Speaker 1: This is the me Eat podcast coming at you shirtless
Speaker 1: severely both bitten and in my case, underwear listening podcast.
Speaker 1: You can't predict anything, all right, man. First thing, we're
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Speaker 1: is gonna be very difficult what I'm gonna do right now,
Speaker 1: because I need to talk about a bunch of things
Speaker 1: that are unrelated to what we're talking about. And they're unrelated,
Speaker 1: there's no relation between them. But I want to have
Speaker 1: it come off seeming really flowey, right, like it like
Speaker 1: it flows, like it's all together, but it's hard. Like
Speaker 1: for instance, first off, as a correction, that Sam Houston
Speaker 1: did not die at the Alamo. We're conversing about this
Speaker 1: the other day on the show, and we were we're
Speaker 1: talking about, like, who didn't didn't die at the Alamo?
Speaker 1: How Davy Crockett. There's a rumor that Davy Crockett did
Speaker 1: not go down and uh, you know, in a valiant
Speaker 1: fashion and actually surrendered at the Alamo and was executed.
Speaker 1: And someone I don't want to name names, someone speculator
Speaker 1: or suggested that Sam Houston might have died at the Alamo,
Speaker 1: and a lot of very angry Texans m hmm. This
Speaker 1: guy whose name is Sam from Texas, the USA says, uh,
Speaker 1: he did not, in fact die at the Alamo. He
Speaker 1: was not at the Alamo. He was the general of
Speaker 1: the Texas Army. It was not the Alamo. He gets
Speaker 1: fired up. Since Sam Houston then went on to a
Speaker 1: career in the Texas legislature as a governor of Texas
Speaker 1: at the time of succession from the Union to the Confederacy,
Speaker 1: and he refused to pledge allegiance to the Confederacy was
Speaker 1: removed from the Governor's office. Sam Houston National Forest he
Speaker 1: died due there and is now named after him. And
Speaker 1: this guy says, speaking permissions, we have plenty permissions in
Speaker 1: Texas if you want to come hunt now. Try to
Speaker 1: relate to that. Imagine the trouble of trying to relate
Speaker 1: that to this. Another guy writes in to say he's
Speaker 1: all worked up. Um, no, this is about dirt. This
Speaker 1: is I get that in a minute. He's all worked
Speaker 1: up about us, saying someone speculating that the wolves in
Speaker 1: Washington state had rolled in from Yellowstone, but Idaho had
Speaker 1: two reintroductions ninety six and the Frank Church. And he
Speaker 1: says that it probably makes the help a lot more
Speaker 1: sense that the wolves coming into Washington are coming out
Speaker 1: of BC and originating from the Frank Church reintroductions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm surprised, he says that. He he says, and he
Speaker 1: ought to know best because he was the wolf biologist
Speaker 1: in Idaho now runs timber to table guide service. What's
Speaker 1: that you know. I'm surprised we mixed that up because
Speaker 1: I thought that we've like talked to people that have
Speaker 1: said that exact thing on the podcast about those Washington
Speaker 1: wolves coming from Idaho, and BC didn't know another one
Speaker 1: real quick. This guy goes on, This guy has a
Speaker 1: beef with me, saying that, uh, the introduction of fossil
Speaker 1: fuels is what saved whales because the market for whale
Speaker 1: oil collapsed. He goes down to say, that's a bunch
Speaker 1: of bullshit. He says, didn't The peak whaling was the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, not the eighteen sixties. He said, in the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, almost seven hundred thousand large whales were harvested commercially,
Speaker 1: and then shows like Flipper, the album of Whales Singing, Um,
Speaker 1: some other stuff all came. Kind of whales got real zekegusty, ZEITGEISTI,
Speaker 1: and came the Marine Mammal Protection Act. So don't be
Speaker 1: talking about fossil fuels and what electricity saving whales. He says,
Speaker 1: that's what did it, And he also likes to point
Speaker 1: out how effective that was because he says the blue
Speaker 1: whales along the coast of California are now at ninety
Speaker 1: seven percent of their carrying capacity. This guy is a
Speaker 1: PhD salmon biologist. He says, he hopes I'm right about
Speaker 1: pebble mind. Finally, the last little unrelated thing that I
Speaker 1: want to talk about it. But here's where I'm gonna
Speaker 1: try to pull off some slick segways. Um dirt YEP.
Speaker 1: A guy wrote in wanting you to know that there's
Speaker 1: a um, there's a dip that has no tobacco in it,
Speaker 1: and he thinks that you ought to be using it,
Speaker 1: and um, let me see if he has any extra
Speaker 1: information about it. No, he just thinks you ought to
Speaker 1: using tobacco free dip. I've tried that. Oh yeah, black
Speaker 1: buffalo tobacco free dip like herbs and uh yeah, you
Speaker 1: like herbs in other situations, yeah, but you believe in herbs.
Speaker 1: I do, but not and tein shirts are trump by
Speaker 1: nicotine at all costs. When you're addicted. It's just that hook,
Speaker 1: you know. But like, I know, but tobacco free dip
Speaker 1: probably has the nicotine, right, No, oh it doesn't know,
Speaker 1: because I was thinking that guy saying, like if a
Speaker 1: dude was saying I'm addicted to uh, or like I'm
Speaker 1: getting all facts that drink too much beer, and then
Speaker 1: someone would say, oh, drink ever clear, because then you're
Speaker 1: getting the thing you're addicted to without all the stuff
Speaker 1: that's giving you the problems you're having. Or like Cow said,
Speaker 1: lacroise are the placebo beer, so the fizzy, but it
Speaker 1: helps you get away from it. So you have no
Speaker 1: interest in taking this guy's advice and trying. No, I
Speaker 1: appreciate it, but I've down that ruffalo dip free dip.
Speaker 1: They need to market that different black buffalo. I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: can I ask a cup more questions? Oh? Yeah, because
Speaker 1: he's watched this segue. Earlier we were talking about corrections
Speaker 1: and you usually had your eye your vision corrected. Um,
Speaker 1: you talked about that. Touch on that, because now you're
Speaker 1: like a game spot and something. I'll tell you a
Speaker 1: sense I never thought I would say in my whole
Speaker 1: entire life, and that's this dirt glassed up a buck
Speaker 1: that I just got. Which if you'd asked me a
Speaker 1: year ago, if I would ever say that sentence, I
Speaker 1: would have said, it's impossible. You said, not unless he
Speaker 1: has some crazy surgery on his eyes or he got
Speaker 1: LASI and he says he got the Game I Special package.
Speaker 1: It was a bonus off. So what's it like. It's
Speaker 1: like being born again, but not really spiritually well I
Speaker 1: think it puts me back to the like the standard
Speaker 1: playing field. I was hindered prior with the glasses. Now
Speaker 1: I can see just as the average man. So what's
Speaker 1: it like to glass now that you can see? I
Speaker 1: do like you enjoy it? Yeah, it's the way. It's
Speaker 1: definitely way more satisfying because I can I can see
Speaker 1: those tiny little you know, great ghost because you're into
Speaker 1: it now. Oh yeah, I always have been. I wanted
Speaker 1: to actually, since we're on the topic, because you brought
Speaker 1: that up. This trip taking out the filming aspect too,
Speaker 1: was a big are that. Even though Stills is engaging,
Speaker 1: like being able to like, you know, pick and shoes,
Speaker 1: that was a big part to be able to gas.
Speaker 1: I always want to glass with you guys, But he
Speaker 1: takes skills. He does motion claims to have that love
Speaker 1: and the potion exactly. And today I or this trip.
Speaker 1: I gotta cut out the film and so I got
Speaker 1: a glass more with you guys and gotta see. Oh
Speaker 1: I loved it. I will say, though, that spot in
Speaker 1: that buck had nothing to do with my with my
Speaker 1: glass and skills, just a matter of tenacity, just looking
Speaker 1: a shotgun effect, just like oh maybe I'll look over
Speaker 1: that way for a minute. Also, yeah, yeah, so it
Speaker 1: is nice. No, it's six Yeah, it's extremely satisfying. The
Speaker 1: glass glass up a critter, and I can see it is.
Speaker 1: There is a big difference now with the lace that
Speaker 1: being able to look through the buyos. Can I see
Speaker 1: one last question and then we'll move on. Um. A
Speaker 1: minute ago, I was asking Dirt about his feelings on
Speaker 1: de ordering. He doesn't like to wear it, but he
Speaker 1: was pointing out not that he has like some hippie
Speaker 1: dippy aversion to illuminum which drives a lot of people
Speaker 1: to smelliness, but that and he says it's laziness. But
Speaker 1: I pointed out that he's the least lazy guy I know,
Speaker 1: And he said, because he has priorities, yeah, in life,
Speaker 1: and he focuses on the things that matter and putting
Speaker 1: the older on his on that list. Yeah, and the
Speaker 1: cost the cost efficiency of that too. But before that's
Speaker 1: that's a lie, because before six months, because before a
Speaker 1: guy suggests that Dirt try a different kind of tobacco,
Speaker 1: and Dirt says, I have a good job. I use cope. No,
Speaker 1: it is the thing. Yeah, it's just one less thing
Speaker 1: to clutter up your day. To day like routine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that I'm lucky that, uh, you know, the gal
Speaker 1: I live with doesn't mind my musk like it. I
Speaker 1: don't know if that's the case, but she doesn't mind it,
Speaker 1: so I get away with it. We started thinking that
Speaker 1: dirt's like a subspecies of halina. Ho you didn't have, like,
Speaker 1: I just want to add to that because the other
Speaker 1: thing that you sort of remove I think for daily efficiency,
Speaker 1: which kind of irks me a little bit, is your
Speaker 1: lack of watch. Oh yeah, but you'd like to know
Speaker 1: what time it is. I love to know what time
Speaker 1: it is. But I just sassy. But I don't know why.
Speaker 1: Well that is it is a hippi. You have a
Speaker 1: hippie different reasons. And I have a watch. You were
Speaker 1: born you were born on a cattle ranch. No, I'm
Speaker 1: Miles City, Montana. I've tried watches and they throw off.
Speaker 1: They like make my arm hurt. I don't know if
Speaker 1: it's I don't know if electron really Yeah, so it
Speaker 1: throws up. Yeah, you should wear one on each wrist
Speaker 1: so you just be imbalanced, like in the force. When
Speaker 1: you're wearing exactly, it disturbs my my charge, my positive
Speaker 1: or name with I just yeah, it hurts my wrist. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's an another thing I don't have to purchase.
Speaker 1: I guess Dirt Night just called in a couple of
Speaker 1: kyles just to look at him. Not many guys do that.
Speaker 1: Late afternoon too, I mean fairly warm and sunny. He
Speaker 1: was twenty yards away. That was really cool. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: move away from you now, Is that all right? I
Speaker 1: mean I was just saying to move off the topic
Speaker 1: of you just as a person, I want to introduce
Speaker 1: other people all as well. Yeah, I'd like take a
Speaker 1: minute first of welcome you guys to me in Yanni's
Speaker 1: hotel room. It's nice, isn't it. It's gonna wrap around couch. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: John Snow, can you can you explain yourself? Oh man,
Speaker 1: I've been trying to do that for years. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean in that way now, I work it Outdoor Life Magazine.
Speaker 1: I'm the shooting editor there. I do the guns and
Speaker 1: shooting coverage for the magazine. I've been there since two
Speaker 1: and one, and I don't know, it's such a long time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But when you talk about being another forms of journalism,
Speaker 1: but that that's been your main deal for for for
Speaker 1: that many years. I can't even do the math. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I'm it's it happens when you get older, man, all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, You've had a bunch of jobs for
Speaker 1: a long time, but no, Afterlife has been the most
Speaker 1: consistent gig of my career. I kind of did the
Speaker 1: thing a lot of young journalists do, jump around from
Speaker 1: place to place. That's Ben's phone song that comes out
Speaker 1: in the morning. Yeah, so yeah, so I joined the
Speaker 1: I joined the staff there in two thousand one, moved
Speaker 1: to move to New York City because that's where they
Speaker 1: were based. And you know, that was the third time
Speaker 1: I worked in New York City professionally, and I always
Speaker 1: knew I have a shelf life in New York and
Speaker 1: I managed to weasel my way into the shooting editor position,
Speaker 1: And um, I feel like a great diaspora of outdoor
Speaker 1: life folks out of New York. Like, does anybody from
Speaker 1: outdoor Life live in New York anymore? Yeah, there's still
Speaker 1: we still have a couple of editors there, but it's
Speaker 1: always attention because obviously the people that we have on
Speaker 1: staff and one on staff are avid outdoors and and
Speaker 1: trying to pursue that in New York city is just
Speaker 1: a lot more difficult. That's shooting bullets all around, right
Speaker 1: about it? Oh? Yeah, no, And that's what happened. I
Speaker 1: I finally went to my bosses and said, look, I
Speaker 1: can't do justice to this job and be in New York.
Speaker 1: And they said, well, where do you want to go?
Speaker 1: And I said Montana And they said, hey, that sounds great.
Speaker 1: Here's a big pay cut. Go have fun. Calculation, John,
Speaker 1: can you real quick explain what the shooting editor is.
Speaker 1: The shooting editor is is the guy who handles all
Speaker 1: of the firearms and shooting skill coverage. So you know,
Speaker 1: I talked about guns. I review them in the magazine. Um.
Speaker 1: I try to take some of the increasingly technical stuff
Speaker 1: that's happening in our world and make it accessible to people.
Speaker 1: So try to give people kind of some leverage on
Speaker 1: what these different technologies and terms are, and obviously just
Speaker 1: to help make people better shots. And it's kind of
Speaker 1: a cool deal. I'm only the fifth shooting editor in
Speaker 1: the history of magazine, so well there's always been one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty much. They stick around. Yeah, they do, stick around,
Speaker 1: stick around, stick around down. It's like like arterial plaque.
Speaker 1: We hang in there until we about lived are usefulness. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: Ben O'Brien, Hey, you've been on the show before, Yeah,
Speaker 1: many times. Once just the one time. Remember you did
Speaker 1: a great job. Though, well it was a year ago,
Speaker 1: so I'm a different person now, so I might screw
Speaker 1: this one up. And that was in Nevada, and right
Speaker 1: now we're sitting in Arizona. That's Arizona. I don't know
Speaker 1: much about this place. Did you care to explain yourself
Speaker 1: at all? Hey, you want to see a transition? Check
Speaker 1: this out? Get it? Uh, don't let me save it. Well,
Speaker 1: now I gotta get ready though, Ready, this is gonna
Speaker 1: blow your mind. Well, I'm basically my resume is I
Speaker 1: was once in the Mediator podcast. Uh, and that's really
Speaker 1: all I got. I'm the Hunting marketing manager for Jetti
Speaker 1: UM formally and well currently if I if I imagine
Speaker 1: to be a journalist, I used to work at Peterson
Speaker 1: Sunny Magazine before that, n Rays American Hunter, some digital
Speaker 1: and print journalism and uh, yeah that's it. And we
Speaker 1: taught was before, so we don't need to get into
Speaker 1: too heavily. But once upon a time you wrote about sports,
Speaker 1: sports with balls, sports with ball, sports ball, sports, sweaty
Speaker 1: balls sometimes just yeah round oyeblong. But you wrote about
Speaker 1: like games, games, sports, things that you don't you know,
Speaker 1: things that you don't know much about. I guess at
Speaker 1: this point I was struggling that Muhammed Ali's somebody that
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, his work. At some point I did
Speaker 1: what I did, aspire to write about sports, and then
Speaker 1: I figured out that, uh, that was a ship job.
Speaker 1: You can I can I revisit with you, just real quick.
Speaker 1: Even though I didn't want to talk about it, I
Speaker 1: do want to revisit. One thing you mentioned to me
Speaker 1: is that, um, once you got to sort of peel
Speaker 1: back the the curtain into the world of professional athletics,
Speaker 1: it lost something for you. Of course it did, Yeah, something,
Speaker 1: something was not what you envisioned it to be. Well,
Speaker 1: and I you know, you grew up on the East Coast.
Speaker 1: I think it's it's it's not particularly just an East
Speaker 1: Coast thing, but on the East Coast and the major
Speaker 1: cities Boston and New York and Baltimore, if there seems
Speaker 1: to be just a proclivity for sports, I mean like
Speaker 1: that's part of your identity, that's part you grow up
Speaker 1: like hey man, what do you do? Who are you like,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm Ben, I'm a Ravens fan. I think I'm married.
Speaker 1: I think I might be married. There's a kid somewhere.
Speaker 1: You just it's part of your personal identity. And for
Speaker 1: me growing up, I would, you know, go to sleep
Speaker 1: as a little kid listening to the Orioles game on
Speaker 1: the radio like this. That's that's part of our identity
Speaker 1: as my family and just who I grew up around.
Speaker 1: And so that was twenty one years old. All of
Speaker 1: a sudden, I'm covering this thing like I'm inside of
Speaker 1: the pulled back the curtain. So young. I was an
Speaker 1: internet at a magazine. But did you go to you
Speaker 1: finished up regular college? Right? Yeah, this is my senior
Speaker 1: year in college. I finished. I was an intern at
Speaker 1: a regular magazine. They just said, hey, would you like
Speaker 1: to go be the beat writer for a while. We
Speaker 1: think you got some good skills in that area. I
Speaker 1: was like, yeah, you said, pure raw talent, Yes, pure
Speaker 1: raw talent, and just so they sent me there and
Speaker 1: I went there, and you know, I remember walking into
Speaker 1: the locker room the first time being so nervous, sweating.
Speaker 1: I was twenty one years old. These are like most
Speaker 1: of the players aren't much older than me, but most
Speaker 1: of the other reporters and writers were six times by age.
Speaker 1: Does it makes sense they're old. They're old, and there
Speaker 1: maybe three dudes writing about sports, and uh, anyhow, they're old,
Speaker 1: I thought. And so you go back there and you
Speaker 1: realize that that these people that you you center your
Speaker 1: identity around their efforts, right, I mean, because the Ravens
Speaker 1: are the orioles or of a sports team, They're not
Speaker 1: much more than just a collection of people doing a game,
Speaker 1: you know, playing a game. And so if those folks
Speaker 1: are that important to you, then they've got to be
Speaker 1: some kind of you know, idol or or somebody you
Speaker 1: can look up to. And so at that point, um,
Speaker 1: I started to meet him and hang out with them
Speaker 1: and interview them and and observe them and their professional
Speaker 1: sense and personal sense, and I realized that most of
Speaker 1: them were nowhere near idol status, like they didn't not
Speaker 1: that they didn't deserve it, but they just not who
Speaker 1: they were. They just hit a ball and we just
Speaker 1: decided that that was somehow culturally important, which to me,
Speaker 1: after I saw back behind the curtain, I thought, well,
Speaker 1: how what a silly thing too to think this is
Speaker 1: culturally as a society something we should worship or cheer
Speaker 1: for whatever, and um, and then I just realized, if
Speaker 1: I take this as a career, I will never get
Speaker 1: to write about what I'm doing, or I'll never get
Speaker 1: to write about my own personal experiences. I'll be just
Speaker 1: writing about what this rich baseball players doing. What there
Speaker 1: I respect him as a person or not. And then
Speaker 1: I realized, oh shit, my career has gotta go a
Speaker 1: different direction because this one sucks. And it did. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of miserable you know, middle aged sports
Speaker 1: writers that just live. They get all the negative stuff
Speaker 1: that the athletes get, like to travel in the long
Speaker 1: hours and crazy schedules. They get none of the accolades,
Speaker 1: none of the they get no, none of the money,
Speaker 1: none of the pretty girls, not It's just nothing. That's
Speaker 1: like the opposite, the antithesis of what this person gets.
Speaker 1: So I quickly I was introduced to the fact that
Speaker 1: you could be a writer and also write about hunting. Um, well,
Speaker 1: I was like that, that seems better. Let's do that
Speaker 1: because I hunted, you know, hunt of my entire life.
Speaker 1: Though I guess that's part of the reason I'm here. Yeah, yeah, um,
Speaker 1: what age are you when you quit doing it? Probably two,
Speaker 1: so you peeled back the curtain like curtain open early. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I had I had some internship and then a
Speaker 1: job at the Washington Post right around the time they're
Speaker 1: making a digital transition. So then it became kind of
Speaker 1: a digital editor where that was my became my calling card,
Speaker 1: you know, knowing a little bit about the digital editorial space.
Speaker 1: And so buddy of mine was like, Hey, I'm working
Speaker 1: at the n R at this magazine called American Hunter,
Speaker 1: and I'm leaving it, and I think you'd be pretty
Speaker 1: good at it if you don't like the sports things.
Speaker 1: So he's like, I don't want the job, perhaps you
Speaker 1: might like it. I know, your job now sucks. So yeah,
Speaker 1: that was right when I was twenty three, So I
Speaker 1: got in the industry early. I mean I'm thirty, you know,
Speaker 1: I've been in nine years. It seems like a lot
Speaker 1: longer than that. Yeah, and then moving on, we have
Speaker 1: dirt myth yep. Uh, you don't mind me interrupting you
Speaker 1: from what you're doing there dirt and getting you some
Speaker 1: photos to introduce you. Yeah, and then finally the Lavin
Speaker 1: Eagle US good evening. Watch this transition this show is
Speaker 1: actually about COO's deer. Now, who's your got its name for? Um?
Speaker 1: The historian and botanist Elliott Cus, who I just read
Speaker 1: died in Baltimore, where Ben is from. He was an
Speaker 1: Orioles fan. He was before that. He's before that. Um.
Speaker 1: I read too that he used to believe in levitation.
Speaker 1: He believed the objects would now and then just inexplicably levitate.
Speaker 1: But I've seen some CU's deer do some gnarly movements,
Speaker 1: some magical movements. So Elliott Cus, we've talked about this before,
Speaker 1: about some touching this because this is like a deep dive,
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about desert white tails, the great ghost
Speaker 1: known as CU's deer. Elliott Cous probably pronounced his name cows.
Speaker 1: But he took a like into this mysterious little desert deer.
Speaker 1: It was given his name. And now people say Cus.
Speaker 1: And when you say cous, half of people get real
Speaker 1: mad and write you a mean letter saying that it's
Speaker 1: cows cow. Johnny, you know this better than I do.
Speaker 1: What's the other way that people like to say it? Yeah? Cows? Okay, Elliott.
Speaker 1: I don't know if Elliott Cow said cows or cow
Speaker 1: Chris Denim, who I've said before has written the word
Speaker 1: coup is more than any man on the planet besides
Speaker 1: perhaps Elliott cous says that he will say wus dear
Speaker 1: till the day he dies. But he points out that Elliott,
Speaker 1: the naturalist and historian and levitation believer in Baltimore die
Speaker 1: person would have pronounced his name cows. I don't know
Speaker 1: how people started, how it became popularized to call it
Speaker 1: cous when people get piste when you do it, just
Speaker 1: like people get piste if you say cows dear, it
Speaker 1: rolls off the tongue. Maybe a little better because if
Speaker 1: you tell people cows dear, they're gonna think you're talking
Speaker 1: about a deer cow. Yeah, which I don't know what
Speaker 1: it is. I don't like the sounds of it. Maybe
Speaker 1: that's it. Maybe we just developed every confusion. We can
Speaker 1: call it something else, we can pronounce it another way.
Speaker 1: Many people, though, I mean, when you get outside of
Speaker 1: the state of Arizona in the lower forty eight, I
Speaker 1: mean you're talking about maybe a percentage of the population
Speaker 1: that actually knows that this deer exists. Yeah, it's a dinky,
Speaker 1: dinky amount of mugs who are interested in whether it's
Speaker 1: coups or cows, but it's it's it's it's a it's
Speaker 1: a white tailed deer. And these white tailed deer can
Speaker 1: be found in the Sky Island mountain ranges of Arizona.
