Ep. 867: Jim Zumbo – An Outdoor Legend at 85

00:00:08
Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast, coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast.

00:00:18
Speaker 2: You can’t predict anything.

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Speaker 1: Brought to you by first Light. When I’m hunting, I need gear that won’t quit. First Light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That’s f I R S T L I T E dot com.

00:00:43
Speaker 2: My god, are we Luckey.

00:00:44
Speaker 1: We’re joined today in the eighty fifth year of his life, very well, lived.

00:00:51
Speaker 2: Better than outdoor writer Bi I’ll just and TV host Jim.

00:00:53
Speaker 3: Zumbo, Thank you, sir. Delighted to be here.

00:00:57
Speaker 1: Multi decade tenure at Outdoor Life Magine has showed Jim Zumbo outdoors on the Outdoor Channel. Know him for big game hunting, known for cooking, known for being a great guy. Has written by his own estimation, he tried to count this up one day. Two thousand and five hundred magazine articles and twenty one books. Jim, thanks for coming on the show.

00:01:21
Speaker 3: Thank you, donk Just. It’s a pleasure to be here.

00:01:24
Speaker 2: I want to go back.

00:01:25
Speaker 1: I want to go back in time and talk about how your career and how you came to do what you want to do. But I’m too dying to talk about something else first. So the first thing I want to talk about is an article you wrote and a man you talked to, and we were talking about this before we started recording. Is I’m just going to refresh viewers on the story if they haven’t heard it. The last known grizzly bear in Colorado, the last documented grizzly bear in Colorado was killed by an archer in seventy nine. In nineteen seventy Nineptember. Okay, there’s an old female. The archer claimed that he was out hunting out in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado. The archer claimed that he was attacked by the grizzly and he killed it. Now, for many years prior, no one had seen a grizzly at all in Colorado. They were hiding, just very few of them, so most people assumed they were gone. After that grizzly was killed, people launched a monstrous search.

00:02:36
Speaker 2: That’s not the right word. Monstrous. Yeah, he musket that’s good, Yeah.

00:02:40
Speaker 1: A mondo search all through the San Juans, trying to establish that there was a population there never to find one.

00:02:52
Speaker 2: This story is.

00:02:53
Speaker 1: This story has a lot of twists and turns, and there’s some controversial elements to it.

00:02:58
Speaker 2: But tell us about I.

00:03:00
Speaker 1: Until this morning, I didn’t know that you spoke to that man in the hospital.

00:03:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, tell the story.

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Speaker 3: So I was I’d drawn out a desert sheep hunt in Utah, in southern Utah in seventy nine and one hundred for a week, and I was on my way home to get more gear, and I heard on the radio that this guy had killed a grizzy bear with a handheld arrow. And I was Western editor for Outer Life at that time, so I thought, holy smokes with a story. So I called my boss in New York and I told him. He says, get that story, forget your sheep hunt for now. So I drove to Alamosa, Colorado, and got a motel and visited him in the hospital and spent probably five days. The nurses kept kicking me out because he was really bad, and so I was able to maybe spend twenty minutes or a half hour a day with him. But I got the story.

00:03:52
Speaker 2: What were the injuries he had?

00:03:55
Speaker 3: Well, the bear had bitten through his left shoulder and it had bitten through his right leg, made hamburger out of it, and he just sustained all kinds of wounds around his body. He was hunting with a with a He had a client, a farmer from Kansas, Mike, and they had split up. Ed was outfitting. He’s a bow hunter, so he had his bow and the other guy had a bow and they split up, and all of a sudden, this bear came charging at him and before he could do anything, was on top of him, knocked him over. Now Ed’s a big guy. He could be a linebacker for an NFL team. He’s big, burly guy. So the bears on top of him and chewing away and blood all over the place, and he knows he’s gonna die. There’s no way out unless the bear leaves. And he sees an arrow. He had his arrows in a quiver and he sees an arrow laying on the ground, and he got the arrow, and the bears on top of him and he kept jabbing him, and he hit the a order in his throat whatever that vein is, maybe juggling or whatever, and the bear started bleeding all over him, and all of a sudden, the bear walked walked away and flopped over and died. So in the meantime Ed’s screaming and yelling and whatever. Mike the guy comes running over and he sees it, and he’s in panic. Home.

00:05:26
Speaker 1: The guy that got mauled was the client or the guide. The guide. Yeah, So Mike the client come running over and he’s Ed’s covered.

00:05:36
Speaker 3: With blood, and he gets pretty upset obviously, and one of the horses takes off because it’s full of blood. They had two horses. So he tried to get up on a horse, and he kept passing out and he just it didn’t work. So finally he got him on a horse and they headed toward They were way back in the wilderness. I don’t think the hunter Mike had ever been there before. They got to a big clearing and where a helicopter could land, and Ed told Mike to get back to camp and bring some help and call a helicopter. I guess I had a satellite phone back in camp. So he told Mike how to get the camp. Mike had never been there before. There was a trail, but it would have been six miles out of the way. He told him how to get right to camp. So before he left, Mike dragged a bunch of wood over to start a fire because in the mountains it’s going to get cold at night. And Ed was just i mean covered with blood, hurt, and he thought he was going to die. Yeah, so he started a fire and he left went back to camp. His dad was a doctor and he had a medical kit. Somehow he finds camp in the dark by riding his horse across the mountains, comes back in the middle of the night and somehow his dad and a couple other guys they had gotten off the trail and his horse went over a cliff with the medical gear straight down and died. You’re kidding me, No, No, I never heard that parts that’s what That’s exactly what that what I wrote what Ed told me. So they finally got to Ed and got a helicopter and got him out and took him to the hospital in Alamosa. So that’s basically what happened. Yeah, But like you said, there’s been a controversy because people just they didn’t believe it and how could this guy kill a bear with an arrow? You know, Yeah, today everything’s a lot of it’s fake news. So that’s bs you know that that didn’t happen. I don’t.

00:07:49
Speaker 2: But I don’t have a problem with this part.

00:07:51
Speaker 1: Well because this, I mean, there’s a documented cases people killed him with twenty two’s people killed.

00:07:56
Speaker 2: With knives, yeah, you know.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, but to have a bear actually rabbit or body and having the presence of mind to grab an arrow and just stab him, And like I said, it was a big he was a strong guy. Yeah, but I believe him because I was there. He didn’t have time to think up any any lies. You know, he was laying in that bed. He was you know, he was he was. He was loopy and stuff. And but I really admire that guy. And uh, he’s since moved. He’s living in the Midwest now. I think he’s about ninety two years old. Really yep, wow, yep.

00:08:29
Speaker 2: Do you care what I think?

00:08:31
Speaker 3: Sure? Yeah, what do you think.

00:08:34
Speaker 1: I wasn’t there. I never talked to the guy. I’ve been to the place where it happened. It just gets a little like, Okay, I want to paint a scenario for you that I that I use in situations like this, Like let’s say there’s an omniscient being, okay, God, an omniscient being who knows all the truth in the world. And he says to me, He says, is that the full story? Because he knows the truth, And he says to me, is that the full story. If you’re right, you live. If you’re wrong, you die. So I have to get it right. There’s no being cute, Okay, there’s no trying to make a point. It’s just what you got to make the best guess you can make. My guess is there’s more to that story. First, I want to throw in an interesting tibet and see if this is true. As you remember, wasn’t it that part of the thing was that they could tell from that there was a female, and they could tell I don’t know how they can tell, but when they did a knee cropsy, they could tell that she had bory young something about there’s some signature on the reproductive system or another that would demonstrate that she had had cubs.

00:09:53
Speaker 3: And she was pretty old too, I think twelve years old or twenty years ago.

00:09:57
Speaker 1: The fact that she had had cubs is part of what brought about this big search that people got involved in, Okay to try to find others, because there’s like she had have aught and she had so she was presumably at bread with a male. Where’s the male? And she had bore cubs. Where are the cubs? But no one ever still remains today the last grizzly. I think some I think there’s more in the story. I like, I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s one, Like if there’s one bear in the whole state, there’s one bear in the san Juans and that bear, an old female, happens to the mall the guy unprovoked. To me, it’s just more plausible that they that they try to get an arrow into it. Maybe they maybe, and it’s excusable. Maybe the idea of there being a grizzly there was totally out of their mind and they were like, oh, black bear, And I feel like they got a arrow into it.

00:10:56
Speaker 2: If I had to guess.

00:10:57
Speaker 1: Not knowing the gentleman, they got an arrow into it and that led to everything that follows.

00:11:03
Speaker 2: If I had to make a guess, what do you think about that?

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Speaker 3: I don’t know. I don’t know. I suppose anything is possible, but yeah, I don’t know. Now they were hunting separately, he was hunting. Maybe they were just kind of still hunting through the forest and then it Mike her Di screaming and come running over.

00:11:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don’t know. I had no idea. You meant, I had no idea you were on that story?

00:11:30
Speaker 3: Yeah?

00:11:31
Speaker 1: All right, now you’re ready to back up? Now back in time? Yeah, go even back deeper in time. How did you like? Where did you grow up? And how did it ever click with you to get into the career you got into and to make a whole life out of, you know, hunting and writing about hunting, and telling stories and sharing, you know, your life and profiling other people’s lives and capturing this whole culture for all these decades.

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Speaker 2: Where’d that come from?

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Speaker 3: Well, when I was a kid, I was I was born and raised in Newburgh, New York, which is sixteen miles north of New York City. It’s in the Hudson Valley, thirty thousand people. And I raised right in the city. And ever since I was a little kid, I just loved anything wild in the outdoors. I’d lay on the sidewalk and feed crumbs to the ants. I’d feed spiders. I had names for the spiders, you know. And I always wanted to be a game order or a forest ranger. And at one point I thought I might like to be a writer. Well, in high school I had an English teacher named Miss Fink, and I love to read. When I was a kid, I read books like Amic the Beaver and Tarka the Otter and all sorts of stuff. You know those books. They’re old you look them up. Yeah, I was a teenager when I read them. It’s a long time ago. But she read one of my compositions, said you ought to be a writer, so I didn’t. I didn’t pay much attention to that because I wasn’t a great student. During lunchtime might be trapping and I was behind high school. We had raccoon sets out and stuff, bossoms and stupid stuff muskrats.

00:13:00
Speaker 1: What do you mean stupid stuff? You mean Granner’s possums. I’m not stupid about a possum.

00:13:08
Speaker 3: But anyway. I went to a little school in northern New York called Paul Smiths way up on the around extent of the Canadian borders. A forestry pool and Liberal arts and hotel management. There were four hundred students.

00:13:18
Speaker 2: And hotel management. Liberal for forestry.

00:13:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, there were two forestry courses and one it was terminal, the other one pre professional. The pre professional course got you basically started for your bachelors. We had to transfer to the university. I didn’t take that one. I took the terminal course. We had casts classes like sawmilling and dynamiting, and and we had a sugar bush. We had a sugar mill. Oh really, yeah, back in the now they use tubes to get sugar syrup. And that those days. You drive us spaggan in a maple tree in March colder than hell, three foot of snow, and put to hang a bucket on it. We go through the woods with a horse drawn sleigh with a big vat. We take those buckets and then we put the sap in the sugar house, and somebody had to keep throwing wood in the stove and it had to be so many degrees. Anyway, that was one of the courses.

