a couple years before this, figuring this was going to be an easy, easy blast. And at this point, I was still waiting for my buddies to show up. One of my buddies was coming over the dam. One was coming from the boat launch, just covering the exits, because that's what these birds do. They'll roost on the lake all night and then at first light they'd take off in all different directions going out of the lake so with like uh two minutes left my buddies i realized

weren't going to make it or they were running late they weren't going to be there at shooting time so i wasn't waiting anymore i had my black lab lucy with me but i really didn't want to take her in the boat being this as small of a boat it was and she had not been in a hunted out of a boat before anyway so i kind of left her on the bank got in the boat i was on my knees and i had the gun alongside me with the barrel pointing up in the air, leaning up against the seat. I grabbed the oar, pushed off the bank with the oar and pushed right into a sandbar and it just stopped the boat just like I'd ran into a brick wall. And when the boat stopped just solid like that, the gun slid down off the bench seat, hit the bottom of the boat,

and went off. Now, I didn't realize at that time that's what happened, because all I remember is hearing a shot and thinking, damn it, somebody shot early, because all the birds, of course, took off as soon as the gun went off. And then I started thinking, how could somebody have shot early? I'm the only one on the lake. But I looked down, and my gun's laying on the bottom of the boat, and there's smoke drifting up out of the barrel.

I realized it was my gun that had went off. And I remember thinking in my head, you dumb SOB. You know, you're so lucky you just didn't shoot yourself. I had a pair of my, what I had on was neoprene hip boots at the time. And then I realized right at the bend of my knee, there was a hole in the waders about as big as a beer can maybe. There's blood trickling out of the waders. And I remember thinking thinking you did shoot yourself

but i couldn't feel any pain whatsoever so the first thing i thought of well it can't be too bad but i better get out of this boat because i figured i'd blown a hole in the boat so i tried to stand up and as soon as i put weight on uh on my bad leg, I flipped over the edge of the boat. My butt hits the bottom of the creek, and I'm in about chest-high deep of water, and my right leg literally just floated up to the top of the creek, I remember, and watching my leg kind of float back and forth in the current, I realized at that time I'd screwed up pretty bad. My leg was at least busted, I knew. I remember telling my dog Lucy right then,

I better make some good decisions from here on out, girl, or I'm going to be in trouble. I had three-quarters of a mile back to my car was one option where I could get back in the boat, attempt to get back in the boat, and go across the lake to my buddy's house. He was the third one that was supposed to show up hunting that morning and didn't. Or I could go to, one side of the lake is a campground and there's year-round hosts that stay at the campground. And I could actually see the big fluorescent light from the campground. It was closer than my car was.

If I get back to the car, I didn't even think I was going to be able to get in and drive it with my right leg being busted up. So I make the decision to head to the campground. I start crawling across the creek and it starts getting over my head immediately. So I kind of swam, dog paddled with my good leg in my arms and my other leg was just kind of dragging behind me crawl out the other side and realized i'd left my shotgun in the boat and i was worried that someone was going to steal my gun if i left it in the boat so my dumb ass crawled back across the creek pulled the gun out and I remember putting the gun butt in the mud and helping myself out of the creek with the gun butt that's when it dawned on me

I probably should unload the gun all the way or I was going to shoot myself a second time I jacked it a couple more times made sure the gun was empty drug myself out of the other side of the creek, and I remember looking back at the creek, and there being blood on both sides of the creek,

just a trail of it heading out to the lake. It was going down in the current. And I was thinking, damn, you're losing quite a bit of blood already. I knew I hadn't hit an artery or anything bad. It wasn't spurting out. But I could see this little hole filling up and draining, filling up and draining right underneath the kneecap

on the inside of the knee. By this time, my dog had swam across the creek and was right alongside me. I'm on my butt, crawling, using my good leg to push me backwards. I'm looking at my leg the whole time and watching it fill up and drain, and I thought, tourniquet, I better get a tourniquet on it. I had my duck calls around my neck. I pulled those off and used the lantern for my duck calls and tied my leg off

and I was thinking I don't know if that's doing any good or not. Start dragging myself again just pushing myself on my butt going backwards crawling towards where I know this campground is but the lake kind of loops around there so I had to had to go around the lake actually it's pretty dense timber gnarly brush that you just you you can't hardly walk through or crawl through I was probably 200 yards away from my boat at this time so it's taken me 45 minutes or an hour to get that far. Pushing myself with my good leg on my butt backwards and then picking up the gun and moving it five feet in front of me and crawling five more feet. I noticed my tourniquet had came off so I took my belt off and tied it around my leg. I don't remember seeing it slow down blood-wise.

