00:00:00 Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Welcome to episode number twenty four of The Hunting Collective. I'm been O'Brien today. I'm gonna start a little bit of a journey, uh, a journey and podcast for him, but a journey nonetheless my family and I. Hopefully you have heard this by now, or if you're listening, you may have caught wind a bit. We are moving from Texas to Montana. Um, why are we moving Texas Montana? Well, Montana is a beautiful place, a beautiful place to raise your children, a beautiful place to recreate, a beautiful place to hunt, a beautiful place to fish in a place that I've always desired to spend my life, even from when I was a little kid. I used to my dad used to watch with us Lonesome Dub the miniseries when I was a kid. I must have watched it hundreds of times over my life. And those folks I thought about Montana much the way I think about Montana. This great frontier. This is a place to live your life and the things you want to do. And those guys and Loan some Dove, those cowboys went from Texas to Montana. And so that's what I'm going to do. But before I leave Texas, I want to have conversations with people that are important to me during my time here, but also important to this place because this is a place where my son was born. This is the place where I was privileged enough to work for a company called Yetti Cool. This is a place where I was privileged enough to um core and expand as a person, and that means more to me than than this place will ever understand or I would probably ever understand. So the next few podcasts will be in Texas, and they will be with people that I think speak to my time here, but also the state and it's culture and it's hunting Way, and so hopefully you enjoy um My victory lab is not a good term my final lab in Texas and get to explore are some new people in places with me before we go. So, without further ado, the first person on my list to talk to in this Texas Final Lap was Wyman Men's. Wyman Men's are, if you don't know him, is an extraordinary human being, and he's extraordinary in many many ways. His life and times are exceptional. He is a man of great faith in the outdoors. He is a man of great creativity. He's a man that that is exceptional and what he can build and and his photography and his hunting life. So what you're about to hear is Wyman men'ser, legendary Texas kyote hunter, state photographer and a man of many schemes. So you're about to hear this man, a man that is very special to me. Hopefully you learn about his life and in doing so, learn a little bit about his connection to check in my connection to him. So without dude, Episode number twenty four, menor Wimon and Sarah being Now are you sir? I'm well, thank you. Oh we're in Benjamin, Texas, are we not? Yes, sir, you lived here your entire entire life. Yes, I was raised on a ranch about eleven miles out of Benjamin. Yeah. You don't have to tell your age, but yeah, sixty seven years old. I'll go ahead and be honest. I didn't want to pressure you in anything at all. Uh. Well, that's an impressive that's an impressive feet given a lot of times today. You know, guys my age don't stick around their home place very very often. Yeah. Um, you know, I really didn't think that I would once I got out of college. Um, I wasn't went to Texas Tech University, but it came back and circumstances were such that that I felt like this would be a good place to headquarter. And it worked out, yeah, in spades, in spades. Well, I mean, might as well start at the very beginning. You grew up here, uh with a brother and a sister, right, Um, you grew up on a ranch not far from here, and tell you, just tell me about growing up and and you call it the big empty Well we uh the ranch that uh that we were reared on as a twenty seven thousand acre, which is not a big outfit in this part of the country, but it's it's a decent size, definitely good for a couple of buys to be raised on. My dad was a foreman there and he was there for thirty years and uh raised up as a as a cowboy and learned to to work cattle and break horses in the whole deal. And uh, but my main love was wash was hunting and studying the natural history of various species. And I was always going and collecting bird eggs and inspecting birds that I had to shot with a bb gun and and uh a key and them out and it it lent to to what I'm I'm doing today for for sure. Yeah. And we were talking about this at breakfast this morning, you know, and even and over whiskey last night, about growing up in that environment and what that, how that shapes you, and what that makes you, the grit that it gives you, the drive and work hard. I mean you were raised at a hard work and hard scramble and life this country, you know it it's pressure, I mean it is it's it's not an easy place to live. Um. Uh. You know, we find a lot of old house places we found there on the ranch. Um in the early nineteen hundreds, people really came in here in droves and you know, um farmed, you know, cut out a little piece of parcel of land and tried to farm it. And through time the land pretty well, um weeded out to where it's now probably at its carrying capacity. Early on, it was it was just you know, overgrazed more or less, I guess you could say. And so even today though, it's hard because you know, it's just mostly big ranch country and uh, ranching practices have changed. You don't need as many people working on ranches and So the town of Benjamin itself used to be a population of like six hundred. Now it's like two. But that's basically what it what it should be. And so my dad and mom were both raised in the Depression years, raised hard. My dad was on the large Emily and that where they parceled out the kids to other families where they could have enough to eat. My mom lived in dugouts and tents during the Depression. She has bad memories about it, but they were resilient people. And they taught my brother and I, especially my brother and I my sister not so much, but taught us, you know, how to how to be independent and to appreciate doing things for yourself. And I appreciate that very much and it's and it's uh, it's been good good to me because so much of my life revolves around, you know, uh, doing things your own way and trying to figure things out and uh and to make it work, make do yeah. Yeah, I mean the early part of your story is very much just you know, the life most kids would dream about, right, I mean, a roaming around this country on horseback, roaming at will your parents to uh did not um, you know, stay on you constantly you know, where are you going? It was just like, watch for rattlesnakes. That that was the warning when we were kids. When you go outside, y'all, watch for rattlesnakes. And if you got a half a mile from the house with your baby gun or you're twenty two and mothers missed you, will she'd host jard holler and you could hear a mile away. She had a shrill voice, and you knew it was time to come back home. But they just didn't keep a rain tight rain on you. You were allowed to go out and be yourself and explore and be creative and in doing uh fighting things to do. And it was it was. It was a good thing. It's a good life. Well, I mean you got a good power of description. I mean describe for people listening that I've never been to this country. Of course, this is north You go on north central Texas and I would say, um, what this country looks like. I mean that the I think, the land, the animals, just the feeling of being here. Well, uh, first off, whether wise, it's we have some fairly cool cold winters, very hot summers, so it's it's kind of one extreme to the other. Um it. We have a thousands of acres what they call the bad lands and local bad lands, Knox County bad lands and uh it's it's just the old red beds, ancient red beds, uh apparently old river beds, because you'll find uh gravel, layers of gravel, and the edges of the cliffs with a lot of of mammoth bones. I've actually had paleontologies come out and I show them these skeletons and they say, yes, that's mammo, that's that's camel as the ancient horse bones. And then you have your your deep soil sites where there's a lot of mesquite. The bad lands pretty well um is uh um dominated by by juniper. And then your your deep soil size from mesquite and to boast of grass, buffalo grass. We have whitetailed deer, a lot of wild of wild farrell hogs, a lot of coats and um and quite a few bobcats. We don't have any foxes to speak of. They live more or less in the in town where they're where they're protected from coats because coats even like hot dogs, they hang out at the bars, so they they hang out in people's garages up in the attics because if they get out of town, the coats eat them. And because we have in the wintertime and this is a central flyway, so we have a good, uh, a good population of snow geese and the and the Canadians come through. Not a lot of ducks. Back in the sixties, you know, I've seen a transition in the in the waterfowl, the makeup of the water waterfowl population. In the sixties, it was just the opposite. We had a lot of crane saniel, cranes that stayed here through the winter, tremendous almost unimaginable numbers of green heads, canvasbacks, and a few uh, Canadian geese. And now it's just reversed. We have a few cranes come in early along with your your teal and and and those little species, and then the cranes move on up to the panhandle, right, and then the ducks they just we just don't have the duck numbers we did in the sixties. And I don't understand why, because we've got as much or more water, but it may have they switched they've switched their flyaway there fat well, I mean, that's a good description of this place, and I mean it's it's shaped you in a lot of ways. It has, um you know, like I say, growing up on the ranch and and being raised as as an independent person. And of course when I went to Texas Tech, I studied while biology and then whenever I left, instead of getting a job, I became a coon hunter, professional Kyan hunter and living out on a pitchfork ranch and a half dug out. And there's where you really became independent because you know, you go into town once week to get groceries and um, and basically you were your own man. I mean there was there was nobody to ask questions to, nobody to talk to to exchange ideas with. It was just you in the land. Yeah, I want to go through that specifically specific but I don't know if you've ever talked about other than the time you told me the first time you saw a hippie on the Texas the first time you encountered a hippie who was having a deep conversation with some fire and it was some red ants, some harvest dance, so he was probably having a good talk with him apparently. So they're circumstances exactly. Um, But you went to Texas Tech and wildlife biology was the choice of trade. Was that just because the intense connection you had to this place and the animals, all those things, that's what drove you to that. And then yes, and the study of that kind of reaffirmed right. And I knew that. I knew there were no job opportunities. I was aware of that at the time, and but I was determined to get a degree in wildlife apology while back then they called it wildlife management. And um but uh uh, you know, I mean I could have been a cowboy. Heaven forbid. I mean, I respect, I love cowboys. I love that life way. I still um across paths wism work with them in some of my photo shoots. I can speak their language. It's just that I've smelled enough horse flat horse swept my life. It's just that I really loved working with with wild creatures. That and I actually aspired at one time to be a paleontologist and found out that it took too much math, and so I'm not a mathematician. That I I still have a great interest in paleontology. Yeah. Well, that so you graduated from college, you go through the process there and you decide pretty much immediately right too, to come back become a professional hunter. You lived in a in a it was a dugout. There's a little half dugout. It was built in nineteen forty eight when the Pitchfork bought that portion of the ranch from the Matador. And I actually I actually knew uh the man who helped build it in nineteen and and so um uh it was, um just a little one room shack with a fireplace in the end. And uh partially you know, the windows up was out of the ground and the windows down was below ground. And it was in the middle of a hundred and sixty eight thousand ranch, a Pacer ranch, And of course I had surrounding ranches that I hunted on. Also, Uh, you had the bags fifty thousand acres, and you had and uh an old fellow name of Hubert Young, and he had ten thousand acres. And then you had the springer was forty thousand and another ten thousand acre wrench. And that was before commercial hunting. I was the only guy out there. I never heard a rifle shot, I never saw another person hunting. The years that I spent three winners that I spent actually five winners. I spent three winners living in the dugout, and then two other winners hunting out there still working out of Benjamin. I never saw anybody else hunning. And it was it was like you stepped back into the eighteenth, eighteen hundreds, and nineteenth century. You're living in a You're living in a one room dugout. Very much that was very much akin to win was