The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 510: On Nature and Suffering with Werner Herzog

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

Steven Rinella talks with filmmaker and writer, Werner Herzog. Topics discussed: Werner Herzog’s latest memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All; writing text in your native tongue; “The nets were set the night before”; mattresses stuffed with fern; when the first time you ate an egg was a feast; having no tolerance for the culture of complaint; the value of food as something to be honored; determining how you live but not telling others how to live; taking self responsibility for getting your own food; grabbing trout out of the creek with your bare hands; the people who seem miserable but are happy and dignified in Herzog’s film Happy People; how Timothy Treadwell was undoubtedly a very good outdoorsman; the Disney-ization of nature; how the story behind Grizzly Man stumbled into Werner; the need to protect the privacy of death; surviving a plane crash from 15,000 feet and then knowing how to get by in the jungle; how the birds scream in agony; loving all of your films; when you use a phone for the first time at the age of 17; the afterlife; acting in The Mandalorian and playing a character on The Simpsons; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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First Light. Go farther, stay longer. I want to start this show out by saying this. Meat Eaters American History, The Long Hunters 1761-1775 is out now. When you get to the end of this episode, you're going to hear a long...

I don't want to call it long. You're going to hear a very good explanation of what this project is and why you want to buy it long. You're going to hear a very good explanation of what this project is and why you want to buy it. Just be prepared for that. When you get to the end of the episode, get your credit card out and go to wherever you buy your audiobooks because you're going to be like, damn, I'm buying that.

So get to the end, and I'm going to tell you a lot about it. I'm going to just convince you just how good it is. It's really good. We've been talking about it a long time. This is narrated by me, Steven Rinella and Clay Newcomb from the Bear Grease podcast. And it is a audio original. It's like an audio book that you listen to.

Okay. And it's called Meat Eaters, American History, The Long Hunters, 1761 to 1775. It tells one of the most bloody hair hair-raising stories of hunting in American history. It's out now, but listen to the show. Enjoy the show, but know that at the end of the show that you're about to listen to,

I'm going to give you the sales pitch to end all sales pitches. If you're not convinced, you can listen and be convinced, or you can just know that you'll be convinced and buy it now i don't really care i just want you to get it and start listening because this is one of the things that i've made that i'm most proud of meat eaters american history the long hunters available now and explained in greater detail at the end of the show so stay tuned okay everybody i'm, very excited to announce that I am seated here with the writer and film director, Werner Herzog, who's made over 60 films and documentaries, including many I'm sure you've heard of and a bunch of them that you better have seen. Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Rescue Dawn,

the famous, in my circle of people, Grizzly Man, Happy People, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which I believe is your only film that I managed to catch when it released in a theater in New York. Cave of Forgotten Dreams. His films deal with extremes with struggle with absurdity with madness with happiness and many are fused in my

opinion with a very unique perspective on nature in the natural world if you read about Herzog you'll often find find writers describing his work as man against nature, man versus nature. We'll find out if he describes it that way. I'm guessing he doesn't, as I believe that that description would imply that nature is aware of man as an adversary. Mr. Herzog, a couple of your own quotes. The universe is monstrously indifferent to the presence of man. He also once said, I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.

Now, many documentarians who deal with the natural world, I find personally, seem to reflect the relationship with nature sometimes feels to me as though it's taught, as though it's something they picked up or learned from their peers. It's oftentimes political. But our guest here today, I feel that the things he has to say about the natural world and to say about the natural world

and the way that the natural world plays into his movies is wholly original. Influenced me immensely, not just as a writer or a TV person, but as a human. I'd say for me on par with Cormac McCarthy because both have these immense bodies of work that interplay together as something that

is not schizophrenic meaning they they carry this sort of intellectual trademark um and the last little bit of introduction I'll say and this is a very inside joke um when I'm arguing with production people which I do in my line of work, uh, I've a lot of times dealt with camera guys, producers that want to catch the entirety of a process. And if they can't catch the entirety of a process, they don't want to use it. And I will say to them in shorthand, I will take a line from happy people and i will say the nets were set the night before because there's a scene in happy people which chronicles the lives of siberian fur trappers and subsistence hunters and there's a scene that opens where they're just checking in that

and my camera guys would have been like well we can't use that we never saw you set the net to which i will refer them to happy people and i will say to them the nets were set the night before and that's it go on with your movie go on with your movie uh I want to start our conversation to talk a little bit about your childhood, which I was like, like I said, my avenue to you and your work has just been your movies. I've been a fan of your movies for such a long time. And it wasn't until I read your new book, which I haven't finished yet, but started a new book. It's Every Man for Himself and God Against All,

your life story. Remember us. Yeah. I didn't realize the extent of the poverty that you grew up in. Well, it's easy to imagine when you grew up at the end of the Second World War and then mostly post-war time. And you have to imagine a scenario where everybody here in the country,

in the United States, is very well aware how Ground Zero looked at 9-11, after 9-11, complete devastation, but a very limited area on the island of Manhattan. But you have to imagine a whole country, Germany, where 720 or so cities were wiped out, the entire cities. Some of them not as completely, for example, Munich, where I was born, was only 80, 85 percent flattened and destroyed. And it was one of these Allied bombing raids, carpet bombings, that hit our neighborhood and everything around destroyed. And I was only two weeks old, 14 days old.

And where we lived was partially destroyed and my mother picks me up from my cradle, which was covered with about a foot high shards of glass and bricks and debris. But I was unhurt. And of course, when you are you are mother you naturally are scared and she fled with my older brother and me um into the remotest mountain valley in in the alps in bavaria and your dad had split out on you guys your dad wasn't in the picture at this time he

wasn't in the picture well he was in the war yeah when when i when i was born i was born 1942 the war was over 1945 and um when he came back he very soon divorced uh and we my mother was a single mother and had to raise, then she had another boy, my younger brother. So she had to raise three children, and there was never enough to eat. So what I remember very well is starving. Yeah, you tell a story of a lesson you learned about nagging your mother, you and your brother, nagging your mother about how and your brother nagging your mother

about how hungry you were, and her saying, if I could take it from my ribs, I would take it from my ribs. Yeah, but I can't. But I can't. You shut up, boys. Of course, that was a serious moment, and it's engraved in my memories.

