In the first Games, Katniss wears a jacket that has special material to reflect her body heat so she won’t get cold at night (The Hunger Games, 145). She also wears boots with rubber soles to help her run quickly.
In Catching Fire, the environment of the Quarter Quell, the seventy-fifth Games, is much more difficult for Katniss. Here, her survival skills are stretched to the limit. She’s in an arena concocted by Gamemakers to resemble a giant clock, with each section devoted to a different hazardous environment.
When first placed into the Quarter Quell arena, she’s confronted with a circle of saltwater. Equipped with a flotation device, her belt, she must make it to a beach, and from there, to an outlying jungle.
This is a much more elaborate and difficult combat experience for Katniss. She really has to use her wits now because she’s not used to the environment.
In reality, jungles vary quite a bit, with the vegetation strongly dependent on both climate and human interference. Clearly, in Catching Fire, human interference is anything but lacking.
Unlike the jungle in Catching Fire, real-world jungles can have tropical trees that mature after a hundred years. Some of these trees only attain their full height and breadth in primeval virgin forests that man has yet to destroy. The canopy of dense top growth of these old trees can be as high as a hundred feet from the jungle floor. Both light and underbrush are scarce beneath the canopy. Monkeys, birds, and bees live in the treetops.
Most jungles are similar to the one in Catching Fire, but there are differences. In reality, men clear the primeval jungles, cultivate the earth or use it for other reasons, and then let the land remain idle. When the underbrush creeps over the idle land, it forms thick, high mats covered in dense vines. In Catching Fire, Katniss is confronted with trees that have very few branches, with soil that is so rich and black that one would think centuries of vegetation has rotted here. Vines are everywhere, it’s humid as hell, and the sun is “hot and bright” (Catching Fire, 275). Katniss’s jungle merges the conditions of a primary jungle with those of a secondary jungle. She has the horrible sun of a secondary jungle that’s without one-hundred-foot trees and their knitted canopies. Yet she also has the vines and underbrush of a primary jungle. The killer muttation monkeys, were they real rather than man made, might live high in the tops of primary jungle trees.
Speaking of, isn’t it enough to be thrust into a jungle with no water and death at every turn without adding killer muttation monkeys to the nightmare? Thankfully—though it’s not much—the tributes don’t have to contend with some aspects of real jungles, such as swarms of mosquitoes and thousands of leeches.
Before traveling to jungles, people are warned to gear up to the climate and conditions. For one thing, it’s wise to be fairly athletic, but experts tell us that even the most athletic people must exercise in scorching, humid climates for a minimum of four days before hiking through a jungle. And even after preparing for the trip, experts tell hikers to allow at least four to six additional days—in the actual jungle—to acclimate to the conditions. Unfortunately for Katniss and the other children in the Games, they aren’t given the chance to prepare for, much less become accustomed to, the harsh environment.
In addition to the jungle, Katniss must cope with various man-made environmental hazards, including a bizarre burning gas-poison fog that causes body seizures; an enormous wave that thunders down a hill and crashes into the saltwater in the center of the arena; and even blood rain. The clock wedges contain plagues such as lightning, killer muttation monkeys, gas-poison fog, the insanely huge wave, and the blood rain. (Catching Fire, 326). In fact, the environment inflicts so many plagues on the tributes that it almost feels as if they’re confronting something akin to the ten plagues in Exodus.
Do you remember the story of Exodus? The tagline might be “Enough is enough.” God finally cast the ten plagues on Egypt, and Moses finally got his way after begging God to “Let my people go!”
Catching Fire has its own set of plagues, which the Capitol uses against the tributes. The districts finally revolt in Mockingjay, and their tagline might also be “Enough is enough.” In fact, Katniss could very well be screaming, “Let my people go!” throughout Mockingjay.
The Ten Plagues
Catching Fire Plague?
Blood
Blood rain
Frogs
No, but there are tree lizards with flickering tongues.
Gnats
Not in Catching Fire, though Mockingjay includes muttation gnats.
Wild beasts
Killer muttation monkeys.
Pestilence
Weird rat-possum rodents.
Boils
Poison-gas fog burns the skin and causes seizures.
Hail
No, but there’s something far icier: President Snow.
Locusts
All of the other “plagues” in The Hunger Games trilogy make up for the omission of locusts.
Darkness
No, but there were the Dark Days, which led to the nightmares of the Hunger Games.
Death of the firstborn, the most vile plague.
All the tributes who are cast into the arena to die are children. An exception is the Quarter Quell, when all winning tributes must compete again, and some of them have already become quite old.
MEDICAL SUPPLIES
Survival in the wilderness is tough without even the most rudimentary first aid kit. Most people bring items such as:
Adhesive bandages in various sizes.
Roll bandages for protecting larger wounds and infections, securing dressings, and wrapping broken or sprained ankles, feet, wrists, etc.
Tape and safety pins.
Scissors.
Antiseptics.
Soap.
Painkillers.
