With the
Hunter Gatherer challenge week already taking bookings for October 2014 I
thought I should get back on here and conclude the story of my own experiences
whilst taking part in the course during the autumn of 2012. Part one gave an
outline of the challenge, what would be required, the tools and equipment we
took and explained my own strategy in achieving the basic essentials for survival
outdoors, most of which needed to be completed on the first day! Part two
took a detailed look at my strategy for gathering, processing, cooking and
storing enough wild food to keep me topped up on energy for the week.
During this
third instalment I’ll explain the true purpose behind the challenge. Although
we were using our bushcraft training to help us locate, gather, process and construct
almost everything we needed to help us survive for a week in a wood, the aim of
the game was to go beyond just scratching together an existence and delve
deeper into improving our situation. Looking to the long term rather than just
waiting to be rescued from our self-imposed imaginary survival situation. Once
the basics for life had been achieved and food had been gathered we would be looking for ways to
become more effective hunters and gatherers, ways of making our homes more
comfortable, ways of making our lives more energy efficient. For someone with a
lifelong interest in the subject and an ever expanding interest in traditional
crafts and ancient life skills this was an exciting prospect…however, you can
only hope to achieve so much in a week (my ‘to do’ list had me down as
inventing the internet by the Friday and getting everyone else to do my hunting
and gathering). This was going to be an exercise in testing bush crafts skill rather than
survival.
By entering
into the challenge, fully appreciating the true aim I was able to be constantly
mindful of the need for certain resources in the very near future, even though
other needs ranked higher at that particular moment. In previous posts I have
explained that whilst a metal cooking pot turned out to be one of the most
essential items of equipment you can have in a situation such as ours was,
having only one pot in the kitchen proved to be fairly limiting. Every drop of
water gathered needed to be boiled before drinking and survival stew was pretty
much the only meal on the menu most days. So, while gathering my first billy of
water from the stream, future resource number one was noted…clay. Our wild meat
ration came in it’s natural packaging so again, future resources such as hide,
sinews and bones were removed and squirreled away. Certain trees were added to
the mental resources map if they looked useful for resin, carving wood or cordage.
My foraged plants often had non edible parts that could be put to good use such
as the easily weaved cattail leaves or the huge leaves of the burdock. If a
resource was small enough to be gathered and bought home whilst looking for
firewood and food, then it was. Soon my camp began to look like a hoarders
paradise, an Aladdin’s cave of crap fit for the compost.
A cattail leaf food preparation mat made by Guy
My first
priority, however, was to repay the wild meat loan. The deal here was that all
participants started the challenge with a certain amount of wild meat (their
only food for the week). The reasons for this marry up nicely with the aforementioned
long term survival theme of the challenge and are explained in part 1.
To retrospectively ‘earn’ the wild meat we had agreed to meet up on day three with
a primitive projectile hunting weapon made by our own fair hands and using only
the limited tools and equipment we carried along with any natural resources we
could gather. Not only that, but it had to be capable of hitting a target from
a suitably realistic hunting distance. We were fully aware that many other
factors would come into play if we really did have to hunt wild game with our
home made efforts (including a hefty fine or prison sentence in the UK) but
given the nature of the challenge, we felt that making an effective weapon and successfully
hitting the target would be a perfectly acceptable compromise.
So, I needed
a projectile weapon capable of taking down a small deer. Not only that but I
had nothing but a small knife and folding saw to make it with, limited time,
lower energy levels and limited skill in successfully hitting targets with some
of the more basic primitive weapon options. I’ve taken many a rabbit, squirrel
or wild fowl with nothing more than a well thrown stick and a hasty follow up
in the past but knew that to justify my fortuitous protein head start I’d need
something with greater accuracy and packing more of a punch than just wellying
a log through the woods. Knowing that a spear would require a lucky encounter
or a long ambush and my atlatl throwing skills were about as predictable as the
British weather I decided that the only realistic option for reliability and accuracy would be a bow and
arrow.
