Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your guide to the whitetail woods, presented by First Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your.
Host, Mark Kenyon, Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. This week on the show, I am joined by Clay Newcombe to discuss the long hunters of the eighteenth century, such as Daniel Boone and what we modern day deer hunters can learn from them. All right, welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by First Light
in their Camo for Conservation initiative. I think you know this by now, but if not, a portion of every sale of First Light's whitetail cameo pattern it's called Specter portion of every sale of that stuff goes to the National Deer Association to help them do good things for deer, deer hunters, deer habitat. I love it, so thank you First Light. And with that said, today's podcast is a
good one. We are looking back in history. We're going to look at our predecessors, the deer hunters that in many ways established a foundation for white tailed deer hunting culture. In America. We're talking on the buddy Clay Newcombe. He recently had a collaboration with Steve Vanella released a new Meat Eater audiobook called The Long Hunters seventeen sixty one through seventeen seventy five. This book, this audiobook is what
it is. It details the story of folks like Daniel Boone and how these folks traveled across the first Far West, the first Frontier and developed a livelihood off of hunting for whitetail deer. And so today I want to bring Clay on to talk about that history, toalk a little bit about Boone and the other guys like him that I think we have now romanticized and developed a set of mythologies around these first wilderness hunters that so many of us like to dream about and imagine living their lives.
What can we learn from these guys? What can we learn from their hunting exploits. What can someone like Daniel Boone teach us about deer hunting? Also, what can they teach us about how to better enjoy the experience and adventure of hunting? And not only that, what can we learn from these guys and the mistakes that they might have made when it came to overexploiting a resource over exploiting a population of wildlife. There's a lot here to unpack.
It's a great audiobook that Clay and Steve just released. I hope you'll check it out. Like I said, it's called The Long Hunters seventeen sixty one through seventeen seventy five. We're going to talk about that and a whole bunch more here on the show with my buddy Clay. I want to give you two quick ups. Number one, we do still have some of our new Wired to Hunt hats over on the med Eater's store. Not wearing one right now, but I showed you guys a couple weeks ago.
It's got that really cool white tail illustration on the front says wired to Hunt on the side of the crown, and they're in like a charcoal gray or tan color
right now. So going over to the meat Eater's store if you've been wanting one of those, And while you're there, I just saw we do still have a few copies of my book That Wild Country and Epic Journey through the past, present and future of America's public lands, and we've got a few more signed copies of that book available on the store as well, So if you're interested in either of those, you can go to the meat
Eater dot com. And if you are not interested in those things, or if you've already got a couple of your own, then just tune in for the rest of my conversation with mister Clay Nukem. All right here with me now is my pal and the one and only mister Clay Nukem. Welcome back to the show. Bude, Hey, Mark, great to be here, man, man, I appreciate you getting up early to do this. I know it's a cold beginning of the day, so thank you.
Negative six is about as cold as it gets around here. That's what it is right now.
How do arc what do you guys call yourselves? Arkansas? Kansas? That's it. How do our Kansans handle this contemperature?
Shut down everything possible and just hunker downy I love it, man.
So you're in hibernation mode.
Yeah, A lot of the schools have been canceled and even business is closed. But we have we have snow too, and so the you know, we just don't have the infrastructure for snow removal, like a lot of the northern States where you get this kind of stuff all the time.
Yeah, you hear these You hear these nightmare stories about like what happens in Texas when they get a little bit of sleep. Is it kind of like that? It really? Yeah?
Oh yeah it is.
In northwest Arkansas, we're a little bit more used to it, maybe have a little bit more infrastructure. We get snow every year, but not usually extended periods of snow. But uh, I think I think the most unique thing about this is just the temperature, just like very cold temperatures for here.
Which is good.
I was talking to a farmer the other day and he said, it keeps the keeps everything honest by getting this cold, you know, with warming trends and everything keeps the fire ants out, and that's true, keeps the keeps the riff raff invasives out well.
And like we were talking about before we started recording, it's it's kind of nice just to feel those extremes every once in a while and just remember, like, all right, nature is a force. There's something a little bit stronger than us out there and going outside. I was just telling you, I went for run the other day and this stuff and it was like negative twenty five wind chill, and you just have to kind of think, all right,
do I have the right clothes on? Am I? How long can I be out there without this getting gnarly? You know, just that kind of little bit of humbling of you in the face of nature.
I like, so oh it makes me think of you know what we're about to talk about, the Long Hunters, and even going back to just our human ancestors that really had to take all this stuff in the face. I mean, it's mind boggling to me that people could survive without the modern technologies we have.
That truly is Yeah, that's so true. So you perfect segue to what I wanted to pull you on here today to talk about, which is this new book that you collaborated on with mister Steven Ranella, The Long Hunters. But before we get into the book itself, you kinda wrapped up a pseudo long hunt maybe you wouldn't call it that, but a long ish hunt yourself going down the Mississippi River. How long were you guys doing that adventure for?
So we set out from Memphis on January the third, and we rode two hundred and fifty miles down the Mississippi River to south of Greenville and hunted and we stayed in the same place for a week. Originally, the idea for the film was that we were going to stop multiple places and hunt here and hunt there, and and we had to reschedule the trip one time because of illness of a crew member, and when we put the hunt back together for the second time, we pretty
much just had one place we could hunt. So we rode two hundred and fifty miles down the river to our camp, which was a big modern camp, I mean a nice camp.
And no.
We did a podcast series back in the summer on the Mississippi River, a four part series, and it was fascinating to me. It was it was I didn't know a lot about the Mississippi really, and honestly, a lot of people don't. I mean even people that live on the banks of it don't. I find most of them don't really know the deeper history of the river. And I set out a year ago to about two years ago, like, man,
I need to know about this river. And we did this big research project and podcast and when I did that, I said, I want to go down the Mississippi and kind of the sweet spot for Mississippi wilderness quote unquote
is from Memphis to Vicksburg. And I mean truly, aside from river improvements by the Core Channel improvements by the corp of Engineers, the river is not that much different than it would have been visually from what Mark Twain and what Davy Crockett and what all these, you know, like every American hero of old times went down and saw, I mean, the river's pretty wild, and so it was
a really unique, unique had some great deer hunting. Mark Holey cow that part of Mississippi's is probably it's got to be some of my favorite deer hunting of all time.
And it wasn't. This is the famed Delta deer hunting down there, right, We.
Got to yeah, oh yeah, yeah.