It’s hard to forget Peeta’s leg infection in The Hunger Games—the fever, pus, swelling, and blood poisoning. Katniss hopes that a sponsor will drop a gift of anti-infection medicine before Peeta dies. She’s been using chewed leaves, all that’s available in the wilderness, and ineffective ointment. As for a first aid kit, forget it: The tributes are on their own. They’re lucky to plunge burning flesh into cool water, and if they want bandages, they have to make them from strips of clothing. The best they can hope is that medicine and supplies drop from gift parachutes out of the sky.
This may be the one area where the tributes, including Katniss with all her wilderness skills, have no chance whatsoever. Break a bone, you’re doomed. Get an infection, pray that a magical ointment falls from the sky.
TRAINING AND OVERALL KNOWLEDGE
If you’re lost in the wilderness, as in the first Hunger Games, and you’re with other people, it’s essential to immediately identify the skills of your potential killers; or in the case of the real world, your friends. Potential killers or friends, you need to know immediately who among you possesses the following skills:
Plant identification.
Navigation.
Medical.
Knowledge of local terrain.
Knowledge of local weather
Builds fires, and by corollary, knowing how to extinguish them.
Physical strength and endurance.
Fast runner.
Reacts quickly and intelligently.
Builds shelters.
Hunts.
Uses weapons well.
Can make rope.
All of these topics seem like logical ones, but without training, most of us wouldn’t have a clue what to do if suddenly stuck in an arena to fight for our lives. Katniss, remember, enters the arena very well trained in plant identification, navigation, weapons, and hunting. She’s physically agile—imagine if Katniss was weak when sent into the arena!—and she reacts quickly and intelligently. Her mother is a healer, so Katniss knows a lot about natural medicines. As for the local terrain in the arena, if she’s not in a forest similar to the one in District 12, she has to learn how to cope just like everyone else. The same is true
for the local weather, which changes at whim in the arena based on what the Gamemakers want to do to the contestants. How do you train for a poisonous gas fog, for example? Or for attacks by strange muttations?
In each of her two Hunger Games, and during the revolution in Mockingjay, Katniss always assesses the skills of her enemies and friends. She works with friends to overcome other groups of children during the Games; for example, helping Rue as much as possible and almost dying herself when Rue is killed.
According to the Army Survival Manual, you should do the following when confronted with possible death in the wild (The U.S. Army Survival Manual, 3):
S—size up the situation.
U—use all your senses, exercise caution.
R—remember where you are at all times.
V—vanquish any fear and do not panic.
I—improvise by making tools, weapons, shelter, etc.
V—value living and keep fighting for your life!
A—act like the natives, note how they survive.
L—live by your wits, but make sure you have basic skills.
Of course, all tributes undergo survival training in the Capitol’s Training Center. To gain sponsors and lifesaving gifts, they must impress the Gamemakers and the crowds with the skills and charisma they bring to the Games. To make up for gaps in their survival knowledge, they must practice as much as possible in areas of deficiency. They learn combat techniques, how to build fires and ropes, how to use a wide variety of basic weapons. What’s missing is the element that may very well matter the most: native intelligence. And this is where Katniss excels. Sure, nobody can beat Katniss with a bow and arrow, but she’s truly extraordinary when it comes to the most critical survival skills.
AD 1910–80
AD 1910, Halley’s Comet was supposed to kill us all. People took “comet pills” to ward off the toxins that would spew from the killer comet.
AD 1914, Jehovah’s Witnesses, which predicted Armageddon repeatedly, pinpointed this year as their most critical death date. You can probably guess how they arrived at 1914; yes, through math. Charles T. Russell assigned numbers to a bunch of quotes from The Book of Daniel to come up with the year of the apocalypse.
AD 1914, World War I was heralded as the end of all wars, true Armageddon.
AD 1917, along with the war came the Spanish Flu, killing many millions of people. Certainly, doomsday was upon us. Any second now . . .
AD 1919, meteorologist Albert Porta did some (care to guess?) calculations and determined that on December 17, 1919, a magnetic current would pierce the sun and cause explosions that would destroy the Earth. People were so terrified that some actually committed suicide rather than be engulfed in the sun’s flames.
1940s, World War II, enough said.
1950s, more and more and more predictions of the apocalypse, most courtesy of aliens, UFOs, and nukes.
1960s, more of the same with the addition of new doomsday scenarios including the truly bizarre notion from Edgar Cayce that the lost continent of Atlantis would rise from the ocean, and major cities would sink while the poles shifted. Another horrific apocalypse spinoff in AD 1969 was Charles Manson and The Family, who murdered famous people to somehow gain a foothold as leaders of the post-apocalypse world resulting somehow from a race war.
1970s, more of the same with the addition of the Rev. Charles Meade’s Armageddon scenario: his End Time Ministries believed the world was soon to end, so people had to prepare by not reading anything, by getting pregnant yet remaining single in their teens, by not going to doctors, and by ignoring all noncult members. Meade believed the world would end by goo, a sticky white semen-sounding glop that would coat and suffocate everything on the planet.