00:14:14
Speaker 2: So what that did.

00:14:16
Speaker 1: I gotta tell you something that you that Okay, when we were when we were little kids, we didn’t know We just knew it was maples. We didn’t know sugar maples. Yeah, and we had like a lot of the wrong maples. We ran around.

00:14:30
Speaker 2: We would just drill holes in those maples and.

00:14:33
Speaker 1: Then like take a peanut butter tub or something and try to nestle it up under that wall, tape it to the tree, you know, and we’re always looking at it like what gibbs Man never got shiging.

00:14:48
Speaker 3: One interesting thing about the sap from the tree. If it’s if it’s two percent or better, it’s fantastic. In other words, you get two gallons of syrup from one hundred gallons of sap centers like impossible. Almost anyway, that was one of the courses. So that prepared me to be a woods boss or working a pulp mill or whatever. And I had a good buddy who was He taught me how to trap. He was always two years ahead of me in school, and he went out to Utah. So he said, hey, you got to come out here and get your degree. He says, you want to, you know, if you want to be a game war and you got to have a damn degree. So I went to in Utah State up in Logan. So I went there and got my bachelor’s. I got a back up. I’m sorry. When I was at Paul Smiths. You know, in a lot of these little communities, hunting communities, guys would say, oh, there’s a big old buck out there, and there was a great, big whitetail that everybody called old Joe Sure, and he was supposed to be this monster, maybe a mythical buck, I don’t know. So one day I’m crawling around a cedar swamp spagna moss and I got my thirty thirty Model ninety four car being, you know, and I’m squeezing between a couple of trees and that out jumps this huge buck and all I could do was just look at him because I couldn’t even move. So I got a while here and I wrote a story about it for the for the college paper, and they printed it, and I thought, holy smokes, you know that’s I was just so impressed to see that, that stupid story and that little stupid paper. When I went out to Utah State, I lived with a bunch of foresters and one of the guys worked on the on the paper called Student of Life, and he said, why don’t you do a deer game forecast? I said, okay, So I didn’t tell me again, what a dear big game forecast deer elk forecast for the upcoming season. So I did, and then he says, the editor wants you to see you want to write a column and I said, yeah, I wouldn’t mind trying that. Now. I never took any journalism courses or anything, and I wish I did. But I wrote the column. And one night, a bunch of Forresters and a couple of professors we went up the canyon. It was a cabin up there, and we had a bathtub full of beer and we were a bs and we were cooking hot dogs and hamburgers. And this professor comes over. He says, Mbowie thinks you think you’re a hot shit. He said, you write that stupid column in that paper. I’ll bet you a case of Lucky Lager beer that you can’t sell a real story to a real magazine. So, you know, we were all kind of half buzzed, and I said, I’ll take you up on that. So there’s a lake called Bear Lake on the Utah Idaho border, and there’s a Bonnaville cisco that is endemic only to that lake, and they only spawn in January and it’s colder than hell twenty thirty blow zero. They blond close to the shore. So you go out there with nets and it’s a galla event.

00:17:37
Speaker 2: That lake has an endemic cisco.

00:17:39
Speaker 3: Yes, sir, they say, this is the last lake in the Bonneville Ocean that still anyways deeper than heck, turquoise, beautiful water. So Liya’s club was out there selling hot chocolate and coffee and hot dogs and people, just a lot of people. Anyway, I wrote a story about that, and I’ll be doing if Outer Life didn’t buy it, Watch money three hundred and fifty bucks in those days, holy smokes.

00:18:06
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:18:06
Speaker 3: I just got married with living in the student housing, you know, and broker in hell and so that that kind of started all and then I started freelancing. In the next three stories I sent to Alter Life rejected, I wrote one on rock chow hunting, and the editor Bill Ray says, that’s a massacre zumbo. He says, I can’t use that story. But this guy, Bill Ray, of all the editors Sports and Field, outer Life and Field and Stream, we’re all in New York City, right down in Manhattan.

00:18:35
Speaker 1: Sure, and they were still running those places out when I started writing. They were still running those places out of New York. You’d be on the phone and are talking to people in New York.

00:18:45
Speaker 2: Yep.

00:18:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, Ultra Life was on Madison Alia, which was advertisers were Sports and Field was there. And but at any rate, Bill Ray was the kind of guy that he would he would encourage a writer even if he had got and rejects. You know a lot of editors were just you know, we don’t want your stuff anymore. But he was really a fantastic guy. I could probably tell you ten guys my age, or least most of them passed on that got a start from Bill Ray. But anyway, that’s how it started.

00:19:19
Speaker 1: So he rejected three at least. Well, do you remember what else he rejected?

00:19:24
Speaker 3: No?

00:19:25
Speaker 2: Do you remember what the next one was that he been on?

00:19:27
Speaker 3: Yes? I worked at West Point for eight years as a wildlife biologist in a post forester or and a game board. And a buddy of mine had developed a tip up with a battery on it and a light.

00:19:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember those well.

00:19:44
Speaker 3: He he said, Hey, let’s go out fishing at night for walleyes. And it’s late. So we built a big fire and had a little whiskey, you know, and the light go out we went out there. So I wrote a story called the Fisher Lighting. So send it to Paul Smith. Paul Smith, I said, at the Outdoor Life, and they bought it. I thought holy smokes. Wow. The next one was called Beacon in the Forest, where when I’m out there in the woods, I realized that in the fall, the first trees that turn yellow were hickorys, and squirrels love hickorys. So I’d spot a yellow tree and I’d go there and I’d sit and by, Oh, here’s here’s the squirrels all over, and then they work on the oaks or whatever else.

00:20:25
Speaker 2: Sure.

00:20:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I wrote a story called Beacon in the Forest about Hickory’s. Beacon in the forest, about Hickory’s.

00:20:30
Speaker 2: They bought me about that one.

00:20:32
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:20:32
Speaker 1: Back when you were selling those articles in the early days, were they paying you on were they doing a word count?

00:20:36
Speaker 2: Paying you on a word count?

00:20:38
Speaker 3: No, just a flat fee, flat fee. Yeah. Yeah. But then I worked for the government, uh fifteen years. I worked for the State of Utah Forestry and Fire Control for two years, and then I worked at West Point for eight years. Then I came back to Utah. I worked as a wildlife biolence for the BLM, and I got a call one day from Don Cosey, who was executive editor, and he says, we’d like you to work for us as Western editor. I said, what does that mean? Well, he says, you’ll run the Yellow Pages, the only Yellow Pages, and work with all these stringers in all the states and send us seven hundred and twenty lines of clean copy, plus maps and photos. And that’s your job. I said, God, I can’t do that. Well, I’m working for the government, can I? He says, Hell no, I says, you mean I gotta come to work for Outer Life full time? He said, yep. So I talk. Took about five minutes to take it over, and I accepted the job for a huge cut and pay, no cutting pay. Yeah, yeah, I had. I was making eighteen thousand bucks with the government, with all the perks, health benefits you know, and all that stuff and pension. Went to work for outer Life for nine thousand dollars in a handshake.

00:21:52
Speaker 2: No kidding. Yeah, were you were married at that point?

00:21:55
Speaker 3: Yeah?

00:21:56
Speaker 2: Yeah? How long were you married for?

00:22:00
Speaker 3: I was married to my first wife, lost for twenty six years, and Madonna for thirty two. So yeah, we’re still fighting with each other, dude, that’s.

00:22:10
Speaker 2: A mark of fidelogy.

00:22:11
Speaker 1: You hit like my old man managed to pull that off to hit like, what’s that called a silver anniversary?

00:22:17
Speaker 3: Yeah? With two different women. Yeah, but my wife, she’s loyal.

00:22:20
Speaker 1: She’s kind of like you could look at it two different ways. You look like amazingly loyal, yeah or yeah or not. Yeah, but she puts up with all my absences. I don’t travel much anymore, but there were times when I was on the road for probably two hundred and seventy two and eighty days. Now that included also shows. I did a lot of seminars.

00:22:42
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:22:43
Speaker 3: In fact, that’s where I met her. She was running the ISIC shows in the Sportsman’s Exposed on the West Coast. But yeah, there were times when I’d take off and be gone for thirty forty days. Then I got the TV show, and between the TV showing out Door Life, I mean it was just constant. I would go on maybe four hunts in a row. I’d go up the BC. I love to go up to the northern BC for elk, and then I Montana typically in Wyoming or Colorado and whatever else. Antelope mil there, yeah, Moose. I loved the hunt moose black bears. So I mean it was just NonStop because he had to you know, I had to write a column a month for Outdoor Life. When I became Honting editor for first when I was Western editor, then they did away with the Yellow Pages. Then they made me editor at large that then I just remember that. Yeah, and then I became Honting editor, and you got to have so much copy, you know, and you got to travel obviously. So that’s kind of where it’s.

00:23:46
Speaker 1: At when you were on the mast head or not on the mass but you were staffed Outdoor Life, but you would do seminars and do TV and stuff. Was that all in on salary or was that more like like a la carte approach where where you would get like additional money to do these different projects.

00:24:06
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was on a seminar. I had a contract with an International sportss XPO, and I did shows in like six cities on the West coast in Denver. But you kept that money, Yeah, and they’d pay me a fee for that, okay.

00:24:20
Speaker 2: And that didn’t conflict with your your normal.

00:24:22
Speaker 3: Gig, No, uh did I. The only conflict was Outdoor Life didn’t want me working for the competition. They didn’t want they didn’t want me in the field and Streamer Sports a Field American Hunter nraa magazine. They didn’t care about that, you know. Because that was a different deal. But so yeah, it was I was. It was crazy. It was a crazy time, you know that.

00:24:44
Speaker 1: That’s a I think I think about that long era, like just the years of your career outdoor life, field and stream sports, the field, there was so many more shared like there were so many more shared now national experiences back then, do you know, like like I’m old enough that when I was a little kid, I mean there’s channels three on a TV.

00:25:08
Speaker 2: There’s channel three, eight and thirteen.

00:25:12
Speaker 1: Right, it was like NBCCBS, ABC or whatever it help was, and.

00:25:16
Speaker 2: That was what it was.

00:25:18
Speaker 3: Yep.

00:25:19
Speaker 1: Right, we still have like we still kind of retained a shared experience of.

00:25:23
Speaker 2: The super Bowl or something.

00:25:26
Speaker 1: But there used to be like many many shared experiences that people would have, and I think some of those were just these magazines because pre internet, you know, if you were a hunter and angler, you were looking at those magazines.

00:25:42
Speaker 2: I think of going to my.

00:25:45
Speaker 1: Maternal grandfather was a musky fisherman and big fishermen.

00:25:50
Speaker 2: He liked to hunt.

00:25:51
Speaker 1: You know, you’d go to his house and he would have the magazines, I mean, and I would like go home and bring them with and it was just that that all it was sort of like all eyes in the outdoor world were on those things, right, you know. And in that way, I grew up just like I just grew up with your name, you know what I mean. I grew up reading your stuff. I was reading your stuff as a as a child at my grandfather’s house.

00:26:19
Speaker 3: Smokes, you know, but just.

00:26:20
Speaker 1: Being being Yeah I’m not young anymore, man, but like being there and dreaming about hunting the West and stuff and that, you know, and your stuff was there. Yeah, and things are so diffuse now, Yeah, it is.

