Original subtitles

Some people must live in great spaces... where the sky

goes on forever... where everyone must bend to the land...

where to hunt, to fish, to sleep under that big sky

aren't activities, but a way of life.

It was between here and those mountains

that Cheyenne and Crow battle took place.

But I like it.

It's very peaceful, huh?

What was it like 100 years ago, 200 years ago?

Oh, not much different.

This was never forested.

This is the dry side of the river, 'cause the primary winds

come from the west.

And rain tends to blow over here.

That brings the snow to the mountains.

Legendary writer and poet Jim Harrison

is one of those people, and this is the place

he calls home.

♪ I took a walk through this ♪

♪ Beautiful world ♪

♪ Felt the cool rain on my shoulder ♪

♪ Found something good in this ♪

♪ Beautiful world ♪

♪ I felt the rain getting colder ♪

♪ La, la ♪

♪ Sha la, la, la, la ♪

♪ Sha la, la, la, la ♪

♪ Sha la, la, la ♪

♪ Sha la, la, la, la ♪

♪ Sha la, la, la, la, la ♪

♪ ♪

Am I as old as I am?

Maybe not.

Time is a mystery that could tip us upside down.

Yesterday I was seven in the woods.

A bandage covered my blind eye.

68 years later, I can still inhabit that boy's body

without thinking of the time in between.

It is the burden of life to be many ages without seeing

the end of time.

Next time you turn off a news cycle filled with shouting

bobbleheads convinced that America is devolving

into a moronic inferno, questioning the greatness

of your nation, maybe you should come here.

Here are your purple mountains majesty.

This is the landscape that generations of dreamers,

despots, adventurers, explorers, crackpots, and heroes

fought and died for.

It's one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

There is no place like it.

Montana.

Many have come to claim their piece over the years.

But before the prospectors and explorers,

there were the Plains Indians.

The Absaroka have been master horsemen since they adopted

Spanish-introduced mustangs in the 18th century.

General "Black Jack"

Pershing... he called the Native Americans

the centaurs of the plains.

Better known as the Crow, they were once part

of the larger Hidatsa tribe.

Centuries ago, they split off on their own and wandered

or were pushed by conflict with the Blackfeet, Cheyenne,

and Dakota until settling here in

the Yellowstone River Valley.

That horse became everything to our people.

Kennard Real Bird grew up ranching and raising horses here

at Medicine Tail Coulee, which happens to be the exact spot

where General George Custer had the worst day of his life.

Kennard raises horses for rodeo... Go!

For riding, and for this... Indian relay racing.

The athletic ability on them kids are just amazing.

The competition is intense.

They travel all over to compete at this collarbone-smashing,

skull-cracking, bone-snappingly dangerous sport...

Former allies and former blood enemies alike.

It requires a lot of courage.

I'll bet.

And a high threshold for pain.

It's representative of warrior mentality.

Welcome!

One rider, three horses.

They're all in line.

When they're lined up, gun goes off.

It's like a spontaneous combustion.

Away they go!

Top speed is around 40 miles an hour.

And after each lap, the rider dismounts

at full freakin' gallop and leaps, hopefully,

onto the next horse.

Yes, it's as dangerous and difficult as it looks.

The prizes at big events run into the thousands of dollars,

but, really, it's about bragging rights...

And pride.

Being in motion, in rhythm, in time, and in one

with that horse, you develop strength of character.

And once they conquer that fear,

that feeling of accomplishment is so great,

when they walk back from that race,

they have this sense of pride, and self-worth is sky-high.

Now they've identified with their ancestors.

Ken's wife, Diane, has prepared a lunch of buffalo steaks,

potato salad, fry bread, and Indian pudding

made of Juneberry stewed with flour and sugar.

When I looked at my ancestors, they didn't have diabetes.

They didn't have much cancer.

They were very strong, durable people.

And I said, "Well, I'm gonna start eating"

nothing but buffalo."

Over the course of your life,

how much has this area changed?

Quite a bit.

We went and picked up a four-wheeler last Sunday.

It'll be the first four-wheeler on the place.

Given those changes, what are the Crow people

gonna be doing in 20 years, 30 years?

The horse is gonna play an important part

in the culture still?

I think so, yeah, because what's a place gonna be like

without horses?

I wouldn't want to be there.

Who owns this land?

Can anyone really own it?

