The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert

that
     bird.”
    They ate its meat; they ate its brains; they ate its feet; and, still famished, they ate every last one of its bones. They
     were so driven by hunger that they became great hunters. Eustace taught Frank how to catch a bird with a noose (thank goodness
     for this skill, an old game he’d played with Randy Cable), and together they scrounged the trail as they headed south. They
     also took to eating crawfish and trout and berries, nettles, anything. They killed rattlesnakes and opened them up to see
     if there were baby rabbits or something else yummy inside the bellies; they’d eat the snake and whatever the snake had just
     eaten. Eustace even killed a spruce partridge one day with a rock. He saw the bird, thought to himself, I need to eat that, grabbed the nearest rock, chucked it, nailed the bird dead, and then ate every part of that blessed creature except the feathers.
    They were determined to be hunters and gatherers. It was hard going and a weird place to try this out; the heavily traveled
     corridor of the Appalachian Trail was already so stripped by human beings that food was harder to find than in normal forests.
     And Eustace well knew it wouldn’t make any environmental sense if every hiker on the A.T. further stripped the land by doing
     what he was doing. Conscious of all that and maybe feeling a little guilty about overtaxing some already overtaxed land, he
     continued the experiment. He knew that primitive people had traveled huge distances on foot in millennia past, eating only
     what they could find along the journey, and he was sure that he and Frank could endure it, too. But that didn’t change the
     fact that they were starving to death.
    They ate whatever they could hunt, pick, scavenge, or sometimes steal. When they hit Bear Mountain Park in New York State,
     they happened to swing through on the Fourth of July, when hundreds of Puerto Rican and Dominican families were picnicking
     and celebrating. It was a food bonanza for Eustace and Frank. They were dizzy with the discovery that every garbage can in
     the park was spilling over with beautiful tins of rice and beans and half-eaten chicken and popcorn and cake. The two of them
     were like Templeton the rat in that state fair scene from Charlotte’s Web —a couple of omnivores in paradise, shouting at each other from distant garbage cans over the din of salsa music, “I found
     an entire ham! Oh,my God! Sweet potatoes!”
    But they’d had their most desperate food experience back in Maine, when they climbed off the trail for a few days and stayed
     in a small town with a family who kept the community hog in the backyard. The way the community hog system worked was that
     everyone in the town fed the hog their table scraps and then, come butchering time, split the meat for the winter. Frank and
     Eustace learned of this interesting custom the day the lady of the house baked some apple pies and gave the boys a bucket
     of apple peelings to take out back for the hog to eat. Outside, Frank and Eustace looked at each other, looked at the apple
     peelings, and said, “Fuck that.” They hid behind the barn and scarfed down the peelings. After that, they graciously offered
     to take over the feeding of the hog. To this day, all they will report about this experience is that the kind people of that
     small Maine town sure did throw away a lot of perfectly good food, and that the handsome community hog sure didn’t gain any
     weight while Eustace Conway and Frank Chambless were around.
    In every way, the journey was a triumph. Hiking, delight, revelation, challenge, and epiphany—day after day. Frank and Eustace
     found all this heightened communication with each other, a tight sense of kinship. They were on the same page about nature
     and what was wrong with America, and they were both heavily into Native American lore and teachings. Eustace could talk to
     Frank about problems with his father, and Frank could talk to Eustace about