Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
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Speaker 1: find the book. Yeah, you can also read the weekly
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Speaker 1: and Henderson is often on this show, sometimes by you.
Speaker 1: He has a very relaxed, casual tone on this show.
Speaker 1: So do all that stuff and get it taken care
Speaker 1: of right away, and now for the show. Uh, dirt,
Speaker 1: I notice you're running like a like a like a
Speaker 1: chew that has a little package around like a school bandit.
Speaker 1: Why why not the normal kind of just where the
Speaker 1: little grip pieces get all over your teeth. Just keep
Speaker 1: it classy and that's nice. B and B Is that why?
Speaker 1: Well too, I don't have to spit as much, but
Speaker 1: you're spitting into that that juice bottle. Yeah, what gets
Speaker 1: me is just disgusting. Man, he's chewing gum, chewing chew
Speaker 1: and spitting in a bottle while trying to talk. Is
Speaker 1: that nicotine gum? No? No. One of my favorite stories
Speaker 1: of Dirts is he had a girlfriend um Don in
Speaker 1: Arkansas and he was down there spitting all over the
Speaker 1: yard visiting her family, and the old man took him aside.
Speaker 1: Were more liberal people who were barefoot most of the time.
Speaker 1: You don't think conservatives go barefoot. These guys, I have
Speaker 1: a lot of conservative views, and I like going barefoot
Speaker 1: in my yard. You wouldn't like stepping on wet grasp
Speaker 1: right then either. That's this guy didn't didn't like me
Speaker 1: spitting where he was stepping. But I don't think that
Speaker 1: has a That's not a function of his. Uh, that's
Speaker 1: not a function of his of his politics. That's true.
Speaker 1: They were. They were thinking like a conservative would be like, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: one thing I like is walking and choose spit. That's true.
Speaker 1: I do think politics influence people. For like you know
Speaker 1: I've brought many times, is that that um being gluten
Speaker 1: intolerance seems to be a left wing ailment. But I
Speaker 1: don't think a lack of a desire to walk around
Speaker 1: and choose spit is part of the political polite. It was.
Speaker 1: They were right on telling me not to do that.
Speaker 1: So they were right wing. They were correct. They were correct. Yes,
Speaker 1: I stopped. I'd spit out on the back forty instead,
Speaker 1: you'd take a little walk stood over the fence of
Speaker 1: the high grass area. Was courteous. Yeah, um, Dirk, did
Speaker 1: you know that? Uh? You know what the word ursus means.
Speaker 1: I know the constellation Ursus minor. Yeah, okay, Ursus is
Speaker 1: the bear family. I didn't know that. Did you know that?
Speaker 1: Of the that the the ursus with the greatest distribution
Speaker 1: is the brown bear slash grizzly bear. No. I believe
Speaker 1: it though, Yeah, because you know Eurasia right, connection just
Speaker 1: has the widest distribution of any bear. There's many versions
Speaker 1: of it now, it's you know, they used called the
Speaker 1: grizzly bear Ursus criblis, which is bad pr because horrible. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So when you get like a Linnaean name, you have
Speaker 1: I feel we talked about this before, like the Latin name, right,
Speaker 1: it's from Linnaeus, and Linnaeus came up with the way
Speaker 1: we name animals. So the domestic dog is you know
Speaker 1: can is familiaris right, that's its Linnaean name. Uh, we
Speaker 1: are homo sapien so self aware of human, self aware
Speaker 1: of homedan um. I don't think we have covered this.
Speaker 1: We haven't covered nan are we homo sapien sapien? Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: see that's like that's when things have h that's called
Speaker 1: trinomial nomenclature. So the brown bear slash grizzly bear is
Speaker 1: Ursus arctos. But there's ursus arctos arctos, or some people
Speaker 1: like like take take the American bison or American buffalo.
Speaker 1: There is there used to be this idea that we
Speaker 1: had bison bison, bison, which was the planes animal, and
Speaker 1: then bison bison athabaska, which was the wood buffalo of
Speaker 1: the boreal forest. And we used to just make the
Speaker 1: you know, these determinations were made oftentimes by morphological differences,
Speaker 1: so you would look and like, let's look at the
Speaker 1: structure of an animal, the visual appearance of an animal
Speaker 1: and draw distinctions. But then once we started getting once
Speaker 1: genetics got involved, it started showing us that things that
Speaker 1: we thought that measured by that parameter, by the genetic markers,
Speaker 1: things that we thought were very simple, Some things we
Speaker 1: thought were very similar are in fact not similar at all.
Speaker 1: That just happened to like accidentally arrive at a place
Speaker 1: where they kind of look the same, right, And an
Speaker 1: extreme version would be birds fly and dragonflies fly, So
Speaker 1: someone would go like they must be closely related, but
Speaker 1: in fact they came to flight through very different paths. Okay,
Speaker 1: so there you have a thing where like um convergent evolution.
Speaker 1: So yeah, like ideas about convergent and divergent evolution. But
Speaker 1: in those cases like they're similarity that there's things that
Speaker 1: we would see and someone would be like, oh, they're
Speaker 1: similar because they both blank. But we realize that doesn't
Speaker 1: denote like a close related nous. So genetics dispelled some
Speaker 1: of those misunderstandings, but it also showed us that some
Speaker 1: things that we thought were very different are in fact
Speaker 1: very close together. Like for instance, that the ABC Islands
Speaker 1: in Alaska, Admiralty bearing Off and what's that chick under
Speaker 1: the name, It's Admiralty Island bearing Off Island, and then uh,
Speaker 1: the Sea Island. They're together there. The polar bears that
Speaker 1: those okay, those bears on that island are like Ursus arctos. Okay,
Speaker 1: so they're like coastal brown bears. Will get more into
Speaker 1: this in a second. Chickagolf Chickergolf Island, Chickagolf Island. I
Speaker 1: think it's there's there's in both places. Oh alright, so
Speaker 1: that one anyway, polar bears are are a recent offshoot
Speaker 1: of Ursus arctos. So polar bears are if you're just
Speaker 1: from a genetic perspective, polar bears aren't are almost like
Speaker 1: a cousin of or almost like a clade of brown bears,
Speaker 1: and polar bears are very closely related to the brown
Speaker 1: bears of the ABC Islands, even though those brown bears
Speaker 1: tend to be darker than other brown bear, grizzly bears
Speaker 1: and other parts of the world. So coloration. If you're like,
Speaker 1: oh there, you're like you, you might look and be like, okay,
Speaker 1: the in the bears of interior North Alaska. So the
Speaker 1: grizzlies of the Brooks Range are tend to be blond.
Speaker 1: So someone might be like, oh so if if polar
Speaker 1: bears are shoot off of grizzly brown bears, I would
Speaker 1: imagine they're shoot off of those very blond ones that
Speaker 1: are already in the Arctic on the north slope of
Speaker 1: the Brooks Range, when in fact, those bears are not
Speaker 1: tightly related as tightly related to polar bears as are
Speaker 1: the brown bears of the ABC Islands. Now where is
Speaker 1: that going from there? Oh So, another added thing of
Speaker 1: that is this is the point I was trying to
Speaker 1: get at, because I'm trying to go way deep. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna talk about a grizzly bear semi attack, but I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go I'm going way deep because here's the thing.
Speaker 1: I just want to clarify a point that brown bears
Speaker 1: and grizzly bears are all ursus arctos. We used to
Speaker 1: have We used to have this idea that we had
Speaker 1: all these different subspecies of bears, all right, So we
Speaker 1: had like the Kodiac brown bear, which are the biggest
Speaker 1: ones in the world. Um. Then you have like polar
Speaker 1: bears that's their own thing, arctists maritimas or something like
Speaker 1: the artist maritimeas, something like that, like marine bear um
Speaker 1: is regarded as a different species though very closely related.
Speaker 1: And then you have like the grizzly bears of the
Speaker 1: lower forty eight and the interior Northern Canada. Those are
Speaker 1: all one species. And the way they talk about in
Speaker 1: genetics is they talk about it being clades, so rather
Speaker 1: than subspecies, they now talk about clades or like genetic
Speaker 1: groupings of bears that are all kind of the same thing.
Speaker 1: But in hunting Lingo and around, you'll be able to
Speaker 1: chime in on this, Okay, and hunting Lingo, when someone
Speaker 1: says a brown bear, what they're referring to is a
Speaker 1: coastal grizzly of Alaska. Correct, But now I've always understood
Speaker 1: though grizzly bears are brown bears, but not all brown
Speaker 1: bears are referred to as grizzly bears. See what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: A brown bear is a grizzly, So grizzly can be
Speaker 1: a brown bear or a grizzly, But you can't call
Speaker 1: a brown bear a grizzly because it's completely like you're saying.
Speaker 1: If you were in Wyoming, you would not be able
Speaker 1: to say, hey, I saw a brown bear, or you
Speaker 1: would be able to say I saw a brown bear.
Speaker 1: A grizzly is a brown bear. A brown bear is
Speaker 1: not a grizzly. The word grizzly is a delineation of
Speaker 1: where they live. So so you would be incorrect saying
Speaker 1: a grizzly on Kodiak Island by okay, but but but
Speaker 1: what yes, if we're if we're switching the hunting lingo, okay,
Speaker 1: then yes, but even normally you know, yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: the brown bears. Correct, Yeah, we're talking. Yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that if you yeah, if you're talking like
Speaker 1: in nan like scientific lingo, it would be that a
Speaker 1: grizzly is a form of brown bear. Correct, Yes, but
Speaker 1: just to clarify because people always get that confused. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: is a brown bear. A brown bear is not a
Speaker 1: coastal grizzly. A grizzly is an inland brown bear. It
Speaker 1: doesn't go both ways, That's what. Yeah, that's what I'm
Speaker 1: trying to get at this point. So that that's that's
Speaker 1: a good clarification. Like if you want to go read
Speaker 1: about the whole broad general family of of of these
Speaker 1: types of bears of Ursus arctos, correct, that you would
Speaker 1: begin the top of the funnel, right, we're talking about
Speaker 1: the funnels earlier. The top of the funnel would be
Speaker 1: brown bears, and then from there you will find your
Speaker 1: way into the himlayan brown bear, the the interior rocky mountains,
Speaker 1: grizzly bears. These are all classifications of brown bears brown bears.
