Calamity in America by Pete Thorsen

keeping them away or maybe there were just fewer that were strong enough to walk all the way to our place from the city.  Or maybe more likely anyone walking away from the city was now heading due south seeking warmer weather before the upcoming winter months.  If I had no good place to go for winter I would certainly head south.  Whatever the reason we were grateful that fewer were showing up here.
    I shot a deer and we turned almost all the meat into jerky.  When we were done I shot another deer and we did the same thing again.  Now when the very few beggars did show up we gave them a small amount of the jerky.  It was rich in protein and did not require them to do any cooking.  And it cost us almost nothing to produce the jerky which also did not require any refrigeration. 
    I hunted often and we ate some kind of wild game meat almost everyday.  I walked some distance from our home before I started hunting so I did not kill all the nearby game, instead keeping that game living nearby in reserve just in case.
    I had cleaned the cannon up after having used it and made additional loads to have ready just in case it was ever needed again.  I prayed I would not have to shoot it again for our protection.
    With the fall weather there were different wild things for us to gather from the surrounding areas to supplement our food supply.  One of the things I taught Beth about gathering and using was acorns for food.  She learned how the acorns contained way too much tannins which had to be leached out by soaking the ‘nuts’ in a couple changes of water before they could be eaten. 
    When she asked how to tell the nuts had been washed enough to remove the tannins I just had her taste one without being soaked.  She tasted the bitterness and then I had her taste one of the batch that had been soaked in two or three changes of water.  That now had a sweet nutty taste so it was easy to tell the tannins were gone or drastically reduced. 
    I showed her how the acorns could then be ground into a course meal and used for things like pancakes (or what I called pancakes anyway) that were actually quite tasty. 
    While acorns were certainly a viable and tasty food, it was a chore to remove them from their shell.  We tried removing the shells before soaking while they were dry and after soaking while they were wet and either way it was still a chore to remove the shell. 
    The shelled acorns still had to be soaked to remove the tannic acid which makes them bitter and too much of this acid can make you sick.  The result was worth the effort because the acorns were then tasty and some could be chopped and added to many other dishes and baked goods.  They were not bad just eating them as a snack too.
    There was some hazel nut brush in one area where we gathered those nuts for our use.  Mother Nature provided many things for us to eat in just about every season.  We just needed to know what we could eat and when was the correct time to harvest this bounty.  To me it was silly to let this natural food supply go to waste.  Well not really go to waste because nature used everything.  I guess I just wanted to be included in the use of all these edibles like all my family had before me.
    Beth was a trooper and was not shy about trying everything we gathered.  She did try altering the recipes that our family had always used for many of the things we gathered.  Naturally sometimes these recipe alterations led to great successes and sometimes not so much. 
    The electric power was still on even though we had no way to pay the bill any longer.  Of course we no longer got any bills because the mail service had stopped a long time back. 
    We had everything we needed to survive but the lack of news was what we really missed the most.  It was quite a change from the news overload that Americans had enjoyed before things had collapsed.  News everywhere including on our TVs, news on our radios, news on our computers, and even news on