Guts (6 page)

I took one step, then heard the first strange sound.

There are many different aspects of sound in the woods. Birds sing; small things—usually sounding like very large things—scurry through the grass and underbrush and make rustling noises; sometimes heavy things crash down, maybe a dead limb at last falling off a rotten tree pulled apart by a bear looking for grubs or ants to eat.

But all the sounds have reason to them, a sense of belonging. There are only two things that stand out and cause the hair to go up on the back of your neck. One is a sudden silence; during day and night, during rain, even during snow, there is some sound, and when it quits it almost always means that something not good is happening. Perhaps a wolf is moving through, looking for something to kill, or a hawk or an owl is hunting over the place where you are standing. Recently I talked to a man who was attacked by a great white shark while diving and he said that just before he was hit, the ocean, which is usually deafening, grew strangely quiet. “I should have listened to the silence,” he said, shaking his head. “I'd still have my right leg.”

The second kind of auditory alert is sudden or very loud sound, and the combination of the two when it is completely unexpected can be a life-altering experience. I was once in a tent half-asleep when what I took to be a tree limb poked me through the tent material, and I angrily kicked out at it, only to find that I had just kicked a bear in the backside. It had leaned against the tent while smelling around the dead campfire for bits of food. The ensuing snort did wonders for waking me up and changing my whole attitude about kicking bear in the butt.

Now, in the swamp, I heard a great bounding noise, as if something large had jumped in the air and landed on the swamp grass just ahead of me.

And then, half a second later, another one, then another, all coming closer, straight at me.

All of this in about two seconds. Automatically, I raised the bow and drew the arrow back, until the back of the three-sided broadhead rested against the belly of the bow just over my hand.

Another bound.

All was in slow motion now. I had a fleeting thought that it had been raining hard and that the feathers on my arrow were wet. I wondered how it would affect the flight or accuracy of the shot. Then another bound and the grass in front of me parted, and coming at me, at a full run, was a twelve-point buck (six on each side, counted later), and I saw him, not ten feet away, just as he left the ground, and I released the arrow and saw it disappear into the center of his chest, just vanish into him. He was already in the air and hit by the arrow when he saw me and he couldn't change the direction of his jump but he tried and so instead of hitting me full on, he twisted in the air and hit me with his side as he fell over me.

It was like being hit by a truck. I went down, arrows and bow flying. One of his legs tangled in the bowstring and in the violent kicking to get loose he broke the bow and several arrows that had been tossed out of my quiver as I went over backward. (I was indeed very lucky not to have fallen on one of the broadheads, the fate a year earlier of a man I knew. He fell out of a tree-stand onto one of his own arrows; the broadhead cut the artery on the inside of his thigh and he bled to death before he could get help.)

In this case, other than being soaked and covered with mud, I was unharmed. The deer had been hit solidly. The arrow had driven into the center of his chest and slightly up, hitting the heart almost exactly in the middle. After colliding with me, he had continued over in a sideways somersault, bounded to his feet, taken two staggering steps, then settled, rather than fallen, in the grass.

I was a mess, with broken arrows and the bow in pieces, string wrapped around my head and the deer kicking his last. I had been told to always test a deer by poking it to make certain it was dead so that it couldn't kick you when you leaned over it. But as I rolled to my feet and moved toward the buck, my hunting knife in my hand, I saw that he was truly dead. His eyes were glazed and gone and he wasn't breathing. I felt the sadness that comes with killing when you hunt but also the elation that comes with having succeeded—it makes for an odd mixture of emotions. I gutted the carcass and cleaned it out with grass to keep the meat from rotting. Heat from the guts as they begin to decompose will cause this, even in hard winter, because the hair keeps the carcass warm and allows the internal organs to go off.

I had taken a very large buck—even dressed out he was close to two hundred pounds. At the time I weighed about a hundred and thirty. I was in the middle of a quagmire swamp two miles in from the road where I'd left my bicycle. And then it was four miles back to town.

