Ep. 757: Surviving and Thriving (and Finding a Dead Man) in the Alaska Bush

00:00:08
Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underware. Listening past, you can’t predict anything 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. All right, man, Randy Brown is back. No, not Dave. It’s the opposite of debut return, repeat en court performance by Randy Brown. Because because Randy came on, what what the hell do we call that episode?

00:01:00
Speaker 2: Living in the woods, living off the land?

00:01:03
Speaker 1: Fifteen years living off land? Randy Brown came in some time ago, I don’t know, and it was spectacular. We couldn’t we didn’t scratch the surface. We talked like just a recap to tell people the years you lived, the years you went out and.

00:01:17
Speaker 2: Lived off the land in Alaska. Well it was about fifteen altogether, okay, yeah.

00:01:23
Speaker 1: And this is recap, just yeah, we’re gonna recap. Yeah. Yeah.

00:01:27
Speaker 2: And so I went out on the Yukon and it was you know, mush dogs and built cabins. Was able to persuade Karen Love My Life to come out there with me, which was that was probably one of the tougher things to do.

00:01:44
Speaker 1: But yeah, it was.

00:01:45
Speaker 2: And then she would teach in a few times out in some of the rural communities and that was fun too, you know, taking as I would, mush dogs and fish and hunt, seeing new places in the state.

00:02:00
Speaker 1: And you did a lot of a lot of fur trapping. And when you came on, we told the story of you finding a body a guy tried to find out the identity of that body. I even brought it up on Rogan’s podcast, thinking that him having such a huge audience would turn up some stuff. We’ll check in with you in a minute there, okay, to find out if we found out any uh, if you’ve ever gotten any intriguing hints about the body you found. The guy you called Smeegel called himself John the Baptist. And then the reason why he wanted you to come back on is because we never because we talked about all this big picture stuff like timeline and all that, but we didn’t get into a lot of the nuts and bolts tactical stuff about living off the country in Alaska. So I want to get back into a bunch of things with you. But the minute we got done recording, I was like, man, I dude’s got to come back on, and our audience as well wanted to come back on because we did. We did. We haven’t fully extracted all the usable information from your brain. Okay, we’re gonna we’re gonna continue the We’re gonna we’re gonna dive into the Randy Brown brain extraction and find out more about just kind of like a life that’s like, uh, staggering in its boldness. That’d be a good blurb. Yeah that’s a blurb, but staggering in its boldness. Yeah, there you go.

00:03:22
Speaker 3: Uh.

00:03:24
Speaker 1: Before we do that, here’s a couple of things. Randall and I, doctor Randall, and I work on this this series. I’m telling the audience thiss not you, but you can listen. We work on a series called meat Eaters of American History. So uh as you guys know it, because we uhould do podcast episodes. When we launched these different volumes of meat Eaters of American History. So the first Meat Eaters of American History we did is we did one on the long hunters, and so the most famous long hunter being Daniel Boone. So we get a meat Eater’s of American History, The Laws, and that covered the years I believe it was seventeen sixty three to seventeen seventy five, and it was about the deer skin trade, primarily around Appalachia, the Kentucky region, but the American Colonial Frontier deer skin trade. The second volume of meat Eaters American History we did was called The Mountain Men, and that covered eighteen oh six to eighteen forty and that was about the beaver skin trade of those years. Well, Volume three is coming out. Pre sales are available now. It’s an audio original, so it’s not a print book. It’s an audio original. Volume three is available now and it’s called me Eater’s American History, The Hide Hunters, and it’s about the buffalo skin trade and it covers eighteen sixty five, so it starts at the end of the Civil War, covers up until eighteen eighty three, which was the last great shoot. At that point they were gone, they were effectively gone. So Meetater’s American History The Hide Hunters tells this story of the buffalo hide hunters predominantly dudes, kind of spun out of the chaos of the Civil War. The Big Hide Hunt starts down in Kansas. First it moves south into Texas, then it moves north into Montana. And it’s that story of kind of the wind down of the Civil War, the chaos and catastrophe of the Civil War, the American government, the federal government, turning its eyes westward after the Civil War is over, turning it westward in two ways, railroad expansion and the Indian Wars, and how those efforts kind of opened up the great planes to the hide hunters, who very quickly put themselves out of business by killing all of their target animals. It’s a story about leather production. It’s a story about combat between whites and Native Americans on the southern plains, and it’s a story about just really not understanding the finiteness of a resource. So Meat Eater’s American History, The High Hunters eighteen sixty five to eighteen eighty three available for pre order. Now another little news bit here, So the met Eater crew is hitting the road again this fall. Last year, a bunch of our guys headed out to do tailgate tours. A bunch more guys are heading out to do tail gate tours this year. Meat Eater Tailgate Tour presented by Dometic. If you have a camper like an RV unit, and you look at the fridge and your RV unit, there’s a high likelihood, it says Dometic on it. They make all kinds of camping gear, electric coolers, they make all kinds of stuff, tons of great products. So presented by Dometic. Got free food, you can hang out with the crew. Texas at Ohio State that’s on August thirty, that’s Randall and Giannis. Kansas at Missouri that’ll be Clay and Baron Newcombe. That’s Columbus, Missouri September six. What’s UTEP mean? University of Texas Huh? At Texas that’s easy. Yeah, that’s Texas v Texas Austin, Texas, Saturday, September thirty. Jesse Griffiths will be there slinging some grub. And then Maryland at Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin, September twenty. That’ll be Spencer Chester and Garrett Long. Garrett Long. Yeah, they’re slinging grub at the tailgate tour. So any of these places go on the tailgate tour. You’re gonna come out. You’re gonna see their tent and you can go get hang out and get free food. Meet eater tailgate tour. Oh I miss some Seth and Brody. Oh this because this is like cess little home spot Oregon at penn State University Park, Pennsylvania, September twenty seventh, Our two big Pennsylvania guys, Seth and Brodi, you’re gonna be running that tailgate tour. And then Boise State at Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana, Saturday, October four. That’s gonna be Mark, Jannie and Garrett slinging grub for the tailgate tour at that game. Stop in and see those fellas. An quick thing. I think we’re off to the races. Oh no, yeah, one more thing. We’re off to the race. Is that correct? No? Two more things? Oh, you guys have been seeing us like everybody. A lot of the guys have coming out on the show kind of living this first light navigator hoodie. These are out and available. I didn’t know they made them in this color until I got one there day. I know. And I’m supposed to tell everybuddy about all the wild, crazy hunting, fishing trips I’ve done in mind my fleece lined hoodie. But I just wear it all the time. I wear it on the plane, I wear it when I’m yelling at my kids. I wear it when I’m having dinner at my wife. It’s just my main like garment. Check it out at first light dot com. It’s the most comfortable thing I own. I live in it. Oh. The last thing. If there’s any people out there, this could be you who are like wizards at GE freezers, listen to this problem I have. I have a brand new GE freezer at my fish shack in Alaska. It’s not it’s one year old. The first year it worked, okay. First off, when you get a freezer to a place like that, it’s not co the back. It’s like it came out on a boat. Right. You’re not gonna like bring it in for service. This is it gonna work? Brand new Ge Chess freezer. The year I get it, it works fine, come back up in May it doesn’t work anymore. But get this, it’s like it’s possessed on this freezer. This is for someone that’s a ge like I need your help if this thing’s on the on light doesn’t come on if you turn it off. You follow me. If you turn the dial and click it off, the on light comes on, but it doesn’t turn on. If you open the lid, the on light goes off. This is like an electronics problem. No again, If you turn it off, the on light comes on, but it doesn’t turn on. And if you if the lit up, the on light goes off. The compressors do not run. It’s possessed. If I call someone eight hundred number, I am It’s like, no, there’s no person on the planet that you’re gonna call on a one eight hundred number that is gonna be like, oh, what you need to do is blank? You follow my problem? Do you understand what I’m saying? What could cause that? If you’re out there and you are like a wizard at freezers send a go to the meat eater at the meter dot com and write like freezers in the subject line. I will like if you have If you know, I will, I will call you and we will talk about it. I feel like it needs like a new It’s something electronic. Man maybe got a fault, but it worked. It’s probably under warranty. But what do you do? I can’t haul it out of there. I’m not going to bring it to town. No, it’s eight hundred bucks down the drain. You want, Yeah, you’d have to burn all the insulation up. You can’t even get rid of a freezer like that. I just like that’s a moment of like in speech, there’s a moment of silence to like have people meditate on something. I want people to meditate, to meditate from minute on this there. If you know a lot about freezers, man, I need to talk to you because I know that like calling a one eight hundred number isn’t going to do it. It’s gonna be a dude that barely speaks English, and I’m like, oh no, check out, you turn it off. You know, it’s just like it’s never gonna work. So what’d you find out about? Can you recap the John the Baptist story for us? Okay, just a quick recap because I want to find out if we’ve found out.

00:13:15
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, Yeah. So so John the Baptist that’s what he called himself, came down and got abandoned, came downs, came down to Yukon between the towns of Eagle and Circle. So it came down from Canada. That’s what he claims, and I think he’s I think that was true. And then with his buddy, with his buddy, and his buddy then shoved their raft off and and left at one point in time, and he happened to be near the mouth of the Candick River where this fella Fred lived, and Fred took him in for a while.

00:13:55
Speaker 1: And can you remind everybody what year this is? This is.

00:14:02
Speaker 2: I think it was nineteen seventy eight, seventy nine. Yeah, And.

00:14:09
Speaker 1: So then.

00:14:11
Speaker 2: Fred ended up going back east to visit family. He hadn’t been back east in a bunch of years at that point, and told him he had to leave, and he didn’t. And he just stayed and had his way with all the Fred’s stuff, food for his equipment, and actually moved a bunch of stuff from his cabin it was out the mouth of Candy to a place about three miles up up river up on the Candy and smoked all his weed and ate most of his fish.

00:14:52
Speaker 1: And was there a lot of weed smoking in those days up there? No could you grow it or did you have to bring it in?

00:15:00
Speaker 2: People did, but it’s uh it it requires you know, some sort of a of a night day period that you don’t have up there. So it was, uh, I don’t know, there were there were people that grew it.

00:15:13
Speaker 1: But also like if you’re trying to grow weed and it’s daylight twenty four hours a day, the weed doesn’t like that.

00:15:21
Speaker 2: It doesn’t it doesn’t grow well. No, and uh, and I don’t I didn’t grow it at all. I didn’t do any gardening. But but yeah, so so Fred did though, but it was kind of rudimentary. He would throw a dog shit and seeds up on the roof of his cabin and that’s how he grew it, which is just you know.

00:15:42
Speaker 1: These spin in a medium of dog shit.

00:15:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that was the that was the fertilizer.

00:15:50
Speaker 1: So that’s not even that’s not even ditch weed, man, you know, no, but.

00:15:57
Speaker 2: For Fred, that was better than nothing, right, And so except that this guy then.

00:16:01
Speaker 1: Saw you, I mean, I don’t know. I mean, like, you could tell me that it was I’m not like a I’m not a connoissewer. I don’t even partake, but you could tell me that. You could tell me that the best weed in the world girls out of dog shit, and I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t refute it. I don’t know either.

00:16:20
Speaker 2: Well, well, but but if anyway, fred Fred got pissed off and told him that, you know, when he did come back in November, that he had to get out of there, he had to leave, go to Circle or go to Eagle when the river froze up.

00:16:34
Speaker 3: And he he.

00:16:36
Speaker 2: Took a different tactic, and he said he’s going to go to chel Keittswick, which was way north and all, you know, through the woods and everything, and and and.

00:16:45
Speaker 1: How many miles would that be when he when this guy says he’s going to go overland.

