Then I pulled out my telephone lineman’s belt I’d used the other night… put on my crampons… and started up the tree, my makeshift spear held firmly in my right hand.
Ten feet up, I grabbed the rope resting over the first limb – the part of the snare I’d thrown up into the tree earlier – and carried it along with me.
About 18 feet up, I was finally high enough up to be completely covered by foliage. At that point, I took off my climbing belt and sat on the limb. I settled my makeshift spear across two branches so it wouldn’t fall.
Then I pulled out my Nitro.
Alternately known as shock absorbers or energy absorbers, they’re designed to hook a rope to your climbing harness to slow your fall.
You’re not supposed to fall in ice climbing, obviously, but if you do, dropping 20 feet and then suddenly jerking to a halt can be wrenching. It can break your back if you’re extremely unlucky. At the very least, it makes for a shitty rest of the climb.
Ropes have a certain amount of elastic give, but not that much. The energy absorber helps slow you down so that you don’t suddenly reach the end of the rope and yank HARD.
And since I was going to be jumping out of a tree, I could use all the help I could in slowing me down.
There was only one problem: I needed to figure out how much rope to use, and how I wanted to fall.
After all, if you go bungie jumping off a hundred-foot bridge but you use 105 feet of rope, you’re going to end up with your skull cracked like an egg on the pavement.
Actually, you’d need to use way less than 100 feet of rope, since bungie jumping uses a highly elastic cord… but fuck it, I didn’t bungie jump.
I counted backwards from the loop to see how much rope to give myself.
If this all went off without a hitch, the buck would end up standing on his hind legs right next to the tree. His front legs would be about 4 feet off the ground; my limb was only 18 feet off the ground, so 18 minus 4 equaled 14 feet of rope between the buck and me.
Then it was 18 feet down to the ground.
But I didn’t want to fall all 18 feet – I wanted some margin for error – so I settled on 14 feet.
14 + 14 = 28 feet of rope total.
Now there was the question of how much rope I already had between me and the noose.
Three feet diameter times 3.14 to get the circumference, so about 9 feet for the noose… another three feet to the tree… 18 feet up the trunk…
That was 30 feet of rope total, give or take, from the ground up to my limb.
Great. (That was sarcasm, if you didn’t notice.)
I needed to wind up with 28 feet… but I already had 30 feet.
That two-foot discrepancy might be the difference between a broken ankle and walking away from this.
Or maybe not. I had over three feet built in for margin of error. And in reality, I wasn’t planning on landing on the ground so much as stopping a couple of feet above it.
I would have to chance it.
I took the rope and secured it to the shock absorber, which I then attached to my climbing harness.
The idea was that I would jump…
Which would yank the rope up…
Which would slide over the limb…
Which would tighten the noose around the deer’s leg.
As soon as that happened, the rope would start going taut, which would trigger the shock absorber and start slowing my fall.
At the same time, the massive amount of force generated by my fall would yank the deer’s leg up into the air, trapping him. Might even break his leg.
That might sound cruel, but remember: I was planning on killing him so I could eat him. Cruelty is a relative thing when you’re just another animal trying to survive out in the wild.
By the time the deer was standing on his hind legs, I would be slowing down and stopping about three feet above the ground.
Theoretically.
At 6’2”, I weighed 195. The deer would hopefully weigh less than that. Which means I should be able to use my weight as a counterbalance until I could tie off the rope, grab my homemade spear, and finish the kill.
But it all depended on a lot going right.
The more I thought about the plan, the crazier it seemed. I actually started to talk myself out of it…
But then the reality of my situation kicked in.
I’d already had a wolfpack try to kill me. If I went down further into the forest, I was sure to run into another – and maybe something worse. And next time, I might not make it up a tree fast enough.
Plus, there was no guarantee I would find any food farther down in the forest.
AND I would be exposed to the elements.
Right now I had a perfect shelter, safe from wind, rain, snow, and wild animals.
I just needed food. Killing a deer was the best way to deal with that particular issue.
Plus, I’d already died once. What was one more time?
So when I weighed it all out, I decided to stick with my plan.
I settled in for a long wait.
And it was a long-ass fuckin’ wait.
I sat in the tree for almost four hours. I was getting ready to call it a day and get back up to my nice warm fire when I saw the deer.
A ten-point buck.
It slowly walked over to the berries on the snow… sniffed at them… and started eating up.
I grabbed my makeshift spear and got ready.
In my head, I was urging it onwards.
Take a step closer… closer, you bastard… Daddy’s got to eat… CLOSER…
The deer’s
