Chapter Six
FIRE
I will never forget the first time I was surviving in a forest and made a fire using only what I could find. Before the trek, I had been practicing with the fire-bow method and some cedar in my basement, but when I needed cedar on the trip, I couldn’t find any. So considering the characteristics of cedar, I chose another semi-soft wood for the baseboard and spindle of my fire bow: poplar.
As the first gentle column of smoke wafted up from the wood, I felt euphoric. It was a pivotal moment for me, and I realized that no matter how bad a situation I might find myself in, I could always make it better because I could make fire without traditional fire-starting devices such as matches or lighters. Over the years, the impact of that day hasn’t diminished one bit. Once I learned how to make fire without matches, my confidence in my ability to survive in the wilderness jumped tenfold.
Fire does so much more than keep you warm. With fire you can signal for rescue, purify your water and cook your food, you can have light, make tools, and keep away the bogeyman. In short, the ability to make and maintain a fire is a huge advantage for your survival.
In some areas fire plays a bigger role as a psychological boost than as a physical one. In the jungle, you don’t need a fire for heat, and possibly not even for food preparation, because you can eat fruit. But a fire will keep away the jaguar more effectively than just about anything else, and that goes a long way toward making you safe. The Waorani of the Amazon jungle never let their fires die. And for good reason: try making a fire after it has rained for six straight hours (and that’s during the dry season!).
For me, fire is like a child that needs to be protected, respected, cared for, and ultimately, loved and appreciated. I can’t count all the nights I have huddled in the dead of winter over a little fire in a claustrophobic shelter surrounded by snow, warming just enough of my face and hands to keep the chill away.
Many matters of wilderness survival are controversial, however, and fire is no exception. For example, two different survival experts I had the privilege of studying with in Africa held opposing views on the use of fire in lion territories. One felt that fire attracted lions; the other felt it served as a repellent.
Here is the perspective of my friend and survival crony Douw Kruger:
During a survival course for air force pilots, I was leading three groups of eight people in the bush. They were instructed to build proper shelters to protect against lions and hyenas. During my inspection I found that the last group had put only small branches without thorns around their shelter. It was almost dark and too late to gather proper branches.
That night a group of young lions was walking on the road about 100 yards (90 m) away and must have seen the fire. They approached and found seven humans sleeping on the ground and one (the night watch) sleeping against a tree, all within a shelter designed at best to keep out housecats.
When the first lion pushed his head through the branches, the watch awoke and the excitement began! The pilots kept the lions at bay by hitting with sticks or throwing rocks. Fortunately, no one was hurt. Needless to say, the next night their shelter was so well constructed that not even an elephant could penetrate it!
Fire is a part of nature, so animals are used to it. Big wildfires might scare them, but a small, stationary fire will not. In fact, it may make them curious and draw them to investigate. The reason fire makes you feel safe is that you can see what is going on around you and you have some burning wood to use as a weapon if necessary. But the downside of a fire is that it makes you visible from a long distance.
In the end, I did opt for a fire in the middle of lion territory, primarily because too many years of using fire for comfort won out. For me, it seemed to be the right choice. I needed the psychological boost, and I wanted to cook the freshwater crab I had caught. However, I stayed up all night listening to growls in the distance. I would learn later that lions had made a kill about 500 yards (457 m) from my shelter that night. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss!
Fire is very, very important. I will put up with many deprivations in a survival situation, but please don’t ask me to go without fire.
Select Your Site Carefully
IN MY FAVORITE MOVIE OF ALL TIME, Jeremiah Johnson, the title character (played by Robert Redford) struggles to start a fire with a piece of flint, some charred cloth, and a steel striker. Huddled down in the snow with the wind whipping furiously, he finally gets his spark to take and then blows the ember into a small flame, only to have a big clump of snow fall from the branches above and put it out!
That’s why the first step in the fire-making journey is to choose an appropriate location. We can all anticipate the risks associated with having a fire inside our shelter (although, you can do it, provided you’re smart about it), but other risks are often ignored.
Your fire should be sheltered from the wind, rain, or snow. Make sure you have lots of firewood or flammable material close at hand (but not so close that it could lead to a forest fire or could fall on you and cause injury). Large boulders work well as protection against the elements: they not only act as a windbreak but also absorb the fire’s heat and reflect it back at you.
Make sure you don’t pick a low spot that will fill with water if it starts raining. Choose a place that seems dry relative to the surrounding area, since a fire draws moisture from the ground beneath it as it burns. If the ground is really wet, your fire won’t even get going.
Always consider safety when it comes to fire, which can spread in ways you might not expect. A root can burn underground for many yards, allowing a fire to pop up elsewhere, developing into a full-blown forest fire, sometimes even a year later. Overhanging dry leaves can catch easily and start a forest fire.
STROUD’S TIP
If the ground is wet and covered with snow, one of my fire-saving tricks is to build the fire on a platform of wood, even if it’s rotten. This protects my fire from the moisture below and provides additional fuel when the fire gets going.
Consider the flow of oxygen as well. Oxygen is a critical component of fire, and if you build your fire too deep in the ground or shelter it too much, it may not get the oxygen it needs. You’ll waste a lot of time and energy if you have to keep it going by blowing on it.
What Type of Fire Should You Make?
THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF FIRE: the small one that protects you from the elements (and that you may even keep inside your shelter), and the big, conspicuous fire that also acts as a signal for possible rescue (provided you have enough fuel to keep it going). Keeping both alight simultaneously may be difficult, especially if you need to spend time seeing to other aspects of your survival.
In fact, keeping just one fire going at all times can be a challenge, and your ability to do so depends on the amount of firewood available. But if you have enough wood, then you should never let your fire die out. It’s what all forest-dwelling and primitive peoples did, and I figure they must’ve known a thing or two about survival.
