Latest / Wired To Hunt Podcast / Wired To Hunt Podcast #215: Steven Rinella and Janis Putelis Talk Whitetails

Transcript

Wired To Hunt Podcast #215: Steven Rinella and Janis Putelis Talk Whitetails · Wired To Hunt Podcast

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your home for
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: deer hunting news, stories and strategies, and now your host,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Mark Kenyon. Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. I'm
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: your host Mark Kenyon in this episode number two hundred
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: and fifteen. Ante In the show, I'm joined by Stephen
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: Ronella and Janice patel Us of Meat Either to discuss
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: all sorts of things related to their history and experiences
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: hunting white tailed deer, and I'm sharing some very big news.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: All right, Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. And today,
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: like I just said, I've convinced my friends over at
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: Meat Eater, Steve Ronella and Janice potel Us, to come
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: over to the dark side with us and talk about
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: white tails for a bit, and uh man, it's it's
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: gonna be a good time. You likely know Steve and
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Janice from the Meat Either TV show or podcast, or
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: maybe from Steve's books like American Buffalo or Scavenger's Guide
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: Hawk Cuisine, or just from all their other adventures across
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: the world chasing big game and fish. But both of
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: these guys began their hunting careers just like me and
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: some of you, hunting white tails in Western Michigan. So
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: today I wanted to get these two back to the
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: roots and back to talking about deer. So that's what
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: we did. We had a great time with it, and
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: I think you're really gonna enjoy it. But before we
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: get to all that, I want to share some big
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: news with you about the future of Weird Hunt and
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: actually my own career. Um. If you've been listening for
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: a while now, you you've likely heard me allude to
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: some new projects over the past few months, and I'm
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: excited that today I can finally share with you what's
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: going on, some very big, very exciting stuff. But in
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: order to do a good job of explaining this new chapter,
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: I feel like I need to go back because I
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: think to understand where things are headed, we need to
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: understand where things started, how I got to this point.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: So if you've heard this story before, I apologized, bear
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: with me for a minute, but I have to quickly
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: regale you with this story of Wired to Hunt. Um.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: This began way back in the summer of two thousand
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: and eight. I was twenty years old, still in college.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: I was working this summer internship in New York City
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: with a digital marketing agency. Basically My job there was
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: to work with bloggers to help promote their clients products.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: So I'd like send free gear to UH shoe blog
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: and they talk about the new reybox or something. So
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: I'm there. I'm in New York and I'm just going
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: nuts because I can't be out in the wood scouting.
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: I can't be prepping for hunting season. I had nowhere
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: to go hike or fish, just surrounded by concrete and
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: loud noises and people everywhere. It was killing me. So
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: I got this idea, you know, why why couldn't I
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: start a blog on my own about deer hunting? And
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: I was working with all these other people with cool
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: websites and they were doing this awesome stuff. Why couldn't
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: I do that myself? Um? It maybe scratch that deer
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: hunting itch too. So, with no real prayer experience, I
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: started a website I called the Wired Hunt and for
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: a few months I dabbled on their writing stories and
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: articles about my past hunts and products and stuff like that. UM,
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: and it was fun. But when school picked back up
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: that fall kind of fell off the wagon. UM got
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: caught up in everything else until fast forward in another
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: year until the next fall. Now it's the fall of
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: two thousand nine and I'm working my first full time
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: job after college. I was out in Silicon Valley in
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: California working for this major tech company, and again I
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: couldn't get out in the woods and I was missing
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: hunting season and just going nuts. So I turned back
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: to wired to hunt again to scratch that itch. But
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: this time, things, um, things got cranked up to a
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: new level because while I was out there, I was
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: a Barnes and Noble looking around and I picked up
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: this book called Crush It, and it was all about
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: turning your passion into a career. And I read that
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: book and was just unbelievably inspired. It gave me this
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: new confidence that maybe I could do something like that too.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: So after just a few weeks in that day job,
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: I decided, and I knew I wasn't gonna be able
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: to do this for the rest of my life. I
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: had to be working on something that I really believed in,
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: something that really inspired me, something that energized me, something
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: that I loved. So I decided that fall that someday,
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: no matter how much work it was gonna take, I
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: was going to find some way to work in the
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: outdoors and turn wired Hunt into a business, making a living,
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: doing something I was passionate about. So I started getting
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: after it. I woke up at four thirty every morning,
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: started working on the website. Then I go to the
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: day job. Then I come home and eat dinner, and
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: I'd start working on it again. I keep going till
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: one or two in the morning. I did this for
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: months and months and months. Eventually moved back to Michigan
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: and my girlfriend at the time, you know this is
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: much to her chagrin, but I was obsessed. I read
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: every book I could about blogging and social media and marketing,
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: and I dove even further head first and all things
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: white tails, learning everything I possibly could, taking my knowledge
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: and experience way up to another level, and then sharing
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: everything I learned along the way through weird Hunt. And
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: I did this for years and years, just grinding away,
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: working on wired Hunt every day, every night, just making
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: slow but steady progress. And after a couple of years
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: I actually began to make a little bit of money.
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: And then a few more years later I was making
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: substantial enough money that I started to think that actually,
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: maybe I could do this as a job, especially if
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: I had more time so I started working on this
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: plan to actually take that leap. My wife and I
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: had lots and lots of kitchen table chats about what
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: this would mean for our family, you know, how I
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: could actually pull something like this off. I started working
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: on like a savings plan. I started lining up more
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: little side jobs that if I could quit my job,
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: i'd have, you know, addition all streams of income to
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: help things meet. And finally, in the fall of two
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: thousand thirteen, I walked out of my day job at
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: Google and leapt off the cliff into the world of
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: entrepreneurship and running where you're hunting full time. It was
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: one of the absolute scariest but most exciting days of
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: my life. I remember on that final drive home from
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: the office that day. Um, I was on the highway
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: in my car, and I remember just thinking about all
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: this and just breaking down crying, I mean, full bore,
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: bawling with with joy, with just just this insane rush
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: of emotions. I mean, so so much work had led
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: up to this point, and now now it was actually happening.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: It was crazy, it was thrilling, it was terrifying, and
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: it was it was it was real now, UM I
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: had achieved this massive, seemingly impossible goal. So it's now
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: here I was. I was doing it. I was running
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: the website, I was making videos, writing article close from magazines. UM.
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: That next spring I started the podcast, and UM that
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: you know, all those things kept growing and growing, and
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: I just kept working at it, building new relationships, trying
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: new things, learning more and more year after year, UM,
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: and things kept growing, and it was it was a
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: dream come true that I could do this kind of stuff,
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: you know, writing and talking about hunting and my outdoor
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: lifestyle and somehow making a living from that. I was
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: so so blessed. But in recent years, as much as
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: that was incredible and fulfilling, UM, in recent years, my
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: my goals and aspirations have begun to evolve. UM. In
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: those early years, when I first started wired Hunt, it
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: was just you know, to scratch that itch. And then
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: as it grew, it began to get to the point where,
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: you know, maybe I can make a little bit of
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: money from it. And then I wanted to see if
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: I could build something that could reach a lot of people.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: And then I did that, and then I wanted to
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: see if I could actually make enough from the business
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: to do it full time, and I did that, and
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: then I wanted to see, you know, could I build
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: things up enough where I can make a good living
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: and not be worried about making the mortgage payment every month.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: And I was eventually able to do that. Um. But
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: you know, more recently, a new set of goals. Over
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: the past few years, a new set of goals have
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: grown larger and larger in my mind. UM. I think
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: it was two years ago that I was encouraged to
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: start thinking about and writing out five and ten year
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: goals for myself and my business. And when I started
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: to do that, when I started to really think about
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: all this, the main goals that stood out to me,
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: we're related to my desire to make an impact, a significant,
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: long lasting impact. You know, in five or ten years.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: The most important things to me where that I would
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: hopefully be making a positive impact on the hunting community
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: in the future of our hunting lifestyle and our wildlife
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: and our wild places. You know, I wanted to look
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: back on my career and be able to say that
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: I was a leader in this space, and that I
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: was someone who elevated the conversation in the hunting world,
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: that I was someone who led by example and represented
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: the hunting community positively, and someone who worked to improve
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: how communicate about hunting and the house and the wise
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: and the what's of it all, both within and outside
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: the hunting world. And I wanted to be someone who
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: left a meaningful mark on the conservation of our wildlife
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: populations and the lands and waters in the environment that
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: supports them and all of us. And when these things
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: started rising to the top of my list, I realized
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: that my actions would have to evolve too. So that's
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: where things stood last year, and I started addressing those
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: goals by embarking on this major new writing project that
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: I've alluded to for a while now, and that's still
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: very much in the works. I'll be announcing that soon too.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: But another opportunity that fit just right in line with
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: these future goals dropped into my lap last summer when
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: I got a call from Stephen Ronnella and um he
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: asked me what I was doing the first week in September,
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: and I told him, well, I've got this Montana whitetail
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: hunt planned. Uh, but you know, if the next few
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: sentences are very compelling, I could probably be flexible with that.
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: And as you know that ended up leading to an
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: invitation to go on this Alaskan Carameu hunt that I
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: did go on. It was an amazing trip. Um. But
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: a few days after that initial invitation, I got another
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: call from Steve Um. I remember that moment well. I
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: was actually standing in the middle of the Tea Town
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: River in eastern Idaho fly fishing, and I see Steve
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: pop up on the caller I d and I figured
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: out I ought to take this. So I wait over
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: to a little island and I sat down, picked up
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: the phone, and after very little introduction, Steve just jumps
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: right into it. He says to me something on the
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: lines of mark, I want you to help me revolutionize
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: outdoor media. You know it was it was pretty pretty big.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: He told me he wanted to he was planning on
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: he was starting a new company, and that he wanted
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: me to help him build it, and he wanted me
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: to be one of the leading voices of this new endeavor. Um.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: He told me about all the exciting new things we
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: could do together and the impact we could have as
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: a team with bigger ideas and more resources and wild
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: He didn't give me a kind of details about the
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: new project. That night he did promise to tell me
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: more in Alaska, and I remember just sitting there on
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: the island afterwards, watching the sunset over the t Town
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: Mountains to my east, and just kind of being blown
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: away by how much things had changed since those early
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: years and that little cinder block New York City, one
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: room apartment of misery. Um. I just remember my mind
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: being a buzz with questions. You know, what could this
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: lead to? You know, was this something I should do?
