I've been hunting sambar and goats for 31 years

Last fall a 64-year-old new club member showed up to opening weekend with something I haven't been able to stop thinking about. I'm not exaggerating. I almost laughed in his face the first time I saw it. Now I won't go into the field without it.

Let me back up. I hunt. Crown land, private ground, wherever the sambar are thick and the goats are high. Pack in. Pack out. Bring home meat. That's the deal.

Early mornings before light. Six-hour sits in the cold. A week at deer camp. Two weeks in the high country. A month of scouting before the season even opens. Then you do it again next year. You sign up for the life. What you don't sign up for is what it does to your body after three decades.

I'm 58. My knees ache on the descent. My calves seize up on the climbs I used to eat alive. I can't remember the last time I made it to my stand without stopping twice on the ridge.

Three years ago I started noticing it. A hillside I'd been running since my late twenties started beating me. Not wiping me out. Just slowing me down in a way I couldn't explain.

I've tried everything. Better boots. Trekking poles. A cardio program my buddy swore by. Fish oil. A cilostazol prescription my doctor pushed that gave me headaches so bad I quit after six weeks. Then back to stopping on the ridge.

Then last October our club got a new member. Guy named Ray. Quiet. Steady. 64 years old. His brother had been a hunter his whole life, fit, nonsmoker, clean checkup the spring before. Dropped on a hillside at 58. No warning. No symptoms. Just gone.

Ray outperforms every man in the club on the mountain

You'd think Ray would be next. Same blood. Same family history. Six years older than his brother was when he died. But here's the thing. Including men half his age.

We had a climb in November. A long pull up a north-facing ridge to get above a bedding area before first light. Steep enough that you're grabbing branches on the way up. Cold enough that your breath is loud. Every man in the group was sucking wind by the halfway mark. Hands on knees. Headlamps pointing at the dirt.

Ray was at the top. Not hands on knees. Standing. Barely breathing. Asked if anyone wanted to push another two hundred metres to the secondary glassing point. I figured it was genetics. Some guys just age differently. 64 versus 58 doesn't sound like much, but some men are built for the hills and some aren't.

But I kept watching it hunt after hunt. The hills were what exposed everyone. A long climb with a heavy pack at altitude, that's where you find out what a man's arteries are actually doing. Ray was always at the top. I'd make the same ridge and feel it in my calves for an hour after. He'd shake it off and start glassing.

Then one morning I walked past the tailgate where Ray was pulling his gear together. He had a small red bag sitting next to his rangefinder and his calls. "What's that?" He looked up. Almost didn't answer. "Cayenne." "Cayenne?"

He explained it. Said it was the only thing he'd changed in the last two years. Said he started taking it after his brother died because his cardiologist told him the real problem wasn't his cholesterol. It was that his arteries had stopped opening on their own.

Even told the guys at camp that night

I stared at him. "You're telling me a softgel is the reason you're handling these climbs better than men six years younger than you?"

He shrugged. "All I know is I went back to my cardiologist after a year on it. He compared my old labs with the new ones. Blood pressure down. LDL dropped. And I'll tell you something nobody puts on a label. I stopped waking up with my calves cramping at night.

I stopped stopping halfway up climbs I'd been doing for twenty years. The doctor showed me the scan, and I understood then how close I probably was." At first I laughed about it. We spent a good twenty minutes joking about Ray and his little softgels. Big tough hunters and here's Ray popping softgels from a red bag like somebody's grandma.

But it nagged at me. Because I couldn't stop watching how Ray handled the hills that used to wreck me. The steep pulls. The long climbs with a pack. The drag back to the truck that leaves your calves knotted and your legs burning. He'd shake it off and keep moving.

A man six years older than me was outclimbing me on every ridge, dragging deer without stopping to let his legs settle, making it to the stand without his calves cramping on the way up. And it wasn't because he was tougher. Something was helping him that wasn't helping me.

One night three weeks later I was lying in my sleeping bag in the wall tent after a brutal day. Knees aching. Calves still cramping from the climb that morning. Knew I wasn't going to sleep.

I grabbed my phone and looked it up

And all I kept thinking about was Ray at the next camp doing just fine. I went down a rabbit hole. I mean a deep rabbit hole. I started researching everything I could find about what actually happens inside arteries as men age. Why some guys slow down on the hills and others don't. Why a clean checkup doesn't mean a clean bill of health.

And every mainstream medical site fed me the same answers. Lose weight. Cut sodium. Exercise more. Take the medication if that doesn't work. But then I found a research paper on arterial health. And it mentioned something I had never heard anyone talk about in the context of your legs giving out on a climb.

As we age, the lining inside your artery walls stops making the nitric oxide that keeps them open. Picture a factory. That factory used to pump the gas that relaxes the vessel. Now it pumps rust instead. It hardens. Year after year the tiny vessels feeding your calves die off.

Your body used to keep them fed. But after 50 that ability drops by half. So the legs keep starving.

That cramp in your calf on the climb, that ache that stops you on the drag, that's not age. That's blood that can't reach the muscle through a starved leg. Being slow on the ridge is the only warning you get. The next one isn't a cramp. It's a toe that turns black.

That same research paper mentioned cayenne. It explained why a man six years older than me could climb like he was thirty. Capsaicin, the heat in cayenne, flips a switch on the vessel wall called TRPV1 and the body starts making its own nitric oxide again.

It's the exact compound scientists used to win the 2021 Nobel Prize in Medicine for mapping that switch. And where a beet shot fades in 90 minutes, the ginseng alongside it holds the signal six to eight hours.