 OK, well, I think we should get started. And if other people come, we'll welcome them as they dribble in. Are you ready over here? Yeah. Cool. All right, so welcome to the Sacred Hunt talk. My name is Murphy Robinson. I run a company called Mountain Song Expeditions up in Worcester, Vermont. And my name line of work is teaching people to hunt and teaching people archery. So I thought I'd come here to the co-op and answer some questions for folks who were interested in this local sustainable source of meat. So this talk is designed for people who are curious about hunting, probably haven't hunted before, and want to know what it takes to get into hunting. We're going to really line out what you actually have to do to get into this so that you can understand the process. Because I was someone who was not raised in a hunting family. I was raised by vegetarians. And I didn't learn to hunt until I was 27 or 28. So I know how intimidating it can be to try and approach this whole culture and practice of hunting when you don't have a family mentor. So I'm going to try and demystify it. So probably one of the questions people have is, why am I calling this a Sacred Hunt? What's that about? And Sacred Hunt is a terminology I use just to talk about hunting that we're approaching in a really mindful way and a way that connects us from nature, rather than just connects us from nature. Some of the dialogue about hunting in the wider culture is a little bit about trophy hunting and dominating nature and that sort of thing. And so this is distinct from that. It's really about the attitude you bring to it. I think that anyone can do a Sacred Hunt and make up what that means to them. For me, some of what that means is being a really ethical hunter, following all the laws in your state, being safety oriented, not being reckless. Also respecting your prey as a fellow being and offering respect and honor to that creature and the sacrifice that they're making to help you feed your family. Also using every part of the animal that you harvest, every part that you know how to use and doing your best with that. Obviously, like using all of the meat on the animal and you can boil down the bones for bone broth, you can tan the hide. I have high tanning glasses for people who want to learn how to do that. And not everyone has all of the knowledge to use the intestines or certain parts. We may just give back to the forest, give to the coyotes, return them to the cycle. But continuing to learn about how to use all the parts so that when you're taking the sacrifice of a life, you're really honoring all of it as an important part of it for me. I also like to engage with the concept of consent as I hunt, which sounds really strange to some people because you're killing something and you're sneaking up on it to kill it, so it doesn't seem like a very consensual process. But on a kind of spiritual level, I like to think about putting forth prayer that is consent-oriented to the animal. A prayer that I do at the beginning of every hunt is, here in Vermont, it's bucks only for a great hunting. And so I pray that like may the buck who is ready to die for his people to sacrifice himself so that there will be more food for the rest this winter and to die cleanly and to have his story told every time his flesh is eaten. May that buck come to me and if no buck like that is in this forest, then may no buck come to me. And just sort of put out an intent that like the right animal will come to me and will die in a way that's clean and that will feed the ecology of the deer herd in general. So that's how I'm kind of bringing in that concept of consent. And also the sacred hunt is usually accompanied with some kind of offerings or prayers. You know, some people offer some sacred herbs or they'll sing a song or they'll just take a little time to like grieve over the animal and mourn its death. And yeah, just being in touch with the emotional flow that you go through as a hunter or a huntress. As you're engaging in that cycle, it's a very intimate way of interacting with our meat. It's very different than just buying it in the store. So I'm going to go through seven steps of what you need to do to go from like zero to actually going out for a hunt. So the first step of course is to know the laws in your state. You need to take a hunter safety class in order to legally hunt anywhere in North America. You only have to take it once. You can take it in any state and it's good in all the other states and Canada and Mexico. Which is kind of amazing because the hunter safety that we do here in the states is much less involved than the one they teach in Canada, but they still have reciprocity with our class. And so it's just something you have to do once. It's free, at least in Vermont. I think some states might have a small charge. And most of the hunter safety classes are taught as a partial home study course where you do a bunch of material online and you take some quizzes and then you go in for just one eight hour day of a field day where they actually watch you shoot and make sure you can handle it gun safely. And those are offered by the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department for free. I'm a hunter safety instructor and a lot of other people are. It's all volunteer and they're really good programs. They do a good job. So when you've gone through this hunter safety class, you also need