Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
Speaker 1: bug bitten in my case, underwear listening Hunt podcast, you
Speaker 1: can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are
Speaker 1: the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the
Speaker 1: Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play Store, nor
Speaker 1: where you stand with on x Okay, Carl Carl Malcolm
Speaker 1: set the scene for us here. What's going on? Well,
Speaker 1: we are here at RAX Camp. We're in south central
Speaker 1: New Mexico, at a camping spot that I have come
Speaker 1: to be uh very familiar with and fond of over
Speaker 1: a number of years now. I've probably camping in and
Speaker 1: around this particular spot for close to a decade of
Speaker 1: hunting a variety of species, and over the course of
Speaker 1: those hunts, I have encountered rix in this general area
Speaker 1: on a number of occasions. So we're here just just
Speaker 1: outside the periphery of the White Sands Missile Range in
Speaker 1: south central New Mexico, which is the place you want
Speaker 1: to be if you're looking for the wily and elusive
Speaker 1: African oracs. I think that you might have even expressed
Speaker 1: at one point here that you intimated that you may
Speaker 1: have even seen one very near where we're at right now.
Speaker 1: If you were to take a straight line distance from
Speaker 1: where our keysters are on these seats right now, I
Speaker 1: have seen an orix no more than three yards sitting
Speaker 1: right now, right shot range. Uh, tom Bodett's here. Mike
Speaker 1: rules on the show before and people wrote in the
Speaker 1: guy wrote, Mike saw a comment where he said, um Man,
Speaker 1: that guy sounds just like tom Bodett. Hit it hit
Speaker 1: at my Yeah, like I said, dude, sounds just like
Speaker 1: Tombo Deett, So do a Tambo Deett line. This is
Speaker 1: Tombo Deett from Hotel six, and we'll leave the line
Speaker 1: on for you. That's pretty good man job. I really
Speaker 1: respect Tombo Debt, so I really took that as a compliment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Mike is actually a Tombo Deett fan. I think that'd
Speaker 1: be fair. Yeah, he's got a great backstory Homer, Alaska,
Speaker 1: and it's tied in with the singer Jewel. What was
Speaker 1: her tune? She had like one super famous tune, didn't she.
Speaker 1: She had a bunch of good ones. And you're a
Speaker 1: Michigan guy. She she did some of her training at
Speaker 1: that Interlocking Fine Arts camp. Well, and that's been there.
Speaker 1: I saw Gordon Lightfoot there first time I saw Gordon Lightfoot,
Speaker 1: but the the Interlocking camp as part of the whole
Speaker 1: story about Tombo Dett and jewel and the connection. Yeah, Homer,
Speaker 1: Alaska is the hometown of well Tombo that's not from Homer,
Speaker 1: I don't think, but but he moved up there, right,
Speaker 1: And then they had a fundraiser to send this jewel
Speaker 1: individual to Interlock to Interlock, and tom Boudette donated money
Speaker 1: toward it. Correct. I got one jewel thing, one jewel
Speaker 1: line that's rolling around in my head. I'm pretty sure
Speaker 1: it's that who Will Save Your Soul? That that was
Speaker 1: her big hit. Yeah, that's the I can't remember the
Speaker 1: name of the song, but hearing her little her voice
Speaker 1: kind of cracking a little bit as she sings that,
Speaker 1: I mean I I totally had a jewel crush going
Speaker 1: on for sure. Yeah. She had, you know, she had
Speaker 1: that like imperfection of that one crooked tooth on the
Speaker 1: on her top top shelf. I don't remember she had
Speaker 1: on her trademark. Yeah, it was like kind of like
Speaker 1: Cindy Crawford. She had that birthmark, right, and my wife's
Speaker 1: got one snaggle tooth. So I found that. I found
Speaker 1: that the fact that she wasn't just like this perfectly polished.
Speaker 1: Don't be staring at my wife. I'm not talking about
Speaker 1: you wife, talking about Gel. Start talking about my wife
Speaker 1: Snaggle too. No, I'm talking about Jewel. But I like
Speaker 1: the fact that, you know, she's like in the in
Speaker 1: the spotlight of Hollywood and she's just out there. I mean,
Speaker 1: she's a beautiful woman, of course, and very talented, and
Speaker 1: I always found it appealing thing that she had this
Speaker 1: imperfection that she was not sufficiently vain to want to
Speaker 1: pursue like a correction. You know. I saw that as
Speaker 1: just like a level of authenticity that want to be
Speaker 1: very attractive. She's a big Jewel fan. Uh yeah, for sure, man,
Speaker 1: I thought, yeah, I love the music. I loved her voice.
Speaker 1: I thought she was just a cool person in the
Speaker 1: Alaska thing too. You know, I've never been to Alaska
Speaker 1: at that point in my life, but I was just like, man,
Speaker 1: Shania Twain too, the same kind of thing, Like this
Speaker 1: woman from the rugged North who's just beautiful and has
Speaker 1: an incredible voice and so talented. And ye, Shni is
Speaker 1: out of Alaska too. Oh no, no, she's she's Canadian. Oh, Canadian, okay,
Speaker 1: but like that rugged northern thing. It's not even American.
Speaker 1: That's all right? Really. Yeah, my buddy Ronnie was all
Speaker 1: excited because Shania Twain has the same kind of dog
Speaker 1: he as, Okay, an Italian broco. I wonder if she
Speaker 1: ut as pretentious people would say, a Braco Italiano. Uh, Jeremy,
Speaker 1: can you say where you Are you allowed to say
Speaker 1: where you work? Yeah? Absolutely. I work for the National
Speaker 1: Wildlife Federation on the Regional Connectivity Coordinator because it's not
Speaker 1: like the government where you gotta y'all sly about where
Speaker 1: you work at all. You don't want to get in trouble.
Speaker 1: I'm happy, I'm happy talking about it. Yeah, that's that's right.
Speaker 1: I am a conservation professional, not currently representing any organization
Speaker 1: on this podcast. Yeah, it's Jeremy Romeo correct um. And
Speaker 1: you're the New Mexico. Well, I work at a New Mexico.
Speaker 1: But I represent, you know, a regional level. I worked
Speaker 1: for the National Wildlife Federation out of the Rocky Mountain
Speaker 1: Regional Center, so we have quite a few states that
Speaker 1: I that I work to promote and protect Wildlife Corridor
Speaker 1: as the Connectivity, which is a hot thing in conservation
Speaker 1: right now. Yeah, absolutely. You know, as as we know,
Speaker 1: wildlife move across multiple jurisdictions, and so when you're gonna
Speaker 1: sit down and really protect and prioritize these efforts, you
Speaker 1: really need to bring a robust group of stakeholders to
Speaker 1: the to the table. And that's something that's that's a
Speaker 1: pretty hot topic and we've been pretty successful in doing
Speaker 1: here in the landscape. And then um seth, yep, the
Speaker 1: flip flop no longer flesher. Who's fallen incredibly behind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's I blame on COVID. Yeah, when you flesh at
Speaker 1: the office and COVID comes, beaver fleshing grinds to a halt,
Speaker 1: which I could do in my garage. But it's just
Speaker 1: it's fun or yeah, I like when people are complaining
Speaker 1: about it in the office. You know. I recently played
Speaker 1: teen Wolf for my kids, Like when we have movie night,
Speaker 1: I tend to when we have movie night, I want
Speaker 1: to like they want to pick by was like wild pick.
Speaker 1: So I picked movies that I remember from being like
Speaker 1: in high school, even though they're in pre an element
Speaker 1: pre elementary and elementary. But somehow I don't line it
Speaker 1: up right. So I'll be like, I remember a movie
Speaker 1: when I was young, but it has some scenes in
Speaker 1: the the Uh, you know, he's got some scenes in it.
Speaker 1: And while watching Teen Wolf, this is the original Team Wolf,
Speaker 1: Michael J. Fox, do you know about this movie? I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's I don't think it's all the original.
Speaker 1: Do you know the premise? It's a duty. He's like,
Speaker 1: he turns into a wearwolf and then he gets like
Speaker 1: people like him. He's a dork, but then he's a
Speaker 1: werewolf and uh, he's really going to basketball. There's a
Speaker 1: girl he really there's a girl that like the neighborhood
Speaker 1: girl likes him, but he don't like her. There's a
Speaker 1: girl he really likes, but she's too good for him.
Speaker 1: He turns into a werewolf, gets super good at basketball,
Speaker 1: the mean girl likes him, then he like self discovers
Speaker 1: right in the end, he winds up with the neighborhood girl. Um.
Speaker 1: Watching it, I was thinking that we could do that
Speaker 1: same movie called The Flip Flop Flusher, where it's like,
Speaker 1: you're just a normal dude, then you become the flip
Speaker 1: flop Flasher and I think you're rul of ship, right, yea,
Speaker 1: because there's a big part of Team Wolf where Michael J.
Speaker 1: Fox he can win all the games, he doesn't even
Speaker 1: need his teammates, but his teammates start getting bummed out.
Speaker 1: So then in the end they play the championship and
Speaker 1: he plays it and he doesn't turn into the werewolf
Speaker 1: to win the championship, do it through regular old teamwork.
Speaker 1: So what would I win? Just win flushing contest or
Speaker 1: to just half the top. He'd come in just as
Speaker 1: you and not the flip up lasher. It's like you'd
Speaker 1: be like, I'm flashing this one as steth bro Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: um uh, explain White Sand missile Range in greater do
Speaker 1: you two who wants to take that one? We could
Speaker 1: probably tag team in a little bit. I mean we've
Speaker 1: been doing a little bit of homework. Um, because it's
Speaker 1: a it's an interesting story, man, it is an interesting story.
Speaker 1: So the wait stands Missile range is this massive chunk
Speaker 1: of country about in the in the neighborhood of two
Speaker 1: million acres hundred thirty miles by what do we figure
Speaker 1: out northwest or north south about and east and west
Speaker 1: was roughly forty I think, Yeah, So it's it's a
Speaker 1: long ass time to even drive around part of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: especially if you're like a Midwestern or by birth and
Speaker 1: you get out here and just see like how vast
Speaker 1: the expanses. And that's kind of the point. So when
Speaker 1: the Department of Defense was trying to figure out places
Speaker 1: to do things like test missiles, detonate the first nuclear bomb,
Speaker 1: atomic atomic bomb, thanks, they were looking for places where
Speaker 1: there weren't a lot of I can't tell you the
Speaker 1: difference between those two things. I think the same thing,
Speaker 1: but I'm not. I don't think that they are man
Speaker 1: isn't like a fish and fusion kind of thing. Yeah, me,
Speaker 1: I'm sure there will be some physicists who ways in
Speaker 1: on this and we can we can see what they
Speaker 1: have to say. Remember, in tenth grade, I was in
Speaker 1: science class. I don't remember what great I was in.
Speaker 1: I remember losing a lot of faith in my teacher
Speaker 1: because I was like, is it possible that you could
Speaker 1: hit you could be splitting firewood and hit it just right,
Speaker 1: that you split an atom and split an atom and
Speaker 1: causing atomic explosion and looking back on it, they were
Speaker 1: not able to answer that question. I think it's a
Speaker 1: thoughtful question, and now understand that you no matter how
Speaker 1: much fire would you split, you're not gonna split at
Speaker 1: will not split an atom. Yeah, I don't know. Man
Speaker 1: Like if you were to say, you know, drop a
Speaker 1: nuclear bomb, and drop an atomic bomb, in my mind different,
Speaker 1: it's different. So that's something I'll take a face value.
Speaker 1: So they're looking for a place where they have enough
Speaker 1: open country to be able to do some of this
Speaker 1: stuff that would be real dangerous if you have a
Speaker 1: bunch of people in proximity. And so when it comes
Speaker 1: to you know the history of things like testing atomic bombs,
Speaker 1: a lot of that were happened in places like the
Speaker 1: Arizon Strip, places like the Trinity Site, which is not
Speaker 1: terribly far from where we are right now, the Trinity
Speaker 1: Site being the place where they detonated the first of
Speaker 1: those bombs. And so the White Sands Missile Range is
Speaker 1: an area where they're they're all manners of testing of missiles, aircraft,
Speaker 1: um and all kinds of other stuff that the general public,
Speaker 1: including myself, probably has no idea about. But it's a
Speaker 1: vast chunk of d D country. And it's also the
Speaker 1: site of the original introduction of the African orcs, which
Speaker 1: is the species we've been hunting. Let's back up one step,
Speaker 1: because I just wanted to tell people, if you want
Speaker 1: to read it, really fascinating story about American history and warfare,
Speaker 1: the story of the Manhattan Project leading up to the
Speaker 1: Trinity Site test and the level of secrecy in manipulation
Speaker 1: that had to go into doing a surface test of
Speaker 1: an atomic weapon while having no one know that you
Speaker 1: just did that. Even people they were in the military
Speaker 1: in the area at the time thought. I think that
Speaker 1: they thought it was a munitions train exploded or something
Speaker 1: like that. They had some cover story like they touched
Speaker 1: off and atomic bomb, like the same bomb they used
Speaker 1: to destroy what it was like a little boy and
Speaker 1: big fat boy. Anyways, the same bomb they used to
Speaker 1: destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They touched off a version of
Speaker 1: it in New Mexico and kept and it remained a
Speaker 1: secret that they had the weapon. Yep. Yeah, And that
Speaker 1: spot it was a different place back then. It was
Speaker 1: a different a different time for sure, and that that
Speaker 1: spot where that occurred. So when I started with the
Speaker 1: Forest Service, I was down on the Lincoln National Forest
Speaker 1: where the headquarters is based in Alama Gordo, New Mexico,
Speaker 1: and the regional offices up in Albuquerque, so would oftentimes
Speaker 1: be traveling between Alama Gordo and Albuquerque, and there's a
Speaker 1: stretch of highway called Highway three eight that goes along
Speaker 1: the north side of the White Sands Missile Range and
Speaker 1: there's very little, um human development along that highway. It's
Speaker 1: pretty open country. So a long Highway three the route
Speaker 1: that I would take between Alama Gordo and Albuquerque. Um,
Speaker 1: you go along the north side of the White Sands
Speaker 1: Missile Range, and among the very few human developments along
Speaker 1: that stretch of highway is a rock shop. And the
Speaker 1: thing that the rock shop advertises on the side of
Speaker 1: the road most prominently is that they have trinitite available
Speaker 1: for sale. And trinitite is this um, mildly radioactive glass
Speaker 1: that was created by the detonation of that first bomb test.
Speaker 1: So you can go out there and there's like fragments
Speaker 1: of this class at the bomb site. And I've I've
Speaker 1: never yet had the opportunity to do the tour, but
Speaker 1: I know a couple of times a year, UM, the
Speaker 1: White Sands Missile Range offers public tours to go back
Speaker 1: and actually visit the Trinity site. Yeah, especially on the
Speaker 1: anniversary I believe, is that right? And I've I've heard
Speaker 1: that that you know, the date's coming up and it
Speaker 1: hasn't lined up to where could come down and make
Speaker 1: it happen. And I feel like I've missed missed an
Speaker 1: opportunity a few times to do that. But um, that
Speaker 1: site is, you know, as the crow flies, not terribly
Speaker 1: far from some of the spots we've been poking around
Speaker 1: looking for ORCX. Do you understand why? What's the story
Speaker 1: of how it came to be that they decided to
Speaker 1: cut some oracs loose in the White Sands missile range.
Speaker 1: So the history is that the state of New Mexico
Speaker 1: back in the late sixties and early seventies, in an
Speaker 1: effort to try to provide more big game hunting opportunity,
Speaker 1: was trying to identify portions of the state that could
Speaker 1: potentially support other big game hunting opportunities. But we're essentially
Speaker 1: unfilled um niches from a big game hunting perspectives, too
Speaker 1: severe the conditions. Yeah, and then and then essentially marry
Speaker 1: up the kind of ecological niche that was perceived to
Speaker 1: be available with a species that had the ability potentially
Speaker 1: to thrive in that portion of the landscape. So there's
Speaker 1: this kind of matchmaking going on and a lot of
Speaker 1: energy around the idea of trying to bring in exotic
Speaker 1: species to exist in portions of the state. And there's
Speaker 1: a handful of examples, and uh, the orcx being one
Speaker 1: that they successfully introduced, like taking an African antelope suited
Speaker 1: to deserts yep and and then they took the Barbary sheep. Ye.
Speaker 1: The Barbary was another which is in the North Africa right,
Speaker 1: a mountain animal from North Africa. And then there were
Speaker 1: two different ibex species, the Persian and the Siberian that
Speaker 1: they brought in. All these are all like drought tolerant species,
Speaker 1: and they looked at some and decided against it as well.
