Hunter-Gatherer

Out there between our camp and their shelters the desert was as dark and still as I have ever known it. The only other living things capable of uttering a sound were snakes, and no serpent would have been so foolish as to hiss while about his business on a night so profound. There was no fitful air of summer even, no heat eddy of the frightful day spinning about to rustle what was left of leaf and grass on the scorched earth. But there was this intense electric murmur of the stars at one’s ears. 

Then suddenly, ahead in a band of absolute black with no fire or reflection of fire to pale it down, I thought I heard the sound of a human voice. I stopped at once and listened carefully. The sound came again more distant, like the voice of a woman crooning over a cradle. I stood with my back to the horizon bright with portents of lightning, waiting for my eyes to recover from the glare of our great camp-fire. Slowly, against the water-light of the stars lapping briskly among the breakers of thorn and hardwood around us, emerged the outline of a woman holding out a child in both her hands, high above her head, and singing something with her own face lifted to the sky. Her attitude and the reverence trembling in her voice, moved me so that the hair at the back of my neck stood on end. 

‘What’s she doing?’ I whispered to Dabé, who had halted without a sound, like my own star-shadow beside me. 

‘She’s asking the stars up there,’ he whispered, like a man requested in the temple of his people to explain to a stranger a most solemn moment of their ritual. 

‘She’s asking the stars to take the little heart of her child and to give him something of the heart of a star in return.’ 

‘But why the stars?’ I asked. 

‘Because, Moren,’ he said in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘the stars there have heart in plenty and are great hunters. She is asking them to take from her little child his little heart and to give him the heart of a hunter.’ 

The explanation moved me to a silence which Dabé mistook. Afraid, I suspect, that like most of the people he knew in his life of exile I would scorn a Bushman’s belief, he wanted reassurance immediately. 

‘But why don’t you say something, Moren?’ he asked, almost like an anxious child. ‘Surely you must know that the stars are great hunters? Can’t you hear them? Do listen to what they are crying! Come on! Moren! You are not so deaf that you cannot hear them.’ 

I have slept out under the stars in Africa for too many years not to know that they sound and resound in the sky. From the time I was born until I first went to school, I slept outside a house every night except when it was raining – and that was seldom. My first memories are of the incomparable starlight of the high veld of Southern Africa and the far sea-sound that goes with it. 

I hastened to say, ‘Yes, Dabé, of course I hear them!’ But then I was forced to add, ‘Only I do not know what they are saying. Do you know?’ 

Reassured, he stood for a moment head on one side, while the light of another flash from the horizon flew like a ghost moth by us. Then, with the note of indulgence he could not resist using on me when he felt his authority not in doubt, he said, ‘They are very busy hunting tonight and all I hear are their hunting cries: “Tssik!” and “Tsá!”’ 

Had it not been for the darkness between us he would have seen, I am sure, the shock of amazement on my face. I had known those sounds all my life. Ever since I can remember we ourselves had used them out hunting with our dogs. ‘Tssik!’ repeated sharply thrice was the sound we used to alert our dogs when we were at the cover of bush, grass, cave, or donga in which we suspected our quarry to be hiding. Hearing it, the ears of our dogs would immediately prick up, their eyes shine with excitement and their noses sniff the air diligently for scent. Another ‘Tssik’ would send them to search the cover. ‘Tsá’ was the final imperative note which released them from all restraint and launched them after our chosen quarry when it was flushed. 

I had always wondered about the origin of these sounds. Neither of them had ever seemed European to me. I had asked the oldest of the old people of all races and colours. I asked one of the greatest of all African hunters, too. They could only say that, like me, they had been born into a world in which they were already in long-established use. Stranger still, wherever I went in the world I found that, although hunters outside Africa did not know the sounds and therefore did not use them with their dogs, if I tried them out many of the dogs responded. They would start searching with all their senses: if I kept up the sounds for long, they became exceedingly restless, in the end letting out that involuntary and nostalgic whimper normally provoked in them only by the moon. That had deepened the mystery for me, but now I thought I knew: we had the sounds from the Bushman, and he and the dogs had them straight from the stars. The revelation filled me with awe. I felt as if I had been allowed to witness the coming of the word in the darkness before time. I thought this was enough of magic in a day which in my encounter with the little steenbuck had begun with magic.

It was impossible to tell from the appearance or behaviour of the two that something well-nigh fatal had happened to them only the morning before. The old lady was pounding some freshly grilled meat to pulp in her stamping-block, since neither her teeth nor her husband’s were good enough to chew venison whole.

The woman’s wooden mortar and pestle, or stamping-block as we call it in Africa, stood near by with her grubbing-stick or iron-wood beside it.

