The purpose of these notes is to endeavour to throw some light on the prevalence or otherwise of cannibalism among Queensland Aborigines in the Nineteenth Century, and by a search of available publications and archival material to make a comparative study of Queensland practices against a background of cannibalistic practices in other parts of the world. In the first place it is necessary to define what cannibalism is; there being held in some quarters a sort of folk belief — which is exempUfied in the typical Ulustrated "joke" showing cannibals preparing to feast on a fat big game hunter ^—that a good deal of cannibalism involved the eating of Europeans by the dark races: where writers such as Thorne i, Simpson 2, and Basedow ^ contended that the only real cannibalism was gustative cannibalism, the eating of human flesh for food. Thus common concepts of cannibaUsm involve mainly the eating of human flesh with reUsh, as the Nineteenth Century 'Feejeeans' ^ and Maoris ^ used to do; and quite frequently also the eating of Europeans by coloured races, which undoubtedly did occur on some occasions ^: whereas it will be shown that a large number of cannibalistic acts were of a ceremonial nature, and involved the eating of the flesh of fellow tribesmen or members of a neighbouring tribe or tribal group. According to the Oxford EngUsh Dictionary, then, a cannibal — the term was originally the proper name of the man-eating Caribs of the AntUles — is simply "a man that eats human flesh"; while cannibalism is "the practice of eating the flesh of one's fellow creatures". Hogg'^ has pointed out that the overwhelming majority of the world population are flesh-eaters, and also that from the remotest periods of pre-history man has eaten the flesh of his fellows. Herodotus * reported circa 450 B.C. that cannibalism was practised by the Scythians, while in the First Century B.C. Strabo ^ made similar observations about the Irish. In the First Century A.D. the Jewish historian Josephus ^^ recorded acts of cannibalism by some of his compatriots during the Roman siege of Jerusalem. St. Jerome 1°, writing in the Fourth Century, claimed that the moss-troopers on the Scottish border drank the blood of their defeated enemies. In the Nineteenth and during the present century an enormous amount of information on cannibalism was obtained; and the practice was observed in almost every part of the world, except Europe, as an integral part of the accepted social order. Even in Europe, where ethical values have, to a great extent, acted as a block, instances of cannibalism can be gleaned from the historians", and among these are included examples where conditions of extreme hardship have obtained.'^ Button '3 distinguished ten different motives for the eating of human flesh — It may be a matter of piety towards the dead; it may be associated with some doctrine of reincarnation; or it may be actuated by some rather crude philosophy as to the nature of life, life-matter, or soul substance. A cannibal feast may be in the nature of a sacrament; it may be a kind of a judicial proceeding; or it may be merely instigated by anger and a desire for revenge. Human flesh may be eaten, or human blood drunk, merely medicinally, or as a result of exceptional limitation in the matter of diet, or under the dictate of hunger or for pure greed. With regard to cannibalistic acts as practised by Australian Aborigines, R. M. & C. H. Berndt '^ have shown, in a masterly analysis of the principal reports available, that the majority of these acts were of a ceremonial nature. The greatest number of these practices were associated with the pietistic burial ritual; whUst in many instances also the whole or part of the bodies of Aborigines killed in battle were eaten by their enemies. Other instances, were recorded, however, of the eating of the flesh of Aboriginal men, women, and children; and it would be untrue to say that all of these acts were performed from pietistic motives, or out of revenge. It is the intention of these notes to deal broadly with the cannibalistic practices carried out by Australian Aborigines and recorded by observers, to try to draw some conclusions from them and to endeavour to apply these conclusions to Queensland examples drawn from 19th Century observers and archival sources. II. According to R. M. and C. H. Berndt the practice of pietistic burial cannibalism (known also as endo-cannibalism) was very widespread throughout Australia. In many cases the whole of the body, except the bones, intestines, and genitalia, was eaten: however, the Dieri '^ and adjacent tribes of Central Australia ate only the