EP:430 | Jim Zumbo A Lifetime Outdoors

On this episode we are joined by Jim Zumbo, a legend in the hunting and outdoor writer world. He has truly been there and done it. The man has killed deer in all fifty states, elk in all the western states and has hunted all over the world. Mr. Zumbo has had more hunting experiences that most of us can dream about and it was our pleasure to sit down with him and just listen. He has a great story to tell and we know you’ll appreciate it. 

Listen, Learn and Enjoy.   

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

I'm Jeff Talk Forty, and welcome to GameKeeper Podcast. If you want to learn more about farming for wildlife and habitat management, are in the right place. Join the GameKeeper crew direct from Australia Live and Haskell Studios that is best related to wildlife and habitat management practices. And of course, there's no telling what you'll learn, but I will tell you I've edited it.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

We're live in three, two, one.

SPEAKER_06 0:29

Lenny, today we are going so old school. Yeah. We're going back. I can remember reading articles that this guy wrote. I mean, as a child. I mean, as a young person. Very young person.

SPEAKER_07 0:41

Yeah, no, read him as a child. Got uh the pleasure of hunting with him. Uh, and actually still got his uh one of his cookbooks that I look at all the time. Is that right?

SPEAKER_06 0:50

He's got over 20 books. We got Cut sitting in here with us. And let me go ahead and get our guest introduced. And we've got, ladies and gentlemen, we've got an outdoor legend. We've got Mr. Jim Zumbo. Okay, Jim, it's where you talk.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

Okay, my turn. Well, thank you, guys. I'm delighted to be here. It should be fun. Been watching your podcast for a long time.

SPEAKER_07 1:17

Well, thank you. Well, he's got a good-looking backdrop, I tell you that much.

SPEAKER_06 1:21

Look at all those animals. Yeah. Thank you. That looks like a giant moose. I I I'm not a moose, you know, I'm not the guy that tell you if that's a boon and crocket or not, but that looks like a really big one.

SPEAKER_01 1:33

Well, I I th someone, a couple guys told me it's a boon and crockett. I didn't measure it. Uh at 64 inches wide, I got them up in Alaska. Wow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:42

That's the perfect fireplace.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_05 1:45

I was gonna say that's the perfect fireplace for that big old moose.

SPEAKER_01 1:49

It is. It is. On the back side, I got some elk and stuff hanging. But uh yeah, it's it's uh they're great memories to you know have those mounts.

SPEAKER_04 1:58

That's that's what you would expect Jim Zumbo's backdrop to look like. You're exactly right. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_07 2:03

I would have been let down if it didn't look like that.

SPEAKER_04 2:04

Yeah, that ain't that ain't no green screen either.

SPEAKER_06 2:07

There, that's the real deal, that's for sure. So let me set the stage. Let me just so if there might be some somebody that's listening that just doesn't know that much about Jim Zumbo, and so we can let me just paint the picture here. So, all right, he's in Wyoming. He is a member of the Wyoming Hall Outdoor Hall of Fame, baby. He's a member of the Legends of the Outdoors, because I think you'll have been out as well. He has written 2,500 magazine articles. Oh my goodness. He's got over 20 books, he's got two degrees, one uh forestry and another in wildlife magic. At some point, you might have been hunting, and the game board walked up to you and asked you for your license. It would have been Mr. Jim Stopper. What? I did not listen on my third. He has hunted deer in all 50 states. He has hunted elk in nine Western states. He's hunted all the provinces of Canada. This guy has been there and done that. And what a tribute to be just a chance to talk to somebody like this, man.

SPEAKER_07 3:08

That's exactly right.

SPEAKER_06 3:08

It just makes me proud.

SPEAKER_07 3:10

You're making me turn red. Yeah. Well, I tell you what, he's he's an icon in the outdoor industry for sure. Uh and uh I had no earthly idea all that was back there, though. Hunted deer in 50 states. That's I didn't know they were in there. I didn't mean it. I was trying to think. I mean, are there deer in Hawaii?

SPEAKER_02 3:35

I knew you were gonna ask that because everybody does.

SPEAKER_01 3:37

Yeah, they have Axis deer and they were introduced there about 1886, and I hunted Molokai Island, and it's overrun with them. Um Hunted with a black powder with old Tony Knight. Some of you guys might know him. Oh, yeah. He invented the modern uh inline muzzle motor, but we had a ball out there, but yeah, Hawaii does have deer.

SPEAKER_05 3:57

Axis. I was looking at somebody had posted uh uh overlay of Hawaii over the United States, and I didn't realize how much room the state of Hawaii took up. Is it pretty big? It goes across like more than half of the of the lower 48, if you were to overlay it.

SPEAKER_07 4:16

It's that big.

SPEAKER_05 4:17

It is that big.

SPEAKER_07 4:18

I did not know that. I wouldn't have thought that either. Yeah. I've been to the big island once. You won a sailfish tournament over there, didn't you? I didn't win. I did get uh I won the highest individual points. We didn't win as a team. First time I'd ever went saltwater fishing, ironically. Uh worked on out.

SPEAKER_05 4:37

And then I know this is all about Mr. Jim, but Lanny has another story. I want to say he was on his honeymoon, and oh yeah. Either you were that was on the Marlin fishing trip. It was on the fishing trip. So either you or your wife got a little bit too far out in the ocean uh trying to surf, and somebody saved you.

SPEAKER_07 4:57

Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_05 4:57

And and it was none other than who?

SPEAKER_07 4:59

Uh Jack Johnson, actually. Jack Johnson. Uh he's a very accomplished uh singer from the big island of Hawaii. Um, but yeah, so Shannon, we were actually snorkeling. Um, and uh the the the the surf got rough. I'm a strong swimmer. I swam to the banks, she was not doing as well, plus the the banks there are a lot of shale. It's like lava rock, so it's not like sand. So we were I was trying to help her get back to the uh um to the beach there, and there was a guy on the um sitting there with a guitar. And ukulele, probably. No, no, no, it was a guitar, and he uh came over there and helped us out and got her back to the beach. Otherwise, I'm mommy might not have Shannon today. Thank you, Jack John.

SPEAKER_06 5:43

How about that? Sorry, sorry for that adventure there. Oh, but Mr. Jim, you see what I got to put up with around here.

SPEAKER_01 5:49

Everybody distracted early easy. Sure do. Yeah, tough job, but somebody's gonna do it, right?

SPEAKER_06 5:55

Well, we're just big fans of you. The outdoor life, I didn't even get to I didn't even get down there. Y'all got me off track. But for 30 some odd years, he was the hunting editor at Outdoor Life. What a I mean, that in and of itself is uh that that's a big deal. What was that like to be at the helm and making some of those decisions on stories and articles at a big magazine like Outdoor Life?

SPEAKER_01 6:20

I'll tell you, it was a real thrill. Um that's I I wanted to be an outdoor writer for for most of my life, even when I was a kid. And uh when I got that job, I just I just couldn't believe it. So but I I kind of believe in fate where A goes to B, goes to C, goes to D. And so many things happened that that channeled me toward that position. But uh I loved it. I just uh I was able to do a lot of travel, a lot of hunting, because I had to. I was writing a column for every magazine, plus six or seven features every month. And uh it was uh no, I'm sorry, uh every year I met. But it was a thrill. Met a lot of cool people um and uh got involved in some interesting stories and did some great traveling. Um I hunted on four continents, but hunting's been my life, and uh that's kind of that was kind of the ultimate, so pretty happy about that.

SPEAKER_04 7:17

Yeah, I was gonna Jim, you remember doing the uh the great American hunters tour for the NRE? You were the elk guy.

SPEAKER_01 7:26

Yeah. That was crazy.

SPEAKER_04 7:29

That was a that was a big deal for a couple of years.

SPEAKER_01 7:32

It was. We were like a carnival. Uh we'd go, we I think we did like 17 towns in uh 20 days. We'd uh we'd have a band, there would be three of us, teams of three of us around the country in each spot. And we'd have a semi loaded with all the NRA sponsored, of course. And they had we had a semi with all the all the stage stuff, and I remember we did a we were in an ice skating rink in Wheeling, West Virginia, and we were in school auditoriums, and there were always three of us, and we'd one guy would be local, and I talk about Elkhan, another guy talking about white tails. So uh, and that they'd switch up, but it was it was crazy.

SPEAKER_04 8:09

So yeah, the the very first one they had. I was there. Jim, Jim Zumbo was the elk guy, and Dick Idol was the whitetail guy. But anyway, I was a turkey guy, and I didn't get asked back because that there wasn't it just wasn't quite enough people to come to the turkey part of that. Jim's Jim's deal was packed and I wouldn't listen to him. It was very so he's as good at public speaking as he is writing it down. But that was that was quite the tour back then.

SPEAKER_05 8:38

And I'm sure the turkey thing would be a lot different these days. Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_08 8:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 8:44

So, Mr. Jim, can you w walk us back? How did your how how did your career get started? And you've got these two degrees. I I'm it I'm just it it's it's odd that you would have those and then find us to me that you then gravitate toward the outdoor writer lifestyle.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

Okay. You want to know it from the beginning?

SPEAKER_06 9:03

Might as well. We got plenty of time.

