Patrol Your Land
Before someone else does
As far back as I can remember, I have loved the wilderness. Growing up, I remember spending hours and days of my time in the woods; either watching the animals and natural movements of the forest or playing some game where I was a Roman legionnaire, or a wild west cavalryman, or a revolutionary war soldier sent to a remote part of the frontier and told to “civilize it”. Yeah, I was an only child who lived in a mountain town, separated from friends by sometimes annoyingly far distances that would leave an only child with his imagination as his friend. In the end, I guess that gave me the mindset of being able to entertain myself today as much as I can, through writing or reading, or sometimes just sitting in the quiet woods by myself observing the natural world.
My first real job was working at a state park in my hometown, helping preserve the area and facilitate its use by the public. In my 20’s I was an Animal Control Officer for a Virginia county where I would work often with the Fish and Game department helping injured wildlife. I studied woodland conservation and management and today I own a couple of acres of the wilderness and try to keep things in balance between having a healthy forest and a working homestead.
We have plenty of game – deer, turkey, bear, whistle pig, etc. We had a problem with raccoons taking our hens at the start of last year, but through strengthening the weak outdoor leaning tower of chicken and a campaign of extreme violence against the 8 or so raccoons that we eradicated, we have brought balance to the ridge. Even in the middle of hunting season, we still see plenty of wildlife who cross our land every single day and make Decker’s Ridge their home.
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My wife had me watch Where the Crawdad’s Sing last night and I will actually recommend it. Solid movie with pretty good acting in a time of what Martin Scorsese calls “Amusement Park movies”, i.e. Superhero movies. Because I like to look up trivia on movies and shows, I came across an interesting bit of controversy about the author of the original novel, Delia Owens. It turns out that she moved to Africa in the 1970’s to study various wildlife. In the 1990’s, her then husband Is accused of killing a poacher in Zambia and today is still wanted for questioning about it as she is the “most important witness” according to Zambian authorities.
This gave me a resurgence of thoughts I have always had. What would I do if I came across a poacher on my land? I’ve come across the proverbial poacher in my time, someone hunting out of season, but it has always been an American hunter who would ethically take his game. But what if I found someone on my land today? What if there is no governing body to legally report these people to for prosecution? There wouldn’t be any hesitation in a collapse scenario. If you are poaching on my land, you will be shot. It doesn’t matter that you are hungry, you are actively going after resources on my land, resources that I am responsible for. Sure, they will be food for my family, and clothes and what not, but I have a management plan in place to ensure that they are an indefinite resource for my family and not just a one season done deal.
If you talk to older Appalachian’s, they will all tell you about how when they were growing up there wasn’t hardly any game in the woods. The great depression hit our region hard, and every tom and dick with a rifle when into the woods to get dinner for their family. Many of these people were city dwellers who over-hunted the populations and caused them to decline so much because they didn’t understand that the wildlife population is a finite resource if you just go and shoot a deer a day.
This should be remembered by people today who think “I will go hunting every day during the collapse”. After your first year, the forest is going to be picked clean. You might be the best, most ethical hunter on the planet, but here comes Tyler with his daddies whatever and he just took a deer. And so did Kyle. And so did Daphanie. And so did Clayton. And it continues.
In Stalin’s War on Ukraine, it is clearly stated that game was picked over quick and people resorted to eating cats, dogs, pigeons, rats, grass, and other edibles outside. Tree bark was boiled for food along with shoe leather, and cannibalism occurred. This isn’t just an isolated phenomenon; it is a historical reality that occurs more often than we care to remember. Famine is a massive part of life, and still is in many parts of the world. Somali warlords in the 90’s killed 300,000 people by controlling the food supply. Saudi Arabia, right now, is using famine as a war fighting tool. In 1975 when Cambodia fell to Pol Pot, he wanted to turn the country into an agrarian communist utopia. He emptied cities, abolished currency, and private property, and forced the people onto communal farms. By 1979, famine struck as the planned agrarian reform policies failed and over one million Cambodians had died from famine. By the time the Communist Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and removed the Khmer Rouge from power, a quarter of the country’s population had died. Vietnam had its own famine in 1945, caused by Japanese occupation, that caused between 700,000 and 2,000,000 deaths.
