By Guest Writer Tom Hron
You must quickly find food when you’re lost in a wilderness, otherwise you’re doomed. Everyone has heard, “Oh, people can live for a month without eating.” That’s false, and you only have a few days in which to find something to eat, and that’s assuming you’re in good physical condition in the beginning and have fat re-serves to burn. If you’re skinny, curl up and kiss your butt good-bye in just a few days. The only time humans can live for a long time without eating is when they’re fasting in bed, hardly the case when you’re camping out and burning calories like crazy.
“I always carry a survival kit with snare wire,” you say, “so I’ll catch rabbits and ground squirrels to eat.” Sorry, but that’s another thing that’s misunderstood. Eat-ing their lean meat is like taking poison, and in a matter of three or four days you will be sicker than a dog. Diarrhea, vomiting, irregular heartbeat, low blood pres-sure, and chronic weakness—it’s called “rabbit starvation,” and the more you eat the hungrier you will get until your belly gets so bloated that you’ll look seven months pregnant. Early explorers learned the hard way to leave these little critters alone.
It takes two things to stay alive in the outdoors—fats and carbohydrates. Tak-ing the carbohydrates first, that presents a problem in itself, since it means you must find edible berries, nuts, and roots as soon as you can. For those who worry that they can’t do it, I’d like to remind them that if the Neanderthals could do it, why can’t you? Blueberries, cranberries, raspberries, arctic willow roots, cattail shoots, dandelions, pine nuts, wild rice, and fireweed are all possible sources of food. And
there are just as many things in desert regions. Buy a book, take a hike, and make it a game to learn as much as you can about the plants you find in your surroundings. It’s not as hard as you think.
Finding fats is an entirely different challenge, since Native Americans from day one knew how to harvest deer, elk, and moose that had stores of fat along their backbones. Nowadays, of course, it’s foolish to believe people can hunt big game with homemade bows, arrows, and spears, and so what can a wilderness survivor do? The answer is to find a beaver pond, which is easy for almost everyone. Bea-vers are the one animal that is simple to locate and that build muddy runways where it’s fairly easy to snare them. An option is to tear a hole in their dam and wait in ambush, although that’s not as easy as you think. You must surprise them a good ways from water or you’ll never catch them. Use a club to administer the coup de grace.
Once you have your beaver, you’re in fat city. Its tail is loaded with nutrition and all you have to do is cut it off, roast it in hot coals, peel off the skin, and eat until you’re 
full. Native Alaskans still prize beaver as food. Try it and you’ll like it, especially when you’re starving to death!
Tom Hron has flown Alaska and the High Arctic with floatplanes and helicopters, written historical novels for Penguin in New York, and adventured all over North America. He tells about his experiences on www.alaskaexpert.blogspot.com and sells his “bear alarm” on www.packalarm.net.
Rabbit by Peterastn
Beaver by Paul Stevenson
