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This is gonna be very difficult what I'm gonna do right now, because I need to talk about a bunch of things that are unrelated to what we're talking about. And they're unrelated, there's no relation between them. But I want to have it come off seeming really flowey, right, like it like it flows, like it's all together, but it's hard. Like for instance, first off, as a correction, that Sam Houston did not die at the Alamo. We're conversing about this the other day on the show, and we were we're talking about, like, who didn't didn't die at the Alamo? How Davy Crockett. There's a rumor that Davy Crockett did not go down and uh, you know, in a valiant fashion and actually surrendered at the Alamo and was executed. And someone I don't want to name names, someone speculator or suggested that Sam Houston might have died at the Alamo, and a lot of very angry Texans m hmm. This guy whose name is Sam from Texas, the USA says, uh, he did not, in fact die at the Alamo. He was not at the Alamo. He was the general of the Texas Army. It was not the Alamo. He gets fired up. Since Sam Houston then went on to a career in the Texas legislature as a governor of Texas at the time of succession from the Union to the Confederacy, and he refused to pledge allegiance to the Confederacy was removed from the Governor's office. Sam Houston National Forest he died due there and is now named after him. And this guy says, speaking permissions, we have plenty permissions in Texas if you want to come hunt now. Try to relate to that. Imagine the trouble of trying to relate that to this. Another guy writes in to say he's all worked up. Um, no, this is about dirt. This is I get that in a minute. He's all worked up about us, saying someone speculating that the wolves in Washington state had rolled in from Yellowstone, but Idaho had two reintroductions ninety six and the Frank Church. And he says that it probably makes the help a lot more sense that the wolves coming into Washington are coming out of BC and originating from the Frank Church reintroductions. Yeah, I'm surprised, he says that. He he says, and he ought to know best because he was the wolf biologist in Idaho now runs timber to table guide service. What's that you know. I'm surprised we mixed that up because I thought that we've like talked to people that have said that exact thing on the podcast about those Washington wolves coming from Idaho, and BC didn't know another one real quick. This guy goes on, This guy has a beef with me, saying that, uh, the introduction of fossil fuels is what saved whales because the market for whale oil collapsed. He goes down to say, that's a bunch of bullshit. He says, didn't The peak whaling was the nineteen sixties, not the eighteen sixties. He said, in the nineteen sixties, almost seven hundred thousand large whales were harvested commercially, and then shows like Flipper, the album of Whales Singing, Um, some other stuff all came. Kind of whales got real zekegusty, ZEITGEISTI, and came the Marine Mammal Protection Act. So don't be talking about fossil fuels and what electricity saving whales. He says, that's what did it, And he also likes to point out how effective that was because he says the blue whales along the coast of California are now at ninety seven percent of their carrying capacity. This guy is a PhD salmon biologist. He says, he hopes I'm right about pebble mind. Finally, the last little unrelated thing that I want to talk about it. But here's where I'm gonna try to pull off some slick segways. Um dirt YEP. A guy wrote in wanting you to know that there's a um, there's a dip that has no tobacco in it, and he thinks that you ought to be using it, and um, let me see if he has any extra information about it. No, he just thinks you ought to using tobacco free dip. I've tried that. Oh yeah, black buffalo tobacco free dip like herbs and uh yeah, you like herbs in other situations, yeah, but you believe in herbs. I do, but not and tein shirts are trump by nicotine at all costs. When you're addicted. It's just that hook, you know. But like, I know, but tobacco free dip probably has the nicotine, right, No, oh it doesn't know, because I was thinking that guy saying, like if a dude was saying I'm addicted to uh, or like I'm getting all facts that drink too much beer, and then someone would say, oh, drink ever clear, because then you're getting the thing you're addicted to without all the stuff that's giving you the problems you're having. Or like Cow said, lacroise are the placebo beer, so the fizzy, but it helps you get away from it. So you have no interest in taking this guy's advice and trying. No, I appreciate it, but I've down that ruffalo dip free dip. They need to market that different black buffalo. I don't know. Yeah, can I ask a cup more questions? Oh? Yeah, because he's watched this segue. Earlier we were talking about corrections and you usually had your eye your vision corrected. Um, you talked about that. Touch on that, because now you're like a game spot and something. I'll tell you a sense I never thought I would say in my whole entire life, and that's this dirt glassed up a buck that I just got. Which if you'd asked me a year ago, if I would ever say that sentence, I would have said, it's impossible. You said, not unless he has some crazy surgery on his eyes or he got LASI and he says he got the Game I Special package. It was a bonus off. So what's it like. It's like being born again, but not really spiritually well I think it puts me back to the like the standard playing field. I was hindered prior with the glasses. Now I can see just as the average man. So what's it like to glass now that you can see? I do like you enjoy it? Yeah, it's the way. It's definitely way more satisfying because I can I can see those tiny little you know, great ghost because you're into it now. Oh yeah, I always have been. I wanted to actually, since we're on the topic, because you brought that up. This trip taking out the filming aspect too, was a big are that. Even though Stills is engaging, like being able to like, you know, pick and shoes, that was a big part to be able to gas. I always want to glass with you guys, But he takes skills. He does motion claims to have that love and the potion exactly. And today I or this trip. I gotta cut out the film and so I got a glass more with you guys and gotta see. Oh I loved it. I will say, though, that spot in that buck had nothing to do with my with my glass and skills, just a matter of tenacity, just looking a shotgun effect, just like oh maybe I'll look over that way for a minute. Also, yeah, yeah, so it is nice. No, it's six Yeah, it's extremely satisfying. The glass glass up a critter, and I can see it is. There is a big difference now with the lace that being able to look through the buyos. Can I see one last question and then we'll move on. Um. A minute ago, I was asking Dirt about his feelings on de ordering. He doesn't like to wear it, but he was pointing out not that he has like some hippie dippy aversion to illuminum which drives a lot of people to smelliness, but that and he says it's laziness. But I pointed out that he's the least lazy guy I know, And he said, because he has priorities, yeah, in life, and he focuses on the things that matter and putting the older on his on that list. Yeah, and the cost the cost efficiency of that too. But before that's that's a lie, because before six months, because before a guy suggests that Dirt try a different kind of tobacco, and Dirt says, I have a good job. I use cope. No, it is the thing. Yeah, it's just one less thing to clutter up your day. To day like routine. Yeah, and that I'm lucky that, uh, you know, the gal I live with doesn't mind my musk like it. I don't know if that's the case, but she doesn't mind it, so I get away with it. We started thinking that dirt's like a subspecies of halina. Ho you didn't have, like, I just want to add to that because the other thing that you sort of remove I think for daily efficiency, which kind of irks me a little bit, is your lack of watch. Oh yeah, but you'd like to know what time it is. I love to know what time it is. But I just sassy. But I don't know why. Well that is it is a hippi. You have a hippie different reasons. And I have a watch. You were born you were born on a cattle ranch. No, I'm Miles City, Montana. I've tried watches and they throw off. They like make my arm hurt. I don't know if it's I don't know if electron really Yeah, so it throws up. Yeah, you should wear one on each wrist so you just be imbalanced, like in the force. When you're wearing exactly, it disturbs my my charge, my positive or name with I just yeah, it hurts my wrist. Yeah, so that's an another thing I don't have to purchase. I guess Dirt Night just called in a couple of kyles just to look at him. Not many guys do that. Late afternoon too, I mean fairly warm and sunny. He was twenty yards away. That was really cool. I'm gonna move away from you now, Is that all right? I mean I was just saying to move off the topic of you just as a person, I want to introduce other people all as well. Yeah, I'd like take a minute first of welcome you guys to me in Yanni's hotel room. It's nice, isn't it. It's gonna wrap around couch. Yeah. Um, John Snow, can you can you explain yourself? Oh man, I've been trying to do that for years. Yeah, I mean in that way now, I work it Outdoor Life Magazine. I'm the shooting editor there. I do the guns and shooting coverage for the magazine. I've been there since two and one, and I don't know, it's such a long time. Yeah. But when you talk about being another forms of journalism, but that that's been your main deal for for for that many years. I can't even do the math. Yeah, no, I'm it's it happens when you get older, man, all of a sudden, You've had a bunch of jobs for a long time, but no, Afterlife has been the most consistent gig of my career. I kind of did the thing a lot of young journalists do, jump around from place to place. That's Ben's phone song that comes out in the morning. Yeah, so yeah, so I joined the I joined the staff there in two thousand one, moved to move to New York City because that's where they were based. And you know, that was the third time I worked in New York City professionally, and I always knew I have a shelf life in New York and I managed to weasel my way into the shooting editor position, And um, I feel like a great diaspora of outdoor life folks out of New York. Like, does anybody from outdoor Life live in New York anymore? Yeah, there's still we still have a couple of editors there, but it's always attention because obviously the people that we have on staff and one on staff are avid outdoors and and trying to pursue that in New York city is just a lot more difficult. That's shooting bullets all around, right about it? Oh? Yeah, no, And that's what happened. I I finally went to my bosses and said, look, I can't do justice to this job and be in New York. And they said, well, where do you want to go? And I said Montana And they said, hey, that sounds great. Here's a big pay cut. Go have fun. Calculation, John, can you real quick explain what the shooting editor is. The shooting editor is is the guy who handles all of the firearms and shooting skill coverage. So you know, I talked about guns. I review them in the magazine. Um. I try to take some of the increasingly technical stuff that's happening in our world and make it accessible to people. So try to give people kind of some leverage on what these different technologies and terms are, and obviously just to help make people better shots. And it's kind of a cool deal. I'm only the fifth shooting editor in the history of magazine, so well there's always been one. Yeah, pretty much. They stick around. Yeah, they do, stick around, stick around, stick around down. It's like like arterial plaque. We hang in there until we about lived are usefulness. Yeah, um, Ben O'Brien, Hey, you've been on the show before, Yeah, many times. Once just the one time. Remember you did a great job. Though, well it was a year ago, so I'm a different person now, so I might screw this one up. And that was in Nevada, and right now we're sitting in Arizona. That's Arizona. I don't know much about this place. Did you care to explain yourself at all? Hey, you want to see a transition? Check this out? Get it? Uh, don't let me save it. Well, now I gotta get ready though, Ready, this is gonna blow your mind. Well, I'm basically my resume is I was once in the Mediator podcast. Uh, and that's really all I got. I'm the Hunting marketing manager for Jetti UM formally and well currently if I if I imagine to be a journalist, I used to work at Peterson Sunny Magazine before that, n Rays American Hunter, some digital and print journalism and uh, yeah that's it. And we taught was before, so we don't need to get into too heavily. But once upon a time you wrote about sports, sports with balls, sports with ball, sports ball, sports, sweaty balls sometimes just yeah round oyeblong. But you wrote about like games, games, sports, things that you don't you know, things that you don't know much about. I guess at this point I was struggling that Muhammed Ali's somebody that you know, yeah, his work. At some point I did what I did, aspire to write about sports, and then I figured out that, uh, that was a ship job. You can I can I revisit with you, just real quick. Even though I didn't want to talk about it, I do want to revisit. One thing you mentioned to me is that, um, once you got to sort of peel back the the curtain into the world of professional athletics, it lost something for you. Of course it did, Yeah, something, something was not what you envisioned it to be. Well, and I you know, you grew up on the East Coast. I think it's it's it's not particularly just an East Coast thing, but on the East Coast and the major cities Boston and New York and Baltimore, if there seems to be just a proclivity for sports, I mean like that's part of your identity, that's part you grow up like hey man, what do you do? Who are you like, I'm I'm Ben, I'm a Ravens fan. I think I'm married. I think I might be married. There's a kid somewhere. You just it's part of your personal identity. And for me growing up, I would, you know, go to sleep as a little kid listening to the Orioles game on the radio like this. That's that's part of our identity as my family and just who I grew up around. And so that was twenty one years old. All of a sudden, I'm covering this thing like I'm inside of the pulled back the curtain. So young. I was an internet at a magazine. But did you go to you finished up regular college? Right? Yeah, this is my senior year in college. I finished. I was an intern at a regular magazine. They just said, hey, would you like to go be the beat writer for a while. We think you got some good skills in that area. I was like, yeah, you said, pure raw talent, Yes, pure raw talent, and just so they sent me there and I went there, and you know, I remember walking into the locker room the first time being so nervous, sweating. I was twenty one years old. These are like most of the players aren't much older than me, but most of the other reporters and writers were six times by age. Does it makes sense they're old. They're old, and there maybe three dudes writing about sports, and uh, anyhow, they're old, I thought. And so you go back there and you realize that that these people that you you center your identity around their efforts, right, I mean, because the Ravens are the orioles or of a sports team, They're not much more than just a collection of people doing a game, you know, playing a game. And so if those folks are that important to you, then they've got to be some kind of you know, idol or or somebody you can look up to. And so at that point, um, I started to meet him and hang out with them and interview them and and observe them and their professional sense and personal sense, and I realized that most of them were nowhere near idol status, like they didn't not that they didn't deserve it, but they just not who they were. They just hit a ball and we just decided that that was somehow culturally important, which to me, after I saw back behind the curtain, I thought, well, how what a silly thing too to think this is culturally as a society something we should worship or cheer for whatever, and um, and then I just realized, if I take this as a career, I will never get to write about what I'm doing, or I'll never get to write about my own personal experiences. I'll be just writing about what this rich baseball players doing. What there I respect him as a person or not. And then I realized, oh shit, my career has gotta go a different direction because this one sucks. And it did. I mean, there's a lot of miserable you know, middle aged sports writers that just live. They get all the negative stuff that the athletes get, like to travel in the long hours and crazy schedules. They get none of the accolades, none of the they get no, none of the money, none of the pretty girls, not It's just nothing. That's like the opposite, the antithesis of what this person gets. So I quickly I was introduced to the fact that you could be a writer and also write about hunting. Um, well, I was like that, that seems better. Let's do that because I hunted, you know, hunt of my entire life. Though I guess that's part of the reason I'm here. Yeah, yeah, um, what age are you when you quit doing it? Probably two, so you peeled back the curtain like curtain open early. Yeah, and I had I had some internship and then a job at the Washington Post right around the time they're making a digital transition. So then it became kind of a digital editor where that was my became my calling card, you know, knowing a little bit about the digital editorial space. And so buddy of mine was like, Hey, I'm working at the n R at this magazine called American Hunter, and I'm leaving it, and I think you'd be pretty good at it if you don't like the sports things. So he's like, I don't want the job, perhaps you might like it. I know, your job now sucks. So yeah, that was right when I was twenty three, So I got in the industry early. I mean I'm thirty, you know, I've been in nine years. It seems like a lot longer than that. Yeah, and then moving on, we have dirt myth yep. Uh, you don't mind me interrupting you from what you're doing there dirt and getting you some photos to introduce you. Yeah, and then finally the Lavin Eagle US good evening. Watch this transition this show is actually about COO's deer. Now, who's your got its name for? Um? The historian and botanist Elliott Cus, who I just read died in Baltimore, where Ben is from. He was an Orioles fan. He was before that. He's before that. Um. I read too that he used to believe in levitation. He believed the objects would now and then just inexplicably levitate. But I've seen some CU's deer do some gnarly movements, some magical movements. So Elliott Cus, we've talked about this before, about some touching this because this is like a deep dive, We're gonna talk about desert white tails, the great ghost known as CU's deer. Elliott Cous probably pronounced his name cows. But he took a like into this mysterious little desert deer. It was given his name. And now people say Cus. And when you say cous, half of people get real mad and write you a mean letter saying that it's cows cow. Johnny, you know this better than I do. What's the other way that people like to say it? Yeah? Cows? Okay, Elliott. I don't know if Elliott Cow said cows or cow Chris Denim, who I've said before has written the word coup is more than any man on the planet besides perhaps Elliott cous says that he will say wus dear till the day he dies. But he points out that Elliott, the naturalist and historian and levitation believer in Baltimore die person would have pronounced his name cows. I don't know how people started, how it became popularized to call it cous when people get piste when you do it, just like people get piste if you say cows dear, it rolls off the tongue. Maybe a little better because if you tell people cows dear, they're gonna think you're talking about a deer cow. Yeah, which I don't know what it is. I don't like the sounds of it. Maybe that's it. Maybe we just developed every confusion. We can call it something else, we can pronounce it another way. Many people, though, I mean, when you get outside of the state of Arizona in the lower forty eight, I mean you're talking about maybe a percentage of the population that actually knows that this deer exists. Yeah, it's a dinky, dinky amount of mugs who are interested in whether it's coups or cows, but it's it's it's it's a it's a white tailed deer. And these white tailed deer can be found in the Sky Island mountain ranges of Arizona. And we talk about sky on the mountain range. What it means you have, like you know, these vast tracts of flat desert punctuated by these these mountain ranges, and these mountain ranges, the higher portions of these mountain ranges have a