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

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with outdoor legend and veteran outdoor writer Jim Zumbo https://www.jimzumbo.com/. Topics discussed: Playing with insects as a kid; going to school for biology; winning a bet and and getting your first article published by Outdoor Life; how the editors always wanted bear mauling stories; "The Cow Call" and the "World Record Whitetail'; the very first rifle; having Obsessive Compulsive Firewood Disorder; philanthropic efforts with veterans; Jim's To Heck with Elk Hunting, To Heck with Deer Hunting, To Heck with Moose Hunting https://www.jimzumbo.com/shop/ books; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:47Speaker 04

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• 1:53Speaker 05

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• 1:58Steven Rinella?

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• 2:21Steven Rinella?

  My God, are we lucky. We're joined today in the 85th year of his life, very well-lived.

• 2:29Steven Rinella?

  Veteran outdoor writer, biologist and TV host Jim Zumbo.

• 2:33Speaker 06

  Thank you, sir. Delighted to be here.

• 2:35Steven Rinella?

  Multi-decade tenure at Outdoor Life Magazine, his show Jim Zumbo Outdoors on the Outdoor Channel. Known for big game hunting, known for cooking, known for being a great guy, has written, by his own estimation, he tried to count this up one day, 2,500 magazine articles and 21 books. Jim, thanks for coming on the show.

• 3:00Speaker 06

  Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

• 3:03Steven Rinella?

  I want to go back, I want to go back in time and talk about how your career and how you came to do what you want to do, but I'm too dying to talk about something else first.

• 3:12Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 3:12Steven Rinella?

  So the first thing I want to talk about is the article you wrote and the man you talked to, and we were talking about this before we started recording, is, and it's going to refresh viewers on the story if they haven't heard it. The last known grizzly bear in Colorado, the last documented grizzly bear in Colorado,

• 3:31Steven Rinella?

  was killed by an archer in 79? In 1979?

• 3:37Speaker 06

  September of 79.

• 3:38Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 3:41Steven Rinella?

  It was an old female.

• 3:45Steven Rinella?

  The archer claimed that he was out hunting elk in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado. The archer claimed that he was attacked by the grizzly and he killed it. Now, for many years prior, no one had seen a grizzly at all in Colorado. They were hiding, just very few of them. Most people assumed they were gone. After that grizzly was killed,

• 4:11Steven Rinella?

  people launched a monstrous search. That's not the right word, monstrous.

• 4:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:17Steven Rinella?

  A humongous.

• 4:17Speaker 06

  That's good.

• 4:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, a mondo search.

• 4:20Speaker 06

  A mondo is good.

• 4:21Steven Rinella?

  All through the San Juans, trying to establish that there was a population there, never to find one.

• 4:30Steven Rinella?

  This story is, this story has a lot of twists and turns and there's some controversial elements to it, but tell us about, I, I, until this morning, I didn't know that you spoke to that man in the hospital.

• 4:42Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Tell the story.

• 4:45Speaker 06

  So, I was, I, I'd drawn a desert sheep hunt in Utah, in southern Utah, in seventy-nine, and hunted for a week and I was on my way home to, to get more gear and I heard on the radio that, uh, this guy had killed a grizzly bear with a handheld arrow. And I was Western editor for Outdoor Life at the time, so I thought, holy smokes, what a story. So I called my boss in New York and I told him, he says, get that story, uh, forget your sheep hunt for now. So, I drove to Alamos, Colorado, got a motel.

• 5:17Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:18Speaker 06

  And visited him in the hospital and spent probably five days, nurses kept kicking me out, cause he was, he was hurt really bad. And so I was able to maybe spend twenty minutes or a half hour a day with him, but I got the story.

• 5:30Steven Rinella?

  What were, what were the injuries he had?

• 5:33Speaker 06

  Well, the bear had bitten through his left shoulder and it had bitten through his right leg, made hamburger out of it. And, uh, he just sustained all, all kinds of wounds around his body. Um, he was hunting with a, with a, he had a client, a farmer from Kansas, Mike, and they had split up. Uh, Ed was outfitting, he, he's a bow hunter, so he had his bow and the other guy had a bow and they split up. And all of a sudden, this bear came charging at him and before he could do anything, was on top of him, knocked him over. Now, Ed's a big guy, he could be a linebacker for an NFL team, he's a big burly guy.

• 6:17Speaker 06

  So, the bear's on top of him and chewing away and, and, uh, blood all over the place and he knows he's gonna die. There's no way out unless the bear leaves. And he sees an arrow, he had his arrows in a quiver. And he sees an arrow laying on the ground and he got the arrow and the bear's on top of him and he's, he kept jabbing him and he, he hit the aorta, in his throat, whatever that vein is, maybe jugular, whatever. And the bear started bleeding all over him. And all of a sudden, the bear walked, walked away and flopped over and died. So in the meantime, Ed screaming and yelling and whatever, Mike, the guide comes running

• 7:00Speaker 06

  over and he sees Ed and he's in panic.

• 7:03Steven Rinella?

  Oh, the guy that got mauled was the client or the guide?

• 7:07Speaker 06

  The guide.

• 7:07Steven Rinella?

  Okay, that's okay, that's what I thought, yeah, I got you, yeah, yeah.

• 7:09Speaker 06

  Yeah. So Mike, the client come running over and he's, Ed's covered with blood and, and he, he's gets pretty upset, obviously, and one of the horses takes off because it's full of blood. They had two horses. So he tried to get up on a horse and he kept passing out. And he just, it didn't work. So finally, he got him on a horse and they headed toward camp. They were, they were way back in the wilderness. I don't think the hunter, Mike, had ever been there before.

• 7:46Speaker 06

  They got to a big clearing and where a helicopter could land.

• 7:51Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 7:52Speaker 06

  And Ed told Mike to get back to camp and bring some help and call a helicopter. I guess they had a satellite phone back in camp. So he told Mike how to get to camp. Mike had never been there before. There was a trail, but it would have been six miles out of the way. He told him how to get right to camp. So before he left, Mike dragged a bunch of wood over to start a fire because in the mountains it's going to get cold at night and Ed was just, I mean, he covered with blood, hurt and he knew, he thought he was going to die.

• 8:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 8:21Speaker 06

  So he started a fire and he left, went back to camp. His dad was a doctor.

• 8:27Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 8:27Speaker 06

  And he had a medical kit. Somehow he finds camp in the dark by riding his horse across the mountains.

• 8:36Speaker 06

  Comes back in the middle of the night and somehow his dad and a couple other guys.

• 8:44Speaker 06

  They had gotten off the trail and his horse went over a cliff with the medical gear, straight down and died.

• 8:53Steven Rinella?

  You're kidding me?

• 8:54Speaker 06

  No.

• 8:55Steven Rinella?

  Dude, I never heard that part of the story.

• 8:56Speaker 06

  That's what, that's exactly what, that, what I wrote, what Ed told me. So they finally got to Ed and got a helicopter and got him out and took him to the hospital in Alamosa. So that's basically what happened.

• 9:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 9:11Speaker 06

  But like you said, there's been a controversy because people just, they didn't believe it. And how could this guy kill a bear with an arrow? You know?

• 9:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 9:22Speaker 06

  Today, everything's, a lot of it's fake news. Some, ah, that's BS, you know, that, that didn't happen.

• 9:27Steven Rinella?

  But I don't have a problem with this part.

• 9:28Speaker 06

  Well.

• 9:29Steven Rinella?

  Cause this, I mean, there's, there's documented cases, people killing with 22s, people killing with knives, you know?

• 9:35Speaker 06

  Yeah. But to have a bear actually ravaging your body and having the presence of mind to grab an arrow and just stab him and, and like I said, Ed was a, he was a strong guy.

• 9:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 9:46Speaker 06

  But I believe him because I was there. He didn't have time to think up any, any lies, you know? He was laying in that bed. He was, you know, he was, he was, he was loopy and stuff and, but I, I, I really admire that guy and, and, uh, he's since moved. He's living in the Midwest now. I think he's about 92 years old.

• 10:04Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 10:05Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 10:06Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 10:07Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 10:08Steven Rinella?

  Do you care what I think?

• 10:09Speaker 06

  Sure. Yeah. What do you think?

• 10:12Steven Rinella?

  I wasn't there. I never talked to the guy. I've, I've been to the place where it happened. It just gets a little like. Okay, I want to paint a scenario for you that I, that I use in situations like this. Like let's say there's an omniscient being, okay? God, an omniscient being who knows every, all the truth in the world.

• 10:38Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:39Steven Rinella?

  And he says to me, he says, um, is that the full story? Cause he knows the truth.

• 10:45Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:46Steven Rinella?

  And he says to me, is that the full story? If you're right, you live. If you're wrong, you die. So I have to get it right. There's no being cute.

• 10:56Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 10:57Steven Rinella?

  There's no trying to make a point. It's just what, you gotta make the best guess you can make. My guess is there's more to that story.

• 11:07Steven Rinella?

  First, I want to throw in an interesting tidbit and see if this is true, as you remember. Wasn't it that part of the thing was that they could tell from that there was a female?

• 11:15Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 11:15Steven Rinella?

  And they could tell, I don't know how they can tell, but when they did a necropsy, they could tell that she had bore young. Something about, there's some signature on the reproductive system or another that would demonstrate that she had had cubs.

• 11:31Speaker 06

  Right. And she was pretty old too, I think. She was like 12 years old or 20 years old or some darn thing.

• 11:36Steven Rinella?

  The fact that she had had cubs is part of what brought about this big search that people got involved in.

• 11:42Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 11:42Steven Rinella?

  To try to find others because it was like she had to have, and she had, so she was presumably had bred with a male. Where's the male? And she had bore cubs. Where are the cubs? Uh, but no one ever, that still remains today, the last grizzly. I think so, I think there's more to the story. I like, I don't know, I don't know. If there's one, like, if there's one bear in the whole state, there's one bear in the San Juans and that bear, an old female, happens to maul the guy unprovoked. To me, it's just more plausible that they, that they tried to get an arrow into it.

• 12:21Steven Rinella?

  Maybe they, maybe, and it's excusable. Maybe the, the idea of there being a grizzly there was totally out of their mind and they were like, oh, black bear. And I feel like they got an arrow into it. If I had to guess, not knowing the gentleman, they got an arrow into it and that led to everything that follows. If I had to make a guess.

• 12:43Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 12:44Steven Rinella?

  What do you think about that?

• 12:46Speaker 06

  I, I don't know. I suppose anything's possible.

• 12:49Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 12:50Speaker 06

  But, uh, yeah, I don't know. Now, they were hunting separately.

• 12:54Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 12:54Speaker 06

  He was hunting maybe 150, they were, they were just kind of still hunting through the forest.

• 12:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 12:59Speaker 06

  And then Mike heard a screaming and come running over, but.

• 13:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 13:04Speaker 06

  I don't know.

• 13:06Steven Rinella?

  I had no idea you met, I had no idea you were on that story.

• 13:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 13:09Steven Rinella?

  All right, now you ready to back up now? Back in time?

• 13:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 13:14Steven Rinella?

  Go even back deeper in time?

• 13:15Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 13:16Steven Rinella?

  How did you, like, where did you grow up? And how did it ever click with you to, to, to get into the career you got into? And, and to make a whole life out of, you know, hunting and writing about hunting and telling stories? And, and

• 13:30Speaker 06

  Right.

• 13:30Steven Rinella?

  And, and sharing, you know, your life and profiling other people's lives and capturing this whole culture for all these decades. How, where'd that come from?

• 13:39Speaker 06

  Well, I, when I was a kid, I was, I was born and raised in Newburgh, New York, which is sixty miles north of New York City. It's in the Hudson Valley, thirty thousand people. And raised right in the city. And ever since I was a little kid, I just loved anything wild in the outdoors. I'd lay on the sidewalk and feed crumbs to the ants. I'd feed spiders. I had names for the spiders, you know? And I always wanted to be a game owner or a forest ranger. And at one point I thought I might like to be a writer. Well, in high school, I had an English teacher named Ms. Fink, and I loved to read when I was a kid. I read books like Amick the Beaver and Tarka the Otter and all sorts of stuff.

• 14:17Steven Rinella?

  I'm not familiar with those books.

• 14:18Speaker 06

  No, they're old. Look them up. Yeah, I, I was a teenager when I read them. It's a long time ago. But she, she read one of my compositions, said, you ought to be a writer. So it didn't, I didn't pay much attention to that because I wasn't a great student. During lunchtime, I'd be trapping in the woods behind the high school. We had raccoons that's out and stuff, possums and stupid stuff and muskrats.

• 14:38Steven Rinella?

  What do you mean stupid stuff? You mean grinders, possums? I'm not stupid about a possum.

• 14:46Speaker 06

  But anyway, I went to a little school in northern New York called Paul Smith's, way up on the around the border of the Canadian border, there was a forestry school and liberal arts and hotel management. There were four hundred students and

• 14:57Steven Rinella?

  On hotel management, liberal arts and forestry?

• 15:00Speaker 06

  Forestry.

• 15:01Steven Rinella?

  Take your pick on.

• 15:02Speaker 06

  Yeah. There were two forestry courses. And one of them was terminal and the other was pre-professional. The pre-professional course, it got you basically started for your bachelor's. We had to transfer to another university.

• 15:15Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 15:15Speaker 06

  I didn't take that one. I took the terminal course. We had track, cast, classes like sawmilling and dynamiting and And we had a sugar bush, we had a sugar mill.

• 15:26Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 15:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, back in the, now they use tubes to get sugar syrup.

• 15:29Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 15:30Speaker 06

  And those days, you'd drive a spigot in a maple tree in March, colder than hell, three foot of snow. And put to hang a bucket on it. We go through the woods with a horse drawn sleigh with a big vat.

• 15:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 15:43Speaker 06

  We take those buckets and then we put the sap in the sugar house and somebody had to keep throwing wood in the stove and it had to be so many degrees. Anyway, that was one of the courses.

• 15:53Speaker 06

  So what that did is-

• 15:54Steven Rinella?

  You know, I gotta tell you something that you, that-

• 15:56Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 15:57Steven Rinella?

