9.

NAKED INTO THE WILDERNESS

“What are we going to do?” my wife asks in a whisper, crouched in the deepening gloom, the forest thick around us. The twilight has reduced all color to shades of bluish gray.

We’d driven for a few days, siphoning some fuel, seeing almost no one. Nervous strangers had run off the road in front of us. We were heading into the great West, away from the cities, away from the dangers of the alien spiders. But our luck had run out on a country highway that ran alongside a broad river.

There was no warning. We were driving along, the hum of travel and the quiet of the road lulling us almost into complacency, when I caught a flash in the rearview mirror, something massive—then our truck was being lifted off the road. A brief impression: mechanical tentacles crushing effortlessly into the car frame, yanking us up in a heartbeat. A different kind of alien monster, something we hadn’t seen. The truck went up like an amusement park ride, and we shrieked in unison. I looked down and saw we were over the water, and without stopping to consider, I grabbed my wife and son and went out the door.

During that sickening moment of free fall, time slowed down, and we watched the truck rise without us, locked in the metallic grip. Then came the utter shock of cold water, the silence, plunging deep. I surfaced gasping, my son bawling and my wife coughing next to us. We bobbed in the river, took one final look at the vanishing truck being crushed to pieces, and then we were swept downstream.

It felt like a long time, but we were probably in the icy water for less than five minutes before we crawled ashore, gasping, trembling. I knew we had to get moving, to get away from the road, so we plunged into woods. A tall, dark forest, with the smell of Ponderosa pine. After an hour, we dragged to a stop, almost too tired to continue, feeling the cold. The adrenaline finally wore off, and my hands were trembling. I’d never been this tired.

Now, in the silence, the mundane hum of mosquitoes. The whisper of the wind in the pines and aspen. My wife and I look at each other. We’ve lost everything but the clothes on our backs. Now what?

—

Kansas in July is a serious proposition. The temperature was over a hundred, the humidity levels such that the briefest activity, such as slowly answering a cell phone, resulted in shirt-drenching sweat. The sky was a hard, parboiled blue, with low clouds scudding by, the breeze a small mercy. The flat, gently rolling grassy landscape was notched with rivulets of cedar. Farmland, cows, silos, big trucks, and the oily heat all reminded me of western Massachusetts, where I grew up and picked corn.

John McPherson climbed out of his massive red diesel pickup to meet me at the local gas station in Randolph, a town of a few hundred. He appears an archetype of the Vietnam vet: long white hair and beard, sweaty bandanna around his temples, gold earring peeking out, and massive glasses with tint control and some kind of thick surfer frames. He’s like Dennis Hopper in the Easy Rider era—a small, strong man, grinning and chatting, aging but irresistibly vital and sure. He wore a T-shirt, cargo shorts, and hiking boots with thick socks. Gypsy the German shepherd is his sidekick. Nearly every day he makes it down to the Quick-Stop to get a small dish of ice cream for Gypsy.

John and his wife, Geri, are experts on “primitive living” who run a company called Prairie Wolf. John has written and self-published half a dozen instructional books that have sold hundreds of thousands of copies. They used to teach classes to the public, but now only teach the military—Fort Bragg sends the SERE instructors to John and Geri to learn the essentials of primitive living. Primitive, in this world, has a strict meaning: no steel tools allowed.

John’s books all have the subtitle “Naked into the Wilderness,” and he teaches the skills necessary to survive with nothing in the deep woods, skills that would have been second nature to primitive man: breaking stone to make sharp edges, starting a fire without matches, building shelters, trapping animals, preserving and cooking meat, tanning hides, weaving plants into string or rope, and making containers for carrying water. John is an original. He’s been doing it for forty years, and many of the modern names in survival, including Cody Lundin of Dual Survival and Les Stroud of Survivorman, took classes with John and Geri at a nascent point.

John McPherson looks a little like a hippie, but he isn’t one.

“Survival is a dictatorship of whoever knows what he’s doing. While you’re here, you do things my way.” He looked at me inquisitively, and I nodded. I had absolutely no problem with that.

John also carries a Glock on his hip. “First rule of a gunfight is to have the gun on you,” he said, smiling. “It ain’t gonna do you any good in the glove box or in the bedside table.” He is very serious about his gun rights. “What good is any right if you can’t defend your own life?” he asked me rhetorically. Good question.

I followed John up onto his land, through a couple of cattle fence gates. He owns about fifty acres of woods overlooking a lake, bordered by a state park and ranchland. We drove over a high (for Kansas) plain through a thick stand of cedar trees into John’s compound. He lives in a log cabin he and Geri built themselves, off the grid. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t the spacious, beautiful house I saw, filled with warm wood tones, lovingly decorated with primitive western artifacts—buffalo robes and skulls, stone axes, saddles. He shows me his solar panels and banks of batteries, a well-appointed three-hole outhouse, and his own shooting range.