If you build a small fire inside your shelter, you must stay in there with it. So the trick is to maintain the big fire outside and then bring it inside when it rains or you are bedding down for the night. Most adventurers keep their fire right outside their shelter, then crawl into the shelter to sleep (only to wake up to a cold or rain-doused pile of ashes the next morning).
If you can master the skill of making a small fire right outside your shelter, you’ll keep the heat inside with you. It makes your survival experience not only more comfortable, but also comforting.
All of the same rules of site selection apply when making a fire inside your shelter, but there are additional considerations. Oxygen supply is one. You defeat the purpose of having a fire inside if you have to keep your shelter open to the chilly air in order to feed the fire the oxygen it needs.
Be careful not to make your fire in a shelter built against a rock with a big overhang. On one survival course, a young couple did just that. The fire heated the rock to the point that a Volkswagen-sized chunk cracked off. Had they been in the shelter at the time, they would have been crushed. I couldn’t stop thinking about this story when I was surviving in the Utah Canyonlands inside a tiny cave, fire by my head and thousands of tons of canyon rock above me. If you find yourself in a similar situation, make sure that there is at least 4 feet (1.2 m) of distance between the top of your flames and the rock overhead.
Butch Cassidy and his “Wild Bunch” hid from the law in these same Utah caves.
Perhaps the most serious risk with an inside fire is that you might burn your shelter. I’ve made hundreds of inside fires, and for many years I’ve never had a problem. But once, on the coast of Alaska, I awoke one morning to find several-foot-high flames reaching up through my shelter’s driftwood roof. Had I not been only feet from the ocean, the whole shelter would’ve burned down.
Driftwood made a great shelter on the Alaskan coast, but nearly burned down when my inside fire grew too big.
Making a Chimney
1. Smoke inhalation is an issue with an inside fire, so make sure your smoke can escape through a chimney.
2. Constructing a chimney tunnel with a direct route to your flames will feed air to your fire without cooling you down.
3. This birch bark vent allows air to circulate from outside of the shelter right to your interior fire.
4. Your shelter will be warm from the fire and the chimney will allow oxygen to circulate to keep the fire going.
In any survival situation you should make the biggest, hottest fire possible, provided you build it safely and have plenty of fuel. I have spent many cold and unpleasant nights huddled by a tiny fire trying to keep warm—but only when I didn’t have a choice. Don’t waste your time thinking small when you can go big: a big fire will kick the chill right out of you.
An emergency is no time to wax environmental and worry that you’re burning too many trees. And the advantage of making a massive fire is that once it gets going, you can burn almost anything, including big, punky logs that smolder forever, which means you can reserve small, dry wood for kindling.
During my plane crash survival experience in northern Ontario, I made a fire that was eventually about 6 feet (1.8 m) long and 4 feet (1.2 m) high. With a blaze that big and so much heat being generated, I was able to sit against a nearby tree and fall asleep in the middle of a cold and snowy winter—without a shelter! There’s little risk of waking up to find a fire this size cold and dead, and in any case, the mounds of red-hot coals sitting there can easily be used to get it going again.
The other benefit of a big fire over a small one is that it takes much more rain or snow to put it out. I’ve had fires going that were so hot they continued to burn right through a downpour.
Believe it or not, a big fire requires less work and effort to maintain than a small one. You simply need to add a few large pieces of wood every once in a while to keep it roaring along. With a small fire, you’ll burn all the small branches in the area to constantly feed its flames, and you’ll spend a significant amount of your time and energy finding and collecting these branches. On top of this, if you need to leave the fire for a while, you run a real risk of it going out while you’re gone.
A pilot friend of mine once found himself stranded on a beach covered with driftwood. He made a massive blaze that kept him warm until rescue. It was the right thing to do.
Preparation
THE GREATEST ENEMY OF A SUCCESSFUL FIRE is your impatience. It is vital that you are diligent in preparing your fire, though it may seem tedious.
An important aspect of fire preparation—especially if you’re using one of the last-ditch efforts I describe later in this chapter—is making sure you have enough fuel before you produce a glowing ember or a small flame. You don’t want to get to the point where you have a flame, only to discover that you don’t have any tinder or kindling to add to it. This is one of the most frustrating things that can happen in the wilderness, and it happens all the time.
A strategy I use with my survival students is to have them gather as much wood as they think they need for the night. Once they’re finished, and without looking at their pile, I tell them to get five times the amount they just collected. Even after they have done that, many of them run out of firewood before morning. It may sound like an exaggeration but it’s true: most people misjudge their firewood needs by a ratio of five to one.
And don’t take for granted the fact that you have a primary fire-starting method such as a lighter or matches, either. What if your lighter breaks or your matches get wet? Now the fire you’ve just started may be the only fire you will ever light. Do not let it die just because you don’t have enough fuel available.
A big, dry tinder bundle is the key to success, followed by lots of dry kindling and lots of dry (and if possible, split) wood. You also need to make sure that your fire doesn’t spread. Clear an area immediately surrounding your fire pit, particularly if you’re in a wooded or brush-covered area. You can even build a wall from damp logs or rocks to both protect your fire from wind and reflect heat back to you. Remember, however, that wet and porous rocks (such as those pulled from a river or lake) have been known to explode violently when heated, so avoid using these very close to (or in) your fire.
Build Your Fire
WHEN IT COMES TO GATHERING FUEL FOR YOUR FIRE, you’ll need tinder, kindling, and large fuel. Each component is critical, but none more so than tinder.
Tinder: Stages 1 to 3
If you don’t have a lighter or matches and are making a friction fire by, say, rubbing two sticks together, the step that takes you from glowing ember to tinder ignition is critical, and one at which many people fail.
Though you shouldn’t discount the tissue in your pants, the pages in this book, or even the lint in your belly button, your primary source of tinder in the wilderness will be fluffy, dead, and dry plant material. The greatest lesson you can learn here is this: Remembering the names of plants means nothing in a survival situation. What’s important when it comes to fire-starting are plant characteristics.
