American Hunting: Starting with Solitary Life in the Wilderness

Chapter 178 The Twentieth Day
Lin Yu'an immediately stood up, intending to retrieve the Thunderbird. He walked to the door and listened intently.

Besides the howling wind, he also heard a sound as if a heavy object was sliding on the roof.

The sound startled him! He immediately realized the potential danger and feared that something was wrong with the chimney.

"No, I have to go out and check right away."

"This snow is wet snow, extremely dense, and very heavy. If it accumulates in large quantities on the roof, especially on the windward side of the chimney, it could put enormous stress on the structure."

"The sliding sound we just heard was most likely a large chunk of snow sliding down from a height and hitting the chimney."

“If the dry-laid stone structure of the chimney is loosened and collapsed due to impact or heavy pressure, not only will my shelter be smashed with a big hole.”

"More importantly, I will lose my only source of heating, which is tantamount to a death sentence in this blizzard!"

He had to go out immediately to inspect and eliminate this deadly threat.

He began to make meticulous preparations for this short but extremely dangerous outing, putting on his thickest coat and wrapping himself up tightly.

After taking the tools, they pulled hard on the latch, and then used all their strength to push open the door, which was tightly held down by the wind and snow, just enough for one person to pass through.

A sudden gust of wind and snow spray rushed in, pelting him head-on, and the damp, cold air made it almost impossible for him to breathe!
He immediately bent down and crawled out of the shelter on all fours, then quickly closed the door again to prevent snow from entering.

In an instant, it felt as if he had been thrown into a high-speed washing machine drum made of wind and ice crystals!
The wind was deafening, and the swirling snow reduced his visibility to less than three meters.

He struggled to climb to the wall, but instead of immediately climbing to the roof, he picked up the wooden stick that had been lying there by the door.

Then, they began to climb up to the roof.

The rooftop slope was covered with slippery snow, and the strong wind blew him about.

With each step upward, find a firm foothold.

When he finally climbed onto the roof and reached the chimney, he was completely exposed to the blizzard's core power.

The sight he saw confirmed his worst fears: large amounts of wet snow were piling up on the windward side of the chimney, forming a snowdrift almost half a meter high!

He could only cling to the roof like a gecko, frantically loosening the snow on the roof with that wooden stick, and then digging the snow piles down with his hands again and again!

"Bang! Bang! Bang!"

Large chunks of wet snow were thrown down by him and rolled off the roof.

He was like a sailor mending sails in a hurricane, engaging in the most direct confrontation with nature.

A dozen minutes later, when the snow on the roof had been mostly cleared away and the structure was no longer under heavy pressure, he finally breathed a long sigh of relief.

Then, after figuring out the direction, he struggled to climb down from the roof.

After digging out the ptarmigan buried in the snow, they prepared to return to the shelter.

But there was a lot of snow at the door, almost blocking half of it. He spent another ten minutes clearing the snow from the doorway.

When he returned to the shelter, closed the door, and bolted it shut, shutting out the roaring world, his clothes were covered in water droplets.

But Arc'teryx's fabric is indeed excellent; not a single drop of water got inside.

He placed the Thunderbird, frozen as a stone, on the stone slab beside the fireplace, letting the warm firelight slowly thaw it.

While he waited, he first placed the iron pot on the fire and melted some of the ice.

Then, he took out a few cattail roots he had previously stored and a small handful of salty dried seaweed from the food bag in the corner and threw them into the pot.

About half an hour later, after the Thunderbird had thawed considerably, he skillfully used his hunting knife to cut the bird into several large pieces.

Then all the pieces of meat, along with the bones, were put into the pot of soup that was beginning to emit a faint, fresh herbal aroma.

He added a few more pieces of firewood to the fire, and then waited quietly.

More than an hour later, Lin Yu'an sat in front of the fireplace, using his newly made wooden bowl to serve the stewed thunderbird soup.

Outside, a cold storm raged; inside, a warm fire blazed.

After finishing his dinner, he carefully wiped the wooden bowl clean and listened to the wind outside, which showed no signs of abating.

He knew that the storm might last a long time.

He took out another piece of wood and a small knife, and began to conceive his next work, perhaps a spoon.

During his long period of isolation from the world, this way of passing the time was his best weapon against loneliness!
Day .

In the dead of night, Lin Yu'an was awakened by a loud, resonant sound.

