Glenn Villeneuve on Eating Boiled Wolf and Caribou Stomach Contents

When you eat the wolf, what do you eat? You eat the back straps? Do you cook the hams? Like, how do you eat a wolf? The only way that I like to eat a wolf is to boil it for a good long time, because wolves too will have pericytes. They'll have trichinosis. They're meat eaters. If anything eats meat, you want to make sure it's thoroughly cooked. I like to boil it. Boiled wolf. Yeah. I haven't eaten a lot of wolf. I've eaten wolf, you know, three or four times when I didn't have much else, and I figured, hey, I'd better take advantage of this food I got here rather than give it to something else to eat. Do you feed it to your family? They've probably eaten wolf, like my kids when they were little, maybe once or something. That is hilarious. How many people could you ask that to? And they go, yeah, my kids are probably eating wolf. I don't know. I met these Mongolians once, and they were like, oh, you shoot some wolves? We want wolf meat. We love wolf meat. Mongolians, they're all into it. Yeah, a lot of Native Americans were into wolf meat. I don't like it. A lot of trappers were into wolf meat. Well, that's what they had to eat. But some of them actually preferred it. Really? Yeah, there was something from the Lewis Clark exhibition. There's another thing that, expedition, there was something from, Ronella was telling me about, some guys actually preferred wolf meat. It was like their favorite meat. Well, domestic dog, Lewis and Clark expedition, they would buy dogs from the Indians and eat them because they didn't want to eat salmon. They had fish is what I heard. They could have eaten, but they'd rather eat dog because they wanted red meat. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Wow. When they got way out, like the Columbia River area. So did you eat these wolves that you shot? I ate a little bit of it because I was short on food at that time, that winter. You know, not like the whole thing, but a few meals of it. So you boil it, and how do you do it? Like onions and potatoes make a soup? I didn't have anything like that. No? I mean, no, I'm out there all winter long. That was 2012, 2013. I didn't have any vegetables. Do you know where I get the vegetables? Out of the caribou's stomach. What the caribou eats for plant food, that's what I get for plant food in the winter. That's the only... So you would actually eat their stomach contents? Yeah. Really? Sure. People's done it for thousands of years. I believe you. I believe they have. Not only that, but I pickle meat in it. I'd take tenderloins off a caribou, a great pickle in their stomach contents. Pickled in their stomach contents. Explain that to me. How do you do that? Well, you got to learn about caribou's stomach, because you don't want to go too far downstream. It starts turning brownish. Right. But like the first... The big chamber, the rumen, when they eat these lichens, in the winter, that's what they're feeding on. Mm-hmm. You can't eat those lichens off the ground. They're harsh. But when it's partially digested in a caribou's stomach, it actually is an edible food, and the old people used to eat these a lot. I read about it, and I even talked to some people who had done it when they were kids and stuff. And sure enough, it's not bad stuff. I got hooked on it, man. One winter, I was eating a lot of caribou's stomach contents. And yeah, my family wasn't into that. They were looking at me like... And I was like, oh, man, it's like salad. This stuff's good. I don't eat much of that anymore. Basically, I went as primitive as I could go, and I satisfied my curiosity about living that extreme of a subsistence lifestyle. So now, I eat much more store-bought vegetables. I eat normal foods. But for a time there, for a few years, I got down to where I was eating caribou's stomach contents. I was doing anything... I just wanted to just immerse myself in that whole environment out there. I wanted to get my food right there, what I could see, what I could get myself. Just get right into it. You know, 15 months without even going out to town, not talking to other people. I mean, at that time I had my wife there. But just to really get into a different state of consciousness, it puts you in a different state of consciousness, and it's a beautiful thing. And when you said pickled stomach contents, how are you pickling a tenderloin in the stomach contents? You just take the caribou, you get to the right chamber of the stomach. They've got four chambers on their stomach, you know. You just cut a little slit in it just after you've pulled the guts out, and you just slip the meat in there. You slip it right into the room and in the contents there. And what happens is, assuming the temperature's about right, it will retain a lot of heat. It creates heat. I think the microorganisms in there create heat, because if you just bury that in snow, and the snow of course insulates it, it'll stay warm for quite a while. And if it was really cold, it might not work out. It might freeze solid before it pickled. But if it's the right temperature, the meat'll turn brownish color over time, and it'll be pickled. The old people used to do this all the time. I read about this, you know, 20 years ago. And then I talked to people, and I said, yeah, this is safe to do. So I tried it, and there was a winter there where that's where I got a lot of my vegetables without a caribou stomach. And the meat will just, it'll turn brownish, first on the outer part of the meat, and then all the way through it, and it gets pickled. I've done a lot of different things with meat. You know what I like