In May, the weather turned mild and muggy. Agloo hunting was finished. Our thoughts turned southward, to the land. It, now, must give us food. The caribou must come, on their annual migration from the taiga, the northern forest belt, over the vastness of the Barren Ground tundra, to the Arctic Sea. 

Each day Ekalun and his sons climbed the mountain behind our camp to scan the land and sea patiently with their telescopes. And each day they came down from the mountain and shrugged. «Tuktu nauk. (No caribou.)" Our stores of seal meat and blubber dwindled rapidly. The children fished for tomcod at fissures in the ice. 

Rosie went inland, with a big bag of traps, to the sandy ridges where perky ground squirrels were emerging from their long winter's sleep to bask in the spring sun. She walked fast, her small, work-worn body bent forward, set a series of traps and rushed off to the next siksik (squirrel) colony, while I trotted behind through the mushy spring snow, out of breath and oozing sweat. At night, the squirrels boiled in a big pot, pink little paws poking pathetically out of the bubbling broth. They tasted like chicken. Squirrels and the little fish the children brought home were now our main food. 

Ekalun's automatic Swiss watch had stopped. "Here, Kabloo, you fix it," he said. I recoiled at the idea, and Ekalun laughed derisively. "I thought white men were supposed to be so clever," he gibed and began to take it apart. The tools he lacked he made, a few out of Rosie's darning needles. He remembered the days when the only tools his people had were of stone, bone, horn, and native copper. He had shown me how to make a stone adze, and it was similar to the ones I had seen in Paris's Musée de l'Homme made by Magdalenian hunters 20,000 years ago. Now he nonchalantly took the watch apart. Before evening he had assembled the watch again and it worked. 

Our camp was nearly out of food; one cannot live long on lean spring squirrels and small fish. The families dispersed, traveling far inland to intercept the vanguard of migrating caribou. The talk in camp was of tuktu - caribou - always tuktu, the quail and manna of the Barrens. 

Ekalun remained. He was carving a chess set: the board superbly inlaid with polished stones of many colors; the rooks were igloos, the knights polar bears, the bishops dogs, the pawns a little army of obese owls. King and queen were Inuit in full fur regalia. "My wife and I," he said, and smiled. The carved stone king did, in fact, look like Ekalun. It would take weeks to finish the set. And food? "The caribou will come," he said confidently. 

I left with George Hakungak; his beautiful wife, Jessie; their two small children; and John Akana, George's bachelor brother. The dogs pulled eagerly, although they had fallen upon hard times. We only had a bit of blubber along, and old caribou skins for roughage. 

We snaked our way up the great Hood River valley. After winter's long dormancy, the tundra throbbed with resurrection, with renewal, with life. Elegant horned larks spiraled toward the sky until they were but specks in the blue, then drifted gently downward on set wings, filling the air with their jubilant, lilting song. Ptarmigan flew up, their plumage piebald like the land, part wintry white, part summer's brown. From its nest of sticks and dry grasses on a ledge above the ice-bound river, a rough-legged hawk rose to circle high above us with wild and urgent cries. The day was warm and brilliant, the dogs ran fast, the long sled slid silently through the wet snow. We joked and laughed. It was wonderful to be alive. 

That night the storm struck. Wind-driven snow wreathed the mountains like smoke. It shrieked around our small traveling tent and whistled cerily in the taut guy ropes. Jessie washed diapers. John carved. George played with the baby. While the storm raged, life went on quietly and harmoniously within the walls of our little tent. 

It was night when the storm faltered. Dark clouds still scudded across the sky; the land and a nearby frozen lake lay in an ominous blue-gray El Greco light. And then the caribou came, and in their wake the wolves. 

Far out on the lake ice, dark and phantom-like, the herd stood. The men harnessed the huskies and drove fast, right into the herd, the dogs frenzied with excitement, the sled slewing wildly, the caribou scattering, stopping, galloping frantically back and forth, fear forcing them to flee, the herd instinct bunching them. George and John stopped and shot, raced on and shot again, then turned the dogs loose to pull down wounded caribou. 

We camped for days to feed the famished, emaciated dogs, to eat huge meals ourselves, our first in weeks, and then, the sled loaded high with caribou meat, we walked the 100 miles (160 km) back to camp. Thaw and rain had ravaged the snow; meltwater rushed to the rivers. The broad, tussocky meadows were bare and brown, and George and John harnessed themselves to the sled to help the panting huskies. 

Before breakup, the planes arrived. The doctor from Cambridge Bay on medical inspection found us well, but left us germs, and soon we all came down with colds. The area administrator arrived to buy the men's stock of carvings, the fur clothes the women had made for sale, and one of our caribou-skin tents for a museum in the United States. 

On the first good day, we left for Baychimo at the northeast coast of Bathurst Inlet to buy supplies at the lonely Hudson's Bay Company store. It then served the eighty-nine people of Bathurst Inlet, who lived in eleven widely scattered camps in a region as large as Belgium. 

People from other camps had preceded us, or arrived during the day. Ekalun, one of the best carvers of the area, had the most money. With a fine sense of drama, he waited until the store was crowded. Every inch the grand seigneur, he strode in and handed Jimmy Stevenson, the manager, his checks. Then he started buying, and the Queen shopping at Fortnum and Mason would not have been nearly as grand. "Twenty pounds of tobacco! Twenty pounds of tea! A new gun! A new net! A carton of cigarettes for my Kabloona" - and, aside, in a not-too-sotto voce stage whisper - "His pipe stinks!" to convulse his audience. 

From time to time, as the pile of goods on the floor rose, he'd ask: "How much?" meaning, how much money had he left? "Ah yes, thread for the wife. And needles. And a new pressure stove. Rosie trailed behind her master, meek and quiet. It was a perfect example of male dominance in Inuit society. But since I shared their tent, I happened to know that this was merely a front. For days prior to the trip, Rosie had carefully programmed Ekalun to buy precisely what she needed and wanted. 

When he was down to five dollars, he said: "That I'll take in cash! One might need it," and all laughed. That would be his initial stake for the all-night poker game. Ekalun was sleepy and sour when we returned home next day. "How did the game go?" I asked, not too tactfully. The five dollars were gone. And his lighter. And the recently repaired Swiss watch. "Ayornamat. (It can't be helped.)" He shrugged. 

We lacked fat. The spring caribou were thin after their long migration and our main food, mipku, dried caribou meat, was leathery and lean. We ate pounds of it each day, yet were forever hungry. Living on an exclusive protein, fatless diet took its toll. We tired easily, and after a month developed the first signs of protein poisoning: diarrhea and swollen feet. As soon as we could supplement our lean-meat diet with fat fish, we felt fine again. 

Camp life in summer was quiet and relaxed. Our nets gave us plenty of whitefish and the odd char. Short trips by canoe provided a few seals. In the past, the Bathurst Inlet people had hunted seals only in winter and spring; they used kayaks primarily to kill migrating caribou at river crossings. Ancient patterns persisted; summer simply was not their seal-hunting season and we lived very well on fish alone. 

We moved outdoors. The women cooked on open fires, surrounded by a mass of dwarf willow and heather, serving as both fuel and windbreak, and when the food was ready we'd all sit together, eat, chat, and swat mosquitoes. Weeks merged into months; season followed season; my other life seemed remote, unreal. Ekalun had unobtrusively but expertly remodeled me. I now conformed, and early problems and frictions did not recur. 