Speaker 1: I think they looked at the kudu and the coudoo
Speaker 1: was having some issues contracting diseases from cattle, so the
Speaker 1: kudo didn't work. And with the species that they did
Speaker 1: want to release, what I've read is that there's a
Speaker 1: federal law that prohibits the importation and release of exotic wildlife,
Speaker 1: and the way that the state worked around that was
Speaker 1: to bring them in and establish experimental populations and propagate
Speaker 1: offspring and captivity and then they were able to release
Speaker 1: the offspring of those imported orax for example. And there's
Speaker 1: a spot kind of on the west side of the
Speaker 1: missile range um Red Rock, where they were doing the
Speaker 1: initial captive breeding propagation of those first ninety or so
Speaker 1: orcs that they brought out and released on the missile range.
Speaker 1: That's somewhere they cut loose was it was ish and
Speaker 1: you know, guys correct me if I'm wrong here, you know,
Speaker 1: brushed up a little bit on this. So and it
Speaker 1: wasn't all at once. They were like adding them in
Speaker 1: kind of overtime supplementing the population, and then pretty quickly
Speaker 1: they got to be self sustaining. And you know, ecologically,
Speaker 1: one of the things that's cool about rix is that
Speaker 1: you know, they're able to reproduce year round, so they're
Speaker 1: very productive. You know, a cow will conceive, carry the pregnancy,
Speaker 1: deliver the calf, raised the calf for some period of time,
Speaker 1: and then she'll cycle again. But they're not constrained by
Speaker 1: seasonality the way a lot of the ungulates that we're
Speaker 1: used to thinking about in North America are When did
Speaker 1: they start? So they brought him in the sixties and seventies.
Speaker 1: They explode in numbers on this giant missile range which
Speaker 1: was very limited hunting, and then at some point someone
Speaker 1: must have gotten uneasy with what was going to happen
Speaker 1: because it didn't just let them overrun the whole damn state. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the the history, I mean, initially the motivation for the
Speaker 1: whole program was to provide hunting opportunity, and the fact
Speaker 1: that they intentionally selected the White Sands missile range as
Speaker 1: the release site, suggests to me that the intention was
Speaker 1: to have some hunting opportunity on White Sands missile range.
Speaker 1: And whether or not that's the case, I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: not super scoop them on all the details here, but
Speaker 1: it's certainly the case that the original population became very
Speaker 1: well established on White Sands missile Range and has provided
Speaker 1: a lot of hunting opportunity over the decades since. And
Speaker 1: to your point, the objective was to keep the population
Speaker 1: primarily contained to the White Sands missile range. So that's
Speaker 1: how we're here on what what in local vernacular, everybody
Speaker 1: calls the off range orc son uh que. Back up
Speaker 1: a moment to your use of the words skukum uh,
Speaker 1: what's your own what? How do you define the scukum.
Speaker 1: So I would think of scukum as being like, you
Speaker 1: are totally on point on a given topic topic in Alaska,
Speaker 1: particularly Southeast Alaska, UM where I think that word might
Speaker 1: come from. Maybe that would be interested in know the history,
Speaker 1: but don't check that you check that out, seth, Why
Speaker 1: are you sitting there while you're sitting there with a
Speaker 1: real bad cell phone service? Um it means good. Scugum
Speaker 1: is good. Okay. He'd be like, that's a scucum rig
Speaker 1: for fishing. Someone's like, hey, should I try this? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a scucum rig. Okay, good rig. I don't know
Speaker 1: what the hell it means. I was just curious. You
Speaker 1: have always I've only ever heard I've only ever heard
Speaker 1: in Southeast last they've only ever heard its mean good.
Speaker 1: So I took took note when you just use scuocum
Speaker 1: to mean like a good understanding of Yeah, like I
Speaker 1: think about it being like you're on point. So when
Speaker 1: it comes to nuclear versus atomic bombs, fever not scookum.
Speaker 1: I'd want to learn a little bit more about that.
Speaker 1: I looked that up. What'd you look up? Atomic versus
Speaker 1: nuclear bombs? Different atomic bombs are nuclear weapons, but not
Speaker 1: all nuclear weapons are atomic bombs. Hydrogen bombs are thermonuclear weapons,
Speaker 1: which is a different category. Remember when Oakley Sunglasses used
Speaker 1: to advertise as thermonuclear protection. No, you remember that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: they dudes it liked Oakley's a lot, Like a certain
Speaker 1: type of guy in high school liked Oakley's a lot
Speaker 1: and would have Oakley stickers on his truck and whatnot.
Speaker 1: And one of the stickers you'd put on your truck
Speaker 1: window would say Oakley Thermo Nuclear Protection, as though the
Speaker 1: implication being that should whiskey whiskey three breakout, uh, and
Speaker 1: you had your Oakleys on, you would not be blinded
Speaker 1: and would be able to see yourself, um shortly thereafter
Speaker 1: die of radiation radiation poison. And couldn't you argue that
Speaker 1: the sun is like a form of thermonuclear Oh maybe
Speaker 1: that's the oh one thing on the on the Oakley's.
Speaker 1: You know, they had those stalls in the mall where
Speaker 1: you'd walk in and and they were like all the
Speaker 1: rage and in the Grand the Grand Travers mall in
Speaker 1: Northwest Northwest, Lower Peninsula, Michigan. I was like begging my
Speaker 1: mom to get a pair of those sweet shades when
Speaker 1: I was in late elementary school and maybe fifth grade,
Speaker 1: and finally for my birthday, you know, she broke down.
Speaker 1: They were just ridiculously expensive for our family budget, and uh,
Speaker 1: she broke down and bought me a pair. And I
Speaker 1: thought they were so cool. I could not wait for
Speaker 1: like recess. And it didn't matter if it was raining
Speaker 1: out at recess. I don't want to have those sunglasses
Speaker 1: onto like strung playground and shore. Everybody in my red
Speaker 1: Oak least I could name off. I could name off
Speaker 1: the dudes in high school who had elementary school, I
Speaker 1: could name them off, and they they also had this.
Speaker 1: They were the kids that got to have Nikes their
Speaker 1: moms and buy him Nikes. They were the kids that
Speaker 1: got to have individually bagged Doritos in their lunch. They
Speaker 1: were the kids that got to have where they put
Speaker 1: the cheese in one compartment and the crackers in the
Speaker 1: art compartment. What do you call those things? They were
Speaker 1: the kinds of kids that had like Levi, actual Levi jeans,
Speaker 1: not tough skins and wranglers. They had Nike shoes, Dorito's,
Speaker 1: like all kinds of store bought shipping their lunch bag,
Speaker 1: and not like stuff their mom made you know what
Speaker 1: about Starter jackets was I was gonna go start jackets
Speaker 1: and the other one is not Nikes. But okay, I
Speaker 1: want I want to back up to name them right now.
Speaker 1: I don't want to give their last names. Nate stand Steve.
Speaker 1: I could name all these dudes last names. I remember
Speaker 1: who still and they had Michael and they had those
Speaker 1: Michael Jackson, Jackets, Kenny, Chris, Kenny, Chris and George or
Speaker 1: three that come in my mind. But you know, the shades. Like.
Speaker 1: The reason it's notable to me is it was such
Speaker 1: such a stretch because we had typically like not a
Speaker 1: bunch of this store bought lunch ingredients, for example. But
Speaker 1: the other thing besides Starter jackets, it wasn't the Nikes.
Speaker 1: It was the Adidas Sambas. Yeah, dude, the sambas. Where
Speaker 1: I was I'm just saying, like sambas and starter jackets,
Speaker 1: that was Those are the kids. Those the girl versions
Speaker 1: of the guys I'm talking about had rebox. Okay, we
Speaker 1: also had probably slightly slightly different like cultural subtleties to
Speaker 1: our respect, even though we're saying state pause, I'm a
Speaker 1: little bit of head of you. I'll tell you horrible
Speaker 1: I'll tell you I want to get back to talking
Speaker 1: about ORCS much of the next guy, I'll tell you
Speaker 1: horrible story. So I was never allowed to have any
Speaker 1: kind of nice stuff. I thought we were poor, but
Speaker 1: it turns out my parents just weren't stupid. Like I
Speaker 1: grew up, I grew up thinking out his poor even
Speaker 1: though we're like absolutely not poor. You know, we had
Speaker 1: like boats, My parents drove new cars, we had a
Speaker 1: big nice house. By thought, as a young kid, I
Speaker 1: thought we were poor because I couldn't have stupid ship.
Speaker 1: But it was not because they couldn't get it. They
Speaker 1: just were annoyed by it. Like we couldn't get we
Speaker 1: wouldn't get There's no way we're gonna get inn Atari
Speaker 1: machine like to play video games, Like there's no way
Speaker 1: my parents were gonna buy one of those. There's no
Speaker 1: way they were gonna buy like a nice television. There's
Speaker 1: no way they're gonna buy Levi's and rebox and whatnot.
Speaker 1: And I remember one time we went down to MC
Speaker 1: Sporting Goods and they had a pair of mismatched Nikes
Speaker 1: in a box for like no money. Because one shoe
Speaker 1: the right one, I can right left one of them
Speaker 1: had red smush marks and one of them had dark
Speaker 1: burnt orange slush mark. And it was a subtle difference,
Speaker 1: but there was a difference, and we could get him
Speaker 1: for like twenty some MT sporting goods. So here was
Speaker 1: my mom's finally like I really have a pair of
Speaker 1: because I'll buy those ones for you. And I'm like,
Speaker 1: no one will notice. No one noticed. I wasn't in
Speaker 1: I was in fifth or sixth grade. I wasn't at
Speaker 1: the schoolhouse. Five minutes someone noticed stand ate Steve. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they picked up on it like flies on ship. They
Speaker 1: were just on it, like they knew it, and they
Speaker 1: were they let you know commercial you keep wearing them.
Speaker 1: I remember, man, Probably not. I do remember there being
Speaker 1: like a little bit of a plan where my mom
Speaker 1: was gonna try to darken up that other stripe somehow.
Speaker 1: It's horrible. Well, being a parent, do you find that
Speaker 1: you have some of those same tendencies with your family?
Speaker 1: Now it depends why they want what they want, But no,
Speaker 1: I'll buy them like good outdoor stuff of two colored shoes.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't. Oh, I do lots of just a mess
Speaker 1: with them, though, like make them eat something they don't want.
Speaker 1: It just I just do Yeah, I just do mean
Speaker 1: stuff to him, just so they're like, I tell them
Speaker 1: someday when you're in college you're telling stories about how
Speaker 1: mean your dad was. You'll be glad I did this
Speaker 1: because you have a funny story. All right, So you're welcome. Kids.
Speaker 1: Where were we? Scook them? Good? Scook them? Hold on, yeah,
Speaker 1: scook them story about orcs am I doing a good
Speaker 1: job of using this appropriately. Okay, you am strong, brave
Speaker 1: or impressive? Does it give the etymology of the word?
Speaker 1: You know what that means? Look up the etymology of etymology? Hm,
Speaker 1: what entomology? Word history? Study of words? Where where they
Speaker 1: come from? From the etymology of the word. People say,
Speaker 1: what's the etymology of flip flop flusher? I'd say, well,
Speaker 1: he flushes in flip flops? Mid nineteen century? Chinook Jorgan
Speaker 1: oh Chinook? Yeah, Northwest Pacific northwest cool. It's a tribe
Speaker 1: in the Pacific Northwest. But that's why the guy I
Speaker 1: know it from is sim Shan, and they probably used
Speaker 1: to take big canoes and fight each other. If I
Speaker 1: had to guess the sim Shan and the Chinook. But
Speaker 1: he's simp Shan. His his people must have picked it
Speaker 1: up from the chinook High Simian people should start using
Speaker 1: it more often. Scoop them you're good and strong on
Speaker 1: a given topic. Okay, the scoopum story of the feel
Speaker 1: semi scookum on the history of orcs. Do you wand
Speaker 1: it real quick for people just to ease this back
Speaker 1: into the conversation about orcs, do you might really quick
Speaker 1: laying out what one of these things looks like? Who
Speaker 1: wants to do that? Mike, you haven't said Tombodet, will
Speaker 1: now explain, Oh man, what does it works look like? Uh?
Speaker 1: Dig deep into your bi biology training. Well, they are
Speaker 1: in terms of size like a mature bull. Orcs is
Speaker 1: roughly you the size of a cow elk. I would say, uh,
Speaker 1: they are probably slightly shorter in their body, but deeper
Speaker 1: like when you look at one, they're there their chest
Speaker 1: particularly like if you come up the leg, they are
Speaker 1: very deep from the bottom of the chest to the
Speaker 1: top of their back. They kind of look like a
Speaker 1: like a billboard, you know, standing there um. And they
Speaker 1: have really distinct markings, so we we say that they
Speaker 1: have like a clown face. They have a face that
Speaker 1: is is black, angelic white right with with striking white
Speaker 1: alongside the black. Yeah, is their face mostly white or
Speaker 1: mostly black? I'm trying to think of it now. It's
Speaker 1: got more a little probably a little more white than black.
Speaker 1: But what is the butterfly? Is that same butterflies white?
Speaker 1: But it's like two triangles that kind of at the
Speaker 1: middle of the face. Yeah, I just scunned one, but
Speaker 1: I can't remember. Makes its way up to its ears.
Speaker 1: Really pretty. Their their bodies are tan, mostly tan in color.
Speaker 1: Their bellies are white, but they have a black stripe
Speaker 1: that runs along their belly. Uh. And then as far
Speaker 1: as headgear, they got big sweat socks on. Yeah. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: they have big white socks of black legs and then
Speaker 1: big white like a big white band like a sock band.
Speaker 1: Reminds me of the old baseball socks I used to
Speaker 1: wear a little. Then they got some horns and then
Speaker 1: the Yeah, the head gear is like a really striking
Speaker 1: element of of them. Uh, long straight, it's like two swords,
Speaker 1: sword like horns, and they're they're especially from a distance,
Speaker 1: I think that the horns will look jet black when
Speaker 1: you get up to them. Once you've harvested one, I
Speaker 1: think they look almost a little bit more dull, but
Speaker 1: maybe they're just a little dusty to once you know,
Speaker 1: once that business is done, there's an age piece to
Speaker 1: it too, with the darkness. Then, yeah, the juveniles will
Speaker 1: have like a a relatively kind of dusty looking horns.
Speaker 1: So the one, the one that you shot, is relatively
Speaker 1: young bull. We'll get into those those details a little
Speaker 1: bit more. But when you look at the tips of
Speaker 1: those horns, you can see where that initial sheath is
Speaker 1: starting to wear away. And if you get into one
Speaker 1: that's that's an older animal, it'll have more of a
Speaker 1: smooth and polished and darker kind of horn to it,
Speaker 1: and a long horn. On orcs, like Jeremy, you kill
Speaker 1: the orcs long and some of the longest horns or females. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, the females tend to have, in my experience,
Speaker 1: some pretty long thin or horns, and you know, the
Speaker 1: bulls tend to be a little shorter, hold a little
Speaker 1: bit more mass like yours did um and like like
Speaker 1: Carl said, the older they get, they get a little
Speaker 1: bit more polished. The female hour was you know, lucky
Speaker 1: enough to harvest, had some She was third eight inches long.
Speaker 1: She flared out right at twenty four not to put
Speaker 1: numbers on it, but it was just a beautiful specimen.
Speaker 1: She was polished all the way down and she even
Speaker 1: had a little bit of like ivory tips there at
Speaker 1: the tip of her horns. Yeah. Yeah, real pretty and
Speaker 1: a big whopper is mid forties. Well yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: like if for bulls, if you shot a forty inch bull,
Speaker 1: people would be like, that is you know, that is
Speaker 1: the orcs of of a lifetime kind of like, you know,
Speaker 1: that's the that's that's one eight white tail. I think
Speaker 1: that thirty to forties what I'm seeing is being the average. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and where were we in terms of the one you
Speaker 1: got in terms of the story. I just wanted to
Speaker 1: real quick fill people on what they look like. Well,
Speaker 1: I think Mike's doing an awesome job of lining out
Speaker 1: the appearance of the orcs. Um. One one piece that
Speaker 1: we haven't talked about those that paint brush tail. Oh,
Speaker 1: that's something that's something that always stands out and um,
Speaker 1: especially when you're glass and for them, they've got this
Speaker 1: tail that like the tip of the tail it looks
Speaker 1: like it could almost drag on the ground, and it's
Speaker 1: got these maybe twelve inch or longer hairs that extend
Speaker 1: from probably halfway down the tail to the tail tip.
Speaker 1: The whole the whole length of the tail is probably
Speaker 1: in the neighborhood of eighteen inches or so, and then
Speaker 1: those hairs extend significantly farther beyond that, and it seems
Speaker 1: like when they're on their feet, that tail is just
Speaker 1: constantly swooshing, so a lot of times in your glass,
Speaker 1: and especially once the heat of the day has picked
Speaker 1: up and you're looking through that heat mirage, you know,
Speaker 1: you're trying your your search images like that that kind
Speaker 1: of cream colored body, and if you see that that
Speaker 1: flickering tail, that fly fly swatter tail kind of blacking
Speaker 1: out a portion of the shape in the distance, that
Speaker 1: can be one of the tell tale things that you're
Speaker 1: looking at an oryx as opposed to a similarly colored cow.
