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Speaker 1: All right, thanks for joining the Meat Eater Podcast. We're
Speaker 1: recording in a very teeny sounding hotel room and Bethel, Alaska.
Speaker 1: Bethel Alaska is in western Alaska. Specifically, it's where the
Speaker 1: Costa Quim River flows out into the Bearing Sea. Just
Speaker 1: north of here, you've got the Yukon River flowing out
Speaker 1: into the Bearing Sea, and so the delta that these
Speaker 1: two things form. People say it's the Yukon Cuska Quim
Speaker 1: Delta or y K delta. It's way bigger than the
Speaker 1: delta made by the Mississippi flowing to the Gulf of Mexico.
Speaker 1: It's actually, um, the y K delta is bigger than
Speaker 1: the state of Louisiana. It's a huge tundra delta. And
Speaker 1: this area is predominantly Um. There's six thousand people in Bethels,
Speaker 1: predominantly Native Alaska. Uh Yupik Eskimo. We're coming from an island,
Speaker 1: Nu Nevak Island, which is forty miles out into the
Speaker 1: Bering Sea Islands, about forty miles by sixty miles approximately,
Speaker 1: and that's Chupic Eskimo out there. UM. And the only
Speaker 1: chupas like Chupas just live on New Nevak. There's two
Speaker 1: hundred people on New Nevak Island in a town called
Speaker 1: McCory Uck, and that's where we're coming from. We're just
Speaker 1: out there hunting muskox. But speaking of how big the
Speaker 1: y K delta is, Um, we're here with Mike washed Leski.
Speaker 1: You've never done one of these Mica. We kind we
Speaker 1: kind of try to do on an anchors, but I
Speaker 1: didn't have a hot Mica, Mike's done him. But Mike
Speaker 1: has done him. But as Mike was on so kind
Speaker 1: of no, and we were asking Mike, Mike's from Texas,
Speaker 1: and this morning we were asking Mike if why is
Speaker 1: Texas so into the thing about how their states so big?
Speaker 1: But it's not the biggest state. It's like Texas fits
Speaker 1: inside of Alaska, but Texans are. It's a big thing.
Speaker 1: It's like no other second place thing acts like it's
Speaker 1: the first place thing. I think it's because it was
Speaker 1: its own country, so that's the claim to fame. I
Speaker 1: guess a certain degree. It's the biggest in the lower
Speaker 1: forty eight. I guess you could just say that, yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's it's probably carrying over from when before, from
Speaker 1: before Alaska became a state and then it was Okay,
Speaker 1: what's the sports team that used to be good? Now
Speaker 1: they suck? Well. It's like like the Packers. The Packers
Speaker 1: ever used to win that they always win the Super
Speaker 1: Bowls in the old days. I feel like they did.
Speaker 1: They've been great. Okay, so people the Packers don't run
Speaker 1: around and being like, yeah, number one champion, right, It's
Speaker 1: like you used to be you're not now now you're
Speaker 1: just like a team. Yeah texts. You guys are just
Speaker 1: like a state. Texas has a lot of pride. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean people get tattooed. I mean how many tattoos
Speaker 1: you see have, Like you know, Massachusetts on somebody's shoulder.
Speaker 1: Well here that you tattooed nine oh seven on your arm.
Speaker 1: That the areas a single area code state like Wyoming.
Speaker 1: So what happens whenever there's another area code and you
Speaker 1: happen to have that tattoo, you do slash, then you're
Speaker 1: you're the next the next three time. It's like a
Speaker 1: remember also so so Mike's a camera operator and still
Speaker 1: photographer um and works with us on the show Media.
Speaker 1: We're actually coming from filming an episode of Media and
Speaker 1: we're also joined by Honest But tell us who who
Speaker 1: you know is always hanging around? It's always kind of
Speaker 1: murmuring in the background there. And then Corey, how do
Speaker 1: you say your last name? Catch mark or catch mark
Speaker 1: or kasmeric? Which do you like? Depending on the day.
Speaker 1: It's like, if you want to tell someone how it sounds,
Speaker 1: it's kasmeric if you look at it. Yeah, Corey comes
Speaker 1: from a big state, sixty six miles wide, Montana, and um,
Speaker 1: what's super interesting about Corey. Tell them what you used
Speaker 1: to do before you start being a cameraman. I'll tell
Speaker 1: him Corey was the dude. Corey is one of the
Speaker 1: dude is it jumps out of the helicopter with the
Speaker 1: snowboard and goes down a big, huge mountain that looks
Speaker 1: like you're gonna die. Talk about that just for a
Speaker 1: quick second. I've been snowboarding like twenty five years, and uh,
Speaker 1: I think my favorite kind of snowboarding is big mountain
Speaker 1: snow waring. So I used to compare bing mountain, big mountain, big.
Speaker 1: Sorry I got a little bit of a cold, but
Speaker 1: uh yeah, I was competed at a professional level, traveled
Speaker 1: around big mountain snow waring. I one time asked Corey,
Speaker 1: we're hunting, and I asked Corey if there's ever been
Speaker 1: a mountain the other dudes would go down on their
Speaker 1: snowboard and he wouldn't go down. And at the time
Speaker 1: he said, no, You've never seen a dude go down
Speaker 1: a hill. And then you said, there's no way I'm
Speaker 1: going down that hill. I could go down the hill.
Speaker 1: There might be routes where right now in my age,
Speaker 1: I'm only thirty nine, But that's old for a snowboarder
Speaker 1: to be jumping off fifty sixty ft cliffs. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: K two or I don't know what. Everest would be
Speaker 1: one that I would question, but it was at low elevation.
Speaker 1: I could probably make it down. Okay. You know it's
Speaker 1: the elevation that will get you on those mountains. What
Speaker 1: do you mean, I mean just the air, the air. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you could just be snowboarding and just pass out, you know,
Speaker 1: is that right? Oh? Yeah? Hey, what what is it?
Speaker 1: What's the death zone twenty? What is it? I think? So?
Speaker 1: Do you snowboard downhills where I don't want? I do
Speaker 1: want to talk about snowboard for a minute. Um, do
Speaker 1: you snowboard down hills or if you fell you would die? Yes? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I do that a lot. So you have to keep
Speaker 1: up right, Yeah, you don't want to fall or usually
Speaker 1: it's you're exposed. So if it's steep enough where you
Speaker 1: can like fall and you start getting momentum, it's the
Speaker 1: rag dolling effecting when you're going to pass over heels
Speaker 1: all the way down the mountain, you know, and then
Speaker 1: that's when you will probably die, have trauma or go
Speaker 1: over a cliff for you know, so you don't want
Speaker 1: to smack into a tree or trees. Did that happen
Speaker 1: a lot? I mean, do you see that like when
Speaker 1: it happens all time? Well, I mean like during a competition. Oh,
Speaker 1: during competitions, he can't get to the bottom hill for
Speaker 1: all the carcasses land everywhere. There are deaths. There are
Speaker 1: some deaths in that competitive scene. You know, it's just unfortunate.
Speaker 1: But you are a risk. You know, it's a time
Speaker 1: of day. Wake up, it's competition day. Or at the top,
Speaker 1: and you're gonna push your limits. And some people try
Speaker 1: to go a little past their limits, or some people
Speaker 1: just mess up off takeoffs and maybe landing and then
Speaker 1: an oncoming rock or cliff because you're missing you're looking
Speaker 1: at it from the bottom with your binoculars, this mountain face,
Speaker 1: and then you have to go up top and kind
Speaker 1: of turn that whole you know vision in your head
Speaker 1: because you're gonna go down the mountain now, so you're
Speaker 1: flipping the image and you have to remember like this rock,
Speaker 1: this tree, this four ft tree, you know, three ft
Speaker 1: to the left. I'm gonna take off there and it's
Speaker 1: gonna be a two ft wide landing and then I
Speaker 1: gotta take a hard left here because this is a
Speaker 1: you know, there's other trees or another forty ft cliff,
Speaker 1: so you gotta like it's a little puzzy putting to
Speaker 1: your head, and then you know you're at the finish
Speaker 1: line hopefully. And how fast you're going, I mean it's
Speaker 1: depending on your route route finding. Are you judged on speed?
Speaker 1: It's not really speed. You know. The judging criteria was
Speaker 1: line choice, which the line you pick going down the mountain,
Speaker 1: control your fluidity or aggressiveness, and um style. It sounds
Speaker 1: like a lot of like pretty arbitrary stuff. It's like
Speaker 1: figure scanning. Yeah you know that, but what speed would
Speaker 1: you hit? Oh, you can hit easy, you know, you
Speaker 1: points point to shoot for a long period of time.
Speaker 1: You can be going fifty easily. So do you do?
Speaker 1: You go on these mountains like side unseen, like you're like,
Speaker 1: here's your mountain, figure out the map and then you've
Speaker 1: never actually done the rap up. Yeah. True, that's at
Speaker 1: the high level. The low level, they'll let you go
Speaker 1: onto the face, ski around, look off things. You know.
Speaker 1: It's called an inspection day. You get one run through
Speaker 1: and you get the find your route and that you know,
Speaker 1: it's pretty explosive skiing when you have when you can
Speaker 1: go see where you're going. So these guys are just
Speaker 1: flying on the mountain, but when you have a there's
Speaker 1: actually a contest the World Tours in Handes, Alaska this week,
Speaker 1: and would you normally be at that right now? I
Speaker 1: followed that tour. I used to snowboard on that tour
Speaker 1: for two years and I've worked at probably like four
Speaker 1: years worked as a camera. So yeah, you just it's
Speaker 1: just the adrenaline thing. It's like hunting, like probably sheep
Speaker 1: or something. I would say I hunt, but on that
Speaker 1: like these guys, you know, not like Steve, those who
Speaker 1: are listening, but you know, you get that scene adrenaline rush,
Speaker 1: probably chasing sheep, walking these cliff edges, trying to find
Speaker 1: the sheet probably and you don't want to fall here
Speaker 1: with your big pack on. If you do, you're gonna
Speaker 1: get messed up a way in the back country. And
Speaker 1: it kind of brings me and Mike peeked over a
Speaker 1: couple of edges. I wasn't about snowboard down. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: was just like Steve, you can go ahead up over
Speaker 1: that edge. I'm just not cool right here. So uh,
Speaker 1: let's go way way back. I'm gonna go way back
Speaker 1: in time from it here. During like the place the
Speaker 1: scene epic, you had musk cocks all the way likes
Speaker 1: there's a term circumpolar, like muscles like the blue muscle
Speaker 1: eat when you get muscles in the restaurant, the blue
Speaker 1: muscles circumpolar. There's a band of latitudes around the globe
Speaker 1: that that muscle exists at. Okay um. Way back during
Speaker 1: the place the scene, European stone ages, you know where
Speaker 1: you've got humans spread around but still a long time ago,
Speaker 1: muskoks were circumpolar. They were like all through the Arctic,
Speaker 1: but way down man like, there's cave paintings of muskox
Speaker 1: down in France, so chro magnet people Stone age Europeans
Speaker 1: were hunting from muskoks. If it's any indication that they
Speaker 1: used to paint the stuff they haunted on cave walls
Speaker 1: from thirty thousand, thirty five thousand years ago, you had
Speaker 1: muskoks way down there. Um. Interestingly, by the time anyone,
Speaker 1: due to under our current understanding, by the time any
Speaker 1: human being step foot in the Western hemisphere. In this
Speaker 1: step foot in North America. Muskox only existed in North America.
