Original subtitles

(sighs)

(dramatic music)

- I have quite a few mice living in my shelter.

- It's slowly getting worse.

- Wake up, mice!

Wakey, wakey!

You want a little bear spray?

- I'm looking forward to getting my long-term shelter belt.

It's getting it chilly, and it's getting it chilly pretty quick.

- I am sleeping in the big shelter tonight.

- I hit a cormorant that got away.

I hurt something else out here, I don't like that.

- I'm pretty lonely, it gets to you after a while.

- This is enough cold, this is enough loneliness.

It's enough of the green monster, this is over.

(dramatic music)

- For the first time ever on a loan, 10 past participants return.

They come back with one goal, redemption.

- I've deserved to be here, and I'm back.

- I want to learn more this time than I did last time.

- Now we fresh hell awaits.

The cold is an incredibly strong punch in the

face, and the punishing wilderness of Mongolia.

- We're in the middle of nowhere.

- Mongolia is a very unforgiving land.

- They must survive in complete isolation, enduring as long as they can.

- I wish gonna push and push and push, till there's nothing left.

- The last one's standing with... (dramatic music)

(dramatic music)

(dramatic music)

(dramatic music)

- Good hunting trip.

(dramatic music)

I just caught a grouse today, and I realized that I had hurt the leg a while ago.

So that makes me feel good,

and I could put that one out of its misery,

and then I could have a good breakfast, 'cause I was hungry, I am hungry.

I'm starting to feel that fatigue that goes along with the hunger.

First time I really started to feel it,

but seventh grouse are to thankful about it.

For a while now, I'm feeling the responsibility

that goes along with killing something.

It shocked me.

How difficult it is.

You're gonna struggle through it, suffer through it,

but then I think you have to set yourself up with understanding that this is life,

and you just do what needs to be done.

So now, hunting has just accepted.

I hid a cormorant with an arrow the other day,

and I wounded this animal, and it got away,

and it's really weighing on my mind.

I need to figure out how am I going to get another cormorant without hurting it.

So I'm thinking, I'm gonna build an atlato, an atlato.

It's basically a spear thrower.

That's much larger than an arrow, and I realize that a cormorant

isn't gonna be able to fly away with that stuck in there.

Let's get in there.

So this is the thrower, which are fingers through there.

And you've got a long spear, and you, oh, what, why, gives it extra power.

It's funny, I carved so much at night, last time, we've had to go in here.

Then it was like, oh, yeah.

Then a carve of chest set, and a carve of fox.

Now, I'm just thinking of just coming up with different hunting techniques.

So here's my atlato.

I've got two fingers in there.

That guy like that.

Beautiful, beautiful artsmanship, right?

Beautiful craftsmanship, right?

So anyways, we're gonna, what this guy does, is just goes in there.

There's a little hole right there.

Set it there, bring it along, and, oh, that's nice.

It's neat, I need to clean up the dirt a little bit, but it'll look good.

The thing for me is, I gotta make sure

that I find things to keep my mind moving forward instead of just being dead stopped,

'cause if I'm dead stopped, man, I get an aggressive state.

Now, I wanna be, I wanna understand what I need to do to stay, you know what I mean?

That corner is toast.

(dramatic music)

Still not fully awake.

There was a male red deer last night doing his thing,

his pupils, and I could just imagine when he was like,

I was laying there and bed thinking, yeah.

He's just calling out.

Hey, girl.

If I can just come on right over,

you can hang out, you know, do a thing.

Just crawl, crawl on over into my bed.

It's kind of what I imagine he was saying.

Specifically in that voice, too.

See what's the plan for today?

Why try to just fish all day?

Definitely starting to feel the lack of energy due to calorie deficiencies.

It's like I'm living on minimum wage here and I'm

kind of living day to day as much as I possibly can.

So, mainly the thing that I'm focused on

is finding a long-term food source that being a deer or a lot of smoked fish.

My survival strategy isn't necessarily about energy conservation.

Fish on.

It's about finding ways to live out here.

(beep)

Austin, got my boots wet.

There's a correlation between how I'm feeling

mentally and emotionally and the amount of food that I'm getting.

Not having food is making things a little bit more difficult on me.

It's a little guy, aren't you?

(beep)

I can't get discouraged.

Fish on.

Oh yeah.

I want to make sure that I put as much energy into every aspect of my life out here.

I feel like I can be successful if I'm really persistent.

(beep) All right.

It's amazing.

Another one.

You haven't been to a spot in a while.

They just, they forget.

I'm not sure what it is.

It's just a nice little boost at a time when you need it every little bit counts.

I've been out here a long time and I still can't

believe that I'm actually out here and I'm doing it.