00:16:48
Speaker 2: Well it would be over one hundred miles. Yeah, the way you’d have to walk and and through you know forest or a windy old black river. You know that now it’s called the Dronjic. Name was changed not too long ago. And yeah, but we didn’t think that he could make it. There’s not a chance in hell that he could. He could do that.

00:17:15
Speaker 1: He he because he didn’t have You could make it, though, I don’t think so. Oh why could you not make it?

00:17:22
Speaker 2: Well, it’s pretty barren country, you know, I mean I would if I went, you’d still have to shoot a moose or shoot a or shoot some cariboo, but there weren’t very many caribou there. There were cariboo near the border because that was where the Ogili Mountains stopped, you know, and that it was wintering ground porcupine caribou that we would get in the Upper Candic River, Upper Nation River, and in the in the Black River, but close to the border because then it gets into flats and the caribou just didn’t go there very often, so to be unlikely that you could run across Cariboo going straight U to chuck KEATSI.

00:18:02
Speaker 1: Now, I haven’t done like, I’ve never done these kind of walks up there. But one hundred miles I understand, Like why couldn’t you just like with a pack of food. I mean, how many miles a day can you get in that kind of stuff.

00:18:21
Speaker 2: Well, you know, you could probably go you know, six or eight miles, ten miles maybe if you were if you were good, you had a good pair of snow shoes. You know, when when the country is it is covered in snow, you know, three four feet of snow on the ground. It’s tough breaking trail. I got you, It’s not a simp.

00:18:43
Speaker 1: I wasn’t factoring in I wasn’t thinking about it that way. I wasn’t thinking about it being the wintertime cold and shit it snow.

00:18:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it’s a lot easier to walk on the on the rivers than trying to bust across country. And you know, when you got all sorts of brushing, and you know different some areas have burned and have down trees, and it’s it’s.

00:19:06
Speaker 1: Pretty tough, you know.

00:19:07
Speaker 2: So you got there’s a lot of different issues, but part of it is feeding yourself. He had a twenty two that Fred len him a twenty two pistol. He had his buddy had left left him with this twenty gauge double barrel, twenty gauge rossy shotgun. But he didn’t have any ammunition for it. Neither did we, and and so he he he had a twenty two pistol. Well, you’re not going to shoot a moose or anything large with it that could actually feed you. And even if you did shoot a moose, you wouldn’t be able to take it very far.

00:19:41
Speaker 1: So it’s possible that you could that you could.

00:19:46
Speaker 2: I mean, if if I were to set off on that kind of a journey, you’d have the equipment that you needed to do it. You know, you’re going to either either poke holes in a in a pond or near a beaver house on a river and snare at trap beavers, you know, to feed yourself. Have some dogs along. I help you with moving stuff.

00:20:10
Speaker 1: But that breaking across country like.

00:20:14
Speaker 2: That is really tough, and you know, and you’d have to feeding yourselves and everything else. So you know, you just don’t have that much small game that you could feed yourself very easily within the winter.

00:20:26
Speaker 1: So what was this dude’s if he had easy access to go on the ice to two different towns on the Yukon, what was his draw? Like? Why did he want to travel cross country to the north.

00:20:42
Speaker 2: I have no idea, Okay, I have no idea, but that’s what he that’s what he told Fred.

00:20:48
Speaker 1: He took off.

00:20:51
Speaker 2: And he ended up finding this little cabin that we had built a couple of years before. It’s just a safety cabin about ten miles up and.

00:21:00
Speaker 1: We so he made it ten miles yeah out of one hundred.

00:21:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, And and that’s where that’s where he stayed. And and he did he did get something. So you know, there was a ball jar in there that had a Martin skin in it and uh, and he had he had peed in it too. It was urine in there with the Martin skin. I think he was trying to I think he was trying to tan it or something.

00:21:31
Speaker 3: I don’t know, but.

00:21:32
Speaker 2: Just soaking it and piss yeah, And I mean that’s what he did. I we you don’t know what was in his mind. Yeah, I have no idea what was in his mind, but that’s what we kind of thought. But but that was he got that with a twenty two clearly, you know. And and but you know Martin or Bold, you know, they’ll come down a tree and yell at you and.

00:21:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, other things. I touched one one time. What’s that I was able to touch one one time? Uh, A live one huh just real. Yeah, he’s real curious. I was bowl hunting. He’s real curious. Yeah, And he was kind of on a tree and I just wanted to see if I could, and actually he was so I mean, there’s not many animals to let you do that. No, I was actually able to put my hand on it.

00:22:13
Speaker 2: I don’t think they fear anything, yeah, really, and I think they feel they’re pretty on top of it and deal with whatever. They’re a bold animal and uh and so as are you know, the the ermines, the weasels.

00:22:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, they’re they’re They’re pretty scary.

00:22:33
Speaker 2: Actually when you I caught one one time, and I was trapping voles at our place in Fairbanks and feeding them to our I had a bull snake for a while and uh, this was after we had moved in there, and uh, and I would feed it the voles. Well, I catch this this uh and it was a live catch trap, you know, a little have a heart and uh. And I caught a weasel and uh. And I had this little bird cage and I could open the door on the bird cage and let the ermine into the cage and close the door and then wire it closed.

00:23:11
Speaker 1: But you know those.

00:23:12
Speaker 2: Cartoons where they have the cat running around on the wall sideways, you know, That’s how this guy was in that, in that bird cage. And he would take a moment off every once in a while and jump to the side of the cage closest to me and scream, you know, and then go back to running around. I go, well, this guy is going to get out of this. This won’t hold him for very long. And so I went out and turned him loose because he’ll probably kill the snake. I put him in with a snake. But they’re a trip.

00:23:45
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:23:45
Speaker 2: But anyway, we’re back to Smiegel, right. So he’s he’s in this in this cabin that we had built back in the woods because we didn’t want airplanes to see us. Actually since I you know what started flying and with my job, it’s it’s amazing how easy you spot something that’s rectangular down in the woods. It’s it’s almost nothing can hide. But why are we trying to hide it from planes? We just we didn’t know whether somebody would try and come and kick us off. Okay, so we would We just built our cabins as deep into the forest as possible.

00:24:23
Speaker 1: Got it, and he found and then later you learned that that’s not an effective strategy.

00:24:28
Speaker 2: It’s not an effective strategy. They’ll that you can see it well, you know, almost always.

00:24:34
Speaker 1: So so anyway, he found it.

00:24:37
Speaker 2: I don’t know how the heck he found it and and and stayed there, you know, whether he whether he froze his feet or whether he he you know, I don’t know what what drove him, but but he was there and and dead when we found him the next spring.

00:24:58
Speaker 1: So you were one. Yeah, And then just to remind listeners a little bit some of this backstory, Yeah, you found him dead. Was he so was he rotted down or just frozen? No? Well, I think he had froze, you know.

00:25:15
Speaker 2: But you know, a cabin is insulated in the winter so that you can build a fire and keep it warm inside. And then once once the fire goes out and it turns cold in there, then that cabin insulates it from the spring, you know, and it started warming up. So I don’t think he’d been thawed for very long because he wasn’t rotten, and he was just he was just.

00:25:42
Speaker 1: Just dead and his hair was slipping just a little bit on his forehead. And you said he was just skin and bones, skin and bones. Yeah, And you picked him up and left them out on the tundra.

00:25:52
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:25:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, we thought about trying to take him down to Circle, but it was that would have been a several day endeavor in the side of the Yukon at that point, not long after breakup were just packed with ice. Breakups are different every year on the Yukon, you know, and sometimes they flow over the banks. Sometimes they just slush out and it’s not a big deal. That particular breakup though, had put ice packed onto the banks, and so it was difficult to actually get someplace off of the river to park and walk into the woods or do other things. And so we just figured that it would put us just in an uncomfortable position, not being able to feed ourselves and things if we had gone down there. We didn’t have any money or anything, and so it was we just took him out in the woods and left.

00:26:49
Speaker 1: Him and it never heard another thing about it, no, never.

00:26:56
Speaker 2: And so after the last podcast where we talked about that, there was a fella from I got contacted by a couple of people.

00:27:06
Speaker 1: Who might who had tips, who potentially had tips.

00:27:08
Speaker 2: Well, so one one fella was a French Canadian and he wanted to know whether he was a Native or a or a or a white man and if we could tell, and he was he was a white guy. And and they said, well, you know, in in French Canada, uh, some people you know might have the name Juan Baptiste. And we may have interpreted it, I mean, but she wrote it, so it was he was calling it John the Baptist, but well he wrote it on what he wrote that note to Fred on the door and signed it John John the Baptist. Yeah, and he’s got that note.

00:27:49
Speaker 1: Now. I don’t know, dude, I’d like to have that note. I don’t think it’s I bet it isn’t around. I don’t know a bit to be hanging around the wall here if I had it. Yeah.

00:27:59
Speaker 2: So, anyway, he was looking through missing persons records in Canada based on our conversation, Yeah, okay, And I don’t know whether he found him or not, but he contacted me on that and we talked a little bit.

00:28:19
Speaker 1: So when you told him that there was a white guy, what did he.

00:28:21
Speaker 2: Say, Well, he said, that’s one of the one of the I guess pieces of information that he used to search the records.

00:28:34
Speaker 1: But you haven’t heard anything more about that. No, huh. That was the only kind of tip. Yeah. I don’t understand how a guy in nineteen seventy eight, seventy eight, seventy nine, how there could be a person that vanished, starves to death in the woods and not some effort from his family or people to sort of like formally be like, has anyone seen this guy?

00:29:07
Speaker 2: Yeah?

00:29:07
Speaker 1: I mean he must have burned all his bridges.

00:29:10
Speaker 2: Well that’s that’s possible, you know, his his whoever he was traveling with, took off, I don’t know, but that could have been that guy’s problem too, But.

00:29:23
Speaker 1: I don’t know. And no idea who the other dude was that abandoned him, No, and he could have so.

00:29:33
Speaker 2: So one of the interesting things is, you know, going down to Yukon between Eagle and Circle, it’s not it’s not necessarily an easy matter to get to Circle, you know, and if they’re doing a log raft, which is what they had, that’s even more tough, you know, to try to navigate different channels and you start getting into this really braided region of the upper Yukon flats upstream from Circle, and it’s way more interesting if you get downstream of it. But uh, it’s possible unless he had a map and understood where he was that he could have gone right past Circle as well.

00:30:13
Speaker 1: That guy.

00:30:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, and uh and not even known it perhaps, but uh, because it’s it’s kind of on a on a it’s on a south leg of the river there, and there’s different islands and shallow places.

00:30:25
Speaker 1: I wonder if that dude even lived.

00:30:27
Speaker 2: I don’t know, I don’t know. We had no other information on that at all.

00:30:34
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. Although why that stuck with me so much? Man, I was like kind of die and know about that guy?

00:30:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know.

00:30:41
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I’m over it now.

00:30:43
Speaker 2: Yeah. I didn’t really think about it very much.

00:30:46
Speaker 1: You know, it was a temporary deal for me, but it’s all I can think about for a minute.

00:30:49
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:30:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know you sent me a story after we talked. I gave you a book yeah too, Yeah, because we talked about Starving to Death, right, and that journal of I talked.

00:31:06
Speaker 2: I’ve talked about that book since. Yeah, there was a guy journal those guys that starved to Death. Yeah, there was a guy that wrote to me and said that he had heard you talk about it and didn’t know what the what the book was and wanted to know the title of it. So God I sent him information on that. Yeah, tell people the name of the book. Well, that was Death in the barn Lands. Yeah, and it was about these three guys, uh, John Hornby and then the two one of them was his nephew, I think another maybe a friend, and they went out into the uh you know, to the to the east of Great Slave Lake, over to the Thelon River trains into Hudson Bay.

00:31:45
Speaker 1: I believe I had a hell of a time finding that. I had a hell of time finding that on good Earth.

00:31:52
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:31:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s a confusing tangle of water up there.