Speaker 1: So but in like in in the way we in
Speaker 1: the way that hunting type dudes use the term. Now
Speaker 1: when we're talking about a grizzly, we're talking about a
Speaker 1: a grouping of brown bears that that do not live
Speaker 1: in coastal environments and do not have access to salmon. Correct,
Speaker 1: they're not exploiting marine resources. They are in the interior.
Speaker 1: Those bears tend to be to have a grizzled appearance.
Speaker 1: They tend to be silvery blonde lighter and you're coastal
Speaker 1: bears tend to be coastal brown. Bears tend to be
Speaker 1: darker brown, running to chocolate. The bears the the largest
Speaker 1: of this whole group of bears which are many and
Speaker 1: varied from Romania and the Himalaya all over damn place.
Speaker 1: The largest ones live on uh the Kodiak Archipelago, which
Speaker 1: includes a fog Knack Island, Fog Raspberry, Kodiak and do
Speaker 1: we talk about this the other day? And the Alaska
Speaker 1: Financia did we talk about this the other day? That
Speaker 1: those bears, the bears on Kodiak and the fog Knack
Speaker 1: and Raspberry have been genetically isolated for ten thousand years
Speaker 1: to be cover this we touch it, ok. So they've
Speaker 1: been off doing their own on their own vibe for
Speaker 1: a long time. Big mo fosi, as my son would say,
Speaker 1: no bad mofos. He doesn't know what a mofo actually
Speaker 1: spells out Toobody knows that there are animals that are
Speaker 1: counted as bad mo fos um Uh that's I'm just
Speaker 1: laying a little unnecessary groundwork for for for what's gonna
Speaker 1: come next. Uh. Now, where we left off on the
Speaker 1: last episode, we were fixing to do some l cotton
Speaker 1: on a fognack and just as a primer, But if
Speaker 1: you watch television, you'll know certain television shows, after every
Speaker 1: commercial break, they they out of a courtesy, as a
Speaker 1: courtesy to the viewer and also as a courtesy to
Speaker 1: their budget, spend some minutes just recapping what they covered
Speaker 1: a moment ago, which saves them money in production and
Speaker 1: also like gives you, keeps you up to speed if
Speaker 1: you just joined in the program. We uh me and
Speaker 1: Remy Warren drew some elk tags on a fog Neck island.
Speaker 1: And the fog Neck Island is just separated from Kodiak
Speaker 1: Island by a narrow straight and I remember the name
Speaker 1: now that might not be the exact pronunciation, but and
Speaker 1: raspberry straight. Yeah, lots of out here has a Roosky name,
Speaker 1: a Russian name, Russian name. And then there's shellakof which
Speaker 1: is the big more open ocean between the mainland. That's
Speaker 1: the rough, real rough seas there. Since we did the
Speaker 1: real clumsy uh and since we did a real clumsy
Speaker 1: recap of of general Bear tax on, I mean, let's
Speaker 1: do a real clumsy recap of uh Coastal Alaska history. Now,
Speaker 1: the uh, the Russians were real heavy, worked real heavy
Speaker 1: in this area, and they were in the you know
Speaker 1: that they would use this area for fur trading so
Speaker 1: um seal and they'd come in here primarily targeting sea
Speaker 1: otters or buying sea otters from indigenous hunters, um wailing
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff. And then we bought it. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, Seward bought it for like five bucks, and
Speaker 1: people were real mad at the time that he got
Speaker 1: ripped off and turned out he got himself into a
Speaker 1: gold mine. Um So, that's how this place came into
Speaker 1: us ownership. It wasn't five bucks, but he got a scream.
Speaker 1: I'm being I'm being an extreme here in in my
Speaker 1: uh in my assessments of what he paid for it,
Speaker 1: But yeah, he gotta scream and deal on it. People
Speaker 1: were kind of piste. They called it the words folly.
Speaker 1: I thought he got ripped, but in the end, I
Speaker 1: mean he the guy did a great turn for his country.
Speaker 1: Um So in some of the areas in Coastal Alaska.
Speaker 1: There's like still kind of a Russian influence and names
Speaker 1: you notice in this area in particulars a lot of
Speaker 1: Russian names in this area from the long even the
Speaker 1: airport English and Russian. Is it really? Uh? Now, so
Speaker 1: we drew these these these these elk tags. Now a
Speaker 1: fog Neck Island does not traditionally have elk. And the
Speaker 1: elk they captured I think nineteen or twenty calves in
Speaker 1: the early decades of the d from the Olympic Peninsula.
Speaker 1: When I'm in my bedroom looking out of my bedroom window,
Speaker 1: I'm looking at descend, I'm looking at the home range,
Speaker 1: the former home range of the elk that now live
Speaker 1: on a fog Neck. And they did two releases. One
Speaker 1: of the releases was just calves. What you think would
Speaker 1: have just gotten wiped. The fact that that worked is
Speaker 1: mind boggling. Yeah, I can't. That just seems like, hey,
Speaker 1: what's this old boss cow right without some boss cow
Speaker 1: who's got some background and dealing with bears. Just surprising
Speaker 1: that they could have lived. And it wasn't even many.
Speaker 1: It was eight Roosevelt elk calves captured on the Olympic
Speaker 1: Peninsula of Washington State. Nine and then they didn't even
Speaker 1: caught him loose till twenty nine, So somehow kept the
Speaker 1: sons bitches alive for a year, turn them loose on
Speaker 1: that hell whole. But the thing they had going for
Speaker 1: him is a familiar terrain like dank, just dank wet is.
Speaker 1: The Olympic PENNSA is pretty steep too, is it. I
Speaker 1: mean it goes from sea level straight up through this
Speaker 1: vicious it's viciously steep, viciously thick. Guys that can go,
Speaker 1: you know, guys that can routinely go in there on
Speaker 1: public ground and kill Elk in Coles, the coastal Washington. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like, I haven't done it once. I haven't. I
Speaker 1: haven't even given it a shot. I haven't been there
Speaker 1: that long and haven't really given it much. I haven't
Speaker 1: given it any shot yet. But I've know enough to
Speaker 1: know that a dude who can consistently fill it Elk
Speaker 1: tag in coastal Washington on public ground is a hunter's hunter.
Speaker 1: Bad mofo, Yeah, bad mo foe. That's consistently doing that.
Speaker 1: Jason Phelps, he cut his teeth on that. The game
Speaker 1: call maker, Jason Phelps, that's his world, man. So the
Speaker 1: fact that like that him and his buddies like do
Speaker 1: it is testament to It's just it's just like nothing
Speaker 1: like you got up on some glass and tits like
Speaker 1: spying on elk and then seeing over and getting them.
Speaker 1: You're just in there shaking hands with him for those
Speaker 1: dudes like you know, the whole like sixty yard pin.
Speaker 1: It's like if you're getting shot, it's ten yards yeah,
Speaker 1: top pin. Yeah you don't. You can't anyhow, So they
Speaker 1: got these out from there, kidnapped him. I got a
Speaker 1: question later on me and maybe premature that was a chair. Um,
Speaker 1: but did those the elk they got relocated to fog
Speaker 1: Neck have have their size and like general demeanor paralleled
Speaker 1: the native Olympia Olympic Peninsula elk. That's a great question.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you asked it. Uh, Roosevelt elk are the
Speaker 1: biggest of the elk a body size, So so you
Speaker 1: have for elk man, let's turn into a tax on him.
Speaker 1: The episode for elk from Hunting Perspective, Elker, elk all
Speaker 1: got the same damn in name. But we break them up,
Speaker 1: um uh, we break them up in a different classifications.
Speaker 1: They're definitely not subspecies, but classifications Rocky Mountain totally Roosevelt. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I guess now I could live in like two places,
Speaker 1: yeah well yeah, coastal California, the valley right, yeah well yeah,
Speaker 1: from like Bishop to the coast. But and then there's
Speaker 1: um that maybe they aren't around anymore, Manito Banilk, Manitoban elk,
Speaker 1: and they may have been larger than Roosevelt's but now
Speaker 1: currently in Roosevelt because what was the native elk of
Speaker 1: like Michigan in Wisconsin. Probably, I don't probably Manitoban. I'm
Speaker 1: not positive because those reintroduction efforts were all done with
Speaker 1: Rocky Mountains. Yeah, I think that elk was probably it
Speaker 1: was probably large. Was extrapated. Man a lot of like, yeah,
Speaker 1: hear you on this fact checking, man, I am. You
Speaker 1: can also like you can you can also throw in
Speaker 1: out freshwords that expensive. I really want to get my
Speaker 1: new sand volleyball court lines out. So you got your
Speaker 1: backlog down fact checking, honestly, just marriam elk. You could
Speaker 1: also throw in their um Manitoban. As Remy said, eastern
Speaker 1: elk Um, I'd had to dive a little bit farther
Speaker 1: to see what they think is still alive or not
Speaker 1: but the main species are the tool the rocky Mountain,
Speaker 1: and the Roosevelt. The Roosevelt or the largest bodied rocky
Speaker 1: mountain are the largest antlers, and just in configuration in size,
Speaker 1: I would say the tool oak or the smallest body
Speaker 1: and their antlers grow more like a red deer, which
Speaker 1: is a crowned effect at the tops. Just to get
Speaker 1: a picture. Yeah, now, just to make just so people,
Speaker 1: just so listeners don't think we're dumb for not knowing
Speaker 1: to all the answers here. A lot of the answers
Speaker 1: are unresolved. For instance, for instance, of all the types
Speaker 1: of big horn sheep, there used to be an idea
Speaker 1: that there was also the Audubon big horn. And the
Speaker 1: Audubon big horn was an eastern Montana in the Dakota
Speaker 1: bad Lands, Okay, and it had been shot out by
Speaker 1: miners and killed out by the introduction of domestic sheep
Speaker 1: and and through disease introductions from domestic sheep. Now there's
Speaker 1: questions of like is the audubon sheep, was it legitimately
Speaker 1: its own sheep, or was it just a rocky mountain.
