Guts Read online

  So I had to get back, and I worked all that day, dragging and stopping, and finally, completely exhausted, I arrived at the road just short of dark. By then most of the hair was gone off one side of the carcass. My bicycle was still there and I lugged and pulled at the carcass until it was across the seat and the handlebars and started pushing it down the road. It was nearly impossible—the carcass kept falling off to one side or the other—but the wheels made it infinitely better than dragging. After a few hundred feet I worked out a balance point and it became slightly less difficult.

  It was an almost-deserted back road but there were some farms out along the edge of the forest and I thought, or dreamed, or hoped and prayed, that somebody, anybody, would come along in a truck and give me a lift to town.

  It did not happen. I wobbled and rolled down the road at about a mile an hour, stopping often to rub my legs, more often to get the deer back on the bike. It was well after midnight when I pulled into the driveway of the apartment. I found some rope and pulled the deer carcass—rubbed and torn, half-skinned, ragged but still there—up on one of the rafters in the old garage near the apartment until it hung with its back feet just touching the floor. Then I went down into the basement, where I slept on an old oversized armchair arrangement. Listening to the hiss of the coal burning in the furnace, I fell into a sleep as sound as a dead man’s.

  And my life moved on and there were other hunts, some better, some worse, and other deer and small game, and I did not really think of this buck again until it was time to write Hatchet and Brian’s Winter, when the buck became part of Brian’s life as well as mine.

  CHAPTER 5

  EATING EYEBALLS AND GUTS OR STARVING: THE FINE ART OF WILDERNESS NUTRITION

  He looked out across the lake and brought the egg to his mouth and closed his eyes and sucked and squeezed the egg at the same time and swallowed as fast as he could. . . . It had a greasy, almost oily taste, but it was still an egg.

  HATCHET

  There are two main drives in nature: to survive and to reproduce. But the primary drive is to survive, for reproduction cannot occur without survival. In most of nature, the most important element in survival is finding food.

  I spent a lot of time in winter camps with dogs while I was training for and running the Iditarod, and I could have learned a whole life’s lesson by studying just one animal—not the dog, not the wolf, but one type of bird: the chickadee.

  Chickadees are simply amazing. They do not migrate but stay north for the winter; at forty, fifty, even sixty below, they not only survive but seem to be happy, fluffed up to stay insulated and warm, and tough beyond belief. I would find frozen grouse; frozen deer standing dead, leaning against trees; frozen rabbits; and two times, even frozen men—all killed by nature, by cold, by starvation or by blatant stupidity.

  (Imagine going cross-country skiing in the dead of winter in thick, old-growth forest and not even bringing a book of matches or a butane lighter; the poor fool broke his leg on a small hill and froze to death in the middle of enough fuel to heat a small city.)

  But I never found a dead chickadee. They are like little feathered wolves, except more versatile.

  I’m not sure exactly when, but at some point in my youth, in the wild, I decided that if it didn’t grow or live in the woods I didn’t want it. For a considerable time, in a very real way, I lived not unlike Brian in Hatchet. I would head into the woods with nothing but my bow and a dozen arrows—eight blunts and three or four broadheads—a small package of salt, some matches and little else.

  When I first started to do this I found that luck had a large part to play in whether I ate, as it did with Brian. But as with Brian, two fundamentals had a great influence on my life. The first was the concept of learning. I went from simply walking through the woods, bulling my way until something moved for me to try a shot at, to trying to understand what I saw, and from that, to “feeling” what the woods were about: a sound here, a movement there, a line that looked out of place or curved the wrong way, a limb that moved against the wind at the wrong time or a smell that was wrong. And not just one of these things, not a single one but all of them mixed together, entered into my mind to make me a part of the woods, so that I came to know some things that were going to happen before they happened: which way a grouse would probably fly, how a rabbit or deer would run or what cover it would make for next.

