00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear. Listening to podcast, you can't predict anything. Many people know Joannice as the Labbyan Hunter, others known as the Labvian Eagle, the Labban lover um. What people don't know is that Joannice wears a special Latvian power ring. It's a somewhat lady like braided silver ring and uh it's called a nams the ring. Yannest paying absolutely no attention to what we're talking about right now, just do my job. Here. Where's the special Lavian decorative power ring on his right hand? Now his father is here, and I would like his father also named be honest, All Lavians are named, be honest. I would like his father to explain to us all once and for all, why uh why you fellas where Latvian power rings? Okay, well, first, I'm not sure that where the power of thing came from, because well because one day I was making a joke like you know, you know that genre of jokes that go like your ma, Yeah, okay, I I got into those for a while and and and I like to do it to Yanni because he's the only guy knew that Cared got it. So if you did a your ma if he's like, hey your ma, um, he would actually act like you were talking about his mom. Yes, And he said, the next time you do that, you're gonna see a blinding flash of silver and as my, as my namies makes contact with your face. So then I started we started calling or I did, maybe the Latvian power ring. So just we'll just call it anomies. But I feel like if you said to Joe Blow American that you had anamson, how are you talking about? What if you said to them you're wearing a Lavian power ring. I think that they start to get the picture. It could be depends on where they're from. I don't have the answer to that. So it's not a Latvian power ring. It's just a ring. And now Mason, it has a definite braiding to it. There's actually more than one type, so you can get variations on them. It's a it's a I think, a beautiful ring, and it's something that Latvian men wear with a lot of pride. But but you pointed out to me this week that while hunting moose that you owned four, but stopped wearing anomies. I have three and then and they're broken because I got my finger caught in the wrong place. And they're better. You know, some are better than others. So yeah, they break somewhat easily. So tell us, tell us all the story. I want to warrant it. This has absolutely nothing to do with the normal things we talked about on this program. Which story, the one where I got my finger caught? Why uh, why Latvians wear as rings? How that? How that tradition came to be? I have no idea. Well, I know you telling me something I already know. Yeah, you tell them. Maybe I don't know more than I about it. I told you the other day, I told you the story to check it with you. I don't recall. I can tell this, I know it. You should, Okay, you know as well as anybody. Okay. Now, Lab's a small country in Europe. Once upon a time they had a king named a mast I remember the story. Okay, A bad guy, an enemy of the Lavian folk says, uh, I'm gonna come kill that king. Nas gonna kill him. And someone must have said to him, well, how are you gonna know it's him? How are you gonna know to kill the right Lavian kind? The customer story, Nam says, or the enemy of Nami says, well, he wears this special braided ring, so I'm gonna find him and kill him. Now, the Lavians get winto this, and they can coct a scheme by which all Lavan men will go out and get themselves a ring just like king names. Then the bad guys gonna show up, and he's gonna have to either kill every single Lavian male or he'll be you know, you there's a story like this is the Bible. You know, it has to do with paint stuff on doors. But uh so, now in case they're still out there looking for him, it's it's you know, it's become tradition now to wear the ring as an act of solidarity to protect king. Though I'm guessing Lavina no longer has a king. That that is true. Let me never had a king as a democratic country, but it was a bunch of tribes, so there were at some point there were king's hundreds of years ago. So does that how much of that story drives with the truth. Well, I mean, I think it's a good story, so that it literally happened with the legend. Yes, it would follow the legend. So so why did I ask you to tell me the legendent? You told me you didn't know that you didn't know because I recall this story, I don't particularly no, I mean, I'm sure there may be other legends that deal with this particular ring, like Latvian's have a bride's ring too, has seven bells from it and those and you can get various you can get variations on what every one of the bells means or how it's to be worn and how it's to be given. So so it's spend their own yard sort of similar thing. Um I used to for a long time. I had a Jewish girlfriend and we would go to this uh this place. It was fun to go. And he was placed called the Habad House, where like super hard hitting ultra Orthodox, and their mission is to take their their mission. I don't know if they've stayed it quite this way, but their mission would be that you take moderate Jews or secular Jews and and and bring them into the traditional old way, to bring him into the hard line. Yeah. So but we would go down because we like talking to these guys and getting the inside scoop on deep Judaism, and uh, we're talking about the various prohibitions cause I was asking the this rabbi. I was like, is it ever possible whatever you possibly have kosher wild game? Like, could you have kosher wild game? He said, the only way you could have kosh your wild game because we just we always ate wild games. So realized we can't be kosher, right, So uh, he said, here's what you have to do. You have to catch it in the net and not harm it, not injured it at all, captured in the net, and then bring it in for for kosher slaughter. Right, That's the only way to do it. Anyways, what I'm getting at is a similar thing where you would say to this guy. You know, people say like there's like this prohibition. There's this Old Testament, Like the Jewish Bible is the you know, the tour is the Old Testament. So there's a story in the Old Testament where you have all the dietary prohibitions and and that originates because they didn't want people eat bad food. Right, No, nope, nope, nope, no, that's my assumption. But I'm just saying when I'm when I put that to that guy, I said, to this this hobbad house guys like, yeah, but don't you think that they didn't want you to eat pork because you could catch parasites from undercooked pork, and so it's sort of like a prohibition that kind of saves you from yourself, right. He said, you don't know why God said don't eat pork. God didn't say don't eat pork because I'm concerned about tricking nosis. It's not your business to even understand why God said don't eat pork. God said don't eat pork. Don't eat pork. Don't rationalize this and guess my motives. My motives are unknown to you. But that's a little different than the ring. Just reminds me that, Okay, sure, that's acceptable. I mean, the ring is basically to protect one person's life, to make it so is now dead. Oh for many centuries, so many people still wear the ring though, Rip a cow, call ladies and gentlemen, Oh ladies, gentes. Brody Henderson, you don't you don't think I can't figure out we have so many fly fishing guides on this damn show. I don't understand why they just trickle your way in. It's a natural progression from big swing fly fishing guy rip call. I'll give him my best. Uh god, Rick, Oh, you don't want me to do it? No, what'll come to we'll do Rick last. This will be the second ever cal call of corps ever ripped. Ah. That's pretty good, like Yannis, but the end of Yannis gets weirdly human. That's also Ah, Man, mine's too high. I know it. You want me, I'm gonna try. Okay, I'll point out that this man called in the bull on the second day, and I really do think it was. Now that right there is the sound that right there is the sound of a winning cow call, proven field tested on a big bull. Thank you, yes, Rick oh Man, alright, I'll do it. Oh that's good. Nice nice. I'm gonna rip one out of my special horn. Uh where is my special horn? Here's a factor, here's a factory produced rip. Oh, brod you get my phone over the way, it's plugged in. Oh, we're gonna do the little time show. Buck Bolding's master show Buck Bodes master call. This this is here first. I I gonna do Buck Boding ripping one. Let me know if you guys can hear this good. This guy's a guy hit in the lask outfitters. This guy's called in the bazillion moose, including a seventy eight inch bowl. One time that you called in twice. First time he didn't want to shoot, Then he shot the second time. Um, here's Buck Boding cranking a cow call. You'll hear me say something. Are you guys getting over your head set? Here's a factory produced cow call. So now I think it's the end that does it, that separates it. What mean, separates the men from the boys. Yeah, bulls from the no. There's something about the guttural quality that fall off that's either real or us blowing out our noses. And mine is real bad, and I can hear it be real bad. But I think the difference isn't that that last little section. Everybody can kind of make that tone, but it's that that like exhale of whatever their exert exertion. Ye. Well, here's the problem with it is this. Raise your hand. There's six mugs sitting here. Raise your hand, ye, raise your hand for radio. If you have heard a cow or cow moose calling the wild, I've heard him be pestered. I've heard bulls growing the wild on at least two occasions that I'm thinking of right now. I've never heard of Kyle, but Bowden when I told him ripped me a cow call, he ripped a cower call. I started talking about this in that place I've learned. He says, well, that's just what I've heard Coles do. And he's not a he's not a bragg and Fellow. So yeah, I don't think it's a very complex sound. I think it's probably a sound that just really like you know, it's a sound meant to carry. And my guess is that a bull isn't sitting there hearing it and be like, yeah, I'm buy it like educated Elkwood or an educated Turkey who's seen it. Only because I think that in the especially in the area we just came out of, I don't think they hear a lot of calls. So we just came out of area. We're seventy five miles seventy five miles from a highway roughly central Alaska in the Alaska Range, say five miles hond we just flew out this morning. We've been out there, moosan um your honesty, and you're tell him, tell explain your big bull and what happened and all that, particularly the part about how you conjured it. Oh, well, I just visually. I've been visualizing this for a year, though it doesn't happen overnight. Oh, conjuring. You started conjuring it a year ago. Well you can call it what you like. What you called it, you use the word manifesting. Manifesting visualizing that I was gonna be when I knew that I was going on this trip to hunt with my son and to hunt with you, I just created this scenario where there would be this nice, big bull to come in. And it did. But it's more than that, because you told me where it would come and how big it would be. Well, be honest and in that wanted be true. Janice said that the area where we are that somebody had killed the bull before and it had literally come up the drainage. And when I got there and saw the area, and I thought, well, this is just like what you know I've been conjuring or thinking as you that story that you created a mental picture, mental picture. The only difference was that I was above the bull, and in the picture I had seen this bull coming in on flat land. But the bull was actually coming out of the drainage, and he literally I was not expecting this bull. So we were walking down and to this second we were on a higher bench. We had walked down to that first bench where you could see a little bit more of the base of the valley, but not entirely. And when we kept moving around, and I can talk about cameraman right right, so, uh, you know, Garrett's behind me, and we stop at one point and start talking about the area and how nice it looks and wouldn't it be nice? And then literally as we stepped down to the lowest bench, the third bench, we're there and Garrett is behind me. So minutes. Yeah, I've been calling about every ten minutes, just what you heard. And Garrett all of a sudden gives me one of these taps on the shoulder and I go, ship man, there's a ff and bull coming right. I mean, he was probably well, he was closer when I first saw him, because then he moved away on the drainage, So he was probably seventy five when he first saw him and moved out to about ninety when I shot him. So, uh, but why were you surprised to see him? Because I would feel that you would be like, well, here he is. Wait. Yes, I made him correct, But like when my child was right, that's right, I wasn't like you know. I mean I was, but I knew that it was coming right. Well, but it's just like when you have a good experience and you go like, yeah, but I didn't think it was going to be that good. So yes, when I saw and you know, I'm only seeing the top of him, barely seeing the hump and the antlers. And when I dropped down, I mean he was doing the old mot side to side swaying, and I mean he was hot. He was looking for that cow that had made that sound. The sound again, no, no, no, you're your cow call, Oh, the real one, the one you use in the field. Now again I may not be able to do it again, approximation of the actual cow call you RiPP in the field. You know that you're not trying for real face because I know you're calling from the field, and I don't why you won't treat the listen. I can't do it, you sre my lips apart. Now I've been doing it for you know, wind chap. Yeah, I said in the picture too, because a mouse is at his shoulder as tall as a person, yes, and ways like even if you're