And of course, it was not only food. We had literally nothing. For example, we didn't have mattresses. My mother stuffed burlap sacks with hay that she made from fern. But when you cut the stem of a fern, it hardens when it dries. It hardens like the tip of a sharp pencil. Yeah, you're saying she cut it with a scythe. Yes, she cut it with a scythe.

And you would feel it at night when you shift it around. All of a sudden, you were on two pencils. It was stinging you. and fern also hardens it's not like hay more fluffy it it becomes almost like cement and you have this little dense and i i had to navigate the dense in my mattress so my entire childhood i never had a flat surface on which i slept and we had no running water you had to go to the well with a bucket and bring in the water and no sewage system no heating no toy no real i mean a toilet but an outhouse which was adjacent to to this little to this little house where we grew up

and you talk about eating uh uh someone killing a crow or a raven yeah yes yes and you being surprised by the image the seeing fat yeah fat on a soup broth and being surprised by fat i've never had seen anything like this and until until today, this means wealth. For example, the first time I ate a fried egg or an egg in my life, I must have been about 10 or 11. And it was like an incredible feast. I never ate a chicken for me when i see and even you see even when you drive by the fast food kentucky fried chicken finger licking good and it makes an impression on me

because chicken means the definitive feast you you mentioned another detail of your mother getting a loaf of bread with food coupons or however you describe them but then scoring the bread right in seven segments for each day so that she would part she would partition the bread yeah as the week's ration of bread yeah and in that passage you mentioned you don't elaborate on it i was looking for you to elaborate on it that you said that you you have no tolerance for the the culture of complaint sure yeah yeah i get it, but explain that to me. Well, I cannot make it the norm how I grew up. It was an unusual childhood because it was in the aftermath of a catastrophic war that Germany actually had started.

And the catastrophe came from our own people from from our society from our leader adolf hitler and it was it was really so bad that we knew now what we got we got and each one of us had a thin slice of bread per day. And the kind of grooves that my mother carved into the loaf of bread, we knew this was the only thing we have. And of course, she would also make some food from dandelion leaves and from syrup from some trees and replacing sugar, which we didn't have.

So when I see in our kind of societies, Western highly technical societies, where a lot of food is being thrown away, in the United States I think more than 40% of food, and I find it outrageous, and I never say anything because it was my experience, and I know the value of food. I know there's something which has to be honored, and in a way, it pains me

when I see so much food being thrown away. Because of my experience, it was unusual. But I never speak out loud. You don't chastise people for wasting food. No, for God's sake, I would be the last one. That's not in my nature. Because you have to determine how you live and whether

you live a life of consumerism or whether you are more cautious with wasting resources that we have. And I think when you are in other societies, hunters and

gatherers, they are more careful and cautious. There's no doubt in my heart, because that's how we were organized as biological creatures. And so, how can I say? I see people in the restaurant complaining to the waiter that this wasn't any good and give it back to the kitchen. And so I don't like this complaint. And it's not only about food, it's about whatever. are so difficult and um gasoline has become so expensive and all these things yes uh deal with it deal with it in the right way but don't complain too much there was a i got two questions stacked up in my head and one i was going to ask you and when i thought about asking you

and decided not to but now i am going to ask you because you alluded to it uh my father fought in world war ii yeah um served in the european theater and maintained i don't want to say uh um we we joke about it now but maintained a deep suspicion of germany through to the end rightly so zero for japan he didn't he didn't fight the japanese yeah zero for his father well no no i'm not i'm not gonna die but what was the it's kind of like outside of a subject matter i'm like anything but uh or that i'm an expert on but what was the so how did you perceive when you're thrust in at a young age, when you're thrust into such like this devastating situation and so many of your countrymen are being killed, your cities are being destroyed, you're starving, what is your perception of Germany? Is it gone?

No, no, of course not. I'm still a German citizen. No, no, I'm saying at that time how are people feeling about you know i mean are they is this all happening to them is it a thing they created like what was your mom's perception there was a different response some some of them you still until today you have deniers you even have holocaust deniers yeah which is the most absurd of all because it's hundreds of thousands of times documented. Survivors are there, bodies were found. I mean, and a crime of proportions that the world has never seen in any country throughout the entire history

of the human race. Nothing like that has ever happened. So, of course, you have to ask yourself what went wrong, what made Germany lapse into a culture from a very solid culture of philosophy, mathematics, writers, composers, you just name it. How does it lapse into a culture of barbarism within very few years

so of course that gave me to think it of course uh it has importance always res something is is resonating from from that in my entire existence but where did the point what was your sense of of or perhaps this would be a question that you'd have to answer on your mother's behalf. What was the sense of blame? Was the blame the allies? Was the blame on England, the US for doing this? No, I think the overwhelming part of the population knew it was self-inflicted and you have to also see one strange thing when you speak about Germany as a child

and even when I was six seven eight years old I didn't know that Germany existed that there was such a thing like Germany. For me, this valley in the mountains, that was the world. And beyond that, yes, there was Austria because the border was close and some young men, the bold young men would secretly smuggle goods from Austria into Germany, and some of them were my childhood heroes. But I did not notice, I had no concept that there were countries, I mean Austria, Tyrol, yes, our valley and something beyond it. And my very first memory that I have about

must have been two and a half years Allied bombers hit the city of Rosenheim and my mother took us out of bed and it was in the middle of the night, ice cold must have been March

or April, still snow out there and very far in the distance at at the end of the valley, you could see the entire sky not burning, not flickering, so a very slow pulsing of red and orange. And she said, boys, the city of Rosenheim is burning. But the city of Rosenheim is 40 miles away, that far, an entire city burning. And for me, it was a very essential moment because I apparently started to understand there's a world out there, not our valley alone and not the waterfall in the ravine behind the home.

There was something out there that was different and dangerous and burning, and there was such a thing like a war. Of course, we saw American soldiers coming in, but they were very genial with the kids and befriended the kids. And for the first time, I saw an African-American, and I was completely enthralled. A huge, big, big guy with a big resonant voice, a little bit. I always compare him to Shaquille O'Neal,

a very, very big man with a very big heart and a wonderful voice, a soft, wonderful voice. That was, for us, we only knew it from fairy tales, the Moors. The Moors, and there was a Moor, and I was completely, completely fascinated. And I knew, yes, it's true. There's some foreign countries like Africa, and you have the moors, and there are moors in America. How about that? 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.

