00:00:00 Speaker 1: Hey, I'm Tyler and I'm k C. And you're listening to the Element podcast. 00:00:11 Speaker 2: What's happening all my woods people? It's another Element podcast, brought to you by First Light. 00:00:18 Speaker 1: Casey. I used the Trace last night? Did you Trace top? I did too, Man. 00:00:23 Speaker 2: I almost put my Marina on, actually because my Trace is kind of dirty, and I was like, start wearing it for a second, and I was like, dude, it is so I mean, it's not even that it's that hot, but it's so much harder than the Trace. 00:00:36 Speaker 1: I really do like that piece. Man, me too. Man, I'm actually wearing the Trace pants right now in a solid and I was telling Brian last night, these are probably my new favorite pant. You know. We used to wear those inexpensive wranglers a lot, and I still do wear those, but these are cooler than those. They're lighter and cooler, which is cooler, like literally and figuratively. Yeah, I've got some zippers, man, And I do think that over time, I mean, any lightweight thing you wear is gonna struggle with durability, just like with like briers and stuff. Right, So I don't but these don't have any tears or anything. But I think that the stitching and the zippers are gonna be one of the things we notice be better than some of the other stuff that we warn you know, like that's really when you pay for something decent, you're paying for better textile, but you're really paying for better stitching and just you know how they're put together. That's gonna be. That's one of the things those other pants kind of struggle with for sure. So we today are talking about Bucks. We haven't been talking about Bucks just a ton lately because we are as far from Buck season as possible pretty much. We have a video coming out. It's the first of a series called The Buck Truck. Today it is coming out and you guys ought to go watch it. You might want to listen to this podcast first because we're going to kind of recap the whole situation in Nebraska, which is the first episode, and this this series will go basically from you know, beginning of the season through the through December end of the season, and it's going to be a chronological deal that you guys can kind of follow us throughout the season as we hop around in Case's buck truck and shoot a bunch of deer. That's what we did. 00:02:24 Speaker 2: So today we're going talk a little bit about Nebraska. 00:02:27 Speaker 1: This is is it a. 00:02:29 Speaker 2: State that I always It's always intrigued me because it's fairly close to Texas in regards to just you know, good whitetail country and other states that we could possibly go to, and there are some public land opportunities. It has an earlier season, usually starting around the first of September. So it's intrigued me for years. And I have now spent four seasons hunting in September up there, and the first two were very much a struggle, and we'll talk a little bit about that here in a second, but I want to talk about basically those struggles that I dealt with early on and then year three that you convinced me to go back and do because I didn't want to. 00:03:13 Speaker 1: Go back, you know what I mean? Yeah, And about halfway through that I could see why. 00:03:18 Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, for real it it can beat you down. And so a couple of things that you know, I noticed when we struggle with early on, and I've been I've hunted all over the state in my my four years up there, lots of different places and different habitats, and I noticed a corresponding thing. That is, it corresponds across the state in a lot of different areas, but there are particular spots that I think if you find a spot, it might end up being a good spot for you. And we'll talk more about that later as well. But overall, the number of bucks bigger than one point five's so one and a half year olds bigger than that her few and far between in Nebraska, and we've we've kind of hypothesized that it's because they have, you know, a rifle season that's I guess decent length, and they allow non residents to go out and pretty pretty well put the hammer on deer in a state where like you can see pretty good, and so if you can shoot pretty good, you can kill a buck, you know, I would say, fairly easy compared to if you're hunting rifle in a big wood state or something like that, you know, you only have shots out to one hundred yards or whatever out here. If you can shoot four hundred you can kill a big buck, you know, during the rud or whatever. So we've seen that kind of put a damper on overall buck numbers probably and especially like more mature bucks. The first year I went, we saw so many deer. I mean, it was I was like, this is the cool this is the best habitat, this is the coolest place everybody. I was texting you, you know, this is awesome, dude. And at the time I was super broke, but we were, you know, this is something I wanted to do, and we were chasing the dream, as they say. 00:05:03 Speaker 1: I remember sitting in the Brookshire's parking lot and Sulfur Springs doing that podcast with you. I don't know why I was there, but that's what we did. And I remember you talking about how it was like this is before we were like had the revelation right of that the buck number thing was a deal, and you were like, man, I just can't believe how many deer were seeing. But I haven't seen a single shooter buck, you know, and it was it's just I was like, man, I just can't believe that, you know, Like, sitting down here in Texas, this is what I was thinking, is, man, they have to be there somewhere. 