by Mick Kitson
And I believed it would because if you believe something will happen then it does, so you have to be careful about what you believe will happen. I believed that I would stop Robert and make Maw safe for nearly a year and then I did.
We set three more snares, one on the run we’d followed further down and then two more on another run that went parallel to the loch at the bottom. Then we went out wide of the area where I thought the rabbits were so we didn’t scare them back down the slope to the loch.
Peppa said ‘Let’s go down to the loch’ and she started running down through the ferns and trees towards the water. I tried to estimate how far I was from the loch in metres. I estimated it was seventy metres, and I knew my stride was ninety centimetres because I had measured it. So I worked out that if I took seventy-seven strides going straight down it was more or less seventy metres. (You divide 7,000 centimetres by 90 and that is approximately 77.7.) This is one of the things I learned to do, estimate distance, and I am good at maths and I know times tables and how to divide in my mind. So if I need to I can work out how far away something is or how long it will take to get to me and that is important for survival. I did seventy-seven strides straight down and got to the lochside and the little beach of flat stones and the water was about fifty centimetres from where I stopped so that wasn’t bad.
The loch was long and turned a corner so from the beach you couldn’t see the end like you could up on the slope. Trees came all the way down to the water all around except on the bit we were. There was a little beach and because of the angle of the slope behind me I estimated the depth to be about a metre and a half deep three metres out, but you can’t really tell for sure because there could be holes or gullies in the rock under the water which would make it deeper. It was flat calm and still. The north breeze had dropped from the morning and the water was like a sheet of glass or highly polished steel.You could see it was yellowy brown in colour but clear quite far out because there had been no substantial rain in this area for close to three weeks. I had checked every day before we came.
Peppa was balancing about three metres out on a rock she had jumped to from some little stepping stones that went out from the beach.
‘Don’t get your trainers wet Peppa’ I said.
‘Alright. Hey Sal I can see fish here . . . wee stripey ones.’
She could actually get her trainers wet because they were made of Gore-Tex which is both waterproof and breathable but if water got in over the top we’d have to dry them out on the fire or they would be dangerous to wear for too long and cause athlete’s foot and other fungal infections. We had to be careful about infections, I had told her this.
Even wee cuts and grazes, because I only had four Amoxicillin tablets which I found in the bathroom cabinet. In my first aid kit I had plasters, iodine, cotton wool, two bandages, safety pins, scissors, Savlon cream and some antidepressants called Citalopram 30. I thought they might come in handy if Peppa got depressed like Maw.They never seemed to do Maw any good but that might be because she was drunk so much they probably didn’t work. Like, you can’t mix antibiotics with alcohol because the alcohol stops the antibiotics from killing bacteria which cause infections. But we didn’t have any alcohol and we weren’t going to get any, even for medicinal purposes.
I also had some paracetamol and ibuprofen and codeine, which is the best painkiller available without a prescription, in case we got hurt or got a sprain or a twisted ankle or I got my period and got period pain. We did periods in P6 and I am thirteen which is the age they said you mostly started getting them. I hadn’t got it yet but planning for potential problems is an important part of survival. Also we could use sphagnum moss, which was everywhere, as an antiseptic on wounds like they did in the First World War.
The wee fish were Perch. The loch is called something in Gaelic like Dubna Da and it contains Pike, Perch, Brown Trout and Eels. We were going to fish for all of these with the rod and reel I nicked off Robert. He most likely nicked it anyway.
It was a ten-foot telescopic spinning rod with a screw reel seat and the reel was a fixed spool Shimano loaded with 10lb line. I had other fishing stuff too. Size 10 and 12 hooks, BB split shot, and some small trout spinners and lures in a plastic pack I nicked from the tackle shop. I also had two Pike plugs and three wire traces, which you need for Pike to stop them biting through the line.
Robert sometimes went down to the wall in the summer to spin for Mackerel and he once brought three back and Maw shrieked and he didn’t know how to gut them or cook them and he just stood there waving them about with Maw shrieking and going ‘Fuck off with them Robert’.
