Fire, and keeping it

This is where most attempts are lost, and it happens before anyone touches a drill. You need three grades, all dry, all within arm's reach of where you will kneel:

• Tinder — hair-fine and fibrous. Two double handfuls. Teased birch bark, inner bark from dead cedar or lime, dry grass heads, seed down, cramp ball fungus, fine wood shavings. It must be dry enough to crumble to dust between your palms.
• Kindling — three sub-grades, a good armful of each: matchstick, pencil, and thumb. Graded, not mixed.
• Fuel — wrist to forearm thickness, enough stacked to burn for two hours.

A coal lives for perhaps a minute. Anything you have to go and look for during that minute is a failed fire.

Wood lying on the ground has been drinking for as long as it has been there, whatever the surface feels like. Take dead branches still attached to a tree, or standing dead trees.

The test is the sound. A dry stick breaks with a sharp crack and a clean fracture. A damp one bends, tears, or breaks with a dull thud and a fibrous face. Test every grade, not just the big pieces.

If everything is soaked, split the fuel wood open — the inside of a split log is dry even after days of rain — and make feather sticks from the dry heartwood.

Friction fire is a skill worth owning and a terrible first choice. Anything on this list beats it, and every one of them should be tried before the bow comes out:

• A lens. A magnifier, a spectacle lens, a clear bottle base filled with water, or a lens of clear ice. Focus to the smallest, brightest point you can and hold it steady on dark tinder. Seconds, in decent sun.
• Ferrocerium rod. Scrape hard with a square-edged steel at about 45°. Sparks land at some 3,000 °C and will take almost any dry tinder.
• Flint and steel. A high-carbon steel struck down the sharp edge of a flint, throwing sparks onto char cloth or amadou. This will not light raw tinder — it needs a charred catcher.
• Battery and steel wool. Fine grade steel wool across the terminals of any battery from a torch upward.
• A parabolic reflector. The bottom of a polished can, a torch reflector, a make-up mirror.

Keep at least two working methods at all times, and keep them in different places.

The numbers matter more than the wood species. Aim for:

• Hearth board — softwood, 20 mm thick, flat on the underside so it does not rock. Willow, cottonwood, cedar, lime, ivy, clematis. Too thick and you never burn through; too thin and you burn through before enough dust collects.
• Spindle — 22 mm diameter, 250 mm long, straight, of the same wood or slightly harder. The two ends are cut differently and this is not optional: blunt and rounded at the bottom to maximise friction, sharpened to a cone at the top to minimise it.
• Bearing block — hardwood, bone, antler or stone with a socket in it. Grease the top socket — green leaf, animal fat, earwax. Never grease the bottom end.
• Bow — 60–90 cm, about arm's length, stiff, with a slight natural curve.
• Cord — strong enough not to part under load. It wraps once round the spindle, and the spindle then sits outside the bow.

The cord should be tight enough that you have to twist the spindle in with some force, and no tighter.

In that order. Set the socket about one spindle-width in from the edge of the board, so the notch you cut later can reach its centre.

Bow gently and slowly until a round, blackened socket has formed to a depth of two or three millimetres, and stop. You are not trying to make fire yet, only a seat for the spindle.

Now cut the notch: a V taking roughly an eighth of the socket circle, cut cleanly from the edge of the board right through to the centre of the burnt socket, and straight down through the board. Cut it slightly wider at the bottom than the top if you can.

Slide a piece of bark or a dry leaf under the notch to catch what falls.

Kneel on your right knee with your left foot on the board, close beside the socket. Load the spindle, bearing block in your left hand, and lock your left wrist hard against your left shin. That bone-to-bone contact is what holds the spindle vertical; arm strength will not.

Start with long, slow, full-length strokes using the whole bow. Do not saw at it with short jabs. As smoke builds, increase speed and downward pressure together — more speed alone polishes the socket, more pressure alone stalls it.

You are watching the notch, not the smoke. Smoke comes early and means little. What you want is the notch filling with dark brown-black powder. When it is full and smoke is pouring off it, give ten more hard, fast strokes and stop.

Stop bowing and do nothing for twenty to thirty seconds. The pile of hot dust needs to consolidate into a single coal, and it will keep smoking on its own — that is it working, not it dying. This waiting is the hardest instruction on the page to follow, and rushing it is the second commonest failure.

Then: tap the board once, firmly, to shake the coal free of the notch, and lift the board straight up and away, leaving the coal sitting on the bark tray. Do not tip, slide or scrape it.

The coal is small — match-head to pea. Fan it gently with your hand if it looks like fading. Carry it on the tray to the tinder bundle rather than carrying the bundle to it.

Shape the tinder into a bird's nest: coarse fibre outside, the finest material you have in the middle. Drop the coal into the middle and fold the nest loosely around it — loosely. A squeezed bundle smothers.

Hold it up, away from your face and to one side, and blow long, steady, increasing breaths into it. Not puffs. The smoke will thicken until it is pouring, then it will go quiet for a moment, and then it will take with a bang and a lot of flame. Expect that; it is why the bundle is held away from your face and clear of your sleeve.

Place the burning bundle into the base of the laid fire. Do not build the fire around it while it burns.

Build the lay before the coal exists, and leave a doorway in it for the burning bundle.

Start with a platform of dry sticks laid on the ground — cold, wet ground pulls heat out of a young fire faster than anything else. On that, stand matchstick kindling in a small cone, then pencil around it, then thumb. Leave gaps: a fire that cannot breathe makes smoke.

Only add wrist-thick fuel once the thumb grade is burning strongly and there is a bed of coals forming. Adding it early is how a good coal is wasted.

Set a stone or log reflector at the back to throw heat forward, and a windbreak on the weather side.

This is the whole point of the step. Making fire is hard; keeping it is nearly free, and every hour spent making it again is an hour not spent on anything else.

At night: rake the coals into a compact heap, cover them with fine ash to a depth of about 50 mm, and lay a green or damp log across. The ash starves the coals of air enough to slow them almost to nothing without putting them out.

In the morning: scrape the ash off, expose the glowing centre, feed the finest tinder onto it and blow. Two minutes rather than two hours.

To carry fire, use a slow match — a punk-wood or fungus ember in a ventilated horn, tin or bark tube — or a bundle of smouldering tinder fungus. A carried ember will keep for hours and will restart a camp at the far end of a day's walk.

A fire with no owner goes out. Name a keeper and a second, say it aloud so everyone hears it, and hand over explicitly at the end of a shift — the handover is the part that fails, not the watching.

The keeper's standing job is fuel: keeping the graded stacks topped up and under cover, and watching the fuel radius. A camp that burns everything within easy walking distance in its first winter has to move in its second. Start thinking about charcoal and about coppicing long before the wood runs short.