Hazel rods stripped of their bark
I’ve
made bows before but here, faced a few potential hurdles. Firstly, to make
something with a fair bit of power, that could be used over and over in
practice would require a seasoned stave of a suitable and readily available wood
such as ash. To split out a stave and then remove enough wood to tiller the bow
with only a small knife would not be impossible, but would take more time and
energy than I was prepared to spare. I had made various ‘survival bows’ in the
past too including a bamboo cane ‘bundle bow’ (bound bundle of canes, various
lengths with all the bulk in the centre, tapering off towards the end of each
limb). These proved to be extremely effective and quick to make…but I didn’t
have any bamboo. By way of experimentation and the potential to look a real
smart arse if it worked, I decided to use the bundle bow principle with a
material I was familiar with, hazel rods. Hazel rods could be easily harvested
with knife or saw and very quickly bound in the same fashion as a bamboo bundle
bow.
Hazel rods bound with rawhide
The binding
material needed to have good tensile strength to hold everything tightly in
place while being stretched back and forth. Gaffa tape provides the perfect
solution if you have your survival kit but the best option available to me was
rawhide strips taken from my RPG blasted muntjac deer. As the hide was not in
the best condition and I was keen to use parts of it for other projects later
in the week, I took just enough for my needs, cut it into strips and left it
soaking in a muddy puddle along with some hard wood ash from the fire to help
loosen the hair. To be honest, the hair was already coming out by the time I
began making my bow and if push came to shove, leaving the hair on wouldn’t
have really made a lot of difference to the materials for this task.
The finished bundle bow with paracord bow string
As
the bow was to be used in quite close cover, I decided on a short but hopefully
powerful model. This was to be mistake number one (but I didn’t realise yet). A
shorter bow would be less cumbersome to sneak around with in the woods and easier to use
from dense cover. The theory was that I should be able to stalk closer to the
deer in woodlands too meaning that the range of a longer bow wouldn’t be so
important. A shorter bow also meant less lashings leaving more hide for other
tasks. I cut several likely looking hazel rods, stripped the bark with the back
of my knife and arranged them in size order. Bundling them together and lashing
them tightly with the stretched and slightly damp rawhide, I gave the clumsy
looking bow a tentative floor tiller. It creaked and complained a bit but felt
extremely robust and springy! I re-positioned and straightened the rods, re-tightened
the rawhide as best as I could and hoisted the bow up in the smoke and ambient
heat from my campfire to dry out overnight. Now redundant, the paracord from my
bow drill set looked like the best choice for a bow string so I tied a loop in
one end and fixed it to one limb of the bundle bow ready for action.
Next, the arrow...
For the arrow, I used another thinner hazel rod
cleaned of it’s bark and scraped to a more even diameter along it’s length. Any
bends and crooked sections were heated over the fire, then held just beyond the
straight until the wood cooled. Finally, I scraped the wooden shaft with a sharp flint edge and using my folding saw, carefully cut
opposing notches at either end for the arrow head and string nock. The
fletchings came from one wing of an unfortunate wood pigeon who had become
lunch for a fox by the looks of things. I carefully trimmed these to sit
tightly against the arrow shaft and bound them in place with sinew. I used back
strap sinew taken from the muntjac deer as it needed very little preparation
and was pretty much good to go after being dried, smoked and re-dampened.
Close up of pigeon wing fletchings tied with sinew
The scraped and dried muntjac back strap sinew
"Get to the chopperrrrr..."
My hazel bundle bow worked ok, hitting the target where it needed to but would’ve benefitted from a few evolutionary tweaks. I used green rods which meant that the bow wasn’t as ‘snappy’ as it could’ve been (but there’s a very fine line between gathering seasoned hazel rods and gathering kindling). Also, for next time I would increase the length of the bow for more draw weight and power as well as making the lightest arrow I could get away with. I know this because Dave (the android) had managed to rustle up an ash self-bow with some very thin hazel arrows and a thinner bow string made from inner paracord fibres. His super light arrows and springier bow combo was the Usain Bolt to my Bella Emberg. I mumbled some stuff about my heavier arrow causing more haemorrhaging but we all knew whose bow had bought home the bacon. A lesson learnt…don’t try to be a smart arse!
