Happy 1st unofficial day of summer to all of y’uns around the globe, whether here in the USA or not. I know you folks down there in Australia are in winter now. Happy day to you, too.
New Supporters: Thank you! I’ll try to keep things interesting here and offer exclusive content that I don’t share anywhere else, such as the video you’ll see here.
This was taken fifteen years ago before video quality and audio is what it is today. I’m in the mountains deep in the backcountry on a very wet excursion. My dog Bradbury is still a young pup in training here, and he has woken me up early before sunrise to go out, use the bathroom, and sniff around a bit. It’s a full moon night. I’ve gotten the fire stirred back up and crackling and I decide to try to capture the moment in a brief video - long before I ever had any ideas or plans to share my life as The Practical Woodsman.
These old videos were only originally ever intended as something for my own enjoyment, a way for me to sort of journal certain experiences. I’m happy to go through many of them now and be able to share them with you.
One other thing, Supporters: Be sure to take full advantage of your supporter status here by sharing your own posts, videos, and so forth. Not only will I really enjoy this, but so will all of our other members. If there are things you would like to share with an even smaller, more exclusive and discerning audience, notice that you can mark the content you upload as ‘Supporters Only’. It will then only be visible to other Supporters. If you’d like for it to be visible to all members in our group, you can do that as well.
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