Dabé and I sat down near them. The children looked up at me out of their slanted eyes, examining my face without fear, as I told him I too would be grateful for ‘some man’s talk’ with him. 

For example, was it true that the stars were hunters? Did the little steenbuck really possess great magic, and if so, what sort of magic? Dabé, I think rather indignant that his word on the subject had not been enough for me, put the questions perfunctorily. A long silence met them. The old lady again stopped pounding. The old man gave me a steady look out of his wide eyes, oddly hypnotic in the firelight flicking on his face. My heart sank. I feared a repetition of my experience with the Bushmen at the Sip Wells. There all my first questions had been met with a similar silence. I had to wait until we had proved over the days that we could be trusted before they would talk to me about the things of their spirit. I began to feel almost culpably naïve for assuming that such bold questions could draw an answer from a member of a race which for thousands of years has been so despised and hunted down by all other men. My only hope, I thought, was to remind him that we were friends of his friends at the Sip Wells and let the fact that they had freely spoken of these things plead for me. 

‘Tell him,’ I asked Dabé, my voice sounding ineffectual in my own ears in the tense silence between us, ‘tell him that his people at the Sip Wells told me about the first of all the Bushmen, Oeng-Oeng and his wives who would not put out the fire, about the little Oeng-Oengs and the elephants, the ostrich, and the finding of the first fire; Mantis and the resurrection of the dead Eland; the turtledove and the honey and many other things; but they never told me these things about which I have just asked him. Surely so old and wise a father as he knows the answers and can help me.’ 

At the mention of the Sip Wells, the magic name of OengOeng and this brief recapitulation of some of the great themes of the imagination of his race, the tension between us snapped. His eyes brightened, the old lady began to pound with vigour again, and said: 

‘Yes. Oh, yes! Yes! Yes! It is true: the stars are hunters.’ 

‘All the stars?’ I asked, my heart beating faster. 

He paused for just a second, then it all came out at length. Yes! They were all hunters, great hunters, but some were greater than others. For instance there was that star there! He raised his thin old arm to point with a long finger at the brightest star in the Great Dipper. It just cleared the fringe of a camel-thorn tree and in the dry air was bright enough to lay a water-sheen on the topmost leaves. That star, he said, was a great hunter who hunted in far away dangerous places in the shape of a lion. Could I not see how fierce its eye shone and hear the distant murmur of its roar? And there was one even greater! He pointed at Sirius, the star of thedog, at the head of the belted and nimble Orion. It was so full and overflowing with light that it was almost shapeless – a sort of careless gash in the night through which the brightness of the day beyond was leaking like clear water from a broken tap. As fast as the great drops of light fell, others swelled in their place to fall with a silky sort of swish on the bush around us. Yes! You only had to look at it once, the old father said, to see what a great hunter it was. Could I not see how fat it was, how heavily it sat there in the midst of plenty in the sky? He paused and I hastened to ask, afraid that silence might cool the subject: ‘Is it the greatest of all the hunters up there?’ 

From the delight that shone in his eyes, I realized the pause had been a trap set to catch just that question. He shook his head vigorously. The greatest hunter was not there yet. It hunted in the darkest and most dangerous places of all, so far away that we could not see it yet. We could see it only in the early morning when it came nearer on its way home. There, there was a hunter for you! The old father made a lively whistling sound of wonder at the greatness of the hunter. Yes, just before the dawn one could see him striding over the horizon, his eye bold and shining, an arrow ready in his bow. When he appeared, the night whisked around to make way for him, the red dust spurting at its black heels. He broke off and shook his grey old head, as he once more uttered that sound of wonder, before asking as if the thought had just come to him: ‘But can’t you hear for yourself the cries of the hunt going on up there?’ I assured him I could. He gave a grunt of satisfaction and leaned back on both his elbows with a look on his face as if to say, ‘Well, then! There is nothing more to be said about it.’

So gradually in these and other ways a natural pride in himself came alive again. Once it nearly had serious consequences. Jeremiah tended to have a noticeably superior manner with his companions, particularly Dabé. For long he never called Dabé by his name, referring to him simply as ‘Massarwa’. This term is used by Africans to describe not only the Bushman but all the mixed peoples in the Kalahari living the Bushman way. No one suspected how much this hurt Dabé until one morning, after having been referred to repeatedly as Massarwa, he could bear it no longer. 

