by Tim MacWelch
Just stick your meal-to-be onto spits or skewers. Metal ones can be reused again and again, or you can make them from green living wood for a single use—just make sure your skewers are from a nontoxic species.
Using live wood for skewers is a very handy trick, as the moisture-filled sticks resist burning. This method can be used on a small scale, like roasting a marshmallow on the end of a stick, or you can fashion a spit that will help roast an entire animal. If you decide to cook something on the big side (say, chicken-size or larger), make a spit that has a side spike or prong of some kind. When the roast, bird, or carcass is impaled on the spit, this prong will stabilize the food as the spit turns.
159 SET UP A GRIDDLE
Who wouldn’t want to wake up to the aroma of bacon cooking? You can achieve this heavenly morning ritual even in the great outdoors—just fashion a griddle.
Start with a flat stone that will work for frying. It should be able to handle high heat and not be too gritty or rough, as the food will stick to it.
Prop the griddle on a stand of rocks or have it straddle a trench in the dirt with the fire underneath. Maintain a coal bed by feeding it plenty of twigs and sticks. You can cook virtually anything to perfection—meat, vegetables, fry bread, etc. Just remember a few of these pointers.
GRIDDLE TIPS
Maintain constant flames beneath your cooking surface for even heating.
Find a rock with a slight depression in the surface—it will hold oil for frying.
Test unfamiliar rocks by placing one in a large fire and moving far away. If it pops or crumbles, find a new type.
Never collect rocks from a wet location, as trapped steam can make them explode when heated.
When finished cooking, let the griddle slowly cool down on its own. Don’t try to wash it until it’s cold.
160 BUILD A STONE OVEN
A stone oven is great for meats, vegetables, and baked goods and can be used repeatedly by simply rebuilding the fire. Just about any tight pile of durable rocks with a hole in the middle can work—the fire’s heat builds up in the stones and then radiates out. There are two types of stone ovens: internally fired, which is made of very large stones around a fire; and externally fired, which involves maintaining a fire all the way around and on top of an oven made of thinner slabs. I have made crispy pizza with an externally fired oven, and I’ve made juicy roasts and desserts with an internally fired oven.
STEP 1 Collect rocks that can handle high heat (the rougher, the better). Look for an existing flat stone in the ground for an internally fired oven base, or place one in a good location.
STEP 2 Build three stone walls and fill in the gaps with clay, if you can.
STEP 3 Form the top using one or several large, wide rocks and caulk with clay. If the oven is internally fired, it’s best to leave an opening near the top to act as a chimney during firing.
STEP 4 Select a large, flat rock to be your door, which should cover the oven opening and be located opposite the chimney hole.
Once built, the oven can be fired right away. For an internally fired oven, burn your fire for 1 1/2 to 2 hours, sweep out the ash and coals, place the food inside, shut the door, and seal the chimney as tightly as possible.
If you’ve built an externally fired oven, you can place the food inside before or during the firing. Tightly seal the door and cover the oven with coals and fire. The food will need to be turned to cook the bottom, unless you placed it on a hot flat stone inside the oven or built an elevated oven with a fire underneath (like building a stone oven on top of a stone griddle).
161 A ROCKING DINNER
IT COULD HAPPEN
On a camping trip with my girlfriend, I decided to show off my camp-cooking skills by building a stone oven.
Everything was going fine, until . . .
Luckily, we all avoided injury, and there were some granite hunks nearby.
I gathered a bunch of nice, smooth rocks . . .
set them up . . .
and lit the fire.
Turns out, smooth rocks probably come from waterways and water in the rocks . . .
well, we learned what happens then.
Our next oven turned out much better.
162 MAKE A STEAM PIT
This elaborate cooking method is worth the trouble because it makes great-tasting food that stays hot for hours. The steam pit is a hole in the ground (or a raised mound) with hot rocks at the bottom covered with dirt or sand. You then sandwich-wrap food between two layers of green vegetation and cover with dirt and/or tarps to seal in the steam. This technique is used all over the globe, often for feasts and special occasions.
STEP 1 Start by digging a pit in the soil or collecting loose soil and sand for a mound. The pit can be any depth, width, or shape, and it can be dug in dirt, clay, or sand.
STEP 2 Collect a pile of rocks that are capable of handling a lot of heat. Make sure you have enough to fill the bottom of the pit—you can even place them in there like a puzzle to see where the stones fit best.
STEP 3 You now have a choice of leaving the stones in the pit and building the fire on top of them, or taking the rocks out of the pit and placing them in a big fire. Either way, the stones should be heated for two hours. If you heat the rocks in the pit, you must scoop the remaining wood, charcoal, coals, and ash out of the pit when the rocks are hot enough, to avoid imbuing your food with an unpleasant flavor. If you heat the stones outside the pit, use a shovel or a large greenwood pole to roll or push the rocks into the pit.
STEP 4 Gather your green vegetation during the rock-firing time. Good steam-pit vegetation is green grass, seaweed, pine boughs full of green needles, or any other abundant nontoxic green plant material. To build a steam pit in winter, you’ll probably have to go with pine boughs, as your choices will be limited.