Speaker 1: And we talk about sky on the mountain range. What
Speaker 1: it means you have, like you know, these vast tracts
Speaker 1: of flat desert punctuated by these these mountain ranges, and
Speaker 1: these mountain ranges, the higher portions of these mountain ranges
Speaker 1: have a slightly more temperate climate, a little more precipitation,
Speaker 1: and these little white tailed deer live out there, running
Speaker 1: around in saro cactuses and okatillo cactuses and just they're
Speaker 1: out in the desert and the mountain desert. There's some
Speaker 1: in New Mexico, but like the cou's motherland is Old Mexico,
Speaker 1: which if you want to talk about transitions, we were
Speaker 1: just talking about the war that helped establish that border
Speaker 1: between Austin Mexico. When I brought up Sam Houston, dirt
Speaker 1: were you? Yeah? Were here when I was Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's another transition. Where in the world is dirt po Yeah,
Speaker 1: dirt there. There was explained to someone how we're talking
Speaker 1: about whether or not who knew Spanish and who knew what,
Speaker 1: and Dirt clarified that he hadn't even learned English really
Speaker 1: well yet he wanted to give me more time because
Speaker 1: he was wondering if if we were looking at a
Speaker 1: peacock and he was surprised that they hadn't been predated
Speaker 1: yet that I got it. Once you learn the dirt
Speaker 1: myths language, though, you can you knew what I was
Speaker 1: completely consisted by what words actually are there, and you're
Speaker 1: able to just like make your point clearly, but just
Speaker 1: making up whole new things to make up what you
Speaker 1: could have said preyed upon. But that that's way too
Speaker 1: many syllables. Like if this guy doesn't have time for deodering,
Speaker 1: he does not have time to say, pray, let me
Speaker 1: lift my stinky arm to look at my non watch,
Speaker 1: So Sam Houston, Yeah, Desert White Tales and like Mexico
Speaker 1: is this fairy? Because Yah's experience with Desert White Tales
Speaker 1: runs deeper a little bit. Yeah, is what fair? What
Speaker 1: are you asking me? Like the Mexico's like where it's at? Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was just talking about good buddy Tyler on the
Speaker 1: phone notes he's living two songs, recommended some restaurants, and
Speaker 1: he's leaving on Saturday. I think to go down. He's
Speaker 1: hunt with Beato next week. So the Beato is getting
Speaker 1: tags for him and his dad, and Um, I was
Speaker 1: telling about how good the hunt was, and he's like, yeah, bro,
Speaker 1: that's why you go to Mexico. It's kind of like
Speaker 1: it's just a whole different ballgame, you know, like you
Speaker 1: just you grind it out in Arizona and you go
Speaker 1: to Mexico and it's, um, figure out how to make
Speaker 1: an analogy. You know, it's like fishing where I don't know,
Speaker 1: you're trying to find an analogy of where something's not
Speaker 1: that great and then where it's real great. Midwest the
Speaker 1: same thing. You know, Um with a large mouth bass
Speaker 1: fishing in Michigan, and my mom's like and your mom's like,
Speaker 1: would out in California down the southeast and most lakes.
Speaker 1: Good job, nice, that's a good analogy. Uh Now, a
Speaker 1: couple of Desert white tales are deaky little deer, Like,
Speaker 1: what do you think those what do you think a
Speaker 1: big buck? We're just coming back from hunting Desert white
Speaker 1: Tales of Mexico and we got some nice bucks. What
Speaker 1: are those big bucks? Way? Not much over a hundred pounds.
Speaker 1: In the fifth, the thing I like most to talk
Speaker 1: about outside of talking about Daniel Boone, is talking about
Speaker 1: Bergman's principle and Bergman's principles principles way of explaining why
Speaker 1: a mambel species will tend to gargantuanism. It will tend
Speaker 1: to be biggest in the northern extreme of its range
Speaker 1: and smallest and the southern extreme of its range. And
Speaker 1: it's speculated this might have to do with heat retention
Speaker 1: and heat dissipation, where when you got these white tails
Speaker 1: away in Alberta, they're like two fifty pounds that they
Speaker 1: have lower surface area, so they have more ability to
Speaker 1: hold in heat. And then and then a ninety pound
Speaker 1: white tail has more surface area per unit of weight
Speaker 1: and he's able to dissipate heat. One theory about why
Speaker 1: Bergman's principle is true. There's exceptions, like mule they are
Speaker 1: considered an exception to Bergman's principle, but generally just like
Speaker 1: small on the south, and so these white shills are dinky,
Speaker 1: dinky little deer, but they're like in minute your form
Speaker 1: because a big, huge giant couz buck scores. What like,
Speaker 1: what's the coup's equivalent of a two white tail? But
Speaker 1: that's like a rarity, rights, that's not as rare anymore.
Speaker 1: Two white tails happened because people can people can make them,
Speaker 1: they grow them. Yeah. Do you know that there's a
Speaker 1: guy I heard about recently that actually puts out medicine
Speaker 1: for his white tails. Yeah, yep, I'm talking. They're beyond
Speaker 1: putting out like subminster and they're medicating dewarming, de worming
Speaker 1: medicine in the summer. And the feeder you're putting out
Speaker 1: feed with medicine for your and growth hormones growth. Sup. Yeah,
Speaker 1: No one's doing that for cou's deer down in Mexican.
Speaker 1: These are all these It's like Pamela and Sitting fair
Speaker 1: fauces CU's is fair Faucet Texas white Tail's Pamela Anderson.
Speaker 1: I get it. I'm I'm following you. I'm tracking natural artificial. Ah,
Speaker 1: they're both hot. Let's see. Yeah, like two under an
Speaker 1: inch free range white tail is probably like okay, but
Speaker 1: give me a more realistic number when we're talking And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna back up because when we're talking about the numbers.
Speaker 1: There's like a way, there's there's an agreed upon way
Speaker 1: that you measure deer antlers when you take various circumferences
Speaker 1: and lengths and dimensions in YadA YadA, and you add
Speaker 1: it all up and you and you take that number
Speaker 1: and say he's a blank inch thing. No, there's like
Speaker 1: there's like lingo, right, Like if you shoot a two
Speaker 1: mule deer, it's a big in the four elk is
Speaker 1: a big in A hundred eight inch ram is a
Speaker 1: big un yeah h in the Alberta in a big, huge, giant. Well,
Speaker 1: the biggest white tailed buck ever was killed albert It
Speaker 1: was two d plus inches, so the same way that
Speaker 1: their body is half the size or less than half
Speaker 1: the size. To put I can put it a little
Speaker 1: more perspective. J killed a few years ago. Um like
Speaker 1: a hundred thirties six inch. I believe couse dear, he's
Speaker 1: somewhere right in there. At the time, he was number
Speaker 1: eight in the All Time Boone and Crockett Book, The
Speaker 1: Big eight biggest you know bucket's ever been entered into
Speaker 1: the Boone and Crockett record book. Yep, and Mark Kennyon
Speaker 1: can barely get excited about a one in regular white tail.
Speaker 1: That's right. Let me ask you this question is the
Speaker 1: is the desert white tail the only white tail? And
Speaker 1: this is a legit questions. Don't know that doesn't have
Speaker 1: hunters or land owners managing the land for their to
Speaker 1: propagate there species. Think about all white tails on our
Speaker 1: continent Alberta, Iowa, little here, a little thinky white tail
Speaker 1: that are that are protected. Um. But it just strikes
Speaker 1: me is that the desert white tail is akin to
Speaker 1: the mule the here in a way that it just
Speaker 1: lives in wild places and nobody's planting out falfa fields
Speaker 1: and crop rows. Agreed until this past week food plot.
Speaker 1: Let me back up someone, I want to walk through
Speaker 1: the whole damn story, right, and I was trying to
Speaker 1: lay a little background by talking about Elliott coups and
Speaker 1: levitation and everything. You're the ordering a little more background.
Speaker 1: There's something I don't know what I'm sure of. People
Speaker 1: write in too clarify. I don't know that Mexico has
Speaker 1: the equivalent of going down to a gas station and
Speaker 1: buying a hunting license. No O, In the U s.
Speaker 1: We have publicly owned wildlife. Okay, so if you own
Speaker 1: property and a deer lives on your property, that's not
Speaker 1: your dear. You can control access to the dear, but
Speaker 1: it's not your dear. Um, and and and and tags
Speaker 1: and stuff. I'm speaking very generally because there's many exceptions
Speaker 1: to this. Tags are generally sold by government agencies, are
Speaker 1: they And they come from government agencies and they get
Speaker 1: distributed in different fashions that will not get into right now.
Speaker 1: In Mexico, if you're a landowner, you say to the
Speaker 1: to to the government biologists in your state, Um, they
Speaker 1: come out and do a survey on your ranch, on
Speaker 1: your astantia. Now that we all know an amazing amount
Speaker 1: of Spanish, they come out to your astantia to do
Speaker 1: a survey and they'll take into considerations like what all
Speaker 1: has been predated or not, and um, they will issue
Speaker 1: this land ord. They'll say this landowner is allowed to
Speaker 1: kill what would be normal, like like a number of
Speaker 1: tags for maybe four or five. Yeah, sometimes it can
Speaker 1: be a lot more, because yeah, I think it could
Speaker 1: be considered to be double that. It does seem conservative,
Speaker 1: but I think some of the rangers are big enough
Speaker 1: for us to double that. We were on this year
Speaker 1: had five and it had tens of thousands acres though,
Speaker 1: didn't it? No? Nine No, And it was roughly what
Speaker 1: four by ten miles? It was four by ten miles.
Speaker 1: The gvernment comes out and they give the guy a
Speaker 1: handful of half Alina tags and a handful of white
Speaker 1: tail tags. Who's your tags? He can do with them
Speaker 1: what he wishes. We haven't had a friend, um, a
Speaker 1: very admirable figure. Admirable that's a hard word to say
Speaker 1: for me. Figure named Jay Scott. And Jay Scott has
Speaker 1: a lot of relationships. Um, he and his partner, Dark Colburn,
Speaker 1: Colburn and Scott. Why is Dark in his name? First?
Speaker 1: That's kind of guy j is? I think jas is
Speaker 1: such a good guy. So Dark Colburn and Jay Scott
Speaker 1: run Colburn and Scott Outfitters and they have a bunch
Speaker 1: of relationships down in Sonora, Mexico. And they broker like
Speaker 1: you're getting tags and you get accused your tag for
Speaker 1: about a couple of thousand dollars. They do a lot
Speaker 1: more than that, you know what I mean. They gotta
Speaker 1: go and scout the you know, they gotta find the
Speaker 1: ranch first, then go scout it. Make sure it's got
Speaker 1: some roads can get around on, make sure it's got
Speaker 1: a house you can sleep in. But we've also just
Speaker 1: camped on Cou's deer ranches down there we have I
Speaker 1: think that was of our own admission. Yeah, but some
Speaker 1: of the drives are so long on the like you
Speaker 1: can drive for hours on one of these places. I'm
Speaker 1: really like offer sharwkward mountain roads. So um Jay guides
Speaker 1: Cou's DearS but also facilitates dudes who want to do
Speaker 1: do it yourself trips on these biggest doan seas and
Speaker 1: j will help you get hooked up with the place
Speaker 1: where you can buy a cou'se your tag and then
Speaker 1: buying the cus your tag usually comes to you understand
Speaker 1: that you're gonna be sleeping somewhere on the ranch, but
Speaker 1: you gotta go down to cross the border. You gotta go.
Speaker 1: You're you're flirting with the border here, right, and that
Speaker 1: turns a lot of people off. You're like taking your
Speaker 1: vehicle down and crossing in into a land that many
Speaker 1: people feel is intimidating myself included, Like you're going from Douglas,
Speaker 1: Arizona into Augo, Pyato, Mexico and hunting along the US
Speaker 1: Mexico border out in some wild ass country. Yeah, if
Speaker 1: you watch you know, regular cable news, you think Cicario.
Speaker 1: As you're down there and camping out and hanging out,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like every night it's fifty fifty whether
Speaker 1: or not you're gonna be bad. So don't have to
Speaker 1: do a bad of acid. I've been down I've been
Speaker 1: down there now five time. As I think, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: it's funny. And I had a shirt maybe misplaced, maybe
Speaker 1: stolen once. I misplaced a lot of ships, so I
Speaker 1: still haven't ruled out that has lost my shirt. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I have never had anything remotely sketchy, but I still
Speaker 1: feel sketched out going through the process, with intimidating process
Speaker 1: without for this trip specifically, the first time I've done it,
Speaker 1: without the pretense, it would have been just a normal
Speaker 1: You would have thought nothing other other than if no
Speaker 1: one said be scared, you would have gone through it
Speaker 1: and what's scary? That was easier than Canada. Yeah. But
Speaker 1: but on the other hand, I mean even for veteran
Speaker 1: guys going down there, you were like, we gotta be here,
Speaker 1: you can't be here after dark. It was like American
Speaker 1: werewolf in London, like you don't mess around with I
Speaker 1: don't want to be there after dark. But it went smooth.
Speaker 1: But some of bitch is beautiful down there, gorgeous country.
Speaker 1: Anything that shocked me with the amount of mangy dog
Speaker 1: is just roaming around, eating trash and shipping in the street. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I told my my kids were in max with. My
Speaker 1: kids are always like, where do these dogs come from.
Speaker 1: I'm like, it's just a thing. It used to But
Speaker 1: it used to be like this in America when I
Speaker 1: was a kid, everybody's dog just ran around. Then Americans
Speaker 1: got sick of that. Two things my brother contributes to
Speaker 1: all of the Clinton presidency. Bill Clinton became president, kids,
Speaker 1: all kids started having helmets on when they rowed a bike,
Speaker 1: and the dogs vanished. Like he doesn't understand the link,
Speaker 1: but he noticed that it all happened time dogs, free
Speaker 1: roaming dogs went away. Kids, parents all bottom helmets to
Speaker 1: ride their bikes. And then it was just like a
Speaker 1: thing that everyone agreed upon at the same time. You
Speaker 1: know what it was. It was the first Internet boom.
Speaker 1: Everybody was suddenly communicating their fears. I'm just guessing I
Speaker 1: have no idea. I like it. Your dog's gonna get
Speaker 1: your kids younger? Did you grow up where you were
Speaker 1: in a helmet. We learned right a bike was a
Speaker 1: little killed. They would have killed you if you had
Speaker 1: a helmet. Beat the guys. Oh they guys that wrote
Speaker 1: motorcycles and were helmets and only half of them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they would have killed you if you showed up at
Speaker 1: school the helmet on. Well that's the beauty. Mexico hasn't
Speaker 1: had that transition. Which transition is that of the dogs
Speaker 1: hang out and kids don't need to wear helmets. We
Speaker 1: saw some dogs today that m M. I could still smell.
Speaker 1: Smell those dogs. Is it interesting to spend any time
Speaker 1: on the process of going through the border. Yes, he
Speaker 1: would you like to walk us through the process and
Speaker 1: hold us. The New Jersey cat lady, she should go
Speaker 1: to Agua Priata and do some work. That's the place
Speaker 1: for her. I mean, if you're really, if you're in
Speaker 1: New Jersey, do you want to like feel good about
Speaker 1: yourself instead of sending that bullshit checked Peter every month
Speaker 1: or year, Go to Agua Priata and just that's all
Speaker 1: I need to say. Go there, you'll know what to do.
Speaker 1: Just bring like a hose and some shampoo and to
Speaker 1: be a start, like some jerky Uh, we got a
Speaker 1: letter about New Jersey cat ladies, and the guy was saying,
Speaker 1: as much as we like joke about news erdies cat ladies, says,
Speaker 1: you're not far off. He says an animal rights activist.
Speaker 1: If you're gonna make this sort of composite picture of
Speaker 1: an animal rights person, it is a woman who lives
Speaker 1: on the coast and owns pets. John Key walks through
Speaker 1: the process of coming into Mexico slick transition. Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: It's a little it's a little different because it's serious.
Speaker 1: You know, if no one laughs doing it, no, no,
Speaker 1: you know, we we we drive up there in our
Speaker 1: big white van, which is instantly just feels sketchy anyway,
Speaker 1: just having a big white rental van, and uh, it's
Speaker 1: all that camera equipment pointing at us. All of a sudden,
Speaker 1: there's like these flats like you don't even have to stop.
Speaker 1: There no humans there, it's just you're being recorded. It
Speaker 1: feels like a dozen ways that the US government. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's no. I mean we haven't even gotten to the
Speaker 1: to the Mexican party before. Well, the thing is, well, Nate,
Speaker 1: did you see the guy did Hey he had the
Speaker 1: little old school digital camera taking a picture of like
Speaker 1: the little vin plate on the Mexican side. It was
Speaker 1: really I and I was like, that's an antique digital camera.
Speaker 1: It was pretty weird. So yeah, anyway, so you get
Speaker 1: you get these pictures taken on the US side, and uh,
Speaker 1: and then we just had to make sure that you
Speaker 1: needed a form. We have one of the things you
Speaker 1: do when you go abroad, particular firearms or other expensive equipment,
Speaker 1: because you fill out these fifty seven customs forms and
Speaker 1: they essentially are just it's just proof of ownership. A
Speaker 1: lot of times guys are like, oh, it's a gun
Speaker 1: license or registration thing. That's that's not what it is
Speaker 1: saying I own this stuff when I left America. That's right,
Speaker 1: I own it when I left America. So that when
Speaker 1: you come back, you know, you can't be accused of
Speaker 1: having purchased some presumably high ticket item or otherwise tax free,
Speaker 1: tax free and then sneak it back across. So you
Speaker 1: know you have this this form and y't even know
Speaker 1: the number of the form. Yeah, there you go. So anyway,
Speaker 1: and we kind of breezed through that. That worked pretty
Speaker 1: pretty good, except their Customs folks, nice nice people, all
Speaker 1: of them, but they were a little confused about the forms.
Speaker 1: I noticed we had to educate them a little bit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: We're like, no, you require me to have this. They yes,
Speaker 1: they just wanted to give the blank form and not
Speaker 1: stamp it or fill it out. Well, you know, I
Speaker 1: noticed today there was some training going on while we
Speaker 1: were getting back into the States, and I'm guessing we're
Speaker 1: kind of at the beginning of hunting seasons, so maybe
Speaker 1: if there's some you know, new people there they just
Speaker 1: haven't had, or people who are moved down from a
Speaker 1: different border or a different area or whatever. Sure that
Speaker 1: was good that, yeah, but it was it was kind
Speaker 1: of one stop for us at the U. S. Side.
Speaker 1: Then very quickly get to the Mexican side and it
Speaker 1: gets confusing, mostly because none of us can understand what
Speaker 1: anybody's saying. But you know, we go in there, we
Speaker 1: get our tourist visas to start with. We have a vehicle,
Speaker 1: you got to register that. It's a little complex, you
Speaker 1: know complex. You guys are talking dirt. Yeah, it's almost
Speaker 1: like you're gonna get predated. It almost like you're gonna
Speaker 1: get predated there. And the thing is, honest, somebody's got
Speaker 1: to give him props for his administrative acuity. I mean
Speaker 1: it is like he knew this thing from like, you know,
Speaker 1: one point to the next. There's the reason I hang
Speaker 1: out with you. But yeah, that's all from j you know,
Speaker 1: so when you do this hunt with j he mean
Speaker 1: you guys saw the letter the documentary said us, he's
Speaker 1: got lined out and what you say, It's like I
Speaker 1: was reading this word document. They put a lot of
Speaker 1: time into the document of how to go across the
Speaker 1: border kind of just that documents useless because no one
Speaker 1: else has filed on the protocolon I wanted to share
Speaker 1: the document with the people. Have you have you read
Speaker 1: step nineteen. That's what we're on, right because step nineteen
Speaker 1: you say this and then I say this, not saying that.
Speaker 1: That document makes like your user agreement for your iPhone
Speaker 1: look like a high coup. You know, that thing was
Speaker 1: just impenetrable for me. Oh I thought, I thought, you
Speaker 1: know what, I thought. There's certain things in there, like
Speaker 1: Jay has certain tips in there. Yeah, Like, for instance,
Speaker 1: there's Jays like anticipate a lot of hubbub about the
Speaker 1: weight of your vehicle which we encounter, which we encounter,
Speaker 1: and Javen has a trick that you go and make
Speaker 1: if you have a trailer. That's how you had a trailer,
Speaker 1: you made yourself. Go and get a stamping machine and
Speaker 1: make a thing that says the weight, and go put
Speaker 1: it in a hidden place on your trailer and then
Speaker 1: go down there and act like you're looking around and
Speaker 1: discover the weight stamped on the thing, because that will
Speaker 1: help you prove the weight of the trailer. But he
Speaker 1: doesn't want you to put the like if it's a
Speaker 1: really heavy one, he doesn't want you to put the
Speaker 1: real heavyweight. Right, isn't there like a number thresholds of weight?
Speaker 1: And we got caught up on how much are creepy
Speaker 1: van weight candy in there? Free candy? Yeah, you gotta
Speaker 1: paint the picture a little bit. I mean you're in
Speaker 1: a place. I mean it's literally the size of this
Speaker 1: hotel room, maybe even a little bit smaller. Right, And
Speaker 1: there's three windows. This is this is banks of windows,
Speaker 1: banks of windows at the Mexican border, right, three doors
Speaker 1: in that place. You kind of go in there and
Speaker 1: you gotta go to one window telling you want the
Speaker 1: tourist basically go to the other window to pay for it,
Speaker 1: and then you come back at eight teams. You're going
Speaker 1: to get it. You're going and show your tourist visa.
Speaker 1: The guy's yep, that's a tourist visa. He sends you
Speaker 1: to pay a dude to photo copy. Yet then you
Speaker 1: go to pay for it. Then you go back and
Speaker 1: show the guy that you did all that and he couldn't.
Speaker 1: He stamps, just stamps. Then it's time to move on
Speaker 1: to your rig and you shooting irons. Yes, that's right.
Speaker 1: So we visit with the police there at the end.
Speaker 1: We were a little confused about where to go. Yeah,
Speaker 1: cop comes out, He's like, yep, that's a gun, that's right,
Speaker 1: and a van. Except except we we did have that
Speaker 1: very sweet lady, that very sweet police lady. When we
Speaker 1: went there. They thought Yanni was guappo guapo, gig wappo,
Speaker 1: gig wapo, handsome, She's not dirt, was l stinky. But
Speaker 1: she liked it. She did like it. Yeah, so, I
Speaker 1: mean it is a little bit complicated, But what were
Speaker 1: the what were you say? We're there for our it's
Speaker 1: kind of alcads intimidating if some of them, you know,
Speaker 1: I'll point out Yanni point this out to me, And
Speaker 1: I hadn't really taken notice that some of our fellow
Speaker 1: countrymen are in there acting very huffy about how annoying
Speaker 1: it was, but then they don't speak the language. It
Speaker 1: would be like if if you worked somewhere and a
Speaker 1: guy comes in blabbering to you in a foreign language,
Speaker 1: then acting annoyed, then acting annoyed with your protocol, especially
Speaker 1: when you're carrying guns into a country where I just
Speaker 1: want to show up down here with guns and ship
Speaker 1: and not speak the language and just come on in
Speaker 1: put a ment on my Just where's the concierge? I
Speaker 1: just it's very simple. I want to take all my ship,
Speaker 1: my weapons and go down and kill animals and bring
Speaker 1: those animals back home out of your country. And I
Speaker 1: don't want to have to answer all these questions in
Speaker 1: a language it is not the one I speak. Are you?
Speaker 1: Are you saying you haven't heard of amendamento? No? What
Speaker 1: is that? The second he caught me not knowing Spanish,
Speaker 1: I knew it. But I found everybody in this room
Speaker 1: is various international borders in various ways. Right. I've found
Speaker 1: most effective ways to know is to read those thirty
Speaker 1: eight steps that Jay has and understand that like parked
Speaker 1: by the gray building and walk a hundred yards. That's
Speaker 1: the ship. You generally ignore the stuff you're talking about,
Speaker 1: like the actual pinch points where they're gonna get you.
