Higher Calling: Youth, Conservation, and Wild Stories with Chester Moore

In this episode of Hunting Matters, host Joe Betar welcomes Chester Moore, an award-winning wildlife journalist, Editor-in-Chief of Texas Fish & Game, and passionate wildlife advocate. Chester dives into his incredible work with Higher Calling Wildlife, a program that creates life-changing expeditions for kids facing special challenges.

From heartwarming youth conservation efforts to capturing desert bighorn sheep for a historic release into the Franklin Mountains, Chester shares unforgettable experiences and insights. Plus, we explore his podcast Dark Outdoors, his passion for wildlife photography, and his incredible body of work as the author of 15 books.

Discover the stories behind Chester's lifelong mission to connect people, wildlife, and the great outdoors.For more on Chester's work, visit www.highercalling.net and follow @thechestermoore on Instagram and YouTube.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
This is Joe Btar, this is Ramon Roblus, and we
talked to fascinating people about their love of hunting, shooting,
sports and the outdoors.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
This is Honey Matters. So we started the show.

Speaker 3 (00:22):
Romone, I don't know, I guess we have this whole
podcast thing. There are no rules.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
We're just uh yeah, we're all we're recording. We've been
recording for thirty five minutes.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
So Joe Rogan is a host, he's a podcaster.

Speaker 4 (00:36):
Yeah, kind of a big deal, kind of you know,
I think I've heard of that guy has a future
in this business, you know. Yeah, yeah, I have spent
time at mar Lago, so he knows who Joe Rogan
is twice.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
But look who's counting honestly.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
Yeah, hey Ramone, yes, sir, anything about me today?

Speaker 3 (00:56):
You got a haircut and oh did you shave your beard?

Speaker 2 (01:02):
Shut up?

Speaker 3 (01:03):
When it's that long to begin with, and you're bringing
down to that.

Speaker 4 (01:08):
So I have so here, here's why the beard's not
here anymore. I was gonna trim it and kneating it
up for you because I last week you comment on
your beard and you're like, what's going on?

Speaker 5 (01:18):
Yep?

Speaker 4 (01:19):
So I'm like mine looked like a thirty years but
it was. And so I break out the razor today
and I'm like, and the guy pops off the top
and goes, yeah, So I could have come in with
a skunk stripe look, but I figured And of course,
you know, the temperatures dropp into the thirties in Houston,
Texas once a year, and this is the week that

(01:40):
it happens, and.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
This is the week that I decided to screw the
beard up.

Speaker 3 (01:43):
So yeah, now you look fine.

Speaker 1 (01:47):
Plus I'm guiding for the next two weekends, so I
might need it, you know, but it's all gone now.
So if you could cut half years off her mind, ye,
put it in a bag. I'll stop buy and pick
it up.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
And you're going to propagate it.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
I'll propagate it, that's right, I'll promulgate the species of hair.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Hey, folks, this is Honey Matters.

Speaker 4 (02:06):
We're back again with Ramone and Joe and our guest
once again this week is Chester Moore. Chester has been
a frequent guest of ours and always brings exciting stories,
uh to our to our form and our and our
little show here. So Chester, thank you once again for
joining us.

Speaker 6 (02:20):
Oh it's always great to be on with you guys
and our mutual love and the great outdoors.

Speaker 4 (02:25):
Yeah, so ramone, I get an email from Chester. I
don't know about twenty minutes ago, finally saw it. I'm
looking through the auction catalog and proving stuff and getting
ready for our annual convention coming up in January, and
it says, hey, I'm out in the I'm out in
the bush in the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
Is this? This is this is audio podcast trying to
na we're a big time now.

Speaker 4 (02:44):
Yeah, so he actually had to go in and get
a wet nap, I guess, and clean his face off
and throw a cap on.

Speaker 6 (02:51):
I got in time to take a shower because I
did live like a swamp rat or some kind of
a refugee from deliverance with all my paint and everything
on my face. So I feel I didn't want to
terrify everyone on the show.

Speaker 3 (03:02):
Yeah, it's funny. I mean, the name of the show's
Hunting Matters that I don't think we expect any cleanliness.

Speaker 6 (03:08):
Yeah. Well, well what I saw in the mirror was
not what I wanted to represent me, even in the
hunting field. You know what I'm saying. They're like, oh
my god, what is going on there? But uh, it was.
It was just funny because I have a buddy of
mine that's been on mine and I'm not I only
have mine on audio, and he's like, I have to
look like me.

Speaker 1 (03:26):
It's you know, head, Hey, Ramon, what's the first line
of the script that comes to mind when you hear
the the reference to the movie Deliverance like Chester just
made squeal?

Speaker 2 (03:39):
Yeah? Oh yeah, yeah.

Speaker 6 (03:43):
The line that always got me was the one before
that where he says you have a.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
Pretty mouth and got a pretty mouth.

Speaker 6 (03:50):
I've always been the horror movies in my whole life.
That's actually probably more horror than a horror movie, and
that keeps me packaging woods right there, Anything keeps me
packing met in the Wood. Deliverance.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah, you know, I love that movie, but that's that's
a difficult movie to make myself sit down and watch again,
especially when he gets to that scene.

Speaker 5 (04:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (04:09):
I mean, I've read a lot of the stories behind
that movie and it was made and and.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
All that stuff. But you know, I think that guy,
that guy who was hunting for.

Speaker 4 (04:16):
Pigs out in the woods that day, is I think
he's a direct to send it or direct direct line
of a relative with that Billy Bob Thornon character and
sing blade.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
Yeah, that's funny.

Speaker 3 (04:30):
You know, I've never seen that movie the whole way through.
I just know, you know, all the pop culture references
and that sling Blade deliverance.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
I've never seen it.

Speaker 3 (04:38):
I mean I know of it. I know what happens,
you know, I've It's just been part of pop culture
for so long that I guess just through being being alive,
I've discovered what the whole movie's about.

Speaker 4 (04:50):
Yeah, you really just sit down and watch it at
least once. Yeah, yeah, there's I mean, sorry to digress.
Ramona and I are movie nuts. I think Chester, I
think you are too. But for sure called honey matters.
We got to call it honey matters and movie reviews.
But that one, there's a few of them that are
hard to watch.

Speaker 1 (05:07):
That one, Passion of the Christ is hard to rewatch,
hard to watch in the first place. Uh there was
another one I was thinking of the other day that
was really tough to watch. It I really love and
I just start stard to watching it. But uh, Chester,
I got, I got.

Speaker 4 (05:21):
I was flipping channels this weekend when it was rainy
and cold outside, and unfortunately I wasn't sitting in a
deer blind but I ran across The Revenant and watched that.

Speaker 2 (05:29):
Again.

Speaker 6 (05:30):
Not another easy one to watch, Yeah, but three hours.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
Of I mean, you got to commit, you got to
commit it, and it's so good.

Speaker 3 (05:37):
I'm trying to remember what that one is.

Speaker 4 (05:39):
That is about the famous mountain man uh. Leonardo DiCaprio
played him. Yeah, it's it's loosely based in the story
of the guy from up in uh I guess uh
Montana or South Dakota, one that was evidently attacked by
bear and crawled across several mountain ranges and survived.

Speaker 3 (05:55):
Yeah, he's perpetually cold. In the whole movie. He keeps
getting thrown into water, which is just kind of unfortunate
for Leonardo.