Famine is the real killer of the world. In a collapse here in the USA, where we haven’t really faced a famine since the end of the Civil War and then it was limited to the South or the dust bowl during depression, our idyllic life will turn rapidly. We have at least ten cities with a population of one million or more people. If you include “Metro-Areas” that surround cities, there are fifty that have over a million people in them. If the trucks and trains that bring fresh food to these cities every day suddenly stop, you will see not only a mass famine, but a mass exodus of urbanites into the rural areas of land.
What I am telling you is nothing new. I know this, you know this. I know that you know this. But I don’t know if you have grasped the gravity of what that would look like. Tens of thousands of dead within the first few days in the cities (that is EACH CITY) at the least, followed by hundreds of thousands from those individual cities hitting the roads to head to the mountains. For some reason, whenever there is a catastrophe, people always head for the mountains. They assume that we are sitting on billions of pounds of food that is neatly wrapped and packaged and ready for them. We are not. We have it, but we have to work for it.
When Dwight Eisenhower became President of the US, he helped champion the creation of the Interstate Highway System. Influenced by the autobahn system in Germany, he wanted a network to quickly transport troops across the country, facilitate trade, and to help with evacuations. The system, which is constantly a pain in our ass and full of traffic, has a different use in mind at the strategic level than you or I going to visit family easier. In the event of nuclear war, the highways were supposed to be the massive corridors where city folks could migrate away from the disaster area and into “safe regions” where they could rebuild.
If, as we stated above, the food stopped being delivered into these cities, the people will migrate along these corridors to areas that have food. If one of them cuts through your town or county, you can guarantee you will be having visitors. People will invariably leave the road when they see a house on a hill with a small fire and the intoxicating scent of cooking meat hits them, a starving people who are desperate. The fiction novel On Second After covers this pretty well, in my option. Not only will you have mass migration from your nearest large city, but you will encounter mass migration going to that city from other desolate areas.
Like the Roman frontier guards of old, you will be sitting watching an entire people move. The land will be trampled flat, picked clean, and left a debris trail in their wake. You may have an organized defense unit for your hubstead of six or twelve or even thirty guys. But in the wake of a million or more starving a desperate people, what are you to do? I do not have an answer written here for you right now as it is not something I specifically have to worry about. My county is small enough that we don’t even have a rail line leading in. We are nowhere, and we like it that way.
But this rounds back to my original point. Just because we are isolated doesn’t mean that stragglers can’t see a road sign and think “Hey, maybe they have something good”. As I stated, people will leave the highways and make their own ways. They will cross through woods and broken trails trying to steal a chicken or some food here and there. As the steward of your land, you have an obligation to prevent this.
My dog (and one of our cats) go for a hike on our land every day. We have only a few routes we can realistically take, but they do allow us to see every bit of not only our hubstead, but of the surrounding valleys as well. I hike this with a different firearm from our collection every day; sometimes it’s one of our AR’s, sometimes a shotgun, sometimes a mosin, sometimes just a .22 with my sidearm. But we patrol our land every day. It allows us to not only exercise, but to keep an eye on changes to the terrain. I can see the game trail’s; I can see where the bucks have been rubbing. I can see where there was rustling in the leaves, where deer bed down, and where tree branches have been falling. I can also see if anyone who shouldn’t be there, was. If I encountered a poacher today, I wouldn’t smoke check them immediately, but I will detain them and get them what’s coming to them. If it’s an honest mistake, a neighbor who strayed onto my land, then I’d chat with them and tell them if they wanted to hunt my land to ask permission before hand and that they give me the same opportunity on theirs.
In the end, my land is my responsibility. My wildlife populations are my responsibility. My family is my responsibility. Patrol your land, before someone else does.
-Smokey
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I hope you all had a good thanksgiving. My wife and I enjoyed some time by oursevles, feasting, doing yard work, starting our rabbit hutch, and hitting the blue ridge parkway as well as some antique shops. I worked a little on my novel and started the next phase of a board game I have been designing for the better part of a year now. I am hoping this winter will allow some things to slow down so I can focus on projects like those as well as finishing the beadboard wall in the kitchen (yay, so excited….).
During this time, I will continue to patrol my land, and manage it. Spring is right around the corner, which will mean planting, hatching, and work work work.
Thank you for reading and I hope you found some good knowledge from this.