I was to learn, as Brian learned later, that there is sometimes a huge difference between hunting and killing the animal and dealing with the results. I had to get the deer back to town, where I knew a butcher who would cut the carcass up into freezer-sized packages in exchange for a quarter of the meat.

I somehow horsed the buck out of the swamp; it took me well over an hour to go the short distance to higher, more solid ground. Once there I used the bowstring and my belt (I would never again hunt without a fifteenfoot piece of light rope in my pocket) to rig up a waist harness, which I looped through a hole in the buck's lower jaw, then around my waist, so that I could drag the dead deer to the highway.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? I mean, I knew it would be hard work but it sounds simple. I would just take my time and drag the deer to the highway, then tie him across the bicycle in some way and push him back to town.

Except that I was dragging an animal that weighed more than me and there was no snow to make the dragging easier.

It was a nightmare. I started dragging in midafternoon and I had not gone a mile when darkness caught me. With the dark came increased rain, and I was on the verge of making a wet, cold, very dreary camp. I didn't have a raincoat on, just an old canvas duck jacket that was semiwaterproof, and I was soon soaked and getting colder.

I stopped dragging the buck before hard dark and set up camp in some willows. Luckily I was on the edge of another small swamp—there were hundreds of them in this area—and I found some dead birch skirting the grass area. With my knife I cut bark from one of the dead trees and used it for kindling. Then I covered the bark with small pine twigs broken off from the underside of dead limbs that were still relatively dry. I had matches, of course. I would not go out without matches. I had waterproofed them with melted wax and I carried them in a waterproof case. I used one of them to start the birch bark and at length had a sputtering half-fire going. I added what partially dry wood I could find under trees, stacked more wet wood on top and soon had a good-sized blaze crackling away, which did much to bring my spirits up.

Of course I was starving, but I had plenty of meat. I cut strips of rib meat off the buck and cooked them, tallow and all, draped over the fire on green sticks (green so that they would not burn), and ate them when they were just short of burnt. They tasted—without salt or pepper or bread—incredibly fine and I must have eaten four or five pounds of meat before I was at last full, my mouth and tongue caked with venison tallow. Then I gathered all the wood I could find by firelight, until I had enough for several nights. I lay near the fire, dozing and adding wood all night.

The wolves came not too long after midnight, brought by the smell of blood and meat. I could see their eyes in the firelight, and for a few moments I was afraid and missed my bow terribly, but the fire kept them well away. They probably would not have bothered me, but I still had some broadheads, which I determined to use as hand spears if necessary. This comforted me.

The wolves left well before first light and when it was bright enough to see I went to work on the carcass. I skinned part of it down the side and used the raw skin to make a better harness than just the belt around my waist. After a meal of cooked rib meat and peaty-tasting water from a spring nearby, I set off dragging again.

I dragged until I couldn't stand it any longer, until every muscle in my body was on fire. Then I tried to haul the carcass in an over-the-shoulders fireman carry, but I only made about fifty yards before my legs buckled, so I stopped and took a break, building another fire and cooking some more rib meat. It actually occurred to me only half in jest that perhaps the best solution was just to stay out in the woods until I had cooked and eaten the whole deer. It was the weekend and my folks probably wouldn't miss me—they didn't know where I was half the time and would probably think I was staying at a friend's house. But at school, where I was mostly flunking, they would notice that I wasn't there.

So I had to get back, and I worked all that day, dragging and stopping, and finally, completely exhausted, I arrived at the road just short of dark. By then most of the hair was gone off one side of the carcass. My bicycle was still there and I lugged and pulled at the carcass until it was across the seat and the handlebars and started pushing it down the road. It was nearly impossible—the carcass kept falling off to one side or the other—but the wheels made it infinitely better than dragging. After a few hundred feet I worked out a balance point and it became slightly less difficult.

It was an almost-deserted back road but there were some farms out along the edge of the forest and I thought, or dreamed, or hoped and prayed, that somebody, anybody, would come along in a truck and give me a lift to town.

