00:00:02 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your home for deer hunting news, stories and strategies, and now your host, Mark Kenyon. Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. I'm your host Mark Kenyon in this episode number two hundred and fifteen. Ante In the show, I'm joined by Stephen Ronella and Janice patel Us of Meat Either to discuss all sorts of things related to their history and experiences hunting white tailed deer, and I'm sharing some very big news. All right, Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. And today, like I just said, I've convinced my friends over at Meat Eater, Steve Ronella and Janice potel Us, to come over to the dark side with us and talk about white tails for a bit, and uh man, it's it's gonna be a good time. You likely know Steve and Janice from the Meat Either TV show or podcast, or maybe from Steve's books like American Buffalo or Scavenger's Guide Hawk Cuisine, or just from all their other adventures across the world chasing big game and fish. But both of these guys began their hunting careers just like me and some of you, hunting white tails in Western Michigan. So today I wanted to get these two back to the roots and back to talking about deer. So that's what we did. We had a great time with it, and I think you're really gonna enjoy it. But before we get to all that, I want to share some big news with you about the future of Weird Hunt and actually my own career. Um. If you've been listening for a while now, you you've likely heard me allude to some new projects over the past few months, and I'm excited that today I can finally share with you what's going on, some very big, very exciting stuff. But in order to do a good job of explaining this new chapter, I feel like I need to go back because I think to understand where things are headed, we need to understand where things started, how I got to this point. So if you've heard this story before, I apologized, bear with me for a minute, but I have to quickly regale you with this story of Wired to Hunt. Um. This began way back in the summer of two thousand and eight. I was twenty years old, still in college. I was working this summer internship in New York City with a digital marketing agency. Basically My job there was to work with bloggers to help promote their clients products. So I'd like send free gear to UH shoe blog and they talk about the new reybox or something. So I'm there. I'm in New York and I'm just going nuts because I can't be out in the wood scouting. I can't be prepping for hunting season. I had nowhere to go hike or fish, just surrounded by concrete and loud noises and people everywhere. It was killing me. So I got this idea, you know, why why couldn't I start a blog on my own about deer hunting? And I was working with all these other people with cool websites and they were doing this awesome stuff. Why couldn't I do that myself? Um? It maybe scratch that deer hunting itch too. So, with no real prayer experience, I started a website I called the Wired Hunt and for a few months I dabbled on their writing stories and articles about my past hunts and products and stuff like that. UM, and it was fun. But when school picked back up that fall kind of fell off the wagon. UM got caught up in everything else until fast forward in another year until the next fall. Now it's the fall of two thousand nine and I'm working my first full time job after college. I was out in Silicon Valley in California working for this major tech company, and again I couldn't get out in the woods and I was missing hunting season and just going nuts. So I turned back to wired to hunt again to scratch that itch. But this time, things, um, things got cranked up to a new level because while I was out there, I was a Barnes and Noble looking around and I picked up this book called Crush It, and it was all about turning your passion into a career. And I read that book and was just unbelievably inspired. It gave me this new confidence that maybe I could do something like that too. So after just a few weeks in that day job, I decided, and I knew I wasn't gonna be able to do this for the rest of my life. I had to be working on something that I really believed in, something that really inspired me, something that energized me, something that I loved. So I decided that fall that someday, no matter how much work it was gonna take, I was going to find some way to work in the outdoors and turn wired Hunt into a business, making a living, doing something I was passionate about. So I started getting after it. I woke up at four thirty every morning, started working on the website. Then I go to the day job. Then I come home and eat dinner, and I'd start working on it again. I keep going till one or two in the morning. I did this for months and months and months. Eventually moved back to Michigan and my girlfriend at the time, you know this is much to her chagrin, but I was obsessed. I read every book I could about blogging and social media and marketing, and I dove even further head first and all things white tails, learning everything I possibly could, taking my knowledge and experience way up to another level, and then sharing everything I learned along the way through weird Hunt. And I did this for years and years, just grinding away, working on wired Hunt every day, every night, just making slow but steady progress. And after a couple of years I actually began to make a little bit of money. And then a few more years later I was making substantial enough money that I started to think that actually, maybe I could do this as a job, especially if I had more time so I started working on this plan to actually take that leap. My wife and I had lots and lots of kitchen table chats about what this would mean for our family, you know, how I could actually pull something like this off. I started working on like a savings plan. I started lining up more little side jobs that if I could quit my job, i'd have, you know, addition all streams of income to help things meet. And finally, in the fall of two thousand thirteen, I walked out of my day job at Google and leapt off the cliff into the world of entrepreneurship and running where you're hunting full time. It was one of the absolute scariest but most exciting days of my life. I remember on that final drive home from the office that day. Um, I was on the highway in my car, and I remember just thinking about all this and just breaking down crying, I mean, full bore, bawling with with joy, with just just this insane rush of emotions. I mean, so so much work had led up to this point, and now now it was actually happening. It was crazy, it was thrilling, it was terrifying, and it was it was it was real now, UM I had achieved this massive, seemingly impossible goal. So it's now here I was. I was doing it. I was running the website, I was making videos, writing article close from magazines. UM. That next spring I started the podcast, and UM that you know, all those things kept growing and growing, and I just kept working at it, building new relationships, trying new things, learning more and more year after year, UM, and things kept growing, and it was it was a dream come true that I could do this kind of stuff, you know, writing and talking about hunting and my outdoor lifestyle and somehow making a living from that. I was so so blessed. But in recent years, as much as that was incredible and fulfilling, UM, in recent years, my my goals and aspirations have begun to evolve. UM. In those early years, when I first started wired Hunt, it was just you know, to scratch that itch. And then as it grew, it began to get to the point where, you know, maybe I can make a little bit of money from it. And then I wanted to see if I could build something that could reach a lot of people. And then I did that, and then I wanted to see if I could actually make enough from the business to do it full time, and I did that, and then I wanted to see, you know, could I build things up enough where I can make a good living and not be worried about making the mortgage payment every month. And I was eventually able to do that. Um. But you know, more recently, a new set of goals. Over the past few years, a new set of goals have grown larger and larger in my mind. UM. I think it was two years ago that I was encouraged to start thinking about and writing out five and ten year goals for myself and my business. And when I started to do that, when I started to really think about all this, the main goals that stood out to me, we're related to my desire to make an impact, a significant, long lasting impact. You know, in five or ten years. The most important things to me where that I would hopefully be making a positive impact on the hunting community in the future of our hunting lifestyle and our wildlife and our wild places. You know, I wanted to look back on my career and be able to say that I was a leader in this space, and that I was someone who elevated the conversation in the hunting world, that I was someone who led by example and represented the hunting community positively, and someone who worked to improve how communicate about hunting and the house and the wise and the what's of it all, both within and outside the hunting world. And I wanted to be someone who left a meaningful mark on the conservation of our wildlife populations and the lands and waters in the environment that supports them and all of us. And when these things started rising to the top of my list, I realized that my actions would have to evolve too. So that's where things stood last year, and I started addressing those goals by embarking on this major new writing project that I've alluded to for a while now, and that's still very much in the works. I'll be announcing that soon too. But another opportunity that fit just right in line with these future goals dropped into my lap last summer when I got a call from Stephen Ronnella and um he asked me what I was doing the first week in September, and I told him, well, I've got this Montana whitetail hunt planned. Uh, but you know, if the next few sentences are very compelling, I could probably be flexible with that. And as you know that ended up leading to an invitation to go on this Alaskan Carameu hunt that I did go on. It was an amazing trip. Um. But a few days after that initial invitation, I got another call from Steve Um. I remember that moment well. I was actually standing in the middle of the Tea Town River in eastern Idaho fly fishing, and I see Steve pop up on the caller I d and I figured out I ought to take this. So I wait over to a little island and I sat down, picked up the phone, and after very little introduction, Steve just jumps right into it. He says to me something on the lines of mark, I want you to help me revolutionize outdoor media. You know it was it was pretty pretty big. He told me he wanted to he was planning on he was starting a new company, and that he wanted me to help him build it, and he wanted me to be one of the leading voices of this new endeavor. Um. He told me about all the exciting new things we could do together and the impact we could have as a team with bigger ideas and more resources and wild He didn't give me a kind of details about the new project. That night he did promise to tell me more in Alaska, and I remember just sitting there on the island afterwards, watching the sunset over the t Town Mountains to my east, and just kind of being blown away by how much things had changed since those early years and that little cinder block New York City, one room apartment of misery. Um. I just remember my mind being a buzz with questions. You know, what could this lead to? You know, was this something I should do? What would this look like? How in the world did I get to this point? Um? You know, I never in the past ever considered for a second changing in any substantial way what I was doing with Wired Hunt, or the idea of going into business with anyone else. But here was this opportunity with Steve that I had to look really hard at. Um. And I don't think there's anyone else in the world who could have come to me with an idea like this and actually gotten me to buy into it. But but Steve was unique, and that I've looked up to him for a very long time as a role model of sorts um and as as the absolute finest example I believe of what a leader in the hunting and fishing space should be doing. Um. I've looked at Steve over the years as the best spokesman and representative of our community and for a long time now, um, you know, I've been working with long term aspirations of some day hopefully doing enough good to be in that conversation too, And now here that guy was asking me to step up alongside of him and to work together. So now fast forward more than six months and many many conversations later, and many long sleepless nights of debating what to do, and here we are, and I'm very excited to announce now that Steve and myself and a handful of other like minded people are building a new company combining what he's done with meat Eater and what I've done with Wired Hunt, with the goal of really revolutionizing the hunting and fishing media landscape and to take things is in a new and more positive direction and to leave a very real, long lasting legacy. Now, how exactly all that's gonna look, um, and how it's all gonna happen, that's still very much up in the air. We are very early in the development of the company. Still there are lots of unknowns. Um, we will be sharing lots more in the weeks and months to come, but I can promise there are some very cool things in the works. So in the short term though, here's what's happening. Wired Hunt is still going to be continuing on as is. UM. The