Geri is a bit younger than John, handsome, at ease. This is her lifestyle as much as his. She loves the house they built, and she loves her life. “You’ll have to kill me to get me out of here,” she murmured to me once. She was going to teach me some supplementary skills, like making jerky and pemmican, and rendering fat for lamps and candles.

I had come to John McPherson to learn the same skills he teaches the SERE instructors. He offered me lodging in a tent on his property, with dire warnings of summer in Kansas. I wasn’t scared of a little heat and humidity. I should have been.

—

We started with fire, not because it’s necessarily the place to start, but because it’s awesome. “It’s magic,” John said matter-of-factly. “I made my first bow drill fire in ’74 or ’75, and it never gets old, because it’s just magic. Of course,” he added with an instantaneous afterthought, “the magic don’t always work.” John was full of those qualifiers. “That’s how you can tell if the survival shit you watch on TV is real,” he said. “If it don’t always work, it’s probably more real.” I thought of the hour it took Luis and me to steal a car.

The bow drill is dependable, the standby, the way to make and get fire on a damp day with damp wood. There are several pieces to it—the bow, the drill, the bearing-block, the hearth, and the cord—that all have to be made by hand. The first time around, we made them with steel (our pocketknives) but all of it can be done with stone. “It just takes longer,” John said. And indeed, over the next few weeks I fashioned another one, making each piece using stone flakes I had chipped myself, and it did take longer. A whole lot longer.

The bow drill is an example of simple mechanics: you spin a wood drill, hard and fast, into a wooden hearth until you get a smoldering coal. The bearing block is used to apply pressure to the drill. The bowstring is wrapped tight around the drill. The drill mates with the hearth on the bottom and is capped by the bearing block on top.

Before crafting my own, I worked with pieces John made. The cord on the bow was 550 parachute cord, another ubiquitous survival item (a lot of survivalists replace their shoelaces with 550 paracord, just in case). It all was good stuff that worked, and had already produced fire. Later I would spin my own cord from hemp fibers, and it was agonizingly hard. My homemade hemp string would stretch, weep moisture, and break repeatedly. It’s hard to really appreciate just how good our tools are until you try to go without them.

“What I want is for you to really understand how this works in the right situation,” John explained. There was always a definite method to his madness. He is perhaps the most hands-on, “what works” guy I’ve ever met.

“I want you to get your mechanics of doing this perfect. That way, when it’s not working in the field, you know that you’re not the problem. You can rejigger the hearth or the drill, tighten the bowstring, try other things—but your mechanics are sound. That’s important. We don’t want you putting a lot of time into something that won’t work.”

I understood that quickly. As I started trying to get the drill to spin, I got frustrated, because it wasn’t working the way it should. It’s not easy applying just enough downward pressure while sawing with the bow to spin the drill.

If you weren’t 100 percent sure of your technique, you might worry at it all day, doing something wrong when all the pieces are right. Get the mechanics right, and then you know there are five or six other variables to adjust, instead of thousands. I could imagine sawing away on a rainy day, huddled in the wreckage of a small plane in northern Canada, the frustration building.

Making fire is an athletic event. Learning the balance—how to maintain pressure on the bearing block and the drill while spinning the drill by razing the bow back and forth—took hours. The drill wanted to skip out of the hearth and flip over, or bind, or slip on the bowstring. I perched on one knee, braced and crouched over the hearth and drill, and sawed away. It was stressful, hard work in the muggy heat. Sweat poured off of me, which I tried to keep from falling onto the drill.

But then, the sudden exhilaration of fire! Not real fire, not at first—but smoke, first a trickle and then a gusher from the bottom of the drill, where it met the hearth. The smoke filled my eyes and nose, but it didn’t matter because I knew I was winning. Now the quest was balanced on a knifepoint. Now was the realm of potential heartbreak, because my muscles were sore and hot, sweat dripped into my eyes—and yet somehow I had to muster up more control, speed, and precision. “Don’t lose your poop,” counseled John.

I was well on my way to losing my poop, but things were happening. Wood dust coagulated around the base of the drill, blackened, tacky, shredded from the drill and hearth by the heat and pressure. Smoke twirled in stringy coils from the drill.

If I had done it correctly, there was supposed be a deep, almost cone-shaped notch in the round hole in the hearth where the drill fit. Eventually, I got it right, so that the smoldering dust could drop out and collect below the hearth. Cutting the notch in the hole where the drill went was a painstaking process of cutting the hard wood and cleaning it, but there were no shortcuts, because that’s where the glowing ember would eventually fall. I learned this by doing it wrong, of course, several times.