At first my curiosity and my questions had riled him, for in his culture questions were considered intrusive. Nor did they ask me questions, including the most obvious ones: Why had I come? What was I doing? How long would I stay? At first I assumed they simply didn't care. Later I found that they were intensely interested, but much too polite to ask. Then I talked about myself, my family, my life, and since I had broached it, they then could ask questions and asked them eagerly. 

To some questions there were no intelligible answers. Ekalun asked me once about Montreal and how many people live there and I said: "Three million." How much is three million? Ekalun wanted to know. He had never seen more than perhaps a hundred people. More than all the caribou in the world, more than all the pebbles on our beach, I said. He thought that over for a while and then he smiled one of his sardonic smiles and said: "Too many!" 

At an old campsite, I found a foot (30-cm)-long stick, the spindle of a fire drill. I showed it to Ekalun. He told me what it was, I pretended ignorance and, rather than waste time explaining, Ekalun made a simple version of the fire drill and showed me how it worked. This put him into a reminiscent mood; he told of travels long ago to a remote valley to pick up "fire stones," the iron pyrite that, struck together, produced sparks that caught on lightly oiled willow catkin fluff or arctic cotton tinder and were blown into a flame. It took about five minutes to produce fire by friction with a fire drill, Ekalun said, and only moments with the "fire stones. From then on, rather than ask questions and annoy, I brought back from my long walks all artifacts I found - broken tools, worked bone, thimbles made of leather, a broken blubber pounder of musk-ox horn - and if I judged the moment and the mood propitious, I showed my finds to Rosie and Ekalun, like a child showing treasures to its parents. 

It often worked. The small bone tube, brown with age and cracked, made of the leg bone of a goose was used, long ago, to suck fresh water off spring ice. That brought back memories of a trip on spring ice nearly half a century ago, when both were starving and their few dogs were near death. Ekalun had spotted a seal far out on the flooded ice and had crawled toward it through the icy water, imitating seal movements and behavior with such perfection that the seal thought he was a seal. It took more than an hour. His body went numb with cold; he dared not throw the harpoon. He crawled right up to the seal and killed it. Rosie, then about fifteen years old and just married, rushed up with the dogs. They ate the seal and lived. 

Fall came, but no fat caribou for winter food, for clothing. We walked far inland. No caribou. We ascended the Hood River. No caribou. And suddenly Ekalun knew. The caribou, he said, are on the islands. We drove to the islands and the caribou were there. How had he known? Experience? Intuition? A good guess? I asked and got no answer. He simply knew. The men hunted. We took several boatloads of meat, fat, and skins back to camp. The rest we cached under heavy stones, to be picked up by dog team in winter. The racks at camp were full of drying meat; slabs of back fat filled the caches. The char were returning to the rivers; our nets were heavy with fish. This was the vital harvest season of fall, to gather supplies until seal hunting began again in winter.

Eating Christmas in the Kalahari

Richard Lee

“Eating Christmas in the Kalahari” by Richard Borshay Lee was published in the December 1969 issue of Natural History. It is one of the magazine’s most frequently reprinted stories. In the final paragraph, Lee wondered what the future would hold for the !Kung Bushmen with whom he had shared a memorable Christmas feast. The University of Toronto anthropologist answers that question for the Botswana San, in a 2000 postscript to his original article. (The postscript follows the main story). A more recent update will be found in Unit 3.

The "Bushmen" are more properly referred to as San in anthropology, and refer to themselves as Ju/’hoansi. The San will also be our example of a foraging mode of production, since that is what they were when Lee began his study in the late 1960's. Lee studied the San in Botswana, although they are also found in Namibia, living in one of the most difficult environments, the Kalahari Desert. Foraging will be discussed later in Unit 1, and you will read more about the San.

Editor’s Note: The !Kung and other Bushmen speak click languages. In the story, three different clicks are used:

1. The dental click (/), as in /Xai/xai, /ontah, and /gaugo. The click is sometimes written in English as tsk-tsk.

2. The alveopalatal click (!), as in Ben!a and !Kung.

3. The lateral click (//), as in //gom. Clicks function as consonants; a word may have more than one, as in /n!au.

he !Kung Bushmen’s knowledge of Christmas is thirdhand. The London Missionary Society brought the holiday to the southern Tswana tribes in the early nineteenth century. Later, native catechists spread the idea far and wide among the Bantu-speaking pastoralists, even in the remotest corners of the Kalahari Desert. The Bushmen’s idea of the Christmas story, stripped to its essentials, is “praise the birth of white man’s god-chief”; what keeps their interest in the holiday high is the Tswana-Herero custom of slaughtering an ox for his Bushmen neighbors as an annual goodwill gesture. Since the 1930’s, part of the Bushmen’s annual round of activities has included a December congregation at the cattle posts for trading, marriage brokering, and several days of trance-dance feasting at which the local Tswana headman is host.

As a social anthropologist working with !Kung Bushmen, I found that the Christmas ox custom suited my purposes. I had come to the Kalahari to study the hunting and gathering subsistence economy of the !Kung, and to accomplish this it was essential not to provide them with food, share my own food, or interfere in any way with their food-gathering activities. While liberal handouts of tobacco and medical supplies were appreciated, they were scarcely adequate to erase the glaring disparity in wealth between the anthropologist, who maintained a two-month inventory of canned goods, and the Bushmen, who rarely had a day’s supply of food on hand. My approach, while paying off in terms of data, left me open to frequent accusations of stinginess and hard-heartedness. By their lights, I was a miser.

The Christmas ox was to be my way of saying thank you for the co-operation of the past year; and since it was to be our last Christmas in the field, I determined to slaughter the largest, meatiest ox that money could buy, insuring that the feast and trance dance would be a success.

Through December I kept my eyes open at the wells as the cattle were brought down for watering. Several animals were offered, but none had quite the grossness that I had in mind. Then, ten days before the holiday, a Herero friend led an ox of astonishing size and mass up to our camp. It was solid black, stood five feet high at the shoulder, had a five-foot span of horns, and must have weighed 1,200 pounds on the hoof. Food consumption calculations are my specialty, and I quickly figured that bones and viscera aside, there was enough meat—at least four pounds—for every man, woman, and child of the 150 Bushmen in the vicinity of the /Xai/xai who were expected at the feast.

Having found the right animal at last, I paid the Herero £20 ($56) and asked him to keep the beast with his herd until Christmas day. The next morning word spread among the people that the big solid black one was the ox chosen by /ontah (my Bushman name; it means, roughly, “whitey”) for the Christmas feast. That afternoon I received the first delegation. Ben!a, an outspoken sixty-year-old mother of five, came to the point slowly.

“Where were you planning to eat Christmas?”

“Right here at /Xai/xai,” I replied.

“Alone or with others?”

“I expect to invite all the people to eat Christmas with me.

“Eat what?”

“I have purchased Yehave’s black ox, and I am going to slaughter and cook it.”

“That’s what we were told at the well but refused to believe it until we heard it from yourself.”

“Well, it’s the black one,” I replied expansively, although wondering what she was driving at.

“Oh, no!” Ben!a groaned, turning to her group. “They were right.” Turning back to me she asked, “Do you expect us to eat that bag of bones?”

“Bag of bones! It’s the biggest ox at /Xai/xai.”

“Big, yes, but old. And thin. Everybody knows there’s no meat on that old ox. What did you expect us to eat off it, the horns?”

