00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening un podcast. You can't predict anything presented by first like creating proven versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear for every hunt. First light, Go farther, stay longer. Yeah, we're good. Yep, we're recording now. Why didn't Steve sound as loud as ours? We are in a Ford Sprinter from Enterprise. I don't think, well, I don't know Ford whatever the hell sprinter type man cargo though, no seats except for the front and back, front and passenger. Steve, what moment? Hold on, We're trying to get something on your voice. There's a knob broken off of this that I didn't see. Um, what where's the chord here? Going to Steve? Just as Steve's right here, this one and that is the one without the knob. Man, it's a lot harder to podcast in a van down by the then you would think, all right, so you've got to change that too, right, Okay, Steve, talk again? You turned me off? Now you should be good, right, not romantically, but just can you hear us? Now? No, I can't hear anything? Well his his Oh here we go, so new snow on the hills. Miles to go, No more than that, oh on fuel fuel and to the next gust nation, shake one down, best of around, miles to go to go in the van. Is it on? It's still a little hot? Uh, it's well, it seems hot to me. Try it now again, No, my things on? Well you just turn it off again. Are you there? Phil recording? A little up on him? Just a tiny's coach halfway test test. There you go. Are we rolling? We are recording. This can all be in the show. It'll help. Yeah, okay, everybody, welcome to me either podcast. Now everybody is realized. We we struggle hard, We struggle mightily to bring you, you know, three episodes a year and of quality programming. And in my mind that quality programming. There's two things that go into that. On one hand, good quality content, right, stuff well considered thoughts. Um, you know news, Uh you know that keeps you up to speed. Um, oh, good entertainment, right, so you learn stuff. Two is we strive for good audio quality, which is impossible right now because Chester keeps messing with my thing. Look at that, dad, Look with Steve. I will apologize, but I'm really trying to hear you're peaking, which means that your little levels are hitting the red line chesters in the back of a band. We're on a road trip right now. I'm trying to set it up. We're trying to set it up like it's a special episode, and you keep turning my thing down. Well, Telty, we're crossing cathedral rapids. We try very hard to bring you a quality show that sounds good. That's why we have filled the engineer and we have our studio and everything. But it just so happens right now. Circumstances have worked against us. And I checked with with our our of it producer, Karin, and we need to roll with this. We are recording the show. My apologies to you on audio quality. We are recording the show in a van driving through interior Alaska. So if you imagine Alaska and you go all the way east where it butts up to Ukon Territory, and then you go pretty much dead nuts between top and bottom north to south, that's about where we're at, driving down the road in the new kind of van that I think it's like like vans, what do they call these vans. Everybody calls him a sprinter, but a Ford it's a rental for no, because like a creeper van is like my old van. This is like a like a high end van podcast van. This is the cool it's like these days. It's the kind of van where people go stay in the van for a summer and have a van life experience. Yeah, it's pretty nice. I kind of want one of these for fishing. Oh no, you just drill holes in this, drill holes down through the ice. A tuber tubanbile mobile. We're on a road trip. It'll Alaska, and we're recording the show from here, and it's the same show, same titillating subject matter, but we're just in a van. And I was just explaining to the boys. Off to the left, we have some beautiful snow capped mountains, and I was explaining to the fellows, here do we have. We're joined by Lauren Molten, driver UH clayt nwcom Chester Floyd and UH fan favorite dirt myth how Hannie Uh. I was explained to the boys that on this drive, which I've done the number quite a number of times over the years, on this drive at this time in the evening this time of year, if one takes a speedy glance down all of the gravel roads coming into the highway, you will often catch grouse out pecking grit. But we haven't seen any yet, but I'll keep you listeners a prize on that situation. I'll point out on our thing because I did this drive one time with my son coming back from Caribo hunting, and we saw seven grouse. And my son pointed out that every grouse we saw it was on the left side of the road. Was he sitting on the south side of the road, No, he was on the right side. I was, But that's how it went, and it was true. And once I reviewed it in my mind, he was cracked sharp kid. Well, yeah, observant, almost a little rain manny, not him, the observation, but I appreciate it. Uh so for companies to get into up top here as we as we cruise along. Um oh, this is good. So I'm pretty this this is exciting in a little a proud thing for me. We have a whole new season and meat Eater coming up soon, Season eleven of meat Eater. What we are able to do now, what we're able to do now. Um, we just filmed the end of the season coming back from that. Right now, what we're able to do now is we are going to here's a TV here's a little TV business tidbit. Uh. We've always so me and my my original partners at zero point zero and now our our company, Meat Eater, We've always owned, um, we've always owned our shows. Right, We've only ever licensed our shows out, meaning like normally if you make like normally if you watch TV show on cable TV or whatever. Uh, the distribution channel owns the material. So a production company will make a show for someone, Um, and then once you produce it and make it, it's like a contractor who makes a house for some and like you hand over the keys of the house, you never walk back in there again. Right, and then the you know, the distribution the distributing platform owns the material. We've always owned Meat, We've only ever licensed our show out. So we are able to now do something that's pretty cool. We're able to do our sort of first window on our own platform. So when we kick out the new season eleven of Meat either the first place we're gonna kick it out as we're going to kick it out on our own website. So at the meat Eater dot com is where you'll be able to go watch the show early first before it appears anywhere else. And that will be coming up pretty soon and I'm excited about that. Meanwhile, over at YouTube, Mark Kenyon's Uh Deer Country show has launched. A few episodes are already out. The show runs through mid October. Go find it at the meat Eater YouTube channel. Stay if he came and hunting with me? I think the episodes out the one you hear it, Yeah, he came, he came down to Arkansas, man and uh killed a deer public land. So tune into that Folks for Love and that Mark Kenyan's Deer Country on YouTube at the Meeting YouTube channel. Uh. Not thing is It's like this is a even though we're on a road trip through Alaska for a couple of hours. Here we're and Lauren observed that we have enough gas to get us to the next gas station plus one mile to Delta Junction and the tank said one miles to go. Excellent. Uh, here's a little show business tidbit. Are It's so frustrating when camp Fire Stories Volume one came out, so it's Meat Eaters, camp Fire Stories, Close Calls. When that came out, instantly, uh was the best seller, and and it got it was best seller a bunch of platforms. But then it made the New York Times Audio Book best Seller, which is a weird thing for an audiobook. And I'll tell you why. Most books that make most books that make the New York Times best seller list in audio are books that were print. So a big book will come out in print, and it'll become big best seller in print, and then the audio hit. And that that that print thing kind of generates a little bit of buzz, right, and the audio hits and the audio does correspondingly. Well, it's exceptionally hard to break into the audio book best seller list with an audio first book. But Meets Can't Our Stories, Close Calls did just that. Now we just released this is very aggravating. We just released Meetators, Can't Fire Stories, Narrow Misses, and more Close Calls. Now we have intimate transparency into the sales of this thing. We know how it's doing. It very much earned its position. Well, let's hear me out. It very much earned its seats, but we don't have seats. But carry on, no, you're actually no, they're sitting on Duffel bags in the bag of man, I'm writing shotguns, I can watch for the grouse um and or it had the numbers like it, it earned its spot on the list, but it got flagged for this reason by The New York Times as the best anyone's been able to explain to us there was an overconcentration of sales from a particular source. It seems as though the overconcentration of sales from a particular source was those crazy e's over at Apple. Mm hmm, the folks who brought you the iPhone and where you know. Historically the vast majority of podcasts or listen to is at Apple. Too. Many of our listeners bought their copies from this single source. Now, if it's a print book, the New York Times will put an asterisk next to the title and point out that something fishy has gone on, and they'll asterick it like it might have had a big single sale or a bulk purchase, or something weird, or someone trying to buy their own book onto the bestseller list by ordering a ton from a weird bookstore somewhere. Okay, I understood, we have no such anomalies, no kind of weird sales, no kind of any purchase that would happen like our number one place we sold Apple and they docked us for it, docked it and because with audio they don't do the asterix marker, you just get kicked off the list. Mm hmm. What we're gonna do so irritating. We need to go and turn around and repair it. So we're gonna stick another. We're gonna put I didn't really want to do us. We're gonna put our probably my favorite story, no offense Clay, no offense taken, probably my favorite story from narrownesses and more close calls. We're gonna tack it onto the end of the episode. Oh this episode. Yeah, we're gonna put it on here because that helps a lot. Now, keep in mind, if you heard the camera Kirkconnell's story where the guy shoots his body through the fin to save his life, here's the story has to do with a guy shooting himself. It is a harrowing, very touching story. Instead of a guy saving his body's life by shoot him through the fin underwater, a guy's dog saves his life. You're gonna hear the story and then hopefully you'll be so inspired you'll go out and we'll make this October list. Okay, Uh there you know when you get this though, there's still hours worth the material you haven't heard you were you're just getting like a smattering, right, But we're gonna stick that on the end of the show here to help move that thing along. And another news bit a former podcast guest, Duke waste Me who works for First Light. He's been on the show before, he's been this show before. Uh the dude was out he drew a big horn tag dude was out hunting big horns and him and his wife they lost their home. There was they have a condo and part of the condo complex whole damn thing burned to the ground. Everything he had is gone. Uh, we've been we've been driving people towards to go fund me site. So if you happen to be out there and you're you're you remember being uh, you know, doing athletics with uh Duke or hunting with Duke, or you know Duke from when he used to be a customer service rep first Light. He always liked that guy. We have a go fund me set up go fund me dot com him. Um, it's helped Duke waste and eat w A S T E n E Y recover from a house fire, go fund me, and we've been to Steve. Let me say something about Duke. Can I can I give a Can I tell him about Duke just a little bit? Yeah, So Duke. Duke is like an eccentric, incredible, great guy. He's like five seven probably ways about a hundred and forty pounds, is an ultra marathon runner, and he can run. A former Division one wrestler and he he ran track, he was a bull rider, and he is an absolute hunter of hunters, the guy and and just a great guy. I mean, you can't There's never been somebody that met Duke that didn't like him, and so it's pretty tragic that he lost his his house. And uh yeah, so just trust me, you'd like Duke and you'd want to give him some money. Uh. Moving on to the Wyoming Corner Crossing. Thanks for that, Clay. Moving on to the Wyoming Corner cross or case update. This is interesting part of this deal we had the This is also like Duke was a former podcast guest We had the guys. If you're not familiar, if somehow you haven't been listening to the show and you're just catching this one. Now. We've covered extensively, including having like the defendants came out from Missouri to be on the podcast, the Wyoming corner crossing case where some guys used the ladder two cross from one piece of public land onto another piece of public land. They had to cross where the two set corner sections meet. Never stepped foot on private land, but they were in for like some second or whatever the hell, however long it takes you to jump over a little step ladder. They were in the air space of a rancher. Uh, they got criminal, they got they got a criminal trial, had to go to a jury trial, a criminal jury trial. In the criminal trial, they were found not guilty. They were found that, uh, no trespassing had occurred. Who Lauren hold On really click gotta pass? We just blew passed and desan rogue. So get out of the way, Jack, So oh you know what here? You know, remind me of the new song in a second. But let me finish this corner crossing deal. So, uh, we're gonna hype that song for us even written we listen, I gotta get you gotta piss on your post. So in the corner cross the case that the defendants came on the podcast after they were found not