The Disaster Diaries: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apocalypse by Sheridan Sam

Author:Sheridan, Sam [Sheridan, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-01-24T02:00:00+00:00

Another day, another vital lesson.

“Small traps, that’s your bread and butter,” John said. “You put enough of those out for pack rats and mice, you can do okay. I like deadfalls because they fall on the animal, kill it, and protect it from coyotes and whatever else is out there.

“Traps are economical. They’re working for while you’re building the shelter or looking for a water supply. If you get good at making them and placing them, you can get to a success rate of fifty percent or better—if the animals are there. And then you have strings of traps, fifteen or twenty this way, fifteen or twenty that way. You can dry the meat and start storing food.”

John and I were now near the house, practicing setting up traps. Looking at the pieces of the trap, a pile of sticks, a piece of cordage, and a large, flat rock, I could tell there was some kind of unique logic to them, but I could never have figured it out on my own. Once John showed me the simple, elegant way the pieces fit together, I practically slapped my head with how obvious it was. It makes perfect sense, a trigger underneath a rock. The rat “busies” the trigger, and the rock comes down.

After a full day of practicing setting deadfalls, often referred to as Paiute deadfalls, we headed out to see what I could do.

John and I walked over the low-slung grass hills under a stinging-hot sky, moving through cow pies and scrub brush, dusty and hot, until we found a pack rat house, one of the infamous middens I had read about. I was looking for some small hole in the ground, but the pack rat midden was more like a beaver lodge, a high pile of sticks.

“Well,” John said, “I would have been collecting the pieces I need to make the trap on the walk here, but you better go do it now.” I felt foolish as I scrambled around to find the ingredients.

There was something childish about setting the trap, down in the grass and bushes, fiddling with twigs. It took me back to my youth, when I would make forts for my toy soldiers. I crouched down next to the midden, shaping the sticks, cutting wedges, balancing the stone. I could imagine doing this in a survival situation, gnawed by hunger and fear, and there would be nothing childish about it then.

The work was hot and scratchy and I killed about six ticks that were climbing on me—but, as usual, to rush was only to lengthen the job. If I screwed it up, and things didn’t balance smoothly, I would have to start over. The sun beat down on my hat, and the blurring buzz of cicadas and grasshoppers rose in a deafening hum around me.

Setting traps was hard work, but it got easier. The first day it took me about an hour to set two. On the second day, I set four in that time.

“Always set each trap like it’s your only one,” I heard John call from somewhere above me on the hill.

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