00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is Me eat podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything presented by on X Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor where you stand with on X Clay Nucome tell tell everyone in the story about when you were hunting that buck and you had them all, you know, watching them all those years. This deer right here, I don't know, no, the one that you found out he was dead when you're down at the pawn shop. Oh, that's an interesting story. So I was hunting this deer that I called Moose, and I had pictures of him from the time. It was a year and a half old. And the only reason I knew, you know, a year and a half old is pretty indistinguishable a year and a half old. Fuck. I think because we're not like a hardcore, super hardcore white tail podcast that when we say I've been hunted deer that I called moose, Okay, I'll get there, there you go, you will thank you. Yeah. Well, I don't understand what origin and I don't even know the damn I don't know this part of the story, but I can tell you what it would be. Karin te you know what, It's so easy you're gonna ask me. It's so easy to Seth will tell you why the deer was so big. It reminds you ester. I don't come on, dude, it probably had palmated andlers. Stevennel and nailed it. Seth nail gave you a layup dudels. Remind you of a moose? Yeah, okay out incess defense. Incess defense. Sam Longern has a big black lab named moose. Moose, but that dog doesn't have antlers. True, but what isn't the characteristic of a moose? That is sometimes an attribute to any deer hunter that goes around name and deer and watched him since they're one and a half years old, is I can he's fixated on antlers. He fetishizes. He's an antler fetishizer. So this deer, basically I got him. I'm still talking about this. He's an antler fetishizer. And so when I hear that the deer was named moose, okay, let's say I said to you, and we called this buck red stag, right, what would you picture. I'd be like, let me guess. Let me guess it had a crowned time. Let's say we called this old buckle unicorn. I'd say, let me guess we called this buckle rabbit ears. I'd be like, let me guess. Ears look like a rabbit. No, antlers look like a rabbit's ears. Anyway, So their herds pawn shop. It wasn't the way. That's good, you nailed that's Steve Palmatian. But what was unique about this deer? So when he was in a year and a half old deer, Rick Smith would be distinguishable by the body size, by the mass of the antlers. So this is a very small deer. Because I'm like, because Rick doesn't know and so he damned her knows what liver mush is. Well, I do know that that sounds like another story. Well, I, oh, you weren't the real quick I'm gonna I'm gonna say this and I'm suing the I'm gonna say this that I'm shutting up. Sure, I used to think that Rick always knew everything. Then I went through a bree period. I thought he didn't know everything. But yesterday I proved we're trying to talk about scrapple. He got talking about liver mush. We all had a good heart. You laugh at Rick's expense. You don't know scrapple from a hole in the ground. And then it turns out that he was right, because liver mush is basically scrapple with a little livery. So anyhow, there you are. You're at the pawn shop. Good job. So year and a half old deer, we're back there again. This deer had incredible palmaction. For a year and a half old deer usually thin horned, you know, like horns and stin as your finger. This deer had like I was, I'm looking for a picture on my phone. Year and a half old deer had like four or five inches of palmacian on his right tiny antler as like a six point okay, look like a moose. Yeah, I said that, dear looks like a moose. The next year, I actually man the story, Steve. If you want like the five minute version, I'll give it to you. There's like a fifteen minute version. I mean, we seven, not that I don't like the story, even Clay. It's okay, actually it's not. But my my thing hasn't adjusted at this time. You know, when you're talking to somebody, I think it's good to count like on the front end, go give me this version of that story. Check this out. I know I was gonna show is this my time? No? But this on your time. But it has to do with this. Remember how saying I wanted a thing that everybody would have a dial? Yeah, yeah, and there's a light in the middle, and if people are not very interested, they could turn their dial down and the light dims, and then you know that you're not being very interested. A guy is making with one of those. He sent me some pictures of the prototype, and it escalates. It's like the color changes. But and he's gonna put six dials on it. Everybody. I'd have that light right there right now. You'd be talking about that ball, and I'd be cranking that sucker way up. I have I recognize this buck as a year and a half old deer. The second year the deer comes back, he had such distinct antlers. I was able to recognize him again as a two and a half year old deer. I'm not that interested in harvesting this deer because he's just a young buck. But he's real distinguishable. Man around here, we don't track bucks for years. Like in the Midwest, guys have like seven years of history. Not here, man. Bucks come and go, like you may get a picture of a buck here two years and never see him again, Mark Kenny. They kind of like almost moved into your house with not man. That is not common here. Third year, so the deer one and a half, two and a half. Now the deer is three and a half. He blossoms into like a hundred and thirty in ten point with two kickers coming off g twos, which is a deer. I'm very interested in three and a half year old deer. Three and a half. Three and three and a half year old deer out here is a target deer. That same year, the deer breaks his front legs, both of them. The reason I know the US is because it's such a long story. His when he was two and a half, his right front hoof was as big around as a coke can, and he had a massive limp. The second year, when he's three and a half hundred thirty in double kickerbuck, his foot is continues to be as bigger aund as a coke can. His left front leg is broke and visibly has a huge knot midway up. The deer is like scrawny as it can be. I'm certain the deer is gonna diet three and a half because it's just scrawny. I hunt the deer, never see it from the tree stand. The deer blossoms into a hundred and forty five in ten point with double kickers. The next year still looks like a moose. I see the deer a mile away from my house. No, no, the deer. The deer no longer carries its palmation. I'm driving one day, see the deer a mile from where I originally knew the deer was. I know that the deer is using this certain farm. I write the farmer a letter and say, my name is Clay Nucombs. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Go up and meet him a week later. I got a little system, can I can I ask real quick when you laid off for him? Did you lay off for him? You like? I feel that's that's like a moral, that's a hard moral. SPOT told him that there was a deer that on his farm. I wanted to hunt out that is honorable. You were like, I have no reason to believe there's a deer of any size. I had a property though I would like to nickname moves. Now, now listen this this so you can learn something from is that nobody ever asked I got a hunt his property because it was not a good place to hunt. Where did this deer live there? You see what I'm saying, scrawny little patches of timber, a lot of stuff going on around like it was not the place like the guy, I don't think anybody had ever like asked him hunts a small property. Well I started getting I'm using trail cameras by this time, I started getting pictures of the deer on that farm, just like I knew I would. And that year I saw the deer from the stand two different times in the late winter. And you'd know him coming because he he looked like he was he was broken down. You see him coming across the field. You can't see this, ladies, gentlemen at home and play did a walk? Like if you watch Young Frankenstein his assistant, Yeah again you know kind of get no no no like for a deer. Yeah, like Young Frankenstein, like his assistant. Yeah, hitch hitching the step, some swagger this this time, this deer's hunt five inches, which around here deer of a maybe not a lifetime, but very few people kill hunting for around here. I don't kill the deer. One time I had him within thirty yards, almost drawn him. Didn't kill him. The net next year the deer survives. He is he is broken down, small, he goes down. And this is what you wouldn't believe unless you see the pictures, which there's this article in North American Whitetail about this deer that I wrote and hadn't published, all documented that deer went dropped down to a hunt. I found the sheds rick hold on, I found the sheds of the four Next the next year, the deer was, presumably so unhealthy his rack dropped to a clean hundred and thirty eight point. The only reason I would have known it was the same deer is because the stinking broken legs the deer was extremely recognizable. He weighed about a hundred and forty pounds average buck around here, big buckways one sixty eight. This deer is like super small, broken up white antlers. Just you just you just learn these deer. I'm getting there, Steven, No, I I've given up. You got a minute anyway, Okay, but no, I don't care. I'm so. I'm so. He's a hundred and thirty inches about buck. I hunt him like he's a boon and Crockett trying to kill him. Don't see him one time the whole year. From the stand, I find his shed horns. The farmer found one and I found the other, so I've got two sets of matching shed horns. The next year, I get a picture in summer velvet. I've got on my phone of a deer that I do not recognize because if first just get the horns. And I text my father in law and I say, I've got a two inch deer on camera, text him this picture. I cannot believe it, and I keep scrolling through the pictures and then I see the dearest whole body and it is moose and he has I know this because I scored the deer. Later you're gonna spoiler spoiler alert. He had thirty one points. He freaked out. He had the same frame. He went from a and this white tail. Guys, just believe it, because it's true. He went from a hundred point to a deer that I grow scored at either or one. I hunted that deer like crazy Rick that year. I mean, like, why is this part directed to Rick? Just he's engaged? Man, I my body still stings from the cold hunting that deer. And I'm serious, like it almost burned me out from late winter bow hunting because I just pounded it so hard that the well, the year before. I'm getting ahead of myself. When he was a hundred when he when he became the big deer, I was hot on his tail, hot on his tail. Actually, man, it's too deep of a story, but I should have killed him one day. Didn't. There's a big buck contest over here, and he's telling you can tell me what happened there. Well, okay, I go up to the farm one day to hunt. Point he's telling me that's not Rick. Now, m I go to the farm to hunt, and I've been getting It's early in the season, it's like October. The four and the bucks were still in groups, and that buck had been running with a buck that I called con con stood for consolation prize. It was a thirteen point buck. Yeah, yeah, I don't think he would have picked that one out, Steve. I was trying to think of some kind of thing to be consistent. But the deer, so Cohn, is a stud buck that if he would be hanging on this wall so like. And I was at a stage in my bow hunting careers like I can't let con walk by. It wasn't just an incredible year for horn growth, which we have here. Some years are great, some of years aren't. I go to the farm to hunt and I see four bucks standing up in the corner of the field, and I know what they're about to do. They're they're bedded over here. They just popped out. They're about to walk through the pinch point that my deer stands in and walk right by me. I watched him walk back into their bedding area. I scuttle up the hill getting my stand, and I'm not kidding. An hour and a half later, here comes a line of bucks coming through the woods, just gonna walk right under me. I get an eye on all of them, and I know that Moose is the lead. I don't see it, but I'm guessing that Moose is the final buck in the in the in the in the line. It's like a foaking horn a six point and it ended up being four bucks, and the last buck was con and I could see way behind him and Moose wasn't there. I was just like, God, it Moose in there. I felt like I could kill Kahn and extract him without without messing up Moose, like I wasn't gonna mess up the whole hunt for this consolation prize with me. Man hey. I tried to get Spencer new Heart to let me write a story on how to grunt stop a deer, and he wouldn't do it because, listen, I learned