So I watched a YouTube and then gutted and baked them with salt and me and Peppa ate them while Maw and Robert were at the Fishermen’s. And they were lovely and tasted sweet.
The sun was fully up now and it was warm on us and Peppa skipped across the stones to the beach and unzipped her Helly Hansen and chucked it down on the rocks and then jumped up onto the grass and started pulling at it and overturning wee rocks and stones.
She is nearly as tall as me and she is only ten and her skin is the colour of dark honey and in the sun it looks gold. Her hair is frizzy and afro and ginger and she has freckles. I think she will be very, very beautiful when she is a woman. Her teeth are very white and she loves cleaning them and biting things with them. She bit Robert’s hand once when he was hitting Maw and he backhanded her across the room and called her a wee cunt and I jumped on her to stop him hitting her again and he kicked me in the back twice and I had a bruise that went purple then yellow and I was off school again.
I was off school a lot and I worried they’d send the plunkieman to get me to go but they never. Our flat was on the second floor of Linlithgow House. There are three blocks all named after royal palaces on a hill above town and you can see the wall and the sea from the balcony. The other blocks round the court are Falkland and Scone. The entryphone lock was knackered in ours and you just shoved the bottom door with your shoulder.The hall was light blue and smelled of piss and junkies sometimes slept under the first set of concrete stairs going up.
Peppa stopped crying the same time as I did when she was about eight and we neither of us have cried since then. If she is angry she looks down and bites her bottom lip like she does when she is running and if she is sad I make a cradle with my arms and rock her.
She shouted ‘Sal . . . worm!’ and held up a lobworm she’d found. Lobworms are very good bait for Perch and Brown Trout and are unusual in acid soils like the area we were surviving in. Peppa skipped back across the rocks and onto the big stone out in the loch and held the worm over the water. She called across to me ‘See if he’ll take it . . .’ and she dangled the end of it into the water from her fingertips. I was just going to say there was no point without a hook when there was a swirl in the water and splash under the worm and Peppa shouted ‘Bastard!’ and looked over at me with her eyes wide and her mouth open. ‘He took it! He was a big one Sal. Get another worm!’
For the first time since we came here I missed my phone. I wish I could’ve filmed her squatting in the sun on that rock in the flat glass water and beaming and looking happy. I decided to remember it there and then in my mind in case it didn’t happen again. The sun was in her face and she called across ‘Nice here innit?’
And I said ‘Aye’ and jumped up onto the grass and started pulling tussocks up to find a worm. It took ages and the one I found under a rock was flat and reddish and I don’t know what species it was. I jumped out on the wee stones and jumped up next to her on the rock and now she was an expert and she took the worm and went on in a sing-song voice ‘. . . you just dangle it like this and let the wee fishy see his tail in the water . . .’
I said ‘Was he spotty or stripey?’
She said ‘Spotty. Gold and big red spots. What’s that?’
‘Brown Trout’ I said.
‘Can ye eat it?’
‘Aye. We can catch them with spinners too.’
‘
We should’ve brought the rod.Why does he eat spinners?’
‘He doesn’t eat them, he thinks they are prey.’
‘But they’re metal.’
‘Aye, but they flash and look like wee fish when you spin them.’
She turned her head and stared at me. ‘You know everything’ she said.
‘Aye, I do’ I said.
But the big Trout didn’t come back so we dropped the worm in down the side of the rock and watched a wee Perch dart out and take it. This would be a good place for fishing and we would come back tomorrow with the rod.
We started back up the slope with the sun high above us. Peppa walked until we came up to the clearing in the bracken where the grass was greenest and thick and we’d set a snare. Two rabbits sprang out of the grass in front of us and tore off up towards the warren and Peppa took off after them. I watched her springing along through the fern with the rabbits, two brown blurs in front of her and their white arses flashing.