slightly more temperate climate, a little more precipitation, and these little white tailed deer live out there, running around in saro cactuses and okatillo cactuses and just they're out in the desert and the mountain desert. There's some in New Mexico, but like the cou's motherland is Old Mexico, which if you want to talk about transitions, we were just talking about the war that helped establish that border between Austin Mexico. When I brought up Sam Houston, dirt were you? Yeah? Were here when I was Yeah? Yeah, that's another transition. Where in the world is dirt po Yeah, dirt there. There was explained to someone how we're talking about whether or not who knew Spanish and who knew what, and Dirt clarified that he hadn't even learned English really well yet he wanted to give me more time because he was wondering if if we were looking at a peacock and he was surprised that they hadn't been predated yet that I got it. Once you learn the dirt myths language, though, you can you knew what I was completely consisted by what words actually are there, and you're able to just like make your point clearly, but just making up whole new things to make up what you could have said preyed upon. But that that's way too many syllables. Like if this guy doesn't have time for deodering, he does not have time to say, pray, let me lift my stinky arm to look at my non watch, So Sam Houston, Yeah, Desert White Tales and like Mexico is this fairy? Because Yah's experience with Desert White Tales runs deeper a little bit. Yeah, is what fair? What are you asking me? Like the Mexico's like where it's at? Oh? Yeah, I was just talking about good buddy Tyler on the phone notes he's living two songs, recommended some restaurants, and he's leaving on Saturday. I think to go down. He's hunt with Beato next week. So the Beato is getting tags for him and his dad, and Um, I was telling about how good the hunt was, and he's like, yeah, bro, that's why you go to Mexico. It's kind of like it's just a whole different ballgame, you know, like you just you grind it out in Arizona and you go to Mexico and it's, um, figure out how to make an analogy. You know, it's like fishing where I don't know, you're trying to find an analogy of where something's not that great and then where it's real great. Midwest the same thing. You know, Um with a large mouth bass fishing in Michigan, and my mom's like and your mom's like, would out in California down the southeast and most lakes. Good job, nice, that's a good analogy. Uh Now, a couple of Desert white tales are deaky little deer, Like, what do you think those what do you think a big buck? We're just coming back from hunting Desert white Tales of Mexico and we got some nice bucks. What are those big bucks? Way? Not much over a hundred pounds. In the fifth, the thing I like most to talk about outside of talking about Daniel Boone, is talking about Bergman's principle and Bergman's principles principles way of explaining why a mambel species will tend to gargantuanism. It will tend to be biggest in the northern extreme of its range and smallest and the southern extreme of its range. And it's speculated this might have to do with heat retention and heat dissipation, where when you got these white tails away in Alberta, they're like two fifty pounds that they have lower surface area, so they have more ability to hold in heat. And then and then a ninety pound white tail has more surface area per unit of weight and he's able to dissipate heat. One theory about why Bergman's principle is true. There's exceptions, like mule they are considered an exception to Bergman's principle, but generally just like small on the south, and so these white shills are dinky, dinky little deer, but they're like in minute your form because a big, huge giant couz buck scores. What like, what's the coup's equivalent of a two white tail? But that's like a rarity, rights, that's not as rare anymore. Two white tails happened because people can people can make them, they grow them. Yeah. Do you know that there's a guy I heard about recently that actually puts out medicine for his white tails. Yeah, yep, I'm talking. They're beyond putting out like subminster and they're medicating dewarming, de worming medicine in the summer. And the feeder you're putting out feed with medicine for your and growth hormones growth. Sup. Yeah, No one's doing that for cou's deer down in Mexican. These are all these It's like Pamela and Sitting fair fauces CU's is fair Faucet Texas white Tail's Pamela Anderson. I get it. I'm I'm following you. I'm tracking natural artificial. Ah, they're both hot. Let's see. Yeah, like two under an inch free range white tail is probably like okay, but give me a more realistic number when we're talking And I'm gonna back up because when we're talking about the numbers. There's like a way, there's there's an agreed upon way that you measure deer antlers when you take various circumferences and lengths and dimensions in YadA YadA, and you add it all up and you and you take that number and say he's a blank inch thing. No, there's like there's like lingo, right, Like if you shoot a two mule deer, it's a big in the four elk is a big in A hundred eight inch ram is a big un yeah h in the Alberta in a big, huge, giant. Well, the biggest white tailed buck ever was killed albert It was two d plus inches, so the same way that their body is half the size or less than half the size. To put I can put it a little more perspective. J killed a few years ago. Um like a hundred thirties six inch. I believe couse dear, he's somewhere right in there. At the time, he was number eight in the All Time Boone and Crockett Book, The Big eight biggest you know bucket's ever been entered into the Boone and Crockett record book. Yep, and Mark Kennyon can barely get excited about a one in regular white tail. That's right. Let me ask you this question is the is the desert white tail the only white tail? And this is a legit questions. Don't know that doesn't have hunters or land owners managing the land for their to propagate there species. Think about all white tails on our continent Alberta, Iowa, little here, a little thinky white tail that are that are protected. Um. But it just strikes me is that the desert white tail is akin to the mule the here in a way that it just lives in wild places and nobody's planting out falfa fields and crop rows. Agreed until this past week food plot. Let me back up someone, I want to walk through the whole damn story, right, and I was trying to lay a little background by talking about Elliott coups and levitation and everything. You're the ordering a little more background. There's something I don't know what I'm sure of. People write in too clarify. I don't know that Mexico has the equivalent of going down to a gas station and buying a hunting license. No O, In the U s. We have publicly owned wildlife. Okay, so if you own property and a deer lives on your property, that's not your dear. You can control access to the dear, but it's not your dear. Um, and and and and tags and stuff. I'm speaking very generally because there's many exceptions to this. Tags are generally sold by government agencies, are they And they come from government agencies and they get distributed in different fashions that will not get into right now. In Mexico, if you're a landowner, you say to the to to the government biologists in your state, Um, they come out and do a survey on your ranch, on your astantia. Now that we all know an amazing amount of Spanish, they come out to your astantia to do a survey and they'll take into considerations like what all has been predated or not, and um, they will issue this land ord. They'll say this landowner is allowed to kill what would be normal, like like a number of tags for maybe four or five. Yeah, sometimes it can be a lot more, because yeah, I think it could be considered to be double that. It does seem conservative, but I think some of the rangers are big enough for us to double that. We were on this year had five and it had tens of thousands acres though, didn't it? No? Nine No, And it was roughly what four by ten miles? It was four by ten miles. The gvernment comes out and they give the guy a handful of half Alina tags and a handful of white tail tags. Who's your tags? He can do with them what he wishes. We haven't had a friend, um, a very admirable figure. Admirable that's a hard word to say for me. Figure named Jay Scott. And Jay Scott has a lot of relationships. Um, he and his partner, Dark Colburn, Colburn and Scott. Why is Dark in his name? First? That's kind of guy j is? I think jas is such a good guy. So Dark Colburn and Jay Scott run Colburn and Scott Outfitters and they have a bunch of relationships down in Sonora, Mexico. And they broker like you're getting tags and you get accused your tag for about a couple of thousand dollars. They do a lot more than that, you know what I mean. They gotta go and scout the you know, they gotta find the ranch first, then go scout it. Make sure it's got some roads can get around on, make sure it's got a house you can sleep in. But we've also just camped on Cou's deer ranches down there we have I think that was of our own admission. Yeah, but some of the drives are so long on the like you can drive for hours on one of these places. I'm really like offer sharwkward mountain roads. So um Jay guides Cou's DearS but also facilitates dudes who want to do do it yourself trips on these biggest doan seas and j will help you get hooked up with the place where you can buy a cou'se your tag and then buying the cus your tag usually comes to you understand that you're gonna be sleeping somewhere on the ranch, but you gotta go down to cross the border. You gotta go. You're you're flirting with the border here, right, and that turns a lot of people off. You're like taking your vehicle down and crossing in into a land that many people feel is intimidating myself included, Like you're going from Douglas, Arizona into Augo, Pyato, Mexico and hunting along the US Mexico border out in some wild ass country. Yeah, if you watch you know, regular cable news, you think Cicario. As you're down there and camping out and hanging out, you know, it's like every night it's fifty fifty whether or not you're gonna be bad. So don't have to do a bad of acid. I've been down I've been down there now five time. As I think, yeah, you know, it's funny. And I had a shirt maybe misplaced, maybe stolen once. I misplaced a lot of ships, so I still haven't ruled out that has lost my shirt. Yeah. I have never had anything remotely sketchy, but I still feel sketched out going through the process, with intimidating process without for this trip specifically, the first time I've done it, without the pretense, it would have been just a normal You would have thought nothing other other than if no one said be scared, you would have gone through it and what's scary? That was easier than Canada. Yeah. But but on the other hand, I mean even for veteran guys going down there, you were like, we gotta be here, you can't be here after dark. It was like American werewolf in London, like you don't mess around with I don't want to be there after dark. But it went smooth. But some of bitch is beautiful down there, gorgeous country. Anything that shocked me with the amount of mangy dog is just roaming around, eating trash and shipping in the street. Yeah, I told my my kids were in max with. My kids are always like, where do these dogs come from. I'm like, it's just a thing. It used to But it used to be like this in America when I was a kid, everybody's dog just ran around. Then Americans got sick of that. Two things my brother contributes to all of the Clinton presidency. Bill Clinton became president, kids, all kids started having helmets on when they rowed a bike, and the dogs vanished. Like he doesn't understand the link, but he noticed that it all happened time dogs, free roaming dogs went away. Kids, parents all bottom helmets to ride their bikes. And then it was just like a thing that everyone agreed upon at the same time. You know what it was. It was the first Internet boom. Everybody was suddenly communicating their fears. I'm just guessing I have no idea. I like it. Your dog's gonna get your kids younger? Did you grow up where you were in a helmet. We learned right a bike was a little killed. They would have killed you if you had a helmet. Beat the guys. Oh they guys that wrote motorcycles and were helmets and only half of them. Yeah, they would have killed you if you showed up at school the helmet on. Well that's the beauty. Mexico hasn't had that transition. Which transition is that of the dogs hang out and kids don't need to wear helmets. We saw some dogs today that m M. I could still smell. Smell those dogs. Is it interesting to spend any time on the process of going through the border. Yes, he would you like to walk us through the process and hold us. The New Jersey cat lady, she should go to Agua Priata and do some work. That's the place for her. I mean, if you're really, if you're in New Jersey, do you want to like feel good about yourself instead of sending that bullshit checked Peter every month or year, Go to Agua Priata and just that's all I need to say. Go there, you'll know what to do. Just bring like a hose and some shampoo and to be a start, like some jerky Uh, we got a letter about New Jersey cat ladies, and the guy was saying, as much as we like joke about news erdies cat ladies, says, you're not far off. He says an animal rights activist. If you're gonna make this sort of composite picture of an animal rights person, it is a woman who lives on the coast and owns pets. John Key walks through the process of coming into Mexico slick transition. Yeah, it is. It's a little it's a little different because it's serious. You know, if no one laughs doing it, no, no, you know, we we we drive up there in our big white van, which is instantly just feels sketchy anyway, just having a big white rental van, and uh, it's all that camera equipment pointing at us. All of a sudden, there's like these flats like you don't even have to stop. There no humans there, it's just you're being recorded. It feels like a dozen ways that the US government. Yeah, that's no. I mean we haven't even gotten to the to the Mexican party before. Well, the thing is, well, Nate, did you see the guy did Hey he had the little old school digital camera taking a picture of like the little vin plate on the Mexican side. It was really I and I was like, that's an antique digital camera. It was pretty weird. So yeah, anyway, so you get you get these pictures taken on the US side, and uh, and then we just had to make sure that you needed a form. We have one of the things you do when you go abroad, particular firearms or other expensive equipment, because you fill out these fifty seven customs forms and they essentially are just it's just proof of ownership. A lot of times guys are like, oh, it's a gun license or registration thing. That's that's not what it is saying I own this stuff when I left America. That's right, I own it when I left America. So that when you come back, you know, you can't be accused of having purchased some presumably high ticket item or otherwise tax free, tax free and then sneak it back across. So you know you have this this form and y't even know the number of the form. Yeah, there you go. So anyway, and we kind of breezed through that. That worked pretty pretty good, except their Customs folks, nice nice people, all of them, but they were a little confused about the forms. I noticed we had to educate them a little bit. Yeah, We're like, no, you require me to have this. They yes, they just wanted to give the blank form and not stamp it or fill it out. Well, you know, I noticed today there was some training going on while we were getting back into the States, and I'm guessing we're kind of at the beginning of hunting seasons, so maybe if there's some you know, new people there they just haven't had, or people who are moved down from a different border or a different area or whatever. Sure that was good that, yeah, but it was it was kind of one stop for us at the U. S. Side. Then very quickly get to the Mexican side and it gets confusing, mostly because none of us can understand what anybody's saying. But you know, we go in there, we get our tourist visas to start with. We have a vehicle, you got to register that. It's a little complex, you know complex. You guys are talking dirt. Yeah, it's almost like you're gonna get predated. It almost like you're gonna get predated there. And the thing is, honest, somebody's got to give him props for his administrative acuity. I mean it is like he knew this thing from like, you know, one point to the next. There's the reason I hang out with you. But yeah, that's all from j you know, so when you do this hunt with j he mean you guys saw the letter the documentary said us, he's got lined out and what you say, It's like I was reading this word document. They put a lot of time into the document of how to go across the border kind of just that documents useless because no one else has filed on the protocolon I wanted to share the document with the people. Have you have you read step nineteen. That's what we're on, right because step nineteen you say this and then I say this, not saying that. That document makes like your user agreement for your iPhone look like a high coup. You know, that thing was just impenetrable for me. Oh I thought, I thought, you know what, I thought. There's certain things in there, like Jay has certain tips in there. Yeah, Like, for instance, there's Jays like anticipate a lot of hubbub about the weight of your vehicle which we encounter, which we encounter, and Javen has a trick that you go and make if you have a trailer. That's how you had a trailer, you made yourself. Go and get a stamping machine and make a thing that says the weight, and go put it in a hidden place on your trailer and then go down there and act like you're looking around and discover the weight stamped on the thing, because that will help you prove the weight of the trailer. But he doesn't want you to put the like if it's a really heavy one, he doesn't want you to put the real heavyweight. Right, isn't there like a number thresholds of weight? And we got caught up on how much are creepy van weight candy in there? Free candy? Yeah, you gotta paint the picture a little bit. I mean you're in a place. I mean it's literally the size of this hotel room, maybe even a little bit smaller. Right, And there's three windows. This is this is banks of windows, banks of windows at the Mexican border, right, three doors in that place. You kind of go in there and you gotta go to one window telling you want the tourist basically go to the other window to pay for it, and then you come back at eight teams. You're going to get it. You're going and show your tourist visa. The guy's yep, that's a tourist visa. He sends you to pay a dude to photo copy. Yet then you go to pay for it. Then you go back and show the guy that you did all that and he couldn't. He stamps, just stamps. Then it's time to move on to your rig and you shooting irons. Yes, that's right. So we visit with the police there at the end. We were a little confused about where to go. Yeah, cop comes out, He's like, yep, that's a gun, that's right, and a van. Except except we we did have that very sweet lady, that very sweet police lady. When we went there. They thought Yanni was guappo guapo, gig wappo, gig wapo, handsome, She's not dirt, was l stinky. But she liked it. She did like it. Yeah, so, I mean it is a little bit complicated, But what were the what were you say? We're there for our it's kind of alcads intimidating if some of them, you know, I'll point out Yanni point this out to me, And I hadn't really taken notice that some of our fellow countrymen are in there acting very huffy about how annoying it was, but then they don't speak the language. It would be like if if you worked somewhere and a guy comes in blabbering to you in a foreign language, then acting annoyed, then acting annoyed with your protocol, especially when you're carrying guns into a country where I just want to show up down here with guns and ship and not speak the language and just come on in put a ment on my Just where's the concierge? I just it's very simple. I want to take all my ship, my weapons and go down and kill animals and bring those animals back home out of your country. And I don't want to have to answer all these questions in a language it is not the one I speak. Are you? Are you saying you haven't heard of amendamento? No? What is that? The second he caught me not knowing Spanish, I knew it. But I found everybody in this room is various international borders in various ways. Right. I've found most effective ways to know is to read those thirty eight steps that Jay has and understand that like parked by the gray building and walk a hundred yards. That's the ship. You generally ignore the stuff you're talking about, like the