those your funnel right under me. It's what's spend. What's Spencer's problem? He just he just didn't think it would be of interest for to learn how to grunt stop a deer. And I got some good intel on it. I mean, I've done it a long time, but I got I don't like running around doing this, but I'm gonna do it right now. When we get done here, you call Spencer and you tell him that you just got that article commissioned. Fist bunk call. I'll call him. Just you call him, I'll call him. So I'm sitting here in the stand full draw or not full drawing, just sitting there waiting birds three buck, and I decided I'm gonna shoot Khan four buck. He's like at seven yards. I'm about eighteen feet up in the tree draw the bow back. He has no clue I'm in the world. I'm leaning the tight angle. He's walking because he's in this line, and I'm back grunt stop him. I was so close to him that it spooked him and he he he spun and looked at me and spinning and looking up as though the sun just exploded. And I had I had the pin right behind his shoulder. Shot and he ducked the string because he was on red alert because of the grunt stop, and it went right through the top of his back straps. Didn't he barrels out of there. We tracked the deer. I get pictures of the deer the whole rest of the year. Didn't hurt him. Ara went right through the backstraps. He jumped the string. So here's the lesson. When you're grunt stopping the deer. Don't grunt stop a deer that's like five yards from you, seven yards from you. If you do, you gotta do it because it's like you walk into the dolls going yes, now if that deer is at thirty yards, and and and the other thing is that you gotta be at full draw before you grunt stop, like you gotta be ready. You can't grunt stop then draw the bow. So don't give you don't give the article away. I'm devastated that I mess up con because then we had to go in and track the deer and just blew the whole area. You know, we had to do our due diligence. So we spent a day tracking the deer. No blood, no no. I knew it was okay, but I just want to make sure. Now it's October nine, and if you kill a big buck in this county, you take it down here to this big buck contest like it's just guaranteed because they give away, like it's just where you go. I'm good friends with these guys down at the pawn shop. I go down there and I look at the leader board. They actually have photos up on the leaderboard. I know this deer like it's my own kid, you know. And I look up on that leaderboard and there's a dude with moose in the back of his truck standing there with moose and I'm not kidding you. I felt like I was punched in the face. I was just like, oh my god, I can't believe. I mean, it was just like such a distinct dear. I the punch out guys are my friends. And I just said, hey, give me that guy's phone number. They did. They gave me a cell phone number. I called the guy. He doesn't know me from Adam, but I knew where he killed the deer. Just sway everything laid out, I knew where this guy lived. And I said, my name is Clay nucom congratulations first of all on your deer. Like I wanted him to know. I wasn't upset with him. I said, if you got a minute, I want to tell you a story, and I want to come to your house. Time time frame on it, Like you got five minutes, you got seven minutes. He He's like, I'll give you six minutes, and uh, your noise is a little late. He Uh, he was home. He was home, like right what. I called him and I said, man, I'll be there, just give me a minute. I gathered up my sheds and took my laptop computer over to his house and I sat on his back porch with he and his girlfriend, and I walked them through this whole story. He was a guy that bought this property from Texas. The first time he ever hunted the property. He killed that deer with a boat. Never knew it was there. Jeez, and uh it had thirty one scoreable points. It's been ten years ago this happened. I me and the guy became good friends. I gave him the shed horns. I said, man, take these things. I don't even want them. They're yours. They deserve they because the shed horns tell an incredible story of antler development, because the deer, the deer went up, went down and then made uh seventy inch jump or not seventies sixty inch antler jump. But so anyway, I mean stuff, you learned a lot from stuff like that. Man, I mean just even even dealing with like he get too caught up in a deer like sounds like he can. Well, but since that time, I've been less vested in the deer I'm hunting. I'm just like and I was never I just want to say I was never mad at the guy. I mean, like, man, good for him. Yeah you did he did he? Uh, because you know he didn't have a lot into it, right, like he just got it? Did it? Did it sort of open him? I mean, did he appreciate the sheds and stuff? He's he's a good hunter, that's the thing he got. He did get lucky, and he knows it, but he was he was He hunted his whole life. He was a good hunter, like and it made his He'll never kill a buck bigger than that. He was thrilled it way better than just some guy killing it just like well killed a buck, like, yeah, great guy to kill it for real? Is he still around here? He moved since then? I still I still talked to him every now and then. Yeah, did he keep the property? Nope? Nope, sold great story. Getting so invested into bucks like that is is tough. My brother in Wisconsin were after a buck named Saddam after a while because he was so sneaky. They nicknamed him Saddam and uh one about a minute now, I mean, how long did he didn't how long did he hide out? I think I was hunting him for like Saddam wasn't sneaking. He got caught pretty quick. Remember they called him in the spider hole, you'd call him bin Laden you probably should have brushed up on your history a little bit. Chester wore you brought that up, because I mean, when did how long after the invasion did they did they catch Saddam in the spider hole? You know, I don't know. They called Kaddafi in a drainage ditch, knowing a colvert very quickly they called Saddam pretty quick. Oh now pol Pot, No, it was the pol Pot. He hit out a long damn time. Anyways, Going anyways, they named himself. I could provide you with a long list of dictators who held out longer. Sure maybe it was a bad guy, bad buck or something like. Uh they big deer hunted though he maybe had crazy sunglasses. No, no, no, just big deer um up a large mustache on the family farm. I knew where this deer bedded um just was invested into this dear passed up. Other deer was hunting him with a re curve bow. And uh, anyways, my brother Fenton went in on the wrong wind during gunn season, and you know in Wisconsin you got to try and keep those deer on lockdown. And he was warned against this kind of it was. It was right borderline wind, and I think I got done with work and he's like, where's where's Finny? And my Mom's like, he's out hunting. And I was like, where'd he go? You know? And he wasn't in the wrong spot. Finney climbs up the tree stand. Here's a deer. Get up. A couple of minutes later across the road and I think Ike was outside and like he heard some hooting holler and and uh, Finny was just devastating. Ah, he's shrunk. He was probably like one ninety and then he probably was like one seventy high one seventies. Just a big deer, you know, like once once every five, six, seven years you might see a deer in that area. But Ike was a was bummed, but he was almost relieved, you know, in a way. He's like, all right, now I can move on. And but then he refused to go over and look at it and refused to go congratulate, like the the lucky shooter. Yeah. If you know Ike, he's a man of a few words, and he was just like, let me see a picture. My dad went over and talked to him, and uh, He's like, yeah, that was a deer. It is kind of weird how he he didn't go over there, but he just was like, yeah, the deer's dad moving on. I think my mom was more devastated than any of the boys that that deer was gone because he was just so invested in it. But mm hmm uh Yehnny, can you feel everybody on the sturgeon deal? We covered this, No, we didn't cover this at all. You gotta tell the whole damn story. I thought you're gonna give an update, but I gotta tell the whole thing, and started with how you got tangled up in this whole thing. I wouldn't say I'm exactly tangled up in this whole thing, all right. Well, just about a year ago, Miles Nolty and I and uh Ty, Emmett and who else shot it with us. Mike Mike Lindon moved went over to uh Fondolac, Wisconsin to spear sturgeon on the Great Lake Winnebago. And should I explain what that's all about? You got two minutes, right, You put me way too far back into history to get it this done in two minutes. Ah. But yeah, there's this giant prehistoric old fish called Lake surgeon that living like Winnebago and there's a spearing season for him. One secon one SECONDE see, I want people to know that this is a true crime story. It is this I just wanted I didn't I didn't see it up. Well, it could be. It could be its home podcast. It's a true crime story. We could if we were like most podcast companies, we were turned it into this some eight episode long who done it with cliffhangers. But here you get the you get the dope quick, yeah, yeah, somewhere between minutes to add a little bit to the front end of it, which Yanni denies, like he's clean, but like he is sort of involved separation. Oh if he gets rolled up in this and and all of sudden some people barge in this door, cuff him and stuff him. Not surprised. Another weird thing is is Chester's hometown. I was gonna say, I lift your shirt up. I guarantee he's wearing a wire. Yeah, Jester might be a little closely related to this story than I am. Jes are so slight. His wires is that big headsets like, trust me, they'll never know. Right here right now, Uh, sturgis spearing you. Uh you have a fish shack and ice shack. It's very similar to like the shacks you see you guys just doing fishing through, except you cut like a six by four foot hole and uh put the shack over. And these shacks are purpose made for uh spearing sturgeon. You got a big old giant spear, I don't know, the sucker waves, probably thirty pounds. It's got like well, they're heavy spears like that, nothing like a pike spear. No, you barely have to really chuck them kind of push them. You can just about drop them on and it'll it'll get into the like pour molten lead in the handle that I don't know. No, I think it's just a big steal. Any who. So we went and did it, and uh we actually did it with some of Chester's extended family. His cousin, right cousin cousin Jake helped us out, and um, he's he's super into it. And out of our group there were two sturgeon spirit I believe in three days, and Jake and I actually each got to throw at a at a at a fish but didn't get one, which in the sturgeons about like our squirrel hunt. In the sturgeon spearing, uh are just fearing World two is really good. People go years without speared. Is sturgeon exactly? Um? Yeah, I was happy just to see one. So uh, the surgeon have uh row in them if they're a female of the right age class, and this rope can be turned into caviar caviar eggs, I wouldn't have known what row was. I mean I do because I watched Yeah, yeah, fish eggs. It can be turned into caviare. Uh, caviar is very expensive. That's the one piece of information that I forgot to check in on is exactly how expensive it is. That do me a favor, just yes, see see what general like Lake Lake surgeon caviare could go for. I don't he might not be. I don't know. You probably came and buy it because it's because there's no there's no there's no actual market. Why you're probably under arrest. I will be shortly. Well. The farms stuff, which is not the real deal, can go for hunterbucks for eight ounces American sturgeon cavar, So give a good ball apart. That's that's that's farms, the wild stuff. I'm sure there's a previous stuff that doesn't sound expensive. I thought it would be that's a half a pound the river blueg gold Sturch and cavre. I don't know how one kilogram for six thousand dollars. I don't know what. Let's just say that to make it more interesting in the story. Yeah, real expensive, real expense. When you start talking about stuff in kilo's yeah, you know you're talking about expensive stuff. Um so a year later, well, let me back up a little bit. The reason that I'm like more uh raveled up or wrapped up in this a little bit is because us for this fur hat ice Fishing Tour episode that we did, we interviewed a fellow by the name of Ryan Kernis, who is known at in Wisconsin as the sturgeon General. He's the lead uh sturgeon biologist. That kind of ran like all the management of that whole system, and that system is uh very healthy. It's like it's them. It's the like the standard by which all all others are are are trying to meet. And not just in the country, but the world over. People would like to have a surgeon fishery