Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast, coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to
Speaker 1: you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging
Speaker 1: deer stands, or scouting for ELK, First Light has performance
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Speaker 1: out at first light dot com. F I R S
Speaker 1: T l I t e dot com. Joined today by
Speaker 1: Randy Brown from Alaska's Fishing Game Agency and Uh, Randy,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna you're gonna, I'm gonna embarrass you a little bit,
Speaker 1: but not bad. It's in the in the kind of
Speaker 1: way you want to be embarrassed. Where you hear a
Speaker 1: bunch of good stuff about yourself. Okay, yeah, not not
Speaker 1: not where you hear stuff bad about yourself. Good.
Speaker 2: You do know it's Wildlife Service, Oh, federof Fish Wildlife Service.
Speaker 3: Oh, because that's where my brother works.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's why he Okay, Okay, I'm sorry about that.
Speaker 1: Uh that was Krins problem US Fish and Wildlife Service
Speaker 1: and that helps that. That's a good team too. How
Speaker 1: why Randy's here? Randy, my brother Danny, who works for
Speaker 1: the US Fish and Wildlife Service, has never once in
Speaker 1: his life made a recommendation of someone that should come
Speaker 1: on the podcast. Ever. I don't want to say stingy
Speaker 1: with respect, but he just like, you know, he uh,
Speaker 1: you know he he called me and said, you know
Speaker 1: who you need to have on this show is Randy
Speaker 1: Brown because he like in the seventies, moved up and
Speaker 1: lived in the bush in Alaska and lived off the
Speaker 1: land up in the yukon Ate like a strict meat diet,
Speaker 1: raised his kids up there, had all these adventures. Later
Speaker 1: decided to become a fisheries biologist, got him self educated.
Speaker 1: He's doing all this cutting edge work on these kind
Speaker 1: of mysterious fish in Alaska. He's like, that's who you
Speaker 1: should be talking to. I had to convince you to
Speaker 1: do it. Yeah you did, so thanks for coming down, man,
Speaker 1: Hey you bet. Yeah. I wish we had you here
Speaker 1: for like three, two shows, because I do want to
Speaker 1: do one show about living in the bush, living off
Speaker 1: the land in the bush. Then I want to do
Speaker 1: another show about fish. Yeah, but we're gonna have to
Speaker 1: condense it, you know, Well, I'm amenable to it. Okay,
Speaker 1: we got to do two quick things. Three, A couple
Speaker 1: of quick things before we get there. One man, you
Speaker 1: weren't here for if we had this guy on about quail,
Speaker 1: people got mad about that. So I don't love you
Speaker 1: know about this, Randy, but down here and there's like
Speaker 1: a huge problem with Bob White quail just vanishing across
Speaker 1: their range. I didn't know that. A host of problems
Speaker 1: with Bob Boy Quail. So we had a guy in
Speaker 1: who had developed it's like a de wormer. Well, they
Speaker 1: have a high parasite loads in some areas, particularly in Texas,
Speaker 1: they have a high parasite load. So a guy comes in.
Speaker 1: We called the episode what Happened to Bib Boy Quail.
Speaker 1: A guy comes in, He's like, Oh, there's all kinds
Speaker 1: of things that are happened in by boy quail. One
Speaker 1: of them is a high parasite load. So he gets
Speaker 1: the first FDA approved drug for wildlife that is publicly available,
Speaker 1: meaning any Joe Blow can buy this this quail feed
Speaker 1: with a dewormer in it, okay, and you can put
Speaker 1: it out and try to produce parasite loads in your quail.
Speaker 1: And he has found anecdotally and otherwise through research that
Speaker 1: it's helpful to quail in some areas where they have
Speaker 1: high parasite loads to deworm them.
Speaker 3: But man, oh man, oh man, the whole world, the
Speaker 3: whole quail.
Speaker 1: World's very upset that he came on because they're like,
Speaker 1: it distracts from the main message of habitat. I disagree
Speaker 1: because he talked about habitat a whole bunch. But anyways,
Speaker 1: we're gonna have another quail. We're gonna have a better quail,
Speaker 1: not a better We're gonna have a different quail person
Speaker 1: on to explain why it's bad, and among other things,
Speaker 1: like it'll be like what real That episode will be
Speaker 1: called what really Happened to the bob Woit Quail? And
Speaker 1: in it, I will press the individual to explain why
Speaker 1: it's bad to deal with If there's a big problem
Speaker 1: with ten parts to it, why it's bad to deal
Speaker 1: with one of those parts.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm guessing that the ratio between the size of
Speaker 4: parts is gonna be.
Speaker 1: Dude, I'm not doing a great job of articulating all
Speaker 1: of the consternation, because, yeah, a lot of consternation in
Speaker 1: the quail world. What was the world before we found
Speaker 1: was Remember we talked about there as the world, Oh,
Speaker 1: the beekeeping world.
Speaker 5: Bee keepers get oh, very very particular.
Speaker 1: And yeah, that was our first That was the first
Speaker 1: time we ever weighed in on the Bob white quail.
Speaker 1: So we're going to have a follow up episode about
Speaker 1: Bob white Quail and we're going to talk about that
Speaker 1: Bob whit Quail episode. Quick question from from uh to
Speaker 1: put to the people in the room. This is from
Speaker 1: a fellow named Christian. So he's check this out. What Statesian?
Speaker 1: New York? Oh, okay, he's in New York. He gets
Speaker 1: a this is a letter. He's thirty three years old.
Speaker 1: Odd that he told us that he's thirty three years
Speaker 1: old and owns thirty acres. Maybe he likes it how
Speaker 1: close his age is to his acreage. It says, I'm
Speaker 1: thirty three years old and owned thirty acres with his
Speaker 1: brother in upstate New York. His father bought the land
Speaker 1: in the eighties, he said. He here's his letter, here's
Speaker 1: his question, here's his ethical conundrum. Over the last few years,
Speaker 1: we've been dealing with a land owner who owns the
Speaker 1: property next to us, who is strongly against hunting. I'll
Speaker 1: keep mind, these guys have owned this place since the eighties. Okay,
Speaker 1: while we are respectful neighbors and hunt by the book,
Speaker 1: she harasses us every year. Do you have any suggestions
Speaker 1: on how to deal with such an issue. So, on
Speaker 1: the day before the opener of New York's gun season,
Speaker 1: he receives this text. He cleaned out the names because
Speaker 1: he doesn't want the person to get harrassed his name
Speaker 1: and her name. He cleaned the names up. This is
Speaker 1: in New York State. She texts him on the eve
Speaker 1: of the opener of the deer opener. Good morning, here
Speaker 1: we go again, much to my dismay, you are back
Speaker 1: to kill the deer. Oh sorry, you are back to
Speaker 1: kill the deer. I love and for whom I provide
Speaker 1: a sanctuary that for you becomes a killing field. It
Speaker 1: is a nightmare for me. So before you tell me
Speaker 1: not to text you again, I'd like to remind you
Speaker 1: that we share a property boundary. I encourage the presence
Speaker 1: of deer, and you can take advantage of this. It
Speaker 1: is not right, and as we still live in a
Speaker 1: partially civil society, I'm asking you with all civility, to
Speaker 1: please stay off my land and not take care and
Speaker 1: not take advantage of the preponderance of deer that are
Speaker 1: here because I provide protection and a sanctuary for them
Speaker 1: best wishes.
Speaker 5: I'm so curious about what her sanctuary looks like.
Speaker 6: She signed off with best wishes.
Speaker 3: And good started with good morning, and ended with best wishes.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it seems pretty civil, but he's not moving on
Speaker 5: to her property.
Speaker 4: He's on his prom he's not on it.
Speaker 7: And it seems like she's been doing this kind of
Speaker 7: thing for a while before. You tell me not to
Speaker 7: text you again, right, Yeah, I think Joannis had.
Speaker 1: The right approach. We talked about it earlier.
Speaker 6: What's that laying on us?
Speaker 4: Oh maybe just go pay her a visit with uh
Speaker 4: with the warden on your on your hip. And she
Speaker 4: hasn't done anything else to have a chat with her. Well,
Speaker 4: unless I don't know at what point it becomes hunter harassment.
Speaker 1: A text this begins good morning and ends best wishes
Speaker 1: to a neighboring property is not harrassment. She didn't threaten them.
Speaker 7: No, it wouldn't be in there going to like threaten
Speaker 7: to put her in jail. Just have the ward and
Speaker 7: give give her a little like education.
Speaker 4: If this is all she's doing is sending texts like this,
Speaker 4: then Christians should just reply to her and say, hey,
Speaker 4: we're not going to go on your property. We're gonna
Speaker 4: continue hunting. We do everything by the law, et cetera,
Speaker 4: and it's over and done. But if it's a if
Speaker 4: there's something more than what we're seeing here, because we're
Speaker 4: getting just a little snippet of this world, then I
Speaker 4: would say go and pay her a visit for sure.
Speaker 1: But I would think at this point, I feel, at
Speaker 1: this point it's like no one wants to get that text.
Speaker 1: But I mean, she's asking him to do something. He
Speaker 1: just would reply and say, I'm respectfully.
Speaker 4: I mean, I respect.
Speaker 5: My property, thank you very much.
Speaker 1: I respect your I respect your private property, but I'm
Speaker 1: gonna use my property, uh, in accordance with the law,
Speaker 1: and I expect that you'll behave in accordance with the law.
Speaker 1: And sorry that we don't see eyed eye on this.
Speaker 1: And then have you seen any biggins?
Speaker 7: It make you not want to hunt that border though,
Speaker 7: because you'd be all worried about a deer running.
Speaker 1: If it runs onto her place. And he's only got
Speaker 1: he's only got thirty acres, So I mean, not only
Speaker 1: that's greats more than I got, but uh not Mortian
Speaker 1: he's got.
Speaker 4: That's a nice chunk for a back east.
Speaker 6: Well, I feel like Giannis has some uh experience here
Speaker 6: that most of us don't with the psychological burden that
Speaker 6: overbearing neighbor can put on you, that's right. So uh
Speaker 6: if there is more here, because it does, it just
Speaker 6: weighs on your like, oh yeah, every shot that goes off,
Speaker 6: I'm gonna get a text, every truck that comes up
Speaker 6: our driveway, I'm gonna get a text every you know.
Speaker 3: That had that very similar situation around a raccoon.
Speaker 1: So he's a scar. That's why he's ready to get
Speaker 1: He's ready to get the law. He's ready to throw down.
Speaker 7: Yeah, if this lady's giving him heartburn.
Speaker 1: It's like, here's an our listener question. So that's so
Speaker 1: so that my official answer. I mean, if I don't know,
Speaker 1: it sounds like from around the room, no Yoanni wants
Speaker 1: to get a game warning and go over there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, to do a preemptive strike.
Speaker 2: I like it.
Speaker 1: Yeahan he proposes a preemptive strike, I propose, I propose
Speaker 1: saying sorry, we don't see eyed eye. I'm gonna I.
Speaker 7: Can see just doing nothing.
Speaker 1: Also, just go on with your definitely justifiable to do nothing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: definitely justifiable to do nothing. Yeah, that's totally fair. Here's
Speaker 1: another question, listener question. We got to talking recently about
Speaker 1: pre chewing deer meat to give to your kids. Like
Speaker 1: when our kids, all of our kids, when they turned
Speaker 1: like pretty much the day they were nine months old,
Speaker 1: I would chew up deer meat and give it to
Speaker 1: them just as like a thing, like to like a
Speaker 1: symbolic gesture, and then they would start eating meat at
Speaker 1: that point. I don't know what they say nowadays. This
Speaker 1: stuff to always changes, but a decade ago, you're supposed
Speaker 1: to give a meat at nine months or they could
Speaker 1: chew up meat at nine months.
Speaker 4: Randy, does that apply when you're living out in the
Speaker 4: bush in Alaska?
Speaker 2: Well, I'll tell you what. What we did is take
Speaker 2: moose ribs that had been boiled up so nice and soft,
Speaker 2: and I'd give it to the kids and hey, with
Speaker 2: chew on it, just like the dogs chill.
Speaker 1: No meat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well there's some meat, not a bunch.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, roughly what age.
Speaker 2: Well, they were still riding in a back for me, okay.
Speaker 2: I I took him around with a jerry pack, no,
Speaker 2: you know, and they loved it. I had two hands
Speaker 2: to work with, and they had they got to look
Speaker 2: at everything.
Speaker 1: Sitting back there nowing on ribs yep, and if.
Speaker 2: They dropped them, the dogs would take them.
Speaker 1: So this guy's wondering, he just shot a deer. Okay,
Speaker 1: he's a new father, so he had his first kid,
Speaker 1: shot his first deer with lead ammunition. And now he's
Speaker 1: wondering if if it's okay to have his kid and
Speaker 1: his wife eat it because he's worried about the lead.
Speaker 1: Come on, like, no, Well, first off, when you cut it,
Speaker 1: just cut around the wound, mark, cut around the wound,
Speaker 1: and then go satisfy your curiosity that that that when
Speaker 1: people look at lead levels, there's not any evidence that
Speaker 1: that hunters that eat a lot of deer meat have
Speaker 1: elevated levels lead. There's also a lot of things about
Speaker 1: inert lead and lead that's like in shot form. But
Speaker 1: just cut around it. I mean, Plus, if you go
Speaker 1: and buy what makes you think the stuff you're buying
Speaker 1: is so like sure different? I mean, okay, I don't
Speaker 1: want to feed him that, but we're gonna eat ocean,
Speaker 1: big ocean fish.
Speaker 7: If it's really weighing on them, just make the switch
Speaker 7: to copper. Bullets or tungsten shot or small game whatever
Speaker 7: like sure, so bugging you that much, but.
Speaker 3: I would cut around it.
Speaker 1: And I mean that's the main, the main thing we
Speaker 1: you know, the main thing we eat. Uh. I got
Speaker 1: a whole bag full of all the lead shot we
Speaker 1: pulled out of birds. Yeah. You know what I'm gonna
Speaker 1: do with that? Reload it?
Speaker 8: No.
Speaker 1: Woman. I was at this event, we did this book event,
Speaker 1: and a woman came and she had this pendant that
Speaker 1: was like a dish, like a dish, and it was
Speaker 1: full of all kinds of shot and I was admiring it.
Speaker 1: And it was all the shot from her first turkey.
Speaker 1: And they sent and her and her husband sent me
Speaker 1: a kit to make them. So I'm taking all the
Speaker 1: shot we've ever picked out all of our food, because
Speaker 1: I always put in a bag, and I'm making my
Speaker 1: wife a necklace. And it's got like this resin. So
Speaker 1: you take the dish, oh yeah, and you put all
Speaker 1: the shot in the dish and it's like a pendant
Speaker 1: and then you squirt this resin in the air and
Speaker 1: then hold a black light on it and it makes
Speaker 1: like a necklace of all the shot you picked out
Speaker 1: of your food. That's cool.
Speaker 7: Does your wife knows she's getting this?
Speaker 1: Oh, I've told her about ten times, as haven't made
Speaker 1: it yet. I got enough for two necklaces song, I
Speaker 1: have one for my wife, more for my daughter.
Speaker 5: There was another person who wrote in about prechewed food.
Speaker 5: He says that his mom was a dentist and when
Speaker 5: he himself had a kid, his mom was like, no, no, no,
Speaker 5: don't do the prechewed food thing because or a dental hygienist,
Speaker 5: because she said cavity developed. I don't think. I don't
Speaker 5: think the logic is sound. But cavities developed because of bacteria.
Speaker 5: So if you take food and you chew it up
Speaker 5: and then you give it to your kid, that might
Speaker 5: increase their likelihood of developing cavities.
Speaker 7: Because they're.
Speaker 1: Going to fall out anywhere.
Speaker 5: That's why I didn't put it in the notes because
Speaker 5: I thought that it didn't make any sense.
Speaker 1: And there's nothing on your mom's mouth that isn't getting on.
Speaker 5: You right exactly exactly. That's why I didn't include it.
Speaker 7: But I thought, I think the food thing has been
Speaker 7: played out.
Speaker 1: We need to move on well with that said, at
Speaker 1: least until we get another email or put it on
Speaker 1: a T shirt.
Speaker 3: So Randy, what, uh, what drew you to Alaska?
Speaker 1: Man?
Speaker 3: Like, how'd you wind up? And where'd you grow up?
Speaker 3: And what drew you up there?
Speaker 2: So I grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and
Speaker 2: so that was southern rockies where my stomping crown. As
Speaker 2: a kid used to fish and you know, it was
Speaker 2: more like hunting for those little, uh little rainbows up
Speaker 2: in the headwaters. And uh and I just I don't know,
Speaker 2: I just wanted to I wanted to live out in
Speaker 2: the woods. I'd read some of these uh, you know
Speaker 2: books like The Big Sky and some other baby gothries
Speaker 2: and uh and I always felt like I was born
Speaker 2: about one hundred years too late. But but so so
Speaker 2: that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to go
Speaker 2: out into the woods. And and uh, I had a
Speaker 2: tense speed was my transportation at the time. So I
Speaker 2: when I finished high school, I had got accepted up
Speaker 2: to university and Fairbanks and came up for one semester
Speaker 2: and quit and went and milk cows for the rest
Speaker 2: of that year and then moved out and woods up
Speaker 2: onto the.
Speaker 3: Who's you milk cows?
Speaker 5: For?
