Fiction: Montani Semper Liberi

[Ammo]

This is a great teaching tale...I would hope that no one person wouls have to go thru all these trials and setbacks...Really good. Thank you.

[FreedomoftheHills]

Thanks for reading, everyone, and for your comments!

Originally Posted by g-bah

The other thing is the raw meat he eats. I know what it is like to not eat or drink for 16 days - I was on iv, but nothing by mouth - I hallucinated food. I fully commiserate with him. But at some point he is going to contract a parasite that does him real harm. Yes, the drone may spot his heat signature along with every game animal around, but he needs fire more regularly, even if for short periods.

Yep, I've done some pretty long fasts, and I know what you mean about hallucinating food. The smell of it, especially, at the most unlikely times...

Einar tries to be selective about which critters he is willing to eat raw--avoiding predators/omnivores because of the increased likelihood for parasites, but you're right, he is very likely to run into trouble at some point. Meat should always be cooked in a "survival" situation if you have the opportunity...but sometimes he simply does not.

Originally Posted by g-bah

Liz thought he was dead after the beating by the agents, but he had been in pretty good shape cognitively before that. Susan wasn't in good shape at all from the crash, then got kicked around on top of that. He may have degraded after a period of time, but Liz didn't really examine him. A pulse can be hard to find in a bad situation she was in, in the backseat.

Yes, that is the answer. Sorry for the confusion.

[FreedomoftheHills]

Continuing through the morning and into the afternoon, the snow drifted several inches deep in places outside Einar’s shelter between the two rock faces, but it did begin melting as soon as it fell, the ground too warm for any great amount to stick despite temperatures that plummeted well below freezing as the storm moved in. Einar huddled over his tiny fire of spruce sticks, working to create a new spearhead and occasionally having to venture out into the wind and snow to get more firewood, wrapping the wolverine hide, which was over four feet long, nose to tail, and covered in thick warm fur, around his shoulders for some measure of protection against the wind driven snow. Even with the hide, he returned from each of his forays badly chilled and quite grateful for a dry shelter that gave him protection from the wind and was warmed reasonably well by the little fire. The storm, he knew, would not last, the rare June snow would soon melt and be gone more quickly than it had come, but he knew that he would have been in serious trouble indeed, had he been forced for whatever reason to be out traveling in that storm, clad as he was.

Wolverine liver, Einar discovered when he ate his stew, was not all that bad, and the next time he grew hungry—which was not very long, as it seemed that he was constantly hungry as his body began trying to repair itself and return to something like a normal state—he tried some of the wolverine meat, roasting a haunch over the fire and knowing as he ate it that if he had been much less hungry, it might well have been one of his last choices. But I think I like it a bit better than coyote, come to think of it… Could get used to this. Which he knew he would not have to do, as the wolverine that had attempted to rob him of his deer jerky was likely one of a very few living among the thousands of acres of forest and meadow on the plateau. Though still angry at the beast for the harm it had done him and reluctant to admit it, Einar felt an odd kinship with the wolverine that he had killed. Just another solitary creature, struggling to make its way in tough terrain.

Finishing his new spearhead, made from a section of leg bone from the deer quarter he had brought out of the wildfire, Einar worked on the paw of the wolverine that he had taken the claw from after the fight. Removing the rest of the claws from that foot, he tied them, hooked and sharp, to the parachute line around his neck until the entire foot was represented. Perhaps not the most useful of endeavors, but the work did seem to lessen the throbbing pain in his arm where the animal had mangled it, or at least to divert his attention just a bit from focusing on it. Liking the result, he slipped the string back over his head.

Towards the end of the day Einar found that much of the jerky on the lower strings was dry after sitting in the rising warmth of the fire, and he carefully moved one of them lower to have a final drying over the coals, leaving the meat on the parachute line and knowing that if the line started melting, that would be a good indicator that he was getting the jerky too close to the fire. One by one he set the brittle-dry strips aside on a rock to cool, using his rounded granite knife sharpening stone to begin gently pounding them into the powder that he would use to make his pemmican. Einar had been very anxious to get some of it made, the knowledge that he might have to move on at some point with little or no warning weighing heavily on him and never very far from the surface of his thoughts. Or dreams. It was going to be a great comfort to finally have some of the stuff put away. Retrieving the dried, berberine-yellowed deer intestines from their spot on a hanging line, he carefully cut out several short sections, twisting and tying one end of each with a short strand of sinew from the deer leg before working his fingers inside and opening them up. Next he used the Spam can to melt down some of the deer fat, snatching bits of it here and there to eat as he worked and removing and eating the “cracklings” that were left unmelted as the fat liquefied. Allowing the fat to cool some, just enough so that he could touch it without the heat being uncomfortable but not so much that it had begun solidifying again, he stirred in the powdered meat, mixing and adding until the can contained nearly twice as meat as fat, by volume.