  This didn’t come all at once—at first it was slow—but before long I understood things that I didn’t quite know how I comprehended: a line would catch my eye and I would know, know that it was a grouse and that it was going to fly slightly up and to the left—and it would happen in just that way. I would hear a sound, just the tiniest scrape or crack of a twig, and I would know it was a deer and that it had seen me and would run before I could turn and get an arrow off. To learn these things, to know how all of it worked and to be part of it, was one of the great achievements in my life and has stayed with me. It has been the one guiding part of living that has helped me more than anything else. To learn, to be willing to learn how a thing works, to understand an animal in nature, or how to write a book or run a dog team or sail a boat, to always keep learning is truly wonderful.

  The other truth—one that Brian came to know, and something that people all over the world have known and spoken of for thousands of years—is that hunger makes the best sauce.

  Something that you would normally never consider eating, something completely repulsive and ugly and disgusting, something so gross it would make you vomit just looking at it, becomes absolutely delicious if you’re starving.

  Consider the British navy in the old days of sailing ships. Their principal food was hard-tack, a dried biscuit kept in wooden barrels that were never quite airtight. After months and sometimes years at sea the biscuits would become full of maggots. The men had once spent many days trying to get rid of the worms, but now they were close to starving, and they saw the maggots as food to smear on the biscuits, a kind of tasty butter. They would also eat the rats that hid in the ship’s hold. By the end of a long voyage the rats could be sold to hungry sailors for up to a month’s wages.

  When I first started living on game, I thought only of grouse and rabbits and deer. I had thought I would eat only the best parts of the animal and stay away from anything disgusting. Like guts.

  And I hung in with that thinking until I went about three days without making a kill, and when I finally did, it was a red squirrel, which is about the size and edibility of the common rat, if perhaps cuter. It was sitting on a limb about twenty feet away and I caught it with a blunt and dropped it and took it back to my camp and cleaned, skinned and gutted it. And then looked at it.

  It looked as if I’d skinned a gerbil. I had a small aluminum pot and I put water in it and then the small carcass and boiled it for a time with some husked acorns I found. I ate it, along with the acorns, and I was cleaning the pot when I noticed the entrails on a log where I’d left them when I gutted the squirrel. My stomach was still empty, so I took the small heart and kidneys and lungs, leaving the stomach and intestines, and I boiled up another stew and ate it with more acorns. I was still hungry. Famished. There was no way a person could get fat living on such a diet. But you wouldn’t starve, either, and some of the edge of my hunger was gone.

  After that I looked at food, or game, very differently. With the onset of hunger in the woods—a hunger that did not leave me unless I killed something large, such as a deer, or killed and ate more than one rabbit or three or more grouse, or as many as ten or fifteen small fish—I never again thought simply in terms of steaks or choice portions of meat or vegetation.

  As the hunger increases the diet widens. I have eaten grub worms wrapped in fresh dandelion greens. They were too squishy for me to want to chew them so I swallowed them whole, but I did eat them and they stayed down. I have sucked the eyes out of fish that I caught the way Brian caught the panfish, with a homemade bow and willow arrows, sharpening the dry willow stalks and car
ving a shallow barb on the ends before fire-hardening them. I have also scaled fish with a spoon and then eaten the skin along with the cooked liver and brains. I ate rabbit brains, too. I have eaten snake in survival courses, and it’s surprisingly good. After reading a National Geographic about African natives when I was a boy, I tried eating both ants and grasshoppers. I found, as with the grub worms, they are easier to eat whole, wrapped in a leaf, although cooked grasshoppers are crunchy and, if you remember the salt, aren’t bad—kind of like snack food.

  Once the door was opened to eating strange food, or perhaps a better phrase might be odd aspects of familiar game and fish, I found I was ready for almost anything and that almost nothing would go to waste. This is not so astonishing really, when you consider that this practice was common among natives in most early cultures, and while much of it has been forgotten because of neglect and a bounty of cheap, readily available food, there are still sources for the knowledge.