Who gets to use it?

These are big questions that cut across traditional

ideological lines out here, where they have real meaning,

not theoretical meaning.

All this belongs to one man... this guy, Bill Galt.

Okay, we're about a half mile from the confluence of

Rock Crick and the Smith River.

Galt Ranch is 100,000 acres of grazing land, mountains,

cliffs, and valleys.

There's also some of the best trout fishing on the planet.

Bill, the water level on the crick looks good.

This is Bill's friend, the author and journalist

David McCumber.

They disagree on land use... a major issue.

Remember when you could do that and still be friends?

Lee Kinsey is a professional outfitter

who Bill leases some areas of his property to for fishing.

- All this to outwit a fish. - I know.

- It's amazing. - All right. Go ahead.

Start that tip high.

Throw that thing straight up in the air.

Good. Perfect.

Bill's a fifth-generation Montanan whose principle business

is raising cattle.

He's no weekend cowboy.

This is work.

And he pays a lot of attention to his land.

And a big issue for him... For just about everybody

around here... is the 1985 Stream Access Law.

Anybody that could access a stream via a public means

could, in fact, use the stream,

even if it was on private ground as long as they stayed

within the ordinary high-water mark of the stream.

Widely heralded by sportsmen and outdoor enthusiasts,

the law did not go down well with land owners like Bill.

Oh! Got him.

Something took a bite.

Yep. You still got a fish right in there too.

Oh, I see him.

Perfect.

That's it!

Oh!

Fish of the day.

Nice brownie.

All right.

Whoo!

Beautiful thing.

That's pretty.

But I will not eat you today, my friend.

Not today.

For lunch, a modest, protein-centered repast of steak...

A wagyu-angus hybrid bred and raised right here

on Bill's ranch.

There's the marbling on the wagyu steak.

That's what makes them good.

Oh, that's nice.

And it's pretty damn tasty, I could tell you.

So you hold an opposing view, is that correct, on access?

The idea behind the Stream Access Law

that if you stay in water, it's public...

I agree with that concept.

But where do you draw the line

for private-property rights?

If the state were to pass a law

that your restroom was public because the public needed it,

in your house... - Right!

Oh, just because this isn't my backyard doesn't mean

it's any less mine than your toilet is yours.

We still pay taxes on every foot of it.

I'm an old-school lefty, but I got to say,

I kind of completely understand the property owner's

point of view here.

There would be no ambiguity in my feeling

if I inherited this land and it had been in my family

for generations, and I looked around at it and

wanted to keep it like it is... If I were to go to a bar

in town and I would ask, "How do you"

feel about this issue?"

- Where would it break? - What would most people say?

It depends on if you're a fisherman or a landowner.

Clearly divided right down the middle.

Well, you know, a lot of people are gonna say,

"When I was a kid, I used to be able to go hunt and fish,

and I can't now, and stuff's getting closed off."

I have some sympathy for that.

Anybody that's not complying with Stream Access

merely has to step into the stream when he hears you coming.

Right.

The spirit of it is... it makes sense.

The spirit of it's thievery.

- Well... - We own it, and they took it,

and that's not stealing it, without compensation?

I think it's still here.

This is about being a good neighbor, right?

Yeah.

I mean, so, if people ask nicely, more often than not,

you're gonna say yes?

We do. It used to be, before Stream Access,

we seldom required somebody to have permission if they just

behaved themselves.

After Stream Access is when the outfitters

came into the world, not because we wanted to make money,

but we wanted somebody there patrolling and policing it.

The outfitters take care of it.

A small stream like this can only take so much pressure.

It really can.

And so we try to manage it, fish it responsibly.

And if somebody wants to walk all the way from the Smith

five miles up to here, and do it legally, I say

all the more power to them.

That's what I'm saying.

♪ ♪

At first look, you'd think this is

the worst place on Earth... A ravaged, toxic,

godforsaken hill threatened from above,

riddled with darkness below.

But you'd be wrong.

Butte, Montana... it is, in fact, heartbreakingly,

poignantly beautiful.

The gallus frames seem eyesores for only a second

before it becomes clear why they are points

of fierce pride for locals, for whom they signify

and commemorate everything.

For Montanans, many people consider it

sort of a black eye.

I happen to think it's sort of the essence of Montana.

Aaron Parrett was born in Butte.