like they had like a hundred years ago. They're nearly extirpated all over the world and now here you have a place where it's so good that you can, you know, have a surgeon spearing season. Ah. He was very Ryan was very helpful in helping us produce the episode, got us a bunch of other interviews with great people. Um. He himself gave us a good interview. Um. In general, we had had good luck working with him. Well year later, right before Surgeon season this year, it turns out that Ryan was charged has been charged with basically dealing in bartering of surgeon eggs. Yeah, so there's we don't know the whole story yet, I'm guessing because they're probably withholding some evidence as this thing kind of works its way through, So we don't know exactly what they're gonna say. But what he's actually being charged with is uh more like an obstruction because he supposedly lied a little bit about what he was doing with the eggs or what or how some of the people that were working underneath him were in quotes, funneling the eggs from these check stations. So when you kill a surgeon, you bring it into a check station. Uh, it's mandatory, and there's biologists there that takes samples, they cut them open, they tell you know, male female, how old the fish is, um all this stuff, and that they're just collecting data. Well, supposedly there's a couple of different sort of mechanisms that have been in place for eggs to be sort of taken from there in a casual way and then gone to processors. There was supposedly like a cooler with a processor's name on it. When people and people and biologists would say, hey, if you don't want the eggs, you're not planing on do anything that takes the surgeon could keep the eggs, it's not it's not why, well can you keep them all? Well? Because I mean some people just maybe don't like salty fish eggs. Yeah don't. I know they don't have a paddlefish that's a that's a valuable cavia and just friends of mine that go snag paddlefish. A lot of the people are like aware that people do, but there I don't like caviar. I don't know, they don't they don't want they want the steaks off the fish and they don't care. So um yeah, anyways, he so Ryan's been charged with it. Alongside there's also there's also three again in quotations here caviar processors that have been charged for bartering services for caviar. So the way it works, and we've gone over this a lot, is that you could offer to clean someone's caviar for him for free, give them all the caviar or or or the eggs now turned into caviar back to them. They could then, if they want you, because they're your bodies or whatever, gift you as much of that caviar as they wanted, or they you could pay the processor to have your uh road turned into caviar. But what you can't do is say, let's trade your services of cleaning for my process caviare. At that point, you're bartering in the eggs. So uh. We've talked about this bartering thing a fair bit. And one of my favorite stories about bartering is a body of mine was fishing. He was shrimping. This is in Washington State. He's shrimping and he's at the boat launch and there's a guy coming in from fishing salmon okay, and they are like, oh, you got a bunch shrimp tails, Oh, you got a bunch of salmon, and just very casually this story, if he emerges that they will do a swap some shrimp tails for salmon flay. And there was an undercover warden on that dock that did citations. But fish for shrimp is not because they were bartering. He could have said, like because one was given more than the other, because it was four, because it's can't trade fish. There was a formal. But what you can do is I could go to your house. I can go to your house and I could be like, Clay, I just got back from my fish. Act man, Uh, I love to have here's some halibut. And you could you could say, like, I just gotta you know, I just put the uh, pulled a bunch of tomatoes. Take some tomatoes back. I know you love tomatoes. That's fine as long as we said, well, you know, I would give you some of my halibit, but what's in it for me? And you say, well, I happen to have some some home grown tomatoes, and I say, oh, that sounds like a deal. So it's just it's bartering. Okay, that makes sense. I mean, it's just semantics, though, is it not. It's the quid pro que of trading things. This for that, and all Americans all the world essentially like if we went I mean, if we went turkey hunting and I killed a bear and you killed a turkey, and I was like, hey, you take some bear meat home, and you were like, well take take a turkey breast. That's fine. Yeah, but if you said if I'll trade you, we had not. I want to point this out now too, And we point this out for but I want to keep because we keep getting emails about it. To keep talking about it. I went to are you got a good place hold around this sturgeon story? Me? Yeah. I went to uh an attorney that represented Wilming fishing game for many years, and and and he said, we have only he could remember he could recall no instance of the bartering and trading prosecution outside of someone like really asking for it and it being a broader package of violations. That's the that's the situations when he could it's a bad guy that they're trying to just stick it. Someone was just like, because I mean, how else would you I guess I also to come up except for the body of mine, who were an undercover guy just hanging out of the docks. Scene who's coming and going witnesses a formal offer of exchange. Mm hmm, like a pro like a provisional I'll do this, you do this. Wow, So is that what we're talking about here? I mean, that's what we think happened. Now if this guy lied, Well, so there's two, there's two separate. So there's the Ryan Canics thing going on, right where again, I don't think we know exactly all the evidence, right nobody, you can't reach HNA talk to him. But what he's been charged with is that there that he like lied about what was going on. And then he also has wiped his DNR issued telephone. That's where it got weird as they interviewed him, right, and then he waved this phone. Yeah, okay, So then these other there's I think there's three other people not knowingly the other folks have been charged in the Fondolack area for basically you know, well, I think there's two that were charged with with processing the eggs and then trading their services for finished caviar. And then another fellow was charged for somehow get for basically serving the caviar in a restaurant. So the thread goes deep. Just like when I first heard of the story, I heard that he was channel it to the Rooskis, which I don't know if he was actually connected, so that that that that titilated me. Yeah, and I've heard some other things that we hadn't reported on, sort of like stories that people have heard, and I don't think I want to bring them up because it's just like they are. I have just I want to defend it. I heard that I have read or see nothing that suggests anything to do with any roost. It sounds good, though, but I think I think it's worth noting that the real like there might be people listening that would understand that one of the pillars of the North American Mile of Wildlife Conservation is non commercial use of wildlife. That's just real simple. Yeah, but it just gets complicate, like we can't sell like I can kill it deer and sell it, but you can you can sell furs, you can sell bear oil as a hairdressing. You cannot sell it as a food. That's another podcast. You can sell beaver meat, you can sell like there's it's generally generally generally yes, but fur bears and there's all these other design but generally yes, generally crect. So that's that's why you can't just take a big surgeon filets eggs and sell its eggs or trade it. So that that's the that's the crime. Yes, yeah, and that's what we're Yeah. So a couple of these processors have been previously warned that the way that they were doing it was illegal. Yeah, that titilates me, and a sort of kept on, you know and doing their program. Um y'all need to know. Yeah, needs like a subject matter expert listening over here here, this is without notes. How much of this did you steal from Durkin? I mean, I don't know I had. It's all the same information, but yeah, I certainly to prepare for this, I read his article. Did you do Did you do any original research Johnny? Outside of me being there a year ago? Maybe a little bit. Yeah, I made I made one phone call, but it was more just to see how the sturgeon was going, the sturgeon fishing was going this year, and we just happened to talk about this a little bit. Yeah, which I'll tell you right now. It's what it is, and which is why it makes it like a controversial, contentious kind of a deal right now, Because as easy as it is for all of us to do what we all just said, say, hey take some tomatoes. Oh yeah, great, awesome, I brought you some halibit. Uh. It's it's very close to being illegal, right, and and you can't trade these things right and so um. I don't want to say they're making an example out of it because it's illegal and you can't do it right the laws of law. But that's the way these things work, though, is that culture begins to establish itself and then at some point they go enough is enough, and they pick somebody and they nail them. I have had two people in two different states right to me with proposals that they were doing on their own nonprofity where they were looking to set up wild game exchanges through a social community, a social network community of participants. Was like, dude, you can't, like, you cannot do that. They're like, I have so much elk, I need some one of them. The guy one of the guy with in the in the town we live in, Yeah, wild game exchange. Yeah. So the local uh, I think feeling a lot of people are like, oh, come on, why you gotta do this to these folks and you know, put them through the ringer. You know so much good has been done by you know, these people for the surgeon, because all these people that are involved in this have also been very um active in sturgeon preservation preservation restoration for a long long time. And uh, they feel that it's like making a big deal out of a yeare you're going to talk about the older couple who you know some stuff? Well, yeah, that's why I just decided to like to limit my I had to cut it off at some point, otherwise it's going I'm not trying to tell that part. Yeah, just because I don't know, I just didn't seem like it. We needed to know who exactly these people are. You know, we're talking about who's you know what the problem is? Because that was and really quick just having grown up in that area. If you know, Wisconsin Nites very great. A lot of them are just great, very great people with no ill intentions. You find that not to be true in the other four nine states. No, but it would be like you could go over there right now and you probably run into somebody on the street and they'd be like, hey, can you come over here and get the leaves out of my gutter? And my mom will trade you for a couple of rhubarb pies, you know, like and tell tell your wild game. No, but I'm just saying like, it's just like always these little um culture of Barterine. Just a little crime break, but not not even not even like it's a community. They don't know they're doing it. They don't know them patchwork held together by the Commission of Small Crimes. Yes, it's just people being nice doing crimes that they don't know that they're doing. Yeah, and I welcome to rural America. Like, yeah, So she was having a problem with the old man, and I'm a good neighbor, so I shot him. Just that's just the community we live in. That would be knowing here's a pie. I know what you mean. I'm with Chester, I'm with you. It's like I'm just teasing you. I mean, the law is the law at the end of the day. So that's that's what it comes down to. But people trying to be good people is what I think a lot of this, maybe not on Ryan's side, but on some of the other folks side. I think that that could have been the case. I'm gonna editorialize here in moment, and I don't know anything beyond what Yanni just told me. I'm like these people, but to editorialize a little bit segment, Yeah, this is this the opinion segment. You and he gave the facts, I'll give the opinion. And I don't even really know. I could see it's easy for me to envision if I like lived here and understood this all. It's easy for me to envision coming to that the conclusion of uh really really in terms of the the extent of the press coverage even and we're we're adding to the problem right now that it it's like unless if the story was that people were going out out of season, okay, or like or or um fabricating permits or committing wire fraud. To let me slip something in here, is that like if can eggs all of a sudden is caught with like an extra fift k that no one knows where it came from. Yeah, and he's got like three dead surgeon