actual pinch points where they're gonna get you. Just know those pinch points and otherwise just be quiet, stand in line, put your card there. When they ask you a question that you can understand your answer and eventually you get through it. If they ask you for money, you give it to them, that's all. And I don't know about that, because I've seen some times down there crossing that board when people wanted money. And then when a Spanish speaker steps and on your behalf, they waved the feet. I seen that several times. But if you don't have a Spanish speaker to step in on your behalf, yeah, there's no you have. And and in our case where they said, well your van ways too much, and they said step in this other line, and I thought, well, the heavy van line, the heavy van line. And I thought, well, they're gonna take gonna go out of the van. There's gonna be some kind of giant, you know, machine to weigh this thing and measure it. And they just wanted more money. Well, is it time to introduce our fixer? Who helped us Bet Bet Beethoven. Beetho helped us a large man. So J Scott and Dark Colburn worked with We're gonna keep explaining this part because I'm like, I don't want to mess it up with Beato. Yeah, was like a dude they hunt with. Yeah, my buddy Tyler I was just talking to He's like, with Beato next week. We haven't hot with him for a long time. We still hunt with him all the time back in the day, So he's been hunting with JA, hunting, guiding slash eros. Yeah, like twenty Yeah, it's a long time. You had many years ago. And yeah, he's basically like what you know in the production business we call a fixer for J. Like he's on the nextan side and he's just running errands and doing business and he's I think now he's also sort of you know, helping J find new ranches to lease and and making friends with new ranch owners, you know, getting more tags lined up. But yeah, you set them up with us to uh, you know, help us once we got to the border, get us to the ranch. Then you hunt it with us. Helped us with cleaning skulls. But you're in me getting around when we we're driving down. Um, you guys don't mind if I move away from the whole. I think we got the point with the Border Crossing. M hm um. Have you guys read The Crossing by Corny McCarthy. Yeah, yeah, the Border Trilogy. Read every Cormick McCarthy book you can get your hands on, sir, because you'll find all the keys, including I have found keys to marriage in there, which I pointed out before. Um, there's a sign when you get a little bit out of a goo creative that says I didn't see it, but you guys described it to me. So it's a American flag, go to X through it. It's official, like actual sign, not graffiti. What's it saying? It had a I can't remember now, but I had a couple of no Hassle Zone leaving no hassles in USA. So like, if you're very ambiguous, we should have taken a picture. But to me it meant like you're in it. Yeah, if you get someone dicks you, now, it's your good because you're in no man's land, best of luck. And it looks like no man's land to be Yeah, it looks like something Cormick would would describe in one of his books mm hmm. And we get down to the Astonsia the ranch, big as ranch, and it's got a how like an empty house thing about. No, No, it's important because you get through all that bs. I'm trying to I'm always trying to be aware of the listener and his tolerances. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Um, you check the guns with the Mexican police, and we also have to go and check the guns with the chicken um federales. And it's it's simple, it's simple. It's gonna sound funny, but you're parking the gas station, you take your guns across the street and literally walk into an army base and go under a little hut, you know, the three sided structure with a roof on it, and uh, dude comes out and wants to check your the serial numbers on your gun versus the serial numbers that are on your what did you call it, like a gun permit? Gun permit, I guess takes a look at your passport. Yeah, sometimes it takes two hours, since it takes fifteen into another room with all that stuff. Yeah, comes back, signed, shakes everyone's hand. Those guys were very friendly, but they were also spun up. We're in body armor because they have shootouts and they had they had their their their rifles were loaded. You know, they were ready. But what I want to mention though, is the start Prince and when you leave that uh, that that border and you roll into Agua Priata, and there's a moment there where you're like, I'm in a different place. Even though I could reach out and touch the fence, it's like you are just in a different land. Yeah. And immediately it's humbling and and it's you also become you know, thankful for like having the opportunity and being able to live in America and for everything we have, because immediately you're in a place where you're like, this looks rough. I think of two things. One, when you get across that border, I felt this like ruthlessness about what my surroundings like. There isn't the structure is not there for your safety, like it it's just rubble and just trash and destitute and desperation. Just felt ruthless. It felt like something could pop up at any minute and tear you down. It's a yes, perception, there wasn't people running around pointing guns at us. That's not but the perception, of course is that this is there, this is danger, dis represents danger. These things seems place you would have had to have traveled a long ways to get to get to. But in fact you could throw a rock from Walmart, yea from the Douglas Walmart and hit that Harker rock and land it over in the zone. And every American with an opinion on immigration, not that we need to go there, but every American opinion on immigration should see that. You just need to see it. And however that helps you formulate an opinion, It does contextual contextualize that thing. It gives you count uh, just a perception of what it really is. And you can see the wall, you can and and what's funny about the wall, there's you can see through it, which I think it's some kind of weird irony that you can see through the wall. It's like a series of bars and you can look through it and see the Taco bell and the McDonald's and the Walmart and the s Western and Douglas, or look through the other side and see the rubble piles and the you know, trash ridden creek beds and all the other stuff on it. On that side. Who was It's not Bill Buckley, but who was the think that the conservative think tank guy that I was affiliated with, the Heritage Foundation. Bennett, Remember Bill Bennett. Bill Bennett, he's involved in politics. Bill Bennett always talked about the Gates test um. When you open the gates, the people tend to come in or go out. You know something, You like that America always passed the Gates test always. North Korea doesn't seem America always passed it on the northern boundary and the northern boundaries sort of. You know this before you go down this path. And I want to get back to hunt COO's deer real quick, you do this. Let's have a let's have a day every year where you can come New America and leave and we'll count everyone here, have the day and then recount. Oh guarantee. I thought you were gonna tell me that somehow you're gonna come up with a lesser number the next day. The interesting thing about that border two is there's people who go back and forth from those two realities every day. That's the thing that they go. They go back and forth the grocery shop to buy parts by car parts. Well, there are kids who are going to school on one side, live on the other, and so that insane reality and which one do you you know, which one do you hold up as the fair one or the one that's more real? Back to back to Sam Houston and how we set those ideas also just shows that even though there's a wall there and a border there and all this stuff that we went through, is that there's they're kind of two parts to something that's together. I mean, it's sort of there's a relationship there that you can't just pretend doesn't exist. Well, that's what we were talking, Steve and I were talking about up how ironic, you know, how we felt at some level getting on the u S side. You felt some sort of calm and safety right the country you live in. Yeah, it's like familiar. Thank god, I'm safe now. But you're just as likely to pull into a parking and get robbed right there in Douglas. Maybe not just as true, it's just likely, but it can't happen. I remember one about that, and I think that Doug. I remember reading something like Douglas is one of the like per like size that winds up the Douglas is one of the safest cities in America. Well everybody, every American who works there, half of them have to work on border security. Yeah, yeah, they all, they all, but yeah, I mean, but but that the reality is that going out at night at two in the morning and at a bar and Douglas is still there's no it's not without danger. But your feeling is that now you're in this safe zone, which really is just a you know, your perception of being on one side of the wall. You can't like check your brain when you get back into the US exactly exactly, just but you feel that you feel like to lay out naked on the side of the road and three the stuff like that. Least I'm not, yeah, at least'm not accupate, but you feel like there's some that calmness that you get from oh, familiarity and safety and all those things. But in reality, that's a relative turn, that's relative to where you are in America, you know. So I don't know, but it certainly visually, you know, you know, when you cross that port and you feel it. There's something about the dogs, the dogs, the main we saw one mangy dog with his head in the trash can in the back end, with the brown with ship and dirt and the front end was white, probably cocaine and sadness, and it was just chewing on a piece of fine old diaper. Uh So, who is dear? Uh Um? We get down to the place we're staying. Thank you, Ben. Yeah, sounds like I feel like Corn McCarthy is here among us. Um it down to hunt. There's an empty ranch house. We're able to set up shop. There's a lot of people coming and going. It's hard to tell what their function is. And that's one of things I talked about all the time, Like when I'm when I'm in America and I see people, I'm like, oh, that's like the drunk uncle figure, right. Or I see someone walking down the road, there's like a look and I look at me like that seems like a guy that broke down. That seems like a guy who had so many d U I s he can't drive anymore. That seems like a guy who's walking his dog. You know what I mean? You just know right when you're really familiar, but just a couple of miles across the boards, like you see people are like, I can't, for the life of me imagine what this person is doing walking down the road and the place you're staying as peacocks, chickens, turkeys that are very clearly across between the Goulds turkey, the Ghoul's wild turkey, and domestic strains, and there are many ghouls turkeys out in this place. And we started hunting first Dame. Right off of that, we went on glass and that night took a quick little tour of the ranch and our tour was hindered by a razor that didn't work, So we're gonna try to drive the whole board of the ranch. We kind of did a half of the north border and I kind of called it quits and went back. So my GPS track that I had on when the when it's a big rectangular ranch, my GPS track after a tour of the ranch described a very small triangle was our tour. It was like an incomplete tour. And that night we went and perched up on some glass and knobs and started seeing a lot of wo's near Yeah. It's so it's this weird whirld when that happens, because you wake up and you go through this sort of like bureaucratic nightmare, and then you drive through a town that makes you just feel like deeply uneasy, influenced by what you hear. You're about the border wars, right, just like all these apprehensions you have, not being welcome, feeling there. Then all of a sudden, you're out in kind of a wilderness, what with fifty miles south thirty miles south, So we're there. I was thinking about that actually, like on that ranch because it hasn't been hunted you know commonly, but they hunt for the pop like it hasn't been hunted by like people who are like really hunting. But the Carols, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll hunt from for meat. But on that same note, though, like that close to the border, that not being a national park or uh you know, like a sanctuary of sorts, we were probably I mean, like the the area that we walked in the land we saw, we were very we weren't there. There hasn't been many people who have walked around on that land. It's like, well it's like wilderness, yeah, but you know what it passes. It passed kind of two tests or two things that sort of always strike me when I'm in a wilder place. One is just a blazingly brilliant night sky. Oh, I mean no light pollution, just the stars just stunning up above and then um a little less so, I mean the stars are really kind of the highlight. But that that's that quiet, that sense of silence, you get it. There's not even a lot of aircraft noise, no dead quiet. I don't think I saw an airplane all week. If you're just the blimp, yeah, the blimp every day. You know. My brother was recently telling me about you talk about the brilliance of the night sky, because he's telling me there's so many planets right, like like an estimate of plants that we can kind of like figure out a it's a number like one, but with twenty for zeros, it's a lot. Yeah, he says that when you understand what that number means. He said, somewhere there is an eight foot tall furry thing that smuggles ship into spacecraft in the spaceship statistically. Yeah, He's like, I'm open to any and all ideas. If there are that many planets a one with zeros on the end of it, that many possible somewhere a Wookie ship called them well to like even today when you were calling in that coy out and I mentioned, Uh, not night necessarily, but the wind reminded me of like old Western Yeah, you just like back in time. There's a couple of differences, like it's like a wilderness but very heavily degraded by cattle. Yeah, the riparian zones. It's just it's like the gloves are off on cattle. Yeah, there's no kind of like effort to fence to to like heavily degraded riperian zones. And there's a limited water. It's dry, dry country, so anything that might have water is like hammered by cattle. And every square inch of the place is cattle country. It's like it's shiploads of exposed rock like outcrops and mountains, lots of cactus and lots of you know, ankle to knee high grass, but all of it grazed. And on top of that, though, I mean, I would guess maybe honest knows better that that area we were in we had a river going through there, so in theory where we were was probably a more water rich. It was the most water I've seen anywhere down there. Yeah, and it's still natural to actually see flowing water like that was the most water I've seen anywhere great heron down there. Yeah, saw wood ducks, redheads, we saw, I saw tree, saw a mountain lion to bobcats, hundreds of deer. Not a lot of quail, though I thought there'd be more. Not one coil jack, saw morning doves, jack rabbits, one cotton tail cottontail numbers done, two gray squirrels. How many times are you in a glassing tail on a high ridge or something? You look across and you could see where one pasture was grazed fence and then there's there's tall yellow grasses, lots of la but the as far as the category is very low stocking ratios, like like not tons of cattle, just like little scattering them because the country is so dry, but good looking cattle for that region from Yeah, yeah, a way to think of this country. I was thinking about how to describe it. Because it's rough on it's rough hiking, because it's it's loose. There's a lot of loose rocks. It's some of the worst hiking I've ever experienced. Imagine a screen field, and I don't know if all of our listeners know what a screw field is, but it's basically where like on the side of the mountain. You just have a bunch of like rubble. It's kind of just it's it's basically a roading off the side of the mountain. But imagine that screen field has just enough dirt in there to produce grass. That's what I feel like. A lot of this is like it's rocky, it's loose. It's like kind of always wanting to slip off in the road, but there's enough dirt in there that there's a grass. You know what I think about it, like, there are very few landscapes on Earth that I'm familiar with where it's way better to walk uphill than downhill. It is much I'm like, normally you're like, sweet, we get to go downhill. Now I am like, damn it, now we gotta go downhill because going downhill on loose lava rock, marble rock. Yeah, going uphill is just nice. It's relaxing. Going downhill, it's kind of like almost like roller coaster mode. Very difficult to be stealthy. There happens to be every tree and bush with a thorn. Everything's arm everything's armed, everything wants to prick. The tall stuff is oktillo, which is a thorn looks like a bunch of bull whips all bound together with thorns on them. Then you got mesquite oak juniper in the bottoms. You have some big it's juniper or not cedar. It's a I think I ain't seen juniper berries. I was looking for that once we kind of had this covers. There are many kinds of juniper. I believe it's a juniper, and I think a lot of people call cedar juniper. I would like to look into it, though, I'm sure someone right now is already writing an email and I welcome, and I will read that something bitch when we get it. Yeah, what else is there? There's what we call century plants, century plants yah yaka, lots of yack, lots of cactus, Troy cactus, cactus. So the first full day hunting happens, and I strike out out onto the land with Ben O'Brien and dirt, and we climb up on a knob and right away just start seeing deer, like a surprising number of deer, more than I thought. You know, in in my I've watched you hunt cus deer. I've watched some other folks on cus deer and talked to a lot of folks about it. It seemed to me like the rule of thumb, as you see few deer and there aren't many big mm hmm. And we pretty much scratched those two off the list in the first two hours. I threw up my knockers, and it was just like, dear, dear, do do do do dear? Yeah exactly, It's like yeah, but to be up. It's such glass dorble country because it's very open and yellow grass. And you get up on a knob and you put down a little pad to sit on, and I got a tripod. I put my razors down the tripod and it's just like, like Yanni says, it almost like it makes a noise as you glash, like blazer, but just like just picking off deer. But we're on this giant glass and tip. I don't know how what the elevation gain was, but it's it's generally there was no probably exactly. I mean, how it was that knob from from from valley to tit how high that first knob? Yeah? No, the no, what the knob that I named the dunk Buck location spot. Yeah, I'd say off the valley floor and you're talking about a river valley with pretty prominent riverbed and then and it's all about five thousand feet above sea level. Yeah, you're starting the high and you can see how many miles? Could we see many? Well? I could see all the way the US borders because you can see the blimps that you can see the surveillance blimps through in the US. If it wasn't for the cuts and the mountains and the different just variations in the terrain, you can see everything. But we could see corrugated lands like implies some kind of order. It's like it's it's like the literal version of a topographic map. It just looks. It's just got lines and divides and just things you can't see into and shadowy ridges and just places that little hellhole, little he choppy, chopping choppy could be good, but you're you're not getting a lot of deeply incised You're not getting a lot of places in a straight line. And when you look at a gully, it's hard to imagine what way the water to flow m hm, because it's so confusing. Oh, you look at a gully from a hundred yards away and you have no idea like the depth or the severe the canyon like nest that it might have, like you just have no idea. You might go across that gully in a hop, skip and a jump, or you might walk up to it and go. It does not look it does not look like country where you would get cliffed out. But there's but because the deer will walk into what you think is a little dinky depression, never to be seen again. Or a bush on a on a wide open hillside walks into that and you look over like, hey, there's a deer, and you look back and it's gone forever, never to be seen the ghost. That was very communication with the um know I thought was chewy though actually portal that's what I was saying. I was saying, they all have trapped doors. They just pull a rope and then there and there and sorry, John, I cut you off. So I was just gonna say that was the thing that kind of surprised