Then Peppa stopped dead and shouted back to me there was a rabbit in a snare we set. She went ‘Sal. Sal lookit!’ and I sprinted up into the clearing.
It was a big long one caught perfect round the throat and bucking and jerking against the cord and the peg. Peppa said ‘I chased him in, I saw him go in it. There’s blood!’
A dark ring of blood was emerging from the throat where the snare wire was clenched tight like a ball, the blood started spraying and flicking in drops on me as the rabbit bucked and I knelt down next to it. I have never killed anything apart from Robert but I was not bothered about it and this was going to be our first kill surviving and I’d seen it done loads of times on telly and YouTube. I grasped the rabbit round the throat and lifted it tugging the snare peg up. It was letting out a high scream like air hissing. I squeezed the neck and the snare ball and felt warm blood flood out onto my fingers.Then I got its back legs that were kicking and caught them in my other hand and pulled as hard as I could and felt a crack under my fingers round the throat and the rabbit hissed and went stiff and then flopped.
Peppa said ‘Fuck me.’
And I said ‘Don’t swear.’ I dropped the rabbit down on the grass and it jerked once when it hit the ground and then went still. It was a big buck. Plenty of meat and a great first snare for us. I felt brilliant.
Peppa stroked its fur. She said ‘He’s warm. Is it a boy or a girl?’
‘Buck or a doe’ I said.
‘Aye. Buck or doe?’
‘A buck. And he’s gonna be our tea.’
‘I chased him in didn’t I not?’
‘You did aye.You herded him like the Sioux with Buffalo.’
‘Did I? Tell me about them.’
‘I’ll tell you stuff later. Tonight when we go to bed.’
She said ‘Okay.’
We walked back up the slope towards the thicker woods and the burn and I held the rabbit by his legs and he was heavy. Then I remembered you’ve got to de-pee them, so I held him by his head and ran my hand down his side and over his stomach and the pee came out from between his legs in a dribble.
Chapter Two
Shots
That afternoon I made a barrier to go behind the fire and reflect heat back towards the shelter and Peppa practised with the slingshot after she had finished the belVitas. With a Bear Grylls knife you can either use the serrated sawing blade to cut wood or you can use a stone as a hammer and hit the blunt side of the blade into a branch at the bottom until it is mostly cut through and then rip it off. I used living branches from birch for the uprights and cut points into the end and then hammered them in with a stone until they were about a metre high. Then I wove branches in between, mostly smaller birch, some alder and some hazel sticks from a pollarded hazel by the burn. The barrier was curved and ran along the front of the shelter about two metres back from where we slept on a raised bed made from birch and alder poles and covered with spruce branches which made a very soft bed and they also insulate and they smell nice.
Peppa collected small round stones from the burn and used them as ammo to practise with the slingshot and I explained the principle of trajectory to her which is that as the speed of the projectile drops the force of gravity comes to bear on it and it falls at a given rate per metre that it is travelling with the fall rate directly related to the speed – so the slower it gets the faster it falls. If you can work out at what point in a given distance the projectile starts to drop then you can make a basic estimate of its eventual position in relation to the target. So that means you can adjust your firing position relative to the target so it is going at maximum speed when it hits it, or you can alter the angle of the aim up or down to make the projectile go in a rising then falling trajectory towards the target.This means you can stand further away and calculate the angle you need to hit the target, but the further away you stand the higher the aim angle needs to be and the less velocity the projectile will have when it hits the target.
So I told Peppa all this about the slingshot and trajectories and she looked at me and frowned and then said ‘Righty-ho Sal’ and started firing stones at the belVita box.
There is an optimum distance from target you can eventually find which ensures the necessary velocity for a kill, the least falling trajectory and the necessary distance from an animal or a bird so you don’t scare it. I told Peppa to try and find that. I thought that if the stone punctured the cardboard of the belVita box then that was probably enough power to kill a rabbit or a Pheasant or a Grouse from whatever distance she was shooting from.