I mean, so we hunted the first week of January basically, and it was it would have been akin to hunting the last week of November. The rut is really December, mid December through mid January. So I mean we were absolutely seeing bucks chasing bucks locked down with those bucks cruising. I mean, it was really neat and they saw Brenton got a good one. He did, he did, he he killed an ice. You know, we didn't score it, but one hundred and thirty to one hundred and thirty five minutes for sure.
And I was bow hunting.
If if I'd carried a rifle, which it was legal to carry, I would have killed a real nice buck the first first day I was there. Wow, But the but I was, I loved to bow hunt there. I killed two dos and had the time of my life doing it.
You know, that's great. So you spend all this time researching, doing the podcast series, learning about the Mississippi River and the history of that place, and then you got to float down the river and see it all. What was that like like when you go down two hundred and fifty miles down the river through this as close to wilderness as you can get at Corridor were the whole time are you are you able to be in the present or the whole time when you're going on that journey?
Are you thinking about this thing you learned about and that thing you learned about and all that?
Like?
What does that look like for you after getting that context?
It was both things.
The primary thing, though, and I think the thing that I was after was to just to kind of confront and experience the River, and when you're on the Mississippi River, the primary thing on your mind is being safe. I mean, it's a big, wooly river, and all you hear people talk about that are on it a lot is how dangerous it is and how you just have to be on your toes all the time. I am not an
experienced riverman. Brent Reeves is Brent spent twenty six years as a duck guide, partly on the Arkansas River, so he was used to navigating big rivers. He's the only reason that I was confident in taking on the trip. But that being said, I drove the boat probably two hundred of the two hundred and fifty miles. Barge traffic is a big problem.
I mean, that's.
The biggest challenge, probably because you have these huge, I mean just unbelievably big barges pushing as many as eighty eighty containers down the river create huge wakes. But also you have to stay inside the channel, which is which is marked. But uh So, to answer your question, I think I probably was dealing with the same things that anyone would have at any time. You know, there's a Mark Twain wrote a famous book called The Mississippi river.
And and you know, he was a cub pilot, meaning he was second in command of a steamboat going up and down the river for several years. And he has he devoted well I've heard it said in some of America's Greatest pros, but he devoted several chapters to talking about navigating the Mississippi River. And it's just fascinating all the things. And what he had to do was vastly more difficult than what we had to do because of
modern technology. So I think I was confronting a fear, you know, overcoming inside of riding down that river.
Truly was.
But also I was thinking about Davy Crockett was about right here when he crashed a boat just south of Memphis. I was thinking about the flood, the flood pulse.
Of the river.
Which that's what makes the Mississippi River so unique among rivers in the world is that we have a thousand mile stretch of this category of river in size that there are no dams, which the only river that has
that long of a stretch damless stretches the Amazon. All the other big rivers of the world have been dammed, So that creates a natural flood pulse because of the levees, which the eleven hundred miles of levees on the Mississippi River is the greatest civil engineering feet really arguably in American history. And because of those levees, the flood pulse of the river is natural, like it allows the water
to rise and that creates an incredible fishery. I mean, yeah, I just could nerd out on it and just loved it. But I'm a terrestrial man, like I'm I'm from the mountains. I'm least comfortable on water, and that's kind of why I wanted to do it. And man, it was no joke doing it in the winter.
Holy cow.
Originally we were doing it in November and then that part of the world November it's pretty mild, river would be low, temperatures would be you know, probably even getting into the sixties and seventies. We did it in January. It was cold and it rained and it was a lot of fun. Much we did what you.
Kind of did here, studying up, researching, exploring the history of the Mississippi and then going and experiencing it. Is kind of analogous to what you've got here with the Long Hunter book, in which someone can read that, listen to this book, experience the history, and then go out in deer hunt themselves. And I'm wondering if in learning the history of our white tail hunting predecessors, if that in some way changes our experience or can change our
experience now today as modern day whitetail hunters. That's a question I have. Do you think that is something that happens? Like, how does a historical perspective change our present day experience? Why is this kind of historical perspective maybe important?
You nailed it, Mark, when this book was being researched, as the details of what we talked about just kind of unfolded, man, I was like, this book is foundational to every American deer hunter, and you wouldn't think it. I mean, you wouldn't think the guy down the road that deer hunts one weekend the year, and.
You know, why would this be relevant to him?
How would this be relevant to to some of the.
Guys that we know that our.
Highly managing land for killing five plus your old white tails with big antlers, every piece of every single piece of the whitetail world that we love today, you can trace back to parts of this story of the American
deer skin trade. You know, if an alien came from another planet and showed up on Earth and he saw Mark Kenyon pass up a whatever kind of deer and shoot this other deer with bigger antlers and be thrilled about it, the alien would be like, what, why didn't he just shoot the one that came by first, so he didn't have to sit there for that long. He's after the meat, he's after the hide, he's after you know,
his horns literally do nothing. You know that that assignment of cultural value goes goes back deep in history, and that doesn't necessarily go to the deer skin trade, but it spans it.
That was a step after the deer skin trade.
You know that the deer were initially sought after for their hides because of a global demand. And we talk extensively about that in the book. Where did this demand come from? Who was using deer skins?
And so there was this value on the deer.
And then later as sport hunting arose, that that value, that legacy of the long hunters, translated into people trying to kill big bucks. You know, we were no longer trying to kill three hundred and fifty deer a year or five hundred deer a year, and it kind of morphed into this this sport hunting where we would culturally value a bigger antler buck. But really the value of that deer really started back during that time.
But no, I think it.
No.
I've heard some great quotes on why history is important, and.
History just adds so many dimensions to the present.
I mean, you to just show up and do what we do and be a human and not have any understanding of history is really in a way. I mean, I personally feel like it's kind of irresponsible. And I don't say that from like a high, high and lifted up place of thinking that I do.
I'm not a trained historian.
A lot of the stuff that I'm researching and learning i'm learning for the first time as an adult. I mean, it's not like I just you're just born knowing stuff. But every time I research something like the Mississippi River or this this the long Hunter stuff, I'm like, holy cow, I cannot believe that I didn't know this before. It seems it's Yeah, that's the way it feels to me.
It's like this almost seems irresponsible that I didn't know this stuff, and that's what's so fascinating and fun about it. And yeah, the research that was done on this book, it was never before compiled data. I'm not saying that people didn't know this data, but nothing has remotely been put together. Where we were taking all this information, you would have found bits and pieces of this information and uncountable sources. So yeah, it's not like we learned something
that was never known. We absolutely put together information that was never compiled together. So in that six hours of The Long Hunter's Book, you'll hear information that you just couldn't find anywhere else, which which is really neat and and you got to give credit to Steve Ranella and Randall Williams.