He's a professor of literature

and a chronicler of the city's colorful literary history.

There is something beautiful about this city, right?

Yeah.

The enduring decay.

Like in Detroit or Buffalo or Cleveland,

you can see the aspirations of the builders or the people

who they were building for.

As I've gotten older, I kind of think about it

the way Europeans romanticize

those ruins in Greece and Rome.

I view it as America's Acropolis.

In its heyday, Butte produced tens of billions

of dollars worth of copper that built, well, America,

that helped power the country, defend it against Germany

and Japan.

Without this hill, no copper wire, no electricity.

At the turn of the century, Marcus Daly's

Amalgamated Company consumed its competitors

and became Anaconda Copper.

By the '20s, the Company, as it was referred to,

was one of the largest corporations in America,

generating staggering wealth by today's

or any day's standards.

People came from all over the world

to make their fortunes here or simply for steady work,

a better life.

Cornish, Welsh, a lot of Eastern Europeans...

Croatians, Serbs... very ethnically diverse.

By Montana standards or by any standard?

I would say by any standards, that it's kind of a

micro-version of New York City.

Meaderville was an Italian neighborhood

and developed a tradition of supper clubs.

Lydia's was opened in 1946 by Lydia Mitchell Eddy

in the 4 Mile, the valley below Butte.

So what is a supper club?

- I've heard about this tradition, - but I don't really understand

What distinguishes a supper club from a restaurant.

At least in Montana, the supper clubs are a variation

on Meaderville style.

It involves this antipasto beginning... Sliced beets,

sweet-potato salad, salami and cheese, side salad,

pickled peppers, and breadsticks.

Then when you actually get your entrée,

you get, oddly enough, ravioli or spaghetti or, here, both.

But also French fries.

Odd.

That may be unique to Montana.

For entrées, seared scallops in white wine sauce for Aaron.

Me... noticing we're pretty much landlocked around here...

I go for the extra-thick tenderloin of beef,

thank you very much.

This is wacky.

It makes no sense.

It is somewhat bizarre to have scallops and French fries.

Yeah.

Meaderville no longer around?

No, it's not.

It was swallowed up by the Pit in the early '60s.

For the first 70 years, it was hard-rock mining...

Blasting and digging tunnels deep into the ground.

By the 1950s, mining was moving

increasingly to above ground... open pit...

Which meant fewer jobs and a bigger,

more visible footprint.

By 1955, the Berkeley Pit had become the largest open-pit

copper mine in the world.

As it expanded, it devoured Meaderville

and surrounding neighborhoods.

There was money down there to be dug out of the ground,

and that's what Butte had always been about

from the beginning.

In 1983, the pumps that held back the groundwater

from thousands of miles of tunnels beneath the city

were turned off.

The Pit filled with 30 billion gallons of water.

And as mine tailings and mineral refuse

contaminated the water, it became a giant,

insanely toxic lake of sulfuric acid... a monument to greed

and heedless exploitation of the Earth

and something eerily, if tragically, beautiful.

If you're still living here, you've got to have

some kind of weird, perverse pride in the Pit.

Absolutely.

I mean, correct me if I'm wrong.

No, you nailed it.

Obviously, the Pit is an enduring emblem of that rapacious,

capitalist greed, but you also have people here

who are proud of where they live.

The history of Butte, in many ways, is, you know,

this town that should've died but never did.

Part of that is luck, geographically,

but also the character of the people here.

You know, they endured.

As you might have gathered by now,

this is a working-class town and unusual,

in that it's a union town, a proudly union town,

in an otherwise very red state.

Butte is the most interesting, important town in America

that nobody knows about.

Brian McGregor is the owner of the Silver Dollar Saloon

in what was once Butte's Chinatown.

So we call ourselves Butte, America.

Amanda Curtis, a former state congresswoman, was born

of the labor movement.

She's a unionist and advocate for workers

in this solidly union city she calls home.

When you got off the boat in Ellis Island,

it said "Butte"

pinned to your shirt.

And it wasn't Butte, Montana, right?

It was Butte, America.

We were founded by European immigrants

who came from socialist countries with all of these crazy

socialist ideas.

Would you say Montana, in a stereotypic way,

is relatively socially conservative?

Oh, absolutely.

But Butte is a labor town.

Nobody knows anything about union history, you know?