Wired Hunt podcast will be living on UH into infinity. UM, I'll be continue doing my wired Dump videos. But I'm just gonna be able to do all these things now with with much more support and resources. I'm actually gonna have other people a team to help me do this kind of stuff rather than just little on me trying to do everything. So this just means that everything's gonna be higher quality, produced at a greater scale, UH, and with new opportunities that just never could have had as a solo operation. And you're also gonna see you know, me getting more involve the different Mediator projects too, and some brand new projects for me and Steve and others as well. So lots of exciting things in the future. UM. One other thing I did want to briefly mention is that along with all these exciting developments, you know, they're also gonna be some changes you'll probably notice with some of the partners we've worked with um Inevitably, when combining brands like Steve and I are doing, they're gonna be some adjustments and changes necessary to get everyone moving in the same direction. Um. Some of that we're still in the process of figuring out right now. But one change you'll likely notice, and I thought was at least mentioning here, was our change from working with sit Gear to now inheriting Steve and meteators long and positive relationship with First Life. And I just want to call this out because Sitka has been such a great partner to Wired Hunt and myself personally over the years. They have been one of our absolute greatest supporters from the very beginning, and I've been a huge believer in their team and their product and their mission and I can't how much I've appreciated that relationship. So you know, while Sitka will not be our title sponsor on the podcast anymore, I will always be a friend of the company and the people there, and I have nothing but very good things to say about what they've got going on. That said, I am very excited to to get to know the first like Gear firsthand this year, and given my experiences with folks from their team like Ryan Callahan. I know it's gonna be a great group to work with as well, and given their strong focus on conservation and public plan advocacy, I'm also excited to see what we can do on that front. So UM, I've also heard that myself and Steve and the meat Ear team are going to have a unique ability to influence new product design moving forward as well, so that's something to look forward to also. So there it is, folks, the biggest news I've had to share in at least five years or so. It's a big new direction in my career and life and with Wired to Hunt, and I'm stoked about it. Um, just very very excited and very very thankful. But what I really need to tell you is that none of this would be possible without all of you, the Wired hunt community. I mean, I've gotten so many notes and emails and messages of support and feedback over the years, and some of you have been following me from the very beginning, way back in two thousand and eight and have supported me all along the way, and I just can't thank you enough. I mean, words just don't do it justice. But UM, serving a community like this one, people like you, it has made this the most fulfilling work I could ever ask for, and I'm so excited to continue doing that moving forward, just hopefully in an even more impactful way. So thank you for that opportunity. And uh, you know, as as we say every every week, thanks for staying weird to hunt. Now, enough of all that, I know what you really want to hear about is deer and you want to hear from Steve and Yanni. So let's take a very quick break to thank our partners at White Tail Properties and then let's get right into it. This week with white Tail Properties, we are joined by Billy O'Connor, a land specialist out of Kansas, and Billy is going to be telling us about what to consider when buying a property with a friend. Um, you know, buying a property the friend is a great idea. You know, it helps you get more land for less and it also helps with the cost and investment of time that kind of need for improvements. Plus it's just fun to kind of share in the experience of owning land with someone who is passionate about the outdoors as you are. But you do need to think through the process a little bit to make sure that you kind of cover all scenarios kind of going down the road. When buying with a friend, you first want to talk through ideally what each partner wants out of the experience. You know, is this for an investment. Is it to raise mature whitetail by let him get to a certain age class. Is it a place you want to bring friends and family to hunt as well? Assuming you both want to manage for deer. Usually friends have the same goal and approach to management, but often one person will want to hunt other things such as quail and small game, and the other partner may not necessarily want to do that, So you kind of want to talk all that through. UM. If you are not a state buyer, you do need to keep in mind at the state of Kansas, you're allowed want to land an attag per eighty acres, So if you both want land under tags, you need to make sure the properties of hundred six acres or more. I'd suggest you buy the property under an LLC UM. That way, everything could kind of be explained in the by laws. In the event that something does come down the road where you guys do need to split it or sell it. You know, things such as a divorce or someone has more kids than they anticipated, and or a death in the family and someone needs to sell. Um. Those type of things. You can kind of go over and get that out of the way from the get go. If you'd like to learn more and to see the properties that Billy currently has listed for sale, visit white tail properties dot com. Backslash O'Connor. That's O C O N N O R. I like that. We can hear the yeah, oh yeah, that's good. Smart to keep the darman. Yeah, okay, So we're here with the honest Pitelis and Steve or Nolla and a lot of frogs and a lot of frogs. You know, we're sitting in a log cabin kind of deal. And I want to I want to pull you guys into my world because so often you guys are off running around Alaska or somewhere exciting, and I'm chasing white tails all the time. So when I come onto the Mediator podcast, I feel like a little bit like the redheaded step child. But you don't actually feel like you're stuck though. No, no, no, no, but dude, that's not it's not. But here's the thing. What you're saying isn't true. Yeah, Well, what I'm trying to do, what I'm trying to say. But yeah, but I mean, I get what you're saying, but I'm like, like, I do a lot of stuff that would be way beneath most outdoors, such as if it's channel cats in the middle of the winter. I don't know that's true on small game fish, rough fish. Well, this is the point I'm trying to get to though, is that while you guys are often on these very glamorous super hunts that people look at and maybe dream about, like gray squirrels in Kentucky playing dogs exactly, you both began or poll poland the limb line and jug fishing for cats in the Ohio River. This too. What I'm trying to say, Steve, is that you guys did begin right here in Michigan chasing white Actually not that far from here. Mega nostalgia on the way in today for sure, because we're in southwestern Michigan. Both of you guys come from my home state. Be honest, you're really close to home, right Yeah. I'd say I'm probably within thirty miles and a couple hours for you, Steve. So we are in the heart of our history, all three of us right here Michigan deer country. So I want to try to convince you guys to talk white tails with me for an evening. Uh, I would love to do you. But, um, just before we get started, do you mean, um, like white tails in the way that I understood them when I was growing up as a Michigan white tail hunter or some or different than that? No, that I want. I want us to talk about your history where it started for you guys with white tails, and then we'll kind of go from there. Um, But before we get to your own personal histories with white tails, Steve, you always do a really nice job talking about the natural history of different critters when you're going on a hunt or talking about them. Do you have any interesting white tail natural history that you could spring on us? Yeah? Can please it? Okay if it involves black tail deer mulder, Well, of course it would. Okay. So there's an idea and I don't know that this idea is true, but there's an idea of how of that of this demonstrates how successful the white tailed deer is as a species. Now, there's gonna be people you hear this, and they might fact check. They might fact check and dispute elements of it, but there's a narrative that that goes um that for that white tails have been around and kind of in there sort of same recognizable state for vastly longer than our other deer species, and that they have been almost in perpetuity, that they have had sort of their central zone being down to the south what's now the southeastern United States. And there was a time historically, during a very wet period when white tails moved their way across and basically colin eyes the whole country from coast to coast, And then a dry period came and white tails shrunk back to the southeast US and left a remnant population of deer along the Pacific coast and the wetter areas of the Pacific coast. Over time, over the hundreds of thousands of years, those became black tails. Later, during another long wet period, those black tails expanded their range eastward, and white tails once again expanded their range westward. There was a hybridization event that happened, and that is where we got the muleteer from. And the milder is a very new species, and the mule deer is very uh finicky, the most fragile of those fragile, finicky, ultimately ephemeral species. But you have this white tail that can just do that's always been and seemingly always will be on the landscape. So that the theory being that white tails are the original This is I think, um, this, this is an idea put forth by Valarious Geist. He seems to be authority on many unlets, you know, and some people will say he's an authority on many things. He's not actually an authority on but um in the like in the ungulate world. But Vlarious GUIs has a lot of interesting ideas. I was reading the pieces not long agover. He's postulating that the reason Clovis and Foalsome points are fluted is that they were packing that projectile points is that they were packing that fluted piece with some sort of poison, right, which is an idea you will not find in mainstream anthropological corners. But it's an idea that that he just kind of puts out like he he now and then we're just like sort of introduced these big ideas and then as you know, a friend of mine put it like he'll introduce a big idea and then kind of leave the room as everything catches on fire like a drop, the mic moment just steps out. It's like, try and argue about that for a while. Wow, So that's how's that for a white tailed tip? That was good. I'm not standing behind any of it. I'm just telling that's the thing that I that's the thing I read from a single source and didn't take the time, didn't take the time to go and see if if it's if it's if there's a sort of academic consensus around that idea or not. It is interesting, and it is it kind of makes sense and a little but when you look at the fidelity of the species of the white tailed of all the species, they've makes sense. They've been around the longest here because they are the most adapted to the widespread environments as they can make anything work, They can do anything. Yeah, and they look how readily they adapted to human presence. Yeah. Well, I just did a podcast on my own about coyotes recently and how kind of like there's a few species here that have done amazingly well living with humans. White tails, coyotes, rats, and basic vermin like that Canada geese, the crow. They they've found a way to make it work, and that's that's kind of admirable, I think to a degree. It's interesting when you're in a grocery store parking lot and there's a bird hop around under your car. It's probably an English sparrow that birds not you know that birds a Eurasian bird. It's not from here. It's the most um populous bird on the planet and has the largest home range of any bird on the planet. This is one of those winners, man, They just win, and white tails just win. And it's funny how we uh, what's the word I always forget when you put like human traits to animals and ye are morphires these animals, and how you look at that trait is admirable, where really it's just the it's just been natural selection that has made those animals succeed, right, And we look at it as sort of this admirable trait. But it's just like it's kind of how the ship's rolled. Yeah, yeah, no, that yeah, it's true. I don't know that I look at it as admirable because I I tend to like I tend to like those um That's what I'm trying to say. There's two kinds of people in this world, there's kind of people that you lump everyone into two groups. So there's two kinds of people in this world. I ain't just the ones that look and they like they like they love those winners, right, So you're the guy that loves you like you love carp Like there's a successful species, carp crows successful species, Canada geese successful species, white tailed deer successful species, the Norway rat successful species, and people look at that and like that's what I like. I tend to have more of an emotional attachment to those finicky, more delicate species that are they just don't cope well with people, that don't coexist well with people. They um, I kind of like see more of like a sort of more beauty