You know, it was Steve's Steve was the it was his idea.
Basically, most of historical hunting practices were covered by historians and academics that were not hunters, and so they didn't they often did not answer the questions that you and I would have. And we learned about a boon on a long hunt and how he processed deer, and where he hunted and why he hunted, and what he was looking for and what the deer we're eating and so
there's you know, you know what I'm talking about. But if you read academic literature, it's like you're reading something that yeat has the it has details, it has important stuff, but it is not from someone that is asking the right questions for people like us. And so that's what Steve wanted to do, is he said, Hey, let's answer the questions that we've we're all interested in and make
a book like that. So the Angle was coming from a different place, and and it wasn't necessarily built four Hunters. Anybody could could listen to it and be entertained. It's not per se made four Hunters, but that was the mentalities to go deeper into it.
So for someone who doesn't have the who hasn't listened to the book yet, let's just lay out a very cliff notes explanation here of just who we're talking about here in the first place. So give me your cliff notes on who the Long Hunters were, and then what this experience that they would go out and have would look like, just to give us like a starting point for a few of these conversations.
So the name the Long Hunters was pulled from the literature and in this back in their day, they were called just by a few people, often, as history does, just kind of tag onto somebody the name long hunters. So and the long Hunt described men people groups that went into the woods and stayed for extending periods of time. The most famous long Hunt was Boon's two year long Hunt into Kentucky, when he stayed for two years away from home in Kentucky. The book is titled The Long
Hunters seventeen six sixty one to seventeen seventy five. There was basically a fourteen year period that was the heyday of what would become America's story of the Long Hunters. They weren't Americans at that time. There was no America. It was the British Colonies. And the British Colonies were divided by a geopolitical border of the Appalachian Mountains. So there's the third imagine. The thirteen colonies on the East coast and then the Appalachian Mountains, which created a border
beyond the Appalachian Mountains was not America. It was not the British Colonies. It was owned by Native American tribes. It was owned by the Shawnese and all the tribes in different places. But It was also claimed by the French, Spanish, and the long hunters were people that were not trying to seek glory. They were not trying to become the legendary forefathers of modern American hunters. They were guys destitute
trying to make a living. And the global deer skin trade, which was primarily based out of England, there was a high demand for deer skin. And everybody knows I got a pair of deer skin gloves right here on my desk. Deer skin is incredibly supple and thin and makes incredible garments like cow leather would be as much thicker, tougher, and you know, you don't see that many people wearing cow leather like as an on skin garment. But the deer skin was compared to the denim. It was the
denim of the seventeen hundreds. It was used that often. This global demand. It was also it was just like the perfect storm. During that time, there was also bovine disease that had struck down in Europe and there was a leather shortage, and so they were trying to find ways to extract resource from the colonies. They had these colonies, and you know what way can we extract resource man the deer skin trade. And prior to that, as early as the early seventeen hundreds, the French and the English
were employing Native American tribes heavily in deer skin. So by the time our you know, the what would become this mythological group of we see them as Americans. We see Boone and Casper Mansker and Simon Kent, Simon Kenton, all these guys as Americans. By the time they showed up, Native Americans had been trading deer skins for seventy years.
But these guys would, out of destitute financial situations, would trespass into primarily Kentucky, but western eastern Tennessee Ohio, and they would go on long hunts and gather deer skins for a season. And when they would when they would gather enough bounty, they would bring the hides back across the Appalachian Mountains, often often through the Cumberland Gap. The most some of the most famous long hunts started and
ended at the Cumberland Gap. People going through it, going on long hunts, coming back over and selling their hides. And it's easy to see why they could do it when you understand the finances of it, they could make a hefty.
Living in three or four months.
So these guys that had no money, no land, no way to make a living. They weren't shopkeepers, they weren't manufacturers, they weren't they had no profession per se. They could go and I would equate it to they could in three or four months make eighty or ninety thousand dollars, which they didn't make that much, but in today's world like they could make a pretty good living. And so they were willing to risk everything to do that. And so they trespassed into land they weren't supposed to be.
They were often killed, got in skirmishes with Native Americans, had their stuff stolen. I mean some of the most the wildest stories are a boone and many many others. But you know, they would have worked a whole winter, and you know, you just to get all these hides, and then on their way back, you know, Native Americans show up, take all their hides, and all their work is just at their back to zero.
You know.
But they were the ones trespassing in the first place. So we made it real clear about that that it's we have mythologized these guys into heroes, But I mean, really they were kind of just normal dudes. Now, what what I can respect and marvel at is the physical hardships that they endured and then truly what they would have known. It'd be interesting to put a Daniel Boone in Michigan with you Mark today and just be like, hey, Daniel, go see if you can kill a big buck?
You know?
Yeah, and you know, would he be able to? I don't know.
I mean I know he would certainly, but would you with what you know about deer movement and and and how to look at the land and you know, but certainly these guys for what they were after, for what they were doing, they would have been as skilled as anybody on the earth at doing their job.
You know.
Yeah, And so is Daniel Boone. Still, you correct me if I'm wrong, But I think it's fair to say that Daniel Boone would be your favorite character within this era. Maybe it seems like you've talked about in your podcast series, he was the one that maybe stood out above all else. But if I'm wrong on that, correct me. But my follow up to that is, if that's true, who is one other long Hunter from this era other than Boone? That the rest of us should know because we all
know Boone, we all know Crockett. Who's someone else that you guys talk about in this book that really deserves some recognition.
Well, Boone is maybe the most fascinating part of this And in Steve's section, I think he did a really good job of describing We've got no choice but to love Boone because in the book Steve described it as he said, imagine a stage and it's black, and a spotlight shut suddenly turns on, and the spotlight is illuminating Boone. But the stage is full of people. It's full of people potentially of equal exploits, of equal skill, with equal stories and lives. But the one that we can see
is Boone. And as the spotlight fades out from its epicenter, you can see you can see part of the guy that's standing next to him, you can see the guy next to him fairly well. With the guy next to that guy you can hardly see, and it fades into blackness, like that's Boone.
For whatever reason, we just know so much about Boone.
