by Tim MacWelch
CONTENTS
HUNTING
001 Pick Up a Rod & Reel
002 Get Hooked
003 Select Your Fishing Line
004 Lure Them In
005 Pack Your Survival Fishing Kit
006 Carve a Fish Stick
007 Go (Really) Old-School
008 Set Traps for Fish and Crustaceans
009 Make It Weir-D
010 Make a Soda-Bottle Trap
011 Catch Fish by Hand
012 Dodge the Dangers
013 Go Noodling Abroad
014 Build a Box
015 CASE STUDY: THE THREE FISHERMEN
016 Dig Up Dinner
017 Get a Line on Crabs
018 Dive for Lobster
019 Follow the Coon’s Example
020 Work for Scale
021 Finish the Job
022 Enjoy the Scales
023 Learn How to Fillet
024 Preserve Fish with Smoke
025 Put the Chips Down
026 Smoke Your Catch
027 Get Salty with Brined Fish
028 Dry Them, You Might Like Them
029 Make a Fish Shed
030 Build a Smoker
031 SUPERPLANT: PINE
032 Know Your Quarry
033 Pay Attention to Season
034 Scout Your Hunting Grounds
035 Get the Right Action
036 Shoot Old-School
037 Go the Distance with Your Rifle
038 Clean Up the Mess
039 Scope It Out
040 Make Some Adjustments
041 Embrace Archery
042 Add Some Sights
043 Get Some Protection
044 Avoid Dry Fires
045 Carve a Bow
046 Make Your Own Arrows
047 Succeed with Small Game
048 Place Your Shot
049 Savor Small-Game Flavor
050 Shoot a Lead Hailstorm
051 Start with the Basics
052 Read the Signs
053 Study That Scat
054 Learn to Trap
055 Select Your Trap
056 Obey the Laws
057 Hide Your Scent with Nature
058 Get Creative with Cover Scents
059 Trap Like a Pro
060 Find the Right Bait
061 Learn Your Footholds
062 Know the Whole Truth
063 Set an Effective Foothold
064 Take Care with Body Grips
065 Safely Set a Body Grip
066 Use Rope for Safety
067 Get Ready to Get Set
068 Catch ’Em Alive
069 Build a Better Box Trap
070 Benefit from Box Traps
071 Put Your Trap to Work
072 Mash a Muskrat
073 Harvest a Hare
074 Pick Up a ’Possum
075 Bag a Beaver
076 Reap a Raccoon
077 SUPERPLANT: WILD ONION
078 Make Deadfalls from Scratch
079 Create Some Options
080 Build a Paiute Trap
081 Study Survival Snares
082 Get Your Fix
083 Set a Baited Snare
084 Make a Bait-Free Snare
085 IT COULD HAPPEN: BADGER ATTACK
086 Poach Some Wild Eggs
087 Become a Short-Order Survival Cook
088 Make a Low-Tech X-Ray
089 Cook in the Shell
090 Eat the Bugs
091 Order the Escargot
092 Crunch Some Crickets
093 Cook a Cicada Feast
094 Dress Small Game
095 Waste Nothing
096 Process Your Own Game
097 Hang It Up
098 Skin Your Carcass
099 Pull the Choice Cuts
100 Discover Wild-Game Nutrition
GATHERING
101 Follow the Boy Scout Motto
102 Pack a Kit
103 Become Lost-Proof
104 Prioritize Your Survival To-Do List
105 Enjoy Your Weeds
106 Stay Safe Out There
107 Give Something Back
108 Learn Botany Basics
109 Get Down to the Roots
110 Divide and Conquer
111 Note the Margins
112 Follow a Pattern
113 SUPERPLANT: DANDELION
114 Find the Fungus Among Us
115 Avoid at All Costs
116 Follow the Rules
117 Make a Spore Print
PLANT IDENTIFICATION
118 Classify Mushrooms
119 Forage for Tree Nuts
120 Harvest Wild Greens
121 Find Bushes and Brambles
122 Try Some Tasty Trees
123 Select Seeds for Grains
124 Pick Wild Fruits
125 Spot Unique Vegetables
126 Dig Up Some Edible Roots
127 SUPERPLANT: CATTAIL
128 Understand Your Risks
129 Spot the Chameleon
130 Stay Hands Free
131 Be Allergy Alert
132 Don’t Be Fooled
133 Act Quickly
134 Pick Your Poison
135 IT COULD HAPPEN: MUSHROOM MADNESS
136 Go Nuts for Acorns
137 Spot a Good Nut
138 Process Your Acorn Bounty
139 CASE STUDY: HUGH GLASS
140 Dine Out in the Concrete Jungle
141 Park It
142 Cruise the Streets
143 Meet Ten Wild World Travelers
LIVING WILD
144 Survive Three Days in the Wild
145 Follow the Signs
146 Kill the Varmints
147 Use a Quality Filter
148 Build a Water Still
149 Fire It Up
150 Light Your Fire
151 Select the Right Tinder
152 Know Your Sources
153 Stock Up on Kindling
154 Build a Teepee
155 Feel the Spark
156 Pick the Right Spot
157 Cheat a Little
158 Cook Like a Champ in Camp
159 Set Up a Griddle
160 Build a Stone Oven
161 IT COULD HAPPEN: A ROCKING DINNER
162 Make a Steam Pit
163 Cook in a Dutch Oven
164 CASE STUDY: THE LYKOV FAMILY
165 Flake a Stone Spear
166 Rock Out with Percussion
167 Test Your Local Stone
168 Know Your Knots
169 Eat Your Way Through the Seasons
170 Stock Your Survival Pantry
171 Store the Top Ten Staples
172 Weigh Your Options
173 Plan for Attack
174 Plan Your Menu
175 Bring Wild Edibles into the Mix
176 Take a Spin on Rotation
177 Sample the Variety
178 Whip Up Some Jerky
179 Render the Fat