in their story. That just means fifty years ago you would have been bodies with the Canada goose. Now you're not. Yeah, fifty years ago sure would have been like I used to like Canada case and it seemed like they were going to vanish from the face of the earth. But I feel like, I feel like you're that guy who says, well, I like that band before they are cool. That's kind of kind of what this is. Yeah, Yeah, it's like Um, you know what it is is because because I think that, uh, you know, I I really appreciate wilderness, you know, and so and so I think that there's some of these things that the animals that don't the animals that don't do well with people, that don't do well with civilization. We tend to associate with wilderness, and I like wildern. However you define it, you know, I have my own personal way that I would sort of go about defining it. Um. And there's animals I associate with it, right, So like grizzly bears. Right, it's not that grizzly bears don't It's not that grizzly bears don't cope well with people. People don't cope well with grizzly bears. I think if if, if when they come up, when they start to like interface with populated areas, they die. They tend to get killed because they get themselves in trouble. I think that if we had just utmost tolerance for the bears and we're deferential to the bears, they would probably be doing great. But when they butt up against people, they suffer. Right, they can't coexist. Um And And there's a handful of other things, but that you're right about. The point you make about knees is a valuable point because I think that you're the same way. You could have gone back to nine thirty and you would have listed the wild turkey in with with grizzly bears and milder and even white tails. You would have said, like, there's an animal that can't hack it, when in fact it was just it just needed the slightest bit of help with a little bit of regulations. You could say that it's important that people do care about these underdog species at times because they won't have the chance to get to that higher end of the cycle of no one did. Thank goodness, people cared about turkeys and deer and said that that's a that's an underdog species right now. I like that because now they're top of the chain again. Yeah, but you did exactly what I said, we weren't gonna do. You've you've got us talking about grizzly bears, did you did? I know? I think you invited it. White tails, guys, white tails. I want to talk about your first deer, your first white tailed deer. You're honest, do you remember that that experience? First one ever kilt? Yeah, how do how'd they go? Uh? We were outside killed it got away? No, my first ball out kind of got away. I thought you got is there, So you got one and even was like sort of confirmed that you had gotten it, and then you came back and it wasn't there anymore. Oh yeah, but that's much later I was. Yeah, I was an adult, yeah, very yeah. No, yeah, we don't have to rehash that story. I think we've already told it twice on on the Meteor podcast. But yeah, we're outside of three hours Michigan, Uh, near the Latvian campus that three rivers archree? Is that a different three rivers? The different three rivers? I think a different three rivers um And we were it was probably we only stand hunted until nine or ten usually opening day, and then it was drives from there on out the rest of Saturday and all Sunday, and I say all Sunday. It was probably half a Sunday and uh, we just like that was kind of like the whole hunt. Right, it lasted about a day and a half. How how old were you at this point? Whatever the minimum age was, So I think I've been hunting in Wisconsin already for a couple of years, but hadn't killed one yet. And uh, we were doing a drive and I was a shooter. I think a couple can't quite remember. A couple three came running by and I emptied, however many slugs I had in my gun, I emptied him at a running deer. H if I had to guess the range. Twe eat a forty yards pretty close, shooting from the hip. No, no, no that, but definitely kind of leading the animal. And uh, it was the last shot and it just cartwheel rolled over. Was that like do you expected that happened? Or was that surprising? Like? Oh, should I actually had it? Oh? Man? Probably a little bit of both. I mean you're, yeah, you're you're expect you're shooting and you're expecting it to happen, but then when it does, you're like, oh, you know, and uh it was emotional. I can't. I think the emotions came later because I was sort of just an awe at first. Walked over there to it, and uh, you know it is on a drive, the deer get pushed through, there's a bunch of shooting, and then you sort of figure out slowly who actually hit some stuff and you kind of help people retrieve deer, and you go over and get do some gutting and you know, helping whatnot dry I go out, so it took it. So I had a few minutes alone with the deer before someone else got there, and I remember walking up to it and not seeing a hole in it. Got scratching my head like you know, maybe it's not dead, and its head was just kind of tilted over just a little bit, and I grabbed its ear and when I pulled its ear, it was almost like just half of its head came towards me and I had somehow like I don't know exactly where it hit, but basically the it was like a perfect melon. The skull had just cracked open like a perfect melon, and the brain was just sitting there. It was wild. Um, I mean not like way way open. That is an exaggeration, but I remember looking in there and seeing the brain. But it wasn't like it was all mushine. There wasn't eyeballs popping out everywhere. It was just a glancing hit. Who knows very quick death. Yeah, Like yeah, when it hit the ground, it didn't flop, but that's not where you were. You don't know where you're aiming, just leading a deer running through the woods, you know, m hm um and uh yeah, So it was I think as the people came there and you start to get congratulations and you get the blood smeared on your face. I don't think my dad ever really did that, but someone in the group did. Yeah. Did he feels the lavian thing? No? No, no, I don't know they picked it up from Red Dawn maybe. Um, But yeah, there was congratulations and uh, you know, I was excited and there was you know, but I definitely remember like some severe remorse, you know, definitely some tears, you know, trying to process at all. It was remember being a heavy duty. So it was like, after all, like the cheers and the handshakes and everything, when you were thinking about it later that you started feeling it was right then and there. It was right there and there. I think I was probably over it by the time we're dragging the deer out of the woods. I was thinking of about when I was going to shoot the next year. You know. For me, it was when I when I first when I saw it, I've been we're tracking, tracking, tracking, when you walked up on it and you first spot it, and I had this just like I don't know, this dropping of my stomach or something feeling right, like, wow, that's it's dead. Has happened, It's real. Did you A lot of people talk about and I experienced this too, that first shot at a deer that first year you killed. Maybe those two things didn't happen the same same instance, but you almost blackout. Some people talk about like it happened, and then you're like WHOA, Like, I don't remember drawing my bow or aiming the gun or doing anything. It just like I went an autopilot. Just happened. Did you have anything like that where you mentally in it? Do you remember, Um, yeah, I don't remember, like a blackout sort of a situation. The next year, I was bowl hunting, but the day before the opening shotgunner and I had a doge come up within a few yards and I was shaking so bad that the arrow just fell right out of my bow and hit the ground and somehow got it back in there. And she just had circled around me and she's on the other side of a like a snag and I just there. That was more like blackout, because I mean she was feet away, and I was shaken and just like must shoot arrow an animal, you know, and I fired one loose it went right over her back, and you know she ran off. UM, and I feel like they're uh there. I had no control, Like, you know, I was not in control of what I was doing. You know, you're just trying to just make it through so that you get that experience. Hopefully next time, you know, you can have some composure. Yeah, it's it's interesting. I talked to so many different people and kind of this topic comes up a lot. Often. You hear some people that never ever had that experience. They're always in control in the moment. You talk to some people that they're still experiencing that now even though they've been hunting for ten or fifteen years. And then there's some people that it's like an evolution, like some people kind of build that control over time. I don't know if it's a personality trait or if it's just your emotion level or what it is. I don't know, Steve, do you have anything like that? Did you think it's I think it's it's um. I think for most people, exposure diminishes it because he just there's less uh, less adrenaline. You know, my older brother talks about the thing where he um. What he doesn't like when he gets rattled, you know, bow hunting for elk right, he gets rattled and like blows a shot. What he doesn't like is he feels that that it. What he doesn't like about himself in those situations that he feels is that he's so lusty. He's so lusty for that elk right. He wants. It's so bad that um that it rattles him, like his desire becomes so like overwhelming that he can't function properly interesting. And later he looks at that um almost like to flow a shot. He looks at it almost like a sin of the flesh, like the way someone might be like, oh, I didn't wish I didn't cheat on my wife, but I'm so overcome by passion and now I hate myself, Like he'll feel that way about flopping a shot. He's like, why do I have to want that so bad that I can't do it in the way that I do the normal things that I do in my life, Like I don't get all panicky when I'm doing normal things about my wife? Why do I get panicky? Then yeah, whenever I'm having a hunting season where I haven't had much success yet that my wife is always saying, you want it too bad, You want it too bad. As soon as you stop, Karen, you'll get that, dear, So something to do it. Do you remember your first year? So yeah, man, vividly, vividly so uh well, But for whatever reason, in my family, we would kind of jump the gun on the legal hunting ages. Like my dad, like he looked like my dad would look at sort of the big major points of the law and abide by those, but like some details were kind of lost on him. And I think that he wasn't, you know, brought He wasn't really brought up in a way to um, he wasn't brought up in a way that people paid a lot of attention to that stuff. I think just who he's, who he was surrounded by and in his formative years. So yeah, I started. I remember being up in my own tree stand when I was levin with the boat too, so young that like my old man would march me down and or send me down whatever into a river bottom to be up in a tree and it would get dark and just be petrified definitely afraid of getting out of that tree and would just wait, you know, more of my brothers would ever come down, or my dad would come and shine a light from up on the top of the ridge or something, and I'd have to get down. It's being so scared man like that young, you know. And they were the first The first year I missed my first encounter where the buck was early in the season when I was eleven, and all of a sudden, heart coming through was have no idea what the hell that would be. And it turns out like a butt kind of walking by me and probably arranged, but I was sold, just like wow, you know. Then later that year we went up to Baldwin. We used to hunt some public land up and Baldwin at a place called Teapot Trail because someone who hung a teapot in a tree, and of course people then have to like shooting full of holes of twenty two and whatnot because there's something hanging tree, you gotta shoot at it, right. So it's a shot up teapot hanging at the entrance of this trail on public land up Mannesseee National Forest, and we would hunt it by just walking the logging roads until you found her two or three deer had recently crossed the road. Then you'd go in seventy yards off the side of the road and hang up a stand and just sit the trail all the better if you found it. If that trail intersected another trail that had two or three deer tracks on it, then you were like in the money. So maybe we caught a track crossing the road. We caught like where it looked like a deer yesterday had cross teapot trail, and it looked like a deer today had cross teapot trail, went and hung up a tree stand. I mean I wasn't sitting there in an hour man alone at eleven, you know, sitting there an hour and here comes this for this forky in this thing, I mean you could reach out and grabbed it. You know, he's ten ten yards off the base of the tree. And I remember shooting right underneath them and just feeling sick, just feeling sick about it. Then what why do you feel sick? Was it because you'd failed yourself? Were you afraid of just because I think just missed? Yeah, whatever, I don't know if it's because I can't remember like what it was. But just like you know, you grew up around deer hunters, so you want to be a deer hunter, you want to get a deer and just being so bummed, you know not I think about it. Maybe was twelve when I missed that one, but that you know I was because I had my first Yeah, it wasn't that it was so I was twelve. I was eleven when I had the first time. I heard a buck come grunting