The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 757: Surviving and Thriving (and Finding a Dead Man) in the Alaska Bush

Episode Date: September 1, 2025

Steven Rinella talks with Randy Brown. Topics discussed: Steve and Randall's latest audiobook is available for presale; MeatEater's Tailgate Tour is back!; our favorite First Lite Navigator Hoody; sprouting weed out of dog shit on a roof; digging in other peoples' gut piles; what do harvest off a bear; frying caribou tongue; hunting wolves; Tolkien people; the biggest lesson; and more.  Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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All right, man, Randy Brown is back. No, not debut. It's the opposite of debut. return repeat on court performance by Randy Brown because Randy came on what the hell do we call that episode

15 years of living in the woods living off the land 15 years living off the land Randy Brown came in some time ago I don't know and it was spectacular

we couldn't we didn't scratch the surface we talked like just to recap to tell people the years you lived the years you went out and lived off the land in the last Well, it's about 15 altogether. Okay. Yeah, and this is recap.

Yeah, we're going to recap. Yeah, yeah, and so we went out on the Yukon and it was, you know, mush dogs and built cabins, was able to persuade Karen, I love my life to come out there with me, which was, that was probably one of the tougher things to do. But, yeah, it was, and then she would teach and a few times. out in some of the rural communities, and that was fun too, you know, taking, as I would mush dogs and fish and hunt, see in new places in the state. And you did a lot of, a lot of fur trapping. Yeah. And when you came on, we told the story of you finding a body. Yeah. Yeah.

The guy tried to find out the identity of that body. Yeah. I even brought it up on Rogan's podcast, thinking that him having such a huge audience would turn up some stuff. We'll check in with you in a minute there. Okay. To find out if we've found out any, if you've ever gotten any intriguing hints about the body you found, the guy you called Smeagel. That's right. Called himself John the Baptist. Yeah. And then the reason we wanted you to come back on is because we never, because we talked about all this big picture stuff, like timeline and all that.

But we didn't get into a lot of the nuts and bolts tactical stuff about living off the country in Alaska. so I want to get back into a bunch of things with you but the minute we got done recording I was like man that dude's got to come back on and our audience as well wanted to come back on because we didn't we haven't fully extracted all the usable information from your brain okay we're gonna we're gonna continue the

we're gonna dive into the the Randy Brown brain extraction and find out more about just kind of like a life that's like a staggering and it's bold That'd be a good blur. Yeah, that's a blurb. Staggering in its boldness. Yeah, there you go. Before we do that, here's a couple things.

Randall and I, Dr. Randall and I, work on this series. I'm telling the audience that's not you, but you can listen. We work on a series called Meat Eaters American History. So, as you guys know, because we usually do podcast episodes. when we launched these different volumes of meat eaters American history. So the first meat eaters American history we did is we did one on the long hunters. And so the most famous long hunter being Daniel Boone. So we did a meat eaters American history, the long hunters.

And that covered the years, I believe it was 1763 to 1775. And it was about the deer skin trade, primarily around Appalachia. the Kentucky region, but the American colonial frontier deerskin trade. The second volume of meat eaters American history we did was called the Mountain Men, and that covered 1806 to 1840, and that was about the beaver skin trade of those years. Well, volume three is coming out. Pre-sales are available now. It's an audio original, so it's not a print book.

It's an audio original. Volume three is available now, and it's called Meat Eat, Eaters American history the hide hunters and it's about the buffalo skin trade and it covers 1865 so it starts at the end of the civil war and covers up until 1883 which was the last great shoot at that point they were gone they were effectively gone so meat eaters american history the hide hunters tells this story of the buffalo hide hunters predominantly dudes kind of spun out of the chaos of the Civil War

the big hide hunt starts down in Kansas first it moves south into Texas then it moves north into Montana and it's that story of kind of the wind down of the Civil War

the chaos and catastrophe of the Civil War the American government the federal government turning its eyes westward after the Civil War is over, turning it westward in two ways. Railroad expansion and the Indian Wars. And how those efforts kind of opened up the Great Plains to the hide hunters who very quickly put themselves out of business by killing all of their target animals. It's a story about leather production. It's a story about combat between whites and Native Americans on the Southern Plains.

And it's a story about just really not understanding the finiteness of a resource. So Meat Eaters American History, the Hyde Hunters, 1865 to 1883, available for pre-order now. Another little news bit here. So the Meat Eater crew is hitting the road again this fall. Last year, a bunch of our guys headed out to do tailgate tours. a bunch more guys are heading out to do tailgate tours this year the meteor tailgate tour

presented by Dometic If you have a camper Like an RV unit And you look at the fridge In your RV unit There's a high likelihood It says Dometic on it They make all kinds of camping gear

Electric coolers They make all kinds of stuff Tons of great products So presented by Dometic Got free food You can hang out with the crew Texas at Ohio State That's on August 30

That's Randall and Janus Kansas at Missouri That'll be Clay and Bear Newcomb That's Columbus, Missouri September 6 What's UTEP mean? University of Texas El Paso

Huh At Texas That's easy In Austin Yeah that's Texas v Texas Austin Texas Saturday September 30 Jesse Griffiths

will be there slinging some grub. And then Maryland at Wisconsin, in Madison, Wisconsin, September 20. That'll be Spencer, Chester, and Garrett Long, yeah. They're slinging grub at the tailgate tour. So any of these places, you go on the tailgate tour, you're going to come out, you're going to see their tent, and you can go hang out and get free food, me eater tailgate tour. Oh, I missed some.

Seth and Brody. Oh, because this is like Seth's little home spot. Oregon at Penn State, University Park, Pennsylvania, September 27th, our two big Pennsylvania guys, Seth and Brody, you're going to be running that tailgate tour. And then Boise State at Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, Saturday, October 4. That's going to be Mark, Janice, and Garrett, Sling and Grub for the tailgate tour at that game. stop in and see those fellas

Nark quick thing I think we're off to the races oh no yeah one more thing we're off to the race is that correct no two more things oh you guys have been seeing us like everybody a lot of the guys

come on the show kind of live in this first light navigator hoodie these are out and available I didn't know they made them in this color until I got one there a day I know and I'm supposed to tell everybody about all the wild crazy hunting and fishing trips

I've done in mine my fleece lined hoodie but I just wear it all the time I wear it on the plane I wear it when I'm yelling at my kids I wear it when I'm having dinner with my wife it's just my main like garment check it out at firstlight.com

it's the most comfortable thing I own I live in it oh the last thing if there's any people out there this could be you who are like wizards at GE freezers

listen to this problem I have I have a brand new GE freezer at my fish shack in Alaska it's not brand it's one year old the first year it worked okay first off when you get a freezer to a place like that

it's not coming back it's like it came out on a boat right you're not going to like bring it in for service just isn't going to work brand new GE chest freezer the year I get it it works fine

come back up in May it doesn't work anymore but get this it's like it's possessed on this freezer this is for someone that's a GE like I need a I need your help if this thing's on

the on light doesn't come on if you turn it off you follow me if you turn the dial and click it off, the on light comes on, but it doesn't turn on. If you open the lid, the on light goes off. This is like an electronics problem. No, again,

if you turn it off, the on light comes on, but it doesn't turn on. And if you lift the lid up, the on light goes off. The compressors do not run. It's possessed. If I call some 1-800 number, it's like, there's no person on the planet that you're going to call on a 1-800 number that is going to be like, oh, what you need to do is blank. You follow my problem? Do you understand what I'm saying? What could cause that?

If you're out there and you are like a wizard at freezer's, send a, go to the meat eater at the meat eater.com and write like freezers in the subject line. I will like, if you have, if you know, I will call you and we will talk about it, I feel like it needs like a new, it's something electronic, man. But it worked. It's probably under warranty. But what do you do? I can't haul it out of there.

I'm not going to bring it to town No, it's $800 down the drain You want Yeah You'd have to burn all the insulation You can't even get rid of a freezer like that I just like that

I just like that's a moment of Like in speech There's a moment of silence to have people meditate on something I want people to meditate to meditate for a minute on this there if you know a lot about

freezers man I need to talk to you because I know that like calling a 1-800 number isn't going to do it it's going to be a dude that barely speaks English and I'm like oh no check this out you turn it off you know it's just like it's never going to work

so what did you find out about can you recap the john the baptist story for us okay just a quick recap because i want to find out if we've found out okay okay yeah so so john the baptist that's what he called himself uh came down and got abandoned came down thanks came down to yukon between the towns of eagle and circle okay so it came down from canada that's what he's he claims and I think he's I think that was true and then with his buddy with his buddy and his buddy then shoved their raft off and and left at one point in time and he happened to be near the mouth of Kandak River where this fellow Fred lived and Fred took him in for a while and can you remind everybody what year this is this is um I think it was 1970s

78 79 yeah and and so then Fred ended up going back east to visit family he hadn't been back east in a bunch of years at that point and and told him he had to leave and he didn't and he just stayed and had his way with all of Fred stuff food his fur his uh equipment and actually moved a bunch of stuff from his cabin that was out the mouth of Candick to a place about three miles up up river up on the Candick and smoked all his weed and ate most of his fish and was there a lot of weed smoking in those days up there no could you grow it or you have to bring it in some people did but it it's uh it it it it it it it requires, you know, some sort of a night day period that you don't have up there.

So it was, I don't know, there were people that grew it, but it wasn't. Also, like if you're trying to grow weed and it's daylight 24 hours a day, the weed doesn't like that. It doesn't. It doesn't grow well, no. And, and I don't, I don't grow it at all. I didn't do any gardening. But, but, but, yeah, so, so Fred did. though but it was kind of rudimentary he would throw a dog shit and and seeds up on a roof of his cabin

and that's how he grew it which is just you know these spindly grow it right in a medium of dog shit yeah that was that was the fertilizer so that's not even uh that's not even ditch weed man you know no but for fred that was better than nothing right and so uh except that this guy then I mean, I don't know. I mean, like, you could tell me that it was, I'm not like a, I'm not a connoisseur. I don't even partake, but you could tell me that, you could tell me that the best weed in the world grows out of dog shit. And I wouldn't know, I wouldn't refute it. I don't know either.