I'm successful.

And I will be the first one to tell you that there are times when I had my doubts.

All the fish on camera here.

All right.

Well, I'm calling it at nine.

Nine's a good number.

That gives me five.

After dinner and breakfast, that gives me five fish to smoke.

10/2 is pretty good.

It's damn good.

I just heard something that scares the **** out of me.

It sounded like a **** masked on.

Suddenly, I wish I put the door on my shelter.

I don't think I've ever heard noise like that.

That made me worried while I was sleeping outside.

I like that kind of...

I'm only really loud.

It was like, whoa.

I think it was a wild boar.

My shelter door is going back up.

We're now on.

The woods are awake tonight.

It was closed.

Let's go check it out.

Where are you?

Peace ****.

I just heard something in the grass.

I'm still over there.

I think last night, I want to say that was a wild boar.

It's the only thing I could think of.

I don't know if they...

I mean, I've raised pigs.

I've raised domestic pigs quite a bit, but I've never.

..

been out in the woods with wild boar.

I sounded like it could have been down by the dead fall.

When I go down there and check that out, it could be caught in my trap.

I feel pretty good about that dead fall.

I think it's killing capacity is pretty good.

That stick is where he's going to step.

Hopefully, step on that and then bring the weight down, crashing down.

I need to build a little bit of a cubby so they can only come in one way

and then get a bunch of sticks and lay across that trigger stick.

With that trap right now, I can take probably a hundred pound animal, I would think.

I just can't even tell you what the emotion would be if I had some of that dead fall.

The pig would just be... would just be beyond ecstatic.

I would have the biggest damn part of the cubby.

The gold is never seen.

Damn it.

Yup, fate's still in there.

Here's the bait.

You accept the fact that you're sharing territory with predators.

Some people might freak out and tap,

but all I want to do is kill them and then eat them.

The weather's going to be a challenge when things start getting colder.

And if you have no calories when it's below zero, you're going to be screwed.

Ooh, those socks coming right off that sun drying.

I feel like they're right out of the dragon.

Somehow, this camera is still alive.

Everything looks good, so we're going to keep filming with it.

Yet to prove myself in the protein realm,

I need to get a fish out of that river and into my belly.

The first thing I'm going to do today is check my fish trap

that's way out in the lagoon, so it's a long walk.

Hopefully there's something in there.

Anything, literally one crawdad I'd be happy.

[MUSIC PLAYING] OK, well.

We're going to show you what we got.

So if I'm being honest, I don't know exactly what

this is, but it looks an awful lot like a leech.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah, it's definitely their leeches.

Here's they've been sucking on this mouse blood.

About the grossest thing you can eat is a

leech who's been feeding off of mouse blood.

Bombs away.

I don't even know if you can eat leeches.

That's probably like the last thing I would want to eat.

All right, back to camp.

I guess we can haul them back home and use them for something.

No fish.

Pretty pathetic.

Another day in paradise, right?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

And let's see here.

Oh, my god.

Oh, oh, oh.

What have we here?

We have Mr. Longtail, cotton, Larry Roberts's trap.

Shmooshy, shmooshy, shmooshy.

Shmooshy, shmooshy.

She had the big, thick and rock.

Oh, tasty, tasty, baby.

Yeah.

Mousey, selfie.

Flat, mousey, selfie.

Out here, all I think about is food.

That's all I think about.

And I think about how I can get more food.

I have to always be adapting to what my circumstances require.

My wind's blowing like crazy, but I'm

still going to try and work on my net a little bit.

I've lost too many fish by trying to just pluck

them out of the river after I get them close to me.

So I'm making my own net, so I won't have that problem anymore.

Come on.

It's pretty awesome.

I've been working on a thing for quite a while.

I'm just going to flex this willow.

I want to bend it eventually into a circle.

Now I'll take one of these strands of paracord.

And I just got to keep going around.

This country's wearing on me.

Tired of the wind.

Tired of the storms.

Tired of the heat.

And I'm tired of the bugs.

You're wearing on me Mongolia.

I liked it first, bud.

And I still like you.

But your attitude is starting to piss me off.

Vancouver Island was hardcore.

It proved to me that I'm tough.

Not many people get to go as far as their breaking point.

I was lucky enough to get there once.

And I left a serious mark on me.

This particular experience has been pretty painful.

But sometimes the lessons that you really remember-- I remembered through pain.

I just hope that this is going to help me

when I go back to the real world to help make my life

and my relationship with my family a better one.

I'm going to take a break here.

Wind.

This place.

Damn it.

You're either screaming hot, storming, or [BLEEP] windy in a fire season, you--

just calm the [BLEEP] down.