STEP 5 Once the pit has nothing but hot rocks in it, apply a small amount of damp soil or sand to insulate the hot stones. Add some green vegetation, and then place your food in a single layer on top. Root vegetables and seafood are great when cooked in this manner. Wrap tender foods with large, edible leaves (like burdock) to prevent them from falling apart.
STEP 6 Bury the food with your remaining vegetation. Cover it with a tarp and/or soil. Come back three or more hours later, dig up your food, and enjoy.
163 COOK IN A DUTCH OVEN
These wide cast-iron pots are the most versatile cooking implements you can buy. Dutch ovens serve as a pot, griddle, and pan all in one. And they can also act like an oven, baking everything from bread to cookies. The only drawbacks may be the weight and the price, as Dutch ovens can be heavy on both counts.
BAKING To bake in the Dutch oven, build up a large bed of coals in a fire. Set the oven into the coals and place coals on top of the lid. Try to follow the average cooking times for the food you are preparing, and replace the coals on top of the lid as they burn down.
BOILING You’ll need flames underneath the oven to boil successfully. Hang the attached bail (handle) from a chain or dangle it from a tree. You can also thread a greenwood pole through the bail and support the pole with posts or convenient forks in small trees.
164 CASE STUDY: THE LYKOV FAMILY
How long could you last if you had to live off nature instead of a paycheck? Tough frontiers-men and women of yesteryear lived out their days in the wilderness, where self-sufficiency was not a matter of choice. Could a person today survive indefinitely if he or she were stranded in a remote region? Incredible survival stories abound, but there is one in particular that is a powerful testament to the human capacity to survive in the wild.
WHO The Lykov family
WHAT Escaping religious persecution in Russia
WHERE The Siberian wilderness
WHEN 1936
HOW LONG THEY SURVIVED Over 40 years
THEIR STORY In 1936, a Russian family of four fled into the Siberian wilderness to escape religious persecution. Taking a few homesteading supplies and some seeds, Karp Lykov, his wife, Aku
lina, their nine-year-old son, and their two-year-old daughter retreated into the forests. They built a succession of primitive huts as they traveled, until reaching a habitable spot near the Mongolian border. The couple had no contact with the outside world and became completely self-sufficient.
They had two more children, born in the wilderness, who had never seen a person outside their family until a geology team found their home in 1978.
HOW THEY DID IT For sustenance, the family of six spent their days hunting, trapping, and farming by saving seeds each year to replant next season. The Lykovs had brought a crude spinning wheel, and they grew hemp to produce the fiber for their clothing. Their staple food was potato patties mixed with hemp seeds and ground rye. They lived this way, deep in the forests, for over 40 years.
The unending issues of nourishment and vulnerability to injury and illness are the main critical factors for indefinite survival. That’s assuming you maintain your motivation when things get tough—which they invariably will. The Lykov family survived in no small part due to their devotion to God and to each other. They also grew as much food as the land allowed and rationed it carefully. Each winter, the family would creep close to starvation, but they still held a council meeting to determine whether they should save their seeds to replant or eat them all. Each year, the family made the hard decision to save their seed stock for the next season—even though one winter, it cost the mother her life.
COULD YOU DO IT?
The technical aspects of long-term survival are quite complex. Depending on the place you take up residence, you may require some very specialized tools or techniques to grow, collect, and catch enough food. But first, you’ve got to survive the short-term.
SHELTER This is your most immediate need in survival scenarios, and over time, your shelter becomes your home. Generally, traditional native cultures of any area devised the best shelter style based on the available building materials, weather, and hazards of the area. Cone-shaped homes (or roofs) have been a global favorite, and angular buildings with angled roofs are also of ancient origin. Find out what native people did for shelter in your area, and let your resources, tools, and building skills lead the way.
WATER Staying safely hydrated is both a short- and long-term survival priority. The Lykov family was fortunate to find abundant springs and clean water in the Siberian wilderness, but not all homesteaders are so lucky. Without fresh water, boiling is your best bet—and even if you don’t have a fire-safe container, you can heat rocks and use them to boil water in a wooden or bark bowl.
FIRE What happens when you run out of matches? You’ll either have to keep your fire burning constantly (which was done in the past), or you’ll need long-lasting or replaceable fire-starting gear. Flint and steel kits contain one part that lasts a long time (the high carbon steel striker can last for decades), and the remaining parts (like flint and char) are replaceable. Friction fire is another fire-building technique that can keep you surviving over the long haul.
FOOD Food will play a critical role in a survival scenario of any length. The Lykov’s farmed and foraged for their staples, and wherever you go, you can look to the native peoples for guidance on the best local wild foods and ways to live off those resources.
ATTITUDE The Lykov family had each other and their faith to provide mental and emotional support during their struggle to survive day-to-day. But what would happen if you were alone, struggling against crushing loneliness and isolation? Should you find yourself in this situation, try treating animals like pets so you have something to communicate with. Faith in a higher power can also sustain you. To make it through each day, you’ll need something bigger than yourself, something worth fighting for, and something more important than mere survival.