Speaker 1 (06:02):
Yeah, and that character that it was based on was,
you know, the mythology around him was that he would
he was an Indian hunter as well, and he would
eat the liver of other human beings, which was not
evidently not true.

Speaker 2 (06:13):
He disputed that. But a really interesting story about that guy.

Speaker 4 (06:17):
So, Chester, what have you been up to, man, I
know you've been on I know you've been I know
You've been involved a lot of things.

Speaker 2 (06:22):
I got several things I want to talk to about. Well,
what's your latest adventure?

Speaker 6 (06:25):
Latest adventure is last week I was with working with
the Wild Sheep Foundation out at Elephant Mountain Wildlife Management
Area and eventually a couple of days later over to
the Franklin Mountain State Park in El Paso for the
capture and release of big horns to restore big horns
into Franklin Mountains for the first time in over a
hund years. And got to document that the story of

(06:47):
a Wild Sheep Foundation on that that I wrote and
shot some photos for and that was just an epic.
I've been on a capture before, you know, watch the
capture for a couple of days, but to actually see
the entire process over to capture, get the sheep over,
have medical tests come back on the sheep swept bullets
because you think, I mean, hopefully they're dizas free in

(07:09):
the mountains was a pretty epic thing for the for
the hunter conservationist movement in Texas and beyond.

Speaker 4 (07:16):
Yeah, I talked to uh By the way that was
that was a project that he's a smartl Foundation helped
partially fund his wealth through our conservation grants program. So
I was Unfortunately I couldn't go, but I got a
call from Kevin Hurley at While Sheep and he was
just you could hear the excitement in his voice. He said,
you know, we caught these sheep. They were disease free.

(07:36):
He said, this was probably the biggest public crowd that
they ever had at a release, between the press the public.

Speaker 1 (07:45):
He said, I've done sheep releases all over the US
and Canada.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
He goes, this is probably one of the largest.

Speaker 4 (07:49):
And he also talked about the fact that they captured
a large amount of views and that a lot of
them were pregnant.

Speaker 6 (07:55):
Eighty I think it was. It's in my story, but
I think it's like eighty three eighty five percent or
whatever it was, if youse were pregnant. So they put
seventy seven sheep on the mountain and if they're all
healthy into spring, there's going to be over one hundred
in the Franklin Mountains here in the spring, which is
which is a beautiful thing.

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Speaker 1 (10:51):
Yeah, the Big Horn Sheep Argament Texas, I mean, the
Wild Shape and other organizations just textas, Big Horse, Sieting,
all those groups do such a great, great job.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
But I you know, I.

Speaker 1 (10:59):
Kind of maybe I'm over dramatizing it, but I kind
of like in the Texas Sheep Program to the recovery
of wild Turkey in the US, I think it's amazing
what this program has done.

Speaker 6 (11:10):
It's incredible. I mean, I remember as a kid, I
had this scrap but I still have them. I would
cut sports of field and outdoor life and field and
stream out and my dad and pay stuff. We wanted
to go hunt. I had a page from a Texas
Parks of Wildlife magazine and I still have this one,
and it's from nineteen seventy seven. I used to go,
like pay go to the thrift store and buy every
magazine for a nickel they had in the outdoors. And

(11:33):
this page had the nineteen seventy seven game animal population.
So it was like whitetail deer, four million, wild turkey,
I think it was the time, about three hundred thousand
or whatever it was, and it said big horn cheap
forty and I went, whoa, there's a big dive. And
you know, that kind of connected me getting interested in this.
So from all the way there is a little bitty
run to seeing this happen, and a lot of things

(11:55):
in that program. You know, Texas never was Texas is
on the eastern fringe of the Desert Big Horn, the
easternmost range of the desert big Horns, so it never
was believed to have a mega population. Maybe in the
late eighteen hundreds around you know, two thousand and fifteen
hundred of her different estimates, but they reached they got
it back to the zero in the fifties to forty

(12:17):
in the seventies to around fifteen hundred, and then in
twenty nineteen, disease which stricken all of these herds in
other states struck Texas really for the first time in
one hundred years, and disease was linked to ADAD populations
a macoplasma of an AMMONIAI. And so putting these in
this Franklin Mountain State Park is really interesting because it's

(12:39):
an urban park in a lot of ways, big mountain range,
but about two thirds of that thing's protected by the
city of El Paso, so not going to be an
odd AD encourasion there. There are no big stocks of
domestic sheep and goats which can transfer, so it's it's
a big positive. Then the other thing, you know, Kevin
had mentioned, and I was great seeing all these as

(13:00):
I talked to you all the time together at the release.
I've been talking about the covering this thing for a
year that the public was so engaged. Now there's a
place the public can go in Texas and have a
legitimate chance of hiking up and seeing big horns, photographing them,
exposing them to a game manimal to a lot of people,
a lot of Texans, a lot of hunters, don't even

(13:21):
know that we have in Texas.

Speaker 2 (13:22):
Yeah, was that the first time they put sheep in
that mountain range?

Speaker 6 (13:25):
Yep, they haven't been there since maybe hundred and twenty
years ago.

Speaker 1 (13:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (13:31):
Man, I'm I'm very fingers crossed that that thing takes
off and that they see the success they've had at
Elephant Mountain in other areas in Texas, and that people
have a respect hunting and non hunting, have a respect
for that species, and I'm hoping that they will, you know,
be guardians of those animals so they can proliferate.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
It'd be great to be driving along the highway in that.

Speaker 4 (13:51):
Part of Texas and see see those things roaming, just
like you see Edge running across the highway.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
Now.

Speaker 4 (13:58):
I mean, don't get me wrong, I love to hunt
on Edge. I think you're very cool animals. But we
all know that you've got to display some of that
population in order to get your big worn cheap up
and running.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
But it'd be so cool to be able to go, hey, look,
there's a bunch of big orn cheap up on the mountain.

Speaker 6 (14:11):
Yeah, you're right, And I think this is that opportunity
for the public and people to be engaged in that
and it's always great when you think about the pospulation
booming and you think about all the development around the nation,
and here's an urban center that's going to have a
population these animals. And you know, the first conservation group
I ever joined in my life was the Texas Big

(14:31):
Orn Society, which is crazy. I was nineteen years old
and I started my career because I wrote an essay
about hunting as conservation as a senior in high school
for Texas Parks and Wildlife. I won. I won a
lifetime combo license. I went to this event called the
Texas Wildlife Expo, had the award handed me by Nolan Ryan,
which freaked out my nineteen year old mind and being

(14:52):
a big Asteris fan and kind of got That's where
I started my career. And I remember being loving wild
cheap and I remember seeing this booth that said Texas
Big Horns Society. There's a society for Texas Big Horns.
And so that was the first conservation group I ever joined,
and they do great work. After Sam Cunningham, a good
friend of mine, is the you know, the president of

(15:12):
that group. And you know, in the second conservation group
I ever joined was the Houston Safari Club, which is
interesting because of my mentor early mentor, Tony Houseman, who
was a past president of HSC. So it's cool to
see and even my personal life on this A lot
of history, a lot of things I kind of rubbed
shoulders with happening on this mount And you think about

(15:33):
the money and work, the Wild Cheap Foundation, Texas Big
Horns Society, Houston Safari Club Foundation, other groups. It was
like a coalition coming together, working with Texas Parks and
Wildlife Department to put together something that was historic, and
I think in today's age, all the crazy things going on,
it's great to have those big, fun, win win stories

(15:54):
that are really going to make a mark for conservation.