Speaker 1: It seems by that point in time, um when the
Speaker 1: Russians first started dick and around in the Arctic, and
Speaker 1: you know, some American Americans are coming up, not quite
Speaker 1: Americans yet, but we're coming up into the Arctic. They're
Speaker 1: running the musk ox all through Alaska, the Canadian High
Speaker 1: Arctic into Greenland like everywhere. But they whittled away at
Speaker 1: him and whittled away at him, and they by about
Speaker 1: eighteen twenty muskox were gone from Alaska extra paated. Uh,
Speaker 1: you'll offer if you read about what happened all the
Speaker 1: muskox and like, let me let me back up one
Speaker 1: quick second. A musk ox is a big wooly animal
Speaker 1: with like a horn boss whereas horns dropped down and
Speaker 1: sort of gold on the side of his head and
Speaker 1: curl out, Like what's that haircut? We're saying, I can't
Speaker 1: because at a Betty Page. Yeah. No, it's like little
Speaker 1: Debbie on a little Debbie snap cake. Yeah. If you
Speaker 1: ever eating a little Debbie what what are some of
Speaker 1: those little devvie deals? Remember those? Uh? Uh, she's a
Speaker 1: big sponsored big dan you're na dingdong um, it's like
Speaker 1: a muskox is horns like are sort of plastered over
Speaker 1: the top of his head and dropped straight down into
Speaker 1: candy cane hooks. They got real wooly coats. In fact,
Speaker 1: they produced a wold called kivot and it's supposed to
Speaker 1: be x times warmer than any other kind of wool
Speaker 1: on the planet. A big bowl might be six hundred
Speaker 1: pounds um. And they live in coastal Arctic regions. People
Speaker 1: you'll read different things. You read like, oh, the Russian
Speaker 1: fur traders wiped out the musk Ox, and then some
Speaker 1: people will point out that the Russian fur traders didn't
Speaker 1: actually wipe out the Muskoks. Natives wiped out the Muskox
Speaker 1: operating on behalf of Russian fur traders who wanted to
Speaker 1: meet in the hides. So whatever it was, Russians came
Speaker 1: in flashing big money around and people shot the Muskox out.
Speaker 1: Period Like when you hear about Arctic explorers, you hear
Speaker 1: about the guy named Peery. Some guys sat down and
Speaker 1: figured out how many Muskoks did Peries expeditions alone account for,
Speaker 1: and they feel like PERI killed six hundred Muskoks to
Speaker 1: feed his expeditions. The Arctic explorer Stephenson, he's always eating
Speaker 1: muskox um. We'll get into why it's easy to wipe
Speaker 1: out muskoks some how. You could probably wipe out muskox
Speaker 1: the second time if you felt like it, within about
Speaker 1: five months, five or six months if you felt like it.
Speaker 1: They're not difficult to find. But they wiped them out
Speaker 1: of a Laska by the mid eighteen hundreds. Then in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty, I'm just giving you some background here. In
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty, they brought thirty some muskoks from Greenland, one
Speaker 1: of the places where they hadn't been extrapated. So like
Speaker 1: the super remote Ship, muskox never got killed out of
Speaker 1: They never got killed out of Greenland. And I think
Speaker 1: like Banks Island, the Coronation goldf Area, the way Canadian
Speaker 1: hier Arctic stuff, they never got wiped out of soties.
Speaker 1: Someone was like, man, we should get some muskoks back.
Speaker 1: They went to Greenland, got some muskox and eventually put
Speaker 1: those muskaks out on New Nevak Island in the Bearing Sea,
Speaker 1: which is off western Alaska, and they dumped them out
Speaker 1: on Nunivak Island and they just let them start reproducing,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't much time at all. They had hundreds
Speaker 1: of the things. So at that point in time, like
Speaker 1: as late as nineteen the only muskox that existed in
Speaker 1: the US besides for a captive zoo specimen here and
Speaker 1: there were the pop was the population on Nanovac or
Speaker 1: nun Novak. They went out and caught some of those
Speaker 1: in the sixties to start an experimental herd in Fairbanks
Speaker 1: where they wanted to start messing around with this idea
Speaker 1: of using it as an agricultural product, where you'd raise
Speaker 1: muskox to get the wool kiveot and you'd have like
Speaker 1: economic development in rural areas. That seems to have kind
Speaker 1: of gone nowhere. As that heard on Nunivak expanded, they
Speaker 1: kept grew in numbers, they kept peeling off some to
Speaker 1: start all these herds. And now if you look at
Speaker 1: a map of Alaska where a musk ox live, they're
Speaker 1: kind of like back to everywhere they would have been.
Speaker 1: You got them on Seward Peninsula. The first muskox I've
Speaker 1: ever seen the first time, the first three times I
Speaker 1: ever ran into muskox was all hunting carried on the
Speaker 1: north slope they got muskots on the north slope around
Speaker 1: Prudeo Bay. They're around and that's kind of how they
Speaker 1: came to be. So hunting opportunities are extremely limited for muskox.
Speaker 1: The hunt I did the State of Alaska. The hunt
Speaker 1: just did. The State of Alaska calls like d X
Speaker 1: O O three. It's a hunt unit you apply for.
Speaker 1: It's a tag that's good from February one to March
Speaker 1: fifteen on now Nevak Island and it has I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's about a nine percent chance of drawn the tag.
Speaker 1: They're giving out fewer and fewer tags right now. The
Speaker 1: herds not doing great on now Nevak. I think this
Speaker 1: year they gave out twenty tags for the winter hunt
Speaker 1: and then I don't know, five or ten tags for
Speaker 1: the summer hunt. Um the spring hunt they calls the
Speaker 1: March hunt. And it's cold. So did you choose no
Speaker 1: Nevak specifically or their other draws in different areas of
Speaker 1: the this year, now Nevak is the only drawing nonresident
Speaker 1: can put in for. So like the way Alaska run hunts,
Speaker 1: Alaska has over the counter stuff, which is just over
Speaker 1: the counter stuff. Tag you're gonna buy you can buy
Speaker 1: the day you want to go hunting. They have registration
Speaker 1: hunts which are first come, first serve open to residents.
Speaker 1: Then they have like the Then they have like a
Speaker 1: Tier one draw which is a resident draw. Then they
Speaker 1: have just like the drawing hunts. And so if a
Speaker 1: non resident wants to put in for a musk ox tag.
Speaker 1: So if you don't live in Alaska and you want
Speaker 1: to hunt muskox right now, now Nevaks your only option.
Speaker 1: You can go up the Northwest Territories and is by
Speaker 1: permits from guides, but if you want to hunt here,
Speaker 1: that's it now Nevak Island. I was awarded one of
Speaker 1: the tags several years ago and wasn't able to go,
Speaker 1: and I never thought it would have had another chance.
Speaker 1: It's was not even fair that you can draw it
Speaker 1: and draw again, like a lot of stose not that way.
Speaker 1: If you draw a buffalo tag in Alaska, that's it
Speaker 1: for the rest of your life. If you draw a
Speaker 1: toke sheep tag, it's it for like four or seven years.
Speaker 1: I don't know why they let you keep cracking on muskox.
Speaker 1: It's not fair, but I did it, and I got
Speaker 1: a second tag and went back and we just got back. Um.
Speaker 1: It was interesting was that the locals on the island
Speaker 1: had to It was a first come, first first come,
Speaker 1: first served basis on the island. Even you know the
Speaker 1: two people there, I think, uh one are One of
Speaker 1: our guys was saying Raymond that he stood in line
Speaker 1: when he was the first one there and he was
Speaker 1: two days early, two days a good tag. So yeah,
Speaker 1: tags are always distribute, like generally, I shouldn't say always.
Speaker 1: Registration hunts are you go online and get the tag.
Speaker 1: It's like or you go something you have to go
Speaker 1: into the actual office and get a tag. So you
Speaker 1: might have a registration hunt where you gotta go to Bethel,
Speaker 1: Alaska to pick up your tag, right, and it really
Speaker 1: limits it two dudes in Bethel because people aren't generally
Speaker 1: gonna fly to Bethel to pick up a tag. The
Speaker 1: residents the Chupic on now Nevak Island every year get
Speaker 1: allocated some number of tags. This year, I think it
Speaker 1: was five cow tags, five bull tags. There's two people
Speaker 1: that live on the island. Um, it's not online, it's
Speaker 1: said a dude from Alaska Department and Fishing Game flies
Speaker 1: out there with the tags and hands the tags out
Speaker 1: to the first guy's waiting in line. So Rain was saying,
Speaker 1: the same people seem to get the tags every year.
Speaker 1: So he went and waited in line two days in
Speaker 1: a row this year, so that when the guy showed
Speaker 1: up he got a cow tag for a muskox. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he's out there right now. He's out there today.
Speaker 1: He's probably out butchering a muskox right now, and that's
Speaker 1: a subsistence hunt for him. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: muskox hunts in alas where it's a registration hunt and
Speaker 1: you have to destroy the head of the muskox. You
Speaker 1: have to saw the horns in half. They have those
Speaker 1: from moves too. You know, they don't want you doing
Speaker 1: the hunt. They don't want a trophy dude coming out
Speaker 1: to do the hunt, so they make it that. Sure,
Speaker 1: you can go get the registration thing and hunt the muskox,
Speaker 1: but you don't get to keep the head. You gotta
Speaker 1: destroy the head. I read an article about a guy
Speaker 1: who was involved in the game commission in Alaska who
Speaker 1: tried to pull a fast one, and he because you
Speaker 1: can buy handicrafts from indigenous people like you know, if
Speaker 1: people are trying to sell US seal hats. Right, you
Speaker 1: can't buy a seal skin from a native lad like
Speaker 1: you can't buy a seal skin from a chup, for instance,
Speaker 1: because of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. But if that
Speaker 1: individual takes that sealskin and make something out of it,
Speaker 1: you can buy it from him, Like you can buy
Speaker 1: carved ivory, but you can't buy raw ivory. So could
Speaker 1: they give you so say, this is a square seal towel.
Speaker 1: That's the thing. That's what I People wonder about that
Speaker 1: all the time, and like, I don't know, it's somewhere
Speaker 1: it's spelled out. But anyway, some guy had gone, so
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go do a registration muskox, hunt, kill my
Speaker 1: musk ox, give the head to a native woman, have
Speaker 1: her do a carving on it, and then buy it
Speaker 1: back from her. And they determined that that violated the
Speaker 1: spirit of that law. I'd be like, just a little
Speaker 1: teeny carving on the bottom would be fine. Write your
Speaker 1: name on the upper palette, the one that sits on
Speaker 1: the wall. So the first like the biggest thing that
Speaker 1: coming up, like coming up to go out and hunt?