It was it had to do with him getting famous at just the right time, and we know exponentially more about Boone than any other long Hunter. But uh, Casper Mansker is probably is a guy we talk a lot about in the book. And it's kind of wild, how I mean, we know a lot about the guy, but not even remotely what we know about Boone. And it Steve did a good job of talking, kind of leveling
the plan field and saying, we know about Boone. It's hard to think this book isn't about Boone, but he that there were countless others that were that were like him. We just like have two or three sentences about that. You know, you see you start putting the dots together and you see their names mentioned here and here and
here and here, But there's just very little. But I would say, uh, Casper Mansker, Simon Kenton, Uh, the Walling Brothers, there were there were many others, and we talked about those guys in the book.
Is there anything about Mansker that stands out that makes him interesting? There's one story I remember here in the beginning of the book that was just an an interesting one about him crossing paths with Boone. But uh, but why do you bring up Mansker? What about him was of interest to you?
You know, Mark, I told you this you're you're, you're, you're pinning me down here.
Uh, it's been a while since i've you know, these books come out and then you, uh, you kind of forget about them.
And and I.
Actually was a little too fearful to listen to the audio book after we recorded.
It turned out, good man, you should listen.
You're catching me with my with my you know, well.
Let me tell you my favorite story then about man.
That's what Mark, Why don't you tell me your favorite.
Story about I just liked this story about he was he was out there on a long hunt himself, somewhere in Kentucky, I guess it was. And he had been on a hunt and he was out there stalking a critter or searching for a deer, I'm sure, and he heard this sound, this strange sound that did not make sense to him. He couldn't he couldn't put a finger on what the sing was he was hearing because it was so outside of the norm of what he would
typically hear when he's out here hunting. And so he starts approaching the sound, and the closer and closer he gets, he realizes it's it's a human. And then he realizes it's someone singing, and he gets out through the brush and then there's someone lying down on his back, singing out loud. And the person lying on his back singing out loud in the middle of the Kentucky Wilderness is Daniel Boone. I mean, what an interesting uh colliding of the world's.
There, Kay Bark, your favorite story about Casper Mansker is ultimately about Boone?
That is that illustrates your original point perfectly.
Yeah. Yeah, there was a lot of there's a lot of that story. There's a lot of speculation about Uh. Robert Morgan, the one of Boone's, my favorite Boone biographer, he thinks this is just him analyzing what he's learned about Boone and knowing what he knows about the frontier and the wilderness. He thinks that Boone knew those guys were there and was kind of putting on a show in a way. That's what That's what Robert Morgan thinks.
I don't necessarily buy it, but Morgan says, you know, in the in the Kentucky Wilderness, when you were trying to be as incognito as possible, you know, you didn't have fires during the day because you didn't want a pillar or smoke going up and the Shawnees seeing that you were trespassing on their land.
You know, why would he be so careless as.
To be yelling and screaming in the wilderness?
And he Boone.
Morgan also felt like Boone was kind of a showman in a way, not in a negative way, but he knew how to portray the image of Daniel Boone that was beneficial to his legacy, which I don't necessarily.
I think it's speculative, but.
I think the man probably was just lonely, and what we know of Boone, he was a charismatic fellow love life, and he had been in the wilderness alone for so long.
I think he was just singing.
For all that not the wrong with that, you know. You mentioned how something that makes this book unique compared to anything else about the Long Hunters in the past is that it's asking the questions that someone like us who is particularly interested in the hunting side of things would be asking of these guys. And so I love the fact that you guys actually cover in the story, You actually talk about how these guys hunted in detail as you dove into this clay. Both this project and
your project about Crockett or Boon. Is there anything that you learned about how these guys hunted that we as modern deer hunters today could benefit from if we were to be a little bit more like them in this way or that way or something. Is there something we can learn tactically from Boone or Mansker or Crockett that would help us as deer hunters today. Is there anything that comes to mind?
You know, they did a lot of still hunting, you know, slowly moving through the woods. I think they you know, they never hunted out of tree stands. They they set salt licks. I'm certain that Boone we never heard. I don't know that there's any documentation of this, but you just know it had to happen. You know, a still hunt, you would have to start out from your camp.
You wouldn't have.
He wouldn't have been traveling for hours in the dark before daylight to get to a spot. Most likely most likely probably started right at daylight and hunted out from his camp and maybe had a specific local to a specific place. But you know that he would have been looking for sign and that he probably would have waited in some you know, actually just set and waited in
places for long periods of time. But the details of how they hunted I felt like was pretty low because the people that were recording these things often weren't real serious hunters. But yeah, I would have been interesting to talk to Boone. I can't say that. That's the one part of their story that to me is kind of vague.
Now we basically know that they just they slipped through and hunted, and when they would shoot a deer, they would hang it up in a tree mark where it was and they would just continue to hunt and kill as many deer as they could in a single day, which could be as many as twenty and then they would come back through and take the hide off of
the deer and most often leave all the meat. They would take the meat they needed to eat, but there was an incredible amount of waste they would but they would take the take the deer hides and preserve them, keep them in a cash at their camp. And so, no, you don't hear them talking about sign You don't hear the long hunters talking about antler size. You you hear occasionally guys talk about you know, mass crop causing animals
to be concentrated. Did you hear anything in there mark that that are you tipping?
Did you hear anything question about you?
Yeah? I think the one thing that one thing that stood up to me was their emphasis on salt licks and and right there's like an historical use of a resource by wildlife and we shouldn't be surprised by this. I don't think, you know the fact that hunters two hundred, three hundred years ago would have keyed in on the same kinds of things that we're looking for today, which is what's the thing that the deer want to come back to time and time again and then and then
key it on that. So I thought that was very interesting that there's a story in there, multiple stories about how, you know, these long hunters knew where these salt looks were, they would go back to them time and time again. And there were sign of other hunters doing the same thing.
So there's a story about I can't remember who it was, but you know there's mansker and a group came back to assault like they'd hunted the year pright previous, and then they saw a sign that some other hunting party had been there and wiped out the deer heard that had been using that salt lick, and there's a different salt lick that I think that they had found Clovis points in so sign of hunters from thousands of years ago hunting at these salt licks and so and now
today in twenty twenty four, I'm sure there are people where it's legal hunting artificial salt licks, and if there are any natural ones out there, I'm sure you would
find deer still utilizing them today. So it's interesting that some things stay the same despite the technology we have now, despite the knowledge base we have now, there are some core things when it comes to understanding wildlife habits that Boone was keening on, that folks fourteen thousand years were king in on, and that we can ken now today. That's interesting to me.
