Imagine, for one horrible moment, that you are lost in a featureless wilderness, immersed in the domain of animals who can kill you and some who would very much like to snack on you. You don’t know which way to go. There is no phone signal, so calling for help is not an option. You don’t wear a watch – why bother when phones tell the time? Of course, you don’t have a GPS app on your phone. You meant to download it but didn’t get around to it. How you regret that now. You have a small compass back at home, but you didn’t pack it. Why would you? You were with a guide and a group of people. Everywhere looks the same. There might be low growls and the sound of breaking branches or total silence. Lions hunt in silence, you remember. The beating sun is overhead, and you are thirsty. Breakfast was a while ago, and you would like something to munch. You should have had lunch and something to drink, but you realise that that is not your immediate concern.
This would never have happened if you had just stayed in your comfortable, but somewhat irksome, apartment in your cozy part of the world. You wanted some adventure – you are red-blooded after all – seeking thrill to alleviate the daily tedium, so you chose Africa.
Why did you choose to do a walking trail? It sounded like fun. “There is no better way to get close to nature,” the advert enticed you. Now your feet are painfully blistered, and your muscles are screaming. You should have trained more. Why did you leave the group at lunch to find a shady spot to rest for a few minutes? To get away from the mindless chatter that never stopped was one of the reasons, you realise, but you were also tired and irritable. You must have fallen into an immediate deep sleep that went on for hours, and when you woke up, you were alone. Completely abandoned. The others had continued their trail without noticing that you were missing when they set off – or, more troubling, maybe they did notice but still chose to leave you behind. Whatever happened, you are stranded in the bush.
Panic rises when the full impact of your situation hits you. What should you do? You yell at the top of your voice, but there is no answer. You try again and again until you realise that, not only will there be no answer, but perhaps you are alerting a predator that you are close by and vulnerable.
What should you do?
Over the next few blogs, for those of you who might somehow find yourself in a similar situation wherever you are in the world, I will share some survival tips from a guide’s training course, called Bushlore, that I used to offer to those who were looking for a career as a professional guide or those who simply wanted to learn more about the bush.
We will deal with the arts of tracking, orienteering, survival techniques and sleeping in the bush.
Before we do that, I must emphasise that ‘Don’t panic’ is the first step. Force yourself to sit as calmly as possible, under a shady tree if that is an option, and take deep breaths while considering what you know about the terrain. You may have looked at a map and noticed a road, river or mountain range. You may recall where the rising sun was – it was on your back when you were walking in the morning. Can you follow the group’s tracks? They were scheduled to get back to camp in the late afternoon. You try that and soon realise that it is not so easy – especially when the ground is bare and hard. You will never gain on them, and it will turn dark before you are back at camp. Spending the night out in the bush alone and without shelter is not something that you want to think about. What about following your tracks back to camp?
You think that the road to the camp lies to the east because the sun was on your back all morning. So, all you need to do is find the compass points and work out where east is. If you wait for the sun to start setting, you will not get back to camp before dark. If you don’t get back, it means that you will have to survive a long, lonely night out in the bush with dangerous animals on the hunt. You don’t want to be their target. How will you best protect yourself? Climb a tree? Build a shelter? Light a fire?
Can you make a fire? Whimsically, you remember that you gave up smoking to prolong your life. How ironic that decision seems now that you don’t have a lighter on you.
On that desperate note, I am going to retire to my cozy and definitely not irksome bed, leaving you to figure out how to get out of the life-threatening position that I have dropped you in.