SPEAKER_01 9:05

All right, okay. Well, I was going to school at Paul Smith College, a little school up in northern New York near the Canadian border in the Adirondacks, and it was uh about 400 students, uh, foresters and liberal arts and hotel management. And I lived with a bunch of guys. We were we were called terminal foresters because we weren't working to get a degree. It was a two-year school. And when we graduated, we'd be woods bosses, you know, and maybe whatever, working a sawmill or something. But uh there was a a buck, a white-tailed buck in that country that all the locals knew about. They called him old Joe. And everybody tried to get old Joe. These bucks up there in the north, they're weighing 300 pounds, seriously. So one day I was crawling around in the swamp with my 3030, and I was literally squeezing between two trees, and this buck explodes out of cover. I don't know if he was old Joe or not, but I was really impressed. I had this wild hair to write a story about him, so I wrote it for the little college newspaper, which came out once a month. And by God, there it was, and there was my byline. I said, holy smokes, I couldn't believe it. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and look at that darn byline again, you know. But I went to Utah State to get my bachelor's, and um I wrote an outdoor column for the student life paper at Utah State, and that was a little bigger deal. But one time our forestry class went to a cabin where we just kind of hung out, drank beer, and told stories, and some of the professors went with us. We're in this cabin at a bathtub full of beer, we were all lying and stuff, and this guy, Professor John Hunt, comes up to me. He says, Zumbo, you think you're a big shot because you write that stupid column up in Student Life magazine. I'll bet you a case of Lucky Lager beer, you can't sell a story to a big magazine. So I said, you know, I was I said, I'll I'll take you up on that, John. So long story short, there's a lake on the Utah Idol border called Bear Lake, and it's turquoise blue, and it's got a little Cisco that lives only there. And uh you go and you catch them in January when it's really cold, 30 below zero, but then that they spawn near shore. So I wrote that story for outdoor life, and my golly, it was accepted. And uh so that was kind of how that thing whole thing happened. But after that, I when I graduated, I worked as a forest ranger and a game warden for 15 years, but I freelanced um in all my spare time. And one day I got a call in my office from the from uh one of the editors. He says, How would you like to work for Outdoor Life as Western editor? And I just I was non-plussed. I said, What? He said, Yeah, we'd like to hire you. So the deal was I was making$18,000 a year with the government as a wildlife biologist. And Outdoor Life was offering me$9,000. There were no perks with outdoor life, and of course the government had pension and health insurance. So I took the job and and I walked away whistling for the government job. So that got that the case of beer is what got me started outdoor life.

SPEAKER_07 12:21

Well, golly, you went for the gusto with outdoor life too. Yeah, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01 12:25

Yeah, yeah, I was that was amazing. Yeah, I started off as a Western editor. I don't know if you guys remember, we had the yellow pages. And outdoor life was reachable. There'd be the northeast, it'd be the south, it'd be the west, midwest, and I handled all the wood Midwest. I had about 40 writers working for me in all the Western states. And we put that all together in the yellow pages. Then they dropped the yellow pages and uh made me editor at large, which meant that I could travel wherever I wanted to and just write whatever fishing stories, uh hunting stories, quail, doves, elk, moose. And then I always wanted to be a hunting editor. That was my I wanna I I wanted to succeed Jack O'Connor because he retired, I think, in 77. And uh Vin Sperato became the editor and he said, Zumbo, I want you to be my hunting editor. I said, Holy smokes. Well, Car Jim Carmichael was a hunting shooting editor, but he he kind of just wanted to do the shooting end of it. So I got the job. The title is hunting editor, and boy, that was I I just still can't believe it. So that's kind of how that all went down.

SPEAKER_04 13:33

A$9,000 pay cut and a case of beer. Yeah. That's uh that that that right there tells you you got all the passion you would need. Really?

SPEAKER_01 13:45

You look at a 50%. I never went to journalism school, but I loved to read when I was a kid. And I was always into the outdoors, you know. And uh I had an English teacher, and she said, when I turned in a composition, she says, You ought to be a writer. Her name was Miss Fink. And I never forgot that. And uh, so that's when I started uh started doing the writing. But I wished I'd gone to journalism school and taken some creative writing and stuff, but I didn't.

SPEAKER_07 14:12

Well, I think you pulled it off.

SPEAKER_06 14:15

That could have sent you down a wrong.

SPEAKER_05 14:17

Yeah, it's it's funny how a lot of people that have been successful in in their passion can trace it back to maybe a professor that nursed them along the way.

SPEAKER_02 14:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:28

That's really what really helped what really helped me was my forestry background because if I wrote that whitales preferred white oak acords over red red oak, they believed me because all those guys were from New York and New Jersey. The outdoor life office was in downtown Manhattan, so was Sports of Field and Field and Stream, all three of them in those days. So they looked at me as kind of a an authority, and uh and that that sure helped.

SPEAKER_06 14:53

So well, Mr. Jim, is when you think back in the the heydays of outdoor life and the other magazines, uh it's not like that anymore. Uh you know, we've got a magazine somewhere around here called Gamekeepers. We it's a quarterly that comes out 150 pages. We've been doing it.

SPEAKER_07 15:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 15:11

Yeah, ships this week. We've been doing it for almost 20 years. And it is so it's so much work to put a magazine together. Oh, yeah. But it's it's it's kind of sad to see that the printed magazine is just not as big a deal as it used to be.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

Oh, yeah. They're all going away. In fact, After Our Life is all digital now. I think Feel and Scream comes out with two issues a year, and the rest is digital. And some other magazines have basically gone away. Um it's totally different. A lot of folks still want to read that thing. They want the paper, you know, instead of just watching it on a screen. But a lot of people do want to watch it on a screen. So that's up to the board of directors and the people that count the beans, and you know, that's really what it's all about.

SPEAKER_07 15:57

We might be the only magazine that doesn't have a digital subscription. Yeah, that could be our problem. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 16:05

But yeah, I mean, I just I remember growing up and you know, going to Dr. Moselle at the dentist and looking down, and there was your outdoor life and field and stream. And nowadays you sit in the office uh waiting on your turn and everybody's staring at their phone.

SPEAKER_07 16:20

Yeah, I was talking to Rob Kinney about it earlier. How we would, I mean, you would go to the mailbox, just please let it be in there. Uh, and then, you know, sit there and read it and just uh I the best way to what describe it is fantasize about going on those hunts and being in those places. Yeah. And then I would follow up the outdoor life with the Cabela's catalog, you know, flipping through there to see what I needed. Wish book. Wish book. That's exactly right.

SPEAKER_04 16:45

Jim, I don't all all the stuff on the wall, all you didn't, you've you've been there and done everything. I always had the feeling being around you a little bit that elk were like, I don't know if they were your favorite, but it just always appeared to me that elk had a special place for you.

SPEAKER_01 17:02

Is that they do, they do. I um I'm I'm passionate about elk hunting. They're my all-time favorite species. And uh uh you're right. One of the speaking of the trophies on the wall, there's four bulls on the other side of the fireplace, and one of them is my wife's, it was a beautiful five-pointer old bull, about ten years old. And that when I look at all those, you know, you as you guys know, you look at a set of horns and there's a memory there, and you think back to those times. But the one that she got was the most special because it was one of the worst hunts of my uh my life, the toughest and the hardest. And she killed it within a half a mile of the house.

SPEAKER_04 17:41

Oh wow. Tell us about it. Yeah, was that I said tell us about it.

SPEAKER_02 17:46

Well, she had drawn a tag in Wyoming.

SPEAKER_01 17:48

Here there's only ten tags, and it's the best, probably the best tag in the entire state. Because it's late in December, and we live in a migration area. The National Forest is a Shoney Forest, it's only half a mile from the house. And the later the better because the big bulls come off the mountains. This is before the wolves, and this was gosh, back in uh 80 or so. No, no, 90 something. But we hiked up and it was cold, cold. It was 30, 35 below zero, and the wind was stop all week. So we'd hike up the main North Fork Canyon that goes to Yellowstone Park, has all these canyons coming off it like a fish spine. And we'd go up one canyon bottom and hunt, and we'd climb up to the ridge and hunt the ridge back down. Next day we'd go up the never next canyon, and we were falling in the snow and ice, and there were places where we almost got ridged up and couldn't get out. Well, that happened for five days. And the last day of the season, the night before, a neighbor up the hill said he'd seen a big bull in his headlights going home. And he he has to drive by the house to get home. So I said to Madonna, I said, Well, let's try something stupid. I said, We've been busting our butts. We did see hell. We hunted quite a few, but we just didn't see a decent bull. So we drove up to where he told us, and uh here this bull was come crashing down uh down the ridge, and we jumped out of the truck and she got on her shooting sticks and nailed him. But uh that was that was really that was really worth it. Interestingly, we found a horseshoe, and that was lucky, and she picked that horseshoe up and and that happened uh the last day up on the mountain.

SPEAKER_04 19:26

So you're talking finding a horseshoe. I have one in my core box as we speak. So yeah.

SPEAKER_06 19:33

Well, while we're at elk, well, I'd just love to get your opinion on maybe the top two or three, and maybe the top caliber that you would suggest if somebody was going out west to hunt elk.