Speaker 1: And we have encountered a number of cattle on this
Speaker 1: trip that have some striking resemblance to marks in various ways.
Speaker 1: But but the tail is one of the things that
Speaker 1: can definitely give them away from a long distance. If
Speaker 1: I could spin back to a couple of the numbers
Speaker 1: some of the population just to throw that out. So
Speaker 1: they said between nineteen seventy seven ninety three, as you mentioned,
Speaker 1: car were released, they expected that to reach about six
Speaker 1: hundred animals on Wismer and by two things White Sands
Speaker 1: missile range, and by two thousand and one the population
Speaker 1: had peaked to about between four and six thousand. And
Speaker 1: now we're looking at it and they say currently the
Speaker 1: population is between three to four thousand. And the information
Speaker 1: Jeremy's quoting is from a New Mexico Department of Game
Speaker 1: and Fish Wildlife. Note, So if somebody's really curious what
Speaker 1: they look like, that would be a place to go
Speaker 1: and get a page or two of information about or
Speaker 1: in New Mexico and see a picture of one. Does it?
Speaker 1: Does it? Do? You guys know what year they started
Speaker 1: allowing people to hunt for him? Well, they said they
Speaker 1: already by the mides. The overabundance had prompted the game
Speaker 1: department in Wismer to start to create hunting opportunities. So
Speaker 1: what when we say that I'm down here hunting right
Speaker 1: now hunt for orcs. I drew what's called an off
Speaker 1: range hunt. And Carl mentioned off range hunts a minute ago.
Speaker 1: So ricks hunting like in the general vernacular of ricks hunting,
Speaker 1: if you say like I drew an ORCS tag. Uh.
Speaker 1: People in the know will know that you're talking about
Speaker 1: New Mexico. UM. They will say to you immediately off
Speaker 1: range round range. On range is I don't want to
Speaker 1: say it's cooler, but on range is much more difficult
Speaker 1: to draw correct correct And why is that? Well, it's
Speaker 1: it's there is a whole bunch of them. Well, there's
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of them. And of course, you know
Speaker 1: White Sands Missile Range is an active military installation and
Speaker 1: so there are a lot of things going on on
Speaker 1: that installation, and so any of the hunts that are
Speaker 1: on the range require really close coordination between New Mexico
Speaker 1: game and fish and the missile range. And you know,
Speaker 1: that level of complexity to kind of work hunts and
Speaker 1: around missions UM, I think makes makes it really difficult
Speaker 1: to hold lots and lots of hunts on the range.
Speaker 1: So there are much you know, the hunting opportunities are
Speaker 1: far fewer on the range, and so there's more orcs
Speaker 1: on the range because you know, there there's just not
Speaker 1: as many tags, there as many hunting raortunities as what
Speaker 1: you drew here off range. When you so if you
Speaker 1: draw an on range or its tag, which means you
Speaker 1: draw a tag to hunt on White Sands missile Range. Um,
Speaker 1: you and everyone with you has to go through a
Speaker 1: background check. Yeah, so my wife drew a once in
Speaker 1: a lifetime hunt. But now we're getting I gotta explain that. Okay,
Speaker 1: now I'll do that. I'll do I think I can
Speaker 1: handle this one. There are a variety of hunts that
Speaker 1: the cur on White Sands missile range. There are broken
Speaker 1: horn hunts, and you can apply for this. Anybody listening
Speaker 1: to this show. I think you can go if they
Speaker 1: can pass it back. Well, no, you need to. You
Speaker 1: don't need to pass the background check to apply, but
Speaker 1: if you get drawn, they can apply. I don't know
Speaker 1: you can apply. Anyone could go on here and fill
Speaker 1: out the thing and say I want to apply for
Speaker 1: a White Sands an no range hunt. You can apply
Speaker 1: for a broken horn hunt, which means you can only
Speaker 1: shooting orcs with one busted horn that is not once
Speaker 1: in a lifetime. You can get it again later. You
Speaker 1: can apply for a non a once in a lifetime
Speaker 1: ORCS hunt, which means you can pick any orcs you want.
Speaker 1: Then when you draw that, you're done for your life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've been over here shaking my head. I think all
Speaker 1: of that was correct. Now, can you go from getting
Speaker 1: the once in a lifetime to a broken horn? So,
Speaker 1: which which I think is one of the things if
Speaker 1: you look at drawing odds for broken horns, it's not like,
Speaker 1: oh man, it's you know, it's really easy to draw
Speaker 1: an on range broken horn hunt because everybody that's ever
Speaker 1: drawn once in a lifetime range hunt then becomes more
Speaker 1: likely to apply on the range for broken horn hunts. So,
Speaker 1: and then there's also hunts, as I understand it now,
Speaker 1: there are all manner of hunts that the military puts on.
Speaker 1: They put on a hunt, they have tags available to
Speaker 1: Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, they have tags available to people
Speaker 1: that work there. There there may be I'd have to
Speaker 1: look at the at the book there there may be
Speaker 1: an active duty veteran hunt, although that a special draw
Speaker 1: for them. There are also rics on some other military
Speaker 1: installations in New Mexico, like the McGregor Range, which is
Speaker 1: part of Fort Bless And so I get a little
Speaker 1: confused on the details sometimes regarding active duty hunts and
Speaker 1: the returning Iraq and Afghanistan veteran hunts. But there there
Speaker 1: there are a number of opportunities for military folks, and
Speaker 1: then there there are population management or hunts that you
Speaker 1: have to have the clearance to go. You have to
Speaker 1: have security clearance to go on range, which generally means
Speaker 1: that you are somebody who in some capacity works on
Speaker 1: the range and has already passed all of the security
Speaker 1: So if you actively hold security clearance. There are sort
Speaker 1: of like these emergency hunts where you can go out
Speaker 1: and they use it to go out and get orcs
Speaker 1: that are yeah stuff column necessarily emergency, but they're used
Speaker 1: as a population management tool. So when you apply and
Speaker 1: you and you land. So you apply and you get
Speaker 1: an on range hunt, which is not what we have.
Speaker 1: You get an on range hunt, then you gotta submit
Speaker 1: and go through security clearance. Yeah, and you and your
Speaker 1: hunting buddies, then you have a three day season. Well
Speaker 1: so yeah, I mean it's you do a number of
Speaker 1: things through that application process. You know, some pre training
Speaker 1: about being on the missile range where there's always a
Speaker 1: concern about unexploded ordinance. Yeah, they told you if you
Speaker 1: didn't drop it, don't pick it up. My favorite quote
Speaker 1: from the training was the guy was like pretty much
Speaker 1: oils down to like, if you didn't drop that thing,
Speaker 1: I don't even think about picking of them. It could
Speaker 1: blow you up. Um. But yeah, so you uh my
Speaker 1: wife's hunt, so she drew a once in a lifetime
Speaker 1: hunt on the range. Um. We show up at the
Speaker 1: gate early in the morning. You know, they tell you
Speaker 1: when to be there. You end up in a big
Speaker 1: line of cars with all the other people. How many
Speaker 1: tag holders are rolling in there on that day? I
Speaker 1: think around fifty is my record. And they all got
Speaker 1: two buddies with them or whatever. Three probably it's like
Speaker 1: maimum it is right. It is a maximum of the
Speaker 1: hunter plus three guests, so it's basically never more than four. Um.
Speaker 1: All the guests have to do the background checked. Everybody
Speaker 1: has to be checked, and they like, you know there's
Speaker 1: this is all pre checked. Yeah, yeah, that's all ahead
Speaker 1: of time. Then you show up at the gate. You know,
Speaker 1: they may what an enormous amount of work for somebody, right,
Speaker 1: and you have to like you have to do things like, uh,
Speaker 1: submit the serial number of the firearms that you're gonna take.
Speaker 1: You know, you're you're not allowed to take additional firearms
Speaker 1: outside of those. You're limited to a two rifles, no photos,
Speaker 1: no recording equipment. Right do they check your firearm one
Speaker 1: you get on range. I do not recall that we
Speaker 1: got checked, but I have certainly heard stories of people
Speaker 1: getting checked. I know, I've heard stories of other folks
Speaker 1: showing up like and having their cooler because they're down
Speaker 1: their camping or whatever, you know, and they have some
Speaker 1: beer in the cooler. Well, that's against the range rules,
Speaker 1: so they won't let you on with that beer. You know,
Speaker 1: you gotta you gotta throw that away. So it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's pretty rigorous right there at the gate, just getting on,
Speaker 1: and they check everybody in and look at everybody's I
Speaker 1: d s. And they do all that stuff. And then
Speaker 1: you proceed to a little sort of hunt organization area
Speaker 1: and everybody gets out of their truck and and then
Speaker 1: you stand there and listen to a briefing, so they
Speaker 1: really sort of repeat all the stuff that they've already
Speaker 1: provided you written material on you know about I mean
Speaker 1: a little bit about orcs and you know their anatomy
Speaker 1: so that you're effective at at shooting them, which I
Speaker 1: think will probably get into. But you know, also again
Speaker 1: about unexploded ordinance and being very careful and they review
Speaker 1: a hunt map with you, because there are places on
Speaker 1: the range that require that that either are closed because
Speaker 1: they are known to have unexploded ordinance, you know, and
Speaker 1: a high density of it, and you can't go in
Speaker 1: there because dangerous, or that there's some active you know,
Speaker 1: military exercise or or operations experiments and aliens and stuff.
Speaker 1: I don't know about that testing alien aircraft something, but
Speaker 1: you know. So so there's there's all a number of
Speaker 1: places even when you're on range. It's like if you
Speaker 1: if you are caught going in there, you will immediately
Speaker 1: be escorted off the range and probably lucky if that's
Speaker 1: the only consequence that that comes of it. And even
Speaker 1: when you leave, they look at your phone. I've you know,
Speaker 1: I've I've heard that's another sort of thing that i've
Speaker 1: i've heard has happened. Uh, it didn't happen to us. Um,
Speaker 1: like no one reviewed your your record and my you know,
Speaker 1: my recollection. And again, if if you draw one of
Speaker 1: these hunts, don't listen to this podcasts and not read
Speaker 1: any of the information they send you. I'm good. I'm
Speaker 1: I actually recall that they they now I believe, require
Speaker 1: you to have a cell phone so that if they
Speaker 1: lose track of you or you know, some of the
Speaker 1: roads on the range are as rough as things that
Speaker 1: we drove to this week. You know, if you get
Speaker 1: stuck back there, you have a or chance of getting help. Um.
Speaker 1: My recollection is they told us you can take a photo,
Speaker 1: you can take photos of the rics, but they don't
Speaker 1: want anything in the photos, Like they don't want big
Speaker 1: panoramic skyline kind of stuff. You know. It's like if
Speaker 1: you're standing there kind of looking down at the orcs,
Speaker 1: you know, with with dirt, you know, juniverse, whatever it
Speaker 1: is kind of the ground, that's okay, but you know,
Speaker 1: don't don't drive around and take photos of anything other
Speaker 1: than your rix. Don't take any video period, you know,
Speaker 1: and when you do take pictures of the rics, make
Speaker 1: sure that that those photographs are, you know, just that
Speaker 1: limited to that sort of small field of view. And
Speaker 1: when you go through all this rigmarole, you drive out
Speaker 1: of there and all of a sudden it's just or
Speaker 1: standing everywhere. Uh. I don't know that I would say
Speaker 1: that that was necessarily our experienced success strates are in
Speaker 1: the nineties. It's it's interesting because of course, you so
Speaker 1: one thing to come back too quick? Is you mentioned
Speaker 1: three days? So my wife's hunt, that was what all
Speaker 1: that I just described was Friday morning and then we
Speaker 1: had I believe we had to be off range by
Speaker 1: the end of shooting light on Sunday. So really I mean,
Speaker 1: and really the briefing and stuff takes up most of
Speaker 1: that Friday morning, so it's really about two and a
Speaker 1: half days of hunting that you get on that once
Speaker 1: in a lifetime hunt. So there's some there's some pressure,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean by the end of my wife
Speaker 1: shot hers on Saturday afternoon, and by Saturday afternoon you're going, like,
Speaker 1: you know, we want to make something work out here,
Speaker 1: because the once in a lifetime element doesn't have anything
Speaker 1: to do with whether you actually harvest in the animal
Speaker 1: or not. So did she get like a big giant toad. No,
Speaker 1: she got one very similar to the to the one
Speaker 1: you harvested this week. But as far as what it
Speaker 1: was like kind of interesting because of course, now you've
Speaker 1: got fifty hunter right at the hunt briefing area, and
Speaker 1: there's a there can be a bit of a race
Speaker 1: two their trucks to kind of like get out there
Speaker 1: and find, you know, the orics close to the road.
Speaker 1: We we kind of opted out of that. We were
Speaker 1: just kind of like, you know what, we'll mosey back
Speaker 1: to our trucks. We'll we'll let this, you know, this
Speaker 1: rush of of folks clear out, and then we'll take
Speaker 1: off to some areas that you know, we had gotten
Speaker 1: advice from people to look at, and we'll leave the
Speaker 1: light on for you, right. And so we got we
Speaker 1: you know, we did get back there the first afternoon
Speaker 1: and got up kind of on top of the you know,
Speaker 1: cooler in the bed of the truck and broke out
Speaker 1: some glass and pretty quickly found some animals and and uh,
Speaker 1: we spent I've actually probably never spent that much time
Speaker 1: within two hundred yards of a group of animals that
Speaker 1: we wanted to harvest one of and and we never
Speaker 1: got a shot because of what. Uh they were in
Speaker 1: a really wide open area and we made a good stock,
Speaker 1: but the shooting conditions were such that the grass was
Speaker 1: tall enough we couldn't she couldn't lay down and shoot
Speaker 1: off of her pack, so we had to try to
Speaker 1: get up just a little bit. But but I mean,
Speaker 1: like there's really nothing between us and the Yorks other
Speaker 1: than you know, ten inch tall grass, and so trying
Speaker 1: not to be obvious, but but getting high enough and
Speaker 1: a solid enough rest to get her a shot. And
Speaker 1: then kind of what would happen would would be there
Speaker 1: were enough animals that one that we would want, you know,
Speaker 1: would get out in the perfect spot, and by the
Speaker 1: time we got set up and she got on that one,
Speaker 1: another one would walk in front of it, or it
Speaker 1: will walk back into the group. So it just it
Speaker 1: was one of those weird kind of situations where you're,
Speaker 1: you know, you're just like for two hours, you're like,
Speaker 1: any second, this is going to all come together. This
Speaker 1: is a comfortable range, you know, this is really sort
Speaker 1: of confident shooting area for my wife, who's quite handy
Speaker 1: with a rifle. But um, it just never happened. And
Speaker 1: then we as it was getting dark, we tried to
Speaker 1: get a little bit more aggressive, and of course that
Speaker 1: would which you know, I tried to get more aggressive
Speaker 1: and and get it to come together, and it didn't.
Speaker 1: They have a reputation for going down and getting up
Speaker 1: and running off. Well, you know, Carl may actually be
Speaker 1: better to tackle the anatomy, but but they are. They
Speaker 1: they have a very interesting anatomy that is substantially different
Speaker 1: from North American deer species. Yeah, I mean they do
Speaker 1: that that deep chest that Mike was talking about. I
Speaker 1: think it leaves you a lot of opportunity to place
Speaker 1: what you think is a good shot and have it
Speaker 1: not end up being lethal. And they're also just a
Speaker 1: tough animal, you know, so that that build that they have. UM.
Speaker 1: The advice generally that that you hear when it comes
Speaker 1: to shot placement on an oors is if you think about,
Speaker 1: like on a white tail, for example, putting those cross
Speaker 1: here sort of tight behind the shoulder. UM. You'd want
Speaker 1: to be farther forward with that and maybe even a
Speaker 1: little bit lower UM. And then when you take that
Speaker 1: first shot, if you're fortunate enough to put the animal down.
Speaker 1: I think it's very advisable based on a lot of
Speaker 1: anecdotes I have both heard and personally experienced to be
Speaker 1: ready for a follow up shot because I have I've
Speaker 1: personally seen animal be knocked down off their feet by
Speaker 1: a shot, lie there on the ground for a handful
Speaker 1: of seconds, and then kick their feet a few times,
Speaker 1: jump back up, and then run to the horizon. So
Speaker 1: high degree of um conservatism with your your willingness to
Speaker 1: follow up like air. On the side of multiple shots,
Speaker 1: I would say, be liberal with your follow up shots.
Speaker 1: Be liberal with your follow up shots. That's a good
Speaker 1: way putting it in. Conservative with your um celebrations. Yes, yea,
Speaker 1: so we had so that breaks down. That's pretty good
Speaker 1: job range. Oh. Yes, to Carl's anatomy lesson there, I
Speaker 1: would say that I would add that, in addition to
Speaker 1: their chest being very deep, their necks are very deep,
Speaker 1: and the location of their spine actually dips kind of
Speaker 1: far down into their body, and so this big hump
Speaker 1: of shoulder that makes up you know, the depth that
Speaker 1: you're looking at them in profile, has processes or like
Speaker 1: almost fin raise of bone that stick up off of it.
