Patriots

by James Wesley, Rawles

  “Where’s he headed?” Doug asked.

  Dan replied casually, “LP/OP.”

  Doug nodded his head. “Sounds like you have a squared-away tactical operation here. Now where was I? Oh yeah, fire starting. The trick is to always start with a tiny fire and work it bigger gradually. I always carry a little dry tinder. Dried moss works the best. And, if you have nothing but damp kindling to light, nothing beats using half a trioxane fuel bar or a full hexamine tablet. That’ll start just about anything.

  “The boots that I had been wearing all this time started to fall apart at the seams. I had them all wrapped up in duct tape. They looked pretty comical, and worse than that, they leaked. I had to wear plastic bags between my inner and outer socks to keep my feet from getting soaked.

  “I crossed the Bitterroots the last week of November. I’ll tell you, at seven thousand feet of elevation, it was plenty cold that time of year. I got close to Darby, which is seventy miles south of Missoula, when the winter really set in, in early December. It was frustrating being so close to home, but unable to go any farther. ‘So close and yet so far.’ The snow was really starting to pile up. I knew that I had to find some decent shelter or I was going to end up a human popsicle for some bear.

  “Out of desperation, I broke into an unoccupied hunting cabin in the Bitterroot National Forest that was off the beaten track. It was a small seasonal cabin without much insulation, but it served my purposes well enough. It had a good supply of firewood under the porch. There was a Franklin stove, bedding, a big year-round spring for water, a couple of good axes, and a bucksaw. There were some canned goods there too. It took a monumental force of will, but I didn’t use anything I found there in the cabin except a bit of salt, soap, and some medical supplies to keep me regular. Those cans of soup, chili, and vegetables were practically singing to me like the sirens of lore. But I resisted the urge. It was bad enough that I was an uninvited lodger, but I wasn’t going to stoop so low as to steal another man’s food.

  “Between snowstorms I gathered as much firewood as I could, and I knocked down two fat does. There was a set of gambrels, two meat saws, and several gutbuckets there at the cabin. I used a pulley and ropes to hang up the skinned-out deer-quarters way up in the fir trees near the house to keep them away from bears. Luckily I didn’t have any bear problems that winter. The meat froze so hard that I had to use an ax to cut it. I left the deer hanging outside and just took each quarter down on an as-needed basis. I used everything from those deer: the brains, the meat, the fat, the heart, and liver. I even sawed the bones open for the marrow.” He added with a snort, “It’s an acquired taste.”

  “I spent most of the winter in my sleeping bag—just hibernating like a bear. It’s a real warm bag—a Wiggy’s Ultima Thule. They make ’em in Colorado. With the heavy bag, I only had to burn a low fire to take the chill off the cabin. I used bedsheets from the cabin as bag liners to protect the sleeping bag from sweat and grime. I piled up another sleeping bag and some blankets from the cabin on top for extra warmth. Tending the fire, cooking one meal a day, and reading is about all that I did for three months. Oh yeah, I also stitched together three pairs of deer hide moccasins. The first pair turned out pretty crummy, but the other two pairs fit me fairly well.

  “I didn’t want to burn any of the candles or kerosene there, for two reasons. First, they didn’t belong to me. Second, burning lights might attract unwelcome attention. I didn’t hear any evidence of anyone living in the area except for a chain saw way off in the distance a few times, and a couple of shots, even further off. I wasn’t taking any chances. I adjusted my sleeping hours to match the sun cycle, so I did all of my reading and cooking during daylight. During the shortest days of the year, I must have been sleeping fourteen hours a day.

  “By about when I estimated it was the middle of February, I was sick and tired of venison and had a bad case of cabin fever. I shot two more deer—both yearlings—in the late winter. I never want to spend a winter by myself like that again. Thankfully, there was a Bible there in the cabin, so I kept sanity by digging into God’s word. It was a Catholic Douay-Rheims version, so I got a chance to read the apocryphal books for the first time. I’m a Methodist and I don’t consider those apocryphal books to be the inspired word of God, but they were fascinating, nonetheless. Aside from the Bible, there was not a full winter’s worth of reading material in the cabin. There were a few hunting and fishing books, and about thirty magazines. I read them all cover to cover—some of them several times.