180 Freeze It Right
181 Can Your Meat
182 SUPERPLANT: YARROW
183 Grow Your Own Investment
184 Lay It All Out
185 Spread Your Roots
186 Brew Compost Tea
187 Don’t Forget to Water
188 Honor the Amendments
189 Plant Accordingly
190 Grow Hardy Herbs
191 Eat on the Cheap
192 Feed the Family
193 Don’t Overlook the Weeds
194 Save Your Seeds
195 Store Seeds Right
196 Dry I
t Out
197 Boil Up a Brine
198 Ferment Some Kraut
199 Store Veggies Underground
200 SUPERPLANT: ECHINACEA
201 Pour a Cup of Medicine
202 Heal with Jewelweed Tea
203 Brew the Perfect Cup
204 Look at Your Herbal Choices
205 Infuse Herbal Oils
206 Make a Quick Balm
207 Melt Some Lard Salve
208 Soak Up Some Alcohol
209 Pick a Poultice
210 Be an Informed Infuser
211 Learn Tincture Treatments
212 Brew a Hot Oak Compress
213 Tap a Tree
214 Follow These Tapping Tips
215 Boil Some Tree Sugar
216 Explore Your Choices
217 Brew Some Maple Wine
218 Meet the Bees
219 Get the Right Gear
220 Set Up a Colony
221 Feed Your Bees Well
FROM OUTDOOR LIFE
LET’S BE HONEST. You probably don’t need this book. You can fill your refrigerator and pantry daily from the storehouse of packaged provisions at your local supermarket. You can eat sanitized meat and prewashed vegetables. Everybody does it. I’m sure you’ll be fine.
But equally clear is this: If you are reading this, then you know everything is not always fine. You know the supermarket is a flimsy convenience, its freezers and fluorescent lights less reliable than most people think. You know you may not always be able to count on a take-out pizza from the joint on the corner.
If you are reading this, then you are obeying some primitive urge to take care of yourself. I don’t mean tuning your head by seeing a counselor or toning your body by visiting a gym. I’m talking about the most basic kind of maintenance: Surviving until at least tomorrow by finding shelter for yourself and your tribe, protecting your possessions, and most fundamentally, gathering and keeping food.
It’s easy to ignore these Paleolithic impulses in our digital, ironic age, but if you look deeply, you’ll see evidence of our ancient caloric urges: your neighbor’s kempt garden, your taste for heirloom vegetables and undercooked meat, the deep satisfaction you feel when you pluck ripe fruit from a wild tree, your tendency to hoard bacon when it goes on sale.
This book is not only a user’s guide to accumulating calories in any way possible, it’s also a rich celebration of your inner scavenger.
The author of this book, Tim MacWelch, is what I’d call a cheerful skeptic. He’s not so sure we’ll always have enough rain to grow our gardens or that our neighbors will always be charitable when they run out of food. He’s uncertain of our anonymous systems of energy and food distribution. He’d rather rely on his own wits and wisdom to make his living.
Tim is no pointy-headed prepper or deep-woods mystic. He isn’t a doomsayer or a conspiracy theorist. Instead, he’s pragmatic, practical, and one of the few people I’d like to be stranded with in the wilderness, which can be defined as the remote backcountry or the empty streets of suburban subdivisions. Tim solves problems by calmly, reasonably assessing situations and observing alternatives, and then finding food nearly everywhere he looks. This book is really a series of alternatives to the supermarket.
But it’s more than that. It’s a manual to living honestly.
Tim teaches you how to catch a fish, but more critically, how to preserve a limit of fish so you can eat them for the next month. Tim teaches you how to recognize edible plants, but also how to save their seeds so you can perpetuate their sustenance. Tim teaches you how to light a fire, cook and cure wild meat, make a food-saving brine, recognize poisonous plants, concoct an herbal remedy, find water, rig a bow, set a snare, and if you get weary of all that solitude, signal for help.
This is a field guide to our collective past as much as it is a user’s guide to the future. But ultimately, it’s a modern manual for noticing that the world around us is full of food. So buy this book. Take it home and learn how you can gather a wild salad on your way home from work. How you can catch a week’s worth of fish by setting out a simple trap in your neighborhood creek. How you can recognize the obscure wildlife in your area by reading their tracks and their scat. How you can make a serviceable bow out of household products.
