Ep. 912: Clay’s Ozark Bear Camp | 12 in '26

Clay gives behind the scenes details and answers com viewer questions about his annual bear camp that is featured in the Meateater “12 in ‘26” film series. It’s a film about tradition, camaraderie, tough situations, and the love of the hunt. Hear the details and what happened that you didn’t see in the film. Watch the film now on MeatEater's YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kgn2SpxaCXs Presented by Can-Am: maker of the best ATVs, SxS, and Utility Vehicles www.can-am.brp.com http://www.can-am.brp.com Connect with 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, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and YouTube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Subscribe to MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:48Speaker 05

  I'm in the Ozarks today, and tomorrow is the opening day of the Arkansas bear season. It's like a holiday to me. We're gonna be competing against the White Oak Acres to kill these bears. But the day before season, today, we're gonna be making molasses with my friend Willard Valines.

• 2:11Speaker 05

  Hey, everybody, my name's Clay Newcomb, and what you just watched was the intro to our newest film called Ozark Bear Camp with Clay Newcomb. It's the latest in Meat Eaters 12 and 26 series, brought to you by Moultrie and Onyx. And that little intro kind of warms my heart. I love the landscape shots. Willard Valines is kind of a legend around here, and it was a good film. So on, on what we're doing right here is our companion series podcast, where we're gonna go behind the scenes, answer viewer questions,

• 2:53Speaker 05

  and talk to you about a bunch of stuff that we weren't able to talk about in the episode. And in this film, we head to my Arkansas bear camp with my family, friends, and a bunch of other people. And, well, I guess everybody's family and friends. There were no non-

• 3:11Speaker 06

  We didn't have any outlaws or in-laws.

• 3:13Speaker 05

  There's a few people that came that just like completely, you know, are not my friends. That's not true. But we're gonna talk about that on this podcast. I'm joined today by my producer, hero, mustache icon, fly fishing sage, and best friend a guy could ever ask for, Josh Landbridge Spillmaker.

• 3:37Speaker 06

  It was very kind of you to write that.

• 3:38Speaker 05

  Wow, that was-

• 3:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, that was touching.

• 3:40Speaker 05

  So great to-

• 3:40Speaker 06

  Appreciate that.

• 3:41Speaker 05

  Great to have you here, Josh.

• 3:42Speaker 06

  Speaking of warming hearts.

• 3:42Speaker 05

  Hey, you were at, you were with me on this film.

• 3:45Speaker 06

  I was.

• 3:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, you showed up a couple of times-

• 3:47Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 3:48Speaker 05

  -in the film.

• 3:48Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 3:49Speaker 05

  So, well, let's-

• 3:51Speaker 06

  We're excited, man. This, the, this film has tons of bear hunting in it. You know, it's, it's kind of a iconic region.

• 3:59Speaker 05

  It's got a lot of bear hunting in it.

• 4:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly.

• 4:01Speaker 05

  Not so, not a lot of bear skinning, or-

• 4:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, but the, you know, this, this region where we're hunting is kind of iconic for bear grease especially. You know, this would be kind of your home. You know, the, the Ozarks and the Wasatchas are kind of where you've cut your teeth hunting. And so, without further ado, we want to just dive right in. Like I said, there's lots of bear hunting in this film, but the film starts with a thing that happens to coincide with bear season, and that's the harvest of the sorghum.

• 4:34Speaker 05

  This-

• 4:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:35Speaker 05

  This was really cool for me because the, the previous year was the first time that I would have made sorghum with Willard Valines and the whole-

• 4:43Speaker 06

  Before you get into it, let's actually watch a clip. We're gonna watch about a one, about a one-minute clip about the sorghum making, so-

• 4:51Speaker 07

  Well, my dad made molasses when I was a kid, so that's been about 70 some years ago.

• 4:56Speaker 05

  And then the Valines, when they came into this valley, brought with them sorghum seeds. And some of that same seed is the seed that you grow today.

• 5:05Speaker 07

  Right, yeah, it's been handed down from generation to generation.

• 5:09Speaker 05

  That Mr. Doyle is putting in there and squeezing all that liquid out.

• 5:14Speaker 07

  Right, then you gotta boil it down until it goes into the molasses.

• 5:17Speaker 05

  The history is pretty remarkable, and in modern times, the timing of the sorghum harvest has coincided with bear season. When you're boiling something down like this, really, you're just removing the water and just concentrating the sugar. I mean, that's really all it is.

• 5:34Speaker 07

  Right.

• 5:34Speaker 05

  So-

• 5:47Speaker 05

  With the molasses making finishing up, it's time to get down to brass tacks. We're hunting bears in less than 24 hours, and we're gonna take today's skimmings to sweeten up my bait side.

• 6:01Speaker 06

  So there you go, just a, just a little clip, just a little clip from the sorghum making with Willard.

• 6:09Speaker 05

  It was pretty cool. The, the year before was the first year that I'd, I'd ever made sorghum with Willard Valines. And it was, it was right before bear season. And so, I wanted to, I'll tell you exactly what happened. Is the year before, I was there with him, just a scene, just like what you saw. And I made a little video on my phone.

• 6:34Speaker 06

  Yep, I remember that.

• 6:35Speaker 05

  And I put that video on my Instagram, and really didn't think that much about it. It was just a cool video showing the mule, grasshopper, you know, you know, turning the mill. It showed the whole process in less than a minute. And that video got 30 million views on Instagram.

• 6:54Speaker 06

  30 million?

• 6:55Speaker 05

  30.5 million views on Instagram. And I, I, it, it just kind of cued me in that this is something that the world needs to see in more detail.

• 7:06Speaker 06

  Right.

• 7:06Speaker 05

  This is a 30-second, maybe minute-long clip. And so, that's when I talked to Willard and said, hey, we're gonna bear hunt next year over here. Why, and we're gonna have a crew here, why don't we, why don't we film the, the full sequence of you making molasses? And, I mean, it was no sweat off his back. It's like, we're gonna be doing it anyway.

• 7:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:29Speaker 05

  There was a little bit of coordination with when to harvest the, the sorghum.

• 7:35Speaker 06

  Is that the, is that like the optimal time?

• 7:38Speaker 05

  So, yes, they, it's, they always harvest it in, in September and early October.

• 7:44Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 7:45Speaker 05

  So, you couldn't, you wouldn't have done it too much earlier, but, but here anyway, mid to late September to early October.

• 7:57Speaker 06

  You know, it seems like in the harvest and production of the sorghum with the Valines, like, not a lot has changed. What, is there anything that has changed since they started doing that a couple of generations back?

• 8:09Speaker 05

  I mean, the way-

• 8:10Speaker 06

  Obviously, they weren't lifting it with a tractor.

• 8:12Speaker 05

  So if you go to the store and buy a jar of sorghum molasses, most likely that was made in a, in a, in a modern mill. You know, they, they weren't using a mule to turn it. It was an electric mill somehow that, you know-

• 8:29Speaker 06

  Right.

• 8:30Speaker 05

  Presses down the, the canes and makes the juice. The way that they're doing it is identical to the way it would have been done 100, 100 years ago. Because that, that mill that he has, the press, is, has been in his family for many years. They actually have one of the other brothers. So what's cool about the Valines, Willard Valines is one of 10 children.

• 8:59Speaker 06

  And how old is Willard?

• 9:00Speaker 05

  Willard's 78.

• 9:02Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 9:03Speaker 05

  And I, don't get me talking about where he's at, but I want to say he's somewhere in the middle.

• 9:09Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 9:09Speaker 05

  So he, he has some brothers that are older.

• 9:14Speaker 06

  Right.

• 9:14Speaker 05

  And one of the brothers has the original mill that his father had, had used, the, the sorghum press. Am I saying the right word for that?

• 9:26Speaker 06

  I think mill seems right.

• 9:28Speaker 05

  So- But, but that

• 9:31Speaker 06

  Well, that might be a press. It might be a press. Mill seems like it would be grinding.

• 9:34Speaker 05

  Right.

• 9:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:36Speaker 05

  So, yeah, the way they're doing it is, is just the same. But it's really pretty simple. You know, when you, the first time I was there, I was like, man, this is a complicated process with a lot of stages. You just press the canes, get the, get the juice out.

• 9:50Speaker 06

  Uh huh.

• 9:51Speaker 05

  And then you just heat it and remove the water. Like, there's no recipe.

• 9:55Speaker 06

  Right.

• 9:55Speaker 05

  There's no, there's not like, well, at this moment, you have to do this. However, that makes it sound simple. When that fire's burning, Willard and those guys are watching it like a hawk. Because you can ruin it.

• 10:10Speaker 06

  It seems like the critical things would be like, timing of when it's done, you know, keeping it moving and making sure that fire doesn't get too hot or too low.