guilty in their criminal trial. If you remember back though, remember back to O J. Simpson. There was once a famous football player the name O. J. Simpson killed his wife in a waiter with a knife. And if you remember, he had his criminal trial and then when he was acquitted, the glove don't fit right, you gotta acquit. He then turned around and had his civil trial and he was found guilty in the civil trial, and the judge baked all this symbolic stuff into like his punishment. And when they had the trial and the guilty verdict and all that, and it was basically like they're saying, like, you committed the crime, now you have to pay. He never paid the families the money, but he lost his civil trial. The owner of Elk Mountain Ranch and Wyoming, who's got a real case of the ass against the corner crossers, is now pushing for a civil trial. And this is interesting. He is claiming seven million dollars and damages from four Missouri hunters who used a step ladder to cross from from public land into public land on a surveyed corner having never actually stepped foot on his land. That cost him seven million and damages. M hmm for them being in his airspace seven million. Well you know why. Here's why it's seven million in damages. Because they had felt as though they had felt as though that ranch and all the public land on it was private, and it seemed like that because no one could go on it. Now they're like, well, now that the public land is public, it's not my private land. The private land lost some value in their mind because they thought it was valuable how they had public land that no one could use. And now they're saying the damages. I used to have all this extra acres that didn't pay taxes on and didn't actually buy but at exclusive to it. Now I don't own that. I don't kind of quote own that anymore. Any Joe schmuck can go on there and hunt out, and that's putting me out. I don't think I had heard a really interesting rumor. It hasn't been corroborated that I was to be subpoenaed for this um very interesting. Now we uh the their legal defense fund, the corner Cross is legal defense fund. I'll just tell people this. Uh, it's short money right now. There's short some jingle And I just was checking some emails, and I know Callaghan, our own beloved Ryan Callahan, is fixing to take some of the money that we have in our Land Access initiative, Kittie. He's doing like a property shopping thing. We're hoping to buy land to turn it over for public access. But uh, he's hoping to draw a little money from our pool to kick in on the legal defense fund. But they're a little short and the legal Defense Fund and hoping that they don't wind up that it's seven million damages for four Missourians having their shoulders go through the air over your place for a couple of minutes. I know people who've had their house broken into that didn't get that kind of damages. Mhm hm. Uh, this is something. Chester is gonna be quaking in his little boots back there. What do you have on your feet? Chester? Wow, he's qua He quaked in his boots so hard as boots fell off. Uh. We put out a call for a polygraph examiner. We have a lieutenant for the Detroit Police Department works in homicide. He's a polygraph examiner for the department. He will come out and test people for us. He has the equipment. Just let him know. So that's happened. What do we what do we test it for? Who stole my cooler? Fish at work? And I wasn't gonna get into this letter. And that's why Chester in his boots say something after We got a guy right in that he's already solved the mystery based on when we discussed in the past. He feels the Chester failed to put it in the freezer. Oh, once it rotted, because he left it land somewhere. Once it rotted, he dumped the rotten contents out through the cooler because this happened to him. This happened to him in a different cooler. Git, Yeah, but he don't know Chester. Yeah, but I wouldn't lie about that. Well, we'll find out when you do the polygraph about polygraphing. Let me tell what I learned about polygraphing. You start off, Chester, You listen up. When this guy comes. You're gonna see that he starts out with some real softballs. He's gonna be like, what's your name? I'm not very good at hitting softballs, Like, is one of your name? Is Chester? The molester. Then he'd be like, where'd you grow up? They're not your chimman. Where's the fish man? And we'll find out. And you know what I'm gonna say, I don't know. We will tell you. I'm going to try a hot tip on how to beat a polygraph. He's I'm gonna polygraph this the driver, Yeah right, because he was probably one of the disgruntled parties who felt like some of that fish was his fish. Steve, I've got a question for you some am I a yeah, my fish got stolen. I've got a question for you. Come look at my freezer. Did you ever grab fish out of that freezer? No? Okay, Well then and I'll take a polygraph. Yeah okay. Well, so I talked to Breathe the other day, who is CEOs assistant exactly the system, and she I went in there and dropped stuff off in that cooler, and I don't know what else it would have been, because it was in that same time frame she saw me put it in there. I'm gonna polygraph her, She said, Yeah, how certain are you, Bree? Yeah, here's the other thing. You know who also gonna polygraph just just because I know what it's gonna score. It's gonna score perfect is I'm bringing my neighbor, Pottery Pat, and I'm gonna polygraph him because Pottery Pat was with me when we discovered the theft. I was like, I was like, Pat, you don't need to worry about fish. Bro I got fish coming out of my ears and I take him down to the office to get my fish. Weird, you miss you're missing the whole cooler. Yeah, we recovered the cooler fish there, but it's empty. Huh, you got chester. I can't even eat gestures. Forgot about that one. How come you know what I got? Polygraph him about the fish? How come you are like? How much? I can't wait? He's not allergic to tuna. Yeah, anyways from Detroit homicide dude, this guy is gonna be one of them hard boiled detective types. And he's before before he comes. I want to tell you in private, my my hot tip on how to be a polygraph. I can't say it on the air man because I don't want all these people learn it. I don't Steve, you have to take that test too, absolutely, yes, then Clay can't give you any tips. Oh, everybody in this tell me the tip right now. Well, if we all know, then it will all be equal because they kind of, like my understanding is they kind of fine tuning. Okay, so they ask you a softball questions that are the truth, and so they get a baseline reading of your of your lie because your name is it's in your voice and something about it bumps up. You know, there's like a baseline. I don't even This guy says that you hold a water bottle under the table and water bottle and when you tell the truth, you squeeze the water bottle so that like intensity comes out of you even when you're telling the truth unseen like, yeah, I got you, I got graphic diameters. So I go. My name is Clay Nukele, and I squeezed it. You see my forearm flag my name is Clay Nukeles. That his gums kind of received. Here's a hot. If you're giving a polygraph exam, make sure they don't have a water bottle under the table. That's a hot. That's how polygraphic standards can beat people who are beating the polygraph. The guy who who told me that that technique was used to win a big Buck contest where a polygraphing used. Moving on, let's break from this company. I gotta get into this like the whole pit toilet thing. Who the compost? Well, no, the guy that this story is really just blown out of proportions, the guy who got stuck in the pit toilet. I'll bring everybody up speed a lot of major developments. We have a very exciting guest coming out of the show. Really is involved? Really coming on the Evolved? Did they shower up before they can come on the show? We're gonna be able to answer a lot of questions about this, But in the meantime, today we we uh, Clay, you sing the first, you sing the chorus as much of the course as we have, and then we'll all do the course and so people can get the course twice. Well, I mean, do they need any context for how this song was written? Uh? Yeah, okay. So if you're approaching an area that you think there might be a bear in, it's customary to yell stuff, and a lot of times people are at a loss for what to yell, and you'll just yell hey bear. Yeah. Well one time we had had a run in with a bear. And then everybody's trying to scare the bear. The bear is already in amongst us. People are trying to scare the bear by yelling hay bear. And I said, it's stop saying bear. Unless you see the bears. I can't tell if people are like, hey a bear, hay bear. So I was like, no more hay bear, Um, just whatever, go whoa yeah yeah uh so. But today we're doing we were doing hay bear to to approach a kill site. We're approaching to kill site where we had stashed meat, and we were doing hey bear, just to give a bear a chance to run off. Yeah, and Clay we started to write a song about it, and Clay came up with just a Ripper, Just a ripper, great little jingle, and we've got a lot of the parts of the song, but Clay kind of came up with the what do you call that in a song? It's it's it's it's the chorus. Course. Yeah, of course, Okay, Clay hit him with the course. So we're walking, we're walking down the hill me steven Chester, and we said, hey bear, what you're gonna do when we come and take that moose meat away from you? Hey bear? What you gotta do? From d what you're gonna do? We take that moves meat away from me? And then I wrote a really really great part that they're trying to cut out of the song because they're trying to cut me out. So you can keep the guts in hide, but you can't have the meat. I got family to feet, dude. The sun is coming up and the super cubs are coming down. I gotta get back to Mama. We're headed for town. Bear, what you gotta do when we take that away from you? And then we did have the one that we said, hey, Bear, I'll make a deal with you. You can keep the guts and hide, and that's as far as we go. I'll make it with you. I'm gonna sing it if we get it all together. I'm gonna sing it in Moose Hunt. I mean that that that's what's about. If I have time to write the rest. So I've never played an instrument in my life, and I can't sing. I'm joking. If Chester has time to work out with Clay Chess is gonna play it when he opens for Trampled by Turtles in Atlanta, Georgia on December one, tenth Buckhead December one, six days before the Pearl Harbor anniversary. Chester. So you're sitting there saying, uh, you know to your husband, Oh you know, Pearl Harbor anniversaries coming up in six days. You'll be like, oh ship. Chester was playing at night in Atlanta. He's opening for Trampled by Turtles and he's a French dan. Uh, he's got Chester. There are a lot in Chester. Up to forty five minutes. I told Chester about the curse of the opening act. I have been trying to implore Chester the grouse you see it. I didn't see it up. Yeah, they switched over from the other side since a couple of years ago. Uh, Chester, I was telling them this. I didn't. I said, I said, nothing personal, right, yeah, no, yeah, you said that before you went into this. I said, we're sitting a seek tent, which usually means it's very personal. It's very person it's tight, it's warm, it's tight, a lot of wet clothes drying out. But it's a lot of steam in the air. And I said to Chester, in this uh, warm, steaming environment, I said, Chester, nothing personal, buddy, but and I hate to say it to you, Chester. Remember I said all this, like yeah, and people aren't there for the opening act. Some are maybe just my mom and dad, but most ain't. And what you don't want to do no, no, what what you said was a great descriptor of it. You said people typically have the attitude of just endure in the first act of live music, waiting for it to start. Just they're just there, you know, they're just enduring it. Like when I went I just recently got to go see Chappelle, but he was doing this thing with He's doing this thing with it was this thing with John Mayer. So I'm sitting there waiting for Chappelle, but I listened to John Mayer sing songs. I don't want to do that. I want to get to the Chapelle part, and I'm like, hey, hey, and my wife's like, oh, I just love him, so you know, so I never got to my advice. My advice was six songs. Keep it tight, keep it because you know what they're gonna give you the ben for the doubt. No, I like that advice, Steve, keep it tight. No one's gonna be like, um, you could have people won over at at twenty four minutes that you've really really lost at forty five minutes. Just professional advice. We've covered diminishing returns. You gotta find that sweet spot. We've covered publishing. You know what I'm gonna try to do. Here's what we'll try to set up between now and then. We'll try to get a call in. Here's what are you comfortable with this? I don't know what you're gonna say. We'll get, we'll get, we'll get We'll get Luke to call in to the podcast, and we'll just put the question to Luke. Yeah, this is good if you agree to go with what he says. But so, how do you feel that forty five minutes if you just just want Mike drop and walk off the stage? He gets up, he leaves them hot and bothered, and he walks off. And well, and you you also advised him to play strongly on his his his true authentic Wisconsin roots, like just stay true to bear song. Okay, use carlt. So here's the thing about the pit toilet deal. And this is where it really gets rich. After we got the after we covered the mysterious case of a man who dropped his phone into a vault toilet at a fishing access site in Montana, something stripped down. Get this, He's stripped down buck naked, okay, and climbed down into the vault where he got stuck. Oh I read this littlemportant detail. I'd say his phone fell in there. Yeah, totally naked, nothing between him and the lord except the house. I'm not gonna well, uh down in the pit toilet and he was rescued. Now we have we put out that we