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That particular city that burned, um, that the story you tell in your book demonstrates a little bit of the of a different perspective on collateral damage than you see in warfare today where in warfare today there's so much public emphasis on um not you know targeting civilians where you're hitting yeah and you're telling that story that allied bombers are actually trying to get to a different place entirely yes and they can't get over the mountains because of weather and they just find a town yeah sure and they find a town

they want to return to the base empty yeah and it was probably the reason why the city of Rosenheim was destroyed in a gigantic conflagration. But only later, let me add up one thing, with the sky in the distance pulsing in flames. It made me curious. And I knew there was something out I wanted to understand. I wanted to learn. So that's why I moved out and that, why can you say that you are a writer? And I have always maintained that my writing will live longer, my prose, my poetry will probably live longer than my films. How do you somehow compare that? Why is there a conflict between filmmaking no it is not and I have a simple almost like a formula

films are my voyage and writing is home oh yeah films are your forays out into the world yeah writing is home yeah that's a your films are your forays out into the world yeah writing is home yeah that's a good way of putting it um that brings you to a question that i was hoping to share with you uh

to ask you about like i said i had i was unfamiliar with the level of poverty that you that you grew up in um oh it doesn't it doesn't matter it doesn no, no, this isn't coming from a place of pity. No, no, no, no. I don't want to be commiserated for children. It was a wonderfully incredible time. And we had to take responsibility. We had to go out foraging. We were the ones who would catch trout in the creek.

But since we had no fishing gear, we caught them by hand you can catch trout yeah you explain that that method in your book it's like a slow a slow movement and then a quick they flee under under stones they take refuge under uh under tufts of grass overhanging into into the creek into the water. And you know where they are hiding. And you have to be very, very patient and cautious. And you actually can catch them with your own hands. People think I'm making it up.

No, no, I don't. I don't. You have probably done it yourself. So considering that childhood, it made me rethink uh your film happy people yes and within the last day or two maybe it was even our producer corinne yeah or phil the engineer here i mentioned happy people and he said you mean i remember who said they said you mean the people that seem miserable but they're happy and I wondered about that uh or some joke like that meaning I just remember watching happy people which is about Siberian hunter-gatherers and fur trappers and

just seeing someone carpeted into mosquitoes I mean it was like they had apparel like their apparel was made of mosquitoes you know yeah but just working away and uh without complaint yeah without complaint yeah and that's what i thought about because because um in happy people there's no no person meditates on the meaning of happiness no no person says well despite you know in spite of appearances i'm quite happy there's no it's just the title is happy people but then it's this portrait of people and and no a viewer would not watch happy people and if someone said what did you watch a movie about they wouldn't say i watched a movie about these very happy people yes and not only happy they are dignified they lead a life full of dignity of awe of wonder of nature of being out there a life that has a lot of

of deep meaning i envy them and when i see them in on on a, there's only one wish, oh man, I would like to join them. Oh, yeah. I can see that feeling. And the fact that they do not have, let's say, electricity and air condition and mosquito repellent, and you just name it, just their dogs, their hands,

their intelligence and rifle and fishing gear and they live an incredible life so fulfilled so wonderful and whoever whoever sees this and i believe those who who actually have ever hunted, they will immediately understand, instantly. Yeah. I envy them. Yeah. When you made, I had watched your films, but became interested in your thinking about nature

and your thinking about animals. Like I had seen A Geary Wrath of God, I'd seen Fitzcarraldo, which are great stories, really enjoyable films. And it sparked a curiosity in me about how you view things. But then the Timothy Treadwell incident happened. So just to give listeners a quick run through, Timothy Treadwell, I think he was born in the late 50s,

if I'm not mistaken. He wanted to be an actor. He actually was in competition with Woody Harrelson. Well, that's what he claims. We do not know exactly. So that's not known for sure. We can look at him and say he was a failed actor. Failed actor.

And then deeply deeply deeply into alcohol and drugs so he was struggling struggling to get out of addiction and in a way that brought him to alaska because out there in nature and with a task to that he put on his own shoulders to protect the bears against the bad guys, the poachers. Poachers hardly exist at all, but that was his fiction under which he lived. And he got himself straightened out in a way. And when you look at him, of course,

he has moments where he unravels and where he's completely falling apart. But moments of deep insight, moments of poetry, moments of beauty, what he's doing, what he's seeing, how he describes it, how he depicts things. A wonderful, wonderful kind of life out there in in the wilderness in my world at that time there was this was getting at about when i became interested in your in how you view these because in my world at that time being uh you know fairly serious outdoorsman strong alaska connections there was just people reveled in his death and it was just how stupid he should have known what a nut job and then i would find

myself before you did your film i would find myself joking like that man would out camp any person I know. And I would say, I would love to see you go spend 13 summers in an alder thicket on the Alaska Peninsula. And with a very dense population of grizzly bears. Go do that and then come tell me how stupid the guy was. You might not agree with what he stood for you might not agree with his practices but like there was a tenacity yeah and a and a sort of outdoor expertise and then your film came out and it's like i had joked about it and commented on it but your film came out and was so it was so like open-hearted and fair and the respect for him and yeah but the the proper

condemnation the proper respect but just painted a wholly different picture than what you got from the media which was this just nothing but a nut job yeah you know well that was a small part of the media uh but um of course it's also unusual that the filmmaker has an ongoing argument with his protagonist who was already killed by a bear ten months before well that was ten months when you're working on that so you got to it right away yeah well I never met him of course he was dead when I heard about it, and his girlfriend was also killed and eaten by the same bear. So it doesn't matter that I differ from him. And I differ from him in some basic, I say it with caution in quotes, basic philosophy. He was more a little bit towards new age,

which I can't stand, this pseudo-philosophical babble. But behind this new agey aspect of wild nature, there's something which I call the Disney-ization of wild nature. For Treadwell, the bears were wonderful, big-hearted, fluffy creatures and you had to approach them and if possible even hug them and sing a song to them and tell them how much you love them and one of the native Alutii people on Kodiak Island, he says on camera, there was something wrong. You do not love the bear.