Yeah, no. But, but anyway, Fred, Fred got pissed off and told him that, you know, when he did come back in November, that he had to get out of there, he had to leave. to circle or go to eagle when the river froze up and he he uh took a different tactic and he said he's going to go to chalkeetsic which was way north and all um you know through the woods and everything and and how many miles would that be when he when this guy says he's going to go overland well it would be over a hundred miles yeah the way you'd have to walk and and through you know forest or in a windy, old black river. You know, now it's called the Dronjik.

Name was changed not too long ago. And, yeah, but we didn't think that he could make it. There's not a chance in hell that he could do that. Because he didn't have, you could make it, though. I don't think so. Oh, why could you not make it? Well, it's pretty barren country, you know. I mean, I would, if I went, you'd still have to shoot a moose or shoot a, or shoot some caribou,

but there weren't very many caribou there. There were caribou near the border because that was where the Ogilvie Mountains stopped, you know, and it was wintering ground porcupine caribou that we would get in the upper Kandik River, upper nation river, and in the, in the black river, but close to the border, because then it gets into flats and the caribou just didn't go there very often so it'd be unlikely that you could run across caribou going straight uh to chakitzi now i haven't done like i've never done these kind of walks up there but a hundred miles why i understand like why couldn't you just like with a pack of food i mean how many miles a day can you get in that kind of stuff

Well, you know, you could probably go, you know, six or eight miles, ten miles maybe. Yeah. If you were good, you had a good pair of snow shoes. You know, when the country is covered in snow, you know, three, four feet of snow on the ground, it's tough breaking trail. I got you. It's not a simple matter. I wasn't factoring in. I wasn't thinking about it in that way.

I wasn't thinking about it being the wintertime. Cold and shit, tons of snow. Yeah. And it's a lot easier to walk on the rivers than trying to bust across country and, you know, when you got all sorts of brushing and, you know, different, some areas have burned and have down trees and it's, it's pretty tough. You know, so you got, there's a lot of different issues, but part of it is feeding yourself. He had a 22 that Fred lent him a 22 pistol. He had, his buddy had left, left him with this 20-gauge, double-barrow, 20-gauge Rossi shotgun, but he didn't have any ammunition for it, neither did we.

And, and so he, he had a 22 pistol. Well, you're not going to shoot a moose or, or anything large with it that could actually feed you. And even if you did shoot a moose, you wouldn't be able to take it very far. So it's possible that you could, that you could, I mean, if I were to set off on that kind of a journey, you'd have the equipment that you needed to do it. You know, you're going to either poke holes in a pond or near a beaver house on a river and snare or trap beavers, you know, to feed yourself, have some dogs along, help you with moving stuff. But that, breaking across country like that is really tough. you know, and you'd have to feed in yourselves and everything else.

So, you know, you just don't have that much small game that you could feed yourself very easily with in the winter. So what was this dude's, if he had easy access to go on the ice to two different towns on the Yukon, what was his draw? Like, why did he want to travel cross country to the north? I have no idea. Okay. I have no idea. But that's what he, that's what he told Fred. He took off.

And, and, and he ended up finding this little cabin that we had built a couple of years before. It's just a safety cabin, about 10 miles up. And we, we were always, you made it 10 miles. Yeah. Out of 100. Yeah. Okay. And, and, and that's where, that's where he stayed.

And, and he did, he did get. some things you know there was a ball jar in there that had a martin skin in it and and he had he had peed in it too it was a urine in there with the martin skin i think he was trying to i think he was trying to tan it or something i don't know but just soaking it and piss yeah and i mean that's what he did i we you don't know what was in his mind yeah i have no idea what was in his mind but that's what we kind of thought but but that was he got that with a 22 clearly you know and and and um but you know martin or bold you know they'll come down a tree and yell at you yeah other things so i touched one one time what's that i i was able to touch one one one time

yeah a live one huh just really yeah he's real curious i was bohunting he's real curious yeah and he was kind of on a tree and i just wanted to see if i could and actually he was so i mean There's not many animals that let you do that. No, but I was actually able to put my hand on it. I don't think they fear anything, really. And I think they feel they're pretty on top of it. You know, can deal with whatever. They're a bold animal.

And so, as are, you know, the urmins, the weasels. Yeah. They're pretty scary, actually. When you, I caught one one time, and I was trapping, voles at our place in fairbanks and feeding them to our i had a bull snake for a while and uh this was after we had moved in there and uh and i would feed at the vols well i catch this this uh and it was a live catch trap you know a little have-heart and uh and i caught a weasel and uh and i had this little bird cage and i could open the door on the bird cage and let the ermine into the cage

and close the door and then wire it closed. But, you know, those cartoons where they have the cat running around on the wall sideways? You know, that's how this guy was in that bird cage. And he would take a moment off every once in a while and jump to the side of the cage closest to me and scream, you know, and then go back to running around. I go, well, this guy is going to get out of this. This won't hold him for very long. And so I went out and turned him loose.

Because he'll probably kill the snake. I put him in with the snake. But they're a trip, yeah. But anyway, we're back to Smeagel, right? So he's in this cabin that we had built back in the woods because we didn't want airplanes to see us. Actually, since I, you know, what started flying with my job, it's amazing how easy you spot something that's rectangular down in the woods.

It's a, it's almost nothing can hide, but, uh, why were we trying to hide it from planes? We just, we didn't know whether somebody would try and come and kick us off. Okay. So we would, we just built our cabins as deep into the forest as possible. Got it. Um, and he found it. And then later you learned that that's not an effective strategy. It's not an effective strategy.

They, they'll, they'll, that you can see it. Yeah. You know, almost always. So, so anyway, he found it. I don't know how the heck he found it. it and and stayed there, you know, whether he, whether he froze his feet or whether he, you know, I don't know what, what drove him. But, but he was there and dead when we found him the next spring. Hunting big country isn't for the faint of heart. You got steep ground, long distances,

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Just gear you can count on. Head to firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. So you were wondering. Yeah, and then just to remind listeners a little bit, some of this backstory. Yeah. You found him dead. Was he so, was he rotted down or just frozen?

No, well, I think he had froze, you know, but, you know, a cabin is insulated in the winter so that you can build a fire and keep it warm inside. And then once the fire goes out and it turns cold in there, then that cabin insulates it from the spring, you know, and it started warming up. So I don't think he'd been thawed for very long because he wasn't rotten. And he was just, he was just dead. And his hair was slipping just a little bit on his forehead. And you said he was just skin and bones.

Skin and bones, yeah. And you picked him up and left him out on the tundra. Yeah. Yeah. We thought about trying to take him down a circle, but it was, that would have been a several-day endeavor. And the sides of the Yukon at that point, not long after breakup, were just packed with ice. Breakups are different every year on the Yukon, you know, and sometimes they flow over the banks. Sometimes they just slush out, and it's not a big deal. That particular breakup, though, had put ice packed onto the banks. and so it was difficult to actually get some place off of the river to park and walk into the woods or do other things. And so we just figured that it would put us just in an uncomfortable position not being able to feed ourselves and things if we had gone down there. Yeah. But we didn't have any money or anything. So it was we just took him out in the woods and left him.

And then never heard another thing about it. No, never. And so after the last podcast where we talked about that, there was a fellow from, I got contacted by a couple people. Who had tips, who potentially had tips. Well, so one fellow is a French Canadian, and he wanted to know whether he was a native or a white man. And if we could tell, and he was a white guy, and they said, well, you know, in French Canada, some people, you know, might have the name Juan Batiste, and we may have interpreted it. I mean, he wrote it, so it was, he was calling it, John the Baptist, but. Oh, and he wrote it on what?

He wrote that note to Fred on the door. And signed it, John the Baptist. John the Baptist, yeah. and who's got that note now i don't know dude i'd like to have that note i don't think it's i i'll bet it isn't around i don't know that's some bitch be hanging around the wall here if i had it yeah so so anyway he was looking through uh missing persons um uh records in canada based on our conversation yeah okay and i i don't know whether he found him or not but uh he contacted me on that and we talked a little bit so when you told him that it was a white guy what

did he say well he said that that's one of the one of one of one of the um i guess pieces of information that he used to search the records but you haven't heard anything more about that no huh and that was that was the only kind of tip yeah i don't understand how a guy in 1978, 78, 79, how there could be a person that vanished, starves the death in the woods, and not some effort from his family or people to sort of like formally be like, has anyone seen this guy? Yeah. I mean, he must have burned all his bridges. Well, that's possible. you know his whoever he was traveling with uh took off i don't know but that could have been

that guy's problem too but i don't know and no idea who the other dude was that abandoned him no and he could have so so one of the interesting things is you know going down to yukon between eagle and circle it's not it's not necessarily an easy matter to get to Circle, you know. And if they're doing a log raft, which is what they had, that's even more tough, you know, to try to navigate different channels. And you start getting into this really braided region of the upper Yukon Flats upstream from Circle. And it gets way more interesting if you get downstream of it.

But it's possible, unless he had a map and understood where he was, that he could have gone right past Circle. as well that guy yeah yeah and uh and not even known it perhaps but uh because it's it's kind of on a on a it's on a south leg of the river there and there's different islands and shallow places i wonder if that dude even lived i don't know i don't know we had no other information on that at all mm-hmm i don't know why that stuck with me so much man i was like kind of dying to know about that guy yeah i know i don't know why Yeah.

I'm over it now. Yeah, I didn't really think about it very much. It was a temporary deal for me, but it's all I could think about for a minute. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you sent me a story after we talked. I gave you a book. Yeah, I want to talk about that too.