really were dying to get anyone we can on um to cover this more thoroughly important news item, and we have a phenomenal podcast guest teed up. People are gonna be on the edge of their sea is it the guy who fell into the edge of their seats to get it when they hear this, when they hear this harrowing account of being stuck in and being stuck in a fishing access toilet vault. And we got an email on If you go on my Instagram at Stephen Ronelle, you'll find a very intriguing picture of a young woman, a cheery young woman half in and half out of a toilet like the toilet top add about her waistline, and she's trying to fish her phone out with her feet. Yeah. I would They were able to recover the phone with a grabber, as they described they found someone with a grabber. We also got a sign from a humpy road. We got a sign from a pit toilet thing and handed though where it's like things you're not supposed to do in the pit toilet, and one of them include someone standing there with a fishing rod fishing in the toilet. And it came from a guy who the joke came from when they found a guy who was trying to use a fishing rod and awaited hook recover his phone out of the pit toilet man. Okay, we get a letter from northwest New Jersey where they have in one of he doesn't say it, but he says it's one of New Jersey's best wallet lakes. Uh, there's a state park and they have a car top boat launch so not the kind of boat launchry back trailer into the water where you can unload canoes and small craft. Okay, that's Walleye Links. And they have a pit toilet, a state park and a pit toilet there. Now here's where this gets interfesting. This individual's friend is a local fire fighter. They get a call on their system about a man stuck in the our house. They think it's a joke and don't respond. They think it's a prank call man. The call comes across again and again, at which point they're like, really, maybe a guy un They run down there with their fire truck equipment. They find a grown man stark naked, stuck up to his chest in the seat based portion of the toilet. Why the nakedness He tried to want to get his clothes off fishing access sites. They question him what happened. He says he was attacked by another man and stuck in them. Shouldn't laugh, that's let's listen. Why did this seem fish you to the first responders, Well, his clothes were folded up on the floor and his phone was on top of the stack of clothes. There's a woman pacing around out in the parking lot. They asked her if she has any relation to the man in the thing and if she knows anything about it. She says, he called me to help him. But where did I just say? His phone was on the top of the clothes. He doesn't have access to his phone. He's start naked in the in the toilet bolt m they called before they loom him up with warm water and dish soap. Still cannot free him. They then pry the seat off the vault top and he goes into an ambulance. Where this is from a firefighter. They're like, bring out the heavy duty drama. He goes into an ambulance wearing the toilet seat. It sounds like a cartoon. Well, here's where the story gets interesting. It already is. Further questioning. Further questioning reveals that this man is a fetishist oh, and that the curious woman pacing around was involved in this man's fetish Oh. I don't want to say it because it's a family program. So point being the guy says, to sum up, you're just like man be where everyone gets stuck in the toilet ball. So it might be. It might be the kind of thing where we need to bring the polygraph to this interview. Wait, he's coming to them. No, no, no, no, that's a guy in New Jersey. This is just a wet Yeah. Give us a road up day, Lauren. We got the law pulling somebody over up ahead of us. Yeah, that probably us. Uh, they're gonna pull us over. No, No, we're good. That dealta junctions. Last sign I saw thirty seven miles in our fuel to emptiest as Sam ahead of us, maybe you should Sam's ahead of us, she could tow us. Let's see let down because there's a get some better mph dang Man. Very intriguing story. A couple of corrections. Dobs and Iowa. We had someone a lot of corrections of stuff that I screwed up and other people screwed up. I kind of want to get to doves I always had. We were talking the other day about how Iowa for a long time didn't have a dove season, and we were wondering if they had gotten themselves a dove season going. And someone said, you know, Idaho has had a third Sorry, Iowa, my bad has had a duve season since so starting an Iowa got got their dove season put in place, and they've been having great. Uh. They've been having great duck hunts since then, barring a bunch of emotionally charged reactions to the I'm distracted by the law enforcement action, so that that that's correction. We we questioned whether they ever got it. They've had it. They've had it for over a decade. M here's another one, and this is one I caught. Someone said, and for whatever reason, I didn't feel like jumping on him. We guests said this, I didn't feel like jump in their case about it. But I even knew it was wrong. The size of a snake, that it's a myth that a small snake has more. It's a myth that that it's like getting zapped by a small snake is more deadly, more venomous, because they like can't control. There's like this thing that they can't control how much venom they're giving you, and an older one can control. And so getting zapped by a young rattlesnake, he's he can't she doesn't have a good shut off valve and gives you more venom. There's nothing to that. That's a wives tale. And I was wrong about that. Another thing you talked about me being wrong about is I we were talking about someone's bringing up if you go to change your motor oil and if you pour your used motor oil out in the dirt, are you just putting it back where it came from, meaning it came out of the earth, and so you're just putting it back into the earth where it belongs. Yeah, of course that all right. And I made a thing like if I take rattlesnake venom and put it on your food. Uh Am, I just putting it back where it belongs because it'll get back into the earth. And someone said, uh, pointed out that I might be that's very faulty logic. And he points out the snake venom would most likely not impact a person if ingested. Now that might warrant. That's not that's more of a call for expertise. He doesn't say, He's just saying that that logic is faulty. And it's like it's meant to be administered into muscle tissue, right, and that you ingesting rattlesnake venom, right, whatever. So it would be great if a snake expert, I imagine to be something that would be right up. Helfle finger. Would you know a helffle finger got kicked off Instagram? You know, he keeps saying he doesn't know why, but I don't know. He doesn't He does a lot of shooting tournaments, like they kicked him off for shooting legally shooting his gun at a shooting range. I don't understand. It's horrible. Uh. I think he's trying to find out what his account question. They banned his account. M hm, but havelf a finger Instagram was heppal finger um who knows everything about everything? I bet you he can answer to us. Why uh if if like, what is up with ingesting, rattlesnake venom clay you know a guy that knows? Yeah, yeah, we we need Dr Chris Jenkins from Georgia to answer that for us. Here's a thing, herpetologist, do you want to hear this? So a guy ruining um. Snake size plays almost zero role on how bad a snake bite can be. The largest role and how bad a snake by is. This is I'm quoting from the person that wrote in Very Informed Gentleman. The largest role and how bad a snake by is depends on when the snake last fed. Hm. If you are bitten by a snake that fed within the last day, then you get almost no venom. And if the snake hasn't fed in a week or longer, you will get a very nasty bite. That's good to know. Man. Again, I know we're taking a vote of whether that is always true. Well, you got herpetolog just gonna come and tell us. Can you get us feedback from the first because when they you know, I just don't think that's uh well, I'm I'm not answering because we're doing corrections stuff we got wrong. I need to know because I got a bad snake problem at the fourteen Steve, Well, what's that? I got a bad snake problem at fourteen on the river plate? Kind of snakes? You got dirt rattlers, i'd say, western divingback like real bad. Really, so I need to know if I'm feeding them, maybe it's not as bad, you know, if your feed a couple of weeks. Here's a here, here's one of you guys. Listen, you guys got paid careful attention. This is like I want this. I like this to be like a quick panel discussion. You know, I caught this this news stories all over the place. But there's a moose draw okay in the British Columbia Cariboo region. Caribou not spelled like how we spell Cariboo. We spell Cariboo c A r I b o U. This is Cariboo c A r I b oo. So British Columbia's Cariboo region. They had a moose draw, okay, and this guy's party, him and his friends were very excited to have drawn moose chat tags and they're chosen area first year they ever went into the lottery. The BC government had increased tag allotments this year and they put in and they drew recently and he's here's these articles. These are articles that people have sent me, but I haven't heard anybody impact from that. Recently, a couple of articles have come out regarding the indigenous nations of the area. So the first people's nations of this particular area in British Columbia asking hunters not to come and hunt in that area. Their claim is that the government's population studies are incorrect and the tag amount should not have been increased this season and there's not enough for them to hunt and other people to hunt too. However, he goes on to say, drawing these tags seems like it is a once in a lifetime opportunity to experience something amazing and grow as hunters ourselves. Having the request to abandon our tags definitely feels like a dampener on the situation. I would be interested to hear your opinions on where the responsibility lies, whether it falls on the hunter who drew a tag or the government who issued them. I don't even think of it that way. I would think of it this way. Your governmental game management agent, see is the law of the land. Yeah, they issued you a legal tag. If you wish to go, I would go. I would not bow to any kind of public pressure campaign to make you feel unwelcome in doing something that your government is allotted you the opportunity in a way to draw the tag to go moves I would not listen. If there's not a suitable population there, some of might go like, oh, they got it all wrong. Who better to know? Then It's like, let's say they do have it. Let's say let's say they're off a little bit. Whose work is? Whose work do you view if you view it from like a standard contemporary Western scientific based principle of of of game allocation and wildlife counts, who do you think is doing a better job to determine that they're wrong? No, well, I would go absolutely, I would go. I think that if a person were trying to be super responsible and look at both sides of it, I mean I would want to say where where is where is the the indigenous nation getting its information biological information? And say why are your studies different than their's like, where is the credential for this? You know what, why do you feel that that? How did it all sun be that we have three miles till in Oh yeah, three miles to go. That's according to the computer in the car. We're probably that according to Steve, I agree with you. I'm just saying it would be interesting to see why these people are saying this, like what is that? Because why would they want to deal with more people in the area? Right right, yeah, I mean we we can assume that if there's a legal play, that there's a legal play that they're gonna make. I'd make making the courts. I wouldn't make it with this like don't make it with this request to people and like ruin their time. And I'm and I'd be very very uncomfortable with the idea of I'd be very uncomfortable with the idea of sorting out in a sort of uh like like bring in some kind of like historical context into sort of who gets and doesn't get to go hunting the area, and that you're supposed to not only go to your game management agency, but also go and check and make sure it's cool with everybody else before you go hunting. You know what I beg there's a lot of people in Canada they wish you didn't hunt at all. Should you listen to them? If you heard it? Call animal rights people have asked hunters to not go hunting. Would you be like, oh, I better not go right? Of course not. Of course someone doesn't want you to go. At the Fox Roadhouse convenience story where gas is available before Delta junction. Yeah, we're back in the mentalis and gentlemen, eight dollars of gallons. Alright, we're back full tank of gas. That was a hell of a gas station. That was a hell of a gas station. Yeah. So the first thing I knew, the first thing I'll tell you the first thing I liked about it is we walked in and I saw that there was a guy putting on a for youngsters, putting on a trapping seminar like you saw a brochure for brochure. It was for area youngsters who wanted to earn a little extra jingle um. And he was gonna talk about Martin Links and Wolverine. And then we got to talking with the woman who ran the place, and they had a lot of furs for sale. They had some interesting tax basically, basically it was it was a nice little gas station and they had a very strong display of what I would call p DT public display of tax germy. And so on the Barriers podcast we did a whole podcast road trip dedicated to p DT. We went around looking for gas stations that still had taxidermy displayed in the But this place had a had a brown bear, a full body musk ox, a full body bison, full body bear, full body wolverine, had doll sheep, had lots of furs for sale. It was a great store, great store, but hit a little detail near here they are there used to be, uh, there's a military presence here, but it was it was heated up