He jerked his eyes open from his sleeping bag and listened intently. The "bomb cyclone" that had been raging all day was taking its power to a whole new level!
He could feel the heavy wooden door making rhythmic "thump, thump" sounds, as if an invisible giant beast was outside the door, repeatedly ramming against the tiny wooden door with its body.

Lin Yu'an immediately got up and, using the faint light from the fireplace, carefully inspected every inch of the shelter's structure.

The walls are as solid as a rock, the roof is as stable as Mount Tai, and the airflow in the flue is still smooth.

He breathed a sigh of relief after confirming that the fortress was safe, and crawled back into his sleeping bag, but he could no longer fall asleep peacefully.

And so, amidst the storm's roar, which sounded like an apocalyptic symphony, he endured the night in a half-dreaming, half-awake state until dawn.

When he opened his eyes again, the shelter was dark.

He unlatched the door, but the snow piled up to halfway up the door, allowing him to push the door open only a tiny crack to peek out.

"call--!"

Outside the door, the wind howled as sharply as a knife scraping against glass. The scene was no longer a pure white, but a chaotic gray-white, with visibility less than a meter.

"The storm is still ongoing, and it's even more intense than yesterday."

He glanced at the time on the camera.

2021 January 11

"Good morning, as you can see, I'm stuck."

He faced the camera, his voice calm but his eyes serious: "It seems that today will be the same as yesterday, and even tomorrow, I won't be able to go anywhere. I don't know how the other contestants are doing."

In this completely isolated and cut-off-from-the-world environment, time seems to stretch out, and every minute becomes exceptionally long.

A strong sense of claustrophobia and anxiety about the unknown are enough to destroy the will of an ordinary person.

But Lin Yu'an knew that the best weapon against all of this was to keep his mind and hands busy.

He first conducted a detailed self-reflection, reviewing every decision and action he had taken since landing in a waterproof notebook.

Then he opened the notebook and pen provided by the production team, and his mind involuntarily began to replay the events of the past twenty days.

Looking back, it was truly a race against time. The first few days were filled with frantic exploration and infrastructure development, building temporary shelters and discovering life-saving foods like mussels and cattails.

What followed was a frantic ten-day construction period.

Images flashed through his mind of himself using fire to soften the frozen soil, moving boulders, and painstakingly chiseling out the saddle pass with a handsaw and axe.

Then came the strategic shift.

To explore and walk in the snow, they crafted snowshoes, boiled sea salt, and tracked down thunderbirds to design new traps.

Twenty days to build something from scratch. Although it was tough, every step was carried out with a reasonable strategy.

It is this accumulation that has earned me the right to sit calmly by the fire in the midst of a roaring storm.

Thinking of this, he stood up, the hunger in his stomach pulling him back from his memories; he needed food.

This rational review allowed him to reaffirm his situation and the resources he possessed, and also dispelled the unease that had arisen in his heart due to the storm.

"Alright, that concludes the debriefing. Now, it's time to get breakfast."

He walked to the door and felt the immense pressure emanating from it once more, a surge of indescribable relief welling up inside him.

He looked at the camera, his voice filled with emotion: "Now, I am incredibly glad that I made that decision, which now seems to be the only right one: to store mussels every day without fail, and to roast and freeze them all."

"If I had hesitated or been lazy at the beginning, if my food reserves had only been enough for one or two days, I don't know what I would be facing now in this desperate situation?"

"Perhaps it was a prayer for the blizzard to pass quickly, or perhaps it was out of hunger and despair that he picked up that satellite phone."

“I didn’t know at the time that there would be such a storm, and that it would last so long and be so intense.”

"But I always believe in one principle: in the wilderness, never despise food that is readily available."

"Use your current diligence to buy certainty in the future; perhaps this is the essence of survival."

"Looking back now, what I gained from my hard work was not just food, but also the confidence to wait patiently now."

After saying that, he took a deep breath, pulled the latch again, and prepared to carry out a brief but necessary "resupply operation".

Using a digging stick and his body, he struggled to push the snow at the doorway to create a passage, then bent down and crawled out.

In an instant, he was once again swallowed up by that roaring, cold world!

Relying on his memory, he frantically dug through the thick snow with his hands! Finally, his fingertips touched the storage basket woven from cattail leaves.

