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The Hunting And Gathering Survival Manual

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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.

 

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