I'm feeling pain some, but not like you would expect. So obviously I was in shock because my leg was literally just kind of flopping and dangling. I'd hunted all around that lake, so I know if I get to that trail, I pretty much got a straight shot. I must have found an opening through it. I don't remember exactly how it worked, but I remember I crawled through the Manzanita,

up the little embankment to the trail. It'd probably been an hour since I shot myself, and now I'm pretty beat. I remember I was going to, I'm telling myself I wanted to take a nap at that time. I lead up against a big pine tree, and my dog just starts going nuts. She's just barking, going crazy,

doing circles around me. And I remember yelling at her to shut up because I was trying to take a nap. And she just kept going nuts. I didn't realize it at the time, but she obviously was saving my life then. As long as I'm crawling, she's okay. I stopped a second time,

I don't know, maybe 10 or 15 minutes later. Again, I was getting pretty tired. And again, as soon as I stopped a second time, I don't know, maybe 10 or 15 minutes later. Again, I was getting pretty tired. And again, as soon as I stopped, she just starts going nuts and going crazy. I remember thinking that I wasn't going to make it. On the path, there was no tracks through the snow, because I remember there just being a dust and a snow. So the campground hosts had not been out there lately. I didn't know if they were year-round hosts or what.

I really didn't know for sure if this place had a landline or not. But I knew the cabin was there, so that was my destination. I started crawling again. I remember thinking to my dad, I think I even said this out loud, it looks like I might be coming to join you a little sooner than we thought, Pops. I came to a couple of outbuildings at this time

and it was a big cook shack for when they had huge campouts. They did all the cooking at this shack. They said I threw a rock through the window of the cookhouse, and I assume I was trying to make an alarm go off or something. I really, I don't remember a lot about that. It was probably an hour and a half after I'd shot myself at this point. I didn't have my gun anymore. The realization came to me that I'd left my gun somewhere, probably leaned it up against a tree

when I tried to take a nap I wasn't making very good time, I knew that I knew I was probably pushing it and needed to get to this cabin and get some help during the last, I don't know, 10 or 15 minutes it had dawned on me I should start whistling and maybe I could get somebody's attention so every couple of minutes I would put my fingers

to my mouth and whistle. I could whistle pretty damn loud. And I would yell I need help. If anybody could hear me, I need help. No response. So I just kept crawling. I'd lost my tourniquet, the second tourniquet. My belt didn't have enough loops to tighten it, make it real tight all the way down around my leg.

And apparently it had come off while I was dragging myself because my pants and everything were around my ankles at this point. I'm pretty much pushing myself bare butt down this creek. That's why I decided to make a crutch, see if I could make a crutch and hop. And that didn't work. The crutch snapped. I hit the ground pretty hard.

I remember Camo crawling forward for a little bit at that time on my elbows and one knee, just dragging myself behind me. But that was just way too hard to do. I can see the cabin now. Actually, it was a house. There was like a three-foot-tall cyclone fence all the way around this house.

I crawled down the fence towards the walkway going up to the house, to the gate, and sure enough, there's a padlock. I remember that bumming me out in a couple different ways. For one, I realized it meant more than likely there was nobody at the house. Secondly, it meant I was going to have to go over the fence. I remember whistling again right then praying that there was somebody in the house

that would hear me even though I'm staring at a padlock on this front gate no response my dog can't jump the fence so this is where I lose Lucy she's on the outside of the cyclone fence

I stood on my good leg and went over the top of the cyclone fence. I stood on my good leg and went over the top of the cyclone fence, flopped on the ground, and at that point, I remember being in a lot of pain. I remember hitting the ground on the other side and it really hurt, and I knew at that point

I was really pushing the limits of whether I was going to make it out of this situation alive. And I remember shaking my head thinking how ironic this is going to be that I'm going to end up dying. Being the safety guy I've always been with all my buddies, I'm going to end up dying over this stupid gunshot. I remember thinking I just have too much life to live. I can't, I'm not giving up I crawl up to the front porch and I'm still whistling hoping there was somebody in the house

I didn't know what time it was but I knew in my mind it was still early enough where these people might be sleeping and I checked the front door to see if it was unlocked and it wasn't. Pounded on the door and yelled a couple of times, I need help. They've got a big picture window into the living room. And I remember looking at that thinking, I could probably go through that window.

But the porch extended all the way along the front of the house. And there was another window at the other end of the porch extended all the way along the front of the house, and there was another window at the other end of the porch going into the house, and I could see a telephone in the bedroom. And I remember thinking, okay, they definitely do have landline here. There was furniture, patio furniture, on this front porch. I hop over and picked up one of the chairs and on one leg I spun around and put the chair through the window and shattered out the bedroom window. The bed in the bedroom was close to the wall right there and I remember flipping in backwards into the house trying to land on the bed. What I did actually is miss the bed and fell right down in about a 10 or 12 inch crack in between the bed and the wall.

At that point, I remember a lot of pain. You might say I was all man then because every little bit of it came out of me. I remember screaming at that point. I was in a lot of pain. I crawled around the bed, got up on the chair that had the wheels on it, rolled over to the telephone, picked up the phone, and it was dead. No dial tone. A lot of people up there have summer homes, so they take off and leave for the winter months shut the water off shut the power off and shut their phones off and i assume that's what had happened there was a

computer on the desk and they say i punched in a help me i had no i never used a computer before in my life at that time but they said I used the keypad and punched in help, I need help, a few times. I figured I was a dead man for sure at that point. There was no dial tone on the telephone. There was a note in paper on the desk there.