fatty parts of the face, thighs, arms, and stomach. G. M. Sweeney ^^ reported instances of the practice of endocannibalism in Arnhem Land as recently as 1939. McCarthy ^'' concluded that the most important functions and meanings of the whole of the funerary ritual were to assure the subject "that his death is regretted, and in certain circumstances wUl be avenged, that his body will be given traditional treatment, and to ensure that his eternal and immortal spirit will be directed and delivered so far as possible to its proper spirit home". If this is correct, members of the deceased's tribal group would have reason to fear the deceased's spirit if the traditional rites were not observed. In some cases the participants hoped, by partaking of the flesh of the deceased, to increase their strength >*; in others to improve their hunting abiUty.^^ Although not as commonly practised in Australia as burial cannibalism, acts of revenge cannibalism were nevertheless widespread. There again some ceremonial was almost invariably observed. By some tribes all of the body except the bones, intestines and genitalia was eaten; by others, only the flesh of the arms and legs; by others, only that of the hands and the feet; by others, only the kidney fat. Howitt 2° made a distinction between revenge cannibalism and the practice of eating the kidney fat of both enemies and fellow tribesmen for magical reasons. Elsewhere ^^ he stated, however, that the Theddora and Ngarigo ate the hands and the feet of their enemies killed in raids, and in eating them they acquired, as they thought, "some part of their qualities and courage". Bates ^'^ came to similar conclusions after a study of some of the desert tribes Queensland Heritage Page Twenty-fivf  of Western Australia. This belief, however, was in direct contrast to that of the Maoris of New Zealand as recorded by Thomson ^^ ; It is erroneous to suppose that cannibalism was practised under the conviction that the strength and courage of the person eaten passed into the body of the eater. No man ever coveted the qualities of those he hated. Howitt's account 23 of the killing and eating by members of the Mukjarawaint tribe of the flesh of the thighs and upper arms of an Aborigine who eloped with a member of his own totem is surely an example of judicial, rather than revenge, cannibalism. R. M. & C. H. Berndt 24 concluded that the practice of killing the very young seemed to have been carried out occasionally over almost all Aboriginal AustraUa, but that infanticide was not invariably followed by eating the flesh. Howitt 25 found instances where young children were eaten by members of the Kaura tribe near Adelaide during hard summers; and where the flesh of young children of the Wotjobaluk tribe was eaten by their elder brothers and sisters to make them strong.26 He reported also 2? that all the tribes of the Wotjo nation and on the Murray River frontage used at times, when an older child was weak and sickly, to kill its infant brother or sister and feed it on the flesh. Bates 2« also recorded examples of the practice of infant cannibalism by the desert tribes of South and Western AustraUa. Thomas 2^ recorded a case on the Gascoigne River in Western Australia where an Aboriginal girl was killed and eaten by a native who decoyed her away. "She was very plump; the object of killing her was to acquire this desirable quality". Bleakle> ^^ also referred to "rare cases .. . of the killing and eating of a young girl on a special ritual occasion"; but his information is not documented. Bates ^"^ wrote of the Kaalurwonga east of the Boundary Dam who killed and ate fat men, women, and girls. Elsewhere she stated ^°^ that "wanton women in any camp" (i.e., among the West Australian desert tribes) could be lawfully killed and eaten, and this may be a key to the motivation for some cannibalistic practices of this nature. Instances of the eating of human flesh by Australian Aborigines solely for food were much rarer than those of endo-cannibalism or revenge cannibalism. Thomas ^' stated that "some blacks kUl only to eat" but did not provide any documentation for this observation. Bates ^2 reported the hunting and sharing of kangaroo and human meat by the Koogurda on the South Australian-West Australian border. Elsewhere ^^ she wrote of the terrible Dowie, who when a boy was given the flesh of four baby sisters to eat, after which "he developed a taste for human food that grew and strengthened with his years". He "brought home many human bodies, for he would stalk game in murderer's slippers, and he loved the flesh of man, woman, and chUd". After reading of some of