Real Survivors

Sometimes it’s not a game …
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It’s late October as I write this. On the northern prairies harvest is finished. Days are getting shorter and colder. The leaves have long since fallen; the first snowfall of winter is not far away. It’s not everyone’s favorite time of year but I like it. I like the bright crisp days; I like bringing in the last of the garden produce or following the dog through wheat stubble looking for partridges. Even the short days have compensations. I enjoy relaxing in a comfy chair in the evening, reading old books or a stack of old outdoor magazines, with coffee on the sideboard and the dog sleeping with his head across my feet.

We even find time to watch videos. One has to keep up with the times. I was fascinated by how much interest there is in nostalgia, self-reliance, a longing for simpler times. Living “off the grid” is a recurring theme. There’s a natural tendency to romanticize the past, to remember the good and overlook the bad. We watched a few episodes of a “reality” show in which 10 survival experts are set down individually in a wilderness area to see who can survive the longest. They have satellite phones and can “tap out” whenever it gets too tough. Medics visit at intervals to monitor contestants’ health.

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Much of North America is still wild. And you don’t have to go far
to find wilderness. It’s right there, five miles past the last shopping mall.
In America you can fall out of a tree stand, break a leg and die of
exposure within sight of the New York city skyline. Or spend the
morning in a theme park with thousands of people, and get lost
in the Everglades the same afternoon.

Rifle Reality

For some reason, they are not allowed firearms, which told me at once this is just a game. If you’re serious about surviving, you have a rifle. As John Steinbeck wrote in The Grapes of Wrath — “Wouldn’t go out naked of a rifle. When your Grandpa came to this land he had salt, and pepper, and a rifle. When shoes and clothes and food, when even hope is gone, we’ll have the rifle.”

As games go, this one is better than most, with perhaps as much reality as the times permit. It doesn’t flinch from showing animals being killed and processed into food. Some of the contestants had good bushcraft skills. Many talk TV/movie jargon: “Failure is not an option,” “The bears should be afraid of me,” “I’m full of grit and never quit.” For non-quitters, they sure seemed to tap out quickly. Some didn’t last even one full day.

As it happened, I had recently read a story in an old magazine (Outdoor Life, May 1967) called “I Had To Have A Moose” by Olive Fredrickson, co-written by the great Ben East. The stark contrast between this actual survivor and modern day game players was striking. Olive Fredrickson was widowed at age 26 when her husband drowned after his canoe capsized. It was the late 1920s. She was left with a quarter-section of unimproved bush in northern British Columbia and a log shack. No money, little food, fewer survival assets than the TV contestants. Oh, and three children age five and under.

The nearest town was 27 miles away and she could get there only by walking. She was 5’2″ and weighed 112 lbs. She survived — and thrived — for 13 years. Not hours or days or weeks. Years. She only left because she remarried and her new husband had a good job in a small city, where she lived out a long life in relative comfort.

When the story appeared, readers were incredulous. Five more stories of her life were published, written with the assistance of Ben East. The stories were organized into a book called The Silence of the North and later into a movie.

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If your life, and the lives of your children, depended on it,
could you kill and process a moose? How about without a rifle?

True Grit

Olive Fredrickson didn’t have the bushcraft skills many boast of today. She recalled, “I planted a vegetable garden and started a hay meadow.… It was all hard work, day in and day out, dragging myself off to bed when dark came and crawling out at daylight to begin another day. But at least my babies and I had something to eat.”

Then the food supply ran out and as the story title said, she had to have a moose. She couldn’t leave the children home alone. “We weren’t hunting for fun. It was early summer, and the crop of vegetables I had planted in our garden was growing, but there was nothing ready for use yet, and we were out of food.” 
She didn’t have the option of tapping out, or medical care or a lifeline for help. What she did have was an unbending will and limitless courage — and a Winchester 94 .30-30, and four cartridges.

In the novel Brown on Resolution, author C.S. Forester wrote: “Brown was only powerful in consequence of his rifle, the handiest, neatest, most efficient piece of machinery ever devised by man … Brown was not a marvelously good shot … but he could handle his weapon in good workmanlike fashion; and the rifle asks no more.”

Like the fictional Brown, Olive Fredrickson was not a marvelously good shot but she was good enough, and the rifle asks no more. Yes, she killed a moose, a young bull. “I had always hated to kill anything … I was close to tears. But I reminded myself that it had to be done to feed the children, and I wiped my eyes and explained to them as best I could.”

She field dressed and skinned it on her own, normally a task two strong men won’t soon forget. She cooked some moose meat and they feasted. By then it was full dark, too late to move the meat back to the cabin. She spread a tarp on which the children could sleep. Then she sat awake all night, watching over her children, with the rifle and two remaining cartridges in case of predators, and a willow branch to wave mosquitoes away. Next day she got the meat home and canned it. It kept the family alive until the garden produce was ready.

God bless all mothers.

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