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Chapter Two

Shots

That afternoon I made a barrier to go behind the fire and reflect heat back towards the shelter and Peppa practised with the slingshot after she had finished the belVitas. With a Bear Grylls knife you can either use the serrated sawing blade to cut wood or you can use a stone as a hammer and hit the blunt side of the blade into a branch at the bottom until it is mostly cut through and then rip it off. I used living branches from birch for the uprights and cut points into the end and then hammered them in with a stone until they were about a metre high. Then I wove branches in between, mostly smaller birch, some alder and some hazel sticks from a pollarded hazel by the burn. The barrier was curved and ran along the front of the shelter about two metres back from where we slept on a raised bed made from birch and alder poles and covered with spruce branches which made a very soft bed and they also insulate and they smell nice.

Peppa collected small round stones from the burn and used them as ammo to practise with the slingshot and I explained the principle of trajectory to her which is that as the speed of the projectile drops the force of gravity comes to bear on it and it falls at a given rate per metre that it is travelling with the fall rate directly related to the speed – so the slower it gets the faster it falls. If you can work out at what point in a given distance the projectile starts to drop then you can make a basic estimate of its eventual position in relation to the target. So that means you can adjust your firing position relative to the target so it is going at maximum speed when it hits it, or you can alter the angle of the aim up or down to make the projectile go in a rising then falling trajectory towards the target.This means you can stand further away and calculate the angle you need to hit the target, but the further away you stand the higher the aim angle needs to be and the less velocity the projectile will have when it hits the target.

So I told Peppa all this about the slingshot and trajectories and she looked at me and frowned and then said ‘Righty-ho Sal’ and started firing stones at the belVita box.

There is an optimum distance from target you can eventually find which ensures the necessary velocity for a kill, the least falling trajectory and the necessary distance from an animal or a bird so you don’t scare it. I told Peppa to try and find that. I thought that if the stone punctured the cardboard of the belVita box then that was probably enough power to kill a rabbit or a Pheasant or a Grouse from whatever distance she was shooting from.

She said ‘Could this kill a deer?’

And I said no because you’d never be able to get close enough to it for the stone to have the necessary power. Deer have hard skulls. Even if you went for a neck shot it would be unlikely to pierce it. I wondered if Robert’s airgun would kill a deer. It would go through 9mm plywood on ten pumps at a distance of about twenty metres and I should think that would go through a roe deer’s skull, and it would definitely go through the neck but I am not sure you could get that close to a deer unless you sat silent downwind for a long time. Most deer rifles are 30-06 or 30-30 calibre which is a very high speed bullet and maintains its power over very long distances like up to a kilometre. And it is a real bullet powered by a cartridge and explosives, but Robert’s rifle is only a .22 airgun and the muzzle velocity is restricted by law. So you would have to get really close. But I thought I might try. A deer would provide meat for several days and they don’t hibernate and I fancied getting camouflaged and stalking one.

Ed Stafford caught one, in some woods in Poland or somewhere like that he was surviving in, with a snare made from a bent-over sapling that triggered and strangled the deer. He skinned it and used the skin for a jumper and he buried the meat in a pit fire to cook it and he hung a load up over the fire so bears didn’t get it. There are no bears in the Galloway forest so we didn’t have to worry about that and I thought I might have a go at making that snare in a few days when we were properly settled in and we knew nobody was looking for us.

I collected more wood for the fire, I got dead branches mostly off trees or leaning up off the ground because they are the driest. I made a long pile the length of the shelter and stacked another pile next to it to dry and use later then I got birch bark for tinder and used the flint and steel to make a spark and blew it until I got a flame and fed in dry grass and twigs and got it going. I used burning twigs to start two more points at the end and in the middle so it would all burn along its whole length. Even after a few minutes I could feel the heat bouncing off the barrier when I sat on the raised bed.

Then I gutted the rabbit and although I had never done it before I had watched it done loads of times and it was easy and I kept the liver, heart and kidneys for fishing bait because they are good for Eels. To skin a rabbit first you cut off the head and the paws, then you pull the skin down each leg until they pop out and then you drag the whole lot back up the body slowly until it all comes off in a oner.

Most of the meat on a rabbit is on the legs and the haunches and so I cut it in half and put some McDonald’s salt on it and laid it on a big flat stone over the fire to cook. Then I went down to the burn and washed my hands because of infections and food poisoning.

I had seen a video of Inuit women in Alaska curing and stretching skins on round frames made from alder saplings, so I cut a long one and made a circular hoop about a metre diameter and bound it with paracord. Then I laid out the skin and made a series of little holes around its perimeter with the Bear Grylls knife.Then I threaded paracord through one, then over the frame, then back through the next one all the way round until the skin was stretched out across the whole frame.

When I was doing this sitting by the fire and with the sun starting to go down and the northerly breeze picking up and making my fingers cold, and the smell of the fire and it cracking and popping, I felt for a minute like I had always done this. I had always been able to thread a rabbit skin onto a frame and this wasn’t the first time.