You should rather respect the bear and respect the territory. Keep your distance. Allow the bear its territory, but you do not need to love it. You do not love the bear, respect it. And this kind of philosophy that went awry into Walt Disney fluffiness somehow unfortunately, unfortunately cost him his life and the life of his girlfriend and the life of two grizzly bears who were shot by park rangers who found them still feasting on the bodies how when you heard how did you first hear that story and jump into that project well it was unusual because i i do things that come with vehemence at me and it was one of those cases where something stumbles in me into me i was at a producer's place down in

in the valley a few miles away from here only where i'm sitting. And he had helped me very generously with finding partners for the film. And I paid him a visit just to thank him. And at the end, we were sitting at a glass table full of messy papers and FedExes and half-eaten lunch salad. And when I got up, I got up and I couldn't find my car keys. I swear to God, I was searching for my car keys, not for a movie.

And I had placed it on the table. And I look at the car key and he sees it and thinks I spotted some paper and shoves an article to me. It was one of the first magazine articles about Timothy Treadwell. And he says, read this, we are doing a very interesting project. So I took it and my keys went home. And I was sitting literally here, just at this table next behind you. I was sitting there and normally I don't read these things. I read it. And you know what? I was instantly back in my car and rushed down and I said, this is big.

This is so big, I cannot believe it. And I said, how far are you in preparations? Ah, we have to start in eight days at the latest. There's hardly any time left. We have to travel. And then I asked, who is directing the film? And he said, listen very, very carefully. He said, I'm kind of directing the film.

Kind of directing this film so i i sensed he didn't know exactly what i what i was uh what he was doing or how to tackle this and i looked him at him and i said no i will direct this movie now i was kind of surprised and shook my hand and said it would be an honor that i made the film in that movie but it was you see what was clear it this is big and there's a storyteller is somebody who makes movies and also a writer i know this is big in that there's the famous scene where you you i believe you're you're at a kitchen table and you put on the headphones and you're able to hear the recording yeah there was a camera rolling for six months during the attack and you hear the recording and your comment does your comment does more to convey the horror of what you're hearing

than perhaps hearing it. I barely comment. Well, you say no one should listen to this. Yes. Never let anyone listen to this. And my comment is even stronger because the camera is over my shoulder. You see only the back or the side of my head. And the camera is on the woman who owns the tape,

who has worked with Treadwell for long, long years. And she tries to read from my face what I'm hearing, how horrible it is. And she starts to cry. She can tell from my face that there's something terrible that i'm hearing she had not heard it no and i said to her please don't ever listen to it and i said to her something very stupid please you should rather destroy it which she didn't do she was smart enough not to do it but she separated her from the tape and put it in a bank vault.

So it's locked away from her. And you see, as a filmmaker, you do not have to put everything out, even though it was there and it would have sensationalized the film. Everybody wanted me to include it into the film. The distributor, the TV network, the production company, everyone said. And I said, I will address the tape because it is known it's out there. But I will make the decision. And after I had heard it, I said, it's not going to be in my film.

You have to take me out. But I will resist to be taken out. I'm a formidable opponent. Be careful. I will fight. And this is not going to be in my film because there's such a thing as a dignity and the privacy of an individual's death. And you do not you do not publicize it and sensationalize it period so and they understood and another example because i saw the film two days ago for the first time in many years the white diamond it's about a jungle airship some sort of of a blimp. I've seen that movie, yeah. Yeah, that maneuvers in the canopies of trees. And nearby... It's in Guyana, right?

In Guyana, yeah. And there's a waterfall, the Cayetua Waterfall, three times the height of Niagara Falls. Not as much volume of water, but a formidable waterfall. I've been to that waterfall. You have been? Wow. Yeah. oh you have been wow yeah and you have seen the swifts there are swifts uh that come down oh yeah into the underneath and beneath they come down from from the sky they form vortices a vortex and then they shoot down and with his speed that is higher than free fall they they swish behind the waterfall

behind this massive curtain there's a gap and they have a million and a half or a million nests behind there and i was curious and we lowered a strong guy in the team, actually also a mountain climber, lowered him on a rope with a camera and he filmed it. And a few days later, a local tribal leader tells us, Ah, you filmed that, yeah, but you know, for us in our culture, there's a secret because there are gigantic snakes. And they keep the secrets of our people they keep the treasures of our hearts and nobody of us would ever look behind the waterfalls and very politely he says could it maybe could it be that you just saw it but you don't publish it and that very moment i said it's not going to be published yeah that little bit of uh i don't know yeah i guess there's something

there's something bigger that bigger than filmmaking there's something bigger that you have to live with than the films that you put out for people to enjoy. There are bigger things than filmmaking, let's face it. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated.

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

Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement you can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service that's a sweet function as part of your membership you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the on x hunt team some of our favorites are first light schne 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.

You've done a number. You've done two. You've done three films about people. You've done three films about people who were shot down or survived air crashes. Yeah. And land in the jungle so you did one about a a woman the sole survivor from a air air crash in peru was this the jungle of peru yeah her the plane was struck by lightning she was buckled into a row of seats yes which maybe acted as a parachute it's just inexplicable but she and a number of other people's a number of other passengers fell 10 000 feet yeah hit the forest canopy 10 000 i think

it came down but but we can only estimate from 5 000 meters altitude 15 16 000 feet and she survived it yes and probably uh it's mysterious. I mean, there was a violent thunderstorm at the eastern slopes of the Andes. And this updraft may even take you higher up into the sky. It could happen. And she was on a window seat, on the three seats. Her mother in the middle seat, an obese Peruvian man, immediately falling asleep, snoring on the middle seat an obese Peruvian man immediately is falling asleep snoring on the aisle seat and she has fragments of memory that she sailed on strapped to the row of seats and she complained she said people say I

left the plane now the plane left me and you know I was always fascinated by her story because I was booked on that very flight yeah in the huge chain of coincidences took me out of this and and also something as he was had the seat the empty empty seeds next to her. It's what we call the maple seed effect. If you have the seed of a maple, you have the seed and then something like a wing and it spirals. It keeps spiraling down to the ground. So that may have saved her.