  When we were, when we were little kids, we didn't know, we just knew it was maples. We didn't know sugar maples.

• 16:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 16:05Steven Rinella?

  And we had like a lot of the wrong maples. We ran around, we would just drill holes in those maples. And then like take a peanut butter tub or something and try to nestle it up under that hole.

• 16:16Speaker 06

  Really?

• 16:16Steven Rinella?

  Tape it to the tree, you know? And we were always looking at it like, what gives, man?

• 16:23Steven Rinella?

  Never got shit.

• 16:26Speaker 06

  One interesting thing about the sap from the tree, if it's, if it's two percent or better, it's fantastic. In other words, you get two gallons of syrup from a hundred gallons of sap.

• 16:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 16:38Speaker 06

  Three percent is like impossible almost. Anyway, that was one of the courses. So that prepared me to be a woods boss or work in a pulp mill or whatever.

• 16:46Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 16:47Speaker 06

  I had a good buddy who, he taught me how to trap. He was always two years ahead of me in school. And he went out to Utah State. He said, hey, you gotta come out here and get your degree. He says, you wanna, you know, if you wanna be a game warden, you gotta have a damn degree. So I went-

• 16:59Steven Rinella?

  In Utah?

• 17:00Speaker 06

  In Utah State.

• 17:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 17:01Speaker 06

  Up in Logan. So I went there, got my bachelor's.

• 17:06Speaker 06

  I got a backup. I'm sorry. When I was at Paul Smith's,

• 17:10Speaker 06

  you know, in a lot of these little communities, hunting communities. Guys would say, oh, there's a big old buck out there and there was a great big whitetail that everybody called Old Joe.

• 17:20Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 17:21Speaker 06

  And he was supposed to be this monster, maybe a mythical buck, I don't know. So one day I'm crawling around this cedar swamp, spagnum moss, and I got my thirty thirty model ninety-four carbine, you know, and I'm squeezing between a couple of trees and that out jumps this huge buck. And all I could do was just look at him because I couldn't even move. So I got a wild hearing. I wrote a story about it for the for the college paper. And they printed it. And I thought, holy smokes, you know, that's, I was just so impressed to see that stupid story in that little stupid paper.

• 17:52Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 17:53Speaker 06

  When I went out to Utah State, I lived with a bunch of foresters and one of the guys worked on the on the paper called Student Life. And he said, why don't you do a deer big game forecast? I said, okay. So I did.

• 18:08Steven Rinella?

  Tell me again, do a what?

• 18:09Speaker 06

  A deer big game forecast.

• 18:11Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 18:11Speaker 06

  Deer elk forecast for the upcoming season.

• 18:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:15Speaker 06

  So I did. And then he says, the editor wants you to see, you want to write a column? And I said, yeah, I wouldn't mind trying that. Now, I never took any journalism courses or anything and I wished I did. But I wrote the column. And one night, a bunch of foresters and a couple of professors, we went up the canyon, it was a cabin up there. And we had a bathtub full of beer and we were BS and we were cooking hot dogs and hamburgers. And this professor comes over and he says, Zumbo, you think you're a hot shit. He said, you write that stupid column in that paper, I'll bet you a case of Lucky Lager beer that you can't sell a real story to a real magazine. So, you know, we were all kind of half buzzed. And I said, I'll take you up on that. So there's a lake called Bear Lake on the Utah Idaho

• 18:59Speaker 06

  border. And and there's a Bonneville Cisco that is endemic only to that lake. And they only spawn in January and it's colder than hell, twenty thirty below zero. They spawn close to the shore. So you go out there with nets and it's a gala event.

• 19:14Steven Rinella?

  That lake has a has an endemic Cisco?

• 19:18Speaker 06

  Yes, sir. They say it's the last lake in the Bonneville Ocean that still. But anyway, it's deeper than heck, turquoise, beautiful water. So Lias Club was out there selling hot chocolate and coffee and hot dogs. People, just a lot of people. Anyway, I wrote a story about that. And I'll be darned if Alterlife didn't buy it.

• 19:38Steven Rinella?

  For how much money?

• 19:40Speaker 06

  Three hundred fifty bucks.

• 19:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, big money though.

• 19:42Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, in those days, holy smokes. Yeah, I just got married, we're living in, in student housing, you know, and brokered in hell and, and, uh. So that, that kinda started all, and then I started freelancing. And the next three stories I sent to Altor Laver rejected. I wrote one on rock chuck hunting and the editor, Bill Ray, says, that's a massacre, Zumbo. He says, I can't use that story, but this guy, Bill Ray, of all the editors, Sports and Field, Altor Life and Field and Stream were all in New York City, right down in Manhattan.

• 20:13Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 20:15Speaker 06

  And.

• 20:16Steven Rinella?

  They were still running those places out, when I started writing, they were still running those places out of New York. You'd be on the phone and they're talking to people in New York.

• 20:23Speaker 06

  Yep, yeah. Altor Life was on Madison Avenue, which was, advertisers were, you know, and Sports and Field was there and, uh, but at any rate, Bill, Bill Ray was the kinda guy that he would, uh, he wouldn't encourage a writer even if he had gotten rejects, you know, a lot of editors would just, you know, we don't want your stuff anymore, but he, he was really a fantastic guy. I could probably tell you ten guys my age or less, most of them passed on, that got a start from Bill Ray. But anyway, that's how it started.

• 20:56Steven Rinella?

  Um, so he, he rejected three?

• 20:59Speaker 06

  At least three.

• 21:00Steven Rinella?

  What else, do you remember what else he rejected?

• 21:03Speaker 06

  No.

• 21:04Steven Rinella?

  Do you remember what the next one was that he bid on?

• 21:05Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 21:08Speaker 06

  I, I worked at West Point for eight years as a wildlife biologist and a post forester and a game warden. And a buddy of mine had developed a tip up with a, with a battery on it and a light.

• 21:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I remember those.

• 21:23Speaker 06

  Well, he, he said, hey, let's go out fishing at night for walleyes in this lake.

• 21:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 21:28Speaker 06

  So we built a big fire and had a little whiskey, you know, and the light go out, we run out there. So I wrote a story called The Fisher Lighten. So sent it to Paul Smith, Paul Smith, sent it to Outdoor Life and they bought it. I thought, holy smokes, you know, wow. The next one was called Beacon in the Forest.

• 21:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 21:47Speaker 06

  Where when I'm out there in the woods, I realize that in the fall, the first trees that turn yellow are hickories. And squirrels love hickories. So I'd spot a yellow tree and I'd go there and I'd sit and by golly, here's, here's the squirrels all over. And then they work on the oaks or whatever else.

• 22:03Steven Rinella?

  Sure, yeah.

• 22:04Speaker 06

  So I wrote a story called Beacon in the Forest.

• 22:06Steven Rinella?

  About hickories.

• 22:07Speaker 06

  Beacon in the forest about hickories.

• 22:08Steven Rinella?

  And they bought that.

• 22:09Speaker 06

  That one, yeah.

• 22:10Steven Rinella?

  Back when you were selling those articles in the early days, were they paying you on, were they doing a word count? Paying you on a word count?

• 22:16Speaker 06

  No, just a flat fee.

• 22:17Steven Rinella?

  Flat fee.

• 22:18Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. But then I worked for the government, uh, fifteen years. I worked for the state of Utah forestry and fire control for two years. And then I worked at West Point for eight years. Then I came back to Utah, worked as a wildlife biologist for the BLM. And I got a call one day from Don Cozy, who was executive editor, and he says, uh, we'd like you to work for us as Western editor. I said, what does that mean? He's, well, he says, you'll run the yellow pages, the old yellow pages and work with all these stringers in all the states and send us seven hundred and twenty lines of clean copy, plus maps and photos, and that's your job.

• 22:59Speaker 06

  I says, God, I can't do that while I'm working for the government, can I? He says, hell, no. I says, you mean, I gotta come to work for Outdoor Life full time?

• 23:06Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:07Speaker 06

  He said, yep. So I talk, took about five minutes to think it over and I accepted the job for a huge cut in pay.

• 23:15Steven Rinella?

  It was, it was a cut in pay.

• 23:17Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, I had, I was making eighteen thousand bucks with the government, with all the perks, health benefits, you know, and all that stuff and pension. Went to work for Outdoor Life for nine thousand dollars and a handshake.

• 23:30Steven Rinella?

  No kidding?

• 23:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 23:32Steven Rinella?

  Were you were married at that point?

• 23:34Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 23:35Steven Rinella?

  How long were you married for?

• 23:38Speaker 06

  I was married to my first wife Lois for twenty six years and Madonna for thirty two. So, yeah, we're still fighting with each other.

• 23:48Steven Rinella?

  Dude, that's a mark fidelity you hit like, uh, my old man managed to pull that off to hit like, what's that called a silver anniversary?

• 23:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 23:55Steven Rinella?

  With two different women.

• 23:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, but my wife, she's loyal.

• 23:59Steven Rinella?

  Kind of like you could look at it two different ways. You look like amazingly loyal.

• 24:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 24:03Steven Rinella?

  Or, or not.

• 24:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, but she puts up with all my absences. Don't, I don't travel much anymore, but there were times when I was on the road for probably two hundred and seventy, two hundred and eighty days. Now that included also shows. I did a lot of seminars.

• 24:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 24:21Speaker 06

  In fact, that's where I met her. She was running the I S E shows in her, uh, the sports and expos on the west coast. But, uh, yeah, I, I, there were times when I'd take off and be gone for thirty, forty days.

• 24:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 24:36Speaker 06

  Then I got the TV show and then between the TV show and outdoor life, I mean, it was just constant. I would go on maybe four hunts in a row. I'd go up to B C. I love to go up to northern B C for elk and then I'd Montana typically and, and Wyoming or Colorado and, and whatever else, antelope, mule deer.

• 24:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 24:54Speaker 06

  Moose, I love to hunt moose, black bears. So, I mean, it was just nonstop because you had to, you know, I had to write a column a month for outdoor life when I became hunting editor. For first, when I was western editor, then they did away with the yellow page. Then they made me editor at large.

• 25:12Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 25:13Speaker 06

  That meant I just.

• 25:13Steven Rinella?

  I remember that, yeah.

• 25:15Speaker 06

  And then I became hunting editor and you gotta have so much copy, you know, and you gotta travel, obviously. So, that's kind of where it's at.

• 25:56Steven Rinella?

  I travel quite a bit and when I'm home, it's very easy to stay on a rigid food routine and eat the right kinds of food at the right time. But when you're on the road, it's hard to stay in your routine and like diet can really start to fall apart. I've seen it and that's why I like Athletic Greens. Now AG1 is already the standard for daily foundational nutrition. AG1 Pro is what's next. It's built for people who don't want to stop there. Creatine, CAHMB, advanced gut lining support. On top of everything AG1 Next Gen already delivers, you can get it in travel packs. One travel pack, 10 to 12 ounces of cold water every morning. If you're already taking creatine separately, AG1 Pro simplifies your stack.

• 26:41Steven Rinella?

  One thing in the morning covers more than your current routine might for less than a dollar more per serving. AG1 Pro supports protein synthesis, helps reduce protein breakdown and supports muscle recovery and consistent training performance. Visit drinkag1.com/meateater and get an AG1 Pro Yeti Shaker in your AG1 Pro Welcome Kit. Again, that's drinkag1.com/meateater. Grab yours now. OnX Hunt is full of great features. I always say it's my favorite app. I use the thing on a daily basis. Here's a new feature I'm very excited about. OnX Hunt's location sharing puts your whole group on one live map.

• 27:26Steven Rinella?

  So you can look and tell where everyone is. And if at night it gets dark and someone's not back yet, you don't got to guess what happened to them or where they are. You can just look and tell where they are. It has implications for safety, coordination. I can't even list all the ways in which this is helpful. You opt in and then when you guys are done, the data goes away. It's not stored. Keep the folks in your deer camp on the same page with location sharing from OnX Hunt.

• 27:54Steven Rinella?

  When you were on the masthead, or not on the masthead, but you were staffed at Outdoor Life, but you would do seminars and do TV and stuff. Was that all in on salary? Or was that more like a la carte approach where, where you would get like additional money to do these different projects?

• 28:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, I was on a seminar circuit. I had a contract with an International Sports Expo and I did shows in like six cities on the west coast in Denver.

• 28:21Steven Rinella?

  But you kept that money?

• 28:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, and they'd pay me a fee for that.

• 28:25Steven Rinella?

  Okay, and that didn't conflict with your, your normal gig?

• 28:28Speaker 06

  No, uh-uh, it didn't. The only conflict was Outdoor Life didn't want me working for the competition. They didn't want me in field in streamer sports at field. American Hunter, NRA magazine, they didn't care about that, you know, because that was a different deal. But, um, so, yeah, it was, I was, it was crazy. It was a crazy time.

• 28:49Steven Rinella?

  You know, that's a, I think I think about that long era, like just the years of your career, Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, Sports at Field. There were so many more shared, like, there were so many more shared national experiences back then. Do you know, like, like, I'm old enough that when I was a little kid, I mean, there's Channels 3 on a TV. There was Channel 3, 8, and 13.

• 29:18Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 29:18Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:19Steven Rinella?

  It was like NBC, CBS, ABC, or whatever the hell it was. And that was what it was.

• 29:24Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 29:25Steven Rinella?

  Right? We still have, like, we still kind of retained a shared experience of the Super Bowl or something.

• 29:30Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:31Steven Rinella?

  But there used to be like many, many shared experiences that people would have. And I think some of those were just these magazines. Because pre-internet, you know, if you were a hunter and angler, you were looking at those magazines. I think going to my, my, my maternal grandfather was a musky fisherman, big fisherman. He liked to hunt, you know? You'd go to his house and he would have the magazines. Do you know what I mean? And I would like go home and, and, and bring them with. And it was just that, that all, it was sort of like all eyes in the outdoor world were on those things. You know?

• 30:14Steven Rinella?

  And in that way, I grew up just like, I just grew up with your name.

• 30:19Steven Rinella?

  You know, I mean, I grew up reading your stuff. I, I was reading your stuff as a, as a child at my grandfather's house.

