00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten in my case, underwear listening un podcast. You can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor where you stand with on x Alright, first thing I want to do, Clay Um Clay Newcomb right off the bat, just to get it started like a cold open man. You've cold opening show business? Uh do uh talk about how you guys fixed squirrels down there in the Ozarks, like the number one if you had to eat them the rest of the one way the rest of your life. Simple answer that there's there's only one answer, that's frieda. But there's more than that, right, Well, I mean you don't that's it. Well, I like to double batter them. So you used to take your buttermilk, and if you got to take this in the field with you gotta have a little preparation, some zip like bags whatnot, but buttermilk flour mix it holdup a little bit more because we don't know if you're butter milk. So you got your squirrel, you got your squirrel quartered. He's also you've you've also got the rib cage and mid section, so you've got five pieces of squirrel. When you're when you're cooking squirreled you, uh, do you discard I mean the actual rib slab. Well, I mean, I mean you're not eating that right, Well, kind of as a hat tip to two the squirrels, I usually cook it just you got some squirrel backstraps on there, you know. H yeah, but so so. But typically you would just eat the quarters. Yeah, well, the quarters and the like the whole I'm trying to look with the vocabulary of squirrel, isn't it the saddle, the four legs, and then from the right in front of the pelvic bone right up until about the second third rib. Yeah, that kind of like oyster like with the spine in the middle. Saddle. Yeah, the saddle saddle. That works for me. But you take and cook the rib cage too, well, if i'm I mean, if we're if we're cooking in the field, I would, but there's not much meat there. There's not much meat there. I mean, really we're talking about four quarters, but you're not throwing the saddle out. Well, I mean it's I guess it's it's a less process just to cook all of it. Just cook the saddle with the ribs. So you just got this big like a saddle handle. Yeah, five pieces, So you got five pieces, five pieces. So what I would do is I would I would take those pieces, dip them in buttermilk. Have a zip like bag with flour. If you're at your house to be a pan or whatever, bat put the put the buttermilk squirrel into the flour. In the perfect world, you soak them in the buttermilk. You know, I'm gonna be honest here. I never have but I've never eaten squirrel with that much like forethought. Times it's just like, hey, we killed some squirrels, let's eat them. That's typically the way that I do it. So I have not like done that, but so buttermilk and then put them back in the flour for the double the double backs. As you're saying, you're going buttermilk flour, buttermilk flour. You ever cook catfish by going, uh, you go flour, then egg because it gives the egg the egg sticks to the flour, and then the corn meal sticks of the egg. I've never done the corn meal first, I would have done the egg first corn meal. Well no, no, no, So you're actually saying, like actual white flower. Yeah, you take those, You take the fish, put it in flour, dusted and flower. Then it goes to the egg because then it gets then the egg. It's like you're sticking the flower to the squirrel, the egg to the flour, the corn meal to the egg. And you're doing like you're sticking the flour to the squirrel. No, you're stick in the buttermilk to the squirrel, then flour, but then sticking more butter milk onto the flower, and second and getting yet more flower. The second dip is where the magic happens, because that's when you really get the thick better. I like a good thick you know, thick battery, you know deep fried. Do you find the as it cooks that all that falls away because you've got too much of it? Probably seven you probably maintain the batter. Yeah, the rest of it's just like crumbled in the bottom of the pan. So that makes the great Yeah. The key though to the way that I have learned and and I can't I won't lie and say I've been doing this my whole life, but bare oil, and you're sitting there holding ladies and gentlemen. Clay newcle was holding a jar barrel which is half pint, which is some pure white. I'd call that pearl. I'd go so far as I call it pearly white. I've got a question for you about this later, but let me should I were so many, so so I would, I would. I would fry that squirrel, double double battered squirrel in some type of pure animal larden. I mean if you if you didn't have barrel oil, if you just had like pork lard, I would fried in that. You know, you know I'm a mid I'm a mid kind of guy. You don't want to You're not deep frying it, so you don't need it like an inch deep, but you don't want to skimp on it too much. Classic mid fry, mid fry. You know I'm gonna fried. It's not deep ride. I think that counts as a shallow fry, because anything shallower than a shallow fry counts is just saute like fry. I pictured the oils coming halfway up it. Okay, it's probably not that because barrel oil is such a precious commodity. You don't want to waste it on one spin, you know what I mean? Dude, I have you ever hear the chef um he's a friend of the program Jesse Griffith's Texas. He was talking. I knew this like a thing people did, but I just kind of forgot about it. He fries his fish and uh be fat, beef fat. Yeah, he buys at his restaurant. At his restaurant, he buys beef fat, renders his own bee fat, fills his fryer's full of bee fat, and fries is fish in there. Yeah. I don't like the smell of beef fat. It's heavy duty. It's heavy duty. So then uh, there you are. You don't power boil it, you don't double fry it. So you like a good chewy hunk of squirrel. You know, I can't. I can't say that I'm like the ultimate squirrel chef. That's just the way we do it. That was my question, How do you do it? Yeah, that's that's the way we do it. I've had some squirrel and some like new bruns with stew that we've made which kind of like, uh, you know, where you would boil it and then add it to a stew with you know, carrots and onions and all kind of stuff. But those are the main way. I mean, there's really only it's really only one way to eat a squirrel. In the South, we had three four ways we cooked it as a kid, and I don't think any of them, like, none of them are traditional. You had gray squirrels in Michigan, fox and gray and then both. You know you guys, where you're at, you have black face gray very very little black squirrel is like, you kill a black squirrel, you're gonna get it out. Oh you know what's interesting, Like in my mom's yard. Um, in my mom's yard. Over the course of my lifetime, it's been funny. It went from very rare to see a black phase gray squirrel and in her yard to now it's rare to see a gray face. Really what happened? It's just you know, well, I think a gray squirrel can have a litter that has gray face and black face in the same litter, and for something, it's just trending towards black h the predators pick up on it. Could be ever hide in the black ones. Yeah, it could have something to do. Remember how we were just talking about black and white squirrels or black or yeah, white and Brown's could be that some there's some really proficient squirrel hunter naturally doesn't like black face gray square. You would have to think that would be a pretty significant change in terms of that's that animals number one line of defenses its color. It really would be. And yeah, I mean I wish I could tell you some hard date on it, but that's happened. But what I was gonna say about the traditional aditional cooking is there's not like where I'm from, there's not a lot of but people don't think of like traditional fried fish is traditional there, but traditional a lot of places. But we had four like my mom would do four things with it. And one was like something that everybody did back then with wild game, which kind of fell out of favor, is you would take a crock pot and put all your squirrels in it and then you dump cream and mushroom soup. Yeah yeah, I'm bringing that back and then turn the crock pot on Minnesota. Same thing you did, the same thing, ladies and general. That's Kevin Harlander. Hello you more? Do you like more of a Harlander? Hard hard Lander? You know that depends I guess Harlanders, great Harlander, Um, yeah, cooking there and then you would put it on egg noodles. You'd put it on toast, oddly shot on a shingle with squirrel, shingle being the toad godfair and Southern has ever done that? That can't be true. I don't know any put it on noodles or put it on toast both. Really you put it on a biscuit. But they cooked it down, they've done you know, Yeah, I think so, I think so. But you would never put it on a piece of toast. You put it on a biscuit, because I know, damn sure you do that. Well, tried on toast. I'm the shingle being, you know, and the toast and you put the uh. We would do that. My mother would. Um. My mom had a recipe card. I bet she still has it. She had a recipe card that she got from her mother. And her mother got it from the package that some frozen rabbit came in from the store thirties. It was like Hassan Feffer. It was like rabbit, and it was like, hey, here's what you do at the rabbit. It was like a recipe card. And my mom said it was stuck onto a package, and they liked it so much she cut it out. And that's how she would cook cotton tail rabbits if she was cooking them. And she would cook squirrels and we'd eat hoss and fever with them, and then we would eat them. And my dad's deep friar a lot, and sometimes my mom would brown him. Like you're saying, do exactly what you're talking about. This is how my brother Matt likes to cook. Him still do everything you're talking about now. He doesn't know what he doesn't do. The double dip chrome, double dip deal single dip, single dip um in a pan, then finished them in a three degree oven for a long time, covered in foil. Mm hmm, and it's it tenderizes them. But that works. Okay, moving on a little bit. You're good on that, Ni. Well, I did have one follow up on cooking squirrel. You treat a young squirrel and an old squirrel the same. You wouldn't if you wanted him to taste good. Oh I mean again, I'm I'm my squirrel cooking has been. We killed the squirrel, We're gonna eat it. We're not gonna be that worried about, you know, the culinary aspect of it. The joy inside of this is just we killed the squirrel and we're gonna eat it. It's that simple. So so sometimes if you cook it the way that I have described as my buddy Michael Lanier says, big squirrel hunter hunt with some as he said, when you get one like that, you just pitch it to the dogs, a tough one. Yeah. How does he know it's gonna be a tough one? Well, he bite it. Oh, I got you, I got you. Yeah. And if if it's just super tough, and then they will be. And sometimes you can't completely tell, but an older squirrel, So I don't I don't have any tricks for tenderizing older squirrels. If that's where we were going, you know, are you familiar with Oh no, I was gonna say that. My only trick is that I look at him like that one is a it's gonna go into the slow cooker file, and that one is a young tender one and I'll fry it or grill it or whatever. Do you remember the term the fell? The fell? No? Uh. We we used to have a really old neighbor in Miles City, Montana. This guy was so old. Um, I'm trying to think there's a couple boys I can describe how old he was. I'll tell you this way to tell you how old he was. He was sold that he wants. They were sawing firewood with a sawmill blade. They would pull the wheel off a truck and jack the back of the truck up. Wow, and run a sawmill blade by putting the accelerator on the truck turn a saw blade. It's impressive. He was using this saw blade and cuts off his thumb like back where he took the base of the thumb with it. And his brother flicked that thumb into the hogpen and the hog ate it. No, just to get rid of it. That told he was so people know to run off to the to the hospital. You put it in butter milk. Just no doubt. You cut off, you cut off anything, you put it in butter milk. That's what I've always heard. And he was a butcher. Um he was. He did cost him slaughter work. Here's no way of telling how old he was. I've talked with this guy a lot, but he was old that he used to shoot horses, shoot wild horses and fat and hogs on him, and was reluctant to send him off to market with a belly full of horse meat because of how it might look to the slaughterhouse people. So he'd give him barley for a while before selling them, so that no one knew he was fattening him on horse meat. And he said that their condition worsened while eating barley. He said, their tail wouldn't have a tight of a corkscrew to it, and they're high to lose a little bit of it. Chip. Is that a correlation to how good the meat is, how type? He said that he was a big proponent of uh so he back then he was a little bit. He felt like this practice was a little bit shady, he expressed, being reluctant to send them off with a belly for the horse meat. I don't know it. He that's how old he was. I can tell you how old he was. He's about ninety three. But when at the time when he passed away, so he described he would talk about the fell on rabbits or the fell on squirrels, and to be like the skin under the skin, m hm, you know what I'm saying, Like the what sits between the muscle in the hide when you pull it off. And he would talk on rabbits that had the fell was too thick, and he felt that was a rabbit that wasn't very Would the fell actually be like the layer of like fat me queeny, Yeah, the connective tissue vis queeny membranes thing and he would point your rabbit, talk about they had a thick fell. It wasn't going to be a good rabbit. Miriam. Miriam Webster defines it as a thin, tough membrane covering a carcass directly under. So he was right. I had no ideas right, he got it right. I just thought it was like his Oh the fell. It can also be a synonym for skin, hide or pelt. Really, or if you if you fell off your bike and scrape your felt, if the squirrel fell out of the tree. Okay, taking a break from that for a minute. Uh, Kevin, speaking of hogs, You see that transitions nice. That's what they call sego called pivot and found some folks called the pivot. I like to think of it as a segue. Uh, you're fatting some hogs? Have you? Have you been a lifelong hogan? No? So I grew up Minnesota. Both my grandparents from dairy farms. So there dairy people. So why wasn't your parents from Why weren't your parents from dairy farms? So my grandpa and my grandma grew up on different farms, right, married, and they moved off neighboring farms. Yeah, oh, Pole and holding for Minnesota Germans, one town Polish and the other. There's a probably a lot of animosity between those, I don't think so. I think they helped that. I think so. It was later later down the down the trail and you heard a World War two heard of it? Yeah, so at that point they were probably his new immigrants to the country. Yeah. I think they're like second, second and third generation together. Yeah. Yeah, certainly. Uh. And they grew up farming, met each other, fell in love, Yeah, moved to St. Cloud, Minnesota. So I got away from farming. Yeah, your parents got away from farming. Yeah. Yeah, Well my grandparents got away from farming. They moved off my my granddad's strung telephone wire from North Dakota down to so they had to get away from farming, did yeah, for like economic reason? Think so, I think so. And my great uncle still runs the farm he's like ninety two, I think, so he's still up there. He's got two thumbs. He has two thumbs. So yeah, but yeah, so they we had started raising hoggs last year as a twenty eight, so we just started last year and that was that your was that your that's your girlfriend that your partnered up with on hog rais. Yeah, yeah, we actually used her. Her folks live over in eastern Oregon where we moved from UM and they've got a little chunk and ground we've been raising some hogs on. So it's been great. And this is the second year, second year, Yep, it's going well. So I hear I've been over too much, very easy. Did you know that I purchased one of these hogs and I'm gonna give you a bunch of it. Yeah, no, but what a great surprise. I'm gonna share my I'm gonna share my hog. I'm gonna share my hog with the people that I work with. Nice's generous and he's gonna he's gonna include all the fat. Yeah. So when I make when I grind up venison, I'm gonna cut in my my pig and do it right. We just did East Pig are in or eastern eastern Oregon right now. And we just moved in May, so we this was hogs were purchased prior to the move, so we didn't really know where going yet. Are you gonna move your hog operation closer to home or you have to get out of it now? Man, I think we're gonna try to keep in it, but we'll see. We gotta move out of catching. We probably gotta go down to Hailey or Bellevue or something like that. Just get you one of those good privacy fences. Yeah, we want back there. We should backyard, we should. Yeah. So how many hogs are you fattening? Three