There were actually other, probably other survivors because some people were found sitting and leaning against a tree. So they must have crawled there. And it was a very eerie scene when the first rescue people arrived. They had actually given up the search after 10 days or 11 days. It was hopeless because the plane had disintegrated in thousands of fragments and rained down. So there was no impact site that you could spot from the air.

And suitcases had opened in midair because it was Christmas Eve day and there were presents dangling in the jungle trees and also human intestines as decoration. I mean, it's an eerie, must have been a very, very surreal sight. But she survives she survived because she knew about the jungle she had grown up with her she had grown up with her parents at an ecological

station biological station in the jungle and then she understood what was going on around yeah and then you did two films about you did a a fictional film and a documentary about an individual a u.s airman i think a navy pilot he was shot down down over laos yeah during the vietnam war survives all these just horrific conditions when he finally gets rescued they can't the guys the helicopter pilots that rescue him can't tell what he is they don't know who he is they find a half-eaten snake in his backpack and it's this airman that had been missing for yeah i don't know how many months half a year yes uh and thinking about those and then thinking about when you were doing the mate when there's there's a documentary made about you

making fitzcarraldo i remember you saying um talking about the birds in the jungle and you said the the birds here i'm paraphrasing you said the birds here don't sing they scream in agony uh what what but you've spent a lot of time in the jungle sure yes i mean do you what is your how do you feel about the jungle well i say it also in uh in in some written texts in my book conquest of the useless and at some point i'm saying i love the jungle, yet against my better knowledge. Yeah, that's right. But you see, you cannot take it completely out of context. When Les Blank was filming me, it was right after we had two plane crashes,

two small aircraft that brought provisions and extras to us. We have just had our camp for 800 people in the jungle burnt down. We ran into a border war between Peru and Ecuador. And my leading character became so ill that we had to fly him back out to the United States and his doctors wouldn't allow him to return. Then there was an attack of a tribal group far, far up in the mountains that had suffered from the drought.

There was the driest dry season in recorded history, in memory. And they had wandered down with a drying river in search apparently of turtle eggs. And they clashed with two, three people, local people, Machiganga, native tribal people, who had been fishing for us and looking for turtle eggs. And they shot them in the dark of the night, and the man was shot through his throat and had also a deflected arrow at his shin,

and a woman shot by three arrows into her body, very close, a cluster of three arrows. And we had to operate them on the kitchen table. They would have died if we had tried to transport them. And I was with mosquito repellent spraying away the cloud of mosquitoes and with the other hand a torchlight illuminating the operation. And all this happens on a daily basis yeah and then les blank says uh let's speak about the jungle so that was in a way that was the frame of mind in which you yes and answer yeah in the frame of mind

uh should should be mentioned at least otherwise it sounds like a crazy statement it was a very natural statement when i described that movie to people um i describe it probably the way many people do where it's the story of a of a of a rubber baron trying to move a boat from one drainage to the next and it's just it's impossible it's a huge steamboat over a mountain. Yeah, and so what you do in the movie, which sounds funny in this age of special effects and CGI, the movie does the exact, the making of the movie does the exact insane thing that is portrayed as an insane thing in the movie. No, I do not agree.

It's not insane. It is, number one one i knew it was doable and i did it and it is not insane because it's a big metaphor somehow dormant in us so big like let's say don quixote tackling with his lance the windmills. It's something described, of course, by Cervantes, and we know, ah, yeah, that's somehow in us. It's a metaphor. Or Moby Dick, the hunt for the white whale.

Things like that. And I knew a ship pulled over a mountain by force of human strength and turnstiles and coiling up ropes and I would move it over a mountain it's a big metaphor not insanity because it's deep inside of us and it has something that I could articulate and others couldn't but since since I articulated, we have a metaphor, one more of the metaphors that are probably dormant in many of us. Absolutely not insanity. Clinically sane, so to speak, what I did.

I stand corrected. And at the time, of course course there was no digital effect it was done in 1981. you had to do it um i mean you had to know no not not necessarily because 20th century fox at the time wanted to produce a film however uh only um with a miniature plastic replica and what they called in a good jungle. And they meant the botanic garden in San Diego. And I asked them, gentlemen, what's the bad jungle then? And then it became frosty and I knew I was alone. And I had to do it alone.

I was also the producer of the film. And so I don't want to miss this work. How do you look at, with all the movies you made, over 60 movies, and how many books? You've done a dozen books? No, it's probably 80 movies by now and a dozen books or so yeah in poetry and I just finished yet another book you have to take it seriously that that I am deeply inside convinced that the written stuff the, the poetry has a more direct impact, something.

And it's not the events. You see, in my memoirs, if you look after event, event, event, yes, of course, there are wild events, but it's a style, it's a prose. That's what makes the book. Oh, I mean, you're a, I mean, I don't know don't like far be it from me to feel the need to tell you this but i mean you're a phenomenal writer and in reading your book i'd said to corinne our producer i'd said i had kind of given up on um literary memoirs in exchange for memoirs autobiographies of people who have a you know a story to tell right and this book but this book is those kind of the story

the way yeah but this book is a combination of those two things yeah i mean this book is this book is of a high literary merit like like you know as a writer as a person who loves the language it's of high literary merit but also does that heavy lifting of telling a story that really ought to be told yeah which is how you came to view the world the way you do and produce the work that you did but i have two last questions with all that work how do you gauge which how do you gauge which of the fate your favorites like which are the ones you shouldn't have done what are you glad you did you can stop right away i love them all you do i truly love them all and they're all good. They're all good.