She said ‘Could this kill a deer?’
And I said no because you’d never be able to get close enough to it for the stone to have the necessary power. Deer have hard skulls. Even if you went for a neck shot it would be unlikely to pierce it. I wondered if Robert’s airgun would kill a deer. It would go through 9mm plywood on ten pumps at a distance of about twenty metres and I should think that would go through a roe deer’s skull, and it would definitely go through the neck but I am not sure you could get that close to a deer unless you sat silent downwind for a long time. Most deer rifles are 30-06 or 30-30 calibre which is a very high speed bullet and maintains its power over very long distances like up to a kilometre. And it is a real bullet powered by a cartridge and explosives, but Robert’s rifle is only a .22 airgun and the muzzle velocity is restricted by law. So you would have to get really close. But I thought I might try. A deer would provide meat for several days and they don’t hibernate and I fancied getting camouflaged and stalking one.
Ed Stafford caught one, in some woods in Poland or somewhere like that he was surviving in, with a snare made from a bent-over sapling that triggered and strangled the deer. He skinned it and used the skin for a jumper and he buried the meat in a pit fire to cook it and he hung a load up over the fire so bears didn’t get it. There are no bears in the Galloway forest so we didn’t have to worry about that and I thought I might have a go at making that snare in a few days when we were properly settled in and we knew nobody was looking for us.
I collected more wood for the fire, I got dead branches mostly off trees or leaning up off the ground because they are the driest. I made a long pile the length of the shelter and stacked another pile next to it to dry and use later then I got birch bark for tinder and used the flint and steel to make a spark and blew it until I got a flame and fed in dry grass and twigs and got it going. I used burning twigs to start two more points at the end and in the middle so it would all burn along its whole length. Even after a few minutes I could feel the heat bouncing off the barrier when I sat on the raised bed.
Then I gutted the rabbit and although I had never done it before I had watched it done loads of times and it was easy and I kept the liver, heart and kidneys for fishing bait because they are good for Eels. To skin a rabbit first you cut off the head and the paws, then you pull the skin down each leg until they pop out and then you drag the whole lot back up the body slowly until it all comes off in a oner.
Most of the meat on a rabbi
t is on the legs and the haunches and so I cut it in half and put some McDonald’s salt on it and laid it on a big flat stone over the fire to cook. Then I went down to the burn and washed my hands because of infections and food poisoning.
I had seen a video of Inuit women in Alaska curing and stretching skins on round frames made from alder saplings, so I cut a long one and made a circular hoop about a metre diameter and bound it with paracord. Then I laid out the skin and made a series of little holes around its perimeter with the Bear Grylls knife.Then I threaded paracord through one, then over the frame, then back through the next one all the way round until the skin was stretched out across the whole frame.
When I was doing this sitting by the fire and with the sun starting to go down and the northerly breeze picking up and making my fingers cold, and the smell of the fire and it cracking and popping, I felt for a minute like I had always done this. I had always been able to thread a rabbit skin onto a frame and this wasn’t the first time.
It felt funny, and I couldn’t remember for a minute if I had ever done it or if I had only seen them doing it on YouTube. And for a minute, or for a few seconds really, I felt a bit dizzy and I could only see my hands threading the cord through the skin and over the hoop and back through the skin and back over the hoop and pulling it tighter. I couldn’t feel the fire on my legs or the cold on my hands or hear the crackles or Peppa shooting at the belVita box, I could only see my hands and the thread and the little holes in the skin and the dark bark on the alder hoop and my hands moving like it wasn’t me. Like I was a big eye watching it. And behind the big eye was a big black space and I was peering out from an eye-shaped hole in it at my hands threading the cord through the skin and over the hoop.
And then I came back and I was still threading the cord and the rabbit was starting to sizzle on the stone and Peppa came running over with the slingshot and belVita box and said ‘I can hit it but it just dents it, look . . .’ And she showed me the little dents and dinks in the yellow cardboard.