• 10:18Speaker 05

  Exactly. And they can tell you the taste difference in where sorghum is grown. Even in their county. Like, Willard will be like, now, this cane came from here and it tastes a little bit sweeter than the cane that came from up on the mountain.

• 10:36Speaker 06

  So is this something that happens regionally? Like, are there other families in that area that are?

• 10:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'd say there's quite a few that, not quite a few. There are others that make sorghum just this same way. Not a lot.

• 10:50Speaker 06

  I wonder if they have like a sorghum off, like whoever makes the best sorghum.

• 10:53Speaker 05

  Oh, it would be a contest, a highly, highly contested.

• 10:58Speaker 06

  I wouldn't want to judge it. I wouldn't want to judge it.

• 11:00Speaker 05

  Yes. But if you haven't had sorghum, it's an interesting product. It's, uh, it's sweet. You could use it like syrup.

• 11:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 11:09Speaker 05

  But it's, um, it's kind of got, it's got a very unique taste that if you didn't grow up with it, you might be like, you know, it might kind of catch you off guard.

• 11:18Speaker 06

  Right.

• 11:19Speaker 05

  I grew up eating sorghum molasses. My grandfather, he treated it like it was, like we got to go out and have ice cream. I mean, it was like, hey, you want some sorghum? You know, I mean, like, it was really something special. And what he would do is he would pour, he would take a butter knife and pour it out of the jar and he could very strategically, you know, it drips, it's like thicker than syrup.

• 11:44Speaker 06

  Right. It's more like honey.

• 11:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's like, it's like a, like a thinner honey.

• 11:49Speaker 06

  Uh huh.

• 11:49Speaker 05

  And so when it's poured out, if you just tip the jar back up, it gets all over the side of the jar. And so at just the right time, when you're tipping it back up, you zoom the knife across and keep the jar clean. And you'd have a little dollop about as big as a silver dollar, about a, you know, less than a quarter inch high. Then he would take a, a piece of butter, a square of butter and put it in there and mash it up with the sorghum and put that on biscuits. That's what he did. And it was

• 12:19Speaker 06

  Making me hungry.

• 12:20Speaker 05

  Man, back in the day before the commercialization of sugar and candy and how much access that the everyday American has to sugar, which is bizarre and you should be very concerned with how much sugar you eat. I mean, wildly bizarre that, of the people watching this video. I mean, what are the statistics of how much sugar the average American eats? I mean, it's like, like 50 pounds of sugar or something a year?

• 12:45Speaker 06

  At least. And if you drink sodas.

• 12:48Speaker 05

  That's insane. You should be very, very, which camera does it look, you should be very concerned about this. But back in the day, to have sorghum, which was sweet, was like a treat.

• 13:00Speaker 06

  Right.

• 13:01Speaker 05

  It is interesting, this overlap.

• 13:02Speaker 06

  Had sugar in your everyday, in your everyday consumption.

• 13:06Speaker 05

  That's right. And it, it's kind of interesting because when I would do the same thing with my kids, hey, you want some sorghum? I mean, I'm ashamed to say that it, they were kind of, kind of unimpressed, you know?

• 13:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 13:19Speaker 05

  Uh, it, but

• 13:20Speaker 06

  Kids these days.

• 13:21Speaker 05

  Kids these, now, my kids don't eat that much sugar. Bear Newcomb? No, Bear Newcomb, Bear Newcomb is like, almost sugar-free.

• 13:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 13:28Speaker 05

  And he's also like a lean man.

• 13:29Speaker 06

  He's also like 2% body fat.

• 13:31Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, no, that kind of stuff is really special to me to be able to document it. And what is most special, and this is what you get behind the scenes is, I wanted to do that for Willard and his family.

• 13:43Speaker 06

  Right.

• 13:44Speaker 05

  Because Willard's, his family's been doing this. And I mean, all they would have would just be some cell phone videos in modern times and then some, just, you know, a handful of photographs from years ago. And so it was pretty cool to have the Meat Eater crew there, um, to document it so well. And, you know, it's about a 10-minute clip, so it's, it's not like it was exhaustive.

• 14:11Speaker 06

  So, but, you know, a couple of questions first. You know, that same seed's been passed down for the, through the generations. Why does that matter, Clay?

• 14:22Speaker 05

  Good sorghum.

• 14:23Speaker 06

  Good sorghum.

• 14:25Speaker 05

  No, it's just, I think it's just a connection to the past, like, the, the human life is deceptive. It feels like people from the 1800s, your third and fourth great grandfathers were a long ways away. But they really weren't.

• 14:40Speaker 06

  Right.

• 14:40Speaker 05

  And, you know, by Willard holding that seed and planting it in the ground and knowing that his ancestors, you know, you could track it back and grew that seed. I think it just connects you to the past and to the, the just, just the, the heritage of the region and it's, it's just unique.

• 15:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 15:03Speaker 05

  I mean, there's, there's nothing that I could, that I have, that I could touch that, I mean, my great grandfather's shotgun, which I've got over there, like, very little. And, you know, when you think about history, which I talk a lot about history.

• 15:18Speaker 06

  Right.

• 15:19Speaker 05

  And you might think that I was hyper nostalgic in the way that I think about even my life. And I'm not sure that I am, because the past is interesting. There's a lot of the past that we should forget and even reject and move past in our own personal lives and even in our family's history, like, but it's, but the knowledge of some of this stuff is powerful. That, that's more a statement of like, general understanding of like, why the history, because I, I think there's, there's probably a, can be a unhealthy attachment to the past.

• 15:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 15:57Speaker 05

  And this is not that. This is a celebration of, of heritage and a connection to a family legacy. And, uh, and over in this part of the world, in Newton County and kind of the central Ozarks, the name Vallines, there are hundreds of Vallines. Because the guys that brought that sorghum seed, I want to say, Willard told me that Abraham Vallines had 18 children.

• 16:23Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 16:24Speaker 05

  And they're all still over there. And they're, they're a wonderful family. They're a lot of, lot, I know a lot of Vallines over there.

• 16:32Speaker 06

  One last question, and it's kind of a philosophical question would be

• 16:37Speaker 05

  Oh, another one?

• 16:39Speaker 06

  What, what does Willard represent about the Ozarks that you wanted the viewers to appreciate?

• 16:45Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 16:45Speaker 06

  By starting, I mean, you started this film off with that. What, what is, what is it about him that you want people to see?

• 16:52Speaker 05

  He's just, uh, there, there are people that are,

• 16:58Speaker 05

  he just has such a connection to the Ozark. He's just a real deal Ozarkian. Like, he's not trying to be anything. He just is what he is.

• 17:08Speaker 06

  He didn't put those overalls and hat on because he was going to be on film.

• 17:12Speaker 05

  He may have, just a little, but, but, uh, but he wears those all the time. I mean, you know, there's actually a part of history in all these places that we,

• 17:25Speaker 05

  we reflect back to our past and are influenced by. I mean, wearing these overalls right here. I mean, it's like, yeah, it's a, it's a hat tip to the past. And I think people still do that today.

• 17:34Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 17:34Speaker 05

  But, but Willard's the real deal. He's a, he's a mule man. He's a hunter. He's a, just a, a well-respected guy over there.

• 17:43Speaker 06

  Love it.

• 17:43Speaker 05

  They, yeah.

• 17:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, great guy. Okay, let's, uh, we've got another, another clip here. Let's go ahead and watch it.

• 17:52Speaker 06

  Bears right now are going into what they call hyperphagia, which is a physiological state of incredible increase in metabolism. So, a bear

• 18:03Speaker 05

  Whoa.

• 18:04Speaker 06

  About fell off right there. Five to 8,000 calories a day. In the fall, they can eat 20,000 calories a day. And so when you're baiting, you're capitalizing on a natural process inside of a bear. We're using Pop-Tarts, corn, sorghum molasses.

• 18:23Speaker 05

  Skimmans. We got in a little later than we wanted, so it was a quick drop of the glasses over the bait. We filled up the bait barrels. The last thing we want to do is spook bears the night before the hunt.

• 18:37Speaker 05

  Everybody's here for the season opener and we're having a big time. Much of my hunting is primarily solo, but our bear camp is always full of people and that's something that I love. I always got to give like the state of the union, the state of the bear union. I have pretty good news. Like I would say that the bear, the bear situation is average to slightly below average.

• 19:11Speaker 06

  So tell us, uh, tell us a little bit about, you know, you typically have a bear camp every year. Tell us what made this bear camp different than, than bear camps in the past.

• 19:24Speaker 05

  Well, it was fun to have Lake Pickle, Jordan Blissette there. They, they were both new bear hunters, had never bear hunted before. So it was cool to get to introduce them to it. We were actually in a new spot that I hadn't hunted before. We were in, uh, we were in a new spot and uh,

• 19:46Speaker 06

  Disclosed new spot.

• 19:47Speaker 05

  And my buddy, uh, Justin House was there. James Lawrence.