Speaker 1: What else should we say? What else is important to
Speaker 1: established about musk cos it tastes good talking more about that, boss,
Speaker 1: you know. I read that the horns and then the
Speaker 1: skull beneath it to where the brain cavity star is
Speaker 1: eight to ten inches. Muskox bash heads one name. It's
Speaker 1: like sheep, dude, Like when big horns are bashing heads,
Speaker 1: it sounds like a twenty two rifle. In fact, I
Speaker 1: was out hunting one time and thought a guy kept
Speaker 1: shooting a gun and later realized there was two big
Speaker 1: horns cracking heads. I saw a big horn ram a
Speaker 1: tree one time. I counted he ran that tree seventy
Speaker 1: five times, like quickcounting are seventy five times in real
Speaker 1: a bighorn sheep can withstand forty times. The bighorn sheep
Speaker 1: can withstand the amount of power to his head forty
Speaker 1: times greater than what would fracture your skull. Why do
Speaker 1: you think he was in a trade for practice, just
Speaker 1: getting pumped up. I guess it's this time of year.
Speaker 1: It was September. They don't run till November. Like a
Speaker 1: football player. Just like banging his helmet. He was banging
Speaker 1: a ponder roles the pine and all those buddies must
Speaker 1: have did the same things is ponder rolls a pine
Speaker 1: look like someone had been hitting with a baseball bat
Speaker 1: for about three years. That was nuts, so they got what. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's called a horn boss where the horns are like
Speaker 1: on top of their head. It's like if a girl
Speaker 1: who's got thickle hair pulls, splits her hair down the
Speaker 1: center and makes a braid or like a pony a pigtail,
Speaker 1: and almost like almost like piggy tails would be like
Speaker 1: a hair boss. And the horn boss is just this
Speaker 1: amorphous blob of horn that sits up there and as
Speaker 1: the bull gets bigger, girls bigger and bigger, and that
Speaker 1: thing's polished off like someone took a palm stander to it.
Speaker 1: It looks kind of like an ass. It does not
Speaker 1: off anyone, I know. It's ass like in that it
Speaker 1: has a gluteal crease, has a crack um. Beautiful animals
Speaker 1: when you're when you're reading about muscos, because muscots like
Speaker 1: live in the Arctic, and the real wooly people eyes
Speaker 1: like an ice age relic. But all animals that we
Speaker 1: know about today, with the exception of perhaps the mule deer,
Speaker 1: are ice age relics. I never I think people say
Speaker 1: that because it's wooly. But like, why do people say
Speaker 1: human beings the ice age relics? Like we were live
Speaker 1: during the ice age, or you might say the field mouse.
Speaker 1: It's just it's because it still lives in a ice
Speaker 1: age like climate. Is that what they mean? You remember
Speaker 1: the lead up to the Iraq War, I was reading
Speaker 1: that Saddam Hussein had published several books of poetry and novels,
Speaker 1: and I would always say Saddam Hussein, the poet novelist.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like in conversation that say, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: Saddam was saying the poet novelists. His country is being invaded. Um,
Speaker 1: but yeah, like everything's like everything's the ice age relic.
Speaker 1: But that might be what they mean, that it's out
Speaker 1: on the tundra, which would mean you'd have to say, um,
Speaker 1: a vole, the ice age relic. He still lives on
Speaker 1: the tundra. You know. It's just looks like a throwback
Speaker 1: to like that's what it is. You think you're looking
Speaker 1: at a mammoth. That thing had hair on it, the
Speaker 1: one we butcher, the muskox we butchered had hair on it.
Speaker 1: It was over eighteen inches long, short of a horse's
Speaker 1: tail nothing his hair like that. It's very interesting to
Speaker 1: see him standing there and then actually moving running and
Speaker 1: it's almost like they had a skirt around him, and
Speaker 1: that hair almost seemed like it was close to the
Speaker 1: almost hits the ground almost. The writer Peter Matheson who
Speaker 1: wrote a book about like there's some natives called Muskox,
Speaker 1: not on, not the Tupic, but some natives called Muskox
Speaker 1: m mac. Peter Matheson wrote this book. It's sort of
Speaker 1: like a magazine article that turned into a book that
Speaker 1: he wrote, and he relates that wool, the way it sways.
Speaker 1: He talks about it reminds him of chain mail moving.
Speaker 1: And he also has a line where when they're in
Speaker 1: tall grass, the grass coming up from the ground and
Speaker 1: the wool coming down from the animal meat in a
Speaker 1: way that makes it hard to sort of distinguish where
Speaker 1: one ends and one begins. It's kind of like they're
Speaker 1: just gliding across the As the animal moves, they do
Speaker 1: seem to glide like they're on wheels, almost super wooly.
Speaker 1: And um, I remember, like when I was working on
Speaker 1: my Buffalo book, I remember reading it. They did this
Speaker 1: study where they took um different animals. They had a
Speaker 1: high a Scottish Highland cattle, Tibettan yak, and a buffalo
Speaker 1: and put them in context containers and started lowering the
Speaker 1: temperature to find out at which point the animals metabolic
Speaker 1: rate went up in response to the to the dropping
Speaker 1: temperature like a basically like when you started shivering and
Speaker 1: getting like not relaxed. And they had I think they
Speaker 1: had like an angus in there. He tapped out at
Speaker 1: like ten degrees um. The Scottish Highland cattle tapped out,
Speaker 1: the Tibetan yak tapped out the coldest they could get
Speaker 1: that context container was negative forty, and the buffalo was
Speaker 1: still relaxing. But I'm telling you a muskox smoked that thing.
Speaker 1: You can't. You can't find his body, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, When he's laying there dead. You can't. If
Speaker 1: you can't get your hand to where it's touching leather,
Speaker 1: like where you parted, Like if you're looking at your
Speaker 1: dog to find ticks, you can't do that with the muscox.
Speaker 1: You can't find him underneath there. It's really hard to
Speaker 1: tell what isn't there. You know, it's very thick, which
Speaker 1: you guess that we were just packing that we checked
Speaker 1: in the hide already at Alaska air And how's that hideway? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I threw it on the Yeah, the hide no hooves
Speaker 1: on it. So this is a hide cut from the ankle,
Speaker 1: skinned out and clean skinned. I mean not a scrap
Speaker 1: of fat or meat on that hide. That hideway pounds well,
Speaker 1: Hilayer scan too is super dance too, way thick fact
Speaker 1: fat leather the biggest thing I'll say this like as
Speaker 1: begin to this discussion, my muskuts, I just want to
Speaker 1: cut right to the main primary point and and and
Speaker 1: leading up to this hunt, not the primary point, but
Speaker 1: just something that this is gonna tea off a whole
Speaker 1: of the conversation leading up to this hunt. I was
Speaker 1: sorry to this dude who was saying, it's not really
Speaker 1: a hunt, it's like an experience. And when we're out,
Speaker 1: I had observed to someone how all animals have like
Speaker 1: a vulnerability um that we exploit when we hunt them.
Speaker 1: You know, deer are suckers for alfalfa and shelled corn
Speaker 1: right um. Turkeys when they're breeding, they're very vocal, uh
Speaker 1: right everything sure kind of find your weakness. And that's
Speaker 1: how ducks are gregarious. Ducks want to be around other ducks,
Speaker 1: so you play that against them. He makes sounds of
Speaker 1: sound like a duck. You put out some fake ducks.
Speaker 1: Duck can't help himself. He's gotta go check it out.
Speaker 1: You know. Generally the thing you exploit on the musk
Speaker 1: ox is they just got nowhere to go for one,
Speaker 1: and they'll bunch up when they're threatened. They'll they'll bunch
Speaker 1: up and stand around, and it's easy to see how
Speaker 1: dudes wipe them out. They got nowhere to go, you know,
Speaker 1: and they can't really put on miles very fat, like
Speaker 1: not that fat, not like most stuff can put on miles.
Speaker 1: So this guy was saying, the hunts more of the experience,
Speaker 1: and I can say that it is, and I would
Speaker 1: almost haven't done it now. I would almost say that
Speaker 1: it's not really a hunt. But what makes it like
Speaker 1: the hunting the animal? I wouldn't say it's really like
Speaker 1: a hard hunt. What makes it what it is is
Speaker 1: the conditions you're dealing with and the getting to the
Speaker 1: place you're going to and being in the place you're
Speaker 1: going to. It's tough, Like how would you guys sort
Speaker 1: of describe the cold and wind it's full tundra, negative
Speaker 1: below with that wind. The win chill what was it
Speaker 1: called we saw I think negative it was negative ten,
Speaker 1: no win chill. Yeah, that's just that was just air
Speaker 1: temperature with the winds with Yeah, yesterday it was I
Speaker 1: mean there was guys like the thirty and so I
Speaker 1: just I mean, I think who knows what the win
Speaker 1: shill was, probably negative. I mean it was cold. You're
Speaker 1: in the middle of the Baring Sea, so the humidity
Speaker 1: level is way high. It's like the comparing Michigan ten
Speaker 1: degrees to Montana ten degrees. That Michigan ten degrees is
Speaker 1: way but this is way different. Yeah, like this island
Speaker 1: is not. It's hard. At times. We're fishing cod tom
Speaker 1: cod through the ice. I couldn't tell when I was
Speaker 1: land around ice. Yeah, it's all just a big white
Speaker 1: blanket that's undulating. It's like I feel like we aren't
Speaker 1: we kind of drilling a hole over the dirt. You
Speaker 1: realize that you are. It's like there's no real protective
Speaker 1: buffer on land, no vegetation. Well, I mean there's tundra,
Speaker 1: but nothing to block the wind. The wind howls and
Speaker 1: the funny thing is like they've they've got you know,
Speaker 1: sand dunes, but they're made of snow. Yeah it's nice
Speaker 1: and you know it's soft, but those are I mean
Speaker 1: those are sand. You know, there's snow dunes just blasted
Speaker 1: by the wind. There's move just as you know a
Speaker 1: sand dune would on the beach. But it's just white,
Speaker 1: blistering cold. I was wearing just just this is just
Speaker 1: the girls stand around. I was wearing bunny boots. Bunny
Speaker 1: boots are like government issue cold weather Korean war boots,
Speaker 1: which are rated to negative sixty three degrees fahrenheit, which
Speaker 1: you know, who should go ahead and just jump in
Speaker 1: and promote some bunny boots because if anybody does any
Speaker 1: cold by their activities and need some cold boots, and
Speaker 1: you're not gonna really hike too far in spend the bucks,
Speaker 1: get some military serapost bunny boots, and you will not
Speaker 1: be disciplined. There really isn't. No one makes a boot
Speaker 1: that can go. No one makes an equivalent. There is
Speaker 1: no equivalent. And the other thing is it's sealed rubber,
Speaker 1: so like we always warm ice fishing, because you can't
Speaker 1: you can fill the boot up with water, but the
Speaker 1: water can't get to the insulation. It's it's wool sealed
Speaker 1: between rubber bunny boots. If you like bunny boots, these
Speaker 1: big gass white boots to actually have a pressure valve
Speaker 1: on the side that you need to like open when
Speaker 1: you're flying so you don't burst the boot. When I
Speaker 1: was a kid, there were five bucks. I mean, we
Speaker 1: just had bunny boots. Man, five bucks apiece. Now they're
Speaker 1: what yeah, something like that, and they got like instructions
Speaker 1: written on them. It says like double lace to hold firmly,
Speaker 1: and then it says, um, open valve when airborne. And
Speaker 1: they're white, they're great. Yeah nothing nothing. I mean running
Speaker 1: on them was terrible and yeah, yeah you sweat. They're
Speaker 1: not for walking. Man. People call Mickey mouse boots too.
