this episode saw some big firsts for alone our first beaver harvested and we got two in one
episode so of course i'm going to be talking about beavers i'm also going to be talking about some
things around traps that we're seeing in this episode some more about shelters what's going
on for people physiologically we're also gonna be seeing someone go home and oh it's definitely one
that gets me right in the heart all right so let's dive into episode four it starts with scene benji
coming in right where the last episode stopped where it's the next morning after he knows he
shot the beaver with a fatal hit and he is getting ready to go look for it so we see him heading out
pre-dawn to the spot where he shot the beaver and knows it should be somewhere in the area
so there's benji heading out looking for his beaver and he's talking about really being
hoping that it is dead and that it didn't make it all the way back to its lodge before it died
one thing that he's doing that i think is really wise is being sure to have an arrow on the string
knocked and ready to go as he's looking for that beaver this is an important thing to think about
when we talk about beavers because while they are a rodent and we don't think of rodents as
particularly fierce or dangerous or scary think about a beaver and what a beaver does
all day long every day of its life right it is chewing beavers are powerful enough to take
down whole trees besides elephants they're about the only animal that can take down
huge trees all of their physiology is built around having insanely strong
jaw muscles let's take a look at this drawing of beaver jaws and you can see that
almost their entire skull is geared towards having these enormous muscles those jaws are so powerful
they can take a huge chunk out of hardwood right so they could take your finger off like nothing
so having an arrow strung and being prepared for that and knowing that that's the reality of
an injured beaver really really smart of benji so i appreciate him demonstrating
this really critical survival skill when it comes to going to find a potentially injured beaver
luckily it is not injured it is dead and oh my gosh right amazing that he's able to find it
what seems who knows how much editing was done maybe he was looking for hours but what seems like
pretty quickly there is his beaver lodged in those alders and it's awesome that benji was paying
enough attention to that beaver's habits that he knew where to start looking for it oh my gosh
fever is such a huge score in a survival situation and benji is absolutely right talking about just
how huge that beaver meat is because it is not just the meat but it is such a good source of
fat and that is absolutely everything out there so benji guts it in the field and then leaves the
pile of stomach and intestines he also leaves the spleen attached to those intestines you can see a
dark organ i definitely would have kept the spleen and eaten it all organ meat is really really
nutritious and the spleen is a very nutritious organ but that said he's reducing the weight
hull it back i prefer to skin an animal before i've gutted it once you've gutted it then they're
open and you don't have anything solid to press on and when we later see him skinning it he's having
to use his knife a lot whereas when the abdomen of the animal is still intact then you can get
in there with your hand and you can really pull the skin away exactly at the the coming together
of the fat and the membrane and the skin so it doesn't take a knife and you're way less likely
to slash open the skin and to leave fat and meat on the animal so there's two ways to think about
it i mean certainly keeping the meat cleaner by keeping the skin on that's true but it's making
it harder for him when he goes to skin it also we see him leaving the guts as bear bait which
is not a bad idea but there is so much good fat all around the intestines and the stomach and that
is part of why animals love to eat them and why a bear is later going to be really excited about it
all of that fatty tissue around the outside of the intestines you can peel off very carefully
so as not to bust the intestines or the stomach and that's going to be probably like a double
handful of delicious fatty tissue one of the most nutritious parts of that animal it's got lots of
fat under the skin beaver meat is really rich it's got fat in the meat but that beaver's not going to
last them forever and that fat is like gold so i would have been really really careful to take all
of that fatty tissue with me as well as the spleen and everything else usable another resource that
benji doesn't make use of when he is gutting that beaver is the caster he talks about getting the
scent glands out so that they don't take the meat absolutely it's really really strongly scented
stuff you don't want it on the meat it's going to make it really musky and a lot less delicious
but it's an amazing resource it's the the scent glands are called castor and beavers
come to the scent of castor either if they think that there are other beavers in the area and they
want to make sure to claim their territory or if they're in a mating phase you can draw
a beaver with the scent gland of its mate so him just leaving that in the gut pile that was a big
resource wasted because he could make little scent mounds around the shore and draw other beaver to
that and if he's laying in weight with his bow then he's going to have a much better chance
at getting a second beaver likewise if you're trapping beaver which i don't know if they're
allowed to on this season but caster is one of the ways that people trap beaver so drying out
those scent glands and then using a little bit of them in places throughout their habitat would
be a really really great way to have more access to more beaver which he's going to be needing if
he's going to make it to over a hundred days like he claims is his goal out there good luck benji
i hope you make it and then we come to timogen and we see him building a raised bed platform which