• 19:52Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 19:52Speaker 05

  Came up, who's in,

• 19:53Speaker 06

  Bear Grease icon.

• 19:55Speaker 05

  Yep. Yes. And, uh, there was another interesting guest at our bear camp this year. Ted Koppel was there.

• 20:04Speaker 06

  As in the, the Ted.

• 20:05Speaker 05

  As in,

• 20:06Speaker 06

  The real Ted Koppel.

• 20:07Speaker 05

  That interviewed Richard Nixon.

• 20:09Speaker 06

  Right.

• 20:09Speaker 05

  Ted Koppel. You, you actually see Ted Koppel in the last clip of the film, sitting by our fire. He's, he's wearing all black and he's kind of sitting in the back and we're playing music and it's, the lights are on. And, uh, you, you actually can see Ted Koppel in,

• 20:26Speaker 06

  So he had come to do a,

• 20:28Speaker 05

  So yeah, what you wouldn't have known from watching the film is that CBS Good Morning.

• 20:34Speaker 06

  Sunday morning.

• 20:35Speaker 05

  Sunday, CBS Sunday Morning came to our bear camp and were there for basically two of the five days. There were people there, I guess there were people there for parts of three of five days. They came in on the evening. Ted was there all day, one of the days, but the guys were still there the next day for portion of the day, if I recall.

• 20:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 20:57Speaker 05

  And they did a, a spot on CBS Sunday Morning. And so Ted interviewed many of us. We rendered bear fat. Aside from what you saw, we rendered bear fat for CBS Sunday Morning and he just hung out with us.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  911, what's your emergency?

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Please help us. They're everywhere. We think they're murder hornets.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  911 Nashville returns.

• 21:28Speaker 05

  It's a homicide detective down here.

• 21:29Speaker 03

  Three bodies on the ground.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  With emergencies of biblical proportions.

• 21:33Speaker 03

  Sin swarms upon you and upon your people.

• 21:36Speaker 05

  That's one of the plagues of the Bible.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Brian Philippi joins 911 Nashville. All new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu.

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• 22:47Speaker 06

  I have to say that, um, compared to some of the bear camps of the past, which have been awesome. This one was a little bougier too. We had a pretty nice place.

• 22:54Speaker 05

  We stayed in a really nice cabin.

• 22:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 22:55Speaker 05

  We did. That was unusual.

• 22:57Speaker 06

  Get spoiled there.

• 22:57Speaker 05

  We, we kind of had to do that because we had, uh, so many people there and because we had Ted Koppel and his crew coming.

• 23:04Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:05Speaker 05

  And so we on the Bear Grease podcast spoke about when Ted Koppel came. He was, he was a, he's 85, 85 years old.

• 23:18Speaker 06

  A very spry 85.

• 23:19Speaker 05

  Younger and you don't reckon, anybody I would say 35 and older would know who Ted Koppel was, was one of the most famous, well-known faces in America for probably 25 years as a, as a broadcast anchor for CBS.

• 23:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 23:37Speaker 05

  So yeah, back in the day, uh, kids, there were, when there was just television, that's, you had television and books and radio. That's all you had, no cell phones. People watched television at night.

• 23:51Speaker 06

  Ted Koppel was a household name.

• 23:53Speaker 05

  And there were, there would have been like three or four major networks.

• 23:56Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:56Speaker 05

  And, and the anchors for the nightly news on those, those stations were as famous as the president.

• 24:04Speaker 06

  Right.

• 24:05Speaker 05

  Most. And, uh, so Ted Koppel was one of those guys.

• 24:08Speaker 06

  He was on Nightline for years.

• 24:10Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 24:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 24:11Speaker 05

  Many years. And he was a delightful man.

• 24:14Speaker 06

  He was. I, it honestly surprised me how endearing he was. I mean, just like personable, humble. Yeah.

• 24:21Speaker 05

  Sat with us and just talked. He singled out almost everyone in our camp.

• 24:28Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:29Speaker 05

  And had fairly in-depth conversations.

• 24:32Speaker 06

  Personal conversations.

• 24:33Speaker 05

  When I realized what he was doing was, uh, Justin House, who can just kind of be a fly on the wall at times.

• 24:44Speaker 05

  Was there and there was a little bit of a lull. We're in a big group. This is after he'd been there for hours and he looked at Justin and he said, Justin, tell me what you do.

• 24:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 24:56Speaker 05

  And it was clear that he was trying to connect with everybody there and, you know, one time I came around a corner and he and Brent were sitting over in a chair, just chatting away. No telling what Brent was telling him.

• 25:08Speaker 06

  When you guys were out hunting one afternoon, he sat down with, with your mom and dad and Misty and I. And I think just the four of us and just for hour and a half and just let us ask him questions about his career and his family and,

• 25:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:23Speaker 06

  Yeah. Just really neat.

• 25:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:25Speaker 06

  Um, what is it about bear camp that, that means so much to you?

• 25:29Speaker 05

  So most of my hunting, I said it in there, most, most of my hunting is solo. Like most of my hunting, I wake up here at my house and, you know, go deer hunting or go bear hunting. And maybe somebody comes with me.

• 25:41Speaker 06

  Right.

• 25:41Speaker 05

  But, you know, I'm driving there and hunting for a day or two and, and coming back.

• 25:47Speaker 05

  Other times I'm leaving on the bigger hunts. To, to me, my hunting and probably most people's hunting can be segregated into two things. Your local hunting, but then you're, if you travel, if you're so fortunate to get to travel to hunt. And many people do make one big trip, hunting trip somewhere.

• 26:04Speaker 06

  Right.

• 26:05Speaker 05

  You know, you travel. So when I travel, I'm usually with people, but it's not home and it's not with family. Bear camp is very communal, very focused on the camp, very, um, uh, we're not, honestly, we're not hunting that hard in terms of hunting. The work that goes into it is more than I do for anything else that I do. And that's, that's hard to describe for some people. I mean, it just, you know, the, the work that goes into baiting bears is the most work that I do.

• 26:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:46Speaker 05

  Like when I go to Alaska next month, I'm just going to like show up and I've never been there. And all of my energy will be dedicated during the time I'm there and then I leave. Uh, you know, this, this takes a whole bunch of effort to get there.

• 27:00Speaker 06

  I mean, for, for a month ahead of time.

• 27:02Speaker 05

  Yes. And, and so when we're there though, we're typically just hunting the evenings, maybe a little bit in the morning. And so we're spending a lot of time at camp.

• 27:11Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:12Speaker 05

  A lot of time with people and that's fun to me.

• 27:14Speaker 06

  Man, we had, we had a great time just, just having food and, you know, in the evenings, people would show up and, you know, one night there were, there were guys there playing some fantastic music. It was your birthday. We celebrated that. It was, I mean, we had a, we had a great time. I've, I've got a couple of questions here, um, from some Instagram.

• 27:34Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 27:34Speaker 06

  From Instagram. First question is from Isaac Reynolds, Isaac underscore Reynolds 34, if you're out there. What's your recommended draw weight for bear and what's your favorite bear bait to use?

• 27:47Speaker 05

  You can use archery equipment on a black bear that you would use on a whitetail deer.

• 27:53Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 27:53Speaker 05

  That they're they're really, they're really, I wouldn't do anything different between my whitetail setup and my bear setup.

• 28:00Speaker 06

  Broadheads as well.

• 28:02Speaker 05

  Now that I would do different. I typically, I go back and forth between expandables with whitetails.

• 28:11Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 28:12Speaker 05

  I'd say 75% of the time I'm using some expandable head for whitetails. They're thinner skinned, thinner boned. They're, they're, you're more likely, I feel like with a whitetail to get a compromised hit because of the way they can react to a shot and drop and move. And so I want a big cutting diameter. When I'm bear hunting, I prioritize an entry and exit hole. So I want the arrow that is going to penetrate the most.

• 28:43Speaker 06

  You use fixed blade, do you use a cut on impact?

• 28:46Speaker 05

  I would, I would not, you wouldn't have to use a cut on impact necessarily. But I like to use a fixed blade broadhead for black bear. Now, yeah, we, I mean, we could go into all the stuff about shot placement and.

• 29:05Speaker 06

  I'm sure that will come up later.

• 29:08Speaker 05

  Today later?

• 29:09Speaker 06

  Well, we'll talk about shot placement on a bear.

• 29:13Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. Forgot about that.

• 29:15Speaker 06

  Yeah. So favorite bear bait?

• 29:17Speaker 05

  Favorite bear bait is gonna be carbohydrate for here. Now, what is interesting about black bears is that they have such a wide geographic distribution, which black bears have the currently of the large mammals on this continent have the largest geographic distribution of them all.

• 29:39Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 29:40Speaker 05

  Historically, wolves would have had a wider geographic distribution than the black bear.