Dowie's actions, however, one feels that this human monster was not typical of the Aborigines of the area: but there is no gainsaying that the cannibalistic acts ^'^ described hereunder by Bates contain elements of compulsive cannibalism and differ from typical acts of simple revenge cannibalism. I use the word cannibal advisedly. Everyone of these natives was a cannibal. Cannibalism had its local name from Kimberley to Eucla, and through all the unoccupied country east of it, and there were many grisly rites attached thereto. Human meat had always been their favourite food, and there were killing vendettas from time immemorial. In order that the killing should be safe, murderers' slippers or pads were made, emu-feathers twisted and twined together, bound to the foot with human hair, on which the natives walk and run as easily as a white man in running shoes, their feet leaving no track. Dusk and dawn were the customary hours for raiding a camp. Victims were shared according to the law. The older men ate the soft and virile parts, and the brain; swift runners were given the thighs; hands, arms, and shoulders went to the best spear throwers, and so on. . . And what of the killing and eating of white settiers by Aborigines? Although the latter would have had every reason to avenge themselves against the early explorers and settlers for invading their tribal territories — and often did so — instances of this type of cannibaUsm were comparatively rare. Lumholtz ^^ however, wrote of a white policeman in Victoria who was felled with clubs by Aborigines, who then removed his kidneys, presumably for the purpose of eating the fat, but unfortunately, no further details of this incident were supplied. Bates ^^ recorded one instance of cannibaUsm at a white man's expense, a shepherd . . . found dead in the country to the westward, with his thigh cut away. In addition white men were said to have been killed and eaten by Aborigines in the "spinifex qountry". Ill Here then is the background for an examination of writings and records about Nineteenth Century cannibalism among the Aborigines of what is now the State of Queensland. From this Australian pattern, it may be possible to make a binary classification of cannibalistic practices according to motivation into non-physical and physical, vide Figure 1.

Although it may provide a superficial analysis, the above dichotomy is not entirely satisfactory. The motivation for the acts of revenge cannibalism reported by Howitt may have been hatred for the fallen enemy and exultation at his downfall 2"; or a belief that the participants were acquiring some of the courage of the deceased.21 And what of the cannibaUstic acts of Bates's "slippered murderers"? -^'* There was hatred, and exultation, there was the belief in the existence of certain magical qualities: there was also the taste for human flesh that the desert tribes had acquired over the centuries. And what of the killing and eating of wanton women as recorded by Bates 30b 7 Was the reason for these practices purely judicial or was there also present a belief that in eating the fliesh of the victim, they were acquiring the same desirable quality (i.e. plumpness) as was coveted by Thomas's 2^ Gascoigne River Aborigine? For infantile cannibalism during hard seasons 25 the motivation may have been primarily dietetic: if practised in order to increase the strength 26 of the deceased's brothers and sisters the motivation would have been partly a belief in magic: or again, the participants in many acts of this nature may have been actuated partially by a belief that they were absorbing the life substance of the chUd (See below ^^). The above-recited examples demonstrate that it is not easy to pattern the cannibalistic practices of the Aborigines, and impossible to segregate them into mutually exclusive categories. As might be expected from the Australian pattern, burial cannibalism was the form most commonly practised in what is now the State of Queensland, over a dozen reports of this practice Page Twenty-six Queensland Heritage  having been easily located from the Eighteen Twenties to the Eighteen Nineties.