00:05:36 Speaker 2: We're seeing hundreds of deer, dude. Yeah, Like I think I bet you there was days when I might have seen a hundred deer, you know, just driving around and looking at different stuff, and they weren't like I wasn't seeing them from long distance either, like I was seeing them fairly close a lot of times because the habitat was so good. It was it was, you know, like I feel like Nebraska sits in a place in the US where like they don't have harsh, like terribly harsh winters like you might get in a Minnesota or something, but they also won't have terribly harsh summers like you get in a Texas. It sits in that belt where like, as you know, as a gardener, like Missouri is a pretty good place to be a gardener, you know what I mean. It kind of sits in that geographic belt where things just grow there well. And so I was just noticing these warm season grasses were so tall, and actually they'd had a lot of rain, so that probably added to I'm sure a lot of the lakes and stuff in that area. I think it was the same year that like South Dakota and all that stuff was like so like legit, roads were flooded for months and months and months and people couldn't like access parts of the state because of roads being flooded and stuff. But it was a good year, but there was a lot of brush plump tickets were going crazy. Anyway, long story short, saw a ton of deer I was hunting. I hunted a spring fed lake that had I saw like twenty seven deer or something that night that I hunted it. It was ninety four degrees. I mean, it should have been the place, right, and we saw like I think we saw like only eight, like two bucks, and they were both one point five, so one was like a spike, you know, and I was just blown away. We saw so many deer. So anyway, that kind of led me to start branching out the next year and the next year, I guess that was twenty I got. I kind of figured out real quickly that because we always wanted you and I filmed ourselves, like we would film each other on trips or self film. We always like, man, what if we could get somebody who would kind of get like a little experience, like an internship kind of thing, quote unquote. And I figured out pretty quickly that the cameraman thing is not all it's cracked up to be sometimes cause they can get the big head and that you know what I mean, Really it's a that's a term that I'm I'm he knows what I mean. It's an inside joke. But essentially, I had a buck in twenty that came out at like twelve yards. I had betted him the morning before came out, and I had set up on him on the ground and we were next to fence line. My cameraman kind of he kind of poked out from the side to get the footage, which is kind of what you should do as a cameraman, right, but as a hunter, you don't want that to happen because you get silhouetted as soon as that buck crosses the fence line and comes out, and uh, it's the movement that's the issue here, it is and he got seen, and you know, it happens to the best of us, so he uh, that buck locked in on us and then just took off real quick before I could even do anything. So it was it was a bad situation overall. Is the only way I could hunt that buck was to be on the ground next to the fence line and the tumbleweeds. So but that's something that we've we started to learn in Nebraska, was that cameraman. You know, struggles can be a thing it's it's trying to get two dudes past the senses of a deer is tough, man. Yeah, and then lining up the cameraman and the the hunter is another thing. 00:08:50 Speaker 1: So this goes back to you and I were talking about this will go. You went up there with their friend Anthony a couple of years back, and like y'all had and hunting together a whole lot. You film together quite a bit in the past, but if you don't have like the jive going on, things can get kind of haywire. Yeah. Oh yeah, I was. 00:09:10 Speaker 2: He shot at a dough that I'd had no clues fixing the shoot. I mean, I was on the deer barely, but I didn't know who was fixing to shoot it. And so he shot and I was like, well, what just happened? Did you accidentally shoot? 00:09:22 Speaker 1: You know? 00:09:22 Speaker 2: And luckily he didn't hit it, you know? Yeah, but uh, And we ended up getting footage of a of a dyker that he shot. 00:09:31 Speaker 1: After that. It was cool. We were stoked, man. Yeah. Then that kind of all brings us to the year twenty twenty one, where you and I went up there together. Kind of I talked you into it because I wanted to go real bad and wasn't able to the first two seasons that you went. And I talked to you into going and you were like, I'm not and did you in the truck. 00:09:55 Speaker 2: Anyways, and made you go. I was done, dude, I had been. I mean, it's a long ways up there. We were struggling and physically and mentally because of like lack of sleep and stuff. I mean, we were, you know, we did. We did have a hotel for a few nights in twenty twenty, but in nineteen we camped in a Dude, it was hot that year, Like, like I said, it was ninety four. One day I was crawling into it was in literally the most mosquito infested place I've ever been I have ever been, dude. And we you know, we've hunted on the coast and all kind of stuff, and we would you would like get into your tent as quick as possible and try to smash out the few mosquitos that got in there, and then you would just go to sleep, you know, on your sleeping bag, sweating your tail off. And by the end of that trip was so nasty, and I had like two ticks around my sock line that I didn't even know were there until like I changed at the very end getting ready to go home that like I had a tick whelp after I pulled one of them out for like two months, because it'd probably been there for like two days, you know, I didn't know that's yeah, it was just it's just terrible there. It is so uncomfortable. And then I taught you to camping again. Yeah, that's right in twenty one, Like I said, brings us twenty one, we're camping again, and I'm like, oh, the weather doesn't look that bad. And it wasn't really like as far as TIMPs go, you know, so. 00:11:16 Speaker 1: It felt nice. It's just uh, you know, in the seventies, I had these things called like water fans, you know what I'm talking about. It's like before the air conditioners, they had water fans. It was kind of like add humidity to the room and cool you off, which I don't know how that works, but that's kind of what we had in Nebraska where oh, there's a storm in the distance. Let's get some cool lightning video of this storm cloud. Oh there's a storm over our heads. It's raining. It's better get in the tent. Ye Oh, this tent is only waterproof for so long and then all of a sudden, every rain drop is a mystification. 