Some Thoughts on Hunting Season

Deer season is in full swing here in Mississippi and naturally, in a state blessed with an abundance of woods and game, hunting is a big deal here.  The woods are full of folks out to fill their freezers with venison or seek a trophy rack to hang on the wall.  As I've mentioned here before, I believe that plenty of the backwoodsmen who grew up in places like this learning to hunt and fish from childhood could feed themselves just fine if forced into a bug-out situation after the SHTF. Although they may not read survival blogs on the Internet, own any books on the subject, or even give it any thought, many would know where and how to to find game and have the skills to do so.  This is especially true of the older generation around here, such as those who grew up in impoverished rural areas where hunting was a supplement to the everyday food supply back when many people still grew most of what they ate and raised livestock for the same purpose.

Today, despite all the concrete and the cities and roads and the ever-growing human population, deer are more abundant in the South than they were at the time of De Soto's expedition in the 1540's.  Wildlife management programs are largely responsible for this.  Another major factor is a lack of natural predators, such as mountain lions (usually called panthers down here) that were long since wiped out but may be coming back.  Finally, one of the biggest factors is the reversion of most farmland back to woods or pine tree plantations, creating more natural habitat.  This explosion of the deer population is evident everywhere, especially along the highways and backroads where they are frequently hit by vehicles and are especially a menace to those of us who sometimes ride motorcycles.  Large numbers of deer are often seen wandering into suburban neighborhoods and down city streets at night, something that was unheard of here when I was growing up. 

This abundance should make deer hunting easier than ever, and it has, but few "hunters" that I know of anymore practice anything that really resembles hunting.  Instead, today it has become all about ease and comfort, with so much reliance on technology and expensive equipment that skills and woodsmanship are rarely considered.

I don't know how widespread this practice is in other regions of the country, but here the concept of climbing a tree to get a better view and to get out of the deer's line of sight and normal zone of awareness has evolved in just my lifetime to something completely different.  When deer hunters first took to the trees to get above their game, it was by either climbing a tree with well-spaced branches and perching in a fork or building some simple wooden platform in the fork with perhaps a few 2 x 4 rungs nailed to the trunk for easier access.  Then, the portable climbing tree stand was introduced, allowing hunters to carry the stand most anywhere and use it on straight, limbless trees to get an unobstructed shooting platform.  I remember buying one of the earliest ones on the market - a dangerous contraption with a flexible steel band that wrapped around the tree and held the lightweight plywood platform in place - as long as your weight was properly centered on it.  Climbing tree stands got better over the years, with more security aloft and better methods of attaching and climbing the tree, such as this one: Summit Viper SS 81066 Climbing Stand

Then the portable climbing tree stand fell out of favor with most hunters and was replaced with a variety of ladder-stands, with the platform and ladder all built into one.  These were heavier and bulkier, of course, not something you could backpack into the wilderness to set up in a new location on every hunt.  But this didn't seem to bother most hunters, who then decided to skip the tree part of the "tree" stand altogether and erect free-standing shooting towers, much like those you see guarding the perimeter walls of a prison or garrison.  No longer simple platforms, these stands featured "shooting houses" atop them, complete with comfortable chairs, shooting ports and heaters.  Some of these were home-built on site, but a new industry sprung up to provide a variety of such tower stands with built-in shooting houses.  Now these are all the rage around here, and they can be seen from the highways and backroads overlooking cut-overs, pipeline and powerline right of ways, and food plots.  The portability is gone, except of course for the initial set-up, which in the case of the biggest ones requires equipment like a tractor with a forklift.

Because this new type of hunting from a fixed location eliminated the possibility of scouting recent deer trails and setting up ambush sites based on the current movements of the deer being sought, shooting house hunters had to either bait their quarry with a planted food plot or set up over an open space like a pipeline and hope for the best.  The food plot option has of course, become the most popular.  It is without doubt an effective means of killing deer, but will those young hunters growing up using nothing but these methods be able to effectively hunt if cast out into a survival situation in trackless swamp or mountain forest?  Will they know how and where to look for deer signs, and how to take advantage of available cover to still hunt from the ground, and to get within effective range of an open-sighted rifle or more primitive weapon such as a traditional bow?  It seems apparent to me that many hunting skills are being lost, even by those who are growing up in the country and raised in a hunting tradition - not to mention the vast majority of more urban youth who have no interest in it or access to it at all.

