by Ron Foster
“Ok, I understand you loud and clear, let’s just go back to the list, OK? Now then, Jeremy, my scribe, are you ready to get back to creating my list of mad scientist items? Add DC to AC Inverters, we might find one of those on some fancy boat but it will be mostly 12v although there is a lot of 24v in use sometimes on bigger boats. Lots of times there will be some kind of 12v specific appliances like a wet dry vac, fan, etc. around to be used on boats so I will keep my eye out for those. In the meantime, I have two inverters in my stash of goodies so I am not sweating that one. The boat rental place on this facility has a battery charger we can hook to one of those gas powered generators around here in the meantime so I just have to think about running a small battery bank for now. That reminds me, I have to figure out how to get gas out of that underground gas storage tank down there without blowing myself up. Put an ear syringe on that list. I need one as a foot valve to make what is called a well bullet. If I can’t find one of those somewhere then just a piece of rubber can work, also. There are lots of ways to build these.” Farley said and went about describing how it would work and how one was made.
A simple method for getting water out of a deep well without electricity is shown below.
Attach a rope to the PVC pipe and lower the bucket down the 4 to 6 inch well shaft
and let it sink into the water. The rubber flapper will act like a foot valve and rise up against the wires when it hits the water. This will allow the water to enter the
pipe. When you start to pull it up, the weight of the water will push the rubber flapper down against the reducer and seal the bottom of the bucket.
Another way to do this is:
From the inside, the valve looks like this. Notice the rubber flapper is covering the holes in the cap but is still a good way from the edge.
Here’s the outside view of the valve. You can use a nut with a nylon insert so you don’t lose parts down the well.
Test the valve by filling the sink with water and slowly forcing the end cap into the water. This flapper valve works by uncovering the holes slightly when water pressure from the bottom is applied. In practice, the weight of the finished well bucket is enough to open the valve.
When you lift up, the weight of the water inside the cap causes the rubber flap to close and seal off the holes. Here you can see as I lift the cap out of the sink that there’s water staying inside the cap.
“That sounds like a great idea, Farley, how much gas do you think is in that tank?” Jeremy asked.
“I have no idea, Charlie should know and they probably have one of those long square wooden sticks with calibrations on it to figure out what it’s holding exactly. That gas won’t stay good forever and lots of times you can get water in those kinds of underground fuel tanks from condensation I have heard but unless Charlie knows how to determine that, I have no idea.” Farley declared pondering just how long they would have access to that precious non-renewable commodity.
“Oh, by the way Becky, Charlie and I cut us a side deal on the gas for my van and to fill up your car so don’t worry about that. I am trading him some cans of dehydrated Sweet and Sour pork of all things for Miss Feng’s birthday next week. That is our big secret and she can’t find out about any part of that deal or Charlie will have our hides. As far as she knows we paid some cash and barter for the gas so we will just leave it that and say nothing further if she ever brings it up. Now back to our list. When you get back to where you were staying, grab anything and everything you might find useful. Normally I would say get the bed linens and towels, etc. but it looks like we got enough of that sort of thing around here already. Uh, wait a minute, Becky, do you have something special that you need to be adding to my list?” Farley asked, regarding her.
“I don’t know yet Farley, I am still thinking on it. What are you hinting at anyway? Oh, I get it, feminine products. You’re right I will be out soon; you think they had some in the store here?” Becky asked.
“I imagine they might have had some in stock but certainly not an aisle full like a drug store or something. Ask Miss Feng about that and I will keep it mind if I run across any. I can’t think of nothing else in that cottage you need then except collecting everything that you brought with you. I think we have pretty much everything we need right here but for the hell of it Jeremy, remind me to lend you my linesman pliers so that you can cut the cords off any electrical appliance in there. You can strip the insulation off them cords later and harvest the copper wire so I can show you how to make some animal snares out of that easily replaceable item. That reminds me, we might have us a raccoon when we get back but I doubt it. They are mostly nocturnal creatures so it’s rather doubtful. Could be we might get a muskrat or nutria but that trap hasn’t been set too long.” Farley said.
“I told Fong about our trap Farley, and he told me that we weren’t going to catch anything, he even laughed about you saying you could do it. We are going to show him big time how good of a trapper you are ain`t we, Farley?” Jeremy said confidently with a grin he was going to show up his new friend.