Speaker 2: It was they had a few dairies up in that
Speaker 2: Palmer while Silla area just north of Anchorage that were
Speaker 2: partially subsidized by the state, and they never did They
Speaker 2: never did make it so they could compete with milk
Speaker 2: being shipped up from lower forty eight because they, I think,
Speaker 2: just with the cold and the inability to grow a
Speaker 2: lot of the grains, they had to ship grain up
Speaker 2: to increase milk fat. And in the dairy world, it's
Speaker 2: my understanding that milk fat content that was what determined
Speaker 2: the price they got on it, and so they were
Speaker 2: always on the edge. But I worked at this one place,
Speaker 2: room and board seven hundred bucks a month, and you
Speaker 2: were there milking it was about two hundred cows twice
Speaker 2: a day.
Speaker 1: It was pretty wild. They fed you, housed, you gave
Speaker 1: you seven hundred bucks, yep, and you milk two hundred cows. Yeah.
Speaker 4: How long did that take?
Speaker 2: Well, it was about four or five hours of milking,
Speaker 2: if I remember right, Milk them in the morning and
Speaker 2: then milk them in the evening.
Speaker 1: And at this point you're eighteen years old, roughly I
Speaker 1: was eighteen.
Speaker 3: And when you say you went to live in the woods,
Speaker 3: how's that even begin?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: What like what.
Speaker 2: So there was a buddy of mine that came up
Speaker 2: with me. He and I used to kick around in
Speaker 2: the mountains and winter camp and everything, and so so
Speaker 2: he and I had had picked out off of a
Speaker 2: map that we were going to go up onto the
Speaker 2: Tautontic River downstream from.
Speaker 1: Eagle What what like? What year was this?
Speaker 2: So it was nineteen seventy six, So.
Speaker 7: Was the Homestead Act still in play?
Speaker 8: There?
Speaker 1: No? Okay, so the male jumping ahead, but so the deal.
Speaker 2: There was a Homestead Act opening in the late sixties,
Speaker 2: I believe, and another one in seventy three. There have
Speaker 2: been some state land dispersals as well, but those two
Speaker 2: acts were before I ever got out there, and then
Speaker 2: the state gave away. They would have these land lotteries,
Speaker 2: you know, in various places. But it was kind of screwy,
Speaker 2: I thought, because because you were going to have a
Speaker 2: bunch of people going out into the same place, and
Speaker 2: nobody could have could have made a living with that
Speaker 2: many people in those places, and a lot of them
Speaker 2: didn't really survive, you know. They would go out there,
Speaker 2: build a cabin and then realize, I got to get
Speaker 2: in here with an airplane. There's four other people with places,
Speaker 2: and a lot of people left or never proved up
Speaker 2: on it, you know.
Speaker 4: So too many people trying to draw from the same resource.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So out on the Yukon, people were you know,
Speaker 2: organized ten to twenty miles apart down the Yukon, up
Speaker 2: the side creeks, and so that was sufficient distance, you know,
Speaker 2: provided they could you know, establish trap lines in different
Speaker 2: places that they could make a living off the off
Speaker 2: of the country. There they weren't stepping on each other's toes.
Speaker 1: So when you when you tried to pick a spot,
Speaker 1: how did you know? How did you know that you
Speaker 1: wouldn't be crowded in with other guys? Or didn't you?
Speaker 2: We didn't. And in fact we went down to Tatonic
Speaker 2: River and there was a guy named Dick Cook who
Speaker 2: lived there and and Tatonic River. So so this is
Speaker 2: right up near the border with Canada, right where the
Speaker 2: Yukon comes in. There's a town of Eagle, it's got
Speaker 2: a road to it, and then Circle is downstream about
Speaker 2: one hundred and sixty miles and then there's several of
Speaker 2: these tributaries that are cannoeable and and so so Tatonic
Speaker 2: River was the farthest upstream of those tributaries. Well, actually
Speaker 2: seventy mile river was was that was from the south.
Speaker 2: But the Tatonic River flowed for about nine miles in
Speaker 2: Alaska before it plunged into the Yukon. But you had
Speaker 2: big mountains there, the Ogilvie Mountains. That's a big range
Speaker 2: goes from you know, Dawson area all the way over
Speaker 2: to the border between the Yukon and the Porcupine River.
Speaker 2: You know, all along that border is the western side
Speaker 2: of the Ogilvies, big limestone mountains with sheep And of
Speaker 2: course we didn't know any of that, but we knew
Speaker 2: there were mountains there. But Dick Dick let us know
Speaker 2: that that he lived, he had a place five miles
Speaker 2: up to Tondick and a place down on the Yukon,
Speaker 2: and that that there wasn't enough room for us and
Speaker 2: so and there wasn't.
Speaker 4: Did you just.
Speaker 7: Run into him or you knew he was in the area,
Speaker 7: or like, how do you make contact with him?
Speaker 2: I made We made contact on the river. We were
Speaker 2: lining up the Tetonic River.
Speaker 3: Oh to go establish the place to live.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're like, damn, there's a cabin here.
Speaker 2: Well, we didn't see the cabin. He was downstream of that,
Speaker 2: but we pulled over. He was talking, well, he saw
Speaker 2: us on the way in and sky Charles was about
Speaker 2: six and a half feet tall and I was just
Speaker 2: about six and so. And so when we came back down,
Speaker 2: even though we realized we weren't going to be able
Speaker 2: to make a place there, we went up and explored
Speaker 2: around and fished and walked in the mountains and things.
Speaker 2: On our way back down, though, Dick was talking with
Speaker 2: John McPhee. That was the huge John see John mc
Speaker 2: out there.
Speaker 1: I'm aware that you had to run in with McPhee
Speaker 1: while he was writing coming into the country, right right,
Speaker 1: So you pull up and he's literally talking to John McPhee. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and John mcviee.
Speaker 2: And John McFee dips his cup into the river and
Speaker 2: offers it to us, and we're like, we don't need that,
Speaker 2: we've been drinking the river. But because he was amazed
Speaker 2: that there was a river that was clean enough that
Speaker 2: you could drink out of, that's what it was.
Speaker 1: And so he was, I.
Speaker 2: Don't know, offering it to we would kneel down and
Speaker 2: drink water and whatever. But yeah, but but as it
Speaker 2: turns out Dick was. When John was with Dick, Dick
Speaker 2: was was looking at our tracks and he's telling He's
Speaker 2: telling John, Okay, well, you can tell one guy's really big,
Speaker 2: you know, because of the stride.
Speaker 1: Lines and everything.
Speaker 2: So John ended up what did he call Dick the
Speaker 2: Grand Swami of trackers or something like that. But but
Speaker 2: Dick never told him that he'd seen us before. So anyway, yeah,
Speaker 2: what a deal.
Speaker 3: But so you're you're sort of in coming into the.
Speaker 2: Country sort of, not really, but sort of. And uh,
Speaker 2: and then we headed back to Eagle because we didn't
Speaker 2: know what the heck we.
Speaker 1: Were going to do.
Speaker 2: And and when we were back there, there was a
Speaker 2: fire that was taking place on the Canadian side of
Speaker 2: the border, just uh north of the Yukon and and
Speaker 2: the Canadians and the US have have they have these
Speaker 2: these agreements, and so the BLM put the fire. They
Speaker 2: went out and and worked on that fire, and they
Speaker 2: hired me and Charles out there, and so we went
Speaker 2: and worked on a fire. And during that period of
Speaker 2: time I met this guy, Mike Potts. And Mike Potts
Speaker 2: had had he lived in the village. He married a
Speaker 2: gull in the village and and he had a trap line.
Speaker 3: Was that his real name?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Mike Potts. Do you ever hear John Colter? He's
Speaker 1: a mountain, He's a he's called the Yellowstone Colter's Hell. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1: He was over by where Seth lives in eighteen oh
Speaker 1: eight and he was with a guy and they got
Speaker 1: caught by the Blackfeet. And that guy's name is Mike Potts. Oh,
Speaker 1: and they caught Mike pots all up in little bits
Speaker 1: and smeared him all over John Colder and then Colter,
Speaker 1: and then they made Colter start running, and that was
Speaker 1: Colter's run. That was Mike Potters. Yeah. Yeah, different Mike Pop.
Speaker 1: That's a different mic post.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, so Mike Mike always well, he several times
Speaker 2: he had people come out to his trap line south
Speaker 2: of Eagle Back on the north fork of the forty
Speaker 2: mile and and help him do building projects or or
Speaker 2: haul meat and various other things. And so he invited
Speaker 2: me to go out there with him that that winner,
Speaker 2: and he had a dog team, had a couple of
Speaker 2: cabins and wanted help with hunting, and I went with him.
Speaker 2: Charles got involved with with gold mining.
Speaker 1: He this is six and a half with Charles.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and so and so he went gold mining
Speaker 2: and I went trapping, and it was kind of like
Speaker 2: an apprenticeship, you know, building cabins with moss, chinking and
Speaker 2: and which is a wonderful way to go, just with
Speaker 2: materials that you find out there in the woods, and
Speaker 2: then uh and then taking care of meat. And we
Speaker 2: went and ended up getting a bear and a big
Speaker 2: moose that was really fat. You know that these animals
Speaker 2: go through these cycles of fat and lean, and big
Speaker 2: bull before they go into rut has an enormous amount
Speaker 2: of fat on it. And so Mike showed me how
Speaker 2: to how to how to cut that stuff off and
Speaker 2: be able to render it into uh into oil, So
Speaker 2: rendering moose fat.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he was using that moose fat as a
Speaker 1: frying medium or like for baking or what was he
Speaker 1: doing with the rendered moose fat?
Speaker 2: Well, yes, it was it was too uh for frying,
Speaker 2: but it was also just to eat with your meat.
Speaker 2: And then there was cracklings that was left over and
Speaker 2: those were also So the deal with eating straight meat
Speaker 2: is you got to eat meat and fat, and we
Speaker 2: would use it that way. Sometimes we'd render as much
Speaker 2: as twelve gallons I think was the most we've rendered
Speaker 2: off a single big bull.
Speaker 1: Damn.
Speaker 2: That's kidney fat. Kidney's kidney fat that can fill a
Speaker 2: five gallon bucket once you take the kidney out jamming
Speaker 2: in there, and then all sorts of other fat in
Speaker 2: the intestines, the ribs, the brisk at the back.
Speaker 6: So you were using primarily internal fat, not the external fat.
Speaker 1: Not the back fat. Or he used the back fat too.
Speaker 6: Did you have separate uses or was it all just
Speaker 6: one oil at the end of the day, one oil?
Speaker 4: Okay? Got it?
Speaker 2: And moose fat is hard, so you know when you
Speaker 2: if you take it at root temperature, it it'll crack.
Speaker 1: Off in a chunk. You know.
Speaker 2: It's not like butter or anything like that. You know,
Speaker 2: it just it breaks off in a solid chunk that
Speaker 2: you can throw in the frying pan, melt it out,
Speaker 2: fry the meat, and then when it starts cooling off,
Speaker 2: you can dip it and get a big swath of
Speaker 2: the fat on the on.
Speaker 1: The meat so that then you take your thumbnail and
Speaker 1: scrape it off through for your mouth. There is that.
Speaker 2: But but the good thing about moose fat is if
Speaker 2: you render it clean and decant it and pour it
Speaker 2: off into a bucket. It will keep through a summer,
Speaker 2: so you can have it without spoiling it. Bear fat,
Speaker 2: on the other hand, will go rancid if it's not
Speaker 2: kept very cold, so it's very different.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Bear fat is more of a of a liquid, almost
Speaker 2: liquid at room temperature, but it won't keep. You can't
Speaker 2: keep it for over over a summer. I mean you
Speaker 2: could if you had it in a freezer. We were
Speaker 2: dealing with whatever the temperature.
Speaker 4: I feel like I've had to survive just in the
Speaker 4: pantry at the house for a year plus.
Speaker 2: But it goes, it goes rancid. Yeah, my experience was it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it went rancid, and then it becomes dog food because
Speaker 2: they don't care.
Speaker 4: Sure, Sure, can you give You're talking about some pretty
Speaker 4: specific places on the map, and I think you're doing
Speaker 4: a good job for people that know that area of Alaska.
Speaker 4: Can you give just a little bit bigger of a
Speaker 4: geographical context, because I think Eagle sort of has like
Speaker 4: the jumping off point for a lot of people that
Speaker 4: went to do what you did, and just kind of
Speaker 4: where that lies and why it's there and why people
Speaker 4: that are drawn to that are drawn to Eagle I
Speaker 4: think that's important.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, so that's right at the border with Canada.
Speaker 2: I mean it's just like ten miles downstream of the border.
Speaker 2: And back in those days, anyway, that was after the
Speaker 2: Native Claimed Settlement Act and before Anilka, and so there
Speaker 2: was kind of a void and all all that a
Speaker 2: lot of the land in Alaska at that point was
Speaker 2: just sort of managed by b l M.
Speaker 7: Didn't we do a podcast on that native Native claims
Speaker 7: and aspects of the Native Yeah, people are wondering.
Speaker 3: Yeah, can I do it real quick?
Speaker 1: Yeah, go for it and correct me where I'm wrong here.
Speaker 1: During it was during the Carter administration they finally they
Speaker 1: finalized a lot of it. But for a long time Alaska,
Speaker 1: a lot of the land in Alaska was in a
Speaker 1: sort of managerial limbo. That's correct, right, And it was
Speaker 1: they knew that that that that Native Alaskan tribes would
Speaker 1: would claim some and some things would become park but
Speaker 1: for a long time it was just in a in
Speaker 1: a limbo. And then during the Carter administration and then
Speaker 1: leading up to the Trans Alaska Pipeline and oil and
Speaker 1: Prude Obey, they started to figure out with greater clarity
Speaker 1: this land is is. This land is going to be parked,
Speaker 1: This land is state land, this land is native land,
Speaker 1: this land will be BLM land. As that fairly accurate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they discovered the so the Statehood Act laid out
Speaker 2: basic acreages of land that would become part of the
Speaker 2: state ownership versus federal ownership and uh and that there
Speaker 2: had to be some sort of native claim settlement, but
Speaker 2: it wasn't figured out. They didn't have it all sorted
Speaker 2: out on where it was going to be or or
Speaker 2: other things like that. There were some parks, you know,
Speaker 2: like the Dnale.
Speaker 1: Was already there in the Arctic.
Speaker 2: They called it National Wildlife Range and rather than a
Speaker 2: refuge and uh and that. So there's there's things that
Speaker 2: were already sorted out for the for the federal system
Speaker 2: when they when they found oil and they were looking
Speaker 2: for a way to get it south. They the Secretary
Speaker 2: of the Interior at the time is 'ed All and
Speaker 2: he he essentially stopped everything, put a hold on everything.
Speaker 2: And so that was the incentive to get the native
Speaker 2: land claims settled.
Speaker 1: Right. God, if you're going to put.
Speaker 2: A pipeline through, we better figure out what land it is.
Speaker 1: As they goes like who's going to end up owning
Speaker 1: what right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so so that took place, and and it
Speaker 2: also laid out the d two lands, which were the
Speaker 2: federal lands, conservation areas, refuges, parks, other things like that,
Speaker 2: not necessarily where they were or or how big each
Speaker 2: plot was going to be, but that there would be, uh,
Speaker 2: these parks and refuges in various places.
Speaker 1: So in this area that we're talking about, like what
Speaker 1: Yanni asked bout, were basically where the Ukon River flows
Speaker 1: out of Yukon Territory into Alaska. At that time, in
Speaker 1: the seventies, a lot of people were moving into that
Speaker 1: area because.
Speaker 2: You could just go live right, yeah, And it was
Speaker 2: So the deal was that BLM what I heard was
Speaker 2: BLM had gone up into the forty Mile country and
Speaker 2: gone down and burned two cabins they considered to be
Speaker 2: trespassed cabins, and they got taken to court over that.
Speaker 1: And the legal.
Speaker 2: Response was that they had to consider any cabin they
Speaker 2: thought was trespassed, they had to deal with it in
Speaker 2: the courts before they did anything with it.
Speaker 1: They couldn't.
Speaker 2: They had to treat it like private property. And so
Speaker 2: they were just like hands off we're not going to
Speaker 2: deal with it.
Speaker 1: Got it.
Speaker 2: And so there were people that went down onto the Yukon,
Speaker 2: and there were people doing this in a lot of
Speaker 2: different places, but that was where I knew about at
Speaker 2: the time, But.
Speaker 1: But there was there.
Speaker 2: It was sort of a you just had to kind
Speaker 2: of negotiate with neighbors, with other people that were living
Speaker 2: there for a place that wasn't going to step on
Speaker 2: somebody else's toes or interfere with their trap line. And
Speaker 2: that's what Dick did with us, you know, he said,
Speaker 2: you can't do it, you know, and we're thinking, Santa
Speaker 2: Fe time, we'll be at least a mile away. You
Speaker 2: did not, no twenty miles, you know.
Speaker 1: So when you spent that, when you did that apprenticeship
Speaker 1: with the guy, did that lead you to find a
Speaker 1: place you could go set up in? Yeah?
Speaker 2: So there was a He did it the year before
Speaker 2: with this guy named Little John, little John Gottio, and
Speaker 2: Little John was out there on the forty mile trapping
Speaker 2: had a different cabin that same winter that I went
Speaker 2: out and helped Mike. I helped him finish a cabin
Speaker 2: in the snow and then took care of We had
Speaker 2: a moose and a bear, and so I took care
Speaker 2: of those out of his main cabin while he went
Speaker 2: back and then came back out later in November or
Speaker 2: something with his dogs. And during the winter, Little John
Speaker 2: and I spent a lot of time together, and we
Speaker 2: decided we were going to go well, we were initially
Speaker 2: going to go up the Colin River the next the
Speaker 2: next year, and when we started down the Yukon though,
Speaker 2: Colina is a big tributary of the Porcupine River, So
Speaker 2: to get there you'd have to go down to Yukon
Speaker 2: a couple of hundred miles and then up the up
Speaker 2: the Porcupine a couple hundred miles and then up the
Speaker 2: Colin River. And how were you guys?