Speaker 1: So when you get in all this taxon taxonomic stuff,
Speaker 1: it's like there used to be like a set of
Speaker 1: understandings that is just getting that is getting eroded by
Speaker 1: inputs of new information. Like for at a time, I
Speaker 1: think that people talked about thirty four types of cariboo
Speaker 1: or some crazy thing like that, and now that list
Speaker 1: has been greatly reduced to now all caribou and reindeer
Speaker 1: of North America, Europe and Asia are not regarded as
Speaker 1: the same species, different clades of the same species from
Speaker 1: a genetic perspective. So where we are we Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: So they take these caves and the Limpic peninsula, cut
Speaker 1: them loose out there, and then they do another introduction
Speaker 1: and eventually that herd on a fog neck gets built up.
Speaker 1: You might go like, well, why would you go and
Speaker 1: turn a bunch of animals that don't belong somewhere loose somewhere.
Speaker 1: And that's a great question because it's a practice that
Speaker 1: we were engaged in very heavily in the early nineteen
Speaker 1: hundreds that were not engaged in now. You would never
Speaker 1: get the green light now to go and establish a
Speaker 1: population of elk on an island where they were not native,
Speaker 1: because the fear would be that you were going to
Speaker 1: upset a delicate ecological balance. But in the early nine
Speaker 1: hundreds and prior to that in other places, there was
Speaker 1: just this idea that all animals should just be everywhere
Speaker 1: that they that it would kind of work, particularly big
Speaker 1: game animals. So on Kodiak they cut loose black tailed deer,
Speaker 1: which you're not native there. They cut loose mountain goats,
Speaker 1: which are not native there. They cut loose elk on
Speaker 1: neighboring a fog neck, which are not native there, as
Speaker 1: well as as reindeer they call reindeer because they were
Speaker 1: a domestic herd that ended up just becoming fairal so caribou.
Speaker 1: So you would never, like you would never in a
Speaker 1: million years get to go ahead to do that. Now.
Speaker 1: A lot of it too, yes, a lot of it too,
Speaker 1: I think has to do with the way if you
Speaker 1: if you lived on Kodiak Island during this time when
Speaker 1: they introduce these animals, you're looking around, You're going, well,
Speaker 1: this is a land of plenty, but there's not a
Speaker 1: lot of red meat running around. There's bears, and there's fish,
Speaker 1: and there is no way to get food to Kodiak Island.
Speaker 1: So everywhere else in Alaska you can set up a
Speaker 1: settlement and you can go shoot a moose. You can
Speaker 1: go shoot a but you're gonna get sick of eating
Speaker 1: brown bear meat, I would imagine, So they release these
Speaker 1: sick from it. So they release these animals primarily as
Speaker 1: a food source to get people. They come and go, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I can live off the land here. I'll start a
Speaker 1: settlement and I'll raise a family, and I'll do whatever,
Speaker 1: and we'll make you're you're act like I'm making a
Speaker 1: value judgment. No, no, no, I'm just saying I'm just yeah,
Speaker 1: the rationale of like why then it was even thought of. Now, okay,
Speaker 1: let me lay this one on you, because you're you're
Speaker 1: like you you you're at this point in news for
Speaker 1: for an American. You're an expert on New Zealand as
Speaker 1: far as Americans go, I'm not talking about Okay, New Zealand.
Speaker 1: When they were doing all these introductions, they were they
Speaker 1: were doing introductions earlier there than they are here than
Speaker 1: they were here. But there was committees called familiar like
Speaker 1: familiar familiarization committees who whose goal would be like sort
Speaker 1: of the equivalent of a conservation group today, called the
Speaker 1: familiar familiarization committee, I believe, whose goal was to establish
Speaker 1: the fauna of Europe into New Zealand to make it
Speaker 1: more like home. Yeah. So when you're in the park
Speaker 1: and you see a red squirrel running boy, you're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes sense. So it was like people just then
Speaker 1: we're into yeah for for all kinds of motivations were into,
Speaker 1: like why not have more game animals on the land?
Speaker 1: Sounds good to me. The funny thing about it to
Speaker 1: me is that you would never get it to go today,
Speaker 1: probably not because now you need to establish that it
Speaker 1: was present and was extirpated by human causes in order
Speaker 1: to do in order to do and we don't do introductions,
Speaker 1: we do reintroductions. If you can establish it it was
Speaker 1: historically present and wiped out by people. This wouldn't fit
Speaker 1: though during the place the scene, there was an elk
Speaker 1: in interior Alaska, but they cut them loose here because
Speaker 1: like why not, why not have more meat on the ground.
Speaker 1: What's funny about it to me is that you have
Speaker 1: those those introductions that occurred and they manage them in perpetuity,
Speaker 1: even though they would never get the green light to
Speaker 1: establish it now. So they're like, well they're here now,
Speaker 1: now we're going to manage it. In a conservative fashion,
Speaker 1: like they don't want them to explode in numbers. And
Speaker 1: they were able to control the valve through how many
Speaker 1: hunting permits they issue, um, so inadvertently, I think I
Speaker 1: now believe they made the most difficult elk hunting on
Speaker 1: the planet, um by Cotton. These elk loose on a
Speaker 1: fog knack island. If I could go back in time,
Speaker 1: I would find the guy that came up with that
Speaker 1: idea and I would punch him in the baby. So
Speaker 1: where are we left that? We were fixing to do
Speaker 1: some hunting and it was foggy, Um, you couldn't see
Speaker 1: ship and ray, rainy and foggy, miserable camping conditions at times,
Speaker 1: miserable camping conditions. But Remy had done the hunt before
Speaker 1: on a fog knack and we were kind of like
Speaker 1: following our hunt play was the mimic Remy's previous hunt plan.
Speaker 1: Like Remy, just like I don't I can't tell you
Speaker 1: what's gonna happen. I don't really know if it works
Speaker 1: like it worked before. Um, and we can find them
Speaker 1: in a valley I found him in. It's just gonna
Speaker 1: come down to will we get a chance to like
Speaker 1: have a look. Will the weather cooperate? If the weather cooperates,
Speaker 1: it's not gonna be. It's not going to be that.
Speaker 1: It's a challenging hunt. It's just a challenging like set
Speaker 1: of experiences, right because you've got to get through the
Speaker 1: shitty weather to get to the point where you can
Speaker 1: shoot one. Then you have to get that one that
Speaker 1: you shoot back to camp. And the terrain lends itself
Speaker 1: very poorly to easily getting back to camp, No two
Speaker 1: ways about it. It sucks walking through it looks nice.
Speaker 1: You could watch the episode say I would make it
Speaker 1: there in an hour, not four hours later, you're gonna
Speaker 1: be slogging through stuff, really discouraged. Well, we can put
Speaker 1: some numbers to it. It took us five hours to
Speaker 1: travel two point seven miles, yeah, the way the crow
Speaker 1: flies two point seven miles as Yeah, so two point
Speaker 1: to cover two point seven miles as the crow flies,
Speaker 1: just you know, with your travel route deviating from that
Speaker 1: straight line from just from topographical features. Took five hours
Speaker 1: to travel and that's like, that's that's hard hiking. That
Speaker 1: was yeah, hiking for five hours straight, not doing during
Speaker 1: refers to as Jimmy Dicken. We were just very well
Speaker 1: could be double the actual distance. Yeah, I think, but
Speaker 1: you can't. You can't. There's no such thing as walking
Speaker 1: a straight line, and there's some major climbing involved in between,
Speaker 1: and that made you're climbing. I just the way that brushes.
Speaker 1: I feel like it's it's very similar to walking through
Speaker 1: knee deep snow or foot igh snow. The amount of
Speaker 1: energy going through that, I think it's even worse because
Speaker 1: like if you get if you get in a situation
Speaker 1: where the tall grass or like the authors grab your leg,
Speaker 1: then you trip, and you don't have that in snow,
Speaker 1: you know, so like you're expending energy trying to keep
Speaker 1: yourself up and like the brush gets too thick. It's
Speaker 1: like waiting through snow men. It's like, yeah, who can
Speaker 1: grab it? Tiny snow man? Who want to knock you down?
Speaker 1: The whole time? Um, hold on, I want to go
Speaker 1: back to the point about it being double. Let me explain. Okay,
Speaker 1: not only are you going zig zagging right, because we
Speaker 1: like you're going away from camp to get to a
Speaker 1: pass and then you go across the ridge up over
Speaker 1: the you know, the top of a you know, a
Speaker 1: small knoll to another pass to then go down. So
Speaker 1: you've got the zig and the zag. But then also
Speaker 1: you figure when you're going up, like you said, like
Speaker 1: Camp's only twenty over that pass, right, because you're at
Speaker 1: the top of the pass and you're looking almost straight
Speaker 1: down at Camp, and so that that um linear distance
Speaker 1: as the crow flies is only whatever, what is it,
Speaker 1: five yards? Eight hundred yards? Right, Like you can make
Speaker 1: the shot with a rifle almost you're actually going down
Speaker 1: twice that at the top of that peak we had
Speaker 1: to go over. You're at fifteen fifty and Camps at
Speaker 1: three fifty, and you could definitely lob a two round
Speaker 1: down into your tent, not lob you could shoot a
Speaker 1: twenty two round down into your tent from that peak. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it's so steep. Yeah, it's it's is steep as
Speaker 1: you'd want to walk without ropes. Probably. I'm just saying
Speaker 1: that there's a lot of distance it's not accounted for.
Speaker 1: When you talk about it wasn't factoring in the zig
Speaker 1: or the zag. I was factoring in just the you know,
Speaker 1: up and down. Yeah. Now, on a trail, you're going
Speaker 1: several miles an hour. A good hiker is covering few
Speaker 1: miles an hour on a trail, so that's the thing.
Speaker 1: So anyways, we finally get like, you can't hunt. This
Speaker 1: is a generalization generally, with notable exceptions. One cannot fly
Speaker 1: in the hunt on the same day in Alaska um
Speaker 1: because it would encourage the practice of locating animals from
Speaker 1: the air landing you're planing and shooting at them, which
Speaker 1: they don't typically want. And in the places where you
Speaker 1: can fly and hunt on the same day, our places
Speaker 1: where that doesn't where the quarry isn't really conducive to
Speaker 1: that kind of approach anyway. Like generally, like hunting blacktail deer,
Speaker 1: it just generally doesn't line out that you would like
Speaker 1: find a blacktail from your plane, land and shoot it.