It did not happen. I wobbled and rolled down the road at about a mile an hour, stopping often to rub my legs, more often to get the deer back on the bike. It was well after midnight when I pulled into the driveway of the apartment. I found some rope and pulled the deer carcass—rubbed and torn, half-skinned, ragged but still there—up on one of the rafters in the old garage near the apartment until it hung with its back feet just touching the floor. Then I went down into the basement, where I slept on an old oversized armchair arrangement. Listening to the hiss of the coal burning in the furnace, I fell into a sleep as sound as a dead man's.

And my life moved on and there were other hunts, some better, some worse, and other deer and small game, and I did not really think of this buck again until it was time to write
Hatchet
and
Brian's Winter,
when the buck became part of Brian's life as well as mine.

CHAPTER 5

EATING EYEBALLS AND
GUTS OR STARVING:
THE FINE ART OF
WILDERNESS NUTRITION

He looked out across the lake and brought the egg to his mouth and closed his eyes and sucked and squeezed the egg at the same time and swallowed as fast as he could. . . . It had a greasy, almost oily taste, but it was still an egg.

HATCHET

There are two main drives in nature: to survive and to reproduce. But the primary drive is to survive, for reproduction cannot occur without survival. In most of nature, the most important element in survival is finding food.

I spent a lot of time in winter camps with dogs while I was training for and running the Iditarod, and I could have learned a whole life's lesson by studying just one animal—not the dog, not the wolf, but one type of bird: the chickadee.

Chickadees are simply amazing. They do not migrate but stay north for the winter; at forty, fifty, even sixty below, they not only survive but seem to be happy, fluffed up to stay insulated and warm, and tough beyond belief. I would find frozen grouse; frozen deer standing dead, leaning against trees; frozen rabbits; and two times, even frozen men—all killed by nature, by cold, by starvation or by blatant stupidity.

(Imagine going cross-country skiing in the dead of winter in thick, old-growth forest and not even bringing a book of matches or a butane lighter; the poor fool broke his leg on a small hill and froze to death in the middle of enough fuel to heat a small city.)

But I never found a dead chickadee. They are like little feathered wolves, except more versatile.

I'm not sure exactly when, but at some point in my youth, in the wild, I decided that if it didn't grow or live in the woods I didn't want it. For a considerable time, in a very real way, I lived not unlike Brian in
Hatchet
. I would head into the woods with nothing but my bow and a dozen arrows—eight blunts and three or four broadheads—a small package of salt, some matches and little else.

When I first started to do this I found that luck had a large part to play in whether I ate, as it did with Brian. But as with Brian, two fundamentals had a great influence on my life. The first was the concept of learning. I went from simply walking through the woods, bulling my way until something moved for me to try a shot at, to trying to understand what I saw, and from that, to “feeling” what the woods were about: a sound here, a movement there, a line that looked out of place or curved the wrong way, a limb that moved against the wind at the wrong time or a smell that was wrong. And not just one of these things, not a single one but all of them mixed together, entered into my mind to make me a part of the woods, so that I came to know some things that were going to happen before they happened: which way a grouse would probably fly, how a rabbit or deer would run or what cover it would make for next.

This didn't come all at once—at first it was slow—but before long I understood things that I didn't quite know how I comprehended: a line would catch my eye and I would know,
know
that it was a grouse and that it was going to fly slightly up and to the left—and it would happen in just that way. I would hear a sound, just the tiniest scrape or crack of a twig, and I would
know
it was a deer and that it had seen me and would run before I could turn and get an arrow off. To learn these things, to know how all of it worked and to be part of it, was one of the great achievements in my life and has stayed with me. It has been the one guiding part of living that has helped me more than anything else. To learn, to be willing to learn how a thing works, to understand an animal in nature, or how to write a book or run a dog team or sail a boat, to always keep learning is truly wonderful.

The other truth—one that Brian came to know, and something that people all over the world have known and spoken of for thousands of years—is that hunger makes the best sauce.

Something that you would normally never consider eating, something completely repulsive and ugly and disgusting, something so gross it would make you vomit just looking at it, becomes absolutely delicious if you're starving.