“That remains to be seen; you can’t just set one trap and hope for success. That’s the thing I am going to teach you boys, you need to set out many traps to insure even a little bit of success by increasing your chances of a possible catch. Besides, I know more theory of how to do it than actual continuous tried and true practice. I am pretty rusty and have probably forgotten a lot of what I used to know. Yes, I have indeed trapped and snared animals many times but that was many years ago. However, I remember a story my buddy Buckshot Hemming told me a long time ago. He was a commercial fur trapper, which means he did trapping for a living and has years more experience than me knowing the ways of animals and how to set traps and snares. Now commercially manufactured traps and snares can get expensive and one year when he wanted to extend his trap line he spent the summer carving figure 4 deadfall trap triggers and hauling rocks and logs to likely places for the winter trapping season in Dakota, I think it was. Well, I forget how many he actually set or his number of successes per trap he had but it was pretty dismal and he said he would never do that again and couldn’t believe all the time and effort he had put into it. Now listen to me, Jeremy, and have some patience before you get your hopes up too much and get discouraged with the trapping ways I will be teaching you. That story came from a man who was well versed and experienced with trapping a specific territory and an old woodsman that had been doing that sort of thing since he was young enough to run a trap line to bring in income.” Farley said deflating the boy’s ego and his confidence in his new found friend’s trapping skills for the moment.
“But you did say that he had successes, you just got to set a bunch of them to increase your chances right, Farley?” The boy said looking for further hope and clarification on the mastery of such skills.
“Of course we will, but we are not limited to just using that one kind of trigger or trap either. Now Buckshot also taught classes in survival trapping as well as he wrote a book and numerous articles on the web teaching modern methods of trapping so the preppers who found themselves in this kind of a situation had a means of understanding the shortfalls of primitive trapping and ensuring their success with modern methods like using aircraft cable steel snares and locks as well as body-hold Conibear killing traps and old fashioned footholds. Now, I was never one for a foothold trap, I don’t like those for my own personal and moral reasons but a Conibear body-hold killing trap that is quick and humane and I have a decent selection of those in my gear. Buckshot’s favorite survival trap is the 110 conibear, for example, for small animals and I have over a dozen of those. Speaking of which, that crazy smart old trapper taught me a trick on how to catch a fish with one that I got to try out just for the hell of it. In theory I can see it working but I never had the inclination or opportunity to think about doing it until now. I will do it just for entertainment versus practical purposes right now because I have probably a hundred easier ways to catch a fish but we will see.” Far
ley said.
“You got any of them aircraft cable snares you mentioned, Farley?” Jeremy said wide eyed at all the fun and possibilities he foresaw tromping the woods with Farley trying to catch game.
“Yea, I got maybe 4 dozen in various sizes but they don’t last like them steel conibears do. See, when an animal fights that cable it gets kinked up and twisted and becomes unusable rather quickly sometimes. You can salvage parts off damaged snares though and build new ones though. Now I will let you in on a little secret, snaring is my particularly most successful forte and trapping for us all is going to use up all the ones I have a lot quicker than I ever anticipated. My number one thing that I can do though to feed us regularly is the highly illegal but very effective practice of deer snaring. I got maybe a dozen snares for that specifically made and maybe a half dozen or so large animal snares I can convert or rig for that purpose so that is going to leave me light a whole lot quicker than I want to happen. With those things it’s all about my placement and not the quantity I set so I put out fewer so we will be ok awhile in that department.” Farley stated.
“You must be awful strong to be able to bend a tree down big enough lift a deer up into the air.” Becky said eying him differently thinking he was going to do some kind of Hollywood spring snare movie act by dangling a poor deer sky high from a tree.
“No, I don’t do it like that to catch them, I could I guess…. But I don’t... Dang girl you have been watching too many of them old Tarzan movies.” Farley said chuckling his outright NO to the Hollywood notion of its necessity but he was still alluding to the fact that he could perform the task of doing it if he really wanted too.
“No, Becky when you go to snare a deer there are several ways of doing it but none of them are the strangle and dangle methods that I use with bent saplings which is effective on small game. You see what I basically do to construct a deer snare is to arrange a noose in a position over a trail that I want to make the deer stick his head into. They are predictable enough creatures so I can accomplish that task in a few ways I learned from Buckshot as well as a guy’s book called the Rural Ranger I once read but he and that guy wouldn’t tell me specifically how to do it and made general allusions instead to using sticks to get the deer to duck his head. I guess he was scared he was giving away too many poaching notions or something. Anyway, it’s not as hard as you might think to get a deer to put his neck or foot in a noose if you know what you are doing. What you are trying to accomplish is either to make the animal choke itself out with a non-releasing snare lock or hold the animal in place with a releasing snare lock that lets up on the pressure once he quits fighting it or you can hook the thing to a drag to slow his ass down and wear him out so you can catch up and dispatch him after trailing it for a bit by walking.” Farley declared looking towards his audience for understanding.
“Why don’t you just let it “choke out” as you refer to it and be done with it as you so aptly said? It sounds awful cruel to me to just hold it in place or make it drag around a log or something before you come after it to kill it.” Becky said looking at Farley like he had just grown horns and a forked tail or something.