Yeah. Because we talked about starving to death. Right. And that journal of, I've talked about that book since. Yeah, there was a guy. That journal those guys that starved to death. Yeah, there was a guy that wrote. to me and said that he had heard you talk about it and didn't know what the what the book was and

wanted to know the title of it so got it i sent him information on that yeah tell people the name of the book well that was uh death in the barrenlands yeah and it was about these three guys uh john hornby um and then the two one of them was his nephew i think another maybe a friend and they went out into the uh you know to the to the to the east of great slave lake over to the thelon river trains into uh hudson bay i believe i had a hell of time finding that i had a hell of time finding that on google earth yeah yeah it's a confusing tangle of water up there it is it is and uh and it's pretty flat country and uh and then there's these cariboo that uh the barren ground cariboo that are moving around in that country but not always in the same place and they were unfortunate enough

that they while there were um caribou here here or there and they caught a little bit of fur but it wasn't enough to keep them keep them all going and they they all ended up dying yeah and the one the youngest one keeps a meticulous journal it's a chronicling his death extraordinary he's a work yeah you know and then the people that ended up finding the cabin and the and the people there that it starved out they found his his journal in the stove he had he had put it in there and left the note saying looking stove yeah so that so that somebody was going to be able to get it and know what what went on this main explorer they were talking about hornby yeah he had found on one of his journeys

traveling the Canadian Arctic he had found a stand of spruce that he felt in that area was the northern most stand of spruce

and he realized you could go into this this is way above tree line go into this stand of spruce and build a cabin and make a go

of it in the way far north you know what he reminds me of later though hornby reminds me of Stockton Rush the guy

from the titan submersible oh yeah because uh because he knew what he was getting into like he knew what he was doing the other two didn't he knew the risk he knew what he was getting into he'd had close calls yeah he knew how dicey it was and he like brings other guys along who are sort of trusting in his expertise and then later it comes out you know like with stock the rush later comes out Stockton Rush had it almost like I wouldn't say a death wish but like incredible hubris

and not a death wish but definitely knew where it was headed and didn't care and this Hornby guy I mean he basically offers these people up to the tundra I mean he serves them to the god of the tundra

he serves them on a platter I think he thought they were going to do all right but but it was a hungry country and the caribou didn't come. The thing that the most upsetting part of that story of starving

to death like that is that they start eating hides. Right. Yeah. And for some reason a lot of hair and their bowels get impacted by hair. And so toward the end of three

of these dudes are trying to give each other enemas and they're trying to claw out of each other plugs of leather and hair and rigging up different ways to try to get their their colon or whatever the hell clear a hair and the guys that find the body's remark on this because some of this excrement some of this solidified

excrement of hair and hide are littered around the cabin just a shitty way to go yeah it was it was bad yeah but that really brought to life reading that book and that's probably why he gave it to me reading that book brought to life what that john the baptist dude like what his days were probably like i think so to starve up in there yeah but there's a story you told you sent me a video clip and you telling a story um about getting a bear out of in a river one time. Oh, yeah.

And you had mentioned the thing that hadn't really occurred to me in it, that, um, but, but I've seen it, but I didn't really thought about it. Like a deer floats. Yeah. Yeah, and a moussell float, even with a big set of antlers. But a bear don't float good. It doesn't float. Yeah.

Do you mind sharing, like, the sort of the implications of a bear, like tell that story and the implications of a bear not floating good? It's one of my favorite stories. Because they sure swim pretty damn good. Yeah, they swim. So we used to sometimes find them in the river swimming from one side to the other, and we'd follow them and wait until they get out on the bank. And then sometimes they're running too hard when they get out and you don't get a good shot.

But most of the time you're able to get them on the bank. But we knew that they didn't float because there were several people that shot bears up on bluffs that come right down to the river and a barrel rolls down and into the river and they're gone. They go away. And, I mean, they don't really,

but they go away as far as you were concerned. So we knew that they that they sink. You know, and it may be that a cub would float, I don't know. Well, you know, a part of why

that there's air in the hair, I mean, you know, this. Like, in cervids, that hair is kind of hollow. Yeah. And imagine a, they got a hair, right? Bear's got more what we call a fur, but it's

more like guard hair. Yeah. So I guess that's something to do with it. Yeah. Yeah. So August is kind of a tough time to make a living out there. You know, the king salmon in that part of the river come in July. And it's just wonderful time. You know, you can sit in one place and process king salmon. And I mean, not up right now, but

because they're desperately low levels right now in the Yukon. But in those days, we could fish and hang a gill net and process five or six fish a day and jar them up and dry them and put them up for later as well as eat wonderful food the whole time there. But August, it comes and there's no fish, really. I mean, you can get pike or you can get some water, white fish or a sheepish or something, but that the salmon have gone through, and the fall chum

salmon are not there yet, you know, and, and so we would, we would usually try to look for a bear because bears start getting, getting pretty nice, fat, and this guy, Seymour and I, we both fished the same place, Glen Creek Bluff there, and we went down to the, to the Kandik, so we were about 15 miles upstream from the Kandak River where our fish camps were. And he and I took some dogs and we went down to Mouth of Kandik looking for a bear. There's some good bluffs down there that you might find them on or sometimes just, you know, walking down through the, you know, walking the riverbank or something. Anyway, we went down there, didn't find anything. We were lining back up the river. And we would, which is, you know, walking the bank and pulling the canoe and during, in places where the bank is really nice, you know,

where you have the same kind of angle going into the water, we'd hook dogs up. We'd hook a couple of dogs up and they would pull the canoe up while you can sit in the canoe and ride during some of that. And so we were in that sort of a situation going upriver on a big inside of a bend. So we could see the shoreline only for a couple hundred yards, and then it kind of disappeared around the corner to us, right? And at one point, we saw this bear that had taken off somewhere upstream of us and had been swimming out, and he got into our view, even though it was around. He was probably 150, 200 yards out into the river.

and a river at that point was about 500 yards we estimated across so we pull we pull over because we're going to try to get him when he comes out the other side on the bank and we we unclipped the dogs because we're going to have to go we're going to let him get half or three quarters of the way over a nimble paddle over there that was how we were figuring to do it why not to take off after him right away well because you'd spook him back to his own bank you never know yeah where he'd go and and so usually we would try to to follow him and um at some point and and once they're close to that bank they're going to go to that bank they'd probably go anyway but um but we also had dogs we had five dogs that were now loose on the bank and they hadn't seen the bear at that point and uh we're trying to um we're trying to um we're trying to get their attention looking downstream a little bit so that they didn't see the bear. Because dogs swim a lot faster than bears.

And so we didn't want them getting out there and messing the situation up. But we did have this one dog that he would look at jets going by in the sky. And so he had really good distance vision. And he spotted it. And they really love to swim after beavers. And I think he probably thought it was a beaver, but it didn't matter that it was a bear.

And the dogs all ran up the bank to where they were, you know, straight in from where the bear was swimming. And they start barking at him. And he turns around and looks back at them and decides he's not going there. because, you know, I think all the animals living out in which think of the dogs as wolves. I don't think they know what they are other than that they're just like wolves to them. And so that bear turned and kept going in the same direction. Well, the jogs all jumped into the river and started swimming after it. And we're sitting there, Seymour and I are sitting there going, this is not good.

They're going to catch him out in the river. We have no idea what's going to happen then, but it's possible that they could drown him and, you know, just by climbing on him and biting him and things, and then he would go away because he'd sink, or it may be that he could drown the dogs just by turning around and grabbing him. And we didn't know how big a bear it was. And so we started thinking about how do we deal with this. You know, there's no way we can go and catch all these five dogs and haul them into a canoe out in the river and not tip over. And so Seymour, who was, he was, I don't know, he's close to 10 years older than me, right? And so he says, here's what we'll do, Randy. And I'm just like 20 at that time.

And maybe 21. How old Seymour? About 10 years older. Okay. Yeah. So he says, here. He's the leader. Yeah. So he had brought a 22 along on this trip down to the candy because we were shooting squirrels to feed the dogs and things. And so I had the big gun, the 243. And so he said, you get in the front, we'll beat the dogs to the bear. You pop him right before we come upon him and then grab him. That was his solution to this thing. And so being just a bit younger than him, I like, yeah, I think that's, I

I think that's how we need to deal with this. So he and I took off, and we beat the dogs by about two canoe lengths. We beat him to the bear, and I popped him and grabbed him. And he was a summer bear. You know, he still had, he didn't have a lot of fur, but enough that I could grab him right above the tail. And, of course, we're really moving with the canoe. And so it almost drugged me out of the canoe on the backside. And Seymour is there just laughing in the back of the boat.

The bear is, you know, nerves are still active and he's kicking. And then the dogs caught up with us. And they grab a hold of him and shake, you know. And I had this paddle and I'm swatting at them trying to drive them away. So they don't pull them out of my hands because then we lose them. And so we tried, Seymour and I, after we got the dogs to leave us be a little bit. We tried hauling the bear into the canoe, but it was too big. And, you know, it's an aluminum canoe, an 18-foot aluminum canoe that we were using there.

But we didn't think we could bring him in without swamping the boat. So we tied him onto the side and paddled. I think we lost about a mile, you know, getting him back to shore. But it was a nice big, about a 250-pound cinnamon-phase bear. huh and nice and fat you know he wasn't super fat like going into hibernation but he was fat enough to make it really good eating so in those days when you're living off the land like that yeah what do you then do it like walk me through how you handle the bear like what all do you take from the bear everything yeah walk me through it okay so uh pulled him up we uh cut around uh under the feet and cut down across

and then from the anus all the way up to the chin and skinned him out. And we usually will skin half back and take an arm off, you know, a front leg and then a back leg, cut open the guts, pull the guts out, and then turn them over and skin the other half and take it into quarters and plus your ribs and the head, pelts. Elvis, all of it, and the guts as well, because the dogs eat anything, we don't. Yeah, what out of those guts will those dogs eat? Everything. Do you boil that so they don't get trichnosis, or the dog doesn't, he's going to get it anyways, I'm sure.

I don't remember boiling that. Yeah, I don't think they would even, they probably just all have it, it doesn't affect them. Yeah, well, I don't know that they have trichinosis, but there's no way they don't. All this stuff they're eating? I don't think so. I never heard of it. Yeah, all the bears have it. not all but I mean

I think they're there they have the capacity to have it yeah well they're like so just as a point of reference this state used to take samples and in the northwest corner of the state where they were taking samples 100% of bears six years old and over were positive oh well

you have more information than I do on that I just think it does it It doesn't affect them. I mean, they might not feel good for two days or something, but they probably just have it their whole life. And, you know. It'd be interesting to know the, uh, the, uh, pathology of that in Alaska. But I, I know that, that, um, everybody advises cooking them because they're

potential for, uh, trichinosis. But I, I've never heard or read on the, uh, details of that. I got it from a bear in Alaska, you know, but I'm just saying, I bet you if you tested, if you pulled this. tissue sample from those dogs. It's possible that it's got the system. There's no way it doesn't. Yeah.