Speaker 7: Were you guys getting in by bush plane or were
Speaker 7: you like traveling by boat or like, how were you
Speaker 7: getting into this remote stuff?
Speaker 6: How were you and Little John hanging out together? Weren't
Speaker 6: twenty miles apart.
Speaker 2: It's doubling canoes and we were lining. We had no motors, yep,
Speaker 2: and so the winter dogs of course, Yeah, so little
Speaker 2: John had dogs. I didn't at the time, but I
Speaker 2: ended up getting a couple of puppies and h and
Speaker 2: off a litter and so and so when we started
Speaker 2: down to Yukon, though we had we had two canoes.
Speaker 2: He had a canoe and I had one. And we
Speaker 2: got down part way down and found out that nobody
Speaker 2: was living on the Candick River. Candiic River is a big,
Speaker 2: big tributary of the Yukon there between Eagle and Circle,
Speaker 2: so it's about eighty miles the mouth. It is about
Speaker 2: eighty miles downstream of Eagle and it also head watered
Speaker 2: in Canada and flowed for over one hundred miles through
Speaker 2: through Alaska. And we decided there was a guy living
Speaker 2: at the mouth of the of the Candic River. And
Speaker 2: it was a guy named Fred Beach. And he told you,
Speaker 2: no one's upstream of me. Well, several other people did too.
Speaker 2: They knew that there was nobody up there, and and
Speaker 2: he reiterated that and said he rarely makes it past
Speaker 2: three miles up. He had two dogs and and so
Speaker 2: we decided we're going to go up there and check
Speaker 2: it out. And so we started lining up the river
Speaker 2: and feeding ourselves along the way. We had a gill
Speaker 2: net and we had we would we would shoot beavers
Speaker 2: and feed us and the and the dogs in that
Speaker 2: way we shoot squirrels sometimes for the dogs. And what was.
Speaker 6: Your lining up process and what type of mileage could
Speaker 6: you make going upstream like that?
Speaker 2: So, so lining is a process where you have about
Speaker 2: one hundred foot long rope and one ends tied to
Speaker 2: the front of the canoe, ones to the back canoe.
Speaker 2: They lining is more easily done if they got a
Speaker 2: little keel on the bottom. And so what you're doing
Speaker 2: is adjusting these two lines so that that canoe stays
Speaker 2: off shore and tries to stay parallel with the So
Speaker 2: a big gravel bar, you just walk up on the
Speaker 2: gravel and it's out in the water, pulling it along.
Speaker 2: And then when you want to create a cross, you
Speaker 2: jump in it and cross and go up the other side.
Speaker 2: If you have to get by a drift pile or
Speaker 2: buy a big cut bank, you might use a pole,
Speaker 2: about a ten foot spruce pole and just push yourself
Speaker 2: off the bottom to get past.
Speaker 6: So are you kind of walking backwards when you're lying them?
Speaker 2: No, it's not that much. Well, if you were hauling
Speaker 2: a moose, you might, yeah, not enough drag, not enough drag.
Speaker 1: It just goes real smooth.
Speaker 4: So by adjusting the two lengths of that rope. You're
Speaker 4: just adjusting the angle of the canoe, and that's it's
Speaker 4: basically faring in the current.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you just have it, did it's straight out from you.
Speaker 1: You can just about yeah, yeah, just about yeah.
Speaker 2: And so there's boulder fields on the Candic River, and
Speaker 2: so you could you it's if you got a keel,
Speaker 2: it's like power steering and you can go around between
Speaker 2: rocks and everything. So whereas if you don't have a keel,
Speaker 2: it kind of bumps against shore. It's doesn't go very
Speaker 2: well at all.
Speaker 1: How many miles were you making on that big river?
Speaker 2: You know, sometimes ten miles, more often.
Speaker 1: Six or eight a day. Yeah, and you got so
Speaker 1: we get so.
Speaker 2: I don't know if you know this, but when the
Speaker 2: Second World War came along, the government ended up when
Speaker 2: we got involved in it, they shut down materials that
Speaker 2: could be used for the war effort from going anywhere else.
Speaker 2: And all of the mines in Alaska, with a couple
Speaker 2: of exceptions, got shut down. And what people back in
Speaker 2: the thirties and early forties were doing is trapping in
Speaker 2: the winter and then working the mines in the summer.
Speaker 2: And so the fur industry went down too, and they left,
Speaker 2: and so that was all the cabins that we found
Speaker 2: on the candy were of that vintage, you know. So
Speaker 2: we were coming there forty years after anybody had been there,
Speaker 2: and so and so we would we went up river
Speaker 2: with one canoe and one of us would walk the
Speaker 2: spruce groves looking for cabins, and the other would line
Speaker 2: and switch off here and there. And and we found
Speaker 2: a few, a few cabins, but none of which were functional.
Speaker 2: They had because back then they didn't have, you know,
Speaker 2: a lot of the waterproofing tarps and various other things,
Speaker 2: and so they would develop a leak somewhere they had
Speaker 2: They used tar paper on the roofs and sometimes dirt
Speaker 2: over that or moss. But if they ever got a leak,
Speaker 2: you know, then you'd get a rot going on in
Speaker 2: the roof would fall in, or a wall would crash
Speaker 2: out or something like that. But what we did see
Speaker 2: was big piles of moose antlers, and then in the
Speaker 2: upper river big piles of caribou antlers too. So we
Speaker 2: thought piles, Well, what do you do with them?
Speaker 3: I mean, from the people that were living there.
Speaker 2: From the people that had lived them there, I see,
Speaker 2: And they wouldn't.
Speaker 1: They wouldn't do anything.
Speaker 2: They bring him in, but they wouldn't do anything with him.
Speaker 1: So they throw him in a pile I see.
Speaker 2: And they would last for a long time, and so
Speaker 2: I mean porcupines chew him and squirrels and things like that.
Speaker 1: But but they they they were still there.
Speaker 2: That it was a good sign because you and we thought,
Speaker 2: why go to the kaleen, We're going to come up here,
Speaker 2: and that's what we did.
Speaker 3: And then when you were seeing all those antlers, it
Speaker 3: would show you where people had lived and also show
Speaker 3: you where places that might be good hunting exactly.
Speaker 2: And in almost every case there was a thin area
Speaker 2: open lead or something in the Candic River that would
Speaker 2: for water in the winter. They were great places, dry
Speaker 2: dry spruce woods.
Speaker 1: And and good water. And you found a guy that
Speaker 1: had starved to death, right.
Speaker 2: I did, Yeah, Me and me and Fred we found him.
Speaker 2: He was that was.
Speaker 6: Held where near a big pile of antlers.
Speaker 2: He was not.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 2: So so little John and I had gone up and
Speaker 2: we had built two cabins where most built two cabins.
Speaker 2: And then we went back to Eagle and got traps
Speaker 2: and things and and stoves, and we came back down
Speaker 2: and and Fred came with us and a couple other
Speaker 2: folks who were interested in having line cabins, just cabins,
Speaker 2: emergency cabins, you know, if you get wet, because these
Speaker 2: rivers that will overflow and sometimes you need to get
Speaker 2: past anyway, and so you get wet, and having a
Speaker 2: cabin in various places was was beneficial. So so Fred
Speaker 2: wanted one about ten miles up the river. And and
Speaker 2: he's the one that kind of designed this a little.
Speaker 2: It was a it wasn't a very good cabin. It
Speaker 2: was about five feet tall on the inside, and there
Speaker 2: weren't any windows, and the door was just a piece
Speaker 2: of plywood that we had found it in a drift
Speaker 2: bile out on the out on the Yukon and and
Speaker 2: it just had these leather hinges on it. So that
Speaker 2: was what that. And and then a bunk it was
Speaker 2: about six feet wide by nine feet long, somewhere to survive,
Speaker 2: somewhere to get out out of the cold and have
Speaker 2: a fire. And uh, and that's where Smigel ended up going.
Speaker 2: We called him Smiegel. Well, so to deal with him,
Speaker 2: he came down.
Speaker 1: Who's this guy?
Speaker 6: This is the dead guy.
Speaker 1: The dead guy eventually, sorry.
Speaker 4: So eventually you knew this guy before he died.
Speaker 2: I did not, but Fred had, Fred had seen him.
Speaker 2: Fred was this gregarious guy that lived at the mouth
Speaker 2: of the Candic and a lot of different people would
Speaker 2: come in there. There was a slew that you could
Speaker 2: catch pike and and things, and so everybody had it
Speaker 2: on their on their on their maps, you know, they
Speaker 2: would go in there, and he would go over and
Speaker 2: trade things, you know, a beaver hide for a sleeping
Speaker 2: bag or various things like this, and and uh. And
Speaker 2: one year this guy that that we called Smigel, he
Speaker 2: called himself John the Baptist. But he and a and
Speaker 2: a buddy of his had floated down from Canada on
Speaker 2: a raft, on a log raft, and there was a
Speaker 2: big cabin just like a mile up stream of the
Speaker 2: Candy and they had seen that and gone to spend
Speaker 2: the night there, and his buddy during the night shoved
Speaker 2: the raft off and left. And so he wakes up
Speaker 2: in the shorting ditched him. He ditched him, did Smiegel,
Speaker 2: and so and so he he had the clothes on
Speaker 2: his back, the sleeping bag, and and uh and a
Speaker 2: shotgun at twenty gates. You know those rossies with the external.
Speaker 2: He had a twenty gage shotguns.
Speaker 6: You just got to wonder how much background have you
Speaker 6: have you tried to do any background, like the ditching
Speaker 6: the partner? Is that bad character of which one?
Speaker 1: Yeah, who was the who was the who was the
Speaker 1: sort of dick you know exactly? I have no idea,
Speaker 1: I have no idea.
Speaker 2: But but this guy wandered down and he didn't know
Speaker 2: Fredwich Baptists on the Baptist Yeah, wandered down to uh
Speaker 2: and this is like early September. He wandered down to
Speaker 2: the mouth of the Candy and saw that there was
Speaker 2: somebody in this cabin across the slough. And Fred came
Speaker 2: over and got him. And Fred was always like, you know,
Speaker 2: happy with the system, you know, and always wanted to
Speaker 2: show it to somebody. A canoe back on a lake
Speaker 2: where they go to hunt ducks and muskrats, you know,
Speaker 2: and various other you know, a cash here or there,
Speaker 2: you know, and and.
Speaker 1: Me just so unclear, like he had a sweet setup
Speaker 1: and he shared he'd want to share, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: like I catch pike here, I do this there, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2: And and he was not very ambitious, so he only
Speaker 2: he might get a Lynx or two, you know, in
Speaker 2: in Trapping or in eight or ten Martin, and you
Speaker 2: know that would be enough for him.
Speaker 1: He just didn't. He wasn't very ambitious.
Speaker 9: And so you know, a very ambitious guy out there, tho,
Speaker 9: it's gotta be fairly ambitious.
Speaker 2: Maybe he didn't build the cabin they called it. Morris's
Speaker 2: I always going back? Yeah, but but anyway, he he
Speaker 2: he decided that he was going to go back east
Speaker 2: that fall and he told he told this guy that
Speaker 2: he had to catch a ride or build a raft
Speaker 2: and go to Circle. They couldn't stay there, but the
Speaker 2: guy stayed and Fred got a ride. There was a
Speaker 2: there was a barge called the Brainstorm that ran out
Speaker 2: of Circle and it would go up to Eagle and Dawson.
Speaker 1: I got I got interrupted discover I got lost from it.
Speaker 1: So Fred, So Fred's living there. Yeah, and okay, let's
Speaker 1: just stick with just calling him Smiegel. Fred's living there.
Speaker 1: Smiegel comes down, Sniegel's been abandoned by his buddy. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now, now who says they're going back? They got to
Speaker 3: go east?
Speaker 2: Fred is Fred had his plan to go back east.
Speaker 2: So he had he had a bunch of food stored.
Speaker 3: Oh, and he says. But he says, you can't stay
Speaker 3: here at my house.
Speaker 2: You can't stay at my house. You have to find
Speaker 2: a ride to Circle.
Speaker 1: And get out of here. I'm gonna be gone. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be out of town. And when I'm out of town,
Speaker 1: I don't want you here eating my food. That's right,
Speaker 1: got it? And about that?
Speaker 2: And Fred got to town by by hailing this barge.
Speaker 2: The barge would pick people up. I mean, it was
Speaker 2: a big enough barge. It could haul like a dump truck,
Speaker 2: you know, on its deck and building materials and things.
Speaker 2: And it would go down and go to fort Yukon
Speaker 2: and then up to okro on the Porcupine in Canada.
Speaker 2: But that was that barge's route, right and the and
Speaker 2: the road that would you know, where supplies were loaded
Speaker 2: was Circle. And so anyway that Fred got a ride
Speaker 2: up and went back east, hitchhike back east and spent
Speaker 2: till it was early November when he got back to
Speaker 2: Eagle and put his It wasn't frozen yet. There were
Speaker 2: there were ice flowing, you know. But he went downstream
Speaker 2: in his canoe in amongst all these ice chunks.
Speaker 1: In November. Yeah, in November, not ambitious. Well he knew
Speaker 1: how to do. You're not ambitious.
Speaker 3: Let me tell you what.
Speaker 1: I'm a picture.
Speaker 2: So he gets down almost of the Candic River when
Speaker 2: the river is just jamming up a little too much
Speaker 2: for even him, and he pulls his canoe out, walks
Speaker 2: to his cabin and it's about twenty below and Smiegel
Speaker 2: has moved his lamp and his sleeping gear to this
Speaker 2: cabin up at three mile, three miles farther up, and
Speaker 2: Fred was he was pissed. And then he left a
Speaker 2: note on the door, I'm up at three mile cabin
Speaker 2: John the Baptist, you know. And so and so Fred
Speaker 2: goes up there and this guy, this guy has been
Speaker 2: eating his jarred fish. He's been eating the moose that
Speaker 2: he had, and has sewn clothes out of furs that
Speaker 2: Fred had. He's loaded all of our ammunition we had.
Speaker 2: Fred had this metal box bolted to a tree that
Speaker 2: would kind of like an underbed box on a truck,
Speaker 2: and it was back in the woods behind his place.
Speaker 2: But of course he'd shown this guy that and that
Speaker 2: was where all of us, me and Fred and little
Speaker 2: John had reloading materials there. And so he had loaded everything.
Speaker 2: We all shot two forty threes, and so he had
Speaker 2: loaded it all but with different you know, you shake
Speaker 2: it and it's none of it was consistent. None of
Speaker 2: it was consistent. We're like, this is not good, and
Speaker 2: we had to get a bullet puller then eventually undo
Speaker 2: it all, undo them. Yeah, we weren't going to shoot him.
Speaker 2: We had no idea about it, right.
Speaker 6: You're like, this one's good for grouse, this one might
Speaker 6: might take down a moose maybe.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So so so anyway, I had left my snow shoes.
Speaker 2: I had store bought snow shoes, but I left them
Speaker 2: down there because I wanted to. I wanted to build
Speaker 2: a pair, and I knew that if I had a
Speaker 2: store bought pair, I wouldn't right, And so I had
Speaker 2: left a pair down there and built a new set.
Speaker 2: And but anyway, Fred fred is Bread is pissed off
Speaker 2: at this guy. Fred used to grow pot on the
Speaker 2: roof of his that cabin. He would he would throw
Speaker 2: dog shit up there, and then he would throw seeds.
Speaker 2: It wasn't it wasn't any good. That's like, yeah, it
Speaker 2: wasn't any weed.
Speaker 1: What it wasn't good weed?
Speaker 6: No, like not for the area, good weed or not
Speaker 6: good weed just can't be choosers.
Speaker 1: Kind of weed.
Speaker 2: It It would give you a headache more than it
Speaker 2: would give you a high. But anyway, this guy had
Speaker 2: smoked all his pot too.
Speaker 7: He was living high on the hog while you guys
Speaker 7: are gone.
Speaker 2: And Fred got pissed about that, and he says it
Speaker 2: wasn't any good stick around anyway. Fred says, you got
Speaker 2: to go circle or eagle after it freezes up. You
Speaker 2: got to go because I'm going to kill you otherwise,
Speaker 2: right and so and so this guy says, I'm not
Speaker 2: going either. I'm going to chalk Keatsick. So chalck Keatsick
Speaker 2: is on the Black River flowing down into the Porcupine
Speaker 2: and and it's a long ways north from the Candic River.
Speaker 2: But that's what this guy says. And so further into
Speaker 2: the bush further h Yeah and so and so, uh.
Speaker 2: Fred outfits him with with some some grain and some
Speaker 2: rice and some beans and stems, gave him, gave him
Speaker 2: a twenty two pistol, Holy cat. And and this guy
Speaker 2: takes off with my snow shoes right and and cruises
Speaker 2: up the Candic River because he's going to go up
Speaker 2: the Candy and over into the the Black river drainage,
Speaker 2: and and and so I came down late he left
Speaker 2: uh late November, and h and.
Speaker 1: I had so I I freaking dart too.