built in the forties, right, I'm seeing pictures. I mean it is. It was literally a one room hole in the in the side of the hill and you're you get up every morning, you were running traplines me and just talked about the daily life. Because I think we've talked a lot about this in this visit when we visited a bunch of times, but in this particularly visit a lot about what how soft our life is right now? You know, my like, how how I'm trying to escape the softest of life by going out and hunting. You came out of college and plunged into the headlong into the hardest, hardest life imaginable. It was. You know, of course I didn't. I didn't going to a dog pool slate or anything like that. I had my forward drift pick up. But every morning was it was a ritual. Every every day I took out when I when I moved in, I took five thousand rounds of twin two ammunition and a couple of hundred rounds a high powered rifle to shoot my coys. With my twenty two, I used to dispatch animals and trapped in practice, and of course my my food stuff. And then in the mornings, I would get get up before daylight, eat breakfast, fixed my lunch, same lunch every day, a summer sausage sandwich, canteena water, and a peanut peanut patty candy bar that I would not eat a piece of it until I caught an animal. When I called a code, I would break a piece off to reward myself. And all day I went along the trap line like fifty sixty miles. And then when I got back to cabin in the evening, I skinned stretched and if I had enough time, I would practice shooting with my Winchester and mountain and uh. Then I cut for firewood, draw my water for that night, for either a bath on it took one bath week, or washing dishes, and then I would finish dinner, wash the dishes right in my journal, sit in front of the fire, and then go to it every night, seven days a week, thirty days a month, all winter along. That's what that was alive. And it was great. I loved it, Yeah, I loved it. First winter was fabulous. Second winner got a little tougher. Third winter was real tough because I've become a little bit more uh social, and living down there, you were pretty restricted. I mean you're a young man at this point, right, you know I needed to see somebody, Yeah, and so every once in a while cowboy would come by and I'd say hi to him and be able to talk to him. But other than that, I'd go to a day or two days without saying anything. And that that kind of got to you after a while. Yeah, I imagine it would. So you're killing coyotes, bobcats. You're you're earning money right from from the pelts, right, So you were how many coyotes, uh among how many kods a season? And how many boats? Well, how much money would you make? Well, you know, we did our coats here in Texas weren't worth that much. You were fifteen bucks piece, but I needed to make four I need to catch four animal units today, and I considered an animal unit. A code bobcat was worth two animal units, a fox three quarters of a unit. And uh, with four animal units today, I could make my pickup payment, my college loan payment, and buy groceries and have some spending money. And so my goal was to at four animal units today and I did a lot of people nowadays say I'm a professional hunter. That is what you were. It was professionally that was hunting, right, Yeah, I mean what I ask many questions about that time in your life. But one of my I always thought was like, what are your main takeaways? Because well, I'll tell you. You know, uh, you know, with age, you you know, you you become mellowed out and you don't hunt as much. But I can look back on those years and realize that hunting at that level it is. People can't fathom being that involved in hunting today, uh, back in the eighteen hundred year, But you become so you become so involved in the natural history of the species that you were after every I mean every track. You know, you studied the tracks, you studied the what you thought was the time of day or night. The tracts were made you watched weather patterns. Uh, you anticipated animal movements in accordance to weather patterns. Uh, you learned that cos travel in certain areas in the daytime versus nighttime. And your average person today who goes out and quote hunts, has no idea of that level of understanding of the natural history of animals that you have to that you have to have in order to be a professional hunter. Yeah, and and it's I wouldn't trade for those years. Well not only did or your professional hunter, but you were as a biologist logging your kills exactly. I took all. I was very much a note taker, and and I would document each animal, Uh, you know, at the distance that I shot it, or the trap I caught it in, what foot I caught it on, and um, and I still have all those that information today from all all the way back in the journals. Now I've I've with a rifle. I've shot one thousand, seven hundred and sixty with the rifle alone, and I was not counting traps. It was another hundred or sold with traps, eight hundred and seventy seven bobcats, and so you know, and and it's something and it's not something that I'm necessarily proud of it. Is just that was a way of life. Yeah, you know, And and as like I said, as an older person, I don't hunt like I used to. I have a softer heart then I used to. That's always the most interesting storyline about you know, when I think about your life, which is this tremendous tapestry of you know, it's something that's to be admired really and in all its stages. But when you're when you're back there and you're killing these kaiaks for a living. You know, a lot of people nowadays might say, well, what a terrible thing. You're out there and just taking life and wholesale and make money and you're selling furs, and you know, in the modern day that might be looked at as as a negative to the landscape. But describe in that place in time, you know, how you thought about the animal. You respect for it. I mean, I know just from knowing you that that's the case I did have and I still do. I mean, I'll always have great respect for the cord. I think they're very intelligent, uh uh an animal that uh they can make those make the changes with man, whereas the wolf could not. And they were pretty well exterminated from Texas. But the cowt is uh very adaptive and very sharp, and so early on the one of the reasons that I started taking notes was that I just wanted to learn more about them. And so the earliest notes came whenever I was in uh like a sophomore attach and I wanted to become a better code hunter, and so I thought, well, I'm going to have to understand the feeding habits of code. So I conducted a full year of research on my own by collecting stomach samples, fecal samples, and uh documenting the areas um separating them by vegetation, topographical, geoogy, geological features. And then I received a grant to study another year and so um, you know, all of this, this note taking has been a very positive thing because to this day, I'll sit down, I'll get bored some day and just sitting with all those notes and go through them just to remember and and uh, and I'll see things that I've forgotten, you know, in in thirty years since I've seen them, and it's uh, he just continues to be a learning process even after all these years. I mean, didn't when you were a professional hunter. Back in those days you're living in a dugout. Do you remember having Do you have any of that? Do you sit here now and your grandfather and time has passed, you look back and have any remorse for for the animals you killed? Yes, yes, I do. I do. I I can recall some instances, especially one one day that that touched my heart into this day, and that has been forty four years ago, to this day still tugged at my heart and um. And it was the cod caught in a trap and uh and I don't know that that cod he just he just sat there and just and just looked at me. I didn't try to fight. And then whenever I I dispatched it, there there was there was a look of helplessness that it knew it was going down. And and I sat down in my pickup and cried. After all those all those animals had taken, that particular animal made me sit down in my pickup and cry. And to this day I still think about it. It tugs at my heart. And another one in particular is one of the first really neat shot photographs I'd take him because at that time I was working on my photography. I remember I called him in the J two pasture on the pitch for a real rough country, just savagely rough country. And it was at the dead end of an old bulldozed road and I caught this big mail code and I mean he stood up and fought me like a lyon. I mean I got out of the pick up and he was snarling. He was caught up in a number four new house trap, no way of getting out. And I had the greatest respect for that animal. And I pulled a camera out and took a photograph of him, and I mean, he's got his teeth bared and he's just saying, you know, I know this is it? Bring it home. And and I still think of that, that animal, and that that that bravery that he showed in the face of death. That picture was selected by Texas Monthly as one of the greatest pictures of twenty five years that they had published a magazine. Wow. Yeah, I mean that that's a great I find myself. I'm not I got a lot of years to live, hopefully a lot of years to hunt. But I find myself examining those those that relationship with the animals that you kill me because you said you kill thousands upon thousands of these animals, But it doesn't mean that you don't have an emotional connection to him. Uh today And and then, like I said, it was just a way of life. Is a way of life. What you did, it was a way of life. And and uh and I also I was enjoying just being a part of the land. You know, every day, the sunsets, the sun rises, the weather changes. All of those things still have an impact on me today. I still refer back to those years and and what I learned, and in the animal movements, animal patterns, like I can say, like, for instance, a couple of days ago, I saw a rattlesnake crawling. Anytime that I start seeing an immediate uh, an increase in animal movement. When I'm walking in the mornings, You'll start seeing various creatures. Tracks suddenly appear, and I'll tell Slender my wife, we go, weather coming. And I learned that from those years as a professional hunter, because I studied, I lived and breathed those habits, those weather changes, and how they affected animals behavior and uh and it just and it still serves me today. Yeah, that's amazing. You don't have to become an animal yourself. You're out there, yeah, not not speaking for some days, and I'm sure you can feel like that you're getting your own head. Yeah, you're getting your own head big time. You better like yourself, so all I can say you better like, yeah, you better enjoy just you know, appreciate you being you, because you're gonna learn yourself. Did you I mean, when you were doing that, did you think, Hey, look, forty years from now, I'm gonna look back and there's gonna be the golden years. Do you think, man, this is I'm a crazy son picture for doing this. I mean, was there a self realization at any point during this? Now I realized that the days would end? And uh, I remember drawing on the wall and it's been covered up since then. It was the last few days of that first winter, that first winner was the golden winter. That was the best because I'd been seemingly all my life in school. As most guys that go to college realized, you go from them in my day's first grade to college and there's no break. And he's like, I've been going to school forever and I was sick of it and men going out and being on your own, and of course immersing yourself in the land with a rifle. I always love to hunt. Wasn't that bigger fisherman, But I love to hunt and uh and I love just big, wide open country with with lots of elbow room. And I realized something told me that first winter at the end that my days were limited. This freedom would some day in this this level of freedom. I mean, I'm free and happy today, I'm doing what I want to do. But back then, man, it was it was really indescribable. And I drew on the door, on the closet door, and that had a little tiny closet in the corner, and that that dug out a dug out, and I drew a cowd in a trap, and in the distance were these two prominent hills called Double Mountains. They've been they've been mentioned in in uh Ronald Mackenzie's books on his fight with the Indians commands in eighteen seventies. They've been landmarked for probably ten thousand years. But I could see him in the distance from my trap line, and I drew those hills, and I drew this kite in a trap, and drag marks leading up to where he had caught being caught up and couldn't go any further, and I wrote beneath it, uh, something to the effect of, to this end, let's see what was it? Uh? I too, I too shall to realize this in meaning that this grand life of freedom will someday be over. And uh it got painted over a few years ago, and it just makes me sick. I'm thinking about going back out there and trying to redraw. Did you ever get a photo of it? Or just I did not know? I did not? Oh? Yeah, I mean that too. It was to this end, I too shall pass, To this end, I too shall pass, And it was a code and a trap, and knowing that the end was near, and seeing that great land