Speaker 1: But then I was here and like black, I didn't
Speaker 1: know this till recently. If you see black bonny boots,
Speaker 1: which are Mickey mouse boots, they're not. I thought it's
Speaker 1: just you could get them in black or in white.
Speaker 1: But black is not as cold rated as white blacks
Speaker 1: negative twenty. White's negative sixty something, which is one of
Speaker 1: the few things in life that's actually true, because like
Speaker 1: when someone tells you sleeping bags rated for negative tent.
Speaker 1: They're lying. That's the survival rating though, Yeah, the comfort
Speaker 1: ratings probably like yeah, survival rating, like I always go,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I are you sleeping bag? That's probably
Speaker 1: like I'll generally go ten or twenty degrees off of
Speaker 1: what they're saying. Is the rating for me? It's my
Speaker 1: legs get cold anyways. These boots are legit war mask.
Speaker 1: Never been had such comfortable feet out in towns like that.
Speaker 1: So yeah, So I'm running around and like thick Marino
Speaker 1: blend socks, Bunny boots, Marino ljs. Then like h are yeah,
Speaker 1: I kind of sweat panty thing down pants. Then like
Speaker 1: the new first Light bibs way call him Sanctuary, which
Speaker 1: are some heavy nice bibs synthetic installation. Then I got
Speaker 1: a Marino bass layer, a Marino hoodie, a flee shirt,
Speaker 1: the same first Light type Sanctuary jacket. Then a giant
Speaker 1: down puffy, a net gator, a face mask, another face mask,
Speaker 1: a fur hat, gloves and beaver fer mittens and goggles
Speaker 1: and goggles. And at that point you're feeling pretty bulletproof,
Speaker 1: like you're just not cold. Did you get cold ice fishing? Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: my feet dicks. I was kneeling for so long, and
Speaker 1: but then I'd sweat it up my boots. My boots
Speaker 1: are sweaty right now. Um, it's just cold, man, Like
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, that's the coldest I mean, the
Speaker 1: coldest to this point that I've ever experienced. I think
Speaker 1: was when we were in Montana for ELK and I
Speaker 1: was like, I think it was like five when we're
Speaker 1: in the wall teeth, Yeah, I mean at night. But
Speaker 1: when we're out in the in the environment, hunting and stuff.
Speaker 1: I mean, those are the coldest temperatures I've ever experienced it.
Speaker 1: So I had never This is the first time I've
Speaker 1: ever felt negative temperatures. Yeah, but what was wicked about
Speaker 1: It's almost more wicked Montana because you gotta move, you
Speaker 1: gotta climb new backs flat and you're on snow machines
Speaker 1: so you can get all bundled up. And if you're conservative, dude,
Speaker 1: we we walked a little ways. I was poor and sweat, man.
Speaker 1: But out there when it's so cold, if you watch
Speaker 1: those guys, they have like the chupic man. They have
Speaker 1: like a you don't see a lot of people jogging
Speaker 1: around town. They're like very purposeful movements. Man, you're playing
Speaker 1: in the head like there's this this tentativeness pervades about
Speaker 1: what the weather is doing. I remember, like the day
Speaker 1: we got there, a kid had gone out. He was
Speaker 1: going on a snow machine to fish. He's going to
Speaker 1: fish Dolly Varden's and he was coming back. I'm like,
Speaker 1: We're like, oh, you got fishing. He said, we called
Speaker 1: it off because they had seen some some kind of
Speaker 1: weather thing. You know, anybody else would have been like that,
Speaker 1: let's go anyways. But just like you know, deep respect
Speaker 1: for the weather man, like you do stuff when the
Speaker 1: weather says it's okay to do it, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: not bashful about it. It's not like they don't try
Speaker 1: to act like those dudes don't try to act like
Speaker 1: like we'll try to act like, hell, I'm going anyway, man,
Speaker 1: can't hold me back. You know, they're like, no, the
Speaker 1: weather is no good, I'm not going. We're going to
Speaker 1: weathers because you know how much it sucks. Because they know, man,
Speaker 1: it's ridiculous. Man. Yeah, nature will uh you know, put
Speaker 1: you on your ass in an instant. Oh it's deadly.
Speaker 1: And they're travel long distances on snow machines, so you
Speaker 1: might be like, oh, yeah, they're hunting off snow machines,
Speaker 1: but would be kind of like saying like, yeah, but dude,
Speaker 1: you're hunting out of a truck because you drive to
Speaker 1: where you start hunting there, hunting fifty miles away, miles
Speaker 1: away from the village. So you might think like you
Speaker 1: might all feel like proud of yourself because you hike
Speaker 1: in a mile to where you hunt. But if you're
Speaker 1: hunting twenty six miles from your house and you drive
Speaker 1: in a car twenty five miles and then walk one,
Speaker 1: I don't feel proud of yourself because you walk them
Speaker 1: out to where you hunt. I don't know, is snow
Speaker 1: machining twenty six miles in negative temperatures like that gravy? No,
Speaker 1: not at all, It's really not. It's like it's a
Speaker 1: difficult place to be out in, you know, and that
Speaker 1: really plays into how you hunt. It's like a difficult
Speaker 1: place to be out in, you know. So there's this
Speaker 1: sort of like they're like in that covid not accustomed
Speaker 1: to it, and then being out and you're in a
Speaker 1: strange place and it's sea ice, which looks like not
Speaker 1: like a frozen hockey pond. I mean it's just like
Speaker 1: a jumble of ice piled up is out there in
Speaker 1: the wind. I don't know. You get like this, I
Speaker 1: don't want to say like a feeling of danger, but
Speaker 1: you get a feeling of as an outside or you
Speaker 1: get a feeling of being on on the edge of something.
Speaker 1: It's like another planet. Yeah it is. And the guys
Speaker 1: that lived there are not flipping about it, but they're
Speaker 1: probably more parent, not paranoid, more cautious, you know, respectful. Oh,
Speaker 1: then we would be, for sure, and yeah, until you
Speaker 1: gain their respect. So do you think if if somebody said, okay,
Speaker 1: we'll go hunt to mus cocks and then they just
Speaker 1: dropped you there, you know, you would obviously wouldn't have
Speaker 1: the same approach as you do now. Having done it,
Speaker 1: just start beating the ground. Yeah, just like I'm gonna
Speaker 1: walk over there and look around and find them and
Speaker 1: get them. It's it's hard, it's hard to picture how
Speaker 1: you do it. You would just have to travel, just
Speaker 1: like Arctic ski explorers do. Now. You have to travel
Speaker 1: with the sled behind you on skis and you have
Speaker 1: to be packing. You know, whether it's Arctic ovens or
Speaker 1: I don't know what. The alcohol still there's no wood
Speaker 1: to burn. Yeah, you travel with the alcohol stove like
Speaker 1: we got for our our We have an arcticle of intent,
Speaker 1: and we got a thing called like the heat. Pal's
Speaker 1: like a sailboat. Heater burns d nature to alcohol, but
Speaker 1: to keep warm. In those conditions, you're gonna be going
Speaker 1: through a at least the court of alcohol a night.
Speaker 1: And how are you gonna get everything back if you
Speaker 1: don't one It's like, yeah, then here's this seven hundred,
Speaker 1: seven hundred pound bull laying there and you snow you
Speaker 1: you skied thirty miles out of the village. They're excited
Speaker 1: if they can find a musk ox within twelve miles
Speaker 1: of mccoriack. Let's talk about mccoyak for a minute. Like
Speaker 1: when the Russia, Like when the when the Russians first
Speaker 1: made contact with the Chupick, they said there was four
Speaker 1: hundred people living on nu Nevak and something like seventeen
Speaker 1: villages or something. Yeah, that's what I are in. People
Speaker 1: were living at every river mouth. Now there's two hundred
Speaker 1: people in one village. Later something, they go to some
Speaker 1: of those old villages now and now they're just they're
Speaker 1: not are just called fish camps. Oh, is that what
Speaker 1: they met my fish camp? Yeah? Once like church, a
Speaker 1: church came, a school came, people got centralized. Later there
Speaker 1: someone came and estimated there were seven people living in
Speaker 1: like far fewer villages, when far more people after the
Speaker 1: Russians first made outside contact. Um, so now everybody McCory, McCory, yuck.
Speaker 1: Everyone on the island lives in mccorrey. It's about two
Speaker 1: hundred people. It's just like on the spit of snow
Speaker 1: out in the Buring Sea. And what's interesting about it
Speaker 1: is it's like they still live very much. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's you know, everybody's got a TV. Right, there's electricity,
Speaker 1: surface level stuff like very modern existence. But underneath it
Speaker 1: is that it's still subsistence lifestyle. Um. They hunt seals,
Speaker 1: they hunt walrusks, They do subsistence fishing. They eat stuff
Speaker 1: that Americans won't eat easily, like chum salmon. You know,
Speaker 1: people are as like talking about fresh salmon. They don't
Speaker 1: catch their salmon. They fished chums for food for human consumption.
Speaker 1: They fished chumps after the chumps have spawned, and they
Speaker 1: looked like hell, they got fungus all over their fins.
Speaker 1: Then they net him to eat him because they the
Speaker 1: less fat on the fish allows it to dry. They
Speaker 1: eat dried fish dipped in seal oil a lot, which
Speaker 1: is something we ate kind of um. One day after
Speaker 1: we hunted muskoks, we went out to fish and fish
Speaker 1: called tom cod. We went, I mean, how close were
Speaker 1: we to the bank, just like took forever to drill.
Speaker 1: We had a dull spun. I don't even if it
Speaker 1: was basically trying to sput a hole to drinking straw man,
Speaker 1: it's like a bunker metal like crow bar. I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess crowbar even sharp sharper crow bars way sharp,
Speaker 1: was blunt two ft right, slowly chiseled ahole. You couldn't
Speaker 1: have pulled a can of beer up through that whole
Speaker 1: well like, but it's star and wide by the time
Speaker 1: that something bitch got through the bottom of the ice.
Speaker 1: You couldn't have shoved a beer. Can't do it. And
Speaker 1: that was the second hole, the first hall. Just Peter,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, hit dirt right, yeah, oh yeah. We chilled.
Speaker 1: We chiseled another hole and got down to the ice.
Speaker 1: Ended that dirt. There's no like water colmn or he dice.
Speaker 1: So he go to drill the second hole, and he's
Speaker 1: got a rig where he's got like a stick with
Speaker 1: some line wound around two dowels punched into the stick
Speaker 1: at perpendicular angle to the dowel, and there was a
Speaker 1: handful of beads on there in a banana. So it's
Speaker 1: like it runs from the monofilment to a barrel swivel.