Speaker 2: I was, Yeah, I was staying in this cabin above
Speaker 2: Johnson Gorge, so about thirty miles up the river. And
Speaker 2: and so I would line a canoe up there and
Speaker 2: spend the winter. But there was a pass you could
Speaker 2: go over some mountains and down to the Yukon, and
Speaker 2: I preferred to do that and run the river because
Speaker 2: the river would would overflow and then your trail would
Speaker 2: be gone and things. If you could, you know, get
Speaker 2: to a place that it was all water.
Speaker 1: So I came.
Speaker 4: Down flow, meaning that you get water flowing on top
Speaker 4: of the ice.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So so once a river freezes over, you get
Speaker 2: snow on it. Sometimes the flow is enough that it
Speaker 2: it doesn't have enough room underneath the ice as it
Speaker 2: starts thickening up weight on it and things, and it'll
Speaker 2: seep up into the snow over the ice and then
Speaker 2: it's it's it's slush for a while until it reaches
Speaker 2: the surface and refreezes, you know. But anyway, so I
Speaker 2: had come down over this pass and come down to
Speaker 2: get my snow shoes because the ones I built I
Speaker 2: broke and I had to splice them or anyway I
Speaker 2: had I had. I got down there in early December,
Speaker 2: like ten days after Smiegel had left Fred, and Fred says, well,
Speaker 2: he took your he took your your snow shoes. And
Speaker 2: I said, let's go and get him. And so we
Speaker 2: we we started walking up the river, but that was
Speaker 2: a really big snow yere and it was we We
Speaker 2: went about five miles up and I decided, ye, he
Speaker 2: he can go wherever he wants. But you know, I'm like,
Speaker 2: he's not going to make it to chuck heat sick,
Speaker 2: no way. And and it actually became a topic among
Speaker 2: all of us living on the river, and uh.
Speaker 7: Where is megel?
Speaker 2: Well, we all we all knew from being out there
Speaker 2: that you can't make a living with a twenty two
Speaker 2: pistol in the winter. You might shoot a grouse or
Speaker 2: a squirrel or something like that here or there, but
Speaker 2: you can't feed yourself that way. And he didn't have
Speaker 2: enough food to start with.
Speaker 7: Someone tells me his buddy had a reason to abandon
Speaker 7: him after hearing this story.
Speaker 1: I think maybe. So. Yeah, we've honed in on who's
Speaker 1: the dick? Yeah, I think maybe so.
Speaker 6: So just to pause here for a second. Again, it
Speaker 6: became a topic amongst everybody on the river. What I
Speaker 6: imagine this is mostly in your heads with little bits
Speaker 6: of being together, because keep in mind, right now we're
Speaker 6: in the days of instant gratification point being right there,
Speaker 6: cell phones, text messages.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, Hey, sorry about that.
Speaker 3: Well that's over here.
Speaker 1: Oh it is.
Speaker 2: I should put mine on airplane too.
Speaker 6: So yeah, Phil will tell you not to have that
Speaker 6: thing on the table either, Okay, yeah, get interference sometimes there.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna turn it off. Ye.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you're doing great. Large preamble just to ask how
Speaker 6: often are you all getting together to have conversations in person?
Speaker 2: Hey, we had good dog teams. Okay, we cruised around
Speaker 2: and h and we did talk, and we did have
Speaker 2: big gatherings up there, you know, Christmas, New Year's and
Speaker 2: various other things. No, we we talked a lot. Okay,
Speaker 2: there'd be people traveling just to say hi or to
Speaker 2: share some meat or or whatever. But there was discussion.
Speaker 2: Everybody uniformly said there's no way he can make it
Speaker 2: to Chalikisik. But there were those that said he probably
Speaker 2: waved somebody down an airplane, but we didn't have hardly
Speaker 2: any airplanes ever go by us there. And some people thought, well,
Speaker 2: maybe he went up a little bit and then walked
Speaker 2: around Fred's place and got onto the river and walked
Speaker 2: a circle or or whatever, you know, and it's like, no,
Speaker 2: we pay attention to.
Speaker 1: Tracks, you know.
Speaker 2: It's living out in the woods in the snow country.
Speaker 2: You're always looking at tracks. There's nothing that gets by
Speaker 2: you tracks. And so we were like, nah, he's got
Speaker 2: to be dead, you know. And so the next spring.
Speaker 2: So so the Candic River is great in the fall,
Speaker 2: has lots of moose and other you know, bears and
Speaker 2: things like that. But in the springtime the Yukon is
Speaker 2: the place to be because there's the flyway, you know,
Speaker 2: you get all the waterfowl coming into Alaska's going by there.
Speaker 2: And then there's these big south facing bluffs on the
Speaker 2: on the mountains that butt up against the Yukon, and
Speaker 2: they call them step Community, you know, because they're just
Speaker 2: at that angle.
Speaker 1: They'll drain all.
Speaker 2: Their snow really early in March sometimes and you get
Speaker 2: all this new growth coming out, even though everywhere else,
Speaker 2: you know, there's still three feet of snow laying around
Speaker 2: and the bears would come out early there. So it
Speaker 2: was the Yukon was the place to be in the
Speaker 2: spring feeding yourself. And so that left me with my
Speaker 2: canoe up at my upper place at thirty miles up,
Speaker 2: and so I would have to walk the ridge and
Speaker 2: down and then canoe down to get my canoe back
Speaker 2: in the spring. So that's what me and Fred did.
Speaker 2: We went up and walked in and get my canoe
Speaker 2: and we're coming down and when we come to where
Speaker 2: this cabin is back in the woods, we'd come around
Speaker 2: this corner. I see my snow shoes hanging in a
Speaker 2: tree right there. We're a couple of hundred yards up
Speaker 2: the river.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: He came around and I say, Fred, somem eagel's here
Speaker 2: and he's not alive. And we get up there, and
Speaker 2: he knew he wasn't alive. Well, he couldn't have been alive.
Speaker 2: We didn't have any food.
Speaker 7: There, and the snowshoes were still there.
Speaker 2: And the snow shoes were there. He didn't walk away,
Speaker 2: and so we get up there. We got five dogs,
Speaker 2: Okay I had three and Spread had two at that time,
Speaker 2: all in the canoe with you no, they're running the pad.
Speaker 1: Oh, I see, okay, they're just keeping up. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so we get there and walk up to the
Speaker 2: cabin and the dogs are all running around, you know,
Speaker 2: and they are just really they they focus on dead things, right,
Speaker 2: they really like you know, if you shoot a bear
Speaker 2: out of a tree or get a moose, you know,
Speaker 2: they want to be there. It's just like that's the
Speaker 2: thing of interest. So so so I opened the door,
Speaker 2: and of course I knock on it, just in case.
Speaker 2: But and and there's this sleeping bag on the bunk.
Speaker 2: The bunk had been nine feet long and three feet wide,
Speaker 2: and it was just these little black spruce back and
Speaker 2: forth begins, back and forth, and then uh, you know,
Speaker 2: on on two poles that were notched into the walls,
Speaker 2: and so and so all of those poles except about
Speaker 2: three feet of them had been burned. Had he had
Speaker 2: a saw in the in the house. And so I
Speaker 2: picked him up, and he was light, and I brought
Speaker 2: him outside.
Speaker 1: He was he's in his bag. Yeah, he's in his bag.
Speaker 2: And so we we took him out in Fred's bag,
Speaker 2: Fred's bag, and and uh and it was it was
Speaker 2: he was so skinny as his eyes were sunken into
Speaker 2: his face, and and we took his clothes off because
Speaker 2: we just wanted to see what had happened there. And
Speaker 2: he was seriously skin on bone.
Speaker 1: There was no meat.
Speaker 2: He had starved out and h and the twenty two
Speaker 2: was hanging on a nail in the back wall. And
Speaker 2: so he definitely didn't kill himself. And and the dogs
Speaker 2: they were like twenty feet away looking the other way.
Speaker 2: They wanted nothing to do with this. Wow, you can
Speaker 2: see their ears are turned back to us, so they
Speaker 2: were paying attention, but they didn't want to be anywhere
Speaker 2: near it. Was almost like, you know, one of the
Speaker 2: what we were thinking was that one of the gods
Speaker 2: has fallen, you know, And because I don't know what
Speaker 2: they think of us, but I think that maybe what
Speaker 2: the dogs, yeah, yeah, oh that's interesting. They didn't want
Speaker 2: nothing to do with it. They want to be near it.
Speaker 2: They didn't want to smell it, close nothing, And so
Speaker 2: we we.
Speaker 1: How long at that point, how long you think he'd
Speaker 1: been dead?
Speaker 2: I really don't know. Was he froze he had been frozen,
Speaker 2: but he was thought then and hair was starting to
Speaker 2: slip on his forehead, but he didn't smell rotten, and
Speaker 2: and so and so we were thinking, what do we
Speaker 2: do with this guy? You know, we don't have a shovel,
Speaker 2: the ground's still frozen. We can't bury him. Do we
Speaker 2: try to take him somewhere? Do we take him to Circle?
Speaker 2: That would be at least a three or four day
Speaker 2: process to get down there. The Yukon was packed with
Speaker 2: ice on both sides at that point in time, you know,
Speaker 2: break up it put a bunch of ice on the banks.
Speaker 2: Neither of us had a penny, and we were making
Speaker 2: our living day by day going down the river, and
Speaker 2: if we went down to Circle, we didn't know anywhere
Speaker 2: where there would be where to go for food, whether
Speaker 2: we could get him down there without him. You know,
Speaker 2: we thought we could put ice in, have him in
Speaker 2: the bottom of the boat with ice, but that would
Speaker 2: put us out because we would get down there and
Speaker 2: we wouldn't We'd have nothing, no way to make a living.
Speaker 2: And so we just decided we're to leave him here,
Speaker 2: and we put him back on some tundra a little
Speaker 2: ways away, and we took off and then he was
Speaker 2: I went back there later in the summer and he
Speaker 2: was gone.
Speaker 7: So something did you guys eventually get word out to
Speaker 7: like some authority.
Speaker 2: We told people that there wasn't anything anybody could do.
Speaker 2: We didn't know who he was.
Speaker 3: As far as you know, has he ever been identified?
Speaker 1: I have no idea.
Speaker 7: Probably probably a lot of people.
Speaker 1: That happened to a lot of people up there.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I don't think he was out there because
Speaker 6: he wanted to stay in touch with his family.
Speaker 4: Right, So we should probably skip forward to what a
Speaker 4: fellow does when he gets lonely and he figures he's
Speaker 4: gonna need a companion out in this life. Could on this, Yeah,
Speaker 4: because otherwise we are going to be here all day,
Speaker 4: which is fine with me. I'll just cancel a couple
Speaker 4: upcoming calls.
Speaker 6: Yeah, no, I mean that's that's amazing. I mean, if
Speaker 6: you guys thought about it that much, I think it's
Speaker 6: longer than I I would have thought about it. It
Speaker 6: would have been like, well, hopefully at twenty two isn't rusted.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, we used the sleeping bag.
Speaker 2: Fred took the sleeping bag.
Speaker 7: No, yeah, you got your snowshoes.
Speaker 1: I got my snow shoes.
Speaker 6: I was just thinking too, like, if he was that emaciated,
Speaker 6: had you guys found him alive, probably wouldn't be anything
Speaker 6: you could have done for him.
Speaker 1: I think that would be hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Where did you wind up? You eventually found your territory?
Speaker 1: So did your whole time in the bush wind up
Speaker 1: being in this river system that you're talking about now? Yeah? Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: and eventually got to where it like Johannie was saying,
Speaker 1: eventually got to where you wanted a companion.
Speaker 2: That's absolutely true.
Speaker 6: The dogs weren't cutting it.
Speaker 2: Dogs weren't cutting it. Well, they were great, but it
Speaker 2: wasn't the same. Yeah. Yeah, and uh, and I wasn't
Speaker 2: running into uh, single women out there?
Speaker 7: How many How many years have you been doing it
Speaker 7: before you decided ahead into the Fairbanks?
Speaker 1: I think? Uh? I think three? Okay, so you're still young. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Were there some couples out there or was it mostly
Speaker 4: single men doing this thing?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 2: There were couples out there. There were, yeah, yeah, most
Speaker 2: most of the other people out there were couples. Oh
Speaker 2: I see, yeah? They would they your third wheel? Well
Speaker 2: not really. I wasn't there. I was the one wheel.
Speaker 9: When you say most of the people out there, like,
Speaker 9: how many people were we talking about?
Speaker 2: There were about twenty people or so that lived between uh,
Speaker 2: Eagle and Circle, okay, yeah. And how many miles it
Speaker 2: verid one hundred and sixty miles okay, yeah.
Speaker 9: And how often would you see like, how long would
Speaker 9: you go without seeing people?
Speaker 2: Well, so when I was up the Candy it would
Speaker 2: be months.
Speaker 1: Oh really yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my father he came out to visit the first
Speaker 2: year that I was out there, that I spent on
Speaker 2: the Candic River, so I'd been out on the North
Speaker 2: Fork at forty mile. And it was funny because he
Speaker 2: was he was working for park Service. He got he
Speaker 2: was a historian down in Southwest Region out of Santa
Speaker 2: Fe for a while, and then he got offered a
Speaker 2: job in Alaska to deal with the d two Lands,
Speaker 2: which became the Parklands. He was park Service, so that's
Speaker 2: what he dealt with. And he was up in Eagle
Speaker 2: dealing with stuff relating to the Yukon what became the
Speaker 2: Yukon Charlie Preserve, and he got buried in effigy there
Speaker 2: by somebody because the Eagle did not like it that
Speaker 2: the federal lands were coming around. But you know, they
Speaker 2: were kind of laid out in statehood and they were
Speaker 2: laid out in the native flames.
Speaker 7: That your dad ended up like right in.
Speaker 2: Near you, So I didn't I had no idea he
Speaker 2: was there. But when Little John and I had gone
Speaker 2: up and gotten the traps everything we were, we were
Speaker 2: at our canoes ready to shove off, and my dad
Speaker 2: pulls up right and he says, he says, Randy, where
Speaker 2: are you at now? I said, well, up in Indian
Speaker 2: Grave Creek. That's one of the tributaries of the Candick.
Speaker 2: And and I was sixty miles up the Candick and
Speaker 2: that was the cabin I was going to be staying in.
Speaker 2: And he says, he says, I'm going to come and
Speaker 2: visit you for Christmas. And when I say, fine, you know,
Speaker 2: and we took off and he took off and and
Speaker 2: come come that time of year. So I didn't have
Speaker 2: a calendar or watch or anything, you know, out there,
Speaker 2: so I don't really know when that was going to be.
Speaker 2: But Little John had been at the at the lower
Speaker 2: cabin near the near the past to the Yukon, and
Speaker 2: he he had he had made a trip over there
Speaker 2: and found out they were doing a big Christmas shindig
Speaker 2: at this one place.
Speaker 1: On a lake beside the Yukon.
Speaker 2: So he came up to get me, and I said,
Speaker 2: I said, I can't, I can't go. What if my
Speaker 2: dad comes, He says, he's not going to come, that's
Speaker 2: you know, how's he going to get up.
Speaker 1: Here, you know?
Speaker 2: And I said, it would be horrible if he came
Speaker 2: and I wasn't here.
Speaker 1: So I stayed.
Speaker 2: I was getting caribou, and I was the only one
Speaker 2: getting caribou out there at the time.
Speaker 1: And so.
Speaker 2: Little John leaves and goes over to this party, and
Speaker 2: and I'm hauling caribou in from a place that I
Speaker 2: had gotten a few and at the time, the the
Speaker 2: limit was no more than ten a day, no more
Speaker 2: than no more than ten a day. And and so
Speaker 2: anyway I'm hauling. I'm hauling this caribou back and uh
Speaker 2: with the dogs. And I hear this airplane come in
Speaker 2: and circle around and land. And it was it was
Speaker 2: Ron Warblow who ran They had an air service out
Speaker 2: of Toke and he was in a one eighty five
Speaker 2: on skis, and Ron was not going to leave him
Speaker 2: be at my place unless it was warm and fresh tracks,
Speaker 2: you know, and which there was. So I come back.
Speaker 2: I hear that plane leave, and I come back and uh,
Speaker 2: and my dad is there and he he has a
Speaker 2: number ten can of cookies and and uh a thing
Speaker 2: of cough drops. And he didn't bring any other food.
Speaker 2: He thought I had a bunch of food. I've got
Speaker 2: just moose, moose fat, moose meat and caribou meat, and
Speaker 2: that's it. And I had no coffee, no tea, no nothing. Right,
Speaker 2: And he's he's going to try to quit smoking.
Speaker 1: So he's got you have salt. I had salt.
Speaker 2: And and so so he has he has Copenhagen because
Speaker 2: he'd been a smoker pretty much all all his life
Speaker 2: that I had known him. And uh, so he has
Speaker 2: Copenhagen there to try to ease things up. Well, he
Speaker 2: had he had a few different things he was dealing with.
Speaker 2: One and you know, they eating just meat and uh,
Speaker 2: and all I would do is fry it in a
Speaker 2: pan and then eat right out of the pan and
Speaker 2: and uh and then go dip.
Speaker 1: Buckets of water. So I had. I had water and
Speaker 1: meat and fat. That's what I was eating.