00:11:53 Speaker 2: Yeah, we got mystified. 00:11:56 Speaker 1: Dude, we were so wet in that tent, there's no That's the night before opening day that year. Ye, and ended up. 00:12:06 Speaker 2: How bad did it hurt your soul that we didn't hunt open him more? 00:12:08 Speaker 1: Oh? It was the worst. It was absolutely the worst because where again that trip we struggled with buck numbers and hunter pressure and that was that was. 00:12:40 Speaker 2: Hunter pressure was a thing that year for sure. And I mean we definitely had seen some hunter pressure in the years before, but like we started to I think word gets out in certain areas about different things, but there was like we even got we got scoped out by some dudes that, you know, I think. 00:12:56 Speaker 1: Knew who we were and we didn't. 00:12:58 Speaker 2: I mean, I didn't feel like anybody should know who we were at the time, but yeah, these dudes did and they were nice, they were fine, but yeah, you just like crossing pass with people, too many people, you know what I mean? 00:13:07 Speaker 1: Yeah, and opening morning, we'd scouted some of the day before and we're like, okay, there's people around. We got to go find some deer to hunt. Get up out of the tent late because we only slept like probably three hours that night, and we're gonna go glass this spot. We see two shooter bucks go past hanging trees and places that we would like if we'd have got there two and a half hours earlier, we would have hung those trees. Yep, And uh we didn't because we had such a terrible night. And then for like the next five days, those are the only bucks we saw. They we could not ring one out anywhere. So it was like and I thought we were about to be in paradise, you know, because like, oh man, look at those two bucks. 00:13:54 Speaker 2: Sweet again. We're trying a new part of the state, trying to figure this thing out. You know, you're like, oh, it's gonna be great. You can see long ways, find bucks all over. No, find dudes all over, that's right, find those all over. Bird hunters all over, bird hunters everywhere. 00:14:07 Speaker 1: Goodness, gracious shit, I had that got come off the hill, just messed me up and walked right through my set. You know, it's whatever public ground, yeah, you know, but it's all well and good until you know a guy with a spaniel runs underneath your tree. But uh, yeah, so that was the struggle on that trip, is finding a deer to hunt and avoiding people and getting around the weather. Yeah it was tough, man. 00:14:32 Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it was and the weather thing. It affected our sleep to the point that your decisions are tough or not. You know, your decisions are not being made well and you're dealing with these same things we've been seeing. And here we are, year three. I feel like, why did I let Case talk me into this thing? And and I had We had decided that there was some pretty good looking stuff quite a ways away that we had pre scouted, and we decided go to a different place, a different area, right, And we thought, well, if this is far enough away that it's it's a commitment. So we can't hunt it unless and we thought we would, we would try to find, uh, you know, some creative access if we ran into trouble. 00:15:15 Speaker 1: Uh, you know where we were at. 00:15:17 Speaker 2: And so we decided to quote unquote spike out. 00:15:22 Speaker 1: Uh. 00:15:23 Speaker 2: And and I don't mean do what Michael does you know or anything, but we're uh, we're headed to this new place, you know, And we go go in, uh to give it a try in the afternoon and if you know me, if you listen to this podcast for a while, you probably know I got a lot of confidence in the afternoon sit a lot of times. That's my my I like afternoon hunts best, and so I'm feeling pretty good. Case had actually the morning that morning, had bombed into a spot pretty far in and kind of burn himself fout not seeing deer. 00:16:02 Speaker 1: Right. Yeah, it was bad. I like found the spot on the map, just did the triangulation thing. It's like, you know, over mile from the closest road. I carried in all my stuff. We're self filming, right, no camera guys. Uh. Eric joined us the next hunt. Yeah, it was when Eric with us. Yeah, you know, they had to get a half bacon, but uh, I was just beat. I also think I wore my rubber boots on that walk, which was a bad idea. Yeah, but it was kind of wet through some of that stuff, you know. Anyways, Yeah, so I decided to kind of do a layup somewhat of an observation stand but still like I was hunting a pretty nice little bed to feed pattern. Yeah, further up close to the road, and I saw deer. I mean I had shots of doze it didn't take you know, it didn't have any bucks, but you decided to just be uh you know the Cameron Haynes of the early season. That's what I am. Dude. 00:17:05 Speaker 2: I always you always hear me saying nobody cares. 