me, and it was a lot of funny. It's obviously an optics intensive way of hunting. You know, you've really got to it is glad. It is glad. But the landscape down there there was so much variety. I mean, it's not a monotonous landscape. At all. I mean, between the different types of rocks and grasses and cuts and elevations. It's just, you know, I was never bored looking at this stuff. And there's a gradual shift as you had as you head west, there's a gradual shift for more of a gentler open grassland, the kind of environment in in the nine miles, to a much more rugged, almost semi mountaine kind of country. Um, we struck out upon the landscape, starts spotting off all kinds of deer, and then all of a sudden, pop, here's a little buck, a little dinker buck like a Michigan sex and cuz dear, like real serious cuzars guy, this is like a this is a little bit of digression, real serious cous gear cuz dear Guys like Jay Scott don't count the brow time, and they only count what a has on one side. I once posed to another serious cus gear cu'se dear guy, Cody Nelson from Outdoorsmands. Does the spike have zero antlers? And he said no, a spike is a spike. I said, so it is a fork a spike since you don't count the first one, he said, a fork is a fork. A spike is a spike, A three is a two. Isn't that how they do elevators in England? Do they like the first floor is zero or something? Oh, i'd be all messed up. I don't know, like sweep around the first floor. But we're not. Uh, we just call them all We prefaced it by saying Michigan and then say the number because it's just like you just we're adding them all up. If it winds up being an uneven number, like a five by four, would just say in Michigan nine, What would an Arizona cou'sier guy call it? Four by five? Three by four? Oh that is ridiculous, man. You just take what it actually is and your minus one on each side. There you go. The formulas don't count. They don't. Then they do the same thing on mule here. Yeah, because you don't count brow times on mule deer. These are muled. There's are white tails. You count brow times on a white tail. I hear, I hear a few keyboards right now. You know why you don't count them on mulder because mulder a lot of most mulder don't have them. Then when they do their dinkers, a white tail the longest time on that some bitch's head might be its brow time speaking along brow times the donk the donk Buck. Good one man, Yeah, I'm learning so gold Star, we're up. We move the little dinker Buck. We're looking at the Michigan Sex is agitated about something below him that's out of our view. He's stomping, he's puffing up, and we've both think that he's got a Kyo or a Bobcat down below him, because he's acting like how they act. His tail is up at some level. Two, we've actually seen coosier bucks chase Bobcats, like literally go chase after and run after Bobcats. And he looks like he's dealing with a problem like that. But after a while he realized his posturing and stuff, and also a little pure a pair of dough he doe ears all of a sudden polkes up, and we realized he's worked up about other deer. And it's not like he's running in there to chase other dear away, but he's kind of like on the he's like on the out he's like, Oh, I want to get in there so bad, but I can't get in there. Is what it looks like, and we get to thinking that there's a big stomper out of sight. Wasn't that kind of our primary motivation? Well? Yeah, and he and he his posture looked like a buck. I have a circle in another buck. He came around that bush. Remember he came around on the on the top side of this ridge, and he came around like he was posturing to fight another buck. And we thought, well, for sure, he's there's a big there's a big one bigger than him that he's not. He's not going straight after, so why not go take a look. So we move around to the chief commander of all glass and knobs and get up on there, hoping that it's gonna allow us to peer down into this box little zone. But you couldn't see into his zone. But we do get to look and across the valley and dirt and just deer all over the place and dirt. Myth all of a sudden, just randomly happens to just decided to point his binoculars over in a direction and low and behold game spooking sunglasses, his blue mirrored sunglasses that are designed to scare away animal. Here's a pro tip if you if you go to the gas station, and they have these sunglasses with blue mirrored that may reflect in the sun to look like to fucking disco balls hanging off a tree. Don't buy those, but girls are like legit coasts right. Oh no, those are five dollars to patient, so they were gas I gotta clear fy. Two things though on at this home when I had those half off coast of things. You didn't buy new coasts because there's still a hundo or something crazy have You gotta watch your eyes. You have those gas station ones, but your brand new eyes that you just got all fixed up. No, you're right, you're right at the gas Yeah, it looked like high quality, right, and they feel I mean the polarized I can see. Yeah, they surely are. But like a rainbow, it's like electric blue rainbow smoke signals to the other group. Anyway, he takes those off and classes. But I gotta say there's two things right here. I gotta interject. One, Ben was telling a story I think that brought out the buck. Was a story of such interest. Animals all gather the box like ship. And then two I did. I didn't know what I saw, but I did, And you'll back me on this as like, wait, Ben, hold on one second. I want to hear more of this. But I think I wasn't sure, but there's something special, Yeah, there is something special about He's like I think I spotted a giant. Yeah, and I don't know anything about who's dear. And I pull up the spotter and get on this thing pretty quick, and I was like, well, I gotta tell you I have no education in this in this opinion, but we should shoot that, chase that, and I put it the one up. Yeah, when your glass, what you do is your glasses through knockers on a proferatly on a tripod. Dirt uses a walking stick, but you put the knockers on a tripod. I was running tens ten ten x, meaning it's ten times the magnification of your regular naked eye. And then what you do is you see you dear, and you just kind of like there's a there's a something about their shape, their relative size to other deer that might be nearby, the heaviness of the neck, the way they walk, just everything. There's just something like you look at like that's a buck. All the times you'll also see antler, the sway in their bellies just like you just you look at enough of me just annoy like there's a box, at which point I'll grab out my spotting scope. So you're always going back and forth like knocker spotter, knocker spotter. That being said, at some distances i'd say roughly approximately yards and farther, when you just have the tens or even twelves on them, you're like, man, the body suggests the buck, but I just don't see antlers. And then when you put the spot and scope on them, you're like, not only is it a buck, but man, like a nice box, Like they're just not big critters. Yeah. The spotter I was using is uh, it's like like like a big I mean it's a big, heavy, like an eighty five millimeter objective lens. This is like a sizeable thing. Um, throw that up and I look at this like right away. Because we talked about box, like early on you're talking about buck being a dinker, bucker, shooter buck. It's just sort of like no one really knows at which point there was a point at which they're just like heavy dark antlerd right, Mark Ken, you just say like mature bucks. Yeah, we're not at the type of cous deer hunters yet where we could just immediately be like, oh yeah, one tent yes or one tent no. You know, you just kind of like yes or no. Because but I think that we I think that we call them that when they have that like mature look that they're dark, heavy antlered bucks with a whole bunch of times on them. They're we're generally saying like, oh, that looks like a shooter buck. It's probably about one plus yes, even though we don't know that. You don't know the number. But I'm just saying, if you're gonna apply a narth like there's a point at which to bark all of a sudden. You look, You're like, that's something bitch is the man? Well, it's a big buck. There's a few things right, he's maybe wider than his ears. He's got long brow tigns. Maybe his threes are his G three's are as long as his G two's. You know, there's like little and J. You know, J told us that if it's if it's he's got an eight point frame and he's got an extra kicker too, or he's got some junk on on that's a shooter you know, if he's more than an eight point that a lot of times it's so there's just little things you say, Oh, but wide enough, he's wide enough. There's a type of coups guy, though, there's a type of cous guy who probably doesn't happen fast. He sees the buck and he's got to do like a long analysis for us. It's like in a second, right, like shooter buck, because you don't know, because it's just something about it. You just know it's worth going after. But I looked down at the buck and I'm like, let's go. But Ben's I think, just you know, let's not both goes. Someone's gonna stick around. And I was like the band. I was being all gracious, you know, you go get him banned, and Ben's being all gracious, be like, oh no, I would never. And you know, Steve, I would never. So he sliced a piece of summer sauceage and and marked one side of the summer sausage and flipped it. And I want to flip but can you go more into summer sausage quotations? Actually, oh, dunk So because we're calling it the dunk buck. Gotta have a dunk buck because my brother every year for Christmas gives out um, sometimes two things, sometimes three things. Always he gives you a bag of banana chips that he made in his food the hide rat. And he always gives you a summer sausage that he made from his deer out and he calls it dunk or we've just come to call summer sausage dunk Um. I'll leave you to figure out why one might call summer sausage dunk. So no casing. Some years, that's thing I should point out how he makes it. That it's a fermented sausage. He fermented in his fridge for a while, and when you do it again, when he ferment, it gets doughey. So he rolls out his donk and smokes it uncased. So it's an uncased donk. It's nice, it is good. It's and in some years you'll give you moose droppings that you can burn his incense, because he likes the willowy smell of him. Um. This year it was just banana chips and donk, And so I took a piece of said donk and gouged one side, and you had to call gouged or smooth, and I won the toss and I got to go after the bark, and we made a little signal system. Ben had a green dry bag and he had a red dry bag, and I had a white game bag in a white game bag, and we devised the system by which we would very cleverly say green means go, Red means stop. Interesting and hung it up in a mesquite tree so that while doing my long stock, I could look and if I glassed back to the donk bunk location point, I have now alone, I'm by myself and saw green. Ben was telling me the buck hasn't budged. Everything's cool. If I glassed up and saw red, I would then look at Ben, wave a game bag at Ben. Ben would realize that I'm looking at him through my spotting scope of bronoculars, and Ben would then gesture with another system that would tell me what direction the buck went or forget about it, and I would only gestured the bucks movements. Not what you want. I wanted you to do, very clear system, clear system. And it's challenging because I was up there trying to spot you guys with the binoculars while also making sure that buck didn't sneak down because that buck moves. You never ever quit hearing about it. Because it happened to dirt on another cuise deer hunt to keep an eye on the buck. Yeah, and it went behind a tree, and it's like dirt just watched the tree and we came back there, never moved. It's still back nervous. That deer is still there today. It slipped out because that slipped away because in that in that but that was before he had his eyes fixed. Look at him now, he's just like he said, I don't know, I see nothing but light and dark. I didn't hear nothing now and that the important part of that plane is that I needed to know where you were at all times. So you're talking, You're walking across you know, a sun kiss ridge, behind trees, behind this found a drop antler was standing on nice one. And so every time I'm looking at you, I'm thinking about how I'm gonna screw that bucks walking out of that bush and into the next bush, and I'm screw And every time I'm looking at the bush, I'm thinking, you're probably gonna change your plan and go down to the river bed. I'll never find you again. So I have this very stressful situation going on up on the up on the old tip. We go down the hill, across the creek, get on a little finger ridge, take the fingeradge up and start getting in the zone. I'm looking at this green green green, not green grass. The grass is dead as hell, but I'm looking at the green bag the green means gold thing. And also we jump up a little bucket the dope, and they run like they're gonna run through. And when you when you spook deer, if you're stalking a deer and you spook other deer that run through the deer, what will often happen is the deer we'll get carried off with the other deer like if deer like, if these guys are that upset about something, I'm leaving too. And we spooked the bucket the bucket, don't they run off over the hill And I'm like, damn, they're here, goes that? But I wait and look, and the green means go was still green. And Ben had watched it all play out. Oh and those deer ran from wherever you spooked him, which you know it was probably five yards away from that that bucket behind that bush, dip down over the ridge. He was on ran right towards him, pulled up at about ten yards, cut back up the hill, and we're gone. He never budged, He never budged, And at this point I'm thinking I pulled a dirt. At some point, buck snuck out, He slicked out of the because if he was in there, he would have been gone. Because of course, you know, a buck like that's gonna see too dear freaking out, and he's gonna do do something similar. He's gonna stand up and look around and and move places and get to a safe spot or whatever. This tear just stayed. And there's a magical thing that happens when you're when you're going after something you spotted far away in spots star hunting, where you're like you out of far away to have to sneak up on it where you have like an understanding of the landscape that is far from right. It's like you can understand it from a perspective and it's sort of and it makes sense to you spatially, but when you get over there, it's like it's it's it's a it's this alternate reality, like this is not how you envisioned it, but this is one of those cases when that did not happen. I got there, I was like, because there's some orange, just like these orange round patches of a different kind of vegetation, of different grass. Everything lined up, and once I saw the green and I started getting the zone, I'm like, this all makes like like magically, somehow this is all understandable. Still, like here's that thing I remember. Remy warrant will take cell phone pictures before heading off on a stock He takes cell phone pictures through the spot and scope or whatever of the area. However he does it depending on how far away is. He takes cell phone pictures of where he's headed. So later when he gets also you and and you're like, damn it, I cannot it. This doesn't make This is not how I pictured it being over here. He'll refer to his cell phone pictures and he'd be like, oh, it was a dead snag that I didn't think to log. But I'm always trying to get in my head like okay, there's a century plant, those are this, as that, there's a rock shape like this, just as little reminders, but it still doesn't work. But this time it did. I get over I'm like, oh, this is like everything's exactly like how I pictured it. And there's the bush that that buck is hiding under, and Ben's telling me green and so it's like somehow I'd made it all the way over there and was perched up two yards above him with a green bag and knowing the bush but not seeing he was still buried. Right, It's been an hour at this point since we've seen the deer, and it's almost like a non story. I started creeping over, creeping over, creeping over, and I had my little shooting fork on my tripod and creeping eepen more and more of the bushes coming into view, and eventually and I knew would probably have because it was like I was in very tight Like the outdoorsman's boys they say, when you get within three yards of a coused DearS zone, he's going to know you're there, he's gonna bust you. And I was well within his in his zone, and um or like you gotta be extra cars or it's like it's like when you get within that three yards zone, it's time to really buckle down and pay attention to what you're doing. And pretty soon he like stood up because he sent something wasn't right and it was just that was it? Big huge giant buck. I gotta say too, like a real honest, big huge giant buck. Gorgeous, the donk, the donk buck, the dunk buck. On that note, like you're saying that it worked out, I'll put a picture that up in the show notes if you want to look at the big, huge giant bar. The difficulty of seeing an area through optics and then trying to pick it out when you get there. I feel like, and this is more a question you guys, actually that ranch because maybe it's hunting the couse deer. Something in the mix makes it even more difficult to judge distance in like space where we just were the last week than other areas, because stuff that's close it's actually farther away than you think it is. Stuff that's far away is much closer than you think it is. Yeah. Yeah, because there's a division that happens that around six or seven hundred yards where ain't do you see? Like, how is that some bitch four yards away? It seems like he's two hund yards away. But a knob a rock a mile away, You're like, that must be a mile away. In fact, it's a half mile away. See, it's like a distancy kind of weirdness. Yeah, so just like share any details about your buck. That's unexplainable. But that happened multiple times this week at that knob you shot your buck from. John, I was like, that's a couple hundred yards, no three, ye looks close. And then we'd be Ben and I were looking at a bug and we're like, it's so far away. We range it yards. We could never get there in a full day. Let's take us hours. I hikes. I don't know. I don't I can't begin to understand it, like why that happens. Barry Lopez talks about it in the Arctic and Arctic dreams about how distances like he talks about people. Um, he talks about a hunter stalking a grizzly that turns out to be a mormot. I always talked about like prairie this. You know, we weren't on a prairie, but prairie depth perception. I've never had it. He's stalking up an antalopen wyoming, crawling across the prairie and look up, like, y'all, he's two hundred yards and he's and he's a hundred yards. I think he's eight hundred. I don't. I don't know size reference. Yeah, the artic dreams. He also talks about a guy who thought he's looking at a walrist once a black and two white tossed. What he's actually looking at is a headland of rock with two glaciers coming down the side of coming down. The depth perception for me, for me on this hunt, you know, a lot of it. It was just the foreignness of the landscape. You know, where I live. I'm not looking at century plants, I'm not looking at okatillos all the time. I'm not looking at these things. And so my ability to kind of get a feel for the distance is pretty bad. And pluses a shooting guy, a gun guy, I mean most people's you know, I'm I'm lost at sea without a range finder in terms of precise shooting, and I think most people vastly overestimate their ability to correctly identify a yardage. Oh, I mean unaided, Yeah, unaided, you know, And this was this was certainly a case. I mean I was full time and time again with the distances on the side. Yeah, how many times was there? It was there a pinnacle or a pyramid? Ridge with ten different fingers that were going in different directions, and some of them were fully shaded, some of them were half shaded them, so they made them look deeper than they might have been. And you thought, oh, that's that's a thousand yards and turns out toothousand. And the early thing is everyone here has spent their whole life looking at normal white tails. Yeah so you got that right fixed in your head. But these things are half the size. Yeah yeah, yeah, and way to put that perspective. We're looking at John's head when you brought your head out in the back of the ranger. There. I mean that full grown, mature buck's head. If you to take off his antlers, it looks like a fawn. The skull is petite nose on it, you know. Yeah, alright, man, I'm begging everyone to go check out a pair of Danner Stronghold work boots if you want to see what the future of work boots looks like. Now. 