Everybody chuckled at Ben!a’s one-liner as they walked away, but all I could manage was a weak grin.

That evening it was the turn of the young men. They came to sit at our evening fire. /gaugo, about my age, spoke to me man-to-man.

“/ontah, you have always been square with us,” he lied. “What has happened to change your heart? That sack of guts and bones of Yehave’s will hardly feed one camp, let alone all the Bushmen around /Xai/xai.” And he proceeded to enumerate the seven camps in the /Xai/xai vicinity, family by family. “Perhaps you have forgotten that we are not few, but many. Or are you too blind to tell the difference between a proper cow and an old wreck? That ox is thin to the point of death.”

“Look, you guys,” I retorted, “that is a beautiful animal, and I’m sure you will eat it with pleasure at Christmas.”

“Of course we will eat it; it’s food. But it won’t fill us up to the point where we will have enough strength to dance. We will eat and go home to bed with stomachs rumbling.”

That night as we turned in, I asked my wife, Nancy: “What did you think of the black ox?”

“It looked enormous to me. Why?”

“Well, about eight different people have told me I got gypped; that the ox is nothing but bones.”

“What’s the angle?” Nancy asked. “Did they have a better one to sell?”

“No, they just said that it was going to be a grim Christmas because there won’t be enough meat to go around. Maybe I’ll get an independent judge to look at the beast in the morning.”

Bright and early, Halingisi, a Tswana cattle owner, appeared at our camp. But before I could ask him to give me his opinion on Yehave’s black ox, he gave me the eye signal that indicated a confidential chat. We left the camp and sat down.

“/ontah, I’m surprised at you; you’ve lived here for three years and still haven’t learned anything about cattle.”

“But what else can a person do but choose the biggest, strongest animal one can find?” I retorted.

“Look, just because an animal is big doesn’t mean that it has plenty of meat on it. The black one was a beauty when it was younger, but now it is thin to the point of death.”

“Well I’ve already bought it. What can I do at this stage?”

“Bought it already? I thought you were just considering it. Well, you’ll have to kill it and serve it, I suppose. But don’t expect much of a dance to follow.”

My spirits dropped rapidly. I could believe that Ben!a and /gaugo just might be putting me on about the black ox, but Halingisi seemed to be an impartial critic. I went around that day feeling as though I had bought a lemon of a used car.

“My friend, the way it is with us Bushmen,” he began, “is that we love meat. And even more than that, we love fat.”

In the afternoon it was Tomazo’s turn. Tomazo is a fine hunter, a top trance performer, and one of my most reliable informants. He approached the subject of the Christmas cow as part of my continuing Bushmen education.

“My friend, the way it is with us Bushmen,” he began, “is that we love meat. And even more than that, we love fat. When we hunt we always search for the fat ones, the ones dripping with layers of white fat: fat that turns into a clear, thick oil in the cooking pot, fat that slides down your gullet, fills your stomach and gives you a roaring diarrhea,” he rhapsodized.

“So, feeling as we do,” he continued, “it gives us pain to be served such a scrawny thing as Yehave’s black ox. It is big, yes, and no doubt its giant bones are good for soup, but fat is what we really crave and so we will eat Christmas this year with a heavy heart.”

The prospect of a gloomy Christmas now had me worried, so I asked Tomazo what I could do about it.

“Look for a fat one, a young one . . . smaller, but fat. Fat enough to make us //gom (‘evacuate the bowels’), then we will be happy.”

My suspicions were aroused when Tomazo said that he happened to know of a young, fat, barren cow that the owner was willing to part with. Was Toma working on commission, I wondered? But I dispelled this unworthy thought when we approached the Herero owner of the cow in question and found that he had decided not to sell.

The scrawny wreck of a Christmas ox now became the talk of the /Xai/xai water hole and was the first news told to the outlying groups as they began to come in from the bush for the feast. What finally convinced me that real trouble might be brewing was the visit from u!lau, an old conservative with a reputation for fierceness. His nickname meant spear and referred to an incident thirty years ago in which he had speared a man to death. He had an intense manner; fixing me with his eyes, he said in clipped tones:

“I have only just heard about the black ox today, or else I would have come here earlier. /ontah, do you honestly think you can serve meat like that to people and avoid a fight?” He paused, letting the implications sink in. “I don’t mean fight you, /ontah; you are a white man. I mean a fight between Bushmen. There are many fierce ones here, and with such a small quantity of meat to distribute, how can you give everybody a fair share? Someone is sure to accuse another of taking too much or hogging all the choice pieces. Then you will see what happens when some go hungry while others eat.”

The possibility of at least a serious argument struck me as all too real. I had witnessed the tension that surrounds the distribution of meat from a kudu or gemsbok kill, and had documented many arguments that sprang up from a real or imagined slight in meat distribution. The owners of a kill may spend up to two hours arranging and rearranging the piles of meat under the gaze of a circle of recipients before handing them out. And I also knew that the Christmas feast at /Xai/xai would be bringing together groups that had feuded in the past.

Convinced now of the gravity of the situation, I went in earnest to search for a second cow; but all my inquiries failed to turn one up.

The Christmas feast was evidently going to be a disaster, and the incessant complaints about the meagerness of the ox had already taken the fun out of it for me. Moreover, I was getting bored with the wisecracks, and after losing my temper a few times, I resolved to serve the beast anyway. If the meat fell short, the hell with it. In the Bushmen idiom, I announced to all who would listen:

“I am a poor man and blind. If I have chosen one that is too old and too thin, we will eat it anyway and see if there is enough meat there to quiet the rumbling of our stomachs.”

On hearing this speech, Ben!a offered me a rare word of comfort. “It’s thin,” she said philosophically, “but the bones will make a good soup.”

At dawn Christmas morning, instinct told me to turn over the butchering and cooking to a friend and take off with Nancy to spend Christmas alone in the bush. But curiosity kept me from retreating. I wanted to see what such a scrawny ox looked like on butchering, and if there was going to be a fight, I wanted to catch every word of it. Anthropologists are incurable that way.

The great beast was driven up to our dancing ground, and a shot in the forehead dropped it in its tracks. Then, freshly cut branches were heaped around the fallen carcass to receive the meat. Ten men volunteered to help with the cutting. I asked /gaugo to make the breast bone cut. This cut, which begins the butchering process for most large game, offers easy access for removal of the viscera. But it also allows the hunter to spot-check the amount of fat on the animal. A fat game animal carries a white layer up to an inch thick on the chest, while in a thin one, the knife will quickly cut to bone. All eyes fixed on his hand as /gaugo, dwarfed by the great carcass, knelt to the breast. The first cut opened a pool of solid white in the black skin. The second and third cut widened and deepened the creamy white. Still no bone. It was pure fat; it must have been two inches thick.

“Hey /gau,” I burst out, “that ox is loaded with fat. What’s this about the ox being too thin to bother eating? Are you out of your mind?”

“Fat?” /gau shot back, “You call that fat? This wreck is thin, sick, dead!” And he broke out laughing. So did everyone else. They rolled on the ground, paralyzed with laughter. Everybody laughed except me; I was thinking.

I ran back to the tent and burst in just as Nancy was getting up. “Hey, the black ox. It’s fat as hell! They were kidding about it being too thin to eat. It was a joke or something. A put-on. Everyone is really delighted with it!”

“Some joke,” my wife replied. “It was so funny that you were ready to pack up and leave /Xai/xai.”