Speaker 1: Then there's like five or six beads, no banana. Wait,
Speaker 1: then five or six beads in a big gass rusty,
Speaker 1: dull trouble hook. He lowers that thing down that home.
Speaker 1: I'm like, come on, dude, ain't gonna work out. Pops
Speaker 1: the tom cod within seconds. It was so fast. We
Speaker 1: set out there and caught thirty time cod just like
Speaker 1: sometimes this fasting pum out of the ice. And it's
Speaker 1: right with the tide, right, I mean the yeah, he said,
Speaker 1: like tide tide fluctuations affected, and whenever the tide change,
Speaker 1: you could hear like boulders and stuff moving under an ice.
Speaker 1: There's a dull thud resonating through the ground. This dude,
Speaker 1: we like when you hunt the nune of that hunt,
Speaker 1: you have to hire a guide um or, or you
Speaker 1: have to hire what's called a transporter because the only
Speaker 1: way to get on nune of back is you have
Speaker 1: to land on native land. Most of the island is
Speaker 1: what what's the refuge. It's the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge.
Speaker 1: So Yanna speak to about the land ownership issues, who
Speaker 1: owns what where we could hunt where normal dudes can hunt,
Speaker 1: because it's kind of interesting because we always have to
Speaker 1: get film permits to hunt public land, usually cost us
Speaker 1: anywhere from thousands to two thousand dollars for a week
Speaker 1: long shoot to be on to be filling publicly. This
Speaker 1: is a commercial commercial use permit, yeah, because we're gonna
Speaker 1: take the footage and then sell it. Um. This was
Speaker 1: a national Wildlife refuge, which we've had permits before in
Speaker 1: the past. But what we didn't realize is that on
Speaker 1: New bac Um most of the refugees wilderness as well,
Speaker 1: and so they don't really give out commercial film permits
Speaker 1: or any kind of commercial permit on wilderness too much.
Speaker 1: And so you can guide hunters out there, yes, kind
Speaker 1: of just like you can in the Bob Marshall. This
Speaker 1: is a side note to what I think is like
Speaker 1: a seriously bullshitty thing on part of the federal government
Speaker 1: is that you can get a permit in the Bob
Speaker 1: Marshall Wilderness Area to every day march up twenty tourists
Speaker 1: on horseback, load them on the rafts, raft them down
Speaker 1: the river, have a giant base camp set up at
Speaker 1: the trailhead generators running hauling in horse feed every day
Speaker 1: all summer long. And that's a okay commercial use. But
Speaker 1: two dudes and the camera can't go in there. Well,
Speaker 1: it's such bullshit. They are reworking the rules and the rags. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you want to talk about high impact US, hear you,
Speaker 1: But I think those those rules are written for back
Speaker 1: in the day when any when basically if someone's gonna
Speaker 1: come to film, it was gonna be like a big
Speaker 1: highwood production, yea setting up fake western town and they're like, no,
Speaker 1: we don't want that understanding. Now it's different. You can
Speaker 1: go in there and film a show like you just said,
Speaker 1: with a couple of guys, a couple of cameras. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because like an outfitter. And I'm not I'm not hacking.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying the outfitters shouldn't be able to do it.
Speaker 1: But outfitter could be like he's got wall tent camp
Speaker 1: set up every which way, packing and dudes on horses right,
Speaker 1: setting up full on little villages out there, electrified wires
Speaker 1: to keep grizzlies out, stacks of hey, cutting fire would
Speaker 1: and you can't be out there with the backpack and
Speaker 1: a handicamp. Do they still make andicamps? You can't be
Speaker 1: out there with the backpack and a camera. You can
Speaker 1: as long as you're not gonna Yeah, but we're talking
Speaker 1: about commercial use. The guys running those rafting companies where
Speaker 1: they're hauling in thirty people every day, they'll float down
Speaker 1: rafts aren't out there for for charity. No, It just
Speaker 1: it just seems like it just strikes me as being
Speaker 1: not fair. There's a case to be made, and we're
Speaker 1: gonna work on it. We're gonna so at the refuge,
Speaker 1: they're actually reviewing their film permit process and so we
Speaker 1: couldn't even apply for a permit, so we can't film
Speaker 1: the whole the new the Tupic. This is something I
Speaker 1: don't want to get into, but but Native communities are
Speaker 1: organized into corporations in Alaska. It's not like the reservation
Speaker 1: system in the lower forty eight Native communities through the
Speaker 1: Native Claim Settlement Act, which is put it under Carter
Speaker 1: have corporations where Native community members are shareholders in the
Speaker 1: corporation and sort of their world as run as a corporation.
Speaker 1: They own this big long strip across the north shore
Speaker 1: of New to Back. Yeah, it's like anywhere I think
Speaker 1: from like one to three miles from the shore line inland.
Speaker 1: For how many miles is that thing run? I think
Speaker 1: about thirty basically from mccoyak to nash Harbor. And uh
Speaker 1: when I applied, when I first applied for the permit
Speaker 1: trying to get it, it has some spots that that
Speaker 1: are James Whitman are outfit or had told me we're
Speaker 1: gonna hunt. The dude came back and said, oh, well,
Speaker 1: all that stuff's on NEMA Corporation land, So you guys
Speaker 1: can film there as much as you want as long
Speaker 1: as NEMA will let you. And uh so they did.
Speaker 1: We paid a trespascity and uh they signed a location
Speaker 1: released for us and we basically had to find a
Speaker 1: muskox on that land if you guys were going to
Speaker 1: get to see us hunt Muskox, which is a big
Speaker 1: chunk of land, but it's like right from what we
Speaker 1: lay there found out is that as the season progresses,
Speaker 1: there's muskoks like a couple of miles from town. The
Speaker 1: first day of the hunt, you know, when the first
Speaker 1: dudes come in, and then as those animals are hunted hastle,
Speaker 1: they just moved farther south. Farther south. Its basically getting
Speaker 1: away from mc quoak. And so by the time we
Speaker 1: were the last group on the island to hunt Muskokah,
Speaker 1: no one was out there hunting when we were out there. No.
Speaker 1: I think there's a couple of locals. Yeah, yeah, doing
Speaker 1: their hunt, but there's no more. Um. The day we
Speaker 1: actually got out, some dudes were leaving on a snow
Speaker 1: machine to go hunta kow. They blew past and smell.
Speaker 1: Those guys had rain bibs. I don't remember. He was
Speaker 1: ready to the clients that James had previous to us
Speaker 1: killed his muskoks based on the southern tip of the island,
Speaker 1: fifty miles one direction away from the town. Was just out.
Speaker 1: I thought that was combined. No, man, he did. He
Speaker 1: did the hunter miles on a snow machine that day.
Speaker 1: So thank goodness, we probably found the only bowl. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was doing some serious praying, you know. I don't
Speaker 1: pray too often, but I was praying that we could
Speaker 1: find Who are you directing them to? Huh? Just the universe.
Speaker 1: You're praying to the universe for muskoks to be on
Speaker 1: the land. The bull muscots the other suit. What's way
Speaker 1: more interesting than hunting muskox is hunting walters. And these
Speaker 1: guys go out um when the ice starts to break
Speaker 1: up in late spring, they go out and hunt walrus.
Speaker 1: They look for They cruise around their boats trying to
Speaker 1: find walrus that are hauled out on the ice floes.
Speaker 1: And a walors weighs two thousand pounds and they kill
Speaker 1: him on the two twenty three in the Heady was
Speaker 1: gonna go kill his cow muscots two in the head, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he said, you hit that walrus right, and he kind
Speaker 1: of showed me where you gotta hit it. He said
Speaker 1: it just crumples. And he hunt seals the same way.
Speaker 1: Hit him in the head of the two twenty three
Speaker 1: close range and pile them up. And then he jacked
Speaker 1: that water's up on the ice. If he falls in
Speaker 1: the water and you start chopping up a two thousand
Speaker 1: pound critter, the butcher on the ice, they don't they
Speaker 1: don't hold on the butt. I'd like to get involved
Speaker 1: in that. Yeah, we really wanted to. Unfortunately we're just
Speaker 1: a little too early. It sounds like the sea on
Speaker 1: the waters huntings in about another month. Yeah, So we
Speaker 1: went out on fish these Tom Catt and he was
Speaker 1: showing us a traditional thing they eat where like a
Speaker 1: tom cuts about if you're familiar with lake perch. Tom
Speaker 1: cuts as big as a lake perch. It looks just
Speaker 1: like a damn cod. But it's like the size of
Speaker 1: a perch, you know, like eight ten inches twelve inches
Speaker 1: for a big one, big fatty, and they take a
Speaker 1: they free I mean the fish freezes rock ass solid
Speaker 1: the minute you pulled out of the water. But they
Speaker 1: take the fish, take a h knife and cut, not flaze,
Speaker 1: just shave off pieces of the fish frozen solid, and
Speaker 1: then just dip it in seal oil and eat it.
Speaker 1: And our guide's wife, our guide was born out there.
Speaker 1: A wife is you know, Chupicka was born there. She
Speaker 1: was saying that her father had explained that if you
Speaker 1: just lived on tom Codd you would starve to death.
Speaker 1: But if you ate Tom Codd dipped in seal oil,
Speaker 1: you can stay alive and I asked her if that
Speaker 1: was something that in his generation was a reality, and
Speaker 1: she said, oh, yes, like they you know they could
Speaker 1: at that time. We're still, you know, just in her
Speaker 1: father's lifetime face starvation. She had a picture of her
Speaker 1: father hanging on the wall dressed completely in skins, you know,
Speaker 1: boots up, m now the most common skin. I did't
Speaker 1: me see his sealskin hats, which Janni actually bought very close.
Speaker 1: It wasn't our style. Yeah, it's just flashed me a
Speaker 1: look to suggested, don't want to talk about the Seals
Speaker 1: getting No. No, I have no problem at all sharing
Speaker 1: the story. You know, it's pretty interesting. It was. It
Speaker 1: was tense negotiation, so to you when you guys talking,
Speaker 1: when of you guys don't. I wasn't even there. I
Speaker 1: was sick. Steve was laid up. Yeah, I had like
Speaker 1: I had gas thrown testinal issues much of the time
Speaker 1: I was out there. No, we can bring we got
Speaker 1: to town. Everybody's wearing these great looking Seal skin hats.
Speaker 1: You know Ray's got a beard, no ribbon ribbon seal, yeah,
Speaker 1: which she said is a rare seal to run into
Speaker 1: a big gassars And James was wearing a bearded bearded Well,
Speaker 1: that's kind of what we've seen. Oh and in town
Speaker 1: here in Baffle, we had seen some beaver hats, Steve
Speaker 1: rocking new beaver hat coin and our Corey and I
Speaker 1: are like, all right, cool, when's next time we're gonna
Speaker 1: be that's old beaver hat. You guys are on the hunt.
Speaker 1: I mean you're like, yeah, you guys are like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you guys are cuting. We pull people all over on
Speaker 1: the streets and ask if we could take a picture.
