by Edward Lang
So we designated a second rope just for me, 30 feet in length. I tied knots in it every two feet, doubling and even tripling them up in size so that I could easily grab hold and use them to climb.
Once Lelia climbed high enough up – 15 feet was sufficient – she would use a carabiner to attach the knotted rope to a limb, and I would climb the knotted rope to safety.
When we put it all together, it went something like this:
I would use the weighted rope to swing it around in the air in a circle, faster and faster, and then release it up over a high limb.
The weight would drop the rope to the ground, at which point Lelia would attach it to the harness she wore.
I would put all my weight behind pulling it, and she would scramble up the tree as I lifted her.
Once she got to the branch, she would immediately attach another, shorter length of rope to the limb so she couldn’t fall.
Meanwhile, I would shuck off my backpack so I was carrying as little weight as possible.
Then she would attach the knotted rope to the limb and throw it down…
…and I would climb up to safety.
After practicing for days – well over a dozen hours, with hundreds of attempts – we got it down to an average of 33 seconds, with a record time of 25.
Was it enough time to escape a wolfpack?
If we heard them coming, yes.
If we didn’t… well, I didn’t like to think about that.
But on both previous occasions, I had heard the wolves coming from a long distance away. After all, I’d had enough time to ‘telephone repairman’ myself up a tree using my crampons and an improvised rope belt.
Our new system used more rope as resources, but it was faster – and it got both of us up in the tree in less time.
We practiced at least an hour every day, trying to beat our record time.
The second thing we needed was supplies – which meant another deer.
Lelia assured me that we could forage for a good deal of our food, but I still wanted a backup, just in case.
We spent several days hunting until we bagged our next kill, a doe this time. After that, we skinned and cleaned it, transported the meat back to the cave, and began roasting and smoking it into jerky. We needed something that would provide us sustenance if we got snowed in inside a cave for days, or if we ran into a situation where we had to be on the run.
Like from skiris.
Hopefully that wouldn’t come to pass, but it was better to be prepared.
Lastly, we had to move as fast as possible. And I had an idea how to make that happen:
Snowshoes.
It had become fairly miserable moving through two to three feet of snow, day in, day out. At first it was a novelty, but then it just became exhausting. It takes a hell of a lot of energy.
(Maybe that was why the wolves had never shown up right away after I’d first heard them; they had to get through a lot of fuckin’ snow first.)
Lelia didn’t seem to mind, but that’s probably because her people had evolved for just this sort of environment. Extremely high body temperatures, light weight, fast healing, things like increased grip strength and physical endurance.
I did not evolve for this kind of environment, and I knew if we wanted to be able to move fast and catch up with her tribe, we needed an advantage over Nature.
At first I considered skis. That actually would have been pretty badass.
There were a couple of problems, though.
One: making them. I didn’t have any way to easily plane flat lengths of wood. Making skis had never been part of my previous survival training, on the TV show or off.
Two: skis would have worked great for fast travel downhill. But, judging from what I’d seen from atop the cliff, most of what we were going to have to traverse was going to be across hills. Probably a fair amount of going up them, too. The ‘down’ part would have been minimal at best, and not worth all the time and effort to create the skis in the first place.
Three: skis would have worked great for wide open areas – but most of what we were going to have to travel through was dense forest. Janky homemade skis were probably not the best for quick maneuvering.
Four: the skill level needed. I wasn’t that great with professionally made skis – I’d only skied a dozen times in my life – and Lelia would have to learn from scratch. I wasn’t about to invest dozens upon dozens of hours trying to build skis with rocks as my primary tools just so we could slam into a tree and kill ourselves.
I thought about trying to do cross-country skis so we could traverse flat areas, but I knew the mechanisms for lifting our feet up would have been way beyond my abilities, so skis were out.
But snowshoes…
Now, I’d never made them on my show. I’d only used professionally manufactured versions.
But, hey – it was basically tennis rackets strapped to your feet. And I knew ancient humans had first used them around 4000 to 6000 years ago. How hard could they be to make?
Turns out, pretty fuckin’ hard.
I won’t bore you with the details. There was a lot of experimentation.
Me trying to bend sticks into racket shapes without them cracking (which they always did)…
Then trying to carve branches…
Then trying to tie strings across frames.
It all failed.
In the end, I basically did the following:
I took a couple of three-foot-long branches made out of a flexible hardwood. (Nevla in Lelia’s language, in case you were interested.)
Then I fastened them together at both ends.
Then I bowed them out in the center with two eight-inch-long pieces of wood, which I lashed to the longer sticks.
Now I had a long-ass, skinny oval shape with supports in the center for our feet.
Then I stuffed several three-foot-long boughs of fir up, over, and under the oval scaffolding. The result was a sort of matted layer of crisscrossing fir twigs that functioned like the strings on a regular snowshoe.
Then we lashed the eight-inch crosspieces to our feet so that we could walk around without the snowshoes coming off.