Speaker 1: That is a different kind of critter in a different
Speaker 1: kind of habitat caribou, it would work out real well,
Speaker 1: and you're not allowed to do it, and you to
Speaker 1: let have a night passed and you hunt the next day.
Speaker 1: So we couldn't hut the first day with it, not
Speaker 1: that we had the opportunities anyways. Then the next day
Speaker 1: just fog um and then we hiked up to a
Speaker 1: spot where we could look down into a valley known
Speaker 1: to be frequented by elk Um based off Ramy's past
Speaker 1: experiences and in conversations with pilots who fly over the
Speaker 1: area all the time. And then I just walked up,
Speaker 1: said wow, it's real foggy, walked back down soaked. The
Speaker 1: next day, walked up, said wow, it's real foggy, and
Speaker 1: walked back down so well. The next day walked up,
Speaker 1: said wow, it's real foggy. And then we decided to
Speaker 1: hang out. That was a third day or what day
Speaker 1: was the day that we walked through the real brushy ship.
Speaker 1: That was the second day. He was on our way
Speaker 1: up to see that it was foggy. Yeah, that was
Speaker 1: the third day we flew. We hiked up to the
Speaker 1: top direct. Third day was the lake hike. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: stayed low and then up, I'm just clarifying in my
Speaker 1: own mind, straight up and said, man, it's foggy. Start
Speaker 1: to see whisperings, whisperings of clearness coming and going. Devoted
Speaker 1: a lot of time to try and to start a fire,
Speaker 1: put up some tarps to get out of the rain,
Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden, I wouldn't make like
Speaker 1: an angel noise, but it wasn't like an angel like
Speaker 1: clearing it was like clouds would blow through. We're staying fog.
Speaker 1: You're not. It's not far rain. You're in the clouds.
Speaker 1: Clouds rain, You're in a cloud. It's not far white room.
Speaker 1: You're just like up in it. You're like in the
Speaker 1: thing when it's raining, the thing that's the rains falling
Speaker 1: out of your standing in that thing. Fog sounds nice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you climb up into a cloud and then there's like
Speaker 1: rain happening around you. It's like a garden hose with
Speaker 1: a mist setting on all the time. Yeah, exactly. But
Speaker 1: these clouds would blow and there'd be gaps between the clouds.
Speaker 1: And during the gaps between these clouds, were looking down
Speaker 1: and lo and behold, um, two point four miles away,
Speaker 1: a bull is standing there like kind of like scent
Speaker 1: from the heavens. And then the bull promptly vantages and
Speaker 1: vanishes into a little thicket. And then we notice in
Speaker 1: a creek bed down below the bowl, we noticed what
Speaker 1: looks like two or three other elk that make a
Speaker 1: little real quick appearance, and they were they were quite
Speaker 1: a ways off, and so we started hoofing down towards
Speaker 1: these elk. Uh travel that distance, it took a lot
Speaker 1: of time. So now it's already into the afternoon, right yeah,
Speaker 1: late afternoon, and no time to stop for lunch, not
Speaker 1: even have time to eat food. And find the bull
Speaker 1: that we saw. Find the bull that was sent from
Speaker 1: the heavens to walk out of a walk out of
Speaker 1: a alder patch and present himself for view. Find him
Speaker 1: beded up on a little high spot, a little high grassy,
Speaker 1: a grassy knole, and get a and here in this
Speaker 1: area it's like all grass like, kind of like waste
Speaker 1: high grass, some chest high grass, some knee high muck.
Speaker 1: And then here and there a big gass spruce tree.
Speaker 1: We get a big gas spruce tree between us and
Speaker 1: the bull, and the bulls laying there and lays there
Speaker 1: for a long time, right up until the point where
Speaker 1: we get about yards away from it, and I'm getting
Speaker 1: ready to prop my rifle up and take a poke
Speaker 1: at him, should he stand up, and he just walks
Speaker 1: and vanishes. Crazy. At this point we start talking about
Speaker 1: how maybe it's getting a little late to be trying
Speaker 1: to do this. That was that like probably three thir
Speaker 1: for Yeah, we're saying it might we might, even though
Speaker 1: it's not dark, it might be getting into foolish territory. Hm.
Speaker 1: But continue on to be shooting because we have to
Speaker 1: remember we're still in that giant bear country, but we
Speaker 1: have yet to see a bear. Yeah, evidence of bears,
Speaker 1: like bears walk in the lake where camped down had
Speaker 1: had had what seemed like it must have been a
Speaker 1: pretty healthy sock i run, just based on the amount
Speaker 1: of carcasses strewn around on the beach, some bears feeding
Speaker 1: on them. And while we were in there, there was
Speaker 1: a lot of steelhead in there, and a lot of
Speaker 1: of cohos or silvers are in there as well, And
Speaker 1: so you'd see some bear tracks uh on the beach
Speaker 1: and then you'd kind of stop them out and find
Speaker 1: a new bear track on the beach. And one day
Speaker 1: on one of the trails up by of the pass,
Speaker 1: we had bear tracks on our tracks. So they're around,
Speaker 1: but had laid eyes on them. And but you're you're
Speaker 1: aware of their presence, and you're mainly wear of the
Speaker 1: presence because your whole life you've been like hearing about
Speaker 1: Kodiak bears, right, the bad mo fo's who endorned the
Speaker 1: you ten us what did you say, arsus used to
Speaker 1: be so they got tangled up with him a little
Speaker 1: bit um now, so we keep pressing on and kind
Speaker 1: of give up on the bull that we knew about.
Speaker 1: Remy ripped a few bugles, did some cow call, and
Speaker 1: nothing in the world was gonna stand that, or we
Speaker 1: didn't know what he did. He laughed, laid down, couldn't
Speaker 1: locate him, couldn't find him. Can I say something, please?
Speaker 1: Something that gave me a perspective on the like the
Speaker 1: heights of the ship you're walking through, was when that
Speaker 1: elk disappears. So it's like on any other hunt, you'll
Speaker 1: see an animal going to a small like timber standard
Speaker 1: tree stand. You're like, yeah, of course it could disappear.
Speaker 1: This elk which is massive, what like how many pounds
Speaker 1: he leased over there? We didn't cover that. We got okay,
Speaker 1: extremely valuable today they were. But so when this so
Speaker 1: you're looking at this elk and you're like looking at
Speaker 1: the landscape and it looks fairly close because it is
Speaker 1: two point four or whatever. And then actually when it disappeared,
Speaker 1: we were away and he literally in what looks like
Speaker 1: you know, like yeah, knee high bush anywhere else totally vanishes,
Speaker 1: like ceases to exist. Like you guys are glass and
Speaker 1: that small chunk, I mean it was tiny area, not
Speaker 1: a sign of them. But then not I would say,
Speaker 1: ceased to exist. But then all of a sudden he
Speaker 1: rematerialized later in fact, had not ceased to exist. He
Speaker 1: was just from our Yeah, the perspective had just like
Speaker 1: was no longer on the earth, was sucked up a phantom,
Speaker 1: a phantom helk. No, So backchack to dirts earlier point.
Speaker 1: Roosevelt's has Roosevelt elk are the biggest bodied of the elk.
Speaker 1: But the biggest versions of Roosevelt elk are here. I
Speaker 1: didn't know that. Yes, they are larger than the natives.
Speaker 1: They have bulls up there here where we are right now,
Speaker 1: they have bulls, or within a few miles where we
Speaker 1: are now, they have bulls that have tipped the scales
Speaker 1: at one thousand, three hundred pounds. Wow mm hmm, ridiculous. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's when you paish on the giants, right on the giants,
Speaker 1: Like they're saying that when you pack, when you could
Speaker 1: be packing seven hundred pounds of meeting and the school
Speaker 1: and alers, biggest of the big that'd be some that'd
Speaker 1: be some bone fish as seven hundred on average for bulls,
Speaker 1: which is it's quite a span there and that's but
Speaker 1: that includes the other islands as well, or is that
Speaker 1: just yeah, okay instantially so Fognac has the largest of
Speaker 1: the large Roosevelt. Yeah. But you know, you know, these
Speaker 1: weights like they're varied. But as far as like finding
Speaker 1: the biggest, you know, if you were going to go
Speaker 1: out and have like a find the biggest bowl thing,
Speaker 1: you would go here and weigh all these bulls and
Speaker 1: you turn up the largest specimen um. So you keep yeah,
Speaker 1: and you just look at that. It's like they're a
Speaker 1: stout man like stout. So we keep pressing along because
Speaker 1: up ahead of us we we got some cows. And
Speaker 1: then we hear a bugle rip out ahead of us.
Speaker 1: And normally when you're hunting out in most places in
Speaker 1: the Rockies or whatever, you hear a bugle rip out
Speaker 1: ahead of you, and you sit there with your binoculars
Speaker 1: for a couple of minutes. You be like, oh, there
Speaker 1: he is, but here I ain't gonna have And this
Speaker 1: mountain where walking across the face of there is I'm
Speaker 1: not exaggerating, there is a full on balls out creek
Speaker 1: every and I don't understand where it's coming from, and
Speaker 1: when you get to the creek it is a I
Speaker 1: would say at least a chest to head high straight
Speaker 1: drop with devil's clubbing minute. Yeah, so it's like ranging
Speaker 1: from Yeah, you're like ranging from a six to twelve
Speaker 1: ft goalie with a full on creek that you could
Speaker 1: like set up a gristmill in everything. Like I'm like,
Speaker 1: where is the water coming from. It's coming from that
Speaker 1: cloud that sits on top of the mountain all day
Speaker 1: long and all night long. Even trying to be like yeah,
Speaker 1: so I'll be like to yeah, it's like yeah, so
Speaker 1: you'll hit a spruce then across thirteen streams and the
Speaker 1: fourteen will be in the four stream bed well. And
Speaker 1: that's like a function to of the uh you know,
Speaker 1: direction to faces pointing, because I feel like on the
Speaker 1: other side of that drainage it wasn't like that, but
Speaker 1: you still have the same water. It just comes in
Speaker 1: the form of these like giant grassy, marshy meadows where
Speaker 1: the streams instead of being like that kind of cutty
Speaker 1: canyon feel to them, it's just like a stream that
Speaker 1: is just moving through grass and yeah, like it's like
Speaker 1: an alluvial fan where you might hike across two yards
Speaker 1: of water from like the rock guard on your boot
Speaker 1: up to your ankle. That's just kind of moving yeah,
Speaker 1: across a like an alluvial fan. It looks like just
Speaker 1: like a flooded field. I'm just walking in like a
Speaker 1: current well irrigated hayfield, but with yea with current, this
Speaker 1: slight movement of the water. Um. So we keep pressing
Speaker 1: along and we got these cows out ahead of us.