When I first learned survival, I was taught that you can ignite milkweed fluff with a single spark. And it’s true—it goes up like gasoline! But what I discovered later is that almost any plant with a light, fluffy part (usually the seed pods, and especially those that will blow easily in the wind) will do the same thing. Fireweed, various grasses, cattails, and numerous other plant species throughout the world work too. So rather than looking for milkweed, look for any plant with the characteristics of milkweed. Shoot a spark into it and you should have fire.
Don’t get caught up searching for specific plants such as birch bark in Canada, white cedar bark in Kansas, or coconut husks in the tropics. Rather, keep your eyes open for plants that have the characteristics of good tinder. Think “Hey, that coconut husk is hairy and light and fluffy. I wonder if that works?” Not surprisingly, coconut husk is great tinder.
So, what characteristics should you be looking for in your tinder? Most important, it should be dry. Damp tinder leads to great frustration…and ultimately, no fire. Tinder also needs to be thin, light, and fluffy. If something has these characteristics, it will ignite into flame when a spark is introduced.
Note that dry leaves make surprisingly poor tinder. Most dead leaves need a fair bit of heat to ignite, making them a poor choice for fire-starting without matches or lighter.
I like to divide tinder into three stages. Stage 1 tinder is the lightest, fluffiest stuff you can find—fine, very thin, even wispy material such as dead grass, birch bark, Spanish moss, or scraped cedar bark. These materials are best at capturing a spark or ember when formed into a bird’s-nest-shaped bundle. Once the bundle catches, you can blow it until it glows and ignites.
STROUD’S TIP
If you are traveling through an area that has loads of dry tinder, gather it now, and gather lots. You don’t want to end up later in a survival location without tinder sources nearby, regretting that you didn’t fill those big pockets in your hiking pants when you had the chance.
Stage 2 tinder is slightly thicker and more substantial than stage 1 tinder, and includes toothpick-thick bits of wood, pine needles, or thinly peeled bark such as birch bark. These materials will take the flame you created with your stage 1 tinder, hold it a little longer, and burn brighter. You can jump right to this stage if you are lighting your fire with matches or a lighter.
Stage 3 tinder is another baby step up, to the smallest pieces of burnable material, such as pencil-thick dead and dry twigs. These will take the secondary flame and hold it even longer than stage 2 tinder. Remember, however, that although the flame may seem more substantial at this stage, you still don’t have a fire. Sure, you have a flame, but it would take little to put it out.
The following are other possible sources of tinder:
- Bird down: I’ve never used bird down, but it certainly has the characteristics of good tinder.
- Cotton balls: These are fantastic as tinder, and you may have them in your first-aid kit (the end of a Q-tip works too). Cotton takes a spark well and converts it to flame. If you daub a bit of petroleum jelly or lip balm (which also may be in your first-aid kit) on the cotton, it will hold the flame longer than cotton alone.
- Lint: This is a favorite in many survival books, but lint is difficult to find in a survival situation.
- Sawdust: You can make a little by cutting wood with your folding saw. Produces a good stage 2 tinder.
Kindling
Once your stage 3 tinder has caught, you can progress to the kindling level. Kindling is not as readily combustible as tinder, so don’t use it until you have a discernible flame.
Kindling generally comprises small twigs and sticks that are thin enough to burn easily but thick enough to last longer than a few seconds. You will slowly graduate from those that are about the thickness of a pencil to those that are the thickness of your thumb.
Fuel
Eventually you will get to the point where you can add large pieces of wood to your fire. As always, work your way up slowly in terms of thickness. Wrist-and forearm-thick wood is the most common type of fuel for survival fires, but don’t hesitate to add larger pieces of split wood and even logs, as long as you’ve got a sufficient amount of fuel available and a solid flame.
When selecting wood for fuel (or for any stage of building a fire, for that matter), choose standing dead trees. They are far drier than anything else you’ll find in the wild. Avoid wood that’s lying on the ground, because it will have absorbed a fair bit of moisture from the ground.
Wood is your primary source of fuel, but there are other sources, including animal droppings, dried grasses, and animal fats.
Animal droppings: Dried dung patties from cows, deer, moose, elephants, rhinos, or other ungulates (grazing, grass-eating animal) can be very good for starting and maintaining fires. These are essentially concentrated plant waste—the natural version of the starter logs and briquettes that are popular these days. Animal dung doesn’t flame very well, but makes for excellent coals.
Dried grasses: If you don’t have much large fuel on hand but find yourself surrounded by grasslands, you can twist grass into tight bundles. By increasing the density of the grass, you make it more wood-like. It will burn quickly, though, so make sure you have lots on hand.
Animal fats: Chances are you won’t have much animal fat available, and what extra you do have you will likely eat to stay alive. For years, however, pioneers rendered animal fat such as whale blubber into fuel for their oil lamps. Long before that, the Inuit people used rendered seal fat to fuel their quuliit, the soapstone lamps in their igloos.
Maintaining Your Fire
BUILDING YOUR FIRE IS JUST THE FIRST STEP. The second is making sure it doesn’t go out; otherwise, you will have to start again from scratch. The bigger the fire you have (provided you have the fuel), the more likely it will keep going, even if you get hit with rain or snow, go to sleep, or need to leave it for a while to carry out other survival tasks.
For millennia, the Inuit have been using quuliit (seal oil lamps) such as this one to heat their igloos.
Should you decide to leave your fire for a few hours, first, make sure it’s not in an especially windy area, or else you’ll burn through your fuel too quickly and also increase the risk of starting a forest fire. Try to find a location that affords at least a little protection for your fire, whether near rocks or in a place that offers natural protection from the elements. The exception, of course, is in the case of a signal fire, which should be out in the open and as visible as possible.