I would have loved to have actually made a crisscrossing pattern of strings on the shoes to provide more elegant support, but the snowshoes – while ugly – got the job done.
Another nice benefit: if the fir boughs came out, you just stuffed them back in. If they broke, you found another tree and cut another branch off.
The first time I tried the snowshoes out, I was nearly falling over myself headlong into the snow. It wasn’t pretty. I looked like a moose on roller skates. And it was still a fuck-ton of work.
But the simple fact was, I could walk over the snow. I mean, obviously I sank several inches down into it… but I stayed more or less on the surface.
But as soon as I took the shoes off and stepped into the snow, I sunk down in it up to my crotch.
And if you’ve ever tried walking around in three-foot-tall snow, trust me – snowshoeing above it is a lot less work, even if you look like an idiot. Or a moose on roller skates.
Lelia watched the entire process with amused dubiousness. She snorted with laughter every time I nearly fell over like a drunk.
“Not good,” she told me with a grin.
“I know it looks bad, but it’s worth it,” I insisted.
She wasn’t convinced until we ran a race after a heavy snowfall.
We crossed a 200-foot expanse of snow that was three feet deep before the storm, and close to four feet deep afterwards.
I wore my snowshoes, and she had to plow through the snow.
I, of course, stumbled around like a drunken moose on roller skates.
She beat me, reaching the other side a full twenty feet ahead of me.
Once I got to the other end, though, I said, “Okay, now race me back – but you have to go through fresh snow.”
She started to go back through the channel she had cut, and I said, “NO,” and poi
nted at the virgin snow beside her. She rolled her eyes, but she waddled over into the fresh snow and we raced again.
She beat me again – this time by only about ten feet. But I wasn’t huffing and puffing any worse than the first race. She was seriously winded.
“Okay, again,” I said.
This time I beat her by ten feet.
She got the point.
She could easily beat me in a sprint… but the marathon was a different matter.
If we were going to be traveling three or four miles a day, it was going to be a hell of a lot easier using the snowshoes than trying to brute-force our way through the snow.
Now, you might be wondering about one little detail: Where the fuck did Jack get what he needed to lash all the pieces together? He’s been using his rope supply willy-nilly the entire fuckin’ time for knotted escape ropes and stone-throwing/Lelia-boosting ropes and whatnot. So what the fuck is he using to lash things together?
Good question.
The answer:
Deer hide.
Now, I knew – theoretically – how to tan an animal hide. I’d just never done it.
By the way, ‘tanning’ is sort of a misnomer. Or, at least, we tend to think of ‘tanning’ as melanin appearing in human skin after repeated exposure to the sun.
Turns out that we have it backwards.
The original meaning of ‘tan’ was to turn a hide into leather. That’s where the word came from.
So getting a tan is being out in the sun and turning your own skin into leather.
Yeah. Think of that the next time you slather on the Coppertone, kids.
Anyway, back to the process.
You remove the skin, the same as I’d been doing to get the meat off every deer I’d killed so far.
Then you scrape every bit of fat and tissue off the inside of the hide. A blunt stone was way better than a knife – you want something that won’t snag the skin or tear it.
If you wanted just the hide, you would have to scrape the hair off, too. Normally, though, that would include soaking it for a couple of hours to a couple of weeks in order to make the hair easier to remove – and I didn’t exactly have a handy vat or tub to submerge it in.
Then you want to treat the skin to make it stand up to water and not rot. Basically that included getting rid of as much moisture as possible, and replacing it in a process called fat liquoring – aka tanning.
The ‘getting rid of moisture’ part usually includes stretching the skin and letting it dry in the sun. But I didn’t exactly have a nice sunny patch and warm weather to do that part.
If you don’t treat the skin, you wind up with rawhide – which can be used, sure, but it will eventually begin to decompose into a wet, stinking mess.
The modern way to tan was to use a special chemical solution you could buy in a plastic bottle.
But, seeing as I was a hell of a long way from a hunting supplies store, and Amazon Prime apparently didn’t deliver where I was, I was going to have to go for an alternate solution.
That ‘alternate solution’ was a certain blue chick I’d been shacking up with.
I pointed to Lelia’s furs one night when I was first figuring out how to bind the snowshoes together. “How did you make these?”
“We need for trip?”
“Yes,” I said, and held up the leather straps at the ends of the furs that she used to tie the bindings together. “I need things like these. Can you do it?”
“Yes, but need deer.”
I’d figured that much out, but I didn’t respond with sarcasm because she hadn’t quite figured sarcasm out yet. The one time I’d used it when I was irritated, she started going around saying everything in a sarcastic tone of voice without meaning it to be sarcastic, which drove me crazy. I had to instruct her not to use that tone of voice because it sounded ‘mean and angry’ – so I couldn’t very well use it now.
We would get to sarcasm eventually.
First off, though, I needed bindings.
“Let’s go get a deer, then,” I said.
