Free Guts by Gary Paulsen

the great achievements in my life and has stayed with me. It has been the one guiding part of living that has helped me more than anything else. To learn, to be willing to learn how a thing works, to understand an animal in nature, or how to write a book or run a dog team or sail a boat, to always keep learning is truly wonderful.
    The other truth—one that Brian came to know, and something that people all over the world have known and spoken of for thousands of years—is that hunger makes the best sauce.
    Something that you would normally never consider eating, something completely repulsive and ugly and disgusting, something so gross it would make you vomit just looking at it, becomes absolutely delicious if you’re starving.
    Consider the British navy in the old days of sailing ships. Their principal food was hard-tack, a dried biscuit kept in wooden barrels that were never quite airtight. After months and sometimes years at sea the biscuits would become full of maggots. The men had once spent many days trying to get rid of the worms, but now they were close to starving, and they saw the maggots as food to smear on the biscuits, a kind of tasty butter. They would also eat the rats that hid in the ship’s hold. By the end of a long voyage the rats could be sold to hungry sailors for up to a month’s wages.
    When I first started living on game, I thought only of grouse and rabbits and deer. I had thought I would eat only the best parts of the animal and stay away from anything disgusting. Like guts.
    And I hung in with that thinking until I went about three days without making a kill, and when I finally did, it was a red squirrel, which is about the size and edibility of the common rat, if perhaps cuter. It was sitting on a limb about twenty feet away and I caught it with a blunt and dropped it and took it back to my camp and cleaned, skinned and gutted it. And then looked at it.
    It looked as if I’d skinned a gerbil. I had a small aluminum pot and I put water in it and then the small carcass and boiled it for a time with some husked acorns I found. I ate it, along with the acorns, and I was cleaning the pot when I noticed the entrails on a log where I’d left them when I gutted the squirrel. My stomach was still empty, so I took the small heart and kidneys and lungs, leaving the stomach and intestines, and I boiled up another stew and ate it with more acorns. I was still hungry. Famished. There was no way a person could get fat living on such a diet. But you wouldn’t starve, either, and some of the edge of my hunger was gone.
    After that I looked at food, or game, very differently. With the onset of hunger in the woods—a hunger that did not leave me unless I killed something large, such as a deer, or killed and ate more than one rabbit or three or more grouse, or as many as ten or fifteen small fish—I never again thought simply in terms of steaks or choice portions of meat or vegetation.
    As the hunger increases the diet widens. I have eaten grub worms wrapped in fresh dandelion greens. They were too squishy for me to want to chew them so I swallowed them whole, but I did eat them and they stayed down. I have sucked the eyes out of fish that I caught the way Brian caught the panfish, with a homemade bow and willow arrows, sharpening the dry willow stalks and carving a shallow barb on the ends before fire-hardening them. I have also scaled fish with a spoon and then eaten the skin along with the cooked liver and brains. I ate rabbit brains, too. I have eaten snake in survival courses, and it’s surprisingly good. After reading a
National Geographic
about African natives when I was a boy, I tried eating both ants and grasshoppers. I found, as with the grub worms, they are easier to eat whole, wrapped in a leaf, although cooked grasshoppers are crunchy and, if you remember the salt, aren’t bad—kind of like snack food.
    Once the door was opened to eating strange food, or