  “The snow got three feet deep. When it got close to the spring solstice, the snow started receding, and finally it stopped sticking. Since I had burned up the two cords of wood that were stored there at the cabin, I felt it was my responsibility to replace it. I spent most of the mud season cutting down small tamaracks, cutting the wood to stove length, hauling it back to the cabin in a wheelbarrow, splitting it in halves, and stacking it. Without a chain saw it was exhausting work, but it was good to get my muscles back in shape. I wore out a pair of work gloves in the process. I piled the wood box inside right up to the ceiling, and I left more wood under the cabin than I had found originally, so I figured that I was square with whoever owned the cabin.

  “Once I got the firewood in, I started spring cleaning. Before I left, I felt honor bound to clean the cabin. I started out by cleaning the chimney, which had so much creosote in it; it was a wonder that I didn’t have a chimney fire that winter. I swept and scrubbed the floors, washed all the towels and bed linens, and hauled out the buckets of ashes and creosote. All in all, the place looked much better than when I found it. Finally, I washed all my clothes, washed my sleeping bag, gave my web gear a good brushing, trimmed my beard, and gave myself a long hot bath. It was the first bath that I’d had in months. It felt reeeeally good.

  “Before I left, I wrote a long and apologetic thank you letter to the cabin owner and left it on the kitchen table, along with two dollars in the old 90 percent silver coins and all the rest of my paper currency—not that it was worth much. I also left behind two of the four deer hides that I had brain tanned. I rolled them up together around a five-foot length of pine sapling. I hung it from two pieces of wire in the center of the cabin so the mice and rats wouldn’t get to the hides.

  “I got an early start, not long after the snow stopped sticking. I really wanted to get home to my folks’ place. I covered the distance to Missoula in just over a week, up through Hamilton and Stevensville. Most of the towns going up the valley looked downright fortified. In most of the towns they had huge abatis roadblocks made out of big logs on all the roads leading in.

  “I took a few risks in covering those last seventy miles. For example, I traveled some in daylight, which I don’t normally do, near population. I guess I was rushing a bit, but again, I couldn’t wait to get home.

  “Past Stevensville, which was fortified, things were pretty well wiped out. Florence and Lolo were burned completely down. There wasn’t a soul around. From a distance, I could see that more than half of the houses and nearly all the stores in Missoula were burned down. My parents lived on the outskirts of the east side. Not knowing who controlled the town, I came into town from the east in the middle of the night. When I saw the ruins of my folks’ house, my heart just sank. All that was left standing was the chimney. The garage was still intact, so I spent the rest of the night in it. I just cried and cried. There was just one neighbor living down the block, named Mack. He was an old widower. Everyone else was either dead, moved out, or burned out.

  “When I left for college last fall, Mack probably weighed two-hundred-and-forty pounds. This spring, he weighed maybe one-hundred-and-sixty pounds. I didn’t hardly recognize him at first. He was practically skin and bones. Mack told me about what’d happened. The brigands came through in a convoy of more than sixty pickups, Suburbans, Hummers, and Blazers, stripping all the food and fuel they could find. They stayed several weeks, raping, getting drunk, and burning a few more houses just to be mean.
Anyone who resisted them in the least was shot or burned out.

  “The evening after I buried what was left of my mom and dad’s bodies, I dug up my cache in my folks’ backyard. In the cache I had a spare pair of combat boots, four pairs of boot socks, half of my silver coins, some .22 and .308 ammo, some Duracell batteries, a few camouflage face paint sticks, two bars of soap, multivitamins, some canned food, salt, cocoa powder, trioxane fuel bars, and eleven MREs. I had it all cached in three of those tall steel ammo cans—the kind they make for the 60-mike mortar rounds. The outside of the cans had gotten pretty rusty, and that scared me when I first dug them up. I thought that they might have leaked. I suppose that I should have painted them with asphalt emulsion to make them last longer. But luckily they kept their seals and everything inside was just the way I left it.”