They don't teach it.

When the country was at its peak, unions were at their peak.

When wages were at their peak, unions were at their peak.

- That was then. - This is now.

This is the era of "I got mine, Jack."

That's what makes Butte different.

It's not a "I've got mine."

It isn't. Why?

It's truly not.

Unionists together, we've grown this community

out of taking care of each other.

You have to remember what it was like here

for workers before unions, if you can imagine.

Men worked underground for as little as $3 a day,

10-to 12-hour shifts, 6 days a week.

Thousands died over the years in industrial accidents

or from silicosis, lungs ravaged

by the airborne silica dust.

You don't have any rights in your workplace

unless you bond together and have a collective voice.

In a one-company town, despite hiring assassins

and strikebreakers, Butte's thousands of workers

successfully managed to unionize.

Labor costs increased while copper prices slumped.

Anaconda responded by moving their production

increasingly south, way south, to Chile,

where such impediments as labor laws and fair wages

were more malleable.

We serve as the example about what happens if you allow

unfettered capitalism.

But isn't there something beautiful

about unfettered capitalism?

Because, look, this structure... Oh, yeah.

We powered the entire world As long as they're making

their money in the goddamn United States of America first.

Right.

I feel I'm a patriot.

But if you're taking jobs away from America

to export them overseas... You're not.

You're not.

And we've been talking about this for decades

in this country, right?

Keep our jobs here.

Yeah.

Time sinks slowly to the deepest part of the ocean...

The Mariana Trench.

She's tired of light, and there it's pure black.

They say that Butte is a mile high and a mile deep,

and to get an idea of what they mean,

you've got to go down... Down deep into the hill.

An intricate warren of tunnels riddled through the rock

and soil that lay beneath the city was flooded forever

by water and darkness.

The Orphan Boy Mine is one of the few remaining

hard-rock mines in the city.

Today it serves as a training facility for the Montana Tech

School of Mines & Engineering.

There's five generations of mining here.

In order to survive and provide the resources for America,

these people were super skillful.

Jim Keane is a state senator and labor advocate

who grew up working the mines of Butte.

How many miles of tunnel under Butte, total?

10,000 miles of tunnels.

10,000 miles.

- And I figure... - Like this?

Like this.

Only smaller, usually.

Larry Hoffman is a longtime mining engineer and instructor.

Matt Krattinger is the new guy.

A hard-rock miner by day, he likes to relax

by spending his free time down here, playing.

I come mining for fun on my days off.

Okay.

It's one of those things that just gets in your blood.

You got a lot of pride in it.

These guys like it underground.

And even more, they seem to like drilling holes

deep into the rock face.

You want to drill?

Sure.

♪ ♪

Pull that out.

Now you're getting the feel of where the weight's on it.

Oh, yeah.

Cool.

- You do that several hundred times a day... - No.

It's good.

Sweet.

The community recognized the miner was at the top

of the food chain.

When I grew up, he was considered

just like a doctor or a lawyer, because everybody knew

he was the one making everything work.

The other thing about mining is it's so intensive.

I mean, you need engineers.

You need guys running ventilation... Mechanic or a carpenter

or a pipe fitter.

It's just such a diverse asset to have all these

different types of people.

That's what was so good about it.

Mining was always dangerous.

But these men are proud of what they do

and of the generations who came before them,

who built neighborhoods and schools

and helped power the nation.

They loved their work.

They raised their families.

They worked all the time.

It was a destination with hopes and dreams of hard work

leading to a better life.

You know, the Company's a son of a bitch.

Let's face it. But they were our son of a bitch.

So, you know, that's just the way it was.

The community worked to support the people.

Here's the fun part.

Cool.

Well, how many holes do you usually drill to make a round?

Oh, between 20 and 30.

What is a round?

This pattern has to be drilled out.

And every time you advance the face, that is a round.

You drill it. You load it.

You blast it.

You muck it. You bolt it.

You drill it again.

And that's a cycle.

We're in the loading process right here.

They call it collar priming or top priming this hole.

Pull it.

Still away.

Back in the day, it was dynamite.

But in the '60s, they started switching over to this stuff...

ANFO, ammonium nitrate and fuel oil.

Okay.

So we got everything charged up, loaded.

Now we get to time it.

This is kind of where I got hooked on mining.

As soon as I set that first round off, it was,

"How do we do another one?"