  I was running my first Iditarod and pulled into a village along the Bering Sea early in the day. This in itself was strange because for some reason I seemed to arrive at all the villages in the middle of the night. But it was early, before noon, and I’d run all night and was tired, as I thought the dogs were, but they suddenly took off at a dead run, passing the checkpoint where I was to sign in, barreling down the village street until they came to a small dwelling where a little boy was kneeling over the carcass of a freshly killed seal. The dogs had smelled it, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that I finally got the snow hook buried in the packed snow and stopped them before they piled on top of the boy. I was terrified they might do him some injury—he was about six years old and small—but he seemed unconcerned and turned slowly when I pulled up. His mouth and chin were bloody and I could see that he had been sucking fresh blood out of a hole cut in the seal’s neck. He smiled at me and gestured and said, “You want some?”

  It was a generous offer and I didn’t feel right rejecting it so I nodded and leaned down and tasted it. It was not unpleasant, although I would have preferred it cooked—as I’d eaten blood sausage, which I made by baking blood and flour in a bread pan—and I nodded and thanked him. Later I would see him walking down a passage between buildings eating straight Crisco out of a can with two fingers as if it were ice cream. Still friendly and courteous, he offered me a twofinger scoop of the white fat, but I thanked him and turned it down.

  When I set out to write the Brian books I was concerned that everything that happened to Brian should be based on reality, or as near reality as fiction could be. I did not want him to do things that wouldn’t or couldn’t really happen in his situation. Consequently I decided to write only of things that had happened to me or things I purposely did to make certain they would work for Brian.

  One of the hardest was to start a fire with a hatchet and a rock. I cast around for days near a lake in the north woods, searching for a rock that would give off sparks when struck with the dull edge of a hatchet. I spent better than four hours getting it to work. It seemed impossible. The sparks would fly and die before they hit tinder, or they would head off in the wrong direction, or not be hot enough, or some dampness in the tinder would keep it from taking. But at last, at long last, a spark hit just right and there was a tendril of smoke and then a glowing coal and, with gentle blowing, a tiny flame, and then a fire. I can’t think of many things, including Iditarods or sailing the Pacific, that affected me as deeply as getting that fire going; I felt as early man must have felt when he discovered fire, and it was very strange but I didn’t want to put it out. Even though I had plenty of matches and could easily start a new fire, there was something unique, something intense and important about this one campfire.

  My one failure was eating a raw turtle egg. I finished Hatchet in the spring, while I was running dogs and training for my first Iditarod. This was in northern Minnesota, not far from the Canadian border, in thick forest near hundreds of small lakes. It is one of the most beautiful places on earth and because of my heart trouble I can no longer take the winters up there, but I still miss it and remember my time there only with joy and wonder.

  In the spring and early summer, after the snow is gone, you cannot run dogs on sleds, but there are old logging roads everywhere and you can have the dogs pull a light three-wheeled training cart. The dogs are very strong after a whole winter of training and racing and they view this as a kind of lark in which the object is to run as fast as possible down the old logging trails and to “crack the whip” on corners and flip the cart into the ditch or the brush at the side of the road. I swear they laugh when they do this. And the driver’s job is to keep the cart upright while running through the forest on the narrow old trails.

  That spring I ran on some new trails that I hadn’t used before; the snow had gone early and the ice was out. The topsoil up there is unbelievably thin. Though there is thick forest it is like the rain forests in South America; there is heavy growth because there is so much water, not because there is rich soil. On the logging roads the soil is gone and what remains is sand, as pure as any beach sand in the world. After all, in prehistoric times, the area was one large inland sea.

  The sandy roads wind through countless lakes and still ponds in the woods and in each pond there are snapping turtles. Because I had not run these roads in the spring I didn’t know that the female turtles come out to lay their eggs in the sand, and the best open sand they can find is on the logging roads.