a substantial size dude. He if you're a two hud pound dude, he's still ways like six of you laying there. Yes, that's what I'm saying. So the surprise to see this animal and literally off to my right below it, and then he disappeared because there's some brush some of those uh a little dwarf birch or willows that he's going through. Kind of picked the spot where I knew he was coming through, dropped down to my knee, you know, flipped up the scope covers, dropped one in the chamber, made that defenders covers. Yes, I did defenders Yeah, yeah, right, shooting that nice savage shooting. Uh some really great Federal one eighties bear claws, Yeah, the little special tips on him and bouched. Yeah. First shot, I mean I made sure that Garrett was, you know, like you on this. He acknowledged that he was. And the first shot at just short of ninety yards right in the honeypot, and you know, the bull kind of stopped. And they don't do the statue of liberty like elk do or sometimes there white tails you know what the kind of stand up on your hind legs. But you could tell this bull was hit and chambered another one and uh, hey, he's still moving a little forward. We don't want to chase this bull. We want to make sure he goes down exactly where he is, So we put another one and he was actually dropping down a little bit. So that bullet came in. I'm sorry, he's going up more. So it came in a little bit lower than what I anticipated. But both both were killing shots and we found the one bullet, so it was a perfect I believe that was the first bullet. And then he ran behind some spruce, got woozy and tipped right over. He didn't run, he didn't go five yards. Yeah for the second shot. Yeah, And I mean it was just textbook hunting, kill everything. Yeah. The only thing the missing was Stephen Ranella coaching me at that point, so I wouldn't have nothing to say or did mess it up. Well, what I thought was missing was the suffering, because it was we had nine hunt days, ten hunt days, m and the whole point of the whole trip to make me suffer, to get your honest's day out of bull news. Okay, So we did that successful. We had eight days left. I just felt like it should have been like getting dark on the last day and you're like crying. Who's who's crying? Crying because like it didn't work out and Austin's out of the bog man. Yeah, well, yeah, I don't know about the crying part. That's probably you're never going to see that. What did what did you think about all that? Er dad got a bull so easily, And what were you doing at the time while he was getting this bull? Making coffee? Were you really at the top of the hill because we're in a cold, windy spot a couple of hours, I'm sure not like the infamous wind tunnel you guys were sitting at. Our calling station was called the wind tunnel. We didn't have a tunnel. We're just like in a chamber. So you're up there making some coffee. What how did you feel when the old man starts blouching down there? Yeah, that's what I was gonna say, Like my only I don't call it a regret, but like, well, what could have made it better for me? That would have been the point of the trip if I would have been able to see it. Yeah, earlier I summed up the whole point of the trip. I missed a part. The whole point of the trip was that your father was gonna get a bull moose with you. Yeah, and then we still kind of did Yeah, you're making coffee. He was close. I mean he was hundred yards a hundred fifty yards up the hill. So when when you heard boat boat, what do you think? Bull down? Did you really? You don't think he's getting malled by Chris. I'll tell you something interesting. So we butchered the ball, which is no small task, perfect weather for bull butchering. But um, we butchered the ball. Was it the next day? I think when the wolverine showed up the next day or two days later? Maybe next day? Yeah, so we go to Yeah, there's a glass and tip where you can look down on where the no two days because we went caribou hunting the next day and then the next day. Oh yeah, I decidn't want to go hunt with you. A little bit before I get to the Wolverene. How you double manifested? Yeah, yeah, this is where I see. I'm a very skeptical person. There's a famous quote that I often tell you, honest, Um, Skepticism is the chastity of the mind. No, the chastity of the intell intellect. Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect. So fellow tells me he's gonna conjure up or he's gonna manifest the bowl. I but my knee jerk reaction is skepticism. That's interesting. But nevertheless, you're sitting on a chair. Is somebody conjured? Yeah, then had to make it. Oh, so what's the difference? What's the difference difference? If I could tell you, it would take me while to think of it, and I don't want the listeners to get bored while I try to articulate, while I try to conjure and then articulate. Why that's different? I can tell you the difference is you don't believe that you can do it, and you haven't worked on that skill set. But you know what your skill sets are. You know, conventional college education, a lot of honey education, right, and you have a great deal of woodsmanship and knowledge. Nobody, I mean you created all of that, right? How did all that start? Where did that come from? You can call it conjuring, you can call whatever you want. Man of fact. It's the same thing. It's just that people don't realize what and we do this every day, and what happens is we get stuck in our environments of maybe perhaps you have a parents that says it, well, you can't do this, or hey, if you don't become a doctor, you're no good. Right, So you decide to be a woodsman and a writer, Well you're no good, Steve right, and that we are, you know, kind of kept in line in that way. I think that if you understand that anybody has that capacity as a human being and nothing special, I do see what you're saying that I'm kind of I'm coming around the way you're thinking. And I don't mean I don't want you to think I'm trickeralizing the ships. I'm not. It doesn't matter to me because I have lived my life this way. It matters to you some amount, or you wouldn't have just said you wouldn't have taken the energy to tell me that energy. You can't take energy to tell me and then say it doesn't matter. Well, of course it matters. But because that's the way I lived my life, and I'm agree, I'm starting to see a point what you're saying because you said that you had a you had an image how this would work. You got there, you you had this thing, and what do you need to do to make it work. It wasn't gonna work if you say at your tent, that is correct. But in order to make this work, I'm gonna call, I'm gonna go look there, I'm gonna go look there, I'm gonna call. I'm gonna look there and look there. I'm gonna call and gonna look there and look there. And they had you needed to do it for ten days, for two days. One day you were gonna Yeah, I understand. And and I'm and I'm pointing out because it's a little bit funny and also kind of interesting that that at the moment, you didn't know that correct. I didn't know that your bull was in root, but you had a bowling root. And I was in the drainage. I was point six miles away. I checked my jeeps, uh, because I took a way point I found a bull. I have been calling at a call station the wind tone and I go there and there's a bull but thrashing brush hunter yards from where we were calling, and took a gander at him, kicked it around bull bed down. Couldn't find it, bro what you found it? Came told me he found it. We went over the head to look at it, and I said, well, let's go grab Janice's dad and see if he wants to put the moves on this bull. No sooner do we just like I'm packing my bag and we're even kicking around, like should we leave our ship or grab our ship? I was taking way point who right? So you had and it's not like we had a ton of accounting. We saw some bulls, but I mean they're close encounters. And you you you had manifested bulls up two parallel draws or I'll take credit for the one. But it was mysterious. Do you remember the way you met you su tell you everything about it. I'm sure there was a bit of manifesting in that. Okay, No, I didn't know. I never manifested that I would like have a different girlfriend and then go to a business meeting in New York and meet a gal who grew up like an hour and forty five minutes from where I grew up. And it wasn't my mind. But you know what I did say this, I had already known her but after me and my girlfriend, my last girlfriend broke up. I said, at the end of that relationship, I said, from now on, I am only dating Michigan girls ever. Smart man have a wonderful Yeah, and I'm sure if you looked at it more in detail you would find more than just per chance. Corey, what do you think about all this? No? I love this stuff. It's right up my alley, you know, visualization and something occurs that becomes the truth. We weren't we talking just on the last shoot about like the difference between imagination and a great idea. No, I think Corey and I were were Maybe you were not the last year I'm sorry, two shots ago in Nevada. Maybe it was Joe and I were talking about this. We're talking about how the fact is is that like the same thing happens in your rain. Sometimes it works out like immediately, or something resolves and people go, damn, that was a great idea. If if there is no resolve, people could just say, oh, they're just kind of imagining things, So that's his imagination. You can kind of write it off in that way. Does that make sense? It doesn't. I feel like it's the failures on my part. I just don't understand like it's one of the same thing. It's just how it's perceived, like your brain doing the same thing. So if you see you're having like an an idea or something that just happens in your brain, you okay, you're sitting there, you have an idea, yeah, or I imagine something whatever you want to call you that has like vanilla accents, for instance, yes, okay, okay, and I go and make it okay, and it just happens that accents is a good thing. Doesn't sound good to me, but I come back and you're like, damn, great idea oka, or you'd be like, man, that guys just imagining things. When people say it that way, just say you're imagining things, it kind of puts it in this negative sort of connotation where it's just like this wild, kind of like goofy thing that really didn't make it much of anything. Where when they say, man, great idea, all of a sudden, it's like, put up on this pedestal. The same thing happened I hear you're saying. But it's a difference because you wouldn't say, like, let's say, I'm like, oh, world peace right now? People say, imagine world peace. You can't say I got an idea world peace, okay, because it's exists at an imaginary level, because it's almost like a hypothetical notion. That's it's kind of impossible. No one would say imagine. You could say, like, imagine beer with nilla accents. You could just be like, I'm gonna make beer with vanilla accents. But you can't go and make world peace. You have to imagine world peace, not world not world peas, but world peace or world peas you can make. So there is a big difference between an idea of something and imagining something. Right. Well, this is the funny thing people that this is introduced. I'm Rick Smith. Dangers like, yeah, okay, tell you whatever happened last. But people with wildly unorthodox views are often kind of put in the crackpot until they actually do something that makes effects. Makes make some visionaries. So most visionaries, once they have had their idea and implemented it, you know, in retrospect, it's like, oh, that guy was just like this budding genius. But at the time when he was an actual budding genius, everybody thought that guy is just a weirdo thinking about some idea that nobody has thought about and imagining things. But some of them were crackpots, like Hitler was a crack pot, well or all, I mean crack pot. If you put your idea into practice, might have some great effects, whether they'd be negative or positive. If you had one, there'd be a segment of the population they would talk about him being like, you know, like true believers would say that he was a visionary, right, you know. And you know when Steve Jobs was cruising around, you know, at Reed College attending classes for free, people were like, that guy is a weirdo. He's not paying for class, he's just sitting in. What is he doing with his life? But once he was running a billion dollar empire, it's like, oh, Steve Jobs the messiah freaking technology. I just read a piece about the sculptor Michael Heiser, and he's one of the earth movers, you know, the guys do like large formation sculptures out on the earth and also welding steel and making giant things that you can't put in new museum now. And this piece is talking about like his father was an archaeologist and he'd come from a ranch family, and and it was talking about his father. He was like a straight f student in a terrible funk up, and his father later came to him and said, I'm sorry, we just all thought you were a loser, but he made it right. Yeah, I don't I don't think there's any I don't know that the idea that you can do well in school and that is predictive of your future success is a correlation. Hardly bush. Yet there's hardly a correlation between doing well. I guess we were so we're just so badly. So we've cut this moose up. Now, we cut this moose up, and the bat came on a moose. We explained the weight because it's a little bit complicated. Yeah, well, I think our pilot today, who's handled many many moose, and we're asking about why they have to be de bones, and he said he don't really care about the bones themselves. It's the fact that you get a rear ham that weighs somewhere between a d and a hundred fifty pounds, and you have to wield it in one big chunk. That's why you have to debone it and then split