is a brilliant idea i'm definitely a big fan of ray's bed platforms and these kinds of situations
particularly in that climate where it is so damp being up off that wet ground is going to make a
big difference in calorie conservation and keeping your gear dry and of course heat rises so if
you're in a shelter then you want to be closer to the top you can do that by lowering the top like
carrie did with a low slung shelter or if you have a shelter like temogen's with a higher ceiling
get yourself up higher when you're sleeping so that you're not burning so many calories keeping
yourself warm we see timogen making a powered snare mechanism and it's using what is a fairly
classic trigger style which is called an l7 so you have an upright in the ground which has a groove
cut in it so basically it looks like a seven and then you have your upper piece which looks like an
l and the two hold in together and the upward pressure keeps them together but so there's
just enough force that a little bit of sideways pressure is going to knock that l away from the
seven and allow that spring pull to spring up so the l7 works on that and the way he's doing it
is he's using a snare out to the side so the idea being that when that squirrel gets caught it's
going to run in either direction that it goes is going to release that trigger and up into the air
one thing is that with snare wire you don't necessarily have to have a powered snare
because the inclination of an animal when it gets caught in a snare is to run to get away from it
they don't know that that's exactly the opposite thing they want to do because if they just stayed
calm they could probably pull that snare off of themselves but by running they're going to be
tightening it and then they're going to be they're going to be having the blood supply cut off to
their head i learned in a trapping course this summer that it's not actually the airway getting
cut off it is the arteries that are supplying the blood with oxygen which is a much faster and more
humane way to go there are no dummies you know their survival is more key to them than that one
meal is to you so if they see something foreign in their environment and they don't have to go
through it chances are good they're going to go around so if i was setting a snare like timogen
is i would be building some kind of funnel that is not really obvious to the squirrel so a few
downed branches not a solid fence of branches that the squirrel is going to be like what is going on
this feels fishy just having enough debris that it's inconvenient for it to sidestep that snare
so it's going to go right through it that would be a really good thing to do so we'll see how
successful timogen is with his snaring but if it was me i would be altering my setup a little bit
we also hear timogen talking about the craving and how challenging it is to deal with that craving
and i just have to say that anyone who hasn't gone weeks with very low to no calories
cannot fathom the amount of hours every day you can think about food it is unbelievable
how much time you spend thinking about food of all kinds when you're really really hungry
we circle back to benji and we see him building a smoker so he says this is more meat than i want to
eat right away so i'm going to be preserving it for the long term which is a great idea
i'm going to talk about some questions about the way he's going about that but building a
smoker sweet we also see him skinning it and this is where i can see that he's probably
really cutting into the height a lot it's hard to see visually the difference between the skin
and the membrane and the fat because they're a really similar color and they're a really similar
texture if you're not used to them so as a hide tanner i get so many hides from hunters who have
slashed the crap out of their hide not realizing it because they haven't gone all the way through
did you see that vulture come over my shoulder i tell you what
when i'm doing these reviews and talking about people going really hungry out in the woods
it's kind of crazy how many vultures come by
it's pretty sweet so benji is both spending way longer skinning than he has to using
it with his knife and doing damage to both the hide and the fat we can see some fat is
getting left on there and potentially cutting through the meat too so again this is where
skinning it with the abdomen intact where you can get in there and actually just push your fist in
or a little hooked knuckle to separate that hide without cutting it at all so much better but
he also didn't have to carry all the weight of those guts home so you know
positives and drawbacks to everything which is a theme for these reviews right there are always a
million different ways to look at it none is right or wrong but they're all going to yield
slightly different results now we see benji cutting up meat and throwing it in the smoker
which i think is a great idea however we see him throw the whole rack of ribs two racks of ribs
in that smoker and i'm really concerned about this because it is not a good idea to try to dry meat
on the bone for long-term storage to just smoke it like you would smoke some ribs for barbecue
no problem but meat that's touching bone is going to have a really hard time drying
because of course it can't get air flow around it and touching the bone is going to make it
more inclined to rot faster and it's going to have fat trapped in there beaver's already a fatty meat
so it's already going to be challenging to dry so doing everything you can to help it is smart
it's hard to remove all of the meat from the ribs so i wouldn't have even tried to do that
what i would have been doing is eating those ribs first thing and then taking the bigger muscles
which are are more appealing to eat right you want to go for that big meaty thigh but better to take
those big muscles and cut those into really thin strips and dry those and all of those little bits
that are around the bones those are the things that you want to be eating fresh and not bothering