Yeah, you know, there was a multiple unique stories. But there was a story of a guy that went to a salt lick, a known salt lick, and was tucked in behind a tree, maybe even in a hollow tree close to the salt lick, and a group in a Native American hunter, Shawneese, came in and he watched them set up to hunt the salt lik just like him. They didn't know he was there, and he just hunkered down and stayed there and basically watched them hunt until
they left. And you know, if they would have discovered him, most likely they would have. It wouldn't have been good for him. They talked about how the salt lakes were the it was the meeting place of wildlife, but it was also the meeting place of people because that's where people were after the animals.
It was the most concentration.
You know, when you think about the Eastern Distiguous forest, just for the sake of the I mean, we know it wasn't fully canopied. We know there was grassland, savannahs, and it wasn't one hundred percent canopy big forest, but for the sake of this thought, it was way more forest than there is today today. We use topographic features where we use vegetative features to hunt deer. We use funnels, strips of funnels, between fields, between ag fields, between subdivision whatever.
They wouldn't have had near the features that we would have today, the vegetative features to hunt deer. And so they would have been looking for ways to key in on where are the deer, And they were congregating at these salt licks and you know the yeah, there are some huge salt licks naturally, and and you know, I mean they're still there today. It's still salty, but they're not wilderness, so there's not animals using them, but big
bone lick. And they had all these salt licks named and bison would use it, elk would use it, deer would use it. Everything would use the salt lick. And yeah, that was sitting. The lick was a it was a big way to hunt.
You know.
It would have man, it would have been so interesting if Boone had been interviewed by a modern sport deer hunter, we would know an entirely different collection of information from him. I mean, I would have been like, man, you think the best time to kill a deer is? You know, and he'd number seventh, he'd say, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean I or time of day? You know, would he would he have had this idea that you have to
hunt morning and evening and midday, and that great. You know, part of that is an artifact of just living in the modern world. You know, we we get a couple hours in the morning to hunt and then we go go about and do our day or go to work or whatever.
You know.
Would he have been like, you know, I never really thought of it, but you know, I killed deer all day long, and these would have been primarily unpressured deer. Not It would have been interesting to see how they would have acted back in. Would they have been just like our white tail today that would have been hyper spooky, or or could you get into pockets of deer that just hadn't seen people in so long that they were
tolerant or maybe be less tolerant of people. You know, I would ask him about, uh, when would you kill deer? I would ask him about shot placement. It been like he's not listened to the Wired to Hunt podcast. He's not listened to you know, all these people. He might have been like, man, I shoot him right in the head, head, shoot every one of them.
And it's like, really, why not shoot him through the lungs?
Oh man, that's for that's for the.
The sissies, you know.
I mean, I don't know what, I don't know. He probably would have had some very very surprising things. And Mark Mark Kenyon, the other thing I know that would have surprised us is he would not have been into synk control at all.
Yeah, all right, am I right right?
Your one is that right, and he certainly killed deer despite it, So you can do it. You can do it.
Play the wind, the wind, that's right, that's right. You know, we talked about this, you and I when we were down in Arkansas together a few years ago when it came down to hunt with you just kind of talking about this whole idea of the long hunt and a hunt being more just than heading out to a tree and shooting something, but instead a larger experience that's that's days on end that involves, you know, not just the taking of game, but it involves the navigation, the exploration,
the surviving out there, all that kind of stuff. And it seems like this era in stories of people like Boone fascinate people in part because of that, because of this experience out there. And I'm curious if your thoughts or if your fascination has changed it all or been colored at all by this latest project, by this new deep dive you've done, or after having done all the work on the Bear Grease podcast about these things. You know, what are your thoughts on this now, on this way
of living? Do you want to do more of this kind of thing yourself? Is there something that we as deer hunters now today could benefit from if we took more of a long hunter type philosophy into the woods with us on occasion. This is a lot to throw at you, but.
You know, it's a fair it's a fair question. I think the older I get, I I since a coming change that you know, when I was in my there was there have probably been a heyday in my bow hunting career when my goal was just to kill as many deer as I legally could. And that's what I enjoyed and and and that has not diminished. I still just enjoy killing deer, eating deer in whatever way I'm
doing that. If I'm just going out for a couple hours in the evening here close to home, or if I'm traveling in some exotic place that's a managed property, like, I still enjoy that.
But the older I get, there's a bigger.
Space in my need to not just go and extract resource, but to experience a wild place, to experience it. And sometimes I think as modern deer hunters, we don't do that. We we kind of extract. We we we've we've made a we've made a challenge out of extraction, you know, technical extraction of a resource from a landscape.
And that's that's fun.
Like I'm not you understand, that's I'm in that boat and love it, absolutely love it. The older I get, the bigger the space of me becomes that I want to experience wildness. I want to challenge myself as a woodsman, even though I'm not a bushcraft guy. Like I don't I don't want to wear buckskins. I don't care about starting fires with flint. I think it's cool, That's not
what I'm talking about. But like, for instance, this year, well the only buck I killed this year I killed on on really a mini long hunt Mark in Arkansas. Packed my mule, me and my buddy most shepherd who's kind of a kindred spirit of mine, buddy of mine. We went in and planned to stay. We had as we could have stayed as many as five days, and went back into a spot that it's hard to get to camped and hunted out from our camp, and.
Oh it was.
You know, in the moment, it's one of those things that you're like, what what are we doing? I could have driven to Missouri and bought an over the countertag and like walked in somewhere and probably killed a deer already, but it was it was an incredible adventure, really was. And now I've already lost some track of your original question.
Well it was you're you're onto it, which was just you know, is there value or have you found any increased interest in going into a hunt more in the style of the long hunter, So so exactly what you said, rather than now, they did go into it with extraction as their goal, but their goal required a longer experience. We're kind of role playing a little bit, I guess
you could say, to get that kind of experience. So having a bigger experience, having a an experience, it's more about It's it's less about can I kill a big deer? More about can I go something? Can I go somewhere I'm interested in, can I learn something new? Can I stretch myself as an outdoors and then can I immerse myself in this place and everything it has to offer? And that's what it sounds like you've been doing more
and more, and I can relate to that too. I've had a desire to to focus more on those hunting adjacent things versus just like do I kill the thing I want? It's becoming more and more important for me to did I have the experience I want in the kind of place I want with the people I care about. That's becoming more important to me, And I wonder if that's a little something we can take from these stories.