Speaker 1: Let me try it on. Yeah. Yeah. The Korean dude
Speaker 1: selling twenty dollar hamburgers, he had an amazing fur hat
Speaker 1: and he said he paid three hundred bucks for it,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, you got ripped, But then I realized
Speaker 1: he didn't get ripped at all. No, dude, a bag
Speaker 1: of zip, a bag of like bad zip blocks up
Speaker 1: here as eight bucks. Man, he's man, he's is twelve dollars,
Speaker 1: which is that's sanity. If you want to ride a
Speaker 1: cab across the street, it's twenty everywhere everything three three dollars. Yeah,
Speaker 1: As the guy explained, a cab driver was trying to
Speaker 1: explain how expensive Where is the cab driver from Korean. Yeah,
Speaker 1: most of the cab drivers were finding our Albanian creature
Speaker 1: was a Korean segment of the cab driving population. He
Speaker 1: was trying to explain how expensive everything wasn't explained to
Speaker 1: these guys that it's not double, it's three double. That
Speaker 1: was a catchphrase for the hunt. What was So we
Speaker 1: basically are are told that you know, a relative, um
Speaker 1: someone skin make these hats for us, like sweet, we
Speaker 1: would make you a steal hat, steal hat, you know,
Speaker 1: beaver trim. So we're literally looking at one hat thinking
Speaker 1: like all right, this is the hat we're getting made,
Speaker 1: and it's like very like okay, you guys sure you
Speaker 1: want it? Like yeah, cool, We're kind of ask him
Speaker 1: like it. And it's a very muted the seal skin
Speaker 1: is very muted. I'm the one you're looking at. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's like a dull gray some black markings. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a muted color. It's real subtle. And as they age,
Speaker 1: the hair stands up on them on the skin itself,
Speaker 1: so it's really a blonde kind of a fuzz to it,
Speaker 1: almost yeah, dirty blonde though dishwater blonde, brown blonde. So
Speaker 1: three or four days into it, we're told that Hey,
Speaker 1: both the hats are ready, let's go. You guys need
Speaker 1: to go over there to take your hat side to
Speaker 1: right by the measurements. No, no, we didn't do that
Speaker 1: because they gotta pay. I was a little nervous about that.
Speaker 1: It was basically like, yeah, you want a large, medium,
Speaker 1: or small, you know. So we tried on a few
Speaker 1: other hats and said, okay, it's large, I'll probably be
Speaker 1: a small one. Was the most nerve wracking part was
Speaker 1: is it gonna fit? You know? So when he said
Speaker 1: you're supposed to go over and look at the hat, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: we need to go over and buy that. As they're
Speaker 1: ready for you to buy, you put your order in.
Speaker 1: And so I've been looking. In two thousand and twelve,
Speaker 1: i lived in Fairbanks. I saw a lot of these
Speaker 1: hats there as well too. I almost bought one there,
Speaker 1: the same hat steal hat with the beaver trim. Some
Speaker 1: of them had like almost like a thicker wolf lining,
Speaker 1: you know, that would give you a little more uh,
Speaker 1: you know, wind protection. So I've been in the market
Speaker 1: because I feel like sitting on a really high glass
Speaker 1: and tit when the winds howling, like you glass forever
Speaker 1: wearing that hat. Yeah, yeah, we I should point out
Speaker 1: there is no hat warmer than a fur hat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like there hasn't been matt Like, no one has matched
Speaker 1: like my beaver fur hat. It's like no one has
Speaker 1: matched that with a synthetic material. It's like the subtraffics.
Speaker 1: It's just like, you know, you can't hear any you
Speaker 1: can't hear anything. You can anything, But anyway, we walk
Speaker 1: a couple of minutes across, you know, a couple of
Speaker 1: through back but the back alleys in the quick and
Speaker 1: into another house. No cameras aloud, we were told, And
Speaker 1: there are these hats and they are spotted seal. So
Speaker 1: it's like this blonde, bright blonde base with basically black
Speaker 1: spotchy kind of poking. It's like it's like almost almost leparty.
Speaker 1: And instead of being like a natural beaver on the
Speaker 1: I don't know what you call that part of the hat,
Speaker 1: it's basically the forehead. I don't know if it's an accent,
Speaker 1: if it's actually technically does something and maybe it keeps
Speaker 1: your forehead warmer, but it's a second layer of beaver
Speaker 1: on the hat. It's died black, like died shiny black.
Speaker 1: Didn't say tourist on it just right, it said Gaper,
Speaker 1: I think and uh yeah, mine was I don't know,
Speaker 1: trimmed and rabbit yours. Corey's is trimmed and something that
Speaker 1: couldn't be identified by anybody in the room and not
Speaker 1: know what it was made up. Tell that part of
Speaker 1: the stories. That's interesting. Yeah, so we're like looking at
Speaker 1: him now, we're like, man, like, this is not what
Speaker 1: we thought we were getting, and like, I want to
Speaker 1: see this skin hat. I want to wear it. I
Speaker 1: want to pay It looked like something like Liberace would
Speaker 1: have ordered. Yeah some gal and yeah, a female and
Speaker 1: asthen is not gonna wear a seal skin hat one.
Speaker 1: It's very style. I mean, it's beautiful. I mean just
Speaker 1: because the whole thing, because they know that the seal
Speaker 1: had died, they'd like first oh yeah, alright, I'm staying corrected.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter. Um. So anyways, we've we've we've entered
Speaker 1: this sort of you know, contractual you know, verbal agreement,
Speaker 1: but having these hats made for us. So how well
Speaker 1: when you first walked in there, she was just like, oh,
Speaker 1: I worked non stop. She was like she was shaking
Speaker 1: her hands and she was she was elderly, and she
Speaker 1: she was just like, I've been working non stop for
Speaker 1: two days to make these hats pieces to make sure
Speaker 1: that you got them before you left. So I mean, like,
Speaker 1: you know, the pressure is on nows like these are yours?
Speaker 1: Top ball off. We just we were getting ready to
Speaker 1: actually go shoot outside to catch you know, just shoot
Speaker 1: shots of mcquarick. We're in like full down triple triple
Speaker 1: double no three double down, layers, bunny boots and everything
Speaker 1: walk into this house and how we get into this
Speaker 1: uncomfortable situation and like, you know, just as many close
Speaker 1: as you could possibly have on and we are sweating bullets,
Speaker 1: and finally I just had to be like, look, I
Speaker 1: don't want to disrespect you. We need to get out
Speaker 1: of this situation. And with enough talking, she finally offered
Speaker 1: up that said, hey, I don't want a discount for you.
Speaker 1: Don't buy him at a discount. I can sell them
Speaker 1: somewhere else. And we basically ended it with that. It
Speaker 1: wasn't miscommunity. Well, well, then her husband comes in and
Speaker 1: like and everything it kind of like found like a
Speaker 1: nice resolve, that's right, And he comes in and he
Speaker 1: introduces himself and then he sits down. He's like, he's like,
Speaker 1: what's wrong with these hats? What's wrong with you guys?
Speaker 1: Why why don't you like these hats? Like getting you know,
Speaker 1: kind of offended that they didn't like them or they
Speaker 1: didn't want to purchase them. Yeah, you boys wanted He's like,
Speaker 1: what's wrong with you? Says He's perfectly fine, you boys
Speaker 1: want to seal. You gotta see the moral story is
Speaker 1: if you want to ribbon seal, hey, you gotta stay
Speaker 1: ribbon seal exactly, You're exactly right, You are exactly right,
Speaker 1: or bearded seal. And then she had a lot of
Speaker 1: other things, but it's there is definitely a little feeling
Speaker 1: of like, Okay, remember we're in like a very small
Speaker 1: town of two hundred people were on an island, like
Speaker 1: we are outsiders, we need to play this very Yes,
Speaker 1: we want to get out of here. Wasn't the diplomacy? Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I understand too, because these these hats are not
Speaker 1: um cheap no three ducks three hundred bucks. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: just so listeners realized we're talking about a three hundred
Speaker 1: dollar hat and for three hund bucks you should get
Speaker 1: what you want. Yeah, you know, because it's certainly it's
Speaker 1: a very it's vastly inflated. You know. The dude that
Speaker 1: one of my the dude that one of my um
Speaker 1: A guy wanted one of my rifles, seventeen caliber rifle.
Speaker 1: And when I talked about how maybe I would probably
Speaker 1: his seals can had out of him for it, he
Speaker 1: didn't act like that was any kind of sacrifice on
Speaker 1: his part whatsoever. You know, I think seals can as
Speaker 1: grow on trees, the spot of ones apparently, but they're
Speaker 1: sweet looking. Man. The official ones are badass either way.
Speaker 1: Corey and I are still sealskin hatless. Yeah, the I
Speaker 1: just wouldn't. I wish we could identified what was the
Speaker 1: interior of here is Corey, because I think you can
Speaker 1: say it's like this this this made a dog. I
Speaker 1: think it was dog, some sort of dog. Another thing
Speaker 1: they got going on out here, which is cool, is
Speaker 1: you go? So there are no native Noonavak has no
Speaker 1: large native land mammals um for native animals, native land mammals.
Speaker 1: They have a variety of small voles and things um
Speaker 1: Arctic fox, red fox. It's about it like a red
Speaker 1: fox is the biggest native land land mammal they have
Speaker 1: out there, but for for a long time, they've had
Speaker 1: a herd of reindeer and they have muskoks and muskoks
Speaker 1: while they were in like historically they were inland, they weren't.
Speaker 1: It doesn't seem that they were actually on now Nevac.
Speaker 1: They were inland, but they weren't on the island. Um
Speaker 1: the island. At one time they had mammoth and all
Speaker 1: kinds of stuff. But you know, when the when the
Speaker 1: sea levels were much much lower, but when the sea
Speaker 1: levels rose, and that in the Bearing Sea, which is
Speaker 1: very a shallow ocean, was just like a you know,
Speaker 1: a grassland steppe environment. They had many animals, water level rolls,
Speaker 1: things turned to tunder. Eventually no big stuff out there.
Speaker 1: But now they got muskots, reindeer and they you know,
Speaker 1: a reindeer is like the term reindeer is sort of
Speaker 1: a eura, like a reindeer is a Eurasian caribou. People
Speaker 1: talk about different species of cariboo woodland, mountain, um, barren ground,
Speaker 1: but a geneticist doesn't even geneticis don't even really draw
Speaker 1: a distinction between reindeer or the European caribou and the
Speaker 1: cariboo that we have here. But in regards that they
Speaker 1: have a reindeer population, so seedstock of the animals came
Speaker 1: from Europe, and they're like a domestic critter out there.
Speaker 1: They don't do any agriculture. They just feed on tundra.
Speaker 1: They live a wildlife. I guess what makes them domestic
Speaker 1: as they round them up with snow machines and slaughter them.
Speaker 1: And the way they do their slaughtering is about maybe
Speaker 1: like three and a half four miles from the village,
Speaker 1: and they slaughter reindeer on what is the biggest lake
Speaker 1: on the island, and the lakes frozen solid, and again
Speaker 1: you wouldn't know you're on a lake. It just looks
Speaker 1: like snoggerware and flat stuff, but you're on a lake.