Speaker 2: And then for light, I had a moose fat candle,
Speaker 2: you know, an old like a tuna fish can with
Speaker 2: a with a bent piece in it and a bit
Speaker 2: of old levi as the wick. And you'd have to
Speaker 2: set it on a stove. You'd have to set it
Speaker 2: on the stove to melt it, and then you could
Speaker 2: light it and it would keep going mostly and uh
Speaker 2: and give off just a candle a candle light. So
Speaker 2: that was my light. And so he he ended up
Speaker 2: he ended up asking me to carve him a pipe
Speaker 2: at one point and because he's going to start smoking
Speaker 2: his Copenhagen because it wasn't it wasn't it wasn't doing
Speaker 2: enough for him.
Speaker 1: But when people do that move, when they do the
Speaker 1: when they do like the they're going to quit something, yeah,
Speaker 1: and they're gonna be like, well, I'm gonna take advantage
Speaker 1: of this remote or out of the country thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they never fixed, but they never they never factor.
Speaker 3: In the people that are around them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know.
Speaker 1: And then they going like, well, I decided I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quit drinking. Yeah, you know, I'm gonna quit smoking while
Speaker 1: you and me are away from that.
Speaker 6: I just talked to an outfitter who they had to
Speaker 6: fly a guy out really yeah, dts because he's like,
Speaker 6: this is the perfect opportunity for me to stop drinking.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I bet those cookies your dad brought were good. Oh,
Speaker 2: we finished them immediately. Up, I had, I had, you know,
Speaker 2: I was adapted to the meat at that point in
Speaker 2: time to just meet. But I still enjoyed some other things,
Speaker 2: you know, And so yeah, I gobbled him down.
Speaker 1: Did you ever lose your salt tolerance? Like, did you
Speaker 1: ever lose did you ever get to the point where
Speaker 1: you didn't even want salt on the meat? No, you
Speaker 1: just wanted it salted. Yeah, I like it salted.
Speaker 3: Have you read Stephenson's My Life with the Eskimo?
Speaker 1: Absolutely? Yeah. When they would go when they would go
Speaker 1: into these in with these groups and with these Eskimo hunting,
Speaker 1: they would find it to keep your supplies from getting diminished,
Speaker 1: they would salt everything because they hated salt. Oh, that
Speaker 1: was a protective measure against him. Yeah, so you'd have
Speaker 1: your stash of food, right, they would just salt it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then no one would touch it because they salted
Speaker 1: it because they had They didn't do they didn't do
Speaker 1: dietary salt.
Speaker 4: Eskimo didn't.
Speaker 1: No, he says, if you salted meat, they don't want
Speaker 1: nothing to do with it.
Speaker 6: Don't you think they were getting salt from seal fat.
Speaker 1: And they weren't using it. They weren't using it as
Speaker 1: a seasoning. You know, if you eat a fish out
Speaker 1: of the ocean, he's not salty.
Speaker 6: No, but right, just your body chemistry, don't you need
Speaker 6: like a certain amount of yeah?
Speaker 1: Right, So he mentions it like multiple times that just
Speaker 1: they don't want salt, and then he he eventually arrived.
Speaker 1: Stephenson arrives at a point because he has to go
Speaker 1: without for months and months they run out of salt.
Speaker 1: He goes months about salt eventually and then gets where
Speaker 1: it ruins it for him. He doesn't want any kind
Speaker 1: of salt on his food, and he talks about it
Speaker 1: being like a it's a learned that that eating all
Speaker 1: that salt is learned. It's a learned taste, and you
Speaker 1: get if you go without it for a couple of
Speaker 1: years or whatever, you don't you can't eat salty meat anymore.
Speaker 3: That's what he says. He was wrong about a few things.
Speaker 2: So he did mention that that they considered polar bear
Speaker 2: liver to be toxic, that you couldn't.
Speaker 1: Eat it without toxic amounts of vitamin A. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a widely held belief. Is that not true?
Speaker 2: I think it is true, so, but it's also true
Speaker 2: for grizzlies. So me and little Giant at one point,
Speaker 2: after eating tried moosse meat for a week, we ended
Speaker 2: up getting a grizzly and and cut him up, and
Speaker 2: we're frying heart, liver, and kidney in a full panload,
Speaker 2: and we both got headaches that just pounded us for
Speaker 2: a couple of days.
Speaker 1: We couldn't get up.
Speaker 2: And I think it was vitamin A poisoning, no kidding, Yeah,
Speaker 2: And so I think that it's not just polar bear,
Speaker 2: but it's the predator livers.
Speaker 6: Did you get that grizz with the two forty three?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that was your gun. Huh yeah, yeah, talk
Speaker 1: about I'm not trying to move you along. I'm just curious.
Speaker 1: How old are you when you decided that I'm going
Speaker 1: to make a go of it and I need a
Speaker 1: wife and kids. Well, so.
Speaker 2: I must have been I must have been twenty or
Speaker 2: twenty one when I decided I was going to make
Speaker 2: a concerted effort to find a woman. I So I
Speaker 2: built a raft and I floated down to Circle and
Speaker 2: I hitchhiked into Fairbanks. I had been at the university
Speaker 2: for one semester, so I knew there was these personal things,
Speaker 2: so I left a personal note on there. I don't
Speaker 2: know exactly what it says right now, but it was
Speaker 2: something about it traffic.
Speaker 1: You made a raft go to circle hitchhike the Fairbanks
Speaker 1: and then make it like a like a little flyer
Speaker 1: for yourself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, with a little tear offf to advertising.
Speaker 1: No, there were no tear offf taps.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that was my first attempt.
Speaker 3: Oh you know, you know what's the.
Speaker 1: Cutest thing in the world is uh uh Paul's daughter
Speaker 1: Paul and Jen's daughter Brooke at the Mediator store downtown.
Speaker 1: She's got a tear OFFF tab.
Speaker 3: That was bummed dear dad.
Speaker 1: Only one thing was tore off, So I don't know
Speaker 1: if it was there that long I was.
Speaker 3: Gonna tear a couple. Maybe it was just to make
Speaker 3: it look a little hotter.
Speaker 6: Well, maybe that's representative of folks not killing stuff walking
Speaker 6: into the Mediator store.
Speaker 1: Well, could be that, or it could be that the
Speaker 1: social media is her preferred mode too. Yeah, he make
Speaker 1: an ad say so.
Speaker 2: Not only that, but I had a dog with me
Speaker 2: and a rifle, so I had a double strap rifle,
Speaker 2: right and just because then it's like a little backpack.
Speaker 2: I gotcha, And that's how I carry my rifle to
Speaker 2: this day. And then the dog had a dog pack,
Speaker 2: and so what we did is we would walk down
Speaker 2: the road and I would shoot. It was big rabbit
Speaker 2: year then, and I would shoot rabbits on the road
Speaker 2: and for our food as well as hitchhiking. Finally got
Speaker 2: a ride all the way to Fairbanks, and then ended
Speaker 2: up getting a ride on the other route going to Eagle,
Speaker 2: and then built another raft and came down down river
Speaker 2: from Eagle. In fact that was I ended up stopping
Speaker 2: at Dick Cook's place and in the spring that year,
Speaker 2: and he wanted to go hunting sheep, and so we
Speaker 2: took off into the mountains there and he gave me
Speaker 2: a two fifty seven robberts that he had and with
Speaker 2: different he had different bullets loaded up for different purposes.
Speaker 2: Right there was you know, for a moose load, or
Speaker 2: to a goose load, or to you know, all these
Speaker 2: different things. So he's got like five shells and and
Speaker 2: we go up after sheep and uh, and I get
Speaker 2: a shot at this uh, this big ram and it
Speaker 2: uh and it was a poof and there's this bit
Speaker 2: of sleeping bag fiber that comes out of it. So
Speaker 2: it's a download, right, but it hits him in both elbows, boom,
Speaker 2: and he's down.
Speaker 4: And what's a download?
Speaker 6: Like a bird shot load type of deals. He was
Speaker 6: using the ticking for wadding.
Speaker 1: Is that right?
Speaker 2: That's right, so you you're not putting near as much
Speaker 2: powder in and so it's a slower so it's a
Speaker 2: bullet that's not gonna I mean we did that for
Speaker 2: squirrels and grouse too. You know, we used full metal
Speaker 2: jacket in two forty three.
Speaker 1: And you just stuff the exit, you just fill the
Speaker 1: excess space was down, Yeah, because if.
Speaker 2: It's laying there and the powder is just spread across
Speaker 2: the bottom, it can they say it can? It can
Speaker 2: back back pressure? Okay, But but Dick had not kept trying.
Speaker 2: This is a smiegel, you know, with all his things.
Speaker 2: That's what we would have run into if we just
Speaker 2: started using those. But he had assured me. Dick had
Speaker 2: assured me that these were all big loads, which they weren't.
Speaker 2: So this ram gets up on his back legs. I
Speaker 2: don't know how he got up and ran on two
Speaker 2: legs over the edge, and Dick ended up dispatching.
Speaker 1: Him down the hill a little bit.
Speaker 2: But but but that was that was a crazy situation there.
Speaker 2: But but then I got in my raft again after
Speaker 2: after we had come down off of the mountains.
Speaker 1: Dick, how long? How long was the sheep hunt? One day?
Speaker 6: I got to tell you, this is the most interested
Speaker 6: I've been in getting the lady story in a long time.
Speaker 3: And meanwhile you've set your trap. You baited the trap
Speaker 3: with this note.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I never got any. My male address was Poba
Speaker 2: General Delivery Eagle, right, and I never got anything. So
Speaker 2: that was a failed What did the note say, though,
Speaker 2: trapper living up on the Yukon is uh seeking a woman?
Speaker 2: I think something like that.
Speaker 1: Nothing about any kind of criteria young and handsome trapper?
Speaker 4: Yeah, he said, yeah.
Speaker 6: Twenty one years old.
Speaker 1: You didn't put anything about like like, you didn't put
Speaker 1: down any parameters that you were hoping to like achieve here,
Speaker 1: I did not. No, did you put your age down?
Speaker 2: I don't think I did. I think See, it was
Speaker 2: a failed attempt. Okay, it was my first attempt. But
Speaker 2: it was a failed attempt.
Speaker 7: Let's hear about the successful one.
Speaker 2: So so I went in again the next summer and
Speaker 2: so but but there's a there's a problem, you know,
Speaker 2: to get to to have a develop a relationship. You know,
Speaker 2: I was going to have to move into Fairbanks and
Speaker 2: get a job and and everything and then.
Speaker 1: And and I just couldn't do that.
Speaker 2: You know, you're going to miss you know, the King
Speaker 2: Salmon Sea's in, you were going to miss and miss
Speaker 2: the moose season. You're gonna you know, it doesn't work.
Speaker 2: So so I went in and happened to be there
Speaker 2: during the Solstice Fair. They have a big party on
Speaker 2: Solstice every year. And and Karen, my my wife of
Speaker 2: forty three years right now, was sitting taking care of
Speaker 2: somebody else's dog and in front of a live music band,
Speaker 2: and so I sawn Heed over there and we struck
Speaker 2: up a conversation. Well, she was taking classes up at
Speaker 2: the university to go out and teach, and I asked
Speaker 2: her if she wanted to come and join me, and
Speaker 2: she said when you go, and I said tomorrow. Was
Speaker 2: she kind of a hippie, yeah, Birkenstocks. Yeah, everybody called
Speaker 2: us the.
Speaker 1: Whole thing watching a dog at a music music thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but back then hippies were kind of hard, like.
Speaker 3: They'd go live in the woods, different.
Speaker 4: Than there's still plenty of them in Alaska. I called
Speaker 4: it's the hippie redneck of Alaska. They're rough and tough,
Speaker 4: but kind of hippies at the same time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I suppose I didn't.
Speaker 2: I didn't if they were hippies, I don't see anything
Speaker 2: wrong with them. They were great people that lived out
Speaker 2: there and high functioning, doing a lot of different stuff. Sure, man,
Speaker 2: I mean taking care of dogs and putting up food
Speaker 2: for the winter and dealing with salmon, and building cabins
Speaker 2: and traveling all over.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was. It was a high functioning group. When
Speaker 1: you met her, how like, how abruptly did you lay
Speaker 1: out what the what the proposal was?
Speaker 2: Oh, within a couple hours.
Speaker 7: And yeah, he said he's got one day to make
Speaker 7: a decision, right.
Speaker 2: Well, and she says, I'm not going to go bed.
Speaker 2: Give me where do I write you? So she would
Speaker 2: write me, and then and then the postmaster in Eagle
Speaker 2: would would give these letters to people to go down river,
Speaker 2: and so I would get a letter from somebody when
Speaker 2: I was down on the Yukon. And of course I
Speaker 2: had to borrow stationery, you know, right back. But but
Speaker 2: we exchanged I don't know, three or four letters during
Speaker 2: the course of that summer and fall, and then I
Speaker 2: was up the Candic River and didn't get any more
Speaker 2: mail until until I went down to the Yukon one time,
Speaker 2: and and she had she had put in her note
Speaker 2: that she was traveling down to San Francisco, where she
Speaker 2: had gone to college, And so I came down and
Speaker 2: met her at the airport in Anchorage.
Speaker 1: So so get this.
Speaker 2: I've got a beaver coat and moose hide pants, mucklucks
Speaker 2: with beaver tops to him, beaver mittens, and hat. And
Speaker 2: I get on an Alaska Airlines jet out of Fairbanks
Speaker 2: and they take me just like that down to Anchorage,
Speaker 2: right and my dad meets me down there and he's like,
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ, Randy, you can't dress like this in the city.
Speaker 2: So he takes me out and gets me new clothes
Speaker 2: and boots and stuff like that. And so I met
Speaker 2: her though at her airplane, and I had a ticket
Speaker 2: to go with her. So I went down to San
Speaker 2: Francisco with her, and it spent a couple of weeks,
Speaker 2: and then she was teaching in Akiak, which is down
Speaker 2: in the Lower Cusquin, a village down there, and.
Speaker 7: I don't want to diverge from your love story. But
Speaker 7: when you got to San Francisco, was it like holy shit,
Speaker 7: culture shock kind of thing?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean I'd grown up in Santa Fe, you know,
Speaker 2: so I mean, I mean it isn't like San Francisco,
Speaker 2: but yeah, no, it's it was, Yeah, it was. It
Speaker 2: was culture shock. She took me to New York one
Speaker 2: time because she grew up back on the East Coast,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, oh, that's Martin. Oh, that's you know, muskrat,
Speaker 2: there's you know, a fox Burg, you know, all these
Speaker 2: different fur.
Speaker 1: Coats that people were wearing.
Speaker 2: And and I also said, don't let go of me
Speaker 2: because I don't think I could make it out of here.
Speaker 2: And so anyway, we've had a lot of great adventures.
Speaker 2: But but I did go down there with her and
Speaker 2: we got married the next year out on the river.
Speaker 1: That's awesome. So and you've been you've been together how long?
Speaker 1: Forty three years?
Speaker 4: And when you got married, did she move up on
Speaker 4: the river with you?
Speaker 1: She did?
Speaker 2: And uh, And I took her to one of our
Speaker 2: cabins that was about a nine y ten cabin and
Speaker 2: showed it to her, thinking, this is there here, it
Speaker 2: is this is the place, and she's going, I don't
Speaker 2: really think this is a good place for me. But
Speaker 2: we'd already been married, okay, and so and so I says,
Speaker 2: Or we can go up river a mile or so,
Speaker 2: and there's this old cabin that was there, and we
Speaker 2: could build a new one.
Speaker 1: And that's what we did.
Speaker 2: And we built the biggest cabin that was out there
Speaker 2: on the river.
Speaker 1: At that point.
Speaker 4: How big was it?
Speaker 2: It was eighteen feet square inside. Oh yeah, and two story.
Speaker 2: Oh well, it wasn't full two story. It was a
Speaker 2: two thirds loft.
Speaker 1: Yeah, mansion. It was a big one. Were you peeling
Speaker 1: those logs? Just leaving them and let letting the bark
Speaker 1: fall off? Eventually I left them. They were dry trees though,
Speaker 1: oh like fire killed trees or no, they weren't fire killed.
Speaker 1: It was a big grove of spruce tree that was
Speaker 1: growing along the Cantic River, and there was a there
Speaker 1: was a green swath that was maybe fifty yards in width,
Speaker 1: and then there was a dead one and I think
Speaker 1: the primafrost just came in underneath them and killed him.
Speaker 1: Oh I see.
Speaker 2: But they were big, big trees, big dry trees, all
Speaker 2: of them. So firewood was not a problem ever.
Speaker 3: At that point, were you build them with a chainsaw
Speaker 3: or all hand tools?
Speaker 2: I both saw on an axe and a two inch
Speaker 2: ogger for pegged work. No, I didn't have a chainsaw
Speaker 2: for a long time.
Speaker 6: Were you moving them on the snow or how are
Speaker 6: you transporting big logs like that? And eighteen foot? What's
Speaker 6: the diameter?
Speaker 2: They were twenty feet long and the big ones were
Speaker 2: probably twelve inches at the butt and uh, you know,
Speaker 2: nine or ten at the small end.
Speaker 1: They're real uniform. I just would grab them and haul
Speaker 1: them in. Yeah, there you go. You know, like normally,
Speaker 1: if you're married, it'd be you know, like you might
Speaker 1: get in the big old fight about I don't know,
Speaker 1: like oh we should stay home this Christmas or no,
Speaker 1: we should go to so and so's this Christmas, And
Speaker 1: that might be like a thing. Yeah, as you we're
Speaker 1: married living out in the bush like that? Was there
Speaker 1: like a major version of that, a major version where
Speaker 1: it was like we should live like this living off
Speaker 1: the land out in the bush, or we should go
Speaker 1: live in the town. I mean, is that like a
Speaker 1: constant source attention?