00:17:08 Speaker 1: Right, nobody you hear hear you say work hard, You just say nobody cares. Nobody cares. 00:17:18 Speaker 2: So anyway, I did bomb back in pretty far, really far, and basically between Kse and I there wasn't there was. There was some options, but nothing I felt real confident about. And so I had a I had a spot picked out on the map that I was like, you know, I'm gonna see what looks what things look like on the way in, but I kind of want to get to this spot and if it's pretty good set up here, so I do. And essentially this spot is it's kind of got like two trails that you would potentially hunt. In my opinion, what I'm seeing from the aerial like two sides of this thing, uh, this kind of tree line thing or whatever. And so I'm like, you know what, I'm gonna look at both sides. Well, I kind of have this thing like probably a lot of you do, where if you get further back in, you feel better about your chances. And so I hunted the furthest trail and I ended up setting up and I don't know it starts getting Golden Hour and I turn around and there's a big old buck on the other trail behind me, down wind, and I'm like, man, he's fixing to get my wind. Of course, I get a little get the camera turned around and get it on him. He gets my wind, takes off. I get footage of it, and he's blowing and runs off, and I was just like texting case. I'm like, I'm so mad because I'm like, I walk so far in here, it's hard as all get out, Like I sweated my tail off. It's like, you know, elk hunting back in here, it's so steep and all this and that. I'm like, if I came all the way back in here and mess this whole thing up, I'm just gonna hit myself in the head to make myself go to sleep. And so I sit there for another thirty five minutes or so. I think I texted a group and maybe old hunter hth told me something along these lines of like be ready because he's seen where like when a deer starts making some weird noises are blowing. Sometimes it attracts O their deer other deer, and sure enough it did. And I had a buck come out where now you and I think deer come out. But instead of taking a certain trail, he walked straight towards me from there at which between so I'm between him and where that buck had blown. So he's walking straight at me. Because he's walking over there, I think to see what's going on. This is literally thirty to forty minutes later, but he for sure it was betted and heard that. 00:19:47 Speaker 1: This is a thing that animals do, specifically males of the species, Like I think about elk and deer and turkeys and maybe even pigs that still remains to be seen, well the other or not, I know, that's what I'm thinking about. Yeah, but it's fast, but still they like are intrigued, Yeah, because they're driven sexually right after trying to reproduce, so even socially too, yeah, social little bit. 00:20:12 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:20:13 Speaker 1: Well the dominance then you know results in you know, prowess when it comes to breeding or whatever. But like so there's like this thing of I need to just make sure they know what they're making sure of, but they're just like, yeah, what's going on, dude? 00:20:28 Speaker 2: That that buck stood over there for a long time and just just keyed up and looked over in that direction even though he couldn't see nothing, guarantee you, and then finally works up the nerve and probably has like seen it before. I mean, how many dudes are going to spook a deer and then stand there for thirty five minutes, you know, like not not any really, So he probably thought KOs is clear, but I'm just going to make sure, you know. So he walks over towards where he heard that blow, and he's going to try to smell and seeing all this that and if you've ever watched the video, you can see where this buck is like creeping. 00:20:58 Speaker 1: You know. 00:20:59 Speaker 2: Well, this dude's coming out at me. He's kind of got his eyes up because he's looking in that direction. I can't do nothing, dude. I mean I barely can get the camera. I follow him pretty well, you know overall, but like he gets out of the camera at like twelve yards and I'm like, all right, it's time to just get a shot. I ain't filming this thing anymore. At this point, I've done the best that I can do. Now I'm gonna put in the footage. It is cool. The actual fall after the shot is my favorite, like my most you know, meaningful camera footage probably, But anyway, he comes right under my stand. I have to shoot so steep down that I have to like really focus on what my waist is doing and like how I'm bending in making sure my tea is still formed really well. First year of a saddle too, by the way, that's right, Yeah, that is right, and so very tricky situation navigate. Anyway, long story short, I shoot the deer straight down, like between the shoulder blades, smoked him, didn't know for sure, walk out, bring Casey back in. We find this deer basically jumped off of the Grand Canyon and we find him in the bottom. We cut him up, haul him out of there, and we decide to get a hotel at like three in the morning because we're beat. We need some showers. So we do that thing, and we kind of learned that you know what, hotel I think too bad if you can afford it a little bit, having a decent bed. We've talked about this a lot in this trip. 00:22:22 Speaker 1: For sure. I'm an agreeance. This is the one where I had the revelation because I've always been the drive through the night, you know, sleep wherever, you know, on side of the road, nobody cares kind of got yeah, yeah. And a lot of that was just out of just being poor, you know, and a lot of it is also like I just kind of have a chronically optimistic look on things sometimes, so I always is like, it's gonna be okay, We're gonna make it work, which is true. But you can perform better if you get a better situation. 