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: What would this look like? How in the world did
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: I get to this point? Um? You know, I never
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: in the past ever considered for a second changing in
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: any substantial way what I was doing with Wired Hunt,
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: or the idea of going into business with anyone else.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: But here was this opportunity with Steve that I had
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: to look really hard at. Um. And I don't think
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: there's anyone else in the world who could have come
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: to me with an idea like this and actually gotten
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: me to buy into it. But but Steve was unique,
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: and that I've looked up to him for a very
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: long time as a role model of sorts um and
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: as as the absolute finest example I believe of what
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: a leader in the hunting and fishing space should be doing. Um.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: I've looked at Steve over the years as the best
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: spokesman and representative of our community and for a long
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: time now, um, you know, I've been working with long
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: term aspirations of some day hopefully doing enough good to
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: be in that conversation too, And now here that guy
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: was asking me to step up alongside of him and
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: to work together. So now fast forward more than six
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: months and many many conversations later, and many long sleepless
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: nights of debating what to do, and here we are,
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: and I'm very excited to announce now that Steve and
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: myself and a handful of other like minded people are
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: building a new company combining what he's done with meat
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: Eater and what I've done with Wired Hunt, with the
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: goal of really revolutionizing the hunting and fishing media landscape
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: and to take things is in a new and more
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: positive direction and to leave a very real, long lasting legacy. Now,
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: how exactly all that's gonna look, um, and how it's
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: all gonna happen, that's still very much up in the air.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: We are very early in the development of the company.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: Still there are lots of unknowns. Um, we will be
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: sharing lots more in the weeks and months to come,
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: but I can promise there are some very cool things
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: in the works. So in the short term though, here's
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: what's happening. Wired Hunt is still going to be continuing
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: on as is. UM. The Wired Hunt podcast will be
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: living on UH into infinity. UM, I'll be continue doing
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: my wired Dump videos. But I'm just gonna be able
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: to do all these things now with with much more
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: support and resources. I'm actually gonna have other people a
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: team to help me do this kind of stuff rather
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: than just little on me trying to do everything. So
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: this just means that everything's gonna be higher quality, produced
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: at a greater scale, UH, and with new opportunities that
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: just never could have had as a solo operation. And
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: you're also gonna see you know, me getting more involve
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: the different Mediator projects too, and some brand new projects
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: for me and Steve and others as well. So lots
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: of exciting things in the future. UM. One other thing
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: I did want to briefly mention is that along with
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: all these exciting developments, you know, they're also gonna be
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: some changes you'll probably notice with some of the partners
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: we've worked with um Inevitably, when combining brands like Steve
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: and I are doing, they're gonna be some adjustments and
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: changes necessary to get everyone moving in the same direction. Um.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: Some of that we're still in the process of figuring
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: out right now. But one change you'll likely notice, and
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: I thought was at least mentioning here, was our change
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: from working with sit Gear to now inheriting Steve and
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: meteators long and positive relationship with First Life. And I
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: just want to call this out because Sitka has been
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: such a great partner to Wired Hunt and myself personally
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: over the years. They have been one of our absolute
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: greatest supporters from the very beginning, and I've been a
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: huge believer in their team and their product and their
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: mission and I can't how much I've appreciated that relationship.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: So you know, while Sitka will not be our title
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: sponsor on the podcast anymore, I will always be a
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: friend of the company and the people there, and I
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: have nothing but very good things to say about what
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: they've got going on. That said, I am very excited
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: to to get to know the first like Gear firsthand
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: this year, and given my experiences with folks from their
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: team like Ryan Callahan. I know it's gonna be a
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: great group to work with as well, and given their
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: strong focus on conservation and public plan advocacy, I'm also
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: excited to see what we can do on that front.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: So UM, I've also heard that myself and Steve and
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: the meat Ear team are going to have a unique
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: ability to influence new product design moving forward as well,
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: so that's something to look forward to also. So there
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: it is, folks, the biggest news I've had to share
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: in at least five years or so. It's a big
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: new direction in my career and life and with Wired
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: to Hunt, and I'm stoked about it. Um, just very
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: very excited and very very thankful. But what I really
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: need to tell you is that none of this would
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: be possible without all of you, the Wired hunt community.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: I mean, I've gotten so many notes and emails and
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: messages of support and feedback over the years, and some
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: of you have been following me from the very beginning,
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: way back in two thousand and eight and have supported
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: me all along the way, and I just can't thank
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: you enough. I mean, words just don't do it justice.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: But UM, serving a community like this one, people like you,
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: it has made this the most fulfilling work I could
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: ever ask for, and I'm so excited to continue doing
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: that moving forward, just hopefully in an even more impactful way.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: So thank you for that opportunity. And uh, you know,
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: as as we say every every week, thanks for staying
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: weird to hunt. Now, enough of all that, I know
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: what you really want to hear about is deer and
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: you want to hear from Steve and Yanni. So let's
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: take a very quick break to thank our partners at
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: White Tail Properties and then let's get right into it.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: This week with white Tail Properties, we are joined by
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: Billy O'Connor, a land specialist out of Kansas, and Billy
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: is going to be telling us about what to consider
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: when buying a property with a friend. Um, you know,
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: buying a property the friend is a great idea. You know,
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: it helps you get more land for less and it
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: also helps with the cost and investment of time that
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: kind of need for improvements. Plus it's just fun to
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: kind of share in the experience of owning land with
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: someone who is passionate about the outdoors as you are.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: But you do need to think through the process a
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: little bit to make sure that you kind of cover
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: all scenarios kind of going down the road. When buying
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: with a friend, you first want to talk through ideally
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: what each partner wants out of the experience. You know,
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: is this for an investment. Is it to raise mature
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: whitetail by let him get to a certain age class.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: Is it a place you want to bring friends and
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: family to hunt as well? Assuming you both want to
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: manage for deer. Usually friends have the same goal and
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: approach to management, but often one person will want to
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: hunt other things such as quail and small game, and
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: the other partner may not necessarily want to do that,
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: So you kind of want to talk all that through. UM.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: If you are not a state buyer, you do need
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: to keep in mind at the state of Kansas, you're
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: allowed want to land an attag per eighty acres, So
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: if you both want land under tags, you need to
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: make sure the properties of hundred six acres or more.
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: I'd suggest you buy the property under an LLC UM.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: That way, everything could kind of be explained in the
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: by laws. In the event that something does come down
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: the road where you guys do need to split it
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: or sell it. You know, things such as a divorce
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: or someone has more kids than they anticipated, and or
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: a death in the family and someone needs to sell. Um.
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: Those type of things. You can kind of go over
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: and get that out of the way from the get go.
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: If you'd like to learn more and to see the
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: properties that Billy currently has listed for sale, visit white
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: tail properties dot com. Backslash O'Connor. That's O C O
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: N N O R. I like that. We can hear
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: the yeah, oh yeah, that's good. Smart to keep the darman. Yeah, okay,
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: So we're here with the honest Pitelis and Steve or
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: Nolla and a lot of frogs and a lot of frogs.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: You know, we're sitting in a log cabin kind of deal.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: And I want to I want to pull you guys
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: into my world because so often you guys are off
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: running around Alaska or somewhere exciting, and I'm chasing white
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: tails all the time. So when I come onto the
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: Mediator podcast, I feel like a little bit like the
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: redheaded step child. But you don't actually feel like you're
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: stuck though. No, no, no, no, but dude, that's not
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: it's not. But here's the thing. What you're saying isn't true. Yeah, Well,
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: what I'm trying to do, what I'm trying to say.
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: But yeah, but I mean, I get what you're saying,
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: but I'm like, like, I do a lot of stuff
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: that would be way beneath most outdoors, such as if
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: it's channel cats in the middle of the winter. I
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: don't know that's true on small game fish, rough fish. Well,
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: this is the point I'm trying to get to though,
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: is that while you guys are often on these very
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: glamorous super hunts that people look at and maybe dream about,
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: like gray squirrels in Kentucky playing dogs exactly, you both
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: began or poll poland the limb line and jug fishing
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: for cats in the Ohio River. This too. What I'm
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: trying to say, Steve, is that you guys did begin
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: right here in Michigan chasing white Actually not that far
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: from here. Mega nostalgia on the way in today for sure,
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: because we're in southwestern Michigan. Both of you guys come
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: from my home state. Be honest, you're really close to home,
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: right Yeah. I'd say I'm probably within thirty miles and
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: a couple hours for you, Steve. So we are in
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: the heart of our history, all three of us right
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: here Michigan deer country. So I want to try to
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: convince you guys to talk white tails with me for
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: an evening. Uh, I would love to do you. But, um,
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: just before we get started, do you mean, um, like
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: white tails in the way that I understood them when
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: I was growing up as a Michigan white tail hunter
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: or some or different than that? No, that I want.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: I want us to talk about your history where it
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: started for you guys with white tails, and then we'll
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: kind of go from there. Um, But before we get
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: to your own personal histories with white tails, Steve, you
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: always do a really nice job talking about the natural
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: history of different critters when you're going on a hunt
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: or talking about them. Do you have any interesting white
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: tail natural history that you could spring on us? Yeah?
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: Can please it? Okay if it involves black tail deer mulder, Well,
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: of course it would. Okay. So there's an idea and
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: I don't know that this idea is true, but there's
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: an idea of how of that of this demonstrates how
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: successful the white tailed deer is as a species. Now,
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: there's gonna be people you hear this, and they might
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: fact check. They might fact check and dispute elements of it,
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: but there's a narrative that that goes um that for
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: that white tails have been around and kind of in
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: there sort of same recognizable state for vastly longer than
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: our other deer species, and that they have been almost
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: in perpetuity, that they have had sort of their central
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: zone being down to the south what's now the southeastern
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: United States. And there was a time historically, during a
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: very wet period when white tails moved their way across
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: and basically colin eyes the whole country from coast to coast,
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: And then a dry period came and white tails shrunk
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: back to the southeast US and left a remnant population
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: of deer along the Pacific coast and the wetter areas
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: of the Pacific coast. Over time, over the hundreds of
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: thousands of years, those became black tails. Later, during another
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: long wet period, those black tails expanded their range eastward,
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: and white tails once again expanded their range westward. There
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: was a hybridization event that happened, and that is where
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: we got the muleteer from. And the milder is a
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: very new species, and the mule deer is very uh finicky,
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: the most fragile of those fragile, finicky, ultimately ephemeral species.
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: But you have this white tail that can just do
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: that's always been and seemingly always will be on the landscape.
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: So that the theory being that white tails are the
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: original This is I think, um, this, this is an
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: idea put forth by Valarious Geist. He seems to be
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: authority on many unlets, you know, and some people will
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: say he's an authority on many things. He's not actually
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: an authority on but um in the like in the
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: ungulate world. But Vlarious GUIs has a lot of interesting ideas.
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: I was reading the pieces not long agover. He's postulating
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: that the reason Clovis and Foalsome points are fluted is
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: that they were packing that projectile points is that they
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: were packing that fluted piece with some sort of poison, right,
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: which is an idea you will not find in mainstream
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: anthropological corners. But it's an idea that that he just
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: kind of puts out like he he now and then
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: we're just like sort of introduced these big ideas and
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: then as you know, a friend of mine put it
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: like he'll introduce a big idea and then kind of
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: leave the room as everything catches on fire like a drop,
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: the mic moment just steps out. It's like, try and
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: argue about that for a while. Wow, So that's how's
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: that for a white tailed tip? That was good. I'm
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: not standing behind any of it. I'm just telling that's
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: the thing that I that's the thing I read from
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: a single source and didn't take the time, didn't take
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: the time to go and see if if it's if
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: it's if there's a sort of academic consensus around that
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: idea or not. It is interesting, and it is it
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: kind of makes sense and a little but when you
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: look at the fidelity of the species of the white
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: tailed of all the species, they've makes sense. They've been
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: around the longest here because they are the most adapted
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: to the widespread environments as they can make anything work,
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: They can do anything. Yeah, and they look how readily
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: they adapted to human presence. Yeah. Well, I just did
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: a podcast on my own about coyotes recently and how
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: kind of like there's a few species here that have
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: done amazingly well living with humans. White tails, coyotes, rats,
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: and basic vermin like that Canada geese, the crow. They
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: they've found a way to make it work, and that's
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: that's kind of admirable, I think to a degree. It's
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: interesting when you're in a grocery store parking lot and
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: there's a bird hop around under your car. It's probably
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: an English sparrow that birds not you know that birds
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: a Eurasian bird. It's not from here. It's the most
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: um populous bird on the planet and has the largest
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: home range of any bird on the planet. This is
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: one of those winners, man, They just win, and white
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: tails just win. And it's funny how we uh, what's
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: the word I always forget when you put like human
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: traits to animals and ye are morphires these animals, and
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: how you look at that trait is admirable, where really
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: it's just the it's just been natural selection that has
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: made those animals succeed, right, And we look at it
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: as sort of this admirable trait. But it's just like
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: it's kind of how the ship's rolled. Yeah, yeah, no,
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: that yeah, it's true. I don't know that I look
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: at it as admirable because I I tend to like
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: I tend to like those um That's what I'm trying
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: to say. There's two kinds of people in this world,
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: there's kind of people that you lump everyone into two groups.
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: So there's two kinds of people in this world. I
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: ain't just the ones that look and they like they
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: like they love those winners, right, So you're the guy
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: that loves you like you love carp Like there's a
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: successful species, carp crows successful species, Canada geese successful species,
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: white tailed deer successful species, the Norway rat successful species,
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: and people look at that and like that's what I like.
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: I tend to have more of an emotional attachment to
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: those finicky, more delicate species that are they just don't
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: cope well with people, that don't coexist well with people.
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: They um, I kind of like see more of like
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: a sort of more beauty in their story. That just
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: means fifty years ago you would have been bodies with
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: the Canada goose. Now you're not. Yeah, fifty years ago
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: sure would have been like I used to like Canada
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: case and it seemed like they were going to vanish
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: from the face of the earth. But I feel like,
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: I feel like you're that guy who says, well, I
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: like that band before they are cool. That's kind of
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: kind of what this is. Yeah, Yeah, it's like Um,
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: you know what it is is because because I think that, uh,
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: you know, I I really appreciate wilderness, you know, and
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: so and so I think that there's some of these
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: things that the animals that don't the animals that don't
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: do well with people, that don't do well with civilization.
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: We tend to associate with wilderness, and I like wildern.
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: However you define it, you know, I have my own
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: personal way that I would sort of go about defining it. Um.
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: And there's animals I associate with it, right, So like
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: grizzly bears. Right, it's not that grizzly bears don't It's
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: not that grizzly bears don't cope well with people. People
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: don't cope well with grizzly bears. I think if if,
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: if when they come up, when they start to like
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: interface with populated areas, they die. They tend to get
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: killed because they get themselves in trouble. I think that
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: if we had just utmost tolerance for the bears and
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: we're deferential to the bears, they would probably be doing great.
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: But when they butt up against people, they suffer. Right,
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: they can't coexist. Um And And there's a handful of
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: other things, but that you're right about. The point you
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: make about knees is a valuable point because I think
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: that you're the same way. You could have gone back
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: to nine thirty and you would have listed the wild
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: turkey in with with grizzly bears and milder and even
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: white tails. You would have said, like, there's an animal
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: that can't hack it, when in fact it was just
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: it just needed the slightest bit of help with a
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: little bit of regulations. You could say that it's important
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: that people do care about these underdog species at times
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: because they won't have the chance to get to that
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: higher end of the cycle of no one did. Thank goodness,
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: people cared about turkeys and deer and said that that's
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: a that's an underdog species right now. I like that
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: because now they're top of the chain again. Yeah, but
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: you did exactly what I said, we weren't gonna do.