I don't have a problem with anyone's choice of hunting methods and I'm all for anything that thins the herd some, since there are no predators other than human hunters and speeding vehicles on the highway to do this.  But the point I want to make is that such methods do not prepare one for real survival hunting while on the move and in the deep woods and swamps where shooting houses and food plots are non-existent.  If you want to be prepared to hunt for your food in a bug-out situation, you're going to have to get off the 4-wheeler, leave the comfort of the shooting house, and forget about the carefully-planted food plots.  You need to know what the natural foods are that your quarry depends on  in your region, and what seasons they are available and where to find them.  You have to think about water sources and look for well-used trails to and from them.  You need to be aware of wind direction and natural techniques for masking your human scent.  You need to know how to move quietly and slowly when in your hunting territory, and how to stalk with excruciatingly slow deliberation when necessary to get closer for a shot.  You need to be an expert with your hunting weapon of choice as one shot may be the difference between going to bed hungry or well-fed.

Another factor to consider is that hunting the old way can be more fun and certainly more challenging.  You may not get a deer as often, but when you do, it will be more rewarding and you will know what it feels like to be a hunter.  Getting your game on its own terms and at the same level will give you the confidence you need to know that you can survive.  If this is something you are already doing, then take it to the next level by using more primitive hunting weapons.  In a future post I will show some examples of the traditional and primitive archery equipment that I have made to give you some ideas about how you can get into this too if you find it interesting.

Demonstrating the Green Sapling Tripod Cooking Method

I've posted here before about one of my favorite methods of cooking or boiling water using an open fire - the simple green sapling tripod support.  This was also described and illustrated in my book, Bug Out.  

Since I find the method so useful in that it allows you to carry nothing but one simple metal pot in the bug-out bag, I thought I would give you a better look at it in this video below.  I plan to do more video demonstrations of various techniques and reviews of gear in the future, and will soon have some better equipment for this.  If you can overlook the poor video quality of this footage, perhaps you can still benefit from the method. When I get set up with a better camera, I'll probably shoot this again in more favorable lighting and replace it here. This was done on a creek bank here in south Mississippi.

This method of cooking is well worth trying on your next overnight stay in the woods.  I've been using it for over 20 years myself, since first seeing it done by some native coconut growers in a remote coastal area of the Dominican Republic.  And although I say that one pot is all you need for the bug out bag, it also works as well when you're better equipped with skillets, coffee pot, etc.  I've cooked many hundreds of pancakes this way and it's easy to regulate the heat by adjusting the amount of fuel you feed into the small fire.

Pine Resin for Wilderness First-Aid

Fresh pine resin is an often overlooked resource that has many uses in the wilderness.  One of these uses is to quickly seal wounds and stop bleeding.

The other day when I posted the contents of an EDC (every day carry) survival kit,  frequent commenter Dave Sears mentioned Super Glue as something he would include in such a kit.  As he says, Super Glue has many uses, including sealing a cut closed or re-installing a loosened crown on a tooth.

On another blog I frequent, Paul at the Urban Survivalist mentioned that he followed the advice in my book and went out and purchased himself a machete.  He promptly sliced open his finger with it, as happens all to often with this wickedly-dangerous tool if you are not 100% cognizant of where the edge is every moment you have one out of its sheath.  I felt bad that he got cut with something I recommended, but I've done it myself as well.  And I once took a fellow member of a survey crew to the emergency room after he nearly whacked off his index finger with one while trying to split the end of a stake he was holding upright with the other hand.

But back to the topic here.  If you spend enough time outdoors doing anything with machetes, axes, hatches, knives or even chainsaws, you're bound to get cut at some point.  Many years ago I learned an old woodsman's trick from a backwoods kinda gal who's father was a logger that had cut himself severely more than once while working alone deep in the woods with no proper first aid kit. 

