This morning we went out to learn snares and signals. I set a few practice rabbit and squirrel snares and we made a fire to cook a rabbit that Dave had caught in the spring and kept in the freezer. We boiled the back legs and roasted the rest. It was actually delicious, but then again we cheated and ate it in wraps with feta cheese!
We also built a smoke generator. Find a small spruce tree in a clearing or cut four thin ones and lean them against each other. Then pack them with loads and loads and loads of twig bundles and birch bark. Then cut down around 45 small spruce trees and cut off the branches to lay all over the flammable tower. The branches will keep the material in the middle dry and insulate the fire when it's lit. Finally, make a spruce branch hat for the tower - this will be removed to release the smoke once the fire gets going.
Once it was built, I lit a twig bundle on our cooking fire and put it into the base of the smoke generator. It took straight away and once it got burning, Dave took the hat off to release a huge plume of smoke - an excellent signal for search planes.
In these pictures, the hat is back on to try and make it smoke for longer - we only used 8 spruce trees, not 45 as it was just a practice! For reference, the top of the hat is just over 7ft off the ground.
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