00:31:57
Speaker 2: It is it is and uh and it’s pretty flat country and uh. And then there’s these caribou that the barren ground cariboo that are moving around in that country, but not always in the same place. And they were unfortunate enough that they well there were caribou here here there, and they caught a little bit of fer but it wasn’t enough to keep them, keep them all going, and they they all ended up dying.

00:32:28
Speaker 1: Yeah. And the one, the youngest one, keeps a meticulous journal. It’s chronicling his death. Extraordinary. He’s the work. Yeah, you know.

00:32:38
Speaker 2: And then the people that ended up finding the cabin and the and the people there that had strived out, they found his his journal in the stove he had he had put it in.

00:32:51
Speaker 1: There and left the note saying looking stove.

00:32:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that so that somebody was going to be able to get it and know what what went on?

00:32:58
Speaker 1: Does man explorer there were talking about Hornby he had found on one of his journeys traveling the Canadian Arctic. He had found a stand of spruce that he felt in that area was the northernmost stand of spruce, and he realized, you could go into this, this is way above tree line, go into the stand of spruce and build a cabin and make a go of it in the way far north. You know what he reminds me of. Later though, Hornby reminds me of Stocked and Rush, the guy from the Titan submersible. Oh, because because he knew what he was getting into, Like he knew what he was doing. The other two didn’t. He knew the risk, he knew what he was getting into, He’d had close calls, he knew how dicey it was, and he like brings other guys along who are sort of trusting in his expertise. And then later it comes out, you know, like with stock the Rush, Later it comes out. Stock the Rush had almost like I wouldn’t say, a death wish, but like incredible hubris and not a death wish, but definitely knew where it was headed and didn’t care. And this Hornby guy, I mean he basically offers these people up to the tundra. I mean, he serves them to the god of the tundra. He serves them on a platter. I think he thought.

00:34:29
Speaker 2: They were gonna do all right, but that it was a hungry country and the caribou didn’t come.

00:34:37
Speaker 1: Yeah. The thing that the most upsetting part of that story of starving to death like that is that they start eating hides right, Yeah, and for some reason, like a lot of hair, and their bowels get impacted by hair, and so towards the end of three of these dudes are trying to give each other enemas, and they’re trying to claw out of each other plugs of leather and hair and rigging up different ways to try to get their colon or over the hell clear of hair. And the guys that find the bodies remark on this because some of this excrement, some of this solidified excrement of hair and hide, are littered around the cabin. Just a shitty way to go. Oh yeah, it was bad. Yeah, but that really brought to life reading that book, and that’s probably why he gave it to me. Reading that book brought to life what that John the Baptist dude like, what his days were probably like, I think, so to starve up in their Yeah, but there’s a story you told you sent me a video clip and you’re telling a story about getting a bear out in the river one time. Oh yeah, and you had mentioned the thing that hadn’t really occurred to me in it that but but I’ve seen it, but I hadn’t really thought about it. Like a deer floats, yeah, yeah, and a muslim float even with a big set of antlers. But a bear don’t float good, It doesn’t float. Yeah. Do you mind sharing like the sort of the implications of a bear, like tell that story and the implications of a bear knoe floating. It’s one of my favorite stories because they they sure swim pretty damn good.

00:36:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, they swim so so we used to sometimes find them in the river, swimming from one side to the other and and and we’d follow them and and wait until they get out on the bank. And then sometimes, you know, sometimes they’re running too hard when they get out and you don’t get.

00:36:51
Speaker 1: A good shot.

00:36:52
Speaker 2: But most of the time you’re able to cut them on the bank. But we knew that they didn’t float because there are several people that shot bears up on bluffs that come right down to the river, and the bear rolls down and into the river and they’re gone. They go away, and I mean they don’t really, but they go away as far as.

00:37:10
Speaker 1: You were concerned.

00:37:11
Speaker 2: So we knew that they that they that they sink, you know, and it may be that a cub would float. I don’t know.

00:37:18
Speaker 1: Well, you know part of why that there’s air in the hair. I mean, you know this inservids that hair is kind of hollow. Yeah, imagine they got a hair, right, Bears got more of what we call fur, but it’s more like guard guard hair. Yeah, So I guess that’s something to do with it.

00:37:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, So so August is kind of a tough time to make a living out there. You know. The king salmon at that in that part of the river come in July and it’s just wonderful time. You know, you can sit in one place and and process process king salmon. And I mean not right now because they’re desperately low levels right now in the Yukon, But in those days we could fish and hang a gil neet and process you know, five or six fish a day and and and jar them up and dry them and put them up for for later, as well as eat wonderful food the whole time there. But August it comes and there’s no fish really. I mean, you can get pike, or you can get some whitefish or a sheet fish or something, but but the salmon have gone through and and the fall chump salmon are not there yet, you know. And and so we would we would usually try to look for a bear because bears start getting getting pretty nice fat. And this guy, Seymour and I we both fished the same place, Glen Creek Bluff there, and we went down to the to the Candy. So we were about fifty miles upstream from the Candic River where our fish camps were. And he and I took some dogs and we went down to mouth of Candy looking for a bear. There’s some good bluffs down there that you might find them on or sometimes just you know walking down through the you know, walking the river bank or something. Anyway, we went down there, didn’t find anything that we were lying back up the river and we would which is you know, walking the bank and pulling the canoe. And during places where the bank is really nice, you know, where you have the same kind of angle going into the water, we’d.

00:39:41
Speaker 1: Hook dogs up.

00:39:42
Speaker 2: We’d took a couple of dogs up and they would pull the canoe up where you can sit in the in the canoe and ride during some of that. And so we were we were in that sort of a situation going up river on a big inside of the bend, so we could see the shoreline only for a couple hundred yards and then it kind of disappeared around the corner to us right and at one point we saw this bear that had taken off somewhere upstream of us and had been swimming out and he got into our view even though it was around he was he was probably one hundred and fifty two hundred yards out into the river, and the river at that point was about five hundred yards we estimated across. So we pull We pull over because we’re going to try to get him when he comes out the other side on the bank, and we unclipped the dogs because we’re going to have to go. We’re gonna let him get half or three quarters of the way over a nimble paddle over there. That was how we were figuring to do it.

00:40:50
Speaker 1: Why not to take off after him right away, well, because you’d spook him back to his own bank. You never know, yeah, where it goes, And so usually we would.

00:41:00
Speaker 2: Try to follow him and at some point and and once they’re close to that bank, they’re going to go to that bank. They probably go anyway. But but we also had dogs. We had five dogs that were now loose on the bank, and they hadn’t seen the bear at that point, and uh, we’re trying to we’re trying to get their attention looking downstream a little bit so that they didn’t see the bear, because because dogs swim a lot faster than bears, and so we didn’t want them getting out there and messing the situation up.

00:41:40
Speaker 3: Uh.

00:41:41
Speaker 2: But but we did have this one dog that he would he would look at jets going by in the sky and so he had really good distance vision and and he spotted it. And they they they really loved to swim after beavers, and I think he probably thought it was a beaver, but it didn’t matter that it was a bear. And the dogs all ran up the bank to where they were, you know, straight in from where the bear was swimming, and they start barking at him, and he turns around and looks back at them and decides he’s not going there. Because you know, I think all the animals living out in the woods think of the dogs as wolves. I don’t think they I don’t think they know what they are other than that they’re just like wolves to them.

00:42:34
Speaker 1: And so that bear turned and kept going in the same direction.

00:42:40
Speaker 2: Well, the jogs all jumped into the river and started swimming after it. And we’re sitting there, Seymour and I are sitting there going this is this is not good. They’re going to catch him out in the river. We have no idea what’s going to happen then, but it’s possible that they could drown him and and you know, just by climbing on him and biting him and things, and then he would go away because he’d sink. Or it may be that he could drown the dogs just by turning around and grabbing them. And we didn’t know how big a bear it was, and so we started thinking about how do we deal with this? You know, there’s no wake we can go and catch all these five dogs and haul him into a canoe out in the river and not tip over. And so Seymour, who was he was, I don’t know, he’s close to ten years older than me, right, And so he says, here’s what we’ll do, Randy, and I’m just like twenty at the time and maybe twenty one. Hold Seymour about ten years older. OK.

00:43:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, so he says here he’s the leader. Yeah.

00:43:47
Speaker 2: So he had he had brought a twenty two along on this trip down to the candy because we were shooting squirrels to feed the dogs and things, and so I had the big gun, the two forty three. And so he says, you get in the front, we’ll beat the dogs to the bear. You pop him right before we come upon him, and then grab him. That was that was his solution to this thing.

00:44:10
Speaker 1: And so.

00:44:12
Speaker 2: Being just a bit younger than him, I like, yeah, I think that’s I think that’s how we need to deal with this. So he and I took off and we beat the dogs by about two canoe lanes. We beat him to the to the bear, and I popped him and grabbed him. And he’s a summer bear, you know, he still had he didn’t have a lot of fur, but enough that I could grab him right above the tail. And and of course we’re we’re really moving with the canoe, and so it almost drugged me out of the canoe on the backside, and Seymour is there just laughing in the back of the boat. The bear is, you know, nerves are still active, and he’s kicking. And then the dogs caught up with us, and they grab a hold of him and shake, you know, and I’m had this paddle and I’m swatting at him trying to drive him away so they don’t pull him out of my hands because then we lose him. And and so we tried Seymour and I. After we got the dogs to leave us be a little bit, we tried hauling the bear into the canoe, but he was too big and and you know, it’s a luminum canoe, eighteen foot luminium canoe that we were using there. But we didn’t think we could bring him in without swamping the boat. So we tied him onto the side and paddled. I think we lost about a mile, you know, getting him back to shore. But it was a it was a nice, big kind a two hundred and fifty pound oh yeah, cinnamon face bear, huh and nice and fat. You know, he wasn’t super fat like going into hibernation, but he was fat enough to make it really good eating.

00:45:55
Speaker 1: So in those days when you’re living off the land like that, yeah, what do you then do it? Like walk me through how you handle the bear, Like, what all do you take from the bear?

00:46:06
Speaker 2: Everything?

00:46:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, walk me through it. Okay, So pulled him up.

00:46:10
Speaker 2: We cut around under the feet and cut down across and then from the anus all the way up to the chin and skinned him out. And and we we usually will skin half back and take an arm off, you know, a front leg and then a back leg, cut open the guts, pull the guts out and then turn them over and skin the other half, and and and take it into quarters and plus your ribs and the head, pelvis, all of it, and the guts as well. Because the dogs eat anything. We don’t Yeah what what what aut of those guts? Will those dogs eat everything? Do you boil that so they don’t get trick nosis? Or the dog is he’s going to get it anyways, I’m sure I don’t remember boiling that.

00:47:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don’t think they would even they probably all have it. It doesn’t affect them. Yeah.

00:47:05
Speaker 2: Well I don’t know that they have trichinosis, but there’s.

00:47:08
Speaker 1: No way they don’t. All this stuff they’re eating.

00:47:11
Speaker 2: I don’t think so. I never heard of it.

00:47:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, all the bears have it, not all, but I mean.

00:47:18
Speaker 2: I think they’re there, they have the capacity, they have it.

00:47:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, well they’re like so, just as a point of reference, this state used to take samples and in the northwest corner of the state where they were taking samples, one hundred percent of bears six years old and over were positive. Uh, well, you have more information than I do on that. I just think it doesn’t It doesn’t. It doesn’t affect them. I mean they might they might not feel good for two days or something, but they probably have it their whole life.

00:47:51
Speaker 2: And you know, it’d be interesting to know the the pathology of that in Alaska.

00:47:55
Speaker 1: But I know that that.

00:47:59
Speaker 2: Everybody advises is cooking them because they’re potential for trick and nosis. But I’ve never heard or red on the details of that.