Speaker 1: And at this point I'm having a lot of trepidation.
Speaker 1: I'm like aware of the time. I keep looking at
Speaker 1: my GPS being like, no matter what happens, this is
Speaker 1: gonna turned into a late one. And all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: Remy spots pretty incredible spot. The real legalize spots a
Speaker 1: bedded one horned bowl and what he spots is the antler.
Speaker 1: So he spots a single antler before in a pile
Speaker 1: of Ye kind of couldn't believe it. Once you're like
Speaker 1: learning what you're looking at, like, wow, that was a
Speaker 1: good spot. Laying down, he's got one six point main
Speaker 1: one main beam with six points on it. And the
Speaker 1: way these elk look they kind of if you're familiar
Speaker 1: with the red deer where they get the crowns on top.
Speaker 1: The way these elk antlers look are so compact, they
Speaker 1: get like a red deer ish quality too. You get
Speaker 1: like a little three point crown on top. So he's
Speaker 1: got like a main beam that comes out of a
Speaker 1: base that's bigger than a beer can. Yeah, And I
Speaker 1: think the way their antlers grows just a function of
Speaker 1: their size, so big, and they've got so much weight
Speaker 1: that when they fight, you know, they need stout antlers
Speaker 1: at the base to keep from breaking off. So the
Speaker 1: bulls that have the bigger bases and the heavier antlers
Speaker 1: are going to be the ones that can plow through
Speaker 1: and fight. They do. So we we went up seeing
Speaker 1: three bulls. All we saw three bulls, Like, I think
Speaker 1: we saw more bulls who were missing. So this dude
Speaker 1: did bust up. So so the way these antlers work
Speaker 1: is like it's way bigger than the beer can when
Speaker 1: it girls out of his head. But then the eye
Speaker 1: guard is sort of mashed down into the base as well,
Speaker 1: so that it's like the eye guarden scenes almost kind
Speaker 1: of come out of the base rather than having like
Speaker 1: a chunk that you kind of put your hand around
Speaker 1: and in the eye guard. It's like the eye guarden
Speaker 1: the base. They're kind of mashed together, and it's just
Speaker 1: really like thick stout antler with very short times coming
Speaker 1: out of it. So he's got an eye guard and
Speaker 1: two times and like a three time crown coming out
Speaker 1: of the top, and the whole thing, the whole I mean,
Speaker 1: the whole main beam and three ft long. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: probably um and then one of them he just snapped
Speaker 1: off above his eye garden. The thinnest spot is snapped
Speaker 1: off on it. But he's laying there kind of unaware
Speaker 1: of us, but facing us and kind of messed around.
Speaker 1: And I'm like trying to get lined out on a shot,
Speaker 1: but he's like facing us too much. Now. One time,
Speaker 1: years ago hunt with Ryan Callahan, I took a dead
Speaker 1: on shot on a bull moose, like a brisket shot,
Speaker 1: which should just devastate a deer, right basically that's the
Speaker 1: little colic that forms on their chest, you know. And
Speaker 1: I hit that and it just wasn't a lethal shot
Speaker 1: on a moose, just too much meat and bone and whatnot.
Speaker 1: And uh, I was lined up on him and I
Speaker 1: had some sticks in the way. Remy had a clear angle.
Speaker 1: I moved over. You called at the bowl a little
Speaker 1: bit to try to I was trying to get you
Speaker 1: to get it to not run off because he was
Speaker 1: becoming aware of our presence. He knew we were there.
Speaker 1: Stood up. Eventually he turned up where I could snake
Speaker 1: one in on like a quartering, a steep quartering to
Speaker 1: a shot, and and that shot would have done would
Speaker 1: have done the trick. You know, after an autopsy, I
Speaker 1: realized that that shot would have eventually it would have
Speaker 1: done the trick, probably within some number of yards. But
Speaker 1: he spun started running and I hit another one that
Speaker 1: shattered his front leg, but he already had his lung
Speaker 1: shot out. And he then tumbled down into one of
Speaker 1: the deeper creeks and landed smack ass in the water,
Speaker 1: and like in the water, formed a small damn and
Speaker 1: formed an embound. When he hit the water, he formed
Speaker 1: an impoundment. This creek is how far down from probably
Speaker 1: dirty feet and probably only ten ft wide. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe that's how steep it was. And there's a waterfall
Speaker 1: just behind him, picturesque, very very steep canyon. The worst
Speaker 1: place he probably could have fallen on that hill, dude.
Speaker 1: And the minute that happened in the minute I walked
Speaker 1: over there. You know, it's like if something's gonna be
Speaker 1: you know, it wasn't even like celebratory because you're kind
Speaker 1: of like, oh man, it is getting late. We are
Speaker 1: a five hour walk from camp and it's already like
Speaker 1: it's evening. Yeah, it's evening now. Such a big body too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't remind listeners that this turns into a grizzly
Speaker 1: bear story, because this turns into a brown bear story. Um.
Speaker 1: So we start cutting on it and really pointed out
Speaker 1: that he did kind of like having the elk laying
Speaker 1: in a creek because it was easy, very easy to
Speaker 1: keep things clean. You would make a cut and like,
Speaker 1: oh man, there's some hair on my knife. Then you
Speaker 1: just like hold your knife in the creek and everything
Speaker 1: was like, looked, it's clean at the kill site. But um,
Speaker 1: there was no way to like move it around the maneuver.
Speaker 1: You just had to start working at what was exposed.
Speaker 1: So we pulled the you know, skin it down, the spine,
Speaker 1: work to hide off, got a back leg off, got
Speaker 1: a shoulder off, got a backstrap off, boned out the
Speaker 1: ribs with the guts still in the thing boned out
Speaker 1: the neck, remove the head, got a tenderloin out with
Speaker 1: the guts still in the thing, got it rolled over. Um,
Speaker 1: and these are a hundred pound quarters probably the shoulders
Speaker 1: probably not, but I think the back legs, I think,
Speaker 1: I yeah, the quarters of the front shoulders, I would
Speaker 1: say we're very similar to a back quarter of average
Speaker 1: size Rocky Mountain hilk. Yeah. And I think the back
Speaker 1: legs were like borderline like moose legs, like probably a
Speaker 1: hundred pounders when you say yanni, yeah, very hard to
Speaker 1: So then we got that the whole thing rolled over.
Speaker 1: Are you are you still conducting fact checking? Really? What's
Speaker 1: what's uh? What's what's what's what are you on? Well,
Speaker 1: I'm going through remember when we had we did the
Speaker 1: five questions from Frank van mannon Um talking about grizzly bear. Uh.
Speaker 1: So I just pulled that up and it it was just refreshing.
Speaker 1: So because I know we're probably talk about numbers about
Speaker 1: how many exists in the world two thousand oh no,
Speaker 1: the like percentages of bear spray versus firearms and that
Speaker 1: sort of stuff, all that all that stuff that I
Speaker 1: now know to be so Um flipped it over. Did
Speaker 1: the same thing all over again. Did you guys see
Speaker 1: the battle wounds on the first side of the Oh,
Speaker 1: that's what I wanted to talk about. We'll talk about
Speaker 1: he's a fighter fighter, so on everywhere on him is bruises,
Speaker 1: and like where he felt it wasn't rocky, so like
Speaker 1: he didn't get bruised up in his He took quite
Speaker 1: a total old old battle scars, some scar tissues, louising
Speaker 1: on his ribs. And keep in mind he had that
Speaker 1: broken antler and he didn't break that antler like you know,
Speaker 1: trash and broke. I was gonna make a point too
Speaker 1: about the broken antlers. Uh, you see a lot of
Speaker 1: broken times a lot of places right like where I've guided.
Speaker 1: Um you probably see broken times compared to broken main
Speaker 1: beams is probably I don't know, a hundred of one.
Speaker 1: It could be everyone we saw it was broken. Yeah,
Speaker 1: now there's competing I think there's competing um theories on
Speaker 1: why some areas have a lot of broken why elk
Speaker 1: in some areas have a lot of broken antlers, And
Speaker 1: I'm sure that there's someone that knows the proper answer.
Speaker 1: Maybe not. I've heard that it has to do with
Speaker 1: mineral quality that some elk antlers are inherently weaker. Some
Speaker 1: elk in some areas produce a weaker antler because of
Speaker 1: mineral quality in the soils. And I've heard that it's
Speaker 1: a function of and Remy shared this one with me
Speaker 1: that he believes a better explanation is that it's more
Speaker 1: of a function of cow to bowl ratios. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: they that that and he's at the time spent fighting
Speaker 1: to breed. Yeah. That in areas where you got you know,
Speaker 1: ten cows for every bull, a bull is able to
Speaker 1: stay out of skirmishes. But these areas where you have
Speaker 1: high bold of cow ratios, they're spending more time in
Speaker 1: the dominant struggles and they're just breaking more aislers. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I feel like that's the accepted theory down in Arizona
Speaker 1: trophy units is that they just they're managed very well
Speaker 1: for a you know, equal bowlder cow ratio, and the
Speaker 1: bulls just have to do a lot more fighting because
Speaker 1: you go to a neighboring unit that's got the same
Speaker 1: terrain and everything, but just managed different not as many
Speaker 1: broken anilers. Because of the three apps fishing fighting right, yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: they're not. They don't do one of them fish, but
Speaker 1: they spend more, they they're able to devote more of
Speaker 1: that energy to the one after the other. Uh So
Speaker 1: where was that the hole in his the hole in
Speaker 1: his rear ham he had. I'm skinning his rear ham
Speaker 1: and I'm like, oh, someone like I almost have shot
Speaker 1: a third time that I forgot about because he has
Speaker 1: a large wound on his rear ham. But when you
Speaker 1: skin the hide back, it's like a perfect inch diameter
Speaker 1: hole punched through his hide where a time punched through
Speaker 1: his hide and then went into his rear ham several inches.