Because they're just eating whatever they find out in the woods. They do. Anyhow, like, what, like out of the bears' innards, what do you guys want to eat? And what do the dogs eat? We would usually take the heart, some of the liver, the kidneys, and that would be what we would eat. Okay. And after I had that run in with that grizzly liver, I think the vitamin A poisoning.

Yeah. With it. I wasn't, I didn't eat any, any liver after that. Off bears. Yeah. You know, I don't eat bear innards, man. Yeah. I eat the meat, I ate the fat, but I don't eat the innards out of them.

Yeah. I can't explain why. It's like a personal, I don't know if it counts as a taboo when it's you. It's a personal taboo, dude. I don't know why. We did. And, and that was, that was actually after. little John and I had gotten that vitamin A poisoning off of that grisly.

So undoubtedly, I did not eat that liver. Yeah. But the dogs do. They think it's great. Yeah. And don't seem to be impacted by it. And so this is August, though, right? So it's, we don't have a freezer or, you know.

That's what I'm curious about. Yeah. I mean, our freezer was broken. because it doesn't come on until October. Yeah, you got like meat, yeah, and you got like meat bees and flies and it's hot during the day. Yeah. Yeah, so you hang it up and it gets dry on the outside. Bear meat doesn't keep for very long, and we just eat it.

And if it starts turning bad, dogs get it. So you couldn't, you wouldn't, with the bear meat, you're not trying to, you can't, you're not trying to smoke it or air dry it. You're just eating it. Yeah. Yeah. And then how do you handle the fat? you render it out no i just uh leave it on the meat and eat it with the meat okay yeah because bears bears uh you know they have it marbled it's marbled not not with moose moose isn't you know

well the ribs brisket but uh but the you know like the back legs or the or the shoulders on a moose uh is not marbled in fat it's got a layer on the outside yeah you get a fat yeah but uh and then it's got the intestinal fat. Bears have fat kind of marbled through the meat. Which is part of why that meat doesn't freeze super good. Right. It goes rancid a little bit. Like the fat goes bad, yeah.

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Head to firstlight.com. That's f-I-R-S-T-L-E dot com. so if you got a bear in august you're not doing anything to save no you're not saving bear lard it's just food until it goes bad but but why not like at that time why would you not render it and save jars of it or save bags of it it it'll go rancid because you can't refrigerate because it's not refrigerated or frozen yeah it's really hard to uh to jar it in a ball jar i know we've tried it We've done it, but it gets in the seal, and it doesn't seal really good. Okay.

Some people may have had other experiences with it, but that's what it. But at that time, you're jarring salmon. Yeah. So you know about the mechanics of jarring. Yeah. But you're not jar and bear meat. No. Just some people do.

Yeah. Some people do. But usually it's fall, and they jar it, and then it's frozen, and they eat it later in the winter. Got it. But it's a hard thing with a really oily piece of meat to jar it and have that seal work for a ball jar. Huh. Okay. And then I didn't like jarred meat as much as, I mean, jarred fish is great.

Meat, I'd rather just eat it straight. Okay. Yeah. But you're also trying to account for, I mean, you're trying to find 365 days where the food. so in the summer months you eat fresh meat yeah and then once things freeze you just eat frozen meat yeah yeah because um you know you can't keep you can't keep a big piece of meat a moose you know shooting them in august you can't do it you know it's going to go bad before um before you've finished eating it what was the date at which you'd want to kill a moose then anytime

you know around fifth the tenth of september uh at that point you could keep it you can keep it right into freeze okay yeah but you got it you got to be careful you know if you got those cuts that you know where there's two surfaces that flop back on each other those are gonna those would go bad over that period of time so there there's a process tell me what that mean well I'm gonna go back to the bear one last question on the bear yeah so I understand the meat fat and the guts yeah at that point time were you keeping the hide or selling the hide or it's useless because it's August, like, how would you view the bear hide? What good use

would you put that to, if anything? Oh, yeah, we'd keep them. And it would be stretching out on a frame and fleshing it and scraping the oil off. Sometimes, you know, really fat bear, that's pretty hard to do, but you can do it, you know, with a scraper. Yeah. And clean it off and dry it as a rug, a seat cushion, a lot of different things. You wouldn't sew any garments out of that stuff? I didn't. There were people that did.

But it, you know, if you like put it on the top of a muckluck, it'll get snow packed into it. So it's not, you know, like a beaver is almost waterproof. You know, the beaver fur. And

that was a really good thing for like the top of a muckluck. mittens, but it would never get snowballs or iceballs forming it, but Bearford does. Okay. So it wasn't a desirable piece of clothing for most people. Yeah. Yeah, I want to hit you with one that I was reading. It's not from your area, but I wonder if you ever heard of this. There's this book, what hell is it called? Oh, the landbreakers? Do you ever hear of that? I've never heard of it. Dude, I was obsessed to this book for a while. The landbreakers. I sent it to my buddy Bubbly Doug he loved it too

it's set in the 1770s it's just about the first families moving into the 7th sorry set in the 1780s yeah early American it's a novel but it's like very very well done it's about the first families moving up into the mountains in Appalachia and their landbreakers because

they're clearing the ground to grow corn in this book uh they talk about that you know you know a ground hog it's like a ground squirrel close relative of a marmot right a groundhog in this book it talks that that's the best raw hide for boot laces oh interesting which i'm gonna make some my kid got one there a day but it was just a juvenile so i didn't do it yet but i'm gonna make my own raw hide boot laces from a groundhog but um if you think about that man like think about a squirrel's

hide. Like, you take a rabbi hide, you can just with your hands, tear it off. Dude, the squirrel is hard to get through. Doesn't it make sense that that would be like a phenomenal raw hide strip? Tough.

How do you get the fur off? Or does it matter? I don't know. I'll figure that out. Yeah. I'm going to probably just soak it for a while and then scrape the fur off. I don't know. I haven't done it yet. Fixing two, though.

Yeah. tough-ass bootlaces made out of groundhog huh well this would be a marmit but either way yeah yeah around here they call them rock chucks yeah but you never had any exposure to that because you had dealt with so many leathers you guys didn't have like a thing of making like raw hide from marmots or anything no there were marmots um in the mountains on the south side of the of the yukon up there i never saw them over in the in the oglebees never where you hung out never where i hung Okay. Yeah.

So tell me about moose, how you handle moose. Because now we're into September. Right. Yeah. So moose always, we skin back one half and take a shoulder off. Uh-huh. And I never got into the game bags. I think we mentioned this a little bit previously.

But it didn't matter because there's going to be a crust on it. And when I've taken game bags off of meat that's, you know, sat in a boat or something for a few days it's pretty it doesn't let it dry out yeah and so if you're dealing with water and stuff it's just the i'm with you because it like it makes it just holds moisture in a way yeah if you can hang it up in the air what's nice about you don't get you don't get fly eggs on it yeah which didn't bother me at all because flies you know once you got a crust on it they don't bother it yeah but they will go and lay eggs if you have say you make a couple of of cuts on the you know the bottom of the back leg you know between it and the and the pelvis bone you

know and you might have a couple of different cuts that when you hang it up those two um there there's a cut in there where the two pieces of meat flop over and touch do yeah when you say that do you mean that you take it like an intact muscle where you're saying you use inadvertently slice it so now you've sliced it open and the two pieces of meat are touching that that's going to rot why do you think that is because the bacteria will grow it doesn't dry out that's exactly why it hit because it's a it's an exposed surface that won't dry it's an exposed surface yeah it's it's been inoculated with bacteria and it stays wet see bacteria aren't going to grow if it's dry and so you get this moose and and you hang it up and over the next few days you know you you work at it you pick at it you know the bottom of the of the

of the back leg and the neck, you know, the back straps, anywhere where there's, you know, a cut that exists there that doesn't dry. Yeah, this is something I've never thought about or heard, man. Well, so it allowed us to hang moose in the beginning of September and have it make it into freeze. Because you just keep, you're letting the crust form making sure there's no spots that hold any moisture. Exactly.

And then it's, and then you can hang it. and you're just basically hanging it, it dries, and then eventually, throw solid. And so at that time, you know, of the year, you tend to get cooler temperatures at night. And so it's, and then as the moisture from that ham or the shoulder works its way out to the crust and evaporates off, it's going to cool that way as well. Like evaporative cooling. Yeah. are you leaving are you harvesting the fat off it or leaving all the fat on it uh i take the fat off

okay yeah and you handle that how so the ribs the ribs um and the brisket that's hard to take the fat off of so that stays but those are the those are you know some of the things you might eat first okay right and it's got all those layers of fat in it yeah yeah yeah and so like the belly fat You know, I hate the inside fat. Yeah, I hang that too, so it gets dry, and it'll dry it fast. So, you know, you get the kidney fat, and you hang it over a pole. And you shift it every once in a while, you know, every couple of days, you move it. And, of course, you've got to protect it from gray jays because they'll come in and, oh, yeah, man, and damage it pretty bad.

but I would hang little gill nets little two inch stretch mesh gill nets around the meat to keep the gray jays off got it yeah

yeah it's a process but then you got this wonderful piece of meat and as you go into the winter if you let's say you're you got a cabin where you know you're going to spend your winter

yeah and you're mostly doing stuff off at that time of year you're operating out of your canoe that's right are you moving that carcass you're trying to move that carcass first back to your cabin yeah and this work is happening at the cabin yeah that's right it not always but that's that's what you that's what you try to do yeah ideally it's back at the cabin yeah and then how are you

protect how do you safeguard so if we go through this drying process and at what date does it at what date would you say it's going to freeze roughly um the end of september beginning of october that's when it used to up there we've had some uh we've had some years where it doesn't freeze till mid-october lately though so yeah it's a different environment right now than it was yeah um and at that point the only you got to worry about uh once bears are down underground the only you got worry about is like Wolverine getting at it whatever kind of you know whatever things chewing it up odds and ends um how do you secure you hear it. You know, I really haven't had any trouble with a moose once it freezes.