- Fascinating. - This is where it all starts.

All right.

Right here.

Everybody got everything out?

♪ ♪

Four seconds of silence.

- All right. Everybody's good? - Everybody's ready?

Yep.

All right.

Fire in the hole!

One, two, three.

- That's deep... - Welcome to mining.

That's deeply satisfying.

Yeah!

Whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo.

Oh, yeah.

Very cool.

Can we see the smoke?

Oh, does that vent it out?

Yeah. The smoke will start moving towards us.

You got to get in the smoke.

Aw, yeah.

Smells like victory.

This is the smell of mining.

We'll see if it all worked as planned.

That shock wave is awesome.

Isn't it?

Yeah.

This is like being an astronaut right now.

You're gonna go in there, and you're gonna be

the first person in the world to see what you're seeing.

All right!

Did you break it?

Yeah!

Nice, huh?

Happy with your work?

I'm very happy with it.

Everything came out just the way it should.

That's another six-foot advance.

And that is a round.

Beautiful thing.

Yes, it is.

I fell in love with the dark and the blowing things up

and the people.

The people's a big thing.

You meet some of the most interesting people.

About one third of Montana is public land.

It was set aside for the people of the United States

of America.

Generally speaking, it is intended for multipurpose use...

Timber harvest, grazing land, hiking, fishing, hunting,

and mining.

These open lands are important to hunters and anglers

like Dan Bailey.

He's the Montana representative for Pheasants Forever...

An organization working to conserve pheasants

and other wildlife through careful management.

So this is a piece of property that's owned

by Pheasants Forever.

It's open to public access.

This is through Montana's Block Management system.

We sign in.

They collect all the tags.

They know who's on the property.

Today me and my friend Joe Rogan are going after some

delicious pheasant for dinner.

Yee-haw, ladies and gentlemen.

Joe is, of course, is the voice of the UFC

and the host of the wildly popular podcast,

"The Joe Rogan Experience."

In recent years, Joe has become an advocate

for the notion that you should, whenever possible,

know where your food comes from.

The connection that you have with your food

when you kill it yourself... It's a totally different

experience.

I believe that if you choose to eat meat, there should be

a little bit of guilt and shame involved.

Something did die.

So there should be a sense of loss and an understanding.

Right here, this is it.

I mean, you know where your food comes from.

That's as small a circle as you can get.

Hey, Tony, the three things we can hunt here

are Hungarian partridge, which is a small bird...

sharp-tailed grouse, and then rooster pheasants.

So no hen pheasants.

I'll call out what it is.

Yeah, I'm gonna wait for you,

'cause I sure as hell wouldn't be able to identify them.

So we'll get one person on one side of the draw.

Need one person on the other.

And I'll run the dogs through the middle.

Which way are they gonna break, do you think?

- Any way. - It could be any way.

Any which way.

We're hoping over us.

♪ ♪

Hen! Hen, hen, hen, hen, hen, hen!

What happens if you accidentally shoot a hen?

You get in trouble?

Report yourself.

You've heard about the walk of shame?

So, really, you've got a split second to determine

whether it's a shootable thing.

Okay, well, we're counting on you.

♪ ♪

That's a rooster.

I had a shot at that too.

That was an easy shot.

Shit.

- Some days... - Yeah.

One of those days, huh?

- Public lands in Montana... we're - fortunate we have a lot of them.

But, you know, they get a lot of pressure.

And so, when you get one of these birds,

it's pretty special.

Public-land hunting is always a lot of work.

In general.

Anybody and everybody can come out here

and chase your birds, so...

There goes a bunch of birds right there.

Yeah.

See them going through the trees there?

I saw.

A bunch of pheasants just got up.

Let's get serious about this.

All right.

We'll take these dogs to the river.

Rooster!

Oh, nice shot.

Dead bird.

Better get up on that bank.

Who got it?

Anthony got it.

Nice.

I missed that one over here.

Good boy. Come.

Bring it here. Come on.

Good boy!

Come on, Jugger.

Nice shot.

Thank you.

Bring it here.

Come on.

Drop.

There you go.

Montana rooster.

It's good eatin'.

Beautiful bird.

All right, man.

Let's start plucking.

With one in the bag, we meet up with the rest of our party

to cook and drink and eat.

Land Tawney is a fifth-generation Montanan

and an active conservationist.