I had scored a piece of glass with a glass cutter and placed it on the edge of my outdoor workbench to snap it off by pressing down with considerable force. It snapped alright, but when it did, my wrist went across the edge and the blood started pouring.  At first I thought I had hit an artery, but it wasn't nearly that bad - just a long, clean cut that let the blood flow freely and looked like it would require stitches to stop it.  But this person referred to above knew what to do, and ran away for a moment to a grove of pine trees nearby, quickly returning with a big gob of sticky, amber-colored resin which she pressed onto my wrist directly over the still pouring cut.  To my amazement, though the blood mixed with the messy pine sap, the bleeding stopped, as there was no way for it to get through this tenacious mess.  Anyone who has ever inadvertently put their hand in a patch of this stuff while passing a pine tree knows how hard it is to get off. 

I was worried that it might be harmful, but she assured me that it would not only stop the bleeding, but heal the wound.  She told me how her father had used in once after a deep cut with a chainsaw that went into his thigh almost to the bone.  I decided to experiment and test it out, leaving the resin on my wrist until it dried out enough to peel off.  When it did finally all come off, to my amazement, the cut was cleanly sealed without scabbing.  Eventually it healed with hardly a trace, much less conspicuous than another glass cut I had on a finger years before that I had sewn up with stitches in an emergency room.

I did a little searching around and found other references to pine sap's usefulness in sealing wounds.  Apparently it has anti-fungal and antibacterial properties, and is safe to use in this application, as well as for more obvious uses like making pitch glue.  Here is a discussion thread about it on the BushcraftUSA forums that you may find of interest.  The discussion gets more interesting on page 2:  

  http://www.bushcraftusa.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4613

You won't find fresh pine sap on every tree, even in a pine forest, but since that incident, whenever I make camp in the woods and there are pine trees around, I make a mental note of any particular trees in the area that are oozing sap - just in case.

Simple, Low-Cost Foods For Wilderness Travel

 
Leon Pantenburg over at Survival Common Sense has just posted a great article about using basic staple foods in a survival situation.  In this article he focuses on flour and the many ways to prepare it that were once in widespread practice by wilderness travelers and explorers, but are seldom used today.  In particular, he discusses bannock, fry bread and hard tack.  Check out the article here:  http://survivalcommonsense.com/2010/06/15/flour-recipesfeed/

I've experimented with these simple flour recipes myself on extended trips where quantities of staples became more important than variety.  Fry bread, or a variation of it made with cornmeal and water, called "hoe cakes," is very simple to make while on the move.  "Hoe cakes" get their name from an old share-cropper's method of cooking them on the flat blade of a hoe while taking a break from working crops.

Another method of making bread from flour if  you don't have a skillet (or a hoe) to fry it on, is simply to bake it right on the coals of a fire.  These are called "ash cakes" and while they may be burnt a bit on the outside and covered with ash, the bread inside is just as good as if you baked it in an oven, once you experiment a bit to get the time and heat levels right.  Tom Brown Jr. describes this method of making bread from natural flours such as acorn flour or cattail flour in his book: Tom Brown's Field Guide to Edible and Medicinal Plants. 

On all of my long-distance sea kayaking trips and many of my backpacking trips, I carried complete pancake mix as a staple rather than plain flour.  You would be surprised how many pancakes you can eat for breakfast when you're living out of a kayak and traveling 8 to 10 hours per day, often against wind or current.  The other morning staple which I prefer now is oatmeal, probably because I ate so many pancakes on those trips I made myself sick of them.  The good thing about oatmeal is that it can be eaten cooked or raw.  You may not realize it, but soaking a bowl of oatmeal in cold water (or milk if you have it) renders it quite palatable without turning it to mush like cooking does.  This makes it a great source of carbohydrates easily eaten on the go.  Of course it's always better if you can supplement it with some wild blackberries, blueberries or crushed nuts.

My main wilderness staple, however, has always been rice - either plain white or natural brown rice.  This is the ingredient at the center of every evening meal, and since it goes well with anything, the possibilities are endless, whether you have some form or wild edible plant or animal food, or something in your pack you brought with you.  For me, the favorite combination for hard travel is brown rice mixed with tuna.  I used to carry the standard sized cans of tuna, but now it is available in more convenient foil packages.  This combination of complex carbs and high-protein fish is real food you can travel on.  I've never had a desire to bother with that expensive, tasteless freeze-dried stuff.