It felt funny, and I couldn’t remember for a minute if I had ever done it or if I had only seen them doing it on YouTube. And for a minute, or for a few seconds really, I felt a bit dizzy and I could only see my hands threading the cord through the skin and over the hoop and back through the skin and back over the hoop and pulling it tighter. I couldn’t feel the fire on my legs or the cold on my hands or hear the crackles or Peppa shooting at the belVita box, I could only see my hands and the thread and the little holes in the skin and the dark bark on the alder hoop and my hands moving like it wasn’t me. Like I was a big eye watching it. And behind the big eye was a big black space and I was peering out from an eye-shaped hole in it at my hands threading the cord through the skin and over the hoop.

And then I came back and I was still threading the cord and the rabbit was starting to sizzle on the stone and Peppa came running over with the slingshot and belVita box and said ‘I can hit it but it just dents it, look . . .’ And she showed me the little dents and dinks in the yellow cardboard.

We turned the rabbit over and put more salt on it and it smelled lovely and was going brown and gold like toffee and hissing. The fire was getting really hot and Peppa laid out on the bed and took off her Helly Hansen and trainers and joggy bottoms and stretched out in her knickers and vest and went ‘Aaah, lovely warm – these are prickly Sal’, patting the pine branches.

The rabbit tasted good and it was all cooked through and Peppa ate most of it but I had a leg and a lot of meat from off the top along the spine they call the saddle. It is good to eat freshly killed and cooked meat because it contains small amounts of vitamin C which you need so you don’t catch scurvy which makes your teeth fall out and you go mad. Old sailors and people on Arctic expeditions used to get it before they started eating lemons which have a lot of vitamin C in them, and so does kale and red peppers. But I also had multivitamins for us so we didn’t get scurvy or other illnesses caused by vitamin deficiencies like osteoporosis, osteopenia and gout.

We boiled water from the burn in the kettle and had tea with McDonald’s milk and sugar. We had a mug each, they were enamel and mine was blue and Peppa’s was green.

I banked up the fire with new wood all along and Peppa jumped up and ran down behind the shelter to do a wee and a poo in the latrine I had dug with a stick on the first day we got here. She went barefoot and came hopping back going ‘Oooh it’s fucking cold . . .’ The latrine was the first thing I made when we got to this site, it’s about seven metres away from the shelter, down from it in case it rains but close enough so you can still see the fire glow from it. But it is black out there behind you when you are going and you have to face the shelter so you can see the fire and not think about the black behind you. You wipe your bum on grass. I had cut a big bunch of it and put it by the latrine on a flat rock where you can see it and it will dry a bit.

It was probably only about 6.30 but Peppa climbed into the double sleeping bag on the bed and I took my shoes off and took off my fleece and got in with her and she wriggled and went ‘weeeeeeeecosy!’ We had two blankets as well, one was a fleece blanket from IKEA and one was an old pink pure wool blanket with a satin edge I brought from the flat where it had been in the airing cupboard for years and nobody used it.

The rabbit skin on the frame was lying flat on the damp leaves with the skin down and the fur up. I didn’t want it to dry out because tomorrow I was going to scrape all the bits of meat and fat off it and then cure it with wood ashes and wee and oak leaves, which have got tannin in them and they are meant to make the skin soft and supple. Inuit women chew the skin side and mash it all up with spit to stop it drying hard and snaggy. The chewing breaks down the skin tissue and I think spit must preserve it too because that is how they cure skins and furs. But you can make it soft with wee and ashes and oak leaves, where you make a paste and spread it on and let it soak in for a few days, and that preserves it according to a site I looked up about curing skins and furs. I didn’t know if it would work or not.

Peppa went on the fire side and I went on the tarp side but I was really warm even though the wind was getting up again and swishing the last leaves on the birch trees, but it must’ve shifted from north because it wasn’t coming in from the top like the night before. It was hitting the back of the tarp and making it billow in and out so it was probably a westerly or a northwesterly, but I didn’t have my compass to check and I was starting to feel very sleepy.

Peppa said ‘Tell me about the Sioux and the Buffalo.’ She likes me to tell her stuff every night and I like it too. Sometimes I have to make things up if I don’t know all the correct facts and dates and places but I don’t tell her because she thinks I know everything. And mostly I do. Especially about the Sioux and the Buffalo and the Indian wars of 1860s in the Great Plains.

So I told her about how the Dakota Sioux migrated to the Great Plains in the eighteenth century and built a culture based on hunting the millions of Buffalo that lived on the plains in herds so big a man could ride past one for a whole day and not see bare ground. And how the braves would ride alongside the herds and use their horses to split off small groups and drive them away across the plains towards a cliff edge where they would all run over and be killed in their hundreds on the rocks below. It was the most dangerous way of hunting the Buffalo and that was why they did it because a brave could show his courage and skill on a horse, and one successful hunt in the autumn would provide food and shelter and clothing for the entire tribe for a whole winter and the winters in the Great Plains were savagely cold with feet of snow and freezing north winds.

And when I got to this bit Peppa was asleep and I kissed her ear and made a spoon behind her and listened to the wind and crackle of the fire with my eyes closed.