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We can we can absorb it. That two coronas uh hopped Corona extra came from Mexico. Um, there's just a weird you're talking about when I shot my buck, just a weird beauty. To those animals like they're coloring is such a difference. There's sleek, sleek, the gray ghost, the gray ghost. But they didn't have their gray winter coats yet, not a lot of them, because the gray ghost becomes very gray soon. They were more like a brown ghost, still very apparition like, but they weren't the gray I saw both. I definitely had I was glass in doze sometimes where you could tell one was definitely a browner shade of deer and one was a gray because the dog bucks still had a red tail. Yeah he didn't have his great coat. Yeah he wasn't the gray ghost. A transition almost seemed to happen just in that seven days as far as the rut started. Yeah, Al Giganta had it like a red tail too, same same had a red tail. Yeh Um. John and I were hunting together all week, and I think on the third day, is the third or fourth day, we struck off. The ranch is divided by the highway, and so we struck off to the east side of the highway and uh diferent like four miles in a pie shape. Yeah. I wish you guys would have gotten to see it, because it was definitely interesting to see different topography, like all long ridges running the whole length of that four miles, and much less vegetation. Still a lot of grass, but not the as many oak tillos, oaks, cedars, junior pers, whatever you wanna call it. Just open, you know, and we get up there. Uh, we're on time this morning where we needed to be at at daylight, and uh, John and Bates are looking one direction. I go and look over the other ridge and it's so open. I felt like they're and John correct me if I'm wrong, But I feel like you could just you felt like you were seeing everything that was there to see, like you weren't like, oh man, it's got there's like all these hidden pockets where these deer might be, just so open that in the first twenty minutes I had twenty deer, which is unheard of for a cuse deer hunting. I feel like I had never seen that me dere one morning because it's they're all in the open, they weren't hiding. And we saw one. I thought it kind of sucked over there, even though you shot a nice buck, well, yeah, let me finish. So we saw what we we thought was a shooter buck and it was on the neighbors property. Beeto got his permission to go on the neighbors We started hiking towards it, and before we started hiking, I'm telling Beato exactly where it is and how far we're going to go to go around where the bucket is, to get on the backside to look into where he went into and he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, no problem. Beato likes to say no problem him. I'm like, all right, let's go. So we go like across one good canyon and this side. I'm like all right, Beato, like over there, see that that's where the buck was. We need to get on the back side where like when you see there was like some man's in needed trees or something. I'm sorry, that's not right ski trees. Man's need is like, is it a tree? What do you call man's anita bush bush? There's no man's in needed there, there's mesquit trees. And he's like, oh, that's where that buck was. Yeah, too far. We just turn around him and as he started heading back towards John and uh, from there on out, I think we glassed up. We had kind of a long afternoon session and we and Beato glassed up. But maybe a buck and two dolls, right, Yeah, it definitely it definitely got slower. It was great looking country though, Like you said, we had these long ridges that we could kind of a lot of them. You could see on both sides of them and down pretty deep, and that was kind of in contrast to the other side of the ranch where you had all those mystery pockets. It felt like this Poe if he revealed itself a little bit more like most your only looking at what's there exactly, and what it revealed was no dear for me. Yeah, definitely felt like is he pretty good at glass? Oh yeah, he definitely glad. Yeah. Um, he felt like lower density, but possibility for El Gagante for sure. So that made that means the giant I believe. I don't speak Spanish, but so we yeah, burned up the afternoon and then come evening, John and I decided we're gonna cut across a canyon to another ridge we can't get the ranger too, and then basically sort of still hunt walk peering down into these small bowls and have Bato pick us up at the bottom of the ridge. Well, we get all the way over there and takes us I don't know, thirty minutes. It wasn't like a monster hike, but it was, you know, some effort. We crawled up this hillside that where we waded through claw that was it wasn't like the stuff that was like the the you know, knee high and like kind of space you can kind of pick a path, I mean it was nipple deep and thick. Just okay, pierce in your nip, screw it. I gotta just plow through it and just take it like a man, you know, covered in deer. Ship though a lot of deer people on that hillside. We saw those coyotes up top. That's right. We get to the top. Mantel calls us on the phone. He's like, no, I don't know how he had figured it out if he was over there working Google Our Earth on his phone. But he's like, the road that's on that ridge that you guys are on, I can't get to. It comes from another ranch. You guys an have to come back. I can't get over to you guys. I'm like, all right, we're gonna hunt out here anyways. So we continue hunting down the ranch or down its ridge, looking both sides, and uh, did we see We didn't see another a single of the deer, I don't think right. No, Yeah, I saw the badger monkey. So yeah, we glass that bag mondy, that's cool. This is single. I seemed like you usually seen a little groups three or four or a whole ship loader, you know. Um, But it was getting later. It was definitely not quite sunset, but getting close and we basically had we were at a spot where we could see a couple of bowls. Um, we just didn't have where we were hunting. It wasn't just the giant vistas where you'd want to just sit and just spend three hours glassing. You know, you kind of had to keep moving because you were just seeing three to four hundred yards and you have to just pop over the next knoll and see another bowl that was three yards and keep on. Yeah, the ridge kind of zigs out. The ridge had an s curve to it, which because every time like skiing down the hill, m m, it's gonna have been a pretty lame ski run the way we were going, and it had been more just like yeah, that's right, we did some in Yeah, John self arrested. I need that would out. We uh, we have like one like we have like we're like, okay, we've got enough time, like go over and like let's pick one more bowl and we'll go and sit there. And we've been looking at the stuff that we couldn't quite see. So we had a um. The rich sort of had a false bowl in it that we had to like cross at the head of and then we'd be on a spot where we could, you know, glass some new country. Can I point out this is not how you're supposed to hunt COO's dere Yeah, although even Ja was telling me that this ranch and in general, because of its choppiness. He's like, you guys might just have to move around a little bit more and maybe thirty minutes on each glass and knob um just to cover it, because there's no way you can. There's just not the knob to sit on the way you can just see it all, you know. And uh, I don't know what held you up, but I'm like, yeah, let's just go over here and we maybe I only had to go eight yards, We're gonna sit down. Some reason you stayed back, I don't know, maybe just put some gear away in your pack or something. It could be just fat and slow, but yeah, and he's like, yeah, maybe you seared to put away. I had to do some push ups. We weren't running anywhere. We just we're just glass and wherever John was coming from so or something. I was just looking down. But yeah, creep over there, and luckily I had mine creeping hat on and uh, because it's so easy to do and We've all done it where you just like walk right up to the edge of that ridge and peer over. You're like, oh shit, you know a bunch of white tails blown out exactly. And I just craft over there and you know, over the edge, and there's a buck staying there not far away, a hundred yards or less, and uh, he's looking away from me. Glass him. And I'm packing eights and twelves because I like to have my eights on my chest for like for this exact situation, but I like to have the twelves. So I'm sitting down and starting a laser distant hillside like, yeah, I want to see. My plan was to go down with tens and twelves, but some insane baggage handler dude, I pulled out my twelves packing and hadn't read the last time I came home. It looks like someone must have taken a fork truck and drove over my twelves. I just send him back to Vortex getting fix like ben I cups and stuff like you have the metal. I don't know what happened. It was like something bad happened coming home from somewhere and I didn't realize and just put them back where they belong. Right, So I was only down there with tens solimente, So it goes, is there right, tens only? Yeah? See? Oh wait wait, So I'm feeling pretty lucky to have caught this buck. And he said, you know, good looking buck, because he wanted to shoot her way within his zone. Way. I'm in there, but I can tell he's something's guy's attention below him. He's like, very fixated on something down below. And look over my shoulder and eight yards away I can kind of see John coming, and I'm like, what on earth is at this moment? Why is he way back there and not right with me? Why is he doing push ups back there now? Exactly? It's not the time. I'm not sure if you heard me counting, I've done a hundred push ups back here. So I'm watching the buck and he's motionless, staring down the hill. I'm like, all right, I've got some time. And finally John, I see John, and I'm like, you know, I'm the beaving my arms. Come on, come on with the universal gesture to means I've found a box. Yeah, and I think he sees me. I go back to looking at the box and I watched the buck put on the ten seconds. I look back at John and John's like still that kind of creeping towards me, and I'm like no, like now, you know. And obviously you hadn't seen my first gestures because you would have been running, I think, right. But the other thing I'll just point out is that you seem to forget that you had a deer tag yourself. Yeah, and what did you do when you started chasing the deer? You left your pack in your rifle? Yea. As soon as I saw the deer, I took off my pack and which I had my rifle strapped to it, just to be ultra light weight and sneaky, you know, because you wanted to sneak up on the deer without a rifle? Is that how you hunt COO's deer? Where was your back when I saw him? I just dropped it, just thinking that I was gonna be because you were thinking you're not gonna be the guy that shoots. Yeah, that's like seeing a delicious steak and like dropping your fork and walking over to it, like no, because he's thinking he's not the guy that's gonna shoot. Yeah, I'm gonna give John the opportunity. I don't know that, you know. I mean, uh, I thought we were like hunting like buddies, like everybody was hunting, like everybody was, you know, and it wasn't matter you Steve Man, I would have been like, come here. Yeah, And well, actually the subcontext of this is both I'll let him finish the story, but basically neither of us wanted to be done hunting. So he tried to trick me into shooting this deer the only day three a big n a big night. It was not a big, huge giant buck with a big buck. Well, you know what, I never saw the animal though. I mean, this is this is this is part of the thing. So he's sneaking up there and he's gesturing me over like he's on fire and I've got to put him out, and okay, creep up there, and he's like the books right below us. He's like, can you shoot off hand at seventy five yards? And I'm like, yeah, I can do that, can you. He's like, well, I can see the buck and I'm like I can't, you know, because he's six inches taller than me and he's downhill from me, and the whole very handsome, very very wig wa The border lady smells nice more importantly sneaky because the buck, while we're doing this the first time, being gracious to each other, the buck moves across the hill. I lose sight of him, and so we had to then back off the ridge a little bit, and we circle around maybe forty fifty yards and start to do the peak over again. At that point, I'm thinking, like I screwed the pooch because I got lucky the first time. How the hell am I gonna creep over now and at seventy yards pick him up before he picks us up? You know, it's like I would be thinking that would be hard to do, especially when you're up a bum because you're like then, like then, only people being above more blown. Yeah, But luckily whatever was below him when we peek back, I don't know never saw. Maybe, like Turner. Turner once said, if they're ever gonna catch me, they're gonna they're gonna have to bait that trap with a word that starts P. It could have been possum, It could have been a dough down blow. But he was leaving that whatever it was bothering when he was leaving it, so I don't know me that you should have had some donk. It should have flipped. That's what I would have said. Let me get some donk out and a knife, and I'm gonna go cut off a coin and gouge one side and we'll settle this. Like, man, we didn't have time for that. We're in tight. Yeah. So anyways, we pick him up again and he's we can range the tree behind him, it's like one thirty something, and he looks to be a good bit closer, so you know, I thought he was. Well, we ran down there after him. It only took us seconds to run down after we after I finally hit him. It took you seconds. It took me about four minutes, but I was running. So yeah. Finally John's like, yeah, you could shoot my gun. I'm like, okay, you onto twist my arm too much. I'll shoot your gun at this buck. Why are you guys swapping out guns now? Because I left mine. I left my path far away, just fifty yards, but again we're seventy yards in this book. You knowver leave your pat that's true. Never leave your pack. Great advice, because you just don't know how this is gonna wind up. You don't. You don't. Well, I thought I was gonna force John into shooting this box. Didn't work. I feel like I want to clear I want to just get some clarity on something. I feel like you, John are trying to say that there's something else going on. And it wasn't just Yanni being generous about who's shooting at the buck. Yeah, I mean, I think we were both having a really good time on this hunt. And you know, we were being at least I was being a little selected. We had seen so you think Yanni was like, this looks like a great buck for you, buddy. No, No, I know. I actually I'm not going to accuse Yanny of that. I don't think he was trying to like give me a sub Yanni buck. But I do think but I do think that he was in guide mode all of a sudden, like just conveniently leaving his rifle elsewhere, and you know, wanted me to pull the trigger so he could keep hunting. And you know how it is when you don't get to carry on a rifle anymore. And for me, I was having I can't overstay, you know, like like all of us, you know, I get to hunt a lot of places and this kind of hunting, this beautiful country, this glassing intensive thing, looking for these elusive creatures, and they are they're weary animals. I mean some of like your hunt. You know, you got up on them, perfect man. That's not how it usually plays out. You know. Well, I point I have a hunter accused your five times and I've gotten to week long. There you go. And there was another example from the day before when Yanni got his deer, and you know, I was up on a big knob we were watching. I spotted a pretty good buck about seven yards away, and Yanni had gone off to check out a ridge on his own, and you know, he was probably at least a good thousand yards from that bucket. When he was working his way back over to my position, that buck popped up his head, looked at Yanni and didn't panic, but it was like, you know what, that cushion doesn't feel good to me, even from a thousand yards, got up out of his bed, was looking at him, and he had a little little buck buddy with him. They just kind of slowly ambled and drifted away, you know. And and that there just shows you these are these are very wary smart creatures. And the day before I shot my buck, you had spotted a good buck and we put the stock on him, kicked up a deer that went right by the buck we were trying to kill, and instead of this buck just laying there watching him stream by, he's like, well, if they're running out, run into see you later. There's two kinds of bucks in this world. There's bucks that see everybody running around getting all excited, and they're like, that is a good way to get shot, running around getting all worked up about nothing. I'm gonna lay tight until I see, Yeah, when I see the problem and I determined that it really is a problem, then I will decide to move. And then there's bucks who are like, if something's bothering them, I'm gonna play it safe and actin that bothers me too, and trust that day right. And I think each type of buck can get killed by his own perspective. The buck I got should have been the kind of buck who sees trouble and says me too, not the kind of buck who says, I'm gonna wait and see how this plays out before I go, burning all my calories up for nothing. Because if I ran every time someone ran, all I'd ever do is run around him and gotta be shot by gun by now. So anyhow, there you are, there we are, And I take John's gun and like I said, seventy to eighty yards and I gotta shoot all panks of a bunch of grass. Like crouch down. You can't even see the deer. If you kind of get a SENDI crouch you can see his head you stand up the full eagle. Yeah, you can pretty much see his body. But even then there's some stuff, and so like look through the sculpe, I'm like, man, there's too much stuff. I crank up the sculpe a little bit and there's still too much stuff. You can't go to the scope a little bit more, and I can finally like pick the lane through the stuff. Right, instead of it being all fuzzy, I can now see a few occaateos. Mostly I could see a lane. And you know how when you crank, as you crank the sculpe up, your aim gets worse as short ranges. Yeah, right, and maybe Johnny you can speak to why that happens, because you see you realize just how shap how much shape you have, right, Yeah, And there are a whole bunch of reasons. That's one of them, that that perception of wobble when you crank it up. I shoot most things at very low power, all things considered, you actually had a good you're explaining it now, you actually had a pretty good reason to turn up your power a little bit. But the problem is is that you get that extra amount of wobble, so you start to overcorrect and just kind of, almost on a subconscious level, second guess yourself. The second thing is is the higher you go up in that magnification, you're shrinking your field of view. So when you take that shot and you lose your site picture under recoil, you've made it much harder for yourself to to reacquire exactly. And you know, you when you hunt enough that being able to get a sense of what that animal has done after the shot can make a huge, huge difference. So yeah, I mean, lower magnification is is the way to go. And part of it is, you know, you shoot enough, you learn to trust your cross airs. You know, at at four x, for example, it's a good like general kind of power to keep a scope on. You know, if if that even though the cross ears look like it's dominating the deer's vitals. You know. Our eyes have a really great ability to kind of just center those things symmetrically, you know, And if you get it in there and you just trust in it, it's gonna work. That is the point of aim. You don't have to jack it up to twelve power or whatever the top end is. You're not really making things more accurate. In fact, you're kind of setting yourself up for potential problems by doing that. I walk around with mine on very low often thinking because if you kick something up for something, all things right there in your face, you can find it in a hurry. Absolutely, I don't crank mine up and sown. I'm like laid down ready to shoot, and it's a long shot. Then I'll crank it up. Yeah, if you need that extra magnification, you will always have time to dial it up. So it's you know, you never need a whole bunch in a hurry, but you oftentimes need not much in a hurry. Absolutely, So there you are there, I am too much power, and I'm seeing the wobbles. So this is gonna get interesting. This is a little trick that you try that doesn't work very good. It eventually worked. But I had read somewhere that I don't I forget who it was. Might have been Van's wall. Yeah. That like as opposed