Okay. You know, we're there. I just have never had a Wolverine. Usually I would put some sort of a trap there for Wolverines, but they're not going to, they're not going to be able to deal with a moose. You know, they could, I always hung it high enough so that my dogs couldn't reach it. I see. You know, at some point, if we were traveling or something. And, uh, and that, and the wolves, they never bothered it. I never had them bother anything of mine. Okay. And, uh, so, so, so, you just hung it clear of a Wolverine where he can't jump up and you can't climb up and get it. Well, the Wolverine can, but, um, you know, they just, they weren't, um, there weren't enough of them that it was an issue. Yeah. For me. If you went into the,

If you're just by yourself and you kill a moose in September, you kill a bowl, these are mostly bulls you're killing? All bulls. All bulls. You kill a bull in September. Yeah. How long can one guy live off that moose? You know, if that's all you're eating, you know, probably three months. Yeah.

It's not going to take you all the way through the winter. So what else would you have to figure out to make the winter? Well, so up there on the Upper Candidic River, where I lived, it was Caribou. Okay. Every year we were up there, there were wintering caribou from the porcupine caribou herd. Okay. And so we would take those, and they were almost always bulls, big bulls that had lost their horns, their antlers. and and they were skinny.

They might have just a little bit of fat on their, on their biscuit. Their tongues are spectacular. You just slice them up and fry them. They're wonderful. Would you boil them first? Not, not with caribou. With moose, I did. So you just slice it, trim off the outer part and just fry the center.

You don't need to trim it off. On a caribou. Yeah. Just slice it and fry it. It's one of the best things, anywhere. Huh. But why does that not work with a moose? I always boil them and then slip the skin off. Yeah, with moose. That's true. With caribou you don't need to. Huh. Like they got a thin shell or something. Yeah, thin shell. And the muscle there is just, it's got a lot of fat

in it. It's wonderful. Just raw sliced. Yeah, well, it's fried. I'm sorry, but not not pre-cooked in any way right to soften it up it's soft enough no you fry it right in a pan just like it is slice it fry it really it's wonderful i never done that it's one of the best things anywhere karen i'm packing non dalton what we uh i had gotten uh three caribu uh up on this uh mountain and i went and was butchering one and this uh this older fella from non dalton stopped and uh cut the tongues out of the other two and and took off. And I go to butcher him and, like, the tongues are gone.

And I'm going to like, this isn't right, you know. So I butcher him up and go home. And Karen says, oh, good, three, three caribout tongues. I said, well, I only got one because, you know, this guy got the other two. He said, well, go get him from him. So I go and I talk with him and I say, you know, we really like that. He says, you're white people. You know, you don't like caribout tongues.

I said, no, we do. I said, Karen sent me to get them back. He says, I'll give you one of them back. I said, okay. Yeah, it's funny. Yeah, but no, it's a delicacy. My old man used to dig around other people's gut piles. Yeah.

Deer gut piles? He'd go get the heart and liver out of other people's gut piles. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Like, didn't even, he didn't even think anything of it. Well, so the heart is off of a fat animal is wonderful. And they got, you know, you got this big, you know,

you know, cluster of fat around the top of the heart and slicing that up and frying it. It's one of the best things, yeah. Moose, caribou. So how would you handle a moose tongue? So I'd boil it and then slice it and fry it. Yeah. Now, help me understand why can you fry a caribou tongue sliced

without doing any prep? It's tender. So if you do it to a moose tongue, Yeah. Is the center still tender or is just the, even the center is hard? It's tough, yeah. Really? Yeah.

Have you ever monkeyed around just frying deer tongs up without cooking them first? I've only had anything to do with a couple of deer. And that was from down to southeast when my father was living down there. And we went out to this island called Pleasant Island in an icy straight and got deer. But those are the only ones I've had any. direct um knowledge of would you eat bear tongues i never tried it huh um would you go up in the mountains for sheep yeah i did what time of year would you go do that august usually okay and how would you handle those well you know by the time you get up there you got to eat it just to get out of

probably well so a lot of people they they get into this crisis right because they they shoot a sheep it's blazing hot yeah and they got a packet for miles and then get it to a freezer what i did is i just sat up there and ate it okay because a sheep is not that big yeah and um and they're wonderful and so it would uh it would feed us and we'd go exploring because you're not going to keep it in you're not going to keep a sheep we didn't we didn't ever hunt sheep at a time when you could put it up for the winter right it's too early it's too early and it's and it's um you know not close enough to anywhere that we would um you know that that we would uh have a cabin it's a it's a long ways out but but by not having to transport it to a

freezer back in town three or four days after you you kill it um we just had we just had a wonderful time in the mountains how many days would you be able to eat that sheep it they'll go for a week okay so you sit there and eat it yeah and it'll keep for for longer than that so you process it the same way hang it cut the places off that are rough that are going to attract blowflies because blowflies are not that big a deal as long as your paying attention to the meat. You can always cut a chunk off that has blowflies on it and throw it to the dogs and they think it's fine. You know, you got to be on top of it, but, um, yeah, but the, the sheep were, we're wonderful. They're always fat, always good. And they're, they're a small. So,

so you were talking earlier about the bear, you know, what do you do with the bear? Well, you eat it. It's in August, you're not trying to keep it into the winter. You're trying to have a good piece of meat to eat for the next couple of weeks. Yeah. And you can do that. You mentioned to Cren something about seeing a ram, a doll ram, how, like, you know how they broom their horns? Yeah. Did you, have you, I've observed them, I've observed big horns scratching their horn.

Yeah. But what did you see? So, so I never understood how they broom their horns, you know, but, but so in Alaska anyway, a legal ram is one that has two broom tips or that's a full curl or more right and and there may be some differences in places it used to be one in a one in an eighth

or something like that you know but a curl but but but that's how it's been everywhere I've hunted yeah like most yeah I would say most you hear of exceptions like any ram whatever someplace in the Brooks range in the old days but yeah full curl or two broomed and they used to not define broomed very clearly but it has to be now it's defined as the entire lamb tip is gone yeah so his entire first year's growth well it always bothered me how the heck do they break those you know because i don't know you know hitting two big rams hitting

you know even if it did connect by the tips you know they're they're just really tough you know they're hitting the boss they're hitting the boss a round thing right and it's it's not going to break it. But so I was up there with my older son in some of these mountains and big limestone mountains on the north side of the Yukon. And we saw these three sheep walking on this one scree slope across this, it was a valley, real steep valley, both sides. And they were walking a scree slope and we charged up down and then up to meet them on this on this street well the sheep trail across the scree slope because you could see it where it goes you know and we knew they were going to go by this one place so we climb up and we get to this place where we thought

they were going to come out in front of us but they had already gotten by and there was one that was on the next it it it has these big ridges of uh of uh of of limestone towers, you know, that would come down. And they had a trail that would go through and then scree between them. And we were about 300 yards away, but we hear this banging. And we look over there, and here's this sheep. And he backs up, and he gets up on his back legs and crack. He hits the rock wall with his horns.

And he grows back again and gets up there. And bam, bam, bam. He's just one after another. He's practicing, you know, hitting this rock wall. And I realized that's how they're, that's how they're breaking their tips. You think so? I know it, yeah. And so what's the first thing that's going to hit?

When you have a full curl, it's the tips. They're going to hit. Huh. They're going to hit the rock wall. And that's a flat enough surface. Yeah, I watched a big horn one time ram a ponderosa pine. I counted. He rammed it 75 times.

Yeah. But that's a soft thing. That's wood. But no, I get what you're saying. Because you can see that they abrad it. Like, I think they don't like it in their peripheral vision when they abrade it. Because sometimes they wear, like, big horns wear them smooth. They're like, like, like my fist, like smooth and round.

And I think they abrade it. Yeah. I don't know. I'm telling you, dude. They don't like it. They don't like it. I think they see it. I don't disagree, but I think the mechanism, you know, because when you get one that is, is, you know, not broomed, but a big full.

girl um they're tough it's hard no i'm with you man i don't i can't account for him being snapped off and i i i yeah i snapped off i know i i like what you're saying it's a theory it's a theory but i pictured him i was like there's no way he's sticking in a crack in the rock and prying it off i don't know how they break them off i think i'm sure you're right they're whacking them yeah i'm sure you're right but what i'm getting that yeah is and it's more common in big horns like you never see on a big like a eight nine 10 year old big Big horn? Yeah.

That some bitch never has his lamb tips. But they're smooth. Yeah. And I have watch sheep. I have watched sheep rubbing them. Rubbing them. On a rock wall? On a rock, on a cliff face.

Just rubbing it. Yeah. Like the same way you'd watch something scratch itself. Same way you'd watch it scratch itself on a tree. He's sitting there like rubbing. Yeah, but I'll bet the break, the initial break. No, no, I'm not contesting it on the break, man. I think you're right.

I'm just talking about the rub, but by theory, and I don't know, I never talked to a guy that knows a bunch about sheep. I know like a teeny about sheep, but my theory is, and no,

no guys ever cropped right. Like, I don't know. This is maybe totally not true. Yeah. My theory is, had been, it gets in their peripheral vision and it bugs the hell out of them.