If it had indeed been a joke, it had been an extraordinarily convincing one, and tinged, I thought, with more than a touch of malice as many jokes are. Nevertheless, that it was a joke lifted my spirits considerably, and I returned to the butchering site where the shape of the ox was rapidly disappearing under the axes and knives of the butchers. The atmosphere had become festive. Grinning broadly, their arms covered with blood well past the elbow, men packed chunks of meat into the big cast-iron cooking pots, fifty pounds to the load, and muttered and chuckled all the while about the thinness and worthlessness of the animal and /ontah’s poor judgment.

We danced and ate that ox two days and two nights; we cooked and distributed fourteen potfuls of meat and no one went home hungry and no fights broke out.

But the “joke” stayed in my mind. I had a growing feeling that something important had happened in my relationship with the Bushmen and that the clue lay in the meaning of the joke. Several days later, when most of the people had dispersed back to the bush camps, I raised the question with Hakekgose, a Tswana man who had grown up among the !Kung, married a !Kung girl, and who probably knew their culture better than any other non-Bushmen.

“With us whites,” I began, “Christmas is supposed to be the day of friendship and brotherly love. What I can’t figure out is why the Bushmen went to such lengths to criticize and belittle the ox I had bought for the feast. The animal was perfectly good and their jokes and wisecracks practically ruined the holiday for me.”

“So it really did bother you,” said Hakekgose. “Well, that’s the way they always talk. When I take my rifle and go hunting with them, if I miss, they laugh at me for the rest of the day. But even if I hit and bring one down, it’s no better. To them, the kill is always too small or too old or too thin; and as we sit down on the kill site to cook and eat the liver, they keep grumbling, even with their mouths full of meat. They say things like, ‘Oh, this is awful! What a worthless animal! Whatever made me think that this Tswana rascal could hunt!’”

“Is this the way outsiders are treated?” I asked.

“No, it is their custom; they talk that way to each other too. Go and ask them.”

/gaugo had been one of the most enthusiastic in making me feel bad about the merit of the Christmas ox. I sought him out first.

“Why did you tell me the black ox was worthless, when you could see that it was loaded with fat and meat?”

“It is our way,” he said smiling. “We always like to fool people about that. Say there is a Bushman who has been hunting. He must not come home and announce like a braggard, ‘I have killed a big one in the bush!’ He must first sit down in silence until I or someone else comes up to his fire and asks, ‘What did you see today?’ He replies quietly, ‘Ah, I’m no good for hunting. I saw nothing at all [pause] just a little tiny one.’ Then I smile to myself,” /gaugo continued, “because I know he has killed something big.”

In the morning we make up a party of four or five people to cut up and carry the meat back to the camp. When we arrive at the kill we examine it and cry out, ‘You mean to say you have dragged us all the way out here in order to make us cart home your pile of bones? Oh, if I had known it was this thin I wouldn’t have come.’ Another one pipes up, ‘People, to think I gave up a nice day in the shade for this. At home we may be hungry but at least we have nice cool water to drink.’ If the horns are big, someone says, ’Did you think that somehow you were going to boil down the horns for soup?’

“To all this you must respond in kind. ‘I agree,’” you say, ’this one is not worth the effort; let’s just cook the liver for strength and leave the rest for the hyenas. It is not too late to hunt today and even a duiker or a steenbok would be better than this mess.’”

“Then you set to work nevertheless; butcher the animal, carry the meat back to the camp and everyone eats,” /gaugo concluded.

“But,” I asked, “why insult a man after he has gone to all that trouble to track and kill an animal and when he is going to share the meat with you so that your children will have something to eat?”

Things were beginning to make sense. Next, I went to Tomazo. He corroborated /gaugo’s story of the obligatory insults over a kill and added a few details of his own.

“But,” I asked, “why insult a man after he has gone to all that trouble to track and kill an animal and when he is going to share the meat with you so that your children will have something to eat?”

“Arrogance,” was his cryptic answer.

“Arrogance?”

“Yes, when a young man kills much meat he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”

“But why didn’t you tell me this before?” I asked Tomazo with some heat.

“Because you never asked me,” said Tomazo, echoing the refrain that has come to haunt every field ethnographer.

I had been taught an object lesson by the Bushmen; it had come from an unexpected corner and had hurt me in a vulnerable area.

The pieces now fell into place. I had known for a long time that in situations of social conflict with Bushmen I held all the cards. I was the only source of tobacco in a thousand square miles, and I was not incapable of cutting an individual off for noncooperation. Though my boycott never lasted longer than a few days, it was an indication of my strength. People resented my presence at the water hole, yet simultaneously dreaded my leaving. In short I was a perfect target for the charge of arrogance and for the Bushmen tactic of enforcing humility.

I had been taught an object lesson by the Bushmen; it had come from an unexpected corner and had hurt me in a vulnerable area. For the big black ox was to be the one totally generous, unstinting act of my year at /Xai/xai, and I was quite unprepared for the reaction I received.

As I read it, their message was this: There are no totally generous acts. All “acts” have an element of calculation. One black ox slaughtered at Christmas does not wipe out a year of careful manipulation of gifts given to serve your own ends. After all, to kill an animal and share the meat with people is really no more than Bushmen do for each other every day and with far less fanfare.

In the end, I had to admire how the Bushmen had played out the farce-collectively straight-faced to the end. Curiously, the episode reminded me of the Good Soldier Schweik and his marvelous encounters with authority. Like Schweik, the Bushmen had retained a thoroughgoing skepticism of good intentions. Was it this independence of spirit, I wondered, that had kept them culturally viable in the face of generations of contact with more powerful societies, both black and white? The thought that the Bushmen were alive and well in the Kalahari was strangely comforting. Perhaps, armed with that independence and with their superb knowledge of their environment, they might yet survive the future.

The Diomeders are known for belligerence and reckless daring and have been called "the Vikings of the Arctic Sea," " a reputation they rather cherish. One day, two boat crews were in the Alaskan mainland village of Wales and saw a film about Genghis Khan and the Golden Horde, with violence and pillage aplenty. Back on Little Diomede, they were asked by a visiting biologist how they had liked the film. One man grinned and said: "Nothing special. Just a bunch of Diomeders on horseback!" 

The walrus hunters in my boat slept soundly, oblivious to the storm. Slowly the wind abated, the sky cleared, the pack spread out, the morning was pure magic. We launched the boat and purred smoothly along dark lanes among the floes, through a fantasy-land of shimmering, wind-and-wave sculptured ice. The ice glowed in the soft opalescence of morning, in delicate lilac, rose, and cool green, and bone-white icicles hung in grottoes of the deepest blue. Thousands of murres and auklets, like dark toy birds, lay scattered upon the satin sea. 

Far in the pack we heard the walruses, drifting north upon the Aloes from the Bering to the Chukchi Sea, all 200,000 funneling through Bering Strait on their annual spring migration. We approached them slowly, cautiously. Masses of madder-brown walruses lay sound asleep in chummy heaps upon brown, dung- smeared floes. 

Tom throttled the motor back, the men readied rifles and harpoons. They spoke in whispers; excitement and tension filled the boat. We drifted close to a pan loaded with sleeping animals, and suddenly, upon a low command from Tom, the eleven hunters fired, and fired again and again, a rapid, deadly fusillade. One moment it had been very quiet and then came carnage and chaos. 