Dinner!
Lessons
learnt, I sloped back off to my den in the woods to try my hand at a bit of
wild pottery. The water level down at the stream was much lower than usual and
as a result, a good amount of clean and useable clay was clearly visible and
easily gathered. I hauled back as much as I could, also hunting down an old
house brick from a foresters bonfire to use as a temper and a hefty hammer
stone to crush it up with. I hadn’t had a great deal of success with previous
pottery experiments but knew this was mostly to do with the fact that I often
tried to squeeze these experiments into a ridiculously tight time schedule. You
can’t rush something like primitive pottery, but here I had time to do a better
job. So I worked the clay in my hands as much as possible, clearing out any obvious,
potentially problematic pieces of debris as I went. With my clay cleaned as
well as it could be in the circumstances I wrapped the burnt house brick up in
a t shirt and bashed it to smithereens with the hammer stone until it was
reduced to a fine red powder. Thinking of Dave and his stupid bow really helped here
(only joking Dave).
Stream bank clay with burnt, crushed house brick temper
This was
worked into the damp clay at a ratio that seemed about right. I pushed, pulled,
prodded and pinched the ball into a sort of shallow bowl, dish kind of thing
trying to get it as smooth and as even as possible even at this early stage. It was
then hidden away to begin drying out in the driest part of my shelter, not too
near the heat from the fire. As soon as the clay felt like it was firming up I
took a sharp slither of stone and began scraping and smoothing the inside and
out to an even thickness, filling any tiny cracks that appeared with the slurry
I had created by scraping. The happier I became with the bowls progress, the
more trepidation I felt about firing it. Previous firings had resulted in some
disappointing but dramatic mini explosions.
I let the
bowl dry some more then carefully etched a pattern around the rim as decoration
(trying to be a smart arse again..). Now, feeling dry to the touch the bowl
found a new, warmer home just inside the stacked log wall surrounding my fire
place. I knew that despite feeling dry, it would only take a few drops of water
to revert this bowl, dish thing into wet clay once more so firing was the only
answer…but not too soon. My plan was to gradually move the bowl closer to the
fire over a period of days, finally allowing the fire to claim it for a proper,
fierce firing right in the heart of the coals and flames on the final day. In
fact, I went home with the bowl dry but not yet fired. The firing happened
whilst running a course a short while later (I think we were heating up rocks
for an underground hangi oven or something). As you can see, despite a few
authentic looking cracks, none of them life threatening, it survived the
process! There’s certainly room for improvement but it’s a good step forward.
As the days
ticked on we all found time to work on different crafts in addition to feeding
ourselves, staying warm and sheltered. We whittled pot hangers, spoons and
other treen, wove brambles into baskets and leaves into food preparation mats.
Myself and Guy had some buckskin pouches to put together (admittedly these were made using our own previously
prepared buckskin we’d bought along but at least we had the spare time).
Various crafted items: bramble stem foraging basket, clay bowls, carved spoons, venison jerky, a roughed out kuksa cup and buckskin pouch
Guys buckskin pouch with bone toggles
Once we’d
fought through the first couple of days and established a routine we seemed to
have quite a bit of spare time, however I’m under no illusion that, for the
purposes of this exercise I had chosen a location with plenty of accessible
wild foods growing nearby. Also, we were just entering a time of year when, not
only was it still pretty warm but in wild food terms it was certainly a time of
plenty. Additionally, we were all in good health and only there for a week so
this personal experiment cannot be considered a realistic example of how
bushcraft training can help a modern human successfully revert back to hunter
gatherer status. Everything is relative though and I still maintain that
without the skills we had spent years honing, our week living wild would’ve
been over in the first 24 hours …. and even if we had managed to stay alive, we
certainly wouldn’t have been as comfortable!
If you fancy trying your hand at the Hunter Gatherer Challenge in October 2014, get in touch to discuss pre-course preparation or visit the website page here
We're also running a Winter Bushcraft Challenge in February which is designed as a perfect warm up (probably not the best choice of phrase) for those who have the intention of attending the Hunter Gatherer later in the year.
Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoyed it!