to just trying to like put the crosshairs in the middle and then trying to hold them there and fighting the wobbles, it's sort of better to like come into the zone and sort of pick a direction to be moving through your where you want to hit, and then squeeze the trigger. Right do you understand when you say right? Do you mean do I understand? You understand what I'm saying? I understand. Okay. I missed twice doing whatever I'm doing. Yeah, and then the third time I just took a little maybe a little bit deeper breath and uh hit him. How is this buck letting you be that close blouching away and racking rounds? I wish I had that. I had Bucks looking at me for three or fifty yards away the whole week. To ye Credit didn't know we were there. Was it dusky, very light? Light was dropping. But to Yannie Credit, he worked the bolt on the gun quickly. It's not like he shot and then waited a few seconds. He's like he's working lever action. Yeah. He I think he knew he was just kind of given the deer a couple of extra chances. I don't know what it was. He like, Jerry Cloward. Man, I mean, look, man, I messed twice. I mean full on. I mean, if that buck would have ran on the first one, I don't. I mean, who knows. Maybe he would have run a hundred yards and stopped and I would have been able to take a knee. Actually, you know what I can you missed. I know why he missed because he wasn't aiming at it right. Well, there was that, But I also up when I handed him the rifle. You know, I said, look, the trigger pull on this is fairly light, you know, and you know, so I think what happened is is he's bringing it up. You know, he's starting his little trigger press. It's sort of as he's doing his quail pull through a rising teal or whatever it was. And I think he just trip the trip the trigger a little too quick, because it's got a fairly light, crisp trigger on that gun. I'm gonna start calling it, even though he doesn't remember where it came from, start calling it the Yannie that that method, that method that way to miss. It's called a yanni. So but John, speak to that. There is some right we've talked about this. You said it's maybe not like pulling through, but you said there's like a figure eight thing where it's opposed to like trying to hold one figure eight into this. Instead of holding one spot, it is better to sort of cross the bull's eye. The part of the thing is is that you hold it when you're shooting off hand unsupported. You cannot hold those cross hairs dead steady. You're just flat out can't do it. So you're gonna be dealing with radical wobble if you try to hold it straight on like we're talking about. Typically, what you get is that figure eight motion that you're talking about, and that naturally happens. And what you have to do is you have to be comfortable with that and not get essentially, train yourself not to be nervous about it, and learn to shoot when that figure eight is crossing where you want. What you're doing, Actually, what you're doing isn't fully wrong. You know. I would say it's seventy five yards on a deer sized thing. Though you can pull that thing up and you have enough time just to kind of snug that thing into your shoulder, you know, and it will steady there for a second, focus hard, and shoot like you don't have to overthink it. Um. Yeah, but the idea of coming up with the idea is to come up and stop. And I don't know, maybe you guys kind of know that trick from bow hunting too. You know, that's a bow hunting way of dropping your pin, you know, you know, settling your pin on an animal. You go and stop, you know, you you either pull you know, pull it up onto the animal or drop it down. And that's the way to kind of hold get your pins steady. So there is some precedent for that technique, but um, honestly, at that distance, you just want to put it on it and shoot the damn thing where my figure eight thing that that description is run. Layton Um was a door gunner in Vietnam, and he likes to talk about the problem with running that M sixty out of the door was that it would drift from the recoil, and he learned to control the drift shooting as them sixty by by giving into it mm hmmm. And he said he would always run figure eights over his targets. He hate to be a target in Franz. Yeah, him running figure eights over you. Yeah, and of course it s shounded rounds a minute too. You've got some extra lee with here too. You're not buying the ammo. So all of a sudden, what so yeah, third one hits him. Yeah, there wasn't that much. It wasn't it was, Yeah, and uh we can tell his his ascent drops. He's kind of like going away from us, and he disappears almost instantly, and uh, kind of Turkey esque style. I just you know, take off Marylon down the hill as though going after it hit Turkey. Yeah, because last thing I saw was him like moving away, and it kind of looked like he might still have his front legs, you know, and after missing twice, you know, it wasn't like fully confident about weren't feeling coy. But we run down there and he's stone cold dead, double long graveyard dead. Graveyard would say, oh my god. It looked like the blood trail looked like somebody took a gallon of red paint, and just yeah, no, third time is the charm. Yeah. If mine was a big, huge giant buck, yours was a big huge buck. Yeah t bit not as big huge giant as I couldn't mean we will put pictures up to show, No, I would. I would happily trade you right now. I always likes time about made with Ben. It's like kind of nice to incrementally build up too, you know, two bigger animals, because you kind of always have like the next step to look forward to. You know, once you shoot two under niche mule here, you may never get to see another one that big. Let alone shoot at one. I had to reset. I had to reset, And now I'm going back down the other directions I'll shoot. I climbed up. Now I'm climbing down. I'm gonna start with forkers and backup. Um so, yeah, the story gets a little we we make quick work of, uh chopping them up, get him into backpacks and uh remember we crossed this canyon earlier to get over there to this ridge we're hunting. Well, we're now maybe half mile down the ridge and Veto and the ranger are right across from us. He was he was able to move the yeah down his ridge, and I mean we can see him seven yards away because we had done the site and go thing on the GPS, which really quickly is basically you point the GPS and lock a direction towards the target and your range find it so you know exactly how far it is, and you can put those two pieces of data into your GPS and project the way points so that later, whether it's an animal or a ranger or whatever, you can find it. So we're at the top of this hill. I'm like, yeah, John, let's just bang off this thing right down across the canyon on the other side. Yeah. Well, we get down after going through a caf we get down to a bench and all we have to do is cross what looks to be a little bitty canyon and up the other side and back in the ranger driving home and uh, we start looking at the edges canyon and it's there's it's like a pret steep drop off. But then we find a little crease. I'm like, well, you know, mother Nature's a little crease. Should just crease it's right down the Well. We get down in there and it's, uh, it gets deeper and steeper, and when there's the rocks that are trickling below is are kind of rolling rolling, and then there'll be a second pause then, so it's not looking good, and I'm I kind of peel off to the right a little bit to see if I can find a way down. And all of a sudden, I here like, oh ship, you know, and I look over and John is now sliding down the slow crease and I'm like, please, dear guys, and stop. Do not want John to go over the edge. And uh yeah, did you grab something find only to stop or just just dig your heels and no. I I clenched the ground so tightly with my butt. She it was like a bs. What happened was we were on it was a very steep I don't know what the grade is on that, but this is the you we alluded it to. We alluded to it before with like the screen, like the marble like quality. You know, this is kind of like rotten ground, you know, I mean, just the dirts loose. And I had managed to dislodge pretty good, like about a pumpkin sized boulder behind me that took my legs out from under me. And you know, I was and I ended up. I probably only slid twenty or twenty, but man, it lasted a long time. And you know, just whatever, I just clawted everything to stop and did it before I went down and over the edge. And at that point I lost enthusiasm for for Yanni's navigational and so he's usually pretty good. So we went up and down not far but a hundred yards in each direction. Nothing looked like it was gonna get any better. It just looked like we were just on top of this king and basically with you know, steep walls. And instead of going the Explora Tory methany farther, we decided to let's take fifteen minutes and walked back up the hill. We just came down and walk basically exactly the same way out that we had come in. Because we know that we can do it. It won't be any surprises. Just followed a little red line on the GPS. Who was carrying all the butt meat? I was, and I gave John all my gear um and uh yeah, So we did that in about two and a half hours later, we caught up with Beat and drove home. Yeah. I talked about then by the time you guys got back, I thought you'd been beheaded and dissolved the bed of acid. The only explanation here is that that was the most stressful part of the trip for me, and I was like, should we just make dinner for us? Even without the detour, it would have been a good hour, you know, pack job. Well, it's it's rugged country, and it's funny because we got back and you know, finally got within striking distance to the razor. So the dim dim headlights on that thing. The headlights on things are like on a model T. You said, it's like driving my candlewights. It sort of like mood lighting. And I thought, for sure, like what I was like, salvation is at hand. You know, there's the there's the razor, and we jump in this thing, and you know, I sort of just I like driving those things. So I'm sort of appointed myself as the designated driver. And we take off and I go maybe twenty yards and I all of a sudden hit this ditch. That damn your flips the thing. Yeah, it drops like two wheels into a ditch to where the wheels don't touch the bottom of it. We're kind of high centered and luckily those things it was a six wheeler ranger and you put into six wheel drive and it climbed right out of here. But it's kind of one of those deals where you're like, oh, the adventure is over right home. Like I'm telling you, it's ruthless country man. There's no there's no escape. It is raw, rugged country. That's that's huge part of the appeal of it. Yeah, Okay, I now need to install a sort of montage. I'm gonna tell a quick story that serves the function of a montage. In the movie. Um, Ben and I have grow curious about the Southwest Corner, the Wild Southwest Corner, the Wild Corner, and we head in there, um and just start tearing it a new one with the Buyos and find like the homeland. Ben said, I feel like we're now in their bedroom or something like that. Yeah. When we sat down in the first I felt unbelievable monster bucks running every which way. To refer to the to the location of the dunk Buck tit as kind of like overlooking their lands. By the time we got into the middle of the Southwest Corner, we were on the back porch. We were there. We could smell them. Yeah, we could smell him. We're in there in the southwest quadrant. Yes. I also want to add in this montage, there's also a moment after which we encounter a bucket another area called El Surpriso, and we grow very interested in ell SURPRISEO. But that's Spanish for the surprise we leeve believe. We grow addressed in the Surpriser ll surprisal, bump them, get up on a way high perch, and devote a whole day to trying to relocate them. Don't get sick of looking at that area, and decided to explore the Southwest quadrant. Go back to the Southwest Quadrant, discover buck Land. The next day, decided to go back and maybe try to find else Surprise Oh again because he still haunting us. At which point John and Yanni move into the Southwest quadrant Shangarlat they find two that is loaded with with bucks in in the other deer, and then more stuff happens, and then we decided to go back into the Southwest quadrant and really tear it the new one where everybody's going in and we're gonna glass the dickens out of it. John, well, you we're getting frustrated with me. I think had punted with you know what the things because you're Mr Picky, because your Mr Picky. All I hear about all the giant bucks. These guys see here, see He's like, how far away was that? Dear here? A hundred five in? How far away wasn't a thousand yards? What's wrong with that? What? Like? Mr? Shooting Editor? I thought you could shoot. It was like just all these barts went around just love him in there. I have to admit I was loving this hunt so much. I just didn't want it to be over. And I feel like time time bore you out. That's all you could say, you were proven right. I was, I was proven right. Well, here's what happened, is is that that first time that Yanni and I encroached on your guys country, you know, we did see a couple of really intriguing bucks, and there was this one buck. A matter of fact, as soon as I saw him, I think I was like, that's l Gigante. I think that's him, you know, And I got super excited about him, and uh and Yannie sort of put him in his spotting school because I didn't have a spotter. I just had my fifteen power banc. Did you guys introduce I'm just trying to move stuff long I did, I'll get you. I don't want to get into el Gagante. Well, I brought in that there's l surprise though, Okagante, I did a montage sort of thing, and now here we are because so now it can't be six days long. Like so anyway, I see this one, good good buck and uh but yeah, he sort of talks me out of it. To be honest, he's like, he's like, yeah, he's okay. When you guys, you guys named him a misleading name. When I heard the century buck, I thought, man, that you could glass bucks for a century and only find one that looks like that. I thought he was a hundred inches. But it turns out the century buck just happen to be raking his antlers on a century plan. So I'm thinking, wow, a once in a century occurrence. It's like, yeah, yeah, John still can't commit This cow's deer levitated the plane. I'm like, this guy doesn't even want a once in a century buck. No I did. I did. I got super excited about him, and I think I saw him later that day and I made a I made a move on him to go to go go after him. You know, he was chasing a dough and I got just the paris glimpse of his antlers, and I'm like, I'm going to go make a movement. So I moved off the knob and did the quick up and down and tried to find him and couldn't and uh. And later that evening we saw another nice buck up and I made a move on him, and the normal identified crab claw. Yeah, so this was crab claw. And I got to with him three d and fifty yards of him at absolute last light. But he was I didn't get because I didn't have the spine scope. I didn't get the greatest look at him. He was bedded facing the way and I couldn't tell if they were vegetation, so I had to not not go after it. Um. But then the next morning ended up connecting. The next morning, last day, we're on day six. Now we're we're you know, Ben and I still don't have our tags down to the wire. Down to the wire we we take. So we're gonna take the secret road in or the better road, and so we take the better road in to get into a better spot and put the full court breaths put put the full court. So we go in there to get into an even better spot than we've been and ended up right back where we were before somehow, and this was put. Every time you step out the door, what time we usually take off out of there? Try to leave it six you're gonna go spend. You're gonna be on the glass and knob till six. Yeah, it's an all day poll. You you spend every time you step out the door, You're gonna spend twelve hours on an old glass. I mean all of us spent seventy two hours hunting cooes, deer and one way shape or form. Yeah, seventy two hours on the knob. That'd be a good name of a book on the knob on the Kno, Well, we got our on the knob between two tips. Well, and you call them knockers. Yeah, yeah, And you see your buddies got a nice pair of board texes. I go, nice knockers, nice pair of knockers. Knocks. It's short for buying knock you alert. I'm just trimming out the knock, but by knocker or knockers knocks, knockers knocks. It's like this. I recently met a guy who runs lions in Mexico, and and and I heard him it's like how language works, right, And I heard him talking about um. He would describe what you'd see a lion track, and he'd say, I thought he was saying, that's a mondo track. I thought he knew a Spanish word. Mando was a Spanish word that means like toad or pig or something big. It'd be a fun game to go around the room. Oh, can can I do two die? Like? Can I do a triple digression? Hold the thought about mindo. When I was in college, I read a paper where a sociologist. The sociologist had men in the room, had a group of friends from a fraternity in a room and tasked them with listing all the names they knew for male genitalium, and likewise took a bunch of sorority sisters and tasked them with generating a list of all the terms they knew for male genitalium. The male list was saying such as the emperor, coach at the president, a commissioner, and the female list was things of a much. It was more like like um, like like disgusting, diminutive, like lacking terms that lacked power and authority. So but anyhow, uh, the guy, I thought, you're saying a mon though, So we started saying mindo. One day, I'm like, hey, what does mando translate to exactly? He says, I'm not saying mando, I'm saying mango, as in humongous. So knockers like knocks makes sense. But things just change over time, Like someday I'll explain the word tigs. You know, we never know what meant, and it's just this long evolution of a couple different terms where it becomes tigs. So so we're in Mexico, right, We're in Mexico here and with knocks with with knocks on the tits. Okay, So we get back up here last day and the Latvian eagle strikes again. We're kind of looking over this we're we're looking at we're looking over this country the Latvia lover, but it's very firmly now the lab the Latvian eagle, and uh, he's like, I think I see him, you know you are are I see him? You know the set in the sentry buck And I take literally about a half second look through my knocker, saying it right, my knocks, my knocks. So I take a half second look through my knocks and I just sort of have this like visceral identification. That's him. And I start packing up my stuff and to make a move on, and I'm going like, I am just I am dialed in, I'm ready to go. Yeah. He's still like, well, I think it's a whatever. I'm going gone and take off. Got dirt with me. Remember asking like are we moving? You're like no, I'm gonna go kill that buck. I was like, oh, okay, yeah. So end up crossing over to another um that's closer to him and I had kind of been on this country. I was really excited because these are a little shoulder on a little shoulder. And the thing is issue is that on the one hand we see how wary the couse deer are, but on the other hand they do have a pretty tight home range. I don't know a lot about their biology, but it doesn't it seems like they have kind of a kind of a tight area that they sort of cou'se dear lower. It is like full of of of like stories that kind of marvel at their fidelity to a little patch of ground. But they got like a little spot where they lived their life in what seems to be a vast and and I guess we looked out in that sense, because I had stopped on that hill where we had first seen him pretty hard the day before. And usually, you know, hunting deer, you think I've kind of spoiled this spot a little bit, or I've stirred it up a little too much, or so I'm always worried about that. Yeah, I mean, it's always that nagging doubt and uh. And yet there he was, just right back where we had seen him before, and I'm like, you know, and this is a deal, right, It's it's the morning, it's cool. They're up and on their feet, you know, and pretty soon they're going to be going to ground. They're gonna be bedded somewhere more or less. Although the rut had kick then too, so you know, that was sort of the X factor. But that's always the worry. So I saw him, I just I just took off dirt and I made the traverse across to this next knob down the saddle, and I had already scouted a shooting location. I knew where I wanted to shoot him with. I had looked and seeing a spot that had fairly bare ground up there to avoid you know us. Yeah, on his grass situation, and got up there, got on and laid my pack down, raised him at four hundred seven yards. He was walking to the right, and I gave him a blee. I mean, just