through the woods and passed by me and I couldn't even pull together to pick up my boat. He wasn't like really close, but it was just remember like a real moment, and you know where that was. There used to be a place like I grew up in an area where an area mission where there was a lot of camps, so we had um O wasap e Scout camp was near us. I used to When I was thirteen, I got a job washing dishes that camp Pendaluon. I'll be washing dishes and the campers were older and I was yeah, the band camp kids were like my two years older. Me and me my brother back there Washington, damn dishes, mixing kool aid in the garbage camp of the canoe paddle a camp Pendaluan. So all these camps, like all the kids would come camp, but in the fall would just be empty land. And you could buy a waspy. You could buy a permit. You could go buy like a trespass permit for ten bucks. I mean it was that cheap. I membe we could buy an ice fishing permit for three dollars or something. So that buck was on a Waspy scout land Waspy boy scout camp, which I think now is not a Waspy camp anymore. And then um, I turned thirteen, and you're not supposed to hunt with a rifle to your fourteen, but I was doing it during this one year grace period that we were allowed in my family for whatever reason. I was thirteen and just like, yeah, don't even were doing a deer drive. So we sat in the morning in our ground blinds, because before you could hunt from the elevated platform. We sat in the morning and our ground blinds, and and we knew this area along this this creek, Mosquito Creek. We knew this area where there was a big bend and a big bottom area. It was full of like multi flora rose and and uh, a lot of tall grass down there. It's like a lot of sunlight would come through down in this area. And we knew that deer bed up down in there, and we knew when you bumped him out of there. This is on a farm owned by a family called the Zerlat family. Um. They they had they ran a dairy operation and they grew without of lflf and corn to feed their own dairy. Um and they did they did something they had They had an orchard, They did some apple, they did some apple stuff and did some timber um. And my dad was friends with him through church, so we would hunt their place, and uh, we had done it enough. It's just the family have been hunted so long. You knew that there was a deer there, you knew what ridge they went up. So my brother in law, my brother went down and I went on the ravine, the ridge they used to climb out of the ravine, and I just sat there and heard him her deer coming. And this deer pulled up less than ten yards away. But all I could see was its face and neck. I could see the white patch on its throat, and I was shooting a Marlon. It was a model Winchester model but thirty two special, which I had gotten from a man named Eugene Grots. And this guy, Eugene Grots, my dad hung out and he's in his seventies. He's a World War Two that like my old man. And he had a gun for every year he'd been alive. And at some point he realized you had like an extra one or two and let me pick one, and he gave you this model ninety four and the thirty two special. And I had a peep site on and I remember I had like a little reduce or you could screw into the peep site and I remember center that pezza in the white patch and that deer still it was a spike corn bucking and uh hit him high. You still have that rifle? No, you know what? I sold for three hundred bucks because I wanted a like a that was yeah, when everybody wanted a thirty at six and stuff right, people were getting sick of thirty thirties and sick of thirty two and wanted like thirty at sixes And sold for for next and nothing to a place called five hundred Guns. Um hit the deer kind of hit a bad hitting the jaw rolled down the hill and instead of just working the level action. I remember like I did a lot of fur trap and I like the mountain meant a lot stuff. I remember I had my knife like on the outside of my shirt, like a she nw if you know, a butcher's knife, right, skin and knife. And remember I ran down the hill and and got down on the deer, and the deer got back up again, and I jumped on the deer. It just didn't occur me to shoot it, you know. And I jumped on deer and wrestled it down, tackled to the ground and cut its throat. Yeah, just like pants not yeah, not having any just didn't occur. Like looking back in my mind, like why would it shots? You're gonna have no idea. Remember the thing got up, I was like, this thing's not getting away, and I jumped right on its back. What was the rest of the crew impressed? They weren't there when they heard the story, though I don't remember that. I remember I carried it was small enough that I carried it up out of there on my shoulders. I can tell you the shirt I had on it was one of those quilted quilted flannel shirts. It was kind of a rust color with blue and green stripes, blue and green checker pattern over it. And I had a pair of Army syrplus wool pants on, and I had a pair of and I had a pair of pack boots on leather upper rubber by the packed boots. What was the weather like? Sunny, hot, unseasonably hot. It would have been probably November sevent Do you remember this, I remember so clear Remember the first time you ate that dear, the first time you ate meat from the first deer you ever killed. Yeah, we ate the heart that morning. I remember that clearly because I brought it home and the old man like it was ritual we had if you killed a deer in the morning, in late morning, they would fry the deer in a pan with onions and you would catch up. My old man wouldn't let us put catch up on dear mct Norman. He'd get really mad if you put catch up on dear meat. But he'd let you put catch up on the heart meat. Yeah, he'd be like consulted, he'd act insulted if you put ketch up on dear meat. Do you think that, even at that young age, was that a different thing, eating something that you pull the trigger on. I thought was that even Oh yeah, I thought different. But you got to realize, man, I like at that age and in that time, all I like, I wanted to be like I wanted to be the mountain man, right, So anything anything they had anything to do it like fur trapping, eating crazy ship, living off the land, killing ship with knives. It's like anything at all that, anything like that, that's all I like. That's what I read about, thought about did so it would have Yeah, it would have resonated with me. And but it was already like a thing we did anyway. Like my old man, this is no joke. My old man would go check other guys as gut piles to get the hearts. If he heard about a guy getting a deer and got a deer out in whatever field, he would go out there and check and get the heart and deliver out of Yeah. It was a big he made a big point out of it. Yeah, And I came up in a much more casual deer hunting culture, like we hunted probably really two days maybe three in Wisconsin, two three in Mission again. Once I was old enough to start getting serious about bow hunt. I had started putting more time when I was about probably sixteens. I think I was driving my own car at that point. But yeah, the whole eating the animal, um, we just had the In Wisconsin, the tradition was that on Saturday night, we just have a It's basically like a sauce that we made with mushrooms, kind of like a hunter's gravy, and we I mean, sure Lovin got made it, but I'm sure that many cultures make this similar sauce. Definitely a little bit probably like a sour cream kind of a base, like a wider sauce, but it would have I think heart and tender oin in it. You know, we take all the tender loins of all the deer that were shot that day and take the hearts. It all get chopped up and put into it. And I always remember like being like, what's this piece is gonna be dang it hard again? Oh? Good tenderly? You know? Yeah? And uh yes, I don't. I don't. I didn't get real serious about all that stuff until I sort of, you know, came of age on my own living in Colorado, and I was probably nineteen twenty, and it just happened to be that I had like my own elk at home. All of a sudden, I'm like, oh, what do I do? Now? I better butcher this thing and just started chopping it up, And the next thing you know, I was going down that path. You know, that's cool, and here you are for me now, of course, the first dear experience is always one their first animal, whatever it might be, kind of sticks with you. But then for me also when I look back on my childhood experiences of the hunter, there's like a moment or two that kind of stands out as is I don't know, that special moment or experience that I can just see and like it has like that kind of magical feeling for me. It was I think it was like ninety six or nine seven. Um, you guys were probably off in college by then or something. I was like eight years old, was graduate school, so you really started. I started graduate school in I was skipping my senior year of high school. So I was seven or eight or something like that. And what, Yeah, I was born in eighty seven. Huh, how can that be? So this is the ninety six or ninety seven somewhere around there, and my one of the there's a the youngest guy in the camp other than me. It was maybe in his mid twenties or something, and I kind of idolized him growing up. Him. He was always up a camp and he always killed deer. He killed an eight point buck, which is the biggest deer I've ever seen up there. And so opening morning he killed his eight pointer and we put up on the buck pole and there it was. That evening my grandpa killed a great big seven point or the biggest now, the biggest buck I've ever seen killed. And that night I remember I heard the gun shot. I was sitting with my dad. Every time you heard a gun shot. I was like, Dad, do you think that was one of the guys from our group? Do you think that was one of the guys? And He's like, oh no, that was way too far away. Mark, you'll know it if you if you almost get knocked out of the seat, you'll know it's one of our guys. And so finally late that night, boom, I jolted away because, oh my gosh, was that one of our guys? And yeah, that was one of our guys. So Grandpa ended up shooting this deer, and I remember we all came back to the cabin. We had this little fourty acre piece up in northern Michigan, this little one room log cabin that my grandpa had bought way back in the day. And so we all are in this one cabin. We no power, no water, no anything, just some kerosene lanterns and stuff. And we're in there waiting for Grandpa to get back, waiting for Grandpa to get back, and everyone else had come into camp, and it's only forty acres, so I just go over and see what he's doing. I don't know, that's just what we did. You just hang out of camp and then everyone everyone arrived. So he finally arrived and waited for one more person and getting and I just remember everyone let let the lanterns. So we all had our little kerosene coleman lanterns, and then we walked back to word GP. Call my grandpa g p Um. You know, I never knew he didn't like the idea of being called Grandpa. I think we were just talking kind of psychoanalyzing if he didn't like the idea of like being old gramp, being gramp and signified. So it was either for Grandpa or his His middle name was Paul, and his first name was Gerald, so it could have been Gerald Paul g P. Oh, that's definitely what it was. I don't know I the grandpa, though I always thought could be possible either way. G P finally got back and we were all there, and we got our Colman lanterns, and we've walked across and it was one of those days where the snow had started falling right during that evening hunt, and so by the time we started walking out, everything was codd in snow, so it was like a white landscape, just the the yellow glow then of the lanterns. And we all walked out and there's this one creek that runs to the property and we come to the edge of the creek and I just remember GP lifting the lantern and he goes there he is, and then you could just see the light and then it sounds like one of those Christmas cards you buy a capella. There's a picture that documents this moment now where you can just see this the most beautiful deer you ever saw, laying in this fresh blanket of snow, you know, landside have to rack up and I'm the seven or eight boy surrounded by these men the guys. I've idolized my whole life, and I'm if I remember, this is definitely the first like track job I've been on like this track quote unquote track job. Um, And here I am with the guys, and there's this big buck that my grap got and so there he is, and I just remember seeing him, and it just I will never forget that moment, seeing this deer and this whole I can see the whole thing, can feel it now. And then that whole night and the next two and a half days of camp, whenever we weren't actually hunting, the guys will be inside eating dinner, eating launch or taking naps. I would just go stand at the buck pole and look at these two deer hanging there and just walk circles around them and touch them and look at them and think about them. And so that whole moment just sticks to me forever. You're wired to hunt, man, I was wired to hunt. Um. Do you have any moment like that? Yeah, anything that stands out? Um, there's probably a few, but yeah, I think that there was sort of like a change over when I probably just decided that I was going to be more serious about hunting. Maybe than he and my dad was a pretty serious bow hunter when I was getting into into high school years um, and he was. He got me into it. But when I just made the decision myself that I was gonna also be a bow hunter. So, like I said, I think I had a driver's license. I was driving, and uh, I remember being the lap being camp hiking in