Scooping the cooling mixture into the deer gut cases, he squeezed the air out as well as he could, twisted and tied them shut, setting the finished pemmican portions on a rock to finish cooling and solidifying. It was a slow process, with the Spam can as his only rendering and mixing vessel, but Einar kept at it until he had filled eight sections with the greyish mixture, sampling it as he went and sitting back, satisfied, to look over the fruits of his labors when he was finished. The pemmican, he knew, should last almost indefinitely, (assuming I don’t eat it all up, before whenever “indefinitely” is…) the deer tallow preserving the meat and preventing moisture and air from contacting it. He had heard stories of pemmican caches being discovered fifty or sixty years after being put by, and the stuff still being perfectly edible. Not that mine will be around that long. But it’s good to know that I don’t have to worry about it spoiling. I can put it aside, hopefully, and live on other meat that I take so that there is something to fall back on if I end up on the move again, or injured in some way that keeps me from checking the snares and hunting. And it will be good to have for this winter, if nothing else. Toss one of those packets into some hot water, maybe add some dried serviceberries, and I’ll have a good stew.

Thinking of the serviceberries made him wonder how the crop might be affected by the sudden shift in weather. He hoped the berries were far enough along that they would not be damaged by the brief dip below freezing, and knew that, even if they were, he ought to be able to head down lower and find plenty that were undamaged. The snow, he knew, would almost certainly be confined to the top of the plateau and the surrounding peaks, and should have fallen as rain in the valleys. With the hastened deterioration of his clothing situation that had been brought on by the fight with the wolverine, though, he knew that his planned berry scouting expedition would need to wait until he had been able to turn that deer hide into something wearable. Which reminded him. Time to check on that hide, see if the hair is ready to come off. Knowing that the hair was not likely to be loose enough to remove yet at that point, he took another can of ashes along, to renew the solution that he had rubbed into it earlier. He also hoped that the strong ash solution might help keep animals from messing with the hide, but intended to bring it back into the shelter overnight, just to be safe. Brushing the wet snow off the hide, he discovered that, as he had expected, the hair was not yet easy to get out. With some effort he was able to pull and twist a clump of it loose, though, and anxious for obvious reasons to finish up the tanning process, he decided to go ahead and work on slipping the hair. Glancing around, he settled on a fallen aspen that lay at an angle, partially beneath a big spruce, to drape the hide over as he scraped. But first, back to the shelter and get that wolverine hide! Kinda chilly out here. Wrapping the wolverine hide around his shoulders—fur side in—and leaving the polypro pants inside where they would stay dry, he stoked the fire and shoved the flat cooking rock most of the way over the pit, hoping to keep some coals alive for when he returned to the shelter. Knowing that it was not the ideal tool but hoping that he might be able to make it work, he grabbed the dried, split spruce stick that he had used for fleshing the deer hide, sharpening one edge of it with his knife before scraping the branch lightly with the knife-sharpening stone, wanting to eliminate any protrusions that might snag and tear the hide as he scraped off the hair. Scraping a hide is hard work under any circumstances, and it was made more difficult for Einar that afternoon by the fact that his right arm was not really working properly after the brush with the wolverine’s teeth. He would have liked to give the arm a few days in a sling until it had started healing, but the motivation to obtain materials for clothing was, at the moment, a more powerful one. The repeated motions necessary in scraping off the hair and top layer of skin on the deer hide kept causing the mullein-leaf bandages to loosen and the wounds to bleed again, and it seemed that he was endlessly pausing in his work to retie the strips of tattered polypropylene that held them in place. The work kept him reasonably warm, though, the tree sheltered him from the bulk of the wet, blowing snow, and things were not going too badly, at least not until the wind, which had slacked off considerably, picked up again.