Speaker 1: Just know those pinch points and otherwise just be quiet,
Speaker 1: stand in line, put your card there. When they ask
Speaker 1: you a question that you can understand your answer and
Speaker 1: eventually you get through it. If they ask you for money,
Speaker 1: you give it to them, that's all. And I don't
Speaker 1: know about that, because I've seen some times down there
Speaker 1: crossing that board when people wanted money. And then when
Speaker 1: a Spanish speaker steps and on your behalf, they waved
Speaker 1: the feet. I seen that several times. But if you
Speaker 1: don't have a Spanish speaker to step in on your behalf, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no you have. And and in our case where
Speaker 1: they said, well your van ways too much, and they
Speaker 1: said step in this other line, and I thought, well,
Speaker 1: the heavy van line, the heavy van line. And I thought, well,
Speaker 1: they're gonna take gonna go out of the van. There's
Speaker 1: gonna be some kind of giant, you know, machine to
Speaker 1: weigh this thing and measure it. And they just wanted
Speaker 1: more money. Well, is it time to introduce our fixer?
Speaker 1: Who helped us Bet Bet Beethoven. Beetho helped us a
Speaker 1: large man. So J Scott and Dark Colburn worked with
Speaker 1: We're gonna keep explaining this part because I'm like, I
Speaker 1: don't want to mess it up with Beato. Yeah, was
Speaker 1: like a dude they hunt with. Yeah, my buddy Tyler
Speaker 1: I was just talking to He's like, with Beato next week.
Speaker 1: We haven't hot with him for a long time. We
Speaker 1: still hunt with him all the time back in the day,
Speaker 1: So he's been hunting with JA, hunting, guiding slash eros. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like twenty Yeah, it's a long time. You had many
Speaker 1: years ago. And yeah, he's basically like what you know
Speaker 1: in the production business we call a fixer for J.
Speaker 1: Like he's on the nextan side and he's just running
Speaker 1: errands and doing business and he's I think now he's
Speaker 1: also sort of you know, helping J find new ranches
Speaker 1: to lease and and making friends with new ranch owners,
Speaker 1: you know, getting more tags lined up. But yeah, you
Speaker 1: set them up with us to uh, you know, help
Speaker 1: us once we got to the border, get us to
Speaker 1: the ranch. Then you hunt it with us. Helped us
Speaker 1: with cleaning skulls. But you're in me getting around when
Speaker 1: we we're driving down. Um, you guys don't mind if
Speaker 1: I move away from the whole. I think we got
Speaker 1: the point with the Border Crossing. M hm um. Have
Speaker 1: you guys read The Crossing by Corny McCarthy. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the Border Trilogy. Read every Cormick McCarthy book you can
Speaker 1: get your hands on, sir, because you'll find all the keys,
Speaker 1: including I have found keys to marriage in there, which
Speaker 1: I pointed out before. Um, there's a sign when you
Speaker 1: get a little bit out of a goo creative that
Speaker 1: says I didn't see it, but you guys described it
Speaker 1: to me. So it's a American flag, go to X
Speaker 1: through it. It's official, like actual sign, not graffiti. What's
Speaker 1: it saying? It had a I can't remember now, but
Speaker 1: I had a couple of no Hassle Zone leaving no
Speaker 1: hassles in USA. So like, if you're very ambiguous, we
Speaker 1: should have taken a picture. But to me it meant
Speaker 1: like you're in it. Yeah, if you get someone dicks you, now,
Speaker 1: it's your good because you're in no man's land, best
Speaker 1: of luck. And it looks like no man's land to
Speaker 1: be Yeah, it looks like something Cormick would would describe
Speaker 1: in one of his books mm hmm. And we get
Speaker 1: down to the Astonsia the ranch, big as ranch, and
Speaker 1: it's got a how like an empty house thing about. No, No,
Speaker 1: it's important because you get through all that bs. I'm
Speaker 1: trying to I'm always trying to be aware of the
Speaker 1: listener and his tolerances. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Um, you
Speaker 1: check the guns with the Mexican police, and we also
Speaker 1: have to go and check the guns with the chicken
Speaker 1: um federales. And it's it's simple, it's simple. It's gonna
Speaker 1: sound funny, but you're parking the gas station, you take
Speaker 1: your guns across the street and literally walk into an
Speaker 1: army base and go under a little hut, you know,
Speaker 1: the three sided structure with a roof on it, and uh,
Speaker 1: dude comes out and wants to check your the serial
Speaker 1: numbers on your gun versus the serial numbers that are
Speaker 1: on your what did you call it, like a gun permit?
Speaker 1: Gun permit, I guess takes a look at your passport. Yeah,
Speaker 1: sometimes it takes two hours, since it takes fifteen into
Speaker 1: another room with all that stuff. Yeah, comes back, signed,
Speaker 1: shakes everyone's hand. Those guys were very friendly, but they
Speaker 1: were also spun up. We're in body armor because they
Speaker 1: have shootouts and they had they had their their their
Speaker 1: rifles were loaded. You know, they were ready. But what
Speaker 1: I want to mention though, is the start Prince and
Speaker 1: when you leave that uh, that that border and you
Speaker 1: roll into Agua Priata, and there's a moment there where
Speaker 1: you're like, I'm in a different place. Even though I
Speaker 1: could reach out and touch the fence, it's like you
Speaker 1: are just in a different land. Yeah. And immediately it's
Speaker 1: humbling and and it's you also become you know, thankful
Speaker 1: for like having the opportunity and being able to live
Speaker 1: in America and for everything we have, because immediately you're
Speaker 1: in a place where you're like, this looks rough. I
Speaker 1: think of two things. One, when you get across that border,
Speaker 1: I felt this like ruthlessness about what my surroundings like.
Speaker 1: There isn't the structure is not there for your safety,
Speaker 1: like it it's just rubble and just trash and destitute
Speaker 1: and desperation. Just felt ruthless. It felt like something could
Speaker 1: pop up at any minute and tear you down. It's
Speaker 1: a yes, perception, there wasn't people running around pointing guns
Speaker 1: at us. That's not but the perception, of course is
Speaker 1: that this is there, this is danger, dis represents danger.
Speaker 1: These things seems place you would have had to have
Speaker 1: traveled a long ways to get to get to. But
Speaker 1: in fact you could throw a rock from Walmart, yea
Speaker 1: from the Douglas Walmart and hit that Harker rock and
Speaker 1: land it over in the zone. And every American with
Speaker 1: an opinion on immigration, not that we need to go there,
Speaker 1: but every American opinion on immigration should see that. You
Speaker 1: just need to see it. And however that helps you
Speaker 1: formulate an opinion, It does contextual contextualize that thing. It
Speaker 1: gives you count uh, just a perception of what it
Speaker 1: really is. And you can see the wall, you can
Speaker 1: and and what's funny about the wall, there's you can
Speaker 1: see through it, which I think it's some kind of
Speaker 1: weird irony that you can see through the wall. It's
Speaker 1: like a series of bars and you can look through
Speaker 1: it and see the Taco bell and the McDonald's and
Speaker 1: the Walmart and the s Western and Douglas, or look
Speaker 1: through the other side and see the rubble piles and
Speaker 1: the you know, trash ridden creek beds and all the
Speaker 1: other stuff on it. On that side. Who was It's
Speaker 1: not Bill Buckley, but who was the think that the
Speaker 1: conservative think tank guy that I was affiliated with, the
Speaker 1: Heritage Foundation. Bennett, Remember Bill Bennett. Bill Bennett, he's involved
Speaker 1: in politics. Bill Bennett always talked about the Gates test um.
Speaker 1: When you open the gates, the people tend to come
Speaker 1: in or go out. You know something, You like that
Speaker 1: America always passed the Gates test always. North Korea doesn't
Speaker 1: seem America always passed it on the northern boundary and
Speaker 1: the northern boundaries sort of. You know this before you
Speaker 1: go down this path. And I want to get back
Speaker 1: to hunt COO's deer real quick, you do this. Let's
Speaker 1: have a let's have a day every year where you
Speaker 1: can come New America and leave and we'll count everyone here,
Speaker 1: have the day and then recount. Oh guarantee. I thought
Speaker 1: you were gonna tell me that somehow you're gonna come
Speaker 1: up with a lesser number the next day. The interesting
Speaker 1: thing about that border two is there's people who go
Speaker 1: back and forth from those two realities every day. That's
Speaker 1: the thing that they go. They go back and forth
Speaker 1: the grocery shop to buy parts by car parts. Well,
Speaker 1: there are kids who are going to school on one side,
Speaker 1: live on the other, and so that insane reality and
Speaker 1: which one do you you know, which one do you
Speaker 1: hold up as the fair one or the one that's
Speaker 1: more real? Back to back to Sam Houston and how
Speaker 1: we set those ideas also just shows that even though
Speaker 1: there's a wall there and a border there and all
Speaker 1: this stuff that we went through, is that there's they're
Speaker 1: kind of two parts to something that's together. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's sort of there's a relationship there that you can't
Speaker 1: just pretend doesn't exist. Well, that's what we were talking,
Speaker 1: Steve and I were talking about up how ironic, you know,
Speaker 1: how we felt at some level getting on the u
Speaker 1: S side. You felt some sort of calm and safety
Speaker 1: right the country you live in. Yeah, it's like familiar.
Speaker 1: Thank god, I'm safe now. But you're just as likely
Speaker 1: to pull into a parking and get robbed right there
Speaker 1: in Douglas. Maybe not just as true, it's just likely,
Speaker 1: but it can't happen. I remember one about that, and
Speaker 1: I think that Doug. I remember reading something like Douglas
Speaker 1: is one of the like per like size that winds
Speaker 1: up the Douglas is one of the safest cities in America.
Speaker 1: Well everybody, every American who works there, half of them
Speaker 1: have to work on border security. Yeah, yeah, they all,
Speaker 1: they all, but yeah, I mean, but but that the
Speaker 1: reality is that going out at night at two in
Speaker 1: the morning and at a bar and Douglas is still
Speaker 1: there's no it's not without danger. But your feeling is
Speaker 1: that now you're in this safe zone, which really is
Speaker 1: just a you know, your perception of being on one
Speaker 1: side of the wall. You can't like check your brain
Speaker 1: when you get back into the US exactly exactly, just
Speaker 1: but you feel that you feel like to lay out
Speaker 1: naked on the side of the road and three the
Speaker 1: stuff like that. Least I'm not, yeah, at least'm not accupate,
Speaker 1: but you feel like there's some that calmness that you
Speaker 1: get from oh, familiarity and safety and all those things.
Speaker 1: But in reality, that's a relative turn, that's relative to
Speaker 1: where you are in America, you know. So I don't know,
Speaker 1: but it certainly visually, you know, you know, when you
Speaker 1: cross that port and you feel it. There's something about
Speaker 1: the dogs, the dogs, the main we saw one mangy
Speaker 1: dog with his head in the trash can in the
Speaker 1: back end, with the brown with ship and dirt and
Speaker 1: the front end was white, probably cocaine and sadness, and
Speaker 1: it was just chewing on a piece of fine old diaper.
Speaker 1: Uh So, who is dear? Uh Um? We get down
Speaker 1: to the place we're staying. Thank you, Ben. Yeah, sounds
Speaker 1: like I feel like Corn McCarthy is here among us.
Speaker 1: Um it down to hunt. There's an empty ranch house.
Speaker 1: We're able to set up shop. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: people coming and going. It's hard to tell what their
Speaker 1: function is. And that's one of things I talked about
Speaker 1: all the time, Like when I'm when I'm in America
Speaker 1: and I see people, I'm like, oh, that's like the
Speaker 1: drunk uncle figure, right. Or I see someone walking down
Speaker 1: the road, there's like a look and I look at
Speaker 1: me like that seems like a guy that broke down.
Speaker 1: That seems like a guy who had so many d
Speaker 1: U I s he can't drive anymore. That seems like
Speaker 1: a guy who's walking his dog. You know what I mean?
Speaker 1: You just know right when you're really familiar, but just
Speaker 1: a couple of miles across the boards, like you see
Speaker 1: people are like, I can't, for the life of me
Speaker 1: imagine what this person is doing walking down the road
Speaker 1: and the place you're staying as peacocks, chickens, turkeys that
Speaker 1: are very clearly across between the Goulds turkey, the Ghoul's
Speaker 1: wild turkey, and domestic strains, and there are many ghouls
Speaker 1: turkeys out in this place. And we started hunting first Dame.
Speaker 1: Right off of that, we went on glass and that
Speaker 1: night took a quick little tour of the ranch and
Speaker 1: our tour was hindered by a razor that didn't work,
Speaker 1: So we're gonna try to drive the whole board of
Speaker 1: the ranch. We kind of did a half of the
Speaker 1: north border and I kind of called it quits and
Speaker 1: went back. So my GPS track that I had on
Speaker 1: when the when it's a big rectangular ranch, my GPS
Speaker 1: track after a tour of the ranch described a very
Speaker 1: small triangle was our tour. It was like an incomplete tour.
Speaker 1: And that night we went and perched up on some
Speaker 1: glass and knobs and started seeing a lot of wo's
Speaker 1: near Yeah. It's so it's this weird whirld when that happens,
Speaker 1: because you wake up and you go through this sort
Speaker 1: of like bureaucratic nightmare, and then you drive through a
Speaker 1: town that makes you just feel like deeply uneasy, influenced
Speaker 1: by what you hear. You're about the border wars, right,
Speaker 1: just like all these apprehensions you have, not being welcome,
Speaker 1: feeling there. Then all of a sudden, you're out in
Speaker 1: kind of a wilderness, what with fifty miles south thirty
Speaker 1: miles south, So we're there. I was thinking about that actually,
Speaker 1: like on that ranch because it hasn't been hunted you
Speaker 1: know commonly, but they hunt for the pop like it
Speaker 1: hasn't been hunted by like people who are like really hunting.
Speaker 1: But the Carols, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll hunt from
Speaker 1: for meat. But on that same note, though, like that
Speaker 1: close to the border, that not being a national park
Speaker 1: or uh you know, like a sanctuary of sorts, we
Speaker 1: were probably I mean, like the the area that we
Speaker 1: walked in the land we saw, we were very we
Speaker 1: weren't there. There hasn't been many people who have walked
Speaker 1: around on that land. It's like, well it's like wilderness, yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know what it passes. It passed kind of
Speaker 1: two tests or two things that sort of always strike
Speaker 1: me when I'm in a wilder place. One is just
Speaker 1: a blazingly brilliant night sky. Oh, I mean no light pollution,
Speaker 1: just the stars just stunning up above and then um
Speaker 1: a little less so, I mean the stars are really
Speaker 1: kind of the highlight. But that that's that quiet, that
Speaker 1: sense of silence, you get it. There's not even a
Speaker 1: lot of aircraft noise, no dead quiet. I don't think
Speaker 1: I saw an airplane all week. If you're just the blimp, yeah,
Speaker 1: the blimp every day. You know. My brother was recently
Speaker 1: telling me about you talk about the brilliance of the
Speaker 1: night sky, because he's telling me there's so many planets right,
Speaker 1: like like an estimate of plants that we can kind
Speaker 1: of like figure out a it's a number like one,
Speaker 1: but with twenty for zeros, it's a lot. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: says that when you understand what that number means. He said,
Speaker 1: somewhere there is an eight foot tall furry thing that
Speaker 1: smuggles ship into spacecraft in the spaceship statistically. Yeah, He's like,
Speaker 1: I'm open to any and all ideas. If there are
Speaker 1: that many planets a one with zeros on the end
Speaker 1: of it, that many possible somewhere a Wookie ship called
Speaker 1: them well to like even today when you were calling
Speaker 1: in that coy out and I mentioned, Uh, not night necessarily,
Speaker 1: but the wind reminded me of like old Western Yeah,
Speaker 1: you just like back in time. There's a couple of differences,
Speaker 1: like it's like a wilderness but very heavily degraded by cattle. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the riparian zones. It's just it's like the gloves are
Speaker 1: off on cattle. Yeah, there's no kind of like effort
Speaker 1: to fence to to like heavily degraded riperian zones. And
Speaker 1: there's a limited water. It's dry, dry country, so anything
Speaker 1: that might have water is like hammered by cattle. And
Speaker 1: every square inch of the place is cattle country. It's
Speaker 1: like it's shiploads of exposed rock like outcrops and mountains,
Speaker 1: lots of cactus and lots of you know, ankle to
Speaker 1: knee high grass, but all of it grazed. And on
Speaker 1: top of that, though, I mean, I would guess maybe
Speaker 1: honest knows better that that area we were in we
Speaker 1: had a river going through there, so in theory where
Speaker 1: we were was probably a more water rich. It was
Speaker 1: the most water I've seen anywhere down there. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's still natural to actually see flowing water like that
Speaker 1: was the most water I've seen anywhere great heron down there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: saw wood ducks, redheads, we saw, I saw tree, saw
Speaker 1: a mountain lion to bobcats, hundreds of deer. Not a
Speaker 1: lot of quail, though I thought there'd be more. Not
Speaker 1: one coil jack, saw morning doves, jack rabbits, one cotton
Speaker 1: tail cottontail numbers done, two gray squirrels. How many times
Speaker 1: are you in a glassing tail on a high ridge
Speaker 1: or something? You look across and you could see where
Speaker 1: one pasture was grazed fence and then there's there's tall
Speaker 1: yellow grasses, lots of la but the as far as
Speaker 1: the category is very low stocking ratios, like like not
Speaker 1: tons of cattle, just like little scattering them because the
Speaker 1: country is so dry, but good looking cattle for that
Speaker 1: region from Yeah, yeah, a way to think of this country.
Speaker 1: I was thinking about how to describe it. Because it's
Speaker 1: rough on it's rough hiking, because it's it's loose. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of loose rocks. It's some of the worst
Speaker 1: hiking I've ever experienced. Imagine a screen field, and I
Speaker 1: don't know if all of our listeners know what a
Speaker 1: screw field is, but it's basically where like on the
Speaker 1: side of the mountain. You just have a bunch of
Speaker 1: like rubble. It's kind of just it's it's basically a
Speaker 1: roading off the side of the mountain. But imagine that
Speaker 1: screen field has just enough dirt in there to produce grass.
Speaker 1: That's what I feel like. A lot of this is
Speaker 1: like it's rocky, it's loose. It's like kind of always
Speaker 1: wanting to slip off in the road, but there's enough
Speaker 1: dirt in there that there's a grass. You know what
Speaker 1: I think about it, like, there are very few landscapes
Speaker 1: on Earth that I'm familiar with where it's way better
Speaker 1: to walk uphill than downhill. It is much I'm like,
Speaker 1: normally you're like, sweet, we get to go downhill. Now
Speaker 1: I am like, damn it, now we gotta go downhill
Speaker 1: because going downhill on loose lava rock, marble rock. Yeah,
Speaker 1: going uphill is just nice. It's relaxing. Going downhill, it's
Speaker 1: kind of like almost like roller coaster mode. Very difficult
Speaker 1: to be stealthy. There happens to be every tree and
Speaker 1: bush with a thorn. Everything's arm everything's armed, everything wants
Speaker 1: to prick. The tall stuff is oktillo, which is a
Speaker 1: thorn looks like a bunch of bull whips all bound
Speaker 1: together with thorns on them. Then you got mesquite oak
Speaker 1: juniper in the bottoms. You have some big it's juniper
Speaker 1: or not cedar. It's a I think I ain't seen
Speaker 1: juniper berries. I was looking for that once we kind
Speaker 1: of had this covers. There are many kinds of juniper.
Speaker 1: I believe it's a juniper, and I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people call cedar juniper. I would like to look
Speaker 1: into it, though, I'm sure someone right now is already
Speaker 1: writing an email and I welcome, and I will read
Speaker 1: that something bitch when we get it. Yeah, what else
Speaker 1: is there? There's what we call century plants, century plants
Speaker 1: yah yaka, lots of yack, lots of cactus, Troy cactus, cactus.
Speaker 1: So the first full day hunting happens, and I strike
Speaker 1: out out onto the land with Ben O'Brien and dirt,
Speaker 1: and we climb up on a knob and right away
Speaker 1: just start seeing deer, like a surprising number of deer,
Speaker 1: more than I thought. You know, in in my I've
Speaker 1: watched you hunt cus deer. I've watched some other folks
Speaker 1: on cus deer and talked to a lot of folks
Speaker 1: about it. It seemed to me like the rule of thumb,
Speaker 1: as you see few deer and there aren't many big
Speaker 1: mm hmm. And we pretty much scratched those two off
Speaker 1: the list in the first two hours. I threw up
Speaker 1: my knockers, and it was just like, dear, dear, do
Speaker 1: do do do dear? Yeah exactly, It's like yeah, but
Speaker 1: to be up. It's such glass dorble country because it's
Speaker 1: very open and yellow grass. And you get up on
Speaker 1: a knob and you put down a little pad to
Speaker 1: sit on, and I got a tripod. I put my
Speaker 1: razors down the tripod and it's just like, like Yanni says,
Speaker 1: it almost like it makes a noise as you glash,
Speaker 1: like blazer, but just like just picking off deer. But
Speaker 1: we're on this giant glass and tip. I don't know
Speaker 1: how what the elevation gain was, but it's it's generally
Speaker 1: there was no probably exactly. I mean, how it was
Speaker 1: that knob from from from valley to tit how high
Speaker 1: that first knob? Yeah? No, the no, what the knob
Speaker 1: that I named the dunk Buck location spot. Yeah, I'd
Speaker 1: say off the valley floor and you're talking about a
Speaker 1: river valley with pretty prominent riverbed and then and it's
Speaker 1: all about five thousand feet above sea level. Yeah, you're
Speaker 1: starting the high and you can see how many miles?
Speaker 1: Could we see many? Well? I could see all the
Speaker 1: way the US borders because you can see the blimps
Speaker 1: that you can see the surveillance blimps through in the US.
Speaker 1: If it wasn't for the cuts and the mountains and
Speaker 1: the different just variations in the terrain, you can see everything.
Speaker 1: But we could see corrugated lands like implies some kind
Speaker 1: of order. It's like it's it's like the literal version
Speaker 1: of a topographic map. It just looks. It's just got
Speaker 1: lines and divides and just things you can't see into
Speaker 1: and shadowy ridges and just places that little hellhole, little
Speaker 1: he choppy, chopping choppy could be good, but you're you're
Speaker 1: not getting a lot of deeply incised You're not getting
Speaker 1: a lot of places in a straight line. And when
Speaker 1: you look at a gully, it's hard to imagine what
Speaker 1: way the water to flow m hm, because it's so confusing. Oh,
Speaker 1: you look at a gully from a hundred yards away
Speaker 1: and you have no idea like the depth or the
Speaker 1: severe the canyon like nest that it might have, like
Speaker 1: you just have no idea. You might go across that
Speaker 1: gully in a hop, skip and a jump, or you
Speaker 1: might walk up to it and go. It does not
Speaker 1: look it does not look like country where you would
Speaker 1: get cliffed out. But there's but because the deer will
Speaker 1: walk into what you think is a little dinky depression,
Speaker 1: never to be seen again. Or a bush on a
Speaker 1: on a wide open hillside walks into that and you
Speaker 1: look over like, hey, there's a deer, and you look
Speaker 1: back and it's gone forever, never to be seen the ghost.
Speaker 1: That was very communication with the um know I thought
Speaker 1: was chewy though actually portal that's what I was saying.
Speaker 1: I was saying, they all have trapped doors. They just
Speaker 1: pull a rope and then there and there and sorry, John,
Speaker 1: I cut you off. So I was just gonna say
Speaker 1: that was the thing that kind of surprised me, and
Speaker 1: it was a lot of funny. It's obviously an optics
Speaker 1: intensive way of hunting. You know, you've really got to
Speaker 1: it is glad. It is glad. But the landscape down
Speaker 1: there there was so much variety. I mean, it's not
Speaker 1: a monotonous landscape. At all. I mean, between the different
Speaker 1: types of rocks and grasses and cuts and elevations. It's just,
Speaker 1: you know, I was never bored looking at this stuff.