awful. Like I'm not a calling guy. I'm never going to win a contest or anything like that. But it does pretty good. Remy is very good. I think in that moment though, nobody's really trying to make a really realistic dear sound. You're just trying to make any sound that makes him go. Remy can make a legit buck noise, and you make a pretty good one. Really do yours like it? Like that? The man did it last night? Oh the money was like full on when you're trying to get a buck to turn or stop. I go, hey, please cut that sound and use it in the just started selling the game causes drunk laugh Anyway. My point is I'm not trying to pretend like I have some great like call. But I bleat out this sound and he stops and and boom, four or seven yards. One shot I cut as it was an interesting shot. I ended up taking him a little high through the shoulders and it went into kind of the Noman's land, you know that dreaded. When you're archery hunting, you you know that dreaded no man's landing shot. And that's that's where that bullet went. And it totally grenaded through his shoulders. I mean it took both of his shoulders right out. But he was still alive. When we got over to him. He wasn't going anywhere. We had watched him a little bit through the glass, and Yanni at that point was like, yeah, I still see him flopping around out there. So we moved over there pretty quickly, and I you know, I had dispatched him with my knife, and and uh, guy, who's just beautiful, great buck, the centry buck, the century buck, and the oh he had a crazy curly hoof. Yeah, what happens to people? Why don't cut their fingernils? You have to curl? Yeah, yeah he had. He had this one like little veloci raptor, little raptor toe toe on him. Starts cocaine. Can you see, John, I'll have it around his neck it. I'm gonna start wearing deep v T shirts. I'm gonna stop shaving my chest. Ye get a thatch worthy worthy of that thing. So yeah, great beautifu Yet another, yet another not big, huge giant but like mine, but another big huge buck. No, he's definitely not as as big as yours and early. I mean, you shot that thing and the sun had barely hit that hill. The sun had barely hit Bend's right cheek. When read throughout the day, I got locked. I got into the mode. You didn't you know what that feelings like though, when the switch just clicks and you're like, all of a sudden, like just everything is just focused on it. And that's that's what I felt. As soon as as soon as I saw his antlers, I'm just like go, you know. I was explaining to Ben the other day, UM about like how days passed out there. It's like you imagine the way a day goes like a like a like a dimmer switch, where you like gradually right and any second is sort of imperceptible from the second past because it's just happening silly gradually, like it's like pre dawn darkness, and then it's all of a sudden, gets the greyness and there's like light and it's kind of like mid day and you just keep slowly graduating it fades. I feel like out here, it's um, it's like clicky. Yeah, it's like it's pre dawned darkness and goes click. It's also like morning and it's like click. It's also like scorching lye hot. And then they're like click and it's evening and clicking is dark. It just happened, like what yeah, and just a feeling that hits at ten am, like someone does a they throw the mid Like at ten am, you're just like, shoot, now, I gotta stay here for four hours getting boiled by the sun and wait for them to throw the next switch, which makes all the deer come back out of the funniest part is the difference in the shade. I mean, you know, just you can you can imagine Deer's movie because when you're in the shade, you feel like calm, that's calm and comfortable. There's a little breeze oh yeah. And then and then you go out in the sun you're like, oh my god, who lives here? Why would you? This? Is there a watering hole? And it's like yeah, and you get back into the two ft wide piece oh yeah, yeah. And that's what the narrowness of the shade, the narrowness of the shad because there's no big trees, every small The narrowness of the shade is what allows you to keep I think it's what allows you to keep spotting deer all day exactly because you can't you get a little shade patch. You're like, remember some time about watching uh antelope get shade from phone poles and they just moved like that to catch the only to catch shade from me a phone pole, and then moving to stay in at little shade line from a phone pole, and it's like a sund out. You're moving every couple of minutes, and so I think that that's like always causing I remember like looking at a doll bettered in a little bit of shade and coming back fifteen minutes later and she was gone, like oh yeah, because her like her shade patch is gone. Now she had to get up. And it's funny on this hunt, this first time I ever realized how much our movements were similar to the deer's. You know, we were went and in Jay's advice of thirty minute, thirty minute, thirty minute, that was during deer movement time, it went deer on their feet. You gotta keep moving, you gotta see new country, glass new country because the deer up and moving and and you can get eyes on them. But when they go to bed, you stay put. You go to bed too. You get under the shade tree and you glass them up and see if you can get lucky. And you're hoping that, yeah, that some dough is gonna stand up to shift, it's gonna make a buck and be like, oh my god, what's she doing? And he stands up to he goes to play grab bass and then you got the moves. He follows her and Austin like yeah, but then you got to jump on him because you know where they are and they're gonna stay in that. He's not going to shake off to the new territory. Right. So this was the first time that struck me just because we did spend seventy two hours doing this, that there is this you know, you're mirroring the movement of the animal for a good reason. Yeah, it's a good observation. So there you are, Ben Benny O'Brien, Ben O'Brien, capital old l Ben No no, yeah, yeah, apostrophe there put a little mar hash um. It's time for your buck story. Yeah. Should I go all the way back to if you want this is gonna probably be two part podcast. I think it's fair to go back, you know, Oh setting it you guys, he says, you know, and in a justice position, I'm leaning, I'm leaning forward, I'm leaving. I'm leaning forward and gripping my teeth like like Yanni driving the van Um. You know, like when you see a deer and you immediately know that it's it's over and above what your expectations might be. My wife, Yeah, for what a deer could look like. You know, when you meet a hot lady or whatever and you maybe just see like the backside of her head. He turns out, WHOA, that's that's gonna work for me. Uh. We saw this buck called El Gagante. Now he didn't have a name prior to seeing him, but I I named him El Gagante because because yeah, the gagante means I believe the giant in Spanish. Mark Kenyon be so excited about names. Names we become good because like gigantico, okay, gante to be sounds more probably pecante, you know, could be like a salta company. Yeah, something like that. I like it to sound authentic. Anyway, we're we're this is two days prior to this is post l surprise. Oh, but prior to john the Johnny and Yanni team going back to the southwest corner our honey to this point, we have to this this point, we have yet to discover that the honey hoole has honey. I mean, we were kind of sniffing aroun it. It smells sweet at this point, but we don't know if there's honey in there or not. And so we get deep in the hole and we're and we're hunting, and we spot this buck. He's across across the south. He's to the north what is the northeast, about um three cords of a mile from our main tip when we first got in the southwest corner. And so we're chasing this buck. We're trying to find him in the shade of the day. Oh crab clawl so crab claws. He's a nice eight point, but he's only got crabs on the end of his main beam. Chasing Jason, he gets up in some shade and we think he's gonna be bet in this little pocket, in this cut of this ridge. We're gonna get over there and find him, and it's gonna be perfect because he's gonna be bedded down in the shade of the day, and we'll have plenty of time to step be on an opposing hillside eye level with him exactly. And we have not We've yet to explore the southwest corner. We don't really know what's going on. We just know there's a buck over that direction that we need to go get him. So we get down or hike and we get over there. We just we know on a lower shoulder of a hill on the Reggy Cross from where we think crab clawl is, and we just we can't see in there. And because I tend to think about think like a bow hunter, I tell Steve, let's roll, let's get off this hill. Let's get on the hill he's on and charge over the hill and just just surprise him and give him and shooting just shooting, just send one. Is that how bowners think? He just starts shooting arrows just like this quiver has got five errors for a reason. Yeah, And so we go over there. Long story short, we were headed over there and we spooked this buck. He jumps up out of another another cut on the same hill. Now we didn't see he jumps up goes over the hill back up. What Yeah, on the spot crab claws. Yes, we did. You didn't think it was cramp little, but I'm telling you that's it was. Oh you're talking that part of the time. Yeah, you're right, all right. Sorry, We go around the same pyramid hill that crab we thought crab claw was on. Well, some cows had gotten into his betting area, and I believe he ran around the hill and betted on the side of what. We didn't know that he was betting area. Got like marauded when the military takes over your stuff and uses it. Yeah, they're betting on got common deered by a group of black angles who are really dainty, quiet animals I find without resisting. Yeah, and so we're we're Steve. I see a shed. Steve goes down to get it. We're on the side hill, this big Okato pyramid ridge, and I look over and I see this buck jump up, big wide buck jump up and over the hill he goes. I mean he was, he was on the He waited till we were in the sha. He was seventy yards and we're staying there talking. We walked past him. Yeah, we walked past the picking up jet antlers, he jumps and runs. Well, we decided the best thing to do is just continue with our plan. Im into the shady area where we think the crab club bucket is. We're not sure what buck we just jumped. We get up there, it's it's devoid, full accounts and devoid a deer. So we proceeded to decide that must have been him. It's way to his hundred yards away from where we saw him and were in dirt, and Steve proceed to take a two hour nap. There was a good shade up there. Well, here's what happens. As long as I sleep on my back on a tilt, I will have a what we call a nappy. But something happens and I moved to my side. It becomes a slumber. Yeah, And I don't know what happened. I remember taking my net gator and like quadruple folding at the blackout the light, which was a mistake. And I was laying on my back and you get that kind of feeling when you're laying on your back and you're gonna choke on your own tongue or something. And I think I rolled on my side and all of a sudden woke up and I thought it was around noon and it was two. Yeah, it was two. And I slept for five minutes, and I sat there and watched him sleep for the next hour. And then had weaved a basket from thee and yeah, I had glassed every hill and and yeah, I'm very sorry about that. It wasn't about news. Something that's too eating their sandwiches, turned their turn their scopes to full power. Not a lot of time. And anyway, we take our we'll speed this up. We take we take our nappy time and turned into a turn and now we're hunting. We're like, we gotta we gotta dial this thing up and find some deer. We screwed this, screwed the pooch on this one. I admittedly was too aggressive on these kids, dear, So we get going up. We just go up the hill, on to the very top of the tip we're sleeping on and start glass and immediate like doe buck, doe buck, doe buck buck. I know we're trying to move quick, but I gotta add one quick face the area we were going to look there was no perch it would allow you to pee. You're down into the zone, and in those situations you do have to be like, actually, could never happen, and wait until they get up and maybe they'll move into an area where you can put a move on or you want up making the mistake of thinking you're gonna find some secret perch, then you're moving around and bumping them and like, well maybe there isn't anyways, Well, it turns out we're we're up to the northeast of this quadrant and and to the west of us at this point is uh dry creek bed with some pools of water, and so I feel like the deer started collecting in there. And as soon as it's maybe two thirty Steve's been awake for half an hour, We're on groggy everybody. We start, we start, we get our knocks out and um we start glassing and immediately pick up a bunch of deer. Well, not long after that, we see old crab Crawl, who we just spooked, maybe seven yards away across this canyon, chasing a dough across this sunlit knob. We're like, we gotta get over there and cut him off. So we start hustling down this into the bottom of this creek, up past the soccer teo flatting onto a shoulder, and are going around this ridge trying, you know, trying to figure out where this where. A crab claul may have chase this dough too, And this time I swing my head over and I looked down on the same sun kissed ridge that we originally saw crab clawl chasing the dough, and I see a buck full on chasing the dough, just nose down and I look into My immediate reaction was that's a giant. And I said out loud, that's a giant. And everybody looked over there, and it was obvious that El Gagante lived. A couple of things I want to interject real quick, No, these are these are essential bits. Yeah, because a lot of issues around the identity the identity of El Gegante versus the identity of the century buck. There's a lot of questions around. Yanny always warns people away from observing a deer from behind and thinking it's big, because he says, all dear look big, all big box look like big, huge giant box from behind. Also in Mexico, there is a lot of Catholic iconography hanging around the walls where people are have halos. Did you notice that, Yes, this bok was haloed by intense setting sun that were also being blinded by And if there was a sound that accompanied my seeing Al Grigante, it would be because I'm looking at him from behind and he is illuminated as though wearing a halo, as though being blessed by the heavens. Yes, and I said, yep, that's a big or something to that effect, something to the effect of, I'm telling you we started class. I was looking at a world's record. I thought I was looking at and keep and listen. We'll get to that hearing about two or three hours. But Gagante was there, right, This is al Gadante. This deer is a big old eight point with his huge mainframe and is his main beams wrap way around and up in the front, which makes him look like some kind of giant twelve point. Like he's got extra antlers. I thought, for I thought, I thought that deer has six antlers per side by Arizona standards five five um. Photo evidence later revealed that no, he has four percent and so four percide but the most analyzed the Brooder film, the film the most and he's three yards away at this point and shootable distance, blazing sunlight black, and the setting sun is in our eyes. And so I'm laying down trying to get on some packs and shuffling around. This deer's is chasing the stuff up this ridge and he's gonna go down into this bottom and be gone. Well, the entire time that I'm trying to put my pack down and get my rifle set up, I hear dirt and my left ear going, oh my god, oh my god, oh oh, and my right here, right here, Steve going wow, oh wow. He is a giant. And I'm over there going no pressure. Boys. We once saw a buck they had gotten Apparently they had just been struck by a car, and so it had an antler that had busted off and was hanging down across its face and under its jaw. And when I spotted I said to Yannie, it's a white time because I just saw something that didn't understand. Yeah, and later guys like buck of a life time, a forky who had just been run over. It depends on what lifetime. Anyway. At this point, I'm feeling like, holy, this is about to get real. I'm gonna get this thing in my scope and he's he's trailing his dough and he's not stopping for much. I get him in my scope. The sun is is whiting out most of my field of view. I can't see anything. I'm shuffling around. I'm trying to get a different path to get settled. I want to make a clean shot on this deer. He when he stops, he's facing completely away. So I got the Texas Hart shot and that's it. And at one point we move across the hillside to try to get a better shot. I had to get reset up. We're all fumbling around. You're practicing incredible restraint. Yes, at one point I had him in the scope perfect and he just was and thinking at the time, this is a world record deer. I could have either shot him in the neck or up the ass, but I chose. I just think, look, I'm not I respected dear of that big too much. Just to throw off some lead over there and then and see what see what happens? And uh so we practiced that restraint. We go around the corner, shuffle back up, gets set up again. We're glass on him, and the setting sun is just getting worse and worse and worse, and this could probably been a five minute time for it. And by the time he comes back up the hill after his dough and into the mesquite he's in shadow. We're in sun, and I can't see a damn thing. And so now Steve takes off his hat and starts holding it right above to shade the sun right above my scope. And now we're doing the dance of like left, a little bit left, right, right right. It's worse is that's everything is so bright, but he's in a dark, little tight hole behind layers gone. And I saw his dog going up the hill and I'm like, he's gonna come after that dope, But it was just like pitch black and one. So at this point you can't even range it. So we had ranged close to where he was, about three fifty and so that's the guests. But you can't range it because you can't get your binos focused on the deer for the sunlight. And just like, oh, he's dear, you're you're on a clock. He's gonna disappear. Eventually, He's not come back out, and so I get set up, I find him and we sit there for what feels like an hour, but it's probably ten minutes where he's standing behind a yucca completely in the shade, and me and Steve are doing the who that had to left move it to the right. Every time he moves. Every time I moved, that son sneaks under his hat brim and into my scope. But I can't see anything. Eventually I get lined up on this deer and he needs to take one step. Well, he sees us now because we're over they're rolling around like idiots, and he sees us, and he's not going to take that step unless he's sure. Well, ten minutes goes by, Dirt's got him in the buyers. I got him in the scope. Steve's trying to my legs asleep. I'm sure parts of you, you know, your leg or something's asleep. And he takes one step, and now I have this shadow of this deer and my right on him. I start pulling. I let it fly, and as soon as I let it fly, whiteness in the scope. The sun hits back on the scope and I can't see anything. And now I look, I get off the scope, I look back. I can't see anything. Dirt says, looks like it hit under him, and he wheeled around and ran up the hill, tail up as healthy as he wasn't a minute as healthy as he was a minute ago. Elca Dante ran off into the sunset, and uh, we were just at that point. I was sure I made a good shot, but I was I was pretty sure. It was a difficult situation, Like there wasn't any distance, was a distance questionable, it was questionable, the you know, my field of view was questionable. It was all just kind of not the best situation. And you get like it happens to me, You get where because you think it's a big one. You right, Yes, if you were all trying to feel a doughteg, you'd be like, it's like, it's take that shot. Let's just go find out. And I previously taking the more ethical rout of like, oh he's you know, and to me, it's being broadside is more important than than you know, those other factors. And so at that point, I feel like, well, i've i've I was comfortable with my trigger, pool I didn't yank on the thing, I held perfect, I felt good about the shot. I felt ethical at the time when I pulled the trigger, like that, all the factors being what they were I got the best out of the best scenario. Well, I mean, whatever I did it shoot under him or whatever it was, I would I would guess that he was three eighty five and I was holding for three fifty shot under it. But we gotta go check for blood. So we go down this ridge, up over the sunny ridge he was on, down to the bottom and up over the next ridge, and Steve's in front