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