Speaker 2: No, it really wasn't. I think the biggest tension initially
Speaker 2: was when we were leaving Eagle with our supplies in
Speaker 2: our double end canoe, getting ready to go up the
Speaker 2: Candic for the winter. Karen came up with this industrial
Speaker 2: sized box of toilet paper. Okay, And I'm like, we
Speaker 2: can't fit that, Karen, we can't fit it. She cause
Speaker 2: it goes all or I stay. And so laid it
Speaker 2: right out. She laid it right out. I says, there's moss, Karen,
Speaker 2: and she goes, not going to use it. This toilet
Speaker 2: paper goes or I'm not going. And so the toilet
Speaker 2: paper came. That was That was. I mean, it didn't
Speaker 2: last for very long because because you started using it
Speaker 2: all No, no, no, I didn't.
Speaker 1: I didn't use it.
Speaker 2: She did, but but uh, but she she she made
Speaker 2: her position known. So so we went out into the
Speaker 2: woods and built that place and stayed there a couple
Speaker 2: of years, and then she wanted to go and teach again.
Speaker 2: So we went together out to Uh. In that case,
Speaker 2: it was Chivak out on the Yukon Delta, and and
Speaker 2: that that one didn't pan out very well because they
Speaker 2: had they had financial problem. That was a b I
Speaker 2: a school and and they hadn't accounted for all of
Speaker 2: the funds from the year before, so b I was
Speaker 2: withholding funds, so none of the teachers got paid for
Speaker 2: like four or five months, and we we had She
Speaker 2: had student loans, various other things and couldn't go that far.
Speaker 2: So she quit and got a job in Dalton. So
Speaker 2: I'm dealing with moving dogs, sleds, you know, all this
Speaker 2: other stuff. And Non Dalton was a wonderful place. That's
Speaker 2: over near Lake Clark, southwest of Anchorage.
Speaker 1: Beautiful place. And we were there for a couple of years.
Speaker 1: And then did you set up and trap there too? Then?
Speaker 2: No, I hunted, but I didn't trap. I hunted and
Speaker 2: I fished. I put gillnets under the ice down there
Speaker 2: and would catch twenty or thirty of these great, big
Speaker 2: humpback whitefish and some lake trout virtually every night in
Speaker 2: non Dalton once the lake froze up. And so the
Speaker 2: town folks in the town there would come down with
Speaker 2: these sleds because they knew I was using it for
Speaker 2: dog food, so they would trade dried sock ice for
Speaker 2: fresh whitefish. And we did that all winter for two years.
Speaker 1: It was wonderful. And you were making no cash money
Speaker 1: at that point, none you personally yeah. None.
Speaker 2: I did build my first birch bark canoe there though,
Speaker 2: in Nondalton, just for fun in the teacher's housing.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well yeah, yeah, to learn to do it.
Speaker 2: I wanted to learn to do it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so these three, these three old guys there would
Speaker 2: when they heard I was I was starting to build this,
Speaker 2: they knocked on my door and I opened it. They
Speaker 2: walk in, took seats, and they would sit there pretty
Speaker 2: much every day and just watch everye Once in a
Speaker 2: while they'd say something about how they used to do it.
Speaker 2: But but nobody had been making making birch bark canoes
Speaker 2: up there in the old ways since about the sometime
Speaker 2: in the nineteen twenties they stopped building them. They would
Speaker 2: they had got canvas then, and they started doing canvas
Speaker 2: boats that were a bit easier to build. But anyway,
Speaker 2: it was. It was great. And they they gave me
Speaker 2: suggestions like to mix caribou hair cut up small into
Speaker 2: uh into the pitch for doing the ceiling on the
Speaker 2: birch bark canoes and.
Speaker 1: Makes it more like a fiberglass or something. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And and like straw in Adobe's and things like that, Yeah,
Speaker 2: holds it together.
Speaker 4: Did you continue to use that skill in your lifetime.
Speaker 2: I built I think eleven or twelve birch bark canoes.
Speaker 2: You're shipping me really, yeah, at the Baskin style once,
Speaker 2: I like, I built two Eastern style, but the Athabaskan
Speaker 2: style is a little different construction. And so I just thought,
Speaker 2: we're in Alaska, we'll do them next way.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Damn. Well, at this point you've gone to school
Speaker 1: one semester. Yeah that's true. So why did you like,
Speaker 1: so you're how how educated are you now? I mean
Speaker 1: you got a lot of school now, a lot of school.
Speaker 1: I've got a graduate school, yeah I did.
Speaker 2: And that was so that was really one of the
Speaker 2: more traumatic things was moving into town. Traumatic things for me.
Speaker 2: So so we went back let me, let me please,
Speaker 2: So we went back.
Speaker 1: In the woods.
Speaker 2: We we we went out a couple of times when
Speaker 2: Caroen taught in Eagle and and for a little bit,
Speaker 2: and I would go out on trapline then. But but
Speaker 2: at one point, you know that remember the Native Claims
Speaker 2: Settlement Act happened, and Nilka happened, and and and all
Speaker 2: of a sudden, you know, people were there was a
Speaker 2: there was a desire to start claiming land or getting
Speaker 2: land that would go to one entity or another. And
Speaker 2: in the interior, Doyon was the big regional corporation and
Speaker 2: they had selected the land that our cabin was on.
Speaker 2: It had been b l M land prior to that,
Speaker 2: and it was just outside of the Yukon Charlie Park boundary.
Speaker 2: And Doyan said that they hadn't figured initially because we communicated,
Speaker 2: they had not decided how to deal with trespassed cabins,
Speaker 2: how to permit them or not and everything. Well, finally
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety they they sent us a note telling
Speaker 2: us that we had to leave, that we couldn't be
Speaker 2: out there anymore.
Speaker 1: The tribal corporation.
Speaker 2: Did, yeah, yeah, the corp yeah, Douyan Native Corporation and
Speaker 2: so but we were getting ready to go anyway because
Speaker 2: we had one dog team and it couldn't take all
Speaker 2: of us on a big trip into Eagle or to
Speaker 2: visit other people. So so you know, we had like
Speaker 2: five or six dogs at that time, great big one
Speaker 2: hundred pound, hundred and twenty pound huskies. There were wonderful animals.
Speaker 2: But it in order to have you know, the kids
Speaker 2: with their own teams or or care and with her
Speaker 2: own team, so you have you can travel as a family.
Speaker 2: It would have been really costly. You know, you can't
Speaker 2: fish in the Yukon, but go thirty miles off to live.
Speaker 2: You know, you can't move that that much stuff, and
Speaker 2: you got to feed those dogs, and you got to
Speaker 2: feed all the time.
Speaker 3: They can't move all that fish.
Speaker 1: Can't move the fish.
Speaker 2: You know, if you you live on the Yukon, that
Speaker 2: was a that was a resource that people used, but
Speaker 2: we didn't. And so I wasn't willing to go and
Speaker 2: try to manage a couple of dog teams. How would
Speaker 2: we even go along the river? You know, as these
Speaker 2: guys already ran the banks and uh and you know
Speaker 2: the Yukon. We would run them for a while until
Speaker 2: they got tired and then throw them in the canoe
Speaker 2: and they would you know, we could manage it that way,
Speaker 2: but uh, it just wasn't going to work.
Speaker 6: And so we were getting do you have no fishing
Speaker 6: on your on your river? No char or grayling?
Speaker 2: Or there were grayling, there were grayling, there were suckers
Speaker 2: along those suckers, there were you know, round white fish.
Speaker 2: There were a few species. But you couldn't feed her
Speaker 2: dog team with him. You know, you might feed them overnight.
Speaker 2: You know, in the lower part of the river there
Speaker 2: were Northern Pike, not in.
Speaker 1: The upper part of the river. They didn't go up there. Anyway.
Speaker 2: We were we were we were getting ready to go anyway.
Speaker 2: And so we just asked for a year leeway from
Speaker 2: Doyon so that we could come in with a ski
Speaker 2: plane and move some things and take care of the
Speaker 2: cabin so it wouldn't be a trash pile at some point.
Speaker 2: So so they they granted that to us, and uh,
Speaker 2: and then we went into Fairbanks and that was I
Speaker 2: hadn't worked a job since I was in high school,
Speaker 2: well the milking the cows period, you know, just out
Speaker 2: of high school. And and Karen had she she was
Speaker 2: a full out teacher. She she could go into Fairbanks
Speaker 2: and boom, she's teaching. And and I was I was struggling,
Speaker 2: what the hell do I do now?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: No, And there was this one log yard and I thought, well,
Speaker 2: I'd do log stuff, and so I walked over there
Speaker 2: and asked if there was any work. And this guy
Speaker 2: has these giant logs, you know that big, big scribe
Speaker 2: log houses get built out of, you know, forty fifty
Speaker 2: feet long, you know, and dirt and bark and stobs
Speaker 2: and everything. I'll give you ten dollars a log for peeling,
Speaker 2: you know. Well that isn't then again to even even
Speaker 2: enough to do our rent on a monthly basis, or
Speaker 2: pay for the kids stay care or whatever, you know.
Speaker 1: You know. And I had a gig for a while
Speaker 1: doing those logs, and it was I feel like it
Speaker 1: was thirty cents a foot. Yeah that's what we get paid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a miserable job. Man. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I peeled a lot of logs, and when it's your own,
Speaker 2: you know, it's just one thing. But peeling them for
Speaker 2: ten bucks a log. So so then I I said,
Speaker 2: I'm going to go to college. And so I went
Speaker 2: back to college.
Speaker 1: Walked up, walked over there.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and uh and and so I had I
Speaker 2: had one semester of credits and and and and went
Speaker 2: there and was going to go into biology because I thought,
Speaker 2: if there's anything I can do, it's it's these some
Speaker 2: job in biology where they go out in the field
Speaker 2: and do stuff, you know, because we met we met
Speaker 2: people out on the Yukon taking care of peregrines. We
Speaker 2: met people that were doing fisheries work or forestry work,
Speaker 2: and we thought I can do that. That would be
Speaker 2: something like.
Speaker 3: Oh, you'd run into professionals out doing their jobs.
Speaker 2: That's right, yeah, yeah, and so and so that's what
Speaker 2: that's what I did. And and my first job was
Speaker 2: with BLM, a seasonal job. This gal, Randy Chant, who
Speaker 2: was a biology biologist with BLM, was doing waterfowl brood
Speaker 2: surveys and wanted to hire somebody to be able to
Speaker 2: do that. But they had to know the birds, and
Speaker 2: and I knew all the birds, all of the ducks
Speaker 2: and the geese and everything. You could see him from
Speaker 2: a mile away flying and know what they were. And
Speaker 2: so she took me out to test me around these
Speaker 2: there's two lakes by the airport when they get a
Speaker 2: bunch of ducks in the spring, and of course I
Speaker 2: could identify them all.
Speaker 1: No problem.
Speaker 2: She's gonna be okay, well you might work. And they
Speaker 2: were really nervous because here's this guy, I don't know
Speaker 2: how old I was, thirty three or something like that,
Speaker 2: and didn't have a job since he was a teenager.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It made him a little bit nervous.
Speaker 1: But they.
Speaker 2: They they took the chance and and so I was
Speaker 2: going to college in the in the winters and then
Speaker 2: working for her doing waterfowl brood surveys. I started to
Speaker 2: do fisheries work with BLM and and finished bachelor's degree
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety six. And one of the guys I
Speaker 2: had worked with at BLM was running a big project
Speaker 2: on the Yukon for Fish Wildlife Service, and I walked
Speaker 2: into the office and he says, you're the man I want,
Speaker 2: and he hired me to work out on salmon down
Speaker 2: at Rapids, which is down near the mouth of the
Speaker 2: Tananaw River.
Speaker 7: Did you kind of like, did you fall into the
Speaker 7: fisheries thing or was that something you were like interested
Speaker 7: in and wanted to hone in on yourself?
Speaker 2: That was really opportunistic. So in my undergraduate work, I
Speaker 2: had done mammalogy and ornithology and I did fish biology.
Speaker 2: You know, there were these different but I had also
Speaker 2: done microbiology and genetics and I liked them all. Sell biology,
Speaker 2: I thought that they were all pretty fascinating. And did
Speaker 2: physics and chemistry and math and everything too. But so
Speaker 2: I started there and the first year, you know, we
Speaker 2: have this big fish wheel running and we're tagging chump
Speaker 2: salmon fall chump salmon at four hundred and fifty fish
Speaker 2: a day, putting these spaghetti tags. And we were doing
Speaker 2: a mark recapture project trying to estimate the population upstream
Speaker 2: of the Tanina. And while we were catching all of
Speaker 2: those chump salmon, shefish were coming through in August and
Speaker 2: September to the tune of you know, sixty or eighty
Speaker 2: a day going through the fish wheel.
Speaker 7: Can you describe a shefish for people that don't know
Speaker 7: what they are?
Speaker 2: She fish are a great, big fish eating whitefish, and
Speaker 2: there can be as much as thirty forty pounds or
Speaker 2: more and well over a meter long, and they're there
Speaker 2: are a really great fish.
Speaker 1: So the tarpin and a whitefish had sex.
Speaker 2: Right exactly. It's kind of like that, And.
Speaker 1: Not that I've ever caught on. They just been described
Speaker 1: to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that tarpin give a much more profound
Speaker 2: fight than shefish do. But shefish are, they're a wonderful fish.
Speaker 1: When you got into this work and got into school
Speaker 1: and all that, like did the whole time that you
Speaker 1: know that you were real bright, like that you had
Speaker 1: like a book learning ability. I mean, you had to
Speaker 1: felt so fairal and wild right, Well, there is that,
Speaker 1: But like to come back to it, were you surprised
Speaker 1: to be like, oh, I can be in these classes
Speaker 1: and get a's on my tests and write papers well,
Speaker 1: or did you feel that that was there all along?
Speaker 1: I didn't really know.
Speaker 2: So there were several of my friends told me, there's
Speaker 2: no way you're going to keep up with these, you know,
Speaker 2: lighteen early twenties test staking machines, you know, yeah, and
Speaker 2: and but I ignored it, and I did just fine.
Speaker 1: My dad hung out with this. My dad was fought
Speaker 1: World War two in a love of his bodies were
Speaker 1: all World War two guys. And there's a guy who
Speaker 1: lived across like across our lake and then over this
Speaker 1: Isthmus and across the next lake. And he had been
Speaker 1: a pilot during World War two, but he was kept
Speaker 1: in a pow camp. He got shot down, was kept
Speaker 1: in a pow camp. You know, the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this guy was Charles Lynn Back. He was telling me
Speaker 1: that when he got home from the war, he just
Speaker 1: assumed he'd go to school on the GI Bill And
Speaker 1: he said that he went and sat there one time
Speaker 1: and right off the bat he's like there's no way
Speaker 1: and just walked out like couldn't do it, couldn't do it.
Speaker 1: You know, that's was hard for me to picture like that.
Speaker 1: You went off and got like undoctrinated and went wild,
Speaker 1: but then came back and got redoctriny, like redoctrinate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I suppose that's that's true.
Speaker 1: I don't know it.
Speaker 2: Uh, it was a wild time, but it was it
Speaker 2: was really hard to to come to grasp uh the
Speaker 2: the the change coming into town, and I struggled for
Speaker 2: a while trying to figure out what what the hell
Speaker 2: am I going to do?
Speaker 1: Yeah, because you're living like you're living like kill a
Speaker 1: rab eat it, yeah, catch something slid, cut a tree down,
Speaker 1: make a house. You're playing. Yeah, I also been playing
Speaker 1: this like long game, like oh, if I do this
Speaker 1: for four years, I'll get like a tech position, and
Speaker 1: then maybe I'll get like a job.
Speaker 6: And the things that you have to do in school
Speaker 6: right where you're like, Okay, I know this doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I ever asked me this as long.
Speaker 6: As whereas like jump back to last year, if you
Speaker 6: didn't do what mattered, bad things goulda happen.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but I imagine just doing homework wasn't necessarily what
Speaker 4: the challenge or what the irk was, right, Like, what
Speaker 4: was the biggest thing that you sort of that you
Speaker 4: had to come to grips with or face head on
Speaker 4: when you made the change, like just in general in life,
Speaker 4: Like what was it that confronted you that really made
Speaker 4: it difficult.
Speaker 2: That That's a that's a good question, I guess you
Speaker 2: know that that had been my identity for so long
Speaker 2: being out in the woods. Coming in it was like struggling.
Speaker 2: And our older boy he struggled with it too, did he? Oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: yeah he did, and he just saw himself as being
Speaker 2: the woods person that that he was and.
Speaker 1: He got over it.
Speaker 2: Although he see he's he he teaches. He teaches applied
Speaker 2: math at University color Colorado, Boulder, right. And on his
Speaker 2: web page it says Jed Brown was born and raised
Speaker 2: by wolves in the Alaska wilderness.
Speaker 1: You know, so he.
Speaker 2: So he he he encompasses that. He likes it and
Speaker 2: uh and likes that. That was what he did for
Speaker 2: the first pretty much eight years.
Speaker 1: Of his life.
Speaker 2: And he's still we he and I had gone out
Speaker 2: sheep on inden and things for several times, and uh,
Speaker 2: that's all really fun. Yeah, I guess, you know, when
Speaker 2: I when I realized that if I'm going to get
Speaker 2: into a job that I'm going to like I got
Speaker 2: to go through this the university. And once I kind
Speaker 2: of came to grips with that, I just I would
Speaker 2: just go there.