Hal Herring is a journalist for "Field & Stream."

The pheasant is cooked two ways... marinated in soy and fish

sauce, Sriracha, and lime, browned in butter, and buffaloed

like chicken wings, or dredged in flour and Cajun spice

sautéed with garlic and brandy,

then braised a bit with stock and wild mushrooms.

Collard greens and bacon as a side serve as a nice cleanse.

Man, these greens are good.

And the bird's delicious.

Oh, yeah.

Mmm.

Man. Amazing day.

Eating it today.

It was beautiful today.

Why should people in New York or San Francisco

who've never hunted... in what way does your access

to hunting ground impact on his nation in a positive way?

Why should they care?

Well, it's not hunting ground.

It's public ground owned by the people of the United States

of America.

And I just see our country... it's very nuanced.

And private property is bedrock.

But public lands have worked.

But you're talking big government stepping in and saying,

"We're taking all this land, "and we're gonna protect it

from exploitation by... capitalists."

Public land management is not perfect for anybody,

but it's a path forward.

It's not happening anywhere else in the world.

And the reason that it came here is because we are

such a great country, but as we move into the future,

it's gonna take everybody understanding how unique it is

to America.

To say that hunting and conservation are intertwined...

Is an absolute fact.

It is an absolute fact, but it is a really painful

admission that we are the masters of this environment,

whether we like it or not.

As thinking beings, we're the only ones in the food chain

that understand the consequences of the imbalance.

And, therefore, we do have a right

to take care of this thing and manage it.

When it comes to animals that can alter their environment,

we're unique.

You know, I'm not a hunter, obviously...

We hunted all day today.

If you take a shit, you're a shitter.

My daddy didn't take me for the long one.

- It is what it is. - You shot that pheasant.

We're eating that pheasant.

There's no closer connection to food almost than that.

I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding

by people that don't hunt or people that call themselves

"animal activists"

that we don't love animals as much as they do,

and that's just not true.

We do what we do because we love Mother Nature

We love wildlife.

We want people to enjoy it.

You know, the three of us... We have decided to spend

what we do for a living to protect wildlife

and to protect access and to protect hunting heritage.

They're fellow living beings that live

in a very hardscrabble life.

They're howling right now because they killed something,

whatever it is.

They're letting all the other coyotes know,

and they're gonna eat it right now,

and that is what they do.

You know, if you ever been out on an open body of water

where you're just surrounded by the ocean or the desert

or here, actually, for that matter... Hey, right.

You do begin to understand your place in the universe,

meaning at the end of the day, I'm not that different

from that pheasant I shot today.

We're all in it together, the elk and me and the wolves.

What we do to the world, we do to ourselves.

We're all in it together.

As the evening progresses, the bourbon flows,

and the fire burns down to coals.

A late-night vape with Joe, and the Earth seems to shift

on its axis.

Later, stumbling out of my tent, I find myself

somehow no longer vertical, looking up, up

at a magnificent bewilderment of stars.

♪ ♪

Livingston, Montana, may be one of the prettiest

and oddest towns in America.

It's also one of my favorites.

Originally a railroad town, a place where cattlemen

could drink and philander.

Then, later, a gateway to Yellowstone National Park.

In the 1960s, the surrounding Paradise Valley

was a popular setting for Hollywood films,

and local ranchers began to see a strange mix

of creative types showing up.

First, to work on films, but later to stay

and play cowboy for real.

Writers like Richard Brautigan, Tom McGuane,

and Jim Harrison, actors like Peter Fonda, Warren Oates,

the notorious director Sam Peckinpah

made Livingston their home.

♪ ♪

The Mint Bar opened in the 1920s and holds the oldest

liquor license in Montana.

Railroad workers used to drink here.

Everybody drank here.

Look at that picture of the bar right there.

Yeah, that picture is this building.

During Prohibition, it was a grocery store.

My friend Dan Laren is a jack-of-all-trades native son...

A hunter, fisherman, and a key figure

in the life of the town.

I mean, this is a rough-and-tumble

railroad/cattlemen town, right?

Yeah.

Why did they put a railroad stop here?

- It was X far from Minneapolis... - Mm-hmm.

And X far to Seattle.

It was kind of middle ground.

700 miles that way, 700 miles that way.

Right.