Any mistake (and that first day there were plenty) just meant the process had to be repeated, and more precisely! There was no backing out, throwing it in. This was survival. If you make a mistake, you have to repeat the task until you get it right. Methodical precision pays dividends—slow is smooth and smooth is fast is the firearms mantra that Tiger had burned into my brain. It really applies to all things in life, particularly in the survival endeavor. “You can’t be in a rush and make fire,” John told me.

I took that to heart, but later John had to prod me—because there is a moment when you have to “get after it” and saw as fast as possible, breath heaving. Don’t lose hope, don’t panic, do just a little more of what you are doing, with a little more pressure and speed, muscles seizing with lactic acid—and finally, there it is!

In the brown dust underneath the notch, on a leaf, was the smoldering coal, just a thin, tiny trail of smoke in the unremarkable dust. Just a promise, but that was what all this work had been for. Still no fire, but the promise of fire, and only tender loving care would see it through.

Filled with adrenaline, I was in danger of fumbling, of moving too fast, and John cautioned me. “You’ve got a lot of dust, a good ember there. You’ve got a few minutes, maybe even three or four minutes. Go slow, be careful, don’t lose it.”

The key now was in the preparation. With John’s help I had prepared a bird’s nest of shavings, shredded bark, anything else airily flammable, the lightest fuel we could find or make. Ever so gently I tipped the leaf and the smoldering coal into the nest, a brave trace of smoke pearling up.

Now I held the bundle high and “blew it up,”: I used my breath and a kiss of wind to fan the embers into flame. Confident, hard, steady breaths infused life into the coals. The ember glowed cherry red and spread throughout the nest. Suddenly, the flame leapt up and seared my hands, the promise flaring—but still so tenuous, for in a brief second the fuel would burn out.

I turned quickly to our preparations. I placed the bundle, too hot to hold, down in the spot where we planned to put the fire, and I added twigs and tiny kindling. There was the crackle and real heat, then I added bigger kindling, and suddenly the promise delivered. I had fire, I was gonna live! Our fire became durable, beyond the whims of wind and error.

John and I stared down at our creation, flushed with adrenaline and success. “It never really gets old,” he said.

It is magical, drawing fire from cold wood. Mastering man’s oldest skill, the skill that truly separates the tool builder from the rest of the animal kingdom, a skill that has essentially vanished. I reached back across the millennia into the dark prehistory of the cave and worked shoulder to shoulder with ancestors.

John and I had spent a whole day just starting a fire. Over the next two weeks this pattern was repeated. We were up at 5:00 a.m., working by 6:30, and done at 5:00 p.m., but usually we only got one or at most two things done. Because these skills required a different mind-set, and the mastery John wanted to impart took time.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been in a hurry. I got decent grades in school, but every report card was the same: “Sam rushes through his work.” Every teacher from kindergarten on wanted me to slow down. The modern world has conspired to exacerbate this problem. Here, in the woods in Kansas, I had to slow down. I had to absorb some of the slow patience that John exuded, because these skills just take time.

—

The fallout from being forced to learn patience is that John and I talked almost continuously for the next two weeks. We talked as we separated plant fibers to weave into string (it sounds complicated, but it’s almost embarrassingly easy); we talked as we cleaned clay we dug from the ground; we talked as we broke flint. All these activities were marked by hours and hours of painstaking work. I got to hear John’s story, starting from childhood.

“I knew what the early explorers and Indians did—they could live without modern gadgets—but I didn’t really have any way to pursue it at that point. But the big thing was that a real outdoorsman could make a one-match fire. So I spent a lot of time doing that,” John told me.

“I did some hunting in my mid-teens, but not a lot. I had an old .303 jungle carbine I’d carry on hikes, which was cool, made you feel like an explorer. But me and my friends, we didn’t know much.”

Eventually John ended up as a paratrooper in the 173rd in Vietnam, where he was wounded and received the Purple Heart. After some twists and turns of fate, he found himself stateside, twenty-seven years old, with no possessions but the clothes on his back.

“I had this opportunity to really go after whatever I wanted. I spent a good deal of time trying to figure out how to take advantage of this. I’ve only done a few smart things in my life, and this was one of them.”

John went after his dream, which was the log cabin in the woods and total self-reliance. Not some job to support the log cabin, but the log cabin and frontier living, period.

“I thought if I could start fire, I’d be god of the wilderness,” he says lightly. “But then I realized I didn’t know shit.”

He became a kind of self-taught anthropologist, rediscovering skills that had essentially disappeared. Some other isolated hobbyists pursued this survival lore, but there was little published literature on the subject. John taught himself tanning by studying Otis Tufton Mason’s anthropology reports written for the Smithsonian in the 1890s. And Mason had never done it himself, he was just recording what he saw. John had to rediscover the methods through laborious trial and error.