00:26:34
Speaker 3: Very much so. You got all kinds of stuff, all your shows everywhere, thankfully.

00:26:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, it gets out there. Yeah, hey, tell me about firewood. You’re big into firewood.

00:26:47
Speaker 3: I suffer from an illness called ACFD, Excessive Compulsive firewood disorder.

00:26:53
Speaker 2: Let me hit you with one? Can I hit you with one?

00:26:54
Speaker 3: Yeah?

00:26:55
Speaker 1: My brother Danny recently got himself this might be a good book subject for you. He recently got himself a book about firewood.

00:27:02
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:27:03
Speaker 2: It’s from the it’s from the might be out of Norway or something.

00:27:07
Speaker 3: I might have that book, honestly, Okay, go ahead, Well.

00:27:11
Speaker 2: No, I mean, yeah, I need to get me a copy. He’s got a book.

00:27:15
Speaker 1: It’s just a book about firewood, and there’s a thing in there that I didn’t that I wasn’t aware of.

00:27:19
Speaker 2: I want to run this by you. It’s like, you know where.

00:27:22
Speaker 1: Always talk about this wood has puts off this BTUs. This wood puts off that BTUs. This wood puts off that BTUs. This book is saying that all wood is the same by weight, but not by volume, like would regard if you if you don’t measure it by volume and measure it by weight, it all puts off the same BTUs. It’s just a matter of efficiency in releasing those BTUs because a denser like denser would we think of as being hotter, but wood by weight has the same be To you, I’ll be dark.

00:28:06
Speaker 2: What do you think about that?

00:28:07
Speaker 3: I don’t know.

00:28:09
Speaker 1: We’ll put that in if you make a wood book, you got to either make that that’s true or not true. I don’t know what to make out of that, you know what I’m saying, but like yeah, yeah, yeah, because I’ll tell you, dude, I grew up in the hardwoods in Michigan.

00:28:24
Speaker 2: A nice to sell.

00:28:25
Speaker 1: Like when I was selling firewood, we would get you get ninety a cord for dried hardwood. You could hold it till like February January February and get one hundred and ten a cord for dried hardwood.

00:28:43
Speaker 2: I would cut it and.

00:28:43
Speaker 1: Make just huge mountains of it and then deliver it when the prices were good. Only maple and oak some beach thrown in. At that time, you could sell white pine. So if you could get a ninety bucks for a cord of cut and split hardwood, a quart of white pine was thirty five dollars. People would talk where I grew up. They would tell you that you can’t heat with pine. They would say that it’ll burn your house down, because the I.

00:29:14
Speaker 2: Mean it was like, you can’t.

00:29:16
Speaker 1: You could you go anywhere in that air You never find a person carry a piece of pine in their house and burn it. But then you move out west and that’s all there is, right, everybody burns pine. Yeah, So for decades I’ve been burning that junk. But then I go back to my mom’s and we go down on the beach on the lake in front of the house there, and I make a big old pile of oak and get that burning.

00:29:37
Speaker 2: Dude, you can’t you can’t even get near that fire.

00:29:41
Speaker 1: So it’s like, that’s that’s a wood right there, dude, that’s a hot wood, you know. So in reading that, it kind of threw me off that it’s like, you know that it’s just they’re talking about by volume.

00:29:54
Speaker 3: Right. Well, I’ve always I’ve always considered that I’ve looked at the BTU charge for both native woods in the US and all woods, and most of the charts would tell you that O sage orange also called bodock or hedge number one, btu’s number one. And they say it’ll burn your great and it damn near will. I like to get wood from all over. I got somebodies from North Dakota who’d come on Antelope with me, and they wearing a bunch of oak from the yards, you know. And I went to Kansas to a writer’s conference and Mike Pierce was a good friend of mine. He used to be the outdoor writer for the Wall Street Journal. And I said, the journal writer, Yeah, Michael Pierce. So I said, Mike, if I bring my chance, however, can I cut some hedge? He said, yeah, there’s all kinds of hedge around here. So, as it turned out, he had a buddy who had a whole barn full full of hedge. He said, back your truck up and loaded up. So I took it home and I only burned it when it’s really cold, but it burns hot and it burned long. And but Locus is another one that’s got a lot of bt you so I don’t know. You know, we live in northern Rockies as you do. And the only two soft was we have or aspen and cottonwood. Otherwise doug fur number one limber pine white bark pine, which is now endangered. You can’t cut that, dude.

00:31:20
Speaker 1: I never met anybody to cut it split into a piece of white bark pine.

00:31:26
Speaker 3: But this this O sage aren’t just so hard that you can’t You can’t cut a you can’t drive a nail in it. And they call it hedge because in the old days the pioneers would plant it and it would grow into into a row of really thick foliage and the cattle couldn’t get through it. But it’s just amazing stuff.

00:31:48
Speaker 1: Anyway, Well guys run that for I mean, the industry there is cutting fence.

00:31:53
Speaker 2: Posts out of that stuff.

00:31:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, So how does your if you got a like a O C D around wood, how does that man fast like what like, how do you what are the symptoms?

00:32:03
Speaker 3: The symptoms? Go cut more wood?

00:32:05
Speaker 2: You just like keep a good stash laid by.

00:32:07
Speaker 3: I once honestly had I swear I measured it one hundred firewood cords. No firewood cord, not a full cord four four by eight. I’m talking two by four by eight, four hundred cords.

00:32:19
Speaker 1: Oh I did, No, no, no, But I’m not getting what in the world you’re talking about.

00:32:23
Speaker 2: We’ve been having this debate lately. Are you forget the term rick?

00:32:30
Speaker 3: Yes?

00:32:30
Speaker 2: Okay, what what do you what is a rick? In your mind?

00:32:33
Speaker 3: The wreck is a full cord four by four by eight and twenty eight cubic feet.

00:32:37
Speaker 2: No, a rick is a face cord?

00:32:39
Speaker 3: It is? Okay, should I google it?

00:32:43
Speaker 2: You know?

00:32:43
Speaker 3: I think you’re right.

00:32:44
Speaker 2: But what you’re talking about? What? What kind of what a firewood cord twenty four inch deep? Yeah, so that’s a long cut piece of firewood.

00:32:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, but that’s if you look it up, it says two by four eight firewood or face court.

00:33:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, but who’s who’s oven door? Are you fitting twenty four inch pieces of firewood.

00:33:06
Speaker 3: Through my fireplace? Goes separates a big stone wall on both sides and it goes all the way throughly. You can open the doors on both rooms, and that thing’s got a three by four foot box, so I can actually put a almost a thirty inch log in there. Yeah, but you’re right, you know, most of those aren’t going to take that twenty four inches.

00:33:30
Speaker 2: I’d like that. You know.

00:33:31
Speaker 1: I’m not a big government guy generally, well in some areas i am. But I would like the government to come in and really put some enforcement and some structure around firewood measurements.

00:33:47
Speaker 2: I think it would do the nation good.

00:33:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, because there’s a lot of like people saying a lot of weird things.

00:33:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, there are.

00:33:58
Speaker 1: Heart this guy Spencer New Heart that hosts trivia and I actually it’s a long story. We got a big fight about this very subject, bricks and face cords and chords and all that.

00:34:11
Speaker 2: So you caught too much wood? Do you sell it?

00:34:14
Speaker 3: No? I used to you just like to keep it because of the legalisation.

00:34:19
Speaker 2: We got all kinds of wood.

00:34:20
Speaker 3: We use it. That fireplace does not go out from usually October until April, unless it’s like this winter, you know, held seventy degrees in January and February. We didn’t burn it. But my wife will say, what’s going on. There’s no fire going there’s un by. Your fire sucks because it’s you know, because it’s there’s no flame. Okay, I’m throwing a log in it. But we burned that. We probably burned ten to fifteen twenty cords a year, seriously. And wow, but I get it from everywhere. Beetlekill. We had a big beetle kill infestation. I lived just maybe a quarter mile from the National Forest. This is shoney forest, huh. And as soon as those trees are go, and I’d get a four serves pervent it for seven bucks or whatever and bring that wood home and.

00:35:06
Speaker 2: That’s your exercise. Yeah, but you had a heart attack right cutting wood.

00:35:11
Speaker 3: I had a heart attack when I was rolling the log. Yeah. I was rolling the log with a peev. It was a big ass log and it was a rock behind it, and I put everything I had behind it, as you know, a pev. You can roll a five hundred pound log with that extra And I felt the pain in my chest and I said, hmm, what was that all about?

00:35:33
Speaker 2: Huh?

00:35:33
Speaker 3: And I thought maybe I strained a muscle, you know, and my chest. So I had all a wood cut to throw in my truck, and I just said, I’m going to leave this wood, sit, put the chainsaw on my truck and go home. And if I don’t have this, and I’m gonna when I get to the highway, I’m going to call my doctor. You know, I didn’t because the pain went away. I never had that pain again until my seventy fifth birthday. On that night, I was kind of short of breath. My right arm hurt and there was a little bit of pain in my chest. I told my wife, and at that time I was between doctors. I hadn’t gotten anew and my own other doctor had taken another job in the hospital. So she drives me to town six two aspirins. Get to the emergency room, tell a lady I got test pains and she’s boomed. They stuck me on whatever you call it, and I did a EKG and it showed nothing, and then they did another test. I’m not sure what it was, and they said he’s having a heart attack right now. So they threw me in an ambulance, took me to Billings and they put two stents in and I had to wait six weeks for the real open heart surgery, which was December fifteenth of twenty fifteen. And I tell you, waiting that six weeks was a nightmare because I knew I was going to go under the knife and you know, get the zipper.

00:37:05
Speaker 2: Oh.

00:37:05
Speaker 3: On the bright side, my surgeon had done three thousand open orth surgeries and billings, so I was pretty he was a great guy. And uh so got the got the operation.

00:37:18
Speaker 2: Whatever he did work because here you are. Yeah.

00:37:21
Speaker 3: And I told my cardiot, I said, when can I start swinging that six pound mall? He said, he said, you got to wait at least three four months, you know, And so I did.

00:37:32
Speaker 1: And uh, you split all you split everything by hand.

00:37:35
Speaker 2: You don’t use it.

00:37:36
Speaker 3: I used to.

00:37:37
Speaker 2: You switched to hydraulic.

00:37:38
Speaker 3: Yeah. And then when I turned sixty five, you know, my son was something. My dad still splits wooden me sixty five years old, you know, And and uh I bought a splitter. Yeah, And I mean that takes all the work out of everything, you know, trying to cut green split green cottonwood. You hit that with a mall and it just kind of, you know, just full of water comes up there make going to split. So you got to hit it fifty more times hitting a sponge.

00:38:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, I used to work The first tree service I worked for was an outfit called Professional Tree Service is when I was in community college. And interesting thing about this dude that I worked with, he had bought this property.

00:38:25
Speaker 2: You’re gonna think I’m making this up. I’m not making this up.

00:38:27
Speaker 3: Man.

00:38:27
Speaker 1: He bought this property and when I’d get to work in the morning, he would be out in the morning with a metal detector, metal detect in his own yard because someone had told him that the old lady that he bought it from had been burying jars of money with metallic like bell ball and Mason money jars with metallic lids had.

00:38:52
Speaker 2: Been burying money all around the yard.

00:38:55
Speaker 1: And this guy’s morning rituals to get up and metal detect this ten acres whatever he had funny hoping to dig up that money.