00:48:09
Speaker 1: I got it from a bear in Alaska. Well, but I’ll just get I’m just saying, I bet you if you test it, if you pull the tissue sample from those dogs, it’s possible that it’s got the system. There’s no way it doesn’t. Yeah, because they’re just eating whatever they find out in the woods. They do anyhow, like what like out of the bear’s innards, what do you guys want to eat?

00:48:29
Speaker 2: And what do the dogs eat, we would We would usually take the heart, some of the liver, the kidney’s and that would be what we would eat. And and after I had that run in with that grizzly liver, I think the vitamin A poisoning with it, I wasn’t. I didn’t eat any any liver after that from the bears.

00:48:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I don’t eat bear innards, man. Yeah, I eat the meat, ate the fat, by don’t eat the enterns out of them.

00:49:01
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:49:01
Speaker 1: I can’t explain why. It’s like a personal I don’t know if it counts as a taboo when it’s you, it’s a personal taboo, dude, I don’t know.

00:49:09
Speaker 2: We we did, and uh, and that was that was actually after little John and I had had gotten that vitamin A poison off of that grizzly So so undoubtedly I did not eat that liver. But but the dogs do. They think it’s great and don’t seem to be impacted by it. And and so this is August though, right, so it’s uh, we don’t have a freezer or you know.

00:49:42
Speaker 1: That’s what I’m curious about. Yeah, I mean.

00:49:44
Speaker 2: Our freezer was broken because it doesn’t come on until October.

00:49:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, you got like meat. Yeah, you got like meat, bees and flies and yeah it’s hot during the day.

00:49:52
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:49:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, So you hang it up and it gets dry on the outside. Bear bear meat doesn’t keep for very long, and we just do we just eat it and it starts turning bad.

00:50:03
Speaker 3: That dogs get it.

00:50:04
Speaker 1: So you couldn’t. You wouldn’t with the bear meat. You’re not trying to you can’t. You’re not trying to smoke it or air dry it. You’re just eating it.

00:50:11
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:50:12
Speaker 1: Yeah. And then and then how do you handle the fat? You render it out?

00:50:15
Speaker 2: No, I just leave it on the meat and eat it with the meat. Okay, Yeah, because bears, bears, you know, they have it marbled. It’s marble not not with moose. Moose isn’t you know, well the ribs brisket, but but the you know, like the back legs or the or the shoulders on a moose is not marbled in fat. It’s got a layer on the outside. You get a fat one. Yeah, but uh, and then it’s got the intestinal fat. Bears have fat kind of marbled through the through the meat and uh.

00:50:49
Speaker 1: Which is part of why that meat doesn’t freeze super good. Right, it goes rantsid a little bit, like the fat goes bad. Yeah. Yeah, so if you’ve got a bear in August, you’re not doing anything to save No, you’re not saving bear lard.

00:51:05
Speaker 2: It’s just food until it goes bad.

00:51:08
Speaker 1: But but why not, like at that time, why would you not render it and save jars of it or save bags of it. It’ll go rantid because you can’t refrigerate, because it’s not refrigerated or for all.

00:51:21
Speaker 2: It’s really hard to jar it in a ball jar. I know, we’ve tried it, we’ve done it, but it gets in the seal and it doesn’t it doesn’t seal really good. Some people may have had other other experiences with it. But at that time, your jarring salmon. Yeah, so you know about the mechanics of jarring. Yeah, but you’re not jarring bear meat. No, just some people do. Some people do, but usually it’s fall in a jar it and then it’s frozen and they eat it later in the winter. Got it, got it, But it’s it’s a hard thing with a with a really oil a piece of meat to jar it and have that seal work for a ball.

00:52:06
Speaker 1: Jar huh okay.

00:52:09
Speaker 2: And then I didn’t I didn’t like jarred meat. As much as I mean jarred fish is great meat, I’d rather just eat it straight, okay.

00:52:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, But you’re also trying to account for I mean, you’re trying to find three hundred and sixty five days for the food. So in the summer months you eat fresh meat, yeah, and then once thing’s freeze, you just eat frozen meat.

00:52:29
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:52:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, because.

00:52:33
Speaker 2: You know you can’t keep you can’t keep a big piece of meat a moose, you know, shooting them in August. You can’t do it. You know it’s gonna go bad before before you’ve finished eating it.

00:52:45
Speaker 1: What was the date at which you’d want to kill a moose? Then?

00:52:48
Speaker 2: Anytime, you know, around fifth to tenth of September.

00:52:52
Speaker 1: At that point you could keep it.

00:52:53
Speaker 2: You can keep it right into freeze. Okay, yeah, but you gotta you gotta be careful. You know, if you got those cuts that you know where there’s two surfaces that flop back on each other, those are gonna those would go bad over that period of time.

00:53:08
Speaker 1: So there there’s a process after tell me what that means. Well, I’m gonna go back to the bear. One last question on the bear. Yeah, so I understand the meat and fat and the guts. Yeah, at that point in time, were you keeping the hide or selling the hide? Or it’s useless because it’s August, Like, how would you view the bear hide? What? What good use that would you put that to? If anything?

00:53:29
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, we’d we’d keep them and it would be stretching out on a frame and fleshing it and scraping the oil off sometimes, you know, really fat bear. That’s pretty hard to do, but but you can do it, you know with a scraper yep, and clean it off and dry it as a rug, a seat cushion, a lot of different things.

00:53:55
Speaker 1: You wouldn’t sew any garments out of that stuff.

00:53:58
Speaker 2: I didn’t. There were people that did. But it you know, if you like put it on the top of a muckluck, it’ll get snow packed into it, so it’s not you know, like a beaver is almost waterproof, you know, the beaver fur. And that was that was a really good thing for like the top of a muckluck or mittens. But it would never get snowballs or ice balls for a minute, but bearford does, Okay, So it was it wasn’t a desirable piece of clothing for most people.

00:54:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you know, I want to hit you with one that I was reading. It’s not from your area, but I wonder if you ever heard of this I’m reading. There’s this book that’s it called, Oh the land Breakers. You ever hear that?

00:54:48
Speaker 2: I never heard it?

00:54:48
Speaker 1: Two that was obsessed with this book for a while, The land Breakers. I sent it to my buddy Bobby Doug. He loved it too. It’s set in the seventeen seventies. It’s just about the first families moving into the sorry set in the seventeen eighties. Yeah, early American. It’s a novel, but it’s like very very well done. It’s about the first families moving up into the mountains in Appalachia and their land breakers because they’re clearing the ground to grow corn. In this book they talk about that you know, you know a groundhog. It’s like a ground squirrel, close relative of a marmot, right, a groundhog in this book talks it. That’s the best raw hide for bootlaces. Oh, interesting, which I’m gonna make some. My kid got one the other day, but it was just a juvenile so I didn’t do it yet. I’m gonna make my own raw hide bootlaces from a groundhog. But if you think about that, man, like think about a squirrel’s hide, Like you take a rabbit hide, you can just with your hands tear it off. Dude, squirrels hard to get through. Doesn’t it make sense that that would be like a phenomenal raw high strip tough?

00:56:03
Speaker 2: How do you get the fur off or does it matter?

00:56:06
Speaker 1: I don’t know, I’ll figure that out. Yeah, I’m gonna probably just soak it for a while and then scrape the fur off. I don’t know, I haven’t I haven’t done it yet. Fixing to though, Yeah, tough ass boot laces made out of groundhog huh, Well this would be a marmot. But either way, yeah, yeah, around here they call rock chucks. Yeah, but you never had any exposure to that because you had dealt with so many leathers. You guys didn’t have like a thing of making like raw hide from marmots or anything.

00:56:33
Speaker 2: No, there were marmots in the mountains on the south side of the of the Yukon up there. I never saw them over in the in the oglevies, never where you hung out, never where I hung out. Yeah, So tell me about moose.

00:56:49
Speaker 1: How you handle moose? Because this now we’re into September.

00:56:52
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, so so moose always we skin back one half and take a shoulder off. And uh, I never got into the game bags. I think we mentioned this a little bit previously, but it didn’t matter because there’s going to be a crust on it. And and when I’ve taken game bags off of meat that’s you know, sat in a boat or something for a few days.

00:57:19
Speaker 1: It’s pretty. It doesn’t let it dry out. And so if you’re dealing with water and stuff, it’s just I’m with you, because it like it makes it just holds moisture in a way. Yeah, if you can hang it up in the air, it was nice. Bots you don’t get you don’t get fly eggs on it.

00:57:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, which didn’t bother me at all, because flies, you know, once you got a crust on it, they don’t bother it, but they will go and lay eggs if you have, say you make a couple of cuts on the you know, the bottom of the back leg, you know, between it and the and the pelvis bone, you know, and you might have a couple of different cuts that when you hang it up those two there’s a cut in there where the two pieces as a meat flop over and touch.

00:58:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, when you say that, do you mean that you take it like an intact muscle, But you’re saying you inadvertently slice it. So now you’ve sliced it open and the two pieces of meat are touching. That’s going to rot. Why do you think that is?

00:58:16
Speaker 2: Because the bacterial grow it doesn’t dry out. That’s exactly why. It because it’s an exposed surface that won’t dry. It’s an exposed surface. Yeah, it’s been inoculated with bacteria and it stays wet. See, the bacteria aren’t going to grow if it’s dry. And so you get this moose and you hang it up and over the next few days, you know, you work at it, you pick at it. You know, the bottom of the of the of the back leg and the neck, you know, the backstraps, anywhere where there’s you know, a cut that exists there that doesn’t dry.

00:58:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is something I’ve never thought about or heard. Man.

00:58:58
Speaker 2: Well, so it allowed us to moose in the beginning of September and have it make it in to freeze because you just.

00:59:04
Speaker 1: Keep your you’re letting the crust form, making sure there’s no spots to hold any moisture exactly, and then it it’s and then you can hang it and you’re just basically hanging it. It dries and then eventually.

00:59:18
Speaker 2: Well solid and so at that time, you know, of the of the year, you tend to get cooler temperatures at night and uh, and so it’s and then as the moisture from that ham or the shoulder works its way out to the crust and evaporates off, it’s. Uh, it’s gonna cool that way as well, like evaporative cooling.

00:59:41
Speaker 1: Yeah. Are you leaving harvesting the fat off it or leaving all the fat on it? I take the fat off okay, yeah, and you.

00:59:51
Speaker 2: Handle so the ribs, the ribs and the brisket that’s hard to take the fat off of, so that stays. But those are the uh, those are you know, some of the things you might eat first, okay, right, And it’s got all those layers of fat in it. Yeah. Yeah. And so like the belly fat, you know, the inside fat. Yeah, I hang that too, so it gets dry and it’ll dry fast. So you know, you get the kidney fat and you hang it over a pole and and you you shift it every every once in a while. You know, every couple of days you move it, and of course you got to protect it from gray jay’s because they’ll come in and oh yeah man and damage it pretty bad. But but I would hang uh little gill nets, little two inch stretch mesh gill nets around the meat to keep the gray j’s off.

01:00:46
Speaker 1: Got it?

01:00:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s a process. But but then you got this wonderful piece of meat. And as you go into the.

01:00:56
Speaker 1: Winter, if you let’s say you’re you got to cabin where you know you’re gonna spend your winter. Yeah, and you’re mostly doing stuff off at that time of year, you’re operating out of your canoe.

01:01:06
Speaker 2: That’s right.

01:01:08
Speaker 1: Are you moving that carcass. You’re trying to move that carcass first back to your cabin. Yeah, and this work is happening at the cabin.

01:01:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s right. Not always, but that’s that’s what you that’s what you try to do.

01:01:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, ideally it’s back at the cabin.

01:01:25
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:01:25
Speaker 1: And then how are you protected? How do you safeguard? So if if we go through this drying process and that what date does it at? What date would you say it’s gonna freeze roughly.

