“Okay, again,” I said.
This time I beat her by ten feet.
She got the point.
She could easily beat me in a sprint… but the marathon was a different matter.
If we were going to be traveling three or four miles a day, it was going to be a hell of a lot easier using the snowshoes than trying to brute-force our way through the snow.
Now, you might be wondering about one little detail: Where the fuck did Jack get what he needed to lash all the pieces together? He’s been using his rope supply willy-nilly the entire fuckin’ time for knotted escape ropes and stone-throwing/Lelia-boosting ropes and whatnot. So what the fuck is he using to lash things together?
Good question.
The answer:
Deer hide.
Now, I knew – theoretically – how to tan an animal hide. I’d just never done it.
By the way, ‘tanning’ is sort of a misnomer. Or, at least, we tend to think of ‘tanning’ as melanin appearing in human skin after repeated exposure to the sun.
Turns out that we have it backwards.
The original meaning of ‘tan’ was to turn a hide into leather. That’s where the word came from.
So getting a tan is being out in the sun and turning your own skin into leather.
Yeah. Think of that the next time you slather on the Coppertone, kids.
Anyway, back to the process.
You remove the skin, the same as I’d been doing to get the meat off every deer I’d killed so far.
Then you scrape every bit of fat and tissue off the inside of the hide. A blunt stone was way better than a knife – you want something that won’t snag the skin or tear it.
If you wanted just the hide, you would have to scrape the hair off, too. Normally, though, that would include soaking it for a couple of hours to a couple of weeks in order to make the hair easier to remove – and I didn’t exactly have a handy vat or tub to submerge it in.
Then you want to treat the skin to make it stand up to water and not rot. Basically that included getting rid of as much moisture as possible, and replacing it in a process called fat liquoring – aka tanning.
The ‘getting rid of moisture’ part usually includes stretching the skin and letting it dry in the sun. But I didn’t exactly have a nice sunny patch and warm weather to do that part.
If you don’t treat the skin, you wind up with rawhide – which can be used, sure, but it will eventually begin to decompose into a wet, stinking mess.
The modern way to tan was to use a special chemical solution you could buy in a plastic bottle.
But, seeing as I was a hell of a long way from a hunting supplies store, and Amazon Prime apparently didn’t deliver where I was, I was going to have to go for an alternate solution.
That ‘alternate solution’ was a certain blue chick I’d been shacking up with.
I pointed to Lelia’s furs one night when I was first figuring out how to bind the snowshoes together. “How did you make these?”
“We need for trip?”
“Yes,” I said, and held up the leather straps at the ends of the furs that she used to tie the bindings together. “I need things like these. Can you do it?”
“Yes, but need deer.”
I’d figured that much out, but I didn’t respond with sarcasm because she hadn’t quite figured sarcasm out yet. The one time I’d used it when I was irritated, she started going around saying everything in a sarcastic tone of voice without meaning it to be sarcastic, which drove me crazy. I had to instruct her not to use that tone of voice because it sounded ‘mean and angry’ – so I couldn’t very well use it now.
We would get to sarcasm eventually.
First off, though, I needed bindings.
“Let’s go get a deer, then,” I said.
After we brought down the deer whose meat we smoked for jerky, we took the hide back to the cave and she systematically scraped it down.
“Keep fur?” she asked.
“Would it be easy to get the fur off?” I asked.
“No.”
“Then keep the fur.”
Then she created a frame made out of tree branches and smoked the hide over the fire, far enough away from the flames that it wouldn’t burn.
The cave smelled pretty raunchy for a couple of days, but after you got used to it, you couldn’t smell it anymore. Until you left, went out into the fresh air, and came back. Blegh.
Then came the rough part.
Native Americans traditionally tanned hides using the brains of the animal.
How the HELL does that work, you ask?
Remember that thing I mentioned about fat liquoring? Where you have to replace the moisture in a hide?
Turns out that deer brains contain just enough of an oil called lecithin to tan their own hides – to replace the moisture and grease up the collagen proteins to make the hide usable.
Native Americans figured it out somehow. I guess Lelia’s people had deduced the same trick.
And how do you tan a hide using brains?
Well, first you have to get the brains out of the deer skull.
I’ll spare you those details. Let’s just say, if you ever need a hitman to kill somebody with blunt force trauma, Lelia should be at the top of your list.
Once we had the payload, now it was time to use it.
I always kind of assumed you took the brain out and rubbed it all over the hide. Nope. Turns out you mix the brains with heated water. Brains are pretty much fat, so they fall apart pretty quickly. You use the solution to spread all over the hide like you’re coating a bad sunburn with lots of aloe.
Problem: we didn’t have a place to mix the brains and water.
Lelia gestured for my metal water bottle.
“You are NOT mixing brains in there,” I said.
I