for quite a while. Uh. And prior to that, they had introduced bison that actually came out of Montana. They put them on a train in Montana, took them by rail. I can't here how this went like, took him by rail to Seattle, then put them on a ship and sent them by a ship to Whittier. And from Whittier they went on a train. Eventually went on a truck and they turned them loose around Delta Junction, which is a hundred miles away, by the way, and I know they had a lot of pictures in there. They had a lot of pictures in there from the Delta hunts. You know, you can still draw a tag to hunt those bison in Delta Junction. Now, when I did the Copper River buffalo hunt, what's interesting is that heard once the military started establishing a stronger presence, they had too many buffalo and they're trying to get rid of something. So they just dumped some here and there. They put some in this Farewell area, and they one day put them on a truck and drove a bunch of them out to a place called the Salanta Road at the Slant of Mine and turned some twenty of them out. I can't remember now how may many they turned out. And they just did what's called a hot release. So if you're doing a wildlife releases, you're here cold and hot. A cold release is where you take animals and bring them to a release site. Okay, let's say you're trying to establish them in some mountain range. You know, you bring them out there and put them in and enclosure on site mm hmm, and feed him there and get them used to the area. Okay. And then one day you leave the door open, okay, and they they kind of one day, Oh they can wander out, but they're already sort of they feel safe, they've been around there. They're more inclined to stay local. A hot release is you just bring something in and you're like, just drop the tailgate, drop the tailgate. They did a release near the slant of mine, and then they lost track of those animals for a decade. People thought they uh died, got eaten by wolves, whatever. And eventually they turn up hundred miles away. And that's that Copper hunt that I wrote about in my Buffalo book, and that um, the Copper River hunt. And then you still apply for those permits today. And that's all out of this. So in that gas station, all those that whole lot of room, that whole room full of dead buffalo land and the snow, that's all Alaska hunts. That's neat uh hell of a gas station. Clay, Why don't you wan, don't you take over from the back of the van and uh tell people a little about what we've been up to and some of your impressions of it. Yeah, and um, yeah, you know, you know you need be going into like harrowing detail, but just yeah, what what what do you think about? So we've so we have been in Alaska on a ten day Alaska Yukon moose hunt. The road Kyle calf unit, Oh, that would be bad coming through that one shield. Wow. We got a cow and a calf. We got a guy stopped in the road for us, big running across the Wow. So we've we've been in Alaska for ten days. We just no longer. Well, we've been in Alaska for let me bring that bowl out twelve days. And uh, yeah, we've been listening to that for twelve days. It's a good call. That's not the man. They'll bring them out. So this was this was a true wilderness hunt. We not wilderness with the capital W, wilderness with a lowercase W. We flew back in and uh, we're dropped in an area that is known to have moose. Is not a guided hunt, so as to do it yourself hunt. Steve Ranella and I both had tags in our pockets. Um and I have Actually you're seeing deltas a hunter miles, Well, the hell you're talking abouts I have. I'm gonna say that I've not moose hunted though I have had an Alaska moose tag before. Once while I was on a brown bear hunt, I had a moose tag. But but so we were dropped camp, dropped out, we backcountry camp for ten days. We would wake up every day, walk out to different calling points on the mountain. This you hunt these moose during the moose rut, and so you're trying to sound like a cow moose called these moose in Steve is an experienced moose hunter, has been on lots of I mean you've you've been on lots of hunts. I've been on like I've been on a number of moose kills over the year, been on moose hunts. But I have a lot to learn. So basically, you're you're put into an area and that the challenges that you're running into when you're moose hunting is that you cannot realistically transport that moose much more than a mile from your camp and that could be broken. Yeah, there's a lot of variables, but in general, most people you're trying because you've got to haul this potentially pound animal back to your camp, back to the how whatever your transport is. So, whether you're hunting on a river, we were hunting in a flying area, so we would had to get all this moose meat back to an air strip. Can I cut him in from him? Yeah? I didn't need to ask. Really, Le'll just do it. I just want to I quickly want to touch on this this moose pack in situation. That's because you got you got a bunch of camera guys willing to carry meat. They're not willing. You gotta gotta cajole them into it. I like, you guys are don't know about three miles. You haven't heard what I'm gonna say. Do I need to stop this van? Stop this van to come back there? Hey stop the man. Let me tell you something. I just wanted to tell you. The most I've moved one is we moved to bowl three miles. But that was five people and it was downhill. Oh okay, that's report detail. And it wasn't like bad downhill. It was like nice, not like degree in client, which would be misery. It's like a you know, downta And it's so it really matters in terms of walking conditions. But a lot of times moose are in really boggy areas or you're on you're out on tussocks like tussocky tundra, and oh it can be horrible walking on And so I would say though, I would say that in general, in general moose hunting circles, if you went out and found a hundred good moose seasoned moose hunters, I would say that, uh, you would probably find a general consensus of people that are they're willing to move them maybe about a mile or so, but no one's gonna like it. I have a friend that used to guide moose and sheep. He is hard to think of how hard hunting doll sheep is. The miles you gotta put on, you're walking ten miles, fifteen miles a day. It's like it's it's brutal. He quit moose hunting. M hmm because he said, and I'll quote him, he said, I am never gonna move one of those swamp donkeys again. And he said to me, every hunter you book, it is all about how he's gonna help you pack that moose. He goes every single time they make a half trip, and you take six and a half loads. Was that buck? But so I just want to give a little that's just put an electro meat on the bone. In terms of moose packing. That's a real consideration when you're that was new to me in the in the when you're hunting an animal, this big the first thing you said when you beheld one as you said, that is bigger than my mule. Hey for real? So well, we we're cutting to the chase. No no, no, no no no, we could have found one. Okay, well I want to come back to that. I'll come back to that. But so so, basically, for for for ten days, Steve and I hunted. We would sometimes hunt together, sometimes we split up. I went to different calling points, and you're trying to hit the moose rut when the moose responsive to cow calls into raking. Essentially, there's two types of calls that you're doing. You're raking with basically to sound like a like a bull raking his horns. You're right. I have seen people rake with canoe paddles. I've seen people rake with a fiberglass bullhorn. I've seen people rake with a caribou antler. I've seen people rake with a dried moose scapula mm hm. But never have I raked with something I like as much as an empty one court motor oil plastic motor oil can with the bottom cut off. I don't know how I feel about it first, So so what what Steve did was and he was shown this by a gentleman that we met, um Well, a bush pilot who doesn't look heavy stuff in his plane. I was walking around the hunk apply when he's like, tell you do with that? He didn't want that thing in his plane. Took a pocket knife and cut the bottom off of a like a valveoline oil can or not canned oil bottle, and then Steve stuck about an eight inch sapling into the nozzle and basically had an oil an oil bottle with a handle, and you would use that to rake. And it sat that that oil bottle sounds like the horns of a of a moose raking against the trees. And what we learned over the oh yeah, if we had windows in the back of this van. We don't have windows back here about it. But so you're calling your your your female moose calling and you're raking. And basically that's what we did for for ten days. And we had very little response to our calling for much of our time. And it's been told us. And what we saw was that the rut was an odd display in terms of timing of when things really started kicking off. And uh, we were seeing plenty of bulls. We were seeing some good bulls. They weren't responding to our calls, and a lot of people would say, we why didn't you just go to them? Steve, do you want to talk to him about why you wouldn't just go to a bull that would be in a place that we would see. Because when I message and reached a few people back home, I said, man, we've been watching a bull a mile away, and their first response was get him, go get him. Of course that's what I tell him. I be like, what are you guys lazy? Yeah, but why couldn't we do that? You're dealing in um if you're not familiar with with hunting in Alaska. Uh, well, I'll let me starting that's all by saying I'll put it this way. Um, My brother Danny lives in Alaska, and whenever he comes down to hang around in Montana, he's always just blown away by walking around in dry grasslands and he'll threaten to move down to Montana or Wyoming now and then, as he puts it, to just get a break from the wet ass. Bro. Yeah, you're dealing in There's there's a very low and interior Alaska. This is not an area where I'm an expert, but I've just been around quite a bit. For someone who doesn't live here, I've been around, like I've had a great fortune to experience a lot of parts of the state. In the interior, there's a very low biodiversity. I was explaining to this I think this morning or yesterday or something where you can learn like six trees and shrubs and seem like a vegetation master because you got there are many species of willow, but you got willow, you got dwarf birch, you got aspen, right, you got older okay um, and you got you know, like a you got like high bush and low bush, blueberry, cranberry. But you have a lot of shrub and then you got spruce stands. But the shrubs that are here, the willow, the dwarf birch, the young aspen, particular stuff that comes in after a burn. It's just thick and you'll always look at it. If you're flying over the country, you guys like, oh, I'm gonna run over there and run down there and go through that until you get in it. A lot of times from the area, you're like, what it must be like way steep. You're thinking it's probably wasteep. It's not man, you it's it's it's eight ft high, it's ten feet high, it's twelve feet high. And for a lot of it you're walking through it, imparting it with your hands. Yeah, you're making it. You're you're You're just you're walking. It's like you're doing the breaststroke. You're going like your hands are out, you spread, you walk through. Your hands are spread, you walk through. But there's there's topography here where we're at. It's it's not steep. There's some steep parts, but there's topography. There's hills, and there are little open pockets in the brush here and narrow okay, Like maybe is a little area that's predominantly blueberry and it is neat and it is knee high. But this is like a little half acre opening, you know, And there's a hill. So you're on one side of a valley looking across the valley and there and some little gap in the vegetation like oh there's one okay, And then you'll sit and look back on that spot for the next three days and never ever find that thing again. And the thing is, you're gonna go over there, But the thing is you can't. Like you quite literally, I mean, you just get lost in it. And we'll have a story to back up how bad it is from from Yes, that was a good story. Uh, you just get lost in it too, because the probability of success and not everywhere. There's a lot of places you can hunt moose up in the alpine where it's it's mostly knee high, mostly wayside vegetation, and you can actually make a play on animals. But in this area it's just with the brush you can't. And here's their thing. Doing a stock on one or an approach on one, you have a pretty low probability of success because it's so hard to navigate and hard to find anything. And even if you do get up on it, you're in eight foot tall stuff. So you can let okay, let's say it all works out and he and you call you get too into his area, you get two yards away, you call him in, he comes into thirty yards. You know what, You've never seen him. You've never seen him. Um, And so it's like, oh, great, congratulations, you call the bowling and never even saw it. Yeah, so low probability success. But you go in there and you're gonna be spooking moose. You didn't know we're there, because all the time you're like, oh, there was a moose, and then you never see it again. All day you stay right in that same spot, can't find them. They're just in there and you don't know they're there. So you go in, you're gonna spook a bunch of moose. You're gonna leave sent all over. And what your strategy is, you're operating out of an area where you're up high and you're in lower like you're you're hunting purposefully in a low in a low vegetation area, because your long term plan is you're gonna call him out of all that fixed ship up where you can see him up into your opening. If you go down there, rummage and around all the time, you're spooking them and you're leaving scent everywhere, and you're doing things that aren't gonna work out, And then by doing things that don't work out, you're just gonna