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: You've you've got us talking about grizzly bears, did you did?
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: I know? I think you invited it. White tails, guys,
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: white tails. I want to talk about your first deer,
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: your first white tailed deer. You're honest, do you remember
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: that that experience? First one ever kilt? Yeah, how do
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: how'd they go? Uh? We were outside killed it got away? No,
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: my first ball out kind of got away. I thought
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: you got is there, So you got one and even
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: was like sort of confirmed that you had gotten it,
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: and then you came back and it wasn't there anymore.
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, but that's much later I was. Yeah, I
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: was an adult, yeah, very yeah. No, yeah, we don't
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: have to rehash that story. I think we've already told
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: it twice on on the Meteor podcast. But yeah, we're
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: outside of three hours Michigan, Uh, near the Latvian campus
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: that three rivers archree? Is that a different three rivers?
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: The different three rivers? I think a different three rivers
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: um And we were it was probably we only stand
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: hunted until nine or ten usually opening day, and then
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: it was drives from there on out the rest of
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: Saturday and all Sunday, and I say all Sunday. It
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: was probably half a Sunday and uh, we just like
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: that was kind of like the whole hunt. Right, it
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: lasted about a day and a half. How how old
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: were you at this point? Whatever the minimum age was,
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: So I think I've been hunting in Wisconsin already for
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: a couple of years, but hadn't killed one yet. And uh,
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: we were doing a drive and I was a shooter.
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: I think a couple can't quite remember. A couple three
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: came running by and I emptied, however many slugs I
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: had in my gun, I emptied him at a running deer.
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: H if I had to guess the range. Twe eat
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: a forty yards pretty close, shooting from the hip. No, no,
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: no that, but definitely kind of leading the animal. And uh,
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: it was the last shot and it just cartwheel rolled over.
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: Was that like do you expected that happened? Or was
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: that surprising? Like? Oh, should I actually had it? Oh? Man?
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: Probably a little bit of both. I mean you're, yeah,
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: you're you're expect you're shooting and you're expecting it to happen,
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: but then when it does, you're like, oh, you know,
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: and uh it was emotional. I can't. I think the
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: emotions came later because I was sort of just an
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: awe at first. Walked over there to it, and uh,
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: you know it is on a drive, the deer get
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: pushed through, there's a bunch of shooting, and then you
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: sort of figure out slowly who actually hit some stuff
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: and you kind of help people retrieve deer, and you
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: go over and get do some gutting and you know,
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: helping whatnot dry I go out, so it took it.
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: So I had a few minutes alone with the deer
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: before someone else got there, and I remember walking up
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: to it and not seeing a hole in it. Got
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: scratching my head like you know, maybe it's not dead,
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: and its head was just kind of tilted over just
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: a little bit, and I grabbed its ear and when
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: I pulled its ear, it was almost like just half
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: of its head came towards me and I had somehow
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: like I don't know exactly where it hit, but basically
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: the it was like a perfect melon. The skull had
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: just cracked open like a perfect melon, and the brain
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: was just sitting there. It was wild. Um, I mean
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: not like way way open. That is an exaggeration, but
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: I remember looking in there and seeing the brain. But
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: it wasn't like it was all mushine. There wasn't eyeballs
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: popping out everywhere. It was just a glancing hit. Who
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: knows very quick death. Yeah, Like yeah, when it hit
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: the ground, it didn't flop, but that's not where you were.
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: You don't know where you're aiming, just leading a deer
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: running through the woods, you know, m hm um and
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: uh yeah, So it was I think as the people
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: came there and you start to get congratulations and you
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: get the blood smeared on your face. I don't think
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: my dad ever really did that, but someone in the
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: group did. Yeah. Did he feels the lavian thing? No? No, no,
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: I don't know they picked it up from Red Dawn maybe. Um,
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: But yeah, there was congratulations and uh, you know, I
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: was excited and there was you know, but I definitely
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: remember like some severe remorse, you know, definitely some tears,
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: you know, trying to process at all. It was remember
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: being a heavy duty. So it was like, after all,
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: like the cheers and the handshakes and everything, when you
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: were thinking about it later that you started feeling it
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: was right then and there. It was right there and there.
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: I think I was probably over it by the time
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: we're dragging the deer out of the woods. I was
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: thinking of about when I was going to shoot the
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: next year. You know. For me, it was when I
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: when I first when I saw it, I've been we're tracking, tracking, tracking,
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: when you walked up on it and you first spot it,
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: and I had this just like I don't know, this
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: dropping of my stomach or something feeling right, like, wow,
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: that's it's dead. Has happened, It's real. Did you A
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: lot of people talk about and I experienced this too,
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: that first shot at a deer that first year you killed.
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: Maybe those two things didn't happen the same same instance,
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: but you almost blackout. Some people talk about like it happened,
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: and then you're like WHOA, Like, I don't remember drawing
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: my bow or aiming the gun or doing anything. It
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: just like I went an autopilot. Just happened. Did you
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: have anything like that where you mentally in it? Do
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: you remember, Um, yeah, I don't remember, like a blackout
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: sort of a situation. The next year, I was bowl hunting,
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: but the day before the opening shotgunner and I had
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: a doge come up within a few yards and I
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: was shaking so bad that the arrow just fell right
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: out of my bow and hit the ground and somehow
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: got it back in there. And she just had circled
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: around me and she's on the other side of a
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: like a snag and I just there. That was more
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: like blackout, because I mean she was feet away, and
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: I was shaken and just like must shoot arrow an animal,
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: you know, and I fired one loose it went right
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: over her back, and you know she ran off. UM,
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: and I feel like they're uh there. I had no control, Like,
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: you know, I was not in control of what I
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: was doing. You know, you're just trying to just make
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: it through so that you get that experience. Hopefully next time,
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: you know, you can have some composure. Yeah, it's it's interesting.
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: I talked to so many different people and kind of
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: this topic comes up a lot. Often. You hear some
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: people that never ever had that experience. They're always in
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: control in the moment. You talk to some people that
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: they're still experiencing that now even though they've been hunting
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: for ten or fifteen years. And then there's some people
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: that it's like an evolution, like some people kind of
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: build that control over time. I don't know if it's
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: a personality trait or if it's just your emotion level
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: or what it is. I don't know, Steve, do you
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: have anything like that? Did you think it's I think
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: it's it's um. I think for most people, exposure diminishes
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: it because he just there's less uh, less adrenaline. You know,
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: my older brother talks about the thing where he um.
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: What he doesn't like when he gets rattled, you know,
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: bow hunting for elk right, he gets rattled and like
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: blows a shot. What he doesn't like is he feels
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: that that it. What he doesn't like about himself in
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: those situations that he feels is that he's so lusty.
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: He's so lusty for that elk right. He wants. It's
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: so bad that um that it rattles him, like his
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: desire becomes so like overwhelming that he can't function properly interesting.
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: And later he looks at that um almost like to
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: flow a shot. He looks at it almost like a
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: sin of the flesh, like the way someone might be like, oh,
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: I didn't wish I didn't cheat on my wife, but
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: I'm so overcome by passion and now I hate myself,
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: Like he'll feel that way about flopping a shot. He's like,
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: why do I have to want that so bad that
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: I can't do it in the way that I do
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: the normal things that I do in my life, Like
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: I don't get all panicky when I'm doing normal things
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: about my wife? Why do I get panicky? Then yeah,
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: whenever I'm having a hunting season where I haven't had
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: much success yet that my wife is always saying, you
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: want it too bad, You want it too bad. As
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: soon as you stop, Karen, you'll get that, dear, So
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: something to do it. Do you remember your first year?
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: So yeah, man, vividly, vividly so uh well, But for
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: whatever reason, in my family, we would kind of jump
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: the gun on the legal hunting ages. Like my dad,
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: like he looked like my dad would look at sort
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: of the big major points of the law and abide
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: by those, but like some details were kind of lost
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: on him. And I think that he wasn't, you know,
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: brought He wasn't really brought up in a way to um,
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: he wasn't brought up in a way that people paid
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: a lot of attention to that stuff. I think just
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: who he's, who he was surrounded by and in his
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: formative years. So yeah, I started. I remember being up
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: in my own tree stand when I was levin with
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: the boat too, so young that like my old man
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: would march me down and or send me down whatever
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: into a river bottom to be up in a tree
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: and it would get dark and just be petrified definitely
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: afraid of getting out of that tree and would just wait,
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: you know, more of my brothers would ever come down,
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: or my dad would come and shine a light from
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: up on the top of the ridge or something, and
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: I'd have to get down. It's being so scared man
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: like that young, you know. And they were the first
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: The first year I missed my first encounter where the
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: buck was early in the season when I was eleven,
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, heart coming through was have
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: no idea what the hell that would be. And it
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: turns out like a butt kind of walking by me
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: and probably arranged, but I was sold, just like wow,
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: you know. Then later that year we went up to Baldwin.
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: We used to hunt some public land up and Baldwin
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: at a place called Teapot Trail because someone who hung
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: a teapot in a tree, and of course people then
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: have to like shooting full of holes of twenty two
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: and whatnot because there's something hanging tree, you gotta shoot
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: at it, right. So it's a shot up teapot hanging
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: at the entrance of this trail on public land up
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: Mannesseee National Forest, and we would hunt it by just
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: walking the logging roads until you found her two or
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: three deer had recently crossed the road. Then you'd go
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: in seventy yards off the side of the road and
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: hang up a stand and just sit the trail all
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: the better if you found it. If that trail intersected
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: another trail that had two or three deer tracks on it,
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: then you were like in the money. So maybe we
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: caught a track crossing the road. We caught like where
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: it looked like a deer yesterday had cross teapot trail,
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: and it looked like a deer today had cross teapot trail,
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: went and hung up a tree stand. I mean I
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: wasn't sitting there in an hour man alone at eleven,
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: you know, sitting there an hour and here comes this
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: for this forky in this thing, I mean you could
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: reach out and grabbed it. You know, he's ten ten
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: yards off the base of the tree. And I remember
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: shooting right underneath them and just feeling sick, just feeling
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: sick about it. Then what why do you feel sick?
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: Was it because you'd failed yourself? Were you afraid of
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: just because I think just missed? Yeah, whatever, I don't
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: know if it's because I can't remember like what it was.
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: But just like you know, you grew up around deer hunters,
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: so you want to be a deer hunter, you want
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: to get a deer and just being so bummed, you
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: know not I think about it. Maybe was twelve when
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: I missed that one, but that you know I was
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: because I had my first Yeah, it wasn't that it
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: was so I was twelve. I was eleven when I
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: had the first time. I heard a buck come grunting
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: through the woods and passed by me and I couldn't
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: even pull together to pick up my boat. He wasn't
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: like really close, but it was just remember like a
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: real moment, and you know where that was. There used
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: to be a place like I grew up in an
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: area where an area mission where there was a lot
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: of camps, so we had um O wasap e Scout
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: camp was near us. I used to When I was thirteen,
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: I got a job washing dishes that camp Pendaluon. I'll
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: be washing dishes and the campers were older and I
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: was yeah, the band camp kids were like my two
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: years older. Me and me my brother back there Washington,
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: damn dishes, mixing kool aid in the garbage camp of
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: the canoe paddle a camp Pendaluan. So all these camps,
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: like all the kids would come camp, but in the
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: fall would just be empty land. And you could buy
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: a waspy. You could buy a permit. You could go
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: buy like a trespass permit for ten bucks. I mean
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: it was that cheap. I membe we could buy an
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: ice fishing permit for three dollars or something. So that
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: buck was on a Waspy scout land Waspy boy scout camp,
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: which I think now is not a Waspy camp anymore.
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: And then um, I turned thirteen, and you're not supposed
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: to hunt with a rifle to your fourteen, but I
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: was doing it during this one year grace period that
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: we were allowed in my family for whatever reason. I
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: was thirteen and just like, yeah, don't even were doing
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: a deer drive. So we sat in the morning in
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: our ground blinds, because before you could hunt from the
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: elevated platform. We sat in the morning and our ground blinds,
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: and and we knew this area along this this creek,
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: Mosquito Creek. We knew this area where there was a
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: big bend and a big bottom area. It was full
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: of like multi flora rose and and uh, a lot
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: of tall grass down there. It's like a lot of
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: sunlight would come through down in this area. And we
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: knew that deer bed up down in there, and we
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: knew when you bumped him out of there. This is
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: on a farm owned by a family called the Zerlat family. Um.
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: They they had they ran a dairy operation and they
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: grew without of lflf and corn to feed their own dairy.