or those heels in the distance, and knowing the freedom and it would be over. And that's the way I felt at the end of that first winter. And it was true. I've never have never been able to feel that kind of magic again. I've had great life, wonderful life of of traveling and seeing the land and going on ranches where nobody else hardly ever goes but with a camera in hand. But there's always that restriction now that I didn't have it back then. I was young, totally completely healthy, lots of ammunition and and more land than I knew what to do with. And I've never known that sense. And of course, now with commercial hunting taking over, that land doesn't exist anymore. It's gone. I can still go to that cabin and I'm welcome to the rancher says, hey, go out there and do whatever you wanna do. You know you're part of this ranch as well. You think you're part of the history. But all that country's lease. And so I go down there and I work on the cabin. I'll pop open a beer, eat some deer sausage, sat down on the porch, and remember, and then I'll leave. I mean, that isn't every person in some way chasing that sense of freedom? Like not everybody knows exactly how they're gonna get to it. Believe me, I whenever I give presentations and I talk about I have one presentation that I give quite often, and it's called the Evolution of a Texas Photographer. And and I give that part of my life and almost without failed, people come up to me, older people especially, and say, how I wish I would have taken the opportunity to do that, Because there's only a small window of time. If I give presentations to say to a college class, I will. I will every time of the time. I will say, when you finish college, you have this small window of opportunity to do exactly what you want to do. And I said, when you let that window pass, it's over your stab. You become that's in that established line of life, you know, and that so called rut, and it's hard to turn back. I said, So, if you have any kind of a a dream, you know, some heartfelt message that you want to go try out for a year, do it. Because it is sad to talk to those people who will will visit with me and say I had that opportunity and I didn't take it. Yeah, but I can go if I pass tomorrow. I have no regrets. I did exactly what I wanted to do. And how much of the rest of your life did that inform Knowing what that freedom felt like, knowing what what the land did for you, and what those animals would provide to you, how much you know there's I don't think there's any way you'd be where you are today with exactly I mean it. It established the basis for what I do today. Without doubt, I just use a camera and still arrived from Why I still hunt, you know, I have uh I I love venison and I'll kill my three or four deer every winter, and uh I called up last winter, I called up a hundred and seventy five cops, but them I shot with a camera. I still shoot a few just to maintain my log my data and entered my log book so I can keep continuity. But most of the time I hunt with camera. Yeah, and that's you look back like you're in those days and you have this. I mean, I think everybody, even me sitting here now, I'm thinking like how beautiful time that must have been. And everybody that listens to this can can think about what they're ultimate freedom looks like and what what the thing is that would would evoke those feelings in them, because I think it sounds to me like you knew during it that it was special and life a life defining, but even even as you went on, you would look back and it became more important as it is. I I catch myself so often in times of you know, uncertainty, I will just sit down and I remember those years perspective. I mean, is that just what it gave you right, he gave me. It gave me perspective, and and it gives me solace today because because I revisit and and almost become, you know, go back to that time, and just even if it's for an hour or so of sitting and reminiscing, I'm happy again and I feel that freedom. And I can pick up that same model line in four Winchester twenty two and I shoot and it feels just like it did whenever. Was just burning that five thousand rounds practicing and nineteen seventy four, seventy five, seventy six, I need to burn out a lot of barrels shooting like that. I burned out three to forty three barrels in that in that rifle that I had at the time. I was too poored but own anything else but a two forty three, that is, that was not a good fur rifle. I learned how to be a real good seamstress or a seamster. I could sew very well, and so I burned. But I burned out three rifles and the two burned out three barrels of two forty three. Well, I mean, so moving on to the next portion of your life, I heard, I heard tell from some people that you were a wild man sometimes, uh you know, and that and that actually that actually sourced from those years of doing that type of thing. Of course, you know, I mean I I became a pilot, and I would fly for ranchers looking for cattle, and and you know, you'd fly much like a bush pilot, low slow all the time, and and I would do things in a plane and all this, all these things combined sort of. There's guys today that that I that I won't see for months, but when they see him, they say, hey, wow, man, what's going on? And I go, well, I'm just living you know, well on that yetie filing there or some some I can't remember who said it, but somebody said, my mama said, don't don't be hanging out on that one. That was That was Mike Gibson. He said, my daddy didn't like me hanging out with you because because I, even as a teenager, I pretty well danced my own drummer and um and as and his father was pretty established, you know, you know in in this is the way life should be a B C. D. And I wasn't following that. I was jumping from A to E and and he he didn't want his son going A to E. And so it was the steps. So that time in your life you were just doing random You were still hunting, obviously, And when was it this post when you got out of being a professional hunter trapper of the dugout right just described that next portion of your well. I I was married nineteen seventy eight, when I was just essamisally twenty eight years old. I got married first time, hopefully, hopefully this might slender, will be my last one. I don't let me go. No, I get beat up if I try to go anywhere. But it sounds like a bad idea. Yeah, but uh, but I continued. I continued hunting and trapping. But I was also working on on my photography. I I in nineteen seventy but nineteen seventy six, I was thinking that I would probably like to do some editorial photography, and so I started submitting to magazines and got him kicked back and started realizing what I needed to do in the level of excellence that I need to achieve in order to be considered a viable photographer and for people to be depended on magazines, And so I finally broke in in nineteen seventy eight, and the more I photographed, the less I hunted, and uh. And that was a period in the nineteen nineties that, uh, my log books were pretty thin because I was really I had to my two sons at the time, and I was really pushing the envelope, you know, traveling a lot, a whole lot. I look back at at my calendars and and I don't know how I did it. I don't know how I stood it because I was going all the time, book signings, you know, doing radio TV interview to San Antonio, Houston, Austin, you know, Avarella, just all around and uh, and then traveling all over the state and shooting for the for various book projects and um. And then then I then I began to realize I missed my hunting, and so now I try to balance it out a little bit. Although photography does take the heavier, heavier load. Yeah, maybe he skipped over the story. I wanted to make sure we recover. Now you you had a little plane crash one time. Yeah, I don't want to skip over that. But yeah, it's a gym. Yeah, well I was I was looking for a cattle. Uh, my brother had leased some land or actually he owned some landing, and he had a couple of heifers missing, and so he asked me if I if I would take plane and go over and look look for him. And I was flying low and slow with the brush and decided finally that that I couldn't I couldn't get them located. They must have gotten out into another onto another ranch. And so I had climbed out to about a hundred and fifty feet and I was banking and headed back to the airport and my engine just died, just just it was just like silence, and I just I was remembered so vividly thinking this didn't happen. I cannot get this engine started. I mean, I'm too low. Besides that you had the proper plane off, and so uh instantly I went into survival mode. My my flight instructor was an O B twenty four pilot from World War Two, and he pounded into my head airspeed airspeed, airspeed, airspeed equates to life, and so I nosed it over and I started looking for a place to land, and I knew it was gonna be bad, but but I can remember that still remember vividly the whistling of wind, the sound of silence except for the wind, and me frantically thinking how can I get out of this alive? And to the right, to the left was where I wanted to land into the wind, but there were two barb war fences, and I could tell by my ready descent that I was going to take these two fences. Out in front of me was a wall of mesquite, and I didn't want to drive a me skit tree through my through my chest. And to the to the right of me, down wind, which is where I didn't want to go because I'd be a built an air speed, was a hilltop that had been freshly deep broke what they called big ox, which you have clods, you know that way fifty pounds sixty pounds, And I knew that that was gonna be a rough run, but I chose that, and so I banked it over very steep, built up my airspeed, did a ninety degree banking. As I leveled out, I was about ten ft above the ground. And my big plan, my big battle plan, was to just pull the nose up as high as I could and barely flopp in. But I was I was really moving pretty quickly a ground speed with a tail wind, and all I remember was a bang. And the next thing I remember, I was hanging upside down the plane in cart wheel and uh. And I could hear gas spewing as it run onto the engine, and I thought, I gotta get out of here. I'm gonna burn up. So I grabbed my shoulder harness and clicked it loose, fell out against the roof of the plane, rolled out on the wing, and I took off running. Plane didn't burn. But uh, but that was that was a very memorable experience. But as I was mentioned to you earlier, I would suggest people who go outdoors and especially engaged in dangerous thing read a book called Deep Survival, Deep Survival. That book explains why I survived. And it was the preparation. The preparation of that old be twenty four pilot taught me, who spent three years of his life in a German PLW camp. But he pounded in my head, this is the way you survive in a plant, whether you're hunting where your mountain clapping, whether you're flying where you're skinning a deer. Preparation and the ability to change at a moment's notice, not stick to the battle plan, not go I got to go A, B, C D. I can go from A to E in order to survive. And that's what kept me alive. Well. And he said, you're describing all these options. I'm sure that wasn't ten minutes. You had to just seconds. You're talking about some boom boom. You had to make that decision, absolutely, and didn't you just walk out to the road, hitchhight and go home. I walked out to the highway and hitchtight. And the cowboy picked me up, who knew me, and said, do you have a flat And I said, no, I plane crash and he I thought, he nearly ran off the road. He looked at me and go you okay? I said, yeah, I just need to go home. I'll get back to that plane when it back that plane one of these days. I want to also talk about when you became a father, right, I mean, you had a a marriage dissolved, which happens to many many people. But but coming to father your two boys, like when the how old are you and that happened? How old were you when they were born? I was, let's see, eighty three. I was thirty Uh, the way you might see see eighty three. So yeah, I was thirty three. I was thirty three when I had my first son. In thirty four in my second, which it's similar to my age. And and hopefully my wife thinks that's the child output you would like to have. She told me, she told me on the far came up yourself, what do you think about having four boys? I said, well, we got one. Let's go one at a time, exactly exactly. Blessing that that was the That was the greatest blessing of my life. Yeah, they having those two boys. I I've told so many people that young people who and I was one of them who go, you know, I'm not gonna have any children. You know, I think that I know what love is. You do not know. And you know, as you know, you do not know the definition of love until you hear that little child cry when he's born. That's when you know this is what love is all about. And I raised my boys like my parents raised me, with a loose rein. Taught him how to trap. Uh. Didn't really want them to go into cowboy and so much. And they did, and they did for a while. They didn't go to college. They didn't want to go to college, and I respected that. Um. I realized now that not everybody needs to go to college to be wildly