Speaker 1: And I think that it is not uncommon spinal processes.
Speaker 1: I think they came right, Yeah, I think I think
Speaker 1: it is not uncommon for them to get hit up
Speaker 1: high in those processes of bones sticking off the spine,
Speaker 1: and that kind of creates shock in the spine, knocks
Speaker 1: them down, gives them the appearance of being stone dead.
Speaker 1: And then as a lot of white tail hunters even
Speaker 1: have experience, you know, if you shoot just above or
Speaker 1: just below the spine with a rifle, like you can
Speaker 1: have that happen, right, the deer just looks dead for
Speaker 1: a minute or two minutes and then just pops up
Speaker 1: runs away. So I think my suspicion is that that
Speaker 1: is a kind of a common thing that occurs with ORYX.
Speaker 1: So we had we did not have the en range
Speaker 1: hunt for everybody else who does not like the other
Speaker 1: thing you can apply for when you go online to apply,
Speaker 1: you apply for like the broken horn on range, the
Speaker 1: once in a lifetime on range, YadA YadA, or you
Speaker 1: just get a straight up off range tag. And the
Speaker 1: off range tag is good for the entire state, except
Speaker 1: the range spatial is good for anywhere who was not
Speaker 1: a bunch of them. Yeah, and those those other military installations,
Speaker 1: and of course you can't go on those places that
Speaker 1: are specifically excluded. There's some research areas, and so it's good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's good for not on the military installations, not on
Speaker 1: any kind of thing that would otherwise be closed to hunting,
Speaker 1: but it's good for all public lands um in the state.
Speaker 1: Though the activity in the population is kind of centered
Speaker 1: around the missile range, um private land, off range private land.
Speaker 1: Anyone can go buy a tag at any time and
Speaker 1: shooting orcs on private land year round. I didn't know
Speaker 1: that little detail till yesterday. So when you get an
Speaker 1: off range tag like what I had, it's good private
Speaker 1: or public off range and they run the hunts. They
Speaker 1: used to run the hunts year round, so every month,
Speaker 1: for every month they issue about a D sixty tags.
Speaker 1: They now only run it ten months out of the
Speaker 1: year April and May. They take it off for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: as you want to go turkey hunt, they take turkey
Speaker 1: season off. No, I think it's it's associated with the
Speaker 1: draw because you have to apply for the license, so
Speaker 1: there has to be a period, you know where, Like
Speaker 1: so our draw was in April, right, Well, they couldn't
Speaker 1: We couldn't call They couldn't call you up in in
Speaker 1: April basically and say oh hey, it's the twenty April
Speaker 1: and you drew an orc's Yeah, but it's easy to
Speaker 1: that's not the answer because if that was the case,
Speaker 1: then you would just do the draw and issue April
Speaker 1: in May for the whole year ahead. YEA. But hunting
Speaker 1: license because about the hunting license expires, I think that
Speaker 1: you think it is related to that. That's that That's
Speaker 1: been my understanding again, maybe not totally scoop them on. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: Now that you put it that way, I like it,
Speaker 1: and I think that you would have without divulging details
Speaker 1: about you, I think that you would have reason to
Speaker 1: understand sure through proximity. I have a lot of conversations
Speaker 1: about talks a lot about hunting and fishing in Mexic
Speaker 1: with people who are very knowledgeable. So, uh, every month,
Speaker 1: ten months a year they hand out right now, like
Speaker 1: what one believe, they give out a hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: tags and your tag is good for one month. So
Speaker 1: in a lot of areas where you get used to
Speaker 1: like deer seasons, whatever, it's a month long, too much long.
Speaker 1: It is always rac season. And those orcs that are
Speaker 1: off range seem to be very aware of the fact
Speaker 1: that people are trying to get them because they live
Speaker 1: with it year round. It's always Oris hunting season, and
Speaker 1: they really really overreact. Two sounds of trucks appropriately, they responded,
Speaker 1: Probably a dude perched up on a safari rack in
Speaker 1: the back of a pickup. It was cause for leaving
Speaker 1: not only the area, but cause for leaving the county.
Speaker 1: Draw proportionate response from the orcs or returning to the
Speaker 1: range exceedingly wary, and perhaps they have a sense of
Speaker 1: where it's safe to be. It would seem that way, Yeah,
Speaker 1: relatively safe anyway. Yeah, they have a sense of what
Speaker 1: direction to go when you get after him. So we
Speaker 1: showed up to hunt, and I had what these guys
Speaker 1: have called themselves and I stand by at the O
Speaker 1: team because I was probably the first at first, I'm
Speaker 1: a first time RIX hunter who was being able to
Speaker 1: hunt with three friends who all are seasoned the rics hunters, Like,
Speaker 1: how many hunts have been on Jeremy, Probably about a
Speaker 1: half dozen, six or seven, And how many of you
Speaker 1: gotten personally? I've gotten one personally and you I've gotten too,
Speaker 1: and probably about a half a dozen others other haunts
Speaker 1: that were successful. Yeah, I would say, I mean similar.
Speaker 1: So I've shot one and I've probably been not with
Speaker 1: half a dozen hunts total. And you know, I certainly
Speaker 1: would acknowledge there's a ton of people who have like
Speaker 1: infinitely more experience. But the team that we've assembled, I
Speaker 1: think there's good chemistry and a just a good degree
Speaker 1: of um like the right personalities and some people that
Speaker 1: have good game eyes. So I would say, like we're
Speaker 1: probably not like the varsity level in terms of RIX experience.
Speaker 1: But we're we have a trio here. People have spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time glassing and you know what we're
Speaker 1: looking for. Um. So I'm sure there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: people listening to this who would be more scoop um
Speaker 1: than we are when it comes to Oric's hunting. But
Speaker 1: we're I would say, like at a at a proficient level,
Speaker 1: describe or hunting well. To be honest with you, the
Speaker 1: time I've spent looking at Orix, um has I probably
Speaker 1: spent more time looking through glass at Orix when I've
Speaker 1: been hunting deer or elk than when I've been hunting Rix.
Speaker 1: So UM A lot of the same strategies, like trying
Speaker 1: to get out there, find a good vantage point. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, I think in an ideal situation, you would
Speaker 1: identify the location of Rix before they see you. I
Speaker 1: know a lot of people spend a lot of time
Speaker 1: driving driving roads and looking for him from the vehicles.
Speaker 1: I think, you know, and we've we've spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time driving around just because the area is so
Speaker 1: vast and the places that we want to hunt are
Speaker 1: far from each other. But like the idea of getting
Speaker 1: out away from the vehicle, getting up high looking through glass,
Speaker 1: hopefully finding an animal before it's detected you, which is
Speaker 1: one of the downsides I think of essentially road hunting.
Speaker 1: You know, oftentimes you're gonna be jumping up in orcs
Speaker 1: with the truck and and hoping to bail out and
Speaker 1: get a shot at it. And to me, like, I
Speaker 1: would prefer a hunt where you're standing on your feet
Speaker 1: looking through a pair of binoculars on a tripod, finding
Speaker 1: an ORCX, planning a move and getting in there. I
Speaker 1: think Mike, Mike put it really well. He said something
Speaker 1: like getting in there and tangling with them. You just
Speaker 1: gotta get in there, get in there and mix it up.
Speaker 1: I think that that puts it really well, man. And
Speaker 1: that's you know, for me, and I think for for us,
Speaker 1: like that's the that's the way that we like to hunt, man,
Speaker 1: But that that gets a little bit, that gets a
Speaker 1: little bit complicated because of the landscape. So the first
Speaker 1: big time the conditions, Yeah, the first orcs we found
Speaker 1: on this trip that wasn't on range, So we're up
Speaker 1: on a glass and knob where I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: half of what you're looking at on range we're actually
Speaker 1: like staring down the fence line from on high and
Speaker 1: you're like, you're looking down there's a there's a fence
Speaker 1: line that's been cleared, like a very clear demarcation line,
Speaker 1: and half of what we can see is on range.
Speaker 1: Half what we can see is off range, and there's
Speaker 1: a big difference. I mean, there's a bunch of orcs
Speaker 1: on range. Maybe I don't know what we saw the
Speaker 1: at first afternoon and next morning we saw sixteen close. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there was seventeen at one point in time,
Speaker 1: all visible on one side of the fence. Jeremy and
Speaker 1: I were confident we had seventeen at one, you know,
Speaker 1: basically at one time, and then Mike finally finds one
Speaker 1: maybe two yards on the other side of the fence. Right.
Speaker 1: We felt saw it from three and a half miles away,
Speaker 1: and you think, like, wow, if you can see it
Speaker 1: from three and a half miles away, it must be
Speaker 1: wide open. That's not the case. It's like you get
Speaker 1: glimpses of stuff from way far away, if you're up
Speaker 1: high or whatever. You just get these little glimpses and
Speaker 1: you realize that you might only the thing might only
Speaker 1: be visible like five percent of the time one percent
Speaker 1: of the time, I don't know. You can watch for
Speaker 1: hours and there's like one moment when there it is
Speaker 1: and then it's not. But then you get down on
Speaker 1: its level and there's nowhere to get up and like
Speaker 1: kind of like snipe in at him. There's just nothing
Speaker 1: you can do. You just gotta go in there. It's
Speaker 1: all stuff higher than your head. And even though you
Speaker 1: cause some little random glamp glimpse through the gaps and
Speaker 1: the stuff, at the end of the day, you gotta
Speaker 1: get in there. There's like no place to go wait,
Speaker 1: there's just you gotta go in there and find him.
Speaker 1: He's not gonna come to you. You gotta mix it up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, like you're gonna get him. You know, he's
Speaker 1: not gonna You're not gonna get him at the Old crossing,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean it's difficult, you know, being kind
Speaker 1: of someone of a spot or two. You know, you
Speaker 1: see these animals, you know, the hunter and whoever else
Speaker 1: takes off after the animal to put on a potential stock.
Speaker 1: And as a spotter, you really want to be, you know,
Speaker 1: dead set on that animal and provide the most intel
Speaker 1: to that hunter to make sure they can they have
Speaker 1: that they can have a successful stock. And when you're
Speaker 1: sitting behind the glass, you know the contour of that
Speaker 1: landscape looks so flat, but when those animals start moving,
Speaker 1: they just almost instantly disappear, you know, and so it
Speaker 1: can get real frustrating as a spot or as you're
Speaker 1: you know, trying to lay down the groundwork for that
Speaker 1: hunter closing the distance, but you lose sight of those
Speaker 1: animals and you lose sight of them. For I think
Speaker 1: Mike and I, you know, as you guys were hunting,
Speaker 1: as you were stalking in on your orics, there were
Speaker 1: moments where we would see the orix completely broadside, you know,
Speaker 1: as plain as day, and then he would disappear and
Speaker 1: we would for ten fifteen minutes have have no idea
Speaker 1: where he was, and you would just be panning across
Speaker 1: and every now and then, you know, going back to Carl's,
Speaker 1: you know, the polishing of the horns. You would see
Speaker 1: these yuccas going back and forth and shaking, and then
Speaker 1: you would just see a little shine with the tips
Speaker 1: of the horns and you would occasionally glance that, you know,
Speaker 1: and then the orcs would move. And then there was
Speaker 1: a couple of instances where we were like, well, I
Speaker 1: think they're gone, you know, like I don't know what
Speaker 1: we're gonna do. But all of a sudden you would
Speaker 1: see something barely, you know, flicker and and you would
Speaker 1: think that it was the wide open and if there
Speaker 1: were an orics there you would see it. But he's
Speaker 1: just behind the contour that makes him almost invisible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the one with the one we got onto where we
Speaker 1: went in after it. We spooked that probably fifty yards
Speaker 1: I think when it jumped up it was probably sub
Speaker 1: fifty and when it crossed out in front of us
Speaker 1: at a gallop, and I like, I like that because
Speaker 1: when that thing moved, I mean, we knew we were
Speaker 1: getting it close to where we'd seen it, and there
Speaker 1: were probably three or four seconds of hearing galloping hoofs
Speaker 1: before we could see the thing. And there was no
Speaker 1: question like, that's the orc's right, It's not gonna be
Speaker 1: a beef cowmbering out of there. It was like the
Speaker 1: brum brum. And it came across a gap at you know,
Speaker 1: fifty or sixty yards in front of you, looking animal,
Speaker 1: big long tail flying out behind it, and that was
Speaker 1: that was a big body, bold he didn't have very large,
Speaker 1: like very long horns, but the body on it was
Speaker 1: like a tank of an orix. And you know, he
Speaker 1: made a good decision in that situation not to shoot.
Speaker 1: And one of the things we talked about after the
Speaker 1: fact is the tendency of that animal to want to
Speaker 1: look back at whatever spooked it, you know, kind of
Speaker 1: like when you think about a mule deer sottting away
Speaker 1: and wanting to pause and look back and occasionally give
Speaker 1: you a shot opportunity. Um orcs are notorious for kind
Speaker 1: of wondering like what the heck was that? And so
Speaker 1: you know, that particular individual did stop, unfortunately in an
Speaker 1: area where we could not see it, and as we
Speaker 1: pursued the direction that he had galloped off, we end
Speaker 1: up spooking him again at a farther distance and watched him,
Speaker 1: you know, disappear again to the vegetation, which in that
Speaker 1: particular example was some kind of scattered, fairly thick juniper
Speaker 1: trees one seed junipers where the thing given us fits it,
Speaker 1: and that animal, Jeremy and I stayed up on the
Speaker 1: glassing knob to try to keep an eye on it,
Speaker 1: and and we lost that orcs about twenty minutes after
Speaker 1: you guys laughed, you know, to cover my vehicle and
Speaker 1: then foot this three and a half miles, which we
Speaker 1: knew would take at least an hour um, and we
Speaker 1: lost it. But where you jumped it was probably within
Speaker 1: a hundred yards of where we had last just disappeared.
Speaker 1: We never saw it. Well. After we spooked that one,
Speaker 1: we decided to go check out the other side of
Speaker 1: this little ridge and went over there, and Pope popped
Speaker 1: into one the second one we saw, and this one
Speaker 1: was at four yards already dead on us, just staring
Speaker 1: at us, and we're just like creeping up over the top.
Speaker 1: It's locked onto us and gone. Then I was like, man,
Speaker 1: this is not going to be super easy, because a
Speaker 1: lot of really hard to draw tags while not being easy,
Speaker 1: but this is not the case. Yeah, I think this
Speaker 1: is like a really interesting tag to hunt because it's
Speaker 1: not easy. But when you look at the success rates,
Speaker 1: they're not bad. It's not like, you know, it's not
Speaker 1: like killing a bull elk in Montana in the general
Speaker 1: season success right, I mean twenty or something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, so I think this hunt is like fifty
Speaker 1: or sixty percent success rate. So like if you hunt
Speaker 1: them if you really you know, if you put days
Speaker 1: in and you kind of grind it out, you know,
Speaker 1: and you will very likely have an opportunity. So it's
Speaker 1: not like it's not hard from the sense that, like
Speaker 1: you never see an animal, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: But but it's very hard from the sense that, like
Speaker 1: you have to make a lot of right, correct decisions,
Speaker 1: you know, in in the whole process to really get
Speaker 1: at the work. When the state post success rates for
Speaker 1: the hunt, are they only giving you last year's success
Speaker 1: rates or is it like an accumulation of years. Probably
Speaker 1: just last year's success rates, right, Like you can look
Speaker 1: it up year to year, and we're talking like if
Speaker 1: you look last year, I think it's like a forty
Speaker 1: to sixty window across those ten months of off ranch
Speaker 1: hunts is kind of the park. Another factor there is
Speaker 1: that you got a month to do it, you know.
Speaker 1: And you and I were chatting a bit when you
Speaker 1: found out you drew the tag. You're like, what would
Speaker 1: you what would you recommend? And I said, well, you
Speaker 1: could come down here. We might end up getting one
Speaker 1: in a day or two. But I think like a
Speaker 1: week of grinding it out, if we hit it hard,
Speaker 1: you will very likely have a good opportunity if we
Speaker 1: hit it hard for a week and you're we got
Speaker 1: one on our fourth day, fourth day. Another thing that
Speaker 1: happened to us while hunting is uh Orcs don't jump
Speaker 1: fences or its go under fences, and they're big and
Speaker 1: they don't fit just under any old fence, and so
Speaker 1: the thing is well known amount or its hunters is
Speaker 1: that you need to find they'll use. They'll know of
Speaker 1: crossing spots to get on fences. So whether it's a
Speaker 1: fence that would put them back into the mist into
Speaker 1: the safety of the missile range, or or just range
Speaker 1: fences out on the open out on the BLM land.