Who would exemplify the qualities that a preponderance

of Montanans would aspire to?

The American Indian, the Plains Indian that lived

here before white man, 'cause it was a tough...

A tough place to live.

You know?

When's the last time you walked outside and you looked

at those mountains and you said, "I, possibly, live"

in the most awesome place on Earth"?

When was the last time that happened?

I do.

I never take this place for granted, okay?

It's one of the most beautiful places that I've been,

and I like to enjoy the outdoors, take my son hunting.

Right.

You know?

You know that moment when an animal dies

and they look at you, and there's a look in their face?

I always interpreted it as, "I'm very disappointed in you."

Yeah, well, as an older hunter, I'm feeling

more and more remorse for the animals that I kill.

And that's why I use every part of the animal that I can.

I have respect for that creature.

I always felt like, "Look, whatever this thing I shot",

"I will treat it they way I would like to be treated.

If you're gonna shoot me, please don't just leave me there."

Yeah.

Don't just rip my breasts out and throw my ass away.

Yeah.

That's a country music song right there.

"Don't rip my breasts off"...

Time... she preferred us drifting through our lives

like clouds, riding her like the gentlest of horses.

You know if you've seen northern lights and a thunderstorm

in the east... and wolves howling all at once,

it's sort of nice.

Do you know there are 90 billion galaxies?

I get a little tentative when I hear that.

Jim Harrison is a colossus, a legend,

and the last of his kind.

People forget children grow up making up stories,

and that's all I'm doing as an adult, you know?

He's one of America's greatest living poets,

the author of 39 novels and books, many set in Montana,

including the "Legends of the Fall."

He's a screenwriter and gourmet.

In his food memoir, "The Raw and the Cooked,"

he chronicles many, many epic meals.

He has lived a life that can only be imagined.

Dan is his friend and confidant,

and the two have, for years, hunted and fished together.

Here's to the game.

His health prevents him from hunting these days,

but not from enjoying a meal of spatchcocked

Hungarian partridge.

I made a liver loaf with elk meat,

elk liver, and pork fat... Awesome.

And some spices.

Gonna have some beets.

Quail in aspic.

Quail en gelée.

En gelée.

Elk carpaccio.

And a morel and chanterelle risotto using a stock

made from ten pounds of roasted game bird bones.

And smoked trout?

Smoked trout. Yeah.

We caught these on the Bighorn.

You know, this is my problem with Montana...

All this primitive, country-ass cooking

that you local yokels do.

Oh, and a risotto with wild mushrooms... it's [...] awesome.

Every time I come here, I say, "Are there others like you?"

Yeah, a few.

That risotto's gorgeous.

- Excellent. - Jimmy, you want to grab a Hun?

Right here.

Okay, and a couple of morels.

Is writing any way to make a living?

No, not our type.

I try to explain this to people You have to be either

a monster of self-regard, delusional,

or just so [...] lucky that... I mean,

the forces of the universe are aligned against you.

Yeah.

The only thing you can do is if you're just

completely tenacious and ready to disregard forever

any outside circumstances there is.

Most people look in the mirror and say,

you know, "I'm getting old,"

or something like that.

But Shakespeare the poet said, "Devouring time",

blunt thou thy lion's paws."

That's a little better, huh?

Nice view.

I cannot complain about this.

Yeah.

So what do you do... you live around half a year here

and half a year in...?

Yeah.

Arizona.

Arizona.

Real interesting culture.

And the ever-present Border Patrol, which I tease a lot.

I'll be hunting, and their Border Patrol plane flies over,

and I run under a tree like I'm hiding.

And then their vehicles start swarming, and they say,

"Harrison, you asshole."

I said, "I'm trying to keep you on your toes."

♪ ♪

What was it about this place that hooked you?

Well, I'm claustrophobic, acutely so.

So Montana's about the best place you could live.

You never feel hemmed in.

Any direction, you can go miles and miles.

♪ ♪

It had been very hot for three weeks, so I worked

well into the cool night when, at 3:00 a.m.,

a big thunderstorm hit.

The lightning was relentless 200 years ago

when the Cheyenne from the east attacked the Absaroka

in this valley.

A group of the Cheyenne were Massaum, the wolves of heaven,

warriors who painted themselves solid yellow.

I want to be a yellow wolf of heaven.

They disappeared into the lightning.

♪ ♪