Forage, trap, fish

Groups starve while working hard because they spend the day on the wrong food. Before anything else, rank what is actually available by energy returned per hour of effort, not by how it feels to obtain.

Rough energy per 100 g: nuts 600–650 kcal, leached acorn ~390, oily fish 150–250, lean meat 100–150, roots and tubers 70–130, wild greens 40–50. An adult doing physical work needs 2,500–4,000 kcal a day.

That makes the order, for most groups in most places: passive fishing and trapping first, then nuts and acorns in season, then roots and tubers, then greens — and hunting large game last, because it is high-variance and most days it returns nothing.

A trap works every hour of the night while you do other work; a hunt works only while you are awake. Set ten to twenty devices, not one or two — any single set catches on a small fraction of nights, and the line is what feeds you, not the set.

Fish traps, a weir, set lines and gill nets go in first; see the fishing guide and the funnel basket trap. Snares and deadfalls go on runs and pinch points, not in open ground; see the hunting guide.

Check every set at dawn, every day. An animal left overnight past dawn suffers, spoils in warm weather, and is taken by something else.

The Universal Edibility Test printed in survival manuals does not work, and the ways it fails are the ways that kill. Amatoxins — death cap, destroying angel, funeral bell — produce no symptom for 6 to 24 hours, so the whole waiting period passes inside the latent phase. Orellanine takes two to three weeks to destroy the kidneys. Cardiac glycosides act far below any dose that irritates a lip.

The rule that replaces it: you eat what you can identify to species, with the feature that separates it from its look-alike checked on the specimen in your hand. Not what resembles something you know. Not what a chart looks like.

The foraging guide carries the identification cards and the killers.

A short list held cold beats a long list half-remembered. Start with plants that have no lethal look-alike in your region and are abundant enough to matter:

Blackberry and raspberry (an aggregate of drupelets — no such berry is poisonous), nettle (thirty seconds of heat destroys the sting), dandelion (one flower head on one unbranched hollow stalk that bleeds white latex), acorn, hazel, rosehip, cattail.

Add one new species per season, learned from a person or a regional field guide, in all its stages — not from one photograph. Ten species known absolutely will out-feed a hundred recognised vaguely, and will not kill anyone.

A mature oak drops 25–90 kg in a good year, the crop stores for years dried in shell, and shelled acorn is ~390 kcal per 100 g. The obstacle is tannin — 2–10% of dry weight — which is astringent, blocks protein absorption, and is water-soluble.

1. Collect after the first heavy drop. Discard any that float, have holes, or are mouldy.
2. Dry in shell near a fire or in the sun until caps and shells come away; at that point they store for a year.
3. Shell, skin, and break into coarse pieces.
4. Leach. Cold: coarse meal in a cloth bag in a stream, or a pot with several water changes a day, 1–7 days — slower, and the starch keeps its binding power so the meal makes dough. Hot: boil, pour off when the water colours, refill with already-boiling water, 5–10 changes of 10–15 minutes — fast, but the meal will only make gruel.
5. Test by taste. Mouth-drying astringency means keep going.

Rough yield: 1 kg of whole acorns → about 400 g of usable meal.

When more than about 35–40% of calories come from protein, the liver cannot clear the nitrogen fast enough. People eating nothing but lean game — rabbit above all — lose weight, weaken and sicken while eating their fill. It has a name: rabbit starvation.

So treat fat as a target in its own right: marrow from cracked bones, organ fat, the fat around kidneys and intestines, brains, fish oil, nuts, and fatter animals in preference to lean ones. Render surplus fat and store it — it keeps, it carries enormous energy per kilogram, and it is the thing a lean-meat diet is missing.

A glut you cannot store is a glut you mostly waste, and the waste is invisible until March. Anything not eaten within a day goes straight to drying, salting, smoking or fermenting — see preserving the harvest and the food preservation guide.

Thin, even slices — 3–6 mm — in moving air, out of direct sun for most things. Small fish dry whole; larger ones are split flat and salted first. Meat must reach 71 °C before or after drying to be safe. Dry until it cracks without snapping rather than until it feels dry on the surface.

A trapline, a fishing reach and a nut grove are all capital. Worked flat in one season they stop producing, and the recovery takes years.

• Move the trapline when the catch per set falls off, and leave the ground a season.
• Leave breeding fish: set mesh that lets the smallest through, and stop when the average size drops.
• Never take the last stand of anything, and never dig the whole patch of a root — leave a third in the ground.
• Record catch per set per week. It is the only early warning you get, and by the time the fall is obvious without records it is severe.