• 29:46Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 29:46Speaker 05

  Okay. Think about this, Josh. This is going back to bear bait and why bears prefer different foods in different places. But the wolf essentially would have historically ranged from north of the Arctic Circle, all the way down into Old Mexico, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

• 30:08Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 30:09Speaker 05

  I mean, like without a gap in there. There would have been different subspecies of wolves, you know, based on the biology and all this. But the wolf would have, would have done that. The black bear would do the exact same thing, except black bears historically were not in the, the great prairie regions of America. A black bear has to have trees to survive. And so there would have been pockets in the Great Plains where black bears wouldn't have been. They would have been in the riparian zones, but wolves would have been in those areas. And then the treeless areas of the southwestern desert

• 30:51Speaker 05

  and the Great Plains were the only places that there were not black bears. So imagine, black bears range north of the Arctic Circle as well.

• 31:00Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 31:00Speaker 05

  Probably not, not as high as wolves though.

• 31:02Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 31:03Speaker 05

  And the, the furthest southerly documented black bears have been around Mexico City, which is deep into Mexico. And so, but are there, are there wolves today in Arkansas and in Oklahoma and in Kansas? No, they're not. So historic range, the wolf had the biggest. Today, the black bear does because the black bear now exists in basically

• 31:36Speaker 05

  65% of its, of its historic range. And in many regions, 100% of its historic range, if that makes sense.

• 31:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 31:44Speaker 05

  Like in Canada and Alaska, the black bear is in 100% of its historic range.

• 31:49Speaker 06

  Okay. So how does that tie to bear bait?

• 31:51Speaker 05

  Okay. Thank you. Bears prefer different things in different places.

• 31:56Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 31:57Speaker 05

  So for instance, in the spring in Canada, these outfitters are using oats with oil on it. I'm convinced that if you put oats with oil on bear bait in this part of the world, you would have not great results. And we can only hunt in the fall here.

• 32:16Speaker 06

  Right.

• 32:16Speaker 05

  But my favorite bear bait, I would say would be pastries, donuts, pop tarts, and bread and grease. That seems to be when we're baiting them. And I, I want to emphasize for anybody that's has not been around bear baiting, there's a ton of research about baiting black bears and it, we covered in my book that's coming out in February.

• 32:40Speaker 06

  Right.

• 32:40Speaker 05

  American bear. I mean,

• 32:41Speaker 06

  Excited about it.

• 32:42Speaker 05

  We, we cover it all, but I, I can just summarize for you to say that all the research indicates that baiting bears does not habituate them to, to anthropomorphic foods, anthropogenic foods. Like they're not going to come raid your house because they're being baited, you know, a half a mile away. Basically, it's, it's, it's, it's not detrimental to.

• 33:08Speaker 06

  And they still have a preference for.

• 33:11Speaker 05

  Oh, they all, they're always gonna have a preference for natural foods.

• 33:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 33:15Speaker 05

  They just do, they would rather eat a white oak acorn. So

• 33:21Speaker 05

  things that, that make a bear fat. But up in Canada, they would use like oil and oats.

• 33:26Speaker 06

  Okay. One of the questions I had when I watched it is you mentioned that during hyperphagia, when they're trying to put on weight, that a bear will eat 20,000 calories in a day. In nature, what are they eating that they're able to get 20,000 calories in a day?

• 33:43Speaker 05

  In, in the fall, hard mast has incredible caloric content.

• 33:48Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 33:48Speaker 05

  And so like a white oak acorn has five to seven calories per acorn.

• 33:55Speaker 06

  Right.

• 33:56Speaker 05

  And imagine, I, I, I tell a story in the book of once when I actually watched, and, and the only reason I knew the timestamp was because I videoed it, but I watched a bear eat white oak acorns for 18 minutes straight without lifting its head.

• 34:12Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 34:13Speaker 05

  And just estimating that that bear was chomping one white oak acorn every five seconds, which probably would be about as fast as it would.

• 34:24Speaker 06

  Right.

• 34:24Speaker 05

  It, it would have consumed like 1,800 calories.

• 34:30Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 34:31Speaker 05

  In, in like.

• 34:32Speaker 06

  18 minutes.

• 34:34Speaker 05

  It may not have been that precise. 18 and 18 makes me think my numbers are wrong, but it consumed an enormous, like over a thousand calories in that 18 minutes. And it's like, how many times could it do that in a day?

• 34:47Speaker 06

  Right.

• 34:47Speaker 05

  20,000. It fairly easily could.

• 34:49Speaker 06

  Right.

• 34:50Speaker 05

  So yeah, they're just cramming on the calories.

• 34:53Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 34:54Speaker 05

  And they, but they, but what's so cool about these bears is that they have to because our bears here are typically up and on their feet for 10 to nine, 10 months a year. But in the highest portion of their range, way up in the north, they're the, the, boy, I don't want to spill too much about the book. The coolest fact in the book, the coolest fact in the whole book is the longest documented denning that we've ever seen a bear stay in a den, like a collared bear.

• 35:30Speaker 06

  Right.

• 35:31Speaker 05

  They knew when it went in, they knew when it came out. And let me just say, it was an unbelievable amount of time.

• 35:38Speaker 06

  And when they're there, they're not eating, they're not drinking, they're not defecating, they're not urinating.

• 35:44Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 35:45Speaker 06

  That is unbelievable.

• 35:46Speaker 05

  Yeah. And that's, yes, it is. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a absolutely fascinating process, but that connects back to them eating, having to eat 20,000 calories a day or, or being able to in the fall. Is that they're trying to make a year's living in six to nine months. And so they've got to pack it all in. And that's, and, and a bear is just built to consume calories. I mean, it just has big intestines, big stomach, the ability, you know, a mouth that just can just consume.

• 36:18Speaker 06

  Right.

• 36:19Speaker 05

  And, and process it quickly. I mean, like every, they're just a, they're just an eating machine is what they are.

• 36:27Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 36:27Speaker 05

  And the coolest thing about bears is they're, they're, they're omnivores. And whatever's happening ecologically on planet earth, it is favoring omnivores. It is favoring generalists. Specialists are often the things that are struggling. And that's why that we see the black bear thriving.

• 36:51Speaker 06

  Right.

• 36:51Speaker 05

  Every researched population of bears is stable or increasing right now.

• 36:57Speaker 06

  Wow. That's awesome. Um, one more, one more viewer question, the simple one. Do you have a favorite fresh kill camp meal? And that's from Mac Fink Biner 0711.

• 37:12Speaker 05

  You know, I think, I don't, I don't have a fancy answer, but just to, to cook a backstrap over a fire.

• 37:20Speaker 06

  Some seasoning on it.

• 37:20Speaker 05

  Yeah. Or just to, to just fry it, pan fry it, battered and pan fried. This is the way to go.

• 37:28Speaker 06

  All right. Well, we've got another clip here. Man, I'm, I'm excited for you. I'm, I'm just eager, man. I'm ready to get up there. I'm ready to see a bear from a stand. That's just, it's gonna be something new for me.

• 37:44Speaker 05

  Dr. Pickle. We're starting our hunt in the early afternoon. Bears are crepuscular, so they move at dawn and dusk. But these baited bears move a lot at night, so we opt to go and start hunting in mid-afternoon when the bears aren't there and just set up and wait for the last hour of daylight. Maybe Lake's anticipation of seeing bears had something to do with it, but he actually doesn't have to sit long until he actually sees a bear.

• 38:14Speaker 06

  Like right here, I don't see it.

• 38:18Speaker 06

  Another bear coming from the right.

• 38:21Speaker 05

  Lake has some truly big bears that are coming into this bait. We know they're coming in, and we also know that these aren't them. So today they get a pass. But in this kind of hunt, your options can change by the day and even by the hour.

• 38:39Speaker 06

  So you've, you've kind of addressed a lot of the, a lot of the, the baiting issues.

• 38:48Speaker 06

  I feel like the film does a good job showing just how difficult it is to bait. I mean, the work that goes into it.

• 38:55Speaker 06

  But just because you bait doesn't mean it's a sure thing. So there's dissenters. Was, is there anything that you haven't covered that you feel like you want to communicate about baiting? But you know, there's always the comments, you know, this is cheating, this isn't fair.

• 39:13Speaker 05

  You know, I would, I would say that somebody that would say that, well, I would say to them, let's look at the bigger picture of bear management. Wherever there is a season that allows it to be legal to hunt bears over bait or use hounds, the other methods of hunting, which basically would be spot and stalk, would be inadequate to harvest the number of bears that needed to be taken out of that system. Let me give you an example. Arkansas currently has about 6,000 bears in the state, which is not, is really not that many.

• 39:50Speaker 06

  Right.

• 39:51Speaker 05

  So many other places, like, don't come here to hunt. It's not that great.

• 39:55Speaker 06

  Right.

• 39:56Speaker 05

  Georgia, West Virginia, North Carolina.

• 40:00Speaker 06

  Tennessee.