00:39:05
Speaker 2: But he so his middle finger is gone.

00:39:11
Speaker 1: And he used to run those sacks, you know, remember that, Remember that I only still make sacks Dolmar chain saws like horrible vibration control on those like no vibration control on those chains. They were just monsters. He’d run those sacks Dolmar saws, and he wouldn’t. He had, he’d buy a regular five finger glove obviously, But this middle finger is gone. So I used to laugh because anytime he was gripping something, he’d be giving you the finger because there’s no middle finger in there.

00:39:39
Speaker 2: To for the glove.

00:39:42
Speaker 1: And I always assumed he’d cut it off with a chainsaw, but we would a lot of times. All that would when we were doing a removal or whatever, just going to a mountain, and then if there was nothing else to do, we’d go out there and firewood all that. And it was terrible because he’d bring it home in all these weird chunks, you know, just lowering stuff right into a truck. So it’s like elbows and odds, and you’re just sorting through the pile trying to find sixteen inch right cuts. And like I said, I never asked him about that finger, but I assumed he cut it off. But one day we’re cutting and I’m doing something or not with that hydraulic splitter, and he says me, that’s just how I lost my middle I forgot that I lost my finger out on a hydraulic splitter.

00:40:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s funny.

00:40:30
Speaker 2: Uh, let’s go back to nineteen eighty six.

00:40:34
Speaker 1: And it’s funny to think about, but Cole calling elk. Yeah, even like bugling elk, man was you know, I’m sure historically people figured it out. But like bugling elk, Coyle calling elk, that wasn’t in Hunter’s toolkits.

00:40:51
Speaker 3: No, not at all. Back when I first started our bugle calls, we made him out of a he’s a garden hose or maybe a piece of pipe cut a little notch in it, you know, And they sounded horrible what they still called elk, and they were awful. And then I remember when the first calls came out. But I think when you say nineteen eighty six, you’re referring to the to the cow call.

00:41:16
Speaker 1: Yeah your article yeah about cow call? Right, your article elk? Huntings knew a secret.

00:41:22
Speaker 3: Yep, well I had. I had gone to gardener a Lot Montana, which is literally on the border of Yellowstone Park.

00:41:29
Speaker 2: Were friends with uh were you parties of Don LAbau.

00:41:34
Speaker 3: That Don Lobach invented to the cow call? Yeh yeah, yeah, okay, So Don and I we’d hang out. He owned like the saloon in town and the motel and the restaurant, a gas station. He owned a bunch. He was from Big Timber. Great guy. Anyway, one day we’re sitting in his bar and he pulled a thing out of his pocket. He said, you know what this is? I said, have no idea? He sai, Well, listen. He blows his thing and everybody looks at him. He says, don’t worry about them. I own the bar.

00:42:03
Speaker 2: You know.

00:42:03
Speaker 3: It makes his big shrieking noise. Does that sound like? I said? It sounds like a cow elk? He says, well, what do you think? I said, what do I think? I don’t know. What do you think? He said, well, don’t you think that, you know, cow elk? They vocalize year around? I said, yeah, all year, not just like during the rod. Yeah, like the bulls. So he said, when you hunt turkeys, what do you sound like? It sound like a hen. You’re yelping out there, you know. And he says, so don’t you think you can use a cow call to the track bulls or whatever? That makes a lot of sense? He sai, I’ll tell you. He says. It works. He says, I know it works because I’ve done it. And he lived right in Gardener, in the Elkwort in his yard year round. Yeah, he heard him talking all the time. So he said, he said, I’ll give you a call if you don’t mind it, and would you if you like it, would you write a story about I said absolutely, you know, after the life like all that. It’s a service magazine. You know, people want to know how to do something, where to go, or maybe he’ll want to read an armchair story me and Joe. But anyway, this was right up my alley, and they said, oh, this is a big deal. There’s no such thing as a cow elk nothing, There was no such thing. So I took it out and I tried it for a year, and he had given a couple to some outfitters up in that country, and it worked like a charm for all sorts of reasons, you know, not just to attract a note during the rut, but all so I wrote a story about it in eighty six, I think it was the August issue Elk Hunting’s Knew a Secret And at the bottom I put to order a cow call called cow Talk from bon Don Lobox and so and so nine ninety five and three bucks to Blah Blah blah and Gardner, Montana. And before the article came out. I told him that we’re going to put a plug for the call, and I asked him how many calls he made? Said, well maybe my wife d we made a couple of hundred in basement, you know. I said, well, maybe he’ll sell them. I can’t tell you him an hesel thousands and thousands and thousands. But anyway, that and it was that was probably my as far as having an impact on hunting for something new, that was probably my number one story. But I didn’t do it. I just happened to be the lucky guy that don knew and passed the story on.

00:44:19
Speaker 1: You didn’t get a cut or commission on calls, no, no. And then he invented the power m yeah, oh yeah yeah.

00:44:25
Speaker 3: And then he did a deer talk, a deer call or something, and but his call went into the Cabella’s catalog and he sold a lot, a lot. But he’s still around in gardener. He’s got a shop there were he still wive.

00:44:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah, he’s the gardener all the time.

00:44:45
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:44:45
Speaker 2: Really, you can find a story. Yeah, well, how old is how old is he? Now?

00:44:51
Speaker 3: He was he’s probably he was probably a few years younger than me. He probably probably late seven, I don’t know, I don’t know, but he was. He was so much fun. And we go up in the famous firing line, you know, when the elk would come out of the forest, out of the park and they’d get out, and they stepped down the Gallaton National Forest, and holy smokes, one day had kind of ninety six hunters up there. They had built snow forts to hide, you know, and herd elk. And then you go to the bar that night, his bar they called the town bar, and everybody talk about how many elk today? Why I see it. I heard a ninety five come out and they killed ninety ninety four of them, you know, but they changed that whole structure. And then the wolf stepped in. You’ll add like a couple of thousand cow tags. It was nuts. And the wardens would ride around on horses, and I was there. I was just I never hunted there. I didn’t want to, but I’d just being a rider, you know, I’d walk around. The wards would ride around on horses, and if hey saw somebody shoot two elk, they’d give the guy a fifty dollars fine and he could keep one elk. Honestly, that’s all they did a long time ago. Yeah, But interestingly, one year, as you know, the Montana elk season runs basically five weeks from October to the Sunday of Thanksgiving week. One year, it was a really really really bad winter during the general season, those elk came out by the thousands, and everybody in Montana headed for Gardener. And I heard a story that in one day they killed like seven hundred elk. I mean, it was just crazy. Yeah, because anybody with a general tag could go, you know. Yeah, but so fascinating place. I spent a lot of time. A lot of the photographers would go there and we’d film elk during the rut and mule there during the rut bighorn sheep. The Gardener was kind of the second second home away from home for me. I spent a lot of time there.

00:46:40
Speaker 1: My one of my kids got accosted by a mean old lady and gardener. Yeah, we were in Gardener one time, and you know, does the elk standley it’s the park, you know, just for people listen, this is the entrance to the park. Yeah, it’s the the Yelso National Park of North Entrance. So you get a lot of these like very very gbituated park elk. They just kind of hanging around, like they’re hanging around the gas station, they’re hanging around the hotels. Anyways, my kid is going up to one of these elk and these a couple old ladies just cut loose on them. He was a little kid. You leave them alone, really, Yeah, like I was thinking about, you know, I didn’t really get involved in it, but.

00:47:24
Speaker 2: It was kind of lady. You’ve seen what this kid’s showing to some elk.

00:47:27
Speaker 3: When she went to park or was she just a civilian?

00:47:30
Speaker 1: No, just some lady yelling at him on the side of the road for getting too close to a tame elk.

00:47:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, I thought that was funny.

00:47:37
Speaker 3: We took When we took pictures in the park, we had to have a commercial permit and we paid one hundred bucks to film because we were in the business. We weren’t just doing a the slide show at home, you know. And those rangers if they saw you using a cawcol they get all upset because you’re harassing the elk.

00:47:53
Speaker 2: Oh, you were trying to call him for photography.

00:47:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, get him to get him to look at you or whatever, you know, and stuff. But they’re loveable. But anyway, they Yellowstone is uh. It’s one of the reasons I moved to Cody because I just loved the park. First first time a lazarira was in my wildlife class at Utah State. Took a bus all those students and two professors and went in the park in Golly nineteen sixty three and we looked out the windowners or heard elks. First elk I ever saw, is that right?

00:48:26
Speaker 2: Yeah?

00:48:26
Speaker 3: We all ran over to the side of the bus, you know. And that was when they were They literally killed like five thousand in the park. They had regular shooters and they had butchers come by and save the meat and everything that was That was quite a deal.

00:48:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, those days are past right now.

00:48:45
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, those kind of out numbers.

00:48:49
Speaker 1: You spent time covering the Mileo Hanson buck yep, Yeah, talk about that.

00:48:55
Speaker 3: Well. I was in Saskatchewan hunting white tails, and I think it’s a same thing. But in Saskatchewan, a nod resident can’t hunt below the bush line. You can’t hunt in the agricultural areas. You gotta hunt north in the bush and miltl lives and bigger. He had a farm there, but.

00:49:13
Speaker 1: He’s south of the line. Yeah, yeah, he just passed away. Yeah, he did a couple months ago.

00:49:19
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:49:19
Speaker 3: Yeah. So we’re having we’re having dinner in my outfitters. He had a farmhouse, that’s where were said, and his wife did the cooking. And we were sitting around the table and she said, by the way, Milton Hanson kill the world record white till a buck, and it’s like home in the back.

00:49:39
Speaker 2: I got refused. You’re you’re there when it happened.

00:49:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, I’m there. I’m sitting there having dinner.

00:49:45
Speaker 1: And it just got killed, just got killed, like the day before, two days before. Okay, and I think I met you were there later, I don’t know you were there. I was there, and they already but they already knew it was a record.

00:49:57
Speaker 3: Well what had happened? I I didn’t believe it, you know, I said, well what at score? She said? I think it was two fourteen? Holy smokes, are you kidding me? Yeah? Yeah, I said. And then my guide sitting next to me, we’re having dinner, he says, I know Milele Hanson. In fact, I sold him a box of Ammo. You know Milo Hanson, He says, yeah, he said, you want me to call him? I said, yeah. So he gets on the phone and he called Milo and Milo confirms, yeah, yeah, I had an official measurer and he says, I got a guy from Outdoor Life here. He wants to talk to you. So I talked to Milo and I said, any chance I could come down in the morning and interview it. He said, he said, yeah, no problem at all. So really nice guy. So I called in the morning just to confirm. The guy was going to take me to his house.

00:50:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, and how far are you from the house?

00:50:47
Speaker 3: About fifty miles dude? What luck? Man?

00:50:49
Speaker 1: I know, I know, that’s like John Crackauer being on That’s like John Crackar being on Everest when that big disaster happened.

00:50:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, like right in the mix. Yeah.

00:51:01
Speaker 3: So I called him in the morning to confirm. He says, geez, I’m sorry, he said, but Gordon, Gordon Woodington is sitting in my living room. Gordon was the editor for North American White Tail outed Georgia, I think South Carolina.

00:51:11
Speaker 2: He was already there.

