No… a better option was a snare. And I knew exactly the bait to use.
Hell, I had a pocket full of it.
7
After popping a couple more berries and finishing my water and power bar, I got dressed again in my cold weather gear. I gotta tell you, it felt a hell of a lot better to be sliding into it toasty warm than the opposite.
I also let the fire die down. I was looking forward to having a sizable amount of ashes in the future so I could bank the coals and keep them hot overnight, but right now they only had to last a few hours until I got back. I could easily restart everything with some more tinder and kindling. In fact, I probably wouldn’t even need that.
Then I filled up my backpack with what I would need, rappelled down the side of the cliff, and set off for the woods.
As soon as I got into the forest, I started looking for a good, straight, solid, six-foot-long stick – something that would have done excellent duty as a walking stick. Took me awhile, but I found it near a fallen hardwood. The limb was pretty strong and only marginally crooked at one end. That was fine. I didn’t need it to be perfect; I only needed it to increase my reach temporarily.
I used a short length of rope to bind my knife to the end of the stick, tying it so tightly that the blade didn’t move much when I dragged it hard across the tree bark. That would do.
Then I started through the trees to the spot where I’d seen the buck. I was guessing that if one deer had come through to forage, there would be others.
Sure enough, the snow around the firs was filled with tracks of varying size – and way more of them than could have been made by one deer.
Now I had my hunting ground.
My idea was to get the deer’s leg in a snare, tighten the loop, and hoist the deer’s leg up in the air so it couldn’t get away.
Of course, I had to tighten the snare as fast as possible, before the deer could see me, get frightened, and bolt.
The only way I could see to reliably do that was to set the snare… hide in a tree so the deer couldn’t see me… and then jump out of the tree to tighten the snare.
Yeah. I know. Not my smartest plan ever.
The snow was pretty damn deep, so it would cushion my fall to a certain extent. But if I landed badly, I could wind up with a broken ankle – which would be a death sentence up here.
So – better not to land in the snow at all.
I’ll get to that in a minute. First I had to lay the trap.
I tied a slipknot at the end of a 60-foot-long piece of rope. I made damn sure it wouldn’t come loose, then threaded the other end of the rope through it. Now I had a makeshift noose. Not a hangman’s noose – just a loop I could tighten.
It would be way too hard to try to get the loop around the deer’s neck, but there was a somewhat even chance I could get it around one of his legs. All I needed to do was immobilize the animal long enough to kill it.
I chose a nearby pine with a good amount of foliage I could hide in.
Then I coiled up the non-noose end of the rope and threw it over the first limb, about ten feet up. The rope went over the limb and fell over the other side, so now I had a rope half in, half out of the tree.
Next I took the noose and spread it out so it was about three feet in diameter. I figured that was plenty of room for a buck to step into.
Technically, what I had planned wasn’t a snare. Snares were traps you set and then came back and checked later. They were passive traps, and usually meant for smaller game, like rabbits and squirrels. Too bad there weren’t any rabbits or squirrels around, so far as I could see.
What I had here was an active set-up for a much larger animal. I didn’t actually know the technical term for what I was doing, so I decided to name it a hangman’s snare.
Catchy. Would have been a great episode for the show, except PETA would have been all over my ass about it.
I didn’t think there was such a thing as PETA in a world with two moons, though.
If there was, and they came after me for trying to survive, I would know conclusively that I really had died and gone to hell.
Anyway. The whole point with the hangman’s snare was that it had a much higher percentage of it working than my crafting a bow and trying to teach myself to be a good enough shot to bring down a deer before I starved to death.
My motto has always been, If it works, it works. Fuck whether it looks pretty or not.
I tossed handfuls of snow on the rope to camouflage it and weigh it down so it wouldn’t move. The rope itself was a bright red and would have stood out like a neon sign against the white of the snow. A deer might have come over just to investigate, but I didn’t want to take my chances on only getting the dumbest sonuvabitch out here, so I made sure the red was completely covered all the way to the base of the pine tree.
The rest of the rope stood out against the bark, but I couldn’t really do anything about that.
Next I seeded the trap with