of me. I'm behind, and Garrett's behind me, and I'll Steve, I'll let you take it here because I want to hear here. We get up to where we think it is, and all of a sudden I see it dear's head and I think it was wounded and is now jumped up, and he's fifteen yards away, and that's all to get away. And I'm saying, shooting the net, shooting the net, shooting the net because I think it's him, And Ben is behind me. A little bit, throws up steep pitch, steep pitch, a lot of grass, throws up his rifle. Bouch just runs away like even healthier or not, like almost like it charged up by the fact that it's the most amazing display of athleticism into the next qu elliot, goold the levitated out of there, and but I but he's saying shoot him in the neck. And I look up and I see ears. I thought, like one of those things that there's nothing to lose because he's already you wounded him. Yeah, And so I took two steps forward and same, I'm thinking the same thing. I gotta get a bullet in this animal again and finish him off. So I kind of went to where I knew his ears were, which I went down to where I thought his neck wasn't shot basically into the grass, just to get one in it and it that didn't condam and then we scoured the area for hair and blood and it was gone. He was he was as healthy as we deturned that he was in fact exceedingly healthy, exceedingly healthy. And the walkout was was interesting because you kind of go through the motions that I missed it. There was a giant's world record buck and it was two hours without proper communication, yeah from our pickup. Yeah, and the plenty of time to think. We we had the two hour, three mile hike out in nasty country, which led to fast forward the next morning. I feel like I've had my chance at al Gagante, and you might move back to I want to go back to l Surprises because I want John to get a chance, because I after up my chance. So I'm thinking it's only fair to let someone else back into the into the honey hoole, because I gotta you know, there needs to be some sort of reset based on my failure to get done what should probably have been done in that in that case. So I just I think, in all fairness, I can't just hog this area or this buck because I had my shot at him. You gotta give somebody else a shot. That's kind of an interesting question though, because there's a they're all these like unspoken dynamics in a deer camp, you know, in terms of who shoots win and kind of courtesy. And that's why you flip chunks of down. Yeah, you have a donk flip. You've got a situation where you know, Yanni wants me to shoot and I don't wanna, you know, I mean both for and again, everything I think is motivated by good, very positive feelings. But it's it's interesting this code. I would never write the rule. I would never write a code down like that, But I would say it's a whatever I feel in the moment. You know, whatever I feel like is right based on that situation and that set of circumstances. But when you say the code exists even though I don't think it is written right, well, I think that when you hang out with if you're with them and you hang out with all the time, you just have established it. Like if you don't let's say you're with you to hang out all the time, you don't want to drive, you stick of driving to be like, dude, I'm not freaking drive not driving, and people be like, okay, cool, I'll drive every with people. You don't know. You can't come down the parking lot and be like, tell you one thing, I'm not driving. Yeah. There, you're gonna get marked as an a hole, right, So you gotta be like, oh, you know, well I could drive even well I don't know. I mean, do you want well, I'm not dying to drive, but I mean if you really don't want, you know, if you don't want to drive, I suppose I mean I'll kill Gagante. Yeah. So's it just has a it's a matter of whether you've been around each other long enough. But I think it is important in those situations to talk about, Like I brought this up before, my brother carrying moose is hard. My brother when they when when Danny keep mentioned different brother, but my brother Dany when they go on the moose trips putting out of their boats, they like, right off the bat, let's agree, how far are we going to carry a bowl so that when we all split up, we know off that river corridor. Yeah, someone can't come back to camp and be like I was really tempted and shot one five miles off the river and lay that and everyone so that everyone now that he's spent all those days carrying the bull, they're like, what are we gonna make? Is it a mile? Is it two miles? And three miles? And when we make the rule, don't violate the rule exactly, don't come tell me you shot some bowl and now I'm going to devote my whole trip to carry in your bowl. Yeah. I mean that that. I mean that's and with moose, I mean you've got to may big thing you've got to do. But there's a I don't know, I guess I find it an interesting this sort of there's a graciousness, yes, because nobody here there's nobody here that this is a once It's a once in a lifetime in a way. But you also understand that that this is a this is a unique opportunity that we all get fairly frequently. You know, this is something that I know that that there's no there's no reason for me to have any inkling of selfishness in regards to the giant cues deer that I saw like that at first, it's not my right to have that because I because I don't have any history with it. I haven't earned anything in regards to that deer. Um there was a lot of luck based on the discovery of and me pulling the trigger. So I I feel like, as decorum states, give someone else a chance to have that same piece of luck, because you know, and I've I've probably harmed in my missing the deer, harmed his chance to have his chance to see it and shoot at And so he's going and probably handicapped by my failure at some level. And that's why I just go through those feelings. And when you're successful and somebody's hunting an area and then you jump back in and hunt it and shoot a deer that they never saw, I there's some guilt there, right, because you didn't work as hard to pick a part in area and discovery had any discovery. Yeah, there's like the same plain simple rule of like if mom was happy, happy, everybody's happy. And I always kind of feel like, I know how I'll come out at the end of the hunt if I don't have a deer, like yeah, but if like someone else doesn't have a deer, I'm like, I'm gonna have like the sympathy for that, and that almost would rather not have that and just be like I didn't get a deer bummer everybody else did, though, Sweet let's go home. That's a perfect, you know, transition to the deer I did kill because this is what Two days later, now we'd go try to get else surprised. Oh, and then the last day, which is yesterday, we decide we're gonna full core press the southwest corner. John gets the centry John gets a centry buck. We put the moves on a new brand new buck. Yeah, we'll call him brand new. We haven't named him yet, branded the previously unknown briefly unknown bucks. We go up on it. Steve and I go up on a tit and sit all day in the sun and the shade and have that experience of it just met. Your eyes are bleeding. You've looked over this country a million times. You can't look behind another damn bush and see another damn single dough walking around with a fawn. H You just don't want to see it anymore. You want to see the thing you're after. Like and and I was getting a little bit just kind of groggy and frustrated and tired of sitting under a damn bush and couch it. And uh, we finally see We sat there all day on the same knob from eight, from about seven thirty eight to what time was it three? So when Steve spots this unknown buck around the same knob as we hunted the first hunted, the crowd club buck, we we start getting after him and I'm with his nose up the keys throws a four doors four does I'm in John's situation, I mean fully in kill mode. We're gonna get across this ridgeon kill this deer, and it has to happen now or it's not gonna happen. So there's like a the the intensity is up, and we we pack up and we start going down this hill we're going, and we're we're doing the old baby deer walk on the freaking lava rocks, you know, twisting your angles and turning your knees and just trying to putting your hand on a bush or down here, and trying to get down this hill. I'm in the lead, and we're going down this slope towards the river bottom, and i've my right foot slips out, my left foot goes in the air, and my left hand goes back to brace my fall, as we all probably did three or four dozen times during the hunt. My left hand goes straight back down and into what do they call it a chola cactus, just child a choya cactus, which sports many hundreds of sharp ass pointy thorns. And I gotta say, I looked down at my hand, and it's not yet bleeding, but I can see that there's probably a hundred and fifty or as many as you could fit on one guy's hand thorns sticking out of my hand. And my first thought is this is gonna hurt real bad in a second. But it doesn't hurt right now. My first thought is what time is it. That's by the time you get all those thorns out, it'll be dark. Yeah, So my first thought is A hundred and fifty is a lot. What time is it? Because how quickly can I get these things out of my damn hand? One of them is like almost all the way through my finger. The other one is stuck in my wrist and like a vein if you pull on it, and like one of my eyelashes move like there's some ship going on in my hand. But my thought, my first initial thought was how much time is there left? Because this is this is an impediment to me getting the old this new bucket shown up. So Steve starts trying to pull these out, and as he starts to pull him out, he gets him in his in his hand, and now I'm trying to pull him out, and as I pull him out of my left hand, they're getting stuck in my right hand. And so eventually it just has to I just start yanking these things out and I get him mostly, if not all, out of my hand. Now there's blood everywhere, and uh, Steve even took time to call us on the radio to be like Ben fell into a gag and he's got blood everywhere. It's not looking good and he's saying to me, like that's gonna hurt later, Like you're fucked man, that that kind of deal. And uh, And I was feeling like the ones at my wrist when I pulled on him. I'm telling you, like my pinky nail just twitched. They were they was attached some nerve or something. So anyway, I finally get all these things out. I remember there's one big bird and like under my pinky that I just had to close my eyes and do one of those like ripping the shark tooth out of your thigh. I mean, after you got bit rip that thing out and stood up and like, let's go. I guess we gotta go. It sucks. So we get down the hill and up the other side, and we're up on this road and about three yards and where we know this buck to be, and we start. We I immediately look over to Steve and you'd feel the wind in the exact wrong direction it needs to be for us to kill something. So we get around close to where we might be able to see these deer, and of course there's what five or six does, and a small bucket between us and in the country that way more deer and we thought way more dear. The wind is wrong. There's way more dear than we thought. It kind of seems like my hand is thriving. It seems like there's like that the hunt is kind of gasping for air, like this is it's over. We're just kind of playing around at this. We're not gonna get this in real We're not gonna actually hunt this deer. And I'm thinking it's over, but we're still gonna go through the motions and go try to find this thing. We get going up this ridge where we know the deers on. We spook a few more doughes and fawns, look around, there's no deer. Like I think you probably knew Steve that that thing's gone thirty minutes before we because of the smell, because of the number of deer failing through where they went. So we get up to the top of the ridge where to look around to see maybe if he's still hanging around chasing does and he's not there. So I kind of sit down and what Yanni said came to my mind, like everybody else got deer and I didn't. That's awesome, Like if it's if somebody wasn't gonna dear, I'm glad it's me and I don't have to, you know, feel bad for anybody else working their ass off and nothing. At least I got mine, and thinking that, don't flip, you're one, don't flip away from sitting on that sun. So I'm sundown and on a Mexican mountain like watching this sun go down, Like what a beautiful sun down. This is fantastic. I didn't get a deer, but what wonderful experiences I've had here with my friends and getting all, you know, if I had a journalize the road in it. And then I hear Steve, hey, hey, hey, come here. I go up the hill to where he is, and he's like, they got a buck spot at Yon. He's gonna come down to meet us if we get if we're we go really quick, we can get him. I'm like, oh yeah, right right right. If we go quick, we'll just run down the Lava Rock mountain. I'll fall in another cactus and I'll die for this deer. But anyway we get going down the hill, we're gonna do it right. We're going through those motions because you have to um even if you think gets over. So we started getting down this one, ravine up the other one getting the same RIGGIANI was glassing from. He comes down the hill. He comes striding down the hill, looking confident as ever. And I immediately look at him and like, okay, I think he's got some confidence in that there's a plan to maybe make something happen. Yeah, we were, we were what six hundred sixty ish yards away? Right, Garrett spotted two dolls, and ten minutes later I went back to glass these doughs, and one's running, you know, across the hillside. Yeah, you go, I wonder what's that, what that's all about? And sure enough buck, Yeah, And at this point it's what it's last shooting late, it's five thirty, maybe it's five oh five. That's something in that range. Definitely passed on up. And I've given them mentally, I've kind of given I already had that sundown moment. So I'm like, this is just you know, a little extra overtime or whatever, fun nightcap. It's a little nightcap. Yeah. Well, actually we'll just John over here and now I'll scarce more deer and then we'll go back to America. And so we get going over there, and I could just see in Yanni's like determined. And that's another thing, Like you start hunt with a group of people and you know that they're determined for for there, everyone to get a buck and everybody to have success, and like that determinations like okay, well yeah, maybe maybe this can happen. It's happened to me before. So we start getting over there. We get over to the to the area where the buck is. Yanni gets pointed in the right direction. We get over It's just a small ridge that's kind of covered in some cedars where we were kind of in some mesquites where we were kind of covered a little bit. We we I lay my pack down, he lays his back down. I put the rifle pointed to where Yanni thinks the buck might be. Well, at this point, it's like dark looking through the scope. You can see shadowy figures that look like deer and trees, and but there's enough light in the scope to make a shot ethically. And every minute that's getting you know, working on a ticking clock, just like you're talking about that dial, it's already clicked over to the dusk. I mean it's clicked and we're looking at this dough and Yanni's sports spots this dough at two and twenty yards, and we're waiting for the buck to kind of run up behind the dough, right, Joannie, Yeah, I mean we're just I mean, at least we had eyes on a beer. Yeah, we're, you know, hoping that the box around there somewhere, and he's gonna show himself before it's you know, pitch black. I looked to the left of where this deer is this. That deer runs off the ridge we're looking at. I look to the left. As it runs, I see another dough coming up the same ridge to our left at about two yards, and I go to get back on my gun, just thinking maybe this buck is behind. And as I'm getting in the scope, Yanni goes there he is. He's right there, He's right there's right there. He's following her. He's going the same pass he was nose down just getting After I get on the scope, I find him. There's that tall yellow grass is she's kind of shrouding my scope. I can still see line, but I've got this yellow haze between me and this deer. I get him in the scope and I'm following him, and Yanni starts making that noise. What does that sound like? That one? I started with it, man, and then it was like and they're like, he eventually stops once, but he didn't stop forms but a split sat I think he heard hey, and he's like, really, are you yelling at me? Trying to I'm trying to chase this still around, so I'm one a at this one. I'm tracking him. I'm moving around the grass. I can't. I don't have the best view of this deer. Yanni gives him another Hey. He turns around. He's courting severely. Way I put the cross airs on him. I feel good. Boom, pull the trigger again, lose everything and it's over. You know. I got a shot off. And then immediately after I pulled the trigger, I thought, Wow, I got a shot off at a deer and I feel good about it. Holy wow. That in and of itself is yeah, only two yards, so one't too far away, you know, And it was it was, you know, a good shot. He was, you know, quartering away, completely standing still. I had, you know, a good field of view with the deer, and uh, honestly, I think I heard it hit. He spun and went downhill. And those are all things you want to hear when you shoot at something. So we went over and looked, and we get him over the hill, and I'm thinking, if I missed this deer, that only adds to the pain of the fact that El Gagante is running around here somewhere. Yeah, I got a hundred fifty cacti and that thing's throbbing, and I'm still I looked down in my hand every once in a while with the head lamp, and I could see that there's more thorns in there that I haven't pulled out. So I got some more work to do. We get over there and that and that deer's laying ten yards from where I shot at him, twenty yards and he's dead. And it took me probably till we got back to the ranger we packed him out, and getting him out and packed him out to be like, wow, that happened. Like from the sundowning ridge to the dead deer was about twenty minutes, maybe five minutes, and then another hour and half to the range. And those two hours, the entire structure of the hunt and what you think about it changed. And that's that's why it's awesome. That's why Honey is great, because that can happen, and it did. Potentially nameless buck or we saw about Yanny and I saw a buck the day before down in that zone. We were hunting him. I mean we were in there glassing up trying to find that buck. Normal we called a normal buck because he was a nice just a nice, normal looking eight Michigan Michigan eight. So that's the story. And that was, um, I think for all of us, Like we were all involved in that one. We weren't all involved in Steve's, we weren't all involved in Yanni's or John's, but we were all involved in some way in mine. So that's a pretty good way to Yeah. And and then sixteen or so hours later, I was singing that Neil Diamond song They Come and to America, And as we went through customs, and I was thinking, I'm free, and I was singing, and I like, like, I like the Petty I like the Petty tribute because we just lost Tom Petty, great American. Um. But I definitely get like, why free falling free? Because I didn't hadn't thought it through. Yeah, you're just like creasing the border. And I went on free and he started switched. I switched to Lee Greenwood was proud to be an American. But it felt a little heavy handed, a little bit much. It wasn't like, I mean, we've been down hunting, you know. I mean, it wasn't that we're coming back from warfare something we've been down like enjoying ourselves. So I stuck with um Neil Diamond. But I thought I thought the free Falling was a good tribute to Ben's experience. Yeah, yeah, that was well. And I was sitting beside Yanni when he when he let out free falling, and he was very confident. He was like, and I'm free and after he said freeze, like crap, the next word is falling and that's not what I was going on. Um Cha ended it up with some customs guys who are fun to deal with, and then uh fans, Yeah, there we are. I had a dirt missong stuck in my head. I said, that is the man? Or is he? Dude? I that perpetually I had that song stuck in my head being the guy that wrote it. Uh. One last quick slot NiFi. You know, NiFi is not in the room. I'm I'm addressing NiFi out there in the in the lands. You know, that that's not true. I said I don't like any politicians because I was being hyperbolic, um, and I was talking smack like it's an American thing to talk smack about not liking any politicians. I like quite a few of them, including you know who I'm talking about. I love that man, um, so don't get prickly. Thanks for listening.