00:22:57 Speaker 2: The more you and I hang out, the more we lean towards the other guys. 00:23:05 Speaker 1: It's exactly right. I'm more optimistic now you're more realistic. That's right. So I now live by the standard of that. I'd rather have five hours of sleep in a really good bed than six and a half of like just mistifying yeah, junkie tense sleep, you know, like it's what you just get so much more rest when you get to get good rest in a shower. Man, Dude, I like being tough, I mean I do. I like the thought of just being a rough and tumble top guy. But a shower every day just makes you feel really good. Keeps the doctor away, and I guarantee you. 00:23:40 Speaker 2: I mean, I'll tell you this the So I talked about this this morning with my my barber, but the I noticed this because we kind of talked for a living Like the podcast thing is where we started this thing, right, And you guys probably can't tell because we play it awful lot, But there are times when we are so exhausted during a hunt and we're podcasting, the words can't come out like I can't, I can't put the words out right, like I'm slurring. Y'all can't understand me. And I've and I even will say a sentence that's got the most basic adjectives in it because I can't think of the normal adjectives that I would use, you know, like we were going, yeah, you know what we were going to when he was big and nice and uh, you know some big words there. But that's that's that's the truth of the situation. So what I'm saying is that makes you realize also when you see that you can't perform that way, think about, uh, taking what you've seen from deer that morning and applying it to a map situation and finding a way to go kill that deer in the evening, not to mention a you've got to walk nine tenths of a mile and you're exhausted, you know, like that's a I mean, things are just compounded, right. It's the whole Mark kenyon scent uh theory, the the the whole argument he has is, you know, if I can bring a bunch of one percent better to my game, it makes me ten percent better or whatever. So that's kind of the way this is. But why does he lift weights if that's his theory. That's a good question. It's a good question. You should ask him that, for sure. 00:25:11 Speaker 1: I know you will. 00:25:14 Speaker 2: But anyway, so that this whole thing kind of brings us, you know, from the twenty one situation where we ended in a hotel and felt good after that and you shot a big bunk case you forget pizza, yeah, that next morning to you know, twenty two, where we think we're thinking, okay, we found a pretty cool spot. Potentially this spot is is good because the first evening in it was paid off with a nice like probably sixteen seventeen inch wide buck, you know, like a nice buck. 00:25:46 Speaker 1: Uh. 00:25:46 Speaker 2: Hopefully this translates into our twenty two stuff a little bit in the summer, we find out there is a massive drought from Texas all the way up to you know, through the Playing States pretty much, so definitely covering this area of Nebraska, all of Nebraska. And we decide, you know what, let's try something different. Let's move away to another area which goes against what you think, but hopefully that what we find there will translate into we can translate that to where we're going. And also with that drought. On the way up, we started talking a lot about water. 00:26:21 Speaker 1: And this also is probably one of those times where my influence isn't always a bess because I have a little bit of this thing of like wanting to see something new, which I know to you do too, because you kind of like have a goal of hunting new state every year, and so like you kind of have that, I just kind of do it more just case by case basis. And I was like, man, we went that place last year. On what it's like over here, you know, and that's just kind of how it's like exploring, you know, it's fun to see new stuff. And like you said, on the way up, we got to talking and looking at the map and thinking about how like detrimental. The water situation was in this part of the country, and you know, it's it's like, uh, I think about as dry as it gets, right, Like, yeah, dasty, I think so. And so we decided, hey, water is going to be the most limited resource. Deer can find food, they can find cover anywhere, and that's apparent, you know, because they live in some wide open places. And so let's just try to figure out where these things are going to be water. And we've been talking to Tony Peterson, who's actually on buck Truck for on South Dakota episode. But you know, Tony is like the king of water and so and for good reason. He's killed a lot of deer over water. He's a good hunter, so I believe him. So we're like, okay, let's like commit to this thing because one of the things about hunting water I feel is that you can't just do it for an evening hunt or whatever and be like, oh, well, I guess water's not the pattern because deer just tart that way. It's just like, if you're a feeder hunter in Texas, like you you know that if you hunt that figure once don't see your target buck, that doesn't mean that you're not gonna shoot in there someday, right, right. And water's the same things. It's just a location that deer visit when they need to. So that was kind of a plan just to find some water on the map and go as far as we can and get as far away from people and hunt a little later in the year so that we have less hunters around and kind of add all that up into killing deer hopefully. Right. 