Pemmican

I’m almost finished talking about my plans, but I have a confession to make. I didn’t just get a good rucksack. When I first started making plans for this absurd excursion and looked on Google Earth at the route I would be taking I realized I would be crossing the Great Plains. Two things came to mind. First thing was the Native American substitute for the wheel, called travois. Two poles with a lashed on blanket or something, and towed behind a pony, like Johnny Depp in Dead Man. I think the analogy of the greyhound bus and the travois makes perfect sense.

And Pemmican. Dried and smoked buffalo meat and sundried sarviceberries drenched in congealed fat, carried in a deerskin pouch. To cross the great Plains on your travois you had to have Pemmican. But then I had a question. What’s a sarviceberry? I had no idea, but all the authorities, like Little House on the Prairie the books not the TV show although Michael Landon was hot in kind of overly Hollywood hunk kind of way, say so. And who’s got the buffalo? Fred Meyer had some for a while but I didn’t like it and I don’t think anybody else did either. It made me think about genocide which is always pretty much of a buzzkill.

And if you’re going to dry you some dried meat you have to have a smokehouse which I don’t so at that point I began to improvise. I put an electric hotplate in my little propane grill on the dock by my boat, and cut up a cross rib roast and put the pieces in a bowl  with all the brown sugar I had in the galley and a handful of rock salt and some soy sauce and some grindered up thyme and some rosemary. I poured on the garlic powder and a handful of dried onion flakes poured in the hot water and a shot of cheap mustard that’s been on the boat going on three years and stirred it all up and let ‘er soak all night long. The next day I plugged in the hotplate and threw some regulation alder chips on there and kept it going all day long. I chickened out and unplugged it when I went to bed. It was making me nervous, there’s been a couple of fires out there lately and you never know.

The next day I had me some pretty good jerky. But I still didn’t have any sarviceberries so I went out to Winco and looked around and they have those  golden raisins that looked pretty good, so I got some and if anybody asks I will just let on they might be sarviceberries I don’t know for sure and change the subject. And I’m not going for the melted fat part either. I don’t care what the authorities say. So I put in some cashew pieces, they got a lot of oils in them... And since I didn’t have any deerskin pouches I got me a couple of fake Tupperware leftover containers and good to go.

I got me some pemmican.

Great Plains look out!