At Home in the Wilderness

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Bones can also become good tools. By selecting suitable ones (such as the cannon bone from a deer) and sharpening them on a rock with a simple abrading motion, you can produce serviceable knives, scrapers, and awls.

COOKING TECHNIQUES

As I've mentioned before, all animals that you intend to eat should be thoroughly cooked to insure that any parasites they might contain will be destroyed . . . in other words, treat all meat as though it were pork. Each creature (with the exception of insects) should be eviscerated, skinned, and carefully checked for any diseases or abnormalities prior to cooking (use unhealthy-looking specimens only for bait). Some plants, too, must be cooked to render them edible, because many contain poisons that need to be destroyed by heat. (For more detailed information on this matter, refer to a good field guide or my article on the subject on page 66 of MOTHER NO. 75.)

Here, then, are half a dozen reliable wilderness food-preparation methods.

Rock boiling. This is not only one of the oldest forms of cooking, but probably also the most useful in situations when you're forced to employ a container that can't be heated directly over a fire. Using hot rocks, food can be cooked in one of the hollowed-out wooden vessels described in this article . . . and much of the nutrition contained in the raw ingredients will be retained.

The best rocks for this purpose are small and rounded, about the size of golf balls. However, because some stones store water in tiny cracks and fissures, it's best not to take them from streams or other damp areas. Heating such a rock can cause the water it contains to vaporize and expand, often exploding the stone dangerously. For that reason, only bone-dry rocks should be used. I also recommend that sandstone, flint, obsidian, quartz, and any other hard, fireformed silicate types be avoided, as they tend to shatter when heated and then placed in water.

To cook your meal, collect from six to ten small stones and heat them in a fire for about two hours (when in an actual survival situation, it's a good idea to keep a number of them in your fire at all times). Place the edible plants and animal parts you intend to cook in your hollowed log, cover them with water, and then remove a rock from the fire with a forked stick or a set of twig tongs and put it in the cooking pot. The water around the rock will begin to boil at once, and, as you keep heating and adding stones, all the liquid in the container will eventually be bubbling. When the boiling begins to slow, remove the first rocks and replace them with fresh ones, continuing the process until your dinner is ready.

Spit cooking. Another ancient form of food preparation, open-fire roasting, is quick but does tend to waste much of the nutritional value of the food. A gutted, skinned, and cleaned animal is simply skewered on a spit made from a thin (nonpoisonous) sapling, suspended over the heat, and turned frequently. (It's best to cook over coals, since open flame will char the meat.) Roots and tubers can be added to the spit and cooked along with the meat, shish kebab style, or wrapped in wet leaves or grasses and roasted in the coals.

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