01:01:36
Speaker 2: The end of September beginning of October. That’s when it used to up there. We’ve had some we’ve had some years where it doesn’t freeze till mid October lately though, So it’s it’s a different environment right now than it was.

01:01:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, and at that point, the only thing you got to worry about, uh once bears are down underground, the one you got worry about is like wolverine getting at it, whatever kind of you know, whatever things chewing it up odds and ends. How do you secure it?

01:02:10
Speaker 2: You know, I really haven’t had any trouble with a moose once it freezes, you know, we’re we’re there. I just have never had a wolverine. Usually I would, I would put some sort of a trap there for wolverines, but they’re not gonna They’re not going to be able to deal with a moose, you know, they could. I always hung it high enough so that my dogs couldn’t reach it. I see, you know, at some point if we were traveling or something, and uh and that and the wolves they never bothered it. I never had them bother anything of mine, and uh so, so just hung.

01:02:51
Speaker 1: It clear of a wolverine where he can’t jump up, and you can’t climb up and get it.

01:02:55
Speaker 2: Well, the wolverine can. But you know, they just they there weren’t there weren’t enough of them that it was an issue for me.

01:03:06
Speaker 1: If you went into the year, if you just buy yourself and you kill a moose in September, yeah, you kill a bowl. These mostly bulls, you’re killing all bulls. You killed bowl in September. Yeah. How long can one guy live off that moose?

01:03:22
Speaker 2: You know what, that’s all you’re eating, you know, probably three months?

01:03:26
Speaker 1: Mm hmm.

01:03:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s not going to take you all the way through the winter. So what else would you have to figure out to make the winner? Well, so up there on the Upper Candick River where I lived, it was a caribou. Every year we were up there, there were there were wintering caribou from the Porcupine Caribou herd and h and so and so. We would take those and they were almost always bulls, big bulls that had lost their horns, their antlers and and and they were skinny. Uh, they might have just a little bit of fat on their on their brisket. Their tongues are spectacular. You slice them up and fry them. They’re wonderful. Would you boil them first? Not not with caribou. With moose, I did so.

01:04:23
Speaker 1: You just slice it, trim off the outer part and fry the center.

01:04:27
Speaker 2: You don’t need to trim it off on the caribou. Yeah, just slice it and fry, slice it and fry it. It’s one of the best things anywhere.

01:04:34
Speaker 1: Huh. But why does that not work with the moose. Well, I always boil them and then slip the skin off. Yeah. With moose, that’s true. Uh. With caribou you don’t need to. Huh. But they got a thin shell or something.

01:04:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, thin shell and uh, and the muscle there is just uh, it’s got a lot of fat in it. It’s it’s wonderful. Just raw sliced. Yeah, well it’s fried, I’m sorry, but.

01:04:58
Speaker 1: Not not pre cooked in any way right to soften it up.

01:05:03
Speaker 2: It’s soft enough. No, you fry it right in a pan, just like it is. Slice it, fry it. Really, it’s wonderful. I’ve never done that. It’s one of the best things anywhere.

01:05:11
Speaker 1: Karen.

01:05:11
Speaker 2: In fact, in non Dalton, we I had gotten three caribou up on this mountain and I went and was butchering one and this, uh, this older fella from non Dalton stopped and cut the tongues out of the other two and and took off. And I go to butcher them, and and like the tongues are gone, and I’m going to like, this isn’t.

01:05:37
Speaker 1: Right, you know. So I put them up and go home.

01:05:40
Speaker 2: And Karen says, oh, good, three h three caribou tongs And I said, well, only got one because you know this guy got the other two. He said, well, go get them from him. So I go and I talk with him and I say, you know, we we really liked it. He says, you’re white people, you know you don’t like caribou times.

01:05:57
Speaker 1: I said, no, we do. I said, Aaron sent me to get him back. He says, I’ll give you one of them back.

01:06:02
Speaker 2: I said, okay, yeah, it’s funny, yeah, but no, it’s a it’s a delicacy.

01:06:08
Speaker 1: Mild Man used to dig around other people’s gut piles, yeah, deer gut piles. He’d he’d go get the heart and liver out of other people’s gut piles. Yeah, yeah, yeah for sure, like didn’t even he didn’t even think anything of it.

01:06:21
Speaker 2: Well, so the heart is off of a off of a fat animal is wonderful and they got you know, you got this big, you know, cluster of fat around the top of the heart. And slicing that up and frying it just one of the best things. Yeah, moose caribou.

01:06:36
Speaker 1: So how would you handle a moose tongue?

01:06:39
Speaker 2: So I’d boil it and uh, and then slice it and and fry it.

01:06:45
Speaker 1: Now, help me understand why? Why does it? Why did? Why can you fry a caribou tongue sliced without doing any prep? It’s tender? But so if you do it to a moose tongue, Yeah, is the center still or is just this? Even the center is hard?

01:07:03
Speaker 2: It’s tough. Yeah? Really Yeah?

01:07:06
Speaker 1: Have you ever monkeyed around just frying deer tongues up without cooking them? First?

01:07:09
Speaker 2: I’ve only had anything to do with a couple of deer, and that was from down to south southeast. Yeah, when my father was living down there and we went out to this island called Pleasant Island in Icy Strait and uh and got deer. But those are the only ones I’ve had any direct knowledge of.

01:07:31
Speaker 1: Would you eat bear tongues? I never tried it.

01:07:35
Speaker 3: Huh.

01:07:38
Speaker 1: Would you go up into the mountains for sheep? Mm hmm, yeah, I did. What time of year would you go do that? August usually, okay, And how would you handle oaths? Well, you know, by the time you get up there, you got to eat it just to get out of there. Probably.

01:07:54
Speaker 2: Well, so a lot of people they they get into this crisis right as they shoot a sheep, it’s blazing hot, and they got to pack it for miles and then get it to a freezer.

01:08:08
Speaker 1: What I did is.

01:08:09
Speaker 2: I just sat up there and ate it, okay, because sheep is not that big and and they’re wonderful, and so it would it would feed us and we’d go exploring, because you’re not going to keep it in you’re not going to keep a sheep.

01:08:28
Speaker 1: We didn’t.

01:08:28
Speaker 2: We didn’t never hunt sheep at a time when you could put it up for the winter. Right it’s too early. It’s too early, and it’s and it’s you know, not close enough to anywhere that we would you know that that we would have a cabin. It’s it’s a it’s a long waist out. But but by not having to transport it to a freezer back in town three or four days after you kill it, we just had We just had a wonderful time in the mountains.

01:09:01
Speaker 1: How many days would you be able to eat that sheep? They’ll go for a week. She just sit there and eat it. Yeah, and it’ll keep for longer than that. So you process it’s the same way. Hang it. Cut the places off that are rough that are going to attract blowflies. Blowflies are not that big a deal as long as you’re paying attention to the meat. You can always cut a chunk off that has blowflies on it and throw it to the dogs and they think it’s fine.

01:09:28
Speaker 2: You got to be on top of it. But yeah, but the sheep were wonderful. They’re always fat, always good, and they’re they’re a small So you were talking earlier about the bear. You know, what do you do with a bear? Well, you eat it. It’s in August. You’re not trying to keep it into the winter. You’re trying to have a good piece of meat to eat for the next couple of weeks. And you can do that.

01:09:54
Speaker 1: You mentioned the krinn something about seeing a ram a doll ram how like you know room their horns? Yeah, did you have you I’ve observed them. I’ve observed big horns scratching their horn.

01:10:07
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:10:08
Speaker 1: But what did you see?

01:10:09
Speaker 2: So so I never understood how they broomed their horns, you know. But but so in Alaska anyway, a legal ram is one that has two broom tips or that’s full curl or more right, and and there may be some differences in places. It used to be one and a one in an eighth or something like that, you know, but.

01:10:35
Speaker 1: Curl. But but but that’s how it’s been everywhere I’ve hunted. Yeah, like most, Yeah, I would say most. You hear of exceptions, like any ram whatever in someplace in the Brooks range in the old days. But yeah, full curl or two broomed. And they used to not define broomed very clearly, but it has to be now it’s defined as the entire lamb tip is gone, so his entire first year’s growth. Well, it always bothers me. How do the heck do they break those? You know, because I don’t know, you know, hitting two big rams hitting you know, even if it did connect by the tips, you know, they’re they’re they’re just really tough. You know, there’s they’re hitting the boss a round thing, hitting a round thing, right, and it’s it’s not going to break it. But so I was up there with my older son in uh some of these mountains and big limestone mountains on the north side and of the Yukon, and and we saw these three sheep walking on this one screeen slope across this uh this uh it was.

01:11:34
Speaker 2: It was a valley, real steep valley, both sides, and they were walking a scree slope and we charged up down and then up to meet them on this on this street. Well, the sheep trail across the screen slope because you could see it where it goes, you know, and we knew they were going to go buy this one place. So we climb up and we get to this place where we thought they were going to come out in front of us, but they had our he gotten by, and there was one that was on the next that it it has these big ridges of limestone towers, you know, that would come down and they had a trail that would go through and then scream between them. And we were about three hundred yards away, but we hear this banging and we look over there and here’s this sheep and he backs up and he gets up on his back legs and crack, he hits his he hits the rock wall with his horns, and he goes back again and gets up there and bam bam. He’s just one after another. He’s practicing, you know, hitting this rock wall. And I realized that’s how they’re that’s how they’re breaking their tips. I know it. Yeah, and so so what’s the first thing that’s going to hit when you have a full curl hits the tips, they’re gonna hit Huh, They’re.

01:12:52
Speaker 1: Going to hit the rock wall. I want you.

01:12:54
Speaker 2: And that’s a flat enough surface.

01:12:55
Speaker 1: Yeah. I watched a big horn one time ram upon de rolsa Pine. I counted he rammed it seven twenty five times.

01:13:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, but that’s a soft thing.

01:13:02
Speaker 3: That’s well.

01:13:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, but no, I get what you’re saying because you can see that they upbraid it. Like I think they don’t like it in their peripheral vision when they upbraid it, because sometimes they wear like big horns, wear them smooth. They’re like like like my fist, like smooth and round, and I think they abraid it.

01:13:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don’t know.

01:13:25
Speaker 1: I’m telling you, dude, I don’t they don’t like it. They don’t like it. They’re I think they see it.

01:13:29
Speaker 2: I don’t disagree, but I think the mechanism, you know, because when you get one that is is you know, not broomed, but a big, full curl.

01:13:39
Speaker 1: They’re tough. It’s hard. No, I’m with you, man, I don’t I can’t account for them being snapped off. And I I, yeah, I snapped off. I know. I like what it’s theory, but I pictured him. I was like, there’s no way he’s sticking in a crack in the rock and prying it off. I don’t know how they break them off. I think, I’m sure you’re right they’re whacking them. Yeah, I’m sure you’re right. But what I’m getting at, yeah, is and it’s more common in big horns, like you never see on a big like an eight nine ten year old big horn. Yeah that’s some bitch. Never has his lamb tips. But they’re smooth.

01:14:12
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:14:14
Speaker 1: And I have watched sheep. I have watched sheep rubbing them, rubbing them on a rock, on a rock, on a cliff face, just rubbing it. Yeah, like cat like the same way you’d watch something scratch itself, the same way you’d watch it scratch yourself on a tree. He’s sitting there like rubbing. Yeah. But I bet I’ll bet the break the initial bright No, I’m not contesting it on the break man, I think you’re right. I’m just talking about the rubbing. But by theory, and I don’t know, I never talked to a guy that knows a whole bunch about sheep. I know, like a teeny about sheep. But my theory is, and no, no guy’s ever cropped like, I don’t know, this is maybe totally not true.