  Looking down at the pair of sturdy Army combat boots that he was wearing, Doug declared, “Like I said before, the boots that I had been wearing the last year were falling apart at the seams. I wore my moccasins part of the time, but they were a poor substitute, particularly on rocky ground. It was kind of odd, you know. I had put these boots in the cache as sort of an afterthought, because I still had room in one of the cans. I was going to put in more canned food—my mom always bought tuna by the case—but then the idea of the extra boots popped into my head. Ironic, but a year later, of everything in the cache, it was these boots I needed the most. It must have been Divine providence. I’m sure that it was the good Lord that put that thought into my head.

  “I spent another full day there, mainly just praying and thinking. I talked and prayed with Mack quite a bit. Since by that time my hair was so long that I was looking like an angora goat, he gave me a short haircut and beard trim. Then I did the same for him. I’m afraid that I wasn’t very good at it. We used some scissors and a pair of hand clippers that had belonged to his wife. I gave him some venison and canned food. He gave me a big bottle of mild laxative, which was something I needed, given the fact that my diet was mostly venison.

  “I didn’t find anything of value in my parents’ garage except for a bottle of Rem-Oil. Practically everything else including all the tools, the camping gear, and even the scrap lumber had been stolen. There wasn’t much in the garage at all except my folks’ car—which was minus its battery and had no fuel in its tank—and a couple of old tire rims. It was like locusts had come through. All that I got out of their car was an Idaho/Montana map. It was identical to the one that I had been carrying all along, but it was in better shape. I had folded the first one so many times that it was coming apart into a bunch of long strips.

  “Neither of my folks had any family west of the Mississippi, so I didn’t have a clear destination. I knew that there was a much less severe climate in the Clearwater River valley, just over the pass, so that seemed like a reasonable first area to look for a place to settle. I’d been across there, fishing steelhead with my dad lots of times, so I knew the Clearwater country fairly well.

  “I spent the first three weeks in the canyons west of Missoula, waiting for the snow to clear in the high country. I shot a young buck, and that fed me for the whole time I was there. It took nearly a week to turn it into jerky. I found some Camas plants and a big patch of miner’s lettuce, and I pigged out. Between the venison, the bulbs, and the miner’s lettuce, I started to put some weight on.

  “I transited the Lolo Pass three weeks ago. By then, the snow was shallow on the northern facing slopes and in the heavy timber, and patchy most everywhere else. Since I wasn’t in any great hurry, I traveled even more slowly than before. I only averaged about four miles a day. I like to move with some stealth, and take lots of listening halts. I gradually worked my way down the Lochsa River, and then the Clearwater. There’s no sign of any organized commerce or travel at all down there. Everybody is just hunkered down, big time. I tried approaching the town of Kamiah, but I got shot at by a guy with what looked like an SKS. I was two-hundred-and-fifty yards away, so I didn’t even have a chance to explain myself. I just got myself out of there, double-time.

  “That same day, I started getting a horrible toothache. It was one of my lower molars. By two days after that, the pain was so bad that I knew the tooth was rotten and had to come out. I couldn’t bring myself to pry it out with my Gerber multi-pliers. So I managed to tie a piece of monofilament around the tooth. I tried pulling it by hand, but I chickened out. It just hurt so badly. I didn’t have anybody to help me. Finally, I ended up tying the fishing line to a big sapling that I had bent over. I sat down, pulled my lips out of the way, opened wide, and let it fly. The tooth came out all right. I screamed for a second. The void bled a couple of days. I did my best not to spit, because I’d heard that that creates suction and causes additional bleeding. It was painful, but luckily I had some Tylenol left in my first aid kit. The gum has healed fine, now.

  “I did some fishing along the Clearwater before I headed up onto the Palouse. There are a lot of fish in that river. Even with just a hand line, I was able to catch a Dolly Varden and a good-sized salmon. That was enough food for three days eating, in less than an hour of fishing. It would have been nice to have one of those collapsing fishing poles, though. A few days later, I did some gill netting on some of the little tributaries going into the Clearwater. I caught a mess of trout. I cooked some, and smoked some.