• 30:25Speaker 06

  Holy smokes.

• 30:25Steven Rinella?

  You know, but just being, being, yeah, I'm not young anymore, man, but like, being there and dreaming about hunting the west and stuff and like, you know? And your stuff was there.

• 30:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 30:37Steven Rinella?

  And things are so diffuse now.

• 30:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, it is. Very much so. You got all kinds of stuff. Well, your show is everywhere, thankfully.

• 30:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it gets out there.

• 30:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 30:49Steven Rinella?

  Hey, tell me about firewood. You're big into firewood.

• 30:53Speaker 06

  I suffer from an illness called ECFD, Excessive Compulsive Firewood Disorder.

• 30:59Steven Rinella?

  Let me hit you with one. Can I hit you with one?

• 31:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 31:01Steven Rinella?

  My brother Danny recently got himself, this might be a good book subject for you. He recently got himself a book about firewood.

• 31:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 31:09Steven Rinella?

  It's from the, it's, it's from the, might be out of Norway or something.

• 31:13Speaker 06

  I might have that book.

• 31:16Speaker 06

  Honestly, okay, go ahead.

• 31:17Steven Rinella?

  Well, no, I mean,

• 31:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 31:19Steven Rinella?

  I need to get me a copy. He's got a book. It's just a book about firewood. And there's a thing in there that I didn't, that I wasn't aware of. I want to run this by you. It's like, you know where I was talking about this wood has, puts off this BTUs. This would puts off that BTUs. This would puts off that BTUs. This book is saying that

• 31:41Steven Rinella?

  all wood is the same by weight,

• 31:48Steven Rinella?

  but not by volume. Like wood, if you, if you don't measure it by volume and measure it by weight, it all puts off the same BTUs. It's just a matter of efficiency and releasing those BTUs because a denser, like denser wood, we think of as being hotter. But wood by weight has the same BTU.

• 32:11Speaker 06

  I'll be darned.

• 32:12Steven Rinella?

  What do you think about that?

• 32:13Speaker 06

  I don't know.

• 32:15Steven Rinella?

  Well, put that, if you make a wood book, you gotta either make that that's true or not true. I don't know what to make out of that. You know what I'm saying? But like,

• 32:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Because I'll tell you, dude,

• 32:27Steven Rinella?

  I grew up in the hardwoods in Michigan and I used to sell, like when I was selling firewood,

• 32:34Steven Rinella?

  we would get, you'd get 90 a cord for dried hardwood. You could hold it till like February, January, February and get 110 a cord for dried hardwood. I would cut it and make this huge mountains of it and then deliver it when the prices were good. Only maple and oak, some beach thrown in. At that time, you could sell white pine. So if you could get a cord, 90 bucks for a cord of cut and split hardwood,

• 33:06Steven Rinella?

  a cord of white pine was $35. People would talk where I grew up, they would tell you that you can't heat with pine. They would say that it'll burn your house down because the, I mean, it was like you can't, you could, you go anywhere in that area, you would never find a person carry a piece of pine in their house and burn it. But then you move out west and that's all there is, right? Everybody burns pine.

• 33:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 33:31Steven Rinella?

  So, so for decades, I've been burning that junk. But then I go back to my mom's and we go down on the beach on the lake in front of the house there and I make a big old pile of oak and get that burning. Dude, you can't, you can't even get near that fire. It's like, that's, that's a wood right there, dude. That's a hot wood, you know?

• 33:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 33:53Steven Rinella?

  So in reading that, it kind of threw me off that it's like, uh, you know, that it's just, they're talking about by volume.

• 34:00Speaker 06

  Right. Well, I've always, I've always considered, I've looked at the BTU charts for both native woods in the US and all woods. And most of the charts would tell you that Osage orange, also called Bodak or hedge, number one BTUs.

• 34:16Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 34:17Speaker 06

  Number one. And, uh, they say it'll burn your grate and it damn near will. Um, I like to get wood from all over. I got some buddies from North Dakota who come on Antelope with me and they bring a bunch of oak.

• 34:28Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 34:29Speaker 06

  From the yard, you know, and I went to Kansas to a writers conference and Mike Pierce was a good friend of mine. He used to be the outdoor writer for the Wall Street Journal. And I said,

• 34:38Steven Rinella?

  The Wall Street Journal had an outdoor writer?

• 34:40Speaker 06

  Yeah. Michael Pierce. So I said, Mike, if I bring my chainsaw over, can I cut some hedge? He said, yeah, there's all kinds of hedge around here. So as it turned out, he had a buddy who had a whole barn full, full of hedge. He said, back your truck up and load it up. So I took it home and I only burn it when it's really cold. But it burns hot and it burns long.

• 34:59Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:00Speaker 06

  And, uh, but locust is another one that's got a lot of BTUs. So I don't know, you know?

• 35:09Speaker 06

  We live in Northern Rockies, as you do, and the only two softwoods we have are aspen and cottonwood.

• 35:16Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:17Speaker 06

  Otherwise dug fir, number one, um, limber pine, white bark pine, which is now endangered. You can't cut that.

• 35:26Steven Rinella?

  Dude, I never met anybody that cut it, split into a piece of white bark pine, I don't think.

• 35:30Speaker 06

  Yeah. But this, uh, this Osage aren't just so hard that you can't, you can't cut a, you can't drive a nail in it.

• 35:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 35:40Speaker 06

  Um, and they call it hedge because in the old days, the pioneers would plant it and it would grow into, into a row of, of really thick, um, foliage and the cattle couldn't get through it, but it's amazing stuff.

• 35:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 35:54Speaker 06

  Anyway.

• 35:55Steven Rinella?

  Well, guys run that for, um, I mean, the, the industry there is cutting fence poles out of that stuff.

• 36:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 36:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:01Steven Rinella?

  So how does your, if you got a, like OCD around wood, how does that manifest? Like what, like, how do you, what are the symptoms?

• 36:09Speaker 06

  The symptoms? Go cut more wood.

• 36:11Steven Rinella?

  So you just like keep a good stash laid by?

• 36:13Speaker 06

  I once honestly had, I swear I measured it a hundred firewood cords. Now, firewood cord, not a full cord four by four by eight. I'm talking two by four by eight. But I had a hundred, a hundred cords.

• 36:25Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 36:26Speaker 06

  I did.

• 36:27Steven Rinella?

  No, no, but I'm not getting what in the world you're talking about. We've been having this debate lately.

• 36:34Steven Rinella?

  Are you familiar with the term Rick?

• 36:35Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 36:36Steven Rinella?

  Okay. What do, what do you, what is a Rick in your mind?

• 36:39Speaker 06

  A Rick is a full cord four by four by eight, hundred twenty, hundred, hundred twenty eight cubic feet, no?

• 36:44Steven Rinella?

  A Rick is a face cord.

• 36:45Speaker 06

  It is? Okay. Shall I Google it? You know, I think you're right.

• 36:50Steven Rinella?

  But what, what you talking about, what, what kind of, what a firewood cord?

• 36:55Speaker 06

  A firewood.

• 36:55Steven Rinella?

  A twenty four inch deep.

• 36:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:58Steven Rinella?

  So that's a long cup piece of firewood.

• 37:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 37:02Speaker 06

  But that's, if you look it up, it says two by four by eight, firewood or a face cord.

• 37:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but who's, who's oven door are you fitting twenty four inch pieces of firewood through?

• 37:12Speaker 06

  Um, my fireplace go, separates, there's a big stone wall on both sides. And it goes all the way through. You can open the doors on both rooms. And that thing's got a three by four foot box. So I can actually put a, almost a thirty inch log in there.

• 37:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 37:32Speaker 06

  But you're right, you know, most of those aren't going to take that twenty four inches.

• 37:35Steven Rinella?

  I'd like the, you know, I'm not a big government guy generally. Well, in some areas I am, but I would like the government to come in and really put some

• 37:45Steven Rinella?

  enforcement and some structure around firewood measurements.

• 37:52Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 37:53Steven Rinella?

  I think it would do the nation good.

• 37:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 37:56Steven Rinella?

  You know? Cause there's a lot of like people saying a lot of weird things.

• 38:00Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, there are.

• 38:02Steven Rinella?

  But there's a guy Spencer Newheart.

• 38:06Steven Rinella?

  There's a guy Spencer Newheart, the host trivia, and I actually, it's a long story. We got in a big fight about this very subject. Bricks and face cords and cords and all that. So you cut too much wood. Do you sell it?

• 38:19Speaker 06

  No, I used to.

• 38:21Steven Rinella?

  You just like to keep because of the civilization collapses, you got all kind of wood?

• 38:26Speaker 06

  We use it. That fireplace does not go out from usually October until April. Unless it's like this winter, you know, hell, seventy degrees in January and February, we didn't burn it. But my wife will say, what's going on? There's no fire going. It's about your fire sucks because it's, you know, because it's, there's no flame. Okay, I'm throwing a log in it, but we burn that. We probably burn ten to fifteen, twenty cords a year, seriously. And, um.

• 38:54Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 38:55Speaker 06

  But I get it from everywhere. Beetle kill. We had a big beetle kill infestation. I live just a maybe quarter mile from the national forest, the Shoshone forest.

• 39:03Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 39:04Speaker 06

  And as soon as those trees started going, I'd get a forest nurse for that for seven bucks or whatever.

• 39:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 39:10Speaker 06

  And bring that wood home and.

• 39:12Steven Rinella?

  That's your, that's your exercise?

• 39:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 39:14Steven Rinella?

  But you had a heart attack, right? Cutting wood?

• 39:17Speaker 06

  I had a heart attack when I was rolling the log. Yeah, I was rolling the log with a peavy. It was a big ass log and it was a rock behind it. And I, I put everything I had behind it. As you know, a peavy, you can roll a five hundred pound log with that, with that extra. And I felt the pain in my chest and I said, hmm. What was that all about?

• 39:38Steven Rinella?

  Huh?

• 39:39Speaker 06

  And I thought, maybe I strained a muscle, you know, in my, my chest. So I, I had all the wood cut, throw in my truck and I just said, I'm going to leave this wood sit. Put the chainsaw in my truck and go home. And if I don't have this, and I'm going to, when I get to the highway, I'm going to call my doctor. You know, I didn't because the pain went away. And I never had that pain again until my seventy fifth birthday. On that night, I was kind of short of breath. My right arm hurt.

• 40:11Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 40:12Speaker 06

  And, um, there was a little bit of pain in my chest.

• 40:17Speaker 06

  I told my wife and at that time I was between doctors. I hadn't gotten a new one. My other doctor had taken another job in the hospital. So she drives me to town, takes two aspirins, get to the emergency room, tell the lady I got chest pains and she's boom, they stuck me on a, whatever you call it and did a EKG and it showed nothing. And then they did another test. I'm not sure what it was. And they said, he's having a heart attack right now. So they threw me in an ambulance, took me to Billings and they put two stents in and I had to wait six weeks for

• 40:58Speaker 06

  the real open heart surgery, which was December 15th of 2015. And that I tell you, waiting that six weeks was a nightmare because I knew I was gonna go under the knife and you know, get the zipper.

• 41:11Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 41:11Speaker 06

  On the bright side, my surgeon had done 3,000 open heart surgeries in Billings. So I was pretty, he was a great guy. And so got the, got the operation.

• 41:24Steven Rinella?

  Whatever he did worked because here you are.

• 41:26Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I told my cardiologist, I said, when can I start swinging that six pound mole? He said, he said, you gotta wait at least three, four months, you know, and so I did and.

• 41:39Steven Rinella?

  You split all, you split everything by hand? You don't use?

• 41:42Speaker 06

  I used to.

• 41:43Steven Rinella?

  You switched to a hydraulic?

• 41:44Speaker 06

  Yeah. And then when I turned 65, you know, my son was telling me, my dad still splits wood when he's 65 years old, you know, and, and I bought a splitter.

• 41:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 41:54Speaker 06

  And I mean, that takes all the work and everything, you know, trying to cut green, split green cotton wood. You hit that with a maul and it just kind of.

• 42:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 42:03Speaker 06

  Just pull it.

• 42:04Steven Rinella?

  Water comes up out there.

• 42:06Speaker 06

  It ain't gonna split. So you gotta hit it 15 more times.

• 42:09Steven Rinella?

  It's like hitting a sponge. Yeah. Man, I used to work, the first tree service I worked for was an outfit called Professional Tree Service. It was when I was in community college. And.

• 42:24Steven Rinella?

  Interesting thing about this dude that I worked with.

• 42:28Steven Rinella?

  He, he had bought this property. You're gonna think I'm making this up. I'm not making this up, man. He bought this property. And when I'd get to work in the morning. He would be out in the morning with a metal detector. Metal detecting his own yard. Because someone had told him. That the old lady that he bought it from had been burying jars of money with metallic like bell ball and mason money jars.

• 42:55Speaker 06

  Really?

• 42:56Steven Rinella?

  With metallic lids.

• 42:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 42:58Steven Rinella?

  Had been burying money all around the yard. And this guy's morning ritual is to get up and metal detect.

• 43:05Speaker 06

  Holy smoke.

• 43:06Steven Rinella?

  This 10 acres, whatever he had.

• 43:07Speaker 06

  Funny.

• 43:08Steven Rinella?

  Hoping to dig up that money. But he, so. His middle finger is gone.

• 43:17Steven Rinella?

  And he used to run those, you know, remember that, remember that, I don't know if they still make them, Saks Dolomar chainsaws? Like horrible vibration. Control on those, like no vibration control on those chains. They were just monsters. He'd run those Saks Dolomar saws. And he wouldn't, he had the, he'd buy a regular five finger glove, obviously.

• 43:37Steven Rinella?

  But this middle finger is gone. So I used to laugh because anytime he was gripping something. He'd be giving you the finger. Because there's no middle finger in there to. For the glove. And I always assumed. He'd cut it off with a chainsaw. But we would, a lot of times, all that wood, we, when we're doing a removal or whatever, just go and do a mountain. And then if there's nothing else to do, we'd go out there and. Firewood all that. And it was terrible because he'd bring it home in all these weird chunks, you know, just lowering stuff right into a truck. So it's like elbows and odd. And you're sorting through the pile, trying to find 16 inch.