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: Um and they did they did something they had They
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: had an orchard, They did some apple, they did some
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: apple stuff and did some timber um. And my dad
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: was friends with him through church, so we would hunt
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: their place, and uh, we had done it enough. It's
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: just the family have been hunted so long. You knew
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: that there was a deer there, you knew what ridge
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: they went up. So my brother in law, my brother
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: went down and I went on the ravine, the ridge
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: they used to climb out of the ravine, and I
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: just sat there and heard him her deer coming. And
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: this deer pulled up less than ten yards away. But
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: all I could see was its face and neck. I
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: could see the white patch on its throat, and I
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: was shooting a Marlon. It was a model Winchester model
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: but thirty two special, which I had gotten from a
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: man named Eugene Grots. And this guy, Eugene Grots, my
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: dad hung out and he's in his seventies. He's a
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: World War Two that like my old man. And he
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: had a gun for every year he'd been alive. And
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: at some point he realized you had like an extra
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: one or two and let me pick one, and he
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: gave you this model ninety four and the thirty two special.
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: And I had a peep site on and I remember
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: I had like a little reduce or you could screw
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: into the peep site and I remember center that pezza
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: in the white patch and that deer still it was
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: a spike corn bucking and uh hit him high. You
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: still have that rifle? No, you know what? I sold
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: for three hundred bucks because I wanted a like a
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: that was yeah, when everybody wanted a thirty at six
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: and stuff right, people were getting sick of thirty thirties
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: and sick of thirty two and wanted like thirty at
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: sixes And sold for for next and nothing to a
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: place called five hundred Guns. Um hit the deer kind
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: of hit a bad hitting the jaw rolled down the
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: hill and instead of just working the level action. I
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: remember like I did a lot of fur trap and
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: I like the mountain meant a lot stuff. I remember
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: I had my knife like on the outside of my shirt,
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: like a she nw if you know, a butcher's knife, right,
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: skin and knife. And remember I ran down the hill
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: and and got down on the deer, and the deer
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: got back up again, and I jumped on the deer.
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: It just didn't occur me to shoot it, you know.
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: And I jumped on deer and wrestled it down, tackled
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: to the ground and cut its throat. Yeah, just like
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: pants not yeah, not having any just didn't occur. Like
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: looking back in my mind, like why would it shots?
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: You're gonna have no idea. Remember the thing got up,
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: I was like, this thing's not getting away, and I
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: jumped right on its back. What was the rest of
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: the crew impressed? They weren't there when they heard the story,
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: though I don't remember that. I remember I carried it
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: was small enough that I carried it up out of
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: there on my shoulders. I can tell you the shirt
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: I had on it was one of those quilted quilted
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: flannel shirts. It was kind of a rust color with
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: blue and green stripes, blue and green checker pattern over it.
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: And I had a pair of Army syrplus wool pants on,
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: and I had a pair of and I had a
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: pair of pack boots on leather upper rubber by the
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: packed boots. What was the weather like? Sunny, hot, unseasonably hot.
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: It would have been probably November sevent Do you remember this,
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: I remember so clear Remember the first time you ate
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: that dear, the first time you ate meat from the
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: first deer you ever killed. Yeah, we ate the heart
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: that morning. I remember that clearly because I brought it
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: home and the old man like it was ritual we
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: had if you killed a deer in the morning, in
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: late morning, they would fry the deer in a pan
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: with onions and you would catch up. My old man
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: wouldn't let us put catch up on dear mct Norman.
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: He'd get really mad if you put catch up on
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: dear meat. But he'd let you put catch up on
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: the heart meat. Yeah, he'd be like consulted, he'd act
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: insulted if you put ketch up on dear meat. Do
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: you think that, even at that young age, was that
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: a different thing, eating something that you pull the trigger on.
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: I thought was that even Oh yeah, I thought different.
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: But you got to realize, man, I like at that
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: age and in that time, all I like, I wanted
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: to be like I wanted to be the mountain man, right,
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: So anything anything they had anything to do it like
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: fur trapping, eating crazy ship, living off the land, killing
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: ship with knives. It's like anything at all that, anything
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: like that, that's all I like. That's what I read about,
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: thought about did so it would have Yeah, it would
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: have resonated with me. And but it was already like
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: a thing we did anyway. Like my old man, this
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: is no joke. My old man would go check other
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: guys as gut piles to get the hearts. If he
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: heard about a guy getting a deer and got a
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: deer out in whatever field, he would go out there
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: and check and get the heart and deliver out of Yeah.
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: It was a big he made a big point out
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: of it. Yeah, And I came up in a much
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: more casual deer hunting culture, like we hunted probably really
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: two days maybe three in Wisconsin, two three in Mission again.
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: Once I was old enough to start getting serious about
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: bow hunt. I had started putting more time when I
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: was about probably sixteens. I think I was driving my
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: own car at that point. But yeah, the whole eating
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: the animal, um, we just had the In Wisconsin, the
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: tradition was that on Saturday night, we just have a
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: It's basically like a sauce that we made with mushrooms,
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: kind of like a hunter's gravy, and we I mean,
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: sure Lovin got made it, but I'm sure that many
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: cultures make this similar sauce. Definitely a little bit probably
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: like a sour cream kind of a base, like a
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: wider sauce, but it would have I think heart and
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: tender oin in it. You know, we take all the
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: tender loins of all the deer that were shot that
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: day and take the hearts. It all get chopped up
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: and put into it. And I always remember like being like,
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: what's this piece is gonna be dang it hard again? Oh?
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: Good tenderly? You know? Yeah? And uh yes, I don't.
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: I don't. I didn't get real serious about all that
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: stuff until I sort of, you know, came of age
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: on my own living in Colorado, and I was probably
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: nineteen twenty, and it just happened to be that I
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: had like my own elk at home. All of a sudden,
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, what do I do? Now? I better
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: butcher this thing and just started chopping it up, And
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: the next thing you know, I was going down that path.
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: You know, that's cool, and here you are for me now,
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: of course, the first dear experience is always one their
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: first animal, whatever it might be, kind of sticks with you.
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: But then for me also when I look back on
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: my childhood experiences of the hunter, there's like a moment
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: or two that kind of stands out as is I
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: don't know, that special moment or experience that I can
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: just see and like it has like that kind of
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: magical feeling for me. It was I think it was
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: like ninety six or nine seven. Um, you guys were
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: probably off in college by then or something. I was
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: like eight years old, was graduate school, so you really started.
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: I started graduate school in I was skipping my senior
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: year of high school. So I was seven or eight
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: or something like that. And what, Yeah, I was born
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: in eighty seven. Huh, how can that be? So this
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: is the ninety six or ninety seven somewhere around there,
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: and my one of the there's a the youngest guy
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: in the camp other than me. It was maybe in
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: his mid twenties or something, and I kind of idolized
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: him growing up. Him. He was always up a camp
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: and he always killed deer. He killed an eight point buck,
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: which is the biggest deer I've ever seen up there.
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: And so opening morning he killed his eight pointer and
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: we put up on the buck pole and there it was.
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: That evening my grandpa killed a great big seven point
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: or the biggest now, the biggest buck I've ever seen killed.
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: And that night I remember I heard the gun shot.
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: I was sitting with my dad. Every time you heard
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: a gun shot. I was like, Dad, do you think
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: that was one of the guys from our group? Do
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: you think that was one of the guys? And He's like,
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: oh no, that was way too far away. Mark, you'll
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: know it if you if you almost get knocked out
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: of the seat, you'll know it's one of our guys.
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: And so finally late that night, boom, I jolted away because,
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: oh my gosh, was that one of our guys? And yeah,
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: that was one of our guys. So Grandpa ended up
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: shooting this deer, and I remember we all came back
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: to the cabin. We had this little fourty acre piece
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: up in northern Michigan, this little one room log cabin
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: that my grandpa had bought way back in the day.
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: And so we all are in this one cabin. We
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: no power, no water, no anything, just some kerosene lanterns
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: and stuff. And we're in there waiting for Grandpa to
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: get back, waiting for Grandpa to get back, and everyone
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: else had come into camp, and it's only forty acres,
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: so I just go over and see what he's doing.
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: I don't know, that's just what we did. You just
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: hang out of camp and then everyone everyone arrived. So
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: he finally arrived and waited for one more person and
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: getting and I just remember everyone let let the lanterns.
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: So we all had our little kerosene coleman lanterns, and
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: then we walked back to word GP. Call my grandpa
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: g p Um. You know, I never knew he didn't
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: like the idea of being called Grandpa. I think we
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: were just talking kind of psychoanalyzing if he didn't like
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: the idea of like being old gramp, being gramp and signified.
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: So it was either for Grandpa or his His middle
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: name was Paul, and his first name was Gerald, so
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: it could have been Gerald Paul g P. Oh, that's
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: definitely what it was. I don't know I the grandpa,
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: though I always thought could be possible either way. G
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: P finally got back and we were all there, and
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: we got our Colman lanterns, and we've walked across and
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: it was one of those days where the snow had
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: started falling right during that evening hunt, and so by
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: the time we started walking out, everything was codd in snow,
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: so it was like a white landscape, just the the
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: yellow glow then of the lanterns. And we all walked
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: out and there's this one creek that runs to the
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: property and we come to the edge of the creek
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: and I just remember GP lifting the lantern and he
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: goes there he is, and then you could just see
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: the light and then it sounds like one of those
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: Christmas cards you buy a capella. There's a picture that
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: documents this moment now where you can just see this
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: the most beautiful deer you ever saw, laying in this
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: fresh blanket of snow, you know, landside have to rack
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: up and I'm the seven or eight boy surrounded by
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: these men the guys. I've idolized my whole life, and
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: I'm if I remember, this is definitely the first like
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: track job I've been on like this track quote unquote
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: track job. Um, And here I am with the guys,
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: and there's this big buck that my grap got and
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: so there he is, and I just remember seeing him,
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: and it just I will never forget that moment, seeing
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: this deer and this whole I can see the whole thing,
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: can feel it now. And then that whole night and
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: the next two and a half days of camp, whenever
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: we weren't actually hunting, the guys will be inside eating dinner,
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: eating launch or taking naps. I would just go stand
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: at the buck pole and look at these two deer
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: hanging there and just walk circles around them and touch
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: them and look at them and think about them. And
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: so that whole moment just sticks to me forever. You're
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: wired to hunt, man, I was wired to hunt. Um.
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: Do you have any moment like that? Yeah, anything that
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: stands out? Um, there's probably a few, but yeah, I
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: think that there was sort of like a change over
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: when I probably just decided that I was going to
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: be more serious about hunting. Maybe than he and my
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: dad was a pretty serious bow hunter when I was
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: getting into into high school years um, and he was.
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: He got me into it. But when I just made
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: the decision myself that I was gonna also be a
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: bow hunter. So, like I said, I think I had
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: a driver's license. I was driving, and uh, I remember
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: being the lap being camp hiking in I think I
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: actually packed in a decoy on this hunt. And I
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: had chosen my own stand site for the first time
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: that fall, and it was a bit in spot, like
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: a like a like an old uh you know, roadbed
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: between two swamps, and there was kind of two hills,
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: you know, opposite corners of the two swamps. It ended
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: up not being a good spot later, I learned because
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: of the way the thermals would roll off the hills
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: and just always be criss crossing whatever. And I think
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: my spread, yeah, my sent was go in every direction,
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: but I can't remember, maybe I didn't that time. But anyways,
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: the first time that like my own stand, I picked it,
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: like I knew there was deer trails, and all of
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: a sudden, there's a buck underneath my stand and that
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: stands out. It's just sort of like a like a
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: moment where like, all right, I did it. Yeah, Like
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: here I am, like I picked my own spot and
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: there's a buck standing underneath me. Did you shoot? No? No,
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: he got like I don't even know if I came
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: to full he uh, but he sent something and basically
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: just backed out, you know, didn't spook, spook, but didn't
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: continue down his path. But it was like the first
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: time that we're just like it seemed like it had clicked,
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: even though it didn't kill him. It's just like, okay,
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: like I did everything right to get to that point.