• 40:01Speaker 05

  Tennessee. All these places have more, more bears than us.

• 40:04Speaker 06

  Right.

• 40:07Speaker 05

  But in, in 20 years, Arkansas had, has, Arkansas hunters have legally harvested over 10,000 bears. Okay?

• 40:19Speaker 05

  I talked to biologists, we did the math together, and if there was no hunting since the year 2000, there would be between 20 and 30,000 bears in the state. Like, like with the reproduction, like counting how many were taken out.

• 40:38Speaker 06

  Right.

• 40:38Speaker 05

  And basically, the carrying capacity of the state and the habitat that we have is, you know, is probably, we're, we're reaching it. They're actually trying to like, keep the population just stable.

• 40:51Speaker 06

  Right.

• 40:51Speaker 05

  And there's many factors that go into that. There's actual habitat constraints. And, and 6,000, I kind of get bummed when I hear that number, because that, at one time, they believed this state had 50,000 bears in it. And to say we have 6,000 and I celebrate that today is kind of like, wow, that doesn't sound that great. But the truth is, is that this place is full of houses and roads and shopping malls and Bermuda grass fields that are no longer bear habitat that at one time were. Every square inch of basically, I mean, I'm just using Arkansas as an example, but you could extrapolate this out.

• 41:30Speaker 06

  Right.

• 41:30Speaker 05

  Every direction, every square inch of the state used to be bear habitat and would have been used by bears in some way. Okay? And so today, habit, actual habitat is a limitation. But then number two, and even more important, and most important, the reason that we couldn't have 30,000 bears in the state is the cultural tolerance, which is how many, how many bears will a culture tolerate? How often, how comfortable are you going to be with bears sleeping under your house? And in California and in New Jersey and a lot of these places, the cultural tolerance and the amount of bears there is in this big conflict. That's a lot about what my book is about.

• 42:15Speaker 06

  Right.

• 42:16Speaker 05

  And I do think, I, I would have a high tolerance for more bears, but also last year in this state, two people were killed by bears.

• 42:24Speaker 06

  Right.

• 42:25Speaker 05

  I mean, wild. This year, there's been more black bear, human fatalities. It's on the rise. I mean, it absolutely is on the rise. So to answer your question about baiting, is that when we bait a bear, we are playing a very significant role inside of bear management to keep the bear population stable, and you couldn't do it any other way. You send out spot and stalk hunters, they will not be able to harvest the same bears. And so you, you, you become a pawn inside of a system. And when you, when you bait a bear, it's less about like,

• 43:06Speaker 05

  clay one-on-one and outsmarting a bear. It's more about, I want to pick the specific bear I want to take.

• 43:14Speaker 06

  Right.

• 43:15Speaker 05

  And I'm gonna eat this bear, render his fat, tan his hide. I'm gonna use this animal to the highest degree, and I'm gonna be selective about the animal that I take based upon the opportunity that I have, which varies from year to year. My, my judgment of what bear that I would take changes by the day.

• 43:38Speaker 05

  With a whitetail deer, I might have in my mind what I'm gonna take and what I'm not. Like, maybe I'm gonna take a doe, maybe I'm gonna take a 115-inch-plus buck. With a bear,

• 43:50Speaker 05

  depending upon how much meat I need, if I need some grease, I, I, I might take the oldest, best male that I've really got a shot at taking, which might be a three-year-old male. Does that make sense?

• 44:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 44:06Speaker 05

  Other years, on really good years, which the, it varies dramatically. Some years, bears are very responsive to bait, and you can be highly selective. And I've taken some multiple 500-plus-pound, just monster, beautiful stomper bears.

• 44:26Speaker 06

  That you might not have had an opportunity to harvest.

• 44:29Speaker 05

  Last year, there was no chance we were gonna kill any of those bears, though we had them on camera in the middle of the night sporadically. And so like, Lake's sitting there thinking he's gonna shoot a 500-pound bear. I mean, by the time we actually got him in the stand, it was pretty much like, hey, that's not gonna happen.

• 44:47Speaker 06

  Right.

• 44:48Speaker 05

  That bear is long gone. He's on some white oak ridge devouring 18, he's, he's just eating.

• 44:56Speaker 06

  Thousands of calories.

• 44:57Speaker 05

  Nonstop.

• 44:57Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 44:58Speaker 05

  He doesn't want to be here. He's not here. And so that really doesn't answer the question, but

• 45:07Speaker 05

  baiting bears is, is critical for bear management.

• 45:10Speaker 06

  You mentioned the 50,000 bears. At one time, there was 50,000 bears in Arkansas. That would have been at a time when populations in Arkansas were very small, and the, one of the main things that, that took that population way down was market hunting. Correct? Would that be correct?

• 45:26Speaker 05

  More so landscape-level logging than even market hunting.

• 45:29Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 45:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:30Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 45:31Speaker 05

  Logging and the, the loss of habitat had way, had vastly more impact on black bear than market hunting.

• 45:41Speaker 06

  Wow. Okay.

• 45:43Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 45:43Speaker 06

  Interesting. Okay.

• 45:44Speaker 05

  You would learn, you'll learn all this in American Bear, coming out in February of 2027.

• 45:52Speaker 06

  I'll be first in line. All right, here's another clip.

• 45:59Speaker 06

  A bear is such a reclusive animal. They're an animal of the shadows. More biology here, folks. It's black.

• 46:07Speaker 05

  Lake made fun of me for that. Saying, black bear is black.

• 46:11Speaker 06

  Fur is for camouflage, and it's, it, it shows you where they want to live. The real reason that a bear is black is that the. The early ancestors of black bears, like deep, deep history, developed in the tropics. And there's a thing called Gloggers Rule, which Gloggers Rule means if an animal, the closer they are to the equator, oftentimes furred mammals are darker because it reduces the potential for them to get like fungal infections. So, modern geneticists have found that the ancestral color of the black bear, the Ursus americanus, American black bear,

• 46:56Speaker 06

  is black. So they can tell by DNA that a long time ago, bears were black. And colorface bears, by genetics, they can tell, developed in the southwest US about 9,000 years ago.

• 47:16Speaker 05

  So, I never thought that was gonna make the cut.

• 47:19Speaker 06

  And I cut a bunch out.

• 47:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, it went on and on and on.

• 47:24Speaker 06

  When did you first become interested in bear? You know, you're writing this book. When did you first become interested in bear biology beyond just hunting bears?

• 47:34Speaker 05

  Well, when I, when I killed my first bear in 2001, that is what catalyzed me to really start studying about bears. And I was in college at the time and went back to the U of A and University of Arkansas and went up into the library and started looking for bear books and found, at the time, what was all the research, academic research that had ever been done on our populations of bears. And it wasn't that many things. I mean, it was like, you know, probably less than, less than five, like thesis projects that people had done and research that people had done.

• 48:19Speaker 05

  And I read it all. I read every word of it and just was fascinated by it. And didn't really have a conclusion of why I was interested in it. It didn't, it didn't really, it wasn't like I was thinking, oh, I'm gonna talk about this one day. I was just interested in it. So, taking that first bear was, well, I tell the story. I've told it many times. Maybe I haven't told it on the podcast before, but it's definitely in the book.

• 48:50Speaker 06

  If you guys haven't picked up on it, Clay wrote a book that's coming out in February.

• 48:55Speaker 05

  I started saving your pennies. When I, when I killed this bear, I walk up to it, my dad's with me, and

• 49:05Speaker 06

  This was what year?

• 49:06Speaker 05

  2001. October 1st, 2001. At the crack of dawn, I shot this bear on the first day it was ever legal to hunt over bait. So I claim, and no one has disputed me in 20 years, so I'm no longer taking disputes because it's so long ago. If you think you shot one before me, you probably just don't remember. I say that I killed the first legal bear in the state of Arkansas.

• 49:28Speaker 06

  Over bait?

• 49:28Speaker 05

  Over bait. Now, I know people that killed them illegally before that.

• 49:35Speaker 06

  Have you turned them in?

• 49:35Speaker 05

  No. That, most, there, there, many of them are no longer with us. But, um, so, it's, it's a joke, but I actually think it's prob, it might be true.

• 49:46Speaker 06

  Pretty close to true, it's not.

• 49:47Speaker 05

  It was barely shooting live. When a bear, when I watched a bear glide, it was so dim, Josh, that I couldn't really see the bear's legs. I couldn't quite make out his legs. It just looked like a floating black blob coming up from down the mountain. And he came right in and I was just like, there he is.

• 50:10Speaker 06

  Did you have game pictures of him?

• 50:11Speaker 05

  No, we didn't have game cameras. The game cameras didn't really come out until later.