There's no one you wish you could put back in the box? No, for God's sake, never. Only over my dead body I would allow you to put it away and put it back. But you have to be aware that, of course, I'm critical as well, and I see mistakes. Yes, I do see mistakes, and I see how I evolved as a kid who made films because I made my first film at the age of 19. I know you made your first phone call at 17. That's true yes nobody will believe it yes

nobody nowadays believes it everybody with their cell phones and applications. So I literally made my first phone call at age 17. Yes, all these films, I see mistakes, mistake here, mistake there, but I accept them. I can live with it. And it's the same way like with a mother. You do not ask the mother, you have five children here which is your favorite and you know who the favorites are my favorites are all the children

that have the worst defects the child that has squint eyes the child that has a stutter the child that has a limp and I would be as a mother the lioness to help them defend them make them proud shine as great and wonderful as i can shine you mentioned a minute ago you said over my dead body uh let's move on to your dead body for a minute what i have no idea what you'd say to this what what are your what do you hope and fear about

what's going to happen to you when you die like what do you are do you entertain an idea no i won't be around anymore i always said posterity uh uh doesn't interest me because i won't be around there anyway however but like what what i mean do you do you picture what is your idea i don't get like i don't get like terribly personal in a way it's uncomfortable what is your idea of an afterlife uh i think it's highly likely that there's no afterlife so you're so your posterity like you don't care about that and then it's i won't be around yeah however um i did something which was not in my catalog of behavior and thinking and my brothers brothers and my wife Lena convinced me there are 80 films, negatives, mixes,

tens of thousands of photos, manuscripts, you just name it, documents. It should be somehow preserved. And I started a non-profit foundation which is has an oversight of the state of bavaria where all the rights of all my films of everything i've created uh went in to go to bavaria well because uh because my culture is Bavarian. I feel like you owe that to America. No, because you do not see where I come from. English was only my fourth or fifth language.

But that's the language you work in, though. It doesn't matter. I would not write a novel like The Twilight World in English. I write it in German and it's translated. Your new book was translated. Sure, yes. Very well. The best translator, arguably, from German into English

has done it, Michael Hoffman. It's in German prose. But you have zero problem communicating in English. Yes, but I do not write poetry in English. You can only do it in your mother tongue. But let me go back

to the afterlife. Yes, my work will have afterlife because it's owned now by a foundation, by a non-profit foundation. In other words, if I become impoverished tomorrow, I cannot sell the catalog of my films to Turner Classics or you just name it because I do not own them anymore. You're protecting yourself from yourself. No, I don't need protection against

myself i understand that and i was clearly told sat down at a table by my wife and she said to me you think your films are your property yes many of them that I produced and wrote and directed, technically, legally, they are my property. But you know what? You really do not own them. The people own it. The people, the audiences out there, they own it. They own the books. They own your prose.

They own your poetry. They own your memoirs so and and i'm completely at ease with that and let let life go on i won't be around yeah and that's totally and absolutely fine because we are made and all biological life is made like that i'm totally at ease i like i got one last question for you okay i haven't gotten to the end of of every man for himself and god against all your new memoir do you this is this one's for this will be for my kids do you in the end of that book get into acting in the mandalorian or is that not is that not addressed in the in the memoir i i believe i am addressing it but briefly yeah um but the end it has a very very strange end that you will never see anywhere in world literature.

And it has to do with something the Japanese soldier Hiro Onoda, who fought the Second World War 29 years still after the end of the war in the jungle in the Philippines. And he had survived 111 ambushes and being fired at. And he says to me, because we were discussing time, does present time exist and is there only past and future?

And present time is a fiction, which actually is. And he says, but sometimes you can see the future because one day a bullet was fired at him and the sun very low and he sees a bullet coming right at him. And with the sun, it has this orange copper kind of glow

and he knows it will kill him. And he only had time to rotate his body to the side and it whizzed by his body. And I was writing on my last chapter. I knew it was going to be the last chapter, the absence of images, the absence of the human race on this planet, maybe 200,000 years in the future. And I was typing at a window, it was out there, and all of a sudden I have this sensation, because I saw and somehow I sensed something golden and greenish iridescent came shooting towards me. And I look up, but it was not a bullet, it was a hummingbird.

Sometimes I shoot straight like that. And I looked at my text in the moment the moment i had reached i i thought i don't i shouldn't write any any more word and the text stops in mid-sentence the book the entire book stops in mid-sentence and that's it that's it did you get a lot of pushback from an editor no they loved it in audiences those who read it you will see when you finish uh reading the memoirs you will like it i guess all right so thank you very much for joining us um check out werner herzog patience well check out all of his movies and especially check out Every Man for Himself and God Against All

by Werner Herzog. And then do yourself a favor and watch Happy People. Yes, they're highly advisable. Thank you very much. Thank you. We've talked about it a lot. We've talked about it. We've promoted it. We've pimped it a lot.

We've talked about it. We've promoted it. We've pimped it. It's here. It's finally ready. You can go right now and get it. You can go right now. Go to where you buy all your audio books.

Go to where you buy your audio originals right now, and you can get it. It's done. You can get it right now. I'm beating the table because you can get it. What's done. You can get it right now. I'm beating the table because you can get it. What can you get? You can get Meat Eaters American History, The Long Hunters, 1761 to 1775. This is the beginning of a big project, and this is the first one we're doing, the first installment of Meat Eaters American History, where we explain in great, fun, lively, bloody detail, chunks of American history. The one we're starting with is the long hunters.

If you're wondering what a long hunter is, Daniel Boone was a long hunter. Everybody knows Daniel Boone like, oh, he's some kind of pioneer or explorer. Well, he was, but he was a long hunter. He was a whitetail deer skin hunter. That was hisail, deerskin hunter. That was his business. That was his craft. That was his trade. The peak of the long hunter era, meaning the peak of the whitetail deer hide business, as we're going to explain in this thing, runs from about 1761 to 1775. If 1775 sticks in your head as a year something happened, that's because it's right before 1776 and if you're any kind of

american you know 1776 declaration of independence the revolutionary war okay there's a reason that this era ends then and this you will learn this reason and be fascinated by this like why would the long hunters who are hunting white-tailed deer skins, having all kinds of adventures and getting killed like flies, why would that all of a sudden end with the American Revolution? You will learn when you get Meat Eater's American History, The Long Hunters, 1761 to 1775. It's an audio original. You can't read this. You can only listen to it it's narrated by me steven ranella my friend clay newcomb and exhaustively researched by meat eater trivia 30 time champion whatever the hell he is dr randall williams it's out now

now this is the definitive telling of the story of the long hunters it's perfect for you if you are a person who understands or wants to understand how backwoods hunting actually happened in the years before the American Revolution and how market hunters, these are people who hunt for a living, how they actually went about their business of killing, skinning, selling scores or hundreds of deer per season. Which, if they were successful, could be more lucrative than farming. Really being a long hunter, if you got lucky and lived and you got lucky and had a good hunt and you got lucky and all your stuff didn't get stolen by native Americans, or they wouldn't view it as stolen. They would view it as taking their stuff back from you, which you stole from them was more lucrative than farming is more lucrative than being a builder, more lucrative than all that.

