by Gary Paulsen
So it was the one bit of research I couldn’t finish, though I tried three times. The second and third tries were worse, much worse, resulting in dry heaves and a snort from Cookie when nothing came. But I left it in because Brian was a different person, in a much different situation. Pushed to the limits of hunger he would probably have been able to keep the eggs down.
Even if they were slimy and yellow and tasted totally funky.
CHAPTER 6
THE JOY OF COOKING
He would not forget his first hit. Not ever. . . . He grabbed the arrow and raised it up and the fish was on the end, wiggling against the blue sky.
He held the fish against the sky until it stopped wiggling, held it and looked to the sky and felt his throat tighten, swell, and fill with pride at what he had done.
He had done food.
HATCHET
We take so much for granted when it comes to eating that we almost always forget how easy we have it. When we’re hungry we simply throw a package in the microwave, punch a button and eat a hot meal. Most people seem to consider “roughing it” to mean that they actually have to cook a meal—peel the potatoes, fry the steak, cut up the string beans. We forget that for most of man’s history there was no such thing as a frying pan or a cooking pot or a salt shaker or a fork.
Brian lived as they did in prehistoric times, and as I have done on occasion. But even with primitive cooking methods it’s possible to have relatively good food. As an example, here are a few recipes that have worked well for me.
HOT WATER
Tricky without a pot, but if there is time (and there is always time if you’re lost in the wilderness) you can make a pot by stitching green birch bark into a cone and using thick pine pitch (taken from lumps of pitch found on the sides of pine trees) to seal the seam of the cone. (It helps if you warm the pitch next to the fire to make it sticky, then use a twig to apply it, because once it sticks to your fingers it will be there until the skin rubs off.) This is the same technique used by Native Americans to make birch-bark canoes. One problem with a birch-bark cooking pot is that the pot doesn’t last long and the pine pitch needs to be repaired constantly.
To heat water, make a forked-branch handle to hold the cone wedged in the middle, then add cold water. Heat bits of granite stone as hot as possible in a fire and, using sticks as tools, drop them in the water. Any ash will float to the surface and can be skimmed off. The water can be sipped hot (great on a cold morning) or meat can be put in to make a soup or stew.
A note about water: Of course good water is necessary for survival and bad water can kill you. The Lewis and Clark expedition headed into probably the cleanest, least-polluted wilderness in the world when they made their voyage of discovery, and yet dysentery from drinking bad water was still devastating to them. When they were boating on muddy, dirty water, they would simply dip their tin cups in the river and drink the water. They had no knowledge of bacteria or what caused disease, but they suspected dirty water. However, rather than boil it for twenty minutes before drinking it, which will kill most bacteria, the men dipped their cups well beneath the scum on the surface to get at the “pure” water down below. They had medicine with them and the one they used most was a “purgative pill” that would clean out the system “like a bomb”—which must have been incredible if given to a man who already was suffering from dysentery. The wonder is that any of them lived through it.
Fish or Meat Stew
Using the same birch-bark container or one like it, put a fish or small animal in the water and keep adding and removing hot— really hot, red-hot if possible—bits of granite until the water boils, then keep adding reheated stones until the meat is cooked and falling off the bones. If it is a fish, don’t skin or scale it; if it is small game, remove the hair; if it’s a bird, remove the feathers but leave the innards inside. This is for two reasons. First, it actually makes the meat taste better. Second, there is much food value in liver and kidney and heart. But you might want to remove the stomach and intestines. If you do, don’t waste them; strip out the digested or partially digested food, wash them in cold water, then cook both the stomach and intestines in the soup-stew you’re making in the birch-bark pot. In the old days native people would pull the intestines out of an animal they had just killed and eat them raw, contents and all, sometimes sprinkling a little gall from the gallbladder on it for seasoning—this was especially true when they killed and ate buffalo.
If it’s a small animal or fish, once it is cooked, drink the broth and then pick the meat off the bones and eat everything—everything; suck the eyes out, dig out the brain. Get over your squeamishness because it is the exact opposite of what you need to survive in the wilderness.
Plank Food
Not as good as making a pot out of birch bark, but if there is no birch bark available and you don’t want to eat the meat raw, this is a slightly better way of cooking than putting the meat on a stick and turning it over the fire, because spit cooking lets too much of the food drip into the fire and burn up. With plank cooking you leave the animal whole, taking off the hair or feathers. Fashion a flat piece of wood and use wooden pegs to hold the meat to the wood, then prop the plank on rocks so that it faces the heat. Let it lean there until the meat is done enough to eat. It does work, if slowly, but you don’t have a broth to drink and some of the food value is lost, dripping away or soaking into the wood.
Either way, with the boiling method or plank cooking, when you are done you can use the bones for making another stew, or at least a flavored broth, if a container of some kind is available. Bird bones are hollow because birds need to be light to fly, but small-game bones have marrow and if broken and reboiled will provide more nutrition.
When dried, small bones can be useful as tools; arrowheads for small-game arrows can be fashioned from fire-hardened bones that have been filed sharp on abrasive stones. You can also use them for fishhooks when using a piece of line with bait—perhaps a grub worm that you haven’t eaten yourself.
Nothing goes to waste.