Calm down.

[THEME MUSIC]

Wind comes from one direction, and the clouds come from another.

It's an odd place.

The weather has just gotten me down a little bit.

It's probably a little stop-not.

Try to do a jam-not.

I should off with maybe a half hitch here.

Just like that.

It's done.

Realize, we'll give it a try.

There is a wonderful band in my river

that I am calling steady-eddy, and I'm pulling quite a few fish out of this area.

It's a sure, meat supply that is making me feel

extremely capable in my abilities to feed myself.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I got a fish with my net, man.

Oh, and I had the camera pulling the wrong way.

I got a fish with my net.

I landed him with my net.

Right on.

And that's a big sucker, too, man.

That's a grailing just how fat one.

Oh, man, I got-- look.

My mission is complete, man.

You know, sometimes you just need a good morale boost out here.

Sometimes things just seem a little overwhelming.

But this journey taught me.

It's to refocus on the small things.

It's amazing how something like this can change your attitude.

That's a nice grailing right there.

And I landed it with my net.

I mean, not that there's anything unusual with that.

I've done it at home with the same sort of net.

But out here, man, out here.

Out here, I made this net.

I made this fish in pole.

Out here, I did it.

She left the handle on this stick a little longer.

If not, the longest grailing, for sure, the baddest one had caught.

This one was fat.

This sure is a lot better experience when you enjoy it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Fire, good, man.

Anybody that doesn't have a fire in their shelter's freaking crazy, crazy.

I don't know, I couldn't do it.

This getting cold.

Working on different types of bushcraft projects is a big thing for me.

I love thinking of different ways to get animals.

But this point, for me, ideally, is what's going to happen is I want to get a deer.

I want to be able to take one large life and get a lot of food out of it.

Right now, I've got a great trail, really nice trail.

I mean, you can see that trail, how a lot of old, old rubs.

There's a lot of actions, a lot of movement in here.

So I'm going to set up a tree stand to see.

Give me a little higher disguise me and disguise my sense a little bit.

Tree stand is just beautiful as far as getting you in higher perspective on the land.

So you can see what's coming.

Just a good way to ambush big game.

What I'm doing is pulling up logs and just putting them over branches.

I'll set it up in a triangle fashion so that I have plenty of room to sit.

And then I'll tie those in.

Yikes.

I like climbing so that it helps.

If one of those branches breaks, that's hopefully don't.

I'm 50 years old, so I'm not a young spring chicken anymore.

My body is not like it was when I was 20.

So there is a concern about putting my body through these stresses.

But I want to be here so bad, so it's worth it for me.

Not bad for not eating anything today, huh?

That's the point I want to eat.

If I want to stay out here, I've got a hunt deer.

It's a huge caloric expenditure.

It's a lot of energy.

But if I want to stay here, that is what I have to get.

And I'm going to put every last ounce of energy I have into that deer.

Look like an old, like blind, albino, coal miner.

I'm definitely going to put on another one to two layers before I go out fishing.

It's definitely chilly outside.

I've never tried to fish from this cold out.

But there's a little bit of sun peeking out, so

maybe somebody's fish will come near the top water.

It's much cooler than yesterday.

Well, this is my spot.

I need something here.

Now, now ever since I scored really big here, I have a nibble and I have a splash.

It's been a cold day.

It could be that the fish are deeper and just don't want to bite any kind of deer.

Ooh, hear that?

There's something going in.

I haven't had much activity.

I haven't seen this cold.

This stays.

There are swirling areas where the water slowed down and it's cold.

So I'm having to move from area to area depending

on the climate to see where the fish are going.

And I'm having no luck with anything in this vicinity whatsoever.

No fish.

The Mongolian cold is definitely becoming a factor now.

I mean, it's present all the time.

I don't know what I'll do yet.

It's definitely getting colder, lots of frost this morning on the ground.

So it seems like the last couple of days have

really been affecting the activity of the fish.

I really need to branch out and figure out

different sources of protein other than fish

in case the fish, you know, one day just completely stopped.

Priority number one for me today.

Taking a might try to go for a little walk and

continue to just look and scout out for good hunting areas.

It seems like a good day for grouse.

I have a really beautiful high-pitched skull.

My dad and my uncle, we've been putting in for

an outcome in Utah for the last seven years.

And of course, this is the year that we got it.

So they're hunting while I'm here.

So my plan is to find a place to hunt and

hunt hard every day to kind of be close with

them and experience what they're experiencing.

Brings me a little closer to them, even

though we're across the world from each other.

There's a grouse right there.

He was five feet away from me.

He don't flew away.

He's gotten down.

Whoa.

Check it out.

It's a large skull.