After we brought down the deer whose meat we smoked for jerky, we took the hide back to the cave and she systematically scraped it down.
“Keep fur?” she asked.
“Would it be easy to get the fur off?” I asked.
“No.”
“Then keep the fur.”
Then she created a frame made out of tree branches and smoked the hide over the fire, far enough away from the flames that it wouldn’t burn.
The cave smelled pretty raunchy for a couple of days, but after you got used to it, you couldn’t smell it anymore. Until you left, went out into the fresh air, and came back. Blegh.
Then came the rough part.
Native Americans traditionally tanned hides using the brains of the animal.
How the HELL does that work, you ask?
Remember that thing I mentioned about fat liquoring? Where you have to replace the moisture in a hide?
Turns out that deer brains contain just enough of an oil called lecithin to tan their own hides – to replace the moisture and grease up the collagen proteins to make the hide usable.
Native Americans figured it out somehow. I guess Lelia’s people had deduced the same trick.
And how do you tan a hide using brains?
Well, first you have to get the brains out of the deer skull.
I’ll spare you those details. Let’s just say, if you ever need a hitman to kill somebody with blunt force trauma, Lelia should be at the top of your list.
Once we had the payload, now it was time to use it.
I always kind of assumed you took the brain out and rubbed it all over the hide. Nope. Turns out you mix the brains with heated water. Brains are pretty much fat, so they fall apart pretty quickly. You use the solution to spread all over the hide like you’re coating a bad sunburn with lots of aloe.
Problem: we didn’t have a place to mix the brains and water.
Lelia gestured for my metal water bottle.
“You are NOT mixing brains in there,” I said.
I mean – I starred on a survivalist TV show for years, but even I have limits.
She rolled her eyes, another little mode of communication I was regretting teaching her, and said, “Only heat water.”
“Oh…”
We ended up packing the bottle with snow and placing it on a flat rock in the midst of smoldering coals. After a couple of minutes, the snow had melted; after 30 minutes, it was hot enough where you wouldn’t want to stick your finger in it. I knew because I stuck my finger in it and immediately regretted it.
At the same time, she had placed coals over a depression in a rock in the middle of the cave. It was sort of a natural basin.
The coals were to heat the rock up so it wouldn’t immediately cool the water down. Once the water was ready, she brushed the dying coals away with another rock, then blew off the remaining ashes. There was a bit of schmutz remaining, but we weren’t exactly creating leather for Louis Vuitton here.
Then she poured the water into the basin and added the brain, smooshing it up with her hands until it was… more or less dissolved.
I’ll spare you the specifics.
Then she set to work smearing the inside of the hide with the goop.
After she was finished, she hung the hide back up on the frame over the fire and smoked it for another 24 hours so the solution could set.
It was not a fun night in the cave, let me tell you.
When a smell kills your ability to get a boner next to a hot naked blue chick, you know it’s bad.
It didn’t help that her hands were still greasy.
No jokes about lube, please.
Yeah.
Not feelin’ it.
Anyway, at the end of the process, I had a hide with fur on it that was both pliable and water-resistant.
I immediately started carving it into strips with my knife. Into strings, really – quarter-inch-wide strips of hide that were three to
four feet long.
When Lelia saw what I was doing with all her hard work, she was not happy.
“WHAT?!” was her verbatim response.
“Relax,” I said. “Trust me.”
And I proceeded to create the strips that I would use as the lashings on our snowshoes. Strong, flexible, and water-resistant.
All was forgiven after I beat her in the 100-yard snowshoe dash.
Once the snowshoes were ready, we had to practice using them.
Then we had to practice getting up the trees while wearing the snowshoes.
That actually proved next to impossible. Our average time went from 33 seconds to 1 minute, 27 seconds.
We would have been wolf chow. Or at least I would have.
So we practiced undoing the bindings, getting out of the snowshoes, and going up the trees.
In a real situation, I would have just slashed the bindings with my knife – but we only had a certain number of spare strips of hide, and I didn’t want to burn through them in practice runs, so we tied the bindings loosely, walked ten feet, then wriggled out of the bindings as soon as we started the clock.
It added an extra 15 seconds to our average time, for a total of 48.
Like I said, in a real situation I would have used the knife to just slash the bindings, so I think we would have come in lower than 48.
I figured 48 seconds was enough to get away from wolves.
Or at least I hoped.
Nine days after we began our preparations, we were ready to go.
We had enough jerky to supplement our foraging.
We had snowshoes to help us travel.
And we had practiced climbing into trees until we were a well-oiled machine.
Not only that, but we’d kept up our archery practice for two hours a day until we were pretty damn good.
All that was left was to gather the resolve to leave.
We lay in the cave one night after making love. Shadows cast by the firelight played over Lelia’s skin.
“I think we’re ready to go find your tribe,” I said quietly.
She propped herself up on her elbow. “Yes?” she asked, hope and fear both in her voice.
“Yes.”