in his trunk. Honestly, you know something. But you could just picture one of being that there's just during the season, there's this mad rush of all these freaking eggs, right and over the years it just has kind of become the some jars eggs get scattered around and and everybody feels like they're promoting sturgeon and looking out for the resource and we're not out like killing them just to carve eggs out of them. And you know, I mean I could just see that. You would be like, man, they were being wrong. They need to be putting their place. But it's getting a little crazy, the reporting and the yeah, because the fines are pretty happy to forget the dollar amount, but I want to say, like it's like up to nine it's nine months in prison something like that, you know, with like you know, tens of thousands of dollars and fines. Mhmm, yeah, yeah, it'll be it'll be interesting, you know. I hope that it can be resolved in a way where the folks that did the wrong understand and will you know, change their ways, and um, you know that the public that is looking at this will also go Okay. That was educational for me too. I know what I can and cannot do and I won't you know, participate and stuff like that. A couple of years ago, I don't think we ever reported on this too much, but a couple of years ago it was a guy there's a you know, uh, I don't want to name who he is. There's a hunter who does a lot of outdoor media and all over the news one day like it and not the news, but sort of like in the text message hunting's you know, sphere and on blogs and stuff is like, oh, it's a poacher, got caught poaching. Hunt license all over plasure here was so and so huntment, no license and the wound up being he had a license, hunting had. What he didn't have is his five dollar archery stamp. He didn't have his five dollar archery stamp which he was eligible to have purchased. So he had his certificate number for the bow, Like what is that that the national the sort of nationally recognized. Yeah, that the archery safety class, but hadn't so he had bought his like six and some odd dollar out permit but didn't get the five dollar archery enhancement. But right, and people get really excited about this stuff and you look into it and it's you know, you're kind of like I have a feeling that he wasn't Like I'll show I just found a way to save five dollars. They'll never catch me, you know what I mean. It happens. Yeah, yeah, he's not a poacher. Yeah, it happens where people get really excited about this kind of stuff. So but the phone deleting, Yeah, yeah, there's some shady stuff and the phone is a little I think we'll know more and we'll just a dirty sound of word. But this is not dirty. Nothing wrong with that word. But man, does it sound dirt. I wonder what the outcome would have been if there wasn't any hint of malice. Like, I don't know, I don't know this guy at all. I just I just would bet my truck that he's a good guy that wasn't trying to do anything wrong. But the whole delete the phone thing, like maybe he's just a stupid criminal. Maybe he's been the best guy his whole life and then realized he was a little bit of trouble and then did something stupid. When a good criminal who's been a criminal their whole life, we're known not to do that. I mean, I'm not defending the guy been like he'd have been like can't text, I'll call Yeah, yeah, so when I'll call you from a pay phone. Yeah, that's what the good criminals do. You know, if there's a story. That's all right now. I feel like it came out before, though I don't really understand this. Someone check into this for me because Kran pointed it out to me, and it's here in my notes. The does every year. This does every year the squirrel hunting contests in New York by the German Sportsman's Association. They try to shut down their squirrel hunting tournament. Oh so February, the German Town Sportsman Association has their annual squirrel hunting tournament seven years running. I should go. I'd like to go hunt this tournament man. Seven years running? Teams or is it solo? They're getting death threats, They're getting vulgar phone call and they are not going to shut down their squirrel hunting contest. Keep it alive. Man. All the meat gets used. They use it for their fundraiser, they use it for the banquet. The argument against it is this killing in the name of fun and family bonding seems contradictory. They've never been squirrel hunting because boy, is it fun and do you get to do some bonding? They want them to replace it with something that promotes family values. What do they suggest? A beef steak? Does that pose family values? Yeah? If they had a big old beef steak, if they had a steak dinner, would anybody be giving them grief? And the damage in so many ways would be so much greater. You get they I like this, it's the weight of your bag. It's a good bass fishing. Yeah. So you get a limit. They weigh out your limit, man, Yeah, you better go on. I want to count disc tournaments so bad German town sports his association so and making their death giving them death threats and whatnot. You should call them and say, I hope that you stay alive a long time. Um, Steve by their rules can use dogs, Me and you and y'all do could roll up there with a couple of hot mountain fights and they might not know what hit him. I know that on Facebook they have Somebody's gonna People are talking about six fourteen likes, But no, I don't know the details. We can get back with you on that, or if you'd like, Clay, we'll go up there with some meals and dogs. Listen, I got this idea. Why don't you all over, Why don't you call over, conduct some interviews and come back and report to us about new York Squirrel Hunting Tournament done another quick squirrel A couple quick you go, I'm going to leave him behind. I'm going no, no, no, I'm not saying to not go. Is she not gonna make it this year? Oh no, this is a quick turnaround. Teams have two look at this guy. This guy's like a we'll split it up cash prize, will take tests. Bonus. So if you get a black face, if you get a black now do they mean red? Like what what do they mean? Fox guaranteed? So bonus for fox really bonus and you get a bonus for black phase gray. Mm no, that's getting a little too flashy for me. Boys, I'm all about that when it comes to squirrel. I know it was a spot in New York where all you see is black face gray, get over there. Yeah, if you want, I know a spot in southwest Michigan, same thing. So if you wanted to do, if you're like a you know, smart criminal, you could hunt up a bunch there and make drivedle detecting over the piles of squirrels. Make sure someone didn't like stuff like lead balls down their throat. Yeah, I remember that reading about that in a Shark tournament. They found a shark pack full of sash weights, so then they started X ray and the sharks. Hey, that might be a reason to use a lead shot for squirrels up there rather than head shoot. Yeah, because head shot you lose weight. Yeah, you that carries off some of the weight. You know. I one time, I wanna get back to this squirrel news. But we years ago. We're turkey hunting. Turkey hunt in Wisconsin and the local bar, which like all the revenue at this bar sees have come from the same six alcoholics. What was that town? Oh yeah, no, damn it, we're all looking at Chester. No, not Roscoe. You oh yeah, you're onto it. Hey wait this here's the funniest part about the story. So there's too funny part. Anyways, there's a bar in Elroy and no, no, no, no misrespect to the to the drunkards to spend their entire day in this bar. But if you ask them, they are all exceptional turkey hunters. So I get a big turkey and everybody's like, and my body had already signed me up for the big turkey contest. He had to put like three bucks in your five bucks in to sign me up. For the Big Turkey contest. I killed turkey, got it, I got it and bring it down. But it winds up being like, for a while it's on the leaderboard. I'm like number one heavy turkey. You're trying to tell him, Oh, if I hadn't get it, Oh in the old drunks in this bar, he got in the turkey. Have you ever he got in the turkey. We go back into a couple days later and I can hear him and they're still in there, and get it, get this, he got in the turkey and I lost that damn thing by ounces. The funniest part about is I knew we were like by Doug Durn's kinda and Doug Durn's talking about being over in Elroy, like like you're in Marrakesh, Okay, Like, oh my god, over in Elroy. Who right? And one day we decided to go to Dougs and it's like we'd like drive down the road like I don't know minutes and we're at Dug's house. Those people. I thought, it's like Dug could like yell over to Elroy, Oh my god, Elroy. Uh so, oh, here's no good squirrel story. They had a squirrel with a radio collar. We're talking about squirrel distribution, which I've taken interest. And I don't want to tell anybody why a secret. But in fact, there was a thing about what I don't want to talk about in here in my notes, and I why I deleted it. Then I put it back in, but put a note, a comment, note that this is a secret, secret thing I know about. Anyhow, the secret I know prompted prompted a question to uh are the squirrel biologist we recently had on that episode is called the squirrel Doctors in um in Pennsylvania, Seth, you'll appreciate this. In Pennsylvania they had a ear tagged squirrel that traveled sixty two miles. Really, mhm, I believe it? What have you? What have master years and p a where it's just there's just nothing in all the squirrels disappear gone. I can't find a squirrel anywhere travel And then and then you next year, good master year, all the squirrels are back. You know what I do? You know what a radius is? In the circle I would put the I would make a radius around that. Wherever you are, I'd make a radius sixty two miles around that. Point and then I'd get in my car and drive do some surveys. Someone real sharp can figure out how far are you'd have to drive? I drive, Yeah, that's the equation, and I'd find him. It's recomference. He little something something hie r. Okay, Clay, do you want to start on? Do you want to start on? What do you want to start on? We start on raccoons really okay, m hmm. Yeah, it's fresh. Yeah, manly because I feel like we've reported on squirrels so heavily over the years, and we'll continue to report on squirrels. We're gonna report on squirrels today, but we have not given due reporting hunting to coon hounding. Yeah, we've had a tough we've had We've so now you've only been here for three nights, Steve, so you've hunted the last three nights. Yanni and I have hunted the last four nights together. And this is about as tough of conditions as we've as I've ever hunted in you know we have right now in the Ozarks or when Yannie got here, there was six eight inches of snow on the ground, which for here is a lot. It does happen but it's a lot. We had records. Yeah, it's so to back you up, it's so rare that I called a buddy of mine who used to hunt a lot of coons in southern Missouri, which is not far from here, and I was asking about cold, snowy conditions. He's like, I really can't tell you because I think I hunted those conditions twice in all my years. Well, that's exactly what I told you. You You said, hey, Clay, have you ever hunted in the snow? And I was like, one time I hunted in the snow, So I didn't really know what to expect um, But the record lows. It was negative twelve on my phone for the town that I live in the northwest Arkansas, like two days before you got here Sunday. There's ponds around here. It looks like you could walk on on the ice and go I fishing. I walked out on one, and my uh Seth knows about this ice talks to me. I walked out on one and it was not It wasn't. I don't like it. Yeah, it went just about it and I got off quickly. But still, how often do you even see a pond frozen over. I mean not like this, so so what was you know what? Hold on a second. I didn't set this up properly. I didn't do a good I have a train. I have a better okay, because see I was set it up like we're going into squirrel, but we went into coons. So check this out let her rip. We're talking about how, uh when they trained dogs in Germany, apparently Navid and all that. Mhm, you make the dog get into a barrel or a cage and scrap with a raccoon. You know about this. I've heard of it. And I got talking about, uh, people putting a dog in to fight with a weasel or to fight with a rat. I've done the weasel fight thing. Really yeah really just like with what kind of dog? No? Just personal? Oh yeah yeah in a culver pipe? Yeah, did you have to scrap? He was he was setting a trap and he went down there and set the trap, and the weasel was in the culvert already they're going to set screamed like a baby. Not you got this is in Texas. This is he talked about it on I reached down in a culvert pipe to set a trap and there was a weasel