Speaker 1: Like everything around here is BLM ton of BLM, so
Speaker 1: range fences out on BLM land, um, they'll have known
Speaker 1: crossing spots. And it seems just from my observation, it
Speaker 1: seems like they like washouts where flash flooding or whatever
Speaker 1: scours out and makes a significant gap under a fence,
Speaker 1: and then they'll use those spots. I was talking to
Speaker 1: an outfit. He was saying, when he's seen people archery
Speaker 1: successfully archery hunt, did he ever say he says he's
Speaker 1: seen people get shots. He hasn't had any clients off range.
Speaker 1: He hasn't had any off range clients get one with
Speaker 1: a bow, but on range clients get them with bows.
Speaker 1: But I think you're saying off range. He's had people
Speaker 1: get shots, um, and those have been by finding a
Speaker 1: crossing under a fence and then just posting up and
Speaker 1: waiting on that crossing under the fence. And the thing
Speaker 1: that they like to do, he was explaining, is the
Speaker 1: thing they do is they brush out all the crossings
Speaker 1: so you can tell the vintage of tracks coming through.
Speaker 1: And they'll also just take tires and stuff and drag
Speaker 1: tires down the road to scrub the road of tracks,
Speaker 1: and then the morning you go drive the scrubbed road.
Speaker 1: I've seen people do this by pulling old box springs
Speaker 1: behind there, like just like bed springs, the same way
Speaker 1: you might groom out of baseball field or whatever, a
Speaker 1: chunk of chain link fence. Yeah, yeah, scrub it all out,
Speaker 1: and then the morning go drive and pick up a track.
Speaker 1: Because the peculiarity of this area, which would not this
Speaker 1: would be hard for people to picture they live in
Speaker 1: other parts of the country. When you're following a track
Speaker 1: in the desert, you can pretty much run. You can
Speaker 1: pretty much run and follow a track once you know
Speaker 1: what you're looking at. There's not so many tracks, and
Speaker 1: it's confusing. It wouldn't be like following white tails in
Speaker 1: the snow, where you know they're criss crossing and zigzag.
Speaker 1: And here's another group of six and then seven more
Speaker 1: across the track, and then he started hanging out with
Speaker 1: five of them and split off, and you can never
Speaker 1: do It's like it's sparse enough. There's a few enough
Speaker 1: life forms around that when you get on that track,
Speaker 1: you could run that track down. And one day we're
Speaker 1: driving along and we hit where there's a whole look
Speaker 1: a little hole down in the road, and we got
Speaker 1: out and sussed it out for quite a while and
Speaker 1: eventually found where the track he had come in, mingled
Speaker 1: around the road a long time, went under a fence,
Speaker 1: and then we got on that track and followed that track,
Speaker 1: and um, you're just most of the time you'd have
Speaker 1: like a maximum shooting distance of fifty yards most of
Speaker 1: the time, like for like a clear shot, but you're
Speaker 1: just able to follow that track. And following this ORCS
Speaker 1: track he went to I think we were calling betting areas,
Speaker 1: but they're like scent post areas. He went from one
Speaker 1: to the next. I think he went to four spots,
Speaker 1: and the spots were all the same, big shade tree.
Speaker 1: Tons of ships scattered around the shade tree, pawed up
Speaker 1: ground and obvious beds, and then that track would leave
Speaker 1: and he'd go off in some other direction and he'd
Speaker 1: hit another one of those spots, and we followed him
Speaker 1: in a gigantic backwards s that's exactly right, at which
Speaker 1: point was like a hundred three degrees and we gave
Speaker 1: up on the track. Yeah, that s I mean the
Speaker 1: way you described it as exactly if you imagine just
Speaker 1: the mirror image of a giant s that from top
Speaker 1: to bottom was about one point four miles tall, So
Speaker 1: the length of that s We probably tracked that thing
Speaker 1: for two two and a half miles. And it was
Speaker 1: this securitist route that intersected with a number of those
Speaker 1: sent post spots along the way. And it was cool
Speaker 1: because there were other, you look like, other places where
Speaker 1: multiple animals might have come together and broken off and
Speaker 1: split apart. It hard, and I felt like at one
Speaker 1: point we might have got off big certainly upgraded. It's
Speaker 1: all a sudden the track we were on, like you'd
Speaker 1: get confused at these scent areas, and Carl felt and
Speaker 1: I think he was right advise, I feel like our
Speaker 1: track is like ever so slightly bigger than when they
Speaker 1: were on earlier. An interesting thing about the reason I
Speaker 1: was hard to keep optimism about the track was that
Speaker 1: we found where a coyote had stepped in its track,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, okay, did a Kyle step in its
Speaker 1: track five minutes ago? Or are we on a day
Speaker 1: old track from the evening before? And then we found
Speaker 1: where it bedded, but we're it bedded a lizard had
Speaker 1: walked across, and I'm like, okay, did he just get
Speaker 1: up and a lizard happened to then just run across?
Speaker 1: Or has that been there a while? And that you
Speaker 1: know what I mean? That shook my confidence a little bit.
Speaker 1: And on the flip side, though, we had a couple
Speaker 1: we found a couple of fecal piles that you know,
Speaker 1: if you chipped away at the top down at the core,
Speaker 1: there was still like some mucusie moisture down in there,
Speaker 1: and and the way that sun is loking down like
Speaker 1: I don't think a pile of scat like that could
Speaker 1: stay put for twenty four hours and not get baked
Speaker 1: to the drive all the way out because that I
Speaker 1: mean they were out in the wide open. So you
Speaker 1: and I, like independently, I think we reached a similar
Speaker 1: conclusion that that the tracks we were looking at were
Speaker 1: probably from like the afternoon or evening of the day before.
Speaker 1: And then you're wondering, like, Okay, you know, the gate
Speaker 1: of these things. If they're just cruising, obviously they can
Speaker 1: cover a ton of ground, but if they're in the
Speaker 1: process of you know, like kind of checking out these
Speaker 1: different sent post areas, bedding down from time to time,
Speaker 1: feeding like maybe we're gaining ground, but one thing is
Speaker 1: sure in your mind, You're like, I know, beyond the
Speaker 1: shadow of a doubt at the end of this trail
Speaker 1: there is an oryx and I don't know how far
Speaker 1: that if you and if you had the stamina and
Speaker 1: and it didn't get over the fence into the range,
Speaker 1: like you would eventually spook it or find it, uh
Speaker 1: following that track. Another interesting thing about it is like
Speaker 1: when you're up glassing, so Jeremy, explain your safari rack. Well,
Speaker 1: I think I think you guys, you know, bring up
Speaker 1: a great point, right, there's no perfect way to hunt Rix.
Speaker 1: You know, we did. We tracked, we got up on knobs,
Speaker 1: and we glassed, and we cruised the Safari Rac. And
Speaker 1: you know, about ten years ago when I first started
Speaker 1: hunting Orix with some friends of mine, we've kind of
Speaker 1: fell into that same scenario where we were in the vehicle,
Speaker 1: you know, trying to track, trying to get to knobs
Speaker 1: to glass, and we just weren't being productive. We weren't
Speaker 1: turning up a lot of animals. And we realized, you know,
Speaker 1: with the contour of the landscape, we needed to get
Speaker 1: a vantage point. You know, they're the habitat is so
Speaker 1: expansive that you know, in order to cover that ground,
Speaker 1: you want to be doing it efficiently. And so we
Speaker 1: you know, I have two really good friends, my my
Speaker 1: two buddies. They you know, put in a lot of
Speaker 1: hard work and creating this Safari Rac. They took an
Speaker 1: old ski lift at the time. At the time, Hey,
Speaker 1: this is coming from the world worst welder, well knows,
Speaker 1: people that have never welded, and then there's me, the
Speaker 1: world's worst welder, and then everything up from there. I
Speaker 1: feel like I could give you a run for your
Speaker 1: money on my high school legg teacher more or less
Speaker 1: just like ask me to stop, please, Mike, Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is I would like you to stop using the welder you.
Speaker 1: I'll just give you a passing grade, but I don't
Speaker 1: want you to do it anymore. That is really an
Speaker 1: accurate portrayal of my my experience in welding. I think
Speaker 1: not to beat the welding thing to death, but there's
Speaker 1: like form and function, right and when it comes to function,
Speaker 1: that rack held two of us. You know that we're insensitive.
Speaker 1: We're insensitive times. We're insensitive times. And everyone right now,
Speaker 1: and I'm talking nationally, everyone right now is over sensitive
Speaker 1: and we're struggling with our sensitivity. I'm just making a
Speaker 1: joke about some globby ask looking wells on the Safari rack,
Speaker 1: and I'll point out that I was very aware of
Speaker 1: these because the roads are very rocky. And when you're
Speaker 1: up on the Safari rack and the driver tip a
Speaker 1: little bit to the right, because it's a thing you're
Speaker 1: like on a in the what do you call it
Speaker 1: a tuna boat. You're in the tuna tower. So it's
Speaker 1: two foot seas in a tuna tower feels like it's
Speaker 1: eight foot seas put someone down on the deck because like, no,
Speaker 1: stupid seas, Like, how could it be tupid seas. I'm
Speaker 1: swaying ten feet side to side. I think you're The
Speaker 1: wells held. The sea clamp didn't go at point the
Speaker 1: sea clamp inexplicably broken half. I never see, like I
Speaker 1: thought it, well, it must have come loose, and they're like,
Speaker 1: I don't know it broke. They got too hot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've never seen it got too hot from the heat
Speaker 1: of the sun and it burst the metal. But listen, man,
Speaker 1: a sense of time. Understand everyone's sensitive, but everything the
Speaker 1: wells they might hold great. I'm not saying I could
Speaker 1: do better. The wells are shitty. I'm not going to disagree.
Speaker 1: But they held. And it just struck me as funny
Speaker 1: absolutely to be up there, swaying back and forth looking
Speaker 1: at that weld. Yeah, for a lot of hours, and
Speaker 1: that's yeah. You know, well, it's the type of thing
Speaker 1: where you know, the first time you you make it,
Speaker 1: you've learned what you can add to it to make
Speaker 1: it that much more comfortable, and it's just unfortunate that
Speaker 1: we haven't had the time to make it. He found
Speaker 1: he found a former ski lift bench. Yeah, and it
Speaker 1: and it fixed it to the top of a contractor rack. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's perfectly you know, when it gets the job done.
Speaker 1: The idea is when you're trying to get to point
Speaker 1: A to point B, you know, get on those high spots,
Speaker 1: use the extra you know, six six ft on top
Speaker 1: of that rack to just spend some time glass the breeze.
Speaker 1: Two does you know you get you get the driver
Speaker 1: to cruise at that fift blowing through your hair. Yet
Speaker 1: you're just comfortably miserable. But you know, it's it's been
Speaker 1: something that has has helped us tremendously and covering ground
Speaker 1: and being able to turn up worcs. And but like
Speaker 1: you guys said, point being what I was good at
Speaker 1: about the spar I rack and when we abound other
Speaker 1: hunt methods, but when we were tracking in orcs, we
Speaker 1: never got like terribly far away from the zig zagging around.
Speaker 1: We got from the one we got one point five
Speaker 1: miles from the where the truck was. You're you're up
Speaker 1: there in your glassing and you're like, oh, there's nothing here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've looked none here. Let's move And then you get
Speaker 1: down into that ship and the Safari rack on the
Speaker 1: truck is how high, it's probably about seven. You get
Speaker 1: down into that ship, you're six ft tall. Yep, the
Speaker 1: Safari rack is probably yea, the Safari rac seven ft tall.
Speaker 1: And you realize that almost at no time can you
Speaker 1: look and see that thing right, And you're like, I think,
Speaker 1: Carl put it like you said, I think that when
Speaker 1: we're glassing this stuff, we're probably maybe we're seeing ten.
Speaker 1: We're having like if there's an ORCS there, we have
Speaker 1: like a one in ten of seeing it. And to
Speaker 1: bring that to highlight at we go to a spot
Speaker 1: you guys that hunt it before, and we're looking out
Speaker 1: on just solid, like you know, over eight degrees of no,
Speaker 1: hundred eighty degrees of like great stuff. We're kind of
Speaker 1: up by a stock tank. We got of just flat
Speaker 1: and we're nice and high, nice and high. It's so
Speaker 1: flat that I noticed that Jeremy. When Jeremy glasses, you
Speaker 1: don't even really mess around too much of binoculars. It's
Speaker 1: so flat. You can just take your spot and scope
Speaker 1: and you can basically get everything from hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: or two hundred yards out to infinity in one frame.
Speaker 1: So you can just take your spot and scope paste
Speaker 1: it out and just move it back and forth. And
Speaker 1: there's no like up down movement. You just got the
Speaker 1: whole damn scene as you swoop along. Uh, We're sitting there,
Speaker 1: all of us, glass and glass and glass, and and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden and ORCS is seven yards away,
Speaker 1: standing on a sand mound. No one saw it. It's
Speaker 1: right and front of us, so everything to the left,
Speaker 1: everything right. No one caught a glimpse of wherever the
Speaker 1: hell it came from. It popped up in the frame
Speaker 1: of my binoculars. As I'm looking in my binoculars seeing
Speaker 1: no Orex, all of a sudden in Oris just emerges
Speaker 1: from below, full body up on this knob, looking at
Speaker 1: us in order to stare at us seven yards is
Speaker 1: already like very aware of us. Yeah, I have a
Speaker 1: theory that that ORACX was closer, way closer, minutes before
Speaker 1: that or seconds before that, Like it was cruising along
Speaker 1: towards where we were, where we were heard of us,
Speaker 1: whatever heard us, saw us, bolted and then was doing
Speaker 1: that like what the heck is going on back there
Speaker 1: from seven yards away. And that's when I saw it,
Speaker 1: because that for it to pick us up, like we
Speaker 1: went back down and it seemed track. It just didn't
Speaker 1: make sense. So that's my theory on that one. So
Speaker 1: we went out, Well, I was just gonna say, and ORCX.
Speaker 1: You know, if if you imagine the way that we're looking,
Speaker 1: I mean, the ORCS is at twelve o'clock, you know,
Speaker 1: like you know, it's not like off to the side.
Speaker 1: It quickly the way that everybody is faced unless it
Speaker 1: had been waiting there. Lets it have been waiting there
Speaker 1: all day. It somehow passed, traveled through some amount of
Speaker 1: stuff in front of us, emerged, became visible, then gallops off.
Speaker 1: No one catches a glimpse of it leaving. We go
Speaker 1: out and strike its track and follow its track. And
Speaker 1: what does it do? It doesn't look like from the
Speaker 1: where we found from where we picked up the track,
Speaker 1: it looks like it trotted in a bee line and
Speaker 1: crossed into the missile range. It was like it had
Speaker 1: a particular spot in mind, and we got to that place.
Speaker 1: It was a spot where you know that bottom strand
Speaker 1: of that barbedware fence on the edge of the missile range.
Speaker 1: Ordinarily it's probably like shin Hai, and at that spot
Speaker 1: it was like mid thigh high, and that oracs like
Speaker 1: without breaking stride, just a duct right under at that
Speaker 1: spot as we were like fouling the track, and I
Speaker 1: could see the missile range boundary coming up. I'm thinking
Speaker 1: that We're all thinking like it'll hit the fence, but
Speaker 1: then it will obviously have to travel, and I'm trying
Speaker 1: to figure out, like, is he gonna cut left or
Speaker 1: right and maybe we'll catch it going down the fence
Speaker 1: line somewhere, trying to find work across. But it had
Speaker 1: already knewhere I was gonna cross and hit the fence
Speaker 1: at a crossing and book back to safety. And it did.
Speaker 1: And then I was like, these sons of bitches, like
Speaker 1: hard it did all that with any without any of
Speaker 1: us seeing it cover like what four hundred yards while
Speaker 1: you think you're sitting there glassing the area I meanwhile
Speaker 1: you're glassing is so well in fact, that one can
Speaker 1: run through four yards of the stuff in front of
Speaker 1: you and no one lays Anne right, it disappeared off
Speaker 1: the sand mound. Jeremy picked it up one place to
Speaker 1: the left, so we knew it was going you know
Speaker 1: that direction, and then nobody ever saw it again in
Speaker 1: the five of them, I mean and we're looking in
Speaker 1: the range, t right. We expected that animal to make
Speaker 1: its way in there and do the old fashioned look back,
Speaker 1: you know, And an hour later, we're still looking for that.
Speaker 1: I'm all on range and never found it. Did Jeremy
Speaker 1: and I continued to spot from where we had originally
Speaker 1: seen the animal, you know, while you guys tried to
Speaker 1: put a track job on it. And nobody, neither of
Speaker 1: us ever put eyes on that. And that's the thing
Speaker 1: I've speculated on a couple of times. I wondered about
Speaker 1: the relationship to the fence in two ways. I wondered
Speaker 1: about the relation to the fence is how onerous do
Speaker 1: they view? Like? How annoying is it to cross? Because
Speaker 1: if you're hunting pronghorn, you'll often find that a spook
Speaker 1: pronghorn will get really confused at a you know, like
Speaker 1: a four or five strand fence if they hit, if
Speaker 1: they're out of their normal routine and they get bumped
Speaker 1: or spooked some hunt way, they don't want to be
Speaker 1: spooked and they hit a fence, they'll be like, because
Speaker 1: they don't, let's just say they don't. They will, Okay,
Speaker 1: for all you people that are gonna send in videos,
Speaker 1: of the prong horm. Wile jump a fence, they'll jump fence.