trying to dry so i'm a little concerned that he's going to be running into some issues with some
of this meat we have seen in previews of other episodes him starting to have some gut issues and
i'm wondering if it's related to that so crossing my fingers that that isn't what does it but
i would have gone about eating it a little bit different oh my gosh watching him eat that fatty
delicious meat oh i'm just so with him and what it is to a body that has been starved for so long to
have that level of not just food that fatty food it's amazing and we can see the sheen on his lips
so you can really see how fatty delicious it is right it's written all over his face
awesome congratulations benji looks amazing i feel for terry deep in my guts it is something
that we don't hear a lot about on alone because like terry people don't feel that comfortable
talking about it but constipation is a major issue on a loan i talked about this in my last review
when you go from eating a ton of food to dramatically reduced calories and dramatically
reduce volume your digestive system shifts and it doesn't have those same impulses to
be pushing food out so terry says i guess i'm just burning everything up without much leftover i
don't think that's what's happening terry i think it's just not moving through and that becomes a
bigger and bigger problem over time because the longer your food sits in your intestines the more
water gets drawn out of it and the harder it gets which makes it a lot harder to push out of course
i talk at length about this issue in my video let's talk about poop on alone check it out
it's a big issue and i'm with you terry because i experienced this as well they never put it
on the show on season six but i had two different periods of going 16 days without pooping and i
really thought that i might be taken out by helicopter because of that i really thought
that it might be a medical evacuation because it was getting dire that experience of just being
cramped up with your guts telling you you have got to poop and trying and not being able to
it is brutal it really feels life and death and it can be and we have seen people taken out by
this issue before michelle on my season season six got taken out by it um jesse in season five
who ate a ton of tree bark had massive fecal impaction had to get flown out to the helicopter
it is no joke and it's something we don't think about that much in in our normal daily
lives constipation is uncomfortable and an inconvenience in normal life but when you are
living by yourself out in the woods with very little coming in and everything is hard that
on top of everything can be really brutal i want to remind you to please like the video
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also all kinds of awesome benefits from joining my patreon team lots going on about alone this summer
terry i love hearing you talk about your ethics around hunting that beaver
and needing food so badly but not taking a shot unless it's a shot you really feel good about
and really know that you can retrieve that animal thank you so much i really love what
you share about what makes the hunter is not what they shoot at but what they choose
not to shoot at that restraint is what separates the good hunter from the mediocre hunter
so with you thank you for that and i just love love love that you are demonstrating that to all
of these people who know what a big deal it is for you to choose not to take every opportunity to get
food out there so really well done and i feel that the land pays attention and i think that showing
that ethic is part of why labrador worked with you and wanted to feed you i love that we see timogen
slurp slurp slurping his bunch berry concoction looks like there's some labrador tea leaves in
there as well and that he talks specifically about that from a physiological and a medical
perspective i want to encourage you guys to check out timogen's reviews he is a doctor the first
doctor we've had on a loan so his perspective of what's happening medically physiologically
out there for himself and others is really really high quality information really cool to check out
and oh my gosh we get to see timogen getting a grouse his first meet what is it day 18 and he
gets his first meet out there that is a huge deal and i'm so with what he's saying which is it's not
just what it does for your body but what it does for you psychologically when you start getting
game out there it is brutal to not have anything coming in but as soon as you get something coming
in it changes your whole perspective and all of a sudden you feel like yes i've got this this is
working and i can be successful out here and it means that even if you go another 10 days without
getting food you know that it's possible and that does something different to you psychologically
it makes it so much easier whereas if you don't get any those next 10 days with no food is like
oh i'm failing i can't do this i got to get out of here so all the difference in the world on a lot
of different levels we do see timogen cutting up that breast and cooking on the fire over a
stick and we see a lot of bones with meat on them sitting around there i really really hope that
all of that goes into the pot and that he boils it all down i think he probably will because he
talks about boiling the skin but while on the first couple episodes we saw everybody
cooking their food down in water or in a pot this episode we're seeing a little bit more of folks
cooking over the fire without anything beneath it again potentially losing fat losing blood so hope
that folks go back to really cooking the heck out of things in a pot with water so they get
all the food value out of that game that they're bringing in check out part two for more about the
rest of this episode some big shifts for terry some hard shifts for igor and some strategies for
how they can do a little bit better with not missing their loved ones so much out there
and how these folks are dealing with the loneliness of that level of isolation