Yeah. And so they're like, what is that? And they're, they don't like it. I don't know. You'd have to interview one. Yeah

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Just gear you can count on. Head to firstlight.com. That's f-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E dot com. Bears see a dog and I think it's a wolf. Yeah. What's a wolf think when it sees it's, what's a wolf think a dog is? So that's an interesting thing, you know, so. I used to travel quite a bit on the Kandik River, and the dogs would be running loose, you know,

because how do you go up the river with a canoe and not have them run loose, right? You can't ride them in there. So there's a lot of things you see, you know, they'll drive a moose into the river. The river is safe country for a moose, right? And the moose thinks the dogs are wolves, and they'll run right into the river, where they can stand and the dogs got a dogs or wolves got to swim and then they'll pound them if they get close they pound them with their hooves in there yeah if they can get them in the water yeah yeah and so and so the dogs sometimes you know because they're not quite as savvy as wolves they would swim out

trying to get to the moose and so the moose will just pound them you know and none of our dogs got damaged in that, that I, that I recall. I mean, it didn't, it didn't kill them. It didn't break them up, but, but I think that sometimes they do that with wolves, but probably not in the water, because wolves probably know you can't get them when they're in the water. But, um, but wolves, so wolves would more or less give up when that would happen. Yeah. They might, they might sit around. We've had times when we're lining up the river and, and, and the, dogs chase a moose into the river and it's not big enough for us to get past while the moose is in there you know so we're we camp sometimes oh really yeah because it's not going to get it come out

you know we get the coax the dogs back to us and get them tied up and sometimes it's still you know hours before the moose is ready to to get out of the water and go somewhere and and then we can continue up but um but one time uh i was walking along the river with the dogs and and and and I hear them barking back in a spruce woods and and I'm thinking that's that can't be a moose because moose you usually won't bay up you know with the dogs Jason back in the woods they go to the water you know and I'm so I think this they may have a bear up a tree right so what can you tell what what breed I mean I'm sure they're mixed but

what are these dogs what they look like they're they're great big huskies that they were, uh, you know, we had some that were as much as 120 pounds. Okay. And, um, they're, they're, they're the same size as wolves. Okay. Uh, up in that part of the country. I mean, a big wolf would be bigger than the biggest dog, but, um, but a lot of people bred these big dogs because they can pack and they're, um, um, you know, when you're mushing around on a, on a trap line and you say, whoa, they'd stop and you know where's you know the little hyper race dogs they tend not to yeah that's what that's what i was trying to picture if you had that new kind of souped up race dog or if you had the old stylers old style but when you say bay they'll still do that though they'll get something

cornered no raise hell yeah so they're barking back in the woods and i think that's got to be a bear you know so i start i'm sneaking back there with my rifle looking up into the trees and i realized I look where the dogs are, and they've got a wolf bait up. They've got a single wolf, same size as they were, and his hair is sticking straight out from his whole body and his tail, and the dogs are seriously as close to me to this microphone, right? And they're barking at him, but they're not biting him. But wolves, you know, if there's a wolf from a different pack that comes

and gets surrounded by a pack of wolves, they'll more likely than not, kill it. And so that wolf was spooked that he was in that situation where he might get nailed. And the dogs, you know, it was, I don't know how many I had then, four or five. And they're the same size as this animal, but they are barking at him, like seriously, this close, you know. And, but the wolf spots me, took off. Oh, really?

Yeah, hauled ass. And the dog's right on his tail. And the dogs came back in about a half an hour. But I'm sure the wolf got away because the dogs, they were just interested. Uh-huh. You know, they weren't trying to kill him or anything. And he might have been able to defend himself, too. But they knew, but they knew he wasn't a dog.

Yeah. Yeah. He was different. Man, I'll tell you, like, on that canine to canine thing, we have this little, I don't know, like, I don't know how big it is, maybe it's 35 pounds. this dog and um if I even so much skin a coyote

okay that dog smells that death that dog knows like it's never been beat up by a coyote something about the smell and if there's a coyote

laying there it is no way gonna go up there's not a dog in the world my dog's not gonna run up and try to play with yeah or you know they smell each other

there's butts, whatever. Like, there's not a dog in the world. My dog's not going to be excited about interacting with. A coyote, it knows. Like, it knows. That is not a dog. It is death. And I always wonder how they put that together.

It knows it's death. There were times when, like, this guy, Dick Cook. We talked about Dick Cook, you know, on the Tatan, Nick River. He had, his dogs sometimes interacted with, wolves and and they didn't kill each other they didn't fight but um the dogs would run out if the wolves were crossing cross and crossing paths with them but um i don't really i don't quite understand why but i think they both understand they're different yeah and um i never had i I never had the wolves bother my dogs.

Mostly they stayed away. But sometimes I've shot them big wolves because they're hanging around. One time it was in the fall, and we had a moose hanging. And our dogs were chained up, but they would at night, they would start barking. and I didn't know what was going on because I never saw anything until it snowed and then I realized

oh this is wolf a wolf is case in our place going all around and and at the time Jed I don't know how old he was five or six maybe and he wanted to

he always took great glee and going doing things by himself so he wanted to walk this trail back to a big beaver pond that we had a ski plane land in every once in a while in the winter and um and uh and we never did let him go by himself you know because there's a i don't know what it was a half mile or so on this nice trail but but uh we didn't think he was old enough at the time to do that and and i think in retrospect i think that wolf would have taken him if he'd been down there by himself but um but anyway i i decided i'm going to take this this wolf and and

there were times when he would walk up along the willab bar right uh right between the house and the and the and the river and i got down there and uh hid out in this uh a piece of driftwood and waited for him and he came right at dusk and shot that that uh that wolf and he had a he had a busted up jaw from the moose cracking him and uh teeth that weren't there and then the jaw had had healed but it just kind of in a in a big glob you know so his uh his jaw didn't work quite so well so he was um couldn't keep up with a pack perhaps couldn't feed himself he was trying to figure out how to get some of our moose yeah up there my buddy in alaska this is last winter he's a trapper some trap and

his wife calls him one day and she's got like she's with her dogs yeah this is just right behind his house and there's a wolf

messing with her and he doesn't believe her he's like that's gotta be a dog and she's like I know a wolf I'm looking at a wolf

there's a wolf won't leave us alone and he's still dismissive of it yeah well later he goes and looks in the snow and it's like

sure enough and in the morning it's all walking around his house so he makes a set for it and catches it right away right away I think he said it was about 20 minutes or something I mean it's that hard it's like that desperate

that wolf wasn't afraid of people well he showed me a picture its face its teeth were gone I mean freshly gone it's it looked like if you to put that dog if you'd turn that wolf sideways

yeah and set it on a on anvil and pulled its lips back and had your body take a sledgehammer and bam on his teeth you would have got something that looked like what this thing's face looked like and only thing he'd think is somehow it got

just stomped by a moose by a moose yeah stomped like he's I mean it wasn't a great picture but you look at it its face its teeth on the one side are just crushed Yeah. In.

That's how this one was. And somehow something got the perfect shot, a moose, has to be a moose. I don't know how else to be up there. Yeah. Got the perfect shot. Poof. Well, so I got, I would rarely get adult wolves in any trap or snare. A couple of exemptions, but mostly you get the first year.

And then all of the pups from that litter would see one of the. their own get into a snare or get into a trap and they were from that point on they wanted nothing to do with anything that people had going and and um it was it was really rare to get the old ones unless you shot them and so i did a couple times in the winter they would uh a pack would run by the house going up the river and uh and i i ended up shooting i think three all together um over the years adults the biggest of the adults and and they're all broken up they're all they got broken ribs they got broken legs that heal um that one had the jaw yeah all of them had broken ribs and uh some of them had healed um most of them had not and it was just you know the flopping bones

Flot and bones. It's just incredible. And I'm certain that it's, uh, it's moose. They're gonna, they're whacking them. Yeah. They get close enough. And, and, and it's just a consequence of what they eat that because they eat moose. And they do.

They go up and they, they bite them and they get kicked and, uh, continue on. But it damages them. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I, I got one one time and, um, and I was skinning it. And it's casing, you know, so you go hang it up and go from back legs down to body and pull it down, working your way down to the face eventually. Well, I get to the area right around the back of the shoulders, and the hide just comes off. It separates right there.

And I look at the home, like the hide fell in two? Yeah. And so I came off the head. And so I'm sitting there. I'm not following what you mean. So I start looking, it's got this scar all the way around. Oh, from a snare. All to the bone.

Yeah, from a snare. It had gotten caught and it drew right down to bone. What? And the snare had eventually rusted away and dropped off. Damn. Yeah, it went right to bone all the way around. What? Crazy.

It had to have carried that snare. for a couple of years but it was fine yeah i mean like seemed to you fine well i mean the hide never never bonded again right the back part but the animal like is up and about yeah

yeah way oh they're tougher than hell the wolves are are outrageously tough yeah if you catch one in the with a foot it's like a bomb went off you know there's moss hanging in trees smaller trees are chewed down it's uh they're they're uh they're extraordinarily tough yeah you know a friend of mine had a he had spent some time with wolverine trappers and tell me an

interesting observation this wolverine trapper shared with him was like in trapp when you approach the animal and the animal's always as far away as it can get on the chain yeah you know he's trying to go the other direction if his foot's caught his legs outstretched and he's trying to get away and this guy said a wolverine is always the wolverine's always coming to you yeah yeah that's right he's stretched in your direction trying to get at you yeah huh that's pretty crazy about that wolf though yeah that it just that it wasn't like a fatality for him and that didn't kill him he he survived it we had a wolf researcher on the show and there's like there's a real paucity of like level-headed wolf researchers

because it gets emotional for them. They lose their they lose their ability to see things clearly. Especially the park, like the park kind. Yeah. She becomes like,

it comes too familial. They kind of become like celebrities, the people and the wolves. They just, they don't see things clearly anymore. But this woman, Diane Boyd, see,

she's very clear-headed. She's never lost her ability to look at things. smartly you know um she also she likes bird dogs a lot she's a big bird hunter so she raises bird dogs and i was asking her how smart are like our wolf smart like what's their intelligence and this is a woman that loves dogs and she said it's not comparable like a domestic dog's intelligence can't compare They can't compare it to a wolf.

A wolf is, like, you know, I can't remember how she put it, infinitely smarter than a dog, than a domestic dog. Well, this is a sense of space, right? This goes back to Charles Darwin, fitness, you know, the survival of the fittest. And wolves are on the chopping block every day, every generation. Dogs, we feed them. Yeah. We take care of them. They're not on the chopping block.

So I think she's probably right Yeah About that You remember the Unabomber Yeah I remember the story Yeah And his manifesto When he's trying to talk about

What happened to society Like when the Unabomber is griping About where society went wrong He's like Survival He grades He has this scoring system It's like a zero to five

or a one to five scoring system for difficulty. Difficulty of a task. A one, like level one difficulty, I think it's how he lays it out, is that if you try your absolutely hardest, you have a slight chance of success up to, you don't even need to try it all, and you'll succeed.