Speaker 1: And there's a gradual shift as you had as you
Speaker 1: head west, there's a gradual shift for more of a
Speaker 1: gentler open grassland, the kind of environment in in the
Speaker 1: nine miles, to a much more rugged, almost semi mountaine
Speaker 1: kind of country. Um, we struck out upon the landscape,
Speaker 1: starts spotting off all kinds of deer, and then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, pop, here's a little buck, a little
Speaker 1: dinker buck like a Michigan sex and cuz dear, like
Speaker 1: real serious cuzars guy, this is like a this is
Speaker 1: a little bit of digression, real serious cous gear cuz
Speaker 1: dear Guys like Jay Scott don't count the brow time,
Speaker 1: and they only count what a has on one side.
Speaker 1: I once posed to another serious cus gear cu'se dear guy,
Speaker 1: Cody Nelson from Outdoorsmands. Does the spike have zero antlers?
Speaker 1: And he said no, a spike is a spike. I said,
Speaker 1: so it is a fork a spike since you don't
Speaker 1: count the first one, he said, a fork is a fork.
Speaker 1: A spike is a spike, A three is a two.
Speaker 1: Isn't that how they do elevators in England? Do they
Speaker 1: like the first floor is zero or something? Oh, i'd
Speaker 1: be all messed up. I don't know, like sweep around
Speaker 1: the first floor. But we're not. Uh, we just call
Speaker 1: them all We prefaced it by saying Michigan and then
Speaker 1: say the number because it's just like you just we're
Speaker 1: adding them all up. If it winds up being an
Speaker 1: uneven number, like a five by four, would just say
Speaker 1: in Michigan nine, What would an Arizona cou'sier guy call it?
Speaker 1: Four by five? Three by four? Oh that is ridiculous, man.
Speaker 1: You just take what it actually is and your minus
Speaker 1: one on each side. There you go. The formulas don't count.
Speaker 1: They don't. Then they do the same thing on mule here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you don't count brow times on mule deer. These
Speaker 1: are muled. There's are white tails. You count brow times
Speaker 1: on a white tail. I hear, I hear a few
Speaker 1: keyboards right now. You know why you don't count them
Speaker 1: on mulder because mulder a lot of most mulder don't
Speaker 1: have them. Then when they do their dinkers, a white
Speaker 1: tail the longest time on that some bitch's head might
Speaker 1: be its brow time speaking along brow times the donk
Speaker 1: the donk Buck. Good one man, Yeah, I'm learning so
Speaker 1: gold Star, we're up. We move the little dinker Buck.
Speaker 1: We're looking at the Michigan Sex is agitated about something
Speaker 1: below him that's out of our view. He's stomping, he's
Speaker 1: puffing up, and we've both think that he's got a
Speaker 1: Kyo or a Bobcat down below him, because he's acting
Speaker 1: like how they act. His tail is up at some level. Two,
Speaker 1: we've actually seen coosier bucks chase Bobcats, like literally go
Speaker 1: chase after and run after Bobcats. And he looks like
Speaker 1: he's dealing with a problem like that. But after a
Speaker 1: while he realized his posturing and stuff, and also a
Speaker 1: little pure a pair of dough he doe ears all
Speaker 1: of a sudden polkes up, and we realized he's worked
Speaker 1: up about other deer. And it's not like he's running
Speaker 1: in there to chase other dear away, but he's kind
Speaker 1: of like on the he's like on the out he's like, Oh,
Speaker 1: I want to get in there so bad, but I
Speaker 1: can't get in there. Is what it looks like, and
Speaker 1: we get to thinking that there's a big stomper out
Speaker 1: of sight. Wasn't that kind of our primary motivation? Well? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he and he his posture looked like a buck.
Speaker 1: I have a circle in another buck. He came around
Speaker 1: that bush. Remember he came around on the on the
Speaker 1: top side of this ridge, and he came around like
Speaker 1: he was posturing to fight another buck. And we thought, well,
Speaker 1: for sure, he's there's a big there's a big one
Speaker 1: bigger than him that he's not. He's not going straight after,
Speaker 1: so why not go take a look. So we move
Speaker 1: around to the chief commander of all glass and knobs
Speaker 1: and get up on there, hoping that it's gonna allow
Speaker 1: us to peer down into this box little zone. But
Speaker 1: you couldn't see into his zone. But we do get
Speaker 1: to look and across the valley and dirt and just
Speaker 1: deer all over the place and dirt. Myth all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, just randomly happens to just decided to point
Speaker 1: his binoculars over in a direction and low and behold
Speaker 1: game spooking sunglasses, his blue mirrored sunglasses that are designed
Speaker 1: to scare away animal. Here's a pro tip if you
Speaker 1: if you go to the gas station, and they have
Speaker 1: these sunglasses with blue mirrored that may reflect in the
Speaker 1: sun to look like to fucking disco balls hanging off
Speaker 1: a tree. Don't buy those, but girls are like legit
Speaker 1: coasts right. Oh no, those are five dollars to patient,
Speaker 1: so they were gas I gotta clear fy. Two things
Speaker 1: though on at this home when I had those half
Speaker 1: off coast of things. You didn't buy new coasts because
Speaker 1: there's still a hundo or something crazy have You gotta
Speaker 1: watch your eyes. You have those gas station ones, but
Speaker 1: your brand new eyes that you just got all fixed up. No,
Speaker 1: you're right, you're right at the gas Yeah, it looked
Speaker 1: like high quality, right, and they feel I mean the
Speaker 1: polarized I can see. Yeah, they surely are. But like
Speaker 1: a rainbow, it's like electric blue rainbow smoke signals to
Speaker 1: the other group. Anyway, he takes those off and classes.
Speaker 1: But I gotta say there's two things right here. I
Speaker 1: gotta interject. One, Ben was telling a story I think
Speaker 1: that brought out the buck. Was a story of such interest.
Speaker 1: Animals all gather the box like ship. And then two
Speaker 1: I did. I didn't know what I saw, but I did,
Speaker 1: And you'll back me on this as like, wait, Ben,
Speaker 1: hold on one second. I want to hear more of this.
Speaker 1: But I think I wasn't sure, but there's something special, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there is something special about He's like I think I
Speaker 1: spotted a giant. Yeah, and I don't know anything about
Speaker 1: who's dear. And I pull up the spotter and get
Speaker 1: on this thing pretty quick, and I was like, well,
Speaker 1: I gotta tell you I have no education in this
Speaker 1: in this opinion, but we should shoot that, chase that,
Speaker 1: and I put it the one up. Yeah, when your glass,
Speaker 1: what you do is your glasses through knockers on a
Speaker 1: proferatly on a tripod. Dirt uses a walking stick, but
Speaker 1: you put the knockers on a tripod. I was running
Speaker 1: tens ten ten x, meaning it's ten times the magnification
Speaker 1: of your regular naked eye. And then what you do
Speaker 1: is you see you dear, and you just kind of
Speaker 1: like there's a there's a something about their shape, their
Speaker 1: relative size to other deer that might be nearby, the
Speaker 1: heaviness of the neck, the way they walk, just everything.
Speaker 1: There's just something like you look at like that's a buck.
Speaker 1: All the times you'll also see antler, the sway in
Speaker 1: their bellies just like you just you look at enough
Speaker 1: of me just annoy like there's a box, at which
Speaker 1: point I'll grab out my spotting scope. So you're always
Speaker 1: going back and forth like knocker spotter, knocker spotter. That
Speaker 1: being said, at some distances i'd say roughly approximately yards
Speaker 1: and farther, when you just have the tens or even
Speaker 1: twelves on them, you're like, man, the body suggests the buck,
Speaker 1: but I just don't see antlers. And then when you
Speaker 1: put the spot and scope on them, you're like, not
Speaker 1: only is it a buck, but man, like a nice box,
Speaker 1: Like they're just not big critters. Yeah. The spotter I
Speaker 1: was using is uh, it's like like like a big
Speaker 1: I mean it's a big, heavy, like an eighty five
Speaker 1: millimeter objective lens. This is like a sizeable thing. Um,
Speaker 1: throw that up and I look at this like right away.
Speaker 1: Because we talked about box, like early on you're talking
Speaker 1: about buck being a dinker, bucker, shooter buck. It's just
Speaker 1: sort of like no one really knows at which point
Speaker 1: there was a point at which they're just like heavy
Speaker 1: dark antlerd right, Mark Ken, you just say like mature bucks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're not at the type of cous deer hunters yet
Speaker 1: where we could just immediately be like, oh yeah, one
Speaker 1: tent yes or one tent no. You know, you just
Speaker 1: kind of like yes or no. Because but I think
Speaker 1: that we I think that we call them that when
Speaker 1: they have that like mature look that they're dark, heavy
Speaker 1: antlered bucks with a whole bunch of times on them.
Speaker 1: They're we're generally saying like, oh, that looks like a
Speaker 1: shooter buck. It's probably about one plus yes, even though
Speaker 1: we don't know that. You don't know the number. But
Speaker 1: I'm just saying, if you're gonna apply a narth like
Speaker 1: there's a point at which to bark all of a sudden.
Speaker 1: You look, You're like, that's something bitch is the man? Well,
Speaker 1: it's a big buck. There's a few things right, he's
Speaker 1: maybe wider than his ears. He's got long brow tigns.
Speaker 1: Maybe his threes are his G three's are as long
Speaker 1: as his G two's. You know, there's like little and J.
Speaker 1: You know, J told us that if it's if it's
Speaker 1: he's got an eight point frame and he's got an
Speaker 1: extra kicker too, or he's got some junk on on
Speaker 1: that's a shooter you know, if he's more than an
Speaker 1: eight point that a lot of times it's so there's
Speaker 1: just little things you say, Oh, but wide enough, he's
Speaker 1: wide enough. There's a type of coups guy, though, there's
Speaker 1: a type of cous guy who probably doesn't happen fast.
Speaker 1: He sees the buck and he's got to do like
Speaker 1: a long analysis for us. It's like in a second, right,
Speaker 1: like shooter buck, because you don't know, because it's just
Speaker 1: something about it. You just know it's worth going after.
Speaker 1: But I looked down at the buck and I'm like,
Speaker 1: let's go. But Ben's I think, just you know, let's
Speaker 1: not both goes. Someone's gonna stick around. And I was
Speaker 1: like the band. I was being all gracious, you know,
Speaker 1: you go get him banned, and Ben's being all gracious,
Speaker 1: be like, oh no, I would never. And you know, Steve,
Speaker 1: I would never. So he sliced a piece of summer
Speaker 1: sauceage and and marked one side of the summer sausage
Speaker 1: and flipped it. And I want to flip but can
Speaker 1: you go more into summer sausage quotations? Actually, oh, dunk
Speaker 1: So because we're calling it the dunk buck. Gotta have
Speaker 1: a dunk buck because my brother every year for Christmas
Speaker 1: gives out um, sometimes two things, sometimes three things. Always
Speaker 1: he gives you a bag of banana chips that he
Speaker 1: made in his food the hide rat. And he always
Speaker 1: gives you a summer sausage that he made from his
Speaker 1: deer out and he calls it dunk or we've just
Speaker 1: come to call summer sausage dunk Um. I'll leave you
Speaker 1: to figure out why one might call summer sausage dunk.
Speaker 1: So no casing. Some years, that's thing I should point
Speaker 1: out how he makes it. That it's a fermented sausage.
Speaker 1: He fermented in his fridge for a while, and when
Speaker 1: you do it again, when he ferment, it gets doughey.
Speaker 1: So he rolls out his donk and smokes it uncased.
Speaker 1: So it's an uncased donk. It's nice, it is good.
Speaker 1: It's and in some years you'll give you moose droppings
Speaker 1: that you can burn his incense, because he likes the
Speaker 1: willowy smell of him. Um. This year it was just
Speaker 1: banana chips and donk, And so I took a piece
Speaker 1: of said donk and gouged one side, and you had
Speaker 1: to call gouged or smooth, and I won the toss
Speaker 1: and I got to go after the bark, and we
Speaker 1: made a little signal system. Ben had a green dry
Speaker 1: bag and he had a red dry bag, and I
Speaker 1: had a white game bag in a white game bag,
Speaker 1: and we devised the system by which we would very
Speaker 1: cleverly say green means go, Red means stop. Interesting and
Speaker 1: hung it up in a mesquite tree so that while
Speaker 1: doing my long stock, I could look and if I
Speaker 1: glassed back to the donk bunk location point, I have
Speaker 1: now alone, I'm by myself and saw green. Ben was
Speaker 1: telling me the buck hasn't budged. Everything's cool. If I
Speaker 1: glassed up and saw red, I would then look at Ben,
Speaker 1: wave a game bag at Ben. Ben would realize that
Speaker 1: I'm looking at him through my spotting scope of bronoculars,
Speaker 1: and Ben would then gesture with another system that would
Speaker 1: tell me what direction the buck went or forget about it,
Speaker 1: and I would only gestured the bucks movements. Not what
Speaker 1: you want. I wanted you to do, very clear system,
Speaker 1: clear system. And it's challenging because I was up there
Speaker 1: trying to spot you guys with the binoculars while also
Speaker 1: making sure that buck didn't sneak down because that buck moves.
Speaker 1: You never ever quit hearing about it. Because it happened
Speaker 1: to dirt on another cuise deer hunt to keep an
Speaker 1: eye on the buck. Yeah, and it went behind a tree,
Speaker 1: and it's like dirt just watched the tree and we
Speaker 1: came back there, never moved. It's still back nervous. That
Speaker 1: deer is still there today. It slipped out because that
Speaker 1: slipped away because in that in that but that was
Speaker 1: before he had his eyes fixed. Look at him now,
Speaker 1: he's just like he said, I don't know, I see
Speaker 1: nothing but light and dark. I didn't hear nothing now
Speaker 1: and that the important part of that plane is that
Speaker 1: I needed to know where you were at all times.
Speaker 1: So you're talking, You're walking across you know, a sun
Speaker 1: kiss ridge, behind trees, behind this found a drop antler
Speaker 1: was standing on nice one. And so every time I'm
Speaker 1: looking at you, I'm thinking about how I'm gonna screw
Speaker 1: that bucks walking out of that bush and into the
Speaker 1: next bush, and I'm screw And every time I'm looking
Speaker 1: at the bush, I'm thinking, you're probably gonna change your
Speaker 1: plan and go down to the river bed. I'll never
Speaker 1: find you again. So I have this very stressful situation
Speaker 1: going on up on the up on the old tip.
Speaker 1: We go down the hill, across the creek, get on
Speaker 1: a little finger ridge, take the fingeradge up and start
Speaker 1: getting in the zone. I'm looking at this green green green,
Speaker 1: not green grass. The grass is dead as hell, but
Speaker 1: I'm looking at the green bag the green means gold thing.
Speaker 1: And also we jump up a little bucket the dope,
Speaker 1: and they run like they're gonna run through. And when
Speaker 1: you when you spook deer, if you're stalking a deer
Speaker 1: and you spook other deer that run through the deer,
Speaker 1: what will often happen is the deer we'll get carried
Speaker 1: off with the other deer like if deer like, if
Speaker 1: these guys are that upset about something, I'm leaving too.
Speaker 1: And we spooked the bucket the bucket, don't they run
Speaker 1: off over the hill And I'm like, damn, they're here,
Speaker 1: goes that? But I wait and look, and the green
Speaker 1: means go was still green. And Ben had watched it
Speaker 1: all play out. Oh and those deer ran from wherever
Speaker 1: you spooked him, which you know it was probably five
Speaker 1: yards away from that that bucket behind that bush, dip
Speaker 1: down over the ridge. He was on ran right towards him,
Speaker 1: pulled up at about ten yards, cut back up the hill,
Speaker 1: and we're gone. He never budged, He never budged, And
Speaker 1: at this point I'm thinking I pulled a dirt. At
Speaker 1: some point, buck snuck out, He slicked out of the
Speaker 1: because if he was in there, he would have been gone.
Speaker 1: Because of course, you know, a buck like that's gonna
Speaker 1: see too dear freaking out, and he's gonna do do
Speaker 1: something similar. He's gonna stand up and look around and
Speaker 1: and move places and get to a safe spot or whatever.
Speaker 1: This tear just stayed. And there's a magical thing that
Speaker 1: happens when you're when you're going after something you spotted
Speaker 1: far away in spots star hunting, where you're like you
Speaker 1: out of far away to have to sneak up on
Speaker 1: it where you have like an understanding of the landscape
Speaker 1: that is far from right. It's like you can understand
Speaker 1: it from a perspective and it's sort of and it
Speaker 1: makes sense to you spatially, but when you get over there,
Speaker 1: it's like it's it's it's a it's this alternate reality,
Speaker 1: like this is not how you envisioned it, but this
Speaker 1: is one of those cases when that did not happen.
Speaker 1: I got there, I was like, because there's some orange,
Speaker 1: just like these orange round patches of a different kind
Speaker 1: of vegetation, of different grass. Everything lined up, and once
Speaker 1: I saw the green and I started getting the zone,
Speaker 1: I'm like, this all makes like like magically, somehow this
Speaker 1: is all understandable. Still, like here's that thing I remember.
Speaker 1: Remy warrant will take cell phone pictures before heading off
Speaker 1: on a stock He takes cell phone pictures through the
Speaker 1: spot and scope or whatever of the area. However he
Speaker 1: does it depending on how far away is. He takes
Speaker 1: cell phone pictures of where he's headed. So later when
Speaker 1: he gets also you and and you're like, damn it, I
Speaker 1: cannot it. This doesn't make This is not how I
Speaker 1: pictured it being over here. He'll refer to his cell
Speaker 1: phone pictures and he'd be like, oh, it was a
Speaker 1: dead snag that I didn't think to log. But I'm
Speaker 1: always trying to get in my head like okay, there's
Speaker 1: a century plant, those are this, as that, there's a
Speaker 1: rock shape like this, just as little reminders, but it
Speaker 1: still doesn't work. But this time it did. I get
Speaker 1: over I'm like, oh, this is like everything's exactly like
Speaker 1: how I pictured it. And there's the bush that that
Speaker 1: buck is hiding under, and Ben's telling me green and
Speaker 1: so it's like somehow I'd made it all the way
Speaker 1: over there and was perched up two yards above him
Speaker 1: with a green bag and knowing the bush but not
Speaker 1: seeing he was still buried. Right, It's been an hour
Speaker 1: at this point since we've seen the deer, and it's
Speaker 1: almost like a non story. I started creeping over, creeping over,
Speaker 1: creeping over, and I had my little shooting fork on
Speaker 1: my tripod and creeping eepen more and more of the
Speaker 1: bushes coming into view, and eventually and I knew would
Speaker 1: probably have because it was like I was in very
Speaker 1: tight Like the outdoorsman's boys they say, when you get
Speaker 1: within three yards of a coused DearS zone, he's going
Speaker 1: to know you're there, he's gonna bust you. And I
Speaker 1: was well within his in his zone, and um or
Speaker 1: like you gotta be extra cars or it's like it's
Speaker 1: like when you get within that three yards zone, it's
Speaker 1: time to really buckle down and pay attention to what
Speaker 1: you're doing. And pretty soon he like stood up because
Speaker 1: he sent something wasn't right and it was just that
Speaker 1: was it? Big huge giant buck. I gotta say too,
Speaker 1: like a real honest, big huge giant buck. Gorgeous, the donk,
Speaker 1: the donk buck, the dunk buck. On that note, like
Speaker 1: you're saying that it worked out, I'll put a picture
Speaker 1: that up in the show notes if you want to
Speaker 1: look at the big, huge giant bar. The difficulty of
Speaker 1: seeing an area through optics and then trying to pick
Speaker 1: it out when you get there. I feel like, and
Speaker 1: this is more a question you guys, actually that ranch
Speaker 1: because maybe it's hunting the couse deer. Something in the
Speaker 1: mix makes it even more difficult to judge distance in
Speaker 1: like space where we just were the last week than
Speaker 1: other areas, because stuff that's close it's actually farther away
Speaker 1: than you think it is. Stuff that's far away is
Speaker 1: much closer than you think it is. Yeah. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: there's a division that happens that around six or seven
Speaker 1: hundred yards where ain't do you see? Like, how is
Speaker 1: that some bitch four yards away? It seems like he's
Speaker 1: two hund yards away. But a knob a rock a
Speaker 1: mile away, You're like, that must be a mile away.
Speaker 1: In fact, it's a half mile away. See, it's like
Speaker 1: a distancy kind of weirdness. Yeah, so just like share
Speaker 1: any details about your buck. That's unexplainable. But that happened
Speaker 1: multiple times this week at that knob you shot your
Speaker 1: buck from. John, I was like, that's a couple hundred yards,
Speaker 1: no three, ye looks close. And then we'd be Ben
Speaker 1: and I were looking at a bug and we're like,
Speaker 1: it's so far away. We range it yards. We could
Speaker 1: never get there in a full day. Let's take us hours.
Speaker 1: I hikes. I don't know. I don't I can't begin
Speaker 1: to understand it, like why that happens. Barry Lopez talks
Speaker 1: about it in the Arctic and Arctic dreams about how
Speaker 1: distances like he talks about people. Um, he talks about
Speaker 1: a hunter stalking a grizzly that turns out to be
Speaker 1: a mormot. I always talked about like prairie this. You know,
Speaker 1: we weren't on a prairie, but prairie depth perception. I've
Speaker 1: never had it. He's stalking up an antalopen wyoming, crawling
Speaker 1: across the prairie and look up, like, y'all, he's two
Speaker 1: hundred yards and he's and he's a hundred yards. I
Speaker 1: think he's eight hundred. I don't. I don't know size reference. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the artic dreams. He also talks about a guy who
Speaker 1: thought he's looking at a walrist once a black and
Speaker 1: two white tossed. What he's actually looking at is a
Speaker 1: headland of rock with two glaciers coming down the side
Speaker 1: of coming down. The depth perception for me, for me
Speaker 1: on this hunt, you know, a lot of it. It
Speaker 1: was just the foreignness of the landscape. You know, where
Speaker 1: I live. I'm not looking at century plants, I'm not
Speaker 1: looking at okatillos all the time. I'm not looking at
Speaker 1: these things. And so my ability to kind of get
Speaker 1: a feel for the distance is pretty bad. And pluses
Speaker 1: a shooting guy, a gun guy, I mean most people's
Speaker 1: you know, I'm I'm lost at sea without a range
Speaker 1: finder in terms of precise shooting, and I think most
Speaker 1: people vastly overestimate their ability to correctly identify a yardage. Oh,
Speaker 1: I mean unaided, Yeah, unaided, you know, And this was
Speaker 1: this was certainly a case. I mean I was full
Speaker 1: time and time again with the distances on the side. Yeah,
Speaker 1: how many times was there? It was there a pinnacle
Speaker 1: or a pyramid? Ridge with ten different fingers that were
Speaker 1: going in different directions, and some of them were fully shaded,
Speaker 1: some of them were half shaded them, so they made
Speaker 1: them look deeper than they might have been. And you thought, oh,
Speaker 1: that's that's a thousand yards and turns out toothousand. And
Speaker 1: the early thing is everyone here has spent their whole
Speaker 1: life looking at normal white tails. Yeah so you got
Speaker 1: that right fixed in your head. But these things are
Speaker 1: half the size. Yeah yeah, yeah, and way to put
Speaker 1: that perspective. We're looking at John's head when you brought
Speaker 1: your head out in the back of the ranger. There.
Speaker 1: I mean that full grown, mature buck's head. If you
Speaker 1: to take off his antlers, it looks like a fawn.
Speaker 1: The skull is petite nose on it, you know. Yeah, alright, man,
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Speaker 1: It's that is there a weird? I gonna get deep
Speaker 1: again on you, but go for it. We can we
Speaker 1: can absorb it. That two coronas uh hopped Corona extra
Speaker 1: came from Mexico. Um, there's just a weird you're talking
Speaker 1: about when I shot my buck, just a weird beauty.
Speaker 1: To those animals like they're coloring is such a difference.
Speaker 1: There's sleek, sleek, the gray ghost, the gray ghost. But
Speaker 1: they didn't have their gray winter coats yet, not a
Speaker 1: lot of them, because the gray ghost becomes very gray soon.