(Fleshing an elk hide. Not the same thing that Einar is doing in this chapter, but you get the idea...)

It did not take long for the wind in its renewed fury to numb Einar’s hands and slow his pace, and though he kept at his work with a grim tenacity that had become an all too familiar part of his existence, he was finally forced to admit that the remainder of the scraping would have to wait. He was growing clumsy, careless despite his best efforts, and in the dimming light knew that he was running an increasing risk of tearing or otherwise seriously damaging the hide. Rolling up the hide and stumbling into the shelter, Einar crept to the back and sat in the dimness on his cattail mattress beside the firepit for a minute, exhausted, catching his breath, before adding a few sticks to the fire and blowing the coals to life, slowly thawing over the flames and setting some snow to melt for a batch of wolverine stew. The next day, he knew, he could quickly finish the dehairing, and begin the process of braining the hide.

[FreedomoftheHills]

Daylight found Einar back out under the tree working on the deerskin, having dried the wolverine fur as well as he could near the fire that previous night before putting it out, wrapping and tying the nearly dry fur around his shoulders for protection. The night had brought a freeze as the storm moved out, turning the wet snow that had remained on the ground into an icy crust on which he left no tracks. The prospect of leaving tracks did not concern him too much, anyway, as he knew that the snow would be gone nearly as soon as the sun hit it, which would not be long; the morning sky was crystal clear. Working on lashing together a hasty frame for stretching the deer hide, Einar moved quickly in an attempt to keep warm. As quickly as he could, anyway, with his right arm bound to his side just above the elbow with a strip of cloth from the wrecked shirt, a measure he had resorted to after seeing what the previous day’s activities had done to the area that the wolverine had mangled. The clots of blood that had formed in the wound had kept breaking loose and the bleeding starting up again, and he could see that, with the animal’s teeth having torn well down into the muscle, there was little chance of anything beginning to knit together and heal, as long as he was using the arm. Need some of that hound’s tongue to make an allantoin wash for it, speed up the healing. Have to go look for some.

Einar could not really see himself finishing the tanning process with one arm, and his bad one, at that, and really had to have something, even if it was just a vest, to replace the ruined shirt. So he ended up treating the area with some more of his berberine and spruce pitch salve and bandaging it as well as he could, wrapping the arm to his body with a strip of cloth just above the elbow, immobilizing the top half but still leaving his lower arm and hand somewhat useful to him. The setup slowed his work some, but he made up for it by redoubling his efforts in a struggle to stave off the cold of the morning, collecting four small dead trees, removing protruding branches and lashing them together to form a rough square. He managed to adapt pretty quickly to the limited usefulness of his arm, and finished the frame without slowing down long enough to get seriously cold, but found himself strongly hoping that the sling would not be necessary for very long.

As he worked, watching the world slowly thaw and the snow melt out of the trees as the sun came up he worried about the berries over near the lake, concerned that they might be a loss after the freeze, however brief it had been, and decided to make a trip over to check on them later that day, after the snow melted and he had got the hide brained and set to dry. Finished with the stretching frame, he propped it against the tree and made a hasty return to the shelter with the dehaired hide, unwilling to risk a fire on a clear day but supposing that he might as well at least be in out of the wind while he prepared the hide for stretching, using one of the sharply fractured fragments from his broken spearhead as an awl to create holes every few inches around the edge of the hide so that he could pass parachute line through them and stretch the hide in the frame he had created. Returning to the frame with some parachute line and the prepared hide, he worked to lace the line through the holes, wrapping it over the frame and stretching the hide tightly between the four logs as he went. The task was difficult with his injuries, and he ended up having to start over twice before getting it done to his satisfaction, sitting down on the ground to rest before throwing a rope up over a high branch of the spruce and raising the frame and hide well off the ground, knowing that he could do no more until night came and he could have a fire to cook down the brain solution.