be pushing more moose away and making the thing that you're actually trying to do, which is called a bull up out of the stuff. You're making it harder. It's this is the rule everybody gives you. Everybody you ask who hunts this way and these kind of areas like here's my tip. Don't move, don't walk around. I got a friend that he could they their spot. They called it prison ridge because his friends are like, he won't let us even move. We gotta sit. I guess the same tree for ten days and so they and they told us, they said us the process, process and the processes. You call you rake. And the way I described it, Steve, was when you call a white tail deer, you call a duck, or you call an elk, you're looking to get, for the most part, an immediate response. And you you see that animal, do you hear a vocal response from that animal, and you get a read on it. Moose hunting, sometimes you're making calls that maybe responded to two or three days from now. I mean that's because a moose could hear you and be so far away. They have such incredible hearing, and we heard. We saw that with our own eyes. We saw their hearing with our own eyes. And I'll explain that this week so many times because these moose would be I mean a mile away, a mile away. They would turn and look at us when we called at them. And so we have an episode where we called one from about three miles away. Incredible. But the thing with these mooses, they're they're like these ladies. We watched him coming the whole way. I was thinking, ni sr No that took Yeah, yeah, he just wanted he just showed up one day. When a moose isn't fired up, which we saw a lot this trip. We'd see him stand up, we'd see him feed thirty yards and then they'd lay down and you'd watch them all day, and some of them moved ards. Well I'm just a moose out here. We had some we had some observations. Yeah, we saw some lazy moose. We're kind of putting some words to their lives. But no, so we'll go ahead. Chester World. Well, I was just saying you were talking about how you're expecting to you know, they might come in a day later, and I've just wanted to point out, like if they're not fired up and running like that one that Steve called from three miles away, over a whole over a day. They're moving slow, and we saw a lot of slow moose. Yeah. Once dirt and I saw a moose basically stay in a hundred square yard area form for a full ball, like from daylight pretty much till dark and here in your call look up. But you know, I'm like, like I said, I'm very much a moose novice. But I had someone who is very much a moose expert, and I was talking and I used to guide it is very successful at moose hunting. Um still active now. Uh. He was putting his like, I don't care about those ones. They don't exist to me. He's looking for a hot one. He's like, you know, I'm looking for the right bull in the right mood. There's a lot of bulls are in the right mood for me. And I don't care if he doesn't play the game he lives. It's like if I'm watching the moose two miles away and he doesn't care, I don't care about him. I'm here for the big one. Did wants to play? Yeah, and that's why I'm here ten days. But it's hard when you sit there for nine days. Yeah, So we we set for nine days and could not find a moose that really wanted to play. A couple of times we made some stocks on moose where they were kind of playing a little bit. They would they would come to a hundred yards and you'd have to go to them a thousand yards fired up bull will they walk and they have like a very plodding, like deliberate walk, but they'll start swinging their head and they kind of swing it to the rhythm of how their feet strikes. So as his right front goes forward, his head swings right and he's just doing his big heads sway they could display and he'll be going m m m hmm. We one time, it wasn't all yesterday that we got one to sway his head maybe twice, Yeah yeah, and walked direction. Yeah, well he doesn't he's swaying his head and walks off. And after that the whole group morale was just fresh in the process for the first what five days? Process? But how did it like the first love it a little bit? Sure? I trust in the process. I put immense faith in the process. Keep telling the story, Clay, Well, we it's it's a challenging hunt because you feel like you need to be doing something like if you're l hunting, you're pounding the mountains, calling, you're moving, you're doing stuff, you're bringing, trying to go to new areas. Um, when you're moose hunting, you're locked, like this guy said, you're locked in a prison and you're trying to call these bills to you. And we what we learned is that it's kind of a combination. Uh that we found success in was you gotta go to him a little bit, but you still got to call him into you. Well, there's peculiar I want to point out just there's peculiarities of of a fly and drop off hunt. If you're doing a river trip for moose, you can call a new place every day, so you're kind of like trying new stuff. Right, it doesn't make sense to go call for a half hour, but you let's spend six Let's do a six hour set and and then next day, next day, next day. If you're hunting out of our goals or a t V s right, let's try here, we'll try there, We'll try there, We'll spend a day call on here. You know whatever. If you just get dropped on an isolated airstrip somewhere and you have no way to move. You can't move from a simple factor. You can't go have a spike camp three miles away because how you can get that moose back to the airstrip. So that's kind of that kind of few the processes like you're you're your by sort of fact constrained and have to deal with that, and said, so how best do you play that situation? You play it by being very gentle on your spot, because you got a spot right and you you you call over long periods of time and long story short the ninth the tenth day day, we'll start with the first story from that morning. Steve is that we had split up. That morning, I went to a spot, saw the team with me. We spotted a bull and spotted two bulls. Steve came over and we got Steve brought him over and we watched these two bulls with two cows. Called to a bull, he looked at us, turned and went the other way. We watched his head and the promising looks promising. We watched a bull bullets. Okay, So the other constraints in all the regulations for legal bulls would be different in different places, but we were hunting in an area that for a non residents of Alaska. We had to shoot a bull that met one of two requirements, which would be either fifty inches wide, which would be the widest point of that rack, or have four brow times, which you'd have to look up what the time one on one side. Uh And so you'd have to look up what a brow time of a bull is. But it's pretty simple. So he had to be fifty inches wide or have four brow tins on one side, which we found was a pretty tall order because we saw a lot of immature bulls. Into someone who didn't know moose hunting man, you'd see a forty five inch bull out there, he looked like a giant he uh. And not all fifty inch bulls have four brow times, and not all four brow times bulls are fifty inches. But in all honesty, there's like a there's a loose correlation. You know, if someone tells you they killed like a sixty inch bull and you look at a picture, it's gonna if four or five six. But then some guy will kill a sixty inch bull with two brow times. But generally like the bigger they get, the more brow times they throw, and it's it's very difficult to judge a moose based upon its spread, and it's a serious game violation. If if we had shot a moose that was forty nine inches wide, that's like a major violation. I mean, you're you're you're getting your animal confiscated, you're getting citations. So they take that stuff real serious. And so Steve and Steve coach me on on on spread. But pretty much we decided we were only gonna shoot bulls based off of four brow times because that is very easily easy to distinguish unless the bulls just ridiculous and yep, unless and and there's certain ways that the antlers, some moose antlers, the paddles go up and are really vertical. Some moose antlers the paddles lay flat. Guys, uh, you know there's a thing that eyeball to eyeball their ten inches. So you can look and be okay, I got ten inches. Then you gotta imagine that on the outside of that, you got that spread twice more on each side, and be like, okay, you might do that. And then people got all kinds of stuff like if he turns his head, how does his antler tip pass over his hump? What else were saying like thirty ears when the erect ears of a bull that's facing you. His full grown moose has ears that are thirty inches and his ears are nine nine inches long, and said, hope, nine to ten inches long. All kinds of little things. But as my brother Danny put it to me, when doing these things, leave some wiggle room, meaning it's got to be just ridiculous. Yeah, like a ridiculous bull, like or for sure for yeah, yeah, it's it's very shoot him off brown times is real comfortable shoot him off with you know, Uh, Steve, I read an article in bow Hunter magazine one time, um where the editor of bow Hunter misjudged a bull. I mean he wrote this article. It was it was a good article where he misjudged the bull and it was like forty nine inches and he had to turn himself in. This was a this was a good standard. Yeah. Anyway, he wrote about it. It sounded hard, It sounded really bad, man. And they all look big, man, they do they do. So we split we that moose shook his head. This is the last day. I got all excited. It started yelling at everybody, whisper yelling. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I said, maybe I think it was at that point, or maybe it was a little earlier that day or the night before. I said, Steve, there's got to be a point when we just got to kind of say it's too late to shoot a moose, because how are we going to get him out? And he because I'm sorry, and he said, uh, I will figure it out. That's what people are saying annoying stuff to me. I will figure it out. But to my defense, I I've never done this before, and now they have doing it, I would would have a little bit different opinions. Well, because what happens is on these hunts you have to schedule when you leave, and so we knew we had to leave on Saturday morning, and so on Friday after, like Friday light morning, we see this bull bed. We see we spook one from our calling. We see one bed. I don't think that's what happened. Well, he was, that's before two things. There's two bulls together. We kind of lost track of one, took one's temperature with some calling. He shook his head too or three times and then fed his way away from us. We're like, did we play it too hot? Did he wind us? Because we'd lost track of the one bull. Later a while later, we realized the other bull is right there. I think that bull had got what by that bowl or wasn't getting anywhere those cows. And then we asked the moose expert if you spook a bowl, and he wins you. Well, he walked away feeding on willow. He's like, no, he's just gonna be getting out of here. He's not gonna like feed his way out of there. I think that that boll came in, checked out those cows. The bull was there, there were the bull, the bulls giving him no quarter, And uh, yeah, I know you don't think that, No, no I do, no, No, I just meant our Colling pushed him away. That's all I'm saying. Our Colin pushed him away for whatever. And so it's it's late in the morning, the last day planes coming tomorrow morning. It's it's eleven o'clock in the day, and we all of a sudden regain sight of a big bedded bull that is not brow time illegal, but we believe have reason to believe he's potentially over fifty. And we dive bomb in. Bull was standing and we go into the brush, go into thick brush, going to try to find this bull, and we know it's gonna be a tall order because you get inside there and you can't you can't see. You're trying to find an opening where you could shoot. And we always had elevation on these bulls because we're up on a ridge and so you can kind of see down into the jungle. Well, when you get in the jungle, you can't see very far. Well, imagine a tick on your dog's back waiting through the Yeah, yeah, Well, I'm gonna get to the good part of this story, which was we finally we know where the bull was when we left. It took us probably thirty minutes to get to our new vantage point. And yeah, and these moose don't move much, so we we assume that he's gonna be right where we left him. We get into the dog hair, thick willows and aspen. We can't see, can't see moving moving, moving, making noise, winds blowing, and we come to what I believe is probably within gun range of where the bull was. You know, we're inside of four hundred yards and there's a spruce about as big as dirt's calf and uh, and I say, like the brushes high, I say, hey, I'm gonna climb up that spruce and see if I can see down into the draw where the bull was, just so we can get a bead and see if he's still there. So I shimmy up a little spruce about probably eight feet, just enough to get me over the top of the willows. I thought you were gonna bend it for it was Yeah, it wasn't. It wasn't the best tree, but it was the only tree. And I'm looking down to where the bull was, and he's not there. He's gone. And so I stay up there for probably a minute or two, and and I'm looking looking, and finally I turned to the guys and say, I don't see the bull. I think he's gone. I think we've spooked him. I think he's left. And then I'm looking out four yards. I draw my gaze in and all of a sudden, I see the bull bulldozing through the willows at fifty yards probably of us busting all that rush. He heard us coming down the mountain, and again going back to the idea that that breaking brush is a communication method with these these moose. They hear it, they know it, and he was coming to fight us. He thought we were another moose coming into his territory. Well, there there was. So I was watching the us from above. Yeah, there was a cow to that had MOSI in the right direction of where you