How long you leave your fire largely depends on how much fuel you have to add to it. If you’ve got plenty of fuel and you have made a big fire, you should be able to stay away for as long as eight hours and come back to hot coals, from which you can restart the fire. The smaller the fire, the less time you’ll be able to stay away.
STROUD’S TIP
Once you get a fire going, make it a practice to never come back to your base camp without a piece of firewood, even if it’s just one stick. This way you’re always adding to your firewood stock. We’ve been doing this as a habit in my family for years. Even when my children were little, they always returned to the campsite with a twig or stick in their hands.
Resurrect a Fire
CHANCES ARE THAT IF YOU LEAVE your fire for any length of time, you’ll return to something much smaller than what you left, usually just a pile of hot coals or a warm bed of ashes. In these cases, it is vital that you have all the stages of fire-starting materials already on hand, so that you can get the fire going again immediately.
Just how much your fire has burned down will determine which stage of tinder (or kindling) you need to get it started again. You should have gathered what you’ll need before leaving and stored everything in a dry, protected area. You shouldn’t have to scramble to get your tinder, kindling, and fuel.
I’m amazed sometimes at how far gone a fire can be and still be resurrected into flame. In the canyonlands of Utah, I awoke to a fire that had been reduced to nothing but white ash. Rather than sweep off the blanket of ash to search for hot coals at the bottom (which would have risked putting them out by cooling them down), I slid the empty cable I had ripped off my mountain bike into the ash. I then blew gently through the tube, which supplied oxygen directly to the warmest part of the pile of ash and coals without removing the protective blanket of ash. The coals began to glow, then slowly transferred their heat to the other dead coals around them. Only then did I brush away the ash and gradually begin adding tinder to the now red-hot coals.
How to Carry Fire
WHEN YOUR CIRCUMSTANCES FORCE YOU TO MOVE, taking your fire with you may save you a lot of trouble in the long run. This is why I recommend including a coffee tin with a lid in your survival kit. You can put some red coals and other tinder inside, where it will smolder while you travel. You can also make a fire bundle, light the end as if it were a large cigar, and carry the glowing bundle to your next destination.
A fire bundle is a collection of tinder that begins with the finest material in the middle and graduates out to the shell or covering.
Tie the material tightly together into a cigar shape. Once lit, it should smolder for hours.
A properly lit fire bundle can last for days.
Ways to Make Fire
GIVEN THE MANY AND VARIED PURPOSES A FIRE SERVES in a survival situation, the ability to make one is an important skill. If you’re a dedicated outdoors person, you should be able to get a fire going just about anywhere, even if it’s been raining for two straight weeks and even in the pouring rain. If this sounds daunting, don’t worry, with the right knowledge and training, you can do it too.
There are several well-known methods of making fire—some of them easier than others—so you’re really limited only by your imagination. Should you find yourself stranded and with no available fire-making method, start thinking like the Professor from Gilligan’s Island, and get creative.
I’ve seen some adventurers make fires by concentrating the rays of the sun through the concave depression of a teaspoon, and others, by concentrating the sun’s rays through an ice cube. Ingenious methods, to be sure, though I wouldn’t want to stake my life on them. That’s why it’s important to be practiced at several ways of making fire (see “Survival Kits,” Chapter 2).
As with all survival tasks, there are primary and last-ditch tools for making fire. Primary methods are relatively simple, and will make your wilderness ordeal easier to survive. Last-ditch implements are well proven in the field, but they are difficult and finicky, subject to a host of variables that may not necessarily be in your control.
Here are the primary tools for making fire:
- lighter
- strike-anywhere matches
- magnesium flint striker
- fire piston
Here are some last-ditch tools for making fire:
- friction: fire bow, fire plow, and hand drill
- sparks: rock and steel, flint and steel, battery
- chemicals
- the sun’s rays
I used one of the craziest last-ditch methods ever to make a fire in the Kalahari Desert. I polished the bottom of a pop can with chocolate (which has waxy properties) and sand to reflect the sun’s rays onto the tinder I’d gathered.
Primary Fire-Starting Tools
Is it cool to know how to make fire using a hand drill or fire bow? Yes, and these are skills that dedicated outdoors people should know. But survival is not about proving that you’re some kind of earth-skills guru; it’s about dedicating your energies to getting home safely or getting rescued. That’s why, for making fire, nothing compares with a lighter, some solid strike-anywhere matches, a flint striker, or a fire piston. Even with those items, building a fire can be a challenge; without those, all bets are off.
Butane Lighter
Nothing compares with a good ’ol butane lighter for starting a fire. As simple as it may be to make a fire this way, however, there are still a few considerations.
First of all, make sure that whatever lighter you have is in good working order, and either waterproof or in a waterproof container. If you fall in the lake or river with a traditional lighter in your pocket, it won’t function when you come out. I prefer a fluorescent orange one. Ugly, I know, but a lot easier to find in a pile of dried leaves than that cool camouflage one from the outdoors store.
My favorite kinds are the butane lighters that act like little torches and can’t be extinguished by a gust of wind or a few drops of rain, as can traditional lighters with other types of fuel. These butane lighters shoot out a hot jet of blue flame that stands up to the toughest conditions. Note that over time, lighter fluid will evaporate, and all lighters have a finite life span: make sure yours has plenty of fuel and use it only when you absolutely have to. You never know how long you’re going to need it!
Matches
Matches have been starting fires successfully for a long time, so they should be at least one component of your fire-making strategy. My preference is the solid, strike-anywhere type found in any local hardware store; make sure you store them in a watertight container. Even though these matches do, essentially, strike anywhere, provide yourself with a backup by tearing the striker edge off the side of the box and including it in the container with your matches.
In outdoors stores you may come across boxes of matches that claim to be waterproof. Don’t buy these; they’re the biggest rip-off going! These matches are tiny and flimsy and come in a little cardboard box with a striker on the outside edge. If the box gets wet, the striker edge also gets wet, and now you’ve got nowhere to strike your dainty little waterproof matches.