Spit Cooking
Maybe the first cooking ever done was done by mistake when a piece of meat or some form of plant food fell into the fire and was snaked out with a stick. It’s hard to call this cooking—it’s more of an accident—but it must have led to cooking on a spit.
It is not a particularly good way to cook meat—although it has evolved into shish kebab cooking, which works well at a barbecue—but it does get food cooked, and if done carefully and with a great deal of attention it’s not so bad. The main thing to remember is to keep the meat just close enough to the fire to cook it but not so close as to burn it, and to rotate it constantly, to keep the juices from all dripping into the fire. The worst, and I mean the very worst piece of meat I ever had, was when I tried spit cooking a jackrabbit and didn’t rotate it constantly. Jackrabbit is notoriously tough anyway, and just about the only way to cook it is to boil it until it is little more than mush, but I was in a desert and had neither cooking utensils nor birch bark to make a pot. The rabbit practically walked into my arrow and I hadn’t eaten anything but two lizards for a day and a half. I finally cut the spit-roasted meat in chunks and swallowed them whole because they simply weren’t chewable. I think if I had tried to chew it up before swallowing it I’d be chewing it yet. It was nutritious and kept me going but was just like chewing wood. Cottontail rabbits were plentiful and after I learned how to hunt them I never ate roasted jackrabbit again. The problem with cottontails is that they are largely nocturnal; they live in burrows during the day and are hard to hunt in daylight. The solution was shown to me by an Apache who found an old piece of barbed wire and made it into a six-foot-long crank. He would crank the wire into a rabbit hole until it tangled with the rabbit’s fur, then pull out the rabbit and knock it in the head. I did this four or five times over three days. Then one morning I worked the crank into a rabbit hole, felt it hit something and pulled out about three and a half feet of really angry diamondback rattlesnake.
It struck four times, somehow without touching me, while I cranked it back into the hole.
Pit Cooking
Cooking in a heated pit is a very popular way to cook meat.
Dig a pit larger than the item you are going to cook and fill it with rocks, then build a roaring fire on the rocks until they are nearly red-hot. Then take the fur or feathers off the animal and wrap the meat in many layers of long grass and soft leaves (or dampened burlap, if it’s available), put it on the rocks and cover the whole thing with at least a foot of dirt. Then leave it all night, or if you started in the morning, wait until late afternoon or evening, and you will find the meat tender and delicious.
I have pit-cooked grouse and rabbit and beef and mutton and pork and venison and lobster and fish (catfish, walleye, northern pike and sea bass, and tuna wrapped in seaweed) and loved them all, and in the end I think this is probably my favorite way of wilderness cooking—with one exception.
I was helping as a laborer on a really bad movie about mountain men, so bad that it was never released. This was years before the present regulations governing animal use existed. Part of the film involved shooting and killing a buffalo, which had been purchased from a nearby ranch. This was done poorly, and the meat would have gone to waste because nobody in the crew seemed to know what to do after the buffalo was killed. I found a butcher knife in one of the catering wagons and before they could drag the carcass off I cut a line down the back, peeled the skin back (it was incredibly thick and tough) and cut out about a ten-pound hump roast and five or six pounds of tenderloin from next to the backbone.
One of the associate producers saw me cutting away and confiscated the tenderloin but he left me the hump, so I made a fire near the movie location, which was out in the desert. I was camped in an old army tent and I cooked the whole hump over a bed of mesquite coals, turning it constantly, and I have never tasted meat that good. The smoky taste, mixed with rich fat and a touch of wildness, made it incredibly good. I had a friend working on the film and the two of us sat there and ate the whole thing, cutting off slabs of meat with the borrowed butcher knife, and washed it down with glasses of pure spring water.
It was a grand feast, a feast that made me think of ancient people and how they must have been before there was writing, before there was recorded history, when they sat this way by old fires, cutting meat with stone tools, looking up at the stars and letting the food and fire fill them with life. It was probably the closest I have ever come to being a cave painting, except when I ran my first Iditarod and let the dogs carry me back in time. In a strange way, although my buffalo feast was in barren desert and not northern woods and lakes, it might have been the time when I was closest to Brian in Hatchet and Brian’s Winter. It would be eight more years until I would move north and run dogs and trap wild animals and begin the process of actually writing about Brian, but it all started when I ate the buffalo hump by the fire.
What if, I asked myself that night, looking into the flames. What if a person suddenly found himself in a wilderness as old as time . . .
ALSO BY GARY PAULSEN
Alida’s Song
The Beet Fields: Memories of a Sixteenth Summer
The Boy Who Owned the School
The Brian Books: The River, Brian’s Winter
and Brian’s Return
Canyons
The Car
Caught by the Sea: My Life on Boats
The Cookcamp
The Crossing
Dogsong
Father Water, Mother Woods: Essays on Fishing
and Hunting in the North Woods
Harris and Me
Hatchet
The Haymeadow
The Island
The Monument
My Life in Dog Years
Nightjohn
The Night the White Deer Died
Puppies, Dogs, and Blue Northers
The Rifle
Sarny: A Life Remembered
The Schernoff Discoveries
Soldier’s Heart
The Transall Saga
The Tucket Adventures, Books One through Five
The Voyage of the Frog
The White Fox Chronicles
The Winter Room
Picture books, illustrated by Ruth Wright Paulsen:
Canoe Days and Dogteam
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Copyright © 2001 by Gary Paulsen
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