to make sure that you know the hunting laws in your state or in any state that you're going to hunt in. You know, I've hunted in five or six different states so you've got to like study the laws in the state where you're going. And you have to purchase a hunting license. In Vermont, there's a program where if you're the landowner, sometimes you don't have to have a license, but you still need to know all the laws and you need to make sure that you're legal in all of those ways. So, and this is a picture of me with a button buck that I harvested in Iowa in a shotgun hunt. My family lives in Iowa so I was out there. And this is an example of knowing the hunting laws in your state because in Vermont during firearm season it would not be legal to harvest a deer that didn't have antlers of a certain size. But in Iowa, the deer herd is much more prolific and they're just begging you to harvest all the deer you can so that they can keep the herd healthy. So, step two is to know your hunting weapon. I get a lot of people coming to me with questions about bow hunting with the belief that bow hunting is somehow more like ethical and fair. I like to challenge that a little bit and ask people to think about what is humane. And bow hunting takes a lot of skill, it's a very advanced skill both in terms of the practice you put in for marksmanship and also you need to get a lot closer to a deer with a bow than you do with a gun in order to harvest with a bow. So, that just takes a lot of hunting skill of putting yourself in the right place at the right time. So, it's harder to have the kind of early success that would keep you going in this fairly difficult pursuit and you also definitely wouldn't want to have a bad experience where you're wounded in the animal but weren't able to harvest it the first time. So, bow hunting is an amazing awesome challenge. I definitely encourage people to bow hunt but I do encourage people if you're just starting out to start with firearms hunting here in Vermont that kind of mean rifle hunting and start hunting with a rifle and then start shooting your bow at the same time and in five years maybe put the two together but build up your skill sets with both first because you'll learn a lot just from hunting for the firearm that you can then apply to hunting with the bow. So, there's a lot of choices. In Vermont we have a 16 day rifle season. Season timing and length varies in different states. We also have a separate muzzle loader season for black powder firearms which are considered a little bit more of a challenge for hunting because you only have one projectile that you're shooting. You don't have like a whole magazine with more that you can load quickly and you can also shoot a shotgun either with a slug which is sort of like a bullet that goes in a shotgun or with buckshot. And the city of Montpelier where we are right now is a good example of a place where you might use buckshot because that's the only thing away to hunt in Montpelier is to use shot. The reason is that shot does not travel very far and this is a very densely settled area so you don't want rifle bullets flying around because they go over a mile if they're not stopped where a shot will only go a couple hundred yards. So, you'll want to evaluate where you're hunting and what the laws are. For example, in Massachusetts you can only hunt with a shotgun. They don't have a rifle season. Same in Iowa where I harvested that button buck. They only are shotgun state. They have a few very strange like handgun and weird rifle calibers that are allowed but I don't own those guns so I had to get a shotgun to hunt there. So know the laws where you are and what would be appropriate and then you need to acquire a rifle or whatever firearm you're looking at and make sure you understand the safe use and get training and have a lot of practice with marksmanship so that you're not questioning yourself. You don't want to be sitting in that tree stand looking at a buck and have this worry in the back of your head of like, oh, but is my marksmanship good enough because that's going to like throw you off. You want to know that it's good enough. And whether you're shooting with a bow or with a gun you always want to stay within your effective range and that's very individual. You know, maybe for you your effective range is 60 yards which is fairly close and, you know, for a rifle anyway and you just need to be able to estimate that distance and, you know, commit to staying within that distance and that as your marksmanship improves maybe you could shoot out to 150 yards or more and knowing that is the way to be ethical whatever weapon you choose. And if you are interested in getting into bow hunting there's a couple different types of bows you can use. I brought a few examples. I didn't bring guns because we're in the co-op and I didn't think they'd like that. But this is an example of a compound bow which is what most people are using for hunting these days with all the complicated pulleys and everything. These have a lot of advantages mostly that when you pull the string all the way back there is a way that it's geared that it's easy to hold back at full draw whereas with a traditional bow it's, you know, the most difficult to hold back at full draw you often have to sit there for a while and wait for the animal to turn correctly or whatever and, you know, you can exhaust your arm with a more