Survival Overnight

I have always been interested in survival and getting along in the wilderness with only my skills. These hopes and aspirations lead me into the bush for an overnight with a friend of mine John, from the near by village. This is the same friend that hiked 28K with me through the Kalahari Desert bush country from my village to his. It was a long walk, and hot!

We left his place and were in the bush country by 10am. First things first, build a shelter. We started a simple frame lean to lodge with some sticks and started putting brush up against is. I brought a few cheater tools to make the work a little faster. The purpose of this trip was to test and build my skills as well as bond with John. With the hatchet I bought, we hacked up some shrub brush and had the shelter ready in less than 2 hours. It was closed at the foot and open at the head with room enough for 2 average people. John a good sized guy…his Setswana name in ‘Tau’, it mean lion. (He named himself but he fits the part), and I who is the average height and weight 5’10, 165lb. We fit in our little house like it was make for us.

Next, while John was collecting fire wood, I built a solar still. This, in essence, is a hole in the ground with a can at the bottom to catch water. The hole is covered with a piece of plastic and a rock is placed in its middle to weigh it down. Water collects on the underside of the plastic, like in a green house, runs to the middle where the rock is and drips into the can. This was just a practice. Five hours later, not one drop but there was a little moisture on the plastic=).

We gathered plenty of fire wood with the handy hatchet and I also build a fire reflector to send the heat back into our little hut. The night here get cold so it came in very handy. From there we went out to set some traps. I had some snare wire and we set some practice trip snares in front of a few small mammal dens. About 50 yards from our camp we found what we thought was a lions den. Which lions don’t dig holes like this one, but it was huge and scary. Latter we were told it must have been a wild bore den.

We set up our camp about ½ mile down the sand road between our villages and 1 mile in to the bush from the road. We thought we were deep in the bush when all of a sudden some cows walk by with bells followed by a guy who ‘Dumela’ greeted us. When we looked a little harder we saw in the distance a tin shack set up at a cattle post. Well, if lions show up, it nice to have a place to run!

We had a beautiful sun set followed by a full moon night that made the experience that much more amazing. Dinner was canned spicy corn beef, jalapeno beans, and chakalaka (spicy canned vegetable mix)…and we were almost out of water!!! Crap. We lit a fire with out matches and cooked our cans right on the coals. Shortly after, we realized we had no eating utensils so we made quick work of some bark and made some shovels which did the job just perfect.

Before we called it a night we dug a shallow trench around the helter to keep out any spiders and pissed in it to keep out the lions…well we hoped it would. Then we surrounded the front of the shelter with brush to make one more obstacle for any visitors. Sand isn’t as soft as you think it would be to sleep on. Just add water and you have concrete right.

I’m still here to write this story so we made it out alive. When John told his Head Master at the school what he did, she said “don’t ever do that again. The lions will kill you.”