SPEAKER_01 19:46

You know, that's a question I get asked quite frequently, and and all I can all I can do is kind of reflect on my own experiences. Uh early on in the in in uh 70 64 when I graduated from school, my uh father-in-law bought me a gift of a gun. He said, Go in that store and buy a gun, anything you want, it's on made for a gift. So I was a big Jack O'Connor fan. I wanted a pre-64, 270. And uh they didn't have any, they had some 270s that were, but they were brand new. I said, I don't want those guns. But they did have a 306 and 364. So I got that rifle and the top of the weaver scope, and uh two um I used that gun for probably 20 years, and I hunted elk in a lot of states being with outdoor life, and I hunted in Canada, Western Canada, and I think I probably killed 22, 23 elk with it. So that rifle to me, and I never had a problem, it was my sweetheart. And then I my boss at Outdoor Life, he told me, he said, Zunboys, you gotta quit using that damn gun, that Winchester. He said, We got a lot of advertisers out there, you know, and they they you know, my gosh, we got, you know, Remington and River, blah, blah, blah. Okay. So I was about to give it away, and I was hunting up in Canada in British Columbia. I was gonna give it to my boy and get another gun. So I was hunting in British Columbia um with General Chuck Yeager, and uh it was right during the rut, and the weather was perfect. The bulls were absolutely quiet. They were silent. And at one point I did shoot a bull, it was a long, long ways away. And I don't know how far it was, there were no rangefinders in those days, so I fired three times with a third shot to kill a bull. I'm getting ahead of myself. But anyway, we went down there and couldn't find a thing. We crawled and no hair, no blood, no nothing. And I was with a guy, of course in Canada you gotta have a guy if you're gonna have a big game. And uh we we We we looked for an hour, we were literally crawling, because I thought I'd heard a a thud, but it was a long ways off. And he said, I don't think you hit him. He didn't exactly see it. He was he had kind of a tree in his way. We were up on a ridge. And I said, I guess you're right, Carl. But I said, Let's just drive for another half hour. We continue to look. So finally we're going back to the horses that we tied up on the ridge. And I had this crazy feeling, a sensation. Like in my mind, I saw that bull lurch, and I heard a crash, and I heard it in my mind. So I said, Carl, that bull's dead. I'm going to find it. He said, You're crazy. We looked all over. I said, I know. And I ran directly down the hill and I found that bull. What he'd done, there was a spruce tree that was had blown over, and there was a well kind of by the around the stump, and the branches all came out from the bottom. That bull fell in there, and all I saw was a tyne. And he was completely enveloped by those by those limbs. And uh so he wondered why hell I'm getting to the gun thing. Well, Chuck said to me at camp, he says, he says, Zumbo, he says, I heard those three shots. Why'd it take you three shots to kill that bull? And he said, What do you shoot? I said, 30 out of six. He says, Well, hell, if you were using a real man's gun instead of that pipsqueak SLB, he says, you'd have killed it. He walks over to me around the campfire and hands me his Weatherby 500. He said, This is yours. This is Chuck Yanger's gun, right? Holy smokes. So I didn't tell him, but uh, I think I did tell him, but I was I had promised to give that rifle to my son Dan. So from that point on, I used the Weatherby. And then I went on a hunt with Don Goble, who was a president of Browning many years ago up in Canada, also. And uh uh that's when the Browning A-bolt just came out, and I had a 7MM. And when the hunt was over, um I asked Don, how do you want me to get the gun back to you? He said, What gun? So obviously he wanted me to use it to you know to promote it. So I used that Browning 7MM for years. And then when I was doing, I had a TV show, Jim Zubbell Outdoors on the Outdoor Channel, and Remington was my title sponsor. So obviously I'm shooting Remingtons. And every other year they give me a new gun to promote on the show. So um now my go-to gun is a 300 rum Remington Altramatic. I still shoot it for elk, uh, grizzlies, moose, whatever. I use a 270 Kimber on uh on Deer and Antelope. So I'm not I've got I'm not a real gun collector. I kind of tend to go with what I'm what I'm sweet on, you know what I mean. So but well, I mean everybody knows there's a big creed more craze, and uh I've shot a few and they're great guns, but people think you gotta have a certain gun to kill a big animal. That's certainly not true. We all know about bullet placement. You know, Jack O'Connor talked about that forever. So I've always been a firm believer that a 30 out six, even a 270, is fine for elk. But one of the problems I think is that a lot of people that come out here from that are non-residents, they think they gotta buy a great big monster gun for elk, you know, 375 or a 416 maybe or something like that. And it it's it's definitely not true. Um elk are a tough tough animal, they're tenacious, you know. Typically, if you hit them behind the shoulder, in my experience with a 180 grain, 30 out of 6, they're gonna go 80 yards, and if you hit if you double-hung them and then they're done. But um, so that's kind of I'm not a bow hunter. I shot an elk once with a bow in Montana, a raghorn, and uh, I shot a few of the muzzle loader when I was hunting with Tony Knight. So that's kind of my my gun deal.

SPEAKER_06 25:57

Yeah. But I can you imagine hunting with uh Don Cobel brown Browning? I mean, that the he's got Chuck Yeager. Chuck Yeager gave him a weatherby. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_04 26:10

Holy a 500 weatherby. I don't know that I've enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_06 26:14

I had a 340 one time, and it would it knocked fillings loose out of you. You're feeling the hell out yesterday because of it, didn't you?

SPEAKER_01 26:20

It was a 300 Weatherby Mark V, and and what's cool about it, I still got the gun. Um what's cool about it, we're in Canada, and they get the gun across the border. I said, General, would you do me a big favor and write out a thing like, hi, General Chucky, here might give this gun serial number, blah, blah, blah, date the gym zombie did. So he got that in to prove that it's his gun. But we became good friends. We became good friends, and we hunted elk at least six times. And we did a number, we've done a number of fishing trips. Um, I might have taken him on his last hunt in Texas about five years ago, maybe six years ago. But he was uh yeah, he was pretty frail at the time, but I'll tell you what a tough guy. Unbelievable.

SPEAKER_06 27:02

Yeah, sure was. Well, so Mr. Dumbo, can we can we steer the conversation? Um when you and I were talking uh in the last few weeks, you mentioned that you had uh you know turkey season has just started here in Mississippi where we are in the south. It's getting it's getting started uh just every weekend. It seemed like another state's coming in. But you were telling me that you got to hunt with Dr. Levitt Williams at uh Fish Eating Creek in Florida. And kind of uh can you tell some of those tell us about meeting him and hunting with him and and how you came to find turkey hunting?

SPEAKER_01 27:33

Yeah, of course, uh Lovitt was known as Mr. Osceola. He was on the Florida Game Commission, you know, and the turkeys were his wife, the Osceola. And he invited me to hunt. Often he invited writers to join him at Fish Eating Creek, which is an amazing place, full of full of tree, palm trees. And by the way, he was a big orchid fan. And he would climb a tree and show me an orchid. He said, Come on up, climb up, and I'll show it to you, gotta get close to this thing, you know. We had so much fun at that camp. We were chasing armadillos, and uh he cooked up a rattlesnake and just had a ball. But on the day we went hunting, we took a jeep and we're crashing through the palmettos in the dark, making all kinds of noise, and we stopped. Heard two turkeys gobble a long, long ways away. So that was it. He said, Okay, follow me. And there was kind of a dry lake bed, maybe a pond bed. It was a bunch of iris in there and stuff. He said, We're gonna sit right here for a while. I didn't know what a while meant, but love it now. This is Mr. Oziola Turkey, is not wearing camo, no gloves, no mask, kind of a blue shirt, jeans. I remember he was wearing a hat. I was I was shocked. I'm I'm expecting this guy to be, you know, totally wearing all the right stuff. He's got a wing bone call, and that's all he wants to use. So we sat there and he he sucks on that call. We sat there a half hour, no turkey, not hear a thing. Sat there another half hour, nothing. And I thought, my god, he's gonna sit here in morning. At one point, he says, I'm tired of sucking on this thing, my mouth hurts. So help me God, a half hour later, he kind of touches my shoulder and he points, and here's two long beards 20 yards away looking at us. I couldn't believe it. So I I shot one of them, and that taught me something. In fact one time I was hunting with an Indian up in uh up in BC for moose, and we're we're watching a bull and a big big cloud, big fog came in, and we sat there and sat there and sat there. He says, What do you suppose the most important virtue is in hunting? And I'm thinking, well, knowing the territory, knowing the knowing the species, the quarry, blah, blah, blah, knowing the area and being a good shot. He said, No. This is all in the atonement. He said, It's patience. I realized what he meant then when I was sitting there with Lovett. How many times have we been out turkey hunting? And we think, well, that bird ain't coming in. Then we get up and all of a sudden he flushes ten feet behind us. But uh, so that was an interesting, that was an interesting trip right there. But Lovett then went to uh Guatemala and to hunt the oscillated. And he he wanted to find a way to call them in because typically they were shot off the roofs. You guys probably all know that. And I went down there to get Long World Slam. And uh we did not use a call. Everybody in those days had to shoot a bird off of the roofs, and and that's that's terrible. I mean, you know, he back here it's illegal, illegal, but probably it's unethical. But I was with a guide, and uh this kid was probably 16 years old, and he located a bird and oscillated. They don't gobble, they sing, they have a weird sound. And what you gotta do is find them in the jungle, uh before, you know, right at shooting lake, because if they're gonna be on the ground, we're on the ground, forget it. So this kid literally dragged me at times. He grabbed my hand and pulled me through, and he had no shirt on. And like poor gamer man back in those days, he had the tripod and the two-foot-long camera, cuz you remember that, of course. And he's probably carrying 80 pounds, and he's struggling to stay up, and all of a sudden that kid stops in his breaking light, his shooting light, and he points up there, and there's a spurt sitting about 25 yards away. So I pull my gun up and my cameraman says, No. I said, What? He said, I ain't got enough light. And I'm just I said, that bird's about ready to perch off of that thing. He was just kind of bobbing his head, and I think it took maybe three more minutes before my you know, he'd always say, I'm on him. When he said I'm on him, I'd shoot. And finally he said it and I dropped that bird. But I think nowadays most of 'em are hunted out of blinds that come into fields. So uh but that was that was interesting. Um I don't know if what dilemma ever perfected, he passed cast the right quite a while ago, but he was he was just so much fun. He was just a great guy to hunt with, and I learned a lot with him.

SPEAKER_06 32:31

So you've you've watched turkey hunting kind of kind of explode over the last would you say 30 or 40 years?

SPEAKER_01 32:38

Oh, golly. Oh my gosh. Uh for eight years I worked at West Point as a as a forester and game warden. The Academy has a 16,000-acre reservation right in the Hudson Highlands north of uh New York City. And it's beautiful country. And uh there was not if you want to hunt a turkey, you had to drive 70 miles to Delaware County. There were no turkeys at all on that side of the Hudson, and now it's just loaded with you know you all know that stuff, you know. All the great work the NWTF has been doing at least. So lots and lots of turkeys, brand new calls, all kinds of stuff we know about them now. A lot of great books written, right, cuz?