Speaker 1: I just do it.
Speaker 2: And and it wasn't all that hard. It was just
Speaker 2: I mean, there was time element to it.
Speaker 9: But was it tough being around people all the time,
Speaker 9: going from like not seeing people for months to being
Speaker 9: around people every single day.
Speaker 1: I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't really, that's probably probably true. That's not something
Speaker 2: that I remember as as a as an issue.
Speaker 1: Though, gotcha, I did.
Speaker 2: We did get a place that was kind of, you know,
Speaker 2: kind of by itself and there was woods around it
Speaker 2: and I really liked that, and we had a bird
Speaker 2: feeder right outside of the this window, and so so
Speaker 2: I would it was definitely a good place for me
Speaker 2: because I would come and decompress if there was decompressing
Speaker 2: to do.
Speaker 7: So was it was it all fisheries research after that
Speaker 7: first job at the fish Wheel?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I got into the I got into the
Speaker 2: the honors program as as an undergraduate, and in the
Speaker 2: honors program, I did work out in Cole Bay, I
Speaker 2: did a small mammal survey following after Murray's worked in
Speaker 2: the nineteen twenties, and that that got put into what
Speaker 2: they call an honors thesis. The honors program paid my way, essentially,
Speaker 2: they paid my tuition and which was a good thing.
Speaker 2: But it also there were classes you had to take
Speaker 2: in that that were I don't.
Speaker 1: Know, maybe maybe.
Speaker 2: A little more philosophy, and anyway, it was, it was,
Speaker 2: it was a good thing. And and so once I went,
Speaker 2: once I got into that fish job, though I've had
Speaker 2: that same job the whole time. I mean I wasn't
Speaker 2: hired permanent initially it was it was a technician.
Speaker 1: But the sheefish work.
Speaker 2: There was a fell at John Burr that worked with
Speaker 2: Fish and Game Department at the time, and he came
Speaker 2: by to see it us at work down there, and
Speaker 2: he said, you guys really should do something with these sheepish.
Speaker 2: We've been working to try to figure out where they
Speaker 2: go and where they came from for a long time.
Speaker 2: And we were doing telemetry work with the chump salmon
Speaker 2: as well, not only the spaghetti tagging, but a telemetry
Speaker 2: program with it. And so we just with towers that were,
Speaker 2: you know, up in the drainage, so you could tell
Speaker 2: when they swim by these towers they would get a record.
Speaker 2: And so that's what I did for my master's degree,
Speaker 2: and I put out radio transmitters three years in a
Speaker 2: row and also did that odalith chemistry and was able
Speaker 2: to show that these fish spawned in this big braided
Speaker 2: region of the upper Yukon flats right in the mainstem.
Speaker 2: Nobody had a clue. And then when they finished in
Speaker 2: mid October, they had back down to see and spend
Speaker 2: the winters in the estuary, perhaps nearby coastal areas.
Speaker 1: I don't know. No one knew what the hell they did.
Speaker 1: Nobody did.
Speaker 6: And like in brackish water like a high saltwater content.
Speaker 1: Yeah really, yeah, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and uh and and those they go down
Speaker 2: their feed all winter, whereas there was a lot of
Speaker 2: them since then, you know, telemetry programs with with the sheefish,
Speaker 2: a lot of them just sit in the Yukon. And
Speaker 2: I have this vision of them with their spectral fins
Speaker 2: in the gravel and their mouths open facing up river
Speaker 2: and just spending the winter that.
Speaker 7: Way, not feeding, just feeding, sit dormant.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and so so that was that's one of
Speaker 2: the one of the papers that I just sent off
Speaker 2: to a journal. We'll see how they how they accept it,
Speaker 2: you know, they sent it out to review and and everything.
Speaker 2: But but I think it's it's an important piece because
Speaker 2: not all the populations do that, you know, spawning populations
Speaker 2: of the shefish. They some of them don't go to
Speaker 2: sea and some of them do and why who knows.
Speaker 2: But that's for somebody else to figure out. But so
Speaker 2: so that's what I did initially for my master's degree.
Speaker 2: And because I had done odalith chemistry work, the professors
Speaker 2: up there anybody else who wanted to go into odelith
Speaker 2: chemistry would get me tagged to be on their committees.
Speaker 2: And so I've been on twelve different graduate committees with
Speaker 2: people doing odalith chemistry work. And I think largely because
Speaker 2: of that, they the university gave me an honorary doctorate
Speaker 2: a few years ago.
Speaker 1: That's cool, man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So so yeah, I got PhD.
Speaker 1: So to speak more or less, Uh, I got another
Speaker 1: question for you about the living in the bush versus
Speaker 1: coming into societ when you're on the bush like I'm
Speaker 1: trying to think of how to put this. You know,
Speaker 1: being alive now in today's atmosphere, you become very aware
Speaker 1: of all the cultural conversations, right and you become aware
Speaker 1: of like how you who you identify as? You know,
Speaker 1: you're like, Okay, I identify as, you know, an American,
Speaker 1: identify as a member of my family. I identify as
Speaker 1: a member of my community. Right when when everything's so
Speaker 1: stripped down, like the way it was, and you're not
Speaker 1: aware of all the like every little thing in the news,
Speaker 1: or every little societal fracture that's going on every blow
Speaker 1: of campaign and like the presidential campaign season, right, where
Speaker 1: do you sort of land in terms of what you
Speaker 1: are or what you identify as?
Speaker 3: Jemmy, Like do you feel like.
Speaker 1: Like, well, I'm an American, you know, or like where
Speaker 1: do you land at what you are? M m hmmm?
Speaker 1: Do you are you a.
Speaker 3: Community member of the Yukon?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 3: Like what it sort of And if someone says like
Speaker 3: who are you? Like what are you?
Speaker 1: What? What would you have said you mean now, no, no,
Speaker 1: sorry when you were living in the bush, Like, what
Speaker 1: would you have said if someone asked you sort of
Speaker 1: explain yourself to me? You'ro what. Yeah, I it was.
Speaker 2: It was much more as a as a resident of
Speaker 2: the of the Woods.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I remember my brother came and visited me one time,
Speaker 2: flew in on a on a ski plane and we
Speaker 2: mushed around. It was in the winter, and he said,
Speaker 2: was during Reagan administration. Right, He's going like, how can
Speaker 2: you how can you sit out here? You know when
Speaker 2: the real world there's so many things going on?
Speaker 1: Is sais?
Speaker 2: I think this is the real world. That's how I felt,
Speaker 2: this is the real work. I didn't know that Reagan
Speaker 2: was president, right, I am no clue.
Speaker 3: That's kind of what That's what That's what I'm getting at.
Speaker 1: And I didn't care.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it didn't affect you, no, And I mean maybe
Speaker 2: it did, but yeah it did.
Speaker 1: It did?
Speaker 3: It did in a macro way. Yeah, like it did
Speaker 3: in a macro.
Speaker 1: Way, meaning you know, like like oil prices, right, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean like these things would come, these things would
Speaker 1: come for you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I didn't buy any gas because I didn't
Speaker 2: have any motors.
Speaker 1: But yeah, you know, like eventually it would be that
Speaker 1: you got a letter saying you got to move off
Speaker 1: the land. And that is in a macro sense, all
Speaker 1: this global stuff has impacted you. But that's like, but
Speaker 1: when you're out there, like that's the falls away. And
Speaker 1: just so you're a guy in the woods, Yeah you're
Speaker 1: not all pissed off about who's using what bathroom, not
Speaker 1: even guy guy in the woods, not even a little bit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've tried to bring it into I
Speaker 2: mean it. It was definitely a big part of of
Speaker 2: who I am and how I think about things, you know.
Speaker 2: You know that that all I don't know some of
Speaker 2: the some of the social issues that are so so
Speaker 2: much conflict right now. It's like I don't really care
Speaker 2: what somebody else does, you know, I just I just
Speaker 2: don't and or who somebody is, you know, I just
Speaker 2: I try to I try to treat people just like people,
Speaker 2: men and women here straight whatever, you know, I don't care.
Speaker 2: It's not my business. I have a hard enough time
Speaker 2: taking care of myself. I'm going to take care of
Speaker 2: everybody else too, or try to define their problems, I
Speaker 2: don't think.
Speaker 1: So do you have do you have any regrets about
Speaker 1: the timeline that you spent how you how you spent your.
Speaker 2: Life, not even a little bit. You know what was weird?
Speaker 2: All my friends at college when I said I'm gonna
Speaker 2: leave and I'm gonna go and live out, and was there.
Speaker 1: Going, you can't do that.
Speaker 2: You got to finish college.
Speaker 1: You know you're going to ruin your life and everything.
Speaker 2: Neither of my parents told me that at all. They
Speaker 2: I don't know what they thought I was getting into,
Speaker 2: but they didn't discourage me at all, not even a
Speaker 2: little bit.
Speaker 1: And I find that surprising.
Speaker 7: But do you still do like field work where you
Speaker 7: get to go spend extended period of time like out
Speaker 7: in the woods or.
Speaker 2: Two falls ago was my last field project. Over the
Speaker 2: last few years, I've been losing my central vision. It's
Speaker 2: a genetic mutation that doesn't usually affect older folks, but
Speaker 2: it is with me. So I have a hard time
Speaker 2: right now. I'm not driving, I can't read a book.
Speaker 2: I can read it on a computer with high contrast
Speaker 2: and stuff. But that last project I was we were
Speaker 2: fishing for sheafish and that was big enough.
Speaker 1: I could see it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But but I wouldn't drive a boat right right now,
Speaker 2: and and I wouldn't be the one taking measurements and
Speaker 2: things like that. And so my my functionality in the
Speaker 2: field has has declined. To the point where I won't.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to be going out anymore.
Speaker 1: How old you know? Sixty six?
Speaker 2: Give me sixty seven in a couple of weeks.
Speaker 1: Give me a piece of marriage advice.
Speaker 2: I don't really know. I just I just I treat Karen.
Speaker 1: Like a princess. I have tried that yet, and I
Speaker 1: went wrong.
Speaker 7: You start out with a toilet paper move right.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's princess treatment.
Speaker 2: And the new cabin.
Speaker 3: Oh, that's princess treatment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, told me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I and and I just levered the pieces
Speaker 2: and and always have and always will.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's been your attitude. It's been my attitude. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're not like, well, I'll see next year. I'll see
Speaker 1: the next year after that, how I feel. No, that's god, man, dude.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of people that view of the world
Speaker 3: like that.
Speaker 1: Man, I get it.
Speaker 4: But are there any plans to live in the woods again?
Speaker 2: Well, I don't know. I don't know. I don't think so.
Speaker 2: I mean, we kind of live on the outskirts. We
Speaker 2: have a we have a forty acre plot of land
Speaker 2: with nice birch and spruce on it where the latest cabin,
Speaker 2: big big scribe blog place that I built. Let's see,
Speaker 2: I started in I started that one in my late forties,
Speaker 2: finished it in.
Speaker 1: Mid fifties. We've been living there for.
Speaker 6: Gotta let those things settle, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I love it. I love it. It takes
Speaker 2: a little work to man maintain. But got a great
Speaker 2: big sauna, baby wood fired sauna, which Dany helped get
Speaker 2: the stove for out of Wasilla. He and his boss
Speaker 2: went up and picked it up.
Speaker 7: He's still feeding yourself with.
Speaker 2: Uh, yeah, to some extent. Yeah, yeah, I went moose
Speaker 2: hunting this year, but we didn't. We didn't get anything,
Speaker 2: which is rare. So so my my moose hunting adventures
Speaker 2: have been to go up to that same place where
Speaker 2: we lived, up on the Candy and uh, there's just
Speaker 2: some good lookouts and open country and and you know,
Speaker 2: when you live in a place for long enough, you
Speaker 2: know where the moose are crossing and and so we've
Speaker 2: always seen sometimes several bowls and uh, and we go
Speaker 2: up a couple of my buddies and and I go
Speaker 2: up there and uh, and we've never come back without
Speaker 2: a moose except for this time.
Speaker 1: And we just never saw a bull. Do you guys call? Yeah,
Speaker 1: we call, Can you can you rip a call for me? Okay?
Speaker 2: So I have been around when cows call, So this
Speaker 2: is a real call. And and it is very similar
Speaker 2: to us to a cow, regular dairy cow ball.
Speaker 1: That's it. Mm, that's your call. It's a cow call. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't do any of that crazy cow call like.
Speaker 2: No, but they do that and and and so if
Speaker 2: it's a small bull, you want to do a cow call,
Speaker 2: guy's a big bull.
Speaker 1: Hit me with your normal like, hey, get out there,
Speaker 1: you're you're there, Okay, all right, boys, we're gonna start hunting.
Speaker 1: Everybody be quiet. You're gonna do what hit me with it?
Speaker 2: Well, if it's uh, if you're looking for a big bull,
Speaker 2: you know it's going to be a grunt.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, I mean the bowl noise, I mean
Speaker 1: the cow noise. I did do it.
Speaker 3: That's your main. That's your main. That's your main cow
Speaker 3: call that you're using.
Speaker 1: That is okay. You never do the big long plaintive.
Speaker 2: Like no, my buddy does this. Guy Scott McLean, he
Speaker 2: goes up there. He's got a fiberglass accelerator type thing
Speaker 2: and he'll do that and then do a couple of
Speaker 2: grunts afterwards, and it works.
Speaker 7: Too, But you were saying cow call for small bulls,
Speaker 7: bullgrunt for bid.
Speaker 2: So if you do a big grunt and it's a
Speaker 2: small bull, he doesn't want to be anywhere near a
Speaker 2: big bull, yep. And if we see a small bull around,
Speaker 2: we would always do cow calls and they'll come. And
Speaker 2: one of the beauties of this particular place is that
Speaker 2: you can see how these bulls are responding.
Speaker 1: I mean, they could be even a mile away, and.
Speaker 2: Then you'll see this this big antler's turn and they'll
Speaker 2: start walking your way. And if you do it too much,
Speaker 2: they'll they'll go away, And so you just want to
Speaker 2: let them do their thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, why do you don't worry? We're going to
Speaker 1: wrap up pretty quick here. But it's got a couple
Speaker 1: of technical questions for you. In your mind, why would
Speaker 1: a bull walk two miles to come and do like
Speaker 1: walk like he's just coming, there's not nothing in the
Speaker 1: world's going to stop him. And then all of a
Speaker 1: sudden he's like, but I'm going to lay down, then walk.
Speaker 7: Away, lay down for a couple hours, then get up.
Speaker 1: There and then get up go the other direction, Like
Speaker 1: what is he what is in his mind?
Speaker 2: Well, I have no idea to tell you the truth.
Speaker 2: I I think that there are some bulls that get
Speaker 2: really damaged in fighting. Okay, we were watching there was
Speaker 2: a big bull and a little bowl, well a kind
Speaker 2: of a bullwinkle walking along this one open hillside at
Speaker 2: one point, and they were not responding to us at all,
Speaker 2: and the big bull would hit this little bowl every
Speaker 2: once in a while, and finally the little bowl turns
Speaker 2: around and nails him in the butt with his horns
Speaker 2: and then hauls out. And we watched them with the
Speaker 2: big bull after this little bull go over a couple
Speaker 2: of hills, across a stream, and then up another hill
Speaker 2: until they disappeared. But that little one had to know
Speaker 2: that he was going to be on the run because
Speaker 2: that bull was going after him. Yeah, and I think,
Speaker 2: I mean, we've we've got him when they've punctured.
Speaker 1: So he's coming in and he's like, man, I'm not
Speaker 1: going in there and fighting. I'm gonna linger on the
Speaker 1: outside and see what's happening.
Speaker 2: Or or he doesn't hear it again and and thinks
Speaker 2: it may be not there anymore.
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's hard to get in their head, man,
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 2: But I do know that if you if you grunt
Speaker 2: too much or if you call too much.
Speaker 1: Turns them off. Turn off. Yet, you know you mentioned
Speaker 1: that that little bull hitting that big bull and ass.
Speaker 1: Me and Seth last year were messing around with We
Speaker 1: were messing around with a there's a company, Dave Smith Decoys,
Speaker 1: and he makes a posturing buck. So it's a buck
Speaker 1: that's kind of all bristled up, and you'll see other
Speaker 1: bucks come and you always think when you see bucks fighting,
Speaker 1: you associate them being antler to Antler. Nos knows, of course, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: because they're squaring off. But here he is. He's looking
Speaker 1: at a buck, but the buck doesn't move, so you
Speaker 1: get to see what he would prefer how he would
Speaker 1: prefer to fight in a situation where the buck isn't
Speaker 1: always facing at him. He would prefer to fight, come
Speaker 1: in behind it, get alongside of it, and drill it
Speaker 1: right in the rib cage, like that's what he wants
Speaker 1: to do. Yeah, So you mentioned that little bull hitting
Speaker 1: that little bull in the ass or something like that,
Speaker 1: Like I imagine when they can get the jump on
Speaker 1: each other, they probably do. And that's a way different
Speaker 1: hit than hitting antler. Oh yeah, when you're driving those
Speaker 1: times into something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, every once in a while, these big bulls will
Speaker 2: lock their horns together, you see, get stuck. Yeah, And
Speaker 2: I've never seen it in practice, but I've seen those
Speaker 2: the sets of antlers that are put together. Department of
Speaker 2: Fishing Game in Fairbanks has one sticking hanging up right
Speaker 2: over there information thing and where people come in to
Speaker 2: get hunting license, fishing license and things like that. And
Speaker 2: there's also one in Eagle. This helicopter pilot had spotted
Speaker 2: these two bulls stuck together. It has to be a
Speaker 2: desperately bad situation for them because any wolf coming around
Speaker 2: or a bear coming around just starting eat them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you're still shooting two forty three when you go
Speaker 4: moose hunting.