it into two. They like fifty pound chunks, So every ham is you know, hy pounds and that was Yeah, this is cut off at the ball skinned, cut off at the ball joint, and cut off at the set at the what what we consider the knee. And by the way, I want to point out what a badass you are, Steve, because you walked one of those suckers all the way back up to camp damn in a backpack. Do you say badass or dumbassad bad The dumbass words should go to Korey and I for doing it without a backpack. We take team to one of those just because, yeah, they put it over their shoulder like they're carrying a piece of log and you're kind of doing like a Chinese dragon thing, you know, with sticking out of the bottom. Yeah, you're just not Like, the size of these things is hard to get across. So if you took the front, like a moose's highest the highest spot on the moose is the you know, the shoulders, it's not actually the shoulders, but it's backbone. Has that thing there. When you cut the front leg off, then cut it off at the knee, that's some bitch comes up to your clavicles. You set it on the ground, It's like, yeah, huge big piece of meat anyway, yanaka continue the story. No, well, obviously, because we wait on one tip at our scale, at max, our hunter pound hunter sex. So cut this mooz all up, and uh, you can't. You're flying in the places were flying when you're flying it on something called supercup, and a super cup has the capacity to carry uh just hundred four h pounds three fifties what they want on max. Yeah, but they'll carry four the way some air carriers. The way some air carriers will do it is they'll just take your body weight. So they'll say that you can put a grown person in there. Just has to do with weight distribution. You put a grown person in there and his clothes and whatever he's got on him, and then fifty additional pounds. So if you're going on a on a sheep hunt in a super cubs on dolls sheep and land in the mountains, you might have it dictated you by your bush pilot, your transporter that you can only have fifty pounds of you can only have a fifty pound backpack that's gonna want to put into a super cup now when you're flying. So when you're flying a moose quarter so the moose quarterways a hundred thirty pounds. Obviously the plane has the capacity to do it, but you gotta get it in a little tight spot. So they don't like the flyout bone meat. They they stipulate that you, um sorry, they don't like to fly out bone in meat. And this air carried that we were flying with makes you bone out your moose meat and have bags that weighed no more than fifty pounds per bag, and we had probably about it. No I think you counted a sixteen or seven Okay, yeah, because we had to separated more. Okay, the pounds. The pilot said, five pounds is what they're flying out from. So five h pounds of bone was meat. We want not taking some of the marrow bones out on a later flight. Now, the pilot one of the piles to tell me a couple of interesting things. He uh, his wife cooks uh when he killed the moose. He knew his wife His wife uh was brought up in in in Native Alaskan culture, and they she uses all the merrow when he kills moose. He has to bring all the marrow bones home because she wants the merrow. He brings the nose home and they take the whole nose of the moose, burn the hair off with a blowtorch, boil it until it gets soft, cut it in slices, and just put salt on it and eat it. And he knew that she liked the stomach, but they do cut the carsage out of the nose. That's what he's saying. He knew that she likes the stomach, so he went and took the stomach and washed it all out in the creek and brought the stomach home. And she was pissed because you don't want to wash it too well because all the stomach you washed away, all the stomach acids and things in those stomach acids are what lends it like the right texture and taste. Interesting, Yeah, I heard. I learned that this morning. So to cut this moose up, and lo and behold, two days go by, and uh we go over there, and uh shiploads of ravens hanging around, and we're looking at the wolverine scavenging the carcass. The wolverine has a hoof, a hoof from the knee down, which is a substantial chunk of thing, and he's dragging it and he's getting dive bombed by ravens and then Uh would stop what he was doing now and then to kind of like hiss at and and kind of challenge the ravens and then drug his hoof over the hill. We started making plans to uh get the wolverine and put a tag on him. And the wolverine never turned up again. But we had hiked this meat up, bone in meat up to the airstrip and boned it there. And over the course of the night, the moose dragged off two hold back boned out legs. What did I say, No, he didn't do it was the wolverine and dragged all that stuff off, going to cash it somewhere. When we were fixing to kill the wolverine, Rick got sensitive. We realized that Rick has a do not He has a special animal list in his mind. Can you speak to this? Yeah, I mean, I mean are on the list? They're on there on there, especially they're carrying a baby on their back. I mean, why is the wolverine? I understand. I was want you to tell me why. I mean, for me, the idea of eating wolverine, why, how possible? Does not seem practical? Um? I mean a lot of death for a little meat. Yeah, a lot of death for a little meat. And it's a symbol of wildness in a way that very few critters are. I mean, they just their ranges are pretty large. But I understand why you would want to kill a wolverine. They have the coolest freaking but range is as big as a cariboo. That's true, Okay, So why was it? Okay? Why is the density? Well, yeah, I mean it's not ranged. Don't tell me it's range because it's not range. Yeah, but he's the only he's the only one in his range. There might be a couple, but the terms of the terms of density and abundance where they are in the trophic scale, there's there's this freaking glacial weasel. I mean, they evolved to deal with super cool there and just like the cariboo, I like the caribou too, but I like, I think I would like eating the caribooe better than the wolverine. So in a way, it has to do with and I know because I have things that I don't like to things that I've eaten that I wouldn't want to go get myself. Okay, But but when you look at it at a at a wolverine. Yeah, it's that um. Is it fair to say that you value him more alive than dead? Yeah? I mean I see him kind of like us, Like he's cruising around looking for his meal in a way that we are, and I put him on our level in a way that I don't put the caribou or the moose. That makes sense. Okay, would you put a pine Martin? I like part of pine Martins as much as a wolverine. They're pretty badass. Yeah. A monkey? Yeah, monkey more or less. If we had a monkey and a wolverine standing there and I said, rick on one of them, what kind of what kind of monkey? Ranging? No tailed monkey? Like a capuchin, white white face capuchin. Yeah, they're they're relatively abundant. Red howler mean little fucker's capuchins in a red howler. That's the kind of iet the howler. How was it? Yeah? I said a thousand tas. It tastes like if you took a steel cable and put liquid smoke on it. Oh yeah, that bad. I just like a dry I mean they smoked the jeeps on thing. What do you think it tastes like? I don't know, I'm eating blue smoke, turkey, drop stick. I mean, I'm eating blue guy, which I think is worse than the in a old ring in some ways. So if I had a red holler monkey, a bluega whale, and a wolverine, I said, Rick, I'm killing one of them and you're eating it. Man, you would tell me to shoot the ah the I think that the one I like the lease is the howler. Okay, whale, but that's the whale. A wolverine and a monkey, Yeah, you would say shoot the monk. That's a great game. I feel like I feel like the listeners need to chime in and send in their their answer. The wolverine, Yeah, a whale, a monkey, I know, and that's probably that's a good answer. I think that's a good answer. I mean, the coolest thing about wolverine is I mean, they're freakingly he warmed up to the idea. No, no, we definitely did not. And I understand this is a like a human like when I the new iPhone comes out, I want one. That's how I feel about wolverine, hight Like, I just kind of want it, like in a I want to take the session of it. And I think that desire is problematic a little bit. Yeah, it's like it's part of like consuming culture kind of thing, like I want to I want to have it. I want to put it on my jacket because they're cool. It's cool. Yeah, yeah, you know, but even if you lived, like if you're the last person alive on Earth. Okay, so your last person alive on the planet. And when I put this out, I'm just saying, there is no there's no more checking things against your peers. There's no more any sort of judgment, like judgment is gone. There is no judgment left on the planet. So your own judgment of yourself, right. I feel in that situation, you would kill the wolverine right off the bat because I want it. Yeah, because you didn't want to kill the wolverine. I think because it had something to do with your perceived the perceived judgment I'm there is. Yeah, I think that's probably the last man on Earth would want that thing. He'd be like, she looks warm. Yeah, there's something desirable about it, for sure, but I don't need it. I got some oil based material that does pretty good, and and those porty geese provide amazing Yeah. I'm not trying to I'm not trying to put holes with thin because it's my feeling about it. I don't want to kill the wolverine because I have said for many years that there's one animal, like outside of a polar bear, there's one sort of animal in the you know, the large North American critters, land critters that I hadn't laid eyes on. And it was him, and there I wasn't there he was and I got to see him, and I said, yes, I don't want to shoot the first wolverine I ever saw. I didn't want to shoot the first links I ever saw. Yeah, I think that's a good because it's like, but I'm like, how about it another one popped over the hill, just like I would feel different about the second one because I felt like I didn't have a personal the personal level of context with where I didn't have that predatory feel. I was like, wow, and I know that the best material for trimming out a parka wolverine's wolverine. Damn straight frost and stuff. It doesn't frost up, doesn't frosty. So if you saw that wolverine the next day you went to went after it because it was still would have been the same one I would have rather someone else went after it. Yeah, you know, and I'll point out to listeners, Um, if you're a non resident honey in Alaska, it depends what unit you're in. The unit we were in. Um, you're allowed one wolverine per season, so we're not going out on a limb here without ten. And this unit we're in your allowed ten wolves, one wolverine, one wolverine proceed, So we're not talking about something. Yeah, this is like by the books sort of sort of thing. September September one, if you want it. If you did want to kill that wolverine, I would have been like, sweet, yeah, give me, give me part of it. But yeah, most folks without a little bit of education would probably think that the wolverines, well, I guess they are. It's kind of similar situations the grizzly bear, Like in a lower forty eight, there's not a lot of them. They're also like you often hear the term symbol of or icon of, and the wolverine is one of those iconic wilderness northern animals. Yea, yeah, university mission. Well, some people say wolver the wolverine may have never stepped foot in Michigan. Do you know that they just spotted one a couple of year or two ago. I think that's the thing about the Lower forty versus Alaska, right, lower forty eight, we have all these like well, like preserving wilderness, and Alaska just is and wilderness. It just is wilderness. You don't have to even think about it. There's a much susy bears occupy like nine of the range, wolves occupy nineties percent of the exactly functioning, much different view of grizzlies in the Lower forty eight than they do up here, like very differently. And you can kill a bunch of wolverines, you can kill wolves, you can kill grizzly bears in Alaska and there's not any global effect to their populations. And they view the wolf the nuisance. That's what. Yeah, in some areas to some degree, in the area we were hunting in, Um, they get after wolves pretty hard because they're trying to they're trying to assist a beleaguered herd of caribou in the area, So they tend to get after wolves pretty hard in that area, right, Um, And your thoughts on this wolverine thing, that's cool to see. Yeah, I liked it. I mean it's pretty rare to to be able to see a wolverine in person. One of our pilots today, forty four years in a Alaska I'm guessing probably twenty or more of them flying. Never seen one. No, yeah, yeah, we all expect grizzlies to show up in camp. There was grizzly ship everywhere and then boom, a wolverine shows it up right next to camp. So that was pretty cool. You know, one thing I want to make a little remark about which some hunter I've done a lot of hunting out West are significantly more than most Midwest hunters. And on occasion out West, you know, you'll be walking a big field or a meadow and you'll come up on grizzly bear, well not grizzly bear, but just black bear ship. Here. When you're walking these meadows, every third step there's a bear turd and some of them like Brody, that one big pile, big boy, This is no kidding, I've got a normal sized fist. This ejection came out of the bear was bigger than my bigger gauge bigger gauge friend Bearer Biologist Carl Malcolm said that there is a correlation and they use it in research as a correlation between the gauge on a bear ship in the size of the bear man. I would believe it. I mean, and but you're seeing a lot of You have to understand