• 44:13Speaker 06

  Right.

• 44:14Steven Rinella?

  Cuts.

• 44:14Speaker 06

  Right.

• 44:15Steven Rinella?

  And, and like I said, I never asked him about that finger. But I assumed he cut it off. But one day we're cutting. And I'm doing something or another with that hydraulic splitter. And he says to me. That's just how I lost my middle.

• 44:27Speaker 06

  For God's sake.

• 44:31Steven Rinella?

  On a hydraulic splitter. Yeah.

• 44:35Speaker 06

  That's funny.

• 44:38Steven Rinella?

  Let's go back to nineteen eighty six and um it's funny to think about but cow calling elk.

• 44:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 44:45Steven Rinella?

  Even like bugling elk, man, was, you know, I'm sure historically people figured it out, but like bugling elk, cow calling elk, that wasn't in hunters toolkits.

• 44:57Speaker 06

  No, not at all. Back when I first started, um, our bugle calls, we made them out of a piece of garden hose.

• 45:06Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:07Speaker 06

  Or maybe a piece of pipe, cut a little notch in it, you know, and they sounded horrible, but they still called elk. And they were awful. And then I remember when the first calls came out.

• 45:18Speaker 06

  But I think when you say nineteen eighty six, you're referring to the, to the cow call.

• 45:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, your article, yeah, about um cow call.

• 45:25Speaker 06

  Right.

• 45:26Steven Rinella?

  Your article Elk Hunting's Newest Secret.

• 45:28Speaker 06

  Yep. Well, I had, I'd gone to Gardner a lot, Montana, which is literally on the border of Yellowstone Park.

• 45:35Steven Rinella?

  Were you friends with uh, were you part of Don Lawbaugh?

• 45:40Speaker 06

  That Don Lawbaugh invented the cow call.

• 45:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah.

• 45:44Speaker 06

  So Don and I, we'd, we'd hang out. He owned like the saloon in town and the motel and the restaurant, the gas station. He owned a bunch. He was from Big Timber. Great guy.

• 45:55Speaker 06

  Anyway, one day we're sitting in his bar and he pulls a thing out of his pocket. He says, you know what this is? I said, no idea. He said, well, listen. And he blows his thing and everybody looks at him. He says, don't worry about them. I own the bar. You know, he makes this big shrieking noise. He goes, that sound like, I said, it sounds like a cow elk.

• 46:15Speaker 06

  He says, well, what do you think? I said, what do I think? I don't know. What do you think? He said, well, don't you think that, you know, cow elk, they vocalize year round? I said, yeah, all year. Not just like during the rut.

• 46:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:27Speaker 06

  Like the bulls. So he said, when you hunt turkeys, what do you sound like? You sound like a hen. You're yelping out there, you know? And he says, so don't you think you can use a cow call to attract bulls or whatever? That makes a lot of sense. He's, I'll tell you, he says it works. He says, I know it works because I've done it. And he lived right in Gardner and the elk were in his yard year round.

• 46:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 46:49Speaker 06

  He heard him talking all the time. So he said.

• 46:54Speaker 06

  He said, I'll give you a call if, if you don't mind and, and would you, if you like it, would you write a story about it? I said, absolutely. You know, after life, like all the, it's a service magazine, you know, people want to know how to do something, where to go, or maybe they'll want to read an armchair story, me and Joe. But anyway, this was right up my alley.

• 47:12Steven Rinella?

  Did you say me and Joe?

• 47:14Speaker 06

  This is a big deal. There's no such thing as a cow elk, nothing. There was no such thing. So I took it out and I tried it for a year and he had given a couple to some outfitters up in that country.

• 47:24Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 47:24Speaker 06

  And it worked like a charm for all sorts of reasons, you know, not just to attract an elk during the rut, but all. So I wrote a story about it in eighty-six. I think it was the August issue, Elk Hunting's No Secret. And at the bottom I put, to order a cow call called Cow Talk from Don Lovox, send so-and-so's nine ninety-five and three bucks to blah, blah, blah in Gardner, Montana. And before the article came out, I told him that we're going to put a plug for the call. And I asked him how much, how many calls he made. He says, well, me and my wife, Dee, we made a couple hundred in a basement, you know.

• 48:00Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 48:00Speaker 06

  I said, well, maybe he'll sell them. I can't tell you how many he sold. Thousands and thousands and thousands. But anyway, that, and it, it, that was probably my, as far as having an impact on hunting for something new, that was probably my number one story. But I didn't do it. I just happened to be the lucky guy that Don knew.

• 48:23Steven Rinella?

  Yo.

• 48:23Speaker 06

  And passed the story on to me.

• 48:25Steven Rinella?

  You didn't get a cut or a commission on all those calls?

• 48:27Speaker 06

  No, no, no, no.

• 48:27Steven Rinella?

  And then he invented the Power Bugle, remember that?

• 48:29Speaker 06

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And then he did a deer talk, a deer call or something. And, but his call went into the Cabela's catalog and he sold a lot.

• 48:39Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 48:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, a lot. But he's still around in Gardner. He's got a shop there.

• 48:46Steven Rinella?

  Well, he's still alive?

• 48:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 48:48Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 48:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 48:49Steven Rinella?

  I've been to Gardner all the time. I didn't know that.

• 48:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 48:51Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 48:52Speaker 06

  You can find his store, yeah.

• 48:53Steven Rinella?

  Well, how old is, how old is he now?

• 48:56Speaker 06

  He was, he's probably, he was probably a few years younger than me.

• 49:00Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay.

• 49:00Speaker 06

  Probably, probably late seven, I, I don't know. I, I don't know. But he was, he was so much fun. We go up in the famous firing line.

• 49:08Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 49:08Speaker 06

  You know, when the elk would come out of the forest, out of the park and they'd get on and they stepped on the gallows national forest and holy smokes. One day I counted ninety six hunters up there.

• 49:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 49:18Speaker 06

  They had built snow forts to hide, you know, and herd elk. And then you go to the bar that night. This bar is called the town bar and everybody talking about how many elk they had today. Well, I seen a herd of ninety five come out and they killed ninety, ninety four of them, you know.

• 49:31Steven Rinella?

  They changed, but they changed that whole structure now, man.

• 49:34Speaker 06

  Yeah. And then the wolf stepped in, you know, they had like a couple of thousand cow tags. It was nuts. And the wardens would ride around on horses and I was there. I was just, I never hunted there. I didn't, I didn't want to, but I just being a rider, you know, I'd walk around. The ward would ride around on horses and if they saw somebody shoot two elk, they'd give the guy a fifty dollar fine and he could keep one elk. Honestly.

• 49:57Steven Rinella?

  That's all it, they didn't care.

• 49:58Speaker 06

  Long time ago. Yeah. But interestingly, one year, as you know, the Montana elk season runs basically five weeks from October to the Sunday of Thanksgiving week. One year it was a really, really, really bad winter. During the general season, those elk came out by the thousands and everybody in Montana headed for Gardner. And I heard a story that in one day they killed like seven hundred elk. I mean, it was just crazy.

• 50:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 50:24Speaker 06

  Because anybody with a general tag could go, you know.

• 50:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 50:27Speaker 06

  But, uh, so fascinating place. I spent a lot of time. A lot of the photographers would go there and, and we'd film elk during the rut and mule deer during the rut, bighorn sheep. But Gardner was kind of, it was second, second home away from home for me. I spent a lot of time there.

• 50:45Steven Rinella?

  My, uh, one of my kids got, uh, accosted by a mean old lady in Gardner.

• 50:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 50:51Steven Rinella?

  We were in Gardner one time and you know, there's elk standing, it's the park, you know, just for people listening, this is the entrance to the park.

• 50:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 50:58Steven Rinella?

  Um, it's the, the Yeltsa National Park, the north entrance. So you get a lot of these like very, very habituated park elk. They're just kind of hanging around, like they're hanging around the gas station. They're hanging around the hotels.

• 51:11Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:12Steven Rinella?

  Anyways, my kid.

• 51:16Steven Rinella?

  Is going up to one of these elk and these couple of ladies just cut loose on him. He was a little kid.

• 51:23Speaker 06

  You leave them alone.

• 51:24Steven Rinella?

  Really? Yeah. I feel like I was thinking about, you know, I didn't really get involved in it, but it's kind of like lady. You seen what this kid's done to some elk?

• 51:33Speaker 06

  Was she with the park or was she just a civilian?

• 51:35Steven Rinella?

  Oh, just some lady yelling at him on the side of the road for getting too close to a tame elk. Yeah, I thought that was funny.

• 51:42Speaker 06

  We took, when we took pictures in the park, we had to have a commercial permit. And we paid a hundred bucks to, to film because we were in the business. We weren't just doing a slideshow at home, you know? And those rangers, if they saw you using a cow call, they get all upset because you're harassing the elk.

• 51:59Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you were trying to call them for photography?

• 52:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, get them to, get them to look at you or whatever, you know, and stuff, but they're low vehicle. But anyway, they, Yellowstone is, uh, it's one of the reasons I moved to Cody. Cause, uh, I just love the park. First, first time I was there was in my wildlife class at Utah State, took a bus. All those students and two professors and went in the park in, golly, nineteen sixty-three. And we looked out the window and there's a herd of elk, first, first elk I ever saw.

• 52:31Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 52:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, we all ran over to the side of the bus, you know? And that was when they were, they literally killed like five thousand in the park. Um, they had regular shooters and they, and they had butchers come by and save the meat and everything. That was, that was quite a deal.

• 52:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Those days are past right now, man.

• 52:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 52:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, those kind of elk numbers.

• 53:25Steven Rinella?

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• 54:09Steven Rinella?

  you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. That way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there, you're gonna be happy you did it. And check this out, American-made floor liners and cargo liners, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weathertech.com. You spent time covering the Milo Hansen buck?

• 54:43Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 54:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Talk about that.

• 54:45Speaker 06

  Well, I was in Saskatchewan hunting whitetails and I think it's the same thing, but in Saskatchewan, a non-resident can't hunt below the bush line. You can't hunt in the agricultural areas. You gotta hunt north in the bush.

• 54:58Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 54:59Speaker 06

  And Milo lives in bigger, he had a farm there.

• 55:03Steven Rinella?

  He's, he's south of the line?

• 55:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 55:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah. He just passed away?

• 55:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, he did.

• 55:08Steven Rinella?

  A couple of months ago, yeah.

• 55:09Speaker 06

  Yeah. So we're, we're having dinner and my outfitters, he had a farmhouse, that's where we stayed and his wife did the cooking and we were sitting around the table and she said, by the way, Milo Hansen killed the world record whitetail buck. And it's like.

• 55:28Steven Rinella?

  Hold on, I got, I got fused. You're, you're there when it happened?

• 55:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm there. I'm sitting there having dinner.

• 55:35Steven Rinella?

  And it just got killed?

• 55:37Speaker 06

  Just got killed like the day before. Or two days before.

• 55:40Steven Rinella?

  Okay. I thought you meant you were there later. Yeah, I didn't know you were there when it got.

• 55:44Speaker 06

  I was there.

• 55:45Steven Rinella?

  And they already, but they already knew it was a record.

• 55:47Speaker 06

  Well, when it happened, I, I didn't believe it. You know, I said, well, what did it score? She said, I think it was two, four, ten. So I thought, holy smokes. Are you kidding me? Typical? Yeah, yeah. I said, and then my guide sitting next to me, we're having dinner. He says, I know Milo Hanson. In fact, I sold him the box of ammo. I said, you know Milo Hanson? He says, yeah. He said, uh, you want me to call him? I said, yeah. You know, so he gets on the phone and he calls Milo and Milo confirms, yeah, yeah. I had an official measure. And he says, I got a guy from Outdoor Life here. He wants to talk to you. So I talked to Milo and, and I says, any chance I could come down in the morning and, and interview you? He said, uh, he said, yeah, no problem at all. So really nice guy.

• 56:31Speaker 06

  So I called in the morning just to confirm. The guy was gonna take me to his house.

• 56:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And how far are you from the house?

• 56:37Speaker 06

  About fifty miles.

• 56:38Steven Rinella?

  Dude, what luck, man.

• 56:39Speaker 06

  I know, I know.

• 56:41Steven Rinella?

  That's like John Krakauer being on, uh, that's like John Krakauer being on Everest when that big disaster happened. You're like, right, like right in the mix.

• 56:51Speaker 06

  So I called him in the morning to confirm. He says, geez, I'm sorry. He said, but Gordon, Gordon Whittington is sitting in my living room. Gordon was the editor for North American White Hill out of Georgia, I think, or South Carolina.

• 57:01Steven Rinella?

  He was already there?

• 57:02Speaker 06

  He had flown all night and he was sitting in Milo's.

• 57:04Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 57:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, swear on it. Yeah, yeah.

• 57:08Steven Rinella?

  He scooped you. He scooped you from Georgia.

• 57:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, Georgia.

• 57:12Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 57:13Speaker 06

  In fact, I put this on Facebook when Milo passed away, that a couple of pictures, you know, and Gordon chimed in. He says, yeah, that was a great time, but, but he had a, he wanted to write the story real quick, real quick to have the issue ready for the shot show, which I think was in January. So he wrote the story. And my boss in New York, he, he was a, um, of course he was all excited. I called him that night, Vince Brannan. I said, Vin, I said, my God, this is, this is, this is the story of the damn decade of the century, World War White Hill.

• 57:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 57:44Speaker 06

  And.

• 57:46Speaker 06

  He said, well, get the story, blah, blah, blah. I said, well, I can't. Gordon's here. He says, we'll get second rights. We'll pay him some money, whatever, exclusivity. And I don't know what the hell he did. I don't get involved in that part of it. But, uh, at any rate.

• 57:59Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 58:00Speaker 06

  Gordon had the story in, in Sports Afield and I interviewed Milo. And we talked about the whole deal. It was like an as to ATT story, as told to Jim Zumbo.