Dead walruses lay on the floe, fountains of blood spurting and bubbling from the wounds. Others, in fear and fury, poured off the floe like a brown avalanche, rallied and attacked the boat, bellowing with rage, their eyes bloodshot. The men shot onto the water, into the walruses at top speed; most walruses turned and fled. A huge bull, bleeding from many wounds, dived, then shot up and hacked into the boat, and water rushed in through the gash. The hunters were prepared. They stuffed a large piece of blubber into the hole to staunch the leak. Ice and water were red with blood. They shot and killed the wounded walruses and tried to harpoon them before they sank. 

Ten walruses were dead. The men pulled the umiak onto the floe, patched the hole, and with amazing speed and precision cut up the 2-ton (1.8-tonne) carcasses. Blood flowed everywhere; piles of steaming guts lay on the ice; men with axes cut heavy-boned skulls to remove the precious ivory tusks. Ivory and a sea of blood; it seemed the essence of the hunt. We loaded the boat to the gunwales with meat, fat, and ivory, and headed for Diomede. The weather was changing fast. Ragged storm clouds raced across the sky. Gray fog oozed over sea and ice and enwrapped us like a clammy shroud. The wind increased; the heavily laden boat pitched and lurched in the rising waves. They raised the yard-broad waistcloth, furled against the gunwales in calm seas, on paddles and poles around the boat and lashed it securely as a guard against the wind-whipped spray. 

The day dragged on toward a dark and evil night. One man stood in the bow to watch for the ice floes that surged suddenly out of the murk and spume and vanished again into the dark-gray void that surrounded us. Tommy and I sat on the food box, lolling against each other with the wildly yawing motion of the boat, shivering and chilled to the core. Toward midnight, when the storm was at its peak, flinging sheets of spray across the waistcloth, and icy water soaked us to the skin, one of the men crept toward us, from thwart to thwart like a huge dark crab, took off his great parka, wrapped it tightly around the boy, gave us an encouraging grin, and crawled back to his seat, now dressed only in shirt and pullover. 

We reached Diomede in the morning and unloaded the boat. I walked slowly up to my shack, made tea and drank it very hot, and fell exhausted on my cot, blood-spattered and reeking of blood and blubber. Two hours later, Tom banged on my shack, I put on my sea-soaked parka, and we were off again. 

Days and nights merged. We hunted in fair weather and in foul (mostly foul, Bering Strait is notorious for its storms and fogs). The great racks on Diomede were loaded with drying meat; the ancient meat holes, the deep freezers of Diomede, were crammed with walrus meat and fat. The women worked nearly as hard as the men. Mary, Tom's wife, split walrus skins to be used as umiak covers with her razor-sharp ulu. Their daughter, Eva, eighteen years old and just back from a mainland high school, cut blubber off the walrus skins, and sliced meat and hauled it to the meat holes. Her sister, Etta, a charming, round-faced three-year-old, sat on a rock and copied her mother, Mary, pretending to split a piece of walrus skin with a can lid in lieu of an ulu. 

Suddenly, near the end of June, the hunt was over. The last walruses had passed to the north. The four Diomede umiaks had brought back much of the meat and all the ivory of 700 walruses ample food and relative prosperity, though much of that would be spent on liquor. The men caught auklets with long-handled nets, just as the Polar Inuit catch dovekies. I went with Albert Iyahuk to collect greens on the mountainside; he showed me the many roots, corms, and leaves Diomeders preserve in seal oil and eat with meat. 

Tom left to work on the pipeline in northern Alaska. Other men followed, some to the pipeline, some to Anchorage or to "the lower forty-eight." Most went to jobs, some went to jails, usually for brawling in bars. "I spend so much time in the Nome jail, I use it as my home address," one man joked. The Diomeders love to travel, but in fall all flock back to their lonely rock set in an icy sea. 

John lyapana was going with his umiak to the mainland and offered to take me along. Once, in a drunken rage at "whites," he had threatened to kill me. Two days later, sober, he asked me over for supper and was a delightful host, generous, amiable, with an enormous fund of stories about olden times on Diomede. Many villagers were on the beach when we pushed off. "Come back," they called, "come back and bring your family."

“Living Off the Country

ONE DAY YOU MAY BE BOATING DOWN THE PEACE River near the start of its more than 2000 mile journey inland to Great Slave Lake and thence as the Mackenzie to the Arctic Ocean. Soon after the headwaters of this wilderness highway mingle in the Continental Trough, the river turns abruptly eastward to flow with surprising tranquility through the entire range of the Rocky Mountains. If you watch the left shore after chuting through the minor turbulence known as Finlay Rapids, your eyes will likely as not catch the platinum gleam of Lost Cabin Creek.

Here it was at the turn of the century, during those apical days on the world’s gold-fever chart, that four prospectors shared the cabin from which the stream has taken its name. Their grubstake dwindling, three watched with growing helplessness their fourth companion die, by which time the ”

“survivors themselves had become so feeble they lacked the vigor to open the frozen ground outside.

They buried their companion in the only spot they could find earth still loose enough to dig. A second prospector died and had also to be there interred. Before the fourth succumbed, he had by himself managed to scoop out enough earth so that a third emaciated body could be added to the grave beneath the cabin floor.

Yet as you will be able to testify from what you can see while boating past Lost Cabin Creek, and as I can substantiate from having camped there on several occasions, the vicinity abounds year around with wild edibles.

Sustenance in the Silent Places

Starvation is not a great deal more pleasant than most of us would expect. The body becomes auto-cannibalistic after a few foodless hours. The carbohydrates in the system are devoured first. The fats follow.

This might not be too disagreeable, inasmuch as diets seek to accomplish much the same result, but then proteins from muscles and tendons are consumed to maintain the dwindling strength their loss more gravely weakens.

“No reasonable nourishment should therefore be scorned if one needs food. The Pilgrims derived considerable nutriment during their first desperate Massachusetts winter from ground nuts which are similar to small potatoes. Some northern explorers including Richardson, Franklin, and members of their parties lived for weeks and sometimes months almost entirely on the lichen known as rock tripe.

Wild turnips kept up John Colter’s strength when the mountain man made his notable escape from the Indians. Beaver meat was a main item on the menu while Samuel Black explored the Finlay River. When regular rations on the Lewis and Clark expedition had to be reduced to one biscuit a day, it was the sweet yellow fruit of the papaw tree that kept the men going.

“There is no need to explain why, if any of us are ever stranded and hungry in the wilderness, we will want to start searching for food while our strength is still near its maximum.

Food Prejudices

Few will disagree, at least not when the moment of decision is at hand, that there is a point where luxuries as such become relatively unimportant.

One of life’s luxuries, which we esteem most highly, is the freedom to indulge our taste buds. Our taste prejudices, a better understanding of which may one day prove beneficial, are commonly based on two factors.

First: there is a human tendency to look down upon certain foods as being beneath one’s social station. Where grouse have been particularly thick in the Northeast, I’ve seen them scorned among backwoodsmen as a “poor man’s dish.” The same season in the Northwest where there happened to be a scarcity of grouse but numerous varying hares, the former were esteemed while I heard habitants “apologizing for having rabbits in their pots. As it is everywhere in such matters, the lower the designated station of the creature, the more prejudiced against eating it the locals are.

Second: it is natural to like the food to which we have become accustomed. We in the United States and Canada have our wheat. The Mexican has his corn, the Asian his rice. These grains we like also, but it would seem a hardship to have to eat them every day as we do wheat bread.