Consider the British navy in the old days of sailing ships. Their principal food was hard-tack, a dried biscuit kept in wooden barrels that were never quite airtight. After months and sometimes years at sea the biscuits would become full of maggots. The men had once spent many days trying to get rid of the worms, but now they were close to starving, and they saw the maggots as food to smear on the biscuits, a kind of tasty butter. They would also eat the rats that hid in the ship's hold. By the end of a long voyage the rats could be sold to hungry sailors for up to a month's wages.

When I first started living on game, I thought only of grouse and rabbits and deer. I had thought I would eat only the best parts of the animal and stay away from anything disgusting. Like guts.

And I hung in with that thinking until I went about three days without making a kill, and when I finally did, it was a red squirrel, which is about the size and edibility of the common rat, if perhaps cuter. It was sitting on a limb about twenty feet away and I caught it with a blunt and dropped it and took it back to my camp and cleaned, skinned and gutted it. And then looked at it.

It looked as if I'd skinned a gerbil. I had a small aluminum pot and I put water in it and then the small carcass and boiled it for a time with some husked acorns I found. I ate it, along with the acorns, and I was cleaning the pot when I noticed the entrails on a log where I'd left them when I gutted the squirrel. My stomach was still empty, so I took the small heart and kidneys and lungs, leaving the stomach and intestines, and I boiled up another stew and ate it with more acorns. I was still hungry. Famished. There was no way a person could get fat living on such a diet. But you wouldn't starve, either, and some of the edge of my hunger was gone.

After that I looked at food, or game, very differently. With the onset of hunger in the woods—a hunger that did not leave me unless I killed something large, such as a deer, or killed and ate more than one rabbit or three or more grouse, or as many as ten or fifteen small fish—I never again thought simply in terms of steaks or choice portions of meat or vegetation.

As the hunger increases the diet widens. I have eaten grub worms wrapped in fresh dandelion greens. They were too squishy for me to want to chew them so I swallowed them whole, but I did eat them and they stayed down. I have sucked the eyes out of fish that I caught the way Brian caught the panfish, with a homemade bow and willow arrows, sharpening the dry willow stalks and carving a shallow barb on the ends before fire-hardening them. I have also scaled fish with a spoon and then eaten the skin along with the cooked liver and brains. I ate rabbit brains, too. I have eaten snake in survival courses, and it's surprisingly good. After reading a
National Geographic
about African natives when I was a boy, I tried eating both ants and grasshoppers. I found, as with the grub worms, they are easier to eat whole, wrapped in a leaf, although cooked grasshoppers are crunchy and, if you remember the salt, aren't bad—kind of like snack food.

Once the door was opened to eating strange food, or perhaps a better phrase might be odd aspects of familiar game and fish, I found I was ready for almost anything and that almost nothing would go to waste. This is not so astonishing really, when you consider that this practice was common among natives in most early cultures, and while much of it has been forgotten because of neglect and a bounty of cheap, readily available food, there are still sources for the knowledge.

I was running my first Iditarod and pulled into a village along the Bering Sea early in the day. This in itself was strange because for some reason I seemed to arrive at all the villages in the middle of the night. But it was early, before noon, and I'd run all night and was tired, as I thought the dogs were, but they suddenly took off at a dead run, passing the checkpoint where I was to sign in, barreling down the village street until they came to a small dwelling where a little boy was kneeling over the carcass of a freshly killed seal. The dogs had smelled it, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that I finally got the snow hook buried in the packed snow and stopped them before they piled on top of the boy. I was terrified they might do him some injury—he was about six years old and small—but he seemed unconcerned and turned slowly when I pulled up. His mouth and chin were bloody and I could see that he had been sucking fresh blood out of a hole cut in the seal's neck. He smiled at me and gestured and said, “You want some?”

It was a generous offer and I didn't feel right rejecting it so I nodded and leaned down and tasted it. It was not unpleasant, although I would have preferred it cooked—as I'd eaten blood sausage, which I made by baking blood and flour in a bread pan—and I nodded and thanked him. Later I would see him walking down a passage between buildings eating straight Crisco out of a can with two fingers as if it were ice cream. Still friendly and courteous, he offered me a twofinger scoop of the white fat, but I thanked him and turned it down.