In this, we start out, there's a phenomenal opening to the book, which is going to hook you like a circle hook, but we quickly get into this question. What is a long hunter? Now, like I said, you know, the most famous one of all Daniel Boone, but he was only one of a generation of backwoodsmen who were hunting whitetail deer for the commercial hide market i i was i was tempted to say one of a generation of americans but as we'll get into the idea of america hadn't taken shape and the long hunters did not identify as americans we talk about that about some of these long hunters like daniel boone becoming these sort of honorary founding fathers but they were anything but founding fathers of America. These guys participated in hunting expeditions beyond the line of British colonial settlement to supply a booming, as we'll explain, global marketplace for whitetail deer skins.

You might expect from the name, they were gone a long time, months or even years at a time on hunting trips, killing hundreds of deer, killing thousands of deer. These adventures include some of the most hair-raising and jaw-dropping stories of wilderness living and deer hunting known to man. In this audio original, you're going to hear about buffalo stampedes, bear attacks, people getting lost, bodies getting found, long journeys, close calls, and the rise and fall of a forgotten trade in the skin of a creature that remains America's favorite big game animal. We've always had market hunters. We continue to have market hunters.

Keep this in mind as you go about getting into this story. We explain all this. You've got market hunters who hunt for whale oil. If you've read Moby Dick, you've read about whale oil market hunters who hunt for whale oil. Okay. If you've read Moby Dick, you've read about whale oil market hunters. You've got market hunters who hunted for beaver pelts. So if you're familiar with the exploits of say Jim Bridger, he was a market hunter after beaver pelts.

You have market hunters who hunted for Buffalo hides and Buffalo meat, Buffalo Bill Cody. You probably heard of, he was a buffalo meat market hunter. Davy Crockett, market hunter. Generally, black bear meat market hunter. But these guys were from the era when the thing that the market hunters were after, the money to be made, was in deer skins. But our story is not just the story of the rise and fall of trade in this particular animal.

These guys were engaged in a risky business. And this chapter of history, this broad story that we tell in this, includes no shortage of life or death adventures. As you'll see, Daniel Boone is one example. He, in this area that we describe, and we describe it as the first far west, and we'll explain why we call it the first far west. And as you'll learn, the second far west

is the one you think of when you think of far west. When you hear far west, you probably think the American Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains. As we'll explain, that's the second far west. This is the first far west, and it was just as harrowing. Boone, Daniel Boone, you've you heard the name you probably don't know he lost two sons he lost his brother he lost his brother-in-law all in the first far west and those are some heart-wrenching stories but even these father-son tragedies were not limited to the Boones. Here's a snippet of a story we tell about a longhunter named Henry Skaggs, who witnessed

his own son's death as well. This happened in the late 1770s when Skaggs was hunting with about 20 longhunters in what is now Kentucky along the Green River. They're out. They get attacked by Indians. They lose a bunch of their horses. Most of the guys that are with Skaggs turn tail and run. They want to head back to the settlements. But three of them stick it out. It's Henry Skaggs, his son John, and a hunter named Alexander Sinclair. They go over the Cumberland Gap.

And if you've heard of the Cumberland Gap, you're going to, at the end of this, when you buy this and listen, you're going to know more about the Cumberland Gap than anybody you've ever met. They go over to Cumberland Gap and begin their hunt, but it's one of the worst winters on record. Hunters that winter were reporting large numbers of deer

simply frozen to death near salt licks. And if you're thinking, what the hell is a salt lick? You will know more about salt licks and if you're thinking what the hell's a salt lick you will know more about salt licks than anybody you've ever met when you finish listening to this so skaggs keeps hunting it out right all his friends take off and skaggs hunts it out we tell this whole story his son gets sick soon after that guy sinclair who's with him heads off to run his trap line, never to be seen again. Henry Skaggs leaves his sick child and goes to try to find the guy. All he can find is a hole in the ice.

And he deduces that the guy must have just fallen through the frozen surface of the Green River, drowned, apparently. The river freezes back up. Shortly after that, Skaggs' boy dies. But the ground's so frozen he can't dig a grave. So he stuffs his boy's body into a hollow log and stoppers up the ends. He then returns to a station camp. If you're like, what in the hell is a station camp? You will learn very well what a station camp is.

And then Skaggs alone now, after losing his partner and his son, spends his whole winter under an overhanging rock near a salt lick and kills whatever animals he can find that approach the lick and then in the spring makes his way back to the settlements. This is like nothing compared to other hardships

you'll encounter in this story. Some of these stories blow away. Anything you'll hear of the Rocky Mountains and the mountain men. Here's another one. In May of 1771, this is a story we tell in great detail. Daniel and his brother, Squire Boone, are headed back to the settlements after a long hunt, and they need to stop to shoot some game for meat

that they're going to bring home with them. They set up camp, and Squire's just heading out to hunt when he sees a lone figure coming in the distance. He's cautious about it because he doesn't know who it is, but it winds up being a guy named Alexander Neely, who they'd been hunting with and had vanished on a previous long hunt. The guy's all messed up. His clothing's torn. He's starving to death.