‘How would you like it if I called you not Jeremiah but Kaffir?’ he asked sharply. Kaffir is the term used by Europeans to describe all black people in Africa irrespective of their race and origin, and has come to be used as a deadly insult among Africans themselves. Dabé could not have hit on a more accurate or provocative parallel. ‘Massarwa!’ Jeremiah exclaimed, putting down the saucepan in his hand, while John, his chief assistant, stopped working too and looked as injured as he did. ‘Massarwa. You must not call me Kaffir.’ 

‘But if you call me Massarwa, why should I not call you Kaffir?’ Dabé insisted, the fiery Bushman temper of which my grandfather had so often spoken, for the first time visible. 

‘You must not call us that!’ Jeremiah and John said together now, both their dark faces paler with emotion. They came belligerently to their feet and looked tall over Dabé’s sturdy little figure. 

Luckily I was near and stopped the argument before it became a fight by sending Dabé away on an errand, while I told the others they were never again to call him Massarwa and I would see that he never called them Kaffir. But to me, slight as the incident was, it was a shining example of a truth I have always believed – that one of the great hungers of the human spirit from the earliest to the most contemporary level is the hunger for honour. I am certain Dabé, Jeremiah, and John had been prepared to fight to the death because the matter appeared to concern their honour. I am certain, too, that no one will ever understand the complex and desperate situation in Africa unless he realizes first that at bottom it is an affair of honour. But besides the hunger for honour there are other great hungers as well: that for justice, for forgiveness, and the one that sums up all – the hunger for love. Some of those too showed themselves a little that day I left ‘Bushman’s Reprieve’ with Dabé at my side. 

When he had been silent for some time, I remarked cheerfully, since his old melancholy seemed to be joined to him again like his shadow, ‘Well, Dabé. It looks as if the rain is really coming to your people back there. They ought to be all right now.’ 

‘Yes. They ought to be all right now.’ He answered without any great conviction, as if he and I inevitably must have different notions of what ‘all right’ was. He hesitated for a brief moment, his brown eyes going black with shadow from within; then he began speaking not so much to me as to that immense glittering overlordship of the day in front of us. His voice was flat, unemotional, and so without anger that I thought my stomach would turn. 

Had I noticed, he asked, how everything in life had a place of its own? For instance, the springbok had their pans; the eland and the hartebeest their great plains; the jackal, the hyena, the lynx, the mongoose, and the leopard had each a hole of his own: the lion could come and go and eat and sleep where he liked. Even the locusts had their grass, the ants their mounds of earth – and had I ever seen a bird without a nest? The black man, the Herero, the Bastaards, had kraals and lands of their own, and the white man houses of stone. But could I tell him what and where was a Bushman’s place? The echo of the New Testament cry about the birds having nests and the foxes holes but the Son of Man no place to lay his head, rang out so loudly in my head that I would have suspected Dabé of having heard it, had I not known otherwise. 

Moreover, he went on, many of these animals were protected by the white man. If a Bushman killed a giraffe, an eland, a gemsbok, or even a bird like the giant bustard for food because he was dying of hunger, and the police discovered it, he was taken away to prison and often never seen again. Yet, if the Bushman killed his own desert animals for food, he was punished. No one punished the white man, the black man, and the Herero when they killed their animals, their cattle and sheep for food. But if the Bushman killed the cattle and sheep that came into the Kalahari to eat the grass of his animals, again he was hunted down and punished. How could such things be? Did I know that, when the first white men came to the Kalahari, they would have died if it had not been for the Bushman? The same was true for the blackman. The Bushman showed them where the water was, took their cattle to grass and helped them to live. Once the Bushman walked the desert like a lion from end to end with no one to trouble him, but today every man and every lion was against the Bushman. He alone had nowhere to go, no one to protect him, and no animal of his own. Again, was that how it was meant to be?

Chapter 3

Science of Staying Alive

SOME NATIVES ROAST THE BLAND YOUNG ANTLERS of the deer family when they are in velvet. Others esteem the stomach contents of herbivorous mammals such as caribou, for such greens mixed as they are with digestive acids are not too unlike salad prepared with vinegar.

Some aborigines, as desirous of wasting nothing as those who can whole sardines, do not bother to open the smaller birds and animals they secure, but pound them to a pulp which is tossed in its entirety into the pot. Other peoples gather moose and rabbit excrement for thickening boiled dishes. Even such an unlikely ingredient as gall has, among other uses, utility as a seasoning.

Nearly every part of North American animals is edible. Exceptions are polar bear and ringed and bearded seal liver which become so excessively rich in Vitamin A that they are poisonous to some degree at certain times and are usually as well avoided. All freshwater fish are likewise good to eat.

Animals should not be bled any more than can be helped if food is scarce. Whether they should be so handled at other times is a matter largely of circumstances and of personal opinion.