SPEAKER_04 33:20

Yeah, yeah. The truth. Yeah, mine are all humor. They're not really books. I'll hand somebody and say, look, this ain't no John Grisham novel, but you may laugh out loud. So yeah, I I learned hanging around when you got, and we were blessed because Mossy Oak figured out early on there was no social media, there wasn't Facebook or Instagram. The way you got the message out was to get with prolific outdoor writers. And, you know, the the advantage we had is you didn't really have to write about us if you were wearing the Mossy Oak with a logo hat. The photos were the deal. So there was never any pressure. And I can tell you, if if I could go back to my favorite time in the world at Mossy Oak, it would be when I had to deal with outdoor writers. I was living a dream. My dad was a sports writer, he had a sports column in the local newspaper. Oh, yeah, used to dream about that. And then one day I'm in camp with Jen Zumbo, and you know, it's like Craig Dwight, shoot, just name them, and we got to go see all you guys. So it's a big deal. So it it it it it prides us to see you doing so good at age five and sharing those stories because I'm telling you, I got grandkids, sons from 14 to 19, and they you can't tell them enough stories. That's what they're missing. You know, there's only so much you can get off the phone. They love, man, that if they see an outdoor life or something on a newsstand, you know, at the barber shop, they're thumbing that thing. They want it. So I think it's trying to, I think that's trying to come back. It's coming back, but it's in a different format, right?

SPEAKER_05 35:02

It's all coming back, and that's a good thing for sure.

SPEAKER_02 35:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:05

That's that's probably the reason why Mike Scovey hired me to write the back page for Peterson's hunting, which I still am. He says, Zumbo, you're one of the few guys I know that that know how to make a help people call out of a garden hose or a piece of pipe, because I was there, you know, and I'm old enough to relate to that stuff.

SPEAKER_07 35:22

But and the hunting culture and storytelling, I mean, they go hand in hand. I mean, it's it's part of it. Even you know, there I was. There I was. You know, and and Toxie talking about the days of Choctaw Bluff where you came in, everybody got in a you know in a huddle and told the stories. It's some of the best part of the whole hunt stories.

SPEAKER_06 35:38

Is the stories, no doubt about it. So Mr. Zumbo, let me uh let me ask this real quick. I so we have the utmost respect for you and the the the the greatest in your in your whiskers there and your mustache, you've you've you've ridden many a mile on a horse, uh paper elk, and you're um been all over the world. But when you stop today and you when you look at like well now we can pick up our phone and and we can look it on it and see exactly where we are. There's red dot scope. There's some guys are flying drones around trying to get around. There's so many advancements in technology from the days when you had to figure out how far that shot was mentally yourself. How do you decide what you like and what you don't like or what you approve of? What's what's kind of your barometer there?

SPEAKER_01 39:35

Well, first of all, I believe in ethics foremost and foremost. You know, uh that to me that's gotta be number one. Um but you're right, so many things are different with the trail cams, you know, you could sit in your recliner and in real time you could see what's going on out there, and and uh people use drones. Uh I don't think any states it's legal to actually hunt with them. But uh so many things are are out there that we didn't have available a long time ago. Long-range shooting, um, big time now. Um I'm not a long-range shooter. Um I have shot a maybe one animal at 500 yards with an odd six. But um it is so very much different. I wrote a column one time in Peterson's, I think, on the quintessential hunt, and that would be still hunting in a forest with no trail cams, just by yourself. Just take a few steps, stop, listen, look, take a few more steps, you know, maybe carry an old 30-30 car beam model 94. Yeah. You're right. It is different. Um, but uh personally, well, at my age, I don't ride a horse anymore. My balance is pretty well gone. But my favorite hunts were always on horseback, typically in rural areas, um, wilderness areas. Uh around Cody here, almost all the camps are at least 25 miles from the highway, traffic from the trailhead. That's a long day of ride on a horse, especially for somebody that's not ridden a horse or uh not used to it. But uh I love that, you know, the grizzly bears and the wolves and all that sort of stuff. So um that's that's my all-time, my all-time favorite hunt.

SPEAKER_06 41:20

You ever had any encounters when you were on horseback with grizzly bears?

SPEAKER_01 41:24

Yeah, I've had quite a few. Um a lot of times a grizzly become walking up a trail in the same trail you're on, and uh you better be holding on tight to that horse because it might be a little rodeo. I was I was uh I was charged by a brown bear once in Alaska. Um I mean the charge. It wasn't a bluff charge. I was fishing with a bunch of buddies. Uh we were fishing for King Salmon, and we flown in a float plane, and uh the float plane was parked on one side of the river. We waded across and we caught some salmon. We built a fire and we're cooking a couple fish. Way down the river, I see a brown bear come out on the sandy bar and he looks at us, he stands up like this. And here he comes. Everybody's quiet scattered like quail in the in the alders. Except I ran for the plane, which was not a smart thing to do. I had a fly rod in my hands and I wasn't packing. So I had a head start on the bear, and and the because he was coming, he smelled that, obviously, he smelled that smoke from the cooking salmon. I barely beat him to the plane. I opened that door and dove in and slammed it, and I almost caught his nose when I slammed the door living hell out of me. But uh, we've had there's a lot of grizzly bear incidents uh every year, mostly out connors. A lot of a lot of times it happens when guys are looking for sheds and gals. Uh that's always in April, usually, and the bears are coming out of hibernation and they're hungry. And I just wrote a big shed article there recently, and uh uh kind of got into a lot of details, but uh that's a that's a tough time to be out there when those those Sal's got the new cubs and uh and the boars are hungry looking for food. Here comes the guy, you know. But uh it's all part of it.

SPEAKER_04 43:14

Jim Jim, have you ever been absolutely solid lost while you're out west? Yes, it's good.

SPEAKER_01 43:22

I was going to this, as I mentioned, this fellow school Plasma College in the Adirondacks, and it was said that there was a we lived in a dormitory on a Lake Osgood Pond, and if we had gone from that point straight north, we would not have hit a highway until we got to Canada. And Canada was about 30 miles away. This is all swamp. I mean, this you can't even imagine. You think of New York, you think of skyscrapers and and stuff. But uh I went up there, we got an old boat, me and two of my roommates. Of course, we're 18 years old, and we're foresters, you know. We know everything there is about know about forest. We're experts, we're woodsmen, you know, we can kill a bear with a knife. So we we leave our boat and we start walking. We weren't paying attention where we were going. It was snowing out. And we got about, oh, I don't know, we hunted about an hour. And then the snow was really coming down hard, and we said, well, let's get the heck out of here. Let's head for the boat. We walked three different directions. Like, oh boy, where's that boat? So we took turns, and one guy said, I think it's that way. So we walked down one way and we flagged our trail. And we walked a half a mile, no boat, we picked up our flags, came back, went another way. Could not find that boat. One of the guys, who was a big guy, he started bawling because he he wanted to see his mama. He was he was out of it, he was panicking, it was hysterical. All of a sudden, we heard two shots, fairly close. So we made a beeline for those shots. And we had jumped a bear, and there were two guys hunting up on a little knoll, and they got the bear, and we just sauntered up and said, uh, by the way, do you know where the Osgood River is? We're kind of you guys lost. No, no, no, we're just a little turned around. It's snow now, you know, so they pointed where it was when we got up. I mean, it was serious. Uh, we were totally, absolutely no idea where that boat was.

SPEAKER_07 45:22

Good thing that got fine. Yeah. Flushed that air up. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:26

Yeah. Here in the West, it's not so tough. I mean, to get I mean, it's it's it's not easy to get lost because you know, you're hunting drainages, and typically you might hunt a mountain, and uh you can always go downhill and find a stream. But you can always often look across and see a certain ridge and kind of keep that in mind. But it's it our search and rescue, those guys, they they earn their keep. Well, actually, they're all volunteers, but they're always looking for lost people. Uh folks that aren't used to it, you know, they just go a little too far.

SPEAKER_04 46:00

Well, it's interesting to talk about. It's no fun if you've been there.

SPEAKER_06 46:03

No, I none like the feeling of being lost. You ever knock your hat off your head completely off your head? You are lost. Remember that. If you knock your head off, if you knock your hat off your head, you're disoriented and you're you're you're you're lost.

SPEAKER_04 46:18

Panic hits people differently, you know. Some some get it quick. And that up that that that northeast world, man, that's crazy. I I got lost out west. I'll just go ahead and tell you. And I just kind of gave up. I said, I'm gonna wait till daylight. I had one of those emergency space blankets. And sat down and covered myself up, and I I I I said, I look like a TV dinner for a grizzly bear wrapped in a little. So I just I started going downhill, found a stream, got out. But that that's no fun. That'll panic, even you know, somebody who thinks they're all that.

SPEAKER_02 46:54

Yep. Yep. So can I tell you can I can I tell you a Mississippi turkey story? I wanted to get to that Winona Man. That was on my list. That was a question. You go ahead. You just keep asking, whatever.

SPEAKER_04 47:08

No, we want to hear the Mississippi Turkey story.

SPEAKER_02 47:11

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 47:12

So I gotta start this story here in Cody. I went into a store one day and it was a boot shop, and there's a woman in there. She was uh she worked at the store and and um I bought something and and um I left the store and this sounds vain, but it happened. Two guys went running in and say they said, Hey, do you know was that Jim Zumbo? And she said, I I don't know. Let me look at the slip. Yeah, that's him. Well, credit card slip.

SPEAKER_02 47:39

And um so anyway, time passes, and she remembered that she had an uncle, Maurice Kemp, who lived in Winona, Mississippi. Oh yeah, yeah. And Maurice was in his 80s, he was very sick, and she found out that he had been reading me an outdoor life, and he told her, Debbie, if you ever run into Jim's um, well, tell him I said howdy.

SPEAKER_01 48:04

So at one point she found me on Facebook and she realized that's the guy that my uncle Maurice was talking about. So she contacted me and and uh I thought that was pretty cool. So I sent him a couple of my books and autographed them, and we got into a little bit of writing, and he was he was pretty ill. And it happened I was going to Tunica to a uh Puma meeting, the professional media association, and uh I had some time, so I thought, you know, I would love to meet this guy, this gentleman. So we had it set up. Um, Debbie's mom and uh her brother picked me up at Tunica when uh I had some time at the Puma conference, and they, oh, I got to back up. The two days before I got there, Maurice died. So I'm thinking, you know, I'm not I'm not going there. Everybody's grieving. And yeah, but his wife, Joyce, the widow, insisted. She says, No, we want you to come out. So Debbie's mom and brother picked me up in in uh tunica and we went out to the house, and it was a it was an old southern home, and he was a taxidermist. He had stuff all over the walls, and I probably shouldn't say that, but he had an owl stuffed, and that was probably before the owls were protected. Oh, yeah, way before they were protected.