I think I actually packed in a decoy on this hunt. And I had chosen my own stand site for the first time that fall, and it was a bit in spot, like a like a like an old uh you know, roadbed between two swamps, and there was kind of two hills, you know, opposite corners of the two swamps. It ended up not being a good spot later, I learned because of the way the thermals would roll off the hills and just always be criss crossing whatever. And I think my spread, yeah, my sent was go in every direction, but I can't remember, maybe I didn't that time. But anyways, the first time that like my own stand, I picked it, like I knew there was deer trails, and all of a sudden, there's a buck underneath my stand and that stands out. It's just sort of like a like a moment where like, all right, I did it. Yeah, Like here I am, like I picked my own spot and there's a buck standing underneath me. Did you shoot? No? No, he got like I don't even know if I came to full he uh, but he sent something and basically just backed out, you know, didn't spook, spook, but didn't continue down his path. But it was like the first time that we're just like it seemed like it had clicked, even though it didn't kill him. It's just like, okay, like I did everything right to get to that point. I'm sure I'll see this again figuring it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good feeling. Yeah for sure. So I think, yeah, that stands out. I'm sure I'll think of others. But Steve, yeah, man, being here, you know, being in Michigan, I definitely think of some like like like I remember like just like it's sort of like moments where things have like this kind of like Crystaline clarity. You know. Remember later later in life, probably around time like I got out of I got a high school, went into community college for a couple of years, and um took all night classes, you know, so I could trapp during the day I was trying to be a professional trapper and uh like around that time, so it's been around ninety three, being up in the up and staying on some bank above a river. I remember watching these river otters down in the down the river, diving down and coming up with yellow perch in space, the kind of surprised that there's the yellow perch down there were coming up these yellow perch and just crunching them so loud. We were like quite a ways a way that you could just hear the crunching up those perch. And I remember like something about it like spoke to me in some way man like, like I always remember that moment. There's something about they just seem like like otters. I've always had like a real affinity for otters, and um, yeah, like that moment in some sort of way that meant something about being outside, right, the things you'd see outside that were like these kind of like special seeing things outside moments and only sticks in my head. In that same period, is there we used to go down to the mouth of the Pendles river it flows out in the lakes period. We go out to the mouth of the Pendles and and uh, surf cast for steel ahead we get them and they we get him in the fall small ones. Um yeah, and it's funny. I remember one time sitting there with my brothers and something like my friend Eric Kern who later died later and um my buddy Matt DROs who we grew up around hunting fishing, and my brother mam my brother Dan and sitting there and we were drinking Boone's farm in the sand there, you know, and just having this moment of like, holy shit, how much do I like my friends and like it being the because like these were the people I hung out with outside like out of doors. These are like these are like the guys I hunted and fished with when we were younger, you know, And just having this moment of like the level of relationship, like the sort of relationship that you can sort of build in living life this way. And I'm sure other people find in other ways, but that's just how we found it. Um. Like that said something to me about the lifestyle of hunting and fishing. Were you hunting without um, like parental guidance and like more with your peers, are on your own by the time you were in your late teens, at what point did you sort of like break away from hunting with, you know, the family group that you grew up with. So it would have been when I started bow hunting as a teenager, so like thirteen years old or fourteen years old or whatever that was, Like I started. I grew up hunting on our northern Michigan deer camp and that was the only place we ever hunted, was going up to. We call it Ken Robin was what my grandpa called this place. So that's where I was hunted, where we learned and did all that stuff. And then my family bought a little three and a half acre a lot in southern Michigan and Grand Rapids and built a house on it. And so when we built that, then my dad and I decided to learn how to bow hunt. He had never bow hunted before, and I was twelve or whatever it was, and we'd learned to bow hunt together on our three and a half acres behind the house, and so I hunted with him the first year or whatever it was until I legally go on my own, and then I just started trying to figure out on my own after that, Um, I've been doing it kind of ever since. So that was kind of my my path. Yeah, I was kind of as quick as we could. We got off on our own. Kind Of an interesting situation because my family was kind of maybe like what you were saying, you honest, it was like very casual hunting and that like up north, it was kind of a serious thing for the opening day weekend. And I think when you say that, it shouldn't have a negative connotation for anybody that's listening, because all these guys are very serious hunters. But compared to where we are now and the people that I hang out with now in the West, it's you know, you look back on that and you go, oh, we only deer hunted for six days out of the year. What's interesting, though, is even though that was the case for you know, my grandpa or my dad or people like that, Um, they would still self identify as a hunter. Like that was like one of their favorite things was hunting, Like what do you like to do? I like to hunt fish? But they only actually hunt four days a year or something fish more than that, but still, I mean not hundreds or anything like that year round. Man. Yeah. But in this case, though, I was like, you know, it was it was like the culture around it, it was experience around is everything that was outside of not just pulling the trigger, but it was everything else entailed and those you know, the social element of it too. But but yeah, I mean I grew up in the situation where you went and sit on a sit on a log next to a tree and just wait and see what happens, and never never really learned about anything other than don't move fast, don't make loud noises. That was basically the extent of my education and how to hunt, and then from there just kind of figured it out. It's mind boggling how bad we were at deer hunting. Oh yeah, um, especially compared to things other things that are difficult that we had like learned how to do. We just remained bad at deer hunting because we had we like just the way the old man did it, and it just really retarded our progress. Our progress was putting dumping carrots out in the woods, man picking up dropped apples, going out to apple orchards and picking all the drops up the farm. I wasn't gonna pick and dumbkinoles out of the damn woods, And then going to Grant, Michigan and buying reject carrots missized carrots, go and fill a you could no ship. When I was looking at five bucks, you could fill the back of a pickup with carrots for five dollars. Did you do the sugar beets sometimes too? Area man, it was sure it was carrots and apples. And so we just was like, you know, my dad was like a you know, kind of a woodsman, you know what I mean. And and like, you know, you wanted to go out and catch a mink man. You're like, you have to know how to read sign right, But for deer hunt, we're just dumb. You go and go to the edge of the field because do you seem like being out in fields and find a treat. It looked like a good tree to hang a stand in and dump saging them damn carrots out, or going to woods and five or two trails came to there and dump a sack and them damn carrots out. And so you just didn't learn about deer. You didn't learn about deer. All you learn was like deer light carrots. That's the extent of my If it would have been such a favor to me, it would have been such a favor to me into my family as hunters. I'm saying it's just as policy for everyone else. I'm saying a favor to me and my family as deer hunters if you wouldn't have been allowed to do that, because then you would have had to take that same level of woodsmanship, right that it takes to catch freaking walleye in the wintertime, or it takes to get a mint to step on a one and a quarter inch circle to catch it. Um to take that two deer. But we just fell into that trap that lasted consumed a decade of my life ste of stupid bait piles. Man. Now I kind of regret it, you know. So I was on your podcast a few weeks ago and you asked me about what I thought about the food plots versus baiting debate. Are they the same thing? Are they equipped? Why is one more acceptable than one or the other? And I kind of stumbled through my my answer. I wasn't happy with how I answered it in retrospect. But Um, from outside perspective, you guys aren't involved as much in the white tail world now, and I don't think you have any involvement like food plots or habitat management or anything like other than you know, maybe having friends that do and stuff. But from an ounce from your perspective, how would you answer that question, Steve, who was it that? Um? Yeah, I was gonna talk about that guy that said he can't define poorn. He just knows that when he sees it. I don't know, it feels like it like it feels a little bit different to me. And I think that in you know, I've never grown a food plot in my life. Um, I've don't plenty of bait, you know, from the time I was eleven to the time I was nineteen twenty, we're dump bait out in the woods. Um, I don't know, there's kind of a different I guess there's sort of like a difference in in perspective and the difference in aesthetics and stuff. With the guys I know that that grow food plots, you know, they seem to have sort of like kind of like a different view of a different landscape view, And so in some way, like I weigh that into it a little bit. But yeah, I don't really know, man, I I like I I think of them differently. I think of them differently, But when I really buckled down on it, I can't really explain why I can't really come up with a reason why I think about them differently when I when I narrow down on it. You know, Um, let's say you like to hunt, you know, let's say you like to hunt black bears, and you realize that in September, black bears will get on blueberries, okay, or get on huckleberries, and you learn to hunt um blueberry huckleberry patches. And when you're up there eating blueberries and huckleberries, you always spit the seeds out and hopes that more blueberries and huckleberries grow up. Right, Let's say that that actually works, and you were like to generate some new huckleberry patch, and then later you were to kill a bear on that huckleberry patch. I would view that very differently than if I took a barrel of donuts and dumped it there. But in growing up in Michigan as white till hunters, when my brothers drew bear tags and you're out hunting these swamps in the up, these vast cedar swamps in the up where you can spend a lifetime running around out there and not running to a barry. Even there's a lot of bears around it's like a way to get a bear in range where you can see the bear and tell if it's got a cob or not. And so when you drew a bear tag, that seemed like the way to do it. If you didn't have friends that had hounds and you wanted to get a bear during a finite period of time, that was the bear seasons. Is the way we'd go out and start shooting car with our bows and freezing them and and then established some bait stations. If I've imagined if I was in that situation right now, it would probably the exact same way that I would go about it. So I know that I'm not comming to anything conclusive here, but just a different way my view on baiting. I don't care if if you if someone listen, area is legal debate and they bait, God bless them, right. But for me, I just look at that. I look at sort of the wasted chances I had to really learn about how dear use the land to learn that, rather than spending time manipulating their patterns, which is counter largely counterproductive anyways, because you put it down changes their patterns around. They become nocturnal, right they walk around the woods looking up into the trees. It's just like you kind of like change dear around anyways, it's kind of counterproductive. But I just look at and I'm like, man, it would have been really interesting to the amount of time we spent bow hunting deer had been really interesting to just buckle down and learning to damn de you're doing. Because now that I understand that stuff better, I review it back in my mind, the places we hunt, and it doesn't seem like it would have been that hard to unravel it. It wouldn't be hard to unravel it at all. If I was to go hunt those same places now, even just reviewing my mind, I know how I would hunt them. I wouldn't hunt them that way. It's interesting when you talk about, um, what you would have how you would be forced to better understand certain things. And I was, as I was thinking through this question that you asked me in retrospect later on, I was rethinking to myself, like, what are the differences in my own you know, more so than the things I