successful, because both my boys are very successful and uh and it's just a work ethic. The one thing that I was able to teach them is a work ethic. Those boys started early, very early, working and uh. And I when their mother left, I told him that we were gonna have to stick together. They had a job to do. I was gonna be on the road and we needed to be a team. And they rose to the occasion. Yeah. I mean that was most of their lives. You know, you raised them by yourself. Uh well, uh, it's well not most They were like you know, thirteen in in fourteen something like that. Whatever. That was a tough time. That was that was tough. That was that was tough. Um. Of course there was the stigma of the divorce. I didn't like that. UM, but I realized in the long run later that it was the best thing, because you know, nobody wants to get a divorce. That that's hard, especially with children. UM. I have I have. I have apologized to my boys numerous times, wishing that they had not had to see what they saw, the arguments, you know, the the strife, the stress, and their response was very mature. They said, Dad, we understood y'all just weren't meant for each other. And I thank god that they look they look at it like that and they realized that we weren't. But I am thankful too that she and I were married because I have my boys. Yeah, I'm thankful for that. But but I can tell you that, uh, and I know this may sound corny, that if everybody could find a woman like my cylinder, there would be no divorces. And I and I and I did not. I was not looking to find anyone. I was burned out, you know. I would have been married twenty years and a lot of strife and stress trying to build up my photography were we didn't have a lot. It was very tough. Um. But when I met her, I realized that I that I had met a jewel. Yeah she is that she is the challenge of raising those boys. And in this country, I mean both of them still live. I mean Peyton lives right down the street. He lives down the street. Of course. Hunters a horse trainer at at near Weatherford at Peaster and uh, highly highly successful, very successful young man. Um world renowned to that world renowned he is. And so you know you raise him on a ranch. You're raised them much like you did. They were on horseback, they were hunting with dad. They were probably reloading bullets and working over action rifles and and uh it took right. I mean we were talking about breakfast again in this morning, like you the challenge of raising your kids and this my son, and this environment and what I'll have to face with technology, with the changing culture, with the liberal nature of a lot of our cities and people and things that that are challenging. Um. Based on the way that you grew up and your kids grew up, I mean what you look back at that? And oh well, I just kept thinking it took. I mean you talked to his boys away to live. They live life their way much like you've lived, George. And it was it's independence that I that I taught him, like for instance, a good a good uh story here is when paid was, you know, maybe seventeen sixteen, and he came in one day and said it was like February, early February, late January, and uh, and he wanted to buy a pickup and don't use pickup. And I couldn't afford to buy the pickup for him. That just just what it was. I'm struggling And I said, uh, he said, Dad, there's not any there's not any day work going on. He said, I need I need this much money to make a down payment, just pick up. I said, well, i'll tell you what. I can't help you, but there's the fur market is up a little and I'll show you how to trap. And I took him out and showed him where to set traps, how to how to read sign on bobcats. And in one month he caught like twenty eight bobcats, enough to make a down payment on his pickup. And I said, now you're gonna skin him too. And there's a couple of times he called said hey, Dad, I'm busy. Can you skin a cat? I said no, he'll be here waiting for you. You gotta do it yourself. I've skinned enough. And it was teaching the boy's responsibility and that that they needed to work, you know, And it was it was nothing wrong with working hard. It was nothing wrong with sacrificing and and taking that extra time when you got in although you were tired, you still had a job to do before you turned in for the night. And it was a positive thing all the way, all the way around. It was good for them in the long haul as as men today and who they are and there their productivity and the respect that they command with other people, and everybody knows him and and respects them. I mean, we've all got an enemy here and there, but by and large, yeah, I found that traveling around that the unique nature of somebody that's raising that environment. We had another I had another guy named fred Eikler on the podcast UM some months ago. I was out turkey hunting his place in Colorado. He lives on a ranch, his kids grow up much like yours did, and his son, I think is probably thirteen or fourteen, maybe a little younger than that even Um, but the young man walks right up to you, shakes your hand, looks you square dead nuts in the eye right and says it was a pleasure to meet you. And sure he means it. He's eleven years old. And that struck me, as you know his father and his parents. But his environment is that you get up in the morning, chores, chickens, goats, run horseback right, this, that and and that always struck me. And you know and pay to that course. Hunter and and Alicia don't have children yet, but Pete has three and to the daughter and the son, uh eleven and ten. I believe they have their chores every day. It's clean out the horse stalls, feed the dogs, water the dogs, water the horses. Every day. They have these chores. And I was asking, Uh, Tristan the little boy the other day when I took him about hunting. I asked him if he liked these chores, doing his chores. He said, oh, not really. And I said, but those chores are good for you. They're teaching you a lesson everybody. I said, when when Pappy that's me and Uncle Rick that's my brother. When we were little in your age, we had our chores. We gathered eggs, we cleaned out the barn, we cleaned out the chicken pan and it was good for us. And this is good for you and and it's and it's unfortunate that more parents don't expect that out of their children. They try to keep trying to insulate your children from that. And that's wrong. I'm sorry, that's wrong. Yeah, I mean it shows in the way. You know, I hate to make it up. It's not because there's definitely parents that live in urban environments that do things like that, and that's that that I don't want to make it sound like that, but I just I've found in travel around and hunting and meeting young folks that live in small town environments, that live in places where work is required, you couldn't just like you, you know, you wake up on on a ranch and sleep in and for a couple of days just watch TV and take the weekend off. Next thing, you know, yeah, things aren't going life's not going away exactly. And so I'm not sure if it's connected to that or just connected to the culture and these in small towns and the connection to people in the land and all that. I'm not sure. I wonder what your opinion on that is, because it's it's just has always struck me that the direct nature of of children raised in that in that environment, and then meeting sometimes meeting kids that are raised with iPad um raised iPads and sleeping in in the summertime, you know, yeah, it's when you're when you're I think, in the in the environment that uh, that defines this part of the country, you know, a ranching culture. Uh. You know, kids are raised knowing that they have to work and I know, you know learning you know, being uh computer individual. You know, everybody has to be somebody and you gotta have that kind of person. But two, it would not hurt those kids to go and get a job sacking groceries and knowing they have to be there at seven thirty to clock in and they have to work until this period of time. Then they can go and study their computers and you know, and there whatever you know, and and be that and pursue the job of career that they want. But there's nothing wrong with learning to be responsible as a young person. And you're just talking about the handshake. My dad taught my brother, and I remember it vividly. You shake hands with a man, you look him in the face, and you squeeze his fist. And old Daddy born nineteen eighteen. Uh sadly tragically lost him when he was sixty five years old. But man, he grabbed us by the hand. He said, now you look at me and you shake my hand, you squeeze. I talked my boys the same way, and to this, I mean, and he is teaching. They're his children to do the same thing. And that's that's good. And and and and Pete's son even though Peate is a is a man of the land like I was raised and my brother was raised. And and hunter he's more he's he's he dips in and out. He lives close to Dallas, and you know he can deal with both. But pat is you know, he trains horses, but as a hunting service, he trains dogs. And and he's more of your of your from the land. But his son wants to be like a marine biologist. Brilliant young man uh into into making model airplanes and studying aerodynamics. It takes my college books that I in parasitology and comparative anatomy, and those are the books he looked likes to read at eleven years of age. And I stressed to him, if this is what you want to do, do it, but do your chores. Do your chores, because you will take you will take those values that work ethic into whatever field that you choose, whether it's computer science, whether it's marine biology, whether it's being a math teacher, or whether it's being a pilot. You're gonna take those work ethics and apply it. Yeah, I mean it's discipline, right this, I mean that seems to be. You know, every once in a while, I wake up in the morning and think, man, you know, I could sleep in. Man, my kid was up all night, or I was up doing this, or I worked worked late. I'll sleep in and I think about disci plane like if you if you do things when you rather not do them, that's the definition of success. That's that's it. That's it. And I and I and when I give this presentation of evolution with a photographer, I talked about being raised on ranch, being required to do a job, and how it could have been so easy for me once I got out of college and moved out there to that, to that dugout. I could have slept in. I can win. Man is cold outside and as far as going and so comfortable with no. I knew that I had to get up and I had fifth years, six few miles of rough country that to to cover. I knew that I needed to have four animal units today because I had a college loan payment to go, I had pick up payments, I had groceries to buy, you know, and I needed a little extra you know, folding cash and and UH, but it was it was what I learned when I was a young kid. How many days in your life have you worked for someone else? I've never. I've never had a steady job. It's always been a part time. I worked for the Forest Department once UH from seven and from UH September one November one, in nineteen seventy five. It's a long tenure, a long tenure in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and came back and we hit the trap line again. And then I worked as a crop adjuster during the summer. UH. Whenever I was in college, I worked in the summertime for the Highway Department, and in the afternoons after I got off work, I weld it to make extra money so I wouldn't have to float alone. I didn't get to have to have to float alone for college until I was to my last semester and as a senior. But but I would hold down two jobs in the summer and so I could so I could, UH could study and and go to school and not have to work in the wintertime. And now I work on weekends. I come on and work and when the first got up in seventy three, I came home and hunted on weekends because I could make more trapping and hunting coves and working cattle. See that It gets me now because you know people working these corporations, right, I mean, you get to be working for somebody else, and I don't know the freedom and the discipline it takes to be like I can't you know, I gotta be work at eight o'clock and my boss is happy. Well, you get up in the morning at seven o'clock and start working your bosses yourself. Yeah, you know, you never know anything. And you and you have you have great years, and you have terrible years. That's just that's just working for yourself. Um. You know the great years wonderful of terrible years. You know they're hungry and you know you have to do without um and and and and you if some people think some people think, well you're past that, well you're not. You never get past the uh there. It's just like a cowd I compare my life a lot to the life of a coat. You know, the season's come and then in September, you know I'm eating I'm eating good on cedar berries. January comes and and I'm eating the last of the cedar berries and things are getting tough, and things don't get good to the low berry crop comes on in April, and I'm eating good and then I go to grasshoppers and skip beans and cactus apples. You know, there are hard times and there's good times, and so you just you just learned to to to deal with it. Yeah, let's