00:28:32 Speaker 2: Yeah, and you spent some time. We spent time glassing a lot early and I was back to the old can't find a buck bigger than seventy five inches. I found a couple of actual two year olds, but I was hoping to shoot something over one hundred inches, like a three year old type of deal. 00:28:52 Speaker 1: You remember this that we were talking about this now this is the buck truck stuff we're talking about now, guys, like we went into Nebraska and buck truck and this is all stuff you're gonna be able to watch when Tyler, when can you watch this as soon as you get done listening to this podcast? Oh my goodness. It goes out on Tuesday, May second, at high noon Central, which is very soon. Okay, So we have two different approaches when it comes to these type of hunts. I like to see stuff. I like to be where I can see, especially when I'm like it's a first early part of the hunt, I can observe, make moves, maybe chasing around. 00:29:29 Speaker 2: On the ground. I should hunt more often. 00:29:31 Speaker 1: Then You're right, So, uh you, on the other hand, you also like those things, I think, But you had a different strategy for that first opening morning. 00:29:44 Speaker 2: Yeah, I just I hunted a I've hunted a similar place before that. I thought like, in this this this exact micro particular spot play similar set up well, and I thought it would be good bombed in because I wanted to hang in a tree and give myself a chance right off the bat. And found out as soon as we got in that morning it was cow Cow's had been everywhere and just destroyed this place. And so I sat anyway, and I didn't pay off, but I did spend the next few days kind of doing more what you did and just could not could not find shooter bucks. 00:30:24 Speaker 1: But you were finding the opposite. Yeah, first morning, I set up where I could see a water source and had four bucks come into the water source, try to make a move on them quick, and made the wrong move, which stinks, but it set us up later for some more good encounters. But like two giants, in my opinion for the country, I don't think that there's much good footage of them, just because it happened real fast and I was thinking about killing more than I was getting them on film. So decided that that was going to be a place to try to make some ambushes on and set up up over the water real close. Never had deer comeing to range, but in the same general area because it was close to the resources of deer needed. Spotted some bucks that were betting, like kind of up in a little pocket, a buck pocket, as you'd say, it's. 00:31:18 Speaker 2: On the back of your jeans, but yeah, it's also the back of yours. 00:31:25 Speaker 1: But made a stalk on some really really nice bucks, and I was, dude, at this point, you had them killed. I am so dial dude like, and I have a tendency to be a little overconfident in my abilities, as a lot of people do, I think, But I'm not joking when I say I could bust a quarter at sixty at this time of the year. I'm telling you, dude, like, I'm shooting good in late September. Man, I mean, I'm smoking it right, and I've got a giant buck. I don't know what to put him at score wise. I mean he's like a poping young class deer or whatever at sixty yards, dead calm, and I'm like about to get a shot at this thing, and something messes it up, old prairie wolf and ran these deer right up in our throats, these deer killing from sixty to like eight yards in our faces, and I can't get my sight. I have a sight tape rolled down to sixty to take the shot. I can't get it up. And then they just take off. 00:32:39 Speaker 2: The big one stops and looks at you for like a long enough time to get a shot. 00:32:44 Speaker 1: If you had it ready. I thought about it. I thought about so. I have shot a few animals looking down the era in my day, Like at night when you walk into the stand and there's a skunk, you just got of like look down there and shoot. I had done that long time, but I remember doing that when I was a kid. Gregg's got a nickname, his new nickname and found out really Papa Skunk. Papa skunk. Huh yep. Oh man, Yeah, that's pretty good. Uh. I could have looked down my era at this year, but I was like, you know what, man, all right, I don't think there's like this thing called ethics or whatever. You know, it's so subjective. But for me, it just wasn't a shot worth taking. 00:33:23 Speaker 2: Sure, you know, hey, it's all good man. You don't feel good about it, don't you either. It ain't no big deal man, you know you live with it. It's you. 00:33:29 Speaker 1: That's what's funny is that I felt great about the sixty yard shot, but the ten yard shot, I was like, no, I ain't taking that. 00:33:36 Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's a split second decision. You know, you may have been if you thought about three or four seconds songs this day. 00:33:41 Speaker 1: I'm happy I didn't. There you go. You don't regret it at all? Yeah, especially it was sad to see uh two buckholes run away. Yeah yeah, yeah, that's what I was all. 00:33:51 Speaker 2: Yeah, that was and and this is this is on video, so you know, we're gonna give you most of this, but not all of it. All you're gonna have to watch some of it. 00:33:59 Speaker 1: But that kind of after that spookage right there, because those deer were double spooked, the coots spooked them to us, and then they for sure, why bear on these planes. 00:34:10 Speaker 2: I hadn't seen that since the seventeen hundreds. 00:34:14 Speaker 1: So you and I had a little meeting midday and we were like, hey, I just blew out my spot. You hadn't found anything, So let's put some rubber to the road and go just buck truck it somewhere else. 00:34:26 Speaker 2: And we we always pre scout this stuff on the maps and we look at the whole state. 