The importance of honing your hunter-gatherer skills is strongly pronounced these days and for a good reason. Natural disasters are now a common occurrence throughout the globe, and what’s worse is that we never know what exactly to expect. The aftermath of a disaster is usually chaotic and a return to the Stone age.
I mean, think of it. Without power, good water, and peace, we are a bunch of primitive higher animals. Coupled with the fact that an EMP attack could render technology useless or that feeding can become extremely difficult during an absolute economic meltdown, you’ll agree with finding alternatives to our lifestyles in readiness against tragedy.
Being A Hunter-Gatherer
To most of us, the word “hunter-gatherer” sure sounds unfamiliar, but I suppose we’ll easily understand if we use the word “forager.” So, typically, a hunter-gatherer is a person who hunts and gathers his foods by himself. That means someone who does not shop groceries at the supermarket, probably because there’s a wildfire that’s caused him to evacuate deep into the wild.
In some scenarios, though, it isn’t compulsory for a disaster to strike before becoming a hunter-gatherer. Some people do prefer to hunt and gather their foods, even under normal circumstances. Often, this is towards fulfilling an adventure or in the belief that foraged foods are the healthiest there is.
7 Techniques Needed When Honing Your Hunter-Gatherer Skills
Whatever your reasons are for choosing to become a hunter-gatherer, there are certain skills which you must develop, else you’ll only be wasting precious time. For a survival situation, you’ll only keep yourself hungry and deprived if you can’t hone these techniques to an acceptable level. Let’s take a look at these seven skills.
Sharpening Your Observation
Sharpening your observation is the foremost skill to develop as a hunter-gatherer, and thankfully, it costs nothing. To improve your observation, you have to become more aware of yourself and your surroundings at all times. So, that way, you’ll be quick to pick out a reptile slithering through the camouflage leaves to your right, find the leopard prints imprinted over 12 hours ago, or recognize an area that’s sure to become swampy during rainfall.
To become more observant, you just have to be more attentive. Pay attention to simple little things around you, noting what someone says or does at a particular time. If you do this regularly, you’ll start to establish simple patterns around you. A more observant hunter-gatherer will find games and healthy plants faster.
Starting A Fire
Starting a fire is part of prepping 101 for most preppers as we know the uses of it. A fire can help us purify water, cook meals, stay warm, create tools, fortify your dwelling and keep night predators at bay in the wilderness. Unlike the average prepper, however, a hunter-gatherer has to learn to start a fire with any material available in his environment. This means, you have to be able to make a fire in all situations. For example, when getting lost in the wilderness, you are presented with a host of potential problems. If the weather is cold, you need fire. If you are hungry, you need to eat and to keep from getting sick, you need to cook your food. When making a habitat to get out of the elements, you might need to use fire to solidify clay or to burn the ends of rope to keep things solid.
When in the wilderness or even in a rural area, you can start a fire following the basic prepping guide, but if in an urban settlement, you may have to make use of plastic bottles, pieces of glass, or eyeglass lenses.
Using Primitive Weaponry
It is rare to have an adequate supply of ammunition in the wilderness, so there has to be other alternatives to save your gun and bullets for crucial moments. For this, you must be able to make and use primitive weapons, fashioned out of the simplest materials. For example, a sling, catapult, and spear can be made from the items in the woods. These weapons are made from materials you can easily find in your environment; meaning that you can’t run out of ammunition no matter how long you are in the wild. A bow and arrows can be made from wood and vines or if you happen to have rope or twine. The tension is from the flexible wood. Any fiber or fibrous material that is strong enough to launch a wooden arrow that has been sharpened could be unlimited “ammo.”
Navigation
Having a good knowledge of your location will help you escape easily during a bug out. You should thus be able to identify major and minor areas in your locale. Also, you have to know where you’re headed if you want to get there. Technology may be inaccessible, so GPS and other apps cannot be relied on. You have to navigate places using old prepping techniques. So, if you want to hunt-gather successfully when SHTF, you should be able to: read topographic maps; use a compass; use objects like the sun to triangulate your position; tell time through the shadows; measure and estimate distance, and tell if there’s water nearby.
Recognizing, Picking and Preparing Edible Plants
No matter how much supplies you have with you, knowing the right plants to pick and how to prepare them will be very helpful. You don’t even have to wait until your supplies are exhausted before foraging. You can forage and prepare good plants even when you still have supplies so you can have a healthy mix of foods to eat. Also, your supplies will last longer by doing so.
However, there are highly poisonous plants in the wild, so you have to be careful with what you forage. To pick wild edible plants in the wilderness, you should be able to know where they grow best, how best to do the harvest, the edible parts of the plant, other uses of the plants apart from food, if the plant is safe or not, ways to prepare these plants and how to use for medicinal purposes.
Building A Shelter
An essential skill for a hunter-gatherer is the ability to build shelter quickly using available materials. You have to understand that you may not have the option to settle for shelter materials that you want, so you must be able to use what you can find effectively. In an urban area, you can find items like Styrofoam, abandoned mattresses, cardboards, shopping carts, tents and tarps. Alternatively, in a rural locale, you can easily find trees, sticks, caves, branches, mud and rocks. Coupled with other survival skills such as the use of fire, you can survive the elements easily and allow yourself to focus on the other survival needs such as food and water.
You can learn even more how to do so by reading articles and watching videos online.
Tracking A Game
To some, this is an essential skill required of a hunter-gatherer. Before you can be called a hunter-gatherer, you must be able to hunt successfully in the wild. To survive, you must understand how to know the right areas to hunt in, identify and follow animal tracks, use available weapons optimally, construct and place traps, catch and cook fish and, lastly, how to prepare and cook game, whether small or big.
Without this skill, you really can’t be called a hunter-gatherer.
Conclusion On Honing Your Hunter-gatherer Skills
Honing your hunter-gatherer skills is necessary for survival when SHTF. By knowing how to hunt and gather food in the wild, you’d have a much better shot at surviving whatever disaster hits. Even if you don’t have a considerable stockpile when disaster strikes, you can still do very well in the wilderness with the bunch of skills highlighted above.