Speaker 1: You know what?
Speaker 2: I changed to a six ' five creed more. And
Speaker 2: the reason I did that is so I could shoot copper.
Speaker 2: Because despite what people's views are with lead, lead in
Speaker 2: the oval of deer down in California is what almost
Speaker 2: put California condors over the edge. And when they found
Speaker 2: out how that was going down, because they were testing
Speaker 2: these condors and they had lead poisoning. But they're eating
Speaker 2: that stuff where all of that lead fragment is sitting
Speaker 2: and scavenging all over the mountains there, and.
Speaker 7: The acid in their guts can break that lead down
Speaker 7: to where it becomes toxic, I suppose.
Speaker 1: So I think that's what the issue is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but so so what I headshot with the with
Speaker 2: the two fourty three was one hundred grain hornity bullet,
Speaker 2: and bullets I think are everything. A lot of people say, oh,
Speaker 2: it's not big enough for Alaska game. They don't know
Speaker 2: what they're talking about. But that hundred grain horneday hunting
Speaker 2: bullet is it rolls back, it stays together, and uh
Speaker 2: and usually on a moose, if I shoot it just
Speaker 2: behind the shoulder, it'll be either in the ribs or
Speaker 2: the or the skin on the other side with a
Speaker 2: lot of bleeding through the lungs. And and if you
Speaker 2: shoot it right in the ear, it'll just shatter that
Speaker 2: big vertebrae right behind the head. So it's it's a
Speaker 2: it's a very very good bullet. And I've tried a
Speaker 2: lot of other bullets, like a nozzle partition. Nozzle partition
Speaker 2: do not work in a two forty three, And the
Speaker 2: reason for that is that back part of it doesn't
Speaker 2: have enough mass by itself. Once it explodes, the front
Speaker 2: part explodes, doesn't carry through. And I shot a couple
Speaker 2: of caribou with that load, and you have this grapefruit sized,
Speaker 2: you know, damage on the outside, but it never went
Speaker 2: into the lungs and it killed them. But it would
Speaker 2: not be a good bullet to have. And so so
Speaker 2: right now though, I wanted to go lead free. And
Speaker 2: if you go down to Copper in a two forty three,
Speaker 2: you're down to eighty eighty five grains.
Speaker 1: And I didn't want to go.
Speaker 2: There because there were people out there that shot twenty
Speaker 2: two two fifties and seventy grain bullets and they won't
Speaker 2: break the neck. They will kill a moose, and but
Speaker 2: they're they're you know, getting down there closer to the edge,
Speaker 2: and and the two forty three hundred grain that I
Speaker 2: was using will break any bone in the body, no
Speaker 2: matter what angle you're you're dealing with. Some people say, well, yeah,
Speaker 2: but you've got to be really precise you do with anything.
Speaker 2: You know, you've got to shoot a moose with a
Speaker 2: thirty hot six, it's going to run for long ways.
Speaker 2: And yeah, so so I tained change to a six
Speaker 2: y five creed More, same rifle, Winchester Model seventy and
Speaker 2: but it can shoot a twenty one hundred and twenty
Speaker 2: grain copper bullet.
Speaker 1: I like it. Uh, this was my last question for you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: then maybe the boy's got more questions for you too.
Speaker 1: But how do you feel what's your general attitude about
Speaker 1: protections of annwa are about the proposed Ambler.
Speaker 3: Road pebble mind, pebble mint, pebble mind.
Speaker 1: Like are you with the time you spent as more
Speaker 1: in kind of the equity you've built up in that place,
Speaker 1: do you encourage do you do you encourage that development
Speaker 1: around job creation or do you just want or do
Speaker 1: you have a view that you just want the wild
Speaker 1: to stay wild? Like? What what's your personal take as
Speaker 1: much as you're able to comment on that with your
Speaker 1: position at work?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and sometimes I can't.
Speaker 1: I did.
Speaker 2: I was part of the the biological team on the
Speaker 2: e I S for the for the Arctic National Wildlife
Speaker 2: Refuge for the Coastal Plane and one of the big
Speaker 2: things that's that's an issue in that and they they
Speaker 2: put their opinion out I think it was last week
Speaker 2: on that the seis that was taking place. But there's
Speaker 2: no water out there, none of those rivers flow during
Speaker 2: the winter, and the oil production depends on that water
Speaker 2: a lot for ice roads, for the drilling, for the camps, everything.
Speaker 2: So there's a big hurdle for any of these companies
Speaker 2: to go in and develop that in that they're going
Speaker 2: to have to figure out how they're going to get water.
Speaker 2: There's six hundred meters of primafrost. There's a handful of
Speaker 2: these perennial springs that come from the south side of
Speaker 2: the Brooks Range, hit these big fault zones and go
Speaker 2: down and muscle their way up through there somehow. And
Speaker 2: and so there's this water in certain places that will
Speaker 2: provide a couple of kilometers of of habitat water that
Speaker 2: all of the fish in those streams like the Hula
Speaker 2: Hula or the Saddle of roach it that have that
Speaker 2: have fish in them, all of them are there. And
Speaker 2: the rest of the river goes dry in the winter.
Speaker 2: And that's true all across that coastal plain. Where they
Speaker 2: get water.
Speaker 1: I have no idea.
Speaker 2: Some people have thought, well, maybe they'll melt snow, maybe
Speaker 2: they'll do a dece out plant, maybe they'll truck it.
Speaker 2: But you know, you can't truck water across an ice road,
Speaker 2: you'll break it up and then you'll be just continually
Speaker 2: doing that. So there are some some steep hurdles to
Speaker 2: doing that, but.
Speaker 1: There are.
Speaker 2: And the last time that there were sails there, it
Speaker 2: was this development group with Alaska Ada that bought most
Speaker 2: of the most of the plots. Two companies from somewhere
Speaker 2: else that didn't have any capacity to develop them bought
Speaker 2: the other two. I think just on a speculation that
Speaker 2: if one of the big companies decided to go in there,
Speaker 2: they would have to buy those leases from them or something,
Speaker 2: and that was what Ada was doing too.
Speaker 1: Ada can't develop it either.
Speaker 2: And so it's it's I mean, they've showed from over
Speaker 2: in Prudo that they can develop without the oil without
Speaker 2: ruining places. But they got all the water in the
Speaker 2: world over there, so I don't know how they're going
Speaker 2: to do it. I don't No big company bid on
Speaker 2: the last group, and I think they probably also thought
Speaker 2: that okay, this is this is too fast, you know,
Speaker 2: and we got to see what happens, and so they
Speaker 2: have that ability. Right now, it's opened up for four
Speaker 2: hundred thousand acres of lands that people could companies could
Speaker 2: bid on. I'm not sure when they're going to do that.
Speaker 2: But but they'll have to figure out they would they
Speaker 2: would only want to bid if they have some sort
Speaker 2: of thought on how they would go about doing that,
Speaker 2: how would they would get over some of these.
Speaker 1: Hurdles because it's money out of pocket right off the
Speaker 1: bat for them. Yeah, yeah, so you can't because of
Speaker 1: your involvement, You don't. You're not You're not in a
Speaker 1: position to say, like what you hope happens or what
Speaker 1: you wish would happen, except with that would compromise your.
Speaker 2: So so I I don't. I don't really see it
Speaker 2: quite that way because I'm not. I'm not a player.
Speaker 2: And where whether it should or shouldn't understand and uh
Speaker 2: and uh, the the mining is is a little bit
Speaker 2: of a different issue. I wrote a piece in our
Speaker 2: Community Perspective for for the Fairbanks Daily News miner on
Speaker 2: some of the mining prospects around in the interior and
Speaker 2: just laid out the dynamics of acid mind drainage and
Speaker 2: the longevity of it, you know how far into the
Speaker 2: future it will continue to have to be taken care of.
Speaker 2: And the newspaper and I just everybody else puts just
Speaker 2: their name and where they live, and that's what I did.
Speaker 1: But the news miner looked me up. I mean they've.
Speaker 2: They've I write letters to the editor every once in
Speaker 2: a while. They know who I am, and they they
Speaker 2: put my affiliation with Fish and Wildlife Service, and I
Speaker 2: got a little bit of a spanking for that, even
Speaker 2: though I didn't do it, and I didn't put it
Speaker 2: on there myself. But Pebble is one of those that
Speaker 2: has not been approved, but they're going to as long
Speaker 2: as the minerals are there. Somebody's going to come back
Speaker 2: over and over and over until maybe the politics.
Speaker 1: Are right to be able to do it.
Speaker 2: But that's in Bristol Bay, right And it's it's on
Speaker 2: that past going over one side down to the New
Speaker 2: Shigak Great Big Fish River, the other side down to
Speaker 2: Lake Iliamna. The biggest of this Saki runs in all
Speaker 2: of Bristol Bay. Bristol Bay is booming, It's been booming
Speaker 2: for a long time. And and that is I mean,
Speaker 2: that fishery is booming. The fishery, yeah, and and.
Speaker 1: It's kind of the hottest fishery in the globe. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And and that Pebble mine is an acid mine, and
Speaker 2: it would require taking care of for thousands of years.
Speaker 2: How does that work?
Speaker 1: That's pretty young.
Speaker 2: I don't know how the hell that works myself. So
Speaker 2: I wrote a piece, you know, detailing that for the
Speaker 2: for the Mancho mine, the Mancho mine out in their
Speaker 2: Tetlan is is also an acid mine. And the state
Speaker 2: and the tribe have and the companies involved have have
Speaker 2: gotten through without having an eis done. And nobody knew
Speaker 2: it was an acid mine. And I had gotten some
Speaker 2: of the some of the documents from somebody that had
Speaker 2: gotten it through a public records thing and thought that
Speaker 2: it was and h and brought that to light. But
Speaker 2: they're doing it anyway, and and how it'll play out.
Speaker 2: Maybe they can take care of it. They think they can,
Speaker 2: but it hasn't been looked at from a broader audience.
Speaker 2: But Tetlan will rue the day they did that if
Speaker 2: it if it isn't going to be contained on their end. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's a big deal. We've got a bunch of them
Speaker 2: in lower forty eight here that are you know, I
Speaker 2: call them, you know, oozing sores on the landscape. My
Speaker 2: geologist friend of mine said he thought that was kind
Speaker 2: of over the top.
Speaker 1: But well, has he been to Berkeley Pitt, I know,
Speaker 1: down the road here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, and.
Speaker 1: That one is gonna go on little outlass humanity. It will.
Speaker 6: And that's like an example I always use, right because
Speaker 6: people are like, oh, well, technology has changed so much
Speaker 6: that you're thinking about this old stuff. I'm like, okay, well,
Speaker 6: so the Berkeley pit as an example where like a
Speaker 6: bird lands on it, it dies, right, is that taken
Speaker 6: care of? In your mind?
Speaker 4: Like technology has made that?
Speaker 1: Okay?
Speaker 6: Like I don't, I don't understand the argument.
Speaker 2: Right, Well, the state has a has a policy that
Speaker 2: if somebody is opening up the earth in an acid mind,
Speaker 2: that they have.
Speaker 1: To put aside a huge bond.
Speaker 2: That will take care of maintenance on you know, in
Speaker 2: in perpetuity, they call it. And I mean, I you know,
Speaker 2: I don't think that societies are gonna are gonna you know,
Speaker 2: there isn't an investment fund that you could guarantee that
Speaker 2: it's going to be true for very long.
Speaker 1: So oh yeah.
Speaker 6: And that's why like a lot of these companies, uh,
Speaker 6: they have working permits in the state that they're in,
Speaker 6: but they're not based there. They're based internationally. Yeah, to
Speaker 6: give them a little more protection, should they just so
Speaker 6: happen to default on that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And I think that's the way it is
Speaker 1: in Alaska.
Speaker 2: Most of these big companies are Canadian or Australian or something.
Speaker 1: Well, my kids were real little. I made the mistake
Speaker 1: one time of explaining to them this idea that the
Speaker 1: sun will burn out, you know, like the sun's kind
Speaker 1: of like in its midlife crisis right now, you know,
Speaker 1: and that as there'd be a day when the sun
Speaker 1: like it's not getting recharged. Yeah, you know, the Sun
Speaker 1: like theoretically will burn out and the solar system will die.
Speaker 1: And that messed them up because they couldn't They couldn't
Speaker 1: picture the geological time I was talking about, you know,
Speaker 1: so I kept trying to walk it back. Wow, probably
Speaker 1: not won't really happen, you know. But now I've taken
Speaker 1: to now they're older, I'll tell them, I said, Man,
Speaker 1: someday like all people are gonna be gone. People are
Speaker 1: gonna be gone, and a bunch of time is gonna
Speaker 1: go by, and the Earth's gonna be full of all
Speaker 1: these kind of new crazy animals and it's gonna be
Speaker 1: sweet here, you know, So don't worry about the future.
Speaker 3: They like that version better they like that better than
Speaker 3: the sun going out.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's a hard thing to grapple with, even
Speaker 2: as an adult, when you're.
Speaker 3: Talking about these mines. Yeah, a thousand year mind.
Speaker 1: But yeah, and then you know, it's like you're stuck
Speaker 1: with the contradiction, right, Like we all got these phones
Speaker 1: and you know, titanium fucking coffee mugs when you're camping and.
Speaker 3: Ship you know, I mean it's like it's you know, it's.
Speaker 1: A mass man being alive is hard.
Speaker 2: Well, that's true, yeah, yeah, situation. Yeah, but the responsibility
Speaker 2: of financial responsibility of the of the public to take
Speaker 2: care of these places after these mining companies take it.
Speaker 2: You know, I don't see the oil in the same way.
Speaker 2: You know, there's other issues with oil, but it's it's
Speaker 2: not you know, poisoning the landscape in that way.
Speaker 1: So, man, I appreciate you coming down to talk. My
Speaker 1: brother was right, Danny is right. I should get you
Speaker 1: on the show. I think you've got to come back
Speaker 1: again someday though.
Speaker 6: Oh I got so many questions. We just don't have
Speaker 6: any time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what a deal. So you're going from here to
Speaker 1: see that boy of years that you raised up in
Speaker 1: the woods, that yeah, yeah, I am doing that.
Speaker 2: His daughter's so his his older daughter is.
Speaker 1: His jewel j o U l e. Right. Oh you
Speaker 1: like the like the vight Yeah.
Speaker 7: Like like like like energy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, not like.
Speaker 2: Some of its head some of his friends. Some of
Speaker 2: his friends were trying to talk him out of it.
Speaker 2: She'll have to tell teachers how to how to spell
Speaker 2: it and everything like that. And and I think it's
Speaker 2: a great name, but you may have to pay for it,
Speaker 2: so anyway. Yeah, and then Neviy, their younger daughter. She's
Speaker 2: wonderful too.
Speaker 1: That's pretty name.
Speaker 2: That uh n e with an accent v he with
Speaker 2: an accent. So that's a certain kind of a snow
Speaker 2: on high altitudes really in the mountains.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sounds like you raised your boy, right Yeah. I
Speaker 1: hope so.
Speaker 3: Well, Man, thanks so much for coming on. Man, it's
Speaker 3: been great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you bet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's still a story or two to tell about.
Speaker 1: I tell that man, you're an interesting guy. Man.
Speaker 9: Yeah, we didn't even get into like fish like Oh
Speaker 9: I want to hear more about the dogs and just
Speaker 9: weird stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I wanted to get into staying real warm when
Speaker 1: it's forty below zero, no tent, but we'll have to
Speaker 1: you have to come back. Yeah, yeah, we did that.
Speaker 1: We come back. We come back on the show. Just
Speaker 1: for a technical technical, purely technical questions. Backwoods know how, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I do it. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Just coordinate it with your next trip down to visit
Speaker 4: the family.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well I definitely do that. It's like a family
Speaker 2: at Albuquerque too. Okay, and so one way or another.
Speaker 1: Do little Rocky Mountain loop. Yeah. Yeah, you're going to
Speaker 1: run the spine of the Rockies all the way to
Speaker 1: the end. Yeah, that's what That's what it would be.
Speaker 1: Oh man, Well, thank you very much, thank you, thanks
Speaker 1: thanks for having me. This has been great. Appreciate it.
Speaker 8: Yeah, well the hun day is over, and this time
Speaker 8: to pack it in. STEVEE got another and I got
Speaker 8: skunked again.
Speaker 4: But that or I can mountain sunset this afternoon was pleasing.
Speaker 4: But it's my last dead campsule.
Speaker 8: I'll see you next season. There's nothing alike the sunrise
Speaker 8: over mountains in the fall.
Speaker 4: Now I hear distant bugle, these answering my call.
Speaker 8: If we may see the warden, if we give him
Speaker 8: a reason.
Speaker 4: But it's my last day in camp, so I'll see
Speaker 4: you next season. If I trall another I'll be back
Speaker 4: here again.
Speaker 8: We'll find out in the summer when the lottery calls in.
Speaker 2: My fingers crossed.
Speaker 1: My friend all wish every.
Speaker 2: One good luck.
Speaker 8: I'm heading home then this evening, because it's my.
Speaker 2: Last day in camp, and I'll see you next season.
Speaker 1: I'll see you next season.