• 58:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:10Speaker 06

  And, uh, he told me the whole story. He went up to his farm and really great guy.

• 58:14Steven Rinella?

  So he, he didn't live on that farm?

• 58:16Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 58:18Steven Rinella?

  He did. So he, he lived there?

• 58:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 58:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Tell the story, him killing the world record buck. Cause then I wanted to get into whether it really is the world record buck.

• 58:25Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 58:26Steven Rinella?

  You know where I'm going with this?

• 58:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, I know where you're going.

• 58:31Speaker 06

  Well, evidently that buck had been seen by the school bus driver, you know, and, uh, in fact, somebody had taken a shot at it and missed it.

• 58:38Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 58:39Speaker 06

  Yeah. So the way they hunt up there, and this was somewhat controversial because what these farmers, they're all Ukrainians, you know, and they hunt deer for sausage. That's what they do. They don't give a damn about horns. It's fact.

• 58:52Steven Rinella?

  Sausage hunters.

• 58:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 58:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I know the kind.

• 58:55Speaker 06

  So they got all these, all this kind of open country with all this popple, which is like stunted Aspen. And basically they drive these different areas and I think Milo was sitting there by his pickup.

• 59:07Steven Rinella?

  You mean they do pushes?

• 59:08Speaker 06

  They do pushes.

• 59:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 59:09Speaker 06

  Yeah. So Milo's sitting there by his pickup truck and here comes this buck, nice buck, you know, and he shoots it and goes down. And he walks down to it. This is what he told me. The first thing he said is, that's a nice buck, but boy, not very big. I ain't gonna get much sausage off of that thing. That's exactly what he said.

• 59:29Speaker 06

  And it was a hole in the antler where somebody had, had hit him in the antler. And they dragged that buck by that, by that antler. And the, good thing it didn't break off.

• 59:39Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 59:40Speaker 06

  Right?

• 59:40Steven Rinella?

  Would have disqualified.

• 59:41Speaker 06

  Yeah. So anyway, he gets the buck home. And people start hearing about it. So he calls a Boone and Crockett guy and, and he comes over and he measured it and I think the score was what, two fourteen and something like that. So anyway, um, funny story. We're at the shot show and Ian McBerchi was a Canadian photographer.

• 1:00:06Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:06Speaker 06

  He passed away and Milo said Ian is the only guy that's gonna photograph this buck. Outdoor Life wanted to send some big shot photographer from New York to Canada to film the buck and Milo said no. And so all of, you know, the editors and they're all upset like, what kind of picture were you gonna get for, they wanted to put it on the cover.

• 1:00:27Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:00:28Speaker 06

  And in fact, the president of Outdoor Life was not a hunter. He was a three-piece suitor from New York. And he says, we can't put that buck on the cover in, in the April issue. That's the trout issue. We gotta put a trout on the cover.

• 1:00:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:40Speaker 06

  Is this true? So anyway, we put the buck on the cover. So we met Ian at the shot show and he comes over to our table. I was sitting with a bunch of guys and he said, I got something for you, Zumbo. And he gives me a little sliver of sausage. He says, that's the world record buck.

• 1:00:56Steven Rinella?

  No, really?

• 1:00:57Speaker 06

  Yeah. So we, no, he gave me the whole sausage.

• 1:01:00Steven Rinella?

  You got to eat a chunk of that buck?

• 1:01:01Speaker 06

  We got, so help me. Yeah. But anyway, that.

• 1:01:05Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:01:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:01:06Steven Rinella?

  Dude, you can sell that sausage for a lot of money now, man. It'd be a little old, be a little freezer burn, but.

• 1:01:11Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:01:11Steven Rinella?

  No kidding? You had a chunk of the Hanson buck?

• 1:01:13Speaker 06

  A chunk of that, yep. True story. And Milo and I became friends on Facebook.

• 1:01:18Steven Rinella?

  You've gotta be kidding me.

• 1:01:19Speaker 06

  No, sir, honest, honest. In fact, when I, I put that in my, my little comment on Facebook and two or three other guys sitting at the table said the same thing. Yeah, that was really a great piece of sausage or whatever.

• 1:01:30Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 1:01:31Speaker 06

  I can't think of who I was well with, just, I don't know, some friends and writers, but.

• 1:01:35Steven Rinella?

  Hey, when you, when you think of doing a push, what do you call the people? Like, what term do you use? Cause buddies all around the country have different terms for it. Like pushers and sitters, you know? Like, what'd you guys call them?

• 1:01:46Speaker 06

  Usually the drivers and the standards.

• 1:01:48Steven Rinella?

  You do drivers, that's a lot of guys do that. It's wrong.

• 1:01:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:01:51Steven Rinella?

  It's wrong.

• 1:01:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:01:52Steven Rinella?

  It's pushers and sitters.

• 1:01:53Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:01:54Steven Rinella?

  A lot of people don't know this. They think it's drivers and, and my buddies in Pennsylvania got some real dumb thing they call it, but yeah.

• 1:02:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:02:01Steven Rinella?

  They got like, I can't remember where they got some dumb things. They get it all, they get all confused now how to do, how to do a drive, you know?

• 1:02:09Speaker 06

  Jeez.

• 1:02:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's pretty crazy, man. So.

• 1:02:14Steven Rinella?

  So obviously you know where I'm like, remember when I made that comment like,

• 1:02:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Steven Rinella?

  Is it the world record?

• 1:02:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:02:20Steven Rinella?

  So I think that there's so these records stand a long time, right? So there's only been a it's only like the world record bucks only turned over a couple of times.

• 1:02:28Speaker 06

  The first buck was a Jordan buck. That was that was around for golly 50 years.

• 1:02:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:33Speaker 06

  And that was scored maybe 209 or something maybe I don't know. I forget.

• 1:02:36Steven Rinella?

  Yep. Then it got whooped and

• 1:02:39Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 1:02:39Steven Rinella?

  The hell was it 96 what year was it?

• 1:02:42Speaker 06

  93.

• 1:02:43Steven Rinella?

  The Hanson bucks, oh, 96 was around Paul Buck, Mitch Rompol. So let's jump to that.

• 1:02:51Steven Rinella?

  Everybody still calls the Hanson buck. You know, it's the world record buck. But there's this there's this question. I'm obsessed with the question.

• 1:03:02Steven Rinella?

  Is like, is it? Because then a guy in in in Mitch Rompol outside of Traverse City, Michigan, mid 90s, he arrows a bigger buck. Right?

• 1:03:14Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 1:03:14Steven Rinella?

  Shrouded in controversy, shrouded in controversy. What's your take on that buck?

• 1:03:23Speaker 06

  Well, from only what I've heard.

• 1:03:27Steven Rinella?

  No, don't caveat at all the hell. Just tell me what you

• 1:03:30Speaker 06

  Do you know Tom Hudler?

• 1:03:31Steven Rinella?

  Who?

• 1:03:32Speaker 06

  Tom Hudler.

• 1:03:33Steven Rinella?

  Hudler?

• 1:03:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, he's from Michigan.

• 1:03:35Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:03:35Speaker 06

  He's like the outdoor guy. He's got a big show and stuff. I went to his show one time, uh, expo show.

• 1:03:41Steven Rinella?

  I mean, I, you know, you know, you like meet people and kind of maybe like the name doesn't click, but I'm not, I don't believe I'm familiar.

• 1:03:48Speaker 06

  Okay. Anyway, Tom and I were good buddies. I was in Michigan one time doing a doing a seminar in Elk Hunt or something. And from what I understand,

• 1:03:59Speaker 06

  this may or may not be true, but Mitch Rompol would not let anybody take a picture of that buck. Nobody.

• 1:04:07Steven Rinella?

  Well,

• 1:04:07Speaker 06

  I don't know. I don't know.

• 1:04:09Steven Rinella?

  There's pictures of that buck.

• 1:04:12Speaker 06

  But who took the pictures?

• 1:04:13Steven Rinella?

  He did.

• 1:04:14Speaker 06

  He did. Didn't he kill other bucks with the same kind of frame?

• 1:04:18Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:04:19Speaker 06

  Big wide?

• 1:04:20Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:04:20Speaker 06

  In some honey hole somewhere.

• 1:04:23Steven Rinella?

  Listen dude, this is why the story makes, it starts to like really make its own gravy, you know? It goes deeper and this, this story is a bottomless pit.

• 1:04:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:04:34Steven Rinella?

  Kills the buck, he has a recovery video. I'll talk about, I'm obsessed with this thing, man. I'm gonna make a documentary about it. So.

• 1:04:45Steven Rinella?

  Kills a buck. Makes a recovery video. Right?

• 1:04:51Steven Rinella?

  Gets some pictures. I mean, there's so many twists and turns in this thing.

• 1:04:56Steven Rinella?

  A handful of people handled the buck. I once sat on the phone with a guy. That, I spent two hours on the phone with a guy that held the buck.

• 1:05:07Steven Rinella?

  Okay?

• 1:05:09Steven Rinella?

  Uh.

• 1:05:12Steven Rinella?

  But in, in, quickly, there's a lot of skepticism about certain aspect, I'm making a short version. There's a lot of skepticism about aspects of the buck.

• 1:05:23Steven Rinella?

  It gets measured, some people come forward and they're like, the buck ought to be x-rayed. Right? There's varying explanations of what he did to it. You know, some people say that he kind of made like a sort of Frankenrack. Like he constructed a rack. Killed a buck. Opened it, opened it up like this.

• 1:05:46Steven Rinella?

  Took the skull plate out, put a skull plate in there, right? Fabricated.

• 1:05:50Speaker 06

  Fabricated the thing, yeah.

• 1:05:51Steven Rinella?

  You know? But.

• 1:05:55Steven Rinella?

  This guy I was talking to one time, he had the weirdest observation about it, man. He said that, uh, I don't want to give his name, but. He said that when he went to see the buck after it was killed, he said it was in a truck with a topper on it. You'll get this because you're a hunter. It's in a truck with a topper on it. And picture when you jam a deer into a truck with a topper on it.

• 1:06:17Steven Rinella?

  Right? They're hard to get in there.

• 1:06:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:20Steven Rinella?

  And he says that that buck was like jammed into this truck with a topper on it. And then you kind of like cocked the head up in there. Right?

• 1:06:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:06:30Steven Rinella?

  So he says, when he goes to look at the buck,

• 1:06:34Steven Rinella?

  it's cocked in this trailer, like where its head and rack are kind of jammed into the topper.

• 1:06:41Steven Rinella?

  As you're looking into the topper on the left side, and he talked about him kind of wrestling because it's stiffened up. He talked about him kind of wrestling that head out of there. And he's like, if that was a make believe Frankenrack,

• 1:06:59Steven Rinella?

  would you have jammed it into a topper like that?

• 1:07:02Speaker 06

  That's true.

• 1:07:03Steven Rinella?

  It's an interesting point.

• 1:07:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:07:05Steven Rinella?

  But he wouldn't submit it to an x-ray.

• 1:07:08Steven Rinella?

  Because people wanted to x-ray it. And eventually, he gets to this point. He eventually gets to the point where he says,

• 1:07:16Steven Rinella?

  with all the scrutiny,

• 1:07:19Steven Rinella?

  he says, this isn't why I hunt. You can all shove it up your ass. And that's not his words, but this isn't why I hunt. And he takes his buck home, never to be seen again. And that's been, that's been the stance since is like, he didn't play the game. But people point out,

• 1:07:39Steven Rinella?

  he was playing the game. He was playing the game.

• 1:07:43Steven Rinella?

  Video, video, photography, declared it, right? And eventually, there was a, with the Hanson Estate, they signed a deal. They signed a contract.

• 1:07:55Speaker 06

  Heard about that.

• 1:07:56Steven Rinella?

  That.

• 1:07:57Speaker 06

  That he would cease and desist.

• 1:07:58Steven Rinella?

  That he would stop saying it was the world record buck.

• 1:08:03Speaker 06

  A lot of people wonder why he doesn't want to claim it. I mean, you know, it.

• 1:08:11Speaker 06

  So.

• 1:08:11Steven Rinella?

  I've, I've sat on so many sides of this thing, man, like.

• 1:08:14Speaker 06

  I'm sure you have.

• 1:08:15Steven Rinella?

  I, I got a buddy from, I got a buddy from back home. He's an outdoor rider. We went to high school together. He was a trapper.

• 1:08:26Steven Rinella?

  He, he, he, he always felt that the, he, he always thought the buck was, was BS. Okay. But one day he told me, one day he went to a guy's house that touched the buck, did it handle the buck?

• 1:08:39Steven Rinella?

  And he said, when I walked out of his house, for a period of time, when I walked out of his house for a period of time, I knew it was real. And he goes, and I think, as he explained to me, he doesn't know where he stands on it now. I've been, I've gone back and forth both sides. One day I was explaining to someone. I was telling someone, like, I was trying to explain to someone that doesn't hunt, how everybody has an opinion about this. Okay. And as we're talking,

• 1:09:12Steven Rinella?

  I'm like, everybody's got an opinion about this thing. So I sent a text message. Like, just watch. So I'm trying to think of people that he would know about. And I sent a text message to Jeff Foxworthy, and I sent a text message to Nugent. I'm like, hey, what do you guys think of the, independently, not in a group text, like, what do you think of the Ron Paul buck? Right?

• 1:09:37Steven Rinella?

  One of them comes back with an answer.

• 1:09:40Steven Rinella?

  I don't buy it. One of them comes back with the answer, I give him the benefit of the doubt.

• 1:09:46Steven Rinella?

  So it's like, dude, I'm fascinated by the whole story, man. I would like nothing more than to touch that buck. I had always heard this rumor, I don't even know where I heard it now.

• 1:09:57Steven Rinella?

  I'd heard a rumor that it had burned up. Like, I can't even think of who told me, it said burned up in some fire or something. But I was talking to a guy.

• 1:10:07Steven Rinella?

  And he's like, man,

• 1:10:12Steven Rinella?

  Mitch lives in the same house he's lived in when he killed the buck. That buck ain't, that house ain't burned down.

• 1:10:18Speaker 06

  Geez.

• 1:10:18Steven Rinella?