Looks like probably the red deer.

The shape of the upper jaw is one of an omnivore.

There's a lot of predators in this area.

We do share this landscape with wolves.

And so, and just hope that if I stay away

from them, they're going to stay away from me.

All right, let's go.

For far away from any sort of medical help, we're taking a big risk just in being this

far disconnected from the outside world.

Can you believe food is in such short supply

that I'm drying out the skin so I can eat

a little bit of the fish remnants that are still on the skin?

Ways not wanting that, right?

Next time Campbell goes to the garbage can with a fish spine on his plate and be like,

"Hey, oh, no, boy, go sit down and suck on that spine.

" I remember watching my dad, mom and dad, they

will leave a chicken bone so clean it looks like you could put it in the Smithsonian.

I'm definitely feeling what I'm eating isn't

giving me enough energy to do what I need to do anymore.

And it's cold, it's unforgiving, warm feet.

All right, Mongolia, I see you're serious.

We're approaching winter, and my diet consists

about 99% of fish, but as it's getting colder,

the fish start getting less aggressive, so

I'm like, "Okay, there's never going to be any fish here.

"

It's a big problem, and in the end, I'm hoping

that it's not detrimental to my stay out here.

It's crazy, it seems like not too long ago.

I was tripping out my socks and stepping into

the river to cool down, and I'm stripping

out my socks and sticking them into the flames to warm up.

But apathetic, weird, mysterious, squarrel.

I'm becoming a man, that's wrong.

Ever since I've been in Mongolia, I'm not getting enough food.

When you go without protein, it really hurts you big time.

Fish is the last piece of my Mongolia puzzle,

but it's not working out, I'm not catching

anything, and the fish trap came up short,

so I figured maybe let's try something else.

I think I'm going to take today and actually make a gilmet.

I've got a few long pieces of pair cord, fully intact.

All right, guys, gilmet 101.

Take a little triangle and approximately the correct shape.

Take both lines together, simple overhand knot,

bring it through, pull it tight, and repeat several hundred times.

I'm losing weight very, very fast, and at this point, I'm craving food.

I think there's a hungry scale where first you start craving ice cream and pizza, then

after a while you start craving vegetables and brussels sprouts and things like that.

And that just means I'm literally starving.

It's a good sized net, I say.

Good sized net.

So basically, my entire system is going to be based off of a nice thick willow.

The line is going to be connected to the willow

so that I can extend it out into the river.

So the gilmet is actually going to be weighted down with stones like this.

It has to be weighted down heavily because

even if it's just a net, that river will take it and throw it against the wall.

It does not give a darn, this river is just hardcore.

Come on, come on, come on, let's go, let's go, you got this sun.

Oh, come on, a little punk.

It's very easy to become frustrated.

You look around and you say, "Hmm, these

traps aren't working, where is there any more protein for me to get?

" So my gilmet needs to work.

I need to start catching fish.

Oh man.

Basically, that's exactly what I didn't want to have happen.

This river is so strong, it literally floats

the net on the water with rocks tied to it.

Perfect, so long on something you're like, "Oh, it's got to work out, right?

" This is like the strongest river I've ever seen.

It's not just total whitewater.

I don't feel super good about my situation at the moment.

You know, I feel like, "What am I doing wrong?

" If I can't get a stinking fish out of my river,

honestly, I feel very down about not being able to score more protein at this point.

I thought that there'd be more stuff out here for me to get.

It looks like fishing is kind of off the menu

for the moment, and I'm literally starving.

When your wife and kids look at you, what kind of man do they see?

I want them to see someone who gives up as soon as things get tough, and I want that.

And so, I feel at this point that I will eat anything.

So what we're doing tonight is we are cooking up the leeches that we got in the fish

trap that I had put over in the lagoon area.

Going to do this, even though I'm not 100% sure if you even can eat leeches.

Oh, smells bad.

So we've got nine leeches and a snail.

I'm going to boil for like five or four minutes.

I do not want this to be slightly undercooked

and get some kind of crazy worm thing in me.

What are the odds that this tastes good?

I wonder what the odds are that I pop these in my mouth and I'm like, "Whoa, man.

What a tasty delicious meal.

" I'm going to put a wire through them and roast them.

Oh, if this was smell-avision, you guys would be getting it.

All righty, one leech kebab coming right up.

Bone-up-a-teet.

I'll look the heck to cut this all for all at once.

Deciding if I'm going to throw up or not.

Wow.

Gross.

Gross.

Ooh, gross, yuck.

Gotcha.

Mouse snack before I go to bed.

That here is a fall to almost certain death.

Just be careful.

I'm a large Mongolian.

I don't know why that makes me want to cry but it does.