SPEAKER_08 49:25

Hold up, bud.

SPEAKER_01 49:28

So anyway, we're uh I'm I'm admiring all this, and his wife Joyce was just a wonderful lady, and Debbie's mom was there, and her brother. And I'm walking around the room admiring all this old stuff. He had stuff, every old stuff. And I spot this box of J. C. Higgins shotgun shells, and there were some, the box was there, and there were some spent shells and and uh and and some uh relied shells. So anyway, I'll be darned. She said, What what what's what's special about that? I said, Oh, my first gun was a J.C. Higgins. It's 16-gauge bolt action that I bought from my Think Sergeant Robux or Montgomery Ward when I was 15 years old. And so anyway, he kept walking. At the end of the day, she hands me a bag, and that's what was in it, the 16 gauge box on the shelves. So she said, uh, and I was on my quest to hunt all 50 states for deer and I hunt, hadn't hunting Mississippi. She said, How would you like to come back this fall and uh and hunt with us? And uh Mike will show you around and stuff. So I said, I would love that. So I went back and uh this is this is the most probably touching hunt I've ever I've ever been on. I wore Maurice's jacket. I wore his hat, his gloves. I used his rifle, I sat in his blind. And in the blind, he had all these nails with spent casings. Obviously, the deer he had killed. You know, I sat there and holy smokes, it just like I can't believe that I'm sitting here in his blind. I didn't know him from Adam, you know, but it was just so special. So uh that was that was uh quite a trip, quite a deal. So anyway, that's my Mississippi story.

SPEAKER_06 53:10

Yeah, and one other thing.

SPEAKER_01 53:11

I did not I didn't get a deer. Um but uh anyway, it was just meeting that family. I want to say that when I arrived for the deer hunt, one of the neighbor ladies, she brought over, I guess you guys call it dinner, we call it lunch, but she had nine crock pots full of good old southern cooking. I swear nine of them. We had a big meal, I invited some neighbors over and stuff. My biggest regret is I was invited to hunt some of some of your big crappie lakes, and I'm a diehard fisherman, and I never went back. And I'll usually a couple of the top crappie lakes are in Mississippi, so that's the story. They kept some big crappie over there.

SPEAKER_05 53:49

That just that's interesting to me. You know, you've you've been all over the world and you've seen some cool stuff, you've you know gotten lost out west, and uh, you know, one of your most memorable hunts was in Mississippi, and you didn't even kill anything.

SPEAKER_04 54:03

You didn't know the guy. That's all you need to know about it.

SPEAKER_05 54:06

But you remember the meal, and uh I mean that's that's how a lot of us are, you know. Uh social media doesn't really portray that these days. It's it's it seems more all about the kill and the photo, but uh you're talking about memories. Um that's pretty dang cool. Any other good any other good uh meal memories you've got? Like a uh you're talking about cooking salmon, you know, anything else, moose ribs, sheep ribs stuff, we would never have a chance to eat.

SPEAKER_01 54:39

Well, I'd always heard Jack O'Connor say that sheep ribs are the best thing he's ever had cooked over a fire.

SPEAKER_04 54:44

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 54:45

I agree with them. I've been able to do some sheep hunting, but uh yeah, they were only my favorites.

SPEAKER_04 54:50

Jim, when you were when you were uh running all this stuff, and it there was a lot of outdoor riders, but there were to me, and I was in the midst of all that entertainment, there was there was kind of a handful that were real prolific that were just always doing that. Did you have a couple that you really liked that that like you really liked their stuff, their riding style, got to be friends with?

SPEAKER_01 55:16

Yeah, uh one of my favorites, he was an old timer, he died probably 15 years ago. His name was Irwin A. Bauer.

SPEAKER_04 55:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 55:23

Uh people called him Joe. And that guy, I swear in a given month, he'd have at least one picture on the cover of either Outdoor Life Field or Streamer Sports A Field. He and his wife Peggy had traveled all over the world. The great photographers and a great, great hunter. I think he's written oh, probably 30 books. Contemporary, well, I gotta tell you about Pat McManus. Um, Pat wrote the back page for Outdoor Life for years, and he was probably the most famous outdoor writer ever because everybody loved him. He was so good at humor, even wives and people that didn't not love to read his stuff. And Pat and I got very close. And I always was one of the things I admired about him, being a humor writer, you can write a story that's funny one time, but can you do it every month? And he did it every month. And of course, he turned out many books in the New York Times bestseller list. But uh we've been on a lot of fun hunts together, and uh a lot of respect for him. As far as some of the contemporary writers, I think Craig Boddington is one of my favorites. Uh, Craig has been around, probably been to Africa 150 times. He's uh he's a colonel in uh in the Marines, he's uh retired from the Marines. He's a great guy, and when he was an editor with Petersons, he was one of the best editors I ever worked for.

SPEAKER_04 56:48

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 56:48

But uh there's a lot of other guys out there that I really respect and love to read their stuff.

SPEAKER_05 56:54

So I love looking, you know, I would I would flip and look for the McManus Psych right off the bat about every time.

SPEAKER_06 57:03

There's some great artwork there too, which I don't know who drew those, but I can remember the grasshopper machine. He had a a net tied down on the front of an old car trying to catch grasshoppers to fish with, and that's an image.

SPEAKER_01 57:14

But if the artist's name was Kirschfield, and he actually wrote for the he was a cartoonist for the New Yorker magazine, and every time he illustrated Pat every month, he would write the word Xina, which was his daughter, and he'd write Xina by his name, two, four, six, whatever. And you had to look at the picture, and her name would be camouflaged in that in that whole cartoon. And if it said five Nina's, I'm sorry, Nina's, if there were five Nina's, you had to look. I always did look, try to find all nine of them. They'd be in the creases of your shirt and everything, but that was kind of fun.

SPEAKER_02 57:54

How about that? Never mind.

SPEAKER_01 57:56

Can I tell you my favorite Pat story? Please, please. Okay. My boss in New York, the top editor, he told Fat and I said, Why don't you guys go on a hunt together? And we'll do a double feature, and each of you write about how that hunt felt in your own words. So he said, Oh, that's gonna be fun, Pat said. Yeah, what do we do? I said, I don't know. We gotta do something that's got teeth and fangs, you know. So we decided to do a buckbear hunt up in British Columbia. We went up with a bunch of writers, Bryce Towsey was there, and uh I'm not sure. Uh Lynn Powell was there from Remington. And uh anyway, so it was a really late spring, and there was so much snow on the ground the bears weren't active. But you could see them up with the cottonwood trees eating the butts. Literally, you could look out over an area and see all these black spots in the cottonwood trees. So, anyway, it's the last day of the hunt, and I think a couple guys got bears, and Pat got a bear on the fourth day of a five-day hunt. And I ain't got a bear. So I'm supposed to be the hunting hitter, and he's a humor writer, right? So the last day, my guide and I are driving around, and we look over, and here's this bear looking at us, just standing here looking at us. He's standing on a ridge about 90 yards away in the snow, and he's just immobile. I said, Holy smokes, is this possible? So I didn't care how big it was at that point. I just had to get a bear because Pat got one. So I get out of the truck, leaned on my shooting sticks. It was a perfect, I mean, no wind. It was my favorite rifle. I mean, it was meat on the table. I fired, and that bear never flinched. He just kind of kept looking at me. Are you kidding me? And I was so dumbfounded I didn't jack another uh cartridge in the gun. And he just turned and just waddled off. I said, and I so I ran over and I never saw him. But the guy said, You sure as hell miss that bear, Zumbo. I said, Yeah, I sure as hell did. I don't know why, but I mean I'm not the best shot in the world, but I should not have missed that bear. I said, Tell you what, you stand right where I stood, and I'm gonna go right where the bear stood. I'd see his tracks in the snow, and I want to just look and draw a straight line. So I walked around and I looked back, and here is the the top of a Doug fir tree laying in the snow, and I clipped it and bullet deflected. It was a little round hole on that uh on that twig. So went back to camp. I had that twig in the back. Pat comes out of the tent and said, Do you get one? I said, Yeah, I got one. He said, Where is it? And I went into the twig. He said, What happened? So I told him the story. Well, so now we each write our our version of the story. What does Pat write? He said, Zumbo was really after that twig. He waited for that bear to move around to present it to present a perfect silhouette. So that's that's what happened. But that was just part that but that the guy's brain, he was he's amazing. I I just love the guy, and I was lucky enough when he passed away. The editors asked me to write a tribute uh for him on his back page in outdoor life, which I did, which was uh another very touching thing.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:15

But uh I'm gonna go look that up as soon as we get out of here. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:20

So anyway. Wow. Well, this is like uh uh I mean I I just remember all this stuff in outdoor life, and it was so important to me growing up. Yeah, it really shaked me.

SPEAKER_08 1:01:33

Yeah, and it shaked me too.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:34

So look, there's another thing I'd like to ask you about. I think I'm gonna be pretty jealous about this one, but could you tell us about your Hank Williams Jr. story?