in there. It snarled at me, but it was in a culvert pipe, so it's yeah, it sounded like a tiger. He's it's a bank of tiger there. It made me step back. And when you put your nose down and you can just smell that weasel in there too, I think you should take out Steve, say Navita too, because I believe Nada North America. I know, but it's all listen, no, okay, take out me could not be able to find my stuff. But keep Yannie in saying to take out NAVDA because NAVDA is heavily influenced by German versatile hunting dogs stuff heavily influenced. But I know, I just don't want it to make it sound like you're saying that NAVDA now has these things going on where they like. I can tell you they maybe don't condone it, they maybe don't talk about it, but I can listen. I'll take this to the grave. I can tell you there are people who are Okay, not NAVDA. There are people who are into the versatile hunting dog aesthetic on this continent who might uh pay attention to NAVDA and be interested in the stuff, who are still believers in making them duke it out with a raccoon. I totally agree. Okay, this guy has firsthand knowledge of a farmer who had a weener dog doins. He's a grain farmer, and he had a dot. He even has it here, a dots and parenthesy weener dog. I'm looking at it right here. I believe it's right the other way with it. I don't know how to pronounce it. I don't wanna get caught not knowing how to pronounce it. It looks like and I knew I'd messed it up, and then everybody have a laugh at my expense. And I like to laugh at everybody, but I want to be laughing at me. So he had a grain stylo. So he's got a grain farmer. He had a weener, a dashing dotson dock Dockson. He had a docks and he would put in a box and make him duke it out with pack rats because cause he had such a problem with pack rats destroying the wiring on his trucks and equipment when he stored it for the winner. So this docks and am I saying that right Dockson hated pack rats because I have him to fight him in that box and would go hunt him and protect the equipment and trucks during winter storage. We had who would lie in an email? Yeah? Right here? Where are we for everyone we've ever elected the office? We've had thousands of dollars of damage on my wife's car from pack rats getting in and chewing wires. I bet that's what your dog ate last night. I was thinking about what the dog ate. I wasn't thinking about it. That's what it was. Yeah, what the hell else would have been? Yeah, that's the only kind of big rat we have. Oys hell are we talking about? Oh? I still haven't seg watch this now? Um made him right in? Was Yannie talking about his his raccoon, his dog? That was a good lead. Now I'll go talking about coon's Yeah, oh we know like a long time ago, and I was talking about training mingus on the trap raccoon. Yeah, so I brought a full circle. That's good. That's really good here Now people would be better prepared to track the conversation. So we've just we've so, I mean, I I have I have raccoon house to start from zero to bring everybody up to speed. I have raccoon hounds Okay, a raccoon is a mammal, I would say coon, I would say, I mean, I would just be not super close cousins to a bear. Yeah, So I have coon hounds, and so coon hounds are they're multiple breeds of coon hounds, five or six different u k c. Registered. Well, there's a walker, blue tick, black, and tan, red bone English in plot? Is that all? Is that? All six of them? Sounds like yeah? And so tell about how the one hand all five? So well, it's easier to say the plothhound, the American plothhound is the only treehound that did not descend from European fox hounds. So black and tan, blue tick, walker, red bone English all descended from European fox hounds. If you look above, you, gentlemen, you'll see uh banning on the wall. I can tell you about that. I'm sorry. Yeah, there's a there's a there's an from this that's a whole another story. You want me to talk about that later? To guard the gate thing. Essentially, that scene no longer exists on the earth because those dudes didn't didn't didn't do it right. And I understand the principal garden the gate, and I believe in Garden the Gate. But I just don't know how. I just don't consider that my those my brethren, Well listen, let me let me. I'm with you. I don't even dress up fancy little hats and riding around on a horse, Jason the fox. I mean, I just still, I just don't look. Look at that scene that was us yesterday. Look, there's a fan, there's a family of people. They're they're on that play dogs. We'll talk about a separate answer. No, I'm just saying those that was a valuable So what I've got, guys, is I've got this old painting of a European fox hunting scene, men on horseback, there's twenty walkers. There's not even that. I don't want to take up everybody's time. I'll talk about it with you later. Sure, God, but I hope they hunt and chase fox till the tills come home. It just isn't relevant. If you had let me tell the story, you can see why it's relevant. But why that's there, No, no, no, no, I don't want to talk about that. All that is symbolic that picture because that no longer exists. That's why it's on the ceiling. I put everything that no one because I'm slapping Yanni on the knee for emphasis. I don't want there to be a painting of me and Steve and Joannice on mules with feists and coonhounds, but they have to make paintings of because you can't do it anymore. Do you see what I'm saying. That's that's the metaphor. That's why it's up there, because I don't want that to be me. I want my kids to be able to ride mules and hunt with dogs and do the stuff that we've done. So that's that's the metaphor. I think it's a little flawed though, because I think usually people make paintings of things that are celebrated. So in a way, I do want a painting of us, but I don't want that paint to go on. You don't want it on the ceiling of this place. So so we coon hunt. So we have coonhounds. Uh, it's something that I got my first coon hounds when I was fourteen years old. I hunted until I went to college, got rid of my dogs, took a hiatus from coon hunting for about fifteen years until my family was kind of of age and my kids and people were interested, and six I think six years ago I got back into coon hunting and just kind of stepped back into it. And it's a it's a pretty it's I mean, if you're an outdoorsman and you're looking for places to spend time in the outdoors, it's pretty unique because you do it at night. I mean almost even from like a logistical perspective. First of all, it's an animal that is abundant that most people don't care about, and you hunted at night. Yeah, involves a dog. It's there's virtually no there's virtually no stress on the resource right now because the furs are not valuable enough to warrant trapping for him, and generally trappers trappers are like when fur prices are high, they're killing nine out of ten that get killed. Yeah, high volume commercial dudes. And that's not nerd even more, you know the whole messo predator seeing like mid sized predators. You know, the big main predators in North America in this part of the world, which would have been mountain lion wolf, they're gone. The messo predators, mid sized predators are more there. I've got some research papers over here from some stuff I was looking at, like there is an unnatural amount of raccoons in North America right now as compared to pre European settlement. So yeah, I was reading in our little fact sheet. I want to say, it was like how many people are in America now around I think it was around three hundred million raccoons in our country. I remember thinking like, wow, it's almost as many people's lived here. I think that that's incorrect. You do just got just got couldn't you see how fast he grabbed that phone. That's like the kind of thing. Yeah, but you know why is because he wrote that fact. I actually alright, so eat, when you hunt and you cast million turn loose, really three in a million coons? Nor do you ever hear about how they how they do that? Wildlife Services does that drop of rabies vaccination pills from the air to spread to stop raccoon rabies. That's some interesting stuff. I was just I was just gonna describe. Yeah, and I called the guy and I'm like, I'm bringing some shid horns. So when we coon hunt, what we do is we go out to a likely spot. Usually involves water, big woods, like you want to turn out around a creek, around a pond. And these are trained dogs. And you know, we could go a thousand different ways of how you train dogs. A lot of it is breeding, getting the right dog to start with, and then you condition that dog and train it. We have to get into the training a little bit because that's the whole reason that Chester and I are driving twenty hours each direction with my dogs so he gets training done. Let me just like set up what coon hunt. It is how we do it. So we turn loose our dogs in a likely spot. These dogs are free cast, which means we just turn them loose, and the idea is that they would they would go out on their own, find coon scent, trail the coon, and tree the coon. And so what I was telling, I want to add into that, like the reason there's like a name for free cast, you know, that's not the reason. But the other version of cut cutting a hound loose to go track something is that you like we do in Montana looking for mountain lions. We find the track and then you put the dog's nose literally on that track and started the humans finds the track in the snow or in the mud. You turn a dog, you'd bring a dog to set them in the right direction to free cast is where I don't know where a coon is, you know, I just I just know by this pond there's likely a coon within three yards here. Maybe he's fifty yards, maybe he's five hundred yards. I'm gonna turn this dog loose. This dog has the instinct to hunt and pray drive. He's gonna he's gonna seek out coon scent and real quick. Interesting you told me tell him about what's it called anie? When you don't FreeCast, is there a turn for it? Put him on the track. Well, I mean, if you're big game, so there's lots of different things. If you're big game hunting a lot of guys rigged dogs, which means you drive around. No, no, I mean, what's it called to stick his nose in a track? I mean, just turn them out on the track, turn him on a track. We talked about this. I was like, what happens when people if coon cuts across the road in front of you. Clay was saying that the strategy is drive past it, wait a while so it's not too hot, and then bring them back and put him on it when it's not too hot. Anybody that's listening to this podcast that's a coon hunter for very long has had this happen. You're going coon hunting and you see a coon cry us the road. The first instinct you have is to slam on the brakes, jump out, grab your dog, and just throw it on the track. And I mean just universal have done it, Oh yeah, many times. A probably learned I'm not just from my experience, but from others telling me the same corresponding story. Dogs have a real hard time with a super fresh track. They'll usually take it the wrong way. This happened. I saw a coon track. This was like three or four years ago. I saw a coon across the road in front of my truck going to the right, going off down the valley. I turned fern loose on that hot track. She just erupts. She goes two hundred and fifty yards the other way and trees a coon on the side of the mountain over the head, dead serious like that. You know, you just feel like she's gonna hit there. So so what you do, if you can discipline yourself enough to do it, is you just well basically wait ten minutes before you turn on the track, and then they hit the track and whatever happens with the scent. So like, there's a there's a lot of science behind the way dogs use their nose with scent, Like there's a scent plume. Like that dog is sometimes tracking ground scent, which means the paths of that coon are touching dirt and grass and soil, leaving scent. The primary way that they're trailing a hot track is from a scent plume. So as that coon or even you or me are walking through the air, micro particles are constantly falling off of our body. I mean like skin particles, hair particles, particles from your shirt falling off, creating a scent plume. That's why a dog will run with his head up and not put his head right into a track. And so depending upon how hot, how fresh the scent is, and how um good the conditions are, conditions are everything. If it's cold, it's one way, if it's hot, it's another way. Um Like, So there's just all these variables that come with the olfactory conditions that a dog and trump. So what to go back to the sequence that I wanted, I told Johnson Steve so to a coon hunter, like the the objective is to get a coon, Like we're after a coon. There are better ways to get coons than with a dog. Like if we were just like if Steve