  You know?

• 1:10:20Speaker 06

  I wonder, did the Boone and Cracker Club ever approach him?

• 1:10:24Steven Rinella?

  It's not certified with the Boone and Cracker Club.

• 1:10:26Speaker 06

  It's not?

• 1:10:27Steven Rinella?

  No, because of these questions about, I, I think it's like, well, if it was, if it was, I mean, I, I, you know what? I take that back, I don't know. But if it was certified, if it was B and C certified, then it, then it would be the world record.

• 1:10:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:10:42Steven Rinella?

  But you know what's crazy, man, about this whole deal?

• 1:10:46Steven Rinella?

  A weird part about this whole deal is that like you know all that scrutiny came on him? Like a lot of that scrutiny is motivated by jealousy and stuff. Because we had on the podcast a hunter named Dustin Huff who killed the, the big, he's, he holds the biggest typical whitetail in the US. So this, the, the, the nation's record, but not bigger than the Hanson Buck, which is the world record. So he has the biggest whitetail in the US. When he killed that whitetail, he killed it. Flat out, fair and square. But what do you think happened when he killed it?

• 1:11:28Steven Rinella?

  All over, right away, all the ways in which he must have cheated it. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:11:34Speaker 06

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 1:11:35Steven Rinella?

  He anticipated it coming and calls his fishing game office.

• 1:11:44Steven Rinella?

  And he says, I just killed a huge buck. Like it might be the big, it might be a record buck. I just killed it. No one calls him back.

• 1:11:52Speaker 06

  Really?

• 1:11:53Steven Rinella?

  Well, then a while later they do call. You know why they call? Cause all the reports they're getting about how he cheated the system. He tried to get hold him in the first place.

• 1:12:05Steven Rinella?

  Isn't that wild? So a lot of that stuff just comes because there's so much jealousy and bitterness.

• 1:12:09Speaker 06

  Oh, my gosh. Totally.

• 1:12:11Steven Rinella?

  You know, but it's a real mystery, dude.

• 1:12:15Speaker 06

  I've never killed a three seventy-five elk, Boone crocodile. I've, I've gotten some three fifties, but I always figured if I did, you know, all hell's gonna break loose. You know, just because people get so damn jealous and you know, being the fact that I, you know, I hunt full time.

• 1:12:32Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:12:32Speaker 06

  Oh, well, he got it on his ranch or, you know, they had that elk, you know, filming them every day, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:12:39Steven Rinella?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:12:40Speaker 06

  It's just, yeah.

• 1:12:42Steven Rinella?

  You're gonna hear about it.

• 1:12:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:12:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:44Speaker 06

  One other thing about the Malahansen buck, that buck was three years old, only three years old.

• 1:12:49Steven Rinella?

  That's the thing I tell people too, man. I didn't know that till just recently. All that talk about six, seven years, six years old, seven years old, the biggest, I was like, the biggest buck ever killed.

• 1:13:00Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:13:00Steven Rinella?

  Three.

• 1:13:02Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:13:03Steven Rinella?

  Isn't that nuts?

• 1:13:05Steven Rinella?

  Would he have been bigger the next year?

• 1:13:08Speaker 06

  Probably, I suppose.

• 1:13:10Steven Rinella?

  You know another little wrinkle about the round pole about?

• 1:13:13Speaker 06

  What?

• 1:13:14Steven Rinella?

  That place don't make big bucks.

• 1:13:16Speaker 06

  Doesn't it?

• 1:13:16Steven Rinella?

  Don't make big bucks. Big bucks don't come out of there. You know?

• 1:13:22Speaker 06

  Boy, what a story.

• 1:13:23Steven Rinella?

  But someone told me it's a freak and freaks can happen anywhere.

• 1:13:26Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 1:13:28Steven Rinella?

  But it's like it doesn't make big bucks.

• 1:13:31Speaker 06

  You remember Gordon Eastman?

• 1:13:32Steven Rinella?

  Yo, yeah. Well, Gordon. Dude, I remember him interviewing. I remember listening to an interview of Gordon Eastman interviewing Don Lawback about the call. I thought it was Lawbow or whatever, Lawback.

• 1:13:43Speaker 06

  Lawback, they they became partners.

• 1:13:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:46Speaker 06

  And they did a bunch of videos together.

• 1:13:48Steven Rinella?

  Sure, man.

• 1:13:48Speaker 06

  Uh, but Gordon Eastman, he he lived in Cody for a while and we got to be pretty good friends. He told me some wild stories when he'd take his little plane up in the Arctic and live with the Eskimos. But he told me every Boone and Crockett buck is a freak.

• 1:14:02Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:14:02Speaker 06

  Every Boone and Crockett buck is a freak. I mean, that's what he said. So anyway.

• 1:14:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's what this one, one guy I was talking to about that buck. He's like, it's a freak and freaks happen anywhere.

• 1:14:12Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 1:14:13Steven Rinella?

  It's a freak. So maybe it was a freak year for a freak buck. Or no, no, sorry, not, I mean, sorry. Well, I'm talking about the youngness of the Hanson buck. I mean, maybe that was like a freak that it was, you know? But you wonder what he at five, would he have been like extra the world record?

• 1:14:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:14:30Steven Rinella?

  Or he had gone downhill.

• 1:14:31Speaker 06

  I don't know.

• 1:14:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:32Speaker 06

  Well, since he was only three, you'd think he would probably be bigger, but I don't know.

• 1:14:37Steven Rinella?

  What's your, uh, you know? Old fellers like you and me?

• 1:14:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:14:43Steven Rinella?

  Right? Like I always shoot like people. Yeah, people are always like, hey, man, what what's your, you know, people ask.

• 1:14:47Speaker 06

  I got kids older than you, Steve.

• 1:14:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. They ask you like, uh, you know, youngsters, young little whippersnappers. Come to me about cat want to talk calibers, you know?

• 1:14:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:14:57Steven Rinella?

  And at this point, I'm like, uh, like, it's like a tinge of embarrassment, you know, when I talk about, I shoot a three hundred win mag. A lot, right? I shoot it a lot.

• 1:15:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:15:07Steven Rinella?

  I have other stuff. My kids shoot six, five. Cause they're, I trained up my kids on suppressed six, five Creedmoors.

• 1:15:16Steven Rinella?

  Because I just didn't want them to develop. You know, fear of recoil, fear of noise. So suppressed six, five is like a very, it's a great way to break them in.

• 1:15:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:15:24Steven Rinella?

  I always shoot a three hundred win mag because I just like, you know, I just, I just shoot it at whatever. You know, it's a great gun. What's your, uh, where do you stand, you know, with all the new calibers and stuff? Do you feel a need to stay hip to the new calibers? You shoot the old classics.

• 1:15:37Speaker 06

  I shoot the old classics, you know.

• 1:15:41Speaker 06

  Way back in sixty four, I graduated, when I graduated from high school, my father in law told me to, to go to a store and, and buy a gun. Now that was just when the pre sixty fours were going away. It was sixty four. It was an old electrical store in rural Utah. They sold everything from diapers to washing machine and all everything. They had a few guns on the wall. So I went in there I was gonna pick out my gift and I wanted a two seventy because I was a huge Jack O'Connor fan, you know.

• 1:16:07Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:16:08Speaker 06

  So.

• 1:16:10Speaker 06

  Do you know pre six, pre sixty four two seventies? They had some two seventies, but they were brand new and I didn't want one, but they had a thirty oh six pre sixty four.

• 1:16:17Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Explain what you mean when you say, because people, a lot of guys aren't gonna know what you mean. When you say a pre sixty four.

• 1:16:23Speaker 06

  Nineteen.

• 1:16:23Steven Rinella?

  Like the claw extractor and.

• 1:16:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, in nineteen sixty four, uh, Winchester came out with a, a modified super version of the old nineteen sixty four, um, but I'm not exactly sure all what the differences were, but I just knew that O'Connor was a serious fan, you know, of the two seventy and.

• 1:16:45Steven Rinella?

  But I think that pre, I can't remember, man, like guys are gonna crucify me for not remembering this. I can't remember what all the selling points were. It was like, I think point of manufacture on pre sixty four and something about the way the extractor. Like it was a claw extractor and post wasn't, but for, for decades after that, people were built, built custom rifles.

• 1:17:05Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:17:05Steven Rinella?

  Off pre sixty four actions. They didn't even want the rest of the gun. They wanted the action.

• 1:17:10Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 1:17:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:12Speaker 06

  So anyway. I picked out that, uh, that thirty oh six. And I, well, I was twenty four years old and I used that gun for probably twenty years.

• 1:17:22Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 1:17:22Speaker 06

  On elk and deer and moose, whatever. And I mean, you know, you get a gun that is, you're sweet on it because it works, you know, when you put it up to your shoulder and you, you know, it's just, it's just right. I love that gun and, um, being hunting editor and writing about it so much in the magazine. My boss, Claire Conley. He said, Zumbo, you're right too much about that damn Winchester.

• 1:17:47Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:17:48Speaker 06

  He's, we got other advertisers, you know, we got Remington and Savage and Marlin and Ruger and stuff.

• 1:17:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:52Speaker 06

  He says, you gotta start using different guns. So I said, okay. So I went on a trip one time and British Columbia was Chuck Yeager and.

• 1:18:02Steven Rinella?

  Chuck Yeager?

• 1:18:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:18:03Steven Rinella?

  The right stuff Chuck Yeager?

• 1:18:04Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:18:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:06Speaker 06

  Yep, we went out there hunting, uh, hunting elk and it was perfect time of the year, like September 26th. Prime bugle time. The woods were silent as hell. And we were staying in a cabin with an outfitter and he was hunting with a guide on one mountain. I was hunting with a guy down another mountain. Long story short.

• 1:18:27Speaker 06

  I finally saw a bull elk standing in a small opening, long, long ways away. There were no rangefinders in those days. And I had to shoot kind of over a canyon. I don't know how far he was, but I took a shot and I'm pretty sure I shot under him because he just stood there. Took another shot, nothing happened. The third shot, he kind of lurched and he ran off. And my guide was kind of standing behind a tree and he didn't really, couldn't see it, get a good view of that elk. So we went down and we looked for it.

• 1:18:59Speaker 06

  Couldn't find anything. We crawled around, no hair, no, no blood, no fur, nothing. And we just made big circles and after literally 45 minutes or an hour, Carl, my guide says, you must have missed him. I says, maybe I did. I don't know. I says, I just thought I heard him. And he says, well, I'm going back. We had the horses tied up on a ridge. He says, I'm going back up on the ridge. I said, I'm going to look a little bit more.

• 1:19:24Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:19:25Speaker 06

  So he, he, he looks with me and so we left.

• 1:19:30Speaker 06

  And we're halfway to the horses and all of a sudden I had this weird sensation like ESP or whatever. And I heard that.

• 1:19:41Speaker 06

  I heard a noise like an animal hitting the ground and I saw that bull lurk in my mind. I saw it. And I said, Carl, that bull's dead. He said, what are you talking about? I says, that bull's dead. Wait here if you want. I'm gonna go find that bull. And I ran straight to it.

• 1:19:56Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:19:56Speaker 06

  I swear to God.

• 1:19:57Steven Rinella?

  What do you think it was?

• 1:19:59Speaker 06

  What had happened was.

• 1:20:01Steven Rinella?

  I mean, what do you think? You just like your mind pulled up an image that you.

• 1:20:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:20:06Steven Rinella?

  Like that you kind of hadn't thought of as you reviewed your memory?

• 1:20:09Speaker 06

  Yeah. It's like another time I was hunting moose and all of a sudden it was real foggy. If something was drilling into my back, something was looking at me. And the fog finally left and it was a Newfoundland and there's this moose. But anyway, I went right to that bull. What had happened, there was an old spruce tree. It was kind of down in the ground and it was typically it had kind of a big space around it. And there was these big branches growing out. That bull had fallen into that, into that hole.

• 1:20:39Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:20:39Speaker 06

  It was about that much of his tine sticking out. And I, I don't know why I didn't smell it. Cause you know, an elk, a bull elk, he's gonna reek a little bit. I, I think I was probably within three feet of that bull crawling and looking. And I yelled to Carl, I found him. He says, he couldn't believe it. But anyway, so long story short, so Jaeger's up on this mountain and he hears me shoot three times.

• 1:21:05Speaker 06

  So we go to camp that night. I said, what the hell happened? Why did you have to shoot three times? He says, I said, well, I don't know. What are you using? I said, I'm using thirty O six. He said, well, that's your damn problem. We're sitting around the campfire, right? So he walks over with his Weatherby Mark five, three hundred. He says, here's a man's gun. Get rid of that goddamn pipsqueak.

• 1:21:24Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:21:25Speaker 06

  So he didn't know, but I had promised that gun to my son. Cause Claire Conley told me to use other guns, so I got his Weatherby. And that's when I had to finally quit using that thirty O six. But as far as other guns, you know, I've.

• 1:21:40Speaker 06

  I don't know. I'm just kind of a traditional old, old school guy and I use a three hundred rum right now for elk, you know, Remington Ultra Mag. And you know, those cartridges, you put them next to a three seventy five. If you don't look real close, you can't hardly tell the damn difference. I mean, it kicks like a mule and it's not suppressed, but I love the gun. Um, I use it for elk, moose, bearish and for deer and antelope, I use a Kimber two seventy.

• 1:22:07Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:08Speaker 06

  And that was kind of a special gun.

• 1:22:12Speaker 06

  One time Chuck Egger, they wanted him to be a guest speaker for Pacific Northwest Steel Hitters in Portland, Oregon.

• 1:22:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:18Speaker 06

  And they knew I knew Chuck. And if I invited Chuck on a trip, he didn't want his regular stipend. He wanted to trade for a hunting or fishing trip. He was a hunting fishin' nut.

• 1:22:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:28Speaker 06

  So I made a deal and I said, Chuck, if you'll come to Portland, I already had researches. I'll, I'll get you set up with five guys on five rivers in the, in the Northwest area fishing for salmon out of boats and stuff. So we made that deal and he came. While we there, we went to, to the Kimber factory, which was in Portland at that time.