“Well, that’s a valid point to bring up but I would appreciate if you would quit looking at me with such distaste. I am not a violent man or a sport hunter, Becky. I am a skilled hunter for the table and a sort of prepper survivalist that can feed himself and others when needed. I take no pleasure in killing anything and indeed if you ever go on a hunt with me you will observe that I take a moment of silence to thank whatever animal that has given its’ life to sustain me and mine. I am not a cat that toys with its prey, ever. My methods sometimes might seem cruel in some ways but I take great care to avoid any unnecessary suffering or pain if I can help it. I do this for personal as well as practical reasons but first and foremost is my love of all life in general. Things are not always as cut and dried as they appear to be sometimes, Becky, and you will see and hear of many things that I might say or do that seem wrong just because the wisdom of it may not at first be apparent. For example, the question you asked about killing an animal by choking it out in less than a minute versus holding it or chasing it. It’s summertime right now and if I put a deer snare on the end of my trap line and killed an animal it might spoil in the heat before I got to it thus ruining the meat. I also don’t want it fighting the snare until I get there and having no access to water in its panic, so depending on the lay of the land I might allow it to pull a drag that will mark its trail well for me but wear the animal down while giving it some hope and comfort until I can take care of it. Dispatching animals is not something you have ever had to do for yourself in your modern grocery store world, Becky, so don’t judge me. Your world comes in prepackaged meat from the supermarket that you understand nothing of its processing practices or the horrors those animals go through to get on your dinner plate. Me? I take life and give life to us from now on in my own weird holistic ways, you might refer to as sometimes savage ways, but you will need to learn them before you judge me. And yes, I said you will need to learn how to trap and track also because now because that is a life skill just like balancing your checking account that must be dealt with and everyone needs to know how to perform to some extent. And I will tell you another thing; I am not going to be cleaning every animal or fish that I bring back to camp.” Farley declared.
“So I am going to be your squaw woman or something that you expect to work in the fields and quietly wait on Lord and master to come home from hunting and throw a couple rabbits on the ground in front of me and say clean these for dinner?” Becky said getting that crazy ire of hers up.
Farley eyed the sparks coming out of her green eyes and gave her the fire from his before trying to seek the middle ground and some calmness between them by stating that he only meant that we were all in this together now and we had to share the same survival skills whether or not we had a taste for them or not. He carefully explained that if perhaps someone got hurt that everyone must be familiar with the skills it took to live day to day and that was that. As for the squaw remark he told her in no uncertain terms he took umbrage with that analogy and that yes her normal duties would be tending the home cook fires but he expected nothing more from her than what she was comfortable doing at home to support him and Jeremy’s efforts out in the woods.
Farley then stated that he would be most likely the main provider of everything else in this tribal camp and if that included stealing he would do that too and if he someday didn’t come back because he got shot doing it, so be it, it was up to her and the rest to fend for themselves. Farley could be a bit blunt and long winded at times.
Becky looked at him long and hard as well as mad as hell for a moment before tearing up and apologizing to Farley for what she had not understood before. That Farley seemed to understand this new violent world they had got thrown into together by chance wasn’t his fault and she wouldn’t blame him for such anymore.
His seeming awareness of what to expect from himself or be expected from them in the gloomy predictable futures he predicted was beyond all strange but admirable in her eyes. Farley had been a gentleman to everyone’s circumstances and he had offered what at first she thought was a bounty of his preps with ulterior motives but she could now see the color of his soul and it was full of compassion and caring as well as a man-sized obligation that he had undertaken to help them all survive as best he could.
Farley’s day of getting fussed at was not over today by a long shot though as he spied an irate Miss Feng headed his way.
“Why you tell Charlie you not going to just stay here and no steal?” Miss Feng began before an “Oh shit” look came over Farley’s face and he began to stare angrily at everyone and in particular Charlie who was sort of looking cowed in back of his wife.
“You go home, Farley! You no good, you lie to me!” Miss Feng said running up on Farley and starting to try to push him away before her husband intervened.
“What the hell you talking abou
t lady? I haven’t done anything..” Farley began before she resumed her tirade.
“Charlie say you say you going to go steal us some guns. I don’t want no stolen gun you hear me, Farley? You no welcome here no more and you take your woman and boy back home, far away!” Miss Feng challenged, confusing everyone present.
“What the hell is she talking about Charlie? We were fine earlier.” Farley said trying to figure out just what had riled the woman.
“I just told her I wasn’t going to hold you to not going scavenging and told you something about one of the officers deer camps not far from here.” Charley squeaked.
“Damn, you couldn’t have lasted at least a day longer before bringing that up.” Farley said disgustedly in Charlie’s direction.
“See, I told you! You were going to lie to me too!” Becky said looking an awful lot like Miss Feng at the moment and moving closer to her side as the men folk milled in confusion.
“Damn it man, you picked a hell of a time to get some shit started.” Farley groused at Charlie before shutting down the hub bub of accusations and snarls from the women in his direction with a loud ass “HEY’ trying to command their attention and say something more.