In the 1980s, John “came out of the closet,” as he put it, and started to attend meetings of groups called Rendezvous and Rabbit Stick, informal gatherings of people who were hobbyists or enthusiasts of primitive skills, drawn to the imagined romance of the Old West. In terms of technical skill, John was surprised to find that he was way ahead of most of the folks there. He was dismayed by these “mountain men” who claimed they could re-create the buckskin lifestyle of the early American West. “My first Rabbit Stick, I had on buckskin everything, and there were only a couple of guys there in buckskin and they had chemically tanned leather moccasins,” John recalled with disgust. “I thought, Well, this is bullshit.” John went from being the new guy to a graybeard in a few days, because he was so advanced his own exacting self-study. He’d brought twenty or thirty skins he’d tanned, and sold them all. He was soon teaching individuals and then classes, and started self-publishing his manuals.

—

Flint knapping is the art and science of breaking rock to get flakes of stone, breaking rock “predictably.” Anybody can take some flint, smash it down, and maybe get a piece or two with a sharp edge. But primitive man could pick up a chunk of flint and strike a dozen knives off it in a few minutes, in the course of fashioning an axhead from the main block.

John has evolved his own peculiar physics on how this works. I watch him pick up a big piece of flint and start knocking flakes off with a “hammer stone,” just as easily as tying your shoes.

When I try it, I find that it is considerably harder than it looks. You have to direct the force into the flint at the right angle and you have to strike accurately, which takes time to learn. The blow produces a cone of force, and you have to angle that cone correctly into the flint in order to produce flakes without breaking too much or too little. Accuracy is important. You must make grazing strikes, forceful and clean.

And, again, patience—if you miss, don’t swing again, trying to hit that tiny spot. You’ve changed the rock with your striking, and need to slow down and reassess.

After a few days, I’ve got enough facility to strike flakes, even some long flakes, from a good-quality rock. But the “bifacial,” the axhead or arrowhead, is out of my league, at least for now. Still, in a pile at my feet lie a dozen knives of various sharpnesses, shapes, and lengths, and I use them sporadically for various tasks, which is more satisfying (but slower) than using my pocketknife.

“Well, you don’t have to be an artist,” John said to me. “Survival isn’t about making beautiful arrowheads, it’s about being well rounded—you get a sharp edge, you can use that to get fire, shelter, and make traps.” He stressed the need to be flexible, adaptable, because each situation is different.

“A lot of ‘survival’ people do short-term bullshit. They don’t realize the amount of work required. If you and I had between now and October in the wilderness we’d have a hell of hard time making enough clothing, with tanning deer hide or whatnot, and putting up meat stores for winter. The effort is huge. Most of these guys go out for a few months at most. Who cares?”

I knew what he meant. I could go out for a month and essentially live off my fat stores. Even if you ate nothing, you could probably last for three to five weeks (although you’d be pretty badly off toward the end). John was talking about being real, true, alone into the wilderness, for the duration. Not in the tropics, but somewhere with snow.

“To be honest, one person alone probably couldn’t do it. You just wouldn’t have the time. Now, the primitive people and the Indians, they were naked their entire lives and they were acclimated from youth to the cold and exposure. Going naked into the wilderness can be done, but time and resources to make winter clothing, that’s a killer.”

He paused, thoughtful. “Of course, everyone always talks about edible plants, and I know I haven’t really studied those as I should. But there’s twenty years of study or more right there, just for one little ecosystem. You got plants that are edible that look exactly like plants that are poisonous, and it takes a botanist to tell them apart. You got plants that are no good in summer, but in winter, when you can’t find them, that’s when their roots have the nutrients. So to do a lot with plants you also need time to plan and make storage. Acorns are wonderful, a miracle food, they got everything—but they’re only good for three weeks a year. In a survival situation, you need meat. You need to be trapping, opportunity hunting, fishing. And then you eat the whole animal.”

John and I talked about “rabbit starvation,” which is a famous term describing the plight of early European explorers who had all the rabbit they could eat and still starved to death—the meat had no fat and not enough nutrients; it was all lean protein. They didn’t eat the organs. Living alongside the Inuit, they starved to death, while the Inuit consumed almost everything of the animals they caught, and survived. You have to eat brains and certain other organs, everything but the intestines and bladder.

“Geri once said, ‘A deer is Kmart.’ If you need to, you can use just about everything.” Later, he showed me how to cut a deer’s backstrap of sinew, a terrific source for cordage and lashing. There’s meat, which can be dried. You can make glue, water containers and clothing from the hide, arrowheads and tools from the bones.

I had read Into the Wild years ago, and I remembered that Chris McCandless had killed a moose, but the meat had spoiled on him. “What should he have done?” I asked John. “Should he have smoked it?”

“You got to cut the meat into strips less than a quarter-inch thick and dry it. That’s all, really.”

“What about flies, maggots?” I asked.

“If it’s thin enough, they don’t lay eggs in it. I don’t know why, but it works.”