Rice is quick to cook and compact and long-lasting when uncooked, and even keeps for awhile after it's cooked.  While trekking through the jungle in Honduras and Nicaragua with my friend Ernest, our Miskito Indian guides simply cooked rice one time per day in the evening when we made camp, then kept the leftovers in the cooking pot with the lid on, packing the whole thing in a backpack for the day's trek, eating it for breakfast and lunch as well.  For a simple way to cook rice over a fire, see my post on Cooking On a Green Sapling Tripod. (as shown in the photo above).  Note that this method also works great with skillets and that you can use it to make your fry bread, hoe cakes, or pancakes, as well as boil your morning coffee, if you have it.

Bugging Out On Foot - Considering Alternate Routes

Okay, now that my book has been officially released, I'll be posting more related content here, including excerpts from the text and additional material to expand on some of those topics that I ran out of room for within the confines of a 302-page book. 

In Chapter Four, which covers Transportation To and Within the Bug Out Location, the last section deals with what could be a worst-case scenario - bugging out on foot, carrying everything you need on your back.  I say "could be" because in some cases the walking option may be the best option anyway.  But if you planned ahead and prepared, you'll more likely use some other method of getting out that will enable you to carry more gear and supplies.  Just as those of us who sail think that knowing how to swim is a good idea, having to swim is jokingly referred to as an ultimate failure as a navigator and sailor.  Having to resort to walking as a bug out method could be put in the same category, depending on where you are and the scenario.

If you do end up walking, however, it pays to think of the advantages this method of travel affords, rather than just dwell on the hardships and physical difficulties.  Among these advantages is the ability to use routes that no vehicle or even pack animal could negotiate.  Here are some thoughts from the book on this subject that will hopefully get you thinking about unconventional route options near your living and working locations:

The final transportation option for bugging out is simply walking. While walking may be slow, it is certainly sure and you won’t have to worry about fuel (other than food), mechanical breakdowns, or traffic jams. If you plan to walk, your packed bug-out bag, along with suitable boots and clothing as described in Chapter Two, will be all the gear you need. Walking gives you more route options than any other bugout method on land, as you can use bike paths and walking trails, cut through alleys in the city, and travel cross-country over parking lots and neighborhoods in the suburbs.

In most cities and towns there are many hidden routes you may not have thought of. Drainage culverts and ditches are among these. A good example is the small creek that runs right behind my fiancée’s house in the city of Jackson, Mississippi. Most residents of the area pay it little mind except when the creek gets out of its banks in heavy rain. When I first saw it, however, I immediately zeroed in on it as a great exit route. The creek bed has been paved and walled in by the city in an attempt to control flooding. As a result, it is mostly out of sight behind thick vegetation and the privacy fences of adjoining yards. Except in times of high water, the stream is only ankle-deep. The paved streambed leads out of the neighborhood, passes under busy streets in great culverts, and just a few miles down leaves the city to merge into the swamps of the nearby Pearl River. It would be a simple matter to walk out of town unobserved along this route. Such drainages can be found in most cities, either open and mostly above ground, or in underground storm drains that can be accessed by opening manhole covers in the streets. Like Jackson, many cities are built along the banks of rivers that periodically flood, and the buffer zone between the river and inhabited neighborhoods is often a no man’s land of levees, sewage lagoons, swamps, and woods.

In mountain country, many cites are likewise built in valleys along streams or rivers. The population situation may be reversed in these areas, with more habitable areas along the drainage and the wild areas on the steep slopes above. In this case, it may be faster to escape by simply hiking up the nearest slope and crossing the first ridge beyond the valley. 

If you’re going to have to walk out of town anyway, you might as well consider all these alternate routes that can get you to safety quicker than if you simply try to follow the roads that will be packed with cars and other vehicles. By doing so, you will be living in the bug-out mode immediately, with only the things in your backpack, as you slowly make your way to your pre-planned bug-out location.