traditional bow and this gives you an advantage there. You need to make sure you're hunting with the right arrows and the right tips they need to have broad heads in order to be legal for hunting. I'm mostly talking about deer hunting but for whatever we do... Oh, it looks like I took the broad heads out probably when I was hunting in Minnesota so I can't show you those. But there are also traditional bows that are wonderful for hunting. This is a Korean traditional bow that is a sort of smaller, shorter example of a recurve bow. Some people also hunt with long bows and this can also be very effective if you know your effective range and stick within it. Hunting poundages for bows... many states have a minimum poundage of like how much weight you're pulling back how much force the bow is putting into that arrow. In a lot of states it's 35 or 40 pounds minimum for deer hunting. Vermont does not have a minimum for deer hunting. There is a minimum for moose hunting, I believe. Either bear or moose. I believe it's moose. It's like a 55-pound draw. But most of my students... I work a lot with women and trans people and most of my students can't pull a hunting weight bow when they walk into the range for the first time. It takes building up some muscle. Unless you're someone who, you know, you work in a warehouse, you already have that muscle. Then maybe you can jump right into it. But usually you need to get a bow of a lighter weight so that you can learn on a bow that's correctly matched to your strength and learn good form. And then you can slowly work up to that weight. And some bows have interchangeable limbs and everything, so it's a little easier to make that transition. Or like this bow has adjustments in order to pull back and put more force into the arrow. But again, I usually recommend that people start with rifle hunting and also start shooting a bow, which is really fun, just as a fun thing to do. And then put the two together down the road after you've had some success with the gun. And there are lots of places to get training in safety and marksmanship with both the gun and the bow. Archie classes up in Worcester at my place. And for rifle marksmanship, in some of my longer hunting training programs we do have some marksmanship training over time. But another program that I recommend is the Apple Seed Trainings. They are put on by this organization that promotes U.S. Revolutionary War History and proper marksmanship. And argues that proper marksmanship was like why we won the war or something like that. I don't know, their politics are kind of interesting, but they offer really, really good marksmanship training that's based on military training models and has really helped me become much more confident with the gun. So you can look them up. And they're quite affordable. It's like $60 for a weekend. And they teach all over the U.S. So once you've selected your weapon you need to make sure you understand how to make a safe shot. Because especially if you're using a rifle, which is what I'm recommending people start with, those bullets can go over a mile if they aren't stopped by something. So basically you should only shoot when you know your bullet is going to be stopped by something even if you don't hit the deer. The deer will to some degree stop it. So the basic principle is you're always shooting into the ground. And luckily in Vermont we have a lot of terrain so shooting into a hillside is not that hard to do. But there's something called skylining an animal where you see that beautiful big stag up on the hilltop with his back against the sunset and it's just silhouetted against the sky. And that is not a shot that you should ever take because if he moves or you miss then that bullet is going to keep on going for at least a mile, probably more. And it's going to hit something and possibly kill something when it finally stops. There have been people in Vermont that have been killed by stray bullets and somehow wove their way through forests without hitting the trees for a mile and then killed a person. So you need to be very, very careful about that. And that bullet is your responsibility after you pull the trigger. One thing that can help with shooting into the ground is be positioning yourself in a tree stand which also helps for a lot of other reasons because it kind of gets you up out of the scent zone of the deer and it's just a little bit more hidden. But if you're in an elevated tree stand then you're sort of automatically shooting down towards the ground wherever you're shooting unless you have a very steep hill falling away from you. So I recommend them for safety for sure. Also gets you up out of other people's shooting trajectories which is nice as well. You should also be careful about shooting towards water. Water can actually ricochet a bullet using the surface tension because of the speed of what goes on. It doesn't always happen but it can happen and that would be very bad. And also rocks. There's a lot of big outcroppings of rock in our mountains and those could potentially ricochet a bullet a little bit too which is not going to ricochet all the way back at you. That would be very unlikely but you don't know where it's going to go. So you want to be in control of that bullet going into the ground or into a tree or hopefully into your deer. And that goes for practice as well as for hunting. You need to find a place to practice if