Later, I tried it with some raw venison and it dried in about two sunny days. The flies buzzed around some but didn’t really bother it much. It made for some tough, bland jerky, but I’d be more than happy to eat it in a pinch. The Indians and explorers would also make pemmican—jerky pounded up and mixed with fat and dried berries. Geri and I made some in her kitchen and I ate it later, out on the road. It was greasy but certainly delicious.

—

We walked out into the sweltering Kansas heat to do a little scavenging. John had always thought he might move farther west, to Montana or Wyoming, but he realized that this part of Kansas has everything he needs. He’s got flint, clay, and all the flora and fauna he requires on his own land, within walking distance from his house. “In Montana, flint might be three hundred miles away, in a certain part of the state, and good cordage fiber might be in the opposite direction. Here I got everything.”

He continued, “As I walked, I’d be looking for flint, for places to put traps, for wood I could make a fire from. You got to be economical, efficient—you might see some good flint and then end up three miles away making camp, and it’s not efficient to come back for it.” That’s one of the reasons he stresses the need to make containers, to efficiently hold the things you find as you gather.

Marijuana, or hemp, grows wild in Kansas. (My wife, who went to high school in Lawrence, Kansas, remembers being surprised to learn that anyone would ever pay for weed.) John and I harvested the stalks, not for the THC but for its other great use—the fibers. Hemp was the source of almost all rope in the Western world until the invention of nylon.

We had to be careful to strip the leaves. John had a basic understanding with local law enforcement, but he didn’t want to push it by bringing leaves home, even by accident. He showed me how to check other types of plants as we strolled, which is what you would do in a survival situation.

“You can tell if a plant will make decent cordage by breaking a small branch and tearing it—if you get long strips, you can weave those to make string or rope. I don’t teach the various names of plants, because those will change from location to location. I try to teach characteristics, to make it more universal.” Cordage, meaning rope or string, is a highly valuable survival item. You can use it to lash your structure together, to make traps, to make the bow part of the bow drill, or to construct a bow and arrow.

He tore off a tiny limb of hemp and watched to see how the bark held together. Hemp bark itself is basically a ready-made lashing, amazingly strong. Compared to the other plants and trees we stripped, the marijuana was miraculous. Small wonder everyone made rope from hemp. A marijuana field would be a gold mine in a survival situation.

“A lot of places, you won’t find fibers this good. But you can still make a decent string from a lot of different things, including animal hair or even your own hair.”

Once I learn the basic pattern for twisting cordage, I do make a short piece of rope from Gypsy the dog’s hair; and although it’s a pain in the ass, it’s doable. Compared to hemp, making rope from anything is a pain in the ass.

About shelter building, John feels that it is so basic, obvious, and time consuming that aside from a few basic principles, it almost doesn’t need to be taught. When I asked about waterproofing the roof, he replied, almost angrily, “There’s really no such thing as waterproof in a primitive situation, just degrees of water resistance. That’s just the way it is.”

Water drips on to your shelter, runs down along the roof material a certain distance, then drips again. You need multiple layers, and the tighter they can be laid the better, so that rain drops down, runs along, hits the next layer, runs along, and so on until the rain drips down outside of your shelter. The smaller and closer together the material, the more effective this is, so grass is superior to small round sticks, for instance, which intuitively makes perfect sense. You’d need several feet of sticks, and maybe just a foot of tightly bound grass bundles. But it all depends, of course.

John mentioned a student he’d had who frustrated him, a student who always wanted too many specifics: how many inches high should the lean-to walls be, how many feet of grass for the roof? John snorted angrily.

I realized that John was teaching me that survival is improvisational. It’s like jazz. You make it up as you go along, provided you understand the principles of what works and what doesn’t. No lean-to situation is exactly like another. No wilderness is a mirror of another. The weather, the flora, and the fauna all play into your choices. You might build a lean-to in a forest with easily accessible materials and the need to get out of the rain, while the desert has totally different requirements and limitations. The igloo is a perfect example of improv. You’ve got no wood, no trees, and yet you can make a shelter.

“Is it E and E?” John asked, and I knew he meant “escape and evade,” the stuff the Special Forces guys are working on. In that case, you better make sure your shelter is well hidden, which takes precedence over comfort.

“You learn the rules, the basics, tools, things you know work,” John said as we stood in the blessed breeze on a high hill, watching his two horses graze, “but then you continually improvise.” That improvisation is the skill I was honing, through instruction and then trial and error, just like primitive man.

—

Another day, another vital lesson.

“Small traps, that’s your bread and butter,” John said. “You put enough of those out for pack rats and mice, you can do okay. I like deadfalls because they fall on the animal, kill it, and protect it from coyotes and whatever else is out there.

“Traps are economical. They’re working for you while you’re building the shelter or looking for a water supply. If you get good at making them and placing them, you can get to a success rate of fifty percent or better—if the animals are there. And then you have strings of traps, fifteen or twenty this way, fifteen or twenty that way. You can dry the meat and start storing food.”