Speaker 4 (15:56):
Yeah, and you know, kind of selfish or The other
thing we were excited about is a lot of those
students PhD Masters level students that participate in that program
or also scholarship or submiens of ours. So it's kind
of a two prong deal for us kind of. I
was like, man, it's so exciting, wish I could go.
I just couldn't get away. But you know that I've
seen the pictures of some of the students. I was
looking up you know, some of the preliminary information that's

(16:17):
come out.

Speaker 2 (16:17):
I'm like, oh, that guy or that young lady got
a scholarship from us last year. Whatever.

Speaker 4 (16:22):
That's very cool. You know, you're talking about that urban model.
I've seen that work, whether it was on purpose or not.
But the first time I went to Bamf, Canada, we
went up there skiing years and years ago, and we
were in the park that was inside the city of
bamp Springs.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
There were hundreds of lka everywhere.

Speaker 1 (16:38):
Now, the locals didn't care for them because you know,
there're these giant elk and if they go on the
rut and they're in the city park, that's one thing.
But there, you know, they have that philosophy there. There's
are they're ours, they're elk, that this is their land.
We're gonna protect and respect them. But it's very cool
to be like us going to a city park here
in Houston and seeing you know a bunch of seeing
whitetail there, are seeing a big horn sheep just outside

(17:00):
of l Passa. I mean, it's it can work during
the urban projects, obviously they can work.

Speaker 4 (17:06):
So I'm excited to see what this where this goes.
Do you think that you're going to write a follow
up story a year from now on the status of
the herd and that sort of thing.

Speaker 6 (17:15):
Absolutely, I'm sure they'll want me to do one for
wild sheep, you know, because they like to They stay
really engage at Wild Cheap Foundation and all these projects,
you know, guys like Kevin Hurley talking with all the
biologists and everything, and uh so it's always exciting to
get to do that. And uh I love to write
about anything outdoors, but when you get to do something
like that, it's extra special, you know, and reminds me
of why I do what I do, you know, like

(17:36):
that's that's the fun stuff.

Speaker 3 (17:38):
So forgive my ignorance. This urban model you've talked about
that is literally introducing these species into a park or
whatever in the heart of the city.

Speaker 6 (17:51):
This was now this is this is overlooking the city
of El Paso, and it rises up to like seven
thousand feet, you know, which is higher anything in the
you know, in the smoke Hookeys or anything. And so
it's like outside the city, but it's like within city
metro area, you know. And then uh but a lot
of these places probably like in bamf and that's this
part of Colorado. It's like they didn't introduce to elk

(18:13):
this the city got built. Me olh what sweet? We
can hang out, you know, but it gives you a
place to see them in a and people who would
never encountered them backpacking or hunting. Yeah, and I think
that's kind of what Joe's talking about, like the areas
where the whole public, not just the hunting or hiking public,
can engage them.

Speaker 3 (18:29):
So there's got to be some sort of campaign or
maybe I'm wrong to let citizens know, hey, you don't
eat these right.

Speaker 6 (18:41):
Like like in terms of legality, well, I mean, like
it's a state park for these big horn sheeps, so
there's not going to be any like there's no open hunting.
Have any draw hunts for mule there out there? I
have to look that up. But I think the biggest
part of the campaign I've seen. I've been traveling a
lot and uh and we'll talk about the next thing
I'm working about, which is big time in terms of

(19:04):
like safety and all that. But like inn Estes Park,
for example, you know there's just signage everywhere, you know,
as always a reminder don't pet the elk, you know,
don't try to steal the baby moods, you know. And
when we were in Yellowstone, and you know, the Uston
Safari Club Foundation is so generously contributed for the last

(19:24):
four or five years to our hier coon of Wilife
expeditions for kids facing special challenges, and you know, and
you take kids out that have never been around any
of this stuff. And you know, I had to tell
a boy who had never seen a mountainous whole life
every day when it was clear skies, never been on one,
and he's all of a sudden enthralled with this, and

(19:45):
he sees these two big old mule deer bucks fighting
and I have to grab him by the shirt and
pull him back. Now, the excitement was there, but you
have to educate, and so I think there's always that
educational element. And then you know, some people have zero
idea about any wildlife. So anything with you know, horns

(20:05):
or antlers, my god, it must kill you, you know, and
so you have to kind of like calm people down. No,
there haven't been a lot of you know, you know,
big horns breaking in homes, killing people or anything like that.
So it's always a balancing act with the public, you know.

Speaker 2 (20:21):
Yeah, so Ramon.

Speaker 4 (20:23):
You can't do like you did in Yellowstone trying to
ride the buffalo and that time they get thrown up
in there.

Speaker 2 (20:26):
You can't try to ride a big horn steep.

Speaker 3 (20:28):
Ignorance of the law doesn't excuse you.

Speaker 4 (20:30):
But I laugh every year when I see those new
video clips, would be going, I want to walk up
here and pet the buffalo, pet the bison.

Speaker 6 (20:37):
I've been there, I have. I watched that and photographed
it in twenty twenty one. It's always some life from
like Ohio, Like it's never been around any wildlife in
this Ohio. Plates pull up and these people and they
were talking. I'm like, oh my god, it's you know,
we don't see this in the city. So they're probably
from like Cleveland or somewhere, and they're just you know,

(20:58):
when you pull in the Lamar Valley, there's little parking
spot you pull into and there's like a little barrier
about this high that you can't go past. And I'm
there because uh, there's a ton of bison in the distance.
There's just mega bull coming down the trail and I'm
just kind of waiting for him to got my lens on,
and so he gets right next to like the barriers.
Oh my god, honey, I'm gonna get a selfie. And

(21:20):
I'm like, ma'am, haven't you seen the signs? She goes, Oh,
that's not gonna hurt me. I said, I'm gonna photograph this,
and I'm gonna be I'm gonna have my viral photography moment.
And I told her this, and so she's leaning over
the post and thank god, the bison's like whatever, and
he kind of just turned. But I got a funny
picture of like the people of Yellowstone, you know what
I mean. It was like it's people most of the

(21:41):
time that just live in some city environment or they've
never been around like western wildlife, you know. But the
next level of that is I've been working this year
on an incredible project with great white sharks, and and
I've been to Cape Cod twice on this project. And

(22:03):
seeing the public like educational efforts they put in into
an area where there are many great white sharks on
the beach, you know, is a different level of like
that public spot.

Speaker 2 (22:18):
I mean.