in your Life's not to find by either one of those things. You life to find by your discipline. Throughout discipline, and the happens with what you're doing. If you're satisfied and you go you go home at night and go to bed, and you feel good about the day you've done. Will Yeah, Well, I mean one of the things you've been most successful at it's photography, right, you talked about a little bit. So you decided after college and after your time as a as a hunter professionally so that you want to start dabbling around with the camera and figuring it out. And this is in the seventies or eighties, seventies whenever I started aspiring, and then it was like nineteen seventy eight is when I first got published in both in parks and Wildife and National Wife about the same month. It might have been a month apart. And of course once as you will know, once you get published, it's like, I love this, you know, I really want to do more of this. And then night one bro and actually nineteen eighty a Rooken the Field and stream eighty one is was that that that transitional year when I had three over his three national covers one month, and I realized then that that I stood a chance. But I was still holding down another job in the summertime, photographing in the winter, and I remember vividly in that I was driving a diesel truck in the summer for a friend of mine and I received the letter from Lionel app Well at Sports of Field and he said, You've been chosen as one of five America's like new photographers, UM kind of the photography of the future, photographer the future, and that we wanted to we want to to uh to uh write a story, you know, devoted magazine issue to you guys. And I realized, then, you know what, I may have something going on here, and he wrote that piece. I still have it today. The new Breed they called the New Breed and UM and then um published my first book in ninety three, Roadrunners, which was an immediate success. Uh. The images were published all over the world. UH did a ten page spread for a Smithsonian magazine. UH, did a big spread for a Career Geo German magazine, French magazines. And then I received an award for that magazine. I forgot what it was out of San Antonio. And then things started popping, you know, things started rolling. I got seven I was voted as uh, what was it? An outstanding a lum at Tech. I was not a great student, I'll admit that. And I questioned why I was given that, and they said, it's not what you did with you're in school, that's what you accomplished when you're out of school. And so then in I got distinguished Alum at Tech. Uh uh the State Photographer of Texas from George W. Bush, the governor, then seven fifth of the legislature, and then things just started going. Most recently in February of two thousand and eighteen, Field and Stream name is one of ten American outdoor Legends because of my my predator hunting. I also in April received the Leaving Legacy Award from the It's a foundation out of Corpus Christie. It's a big deal. I didn't know it's such a big deal till I went, and he was like, this is big. There's only three people before me it received, and all of them artists, and what it is. It's art inspiring others to be interested in conservation the art that you produce. And that was the reason the other three guys. Well, I mean you take that all back, all the things you've achieved in the even later years, but those first covers and all that stuff, and prior to that was a stack of rejection with and I still have them. I still have them to read them. Yeah, and I don't I don't submit that much anymore. It's mostly I do books sometime in magazine we're calling them need images, and I'll publish the story or something here and there. And I like I enjoy writing especially about kayle my years as Kyle Hunting. I enjoyed doing that. Uh but uh um, But I still have those rejections lad. In fact, I read one too to the guy who gave it to me, A nineteen and seventy eight and seventy seven Bill Reaves at parts twelve, and he said, you actually kept that letter and I said, Bill, I've got them all. Yeah. I mean, you think about those rejections and then it would be interesting to hear because I know you talked about and you're one of your presentations about you never knew there was a state photographer Tex but you just worked and you worked and you worked, that worked, and then all of a sudden somebody said you are that, and you're like that, that's nice. That's another lesson that I tried to to instill in people whenever I give a presentation, is that if you love what you do, if you work from the heart, if it if you if it comes from the soul, then the good things will happen. Uh. But don't don't set in the beginning. Don't say well I want to be this, I want to be that. Just work and love what you do and if it was meant to be those those other things will come, those accolades, whatever is out there, they will, they will come about. Well, like you said, there's certainly struggles in your career and constantly, you know where you have two kids and you're trying to make ends, meeting you gotta stacker rejection letters and you know what do you do do you quit? You go get a nine to five, and sometimes you think about it. You go, you know, there must be an easier way, and then you think, jeez, I don't want to live like that. I want to I want to continue being free, being able to roam over this old hardass country here and the and the rolling plains of Texas called a big empty and and mix with the cowboys, go out here on these big canyons early in the morning and watch the fall rise from the canyon floor. I want to see that. I want to be able to see that all the time. And so I'm willing to sacrifice and able to do that, but to be able to do that and to work hard for it. So your photography, it's an art, right, I mean, you're you're an artist. Describe what that that art means to you, like kind of how you developed your style and your well, your functionality of h When I was trapping, when I was living out there on the Pitchfork, I was always fascinated by the light playing on those cliffs. And in one of my one of my journal uh entries at the very end of that first year, I wrote about the way the light played on the cliffs and how I would watch it disappear, and I felt like that was much like the life that I was living, that that beautiful light, that beautiful life was fading, at least the feeling that I had for that year. But but still I would take and I still have those photographs of those sunsets and sunrise. Of course, then composition is not good, you know. I all have was a fifty millimeter lands on an old cannon Tell shooting code chrome and sixty four. But but the light was really what UM played a huge role in in the style of my photography. And I learned that and also from the hunting, because I would shoot my photographs much like I would when I was hunting from a low you know, ground level, you know, shooting kind of eye level at the at the animal. And so I remember calling Gary Gretter at sports Field, was asking him before I became published a lot about my imagery and he said, you've got a style, and he said I like it. He said your eye for light and color and the angle that you shoot from. And I realized at that point that I had established a style, and to this day that's I've been at this over forty years. People will say, I know your image is the minute I see them because of the light you use and the angle that you shoot from. And that's I mean. And again, you just had a passion about something. You were at it every day and eventually you had you had developed something hammering on the rock and eventually and that wasn't you know at the time in the late seventies, nobody around here was being published at all. I mean, the closest guy was San Antonio, and then the next guy was h an Alice Texas, Jerry Smith, hell of a photographer, and um. And so the rest of the people were what New Jersey all around you know, you I forgot their names. And now it's been so long ago. Bill McCrae, those guys super guy, super photographer, I hope so because he was a nice fellow. But you had Leonta Rue. You know, those are the and and that God knows they live across the United States from me, and so you know, and at that time sent a roll of film. Often it was a week or so before I get it back, and so man, it was it was basically you know, flint and steel, you know, starting to fire. Oh, I had to just you know, writen down my exposures. And then when I get the shots back, I look and I go, well, screwed this one up? Wine, I look over and go okay, now no way and uh. And it was it was a hard process and um and in the twelve years I taught it tech as an adjunct professor or an instructor. UM, I would instill that in in in people in that I am here. You have the opportunity to learn from someone who started from the ground up with flint and steel, with a stick and string, and and you better pay attention because there's not a lot of me around. And so for twelve years I shared that with those kids, and and I still have letters from them today. I kept those letters telling me how much they appreciate my sharing the knowledge that I learned from the hard knocks. Because there are those folks myself included, or anybody who wants to be a photographer, even a hunter, it will be be loath to know kind of what how you hammered that skill out, the process you had to go through to your kid to refined image and then to mail at somebody and sell itude or whatever. Um. They won't know that there's no way for anybody to unless they deliberately use that process, they won't know the perspective you gain from britt out how how much every image. Probably by the time you got an image published, you worked and refined and and checked and rechecked. And I talked to people. I'd call New York. I mean a guy here in Benjamin, Texas, you know, turing fifty eight people. Nobody who are Benjamin was? They do now, you know? Uh, but uh, for the most part, I mean a lot of people don't. But still I would call the guys in New York and just say, what do I need to do to make a difference? How can I be better? And luckily they would talk to me. And uh, you had Victor Classie at Field and Stream at the time. Good, good guy, great guy. Talk to him, you know, and he would share ideas with me, and I would try. I would go out and I'd hammered out and and try to do better. Yeah, I mean, and teaching those kids. I mean, I'm sure you learned something about how to construct your own ideas the things that you've done, you know, he said, you weren't sitting there thinking about I gotta have style. I gotta have a style. But eventually with your the way you can see things, the way the light places of what you'd like that it all started out with a rifling hand. That was the source, That was the seed that that grew into what I have today and what I do today and the way I see life. Well, what did you teach those kids? I mean, and you can't say all that wasn't place. It was, you know, basically it was responsibility. You know, especially when I was teaching at Junction when it was they called the Intercession. It was a two week class, a full semester, cram in to two weeks, and and the very first day, you know, my t A and I laid out the battle plan. I mean, this was the way it was gonna be done. You had to be on time. If you were not on time, if you were three minutes late, you were left. So get it. You know. You learn up front there will be no sleeping in for two weeks. This is gonna be a boot camp. And you will walk in the creeks. You will weigh in the beaver feeces an Independence Creek. If you have to. You will wade up to your chin and water to get the photograph you will lay down in front of the rattlesnake. I don't care if you're afraid of him or not. I will keep the snake off of you. But you're gonna lay down and get eye leveled because that is the best angle in which to shoot a rattlesnake. And I had people scared to death shaking, but when it was over, they said, thank you for making me do that. Yeah, what are your what are your favorite images that you've ever Oh, you know, uh, I love photographing coles, you know, because I love photographing deer. I've got photographs of big white tails fighting, you know, seeing I've seen things from being out on some of these big outfits where where other people can't go to most for the most part, and being able to see two big bucks go together, you know, out in the middle of nowhere, not not in a fenced area, but just be driving along hilarious and all of a sudden crash or be rattling and see five bucks come in and all of a sudden to of them turn on each other and you know, just go at it, you know, I mean, for the I call them Gladiators of the wild Horse Desert because I mean they're fighting to fighting to the death. As you saw in my home. I got those two skulls walk together, and uh, things like that are even a little simplistic photographed, like in the in the eighties. One day I was into when I was living at the jail house there before we built the annex. H a snowy day and I was bored, and I went out in a pray dog town and photographed this little burrowing out peering over a snowbank. At that's a wonderful photo and and just a great shot. You know. It's just it reaches your it touches your soul. Just very simple images like