00:51:12
Speaker 3: He had flown all night and he was sitting in Milets. No. Yeah, I swear to God. Yeah. Yeah.

00:51:18
Speaker 2: In fact, he scooped you from Georgia.

00:51:20
Speaker 3: Yeah, Georgia.

00:51:22
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:51:22
Speaker 3: In fact, I put this on Facebook when Milo passed away, that a couple of pictures, you know, and Gordon chimed in. He says, yeah, that was a great time. But he had a he wanted to write the story real quick, real quick, that have the issue ready for the shot show, which I think was in January. So he wrote the story and my bosss in New York. He was, of course, he was all excited. I called him that night, Vince Brown, and I said, Vin, I said, my god, this is this is this is the story of the damn decade of this entry work, whitetail. Yeah, and he said, well, get the story. Blah blah blah. Says well I can’t. Gordon’s here. He says, well, reckon rights. We’ll pay him some money whatever exclusivity. And I don’t know what the hell he did. I don’t get involved in that part of it, but at any rate, Gordon had the story in Sports of Field and I interviewed Milo and we talked about the whole deal. Was like an as too Att story as told to Jim Zumbo. Yeah, yeah, And he told me the whole story. He went up to his farm and really great guy.

00:52:24
Speaker 1: So he didn’t live on that farm, Yeah, yeah.

00:52:28
Speaker 2: He did, so he lived there.

00:52:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, tell the story him killing the world record buck, because then I want to get into whether it really is the world record buck.

00:52:35
Speaker 2: Okay, you know where I’m going with this.

00:52:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know where you’re going. Well, evidently that buck had been seen by the school bus driver, you know, and in fact, somebody had taken a shot at it and missed it. Really Yeah, So the way they hunt up there, and this was somewhat controversial because what these farmers they’re all Ukrainians, you know, and they deer for sausage. That’s what they do. They don’t give a damn about warns. In fact, yeah, I know the kind. So they got all these all this kind of open country with all this popple, which is like stunted aspen, and basically they drive these different areas and I think Milo was sitting there by his pickup. They pushes, they do pushes. Yeah. Yeah. So Mile is sitting there by his pickup truck and here comes his buck, nice buck, you know, and he shoots it. It goes down and he walks down to it. This way. He told me. The first thing he said is that’s a nice buck, but boy, not very big. I ain’t gonna get much sausage off of that thing. That’s exactly what he said. And it was a hole in the antler where somebody had had hit him in the antler and they dragged that buck by that by that antler, and the good thing it didn’t break off, sure right, disqualify. Yeah, So anyway, he gets the buck home and people start hearing about it. So he calls a boon, the Crockett guy, and he comes over and he measured it, and I think the score was what two fourteen and something like that. So anyway, funny story. We’re at the shot show and Ian mcbirchie was a Canadian photographer. He passed away and Miles said, Ian is the only guy that’s going to photograph this buck. Now. The wife wanted to send some big shot photographer from New York to Canada to film the bucket, and Milo said no, and so all of you know, the editors and they were all upset, like what kind of picture were you going to get for? They wanted to put it on the cover yep. And in fact, the president of Outdoor Life was not a haunter he was a three piece suitor from New York. And he says, we can’t put that buck on the cover an April issue. That’s the trout issue. We got to put a trout out of the cover. Is this true? So anyway, we put the buck on the cover. So we met Ian at the shot show and he comes over to our table. I sit with a bunch of guys and he said, I got something for his umb and he gives me a little sliver of sausage. He said, that’s the world record, but no really yeah, so he no, he gave me the whole sausage. You got to eat a chunk of that, but we got so help me. Yeah, but anyway, that.

00:55:15
Speaker 1: Really Yeah, dude, you can sell that sausage for a lot of money. Now, man, it’d be a little old, a little freezer burn. But yep, no kidding. You had a chunk of the.

00:55:23
Speaker 3: Hands in a chunk of yep. True story. And Milon and I became friends on Facebook.

00:55:28
Speaker 2: You’ve got to be kidding me.

00:55:29
Speaker 3: No, so honest. In fact, when I put that in my little comment on Facebook, and two or three other guys sitting at the table said the same thing. Yeah, that was really a great piece of sausage or whatever. Wow, I can’t think of who I was well with, just I don’t know some friends and writers.

00:55:45
Speaker 1: But hey, when you when you think of doing a push, what do you call the people?

00:55:48
Speaker 3: Like?

00:55:49
Speaker 2: What term do you use?

00:55:50
Speaker 1: Because buddies all around the country have different terms for it, like pushers and sitters?

00:55:55
Speaker 2: You know, like, what’d you guys call them?

00:55:57
Speaker 3: Usually the drivers in the standards.

00:55:58
Speaker 1: You do drivers, that’s guys do that. It’s wrong, Yeah, it’s wrong, pushers and sitters. A lot of people don’t know this. They think it’s drivers. And my buddy’s in Pennsylvania got some real dumb thing they call it. But yeah, they got like I can’t remember what they got, some dumb things.

00:56:15
Speaker 2: They get it all. They get all confused. Now how to do it? How to do it? Drive?

00:56:18
Speaker 3: You know? Jeez?

00:56:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s pretty crazy man.

00:56:22
Speaker 1: So so obviously you know around Like remember when I made that comment, like, is it the world record? So I think that there’s so these records stand a long time, right, So there’s only been a it’s only like the world record.

00:56:36
Speaker 2: Bucks only turned over a couple of times.

00:56:38
Speaker 3: The first buck was a Jordan buck that was that was around for got like fifty years. Yeah, and that was scored maybe two nine or something maybe I don’t know, I forget yep.

00:56:47
Speaker 2: Then it got whooped in the hell was it ninety six?

00:56:50
Speaker 3: What year was it ninety three?

00:56:53
Speaker 1: The Handsome Bucks nine oh ninety six was a round Poulla buck, round pole metchron Pold. So let’s jump to that. Everybody still calls the hands and Buck. You know, it’s the world record buck. But there’s this there’s this question I’m obsessed with the question is like is it because then a guy in in mitch ron Pol outside of Traverse City, Michigan, mid nineties, he aar was a bigger buck, right, shrouded in controversy, shrouded in controversy.

00:57:29
Speaker 2: What’s your take on that buck?

00:57:33
Speaker 3: Well from only what I’ve heard, No.

00:57:38
Speaker 2: Don’t cavyat at all? The hell just tell me.

00:57:40
Speaker 3: What you know. Tom Huggler, who Tom Huggler, Huddler, Yeah, it’s from Michigan. No, he’s like the outdoor guy. He’s got a big show and stuff. I went to a show one time at expos show.

00:57:51
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, you know how you like meet people and kind of maybe like the name doesn’t click, but I’m not.

00:57:57
Speaker 2: I don’t believe I’m familiar.

00:57:58
Speaker 3: Okay, Anyway, time and I were buddies. I was in a Michigan one time doing a doing a seminar and l hunt or something. And and from what I understand this may or may not be true, but Mitch ron Pla would not let anybody take a picture of that buck. Nobody.

00:58:17
Speaker 2: Well, now I don’t know, I don’t there’s pictures of that buck.

00:58:22
Speaker 3: But who took the pictures?

00:58:23
Speaker 2: He did? He did?

00:58:25
Speaker 3: Didn’t he kill other bucks with the same kind of big white yep, some honey honey whole somewhere.

00:58:33
Speaker 1: Listen, dude, this is why the story makes. It starts to like really make its own gravy. You know, it goes deeper and this this story is a bottomless pit.

00:58:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, it kills the buck. He has a recovery video.

00:58:47
Speaker 1: I thought, well, I’m obsessed with this thing, man, I’m gonna make them documentary about it. So kills a buck, makes a recovery video, right, get some pictures. I mean that there’s so many twists and turns of this thing. A handful of people handle the buck. I wouldn’t sat on the phone with a guy that I spent two hours on the phone with a guy that held the buck. Okay, but in quickly there’s a lot of skepticism about certain aspects. I’m making a short version of there’s a lot of skepticism about aspects of the buck. It gets measured. Some people come forward and they’re like, the buck ought to be x rayed.

00:59:38
Speaker 2: Right.

00:59:39
Speaker 1: There’s varying explanations of what he did to it, you know. Some people say that he kind of made like a sort of frank and rack, like he constructed a rack, killed a buck, opened it, opened it up like this, took the skull plate out, put a skull plate in there, right, abricated, you know. But this guy was talking to me one time. He had the weirdest observation about it. Man, he said that, uh, I don’t want to give his name, but he said that when he went to see the buck after it was killed, he said, it was in a truck with the top around it.

01:00:18
Speaker 2: You’ll get this because you’re a hunter. It’s in a truck with the toper on it.

01:00:22
Speaker 1: And picture when you jam a deer into a truck with the toper on it, right, they’re hard to.

01:00:28
Speaker 2: Get in there.

01:00:30
Speaker 1: And he says that that buck was like jammed into this truck with a toper on it, and then you kind of like cock the head up in there.

01:00:38
Speaker 2: Right. So he says, when he.

01:00:41
Speaker 1: Goes to look at the buck, it’s cocked in this trailer like where it’s head and rack are kind of jammed into the topper as you’re looking into the top er on.

01:00:52
Speaker 2: The left side. And he talked about.

01:00:54
Speaker 1: Him kind of wrastling because it’s stiffened up. He talked about him kind of rass in that head out of there, and he’s like, if that was a make believe Frank and Rack, would you have jammed it into a topper like that? It’s true, it’s an interesting point, but he wouldn’t submit it to an x ray because people wanted to x ray it. And eventually he gets to this point. He eventually gets to the point where he says, with all the scrutiny, he says, this isn’t why I hunt. You can all shove it up your ass, and that’s not his words, but this isn’t why I hunt. And he takes his buck home, never to be seen again. And that’s been that. That’s been the stance since it’s like he didn’t play the game, but people point out he.

01:01:49
Speaker 2: Was playing the game. He was playing the game.

01:01:53
Speaker 1: Video video photography declared it right, and eventually there was a with the hands in the state. They signed a deal. They signed a contract that and he was such that he would stop saying it was the world record buck.

01:02:13
Speaker 3: A lot of people wonder why he doesn’t want to claim it. I mean, you know it.

01:02:21
Speaker 1: So I’ve sat on so many sides of this thing, man, like I’m sure you have. I got a buddy from I got buddy from back home. He’s an outdoor writer. We went to high school together. He was a trapper. He always felt that the he always thought the buck.

01:02:39
Speaker 2: Was was bs okay.

01:02:42
Speaker 1: But one day he told me, one day he went to a guy’s house that touched the buck, didn’t handle the buck, And.

01:02:49
Speaker 2: He said, when I walked out of his house.

01:02:52
Speaker 1: For a period of time, when I walked out of his house for a period of time, I knew it was real. And he goes, and I think, as he explained to me, he doesn’t know where he stands on it.

01:03:03
Speaker 2: Now. I’ve been I’ve gone back and forth both sides.

01:03:06
Speaker 1: One day I was explaining to someone I was telling someone like I was trying to explain to someone that doesn’t hunt, how everybody has an opinion about this, okay, And as we’re talking, I’m like, everybody’s gonna pinion about this thing. So I sent a text message like just watch. So I’m trying to think of people that he would know about. And I sent a text message to Jeff Foxworthy, and I sent a text message to Nugent and I, Hey, what do you guys think of the independently not in a group text? What do you think of the round palla buck right? One of them comes back with an answer, I don’t buy it. One of them comes back with the answer I give him the benefit of the doubt.