to do with meat? A lot of people don't realize, because you live in the modern world, and just like me when I grew up, right, meat's dangerous if it's raw. You've got to be careful. You've got to like wash everything, be careful. Actually, what I found is that it just all depends on the conditions. Once you learn how to handle meat properly, you can do a lot of things with meat that most people would be scared to death of, and it's completely safe, as far as I'm concerned. I never had any problems with it. But like moisture's very important. If you buy meat in the store, it's wrapped in plastic. That keeps it moist. You let it sit around for a while. It spoils, and it doesn't take long. Leave meat out of your refrigerator. It'll be spoiled in a day, right? But if you take a muscle out of an animal, and you butcher it properly, you separate the muscle as one piece. You don't make a bunch of cuts in the fascia. You can take a muscle that's two or three inches thick. Don't put it in plastic. Don't wrap it up. That'll cause it to spoil. You leave it right out in the air. Two or three inch thick muscle. I set them on a rack up high above my wood stove. It's like 100 degrees up there sometimes. Other times it's cold up there. It just varies during the day, depending on how the fire is stoked, right? I'll let it sit there for a week, ten days, and then I'll eat it. Never cook it. Just let it sit there. Really? Yeah. Never cook it. No. Just let it sit there. So it gets a crust on the outside? It gets a crust on the outside, but it's too thick of a piece to dry, like you would dry jerky or something. It stays moist inside. It's like making cheese almost. It turns into something like cheese. It gets different flavors. You're aging it. Yeah. You're aging. It's actually fermentation that's taken place. I believe it's actually a fermentation process, but it takes on different flavors. I really like it. I call it gummy meat, because that's what my kids used to call it. Gummy meat. Gummy meat, because it gets kind of gummy. Oh, God. No, it's good. It's good. Yeah. It really is. I wish I had some. I was saying when I left Alaska, I wish I had something like that to bring Joe down, but I didn't have anything. So when you're... What was going on here? I was looking for something about the caribou's stomach, and there's this thing called the Polar Manual made by the government. I think the Navy. Oh, it is. It says the caribou back fat is better than chewing gum. I think this was made in 1961, so it might be even older. Look at this. Old timers from the North mention many interesting Eskimo, Indian, and Siberian foods. Pemmican, I've heard of that. It's the meat of bear, seal, caribou, and walrus mixed together with fish, eggs, and dried into a hard, frozen block. Trappers, peaches, and cream is chewing dried beaver tail. Caribou back fat is better than chewing gum. Don't overlook the contents of a seal's stomach for a fresh-fried fish dinner, nor the contents of a caribou's stomach mixed with the trip lining as a tasty, in quotes, salad of reindeer moss and lichens properly...how's that word? Assidulated? Yes, yes, yes. Assidulated? I like the next one there. Walrus milk that death gives 16 quarts of milk. I love dairy products. You know, you can't get them out there. 16 quarts of milk from a walrus. One time I was thinking about milking a caribou after I killed her, but I didn't, just because she was in bad shape. She'd been attacked by the wolves, and she had an infection in her leg, and I was afraid that somehow I might get sick. But I just remember this lactating caribou that I had killed, and I was thinking... I'd never heard of people doing that, but milking an animal after it died until you just read that, but walrus milk... So you were worried you would have taken the milk, except for the fact that she had been infected? She was the one that only had two good legs, and her back leg going right up there towards her udder, oh, it was in terrible shape. It was full of pus. Damn. I encountered that with an elk shot once. He had been stabbed by another elk, like in one of his back legs, and it was just all filled with pus. Like when we were quartering him and taking it apart, there was this one section that was just all pus. It was just fucking nasty. I've seen the same thing in a moose, stabbed in the back, like in the hunch there. Yeah. By one of the tines. So when you boiled the wolf, how are you eating that? Just plain. Just plain. Just chopping it up? You can fry it after you boil it, give it a little extra flavor. So you got some fat? So you do, or do we just fry it? Yeah. Was that what you were doing, or were you just eating it boiled? Both. What is it like? Is there something you could... It tastes a little wolfy. Wolfy. I'm not much into wolf meat. Right. It's a desperation food, right? Is that how you would look at it? If I didn't have something else, I'd eat wolf, but... Yeah. You know, I've got other things. There's all kinds of stuff you can do with food. You can get as primitive as you want. Yeah, I can imagine. But there's so much else going on. Like, for me now, if you want to live that primatively off the land, that's all you do. It takes all your time. Mm-hmm. If you want to share that life with other people, like what I've been trying to do the last six years, you can't just do that. Yeah, because you don't really have the amount of time to hunt and gather like you would. Yeah, I wouldn't even have the ability to communicate. Right. I wouldn't even be able to arrange to be on your show if I was out there living the way I was living, you know, six, seven, eight years ago. Right. Right.