Speaker 1: They were more like a brown ghost, still very apparition like,
Speaker 1: but they weren't the gray I saw both. I definitely
Speaker 1: had I was glass in doze sometimes where you could
Speaker 1: tell one was definitely a browner shade of deer and
Speaker 1: one was a gray because the dog bucks still had
Speaker 1: a red tail. Yeah he didn't have his great coat.
Speaker 1: Yeah he wasn't the gray ghost. A transition almost seemed
Speaker 1: to happen just in that seven days as far as
Speaker 1: the rut started. Yeah, Al Giganta had it like a
Speaker 1: red tail too, same same had a red tail. Yeh Um.
Speaker 1: John and I were hunting together all week, and I
Speaker 1: think on the third day, is the third or fourth day,
Speaker 1: we struck off. The ranch is divided by the highway,
Speaker 1: and so we struck off to the east side of
Speaker 1: the highway and uh diferent like four miles in a
Speaker 1: pie shape. Yeah. I wish you guys would have gotten
Speaker 1: to see it, because it was definitely interesting to see
Speaker 1: different topography, like all long ridges running the whole length
Speaker 1: of that four miles, and much less vegetation. Still a
Speaker 1: lot of grass, but not the as many oak tillos, oaks, cedars,
Speaker 1: junior pers, whatever you wanna call it. Just open, you know,
Speaker 1: and we get up there. Uh, we're on time this
Speaker 1: morning where we needed to be at at daylight, and uh,
Speaker 1: John and Bates are looking one direction. I go and
Speaker 1: look over the other ridge and it's so open. I
Speaker 1: felt like they're and John correct me if I'm wrong,
Speaker 1: But I feel like you could just you felt like
Speaker 1: you were seeing everything that was there to see, like
Speaker 1: you weren't like, oh man, it's got there's like all
Speaker 1: these hidden pockets where these deer might be, just so
Speaker 1: open that in the first twenty minutes I had twenty deer,
Speaker 1: which is unheard of for a cuse deer hunting. I
Speaker 1: feel like I had never seen that me dere one
Speaker 1: morning because it's they're all in the open, they weren't hiding.
Speaker 1: And we saw one. I thought it kind of sucked
Speaker 1: over there, even though you shot a nice buck, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: let me finish. So we saw what we we thought
Speaker 1: was a shooter buck and it was on the neighbors property.
Speaker 1: Beeto got his permission to go on the neighbors We
Speaker 1: started hiking towards it, and before we started hiking, I'm
Speaker 1: telling Beato exactly where it is and how far we're
Speaker 1: going to go to go around where the bucket is,
Speaker 1: to get on the backside to look into where he
Speaker 1: went into and he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, no problem.
Speaker 1: Beato likes to say no problem him. I'm like, all right,
Speaker 1: let's go. So we go like across one good canyon
Speaker 1: and this side. I'm like all right, Beato, like over there,
Speaker 1: see that that's where the buck was. We need to
Speaker 1: get on the back side where like when you see
Speaker 1: there was like some man's in needed trees or something.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, that's not right ski trees. Man's need is like,
Speaker 1: is it a tree? What do you call man's anita
Speaker 1: bush bush? There's no man's in needed there, there's mesquit trees.
Speaker 1: And he's like, oh, that's where that buck was. Yeah,
Speaker 1: too far. We just turn around him and as he
Speaker 1: started heading back towards John and uh, from there on out,
Speaker 1: I think we glassed up. We had kind of a
Speaker 1: long afternoon session and we and Beato glassed up. But
Speaker 1: maybe a buck and two dolls, right, Yeah, it definitely
Speaker 1: it definitely got slower. It was great looking country though,
Speaker 1: Like you said, we had these long ridges that we
Speaker 1: could kind of a lot of them. You could see
Speaker 1: on both sides of them and down pretty deep, and
Speaker 1: that was kind of in contrast to the other side
Speaker 1: of the ranch where you had all those mystery pockets.
Speaker 1: It felt like this Poe if he revealed itself a
Speaker 1: little bit more like most your only looking at what's
Speaker 1: there exactly, and what it revealed was no dear for me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: definitely felt like is he pretty good at glass? Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: he definitely glad. Yeah. Um, he felt like lower density,
Speaker 1: but possibility for El Gagante for sure. So that made
Speaker 1: that means the giant I believe. I don't speak Spanish,
Speaker 1: but so we yeah, burned up the afternoon and then
Speaker 1: come evening, John and I decided we're gonna cut across
Speaker 1: a canyon to another ridge we can't get the ranger too,
Speaker 1: and then basically sort of still hunt walk peering down
Speaker 1: into these small bowls and have Bato pick us up
Speaker 1: at the bottom of the ridge. Well, we get all
Speaker 1: the way over there and takes us I don't know,
Speaker 1: thirty minutes. It wasn't like a monster hike, but it was,
Speaker 1: you know, some effort. We crawled up this hillside that
Speaker 1: where we waded through claw that was it wasn't like
Speaker 1: the stuff that was like the the you know, knee
Speaker 1: high and like kind of space you can kind of
Speaker 1: pick a path, I mean it was nipple deep and thick.
Speaker 1: Just okay, pierce in your nip, screw it. I gotta
Speaker 1: just plow through it and just take it like a man,
Speaker 1: you know, covered in deer. Ship though a lot of
Speaker 1: deer people on that hillside. We saw those coyotes up top.
Speaker 1: That's right. We get to the top. Mantel calls us
Speaker 1: on the phone. He's like, no, I don't know how
Speaker 1: he had figured it out if he was over there
Speaker 1: working Google Our Earth on his phone. But he's like,
Speaker 1: the road that's on that ridge that you guys are on,
Speaker 1: I can't get to. It comes from another ranch. You
Speaker 1: guys an have to come back. I can't get over
Speaker 1: to you guys. I'm like, all right, we're gonna hunt
Speaker 1: out here anyways. So we continue hunting down the ranch
Speaker 1: or down its ridge, looking both sides, and uh, did
Speaker 1: we see We didn't see another a single of the deer,
Speaker 1: I don't think right. No, Yeah, I saw the badger monkey.
Speaker 1: So yeah, we glass that bag mondy, that's cool. This
Speaker 1: is single. I seemed like you usually seen a little
Speaker 1: groups three or four or a whole ship loader, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: But it was getting later. It was definitely not quite sunset,
Speaker 1: but getting close and we basically had we were at
Speaker 1: a spot where we could see a couple of bowls. Um,
Speaker 1: we just didn't have where we were hunting. It wasn't
Speaker 1: just the giant vistas where you'd want to just sit
Speaker 1: and just spend three hours glassing. You know, you kind
Speaker 1: of had to keep moving because you were just seeing
Speaker 1: three to four hundred yards and you have to just
Speaker 1: pop over the next knoll and see another bowl that
Speaker 1: was three yards and keep on. Yeah, the ridge kind
Speaker 1: of zigs out. The ridge had an s curve to it,
Speaker 1: which because every time like skiing down the hill, m m,
Speaker 1: it's gonna have been a pretty lame ski run the
Speaker 1: way we were going, and it had been more just
Speaker 1: like yeah, that's right, we did some in Yeah, John
Speaker 1: self arrested. I need that would out. We uh, we
Speaker 1: have like one like we have like we're like, okay,
Speaker 1: we've got enough time, like go over and like let's
Speaker 1: pick one more bowl and we'll go and sit there.
Speaker 1: And we've been looking at the stuff that we couldn't
Speaker 1: quite see. So we had a um. The rich sort
Speaker 1: of had a false bowl in it that we had
Speaker 1: to like cross at the head of and then we'd
Speaker 1: be on a spot where we could, you know, glass
Speaker 1: some new country. Can I point out this is not
Speaker 1: how you're supposed to hunt COO's dere Yeah, although even
Speaker 1: Ja was telling me that this ranch and in general,
Speaker 1: because of its choppiness. He's like, you guys might just
Speaker 1: have to move around a little bit more and maybe
Speaker 1: thirty minutes on each glass and knob um just to
Speaker 1: cover it, because there's no way you can. There's just
Speaker 1: not the knob to sit on the way you can
Speaker 1: just see it all, you know. And uh, I don't
Speaker 1: know what held you up, but I'm like, yeah, let's
Speaker 1: just go over here and we maybe I only had
Speaker 1: to go eight yards, We're gonna sit down. Some reason
Speaker 1: you stayed back, I don't know, maybe just put some
Speaker 1: gear away in your pack or something. It could be
Speaker 1: just fat and slow, but yeah, and he's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe you seared to put away. I had to do
Speaker 1: some push ups. We weren't running anywhere. We just we're
Speaker 1: just glass and wherever John was coming from so or something.
Speaker 1: I was just looking down. But yeah, creep over there,
Speaker 1: and luckily I had mine creeping hat on and uh,
Speaker 1: because it's so easy to do and We've all done
Speaker 1: it where you just like walk right up to the
Speaker 1: edge of that ridge and peer over. You're like, oh shit,
Speaker 1: you know a bunch of white tails blown out exactly.
Speaker 1: And I just craft over there and you know, over
Speaker 1: the edge, and there's a buck staying there not far away,
Speaker 1: a hundred yards or less, and uh, he's looking away
Speaker 1: from me. Glass him. And I'm packing eights and twelves
Speaker 1: because I like to have my eights on my chest
Speaker 1: for like for this exact situation, but I like to
Speaker 1: have the twelves. So I'm sitting down and starting a
Speaker 1: laser distant hillside like, yeah, I want to see. My
Speaker 1: plan was to go down with tens and twelves, but
Speaker 1: some insane baggage handler dude, I pulled out my twelves
Speaker 1: packing and hadn't read the last time I came home.
Speaker 1: It looks like someone must have taken a fork truck
Speaker 1: and drove over my twelves. I just send him back
Speaker 1: to Vortex getting fix like ben I cups and stuff
Speaker 1: like you have the metal. I don't know what happened.
Speaker 1: It was like something bad happened coming home from somewhere
Speaker 1: and I didn't realize and just put them back where
Speaker 1: they belong. Right, So I was only down there with
Speaker 1: tens solimente, So it goes, is there right, tens only? Yeah? See?
Speaker 1: Oh wait wait, So I'm feeling pretty lucky to have
Speaker 1: caught this buck. And he said, you know, good looking buck,
Speaker 1: because he wanted to shoot her way within his zone. Way.
Speaker 1: I'm in there, but I can tell he's something's guy's
Speaker 1: attention below him. He's like, very fixated on something down below.
Speaker 1: And look over my shoulder and eight yards away I
Speaker 1: can kind of see John coming, and I'm like, what
Speaker 1: on earth is at this moment? Why is he way
Speaker 1: back there and not right with me? Why is he
Speaker 1: doing push ups back there now? Exactly? It's not the time.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if you heard me counting, I've done
Speaker 1: a hundred push ups back here. So I'm watching the
Speaker 1: buck and he's motionless, staring down the hill. I'm like,
Speaker 1: all right, I've got some time. And finally John, I
Speaker 1: see John, and I'm like, you know, I'm the beaving
Speaker 1: my arms. Come on, come on with the universal gesture
Speaker 1: to means I've found a box. Yeah, and I think
Speaker 1: he sees me. I go back to looking at the
Speaker 1: box and I watched the buck put on the ten seconds.
Speaker 1: I look back at John and John's like still that
Speaker 1: kind of creeping towards me, and I'm like no, like now,
Speaker 1: you know. And obviously you hadn't seen my first gestures
Speaker 1: because you would have been running, I think, right. But
Speaker 1: the other thing I'll just point out is that you
Speaker 1: seem to forget that you had a deer tag yourself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and what did you do when you started chasing the deer?
Speaker 1: You left your pack in your rifle? Yea. As soon
Speaker 1: as I saw the deer, I took off my pack
Speaker 1: and which I had my rifle strapped to it, just
Speaker 1: to be ultra light weight and sneaky, you know, because
Speaker 1: you wanted to sneak up on the deer without a rifle?
Speaker 1: Is that how you hunt COO's deer? Where was your
Speaker 1: back when I saw him? I just dropped it, just
Speaker 1: thinking that I was gonna be because you were thinking
Speaker 1: you're not gonna be the guy that shoots. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: like seeing a delicious steak and like dropping your fork
Speaker 1: and walking over to it, like no, because he's thinking
Speaker 1: he's not the guy that's gonna shoot. Yeah, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: give John the opportunity. I don't know that, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, uh, I thought we were like hunting like buddies,
Speaker 1: like everybody was hunting, like everybody was, you know, and
Speaker 1: it wasn't matter you Steve Man, I would have been like,
Speaker 1: come here. Yeah, And well, actually the subcontext of this
Speaker 1: is both I'll let him finish the story, but basically
Speaker 1: neither of us wanted to be done hunting. So he
Speaker 1: tried to trick me into shooting this deer the only
Speaker 1: day three a big n a big night. It was
Speaker 1: not a big, huge giant buck with a big buck. Well,
Speaker 1: you know what, I never saw the animal though. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is this is this is part of the thing.
Speaker 1: So he's sneaking up there and he's gesturing me over
Speaker 1: like he's on fire and I've got to put him out,
Speaker 1: and okay, creep up there, and he's like the books
Speaker 1: right below us. He's like, can you shoot off hand
Speaker 1: at seventy five yards? And I'm like, yeah, I can
Speaker 1: do that, can you. He's like, well, I can see
Speaker 1: the buck and I'm like I can't, you know, because
Speaker 1: he's six inches taller than me and he's downhill from me,
Speaker 1: and the whole very handsome, very very wig wa The
Speaker 1: border lady smells nice more importantly sneaky because the buck,
Speaker 1: while we're doing this the first time, being gracious to
Speaker 1: each other, the buck moves across the hill. I lose
Speaker 1: sight of him, and so we had to then back
Speaker 1: off the ridge a little bit, and we circle around
Speaker 1: maybe forty fifty yards and start to do the peak
Speaker 1: over again. At that point, I'm thinking, like I screwed
Speaker 1: the pooch because I got lucky the first time. How
Speaker 1: the hell am I gonna creep over now and at
Speaker 1: seventy yards pick him up before he picks us up?
Speaker 1: You know, it's like I would be thinking that would
Speaker 1: be hard to do, especially when you're up a bum
Speaker 1: because you're like then, like then, only people being above
Speaker 1: more blown. Yeah, But luckily whatever was below him when
Speaker 1: we peek back, I don't know never saw. Maybe, like Turner.
Speaker 1: Turner once said, if they're ever gonna catch me, they're
Speaker 1: gonna they're gonna have to bait that trap with a
Speaker 1: word that starts P. It could have been possum, It
Speaker 1: could have been a dough down blow. But he was
Speaker 1: leaving that whatever it was bothering when he was leaving it,
Speaker 1: so I don't know me that you should have had
Speaker 1: some donk. It should have flipped. That's what I would
Speaker 1: have said. Let me get some donk out and a knife,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna go cut off a coin and gouge
Speaker 1: one side and we'll settle this. Like, man, we didn't
Speaker 1: have time for that. We're in tight. Yeah. So anyways,
Speaker 1: we pick him up again and he's we can range
Speaker 1: the tree behind him, it's like one thirty something, and
Speaker 1: he looks to be a good bit closer, so you know,
Speaker 1: I thought he was. Well, we ran down there after him.
Speaker 1: It only took us seconds to run down after we
Speaker 1: after I finally hit him. It took you seconds. It
Speaker 1: took me about four minutes, but I was running. So yeah.
Speaker 1: Finally John's like, yeah, you could shoot my gun. I'm like, okay,
Speaker 1: you onto twist my arm too much. I'll shoot your
Speaker 1: gun at this buck. Why are you guys swapping out
Speaker 1: guns now? Because I left mine. I left my path
Speaker 1: far away, just fifty yards, but again we're seventy yards
Speaker 1: in this book. You knowver leave your pat that's true.
Speaker 1: Never leave your pack. Great advice, because you just don't
Speaker 1: know how this is gonna wind up. You don't. You don't. Well,
Speaker 1: I thought I was gonna force John into shooting this box.
Speaker 1: Didn't work. I feel like I want to clear I
Speaker 1: want to just get some clarity on something. I feel
Speaker 1: like you, John are trying to say that there's something
Speaker 1: else going on. And it wasn't just Yanni being generous
Speaker 1: about who's shooting at the buck. Yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 1: think we were both having a really good time on
Speaker 1: this hunt. And you know, we were being at least
Speaker 1: I was being a little selected. We had seen so
Speaker 1: you think Yanni was like, this looks like a great
Speaker 1: buck for you, buddy. No, No, I know. I actually
Speaker 1: I'm not going to accuse Yanny of that. I don't
Speaker 1: think he was trying to like give me a sub
Speaker 1: Yanni buck. But I do think but I do think
Speaker 1: that he was in guide mode all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: like just conveniently leaving his rifle elsewhere, and you know,
Speaker 1: wanted me to pull the trigger so he could keep hunting.
Speaker 1: And you know how it is when you don't get
Speaker 1: to carry on a rifle anymore. And for me, I
Speaker 1: was having I can't overstay, you know, like like all
Speaker 1: of us, you know, I get to hunt a lot
Speaker 1: of places and this kind of hunting, this beautiful country,
Speaker 1: this glassing intensive thing, looking for these elusive creatures, and
Speaker 1: they are they're weary animals. I mean some of like
Speaker 1: your hunt. You know, you got up on them, perfect man.
Speaker 1: That's not how it usually plays out. You know. Well,
Speaker 1: I point I have a hunter accused your five times
Speaker 1: and I've gotten to week long. There you go. And
Speaker 1: there was another example from the day before when Yanni
Speaker 1: got his deer, and you know, I was up on
Speaker 1: a big knob we were watching. I spotted a pretty
Speaker 1: good buck about seven yards away, and Yanni had gone
Speaker 1: off to check out a ridge on his own, and
Speaker 1: you know, he was probably at least a good thousand
Speaker 1: yards from that bucket. When he was working his way
Speaker 1: back over to my position, that buck popped up his head,
Speaker 1: looked at Yanni and didn't panic, but it was like,
Speaker 1: you know what, that cushion doesn't feel good to me,
Speaker 1: even from a thousand yards, got up out of his bed,
Speaker 1: was looking at him, and he had a little little
Speaker 1: buck buddy with him. They just kind of slowly ambled
Speaker 1: and drifted away, you know. And and that there just
Speaker 1: shows you these are these are very wary smart creatures.
Speaker 1: And the day before I shot my buck, you had
Speaker 1: spotted a good buck and we put the stock on him,
Speaker 1: kicked up a deer that went right by the buck
Speaker 1: we were trying to kill, and instead of this buck
Speaker 1: just laying there watching him stream by, he's like, well,
Speaker 1: if they're running out, run into see you later. There's
Speaker 1: two kinds of bucks in this world. There's bucks that
Speaker 1: see everybody running around getting all excited, and they're like,
Speaker 1: that is a good way to get shot, running around
Speaker 1: getting all worked up about nothing. I'm gonna lay tight
Speaker 1: until I see, Yeah, when I see the problem and
Speaker 1: I determined that it really is a problem, then I
Speaker 1: will decide to move. And then there's bucks who are like,
Speaker 1: if something's bothering them, I'm gonna play it safe and
Speaker 1: actin that bothers me too, and trust that day right.
Speaker 1: And I think each type of buck can get killed
Speaker 1: by his own perspective. The buck I got should have
Speaker 1: been the kind of buck who sees trouble and says
Speaker 1: me too, not the kind of buck who says, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna wait and see how this plays out before I go,
Speaker 1: burning all my calories up for nothing. Because if I
Speaker 1: ran every time someone ran, all I'd ever do is
Speaker 1: run around him and gotta be shot by gun by now.
Speaker 1: So anyhow, there you are, there we are, And I
Speaker 1: take John's gun and like I said, seventy to eighty
Speaker 1: yards and I gotta shoot all panks of a bunch
Speaker 1: of grass. Like crouch down. You can't even see the deer.
Speaker 1: If you kind of get a SENDI crouch you can
Speaker 1: see his head you stand up the full eagle. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can pretty much see his body. But even then
Speaker 1: there's some stuff, and so like look through the sculpe,
Speaker 1: I'm like, man, there's too much stuff. I crank up
Speaker 1: the sculpe a little bit and there's still too much stuff.
Speaker 1: You can't go to the scope a little bit more,
Speaker 1: and I can finally like pick the lane through the stuff. Right,
Speaker 1: instead of it being all fuzzy, I can now see
Speaker 1: a few occaateos. Mostly I could see a lane. And
Speaker 1: you know how when you crank, as you crank the
Speaker 1: sculpe up, your aim gets worse as short ranges. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: and maybe Johnny you can speak to why that happens,
Speaker 1: because you see you realize just how shap how much
Speaker 1: shape you have, right, Yeah, And there are a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of reasons. That's one of them, that that perception
Speaker 1: of wobble when you crank it up. I shoot most
Speaker 1: things at very low power, all things considered, you actually
Speaker 1: had a good you're explaining it now, you actually had
Speaker 1: a pretty good reason to turn up your power a
Speaker 1: little bit. But the problem is is that you get
Speaker 1: that extra amount of wobble, so you start to overcorrect
Speaker 1: and just kind of, almost on a subconscious level, second
Speaker 1: guess yourself. The second thing is is the higher you
Speaker 1: go up in that magnification, you're shrinking your field of view.
Speaker 1: So when you take that shot and you lose your
Speaker 1: site picture under recoil, you've made it much harder for
Speaker 1: yourself to to reacquire exactly. And you know, you when
Speaker 1: you hunt enough that being able to get a sense
Speaker 1: of what that animal has done after the shot can
Speaker 1: make a huge, huge difference. So yeah, I mean, lower
Speaker 1: magnification is is the way to go. And part of
Speaker 1: it is, you know, you shoot enough, you learn to
Speaker 1: trust your cross airs. You know, at at four x,
Speaker 1: for example, it's a good like general kind of power
Speaker 1: to keep a scope on. You know, if if that
Speaker 1: even though the cross ears look like it's dominating the
Speaker 1: deer's vitals. You know. Our eyes have a really great
Speaker 1: ability to kind of just center those things symmetrically, you know,
Speaker 1: And if you get it in there and you just
Speaker 1: trust in it, it's gonna work. That is the point
Speaker 1: of aim. You don't have to jack it up to
Speaker 1: twelve power or whatever the top end is. You're not
Speaker 1: really making things more accurate. In fact, you're kind of
Speaker 1: setting yourself up for potential problems by doing that. I
Speaker 1: walk around with mine on very low often thinking because
Speaker 1: if you kick something up for something, all things right
Speaker 1: there in your face, you can find it in a hurry. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: I don't crank mine up and sown. I'm like laid
Speaker 1: down ready to shoot, and it's a long shot. Then
Speaker 1: I'll crank it up. Yeah, if you need that extra magnification,
Speaker 1: you will always have time to dial it up. So
Speaker 1: it's you know, you never need a whole bunch in
Speaker 1: a hurry, but you oftentimes need not much in a hurry. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: So there you are there, I am too much power,
Speaker 1: and I'm seeing the wobbles. So this is gonna get interesting.
Speaker 1: This is a little trick that you try that doesn't
Speaker 1: work very good. It eventually worked. But I had read
Speaker 1: somewhere that I don't I forget who it was. Might
Speaker 1: have been Van's wall. Yeah. That like as opposed to
Speaker 1: just trying to like put the crosshairs in the middle
Speaker 1: and then trying to hold them there and fighting the wobbles,
Speaker 1: it's sort of better to like come into the zone
Speaker 1: and sort of pick a direction to be moving through
Speaker 1: your where you want to hit, and then squeeze the trigger.
Speaker 1: Right do you understand when you say right? Do you
Speaker 1: mean do I understand? You understand what I'm saying? I understand. Okay.
Speaker 1: I missed twice doing whatever I'm doing. Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: the third time I just took a little maybe a
Speaker 1: little bit deeper breath and uh hit him. How is
Speaker 1: this buck letting you be that close blouching away and
Speaker 1: racking rounds? I wish I had that. I had Bucks
Speaker 1: looking at me for three or fifty yards away the
Speaker 1: whole week. To ye Credit didn't know we were there.
