How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It - James Wesley Rawles [55]
CHICKENS
Egg yolks are another important source of fat.
Waste Not, Want Not
Survivalists need to seriously rethink the way they process the wild game they harvest. Odds are that you currently throw away fat, kidneys, tongues, and intestines. Some hunters even discard hearts and livers. Wasting valuable sources of fat would be foolish in a survival situation.
American Indians were famous for hoarding fat. Bear grease and fat from beaver tails were both particularly sought after. They have multiple uses, including lubrication and medicinal, and are even used as a source of fuel for lighting.
One important proviso about bears for anyone living up in polar-bear country: Avoid eating more than a quarter of an ounce of polar-bear liver per month. Because of the bear’s diet out on the ocean-pack ice, like many other polar-region predators their livers contain so much concentrated vitamins A and D that it causes vitamin poisoning when eaten. A quarter of a pound of polar-bear liver contains about 2,250,000 IUs of vitamin A. That is roughly 450 times the recommended daily dose for an adult weighing 175 pounds. From what I have read, this is thankfully not an issue with bears in lower latitudes.
Versatile Pasture Fencing
Just as it’s important to keep vermin out of your garden, it’s crucial to keep livestock on your property. You’ll need good, solid fencing. My favorite type of versatile livestock fencing is forty-seven-inch-tall variable-mesh woven field fencing, tensioned on six-foot heavy-duty studded T-posts that are spaced ten to twelve feet apart. This will give you a fence that will hold sheep, most breeds of goats, most cattle, llamas, alpacas, donkeys, horses, mules, and more.
Tensioning a woven-wire fence can best be accomplished with a forty-eight-inch “toothed” bar to hold the wire. These can be bought factory made or custom-fabricated in your home welding shop. But for those without welding equipment, here is a simple expedient that can be made with wood, carriage bolts, and chain: Cut a pair of two-by-fours fifty-two inches long, and install a row of protruding screws down the length of one of the wide sides. Drill a row of shallow holes in the other board, to accept the screw heads from the first board. (Like the teeth on a commercially made bar, these screws will evenly distribute the stress on the full height of the woven wire.) Drill through holes and position six-inch-long, three-eighths-inch carriage bolts through both boards at both ends. Sandwich the woven wire between the two boards. Attach chains to the carriage bolts, and then connect the chains to a “come-along.” If no large trees are available as an anchor for the tensioning, then the towing-hitch receiver on a parked large pickup truck will suffice. Proviso: All of the usual safety rules when working with come-alongs apply!
In my experience, used, creosote-soaked railroad ties work fine for H-braces, anchor braces, and corner braces. To tension the diagonal wires for the H-braces, I prefer to use ratchet tensioners, rather than the traditional “twisting-stick” windlass arrangement. Be sure to wear gloves to avoid skin contact with the creosote, which is toxic.
When you’re building a fence in rocky soil, a seven-foot-long, plain digging bar with hardened tips will be indispensable. If you get into an extremely rocky portion of ground along the intended fence line, you can construct aboveground “rock boxes”—the type that you might have seen in Eastern Oregon. These are cylinders of woven wire between thirty and forty inches in diameter and four feet tall that you will fill with rocks anywhere from fist-size to bowling-ball-size. Because the fence will have to be tensioned, make sure the side of the rock box that will contact the main fence wire has no rock tips projecting through the wire mesh that might hang up the main fence wire as it slides by during tensioning.
Horses, in particular, tend to be hard on woven-wire fences.