like you're seeing a ton of bearship where you are because you're in the spot. You're in the barry zone right and get above the alder and dwarf birds and they're the alpine. But there's still a lot of good groundcover before you get into the bear rock and there's like a there's a band of exceptional barry growth. You happen to be also, you know when you're honey has been a lot of time in that band because it's got a good visibility, easy traveling. So you're in there where the bears are, and there's just a lot of bear ship there. So it's like that little boy digging for that pony on that piloo. I don't know, but it's an old story, like you know, my dad always told this story. Yeah no, I haven't heard this. So my dad said, you said there's two kinds of people. Okay, now, well no, my dad put like this. He put it as a he put a socio economic spin on it. He said, you take a rich kid and put him in a room full of horse ship, he's just gonna cry. You take a poor kid and put him from room full of horse ship, and you're open up. He's gonna be digging because you'd be like, with all this horse ship, it's gonna be a pony in here somewhere, right. Yeah, So that's the same theory that I'm applying to the bear ship. He's there somewhere. Yeah, it's got to be somewhere. Do you guys have never heard dad? I was quite happy to see four bears two miles away. That was funny that grizzually mama with the three cubs. We saw a sour two and the sou with three, right, And that the blonde ship was awesome. She was as almost white all right, yunhy, just without looking like a polar bear. Tell us your whole caribou story, I mean, write down to the everything. How we got there and they were all over the place, dicking around. We're looking for we're the monster across the way. Rick, What do you do? What's important on your phone? There? Nothing? Girl? I figured he was just researching the string. I'm single. These days. You know he is there anything we can do to help you out there? He've asked for it. You want me to put it a plug for you on this podcast, like a little website or definitely not people visit you on maybe maybe maybe, I'll just say this the right type of girls guy to find because of his last name. Yeah, you had an Instagram account that we can rix Rick Smith Media. Yeah, so go they try to find Rick Smith on Facebook when it was I mean name Rick Smith and bow. Let me just put it out there. How old are you? Gain fully employed freelance lifestyle works on interesting projects. Rick recently has discussed on a previous podcast. Rick will sometimes go into a will get a shot list and go out and to subserve wild animals and film behaviors. That's interesting dinner conversation, right, that's not lacking. Um, very bright guy, well educated. You doing a house? Rick does no one house? But he right some day, very gross survivor show. I was a reality TV, reality TV star, reality TV made it survived and uh and is not married. Still major commitments. So there you have it, ladies. Rick Smith bosmantin. I'll let you know in the next podcast what comes to fruition out of this. You've got a lot of female listeners of this podcast. But what I pictures are some dude listening and is with his wife and she's like over hearing. Oh yeah, his wife, but his sister is over hearing. Yea or like his cousin. That could work though, because his wife could be like, oh, we should set him up with my friend. We should call dep and tell her to call this guy. Is can a gal go like move in with you? Or do you want a gal who's already in that town with her own place? Um, my current place would be a little tight. So what radius are you looking at here? I don't know. I don't have four corners too far. I have a lot of restrictions. I mean, I don't know. I think with right gal, Rick would import from Palm Beach, New York. If you're from like beaute. What are you looking for, Rick? Oh wow? Yeah, No, I don't put a lot of I don't put a lot of stock in. He told me that I'm not a judgure, he has no opinion about promiscuity. That was an example of a profile questions that I had to take reality shows giving me a lesson and I saw neutral a lesson about how to pass the psycho logical profile test. Now that's what you claim neutrality on things. I claimed neutrality on that one. Uh yeah, so good, guys. I just want to help you out there. That's good that you got some you got some followers out there and the podcast. Oh man, yeah they're dude, they have cousins, sisters. So yeah, I need tell your care Why don't we start talking about rix life. I don't know, because I mentioned the fact that he was on a reality show. It was we were about to get the play by play of this freaking yeah. Then somehow concerned about your love life. Oh I was on my phone. Oh you were messing around. I thought you're on one of those dating websites. No, no, I'm just texting because trying to make the most of my time here in the last time. But it makes me really uncomfortable. Man, it makes me feel like you're not engaged. That's that's a good point. Yeah, that's true. It's really hurting my feelings. All right. Yeah, I need to tell tell the cab story Rix Rix dying to hear it, Rix's attentive look at them over here. Now, I just want to hear. I want to hear. I want to hear about the camera cameraman's role in this hunt too. But you gotta start from the beginning. Yeah, we land day one. We you see three caribs. First thing, I didn't even off the plane, throw up my knockers and I see three grizzlies and three caribou. I'm sorry, explained that throw your what up knockers by no oh binocular. Okay, I was called boks well when I grew up knockers for something else that they still are. But I keep my knockers right there at that part of my body. And when I see a fella and I like his knockers, I'd be like, nice knockers, bro, You've never said that. So that was day one. I didn't I didn't see those three. I think the next day I lasted up six bulls. But we were moose hunting and we're like thinking, there's gonna be more caribou, and they're they're moving. We later heard we're moving northward. Yeah. The way they what these bulls did that day is we spotted them fairly early and actually ended up betting in this big valley for quite a while and then feeding, and they never left sight before dark, so they actually could have been bulls. We could have caught it. Yeah, that day I think I saw yeah, one bull. It was tricked out. He was already getting his his He was already getting his winter pellage, big white main, big white feet, clean antlerd, big sun a bit, and he had five or six coles with him. Yeah. Out of the six I saw, half looked like that, half tricked out like all five yo out. So we're pretty good. We're pretty confident that we're gonna see more cariboo. We've been told we're probably hunting stragglers, but at that point we've been seeing cariboo every day. So my dad kills a bull moose. The next day we go cariboo hunting, and can we go there two days? One day to two days? We go up on Yeah, sit all day, do not see a single cariboo any direction? I didn't see any. Then I said, I'm gonna go bull moose hunting with Steve, just because we want to hunt together. Dad was getting a little talking about we're missing days and more days go on were because another day up there I spotted to the one night we were in the tunnel, we crossed the valley. There got a whole other day up there, and then it got rained out. Yeah, well we might have done three up there, one partial to anyhow, a commanding view, a commanding view and see nothing not hiding nothing, void of game. And so we go, Mousan, we're calling, calling, chatting it up, and uh we actually get to talking about writing workshops, right, and workshops. You're true dissuading me of spending my money on a writing workshop. I just happened to look over my shoulder and air as someone had manifested a single bowl caribou on the horizon. He's a he's like on a beer commercial. Yeah, yeah, like a bowl skyline on top of the high mountain. It would be it would be a shot that photographers get a little chubby for how many chubbies we have a little list on a little shots the outdoor, the shots the outdoor photographers get a chubby about. But it was a distant shot. He was not close. But still it's like this beautiful mountains seen in a silhouetted caribou, I mean from the hoofs all the way up. Like he went up there and said, see those fellows down here. I'm gonna stand here and watch the look on their face when they see my ass. That's what he was positioned like. So we make a quick plan, back up our backpacks and we who oh, we had the whole pile, six of us there. Yeah, cameras balancing every which way. We just we took the lead. I didn't get to see against any of the action. Everybody was talking about how funny it looked. I guess in the back you were saying how funny Rick looked. Coreys trying to get it. We're trying to send a bunch of ladies way, and he talking about how he looks funny running with a forty five pound pack one mile at the tundra. That's a foot thought he looks sexy. He stayed with the honest man, you were right one, yeah, that's right. And at one point Steve commented on how we were kind of out of order for a good production, like we might not be getting the right camera angles and Rick should be closer to me, and it was like, hey, Bud, I got no problem. If I need to be on his heels, I'll be there. And I trust Rick that he could do that because so sexy. Yes, but then you and Steve kind of split off. It was we did yeah, I mean you're no, this is not normal TV production. We had to catch him. Carib was one of the few things you could run after that high elevation. Like, let's back up, because it just general carrib hunt. When I spend a little bit of time caribe hunting, uh, we would go and get on a big high knob or a big high tit and just wait and and why because they're always moving, like you seldom watched then just like rarely doesn't care. Just stay someplace, to stay there all day long. They just are drifting and we would sit out there and you have to catch them where You're always like calculating, like if we start a hauling asks now we'd be able to intercept him somewhere. If you caught one going away from me, you can't catch him. You know, he's like a mile out. You're not gonna overtake a grazing caribou there just like moving. Um, we see the most of them when if we're hunt in August early September and if there was a wind it feels breezy, you would not see carribo. You wouldn't see any cariboos. Then the winded die. In the minute the wind died, the hordes of mosquitoes and white socks and black flies would rise up out of the tundra and start mauling you. And you put your mash gloves on, and you put your bug net on your head, and then you start seeing shiploads of cariboos because the bugs would bother the carribe was so bad. That would make the carribould get up and start moving, and they would settle into these little draws and stuff to feed. And then when it got buggy, they just start hauling ask because they wanted to get away from the bugs. And you're always like trying to gauge where you could catch them. We started off after Yanni's carried, but kind of not really. We thought we were being that we were gonna go and way had them off and then actually go toward him. Yeah, but by the time we go out there, we way missed the mark. Way missed him, and we were saved by the gregarious nature of caribou. Yeah, he was on his own, gonna just feed walk do the care. Both caribou thing across the bottom of the valley and up the other side and disappear over the ridge. And as he's cressing the ridge and he's on the horizon again on gone gone, I mean ten more, ten more, ten more steps and yeah, you're not being our bellies. At this point, he happens to look over his shoulder and see six mugs and cameras and dudes throwing their packs down getting ready to shoot. And he's like, oh, what's that my friends? Yeah, he's like and he was a young bull, so he's probably that much more curious. I've seen him all. It's just the thing they do. Man, It's like when you see him the best sea. Here's just get down, let him see it and get down. And they just they just don't want to rule out. They don't want to like they have a herd mentality. Yeah, and I don't know why I even thought about it, because I don't think I've ever heard about it. Isn't like a thing that dudes do. Care ab hunting with the white flag. I know it from antil My. Yeah, Antilop punting. It can work. I've seen it work well. So we tried that with a game bag. Brody picked up a drop antler, which are littering the ground around there. He picked up a drop antler and waved it. Wait, he didn't want to leave. Then he caught our win and then that changed his mind about in a hurry. But I like the fact that he was all on. He he was missing, he was missing out on the days behind everybody else. Yeah, he was looking for his friends. The pilot told me. I told that about. He said, it's a little bit unusual. You know, he he lived his whole life. You're flying here. He says a little bit unusual that you would see a bull traveling with no known other cariboo in the area. But he said that in his experience, Um, it's coming from his set of experiences. It's frustrating for him to watch nature documentaries where they are saying, like, oh, the caribou are migrating to X place this time of year. They go this direction, and they all go there, and they all know to go there. He said that. He says that that herd has many places. They wind up. Some years they're up in the White Mountain Range north of Fairbanks, the same herd hundreds of miles away. Some years they go an entirely different directions. Some years for days they're going north. They're like, oh, they're going north, and then all of a sudden, for days they're going back south. Or one side of the river, theres a bunch of Cariber going east. Side