Magnesium Flint Strikers
Wonderful devices, magnesium flint strikers can be struck anywhere, come with their own emergency fuel source (the magnesium shavings themselves), and—best of all—you can get them soaking wet and they still work like a charm.
But the real beauty of the magnesium flint striker is that it produces a powerful spray of sparks. If you don’t have any other tinder material available, you can scrape magnesium shavings off the flint stick itself and light these with a spark.
Fire Piston
A relatively new addition to my collection of fire-starting devices, the fire piston gives me the ability to start a fire quickly and easily. In a nutshell, the fire piston works because heat is generated when air is compressed.
The fire piston is made up of three components: an outer barrel, a plunger with a hollow tip, and a gasket. Insert a small piece of tinder (usually a dry, punky wood bit) into the hollow tip of the plunger, which fits into the barrel. Then thrust the plunger down one (or more) times and the tinder should ignite. The compression of the air inside creates the heat that ignites the tinder.
Fire pistons are not without their drawbacks: they are a little bigger and bulkier than other primary fire-starting methods, and their success relies heavily on a gasket, which can get worn out or lost. And although all fire-starting methods require the right selection of tinder, the fire piston seems dependent on it. You need the right type, and it has to be very dry. But if your other option is a last-ditch fire-starting method, opt for the fire piston.
Lighting a Fire with a Magnesium Flint Striker
1. Use a knife or similar hard object to shave a pile of magnesium off the striker. The pile should be about the size of a nickel, and 1/4 of an inch (0.5 cm) high.
2. Strike a spark into the filings for a fast, hot flame.
Last-Ditch Fire-Starting Tools
Once you’ve exhausted the primary tools of starting a fire, you now have to turn to what I call the last-ditch efforts. Other books and survival instructors call these primitive tools: they were used by our ancestors thousands of years ago. If you have no choice but to make a fire by one of these methods, rest assured that they do work, although you may pay for your flame in blood, sweat, and tears.
Charred Cloth
One of my favorite ways to make fire is to char cloth. Making charred cloth is a bit of a chicken-and-egg exercise, because you actually need fire first. But once you have created charred cloth, it will go a long way toward saving your matches or lighter fluid, as you need only a single spark to reignite it.
As the name indicates, you need cloth to make charred cloth. Linen is the traditional fabric of choice, but I use 100-percent cotton and it works well. Punky wood or bark can be used instead of cloth. Either way, your fabric must be natural; synthetics won’t work. Your piece should be a few inches square.
Take a can with a tight-fitting lid and punch a small hole in each end. Put the cloth inside the can and place the can in the coals of a fire. Make sure the cloth inside does not ignite, or you’ll be left with nothing in the can but a small pile of ashes. As the cloth begins to heat up, it emits gases that fill the interior of the can, driving out the air. These gases are vented through the holes, appearing as small jets of flame. This will be followed, eventually, by smoke.
When the smoke subsides, turn the can over to ensure even charring of the cloth (this momentarily increases the amount of smoke coming out of the holes in the can). When the smoke again dies down, the process is finished and the can should be removed from the fire. At this point, plug the holes with twigs to create a tight-fitting seal. If air gets into the can while it is still hot, your cloth will ignite and burn.
After the can has cooled (wait at least 10 minutes), open it and remove the charred cloth. If properly charred, it should be uniformly black.
Making a Charred Cloth
1. You will need a can, a punctured lid, and a fire.
2. Place the closed can on the fire. Once you see flame coming out of the can’s holes, you’re nearing the end of the process. Smoke will soon follow, signaling that you should remove the can from the coals.
3. Allow the can to cool, then open it up. It doesn’t look like much, but this charred cloth is ready to take a new spark…and re-ignite easily the next time you want to start a fire.
The magic of charred cloth is that when a spark hits it, a tiny red ember on the cloth slowly grows larger. The ember is virtually impossible to blow out and will increase in intensity if oxygen is introduced. It’s relatively easy to start a fire with charred cloth, and it allows you to save your primary fire-starting tools for circumstances when you need them most.
While surviving beside a downed plane in northern Ontario, I made a small container from some thin metal I had found inside the plane. I then ripped canvas from the body of the plane, placed it in the metal container, and charred the cloth by putting the container in a fire. Later, when I needed to make a new fire, I struck a rock I had found in a creek bed against the back of my axe to throw a spark into the charred cloth. It gave me the ember I needed to build a new fire.
If you don’t have a metal container, you can also char cloth by partially burning small strips of cotton and quickly smothering them in dry sand or soil.
Flint and Steel
There are many ways of generating sparks. One way is to strike a flint rock (such as I found in the creek bed) or other hard, sharp-edged rock with a piece of high-carbon steel.
Friction
Of the last-ditch efforts, the most common are the three methods of making a friction fire, or “rubbing two sticks together.” These are the fire bow, the hand drill, and the fire plow. The hand drill and fire plow are advanced skills, so I do not cover them here. The fire bow is a method you can employ effectively, though not easily, if caught in a survival ordeal.
STROUD’S TIP
What type of fire warms twice? The friction fire. It not only keeps you warm once you get it going, but also warms you while you’re trying to make it, even in the winter. But try to sweat as little as possible while building your fire. Anticipate the fact that you’ll be working hard for the next little while, and remove layers of clothing as necessary before you start sweating.
Fire Bow
The fire bow is an effective last-ditch fire-starting method, but it depends very much on the availability of the necessary materials.
Components: The fire bow is made up of four components: the baseboard, the spindle, the bearing block, and the bow.
The baseboard is the part of your fire bow that eventually produces the smoldering mound of wood dust that will (hopefully) start your fire. You can use various types of wood depending on your geographic location, but in my home location in north-central Canada, I prefer semi-soft woods such as cedar, poplar, aspen, or basswood.