01:03:55
Speaker 3: Geez.

01:03:56
Speaker 1: So it’s like, dude, I’m fascinated by the whole story. Man, I would like nothing more than to touch that buck. I had always heard this rumor. I don’t even know where I heard it.

01:04:05
Speaker 3: Now.

01:04:07
Speaker 1: I’d heard a rumor that it had burned up, Like I can’t even think of who told me this said burned up in some fire or something.

01:04:14
Speaker 2: But I was talking to a guy and.

01:04:17
Speaker 1: He’s like, man, uh, Mitch lives in the same house he’s lived in when he killed the buck.

01:04:25
Speaker 2: That buck ain’t the house ain’t burned down.

01:04:28
Speaker 3: Geez, you know, I wonder did the Boone Cracker Club ever approach him.

01:04:34
Speaker 2: It’s not certified with the Boone Cracker Club.

01:04:36
Speaker 3: It’s not.

01:04:37
Speaker 2: No, because of these questions about.

01:04:39
Speaker 1: I think it’s like, well, if it was, if it was, I mean, I you know what, I take that back.

01:04:44
Speaker 2: I don’t know.

01:04:45
Speaker 1: But if it was certified, if it was B and C certified, then then it would be the world record.

01:04:51
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:04:52
Speaker 1: But you know what’s crazy, man about this whole deal. A weird part about this whole deal is it like, you know, all that screw routine. He came on him like a lot of that screwtin He’s motivated by jealousy and stuff. Because we had on the podcast a hunter named Dustin Huff who killed the big He holds the biggest typical white tail in the US, so the nation’s record, but not bigger than the Hansoen buck, which is the world record. So he has the biggest white tail in the US. When he killed that whitetail, he killed it.

01:05:30
Speaker 2: Flat out, fair and square.

01:05:35
Speaker 1: But what do you think happened when he killed it?

01:05:38
Speaker 2: All over right away?

01:05:40
Speaker 1: All the ways in which he must have cheated it, do you know what I mean? Yeah, Yeah, he anticipated it coming and calls his Fish and Game office and he says, I just killed a huge buck, like it might be the big it might be a record. I just killed it. No one calls him back. Really well, then a while later they do call. You know why they call because all the reports they’re getting about how he cheated the system, he tried to get hold him in the first place, and that while so a lot of that stuff just comes because there’s so much jealousy and bitterness.

01:06:19
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, totally you know, but it’s a real mystery, dude.

01:06:25
Speaker 3: I’ve never killed a three seventy five Elk Bloom Crocodi Elk. I’ve gotten some three fifties, but I always figured if I did, you know, all hell is going to break loose, you know, just because people get so damn jealous, and you know, being the fact that I, you know, I hunt full time. Yep, Well he got it on his ranch or you know they had that elk you know, filming him every day. Blah blah blah. Sure, sure, it’s just yeah, you’re going to hear about it. Yeah, yeah, wondering to think about the mile Hanson buck with that buck was three years old, only three years old.

01:06:59
Speaker 1: That’s the thing I tell people too, Man, I didn’t know that to just recently all that talk about six seven years six years old, seven years old, the biggest I was the biggest buck ever killed?

01:07:10
Speaker 2: Yep, three yep? Nuts. Would he have been bigger than next year?

01:07:18
Speaker 3: Probably? I suppose you.

01:07:20
Speaker 1: Know another little wrinkle about the round polar buck. What that place don’t make big bucks, doesn’t It don’t make big bucks? Big bucks don’t come out of there, you know what a story? But someone told me it’s a freak, and freaks can happen anywhere. But it’s like it doesn’t make big bucks.

01:07:41
Speaker 3: You remember Gordon Eastman, Yo, Yeah.

01:07:43
Speaker 1: Dude, I remember him interviewing I remember listening to an interview of Gordon Eastman interviewing Don Lovac about.

01:07:51
Speaker 2: The call I thought was Lawbauer or whatever law Buck.

01:07:54
Speaker 3: They became partners and they did a bunch of videos together. Sure, man, But Gordon, he lived in Cody for a while. We got to be pretty good friends. He told me some wild stories when he’d take his little plane up in the Arctic and live with the Eskimos. But he told me every boona Crockett buck is a freak. Oh, every boone crocket buck is a freak. I mean that’s what he said.

01:08:16
Speaker 1: So anyway, yeah, that’s what this one one guy I was talking to you about that buck. He’s like, it’s a freaking freaks happen anywhere.

01:08:23
Speaker 2: It’s a freak. So maybe it was a freak year for a freak buck or.

01:08:27
Speaker 1: No, no, sorry not I mean sorry when I’m talking about the youngness of the Hanson buck, I mean maybe that was like a freak that it was, you know, but you wondered what he at five? Would he have been like extra the world record earlier gone downhill?

01:08:41
Speaker 3: I don’t know. Yeah, well since he was only three, I think he would probably be bigger. But I don’t know.

01:08:47
Speaker 2: What’s your uh you know, old fellers like you and.

01:08:51
Speaker 1: Me, Yeah, right, like I always shot like people.

01:08:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, people are like, hey, man, what what’s your You know, people have to.

01:08:58
Speaker 3: Get older than you, Steve.

01:08:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, they ask you like, uh, you know, youngster’s young. Little whipper snappers will tell to me about want and talk calibers, you know, and at this point I’m like, uh, like it’s like a tinge of embarrassment. You know when I talk about why I shoot a three hundred win mag a lot, right, I shoot it a lot. Yeah, I have other stuff. My kids shoot six five because I trained up my kids on suppressed six y five creedmores, because I just didn’t want them to develop, you know, fear of recoil, fear of noise. So suppressed six y five is like a very It’s a great way to break them in.

01:09:34
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:09:34
Speaker 1: I would shoot a three hundred win meg cause I just like, you know, I just I just shoot it at whatever.

01:09:38
Speaker 2: You know, it’s a great gun. What’s your where do you stand?

01:09:41
Speaker 1: You know, with all the new calibers and stuff, do you feel a need to stay hipped to the new calibers?

01:09:46
Speaker 2: You shoot the old classics.

01:09:47
Speaker 3: I shoot the old classics. You know, way back in sixty four, I graduated went graduated in high school, and my father in law told me to to go to a store and buy a gun. Now, that was just one of the pre sixty four’s. We’re going away. It was sixty four. It was an old electrical store in Burly, Utah, and they sold everything from diapers to washing machine you know, and every they had a few guns on the wall. So I went in there and I was going to pick out my gift, and I wanted a two seventy because I was a huge Jack O’Connor fan, you know. Okay, so doing no P six Pre sixty four two seventies. They had them two seventies, but they were brand new, and I didn’t want one. But they had a thirty h six Pre sixty four.

01:10:27
Speaker 1: Okay, And explain what you mean when you say, because people a lot of guys aren’t gonna what you mean.

01:10:32
Speaker 3: Might say at Pre sixty four nineteen the Quaw Extractor. And yeah, in nineteen sixty four Winchester came out with a modified super version of the old nineteen sixty four. But I’m not exactly sure all what the differences were. But I just knew that O’Connor was a serious fan, you know, of the two seventy, and but.

01:10:55
Speaker 1: That I think that pre I can’t remember, man, Like the guys are going to crucify me for not memoring this. I can’t remember what all the selling points were. I was like, I think point of manufacturer on Pre sixty four, something about the way of the extractor like it was a claw extractor and post wasn’t. But for for decades after that, people were built built custom rifles off Pre sixty four actions.

01:11:18
Speaker 2: They didn’t want the rest of the gun right and they want the action exactly.

01:11:22
Speaker 3: So anyway, I picked out that at thirty six, and I I was twenty four years old, and I used that gun for probably twenty years on elk and deer and moose whatever. And I mean, you know, you get a gun that is you’re sweet on it because it works, you know when you put it up through your shoulder and you know, it’s just it’s just right. I love that gun and being Honting editor and writing about it so much in the magazine. My boss, Clara Conley, he said, somebody, you write too much about that, Dan Winchester. We got another advertisers, you know that Remy and Savage and Marlin and Ruger and stuff. He says, you got to start using different guns. So I said, okay. So I went on a trip one time and Bridge Columby with Chuck Gager and.

01:12:12
Speaker 2: Chuck Yeager the right stuff, Chuck Yeager, yep, yep.

01:12:16
Speaker 3: We went out there hunting, hunting elk, and it was perfect time of the year, like September twenty sixth, prime bugle time. The woods were silent as hell, and we were staying in a cabin with an outfitter and he was hunting with a guy on one mountain. I was hunting with a guy on another mountain. Long story short, I finally saw a both alex standing in a small opening long, long ways away. There were no range finders in those days, and I had to shoot kind of over a canyon. I don’t know how far he was, but I took a shot, and I’m pretty sure I shot under him because he just stood there. Took another shot, nothing happened. The third shot, he kind of lurched and he ran off, and my guide was kind of standing behind a tree and he didn’t really couldn’t see it get a good view with that elk. So we went down and we looked for it. Couldn’t find anything. We crawled around, no hair, no no blood, no fur, nothing, and we just made big circles. And after literally forty five minutes or an hour, Carl, my guy, says, you must have missed him. I said, maybe I did. I don’t know, I said, I just thought I heard him. And he said, well, I’m going back. We had the horses tied up on a rage. He said, I’m going back up on the ridge. I said, I’m going to look a little bit more. So yeah, he looks with me, and so we left and we’re halfway to the horses and all of a sudden, I had this weird sensation like esp or whatever, and I heard that I heard a noise like an animal hitting the ground, and I saw that bull alert in my mind. I saw it. I said, Carl, that bull dead. He said, what are you talking about? I said, that bullt dead. Wait here if you want to, I’m going to go find that bull. And I ran straight to it. Really, I swear to God.

01:14:07
Speaker 2: What do you think it was?

01:14:09
Speaker 3: What had happened?

01:14:10
Speaker 2: Was? I mean, what do you think of? You?

01:14:12
Speaker 1: Just like your mind pulled up an image that, Yeah, like that you kind of hadn’t thought of as you viewed your memory.