• 1:22:49Speaker 06

  They knew we were coming. And when, when the tour was over, they gave Chuck a rifle, seven mm, which is his favorite.

• 1:22:58Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 1:22:58Speaker 06

  And it said Mach one in gold. That was a serial number. And they gave me that two seventy and it said Zumbo for the serial number. So that gun was so special. I still shoot it.

• 1:23:09Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 1:23:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:23:10Steven Rinella?

  That's great, man.

• 1:23:11Speaker 06

  But you know, as you know, everybody knows it, it's bullet placement, you know, for the most part.

• 1:23:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:19Speaker 06

  I remember O'Connor saying, when you shoot an elk with a two seventy right behind, right in that crease right behind the shoulder and get a double long shot, that bull's going eighty yards and he dying, which is pretty much, you know, not always true, but it pretty much is. But so, you know, a lot of people come out west from East Coast or when they're hunting whitetails and they think they gotta have a great big giant gun.

• 1:23:41Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:23:42Speaker 06

  But, uh, it's not really, and, and they're afraid of it, you know, and they hate to shoot the damn thing, but they think they gotta have it. So I always say, you know, shoot what you can shoot best, you know, back home, but don't bring the thirty thirty.

• 1:23:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:55Speaker 06

  You know, unless you're in the woods or something, but.

• 1:23:59Steven Rinella?

  First deer I ever killed with a gun.

• 1:24:01Speaker 06

  Pardon?

• 1:24:01Steven Rinella?

  I said, the first deer I ever killed with a gun.

• 1:24:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:24:03Steven Rinella?

  I shot it with a open sight Model 9432 Special.

• 1:24:08Speaker 06

  Oh, did you?

• 1:24:09Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh. This dude, I've told the story a hundred times, but this, this dude was kind of a mentor and good buddy of my dad's. He had this cabin.

• 1:24:20Steven Rinella?

  His name is Eugene Groeters and he had the, he had these gun racks built into the ceiling of the cabin. He was in his eighties, like yourself. And when I was a kid though. And he would do this thing with kids. He did it with me where he'd say, uh, you know, I, I, I try to have one gun for every year I've been alive.

• 1:24:43Speaker 06

  Really?

• 1:24:43Steven Rinella?

  In the roof. And when I was little, and he says, you know, and I counted the other day and realized I have an extra. And he would do this with kids, you know? I have an extra. And so he pulled that gun down. And, um, yeah, shot deer with it. And the dumbest thing I ever did, the dumbest thing I ever did is I took it down and sold it at a place that sold wood stoves and guns.

• 1:25:05Speaker 06

  Oh geez.

• 1:25:06Steven Rinella?

  And that dude gave me 300 bucks for it. Cause I wanted a bolt gun.

• 1:25:09Speaker 06

  Oh wow.

• 1:25:10Steven Rinella?

  Dumbest thing I ever did, man. Dumbest thing I ever did.

• 1:25:15Speaker 07

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• 1:25:42Steven Rinella?

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• 1:26:26Steven Rinella?

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• 1:27:00Steven Rinella?

  Like,

• 1:27:03Steven Rinella?

  you do, I mean, you're like, for your age, dude, you're doing like phenomenally well, right?

• 1:27:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:27:09Steven Rinella?

  What's it like in life when you get to where?

• 1:27:13Steven Rinella?

  I mean, you know more people that are, you've known more people that are dead than are alive.

• 1:27:18Speaker 06

  I do.

• 1:27:19Steven Rinella?

  You know what I'm saying?

• 1:27:20Speaker 06

  All my buddies back east are dead, every one of them.

• 1:27:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. What's that start to look like? You know, I mean, like, how do you start? How do you think about all that? What's that start to feel like?

• 1:27:29Speaker 06

  Well,

• 1:27:33Speaker 06

  I'm thankful every day I get, that I get out of bed, you know, being 85, because I, you know, I'm way beyond the, the normal age for, for white men and stuff. But I just wrote a, I'm writing a story right now for Beagle Magazine on that very thing, on, on aging and how you feel. First thing that happens pretty much is your balance starts going. Like just putting on a hunting boot, no problem. But I got to the point where I realized it was easier to sit down.

• 1:28:03Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:28:04Speaker 06

  Or, you know, to lace the thing up. So little things like that happen and now.

• 1:28:12Speaker 06

  I'm at the point where I can't ride a horse anymore and that really hurts.

• 1:28:16Steven Rinella?

  Okay, what, what, what, what, what, what happens when you go to ride a horse?

• 1:28:21Speaker 06

  Your balance and just getting up on the thing.

• 1:28:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:28:23Speaker 06

  You know.

• 1:28:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:24Speaker 06

  When I go upstairs, I gotta have a railing, use a cane sometimes.

• 1:28:27Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:28:28Speaker 06

  But, but I have a foot issue and knee issue and the heart, the heart seems to be okay.

• 1:28:33Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:28:33Speaker 06

  You know, my back, I've got back, serious back issues, but, uh, and I haven't taken care of myself, you know, I, most of my hunts were remote wilderness hunts on horseback and a lot of hiking and tough country.

• 1:28:46Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:28:48Speaker 06

  Early on, I was a forester. I did a lot of wildfire suppression and which is, I think, the toughest job you can have because you, you're going, you're, there's no timetable, you know, you got those, but, so I was, I was always in pretty doggone good shape, but then I realized, well, like right now, somebody wants me to do something this fall and it's like, well, maybe I'll be able to, maybe I won't be here.

• 1:29:13Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:29:14Speaker 06

  I mean, you can't sit around and cry about it. A lot of people say, you're so damn lucky, you know, that you can still do stuff.

• 1:29:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:21Speaker 06

  Cause a lot of guys 20 years younger than I have given up hunting because they just can't, you know, they, they can't get around, so. It's, it's a sobering thing. One day I drove up to South Fork and near Cody, which takes you up to the famous Thoroughfare.

• 1:29:37Speaker 06

  Where Jack O'Connor has hunted a lot and I've hunted a lot. And I was sitting on the, on the dirt road where the trailhead is and I saw these guys come down. They had, they were on horseback and they each led two horses and I set it. Elk antlers, six point bull and all the meat, two bulls. And I thought, I'll never go up that trail again.

• 1:29:56Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:29:58Speaker 06

  You know, so.

• 1:30:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but you know, the only alternative is that you're dead.

• 1:30:05Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 1:30:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:30:06Steven Rinella?

  People complain about getting old, you know what I mean?

• 1:30:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:09Steven Rinella?

  It's like, well, what would be the opposite of that?

• 1:30:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:30:12Steven Rinella?

  It's being dead.

• 1:30:13Speaker 06

  My dad lived to 92.

• 1:30:15Steven Rinella?

  Did he?

• 1:30:15Speaker 06

  Yep. And that's because he fell and broke his hip. And when you fall, you break your hip.

• 1:30:19Steven Rinella?

  At a certain age, it's a death sentence.

• 1:30:21Speaker 06

  You're going into rehab and then you're going into assisted living and then you're going to rest home and then you're done.

• 1:30:25Steven Rinella?

  Who are the people you miss the most?

• 1:30:28Speaker 06

  Who what?

• 1:30:28Steven Rinella?

  Who are the people, friends that you've lost? Like who are the people you miss the most?

• 1:30:32Speaker 06

  Oh gosh.

• 1:30:35Speaker 06

  Oh golly, there's a lot of them, um.

• 1:30:41Speaker 06

  Oh gosh, one of my, one of the, my all time best buddy, his name was Louis Gisarelli.

• 1:30:49Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:30:49Speaker 06

  Real Italian name.

• 1:30:50Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:30:51Speaker 06

  And we were buddies since we were twelve. And we were in Boy Scouts together and we hunted and fished like crazy. We trapped and we'd be riding our bicycles at five in the morning before school to check our muskrat traps and

• 1:31:05Speaker 06

  we're the best of friends and the year before I joined out to a wife in seventy-eight, he got killed. He, somehow he had,

• 1:31:14Speaker 06

  he had rolled off a bridge and his truck landed, it, the water was only two foot deep. And his truck landed on its, on its top and he drowned in the truck.

• 1:31:25Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:31:25Speaker 06

  And.

• 1:31:27Steven Rinella?

  And I miss that guy.

• 1:31:29Speaker 06

  We'd go to Newfoundland fishing for Atlantic salmon and hunting bears, you know, and we had so, I mean, we'd catch yellow perch and blue gills to hell one have it. And a lot of times I'd be hunting squirrels and I'd have them in my game pocket. And at the end of the day, they're all stiff, you know, and hard to skin. Louis says, leave the damn things here, I'll do it. That kind of guy.

• 1:31:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:49Speaker 06

  We'd always fight over the best minnows in the bucket, you know, and we're on a boat and the best worms.

• 1:31:56Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 1:31:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, he was, he was special, but.

• 1:32:00Speaker 06

  Golly, they're just, uh, most of the guys that I miss a lot were the guys back east. We had a cabin in the Adirondack in the Catskills Deer Cabin.

• 1:32:08Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:32:09Speaker 06

  Typical deer cabin, you know. And, uh, but. So, yeah, it's, it's tough because, you know, people are dying every day, especially as you get older and sometimes there's, there's a, you know, they get killed in an accident or whatever.

• 1:32:26Steven Rinella?

  Hmm, hmm.

• 1:32:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it is tough, man.

• 1:32:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:32:31Steven Rinella?

  The thing, I, I got a real good buddy I lost in, uh,

• 1:32:35Steven Rinella?

  You know what haunts me the most about that is the times I had negative, that I had negative comments about him to other friends. About whatever, we get into a skirmish about something. You know, and I'd have negative comments about him.

• 1:32:51Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:32:51Steven Rinella?

  That sticks with me now, man. The feeling of how I should have never said that shit. Anytime we had, we, we knew each other for many, many years. So of course we had like disagreements. That sticks with you. Tell people about your books.

• 1:33:06Steven Rinella?

  You got a handful of them here. I didn't know that your first book, this is crazy, but your first book was called Ice Fishing East and West.

• 1:33:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:33:12Steven Rinella?

  I didn't know about this one.

• 1:33:14Speaker 06

  Seventy six. That was out of print.

• 1:33:16Steven Rinella?

  It's out of print.

• 1:33:17Speaker 06

  But it's funny, that cover, Arctic Cat sent me that cover. Look at those snowmobiles.

• 1:33:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:21Speaker 06

  I mean, they're ancient.

• 1:33:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:33:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Fish cleaning.

• 1:33:29Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 1:33:29Steven Rinella?

  Snow travel.

• 1:33:30Speaker 06

  Yeah. Safety on the ice, where to find fish. Yeah, that book, let's say I wrote it in seventy six, I think. God almighty, that's more than fifty years old.

• 1:33:43Steven Rinella?

  I don't know how I didn't know about this book because we, we, I come from a long line of ice fishing, man.

• 1:33:49Speaker 06

  Well, the editor of that book, he was with Outdoor Life and he worked for David O'Mcay Company in New York City. And he saw me at the SHOT Show and he said, why don't you write a book on ice fishing? He says, why don't you write a book on cotton tail rabbits? I said, who the hell's gonna buy that? Ten people.

• 1:34:06Speaker 06

  So, yeah.

• 1:34:07Steven Rinella?

  You sold one copy.

• 1:34:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:34:08Steven Rinella?

  If I'd have known about it. Did this, did this ice fishing book sell any copies?

• 1:34:13Speaker 06

  No, not really.

• 1:34:14Steven Rinella?

  I can't picture it would.

• 1:34:16Speaker 06

  That was back in the days where you do the royalty thing, like you get ten percent of this first, first ten thousand books and twelve percent for the next ten and fifteen percent for the next. And I don't think that, I don't know what it's all about.

• 1:34:28Steven Rinella?

  I never want to make any jingle for you.

• 1:34:30Speaker 06

  That was back in the day when, I mean, you win your ice fish. Nowadays, they got all kinds of stuff, you know, obviously, just a ton of new stuff. Back in the old days, you drilled the hole and you stood there with the warmest clothes you could find.

• 1:34:43Steven Rinella?

  Like a man.

• 1:34:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, you stick your hand in that damn cold bait bucket and grab a minnow and, and wind or whatever, you just stay there. And, uh, so it wasn't, there was no really technology to it. Today, you know, there's all sorts of stuff.

• 1:34:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, e- even when I was young, so much ice fishing gear was homemade. Yeah, you know, my old man would make his ice fishing gear.

• 1:35:04Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 1:35:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah. A lot of it was homemade.

• 1:35:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:35:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, and it, but these books took off, man.

• 1:35:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, they did really well. It was To Heck With Deer, To Heck With Elk, To Heck With Moose. Um, basically, those are just stories that I've written, like each one has like thirty stories in them.

• 1:35:22Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 1:35:22Speaker 06

  Um, about crazy stuff, you know, each, each one of them is not. To Heck With Moose is actually a compilation of everything other than deer and elk, like moose, caribou, sheep, antelope. So those are all kinds of different stories.

• 1:35:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You regret naming it To Heck With?

• 1:35:38Speaker 06

  I do. You know, people say, what the hell, what's, what's wrong with that book? I said, it's just the title, you know, and.

• 1:35:43Steven Rinella?

  It bugs you.

• 1:35:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. But the one, once I explained it, then they looked at it, I said, yeah, okay.

• 1:35:50Speaker 06

  And To Heck, uh, To Heck With, uh, How To Get An Easy Elk. That's kind of just a, in fact, Pat McManus wrote the foreword in that book.

• 1:35:57Steven Rinella?

  That was a funny man. I never met him, but my God, is that guy funny? We were emailing around favorite Pat McManus quotes the other day.

• 1:36:04Speaker 06

  Were you?

• 1:36:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, just the other day.

• 1:36:07Speaker 06

  He was so much fun.

• 1:36:09Steven Rinella?

  That dude was a funny, funny guy.

• 1:36:11Speaker 06

  Yeah. He, he was.

• 1:36:13Steven Rinella?

  I would read him as a kid.

• 1:36:14Speaker 06

  Can I tell you a quick Pat McManus?