• 50:15Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 50:15Speaker 05

  2001, no. We were, but we had, I mean, we just knew there were bears there because they were, they were eating our bait. Oh, it was the most, one of the most exciting things in my life was that year when it became legal to bait bears. We started baiting bears and they started showing up. And we would go out there and we would occasionally see a bear. And it was just so exciting. And then I shoot this bear. And when I walk up to it, I, I have, I was 21 years old and I had an incredibly hollow feeling that I knew nothing about this animal. And it was just this majestic, awesome animal.

• 51:00Speaker 05

  And, you know, I deer hunted and turkey hunted and, and small game hunted up until this point. And, you know, I knew what deer ate, where they lived, when they bred. I knew how to call a turkey. I, I knew about these animals. And so when I took one, there was a sense of connection to this thing. When I killed this bear, I realized I didn't know a thing about it. And this was an incredible animal. And honestly, many people of the generation before mine and even my generation at the time viewed a bear as just kind of like a big raccoon. You know, just kind of like, yeah, shoot all of them, you know? And man, when I walked up to it, that is not the sense that I had at all. It was just like, wow. This, what a beast. I cannot believe.

• 51:45Speaker 06

  It was a good bear, too.

• 51:46Speaker 05

  I mean, it was, it was a nice bear. And, um, and that just set me on, on a track to kind of

• 51:54Speaker 06

  I remember when you got the rug back and I was like, wow. Like, it was one of the coolest things that I've ever, ever seen.

• 52:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:04Speaker 06

  Recto, R-E-K-T-O-J-M 63, has a question of, of the many bears you've harvested, which one of them stand out in high quality flavor? Can you tell the difference from bears that you've killed in different regions?

• 52:19Speaker 05

  No. I wish I could. And, and maybe somebody that paid more attention to their palate could. I will say that there's a lot of press about how bears in southeast Alaska taste fishy. And man, I've just, I've eaten two and I have not found them to

• 52:37Speaker 06

  Really?

• 52:38Speaker 05

  I have, I have not. Bear, Bear Newcombe killed one on the shore of the Alaskan coast this year that was eating mussels when he, when he, when he shot it. And I can't tell the difference between that bear and one here in Arkansas.

• 52:53Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 52:53Speaker 05

  But I think it probably, maybe it was luck of the draw because it's kind of indisputable that some of these bears that are eating a lot of fish and, and, and ocean types food, you know, have a kind of a fishy taste. But, um, but in the two that I have had, I have not, I have not had that.

• 53:14Speaker 06

  Okay. Well, we've got another clip here. This one's a little bit longer. When Lake has his first interaction with, with shooting a bear.

• 53:25Speaker 05

  Based on the pictures, there are about 10 different bears that have been coming to this bait. A lot of them look the same. Two bears showed up on the first day that Lake saw that he chose to pass. I kind of want to shoot that back one.

• 53:51Speaker 05

  I think we got him, buddy. I just got word that Lake shot a bear. I don't really know anything about it. Lake gives the bear an hour before climbing down to assess the situation. That's my arrow. He finds his arrow, which clearly passed through the bear, but it hardly has any blood at all on it, which is not a good sign. And there's hardly any blood on the ground. The whole gang comes down from their stands to help look for Lake's bear.

• 54:34Speaker 05

  When there's barely a blood trail like this, it takes the whole camp. Luckily, we've got some guys with some experience. If we're gonna find this bear, these are the guys I'd want helping me.

• 54:46Speaker 07

  Across it. All right, we got blood right here, guys.

• 54:52Speaker 06

  Bear coming in clutch.

• 54:53Speaker 05

  Just a hair, not much. And there is not much blood. And it's that dark red, not great blood.

• 55:04Speaker 06

  What are you seeing? I can't hardly see where it's hitting the bear. I can see it blowing out the other side of me, leaves.

• 55:16Speaker 05

  It does look a little high, don't it? Yeah.

• 55:19Speaker 05

  I think I shot him too high. Yeah. I don't want to admit that, but I think that's what happened. Man, it's easy to do. It's a, it's a bummer. I hate it for you, man. The, the, the truth of it is, is that bear is gonna live and he's gonna be fine.

• 55:38Speaker 06

  911, what's your emergency?

• 55:41Speaker 02

  Please help us. They're everywhere. We think they're murder hornets. 911 Nashville returns.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  What's a homicide detective doing here? Three bodies on the ground.

• 55:51Speaker 02

  With emergencies of biblical proportions.

• 55:54Speaker 03

  Hell, since swarms upon you and upon your people. That's one of the plagues of the Bible. And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville.

• 56:01Speaker 02

  Brian Phillippe joins 911 Nashville. All new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu.

• 56:07Speaker 07

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• 57:08Speaker 06

  So, we kind of see the arc of emotion of Lake from his first shot. You know, feels pretty good about it. And then, all of a sudden, it comes to the realization that the shot placement was not, not optimal. Why was it important to leave that whole sequence in the, in the film?

• 57:28Speaker 05

  Well, we've, we've always, at Mead, or just kind of showed things the way it happened. You know? And so, yeah, it was a, as you could see, I mean, it wasn't a compromised situation when Lake shot. I mean, the bear was broadside, probably 19 yards. I mean, which is a chip shot. And he just hit a little high. And, and it, it, boy, there, there really is a, a big hollow spot high on those bears.

• 58:05Speaker 06

  Bears are difficult because they've got so much fur. It's hard to see what's...

• 58:10Speaker 05

  I always say that a, a short-haired, light-colored animal like a whitetail deer, you can see the contour of its body. You can see where the shoulder comes up. You can see where the neck comes down and the shoulder bulges. You can see where the rib cage ends a lot of times. You know, you see the, you can, you can really see and you can really aim where you want to. On a black bear, it's almost like you are shooting at an inflated, blash, black trash bag. And so, and when you draw back and you're looking through a peep, oftentimes, all you see is black, especially if it's close.

• 58:49Speaker 06

  Right.

• 58:49Speaker 05

  Several bears that I've shot close, I've drawn back, and all you see in your peep sight is black. And now, Lake being at 20, 19 yards would have, would have had more aperture than that. But, I mean, he just hit high. He did. And, and, you know, the film doesn't show the extent to which we went to look for that bear.

• 59:13Speaker 06

  Right. There were comments of, well, you should have looked for it longer. You guys looked for that bear for hours and hours and hours.

• 59:19Speaker 05

  We did. We, we exhausted our efforts and used all the data points that we had. And, I mean, I will, I, I am fully confident that, that, that bear's still alive today. And, I mean, you, with collectively inside...

• 59:38Speaker 06

  Because it didn't hit anything vital.

• 59:40Speaker 05

  That's right. It just, it, it, it was high, passed through the back straps. I mean, we could, we could see that. And, and, you know, Lake's in an elevated stand. And, you know, it, it's, it's kind of dumb to try to justify to the world that we did what we should have done. But, I mean, I grew up, my dad, Gary Believer Newcomb, was, he, he was absolutely the biggest stickler I've ever been around in my life for giving the fullest extent towards tracking an animal that you made any contact with, with an arrow, you know?

• 1:00:24Speaker 05

  And so, that's, that's been built deep inside of me for a long time. And those, those periphery hits on an animal, if you hit one too high or too low, like, that animal is not gonna die. Now, if the shot had been far back, like, if he had hit that shot, that bear, far back and hit it in the guts, totally different story.

• 1:00:45Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:00:46Speaker 05

  Because that bear, that's a mortal wound. That bear is gonna die. And it's a completely different scenario. But we knew, based upon the blood on the arrow, you know, we knew that there, there, there was not a chance of finding this animal. But we did exhaust, we spent, yeah, we got back to camp way after midnight.

• 1:01:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08Speaker 05

  And I mean...

• 1:01:10Speaker 06

  With multiple people.

• 1:01:11Speaker 05

  What, what if our, to, to, to help those people, what if our whole film was just us tracking the bear? And it was a six-hour film? That would be cool.

• 1:01:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:01:21Speaker 05

  No, I mean, of course, we show this, like, condensed version.

• 1:01:25Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:01:25Speaker 05

  And it's a bummer. And, you know, I hated it for Lake. And I hate, Ted Koppel was there.

• 1:01:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:01:32Speaker 05

  That was probably the, the most difficult part of it is, you know, when, when the, America is watching, you're hoping that as a hunter, you're gonna put your best foot forward.

• 1:01:44Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:01:44Speaker 05

  And, and we did. And that just...

• 1:01:47Speaker 06

  And Lake wasn't being careless or a bad shot. It was just, I mean, yeah, it just happened.

• 1:01:53Speaker 05

  It just happened. It could have, could have happened to me just as easy as it happened to him. And, and so, we had to go talk with Ted Koppel about this.

• 1:02:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:02:03Speaker 05

  He didn't seem that worked up about it.

• 1:02:06Speaker 06

  Yeah. Lake, Lake just felt sick about it because y'all had to come back to film with Ted Koppel here after he's been looking for this, this bear.

• 1:02:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17Speaker 06

  And, and it was the only thing on his mind while we were trying to do the interview.