Speaker 1: Do they like to do? They do it norminally generally
Speaker 1: want to go under fences. But they are capable, yes,
Speaker 1: of jumping fences. But I've watched them hit fences and
Speaker 1: then run for a mile down the fence, almost like
Speaker 1: second guests themselves, and start coming back and running down.
Speaker 1: It's always like when you when a deer's going across
Speaker 1: the road and hit your car, that they'll just start
Speaker 1: paralleling your car now and then, and it seems so illogical.
Speaker 1: I see him do crazy ship up against fences, like
Speaker 1: very disoriented. So I was like, what is the orcs
Speaker 1: relationship to the fence in that way, and what is
Speaker 1: its relationship to knowing that the safety of the other
Speaker 1: side of the fence. And I think that, uh, they're
Speaker 1: not terribly annoyed by getting across the fence because they
Speaker 1: have spatial awareness where they know like the crossing. And
Speaker 1: I and my just little pet theory, which is like
Speaker 1: completely like an amateur theory, is that they are um,
Speaker 1: they're aware of that there that they get screwed with
Speaker 1: less over there, which are the other kind of big
Speaker 1: animal animal definitely figures that kind of stuff out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think there's any doubt about that. I think
Speaker 1: they understand, you know, that they're safer on the range
Speaker 1: side of the fence. I've seen those animals cross in
Speaker 1: front of us at a fence line, and they will
Speaker 1: cross under a fence almost about the same speed that
Speaker 1: they're approaching that fence, if they're in about a gallop.
Speaker 1: I've seen those that It's amazing how fast in order
Speaker 1: its can dip down to the ground. You know, we
Speaker 1: think about ourselves trying to crawl under the bottom strand
Speaker 1: of the barbed wire, you know, and you're on your
Speaker 1: knees and you're you know, things are hurt. And I've
Speaker 1: seen those animals just dip and they're under that fence
Speaker 1: and they're maintaining the same momentum out of there, so
Speaker 1: they they're pretty athletic. I'll share with you a fence
Speaker 1: story that I've shared before, but it's worth it's worth
Speaker 1: telling it again. Uh, we knew this guy in Florida.
Speaker 1: We're down there turkey hunting in Florida one time and
Speaker 1: we ran into these guys that like to run pigs
Speaker 1: with dogs and they're like, oh, you guys should come
Speaker 1: out with a snipe and um. This guy's family's cattle ranch,
Speaker 1: a butts of nature preserve, um, and the between stuth
Speaker 1: that's been traditionally grazed, the difference between like what's been
Speaker 1: traditionally grays, which is all these hammocks. So it's like
Speaker 1: just grasslands with these palm hammocks in it, very open um,
Speaker 1: grays very low. It's just been you know, grace for
Speaker 1: whatever a couple hundred years. I don't know. The bird
Speaker 1: preserve is a comparatively a jungle, so it's amazing to
Speaker 1: see this juxtaposition between something that hasn't been grayed and
Speaker 1: however many decades and something that traditionally is like a
Speaker 1: very different landscape. So on the border between the cattle
Speaker 1: ranch and the preserve is a fence. The cattle ranch
Speaker 1: has a problem with hogs digging it up too bad,
Speaker 1: so he put a hogproof fence. Someone had put historic
Speaker 1: it's going to put a hogproof fence, but there are
Speaker 1: other people argue whether there really is no hogproof fence,
Speaker 1: but it's like kind of a hogproof fence, though they're
Speaker 1: always finding ways to get in and around it. What
Speaker 1: this guy would do because this guy liked to hunt pigs.
Speaker 1: He put little doorways into the hogproof fence. This is
Speaker 1: the rancher's kid. He puts doorways into the hogproof fence
Speaker 1: in order that the hogs can come onto the ranch
Speaker 1: and let he lets him get used to the holes.
Speaker 1: So when we go out to hunt hogs, the first
Speaker 1: thing he does is, well, let me go close all
Speaker 1: the doors. He then drives down this big gass long fence,
Speaker 1: closing all the doors. Once it's about midnight, then we
Speaker 1: started hunting. And guess where the dogs catch the x
Speaker 1: at the doors? At the doors. So yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: little hunting method. There's a research preserve. I used to
Speaker 1: live on um in southeast Michigan when I was an
Speaker 1: undergraduate at the University of Michigan, and there was a
Speaker 1: deer herd on the property. It's a famous deer heard
Speaker 1: The George Reserve is the name of this place. And
Speaker 1: the fence had fallen into tremendous disrepair and um I
Speaker 1: worked one summer helping to repair that fence line. And
Speaker 1: there were some places where white tailed deer trails were
Speaker 1: coming on and off the reserve. And one day, in
Speaker 1: the middle of the day, I just closed up a
Speaker 1: portion of that fence, and there's a mountain bike trail
Speaker 1: that goes along the outside of the reserve, and a
Speaker 1: mountain biker had spooked a white tail dough And so
Speaker 1: I'm standing there along the fence, just mending mending a
Speaker 1: portion of the fence, and twenty yards to my left
Speaker 1: is the spot I just fixed. And this dough comes
Speaker 1: tearing through the woods and smashes into that spot in
Speaker 1: the fence, backs up, smashes into it again, and then
Speaker 1: stands there looking at the spot, and then races off
Speaker 1: the other way down along the fence line. So they
Speaker 1: get keyed into those crossing points. That's interesting, man, She's
Speaker 1: like this normally works. I mean, she hit it hard,
Speaker 1: Like I'm standing there at the fence, and you know,
Speaker 1: if you imagine like an outfielder going for a home
Speaker 1: run and crash into the fence, that's what it sounded like,
Speaker 1: that big ching of the you know, the chain link.
Speaker 1: And then and then backed up and did the same
Speaker 1: thing again, like I know this is the spot without
Speaker 1: a shred of doubt in her mind. I don't know
Speaker 1: why mountain biker comes by. Yeah, I was like, what's
Speaker 1: she running? From, you know, and then there's this ten
Speaker 1: seconds away and here comes a dude on the mountain.
Speaker 1: But I don't know why I'm thinking this right now,
Speaker 1: but I want to get back to what we're talking about.
Speaker 1: But I got a buddy who's a surveyor, and he
Speaker 1: was surveying in Michigan's Apa Peninsula. And you put up
Speaker 1: those little contraptions that you look at each other, the
Speaker 1: two surveyors. He said that it's all it's in the wintertime,
Speaker 1: and the all dear starving and ship in the wintertime.
Speaker 1: Him and they got to go through a sight line
Speaker 1: through the hemlocks, and he's bit like, well, they call
Speaker 1: like cedar swamps up there, right, there's the hemlocker cedar
Speaker 1: up there. I've heard. I think it's cedar swamps. So
Speaker 1: they cut the sight line and then he gets on
Speaker 1: his little thing and the other guys on his little thing,
Speaker 1: and he said, they having the chainsaw running while they
Speaker 1: cut the sight line. Deer just showing up. They hear
Speaker 1: the chainsaw and come running. So he said, you get
Speaker 1: set up to do your work. And he had to
Speaker 1: hustle becauseaid all of a sudden, all the deer would
Speaker 1: be filling in eating all the junk they knocked down,
Speaker 1: and someone had to run along trying to scare the deer,
Speaker 1: heard the deer out of the way enough to then
Speaker 1: go back and try to do your survey work. Anyways, works.
Speaker 1: I'd knock cedar limbs down to catch deer is like
Speaker 1: a bait source when I was darting deer from my
Speaker 1: grad project winter. Yeah, you could just you could just
Speaker 1: trim a couple of low limbs that were just out
Speaker 1: of reach of the brows line, and it was just
Speaker 1: as good as having any other kind of bait out
Speaker 1: there for bringing him into dart range and then try
Speaker 1: and quil huh uh the one we got, the one
Speaker 1: we got, the works we got. It was very similar
Speaker 1: to hunt. It was like very similar to an antalope
Speaker 1: hunt situation, at least for me. I would agree in
Speaker 1: general terms other than the vegetation, but in terms of
Speaker 1: there's some generally drifting like like a caribou antelope kind
Speaker 1: of set up. I feel like like there's some pretty
Speaker 1: far away ye generally drifting in some direction on a
Speaker 1: somewhat identifiable land along a somewhat identifiable vegetation zone. Um,
Speaker 1: and you strike off at an angle and try to
Speaker 1: get to where you think they will arrive, but again
Speaker 1: far off. It was like, oh, there's some WORCS moving
Speaker 1: along and there he is, and there he is, there
Speaker 1: he isn't there he is? And then you get down
Speaker 1: in the ship and it's like I have no idea
Speaker 1: what is going on and we're using this far off
Speaker 1: power line like who you spot it again? Like damn?
Speaker 1: Well yeah, I mean it was a real group effort
Speaker 1: though to keep up with that. Well was the first
Speaker 1: one that picked it off. Yeah, right and way off,
Speaker 1: and it was a real obvy. I mean, this one
Speaker 1: was like an easy one. It just sort of like
Speaker 1: Carl's where it was like you know, scanning something you
Speaker 1: scanned ten times and like standing right, like no question
Speaker 1: like that right, there's an ORCS broad side and way
Speaker 1: the hell off as a power line, and you're able
Speaker 1: to be like there's a trailer you could see like
Speaker 1: count eight power polls. And so when we struck off,
Speaker 1: we just went at an angle and at the point
Speaker 1: got lucky because we're sort of getting like, you know,
Speaker 1: one where they are, and then we eventually catch a
Speaker 1: glimpse of one and we had it being like let's
Speaker 1: say we're facing some way, um, and we had to
Speaker 1: be that they were gonna be appearing at one o'clock
Speaker 1: if we're lucky. And we're recognizing at this point that
Speaker 1: like everything's very far away, you can't see ship, like
Speaker 1: not thumbing your gotten knife to check if it's sharp.
Speaker 1: You know, you're like, who knows. But we had a
Speaker 1: little cow like an analop hunting blind cole blind looks
Speaker 1: like a cow set up, and our line was off
Speaker 1: or they changed course, and all of a sudden, Carl's
Speaker 1: got one at what distance I would say at that
Speaker 1: point it was probably like one fifty pick us picking
Speaker 1: us off at one, Yeah, and most you know, our
Speaker 1: attention had been focused. If you imagine looking at like
Speaker 1: twelve o'clock is where we're thinking we might see these orcs.
Speaker 1: I was trying to make it a point to do
Speaker 1: like a three sixty every few minutes, because we're also
Speaker 1: seeing a lot of fives try and they're probably the
Speaker 1: most tracks we've seen. And I was thinking, like, we've
Speaker 1: got these this group that we've seen of three or four,
Speaker 1: and who knows what else is in here. So I
Speaker 1: was trying to keep heads up with what's going on. Around. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You had even said, like, we're just gonna all of
Speaker 1: a sudden have one staring at us. Yeah, when we're
Speaker 1: sneaking in there, and and what caught my attention, So again,
Speaker 1: if you're thinking twelve o'clock, I happen to be looking
Speaker 1: towards like let's say, four thirty off over my right
Speaker 1: shoulder and spotted that sword like horn immediately dropped down
Speaker 1: without any question in my mind about whether or not
Speaker 1: that was an oryx, and I whispered to each guy
Speaker 1: individually and like, do not move, because that thing was
Speaker 1: dialed dialed in, and it went from what I saw
Speaker 1: was the like the parallel of one horn, and it
Speaker 1: turned and gave me the two horns. So I saw,
Speaker 1: you know, the the fact that the skull staring at
Speaker 1: is facing at us, and I never I could not
Speaker 1: see the face at that point. I could just see
Speaker 1: these two They kind of remind me like antennae off
Speaker 1: an insect um, And I could just see the tips
Speaker 1: of those two sword like horns and could not see
Speaker 1: the face of the animal. And I'm just kind of
Speaker 1: like peeking up. So I tell you guys, like, you know,
Speaker 1: don't move. I've got Steve on my left with the
Speaker 1: rifle that seth on my right. We're all kind of
Speaker 1: packed in behind this decoy, and I start trying to
Speaker 1: get the shooting sticks set up. I've been carrying around
Speaker 1: a set of shooting stick because that's one lesson we've
Speaker 1: learned the hard way, you know, about trying to get
Speaker 1: steady from a standing position. You're always trying to work
Speaker 1: through all that vegetation. So my chief responsibility this trip
Speaker 1: has been chasing Steve around with the shooting sticks so
Speaker 1: they're at the ready. So I get the shooting sticks
Speaker 1: set up at a good height for Steve to be
Speaker 1: like in a kneeling position. He sneaks around behind me,
Speaker 1: peeks up over the top, and as we rise up,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm thinking there's probably like a chance that
Speaker 1: the ORACX is still there because there's been quite a
Speaker 1: bit of commotion. And he's like, Hey, that Cole's got
Speaker 1: a gun. Yeah, that Cole's got a gun stick out
Speaker 1: of its back. So so yeah, um, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: I'm thinking, I know, like exactly where this thing is.
Speaker 1: I don't initially relocate it, but within a couple of
Speaker 1: ticks there are two racs trotting from left to right.
Speaker 1: And at that point, in order to gain like a
Speaker 1: good shooting lane, we abandoned the decoy. We get up
Speaker 1: on our feet and we shifted to the right. What
Speaker 1: do you think like fifteen yards maybe, and we get
Speaker 1: this nice gap where the orcs are now stopped doing
Speaker 1: the ox. Look. But he did what he shouldn't have done. Yes,
Speaker 1: he did did what he should not have done. Stop
Speaker 1: the two hundred thirty yards and stared. Yea. The problem was,
Speaker 1: though the shooting sticks were set for the kneeling. The
Speaker 1: kneeling shot at that point, so we drop a couple
Speaker 1: of the legs that still wasn't quite stable enough. We
Speaker 1: got the third leg out, got him ranged. Steve took
Speaker 1: his time blouch And the thing was the thing that
Speaker 1: was interesting about that is and I'm a ears plugged
Speaker 1: trying to do a good job of protecting my head. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're asking me for a range of my ears. What's
Speaker 1: the range? What's the range? Well, let me ask you this,
Speaker 1: what turning back Carl's guy's ears like extra plugged? What?
Speaker 1: Let me ask you this, what range? Are you zeroed on? That? Rifall?
Speaker 1: I don't know how big they are? Zero? Okay? I'm
Speaker 1: looking at that thing like, there's no question you don't
Speaker 1: need to worry about race because the circums. Me being
Speaker 1: a novice and not having sort of like a very
Speaker 1: fixed mental image of how big they are and hearing
Speaker 1: all these stories of how big they are, I was like,
Speaker 1: if you had said three fifty, I wouldn't have been shocked.
Speaker 1: That's good to know. And it's a very disorienting landscape.
Speaker 1: It's it's like flat ass desert with brush in it
Speaker 1: because an annually don't know how big it is. You
Speaker 1: can see it from like the brisk it up, and
Speaker 1: I just was you could have said three ye. Well,
Speaker 1: so my thought process in that situation, like in that instant,
Speaker 1: I was thinking, like, don't you you're not worrying about
Speaker 1: adjusting anything like that that animal in terms of where
Speaker 1: your point of aim would be if you're zero to
Speaker 1: two ish, that animal somewhere right in that ballpark. So
Speaker 1: I'm just I would only be a minute. I would
Speaker 1: be a minute low, and may yeah, in hindsight maybe,
Speaker 1: but that was the thing I wanted to know. And
Speaker 1: so I noticed your your lips moving and I've got
Speaker 1: my ears like plugged with my fingertips and I unplugged
Speaker 1: my ears. You're saying range, You're like perfect, and don't
Speaker 1: you know you imagine, don't adjust anything aimed that on.
Speaker 1: So I've got my ears like plug plugged, like fingertips
Speaker 1: over those little ear flappers pushed way down in there.
Speaker 1: And when you pulled that trigger, the sound of the
Speaker 1: impact was what stands out in my mind. It was
Speaker 1: such a distinctive whop. And and I wasn't exactly sure
Speaker 1: which of the two you might shoot at. The one
Speaker 1: that you shot was the one I expected, but I
Speaker 1: thought you might shoot it either one potentially, and they
Speaker 1: were close enough together that I saw one of them
Speaker 1: run away, So I wasn't certain, like which, you know,
Speaker 1: what exactly had happened at that moment, but I definitely
Speaker 1: heard a very distinctive whop o. Our buds who were
Speaker 1: back on the glass heard that. To you. I liked
Speaker 1: the whop, yeah, And I liked that only one ran
Speaker 1: away and there was a there was a big cloud
Speaker 1: of dust to like, instantly there was this pluma dust.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you saw that, but big brown
Speaker 1: pluma dust. And you know, we you were in the
Speaker 1: right mind space at that point because you're like we
Speaker 1: need to get to where I can be ready for
Speaker 1: a follow up shot. And I was sitting there with
Speaker 1: a good line where there were a couple of sort
Speaker 1: of like semidistinctive bushes lined up where I felt like
Speaker 1: we could we could keep a good line to get
Speaker 1: in on that thing. But we kind of split up
Speaker 1: a little bit, worked our way into the area where
Speaker 1: we where we thought that orcs might be, and you
Speaker 1: very quickly identified the location and that animal had not
Speaker 1: taken a single step from the down going right down.