right now? And do you call it fatten him? I think we just we're just calling raising him. Just doesn't sound as cool as I know. Okay, is this a business or is this a hobby farm? It's hobby so it's a hobby however, but you're bowling yeah, yeah, But I don't think he's like you just turned it into a bit. We're just covering costs most because he's like, no, I bought it from him. I'm saying, I don't think that if you asked him what he did for a living, he'd probably say he works in first light, I thought he says he's a hog man. That's right, that's right. I just never uttered those words actually, just like I'm not a chicken man. Yeah, that's a chicken man. But you do. But I've been I've you've been known to let eggs go to cover costs. Yeah, and that's what we're all about, trying to cover the costs. And it's really awesome because we had it to all our grind for them. Yeah, that's what I'm interested in. Yeah. So he took the bacon eggs. And I shouldn't say I do this. My friend Jake Keys, who owns a butcher shop in the Grand Organ, who's a phenomenal cutter. Um, he add added all the hog bacon eggs from one of our hogs to all the bacon ends, the bacon eggs and bacon ends eggs, just your cut ends. He added all those to our elk grind. Um, it's delicious. Oh so he smoked it. Yeah, and then you made your own bacon elk grind. Yeah. Have you noticed when I've done that in the packs I've bought specifically bacon end before, have you noticed it almost a grind? You notice it mostly like when you do something like a burger, but that you almost get like it almost like firms the burger up a little bit, the sausage up if you get enough of that actual pork meat in there. Yeah, and we've been kind of messing around with different percentages, um, you know, different percentages of pork in the actual olk grind. But what do you what do you what do you what are you going at? I think like ten to fiftent is pretty good. That's why I feel like that's industry standards. Yeah, but that's not full fat, that's yeah, it's like bacon end. So you're getting junks and muscle in there as well. So yeah, it does add a little bit of firmness to that burger. We actually just did a little video clip at First Light about making burgers over and open fire. So that was elk with with your your port your own home raised pork. My brother got all he got all snooty for a while, and I didn't want to put any any domestic meat into his wild meat, which is like I get it, but you know, like put eggs and ship in there. But I mean, but he had chickens too, though, but he put eggs in there to try to bind it, but just help. It helps. Uh, it just helps to add that fat in there. And we always would do ten, you know, and you go to some guys and be like, oh I do fifteen or twenty. But when you get too much of it. I talked with this four, it feels like it stops being a wild game and become something else, like a blend is like is that wild game? I don't know. Yeah, we feed a lot of folks that come through and friends of ours that don't eat a lot of wild games. So I feel like a little bit of bacon in there is always a good entry level, especially with elk. You don't hardly need it, but good entry level piece of wild game to serve those kinds of people. How big is my pig gonna be? We'll probably killing me like to to fifty somewhere around there. And then are you gonna charge me on the hoof guts in and everything? Or how do you do think it's? It's based off anyway? So what are you gonna charge me? I don't know yet. I gotta look at the books. That's more silly as departs. So you just starts following the commodities market. You're setting it off that you're setting it off global pork prices. That's right. Well, last year in the driver's seat, Okay, you've got this sale before you even told him the costs. That's right, that's right. I roped him right in that. I'm a hogman. Now, yeah, we used to I worked at a brewery before first light, and I was doing a handful of things and we get all that spent and grain, so all that barley actually with all the sugar out of it. I was like a start over again. Now, we used to work at a brewery, right for a first light. There's this stuff called spent grain. What's that you said, we used to work at a brewer. Well, I worked at actually Silia, and my girlfriend worked at the brewery as well. She's on the front end of Cilia. Cilia. How'd you spell that? S I l j E. Yeah, she's from North Norway. Her families from Norway. Okay, yeah, I met her. Yeah, I liked her. She's awesome. Um. So you guys used the word to brewery yep um. And so I worked on the business side and I would take all the spent grain, which is brewery grain. Mash that's been brewed through UM and bring that to the hogs and they love that and it has some nutritional values, just a little bit all the sugars out of it. It's kind of just like a filler, a fattener if you will, so work pretty good. Where do you feed in mine? They're getting a blend from this guy named what do You Wolf? If he raises barley and what do you wolf? What do you Wolf? That's a good name. Yeah, great guy. He's in the lower Rollawa Valley. UM. He actually raises all the grain for the Carmen Corey Carmen's hog operation, which is in in Willao County as well. Is something that I would know about, probably not. She does a lot of like grass fed beef and that sort of thing. She's entered entered quite a few markets with that products. They have a hog side to UM. So you're not feeding any kind of restaurant slop right now. A little bit of compost here there, you know, ends of like salad, greens and things like that, and then how are you gonna kill it? There's a guy named Dale who's got a mobile slaughter operation. It's pretty awesome. He comes through kills its skins, It brings it to Jake, and Jake takes care of their ast. So how much space is my pig have to run around on? Quite a bit, It's like acre and a half. There's three of them, so it's pretty good. They tend to want to stick into the shade this time of year because it's pretty pretty hot. So have you named my pig? No? No? Do you know the one that's mine? Ah? Yeah, I think so, I start scraggly looking one. I'm just kidding. Hey, I'm gonna advise that you feed it a little bit of Asian food right before you slot. Okay, I just I just I just hear people. I hear people talk lil Asian food just fattens him, fattens him up, flavors them up right. I'm kind of joking. I like you said, he said, He said that he didn't feed him any like restaurant slop. Do what you're doing, Yeah, about three weeks before you give it a little Asian food. The point of the Grandma story was they used to take the skim off of their milk, like the thick, and they would throw that in as as their main food source without mixed with old oats. So that was probably pretty delicious pork, I imagine, I think, way to bring it back. Thanks dude, that was he should host this thing. That was good. I appreciate it. But you know what was bad about it is he took the damn long that it wasn't fresh in people's minds that while you were talking about your grandma. That's right. So you went from there, and then you've been with First Light essence about may. I just started with those guys actually, just as as we were kind of marrying up these two operations. So I feel like we're cousins now. Yeah, I think we are. I think we are kissing cousins, all right. And then you're liking it over there, loving it. It's the best job I've ever had, for sure. Oh yeah, hands down. I mean I just got back from a week in Texas access to deer hunting, so it's pretty damn good. And you were at work, Yeah, that was at work. Um, I can't I can't talk about it. But we looked at a bunch of the new First Light stuff coming out. Yeah, I guess we can talk about just that. It's there, it's in development, so we're working hard. On that. We got a whole new robust program for gear testing, and I'm really excited about that. We're gonna get it to a lot of key guys. And it sounds like you guys are gonna wear it somewhere this week. You're heading somewhere. Yeah, Um, we're heading up Me and my wife and children, Brodie Henderson and his wife and children, and then my wife's buddy and her husband and children are going up to our fish shack. Um, and I'm gonna wear that new summertime ish. Yeah, that's a good way to put on that new summertime. Feeling too too much. You guys are leading in U into the Texas market. Yeah, it's been been spending quite a bit of time. Actually, just I can tell you. I can tell you guys have been hanging out in Texas and you've got some clothes that are like, yeah, we're getting close set that wasn't hot in Texas. Yeah at the latest gear me and they're like, so what do you guys think about some elephant skin boots rhino Ostrich. Yeah, that was yeah, that was a The one of the more shocking things about Texas is all the things you can make boots out of the man's, isn't it. I'm kind of thing about going in that direction. Yeah. I don't know, man, you don't know if I could really pull it off, like wearing boots of all different critter types. Like if I was sitting here and you said that, hey, one of those boots made out of and I was like, elephant. Yeah, I feel like you'd be like that. I was a little bit of a poser well, being from Michigan. I work at Bay Boots once in a while, but they're just leather, you know, I just made out of cow's hide. Yeah, I just got ease into it. Maybe. Yeah. I don't even know if I could. I can't even pull that off. Yeah, I think that would be the harder part, More than worrying about what species it was. It just be like, are you comfortable in some high heels? This is legit choice though, Yeah, but your neck of the woods. Yeah yeah, they're comfortable though. But you have the right person, you have the right personality and everything for it, and these are just leather. Listen. I mean you get into like the guys wearing like the ant eater boots, boots growing up eaters. Oh yeah, my god. I mean used to. I remember as a kid sitting around and the guys used to wear shorter pants and they do now. So my uncles would have their legs crossed, and so you could see like almost the entire boot, you know, when they their legs crossed, like the upper leg over the knee boot is then exposed. I remember my dad being like, look at his ant eater boots. I mean to me, it was just like that is top level, that's you know, you made. I've never I've never had anything other than leather though, just uh yeah, I mean I I've had boots, but I started wearing cowboy boots probably I don't know, eight or nine years ago. I mean, like where wearing them casually? And where are they comfortable? Like right off the bat, like acquired. It's an acquired taste. I mean it's it's partially. I mean, I'm of the firm belief that I'm man ought to be wearing leather boots, leather shoes of some sort. Almost all the time. I'm uncomfortable. Like I have sandals. I mean I like sandals. Don't get me wrong. You'll see me, You'll see me with sandals, But quit wearing flip flops a few days ago for the same reasons that you're okay, Well, why do you wear leather boots? Man, I was gonna wear you defend your family. Man, I'm serious. When I wear these, I feel like I'm wearing like armor. Like I was yesterday. I was gonna when I was fine up here, I was like, man, I'll just wear my tennis shoes. I have some shoes for like running these different things. And I was like, man, I can't do it. I'm gonna wear the boots. I mean, if it, if it goes fisticuff somewhere, I need these. I mean, I'm being serious. I'm not I want to talk about Ronnie Beam anyway, so I'll start now. Um. He like he always asked himself, am I ready for a volcano to erupt? And when he has uh, I can't remember. He has some crazy word for flip flops, but anyways, He's like, I just don't feel like I'm ready for that occurrence. And the other day, a longtime friend of mine who I've been hanging out with for forever, I was sitting there, we were having dinner, and I had flip flops and he said, man, just like really surprises me to see you and flip flops and he's from Montana. That who this friend is Dave McKay. So Dave McKay's from Montana. And he was with his wife in New York once and they went into a comedy store, comedy show right to watch stand up, and the stand up guy sees Dave and Dave's got flip pops on and he yelled, where are you from because you're not from here. It's not from Montana. And he goes, and you're gonna defend your wife in those shoes, And it got to him and him pointed out to me, got to me that, like, you're not ready for action. It's true, he's not ready for action, and he strap on. I got on, Now I'm ready for action. You can move in those yeah, spring over and defend him and he'll be falling over his flip pops. Oh, I forgot this. The day we went to dinner, I had tripped twice in my flip flops, fell off a curb and tripped coming through a doorway. It was top of mind. Yeah, well, I didn't know that other people shared my sentiments about shoes. I mean, really, I've never I don't know that I've ever like verbalized when I just said being ready for a yeah, but it's very real. The first guy that ever brought this to my attention was Donnie the wild Man McConnell, who I've talked about before. Was that just the guy that would so pistol pockets into his leather vest, that's the guy. That's the guy. Yeah. He says that he wouldn't do anything. He wouldn't even get ready for bed. Yeah, he said, he just laid down. Yeah, there wasn't even sleeping bag on his bunk. And I don't always try that. When I was just starting there, I would trying to always steal that bunk, and they'd like, no, it's Donnie's bunk. He's he's just for gets. There's like nothing there besides an ash tray and some empty coke cans and empty Budweisers. And uh, that was how his day went, was when he when he would finish the day with Budweisers and some cigarettes, and he would take his boots off and lay down jacket with in this pistol pocket and all. And then when your alarm and go off, you get up and we'd spend fifteen minutes getting our ship on, getting all geared up and brushing our teeth, and he like donning breakfast, you know, and he just sit up, put his boots on, light a cigarette, crack of coke, and be gone. That man, that's like the Mitch Hedberg joke. He wanted to get clothes made out of blankets. Yeah, so ahead, so at night he didn't need to do anything. Um oh, my thing about Ronnie Bam. Did you guys notice that you know what a trombo is? No, a trombo trombo You ever spent much time in Mexico or Greece. Nope, you know you know what Tacos l pass store is not. Really you can help me out here, man, just go with the hero I'm talking about the spiraling. Okay, the engineers, let's go lace ups. He's reads the fan piel is gonna spring out of that little booth there and coming in that Phil is gonna be coming in to the rescue. So it's like you take you slice a bunch of meat, thin thin slice, not cooked, which is raw slice, raw meat, thin slice, and you marinate it and then you put it and you stack it on this skewer and so it winds up being on the skew were in the shape of a giant pineapple. And I say that because they often put slices of pineapple in there. And then it turns vertically on a spit. And you gotta either a propane burner or charcoal that's oriented vertically. And this thing turns on a spit with a vertically oriented heater. And then when it's kind of like and then you're just ready, that thing's just running around the clock. Okay, so you you put that. We usaid when we started first started travel to Mexico, we called it a pork rock because it looks like a giant rock man out of pork um. And that spit turns and when you go to make a taco, you just hold the taco up against the rock of meat and and it's all stacked like if you put one hand on top of your hand and another hand on top looks like this is a solid piece of meat, you can't really tell. But then you slice also vertical slices off, so you're just taking the ends of all this stuff that the part that's cooked, and you slice the cook part onto a taco, or you slice it into a euro Um. And that device, that cooking piece of equipment I recently learned is even though I owned one, is a trombo. So Ronnie Bam. When I got married all those years ago, uh, we had you know, you'll have like a party. No, we had a party the day I got married. Before I got married, so we had a party before the party. And at this party, my brother took a bunch of deer meat and Ronnie Beam welded us up a trombo out of stainless steele and it was a hand turn kind you had a hand crank it. So we cooked a bunch of venison tacos like this, and then I kind of forgot about it for eleven years. But I was just home at my mom's and found the trombo and the pole barn brought it back here and had a fabricator here in Bozeman named Travis Barton, who's a fireman. Yanni introduced me to him. He did a lot of the metalwork at Yanni's house. When Yanni remodeled UM, he raised it on a higher let eggs and put a rotisserie motor so you don't need to hand turn it anymore. Single single speed. Can you regulate the speed? Just single speed? It's about this fast? Mak it sounds like but smooth like? No. Uh. And I'm gonna make a mountain lion. Oh, I'm gonna make a pork rock out a mountain lion. I like it. That's gonna be good. Yeah, we already started that. Ladies and gentlemen, Okay, how do you describe? Uh? Do do you say you're from the Ozarks? Yeah? Yeah, I live in the Ozarks? Now, hunt and the washing Toss something I wanted to bring, But that's Kevin. You don't have pronounced that mountain range the wash toss. He he didn't. He didn't see the spelling. I called the au cheetahs. Yeah, so if you saw the spelling, it's spelled. Oh you a c H I t A. You mentioned how we mispronounced it was me because I don't think I would venture to try to pronounce. Well. I don't want to name any names here, but it was a guy that was from the Ozarks and he mispronounced. Well, you you mispronounced it and he didn't correct you, and he was like, yeah, that's the way you said. Who was it? Man? I honestly can't remember. It was on one of the turkey hunting episode y'all did with Brandon Butler, but there was he the one that It wasn't Brandon. I'm not throwing Brandon on the was it a guy that was the other guy, our friend Steve Jones, the Wild Game chef. I don't Parker Hall. No, it wasn't Parker. It was were narrowing it. It was a guy that was a turkey hunter. He was describing how he called turkeys with his mouth, but it was kind of like it felt like it was kind of he didn't really know, but it was kind of just like, yeah, that's the way he said, guys uck. What's that? Guys uck? May have been so you're so polite you don't want to say who did it? Well, I mean, I just hate to throw the guy under the bus, But at the same time vowed to my people that if it ever came to it, I would I would would bring back the honor of the wash Ittals. So oh you a he starts with a w. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it looks like oha cheetahs, chah cheetah and say wash it talk like with a hard w wash wash yeah yeah, yeah, why don't you guys just spell it different? Man? We didn't. We just we're just some messengers. Man, this is a chock talk. Well, actually, there's three things that they that they say that. First of all, it is a transliteration of a Catto Indian word for wash it talk explain cattle Indian. It's just a it's just a type of Native American that lived in Southeast Catto Indian. Yeah, try like Choctaw cherry. And I was like when you when they talk about language types like Proto Indo European or so it's a trans It's a French transliteration of the way the Cattos said wash ital and they said it with a W. But it's a bunch of French guys over here that said, oh, we're gonna spell it o U A c h I t A and it actually means good hunting grounds. Yeah, so there's three things. There's another guy that says that the O U A c is the choc Tall word for buffalo, and it actually means buffalo hunting grounds given a throwback to the woodland buffalo, which totally was in Arkansas buffalo. And then, um, the third there's three possibilities and there's no agreement on truly what it means. The third one is another choc tall word that they think it means far away hunting ground. That's that's what I got. Like ozark man the French like named a bunch of stuff back in that country. So the word ozark describes a bend in the Arkansas River. Arkansas River flows, it doesn't really flow north, but there's a north trending bend in the Arkansas River and they called it ox Arc. They called this region above the arc ox arc a u x arc French. And so the trans well it grew into the Ozarks. So the Ozarks are north there above the ark Ship. So those are the two I like them all. Those are the two. Those are the two mountain ranges in Arkansas. And they're very different. I could totally nerd out about the differences and or culturally geologically sometimes those are inseparable though right right, they're similar enough in size and and like the geology will shape the culture in some ways. Absolutely. Yeah. Now, so the y stalls where are in east west running mountains uh formed from uplift when the when the South American continent bumped into the North American continent, and it's the only mountain range between the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains that runs east and west. And so what happens when you're hunting in the Washingtalls is you have two very different types of terrain because you have these southern facing slopes and then north facing slopes, because the mountains are running east and west with me. So the north it's like really thick, moist, vegetative, not as much strict sun. The south sides are arid, have a lot of pine, blueberry, a little bit more open, so that critters used that different terrain in different ways. Pretty interesting that you go up hung along the rim where you're kind of tapping into both. Yeah. Well that's the other feature of these mountains is that they're formed by uplift, so they're these like hogback ridges, and so there's these real distinct tops which are usually fairly flat but but small. So either walking straight it up are you're walking straight down the other side, but there'll be you know, these flat tops, and critters travel on them. So you hunt the tops of these mountains quite a bit. You know, while you were talking about all that stuff reminds me of two good pieces of barroom banter. One being you talk about the buffalo hunting, you know where that word comes from? What they're one of the ways they think that buffalo came about. I read your book. I shouldn't know, but uh, good for making buffalo leather. M But there's even occurrences where people called man and teese buffs thick leather. Now buffalo wasn't the Native American word for it. This was an English word. Yeah, they would call him buffs. You just spelled all kinds of different ways, and the eventually became buffalo. But it's something good for making buffalo leather. Um like thick leather, you know. And the everything you're talking about, like the geology. Have you ever read uh, Animals of the Former World by Geo McPhee. It explains all the geography in the US. They want a Pultz front different east to west than won a Pulitzer. But it was the interesting thing in there where um, you know, Alaska kind of a created and docked up. It was a bunch of islands, just a big mishmash of ship. The decreed did and docked up against our continent and then rolled north on a transform fault. And I can't remember. I think in eighty seven million years Japan we'll have a created all of the illusions and slammed into Alaska. Yeah, all them bears and everything going to be in Japan, which is in Alaska. Uh, how'd you getting none? Man? I grew up. It's just I grew up with it my dad. I always say that my dad was bow hunting before bow hunting was cool. Uh he so, I mean I I grew up bow hunting for white tail deer. My dad got into hunt to stick. No, no, that's new. My dad is like totally a compound like speed guy. My my movement into traditional archery probably is a little bit of a throwback from his his uh kind of the the intricacies and he took he takes tuning bows and all this kind of to the extreme. I never really liked that side of it. I wanted it to be simple, and so I still shoot compound and love it. But my dad shot a reeker before compounds came out, and then he rolled into compounds hard. Now see that's the way these guys think though, Like my dad is like, why the heck would you want to go backwards? Because that's where he started to you know, shooting these traditional bows that they couldn't kill anything with. And then so to go backwards just the forty years. Yeah yeah, but yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we grew up deerhund. We had a place in northern Minnesota, so we kind of grew up in that North Belt country of just honey, small racked, big bodied white tails, and then really got into waterfall hunting in high school because it's accessible where I lived. You run right for the get go, Yeah, yeah, right right away. It's been a part of my family for a long time m hm, because you had access to those farms. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of good pheasant hunting, a lot of good duck hunting, pretty good deer hunting. Not as good as Iowa and on the west actually, but it's great, good way not as good, yeah, at least in northern Minnesota. Oh yeah, I'm with yeah, still pretty good though, great for the camaraderie sense from the deer camp since uh, not as big a deer for sure, but great great deer populations. Certainly. Are you guys in wolf area? Yeah yeah, certainly has that changed a lot for real? Or can't you even look at it for real? Because you're still wrapped up in the differences. That's a loaded question, I think. Um, if you talk to people up there, they'll say it has impacted it tremendously. Um, But I think in my case, I haven't seen it to the point where it's made the deer hunting in my lifetime that that different. Yeah, it feels different. Yeah, certainly feels different. Yeah. Yeah, And I would say that my experience in the West, specifically in Oregon, with with wolf free introduction has been my My experience in the short time I've lived out there has changed traumatic, like pretty dramatically. Let's say, yeah, where we go ahead, Well, I might I want to name an example, Like, what's the common thing you've seen change? I think in eastern Oregan specifically, it's just the balance back between the ranching community and and sort of the introduction of wolves. It's a obviously a slippery slope conversation, but they've been impacted in a different way than they haven't been in the last fifty years. UM. From a hunting standpoint, A lot of guys will say, oh, those alcal quatter in this area now, which I think I've had a few experiences with that. Although it's you know anecdotal, it's not based off science. So, UM, I think my experience in in see Ean wolves to have seen a couple in eastern Oregon. That's different when than when I started hunting there when I was a nineteen and I didn't see wolves until two years ago. Um, just quite a few. Now you started hunting organ when you're nineteen. Yeah, I was out there to fight fire when I was in college, So that was the first time ever stepped foot in Oregon for real. So I was spending mostly about May through and in September there and then going back to school. I heard my first wolf from my deck a couple of nights ago, just to two howls, and there's just happened. I was out there watching a small herd of elk, and every single one of those mature cows was looking down the hill and across the drainage. Nobody was eating, nobody had their heads down, everybody was just staring. When that wolf was out, but he only it only it howled twice. Now is that? Yeah? Such a different sound too. It's pretty remarkable. Uh. You got like your grandpa's a big hunter. My grandfather was a quail hunter, that's all he hunted. Really, that's that's all he out of luck now, uh yeah, yeah, Well, so there was a time in the South when I mean the heyday of quail hunting would have been from the forties to well nineteen eighties. Do you regard yourself as being from the South, Yeah, it's really I mean I do being from Arkansas, but I mean, you know, I can drive twenty miles and technically well yeah, yeah, yeah, Arkansas is it's definitely not Deep South where I live. But I live in northwest Arkansas on the mountains, and so the mountain culture truly is not Deep South. You get into the Arkansas Delta, you absolutely would feel like you're in the Deep South. This is very different. But also my my grandfather, he was a renowned bird dog trainer, and that's all he did. I mean, they would they would go out there were I mean he talks about going out and you know, finding nine covees of quail and day and you know, several guys killing their limits of quail, and then about night the quail world just started to dry up. And um, I had bird dogs. When I got my first bird dog when I was in sixth grade, got it from my grandfather, And we actually had two or three cuvees of quail back behind our house. And uh, my dad wouldn't let me take the shotgun. At that time, there were had some houses. It was kind of suburban, rural Arkansas. And so I would take that dog out and we pointed quail during the winter. I mean, I probably didn't go out every day, but I feel like I did. Snow undergrown. No not not not in Arkansas. Really, I thought we do get a little bit, but not a lot. I mean just a few days a year. Well yeah, but he so, he he is the one that really introduced my dad. He my grandfather did some squirrel hunting, but he was he was a bird dog man. I mean that's like in the South. That was like a like a nobleman's sport, you know. And then he was a trainer and then was the affluent. Tell me what you mean by that, Like was he When you say, what was the word you used, I said, it was a nobleman's sport, I mean like affluent. Was he wealthy? No? No, No, he was a He was a biology teacher for a public school and a pastor and a pastor of a church. When he said like noble. This noble in the sense of like this is a this is not no no no YEA good good clarification there. But but he and part of truly what influenced still influences me today is that I watched my grandfather the last twenty five years of his life lament the demise of the animal that he loved. Really, I mean, I didn't know that conservation was cool. I didn't know that. I mean, it's just what happened before me. But every time I talked to him and would be like, man back, and he was. It wasn't like he was embittered against it or he like he hunted just the same when there were no birds as he did when there were lots of birds. I mean, it wasn't like he was like, I'm getting rid of the dogs, there's no more quail. He he hunted until the He didn't huntil the day that he died when he was ninety four. But but he was a he was a good man, good good dog trainer. What uh, I don't want to ask what his idea was about what happened to the quail, but like what you take on what happened to the quail? There are so many different versions. You know what I mean. Do you remember you read something that I sent to you one time and it's pretty to think about the fire ants. Nope, but a habitat mine had to do with invasive grasses fence posts. So I mean basically, back in the day, there was no fescu and bermuda grass, and because of the cow calf operations that all these farms have turned to in the last forty years, cow calf operations in Arkansas need fescu and bermuda grass. It's just the best. And those grasses it's just it's just hardy, it's nutritious, it grows like crazy. That's what everything is. I mean right now, you go and look at any grass and it's gonna be some type of fescue or bermuda, which are both invasive grasses and their turf type grasses, which means they grow by rhizomes. So what the quail would have been used to back in the day before these invasive grasses would have been clump grasses, and so clump grasses provided uh places for the birds to move through. We see, like I'll hear you from the people on bunch grasses. Yeah, I mean just the native grasses of Arkansas, like orchard grass and some of the some of the sage UH would have, they would not have grown in like these continuous patches. Like even if it looked like a continuous patch, if you open it up, you'd see ground underneath it. And so basically habitat was destroyed by those two invasive grasses. And then with the advent of basically modern brush hogging machines and just people kind of taking better care of their farms. People have t post fence rows now, when back in the day they probably would have just strung barbed wire between trees and put up some wooden fence. And not that wood or metal makes a difference, but basically they had these robust edges that product provided habitat for quail and and and we don't now we have t posts. And with a t post fence you can mow right up beside it. You can right you can mow within six inches of one side and six inches of the other, you know, I mean, like there's two sided fence. So that was big. I mean, those really are the it's it's it's habitat degradation. But the other thing that's happened in Arkansas. That's crazy. That has to do with the ground nesting bird is our quite Our turkey populations are down like six. So it's almost like there's this fuzz of nobody knows really what's going on with the ground nesting birds other than that they're doing really bad. You know, we had an article we ran on uh the meat eater dot com about declining turkey numbers in some states, and it's kind of funny, Man, piss people off. You come war with my house. We've got playing turkeys. I'm like, I'm sure you do, man, But I mean, there's certain things you can't ignore it. There's a lot of states that have for the first like for the first time, and you know, a decade or so you're seeing like declines and turkey numbers. But people get here, I don't know, it's like a weird thing to get irritated about. No one said like turkey huntings, but you're seeing like like you're seeing a widespread decline in turkey numbers in certain parts of the country. Yeah, well, I think it's guys, like I can go back to some of my good spots that maybe there is a six decline in turkey numbers, and I can still hear a turkey gobble from there, but there's