Then, he lifted the lid of the basket and grabbed a large handful of roasted mussels that were already frozen solid like rocks.

He didn't take more than enough for one day, then immediately buried the basket again and fled back to the shelter as quickly as possible.

"Bang!"

The wooden door closed, and the world fell silent once more.

He took off his snow-covered coat, sat in front of the warm fireplace, and threw the frozen mussels into the iron pot to heat them slowly.

The sizzling sound from the pot and the muffled roar of the storm outside created a stark contrast that instilled in him a strong sense of belonging to the shelter he had built with his own hands!
After finishing the hot meal, Lin Yu'an felt his energy return.

He looked at the gray and white chaos outside the house and knew that he still had a whole day to "kill".

He decided to use this time of freedom that God had taken from him to forge a crucial weapon in advance for his new life after the snowstorm.

"Once the storm passes, the lake will be completely frozen over and covered with a thick layer of snow. Ice fishing will become one of my most important ways to obtain food."

"Fish bite very lightly under the ice, requiring an extremely sensitive rod tip to detect it. That's why I want to have a professional ice fishing rod custom-made for me."

He walked to the corner and pulled out one of his eight spare carbon arrows from the bow and arrow set wrapped in a canvas bag.

Holding the arrow horizontally in his hand, he said to the camera, "The conventional wooden shaft, although tough, is too inefficient in transmitting vibrations."

He tapped the black carbon fiber arrow shaft lightly with his finger: "And this is a miracle of modern materials science. It is light, hard, and its vibration transmission efficiency is dozens of times that of wood."

“Any tiny touch from beneath the ice can be transmitted to my hand without any loss of quality through it. Using it to make the shaft of an ice fishing rod is luxurious, but absolutely suitable.”

He plans to create a hybrid design that integrates a wooden handle, a wooden reel, and a carbon fiber shaft.

First, a wooden handle is made that fits perfectly in the palm of the hand.

He selected a piece of dry birch wood, about the thickness of a wrist and without any cracks, from the pile of firewood, and then spent more than an hour meticulously carving it into a handle using a short-handled axe and a hunting knife.

The front of the handle is slightly thicker, with a space reserved for mounting the rod shaft. The middle section fits comfortably in the palm of your hand, while the rear end provides a platform for mounting the reel.

Next, we come to the soul of the entire piece: the wooden winding reel.

He found another, thicker piece of birch wood, intending to make the spool that resembled a miniature version of an I-beam reel.

He first used a knife to carve the block of wood into a cylinder, and then, with great patience, he carved from both sides of the cylinder toward the center, little by little, hollowing out the middle part, leaving only the protruding edges at both ends.

"The inner wall of this spool must be smooth, otherwise it will wear down the precious fishing line." He said, while repeatedly scraping the inner wall of the spool with a knife.

Now, he has encountered his first technical bottleneck.

He needed to drill smooth, straight, and sized shaft holes in the very center of the I-beam wheel and on the platform at the rear of the handle.

He tried to drill with the tip of his hunting knife, but found that this was not only extremely inefficient, but also made it difficult to ensure that the hole was vertical and round.

He stopped what he was doing, frowned, and said, "No, this will ruin these parts that we've worked so hard to make. I need a tool that can provide a continuous and stable rotational power."

He looked around the small shelter, his eyes scanning all his tools, searching for a solution.

His gaze finally settled on the recurve bow hanging on the wall.

"bow……"

He muttered to himself, and then a classic and efficient primitive tool came to mind—the bow drill!
“I need to make a bow drill. It requires four core components: the bow, the drill rod, the shank, and the drill bit.”

“I have a perfect replacement for the drill bit!” His gaze shifted to the carbon fiber arrow in the corner.

He held the carbon fiber arrow up to the camera and pointed to its head: "It's a standard hunting arrow. To make it easy to change the arrowheads for different functions, the connection point is designed with threads."

Lin Yu'an pinched the sharp G5 hunting arrowhead in his hand and twisted it counterclockwise. With a slight scraping sound, he completely unscrewed the deadly metal arrowhead from the shaft.

He showed the camera the connection between the arrowhead and the shaft: "Look here, this metal arrowhead is itself a perfect drill bit made of high-strength steel!"

"Using it to drive the system will greatly improve accuracy and efficiency! I never realized this when I was making doors!"

This discovery thrilled him!

(End of this chapter)