was like Clay, I gotta come to Arkansas and bring ten coons home with me, I would have said, well, let's put out some dog proof traps. You know. That's like there there's a more conficient Yeah, there's a more official way. So like the whole thing is about working with this dog. That's part of it. And so what happens when you're a coon hunter is if I took Rick Smith out, he might have if he hadn't heard to spill. The first night just been like the dogs barked and then there was a coon, Like, big deal, My yard dog barks. Well, to a coon hunter, the nuance inside of those barks, it's like a book. It's like a story. And man, I mean, y'all, it was dark last night and I can't hear out of my right ear, and that you got you want to talk about a handicap this guy, no doubt. I'm sure everybody knows this, but when you hear a sound, your ears are making a calculate It seems crazy, but this is when a sound hits your head. What are you laughing about? That's true. That sounds insane. Your brain knows which your ears the sound got to first, as fast as that is traveling. In fact, that's why when you're underwater, you can't tell where it came from, because it's traveling. What thirteen times fast or something like that. Look that up, my guess that's seven times fast. Look at them. When you're underwater and you hear like a way away off or you hear um boat motor, you feel you're gonna get faster than in there. Oh yeah, so fast that you brain, I can't pick it. That's why when you that's why when you hear an outboard, when you're diving under water and you hear outboard, it feels like it's gonna hit you from some direction you can't tell water. You feel like you're surrounding by whales when they're that's what the whale sounds like, um so whistle. Yeah, that's why it's so disorienting. Your brain knows what year that sound hit first, and then like through some calibrated it's unbelievable. Clay has got a bad a bum here every noise Clays like, where'd that come from where'd that come from? He cannot tell where it came from. So you can play a hell of a trick on you, Oh you could. For sure. I'm gonna start hiding out in the woods at night. Hey, do you know do you want to know how I learned that I couldn't hear direction? When I was a kid, I'd be hunting with my dad and he'd holler at me from you know, we'd we'd split up to scout for deer, and he'd be like clay and I'd be like, yeah, come over here, there's a bucker uh. And I'd just take off going that way and he'd holler hey, and I'd be like yeah, and he's further away, and I'd take off after and I mean it would just so that's not that's not like a result of blowing in the era. When I was in the ninth grade, my ear started ringing after getting a twenty two pistol and burning up about two thousand rounds out of there. But but I didn't shoot at home kids where it's like day eight dollars, short dude runs around all day or the ear plugs in thought, Steve, if you clapped your hands real hard, by me my bad here that I can't hear out of well ring so loud. I can't hardly hear people talk, like if you just went yeah, I mean like, so i'd really take care of my bad here because that's the one that rings. So that's when when you'll learned if you hunt with me very much. I always ask people to tell direction. I was doing it with you all yesterday. I was like, which direct point? I say, point point where that dog is, and Steve would be like this way, Michael, and here does it where? I say, pointed those dogs because I hear them, because I got a good ear. I've got one here that's great, which is a blessings, you know, if they're both bad. I couldn't hear people talk. I can hear you talk, fine, Oh no, you hear it. I just don't know where it makes for a tough turkey hunt. Oh dude. It's sort of ruined my solo turkey career, no doubt. I want to train my mule to key in on. I'm serious. I thought about getting a gobble machine and and then go feed the feed the feed of a treat next to it, and then so when she hears a gobble on a colt on a spring morning. Here's to go up the mule that the mule I was riding squirrel hunting. I was kind of wondering, how much would you need to do this before when those dogs bade they go to them, that the mule will just be like, I might as just go over there because this guy is gonna be kicking my side, yanking out my reins and whatnot. I feel like, now, see, the mule you were riding would be one that we ride less, like is he my mule? Like every time that we hunt on mules, I'm riding her. And I'd be stretching to say that when she hears dog barks, she just starts going. It eventually happens. She she tends to go the way they go. You should every time you get a squirrel feeder, give that mule something to eat that's good. So she's like over there where those dogs are dogs, Those dogs are banned by some green that's solid that it really would work. Those those mules would sell their soul for a handful. And Phil Phil cut that dogs. I'm actually gonna sell that idea to somebody a book. He's gonna make a book. M We were talking about the sequence, and I said, like, in the dark, you're listening for these certain things to happen. What might seem just like a bark to someone else's like this this story, and so there's four things that are happening on a coon hunt. You turn the dogs, you free cast the dogs. In the first bark that you hear that it is what we call strike. So you would hear us say that man Fern just struck a con. That would mean she located the scent of a coon. And there is an excited bark. I mean, it could be a variation of barks, but it just there's no like someone stepped on their tail, they strike the con. There's no exactly okay, like for instance, and I didn't even have time to get into it the other night. But there was one time when Fern went way out embark down in that field where we thought we her to coyote, And when I heard her open strike, I didn't think it was a coon. I thought she was booger barking. Well, no, she got sprayed in the face by a skunk. That was another time. You gotta explain booker bark. Well, let's let's not let me just uh, well, I can't. I mean, a booker bark would just be a meaning the dog was scared by something. And like if a ups man drove up in the front of your yard and the dog was out, it would be like, I'm just gonna stand there and look. When fern strikes, she has a squall. And when I hear a squeaky squall at a fern, I feel good about that. As a coon she's after. So they strike. The next thing they do is they trail the coon. And this is this is the part of the sequence that every dog is gonna be different. There's no dog that's gonna be the same. But what they're doing is they're trailing the ground. Sin of that coon, the tempo, cadence, loudness, excited, this of that bark tells you how hot that track is. If they just blow out of there, then man, you're like, man, it's a hot track. If it's like we heard a lot of this this week, you're just saying, man, they're they're working it. And on a textbook track, the track would get hotter and hotter, but it's rarely textbook. So there's there's the trail sounds when you're hunting an animal that climbs trees, you have in these dogs are tree dogs, which means they are bred to run game, and when that game runs up a tree, they stay there and bark. And that's a special thing because most most most hounds would be dogs that would just want to pursue game. So like running dogs, that's what we call a running dog. A running hound, and a treehound is different. A running hound, when he chases a coon and it goes up a tree, he goes, dang, this isn't he fun anymore. I'm gonna go somewhere else and find another one to try to catch. A treehound, when he gets to where he believes the animal left the earth and is standing up in a tree, he will stay there and bark, which is think about this though, Rick Smith, this is an unnatural thing for an animal to do. Like in the wild, there's no replication of that thing, because a treehound has a human partner that will then come to the tree and harvest the animal. So like a wolf wouldn't be a treehound. A wolf would run you up a tree and be like, I ain't getting that guy, I'm gonna go catching it. You see, what I'm saying. So it's this influence of human artificial selection and breeding that makes something really special. So like when I say that dog is a tree dog, Like what I'm gonna say about a little bit question. Can all of the so the breeds of the hounds, can they all be tree dogs? Well, I mean they all running hounds, like like like all the six breeds that I just all, they're all treehounds. What's a hound that is not a treehound? Well, there's lots of walkers that are running walkers like guys that run deer, guys that run foxes, guys that run coyotes. Those are running dogs. Um, so is a bagle. Beagles are running dog. If a bagel a rabbit could climb a tree, a bagle would just leave in the tree and go find another rabbit to run. My dog, my dogs a snuggling dog. See someone on the couches. That's where it's going artificial human selection. Our dog is such a snuggling dog that now, en if we let the kids go into we don't have like a living room with the TV area, and and when the kids go into the I was like, oh yeah, we get sick of them, Like you guys can go watch the show. If that dog hears that a cartoon or something come on, like a bline runs in, No one that can go snuggle with the money. That's a snuggle dog. Yeah, stays on that snuggle. So we're a part two of four. So so strike, trail and then locate and these are all things that I could call in a sequence. The locate bark is when the the the animal and in our case of coon has gone up the tree. And it may seem like the dog would just trail footsteps right up to a tree and just start barking, but it's never the way it happens. Like y'all saw last night, Like fern trail, that coon got to generally where she believed it was, but the scent trail was indistinct to which tree it was. I mean, she was checking every tree in a fifty sixty square yard area. She didn't know where it was, and she during that time will lead out a series of elongated barks that indicate that she is no longer on the actual linear trail that coon and she's like do circles and and every dog will be different. I know what ferns locate bark sounds like if you're a coon hunter, you'd say, she's looking up, but she doesn't know where it's at. Looking up with mean the dog is trying to locate the coon in the tree, but it's not real clear. They almost always locate, and so you get excited when your dog locates. So the dog strikes, the dog trails, and then when she locates, you slap your buddy on the knee and you go, may, we're about to be looking at the coon. And then the fourth thing, the fourth sequence is the dog begins to tree. That's when the dog locates the coon, and the dog begins an excited series typically of chops oh oh, oh, oh oh. Not all dogs chop some dog's ball, but like eight percent of these coon hounds that are in these breeds will chop on the tree. So it's like locate, oh oh, strike trail, okay tree. When last night when we were having such a time, when they're having such time untangling that track, well I thought was interesting was you, um, they hit a tree and you said, I think the tree and we ran over there and I said, well, there it is. I could see it up in the tree, and you seem real surprised. Yeah, man, just because you were getting frustrated with how long it took to sort the track out. You know. Yeah, what we saw last night was it was in some ways it was great dog work and other ways it was bad dog work. I mean, it's just kind of which side of it you wanted to look at. For whatever reason, that was a hard track for them to sort out. And I can't tell you why it was. Um, they made a massive loss. So I should have never gone in there, Steve, I was. I was just confused. Well, it doesn't help him any But like when I was looking at my garment and there's like eight people looking over my shoulder and we've been hunting for four nights and and we hadn't even seen a coon yet. And this is so not a big deal to one o the morning. And I'm here Fern locating and I'm watching my garment and I see her doing tight circles. I felt like she was treated, and I said, let's go to her. And I made the decision we're gonna go. And we got in there. And as soon as we got in there, she wasn't where I left her, you know, she wasn't And and and it wasn't. She didn't leave the tree like a bad thing. That would be a bad thing. She just hadn't committed. They hadn't got bored left. No, No, she just she just knew it wasn't there. She wasn't certain where it was. So we got in there and I saw her nose on the ground and not pointing the tree. I just was like, Doc, got it. And this is after several nights a tough coon hunting. I like that. You yelled at me in there to uh you said, don't start shining your light up in the trees because then they'll think they