Blood, which is not far removed from milk, is unusually rich in easily absorbed minerals and vitamins. Our bodies need iron. It would require the assimilation of ten ordinary eggs, we are told, to supply one man’s normal daily requirements. Four tablespoons of blood are capable of doing the same job.

Fresh blood can be secured and carried, in the absence of handier means, in a bag improvised from one or another parts of the entrails. One way to use it is in broths and soups enlivened perhaps by a wild vegetable or two.

Leather and Rawhide Both Edible

The skin of the animal is as nourishing as a similar quantity of lean meat. Baking a catch in its hide, although ordinarily both a handy and tasty method of occasionally preparing camp meat, is therefore a practice we should not indulge in when rations are scarce.

Rawhide is also high in protein. Boiled, it has even less flavor than roasted antlers, and the not overly appealing and yet scarcely unpleasant look and feel of the boiled skin of a large fish. When it is raw, a usual procedure naturally adopted in emergencies is to chew on a small bit until mastication becomes tiresome and then to swallow the slippery shred.

Explorers speak of variances of opinion among individual members of groups as to whether or not leather, generally footwear or other body covering, should be eaten. When we are so situated that to reach safety we will need to walk, retaining our foot protection should of course come first. If we are cold as well as hungry, we will stay warmer by wearing the rawhide than we would by sacrificing it to obtain a little additional heat via the digestive system. If the article in question is made of commercially tanned leather, the answer will be simpler indeed, for such leather generally has scant if any food value.

Bones May Mean Salvation

A lot of us, given the time, capitalize on the food value inherent in bones in two ways: Small bones go into the pot to thicken stews and soups, and we may also like to chew on the softer of these, particularly if we are lounging around a campfire. Larger marrow bones are opened so that their soft vascular tissue can be extracted.

The mineral-rich marrow found in the bones of animals that were in good physical condition at demise is not surpassed by any other natural food in caloric strength. What is, at the same time, the most delectable of tidbits is wasted by the common outdoor practice of roasting such bones until they are on the point of crumbling. A more conservative procedure is to crack them at the onset, with two stones if nothing handier is available. The less the marrow is then cooked, the better it will remain as far as nutrition is concerned.

All this is something to consider if any of us, when desperate for food, happens upon the skeleton of a large animal.

Rare or Well Done

When food supplies are limited, nothing should be cooked longer than is considered necessary for palatableness. The only exception is when there may be germs or parasites to be destroyed.

The more food is subjected to heat, the greater are the losses of nutritive values. Even the practice of making toast diminishes both bread’s proteins and digestibility. The greatest single universal error made in preparing venison and similar game meat for the table is overcooking which, in addition to drying it out, tends to make it tough and stringy. What this practice does to the flavor is a matter of opinion.

Scurvy Easily Prevented and Cured

A very definite risk when fresh food is habitually overcooked, especially under survival conditions, arises from the fact that oxidation destroys the inherent Vitamin C, lack of which in the diet causes scurvy.

Scurvy has gathered more explorers, pioneers, trappers, and prospectors to their fathers than can be reckoned, for it is a debilitating killer whose lethal subtleties through the centuries have too often been misinterpreted and misunderstood.

Scurvy, it is known now, is a deficiency disease. If you have it, taking Vitamin C into your system will cure you. Eating a little Vitamin C regularly will, indeed, keep you from having scurvy in the first place.

Free Vitamins

Spruce tea can be made, by steeping fresh evergreen needles in water, that will be as potent with the both preventative and curative ascorbic acid as the ordinary orange juice. This vitamin you can get even more directly by chewing the tender new needles, whose starchy green tips are particularly pleasant to eat in the spring.

Boiling supple needles in water will provide as much Vitamin C as fresh orange juice and can restore a body with warmth and a sense of well-being under cold and trying circumstances.

Fresh meat will both prevent and cure scurvy. So will fresh fish. So will fresh fruits and vegetables, wild or otherwise. So will lime juice and lemon juice but, no matter how sour, only if they too are fresh. The Vitamin C in all these is lessened and eventually destroyed by oxidation, by age, and, incidently, by salt.

How Rabbit Starvation Really Happens

A man can have all the rabbit meat he wants to eat and still perish. So-called rabbit starvation, as a matter of fact, is particularly well known in the Far North.

An exclusive diet of any lean meat, of which rabbit is a practical example, will cause digestive upset and diarrhea. Eating more and more rabbit, as one is compelled to do because of the increasing uneasiness of hunger, will only worsen the condition.

The diarrhea and general discomfort will not be relieved unless fat is added to the diet. Death will otherwise follow within a few days. One would probably be better off on just water than on rabbit and water.