Returning to the shelter, he slumped down on his cattail bed and sat for a minute with his head on his knees, worn out again and realizing that in his haste to secure some new clothing, he had entirely forgotten about breakfast. Cutting a few slivers from the wolverine haunch he had roasted the night before, he ate them with some deer fat, seeing that his supply of fat was rapidly dwindling with the making of his first few batches of pemmican, and knowing that he would have to use a bit more of it in tanning the hide, to supplement the brain. Time to set out another deer snare, I guess. He knew that a steady diet of venison jerky would do him little good without a source of fat to supplement it, and he found himself very tired at the thought of processing another deer just then, for the first time in many months almost wishing that the whole thing could be over so he could just walk into a grocery store and buy a big pail of peanut butter like everybody else, regardless of the consequences. And one of lard, and a bunch of butter, and don’t forget cheese… It was a foolish line of thought and a brief one, Einar quickly dismissing it by laughing and telling himself that if he was not careful enough in his use of fire, he might very well be getting an airdrop on or near his location, but I highly doubt that it’ll have anything at all to do with food. There had been nothing in the article he had discovered in the newspaper salvaged from the camp after the forest fire that indicated whether or not the UAV the feds were using was armed, but he knew it would be foolish to assume anything other than that it was. Or could be, if they decided to take such a step. And Einar still found himself pretty jumpy about the fact that his shelter was so near an area that was clearly used, if not on an especially regular or predictable basis, for helicopter training. He worried at times that he was perhaps already becoming too complacent, too dependent on the protection of the shelter and beginning to lose a bit of the edge of alertness that had so far kept him free, if not always (always?) comfortable. Well, I can’t exactly leave right now, though. Can work towards it, but I’ve got to get this meat put away, get the hides taken care of so I have something to wear, so like it or not, I am kind of dependent on the shelter at the moment. Better just make the best of it.

Securing the wolverine hide around his shoulders for his planned scouting trip over to the serviceberries near the lake, Einar realized that he could, with a few hours’ hard word, rub, stretch and soften the hide to a nearly “tanned” state where it would be more flexible, and use it as a garment of sorts as he worked on the deer hide. It would be better than nothing, and was certainly quite warm, if not exactly large enough. Blocking up the entrance to the crevice with rocks in the hope of preventing another wolverine-type incident, Einar took his knife-spear as well as the bone spearhead he had nearly completed the day before, hoping to find a new willow shaft for it on his wanderings. He felt a bit vulnerable with only the clumsy, half-length pocket knife spear in his hand, wanted something longer, though he knew that his injuries left him with a somewhat limited ability to use it, at the moment.

Upon reaching the serviceberry covered hillside over near the lake, Einar’s fears were confirmed. Not only did the half-grown berries appear to have been nipped by the freeze, the late-season snow, wet and heavy and nearly slush when it fell, had broken a good many of the branches from the bushes, meaning that the berries would have no chance of finishing their growth and ripening, even if they had managed to survive the brief dip below freezing. Staring at the ruined berry patch in dismay, Einar collected a few small, berry laden branches to carry back with him, curious to see if the tiny green fruits might be edible when dried, even thought they were a long way from being ripe. He doubted it, doubted that they would be especially digestible, anyway, and knew that the sugar content would be very low at that stage. Well. Better make that scouting trip down to a lower gully somewhere, just as soon as I have that deer hide brained and drying. Tomorrow, hopefully. Cannot risk letting the season pass by down there without me taking advantage of it. He knew that in times past, dried serviceberries, known as “Saskatoons” in more northern latitudes, had, with their abundant sugar and carbohydrate content, been a staple winter food for many tribes, along with meat of various types, and had hoped they might serve a similar function for him. Not wanting to wait on the berry scouting trip until he had finished the hide and made some sort of garment out of it—several more days, at best—he decided that the wolverine hide would just have to do. It’ll be alright. Weather has moved out, and it is, after all, summer up here.

[EdD270]

So glad EA is having a few days to get himself back in shape and build up supplies.
I'm curious about something. EA knows there are aircraft of various kinds, manned and unmadded, with IR equipment looking for him. He knows IR "sees" variations between heat given off by various surfaces, even air columns. Yet he only makes a fire at night, when the temperature gradient between his shelter and surrounding rock is greatest. It seems he'd make a smokeless fire (Dakota fire hole?) in the day time when the surrounding rocks are heated by the sun.
What's EA's thinking about this? Is he more concerned by the possibility of smoke being seen than the detection by IR devices?