00:34:33 Speaker 1: If we got the option, that's a good, good point man, Like I talk about having options A through F or even more. You know, like if you're on an out of state hunt, there's no reason to confine yourself to something. You know, have some backups. The wind can blow out of three hundred and sixty different directions, right, so like you never know when you might need a different spot or just thing to bounce for some reason. 00:34:55 Speaker 2: And this was the exact time to do it. Yep, yeah, for sure, And that's what we did. We thought, you know what, we have a spot that has worked for us in the past. Let's go see what's going on over there. And so we made the trip over to this area, and the thing that we saw with your encounters so far on that trip related to twenty one's encounter where big Bucks were far from entry points, and so we knew that this was another option we had where we could walk a long ways in and probably not deal with people because of that, and encounter big Bucks because where you had that encounter with those Bucks was eight long ways from the road, you know. So people just don't want to do that, and that's fine if you don't want to, I understand it. I personally would rather hunt some permission where I could drive you know, my truck to within a quarter mile, hide it in the woods and go hunting, you know what I mean. But it doesn't happen for us all the time because we didn't. We hadn't always been able to do that, and so in this situation, we thought, this is this is a spot. So we went back after we got I don't even remember it was. It was a we did it evening hunt, so I don't know. I think we had decided the next morning we would leave. So we hunted that evening and then the next morning we would get up leave and you know, because it was going to take some time to get there, give us time if we left early enough to get uh into the woods and kind of make plans. 00:36:26 Speaker 1: And so. 00:36:28 Speaker 2: Here's another thing about a drought situation is that, especially in an extreme drought like we had, not only is water very limited, but food is also limited. And they're going to find food because there's food in the landscape. But if you have if you have you know, crops, then that stuff a lot of times is going to be better than what has been naturally growing in drought situations. So the deer can't just ours their way slowly to the crop situation because there's not a whole lot to eat and it's not very tasty. Yeah, we noticed like in our area in particular, snowberries were like there was barely any of them, and the year before it was like the whole plains were pretty lush and green. There was snowberry everywhere up there right in South Dakota, and stuff too, so that stuff was like non existent pretty much. Leaves weren't even on these things hardly. So we decided that we would go in and hunt because of these two things were kind of lined up far from the entry to keep hunters out out of the way a little bit. And then also just the fact that there would be some food around, and so we decided to walk in, and there's five of us, no, there's four of us walking in. We actually find a place for old e gentry Eli to hunt as well and let him kind of hunt, and the four of us go to walking in. So we're kind of about like herd of elephants leaving a dustry, you know, through this stuff. But you and I are going to scatter away in kind of and decide for sure. But I had told you. I was like, man, you know, why don't you hunt where I hunted last year? And I'll hunt, uh, not far from you, but I'll hunt closer to where I had kind of seen that bigger buck catch my wind and just see if that was an anomaly or what. And so I actually we kind of looked at some stuff even further or closer as we're walking in, and I wasn't super thrilled about it, but there was some stuff I could definitely live with. And we're getting pretty close to where, you know, the last spot that I potentially was gonna be at, right and I'm like, man, I might could work to make this work from the ground right here. And You're like, okay, well, you know holler at me if you need something, but I think I'm gonna go on and hunt. 00:38:47 Speaker 1: You leave and uh probably like thirty seconds later here or whatever you wood noise. Yeah, so like I've decided that there's no quail anymore. So like the quail whistled don't make any sense, yeah, because you're like, what's that kind of joking? But like not about there not being equal, There aren't an equal. 00:39:03 Speaker 2: Yeah, the quil un limit is not really a it's kind of ironic statement. 00:39:07 Speaker 1: It is. It's kind of it's pretty limited, but I've decided to is like a pretty natural sound in the woods, like crickets or whatever, like this little tick tick. Yeah. Anyways, when you heard me do that and you were like. 00:39:22 Speaker 2: Yeah, I look up and you're like you give me this little like finger to the ground kind of swipe, like there's a trail here, and you point out and you're like this. I can see you mouthing like this is the spot. And I was like, okay, I walk over there, and it's the trail that I assumed at least that the buck could probably walk the year before. But it's so dry. The trail is really beaten dusted, you know what, I mean, like, so you can see it really well. And so I was like, okay, well I'm just gonna hunt this thing, you know, find a way cool. We go on split up. Me and Michael find a way to get up in a tree and it's really good tree actually, And we get up in this tree, get set up and it's pretty warm, and I arranged the trail and it's like I think I was ranging like twenty eight I think to where I figured if that if a buck walked that trail, that's where my shot would be. And I ended up basically seeing that this trail was also walking