Choosing the proper wood for the baseboard is critical because the spindle, a long stick that rubs against the baseboard, will grind the baseboard away as you spin. Some instructors prefer a hardwood spindle because they feel it’s more effective at grinding the baseboard. Personally, I prefer semi-soft wood for both pieces, because then you’re grinding not only the baseboard but also the spindle, possibly producing double the wood dust for your effort. Choosing a wood for a friction fire mostly comes down to what works for you. To test if a wood is semi-soft, jam your thumbnail into the wood. If it makes an impression, it’s semi-soft or soft.
After practice, the most important aspect of making a proper friction fire is finding the right kind of wood. This is where a little local knowledge goes a long way. How else would you know that the dry saguaro cactus makes a great friction-fire fuel, or that if you’re in the boreal forest of northern Ontario you’re better off using poplar, cedar, aspen, or birch than pine, which is so full of resin that it polishes instead of burns?
Your spindle should be as straight as possible. The spindle will turn rapidly as you move your bow, creating friction on the baseboard. The size of the spindle is up to you, but I typically shoot for one 8 inches (20 cm) in length and as thick as my thumb. Make sure the wood you use is dead and dry.
Most people use branches because these are naturally the right size and shape. In fact, the molecules inside a tree branch are tighter together than those throughout the rest of the tree, making the wood a bit harder. By comparison, the heartwood of the tree—the wood right in the middle of the trunk—is softer. Therefore, you’re better off finding a downed tree, breaking off a piece, and carving it into a spindle. Basswood branches (dead and dry ones) are superb spindles.
The bearing block is the part of your fire bow that you use to apply weight and pressure to the top of your spindle. Many things can be used for this purpose, but I like a piece of rock with a small indentation knocked into it, where the spindle can sit.
You might also consider using a piece of bone; the knee-knuckle bones of a deer or other ungulate work well. Travelers often use a piece of wood as the bearing block, but if you do so, lubricate the point where the spindle contacts the bearing block so that it doesn’t grab. Beeswax, ear wax, pine pitch, or oil from your skin or hair can all serve as lubricants in a pinch.
My friend and fellow survival instructor Doug Getgood was once using a piece of wood as his bearing block and accidentally got the ember forming in the bearing block instead of the baseboard, likely because the bearing block was softer than the baseboard. Accepting the circumstances, he turned the whole set upside down and got his fire going that way.
The bow ties your entire fire bow drill together. It can be any kind of wood, as long as it’s strong and has a slight bend to it. Hopefully you’ve got some kind of parachute cord or other strong rope, shoelace, or string on hand. If you don’t, you may have to resort to making your own, which is an extremely slow and laborious process (see “Essential Survival Skills,” Chapter 14).
The Fire Bow
Fire Bow Components
Various baseboards, each of which successfully resulted in fire with the fire bow.
An alternative two-stick method for the baseboard (courtesy of Allan “Bow” Beau champ): instead of making a notch in the base, simply place the spindle in the groove of the two branches, and the dust will fall through.
A bearing block can be made from almost anything, as long as the material is heavy and allows you to bear down on the spindle.
Fire bows, with some handmade cord made from basswood bark.
They’re different shapes, sizes, and types of wood, but these spindles all worked.
The Process: As with any fire-making method, preparation is the key to success in making a fire bow. Once you have your four components ready, make sure your tinder bundle is as big as possible, at least the size of a five-pin bowling ball. Fibrous materials like scraped cedar bark tend to work best.
Then get comfortable and settle in for what may be a long process: it can take from minutes to hours. You don’t want to get halfway through—just to the point where you’re getting wisps of smoke—and realize you’re kneeling on a rock and can’t take the pain any longer. Also, ensure that nothing will inhibit the motion of the bow.
STROUD’S TIP
There are two schools of thought on where to put your tinder pile with the fire bow. One says that you should have a small piece of leaf or bark under the baseboard to catch your ember, which you then transfer to your tinder pile. I feel this just adds an extra step to the process, as well as the risk that you’ll drop the ember, or that it will go out, or be blown by the wind.
I prefer to put my tinder directly under the notched-out hole in the baseboard, so that the ember falls right where it’s intended to go. Put the finest tinder in the center, just below the notch. Make sure that you pat down the tinder bundle enough that it doesn’t sneak up and get caught in the spindle during the spinning process.
Rest the baseboard on the tinder bundle to flatten it out (make sure the ground isn’t damp!). Your body should be positioned such that if you drove a steel rod straight down through the top of your shoulder blade, it would go through the back of your hand, through the spindle, and right down to the baseboard.
Place one foot—the one opposite the bowing arm—on the baseboard and start slowly with a fluid back-and-forth motion, applying gentle pressure to the bearing block. Don’t forget to breathe! Focus on your breathing and establish an even rhythm.
I find that placing a bare foot on the baseboard gives me a better feel and more control than a pair of boots. By wearing boots you also run the risk of accidentally kicking the baseboard when you decide it’s time to transfer your ember to your tinder pile. But comfort is important here, so wear what feels right.
Once you have achieved a slow, fluid motion (it’s all about the feel), and as you get comfortable with the process, gradually build up your speed, pushing down a little harder on the bearing block. Eventually, you will find that you’re spinning as fast and pushing as hard as you can, without the spindle binding or popping out on you.
At this point, three of your senses play a critical role: touch, hearing, and sight. You want to feel a grinding going on between the spindle and the baseboard. You should also be listening carefully to the sound you’re producing. You don’t want to hear chirping, squawking, or squeaking, which indicate that you’re polishing the wood, not grinding it. If that occurs, stop and roughen (or chip) the hole and the end of the spindle to increase the friction between them. If the noise continues, this may mean that you have chosen the wrong type of wood for one of your components.
