by Les Stroud
As with any natural material, boughs may not always be where you need them to be. Once, while teaching survival skills to a husband and wife, I was touting the benefits of boughs as shelter materials. It was a perfect teaching opportunity, because we were walking right through a “Christmas tree” forest. Two hundred yards later, however, we had left the spruce forest and entered a deciduous forest, where there wasn’t a bough to be seen! Our discussion naturally turned to making an emergency short-term shelter out of leaves.
A couple hundred yards can make all the difference in the world when it comes to survival. When you travel, make a note of the natural materials you see.
You might be lucky enough to come across a tree that’s been blown down by the wind, root bed and all. These root beds are walls of earth as large as 10 feet (3 m) in diameter that often stand up perpendicular to the ground and can be used to form the walls of a shelter.
You may also come across a boulder in the forest. If it’s large enough, use this as one wall of your shelter, as described above for root beds.
A root bed is also great to use in an emergency short-term situation because it provides a ready-made windbreak and wall.
The added benefit of incorporating a boulder into your shelter’s construction is that if you build a fire up against it, it will reflect the heat back at you.
The Arctic and Polar Regions (or anywhere in the snow)
The best shelter to use in the Arctic (in the winter) is the igloo. The problem with igloo building, however, is that it takes skill and practice. Few people can make an igloo on their first try if they haven’t been trained. You have to know what kind of snow to look for—it feels like you’re cutting into Styrofoam—and understand the process. A few photos in a book will not give you the instruction you need to build one successfully. That’s why it’s imperative that everybody planning to travel in the Arctic in the winter take a survival course, and one that includes igloo building.
Another option in areas of ample snow is the snow cave. Although most books make the snow cave seem like an easy shelter to build, it’s not (at least not the first time). I’ve been in survival mode in the middle of winter where there was snow all around me, and still I could not find a suitable spot for a snow cave. In the right location, however, a snow cave can provide protection that could save your life in winter conditions.
Related to the snow cave is the quinzee. The difference between a quinzee and a snow cave is that a snow cave requires that you find a snowdrift and dig into it. With a quinzee, you take matters into your own hands and make the pile of snow yourself, then dig out a cave. This can work, but I hesitate to call it a survival shelter because a) you have to be in a place where you can maneuver enough snow into a large pile, b) you need a shovel (or at least a snowshoe) for digging, c) building it exhausts you, and d) you get soaking wet while making it.
If you decide to make a quinzee, dig your entry hole on the side away from the wind. And with any snow-cave shelter, make sure you poke a hole in the ceiling for ventilation. Finally, make a small fire inside for a few minutes to glaze the ceiling. The ice-glazed ceiling will reflect your body heat back inside and any moisture will drain down the sides rather than drip on you.
Whether you decide to build a snow cave or quinzee, the effort you exert making one (as well as the snow that accumulates all over your body) will make you wet. So brush off snow constantly and remove layers as necessary to minimize sweating.
Summer in the Arctic changes your perspective greatly, and your first priority will be getting away from the bugs. Choose as windy an area as possible; that’s where the bugs won’t be.
Making a Snow Cave
1. Start by digging a snow trench. A snow trench is the emergency short-term version of the snow cave. As you dig, use the excess snow to make the walls higher.
2. Make a bed on the floor of the trench using available materials and cover the top with branches to make the roof frame.
3. Close the roof off to the weather with a tarp or emergency blanket. If you don’t have this type of man-made material on hand, you can also use boughs, bark, or leaves.
Making a Quinzee
1. Find a spot that has a large enough deposit of snow for a quinzee, or the right pitch and angle to allow you to dig a snow cave. This is a task unto itself.
2. Place a few sticks at strategic locations throughout your snow shelter. Then, if you come upon one when you’re digging out from the inside of the quinzee, you’ll know how far you’ve come and how thick the wall is.
3. Hollow out the snow pile to create a cave. The inside platform must be higher than the entrance so that the cold air flows out and the warm air stays in.
4. Keep a pole inside with you while you dig your cave. It can save your life if the roof collapses. Should this happen, twist the pole slowly until it bores an opening in the snow above you.
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STROUD’S TIP
It’s important to keep the inside of winter shelters free from snow. Native peoples, particularly the Inuit, are fastidious about shaking off every last fleck of snow before they crawl inside a shelter. You need to be the same way. If you aren’t, the snow will melt, leaving you damp and miserable.
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Jungles
The best type of shelter in the jungle is a lean-to combined with a hammock or platform bed to keep you protected from the critters that live on the jungle floor.
Wind is not usually a consideration because of the denseness of the vegetation, and a lean-to should allow you to make a fire. Just make sure your bed is well up off the ground! A Waorani friend of mine once woke up to find a snake sleeping curled around his legs. He lay still for the next seven hours until the snake finally moved on, apparently fully rested.