Speaker 1: It was just an infected mess, just beat up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he should take up fishing, so he probably do pretty
Speaker 1: good fishing there. Um. So that was weird triming that
Speaker 1: all out. So now now we're entering in like so,
Speaker 1: so so here you are. You got uh we got
Speaker 1: six guys because you know me and Remy and then
Speaker 1: we have our crew guys and and and a A
Speaker 1: perk and liability of this line of work is that
Speaker 1: you get when you come out like crew guys get
Speaker 1: equal cut of all the meat if they want it. Um,
Speaker 1: but they also carry it. Would we share if they
Speaker 1: didn't carry I would to expect it to be I
Speaker 1: also wouldn't want we would, but maybe not as much
Speaker 1: because we share with the office crew as well. Not
Speaker 1: on this one. When you carry do you feel uh,
Speaker 1: you're carrying your one sixth so rich? When you carry
Speaker 1: elk or when you pack me, do you feel like
Speaker 1: I'm packing me in order to get some or you
Speaker 1: like un packing me this because this is a sucky
Speaker 1: thing that needs to happen a little bit of both.
Speaker 1: I like, if I'm thinking I'm gonna take any home,
Speaker 1: I'm not just gonna watch you guys carry a bunch
Speaker 1: of weight in some shitty terrain. I want to like
Speaker 1: help out, but you guys already have a ton of
Speaker 1: gear with you. Yeah, and it and when we do
Speaker 1: get strapped up with me, well, at least me A
Speaker 1: Garrett is kind of a superhuman dude, so he can
Speaker 1: still charge up hills, but it makes me a little slower,
Speaker 1: so I can't like run out and get all the
Speaker 1: shots that I normally do when we're on we're unloaded.
Speaker 1: But I just like, especially this one, I just would
Speaker 1: I just couldn't sit and like hike out with an
Speaker 1: empty pack because we're in a we're in like a
Speaker 1: like just kind of uncomfortable city. Yeah, so we got
Speaker 1: always meet and we know that, um, because we're gonna
Speaker 1: be hiking in the ground so bad, like the walking
Speaker 1: is so difficult that and it's already and it's dark
Speaker 1: out now that we know, we're not gonna even though
Speaker 1: there's six of us and six people can carry like
Speaker 1: trail hiking, six people can absolutely move a normal elk
Speaker 1: with like not that big of a deal really, Like
Speaker 1: if you're just like, go ahead a trail wad for
Speaker 1: a few miles, you just picked the whole thing up
Speaker 1: and go. But this is kind of out of the
Speaker 1: question because we have so much vertical to gain and lose.
Speaker 1: We're not on any kind of a trail for the
Speaker 1: bulk of it, and we have a very large patch
Speaker 1: of brush. We should also mention at this point when
Speaker 1: the last meat went in the bag, it is pitch black. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I pitch yeah, pitch black. Yeah. So the first thing
Speaker 1: we need to do is go earlier I was mentioned
Speaker 1: and how now and then there's a big gas spruce
Speaker 1: we had before it got dark, identified a spruce tree
Speaker 1: that would be adequate to get whatever meat we couldn't
Speaker 1: carry up into the tree. And this spruce was directly
Speaker 1: uphill from us. So we get done butcher in the elk,
Speaker 1: and the first step is too because now it's dark
Speaker 1: and you got a nice gutty smell blown everywhere. The
Speaker 1: first step is to try to get some separation of
Speaker 1: the meat and the guts, thinking that I want a
Speaker 1: bear or any kind of predator really comes in and
Speaker 1: claims a kill site. They I'm anthropomorphizing a little teeny bit,
Speaker 1: but probably not too much. They know that they might
Speaker 1: lose it to the next thing up. Okay, so you
Speaker 1: find a kill and you don't you can't just assume
Speaker 1: that it's yours for the next five days. So what
Speaker 1: things generally do is devour soft tissue because you can
Speaker 1: just wolf fit down. It's high calorie food. They'll come
Speaker 1: in and mop up like the liver goes quickly the
Speaker 1: long just and then you can just soup right up
Speaker 1: and doesn't take a lot of work. They'd like to
Speaker 1: get on that stuff first. So the general thinking in
Speaker 1: bear country is if you remove your your meat, like
Speaker 1: your bone in quarters or whatever, remove them from the guts,
Speaker 1: there's a chance that a bear is gonna come in
Speaker 1: and the first thing he's gonna do is claim the
Speaker 1: thing with the soft tissue, the greatest amount of smell,
Speaker 1: all the blood. He's gonna pick that, and you might
Speaker 1: grease off with your meat if it's separate. So we
Speaker 1: move all our meat, not far but out of the
Speaker 1: goalie up onto a little grass, another grassy knoll, and
Speaker 1: then we take half of it, load our backpacks with
Speaker 1: half of it, and hike that up to a big
Speaker 1: spruce tree. Yeah, and hang half of that up in
Speaker 1: a spruce about probably twelve to thirteen feet up in
Speaker 1: a spruce tree, with the theory that nothing can get it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Mature grid like cubs, brown bear cubs can climb a tree,
Speaker 1: but eventually that you know. A distinguishing feature, a morphological
Speaker 1: difference between black bears and brown bears is that black
Speaker 1: bears have a short, hooked claw. Grizzlies have a long,
Speaker 1: relatively straight, more sickle shape claw. And as a grizzly
Speaker 1: gets big and heavy, those claws, the way that they're
Speaker 1: long and straight, those claws do not lend themselves to climbing.
Speaker 1: They're more for digging. Yeah, they got a digging claw.
Speaker 1: They spend a lot more time flipping rocks, digging roots.
Speaker 1: It's just their their food resources are used differently. They
Speaker 1: tend to live in more open country, can live quite
Speaker 1: happily in a total absence of trees. You do not
Speaker 1: find black bears in the absence of trees. The old
Speaker 1: adage is to tell a difference between a black bear
Speaker 1: and a grizzly is if the bear climbs up a
Speaker 1: tree and eats you, it's a black bear. That's an
Speaker 1: interesting thing to bring up in these in in Coastal Alaska,
Speaker 1: the islands. There are some minor exceptions of this, but
Speaker 1: this is a this is generally true. It's a true.
Speaker 1: It's a truism. The islands either have black bears are grizzlies.
Speaker 1: So Prince of Wales Island is a black bear island.
Speaker 1: Right Admiralty Island north of there is a grizzly bear island.
Speaker 1: They don't commingle on islands. If it's a suitable habitat,
Speaker 1: I keep saying, if it's suitable habitat for a brown bear,
Speaker 1: that's who's going to live there. If it's black bears
Speaker 1: on an island, it's because it's not suitable habitat for
Speaker 1: brown bears. If it's not suitable habitat for brown bears.
Speaker 1: It's probably all heavily timbered and there's no open country.
Speaker 1: They tend to like open country, they use it better.
Speaker 1: So we get it up in a tree because because
Speaker 1: he's not gonna buil, climb to damn tree and get
Speaker 1: the meat up. Then we go back down to buy
Speaker 1: the kill site, get all of our meat and start
Speaker 1: hiking at ten thirty pm. Get to our camp at
Speaker 1: three thirty am. Yea, eat some freeze, dry, go to
Speaker 1: bed about four or thirty am. Fairly exhausting, chuck it out.
Speaker 1: It was a full day now by the time you
Speaker 1: get like a reasonable amount of sleep and also then
Speaker 1: wake up and regroup, Like you got a mess, right,
Speaker 1: you got stuff to clean up. We had to get
Speaker 1: the meat we brought home, um get it, you know,
Speaker 1: get it situated in the way that we're happy with.
Speaker 1: We put it inside a hot wire we have like
Speaker 1: a little portable hot wire fence. We put the meat
Speaker 1: inside there. But the next day we wanted to establish
Speaker 1: another hot wire fence that wasn't the same hot wire
Speaker 1: fence that contained our tents. Get the meat out of
Speaker 1: the ground in another tree. So originally like the night
Speaker 1: we got back all late at night we put the
Speaker 1: meat inside the hot wire fence that also contained tents,
Speaker 1: and the next day we wanted to get it up
Speaker 1: in a tree where it could breathe out and be
Speaker 1: up in the breeze and have its own containment hot
Speaker 1: wire fence around it. Um did all that, had some
Speaker 1: show business stuff to take care of. I had a
Speaker 1: bunch of fish catching to do. We're talking meat though,
Speaker 1: because it might be hard to come back to it.
Speaker 1: But since you guys dropped it off in your mouth,
Speaker 1: you see something I don't know. I thought you're chewing
Speaker 1: teeth and chewing us like some hard candy or something,
Speaker 1: which I thought was disrespectful. I do have a little
Speaker 1: pith stuck between That's fine, that's fine, um. But because
Speaker 1: we're the meat hung for what was it three days?
Speaker 1: Four days, and we were a little bit worried about
Speaker 1: the condition of the meat. But you guys take it
Speaker 1: to the process and I'm guessing I got to handle
Speaker 1: it and look at it and smell it. How was it?
Speaker 1: Did it farewell? They thought? Look good? I thought, look good? What? What? What? What? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I see now we're man. That was a way out
Speaker 1: of order. Uh, it was a way out of order.
Speaker 1: Thing to bring up. Look fine, look fine, Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not cold here. It's like it's not like a normal
Speaker 1: you know. I mean you're in a coastal environment here
Speaker 1: and it's like always cold but never cold cold. Yeah
Speaker 1: not I only you ever got below forty Yeah, not
Speaker 1: great meat hanging weather. And when it's real what it's
Speaker 1: all this rain, right, So it's a lot of rain
Speaker 1: and never real cold old. So when we got back,
Speaker 1: uh flew out and got back to town, first order
Speaker 1: business is trying to find someplace to that we could
Speaker 1: get our meat chilled off because it was already borderline.