it's not at a shooting range which is all set up for that. A place to practice that you're definitely shooting into a hill. And also being aware of lead if you're using lead bullets. You can invest in non-lead bullets which are better for the environment but they do cost more. They're harder to source and you are putting lead into the ground wherever you're practicing your shooting. So shooting ranges are set up for that. But your home spot you'd want to pick a spot that wasn't in a drainage. Now we've acquired our weapon we practiced with it we feel confident we understand a safe shot but there's also a lot of clothing and gear involved. You can see this is a hunt that I led in North Carolina and we are all extremely bundled up. And this is North Carolina it's not nearly as cold as Vermont you can see there's no snow on the ground but if you are being still and most types of successful beginning hunting involve sitting in a place where the deer will be passing by you on a deer which is very advanced. If you're sitting still early in the morning or as the sun is setting you're going to get very very cold so you need to dress in many many layers I usually have like seven layers on my top and three on my bottom and really big winter snow boots even though it's not snowing out you can kind of see I've got some like wool pants here and like a down jacket and a hooded jacket under my camo raincoat and all of that so coming up with a layering system that works for you is really important with special attention to fingers and toes especially for people who are assigned female tend to have worse circulation in these Japanese a little bit not always but for many people and so I get like arctic rated boots I like the ones made by Baffin they're really good and also use till warmers because one of the number one things that can prevent someone from getting a deer is if your toes are just too cold for you to stay in the tree stand and that has happened to multiple people that have come on my hunting trips they're just like I can't do it anymore and you know if there's no way you're going to get a deer you're not out in the woods and fingers too your fingers are pulling your bow or pulling your trigger and so they need to be warm and flexible and ready to go and so they make mittens that will sort of fold back and reveal your fingers so that you can have that dexterity when you need it or you can wear like liner gloves and put them inside some big fluffy mittens or some mittens actually have a trigger finger separate and the rest is a mitten there's all kinds of special things you can get but with a little creativity you feel it put together it works it isn't too expensive and then you're going to want to have a little backpack with you of some sort of stuff you need to bring both basic gear like map and compass knife, crochet kits, water food that sort of thing some way to communicate is good you know cell phones don't always work in the mountains but it's nice to have one in case you have a deer you're going to be dragging it out and you want to call some friends for help some way to communicate is recommended if it's possible and you also need to carry a certain amount of stuff that you wouldn't carry on like a day hike or something like that that's poor recovery for any animal so you need your hunting license to be on you you need your hunting tag to be on you because you're going to need to attach that to the deer before you move it you're going to need to have some kind of pen or a sharpie to like write down the date and time that you shot it that's part of the legal tagging process I like to bring some latex gloves or nitrogen gloves out in so that I can feel dress it and then just take off the gloves because it's probably not running water right there that I can clean my hands off with it's just easier and you know whatever kind of knife or the gutting hook or something like that you need for field dressing I like to bring some Ziploc bags for putting the organs in so we want to take all the organs out so the animal pools faster but some of the others are very good to eat so whatever you need to like again use all the parts of the animal and then whatever you need to haul that animal out like a rope or special harnesses for hauling deer and stuff like that so you need all that to fit into a day pack comfortable so that you again can stay out for as long as you want to and have a better chance of finding that deer step five is to really learn the ground that you're going to be hunting there's all kinds of different ways to get land access in Vermont state owned land is mostly open to hunting as state forest land is all open to hunting but then there's also private land and if that land is posted in Vermont then you need to have written permission in your pocket to be on that land hunting posted land can be some of the best hunting land you just have to have a good relationship with the land owner so that they trust you and they welcome you on to their land and you're not going to trash things and some people are you know just against hunting and will not say yes but many people will and they've just had bad experiences with people being rude on their land so you want that permission with you and then you really want to like scout the land that you're going to be hunting because you need to put yourself in the right place you know Vermont is only 16 days long and you