  “My trip up here toward the Palouse was relatively uneventful. I saw a lot of wild turkeys, several elk, and deer beyond counting. This is good country for foraging.”

  Todd interrupted: “Is there anything else you wish that you’d had in your pack or cache, or things you would have done differently, in retrospect?”

  “Let me think.” Doug paused to ponder. “Several things come to mind immediately. First and foremost, I should have found somebody to travel with. Going solo cross-country is a dicey proposition. You never know when you might get ambushed. If somebody gets the jump on you, you’re history. Also, there is no simple way to provide security while you’re sleeping. Just twisting an ankle badly or one bad swing with an ax could be fatal. You need a partner. Preferably two or more partners.

  “And needless to say, traveling at all in anything less than an APC these days is foolhardy. There are too many chances of running into brigands; too many uncertainties. Staying put at a well-stocked and defensible ranch or farmhouse is the best approach. Traveling is only for the foolish or the desperate.

  “Secondly, if I had cached some MREs and a few essentials in a few places along my route from Colorado, things would have been a lot more comfortable. I had some hungry days. For that matter, I could have cached some gas too, and just zoomed home.

  “Third, I would have really benefited from a pocket-sized Bible. A few memorized verses aren’t enough. You need the Word to keep you going and to maintain your balance.

  “Fourth, this may sound pretty minor, but it isn’t. I should have bought a pair of gaiters. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve had to start a fire at midday to dry out my pants from the knees down.

  “Fifth, I should have taken better care of my teeth. Brushing with just salt works fine in a pinch, although a mix of three-quarters baking soda to one-quarter salt is preferred. I should have carried a toothbrush, floss, and a tin of powder. They would have added hardly any weight at all to my pack, and in the long run, they could have saved me some grief.

  “Sixth, I should have invested in an expedition-quality four-season tent. Tube tents—or even three-season tents for that matter—don’t cut the mustard. Every time it rained, part of my gear would get wet and I’d spend hours drying it out.”

  Kevin chimed in, “As we often say around here, ‘hindsight is twenty-twenty.’ We planned ahead for what we could foresee and bought all that we could afford, but there’s a lot of gear that we now wish that we’d bought.”

  Todd declared, “Speaking of gear, Kevin… Go gather up Doug’s gear out at the wood lot, bring it back to the barn and inventory it.” Lendel nodded his head, picked
up his 870 from the ready rack, and headed out the door.

  Watching Kevin go, Doug said, “You certainly have a very well-organized retreat here.”

  Mary chimed in. “Yes, Cadet Carlton, you stumbled into the perimeter of a real-live survival retreat. You’re looking at the culmination of about nine years of active preparation. Nobody wanted things to fall apart, but our group was part of the minority that was ready for it.”

  “Nine years?” Carlton asked.

  “Yeah. Nine years ago most of us were in college, and not anywhere near the same stage of preparedness as you. We just have the advantage of having been at this a lot longer, methodically getting ourselves trained and storing up all the necessities, in quantity,” she said smugly. With her last comment, Carlton’s eyebrows raised and then a smile spread across his face.

  Mike Nelson made a large batch of popcorn for everyone to share. Mike was the only one at the retreat that had yet learned the knack of making popcorn on the woodstove without burning it. As they were finishing the popcorn, Kevin returned. His report was terse: “Everything was just the way he described it, although he didn’t mention that the socks and underwear were dirty. Whew! They’re very frausty.”

  Todd called for another meeting late that evening. Everyone was present, with the exception of Kevin, who was by then on picket duty. Mike listened in over the TRC-500. As the conversation developed, it became apparent that there were two avenues that could be taken. The first option was that if he was interested, Doug could be nominated for consideration for a position in the group. If he accepted, it would be with the understanding that he would be treated as a full and equal member. However, he would have to give up any ideas that he might have of being a paid employee. If anything, he would owe the group redoubled efforts, as he would be using up part of their precious food supply. The second option was that Carlton could be resupplied with food and sent on his way, with the group’s best wishes.