SPEAKER_07 1:01:42

What uh yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:46

I was going to the NRA convention in uh Nashville, and I had a few days to spend, so I knew this couple, John and Bonda Williams, who owned Buchanan Lake Lodge on Kentucky Lake. And I went out there for a few days catching crappies. And it was another day to spare, and John says, You want to hunt turkeys? Um season still up. I said, Yeah, absolutely, I'll hunt for one day, so I got a license. In the dark 30 in the morning, this guy knocks on my door. He says, Ready to go? I said, Yep, his name was Billy Dwyer. So we hunted this beautiful place, manicured lawn and a beautiful pond. And it was the wind was blowing pretty bad, and he had to leave at noon. He had to go back to work. So we're driving out of there. He said, You know where we've been just hunting? I said, No, I did. He says, That's Hank Williams Place. I said, Are you kidding me? Because I've been a Hanks fan for a long time. He says, Yeah. He says, You ever met him? I said, No. He says, Do you want to? I said, Yeah. So he said, Here's what you do. I'll call him and tell him you're coming, and I'll tell you where his studio is near Paris. Um, and you go over and introduce yourself to him. So, man, I'll tell you what, talk about being stressed out. I was so darn nervous I gotta meet Hank Williams Jr. So I walk over to the door in the studio and I go in, and there's a big lady sitting at this table reception. She says, How may I help you? As a man while here I see Hank Williams. She says, What's your name? I said, Jim Zumbo. She says, Walk right down that hallway and take the last room to the right. So I'm walking down there. Here's all these records, you know, silver records and whatever, all over the framed on the wall. I walk in that office and so help me. Hank is sitting there in his chair with his feet up on the desk and he's wearing an outdoor life magazine hat. Just to put ease. I couldn't believe it.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:39

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:41

He proceeded to show me all his guns. And I tell you, there were a lot of guns. I mean, men Henry's oh my god. So anyway, I gotta tell you another connected story. I went on a bear hunt up in uh British Columbia with uh with a guide. It was a place called Portland Canal. He came off the uh the BC coast and it actually divided part of Alaska and British Columbia. And it ran inland about 70 miles and was really steep country. I hunted with uh guy named Bob Milligan. He owned a sawmill and then he he uh sold that and he he bought this outfit. So he took us in there, me and the guide with uh with his beaver float painting. He lands a plane. We uh look around in the brush alongshore, and he had cash the whole camp under the brush. So we pulled out all the stuff we needed, the tent and uh and all the lanterns and all the stuff. So now we gotta get a boat and a motor. So he says, Come on, Zombo, hop in with me. So we got in the plane and flew another few miles and moored the plane and walked in the woods with all that stupid devil's quote and nasty brush, and and uh he pulls a branch out and there's a boat. So we got the boat out in the motor, and he tied the boat to the struts. And uh I said, Bob, is this plane gonna fly right? He says, I don't know, we'll give it a try. So we become airport in that plane and shuttering all over the place. He said, This thing's driving like a damn Peterbilt, he said. But anyway, we got back and we set up camp. So we went on this hunt, and uh I got a nice bear, and I wrote about it in American Hunter called Surfside Bruins. And Hank saw the story. And uh he called and he said, Uh, hey, I want to take you on that hunt with you to go with me as my guest. I said, Hell yeah. So we had it all set up. And I was in Montana two days before hunting bears, and I was gonna fly commercial. He was gonna fly in this private jet. And I called the outfitter and he didn't answer the phone. But his son answered, I said, Is your dad around? He said, No, they're a little bit late. He said, uh, but we're expecting them later tonight. So I called tonight and called that night. He said, Well, they're not back yet, and we're pretty worried. But what had happened was Bob and his wife Penny and two guides, they were lifting off after setting up a camp, and the wing clipped the snag, and the plane crashed and killed killed three of them. Uh killed Bob and his wife and his guide, and the other guy got hurt pretty bad. So that was the end of the hunt with Hank. But uh it was it was a tragedy and it was just terrible. But uh at any rate, I got to see him at lots of concerts because he always liked the BS and I go back in his bus. I knew his road manager. He gave me his road manager's address, so he'd always uh set it up so I could go back and we can talk about Hunt a little bit. But still a big fan.

SPEAKER_07 1:06:44

I know you're your Game Keeper Green. Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:47

Yeah, I would I would have loved to see that gun collection. Oh man.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:51

Oh I'll tell you, uh I probably shouldn't mention on on your show how many there were because someone might be going to look for them, but there were a lot. Like four, like, like four digits worth. Yeah, they were having a lot of people. Introduced me to his beautiful wife, I think who I think passed away. And she was just she just had a baby and she was carrying a baby around and diversity. I mean, I I mean, I was just absolutely on a cloud nine minutes just being near that guy and uh just loved his concerts. I didn't know it, but he plays so many instruments, it's crazy, and he plays it well. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:07:28

So that's my number one guest that I've been hoping to get. And don't want to talk to him about music, just want to talk to him about hunting and taking care of the forums and all that. But you know, he won't uh he won't get in touch with us or cousins too.

SPEAKER_07 1:07:42

I mean kind of down there maybe part of the world.

SPEAKER_06 1:07:45

Maybe you're trying to, or I haven't got guessed out. Well, hey, look, Jim, I'd love to ask and get your take. You've been out west a long time. What's going on with the wolves? And I mean, just I'm just asking your opinion, but boy, there's just some crazy stuff going on out there.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:05

Yeah, well, the wolves are basically in three states. Uh all Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. And for years and years, they tried to get the wolf delisted up from the from the endangered species list, and they finally got it done. So what's happening now is Idaho and Montana, uh, you can trap wolves, you can shoot them. I'm not sure what the limits are. I think one one state you can take ten. Um in Wyoming, we have a different situation where the northwest part of the state where I live, around Yellowstone Park, is called the trophy wolf management area. And in order to hunt a wolf here, you've got to have a wolf license that you buy. You can kill two. And um getting a wolf is very difficult, even though there's a lot. Um I mean, you can hear them howl from right here from the house, but the guys again were usually the ones that are up in the wilderness area. But what I was gonna say is so that that 85, that 15% of Wyoming, um, they give about 50 tags, and that's it. Once a wolf is harvested, uh that goes against the quota. When all 50 are taken, the season ends. But the rest of Wyoming, 85%, wolves are considered predators like coyotes. You guys, as non-residents, could be driving down a road, and if there's wolves on public land or landing out, you can get out of that vehicle and as long as you're 30 feet from the road, you can what we call smoke a pack. So uh but you can shoot all you want, no license required. You just have to take them to the game department so they can tag them. But uh so in that way, we keep wolves out of the rest of Wyoming and all the other mountain ranges, but we we we put up with them here. And like I say, they take about 50 a year. But the wolves were introduced in 95-96 in Yellowstone. They all came from Canada, and I think there were a total of about maybe 22. And I'll tell you, it didn't take long for them to they turn them loose and and uh they kept them in behind a big cage and they fed them roadkill until they got a climate and then they turned them loose. And it took about four years for them to get here to my backyard, and I live about 30 miles from the park. But uh very, very controversial. Um now they've spread into other states or in Oregon or in Washington. Um I think there might be some in Utah, and of course they had a big deal. They had a ballot box initiative in my in Colorado two years ago, and that's where you go to the polls and you vote. Well, the public decided they wanted wolves in Colorado vote. It was fifty one percent for and forty nine percent against, but they won. But it's turned into a fiasco because so many wolves have been killed because they Turn into cattle killers, which is predictable. And some of them wandered across into Wyoming and got shot legally in Wyoming. But uh so they're having some real issues. And so um I think um Brian Nesvik, who wasn't once a coyote uh Cody game warden and was uh worked his way up through the ranks or became director of our game and fish department, is now the head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He was he was uh he was appointed by by Trump. And and Brian knows being a game warden in Wyoming and worked all over the state, he he knows what's going on, he's got his stuff together. And he said no more wolves are coming into into the United States from from Canada or any place else or into Colorado. So it's who knows what's gonna happen there. But I think mo maybe half of the wolves they've introduced, I think maybe twenty, are now demised. So but it's it's always controversial because you know people say that wolves kill the sick, you know, and uh and the old, and well they do, but they can tackle a a bull bison and a six-point elk, and when there's enough of them, there's no challenge. And wolves are also responsible. They do this thing called surplus killing. And I remember an incident over by Bondarant uh toward Jackson where a pack of wolves killed 21 elk, didn't take a bite out of any of them. And I remember Game and Fish had all those elk, all cows and calves lined up in a big line, all dead from it. So that doesn't go over well.

SPEAKER_06 1:12:43

So yeah, well, we kind of watched from afar, but it's just well.

SPEAKER_07 1:12:48

Lane, you got a question? Uh I was gonna, you know, I think I uh heard you talk a little bit about do I understand right that you were the the game warden in forestry at the at the West Point Naval Academy? I mean, or the Army Academy?

SPEAKER_02 1:13:00

Yes, yep.

SPEAKER_07 1:13:01

So can you tell us a little bit about that experience?

SPEAKER_02 1:13:04

Yeah, that was that was a fun job.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:06

I after I got out of college at Utah State, I took a two-year job with the Utah Department of Forestry and Fire Control. And then I went back east to West Point. And um I basically ran the uh the deer hunting program and the timber. We had a timber operation where we we had some pretty nice oak trees and we cut some veneer logs. I do contracts out with some loggers and anything that was anything that was in the outdoors under my umbrella. Even um I remember there were times when they had these dumpsters, they got the dumpsters all over the cantonment area, and an officer's wife would call and say, I got a raccoon in my dumpster, come get him out.

SPEAKER_08 1:13:45

So had to go.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:47

And I first I try to have a heart trap with bait, and I'd catch him and I'd take him on the other side of the reservation, which was 16,000 acres, pretty big place. And so then I got the idea. I said, you know what I'll do? I'm gonna put a down two by four in there and leave the damn door open so the coon can crawl over and call crawl out by himself. So it worked. But um we had a hunting program, and everybody that hunted had to take an orientation uh from me. And there was about, oh, I don't know, a total of 150 people, cadets, uh general, there were three generals at West Point, lots of high-ranking officers, enlisted men. But for the first three three days of the hunt, you you we had the installation broken down into hunting units. There were 28 units, and it only could be five people hunting in a unit, and they had the form at my office. And they'd come in in the morning, first come first serve, and they'd put their name on that unit. When there were five names, that unit was closed. So at this meeting, we did a thing, I had 150 names or uh numbers in a hat. So I passed the hat around, but it had number one, and I walked out of the aisle and I gave it to General Sam Walker. He was a he was a commandant, commandant of cadets, I think. And he was an avid outdoorsman. So he he got his first pick. And nobody said a word because he was a general.