John and I were now near the house, practicing setting up traps. Looking at the pieces of the trap, a pile of sticks, a piece of cordage, and a large, flat rock, I could tell there was some kind of unique logic to them, but I could never have figured it out on my own. Once John showed me the simple, elegant way the pieces fit together, I practically slapped my head with how obvious it was. It makes perfect sense, a trigger underneath a rock. The rat “busies” the trigger, and the rock comes down.

After a full day of practicing setting deadfalls, often referred to as Paiute deadfalls, we headed out to see what I could do.

John and I walked over the low-slung grass hills under a stinging-hot sky, moving through cow pies and scrub brush, dusty and hot, until we found a pack rat house, one of the infamous middens I had read about. I was looking for some small hole in the ground, but the pack rat midden was more like a beaver lodge, a high pile of sticks.

“Well,” John said, “I would have been collecting the pieces I need to make the trap on the walk here, but you better go do it now.” I felt foolish as I scrambled around to find the ingredients.

There was something childish about setting the trap, down in the grass and bushes, fiddling with twigs. It took me back to my youth, when I would make forts for my toy soldiers. I crouched down next to the midden, shaping the sticks, cutting wedges, balancing the stone. I could imagine doing this in a survival situation, gnawed by hunger and fear, and there would be nothing childish about it then.

The work was hot and scratchy and I killed about six ticks that were climbing on me—but, as usual, to rush was only to lengthen the job. If I screwed it up, and things didn’t balance smoothly, I would have to start over. The sun beat down on my hat, and the blurring buzz of cicadas and grasshoppers rose in a deafening hum around me.

Setting traps was hard work, but it got easier. The first day it took me about an hour to set two. On the second day, I set four in that time.

“Always set each trap like it’s your only one,” I heard John call from somewhere above me on the hill. The clink of breaking rock told me that he’d found some flint to work on while he patiently waited for me. “Make each trap a ten, each part of each trap a ten. This trap could be the only one that produces for you.” John always said, “Make it a ten,” meaning make something perfect—because you might be limited in what you find. If most of the pieces that you can make are tens, and then you only find a six for another piece, then you have enough quality built in to still make a trap that works well.

I sat cross-legged in the dirt, surveyed my delicately balanced deadfalls, crushed the seventh tick I’d found on my leg, and thought, You better produce for me, you son of a bitch.

Over the next few days John and I would walk out early in the morning, long before the day got hot, to check the traps and reset them. I had mastered the basics, so I could make the trap, set the rock, and place the bait (a dab of peanut butter, but it could be a bug or anything that might draw attention) usually within ten or fifteen minutes—but my luck was bad, or my traps weren’t tens, and I caught nothing.

John explained that the problem probably lay in the trapping surface: rats could squeeze out of the gaps and escape. I needed to fill in any holes in the ground the rock was falling onto. The rock and the ground had to mesh like puzzle pieces.

I figured that I was just unlucky. I have bad luck fishing, too; friends who catch lots of fish mysteriously go dry with me. My vibes are wrong, or I lack patience. I felt a familiar disappointment with these traps, and I could only imagine the heartache I’d feel if I was actually starving to death.

I’ve been hungry before. I’ve gone on monthlong camping trips, run out of food, and lost thirty pounds, and I was never a fat guy to begin with. In the Amazon I probably lost thirty-five pounds because we ran low on food and my guides had only two bullets for the ancient shotgun, one of which turned out to be a dud. Hunger permeates your soul and takes over your mind. You start having four-hour conversations about food, about what you’re going to eat when you get out of whatever shitty situation you’re in. I used to get olfactory hallucinations—suddenly, deep in the jungle, I’d smell glazed ham. If I had been truly starving, my disappointment at finding empty traps might be overwhelming.

John wasn’t buying my “unlucky” line, either. “That’s just bullshit,” he said. “Every man who fishes goes through his dry spells. You just don’t fish enough, so you had a few dry spells and think that’s it.”

I was reminded of the famous race to the South Pole between the Englishman Robert Scott and the Norwegian Roald Amundsen in 1910–12. Amundsen used sled dogs and ate some of them, while Scott felt that this was “unsporting” and pushed his sleds with his men. Amundsen was first to the Pole, and all his men lived; Scott perished along with his entire party.

The journals of both men are part of the public record, and Scott is always talking about “God’s Will” and “fate” and saying “we’ve been unlucky with the weather,” while Amundsen’s journal is filled with numbers—calories carried, kilometers covered, and so forth. Amundsen even wrote later, “Victory awaits him who has everything in order—luck, people call it.”

Another lesson: luck is a critical element of survival, but you have no influence over it, so make it as irrelevant as possible. Don’t let bad luck beat you, and take advantage of good luck by being prepared.