mentioned. And one thing that leapt out to me is that I was kind of reflecting on this more is that you know, when I go about working on habitat and planning food plots are doing something like that. One of the most unique and what I find, um compelling parts of it for me is that when I'm doing that, i am I'm forced to learn about and to become connected to something that's very different than when I'm hunting in other ways. And by by that, I mean when you have to understand habitat, and when you start making changes to habitat, you need to understand things like the impact of sun and water and rain and soil, and and how these different forage types you know, benefit deer or other wildlife, and what all these different habitat pieces and parts, how that fits into this cycle, and how whatever changes we might make might influence things, and what wildlife benefit from And you start learning about all these different things that never would have before. I never would have started to dive into that part of this world. And to me, that's been like a really valuable thing to dive into that aspect of very interesting and it connects me again to the resource to the wildlife in a different way. That um that I've found really fulfilling and satisfying. And another piece too, and I've mentioned and you wouldn't get that by dumping the pile of carrots. And you wouldn't get that by dumping the carrots, and and and you wouldn't You wouldn't get that by just hunting a junction a funnel point either, you know. I mean I find a lot of value in getting to hunt all these different types of ways. I enjoy the ability to go on a piece of public land or somewhere where I can't change anything at all, because then you need to do nothing but understand how the deer are working the land right now, and how can I use that information to be in the right place. Then there's also something really neat and fulfilling about understanding the habitat itself and how we can make that better, how we can interact with that landscape. You're not just interacting from like a surface level, but you can actually go deeper and change things. And what that what you need to start making those decisions in a smart way, forces you to learn a lot to engage You engage with it in a different way. That's interesting. Yeah, you become kind of an ecologist, you know, or you have to have an ecological understand anything. Yeah, And I could see it if I live. If I had some uh, if I own some small chunk of land and you know there was wildlife in the area, I wasn't getting it out of my property. I could tell you that would probably become obsessed about about habitat improvements. Man, I know that would happened. And that's another thing I feel like so often as a white tailed guy with Western hunting friends, I always find myself feeling like I'm like defending myself or something, and then I feel like there's a perception sometimes and you guys can tell that this is true or not if you think from from your side of this. But I feel like a lot of guys out west the hunt in the mountains and stuff. Look at these white tail guys, is I don't know, lazy doing this easy kind of hunting. It's kind of I don't think that at all, man, I don't. I feel like you guys think we're crazy, Like you guys are playing food plots or you're doing these place like this, like where we're at right now. I come to place like this and I'm like, my god, Like the level of bio diversity, Yeah, one of the bio diversity is is phenomenal and then the pounds of life per unit of space is extremely high. It's just rich, rich environment you could have. You can be on a six hundred acre farm in Michigan. There's six hundred acre piece of property in Michigan and know that there are a lot of animals there. Right now. You could sush, you could sqush a pair of bonoculars over six d um six hundred acres of arid grassland and within a couple of minutes say that there's not a thing out there right now. It's just different, it's different different. Yeah, it's funny you mentioned next. We talked about that when the drive in. We drove separately today and I was with Garrett and uh Andy and uh I was talking about being a little nostalgic about it and comparing it to out West, and yeah, these woods are just so thick with just like you said, just biomass. You know, there's just so much going on here. I love that, you know, I love being in these woods for that reason. Just replete with life. Man, it's amazing. Um. Yeah, I don't know why. I don't know why I think that. You know, you grow up and everybody people want to hunt out west man. You know, there's there's like I think that a lot. I think the guys in Wyoming don't grow up dreaming about hunting Michigan. Okay, guys in Michigan, as much as you love it and and and do it, you kind of grow up not you kind of grow up dreaming about also being out west. And and it's this sort of natural draw on this country. I mean, if you look, there's this there's this like this Western motion. It's kind of ingrained in US historically, and I think it exists. There's kind of a romance to it, and there's a greater you know, I talked about's a lot of biodiversity here, but when it comes to large mammals, there's much like broader suite of large mammals in the West, and people are drawn to that. But I do meet a lot of guys in the mid in the Midwest who sort of have this sense of like like this a little bit of like an inferiority complex or feel that that they're sucking high and titty on the hunting world in some way that I don't see it. But that's coming from me too, from being like a generalist, right, like, like I like to hunt whatever. So I'm out and these was I'm like, man, there's tons of squirrels, tons of turkeys, tons of deer. Rivers and lakes are full of fish. You can fish the big lake, you can fish small inland lakes, you can fish streams, you can fish rivers um year round sportsman's paradise, right it just in. This is coming from a guy that left Michigan to go move to Montana. But when I'm here, I'm like, man, like, if you also put me back here, I would, right, I'd be pretty excited. But you wouldn't move back on purpose, right, I would not. It's just it's not it's not that ten years ago. But just to just again today on the drive in, I was thinking, like, you know, what wouldn't be the end of the world. Not too bad. It's not too bad. My ole man. He's always tell a story about talk about like an optimist, you know, and a pessimist. Like he talked about if you had to imagine this big room full of horseship, right, and you put a kid there and he just sits there and cries, Okay, when you're putting our kid there and he's just in there, digging, he's like with all this horse ship, there's gonna be a pony in here somewhere, you know. And so I feel like it's just like there's so much like matter of just like perception of where you are, you know, and I go like a lot of places that going. I'm like, dude, I can just picture being here and tearing it up. And when I'm in Michigan, I think like this place right right now, I'm like, my god, if I lived here, I would get after it. Yeah, And I think that's what is more important than anything, is Uh, wherever you find yourself, you still gotta put in the time and effort to be you know, everybody can sit around talking about how good or bad it is here they're nowhere. But if you if you actually hunt six or eight days a year, then who gives a ship? Right? Like, Yeah, you gotta be a guy that puts in the effort. We're talking to a guy there Day lives in Missouri, and you know, sports is paradise, just like Michigan lives in Missouri. And you talk to that guy, there's no like he's doing everything. He hunts deer, he taunting turkeys, he's bank pulling flatheads, just he's keep squirrel dogs. All that guy does is hunting fish. There's probably a lot of guys sitting around is moping around like can't afford dude. Right, there's just people like that, and there's people that tear it up. And everywhere I go around the country, you know, I meet guys like we know a boatload up now, guys like Kevin Murphy. Kevin Murphy does not sit around lamenting the location. The guy hunts and fishes NonStop, and he's like one of the better ones out there in every corner, every corner in the country you go, you're gonna find you guys like complain about what it is or or the bucks. By me, you aren't as big as the bucks in Iowa. Hunting here sucks. And then you're gonna go down and bang on the next door, and it's gonna be some guy out he's got like four kinds of boats parked in his driveway. And all the guy does is like in his from his mind, he's like living the American dream. It's just an attitude thing that's take advantage of you, gat And I think back to your original questions of like Western guys thinking that you know this white tail thing is a lazy man saying whatever. We hear that, But it's just a very very small little percentage of the overall you know people, it probably comes from the hunting media, but if you pulled most Western hunters, I don't think that they feel that way about white tail dudes. You know, No, I definitely don't know what about this. Here's another perception that the Western guys think the white tail guys are nuts. When we're sitting over here and naming the deer. What do you think about naming? Dear? Do you think I'm crazy when I had to go telling me that I'm hunting this buck named holy Field for four years? Steve's you're pondering, so hum? No, we you know, before I think it became a thing, we had named a few. It's a natural thing to do as soon as you've seen an animal twice three times. However many times it takes where you're like, that's the same one that has that broken third on the left side. Uh, that's the big six that we saw. What do we have that one time? Oh? Shocks? I remember what the name him this bowl was. That had something to do with the fence. Because every time someone saw him. Someone had seen him and it was like a nice six for us, which probably wasn't even threes. But he had just stepped over like a four strand, right, Someone had seen him step over a four strand and didn't jump. So he was known as like high stepper, high fence or something like that. But he got this name and he hung out and you know, in his zone and who he was seen three or four times before someone killed him. But anyways, we were doing that before. I kind of like it became a thing where, you know, the white tail guys really popularized, and he started seeing it in the magazines where you know, the story was about how how someone killed old deuce Um. It's hardly it's hardly an Eastern thing. If you read Hunting Full magazine, every every article in there includes the part of the paragraph where they name it, like whatever the hell I had a hunter right one of those Hunting Full stories after we killed the ball together in Arizona and that bowl was named. He started bugling at three in the afternoon. He was dead at six, and he was named in those three hours. And I didn't I didn't even know until the story came out later. But he had a very like one of the weirdest bugles I've ever heard. Was kind of like growling, but like a digitized growl. It was like a robot bull bugling. And it sounds like he almost had like issues with his larynx. It was just kind of like kind of breaking and crackling, And so in the story he came out to be the I think he was the larynx bowl. One thing that that I think one place that comes from is nameing or not naming is um. You like when you guys hunt these places out here and you study him so carefully and and like are out paying attention all throughout out the year and paying such detailed attention that you're watching a buck progressed through the years. Your level you're you're getting a level of familiarity with a particular animal that you're not going to achieve if you're kind of if you're sort of a traveling like wilderness hunter. You know, like if you in a lot of locations, especially if you're always bouncing around here and there and checking out new stuff and going on like expeditions and whatnot. Um, you're often when you get onto an animal, it's like probably the first it's gonna be the first time in your life you ever laid eyes on it and probably the last, so you don't develop that level of familiarity. I think that a lot of that it probably came out of you know, it probably came out of the also the advent of trail cameras and other things where people are sort of like looking at it in a different way. But people name. You just kind of name stuff naturally. Anyway, even if you're just sitting up on a glass and knob, there's like that one buck over there, or old Sunshine Buck or you know whatever, and you might and you might pick it up and use it for a couple of minutes to to describe what's around you and to develop a kind of a context of whose where. But then when you walk off there, you just forget the names. But imagine that you're gonna spend four years on that glass and knob, the names will become very useful. Yeah. I mean, we happened to us and we're hunting Cou's dere in Mexico this year. The whole shipload of bucks names. Yeah, I mean, just it takes hours because it just becomes a matter of efficiency when you're like, let's let's go back to where the century buck was. We had the sentry buck, normal buck, el Gagante, Dirt's buck, which didn't exist. All kinds of names sounds like normal names, right, but when we didn't has we don't have a naming process which I think you guys go through. You think you guys kind of christened. You sort of christened the deer. Like you treat it like naming a child. I wouldn't like. I wouldn't like, I like, we'll name it your Like imagine that your wife gives birth and not of her vaginaltle canal spills