Speaker 1: Was it dusky, very light? Light was dropping. But to
Speaker 1: Yannie Credit, he worked the bolt on the gun quickly.
Speaker 1: It's not like he shot and then waited a few seconds.
Speaker 1: He's like he's working lever action. Yeah. He I think
Speaker 1: he knew he was just kind of given the deer
Speaker 1: a couple of extra chances. I don't know what it was.
Speaker 1: He like, Jerry Cloward. Man, I mean, look, man, I
Speaker 1: messed twice. I mean full on. I mean, if that
Speaker 1: buck would have ran on the first one, I don't.
Speaker 1: I mean, who knows. Maybe he would have run a
Speaker 1: hundred yards and stopped and I would have been able
Speaker 1: to take a knee. Actually, you know what I can
Speaker 1: you missed. I know why he missed because he wasn't
Speaker 1: aiming at it right. Well, there was that, But I
Speaker 1: also up when I handed him the rifle. You know,
Speaker 1: I said, look, the trigger pull on this is fairly light,
Speaker 1: you know, and you know, so I think what happened
Speaker 1: is is he's bringing it up. You know, he's starting
Speaker 1: his little trigger press. It's sort of as he's doing
Speaker 1: his quail pull through a rising teal or whatever it was.
Speaker 1: And I think he just trip the trip the trigger
Speaker 1: a little too quick, because it's got a fairly light,
Speaker 1: crisp trigger on that gun. I'm gonna start calling it,
Speaker 1: even though he doesn't remember where it came from, start
Speaker 1: calling it the Yannie that that method, that method that
Speaker 1: way to miss. It's called a yanni. So but John,
Speaker 1: speak to that. There is some right we've talked about this.
Speaker 1: You said it's maybe not like pulling through, but you
Speaker 1: said there's like a figure eight thing where it's opposed
Speaker 1: to like trying to hold one figure eight into this.
Speaker 1: Instead of holding one spot, it is better to sort
Speaker 1: of cross the bull's eye. The part of the thing
Speaker 1: is is that you hold it when you're shooting off
Speaker 1: hand unsupported. You cannot hold those cross hairs dead steady.
Speaker 1: You're just flat out can't do it. So you're gonna
Speaker 1: be dealing with radical wobble if you try to hold
Speaker 1: it straight on like we're talking about. Typically, what you
Speaker 1: get is that figure eight motion that you're talking about,
Speaker 1: and that naturally happens. And what you have to do
Speaker 1: is you have to be comfortable with that and not
Speaker 1: get essentially, train yourself not to be nervous about it,
Speaker 1: and learn to shoot when that figure eight is crossing
Speaker 1: where you want. What you're doing, Actually, what you're doing
Speaker 1: isn't fully wrong. You know. I would say it's seventy
Speaker 1: five yards on a deer sized thing. Though you can
Speaker 1: pull that thing up and you have enough time just
Speaker 1: to kind of snug that thing into your shoulder, you know,
Speaker 1: and it will steady there for a second, focus hard,
Speaker 1: and shoot like you don't have to overthink it. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but the idea of coming up with the idea is
Speaker 1: to come up and stop. And I don't know, maybe
Speaker 1: you guys kind of know that trick from bow hunting too.
Speaker 1: You know, that's a bow hunting way of dropping your pin,
Speaker 1: you know, you know, settling your pin on an animal.
Speaker 1: You go and stop, you know, you you either pull
Speaker 1: you know, pull it up onto the animal or drop
Speaker 1: it down. And that's the way to kind of hold
Speaker 1: get your pins steady. So there is some precedent for
Speaker 1: that technique, but um, honestly, at that distance, you just
Speaker 1: want to put it on it and shoot the damn
Speaker 1: thing where my figure eight thing that that description is run.
Speaker 1: Layton Um was a door gunner in Vietnam, and he
Speaker 1: likes to talk about the problem with running that M
Speaker 1: sixty out of the door was that it would drift
Speaker 1: from the recoil, and he learned to control the drift
Speaker 1: shooting as them sixty by by giving into it mm hmmm.
Speaker 1: And he said he would always run figure eights over
Speaker 1: his targets. He hate to be a target in Franz. Yeah,
Speaker 1: him running figure eights over you. Yeah, and of course
Speaker 1: it s shounded rounds a minute too. You've got some
Speaker 1: extra lee with here too. You're not buying the ammo.
Speaker 1: So all of a sudden, what so yeah, third one
Speaker 1: hits him. Yeah, there wasn't that much. It wasn't it was, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh we can tell his his ascent drops. He's
Speaker 1: kind of like going away from us, and he disappears
Speaker 1: almost instantly, and uh, kind of Turkey esque style. I
Speaker 1: just you know, take off Marylon down the hill as
Speaker 1: though going after it hit Turkey. Yeah, because last thing
Speaker 1: I saw was him like moving away, and it kind
Speaker 1: of looked like he might still have his front legs,
Speaker 1: you know, and after missing twice, you know, it wasn't
Speaker 1: like fully confident about weren't feeling coy. But we run
Speaker 1: down there and he's stone cold dead, double long graveyard dead.
Speaker 1: Graveyard would say, oh my god. It looked like the
Speaker 1: blood trail looked like somebody took a gallon of red paint,
Speaker 1: and just yeah, no, third time is the charm. Yeah.
Speaker 1: If mine was a big, huge giant buck, yours was
Speaker 1: a big huge buck. Yeah t bit not as big
Speaker 1: huge giant as I couldn't mean we will put pictures
Speaker 1: up to show, No, I would. I would happily trade
Speaker 1: you right now. I always likes time about made with Ben.
Speaker 1: It's like kind of nice to incrementally build up too,
Speaker 1: you know, two bigger animals, because you kind of always
Speaker 1: have like the next step to look forward to. You know,
Speaker 1: once you shoot two under niche mule here, you may
Speaker 1: never get to see another one that big. Let alone
Speaker 1: shoot at one. I had to reset. I had to reset,
Speaker 1: And now I'm going back down the other directions I'll shoot.
Speaker 1: I climbed up. Now I'm climbing down. I'm gonna start
Speaker 1: with forkers and backup. Um so, yeah, the story gets
Speaker 1: a little we we make quick work of, uh chopping
Speaker 1: them up, get him into backpacks and uh remember we
Speaker 1: crossed this canyon earlier to get over there to this
Speaker 1: ridge we're hunting. Well, we're now maybe half mile down
Speaker 1: the ridge and Veto and the ranger are right across
Speaker 1: from us. He was he was able to move the
Speaker 1: yeah down his ridge, and I mean we can see
Speaker 1: him seven yards away because we had done the site
Speaker 1: and go thing on the GPS, which really quickly is
Speaker 1: basically you point the GPS and lock a direction towards
Speaker 1: the target and your range find it so you know
Speaker 1: exactly how far it is, and you can put those
Speaker 1: two pieces of data into your GPS and project the
Speaker 1: way points so that later, whether it's an animal or
Speaker 1: a ranger or whatever, you can find it. So we're
Speaker 1: at the top of this hill. I'm like, yeah, John,
Speaker 1: let's just bang off this thing right down across the
Speaker 1: canyon on the other side. Yeah. Well, we get down
Speaker 1: after going through a caf we get down to a
Speaker 1: bench and all we have to do is cross what
Speaker 1: looks to be a little bitty canyon and up the
Speaker 1: other side and back in the ranger driving home and uh,
Speaker 1: we start looking at the edges canyon and it's there's
Speaker 1: it's like a pret steep drop off. But then we
Speaker 1: find a little crease. I'm like, well, you know, mother
Speaker 1: Nature's a little crease. Should just crease it's right down
Speaker 1: the Well. We get down in there and it's, uh,
Speaker 1: it gets deeper and steeper, and when there's the rocks
Speaker 1: that are trickling below is are kind of rolling rolling,
Speaker 1: and then there'll be a second pause then, so it's
Speaker 1: not looking good, and I'm I kind of peel off
Speaker 1: to the right a little bit to see if I
Speaker 1: can find a way down. And all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: I here like, oh ship, you know, and I look
Speaker 1: over and John is now sliding down the slow crease
Speaker 1: and I'm like, please, dear guys, and stop. Do not
Speaker 1: want John to go over the edge. And uh yeah,
Speaker 1: did you grab something find only to stop or just
Speaker 1: just dig your heels and no. I I clenched the
Speaker 1: ground so tightly with my butt. She it was like
Speaker 1: a bs. What happened was we were on it was
Speaker 1: a very steep I don't know what the grade is
Speaker 1: on that, but this is the you we alluded it to.
Speaker 1: We alluded to it before with like the screen, like
Speaker 1: the marble like quality. You know, this is kind of
Speaker 1: like rotten ground, you know, I mean, just the dirts loose.
Speaker 1: And I had managed to dislodge pretty good, like about
Speaker 1: a pumpkin sized boulder behind me that took my legs
Speaker 1: out from under me. And you know, I was and
Speaker 1: I ended up. I probably only slid twenty or twenty,
Speaker 1: but man, it lasted a long time. And you know,
Speaker 1: just whatever, I just clawted everything to stop and did
Speaker 1: it before I went down and over the edge. And
Speaker 1: at that point I lost enthusiasm for for Yanni's navigational
Speaker 1: and so he's usually pretty good. So we went up
Speaker 1: and down not far but a hundred yards in each direction.
Speaker 1: Nothing looked like it was gonna get any better. It
Speaker 1: just looked like we were just on top of this
Speaker 1: king and basically with you know, steep walls. And instead
Speaker 1: of going the Explora Tory methany farther, we decided to
Speaker 1: let's take fifteen minutes and walked back up the hill.
Speaker 1: We just came down and walk basically exactly the same
Speaker 1: way out that we had come in. Because we know
Speaker 1: that we can do it. It won't be any surprises.
Speaker 1: Just followed a little red line on the GPS. Who
Speaker 1: was carrying all the butt meat? I was, and I
Speaker 1: gave John all my gear um and uh yeah, So
Speaker 1: we did that in about two and a half hours later,
Speaker 1: we caught up with Beat and drove home. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: talked about then by the time you guys got back,
Speaker 1: I thought you'd been beheaded and dissolved the bed of acid.
Speaker 1: The only explanation here is that that was the most
Speaker 1: stressful part of the trip for me, and I was like,
Speaker 1: should we just make dinner for us? Even without the detour,
Speaker 1: it would have been a good hour, you know, pack job. Well,
Speaker 1: it's it's rugged country, and it's funny because we got
Speaker 1: back and you know, finally got within striking distance to
Speaker 1: the razor. So the dim dim headlights on that thing.
Speaker 1: The headlights on things are like on a model T.
Speaker 1: You said, it's like driving my candlewights. It sort of
Speaker 1: like mood lighting. And I thought, for sure, like what
Speaker 1: I was like, salvation is at hand. You know, there's
Speaker 1: the there's the razor, and we jump in this thing,
Speaker 1: and you know, I sort of just I like driving
Speaker 1: those things. So I'm sort of appointed myself as the
Speaker 1: designated driver. And we take off and I go maybe
Speaker 1: twenty yards and I all of a sudden hit this ditch.
Speaker 1: That damn your flips the thing. Yeah, it drops like
Speaker 1: two wheels into a ditch to where the wheels don't
Speaker 1: touch the bottom of it. We're kind of high centered
Speaker 1: and luckily those things it was a six wheeler ranger
Speaker 1: and you put into six wheel drive and it climbed
Speaker 1: right out of here. But it's kind of one of
Speaker 1: those deals where you're like, oh, the adventure is over
Speaker 1: right home. Like I'm telling you, it's ruthless country man.
Speaker 1: There's no there's no escape. It is raw, rugged country.
Speaker 1: That's that's huge part of the appeal of it. Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 1: I now need to install a sort of montage. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna tell a quick story that serves the function of
Speaker 1: a montage. In the movie. Um, Ben and I have
Speaker 1: grow curious about the Southwest Corner, the Wild Southwest Corner,
Speaker 1: the Wild Corner, and we head in there, um and
Speaker 1: just start tearing it a new one with the Buyos
Speaker 1: and find like the homeland. Ben said, I feel like
Speaker 1: we're now in their bedroom or something like that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: When we sat down in the first I felt unbelievable
Speaker 1: monster bucks running every which way. To refer to the
Speaker 1: to the location of the dunk Buck tit as kind
Speaker 1: of like overlooking their lands. By the time we got
Speaker 1: into the middle of the Southwest Corner, we were on
Speaker 1: the back porch. We were there. We could smell them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we could smell him. We're in there in the southwest quadrant. Yes.
Speaker 1: I also want to add in this montage, there's also
Speaker 1: a moment after which we encounter a bucket another area
Speaker 1: called El Surpriso, and we grow very interested in ell SURPRISEO.
Speaker 1: But that's Spanish for the surprise we leeve believe. We
Speaker 1: grow addressed in the Surpriser ll surprisal, bump them, get
Speaker 1: up on a way high perch, and devote a whole
Speaker 1: day to trying to relocate them. Don't get sick of
Speaker 1: looking at that area, and decided to explore the Southwest quadrant.
Speaker 1: Go back to the Southwest Quadrant, discover buck Land. The
Speaker 1: next day, decided to go back and maybe try to
Speaker 1: find else Surprise Oh again because he still haunting us.
Speaker 1: At which point John and Yanni move into the Southwest
Speaker 1: quadrant Shangarlat they find two that is loaded with with
Speaker 1: bucks in in the other deer, and then more stuff happens,
Speaker 1: and then we decided to go back into the Southwest
Speaker 1: quadrant and really tear it the new one where everybody's
Speaker 1: going in and we're gonna glass the dickens out of it. John, well,
Speaker 1: you we're getting frustrated with me. I think had punted
Speaker 1: with you know what the things because you're Mr Picky,
Speaker 1: because your Mr Picky. All I hear about all the
Speaker 1: giant bucks. These guys see here, see He's like, how
Speaker 1: far away was that? Dear here? A hundred five in?
Speaker 1: How far away wasn't a thousand yards? What's wrong with that? What? Like? Mr?
Speaker 1: Shooting Editor? I thought you could shoot. It was like
Speaker 1: just all these barts went around just love him in there.
Speaker 1: I have to admit I was loving this hunt so much.
Speaker 1: I just didn't want it to be over. And I
Speaker 1: feel like time time bore you out. That's all you
Speaker 1: could say, you were proven right. I was, I was
Speaker 1: proven right. Well, here's what happened, is is that that
Speaker 1: first time that Yanni and I encroached on your guys country,
Speaker 1: you know, we did see a couple of really intriguing bucks,
Speaker 1: and there was this one buck. A matter of fact,
Speaker 1: as soon as I saw him, I think I was like,
Speaker 1: that's l Gigante. I think that's him, you know, And
Speaker 1: I got super excited about him, and uh and Yannie
Speaker 1: sort of put him in his spotting school because I
Speaker 1: didn't have a spotter. I just had my fifteen power banc.
Speaker 1: Did you guys introduce I'm just trying to move stuff
Speaker 1: long I did, I'll get you. I don't want to
Speaker 1: get into el Gagante. Well, I brought in that there's
Speaker 1: l surprise though, Okagante, I did a montage sort of thing,
Speaker 1: and now here we are because so now it can't
Speaker 1: be six days long. Like so anyway, I see this one,
Speaker 1: good good buck and uh but yeah, he sort of
Speaker 1: talks me out of it. To be honest, he's like,
Speaker 1: he's like, yeah, he's okay. When you guys, you guys
Speaker 1: named him a misleading name. When I heard the century buck,
Speaker 1: I thought, man, that you could glass bucks for a
Speaker 1: century and only find one that looks like that. I
Speaker 1: thought he was a hundred inches. But it turns out
Speaker 1: the century buck just happen to be raking his antlers
Speaker 1: on a century plan. So I'm thinking, wow, a once
Speaker 1: in a century occurrence. It's like, yeah, yeah, John still
Speaker 1: can't commit This cow's deer levitated the plane. I'm like,
Speaker 1: this guy doesn't even want a once in a century buck.
Speaker 1: No I did. I did. I got super excited about him,
Speaker 1: and I think I saw him later that day and
Speaker 1: I made a I made a move on him to
Speaker 1: go to go go after him. You know, he was
Speaker 1: chasing a dough and I got just the paris glimpse
Speaker 1: of his antlers, and I'm like, I'm going to go
Speaker 1: make a movement. So I moved off the knob and
Speaker 1: did the quick up and down and tried to find
Speaker 1: him and couldn't and uh. And later that evening we
Speaker 1: saw another nice buck up and I made a move
Speaker 1: on him, and the normal identified crab claw. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: this was crab claw. And I got to with him
Speaker 1: three d and fifty yards of him at absolute last light.
Speaker 1: But he was I didn't get because I didn't have
Speaker 1: the spine scope. I didn't get the greatest look at him.
Speaker 1: He was bedded facing the way and I couldn't tell
Speaker 1: if they were vegetation, so I had to not not
Speaker 1: go after it. Um. But then the next morning ended
Speaker 1: up connecting. The next morning, last day, we're on day six.
Speaker 1: Now we're we're you know, Ben and I still don't
Speaker 1: have our tags down to the wire. Down to the
Speaker 1: wire we we take. So we're gonna take the secret
Speaker 1: road in or the better road, and so we take
Speaker 1: the better road in to get into a better spot
Speaker 1: and put the full court breaths put put the full court.
Speaker 1: So we go in there to get into an even
Speaker 1: better spot than we've been and ended up right back
Speaker 1: where we were before somehow, and this was put. Every
Speaker 1: time you step out the door, what time we usually
Speaker 1: take off out of there? Try to leave it six
Speaker 1: you're gonna go spend. You're gonna be on the glass
Speaker 1: and knob till six. Yeah, it's an all day poll.
Speaker 1: You you spend every time you step out the door,
Speaker 1: You're gonna spend twelve hours on an old glass. I
Speaker 1: mean all of us spent seventy two hours hunting cooes,
Speaker 1: deer and one way shape or form. Yeah, seventy two
Speaker 1: hours on the knob. That'd be a good name of
Speaker 1: a book on the knob on the Kno, Well, we
Speaker 1: got our on the knob between two tips. Well, and
Speaker 1: you call them knockers. Yeah, yeah, And you see your
Speaker 1: buddies got a nice pair of board texes. I go,
Speaker 1: nice knockers, nice pair of knockers. Knocks. It's short for
Speaker 1: buying knock you alert. I'm just trimming out the knock,
Speaker 1: but by knocker or knockers knocks, knockers knocks. It's like this.
Speaker 1: I recently met a guy who runs lions in Mexico,
Speaker 1: and and and I heard him it's like how language works, right,
Speaker 1: And I heard him talking about um. He would describe
Speaker 1: what you'd see a lion track, and he'd say, I
Speaker 1: thought he was saying, that's a mondo track. I thought
Speaker 1: he knew a Spanish word. Mando was a Spanish word
Speaker 1: that means like toad or pig or something big. It'd
Speaker 1: be a fun game to go around the room. Oh,
Speaker 1: can can I do two die? Like? Can I do
Speaker 1: a triple digression? Hold the thought about mindo. When I
Speaker 1: was in college, I read a paper where a sociologist.
Speaker 1: The sociologist had men in the room, had a group
Speaker 1: of friends from a fraternity in a room and tasked
Speaker 1: them with listing all the names they knew for male genitalium,
Speaker 1: and likewise took a bunch of sorority sisters and tasked
Speaker 1: them with generating a list of all the terms they
Speaker 1: knew for male genitalium. The male list was saying such
Speaker 1: as the emperor, coach at the president, a commissioner, and
Speaker 1: the female list was things of a much. It was
Speaker 1: more like like um, like like disgusting, diminutive, like lacking
Speaker 1: terms that lacked power and authority. So but anyhow, uh,
Speaker 1: the guy, I thought, you're saying a mon though, So
Speaker 1: we started saying mindo. One day, I'm like, hey, what
Speaker 1: does mando translate to exactly? He says, I'm not saying mando,
Speaker 1: I'm saying mango, as in humongous. So knockers like knocks
Speaker 1: makes sense. But things just change over time, Like someday
Speaker 1: I'll explain the word tigs. You know, we never know
Speaker 1: what meant, and it's just this long evolution of a
Speaker 1: couple different terms where it becomes tigs. So so we're
Speaker 1: in Mexico, right, We're in Mexico here and with knocks
Speaker 1: with with knocks on the tits. Okay, So we get
Speaker 1: back up here last day and the Latvian eagle strikes again.
Speaker 1: We're kind of looking over this we're we're looking at
Speaker 1: we're looking over this country the Latvia lover, but it's
Speaker 1: very firmly now the lab the Latvian eagle, and uh,
Speaker 1: he's like, I think I see him, you know you
Speaker 1: are are I see him? You know the set in
Speaker 1: the sentry buck And I take literally about a half
Speaker 1: second look through my knocker, saying it right, my knocks,
Speaker 1: my knocks. So I take a half second look through
Speaker 1: my knocks and I just sort of have this like
Speaker 1: visceral identification. That's him. And I start packing up my
Speaker 1: stuff and to make a move on, and I'm going like,
Speaker 1: I am just I am dialed in, I'm ready to go. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He's still like, well, I think it's a whatever. I'm
Speaker 1: going gone and take off. Got dirt with me. Remember
Speaker 1: asking like are we moving? You're like no, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go kill that buck. I was like, oh, okay, yeah.
Speaker 1: So end up crossing over to another um that's closer
Speaker 1: to him and I had kind of been on this country.
Speaker 1: I was really excited because these are a little shoulder
Speaker 1: on a little shoulder. And the thing is issue is
Speaker 1: that on the one hand we see how wary the
Speaker 1: couse deer are, but on the other hand they do
Speaker 1: have a pretty tight home range. I don't know a
Speaker 1: lot about their biology, but it doesn't it seems like
Speaker 1: they have kind of a kind of a tight area
Speaker 1: that they sort of cou'se dear lower. It is like
Speaker 1: full of of of like stories that kind of marvel
Speaker 1: at their fidelity to a little patch of ground. But
Speaker 1: they got like a little spot where they lived their
Speaker 1: life in what seems to be a vast and and
Speaker 1: I guess we looked out in that sense, because I
Speaker 1: had stopped on that hill where we had first seen
Speaker 1: him pretty hard the day before. And usually, you know,
Speaker 1: hunting deer, you think I've kind of spoiled this spot
Speaker 1: a little bit, or I've stirred it up a little
Speaker 1: too much, or so I'm always worried about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's always that nagging doubt and uh. And
Speaker 1: yet there he was, just right back where we had
Speaker 1: seen him before, and I'm like, you know, and this
Speaker 1: is a deal, right, It's it's the morning, it's cool.
Speaker 1: They're up and on their feet, you know, and pretty
Speaker 1: soon they're going to be going to ground. They're gonna
Speaker 1: be bedded somewhere more or less. Although the rut had
Speaker 1: kick then too, so you know, that was sort of
Speaker 1: the X factor. But that's always the worry. So I
Speaker 1: saw him, I just I just took off dirt and
Speaker 1: I made the traverse across to this next knob down
Speaker 1: the saddle, and I had already scouted a shooting location.
Speaker 1: I knew where I wanted to shoot him with. I
Speaker 1: had looked and seeing a spot that had fairly bare
Speaker 1: ground up there to avoid you know us. Yeah, on
Speaker 1: his grass situation, and got up there, got on and
Speaker 1: laid my pack down, raised him at four hundred seven yards.
Speaker 1: He was walking to the right, and I gave him
Speaker 1: a blee. I mean, just awful. Like I'm not a
Speaker 1: calling guy. I'm never going to win a contest or
Speaker 1: anything like that. But it does pretty good. Remy is
Speaker 1: very good. I think in that moment though, nobody's really
Speaker 1: trying to make a really realistic dear sound. You're just
Speaker 1: trying to make any sound that makes him go. Remy
Speaker 1: can make a legit buck noise, and you make a
Speaker 1: pretty good one. Really do yours like it? Like that?