that, you know, are very memorable shots. Um, you know, it doesn't have to be something bodic thing. Some some people say, well, how long did you wait for for a certain image? Will Yeah, I waited one time. Uh went out every day for like a month and a half waiting to catch a coyote two cote fighting. That was tough, you know, and like froze my butt off his in December and stayed in an old blind built out of my skite stumps, and I finally got the shot of two cote fighting. But just as significant as I came across um a jack rabbit one day that accepted my friendship or my my my presence and just laid down in the cool sand and stretched out like he and just basically went to sleep. And I was like ten steps from you, And that was special. I'll never forget that. Are are making friends with two roadrunners who for all summer allowed me to hunt with them every day and I could reach out and touch them. They allowed me to do that. It doesn't have to be something exotic to make it a great image. It's just a memory of that of making that image. What what led up to that image that I'll never forget that? They will always be special. Yeah, I mean that's got to define let's define the creativity. I mean there, that's a moment to be able to capture that relationship in some rare form like, that's a moment that no, you'll never be able to recreate, but then you can share with many people has decided to look at it or come across them. You have got to be important, you know. As a writer, I think of that all the time. I think that these words, you know, while they mean something to be now, they will forever be wherever they end up, you know, they end up in a print magazine or whatever. They'll forever be there in the form that they're in, and nobody can change that. Hopefully someday they'll read yours like that, like like we read Jack O'Connors today. Hell no, if I could be Billy O'Connor, yeah just as well. But yeah, there's hopes of that, right, you have hopes that your ideas and your creativity somehow created an impact on the right and I and I enjoy writing. I enjoy right. I I don't write. I'm not a big time writer, like like Henry Chappell, a guy who I've collaborated with who's just a spiritual writer writes from the soul. But I spent a lot of time in work in UH, in association on several books with John Graves, is one of the great writers, the late John Graves, fabulous writer published UH, Goodbye to a River and not sixty and he influenced me greatly his writing style and UH, and I if I feel like writing, I love to write. I will not write on anything that I don't know something about. I could I could never be a news writer. But if I feel like like for instance, I wrote a post the other day about the history of the jail there that that I've purchased, night two, that was built in eighteen eighty seven, and I went through the history and the the times of living there and the experience. And it was a long post and and I'm very proud of that post. I spent time in in it, and it's a good example of my writing style. And hopefully one of these days I'll be able to publicsh say it in some little booklet of my writings, you know, just columns that I've written and in posts. Yeah, I mean, I always thought about I think about writing in two ways, and in the first the first ways, I think it's hard. It's painful process. It is, and I'm sure photography is that way for you. I mean, when I write a long form story, it is the worst. Like the actual process of mentally like okay, now I gotta do this, now I gotta do this, and going over every line and reworking, and it is. People say, you know, do you enjoy when you were a writer full time? Do you enjoy that process? I'm like, not all I'm doing it, I don't. Yeah, it is, it's it's a lot a lot of heart heartaches, staying up all night thinking about is this the right way to this phrase? This? Is this the right way to get my ideas across? Is this the right ending? Is this right beginning? Did I carry on through with it? Just like you? Is that you get passionate about the subject or whatever you're right about. You know a lot about it and it's important to you, and you think like it. Normally you're limited to a certain amount of words and you're just trying to, you know, release all the energy you have into this short or depending on how long it is, into this motive copy. And it's just I'm always just distressed. Whenever I turned something in is the most it's like the release of all have a beer like I did. It might suck, it might be really good, but at least it's gone. You know. When I was teaching how I totally students. Of course, I've taught in mass communication and I had a lot of ad com students as well, and it was a senior level and graduate level. Photographers, I mean in photography was my class. It was editorial photography basically, but I I taught my My approach was, okay, you people are advanced students and you're in communication. Remember you're in a photography class. Building a good photo is like building a good paragraph. You have to have a beginning and a good ending. So, like writing a story, you have these elements that must be there in order to carry the viewer all the way through to the end. I said, think of a photograph. It's writing an article or a good paragraph. It's got to start, whale's got to end. Well, you gotta have interest points in between. And that was my approach. Well, sometimes I'm sure it's like this is a photography for for writing. For me, sometimes it's like I know where I want to get to, but I don't necessarily know all the steps to get there. You know, like you're saying, I want to get a shot at two Bucks fighting. If I knew how to get there, I just walk over there and do it. But I know I want to get there, and I gotta take all these steps get there so that the copy becomes this like you know learning process that people cant reread through. They get read through your learning process. And I'm sure with photography, you know, people don't see all the work, but they see the end product. You had to take every step to get to that and and go. Now, it's not it's not easy. They're struggling there. That's not evident. There's a you know, a lot of some people recognize. I said, man, we knew what you. We understand that you probably went through a lot of trouble to get these other people that's just a great picture. But they can't and I appreciate them appreciating it. Yeah, but some people can see the paintings. Some people can see the strokes. And it's like like someone I learned very early in in editorial work, the editor doesn't give a damn how much trouble it took to get the image. Just get the image. So don't worry about telling him or her you know how hard it was to get. Just make sure it's right. Yeah, we're talking about your the creativity it takes to do that. And then you know, it takes pressure to make a diamond, right, I mean, the struggle for you as real. But then you started to very quickly, uh find success, Well not very quickly, but you you started to find success and and eventually you were you know, you marry that up to today and you're putting out books, films, what you're doing speaking engagements, you're doing photography classes. You're pretty much immersed in this life that that is defined by success, many successes, many varying successes at different levels. Um, how does that feel? Just as I just remove everything else, just as a photographer, just as a creativity, just a creative person. Yeah, you know, you've feel it's a it's a positive thing. You know, you feel like that you've achieved. I know that in the early years, you know, there was this yearning what is the sign of when will I know that success has right? Uh, It's like I told my students, Uh, not not necessarily monetary in monetary ways. There are other other times, other aspects, other elements that define success. And one of them is, you know, are some of them are people calling you? You know, would you please come and share your knowledge with us? And uh, or share your imagery or we want to use your imagery. And of course obviously you know you want to get paid for it. But but still that people want to hear your word, they want to hear your your message. They want to know the experiences that you that you had to endure to get to where you are today. And uh, and I you know, I'll admit, you know, it's not like me in movies or anything. But you know, I've gone to Cabella's and places and people will come up and say, you know, you know, I'm a fan of yours, blah blah blah blah blah blah, you know what you you know, sign your autograph, you know, And I and I appreciate that. I'm humbled by it. But when I leave, I feel good because I know that I really did arrive. And again it's not something that I that I set as a goal. It was just It's just an ancillary thing of the success of a lot of hard work. And and I do appreciate it. And I tell people thank you so much because I appreciate people saying what you just did to me. It makes me feel like like what I've done is worth worth and is it impactful. I don't the same. But beyond the you know, even beyond photography, you'd have to admit to some level, because I remember when I first came up here and I was describing, man, I met this guy, like this exceptional fella in Benjamin Kayok killing some be but exceptional. So you don't have to admit to some level of exceptionalism outside of of your professional life in your career, just when it comes to building your own calls, having a book of all your kayo kills, the histories that are are in the jail have remodeling that jail house, and and having to be featured on what HTTV building a dugout with your brother Rick. So you I want to get you to admit to some level of like just exceptionalism outside of just hey, I wake up in the morning, I'm gonna do this or that. I mean, they're just is uh something in you? Yes, there's a drive, there's a fire, there's a fire that I have to excel. I can't. I'm not to kind of get a person. And then I know a lot of my friends this way, my boys, this way. You get up in the morning and you want to achieve something. I don't care if it's building a Kayo call. I don't care if it's more in the lawn exactly right, are building a wooden box? You know. I want to know by the end of the day, I have achieved something that I can be, that I can take pride in and and something that is lasting that I can turn around and view and go I did that. And that's just the way I'm built. It's it's genetically coated in me. My father was that way. He worked too much. He was a workaholic. He was just an old cowboy work, you know, born in eighteen nine, eighteen, worked through the depression, was hungry and he knew he had to work. And I was told by the old timers that he was a hell of a horseman. He rode the rough string at some of these ranches, rode their bad horses. He was just cut like that. And uh, and that's just that's just the way that some of us are. And um. And like yesterday, yesterday, I had the grandkids there, but I wanted to take a break and go out to my shop and I built a Kyo call and I felt great, I felt wonderful. I went back to the house and went, I have a cheese something. Today. I built a kyo call that is so good that I'm putting it in my personal collection. Yeah, that's yesterday. That was yesterday. Yeah, when I when I came up here the first time you had I remember you had we were over there at the Spike Box f Nance and you came out and you had your book of all the kaya Kills. And we looked at that and I thought, I've never seen I mean, these are you know how many notebooks are there now? One, two, three, four or five and around five or six seven, something like that. And to describe what this looks like, this is a stack of old to new body like. Some of them are held together with great tape, little dusty, dirty duct tape. You have, dirty, bloody And it's essentially a roll of row of columns. And you you wrote, you can tell me but where, Yeah, I put the date, the location, the rifle of the distance, if he was running or walking, the age, the way, the gender, the weather conditions, if I called him up, the direction the approached in the direction of the wind. And then comments was he was he in good condition? Um? You know, was there something wrong with him? That type of thing. And so you can flip through. And I remember the first time you did very flip through and be like there you up sixty nine, Me and old Bob waters the winds out of the north, and this kid approached up this little royal and he shot him at twenty yards. And I and I've since I've taken my my notes to a statistician and he has gone through bless his heart. Wow, that was that was a job amassing all this. I had to go through all my notes and put him in order and then gave him to the statistician Neil Wilkins, and he came up with all this data wind direction, average wind velocity, average weight. Uh does male do male? Uh? Cotes answer a call more prevalent than a female? Blah blah blah. And then I went in and then slice this into time frames and figured out, uh, you know, the percentage of coves that would come up wind, down wind, cross wind, Uh, the average distance they were, Um, you know, the average male and the female. What what the what the ratio was? And broke that down and I keep that and now do that each year. And