of the river, there's a bunch of Carriber going west. And he said it's like he says, he has seen many times where a band of Cariboo will hold up on one of those mountains where we were, get on the wind blown side and spend the whole damn year there. So he was saying, yeah, it's unusually saw and run around by yourself until you consider that there's no like absolute there's sort of like these general things. But within that, he said, there's so much really nearly behavior and and things sort of bucking the trend. He said, it's a little bit like when he said when people speaking absolutes about Cariboo movements, it's a little frustrating, but they do like grate. Yeah, but he was saying that like to be like, oh, they all went north. He said, it just is it's like narrative simplicity, right, You Like you have a documentary that needs to be like, okay, we're talking about Cariboo migration. We can't talk about all these places that are going. We don't have time. We gotta they're going one place. Yeah, So he was saying it could be that off last where every day all winter. I think there's one bullet for whatever reason. Side just make a stand. Janna shot dynam label. Yeah, but he was heading out. He was head its owner's head north. He was in the same direction as everybody else we had seen. I was hunt one time on the north slope of the Brooks Range, right ahead of the rut, and I remember it was we were out there first week in October. I killed one on in October nine, and at that time of year, it's it's like the ruts coming on, and everybody says, those carribou there all not Oh there I go. Those caribou that are on the north slope of the Brooks Range tend to winter on the south slope of the Brooks Range, where they go down into the Tiger Forest and winter down there. And they have on the coastal plane because it's more wind and you can get away from the bogs and it's good food. Now we were waiting and we're convinced that all the caribou had left the coastal plane and gone over the range because we weren't seeing ship. And then one day here comes from miles off. I can't remember what it was, nine or ten bulls just like a laser headed towards the coastal plane. So going on the wrong direction that quote wrong direction, but they move so much that they could they could correct and be you know, the next day turned around and recover all the ground. But it is I mean, you do get your heavy one to see these these certain things. Also something we discussed. Yeah, they said that, uh, those moose do winner there. He said, they particularly like those draws, those willow choked draws will lead down to the main drainage. He said, they'll move once the snow starts piling up, they'll move up into those kind of like right blow where we got it out. Yanni's cariboo, butcher down he's cariboo that head high willow. He says, they like that stuff a lot for wintertime. It's great walking through. You know. Try to go back to one thing about these camera guys, Well, can I got I got such an epic in uptually going on right now, We're gonna get He's at like probably five hundred as he's about to go over the horizon, right, I think that's what you're yelling numbers. But he sees us, he comes back towards us and gets I think all the way maybe even under three hundred, heard something like that. But he's facing us the whole time, the winds kind of blowing. I'm just not a huge like frontal guy shot, especially when I'm like thinking meat. Yeah, YI was practicing excellent restraint because he was gonna let to carry but get away rather than hit in the front. Yeah. And then and I will not lie. This makes me kind of like the trophy hunter or whatever. Had it been just like the guard gangein like monster Bull with just points coming off every direction, I would have taken that shot. Yea. So were you not shooting like on the shot place with an argument? Were you not shooting the front facing you because you're worried about meat wastedge because you're worried about having a greatly diminished kill zone and getting the clean kill in such whipping and it was it was it was brisk wind. Yeah, which one was more? I don't know, I mean it's one of the same. Really wasted meat and crippling the critter. It's not the same thing. Well, I mean, it's still like a huge negative both of them. You know, So you're practice incredible restraint, bad ethics. He was practicing good ethics. Weird shot, big antlers would have caused me to make a maybe take a little bit more questionable shot, possibly loose some meat, possibly not have quite as you know, the hypercentage for a quality kill. I feel like I could have made that shot, sure, But on that bowl, I was like not. I was like very able to like just be calm and be like I'm gonna get the right shot, wait for it to happen. You were just gonna let him walk. Well, it was very I'll continue my story. He got down like two or whatever, and he's like coming, he's coming, He's coming, And I thought he was almost I was like, man, he's just gonna walk into our laps and it will be a real gimme. And then also his nose picked up and he got our wind and he was again heading out. It looked like he got hit by a car when that wind hit him. Yeah, so you're in the bottom of the valley, yeah, right, and instead of heading right back towards the her ezes, and he kind of just heads back and like a side he's traversed in the side of the hill instead of going, you know, just back right it towards the horizon where he could have quickly, you know, had he gone the same distance towards her eyes, and he would have disappeared. But he went across the hillside and uh, you gave him a couple of hoots and hollers. He didn't stop. I feel like that that that trick didn't he didn't care about that trip. Yeah, I gave him. I gave him my my, you try to bugle beagle Dad. I whistled bugle. He's like, hey, my distant cousins stopped and he turned Bron's side and you said, I don't know what you said, four oh something. I remember hearing four oh. And I was like, okay, I got this. I knew that my second hash down was roughly four yards, so I held right on and shot broke clean what was it went through both lungs and he ran down into a little fold in the land and disappeared. Because I thought you missed. Because I saw what I thought I saw. It was a proof of powdered rock, right, But no, I don't know if I might have just seen some hair come up. So I heard the thump like when you get a good hit on an animal. Sounds like a hitting the pumpkin, like hitting the watermelon. It's unmistakable. Yeah, I've heard described as like a baseball bat to a wet towel that's hanging. That's good. A it is good. Um punch the pumpkin hitting the wet toil the baseball bat just like oh no, not like that, Like is that good? There's like a whap wap deeper. Yeah, there you go. No, it's like I heard that. Uh. And then we went over there and he was you you double along to him. It's the heart. We had to keep the harb very windy and cold, and we uh dug it, drug it down the hill and then and then proceeded to butcher it up. And his liver. We're going a conversation about liver. I had just had some very good deer liver hunting down the southeast, and uh, I was kind of excited to replicate that meal with this liver. And and the liver is full of spots now in kosher slaughter which is called um. Okay, if you're an observe if you're an observant Jew, you would you eat kosher food non kosher food? I think is it glad anyway? One of the things you do during the Kosher slaughter processes you inspect the animals organs because God said in the Old Testament, God says, don't eat carrying okay, um, I mean don't eat dead. Don't eat animals you find laying around dead. Now, you don't know why I said that. It's not for you to like, it's not for you to say like, oh, I'm not gonna do it because I don't want to get sick. You don't know why I said it, But don't eat dead animals you see laying around. So to be extra careful because a lot of that, like the interpretation, a lot of the rules is to be like if he says something like God said, don't shave the corners of your face in the Old Testament. Now, ultra observant Jews will will grow out the sideburns because they're like, well, I don't know where the corner of your face ends and your hair begins. So to play it ultra safe and to be extra careful to be observant of the law. I'll grow out this long thing. So God says don't eat carrying. They would say, well, then you better not eat a wounded animal. Don't eat an animal that's damaged. To be extra careful. So when you do kosher slaughter, you inspect the organs to to look and make sure there's no evidence of illness in that animal, because you're being extra careful to follow God's word. Now that's not why I was inspecting his liver, but I haven't. But but I happen to be inspecting his liver and they had large white spots on it. Yeah, this way predates the FDA, but that's actually us. So I happen to be inspecting his liver. Notice some large whites on it. Yanni tries to tell me, it's some land in the creek. Well, it was just funny that we hadn't noticed it when well I had noticed when I cut it out and then went and put it in the creek, and we talked about leaving in the creek. Washed off a little because my mom when I was a kid, I had iron poor blood and I used to eat a lot of liver and my mom would take deer liver and so cut the deer liver up and soaking lemon water to draw the blood out. People soaking milk or water, various things that draw the blood out. When you throw you throw a liver in the creek, let me change its color, yeah quickly? Um So Yanni threw in his cold ass creek. And then we pulled it out and I had these things in it. Who wasn't did a biopsy on that liver. We cut it open. I don't senor know about it though. I thought it was some deposits a big ass parasite there. I don't real what it was, but that's what I recalled. The DNR Michigan biologists tell me it was some kind of parasite. He said, Tony, it's real waxy. Yeah, what do you do on your phone? Rick, I'm looking up fatty liver, which that's what I think it is. I don't think it's a parasite. Rick feels as though, and we caught we did a biopsy on it. You pull out a thing the size of a p with an encase. It's got a case and you pulled out and it is just like a waxy fat inside there, whether it's a paris that are not so we uh, we discarded the liver. Would animals get I mean, humans do because they eat the wrong diet. Would that animal get that? It wouldn't occur in that way. It occurs just like you have like a lot of abdominal he'd have like a lot of fat in his abdominal cavity, like kidney fat. He's not gonna wind up with balls of fat. Rick. Well, yeah, maybe that's that's what I'm looking like. It didn't look like a larvae. That might have been an agger or something. Where the hell was? It was good, eat, not deliver. We did deliver, and then this morning, Yeah se wants talk. Who wants to explained this morning's meal? But yeah, because he well he already got to explain a bunch of stuff. Well, I watched you master chef and hunter prepare a extraordinary meal. Uh. The primary uh entree was bone marrow. We took and cut, sawed up the mooses front yeah, shins, and cooked those on a pan. I went and collected some berries, blueberries, huckleberries, and cranberries. Right, what was the third one? You picked? Blueberries, crowberries, crowberry, cranberries all right, and then you reduced those down added I'm sorry you took a little bit of the fat out of the bone marrow path the reduced heated that reduced it down, added it to the blueberries to make a blueberry reduction like a fat reduction, like a sauce. And then we also took a mushroom that you had rough stemmed the bleat thank you, which I at first didn't think had any taste to it, but by the third one that not because the flavor just kind of comes through, you know, it grows on you. Ah. So we had that sautet in a pan, and then we also had uh the tender loin, which was grilled on an open flame fire, and you sort of made like a little I'm sure there's a French word for it or derv stacked up with the tenderloin on the bottom. I'm sorry, cariboo. Yeah, the tender tenderline and then the bone marrow and then the mushroom on the side, with a little sauce covering it all. And you served it on a a moose dropping not dropping sho shoulder blade. No, I thought we put it on the We did put it on schedule, ok. Yeah, So we put it on the bone of the scapula of the moose and that was very impressive for a field and it all tasted excellent. So for those of you who have never had any bone marrow, you gotta do it. But you had eaten bone marrow, Oh yeah, I've done. It was Dennison, thanks to you and Hank Shaw. So it's not it's not a h and I'm sure I could find a Latman recipe for it. I would think most European NU countries do. That's grand down the bone marrow in a French restaurant in San Francisco and I ordered that bone. I remember sitting there and I saw it. I was like, I can't this is this is many many years ago. I think this is you know, I'll tell you what year it was. It was two thousand three or two thousand four, and sitting there and uh, there's two thousand three and I see bone around like I just didn't understand what they meant. And I order it and its discs of femur cut and they got each one has a sprig of time and a sprig of rosemary stuck in it with sea salt on top. And I spread some of that on some toast. And the first thing, the first and only thing I thought, was do you know how many pounds of that ship I have left land in the woods. Yeah, and most tunners should they don't know about it. Yeah, but it does take some word white tailor is not a lot there. I usually say to people, I just say, like white bigger than a white hell. It's worth your while. I think on tongue, and I think on marrow bones. You know, you get into an elk, like that's a marrow bone, a mule to your