• 1:02:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:02:21Speaker 06

  And then he went back out looking for it even more. So, Lake chose not to continue hunting after he drew blood. What do you think about that decision?

• 1:02:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it was a great decision. In some places, that's the legal requirement, but not here. And not in most places, it's not. There, there's probably just a few places in the country where if you draw blood, you legally have to notch your tag. So, he, he kind of, he chose to do that. And I, I thought it was a good move.

• 1:02:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. We talked about this a little bit on the last, on the last companion podcast when you were in Alaska hunting bears. But what are some of the pros and cons of hunting with a bow? And what can a hunter do to mitigate the opportunity to have a failed harvest?

• 1:03:10Speaker 05

  Well, shooting a bear is, is, they're a difficult animal.

• 1:03:20Speaker 05

  Really, well, I take that back.

• 1:03:24Speaker 05

  A well-placed arrow is very efficient at taking that.

• 1:03:27Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:03:28Speaker 05

  People that are used to shooting whitetail deer can have trouble shooting a bear.

• 1:03:33Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:03:34Speaker 05

  Okay? The, the, the structure of a bear is different than a whitetail deer. And you aim low on a whitetail. These are all the bullet points I always say. When you're shooting a whitetail deer with a bow, you aim low because that animal's gonna react to the sound of the shot and duck. A bear is not a prey animal. He does not have the same flight response as a prey animal like a whitetail deer. They're, they're not gonna jump the string, so you don't need to aim low. One of, one time, I took a veteran whitetail hunter out, a guy that had killed 300 whitetails with a bow. And he, he shot a bear right through the brisket that we, that we didn't find. And it was because he was aiming low and tight, anticipating the bear dropping into there.

• 1:04:17Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:04:18Speaker 05

  So, don't do that. And then, the other thing that's slightly uncomfortable for whitetail hunters about bears is that you need to aim further back. Like, you need to aim probably four to six inches back from the shoulder. And it's because, Josh, if we had a picture of a whitetail deer and a bear, a whitetail deer's legs are further back on its body compared to where its neck and brisket come down. Okay? Like, imagine the head of a bear.

• 1:04:51Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:04:52Speaker 05

  And there's just his neck, and then there's his shoulder.

• 1:04:54Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:04:55Speaker 05

  His front legs are up further.

• 1:04:57Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:04:58Speaker 05

  Does that make sense?

• 1:04:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:04:59Speaker 05

  A whitetail deer is back, and you can actually see his chest stick out like this. And so, it's not that their anatomy is different. I mean, in a wild way, all mammals are about the same. Right. Heart, lungs, intestines, liver, all this stuff is the same. But the positioning of the legs on a bear is further forward. So, it means you have to aim further back from the leg. That makes sense?

• 1:05:25Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, it does.

• 1:05:26Speaker 05

  So, middle of the middle is what some people have said. I go not quite middle. Middle of the middle, almost middle of the middle, but then back a little bit towards the shoulder.

• 1:05:36Speaker 06

  Oh, back even further than?

• 1:05:38Speaker 05

  No, no, no, back.

• 1:05:39Speaker 06

  I see, back, going back toward the head.

• 1:05:41Speaker 05

  Towards the shoulder.

• 1:05:42Speaker 06

  Okay. Excellent. Okay, we've got another clip here.

• 1:05:48Speaker 05

  Man, that's some beautiful bear grease or bear fat right there.

• 1:05:53Speaker 06

  Here we go.

• 1:05:55Speaker 05

  Were a little optimistic even. I would say this was a.

• 1:06:00Speaker 06

  Well.

• 1:06:02Speaker 06

  Let's go back here. I think it started a little late. There we go.

• 1:06:08Speaker 05

  I would say my predictions were a little optimistic even. I would say this was a below average. But we had somebody give us some bear fat. This is fresh bear fat. And we're gonna render it down.

• 1:06:26Speaker 05

  I'm gonna put about a quarter inch of water in there. So that when it hits the pans, it doesn't scald and burn.

• 1:06:37Speaker 05

  So we're just gonna put it right in that water.

• 1:06:41Speaker 06

  Good looking bear fat.

• 1:06:43Speaker 05

  It is. It's getting there. Look at that oil, like.

• 1:06:46Speaker 06

  Boy.

• 1:06:47Speaker 05

  You want it to be that like light colored. See how that's like, like the color of like chicken broth? Mm hmm. Yeah. That's what you want it to stay the whole time. We're almost done. I mean, you can see these like little pieces. Like. They're, they're almost rendered down like as much as they're gonna render down.

• 1:07:07Speaker 06

  Gotcha.

• 1:07:11Speaker 05

  With our bear fat rendered, we're ready to put it in the jars. The lower and slower you cook it, the lighter the oil will be. My preference is to cook around 225 degrees for 45 minutes until it's the color of chicken broth.

• 1:07:33Speaker 06

  All right, well. Why, that's great. I think a great way to end the film with rendering the bear grease. Why has rendering bear grease become something that you're so passionate about?

• 1:07:46Speaker 05

  Well, let me. Address a little more functional question first. Is that okay?

• 1:07:51Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 1:07:52Speaker 05

  The best case scenario when you're, when you're rendering bear fat is to grind it.

• 1:07:58Speaker 06

  So we have a question from Kevin Klein 1852. And I've got a question about rendering bear fat. Would grinding the fat prior to rendering yield more oil and does it, does cutting or does cutting it in small cubes?

• 1:08:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, so in the field like that. You can cut it up into, into cubes, just like we did. And the smaller the cubes, the better. And you can render it down. And you, you get a pretty good yield. You, you probably get. Eighty, twenty, like eighty percent oil, twenty percent solid cracklins.

• 1:08:30Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:08:31Speaker 05

  And, and that's a decent yield. You will get. Probably close to ninety percent yield when you grind it.

• 1:08:39Speaker 06

  So is fine grind the ideal?

• 1:08:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. And what you would do is you would, you would, you would. Get your bear fat, the chunks of it cold, or even put it in a freezer and just like almost get it frozen. And, and then cube it up and then put it in a grinder and then render that. And, you know. There is no, it's kind of like. Making sorghum, you're just heating the fat. Like there's no recipe.

• 1:09:07Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:09:08Speaker 05

  And you could.

• 1:09:09Speaker 06

  The water that you put in there just evaporates out.

• 1:09:11Speaker 05

  That's right. That's just, uh, that's just to keep it from burning and scalding at first. That's just something that we do. Just put a little water down there. But. You can render bear fat with any heat source, you know? I've, I've done it in a fry daddy. I've done it over fire and cast iron, like a Dutch oven, done it in a jet boil. I've done it in these like turkey cookers with propane. I've done it on the, on a electric stove with just a, like a saucepan.

• 1:09:40Speaker 06

  And you're using like medium heat?

• 1:09:43Speaker 05

  Well, so that's, that's the only variable inside the whole process. You could just barely turn it up. You know, to one eighty and let it cook down for longer periods of time.

• 1:09:57Speaker 06

  Theoretically, you could do it in a crock pot.

• 1:09:59Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, people do. That's what, that was my, next on my list was a crock pot. There's people that really love cooking it in a crock pot.

• 1:10:10Speaker 05

  What you can do, and it doesn't completely ruin it, but it, it's not ideal, is that you can burn it. Like if it gets to like three hundred degrees, it's gonna be dark. And it's not unusable. It's, it's still usable, but it does have a stronger odor. And it's, uh, it just kind of has a little bit of a burnt taste. But much of the bear oil that I have rendered has had a little bit of a burnt taste because it's easy for it to, to get too hot.

• 1:10:36Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:10:36Speaker 05

  And so low and slow, the two twenty-five for forty-five minutes is just a generalization. Probably, I, I say that because it's just easy to, to cite those numbers. Probably it would be more like. Two ten, two fifteen. For a little under an hour would probably be ideal, but you just don't ever want it to get like really dark and really hot.

• 1:11:00Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:11:01Speaker 05

  So.

• 1:11:03Speaker 06

  What are some of your favorite modern uses for bear grease?

• 1:11:08Speaker 05

  Well. I've got, um, I've got bear grease on my face right now.

• 1:11:14Speaker 06

  Oh, really?

• 1:11:15Speaker 05

  I've, I've, for, for several years have been putting bear grease on my face. After, um, after we had bear grease chemically analyzed by one of the top lipid labs in the country that we report in our book, What We Find. But what we found made me want to put it on my face every day.

• 1:11:35Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:11:36Speaker 05

  So, but we cook with it. Frying with it is the best thing that I do.

• 1:11:41Speaker 06

  I mean, you use it to, to oil your saddles, you use it.

• 1:11:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, you could use it.

• 1:11:45Speaker 06

  I mean.