Survival Myths Regarding Living Off the Land

The first chapter in my new book, Bug Out: The Complete Plan for Escaping a Catastrophic Disaster Before It's Too Late, is entitled THE FANTASY & THE REALITY OF LIVING OFF THE LAND.  I started the book off with this chapter because I see a huge amount of debate and misinformation about the subject posted all around the Internet in various discussion forums, blogs and websites.  Here's an excerpt from that chapter:

It took a long time for modern humans to progress from Stone Age hunter-gatherers to the creators of an artificial environment almost completely insulated and protected from the uncertainties of nature.
As a result, you cannot expect the transition in the other direction to be much easier. Knowledge has been lost, skills that are necessary to thrive in the wild are difficult to learn, and senses and instincts are dulled by lack of daily use in a world where survival of the fittest is no longer the rule.

Although many people today engage in outdoor pursuits like hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, and canoeing, they often do so with the help of expensive high-tech gear like satellite communication and navigation equipment, sophisticated ultra-lightweight stoves, freeze-dried foods, and clothing and shelter systems made of synthetic fabrics. Unfortunately, much of this equipment will eventually fail and may not be replaceable. This is not a problem in times of normalcy when resupplying or returning to civilization are viable options, but in a SHTF situation, you will far better served by cultivating skills and knowledge.

Our ancestors would be amused, to say the least, at the sight of a modern backpacker struggling along under the weight of a bulky pack almost as large as the bearer. They, like the few remaining bands of
aboriginal people still living in isolated groups today in places like the Amazon Basin and New Guinea, could get by with practically nothing but what could be found in their environment.

To approach the prospect of bugging out into the wilderness from a realistic perspective, you have to strike a balance somewhere between the naked native adept and the overburdened recreational outdoorsman when it comes to equipping yourself for survival. It’s also important to have realistic expectations about what life in the wild will be like, whether it is just for a few days or for a period of weeks or months.

I wrote this for the book because I did not want to mislead total newbies to the idea of outdoor survival that bugging out to the wild to live off the land after SHTF would be a picnic.  It seems that people fall into two categories when discussing this topic - those with Rambo fantasies and no experience who think all they need is a knife and a pocket survival kit, and those who think the only way humans can survive is to have a stockpile of every meal they intend to eat for the next five years or beyond.

The truth, of course, is that humans are incredibly adaptable, which is how we got to where we are now in the first place.  We can adapt to changing conditions, and while many individuals are unable or unwilling to do so, those who have the desire and the right attitude can and will be able to adjust to any living conditions ranging from modern comfort all the way back to primeval hand-to-mouth survival.  Don't ever forget that in the span of human existence, the time of the modern Industrial Age is but a few moments compared to the millennia that our ancestors lived a wild or semi-wild existence adjusted to as needed by changing circumstances.   If you think of this time-span in terms of the hours of a single day - our modern separation from nature began probably in the last hour before midnight - and during the previous 23 hours people lived as hunters and gatherers, subsistence farmers and nomadic herders before the invention of internal combustion engines and long-distance communication.

To suggest that it would be impossible for a modern human to survive in the wild or live off the land is absurd.  Sure, it might be hard, as generations of easy living have dulled our senses and awareness and knowledge that was once taken for granted has been lost.  But we have other advantages to make up for it, at least as long as they last - such as better cutting tools and hunting weapons, easy and portable ways to make fire, stay warm and dry, etc.  And even stripped of these modern implements and materials to make them, we can certainly re-learn the time-tested skills of making our tools from what is found in our environment as our ancestors did,  as many modern hobbyists and primitive skills enthusiasts do today.  For all our sophistication, who knows if we are more intelligent than the "savages" we descended from, but there's certainly no reason to think we are any less so.  If they could live on this planet using only simple resources easily obtained in nature - then at least a few of us can too.  

This is a subject I've been interested in my entire life, going all the way back to when I was seven or so, setting out in the woods behind my parent's house to hunt squirrels with an old Benjamin pellet gun.  I constantly thought about what it would be like to have to hunt to eat and how difficult or easy it would be.  I've experimented with it extensively since those days, in all sorts of environments ranging from the woods and swamps where I grew up hunting in Mississippi to places like tropical seashores and reefs, the North Woods, desert, mountain and jungle habitats.  Each environment has it's unique challenges, of course, and each environment also offers unique resources.  Will there be enough of these resources to feed and shelter everyone pouring out of the cities in an attempt to bug out after a SHTF situation?  Of course not.  But how many of these people do you really think are going to try to bug out and take care of themselves in the first place?  The answer is not very many.  Modern civilized people have been conditioned NOT to think in terms of self-sufficiency.  Instead, they will wait for someone else to come to their rescue, leaving the truly remote and difficult-to-reach uninhabited areas available to those of us who are willing to take our chances there.