Speaker 6 (22:18):
So February twenty sixth, twenty and twenty four, a great
white shark named Lebeth showed up one hundred yards from
the surf at South Padre Island, all twenty six hundred
pounds of her and she had a satellite tag in her.
Someone shared this on Instagram. I saw it immediately. I'm

(22:39):
on the phone calling. I mean, I have a great
white shark tactic. So I'm kind of into them, you know,
and like you know, and like I found this fishing
guide who helped put the tag in her in South
Carolina on December the eighth, So December eight, twenty twenty three,
she makes a journey. In February twenty six, she's at
South Padre. Found out about this group called the Atlantic
White Shark Concern and see who do this tagging work,

(23:03):
and they also are big time into education and public awareness.
And I got invited out to a media event at
their Shark Center in Chatham, Massachusetts on Cape Cod and
then me and my friend Paul Pazinski, we went out
and we're working on a documentary about the return of
great whites in the Gulf, and we got to go
out with them in September, and they're doing a drone

(23:24):
study because apparently a lot of these great whites have
prop scarring, kind of like manatees do in Florida. And
so they're taking a spoderplane finding a great white, taking
the drone and you know, getting the exact location, and
then they're trying to film it. I think it's like
eight to ten minutes. And then they'll approach you at
different angles and ways and speed seeing what. And so

(23:47):
we got to go do that. We got to see
four on the drone, three with our eyeballs, and one
twelve foot or five feet below us at the boat
right now. So the little kid who saw Jaws and
was a crazy person and wanted to get in the
water was like a lie well at that period, and
so their public safety thing is crazy guys. I mean like,
walk onto this beach and there's this uh, there's this

(24:09):
big sign. It says, you know, it's crazy. It was
like warning extremely dangerous currents, please consider not kayaking, not waiting,
not swimming, and also says a thing about rogue waves
coming over the cape or whatever it was going on.
And then you go over the hump and there's a
sign and it is a about five foot so I

(24:30):
gotta picture me in front of it with a great
white shark and it says people have been killed by
great white sharks in these waters.

Speaker 2 (24:38):
Right.

Speaker 6 (24:40):
So we're out the next day and we're you know,
me and Paul are filming and I'm talking on camera
and we're trying to capture the documentary and I look
over and there's some dude surfing right, and they are
probably one hundred yards from the sign that says people
have been killed at the waters. You know. So there's
different levels of post one thing for public safety of

(25:04):
don't mess with an elk, and then there's another one
in the fear process of like, hey, great white shark.
You know.

Speaker 2 (25:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:13):
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Speaker 3 (27:22):
So let me just ask this because I don't know
if we're ever going to talk about gray whites again
on the show. But people die from gray whites, not
because the gray whites are like in the movies, right,
they're just I mean, can you explain how people die
from gray white Yeah, you.

Speaker 6 (27:39):
Know, it's really interesting. There's a ton of great whites
on Cape Cod and they've had one attack in like decades.
You know, there's just not really after people. You know,
they're after seals over there. That's their main order of business,
with any other stuff as well, and most of the
time when someone's attacked by a great white is often
a swimming area or a surfing area, and you know,

(28:05):
top of the water looks kind of like a seal,
the silhouette, and they just come up and they're not
real worried if it's me or youth. They're like targetings.
But ah, that's hit a guy this time boat, you know.
And then the problem is if you get hit by
a twenty five hundred pounds shark that has jaws as
wide as my chest, you know, there's a good chance
you're going to bleed to death or whatever. But they're

(28:26):
for the for the presence of great whites and concentrations
in some areas. In the number of attacks, it's actually
really astounding. I mean statistically, they're I guarantee you there
are more people that are like whacked by an elk,
you know, not probably killed by elk, but you know
they have like an unfortunate situation. And what's interesting is
Cape Cod area, the current generation of people did not

(28:49):
grow up with gray white. They just weren't there in
large numbers. But we talked I'm sure you guys have
talked about the North American model for wildlife conservation. Also
applies to fisheries, and the Marine Memeral Protection Act in
the seventies started protecting these seals. Now of us all
these seal populations. While the prey base went up, the
predator base went up. But what interests me the most

(29:11):
was about twenty going on twenty years ago and next year,
you know five. A friend of mine was like nineteen
year old charter captain had a satellite phone. He calls
me one day and I knew he's fishing that day.

Speaker 8 (29:25):
Chester.

Speaker 6 (29:25):
What does a great white's teeth look like compared to
a mako, because they're both in the same branch, they
look similar at certain sizes, so well, a mako's kind
of jangly and a great whites perfect triangle. And it
just got real quiet. I'm looking at a great white
shark and it was off Sabine Pass. It was fifty
five miles off shore, he said. He pulled up to

(29:47):
the rig and all the rig workers are pointing down, Look,
big shark. They've been watching this shark. They didn't see it,
and they, you know, put the rig hook or anchor
whatever they did. I think they put a chum bag
over and all of a sudden, white shark comes around
the boat, spent a few minutes well. I wrote an
article for Tide Magazine at that point called Jaws and
the Golf, and I dug up like some historical references

(30:09):
of Jaws and Jaws, Great Whites and the Gulf. The
Freudian slipped there stories of three great whites caught in
one week in nineteen fifty five or four in Port Ransas, Texas.
It's longlining stuff from Japanese fleets in Florida. And but
what's happened is they eliminated a lot of the gill
nets and stuff that were ravaging our redfish and other fisheries. Well,

(30:32):
when they took the gillnets away, what happened is these
young great whites that are born in the Atlantic, they
come into cooler waters and things during the winter, and
they were getting caught in nets. So that's been eliminated.
The silk population's up now. The great whites were turning
to the Gulf of Mexico. So we got a documentary
that'll be out and just in time for the fiftieth

(30:53):
anniversary of Jaws, about the return of Great whites in
the Gulf of Mexico. So that's been pre cool and
I have a blog now called Golf Great Whites dot Com.
It's all about great Whites and the golf and great
white sharks and people need to check out the shark
Tivity app, which is the Great White Shark Conservancies app.
And there's another group called o Search been doing it
a long time as well. They have a great app.

(31:15):
They have multiple great Whites that are popping up in
the golf on their tags as well. But the one
that they Lee Bath showed up right on the beach
at South Padre like she's gonna make a statement like
I'm rolling up to the top tourist destination for people
and we're gonna hang out, you know.

Speaker 2 (31:29):
Yeah, that's cool. Was this was this one of the signs.

Speaker 6 (31:33):
That's the sign. That is the sign. I have a
picture of me in front of that sign.

Speaker 4 (31:36):
I'm tempted to know how tempted you are to steal
one of those and bring it home.

Speaker 2 (31:40):
I could just see you putting on these, dude.

Speaker 6 (31:43):
I would totally have it like right here.

Speaker 2 (31:44):
It was.

Speaker 6 (31:45):
It was totally awesome. Yeah, it was right behind us,
and that was on multiple beaches. We saw that sign
on multiple beaches. That one got me because it's like
roague waves, dangerous currents, great white sharks, you.

Speaker 4 (31:56):
Know, know your risk when entering the water. I would
take that to heat. I would heed that warning.

Speaker 6 (32:02):
Yeah, I mean, like sadly here we have like the
watch out for the flesh eating bacteria in the beaches.
You know, you know it scares me more than white
sharks by far. But uh, anyway, that's been an interesting
project this year, you know, that's that's been a cool
and and and what I really besides just the kid
in me, is the fact that that stuff supersedes fishing

(32:24):
and hunting in terms of public interest. It is so
much bigger. And so it's a way to use these
things to teach about scientific wildlife management. It's a way
to draw people into conservation that's paid for by fishermen
and hunters. And so I always try to make teachable
moments out of those because a lot of this even
benefits like Dingle Johnson dollars, you know what your exercise

(32:47):
taxes on sport fishing and everything like that. So if
a great white shark comes up and takes the trout
on your stringer, you can blame the Dingle Johnson acting
because it probably had had a helping and somewhere.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
You know, that's a that's a great you kind of
skimmed over that point.

Speaker 4 (33:05):
That's a great point for those people who are listening
that do like to hunt and fish and are have
the opportunity to engage people in a conversation that don't
understand hunting and fishing and why we do it and
why it's a conservation tool. You know, obviously, our our season,
our oceans are are nothing what they used to be.

Speaker 2 (33:22):
We we need to do a better.