Yeah, and I don't think they're mutually exclusive, because you know, you get the idea that, oh, well, these guys are just You might hear what I'm saying and say, oh, Clay's just likes camping and probably doesn't kill very many deer.
I mean, now, I'm to me, the.
I'm looking for a specific deer taken out of the place that I want to be, and that will be one of the most well. I mean, even the deer I killed this year wasn't a big deer, but that's a really valuable deer. But to go in and be a successful hunter, I mean, to me, going on a hunt like I'm talking about, not killing a deer is not a success.
I struggle with.
Being like we, oh, I'm just here for the experience. No, I'm here to kill a deer. And but so I think you can combine the two and it's just what you're interested in. I mean, I think hearing other people
talk sometimes shapes what shapes us and makes us interested. Like, for instance, I think the reason long before I knew anything so to speak, or anything of detail about Daniel Boone, my buddy James Lawrence was essentially doing long hunts back in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, and he had no concept of history. His idea, the way he hunted and what he did was so similar to the long hunters
it's unreal. And he came by it honest, he wouldn't have known anything about history, but literally they were that close to that era that that's just the way he hunted. I mean he took he took horses back into wilderness and would just hunt solo as long as he could. Never climbed a tree, still hunted, never wore camo never. I mean, you know, shock pouch deer back to his to his horse. I mean, nobody told him that was cool. He just thought that's the way you're supposed to hunt.
And and now when I see Boone and learn about the long hunters, I'm like, James, like, you learned this from them. You may not know you learned it from them, but you did, you know, I mean, it was just passed down yeah, so, and that's that's romantic to me. So that's as much as I'm influenced by Boone, I'm influenced by people like James Lawrence and uh. I just have a lot of respect for those guys. Again, I love hunting the way that we in modern times. I
mean no doubt. I mean this where I was hunting in Mississippi was a pretty modern hunt really, But I also just have something for the for the hard way.
All Right, here's something that I'm challenged by. You talked about how how this whole idea of this kind of hunting, of this era, of these people, we've kind of romanticized it, right, You just said that you've kind of felt that way, and I think a lot of us do. Right. We look back on it, and it seems we glorify it, we romanticize it. It seems fascinating to us for so
many reasons. I Mean, there's there's countless stories and American folk heroes from this area, right, but these folks were the perpetrators of maybe one of the most catastrophic crimes against wildlife in the history of the world. When you look at the market hunters, both with deer and buffalo and so many other species across North America were nearly wiped off the face of the earth by this group
of folks trying to make ends meet. We almost lost white tail deer, we almost lost buffalo, We almost lost so many critters. So how do you or how do we square that? And that we have canonized, we have made heroes of people who almost wiped out the wildlife that we care so much about today, who did something that if it was done today, we would look at them as the worst crooks in town. We would look at them as like the people burning down the house that we live in. But now we look at them
today as heroes. How do you make sense of that? How do you square that?
That's a well stated question mark and an accurate one in that these guys were we're we're a part of a vast squander of of of wildlife resource. And I think the short answer is that luckily at the end wildlife one like if today there were no deer, if literally white tailed deer were hunting to extinction or we only could go see them in zoos, I think are we would not be talking about the long hunters in the way that we do.
Absolutely not.
If if there were no bison, we would be talking about these people different. But just the way the cards came out, we do have them. And in a way you can trace back the saving of American wildlife to these guys, like if yeah, I look at it as just one big, one story. I look at it as one big story because of a market value. There was cultural value assigned to hunting wildlife that was the original
value of its that was worth money. You could feed your family, you could put shoes on your children's feet, and that deer had value and you sought after it because you could access the resource of it. That happened so much that there was an incredible wanton slaughter of wildlife in America for you know, one hundred and fifty years.
True story.
But because of that value that was initially kind of a maybe not so righteous value that translated into the same people, the hunters being the ones who.
Who saw that value.
Roosevelt, all these guys in the late eighteen hundreds that started the boone Crocket Club that that consciously decided we are going to shift the value system away from commercial market hunting onto you know, adding value to older age animals. We're not going to take away hunting access. We're going to keep hunting access in the hands of the people
so that they'll have vested interest in this resource. And we're going to save wildlife by you know this strategic strategic hunting and then and then later it would be habitat funded through hunting. And it all goes back to a man wanting a deer, a man wanting a bison, and though the motivation was out of control, it was
untethered back in those days, that original desire. You know that Io Wilson has a book called Biophilia, which is he believes that there's an innate thing inside of man that loves animals, and you know, the love of that animal comes from a lot of different places, but almost exclusively so we can exploit them as a resource for us. And so that's a that's a not a great picture. But yeah, we have to condemn these guys for the for the want and waste that they that they inflicted
on America. But there were different scales of it, just like today. I mean, there were people who were shooting bison out of train car windows just to watch them fall. Yeah, you know, there were also planes tribes that were killing bison kind of in traditional ways and contributing to the market, uh, the commercial market.
There were there.
Were egregious, egregious wildlife crimes by today's standards, and even then, even then, there were there were people that were like, man, this is bad. One of my favorite books of all time is this Wild Sports Book by Frederick Gershtacker, who was in Arkansas between eighteen thirty seven and eighteen forty two. German guy came over here. All through this book he says, Holy cal these Americans are wasteful. They just kill everything.
And he did too though he was right there with him market hunting and interesting.
So it's yeah, it's it's a tough spot.
But if you kind of view it as one big picture, and you can't, I mean, historical revision is so tough. I'd have been right there with a mark. I mean, there's no way that I could say that. I would have been like, well, you know what, boys, we should probably just kill one or two deer each every year and say.
There was a certain ignorance to their situations, right. I don't think anyone out there realized the impact that they were having. They did not realize the finite nature of the resource to the degree that it was. And I think a lot of people for a long time thought these were infinite resources that you know, there was no end to it. And so that doesn't necessarily excuse them,
but to your point, it does. It's hard to, you know, judge someone by our standards and knowledge today when they did not have the luxury of that knowledge and context. Then yeah. So so yeah, it's it's a tricky thing to try to make sense of though. Now when you look back on that era of market hunting and the crash of wildlife populations and then you know what happened after, what's the lesson that you take from that? What's the lesson we can take from that?
I think it's stay humble, because history is gonna judge you for what you're doing today that you're fully convinced is right and ethical and good. And we will look back on stuff we're doing today with wildlife and go, holy cow, how did how was Mark Kenyon a part of that? I mean, it's gonna happen. It's gonna happen, and so to me, it's just stay humble, you know. I mean, like you think of all the challenges that we have in wildlife today, you know, chronic wasting disease.