01:14:52
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:14:52
Speaker 1: My theory is had been it gets in their peripheral vision and it bugs the hell out of them. Yeah, and so they’re like, what is that? And they’re and don’t like it. I don’t know, you have to interview one. Yeah, bear see a dog and they think it’s a wolf. Yeah, what’s a wolf think when it sees it’s? What’s a wolf think a dog is? So that’s an interesting thing, you know.

01:15:23
Speaker 2: So I used to travel quite a bit on the Candic River and the dogs would be running loose, you know, because how do you go up the river with a canoe and not have them run loose? Right, you can’t ride them in there. So there’s a lot of things you see, you know. They they’ll drive a moose into the river. The river is safe, safe country for a moose, right, And the moose thinks the dogs are wolves, and they’ll run right into the river where they can stand. And the dog’s gotta dogs or wolves gotta swim and then they’ll they’ll pound them if they get close.

01:16:01
Speaker 1: They pound them with their hoofs in there. Yeah, they get them in the water.

01:16:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and so and so the dogs sometimes, you know, because they’re not quite as savvy as wolves. Uh, they would swim out trying to get to the moose, and so the moose will just pound them. And none of our dogs got damaged in that that I that I recall. I mean, they it didn’t it didn’t kill them, it didn’t break them up. But but I think that sometimes they do that with wolves. But but probably not in the water because wolves probably No, we can’t get them when they’re in the water, but but wolves, so wolves more or let’s give up when that would happen. Yeah, they might, they might sit around. We’ve had times when we’re lining up the river and and the dogs chase the moose into the river and it’s not big enough for us to get past while the moose is in there, you know, so we’re we camp sometimes really yeah, because it’s not going to get it come out, you know. We get the coax the dogs back to us and get them tied up, and sometimes it’s still, you know, hours before the moose is ready to to get out of the water and go somewhere and then we can continue up. But one time I was walking along the river with the dogs, and and and I hear them barking back into spruce woods. Uh and and I’m thinking, that’s that can’t be a moose. Moose usually won’t bay up, you know, with the dogs Chason back in the woods, they go to the water, you know. And I’m so I think this they may have a bear up a tree, right, So what can you tell me what breed?

01:17:42
Speaker 1: I mean, I’m sure they’re mixed, but what are these dogs? What do they look like?

01:17:45
Speaker 2: They’re they’re great big huskies that they were. You know, we had some that were as much as one hundred and twenty pounds and they’re as there. They’re the same size as wolves up in that part of the country. I mean, a big wolf would be bigger than the biggest dog. But a lot of people bread these big dogs because they can pack and they’re you know, when you’re mushing around on a on a trap line and you say whoa, they’d stop and you know where’s you know, the little hyper race dogs they tend not to.

01:18:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s that’s what I was trying to picture. If you had that new kind of souped up race dog, if you have the old stylers, old style. But when you say babe, they’ll still do that, though they’ll get something cornered, they’ll raise hell. Yeah.

01:18:31
Speaker 2: So they’re barking back in the woods, and I think that’s got to be a bear, you know, So I start, I’m sneaking back there with my rifle, looking up into the trees, and I realized, I look where the dogs are, and they’ve got a wolf bite up. They’ve got a single wolf, same size as they were, and his hair is sticking straight out from his from his whole body and his tail, and the dogs are seriously as close to me to this microphone, right, and they’re barking at him, but they’re not biting him. But but wolves, you know, if there’s a wolf from a different pack that comes and gets surrounded by a pack of wolves, them more likely than not kill it. And so that wolf was spooped that he was in that situation he might get nailed. And the dogs, you know, it was I don’t know how many I had then four or five, and and they’re they’re the same size as this animal, but they are they are barking at him, like seriously disclose, you know. And but the wolf spots me, took off, oh really yeah, hauled ass and the dogs right on his tail. And the dogs came back in about a half an hour. But I’m sure the wolf got away because the dogs they were just interested, you know, they weren’t trying to kill him or anything. And he might have been able to defend himself too, but they.

01:19:54
Speaker 1: Knew but they they knew he wasn’t a dog. Yeah, yeah, he was different. Man. I tell you, like on that canine and canine thing, we have this little I don’t like, I don’t know how big it is. Maybe it’s thirty five pounds this dog. And if I even so much as skin a coyote, okay, that dog smells that death. That dog knows like it’s never been beat up by a kyote. Something about to smell. And if there’s a kyote laying there, it is no way gonna go up. There’s not a dog in the world. My dog’s not gonna run up and try to play with yeah, you know, they smell each other’s butts whatever. Like, there’s not a dog in the world. My dog’s not gonna be excited about interacting with a kyote. It knows that, it knows that is not a dog. It is death. And I always wonder how it like, how they put that together. It knows it’s death.

01:20:57
Speaker 2: There were times when like this guy Dick Cook. We talked about Dick Cook, you know, on the taton Nick River.

01:21:04
Speaker 1: He had.

01:21:06
Speaker 2: His dogs sometimes interacted with wolves and and they didn’t kill each other, they didn’t fight, but the dogs would run out if the wolves were cross and crossing paths with them. But I don’t really I don’t quite understand why. But I think they both understand they’re different.

01:21:31
Speaker 1: Yep.

01:21:32
Speaker 2: And I never had I never had the wolves bother my dogs.

01:21:39
Speaker 1: Mostly they stayed away.

01:21:41
Speaker 2: But but sometimes I I’ve shot him big wolves because they’re hanging around. One time it was in the fall and we had a moose hanging and our dogs were chained up, but they would at no they would start barking, and I didn’t know what was going on, because I never saw anything until it snowed, and then I realized, oh, this is wolf. A wolf is casing our place, going all around and and and at the time, uh Jed, I don’t know how how old he was, five or six maybe, and he wanted to He always took great glee and go and doing things by himself. So he wanted to walk this trail back to a big beaver pond that we had a ski plane landing every once in a while in the winter. And and uh and we never did let him go by himself, you know, because there’s a I don’t know what it was, a half mile or so on this nice trail. But but we didn’t think he was old enough at the time to do that. And and I think in retrospect, I think that wolf would have taken him if he’d been down there by himself. But but anyway, I I decided, I’m going to take this this wolf in. And there were times when he would walk up along the willow bar right right between the house and the and the river. And I got down there and hid out in this piece of driftwood and and waited for him, and he came right at dusk and shot that that that wolf, and he had a he had a busted up jaw from the moose cracking him, and teeth that weren’t there, and then the jaw had had healed, but it just kind of in a in a big glob, so uh, his jaw didn’t work quite so well.

01:23:42
Speaker 1: So he was.

01:23:45
Speaker 2: I couldn’t keep up with a pack, perhaps couldn’t feed himself. He was trying to figure out how to get some of our moose up there.

01:23:53
Speaker 1: My buddy in Alaska. This is last winter. He’s a trapper, does some trapping. His wife calls him one day and she’s got like a she’s with her dogs. Yeah, just just right behind his house and there’s a wolf messing with her and he doesn’t believe her. He’s like, it’s gotta be a dog. She’s like, I know, wolf, I’m looking at a wolf. There’s a wolf. Won’t leave us alone. And he’s still dismissed above it.

01:24:19
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:24:19
Speaker 1: Well, later he goes and looks into the snow and it’s like sure enough, and in the morning it’s all walking around his house. So he makes a set for it and catches it right away right away. I think he said it was about twenty minutes or something. I mean is that it’s like that desperate, that wolf wasn’t afraid of people. Well, he showed me a picture. It’s face, it’s teeth were gone, I mean freshly gone. It’s it looked like you if you to put that dog, if you to put that wolf, if you to turn that wolf sideways and set it on an anvil and pulled his lips back and had your body take a sledgehammer and bam on his teeth, you would have got something that looked like what this thing’s face looked like. And the only thing you think is somehow it got just stomped by a moose. By a moose, yeah, stopped like he’s I mean, it wasn’t a great picture, but you look at its face. It it’s face, it’s teeth on the one side are just crushed.

01:25:24
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:25:25
Speaker 1: In that’s how this one was. And somehow something got the perfect shot. A moose has me a moose, Oh the hell’s be up there? Yeah, got the perfect shot. Well, so I got. I would rarely get.

01:25:41
Speaker 2: Adult wolves in any trap or snare a couple of exemptions, but mostly you get the first year and then all of the pups from that litter would see one of their own get into a snare or get into a trap, and they were from that point on they wanted nothing to do with anything that people had going and and it was it was really rare to get the old ones unless you shot them. And so I did a couple of times in the winter they would a pack would run by the house going up the river, and uh, and I ended up shooting I think three all together over the years, adults, the biggest of the adults. And and they’re all broken up. They’re all they got broken ribs, they got broken legs, that heel, that one had the jaw, all of them had broken ribs, and uh, some of them had healed, most of them had not. And it was just, you know, the flopping bones, flotten bones. It’s just incredible. And and it’s I’m certain that it’s uh it’s moose. They’re gonna they’re whacking them they get close enough, and and it’s just uh, consequence of what they eat, because they eat moose, and they do they go up and they bite them and they get kicked and continue on, but it damages them.

01:27:10
Speaker 1: Yeah.

01:27:11
Speaker 2: I got one one time and and I was skinning it. Uh, and it’s casing, you know. So you go hang it up and go from back legs down to body and pull it down, working your way down to the to the face. Eventually, Well, I get to the area right around the back of the shoulders and and the hide just comes off. It separates right there, and.

01:27:37
Speaker 1: I look at home, like the hide fell into Yeah, and so I and came off the head. And so I’m I’m sitting there and and the high I’m not following me. So so I start looking.

01:27:49
Speaker 2: It’s got this scar all the way around from a snare all to the bone. Yeah, from a stare from a snare it had gotten caught and it drew right down to bone and what and the snare had had eventually rusted away and dropped off, and yeah, it went right to bone all the way around.

01:28:12
Speaker 1: What crazy.

01:28:14
Speaker 2: It had to have carried that snare for a couple of years. But it was fine. Yeah, I mean like seemed to you fine. Well, I mean the hide never never bonded again. Right, but the animal like is up and about yeah yeah, way, Oh they’re tougher in hell that the wolves are are outrageously tough. Yeah, if you catch one and with a foot. It’s like a bomb went off. You know, there’s moss hanging in trees, smaller trees or chewed down. It’s uh, they’re they’re they’re extraordinarily tough.

01:28:52
Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, a friend of mine had a he had spent some time with wolverine trappers, and tell me some observation this wolverine trapper shared with him is like and trap and you approach the animal, and the animal is always as far away as it can get on the chain. Yeah, you know, he’s trying to go the other direction if his foot’s caught, his legs out stretched and he’s trying to get away. And this guy said, a wolverine, there’s always the wolverine’s always coming to you. Yeah.

01:29:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s right.

01:29:26
Speaker 1: He’s stretched in your direction trying to get at you. Yeah, huh. That’s pretty crazy about that wolf though. Yeah, it just it wasn’t like a fatality for him. Night didn’t kill him. He survived it. We had a wolf researcher on the show, and there’s like there’s a real paucity of like level headed wolf researchers because they get it gets emotional for him, They lose their they lose their ability to see things clearly, especially the park, Like the park kind just becomes it comes too familial. They kind of become like celebrities, the people and the wolves. They don’t see things clearly anymore. But this woman, Diane Boyd, see she’s very clear headed. She’s never lost her ability to look at things smartly. You know. She also she likes bird dogs a lot. She’s a big bird hunter, so she raises bird dogs. And I was asking her how smart are like a wolf smart? Like what’s their intelligence? And this is the woman loves dogs, and she said it’s not comparable, like a domestic dog’s intelligence can’t compare. Well, they can’t compare to a wolf. A wolf is like you know, I can’t remember how she put it. Infinitely smarter than a dog than a domestic dog. Well, the sense of space, right.