guys were, and he was actually on her tail, following her, and I think that brought him in close enough where he was like, now he can hear what he thinks there's another ball. And that actually helped h because he's thrashed. He was thrashing, brushing, and so I go, oh, he's right there, he's fifty yards fifty yards and I actually was My instinct was to stay in the tree. Steve. I was gonna just stay in the tree and let you shoot him, because I'm scared. I thought he was just gonna walk right up, and uh, Steve was like, get out of the tree. And so I come down. The moose keeps coming and by this time, the wind, I mean this time he's probably inside. Was he thirty yards yards because he's but you see the trees, trees and in the wind just swirled when it was he was that close, and the and the moose spooks in the way. You know what moose spooks is you never see him again. Things are hot he's coming in. You see the brush movement, and it is an incredible of all the hunting that I've ever done in my life, I would say that watching a bull moose way in the willows bobbing his head like that, intentionally making noise is one of the most I'm not gonna I don't know if it's intimidating or exhilarating. His head is taller in your head. Yeah, it's like it's like a seventeen hand mule with big antlers coming at you. And uh so we spook that bull, but he responded to us. We learned a little bit. The hunt is over, man, We've been doing this for nine and a half days. It's now noon. Steve raised down in the middle the willow brush and takes a nap. He's so frustrated, like I throw up the orangeling system. Back to the people on the hill and literally we're like, man, this has been fun, but we have been beat to the pulp by these moose. And we go back up the hill and I make a pot of percolator coffee. We we go back to our camp and I remember being in the tent with the guys, the camera crew because we filmed this. You'll be able to see this on uh can we tell him where it's gonna be? Already were paying This will be on Meat Eaters season eleven, which you can find on the Meteor dot com. And we were in the tent and the guys asked me, They said, hey, have you talked to Steve? Do you even think we're going out? And I said, I doubt we're even going to go out, like I mean, I thought we might go for a little walk, but we really we didn't have time to kill and pack and it was raining. I mean, everything was saying game over, boys, yeah, because we've been doing this for so long. Well, at four sixteen, after Steve had given Chester quite a bit of input about his uh his live show in Atlanta, UH, Steve says, hey, I want to go walk up to the porcupine, which is the head of a big hollow that we that we named the Porcupine and uh, and I said, well, I'll go with you. And so when I went, then it instigated. It caused the producer of our show to go, well, the camera guys should go too, and so Dirt and Lauren pack up their camera gear and willing En and Sam and I grab a twenty two and go chase Tarmigan. I had just indulged in some wonderful beef struggle peak instant meal, thinking this is my dinner and this is where this is where the story gets good. Can I one little nuanced thing, because we all acknowledge we did it. Everyone left there, most of their ship in there, most of their stuff in their tent. It's like, this is gonna just be a sunset. Like, Yeah, I did the opposite. I wore my my slippers for camp and loaded up the lenses I hadn't used for a while, thinking, oh, yeah, we're going to the Porcupine. We're gonna sit there. Some macro get some time lapses finished this deal out. Yeah. Well, I mean what we're talking about is only like a few yards of our camp, but it's just a way to call into a valley. Yeah, so we go for a while, because we got like two valleys that kind of head up off our off our ridge, and we're gonna go call the valley where not a lot happens. Yeah, we're the Porcupine is not the place you wanted to go. We said that. We we looked into that valley for nine days and I've only seen a couple of cows, and uh, we went there just because we hadn't been there in a few days. Can I t t this up for you? Yeah, So we're walking on a ridge, Sam and I shooting Ptarmigan. We're shooting at him and talking loud, and we're walking along and we come to a chair, Lauren's glass and chair, and no one's sitting there. What happened? So? What happened there? So we were sitting there glassing and uh, we were actually probably looking for a bear that we had seen on the side of this hill a few days before, not even a hunted necessarily, just look. Yeah, we just knew there was a bear on this side of the hill eating blueberries. And Lauren all of a sudden says, Okay, Garrett had a dirt saw a moose that had to have been four miles away cooking, going across an open barren tundra, such that when Steve pulled up his binos and looked at it, he said, that's an argo. That thing is moving so fast. That is an a TV or an argo. And it was just buzzing across the landscape. And Steve pulls up the spotter and it's a bull and he is moving, and Steve said, that bull you could call in. That bull's cruising. That's what we've been looking for, these bulls just lounging around, not responding to calls. We need bulls that are moving, that are that are serious about the rut. So we see the what we called the Argo bull. Within minutes, Lauren says, there's a bull. He says, there's a moose down in the valley below us, and it disappears into the willows. He wasn't even sure it was a moose moose, thought it was a moose. We start looking directly, we see a small, probably two year old moose come out, and we were just all pretty surprised hadn't seen moose there. We say, oh my, there's a moose. Let's call at him. So we called the moose, and directly we see a bigger moose a mile away, well twelve hundred and forty seven yards away, not quite a mile. A couple of days prior, we're thinking up until that point, right, say that again, like that, yeah, that distance, like it maybe an hour prior, we were thinking there was no play, right, there's not gonna be an opportunity. We've now got two hours of daylight. Oh no, no, no, wait, I'm saying we were raring to go. There was no doubt about No. No, I'm saying at camp though, at camp before we and out, Oh we thought we were just done. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, No, I knew game on. So we finally see illegal bull because the young bull wouldn't be legal, he wouldn't be fifty or have four brown times. We see a big, huge paddle sticking out seven yards away and we call at it, put a spot in skull b on it, and I was like, legal bull, And so Steve and I look at each other and basically they're like, let's go to lose. We've got nothing to lose. Is the last two three hours of the season. The season ends today, not just for us, but the most season in this zone. We're gonna go down shooting. So we barrel off the ridge. We know we've got to close the distance. We think if we can get inside this bull's bubble, we might respond. But we're going into thick willows, so we know that we're gonna lose visibility of him. It's gonna be difficult, and we probably gained three hundred yards on him. Steve calls, but what you forgot to make when we put eyes on that bowl as far away as he was, and they can hear for miles. As far away as he was, you couldn't ignore the fact that he was holding stock still with his head point in our direction. Not budget right, something he was interested because we had been calling at that little bull to see what his response would be, and there was reason to believe that he was like, huh, what do I hear? Not for sure because plenty of there's plenty of moose they're looking at you and it's coincidence, but he was looking our way. Yeah. So we dive off the mountain and I know what me we were all thinking, is that every step we go down this mountain, we gotta go back up it. But man, this is the last chance we've got, and we get We gained probably three yards on the bull. Steve climbs up a spruce about probably ten twelve feet to get vantage to look down into the willows, and we're expecting if the bull has responded to our call, to see him coming through the willows because we've got a little bit of elevation on him and sometimes and and he's in an open creek bottom and you can see their horns on a big bull sticking up out of some of the stuff, and we see nothing. And Steve's tree climbing days paid off because he zipped up that sucker. Right. Yeah, I'll point out that was a dead tree too. That's particularly perilous. Yeah. I was seeing, man, this could go bad before and he was breaking and breaking stuff on purpose on the way up the tree because we were He was calling to that bull while he's going up, breaking limbs, stomping limbs, and uh. Basically, after about fifteen minutes, I kind of look at Steve and shrugged my shoulders and just like, I don't know, I guess he's not responding. And then Lauren goes, Okay, more to the story. Okay, I was about to get credit for something. You'll get your credit, buddy. I could see. The one thing I could see real clear was out past where he was, and I'm up in my tree. Is that moose in the road? Man? Sorry, it's right ahead, a little jumpy. So there's there's important part here. Yeah, Yeah, he's he's standing by a little a little spruce patch an island spruce. Yeah, and oddly everything beyond that is was burned off and not growing up good. I know that he hasn't gone left, right or away from us, because if he did, I would see him from the tree. I'm like, I can tell you if you divide the world into like into like directions coming off that thing, whatever the hell north, south, east, west was like, he didn't go south. Let's say we're to the north. He didn't go south, he didn't go west, he didn't go east, because that's the three places I could tell if he went there, and he wasn't any of those places. And our direction was thick willows, so if he came our direction, potentially wouldn't say. I'm like, I don't know, I don't know what happened, but I can tell you where he didn't go. He didn't go in any of the bad directions. And we got down and I started heading downhill trying to find an opening. We got to an opening and then he praise says, hey, I just heard some brush cracking over to the left, kind of to the east, and uh, sure enough, Steve says, I thought I heard something too. Now I'm half deaf, so I didn't hear it at first, and sure enough it we hear a distinct crack again that we know is not just a tree falling, and we know there's a bull moose coming in. So Steve and I cast come halfway up that hill. He's come yards this this, this bull has and in a matter of probably fifteen minutes, all the while you guys have been calling and raking, we've been calling, and he was coming to meet us. And what we didn't we didn't know it. And so Steve and I crouched behind the log, and all of a sudden we see the brush splitting, and we see the tree top swaying. And man, I'll go back to I've been in a lot, I mean, killing whitetail, deer, killing goblin goblin, turkeys, killing bears. Man, there, I don't know that much comparison with seeing a big bull moose wading through stuff coming to you. Just the top swaying like some big coming. He was just knocking huge trees and shaking. He's coming for you, and it's like it was a guerrilla coming. And then I always think Jurassic Park, You guys, remember that the raptors coming in, just parting all the I'm thinking of dinosaurs coming. Well, we see a bull. We we see his shape through the trees, and started grunting a little bit, and and Steve and I both have a tag and and I know that Steve wants to kill a big bull moose and has been on many trips. And I will say this of Steve Ronella is that he is always letting other people shoot stuff that he's on hunts with. That's true. Yeah, don't tell that, Ryan Callahan, well except except for sorry cal So, this bull's coming and I say, Steve, shoot this bull, and he says, no, you shoot the bull. And I said, if it's a big bull, you shoot the bull. And then directly a small bull appears twenty yards from us. I stepped it off today and it was under twenty yards yards nineteen yards and a young, immature bull steps out and I go, man, it's a it's not legal. I can see it better than Steve, just because I'm where I'm at, and uh, and Steve goes, I can't believe it's that small bull. And so we're it's fun that we're twenty yards from a bull that came in. Our hearts are racing, but it's a bummer. That's a small one. Well, the bull standing still and kind of directly behind him. You can still see the brush cracking and moving back behind him. And I don't know who, if it was Lauren or Dirt or who, but people said there's there's another bull coming. I like, Steve heard it too, and and so we know that this one has got to be the big bull that we saw. And so we're crouched behind a log and I say, Steve, it's a big bull. You shoot it. And he says, no, Clay, you shoot the bull. And so I say okay, and me and Dirt jump up and move about ten ft behind a spruce stump that had uprooted, and it was a perfect cover. I laid my gun right and the why and man, here comes this what to me is a giant bull moose, still very dense, like what visibility is like, yeah, yeah, you couldn't see very far. And and so now there's a thirty inch bull moose and then this giant to what to me is a giant bull moose twenty yards from us. I've got the gun up. He comes through an opening, but there's a lot of limbs and I realized that I'm gonna have to shoot through limbs, and he continues to move and gets the nineteen yards. I shoot through some brush, hit him in the shoulder, Moose goes down on his back end. Shoot him again. Moose goes down, and we got a big bull moose. On the tenth day, six thirty in the evening gets dark about eight o'clock, and I heard I heard the two shots from above, and I'm like, I can I can't believe it. Like, yeah, I couldn't believe it. Just the whole week. We had been trying so hard, and then it finally came together on the last day. And I'll say, now this is where I'll get back to what Steve said earlier