From the creators of the New York Times bestselling series Campfire Stories: Close Calls comes a new original audiobook that brings to life the bold, hair-raising, and often tragic adventures of a generation of eighteenth-century frontiersmen: the Long Hunters.

Steven Rinella (The MeatEater Podcast) and Clay Newcomb (MeatEater's Bear Grease podcast) gather listeners for a new round of stories, this time drawing from the lives of the rugged Long Hunters, who include such figures as Daniel Boone, Henry Skaggs, and Kasper Mansker. These were the commercial hunters and trappers who explored and exploited the First Far West, the land across the Appalachian Mountains, in the era between the Seven Years War and the American Revolution—one of the most fabled periods of American history.

The feats of these courageous, resilient backwoodsmen forever shaped a national identity centered around individualism, capitalism, freedom, and the need for wild places and wild animals.

While working on this audiobook, Steve Rinella researched the types of blade tools carried by commercial whitetail hunters such as Daniel Boone in the mid-1700s. He sent some specs to Riley Kirkpatrick at Kirkpatrick Forge, who made him a custom “belt axe.” It was so badass that we asked Riley to make another twenty of the axes for our own MeatEater Store in celebration of The Long Hunters launch. Check out the Long Hunters Axe here.