If you have any doubts about your wilderness survival skills, now is the time to practice.  Even if you didn't grow up hunting, fishing or foraging for wild edibles, it's never too late to start learning how.  Do this long enough, and your confidence will greatly improve that you can take care of yourself and those dependent upon you if  you are ever put to the test.  Don't be like those who spend their days surfing the Internet for their survival information, echoing what others say by posting on forums about how it would be impossible to survive by bugging out because they personally couldn't do it.  Find out for yourself and prove it by doing.  And all this isn't to say you shouldn't have other preps and perhaps a "bug-in" survival retreat.  There's nothing at all wrong with having more than one plan and back-ups as well - just try to be as ready as possible by being willing to adapt - and willing to stay or go as circumstances dictate.

I'll be posting a lot more on this topic, and I look forward to your comments and questions, and accounts of your own experiences in wilderness survival or living off the land if you have them.

Edible Plants: The Inner Bark of Pine Trees

Pine trees of one variety or another are plentiful in most parts of North America:

I just ran across an excellent article over at Survival Topics on how to harvest and prepare a widely available edible plant food that is overlooked by most foragers and survivalists - the inner bark of pine trees.  Yeah, I know, if you haven't tried it I know what you're most likely thinking.  But this is something I have tried, and like the author of this article, found it to be not only palatable, but quite tasty when prepared in a similar manner to how he does it.    

My first attempt at eating pine trees came at a time between two of my longest kayak trips, when I was out of money for more travel, but too used to living outdoors to adjust easily to any other lifestyle.  I went to the woods to think about what I was going to do next, launching my kayak on one of my favorite streams in my home state: Black Creek.  After paddling downstream a couple of days to one of the most remote stretches of this creek that winds through the Desoto National Forest, I pulled the kayak up a steep bank near a place where a spring poured into the main creek and set up a hidden camp in a stand of tall pines.

It was an awesome place to do what I had come to do, which was to get away from all people to think and to spend a few weeks practicing my hunting and gathering skills.  I had some fishing gear and my Marlin Model 60 .22 rifle, and very little in the way of food, mainly just some rice to fall back on if all else failed.

At the tail end of winter, it was not the best time of year for foraging for edible plant foods, but with several hardwood hollows within a short walk of my camp, the squirrel hunting was exceptionally good and I was able to take two or three each time I went on a on a short morning hunt as needed.  It was too early in the year for much in the way of fresh greens, but I did utilize things like palmetto hearts that I found in one area and every day I made pine needle tea and sassafras tea (more on those in future posts), while trying to stay warm as a cold, drizzly rain fell for much of the time I was there.  I had long planned to experiment with edible inner bark, and this was the perfect time to do so.

I found a medium-sized Longleaf pine felled at the creek's edge by erosion of the banks, but still green and fresh, and went to work with my machete, chopping away the rough outer bark, then using it like a drawknife to peel off strips of the white inner bark.  This inner bark is soft and flexible, and separates nicely from the trunk into strips about an eighth inch thick.  Back at camp, I sprinkled these strips liberally with my essential survival seasoning, Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning, which renders practically anything not only edible, but delicious.  I don't go anywhere without it, and will have as large a supply as I can carry in any bug out bag or bug out vehicle I have to leave in.  I know I would eventually run out in if the situation turns long term, but like coffee and other vices, it will sure make things nicer in the beginning.

The way to prepare this inner bark is to roast it until the strips become dry and crispy, with much the same texture as potato chips.  I used a rack I built near the fire to hang the strips much the same way you would hang meat to make jerky. Believe it or not, roasted inner pine bark prepared this way is not only edible, but pretty tasty as well, the only thing disagreeable being the slight flavor of tannin.  For the rest of that three week trip I kept a supply of it, roasting it every evening while sitting by the fire.

