Sweetie Pie

No one likes being hungry.

I've come to learn that there are many things that make a thing hungry. Lack of food is only one of them. Being hungry can make a person crazy, but true hunger ... that tends to lead to unpredictable reactions. The Big Game showed me just how much.

The Big Game was a stroke of brilliance. Reality cooking shows had begun choking the TV network schedules like cheap, late-night crime procedurals, bleeding out from the confines of their dedicated food channels. Viewers wanted an over-seasoning of drama thrown into the cooking competition pool, and of that they were happily served. More backstabbing; more tears. That's about when The Big Game moved in.

The Big Game staked a claim into the growing trend of cookery, but there was another growing trend that they threw into this pot as well: farm-to-table. Not just farm-to-table, but forest-to-table. Competitors use only what they grow, harvest or kill; anything store-bought was out.

A quarter-million dollar prize. Ten contestants. Six weeks. Four judges. One of them, me.

I know what you're thinking. How did a has-been, rehab-frequenting rocker get put on television in the first place, let alone judging a weekly cooking contest? Believe it or not, I did have a show once, though it's unlikely most folks south of fifty-years-old remember it. In The Woods with Gillean Rush lasted three seasons before being pulled from its "please just let me die" time slot, just after hour-long infomercials for pet vomit cleaning products and before The Star Spangled Banner. Do they still put that thing on the air at night? Is it even called "the air" anymore? Anyway, trust me, I was relieved to the point of elation to be through with it; the network, probably more so.

I may have been best - or more infamously - known as the frontman for Sweetie Pie, since broken up about ten years prior; or maybe for the seven-or-so times I was profiled in some tabloid as being caught naked, stoned, drunk, wasted, passed-out or beating the piss out of someone. Usually it was a combination of two or more of those. On more than one occasion, it was all of the above. In the Woods was where some people saw a different side of me - a primal one. For me, hunting is more than playing "me man, me use big bow." It's more than stalking game, putting careful and quiet arrows through the lungs of pretty woodland creatures. That's what brought the viewers in, but it's not why I do what I do.

It's for the meat.

"The cuter the critter, the sweeter the meat," someone once said. If I'd only stuck close to home, I'd have said no truer words have been spoken. Unfortunately, I know better.

At first Woods took place in my woods, just outside Colorado's White River National Forest. By the time the show's third season wrapped, the producers informed me that we were taking things international: Canada, Tanzania, Namibia, a few others. We pulled out what must've been close to a ton of incredible meat out of those places. Just outside of Siberia is where things turned to shit in a hurry.

If my story is going to make any sense, I have to open that closet, one I hoped I'd be leaving very shut and locked. Seems now I've seen some new things I can throw in there to keep it company.

Three days into our shoot and twenty miles deep into Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, we were set to snag some Bighorn sheep. As it turned out, we had some competition ahead of us or, more accurately, behind us: fifteen-hundred pounds of Kamchatka brown bear. "But bears in Kamchatka only eat fish and berries." Hunger tends to lead to unpredictable reactions.

The closest that bear saw to a berry that day was our cameraman's head, as she rather easily squashed it like a ripe raspberry under her colossal paws. Except raspberries tend not to violently convulse or make gurgling noises when they're eaten.