I just finished this last my last season, just just a few days and going I'm going this could get oh real quick, The hell have I been doing a god? You know, I get to get the calculators and they're picking in the numbers and go I thought through this not teams seven before, and I got out of heck, you know, statistics, I love it, but yeah, it just it draws me back to this when you see you know folks would ever see that book. Um, it's just this exceptional display of of I'm not even sure other than just say like there's there's an exceptionalism to the consistency with which over the years that you did that. That statutician Neil Wilkins told me, he said, this is very interesting because I doubt there are there are there is any data like this anywhere anywhere in the world. How could there be this is there couldn't put the range of the kia or it's lived for that many years, because they've been certainly been spread around in the recent years, but they weren't always spread around this country. Uh, the amount of years where the kio lived, in the amount of times that you recorded the KaiA, it's crazy. Couldn't be. And I started when I started it. The first note that I ever took was October's seventeenth, nineteen sixty five, when I shot my first one, and all it was was a card, a little fold that card that you would put in a file, and it had Wyman Men's are Killed A code to fift PM. October sevent nineteen sixty five with a thirty thirty Marlin with a two and a half power scope with a hundred fifty grain bullet shot running at two hundred forty seven yards. Who was with me, my friend Kermit Woollie. That was the first note I ever wrote on on hunting, and and then and then after that, I would just put one, two, three, five, six seven, then I put a mark to it. And then when I got to a hundred, I went, I'm gonna start keeping more detailed notes. And then I started keeping him a little bit more detail, and then way more detail, and then got deeper into it. And so now I've got a And then there were years that I would kind of very ago, I'm too busy to put that many notes down, but I would document. I would document, but I might not put the weather conditions or something like that. But now it's absolute. In the last you know, eight or ten years, it's absolute. I don't miss any notes. I even put a blood if I kill the kid, if if I'm not photographing, I'll actually put a blood print. I put my fingerprint, and I put a blood spot. And and I actually had dinner with uh, with one of the greatest cat men in America. While researcher Mike Toois, who knows more about Austin than any man in the world. And I told me about my notes, and he said, one of these days, I would like to look at your Bobcat notes and your blood prints, because I we might be able to take DNA samples from those blood prints and find out something about the bobcats and you're part of the country versus bobcats elsewhere. And that's one of the reasons I did that blood print, because I got to thinking, what if the old wolf trappers in the nineteenth century who exterminated the Texas buffalo wolf, but I mean literally exterminated that wolf. I don't remember. The subspecies was Kenis lupus, one of them was monstrobolis, and then there was another and there's like three different wolves in Texas of gray wolves, but they exterminated. Well, what if each one of those guys would have kept a blood print, but they could take the DNA and compare it with the wolves in Montana, Wyoming, Minnesota, Alaska, Ontario, British Columbia. What if? And so I said, you know, I'm gonna starting doing that so and I won't realize it, but some day somebody might realize something from this that's positive yeah, and there will. It's no doubt about it in my mind. And that's too to see you walk out with a big stack of thingy like, that's a life right there. That's that is that am life. It is. It is a huge part of it. So the next exceptional thing that you've done, it's not in order at all. But you bought a jail, yes, and then you remodeled said jail, lived in that jail house. We're talking an old eighteen hundreds stone j right, So why did you do that? Could my ex wife wanted it? That could be serious another chapter of the book, right, and I did. I mean all I can see was a tremendous amount of work. And but we hired a couple of guys who are really good freelance guys. They weren't your you know, your follow you have to follow a line, you know this ABC, D f G. And these were the guys who would look at a blueprint and go, yeah, I think we can do this, or they look at us say yeah, let's do this. It may not be the exact way it should be done, but this is probably the way that it would be stronger. And they lived here. One of them is to cease now, but one of them still lives here and works for the Army Corp of Engineer Tracy Cartwright. And so together we put that we worked years on it, and uh and I it's it's it's a work. I'm very proud of the place. We don't live in it now. It's more or less a museum, but it represents another era. And in my appreciation of history, I can go in there and I can pick up that old jail book and I can look at the name October seven, W. E. Willis, horse theft, the first guy ever thrown in there. Then you look down and a week later W E. Willis? You know, W was a popular dude here. And then I put this on Facebook, this page, and here this guy right, he said, W. Willis is my great great grandfather, and he was. He and Mr Drummond I think it was. That's just down the line from him. Was thrown in the state penitentiary and it escaped and w was never heard from again. We don't know where he went. But this other fellow turned up and lived a good life after that. But he said, we don't know where W went. He just disappeared. It's amazing, you know, all this stuff just pops up. It's amazing. Yeah, if you got your own history, it's always yeah, it's just it's just all and you know, and I bought that jail nineteen eighty two, and so it was a around a hundred years old, hundred basically a hundred years old. And then he was like, yesterday, I get this email from this guy that tells me about W. Willis And I've been looking at his name since nineteen two. And you guys have worked on that jail for how long? Jeez? It took two and a half years. Was it crumbling when you bought it? It was a horrible condition that windows were all broken out, Uh, raining in the windows, the rock was disintegrating. It was just terrible. And so it just took. You know, we bought the thing for six thousand, and it took. I looked at the old uh, the old notes, the old entry in the courthouse, Uh, in the county notes, and it's cost six thousand dollars to build it. I paid six thousand dollars for a nineteen two and UH put about sixty thousand in it to refurbish it. And uh, and it's it's quite a deal. H g TV has been there three times, and it's beautiful and it's like you know when you know. Yetie came and they did all their interviews in the jail, and then last a year ago, this past June, Best made Uh out of New York City came and shot the catalog, some of it in the jail. It's just a really neat place. And and when people come in, you know, sometimes someone will stop said, man, that's a neat place and said, how would you like to go for a walk through? Would you really take me through? That said sure, I got some time. One day I stopped and there's three guys standing in the ditch, So can I help you? And they said, ah really, I said, well, I own that place right there. I said, would you like a visit? And there were three Texas Rangers. He said, oh, you take us through. I said sure, so would give me a minute. A part took him through there, and I mean they were so happy, so thankful. And of course one of the guys that used to live in there in the twenties was a Texas Ranger when he died home with Team Melton. He's an old buddy of mine and he'd tell me stories when he was a kid leaving to jail and nineteen twenties during the Prohibition years, and all the people his daddy threw in jail, including the sister of Ernest Tub, the country singer Ernest Tub Yeah, Jules Snailson, and that I mean when he walked through that place. You've kept it, You've updated it to this beautiful I mean it could be a bed and breakfast, um, but it still has the original bars on something, a lot of the windows still a lot of the bars, and so it just has this it's much like I think, it's kind of like the way you lived your life. It's like this beauty full representation of who you are, your creativity. But it's it's it's has respect for what it is, respect for the history of that building to what it means. And so it's it's another I say, like another example. The other example is you and your brother Rick build a dugout angler creek dugout on the creek dug out. I took a few years off your life. That came from that came from our appreciation for the life our mother lad when she had lived in a dugout when she was a young child during the depression. And the dugout is essentially just a hole. That's a hole dug in the back of the bank with a with a roof put on top of it and the roof covered in dirt with a stove pope steaking at the top. And we worked from February of I think two thousand and fifteen, and we finished that thing and like about November of two thousand and fifteen. And it wouldn't work on it, you know, on weekends and and but the main thing is like we consistently and we we had a plan. Let's do abcd f G. We I actually saw a dugout in the sixties when I was cowboying on the ranch, and it was a one man dugout. And I remember the construction of it. I remember getting on my hands knees and looking inside and seeing how they had the ridge pole and and the support poles. And so that's the way we built it and um and it's built to stay. It'll be here for a long long time. We built it to last. It wasn't something that might crumbled in five years to that place. Now, you guys cut how many trees? How many days there were days we were cut we would go cut red cedars. We traded. We traded a bunch of We traded a case of beer for a bunch of red cedar trees. And we would go out and I remember the wait, what kind of beer was it? Uh? It's uh. We told the guy just buy something, we'd would pay for it. It It might have been and I might have been some some Coors Light. I don't preferably it was dos Achies, but he or yeah, but uh anyway, Um, I remember one day it was dove season and we had a hundred and like a hundred two degree days. Wind was blowing. God, it was hot. We were right there cutting those things. They weighed like a hundred fifty pounds each, thirty five ft long. Was carrying him out if we took the cut the limbs off of them, loading him in a trader. And here comes the game ward and driving up and he'd been watching us and he thought we were dove hunting, and he's he's a good guy, great guy. He said, Oh, I thought y'all were hunters, and I was come to check your license. I said, no, we're just cutting these trees. Were working on our dugout and I said, I said man, if you're gonna give us a ticket, give us a ticket. If you're if you're not gonna get out and help us or give us a ticket, just move on, man, he said, I believe I'm gonna leave there and man at work. But we uh, oh, my jeez. I don't know how we survived through that, because I remember one day shoveling dirt onto that roof for six hours, six hours, and I didn't know at the time I had like blocks. Yeah, we were talking about that the next year, and in November of two December of two thousand and sixteen, I had to have a stint in my left left artery. We'll talk about one to achieve something. I mean, there is zero reason for you guys to build that, like the zero practical reason for you guys to build a dugout right. It was just it was just an appreciation for an old whale wife. And like I said, we'll be there for We can go there and take our kid, we can go there and take friends, we can celebrate, we can open a bottle of wine on a fall evening or in or spend the night, get up on the deck and set up there and and listen to the wild turkey and listen to the bird's call and say, that's the sound of winter, that's the sound of spring, that's the sound of fall. That's the first geese I've heard come in. Those are the sand hill cranes us the beginning of autumn. And just and just talk about that, and that takes us back to when we were young, and when we lived a quarter of a mile away where we were raised, when we used to walk down to that same spot and hunt like fifty yards away with an old sawt off twive gate shotgun that was held together with copper wire that had bulges in the barrel where people had shot with with something in the barrel, and and uh, dangerous is heck? But that's the guns we used, and and and reminisce and have a good time. Yeah, Well that's where you are, you know. I'm sure it's your life now. In the Yetie film you said you gotta be at a and and so you're a z um. You got grandkids, we'd say, seven grand grandkids, a wonderful wife, great home here, lots of lots of friends, lots of friends, lots of memories, lots of artifacts from your life and other folks life. They appreciate it. I mean, what's what's the feeling when you get up in the morning nowadays? I mean, what's up again? It's what can I do today? What can I do today that I can achieve something? And um and I and I suppose it will never