And, ultimately, how you can recognize calories in all their various and obscure forms in the world around you. Because it’s calories—not relationships, or money, or possessions—that will enable you to survive from today ’til tomorrow. And pass this book down to your heirs.
Andrew McKean
Editor-in-Chief, Outdoor Life
Can you really “live off the land” like our ancestors did?
The truthful answer isn’t a simple yes or no—it depends on a dizzying array of factors. The location, the time of year, the weather, and the populations of plants and animals all have a huge impact on the success of a modern-day hunter-gatherer. And how long are you planning to live on wild food? It may be easy to find food for a day, but finding food for a year is a much more daunting task. Cultivating and honing your foraging, fishing, trapping, and hunting skills will play a major role in the amount of food you can bring home—or back to base camp. And in all your pursuits, you’ll need to be observant, patient, intuitive, and lucky in order to maintain a full, balanced diet of wild foods.
But it can be done.
You and I are living proof that our forebears collected their meals from the wild. Food harvesting, in fact, is the world’s oldest occupation. Once our predecessors secured their shelter, fire, water, and tools, the rest of their daily labor would have been devoted to the gathering of food—as is this book. The Hunting & Gathering Survival Manual is designed to be your guide through the world of foraging wild edible foods, harvesting game animals, and providing for your every survival food need.
The art of collecting food from the wild is a synergistic one; all the disciplines are connected. Once you know the basics, your scouting trip for new trapping sites can quickly turn into a wild fruit–foraging mission, just as your quest to harvest cattail plants can easily turn into a profitable fishing trip. These are self-preservation skills that will take you back into the outdoors—your natural habitat. With practice, your eyes will be opened to the amazing variety of foods that fill the parks, countrysides, and wild places all around you. And with luck, you’ll never need to go hungry again.
Now, let’s eat!
-Tim MacWelch
In my years of teaching survival classes, I’ve often been asked about the strangest thing I’ve ever eaten. The answers always come from the animal kingdom, and the list invariably contains a lot of random animals and animal parts. I’ve eaten deer hearts, squirrel tongues, opossum lungs, and countless other meats and organs, most of which were surprisingly tasty.
These organs and offal weren’t on my plate for some trivial reason; no one dared me to eat anything, nor was I trying to look like some kind of macho survival guy to my friends or students. When I eat most animals, I almost always eat more of them than most folks do, because the organs and other parts are nutritious, and because it’s the right thing to do. Taking an animal’s life should be a sobering experience—it should mean something. By using the entire animal, I honor the experiences of hunting, trapping, and fishing—and I prepare for a survival scenario in which every calorie counts. This first chapter will teach you the practices of respectful harvesting from nature—not just how to be a predator.
And to that end of conservative collection, I’ll show you how to get started in fishing—whether you have tackle or not. You’ll build a foundation in animal-trapping skills and learn what to do once you’ve landed your quarry. From cleaning and preserving to gaining the most nutrition and biggest calorie payouts, you’ll get a lot of mileage from this arena of the wild-food realm.
If it’s got fur, feathers, scales, or a shell, the following pages will help you turn it into a meal.
001 PICK UP A ROD & REEL
We’ve a
ll heard the old adage: “Give a man a fish, you’ll feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, you’ll feed him for a lifetime.” There is a lot of truth in those words—often the best way to help someone is by empowering him to be self-sustaining. If you’ve never fished before, start with the basics, and then share your newfound knowledge with others.
The number of rods and reels on the market can boggle beginners—as can their prices. Sport fishing is a big business, but don’t lose hope—you can get by with a lot less tackle than the store would like to sell you.
All you really need to get started is a rod and matching reel, some monofilament line, and some hooks or lures—plus a fishing license. Study up on these different reel styles, find one that works for you, and grab a rod to match.
SPINCAST REEL This is the easiest reel for beginners to use. The top-mounted reel with thumb-button release makes casting easy, and the closed face keeps the line clean and controlled. These reels are also good for night fishing, but they only handle a limited range of lure weights.
SPINNING REEL Don’t let the similar name fool you. Spinning reels come in open- and closed-faced models and are different from spincast reels. This undermounted reel can suit many types of fishing and it can cast far, even with light tackle. The line can have a tendency to unspool in a beginner’s hands, however.
BAITCASTING REEL These popular, historic reels, which have a partially exposed spool, are often used for larger fish and can be tricky for new anglers. One bad backlash (in which the spool speed exceeds the speed of the outgoing line), and you’ll have a tangled mess of fishing line.
FLY REELS Similar in mechanics to a baitcasting reel, fly reels are a different breed of device used exclusively for fly fishing. Unique rods, fly line, and lures, along with the hypnotic flow of the line, make this a fishing style unlike any other.
TROLLING, CASTING, AND BOAT REELS This group of large, rugged baitcasting reels are almost always used for big-fish sport fishing in saltwater. Marlin, sailfish, tuna, and other big oceanic game fish are often the quarry.
002 GET HOOKED
The hook is really humanity’s attempt to grow some claws. Eagles have little trouble grabbing slippery trout with their hooked talons, and our ancestors no doubt borrowed the idea.