SPEAKER_08 1:15:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:14

You know, that's the military. Better not mindset.

SPEAKER_08 1:15:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:18

But he was crazy. When I talked, he'd invite me in his office, you know, on big red carpet, smoking good cigars. Here's Mr. Zumbo, Zumbo, have a cigar, you know. Tell me now, where's the biggest bucks going to be this year? And there was a good unit 14, that's where I'd send him every time, and he had that place all to himself for the first three days. Then we stocked, there was a stream called Popalopa Street, and I stocked trout in it. And he'd want to come out and uh and help me uh help me uh stock trout. We had these big milk cans and we had to jump on rocks, you know, and his aides were running around all nervous, you know. He was out there in his uh his uh regular fatigues, and and uh gosh, he was just dumping trout in, and sure enough, opening day he'd be out there catching those trout. But the the academy was a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_07 1:16:08

Um I bet so. Never realized they had forestry in that 16,000 acres, and y'all were actively managing wildlife way back then.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:16

You know, there's a lot of military installations in the country that do have forestry programs and hunting programs, quite a few of them. Um but uh it was it was just just a ton of fun. I met a lot of fun people. I'll tell you one funny story, we had a nursery there where uh they were were eating the hell out of it, and they were they were coming from another from off the West Point property from another forest, and they were eating all the stuff. And my boss said, uh, we gotta get rid of those damn beer. He was in deer, he's in charge of roads and grounds. And he said, I want you to go out there and and shoot those things. They try everything, you know, all kinds of anti-deer stuff. And I'm thinking, I don't want to shoot those deer, are you kidding me? So he said, I'll get you a tag for a uh permit from the state, because I was federal, and the state has jurisdiction over the deer. And um interestingly, the forest next to it was called Black Rock Forest, owned by Harvard University, and it was something like 9,000 acres or so. And and I grew up there. I grew up 10 miles away from West Point, and I used to hunt the Black Rock, and I was still a member. And if my buddies found out that I was shooting their deer at West Point, I'd have been hung. But I didn't want to do it anyway, so so the appointed nightcomes, and I had already scoped it out. There was two nice bucks and a bunch of those. I think there were 11 of them. So I drove in, and when you go into West Point back in those days, before 901, um, there was a little little building, and there was always two MPs there, and they just they were just there for for whatever, but they'd wave everybody in. They wouldn't even talk to you. So, oh, 24 hours a day. So I drive up to the gate, and I said to the MP, I said, Sir, I'm uh I'm a post-forester, and and you're gonna hear some shooting here in a little while because I gotta shoot some deer over at the nursery. He said, Did you clear this with the provost marshal? I said, No, I have it. I got to thinking, oh man, this might turn out in my favor after all. So he said, Hold on a second. So he goes inside the little building and calls the provost marshal, and he comes back. He said, The provost marshal says, You ain't shooting any freaking deer on this post to get out of here. So that was it. But he was he was you know, he was the top cop.

SPEAKER_07 1:18:41

Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:41

But anyway, he saved my life. So about that.

SPEAKER_07 1:18:45

Didn't have to shoot you deer. That's a good question, Lane. Well, thank you. Really interesting thing. You got another one? Uh no. Yeah, I was listening to that one.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:52

What about you, Dud? Uh, you know, I was thinking like, you know, you you've been on so many cool adventures, but you know, uh, I know you said you enjoy hunting elk, but after all these years, uh is there are there any other activities that you just you know you gotta participate in every year?

SPEAKER_01 1:19:13

Well, I do a lot of stuff with veterans. I've probably I've probably been involved in seven, eight foundations, and I was a president of Alaska's Healing Arts for four or five years, and and we take combat injured veterans on hunts all over the place. We have had a big one in South Carolina. We take uh 35 or 40 people in a group, but I've taken some guys right out of Walter Reed with no legs. Uh I took uh two guys to Africa. And uh in fact, on my TV show, I had a special series of just hunting with uh with veterans. So that's been that's been a big deal. And every year I get involved in an analoge punt here with an outfit called Hunting with Heroes. It's a Wyoming-based outfit where you can actually donate your your tags to the organization, and then they can give them to these veterans who uh who uh apply for the tag. So that's been a big part of my life, and uh I've always enjoyed doing that. I still do it. That sounds fulfilling.

SPEAKER_06 1:20:13

Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah, yeah, it sure does.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:15

Yeah, it is. I've I've heard those guys say things that uh bring tears tears to your eyes, like, you know, I had a gun in my mouth and I went on this hunt, and I'm still hearing from those guys are doing fine. Wow. Uh so that kind of that kind of motivates you. But other than that, um one of my big hobbies is crawfishing. Believe it or not, here in Wyoming and all the northern states, crawfish are crazy. I catch a couple thousand a year, and uh I freeze them up and eat them all year long, so I'm always in the summertime.

SPEAKER_05 1:20:47

Huh.

SPEAKER_07 1:20:50

I don't know, think about that.

SPEAKER_05 1:20:51

Yeah, uh way further south of you, but I I hear like in Arizona, some of those big lakes, you can just wear the crawfish out and they're you know they're invasive. Right. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:02

Yeah, some are invasive, yeah. But I enjoy everything. I I did a lot of black bear hunting. Elk hunting has been my most favorite always. I've written seven books on elk hunting and stuff, and I just love the animals. I love being out there. I've been active for the elk foundation for 40 years, uh, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. But I like to hunt black bears. Um I've hunted all the four species of sheep. But um I I I think antelope would be kind of a favorite because it's wide open country. Uh, most of it's public BLM land. You don't have to have any permission. Lots of roads, good access, and they're just fun to hunt. Um mule deer, whitales, believe it or not, Wyoming has a hell of a lot of white tails. Um we've got some right here in in Park County, and they live literally along the river corridors, they never leave. But our mule deer here are we're we live in a classic migration area. There's about 1,500 mulies. And every one of them, every one, but maybe a half a dozen will leave here around the last of May, and they 98%, according to GPS collars from the biologists, 98% go into Yellowstone Park in summer. And in the fall, around late September, the valley fills up with with uh with mules, but the whitetails they put, they just don't migrate. So, but I love it all. You know, I rabbits, quail, pheasants. I I usually make a journey up to South Dakota every year for pheasants. Um there's nothing much I haven't hunted in the in the lower 48. But uh, and you know, when you're writing for a living about hunting, you've got to do that stuff. You know, um, you can't just write about cottontails in your backyard and stuff. You've got to get out there and and write stories that readers can enjoy vicariously because maybe they can't go to Africa or Argentina or whatever, you know.

SPEAKER_08 1:23:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:01

So I'm very I'm very blessed, I'm very very humbled by it all.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:05

So that's awesome. You know, you you've gotten to do so much, and you know, you you thought about catching crawfish in your backyard. Yeah. That's so cool. So cool.

SPEAKER_06 1:23:15

So when we were we were talking about this, I told you I was gonna ask you if you could tell your favorite hunting story. You may have already told it to us, but is there one that kind of stands out? It's like, boy, this is my this is my best story.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:29

Well, like I said, that one that I hunted in the Mississippi, um, that was about probably the most touching story. But my favorite hunts are with my kids. Uh I've got three girls and a boy, and they all hunt. They've all hunting all taking alpha deer. And uh every time I take take them out on their first ever trip, it was I'd have to apologize because I couldn't see very well because the wind was blowing something in my eyes, you know. So they were they were my favorite. But I think I always enjoyed hunts where you can kind of, you know, you guys have been probably to lodges where you almost have to take your boots off to go in and you know, you get hors-terves and all that stuff. And I've always enjoyed being in an old tent and uh in the wilderness area not having and of course in a real wilderness area, you can't have any kind of uh uh gasoline engine, so that rules out chainsaws and generators. But uh when I think about it, I think my most my most favorite hunt was the those hunts up in that Portland canal I mentioned where uh where Hank and I were gonna go. Um after Bob was killed on that plane, his son Bobby Jr. had hunts in camp was a 70-foot boat. And we we had so much fun. I went up with I went up there probably four or five times. And we h we always hauled a couple 16-foot skiffs behind the boat, and we would be hunting those bears uh that were coming down to the to the uh to the tidal grass. But we just did whatever we wanted. When the tide was high, we didn't see any bears, so we deep jig for halibut, we'd throw out traps for giant prawns and shrimp, dungeon-esque crabs, we fish for salmon, and we just kind of we just kind of enjoyed it all. The meals were great, and we cooked it all ourselves, and and it was so beautiful. We never saw another soul up there. And I remember one time when we killed a bear, we would take all the all the edible meat off of it, and then we take the carcass up on shore where we were gonna spend the night with the boat, and we put it up where we could see it from the boat. And I remember one time there were 17 different wild eagles that had come in and stripped that carcass to nothing in about two hours. But it was just it was just fun. And uh so that was probably my most memorable.

SPEAKER_06 1:25:52

Yeah, it sounded like a pretty part of the world, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:25:55

Hey, so look, let's do this. Uh, Mr. Jim, we've got a trivia question for you. And I'm not sure you'll have we'll have to wait until after the trivia question before we can figure out what it is you that you might win out of this deal. But uh our trivia is brought to you, and I've noticed that you're a fan of boiled peanuts. Our trivia is brought to you us by the peanut patch. They're uh they make these boiled peanuts that you can find in any convenience store because you probably see them when you're traveling around. They're available in Walmart, Kroger's, they're great everywhere. That's great. They're that he eats them out there in one of them.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:27

It's like my favorite, you know, you have an unsuccessful or a successful turkey hunt, you know, you go and get some of those things and eat them while you're driving home and thinking about what you're gonna do with the rest of your day.

SPEAKER_07 1:26:40

Yeah, have them on the fishing boat too.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:43

You know, it's funny. A couple days ago, um, I bought some peanuts from Walmart, uh, the peanut patch.

SPEAKER_07 1:26:50

That's them.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:51

Yeah, I know. And and Bumperie put a like on my page and uh and we got to talk the next day. He said, by the way, he said Peanut Patch is one of our sponsors. You were eating them yesterday. I said, Yeah, I was here at Walmart. Is that was that the trivia question?