Speaker 4 (33:24):
Job of manage in those But you know, I'm not
a marine biologist, I'm not an ocean oceanographer or those things.
But you know, obviously the things I read always says that,
you know, commercial fishing is illegal. Commercial fishing is pretty
much doomed a lot of our a lot of our
fish populations. But I mean still, I mean, you know,
regulated ethical hunting and conservation practices. You you make a

(33:44):
perfect point of let's talk about sharks. Let's talk about
how science has brought back sharks or turkeys or she yep,
you know, and then let's talk about where those dollars
come from. It's kind of a stair step approach where
you can back into that conversation, conversation about honey, how
important hunting and hunter fishing and fishermen, fisher persons or
whatever you want to call them, are too wildife species

(34:05):
and habitat.

Speaker 6 (34:07):
You're right, and we, you know, our Higher Colling Wildlife,
the Houston Safari Club Foundation, you know, give us a
wonderful grant for our Colorado expedition this year. Of course,
kids got to see some elk and we just had
an overabundance of mule there. It was unbelievable, not a
mule deer that we encountered. And then we did one
in Tennessee and the Smokies and that's a recently and

(34:28):
fairly recently recovered elk population. So we weren't able to
get deep into North Carolina Park because of the hurricane
it happened a few weeks earlier, you know, in North Carolina.
But we found some of their Cherokee and I'm just
sitting there telling these kids and their families. I'm like,
you know, because one of the one of the families asked, Hey,
how this elk thing's really cool and they're from Tennessee.

(34:49):
How can we get involved in something that might help this?
And said, you need to join the Rocky Mountain out Foundation.
I said, they're doing work in your state with this
right now, and they're are really doing it and one
hundred dollars or funding this and a hunter based conservation organization.
So I think if we're intentional about some of those things,
and uh, and they're they're not. They're not big leaps,

(35:11):
they're realistic links, you know.

Speaker 2 (35:14):
Yeah, I agree. I agree.

Speaker 3 (35:17):
I'm wondering what I have to do to be eligible
to get the Houston Safari Club to send me to Colorado.

Speaker 6 (35:25):
See, do you have any talents outside of like doing this?
Can you videot do videography? Maybe we could get you
on a Maybe I could put you in a backpack,
like stow you away and I'll help you. I'll smuggle
you out of here.

Speaker 4 (35:38):
You you can help Chester, maybe be a mentor for
one of his trips and that sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (35:42):
You apply for a grant.

Speaker 4 (35:43):
We could cover your expenses, but you got to pass
the background check first.

Speaker 2 (35:46):
I don't know about that.

Speaker 6 (35:48):
We look at a rest records and Chester's background check
is much stiffer than the governments.

Speaker 1 (35:54):
Yeah, yeah, it's it's a real thing.

Speaker 2 (35:58):
Absolutely. Ramone can cook though, I can't.

Speaker 3 (36:03):
Now that's true.

Speaker 6 (36:04):
That's cool.

Speaker 2 (36:04):
So you always need to can't cook.

Speaker 6 (36:08):
I'll break him out. I'll break him in in some
kind of swamp here in text and some hog adventure
or something and all.

Speaker 4 (36:15):
Yeah, get him a knife and say there he is.
Do a little grab and staff. Just just don't want
to remind our listening and viewing audience about your your
great your greater work that you do on a constant
basis Higher Calling Wildlife. Would you tell our audience to
remind them again with that what that mission is all
about and how you came up with the name of

(36:35):
Higher Calling.

Speaker 6 (36:37):
Yeah, you know, I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this.

Speaker 5 (36:40):
Uh.

Speaker 6 (36:40):
Me and my wife have a ministry Outreached children's team
to ministries and our missions to bring the love of
Christ to hurting children through wildlife andcounts hurting children maybe
terminally ill life in the foster system, uh depression which
is ravaging kids. Or we've even been privileged to work
with the group that brings sex trafficking victim young people
to us. And we have to think called wild wishes.

(37:03):
It's like meet your favorite animal kind of thing. But
Higher Calling Wildlife is like our expedition branch of that
where we get spend a little more time with the
kid and their families. And we've been doing them and
we've done them in Texas, We've done them in seven
of them in Colorado, then them Yellowstone this year, Smoking Mountains, Florida,
the Everglades, and it's getting those kids out to these

(37:23):
places because what happens is and this is really my
motivating factor on this, if a child is bluntly like
a little girl that we had that was rate some
horrible like that happens, or a health diagnosis or loss
of a parent or something, if it happens on March
to fifteenth, life never gets better than them in their

(37:44):
mind than March to fourteenth. Right, there's a cap on
how good life can be. They're always waiting for something horrible.
So it's our way of letting them know, despite whatever
horror this life has brought them that good things, people
love them, God loves them, and great things can still
happen for their life. And that's really what it's about.

(38:05):
And the Expedition Park came. I was praying on you
any Warry the third twenty nineteen day of the day,
I don't remember a lot of dates.

Speaker 3 (38:11):
Either.

Speaker 6 (38:12):
That's the thing I remember that day and I heard
Higher Calling in my spirit and I knew there's a
scripture about seeking the Higher Calling and prayer. That the
Lord really put it on my heart that there was
more I needed to go back to my roots. Say,
I work in the outdre media business. If you want
me to write an article or do a podcast about
bass and you got to check, I will do it
because I like all of it. I love all of it.
But if I he said, the Lord was kind of

(38:33):
I really felt pushing me to go toward things that
I would have written about if I could have chosen, like,
this is what I'll be specializing in. And it was wild, cheap,
wild Turkey's Mountain, wildlife, flat fisheries, that kind of stuff,
And I knew I had to kind of put the
two together. And so our first this is a great
feel good moment story here for you guys. Our very

(38:55):
first trial with this was in December twenty nineteen, a
kid named Rihanna Holloway. She was nineteen at the time.
She came through a Wild Wishes program. Her wish was
to meet a sea turtle. She has cystic fibrosis, and
she called us after she graduated high school and said
that our program messed her up. She said, because now
she wanted to change your life and become a wildlife conservationist.

(39:19):
So we're like, she goes, what does that mean? And
so that went to months of text message back and
forth at every angle of conservation. So I called my
friends out there at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Office
in Alpine to do the sheep program at Elephant Mountain.
And I was talking with Mark Garrett and Mark said,

(39:40):
I said, hey, because I had brought a boy out
with me to do photography. He was a kid that
my was my friend's young seventeen year old son, just
to ride with me. And he liked it, you know,
but he wasn't like heading toward conservation. You know. I said,
can I bring this me and my wife bring this
girl out there? He goes, how about this? You bring
her on a big horn capture. We got to Rihanna

(40:00):
on a big ron capture in twenty nineteen. And I
will forever my whole life salute Mark and that crew
because we just wanted We're happy to be there observe photograph.
You know. I was doing some media work all on
there because I got to cover this right And he said, Rihanna,
you're gonna do everything everyone here is doing. So he
let her collect a blood sample. He let her collect

(40:21):
an ear clip and put an ear tag. And the
best part is, if you've ever been on a sheep capture,
they catch him on a mountain. They're on a tether
on a helicopter. It's a crew image. Ever, the biggest
ram of the day comes down. He walks past all
these interns and everything else and goes, you're up. He
let her put the GPS caller on the biggest ram
of the day. Rihanna graduated from Texas Tech with a

(40:43):
Wildlife Management degree last fall and is working for the USDA.