Our fastidiousness, too, is perhaps repelled by the idea of a Polynesian’s eating raw fish, although at the moment we may be twirling a raw oyster in grated horseradish. The Eskimo enjoys fish mellowed by age. Many of us regard as choice some particularly moldy, odoriferous cheeses.

What About Frogs

Frog meat is one example of an often disdained food. Yet frog can be very expensive in the more fashionable restaurants of the world, though in nature it is free for the taking. Amphibians can be hooked with fishing tackle and small fly. They can be caught with string and a bit of cloth, the former being given a quick tug when “hooked with fishing tackle and small fly. They can be caught with string and a bit of cloth, the former being given a quick tug when the latter is taken experimentally into the mouth.

Frogs can be secured with spears of various types. A sharpened stick will do. They can be so occupied at night by a light that you’ll be able to net them and, even, occasionally to reach cautiously around and clamp a hand over one.

With a string and a bit of brightly colored cloth in the absence of live bait, you may be able to capture a frog. When you cannot see frogs, their presence is obvious by their easily distinguished croaking. Jerk the string so the cloth flutters. You may have luck with the chance that a frog will take it as food in its mouth. Then jerk the line and frog towards you to catch it.

“Most of the delicately flavored meat is on the hind legs which can be cut off, skinned, and in the absence of cooking utensils, extended over hot coals on a green stick for broiling. If rations are scant, you can use the entire skinned frog after removing or at least emptying and cleaning the entrails, perhaps boiling the meat briefly with some wild greens.

Letting Predators Hunt for Us

If one of us is ever stranded and hungry, it may not be amiss to watch for owls, for spying one roosting in a quiet shadowy spot is not unusual, and it may be possible to steal close enough to knock it down. Although not as large and plump as would seem from outward appearances, an owl nevertheless is excellent eating.

What is more likely, however, is that we may scare an owl from a kill and thus secure ourselves a fresh supper. We may also have such good fortune, perhaps earlier in the day, with other predatory birds such as hawks and eagles. It is not uncom“mon to come upon one of these after it has just captured a partridge, hare, or other prey that is too heavy to lift from the ground. By running to drive the hunter away, we may thus secure a fresh meal.

Wolves, coyotes, and foxes may also be surprised at fresh kills that are still fit for human consumption. Such carnivores will seek new hunting grounds at the sight or scent of an approaching human being.

“Can Live Meat Spoil Too Quickly to Be Consumed?

One often hears it suggested that when any bird or animal has been unduly harassed before death, as may be considered to be the case if, for example, it has been relayed by wolves, its meat is no longer fit to eat. Such conclusions are false, however, and are more attributed to fancy than fact. Although it is true that the amounts of lactic acid in the muscle tissues of such animals is higher than those not chased by their predators and that the rate of spoilage is faster, this meat is still quite safe to eat if cooked well and immediately.

How About Bears?

“Coming up to a bear’s kill may be something else again. A wild bear probably won’t dispute your presence. Then again it may, and although the chances are very much against this latter possibility, that is all the more reason not to take disproportionate risks.

If you are unarmed and really need the bear’s meal, you will want to plan and execute your campaign with all reasonable caution. This will probably mean, first of all, spotting with the minutest detail, preferably at least two paths of escape in case a fast exit should become advisable. This should not be too difficult where there are small trees to climb.”

“If you are trying to steal dinner from a bear, or just help to clean his plate, be aware of at least two distinct escape routes. Even if the bear seems to have left the vicinity, approach with quiet caution and stay alert. Bears often sleep soon after—and nearby—their last meal. Use discretion to build a fire near the food, gathering enough fuel to keep it going throughout the night.”

“You’ll then watch your opportunity and if, for instance, the kill is a still warm moose calf, build a large fire beside it, discreetly gathering enough fuel to last for several hours—until morning, if night be close at hand. You will take care in any event to be constantly alert as bears, especially when they have gorged themselves, have a habit of dropping down near their food.

If you have a gun, you will be able to judge for yourself if the best procedure may not be to bag the bear itself. Fat is the most important single item in most survival diets, and the bear is particularly well fortified with this throughout most of the year. Except usually for a short period in the spring, bear flesh is therefore particularly nourishing.

Many, most of whom have never tasted bear meat nor smelled it cooking, are prejudiced against the carnivore as a table delicacy for one reason or another. One excuse often heard concerns the animal’s eating habits. Yet the most ravenous bear is a finicky diner when compared to such game as lobster and chicken.

It is only natural that preferences should vary, and if only for this reason it may be interesting to note:

“(a) That many of our close acquaintances who live on wild meat much of the time relish plump bear more than any other North American game meat with the single exception of sheep,

(b) and that, furthermore, these individuals include a sizable number who after long professing an inability to stomach bear meat in any form found themselves coming back for thirds and even fourths of bear roast or bear stew under the impression that anything so savory must be, at the very least, choice beef.

Getting Birds Without Guns

Game birds such as ptarmigan and grouse promise feasts for anybody lost in the wilderness, especially as a few stones or sticks are often the only weapons needed to catch one. If one misses the first time, such fowl usually will afford a second and even a third chance to be captured. When they do fly, they generally go only short distances and may be successfully followed, particularly if this is done casually and at such a tangent that it would seem that one were strolling on past.

It goes without saying that no sportsman finds any amusement in indiscriminate killing: it follows with equal reason that when survival is at stake and when wild meat may mean life itself, otherwise distasteful means of securing meat may be justified, even though regrets for their necessity may remain.

Any bird, as a matter of fact, will furnish good eating in an emergency. The only difference is that some are more tender and plump, and to different palates better tasting than others. Colonies afford particular opportunities, some of which are considered in Chapter 5. Even ripe eggs should not be overlooked when one needs food.

Because bevies of grouse tend to fly and flutter close to the ground for short distances only, a casual pursuit with a few good stones or sticks may lead to an important feast. The birds will usually allow the hunter a few opportunities to get reasonably close enough to them so that his chances of success are quite high.

Why Porcupines Are Given Reprieves

Porcupines, like thistles and nettles, are better eating than it might seem reasonable to expect. The slow moving, dull witted rodent is in human estimation often a nuisance, being so ravenous for salt that practically anything touched by human hands will whenever possible be investigated by sharp inquisitive teeth.

When shooting the rocky headwaters of the Southwest Miramichi River in New Brunswick, I’ve had to hunch out of my sleeping robe a half-dozen times a night to switch determined brown porkies away from my canvas canoe. Several years later, King Gething told me how when boating mail in the Canadian Rockies he’d solved with better success a similar problem, looping wires harmlessly around the yellowish necks of offending western hedgehogs and hitching them to poplars until he was ready to go the next morning.

The sluggish porcupine is the one animal that even the greenest tenderfoots, even weak with hunger, can kill with a weapon no more formidable than a stick. All one usually has to do to collect a meal is reach over the animal, which generally presents the raised quills of back and tail, and strike it on the head. Being so low in intelligence, “the hedgehog requires a lot more killing than might be expected.

Porcupines can not, of course, shoot their quills, but any that are stuck in the flesh by contact should be pulled out immediately, for their barbed tips cause them to be gradually worked in and out of sight. Dogs are common victims. I had a big Irish Wolfhound who became so infuriated at the genus that with no regard for himself, until later, he killed every porcupine he could find.