There may come something that in the future that we realize we've been doing so wrong inside of it. That would be so evident that unless someone was really paying attention seventy years from now, they would just think, man, those guys were so reckless, just reckless. But here we are, sitting here today with all the information of the best science, and we're kind of like Goleia, we don't really know exactly what to do. We have some ideas, you know.
To me, that's the biggest thing is it's just stay humble. I mean, our motivations of humans change so much.
I mean.
It's hard to picture what should the earth persist that in one hundred and fifty years they would say about this generation, you know, when it comes to how we manage wildlife, and yeah, perhaps will be the heroes, or perhaps will be We're a part of some big moved movement that we can't even see right now.
You know, I guess that's usually the case, right You don't know, you don't know what history book you're in in the moment. They'll be writing those stories fifty years from now or one hundred years from now that's a
very interesting thing to ponder. So there have been there have been some renewed calls to put a price on wildlife again, specifically meet There have been some calls for the fact, not the fact, but there have been some calls for a need to have a market hunt again, in particular for white tailed deer in some places where not enough deer being killed or where there are issues with disease and calls to try to reduce the population, and folks saying, man, if we don't incentivize people to
do it, it's not going to get done. And so some folks have said, hey, we should do that again. We should allow people to sell the excess meat or something. We have to incentivize it somehow. When you hear that, knowing what you know, having researched and studied the history of market hunting, what is your take on that, if you have any ad all, does that? Does that seem reasonable to you? Does that worry you? What do you think?
It's actually the first I've heard of a call for that mark, So I haven't heard that. Is that a legitimate thing? Like people they're people that have power that are saying this, or just the internet crowd.
There are I wouldn't say people with real, real power yet, Like I'm not talking government officials pitching it, but there are folks within our community and folks within the wildlife management community who have talked about that. It's like, Hey, do we need to go back down that road.
Yeah, that's a tough one. That's a tough one.
I mean, I incentivizing killing deer is uh, it's something we've got to do in some places, you know, and considering that the deer meat is so healthy, it's such a clean meat, it's honestly what the world is after in a lot of ways. I just got some venison sticks from Hawaii from wild killed access there in Hawaii.
Did you get any of those?
Mark? I think I'm supposed to be getting some, but I haven't got them yet.
And my kids immediately saw the labeling and said one hundred percent wild venison. Like what's up, Dad? Like, they're like North American Mallive Wildlife Conservation. You can't sell wildlife. And you know, we kind of quickly found out where they're access teer which are invasive. So somehow they're regulating killing them and USDA processing them and selling them.
I don't know.
I really don't have an answer, Mark, I don't I mean, yeah, it would kind of be. It would It would definitely go against the grain, probably like in the seventies when they're in the eighties and nineties when they start encouraging us to kill dose and all our grandpas were like.
We're never going to kill a doe deer.
That's you know, we're gonna shoot Spike bucks every you know, we'll shoot everyone with C but no does. And now we realize how wrong that was. I don't know, man, I don't know. It would have to be highly regulated. I mean, there's probably a way you could do it, Like if if you could say, everybody in the state of Missouri can legally sell seven doe deer at this USDA processor Dot DA DA DA DA and get seventy five dollars per year, so you could make an extra you know, five hundred dollars a year.
I don't know.
People would exploit it, people with I mean, yeah, there'd be people that'd be making a living off of it and taking everybody's I mean, there would just be It would just be so hard to regulate. But then again, if deer numbers get so high places and disease is a problem. It's like, would it be better to do that or to hire government assassins that go in and
kill deer, or the ridiculousness of your contraceptives. You know, where these people are going in and tranquilizing to your that's just unreal.
So I don't know. That may be conversations that we have in the future.
Yeah, I don't know either, and I haven't you know, gone deep down that road of inquiry yet. But it's something you start hearing tossed around, and it's it's it's a worrisome thing, like there's that slippery slope worry looking back on what happened last time. But who knows, Like you said, you break up a great point. All of these things will be judged by future generations. We don't really know the right answer right now. We don't know
what they're going to say. But all you can do is make the best decision with the best information you have at hand and in a good, good set of intentions, and let the chips fall where they are, you.
Know, I think the biggest thing that we that we will give to future generations is modern hunting, and all the criticism that it takes even from the inside, we are adding monetary value to wild places and preservation of wild places. I'm even talking about I'm primarily even talking about private land like I was on the Mississippi River, and the land inside the levees of the Mississippi River is incredibly valuable. I mean, probably some of the most
valuable ground in America. And it has that kind of wild value, which there's a thousand ways to look at that. Some could view that as an atrocity because access is not something you can get inside the levees of the Missippi River. I mean it's closed down, tight private land. And but the way I look at it is that land at one time was owned by primarily owned by timber companies who were managing that land solely for the
for timber and making money. Today a lot of that timber company land has now gone into private hands and is now being heavily managed for wildlife, and it's so valuable because of its hunting recreational hunting value, that land will probably never go back into the hands of timber companies.
And not that timber companies are the villain, but I'm making a point that land being managed exclusively for wildlife is perhaps better than land being exclusively managed for financial gains of the forestry industry, which I'm pro cut them down. I'm pro prologing. You know, you hear what I'm saying. But we're we're adding value to keeping wild places intact because of recreational hunting.
I mean, because.
I mean, you know, there's there's land all around me right now, farms that are being bought, subdivided, divided up into five acre plots. You know, our buddy Matt Cook, just a friend of ours at Meat Eater, he bought a golf course up in Michigan and turned it into a just turn it back into a place to hunt. You know, that's an extreme version of it. Most of us can't do that. But we can make decisions to buy a piece of property and not fragment it on purpose just for financial gain.
You know.
So anyway, I think that's the one thing that we'll look back on and be proud of.
I think you're a hundred percent right, And it is not a small it is not a trivial thing either, the impact that has. So there was a study that came on a few years ago that quantified how land is what for what use is land is owned or least And the study found that about three hundred and fifty six million acres of land across the United States of America is primarily owned or least for hunting. That's just for hunting. Four hundred and forty million acres were
for wildlife related recreation. Three hundred and fifty six of those were for hunting. So that is that's about half the sum total that America has a public land. So we have it. So we have six hundred and forty some million acres of federal public land. We've got another three hundred and fifty six million acres of private land
now managed for hunting and wildlife. That is a huge sum yeah of wildlife habitat that is being protected in mana for critters that you know, if we didn't have that, you know, there aren't as much as I love hiking or backpacking or whatever like, there aren't a pile of people who loved a mountain bike who are buying thousands of acres of land to manage to help wildlife. That's a thing that we are community is doing and is keeping a lot of species on the ground and here
because of it. So yeah, that's a big deal.