It's well-documented that many Native American tribes utilized the inner bark from a variety of trees as a staple of their diet.  The reason is simple: it is found everywhere, is available year round, and is easy to obtain and prepare.  You can harvest it from living trees as well, as they often did, and can do so without killing the tree as long as you only remove a small section from one side of the trunk and not all the way around.

For much more on the topic and for photographs of harvesting and preparing pine bark, both by roasting and frying, read the full article on Survival Topics:

http://www.survivaltopics.com/survival/edible-pine-bark/

Although this piece is specifically focused on  the Eastern White Pine, many other varieties of pines and other trees as well yield edible inner bark.  If you're serious about learning how to survive in a bug out situation, especially while on the move,  it pays to experiment with these kinds of plant foods that can be found most anywhere, regardless of the season.  Just don't forget to bring the Tony's.

Cooking On A Green Sapling Tripod

The Green Sapling Tripod:  An easy way to boil water without a stove:

Most backpackers and other wilderness travelers think they have to have a camp stove for cooking meals in the wilds. Such stoves are offered in a dazzling array of styles, sizes and prices. New stoves are always on the market, promising better performance and advanced technology. Stoves do have their place in the wild for recreational camping and can contribute to your enjoyment of the trip, but they are certainly not necessary in most environments, where you can easily build a fire to do your cooking. Most cooking done on camping trips with fancy, high-tech stoves involves nothing more complex than boiling water to add to freeze dried foods. Some campers, however, like to cook rice, pasta or other foods that require keeping the water boiling for a period of time. This can be done with a fire just as well as you can do it with a stove, provided you know a simple technique for setting up a pot over the flames.

Forget about the Western movies you’ve seen with complex, counter-weighted branches leaning out over a big roaring fire, supporting a kettle suspended from its bail over the flames. It’s a romantic picture, but not practical or easy to set up. All you need is a small metal cooking pot of stainless steel, and it does not even have to have a bail or even a handle. One point I make in my book in the chapter on gear selection is that if I had to chose between a metal pot and a metal knife to take into the wilderness, I'd take the pot.  The reason is simple.  You can not easily make a pot capable of holding boiling water from materials found in nature, but you can make cutting blades from simple shards of flint, bone or even found glass.  A cooking pot that you can boil water in will allow you to utilize all sorts of edible plant parts that can be prepared in no other way but by boiling.  And of course, it can be used to purify questionable water. 

The key to successfully using open flames to boil water is to set up the pot so it is secure and will remain so throughout the cooking. The method I prefer is the one I learned from some jungle natives in the mountains of the Dominican Republic, and it works great:

Use a machete or hatchet to cut a small green branch or sapling about one to two inches in diameter and about three feet long. Cut this length of green wood into three equal lengths, and sharpen one end of each to make stakes. The other end that is not sharpened should be cut straight across, so that there is a flat surface on it. What you will do is drive these three stakes into the ground to form a tripod, upon which your pot will rest. The stakes must be driven at an angle, so that the bases will be farther out than the tops, just like a camera tripod. Do this by driving one stake first and checking the height by holding the pot on it. You want to have several inches of open space under the pot for fuel wood. Use the pot as a gauge to determine where to set the other two stakes and then drive them down to the same height as the first. If you don’t have a hammer or the back of an axe or hatchet to drive stakes, use a rock or lump of solid wood.

The stakes should be solidly set in the ground and spaced just so they support the edge of your cooking pot. If they are evenly spaced, this set-up should be rock-steady and it will be difficult to turn the pot over. Even heavy pots full of water and food can be securely supported this way.

Now it’s time to build the fire and get on with the cooking. The key here is not to think in terms of a big, roaring campfire. If you want that, you can have that later in a separate place after dinner. What you need to cook with this green wood tripod is just a supply of pencil-sized, dry twigs. Build these up under the pot and ignite them using some leaves or other flammable material. These small twigs will burn hotter and faster than larger pieces of wood. They will also burn up quickly, so if you are cooking something like rice you will need an adequate supply of these twigs to keep feeding into the little fire under the tripod. A fire set up like this can have your water boiling as fast or faster than most backpackers can unpack and set up a modern stove. You don’t have to worry about the tripod catching on fire. That’s why you used green wood to make it. The green wood will usually last more than an hour, depending on the thickness and species of the branch or sapling, before it starts to dry out and ignite. Usually, one such set up built when you make camp will last for cooking dinner, making evening hot chocolate, morning coffee and cooking breakfast before the tripod starts to burn up. This set up will work for skillets as well as for pots, so you can make morning pancakes or fry bread if you prefer.