I was going to write a note basically at that point to let my mom know what happened. I was real close to my mother. I was the baby in the family. I have an older brother and older sister, and I was quite the mom this morning. And I remember thinking, it's just going to devastate her.

So I was going to write out a note and let mom know what happened. Earlier in the crawl quite a bit, I remember thinking, God, I'm thirsty. I wish I had something to drink. So at that point, I thought, well, I'm going to check the refrigerator and see if they got anything to drink. I said, I've always been a beer drinker. And quite frankly, I think I'm going to go out with a beer. See, I'm going to see if they've got a beer in the refrigerator.

So I didn't write the note yet. I'm on the chair with the wheels behind it. So I'm able to push myself with my one leg out of the bedroom. And I was using the walls to push myself out of the hallway. And I remember there looked like there were a bunch of kindergartners admitted their hand painting because there was blood red handprints on all their walls for my hands when I was pushing myself through. So I pushed myself around the little wall into the kitchen, and right next to the refrigerator, there's another telephone. It's blinking 01, like there's a message on the telephone.

And I told myself, don't get your hopes up. The other phone's dead. There's no way there's going to be a dial tone on this phone. So I popped the refrigerator open. There was no beers, unfortunately. But they say I ate a banana and drank a V8, which I don't remember

doing either one of those things. And the time I'm staring at the phone going, you've got to check it. I grabbed the phone, put it up to my ear, and damn, it hung it up. And I was like, wait a minute. And I picked it up again, and there was a dial tone. I remember even putting my finger up and clicking the button a couple of times, just so I wasn't, you know, making stuff up in my mind

at this point. There really was a dial tone. And I couldn't figure out why there wouldn't be a dial tone on one phone, and there would on another one. But I thought you better quit thinking and make a damn call because at this point there's not a lot of blood coming out of my leg and I knew it wasn't good. And obviously it was because I'd lost most of my blood at that time. I remember the emergency operator coming on, and she does the regular routine, what is your medical emergency or whatever she said. And I told her I'd shot myself. I remember unlocking the deadbolt and opening the door,

and I could see out the front door down the driveway to where they had a big gate out front that was locked up. First ambulance pulls in and it stops at the gate. And then another ambulance pulls right in behind it and they're both at the gate. And I'm sitting in this chair and I'm like, okay, they're at the right spot.

Send them in. One announced to me at the time anytime there's a gun involved accident the sheriffs have to be the first one on the scene so you know I had no idea about that at this time and I couldn't figure out why the ambulances weren't coming in it was hard for me to stay conscious at this time. I remember nodding quite a bit, just barely being able to stay awake. And then I saw the second ambulance, the passenger door opens up, and I see the passenger get out of the second ambulance,

goes by the first ambulance, and swings open the gate, and came in and shot down the driveway. And I remember thinking, wow, it's a bad time for an ambulance to break down. They wheeled me out, started getting fluids into me. I hear a couple more cars pull up outside and the sheriffs had pulled up. I remember them putting me in the back of the ambulance. And I remember telling the sheriff, hey, I don't know where my dog is right now,

but somebody needs to find her because that dog saved my life, there's no doubt. The ambulance doors closed. I remember them being in a bang or the back door or something, and one of the sheriffs opened up the back door and told me, hey, Dominic's here and he's got your dog. When the 911 call went out, another friend of mine over the scanner had heard the 911 call, had heard my name and called my house, told my mom, I don't know what's going on, but Vince was shot. My mom knew Dominic was supposed to be hunting with me that morning.

So she called Dominic. When he answered the phone, she said, I don't know what the hell's going on, but Vince has been shot. You need to get to the lake. The next time I remember waking up was in the recovery room. My son was standing over the top of me. I had a sheet pulled up to my waist, and he could see I had both my feet there, and he says, you still got both your legs. He

said, yeah, they made me sign a waiver a while back that said they could take your leg if they needed to to save your life. I remember telling him, boy, you are damn lucky they did not take my leg because I'd have been one pissed off guy at you. The first x-rays I saw that they took, the plastic wand and every BB from that shotgun shell was under my kneecap. They drilled a hole in my femur and put a pin in it and attached my knee to that. 13 surgeries, clean outs, trying to get pellets and everything out of my leg. Dominic, he came in to see me and he said, hey, I already cleared it with the nurses.

Let's go for a walk. And he had brought Lucy with him. So I got to throw a few sticks for her. I vowed then that I would never have another dog not named Lucy. I'm on my third dog since her. She's named Lucy. I'm on my third dog since her. She's named Lucy 3. And I will not have another dog that's not named after that girl. There's no doubt she definitely saved my life that day. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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