not eight of them there anymore. There's one, you know. So I mean, like to the guy that's really not paying that much attention, he goes in there and he kills that bird, and he's like, like, kill the bird last year, killed the bird year before that. Don't you tell me about my turkeys. Yeah, we've got some good homes down to Missouri. Yeah, now Missouri, oddly, Missouri is totally different. Man. You go and this is what's bizarre. And you can't blame any of the commissions. I mean, I don't think it's anything they're doing. But any direction you go from Arkansas, turkey hunting gets better quick huh, no doubt. I mean even where you are hunting with with Brandon Butler. I mean that's a couple hours from my house, like three hours and uh, dramatically better turkey hunting up there. I've talked about this. I'm sure we staught this interesting thing hunting in Kentucky, UM, which is another area that used to have great quail hunting, and the quail are gone kind of gone. And we're home with our friend Kevin Murphy, and he was explaining that when he hunts a small game, he likes to hunt on the Amish farms because he said, they don't clean farm. They they still dirty farm and you go out there, and it was so funny the whole time run around with him. That was the place we saw quail was on an Amish farming, described dirty farming. I've heard you said before. But well leave like they'll pick corn, leave it for the winter. So they'll pick corn, leave the ground covered all winter. They will have uh big rows, like big huge wind rows and they don't win untill Okay, they leave crop coverage on the ground for the winter. And so he was just saying, then he did our part of it is he said, he says they're hell on predators. Yeah, so they provide habitat kill predators and it's like small game golds. He goes way out of his way to hunt the Amish farms. That's the games all the game is. Man sounds good. Yeah, did uh did your grandpa hunt quail on mules? No? No, no, he didn't. But how did you get into hunting on mules? You know, my my dad doesn't hunt on mules. We actually did not grow up having ecoin animals. I mean it grew being in rural Arkansas. I grew up with horses and stuff. I mean just people had them, you know, Buddy's had them, and we'd ride and stuff. But it wouldn't tell about four or five years ago that I just said it's time to get a mule, and it was. It was as you know. I'd give you a short version or a long version of that, but I think I'll tell people what a mule is. A mule is when a donkey and a horse do it. A mule is a hybrid cross between a male donkey called a jack and a female horse called them mayor, and it produces a what in the biology world, how's it work with? How's it work with? The gender? Again, So it's a a mule is a male donkey, a jack and a female horse. The opposite is what's a genie mule? That's okay? That is when it's a man. I'm gonna get I'm gonna mix it up. I'm not an expert, but it's a differ for an animal. When you do the inverse, when it's a male horse and a female donkey, it produces a different animal. It's it's escaped me what that is. It's really rare. People don't do it. Well, that's what. That's what a genny mule is or whatever. I think that. Yeah, there's a phrase for it, and I can't recall what it is. Jenny, I think it's g So the cool thing about we'll come back to you. The cool thing about a mule is that it's a classic example of hybrid vigor. You know the phrase hybrid hybrid, hybrid, hybrid, hybrid vigor, hybrid, I mean I know it in terms of egg Yeah. So, so basically, you take the strength of these two animals, which both have great strengths like a donkey. Like a donkey strength would be like hard feet, nimble, very strong for its size. Um. And you would take a horse, which would be its strengths would be um, it's it's speed, it's trainability. And basically inside of a mule you get you get the best characteristics of both animals in one animal. And this is fascinating to me. A mule will live longer than both a donkey and a horse live longer. I mean, uh, they're not. It's actually viable. They're they're not. Do you still geld him. Yep, they have all the same desires, but no, no real ammo. Yeah, so you gotta you gotta, you gotta cut a male or he'll want to breed females and stuff but won't do any good, won't do them any good. But he didn't know that. Yeah, that's when you wanna want a boy. That's when a boy stallion and a girl donkey a jenny they do it. They get a henny, correct, honey, male horse, female donkey? What is the opposite what you're talking about? And it's a different animal. They have different they're usually not as big and for some reason people just don't do that very much. It's not his story. So stature, shorter ears, stronger legs, and a thicker mane. So guys who produced mules for the mule trade, um, they just they have some donkeys, they have some horses. Well you would you would have a set of Let's say there was a guy that was actually a mule breeder, he would have a set of mayor horses that would be I mean, if he was good. They would be selected horses based upon them being a good horse, being trainable, being not KICKI being having good feet, I mean, have all these like traits that you want a good horse, and then he would have he would have a jack that suited and produced what he wanted in side of a mule. And so a lot of guys use mammoth jack's, which a mammoth jack it's like a jack that's over hands. It can be up to like seventeen hands, which is huge. I mean, it looks like a dinosaur. You got to look up. A mammoth jack looks crazy. But so you just have you have you know, one or two breeder jack's and and it's just like any type of animal breeding. You make a cross and maybe it produces a mule that's really good, that's tempered right, that's built right, that's a good feet, that's strong, that's colored the way you want it to. But there's a lot of quirks inside the mule world too. It's really hard to get a mule bred with color like actually the fur color of a mule typically tends to be solid ball. For everybody, buddy, man, it's just a it's just a it's just like, for instance, the mule that I that I trained and own, Like in the mule world, it's like, oh, that's a flashy mule. I mean it's just like your bow. It's just like your boat. I mean, like you want a bow that you like the looks of it. Yeah, my new bowl, my new boat. All bowls are this way now almost, But I got a new Matthews and it's flat black looks it looks menacing. Many verdicts everybody. Everybody wants one of them flat black black bows because he looks like a killer. Remember Fridge Perry, oh, the football player. Yes, remember you know they won the Super Bowl. That was kind of the last football game I watched. Uh a touchdown. My mom was from Chicago. He wore black shoes back when everybody had white shoes. And he was saying he wore black shoes because people looked at him, they think they're gonna he was gonna be slow, but then he just slam them with black Now, why would black shoes make you think they're slow. Let's dude, this is man. We just thirty seven years ago. People to who knows. That's what was his theory on it. But that black boat, what the point is? My black bowl looks fast. Jet black bowl looks menacing. Man, I shoot the same color bow mean, if I had a guy pop up to shoot me with the arrow, and he had wanted and he had I choose whether he had a camel bow or a black bow, I'd go with camel if he's shooting at me, because I'd be like, yeah, you think could be. But he had a flat black boat that's menacing fops, I do shoot my bone flipflops a little bit. Uh. How much is the mule? Man? That's just like every other thing on the planet when you're dealing with a commodity, there's all kind of variations. I mean, just this last week, somebody asked me how much I paid for the mule that I have, which I trained my mule, so it's an untrained mule. I mean basically she was totally untrained. But no one knew what it had. No one knew what it was the only the only thing, the only reason I bought the mule that I did, traded and bought, and I'll tell you what I gave for it. It was because it was a flashy mule that was the right size that I wanted so wanted you, oh I have. I have no apologies for wanting to flash man. If I'm gonna feed that thing and see it every day out from my house. I wanted to look good. Let me tell you why you don't want to flashy mule. Let's see you get a flashy mule, okay, and it winds up being a shitty mule. People are gonna be like that guy taking those all cool looking and now he's got But let's say you have a shitty looking mule and he's a shitty mule. People will be like, whatever, Yeah, he got some old mule. I don't know what. Dude doesn't do what he says. But it's like a lot different if you bought a really fancy sports car and then the minute you take it out, you crash it. People, it's more funny to people. That's gonna be more funny to people. It's he bought an old junkie car and crashed it. So you're just more you're gonna head your bets on like the social the social aspect, Like Romella bought an ugly mule. Really it turns out stupid mule and it doesn't work good. But I mean, what do you expect? Well, do you understand what I'm saying? You don't understands? Yeah, we'll see the thing about. I'll try to be brief here. I mean, you can. I can leave it rest. You bought a cool looking mule, right, you could. You could. You could pay ten dollars for a mule easily based on what it looks like, based upon a whole bunch of stuff. Men, The complexities inside of the animal world, especially one that you're gonna ride, are so at the point at which it's broke, right, Yeah, you don't. It's intelligences And yeah, you'd never buy like an untrained ten thousand dollar mule. The reason can you spend on a horr mean, he's spend like you can spend times out of a horse. Sure, yeah, because of the racehorse industry and some of the stuff. But but you know, the reason that I bought the mule that I did is because I like the way it looked, its right size, and nobody had ever messed with it. Which that's the one thing with a mule is that they're easy to mess up there, so the strong they're easy to mess up very So you don't want to get a mule from a guy that's like, I trained this smele a little bit. You know, I'll sell it to you for this much. You don't know what's happened with that mule. And that's that's the one negative people talking about formed a really bad impression of people. They they're highly unforgiving. But in the same sense, that's what makes a mule great, is that if he trusts you, if you train him right, if you do it right, he's gonna be an incredible animal forever. That's an abbreviated like simple thing inside of a complex situation. But I wanted to I wanted a mule that nobody had messed with. And you want to your mistakes to be your own, Yeah, I did. I wanted to know because I got a mut I had a mule before that that was green broke, and green broke is basically just a way of saying, this thing ain't trained. And I had one means technically like you could put a saddle on it and get on its back. It's trained enough for that and could ride a little bit. But it's broad term. But green broke, in my book, means highly dangerous. Really, you don't know what this animal has. So I had some bad experiences with a with a green broke mule, so I wanted to train one on my own, and I this guy has now become my friend. But a guy in southeast Oklahoma had this mule, Craigslist mule dangerous. Oh yeah, I do it almost almost every day. And uh, he had this mule I wanted about He wanted fifteen hundred dollars for an untrained mule, which is you could buy a broke mule for fifts, but the mules special. Basically, I traded him n Honda four tracks four wheeler, an old Russian World War two rifle. It was worth about seventy five dollars one of those. Man, it was a little set with what call. It was given to me as a gift, and it fired. It's some odd caliber but no, it's like it was like seven six to like whatever. Yeah, with one of those four wheeler, one of those rifles and five dollars cash and he took me to the cleaners. Really, I'm not a good negotiator when it comes to stuff like that. I'm a little too nice. So he got a gun, a quad Runner and five hundred bucks and I got a man. It was an incredible, incredible experienced just for hunting. None. Yeah, there's six mules for sale on the boat on the bowsman Craigslist right now? If you is there a dead deer on that same page mule deer? Get you get on that? Oh you want to know people selling mule deer Kawasaki mule four wheelers. You gotta do a lot of digging to buy mu there's a lot of nuances in the Craigslist mule world that guy has to get tuned up on. Uh, that's pretty interesting, man. But you don't love the thing about hunting with mules down where you're at is um Is it really like an access issue? You know, like what can you get you on a mule that you can't get to in your in your truck. Well, that's a good question. It's legitimate. I mean, we don't have the wilderness that you guys have in the West. I mean we just don't. But we do have. We do a big but I think we have two point two million acres in National Forest and Arkansas and a lot of it's fairly remote, fairly well, all of it's pretty rugged. We have eleven wilderness areas in Arkansas that are you know, limited to foot travel, leaqueline travel, Federally designated wilderness like roughly. How big are they? Um, the biggest ones about thirty thousand acres. Yeah, the smallest one is probably six seven thousand acres. Is that thirty acre one fairly contiguous or is it buzz it all up into a thousand contiguous? No kidding? Yeah? Yeah, yeah for the south or you know, if we're considering Arkansas at the south, which it is, we uh, we have some incredible rugged I mean, well, it is wilderness, it's federal wilderness, wilderness area. Uh, it's the Buffalo Wilderness that's the biggest one. And no, kid, I can't remember I've never hunted the Buffalo Wilderness. Because the Buffalo Wilderness has become a hot spot for tourism because of the Buffalo River, which is the nation's first national river. So it's incredible. The Buffalo River area is probably the most rugged, true representation of the Ozarks that there is, and but it's become a hub for tourism big time. So it's it's a positive thing. But I don't really want to go there and hunt. Yeah, I got you. Yeah, it sees a lot of nine tourism. Yeah it does, it does. But so being an issue of access, like it's not like I'm gonna ride my mule like eighteen miles back into the wilderness to hunt that that's just not gonna happen. But definitely I go places that other people don't go and stay longer. I mean, that's the whole point of it, is to go further and stay longer and a lot of times ill. And now I learned this technique from James Lawrence. You know what it does, but it's but it's right, I add, that's my one of my I call him a friend, but he's almost he's more than a friend. Guy named James Lawrence. James is he he grew up hunting in wilderness in Arkansas, and what he would do and this, and he taught me how to do this, and that's kind of kind of a lot of what I do. I'm trying to do what James did, and it's just I like to do it. But he would use a paniard and lead a horse in with all his gear on it for like nine days. So he'd just hauled his horse in with packs on, and then once he got to his camp, he'd unload all his stuff and then he'd ride the horse. And I liked hunt that way. Yeah, I saw one of the one of your videos that you made. You're a good writer, man, Thank you like you right? Like the narrations, Well, I like it. It's well done. Um, you can shoot off that mule. Yeah, he doesn't even give a ship. Yeah, shooting right off over his head. Dude. At one time got in a horse with a muzzle loader, and that most lord swung across the corner of his eye. I was down on the ground so fast and so hard. Man, I hate that just from not even shooting it swung in his peripheral vision. I'll spook a man off of lip out and landing on a rock. We with an outfitter, were you? Yeah? Well I was on a reservation, so I was with some tribal members messing around. See a good animal is not gonna do that, Steve, You're gonna desensitize it. I mean, like I spend We'll just dude. You know what's funny, The guy knew enough to know that. He knew enough to know that, Um, it might not like that. See that's you shouldn't put You shouldn't put somebody. You shouldn't put somebody on an Yeah, my sister in law takes my daughter outright, and she picks a horse that she thinks is suitable for my daughter. Yeah, she's like, this would be a good horse for her. Yeah, because of X, Y and Z. This guy's like, this would be a bad horse for that. Let's go put him on that horse. Um, you guys hunt raccoons. You guys hunt raccoons on mules? What kind of dogs you chase them with? I've got plot hounds, so you don't use your squirrel dogs? No, No, what's the plot? Plot? Hound? Is a It's a uk C registered breed of dogs p L O T T the plot home plot? Is it like a walker? Is it like over? I mean it's a it's a hound, and it's a it's a fascinating story, like a lanky, long legged deal. Now it's a pretty compact. I mean my dogs are like fifty to