white tail. It's just not a lot of think about game processors in the West, how many pounds of that stuff? But I don't think that ship can't be that good for you. I think it's really good for you. I don't know. If you're trying to like watch, I don't care. I don't pay attention to it. But if you're in a situation physically where you're trying to watch cholesterol and all, that, better than a Coca cola, I'm pretty sure is actually good for you. It depends on what diet is in fat. In these days, high fat is in so yeah. But here's the thing I didn't change what I I eat, what I'm gonna eat. I know what I feel good eating. Now people who are like, are you used to not eat this and now I eat that? When you're involved in a fat diet, no one knows they're doing a fat diet while they're doing it. They only know it's a fat diet later. So now you got the whole damn world. You were just like red, Yeah, it's like, oh, this is what jeans look like. No, it's not what jeans. So it's like it's like now I was like, yeah, fat, fat, fat, Oh of course it's you know, it's healthy. But like a while ago, no one was doing it. They're doing it now. All the people that change what they eat all the time according to what they're hearing on, whatever kind of media they take in, those people will in some amount of time move away from fat. I will still be consuming the same food I always eat, cause I don't shift my food around based on what dudes tell me. But for but most people, not most, many many people do. And and and now they'll be like, oh, what you're supposed to do? And then they'll be on to some other ship and I'll be like, you should really be eating a ton of bread and refined sugar. That's actually where the science is and then and that's what I eat now. Yeah, No, I'm just saying, no one engaged in a fat diet and knows they're in a fat diet. Right now, there's a fat diet that happened to be Like Yanni, there were talking about this with shoes. When I used to work for Ronnie Bain Twinlak installations, we wore red wing boots that had a white flat soul on them because we did most of our work on concrete bear concrete floors. I the other day found a pair of these boots and purchased them because I always liked that style of boot. And Yanni was saying, those boots and the ship right now really in fashion. And we're talking about when fashion comes and collides, like fashion comes and collides with you, like you're on a path and all of a sudden it's get you get hit by fashion. Yeah, that fashion was just where somebody went home and saw a pair of grandpa's little boots. He said, man, those mothers would look good. Why don't I make some money and we'll just popularize that and make that the new things. So fashion collided with you. And that's easy because stupid follows that all the time. Yeah, I mean look at America. I mean just oh yeah, that's create this and it's another stupid thing we can spend money on exactly. But for the bone, I feel like I feel like my diet has been I feel like the diet I eat has has fashion came and collided into my diet. Now they'll all go off and do other ship, but I'll be eating what I like to eat. For the bone marrow, there's like if you eat a like back and you know, before people agriculture and not quite poor people, but before we could go buy food in the grocery store, there's a legitimate reason to eat bone marrow because lean meat doesn't have what bone. Man, you want to hear an interesting theory that I read one time. I don't know where. I don't know if this theory is fashionable anymore. Ricky might be able to speak to it. You're schooled up on this kind of stuff. Uh, when you look at the African diaspora by which hominis Um left Africa, of course, Neanderthals left Africa, you know, six years ago and had quite a long ten year in Europe before we showed up for Homo sapiens showed up. But there's a theory out there that hominids didn't leave Africa. Tell you if you've ever heard this, I read this, and I'm not I'm not weighing in on this. I'm just telling you about a thing I read. I find oftentimes people have a very hard time, Like you'll go and tell someone about something you read and you're just saying, like, I read this thing. I'm telling you what I read, and they'll get mad at you. So you're like, they're like mad at you. I'm like, I can't tell are you mad at me that I read it? Are you mad at me that I'm telling you about it? Because I'm not claiming that it's mine. I'm just telling you as not a one to one right in the reading and the interpretation of the thing you read, well, I mean you might you have a pretty good memory, though you give For example, I'm talking about I once read an article thing I just told you guys about this. I read an article where I was saying like, were we to build were we to build an impenetrable wall between the US and Mexico? Here we go, I'm not doing any here's the problem. I'm not doing value judgment right now. But there's no way for people to listen to me without realizing I'm not doing value judgment because people have so much ship in their head that they need to assign value even when someone's not making value judgment. But there was a biologist who said, were we to build this impenetrable wall between the US and Mexico border, it would have it may have the following implications for migratory patterns and movements of jaguars, mountain lions, and black bears. So he's just saying, as we consider this idea, if you're interested in large carnivores and large omnivores when making the decision about the rights and wrongs of this, a set of factors to consider would be the movements of large rare animals. Okay, he's just throwing it out there now. I put this article up on social media. I put it up on Facebook and get bombarded with people saying, well, if you lost your job to a you know, but it's like but like, no, no, no, I wasn't saying that at all. I didn't write the article I'm sharing with you a collection of thoughts about a thing that's in the national debate, and people were attacking me for having drawn attention to a piece of field work done by someone because they couldn't keep their values out of it or their their world view out of it. But here's what I fail to see. Why did you not support the wall? And do it be like, yes, all factors included, all factors considered, including the implications for jaguars, mountain lions, and black beards. I still support the wall, and I've taken time to consider that because my people don't work that way. They're like, I don't want to hear about that ship because I support the wall. Who cares about those bears? Not even there? They're like, they're like, you can't say, like you can't look at the look at things. Well, so I'm precacing. I'm practicing my story because I'm not making a comment about humans and how our species came. I'm not telling any of that. I read a story where someone was positing someone was making a hypothesis that the human diaspora from Africa had some link in time with the um with the proliferation of saber tooth cats. Now here's why this is important to this theory. Saber tooth cats can't crack open bones, could not just tooth structure. We were talking about how wolverine will get in due. He'll whittle his way in there like a dog. You know, dog will slowly destroy a bone. Wolverine was gonna get in there, eventual's gonna get that marrow out, saying saber tooth cats, uh can make a kill, they eat soft tissue. They couldn't. They couldn't get into the bone once you had this guy was positive came here as a man of woman, saying that once we see this great proliferation of sabre tooth cats on the landscape, we start seeing more movements out of humans. He was suggesting that that there was a there was a an abundance of bone marrow on the landscape because people who were didn't have a very sophisticated tool set. Um we're just starting to mess around with stone tools and figuring out how all that ship worked. We're in knew about ads is and hammers and anvils and things, but weren't very effective at going out and killing large, dangerous animals with projectile points yet. And they were making a lot. They were making them like pre pre human human, right, making the lifestyle out of out of scavenging carcasses and cracking them open and getting and getting meryl. You know, it was just throwing it out there. That's something I read. I think that's whether's they talked about, this idea that early humans were scavengers. All these like sort of bipedal semi bipedal creatures cruised around and then they could carry away meat. They could like run up to a carcass, grab some ship, and hustle off before the big guys showed up before. Yeah, rain front or right now. You don't want to you can't fight, you don't, I mean you just starn't equipped to fight with other predators. But you can and grabbing stuff, barrows transportable, it comes to its own package. It's sealed, it's her medically sealed. Yeah, I think can that last? You know what I'm gonna start. I should start messing routh going and cracking open a bone out and then and seeing what it looks like. I have found old bones and fore and cracked and open and had it been like kind of dry it out and whatnot. But it'll be really interesting to take a shin bone and throw all the yard. I have to think it would last a long time, man, I mean a hell a lot longer than the than the bones a week and like seventy degree weather or longer and not even I can't say it would. I wouldn't be I can tell you wouldn't be surprised. Yeah, but I think if it's cool, reasonably cold out for like forty degrees or colder, it's solid a room. It's solid at room. It's a fat it's solid at room temperature. More than a week later, yeah, true, nine days later. Yeah, just laying on an air striping. You know. The best thing is a scapula had you know, bit some meat just kind of on it. But the like, oh gosh, yeah, I was cured. But the color, the white bone, red meat, blueberry bone. Marrow. Yeah, we had a scavenge. From the scavenger. We had to take what the wolverine left us. We went on to get the fevers, and the wolverine fevers. We had to know. It's my favorite marrowbone. I don't know why in the world I had never cut into a shin bone. Yeah, I'd watch those camp robbers climbing all over those things when they were up there on the so you know they were doing another thing on those bones, tooth on those capulus. That's a bright bird man, like the camp robbers after we So we killed a moose and the camp robbers were there within a couple of hours, not even probably an hour, and we were throwing bits of fat to him, and then we realized we were being followed. The rest of the week, we were being followed by camp robbers all the time. They're like, see those dudes, Yeah, follow those guys, man, because there's gonna be something. Because they called whiskey Jack Gray j camp robber. Yeah, Corvette. Corvette's old trappers don't like him because too right is that another word for him? I know that like you read when you read old trapper accounts, they really didn't like them because they would tune into your trap line and in all your Martin sets they would always be they'd harass your bait. So people were always pissed that when they killed the Matt Trap, the mad trap from Rat River, he had a couple of frills and whiskey Jacks in his backpack. He was feeding off him. Wolverines feeding off the trappers hate wolverines too. They do the same thing. Follow the trap line, right, and then they would just eat eat the stuff they got stuck on the trap. Kill your catch, Jhanna Senior. You any concluding thoughts, Oh yeah, quite a few extraordinary week, well two weeks basically. Uh, well, a couple of things. Let me start out. First of all, having just watched the show, having been involved with my son, just you know, seeing what he goes through. What does that mean? Well, I'm sorry, let me back, having talked to my son and you know, hearing what he does to do the show, and having met you in the field before doing a show, but now being in a show. But it's a whole entirely different perspective on it. It's an incredible amount of work that you guys, and I'm talking about everybody. It's not just you, it's not him, it's the camera crew, the field, you know, production assistance. Everybody works their asses off to make this show go. And I mean it to me. You know, everybody has kind of like their time and place. They're all like a well oiled wheel in the bigger set of wheels. It all moves together. You never hear anybody bitching at least hardly at all. Did you hear some bitching? Dude? I start feeling bad, Like I felt bad for Corey because I'm reminded myself the course you're working, and it's like we're just sitting in one place for several days. I started to feel self conscious. No, I just go in my own little world. People pray for the job that you just described people when they watch a show. I mean, like, you know, some of these silly reality shows are on TV. I don't think that those camera people have to move around as much. Is what I saw you guys doing this week. I mean it's when they say forty pounds of gear, they're not kidding, and that's probably more than that. And then you've got headsets on, and this stuff that we're walking over is I mean, it's either rock shale sliding or its moss that sinks in. And then you got these tussocks of grasses right very uneven, and you're watching somebody on the lens and you're moving across this while they're moving. That's a tough job. Tough job. And then putting the whole that entire picture together, it's an incredible amount of work. That's the first thing I want to say. So my hat's off to you guys. And then my hat's off to you Steve, because you add an incredible amount of authenticity to that show because you won't take anything but top tier. Man. It's like, there's no fraud to this show. It's like the real deal. And it was tough enough