can't just be wandering and tramping all around there you've got to be like deliberate and strategic about it so you're going to be looking for rugs and scrapes which are buck sign for the rut so like here's an old old rub that Meg is demonstrating she's a deer tracker here and they make scrapes on the ground where they scrape with their hooves like P&N it's sort of like a little voicemail box where they exchange hormonal messages with the bucks and the does and other sign like scat and tracks and whatever you can you know bends in the grasses that can help you figure out like where are the deer traveling between at different times of day like where do you want to sit in the morning where do you want to sleep in where is the general wind direction coming from because the smell is there number one sense for telling if they're in danger you also want to look for the food deer are going to go to the food source if you have access to hunting over an old apple orchard that's amazing you're going to have good luck deer hunting but otherwise you've got to figure out what are they eating in the forest going see where the sign is see where things have been nibbled try and figure that out where their travel corridors are and some people do use game cameras for this like find what they think is a game trail and put a camera out there and you can get a picture and it'll have a timestamp on it and there's passing through there a lot of game trailers only use it at night and we can't hunt after dark so you've got to figure out where they're going to be in daylight and then some people think that the game camera is kind of like a cheat but also most of us have full-time jobs and can't just spend all of our time getting to know the wildlife patterns of the land so it can actually be a really helpful aid in the modern world and you want to think about tree stand placement if you have permission to put a tree stand where are the places you're going to want to go most frequently and putting up a stand well ahead of time so that the deer get used to it and don't consider it a threat you want to give them like a month to get used to it at least so that's some of the steps to learning your hunting ground there's a lot of work to put into that and then you want to have a good plan for game recovery this is one of the biggest questions I get in my classes especially from women or anyone who has like a little bit less brute strength that are asking like well how do I get the deer in the woods it's a really good answer I actually like to think about this when I plan where I'm going to be hunting I like to hunt uphill from a road not downhill from a road because I don't want to haul a deer up the trail but once you've made a shot and you've connected with an animal often that animal does not just fall right where you shot but even if it's a very good shot it will often run us short ways there's just that much life left in an animal even if you shot it straight through the heart that it can still run a little ways so our bodies are amazing that way so you may have to follow a blood trail and that involves waiting a little while letting the forest calm down if it's a good shot the deer will probably expire in an hour just sit there and wait and then go down to the point last scene see if you can find drops of blood and start following that trail and find out where that animal has retreated to something that feels safe probably in some brush, probably a little bit hard to find you can see here this is one of my hunting students Cecilia recovering her first deer down North Carolina and it's kind of like managed to get itself way and under there we found a little spot surprisingly not obvious it's the same color as the leaves so you have to be prepared to do some tracking you may also want to bring some flagging tape so that you can flag your way back because you could track it for a while if it was a good shot it shouldn't be that far if it was not the best shot you've ever made you might be going a ways and you owe it to that animal to recover the body and to use it but you also want to be able to find your way home so bringing the flagging tape can be really good you need to confirm that the animal is fully dead sometimes they look dead but people have been very badly injured by deer that weren't actually dead that can kind of leap up and do the last fight thing so the way that we recommend to confirm death is to take a long stick and touch it to the eyeball of the deer and if it doesn't blink it's dead that's good for any mammal that I've tried to confirm death on and then you want to be able to field dress the animal unless it's right next to a road then you might just take it home first but most people are going to remove the guts and organs before they haul it out because A, it makes it a lot lighter like a pretty high percentage of the deer's weight is in its stomach and organs and it helps the carcass cool faster instead of the meatball and spoil so you want to have materials with you for that and then dragging strategies include having friends you can call I like to have a list of people that are available both in the evening and during working hours that I could call if I have a really long drag a lot of people will use a sled like a snow sled that even if it's like this and there's no snow on the ground it's still a lot easier to pull a deer on a sled than to pull a deer just