Like from skiris.
Hopefully that wouldn’t come to pass, but it was better to be prepared.
Lastly, we had to move as fast as possible. And I had an idea how to make that happen:
Snowshoes.
It had become fairly miserable moving through two to three feet of snow, day in, day out. At first it was a novelty, but then it just became exhausting. It takes a hell of a lot of energy.
(Maybe that was why the wolves had never shown up right away after I’d first heard them; they had to get through a lot of fuckin’ snow first.)
Lelia didn’t seem to mind, but that’s probably because her people had evolved for just this sort of environment. Extremely high body temperatures, light weight, fast healing, things like increased grip strength and physical endurance.
I did not evolve for this kind of environment, and I knew if we wanted to be able to move fast and catch up with her tribe, we needed an advantage over Nature.
At first I considered skis. That actually would have been pretty badass.
There were a couple of problems, though.
One: making them. I didn’t have any way to easily plane flat lengths of wood. Making skis had never been part of my previous survival training, on the TV show or off.
Two: skis would have worked great for fast travel downhill. But, judging from what I’d seen from atop the cliff, most of what we were going to have to traverse was going to be across hills. Probably a fair amount of going up them, too. The ‘down’ part would have been minimal at best, and not worth all the time and effort to create the skis in the first place.
Three: skis would have worked great for wide open areas – but most of what we were going to have to travel through was dense forest. Janky homemade skis were probably not the best for quick maneuvering.
Four: the skill level needed. I wasn’t that great with professionally made skis – I’d only skied a dozen times in my life – and Lelia would have to learn from scratch. I wasn’t about to invest dozens upon dozens of hours trying to build skis with rocks as my primary tools just so we could slam into a tree and kill ourselves.
I thought about trying to do cross-country skis so we could traverse flat areas, but I knew the mechanisms for lifting our feet up would have been way beyond my abilities, so skis were out.
But snowshoes…
Now, I’d never made them on my show. I’d only used professionally manufactured versions.
But, hey – it was basically tennis rackets strapped to your feet. And I knew ancient humans had first used them around 4000 to 6000 years ago. How hard could they be to make?
Turns out, pretty fuckin’ hard.
I won’t bore you with the details. There was a lot of experimentation.
Me trying to bend sticks into racket shapes without them cracking (which they always did)…
Then trying to carve branches…
Then trying to tie strings across frames.
It all failed.
In the end, I basically did the following:
I took a couple of three-foot-long branches made out of a flexible hardwood. (Nevla in Lelia’s language, in case you were interested.)
Then I fastened them together at both ends.
Then I bowed them out in the center with two eight-inch-long pieces of wood, which I lashed to the longer sticks.
Now I had a long-ass, skinny oval shape with supports in the center for our feet.
Then I stuffed several three-foot-long boughs of fir up, over, and under the oval scaffolding. The result was a sort of matted layer of crisscrossing fir twigs that functioned like the strings on a regular snowshoe.
Then we lashed the eight-inch crosspieces to our feet so that we could walk around without the snowshoes coming off.
I would have loved to have actually made a crisscrossing pattern of strings on the shoes to provide more elegant support, but the snowshoes – while ugly – got the job done.
Another nice benefit: if the fir boughs came out, you just stuffed them back in. If they broke, you found another tree and cut another branch off.
The first time I tried the snowshoes out, I was nearly falling over myself headlong into the snow. It wasn’t pretty. I looked like a moose on roller skates. And it was still a fuck-ton of work.
But the simple fact was, I could walk over the snow. I mean, obviously I sank several inches down into it… but I stayed more or less on the surface.
But as soon as I took the shoes off and stepped into the snow, I sunk down in it up to my crotch.
And if you’ve ever tried walking around in three-foot-tall snow, trust me – snowshoeing above it is a lot less work, even if you look like an idiot. Or a moose on roller skates.
Lelia watched the entire process with amused dubiousness. She snorted with laughter every time I nearly fell over like a drunk.
“Not good,” she told me with a grin.
“I know it looks bad, but it’s worth it,” I insisted.
She wasn’t convinced until we ran a race after a heavy snowfall.
We crossed a 200-foot expanse of snow that was three feet deep before the storm, and close to four feet deep afterwards.
I wore my snowshoes, and she had to plow through the snow.
I, of course, stumbled around like a drunken moose on roller skates.
She beat me, reaching the other side a full twenty feet ahead of me.
Once I got to the other end, though, I said, “Okay, now race me back – but you have to go through fresh snow.”
She started to go back through the channel she had cut, and I said, “NO,” and pointed at the virgin snow beside her. She rolled her eyes, but she waddled over into the fresh snow and we raced again.
She beat me again