His arms and legs are all cut up. Neely explains that he had got separated from a group of hunters and tried to shoot his gun, fire off his gun so they could hear him, but he burned up all of his gunpowder. So he had no way of shooting his gun anymore and never found his hunting partners. Tried to make his way back to the settlement with no gun, so he's got no way of obtaining meat, gets hopelessly lost, and then one day he's resting against a downed tree and a dog shows up. This dog probably belonged to an Indian hunter, and it runs up to greet him. But Neely strangles the dog and roasts it and makes jerky out of it

and stores that jerky in a sack made out of the dog's skin when squire boone finds him he's still got some of this dog jerky in the dog skin bag and squire boone comments how it was quite alive with maggots this is all stuff you're going to hear about it's just it's stuff that blows your mind. And I had been, my whole life I've read about the long hunters and these are all like so many of these stories, like that one, for instance,

are stories that I had never known until we got into this project. Like this is the level of detail stuff that we, that we drug out through research to bring out in this project. And there's other stuff that's going to really blow your mind. Cause you might've heard a lot about Daniel Boone or heard the term long hunters even, but there's stuff you might not know, like even just the intricacy of game laws back then in the first far West,

meaning there was restrictions on the kind of hunting that these backwoods frontiersmen were supposed to do, whether or not people listen to him or not, there were restrictions passed by lawmakers to try to discourage these colonial backwoodsmen from engaging in the deerskin trade. So this is an era when Daniel Boone and these other Euro-American hunters

are literally having like running gun battles with Native Americans over access to deer herds. Meanwhile meanwhile there's people trying to impose game laws on them there was a law meant to prevent these so-called quote disorderly persons from hunting deer quote merely for the sake of skins which lawmakers pointed out were clandestinely carried out of the colony in order that the hunters could avoid paying taxes or that legislators in some areas had explicitly banned the practice of shooting or killing any deer just for the skin you could not kill a deer for the skin while leaving the flesh in the woods to rot if you did did, you were subject to a fine. And in this project, as you're listening to this, you'll learn like how that could be

reconciled with this history of people who are killing hundreds or thousands of deer for the skins. Likewise, to try to discourage over harvest by market hunters. In North Carolina, check this out. They had a law that prohibited you from hunting deer if you didn't have a settled habitation in the colony. So nowadays when you hear people complaining about out-of-state hunters, there were rules like that in place then, and we lay these out. I think the reason most stories miss this stuff is because they have an audience

that isn't going to understand it or they fear they won't understand it anyways. But our audience understands this, and you going to be like delighted in these kinds of intricacies you needed to have in certain places. Check this one. You needed to have 5,000 corn hills within the colony in order to be a legal deer hunter. Meaning they would at that time, they would say like, no, no, you got to have, yeah, you got to have, you can't be from out of town. You got to have land. Not only do you got to have land, you have to have 5,000 corn hills and you'll learn what a corn hill was and why that mattered. If you wanted to hunt deer, South Carolina at the time, Boone was out being Boone,

South Carolina passed the law that made it illegal to hunt more than seven miles from one's own home in an effort to try to restrict these commercial deer hunters who would come through an area and wipe out the deer to get the hides there were exceptions to these rules meaning they still even back then you've heard of depredation permits now even back then pre-america okay pre-declaration of independence there was exemptions for landowners who needed to kill deer to protect their crops and there were exceptions for people who needed to kill deer for food what they called the necessary subsistence of himself or his family but even then they had provisions back then if you killed a deer

for food you were not allowed to sell or dispose of the skin because they were trying to deter these frontier settlers, these crazy backwoods wild men from hunting deer for skins. These restrictions combined with declining deer numbers are part of what pushed the long hunters to go further and further West into the farther reaches of this first far West. Now, what we wanted to do with this book, I'm just giving you a handful of examples of stuff you're going to learn. We're talking, this is hours of material that's like expertly researched and very succinctly

presented. This is just me talking about this thing, but this thing is different because it's, it's, it's perfect. Okay. What we wanted to do in the book is we wanted to dig into the historical sources so we could tell you who these guys were, like really who they were,

where they came from, what their backgrounds were, what their circumstances were, what pushed them into this very deadly, bloody trade, why they engaged in the deerskin trade, which means we have to explain what America was then, who Americans were then, what the globe looked like then, what cattle ranching was like, why there was a shortage of leather.

In telling this, we explain all this other stuff. Like, why did they use the rifles they used? When you hear of a Kentucky long rifle, what did that mean back then? Now you shoot it because it seems old and antique-y. They shot them because it was the most sophisticated

weapon you could get your hands on. They were shooting state-of-the-art equipment. Cutting-edge equipment. Why was that the way it was? How did they camp? Because I mean, remember, they didn't have flashlights. They didn't have lighters.

They didn't have tents. But they're gone for two years, killing deer in the woods. How did they camp? What did they eat? What were their interactions with native people? What were the long hunters' interactions with tribes, the Shawnee, the Cherokee who had a rightful thousands of years old claim to these hunting grounds. And this becomes a really complicated thing that we'll explain. The long hunters had this idea of this area against all historical evidence outside of these things that they saw

when they were there, they had this idea that it was unclaimed and we're going to talk. We talk a lot about that. Why did the long hunters think that was on this landscape? The first far West, why did they think it was unclaimed? And why did the Shawnee and Cherokee and other tribes know that in fact, that was not true.

It was quite claimed. They had been hunting it a long time and they were not going to stand by and watch these Euro-Americans come in and rape and pillage the landscape and deplete it of deer. So we explore this just like very different perceptions of the American wilderness. To the long hunters, it was wilderness. It was the unknown. It was the dark and dangerous, right? To the Shawnee and Cherokee, it was home.

It was their hunting spot. And this disagreement takes many shapes and forms, and we dig a lot into this so you can understand this interplay of America and Native America on the landscape. How did the long hunters like actually hunt deer? This is something that like that our audience is going to want to know because you might just read a normal history book. They hunted deer, but you know about hunting deer, right? You know about bait.

You know about blinds. You know what know about bait. You know about blinds. You know what still hunting is. You know what deer drives are. You know what ambush hunting is. We tell you how they were so effective, like how they hunted deer. And a normal history book might be like they sold the skins, they processed the skins. But you want to know more. We tell you like how they skinned them, what they did with those skins step by step,

and we're honest with you when there's parts of that explanation that we don't know and we tell you why we don't know what we know. We tell you how we know what we know, and we're straight with you when we tell you what's not known. How the skins get to market. And then, how did those skins travel across the Atlantic to craftsmen and consumers in Europe? And get this, how did piracy, pirates, how did piracy play into this whole thing? It includes a deep dive on the global financial circumstances, the global economic circumstances that drove the deerskin trade at that time.

And all of this plays into explaining what would cause a person who could become some humdrum farmer to instead risk fairly certain death, pretty certain death, damn certain trouble, and risk to go out and become this thing called a long hunter. Meat Eaters, American History, The Long Hunters, 1761 to 1775, narrated by me, Stephen Rinella and Clay Newcomb. Available now wherever you get your books. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now, the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land,

hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.