01:14:19
Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s like another time I was hunting moose and all of a sudden it was real foggy and something was drilling into my back, something was looking at me, and the fog finally left and it was a Newfoundland and there’s this moose. But Anyway, I went right to that bull. What had happened. There was an old spruce straight it was kind of down in the ground, and it was typically It had kind of a big space around it, and there was these big branches growing out. That bull had fallen into that, into that hole. God, it was about that much of his time sticking out. And I don’t know why I didn’t smell it, because you know, an Elko bull, elk, he’s going to break a little bit. I think I was probably and three feet of that boat, crawling and looking, and I yelled the carl I found him. He says he was. He couldn’t believe it. But anyway, long story short, so Jager’s up on this mountain and he hears me shoot three times. So we go to camp that and I said, what the hell happened? Why did you have to shoot three times? He says, I said, well, I don’t know what do you use it? And I said, I’m using thirty out six? I said, well, why is your damn problem. We’re sitting around the campfire, right So he walks over with his whether it be mark five three hundred, he says, here’s a man’s gun. Get rid of that guy damn Pip squeak, So he didn’t know it. But I had promised that gun to my son because Claire Conley told me to use other guns, so I got his weather we and that’s when I had to finally quit using that thirty o six. But as far as other guns, you know, I’ve I don’t know. I’m just kind of a traditional, old old school guy, and I use a three hundred rum right now for elk. You know, run me to an ultramag and you know those cartridges, you put them next to a three seventy five. If you don’t look real close, you can’t hardly tell the damn difference. I mean it kicks like a mule and it’s not suppressed. But I love the gun. I use it for elk, boose bears, and for deer an antelope, I use a Kimber two seventy and that was kind of a special gun. One time, Chuck Yeger they wanted him to be a guest speaker for Pacific Northwest Steelheaders in Portland, Oregon, and they knew I knew Chuck, and if I invited a Chuck on a trip, he didn’t want his regular stipend. He wanted a trade for a hunting of fishing trip. He was on fish and nut. So I made a deal and I said, Chuck, if he’ll come to Portland, I already had researches, I’ll get you set up with five guys on five rivers in the Northwest area fishing for salmon at a boat and stuff. So we made that deal and he came. While we’re there, we went to the Kimber factory, which was in Portland at that time. They knew we were coming, and when the tour was over, they gave Chuck a rifle, seven of them m which is his favorite, and it said mock one in gold. That was the serial number. And they gave me that two seventy and it said Zumbo for the serial number. So it was so special. I still shoot it. So it is really Yeah, that’s great. But you know, as you know, everybody knows that it’s bullet placement. You know, for the most part. I remember O’Connor saying, when you shoot an elk with a two seventy right behind and that crease right behind the shoulder and get a double long shot, that bull’s golling eighty r and he’s dying which is pretty much you know, not always true, but it’s pretty much is. But so, you know a lot of people come out west from East Coast or when they’re hunting white tails, and they think they got to have a great, big, giant gun, but it’s not really and they’re afraid of it, you know, and they hate to shoot the damn thing, but they think they got to have it. So I always say, you know, shoot which you can shoot best, you know, back home, but don’t bring to thirty thirty. Yeah, you know, unless you’re in the woodards something.

01:18:07
Speaker 1: But first year I ever killed with a gun, pardon I said, the first year I ever killed with a gun. Yeah, I shot it with a open Sight Model ninety four thirty two special.

01:18:18
Speaker 3: Oh did you uh huh?

01:18:20
Speaker 1: This dude, I’ve told his story one hundred times, but this this dude was kind of a mentor, good buddy my dad’s. He had this cabin. His name is Eugene Grotors, and he had the he had these gun racks built into the ceiling of the cabin. He was in his eighties like yourself. And when I was a kid, though, and he would do this thing with kids. He did it with me where he’d say, Uh, you know, I I try to have one gun for every year I’ve been alive, really in the roof and when I was little, and he says, you know, and I counted the other day and realized I have an extra. And he would do this with kids. You know, I have an extra. And so he pulled that gun down and yeah, shot deer with it. And the dumbest thing I ever did, the dumbest thing I ever did, is I took it down and sold it at a place that sold wood stoves and guns. And that dude gave me three hundred bucks for it because I wanted a bolt gun. Dumbest thing I ever did, man, dumbest thing I ever did.

01:19:25
Speaker 2: The other thing I wanted to ask you about, like you do it?

01:19:31
Speaker 1: I mean you’re like for your age, dude, you’re doing like phenomenally well, right, Yeah, what’s it like in life when you get to where I mean, you know more people that are you’ve known more people that are dead than there are a lot I do you know what I’m saying, Oh.

01:19:48
Speaker 3: My buddy’s back eat dead, every one of them.

01:19:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, what’s that start to look like? You know what I mean? Like, how do you start, How do you think about all that? What’s that? Starting to feel like?

01:19:57
Speaker 3: Well, I’m thankful every day I get that I get out of bed, you know, being eighty five, because you know, I’m way beyond the normal age for white man and stuff. But I just wrote I’m writing a story right now for Buble magazine and have everything on ag And how you feel first seeing it happens pretty much is your balance starts going, like just putting on a Honting boot, no problem. But I got to the point where I realized it was easier to sit down or you know, to lace the thing up. So little things like that happened, and now I’m at the point where I can’t ride a horse anymore, and that really hurts.

01:20:45
Speaker 2: What what? What? What? What? What happens when you go to ride a horse?

01:20:49
Speaker 3: Your balance and just getting up on a thing, you know, when I go upstairs, I got to have a railing use a cane sometimes. But but I have a foot issue, and the issue and the heart the art seems to be okay. You know, my back, I’ve got back, serious back issues. But and I haven’t taken care of myself. You know, most of my hunts were remote wilderness hunts on horseback, and a lot of hiking in tough country. Early on, I was a forester. I did a lot of wildfire suppression, and which is I think the toughest job you can have, because you’re going there’s no timetable. You know, you got those. But so I was. I was always in a pretty dog on good shape. But then I realized, well, like right now, somebody wants me to do something to fall and it’s like, well, maybe I’ll be able to maybe I won’t be here. I mean, you can’t sit around and cry about it. And a lot of people say, you’re so damn lucky. You know that you can still do stuff. Yeah, because a lot of guys twenty years younger than I have given up punting because they just can’t, you know, they can’t get around. So it’s a sobering thing. One day I drove up the South working near Cody, which takes you up to the famous thoroughfare where Jack O’Connor is hunted a lot and I’ve hunted a lot, and I was sitting on the on the dirt road where the trailhead is, and I saw these guys come down. They had they were on horseback and they each led two horses, and I said it elk Antler’s six point bull and all the meat, two bulls, and I thought, I’ll never go up that trail again.

01:22:25
Speaker 2: Oh so.

01:22:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, But you know the only alternative is that you’re dead, right, Yeah. People complain about getting old, you know what I mean. It’s like, well, what would be the opposite of that?

01:22:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s being dead.

01:22:41
Speaker 3: My dad lived in ninety two, did he Yep? And that’s because he fell and broke his hip. When you followed.

01:22:47
Speaker 2: Breakerr hip at a certain age, death sentence.

01:22:49
Speaker 3: He’s going into rehab and then you’re going into the censet living and you’re going to rest home and then you’re done.

01:22:54
Speaker 2: Who are the people you miss the most?

01:22:56
Speaker 3: What?

01:22:56
Speaker 1: Who are the people the friends that you’ve lost? Like, who are the people but you missed the most?

01:23:01
Speaker 3: Oh gosh, Oh golly, there’s a lot of them. Oh gosh. One of my one of the my all time best buddy. The name was Louis Gizarelli, real Italian name, yep. And we were buddies since we were twelve, and we were in boy Scouts together and we hunted and fish like crazy. We trapped and we’d be riding our bicycles at five in the morning before school to check our muskrat traps. And we’re the best of friends. And the year before I joined out our wife in seventy eight, he got killed. He somehow he had he had rolled off a bridge and his truck landed. The water was only two foot deep, and his truck landed on its on its top, and he drowned in the truck. Oh, and I missed that guy. We go to Newfoundland fishing for ATLANTICX. We’re hunting bears, you know, and we had so I mean, weach catch yellow perch and bluegills the hell one habit and a lot of times I’d be hunting squrels and I’m having my game pocket and at the end of the day, they’re all stiff, you know, and it’s hard to skin. LUI said, leave the damn things here, I’ll do it. That kind of guy, we’d always fight away the best mentos in the bucket, you know, when we’re on the boat, in the best worms. Uh. Yeah, he was. He was special, But they’re just most of the guys that I miss a lot were the guy’s back case. We had a cabin in the d around and the catch skills. Deer cabin typical deer cabin, you know.

01:24:39
Speaker 2: And but.

01:24:43
Speaker 3: So yeah, it’s it’s tough because you know, people are dying every day, especially as you get older, and sometimes there’s there’s a you know, they get killed in an accident or whatever.

01:24:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is tough, man. Yeah.

01:24:59
Speaker 1: The thing that I got a real good buddy I lost. And you know what haunts me the most about that is the times I had negative that I had negative comments about him to other friends about whatever. We get into a skirmish about something, you know, and I’d have negative comments about him.

01:25:20
Speaker 2: That sticks with me now.

01:25:21
Speaker 1: Man, the feeling of how I should never have said that ship anytime we had it. We knew each other for many, many years, so of course we had like disagreements.

01:25:29
Speaker 2: That sticks with you. Tell people about your books. You got a handful of them here.

01:25:35
Speaker 1: I don’t know that your first book, This is crazy, but your first book was called Ice Fishing East and West.

01:25:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn’t know about this one. I know.

01:25:44
Speaker 3: It’s out of print, but it’s funny. That cover Hard Catch sent me. That cover look snowmobiles.

01:25:49
Speaker 2: Yeah that’s yeah, Yeah, fish cleaning, snow.

01:25:58
Speaker 3: Travel yeahty on the ice were to fine fish. Yeah, that book. Let’s say I wrote it in seventy six. I think, God am mighty, that’s port fifty years old. Huh.

01:26:11
Speaker 1: I don’t know how I didn’t know about this book because we I come from longland ice fish.

01:26:15
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:26:16
Speaker 2: Man, yeah.

01:26:17
Speaker 3: Well the editor of that book, he was with Outdoor Life and he worked for David O. McKay company in New York City, and he saw me at the shot show and he said, once, write a book on ice fishing, which is latch, write a book on cottontail rabbits. I said, who the hell was going to buy that?

01:26:32
Speaker 2: Po So, yeah, you sold one copy? Yeah, I’ve known about it. Did this Did this ice fishing book sell any copies?

01:26:41
Speaker 3: No?

01:26:42
Speaker 2: Not really, I can’t picture it would.

01:26:44
Speaker 3: That was back in the days where you do the royalty thing, like you get ten percent of this first first ten thousand books, and twelve percent for the next ten and fifteen percent for the next.

01:26:54
Speaker 1: And I don’t think that. I don’t know what it’s like and never want to make any jingle for you.

01:26:58
Speaker 3: That was back in the day when I mean you win you ice fish. Nowadays got all kinds of stuff, you know, obviously just a ton of new stuff. Back in the old days, you drill the hole and you stood there with the warmest clothes you could do like a man. Yeah, you stick your hand in that damn cold bait bucket and grab a minnow and the wind or whatever. You just stay there. And so it wasn’t there was no really technology to it. Today, you know, there’s all sorts of stuff.

01:27:25
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:27:26
Speaker 1: Even when I was young, so much ice fishing gear was homemade. Yeah, you know my man would make his ice fishing absolutely, yeah, yeah, a lot of it was homemade.

01:27:36
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:27:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, but these books took off, man.

01:27:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, they did really well. It was to Heck with Deer, to Heck with out the Heck with Moose. Basically, those are just stories that I’ve written, Like each one has like thirty stories in them, uh huh about crazy stuff, you know, each each one of us Hunt the Heck with Moose is actually a compilation of everything other than deer and elk, like moose, caribou, sheep, antelope. So those are all kinds of different stories. You regret naming it to Heck with I do you know, people, there worn’t the hell or what’s what’s wrong with that book, and there was just a.

01:28:11
Speaker 2: Title you on it bugs you?

01:28:12
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. But once I explained it, then they looked at it. I said, yeah, okay, and to heck with to heck with how to get an easy yelk. That’s kind of just a In fact, Pat McManus wrote the forward in that book.