sixty pounds, females in the forty five to fifty pound range, males in the sixty to sixty five pound range. If it wasn't black, it would look like a hound I'm looking at. That's what you're run raccoons with. You bet you like one of them? Like, what's the dog? I'm looking Catahoulo. Yeah, they're kind of a brindle dog. My dog, one of my dogs is black. But the plot, the plot hound is the only breed of hound that didn't descend from European fox hounds. So Walker, blue tick, red tick, English. All these dogs descended from European fox have all been tainted by Europe. Well, the plotthhounds were to the plothounds came from Germany. But they were big game dogs in Germany and they were brought over in seventeen fifty by sixteen year old boy named your Honness Plot and Johannes's Plot. He his father bred these dogs for a nobleman in Germany. He sent his son to the New World, and what he sent him with was five hounds, which were the original plot hoounds. They came in. Johannes's Plot was sixteen years old. His brother died on the journey over. He and to one other brother came. They ended up in North Carolina with these five dogs. I mean they weren't plot hoounds, that that was just their last name. They were just hunting dogs. And he had a mix of males and females presumably. Yeah, And so the the story is is that the plothhound breed descended directly from those five dogs, and the plothhound is it's it's absolutely true to a degree. There's some like real hardcore plot men that are like, the plot breed has never been bred by anything outside of those five dogs. But clearly when you look at the history and the culture, I mean dogs on tethers out in people's yards and these mountain people they were breeding other dogs in but in general they stayed true to that, to that plot lineage. And uh so the plot is the national dog or the state dog of North Carolina, and it's the only hound. Jana is married into North Carolina. He's essentially from North Carolina. Okay, but the plot, the plot hound is the only breed of hounds that is directly associated with bear dogs. Some it's like a plot bear dog. And so for me, hunting coons with with plots is actually primarily because we cannot run big game in Arkansas with hounds, and so I wanted to have plot hounds, and what we can run is raccoons. And so a tree dog is a tree dog. They'll chase anything with fur and they've just got to have that tree and instinct. So the difference between a bear dog and a raccoon dog is very different depending on how much you want to nerd out about it. But you could take a bear dog and train it to be a raccoon dog. Why do you guys call all it when when a when a tree, squirrel, a raccoon taps the tree, jumps from one tree to the next. Why do you call it that he timbered the tree? You know, I guess because that's I say tap, because that's the Jerry Clouds possible description of it. Steve, what else have we heard for that? Like Mississippi? I think you know that taps the tree, taps the tree. Let's say, when I hear the word taps the tree, to me, that means that the raccoon, squirrel, whatever went halfway up the tree and then came back down and went to another tree. Oh you know, that might be what Jerry claud was talking about. Yeah, that's what he was he was. Yeah, that's what he's saying. He tapped the tree. Yeah, so they timbered because he timbered out. Yeah, he timbered Like we didn't have we don't have a word where I'm from, We didn't have a word for that. You have to say something like he jumped into another tree. Yeah, you didn't settle with something like that. So that's what, like he tapped it but didn't climb, And that happens a lot. A lot of people would think that they did that on purpose to throw off the dogs. And I don't think that happens. I think that the critters just moving around and maybe went up that tree for a little while and goes to another one. So what happened? Dogs? And so the dog starts tree and on that tree you get there, there's no animal in the tree. And the guy goes, I tapped this tree, you know, and the coon's not there. That's good. Yeah, you guys eat the raccoons. No, no, I mean I can't. I can't. I have eaten them. But it's not the norm. Are you selling hides right now? You know? Uh? Uh? An Arkansas raccoon hide. I think the average market value last year per the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission report that they give was like less than two dollars a pet. It's sad. Yeah, we just don't have good for density. It's just not that good of a it's just not that good of a hide. So I mean, you know, we take so many people raccoon hunting. I have this like spiel down to like a science when I take people, because we do skin the hides. I've got a bunch of hides right now at a tannery. And uh and I get the hides tan flushing yourself. Yeah yeah, and and gived. Have you send up a we can do an exchange program. Done, I'll send you one. I'm not gonna get him back to like December over my I keep a raccoon hide over my desk chair. You come out of dog Durn's barn, well, come out of his his grain silo. Yeah, you know, obviously reasons that wanted in there. Yeah, well we you know. So I talked to people that I take hunting new hunters because we take a ton of new hunters raccoon hunting, We really do. And uh, you know, I talked about how this this hunt is is your there's two birds being killed with one stone, and that this is a conservation hunt, depredation hunt in terms of we're trying to remove an unnatural amount of raccoons that are here. There's an unnatural amount of coons right now because because of agriculture, because of all the things that are going on ecologically, So we're trying to remove them because of their suppression of ground nesting birds, you know. And uh and yeah, we just don't. We just don't eat raccoon that much. It's laborious to cook it, you do, Like any when you talk to the eats raccoon, they're usually doing two or three things to it, like you cook it this way, then you cook it that way. We like slow cooked one, you know, and then finished it on a grill. It's not bad, though, Yeah, it's not bad. I've cooked it over an open fire, pretty open fire. You guys eat raccoons. You grew up in Minnesota. You read to raccoon JOHNI I have not. You don't. You don't remember anybody eating them. Just last guy told me he was eating raccoons and still making them cooking him was bo what it's for? Yeah, that was that was the name of that podcast. Yeah, no, that was the last the most reason and he still eats them. M hmm. I'd like to cooking on the one up. I mean, there's a million of them around here east here especially. You say it's pretty similar to beaver, no greasy, greasier. I think it's not a ton different than bear meat, even though I think bear meat is better, but it has that same, you know, kind of greasy feel. Diets fairly similar. But I really don't think it's that it could be eaten. But it's just not it's just not what you do. You know. What had to me that was funny is today I was thinking about, you know, when you're looking at YouTube videos, I was wondering how fixed the ratio is of likes and dislikes on YouTube videos. This is like honestly going through my head today. Um, And I was like, man, it'd be interesting to take an analysis of all YouTube videos and add up the likes that dislikes because it's like, I feel like it's like less than like generally runs lessan ten percent all like dislike. Yeah, I feel like I was thinking, like, it's such it's so weird that there seems to be such a fixed ratio, like and when we put out videos, you look at the thumbs up and thumbs downs, they're like always fixed, right, overwhelmingly positive, but always yeah. And then I was reviewing one of your videos that that's got like one point eight million views and it has more dislikes and legs, which shattered my operator, which shattered the theory that I had just been thinking about that day. You know what's amazing video on talking about talking about let me tell you something that's amazing about that. I've been tracking that video now for about two years. Video. I put it up I think in September of seventeen, so almost two years seen his video. You haven't seen his video, h the like, the likes and dislikes were within a hundred of each other for years. It's ten thousand and eleven thousand right now, Well it's it's started to kind of go over, but that's still very close. Yeah. Man, it was like it was like I wanted to start like calling my friends, like hey, you like this video. You know what's funny? I need to pull it back up and like it. It would help man over. Yeah, no, kids, I'm sure there was a time when I want to say, it was below a hundred difference between and it was just like, it's amazing that there's just this tug of war, but it actually stayed above on the positive side, and just in the last like a couple of months, it's kind of tipped over. Yeah. Yeah, that's tough. Tough being a YouTuber. Do you do you think of yourself as a YouTuber? Man, I never wanted to be on YouTube. Intentionally stayed off YouTube two years ago because we were creating We've been creating video content for five years, and uh, never wanted to be on YouTube. To me, YouTube was like for cell phone videos and stuff you didn't want to watch and bad stuff. If you didn't want to watch it, that's where you put it. Yeah, and I had a buddy of like the garbage can. I mean, that's the way that was my perception. But just someone recently told me that, um, every minute, I don't know if this is true or not. I think from judging by the source, I think it's probably true. Every minute, four hundred hours of content are uploaded to YouTube. I believe that cynd hours per minute. Incredible. I had a buddy you could tell about the video. Yeah, I'm just gonna continue on how it got there. Yes, how you asked me if I felt like I was feeling at some point we need to get around to what's in it? Okay, but go ahead. You're you used you use the word YouTuber. I didn't. I'm a lot of surprised when someone calls himself a YouTuber. No, I don't really consider myself a YouTuber, but I do have content on YouTube, you know. But yeah, that's what I would think, because you wouldn't be like, um, it just seems weird to name like if you're a musician, right, and what you wind up that most of your money comes from Spotify? Do you call yourself a Spotify or right? Just a platform for the art? Really? Yeah, and so it's like it just it always felt weird for me to be like, like, oh when it used to be like iTunes store. I would like to interject though, that I feel that YouTube made YouTubers and not that musicians made Spotify. Spotify wouldn't exist without musicians, That's what I'm Yeah, you're saying that platform created a platform, created a type of content producer, and it wasn't like musicians, like, oh, we used to make our business this way. Now we distribute that way in the way that that YouTube handles creators kind of channels do they handle creators? You bet? Yeah, you get if you guys are on you, I'm like, I get, but I don't think of them as like hand. I wouldn't say they handle well, they I feel like they're trying to help creators, like with the best possible ways to do things and to upload and create content, and so they kind of created this culture of hey, you guys are YouTubers. I mean, and you know, but I don't necessarily identify with that. But but now, so, do you want to talk about the video when you're ready? I'm ready. So it actually surprises me that you brought this video up. Why you know? To me, well, I brought it up because of the really supernatural thing. I was not supernatural, like like above natural, but like exceedingly natural that I was thinking about the ratios then I'm then I was like before we came and talked, I was like, oh my god, it's funny. Yeah yeah, no, no it it's the year the people don't like it. More than man that this video has taught me a lot and really is toughened up my skin. I can't imagine talks about video. You don't know about the video video. No, I'm not let me tell about it. No, you're telling about it. I was. I was a bear hunting in Saskatchewan, bear hunting in Saskatchewan. I believe in uh. I like the way you pronounced Saskatchew. Now you're gonna have some dude like you calling in and talking about how you didn't say it right, a skatchewe what you calls a cat scratch one. So, so hunting in Saskatchewan with it was it was a wilderness based boat hunt. So we were boating back in like on these on these Canadian rivers, and man, the Canadian wilderness is incredible. Oh yeah, they don't play around up there, man, like legit wilderness. Not it wouldn't even classified as that. But we I was twenty one miles from the nearest road and we were hunting bar over bait and that is camping. Yeah yeah, yeah, I mean we were camped closer to the road system, but we were going we were traveling by boat twenty one miles a day to get one way to get to this particular spot. Well, how do you get before it gets darker, before it gets late in the morning, You don't. You just typically are hunting in the evenings the days. Yeah, in June and northern Saskatchewan hardly gets dark, you know, so you just you just kind of navigate out and you you gotta give up on the idea of hunting from dawn until dark. And that's the hard one breakfast. Yeah. So, and that's the key component of this video is it was true wilderness to the to the other direction from me. According to my buddy, it was the outfitter. The closest road was fifty six miles away. So we're twenty one miles away from this road, and then the other direction, the closest road is fifty six miles. I mean, this is like a seventy five mile block of wilderness. Now they were they probably would have been like snowmobile trails and stuff in there, but like you couldn't have taken a motorized vehicle back in there. Yeah. Yeah, us in Alaska, if you headed west, you won't hit a role till you get into Siberia. Yeah. The first day of the hunt, we come to this it's a bait site and nobody's hunted there that year. And he he told me, he's like, man, there's a big black bear coming in here. That's you know, that's what you're after. And so I was looking for a big black bear. He's beating with what oats and he's a lot of oats and grease up in northern Saskatchewan. Fry oil. Yep, yep, that's primarily what they used. So he he goes around the restaurants and saves all their grease and pours it on top of oats. Yep. I met a guy that long ago that was baiting with um. I don't know if it's the same brand. Do you know Jolly Ranchers. He gets barrels of that syrup that hardens into a Jolly rancher. Shots of that man puts them ever clear in air anyhow So, so it's the first said of the hunt, the I miss a bear. So this video shows a ton of barry Interactionally, I missed this beart like probably twelve yards with a tradition, I'm hunting with a traditional bow. We're hunting off the ground there. The trees up there too small to put tree stands in. And so now why are you hunting with a traditional bowl, Just the same reason I write a mule. Just I like it. It's hard. You can't fake it. I like doing stuff that you can't fake. I mean, yeah, but you can say that about baiting bears. Yeah, I'd love to talk directly about that. When I say, when I say fake it, that's probably a hard term. But like, and that's not why I do it. But you can't fake being a traditional archer, like you can't just go pick it up. And it's probably a harsh term. I don't want to. Well, we talked to a guy yesterday that they've been doing this, they've been training new hunters up and shooting cross bowls and three hours they can have you ready to kill a deer. Yeah. Well, I would say in three hours they're ready to kill a deer. I would say you could do that with a compound boat today. I disagree hand three days, No, you know, it depends, man, but not no, no, no, no, no, I'm with you. Okay, I can conceive that. But you can get them shooting accurate quick, Yeah, you really can't. And that's a good thing. I'm not like yeah, and I'm I'm I'm walking real careful here because uh no, I'm not. I'm dogging on your bow and crossbows because everybody knows that their own both way to go. Yeah that's right, No, do it like me? Yeah that's the right way. Yeah. Okay. So anyways, there you are on the traditional bowl on the ground recurver long bow. This was a hybrid longbow, which is just kind of in between a recurve and a long bow. Yeah, I get confused with those bows a long bow. It's the most simple way to think about is a long bow has pretty much straight limbs and a recurve bow has the curved limb tips. And that's the simplest way to think about it. It's this bowl would have been kind of like you could call a cross bowl, but then it'd be like I mean crossed, like a little bit of each It would be a little confusing though. It would be confusing as hell. Yeah, I mean, so I missed this bear and then a different bear. I missed a bear that I never killed, big big like big Boone and Crockett, potential type bear. And did it spook him off? Yeah? He ran off, he did. He never came back. And see like the noise he knew. He all the bears know that you're there. That's that's that's what I kind of want