Speaker 1: The man did it last night? Oh the money was
Speaker 1: like full on when you're trying to get a buck
Speaker 1: to turn or stop. I go, hey, please cut that
Speaker 1: sound and use it in the just started selling the
Speaker 1: game causes drunk laugh Anyway. My point is I'm not
Speaker 1: trying to pretend like I have some great like call.
Speaker 1: But I bleat out this sound and he stops and
Speaker 1: and boom, four or seven yards. One shot I cut
Speaker 1: as it was an interesting shot. I ended up taking
Speaker 1: him a little high through the shoulders and it went
Speaker 1: into kind of the Noman's land, you know that dreaded.
Speaker 1: When you're archery hunting, you you know that dreaded no
Speaker 1: man's landing shot. And that's that's where that bullet went.
Speaker 1: And it totally grenaded through his shoulders. I mean it
Speaker 1: took both of his shoulders right out. But he was
Speaker 1: still alive. When we got over to him. He wasn't
Speaker 1: going anywhere. We had watched him a little bit through
Speaker 1: the glass, and Yanni at that point was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I still see him flopping around out there. So we
Speaker 1: moved over there pretty quickly, and I you know, I
Speaker 1: had dispatched him with my knife, and and uh, guy,
Speaker 1: who's just beautiful, great buck, the centry buck, the century buck,
Speaker 1: and the oh he had a crazy curly hoof. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what happens to people? Why don't cut their fingernils? You
Speaker 1: have to curl? Yeah, yeah he had. He had this
Speaker 1: one like little veloci raptor, little raptor toe toe on him.
Speaker 1: Starts cocaine. Can you see, John, I'll have it around
Speaker 1: his neck it. I'm gonna start wearing deep v T shirts.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna stop shaving my chest. Ye get a thatch
Speaker 1: worthy worthy of that thing. So yeah, great beautifu Yet another,
Speaker 1: yet another not big, huge giant but like mine, but
Speaker 1: another big huge buck. No, he's definitely not as as
Speaker 1: big as yours and early. I mean, you shot that
Speaker 1: thing and the sun had barely hit that hill. The
Speaker 1: sun had barely hit Bend's right cheek. When read throughout
Speaker 1: the day, I got locked. I got into the mode.
Speaker 1: You didn't you know what that feelings like though, when
Speaker 1: the switch just clicks and you're like, all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: like just everything is just focused on it. And that's
Speaker 1: that's what I felt. As soon as as soon as
Speaker 1: I saw his antlers, I'm just like go, you know.
Speaker 1: I was explaining to Ben the other day, UM about
Speaker 1: like how days passed out there. It's like you imagine
Speaker 1: the way a day goes like a like a like
Speaker 1: a dimmer switch, where you like gradually right and any
Speaker 1: second is sort of imperceptible from the second past because
Speaker 1: it's just happening silly gradually, like it's like pre dawn darkness,
Speaker 1: and then it's all of a sudden, gets the greyness
Speaker 1: and there's like light and it's kind of like mid
Speaker 1: day and you just keep slowly graduating it fades. I
Speaker 1: feel like out here, it's um, it's like clicky. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like it's pre dawned darkness and goes click. It's
Speaker 1: also like morning and it's like click. It's also like
Speaker 1: scorching lye hot. And then they're like click and it's
Speaker 1: evening and clicking is dark. It just happened, like what yeah,
Speaker 1: and just a feeling that hits at ten am, like
Speaker 1: someone does a they throw the mid Like at ten am,
Speaker 1: you're just like, shoot, now, I gotta stay here for
Speaker 1: four hours getting boiled by the sun and wait for
Speaker 1: them to throw the next switch, which makes all the
Speaker 1: deer come back out of the funniest part is the
Speaker 1: difference in the shade. I mean, you know, just you
Speaker 1: can you can imagine Deer's movie because when you're in
Speaker 1: the shade, you feel like calm, that's calm and comfortable.
Speaker 1: There's a little breeze oh yeah. And then and then
Speaker 1: you go out in the sun you're like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: who lives here? Why would you? This? Is there a
Speaker 1: watering hole? And it's like yeah, and you get back
Speaker 1: into the two ft wide piece oh yeah, yeah. And
Speaker 1: that's what the narrowness of the shade, the narrowness of
Speaker 1: the shad because there's no big trees, every small The
Speaker 1: narrowness of the shade is what allows you to keep
Speaker 1: I think it's what allows you to keep spotting deer
Speaker 1: all day exactly because you can't you get a little
Speaker 1: shade patch. You're like, remember some time about watching uh
Speaker 1: antelope get shade from phone poles and they just moved
Speaker 1: like that to catch the only to catch shade from
Speaker 1: me a phone pole, and then moving to stay in
Speaker 1: at little shade line from a phone pole, and it's
Speaker 1: like a sund out. You're moving every couple of minutes,
Speaker 1: and so I think that that's like always causing I
Speaker 1: remember like looking at a doll bettered in a little
Speaker 1: bit of shade and coming back fifteen minutes later and
Speaker 1: she was gone, like oh yeah, because her like her
Speaker 1: shade patch is gone. Now she had to get up.
Speaker 1: And it's funny on this hunt, this first time I
Speaker 1: ever realized how much our movements were similar to the deer's.
Speaker 1: You know, we were went and in Jay's advice of
Speaker 1: thirty minute, thirty minute, thirty minute, that was during deer
Speaker 1: movement time, it went deer on their feet. You gotta
Speaker 1: keep moving, you gotta see new country, glass new country
Speaker 1: because the deer up and moving and and you can
Speaker 1: get eyes on them. But when they go to bed,
Speaker 1: you stay put. You go to bed too. You get
Speaker 1: under the shade tree and you glass them up and
Speaker 1: see if you can get lucky. And you're hoping that, yeah,
Speaker 1: that some dough is gonna stand up to shift, it's
Speaker 1: gonna make a buck and be like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: what's she doing? And he stands up to he goes
Speaker 1: to play grab bass and then you got the moves.
Speaker 1: He follows her and Austin like yeah, but then you
Speaker 1: got to jump on him because you know where they
Speaker 1: are and they're gonna stay in that. He's not going
Speaker 1: to shake off to the new territory. Right. So this
Speaker 1: was the first time that struck me just because we
Speaker 1: did spend seventy two hours doing this, that there is
Speaker 1: this you know, you're mirroring the movement of the animal
Speaker 1: for a good reason. Yeah, it's a good observation. So
Speaker 1: there you are, Ben Benny O'Brien, Ben O'Brien, capital old
Speaker 1: l Ben No no, yeah, yeah, apostrophe there put a
Speaker 1: little mar hash um. It's time for your buck story. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Should I go all the way back to if you
Speaker 1: want this is gonna probably be two part podcast. I
Speaker 1: think it's fair to go back, you know, Oh setting
Speaker 1: it you guys, he says, you know, and in a
Speaker 1: justice position, I'm leaning, I'm leaning forward, I'm leaving. I'm
Speaker 1: leaning forward and gripping my teeth like like Yanni driving
Speaker 1: the van Um. You know, like when you see a
Speaker 1: deer and you immediately know that it's it's over and
Speaker 1: above what your expectations might be. My wife, Yeah, for
Speaker 1: what a deer could look like. You know, when you
Speaker 1: meet a hot lady or whatever and you maybe just
Speaker 1: see like the backside of her head. He turns out, WHOA,
Speaker 1: that's that's gonna work for me. Uh. We saw this
Speaker 1: buck called El Gagante. Now he didn't have a name
Speaker 1: prior to seeing him, but I I named him El
Speaker 1: Gagante because because yeah, the gagante means I believe the
Speaker 1: giant in Spanish. Mark Kenyon be so excited about names.
Speaker 1: Names we become good because like gigantico, okay, gante to
Speaker 1: be sounds more probably pecante, you know, could be like
Speaker 1: a salta company. Yeah, something like that. I like it
Speaker 1: to sound authentic. Anyway, we're we're this is two days
Speaker 1: prior to this is post l surprise. Oh, but prior
Speaker 1: to john the Johnny and Yanni team going back to
Speaker 1: the southwest corner our honey to this point, we have
Speaker 1: to this this point, we have yet to discover that
Speaker 1: the honey hoole has honey. I mean, we were kind
Speaker 1: of sniffing aroun it. It smells sweet at this point,
Speaker 1: but we don't know if there's honey in there or not.
Speaker 1: And so we get deep in the hole and we're
Speaker 1: and we're hunting, and we spot this buck. He's across
Speaker 1: across the south. He's to the north what is the northeast,
Speaker 1: about um three cords of a mile from our main
Speaker 1: tip when we first got in the southwest corner. And
Speaker 1: so we're chasing this buck. We're trying to find him
Speaker 1: in the shade of the day. Oh crab clawl so
Speaker 1: crab claws. He's a nice eight point, but he's only
Speaker 1: got crabs on the end of his main beam. Chasing Jason,
Speaker 1: he gets up in some shade and we think he's
Speaker 1: gonna be bet in this little pocket, in this cut
Speaker 1: of this ridge. We're gonna get over there and find him,
Speaker 1: and it's gonna be perfect because he's gonna be bedded
Speaker 1: down in the shade of the day, and we'll have
Speaker 1: plenty of time to step be on an opposing hillside
Speaker 1: eye level with him exactly. And we have not We've
Speaker 1: yet to explore the southwest corner. We don't really know
Speaker 1: what's going on. We just know there's a buck over
Speaker 1: that direction that we need to go get him. So
Speaker 1: we get down or hike and we get over there.
Speaker 1: We just we know on a lower shoulder of a
Speaker 1: hill on the Reggy Cross from where we think crab
Speaker 1: clawl is, and we just we can't see in there.
Speaker 1: And because I tend to think about think like a
Speaker 1: bow hunter, I tell Steve, let's roll, let's get off
Speaker 1: this hill. Let's get on the hill he's on and
Speaker 1: charge over the hill and just just surprise him and
Speaker 1: give him and shooting just shooting, just send one. Is
Speaker 1: that how bowners think? He just starts shooting arrows just
Speaker 1: like this quiver has got five errors for a reason. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so we go over there. Long story short, we
Speaker 1: were headed over there and we spooked this buck. He
Speaker 1: jumps up out of another another cut on the same hill.
Speaker 1: Now we didn't see he jumps up goes over the
Speaker 1: hill back up. What Yeah, on the spot crab claws. Yes,
Speaker 1: we did. You didn't think it was cramp little, but
Speaker 1: I'm telling you that's it was. Oh you're talking that
Speaker 1: part of the time. Yeah, you're right, all right. Sorry,
Speaker 1: We go around the same pyramid hill that crab we
Speaker 1: thought crab claw was on. Well, some cows had gotten
Speaker 1: into his betting area, and I believe he ran around
Speaker 1: the hill and betted on the side of what. We
Speaker 1: didn't know that he was betting area. Got like marauded
Speaker 1: when the military takes over your stuff and uses it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're betting on got common deered by a group of
Speaker 1: black angles who are really dainty, quiet animals I find
Speaker 1: without resisting. Yeah, and so we're we're Steve. I see
Speaker 1: a shed. Steve goes down to get it. We're on
Speaker 1: the side hill, this big Okato pyramid ridge, and I
Speaker 1: look over and I see this buck jump up, big
Speaker 1: wide buck jump up and over the hill he goes.
Speaker 1: I mean he was, he was on the He waited
Speaker 1: till we were in the sha. He was seventy yards
Speaker 1: and we're staying there talking. We walked past him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we walked past the picking up jet antlers, he jumps
Speaker 1: and runs. Well, we decided the best thing to do
Speaker 1: is just continue with our plan. Im into the shady
Speaker 1: area where we think the crab club bucket is. We're
Speaker 1: not sure what buck we just jumped. We get up there,
Speaker 1: it's it's devoid, full accounts and devoid a deer. So
Speaker 1: we proceeded to decide that must have been him. It's
Speaker 1: way to his hundred yards away from where we saw
Speaker 1: him and were in dirt, and Steve proceed to take
Speaker 1: a two hour nap. There was a good shade up there. Well,
Speaker 1: here's what happens. As long as I sleep on my
Speaker 1: back on a tilt, I will have a what we
Speaker 1: call a nappy. But something happens and I moved to
Speaker 1: my side. It becomes a slumber. Yeah, And I don't
Speaker 1: know what happened. I remember taking my net gator and
Speaker 1: like quadruple folding at the blackout the light, which was
Speaker 1: a mistake. And I was laying on my back and
Speaker 1: you get that kind of feeling when you're laying on
Speaker 1: your back and you're gonna choke on your own tongue
Speaker 1: or something. And I think I rolled on my side
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden woke up and I thought
Speaker 1: it was around noon and it was two. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was two. And I slept for five minutes, and I
Speaker 1: sat there and watched him sleep for the next hour.
Speaker 1: And then had weaved a basket from thee and yeah,
Speaker 1: I had glassed every hill and and yeah, I'm very
Speaker 1: sorry about that. It wasn't about news. Something that's too
Speaker 1: eating their sandwiches, turned their turn their scopes to full power.
Speaker 1: Not a lot of time. And anyway, we take our
Speaker 1: we'll speed this up. We take we take our nappy
Speaker 1: time and turned into a turn and now we're hunting.
Speaker 1: We're like, we gotta we gotta dial this thing up
Speaker 1: and find some deer. We screwed this, screwed the pooch
Speaker 1: on this one. I admittedly was too aggressive on these kids, dear,
Speaker 1: So we get going up. We just go up the hill,
Speaker 1: on to the very top of the tip we're sleeping
Speaker 1: on and start glass and immediate like doe buck, doe buck,
Speaker 1: doe buck buck. I know we're trying to move quick,
Speaker 1: but I gotta add one quick face the area we
Speaker 1: were going to look there was no perch it would
Speaker 1: allow you to pee. You're down into the zone, and
Speaker 1: in those situations you do have to be like, actually,
Speaker 1: could never happen, and wait until they get up and
Speaker 1: maybe they'll move into an area where you can put
Speaker 1: a move on or you want up making the mistake
Speaker 1: of thinking you're gonna find some secret perch, then you're
Speaker 1: moving around and bumping them and like, well maybe there
Speaker 1: isn't anyways, Well, it turns out we're we're up to
Speaker 1: the northeast of this quadrant and and to the west
Speaker 1: of us at this point is uh dry creek bed
Speaker 1: with some pools of water, and so I feel like
Speaker 1: the deer started collecting in there. And as soon as
Speaker 1: it's maybe two thirty Steve's been awake for half an hour,
Speaker 1: We're on groggy everybody. We start, we start, we get
Speaker 1: our knocks out and um we start glassing and immediately
Speaker 1: pick up a bunch of deer. Well, not long after that,
Speaker 1: we see old crab Crawl, who we just spooked, maybe
Speaker 1: seven yards away across this canyon, chasing a dough across
Speaker 1: this sunlit knob. We're like, we gotta get over there
Speaker 1: and cut him off. So we start hustling down this
Speaker 1: into the bottom of this creek, up past the soccer
Speaker 1: teo flatting onto a shoulder, and are going around this
Speaker 1: ridge trying, you know, trying to figure out where this where.
Speaker 1: A crab claul may have chase this dough too, And
Speaker 1: this time I swing my head over and I looked
Speaker 1: down on the same sun kissed ridge that we originally
Speaker 1: saw crab clawl chasing the dough, and I see a
Speaker 1: buck full on chasing the dough, just nose down and
Speaker 1: I look into My immediate reaction was that's a giant.
Speaker 1: And I said out loud, that's a giant. And everybody
Speaker 1: looked over there, and it was obvious that El Gagante lived.
Speaker 1: A couple of things I want to interject real quick, No,
Speaker 1: these are these are essential bits. Yeah, because a lot
Speaker 1: of issues around the identity the identity of El Gegante
Speaker 1: versus the identity of the century buck. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of questions around. Yanny always warns people away from observing
Speaker 1: a deer from behind and thinking it's big, because he says,
Speaker 1: all dear look big, all big box look like big,
Speaker 1: huge giant box from behind. Also in Mexico, there is
Speaker 1: a lot of Catholic iconography hanging around the walls where
Speaker 1: people are have halos. Did you notice that, Yes, this
Speaker 1: bok was haloed by intense setting sun that were also
Speaker 1: being blinded by And if there was a sound that
Speaker 1: accompanied my seeing Al Grigante, it would be because I'm
Speaker 1: looking at him from behind and he is illuminated as
Speaker 1: though wearing a halo, as though being blessed by the heavens. Yes,
Speaker 1: and I said, yep, that's a big or something to
Speaker 1: that effect, something to the effect of, I'm telling you
Speaker 1: we started class. I was looking at a world's record.
Speaker 1: I thought I was looking at and keep and listen.
Speaker 1: We'll get to that hearing about two or three hours.
Speaker 1: But Gagante was there, right, This is al Gadante. This
Speaker 1: deer is a big old eight point with his huge
Speaker 1: mainframe and is his main beams wrap way around and
Speaker 1: up in the front, which makes him look like some
Speaker 1: kind of giant twelve point. Like he's got extra antlers.
Speaker 1: I thought, for I thought, I thought that deer has
Speaker 1: six antlers per side by Arizona standards five five um.
Speaker 1: Photo evidence later revealed that no, he has four percent
Speaker 1: and so four percide but the most analyzed the Brooder film,
Speaker 1: the film the most and he's three yards away at
Speaker 1: this point and shootable distance, blazing sunlight black, and the
Speaker 1: setting sun is in our eyes. And so I'm laying
Speaker 1: down trying to get on some packs and shuffling around.
Speaker 1: This deer's is chasing the stuff up this ridge and
Speaker 1: he's gonna go down into this bottom and be gone. Well,
Speaker 1: the entire time that I'm trying to put my pack
Speaker 1: down and get my rifle set up, I hear dirt
Speaker 1: and my left ear going, oh my god, oh my god,
Speaker 1: oh oh, and my right here, right here, Steve going wow,
Speaker 1: oh wow. He is a giant. And I'm over there
Speaker 1: going no pressure. Boys. We once saw a buck they
Speaker 1: had gotten Apparently they had just been struck by a car,
Speaker 1: and so it had an antler that had busted off
Speaker 1: and was hanging down across its face and under its jaw.
Speaker 1: And when I spotted I said to Yannie, it's a
Speaker 1: white time because I just saw something that didn't understand. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and later guys like buck of a life time, a
Speaker 1: forky who had just been run over. It depends on
Speaker 1: what lifetime. Anyway. At this point, I'm feeling like, holy,
Speaker 1: this is about to get real. I'm gonna get this
Speaker 1: thing in my scope and he's he's trailing his dough
Speaker 1: and he's not stopping for much. I get him in
Speaker 1: my scope. The sun is is whiting out most of
Speaker 1: my field of view. I can't see anything. I'm shuffling around.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to get a different path to get settled.
Speaker 1: I want to make a clean shot on this deer.
Speaker 1: He when he stops, he's facing completely away. So I
Speaker 1: got the Texas Hart shot and that's it. And at
Speaker 1: one point we move across the hillside to try to
Speaker 1: get a better shot. I had to get reset up.
Speaker 1: We're all fumbling around. You're practicing incredible restraint. Yes, at
Speaker 1: one point I had him in the scope perfect and
Speaker 1: he just was and thinking at the time, this is
Speaker 1: a world record deer. I could have either shot him
Speaker 1: in the neck or up the ass, but I chose.
Speaker 1: I just think, look, I'm not I respected dear of
Speaker 1: that big too much. Just to throw off some lead
Speaker 1: over there and then and see what see what happens?
Speaker 1: And uh so we practiced that restraint. We go around
Speaker 1: the corner, shuffle back up, gets set up again. We're
Speaker 1: glass on him, and the setting sun is just getting
Speaker 1: worse and worse and worse, and this could probably been
Speaker 1: a five minute time for it. And by the time
Speaker 1: he comes back up the hill after his dough and
Speaker 1: into the mesquite he's in shadow. We're in sun, and
Speaker 1: I can't see a damn thing. And so now Steve
Speaker 1: takes off his hat and starts holding it right above
Speaker 1: to shade the sun right above my scope. And now
Speaker 1: we're doing the dance of like left, a little bit left, right,
Speaker 1: right right. It's worse is that's everything is so bright,
Speaker 1: but he's in a dark, little tight hole behind layers gone.
Speaker 1: And I saw his dog going up the hill and
Speaker 1: I'm like, he's gonna come after that dope, But it
Speaker 1: was just like pitch black and one. So at this
Speaker 1: point you can't even range it. So we had ranged
Speaker 1: close to where he was, about three fifty and so
Speaker 1: that's the guests. But you can't range it because you
Speaker 1: can't get your binos focused on the deer for the sunlight.
Speaker 1: And just like, oh, he's dear, you're you're on a clock.
Speaker 1: He's gonna disappear. Eventually, He's not come back out, and
Speaker 1: so I get set up, I find him and we
Speaker 1: sit there for what feels like an hour, but it's
Speaker 1: probably ten minutes where he's standing behind a yucca completely
Speaker 1: in the shade, and me and Steve are doing the
Speaker 1: who that had to left move it to the right.
Speaker 1: Every time he moves. Every time I moved, that son
Speaker 1: sneaks under his hat brim and into my scope. But
Speaker 1: I can't see anything. Eventually I get lined up on
Speaker 1: this deer and he needs to take one step. Well,
Speaker 1: he sees us now because we're over they're rolling around
Speaker 1: like idiots, and he sees us, and he's not going
Speaker 1: to take that step unless he's sure. Well, ten minutes
Speaker 1: goes by, Dirt's got him in the buyers. I got
Speaker 1: him in the scope. Steve's trying to my legs asleep.
Speaker 1: I'm sure parts of you, you know, your leg or
Speaker 1: something's asleep. And he takes one step, and now I
Speaker 1: have this shadow of this deer and my right on him.
Speaker 1: I start pulling. I let it fly, and as soon
Speaker 1: as I let it fly, whiteness in the scope. The
Speaker 1: sun hits back on the scope and I can't see anything.
Speaker 1: And now I look, I get off the scope, I
Speaker 1: look back. I can't see anything. Dirt says, looks like
Speaker 1: it hit under him, and he wheeled around and ran
Speaker 1: up the hill, tail up as healthy as he wasn't
Speaker 1: a minute as healthy as he was a minute ago.
Speaker 1: Elca Dante ran off into the sunset, and uh, we
Speaker 1: were just at that point. I was sure I made
Speaker 1: a good shot, but I was I was pretty sure.
Speaker 1: It was a difficult situation, Like there wasn't any distance,
Speaker 1: was a distance questionable, it was questionable, the you know,
Speaker 1: my field of view was questionable. It was all just
Speaker 1: kind of not the best situation. And you get like
Speaker 1: it happens to me, You get where because you think
Speaker 1: it's a big one. You right, Yes, if you were
Speaker 1: all trying to feel a doughteg, you'd be like, it's like,
Speaker 1: it's take that shot. Let's just go find out. And
Speaker 1: I previously taking the more ethical rout of like, oh
Speaker 1: he's you know, and to me, it's being broadside is
Speaker 1: more important than than you know, those other factors. And
Speaker 1: so at that point, I feel like, well, i've i've
Speaker 1: I was comfortable with my trigger, pool I didn't yank
Speaker 1: on the thing, I held perfect, I felt good about
Speaker 1: the shot. I felt ethical at the time when I
Speaker 1: pulled the trigger, like that, all the factors being what
Speaker 1: they were I got the best out of the best scenario. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, whatever I did it shoot under him or
Speaker 1: whatever it was, I would I would guess that he
Speaker 1: was three eighty five and I was holding for three
Speaker 1: fifty shot under it. But we gotta go check for blood.
Speaker 1: So we go down this ridge, up over the sunny
Speaker 1: ridge he was on, down to the bottom and up
Speaker 1: over the next ridge, and Steve's in front of me.
Speaker 1: I'm behind, and Garrett's behind me, and I'll Steve, I'll
Speaker 1: let you take it here because I want to hear here.