^* The occasions varied from Aborigines killed in tribal fights, in resisting a trooper, or in a brawl with a white settler, to corpses (in the case of the Kalkaduns of the head waters of the North Leichhardt) of "friend or foe, old or young, even in cases where the flesh was visibly rotten with venereal disease". Instances of the acts of revenge cannibalism in the southern part of the survey area are not nearly as common as might be expected from a study of the Australian scene. In fact Davis (Duramboi) ^^ reported that the bodies of enemies killed in battle were not eaten in the district of Moreton Bay. On the other hand, Beardmore, who took up Tiaro in the Maryborough District shortly after the killing of Eames's men on that run, described in his reminiscences '^o how one Minni Minni, a Fraser Island Aborigine, was killed and eaten by his (Beardmore's) Aboriginal shepherds, who were Minni Minni's inveterate enemies. Further north Carstensz ^^ saw definite signs of cannibalistic practices on the eastern shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria as early as 1623. The fact that the burial ritual had not been completed would appear to show that the motive was revenge. Frank Jardine "^2 while at Parallel Creek in 1864, and Mulligan ^^ in the Lynd Valley in 1875, made simUar discoveries. Dalrymple,*^^ too, saw "unmistakable evidence of wholesale habitual cannibaUsm" in Aborigines' camps during his expedition along the "North-East Coast" in 1873. Lumholtz ^4 reported that a "stranger" who dared to trespass was "pursued like a wild beast and slain and eaten". Gribble''^ recounted how, early in 1892, Aborigines at Leper Bay kiUed and ate during a corroboree three "cannibals", who were from another tribal group, and who they feared menaced their safety. Roth '^^ recorded that in former times enemies were killed and eaten on the Lower Tully River. The utilization of kidney fat in the belief that it conferred magical qualities on the recipient seems to have been practised in both the northern and southern halves of the survey area. In the Maryborough district, after the flesh had been eaten, the kidney fat was rubbed on the points of spears and the kidneys themselves affixed thereon to make the spears more deadly.'*'' Mrs K. Emmerson'*^, now residing at Chinchilla, relates that when she was Uving near the Bowen River in 1908, an Aboriginal employee of her father was kUled by members of a local tribal group and his kidney fat eaten. An instance was reported *^ in the wild country between the headwaters of the Herbert and Burdekin Rivers as recently as 1934. In fact fat in general was highly regarded for its magical powers. Howitt ^^ recorded how Aborigines of the "Turrbal tribe" rubbed it over their bodies; Thomas ^^ that it was rubbed on the faces of the "principal medicine men". Duramboi left behind an account 52 of how an Aborigine would hold a receptacle under his portion of flesh in order to catch the melting fat, which he then imbibed. Lumholtz'3 reported that the Aborigines of the Herbert River were fond of the fat of a dead foe, which is not only eaten as a delicacy and as a strengthening food, but is also carried as an amulet. A small piece is done up in grass and kept in a basket worn around the neck, and the effect of this is, in their opinion, success in the chase, so that they can easily approach the game. The practice of eating the flesh of the very young followed the same general pattern in the survey area as in the rest of Australia. Writing of his sojourn in the Maroochy and Noosa areas in the Eighteen Sixties, Thorne '4 recorded instances of the killing and eating of young female Aboriginal and halfcaste children. In one instance he was informed, "It was always crying, and was not a boy". One concludes from reading Thorne that infant cannibalism was most likely to take place in this area during a wet season, when game was scarce. Roth ^5, Kennedy 57, and Lumholtz'^ showed that the practice was observed in the inland areas of Queensland during the Eighties and Nineties when food was in short supply. Rudder ^^ noted instances of the practice in the Maryborough district in the Eighteen Sixties, the Aborigines believing that the spirit of the child went back to the mother. "Mother altogether got 'im". This supports the belief that even when infantile cannibalism was practised during hard seasons a certain ritual was observed and the motivation was not wholly dietetic. Reports are at variance concerning the killing and eating of fully grown Aborigines in the survey area for dietetic reasons. Both Russell ^9 and Brough Smyth ^ stated that during the 'Bunya Bunya' season the Aborigines' craving for flesh was so intense that they were impelled to kill one of their number in order that their appetites might be satisfied. These statements were corroborated by Colin McKenzie Fraser of the Kenilworth Run, when giving evidence in 1861 before a Select Committee on the Native Police Force and the condition of the Aborigines generally.