Then I set off into the woods with my empty backpack to go find some dead wood.
As I tromped through the trees, I started to see some hardwoods dotted amongst the firs and pines – which was good. Pine was good for kindling with its high resin and sap content, but the wood burns smoky. Hardwoods burn slower and cleaner.
That raised another question: if I really was on another planet, how come there were firs and pines and wolves ‘n shit? Why weren’t there… I don’t know… giant mushroom trees and oompaloompas instead?
Fuck if I knew.
As I walked through the forest, I also tried to follow the footprints of the abominable snow survivalist from the other night.
However, the A.S.S. (abominate snow survivalist, naturally) was good. He’d done something to cover his tracks – maybe gone up into a tree like I had. Anyway, there was a point where his tracks just disappeared. I searched nearby to see if they picked up anywhere, but the trees were so thick here that he might have been able to move through the canopy aboveground without too much of a problem, if he was particularly skilled and had some rope. That was the only way I could see that he’d disappeared into thin air.
Just to be on the safe side, though, I spent as much time looking up into the treetops as I did looking at the snow all around me.
I was looking up in the air so much that I almost missed the thing that might prove key to my survival.
It was a deer. A big 12-point buck, about 150 feet away.
Except its antlers were the weirdest thing I’d seen on a deer before. They were green and mossy.
But otherwise it was a regular, good old-fashioned deer. It appeared to be eating the berries on the fir trees.
I froze as soon as I saw it.
It saw me, though, too. It lifted its head to stare straight at me… and then slowly walked away.
Well.
SOMEBODY apparently wasn’t very afraid of Jack Harrington.
Which was fine by me.
It’ll make it that much easier for me to catch you and eat you, bud.
Speaking of eating…
I walked over to the tree the deer had been at and double-checked to make sure it had been eating what I thought it had been eating.
Sure enough, it was the same orange berries I’d seen on other trees.
If they weren’t poisonous to the deer, that wasn’t any guarantee that they wouldn’t be poisonous to me. After all, we were talking a completely different animal with a completely different physiology.
Don’t forget ‘completely different planet.’
And even if it wasn’t poisonous, it didn’t mean that I could digest what the deer ate. They were ruminants, with a four-chambered stomach, which allowed them to break down cellulose for nutrients – something humans couldn’t do.
However, that being said, humans are able to eat a majority of what deer consume without it hurting them. Corn, acorns, berries, fungi (non-poisonous varieties), nuts, clover, flower buds… not so much the twigs, leaves, and grasses, though. And there were some things that deer ate that were downright poisonous to humans, like strawberry bush – not strawberry plants like humans eat, but a bush that had tiny, round, red berries.
But it was likely that it could take me days to trap an animal I could eat. (Also no guarantee that animals on this planet weren’t poisonous.) In the meantime, it would behoove me to figure out a source of local plant life I could eat that would keep me functional.
Unfortunately, I was dealing with completely weird-ass plant species that looked like things back home, but which were potentially completely different.
Not to mention that the pickings were slim anyway. I hadn’t seen any cones on any of the pine trees, so pine nuts were out. I could potentially eat the inner bark, the part right under the rough outer layer. Native Americans did it for centuries. You basically had to peel off the outer bark, then the greenish bark under that, and then use a knife to scrape off the white, rubbery, cream-colored bark beneath – without going too deep and hitting the wood. And then you had to cook it. It tasted like sawdust, though, because it basically was – but it would keep you alive.
But harvesting bark seemed a little crazy seeing as there were tons of berries just hanging out all over the place. And if the berries could kill me, there was no guarantee that the bark wouldn’t, either.
So I decided to check out Nature’s bounty. If I was going to check out over eating something in this weird-ass place, might as well go ahead and get it over with.
I plucked off one of the berries and smelled it. No scent, really.
I nibbled at the bright orange skin. No bitter alkaloids, which would have been the first telltale sign of poison – although there were plenty of things that could poison you that weren’t bitter.
I broke the berry apart and nibbled on the insides, which was starchy – it reminded me of a raw potato in texture and taste. Completely bland, which was a good sign.
After I’d consumed a fourth of the berry, I tossed it to the ground and went about my business. I would give my body a chance to digest it and see what happened. Nausea, cramping, vomiting, diarrhea, unconsciousness, death – yeah, that would pretty much indicate I shouldn’t eat any more of them.
Maybe I’d trip balls.
Frankly, I was more worried about shitting my pants.
Speaking of which, I relieved myself in the woods during my trek. I won’t go into the details – I’ll spare you that.
Naaah, fuck it. If I had to suffer through all this, so do you.
Snow is one of the best ass wipes you can have.