got the tree. Which is interesting that they got that. They bunch of dudes come in and shine light the tree. They're like, it must be the raccoon exactly. I mean, think, think about a couple of hundred times or more in their life. The only time we shot up in a tree, a coon comes falling down, you know what I mean. So you don't, especially when they're struggling, you don't. You just cut your lights. You just kind of want And when we did go in on the tree, when you finally like you the dogs were doing a bunch of they going all over the place, and couldn't sort it out. But then they found it, like really committed to a tree. But you're still a little incredulous just because there's so much weirdness has already gone on. You had me switch my light to a green light so that I didn't get so that I didn't if they were not if they were not sure yet, that I didn't make too much of a suggestion. Okay, that wasn't my thought at all, that I thought. I assume that's what it was. Okay, Yeah, I can see why you think that, because I was telling you at one time not to shine your light and then you said put it on green, and put it on Yeah, I had mine on red. The reason I did that, Steve, is because we were in a cedar thicket, and those coons would get up in the top of those thirty foot cedars and you can't see them. You might it was another five ten ft higher in that tree would have been harder to pick up. Oh I wouldn't You saw how quick I found that quick? You know what I saw that tail, the ring on the tail, it was beautiful. Well, what I wanted that coon to do was look at it. He'll look at a red light, and he won't look at a bright light. Oh so that's what you were thinking, because looking eyes shine a lot of times you get you get one flicker of a con i right when you walk up. When you walk up, they're trying to figure out what's going on. They'll look at you, and then they'll closer us and just hunker down. And if they're up in the top of a cedar tree that you can't see all of it, you might get one look at him in a red light. They'll look at a red light or a green light. So I was worried about finding the coon. I saw a fern standing on the tree barking. I was like, whether she's got it or not, she's committed. I'm going in. And then the coon was not very far up the tree. You saw it right away. I was excited. Man, you know, it feels way up. I could have saw it right away. To Clay, do you think the dogs getting sprayed by the skunk messed with him at all? You know, because that's Jester said it. Somebody said it. I kind of doubt it did. And let me tell you why. We have this sense of what it's like to use your nose to navigate life because but a dog's navigation of life through its nose is vastly different than ours. The way I've heard it described by someone, it would be like walking into a house, and let's say your wife was cooking lasagna. You were cooking lasagna, Johnny, and you'd walked into the house. You would smell lasagna. Your dog would walk in and he would smell tomato, sauce, boiled noodles, ricotta, cheese, and Italian sausage, and he could distinct. They would be like distinct colors that he could separate from one another. So, yeah, are my dogs were out? I gotta qualify this because people are gonna think I have skunk dogs. Uh, my dogs were. I think they were working a little drainage and both of them just erupted, just just for probably four or five seconds into it. I think they just spooked. There was a lot, don't if you noticed, there was a lot of skunk tracks last night they were, Yeah, because I think that warm break in the weather, so in a lot of greener tracks. Yeah, we haven't seen a greener track. I don't think. I didn't see one. I saw it. We saw as he left. I don't know, if you went and looked around that area, it looked like he had had a hole down in that area. Is that yeah? M hm, he'd been working and work and working, and it was I remember asking you what that little outburst was. The dogs like kind of went crazy there for a second. Right, They probably just jumped something. Yeah, And that's not you said. They maybe they maybe like kicked up a deer and it scared him or whatever. Because they didn't run it. I mean that like, you know, to run it out of the cunt. I mean, they just typically don't. They're pretty straight dogs. But it was as tough of conditions as I've ever been in for tree coon the last several days. And just so everyone knows, those dogs treat that coon after they got sprayed by that skunk. So yeah, probably thirty forty minutes after they got sprayed by scunt. Yeah they did. Uh what do you think about that one? You know, Yanni's one of his nicknames is the lavin Eagle. What do you think when Yannie spotted that squirrel's eyeball up in that tree? I was oppressive, it really was. Man. Good Ah, that's when the I know save this. You know, we had we lost the squirrel in the tree. This is a segway in the squirrel hunt. No, we forgot something, Yeah, the Ballad of Mingus the dog Um. We lost a squirrel the tree and Yanni there's a crack in the tree. And Yanni found its eyeball up in the crests like a little hole look like a you know, like a yeah, not too small, and he could probably make a volleyball stick into it. Jam it in there, eyeball looking at but it wasn't deep. And so when I glassed up there, you could see a little squirrel head. You can see a head in the shine of its eye. That was an interesting call on squirrel hunting, is like you can see his head in there, and you definitely could have shot him in the head. But then if you stoned him he might not come out. But the nature of the whole was such that you had to actually do something, go for a less ethical kill, in order that it would have a lot enough life to scurry itself out of that crack. Well that's not what we did, though, didn't do You know what we did? You spooked him out. I shot right under the hole. So what we did so we had twenty two's on him. We had Michael Lanier with the twelve gauge. I was carrying a four ten, and I the fact that we could see the squirrel and the hole told me that the hole didn't go deeper like advantage of it. He was just in a little cavity, and so I said, well, I'll just shoot right beneath the hole, and that's what we did. It worked, shot and he ran out of the hole. It was delayed though I shot boom. He didn't move and then he broke like a few seconds later. That's why I remember it. And then he ran up the tree. And then I guess Michael ended up shooting it with a shotgun as it was going up the tree. Yeah, all right, talk about Amingus Update. We need a jingle for Amingus Update. A little song. Oh you know what I want to do? I wanna you know that old kiss song Beth. It goes Beth. You hear me calling Beth, to hear me calling you calling, But I can't come home. I'm gonna do one. I want to rewrite it so it's seth. But I can't see if I wanted to be a turkey hunting song fleshing songs did last night. Well, I know, but now I got thinking Seth. I hear him calling, Well, I like that. That'd be us here in to gobbel it be all about me and Seth here in to go Seth. I hear him calling. I like that. I like that better than the fleshing. Yeah. I'm just in a Turkey state of mind right now. It's coming. It's gonna be sweeping. I get that song written up. Jesse is gonna help me with it. The creative projects just flow around here and put some chords in there. So then also when you get working at it, work up a jingle for Yanni's Mingus update. Okay, yours will be Mingus mingas Mingus. Don't make it that they're all the same. Well, I'll let Clay speak to it more because Clay has got more experienced so he can see what my dog didn't learned. But two set it up. Mingus has been trained a little bit with uh one live con and a dead coon in Montana, maybe four days total, and uh he got to trail one and he fought one for a little bit and then we shot it out of a tree. And um, you know you got to smell it a little bit when it was when it was not that much exposure, with not much, not much, And he's been at two lion trees. Now he's been on quite a few more hunts, but my hunts just haven't been panted out, so he hasn't actually gotten to run a lot of tracks. So I wanted to bring him down here for this so you get some more experience. Well, first of all, for the houndsmen out there, or the non hounsmen, Mingus is a and I'm not just saying this because I don't just walk around telling people they got good looking hounds. That's just not a compliment you throw around too lightly. But Vengus is like big, old, handsome looking dog. It really is. For a hound, handsome looking dog, loud are most hound is known to be ugly. I mean they're not always pretty, and I'm being serious, they're working dog. What sentence would sound more familiar to you? And up on the porch is ugly old hound dog, or and up on the porch it's a beautiful old hound dog. Ugly like something you wouldn't You don't really, you wouldn't really call a hound beautiful. You might call him handsome Regal or you know, I'm just like Regal Eagle. Yeah, no, it really when I saw him, I'd seen him when he was younger back in Montana, you know, when he was just kind of a pup, maybe three quarter grown. But boy's a big old dog. And uh in a pound puppy pound. Yeah, you honest got him from a pound. Didn't know anything about him, so we we don't know the daughters picked him up. This. This is what would be interesting about mingus to me is that John's doesn't know any history of this dog. Like my dogs, I would be able to tell you back to about seventeen fifty their lineage. And I'm sort of being serious, uh like you know, you just know so much. Uh, this dog, we don't know anything. But yann say he's gonna bring the dog. Um I didn't. I mean I was all for it. I didn't think the dog would do much, not because he's a bad dog, just because he was coming to a new environment. He's gonna be with new dogs, he's gonna be a new territory, running something he's not familiar with. And uh and he's just yeah, he's a pup, he's a how old is he Yeah, and anything under two years old, and a hunting dog would be kind of considered a young dog, and he might be out of the puppy stage. You might be into a young dog stage. They're pretty pliable until they're about two two and a half years old. You got a lot of room to train and such. But the dog, we cast the dogs with my dogs, and uh, I mean he went hunting, which number one, that's a good thing. He didn't just stay at our feet the whole time. Yeah, he'd go away the hell off and that That's one of the main things I'm looking for is just drive to go, you know, because you know my dog go back to the truck. Well, you kept saying, you kept making the joke of when you'd see a dog that was doing that. What's the joke? What's the line? I remember? Oh, you're always saying like, oh me, it's is just over there standing there thinking like un yeah, Fern. Every now and then it comes back and she'll hear jed bark out there four hundred yards and she'll just perk up and listen like she's so proud of him. She's just like like, man, she loves hearing a good coon race and then yeah, so so we cast the dog um And what I was most impressed with was the first night my dogs went I think eight hundred yards, which is essentially half a mile intreed, so solid, and we're going to the tree. And my dogs are not big dogs. These in my plots are not loud like they're just average and a lot of things which is not factors I'm that worried about. And we hear like the volume and you can you said it to Saith, the volume of noise coming from that tree like tripled. Oh it's right, you guys can hear it would be like this would be like two. I mean, it's just like we thought. They had turned around and came towards us, and and essentially Mangus went to him and started treeing, which which to me, that's what I was impressed with, its tree instinct, that he didn't see them, just that he has the idea that you stand here, put your feet on the tree, chew on the bark, make a rucus, and don't leave you. You don't know how special that is unless you're you're after a tree dog, and you see all the ones that won't do that, even ones that are bred to do that that don't do it very well well. And the reason I have some now understanding of why it's it is something whether especially or not, I don't know, but you know it wasn't but probably I don't know. In December sometimes so to three months ago, we're at a tree with three other dogs that are treeing, barking nuts and there's a lion in the tree and Mingus is walking around and wanting to play grab bass with the dogs and just kind of wagging his tail and like not putting two and two together at all, you know what I mean. I remember you're saying you were trying to make him look up the tree, and someone told you that don't work. Yeah, So like, yeah, even though there was ah, we knew it was a very because on a on a lion when you come up to that tree, that