Legitimate suggestions only, please. Should I go a day in using just a compass? Should I start fires in the rain? Should I go when it’s 2,000° outside? Should I go when there’s a blizzard? Should I show you more about pre-planning? (There’s a lot of research and planning that I put into every trip I take into unfamiliar territory.)
Let me know right here. I still don’t have a feel for why it is you folks follow me. Maybe you just like to see somebody doing what they love in the woods, and that’s fine, too. But I’d love to hear your thoughts, exclusively here on our Locals group.
Keep in mind that coming right up very soon will be some video documentaries of me training my new pups to be good companions in the woods. I don’t even have a choice in the matter, it’s something I absolutely have to begin in the next week or so, and that I am committed to recording and sharing with you.
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...