• 1:11:45Speaker 05

  To soften leather. But the, the, to me, the premium use is for pan frying. Either fish or meat. We, you can use bear oil and substitution for anything that calls for oil. So any cake recipe, any biscuit recipe that calls for Crisco or oil, you can substitute in bear.

• 1:12:07Speaker 06

  High crust.

• 1:12:07Speaker 05

  And it.

• 1:12:10Speaker 05

  If you, if you cook it too long, it does, it can have a burnt flavor. If you cook it just right, it really doesn't have a flavor. You can make, you can make bear oil chocolate chip cookies. That just, it's like, it's like using shortening. Basically, before, before these processed oils and shortening, animal fat oils were used for all this stuff. And, uh, and so historically, oh man, I, I could go, I could go on and on, but the. The first time the word bear grease shows up in the literature, in the, in the record of America. Was in fifteen forty-one, July the fifth. Hernando de Soto, his scribe, a guy named Elva, wrote when they encountered.

• 1:12:56Speaker 05

  Native Americans in East Tennessee. He writes, they have. What they call bear grease stored in gourds, which is like olive oil and butter. And that's the way he described it, like olive oil and butter. And. What we found when we did the chemical analysis of, of black bear fat. Was that it actually is very similar to olive oil and chemical composition.

• 1:13:27Speaker 06

  That's really, would they not have been doing this like in Europe and Bavaria and that kind of thing?

• 1:13:32Speaker 05

  Black, black bears are only in North America.

• 1:13:34Speaker 06

  Oh, really?

• 1:13:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:36Speaker 06

  I don't think I realized that. What bears do they have in Europe?

• 1:13:39Speaker 05

  Ursus americanus, baby.

• 1:13:40Speaker 06

  I guess they're Ursus americanus.

• 1:13:42Speaker 05

  Now, they, they would have been rendering Asiatic black bear fat in, in Asia and the places, but, but Ursus americanus is the only. I mean, it's only here. It's endemic to North America and only on the North American continent. Now, an Asiatic black bear is, looks similar to a black bear, but they're.

• 1:14:01Speaker 06

  It's not.

• 1:14:02Speaker 05

  Completely different species.

• 1:14:04Speaker 06

  Well, I'm gonna have to read the book.

• 1:14:05Speaker 05

  Black bears are actually genetically more kin to grizzly bears and polar bears than Asiatic black bears.

• 1:14:14Speaker 06

  Fascinating.

• 1:14:14Speaker 05

  Isn't that wild?

• 1:14:15Speaker 06

  It is wild. Yeah.

• 1:14:17Speaker 05

  Absolutely wild. But the black bear was the premium bear on planet earth for fat. Because of their diet. So in Europe, they would have had some bear fat, but it would have been brown bear fat.

• 1:14:31Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:14:32Speaker 05

  And so when these Europeans came over here. And in, in the Roanoke colonies, some of the first correspondents. That they had with England, I mean, like the first guys that came over and set up a colony and they were doing it to make money to like export stuff back to Britain. Bear grease was in their list of stuff that, hey, there's some pretty wild bear grease over here, different than anything that we have. That became a commodity.

• 1:14:57Speaker 06

  Good stuff.

• 1:14:58Speaker 05

  In the mid seventeen hundreds, fourteen percent of the exports coming out of New Orleans was American black bear grease. Going to Europe. Fourteen percent of all the exports out of New Orleans was black bear fat. Much of it stored in skin hides and what they called a deer of oil. When, oh, wait till you read the book. When they killed a deer, there, there's, there's this historical accounts of when these guys would kill a deer and they would describe what would happen, what Native Americans would do. If you kill the bear, you immediately went and tried to kill a deer.

• 1:15:36Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 1:15:37Speaker 05

  And you would skin it and, and tube skin it. And basically. Tie off the legs and the neck. The neck would be the spout of this bag, this deer skin bag.

• 1:15:52Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:15:52Speaker 05

  And you would completely fill it with oil and then seal it off. And that would be what you, what you called a deer of oil.

• 1:16:01Speaker 06

  A deer of oil.

• 1:16:01Speaker 05

  Some of the first travel writers that ever came to the Ozarks, um, described. He described what he thought was bizarre, but a deer of oil hanging on someone's house that he walked in. He was like, they had a, I mean, he, he, he described that. So.

• 1:16:18Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:16:19Speaker 05

  Wild, wild history of bear grease in this country. Bizarre and wild history. And we, we documented it. In, in a really. Thorough fashion.

• 1:16:31Speaker 06

  So. No bears killed.

• 1:16:35Speaker 05

  No bears were killed.

• 1:16:36Speaker 06

  The quota didn't get filled. The baits go cold, but still this film was like satisfying. Um, in your opinion. Can you have a successful hunt without harvesting an animal?

• 1:16:48Speaker 05

  No, it's all.

• 1:16:53Speaker 05

  Did you write these questions? Wait, did my hero producer mustache icon?

• 1:16:57Speaker 06

  I don't know. I don't know who wrote that.

• 1:16:59Speaker 05

  Best friend a guy could ever have, Josh filmmaker, write that?

• 1:17:01Speaker 06

  I don't know who wrote that. I don't know who wrote that.

• 1:17:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's like the, that's like the clickbait, social media question of the ages. You know?

• 1:17:11Speaker 06

  What does a successful hunt look like to you then?

• 1:17:14Speaker 05

  When you kill something?

• 1:17:17Speaker 05

  No, you know, I'm kidding. You know, you just, you're just not always going to kill an animal. Were we disappointed massively? Was I surprised? Yes. Was I pretty confident we were going to get a bear? Yes, I was. And we did have an opportunity.

• 1:17:30Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:17:31Speaker 05

  You know, and, and I passed a bear that was legal to have killed.

• 1:17:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:17:34Speaker 05

  I only saw one bear in five days. That first afternoon had about a hundred pound boar come in. And I mean, technically that would have been a legal animal to take.

• 1:17:42Speaker 06

  Brent was hunting on some property that he had secured and he, his arrow deflected on a little tiny branch.

• 1:17:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Brent actually had a, a pretty nice boar come in the first day that he missed.

• 1:17:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:17:54Speaker 05

  And we, we didn't, you know, just limitations of making a film. We, we didn't have a cameraman with Brent, which we should have, we should have, we should have learned that. Always have a cameraman with Brent.

• 1:18:05Speaker 06

  Right. Um, if someone has, who's, who's never hunted, watches this film, what do you want to be their takeaway?

• 1:18:12Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 1:18:14Speaker 05

  Just to see the, um,

• 1:18:18Speaker 05

  the history, the culture, the, the, the bigger picture of hunting. It's, it's not just about harvesting an animal, but it's, it's a lifestyle, a regional lifestyle.

• 1:18:30Speaker 05

  Great. So, thank you so much for joining us on this companion podcast of Meat Eaters 12 and 26 film. If you haven't seen our Arkansas Bear Camp film, go to the Meat Eater YouTube channel and check it out. You can leave your questions and comments there. Hey, it's not lost on us that all of you watch this content. And it's really great. It's the, one of the, one of the joys inside of my life is to be able to make content. And man, I, I recognize what a privilege it is to get to document this stuff. Because I know so many of these people out there are doing stuff

• 1:19:16Speaker 05

  cooler, better, faster, stronger and more compelling than what we're doing. I mean, that's, that's the truth. I think there's a, inside of society, there's sometimes this idea that the guys that are on TV are the best.

• 1:19:32Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:19:33Speaker 05

  We, I, we are not. Does that, is that relevant? To me, it's relevant. I'm just, I just want to say thank you. And, and so many of you are the people that I look up to.

• 1:19:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:19:46Speaker 05

  Uh, and, and are, are, teach me so much about hunting. I mean, we're, we're not the best. We just love it. I, I do think, I do think I love it as much as anybody.

• 1:19:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:19:59Speaker 05

  Not the best.

• 1:20:00Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 1:20:01Speaker 05

  So it's a, it's a privilege to just document it.

• 1:20:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:20:04Speaker 05

  You know, so thanks, everybody.

• 1:20:06Speaker 06

  Thank you guys.

• 1:20:06Speaker 05

  For watching. Really appreciate it.

• 1:20:25Speaker 02

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• 1:21:07Speaker 05

  Someone once said, everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

• 1:21:11Speaker 07

  I did. Mike Tyson.

• 1:21:12Speaker 05

  Oh, well, Mike Tyson and Boost are here to tell you that your mobile plan is punching you in the mouth with prices that can knock you out.

• 1:21:20Speaker 07

  That's a low blow.

• 1:21:21Speaker 05

  Totally. But you can do something about it.

• 1:21:24Speaker 07

  You have to punch back.

• 1:21:26Speaker 05

  No, Mike. You gotta switch to Boost with a plan that's $25 a month forever.

• 1:21:31Speaker 07

  Oh, that's a great plan. Maybe you can do both. Boost Mobile. What's your plan?

• 1:21:37Speaker 00

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