—

“I always say that you should be an opportunistic hunter,” John said as we walked out one morning, the dew soaking our legs.

“Hunting by itself is inefficient. You’ll spend a lot of time and energy with usually very little payback. But walking in the woods you come upon animals—rabbits, deer, anything. And if you have a bow and arrow in your hands when you check your traps, you can take advantage.”

John showed me how to make a primitive bow, and we spent days shaping the bow stave according to the physics of the curving wood. As the bow curves, one side stretches and the other side compresses, and compression is where failure happens first. So when we shaped the bow, we spent hours removing wood equally from the top and bottom on the compression side. Adding sinew to the elastic side and horn to the compression side would have increased the bow’s power, since those two materials are better for their respective roles than plain wood, but that was too advanced—John wanted me just to see that a simple bow was possible.

John spent another day teaching me to make an arrow, which is widely regarded as more important than the bow. We heated a wood shaft and straightened it, chose a piece of bone for the arrowhead, and attached the arrowhead to the shaft using sinew and hide glue.

“With this little bow,” John said, “if you had a chance encounter with a rabbit or deer you could at least make an attempt. And if you were serious and had time, you could easily make a bigger bow that had a fifty- or sixty-pound pull. And then you’d have a chance of wounding a deer at twenty yards or so.”

My first two traps of the morning were down but empty. There is some suspense when you approach a down trap, a slight thrill: It’s tripped! Something happened! Multiply that emotion a hundred times if you’re starving to death.

John and I ambled over to the other set, and I slogged through the wet brush to see that both of them had also tripped. Up came the rock on the third trap and there was nothing underneath. Sigh.

My fourth trap boasted the biggest and heaviest rock I’d used, maybe sixty pounds. I yanked it up, not expecting anything at this point, and there it was! The gray fur of a pack rat! I hooted with triumph, startled John with a high-five, and shouted, “We’re gonna live!” at the top of my lungs.

The pack rat was healthy looking, with thick fur, big as a pet gerbil. We were concerned about hantavirus, a fatal disease found in the dried urine of rats and mice, so we carefully picked up the rat with a plastic bag, as if scooping up dog poop. When we got home we threw it in a bowl with water and bleach, then thoroughly washed and rinsed it. John showed me how to clean it. Pulling off the furry skin felt like like pulling a tight sweater off a doll.

We cleaned the rat and we threw out most of its organs, which in a survival situation you’d probably eat. Another reason to make containers is that boiling the rat in water would be the most efficient way to eat it—no protein or nutrients would drip off into the fire and be wasted. If you had one rat to dole out between three or four people, with a stew you could be fair.

I fried the rat on a hot “griddle” rock with some deer fat and salt and ate it. It was gamy and delicious.

As I finished and licked my fingers, John gave me a funny look and said, “I believe that’s the first time anyone’s eaten a rat and not offered me some.” I was instantly contrite. My wife was completely unsurprised when I related this story to her. I’m not sure what that means about my eating habits, but it doesn’t feel complimentary.

I certainly wasn’t going hungry. Geri was cooking three meals a day and at night we were eating desserts like pecan pie with fresh-picked blackberries. After dinner, John would usually throw on one of his own instructional DVDs (powered by his solar array and battery bank), a warm-up to the next day’s lesson, or a survival-themed movie. We watched Werner Herzog’s documentary Little Dieter Wants to Fly, a tremendous story of an American pilot shot down in Vietnam. In the documentary, the pilot escapes from his captors with nothing, not even shoes, and he destroys his feet running through the jungle. John talked to me about constructing footwear and showed me some sandals he’d made from cordage.

“We didn’t learn survival skills in the military, not like what we teach here,” John said. “It was all about using flares, getting rescued.”

John has decorated a large corner of his house with Vietnam memorabilia: pictures, clippings, letters, and citations. Faded photographs of a much younger, skinnier John grinning ear to ear, with a long M16 in his arms. John was involved in a firefight and was wounded. We talked about the particulars for a long time, the tunnel vision he’d experienced when being shot at. Tunnel vision is often described as a narrowing of perceptual focus; as your eyes fill with the image of the threat, you can’t see anything else.

“I ain’t no hero,” John said. “Hero is risking your life to save another, and succeeding. If you don’t succeed, well, you’re maybe a little heroic. I’ve been involved in some heroic things, but I ain’t no hero. Now, shit, if somebody calls 911 they’re a hero.”

He laughed. There was no rancor in his words, just amusement at our changing world.

—

In 1975, John had been talking a lot to his friends at a bar about how he thought he could start tanning skins. One day when he came home from work, he found a dead calf on his doorstep. He knew who had dropped it off and why. They were calling his bluff.

“So I dressed it out, and tanned it with the brains as I had read in that Otis Manning book, and most of it was like cardboard—but there was one little piece, about as big as my hand, that was perfect. Soft and supple. I knew I had to get the whole skin like that.”