Speaker 1: We did shoot him in the neck, yes, because it
Speaker 1: was hard to tell. We were very uh yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: a little I'm little trigger shy. Well I think is
Speaker 1: that the right word liberal? With the follow up shot,
Speaker 1: I mean the stories you hear like you we heard
Speaker 1: another one that day, Yeah, we did, and that's heart
Speaker 1: to another hunter. He wasn't hunt right now, but he
Speaker 1: hadn't hunted orcs in the past, and told another story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you want me to recount that. The guy was talking
Speaker 1: about being out with his his so called friend and
Speaker 1: knocking an oorcs down. There's stop being friends over. I
Speaker 1: don't blame the guy, man um, And I'm sort of
Speaker 1: haunted by the situation with my buddy too, and I
Speaker 1: can I'll tell that very quickly as well. But the
Speaker 1: situation the guy told us was he shoots an OORX,
Speaker 1: the orix is on the ground. They walk in and
Speaker 1: they're trying to determine whether or not a follow up
Speaker 1: follow up shot is necessary, and his friend unexpectedly decides
Speaker 1: the best course of action is to throw a stick
Speaker 1: at the downed ox. No, the guy wanted to shoot it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's he's like, maybe we should take a following and
Speaker 1: he said, no, don't, let's not shot it's dead. And
Speaker 1: instead he chucks a stick at the down ORIX, at
Speaker 1: which point the OORCX jumps to its feet and runs
Speaker 1: to the horizon again. And just real quick while around
Speaker 1: the topic, I've got one of my dearest hunting buddies,
Speaker 1: um guy named Ryan, who we were out on his
Speaker 1: off range orics hunt and we worked hard, we suffered together,
Speaker 1: we earned a shot opportunity where he hit an orax
Speaker 1: knocked it off its feet, and we were both so
Speaker 1: elated and so rookie in our rax experience that we're
Speaker 1: standing there, you know, just like giddy, looking at each
Speaker 1: other like yeah, yeah, and the orax is laying there
Speaker 1: and the next thing, you know, the thing kicks its
Speaker 1: feet back under itself and just gallops to the horizon.
Speaker 1: And when we can never to be seen again, we
Speaker 1: went down there, found a couple little spots of blood
Speaker 1: and that oracs. I mean, we followed it, Like you said,
Speaker 1: the tracking conditions, you can basically walk at a fast walk,
Speaker 1: and we followed it for miles up and over hill
Speaker 1: after hill, and it never even slowed down. So there, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the idea of being liberal with follow up shots makes sense.
Speaker 1: And when I got around to where I could see
Speaker 1: what what was the exit point of your shot, it
Speaker 1: was up at the base of the neck, So you'd
Speaker 1: made it. You'd made a solid shot on that oorcs.
Speaker 1: And I do not believe that ORCS would have gone anywhere.
Speaker 1: But when I saw the hole at the base of
Speaker 1: its neck, and the fact that you know, the oracs
Speaker 1: was still breathing a little bit, you could have could
Speaker 1: have been stunned from the load of the process. When
Speaker 1: I saw that hole on the neck, I just said,
Speaker 1: shoot it again. And we went back and forth, I
Speaker 1: think three different times. We're like, really, like, shoot it again,
Speaker 1: just just be safe. And that's that follow up shot
Speaker 1: you took it didn't do a ton of meat extra
Speaker 1: meat damage. Yeah, and so I feel like a shot
Speaker 1: in the neck. Then for a minute was scared that
Speaker 1: I just blew the horn off, Carlton. It doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: I did say that, and I stand and I stand
Speaker 1: by that because also was like one of those horns. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was one of That was one of the most
Speaker 1: sickening experiences with with my buddy Ryan. And I take
Speaker 1: responsibility for that because I should have just said, like,
Speaker 1: you know, the same thing I said you was chamber
Speaker 1: around and just keep your cross hairs on that thing,
Speaker 1: and if there is any question in your mind about
Speaker 1: whether it may or may not get up, like if
Speaker 1: it blinks wrong, take a fill up shot. We spoke
Speaker 1: to a guide who expressed to us that the glory
Speaker 1: days of off range or funning in New Mexico are waning.
Speaker 1: That is getting harder. You don't have the big ones
Speaker 1: around anymore, and it is like they're with they're I mean,
Speaker 1: you gotta think it is it fair to say that
Speaker 1: they're kind of whittling away at them. I mean, you
Speaker 1: just read the numbers. There's a thousand fewer and when
Speaker 1: we're only talk about four or five thousand thousands a lot.
Speaker 1: But we're still over the objective, right. I'm not saying
Speaker 1: we're not objective. I'm saying that the good old days
Speaker 1: are waning. I mean, I, for one, I can't speak
Speaker 1: to the good old days because I I wasn't fortunate
Speaker 1: enough to hunt at those times. But the hunts that
Speaker 1: I've been fortunate to be on, you know, we've we've
Speaker 1: turned up ricks and I can't tell you it's a
Speaker 1: lot of rics, it's a little orics. I don't know
Speaker 1: how to you know, quantify that to past experiences in
Speaker 1: the nineties. But I think, you know, um, the direction
Speaker 1: of of you know, the way the population is being managed.
Speaker 1: They wanted to be at a lower target rate. Um.
Speaker 1: But I think the hunting is good still. You know,
Speaker 1: I would find it hard to believe that it's dwindling
Speaker 1: down to the expectations that we might have gotten from
Speaker 1: the individual. Yeah. Well, let's say you had two billion
Speaker 1: dollars and then all of a sudden you had one billion,
Speaker 1: and I observed, man, you have less money. You would
Speaker 1: then be like, but a billion is a lot, Like, yes,
Speaker 1: but you have less. That's all I'm getting at I'm
Speaker 1: not saying it's bad. I'm just saying he seemed to
Speaker 1: think that he used to be like why am bam?
Speaker 1: Maybe that's not even true. There is like a real
Speaker 1: good old days problem that hunters, and I think, you know,
Speaker 1: it might have been as simple as like everyone remembers. Okay,
Speaker 1: just me now, I'm thinking back to the last Turkey season.
Speaker 1: In my mind, all I did was called back and
Speaker 1: forth at hot gobblers. How much does that happen a
Speaker 1: couple of times? But in my head, it's like, dude, right,
Speaker 1: you know, you forget about all that, like the days
Speaker 1: nothing happens and you might as like turkey on, Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: it's great man working, hot working, you know, so whatever, Uh,
Speaker 1: it might just be his you know, And he wouldn't
Speaker 1: be the first guy to tell you that things used
Speaker 1: to be good. Yeah, I mean, and you know, he
Speaker 1: spent a lot of time hunting in those good old days,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure a lot of has changed since then
Speaker 1: as far as tag allocation and pressure and those types
Speaker 1: of things that could be you know, there could be
Speaker 1: many more contributing factors to you know, maybe that that
Speaker 1: dwindling down of the of the experience and I've I've
Speaker 1: never looked at those data, but you know, we do
Speaker 1: post harvest success data that includes because so like you'll
Speaker 1: have to report on this harvest and you know, identify
Speaker 1: the sex of the animal that you killed. I don't
Speaker 1: think they'll ask you anything about the horns, although I
Speaker 1: can't recall, but they will ask you how many days
Speaker 1: did you hunt, so you could I mean from a
Speaker 1: quality of I'm not talking about necessarily from the number
Speaker 1: of animals and the population standpoint, but if that's a
Speaker 1: corollary to the quality of the hunting, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: the good old days, you could look at those data
Speaker 1: and ask how many you know, what percentage of people
Speaker 1: are being successful, and how long is it taking them
Speaker 1: to be successful. So that information exists so you can
Speaker 1: find us all out and the range on range hunts, uh,
Speaker 1: they do record the length of the horns on the animals,
Speaker 1: so you can see if there was a Yeah, you
Speaker 1: can see if there was a drift there, right, So
Speaker 1: you know, maybe it wouldn't tell you anything about off
Speaker 1: range although I think I think the animals that you
Speaker 1: see on an off range hunt, many of them also
Speaker 1: spend a lot of time on the range. I don't
Speaker 1: think they have I don't know what they're each other
Speaker 1: up and do. Okay, you guys are off range, we're
Speaker 1: around range. I don't get a sense that there's like
Speaker 1: a really high level of you know, fidelity to a
Speaker 1: particular area. It's just like or show up in one
Speaker 1: place and if they don't get bumped, they hang out
Speaker 1: around there for a while. Yeah, when then they might
Speaker 1: just all take off walking and go, you know, ten
Speaker 1: miles back onto the range or wherever. Yeah, I'm not
Speaker 1: like bad mouth and experience. I mean, we had interact
Speaker 1: except for the day we got here and only went
Speaker 1: out in the afternoon, we had interactions and like opportunities. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I we even had an opportunity to day we
Speaker 1: got here right at dark that we ran out of daylight.
Speaker 1: We found one. It was like you could have walked
Speaker 1: there anyways. Multiple opportunities after that too. So like not
Speaker 1: bad mouth in it. I'm just I'm just sharing a
Speaker 1: thing that a guy said, and take it for what
Speaker 1: it take it for what it's working. I was trying
Speaker 1: to sort of offer the approach that if some you know,
Speaker 1: that if if we were really interested in that question,
Speaker 1: you could find the information is publicly available, so we
Speaker 1: had opportunities every day. Got one the morning of our
Speaker 1: fourth day. You could say, basically, this is gonna sound
Speaker 1: like you're giving away something and to something you can find,
Speaker 1: Like the most basic Internet search would reveal to you
Speaker 1: that you want to hunt within I don't know, ten
Speaker 1: twelve miles of the missile range across the northern and
Speaker 1: western sides. And if you think I'm narrowing it down,
Speaker 1: I'm talking one hundred and eighty linear miles of a
Speaker 1: ten mile wide stretch of ground. So yeah, plenty of
Speaker 1: place on Yeah, in the east side too, I mean
Speaker 1: right seven when there's some story somebody reached out through
Speaker 1: some guy sent me a screenshot of an on of
Speaker 1: on X. I not had to like go on on
Speaker 1: X and kind of figure out where it was, but
Speaker 1: it was on the east side. He said, look here
Speaker 1: if you're struggling to yeah, okay, so maybe there is
Speaker 1: one thirty two sixty nine linear miles of a ten
Speaker 1: mile wide strip. That's my hot tip by looking at
Speaker 1: on X. So it seems that that east side there's
Speaker 1: not as much ground the hunt well, it seems to
Speaker 1: be a little bit more checkerboarded um, but you know,
Speaker 1: they've they've seen him, you know, really far north to
Speaker 1: they've seen him you know south as well, So that
Speaker 1: three sixty degrees around there. I think that's a that's
Speaker 1: really good. My hot tip would be like five to
Speaker 1: seven miles around the entire perimeter of the missile range,
Speaker 1: the potential bump into them and there is an enormous
Speaker 1: amount of BLM lamb. Yeah, there is no need millions
Speaker 1: of acres. There is no need to feel like, you know,
Speaker 1: you don't have spots, I mean state BLM planning of space.
Speaker 1: That's right. Another hot tip is they're pretty serious about
Speaker 1: that missile range boundary. So having having on X you know,
Speaker 1: or or some other mapping app to, so you're confident
Speaker 1: where it is. It's it's pretty well marked. But yeah,
Speaker 1: that's so bad that I leaned on it one time.
Speaker 1: I leaned on it and and quickly withdrew my fingers,
Speaker 1: realizing that that my fingers had wrapped around the barbed
Speaker 1: wire into it. Probably felt they're probably reading my right
Speaker 1: now with some kind of contraption. But and of course
Speaker 1: there are some private in holdings around, some ranch in holdings,
Speaker 1: you know, and amongst a lot of BLM and state lands,
Speaker 1: and you got to be careful about as well. I
Speaker 1: think one of the biggest tips I can give to
Speaker 1: folks that may be lucky enough to draw that tag
Speaker 1: is not only do you get a four wheel drive vehicle,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean from get a tune up. You know,
Speaker 1: from a map it looks like you can get from
Speaker 1: point A to point B very easily, But once you're
Speaker 1: there on the landscape, you'll quickly understand that, you know,
Speaker 1: time really erodes those roads in a in a quick
Speaker 1: thunderstorm can really have a lasting impact. Flash flooding is
Speaker 1: serious issues, absolutely, especially this time you're in June. You
Speaker 1: got monsoons and they just like make the rivers turn
Speaker 1: into the roads turned into rivers. Right, These guys travel
Speaker 1: with um lots of water, twenty extra twenty gallons of
Speaker 1: fuel and fuel cans, all your repair stuff, shovels and whatnot.
Speaker 1: And then you do want to have like your your
Speaker 1: camp gear and just keep your stuff in your truck
Speaker 1: so you can roll from Yeah, and I have an
Speaker 1: extra spare tire, and he knowed that he's running ten
Speaker 1: ply kevlar. Those those mesquite thorns. Well, well, your tiresias
Speaker 1: and tread side, like good solid tires are are a
Speaker 1: huge advantage. Yeah, my buddy who built that Safari rack.
Speaker 1: One time we were hunting and he popped the tire,
Speaker 1: put the spare tire on a couple hundred down. A
Speaker 1: couple hundred yards down the road. He started hearing some
Speaker 1: air and sure enough he popped that that same tire
Speaker 1: that we just replaced, so multiple spars. We were out
Speaker 1: of tires and we had to make a trip back
Speaker 1: into town to get those tire space. I also have
Speaker 1: an air compressor and so like a little we've got
Speaker 1: two air compressor plug all of it. You gotta be
Speaker 1: if you rig up like that, if you rig up,
Speaker 1: we got a good BAA truck and rig up with fuel, water, food,
Speaker 1: camp gear. I got one more for you. Okay. If
Speaker 1: we were to count up the number of full coolers
Speaker 1: of ice that we've been here, that's how I just think, man,
Speaker 1: I forgot it's a hundred It's a hundred degrees in
Speaker 1: the daytime. We probably have at least half a dozen
Speaker 1: coolers with us. Some of them are giant that we
Speaker 1: had hundreds of pounds, Like we probably had three hundred
Speaker 1: pounds of ice. I had to fifty in my head. No,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I think three. I forgot that detail because
Speaker 1: you gotta picture putting, uh at the top end, you
Speaker 1: gotta picture of putting a four hundred fifty pound bowl
Speaker 1: parted out, and if you want to keep the hide
Speaker 1: or sweet that you need to be able to ice
Speaker 1: that thing because you're a long way from any kind
Speaker 1: of town and your long way from replenishing ice, and
Speaker 1: so you need massive amounts of ice and cool because
Speaker 1: it's a hundred degrees really right, it's it's I mean
Speaker 1: over a lot of this hunt. It was over a
Speaker 1: hundred degrees in the middle of the day. So if
Speaker 1: you shoot one at eleven o'clock, you gotta get that
Speaker 1: thing cool down. Yeah, you're just not gonna be like
Speaker 1: if you got to carry it a mile or two
Speaker 1: and then like get in your truck and then driving too,
Speaker 1: you're screwed, right, Like the bull you killed, you know,
Speaker 1: we uh, Jeremy and I again and hung back the
Speaker 1: spot and you guys went in and killed him, and
Speaker 1: then you know, normally it would have like you guys
Speaker 1: took a couple of quick photos, I would imagine, and
Speaker 1: then you know, until we were able to make our
Speaker 1: way there. You guys were, you know, in the middle
Speaker 1: of it of getting that animal apart, and you know,
Speaker 1: maybe would have been a little offended in some situations,
Speaker 1: like oh, I would have liked to get a picture
Speaker 1: of the animal, Like not like that thought never crossed
Speaker 1: my mind, Like, no, the you just got to get
Speaker 1: to work and get that thing taken down. It's alarmingly warm. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean those quarters were off, and it's like put
Speaker 1: him in the bag, let's go, let's take them. As
Speaker 1: Carl was gutting that thing, just the the stomach, like
Speaker 1: second by second, it seemed like it was just growing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like in my hands. Yeah. Times the time Jeremy had
Speaker 1: a cape spoiling two hours, right, yeah, the the ORCX.
Speaker 1: I was lucky enough to harvest in August within a
Speaker 1: couple of hours. And it was nowhere near as hot
Speaker 1: as it was when we were able to. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: hair was already slipping, you know. I I took the
Speaker 1: cape home and I wanted to donate it to a
Speaker 1: tax it or missed. And I called him and he said,
Speaker 1: do me a favor and go ahead and take a
Speaker 1: clump of that hair and just give it a pool.