Speaker 1: They drive They built these big drive line fences like
Speaker 1: funnel fences. They go out on snow machines and push
Speaker 1: the reindeer out onto this ice, shoot all the reindeer
Speaker 1: in the head of the I'm assuming with the twenty
Speaker 1: two or two twenty three apparently kill all the reindeer,
Speaker 1: and then everybody in the village buys reindeer. This year,
Speaker 1: I think the going price is two bucks from reindeer
Speaker 1: for a reindeer. That's just like what they pay, so
Speaker 1: like that's what a community member pays to access one
Speaker 1: of the reindeer that's owned by the community. And there's
Speaker 1: some commercial slaughtering going on too, or some guy is
Speaker 1: shooting reindeer and then shipping the meat out, so they
Speaker 1: butcher these reindeer out on the ice and they're just
Speaker 1: pulling meat off, like all the heads, all the horns,
Speaker 1: all the hides are just laying out on the ice.
Speaker 1: Spring comes, ice melts, and all that stuff just goes
Speaker 1: into the lake. They've been doing this for decades and
Speaker 1: decades and decades, and I think if you wanted to
Speaker 1: make the weirdest video ever, you would go to that
Speaker 1: lake and snarkle around or scuba dive around filming decades
Speaker 1: worth of caribou or decades worth of reindeer skulls and
Speaker 1: horns accumulated on the bottom of a tundra lake where
Speaker 1: nothing breaks down, nothing breaks down. It's pretty cool. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's what tundra is is just like vegetation that doesn't decompose.
Speaker 1: You know, it is probably the creepiest place on the planet.
Speaker 1: You couldn't wade through there. No, it's just so the
Speaker 1: ice is covered with slaughtered caribou bits and pieces, and
Speaker 1: like you go out there and it's just like red
Speaker 1: fox and Arctic fox just to come in and going
Speaker 1: out there. The Arctic fox coming off the sea ice,
Speaker 1: the red fox come off the island. I got one
Speaker 1: of each red fox in the Arctic fox, and um
Speaker 1: women was telling me that in the old days, when
Speaker 1: arctic fox is worth a hundred bucks, just sit out
Speaker 1: there in a little hut shooting artic fox and selling
Speaker 1: him and nothing he did for businesses. We're talking about
Speaker 1: fishing tom cod. He would call him to Bethel here,
Speaker 1: find out who wanted tom cotton. He'd sell frozen com
Speaker 1: cod for two fifty pound, catch him through the ice,
Speaker 1: freeze him, send him by air to Bethel. We didn't
Speaker 1: catch five bucks for the tom cod at that price.
Speaker 1: You know. Now they fish halibut commercially out there. Did
Speaker 1: you notice any of the did you see any of
Speaker 1: those big big antler piles with the the skins and
Speaker 1: stuff that there was holes that the article or eat
Speaker 1: the artic of the red fox had dug underneath the piles.
Speaker 1: So essentially just had a little little little dan and
Speaker 1: they just like you know, probably just sit there and
Speaker 1: just like take a little snack from the roof and
Speaker 1: just take a nap and just wake up and just
Speaker 1: like eat from underneath. Yea, just like the and the
Speaker 1: stuff is frozen. Everything's frozen, soil rock card. They must
Speaker 1: just rasp that stuff off. I don't know, I don't ever.
Speaker 1: I would be shocked if when I'm like dying, okay, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've been telling the people lately, I don't want to
Speaker 1: get in this too long. That's one point. If if,
Speaker 1: like at whatever age my kids are old enough for
Speaker 1: if I died a tragic death, it wouldn't screw them
Speaker 1: up psychologically. How old is that? Like, how old you
Speaker 1: gotta be? How old your kids need to be that
Speaker 1: you dye in tragically has a greatly reduced chance of
Speaker 1: screwing them up psychologically adults. Adults. So I got a
Speaker 1: one month old right now, and I'm forty one, so
Speaker 1: at age sixty, roughly you're gonna start at age sixty.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go die on K two. So when I'm
Speaker 1: laying there dying, if you if I'm laying there dying
Speaker 1: as a man who's been to now Nevak Island twice,
Speaker 1: I'll be shocked Mike's going back. I'll go back. I'll
Speaker 1: put it in. Why not. I I enjoyed my time there. Um,
Speaker 1: I enjoyed my time there. I'm very glad I went
Speaker 1: there to to have that experience. It's an animal I've
Speaker 1: always been curious about. It's a landscape that I'm curious about.
Speaker 1: I've read a lot about, you know, the baring scene
Speaker 1: in the Arctic. I've been a Browns Mary. I I
Speaker 1: am glad I went. But one, um, you are you
Speaker 1: would never overcome outsider status. No, you're not chupid, you
Speaker 1: got money. No, but you could marry in possibly if
Speaker 1: you live there, I think you'd overcome out side er status. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe not with everybody. But you're still the white guy.
Speaker 1: I mean they said that there was there was like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, there used to be a white guy that
Speaker 1: lived here for five years. But I don't hold. I
Speaker 1: don't hold. I'm not I don't. I'm not even saying
Speaker 1: that as a negative. Man. I totally understand it, all right, Well,
Speaker 1: everybody everybody's like family. I mean it's literally like one
Speaker 1: giant family. Yeah, i'dn't understand. I just don't. I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't know that I'm dying to go back well
Speaker 1: for the seal or for Walters. I would go back
Speaker 1: to hunt Walter. I would go back to go I
Speaker 1: can't hunt walrus. I would go back to be present
Speaker 1: for a walrus hunt. I would go back to be
Speaker 1: present for a seal hunt, to witness it. Um, but
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna apply for d x O O three
Speaker 1: the Muscots hunt because I didn't like it, or that
Speaker 1: something's wrong with it. It's just like it was. It
Speaker 1: was a once in a lifetime thing, not legally, but
Speaker 1: like spiritually or something. It's like a once in a
Speaker 1: lifetime thing now for me, Like if I go down
Speaker 1: you know and hunting National forest land right all, Like
Speaker 1: when I walk out of there, all I want to
Speaker 1: do is go back and hunting in But I didn't
Speaker 1: get that feeling hunting muskots. Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 1: I felt like UM in large measure, Uh, I felt
Speaker 1: like an interloper out on the Muskot. I just felt Yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't feel like UM. I didn't feel like an
Speaker 1: ecological participant. I felt more like an ecological war year
Speaker 1: that because of the challenge. Yeah, it just was. It's
Speaker 1: not like it just not a kind of hunting that
Speaker 1: I'm interested in doing. I mean, I'm glad I went.
Speaker 1: It's not a kind of honey, I'm interested in doing.
Speaker 1: What's kind of like if you know, I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: see the lead entire pizza. Once you've done it, what
Speaker 1: are you gonna go back and see it again? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you know you really yeah right, but yeah,
Speaker 1: but it feels like that. But um, but most things,
Speaker 1: like a lot of hunting doesn't feel like that to me.
Speaker 1: You know, like I'm dying to get back up in
Speaker 1: the Brooks Range and hunt moves because it's because that's
Speaker 1: gonna be a different adventure and tight you don't know
Speaker 1: what's gonna happen. I mean, this is kind of predictable,
Speaker 1: that's right. If you went back and hundred muskox, it
Speaker 1: would be the same thing. There's no I mean, the
Speaker 1: only thing that would be surprising is if you got
Speaker 1: caught in some nasty weather and got stuck out overnight,
Speaker 1: you know, in the tuns and had to do some
Speaker 1: arctic survival. I mean, that would be which is never
Speaker 1: happened to our you know guide They're cautious doing it, yeah,
Speaker 1: because because they respect the land, because they know it,
Speaker 1: but there's more to it because even something as small
Speaker 1: and simple as like the gray squirrel, you're looking forward
Speaker 1: to your next grade squirrel. Absolutely. Yeah, I think there's
Speaker 1: no mystery when those boys go out, when they get
Speaker 1: a good weather day, they're going out and the muskox
Speaker 1: is gonna die. Mhm. You know you got four there's
Speaker 1: like four muskoks out on the island. The islands huge,
Speaker 1: like you know, I keep saying it's an island. There's
Speaker 1: no Lancet Island, but we're gonna saying the islands. Well,
Speaker 1: it's why does point close to seventy is the same
Speaker 1: size as Long Island? Roughly? Okay, so it's the island,
Speaker 1: but it's giant, right, But you have four kas out there,
Speaker 1: there's nowhere to really hide. When they go out, they're
Speaker 1: gonna get a muskas if the weather is good. So
Speaker 1: it's like, uh, I don't know, man, it would be
Speaker 1: like I guess it's like going to the bar. Like
Speaker 1: when you're single, there's sort of an adventure to going
Speaker 1: to the bar that probably doesn't exist. Going to a
Speaker 1: house of ill repute, you know what's gonna happen. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like Buffalo hunting outside of the Elstone. Yea
Speaker 1: almost same thing. But I put in for that tag
Speaker 1: every year, but once I draw it, I don't know
Speaker 1: if I mean I put it in for it all
Speaker 1: the time. But yeah, it's like they're either there or not.
Speaker 1: They're they're you're gonna kill them, But they're not hunting
Speaker 1: for novelty. They're hunting for food. Who the locals are
Speaker 1: new to that. I'm not talking about them, talking about
Speaker 1: me right for them? Yeah, it's a subsistence harvest. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm talking. I'm trying to put into words why Sometimes
Speaker 1: I'll come back from my hunt and all I want
Speaker 1: to do is go do it again, Like, for instance,
Speaker 1: that hunt we did in the like hunting Cou's deer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when were we down here? All right, sign me up, man, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm ready to go. I didn't even get a deer.
Speaker 1: Maybe and there in lines to catch. Maybe that's why
Speaker 1: I want to go because there's a level of uncertainty.
Speaker 1: But it's not like this is a secret, because you
Speaker 1: can go on the Last Department of Fishing Games website
Speaker 1: and go look at success rates. So every year they
Speaker 1: give out X number tags. Let's say on a typical year,
Speaker 1: they give about thirty tags, you're go look and and
Speaker 1: be like they issued dirty tags. Twenty two dudes actually
Speaker 1: showed up and most of us to be like when
Speaker 1: he one killed the musk. Cos you know, so going
Speaker 1: into you're like, all right, you set aside a week,
Speaker 1: and the reason you're setting aside a week is you're
Speaker 1: trying to get a good weather day. We got lucky
Speaker 1: and had we like we had a day. We had
Speaker 1: a day we got stuck in Bethel. Couldn't even fly
Speaker 1: for it's a little bit complicated, but we couldn't have
Speaker 1: flown to Bethel. We couldn't have flown out there. Even
Speaker 1: that they couldn't even have flown out there. Definitely could
Speaker 1: have hunted that day, had another day when it wasn't
Speaker 1: good to hunt, had later, but the day we got
Speaker 1: there just so happened. We got there. It was a
Speaker 1: good hunt day. When those boys loading up those trailers
Speaker 1: and those snow machines, there was no doubt what was
Speaker 1: gonna happen that day we were killing the musks, you know.