Okay. His gripe with technology is that human existence has become a five. You don't need to do shit. You don't need to try at all. You're going to survive. And that's where all of our neuroses come from. We have nothing to focus on, right? It's just, it's all just, like, staying alive is just bullshit.

It's like it just happens. So that's why we have all these psychological, emotional issues. Because our main thing has been taken away from us. Well, Smeagled, he did have some problems. He had a five. He encountered a five. Yeah. But domestic dogs are in it.

Humans and domestic dogs share our thing. Yeah. You don't need to try at all. You'll be fine. That's domestication. Yeah. Like us, them. Yeah.

Right? And you're right. A wolf man, that sucker, they're living their lives in the two. well if you try really really hard you have a reasonable chance of success is where they're where they're at you know and it probably does drive a level of intelligence man yeah yeah what the you know i think the the in recent times you know when they're looking at how far back was it before we domesticated or became symbiotic with wolves yeah probably 10 15000 years ago that was our first domestic right and one of the best

and for a lot of different reasons because they did help us, you know. They could smell, they could bay a moose up, they could find the seal hole on the ice, you know, a lot of these. You hear as well, it's a good point, is the early warning system. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like imagine how much better you sleep knowing that anything comes near here, those dogs are going to go nuts. But it's over that period of time that we've kind of bred out the intense nervousness that, that wolves have. And there was somebody up in Central

had caught a wolf and brought it into their dog yard. How they did it, I don't know. But it seemed that that would be a really fraught thing to try. And they bred her with dogs and the progeny, the first group of pups

that she had. couldn't be handled they weren't they you couldn't turn them into a sled dog okay right even though they were half dog and half wolf and then they would breed those and they got the uh quarterwolves right off of the pup you know and and this guy fred he had one of those quarter wolf pups he called it strider and uh was he a Tolkien fan yeah all of us were. Really? Yeah.

Yeah. We named mountains a lonely mountain. Because you guys had the books. Yeah. Yeah. We were all. Well, why were you guys all Tolkien fans? I don't know.

It was that time of, of the world, I guess. I don't know. But, but yeah, we got, I mean, it was Tom Bombadillo. It was this guy that used to paint the, this, uh, had a big garden that had, you know, the ends of his logs were painted red and various, uh, So I need to do just real quick on this subject. This is like a sociological experiment. When I was in high school, I had a teacher, a beloved, beloved man that kind of in some ways, his name was Bob Heaton.

When I tell my story of how I became a writer, it's, it's him, he's a major point in that narrative. Yeah. The first point. He's the first point in that narrative. He had a class. you could take in high school called modern mythology. All you did was read Lord of the Rings.

It was the whole damn class. You read Lord of the Rings. And he taught it. But I wonder if you could go and do a thing about Lord of the Rings people what their sort of moral perspective is, their work ethic and all that. And compare them to Harry Potter people.

Like are they tougher? Like what? You know what I mean? Like Harry Potter spun. off what kind of person did that spin off yeah and what kind of person did lord of the ring spin off yeah i don't know i mean my kids uh my younger boy anyway uh read harry potter and loved it i haven't read him is he tougher than you uh yeah he's you're lying no i'm not but but uh he works out he works out oh that kind of tough i'm not talking about that kind of tough yeah i'm talking about like gur no he's he's

He's tough that way, too. But I want to go back a step, though. Sure, no, I got off on this whole Lord of the Rings thing. Hunting big country isn't for the faint of heart. You got steep ground, long distances, and miles of crown land that aren't always easy to navigate. That's why Anex Hunt just got a serious upgrade for hunters in Canada. Now you can get nationwide coverage for less than the cost of a box of shells with major updates to Crown land. layers and new parcel boundaries where available.

Scout access boundaries and terrain with confidence before you even lace up your boots. Whether you're chasing elk in the mountains, spotting mule deer in the coolies, or looking for big woods white tails, Anex gives you the tools to plan smarter and hunt harder. You'll still get fully functional offline maps, precise weather conditions, real-time GPS tracking, and customizable markups to share with your crew. Big country demands better intel.

Download on X hunt and start your seven-day trial to get dialed before your next trip. Hunting demands preparation, persistence, and gear that will not quit on you. That is why I wear first light. This isn't about hype. It's about no compromise gear. Built to perform, built to last, whether it's their industry-leading merino wool, keeping me comfortable through the cold and the hot, or their durable outerware shrugging off the elements.

First Light is built to help you go farther and stay longer. Designed by hunters, four hunters, with a deep commitment to conservation and land access. No shortcuts, no excuses. Just gear you can count on. Head to firstlight.com. That's f-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. Why did I bring it up?

Oh, because his dog was striked. He was a dog. It was strider. So Strider was super nervous about everything. And he would, if he was inside the cabin with Fred and his other dog, I forget what her name was. But he would know that there was something going on outside way before anybody else, you know. And if there were neighbors came in, if we went to visit and he didn't have it on a chain, he couldn't catch it. it would go around in the in the shadows of the woods you could see him but he wouldn't come

to fred or anybody right yeah and and his whole life his parents lives were captivity his life was captivity but he still had that cageiness yeah he didn't lose it and and dogs lost it over 10,000 years right i mean the you know selected breeding of those that don't bite that don't run a way that, you know, are nice, are friendly to people, whatever. And one time this guy, your trap there reminds me of this time, there's this guy, Charlie Edwards. He was up at Shade Creek, a little ways down, eight or nine miles down from Eagle, right? And he used to set a bear trap because the bears would come off of this McCann Hill and Hilliard up Shade Creek, where his cabin was at the mouth.

And there was two little streams that came by, and he would set a bear trap at that spot every spring and sometimes get two or three bears. He just had one little pinch point where he knew a bear was going to put his foot. And one time he caught him, he caught a wolf. It was a, it was a female wolf. Well, can you explain the pinch point again? He's putting it where? So there's a bait set or is a blind set? There's this bluff along the river, and Shade Creek comes out.

About a quarter mile in, two forks of Shade Creek come together. And there's a ridge that comes down right at the wall. He would set it right there where those two streams came together. It's a trail set. It's a trail set. It's a trail set. Oh, it was a baited set. Oh, it's okay.

I'm with you. I understand. I understand. Yeah. So he had this, he had this big trap there, and this wolf got caught, and it was a female. And he, Charlie was, he's kind of spiritual, you know, and had all these visions of, you know, most giving themselves to us or whatever. whatever, you know, and so he thinks this, this wolf is sitting there looking off in one direction and its foot is in the trap. And he comes walking up. Its ears move, but it doesn't, it doesn't

turn or growl or do anything. It's just sitting there. Freaking out, I'm sure. And he decides he's going to, that he's got some connection with this wolf and he's going to try to capture it take it back to his place, right? To keep it. Yeah, to breed it with his dogs. He's thinking he might do that. And so he sits down to somehow commune with this wolf in back, where he doesn't think that the wolf can get to him, right? Because its leg is out that way, heads out that way.

And he sits there for a little while, and then he reaches out and touches it on the first. length. Huh. Bam! That wolf goes, grabs him right by the hand and looks at him right in his eyes and sort of, it didn't crunch it the way it could have, but he bit, he put some pressure on it, a couple different

times, looking at him, right in the eye, and then let him go. What? He thought he was gone, and the wolf could have killed him, could have killed him, could have killed him right there, didn't, let him loose. so he's got some teeth marks but he didn't crush his hand even though he could have yeah and and uh and he was he was just about he was just totally totally wiped out at that point he rolled away he didn't feel he could shoot the but there's no way to let it go can't let it go you know it's not like you could just say hey wait a minute yourself really bit then yeah and so he he realized he had to kill it and he

walked back to his place though and calmed down before he went back up um but you can't you can't get close enough to ever try to to let it go what was his takeaway from that well it didn't dissuade him of of you know his his spirituality type you know did he keep that trap set i don't know if he kept that trap set he he had it set on the river one time when he moved down river from there and uh and we ran our dogs right past it and they didn't none of them went to it but but we were pissed off that he had it set in a place that we would have our dogs because i'd kill a dog you know break their break their foot but uh you know those big big bear traps but anyway yeah so so wolves wolves and dogs actually have really strong uh bites because they've got a

Cranial ridge, you know? And so your jaw muscles have more leverage than, say, a bear. They got a smooth sick, smooth top of the skull. And never thought about that. Yeah. And their jaws are not near as tough. That cranial ridge on a skull that ties into bite strength? I don't know that.

Yep. Yep. Exactly. And our dogs killed a number of black bears over the years when they would catch them where there wasn't trees. Uh-huh. Because if they couldn't get up a tree, they couldn't defend themselves.

And the dogs, be able to take them down. Take them down and kill them. Did you have a lot of dogs get killed doing that? None. None of them even got hurt. It's that easy for them. It's that easy.

And I think that, I think that any wolf pack would kill bears. Anytime they see them. Maybe because of size, they might shy away from some, you know, like grizzlies.

But, I think, I think, that they, wolves are the reason that black bears don't occur up on the North Slope or Seward Peninsula where it doesn't have trees, Yukon Delta, Alaska Peninsula. None of those places really have enough trees for black bears to go up. And I think that wolves would kill them anytime they come across them. Because our dogs did, and they didn't have trouble killing them.