to talk about. Well, we'll get the story will reveal this. So what we didn't show on the video is that almost all those bears walked up to us, not much different than the bear did. So these these bears they see you, so far in the wilderness that they are. They're not They're not that alarmed by human presence. And I'm realized I'm digging myself a hole, but I would love to talk myself out of it after I tell the story. So the bear, huh, you haven't seen this video. A bright blonde salve bear comes in, A bright blonde salve bear, beautiful bear comes in, and another bear comes in and they begin to frolic on the ground breed. I mean, it was incredible to watch him. I don't think you really ever. It was like early summer. Well I was late June, which is a primetime for bear, you know. So these bears are frolicking around and literally rolling on each other, and he'd kind of jump up on her and act like he's gonna breed her, but he never really did. And then all of a sudden, off down beyond the bait, I see, I see a big color face bear coming up the hill. He's got a his lip was drooping and had saliva and dripping from his lips. Man, he did not like the looks of that one bear getting on that female he saw. I mean, they were literally he the big the black bear was on top of the South, and they were just like, oh hey, you know, that's like they got busted. And he charges them, and these three bears just run right past us, and uh. And when I saw the color phrase bear, I was like, I want that's the bear. That's the bear I want to shoot. That's a shooter, old age class male, That's what I'm after. Forty three seconds later, the bear comes back in the colored bear, and they don't really look at you. I mean, it's kind of I've probably heard people talk about this was like grizz attacks and stuff. They he didn't he didn't just like look at me, but you could tell he was. He totally knew we were there. And he basically just kind of like starts walking towards us, but kind of at an angle, and then he gets about eight yards away, and at that point he directly looked at me, and then he turned and started to two to walk in a a place that was going to project him to be about five yards from me. Broadside is just walking this way, and I'm thinking, here's my chance. You know what's better than a Barrett tin yards is a Barrett five. You know, when you got a traditional bow. And so I mean I got three fingers under the knock. I mean this is about to happen. You do three under, you don't do one over and two under? Three? Is that for suckers? To do one over and two one? Oh no, it's it's no meridian. One over two under is the traditional way to shoot a traditional bow. My kids do it. Oh really happen one over to under? Now let him shoot three under? Well, the reason we didn't weird kids because our arrows didn't fit our strings and you had to use You can chew on them all day long and bite the knocks down, but you still like had to pinch it on there. Why do you actually three fingers? I just think you can shoot better. It transformed my shooting when I when I just one day started shooting three under because you can draw that era right beneath your eye and there's some ship where you stack your fingers to right, you count down. Yeah that's yeah, yeah, people do that, but that's not normal in hunting. That's more like Olympic style target shooting stuff. They tically not do that with hunting. So there we are, so the bears coming at me, and when he gets to like this place where he's just about to be broadside five yards away. He just turns and just comes at me, comes at you, like to the point where he comes up and touches your arrow. How do you how do you know he's not gonna um, he's not gonna do anything. He's not gonna try to get a bite of year or get piste and scratch you when he's at close to get scared and take a jump out of you. This was the only situation thus far in my hunting career where a situation got out of control. Fucking say it that way. Up until he touched the end of my arrow, I thought I was in the driver's seat because I thought he was gonna turn. I thought he was just gonna kind of wheel in about two or three yards and just kind of spin and go on because he weighs quite a bit more than you. Yeah, it was probably you know, it was It was probably a two in fifty pound bear. I mean you could tell somebody it was four and they probably believe it was probably to fifty. And when he didn't stop coming and and I I subconsciously used the tip of the arrow to like I didn't poke him, but like I positioned my arrow so that. I mean, imagine a dog like attacking you and you've got a bow and arrow in your hand, and you're not gonna shoot him in. I mean, you'd like use what you had in your hand to keep the animal in between, you know, away from you. And when my arrow touched his nose, that's when I said, oh crap. Literally, that's what I said. And uh and I backpedaled and it startled him and he raised up on his hind legs about three quarter It's not like he just stood straight up, but he he kind of reared up and he stuck his head in the blind and just kind of smelled us and then dropped down and uh and yeah, do you feel that that was his first encounter with humans? Absolutely? And there's a couple of back things behind it too. The uh Kobe Morrison had never seen that bear before. I mean, these are stations that they know what barriers are coming in, never seen that bear before. I am confident that Barrett never encountered a human and that's why he did what he did. It was just like, who are these guys? Like what is that? Who are these guys? And I it's the only time in my life that I didn't think he was gonna eat me. I was just reading him. I mean, I just didn't think he was gonna attack me and eat me. Yeah, but I I yeah, not that he's coming in with that intention. But when he's that close, there's no room. Right when he's that close, like the minute he gets scared, he's so on top of you that you could just see and I know, like like a grizzly would be a very bad situation. You wouldn't let that happen. Yeah, And like black you couldn't write because they when they get scared, day lay the lash out. And so you could be thinking, oh, yeah, when black bears get a scared, day run. But at that close, it's just hard to rule out that he's not going to get scared and neutralize what he's also not. And I thought that's what was gonna happen. After I said oh crap and I stepped back, I thought, it's like, you know, one time almost drowned, and it was like slow motion, like, oh, this is what it feels like to drown. In that moment, I thought, oh, this is what it feels like right before you get roughed up by bear. I mean, I thought he might just kind of like whack me. I thought he might knock my bow out of my hand or something. And yeah, it was. It was scary but it But a lot of people are like, what were you thinking? What were you thinking? I was trying to kill that bear. I did not have another thought in my mind other than that's the bear I want to kill. And I was in I was in mode of that's what I'm gonna do. Yeah, surprised me how much you kept your composure. Two. Then take the shot, man, that's what I took a ton of heat for, even from bow hunters. What the shot? Well, we can talk about that later. But yeah, so he because he's like two ft away. Man. You go read some of those comments, I made a conscious decision not too well. Yeah, I understand that. Well, that's another another when I'm trying to when I'm trying to, like um taken, well formed, well thought out sentences, I don't typically go to the YouTube comments. I hear you, I hear you. A lot of people, A lot of people had a sentiment of that bear gave you spared my life and then I took kids. What a terrible things he spared your life? Steve It's incredible how many people. I mean, I bet since I've been in Bozeman, someone has made a comment that that bear spared my life and what a expletive expletive expletive I am for shooting him, and how cowardly it was for me to shoot him once he turned his back on me. No, I'm not. I mean, hundreds hundreds of comments, and that's a sentiment the hunters have no no, Okay, what I took for on flag for the shot was and this goes just a shot placement stuff. People said there was a terrible shot and shot him in the butt or something. Man, that was a full length shaft, thirty inch long shaft. I got seventeen inches of penetration, steep quartering away angle, hit it in the last rib. It was totally immortal shot. I won't give on that because people are like, oh, you shouldn't killed because I made a follow up shot that was better than the first shot, granted the first When you shot again, man, he just strolled out. I sorry, I couldn't tell what the arrow did. I just tendering him. Yeah, out there he felt either arrow would have killed him. Either arrow, But you know, I mean he's he's he just he just kind of strutted out there like nothing happened, Like he didn't evenine that. So I was just like, what do you do when he keeps walking? You shoot him again? How far was it the second time? About twenty four yards? Dude watching it it's unsettling. Man, It's like it's like you're like, wow, you know. But then the thing I think is, yeah, it's unsetting because you're sort of watching it through other people's eyes. Yeah, but anything like you're hunting, the objective is the objective is to get a bear. You got a bear, yea? What is it removed? The objective of the bearer comes up and touches your arrow? Yea? If you had, If you had, if someone was hunting deer and the buck came up and touched the arrow and the guy shot it, that's not going to annoy people. It does, Yeah, I mean I've made I mean to annoy some of it wouldn't annoy eleven thousand of them. I mean it would have made it would have made these people that had complaints happier if I had shot the bear a tin yards, which that doesn't make any difference. But now there's there's a lot to this, and obviously people don't understand baiting and and Steve, honestly, this is awesome that we're having this conversation because I have been torn at different times and I feel like I've created my my position, which I assume you would agree with hopefully maybe. But just like when I first put that up, I thought, is this good for hunting? For this to be on YouTube? Because of how misunderstood it was, and from a guy that's running a small business, and you know, I mean like this has been good for my business. Um, you know, I'm like, well, am I gonna? I mean, I've really wrestled with that because man, the first few months that I had that up, I was like, this is bizarre. I mean, people talking about my mama, people talking about my wife, people, my kids. Oh, just people saying I hope your mom dies. I hope she dies of cancer. I mean just like mom, yeah, oh yeah. They talked about juju yeah, oh yeah. So that's when my kids call my mother. But no, I just just like like, oh, I don't know what it means, but like yeah, Karmen, Like my mother's name is Judy, So my my kids call her juju. So we joke. We joke with my mom. We're like, YouTube hate you. So they were like, I hope your mom because they're like, you're dying would be bad enough. I want your mother to die. Yeah. Anyway, if picked up my skin. For a while, I had the comments closed down because I was just like, this is crazy, that's a great future closing comments. Yeah, But then I then I decided to open them back up, and I've just left him up in in the you know. I guess it has to do with just how much time I have. But I've gotten to where I respond to some people if they have it, if I can discern that they have a genuine like question of why we do it. You could write a book off the off the comments that I've made two genuine people about the North American model for wildlife conservation and hunting older mature males being selective. Um bear number bears are thriving all across North America. Most of these people think that I killed the last black bear on the planet. Actually, they think I killed the last grizzly bear on the planet because of what color it was. Oh absolutely, They're like, God, dare you kill it? Grizzly, and I'm just saying, Kevin, have you have you killed the bear over bait? No, we're just talking about this. I've never killed a bear. He's never killed because we're gonna swop. Yeah, how did you avoid bear hunting? I think the biggest part of it was in Minnesota. I was always playing baseball in Springs, I played college baseball. So, yeah, can I read your quote? Sure, we pull it up, go on, finished talking. Yeah, So I guess it just wasn't a thing we grew up doing. And then when I came out West and I've been on bear hunts, haven't killed one myself, but I hear a quote from Jim Harrison. Sure, in the spring and summer, the boys in the town carry either baseball mits or fish poles on their bicycles. Two different types are being formed, and though they might merge or vary at times, most often they have set themselves up for life. So you broke the trend. Yeah. We used to tell Jim here he was wrong, but he's dead. Yikes. Yeah. In baseball, we usa these like hunting racks on our bikes, and we biked baseball practice. One hole would have fishing rod. One would have the back. Yeah. Yeah, I think he's being a little rigid there. I just I was thinking about that. Is what happened was, Um, I want to get back to this YouTube video. But the other day of my boy for the first time. He's nine and we don't him straight too far. But his buddies, the neighbor kids twelve, and they both liked to fish, so they wanted to go fish where they had to ride off a mile away or whatever. Um, and I said, I said, you can go, but I took the twelve year old boy. His name Oddley's Harrison. Took twelve year old boy, and I said, you're in charge, and and uh, that's great if you guys go together, but I want to make sure you come back together, like don't you split and leave him and you know what I mean. And they rolled off together with their backpacks and they rigged the rods up their backpacks and rolled off together. And dude, it was heartbreaking because he didn't want me to go. He didn't say it, but he was like, didn't want me to go. He wanted to have the tag. He's like was awesome, real concerned about what if it was his tackle box or not. If it was his rod or not. It was not like old come with right. She was just like, we're out of here. He kind of like, I hope you don't want to go, and they took off and his way out, he goes to get a zip like bag for his fish and they took off down the road, and um, I put it on Instagram the video him taken off on Instagram, and uh, and and and I thought of that Jim Harrison quote, and I put that Jim Harrison quote in there. Dude, it was heartbreaking. Just wait, just wait, there's gonna be shat wraps disappearing on your tackle box. I grounded him last night because he lost a bowl, Like, how do you lose a boat? I caunually losing arrows, but you don't lose the bowl. Was talking about all this stuff of disappearing. Now it's starting to come back around. But yeah, he found it and got on grounded. But but I had to like try to find a way to express to him that it was not acceptable to lose the whole bow. Oh man. Anyhow, Uh, playing baseball didn't bear hunt. Yeah, sell me on bear sell me on bear bait. Yeah, So anywhere that you can hunt bears over bait. It's a management tool for the powers that be that have the data, that want to achieve a harvest objective of taking out a certain number of bears. That's the way, that's the only way they can do it. I mean, you you look at any place where it's legal bait bears and it is a management tool. Spotting stock hunting could not take out the number of bears that they need, and so they use baiting as a management tool for bears. Can I tell you a story about the first bear I ever saw in Michigan? Grew up there, there's bears there. My brother drew a bear tag. We put out and lived our whole lives. Never saw damn bear. He put his out a bait pile. Within a couple days, I saw my first bear. You know what I'm saying. It works, just flat thick. Yeah. Why did game in Phish agencies need to reduce the numbers of bears? That's just I mean, just like every other thing, there's a suitable amount of habitat. I mean, you know, like we've got X number of available quality habitat for bears. Those bears that bear population will remain healthy if it stays at these numbers, bear population is increased by ten percent per year if you don't if you don't harvest these bears, then overpopulation isn't like the end of the world. But you know, if if a block habitat is supposed to can confeasibly hold ten bears and it's got fifteen in it, all fifteen or compromised in some way, so why not take out those five balance it and have a population that stable. I mean, it's just just like any other species. But you're talking about a little bit different situation when you we're talking about a big predator. That there's a low cultural tolerance for a bear being on your back porch eating your bird seed as opposed to deer. So I mean, I think that we just had a running We just had a bear in our neighborhood. That bear is not alive anymore. Yeah, he wasn't killed by a hunter. See, I mean, that's