this slimy child. I wouldn't look over and be like the couch buck, the couch kid, right, or know the bed the bed sheet kid. But you guys will kind of be like, what are we gonna name it? What are we gonna name it? There's some truth to that, Yeah, So you treat it more like the birth of a child. When we'd be like, you know that buck, you kind of see the sunshine shining at him in a minute later, like, oh, sunshine Buck, he's over chasing the doll all of a sudden. It just but I think it does go back to what you're saying before, because whatever we call this deer, you might be referring to that animal for years, four for months, or whatever it might be. If you hadn't come up with a name, Holy Field, how in the world would you ever have managed all the conversations, remember that one, it's not practical. Well, I think before then anything came about it was just like, you know the eight point buck that we see on the back forty all the time, and that's hard to talk about. You know that one buck that hangs out by the one place. Yeah, well no I think that, but that's how they went by. It was probably like the big six, the medium six, little six. And then it just came from just saying like the number of points on their head, and that evolved into and that still has a common thing today to a lot of people. I mean many times that still has eighty eight. We weren't good enough then, all the years I spent hunting white tails, we weren't good enough, dedicated enough white tail hunters to get into a position where we would have even need to have begun naming them. When you became aware of that thing, it was because walking through the damn woods towards you. Yeah. Right, that's when he became aware. Presence weren't scientific about it. If anything gets a little funny, it's where if so much has gone into it, and you sort of can look at it as like I've almost farmed his deer, Like I probably watched him when he was a fawn. I've been feeding him off my food plots or whatever it is. Let him grow up. Um, I named him when he was young. My plan was to kill him when he was six, and then I did you know, it's agriculture. It's a different thing. And I'm not saying you shouldn't get excited about it, and it's great to get excited about it, but for me, it just it's not like, So, where's the difference though, whether you see that deer for the first time at three years old and then shoot him at six, or if you saw him as a a year and a half old. If you you're kind of if you have like if you have a little chunk, if you have a chunk of land and you're able to like sort of like limit the comings and goings, limit the access on the land, and you grow up particular crops and find his deer and you're like feeding them different supplements and sort of like taking care of him and cultivating him for this day when he will achieve maximum yield and harvest um. It's very similar to to my brother raises sheep, my brother raises lambs. It winds up seeming more like his raising of lambs for slaughter. It seems more like that than it does hunting. But I don't begrudge him the raising of lambs. I think it's he's got ten acres of irrigated pasture, why not raise some lambs on it? His friends like the meat heats deer, notlk, but his buddies right use that. I would never be like that's immoral. It's not. It's just different. It's different, Yeah, and whatever. Like we're talking about the turkey hunt earlier, we're talking about, you know, whether or not to use decoys, and you're like, well, why don't you just use decoys be instead to make it harder to use the boat. And I'm like, what I explained to Mark that I'm very happy with where my bar is set is that if without decoys, just in my calls and a shotgun, that like there's like the perfect balance of challenge and being defeated and being humbled and some success also, and it's like it's a very happy place that I'm at. And maybe in ten years I'll say, well, I am going to go to the boat or go down to a twenty gage or whatever. But that's like a nice place to be. I think, like you're saying, like taking the taking the mystery out and controlling the situation to the point where you almost know that they're gonna be in that field you know so often, Um, yeah, it changes it, but you know, nothing is why do people care someone for? People think though, like why are people why are you sensitive to it? I don't think I'm sensitive. I think it's just an interesting question. No, it's it's interesting wrestling. And it's good that we can talk about it because I think that there's a way where like, um, so we're sitting around talking about ideas around hunting and what we enjoy about hunting and don't enjoy about hunting, right, I think that it could be that something doesn't appeal to me personally. Okay, it should be that you'd be able to share that it doesn't appeal to you personally. You explain what, um, what does appeal to you personally, and none of this should be taken as a condemnation of of certain practices. Where is a wedge being driven? Yeah, it's just like amongst hunters. If we're sitting around talking about how you like your steak prepared, right, and I'm talking about how I like my steak we're prepared. No one would be like, why are you trying to drive a wedge between steak eaters. It's like I like grilled, You're like I like suvie and then I finished it with a torch, So, oh, you see, you're driving a wedge between state consumers. It's like, no, we're just talking about the different things that we like and enjoy. So in trying to articulate what I like what I see when I look at I just don't want you to take it to be that I'm somehow You know that I'm that I'm taking to be that it's somehow anything other than just like what's appealing to me. Um. So that's just the thing I noticed, and and and I view two on this step towards the agriculturalization, which isn't the word. I don't think the agriculturalization of deer hunting. When I get this idea, like taking this step towards the agriculture, the agriculturalization of deer hunting, it comes to a point where someone's like, you know what, I'm gonna string of fence, right, you can keep marching it down. You can keep marching it down into a direction, and um uh yeah, it just could march. And it marches into a place where I think that some people are just naturally gonna look and be like, wow, it just stopped. At some point. It kind of doesn't seem like hunting anymore. It seems kind of more like and like, like I said, it seems more like a gronomy, not a gronomy like egg animal husbandry. Maybe it takes out, Yeah, that's probably it. It becomes a sort of animal husbandry. And agree with you and that, Um, it's neat to be able to talk about these different ideas and different perspectives and stuff and and look at it as a way of just understanding different ways that we're seeing things versus it being adversarial or something like that. I think that's that's It's you said this a while back, But it's refreshing to be able to find people where you can't talk about these things and get those different perspectives. And it's funny you talk about like the agriculturalization of deer hunting, and it's something that when I hear that, it sounds it sounds negative, like to me, like thinking if what I'm doing is is something like that, that's that feels like that feels like it feels like a little sour to me. Um, I don't don't like that. You don't like the way I'm describing it. Not that you're describing that, but if if if that was just as I think about that for myself, I don't like the idea of of agriculturalizing my hunting or something. Um. But at the same time, like I'm involved in I do some of these things myself and it doesn't feel like that, Like what I'm doing doesn't feel like I'm farming wildlife or something. It still feels very There's a tremendous amount of work. There's a ton of hunting that I fail nine nine point nine percent the time. If if what we're talking about, you know, killing the sheep, your brother sheep, he's having a very different outcome than There's the farthest thing from a guarantee with what I'm doing or what other deer hunters that I know are doing that are participating in some kind of management habitat wise or age structure and choosing what kind of deer they're gonna take. But it's just different, and it's hard to articulate that or help someone understand that unless you are doing it. Because I can see from the outside looking in. You see all these practices and the way it stuff talked about, and it does sound like farming in some ways, but it doesn't feel that way from the inside. But I don't know how to how to make those two ends meet as I'm like thinking through all this, like why. But it's an interesting it's an interesting thing to think about, and there's there's so many different angles to think about it. So last like like I killed a nice buck in Colorado last year, and we had gone up in the area, first time we've ever been and stuff into an area, and we were hiking out in the dark and bumped a couple of big bucks in the dark dusk. And I come back up the next day and not too far away from there, I catch one of these bucks out in the stage flat and and got him very mysterious. Dear to me, I don't know it's past right, just the mysterious. You don't know where it came from out on how long I've been in the area. Now, imagine that there had been a guy who had just been hunting that buck, and he had studied that buck, and he'd been out there observing that buck all the time and watched it come up through velvet and knew where it had spent it summer, and knew that it had moved into this area, and knew when it would come out in this stage flat right, and knew that thing in and out and was trying to trying and trying to get it, and I get it. So what's what's his perspective on it? Gonna be you ship locked into some buck and I did. And he might have been like, an, I probably deserved it more when you look at the time I put into that animal, study an animal, And I would be if I confront of that person, I'd be like, you know what, bro, It's true, It's true you deserve that buck more than I did. I got him. I ship locked into him, right, But you sort of like the effort and all that. So I think it's always it always like the quality of a hunt always remains in the eye of the beholder. And the one place I think the hunters go that verges into the into the unethical, or the verges into the I don't want to use the word unethical, that just verges into bullshit territory is when you do something and you feel the need to con seal the reality of what happened. Guys that hunt high wire never put that fence in the photo. Yeah, People that shoot stuff with ear tags take the ear tags out before they take the photo. So that's like, so, what are you embarrassed about? What is it that you wish this looked like because you wish it was something other than it is. When you get to that point where you wish it had been other than it was, I think then you've trailed into stuff that's beyond just personal perception and beyond these like subjective ideas of what's right and what's wrong. At that point, you've become like where you're lying to yourself and you're lying to others. If you cultivate a piece, if you buy a piece of property, and they means ship for animals on there, because it's just like piss poor habitat, and you build it up and make the desert blooms, so to speak, and you do things and you and you do habitat improvements and put in some dead falls and tops some trees and start planting some crops and start thinking about connectivity between different properties, and all of a sudden you create like this little wildlife mecca and it's benefiting everything from bucks down to chickeneas. And all of a sudden you got moths and butterflies hanging around that you've never seen before. And you go outside and you did some water, and you hear frogs you never heard before, and you wind up shooting some tank or buck. Right, that dude gonna be so proud of. What are you accomplished? Who gives a ship? If someone else looks at and they think that there's like they don't know the full story. Now, if that guy like bought a little area and put a fence there and went and bought a deer from a guy down the road and then pumped it all up full of medications and artificial feeds and shot and then drug it out of there and took a picture of it somewhere else it's just different and everybody knows it. And I think something that comes into play here too is traditional use and not looking at it like over you know, a hundred years, but just the stuff that we grew up with in our lifetimes. Like you did the debate thing, Uh, we didn't. I didn't do it at all. Never, I've never done it. I think one time. I think one time my dad sometimes and it was a legal bait state. Yeah, one time my dad showed up with these, like I think it was like a full on incent. It was like one of those I don't know if the buck bomb thing ever took off. It was some variation of that, but literally, like an incent you're supposed to dig a little hole out, put it in there and light it and you know it's gonna attract beer. Like like I got sense yeah, um yeah, I was trying to find the singing of the version of um. But yeah, Like, so you've grown up in a world where like food plots and stuff and your career of white tails it's like just been a part of it, right, so you're just immersed in it, and it's like you're like, yeah, man, it's like what we do and it totally feels normal, you know. And but again we didn't do that either. But again, for most of my white tail life, I hunted probably six days of years for white tail. Right at the end before I left to Colorado, might have gotten up to a dozen or fifteen. Um, But like, can