John assaulted the problem, experimenting on a succession of hides, reading what paltry literature there was, sometimes having a conversation here or there with somebody who knew a little. And eventually, he figured out a system that worked for him.

Clothing is an essential survival tool. By wearing the skins of animals, our ancestors survived and flourished. John showed me how it could be done.

Basically, the animal skin has to be cleaned of tissue and membranes on the inside and hair on the outside. I asked about that. Wouldn’t leaving the hair on make it much warmer? Yes, but it would also make it ten times harder to tan.

The raw skin of the animal is supple and soaked with moisture—it is recently living tissue, after all. So you could kill a deer, skin it, and throw the skin over your shoulders—a nasty, sopping, clammy cloak—but when it dried, it would be as hard as wood. This is rawhide. You couldn’t wear a rawhide cloak unless you kept wetting it.

To tan a hide, you coat it with oils, which allows it to dry but stay supple. The way John does it is with “brain oils,” which are just what they sound like—the oils from the brain of the animal.

I spoke to John Shea, an anthropology professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, about the origins of tanning. He told me that it’s hard to be sure but that the first real hard evidence is eight hundred thousand years old, and that some researchers suspect tanning might have been invented even earlier.

Early humans would have experimented with many processes—saltwater helps the tanning process, and tanning can also be done with uric acid, from urine. “At some point, somebody probably noticed the detergent effects of stale urine; it could be used to drive the fats out,” the professor told me.

John and I scraped the meat, membranes, and hair off a deer hide. Then we soaked it in brain oils (John bought pig brains from the supermarket). You have to really work the oils in, soaking and wringing the hide out dozens of times. Wringing the heavy hide dry like a chamois is laborious work, but the hide needs to soak up the oils completely. Leaving the hair on makes the job harder because then the oils can only penetrate from one side.

After you’ve really imbued the hide with brain oils, you need to work it as it dries to keep it from becoming a piece of rigid cardboard. John showed me how to push and pull, stretch and grip the hide as it dried. Slowly, imperceptibly, the hide begins to turn into buckskin, that soft, supple, wonderful stuff that feels like a velvet blanket.

It’s a ton of work. John claimed, “If you know what you’re doing, you can kill a deer in the morning and be wearing him by that evening.” I thought, You better shoot that sucker early. You can’t leave the skin alone for ten minutes during the drying phase, or you’ll be screwed and have to go back to the brains. I worked the skin for almost four straight hours. Professor Shea told me that for early humans this would be a familiar, routine skill—like driving a car is for us.

Finally, you take the lovely soft piece of skin and smoke it, locking in the oils, so that afterward, even if it gets wet, it will dry soft. Geri sewed the skin into a cone and attached a piece of fabric to the bottom (to extend the cone). John and I gathered cedar branches with a lot of leaves, and we smoked the skin over a long thin smokestack from a tubby iron woodstove. “The Indians would either use the tepee, and smoke a lot of skins at once, or build a fire pit in the ground with a low entrance and a natural chimney,” John told me. The skin slowly turned a lovely, rosy dark brown, and within another hour it was done—smooth and soft and wonderfully supple. The whole process had taken an epic seven hours of straight work.

Holding up the skin, I again felt that connection to our ancestors: this is how we all used to do it.

“The thing to remember about so-called ‘cavemen’ is that they were smarter than us, probably,” Professor Shea said. He meant that because of constant survival tension, they would be more “on point” than we are. The common fallacy is to think of cavemen as grunting savages, but physiologically, they were exactly the same as us. They were pure Homo sapiens, with the same brain, same bones. From birth they were under incredible stress from the world around them, which would have made them phenomenally strong and motivated. You see what we’re capable of: Mozart, the space shuttle, the atom bomb. They had all that same brainpower, but they used it on their small patch of ground, their immediate environment.

“There were no dumb cavemen,” said Professor Shea. “The lions and wolves made sure of that. These were a profoundly intelligent and spiritual people.”

To survive in the wilderness, I would have to rediscover that strength and spirituality. We all would.

The fire pops. Shadows flicker off the walls of the lean-to, creating depths in darkness. Outside, the night is black and pricked with stars.

My son picks at his rat, gnawing at the end of a bone. His face is greasy with fat.

“Can I have some more?” He grins. My wife grimaces. “I never thought I’d say this,” she mutters, “but I wish there was more rat, too.”

It hasn’t been easy. We’re gaunt with hunger, on the edge of starvation. Those first few nights—before we got a fire going, before we really figured out the trick of building the lean-to and burying ourselves under pine needles—those nights had been hell. But we are still alive.

The wind gusts and sparks shower out of the fire, some spiraling up and out into the night. Somewhere a coyote calls, but the sound is far away and feels reassuring—the coyote is telling us we’re alone.