Your jungle survival kit should contain bug netting, which will make all the difference in the quality of your sleep. Drape it over your bed or cover yourself with it to keep most flying and stinging insects from getting to you.
Coastal Regions
Most coastal regions provide ample materials for shelter, as they are usually not too far from temperate forests. Driftwood is another possible shelter-building material found along the coast.
One often-ignored material in these regions that may help you when constructing a shelter is the flotsam (beach junk) that washes up on shore. You may find items such as fishing nets, pieces of plastic, and barrels, all of which you—the adaptive and ingenious survivor—can use to your benefit.
In some coastal areas you may find enough large rocks to construct a rock shelter. Build the shelter in the shape of a U, and cover the roof with any suitable material, including driftwood. Be warned, though: these shelters are labor intensive and difficult to build, especially if you are lacking food and energy.
I built this shelter from flotsam collected from the beach.
Mountains
Mountainous areas are often surrounded by forests, so any of the shelters that use trees or are mentioned in the boreal/temperate forest section apply here as well.
A possibility in coniferous mountain forests where the snow is deep is to dig a tree well, also known as a tree-pit shelter. Locate a tree with low-hanging boughs and dig out the snow around the trunk until you reach your desired depth and diameter, or until you reach the ground. Clear away any dead bottom branches that are in the way (use them for firewood). You can place evergreen boughs or other material in the bottom of the pit for comfort and insulation.
No matter where you build your shelter in the mountains, take into account the risk of avalanche, rockslide, or rockfall.
Swamps
The ground near swamps is generally damp, so your primary concern is to make sure your bed is well off the ground. One option is to make a swamp bed. Find three or four trees clustered together. Use sturdy poles to connect the trees at the same height; this is the frame of your bed. You can either rest the poles against the trees’ branches or attach them using rope or cord. Now fill the space within
your frame with a series of cross pieces. Cover the top of the bed with any soft insulation/bedding materials you can find.
While a swamp bed can get you out of the water, it can’t get you away from alligators.
Chapter Eight
FOOD
Almost everybody who travels, it seems, worries about starving in a survival situation. In reality such concerns are largely overblown: you can survive for a month (or longer) without putting any food in your body. This is hard for some people to wrap their heads around, since most who live in developed nations are comfortably used to eating three or more meals a day. The thought of going days—or even hours—without a substantial meal is a scary proposition. But though it’s not necessarily comfortable to go for a stretch without food, it is possible.
Your quest for food will be easier if before you leave you research what you can eat, how to catch or pick it, and how to make it edible. There may be food in abundance all around you in the wild, but you have to know it’s there, and if necessary, how to prepare it. And there’s danger in consuming something without knowing if it’s edible.
The first time I saw star fruit was in Costa Rica. As I stared, wondering if they were poisonous, my survival buddy and military survival expert Mike Kiraly was stuffing his face with them. Had it not been for him, I might never have tried them, thereby missing out on an important and abundant food source.
Many early explorers died from scurvy while sleeping on beds of spruce boughs, which when boiled into tea would have provided all the vitamin C they needed.
Manage Your Energy
THE MAIN EFFECT YOU’LL NOTICE FROM LACK OF FOOD is a significant decrease in your energy level. In many survival situations, I’m fine without eating for a week, but I really notice the loss of energy. As my energy fades and I tire quickly, I can work for only an hour or so at a time, and then I have to sit down and rest for 20 or 30 minutes. Then I work a little more, only to have to sit or lie down again. I repeat that pattern throughout the day.
So forget about needing massive quantities of food on which to feast, accept the stomach growling as part of your ordeal, and focus on getting something, anything, into your system that will increase your energy.
Closely manage your activity level so that you require less food than usual. This means sitting down if you don’t need to stand, lying down if you don’t need to sit, and sleeping if you don’t need to be awake. Anything you can do to slow your heart rate and relax will preserve your energy for the things you need to do to stay alive. The major risk you run from lack of energy is that it can lead to listlessness, apathy, and ultimately, depression.
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STROUD’S TIP
The more food you eat, the more water your body needs for digestion. So if you are short on water, then eat less food, or you’ll speed up the dehydration process. On the other hand, if you’re near a large source of fresh drinking water, force yourself to drink every half hour. This not only keeps your system flushed and clean but also makes your stomach feel like something’s in there. This is a trick I use all the time while filming survival ordeals.
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The Myth of Wild Edibles
PERHAPS NOTHING IS AS OVER-ROMANTICIZED IN THE world of survival as the notion of gathering and eating wild edibles such as plants and mushrooms. Many people envision the wilderness as providing a bounty of plants to feast upon. Don’t be fooled; the search for plants to eat can be fraught with danger. These are the some of the challenges you’ll encounter.