you still bait in Michigan? You can bait was much more regulated. It's the type of fifteenth through the end of the year, and you can't put the whole Can you run like the big feeders that you see in Texas? Not I don't think you can put as much as they put out it. You've got like a like a one gallon for five gallon bucket wherever it is that you can put out at a given time. Got it? Got it? But like, do you you don't go that down that road? Well, I don't. I don't bait, you don't I don't personally, Yeah, you don't personally bait at all. Right, but again, you know down in Texas is like that's what they do. It's legal whatever you want to do. Yeah, can I tell you another moment or do you ask about revelatory moments? Yeah? You could hunt, so you you you know, we'd hunt deer in the bow from October one until you know, then rifle seem to be November and you hunt guns for ten days and then you have this window of the late season archery. And I remember being out there. It was a year that they couldn't get the corn out because everything was too wet. Remember sitting up on a corn field and their lot property, and you finally the ground froze and he went out like this guy went out in the frozen ground and picked a bunch of corn. And this is a spot where if you saw two deer, it was a good night. And remember one night he picked this corn. As a couple of nights later and I counted ninety deer one night. Wow. And I remember that opening up the mystery of like again you could look at me like it's an artificial crop, right whatever, But to look and be to see that level of response two a landscape change, and that being how in the world did they know? How did they know? Like how did words spread? Right? So in that way, Um, yeah, it was like one of those just like it opens you up to some level of bafflement, you know, um, And I think like like invite a sort of inviting those moments of discovery. However they occur. Being like open to those moments of discovering and analyzing what's going on has kind of a value, you know, like those moments where like something happened, you can't figure it out. And I feel like those types of moments if you're open to them and like searching for them or putting yourself in a position to accept them, those kinds of things can occur no matter how you're hunting. It could be in the find new place, hunting for the first time and you get this mystery, you get this surprise, or these things happen in the moment, or it could happen where you work one little piece of ground for years and you get to learn it. The depth of those moments are different, maybe the scale of those moments are different, maybe, but you can have these really powerful, interesting, compelling, revelatory moments. I think, whether it's food plots and hanging out in one spot or brand new public land spots, and I I've been I just count myself fortunate that I've been able to experience both. And I find both of those really interesting and exciting and satisfying, but just in very different ways. But I think that kind of comes back to everything we've talked about here. There's lots of different ways to to to get some form of enjoyment or satisfaction out of a hunter that that journey, and um, it's neat to be able to see all those different facets of it. So for you guys, if you were to go back, and I know you do. You dabble a little bit of white tail hunting back, you know, Wisconsin ever once a while and stuff like that. But what would it take to get you guys back to your white tail roots? What would be that dream white tail hunt that for you would make it? Like now, that would be really cool. I want to go do that. Why hunted western white tails hard for three or four years in Nebraska, Um, but pretty different than hunting white tails here. You know again you're glassing them up. Didn't you just get a white tail last year? No? But I went on a white tail hunt. I went back to our stopping grounds in Wisconsin, your little local hidie hole. Oh yeah, I killed a dough you're right. And in the year before I killed a little buck there. But yeah, that was very much like a grocery run. You know, I'm hunting like a I'm hunting where I can see the guy's house, you know, Like I when I sit against the tree, I sit so that I'm facing away from the house, so I'm not going to shoot in that direction kind of a thing. And there's just a lot of deer there, and it's very much like like a nice way to kind of top off the freezer, you know. So yeah, yeah, no to me that it's just like I wasn't for both of those animals. I wasn't really there for like the excitement of the hunt. It was kind of like last day of the season. I got an unfilled buck tag. That's where I'm going. I'd like to have to meet whatever buck I see. I'm shooting. But but what like if you could outline your white tail hunt, that would be like really compelling for you. What would that situation be, Oh, I would just go right back to the or like the country that we get to hunt in Wisconsin is uh, it's sweet's very little agg. Was The stuff that my dad and his friends own is zero agg. We have some agg on the neighbors, so it's just big woods and uh, you know, it's hard to read the sign there. You know, I've trumped those woods a lot, and I still have like a very just my new understanding of general deer movement on these this chunk of land and it's pretty big. It's like acres, you know, pretty sizable chunk of land. And uh, you know, I had a blast hunt there last year. Never saw you know, what i'd call shoot or buck. I don't know if I saw a buck. Um. Yeah, I loved it. I had a great time. Like I said, I love hanging in these oaks and just the big wood forests. It's just you spend enough time in one place and the other place gets appealing again. Right Yeah. Yeah. For me to be doing the kind of stuff you do during the rut with my bow, sitting up perching up in different trees here and there, just watching all this stuff, oh yeah, definitely. I remember I hadn't sat in tree stay in years. At one point in time, I hadn't been in treeing a long time. And then sitting up hunting white tails. My brother and I had a couple of raccoons fighting the tree next to me and just being like, man, I kind of like the level of detail you see when you're just sitting you walk out in the woods man you think there's nothing around you sit there fifteen minutes. I'll see that's just like ten squirrels hanging around that passing through. They would have been too paranoid, but then they forget about you or having birds land on your arrow. Somebod I was just talking to you, had I will try to land on him? Wow? My brother? Yeah, my brother was telling me that he had a great horned I will come and try to land on him. Scared the ship? Wasn't that math that I just happened to? I think it was fell out of a tree. So uh yeah, I would want to come and do not for all that, I mean, that would all be like extras, but to come and and um just do another like with someone that really knows it inside out, like you, to come and have you like putting me up in a good tree with my bow doing rut and just kind of watch and all that taking place. I think it be a blast, man. We should do it. Not I'm planning on doing it all right, dude, It's like it's fascinating to me. It is, you know, another cool thing that I just thought. And this is something I thought about in the past when um talking to my friends who who who never hunted out west or someone who has hunted out west but never hunted back east. When you're talking about stand hunting versus like you know, chasing down ugling elk or something, and with what I find so cool about chasing down elk out west is that when you are fully there's something going on in the moment, so fully engaging that you can't think about anything else. Nothing else is on your mind except for the next step. What's the wind doing right now? Where am I going next? Where is it going? You are fully two thousand percent in this electric moment. I can't think about anything else. Nothing else in the world is on your mind. And that's a really cool thing to have. Like experiences like that the fully engage you to the highest possible amount, that's a really cool thing. When you're deer hunting and you're sitting a tree stand for fourteen hours straight, there's nothing you are relieved of anything else, and it opens your mind to everything now. So when else in your life do you have this quiet space in your mind to reflect on stuff, to think about things more than just what you're doing in the next ten seconds or what job do I wanted to do? Or what blah blah. You can just sit and you can breathe and you can just Yeah. I used to bring very small paperbacks. I have my have my coat kind of open where I could just read it like like like a poker player holding and could like stuff that paperback through an open button or two. You gotta be careful when you're reading in the tree stands to I'm sure, man. But up until the magic moment though, you know, because I couldn't deal with the I couldn't deal with the there's still quiet nothing, the quiet noise of your own brain. Man like that. I feel like that's an important rare thing these days, you know. Yeah, I feel like in mountain hunting, it's the in and out, like when you got a pound, you know, three or four miles in the dark either direction. Your brain gets to a similar place where you just you just kind of have to just put one ft in front of the other and you're thinking about, you know, all kinds of things. Yeah, it's cool to have those two different opportunities, Like, those two different things are really compelling in their own way, and that's what makes all this stuff pretty cool. So driving anything, driving a driving age, I don't want to do that. Any final any any final things in the white tailed world you guys want to count on before we shut this down and go think about turkeys? You any anything final white tail thoughts or other was anything we need to touch on before we hit this act? No, tidn't hit the sack mark. He kept me up too late, and then I apologize. No, man, I got nothing to add. It's like I grew up hunting them and remain interested in him, along with a whole ton of their animals that I'm interested in. Well, thanks for walking down the white tail path for at least one more night, all right, and I'm gonna take you up on the hunting thing. But now that you taught me the word gar whole, damn, I'm gonna be very sensitive. You've been being place in the gar hole. I didn't teach you garl you never I've never heard that, really, never heard sucking old. No, I would think that this is a good place to go bow fishing for garf someone that they're going to the girl like sweet, let's go hold. I feel like we need to touch on it, really, quid If anyone doesn't know if you're getting gar hold that's like you're hunting with a buddy or you're hunting with someone else and they're they're gonna say, oh, well, you should go hunting this spot. They send you to a spot to hunt, and you get done and you hunt it all day and you didn't see anything, or you get there and you're like, oh gosh, this is horrible. There's I'm sitting next to the highway or a parking lot of the tree stand, the seats missing on the tree stand, and you're just in a wide open field and there's nothing all that give this to you on purpose because he took this good spot. Yeah, you would, you would say, at least you would assume hold me, but what really? But I think it's important to designate, like if he don't like could couldn't? Can you be guard hole? Kind of by by accident, by coincidence or is it always like you're getting hosts? I think is the business well knows no one he's been garbling. Yes, it would be with intent, It would you A gar holing would be if it was done with intent, Because if a guy said to you, hey, man, you're gonna get up there and you're gonna think I goar hold you but really hear me out right then right, you might be like, wow, it seems like I feel like you're a you're in a rocky relationship if this is actually going on because one of two things he's saying, guides of garhole people. Right, No, that's what I was saying, because I have guard hold guys again, because here's my explanation to one or two things. Either you're an asshole and so you're being guard hold, or you're an asshole and you're gonna be it, because like you're not gonna I'm never gonna gar hole one of you two. It's just like I'll take the guarhole spot and give you guys the br I try to hang out with people that are sort of going through life in general that way. Yeah, And so you know, it's too short for assholes. So i'd say the time that is used, it's used in h ingest, like you're giving your buddy a hard time, like nothing happens, you come back, put me in the gar hole. It's that kind of thing. But there are some real instances. I'm so glad, like this made my night knowing that I introduced that term. Do you guys, Oh yeah, yeah, I'll use it, please do and I will take Yeah, I want to put you in to Mondo gar hole. All right, guys, thanks for being here and that is it. Quick reminder though, to hit us up on itune for a quick rating or review if you haven't yet, and then also be sure to subscribe to the Wired Hunt YouTube channel. There's lots to come there soon, so then wrap things up here. I guess I'll just finish by thanking our partners at Yedie Cooler's, Matthew's Archery, Maven Optics, Whitetail Properties and hunt ter Maps, and of course thank you all for listening. As I mentioned earlier, you are part of an amazing community. It's been just the joy of my life to serve you and share my stories and experience and lessons learned. I can't wait to see where things go next, so thanks again and until next time, stay Wired to Hunt. M