just walking, you know, around, hanging around you, but just to keep up with you. It's it's tough and knowing that you want that better quality show. So when I asked you why are you making why do you do meet either? Your answer was excellent. Was for those guys who hate TV who want to see the real deal. And I may be paraphrasing it, that's what almost you know, you get like in your mind, you're sort of picture who you want. Yeah, yeah, and that's what this show is about. And of course you know, I'm coming in kind of from the outside, you know, considering myself a experienced hunter man. Well not really, not when you put yourself into Alaska, because that's an entirely different environment. So that that, you know, I mean, there's a lot of environmental conditions that I had to get used to, like constantly having your hands cold, you know. I mean you do warm up, but it's you're constantly cold. It's just just one of those things I thought you were kicking ask though, Well, I thought I did. Okay for a guy that's you know, my age and and physical condition, all things considered. Yeah, I thought what I did. All right, crew, acknowledge that we talking a little bit about can you hear me? Why are you wearing it like that across your forehead? Because I've got a pointy head, And when we get into this time period of the podcast and it's sitting right on top, it really starts to keep passing with them cold. He's yeah, um, but no about how you really haven't camped in forty plus years and all of a sudden you went on a nine day camping forty years Where are you camping all those how many ever? Forty years ago? That was with my dad, you know, in a tent. And then we know this isn't car camp and this is like this, this is the real deal. This is the real deal. Yeah, I mean you're out there in the f and wilderness and yeah, it's it's it's cold. You were a sleeping about twenty seconds every you know, Hey, there's is no kidding. I would lay down. I could get like a third way through my meditation. You know, I remember my son waking me up, quit snore and dad that was only one night. What's your medic what's your meditation? Uh? That's for me. Well it's not okay, don't tell me yours. What do you mean by that I meditate? What does that mean? Basically? I just released everything. Just I just let it afist in your head. Well I do, We're gonna, yeah, I do. I go through a little checklist, and then at the end of that checklist, I basically just I zone out. I just go to that other place. Nothing. Your checklist consists of specific things that you need to think through, or is it that you're emptying of everything that comes up? Yeah, I'm not going to share that with you. You're gonna have to develop that on your own. Why can't you share with me? Because it's it's a personal thing. It's what I do in the other ways. It's the way I've developed my intuition. My actue Corey will tell you. I mean, I think it's a very personalized thing. But what is the goal? And you ask the goal is nothingness, to be totally nothing, to be totally withdrawn from everything that is around you, so from all, from emotion, from all, want to be just. I don't know, that's like the ultimate spirit that point. Are you able to meditate while hunting or do you meditate you've got to be in the dark and you're sleeping. You can. You can meditate any place point time. That's just darious levels of meditation that you can achieve. Yeah. I don't do anything like that, but I remember I read something that long ago where someone was a practitioner of meditation. Someone said to him, you know, I don't have time to meditate twenty minutes a day. He said, if you don't have time to meditate twenty minutes a day, you ought to be meditating two hours today. I totally agree, And basically in two minutes you can do anything that you need to do at the last Yeah, there's a lot of good stuff online. People want to check it out. I got no experience with it. I don't really to understand what it is. Well, but you're going there. I mean, you're on your own path, you know, and eventually things will come to you that will say, hey, you know what I gotta check this out. What I do do I stumbled into a Eastern practice, if you will, I don't know if it is or not. When I can't sleep, I focus very heavily on inhaling and exhaling breath. I just think about, okay, like air coming in coming, in coming, in air going out, going out going, Well, that's and it makes me falseleep, so goddamn fast. I don't I don't do yoga like my son does, but I think that's the ones common thing with with meditation. That's the simplest of all meditations, just basically concentrating on your breath, a little simple. So the last thing I want to say about you all you want the last item would be that having grown up in the Midwest, hunted in the Midwest and then in the West for big game elk and a lope and uhl, dear hanging out there is still you kind of get the feeling that you're hunting in a box, so yuh kind of like a corn flakes box. But I'm saying Midwest was definitely the corn flakes box. And then you go out west, it's a little bit bigger when you when you get to Alaska, it's like somebody took the top and just ripped it right off of that corn flakes box. And there's just no limit. I mean there is. You look around you and you go like, holy smokes man. No matter what direction I look in, it's this is it? Yea? And that took some I'm getting used to the thing that first struck me when I started hanging around in Alaska. And it was after I started hanging around in Alaska til my one of my older brothers, finished his schooling and went up there to as a biologist the first thing to struck me. And it still strikes me now as you see the size of rivers, they don't have roads on them because you think about like even in the West, there's a certain size of river, the like there's a threshold right where you get like a size of river the invariably has a road on right, right right. And the fact that you can have well the Yukon, for instance, which is a you know, drains significant portion of the conda, it is by all definitions, a mighty river. There's there's no paralleling road. Yeah. And if you imagine, like I used to think, like if I was king of the world, where my call just made. I would take a lot of river courses in the American West, and I would and I would, I would make them not roaded. If I was just able to act with im community, you know what I mean, I would say, like, you know, we're gonna take this river and does that even road on it. We're gonna tear the road up, but um it will last. You have giant, mighty rivers that you can't there's no road to go on them, right, I said to the pilot today flying out, I said, do you think right now, still today, that there are populations of game animals, moose and whatnot that are living and dying unhunted simply because you cannot get to him? He said, oh, yeah, absolutely sure. Because you got a moose, you kill a moose, you have you are bound by law to move five hundred pounds of flesh out of there. So you either are gonna have to get a wheeled vehicle, or you're gonna have to get a boat, or you're gonna have to get fixed wing aircraft because you can't and you can't use the helicopter for any aspect upon it. You can't transport hunters, you can't transport hunting equipment. You can't transport meat has to be fixed wing aircraft, right or a horse? Did you mention a horse? Horse? So you need to get some form of conveyance there, or you're limited by what you can do on your own self. Yanni was just saying that tonight that this hunt that I experienced today probably would not have been possible except for a very few people. What years ago? I was relating to him, how Buck, now we can do these hunts in a week because it's so easy to get in get out. We're even just twenty years ago when you wanted to come up and do this kind of hunt, it was gonna take a month. You know, the old old guys would say that Alaska was ruined by the bush plane. Um Buck bow who we were talking about, being a moose expert, moose caller. Buck Bowden one day was saying to me just a couple months ago, in fact, I was at his place in the southern Alaska Range, and he was saying, you know, the really true hunting, the true hunt ended thirty four years ago, And I said, what was the true hunting? He goes, before we had satellite phones and stuff. He goes because back then that was like the exploration. You could still ride a horse and go in and fly in and ride a horse in and hunt stuff knowing and hunted in modern times, and he said, the sad phone ruined it because as a guide, we used to wave goodbye to that plane and it was gonna be ten days, twenty days, and there was no change in anything. It was when that plane took off, it was gone, and you had a rendezvous to meet that plane at a specified point in ten or twenty days, and then you just hunted. He said, Now a lot of clients get their thing and they can't get out of there quick enough, and they're on the phone. He'll even say let's go get a caribou, let's go look for a bear, and they're like, well, let's get the hell out of here. I got what I'm after, And he said it really started to sour things for him that long ago. So it's always like, you know, wolt from our perspective, like I guess there that we're like, I'll always be that I experienced the good old days, right, And there'll be some as yet undeveloped technology and then in ten years or twenty years I'll be sitting around saying that I had it during the good days and now it's all messed up because of unknown At least we didn't have cell phones out there. I mean, I can imagine one day where for some sort of satellite whatever, I can't send a tax can't make a phone call. So yeah, you can make a phone call on a satellite phone. But yeah, so someday we'll be like, man, it used to be why I couldn't send a you know, text messenger or whatever. You're making up for it tonight though, that's right, But don't feel bad, Rick, I can't tonight yet either. So all right, that's good. I'm making Yeah, I'm bouncing out though. Yeah. A concluding thought, he got his headset back on, right? Was it the wolverine think about taking the two femurs? My closing thought is a question. I have a theory about this. Did he take the two femurs or was it just coincidence and or randomness? I think you could move those front legs because of the shoulder blades just too damn big with that scapula and everything. That's my theory. He's got four legs. I should call my brother who does a lot of statistics work through work for work. What are the chances if you have four objects? Rick Ricker Bill hear this out? What are the chances that he grabbed the two back legs? What are the odds you have four objects? What are the odds that two of them, two specified ones get picked? I don't know. What are your combinations? One you can grab one front, one back, two fronts or two backs? Yes, there's only three. You have two a's and two bees, and someone has two picks and they happen to grab two bees. What are the odds that they're gonna grab two? Aren't bad odd? Is it? But you're not talking about a human being, You're talking about an animal. You know, you trip me up about statistics. That was still the same probability, right, I mean, if it was random, I'm saying, I don't think. In my mind, I haven't thought, oh it was randomness. But here's nothing my brother talks about oftentimes because he's very involved in you probabilities that we find patterns. He thinks fly fishermen are fishermen, not fly fishermen are more guilty of this than most. We see patterns where no pattern exists. Oh, they were coming on Shard Truce and then all of a sudden they were coming on Olive. He's like, I think that it has a lot to do with coincidence and what was going on, and like maybe one of you you were running three different things and some guy cast at Chartreuss and someone caught one on and then everybody put a Chartruss on and later appeared as though Chartruss. But you know, it's the classic correlation causation issue. It's rampant. But with the wolverine, I feel that I just might drive him nuts were he here right now. I feel as though there's something about that. It was easy to drag those back legs off, and the capitoles were hard to manage. I don't know. Maybe they taste yeah, maybe they taste better. And that's what John he was driving at. But oh yeah, he's thinking there's more more. He's handled enough carcasses to know what's got the goods? Were they too closest bones? What was interesting about because BRONI and I went and looked for it for him one last time last night, right at dusk, and I pulled that high over that carcass that hide was still pulled over the rib ken. He so he hadn't gone through the pain to go do that, to dig inside there too. For whatever reason, he's like, no, I'm taking these four lower legs and I'm gonna go stash him. I think, and this again me, I'm not anthropomorphizing, but I'm I think that when when a critic like that shows up, I think that he, through experience, knows that a bigger bed or something's gonna show up the same way like a gray j they're the first of the carcass. They get displaced, no doubt by the ravens. The ravens are gonna get displaced. The ravens we saw get displaced by the wolverine. The wolverine has to know from experience that when you find something, a very good approach is to get that ship out of there before the grizzly shows up. So they're known to every now and then. Yeah, but I'm sure are like like the fact that he was dragging it way across the hillside down into wherever he was dragging it. He was getting it away from something. Sure, and we know that that he was dragging I know that he was dragging it, but we saw him dragging parts off. So I don't know. I'm just like I'm trying as I try to make sense out of other things I observed in a somewhat unscientific fashion, informed