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: I'm sure I'll see this again figuring it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: that's a good feeling. Yeah for sure. So I think, yeah,
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: that stands out. I'm sure I'll think of others. But Steve, yeah, man,
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: being here, you know, being in Michigan, I definitely think
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: of some like like like I remember like just like
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: it's sort of like moments where things have like this
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: kind of like Crystaline clarity. You know. Remember later later
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: in life, probably around time like I got out of
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: I got a high school, went into community college for
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: a couple of years, and um took all night classes,
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: you know, so I could trapp during the day I
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: was trying to be a professional trapper and uh like
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: around that time, so it's been around ninety three, being
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: up in the up and staying on some bank above
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: a river. I remember watching these river otters down in
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: the down the river, diving down and coming up with
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: yellow perch in space, the kind of surprised that there's
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: the yellow perch down there were coming up these yellow
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: perch and just crunching them so loud. We were like
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: quite a ways a way that you could just hear
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: the crunching up those perch. And I remember like something
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: about it like spoke to me in some way man like,
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: like I always remember that moment. There's something about they
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: just seem like like otters. I've always had like a
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: real affinity for otters, and um, yeah, like that moment
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: in some sort of way that meant something about being outside, right,
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: the things you'd see outside that were like these kind
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: of like special seeing things outside moments and only sticks
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: in my head. In that same period, is there we
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: used to go down to the mouth of the Pendles
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: river it flows out in the lakes period. We go
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: out to the mouth of the Pendles and and uh,
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: surf cast for steel ahead we get them and they
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: we get him in the fall small ones. Um yeah,
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: and it's funny. I remember one time sitting there with
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: my brothers and something like my friend Eric Kern who
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: later died later and um my buddy Matt DROs who
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: we grew up around hunting fishing, and my brother mam
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: my brother Dan and sitting there and we were drinking
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: Boone's farm in the sand there, you know, and just
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: having this moment of like, holy shit, how much do
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: I like my friends and like it being the because
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: like these were the people I hung out with outside
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: like out of doors. These are like these are like
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: the guys I hunted and fished with when we were younger,
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: you know, And just having this moment of like the
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: level of relationship, like the sort of relationship that you
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: can sort of build in living life this way. And
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: I'm sure other people find in other ways, but that's
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 1: just how we found it. Um. Like that said something
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: to me about the lifestyle of hunting and fishing. Were
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: you hunting without um, like parental guidance and like more
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: with your peers, are on your own by the time
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: you were in your late teens, at what point did
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: you sort of like break away from hunting with, you know,
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: the family group that you grew up with. So it
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: would have been when I started bow hunting as a teenager,
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: so like thirteen years old or fourteen years old or
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: whatever that was, Like I started. I grew up hunting
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: on our northern Michigan deer camp and that was the
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: only place we ever hunted, was going up to. We
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: call it Ken Robin was what my grandpa called this place.
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: So that's where I was hunted, where we learned and
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: did all that stuff. And then my family bought a
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: little three and a half acre a lot in southern
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: Michigan and Grand Rapids and built a house on it.
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: And so when we built that, then my dad and
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: I decided to learn how to bow hunt. He had
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: never bow hunted before, and I was twelve or whatever
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: it was, and we'd learned to bow hunt together on
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: our three and a half acres behind the house, and
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: so I hunted with him the first year or whatever
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: it was until I legally go on my own, and
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: then I just started trying to figure out on my
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: own after that, Um, I've been doing it kind of
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: ever since. So that was kind of my my path. Yeah,
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: I was kind of as quick as we could. We
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: got off on our own. Kind Of an interesting situation
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: because my family was kind of maybe like what you
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: were saying, you honest, it was like very casual hunting
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: and that like up north, it was kind of a
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: serious thing for the opening day weekend. And I think
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: when you say that, it shouldn't have a negative connotation
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: for anybody that's listening, because all these guys are very
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: serious hunters. But compared to where we are now and
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: the people that I hang out with now in the West,
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: it's you know, you look back on that and you go, oh,
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: we only deer hunted for six days out of the year.
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: What's interesting, though, is even though that was the case
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: for you know, my grandpa or my dad or people
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: like that, Um, they would still self identify as a hunter.
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: Like that was like one of their favorite things was hunting,
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: Like what do you like to do? I like to
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: hunt fish? But they only actually hunt four days a
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: year or something fish more than that, but still, I
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: mean not hundreds or anything like that year round. Man. Yeah.
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: But in this case, though, I was like, you know,
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: it was it was like the culture around it, it
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: was experience around is everything that was outside of not
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: just pulling the trigger, but it was everything else entailed
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: and those you know, the social element of it too.
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: But but yeah, I mean I grew up in the
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: situation where you went and sit on a sit on
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: a log next to a tree and just wait and
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: see what happens, and never never really learned about anything
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: other than don't move fast, don't make loud noises. That
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: was basically the extent of my education and how to hunt,
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: and then from there just kind of figured it out.
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: It's mind boggling how bad we were at deer hunting.
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, um, especially compared to things other things that
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: are difficult that we had like learned how to do.
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: We just remained bad at deer hunting because we had
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: we like just the way the old man did it,
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: and it just really retarded our progress. Our progress was
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: putting dumping carrots out in the woods, man picking up
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: dropped apples, going out to apple orchards and picking all
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: the drops up the farm. I wasn't gonna pick and
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: dumbkinoles out of the damn woods, And then going to Grant,
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: Michigan and buying reject carrots missized carrots, go and fill
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: a you could no ship. When I was looking at
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: five bucks, you could fill the back of a pickup
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: with carrots for five dollars. Did you do the sugar
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: beets sometimes too? Area man, it was sure it was
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: carrots and apples. And so we just was like, you know,
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: my dad was like a you know, kind of a woodsman,
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: you know what I mean. And and like, you know,
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: you wanted to go out and catch a mink man.
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: You're like, you have to know how to read sign right,
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: But for deer hunt, we're just dumb. You go and
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: go to the edge of the field because do you
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: seem like being out in fields and find a treat.
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: It looked like a good tree to hang a stand
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: in and dump saging them damn carrots out, or going
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: to woods and five or two trails came to there
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: and dump a sack and them damn carrots out. And
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: so you just didn't learn about deer. You didn't learn
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: about deer. All you learn was like deer light carrots.
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: That's the extent of my If it would have been
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: such a favor to me, it would have been such
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: a favor to me into my family as hunters. I'm
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: saying it's just as policy for everyone else. I'm saying
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: a favor to me and my family as deer hunters
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: if you wouldn't have been allowed to do that, because
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: then you would have had to take that same level
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 1: of woodsmanship, right that it takes to catch freaking walleye
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: in the wintertime, or it takes to get a mint
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: to step on a one and a quarter inch circle
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: to catch it. Um to take that two deer. But
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: we just fell into that trap that lasted consumed a
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: decade of my life ste of stupid bait piles. Man.
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: Now I kind of regret it, you know. So I
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: was on your podcast a few weeks ago and you
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: asked me about what I thought about the food plots
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: versus baiting debate. Are they the same thing? Are they equipped?
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: Why is one more acceptable than one or the other?
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: And I kind of stumbled through my my answer. I
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: wasn't happy with how I answered it in retrospect. But Um,
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: from outside perspective, you guys aren't involved as much in
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: the white tail world now, and I don't think you
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: have any involvement like food plots or habitat management or
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: anything like other than you know, maybe having friends that
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: do and stuff. But from an ounce from your perspective,
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: how would you answer that question, Steve, who was it that? Um? Yeah,
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: I was gonna talk about that guy that said he
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: can't define poorn. He just knows that when he sees it.
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: I don't know, it feels like it like it feels
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: a little bit different to me. And I think that
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: in you know, I've never grown a food plot in
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: my life. Um, I've don't plenty of bait, you know,
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: from the time I was eleven to the time I
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: was nineteen twenty, we're dump bait out in the woods. Um,
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: I don't know, there's kind of a different I guess
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: there's sort of like a difference in in perspective and
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: the difference in aesthetics and stuff. With the guys I
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: know that that grow food plots, you know, they seem
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: to have sort of like kind of like a different
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: view of a different landscape view, And so in some way,
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: like I weigh that into it a little bit. But yeah,
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 1: I don't really know, man, I I like I I
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: think of them differently. I think of them differently, But
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: when I really buckled down on it, I can't really
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: explain why I can't really come up with a reason
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: why I think about them differently when I when I
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: narrow down on it. You know, Um, let's say you
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: like to hunt, you know, let's say you like to
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: hunt black bears, and you realize that in September, black
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: bears will get on blueberries, okay, or get on huckleberries,
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: and you learn to hunt um blueberry huckleberry patches. And
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: when you're up there eating blueberries and huckleberries, you always
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: spit the seeds out and hopes that more blueberries and
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: huckleberries grow up. Right, Let's say that that actually works,
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: and you were like to generate some new huckleberry patch,
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: and then later you were to kill a bear on
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: that huckleberry patch. I would view that very differently than
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: if I took a barrel of donuts and dumped it there.
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: But in growing up in Michigan as white till hunters,
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: when my brothers drew bear tags and you're out hunting
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: these swamps in the up, these vast cedar swamps in
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: the up where you can spend a lifetime running around
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: out there and not running to a barry. Even there's
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: a lot of bears around it's like a way to
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: get a bear in range where you can see the
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: bear and tell if it's got a cob or not.
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: And so when you drew a bear tag, that seemed
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: like the way to do it. If you didn't have
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: friends that had hounds and you wanted to get a
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: bear during a finite period of time, that was the
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: bear seasons. Is the way we'd go out and start
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: shooting car with our bows and freezing them and and
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 1: then established some bait stations. If I've imagined if I
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: was in that situation right now, it would probably the
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: exact same way that I would go about it. So
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: I know that I'm not comming to anything conclusive here,
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: but just a different way my view on baiting. I
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 1: don't care if if you if someone listen, area is
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: legal debate and they bait, God bless them, right. But
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: for me, I just look at that. I look at
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: sort of the wasted chances I had to really learn
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: about how dear use the land to learn that, rather
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: than spending time manipulating their patterns, which is counter largely
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: counterproductive anyways, because you put it down changes their patterns around.
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: They become nocturnal, right they walk around the woods looking
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: up into the trees. It's just like you kind of
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: like change dear around anyways, it's kind of counterproductive. But
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: I just look at and I'm like, man, it would
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: have been really interesting to the amount of time we
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: spent bow hunting deer had been really interesting to just
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: buckle down and learning to damn de you're doing. Because
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: now that I understand that stuff better, I review it
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: back in my mind, the places we hunt, and it
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: doesn't seem like it would have been that hard to
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: unravel it. It wouldn't be hard to unravel it at all.
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: If I was to go hunt those same places now,
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: even just reviewing my mind, I know how I would
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: hunt them. I wouldn't hunt them that way. It's interesting
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: when you talk about, um, what you would have how
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: you would be forced to better understand certain things. And
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: I was, as I was thinking through this question that
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: you asked me in retrospect later on, I was rethinking
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: to myself, like, what are the differences in my own
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: you know, more so than the things I mentioned. And
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: one thing that leapt out to me is that I
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: was kind of reflecting on this more is that you know,
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: when I go about working on habitat and planning food
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: plots are doing something like that. One of the most
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: unique and what I find, um compelling parts of it
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: for me is that when I'm doing that, i am
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: I'm forced to learn about and to become connected to
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: something that's very different than when I'm hunting in other ways.
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: And by by that, I mean when you have to
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: understand habitat, and when you start making changes to habitat,
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: you need to understand things like the impact of sun
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: and water and rain and soil, and and how these
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: different forage types you know, benefit deer or other wildlife,
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: and what all these different habitat pieces and parts, how
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: that fits into this cycle, and how whatever changes we
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: might make might influence things, and what wildlife benefit from
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: And you start learning about all these different things that
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: never would have before. I never would have started to
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: dive into that part of this world. And to me,
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: that's been like a really valuable thing to dive into
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: that aspect of very interesting and it connects me again
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: to the resource to the wildlife in a different way.
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: That um that I've found really fulfilling and satisfying. And
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: another piece too, and I've mentioned and you wouldn't get
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: that by dumping the pile of carrots. And you wouldn't
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: get that by dumping the carrots, and and and you
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: wouldn't You wouldn't get that by just hunting a junction
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 1: a funnel point either, you know. I mean I find
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: a lot of value in getting to hunt all these
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 1: different types of ways. I enjoy the ability to go
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: on a piece of public land or somewhere where I
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: can't change anything at all, because then you need to
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: do nothing but understand how the deer are working the
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: land right now, and how can I use that information
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 1: to be in the right place. Then there's also something
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: really neat and fulfilling about understanding the habitat itself and
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: how we can make that better, how we can interact
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: with that landscape. You're not just interacting from like a
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: surface level, but you can actually go deeper and change things.
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: And what that what you need to start making those
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: decisions in a smart way, forces you to learn a
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: lot to engage You engage with it in a different way.
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: That's interesting. Yeah, you become kind of an ecologist, you know,
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: or you have to have an ecological understand anything. Yeah,
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: And I could see it if I live. If I
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: had some uh, if I own some small chunk of
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: land and you know there was wildlife in the area,
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: I wasn't getting it out of my property. I could
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: tell you that would probably become obsessed about about habitat improvements. Man,
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 1: I know that would happened. And that's another thing I
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: feel like so often as a white tailed guy with
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: Western hunting friends, I always find myself feeling like I'm
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: like defending myself or something, and then I feel like
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: there's a perception sometimes and you guys can tell that
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: this is true or not if you think from from
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: your side of this. But I feel like a lot
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: of guys out west the hunt in the mountains and stuff.
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: Look at these white tail guys, is I don't know,
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: lazy doing this easy kind of hunting. It's kind of
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: I don't think that at all, man, I don't. I
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: feel like you guys think we're crazy, Like you guys
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: are playing food plots or you're doing these place like this,
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: like where we're at right now. I come to place
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: like this and I'm like, my god, Like the level
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 1: of bio diversity, Yeah, one of the bio diversity is
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: is phenomenal and then the pounds of life per unit
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: of space is extremely high. It's just rich, rich environment
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: you could have. You can be on a six hundred
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: acre farm in Michigan. There's six hundred acre piece of
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: property in Michigan and know that there are a lot
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: of animals there. Right now. You could sush, you could
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: sqush a pair of bonoculars over six d um six
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: hundred acres of arid grassland and within a couple of
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: minutes say that there's not a thing out there right now.