on the ground so some people like to keep a sled in their truck or something and then you'll get it if they get a deer having rope is really helpful or even like little harnesses that you can tie to the deer so you can pull it away where you're not bent over and crouched potentially injuring yourself and then again that flagging is really helpful for recovering as well so step seven the last step in my personal set of steps here is to really spend some time reflecting on your personal ethics and your spiritual beliefs around this because the moment when you do harvest your first deer is a very emotionally intense moment and you want to be prepared for that you want to have done some reflecting and not let it catch you off guard grief is definitely a part of hunting it's very very healthy for us to grieve the death of a beautiful strong living animal even if we know that we're doing it for reasons that we're aligned with and that it's coming to feed our family and all of that this is JoJo harvesting her first deer in North Carolina with us she came on this hunt for her 60th birthday and was able to get her first deer on this hunt and she just made an offering and really just allow herself to feel those emotions flowing through her and had a really beautiful moment with this deer and the immensity of the gift it was giving many people like to prepare some kind of offering or prayers JoJo here brought some dried apple and kind of gave it a little last bite after death some dried apple that was from her land and for some people there's like highs and lows that come after this experience of like there can be a euphoria of like whoa I just did this really hard thing that I've probably spent years into repairing for and like the joy of success and then there's also the grief that comes with that and it's like this whole tangle of emotions that's very unique but anyone who's can understand what you're talking about it's kind of an initiation and there can sometimes be an emotional low that follows that afterwards after that initial rush of energy and activity around the harvest of like really sitting with that and one thing that that's brought me to is a lot of reflections around how do we live in order to deserve this sacrifice you know the deer is just giving us the ultimate gift and I don't feel especially someone who's raised a vegetarian I don't actually feel that I need meat in my diet to be healthy but I do feel like it's very sustainable local form of nourishment that connects me to the earth and connects me to the spirit of the deer and I know that if I'm going to be engaging in this practice I really need to be living my life in an authentic way where I'm like bringing my gifts to the world and I am doing everything I can can for positive change to care for the environment and everything in order to deserve that sacrifice so it's been a really good thing that sort of holds me accountable in my life I also personally have a practice around contacting the spirit of a dead deer a deer that I shot or sometimes I'll do this for Roadkill that I harvest as well and going through a practice of what has often been called shamanism called spirit journeying because that's a very specific term from Siberia for that culture but to do some kind of spirit journey and to really ask the spirit of that deer is there anything I can do for you what can I offer in exchange and to see if you get any inspiration or any guidance around what you can do to be in reciprocity with the deer for this gift that it's given and go out and do some acts of service that wants to get aloo about it but you can still think in your logical brain of like what can I do to give back to this ecosystem that's feeding me and try and do some service on the land or something like that it also really helps to have a supportive community around you many of the people that I teach are folks who don't have a hunting background in their family and may not have a circle of friends that are bought into hunting as something that you can do ethically and so it's really important to have community that is okay with this than you're doing and willing to support you through it that's something that I've had to develop for myself and there is a ton of supportive community and the more traditional handed down father to son hunting community that's sort of built in and those of us who are building this new hunting community for ourselves really have to look harder for it and find that reinforcement of community I also really like to honor the meat in special ways when I cook it I really like to have a gathering share it with people and to do some storytelling around it and make sure that that deer gets its story told like what was that hunt like what were the special things about it I think my computer has just died because I'm maybe not plugged into a live outlet so I'm just going to that was pretty much the last slide I'm just going to rip on the rest of it that you can that feels appropriate to offer as a gift in that moment you may want to think about it prepare ahead of time write a story about that hunt make a poem, compose a song just say some prayers do things that honor the of the exchange that you're taking part in and it's funny because anyone who eats meat is taking part in that exchange all the time but we're not mindful about it because we're moved from it it's an incredibly intimate way to engage with