Speaker 2 (40:47):
Yes, yeah, so.

Speaker 6 (40:50):
That's that's really, in a nutshell, what it's about. But
it's just finding ways to help kids that don't have
a lot of hope and use wildlife as as a
tool for that. And we do a lot of photography.
The basis of most of it's photography, and the reason
that is everyone can do it there and everyone's got
a phone. Yeah, and we find what we do is

(41:12):
we get people to donate used SLR like Cannon cameras
that I use and we most of the kids now
get sent home with a good refurbished camera and we
teach them through uh you know, some ongoing things we
do about this North America model for wildlife conservation. Then
we let we publish their photos and articles with their
bylines to let them know they can contribute to communicating

(41:36):
about the conservation of these animals. So, uh, that's a
that's a cool part of it. And uh, it's it's
we love it, and we're already we're already definitely doing
Colorado again next year. We're gonna do Yellowstone at some level,
and then we're working on the other ideas.

Speaker 4 (41:50):
Yeah, we uh, you know, I I appreciate you sharing
that story. That's that's really a phenomenal story. I know
you guys don't do it for a reward, but it's
it's not when it comes back around and you're like,
you know, you can get up on that one day
and kind of go, you know what, we made a
difference in somebody's lives. That's not what we were expecting,
but it's it's what happened, and that's phenomenal. And folks,

(42:11):
if you want to learn more about Chester's mission. Go
to Higher Calling dot net you can learn about the program.
You can also donate there and help support his outreach
and youth conservation programs. It's a phenomenal program. Yeah, that's
just that's just it gives me chills to know that
somebody who basically was at a point in their life
were like, I don't know what I'm gonna do, you know,

(42:31):
and then just a few years later, they've got they've got.

Speaker 2 (42:33):
A direction and and they're following their passion.

Speaker 4 (42:36):
And and like you said, those guys who said, here,
here's the GPS collar, let's go to work.

Speaker 1 (42:40):
Yeah, you know that that that put her over the
finish line. That kind of you know, hooked her in.
So that's that's pretty incredible story.

Speaker 6 (42:48):
It was. It was amazing. And so we got some
kids that are really interested in some things now and
uh and their only individual states kidd in Tennessee. And
Christian really took the de patography thing. He got to
photograph elk with me and turkeys in Smoking Mountains. And

(43:09):
we have some younger girls that came with us from
Orange Riley of they they came their family went with
us to the Smoking Mountains in the first evening, we
had black bears like seven yards from the truck. You know,
there was a young black bear eating I mean, he
was just gorgeing on every single walnut under that tree.
And so We're in the vehicle with the lens out
and I'm like, it doesn't get better than this for

(43:29):
bear photography, you know. So a lot of neat stuff
like that, and we're gonna be posting. We had two
award winning videos this year, me and my friend Paul
Fazenskim doing the Great White Video with Higher calling Wildlife
the elevation that is. We're gonna be sharing that out again.
It won some awards from the Press Club of Southeast
Texas text Out their Media Association. And we have another

(43:53):
one that's about to be released as well, and it's
about the Yellowstone expedition. So we're pretty pretty excited about
that one because we got some insane footage. I mean
it was it was really good in Yellowstone. I mean
the bison stuff, that's kind of what we were targeting,
and they were We had some like mega bulls. I

(44:13):
would like to have had a scale on this one
ball just for him to step on for a second,
because I'm like dude, this is the biggest ball bison
I've ever seen in my life, you know. And then
the redneck hunter in me's like, dude, if you turn
just at the right angle, I'm like, oh man, you know,
he'd be booning Crockett. You know.

Speaker 2 (44:29):
Yeah, I digress, I get it. That's so it's called
it honey matters.

Speaker 6 (44:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (44:35):
I don't know if you saw the post that came
out today. It's been out for a little while, but
I saw it on Outdoorwarey to day about the uh
the draw for the bison i in black Feet Reservation. No, No,
you need to look in today's edition of Outdoor Wire.
They're doing a I think it's ten dollars a try.
You can buy up to twenty and they have to
sell a minimum of four hundred chances or something like that,
and you can go hunt on the black Feet Reservation

(44:57):
for bison guided.

Speaker 6 (45:00):
I'm on it. Yeah, that's making news.

Speaker 2 (45:02):
Yeah, that's what we're here for.

Speaker 6 (45:05):
Yeah. Unfortunately they didn't draw me for the Kentucky Elk
tag this year. There's a great conspiracy in the state
of Kentucky. It's supposed to said Chester Moore, And I
didn't get the archery tag for ELK. So I'm airing
my grievances. I'm hunting matters.

Speaker 5 (45:18):
Go.

Speaker 2 (45:19):
I'm sure.

Speaker 4 (45:20):
I'm sure the officials at Fishing Game in Kentucky will
be in touch with you.

Speaker 6 (45:23):
Yeah, I'm sure so far.

Speaker 2 (45:24):
I forget.

Speaker 1 (45:24):
Listen, if you've got a group of kids that you
need passes for for the convention and coming up in January,
just give me a shout and I'll throw you a
bunch of a bunch of day passes.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
For you and your crew.

Speaker 6 (45:33):
Thank you. I appreciate that.

Speaker 2 (45:36):
What's that?

Speaker 3 (45:36):
Were you talking to Chester or me?

Speaker 2 (45:38):
Well? You know you get you, you got carlunch wherever
you go. Do I appreciate that.

Speaker 3 (45:42):
I just want to land your so I can kind
of just walk around like a big shot.

Speaker 2 (45:47):
I'll get you. I'll get you, uh, get you one
of these there we go. So yeah, I want you
to think that, hey, watch this o.

Speaker 6 (46:04):
That looked like predator from the lid, like in the tree.

Speaker 2 (46:07):
You know, right right, if you hear me start purring,
you guys want to run. Yeah. So, Chester, You've got
another project you've been working on for quite a while. Now.
I call it new, but it's not new to you.

Speaker 1 (46:18):
But this whole dark Outdoors thing tell us about that,
because I think this is a phenomenal and an intriguing
approach to the outdoors.

Speaker 6 (46:27):
Well, dark Outdoors is about true crime, wildlife attacks, and
strange encounters in the outdoors because, as I say in
my show intro, you know, the outdoor is the place
for solitude and great recreation, but sometimes the outdoor experience
goes dark and uh. And it started with me twenty
years ago getting ran off a mountain in northern California,

(46:50):
me and my dad by drug runners and uh, and
the I didn't know it was called the Emerald Triangle
at the time. I just you know, there's drug runners
in East Texas. I didn't know the level of it.
And the Force Service told us were lucky we were alive.
And my snarky reply was, you have a flip and
elk crossing sign, can you put like drug trafficking or

(47:10):
something on it? You know, warning? Yeah, drug drug exactly.
And I would have listened to that. So it's about
all these things, and it's about but it's it's true
crime part of it. But it's not like hovering over
and making some idiot, evil serial killer or hero it's

(47:32):
about awareness and making people think. So every episode has
a missing person trying to raise awareness of missing people
and cold cases of missing people. And we also have
to think on dark outdoors defense where we share defense strategies, mechanisms,
weigh people escape bad situations. And then we dive into
what people want to dive into. I mean, like the
crazy stuff that really happens, because a lot of this

(47:54):
happens in the outdoors, and it doesn't get connected to
the outdoors, like the outdoor media doesn't cover. The mainstream
media might have a glancing blow of like it happened
in this national forest, and that's about it. Well, we
go way way into it, and I'll tell you one.
So my number one most downloaded show is about feral dogs.