^i 45. Then, in fact, you have no doubt that the practice of cannibalism prevails? I have not the slightest doubt in my mind. 46. Do you know how they select a particular individual? Well, he is selected by a few; they pitch upon him, and on the first opportunity they get him off his guard, and knock him on the head. . . On the other hand Howitt ^2 quoted both Petrie and Aldridge as stating that the idea of 'flesh hunger' during the bunya season "was absurd". One wonders, in view of Petrie's and Aldridge's denials, what would be the source of food supply for such a large body of Aborigines at the end of a bunya season, when much of the local fauna would have been driven away, especially — as would sometimes be the case in this area — if the onset of a rain period with its concomitant scarcity of game coincided with the last days of the bunya season. Writing of "North West Central Queensland", Roth stated that native people were kUled and eaten if in good condition, numerous instances having been related by Aborigines as having occurred in the early days. He could find no instance in that area, however, "where any adult, male or female had been killed for the sole purpose of providing a repast".^^ x^g same writer, on the other hand, recorded instances of cannibalism among the Bloomfield River Aborigines "since 1885" when impelled by hunger. He also reported exceptional instances of "killing to eat" on the part of the 'scrub blacks' of the Lower Tully River. Lumholtz ^'^ stated that the Herbert River Aborigines sometimes undertook expeditions for the special purpose of obtaining 'talgoro', — that is, human flesh. Attacks were made before sunrise on small neighbouring groups. Those who did not succeed in escaping were kUled and eaten. Dalrymple's "^^a reference to "wholesale, habitual" cannibalism south of the Endeavour River (see col. 1) renders it possible that at least some of these acts may have been motivated by "flesh hunger". Gribble's ^^ "three old cannibals" at Yarrabah who were wont to pick quarrels with a view to kiUing and eating their opponents also belong to this category. In addition Longman ^ quoted Meston as stating that cannibalism was occasionally welcomed as a change from a vegetable diet. With regard to the killing and eating of young women reported in other parts of Australia by Thomas 2^, Bleakley ^o, and Bates 30a, evidence of this practice in the survey area has been somewhat scarce. Rudder, however, reported that in the Eighteen Sixties, two young Aborigines sought the affections of a young Aboriginal woman in the Maryborough area. Later, one of these Aborigines waylaid and speared her. The two then held a cannibalistic feast, in which they were joined by other Aborigines. Roth ^'^ also recorded instances of killing and eating women, but did not state the age of the victims. According to Queensland Heritage Page Twenty-seven  Lumholtz 6^ young women who were caught in 'talgoro' raids by Herbert River Aborigines were spared, but old women were killed and eaten. On the Lower Tully River, a woman could be eaten as a punishment for leaving her husband. An Aborigine "has been known to eat a woman to provoke a quarrel with her father". The former of these two Lower Tully instances is a further example of judicial cannibalism to add to those recorded by Howitt 23 and Bates 30b. There is also C. M. Eraser's evidence ^^ of the killing of women during the bunya season and a reference by Howitt ™ to Curr's report ''i of the kUUng and eating of a woman and a girl at Gobungo. This report was, however, impugned by Petrie, who considered that the woman must have been kUled in a fight. Instances of the kilUng and eating of white people by Aborigmes in the southern part of the survey area have proved dUficult to locate. According to Lang ^2 Gottfried Hausmann, one of the early German missionaries, had a narrow escape from being the first European victim, as while his Aboriginal attackers were endeavouring to effect an entrance to his hut on Burpengary Creek, he learned that they had a fire kindled to roast him, and he heard them observing to one another in their own language, that he was fat and would roast well. In September, 1854, Arthur E. Halloran'^3^ Police Magistrate and Commissioner of Crown Lands for the Wide Bay and Burnett Districts, in a letter to the Attorney-General for New South Wales, reported concerning the death of a man named George Brown about thirty-three miles from Maryborough: I have little doubt that the man Brown was murdered by an Aboriginal named Jimmy alias Billy Boy — that the father, mother, and sister of Billy Boy were present at the murder, and that the body of the unfortunate man was roasted and eaten by the blacks but as the evidence is only