If you’re alone in the bush with a dog in such a disagreeable predicament, you’ll probably have to do as I did; lash the pet as motionless as possible against a tree, and use your weight for any necessary additional leverage. Pincers can be improvised by splitting a short branch, At any rate, each of the perhaps hundreds of quills has to come out, or death may be the least painful result.

Because they are so dumb, porcupines, which may provide a good source of nutrition, are possibly the easiest forest-dwelling animals to kill. A few blows with a simple, sturdy stick to the head of the slow-moving animal, and your kill should be complete. But take heed: although porcupines cannot shoot their quills, if a quill happens to stick you, it can easily become lodged beneath the surface of the skin, and thus, it should be removed immediately. Before cooking, skin the porcupine completely, using caution, by first making an incision on the smooth underbelly.

This danger from quills is one reason why it is a poor practice to cook a porcupine by tossing it into a small fire. Very often all the quills do not burn off. The best procedure is to skin out the porcupines by  “first turning it over so as to make the initial incision along the smooth underneath portion. Many who’ve dined on this meat consider the surprisingly large liver uncommonly toothsome.

The Most Widely Hunted Game Animal

In the spring particularly, those years when rabbit cycles are near their zeniths, the young lie so fearlessly that a dog will step over one without scenting it, and all an individual has to do, if he wants, is to reach down and pick the youngster up.

Adult rabbits themselves depend so much on camouflage that at any time if you pretend not to see one and continue strolling as if going past, it is frequently possible to come close enough to do some immediately accurate throwing with a ready stone.

Tularemia, or rabbit fever, is occasionally a threat in some localities and in one respect the disease is a little harder to avoid when not hunting with a firearm, for one precaution can be to shoot only rabbits that appear to be lively and in good health.

The germs of rabbit fever are destroyed by heat, however, and another safeguard is to handle the animal with covered hands until the meat is thoroughly cooked.

Rabbits are unusually easy to clean. One method is to begin by pinching up enough of the loose back skin to slit it by shoving a knife through. Insert your fingers and tear the fragile skin apart completely around the rabbit. Now peel back the lower half like a glove, disjointing the tail when you come to it and finally cutting off each hind foot. Do the same thing with the top section of skin, loosening it finally by severing the head and two forefeet. You can then, as you’ve already possibly found, pull the animal open just below the ribs and flip out the entrails, retrieving heart and liver. You may also want to cut out the small waxy gland between each front leg and the body.

Starvation Next to Impossible

“It is next to impossible to starve in a wilderness,” says George Leopard Herter, of Herter’s, Inc., sporting goods manufacturer, importer, and exporter. “If no game, fish, mollusk, etc. are present, you are still in no danger.

“Insects are wonderful food, being mostly fat, and are far more fortifying than either fish or meat. It does not take many insects to keep you fit. Do not be squeamish about eating insects, as it is entirely uncalled for. In parts of Mexico, the most nutritious flour is made from the eggs of small insects found in the marshes. In Japan, darning needles or dragon flies are a delicacy. They have a delicious delicate taste, so be sure to try them.

“Moths, mayflies, in fact about all the insects found in the wools, are very palatable. The only ones I ever found that I did not care for were ants. They contain formic acid and have a bitter taste. Some aborigines have capitalized on the ants’ acidity by mashing them in water sweetened with berries or sap to make a sort of lemonade. The eggs and the young of the ant are also eaten.

“A small light at night will get you all the insects you need to keep you in good condition. If the weather is too cold for flying insects, kick open some rotten logs or look under stones and get some grubs. They keep bears fat and healthy and will do the same for you.”

Odd Meals

Grasshoppers are edible when hard portions such as wings and legs have been removed. So are cicadas. Termites, locusts, and crickets may be similarly eaten.

Both lizards and snakes are not only digestible but are often considered delicacies for which some willingly pay many times the amount they expend for a similar weight of prime beef. The only time snake meat may be poisonous is when it has suffered a venomous bite, perhaps from its own fangs. This also holds true with lizards, the only poisonous ones on this continent being the Southwest’s Gila monster and Mexico’s beaded lizard. To prepare the reptiles, decapitate, skin, remove the entrails, and cook like chicken to whose white meat the somewhat fibrous flesh is often compared.

An ancient method for securing already cooked insects, reptiles, and small animals is to fire large tracts of grassland and then to comb them for whatever may have been roasted by the conflagration.

A Rule for Survival

Although it is true that under ideal conditions the human body can sometimes fend off starvation for upwards of two months by living on its own tissues, it is equally certain that such auto-cannibalism is seldom necessary anywhere in the North American wilderness.

A good rule is not to pass up any reasonable food sources if we are ever in need. There are many dead men who, through ignorance or fastidiousness, did.

Excerpt From: Bradford Angier. “How to Stay Alive in the Woods.” Apple Books. 

Chapter 3

Science of Staying Alive

SOME NATIVES ROAST THE BLAND YOUNG ANTLERS of the deer family when they are in velvet. Others esteem the stomach contents of herbivorous mammals such as caribou, for such greens mixed as they are with digestive acids are not too unlike salad prepared with vinegar.

Some aborigines, as desirous of wasting nothing as those who can whole sardines, do not bother to open the smaller birds and animals they secure, but pound them to a pulp which is tossed in its entirety into the pot. Other peoples gather moose and rabbit excrement for thickening boiled dishes. Even such an unlikely ingredient as gall has, among other uses, utility as a seasoning.

Nearly every part of North American animals is edible. Exceptions are polar bear and ringed and bearded seal liver which become so excessively rich in Vitamin A that they are poisonous to some degree at certain times and are usually as well avoided. All freshwater fish are likewise good to eat.

Animals should not be bled any more than can be helped if food is scarce. Whether they should be so handled at other times is a matter largely of circumstances and of personal opinion.

Blood, which is not far removed from milk, is unusually rich in easily absorbed minerals and vitamins. Our bodies need iron. It would require the assimilation of ten ordinary eggs, we are told, to supply one man’s normal daily requirements. Four tablespoons of blood are capable of doing the same job.

Fresh blood can be secured and carried, in the absence of handier means, in a bag improvised from one or another parts of the entrails. One way to use it is in broths and soups enlivened perhaps by a wild vegetable or two.

Leather and Rawhide Both Edible

The skin of the animal is as nourishing as a similar quantity of lean meat. Baking a catch in its hide, although ordinarily both a handy and tasty method of occasionally preparing camp meat, is therefore a practice we should not indulge in when rations are scarce.

Rawhide is also high in protein. Boiled, it has even less flavor than roasted antlers, and the not overly appealing and yet scarcely unpleasant look and feel of the boiled skin of a large fish. When it is raw, a usual procedure naturally adopted in emergencies is to chew on a small bit until mastication becomes tiresome and then to swallow the slippery shred.

Explorers speak of variances of opinion among individual members of groups as to whether or not leather, generally footwear or other body covering, should be eaten. When we are so situated that to reach safety we will need to walk, retaining our foot protection should of course come first. If we are cold as well as hungry, we will stay warmer by wearing the rawhide than we would by sacrificing it to obtain a little additional heat via the digestive system. If the article in question is made of commercially tanned leather, the answer will be simpler indeed, for such leather generally has scant if any food value.

Bones May Mean Salvation

A lot of us, given the time, capitalize on the food value inherent in bones in two ways: Small bones go into the pot to thicken stews and soups, and we may also like to chew on the softer of these, particularly if we are lounging around a campfire. Larger marrow bones are opened so that their soft vascular tissue can be extracted.