(48:15):
Feral dog attacks. And there was a hunter in Georgia
who was almost killed by these these pitbulls that were
loose in the woods. And then a friend of mine
had to shoot his way out of a pack of
feral mongrels. And I've had a couple of run ins
over the years. And yesterday I told you I was hunting. Today,
I came out of the woods yesterday I drove about

(48:38):
a half mile down the road in there, and I've
seen feral dogs in this set of woods before. There
were two big feral dogs chewing on a hogcark as
someone had dumped off on the road down there. And
so it might be that, and then it might be
the really juicy stuff like serial killers, you know. And
the first episode was about Ted Bundy. I figured, if
I'm going to start this, I'm going to go out.

(49:00):
You know Stephen the show who interviewed Ted Bundy for
like six months and wrote confession I think it was
Confessions of a Killer was his book. And Bunny did
a lot of stuff to women in the out He'd
take them out in the outdoors, you know. And the
line that I remember from this was I said, if
I came upon like a Bundy, I could do back
country fly fishing. And I had, you know, I'm gonna

(49:22):
if I seeing kind of rape a woman or something,
I mean, I'm gonna intervene. I mean, what would he
have done? He goes, how tall are you? Said? Six feet?
He goes, oheita rant he's about five to nine. He goes,
did he this? I still get chills thinking about this.
He goes, but if you're a woman, he would not
have been able to help himself. Yeah, the chances are
he probably would have already seen you coming. You know,
I went to this whole thing. So it was like

(49:43):
awareness raising and me and Lisa, who's sitting over here
listening over here, we have this friend of ours. That
I've always said is that the introductory moment to a
horror movie, Like she is the opening scene of the
horror movie. You know, beautiful woman. Where's Daisy? Duke's like
everywhere all the time, and she goes on the back
roads looking for arrowheads and stuff by herself. And she

(50:04):
listened to that first episode and called me and said,
I'm gonna get training and get my concealed handgun license.
I said, smart girl. You know, I don't want to
do an episode about you know.

Speaker 2 (50:16):
Oh yeah, Well that's.

Speaker 6 (50:17):
What the show's about, and it's it's interesting, and it's
about to expand it to a weekly show. So I've
been doing it in seasons, but I've been I found
a way to make it work for a weekly show,
and we're gonna rock and roll on that in twenty
twenty five.

Speaker 4 (50:31):
That's cool, And people can find the podcast on iHeart, Spotify,
Apple and all the major platforms.

Speaker 6 (50:36):
Yeah, Dark Outdoors on Apple, It's on iHeart is a
big chunk of my listenership and I'll Spotify everywhere. This
podcast Dark Outdoors is there.

Speaker 3 (50:48):
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Speaker 4 (53:56):
Tell us a story if you have one that you've
un covered for dark outdoors at Long Levane, a bigfoot
UFOs something like that. We've all, if we've spent enough
time in the woods, we've all heard something.

Speaker 2 (54:10):
They were like, that's got to be bigfoot.

Speaker 6 (54:12):
Oh I love that stuff, man, I absolutely love that stuff.
That's fun stuff. And you start talking to people like
people knowing the dark outdoors guy, Now they'll start telling stuff.
They'll be like, home on a second, let me tell
you something that happened in the woods. And they'll be like, so,
I'll give you a story that a friend of mine
who's deceased uncovered. And then I had a person who
listened to my episode called me back and was like,

(54:33):
I can't believe I found someone find knows about this right,
So it's the guname Rob Riggs. He wrote a book
about the legend of the wild Man in the Big
Thicket area of East Texas. And me and my good
friends the researcher Lyle Blackburn were talking one day and goes, hey, Chester,
do you remember your friend Rob, who's passed away writing
about someone seeing like primitive Indian looking people in the

(54:55):
Big Thicket? And I said, I do remember that kind
of I hadn't read the book years so I went
and found the book in my archives, and he for
years had people who were saying in the in the
Old and Lost River area multiple Trinity, upper Trinity Bay
into Trinity River, who said that they encountered what they

(55:18):
thought were Indians, were like people like getting shot at
with an arrow. And the craziest story, let me think
it might be true because this is back in the
sixties to the early eighties as the time window right,
so you're looking fifty years ago, right, plus was alignment.
Nobody would make a story about alignment. Alignment was working
on thing in the area and looked down he saw
this group of six what he said were like Indians

(55:41):
looking at him, glary and in primitive looking. And I
got to think, and this is coming out of like
the hippie movement era and people living in communes. Could
it have been like that or modern people kind of
going back and living like a primitive way? And so
I ran a show on Riggs Old Reports, and I
had a guy whose dad was the sheriff down there

(56:01):
in the seventies. And this is what's interesting. There were
six linked to this one sighting that these hunters were
coming out of the Old and Lost river bottoms at night.
There were three hunters and they saw people ahead of
them and they were walking without a light, and they're like,
what is going on on this trail? And they got
close and according to the story, and they said it

(56:24):
was like primitive Indians, almost no clothes, and one of
them shot an arrow. And this guy said, my dad
for years had a polaroid that they took of that arrow.
They went back out in the woods and found it
in an evidence thing. He actually went interviewed the people.
This guy knew this story from his childhood. So the
craziest wildest ones I've ever had that probably oppos it

(56:47):
and who knows. I mean a lot of things are possible.
A lot of things fifty sixty years ago could remain hidden.
And so if anybody's ever heard of that stuff, please
message me. I love to do more on that because
that was a big response. That one just kind of
told me like, you never know what's going to be
reported to what could be out there, you know. So
that's my current favorite oddball, dark out door story.

Speaker 2 (57:09):
That's cool.

Speaker 4 (57:10):
Yeah, you know, unfortunately that that small tribe is now
all working at Chipotle and Starbucks.

Speaker 6 (57:15):
Yeah, but what was interesting my buddy Lyle and I
went back and researched the Karankawa, who were the tribe
that was in the Galveston area, and there was this
reference that they often mainly would travel in bands of
six people really, and this was six people and two
of the reports. So there's a lot of connective tissues.

(57:36):
So who knows.

Speaker 4 (57:38):
Hey, look they found that guy on the island, what
fifty something years after World War Two?

Speaker 2 (57:42):
That yeah, the war was going on. I mean, I I.

Speaker 4 (57:46):
As urbanized and populous as this country is, I still
think there are those who are living, oh yeah, you know,
as primeval people. I think it's that's very cool, But
I still think there are those people out there. When
I was a kid, I used to hunt the pipelines,
these these up and down hill pipelines in northeast Louisiana.
My dad worked for Columbian Chemicals for twenty five years

(58:07):
and had these gas pipelines behind the plant where he worked.
And we ran across an old still and it wasn't
that old. I mean, it wasn't functioning, but I was like, I.

Speaker 2 (58:16):
Was old enough. You know, they would when we were young,
it was a different world.

Speaker 4 (58:19):
They'd drop us off I had a four to ten
single shot. Yeah, I could hunt squirrels and rabbits and
ducks right there.

Speaker 1 (58:24):
And they'd dropped me off in the morning and picked
me up when the sun went down, and I would
walk those hills all day long, have a lunch, you
know whatever. We were to cross some weird stuff, and
when we came across that steel one day, I'm like,
well this. I was old enough to know what it
was and old enough to be afraid because it was
not non operational for that long.