the crops, so that kind of helped me make a decision as well. And long story short, I saw a bunch of deer. You did, but what'd you do? 00:40:32 Speaker 1: Once we split up, I went to the tree that you had hunted previously, and then you started singing creed can you jake me? I didn't realize how high you can get in that tree, and I was like, that's a good idea. I want to get up there. And Papa Skunk was scared. He was dude, Greg, Dude, Greg has come a long ways with his comfort and a tree. At one point in time, I feel like, you know, he's from hill country in Texas and spend a lot of time in the tree and when we get over like ten foot high, he kind of was like a little weird about it. Now after that experience, he's like, you get used to it, man. 00:41:10 Speaker 2: Yeah, there's times when I lean back with my saddle and I'm like, I should have checked before I leaned backwards. 00:41:17 Speaker 1: You know what was I thinking? 00:41:18 Speaker 2: I mean, I pretty much, I guess subconsciously knew, but it it kind of gives me this weird pit feeling in my stomach where I'm like, I didn't check it at all, just leaned back and falling on this tree. 00:41:27 Speaker 1: With the liman belts and then the tether is like sometimes so you know, be just fully transparent, y' all. I don't wear a limon belt all the time. I feel safer with aut it on. Sometimes. I know this is personal preference, but that's how I am. I do Whenever I need it, I put it on. But they should wear it one right, they should do whatever they feel the safest. How about that you don't have to tell people what is You can make a personal choice. Isn't that crazy? Yeah? So, but here's here's the thing. There's like this transition when you do wear a liman belt and you're on your platform that you take your lineman belt off and then put your heather on, or you know, if you want to really be safe, you put your then take your line built off. But like there's a gap in there. If you don't remember to do one or the other, then like suddenly you're not hanging up, you're standing. You're a standing out of tree. Remember to do that? So uh yeah, but what did you what did you see? 00:42:27 Speaker 2: What you did you did you go out and look at any trails or did you just like you're like, okay, I know. 00:42:32 Speaker 1: This is in the intel provided to me from my good hunting partner Tyler Jones. Go dude, indeed, I wouldn't be so trusting. Still, one of the things I don't like doing is stomping around. I learned the way back in twenty like it's probably January twenty eighteen, I think, right, yeah, that messing around out there trying to figure out the place to be in place to hang is just a good way to lay down some ground, sending mess stuff up. 00:42:56 Speaker 2: It is, dude, you know, I can I can bet you old Eric has been like, what is this dude thinking? Because I will stand at a tree and look at like three trees and a couple of trails for fifteen minutes straight. I mean, legit, fifteen minutes just looking at this stuff, just trying to decide instead of walking around. 00:43:14 Speaker 1: Well, I left you back, yeah, because I was standing and looking well yeah, and I knew I need to do at least a little bit of sure. Yeah, I mean we hadn't been there yet. Who knows the tree might have got struck while light and it ain't there any more. Make a new decision or something, you know, But like, uh, I didn't need to stand there and let you figure out exactly what you were doing. I need to be figure out what I was doing. Yeah, that's what you were doing down there, figuring all that stuff out. Yep. Yeah. So I got the tree and saw a few deer and saw one nice one and it was far though, wasn't he He was real far? Y'all need to tune into Buck Truck on the Meat Eater YouTube channel, yep, and you'll see what happens with all that stuff. 00:43:58 Speaker 2: Five dollars, I said, y'all see, y'all will see we're not going to see y'all will see that's right, well, yeah, that's that is a that is a truism though. We they need to go see what happens. If if you subscribe to the channel, it'll update you every time that a new Buck Truck series video comes out, which will be weekly for the next like two months pretty much, so be ready for that. You're going to see some familiar faces if you know any of the Mediator crew, Tony Peterson, Mark Kenyon, Klay Nukelem, those guys hunting with us this year. We guys, we have worked so hard. We worked so hard during the season to get this stuff produced as far as like camera killing, dear all that stuff, and then we've worked so hard on the back end to bring music of the general region into these episodes. We've brought you know, uh, just the whole even visually like what this region represents and show like what it looks like in the area, you know, the economy, the social structures, all these different things. And so we've worked really hard on the editing side of this thing as well. This is our you know key just you know, zenith of production or whatever you want to call it. Like this is the This is the very tip of what we can produce right now, and we're going to be even better next year. But this is the best thing that I've ever done as far as video production goes, and I really am. 00:45:27 Speaker 1: Excited about it. 00:45:28 Speaker 2: I hope you guys love it, and I really want you to go check it out on the Media's YouTube channel right now. Thank you guys for listen, Thanks for all the support. Make sure and comment and all that that you know, anything kind that you want to and anything you want us to take into mind next year. We appreciate it. We love you guys, and remember this is your element. 00:45:46 Speaker 1: Live in it.

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