After this, your sight comes into play. You’ll see fine wisps of smoke appearing in the baseboard. This is your cue not to stop but rather to keep going using maximum speed and pressure. At some point, the smoke you see will not be from the grinding of the spindle into the baseboard but from the ember that has formed in the clump of wood dust in the baseboard. The curl of smoke you see then will be thicker and whiter than the wisps you first noticed while spinning the spindle.
What if you’re not alone? It takes time to establish the rhythm, but doing the fire bow with two people can be more effective that with one person alone. One person assumes the standard solo position and holds the bearing block, with the other in a comfortable position facing his or her partner. Each person holds an end of the bow, pushing or pulling as required. If you can master the rhythm, the two-person method allows you to spin much faster and longer than if you are by yourself.
STROUD’S TIP
Don’t let your forehead sweat drip onto the ember you’re creating. This can put it out!
The Grand Finale: One of the most common (and significant) mistakes people make with the fire bow is at the end of the process. They’ll get the smoke and the ember, then blow it by trying to make the fire as fast as they can because they think the ember is going to burn out. You don’t have to jump up like a jackrabbit; the ember is not going to burn out in a matter of seconds. You’ve put a lot of kinetic energy into that glowing mass, and if you treat it right, it will smolder for a while.
So once you’re pretty confident that you have an ember down there, pull away slowly and cautiously, all the while holding the baseboard down with your hands to make sure you don’t upset it when you take your foot away. You’ll need to transfer the ember to the tinder pile very carefully.
Slide your hands underneath the tinder bundle, and gently close it around the ember, being careful not to suffocate it. (You will likely be shaking from exhaustion at this point, which is normal.) Essentially, you’re creating a mini-furnace in the middle of the tinder pile. Blow softly onto the pile until the heat from the ember transfers onto the tinder and catches the tinder itself.
Blow slowly at first. Once you’ve got a glowing red ping-pong-ball-sized mass inside the tinder pile, you won’t likely blow it out, so you can begin blowing more vigorously.
At this point you should be ready to transfer your tinder pile to your fire pit, where you can begin to add stage 2 and 3 tinder, followed by small, dry kindling.
The Fire Bow Method
1. Make a fire bow using a piece of wood with a slight bend in it and any piece of cord (shoelace, string, rope, etc.).
2. Next, prepare the baseboard by making a small indentation for the spindle to grind into.
3. Cut the spindle on each end like a pointed crayon.
4. Loop the spindle in the fire bow string. The string should be tense, but not too tight or too loose.
5. Grip the string and bow as shown so that you can adjust the tension. As I push and pull the bow, I like to feel the string with my fingers, which allows me to tighten the pressure on it as needed. Be sure to spin the spindle only enough to make a small indentation.
6. Your body position, the string tension, and the smoothness of your motion are critical to success with the fire bow. You should be able to drive an imaginary straight line down through the shoulder of the arm holding the fire bow, your hand, and the spindle. Get the feel of the motion while “seating” the spindle in the indentation.
7. Note how the black wood dust that was created by the spinning has spread around the hole, with no place to go to form an ember.
8. Cut a notch into the baseboard, next to the indentation, to give the hot dust a place to fall and catch a spark. Note how the notch nearly reaches the center of the indentation.
9. Put the finest tinder under the indentation, just below the notch. Surround the rest of your base board with stage 1 tinder.
10. Return to the action position described in Step 6, and begin to spin again while slowly increasing the downward pressure on the spindle through the bearing block.
11. When smoke begins to form, this is your signal to give it all you’ve got. Once the actual ember forms, the curl of smoke you see will be thicker and whiter than the wisps you first noticed when spinning the spindle.
12. Lift the baseboard slowly and carefully, and transfer the ember from the notch in the baseboard to the middle of the stage 1 tinder pile.
13. You might find that the ember sticks to the baseboard. The best way to dislodge it is to give the board a couple of light taps or a nudge with a twig, so that the ember breaks away and falls into the tinder bundle.
14. Gently lift the tinder bundle.
15. Blow into the tinder pile from underneath (as if you are praying to the fire gods), so you don’t burn your hands. If you’re lucky, the tinder will ignite into flame.
16. But remember: it’s only a flame! You don’t have a full-fledged fire yet. Carefully transfer the flame to your stage 2 tinder.
Other Last-Ditch Fire-Starting Methods
There are a variety of other last-ditch techniques for starting fires. All of these require supplies that you may not normally carry, but as long as you’ve got sufficient tinder, you can get a roaring blaze going with any of these methods.
Provided you have a lens or some type of highly reflective object, you can use the rays of the sun to make a fire. You can find lenses in binoculars, cameras, telescopic sights, and magnifying glasses, but don’t limit yourself. As I mention earlier, I’ve seen people get fires started by concentrating the rays of the sun off the inside of a teaspoon, or through an ice cube.
Clearly, the success of these methods requires a bright, sunny day and usually intense sun. Your tinder pile is also critical: you’ll have no luck igniting a pile of twigs or objects of similar size, so make sure you’ve got light, dry tinder material. Angle the lens to concentrate the sun’s rays on a single spot on the tinder until it begins to smolder.
Another way to get a fire going is with steel wool and batteries. To get a hot, glowing ember quickly, simply run two batteries end to end in series so that the positive end of one is contacting the negative end of the other. You can use any type of battery that has a positive point on one end and a negative point on the other, but D cells work the best.
Stretch out the steel wool so that it contacts each of the battery terminals. Almost instantly, the steel will puff up and ignite. Make sure you have your tinder pile at the ready, because this all happens very quickly!
Finally, there are ways to make fire from various chemical combinations, although you have to be sure that your combination won’t produce a noxious gas that will leave you gasping for air—or worse. In the past, I’ve had great success using potassium permanganate combined with sugar.
To become adept at any of these methods, whether primary or last-ditch, it makes sense to take time to practice them. I acquired these skills over the course of several summers. Each year, I chose a different fire-starting method and that would be the only way I would make fire during my camping trips that season. One summer I allowed myself to use only a flint striker; the next, I used only a piece of rock and steel; and the next, only the fire bow. By practicing this on safe, easy camping trips (I was an outdoors adventure guide for many years) and through repeated efforts, I finely honed these skills.