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: It's just different, it's different different. Yeah, it's funny you
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: mentioned next. We talked about that when the drive in.
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: We drove separately today and I was with Garrett and
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: uh Andy and uh I was talking about being a
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: little nostalgic about it and comparing it to out West,
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: and yeah, these woods are just so thick with just
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: like you said, just biomass. You know, there's just so
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 1: much going on here. I love that, you know, I
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: love being in these woods for that reason. Just replete
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: with life. Man, it's amazing. Um. Yeah, I don't know why.
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 1: I don't know why I think that. You know, you
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 1: grow up and everybody people want to hunt out west man.
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: You know, there's there's like I think that a lot.
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 1: I think the guys in Wyoming don't grow up dreaming
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: about hunting Michigan. Okay, guys in Michigan, as much as
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 1: you love it and and and do it, you kind
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: of grow up not you kind of grow up dreaming
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: about also being out west. And and it's this sort
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: of natural draw on this country. I mean, if you look,
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 1: there's this there's this like this Western motion. It's kind
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: of ingrained in US historically, and I think it exists.
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 1: There's kind of a romance to it, and there's a
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: greater you know, I talked about's a lot of biodiversity here,
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: but when it comes to large mammals, there's much like
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: broader suite of large mammals in the West, and people
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: are drawn to that. But I do meet a lot
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: of guys in the mid in the Midwest who sort
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: of have this sense of like like this a little
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: bit of like an inferiority complex or feel that that
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: they're sucking high and titty on the hunting world in
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: some way that I don't see it. But that's coming
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: from me too, from being like a generalist, right, like,
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: like I like to hunt whatever. So I'm out and
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: these was I'm like, man, there's tons of squirrels, tons
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 1: of turkeys, tons of deer. Rivers and lakes are full
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 1: of fish. You can fish the big lake, you can
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: fish small inland lakes, you can fish streams, you can
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: fish rivers um year round sportsman's paradise, right it just in.
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: This is coming from a guy that left Michigan to
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: go move to Montana. But when I'm here, I'm like, man, like,
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: if you also put me back here, I would, right,
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: I'd be pretty excited. But you wouldn't move back on purpose, right,
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: I would not. It's just it's not it's not that
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 1: ten years ago. But just to just again today on
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: the drive in, I was thinking, like, you know, what
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: wouldn't be the end of the world. Not too bad.
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 1: It's not too bad. My ole man. He's always tell
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: a story about talk about like an optimist, you know,
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: and a pessimist. Like he talked about if you had
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 1: to imagine this big room full of horseship, right, and
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: you put a kid there and he just sits there
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: and cries, Okay, when you're putting our kid there and
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: he's just in there, digging, he's like with all this
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: horse ship, there's gonna be a pony in here somewhere,
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: you know. And so I feel like it's just like
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: there's so much like matter of just like perception of
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: where you are, you know, and I go like a
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: lot of places that going. I'm like, dude, I can
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: just picture being here and tearing it up. And when
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: I'm in Michigan, I think like this place right right now,
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: I'm like, my god, if I lived here, I would
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: get after it. Yeah, And I think that's what is
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: more important than anything, is Uh, wherever you find yourself,
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: you still gotta put in the time and effort to
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: be you know, everybody can sit around talking about how
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: good or bad it is here they're nowhere. But if
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: you if you actually hunt six or eight days a year,
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: then who gives a ship? Right? Like, Yeah, you gotta
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: be a guy that puts in the effort. We're talking
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 1: to a guy there Day lives in Missouri, and you know,
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: sports is paradise, just like Michigan lives in Missouri. And
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: you talk to that guy, there's no like he's doing everything.
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: He hunts deer, he taunting turkeys, he's bank pulling flatheads,
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 1: just he's keep squirrel dogs. All that guy does is
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: hunting fish. There's probably a lot of guys sitting around
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: is moping around like can't afford dude. Right, there's just
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: people like that, and there's people that tear it up.
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 1: And everywhere I go around the country, you know, I
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: meet guys like we know a boatload up now, guys
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 1: like Kevin Murphy. Kevin Murphy does not sit around lamenting
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: the location. The guy hunts and fishes NonStop, and he's
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: like one of the better ones out there in every corner,
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: every corner in the country you go, you're gonna find
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: you guys like complain about what it is or or
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 1: the bucks. By me, you aren't as big as the
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 1: bucks in Iowa. Hunting here sucks. And then you're gonna
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 1: go down and bang on the next door, and it's
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 1: gonna be some guy out he's got like four kinds
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: of boats parked in his driveway. And all the guy
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 1: does is like in his from his mind, he's like
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 1: living the American dream. It's just an attitude thing that's
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: take advantage of you, gat And I think back to
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 1: your original questions of like Western guys thinking that you
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 1: know this white tail thing is a lazy man saying whatever.
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 1: We hear that, But it's just a very very small
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 1: little percentage of the overall you know people, it probably
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: comes from the hunting media, but if you pulled most
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: Western hunters, I don't think that they feel that way
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: about white tail dudes. You know, No, I definitely don't
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 1: know what about this. Here's another perception that the Western
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 1: guys think the white tail guys are nuts. When we're
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: sitting over here and naming the deer. What do you
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: think about naming? Dear? Do you think I'm crazy when
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: I had to go telling me that I'm hunting this
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: buck named holy Field for four years? Steve's you're pondering,
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: so hum? No, we you know, before I think it
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 1: became a thing, we had named a few. It's a
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 1: natural thing to do as soon as you've seen an
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: animal twice three times. However many times it takes where
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 1: you're like, that's the same one that has that broken
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 1: third on the left side. Uh, that's the big six
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: that we saw. What do we have that one time? Oh? Shocks?
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 1: I remember what the name him this bowl was. That
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 1: had something to do with the fence. Because every time
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: someone saw him. Someone had seen him and it was
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: like a nice six for us, which probably wasn't even threes.
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: But he had just stepped over like a four strand, right,
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: Someone had seen him step over a four strand and
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 1: didn't jump. So he was known as like high stepper,
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 1: high fence or something like that. But he got this
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: name and he hung out and you know, in his
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: zone and who he was seen three or four times
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: before someone killed him. But anyways, we were doing that before.
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: I kind of like it became a thing where, you know,
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: the white tail guys really popularized, and he started seeing
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 1: it in the magazines where you know, the story was
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 1: about how how someone killed old deuce Um. It's hardly
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: it's hardly an Eastern thing. If you read Hunting Full magazine,
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: every every article in there includes the part of the
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: paragraph where they name it, like whatever the hell I
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: had a hunter right one of those Hunting Full stories
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 1: after we killed the ball together in Arizona and that
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: bowl was named. He started bugling at three in the afternoon.
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 1: He was dead at six, and he was named in
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: those three hours. And I didn't I didn't even know
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: until the story came out later. But he had a
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: very like one of the weirdest bugles I've ever heard.
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: Was kind of like growling, but like a digitized growl.
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: It was like a robot bull bugling. And it sounds
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: like he almost had like issues with his larynx. It
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 1: was just kind of like kind of breaking and crackling,
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: And so in the story he came out to be
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 1: the I think he was the larynx bowl. One thing
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 1: that that I think one place that comes from is
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 1: nameing or not naming is um. You like when you
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 1: guys hunt these places out here and you study him
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: so carefully and and like are out paying attention all
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 1: throughout out the year and paying such detailed attention that
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: you're watching a buck progressed through the years. Your level
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: you're you're getting a level of familiarity with a particular
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 1: animal that you're not going to achieve if you're kind
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 1: of if you're sort of a traveling like wilderness hunter.
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 1: You know, like if you in a lot of locations,
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: especially if you're always bouncing around here and there and
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: checking out new stuff and going on like expeditions and whatnot. Um,
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: you're often when you get onto an animal, it's like
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: probably the first it's gonna be the first time in
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: your life you ever laid eyes on it and probably
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: the last, so you don't develop that level of familiarity.
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 1: I think that a lot of that it probably came
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: out of you know, it probably came out of the
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: also the advent of trail cameras and other things where
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 1: people are sort of like looking at it in a
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 1: different way. But people name. You just kind of name
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 1: stuff naturally. Anyway, even if you're just sitting up on
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: a glass and knob, there's like that one buck over there,
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: or old Sunshine Buck or you know whatever, and you
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: might and you might pick it up and use it
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 1: for a couple of minutes to to describe what's around
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 1: you and to develop a kind of a context of
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: whose where. But then when you walk off there, you
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: just forget the names. But imagine that you're gonna spend
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: four years on that glass and knob, the names will
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 1: become very useful. Yeah. I mean, we happened to us
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: and we're hunting Cou's dere in Mexico this year. The
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: whole shipload of bucks names. Yeah, I mean, just it
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 1: takes hours because it just becomes a matter of efficiency
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: when you're like, let's let's go back to where the
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 1: century buck was. We had the sentry buck, normal buck,
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 1: el Gagante, Dirt's buck, which didn't exist. All kinds of
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 1: names sounds like normal names, right, but when we didn't
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: has we don't have a naming process which I think
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 1: you guys go through. You think you guys kind of christened.
• 1:25:07
  Speaker 1: You sort of christened the deer. Like you treat it
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: like naming a child. I wouldn't like. I wouldn't like,
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: I like, we'll name it your Like imagine that your
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: wife gives birth and not of her vaginaltle canal spills
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: this slimy child. I wouldn't look over and be like
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: the couch buck, the couch kid, right, or know the
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: bed the bed sheet kid. But you guys will kind
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: of be like, what are we gonna name it? What
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 1: are we gonna name it? There's some truth to that, Yeah,
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: So you treat it more like the birth of a child.
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: When we'd be like, you know that buck, you kind
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 1: of see the sunshine shining at him in a minute later, like, oh,
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 1: sunshine Buck, he's over chasing the doll all of a sudden.
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 1: It just but I think it does go back to
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 1: what you're saying before, because whatever we call this deer,
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 1: you might be referring to that animal for years, four
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: for months, or whatever it might be. If you hadn't
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 1: come up with a name, Holy Field, how in the
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 1: world would you ever have managed all the conversations, remember
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 1: that one, it's not practical. Well, I think before then
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: anything came about it was just like, you know the
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 1: eight point buck that we see on the back forty
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 1: all the time, and that's hard to talk about. You
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 1: know that one buck that hangs out by the one place. Yeah,
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: well no I think that, but that's how they went by.
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: It was probably like the big six, the medium six,
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 1: little six. And then it just came from just saying
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 1: like the number of points on their head, and that
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: evolved into and that still has a common thing today
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: to a lot of people. I mean many times that
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 1: still has eighty eight. We weren't good enough then, all
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: the years I spent hunting white tails, we weren't good enough,
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: dedicated enough white tail hunters to get into a position
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: where we would have even need to have begun naming them.
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: When you became aware of that thing, it was because
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 1: walking through the damn woods towards you. Yeah. Right, that's
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: when he became aware. Presence weren't scientific about it. If
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: anything gets a little funny, it's where if so much
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 1: has gone into it, and you sort of can look
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: at it as like I've almost farmed his deer, Like
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 1: I probably watched him when he was a fawn. I've
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: been feeding him off my food plots or whatever it is.
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: Let him grow up. Um, I named him when he
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: was young. My plan was to kill him when he
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: was six, and then I did you know, it's agriculture.
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 1: It's a different thing. And I'm not saying you shouldn't
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: get excited about it, and it's great to get excited
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 1: about it, but for me, it just it's not like, So,
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: where's the difference though, whether you see that deer for
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 1: the first time at three years old and then shoot
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 1: him at six, or if you saw him as a
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: a year and a half old. If you you're kind
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: of if you have like if you have a little chunk,
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 1: if you have a chunk of land and you're able
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: to like sort of like limit the comings and goings,
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: limit the access on the land, and you grow up
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 1: particular crops and find his deer and you're like feeding
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 1: them different supplements and sort of like taking care of
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: him and cultivating him for this day when he will
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: achieve maximum yield and harvest um. It's very similar to
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: to my brother raises sheep, my brother raises lambs. It
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 1: winds up seeming more like his raising of lambs for slaughter.
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: It seems more like that than it does hunting. But
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: I don't begrudge him the raising of lambs. I think
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: it's he's got ten acres of irrigated pasture, why not
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: raise some lambs on it? His friends like the meat
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: heats deer, notlk, but his buddies right use that. I
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 1: would never be like that's immoral. It's not. It's just different.