that's the thing. Bears are going to be taken out of the population, you know, So why wouldn't we use hunting in Arkansas? Like so? Arkansas reinstated s bear season in nineteen eighty, So from nineteen eighty to two thousand, one that all you could do in Arkansas would be equivalent to a Western spot in stock hunt. Okay, I mean you just had to go out and just hunt them. Okay, Oh, I do that now by choice. Yeah, I do that now by choice. But I'm I'm giving you an example. So for twenty one years you could only hunt in that way in Arkansas, and they killed I don't have the exact data, but I'm gonna guess less than twenty bears a year. I mean, because it's just such a tough hunt. It's just such a low odds hunt. I mean, bears were being killed just by happenstance, by walking past the deer hunters. Opportunistic yeah, yeah, opportunistic deer hunters killing bears. And so basically the bear properation got to a point where they said, man, we've got to take out three bears a year. How are we going to do that? Well, in Arkansas, the furthest you've seen in any directions about fifty yards in most places, so that's not by spot and stock hunting. And they said, we're gonna use bow hunters over bait on private land to manage the bears in Arkansas. Do the same thing in southeast Oklahoma, and so where people have a problem with it is this emotional sense that some way it's not you know, fair to put out bait and draw a bear in Well. My position on it is is that if if the goal of conservation is to strategically take out animals, bear baiting is has the opportunity to be highly selective. You can be highly selective. Not everybody is, but you have the opportunity to be highly selective watching animal for a long period of time before you can you can sex it, you can tell its age, you know, get a general estimate, you can make a wise decision about where you're gonna shoot that bear. I would argue that that spot in stock hunting is the least selective type of hunting. Oh, I'd agree with that at least opportunity. Like if you say that does it and what chance does the hunter have the map whether he acts on it or not, and what chances the hunter have the maximum capability and knowing what we're going on, I'd be like a tree hund hunting. Yeah, in bait probably one of the same, because officis, they might treat you high up to get a good look at him and the third being spot start. Yeah, and so if you're talking about, well, who's the conservation hero, because I've been, I'm on both sides of it when I kill the I don't want to get too far away from what I'm talking about. But like that's the number one foundational thing that I think gives us is that this is a management tool. But what nobody People can buy that, but they can't buy what. People have a hard time understanding, and it's because of a skewed foundational understanding of wildlife as they feel like that this is somehow unfair to do this. And I feel like Steve, that we're shooting ourselves in the foot by hunters. It's almost like we are giving into the emotional propaganda that a wild beast is is, you know, like you shouldn't you shouldn't kill a bear, charismatic megafauna. You know, you shouldn't kill a bear. It's okay to kill a deer, but you shouldn't kill a bear. Like totally emotional propaganda. This is an animal that just we have this emotional connection to and I kind of feel like that hunters play into that a little bit, like we're like, yeah, I don't mean that they the hunters are like, Okay, I'll give you I'll give up on that one. Yeah. And and here's I'm not jumping too far ahead, Steve, but I feel like that we've we've started to use a hashtag called guard the Gate. Okay, guard the gate in the right now, the biggest threat to hunting. I mean, there's lots of threats, you know, access to land and habitat and these things, but one of the most direct threats is anti hunting community massively coming in on us. And bear hunting is the gate for the anti hunting community to get into our space. Would you agree with for And so our stance is why wouldn't we want to like create and form And I'm open to for input, but like, why wouldn't we want to create and form this powerful narrative for why that we do what we do? Why do we use hounds? Why do we use bait? Because a lot of hunters don't understand that a lot of hunters would be like, ah, we could give that to them. Like honestly, I think a lot of hunters would just be like, Hey, why don't we just give them, just give them the hounds and the bait. Just let them have that, but we all know that that will not solve the problem, because they're not just after hounds and bait. It's just the lowest rung on the ladder. It's just the it's just the easiest thing that's easy enough to sell. And so if we could sit down in a perfect world with the anti the powers that be in the anti hunting community and could truly say, hey, will you stop harassing our way of life if we will give this to you, I wouldn't. I wouldn't do it, though, Well, I wouldn't even make even if I knew it was like even if like somehow it was like an enforceable deal, I wouldn't want to do the deal. Well, but the thing is is that they wouldn't. I mean, like if we give them let's say, let's say that, I mean, let's just say it was somehow it was possible, like through whatever, it was like possible that you would make a truce and be like, Okay, I'll forfeit, I'll forfeit these two things and then you'll never mass with us again. Um, I would be like I wouldn't. I wouldn't make the deal, would make that deal. And that's why I think sometimes we're missing it when it's not. I mean, we have been really my personal I mean, I would rather kill a bear in the National Force in Arkansas with my traadbo just out in the mountains. So it's not like I just have this love affair with bait and bears, but I feel like that it's a critical component of this whole mechanism of hunting that we have to guard this thing and so guard the gate, you know, the well that those That's that's my main my main thoughts. What annoys me a little bit and you run into this in a in a handful of things, is people will take it's almost like almost it's almost like I almost the only want to bring it up. No, I bring it up. Let's say a hunter says I don't have any desire to shoot a bear over bait. People take that to be a condemnation. And yeah, no, people do like I don't uh hunt whether they are so people be like, oh, he must condemn a r So like I don't hold the long bow. Do you also think that I condemn long bows. It's just like I just feel like there's a little bit of a part of that sensitivity is people want to. There's if there's a practice that the broader public might view as being controversial that somehow you not participating in it is supporting that when you could, when you could have very much like I think they're uh, typically it would be I haven't hunted that way, I haven't gone out and booked a trip to go do that. Do I have a problem with it? Absolutely not. But there are a thousand things to do in this world. There's a thousand hunts to do kinds of hunts in a lifetime. You only get to do a hundred, and so does that mean I hate Yeah, I think that's probably a symptom of being the bottom round on the ladder. Maybe you're a little insecure. I get it, I get it. But then if you take someone like another beleaguered group would be trappers, trappers don't get pissed at people for not trapping. Yeah, well, I don't think. I don't think bear hunters are upset for people for not hunting bear over bait. I think it's just a general a general stigma, and not everywhere, but in some places that just it's like taboo to do this, you know, Yeah, you know, one of the things that people mix up a whole bunch of things. People mix up. They're like, and we talked about this all damn time. We talked about yesterday ethics, right, but like ethics and what end do you need, like ethics meaning the challenge for the hunter or somehow something to do with ethics meaning the experience of the animal, the experience of the animal. You're not doing the animal service or disservice to kill it one way or another, except for what's most effective. You'd be if you're gonna look and say, like, what is most ethical? And I would say, okay, in terms of the likelihood of success us or in terms of like sort of like what's the most ethical way to dispatch an animal? I think that if you're saying the most ethical way to dispatch an animal to be bait because you have the greatest chance for a really good shot opportunity. So people be like, honeymore based, not ethical. I'm like, what what part of this you're talking about? Because getting a twenty yard shot at a stationary animal that's broadside you that you can make a good judgment on what's going on and place your arrow carefully, that's pretty damn ethical. If the goal is to kill it quick. Yeah. But then but that's not the that's not what people are on the top about that. That's the thing. That's why I hate when people use the word I almost hate, like the word ethics. I don't hate the word ethics, but I mean I hate when it's like describing that way. Like I've had so many people come to me and say, oh, I hunt with the bolks. It's more ethical to play devil's advocate. Okay, we are. I think the thing we've brought it before. The bait that can trip people up is that you're changing the animals natural behavior or natural patterns. But then some people would argue this, when a whale water is up on the beach and there's twenty bears feeding off it, is the weale guilty of changing their natural patterns. No, what's natural is if there's a big cache of food out in the woods, as an elk carcass, if you like, If you butcher an elk and leave the gut pile on the bear eats, that have you changed the bear's natural habits. He's out in the woods, he finds a big thing to eat and hang it. You're capitalizing upon a natural thing that a bear does. I mean a bear interacts with a bait site the same way that he interacts with a wide oak acorn covered ridge. I mean he pounds it until the food sources gone. I mean like it. Yeah, I mean you're I mean, I'm just doing the whole Devil's advocating. We're two douvils advocating. Hey, can I can I paying the story? That could. I'm not gonna step on anybody's toes, but it could. I think it's I think it's legit. So I think I think the issue, especially with hunters, is is an issue that I think could be characterized by fair chase. People say it's not fair chase to hunt. But yeah, okay, I'm gonna start the story by saying that I love Western spot in style hunting. I hunted Montana, killed the bear in Montana, hauled my mules up here this year, and hinted to do it yourself. Deal. I love it, but let me Yeah, I killed the bear man, brought my mules up from Arkansas. Where, Oh, Western Montana. I'll tell you right where after we're off there here. Um, I don't know where you're out here hunting the spring. Yeah, how made you see a lot? We we saw bears al ust every day, killed the killed a nice boar. You show me where. I mean, I don't even know exactly. I'm just curious. I'll show you. Um, So, what's what's more fair Chase? Two hunt with a high powered rifle with a custom turret on it, have technological mapping capabilities that absolutely are supernatural compared to the human navigation abilities we have. I'm talking about having like an app on your phone, having a four wheeler, and having optics which greatly radically increase your natural ability to see. So what's more fair chase we're talking about we're talking about success rate? No, we're talking about fair Chase like fair well, but we have to have a way. We have to have a way. We're finally checking it. If it's success rates, it's still better to home with bait. Okay, I said, you cut me right to the chach. I should have known you would have done it. Man, you're good now. So yeah, so you give me those four things, which optics and we're gonna give a plug for on X hunt maps because they're awesome. I wouldn't have killed the bear I did without on X, that's the truth. Um, And uh, you know a four wheeler, a map or you got a bucket of bait and a mule and a bow. Which one is? Which guy is more fair chase? Again, it's a difficult word to work with because we don't know what it means. If we mean that it makes it really if we mean what way makes it harder to kill a bear? Which I think is what some people are kind of talking about, like evens the playing field. And you said to me, which of those people a guy with a quad and an X and a high powered rifle and optics in a non bait state compared to a guy with bait and a bow and a bait state, the guy with bait and a bow will have a higher success rate than the guy in a non bait state. But I don't know that that's what I don't know that that's what people mean when they talk about this kind of Eldo Leopold. This guy slipped this in real quick that Boone and Crockett basically says the fair chase is just in a in a manner that does not give the hunter an improper or unfair advantage over the game animal. Again, it's slippery language. Crockett is all basically, well, they're they're totally cool with baiting hounds, Boone, crock It is. I am too. Yeah, I'm glad to hear that. Man, I am one of one of the when what I've ever said or done something to make you feel otherwise besides saying what's interesting to me? Now? I get it. You know I think I don't like starfruit. Yeah, I'm with you. I think sometimes we're probably probably a little maybe a little insecure for real, Like you got what Randall Weaver calls the persecution complex. Yeah, we do. I mean what's true because they are persecuted. I mean we we really are. So nah. Yeah, you know I got half my Brody, our buddy Brody. He would he did a hound hunt this year. Man. I loved hunted mountains, the hounds. I haven't had it. I would. I would wake up tomorrow and go hunt Bear the house. Hey, that's like home with hounds. You don't like? Very interesting? To come with me to New Mexico on a meal based hound hunt for Bear. You do that, I'm going to you get around a little bit, uh yeah, you bounce around? Yeah? Yeah, I would do that it's it's gonna be. I'm really interested in hounds, man, Like how like all this stuff? I mean, I like how much stuff those people know. Yeah, so it's powerful for us to get a get even just a small hat tip from a guy like you, Steve for real. Yeah, I mean like the first bear ever eight was my brother. The first piece of bearing me to ever eate, we eat we that bear down to the nobles was a bear my brother Danny killed over bait Pie when he drew a bear tan in Michigan. Second bear every it was the one my other brother killed over bait Pilo, Michigan. This this is what we say, and you may say it too. Maybe I've never heard you say it, but we have absolutely got to defend every legal method of hunting that I mean and in my traditional use, every legal method of hunting that's legal today in twenty nineteen, it's been run through the ringer of all the things. You know, is that science based? Is that? This? Is that that? And we've got nothing left to give the anti hunting community. Well, my my perspective on this, I mean, my perspective is, like I said, you know, I support people's right two have a legally ordained and legally managed way of extracting natural resources of sustainable populations of wildlife. I've used population like healthy populations of wildlife where there's public demand, and used for it a view that we have a right set up, a system set up by which we determined the resources viable and it can withstand x amount of pressure, and we allocate that through a democratic process and give people the right to go out and utilize resources. And bears are part of that. There's certainly desire always has been. If you went to the frontier settlements, they shot deer for hides, they ate bear meat. H Now, in a lot of places, that's just the only way to go about it, Like traditionally, that's all people have done it. I have no desire to see that be taken away from them, especially in places where you're effectively killing bear hunting and then nolier effectively killing bear hunting. Yeah um yeah yeah. And I you know, I love I want to say that I'm not like I mean, I I enjoy baiting bears, I do, but you know I enjoy spotting stock bear hunting just the same. I mean, I see what a lot of people don't understand that have never baited bears? Is how difficult that it is, truly and that may sound crazy, but if you've never done it, and difficult in terms of not just killing the bear, but killing the bear that you're after. It's just like hunting a big white tail. It's difficult. People don't understand that. Um, it's a ton of works. Understand that hunting a cat behind hounds is difficult. It takes It takes a dedication of a lifetime to be able to do that, to have your own pack of dogs, to know the cats, to know where they crossed, to know what you need in a hound. I mean it's laughable in someone you know, sitting on the edge of the edge of an apple orchard with a crossbow in a tree shoots a deer, which I'm all for, God bless you. But when they're like, oh, I don't think it's okay to to spend your whole life training up a hound dog and learn how to