change. I want to achieve and I don't care how how minimal it is, how how insignificant people are. Why why are you building that the little call? You know, it's because I want to and I want it to sound just right to where I can put it down and say I have I have achieved something positive, something that I can use or I cannot use. But it's something that someday someone will look at with my initials and say he built this. This is from why i'man menzer and there's a lot of that hopefully. Yeah, you're a part of this land. This land is a part of you, I'd like to think. So that's definitely as part of me. It's it's it Its shaped my whole, my whole life. It shaped myself. I mean it's from a child. I mean, it's the light, the roughness of the land. To the American called it. Lizards that used to fascinate me to the bones of a of a mami stick and have a creek bank, uh, finding a buffalo skull. All those things have have created the foundation for what I am today. What what do you say? I think I know what you'd say, But what would you say to somebody who Because I think there's a lot of people that listen to this particular program that maybe your thirty five or forty or twenty five, or just are curious about hunting just starting out. I've met a lot of them. I heard fu lot of them via email, I've heard from a lot of them on messages from different platforms that are it's curious about hunting, getting outside. They're new to it. They're not children, they're adults. They have fully formed a lot of their opinions in the world. But either kind of going outside with this newfound motivation to discover everything that they've never known, This wild places that you grew up in you were lucky enough to have been presented to you when you were just a little one. What would you say to those folks that are going outside? When they go outside, what should they look for? What should how should they think and try to be as close to the land as possible. Don't go and sit in a blind, don't go stare mindlessly at a feeder. Take that rifle. If you're gonna hunt, take that shotgun, take the pistol, take the bow. Go out and read sign and and wonder why why that animal was walking or heading in that direction on that particular day. Why were there so many snake tracks today and not so yesterday. Ask yourself the questions and try to find the answers, and and just be a thinker. And don't just don't don't just walk out of the gun and say I'm gonna go kill something and I'm gonna be happy because that's notice what it's about. Be a part of the land, and yeah, yeah, be be aware, be aware, be a part of the land, and be aware and appreciate uh and have reverence. Yeah, I would prescribe your reverence through this place after I mean reverence from everything to road runners to quail. I know I I look at each at each creature, and I know it's it's uh the reason for its existence. I know its job. I know it's placed in the equal system, and I appreciate. I don't kill rattlesnakes, you know, I avoid them if unless I'm taking photographs. I mean, I've crawled down into a DNA rattlesnakes and they'll be teen or fifteen rattlesnakes all around me. But I just go down there to take photographs, and I get up and leave. I get my images. I've done, I've I've created, my've I've enacted my career duty for the day. And they didn't bite me, and for that I appreciate it. And so and I invaded their place, and so I leave, But I have reverence from them. Now. I don't want them in my house. I'd rather they they not be in my yard. But whenever I see him any place sales, I go, hey, you belong here. I have reverence for you, and I know how to understand your job. Is there a way that you would because you talk a lot about last night at dinner and this morning and throughout this visit about how the difference and the types of people, types of humans in this world. You know, we label them with different labels, but there's there's We talked about soft and hard, we talked about liberal and republican. We talked about a lot of different types of people, but there certainly is people that enjoy wildlife, people enjoy going outside, people that don't do that. But as I said before, there's some chunk of people in the middle that just didn't have the you know, the luck or the circumstances that you had or even I've had in my life. Um, and they're curious, but never have never been presented that. How do you how do you feel after all your years of doing this that if somebody said, I have no idea about anything, I've not rarely ever been outside. Why do I approach this stuff? Well, you know, they need to to isolate the interest point, the point of interest that there that they they're seeking, read up on it, and then go out and just try to experience it. If you have to go to a state park, go to a national park, go high. But be observant, be aware and uh and and just be take notice, you know, of of all your surroundings from the vegetation. Understand that there's plants that that that that blossom in the fall. Why do they there's there's plants that blossom and nightfall and not during the daytime, you know, and and recognize that, study it and recognize that that some plants are essential for the existence of some species of animals. You know, understand that that that sticky lope bush with forns three inches long that produces that little berry, little purple berry that has a consistency of a near rotten apple, is one of the most sought after food atom items of coats in May in early June. That's just on the land. And know that all those mesquite beans daming from the from the limbs will soon be eaten by deer, wild hogs. It uh it u is an essential food item for all these animals. Unfortunately, some of them spread that its seed while also like the coat. When they eat a mesquite being, they virtually kill the viability of that seed. And people don't know that. It's amazing how many people around here thinking what kind spread p squite? I don't know. They don't hell I was involved in research and we've proved otherwise. Cattle spread it. They actually scarify the seed to where it grows better and faster, but when it goes through the couch uh digestive system, it kills the seed. Understand small things like that and just learn begin at the bottom. Begins slow with easy things, and work your way up. It takes time. It's taking me sixty seven years to get to this point. It's not an overnight thing. Yeah. I think that's with people that are either new or trying to get into this thing. That's what that's what it is. It's a discipline, very discipline, and it takes time. It takes time. I see that a lot in in people, and like say, for instance, rights photographers, I'll see that a lot in young ones, very young with just starting out. They want to go from A to Z, not A B, C, D, E f G. Yeah, that's not the way it works. It's very disciplined. You have to go through the stages and uh. And otherwise you're gonna be a flash in the pan. Yeah. Yeah, that's hard. I mean today you have this do you have the internet, that's this wealth of information, but it's also this wealth of perspective or you see this guy's doing that, this guy's doing that's get lost in what everybody else might be doing, and I forget that. You have to change stiff to your own path, stick to your path, and understand that if you have a passion and you follow it, you'll get there eventually, get there tomorrow, right Uh. And you struggle. Awhile with that struggles damn good struggles, struggles worth it. If you if you stay stay hooked, well you've you certainly live the outdoor life. And and for them for Fielding Stream to call you that was that was pretty cool. Yeah, that was cool. I remember a guy I'd forgotten all about it, and a writer I think from hours somewhere. He called and he said, I'm I'm doing interviews with ten guys from Feeling. I picked my film stream and so I interviewed with him and totally forgot about it. And then a friend of mine, Ol Brothers, who's an old time or eight eighties, some fine years old South Takes has called me. When they said, have you seen film stream? I said no, it's well, you need to see it. I said, okay, al, I'll gave me a coffee. He said, you're in it. I said, well, what did I do? And he told me he said, you were Slavis one of the top ten outdoor legends in America. And I went really, And then then I went, I remember the guy interviewed me, and it was cool. It's it's really special, lant I appreciate it. And I think that was the last published issue all the risk of its own lane. I think. So there's something that that was online the part that I've read, but that gave me a smile. I thought, yeah, that's right, I got the hard copy. I got the last hard copy. Right. Well, I mean, there's no way to help folks understand like your ethos. So hopefully this conversation has but your ethos and your way of life and how that's led you to where you are. But is there one philosophy or ideology that you've had. I mean, we've talked about the hard work and the work ethic. Is there some parallel philosophy that we can end with that'll that'll really don't really wrap it up. A lot of pressure now, I know. Just I mean basically basically, it's uh having willingness to work hard and have that pack. You've got to have a passion. I remember an old photographer one time that I met from Medicine Lodge, Kansas, and I was just in early years and and we were out together on a ranch shooting photographs. It was early in the morning and the cowboys are saddling up for the sun came up and I was up on a hill ready to start shooting and he told me later, I said, well, I don't know. You know, this is a hard, hard business, and he said, you'll do well. You've got a fire in your gut. I'll never forget that. Yeah, well, I mean I can. I thank you because you know, I'm getting ready to move out of Texas and then go on another little adventure here with my family. But it's it's been good to visit with you. The times I've been able to do it here, it's been an honor for me. You've been You've been special for me, and and I'm glad our paths crossed some time and go with with with the Winchester co hunt. Well, I'll always be able to say that. I think we sat fifteen maybe fifteen kyat stands in our time together, and I think you called it sixteen kIPS. Now, I didn't always do my job. Well, I didn't always do my job with them, right, we all miss believe me. My notes don't tell about Missy's. There's no book of miss No, come on, I could have a book of mrs that long. But yeah, it's you know, I always think of through my lifetime that there's people you meet and there's impacts that people have on you and just the person that you are. It means a lot to me, lots a lot of people, And I hope I hope that that I hope that my story inspires because I as the older I get, the more I realize that it is important to share a story that will give people inspiration, because too many individuals I've met over the years have a story of sadness, especially in the end years, and they wish they would have And many times after one of my presentations, I've heard people say I wish I would have Yeah, yeah, I mean it's if you fill your fill your cup up with love and passion, hard work man, try to treat other people good, be fair with other people. That that also was very important, you know, the and and and it will it will be reciprocated. Yeah. Then if you want to really kill coyotes, then just give a woman a call and get one of this and then hand carved open. Yeah. Wait, we're starting a new deal. I'm gonna I'm gonna actually send a photograph with eat with each purchase, a photograph of of one of my months at Batch Camp in the seventies of black and white old kind of a tin type version of me standing there with the furs, and also a note, uh, out of my kill notes Oh wow, yeah, yeah, that's awesome. We'll go yeah, Wyman Menser dot com? Is that where you go? Men dot com? I'd go there if I was at somebody listened to this age there. I hope, I hope you'll come and visit. All right, Thank you very much, thank you. That's it. That's all. Episode number twenty four is in the books. Thank you to woman, Men's here, Thank you to Texas. Thank you to the folks of Benjamin Texas for having me feed me your wonderful foods and let me ah meet your native son once again. Wyoman mens Uh. Woman and his wife Salinda are I would consider friends of mine good friends of mine. Uh. Woman is, for lack of a better term, a mentors to me, someone who has taught me a lot through just the way he's lived his life, taught me a lot through our own interactions. So if you ever make it, Benjamin Texas, stop by, I'm sure why. I'm gonna be happy to give you towards the jail house. I'm happy to show you his work and talk about his life, which is extraordinary. Until next time, we'll continue our towards through Texas. We're gonna talk to a man named Russell hunting Men Russell Cunningham being a amateur archaeologist that lives in near my home in Trippic Springs, Texas, and he has quite the collection of artifacts to share with us. So stick with us in the meantime the Hunting Collected dot com podcast articles videos. There you'll find a lot of stuff hopefully you'll enjoy. Stick with us. We're gonna keep this conversation rolling. Thank you so much for listen.

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