01:28:26
Speaker 1: That was a funny man. I never met him. With my guys, that got funny. We’re emailing around favorite Pat McManus.

01:28:31
Speaker 2: Quotes the other day. Yeah, just the other day.

01:28:35
Speaker 3: It was so much fun.

01:28:37
Speaker 2: But it was a funny, funny guy.

01:28:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, he was. I would read him as a kid. Can I tell you quick? Pat McManus, the editor about their life, said, why don’t you and McManus go in a hunt somewhere and write a double feature, you know, side by side, and each of you tell what happened in that hunt. Mm hmm. So we uh decided, well, let’s go and hunt something that’s got fangs and clarks, you know, to make it make it real, real interesting. So we went on a bear hunting British Columbia with Remington and a bunch of writers and it was a real crazy spring. It was snow everywhere and the bears were not out. They were in the cottonwood trees, way up in the cottonwood trees, and you could look out over this river and see five or six bears, black blobs, but they were kind of smallesh bears. You know, I don’t think there was a six footer up there eating in there in British Columbia.

01:29:34
Speaker 1: Like, no, they’re laying up, they’re eating, uh yeah, yeah eating.

01:29:39
Speaker 2: It was big buds.

01:29:41
Speaker 3: So well, nobody’s doing very well. And on the fourth day, Pat got a bear. Okay, so of course he’s a humor writer, he gets a bear. I don’t have a bury yet, right, So the last day, my guy and I were driving around and there’s a bear standing there looking at us, like seventy eighty yards away, piece of cake, you know, meat on the table, and he’s just looking at us in the snow. So I got out of the truck, set up my sticks and I said, you know, there’s my bear. I fired and he just looked at me. He didn’t do a damn thing. He just then he kind of just ambled off and waddled away. That bear would not hit so the guy, so I said, I missed him. The guy said, you sure, hell did miss him? What the hell happened? I said, I don’t have any idea. So I said, I’m going to go up there where the bear was. I’m going to find his tracks. And I looked for blood tube they know, And I’m gonna you stand right where I shot from, draw a straight line and I looked in There is the top of a Douglas fir tree laying in the snow. There was a little hole in it. The bullet had deflected. Yeah, so we go back to camp, passing our tent. Here’s us pull up. Do you get what? I said? Yeah, I got one. Where is it? I said, right there? And he looks at that piece of tree and learn laughing like how I told him the story. So there’s a little place where you get cell service. So I called the editor in New York and I said, I got a I got an interesting story. I said, Pat got a bear and I didn’t. And there’s a silence. He says, well, we can’t run that story. I said, well, think about it. You know, it’s it’s a fun story. What is Pat right? He said? Zumble was after that Doug fur, that trophy Doug fur, and he waited for that bear to walk around behind it to present a good silhouette, and he fired and he got the fur. But that’s just Pat, you know. He golly. We used to do a stand up act for the Elk Foundation on stage and he tells his famous deer on a bicycle story. People, I saw one guy fall off his chair. He was laughing. So, no, wonder what the hell am I doing up here with Pat McManus. You know, we were close friends and and uh, but all I do is tell some stories. I didn’t try to get funny, but he was. Yeah, because that guy, man, he was hilarious, but he wasn’t really funny in person.

01:32:20
Speaker 1: You know, that’s a weird deal about real funny People’s the funniest people aren’t funny in person. Yeah, yeah, they don’t have they run, they run out of energy, a little bit of that. Yeah, the funniest, funniest people performers aren’t funny in person. And sometimes the funniest people in person aren’t funny and performers.

01:32:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, you’re right.

01:32:44
Speaker 2: That’s a weird deal. Man. So when you’re hanging out with them, he’s not just cracking jokes left and right. Was that? What when you’re.

01:32:51
Speaker 1: Hanging out with Patrick McManus. He’s not just cracking jokes left and right when you’re driving down the road.

01:32:58
Speaker 3: No, we just we just, I don’t know. We talk about the magazine, you know, and the jerks we know, and one.

01:33:08
Speaker 2: Do you guys know a lot of jerks?

01:33:09
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah. Some of the editors were they’re off from New York, in New Jersey and Connecticut, you know, so were you? Yeah? Yeah, but I took off out west and I started hunting at a young age. Those guys never got it, got it, got it?

01:33:23
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:33:24
Speaker 3: But uh, Pat was the kind of guy where a stranger could walk up to him and he started talking to him, and so you want to go to lunch with us? I mean, he was that kind of guy.

01:33:35
Speaker 2: M hm.

01:33:36
Speaker 3: But one of one of my greatest articles was when Pat died. The editors asked me to write a tribute to him on his back page and out.

01:33:45
Speaker 2: Door, to take his column yeah.

01:33:48
Speaker 3: And write about him. That was fun.

01:33:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, that guy was funny man.

01:33:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, he saw so many books, some of them and made the New York Times bestseller lists, you know, and m hm, and uh he also had someone do a play. I didn’t know that, especially around Montana and Idaho. He’d actually impersonate Pat and uh oh really yeah, Pat wasn’t there, but he impersonated him and they did a great show. But Pat could make anybody laugh, even even the wives that didn’t hunt. You know, he like he right about backing up a trailer a whole column, make it, make it funny as hell. One time. Yeah, he actually started with Field and Stream and Claire Conley stole him away from Field and Stream got out out there like well. Pat told me one time an editor called and said, the artist wants to know what your next column is going to be about so he can start working on it. Pat had no idea. He said, it’s about a box. He said, okay, what kind of box? He said, A green box? A green box?

01:34:54
Speaker 2: How big?

01:34:55
Speaker 3: Oh? Not as big as a coffin. Okay, So they went with that. He had no idea what and he wrote about it.

01:35:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s good, that’s good.

01:35:08
Speaker 1: Well, man, I appreciate you coming on the show and taking the time to drive up here.

01:35:11
Speaker 3: I’ll tell you I wanted to meet you for a long time because I know you are You can tell you’re so genuinely involved in hunting and fishing, and I get so much out of your podcast. You did one on CWD recently. I learned a lot of stuff you do. Yeah, oh yeah, I saw when you went to North Dakota to the Bobcat Sale.

01:35:32
Speaker 2: Learned a lot of stuff from Nevada.

01:35:34
Speaker 3: Oh was that Nevada?

01:35:35
Speaker 2: Yes, sir No.

01:35:38
Speaker 3: I really enjoy your stuff, and it’s a pleasure to meet you and do the podcast. So I appreciate that.

01:35:43
Speaker 1: You know, I want to share this with people that we met down in Cody, Wyoming, and you gave me some smoked trout, and it’s great smoke trout.

01:35:54
Speaker 2: I ever really loved it.

01:35:55
Speaker 1: But I wound up they want to be in well traveled smoked trout because I took that I took I had one pack left.

01:36:03
Speaker 2: And I took it to the Bahamas. We brought our own food down, Oh my gosh.

01:36:08
Speaker 1: Right, we charted a plane to get out to a remote area, so we brought you know, deer and elk and whatnot. And I threw that smoked trout in there. And so we’re sitting out there and the Bahamas on like the you know, the clean mother fishing grounds, you know, all these dead fish on ice, right, and we’re sitting around eating that smoke trout and my buddy down there, Yeah, he’s fished all over the world, you know. Yeah, And we’re eating Zumbo’s smoked trout and he’s just blown away how good it is. And he’s like, man, how could I make this with something down here? You know what I used down here?

01:36:42
Speaker 2: Yeah?

01:36:43
Speaker 3: I didn’t tell you this, but I got that right. I’ve been smoking fish all my life, in like since my twenties, and I had one of those little little cheef smokers, you know, sure, and Lord Jensen, I think out of that.

01:36:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, everybody, Yeah, that was like the smoker.

01:36:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I never was happy with the with the Brian. I just wasn’t happy. And I go to Alaska. Man, I had such good stuff. And one day I have mice fishing at Cody on Buffalo Bolloe Reservoir and there was a bunch of old guys there and I didn’t know we got bs and and one guy said he had retired from a meat process and wild meat processing business. I said, oh, well, that means I cut up stuff and you smoke stuff, right, He said, yeah, yeah. We smoked deer hams and pheasants and ducks and does he smoked fish too? He said, oh yeah. I says, now that you’re retired, could I get your brine recipe? Because this guy’s a pro. He says, Wait a minute. He goes up to his truck and he’s got a package of smoke drott. He gives it to me and I said, holy smokes, I haven’t looking for this all my life. So I didn’t do it. I just got that from him.

01:37:39
Speaker 2: Are you willing to share?

01:37:41
Speaker 3: Yeah?

01:37:41
Speaker 2: Tell people right now. Okay, lay it out.

01:37:44
Speaker 3: Two cups of brown sugar, half a cup of white sugar, and one cup of tender.

01:37:49
Speaker 2: Quick people, Smortan’s Tender Quick.

01:37:52
Speaker 3: Tender Quick.

01:37:53
Speaker 1: If you want to make, like, if you want to make your own like corn meat, this is like the quick and easy way of doing it.

01:37:57
Speaker 2: That product. I buy that product. I order that shit on Amazon. Yeah. Yeah, because it’s hard to find.

01:38:02
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I found it in Alberson’s and Cody it’s it’s it’s made by Morton Morton Salt yep. And it comes in a blue bag, maybe a two pound bag, but it’s actually a meat cure. It’s got a sodium nitrate and nitrate. So I’ve actually sent smoked fish across the country, and you know, it takes four or five days and it’s warm and it’s it’s okay because.

01:38:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, you take it down to the Bahamas, dude.

01:38:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s right. Yeah, but anyway, I put it on dry yep, take your flase, take the flies skin on. Of course, I’m going to smoke them and just lay them in a tub and just keep sprinkling that that mixture on them. And then and as soon it hits the cold fish, it turns to liquid. It looks just like maple syrup.

01:38:47
Speaker 2: Ye starts drawing a moisture out.

01:38:49
Speaker 3: Yeah. I let them. I let them soak for about nine hours. Then they rid them off in cold water.

01:38:55
Speaker 1: I like how you take your own chains on. You cut your own wood chips for your smoke. Yeah, just pick your saw cuttings.

01:39:01
Speaker 3: Yep.

01:39:02
Speaker 2: You ever rip it length wise to get bigger cuttings.

01:39:04
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, you get those big.

01:39:06
Speaker 2: Big, big curl cues.

01:39:07
Speaker 3: Yeah. But what I did is I took I had a friend in an outfit everybody in Montana Billy stocked. Billy Stocked, and he lived in the Wise River, and he had a chainsaw and he put vegetable oil in it, and he cut his out.

01:39:21
Speaker 2: So he had food grade chips.

01:39:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that’s what I did. I had a saw and I put take on the old oil out and put the vegetable oil. So so when you’re cutting the wood, you didn’t have oil resident in the wood. You know.

01:39:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s a good move Maneh.

01:39:36
Speaker 2: We’ll get masked. So much.

01:39:37
Speaker 1: Appreciate you coming out. It’s it’s a real honor to me. It’s honor to the show.

01:39:40
Speaker 2: They have you on.

01:39:42
Speaker 3: Thank you, sir. I really appreciate it.

01:39:44
Speaker 2: Everybody, Jim’s Umbo, thanks man.

01:39:46
Speaker 3: Thank you.