01:30:59
Speaker 2: This goes back to Charles Darwin fitness, you know, the survival of the fittest. And wolves are on the chopping block every day every generation. Dogs we feed them, Yeah, we take care of them, and they’re not on the chopping block. So I think she’s probably right, yeah about that. You remember the unibomber, Yeah, I remember the story. Yeah, And his manifesto.

01:31:28
Speaker 1: When he’s trying to talk about what happened to society, like when the UNI bomber is griping about where society went wrong, he’s like survival. He grades Okay, he has this scoring system. It’s like a zero to five or a one to five scoring system for difficulty, difficulty of a task, a one like level one difficulty. I think it’s how he lays it out is that if you try your absolutely heart, you have a slight chance of success up to you don’t even need to try it all and you’ll succeed. Okay. His gripe with technology is that human existence has become a five. You don’t need to do shit, you don’t need to try it all. You’re gonna survive. And that’s where all of our neuroses come from. We have nothing to focus on, right, It’s just it’s all this like staying alive. It’s just bullshit. It’s like it just happens. So that’s why we have all these psychological emotional issues because our main thing has been taken away from us.

01:32:43
Speaker 2: Well, Smiegeled he did have some problems.

01:32:48
Speaker 1: He had a five. He encountered a five. Yeah, but domestic dogs are in it. Humans and domestic dogs share our thing. Yeah, you don’t need to try it all, you’ll be fine. That’s domestication, yeah, like us them. Yeah right, and you’re right, a wolf man’s that sucker. They’re living their lives in the two Well, if you try really, really hard, you have a reasonable chance of success. Is where they’re where they’re at, you know, and it probably does drive a level of intelligence man.

01:33:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, but you know, I think the in recent times, you know, when they’re looking at how far back was it before we domesticated or became symbiotic with wolves. Yeah, probably ten fifteen thousand years ago. It was our first domestic right and one of the best, and for a lot of different reasons, because they did help us. You know, they could smell, they could bay a moose up, they could find the seal hole on the ice, you know.

01:33:52
Speaker 1: A lot of it. You hear as well. It’s a good point as an early warning system.

01:33:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:33:58
Speaker 1: Like, imagine how much better you sleep knowing that anything comes near here? Those dogs are gonna go nuts.

01:34:03
Speaker 2: But it’s over that period of time that we’ve kind of bred out the intense nervousness that the wolves have and and there was somebody up in central had caught a wolf and brought it into their dog yard. How they did it, I don’t know, but it seemed that that would be a really fraught thing to try. And and they bred her with dogs, and the progeny the first the first group of pups that she had couldn’t be handled. They weren’t they You couldn’t turn them into a sled dog, right, even though they were half dog and half wolf. And then they would breed those and they got the quarter wolves right off of the pup, you know. And and this guy Fred, he had one of those quarter wolf perhaps he called it Strider, and uh was he.

01:35:07
Speaker 1: A Tolkien fan?

01:35:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, all of us were really.

01:35:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, we named Mountains guy because you guys had the books.

01:35:17
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we were.

01:35:19
Speaker 1: We were all, oh, why are you guys all Tolkien fans?

01:35:22
Speaker 2: I don’t know, it was it was that time of of the world, I guess, I don’t know, but but yeah, we got I mean it was Tom Bombadilla was this guy that just to painting is uh, had a big garden that had that you know, the ends of his logs were painted red and.

01:35:40
Speaker 1: Various what he needs to do just real quick on this subject. This is like a sociological experiment. When I was in high school, there’s a I had a teacher, a beloved, beloved man that kind of in some ways. His name was Bob Heaton. When I tell my story how I became a writer, Yeah, it’s hit him. He’s a major point in that narrative. Yeah, the first point. He’s the first point. Yeah, in that narrative. He had a class you could take in high school called Modern Mythology. All you did is read Lord of the Rings. Yeah, it’s a whole damn class. Yeah, you read Lord of the Rings. Yeah, and he taught it. But I wonder if you could go and do a thing about Lord of the Rings people, what their sort of moral perspective is, their work ethic and all that, Yeah, and compare them to Harry Potter people, like are they tougher? Like what you know? What I mean? Like Harry Potter spun off? What kind of person did that spin off? Yeah? And what kind of person did Lord of the Rings spin off? Yeah? I don’t know.

01:36:48
Speaker 2: I mean my kids, my younger boy. Anyway, I read Harry Potter and loved it. I haven’t read him.

01:36:54
Speaker 1: Is he tougher in you. Yeah he is. Yeah, you’re lying. No I’m not. But but he works out. He works out, Oh that kind of tough. No talking about that kind of tough Yeah, talking about.

01:37:07
Speaker 2: It, girl, No, he’s he’s tough that way too. But but uh, I want to go back a step though.

01:37:15
Speaker 1: Sure, No, I got off on this whole Lord of the Rings thing. Why did I bring it up? Becaus his dog was Strider dog with Strider, So Strider.

01:37:25
Speaker 2: Was was super nervous about everything, and he would if he was inside the cabin with Bred and his other dog, I forget what her name was, but h but he would know that there was something going on outside way before anybody else, you know. And if there were neighbors came in. If we went to visit and he didn’t have it on a chain, he couldn’t catch it. It would go around in the in the shadows of the woods. You could see him, but he wouldn’t come or anybody, right, yea.

01:37:57
Speaker 1: And in his whole life, his parents live were captivity. His life was captivity, but he still had that cageness.

01:38:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, he didn’t lose it, and dogs lost it over ten thousand years, right, I mean the selected breeding of those that don’t bite, that don’t run away, that you know, are nice, are friendly to people, whatever. And one time, this guy your trap there reminds me of this time. There’s this guy, Charlie, Charlie Edwards. He was up at Shade Creek, a little waist down eight or nine miles down from Eagle right, and he used to set a bear trap because the bears would come off of this McCann hill and Hilliard up Shade Creek where his cabin was at the mouth, and there was two little streams that came by, and he would set a bear trap at that spot every spring and sometimes get two or three bears.

01:38:52
Speaker 1: He just had one little pinch point where he knew a bear was gonna put his foot.

01:38:55
Speaker 2: And one time he caught him. He caught a wolf. It was a it was a female wolf. Can you explain the pinch point again? He’s putting it where so so there’s a baits, there’s this set there’s this bluff along the river and Shade Creek comes out about a quarter mile in. Two forks of Shade Creek come together and there’s a ridge that comes down right which set it right there with those two streams came together.

01:39:19
Speaker 1: A trail set. It’s a trail set.

01:39:21
Speaker 2: Well, it wasn’t a trail set, it was a baited sets.

01:39:25
Speaker 1: I understand. I understand. Yeah.

01:39:27
Speaker 2: So he had this he had this big trap there and this wolf got caught, and it was a female. And he he Charlie was he’s kind of spiritual, you know, and had all these visions of you know, moose giving themselves to us or whatever, you know. And and so he thinks this this wolf is sitting there looking off in one direction, and its foot is in the trap, and he comes walking up. Its ears moved, but it doesn’t it does turn or growl or do anything. It’s just sitting there freaking out, I’m sure. And he decides he’s going to that he’s got some connection with this wolf and he’s going to try to capture it and take it back to his place, right, to keep it, yeah, to breed it with his dogs. He’s thinking he might do that. And so he sits down to somehow commune with this wolf in back where he doesn’t think that the wolf can get to him, right because its leg is out that way, heads out that way, And he sits there for a little while, and then he reaches out and touches it on the flank.

01:40:44
Speaker 1: Huh bam.

01:40:46
Speaker 2: That wolf goes, grabs him right by the hand and looks at him right in his eyes, and sort of it didn’t crunch it the way it could.

01:40:54
Speaker 1: Have, but he bit.

01:40:57
Speaker 2: He puts some pressure on it a couple of different time times, looking at him right in the eye, and then let him go. What he thought, he thought he was gone, and the wolf could have killed him, could have called, could have killed him right there, didn’t let him loose. So he’s got some teeth marks, but he didn’t crush his hand even though he could have.

01:41:17
Speaker 1: And and uh, and he.

01:41:20
Speaker 2: Was he was just about he was just totally totally wiped out at that point. He rolled away. He didn’t feel he could shoot the wolf. But there’s no way to let it go. Can’t let it go, you know. It’s not like you could just say, hey, wait a minute, himself really bit then, yeah, and so he he realized he had to kill it. And he walked back to his place though, and calmed down before he went back up. But you can’t you can’t get close enough to ever try to let it go.

01:41:50
Speaker 1: What was his takeaway? From that.

01:41:53
Speaker 2: Well, it didn’t dissuade him of you know, his his spirituality type.

01:42:00
Speaker 1: You know, did he keep that trap set. I don’t know if he kept that trap set.

01:42:07
Speaker 2: He had it set on the river one time when he moved down river from there, and uh, and we ran our dogs right past it and they didn’t none of them went to it. But but we were pissed off that he had it set in a place that we would have our dogs because i’d kill a dog, you know, break their break their foot. But you know those big, big bear traps. But anyway, yeah, so so wolves, wolves and dogs actually have really strong bites because they’ve got a cranial ridge, you know, and so your your jaw muscles have more leverage than say a bear. They got smooth, sick smooth top of this. Yeah, and their jaws are not nearest tough.

01:42:54
Speaker 1: That cranial ridge on a skull that ties into bite strength.

01:42:58
Speaker 2: I didn’t know that, yep, yep exactly. And our dogs killed a number of black bears over the years when they would catch them where there wasn’t trees, because if they couldn’t get up a tree, they couldn’t defend themselves.

01:43:14
Speaker 1: And the dogs will take them down, take them down and kill them. Did you have a lot of dogs get killed doing that?

01:43:19
Speaker 2: None? None of them even got hurt.

01:43:22
Speaker 1: It’s that easy for them. It’s that easy.

01:43:26
Speaker 2: And I think that I think that any wolf pack would kill bears anytime they see him. Maybe because of size, they might shy away from some you know, like grizzlies, But I think that they wolves are the reason that black bears don’t occur up on the North Slope or Seward Peninsula where that doesn’t have trees, Yukon Delta, Alaska Peninsula. None of those places really have enough trees for black bears to go up. And I think that wolves kill them anytime they come across them, because our dogs did and they didn’t have trouble killing him one time. First time that happened, I was with Little John and we tried to get the dogs to back off so we could kill the bear. Because what bears do is they lay on their back when once they’re once the dogs grab them, they lay on their back and they try to to swipe at them with their claws and stuff, and they try to bite too, But the dogs don’t seem to get hurt at all by it and they kind of turn them to the burger bloodshot pretty quickly.

01:44:35
Speaker 1: Yeah. How like if you did the autopsy on a bear that your dogs killed, what would the autopsy say.

01:44:41
Speaker 2: Well, they just got they got bite marks all over in their in their chest and their neck.

01:44:47
Speaker 1: But then they think to like they don’t know enough to like crush the throat or something. They don’t. They’re not strategic, No, they’re they They would you know, bite the inside of the back legs and the belly.

01:44:58
Speaker 2: When we would open them up, they’d be all bloodshot.

01:45:01
Speaker 3: It was uh yeah.

01:45:02
Speaker 1: It just doesn’t seem like that it would add up enough.

01:45:07
Speaker 2: Well, they did it with black bears three times that I remember. I wonder if like the stress is also real bad. Oh, I imagine it’s enormous. Yeah, it also leads to mortality. Yeah, they killed one grizzly. Your dogs killed a grizzly. Yeah, and that grizzy didn’t get any of the dogs killed. Uh huh. I I think that it was Uh, it was a young grizzly And I think what happened is it broke its back.

01:45:37
Speaker 1: It had flopped.

01:45:38
Speaker 2: On its back on a rock as it was up in the sheep mountains and uh, and we saw the dogs chasing this bear over the over a little ridge and when we got up to the top, they were all just laying around next.