• 1:36:16Steven Rinella?

  Please, man.

• 1:36:18Speaker 06

  Uh, the editor of Outdoor Life said, why don't you and, uh, McManus go on a hunt somewhere and write a double feature? You know, side by side, and each of you tell what happened in that hunt.

• 1:36:30Speaker 06

  So we decided, well, let's go and hunt something that's got fangs and claws, you know, to make it, make it real, real interesting. So we went on a bear hunt in British Columbia.

• 1:36:40Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 1:36:41Speaker 06

  With Remington and a bunch of writers. And it was a real crazy spring. It was snow everywhere and the bears were not out. They were in the cottonwood trees, way up in the cottonwood trees.

• 1:36:54Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 1:36:54Speaker 06

  And you could look out over this river and see five or six bears, black blobs, but they, they were kind of smallish bears, you know, I don't think there was a six footer up there.

• 1:37:03Steven Rinella?

  Up eating in there?

• 1:37:05Speaker 06

  In, in British Columbia.

• 1:37:06Steven Rinella?

  Like, no, they're laying up or they're up there feeding?

• 1:37:08Speaker 06

  No, they're eating, they're eating them.

• 1:37:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, eating those big buds.

• 1:37:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:12Speaker 06

  So, well, nobody's doing very well and, and on the fourth day, Pat got a bear.

• 1:37:19Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 1:37:20Speaker 06

  Okay. So, of course, he's a humor writer, he gets a bear, I don't have a bear yet, right? I'm the hunter editor.

• 1:37:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:27Speaker 06

  So, um, the last day, my guy and I are driving around and there's a bear standing there, looking at us, like seventy, eighty yards away.

• 1:37:37Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 1:37:38Speaker 06

  Piece of cake, you know, meat on the table. And he's just looking at us in the snow. So I get out of the truck, set up my sticks and I said, like, you know, this, there's my bear. I fired and he just looked at me. He didn't do a damn thing. He just, then he kind of just ambled off and waddled away.

• 1:37:59Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 1:37:59Speaker 06

  That bear was not hit. So the guy, so I said, I missed him. The guy said, you sure as hell did miss him. What the hell happened? I said, I don't have any idea. So I said, I'm gonna go up there where the bear was and find his tracks and I looked for blood too, but there was none. And I'm gonna, you stand right where I shot from.

• 1:38:19Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 1:38:20Speaker 06

  Draw a straight line. And I looked and there is the top of a Douglas fir tree, laying in the snow. There was a little hole in it.

• 1:38:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:30Speaker 06

  Bullet had deflected.

• 1:38:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:33Speaker 06

  So, we go back to camp, pass in our tent, hears us pull up. Do you get one? I says, yeah, I got one. Where is it? I says, right there. And he looks at that piece of tree and they're laughing like how I told him the story. So, there's a little place where you get cell service, so I called the editor in New York. And I said, I got a, I got an interesting story. I said, Pat got a bear and I didn't.

• 1:38:57Steven Rinella?

  Uh.

• 1:38:58Speaker 06

  And there was a silence. He says, well, we can't run that story. I said, well, think about it. You know, it's, it's a fun story.

• 1:39:07Speaker 06

  What does Pat write? He said Zumbo was after that dog fur. That trophy dog fur and he waited for that bear to walk around behind it to present a good silhouette and he fired and he got the fur. But that's just Pat, you know?

• 1:39:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:21Speaker 06

  He, golly.

• 1:39:24Speaker 06

  We used to do a stand up act for the Elk Foundation on stage.

• 1:39:27Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:39:28Speaker 06

  And he'd tell his famous deer on a bicycle story.

• 1:39:31Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:39:31Speaker 06

  People, I saw one guy fall off his chair. He was laughing so. And I wonder what the hell am I doing up here with Pat McManus? You know, we were close friends and, and, and, uh, but all I do is tell some stories. I didn't try to get funny, but he was.

• 1:39:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Cause you're not gonna out funny that guy, man.

• 1:39:48Speaker 06

  He was hilarious. But he wasn't really funny in person.

• 1:39:51Steven Rinella?

  Oh, is that right?

• 1:39:52Speaker 06

  We got a lot.

• 1:39:52Steven Rinella?

  You know, that's a weird deal about real funny people's.

• 1:39:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:39:55Steven Rinella?

  Funniest people aren't funny in person.

• 1:39:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:57Steven Rinella?

  They don't have, they, they run, they run out of energy a little bit, I think. Yeah. The funniest, funniest people, performers.

• 1:40:05Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 1:40:07Steven Rinella?

  Aren't funny in person.

• 1:40:09Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 1:40:09Steven Rinella?

  And sometimes the funniest people in person aren't funny in performers.

• 1:40:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, you're right.

• 1:40:15Steven Rinella?

  That's a weird deal, man.

• 1:40:18Steven Rinella?

  So when you're hanging out with him, he's not just cracking jokes left and right.

• 1:40:22Speaker 06

  Was I what?

• 1:40:23Steven Rinella?

  When you're hanging out with Patrick McManus. He's not just cracking jokes left and right when you're driving down the road.

• 1:40:30Speaker 06

  No, we just, we just, I don't know. We talk about the magazine, you know, and some of the jerks we know and. One, one.

• 1:40:39Speaker 06

  One interesting.

• 1:40:40Steven Rinella?

  You guys know a lot of jerks?

• 1:40:41Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Some of the editors were, they're all from New York and New Jersey and Connecticut, you know?

• 1:40:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so were you.

• 1:40:47Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. But I, I, I took off out west and I started hunting at a young age. Those guys never.

• 1:40:53Steven Rinella?

  Got it, got it, got it. Yeah.

• 1:40:56Speaker 06

  But, uh, Pat was the kind of guy where a stranger could walk up to him. And he'd start talking to him and he'd say, you want to go to lunch with us? I mean, he was that kind of guy.

• 1:41:06Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:41:07Speaker 06

  But one of, one of my greatest, uh. Articles was when Pat died. Um, the editors asked me to write a tribute to him on his back page. And I'll do like.

• 1:41:17Steven Rinella?

  Oh, to take his column.

• 1:41:19Speaker 06

  Yeah. And write about him.

• 1:41:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:21Speaker 06

  So that was fun.

• 1:41:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:41:24Steven Rinella?

  God, that guy was funny, man.

• 1:41:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:41:27Steven Rinella?

  Well.

• 1:41:27Speaker 06

  He sold so many books, some of them and made the New York Times bestseller list, you know, and.

• 1:41:31Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:41:32Speaker 06

  And, uh, he also had someone do a play.

• 1:41:36Steven Rinella?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:41:37Speaker 06

  Especially around Montana and Idaho. He'd actually impersonate Pat and, uh.

• 1:41:42Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 1:41:43Speaker 06

  Yeah. Pat wasn't there, but he impersonated him and did a great show.

• 1:41:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:48Speaker 06

  But Pat could make anybody laugh, even, even the wives that didn't hunt, you know, he, like he write about backing up a trailer. A whole column, make it, make it funny as hell.

• 1:41:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:59Speaker 06

  One time, yeah, he actually started with Field and Stream. And Claire Conley stole him away from Field and Stream.

• 1:42:05Steven Rinella?

  God.

• 1:42:05Speaker 06

  But Pat told me one time, an editor called and said, the artist wants to know what your next column is going to be about. So we can start working on it. Pat had no idea. He said, it's about a box. He said, okay, what kind of box? He said, a green box. A green box? How big? Oh, that was big as a coffin. Okay. So they went with that. He had no idea what, and he wrote about it. He.

• 1:42:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's good. That's good. Well, man, I appreciate you coming on the show and taking the time to drive up here.

• 1:42:43Speaker 06

  I'll tell you, I'm, I'm, I've wanted to meet you for a long time because I know you are. Uh, you, you can tell you're so genuinely involved in hunting and fishing. I get so much out of your podcast, uh, you did one on CWD recently. And I learned a lot of stuff.

• 1:42:59Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you do?

• 1:42:59Speaker 06

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I saw when you went to North Dakota to the bobcat sale.

• 1:43:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:04Speaker 06

  Learned a lot of stuff.

• 1:43:05Steven Rinella?

  Nevada, yeah.

• 1:43:06Speaker 06

  Uh, oh, was that Nevada?

• 1:43:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yes, sir.

• 1:43:07Speaker 06

  Okay. Uh, no, I really enjoy your stuff and it's a pleasure to meet you and, and do the podcast. So I appreciate that.

• 1:43:15Steven Rinella?

  You know, I want to share this with people that we met down in Cody, Wyoming. And you gave me some smoked trout.

• 1:43:25Steven Rinella?

  And it's great smoked trout. Everybody loved it, but I wound up, they want to be a well-traveled smoked trout. Because I took that, I took, I had one pack left. And I took it to the Bahamas. Cause we brought our own food down.

• 1:43:39Speaker 06

  Oh my gosh.

• 1:43:39Steven Rinella?

  Right? We chartered a plane to get out to a remote area. So we brought, you know, deer and elk and whatnot. And I threw that smoked trout in there. And so we're sitting out there in the Bahamas on like the, you know, the queen mother fishing grounds, you know? All these dead fish on ice, right? And we're sitting around eating that smoked trout. And my buddy down there.

• 1:44:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:44:03Steven Rinella?

  He's fished all over the world, you know?

• 1:44:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:44:06Steven Rinella?

  And we're eating Zumbo's smoked trout. And he's just blown away how good it is. And he's like, man, how could I make this with something down here? You know, what would I use down here?

• 1:44:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. I didn't tell you this, but I got that right. I've been smoking fish all my life in my, since my twenties. And I had one of those little, little chief smokers, you know?

• 1:44:23Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:44:23Speaker 06

  And Lord Jensen, I think.

• 1:44:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, everybody, yeah, that was like the, those, the smoker.

• 1:44:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:44:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:29Speaker 06

  But I never was happy with the, with the brine. It just wasn't happy. And I go to Alaska, man, they had such good stuff. And one day I was fishing at Cody on Buffalo Bill Reservoir and there was a bunch of old guys there and I didn't know them. We got BS and, and one guy said he had retired from a meat processor, wild meat processing business. I said, oh, well, that means you cut up stuff and you smoke stuff, right? He said, yeah, yeah. We smoked deer hams and pheasants and ducks. And does he smoke fish too? He said, oh, yeah. I says, now that you're retired, could I get your brine recipe? Cause this guy's a pro. He says, wait a minute. He goes up to this truck and he's got a package of smoked trout. He gives it to me. And I says, holy smokes. I've been looking for this all my life. So I didn't do it. I just got that from him.

• 1:45:11Steven Rinella?

  Are you willing to share?

• 1:45:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:45:13Steven Rinella?

  Tell people.

• 1:45:13Speaker 06

  Right now? Okay.

• 1:45:15Steven Rinella?

  Lay it out.

• 1:45:16Speaker 06

  Two cups of brown sugar, half a cup of white sugar, and one cup of Tender Quick.

• 1:45:22Steven Rinella?

  Morton's Tender Quick.

• 1:45:23Speaker 06

  Tender Quick.

• 1:45:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, if you want to make, like, if you want to make your own, like, corn meat, this is like the quick and easy way of doing it, that product. I buy that product. I order that shit on Amazon.

• 1:45:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:45:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, because it's hard to find.

• 1:45:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:45:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:35Speaker 06

  Well, I found it in, uh, Albertson's in Cody. It's, it's, it's made by Morton, Morton Salt.

• 1:45:39Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:45:40Speaker 06

  And, uh, it's, it comes in a blue bag, maybe a two-pound bag, but, uh, it is, it's actually a meat cure. It's got sodium nitrate and nitrate.

• 1:45:48Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:45:49Speaker 06

  So I've actually sent smoked fish across country, and you know, it takes four or five days, and it gets warm, and it's, it's okay because it's.

• 1:45:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you take it down to the Bahamas, dude.

• 1:45:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. Yeah, but anyway, I put it on dry.

• 1:46:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, take your fillets.

• 1:46:06Speaker 06

  Take the fillets, skin on.

• 1:46:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:08Speaker 06

  Of course, I'm going to smoke them, and, uh, just lay them in a tub and just keep sprinkling that, that, uh, mixture on them, and then, and as soon as it hits the cold fish, it turns to liquid. It looks just like maple syrup.

• 1:46:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, starts drawing that moisture out.

• 1:46:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I, I let them, I let them soak for about nine hours, and I rinse them off in cold water.

• 1:46:27Steven Rinella?

  I like how you take your own chainsaw and you cut your own wood chips for your smoker.

• 1:46:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:46:31Steven Rinella?

  Just pick up your, your saw cuttings.

• 1:46:33Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:46:34Steven Rinella?

  You ever rip it lengthwise to get bigger cuttings?

• 1:46:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:46:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, you get those big, big, yeah.

• 1:46:38Steven Rinella?

  Big curlicues?

• 1:46:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:46:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:40Speaker 06

  But what I did is I, I took, I had a friend and an outfitter buddy in Montana, Billy Stockton, Billy Stockton, who lived in Wise River, and he had a chainsaw and he put vegetable oil in it, and he cut his.

• 1:46:53Steven Rinella?

  So he had food-grade chips?

• 1:46:54Speaker 06

  Yeah. So that's what I did. I had a saw and I put, take all the old oil out and put vegetable oil, so.

• 1:47:00Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:47:00Speaker 06

  So when you're cutting the wood, you didn't have oil residue on the wood, you know?

• 1:47:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:04Speaker 06

  So.

• 1:47:04Steven Rinella?

  That's a good move, man.

• 1:47:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:47:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:47:07Steven Rinella?

  Well, again, man, I so much appreciate you coming on. It's, it's a real honor to me. It's an honor to the show to have you on.

• 1:47:13Speaker 06

  Thank you, sir.

• 1:47:14Steven Rinella?

  I appreciate it.

• 1:47:15Speaker 06

  Really appreciate it.

• 1:47:15Steven Rinella?

  All right. Everybody, Jim Zumbo. Thanks, man.

• 1:47:17Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 1:47:45Steven Rinella?

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• 1:49:45Speaker 00

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