Speaker 1: We get up to where we think it is, and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden I see it dear's head and
Speaker 1: I think it was wounded and is now jumped up,
Speaker 1: and he's fifteen yards away, and that's all to get away.
Speaker 1: And I'm saying, shooting the net, shooting the net, shooting
Speaker 1: the net because I think it's him, And Ben is
Speaker 1: behind me. A little bit, throws up steep pitch, steep pitch,
Speaker 1: a lot of grass, throws up his rifle. Bouch just
Speaker 1: runs away like even healthier or not, like almost like
Speaker 1: it charged up by the fact that it's the most
Speaker 1: amazing display of athleticism into the next qu elliot, goold
Speaker 1: the levitated out of there, and but I but he's
Speaker 1: saying shoot him in the neck. And I look up
Speaker 1: and I see ears. I thought, like one of those
Speaker 1: things that there's nothing to lose because he's already you
Speaker 1: wounded him. Yeah, And so I took two steps forward
Speaker 1: and same, I'm thinking the same thing. I gotta get
Speaker 1: a bullet in this animal again and finish him off.
Speaker 1: So I kind of went to where I knew his
Speaker 1: ears were, which I went down to where I thought
Speaker 1: his neck wasn't shot basically into the grass, just to
Speaker 1: get one in it and it that didn't condam and
Speaker 1: then we scoured the area for hair and blood and
Speaker 1: it was gone. He was he was as healthy as
Speaker 1: we deturned that he was in fact exceedingly healthy, exceedingly healthy.
Speaker 1: And the walkout was was interesting because you kind of
Speaker 1: go through the motions that I missed it. There was
Speaker 1: a giant's world record buck and it was two hours
Speaker 1: without proper communication, yeah from our pickup. Yeah, and the
Speaker 1: plenty of time to think. We we had the two hour,
Speaker 1: three mile hike out in nasty country, which led to
Speaker 1: fast forward the next morning. I feel like I've had
Speaker 1: my chance at al Gagante, and you might move back
Speaker 1: to I want to go back to l Surprises because
Speaker 1: I want John to get a chance, because I after
Speaker 1: up my chance. So I'm thinking it's only fair to
Speaker 1: let someone else back into the into the honey hoole,
Speaker 1: because I gotta you know, there needs to be some
Speaker 1: sort of reset based on my failure to get done
Speaker 1: what should probably have been done in that in that case.
Speaker 1: So I just I think, in all fairness, I can't
Speaker 1: just hog this area or this buck because I had
Speaker 1: my shot at him. You gotta give somebody else a shot.
Speaker 1: That's kind of an interesting question though, because there's a
Speaker 1: they're all these like unspoken dynamics in a deer camp,
Speaker 1: you know, in terms of who shoots win and kind
Speaker 1: of courtesy. And that's why you flip chunks of down. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you have a donk flip. You've got a situation where
Speaker 1: you know, Yanni wants me to shoot and I don't wanna,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean both for and again, everything I
Speaker 1: think is motivated by good, very positive feelings. But it's
Speaker 1: it's interesting this code. I would never write the rule.
Speaker 1: I would never write a code down like that, But
Speaker 1: I would say it's a whatever I feel in the moment.
Speaker 1: You know, whatever I feel like is right based on
Speaker 1: that situation and that set of circumstances. But when you
Speaker 1: say the code exists even though I don't think it
Speaker 1: is written right, well, I think that when you hang
Speaker 1: out with if you're with them and you hang out
Speaker 1: with all the time, you just have established it. Like
Speaker 1: if you don't let's say you're with you to hang
Speaker 1: out all the time, you don't want to drive, you
Speaker 1: stick of driving to be like, dude, I'm not freaking
Speaker 1: drive not driving, and people be like, okay, cool, I'll
Speaker 1: drive every with people. You don't know. You can't come
Speaker 1: down the parking lot and be like, tell you one thing,
Speaker 1: I'm not driving. Yeah. There, you're gonna get marked as
Speaker 1: an a hole, right, So you gotta be like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, well I could drive even well I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, do you want well, I'm not dying to drive,
Speaker 1: but I mean if you really don't want, you know,
Speaker 1: if you don't want to drive, I suppose I mean
Speaker 1: I'll kill Gagante. Yeah. So's it just has a it's
Speaker 1: a matter of whether you've been around each other long enough.
Speaker 1: But I think it is important in those situations to
Speaker 1: talk about, Like I brought this up before, my brother
Speaker 1: carrying moose is hard. My brother when they when when
Speaker 1: Danny keep mentioned different brother, but my brother Dany when
Speaker 1: they go on the moose trips putting out of their boats,
Speaker 1: they like, right off the bat, let's agree, how far
Speaker 1: are we going to carry a bowl so that when
Speaker 1: we all split up, we know off that river corridor. Yeah,
Speaker 1: someone can't come back to camp and be like I
Speaker 1: was really tempted and shot one five miles off the
Speaker 1: river and lay that and everyone so that everyone now
Speaker 1: that he's spent all those days carrying the bull, they're like,
Speaker 1: what are we gonna make? Is it a mile? Is
Speaker 1: it two miles? And three miles? And when we make
Speaker 1: the rule, don't violate the rule exactly, don't come tell
Speaker 1: me you shot some bowl and now I'm going to
Speaker 1: devote my whole trip to carry in your bowl. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean that that. I mean that's and with moose,
Speaker 1: I mean you've got to may big thing you've got
Speaker 1: to do. But there's a I don't know, I guess
Speaker 1: I find it an interesting this sort of there's a graciousness, yes,
Speaker 1: because nobody here there's nobody here that this is a
Speaker 1: once It's a once in a lifetime in a way.
Speaker 1: But you also understand that that this is a this
Speaker 1: is a unique opportunity that we all get fairly frequently.
Speaker 1: You know, this is something that I know that that
Speaker 1: there's no there's no reason for me to have any
Speaker 1: inkling of selfishness in regards to the giant cues deer
Speaker 1: that I saw like that at first, it's not my
Speaker 1: right to have that because I because I don't have
Speaker 1: any history with it. I haven't earned anything in regards
Speaker 1: to that deer. Um there was a lot of luck
Speaker 1: based on the discovery of and me pulling the trigger.
Speaker 1: So I I feel like, as decorum states, give someone
Speaker 1: else a chance to have that same piece of luck,
Speaker 1: because you know, and I've I've probably harmed in my
Speaker 1: missing the deer, harmed his chance to have his chance
Speaker 1: to see it and shoot at And so he's going
Speaker 1: and probably handicapped by my failure at some level. And
Speaker 1: that's why I just go through those feelings. And when
Speaker 1: you're successful and somebody's hunting an area and then you
Speaker 1: jump back in and hunt it and shoot a deer
Speaker 1: that they never saw, I there's some guilt there, right,
Speaker 1: because you didn't work as hard to pick a part
Speaker 1: in area and discovery had any discovery. Yeah, there's like
Speaker 1: the same plain simple rule of like if mom was happy, happy,
Speaker 1: everybody's happy. And I always kind of feel like, I
Speaker 1: know how I'll come out at the end of the
Speaker 1: hunt if I don't have a deer, like yeah, but
Speaker 1: if like someone else doesn't have a deer, I'm like,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have like the sympathy for that, and that
Speaker 1: almost would rather not have that and just be like
Speaker 1: I didn't get a deer bummer everybody else did, though,
Speaker 1: Sweet let's go home. That's a perfect, you know, transition
Speaker 1: to the deer I did kill because this is what
Speaker 1: Two days later, now we'd go try to get else surprised. Oh,
Speaker 1: and then the last day, which is yesterday, we decide
Speaker 1: we're gonna full core press the southwest corner. John gets
Speaker 1: the centry John gets a centry buck. We put the
Speaker 1: moves on a new brand new buck. Yeah, we'll call
Speaker 1: him brand new. We haven't named him yet, branded the
Speaker 1: previously unknown briefly unknown bucks. We go up on it.
Speaker 1: Steve and I go up on a tit and sit
Speaker 1: all day in the sun and the shade and have
Speaker 1: that experience of it just met. Your eyes are bleeding.
Speaker 1: You've looked over this country a million times. You can't
Speaker 1: look behind another damn bush and see another damn single
Speaker 1: dough walking around with a fawn. H You just don't
Speaker 1: want to see it anymore. You want to see the
Speaker 1: thing you're after. Like and and I was getting a
Speaker 1: little bit just kind of groggy and frustrated and tired
Speaker 1: of sitting under a damn bush and couch it. And uh,
Speaker 1: we finally see We sat there all day on the
Speaker 1: same knob from eight, from about seven thirty eight to
Speaker 1: what time was it three? So when Steve spots this
Speaker 1: unknown buck around the same knob as we hunted the
Speaker 1: first hunted, the crowd club buck, we we start getting
Speaker 1: after him and I'm with his nose up the keys
Speaker 1: throws a four doors four does I'm in John's situation,
Speaker 1: I mean fully in kill mode. We're gonna get across
Speaker 1: this ridgeon kill this deer, and it has to happen
Speaker 1: now or it's not gonna happen. So there's like a
Speaker 1: the the intensity is up, and we we pack up
Speaker 1: and we start going down this hill we're going, and
Speaker 1: we're we're doing the old baby deer walk on the
Speaker 1: freaking lava rocks, you know, twisting your angles and turning
Speaker 1: your knees and just trying to putting your hand on
Speaker 1: a bush or down here, and trying to get down
Speaker 1: this hill. I'm in the lead, and we're going down
Speaker 1: this slope towards the river bottom, and i've my right
Speaker 1: foot slips out, my left foot goes in the air,
Speaker 1: and my left hand goes back to brace my fall,
Speaker 1: as we all probably did three or four dozen times
Speaker 1: during the hunt. My left hand goes straight back down
Speaker 1: and into what do they call it a chola cactus,
Speaker 1: just child a choya cactus, which sports many hundreds of
Speaker 1: sharp ass pointy thorns. And I gotta say, I looked
Speaker 1: down at my hand, and it's not yet bleeding, but
Speaker 1: I can see that there's probably a hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: or as many as you could fit on one guy's
Speaker 1: hand thorns sticking out of my hand. And my first
Speaker 1: thought is this is gonna hurt real bad in a second.
Speaker 1: But it doesn't hurt right now. My first thought is
Speaker 1: what time is it. That's by the time you get
Speaker 1: all those thorns out, it'll be dark. Yeah, So my
Speaker 1: first thought is A hundred and fifty is a lot.
Speaker 1: What time is it? Because how quickly can I get
Speaker 1: these things out of my damn hand? One of them
Speaker 1: is like almost all the way through my finger. The
Speaker 1: other one is stuck in my wrist and like a
Speaker 1: vein if you pull on it, and like one of
Speaker 1: my eyelashes move like there's some ship going on in
Speaker 1: my hand. But my thought, my first initial thought was
Speaker 1: how much time is there left? Because this is this
Speaker 1: is an impediment to me getting the old this new
Speaker 1: bucket shown up. So Steve starts trying to pull these out,
Speaker 1: and as he starts to pull him out, he gets
Speaker 1: him in his in his hand, and now I'm trying
Speaker 1: to pull him out, and as I pull him out
Speaker 1: of my left hand, they're getting stuck in my right hand.
Speaker 1: And so eventually it just has to I just start
Speaker 1: yanking these things out and I get him mostly, if
Speaker 1: not all, out of my hand. Now there's blood everywhere,
Speaker 1: and uh, Steve even took time to call us on
Speaker 1: the radio to be like Ben fell into a gag
Speaker 1: and he's got blood everywhere. It's not looking good and
Speaker 1: he's saying to me, like that's gonna hurt later, Like
Speaker 1: you're fucked man, that that kind of deal. And uh,
Speaker 1: And I was feeling like the ones at my wrist
Speaker 1: when I pulled on him. I'm telling you, like my
Speaker 1: pinky nail just twitched. They were they was attached some
Speaker 1: nerve or something. So anyway, I finally get all these
Speaker 1: things out. I remember there's one big bird and like
Speaker 1: under my pinky that I just had to close my
Speaker 1: eyes and do one of those like ripping the shark
Speaker 1: tooth out of your thigh. I mean, after you got
Speaker 1: bit rip that thing out and stood up and like,
Speaker 1: let's go. I guess we gotta go. It sucks. So
Speaker 1: we get down the hill and up the other side,
Speaker 1: and we're up on this road and about three yards
Speaker 1: and where we know this buck to be, and we start.
Speaker 1: We I immediately look over to Steve and you'd feel
Speaker 1: the wind in the exact wrong direction it needs to
Speaker 1: be for us to kill something. So we get around
Speaker 1: close to where we might be able to see these deer,
Speaker 1: and of course there's what five or six does, and
Speaker 1: a small bucket between us and in the country that
Speaker 1: way more deer and we thought way more dear. The
Speaker 1: wind is wrong. There's way more dear than we thought.
Speaker 1: It kind of seems like my hand is thriving. It
Speaker 1: seems like there's like that the hunt is kind of
Speaker 1: gasping for air, like this is it's over. We're just
Speaker 1: kind of playing around at this. We're not gonna get
Speaker 1: this in real We're not gonna actually hunt this deer.
Speaker 1: And I'm thinking it's over, but we're still gonna go
Speaker 1: through the motions and go try to find this thing.
Speaker 1: We get going up this ridge where we know the
Speaker 1: deers on. We spook a few more doughes and fawns,
Speaker 1: look around, there's no deer. Like I think you probably
Speaker 1: knew Steve that that thing's gone thirty minutes before we
Speaker 1: because of the smell, because of the number of deer
Speaker 1: failing through where they went. So we get up to
Speaker 1: the top of the ridge where to look around to
Speaker 1: see maybe if he's still hanging around chasing does and
Speaker 1: he's not there. So I kind of sit down and
Speaker 1: what Yanni said came to my mind, like everybody else
Speaker 1: got deer and I didn't. That's awesome, Like if it's
Speaker 1: if somebody wasn't gonna dear, I'm glad it's me and
Speaker 1: I don't have to, you know, feel bad for anybody
Speaker 1: else working their ass off and nothing. At least I
Speaker 1: got mine, and thinking that, don't flip, you're one, don't
Speaker 1: flip away from sitting on that sun. So I'm sundown
Speaker 1: and on a Mexican mountain like watching this sun go down,
Speaker 1: Like what a beautiful sun down. This is fantastic. I
Speaker 1: didn't get a deer, but what wonderful experiences I've had
Speaker 1: here with my friends and getting all, you know, if
Speaker 1: I had a journalize the road in it. And then
Speaker 1: I hear Steve, hey, hey, hey, come here. I go
Speaker 1: up the hill to where he is, and he's like,
Speaker 1: they got a buck spot at Yon. He's gonna come
Speaker 1: down to meet us if we get if we're we
Speaker 1: go really quick, we can get him. I'm like, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: right right right. If we go quick, we'll just run
Speaker 1: down the Lava Rock mountain. I'll fall in another cactus
Speaker 1: and I'll die for this deer. But anyway we get
Speaker 1: going down the hill, we're gonna do it right. We're
Speaker 1: going through those motions because you have to um even
Speaker 1: if you think gets over. So we started getting down
Speaker 1: this one, ravine up the other one getting the same
Speaker 1: RIGGIANI was glassing from. He comes down the hill. He
Speaker 1: comes striding down the hill, looking confident as ever. And
Speaker 1: I immediately look at him and like, okay, I think
Speaker 1: he's got some confidence in that there's a plan to
Speaker 1: maybe make something happen. Yeah, we were, we were what
Speaker 1: six hundred sixty ish yards away? Right, Garrett spotted two dolls,
Speaker 1: and ten minutes later I went back to glass these doughs,
Speaker 1: and one's running, you know, across the hillside. Yeah, you go,
Speaker 1: I wonder what's that, what that's all about? And sure
Speaker 1: enough buck, Yeah, And at this point it's what it's
Speaker 1: last shooting late, it's five thirty, maybe it's five oh five.
Speaker 1: That's something in that range. Definitely passed on up. And
Speaker 1: I've given them mentally, I've kind of given I already
Speaker 1: had that sundown moment. So I'm like, this is just
Speaker 1: you know, a little extra overtime or whatever, fun nightcap.
Speaker 1: It's a little nightcap. Yeah. Well, actually we'll just John
Speaker 1: over here and now I'll scarce more deer and then
Speaker 1: we'll go back to America. And so we get going
Speaker 1: over there, and I could just see in Yanni's like determined.
Speaker 1: And that's another thing, Like you start hunt with a
Speaker 1: group of people and you know that they're determined for
Speaker 1: for there, everyone to get a buck and everybody to
Speaker 1: have success, and like that determinations like okay, well yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe this can happen. It's happened to me before.
Speaker 1: So we start getting over there. We get over to
Speaker 1: the to the area where the buck is. Yanni gets
Speaker 1: pointed in the right direction. We get over It's just
Speaker 1: a small ridge that's kind of covered in some cedars
Speaker 1: where we were kind of in some mesquites where we
Speaker 1: were kind of covered a little bit. We we I
Speaker 1: lay my pack down, he lays his back down. I
Speaker 1: put the rifle pointed to where Yanni thinks the buck
Speaker 1: might be. Well, at this point, it's like dark looking
Speaker 1: through the scope. You can see shadowy figures that look
Speaker 1: like deer and trees, and but there's enough light in
Speaker 1: the scope to make a shot ethically. And every minute
Speaker 1: that's getting you know, working on a ticking clock, just
Speaker 1: like you're talking about that dial, it's already clicked over
Speaker 1: to the dusk. I mean it's clicked and we're looking
Speaker 1: at this dough and Yanni's sports spots this dough at
Speaker 1: two and twenty yards, and we're waiting for the buck
Speaker 1: to kind of run up behind the dough, right, Joannie, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we're just I mean, at least we had
Speaker 1: eyes on a beer. Yeah, we're, you know, hoping that
Speaker 1: the box around there somewhere, and he's gonna show himself
Speaker 1: before it's you know, pitch black. I looked to the
Speaker 1: left of where this deer is this. That deer runs
Speaker 1: off the ridge we're looking at. I look to the left.
Speaker 1: As it runs, I see another dough coming up the
Speaker 1: same ridge to our left at about two yards, and
Speaker 1: I go to get back on my gun, just thinking
Speaker 1: maybe this buck is behind. And as I'm getting in
Speaker 1: the scope, Yanni goes there he is. He's right there,
Speaker 1: He's right there's right there. He's following her. He's going
Speaker 1: the same pass he was nose down just getting After
Speaker 1: I get on the scope, I find him. There's that
Speaker 1: tall yellow grass is she's kind of shrouding my scope.
Speaker 1: I can still see line, but I've got this yellow
Speaker 1: haze between me and this deer. I get him in
Speaker 1: the scope and I'm following him, and Yanni starts making
Speaker 1: that noise. What does that sound like? That one? I
Speaker 1: started with it, man, and then it was like and
Speaker 1: they're like, he eventually stops once, but he didn't stop
Speaker 1: forms but a split sat I think he heard hey,
Speaker 1: and he's like, really, are you yelling at me? Trying
Speaker 1: to I'm trying to chase this still around, so I'm
Speaker 1: one a at this one. I'm tracking him. I'm moving
Speaker 1: around the grass. I can't. I don't have the best
Speaker 1: view of this deer. Yanni gives him another Hey. He
Speaker 1: turns around. He's courting severely. Way I put the cross
Speaker 1: airs on him. I feel good. Boom, pull the trigger again,
Speaker 1: lose everything and it's over. You know. I got a
Speaker 1: shot off. And then immediately after I pulled the trigger,
Speaker 1: I thought, Wow, I got a shot off at a
Speaker 1: deer and I feel good about it. Holy wow. That
Speaker 1: in and of itself is yeah, only two yards, so
Speaker 1: one't too far away, you know, And it was it was,
Speaker 1: you know, a good shot. He was, you know, quartering away,
Speaker 1: completely standing still. I had, you know, a good field
Speaker 1: of view with the deer, and uh, honestly, I think
Speaker 1: I heard it hit. He spun and went downhill. And
Speaker 1: those are all things you want to hear when you
Speaker 1: shoot at something. So we went over and looked, and
Speaker 1: we get him over the hill, and I'm thinking, if
Speaker 1: I missed this deer, that only adds to the pain
Speaker 1: of the fact that El Gagante is running around here somewhere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I got a hundred fifty cacti and that thing's throbbing,
Speaker 1: and I'm still I looked down in my hand every
Speaker 1: once in a while with the head lamp, and I
Speaker 1: could see that there's more thorns in there that I
Speaker 1: haven't pulled out. So I got some more work to do.
Speaker 1: We get over there and that and that deer's laying
Speaker 1: ten yards from where I shot at him, twenty yards
Speaker 1: and he's dead. And it took me probably till we
Speaker 1: got back to the ranger we packed him out, and
Speaker 1: getting him out and packed him out to be like, wow,
Speaker 1: that happened. Like from the sundowning ridge to the dead
Speaker 1: deer was about twenty minutes, maybe five minutes, and then
Speaker 1: another hour and half to the range. And those two hours,
Speaker 1: the entire structure of the hunt and what you think
Speaker 1: about it changed. And that's that's why it's awesome. That's
Speaker 1: why Honey is great, because that can happen, and it did.
Speaker 1: Potentially nameless buck or we saw about Yanny and I
Speaker 1: saw a buck the day before down in that zone.
Speaker 1: We were hunting him. I mean we were in there
Speaker 1: glassing up trying to find that buck. Normal we called
Speaker 1: a normal buck because he was a nice just a nice,
Speaker 1: normal looking eight Michigan Michigan eight. So that's the story.
Speaker 1: And that was, um, I think for all of us,
Speaker 1: Like we were all involved in that one. We weren't
Speaker 1: all involved in Steve's, we weren't all involved in Yanni's
Speaker 1: or John's, but we were all involved in some way
Speaker 1: in mine. So that's a pretty good way to Yeah.
Speaker 1: And and then sixteen or so hours later, I was
Speaker 1: singing that Neil Diamond song They Come and to America,
Speaker 1: And as we went through customs, and I was thinking,
Speaker 1: I'm free, and I was singing, and I like, like,
Speaker 1: I like the Petty I like the Petty tribute because
Speaker 1: we just lost Tom Petty, great American. Um. But I
Speaker 1: definitely get like, why free falling free? Because I didn't
Speaker 1: hadn't thought it through. Yeah, you're just like creasing the border.
Speaker 1: And I went on free and he started switched. I
Speaker 1: switched to Lee Greenwood was proud to be an American.
Speaker 1: But it felt a little heavy handed, a little bit much.
Speaker 1: It wasn't like, I mean, we've been down hunting, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, it wasn't that we're coming back from warfare
Speaker 1: something we've been down like enjoying ourselves. So I stuck
Speaker 1: with um Neil Diamond. But I thought I thought the
Speaker 1: free Falling was a good tribute to Ben's experience. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that was well. And I was sitting beside Yanni when
Speaker 1: he when he let out free falling, and he was
Speaker 1: very confident. He was like, and I'm free and after
Speaker 1: he said freeze, like crap, the next word is falling
Speaker 1: and that's not what I was going on. Um Cha
Speaker 1: ended it up with some customs guys who are fun
Speaker 1: to deal with, and then uh fans, Yeah, there we are.
Speaker 1: I had a dirt missong stuck in my head. I said,
Speaker 1: that is the man? Or is he? Dude? I that
Speaker 1: perpetually I had that song stuck in my head being
Speaker 1: the guy that wrote it. Uh. One last quick slot NiFi.
Speaker 1: You know, NiFi is not in the room. I'm I'm
Speaker 1: addressing NiFi out there in the in the lands. You know,
Speaker 1: that that's not true. I said I don't like any
Speaker 1: politicians because I was being hyperbolic, um, and I was
Speaker 1: talking smack like it's an American thing to talk smack
Speaker 1: about not liking any politicians. I like quite a few
Speaker 1: of them, including you know who I'm talking about. I
Speaker 1: love that man, um, so don't get prickly. Thanks for listening.