find a damn mountain lion, And it's like, oh, that doesn't take any nohow man, We've said. The houndsman that we've gotten to spend some time with, have always been the best. You know, overall outdoorsman. You can't take it in the woods. You know, the best woodsman that we've ever met trackers, and my god, that's right. I mean, they dedicate their their lives to it. I mean, you can't people just still it down to one thing that you shoot something in a tree. They boiled the whole thing down to the part that they care least about. And it's such a traditional method to I mean, like the hunting culture of North America was built not totally on the backs of hounds, but I mean they've been doing it since the beginning at least European. European hunting on this continent highly traditional. You know what Prus houndsman like don't view the kill as the thing because they don't care who does the shooting. You have some guy that like you have some guy that patterns some big white tail and finally cracks the coda on some big white tail. Does he turn around going you know, I'll tell you what, Bob w don't you go up there and get shot? He don't know, Like, dude, all the work is getting it, catching it, like I really don't care. Like they don't care. And a lot of them get to where they don't shoot. They're like, don't shoot. Ah. They release way more, way more animals than they take, almost all of them, almost every hounds. When I know, I got one last quick question for you. Uh how do you how do you how do you spot stock bears in Arkansas? What are they doing? So we're hunt in the fall, and uh, man, I'm looking for white oak acorns and bear sign, bear scat and white oak acrens. Well, you know, ambush hunt. So I do a lot of what I call slip hunting, which is just slowly moving through places, covering a lot of ground with a wind in your face, moving into just covering a ton of ground, just trying to find bear. And you might kill a bear while you're doing that. You might see a bear before he sees you, and then you're able to put a stock on him. Or in your rambling you find a ridge top or a finger or a flat or a saddle that's covered in bear scat and bear trails and white oak acorns, and maybe there's not a bear there right then, but you come back in the next day and hunting like a deer. That's the that's the essence of it. I'd say it's it's one of the toughest big game hunts in North America. Have you been successful doing that? Yeah, it's to me, it's the it's the sheep hunt of the South. Yeah. Now, one of my one of my greatest, most personal, you know, achievements inside of hunting was I killed a bear in Arkansas with my bow spotting stock, actually killed it over water. And uh, in the next day, I went into Oklahoma and did the same thing, killed the bear of the tread bow, just stalking. So two days. Yeah, and it was because I just I wouldn't even plan it on hunting. It's a whole another story. But I had gone into Scout, made a big spin, found a ton of bear sign Luckily I had my bow. I mean, I wasn't even gonna bring my bow. And uh, it's all on video. It's a YouTube video that YouTube shut down and probably have it. It's got like six thousand views right now, but they shut it down because of graphic content. Sad story. The but so I found all the acrons that year was high. So in in our mountains, like mass crop varies based upon things that happened in the spring, you know, like freezes, different things, so that year, all the acrons were up high. I didn't know that. I just was going in to scout this area, found a ton of bears and uh, kill the bear, packed it out. I had an Oklahoma bear tag. So the next day I went into Oklahoma, which was just the exact same terrain the Washingtons run into Oklahoma and the Ozarks. And I was like, well, if they're high in Arkansas, they'll be high in Oklahoma. And man, I went up there and killed another bear spotting stock on the ground. The next morning by ten o'clock. Was that a place you had been in before? Not in Oklahoma? The Arkansas place? Was the Oklahoma place? Was? I got on what's what's graphic about? What's more graphic about that video? Nothing? The human that decided it was graphic from YouTube that flagged it. You know what it could be as a volume of a volume of planes? Yeah, one hundred hours a minute. Man, there's a ton of artificial intelligence using that stuff. Yeah, yeah, you're right. They shut it down though. It was getting fifty thou views a day, and they shut it down, and and and since that time, it's gotten like maybe fifty views in two years. Yeah, I've found they for whatever reason they cherry pick they shut down one. If you want, I don't know if you want to give it, if you want to pull, We'll put it on our website if you want, if people want to come check it out. I mean you're saying, like my YouTube video or like content. No, we could just like put the video, could put it. I mean that doesn't go to YouTube if they shut it down, right, Oh, I see, just like put it on your website. Yeah, absolutely would be awesome. Man, that's see that video to me is the is the epitome of of hunting. I mean, the bears were not and this again goes back to it's not selective to be spotting stocking. I mean both of these bears were. They were not large bears. They were just average bears. But man, you'd hear me say it if I if you watch the video, I shoot this bear out of the water. Bear standing in the water, eight yards on the ground, just tendering this bear, And I say, I would rather kill that bear than a Kodiak brown bear. That bear. I did it on my turf. And and the thing is is that just nobody's doing that. Yeah, how many likes and dislikes they have I don't even know. No serious, if you want to put it out just the listeners can go see the video, we could like host it on it. You're saying it's back on YouTube. Now it is on YouTube. It's on YouTube, but you have to be eighteen years old or older to watch it. And what happens when YouTube flags one of your videos as they quit promoting it, so you know the algorithms it was getting views, so now they don't prompt anyone. If you like this, you'll okay, and like, yeah, we just have the link up that like if if you're but if someone under eighteen or a someone tried to watch the video and they weren't logged in the YouTube, they couldn't watch it, got it because the YouTube has to know, oh this person's over eighteen, so you actually have to have an account, like if you logged on and tried to watch it right now? Uh? Are things heating up? First? Light? Heating up is the time of year when people start buying a bunch of stuff. It's crazy. It just like when fourth of July, I think people are like to shoot the fireworks off. Then like what's next? The like, oh, ELX season's almost here, It's the same thing with archery shops. I talked to my friend John, who runs archery shop in Eastern Oregon's like, man, it is nuts in here right now, all the way until, like August said, people will come in as we speak. Our guy, Joe Ferrigno is Joe Farron attles cutting my arrows down right now. Man, I just got a couple of built myself. I'm excited. But yeah, things are heating up, Like people are coming coming, sniffing around looking at gear. Yeah. Yeah, we have more people swinging by the office. Is this the show room, no, sir, Yeah yeah, oh yeah. They want to come in to buy stuff. Yeah, we send them to the interwebs. Though, do you guys sell, um, you guys sell a lot more like mountain stuff before you start selling the white tail stuff, Like, do white tail dudes wait a little bit longer? I don't know, you know, I think the most guys that are getting geared up right now are kind of getting geared up four in November already, they're starting to starting to get ready. But um, I think the majority of the purchases right now are from our two thousand nineteen line that just kind of get came out, So most of that stuff has hit the website as of Yeah, it's about a week and a half ago. What's the hottest selling item, Man, that's a good question. Probably brooks Down sweater. That's a great one this year. Um, the Sawbucks that thing along. You've tried those sawbucks hunt? Yeah, but tell you what, I was wearing them hunting down in Old Mexico and I was greasing through that like man, everybody else's like, yeah, cat Colm, me squite all that stuff. I got a feeling that's gonna be I got a feeling like after we went down we go down there. We've been on it quite a few times. Go down there January hunt COO's dere in the desert, and um, I got a feeling that there's gonna be a lot more those pants on the ground come this January than we're last. Dude, my legs are the only ones not ripped up. Yeah. There, that's an incredible pair of pants. The best part is it's not like a thick canvas pant where you can actually eat their breathable for the hotwell, I lived it every morning. I just pulled all the Southern listeners. Guys are talking about briar bridges. Yeah about this today, that's awesome. Should have called him that briar bridges, briar pants brush pants. But no, things are things are getting pretty heated up at first. People are getting excited. Yeah, yeah, we're coming up on it. Antelope season starts in August. I think you guys all hunt animal withoutree equipment? Yeah you guys, Yeah, guys over here, that's right. It should be fun. I've actually never killed aniop with the bow. So so who's buy our the sawbuck pants? Is it? Like? Um, a lot of bird hunters are big game. I mean they're built for for for the bird hunter, chucker hunters and and folks like that. But um, actually a lot of folks in tech to start buying him. I was wearing them squirrel hunting Missouri. Sweet. It's like it's sick of getting scratched up by the brush. Yeah. Ye, eliminates the need for a gator on the bottom when it's hot. I was crawling out of the river the air day with U, and I didn't want my little boy to climb through the rolls, bushes and thistles, so I picked him up over my shoulder and climbed up through there. Gash my legs all up. I had my shorty pants on because we're coming out of crayfishing. Oh nice, Yeah, you need to make those shorts just have a big gap in the thigh right there. All right? Man? Yeah, any what do you got anything final thoughts? I do, Man, we net We need to finish up on the barrel oil. Why does it say okay barrel oil. It's only a right, it's only so good. That's okay. Well that's uh, that isn't oklaholm for Oklahoma. Yeah, so I brought I brought you guys some barrelil, Johnnie and Steve, and this is this is Oklahoma barrel oil. Well okay, so I did it test on how to render fat, whether there was any difference in rendering it slow or rendering it slow and low? This is this is not viscous, not at all. That was gonna be my question to you after I tell you a few things about this. Um. So, I brought you this barre oil to use it your pleasure. But this is a testament to black bear conservation because black bears were brought into Arkansas. It's considered the most successful reintroduction to large carnivores in the world's reintroduction of bears into Arkansas. And these Oklahoma bears are bears that have infiltrated into Oklahoma from Arkansas and now have a huntable population and are thriving. That was a fifty pound Oklahoma black bear. Yes, sir, yes, sir, Oklahoma head on him to bet you well, I'm one of the few people on the planet besides they, of course holding a bottle of Oklahoma barre oil right now. Well, hey, not only do you get that, but I'm gonna give you this, uh bear grease weather chart that you can use. It's in a magazine. What magazine is that? Okay? Yeah? This this is Bear Hunting magazine. And we wrote an article this like are we published an article we didn't write it about an old guy in New Mexico named Gordon Websad. He died in Gordon Websitt was nationally known for sixty years of watching and forecasting weather based upon bar oil forecasting. Absolutely he could forecast weather with a high degree of success, says this article. And this is his personal chart. And so this this chart shows, I mean, you know, one if the barrel oil looks like that, then you go heavy and bottom no changes for several hours. Clear. Number two, there's a slight bulge in so barre oil for people who wouldn't know it watching the bear matric pressure. Ye, well he you you got to read this article earthquakes with this, I mean does it? I mean I like it. I believe that he believed it right, But it doesn't bother you that I'm not buying it. I'm with you, okay, But it's just it's thrilled. I'll yeah, it's just eccentric. It's just cool. I love stuff with bear grace. It's a cool. It's a cool article about that old guy Gordon whims that my fridge is gonna set up like a rock. Yeah. Well my question is, how do you render fat? That's clear because I have rendered bear fat, Steve, that was totally clear. Well, once it gets warm, it's clear. Wow. I mean it's like piss colored. Yeah, but somebody told me that has to do with what the bear eight and actually like the the chemical makeup and well yeah, you know, like when you get like, uh, you know sometimes just like you know, I've seen it on on when I killed a buffalo that was in a certain area there's a lot of caroteen and he had orange like orange, like a damn orange orange fat. But uh, that doesn't surprise me that the I know. I know because I have people with contested but it's true feeding on when they're feeding on blueberries, the fat takes on a tint from that coloration. Well, just my question is, and what I was trying to decide by doing different temperatures is I have rendered it before when it was almost clear all the time, like if you can put in refrigerator, it would have solidified up, but it looked like olive oil. Yeah, well even look at put it in your fridge, it was clear. Yeah, even after that, I don't know that was possible. Right, not long ago. There's a whale fat Mark Tuck skin and the fat I don't know that's Mark Tuck or not. I think part of the skin. I don't know. Either way, we're eating some whale fat. That was interesting, pretty good. Uh, good looking magazine, So you're good. Bear tell us again, Bear Hunting, Yeah, Bear Hunting magazine. Yeah, we've been in print for twenty years. I've had the business the last six years. But we're making a yep, that's us print magazine six times a year. Read all about bear grease. Yeah, the editor's note and this one is titled guard the Gate. That would be a good one. Uh, you got any concluding thoughts? Kevin for Antelope season comes. Get those Guidelight pants. They're sweet. That was a good one coming out. Are there out right now on the website. It's gonna be hot. And man, when you get those, get yourself a Marino T shirt. What's the light one called the Wicks, the New Wicks. Yeah, I've keep mean to do it. I'm gonna do it next time I climb up Baldy. We've been going up Baldly every Thursday, and I wear my Wicks T shirt and everybody else is wearing like a T shirt plus another layer. And I started off just the hair chili, which is always you should start a mountain. But that T shirt makes it through the whole experience. Starting at fifty degrees or so, and by the time we get down it's probably well into seventy and we're running and it's hot, and that T shirt just it spans that whole you know, variants and temperatures and you get up top on Baldi and the winds howling, even sweating, and it's trying to blow through you, but it dries out and it still keeps you warm. I feel like everybody should have that is their basic as their first you know, piece on their skin. Thank you, My concluder is I think now that these these guys pointed out a little problem. I think you ought to work up a price on that hog. I'll see what I can do by eight. So I'm gonna roll back over there and i'll drop it off. It's gonna get it cutting wrapped, cutting wrapped like a pro. I'm gonna be generous with it. Yeah, I'm keeping all the fat for myself. Yeah, yeah, that's a good, good plan. Well, I'll give Yanni a little fat. Yeah, the whole jar right now? If I just buy my half, can we just split it and share it? Oh? Has he's straight up right now. I'll shake on it. I get the left half, we'll bulk up that left side for it. Alright, Clay, you got your final thoughts. Man, I've I've said enough. I appreciate you having me on truly. Do you do a good job? Thank you? Yeah, thanks, thanks for opening. It's been great. This is really sweet. Go give his video films up. Yeah. Man, maybe maybe if everybody works really hard, we could tip it back over the other direction. Would help. Great. What's it called? I think the title I mean they need to check out the like Clay new Comb bear hunt. Well, I think it's called bear bumps into traditional Archer's arrow, like we we tried to describe in the title. But if you just go to the Bear Honting Magazine YouTube channel and hit popular, like there's a tab up there that's some of the most popular videos, you'll see three or four come up and it'll it'll be there. Yeah, but I'm more proud of the squirrel hunt on mule videos and stuff like that than that. That's a good one. Everybody should watch that one too. Steve and I both enjoyed that one. All right, man, thanks for coming on. Hey, my pleasure. Thank you appreciate it.