One time, first time that happened, I was with Little John, and we tried to get the dogs to back off so we could kill the bear because what bears do is they lay on their back when once they're once the dogs grab them they lay on their back and they try to to uh um swipe at them with their claws and stuff and they try to bite too but the dogs don't seem to get hurt at all by it and they kind of turn them to to burger bloodshot uh pretty quickly yeah how like if you did an autopsy on a bear that your dogs killed what would the autopsy say well they just got they got bite marks all over in their in their chest and their neck well they never think to like they don't know enough to like crush the throat or something they don't they're not strategic no they're they would

you know bite the inside of the back legs and the belly when we would open them up they'd be all bloodshot it was uh yeah but just doesn't seem like that would add up enough well they did it with black bears three times that I remember i wonder if like the stress is also real bad oh i imagine it's enormous yeah like also leads to mortality yeah they killed one grizzly your dogs killed a grizzly yeah and that grisie didn't get any of the dogs killed uh-uh i i think that it was uh was a young grizzly and um i think what happened is it broke its back it had flopped on it back on a rock as it was up in the sheep mountains and uh and we saw the dogs chasing this bear over the uh over a little ridge and when we got up to the top they were all just laying around

next to it and it was dead these dogs are real menace man they they're they're wolves yeah right in mind they're not but but in body they are and of course they they behaved kind of like a pack when they would encounter something they're bold they were bold they were bold Yeah Yeah What's like What's kind of the biggest Lesson you took away from

Um Like what's the biggest life lesson You took away from living in the bush Oh God Like something you realized about people You know Biggest life lesson Or like a valuable lesson

You know, whatever Yeah I don't know what the hell There seemed a valuable lesson And a life lesson but like what's something you carried with you from it i don't know i i guess i always um in doing that i realized i can i can do anything okay you know i can i can persevere i can navigate whatever comes up hmm i don't really know but it was uh you know that i look at for example i look at

the folks clustered, you know, homeless folks in town. And I'd say, that were me, I'd be out the road. I'd be out on the river because I can make a living there. Yeah. In town, it's a lot harder. But I don't know, just thinking, I mean, I realize there's a lot of different reasons that people might be homeless, but, and I wouldn't degrade that at all. But for me, I really think, you know, be an out.

out on the country is a it's a neat place and there's ways to go about feeding yourself there what did you see you had to have encountered guys in that time you had to encounter guys that were going to go do it but just didn't work like it wasn't going to work yeah did you have would you be able to gauge when you met somebody would you be able to gauge off your own intuition, you have what it takes, or you don't have what it takes. Like, would you know someone was headed for trouble? I don't know that I would, at least not right away. You know, you have to get to know somebody, you realize, you know, these guys, they need

their motors, you know, and be able to move places really fast. And that's not something that we did. we didn't so so by having motors you need a lot of money okay right i mean it's just the way it works snow machine or a big boat to go up and down to yukon um and that's a lot of money is really not to be had out in the woods at least it it certainly wasn't for for us even if you have a good year trap and you're not going to buy a snow machine and spend it on that So you would view reliance on motors at that time. Reliance on motors was a deficit? Well, I mean, I felt it was. I mean, I didn't want to go to get the job. You know, there were a lot of people that went and worked up on the pipeline, you know, when that was happening back in that period of time. And it was good wages and everything, but they, that's where they lived.

Okay. You know, they were. And you were never, you were never drawn to that. I wasn't. Yeah. Were you running into guys at that? time were there guys coming out of vietnam coming home and going into the bush were you encountering that no i think out there were to to the uh to the communities there like eagle and uh and circle you know tan annaw and like returning veterans were going into those communities to live but you weren't seeing them off living off the land out in the bush yeah i don't know if you they're definitely was that happening i don't know whether it was a movement or say but it was there

were some people that were um ex-vietnam your circle of guys what was the commonality if you had to think of one in your circle of folks and you're when you say because you often use the term we we would do this we would do that yeah in your circle of folks what were they what was pushing them what was pulling them what was pushing them where were they coming from yeah You know, a lot of it was just back to the land type, you know, adventure, going out and trapping, living in the woods. I think they liked what I did, which was the ability to go out and get my own food. And I did a lot of tanning. I sewed my own clothes, the winter clothes anyway.

I tried leather for the summer, and it did. didn't work so well it just got wet yeah because it's always going to rain at some point you're going to walk through bushes and have your leather pants soaking wet um yeah i don't know i like the idea of uh building things out of what's there yeah yeah and and being able to feed myself i mean there were things that we were buying from town you know the rifle a gill net um plastic eventually for the bottom of the of the toboggan you know so it slid better than just straight birch boards which is what i used for a few years to start with um yeah aluminum canoe you know yeah there were a lot of things that we brought we weren't we weren't in any way like

uh you know uh previous times with uh the native folks there's They truly made everything and worked it. And it was pretty great. So one thing that happened when I was down in Cheevac, I mentioned Chewack, I think when Karen was teaching, we had gone out to there on the Yukon Delta, right? And I remember one time when I was going downstream, I had fixed this old double-end canoe.

It was a fiberglass canoe. and this one, uh, uh, woman there, uh, let me use it because I patched it up for. And, uh, and I would, would take the tide out from this river and, uh, and hunt ducks and things. And I had a gill net in for some, for some fish. And one time when I was down there, I don't know, 10, 15 miles away from Chivac, I started coming back in with the tide. And this, uh, this old man waves me down. And I pulled over and wanted a ride. I said, jump in.

He had all skin clothes. And he had these hip boots that were made out of seal skins and sewed with this grass. No. In the thread. It was, it was, it was, it was some sort of sinew thread, but they would put in a blade of grass with it. And that would, my understanding was that that, would swell when it got wet and helped to seal it. Yeah, it was outrageous. And he just sat there with his feet in the, in the water, just like me with my rubber hip boots.

Guy had you out badass. Totally. Totally. Yeah. No, it was great. It was cool to see. And so, I mean, we did that sort of stuff with the, you know, tanning hides and sewing clothes with them and various things, but not like that. You know, when I was talking in the beginning, beginning of the show I was talking about these American history things were doing one on daniel boon and the long hunters then the mountain the mountain men like jim bridger and then the buffalo hide hunters yeah so it's funny because those buffalo hide hunters are 100 years before you were living in the bush like they were that sort of peak hide hunt was 1874 and you were around you know century later but one of the observations we have and that hide hunters

piece we got coming out is that the long hunters the boon and the long hunters Jim Bridger and the mountain men those guys lived off the land okay they could produce their own clothes

source their own food it was the part of the whole plan right that you're part of the whole mountain man plan is that you're going to have to source your food there it was baked into the system boom they'd source their own clothes their own shoes everything in a pinch

they could make gunpowder, okay? The hide hunters, by 1870, the hide hunters were, they were these first breed of market hunter that they didn't live off the land. They had wagons, they carried bacon, they carried flour, they ate enormous amounts of buffalo meat, but they didn't make clothes.

like they these were guys that would write letters and order shit right and so it's like they look they would if you saw them they would look like gunfighters

in their attire right they were no at that point 1870 they're no longer living off the land you're feeding yourself some but you're not responsible for all that anymore

maybe that's why they're more effective killers. There's no time. Like, they lived in tents, man. Yeah. They had access to canvas tents. They had wagons. They had to reload ammo, but they wore cotton.

They were wool. They were linen. Didn't make tools, just bought tools. Carried extras of everything. You know? That was a century before your time, though. Yeah. So the fact that a century later, you were still doing what you did is remarkable.

Yeah. And you couldn't really do it. in lower 48, meek, sort of could. You'd be laying in jail. Yeah, you'd get chased away eventually. There were people in the mountains in northern New Mexico who would live in some of the caves and do gardens and things, but they were, the foresters, as I understand it, would go and chase them away every few years so that they didn't have the adverse possession thing.

In Alaska, the adverse possession was, they made it so that it didn't apply. because it was such huge land masses that they couldn't afford to keep track of them all. And so it never was an issue. And we didn't own property either out there, you know. Some, I mean, it was in that transition period, you know, and, you know, the native claim settlement had gone on. And there were, you know, a lot of the time was, as, well, some of the time was before Anilka.

But even then, you know, nobody knew what land would become what ownership for quite a while. There's places you can still make a pretty good go of it. You could. Because you got all the non-game, squirrel, porcupine, stuff like that, very long waterfowl seasons. Yeah. Like, you know, extended camping periods. Like, this place is in a canoe just rod and reel. You're not going to be on that.

But, like, there's places you can make a go of it, for sure, if someone had the audacity. Yeah. Yeah. It'd be easy in the summer and easy if you moved pretty regular. Yeah. There's nothing stopping you've been doing that. But there's a few private land holdings that somebody could pick up and then make a go of it. Yeah.

You know, so that you couldn't get, you could build something that was. And no one can run you off. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, man, I got a get, but man, I'm so glad you came back. I had a lot of these questions I needed to clarify. Yeah, yeah.

We didn't get to fish, though. I know. It's the next time. Next time you come on, we're going to just talk about fish research. Okay. Like, just to titillate people ahead of time, I'm going to tell them how you can tell when it's, uh, well, the whole thing with salmon, sharks and salmon. Yeah. That's interesting.

It is. We're going to do the fish episode next. It'll be a three part. Okay. And next time we're not going to do any recap on John the Baptist. There you go. We're going to dive right into fish. Yeah.

Fish research. Just to remind folks in preparation for Randy's next visit, when he quit the bush, you became like a full-on fish researcher, a fish biologist. That's right. Your second life. I know. And that's been really rewarding. too yeah yeah all right next time i'm serious all right next time's the fish episode the final episode the fish episode it'll be like how many how many installments are there in lord of the rings

three well there's the hobbit yeah and i don't count the salmoralian yeah not counting the hobbit it's a three pack or we'll go back in time and hit the hobbit later one last thing on uh please on the lord of the rings yeah so when we were when we were living out it was there was there There was a time when we felt like we were the good guys, you know, we were, we were, the fellowship. Yeah, we were, we were, we were fine, right? And then we started reading these, these passages in Lord of the Rings, you know, with, with, what was it, the, the orcs or something, with, with these areas where they're just all these dead bones from things that they'd eaten. And we start looking around and we go, well, that, that looks more like us than anything else. But it was true, you know, because you can't get rid of the bones. They're always going to be there. Dogs chew them.

And they're there. That's a part about, that's a part about death in the barons. Yeah. As they're dying, they get to digging out all their old bones and trying to boil them and all that. And that left left them more trouble for them. You know what I did after reading that book? Because I was curious about it, I took some raw hide and boiled it and ate it. Did you?

Yeah. Heron all? No, no, no, no, no hair. I was boiled the raw hide. I boiled it, boiled it and boiled it until it turned into like a gelatin. Yeah. I didn't eat enough to clog my, you know, I didn't have to have the misses doing anima on me. She might say, yeah, I ate a couple, though.

I ate a couple strips just to see. It kind of had like a, it had like a noodley, like a very gelatinous noodley quality to it. But I didn't eat enough to die or anything, you know, as evidence by my presence. Exactly. Yeah. All right, dude, I got to run. Okay. all right next time fish thanks for having me yeah thank you man

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