Identification
Plant identification in various parts of the world is difficult at the best of times, even if you have a book telling you their Latin names and accompanied by photos. The same plant may look different depending on your location or the time of year, and this is not easily gleaned from most guidebooks. Some plants are safe to eat, abundant, and easily identified, but for the most part reading a book is not the way to learn about most wild edibles. You really need an expert on the local vegetation to offer you first-hand education on location: you should smell it, touch it, taste it. Then, when the time comes, you’ll know it.
Availability
Contrary to popular notion, wild edibles often are not plentiful. There are some regional exceptions, such as coconut trees on tropical islands or prickly pear cacti in the Sonoran Desert. But even with coconuts, once you’ve eaten what’s fallen on the ground and knocked down what you can reach with a stick, you’ve got to climb 30 to 60 feet (9 to 18 m) up the tree to get at the rest, and that’s not easy to do.
The truth is, you might have to walk for miles before you find a single wild edible. When I was in the Amazon, the only significant source of fruit I found was in an overgrown jungle area that had previously been a farm. Otherwise there was nothing but big green leaves everywhere, which my Waorani teachers didn’t eat.
Even while spending a year in the wilderness in northern Ontario, my wife, Sue, and I found only one or two places where the blueberries and raspberries grew so thick that we couldn’t eat all of them in one sitting.
Season
Most wild edibles, especially fruits, grow only at certain times of the year.
Latitude
The availability of wild edibles is region-specific. As a rule, the farther you are from the equator, the less abundant wild edibles become. So if you’re in the Rocky Mountains, the best time to find wild edibles is really limited to spring and berry season. Everything but berries is unpalatable and difficult to digest.
The farther you get from the equator, the more you have to rely on meat or critters for food. That said, it seemed peculiar to me that the Waorani of the Amazon could not teach me about very many wild green edibles. It turned out they believe that because greenery is eaten by the small animals it will make them weak, so they stick primarily to meat, manioc (a potato-like root), and a few fruits.
Personal Sensitivities
You may have a severe allergic reaction to a plant you’ve never before eaten. Given this risk and the many other variables in identifying and eating wild edibles, your best bet is to know two or three that are plentiful and easily identified for each of the world’s regions. These are listed later in this chapter as my Top Three Wild Edibles and Top Three Critters.
The Edibility Test
IF YOU HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO EAT WILD PLANTS that you cannot identify, you should employ a last-ditch effort called the edibility test, which exposes your body to the plant in slow increments.
Since the edibility test requires a lot of time and effort (and potential risk), make sure there is enough of the plant available to make the test worthwhile. Note that it does not work with all poisonous plants! Here are the steps to follow:
1. Test only a single plant type at a time; don’t eat anything else during the test period. Rub the plant on a sensitive part of your body such as your wrist; wait
2. 45 minutes to an hour for signs of any adverse effects like nausea, hives, dizziness, or shortness of breath.
3. If there’s no negative effect, take a small part of the plant and prepare it the way you plan on eating it.
4. Before eating, touch a small part of the prepared plant to your outer lip to test for burning, tingling, or itching.
5. If there is no reaction after five minutes, place the plant on your tongue. Hold it there for 15 minutes.
6. If there is no reaction after 15 minutes, chew a very small amount for 15 minutes; observe for any adverse effect. Do not swallow.
7. If you still feel fine after chewing for 15 minutes, swallow it.
8. Wait eight hours. If you begin to notice any adverse effects, induce vomiting and drink as much water as possible. If there are no adverse effects, eat a small handful of the plant.
9. Wait another eight hours. If there are still no negative effects, you are likely safe.
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STROUD’S TIP
In almost all parts of the world most grasses are chewable. Don’t swallow the grass itself, just chew it and
swallow the juice. It’s a good way to get some nutrients into your system.
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Critters and Creepy Crawlies
THE GOOD NEWS ABOUT CRITTERS is that they are plentiful in many parts of the world. From worms to ants to frogs, there are usually lots of items on the menu. The problem, obviously, is that most of us find the prospect of eating bugs and slugs and snails downright disgusting, a phenomenon known as plate fright. Believe me, after a few days without food, you get over plate fright pretty quickly.
Almost every culture on the planet has either an active or recent history of eating critters as part of its diet, whether it be tarantulas in the Amazon, chocolate ants in India, or grubs in northern Ontario. We’re not alone, either: most predators and big-game animals will eat bugs too. If you’re at risk of starving, the fact that these creatures are almost universally high in protein and fat may make them more appealing. Don’t forget that insect larvae are also edible.
To successfully eat critters, follow a few basic rules:
Get over plate fright. Remember, your ancestors feasted on slimy, wriggly creatures. Why can’t you?