Speaker 1: And but I don't know, man, Like if I went
Speaker 1: to my mom's house right now on September, opening day
Speaker 1: of Squirrel and I call Mrs Elder Rust and I said,
Speaker 1: Mrs hunt squirrels on your place. Not only do I
Speaker 1: know I'm gonna get a squirrel, I'm gonna get the
Speaker 1: daily bag limit of five. They would take an act
Speaker 1: of God to for me to not get five. That's
Speaker 1: enjoyable to me. So is it that I don't know
Speaker 1: what it is? I'm gonna kill five squirrels. Absolutely, if
Speaker 1: I'm out of Miles City, We're gonna go hunt cotton tails.
Speaker 1: We're gonna kill cotton tails. I'm going out there next
Speaker 1: week to fish catfish. We're gonna knock the hell out
Speaker 1: of them. Is it not fun? Now, dude, I know
Speaker 1: we're gonna catch catfish. Do you know what is it?
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's a mystery. It is the serenity
Speaker 1: wasn't there with loud snowmobiles and cold exercise. Maybe you're
Speaker 1: not in the driver's seat. It might be a guided
Speaker 1: hunt thing, because think about it like this. Say you've
Speaker 1: gone out there and it wasn't administered. It wasn't that
Speaker 1: you had to land on native land Okay, and it
Speaker 1: was just you could just have a pilot. He's got
Speaker 1: a plane on skis. You could fly around. You can't
Speaker 1: hunt the same day you fly. You flew around founder Herd,
Speaker 1: put down somewhere a couple miles or mile away, so
Speaker 1: you're not going to disturb him, set up camp, and
Speaker 1: then out on foot. You'd be like, I'm coming back, dude.
Speaker 1: That was a blast. You know, it's just the mechanics
Speaker 1: of the hunt itself. Just how long we've been talking
Speaker 1: for you? We're at an hour plus? All right, it's
Speaker 1: all you guys paid for us. One hour. We're gonna
Speaker 1: log out. Um a concluding thoughts, Mike, Texas is big.
Speaker 1: Mike's wants clarified just how big Texas is. I wish
Speaker 1: you'd best of luck, best of luck in the muscock
Speaker 1: straw next year. Yeah, have you when you give your
Speaker 1: concluding thoughts right now, tell us where you're at on
Speaker 1: doing the muscart straw. Uh to be able to take
Speaker 1: part in it as a well, you know, you bring
Speaker 1: up some good points and screw it. I said, I'm
Speaker 1: just tring. I don't know what. I'm sorry, but I
Speaker 1: can't subtract us from my brain already in there. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, like you said, it is
Speaker 1: a once in a a one lifetime kind of thing
Speaker 1: to do. It would be nice because you know, we
Speaker 1: took part in it, so I've you know, the whole
Speaker 1: operation and stuff, and so it's less of a mystery.
Speaker 1: So maybe I don't know if that's a bad thing
Speaker 1: or a good thing, But to do it yourself, I
Speaker 1: think would be kind of cool. I'd like to come,
Speaker 1: you know, bring my dad and like, you know, be
Speaker 1: able to share in that experience. It's a great experience
Speaker 1: because I mean there's no place that I've been to
Speaker 1: that's more I mean save the you know, southern slope
Speaker 1: of the Brooks Ranch when they were there, just vast open,
Speaker 1: just it's bleak, but it has its own really like
Speaker 1: sharp edged beauty to it. And you know, there's something
Speaker 1: about the landscape that is just so it's I mean,
Speaker 1: like I said, you know, it's like it's another planet
Speaker 1: and you'll never see I mean, you know that stuff
Speaker 1: like that doesn't exist in Texas as an owned as
Speaker 1: it is, as big as it is, it doesn't have
Speaker 1: that doesn't have arctic tundra snow dunes. So to be
Speaker 1: able to to or be able to experience that vicariously,
Speaker 1: to bring somebody else there would be pretty cool. You know,
Speaker 1: having the knowledge of being there and taking part in
Speaker 1: their in their community and stuff, and just you know,
Speaker 1: just in a cultural sense, being able to see how
Speaker 1: you know other people are. That's what's so great about
Speaker 1: this job, as you get to go all these different
Speaker 1: places and experience all these different people and stuff, and
Speaker 1: that's that's rewarding in itself, beyond the animal. So you're
Speaker 1: making me feel like a dick. Not for us that
Speaker 1: because everything you're saying, no, because I was trying to talk,
Speaker 1: you're shaming me on my own podcast. I was trying
Speaker 1: to speak to just the just hunt. Yeah, culturally right,
Speaker 1: I loved it. Okay, Yeah, granted there the hunt is
Speaker 1: its own kind of beast. You hit the nail on
Speaker 1: the head. It was the mechanics of the hunt. We
Speaker 1: can we can let that one lay rest. I mean,
Speaker 1: but yeah, being there, dude eating frozen tom con dipped
Speaker 1: in seal oil. There are a few places wrap up
Speaker 1: the mike still doing as wrap up um, you know,
Speaker 1: because you know right now it's just such putting that
Speaker 1: the chances of actually drawing that tag, I mean, it
Speaker 1: would be more of just like, yeah, let's see what happens,
Speaker 1: you know, throw on the wall seap of sticks, and
Speaker 1: then I would have to like, okay, you know if
Speaker 1: I did draw a tag, Okay, is this really going
Speaker 1: to happen? And then there would be a whole another
Speaker 1: process of like thinking about that and if actually pulled
Speaker 1: the turner on it. But you know, right now and
Speaker 1: just like a far off not real place like yeah,
Speaker 1: sure it might be kind of cool, but definitely not
Speaker 1: definitely not for the you know, the challenge of the hunt.
Speaker 1: For sure. I feel like there's a few places in
Speaker 1: the United States of America that are as exotic in
Speaker 1: both like landscape and culture and activity and animal That's
Speaker 1: what we just experienced. Put all those things together. Where
Speaker 1: else are you gonna go to really like get that
Speaker 1: far out of your comfort zone across the board like
Speaker 1: that not necessary comfort zone, but just like what you
Speaker 1: know about like we really mean, like even at the
Speaker 1: airport here in Bethel, dudes are talking you know, some
Speaker 1: dialect of Eskimo. Like it's the real deal. You're way
Speaker 1: out here in Eskimo. It was shocking to be with
Speaker 1: people who are speaking cupid. Yeah, like you know, like
Speaker 1: these people are like into James. We we touched on
Speaker 1: the Tom cod in the seal oil. James Whitman's wife
Speaker 1: really never really hung out with us too much, didn't
Speaker 1: really eat with us even as pain clients. Like around
Speaker 1: the dinner table when we bosted out that tom clot
Speaker 1: in the sea oil she was in, it was like this,
Speaker 1: this stuffs the bomb, you know, yeah, I mean she
Speaker 1: had a whole fish before you even got the first bite, Like,
Speaker 1: you know, um, would you put in for the tag?
Speaker 1: Not yet? Not yet? Give me your concluding thoughts. I'm
Speaker 1: very excited to add I think species number ten to
Speaker 1: my freezer. With that, weren't talk about the meat. Fifty
Speaker 1: pound box of meat that you so generously rich, very
Speaker 1: good meat, but very rich. Yeah, fatty meat, that's good.
Speaker 1: We ate some that's great. We ate some ribs that
Speaker 1: we're tasty. We ate pot no, we ate diaphragm. What
Speaker 1: else we that sounds raw? Raw? Rich, fatty meat. We
Speaker 1: went up was easy. We have over two hundred pounds
Speaker 1: of meat. My box weighed in at sixty something sixty
Speaker 1: So yeah, so we're each going home with sixty pounds
Speaker 1: of you know, untrimmed meat, no bone, untrimmed but bones. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you'll probably yield you know forty I got a
Speaker 1: sack of Tom caught me, and Corey got a sack
Speaker 1: Tom got. It's gonna be eating shavings. So that is
Speaker 1: that you're concluding thoughts concluding I had a great time.
Speaker 1: I mean the experience and I agree with everyone in
Speaker 1: the cultural aspect of it was amazing. I think that
Speaker 1: the imagery that it's gonna stick in my mind and
Speaker 1: the rest of my life is like pulling alongside, you know,
Speaker 1: paralleling the moscocks running. I'm looking off the snowmobile thinking, wow,
Speaker 1: you know there's like Jurassic Park or something. You know,
Speaker 1: where's the saber tooth tiger now? But you know that
Speaker 1: animals just like gliding on the thunder rod. See that
Speaker 1: animals came to the ice age. He was right there. Dude.
Speaker 1: It did me too. I know I was happening on
Speaker 1: I know I was happening on the ice age thing.
Speaker 1: But when I looked at him, I'm like, if I
Speaker 1: was just sitting here, if you if you said to me, like,
Speaker 1: if I somehow lost my position in time, okay, you
Speaker 1: somehow could be confused where you were in the space
Speaker 1: time continual, and you sat me down with my bannockers
Speaker 1: on that glass and tip and I looked out, I'd
Speaker 1: be like, well, there's a mammoth down there. That's what
Speaker 1: I would think. I had talked about this a couple
Speaker 1: of times out there. Is that when I first saw
Speaker 1: musko was the first time I went Carribo hunting and
Speaker 1: we drove up hunt caribool. I didn't hire, We just
Speaker 1: like did it with a canoe in a truck. And
Speaker 1: it was the first time I'd ever hunted in Alaska.
Speaker 1: And this was the way it was fifteen years ago.
Speaker 1: I knew that there was a thing called the muscos
Speaker 1: that exists did but I couldn't have told you if
Speaker 1: it existed there still or not, or where I knew.
Speaker 1: It was just like I knew it was a creature, right,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, We're looking at something through
Speaker 1: the barbanoculars. You know, it was like looking across Some
Speaker 1: talk about confusion and spacetime continue. It really was like
Speaker 1: I wasn't like clear what I was looking at. I
Speaker 1: could be like, Oh, there's a Muscox, but I'm like,
Speaker 1: but what is a musco? Like where are they right now?
Speaker 1: As a species? Am I did? I am? I seeing
Speaker 1: the last one, you know, like what am I looking at?
Speaker 1: It's just there's not a lot of awareness about that,
Speaker 1: am because it's where I say, ram, it's like the
Speaker 1: normway rat. I mean overall, the beautiful trip. Really, those
Speaker 1: old ice shanties just sitting on the edge of the
Speaker 1: Bearing Sea, Like the more sunrises sunsets were amazing. I
Speaker 1: think we got lucky with the weather, Like really we
Speaker 1: had five days straight of you know, partly cloudy to
Speaker 1: sunny days. You had to have liked watch me jack
Speaker 1: those time caught up through that whole new ice. That
Speaker 1: was inspiring for you. Probably. I think making the hole
Speaker 1: is the best. I don't know. Man, it wore out.
Speaker 1: It wore a whole thing by beaver Mitten. Man, it
Speaker 1: did were a whole thing by Beaver May has worked
Speaker 1: for those holes. Four hours four hours of whole pounding.
Speaker 1: All right, Yannis, give me the old wrap it up.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, say say thanks for listening and laughing,
Speaker 1: and I'll shut up. Paul Disca, he's close at this.
Speaker 1: I love bun alright, signing out mediator podcast tune the
Speaker 1: next time. Hey, listen up. This sounds like an advertisement,
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