AD 1977, Salem Kirban claimed the world would end because killer bees swarming throughout the United States fulfilled the Revelation prophecy of locusts with scorpion stingers and human heads.
AD 1978, on November 18, 919 people killed themselves in Jonestown, Guyana. A doomsday cult, the followers of Jim Jones were terrified of an imminent racial holocaust and nuclear Armageddon. Obeying Jones, cult members drank poisoned Kool-Aid, then lay on the ground and died together. Any cult member trying to flee was either injected with poison or shot to death.
Medicinal herbs, sleeping syrups, morphling: all play key roles in the three Hunger Games books. Not only does Katniss know which plants to gather for eating and which ones to avoid, she’s lucky to have a mother who is, for all practical purposes, a medicine man, or as I think of her, a medicine mom.
On the flip side are the poisons, most notably, the nightlock berries used by Katniss and Peeta to fake-out President Snow and his cronies. But of keenest interest are the poisons that do not involve plants, such as the tracker jacker venom that hijacks Peeta.
Katniss’s mother is an expert with medicinal herbs and basically serves as District 12’s healer. In Catching Fire, she and Prim use all sorts of herbs to cure Gale after he’s whipped for possessing a turkey. As mentioned in chapter 2, “Repressive Regimes and Rebellions,” real-life governments have starved millions of their own people to death, they’ve stolen food from citizens, and they’ve mercilessly beaten people for infractions as ludicrous as “thinking” the wrong ideas. So it’s not a stretch that a regime as tyrannical as the Capitol would whip someone into unconsciousness over a turkey. Luckily for Gale, Katniss’s mother is a healer and knows how to use salves, bandages, sleeping syrup, and herbs to reduce inflammations. She even has syringes for injecting morphling, though it’s somewhat unclear how she maintains a supply of hypos and how she’s able to keep them sterile. In real life, doctors use sterile hypodermic needles once and then dispose of them. On the streets, used needles are a cause of infection and spreading disease.
All that aside, it’s lucky for everyone in District 12 that Katniss’s mother knows what she’s doing. She’s a medical healer, an herbalist really, whose methods aren’t connected to the idea of a God or gods or spirits of any kind.
In reality, cultures around the world have believed in faith healers and medicine men for thousands of years. The notion that one man can cure the sick and return life to the dead has been around for a very long time—since prehistoric times.
A shaman, for example, is a medicine man with magic-religious powers who cures human suffering by forming relationships with spiritual entities. The shaman goes into a trance, or spiritual state, and he asks the spirits how to heal the sick, raise the dead, and save the tribe or nation.
The word, “shamanism,” comes from the Russian evolution of the Tungusic word, saman. We could list many examples of medicine men and shaman in all cultures. One such example might be the Tatar people, who used the shaman for most everything. For example, to cure a sick child, the shaman would hold a séance to try and bring back the soul of the child. The séance could last six hours, maybe more, during which the shaman went into a trance, traveling to the lands of the spirits. The shaman would search for the sick child’s undamaged soul and ask spirits for a way to heal the child’s illness.
In keeping with the universal ideas throughout history of cosmic consciousness and the interconnection of human souls, the shaman traveled from one cosmic region to another for advice and help. He was able to communicate on a cosmic plane via the cosmic consciousness.
An herbalist such as Katniss’s mother doesn’t travel from one cosmic region to another. She simply knows how to use plants and medicines to heal people. It’s a form of folk medicine, and many modern laboratory-produced medicines are derived from natural plant sources or derivatives.
Since prehistoric times, people have used herbs to heal themselves of illnesses. The Sumerians practiced herbal medicine with thyme and laurel; the ancient Egyptians used mint, garlic, castor oil, coriander, and opium. The ancients of India used turmeric, and later more than 700 different plants for medicinal reasons. The ancient Chinese used as many as 365 medicinal plants.
The cat, Buttercup, is named after a plant; Prim is name
d after a plant; and even the name, Rue, refers to a plant.
While Katniss almost kills Buttercup, she ends up quite fond of the cat. When wild, Buttercup is scrappy, but when fed and cared for, she becomes almost affectionate. When raw, all buttercup plants are poisonous. When boiled or pickled—when cared for—the plants are safe for consumption.
The primrose is a delicate flower, and both the leaves and flowers are edible. Prim is cast as a delicate, innocent flower in The Hunger Games.
As for rue, it is a bitter herb that tastes horrible. The word is derived from the Greek reuo, to set free; historically, people used rue in an attempt to cure the plague, get rid of worms and fleas, and set the body free from other diseases. Chewing rue leaves may relieve tension headaches and anxiety.
Speaking of Rue, she chews green leaves and then applies the glop to skin in order to relieve the pain and sting from leech bites. Plantain leaves, which are common weeds, can take the sting out of bites. If you chew plantain leaves, then apply the glop to an insect bite, it’ll relieve the pain, swelling, and sting. Other leaves that work well include witch hazel, oak, willow, and maple.
The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion Page 19