165 FLAKE A STONE SPEAR
Stone spear points date back millennia, but don’t think of them as backward or ineffective just because they’re old. A famous test in the 1970s proved that stone-tipped spears could even punch through elephant hide, piercing vital organs (don’t worry, the elephant had already died of natural causes prior to the test!).
You can use traditional methods to create a stone spearhead or a shorter-handled stone knife. All you need is a high quality stone piece that is larger than your intended project, and the tools for stone working—plus some practice and patience. Here’s the technique for using direct percussion to create the rough shape of your blade, then finishing it off by pressure flaking with a pointed tool.
STEP 1 Select a piece of flinty rock about the size of a sandwich. This will be the rock you’re breaking into a point. Select another rock that’s round, rough, and a little bigger than a large egg to serve as your hammer. With a wax pencil or marker, draw a line around the circumference of the first rock (imagine a line where you’d cut a bagel). This is known as the midline and it will indicate the center mass of the rock.
STEP 2 Wearing gloves and goggles, hit the thinnest edge of the “sandwich” rock with your hammer stone. Hit just slightly above the midline and right on the edge. Follow through with the strike, like driving in a nail with a hammer. If you picked a good stone for your spearhead and you hit it hard, you should knock a flake of stone from the underside of the rock.
STEP 3 Work your way completely around the stone, striking flakes to create a sharp edge. Alternate the sides of the rock you are striking.
STEP 4 Once you have removed flakes of stone all the way around, work further down with gentler hammer strikes. Strike in spots that have a pronounced ridge underneath the rock, as the force of your strike will travel along these ridges.
STEP 5 Final shaping is too delicate to perform with jolting percussion strikes, so now it’s time to turn to pressure flaking—flaking the edge of the stone with a hard, pointed tool. A traditional choice is a broken deer antler tine; a copper nail driven into the end of a short stick also works. Wear a thick leather glove or pad your palm with pieces of leather, and press hard on the stone edge with your tool to chip it. With a fair bit of practice, you’ll be able to remove long flakes and give your stone tool a uniform shape. For arrowheads and spears, chip in notches at the base of the point.
166 ROCK OUT WITH PERCUSSION
If you need some sharp, expedient blades (like for butchering), the easiest way to get them is via a method called bipolar percussion. In this method, you rest the stone you are trying to break on a large stone and strike it hard with a hammer rock. It’s like being a blacksmith—the big rock is your anvil, providing unyielding resistance behind the breaking rock.
Stand your breaking rock on its tallest axis—this will allow the shock waves from the hammer stone to move through the rock via its most efficient path. For your hammer, use a large, flat stone that’s four to five times larger than the rock you are trying to break. If you’re lucky, you’ll fracture off some thin, wickedly sharp stone blades within a few strikes.
For any stone tool work, make sure you wear gloves (preferably leather) and glasses or goggles to protect yourself from flying stone chips.
167 TEST YOUR LOCAL STONE
Razor-edged rocks are as close as your local creek, if you’re in the right area and know how to break them. Not all rocks produce a good cutting edge when they break, and many have interiors that won’t work for your purposes, so test your stones by delivering a quick tap with a hammer stone to break off a piece. This will show you the rock’s interior and how it breaks, which is everything you need to know.
You don’t need to be a geologist to sort it all out: Flint, chert, jasper, chalcedony, quartz, and obsidian can all break to make sharp cutting tools. Just try out different types of local rock to see what works.
168 KNOW YOUR KNOTS
There is essentially a knot for every outdoor occasion. Whether it be a simple overhand or the more complicated utility knots shown here, knowing basic rope twists in a survival situation can literally save your life. Don’t let these knots intimidate you—you’ll get the hang of them after a few tries, and because a picture
is worth a thousand words, let the illustrations guide you through your practice.
TRUCKER’S HITCH This versatile knot is great for tying down heavy loads for transporting. The combination of knots allows a line to be pulled very tight using the pulley effect of the loop in the middle line. Use it to tie your canoe or kayak to a roof rack or to secure heavy loads in place.
HOW TO TIE Begin by loosely looping your rope as shown (A), leaving the tail end free. Then feed the tail end through your anchor point and then through the loop you made in the first step (B). Next, loop the free end into a half-hitch knot (C). Finally, for extra security, tighten all knot points (D).
HEAVING LINE KNOT There are plenty of times when you might need to throw a rope, and you need a knot that provides enough mass to do the job. A standard heaving line knot doesn’t quite add enough weight and mass, but this supercharged version does.
HOW TO TIE Make two bights in the end of the rope (A)—this results in three “rungs” of rope next to one another. Leave plenty of line in the working end for the wraps.
Next, weave the working end under the middle rung and over the bottom rung, then loop it around the back of the knot to bring it between the top and middle rungs (B). Now wrap all three rungs six to nine times (C). On the last wrap, thread the working end through the remaining loop and tighten (D).