The mineral-rich marrow found in the bones of animals that were in good physical condition at demise is not surpassed by any other natural food in caloric strength. What is, at the same time, the most delectable of tidbits is wasted by the common outdoor practice of roasting such bones until they are on the point of crumbling. A more conservative procedure is to crack them at the onset, with two stones if nothing handier is available. The less the marrow is then cooked, the better it will remain as far as nutrition is concerned.

All this is something to consider if any of us, when desperate for food, happens upon the skeleton of a large animal.

Rare or Well Done

When food supplies are limited, nothing should be cooked longer than is considered necessary for palatableness. The only exception is when there may be germs or parasites to be destroyed.

The more food is subjected to heat, the greater are the losses of nutritive values. Even the practice of making toast diminishes both bread’s proteins and digestibility. The greatest single universal error made in preparing venison and similar game meat for the table is overcooking which, in addition to drying it out, tends to make it tough and stringy. What this practice does to the flavor is a matter of opinion.

Scurvy Easily Prevented and Cured

A very definite risk when fresh food is habitually overcooked, especially under survival conditions, arises from the fact that oxidation destroys the inherent Vitamin C, lack of which in the diet causes scurvy.

Scurvy has gathered more explorers, pioneers, trappers, and prospectors to their fathers than can be reckoned, for it is a debilitating killer whose lethal subtleties through the centuries have too often been misinterpreted and misunderstood.

Scurvy, it is known now, is a deficiency disease. If you have it, taking Vitamin C into your system will cure you. Eating a little Vitamin C regularly will, indeed, keep you from having scurvy in the first place.

Free Vitamins

Spruce tea can be made, by steeping fresh evergreen needles in water, that will be as potent with the both preventative and curative ascorbic acid as the ordinary orange juice. This vitamin you can get even more directly by chewing the tender new needles, whose starchy green tips are particularly pleasant to eat in the spring.

Boiling supple needles in water will provide as much Vitamin C as fresh orange juice and can restore a body with warmth and a sense of well-being under cold and trying circumstances.

Fresh meat will both prevent and cure scurvy. So will fresh fish. So will fresh fruits and vegetables, wild or otherwise. So will lime juice and lemon juice but, no matter how sour, only if they too are fresh. The Vitamin C in all these is lessened and eventually destroyed by oxidation, by age, and, incidently, by salt.

How Rabbit Starvation Really Happens

A man can have all the rabbit meat he wants to eat and still perish. So-called rabbit starvation, as a matter of fact, is particularly well known in the Far North.

An exclusive diet of any lean meat, of which rabbit is a practical example, will cause digestive upset and diarrhea. Eating more and more rabbit, as one is compelled to do because of the increasing uneasiness of hunger, will only worsen the condition.

The diarrhea and general discomfort will not be relieved unless fat is added to the diet. Death will otherwise follow within a few days. One would probably be better off on just water than on rabbit and water.

The Tremendous Importance of Fat

Why is fat so important an item in a survival diet? Part of the answer, as we have seen, lies in the fact that eating lean flesh without a sufficient amount of fat will kill us, an actuality that may seem astonishing, for in civilization we obtain numerous fats from a very great number of often unrecognized sources. These include butter, margarine, lard, milk, cheese, bacon, salad oil, mayonnaise, various sauces, candy, nuts, ice cream, and the fatty contents of such staples as bread.

If in an emergency we have to subsist entirely on meat, the fat of course will have to come from the meat itself. The initial consideration in a meat diet, therefore, is fat.

Yet history tells of supposedly experienced men who, although starving, have burned vital fat to give nutritiously inferior lean meat what seemed to them a more appetizing flavor—a suicidal error of which we, having learned better in an easier way, need never be guilty.

Cannibalism

It has always been believed, among all social levels of all peoples, that starving human beings left to their own resources will devour everything suspected of having food value, including their fellow human beings.

“It is rare, except in fiction, that men are killed to be eaten. There are cases where a member of a party becomes so unsocial in his conduct towards the rest that by agreement he is killed; but if his body then is eaten it is not logically correct to say that he was killed for food,” Villijalinur Stefansson says. “What does happen constantly is that those who have died of hunger, or of another cause, will be eaten. But long before cannibalism develops the party has eaten whatever else is edible.”

Some scientists, who point out that objections are psychological and sociological, declare abstractly that animal proteins are desirable, in direct ratio with their chemical similarity to the eating organism, and that therefore for the fullest and easiest assimilation of flesh, human meat can hardly be equaled.

What to Kill for Food

Some member of the deer family is what anyone really bogged down in the North American wilderness is most apt to turn to for sustenance. The adult male, as any sportsman knows, is fattest just before the mating season which, varying according to species and climate, commences roughly in early autumn. The male then becomes progressively poorer. At the end of the rut, the prime male is practically without fat even in the normally rich marrows.

The mature female is the choice of the meat hunter once the rutting season is well under way. She remains preferable until approximately early spring. Then the male once more becomes more desirable. Generally speaking, older animals have more body fat than younger ones.

Tidbit of Old-Time Trappers

Beaver was something I had very much wanted to eat ever since I was a boy and had read Horace Kephart’s regretful observation: “This tidbit of old-time trappers will be tasted by few of our generation, more’s the pity.” It was a lean black-haired trapper, Dan Macdonald, who gave me the opportunity some years later, and as beaver are one of the principal fur animals along the upper Peace River I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to enjoy amisk many times since.

The meat is so sustaining that anyone lost and hungry is markedly fortunate to secure it. Beaver cuttings on trees, which indicate the presence of the amphibian, are easily recognized by the marks left by the large sharp teeth that have kept gnawing around and around, biting continually deeper until the wood is severed. Because beaver don’t know how trees will fall, the animal is occasionally found trapped beneath trunk and branch.

If you have a gun and enough time at your disposal to wait for a sure shot, an often productive campaign is to steal to a concealed vantage on the downward side of a beaver pond. The furry animal may then be seen swimming and shot in the head. If you have a choice and not much ammunition, wait to bag the biggest one you can. Beaver, the largest rodents on this continent, weigh up to fifty pounds or more.

Beaver quarters seem almost incommensurably delicious when you’re hungry from outdoor exertion, although with the larger adults the meat does, even though you may be reluctant to heed it, have a tendency to become somewhat fibrous and stringy when cooked. The meat has a distinctive taste and odor somewhat resembling that of plump turkey. A sound idea in an emergency is to supplement it with lean flesh such as rabbit, so as to take the fullest possible advantage of the fat.

A beaver tail looks surprisingly like a scaly black fish whose head has been removed. Tails may be propped up or hung near a cooking fire whose heat will cause the rough black hide to puff and to separate from the flesh, whereupon it can be peeled off in large flakes.

The beaver tail is so full of nourishing oil, incidentally, that if set too close to a blaze it will burn like a torch. The meat is white and gelatinous, and rich enough that one finds himself not wanting too much of it at a time.

What Parts of Meat to Eat

We will probably want to eat most of any animals we can secure if short of food. Some parts, such as the liver, have been recognized even among some primitive tribes as a specific cure for night blindness as it is high in Vitamin A. But any section of plump fresh meat is a complete diet in itself, affording all the necessary food ingredients even if we dine on nothing but fat rare steaks for week after month after year.”

Excerpt From: Bradford Angier. “How to Stay Alive in the Woods.” Apple Books.