The Tremendous Importance of Fat

Why is fat so important an item in a survival diet? Part of the answer, as we have seen, lies in the fact that eating lean flesh without a sufficient amount of fat will kill us, an actuality that may seem astonishing, for in civilization we obtain numerous fats from a very great number of often unrecognized sources. These include butter, margarine, lard, milk, cheese, bacon, salad oil, mayonnaise, various sauces, candy, nuts, ice cream, and the fatty contents of such staples as bread.

If in an emergency we have to subsist entirely on meat, the fat of course will have to come from the meat itself. The initial consideration in a meat diet, therefore, is fat.

Yet history tells of supposedly experienced men who, although starving, have burned vital fat to give nutritiously inferior lean meat what seemed to them a more appetizing flavor—a suicidal error of which we, having learned better in an easier way, need never be guilty.

Cannibalism

It has always been believed, among all social levels of all peoples, that starving human beings left to their own resources will devour everything suspected of having food value, including their fellow human beings.

“It is rare, except in fiction, that men are killed to be eaten. There are cases where a member of a party becomes so unsocial in his conduct towards the rest that by agreement he is killed; but if his body then is eaten it is not logically correct to say that he was killed for food,” Villijalinur Stefansson says. “What does happen constantly is that those who have died of hunger, or of another cause, will be eaten. But long before cannibalism develops the party has eaten whatever else is edible.”

Some scientists, who point out that objections are psychological and sociological, declare abstractly that animal proteins are desirable, in direct ratio with their chemical similarity to the eating organism, and that therefore for the fullest and easiest assimilation of flesh, human meat can hardly be equaled.

What to Kill for Food

Some member of the deer family is what anyone really bogged down in the North American wilderness is most apt to turn to for sustenance. The adult male, as any sportsman knows, is fattest just before the mating season which, varying according to species and climate, commences roughly in early autumn. The male then becomes progressively poorer. At the end of the rut, the prime male is practically without fat even in the normally rich marrows.

The mature female is the choice of the meat hunter once the rutting season is well under way. She remains preferable until approximately early spring. Then the male once more becomes more desirable. Generally speaking, older animals have more body fat than younger ones.

Tidbit of Old-Time Trappers

Beaver was something I had very much wanted to eat ever since I was a boy and had read Horace Kephart’s regretful observation: “This tidbit of old-time trappers will be tasted by few of our generation, more’s the pity.” It was a lean black-haired trapper, Dan Macdonald, who gave me the opportunity some years later, and as beaver are one of the principal fur animals along the upper Peace River I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to enjoy amisk many times since.

The meat is so sustaining that anyone lost and hungry is markedly fortunate to secure it. Beaver cuttings on trees, which indicate the presence of the amphibian, are easily recognized by the marks left by the large sharp teeth that have kept gnawing around and around, biting continually deeper until the wood is severed. Because beaver don’t know how trees will fall, the animal is occasionally found trapped beneath trunk and branch.

If you have a gun and enough time at your disposal to wait for a sure shot, an often productive campaign is to steal to a concealed vantage on the downward side of a beaver pond. The furry animal may then be seen swimming and shot in the head. If you have a choice and not much ammunition, wait to bag the biggest one you can. Beaver, the largest rodents on this continent, weigh up to fifty pounds or more.

Beaver quarters seem almost incommensurably delicious when you’re hungry from outdoor exertion, although with the larger adults the meat does, even though you may be reluctant to heed it, have a tendency to become somewhat fibrous and stringy when cooked. The meat has a distinctive taste and odor somewhat resembling that of plump turkey. A sound idea in an emergency is to supplement it with lean flesh such as rabbit, so as to take the fullest possible advantage of the fat.

A beaver tail looks surprisingly like a scaly black fish whose head has been removed. Tails may be propped up or hung near a cooking fire whose heat will cause the rough black hide to puff and to separate from the flesh, whereupon it can be peeled off in large flakes.

The beaver tail is so full of nourishing oil, incidentally, that if set too close to a blaze it will burn like a torch. The meat is white and gelatinous, and rich enough that one finds himself not wanting too much of it at a time.

What Parts of Meat to Eat

We will probably want to eat most of any animals we can secure if short of food. Some parts, such as the liver, have been recognized even among some primitive tribes as a specific cure for night blindness as it is high in Vitamin A. But any section of plump fresh meat is a complete diet in itself, affording all the necessary food ingredients even if we dine on nothing but fat rare steaks for week after month after year.”

Excerpt From: Bradford Angier. “How to Stay Alive in the Woods.” Apple Books.