When I set out to write the Brian books I was concerned that everything that happened to Brian should be based on reality, or as near reality as fiction could be. I did not want him to do things that wouldn't or couldn't really happen in his situation. Consequently I decided to write only of things that had happened to me or things I purposely did to make certain they would work for Brian.

One of the hardest was to start a fire with a hatchet and a rock. I cast around for days near a lake in the north woods, searching for a rock that would give off sparks when struck with the dull edge of a hatchet. I spent better than four hours getting it to work. It seemed impossible. The sparks would fly and die before they hit tinder, or they would head off in the wrong direction, or not be hot enough, or some dampness in the tinder would keep it from taking. But at last, at long last, a spark hit just right and there was a tendril of smoke and then a glowing coal and, with gentle blowing, a tiny flame, and then a fire. I can't think of many things, including Iditarods or sailing the Pacific, that affected me as deeply as getting that fire going; I felt as early man must have felt when he discovered fire, and it was very strange but I didn't want to put it out. Even though I had plenty of matches and could easily start a new fire, there was something unique, something intense and important about this one campfire.

My one failure was eating a raw turtle egg. I finished
Hatchet
in the spring, while I was running dogs and training for my first Iditarod. This was in northern Minnesota, not far from the Canadian border, in thick forest near hundreds of small lakes. It is one of the most beautiful places on earth and because of my heart trouble I can no longer take the winters up there, but I still miss it and remember my time there only with joy and wonder.

In the spring and early summer, after the snow is gone, you cannot run dogs on sleds, but there are old logging roads everywhere and you can have the dogs pull a light three-wheeled training cart. The dogs are very strong after a whole winter of training and racing and they view this as a kind of lark in which the object is to run as fast as possible down the old logging trails and to “crack the whip” on corners and flip the cart into the ditch or the brush at the side of the road. I swear they laugh when they do this. And the driver's job is to keep the cart upright while running through the forest on the narrow old trails.

That spring I ran on some new trails that I hadn't used before; the snow had gone early and the ice was out. The topsoil up there is unbelievably thin. Though there is thick forest it is like the rain forests in South America; there is heavy growth because there is so much water, not because there is rich soil. On the logging roads the soil is gone and what remains is sand, as pure as any beach sand in the world. After all, in prehistoric times, the area was one large inland sea.

The sandy roads wind through countless lakes and still ponds in the woods and in each pond there are snapping turtles. Because I had not run these roads in the spring I didn't know that the female turtles come out to lay their eggs in the sand, and the best open sand they can find is on the logging roads.

These are big turtles, some of them two or more feet across. And they are ugly, and they are very, very mean. They always make me think of what you would get if you crossed a
T. rex
with an alligator. They hiss and snap and bite and can easily take a finger off. I once had a friend named Walter who got his rear end too close to a snapper on a river-bank and I will always remember the sight of him running past me, naked, screaming, “Get it off! Get it off!” The snapper had locked, and I do mean
locked
, onto the right cheek and would not let go even when we finally stopped Walter and used a stick to try and pry the turtles jaws apart. I suspect he still has a good scar there.

One day I came barreling over a small hill around a corner thick with brush and the dogs ran directly over a female weighing about forty pounds in the process of laying eggs. Apparently she was not having a good day and we did nothing to improve her disposition. The dogs had never seen a turtle before and heaven only knows what they thought—probably that she was an alien sent down specifically to kill and eat dogs. Everything happened very fast. I saw her just as the dogs ran over her, and she snapped at them left and right, hissing and spitting fur when she connected, and then the cart flipped on its side and the dogs left the trail and tried to climb the trees alongside the road and I rolled over the top of the snapper, screaming some words I thought I had forgotten as she took a silver-dollar-sized chunk out of my jacket, and the cart gouged a hole beneath her and dug up her eggs and we all tumbled to a stop.

I lay on my stomach, four feet beyond the turtle. The dogs were scattered through the trees, still in harness and tangled so badly that I would have to use a knife to free some of them. For half a beat nothing moved or made a sound.