circumstantial, I shall be glad to be honored with your instructions in the case for where a black is tried for any offence & acquitted he returns to his District & it has a very bad effect upon the other blacks in the district to which he belongs. In Northern Queensland, the search has not proved so difficult. There was first the brig "Maria" '''* which was wrecked on a reef near Cardwell on 26 February, 1872. Captain Stratman, who with several companions had taken the ship's cutter and deserted the "Maria", landed at Tam O'Shanter Point, near Rockingham Bay, where all but two of them were killed by the Aborigines. These two were located by a shore party from Cardwell who had been searching for survivors. Reaching the scene of the massacre, the shore party found the ashes of Aboriginal cooking fires stiU hot, and portions of clothing, human bones and pieces of human flesh. Six years later the cutter "Riser" "^5 was wrecked on King's Reef in the same area. Sub-inspector of Police Robert Johnstone and party, who were searching for survivors, found the bodies of two of the cutter's crew of three in a native oven. There were traces of fire under the bodies, which had been partially roasted. The flesh had been removed from the thighs and arms of one of the bodies. Corfield ""^ and Meston'''' both recorded the kUling and eating of white men by Aborigines during the Palmer River gold rush days, the former writing of the death of two packers in 1875 and the latter of an attack at Cannibal Creek, where the bones of a speared prospector were found at a fire after he had been the victim of a cannibalistic feast. In all parts of the survey area the first white visitors were regarded as spirits. Yungi, Wunda, Muthara, Mudhere, Makoron, Pirri-wirri-kutchi — these were the Aboriginal names in various localities for spirits or ghosts, and these were the names given to the first European visitors. In the Moreton and Wide Bay Districts, the first white men were regarded with awe by the Aborigines, who in some cases received them back into their tribal groups as being the spirits of deceased ancestors. Finnegan ''^ related how, while visiting the "Pumice-stone River" in company with a tribal group, he attempted to detach himself from an Aboriginal woman in whose care he had been left in order to watch a fight in a specially prepared "pit". She, however, followed me, calling out and weeping; upon which one of the men of our tribe came up to me, and, taking my hand, led me up to the pit. . . The man who had brought me to the pit still continued to hold my hand, and I observed his whole body tremble like an aspen leaf. Within a few years, however, the Aborigines in this area had lost their feelings of awe for these "spirits", and at times, were according them the same hostile treatment as did the northern Aborigines. That more white men were kiUed and eaten in the northern half of the survey area than in the southern portion is due to the fact that revenge cannibalism was practised in the North to a greater degree ''^ than in the Wide Bay and Iviorecon Districts. That Aboriginal attitudes towards early white visitors could vary from tribal group to tribal group even within a small area was evidenced by the diverse treatment accorded to three separate groups of castaways from the "Maria". The men from the "Maria's" cutter were kUled and eaten; those from a small raft were killed, but not eaten; while those who survived the ordeal on a larger raft were treated with extreme kindness, their Aboriginal rescuers weeping sorrowfully on bidding farewell to the castaways. Finally, what was the reason why, when the Aborigines had every justification, according to their own laws, for celebrating the killing of the early white invaders by eating their flesh, the number of white men eaten was exceedingly small in proportion to the total number killed, this being true even in areas where revenge cannibalism was the accepted practice? Alexander Kennedy ^o quoted Inspector Urquhart, of the Native Police, as stating that the Aborigines of the Palmer River area preferred the flesh of Chinese, hundreds of whom were killed when travelling to the goldfields in the Eighteen Seventies, to that of Europeans. Beardmore ^^ of Tiaro put this question to his Aboriginal shepherds. Their reply was "too much salt, like it macon". This was corroborated by Urquhart and Lumholtz *2 in North Queensland, and by Fraser *3 on the Mary River. Bates ^"^ reported the same of the desert tribes of West Australia; it was the same with primitive races elsewhere ^5. They disliked the taste.

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.