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: It's different, Yeah, and whatever. Like we're talking about the
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 1: turkey hunt earlier, we're talking about, you know, whether or
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: not to use decoys, and you're like, well, why don't
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 1: you just use decoys be instead to make it harder
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: to use the boat. And I'm like, what I explained
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: to Mark that I'm very happy with where my bar
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 1: is set is that if without decoys, just in my
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: calls and a shotgun, that like there's like the perfect
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 1: balance of challenge and being defeated and being humbled and
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 1: some success also, and it's like it's a very happy
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 1: place that I'm at. And maybe in ten years I'll say, well,
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 1: I am going to go to the boat or go
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 1: down to a twenty gage or whatever. But that's like
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: a nice place to be. I think, like you're saying,
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: like taking the taking the mystery out and controlling the
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 1: situation to the point where you almost know that they're
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 1: gonna be in that field you know so often, Um, yeah,
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 1: it changes it, but you know, nothing is why do
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 1: people care someone for? People think though, like why are
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: people why are you sensitive to it? I don't think
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 1: I'm sensitive. I think it's just an interesting question. No,
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 1: it's it's interesting wrestling. And it's good that we can
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 1: talk about it because I think that there's a way
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 1: where like, um, so we're sitting around talking about ideas
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 1: around hunting and what we enjoy about hunting and don't
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: enjoy about hunting, right, I think that it could be
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: that something doesn't appeal to me personally. Okay, it should
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: be that you'd be able to share that it doesn't
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 1: appeal to you personally. You explain what, um, what does
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 1: appeal to you personally, and none of this should be
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: taken as a condemnation of of certain practices. Where is
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 1: a wedge being driven? Yeah, it's just like amongst hunters.
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: If we're sitting around talking about how you like your
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 1: steak prepared, right, and I'm talking about how I like
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 1: my steak we're prepared. No one would be like, why
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: are you trying to drive a wedge between steak eaters.
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 1: It's like I like grilled, You're like I like suvie
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 1: and then I finished it with a torch, So, oh,
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 1: you see, you're driving a wedge between state consumers. It's like, no,
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 1: we're just talking about the different things that we like
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 1: and enjoy. So in trying to articulate what I like
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 1: what I see when I look at I just don't
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 1: want you to take it to be that I'm somehow
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 1: You know that I'm that I'm taking to be that
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: it's somehow anything other than just like what's appealing to me. Um.
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: So that's just the thing I noticed, and and and
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 1: I view two on this step towards the agriculturalization, which
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: isn't the word. I don't think the agriculturalization of deer hunting.
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 1: When I get this idea, like taking this step towards
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: the agriculture, the agriculturalization of deer hunting, it comes to
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: a point where someone's like, you know what, I'm gonna
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 1: string of fence, right, you can keep marching it down.
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 1: You can keep marching it down into a direction, and
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 1: um uh yeah, it just could march. And it marches
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 1: into a place where I think that some people are
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: just naturally gonna look and be like, wow, it just stopped.
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: At some point. It kind of doesn't seem like hunting anymore.
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 1: It seems kind of more like and like, like I said,
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: it seems more like a gronomy, not a gronomy like
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 1: egg animal husbandry. Maybe it takes out, Yeah, that's probably it.
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: It becomes a sort of animal husbandry. And agree with
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 1: you and that, Um, it's neat to be able to
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 1: talk about these different ideas and different perspectives and stuff
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: and and look at it as a way of just
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: understanding different ways that we're seeing things versus it being
• 1:32:55
  Speaker 1: adversarial or something like that. I think that's that's It's
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 1: you said this a while back, But it's refreshing to
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 1: be able to find people where you can't talk about
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 1: these things and get those different perspectives. And it's funny
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 1: you talk about like the agriculturalization of deer hunting, and
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 1: it's something that when I hear that, it sounds it
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: sounds negative, like to me, like thinking if what I'm
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: doing is is something like that, that's that feels like
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: that feels like it feels like a little sour to me. Um,
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 1: I don't don't like that. You don't like the way
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: I'm describing it. Not that you're describing that, but if
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: if if that was just as I think about that
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 1: for myself, I don't like the idea of of agriculturalizing
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 1: my hunting or something. Um. But at the same time,
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: like I'm involved in I do some of these things
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 1: myself and it doesn't feel like that, Like what I'm
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: doing doesn't feel like I'm farming wildlife or something. It
• 1:33:53
  Speaker 1: still feels very There's a tremendous amount of work. There's
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 1: a ton of hunting that I fail nine nine point
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: nine percent the time. If if what we're talking about,
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 1: you know, killing the sheep, your brother sheep, he's having
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: a very different outcome than There's the farthest thing from
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: a guarantee with what I'm doing or what other deer
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 1: hunters that I know are doing that are participating in
• 1:34:19
  Speaker 1: some kind of management habitat wise or age structure and
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 1: choosing what kind of deer they're gonna take. But it's
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: just different, and it's hard to articulate that or help
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: someone understand that unless you are doing it. Because I
• 1:34:32
  Speaker 1: can see from the outside looking in. You see all
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 1: these practices and the way it stuff talked about, and
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 1: it does sound like farming in some ways, but it
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 1: doesn't feel that way from the inside. But I don't
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: know how to how to make those two ends meet
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: as I'm like thinking through all this, like why. But
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 1: it's an interesting it's an interesting thing to think about,
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 1: and there's there's so many different angles to think about it.
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 1: So last like like I killed a nice buck in
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 1: Colorado last year, and we had gone up in the area,
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: first time we've ever been and stuff into an area,
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 1: and we were hiking out in the dark and bumped
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 1: a couple of big bucks in the dark dusk. And
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 1: I come back up the next day and not too
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 1: far away from there, I catch one of these bucks
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 1: out in the stage flat and and got him very mysterious.
• 1:35:29
  Speaker 1: Dear to me, I don't know it's past right, just
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 1: the mysterious. You don't know where it came from out
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 1: on how long I've been in the area. Now, imagine
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 1: that there had been a guy who had just been
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 1: hunting that buck, and he had studied that buck, and
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 1: he'd been out there observing that buck all the time
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 1: and watched it come up through velvet and knew where
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: it had spent it summer, and knew that it had
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: moved into this area, and knew when it would come
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 1: out in this stage flat right, and knew that thing
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 1: in and out and was trying to trying and trying
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 1: to get it, and I get it. So what's what's
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 1: his perspective on it? Gonna be you ship locked into
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: some buck and I did. And he might have been like, an,
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 1: I probably deserved it more when you look at the
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 1: time I put into that animal, study an animal, And
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 1: I would be if I confront of that person, I'd
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 1: be like, you know what, bro, It's true, It's true
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: you deserve that buck more than I did. I got him.
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 1: I ship locked into him, right, But you sort of
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 1: like the effort and all that. So I think it's
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 1: always it always like the quality of a hunt always
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 1: remains in the eye of the beholder. And the one
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 1: place I think the hunters go that verges into the
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: into the unethical, or the verges into the I don't
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 1: want to use the word unethical, that just verges into
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 1: bullshit territory is when you do something and you feel
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: the need to con seal the reality of what happened.
• 1:37:03
  Speaker 1: Guys that hunt high wire never put that fence in
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: the photo. Yeah, People that shoot stuff with ear tags
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: take the ear tags out before they take the photo.
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 1: So that's like, so, what are you embarrassed about? What
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 1: is it that you wish this looked like because you
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 1: wish it was something other than it is. When you
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 1: get to that point where you wish it had been
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: other than it was, I think then you've trailed into
• 1:37:36
  Speaker 1: stuff that's beyond just personal perception and beyond these like
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 1: subjective ideas of what's right and what's wrong. At that point,
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 1: you've become like where you're lying to yourself and you're
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 1: lying to others. If you cultivate a piece, if you
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 1: buy a piece of property, and they means ship for
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 1: animals on there, because it's just like piss poor habitat,
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 1: and you build it up and make the desert blooms,
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 1: so to speak, and you do things and you and
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 1: you do habitat improvements and put in some dead falls
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: and tops some trees and start planting some crops and
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: start thinking about connectivity between different properties, and all of
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: a sudden you create like this little wildlife mecca and
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 1: it's benefiting everything from bucks down to chickeneas. And all
• 1:38:20
  Speaker 1: of a sudden you got moths and butterflies hanging around
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 1: that you've never seen before. And you go outside and
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 1: you did some water, and you hear frogs you never
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 1: heard before, and you wind up shooting some tank or buck. Right,
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 1: that dude gonna be so proud of. What are you accomplished?
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: Who gives a ship? If someone else looks at and
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 1: they think that there's like they don't know the full story. Now,
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: if that guy like bought a little area and put
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 1: a fence there and went and bought a deer from
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 1: a guy down the road and then pumped it all
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 1: up full of medications and artificial feeds and shot and
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 1: then drug it out of there and took a picture
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 1: of it somewhere else it's just different and everybody knows it.
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 1: And I think something that comes into play here too
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 1: is traditional use and not looking at it like over
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 1: you know, a hundred years, but just the stuff that
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 1: we grew up with in our lifetimes. Like you did
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: the debate thing, Uh, we didn't. I didn't do it
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 1: at all. Never, I've never done it. I think one time.
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 1: I think one time my dad sometimes and it was
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: a legal bait state. Yeah, one time my dad showed
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 1: up with these, like I think it was like a
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 1: full on incent. It was like one of those I
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 1: don't know if the buck bomb thing ever took off.
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 1: It was some variation of that, but literally, like an
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 1: incent you're supposed to dig a little hole out, put
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 1: it in there and light it and you know it's
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 1: gonna attract beer. Like like I got sense yeah, um yeah,
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 1: I was trying to find the singing of the version
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 1: of um. But yeah, Like, so you've grown up in
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 1: a world where like food plots and stuff and your
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 1: career of white tails it's like just been a part
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 1: of it, right, so you're just immersed in it, and
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 1: it's like you're like, yeah, man, it's like what we
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 1: do and it totally feels normal, you know. And but
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 1: again we didn't do that either. But again, for most
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 1: of my white tail life, I hunted probably six days
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 1: of years for white tail. Right at the end before
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 1: I left to Colorado, might have gotten up to a
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 1: dozen or fifteen. Um, But like, can you still bait
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: in Michigan? You can bait was much more regulated. It's
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 1: the type of fifteenth through the end of the year,
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 1: and you can't put the whole Can you run like
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 1: the big feeders that you see in Texas? Not I
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: don't think you can put as much as they put
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 1: out it. You've got like a like a one gallon
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 1: for five gallon bucket wherever it is that you can
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 1: put out at a given time. Got it? Got it?
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 1: But like, do you you don't go that down that road? Well,
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 1: I don't. I don't bait, you don't I don't personally, Yeah,
• 1:40:57
  Speaker 1: you don't personally bait at all. Right, but again, you
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: know down in Texas is like that's what they do.
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 1: It's legal whatever you want to do. Yeah, can I
• 1:41:05
  Speaker 1: tell you another moment or do you ask about revelatory moments? Yeah?
• 1:41:09
  Speaker 1: You could hunt, so you you you know, we'd hunt
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 1: deer in the bow from October one until you know,
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 1: then rifle seem to be November and you hunt guns
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 1: for ten days and then you have this window of
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 1: the late season archery. And I remember being out there.
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 1: It was a year that they couldn't get the corn
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 1: out because everything was too wet. Remember sitting up on
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 1: a corn field and their lot property, and you finally
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 1: the ground froze and he went out like this guy
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 1: went out in the frozen ground and picked a bunch
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 1: of corn. And this is a spot where if you
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 1: saw two deer, it was a good night. And remember
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 1: one night he picked this corn. As a couple of
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 1: nights later and I counted ninety deer one night. Wow.
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 1: And I remember that opening up the mystery of like
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 1: again you could look at me like it's an artificial crop,
• 1:42:02
  Speaker 1: right whatever, But to look and be to see that
• 1:42:06
  Speaker 1: level of response two a landscape change, and that being
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 1: how in the world did they know? How did they know?
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 1: Like how did words spread? Right? So in that way, Um, yeah,
• 1:42:28
  Speaker 1: it was like one of those just like it opens
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 1: you up to some level of bafflement, you know, um,
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 1: And I think like like invite a sort of inviting
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 1: those moments of discovery. However they occur. Being like open
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 1: to those moments of discovering and analyzing what's going on
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 1: has kind of a value, you know, like those moments
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 1: where like something happened, you can't figure it out. And
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 1: I feel like those types of moments if you're open
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 1: to them and like searching for them or putting yourself
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 1: in a position to accept them, those kinds of things
• 1:43:04
  Speaker 1: can occur no matter how you're hunting. It could be
• 1:43:09
  Speaker 1: in the find new place, hunting for the first time
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 1: and you get this mystery, you get this surprise, or
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 1: these things happen in the moment, or it could happen
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 1: where you work one little piece of ground for years
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 1: and you get to learn it. The depth of those
• 1:43:21
  Speaker 1: moments are different, maybe the scale of those moments are different, maybe,
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 1: but you can have these really powerful, interesting, compelling, revelatory moments.