Speaker 1: And I pulled it, and I was I was pulling
Speaker 1: off handfuls of hair off that cape hours. Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: He was like, how long when did you kill When
Speaker 1: did you kill it? I said about three thirty it
Speaker 1: was you know, four, five thirty six, somewhere around there.
Speaker 1: He said, go ahead and just pull some hair. I
Speaker 1: pulled it in. He's like, is it coming off? I
Speaker 1: said yeah, He's like, throw it away. We took a
Speaker 1: giant cooler, put sixty pounds of ice in the cooler
Speaker 1: and then put down a contractor bag and then laid
Speaker 1: the hide meat side down, kind of loosely folded packs
Speaker 1: all and like, you know, you hear a lot of
Speaker 1: people say, oh, oh, hesitatedn't get this. You're able to say, like,
Speaker 1: don't put meat and water and sure when in the
Speaker 1: perfect world, like if you go into a slaughterhouse, they
Speaker 1: don't put well, they cool they cool poultry as we
Speaker 1: now know, and ice baths. But um, and like, no
Speaker 1: one in the slaughterhouse puts meat in the water to
Speaker 1: cool it off. But I've found it in really hot
Speaker 1: places hunters don't hesitate to put meat in the water
Speaker 1: because wet meat is better than rotten meat. One in Hawaii,
Speaker 1: everything goes into ice water to take a shipload of ice,
Speaker 1: put water on it, submerge it, because it's like, well,
Speaker 1: I don't like it when it's rotten, I'll take wet.
Speaker 1: I'm just thinking of us load in our water bottles
Speaker 1: with ice. I mean, you would fill an analogy and
Speaker 1: container full of ice and by the time that sucker
Speaker 1: hits your lips, it was already all melted. Uh. And
Speaker 1: the meats highly regarded. Oh man, yeah, it seems like
Speaker 1: you know, you know, a lot of these are good.
Speaker 1: But he says they're no good, like people like oh
Speaker 1: big Buck Milder. I love him, my wife likes him.
Speaker 1: Ever likes him, but some people like to ship talk him.
Speaker 1: But Orcs everybody says it's good. Orcs acts as dear
Speaker 1: seek a deer. Everybody says it's good. Yeah. It would
Speaker 1: be like a really common reaction, Like if you ask
Speaker 1: a non hunter in New Mexico, like, oh, do you
Speaker 1: like wow game meat, they'd be like, I like Orcs.
Speaker 1: It's I mean, that's it's got that good of a reputation.
Speaker 1: I think it's more. I think it's just really mild. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say. I mean, I'm glad you said that,
Speaker 1: because I would not say it's my favorite for that
Speaker 1: very reason. I feel like it's a little bit too mild.
Speaker 1: I think that's why I like milder. I like, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't mind a robust flavor. Yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 1: you know, people like to say, you know, people like
Speaker 1: talk about wild game being organic. Yeah, and most of
Speaker 1: the vast majority of wild game eating this country is
Speaker 1: not organic, right, um or no way, they're not organic.
Speaker 1: What would be a thing that would make them not organic?
Speaker 1: If they got into maybe if they got into some
Speaker 1: of that one of those cattle spots where there's some
Speaker 1: kind of supplemental out there that could be But I
Speaker 1: agree with your point. But there there may be the
Speaker 1: occasional exception. And the ones that are on the missile
Speaker 1: range probably probably almost to the individual, because they don't
Speaker 1: graze any livestock on the range, right, not the my knowledge.
Speaker 1: So organic, yep, you're dark your mallard, Nope, your white
Speaker 1: tail probably not. But these are organic ORCS certified yep.
Speaker 1: Uh what else? Man? Fill me in? And we missed well,
Speaker 1: I think on that logistics piece. You know, we we
Speaker 1: talked a lot about ice just now. Um, and the
Speaker 1: fact that Now, I think this kind of hunt really
Speaker 1: lends itself to teamwork in terms of the hunt itself,
Speaker 1: but also logistically, I think going out into that country
Speaker 1: with a single vehicle, you know, I would put like
Speaker 1: I would put like an extra vehicle as a valuable
Speaker 1: pieces car because if you get buried, like we've all
Speaker 1: got toe straps and there's just peace of mind. Like
Speaker 1: some of the stuff that we were driving over. There
Speaker 1: was some places I thought, I thought that one night
Speaker 1: that Jeremy's truck was going to tip over in that
Speaker 1: in that washout man, And if something like that happens
Speaker 1: in your way, the heck back in here. And there's
Speaker 1: some places where phone services spotty and you cannot you
Speaker 1: cannot exaggerate the vastness of the landscape. So having an
Speaker 1: extra vehicle I think is really smart. And then also
Speaker 1: you know, just having another person in case something goes wrong.
Speaker 1: You know, there's snakes, it's hot, there's all kinds of
Speaker 1: stuff that you know might happen from a health and
Speaker 1: well being perspective. So I would suggest not doing the
Speaker 1: hunt solo would be my other piece of advice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but if you rigged up properly, two rigs couple buddies
Speaker 1: outfit them all the way. You could let me talk
Speaker 1: about the thing being a hundred thirty miles north south.
Speaker 1: You could finagle your way just on washed out two
Speaker 1: tracks and whatnot. Fonnago your way for days, sitting up
Speaker 1: on top of the top or whatever the hell you're doing,
Speaker 1: stopping at every high spot to look and just spend
Speaker 1: your time. Yep, And it might be worth noting. You
Speaker 1: know somebody who has no idea what they'd be. You
Speaker 1: know what this landscape is like in the vegetation, Like
Speaker 1: if you bring a brand new six pick up down here,
Speaker 1: you may end up sending Stephen angry email. Get Arizona
Speaker 1: Arizona pins drives. You just you get scratches. It's it's
Speaker 1: real good to have a capable truck that's already broken in,
Speaker 1: broken in and got a few dance and scratches because
Speaker 1: you're gonna yeah, you guys took a fence when I
Speaker 1: call them Arizona pins drivers, right. Um, The best thing
Speaker 1: I heard lately is what was the what was the rifle?
Speaker 1: We were talking about their day, those old Remington, those Remingtons,
Speaker 1: slide action rifles. What were those? The Amash machine guns.
Speaker 1: They're like seven seven six seven sixties and seventies, remember
Speaker 1: guys have like if you were when we were kids, man,
Speaker 1: like you know, yeah, like a lot of people like
Speaker 1: your hand me down was the thirty thirty, right or whatever.
Speaker 1: But the thing to get was if you could get
Speaker 1: one of those Remingtons slide action rifles and then get
Speaker 1: the look through mount Oh yeah, so you had the
Speaker 1: iron sight corn sight on the bottom and then like
Speaker 1: these like plastic mounts you can or through, and then
Speaker 1: you had your scope on top. So it was like
Speaker 1: a brush gun and a field gun. Yeah, machine gun, man,
Speaker 1: you get a lot of rounds down range quick. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Seth and I both grew up in Pennsylvania, and I
Speaker 1: don't think it's an exaggeration at all to say, like
Speaker 1: in in the heyday of our deer camp, when there
Speaker 1: were twenty plus guys there, at least fifty percent of
Speaker 1: the rifles that people were hunting with were slide pump
Speaker 1: action Remington rifles and the other we're lee reaction thirty. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, some guys were starting to hunt
Speaker 1: with bowl guns. I was old school. I had a
Speaker 1: third I had a Model thirty two Special with the
Speaker 1: peep site nice and had that reducer so as you
Speaker 1: always had to carry that reducer around in your pocket,
Speaker 1: you know. And um, in the morning you had to
Speaker 1: take the reducer out because it was too dark. But
Speaker 1: then once it got good light, you kind of like
Speaker 1: screw that reducer in because you get the extra accuracy.
Speaker 1: That started getting dust, you had to take the reducer
Speaker 1: back out. But I put some does down at that
Speaker 1: put down a buck or two that thirty two wins
Speaker 1: special is a good man. I was so stupid. I
Speaker 1: sold that thing and it was given to me. There's
Speaker 1: this guy one of my one of my mentors as
Speaker 1: a kid was the guy Eugene Grotors, and he had
Speaker 1: he was in his eighties. He had a gun for
Speaker 1: he he made a point to have a gun for
Speaker 1: every year he'd been alive. And he kept him in
Speaker 1: these big overhead racts in his house. So his house
Speaker 1: was like the ceiling instead of a drop ceiling, it
Speaker 1: looked like a like what his like den area. It
Speaker 1: looked like a drop ceiling of firearms eighty three of
Speaker 1: them or whatever up there. And super generous, nice dude. Um.
Speaker 1: I remember he used to have like he was a
Speaker 1: big admirer of these are all World War two guys,
Speaker 1: you know. But he was a big admirer of like
Speaker 1: centerfolds from you know, like old whatever to hell Playboy
Speaker 1: precursors or Tiger magazine or whatever you know, like, and
Speaker 1: he had always decorated everything with these. And I remember
Speaker 1: being a little kid and wandering around there, you know, like,
Speaker 1: man might also look at this, sir, I can't really
Speaker 1: help not look at it. Oh my dad, don't catch
Speaker 1: me looking anyways. He had all his damn guns, and
Speaker 1: he was such a nice dude the way instead but
Speaker 1: but uh, he gave me a model. And instead of
Speaker 1: him saying like, I just want to give this to
Speaker 1: you as a nice guy, he presented it to me
Speaker 1: to be like I got to counting and realize that
Speaker 1: I have an extra gun. Oh man, what a guy,
Speaker 1: and I like to have one for every year I'm alive,
Speaker 1: So please take this, and positioned it to me as
Speaker 1: a kid that I was doing him a favor by
Speaker 1: taking that gun. And then I took it shot a
Speaker 1: bunch of deer with it. I remember going out in
Speaker 1: the yard and someone filled the milk jug up full
Speaker 1: of water and put it out there at seventy five
Speaker 1: yards and hit the milk jug full of water and
Speaker 1: it was like that was like the test, you know,
Speaker 1: And I was like, it's a hunting gun. And then
Speaker 1: later UM sold it to a dude, the head of
Speaker 1: uh uh wood Stove a gunshot wood Stove shop sold
Speaker 1: it to him, and he gave me three hud bucks works.
Speaker 1: I wanted a trap and gunna those uh twenty two
Speaker 1: over and under and then later realized that I was
Speaker 1: grossly underpaid. Yeah for that model ninety four. My fault
Speaker 1: anytime you sell a gun later and I'm like, dude,
Speaker 1: I think because you forget what it's like to be
Speaker 1: out of money, and then you just think you're being stupid.
Speaker 1: But I'd like to have that thing back. I got
Speaker 1: something we forgot. God, well, it's still fresh in my mind.
Speaker 1: Carl mentioned snake that just happened with across the table
Speaker 1: a seth. I don't want to take your story from you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: be careful you step out here. We pulled up. I
Speaker 1: think we're just pulled up to a glass and spot.
Speaker 1: I swung the door open and stepped out and walked
Speaker 1: over between a bush and the door, between a bush
Speaker 1: and the doors, not very much space. And I walked
Speaker 1: over to Jeremy's truck was in front of us, and
Speaker 1: you know, we exchanged words and stuff, and I turned
Speaker 1: around to get back in Mike's truck, and right where
Speaker 1: I had stepped out is coiled up rattlesnake a little
Speaker 1: dish and a little dish. I think it was like
Speaker 1: an old cattle track or something that just you know,
Speaker 1: got washed out and just made his perfect little dish.
Speaker 1: And uh yeah, I stepped inches from it. I mean,
Speaker 1: it really would be difficult to step closer to the
Speaker 1: snake without actually stepping. I got a video, did you.
Speaker 1: I put a video on my If you go to
Speaker 1: Instagram at Stephen Ronella, Yeah, is there one at Signs
Speaker 1: Underscore West, there'll be photos of it. You should change
Speaker 1: your thing to SETH so people can find you, or
Speaker 1: at the flip Flop Flusher, Yeah, or at Seth. I
Speaker 1: gotta talk to who would know I would who would
Speaker 1: know how to look you up. I want to talk
Speaker 1: to the even just type my name and it comes up.
Speaker 1: I want to talk to someone about about like if
Speaker 1: that makes a difference by changing your Because Sessa takes
Speaker 1: a sense of photographer takes beautiful photographs. Thank you you're
Speaker 1: going there and follow him at Signs West signs underscore West. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's not his name, it's just signs West yea underscore.
Speaker 1: Maybe it needs updated. I think you need to update it. Um.
Speaker 1: One last thing another good satis m is uh tagged out.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call this we should call this episode tug
Speaker 1: out because rather than saying we tagged out, Seth would
Speaker 1: say we tug out yea and scun it. I think
Speaker 1: that's a Pennsylvania thing. That's where I came out, talk out,
Speaker 1: tug out. We're all tug out, like I don't know
Speaker 1: that sounds that's perfectly normal to me. I'll tug out.
Speaker 1: I love it. I'll tug out. Okay, Jeremy, thank you.
Speaker 1: Well tell people how to find uh how do people go?
Speaker 1: If you want to look at the work you guys do, well,
Speaker 1: you can go to the National Wildlife Federation or NWF
Speaker 1: dot org. You know, from there that's a hunting friendly
Speaker 1: conservation absolutely yeah. You know, the National Wildlife Federation focuses
Speaker 1: on a lot of conservation issues. But one of the
Speaker 1: things that I and a lot of my you know, team,
Speaker 1: prides ourselves and doing are you know, conservation that's related
Speaker 1: to sportsmen and sports women, you know, advocating for things
Speaker 1: like Land Water Conservation Fund, the Great American Outdoors Ach,
Speaker 1: you know, access to for sportsmen and sports women of
Speaker 1: public lends a lot of those issues that we hear
Speaker 1: a lot about on this show. You know, the National
Speaker 1: Wildlife Federation and you know, the team that I am
Speaker 1: fortunate enough to work with, you know, really does a
Speaker 1: great job of, you know, working hard to protect these
Speaker 1: these traditions that we you know, value that allows us
Speaker 1: to be here talking about you know, and so folks
Speaker 1: want to learn more about as you know, the National
Speaker 1: Wildlife Federation itself is a nonprofit, but we're also made
Speaker 1: up of state affiliates. So you know, if you're in
Speaker 1: New Mexico and you draw an orange tag and you
Speaker 1: want a little bit more information, you can always go
Speaker 1: check out the New Mexican Wildlife Federation, but you know,
Speaker 1: go to NWF dot org and you can really start
Speaker 1: to see kind of all the different angles that we
Speaker 1: focus on in conservation and uh kind of start to
Speaker 1: you learn from there and kind of really divulge into
Speaker 1: the many different state you know affiliates that are also
Speaker 1: focused on more specific issues. Yeah, when I say a
Speaker 1: hunting friendly conservation group, that's like a thing that I
Speaker 1: think it's really important for you to understand, because when
Speaker 1: you support hunting friendly conservation groups, you're in you're getting
Speaker 1: in bed with people who want there to be a
Speaker 1: they want they want there to be great habitat, they
Speaker 1: want there to be a lot of wildlife, and they
Speaker 1: support your right to use that wildlife when there is
Speaker 1: enough of it to warrant some consumption. And other conservation
Speaker 1: groups that might really support the habitat and support the
Speaker 1: wildlife end uh want to starve you out. And so
Speaker 1: I think always lend your support to the hunting friendly ones,
Speaker 1: because if not, you're just you're you're helping the long
Speaker 1: game but screwing the screwing yourself in the short term.
Speaker 1: That's not two cents, Mike, He's got nothing to say.
Speaker 1: I got nothing to say any concluders, Carl Uh. I
Speaker 1: would just like to express gratitude to my two buddies. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, these guys taking time off of work and
Speaker 1: beating the crap out of their vehicles and you know,
Speaker 1: cooking some incredible food and you know, just like you,
Speaker 1: I think you guys both have an appreciation Steven Seth
Speaker 1: at this point for they rolled all the red carpet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but they rolled all the red chili sauce. And the
Speaker 1: point I want to make is it's not because it's
Speaker 1: not because it's not because you were the guy coming
Speaker 1: to hunt. But that's just the kind of guys that
Speaker 1: they are. And if if you were any other old
Speaker 1: Joe buddy of mine coming from out of state to
Speaker 1: go on in oracs, not they would have gotten the
Speaker 1: same kind of treatment. Because I'm lucky enough to have
Speaker 1: friends like these two. Appreciate you, guys. Jeremy, Mike, thank you.
Speaker 1: And anyone draws an OORCS tag Jeremy might be take out. No,
Speaker 1: I mean you guys, don't eve worry about bringing a truck.
Speaker 1: You guys are thoroughly welcome. This was This was an
Speaker 1: absolutely enjoyable five days of just bombing around with with
Speaker 1: people that you know, really feel like old friends at
Speaker 1: this point and so really an authentic experience and just
Speaker 1: a heck of a lot of fun. So I you know,
Speaker 1: I appreciate the time together. This is great. Thanks guys,