when I said this thing is bigger than my mule. That moose was was about as big as a seventeen hand mule in my assessment. Uh, monstrous animals. I mean just yeah, you can't even especially when they fall on the trees like that. I mean you can't even kind of move them. No, I mean you just gotta start. You skin him up the back. It just gets get whatever side happens to be facing up skinned off. You're not gonna like roll him on his back and got them out and not in that kind of cover. So we had airplanes coming at seven thirty in the morning and it's six thirty and we've got a moose down. But good for us. He was only about eight and fifty yards from the air strip, but uphill probably a thousand feet of elevation. Game and uh so we had a good team with us. The camera guy's Chester, Samantha Bates, was with us. So there were six how many of the six six of us. I was impressed with how I mean, I was impressed with that hunt, but also the reaction to the time, sensitiveness of man, we had that sucker. Yeah, owned out in a couple of hours. When that kind of stuff happens, as much as you know how much work it's gonna be, it's very exciting at the same time because you're like, we're gonna be up till midnight. They had a fire going down there. It's just like a cool moment, like my favorite moment of the trip. And we're all they're boning out the meat and putting it in game bags and pack it out and big old fire. I learned a new recipe when you bone out of the shoult the scapula, stand the scapula up next to the fire until the meats all kind of whatever little bits around there charred a little bit and then you scrape them all off with a knife and eat them. You're saying, bring salt, right, Oh, we didn't have salt. Would have made it ten times. So the reason you make a fire, you make a big fire for it helps for light, but also to keep grizzlies away, because when you're in Alaska and you kill a moose, you're immediately a grizzly target. So we did a lot of whooping and yelling, and it's it's comforting too when you're out there in the dark. Just it's nice to warm up and have a fire. And another thing, so we beg all this meat up and the planes fly it out the next day. One of the things that before this trip, I'm like, how are we going to get all this meat back? Usually we throw it in like yetti, you know, soft sided YETI coolers and like fly back with it all. But you can't really do that with a moose too. We've done it. It gets real pricey. Yeah, So we found so we found a guy who's got a business that revolves around getting people's meat back to the States, and he's it's an Alaska Trophy Express and he just picks up your meat from whatever locker that there is. It's Tim, I think his name is Tim, and he'll pick it up and he's gonna drive it down to Arkansas. So we got frozen game bags, he's got the skull, he's got a sweet shot I found and we'll keep you updated. And he's gonna pick it up and bring it down in a refrigerated truck. Yeah, Alaska, Alaska, say the Alaska Trophy Express. With the guy on how communicative he was he talked to me on the phone today. I felt very certain that he was gonna take care I was very concerned about my antlers. I mean, it's like, dude, you're gonna take care of these for me. The whole thing get busted, just like not ever seeing him again. Very nice guy. Yeah, that's wild. We're talking about getting out there. You go from you know, flying from Montana and Arkansas to be in out and I don't know how many miles into the wild country without any establishment, and the transition is so quick you almost can't help process where you're at and I was just thinking, it's only twenty four hours. Wait, we were skinning a bull moose. Twenty four hours ago. We were skinning a bull moose next to the fire in the wilds of Inland, Alaska. Now we're in a van doing a podcast. Just crossed the river. Just crossed the river. Yeah, it's a good trip, man, trip. I had come to peace with. I had come to peace with not getting one. Yeah, that's Souff bugs me, but it never but I mean, you know it bugs me. Yeah, he tears me up a little bit. But I had come to peace, and I was like, man, we had to help a trip, you know. And I thought, Chester said, you think we did it again, we would have got one, And I'm like, yeah, because I learned enough where I was like, I learned enough where I think if I could do this over again, I would we would. Yeah. But it's a lie that it's it's it's a lot of work to get up there. It's a big commitment. You're, you know, away from family, so it is kind of a bummer when you go up there and sit there for nine days. But we're there for the entire season. It's pretty Yeah, it's it's an interesting hunt. To sum it up, it's like, bring some books. Yeah, bring a zero degree bag. I learned that in the hardware. Yeah, you can't um you like, no matter what, you're gonna underestimate the cold because you're just sitting. Man. We're there on some days like humidity, you know, lows in the thirties, and you're just sitting, sitting, sitting, sitting, sitting. It wears on you. Yeah, Lauren, how far are we away from Fairbanks? We're getting close now. We're probably another forty miles away. Not too bad. Good all right, ladies and gentlemen. It's getting dark. Sun is setting, Sun is setting. The whole growl thing didn't happen. Still trying to booze, closing in on Fairbanks, Alaska. We love you all. Ninety night, Lucy. By Vince Merritt. This story came to us from Vince himself. He submitted it to us through email, and then we had a hard time getting hold of him again. After his submission, he wrote back to say, quote, Luckily, my lifelong friend and hunting buddy Michael is a bit a lot more computer savvy than I. Although I have an email account, I just recently set it up and had no idea the unbelievable amount of junk emails one can acquire. I would much rather talk in person, if that's possible. Unquote. You'll see why Vince feels that talking is a strong point, because he is a vivid, somewhat immaculate storyteller. His attention to detail is pretty astonishing. I also like how he's able to talk about shooting himself without any real self consciousness or shame. He just takes it as something that's a matter of fact. My dad liked to brag that he got through World War Two without ever getting scratched by a bullet, only to come home and get shot in the at hunting rabbits. I've heard countless stories of shooting accidents out hunting, but I'd be being dishonest if I didn't admit that some of them are just kind of funnier, or they're just so weird, and they have this tone to him that when you hear him, you kind of want to laugh. We all know the story where Dick Cheney shot his friend in the face while hunting quail, and it should be said that the most common hunting injury like gun related hunting injury is that you get shot by a shotgun. A lot of people feel that big game rifles with the requisite blaze orange that that's where the danger lies, but it's not as bad as shotguns. I recently heard a story from a friend of mine about a very rotund man that he knew who was out hunting rabbits. This guy gets down on his hands and knees to check under a junk car. In any rare hunter will know that rabbits like the hide under jumped out cars. For whatever reason, realizes that he can't get back up. He doesn't have that kind of mobility, so he grabs his pump action four ten shotgun by the barrel to use it sort of like a cane or walking stick, and with this gun as a support, manages to get himself back up on his feet. But he gets the muzzle of the shotgun under one of his fat rolls and he's kind of lodged on it and can't get himself up and off it. So what he decides to do is kick the stock of the shotgun in order to kick it out from under his gut. When he kicks it, it goes off and his gut fat absorbs the full force of that four ten load, no injury to his internal organs. A couple of years ago on the Meat Eater podcast, we got kind of wrangled into this discussion about what we call accidental discharges. Right, so when your gun goes off and you didn't mean it, and the marine wrote in to say, there's no such thing as an accidental discharge. There are only negligent discharges. Where these stories lose their humor is when you get into fatalities or permanent injuries. Recently, someone recommended to me a book called Dying to Hunt in Montana, and a large section of that book is devoted to firearm fatalities, many of them self inflicted accidents. I got a couple of pages into that book and had to put it away and never opened it back up again. It was just too upsetting to imagine those things happening to my friends, or particularly to my kids. It's not all a joke. The story you're about here could have easily it almost did, turn into one of those deeply sad and tragic stories. But we all know this is called close calls, so ultimately it's about triumph. My name is Vince Merritt November five. It was of two thousand and five. I was duck hunting in uh, a little lake up in northern California where I live, ten or fifteen minutes away from my house. Me and a couple of buddies of mine, we're gonna go out and jump this lake and see if we could kill any birds. I parked about three quarters of a mile away from where I was going to launch my little boat, got out of the vehicle and uh, it was cold. We had a good storm that weekend, left the dusting of snow on the ground, and figured it'd probably pushed some birds down. I stopped about a hundred yards short of the lake. I was just gonna drift down the creek time it so I can hit the lake. Just at shooting time, a flock of birds came in and sat down right at the mouth of the street. So foolishly I loaded my gun up all a five brownie and as my dad's gun, who had just passed away a couple of years before this, figuring, this is gonna be an easy, easy blast. And at this point I was still waiting for my buddies to show up. One of my buddies was coming over the damn one was coming from the boat launch, just covering the exits, because uh to these birds do. They'll they'll roost on the lake all night and then at first light they take off in all different directions going out in the lake. So with like two minutes left my buddies, I realized weren't gonna make it, or they were running late. They weren't gonna be there a shooting time, so I wasn't waiting anymore. I had my black lab Lucy with me, but he didn't want to take her in the boat, being this small of a boat it was, and she had not been in a hunted out of a boat before anyway, so I kind of left her on the bank. Got in the boat. I was on my knees and I had the gun alongside me, with the barrel pointing up in the air, leaning up against the seat, I grabbed the oar, pushed off the bank with the oar and pushed right into a sandbar and it just stopped the boat just like I ran into a brick wall. And when the boat stopped, just solid like that, the gun slid down off the bed. Sheat hit the bottom of the boat and went off. Now, I I didn't realize at that time that's what happened, because as I remember is hearing a shot and thinking, damn it, somebody shot early, because all the birds, of course, took off as soon as the gun went off. And then I started thinking, how could somebody have shot earlier? I I'm the only one on the lake. But I looked down and my guns laying on the bottom of the boat, and there's smoke drifted up out of the barrel. I realized it was my gun that it went off, and I remember thinking in my head, you dumb s ob. You know you're so lucky you just didn't shoot yourself. I had a pair of my what I had on was near primum hip boots at the time. And then I realized right at the bend of my knee, and there was a hole in the waiters about as big as a beer can. Maybe there's blood trickling out of the waiters. And I remember thinking, you did shoot yourself. But I couldn't feel any pain whatsoever. So the first thing I thought, of all, it can't be too bad, but I better get out of this boat, because I figured I'd blown a hole in the boat. So I tried to stand up, and as soon as I put weight on on my bad leg, I flipped over the edge of the oat. My but HiT's the bottom of the of the creek and uh, I'm in about chest high deeper water and my right leg literally just floated up to the top of the creek. I remember and watching my leg kind of float back and forth in the current. I realized at that time I had screwed up pretty bad. My leg was at least busted I do. I remember telling my dog Lucy right there, I better make some good decisions from here out out, girl, I'm gonna be in trouble. I had three quarters of a mile back to my car. It was one option where I could go across, get back in the boat, attempt to get back in the boat, and go across the lake to my buddy's house. He was the third one that was supposed to show up hunting up order that didn't. Or I could go to uh. One side of the lake is a campground and there's year round hosts that stay at the campground. And I could actually see the big fluorescent light from the campground. It was closer than my car was. If I get back to the car. There's I didn't even think I was gonna be able to get into drive it with my right leg being busted up. So I make the decision two head to the campground. I start crawling across the the creek and it starts getting over my head immediately, so I I kind of swam dog paddled with my good leg in my arms and my other leg was just kind of dragging behind me. Crawl out the other side, and I realized I left my shotgun in the boat, and I was worried that someone was gonna steal my gun if I left it in the boat. So my dumbmass crawled back across the creek hold the gun out. I remember putting the gun but in the mud and helping myself out of the creek with the gun butt. That's what it dawned on me, I should probably should unload the gun all the way where I was going to shoot myself a second time. I jacked a couple more times, made sure the gun was empty, drugged myself out of the other side of the creek, and there I remember looking back at the creek and they're being blood on both sides of the creek. Just a trail of it heading out to the lake. It was going