SPEAKER_06 1:27:06

Uh no, that is not the trivia. How many peanuts are in the came in a peanut? Let's go, Mitchell.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:13

Well, I pulled a user review and I got it off the uh YouTube, mainly because it mentioned the YouTube, at CatchULaterOutdoors. Great video as always. Keep up the great work. God bless y'all.

SPEAKER_06 1:27:28

How about that?

SPEAKER_00 1:27:29

Wow, thank you for the great video, so you can watch this on YouTube as well. Look at that.

SPEAKER_06 1:27:35

That got one at Newcomb Blind. We'll get that sent right out to him. You will need to get back in touch.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:40

Uh email us, reach back out on YouTube, and we will send it your way.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:44

That's awesome. Uh-huh. Um, I ran into somebody that met Pat Newcomb at the turkey tailgate and got one of his chairs. And he said that thing is a game changer. Yeah. They are nice.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:57

What is one of two living things they cause the most human deaths per year? So, what living thing causes the most human deaths per year? What living thing causes?

SPEAKER_03 1:28:10

You asking me?

SPEAKER_00 1:28:11

Yes.

SPEAKER_06 1:28:12

Yes, sir. And there's two things that will take one. If you get one of them, you'll win. Let's say mosquitoes. Oh my goodness, we got a bad. How about that? Does anybody know the other one?

SPEAKER_02 1:28:29

Uh bee's would it be bees?

SPEAKER_06 1:28:33

No, sir. No, sir. No. Uh no, sir. Something that something that you don't like. Uh, it's makes it. That's right. Uh, Mr. Jim, you just want some boiled peanuts. We'll get those stuff right out there to you. Yeah, we've got to send them some. How about that? Mosquitoes, though, evidently are a problem in something like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:53

Yeah, they uh a lot of people die from malaria every year in these mosquito-infested areas, and it's uh it's a serious problem.

SPEAKER_07 1:29:00

I thought I had it one time at the dummy line. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:29:04

You know, being from the south, uh, everybody in the south that doesn't travel much just assumes mosquitoes are the worst in the south. But that is so far from the truth.

SPEAKER_07 1:29:14

No, Alaska's the worst place I've ever been.

SPEAKER_05 1:29:17

It's like the furthest north you go.

SPEAKER_07 1:29:19

They're like birds up there. You can't breathe. You got to put something over your mouth.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:23

Yeah. My wife and I went on our honeymoon up in northern Quebec for cat caribou, and uh, I'll tell you what, the mosquitoes in the black five are so bad, but I've understood that from biologists that mosquitoes can be so bad they can literally suck the blood out of a caribou and kill it.

SPEAKER_08 1:29:38

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:39

I saw a picture of a caribou. Um it was alive, and there were so many mosquitoes on its head, they were just packed, and you couldn't barely make out the silhouette of that animal because there were so many of them. And you know it's funny because it's so cold up there, and it's all tundra. How the hell do they survive the winter is what they do?

SPEAKER_06 1:29:57

You'd think they'd freeze.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:59

So the stats on here say mosquitoes roughly kill 760,000 people per year, snakes at 100,000, dogs at 40,000, and then surprisingly, freshwater snails at 14,000.

SPEAKER_06 1:30:14

Really? I haven't heard that. I didn't know going caribou hunting was a honeymoon option. Did you, Lenny? It wasn't for me. And look, Mr. Jim, his wife's name is Madonna. How many people I've I've never met anybody named Madonna before.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:31

He just keeps getting higher on the list right there. He's a unicorn.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:36

Let me tell you a quick story about that. Uh, we were gonna actually go fishing. She was gonna fish and I was gonna have a caribou. And I met this guy who owned Safari Nordica at one of the shows. Madonna used to run the expo shows on the West Coast. She was a vice president of big cities uh in California, Seattle, Portland, but that's where I met her. But anyway, I met an exhibitor there, and he was one of the biggest outfitters in the country. He took up something like 2,000 caribou hunters in Quebec in a place called um uh I can't remember. Anyway, we were sitting there one time after dinner, and I uh he introduced himself to me, and we got arguing about uh Bunacrockets uh fair chase stuff, and he said, How come you Americans won't shoot a swimming caribou? I said, Because it's not ethical, you know, it can't get away, and it's it's not part of the fair chase sentence of the Bunacrock Club. So we started arguing back and forth, and then we made up, and uh, I happened to mention that Madonna and I were gonna go hunting on our honeyboard. She said, Why don't you come up and hunt with us? So I said, Well, sure, okay. So, like I said, she was intending on fishing, so we were building out a log home here, and we were working one day. And she says, You know, maybe I'd like to hunt also. Now, she'd been around hunters for 20 years during her career in the expo because you know there were thousands of exhibitors. They like they had shows in the kingdom when the kingdom was there. But anyway, I said, Well, okay. She said, Well, I don't know how I'll feel I feel if I kill an animal. I said, All right, let's go. So I said, uh, jump in the truck. I got my 22250 and went out to a prairie dog town. And there's a prairie dog sitting there on a hill, and I got out with the shooting sticks, and I said, There he is. So she kills that thing with one shot. I said, Holy smokes. And she said, I think I can kill a caribou.

SPEAKER_04 1:32:32

Didn't leave long. And the rest is history.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:35

We just got two bulls. Yep, it's one of the most fascinating northern lights, but I'm fortunate that I have taken all five subspecies of caribou. And I just I I love the Inuits. I love the Inuits. I've hunted with them five hundred muskox a couple times. And what a culture. Those people are such survivalists. I just can't get over how they how they can tolerate that stuff and still enjoy it. And it's wonderful.

SPEAKER_06 1:32:59

You know, cu uh with the guy that you're talking about, it wouldn't happen to have been Jack Hume.

unknown 1:33:03

It.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:04

No, but I knew Jack.

SPEAKER_06 1:33:06

Yeah, so cousin and I, you're many years ago, hunted whatever that herd was up there. I can't remember it was three different ones.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:14

I forget which one it was.

SPEAKER_06 1:33:15

But that guy, he was taking lots of hunters, hundreds of hunters every year.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:20

His name was this guy's name was Henry Poopart, and we hunted at a Kuac, which used to be called another name, but they changed it to an Indian name called Koojuac.

SPEAKER_06 1:33:29

But you know, you can't hunt the where we hunted, they don't hunt those caribou anymore.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:33

They know, they're basically gone. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:33:36

Not a thing anymore.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:38

No. Now New York.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:41

Yeah. Newfoundland has still some caribou. Those are the woodland subspecies and uh also a great moose population. I was the first outfit that I ever went on when I was in my twenties and went to Newfoundland and got a moose. But yeah, the caribou, well, they're not suffering everywhere, but a lot of places they are.

SPEAKER_06 1:33:58

Yeah, they sure are. Hate that. Well, I tell you what, guys, Mr. Jim Zumbo's got 20 different books. You could, yeah, I'm sure you can go to just Google Jim Zumbo, and there's probably a book you'd be interested in that he has written. There's a lot of good stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:12

What's the web called? It's called Jim Zumbo.com. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:16

And in fact, I've got a couple of books right here.

SPEAKER_07 1:34:20

Look at there.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:21

Can you see that one? Yeah, we can. The heck with moose hunting. Yeah. Okay, and then I've got The Heck with Deer Hunting. And I've got The Heck with Elk Hunting. And I've got How to Get an Easy Elk.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:34

Now those are the only books I've got available now that rest are out of out of print. But basically they're the Hack books are about there's like 30 chapters, and each chapter is a story of one of my crazy hunts. A lot of those stories have not been printed before. So it's a compilation of my hunts. So if anybody wants one, you can just go to jimzumbo.com and order it from there. But uh so yeah, it's it's been fun writing those things.

SPEAKER_06 1:34:58

So Laney, are you ordering a book right now? That's exactly what I mean. I figured that's exactly what you're doing. Well, Mr. Zumbo, we have thoroughly enjoyed this. Well, so have I. Well, um, I mean, what you know, when I I look at what all you've done during your career, just what a life well lived, Lane. Oh, no doubt about it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:35:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:35:18

It makes you humble. It does. Well, you know, we've all made our living doing this, blah, blah, blah. And you meet somebody like him. And I used to feel like that around him, Judd Cooney, people like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:27

Oh, gosh, yeah. Judd's still going strong. He lives right when it.

SPEAKER_04 1:35:31

Yeah. You you guys, you guys make us all humble and uh proud to know you.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:37

I'm happy to know you guys too. So maybe we'll meet in the woods sometime.

SPEAKER_07 1:35:41

That's right. We'll do that again for sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:43

If you ever come up, if you're ever in the Cody area, give me a buzz, and seriously, and I'll show you around.

SPEAKER_07 1:35:48

Absolutely. Eat some crawfish. Yeah, oh thank you. That's right.

SPEAKER_06 1:35:55

Yeah, that sounds good. Well, thank you so much. And uh, it's been a pleasure to talk to you. Has anybody else got anything else we can? I think we're that that kind of covers it up.

SPEAKER_04 1:36:03

No, thank you for what you do. Appreciate your time because it's very valuable.

SPEAKER_06 1:36:07

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:08

Appreciate your time. Yes, sir.

SPEAKER_06 1:36:10

And and tell uh Madonna, thank you for helping with uh uh the IT advice there to get you.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:15

She was a chief She was a chief engineer. Are you kidding? Holy smokes, I would be lost without her.

SPEAKER_05 1:36:21

No doubt. Wouldn't we all? I don't even know which remote to use anymore. Don't either. All right, guys. Why don't you say goodbye, Dudley?

SPEAKER_06 1:36:29

Goodbye, Dudley. Get us out of here, Mitchell.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:31

Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of the Gamekeeper Podcast. And be sure to tune in again. Subscribe to Game Keeper Farming for Wildlife magazine, and don't miss the Mosteo Properties Fistful of Dirt podcast with my good buddy, Ronnie Cutter.