In a real bug-out situation, there is no place in your pack for a camp stove, much less the fuel to run it.  For any sort of wilderness living experience lasting more than a few days, cooking with fire is the only practical alternative.

The author boiling water for coffee. 

Fire in Rain

Fire can be the difference between life and death in the most dire circumstances, and in less serious circumstances at the very least - the difference between comfort and misery, or eating and going hungry.  In the wilderness, fire is light and life, and a welcome guest at any camp.

This is a photo I took in the Alaskan wilderness not far from Sitka. 

Southeast Alaska is good example of a place where the ability to build a fire in the rain is essential.  These forested islands are perpetually wet with either rain or fog.

Fires have fallen out of favor with recreational campers these days, mainly due to the advent of a wide variety of compact camp stoves. Modern campers often forget, however that a fire can mean the difference in life or death in a survival situation. In freezing cold conditions, the ability to build a fire can save you from certain hypothermia if you are caught out in the wilds without adequate clothing or shelter to stay warm. This is especially true if you have fallen into a stream or otherwise gotten wet and have no way to dry your clothes without the heat of a fire.

Building a fire in truly adverse conditions, such as falling snow or rain, might seem impossible to today’s urbanized outdoors enthusiasts. But native peoples and frontier travelers always depended on fire for everyday cooking and warmth, so they had to become proficient in building them, despite whatever bad weather Mother Nature threw their way. You can build a fire in such conditions too, as long as you have an understanding of how to do it and practice often in better conditions. Many people dismiss fire building as a no-brainer – just get some wood and light it with a match. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Real backwoods experts know that fire building is an art and a craft and their ability to rapidly build fires that burn hotter and brighter and more reliably bears this truth out.

Rainy weather is perhaps the greatest challenge to the fire builder. All fires depend on fuel in the form of combustible material, and in the woods, this usually means dry leaves, twigs, branches and other chunks of wood. If it’s raining out, how do you find dry wood?

It’s really quite easy if you know where to look. Not every piece of wood in the forest gets soaked in a rainstorm. The easily-gathered dead branches you find lying around on the ground that work well in fair weather will be wet however, so you must look elsewhere.

Standing trees are much less likely to absorb water than those lying on the forest floor. Often you can find dry dead branches near the bottoms of pine and spruce trees, as these are shielded from falling rain by the dense needles on the living branches. The outer bark of even these limbs may be wet, however, so you will need a knife to cut it away and reach the dry wood inside. Building a fire in the rain will be much easier if you have a large knife, or preferably, a machete or an axe. The frontiersmen of days gone by never ventured into the wilds without an axe, and this was one of the reasons. A sharp cutting tool will give you the ability to split large pieces of wet wood to get at the dry interior, or even to cut down small standing dead trees that can then be split into usable sized pieces of fuel.

Even better than wood that is merely dry on the inside is the wood you can sometimes find in old stumps that are full of concentrated pine resin. Called “lighter knots” or “fat lighter” by country folk, this resin rich wood will burn with a hot and bright flame even in the rain, if you first cut it into little pieces of kindling to light it. You can identify such fat lighter by the smell and color of the wood when you cut into it. It will smell like pine pitch or tar and is bright yellow or orange inside, often oozing sap. This wood is also much heavier than regular dry wood. It can be found in any forest where there are conifers such as pine, spruce, fir or cedar.

Once you find a source of ignitable fuel, try to locate your fire somewhere so that it is at least partially sheltered from more falling rain. Although fat lighter will burn in direct rain, you will have to build a really large fire and keep the fuel coming to keep it alive in a downpour. If you can get under some dense trees or a rock overhang, you can keep your fire going much easier once you locate a source of dry wood. Don’t give up on a fire just because it’s raining. Remember there is always dry wood somewhere in a forest, but it may take a little effort and a sharp blade to get to it.