Journal by Craig Buckhout, Abbagail Shaw, Patrick Gantt

were
concerned, they skirted the edge of desperation.
    During
the last several yards of my approach, I whistled, sang, shouted, stomped my
feet, and generally made my presence known.  The coyotes were clearly not happy
to see me and to give up their find but nonetheless surrendered ground.  Still,
they circled like ghosts, nosed the air and darted in and out quick like,
yipping and baring teeth, trying to spook me away.

It
was a dead mule deer, a big one, half buried.  And in the earth surrounding the
animal’s carcass there were definite bear tracks, large ones.  My guess was
that the deer had been killed by a bear, dined upon and, as is their
inclination, buried for later feeding.  The thought that a bear was anywhere
nearby made me nervous, but I was so hungry I’d fight him for his kill with
nothing more than spit and rocks if I had to.
    All
I had for cutting was a pocketknife with a three-inch blade, but still I went
to work.  It took a considerable amount of pulling and slicing, but in the end
I was able to trim about a fifteen or twenty pound filet off its upside flank;
skin, dirt, debris, and all.  I jammed my rifle into my pack and started back. 
I think if anyone had been watching me, they would have thought me drunk, or
touched in the head, or both because I staggered, yelled, and held the meat up
high.
    Anna
built a fire in a grouping of nearby rocks while Gabriel and I used water from
one of our bottles to wash off as much dirt as possible.
    A
long time ago, I used to have this little black and white Boston Terrier.  Actually,
it’s debatable if I had him or he had me, if you know what I mean.  I called
him Ivan after Ivan the Terrible because he was such a terror.   Anyway, he
would always shake all over and let out these little whinny squeaks whenever I
prepared his meals.  As strange as it sounds, I thought about him for a second
there while all this was going on.  That’s because my own hands were shaking,
my heart was racing, and my mouth was watering the entire time we were
preparing the venison to cook.  I was so hungry that even though that meat
smelled something terrible, it was all I could do to keep from biting off a
piece and eating it raw. 
    After
removing the skin, I laid the fillet on a flat rock and cut it into smaller
chunks that we skewered with sticks and roasted over the fire.  It seemed to
take forever.
    A
few days ago, I would never have pictured myself eating something as rank as
that.  It probably had been out there for at least a day, gnawed on by bear and
coyote, attacked by insects, a veritable Petri dish for the most evil of
bacteria and parasites, but it was the best meal I’d ever had.
    I
ate until my jaw hurt and my stomach ached, which probably wasn’t much more
than a pound, pound and a half or so.  But considere high-top tennis shoes.  with t ing how little I’d had the
last few days and how my stomach shrunk because of that, it was more than I
should have taken in.  Five minutes after taking my last bite, first Gabriel
and then I, threw most of it up.
    At
first I thought that it was because the meat was spoiled, but since Anna kept
hers down, I knew it wasn’t that.  We had just eaten too much is all.  So both
Gabriel and I took a couple more bites of meat and waited while we cooked up
the rest.  What we consumed stayed down this time, so we ate a couple more
chunks and wrapped-up the rest in a piece of fabric from the plane.
    As
much as we wanted to stay, eat some more, and rest, we couldn’t.  We were in an
area that offered little concealment, so we could conceivably be spotted.  And
now that I was thinking straight again, I was chiding myself for my earlier
boisterous celebration upon finding the meat.  We had to push on.
    We
walked until just before dark, feeling a little better now, and again made camp
in some trees under a lean-to constructed of tree limbs resting against a low
branch of a sixty foot pine tree.  It wasn’t good enough