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 1: I think, whether it's food plots and hanging out in
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 1: one spot or brand new public land spots, and I
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 1: I've been I just count myself fortunate that I've been
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 1: able to experience both. And I find both of those
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 1: really interesting and exciting and satisfying, but just in very
• 1:43:46
  Speaker 1: different ways. But I think that kind of comes back
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 1: to everything we've talked about here. There's lots of different
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 1: ways to to to get some form of enjoyment or
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 1: satisfaction out of a hunter that that journey, and um,
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 1: it's neat to be able to see all those different
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 1: facets of it. So for you guys, if you were
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 1: to go back, and I know you do. You dabble
• 1:44:06
  Speaker 1: a little bit of white tail hunting back, you know,
• 1:44:09
  Speaker 1: Wisconsin ever once a while and stuff like that. But
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 1: what would it take to get you guys back to
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 1: your white tail roots? What would be that dream white
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 1: tail hunt that for you would make it? Like now,
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 1: that would be really cool. I want to go do that.
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 1: Why hunted western white tails hard for three or four
• 1:44:26
  Speaker 1: years in Nebraska, Um, but pretty different than hunting white
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 1: tails here. You know again you're glassing them up. Didn't
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 1: you just get a white tail last year? No? But
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 1: I went on a white tail hunt. I went back
• 1:44:38
  Speaker 1: to our stopping grounds in Wisconsin, your little local hidie hole.
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I killed a dough you're right. And in
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 1: the year before I killed a little buck there. But yeah,
• 1:44:51
  Speaker 1: that was very much like a grocery run. You know,
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 1: I'm hunting like a I'm hunting where I can see
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: the guy's house, you know, Like I when I sit
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: against the tree, I sit so that I'm facing away
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 1: from the house, so I'm not going to shoot in
• 1:45:05
  Speaker 1: that direction kind of a thing. And there's just a
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: lot of deer there, and it's very much like like
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 1: a nice way to kind of top off the freezer,
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 1: you know. So yeah, yeah, no to me that it's
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 1: just like I wasn't for both of those animals. I
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 1: wasn't really there for like the excitement of the hunt.
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 1: It was kind of like last day of the season.
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 1: I got an unfilled buck tag. That's where I'm going.
• 1:45:33
  Speaker 1: I'd like to have to meet whatever buck I see.
• 1:45:35
  Speaker 1: I'm shooting. But but what like if you could outline
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 1: your white tail hunt, that would be like really compelling
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 1: for you. What would that situation be, Oh, I would
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 1: just go right back to the or like the country
• 1:45:46
  Speaker 1: that we get to hunt in Wisconsin is uh, it's
• 1:45:49
  Speaker 1: sweet's very little agg. Was The stuff that my dad
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 1: and his friends own is zero agg. We have some
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 1: agg on the neighbors, so it's just big woods and uh,
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 1: you know, it's hard to read the sign there. You know,
• 1:46:02
  Speaker 1: I've trumped those woods a lot, and I still have
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 1: like a very just my new understanding of general deer
• 1:46:08
  Speaker 1: movement on these this chunk of land and it's pretty big.
• 1:46:11
  Speaker 1: It's like acres, you know, pretty sizable chunk of land.
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 1: And uh, you know, I had a blast hunt there
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 1: last year. Never saw you know, what i'd call shoot
• 1:46:22
  Speaker 1: or buck. I don't know if I saw a buck. Um. Yeah,
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 1: I loved it. I had a great time. Like I said,
• 1:46:29
  Speaker 1: I love hanging in these oaks and just the big
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 1: wood forests. It's just you spend enough time in one
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 1: place and the other place gets appealing again. Right Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 1: For me to be doing the kind of stuff you
• 1:46:42
  Speaker 1: do during the rut with my bow, sitting up perching
• 1:46:46
  Speaker 1: up in different trees here and there, just watching all
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 1: this stuff, oh yeah, definitely. I remember I hadn't sat
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 1: in tree stay in years. At one point in time,
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 1: I hadn't been in treeing a long time. And then
• 1:46:57
  Speaker 1: sitting up hunting white tails. My brother and I had
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: a couple of raccoons fighting the tree next to me
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 1: and just being like, man, I kind of like the
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: level of detail you see when you're just sitting you
• 1:47:10
  Speaker 1: walk out in the woods man you think there's nothing
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 1: around you sit there fifteen minutes. I'll see that's just
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 1: like ten squirrels hanging around that passing through. They would
• 1:47:19
  Speaker 1: have been too paranoid, but then they forget about you
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 1: or having birds land on your arrow. Somebod I was
• 1:47:26
  Speaker 1: just talking to you, had I will try to land
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 1: on him? Wow? My brother? Yeah, my brother was telling
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 1: me that he had a great horned I will come
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 1: and try to land on him. Scared the ship? Wasn't
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 1: that math that I just happened to? I think it
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 1: was fell out of a tree. So uh yeah, I
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 1: would want to come and do not for all that,
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 1: I mean, that would all be like extras, but to
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 1: come and and um just do another like with someone
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 1: that really knows it inside out, like you, to come
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 1: and have you like putting me up in a good
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 1: tree with my bow doing rut and just kind of
• 1:48:00
  Speaker 1: watch and all that taking place. I think it be
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: a blast, man. We should do it. Not I'm planning
• 1:48:05
  Speaker 1: on doing it all right, dude, It's like it's fascinating
• 1:48:11
  Speaker 1: to me. It is, you know, another cool thing that
• 1:48:14
  Speaker 1: I just thought. And this is something I thought about
• 1:48:15
  Speaker 1: in the past when um talking to my friends who
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 1: who who never hunted out west or someone who has
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 1: hunted out west but never hunted back east. When you're
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 1: talking about stand hunting versus like you know, chasing down
• 1:48:27
  Speaker 1: ugling elk or something, and with what I find so
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 1: cool about chasing down elk out west is that when
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 1: you are fully there's something going on in the moment,
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 1: so fully engaging that you can't think about anything else.
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 1: Nothing else is on your mind except for the next step.
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: What's the wind doing right now? Where am I going next?
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 1: Where is it going? You are fully two thousand percent
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 1: in this electric moment. I can't think about anything else.
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: Nothing else in the world is on your mind. And
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 1: that's a really cool thing to have. Like experiences like
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 1: that the fully engage you to the highest possible amount,
• 1:49:02
  Speaker 1: that's a really cool thing. When you're deer hunting and
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 1: you're sitting a tree stand for fourteen hours straight, there's
• 1:49:09
  Speaker 1: nothing you are relieved of anything else, and it opens
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 1: your mind to everything now. So when else in your
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 1: life do you have this quiet space in your mind
• 1:49:22
  Speaker 1: to reflect on stuff, to think about things more than
• 1:49:25
  Speaker 1: just what you're doing in the next ten seconds or
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 1: what job do I wanted to do? Or what blah blah.
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 1: You can just sit and you can breathe and you
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 1: can just Yeah. I used to bring very small paperbacks.
• 1:49:41
  Speaker 1: I have my have my coat kind of open where
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: I could just read it like like like a poker
• 1:49:47
  Speaker 1: player holding and could like stuff that paperback through an
• 1:49:52
  Speaker 1: open button or two. You gotta be careful when you're
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: reading in the tree stands to I'm sure, man. But
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 1: up until the magic moment though, you know, because I
• 1:50:01
  Speaker 1: couldn't deal with the I couldn't deal with the there's
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 1: still quiet nothing, the quiet noise of your own brain.
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 1: Man like that. I feel like that's an important rare
• 1:50:11
  Speaker 1: thing these days, you know. Yeah, I feel like in
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 1: mountain hunting, it's the in and out, like when you
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: got a pound, you know, three or four miles in
• 1:50:20
  Speaker 1: the dark either direction. Your brain gets to a similar
• 1:50:23
  Speaker 1: place where you just you just kind of have to
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 1: just put one ft in front of the other and
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 1: you're thinking about, you know, all kinds of things. Yeah,
• 1:50:32
  Speaker 1: it's cool to have those two different opportunities, Like, those
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 1: two different things are really compelling in their own way,
• 1:50:36
  Speaker 1: and that's what makes all this stuff pretty cool. So
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 1: driving anything, driving a driving age, I don't want to
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 1: do that. Any final any any final things in the
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 1: white tailed world you guys want to count on before
• 1:50:49
  Speaker 1: we shut this down and go think about turkeys? You
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 1: any anything final white tail thoughts or other was anything
• 1:51:01
  Speaker 1: we need to touch on before we hit this act? No,
• 1:51:06
  Speaker 1: tidn't hit the sack mark. He kept me up too late,
• 1:51:09
  Speaker 1: and then I apologize. No, man, I got nothing to add.
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 1: It's like I grew up hunting them and remain interested
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 1: in him, along with a whole ton of their animals
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: that I'm interested in. Well, thanks for walking down the
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 1: white tail path for at least one more night, all right,
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 1: and I'm gonna take you up on the hunting thing.
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 1: But now that you taught me the word gar whole, damn,
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna be very sensitive. You've been being place in
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 1: the gar hole. I didn't teach you garl you never
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 1: I've never heard that, really, never heard sucking old. No,
• 1:51:48
  Speaker 1: I would think that this is a good place to
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 1: go bow fishing for garf someone that they're going to
• 1:51:52
  Speaker 1: the girl like sweet, let's go hold. I feel like
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 1: we need to touch on it, really, quid If anyone
• 1:51:57
  Speaker 1: doesn't know if you're getting gar hold that's like you're
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 1: hunting with a buddy or you're hunting with someone else
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 1: and they're they're gonna say, oh, well, you should go
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 1: hunting this spot. They send you to a spot to hunt,
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 1: and you get done and you hunt it all day
• 1:52:09
  Speaker 1: and you didn't see anything, or you get there and
• 1:52:11
  Speaker 1: you're like, oh gosh, this is horrible. There's I'm sitting
• 1:52:13
  Speaker 1: next to the highway or a parking lot of the
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: tree stand, the seats missing on the tree stand, and
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 1: you're just in a wide open field and there's nothing
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 1: all that give this to you on purpose because he
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 1: took this good spot. Yeah, you would, you would say,
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 1: at least you would assume hold me, but what really?
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 1: But I think it's important to designate, like if he
• 1:52:33
  Speaker 1: don't like could couldn't? Can you be guard hole? Kind
• 1:52:36
  Speaker 1: of by by accident, by coincidence or is it always
• 1:52:40
  Speaker 1: like you're getting hosts? I think is the business well
• 1:52:44
  Speaker 1: knows no one he's been garbling. Yes, it would be
• 1:52:47
  Speaker 1: with intent, It would you A gar holing would be
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 1: if it was done with intent, Because if a guy
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 1: said to you, hey, man, you're gonna get up there
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 1: and you're gonna think I goar hold you but really
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 1: hear me out right then right, you might be like, wow,
• 1:53:03
  Speaker 1: it seems like I feel like you're a you're in
• 1:53:06
  Speaker 1: a rocky relationship if this is actually going on because
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 1: one of two things he's saying, guides of garhole people. Right, No,
• 1:53:15
  Speaker 1: that's what I was saying, because I have guard hold
• 1:53:18
  Speaker 1: guys again, because here's my explanation to one or two things.
• 1:53:24
  Speaker 1: Either you're an asshole and so you're being guard hold,
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 1: or you're an asshole and you're gonna be it, because
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 1: like you're not gonna I'm never gonna gar hole one
• 1:53:34
  Speaker 1: of you two. It's just like I'll take the guarhole
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 1: spot and give you guys the br I try to
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 1: hang out with people that are sort of going through
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 1: life in general that way. Yeah, And so you know,
• 1:53:50
  Speaker 1: it's too short for assholes. So i'd say the time
• 1:53:54
  Speaker 1: that is used, it's used in h ingest, like you're
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 1: giving your buddy a hard time, like nothing happens, you
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 1: come back, put me in the gar hole. It's that
• 1:54:06
  Speaker 1: kind of thing. But there are some real instances. I'm
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 1: so glad, like this made my night knowing that I
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 1: introduced that term. Do you guys, Oh yeah, yeah, I'll
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 1: use it, please do and I will take Yeah, I
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 1: want to put you in to Mondo gar hole. All right, guys,
• 1:54:24
  Speaker 1: thanks for being here and that is it. Quick reminder though,
• 1:54:29
  Speaker 1: to hit us up on itune for a quick rating
• 1:54:31
  Speaker 1: or review if you haven't yet, and then also be
• 1:54:34
  Speaker 1: sure to subscribe to the Wired Hunt YouTube channel. There's
• 1:54:37
  Speaker 1: lots to come there soon, so then wrap things up here.
• 1:54:41
  Speaker 1: I guess I'll just finish by thanking our partners at
• 1:54:43
  Speaker 1: Yedie Cooler's, Matthew's Archery, Maven Optics, Whitetail Properties and hunt
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 1: ter Maps, and of course thank you all for listening.
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 1: As I mentioned earlier, you are part of an amazing community.
• 1:54:55
  Speaker 1: It's been just the joy of my life to serve
• 1:54:57
  Speaker 1: you and share my stories and experience and lessons learned.
• 1:55:02
  Speaker 1: I can't wait to see where things go next, so
• 1:55:04
  Speaker 1: thanks again and until next time, stay Wired to Hunt.
• 1:55:09
  Speaker 1: M