maybe by some amount of science. I feel like there's something like that going on. It just happens that when I saw the other wolverine that I saw four years ago, and he was doing the same thing, he was cashing parts off caribou kills. Was there any rhyme for reason why he was hauling away? No. The first thing I saw him hauling away, which just like before I get my spot and scope on him, I could not, for the life of me figure out what animal was looking at because he was hauling away a whole half a neck and a whole head of a cow cariboo that still had you know, her antlers on her head. You see that dragon along the ground. No, I mean, this dude was like just moving and I'm looking at it, and I just could not, like, because you're seeing white, you're seeing antler and just like you're just like running through the species in your head. Yeah, and you know black animal in the snow and it wasn't Yeah, exactly, pretty much like this weird jack little thing. But yeah, finally that spot ands go bind. I'm like, oh Wolverin hearing ahead, Sure, why did I think of that? And we watched him for you know, we're probably watched him make four or five trips. He would go into like this kind of a draw that later we skied by it and you could see kind of had like a crevasse almost, you know, kind of he had like a little stat like just a dark hole that he was going down into, and we watched him make four or five trips putting cariboo parts in there. This is up around the Arctic Circle. Yeah, north Arctic Circle, um, north side of the Brooks Range south and north north. Uh. Is that your concluding thought? Yeah, that's a good addition to the story, Corey. Uh, since we I think it's just just fake. Sorry it's late, but we just finished up a father's son meat either. It's just a good reminder I think that I take for granted your loved ones or your family members, and you know, set aside some time and you're busy schedules, maybe to go do an adventure with them, or you know, just get out there and enjoy each other's company while you can that's I thought about that a lot. I think about a lot of I think about my father a lot all the time. I thought about like how much he would have enjoyed a trip like that. Yeah. No, I heard it once in a hunting camp reaction in Mexico guiden cous deer and there's a father son combo there and they said one of the biggest reasons they like to go hunting together was for the windshield time. Because when they're on the hunt, they're like pretty hard, they're hardcore hunters and their hunt, but they're like, yeah, we always drive everywhere, So there's like this time, this time period with it that they don't have in their lives anymore, without kids and wives and life and work and stuff going on. So they get to get in the truck together and drive six or twelve or two days time and have winshow time and just get to talk. Yeah. Yeah, hunting. I mean for me and my father, it's it created this situation last ten fifteen years where we spent time together where that we wouldn't have otherwise. You know, best hunt I was ever on was when he shot that, and nothing I've ever s like, no hunt I've ever been been on is compared to that. You know, Well, that's true because I now kind of every year we tried to get up to Wisconsin and I have a turkey hunt. I do with both my sons and other people, but primarily with them, and it's yeah, it's enjoyable time. And they're you know, it's not like they're little kids anymore. I'm learning it's valuable, especially that it's different when you're when you're both adults. You know, it's not like dad taking the twelve year old right now. It's right. Yeah, maybe thinks that's that's the problem is I never got with my own with my own dad. I never got beyond that point like I got to be the age, you know, and then we moved like we just moved away. So I never had like, uh, I never took the time really except for like hunting rabbits and small game for five six hours. Never took the time to go out like as adults. Then he died. We'll just hanging out with Joannie Senior. We'll give you some more of this good, right. I mean there's two two things. One I mean, as a non hunter, I've really enjoyed getting to hang out with the like, I don't know, hunting cultured humans like progressive hunters that are getting after it, and I feel like doing it in a way that's, um, I don't know, I can see myself pursuing hunting in a way that I haven't before. And one just mostly wolves and wolverines totally all the Yeah, and omnivorce. Yeah, let's not about the omnivorce. Um No, But I just I do look forward to that point where I'm gonna, i don't know, kill kill something and eat it and cook it up. And it's just it's such a cool process, um to be a part of. So that's that's on the one hand. And then ye, you still talk to him. Yeah, yeah, he would. He would have not wanted to hike around. He would have he would have been camp cook. Yeah, he would have been happy to cook up some good stuff, put some butter on some bone marrow. He would have loved that. But he would have but he would have not really wanted to hike around. Yeah, I mean he would have done it maybe, But that being said, the other thing was the Latvian part of this episode, Like I mean we sort of like joke about it when you guys are. I mean, I'm listening to your audio all the time, and so no, well, when they're on camera, the Jans when they're on camera would speak English, but as soon as soon as they walked off almost always just bust right into Latvian. And to listen to that, it's just like, I don't know if there's something fulfilling about um, about a culture that has kind of maintained its language. And I mean Janice Jr. Yanka, I mean, he was born in the States, his dad was born in the States, but still speaks Fian And I think that that seems rare that that would still that would happen, right. A lot of a lot of second generation immigrants sort of uh have a really tough relationship with their um first language. I think just because of trying to assimilate uh. So to see to see Yanka and kind of embrace speaking Latvian, it's just it's I feel like I'm jealous in some ways. It's such a cool thing to be able to have your your guy's own like I don't know, a little incret, secret, freaking coded, ancient, unrelated language. It's weird to listen to because they'll be doing their thing and then like an English word will pop up in the middle of a sentence and it just sounds wrong. Copy and then Latin. Yeah, yeah, so I just enjoyed. I didn't enjoyed the whole The whole deal was good. What was the charm you were given? Steve? Oh? Yeah, can you tell that that secret charm? Well, it's not a secret charm, it's just a well known charm. It's actually or whatever it is. I didn't tell you the full story. I thought. I didn't want to spoil it for just don't tell a story. Just blessed this here beer bottle or not blessed, but whatever it was, And I can't do that with a beer bottle, not the it's it's the mystique. Could you tell people? Would you mind telling listeners what it was? The incant whatever? Yeah? I just the words you uttered when when when giving my when setting things in moment. But I have to do the whole thing. But I have to tell you this what it is that I told? Yeah, I will, I will know. So this incantation is nothing more than a little ditty that you use with small children that when you're deciding which one is it. So it was like, thank good dank coold really do bricks. So now you because I mean believer out of you for that moment, I changed your acceptance of that and you you believed it. You were right there, man, because you have you do it twice. You remember when he said did you crosswater? You're like, He's like, oh God, you crosswater right washed it away. So I don't care. You want to you want to put that. I mean there's a lot of in that context. You get it. So if I make a book and say this is the book of you, honest man, this is the way you gotta do it. If you're a believer, you're gonna do it that way, i'd priority concluding thoughts. Yeah, obviously this whole things about Alaska. And when people talk about Alaska, they talk about it as this like all encompassing, like umbrella kind of word. And my experience with Alaska up until this point was at your cabin in southeast Alaska, which couldn't be more different from where we were in the Alaska Range. And like it's almost a disservice to say I went to Alaska because people just get whatever they're gonna get in their heads. Some some nature documentary about Denali or whatever. And Alaska has like I don't know how many, like Southeast Alaska, Interior Alaska, Arctic Alaska, and it's just big. Yeah. And so it's so different to the Yeah, and it was amazing to see that that different friends experience. It makes you want to see different more different places going Alaska. Do you had a good time? Hell? Yeah, Yeah, it was impressive, even though you know he passed up on all three times. Uh My concluding thought it kind of has to do with fathers and sons. We just talked about this R day and I can't get it out of my head. It's not something that I came up with. But mo Um, who we work with quite a bit over the years, was was talking about having kids and he was saying that how when you have kids, and he has young kids, they're my kids ages. He's like, when you have kids, all you wish upon them is that they'd be happy, you know, and you don't, like he said, he was talking about how you don't spell it out. You don't spell out like oh I wanted to, you know. He's just like, no, just it's just that, like that's all I is one gonna be happy whatever that means for them, you know, and then later in life, you know, later life, when you're when you're looking at your own life, you get into all these specifics, like you want if you don't want this truck, I want this house, all these specific things you want, and you lose started that original idea that you would have upon your own children, be like, oh, I just want them to be happy. It's just you don't talk about you don't use that term anymore. You know, you're something like things that will write. But you're saying that now that he knows, that's just the side note to where he's the point he's making with me that's really stuck with me. You're saying that now that he has kids and he knows how badly he wants his kids to just be happy, He's like, oh, now I understand how my parents must have felt, right. They must have just looked at me and all they ever wanted was for me to be happy. And he was saying, and now I'm at a point in life we're I am. It's like, and I'm gonna make a point to go and say, you know what, I'm happy because now that I'm a parent, I realized how much that probably means to you, you know, got it because it's an interesting observation. He's like, that's the least I could do for my parents is to let them know that the thing they obsessed over all through bringing me up has come true. It's like they did it, you know. So you bring up an interesting questions and that question is very obvious to me. Did your father ever know about your finding your happiness right? And that's probably your biggest regret is that, Yeah, I have a million regrets, man, millions of No, it's probably not a million, but I had a shipload of regrets. Uh No, because I wasn't I was. I was in Um I took at that period, I had in my head something I wanted to do and it and it was it seemed like a moon shot. It seemed impossible. So I think he saw me. Um, he definitely saw me struggling towards something that was that I thought was impossible, and he was very encouraging that I go and do it. Never put anything oh my parents, listen, that's good. My mom, uh my mom. My dad never laid any bullshit on any of us about you need to do this and you need to do that. And that's you're just dreaming and that's not how the real nothing like that. Ever, They're like, you gotta find something you love to do and go do it. My mom was always the encourager and the dad said, now you need to go, Yeah, you need to be a doctor. My mom and dad never laid any of that bullshit on us. Ever. My dad think always said this is that you're gonna spend the third year life working. He was actually off, I feel like I spent a lot more than that. He said, you just spent a third year life working. You better do something you like. Correct. That was the only career advice he ever gave, But he gave it adamantly, and the same thing like, you know, we never heard from our folks, you know, and you know my mom thankfully, I'm still talking to my mom and she's you know, ever, never just like, do stuff you like, find a way to take what you like and make it pay. The advice I give out now when I give out, if I have a chance to give advice out to people, which comes up now, and then I'm always like, man, you gotta figure out what plan A is and forget about plan B, because plan B is gonna be cheaper and ease, cheaper and easier, and keep you from plan You're gonna go, You'll you'll wind up. It has a tremendous gravitational pull Plan B. Does you know don't you think that? Uh? Like you guys are saying tell your parents that you are happy, I think it wouldn't be nice. Yeah, But but I'm saying, but wouldn't it. I think it's just as important to tell your kids I'm happy. Yeah, that's a good point, you know, when you're not screaming at listen, catch up, catch up, catch up? You ever heard that word? And I'm happy? Okay to wrap up? Will you say we just went moose hunting and now we're back and thanks for listening to the Meat Eater podcast in Labyan Sure mass nor LEDs um leoliss all on your meddibus all us because territory when targeting mass has some no bagels ship moves. So Meat Eater, let's boot took our guy just ad a radio programo on Mass so well put Thank you John Senior was actually Johannes Jr. It is gath that makes you honest? Hey, man in hospital the hospital? It up alright, ytnon