lion ran into that tree. Like a coon might have been there for half an hour, right, but a lion has been there for minutes by the time those dogs get there, you know, I mean, it happens like that. And uh, even with that, he just would like kind of put a pop up on the tree. But there was no barking. He's just kind of like, so what what turned him around on that? They just click, man, They just they just well eventually, yeah, So that the next time, the lion was a little bit lower on an exposed branch where you could just see the whole cat. And the hill was so steep when you backed ten yards off the tree, you're almost eye level with it. And he was kind of just walking around and looking looking. The other dogs are barking. That's when I grabbed his head and I pointed it up there. I felt his head quiver for a moment as he locked on, and then he almost blew my hands on. Yeah. Yeah. And when when Menga says, guys, guys, there's a cat in a tree, he goes, it's but I was. I was just impressed they did that. And so you wouldn't you. So if you, if you imagine your own honor as a man, clay, you wouldn't shine your honest up just for the sake of sparing his feelings. I really wouldn't. I now what I want to qualify. I've tried to be encouraging to your honest because a child, no, no, no, no, I just know there's a lot of people that if your dog does something good, they wouldn't tell you it was good if it was the best dog in the world. And I'm just not gonna be that guy. You know. It's like, yeah, the dogs are doing good. I don't want to say that. Like, there's so many other components that make a whole balanced hound. That's just one of them, and he's got it good. So there's all like So that doesn't just mean because I say he's a good tree dog. It means that Mingus is gonna be the best lion hound in the West. There's a lot of other factors that come in that are gonna determine like his end goal. But for a pound dog that's been your yard dog, I mean I was totally impressed. I mean, my dog that I've got out here that's the same age as Mingus, that we did not hunt, um that was bred specifically. I mean, it's out of my fern. Dog won't won't do that. So I mean I'm just saying you're hoping it will. Yeah, it will at some point. It just hadn't yet. But so I'm not trying to shine him, but I've just impressed with a dog. Well, look, we ure we as a team Mingus got benched to you yesterday because it was I'll tell you that I'm not afraid to hurt his feelings, because I actually wanted to talk to you about that in private to make sure you didn't think it's being a jerk. I understood. I would tell this, you tell me if I mess it up. The dogs are struggling on a couple of tracks that were hard to sort out, and Mingus being impressionable as a young youngster and liking all that excitement. The dogs would come in and they check some trees and they're trying to figure it out, and Mingus would be like, there it is. It must be in the tree. And then he gets worked up and they're like, well, it must be in the tree because look at him. He's why would he be that excited? And then it sets off a false tree, and I, Yeahni, I wouldn't have known that except for when I walked away from At one point, I walked away from the guys, and I walked in there and I watched fern on my garmen come down make a certain it's in the dark. I'm just watching a garment and listening with my one good ear, and I hear Fern locate bark like once or twice, make a couple of tight circles, and then move on. Mingus comes out and I don't have him on my garment, but Mingus comes down, gets to the same spot Fern was and just just starts treating like crazy. Fern pedals around for probably five or six minutes out here, hunting, trying to work the actual track out, and then Jed here's Mingus and Jed's three yards away. He comes to the tree and Jed's like, oh, it's here. He starts treeing, and then Ferns like, well, dog on Mingus and jet or treeing over there here. I am like, some sucker, yeah, and so and that's a fault of my dog. And that's what I wanted to say last night. I wasn't trying to make an excuse for my dogs slick treying essentially like tree and where there is not a coon, because it's like, and that's just whatever. They just did it. You know. You know, Yanni's honorable man himself, and he's a growing up. I don't think you hurt his feelings. Yeah, but I didn't want it to sound like did he strike he was being diminished and hurt last night, seth oh, No, you thought Yanni took like a man. I thought it was he was taking as like, this is more valuable for my dog to do this right. Well. And the thing is, if we hunted together two or three nights a week, it wouldn't be any big deal. I would probably, I mean just but we were we kind of had a mission we had to accomplish, which was Tria coon and and it just it was just another factor. And then we could even go deeper on why my dogs are more susceptible to honoring another dog, which is true. My my dogs away their bread. If they hear another dog bark, they're probably gonna go to them. A more independent bredhound would hear mingus barking would be who cares, I'm going to find my own coin. Yeah, Clay was talking about in uh coon hunting contests where you like, basically it's a it's a dog handling, like a display of dog handling that they might put out multiple dogs that are competing against one another, and they each gotta find their own thing. And you gotta get a dog that doesn't care what's going on that he's in a silo not like a group thing, but in other kinds of hunting you want that group aspect. So in big game hunting, it takes more than one dog to tree, a bear, a lion, and so you want a dog that one we call it honor will honor another dog. And uh, my dogs come from a long lineage of big game hounds. So they're not they have not been influenced by the competition coon world, because they could breathe that. They got a pack mentality. Yeah, so they hear mingus and they're like going to him, so and that and that. So what happens when guy's dogs struggle? And I was frustrated, I really was. I mean, you guys come all the way down here to go coon on with me, and I'm like, oh yeah, we'll treat all the kind of coons and then we can't treat coon. I'm frustrated. And I'm not frustrated at mingus for you. I'm really not, but I just I see what's happening, and I'm like, probably the best holding back. What I thought was fun to watch because it's on such a micro scale, is watching the when you when you're in your body, head out the four squirrel dogs, and there's no leaves on the trees, so you see pretty far all the woods, and a lot of times you kind of know where they're all at and wanted to hit a tree liked, and just watching those other ones like yeah, let's go come running from all directions to join that one of the tree was kind of fun, man, And I won't lie. It's like, it's no fun to get taken out of the game. No different you're in a basketball game and you know you're taken out. You want to be in the game, and now you don't. You're just sitting there like trying to hang onto the seventy pound beasts trying to yanke you through the woods. But I told you that the first night, or maybe the second night, I said, Man, if I could just hear him bark out in the woods one time on like what we think is a coon track or a coon tree, like, I'll consider this trip of success. So when I thought that through, I was like, man, we're like, we blew that goal out of the water. You know, I've got a question for it. You know, you're saying, how competition dogs are good? When they get him out of the truck, they get on sent and tree quick. Do you think Mingus would be a good competition dog because he does lockdown in tree or you know what I'm saying in I see what you're saying. And I don't think that we have enough data points to like say that for sure, because there's other things. I mean, like my dogs will go out and tree a coon quick and lockdown on a tree if there's a fresh coon track there, you know, I mean, like, uh, we saw kind of an atypical series of coon hunts this week because of the extreme temperatures and whatnot. Oh you know, you know on that extreme temperature point, um that what's interesting as hell. We're all squirrel hunting and ridge pounder finds like it looked like a taxidermy robin laying on the ground, not a ruffled feather on it. They're like, what the hell is that all about? Like no broken neck, nothing, And last night what we find three frolls of death woodpeckers laying there like completely completely fine, Like anytime you find a burden woods. He looks roughed up generally like it's some way roughed up, just like like you've gassed it in a bag. And and and laid it out on the forest floor. I just got froze out negative twenty or whatever. Fayettville got killing all these migrat killing like migratory like killing birds that are. There was a dead bird wrapped by my house. I didn't tell you all that, but the morning I was skinning squirrels after our first day, there was a hat. I mean, he was alive laying there. I kind of nudged him and they I could tell he was going down. Yeah, those woodpeckers like froze to death all of the same vintage too. It was like, oh, he died a month ago. It was like, remember when we went and got coffee the first morning we park. I get out and I couldn't missed it. But you don't think I would miss it, because it's like it's one of those spots on this sidewalk where they've got a little spot cut out. There's like a little bit of dirt and a tree growing out of it. You know. There was snow tree, well whole snow holding there and it was fresh as could be. We're gonna get coffee and I come back and I opened the door. And as I opened the door, and I looked to the ground and right there, you know, like the door had to swing over the top of it is a dead bird. And I was pretty he had a window. But now right mass event, just thinking how many we may have cleaned the clean the woodpeckers out of this place, or were not just woodpeckers. But I bet a lot of birds died. I wouldn't. I wouldn't have picked birds to die. I would have thought like rabbits died, you know. And and this this strikes at me personally cause I have an interest there. But a lot of nil guy died in Texas. No way, they just aren't built for cold now, h I guess it was real hard on seek a deer, no not seek as us. A lot of dead access here, a lot of dead yoga, a lot of those exotics. Just did the book, I mean, when did you start coon hunting into the book Where the Red Fern Grows? How did that? Did you read it as a kid? You know, I don't It was influenced. It influenced me, just kind of culturally. I can't say that like I read Where the Red Fern Grows and wanted to start doing you know, I want to start coon hunting but you know, so that book was took place in northeast Oklahoma. If you remember in the book tal the city of Talaqua is mentioned. That's where Billy Coleman got his dog. Anyway, Talaqua is like forty five minutes from here. Yeah, so I mean it's like this is this is coon hunting country. You know. It's funny when I when I was a kid and read that book, I didn't really I can I imagine the South, but at all it didn't really I didn't think of like a place like this. Yeah, I felt like it was I don't know, but that was the first book I read that. I remember that that I that I cried after reading. Really yeah, I just remember being like, we're born to be a coon hunter. Rick Smith. You never know, you never know what's gonna happen. Suburbs of Bellevue. Come on. There's a there's a marketing thing that people use a marketing about touch points, and you like to get someone to buy something right there. Oftentimes it needs to be six touch like on the average, like six touch points, and in marketing you're just trying to provide you yet another touch point. You could describe where the red Fern grows as perhaps a touch point. Yeah in your journey for sure. Read the book. Great movie, especially like the nighttime scenes really felt like it was nighttime. Really warms my heart. Are nighttime scenes are going to really feel like nighttime. We've got some good stuff next season. For all you listeners out there and all the child for all the child performances were stellar. Well, everybody did a phenomenal job. Child actors back. Clay and I are going to go out again tonight. Is he back on the Team'na, We're gonna get that. That's what I wanted, Gonna bring you out of you out there and make up standard. Trying to restrain that dog, That's what I was saying. If there's not anything, we'll just turn him loose tonight on the planet. Man, Poor Yanni stand here trying to restrain that. I want to say, your son Bear and I we have a plan. That dog crying because he can't go out. No, Hey, it means the world to me. You guys came to Darkansas for real, I mean like for real. To my family, Thanks for having us, Thanks down here. Wouldn't miss it. Thank you everybody,