down to the current, and I was thinking, damn you other losing quite a bit of blood already. I knew I hadn't hit an army or anything bad. It wasn't it wasn't spurting out, but I could see this little hole filling up and draded and filling up and draded right underneath the kneecap on the inside of the knee. By this time, my dog had swam across the creek and was right alongside me. I'm on my butt crawling. We're using my good leg to push me backwards. I'm looking at my leg the whole time and watching it fill up and drade, and I thought, tourniquet. I better get a tourniquet on it. I had my duck calls around my debt. I pulled those off and used the landard for my duck calls and tied my leg off. And I was thinking, I don't know if that's dowd any good or not. Start dragging myself again, just pushing myself on my butt, going backwards, crawling towards where I know this campground is, but the lake kind of loops around there, so I had to had to go around in the lake. Actually, it's pretty dense timber, gnarly brush that you just you can't hardly walk through or crawl through. I was probably two d yards away from my boat at this time, so it taken me forty five minutes or an hour to get that far, pushing myself with my good leg on my butt backwards and then picking up the gun and moving at five ft in front of me and crawling five more ft. I noticed my tourniquet it came off, so I took my belt off and tied it around my leg. I don't remember see it slowed down blood wise, I'm feeling paind some, but not like you would expect. So obviously I was in shock because my leg was literally just kind of flopping and dang wood. I'd hunted all around that lake, so I know if I get to that trail, I pretty much got a straight shot. I must have found an opening through it. I don't remember exactly how it worked, but I remember I crawled through the manzanita, up the little embanquet to the trail, and probably been an hour since I shot myself, and now I'm pretty beat. I remember I was gonna, I'm telling myself, I wanted to take a nap at that time. I lead up against a big pine tree and my dog just starts going nuts. She's just barking, going crazy, doing circles around me, and I remember yelling at her to shut up because I was trying to take a nap, and she just kept going nuts. I didn't realize it at the time, but she obviously was saving my life. Then as long as I'm crawled, she's okay. I stopped a second time, I don't know, maybe ten or fifteen minutes later. Again I was getting pretty tired, and again as soon as I stopped, she just starts going nuts and and going crazy. I remember thinking that I wasn't gonna make it. On the path. There was no tracks through the snow because I remember, they're just being a dust in the snow. So the campground hosts had not been out there lately. I didn't know if they were year around hosts or what. I really didn't know for sure if this place had a landline or not, but I knew the cabin was there, so that was my destination. I started crawling again. I remember thinking to my Dad, and I think I even said this out loud. It looks like I might be coming to join you a little sooner than we thought, Pops. I came to a couple of outbuildings at this time, and it was a big cook shock. For when they had huge campouts they did all the cooking. At this shock. They sat through a rock through the window of the cook house, and I assume I was trying to make an alarm go off or something. I really I don't remember a lot about that. It was probably an hour and a half after I'd shot myself. At this point, I didn't have my gun anymore. The realization came to me that I had left my gun somewhere, probably leading up against the tree when I was trying to take a nap. I wasn't making very good time, and I knew that. I knew I was probably pushing it and needed to get to this cabin and get some help. During the last I don't know, ten or fifteen minutes, and it dawned on me I should start whistling and maybe I could get somebody's attention. So every every couple of minutes, I would put my fingers to my mouth and and whistle. I could whistle pretty damn loud, and I would yell I need help if anybody could hear me, I need help. No response, so I I just kept crawling. I'd lost my tourniquet. The second tourniquet my belt that didn't have enough loops that tightened make it real tight all the way down around my leg. And apparently it had come off while I was dragging myself, because my pants and everything went around my ankles. At this point, I'm pretty much pushing myself bare butt down this creek. That's why I decided to make a crutch see if I could make a crutch and hop and that didn't work to crutch snapped. I hit the ground pretty hard. I remember camel crawling forward for a little bit at that time by my elbows and one knee, just dragging myself behind me. But that was just way too hard to do. I can see the cabin now actually was a house. There's like a three ft tall cyclone fence all the way around this house. I crawled down the fence towards the walkway going up to the house to the gate, and sure enough there's a paddleog. I remember that bumming me out in a couple of different ways. For one, I realized that meant more than likely there was nobody at the house. Secondly, it meant I was going to have to go over the fence. I remember whistling again right then, praying that there was somebody in the house that would hear me, even though I'm staring at a paddle lock on this front gate. No response. My dog can't jump the fence, so this is where I lose Lucy. She's she's on the outside of the cyclone fence. I stood on my good leg and went over the top of the little the cyclone fence, flopped on the ground, and at that point I remember being in a lot of pain. I remember hitting the ground on the other side and and really hurt, and I knew at that point I was really pushing the limits of whether I was going to make it out of this situation alive. And I remember shaking my head thinking how ironic this is gonna be that I'm gonna end up dying being being the safety guy I've always been with all my buddies, I'm gonna end up end up dying over the stupid gunshot. I remember thinking I just have too much life to live. I can't. I'm not giving up. I crawled up to the front porch and I'm still whistling, hoping there was somebody in the house. It's I didn't know what time it was, but I knew in my mind it was still early enough where these people might be sleeping. And I checked the check the front door to see if it was unlocked, and it wasn't. Pounded on the door and yelled a couple of times, I need help. They've got a big picture window into the living room, and I remember looking at that thinking I could probably go through that window. But the porch extended all the way along the front of the house, and there was another window at the other end of the porch going into the house, and I could see a telephone in the bedroom, and I remember thinking, okay, they definitely do have landline here. There was furniture, patio furniture on this front porch. I hop over and picked up one of the chairs, and on one leg, I spun around and put the chair through the window and shattered out the bedroom window. The bed in the bedroom was was close to the wall right there, and I remember flipping in backwards into the house, trying to land on the bed. What I did actually is missed the bed and fell right down in about a ten or twelve intes crack in between the bed and the wall. At that point I remember a lot of pain. You might say I was old man then, because every little bit of it came out of me. I remember screaming. At that point, I was in a lot of pain. I crawled around the bed, got up on the chair that had the wheels on it, rolled over to the telephone, picked up the phone and it was dead. No dial toad. A lot of people up there have summer homes, so they take off and leave for the winter months, shut the water off, shut the power off, and shut their phones off. And I assume that's what had happened. There was a computer on the desk and they say I punched in a help me. I had no I never used a computer before in my life at that time. But they said I used the keypad and punched in help. I need help. A few times, I figured I was a dead man for sure. At that point. There's no dial tone on the telephone. There was a note paper on the on the desk there. I was going to write a note basically at that point to let my mom know what happened. I was real close to my mother. Um. I was a baby in the family. I have older brother and older sister, and I was quite the moment's boy, and I was ever thinking it's just gonna devastate her. So I was gonna write out a note and let mom know what happened. Earlier in the crawl quite a bit, I remember thinking, God, I'm thirsty. I wish I had something to drink. So at that point I thought, well, I'm gonna check refrigerator and see what they got to think to drink. I said, I've always been a beer drinker, and quite frankly, I think I'm gonna go out with the beer. See, I'm gonna see if they've got a beer and refrigerator. So I didn't write the note yet. I'm on the chair with the wheels behind it, so I'm able to push myself with my one leg out of the bedroom, and I was using the walls to push myself out of the hallway, and I remember there looked like they were in a bunch of kindygardeners admitted their hand painting because there was blood head handprints on all their walls from my hands when I was pushing myself through. So I pushed myself around the little wall into the kitchen, and right next to the refrigerator there's another telephone. It's blinking oh one, like there's a message on the telephone. And I told myself, don't get your hopes up. The other phone is dead. There's there's no way there's gonna be a dial tone on this phone. So I popped refrigerator open. There was an beers unfortunately, but they say I ate a banana and drank a V eight, which I don't. I don't remember doing either one of those things. And the time I'm staring at the phone, going you've You've got to check it. I grabbed the phone, put it up to my ear and went damn, and hung it up, and I was like, wait a minute, and I picked it up again, and there was a dial tone. I remember even putting my finger up and and clicking the button a couple of times, just so I wasn't, you know, making stuff up in my mind. At this point, there really was a dial tone, and I couldn't figure out why there wouldn't be a dial tone on one phone, and there would on another one, but I thought, you better quit thinking and and make a damn call, because at this point there's not a lot of blood coming out of my leg, and I knew it wasn't good, and obviously it was because I had lost most of my blood at that time. I remember the emergency operator coming on and she's as the regular routine, what is what is your medical emergency or whatever she said, and I told her I shot myself. I remember unlocking the dead bolt and opening the door, and you could see how I could see out the front door down the driveway to where they had a a big gate out front that was locked up. First ambulance pulls in and uh, it stops at the gate, and then another ambulance pulls right in behind it, and they're both at the gate, and I'm sitting in this chair and I'm like, okay, they're they're at the right spot. Send them in. One renounced to me at the time, anytime there's a gun involved accident, the sheriffs have to be the first one on the sea. So you know, I had no idea about that at this time, and I couldn't figure out why the ambulances weren't coming in. It was hard for me to stay conscious at this time. I remember not in quite an it just barely being able to stay awake. And then I saw the second ambulance. The passenger door opens up and I see the passenger get out of the second ambulance goes by the first ambulance and swings opened the gate and came in and shot down the driveway, and I remember thinking, wow, it's a bad time for an ambulance to break down. They wheeled me out, started getting fluids into me. I hear a couple of wor cars pull up outside that and the sheriffs had pulled up and out. I remember them put me in the back of the ambulance, and I remember telling the sheriff, hey, I don't know where my dog is right now, but somebody needs to find her because that dogs saved my life, There's no doubt. The ambulance doors closed. I remember the bigging a banger or the back door or something, and one of the sheriff's opened up the back door and told me he Dominic's here and he's got your dog. When the nine one one call went out, another friend of mine over the scanner had heard the nine one one call, had heard my name and called my house. I told my mom, I don't know what's going on, but Vince was shot. My mom knew Dominic was supposed to be hunt with me that morning, so she called Dominic. When he answered the phone, she said, I don't know what the hell is going on, but Vince has been shot. You need to get to the lake. The next time I remember waking up was in the in the recovery room. My son was standing over the top of me. I had a sheet pulled up to my waist and he could see I had both my feet there, and he says, uh, you still want both your legs. He said, yeah. They made me sign a waiver awhile back that said they can take your leg if they needed to to save your life. I remember telling him, boy, you are damn lucky they did not take my leg, because I'd have been would piste off guy at you. The first X rays, I saw that they took um the plastic wad and every baby from that shotgun shell was under my kneecap. They drilled a hole in my fever and put a pin in it and attached my knee to that. Thirteen surgeries clean out trying to get pellets and everything out of my leg dominic. He came in to see me and uh he said, Hey, I already cleared it with the nurses. Let's go for a walk. And uh uh he had brought Lucy with him, so I got to throw a few sticks for I vowed then that I would never have another dog not named Lucy, my third dog since her, she's named Lucy three, and I will not have another dog that's that's not daved after that girl. There's no doubt she She definitely saved my life that day. M