  These are big turtles, some of them two or more feet across. And they are ugly, and they are very, very mean. They always make me think of what you would get if you crossed a T. rex with an alligator. They hiss and snap and bite and can easily take a finger off. I once had a friend named Walter who got his rear end too close to a snapper on a river-bank and I will always remember the sight of him running past me, naked, screaming, “Get it off! Get it off!” The snapper had locked, and I do mean locked, onto the right cheek and would not let go even when we finally stopped Walter and used a stick to try and pry the turtles jaws apart. I suspect he still has a good scar there.

  One day I came barreling over a small hill around a corner thick with brush and the dogs ran directly over a female weighing about forty pounds in the process of laying eggs. Apparently she was not having a good day and we did nothing to improve her disposition. The dogs had never seen a turtle before and heaven only knows what they thought—probably that she was an alien sent down specifically to kill and eat dogs. Everything happened very fast. I saw her just as the dogs ran over her, and she snapped at them left and right, hissing and spitting fur when she connected, and then the cart flipped on its side and the dogs left the trail and tried to climb the trees alongside the road and I rolled over the top of the snapper, screaming some words I thought I had forgotten as she took a silver-dollar-sized chunk out of my jacket, and the cart gouged a hole beneath her and dug up her eggs and we all tumbled to a stop.

  I lay on my stomach, four feet beyond the turtle. The dogs were scattered through the trees, still in harness and tangled so badly that I would have to use a knife to free some of them. For half a beat nothing moved or made a sound.

  Then the turtle looked at the wreckage of her nest, the small round eggs scattered like dirty ping-pong balls; at me flopped there; at the dogs among the trees and the cart lying on its side, and she gave it all up as a bad try and with a final loud hiss, she dragged herself off the sandy trail and back to the swamp where she lived, looking very prehistoric and completely fed up.

  As I began gathering up the pieces, my lead dog, Cookie—who was so smart and quick she never got tangled—reached around and deftly used her teeth to sever the tug holding her to the team (a habit I wished she would stop) and moved down to the turtle nest. She smelled one of the eggs, nuzzled it with her nose, then ate it whole. I knew skunks dug the nests up and ate them, because I had seen the torn-apart nests around lakes and swamps. Since I was writing Hatchet, it came to me that Brian would almost certainly run into
a turtle nest, having crashed into a northern lake, and would be hungry enough to eat the eggs. I grabbed half a dozen of them before Cookie could eat them all. She let me have them without protesting, other than lifting her lip a bit—which should have been a warning to me that perhaps they were not as good as eggs might be—and I put them in the pocket of my jacket until I had a quiet moment.

  Here we might look at several mistakes I made. First, I set myself too far away from the subject of my research: I had a full stomach; Brian was starving. Brian had just crashed in a plane; I had merely flipped over in a dog-training cart. And in the end Brian was desperate; I was only doing research.

  With the dogs settled back into patched harnesses, I took out one of the eggs, cleaned the dirt off it, used my knife to cut the leathery shell slightly, and without waiting to think I tipped my head back and sucked out the contents.

  I have eaten some strange things in my life: raw meat, eyeballs, guts. In the Philippines I tried to eat a local delicacy called a baloot, a duck egg with the baby duckling dead and fermented and half-rotten on the inside, and it all slithers out into your mouth with only a slimy lump here and there. I have eaten bugs, and I know that some of the food in army C rations was fermented road kill canned in lard and cigarette ashes mixed with cat vomit.

  But I couldn’t hold the turtle eggs down.

  They hung halfway down my throat and tasted the way I imagine Vaseline would taste if, somehow, it were rotten. I looked at the horizon and thought of wonderful things, of ice cream and steak and the apple pies my grandmother used to bake for me with light-brown crusts and sugar sprinkled on top, of lobster and cheeseburgers and vanilla malts, and I lost it.

  I threw up turtle eggs at terminal velocity, straight out like a runny yellow bullet, and Cookie, as if patiently waiting, licked it up, which made me throw up harder. She neatly caught the vomit before it could even hit the ground.