In Africa I used a small vial of potassium permanganate and glycerin to make a fire. The tinder is rhino dung.
Dried animal dung makes a great fire starter because it has all the characteristics of good tinder.
Believe it or not, dry dung doesn’t smell when burned.
Making Fire in the Rain and Snow
MAKING FIRE WHEN YOU’RE STRUGGLING TO SURVIVE can be difficult enough when the weather is dry. Add a constant rain, and most people just give up. Don’t! With a little forethought and diligence, you can get a fire going—and keep it going—even under these conditions.
The first trick is finding dry material in the rain, particularly tinder and kindling. This is possible, if you know what to look for and where to look. First, you need to search for materials that are protected by natural shelter. This means looking under overhangs, in animal holes and dens, in caves, and in rotted logs. Holes or crevices are where you have your best chance of finding dry tinder and kindling.
If you’re not able to find tinder and kindling, though, you should be able to make it. Here’s where having a folding saw and belt knife really comes in handy.
First, look for forearm-thick branches. Cut off a section about a foot (30 cm) long. You might be surprised to find that other than the outer 1/8 inch (3.5 mm) the rest of the wood is dry. Now you need to split it.
You can then take some of those twigs and make fine wood shavings from them. Soon you’ll have a pile of a dry tinder and kindling, all of which you’ve made from one forearm-thick branch in the pouring rain (see next page).
Fire Ingenuity
WHILE SURVIVING BESIDE A DOWNED PLANE IN NORTHERN ONTARIO, I was able to make fire with gasoline from the busted gas tank, two long strips of metal from the frame of the plane, the plane’s battery, and some tinder.
I touched each metal strip to a battery terminal, then brought the other ends together to create a spark. At first I was trying to spark the liquid, which didn’t work. But when I remembered about the fumes, I put a cloth on top of the cup of gas (which allowed the fumes to concentrate), then sparked the air space above the liquid. Without matches, and with barely 2 ounces (59 ml) of gasoline, a battery, and some metal, I successfully made fire.
Splitting Wood with a Knife
1. Stand the branch on its end and place the blade of your belt knife (or a sharp object such as a stone) on the top center of the log.
2. Strike the back of your blade with a heavy object, preferably wood or bone, knocking it farther down until the wood eventually splits.
3. Hit the tip of the knife once it becomes embedded in the wood.
4. Using this method, you can continue to split the wood into successively thinner pieces, all of which will be completely dry.
A variation on this method also worked in the middle of the Kalahari Desert. I had no gas this time, but took some local tinder and formed it into a tight bundle, soaked it in oil from the vehicle’s oil filter, and placed it on top of the battery, where I again crossed the terminals with a piece of metal for a spark…and got fire.
Duct tape holds a flame like a candle and is a great way to get and keep your fire going. Road flares too can be used. And lip balm or petroleum jelly daubed on cotton also takes and holds a flame well.
Region-Specific Fire Considerations
FIRE IS SUBJECT TO THE VAGARIES OF GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION. What works as fuel in one place may not work at all in another. Here again, local knowledge and expertise help tremendously.
In the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, I used some bits of mesquite wood in one of my fires. I was surprised to find that a small fire there lasted a very long time, much longer than a similar-sized fire would have lasted in the boreal forest. There were a number of variables at play.
Arid Regions, Deserts, and Canyons
Although making and maintaining fire in these regions is compromised by the fact that often there is a significant lack of fuel (particularly wood), the good news is that whatever fuel you can find is usually already dead and very dry, so it burns well. Dried cactuses, for example, are an excellent source of fuel. The irony is that in the desert you usually find the best wood to make the easiest fire during the heat of the day, when the need for fire is almost non-existent.
Boreal and Other Temperate Forests
Perhaps the greatest advantage offered by these regions is the readily available supply of fuel. The trick is to be aware that sooner or later it’s going to rain, so gather your material when you have the chance and try to shelter and protect it as best you can.
Low-lying, gnarly pine shrubs and trees are renowned for the incredible amount of sap they build up. These are very flammable and make great stage 2 tinder when shaved down with a belt knife.
The bark of the cedar tree is a good source of tinder. Squirrels, chipmunks, and other rodents will scrape the bark of these trees into a light fluff and use it for their nests. You can create this same type of fluff by scraping cedar bark with the back of your knife blade or a rock.
Tinder fungi grow on birch trees in temperate forests. Tinder fungi are large, black, and lumpy on the outside, orange-brown on the inside. They catch a spark very well and are a great fire-starting material.
The Arctic and Polar Regions
Believe it to not, you can get a fire going in these regions, although it’s likely not going to be a big one (unless you’re on the coast and have ample driftwood on hand, see below). One of the reasons why the Inuit are so accustomed to eating raw food is that they can’t build big fires.
But even on the tundra, it’s surprising how many twigs and small scrub bushes you can find if you look hard enough.
In addition, mosses in the Arctic burn reasonably well, provided they’re sufficiently dry. Inuit have used seal oil lamps for thousands of years, so that’s an option as well.
Jungles
Rain is your biggest threat to fire in the jungle, where it can easily fall for 10 or 12 hours a day. The challenge, then, is to shelter your fire.
Even so, any fire you get in the jungle isn’t likely to be a roaring one. The general dampness of the area and the restricted availability of dry fuel will limit you to a small fire. But fire will still provide you with a psychological boost, warmth if needed, and the ability to cook your food—and it may help keep the animals away.
Coastal Regions
Driftwood is a godsend in coastal regions, and often there is lots of it. Although some of it will be very dry, don’t assume it will all be so. In my experience, at least half of all driftwood is waterlogged and unusable as firewood.