Speaker 1: And a thing that there's like a smell that that
Speaker 1: like bloody game bags. Wet bloody game bags take on
Speaker 1: a smell that is like a not a good smell,
Speaker 1: and it's a precursor to smells you don't want to smell.
Speaker 1: But it's not in and of itself a bad smell,
Speaker 1: but it's an indicator of bad things could happen soon smell.
Speaker 1: It's a little off putting. We were in the bad
Speaker 1: things could happen soon smell phase from having the meat
Speaker 1: not being able to dry out because of the rain. Yeah,
Speaker 1: everything's wet forty degrees like, and it was in a
Speaker 1: creek too, so nothing ever had a chance to dry out.
Speaker 1: But yeah, everything's fine. It look good. They thought it
Speaker 1: looked good too. Yeah, we paid some boys to Uh,
Speaker 1: I like that dude's hat. Retired drug dealer. We paid
Speaker 1: some boys to you. Uh two. Process and freeze are
Speaker 1: our thing for us. But to get back to where
Speaker 1: I was caught some fish. Um, how did we know
Speaker 1: the bare fence was hot? Is there a test or something? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I hold the I touched the wire and then see
Speaker 1: what And then I gauge what kind of jolt it
Speaker 1: gives me and whether I'm not satisfied with the joelt,
Speaker 1: whether I feel that it would be a deterrent or not. Um,
Speaker 1: and I'll satisfy with that fence. Point being the point
Speaker 1: all this being, we don't strike off to the hanging tree.
Speaker 1: Did you hear that Bob muldsong hanging tree? Should I
Speaker 1: throw myself from the hanging tree? You don't know that one? Oh,
Speaker 1: that's a story we ought to tell sometime, that story
Speaker 1: about that dude. Did we ever tell this story? The
Speaker 1: guy the spurned lover? What's that bighorn sheep hunting area?
Speaker 1: That that dude, Tristan is the guy. Then his name
Speaker 1: wasn't Tristan, was it? No, it wasn't. He looked like Triston.
Speaker 1: It looks like a dude named Tristan ledgend of the
Speaker 1: fall of his name, wasn't Tristan? Long hair, leather, cowboy hat? Yeah? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you. Remember the story he told us. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: he's the guy big Horn Sheep in BC. Yeah, in
Speaker 1: the McKenzie's. Yeah, but it had a name. It's like
Speaker 1: the blank. Yeah, what's a big horn area up there
Speaker 1: around me? Like rocky big horns? You know? Um the
Speaker 1: in BC or Alberta could be Alberta, the Alberta BC line. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's a W word white. No, I would think like
Speaker 1: there it was the Whitmore. I remember that because I
Speaker 1: was on that trip and there. Yeah, it's the area.
Speaker 1: I think maybe the area called the Whitmore. Yeah. But anyways,
Speaker 1: you're south the Stone Sheep country, in Big Horn Sheep Country.
Speaker 1: I think the spine of that the end of that
Speaker 1: range is the BC Alberta line. Yanni to look it up.
Speaker 1: The whit More wind more willmore will more. So just
Speaker 1: a quick digrection. This is an interesting story. There's a
Speaker 1: guy that the outfitter he used to work for used
Speaker 1: to have a horse packer, and the horse packer was
Speaker 1: in camp with his girlfriend. Okay, and the horse packer
Speaker 1: and the girlfriend getting a fight. He grabs a hunker rope,
Speaker 1: walks off, and a huff never to be seen again.
Speaker 1: It became like a mystery. Years later, someone is dicking
Speaker 1: around in that area and finds a skull and spinal
Speaker 1: column hanging from a rope. What did they obviously search
Speaker 1: for him, money, search for him when he huffed off,
Speaker 1: but could never find him, was assumed dead. Bad argument.
Speaker 1: Someone finds a skull and a chunk of spine hanging
Speaker 1: from a rope from a tree, and they excavate the
Speaker 1: ground beneath them, and they're able to match up his
Speaker 1: buckles from his boots and his rivets and stuff from
Speaker 1: his jeans with what he was wearing when he vanished.
Speaker 1: So anyhow, the next day we go back to find
Speaker 1: our way back. We wake up. It should be mentioned
Speaker 1: that the rest day was a glorious, glorious drying out
Speaker 1: close only day of the whole trip that was blue
Speaker 1: bird drying out close but the sun hooking fish like
Speaker 1: nobody's in the sky to actually ben always into rect son.
Speaker 1: I got a bass in it was warm enough, did
Speaker 1: you Yeah, dirt showered in the creek. Yeah, I didn't
Speaker 1: know that. Um, that was jealous, but yeah, the sun
Speaker 1: went from peak to peak on the same ridge. All right.
Speaker 1: So the next day we wake up right and early
Speaker 1: and strike off for the hanging tree. Um takes us.
Speaker 1: I think we had a better route. It took us
Speaker 1: four hours to get to the hanging tree. Now approaching
Speaker 1: the kill site. We the kill sites about a hundred
Speaker 1: yards up a small tributary from the main Stem Creek
Speaker 1: of the valley. We approached the kill site from across
Speaker 1: the main stem to get eye level with the carcass
Speaker 1: which is laying down in a tributary on the other
Speaker 1: side of the main Stem from us. And we're able
Speaker 1: to get a gander in there and see that at
Speaker 1: least the carcass has not been moved, right, And think
Speaker 1: of me, if a bear had claimed it quickly, he
Speaker 1: probably would have drug it off and buried it. It
Speaker 1: would look different. There's a bunch of magpies in there,
Speaker 1: and a lot of magpies making a lot of racket, right.
Speaker 1: That helps alert you know, predators to something going good
Speaker 1: going on, They feed off that information. But the carcass
Speaker 1: is there where we left it, seemingly undisturbed. But we
Speaker 1: still pick a route that goes clear of the carcass
Speaker 1: up towards the hanging tree. Now when we get up
Speaker 1: by the hanging tree, we do a number of things. Uh,
Speaker 1: we got pepper sprayed drawn, was your pistol drawn? Drawn?
Speaker 1: Pistols out, pepper spray out, making a lot of noise,
Speaker 1: yelling the whole way up. I was yelling to him,
Speaker 1: did I got some spice for that meat that he
Speaker 1: ain't gonna like? Because I had my pepper spray out?
Speaker 1: And then we're gonna We told him too that it
Speaker 1: was if if he did like it, he was gonna
Speaker 1: be followed up with some lead chasers. So we're being
Speaker 1: very intimidating in hooting and holland and yelling. We have
Speaker 1: not seen anything. Now, we just evidence to think anything.
Speaker 1: And we glassed that hanging tree, or at least I
Speaker 1: glass that hanging tree. I glassed it until I could
Speaker 1: account for everything that was supposed to be in that
Speaker 1: hanging tree. So at that point we've done everything as
Speaker 1: good as we could do. Now there's some hindsight issues. No, no,
Speaker 1: okay from that point. The one mistake, I would say,
Speaker 1: but there wasn't an option. The one mistake is the
Speaker 1: hanging tree is surrounded by very thick brush. But there
Speaker 1: were no other There was no clear hanging tree. How
Speaker 1: big do you think, Like the diameter around the tree
Speaker 1: was clear, Yeah, like around like from the base of
Speaker 1: the tree to the like circle of brush. I would
Speaker 1: say it was from the tree. It was a radius
Speaker 1: of maybe fifteen feet basically the canopy of the tree.
Speaker 1: It was a heavy, thick enough tree. And elk must
Speaker 1: take aid under there when it's sunny, like it ever
Speaker 1: gets sunny, it must get because there was I noticed
Speaker 1: when we were in there in the dark, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of elk ship and bedding, betting depressions under that tree.
Speaker 1: So on a hot day they most like to get
Speaker 1: under their same way cattle will do and get on
Speaker 1: there and bed up in the shade of that tree.
Speaker 1: I noticed that. So in hindsight, it was a shitty
Speaker 1: hanging tree. But there wasn't like a good version, right correct,
Speaker 1: which is bad? It was a bad choice among bad choices. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you could only have the foresight having I think been
Speaker 1: there before to like, as you pull the trigger and
Speaker 1: you watch you all die in the daylight at that moment,
Speaker 1: to then do a three or sixty degree scan and
Speaker 1: make a way point on the best hanging tree. And
Speaker 1: we did. Me and Remy argued about the best hanging tree.
Speaker 1: But our argument wasn't based on clearing. Our argument was
Speaker 1: based on proximity. It was based done. I was going
Speaker 1: for a tree in an area that I knew sucked
Speaker 1: for travel, a side of the drainage that I knew
Speaker 1: was sucked for travel, but it was a known suck.
Speaker 1: Remy was saying, let's go across. It can't be worse
Speaker 1: because I've traveled, and he's like, it's there are parts
Speaker 1: that are better. And I said, because it's dark, because
Speaker 1: we're loaded out heavy, I think we should go for
Speaker 1: the known suck instead of that. In hindsight, that would
Speaker 1: have his tree would have been a better tree. But
Speaker 1: so you guys didn't really consider the whole like open
Speaker 1: we were not talking about visibility under the hanging tree,
Speaker 1: but either side it would have been the same visibility
Speaker 1: both all their hell holes of lots of goalies. So
Speaker 1: now here's where things, here's where mistakes start getting made.
Speaker 1: I get up to the hanging tree and I noticed
Speaker 1: a smashed I noticed a smeared bear ship. And do
Speaker 1: you remember do they remember me getting down on my
Speaker 1: knees to examine that ship? Because I was I and
Speaker 1: my initial thought was did it look like a of
Speaker 1: ship that was smeared from a bear? A bear track
Speaker 1: smeared ship? And I got down to examine it, and
Speaker 1: I'm like, I don't remember that being there, but it
Speaker 1: was nighttime, but it was like nighttime and it looked
Speaker 1: like a boot. Then I was like, it must be
Speaker 1: a boot smeared it because it was all smeared out,
Speaker 1: and I was like, we were stomping all around and
Speaker 1: here we must have smeared that bear ship. And it
Speaker 1: was a salmon fueled bear ship. It was like that
Speaker 1: gray mush ship from when they were feeding on salmon
Speaker 1: looked like and it was smashed. And I looked at
Speaker 1: that and was like, is that a boot or a
Speaker 1: bear track smeared that? And then I looked at the
Speaker 1: tree and a lot of the stuff was hung up
Speaker 1: with para cord and I looked in the tree. There's
Speaker 1: like no scratching on the tree, no sign of disturbance,
Speaker 1: and also if something was in there really like trying
Speaker 1: to climb that tree, I felt that he might have
Speaker 1: actually like busted some of the pieces of para cord
Speaker 1: in trying to like reach around and do all of
Speaker 1: his business up there. That I saw no other evidence
Speaker 1: except that smeared chip. So then we make a giant
Speaker 1: mistake and decided to sit down and have some sandwiches.