Speaker 4 (58:42):
And I'm like, okay, well this is not that far remote.
But here's a still out in the woods, you know.

Speaker 6 (58:47):
Yeah, well, like forty five year old Chester finds a
meth lab. And I talked about this on my radio
shows before I had the Dark Outdoors podcasts. I mentioned,
you gotta be careful of this kind of stuff. You know.
Some caller calls in one of these really like really
in tune people and is like, so, Chesters, you confirm
it was a myth emphetamine lab. I said, yeah. I

(59:08):
knocked at the door and I said, yeah, it's a
smart thing to do, because it was either one of
two things. It was a myth lab and they have
an ar and their keyed up or it was Jason
Shack from Friday the thirteenth, Part two. And I don't
want to meet either one of those guys, you know,
so h there you go.

Speaker 4 (59:25):
Yeah, yeah, you know, I've had and I'm sure you've
had experiences too. I've had times where and I've come
across uh in parts of North Louisiana, which which I
don't know about. You know, they had a huge Indian
population up there at the Poverty Point area is one
of the most bizarre Indian settlements in the entire United
States and the history behind it. They had a whole
thousands of thousands of Native Americans that were there that

(59:47):
just disappeared.

Speaker 2 (59:49):
They don't know what happened to them.

Speaker 1 (59:50):
They had all these giant mounds, circular mounds that looked
like snakes and things like that. It's the largest, it's
the largest establishment of mounds in the US. And they said,
these people out there thousands of years hunters gatherers and
agricultural people, and they're like, we don't know where they
went or when they left.

Speaker 6 (01:00:07):
It's kind of like the Aranka Law are very similar
that they've just gone. You know. There's another trial I'm
going to mess the name up. The attack Open or
a Pacaton. There were ones here close to me, and
they were also allegedly had some cannibalistic rights or whatever.
They're another one that's kind of let gone, you know.
So that's interesting about North Louisian. I like that area
up there.

Speaker 1 (01:00:25):
You need to look up Poverty Point and go out
there and see it. And they just found a new
mound on the property. They didn't realize it was officially
an Indian mound. I think they found that probably ten
years ago. But it's one of the largest archaeological sites
in the US right now and it's open to the public.
But I've been walking on like you, and you know,
found shacks and woods.

Speaker 4 (01:00:45):
Found an old church one time that hadn't been inhabited
probably for one hundred years, that was still standing in
the middle of these piny woods up in northeast Louisiana.

Speaker 2 (01:00:52):
So I've had some pretty cool run ends and discoveries.

Speaker 4 (01:00:54):
But I'm guessing the more your show grows dark at doors,
the more cause you're going to get, oh.

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
This is this is the kind of thing that attracts me.

Speaker 1 (01:01:03):
Ever to go oh, I remembering Uncle Bob told me
and Ramon about that time that he saw you know,
a four legged uh, you know four legged uh or
a six legged giraffe that time and blah blah blah.

Speaker 6 (01:01:15):
And you know, here's the thing I tell people about
all this mysterious stuff. All it takes is one report
to be true, right, for there to be really something
behind a lot of this stuff. And uh And when
you go out there and you start I've been into
this stuff for kind of stuff for years and you
start talking to people, people have encounters with stuff, and

(01:01:35):
people have grushes with danger that they never talk about,
like you know, getting shot at and weird stuff. So
it's a place to talk about that, but also hopefully
to raise awareness so people. I mean, I had to
show about rogue waves, you know, like uh uh and
you know, crazy story of rogue waves were off from
a ship channel and the guys who were in the
back of Corpus Christie Bay and they see a wave

(01:01:56):
that's going across the entire bay. They thought it was
a tsunami. It was so big, wow, And they covered
the whole bay and it was from a ship and
they had and they almost got they almost died, you know,
And so if we can take all this stuff and
make people safe and also entertaining with some crazy cool
campfire stories, I'm in you know.

Speaker 3 (01:02:16):
Yeah, you ever think how many times your life was
in danger and you never even knew it.

Speaker 6 (01:02:20):
Oh that's a scary thought, man. Yeah, yep, you're right
about that for sure. You know. My closest brush with
death that I'm aware of and the outdoors was getting
drug under on a trot line and forty feet of
water in the winter in nineteen ninety seven by an
alligator garfish. It was on my triut line and the I,
like an idiot, I put the trout line up, you know,

(01:02:42):
the line in the boat. I saw the gar on
the line and he you know, this was about dead.
I thought, because they'll drown themselves. They got they like
to bree there in the winter time. They don't do
real good in there. So I'm like, goofy me, two
uter pound gar that's getting in the boat by yourself.
So I got the gas folk under that soft spot
under his jaw and I kind of did like this,
and he did barely moved. I'm like, sweet man, it's
gonna be awesome. I'm gonna heave hol him and I

(01:03:05):
laid the trot line across the front of the boat.
Well when I heaved, he hoed in. What happened was
the hook caught the bottom of my shoe. Ah, and
I went. My cousin saw this sobou two hundred yards
away and he's running his truck. He saw it happen,
and he was like, you went in Like I just remembered,
gulp and look up like where the bubbles are going.

(01:03:26):
That's the only thoughts I had in my head. And
thank god, you know, a two hundred pound guy and
a two hundred pound guard broke the line. But uh,
how many times, like you said, was there? Maybe were
you and Yellowstone and there's a grizzly sal with cubs
right behind you ten yards away, or you know, some
nut job in the woods. So so my slogan is pray, prepare,

(01:03:48):
and pack heat. That's my dark outdoor slogan. That's what
we did. We pray, repair, pack heat.

Speaker 4 (01:03:54):
Well, I'm just glad that that alligator guard didn't perfect
storm you off the back of the boat.

Speaker 6 (01:03:58):
It was terrifying, dude. Here's the bad thing. I get
back in. I get back in the boat. And it
only took a second, and I'm like, damn, I'll jump
up by the I'll get myself in the boat. And
I'm like, I got to get home because it's cold.
I'm worried about hypothermia.

Speaker 7 (01:04:12):
You know.

Speaker 6 (01:04:12):
I wentn't too far from from home, and I go,
maybe the gar Maybe the gar still on? So do
you like this? And it's not on there? And so
if you ever are fishing the Sabine River and you
catch a guard that has a gaff book about that
long with a orange handle, please return the handle to me.
Am I like to have it hang on the wall.

Speaker 1 (01:04:33):
Go to Higher Calling dot net find information he needs
his gaff back.

Speaker 2 (01:04:39):
I do man all right, Chester, We appreciate your time.

Speaker 4 (01:04:41):
This has been this week's episode of honey Matters with
our buddy Chester Moore Higher Calling, Higher Calling dot Net.
Check out Higher Calling Wildlife and then following him on
social media's d Chester Moore on Instagram and d Chester
More on YouTube and check out the Dark Outdoors podcast.
A lot of cool and weird stories coming up. I'm
sure Chester is always We appreciate your time.

Speaker 2 (01:05:00):
It's been a lot of fun.

Speaker 6 (01:05:02):
It's great to be honest you guys, Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (01:05:04):
Thank You.

Speaker 3 (01:05:08):
Hunting Matters is a Houston Safari Club Foundation production hosted
by HSCF Executive director Joe Beetar and Ramone Roeblus, produced
by Ramone Roeblas. Please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you
listen to podcasts.

Speaker 8 (01:05:21):
For questions or more information, email us at info at
we huntwee give dot org