Hub and Spokes. Audio Collective.

This is what it sounds like driving across Victory Bog.

This is what it sounds like driving across Victory Bog.

Victory is in Essex County, the most unpopulated part of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom,

and the town of Victory is the smallest organized town in Vermont. It's at least a half an hour

from any store and it's surrounded by big forest land that's mostly owned by the

state. I was meeting up with Will Stats, who worked for both Vermont and

New Hampshire for 40 years as a wildlife biologist. He's also a passionate hunter. He spends every

hour he can in the woods. He knows the backcountry of the kingdom right up into Maine and up to Labrador

And by that I mean he has hunted and explored so much of it that he can connect ridge to softwood bowl to bog.

He can picture how the land lays.

On this day he was taking me bird hunting.

We met up at his house and then we wrote about 10 miles in his truck on logging

roads and I figured I'd just be learning about bird hunting, but we ended up talking about

the growing divide between traditional hunting culture and people who are trying to stop

certain kinds of hunting here in Vermont. But it was more than that, more than just about

hunting. It was maybe more about how we hardened against each other.

Anyway, before we went into the woods, we sat for a while in his truck and we talked about

the town of victory.

Here's Will.

Well, I don't know the exact number. It's somewhere in the 60s, you know, the number of people

that live in victory and we're and I must say we're kind of an eclectic bunch. We like to be

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