that cycle and to really understand what we're doing every time we put a bite of meat in our mouths and for me that's been really humbling and really feels like a healthy thing to look in the face and so those are the 7 steps and I want to give you a couple of resources about where you can learn more the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department is really excellent and very supportive of new hunters especially non-traditional hunters who are women or people of color or queer or trans everyone that I've worked with in the department has been incredibly supportive of all of that it's very excited about sharing hunting with new groups of people especially the people in the education part of the department which is who I mostly worked with and so you can go on their website and sign up for a hunter safety course that's a really good first step I also do offer some seminars on like different skills that people might want to learn that are taught by local folks who are really knowledgeable sometimes in those classes I find you have to go in like knowing what questions to ask because there can be just an assumption of a basic level of knowledge that not all of us actually have or have passed on in our families but people are really willing to help if you can take the time to figure out what words to use for those folks and then I also offer a ton of different programs around hunting and archery my kind of flagship program is this two-day hunting skills intensive that I offer in the fall there's one weekend that's just for women and trans people and there's one weekend that's for all genders so if you want to come with their boyfriends or their nephews or whatever everyone's welcome in that one and that walks through a lot of the skills that's designed to complement it so Hunter's H class is for all types of hunting it could be for waterfell hunting or for turkey hunting or stuff like that so they're not going to get into deer specific strategies they're just really covering firearm safety so my class is specifically about deer hunting and what do you need to know to become a deer hunter and practicing those skills and we do actually harvest an animal in the class we slaughter a goat since it's not a hunting season we don't hunt but we slaughter a goat and learn skinning and just experience interacting in a prayerful way with death during that transition and that can be a really good preparation for people and can help people discern whether or not this is something they want to pursue for people who know this is something they want to pursue and they know like I want to harvest a deer this year I offer an eight month training where you come one weekend a month for seven months and then you come on a seven day guided hunt down south somewhere and you get a lot more deer than they ever want and where you can shoot does and yearlings and everything so that people have had very good success rates but yeah I don't want to promise anything but so far we've had 100% success rate on those trips and a lot of the photos that you saw today were from one of those trips or several of those trips so that's like really it holds your hands through the whole process it takes you through a year of study and it also creates community amongst you and the other students and the supportive community of people you can talk to about it that have the same understanding you do and I also offer a bunch of archery classes and this year for the first time I'm also offering a sort of spiritual skills training for folks who want to develop more of a spiritual practice framework whether it's in correlation with a hunt or not of how do you do this like contacting the spirit of a deer and how do you develop these prayers and practices and stuff like that open source skill set that you can apply to any earth-based practice so there's flyers on the corner of my stuff and for folks watching the video or anything like that my website is mountainsongexpeditions.com and you can find the information on all the programs there so those are the main places where you can learn more information I hope this was helpful and I'd be happy to answer any questions if you have any I hope I covered things that were useful oh yeah you covered a lot it was great good well feel free to be in touch if you think of more questions later or want to have any more questions that come to you as you talk about those with others and things like that I'm going to sign up for your email that's awesome that's probably why I wanted to come I wanted to meet you I wanted to discuss because I'm interested in one of your classes and I just thought well I have a different spiritual belief than you and I just wasn't sure it would be a good match but I feel good about it that's good to hear and I try very hard to keep the Huntress classes really open to all spiritual paths I don't teach my own spirituality I create a space where we have conversations and I have people who are Christian and people who are Buddhists and people who are Jewish and everyone just brings their own perspective and is able to share from that perspective and that's the sense I have for you cool that's great I think it's a really powerful thing to include in our spiritual practice you know except for some of the kosher practices I've largely fallen to the wayside so it's the way to sort of bring some back cool alright well thanks for coming thank you