01:45:50
Speaker 1: To it and it was dead. These dogs are real menace man that.

01:45:54
Speaker 2: They’re in body they’re they’re wolves. Yeah right, in mind they’re not, but but in body they are. And because they they behaved kind of like a pack when they would encounter something, they’re bold.

01:46:07
Speaker 1: They were bold.

01:46:09
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, what do you What’s like, what’s kind of the biggest lesson you took away from What’s the biggest life lesson you took away from living.

01:46:20
Speaker 1: In the bush?

01:46:24
Speaker 3: Oh?

01:46:24
Speaker 1: God, like something you realized about people, you know, the his life lesson or like a valuable lesson, you know whatever. Yeah, I don’t know what the hell difference in a valuable lesson in a life lesson is, But like, what’s something you carried with you from it? I don’t know.

01:46:41
Speaker 2: I I guess I always in doing that, I realized I can I can do anything. Okay, you know, I can, I can persevere, I can navigate whatever comes up.

01:46:57
Speaker 1: Mm hmm.

01:47:00
Speaker 2: I don’t really know, but it was, you know that I look at for example, I look at the folks clustered, you know, homeless folks in town, And I say there were me, I’d be out the road. I’d be out on the river because I can make a living there. Yeah, town it’s a lot harder. But I don’t know, just thinking, I mean, I realized there’s a lot of different reasons that people might be homeless, but and I wouldn’t degrade that at all. But but for me, I really think, you know, being out on the country is a it’s a neat place, and there’s ways to go about feeding yourself there.

01:47:46
Speaker 1: What did you see? You had to have encountered guys in that time, You had to encountered guys that were going to go do it but just didn’t work. Like it wasn’t gonna work. Yeah, did you have would you be able to gauge when you met somebody? Would you be able to gauge off your own intuition you have what it takes you don’t have what it takes, Like would you know someone has had it for trouble? I don’t know that I would, at least not right away. You know, you have to get to know somebody. You realize, you know, these guys they need their motors, you know, and be able to move places really fast, and that’s not something that we did. We didn’t.

01:48:37
Speaker 2: So so by having motors, you need a lot of money, okay, right, I mean it’s just the way it works. Snow machine or a big boat to go up and down the Yukon, and that’s a lot of money is really not to be had out in the woods. At least it certainly wasn’t for us. Even if you have a good year trapp and you’re not going to buy a snow machine and spend it on that, you know.

01:49:05
Speaker 1: So you would view reliance on motors at that time, reliance on motors, what was a deficit?

01:49:12
Speaker 2: Well, I mean I felt it was. I mean I didn’t want to go to get the job.

01:49:16
Speaker 1: You know.

01:49:16
Speaker 2: There were a lot of people that went worked up on the pipeline, you know, and that was happening back in that period of time, and it was good wages and everything, but they that’s where they lived, you know, they.

01:49:27
Speaker 1: Were, and you never you were never drawn to that.

01:49:30
Speaker 2: I wasn’t.

01:49:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, were you running into guys at that time? Were there guys coming out of Vietnam coming coming home and going into the bush. Were you encountering that. No.

01:49:45
Speaker 2: I think out there were two to the to the communities there like Eagle and H and Circle, you know, Tann and on and like.

01:49:55
Speaker 1: Returning veterans were going into those communities to live, but you weren’t seeing them off living off the land out in the bush.

01:50:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don’t know if you there. Definitely was that happening. I don’t know whether it was a movement or state, but it was. There were some people that were ex Vietnam.

01:50:14
Speaker 1: Your circle, guys, what was the commonality if you had to think of one in your circle of folks and you’re when you say, because you often use the term we, we would do this, we would do that. Yeah, in your circle folks, what were they? What was pushing them, what was pulling them? What was pushing them? Where were they coming from?

01:50:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know a lot of it was just back to the land type, you know, adventure, going out and trapping, living in the woods. I think they liked what I did, which was the ability to go out and get my own food, and I did a lot of tanning.

01:50:57
Speaker 1: Uh.

01:50:57
Speaker 2: I sewed my own clothes the winter closed way. I tried leather for the summer and it didn’t work so well, it just got wet because he’s always gonna rain. At some point you’re going to walk through bushes and have your leather pants soaking wet. Yeah, I don’t know. I liked the idea of building things out what’s there. Yeah, yeah, and being able to feed myself. I mean, there were things that we were buying from town, you know, the rifle, gilnet plastic eventually for the bottom of the of the toboggan, you know, so it slid better than just straight birch boards, which is what I used for a few years to start with. Yeah, aluminum canoe, you know. Yeah, there were a lot of things that we probably weren’t. We weren’t in any way like you know previous times with the Native folks there’s they truly made everything and worked it and it was pretty great. So one thing that happened when I was down in Chivac. I mentioned Chivac. I think when Karen was teaching. We had gone out to there on the Yukon Delta, right, And I remember one time when I was going downstream, I had fixed this old double end canoe, who’s a fiberglass canoe, and this one woman there let me use it because I patched it up for and I would would take the tide out from this river and hunt ducks and things. And I had a gillnet in for some fish. And one time when I was down there, I don’t know, ten fifteen miles away from Chivac, I started coming back in with the tide and this old man waves me down and uh I pulled over and and uh I wanted to ride, I said, jump in. He had all skin clothes and he had these hip boots that were made out of sealskins and sewed with this grass in the thread. It was it was it was. It was some sort of sinew thread. But they would put in a blade of grass with it and that would my understanding was that that would swell when it got wet and help to.

01:53:32
Speaker 1: Really seal it. Yeah, it was outrageous.

01:53:35
Speaker 2: And he just sat there with his feet in the in the water, just like me with my rubber hip boot.

01:53:41
Speaker 1: Guy had you out bad assed totally totally. Yeah, No, it was great. It was cool to see.

01:53:47
Speaker 2: And so I mean we did that sort of stuff with the with the you know, tanning hides and sewing clothes with them and various things, but not like.

01:53:57
Speaker 1: That you know, I was talking in the beginning of the show that’s talking about these American history things are doing one on Daniel Boone and the long hunters, then the mountain the mountain men like Jim Bridger, and then the buffalo hide hunters. Yeah. So it’s funny because those buffalo hide hunters are one hundred years before you were living in the bush like they were. The sort of peak hide hunt was eighteen seventy four and you were around, you know, century later. But one of the observations we have in that hide Hunters piece we got coming out is that the long hunters, the Boone and the long hunters, Jim Bridge and the mountain men, those guys lived off the land. Okay. They could produce their own clothes, source their own food. It was the part of the whole plan, right, The part of the whole mountain man plan is that you’re going to have to source your food there. It was baked into the system. Boone, They’d sourced their own clothes, their own shoes, everything. In a pinch, they could make gunpowder, okay. The hide hunters by eighteen by by eighteen seventy, the hide hunters were they were these firs, this first breed of market hunter. That they didn’t live off the land. They had wagons, they carried bacon, they carried flour, They ate enormous amounts of buffalo meat. But they didn’t make clothes like they they These were guys that would write letters and order shit, right, and it’s and so it’s like they looked they would if you saw, they would have looked like gunfighters in their attire. Right. They were no at that point, eighteen seventy, they’re no longer living off the land. You feeding yourself, yeah, some, but you’re not responsible for all that anymore. Maybe that’s why they were more effective killers. There’s no time like they lived in tents man. Yeah, that had access to canvas tents that wagons they had to reload, ammo. But they wore cotton, they were wool that were linen. Didn’t make tools, just bought tools, carried extras of everything. You know, it was a century before your time though. Yeah, So the fact that the century later you were still doing what you did is remarkable.

01:56:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you couldn’t really do it in lower forty eight you sort of couldn’t land in jail. Yeah, you get chased away. Eventually there were people in the mountains in northern New Mexico who would live in some of the caves and do gardens and things. But they were the foresters, as I understand it, would go and chase them away every few years so that they didn’t have the adverse possession thing. In Alaska, the adverse possession was they made it so that it didn’t apply because it was such huge land masses that they couldn’t afford to.

01:57:02
Speaker 1: Keep track of them all. And so it never was an issue.

01:57:07
Speaker 2: And we didn’t we didn’t own property either out there, you know, some some I mean it was in that transition period, you know, and you know that the Native Clayton settlement had gone on, and there were there were you know, a lot of the time was uh well some of the time was before a nilka. But even then, you know, nobody knew what land would become, what ownership yep, for quite a while.

01:57:38
Speaker 1: There’s places you can still make a pretty good goal of it. You could, because uh you got all the non game squirrel, porcupine stuff like that, very long waterfowl seasons. Yeah, like you know, extended camping periods like this place is in the Canoe just Rod and reel. You’re not gonna be on net. But like, there’s places you could make a go of it, for sure, if someone had the audacity.

01:58:03
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:58:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’d be easy in the summer and easy if you moved pretty regular. Yeah, there’s nothing stopping you doing that. But there’s a few private landholdings that somebody could pick up and then make a go of it, you know, so that you couldn’t get so you could build something that was.

01:58:23
Speaker 1: Ann one can run you off.

01:58:24
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:58:25
Speaker 1: Well yeah, well man, I gotta get But man, I’m so glad you came back. I had a lot of these questions I needed to clarify. Yeah.

01:58:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, we didn’t get to fish though.

01:58:34
Speaker 1: I know next time, next time you come on, we’re gonna just talk about fish research, okay, Like just to titillate people ahead of time, I’m gonna tell them how you can tell one. Uh well, the whole thing was salmon, sharks and salmon. Yeah, that’s interesting. Well to do that. We’re gonna do the fish episode next. It’ll be a three part okay, and next time we’re not gonna do any recap on John the Baptist. There you go. We’re gonna dive right into fish. Yeah, fish research. Because just to just to remind folks in preparation for Randy’s next visit, when he quit the Bush, you became like a full on fish researcher, a fish biologist. That’s right, your second life, I know.

01:59:24
Speaker 2: And that’s been really rewarding too.

01:59:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, all.

01:59:27
Speaker 1: Right, next time I’m serious, all right, the next time is the fish episode. The final episode of the Fish episode. It’ll be like how many how many installments are there in Lord of the Rings? Three? Well, there’s the Hobbit, and I don’t count the salmarillion. Yeah, not counting the Hobbit. It’s a three pack. Or we’ll go back in time and hit the Hobbit later.

01:59:49
Speaker 2: One last thing on uh please, on the Lord of the Rings. So when we were when we were living out, it was there was a time when we felt like we were the good guys.

01:59:58
Speaker 1: You know, we were we were the Fellowship.

02:00:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, we were, we were. We were fine, right, and then we started reading these uh, these passages and the Lord of the Rings, you know, with with what was it, the uh, the Orcs or something with with these areas where they’re just all these dead bones from things that they’d eaten and we start looking around and we go, well, that that looks more like us than anything else. But it was true, you know, because you can’t get rid of the bones. They’re always going to be there, and dogs to them, you know, they’re there.

02:00:32
Speaker 1: That’s a part about uh, that’s a part about death and the barons. Yeah, as they’re dying, they get to digging out all their old bones and trying to boil them and all that, and let that left more for trouble for them. Yeah. You know what I did after reading that book, so I was curious about it. I took some raw hide and boiled and ate it, did you yeah, hair and all. No, no, no, I was boiled the raw hide, boiled and boiled and boiled it till it turned into like a gelatin Yeah. I didn’t need to know to clog my uh you know, I didn’t have to have the missus do an animal on me. But yeah, I had a couple a couple of strips just to see. It kind of had a like a it had like a noodlee, like a very gelatinous noodley quality to it. But I didn’t eat enough to die or anything, you know, as evidenced by my presence. Yeah, all right, dude, I gotta run, okay, all right, next time Fish, Thanks for having me. Thank you man.