Speaker 1: And we had a MSR stove with us at a pot,
Speaker 1: and I remember the pot got passed around and everybody
Speaker 1: was who wanted a quick uh Starbucks. Via was supposed
Speaker 1: to throw in a small amount of water into the pot.
Speaker 1: I dumped half my water bottle into the pot and
Speaker 1: there was like a little excavation dug out, and I
Speaker 1: was sitting by that excavation dug out, and there's six
Speaker 1: of was huddled on one side of the tree in
Speaker 1: a space seeing about like what we're in there during this,
Speaker 1: During this, packs came off. Packs came off in one area.
Speaker 1: Then I got up to grab the pot somebody had
Speaker 1: sat So now people are actually sitting by Paxson aren't there.
Speaker 1: So my pack is now a cross from us which
Speaker 1: has are my personal bear deterrent pistol and bear spray
Speaker 1: leaning against the hanging tree. Your pack is leaning against
Speaker 1: the hanging tree, because then you moved into mice. So
Speaker 1: we're kind of we did this weird shuffle where nobody
Speaker 1: was near their own pack the way that we sat,
Speaker 1: but still tight figured roughly like people in a living
Speaker 1: room around a coffee table, for instance. Yeah, maybe maybe
Speaker 1: even a tad tighter than that. I gotta say. Two,
Speaker 1: we were pretty whooped on the hike in, and that
Speaker 1: was a great spot, taken away any risk of bear
Speaker 1: perfect chill the sandwich. Yeah, it was like it was nice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was like walking into a bed. I have thought
Speaker 1: about lighting the fire for no reason, just because it
Speaker 1: was so nice under that tree. The first post hanging
Speaker 1: tree selection mistake that we made was that we got
Speaker 1: under the hanging tree and decided to linger unnecessarily long
Speaker 1: and let our guard down. Yes, what we did that
Speaker 1: caused us to linger unnecessarily long, let our guard down,
Speaker 1: and divorce us from our deterrens being pistols in spray
Speaker 1: was the idea that we would have some sandwiches and
Speaker 1: some coffee. So our desire to have sandwiches in an
Speaker 1: idyllic setting in the relief of having not had our
Speaker 1: kill site claimed by a bear, which the Alaska Department
Speaker 1: of Fishing Game says often happens on the first night.
Speaker 1: But we had allowed a night and a half to pass,
Speaker 1: and to be fair to us, how long was the
Speaker 1: hike into the hanging for? Yeah, so a four hour
Speaker 1: hike up and then down and through in one point
Speaker 1: five nights pass and one five nights passed. We got there.
Speaker 1: We were all pretty hungry, and it was like, thank God,
Speaker 1: a bear isn't here. Yeah, that's because based on my
Speaker 1: hasty bit of sign reading, backed up by Remy's hasty
Speaker 1: bit of sign who also said, it looks like a
Speaker 1: bear had been here. You said, it looks like I
Speaker 1: came up a little bit late. You must not have
Speaker 1: felt the same as me as we trampled it. But
Speaker 1: I that's why I looked at you and said it like,
Speaker 1: oh did you step? You know? Like was this? I
Speaker 1: got down on my knees to examine, but I wasn't
Speaker 1: there for that, and I did a faulty read on that.
Speaker 1: I'm taking full blame unsigned reading faultiness. I saw what
Speaker 1: I wanted to see, not what was there right. Second
Speaker 1: mistake was I and others did not say let's get
Speaker 1: while the getting is good. Not that that would have
Speaker 1: It wouldn't have mattered, wouldn't matter. It wouldn't matter because
Speaker 1: it could have been Now now we could look and
Speaker 1: be like it couldn't have been any better. Every option
Speaker 1: from here on out is like it could have been worse.
Speaker 1: There's no way it could have been better because of
Speaker 1: what I'm gonna explained happened because our our act of
Speaker 1: eating sandwiches just the only the mistake of the eating
Speaker 1: the sandwiches was us letting our guard down. But when
Speaker 1: we got to the tree, our guard would have been
Speaker 1: down regardless our packs would have been off. We would
Speaker 1: have been disarray packing at meat. There's just maybe potentially
Speaker 1: more distracted by climbing and lowering stuff down, spread out
Speaker 1: in filming. Instead we were clustered. A break. So I
Speaker 1: get my sandwich. Pat makes me a sandwich. It's just
Speaker 1: I had come off the heels of having had a
Speaker 1: bad sandwich. Not just me though, this was Garrett and
Speaker 1: Chris helped out with the sand So Pat had made
Speaker 1: me a really bad sandwich couple of days before, and
Speaker 1: I was saying to him dry, very dry sandwich. And
Speaker 1: I was I reprimanded him and and and told him
Speaker 1: as much, and told him that when I send the
Speaker 1: pros and cons, this is going down as a bad sandwich.
Speaker 1: He sent, he hands over a spectacular sandwich. Sandwich, sandwich,
Speaker 1: heavily great sandwich. Did you have the the did you
Speaker 1: have the stove fired up stove this whole time? And
Speaker 1: I was eating my sandwich, and some folks were coming,
Speaker 1: and then why was my sandwich so nice? Looking at
Speaker 1: the sandwich, I noticed him actually looking at your sandwich.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I've been looking at that stamp sandwich too,
Speaker 1: looking at his sandwich, looking at my sandwich, and looking
Speaker 1: at the meat that was still in the bag, thinking
Speaker 1: you know this is And I was just opening my
Speaker 1: mouth and beginning to form a sentence to the effect
Speaker 1: of kiss my ass on the sandwich is because you
Speaker 1: didn't see my sandwich last time I had a sandwich,
Speaker 1: When all of a sudden, there was like, well, Pat, yeah,
Speaker 1: well stop, sorry, all right. I know not that I
Speaker 1: won't be interrupted. I'm like, like you act like that.
Speaker 1: I'm that I'm not going through this in a way
Speaker 1: that makes sense to me. I think that there is
Speaker 1: tension in the room. I'm looking around and I'm seeing
Speaker 1: what I believe to be sweaty palms and people gripping
Speaker 1: their shirt tails. You know, I feel like, you know
Speaker 1: what I want to do. I want to have someone No,
Speaker 1: I don't. I'm not gonna do this. I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: do this, but I have a slight feeling of wanting
Speaker 1: to have someone else run point on explaining how this went.
Speaker 1: I was actually gonna recommend that you tell the whole
Speaker 1: story from beginning to end. That's not how I'm going
Speaker 1: to do without anyone else. That's what I'm going to do,
Speaker 1: adding in and then we can this is all thought
Speaker 1: out how how I feel that this should be approached
Speaker 1: Unless someone else has really sat down and thought it out.
Speaker 1: I'm blocking it, reliving the experience, not thinking about how
Speaker 1: to tell people. I mean, has there We've taken people
Speaker 1: from the place to see epic up into the sandwich making. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like I feel like like I don't know that big
Speaker 1: mistakes have been made. Man, keep it going great? Uh?
Speaker 1: I register and explosion of holy shitness not over to
Speaker 1: Pat because Pat is the first person. Pat, what was
Speaker 1: the first thing amid the sandwich making. What was the
Speaker 1: first thing that happened. So I'm listening to everybody you know,
Speaker 1: praised me for the sandwiches and criticizing sandwiches and uh,
Speaker 1: and I'm sitting here enjoying my own pistronomy sandwich and
Speaker 1: thinking how how wonderful that pistronomy tastes in my mouth.
Speaker 1: And I hear off to my right some panting, some deep,
Speaker 1: you know, guttural breathing. Can you can you mimeric it? Uh?
Speaker 1: It sounded a lot like a dog panting at first,
Speaker 1: like from far away, like and just kept getting a
Speaker 1: little louder, little little uh deeper and scarier sounding. Sounded
Speaker 1: angry too, And at first it seemed fake because I
Speaker 1: was like, no, no way this is happening. There's no
Speaker 1: way when a bear attacks you, he actually makes such
Speaker 1: a nasty well and there's there's no way like a
Speaker 1: bear is actually gonna like run up in attacks right now.
Speaker 1: That's just that's just crazy. We're only sitting under three.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's gonna happen, but you never expect that
Speaker 1: to actually happen to you. And uh, and I mean
Speaker 1: it was something I was like prepared for on this
Speaker 1: trip you know, we knew there was gonna be big
Speaker 1: bears out there. We knew there's potential, but you never
Speaker 1: actually expect to be like straight up attacked by a
Speaker 1: brown bear. And so I'm sitting there, I hear these
Speaker 1: noises and it just like it's like, okay, this's happening.
Speaker 1: I think I was the first person to say something like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, what's that noise? And then all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, within two s aggins, there's a bear on
Speaker 1: top of us. All right, man, I hate to do
Speaker 1: this to you. I know that you are on the
Speaker 1: edge of your seat waiting to hear what happens when
Speaker 1: the brown bear that we've been alluding to enters this story.
Speaker 1: It is worth your weight. It's what I'm doing to
Speaker 1: you right now is awful. It's terrible. If a man
Speaker 1: did this to me, I would punch them, But I'm
Speaker 1: doing it to you. You're gonna have to tune in
Speaker 1: next week on the Meat Either podcast to hear the
Speaker 1: final culmination the resolution of the Fognac Island brown bear
Speaker 1: attack charge mayhem story. Are now smart like with a
Speaker 1: little bit of with a little bit of painting, and
Speaker 1: then sometimes not this time, and sometimes you also get
Speaker 1: this little treat right. We didn't get that this time.
Speaker 1: Tune in next week.