I think in the future, in our kids' lives and our grandchildren's lives, one of the most finite resources will be wild places, just places without roads, places without fragmentation, large tracts of land, and you can't get those back, I mean in the foreseeable future, and I mean unless our whole civilization just falls and becomes ruins and you know, people a thousand years from now dig up our houses from the ground. I mean, you don't get back where a Walmart goes in. You don't get back where a
subdivision goes in. I haven't told the world this yet, Mark, but we'll release it on the Wired to Hunt podcast. We're gonna do a series on American wilderness. I've been working for pretty long time on a series on American wilderness and wilderness like with a capital W regulated wilderness, but also the idea of wilderness and how as Americans we view that very different from anywhere in the world. And as I've researched, and most of the information is
not coming from hunters. I mean, there's a lot of people that are invested in wilderness, but as I read it, I'm like, hey, do y'all realize that, like we're the ones who are probably doing more, especially in private lands, for keeping keeping tracks of land intact and adding value to to just raw land, probably more than anybody. And it's it's going to be a really interesting.
But yeah, I'm looking forward to that.
Yeah.
Yeah, the history of our wilderness preservation system and all that's fascinating stuff. Did a lot of research into that.
You're an expert, You're an expert on it to a degree, and uh, and yeah, it was very very interesting, and I agree with you that I think these last places that we have that are relatively.
Wild are about as rare of a resource as you can find today. So I'm all for protecting them. And uh. And there's very interesting things between the capital W designation and then the concept and philosophy of wilderness and what all that means to to us as a people, to us as hunters, to us to managing resources. I mean, there's you've got a lot of fought out of there for podcast series. I'm sure it's gonna be great. Yeah. Have you read the book Wilderness in the American Mind?
I think it's called.
Yeah, Man, I got it sitting right over here. It one of my one of my favorite books.
Yeah, phenomenal, that phenomenal.
Hey, I need to interview you for this podcast for real? Yeah, yeah, deal, for real.
I want to I want to talk to you.
I've got I've got a great I've already done several interviews in the Very Interesting People.
Yeah. Well, along those lines, so Wilderness in the American Mind by Roderick Frasier Nash, I think is the author. That's a recommendation I'll give folks. But now I'm gonna throw back at you on this topic of long hunters and this era that you guys explored in your book. Are there any other books or documentaries or or any other kind of resource you would recommend to folks if they want to dive into this world more?
Well, anybody that's been hovering around.
Bear Grease at all or even meat Eater with with Steve's stuff. You know, the book Boone by Robert Robert Morgan is really good.
There's a book.
There's a book called My Father by Nathan Boone, which is Boone's youngest son, who was interviewed when he was seventy years old, thirty years after Boone's death, and it's it's some of the best insight that we have into Boone, And again Boone is the primary character that we understand the Long Hunters from. So that's an incredible book. Yeah, Unfortunately it's all these Boone books.
Man.
Yeah, there, there's there's there's a lot, there's Uh.
Robert eckertz Ah, the world's.
Going to be mad at me for not knowing the name of his book. I actually didn't like it. But The Frontiersman, I believe it's called The Frontiersman. I started and couldn't finish it. People probably be very angry at me for saying that. But that's a very famous book about the era of the Long Hunters. Ted Franklin Blow has a lot of work on the Long Hunters. A lot of the stuff that we research that we got
came from different articles and papers that he wrote. But I still got to go with Robert Morgan's Boone talks a lot about the Long Hunters.
Awesome. Last question for you. If someone is listening to this today, obviously they should go out and pick up a copy download a copy of The Long Hunters book to listen to. But if they want to listen to some Bear Grease episodes, either about this world or about anything else you're working on out Could you recommend like one or two Bear Grease episodes that folks should go listen to if they haven't already.
Well, I'll have to bring up the current episode that came out on January the tenth, which is called the Donnie Baker Story Nightmare. That's the title, and that's part one, and it is about the illegal killing of a two hundred and four inch buck on the Fort Leonardwood Military base in central Missouri in two thousand and nine. Fascinating story and the most unique thing about it, Mark is
that we interviewed the guy who did it. We didn't interview game wardens, we didn't interview landowners, we didn't interview people in the community. We interviewed the man who commit
the crime, which was pretty unique. And it's really it's a story about the illegally, the illegal killing of this buck, but really it's a human story more than more than anything, just about what this guy, the kind of the mentality this guy had and what he went through, and just what it was like killing this deer, trying to hide it, lying about it, and I don't know. It was one of the hardest podcasts I've done because the guy, the
guy's forty years old. His name is Donnie Baker. I mean, it's not a secret, and.
It was.
It was a challenge because a lot of times when you're dealing with people that are deceased, I don't know, you just feel a little bit more liberty to say what you think or And in this case, I was very concerned about like crushing this guy.
Honestly, Yeah, with the ramifications of the story out there. Yea.
Even when when he agreed to tell the story, I was like, man, let's talk about this. You sure you want to do this? And I think it influenced the way I told the story in a way, in a good way. But it's a fascinating story. So the Donnie Baker Story, it's a two part series. The second part comes out. I don't know when this podcast that we're making right now is going to come out, Mark, but it comes out like January twentieth something. The second part
comes out. But it's it's really cool. And then you know, our boon series was good. Whole Collier, Mississippi River.
Ah. I love mal Mark.
Mm hmm, it's good stuff. Man. My son Everett still special requests Clay Newcombe talking about Daniel Boone. Every once in a while, I'll be driving, let's listen to Clay talking about Boone. Not again, not again ever, please, So up the good work man. You're doing great. I love the things that you're putting out there into the world. I appreciate you, and thank you for coming on and doing this.
Thanks Mark, really appreciate it. Thank you.
All right, and that's a wrap. Thank you for tuning in. Hope you enjoyed this conversation, as I always do when me and Clay get together. Good guy does great work, and you know this. This latest audiobook is another great example of that, so I hope you'll check it out with that in mind. And with that said, thanks for being here. Appreciate you being a part of this community. Thanks for tuning in, and until next time, stay wired to Hunt.