Chumming Bream with a Dead Raccoon (and Other Crucial Wilderness Skills) 

If you’re like me you spend a lot of time in psychiatrists’ waiting rooms. That’s where I recently came across an astonishing article on wilderness skills in the May ’09 issue of Field and Stream. The article is titled “The United States of Skills.” “This year,” say the editors, “we made a cross-country tour to find the best [outdoor] skill in every state.”  It seems that if you master all 50, “there won’t be one wild stretch in America that you can’t handle.”

As you would expect, many of these skills relate to hunting or fishing. These are not, of course, part of the official WEA curriculum, though some, such as “Fillet a Northern Pike,” from Minnesota, could be quite useful on certain courses.

 Several others are of direct relevance.  Washingon’s for example, is “Get a Tarp up Fast.” Virginia’s is “Rig a Prussik-Knot Safety Rope.” And Montana’s is “Search for a Lost Person.”

Others are skills that WEA students and instructors might find useful after their course is over. The “best skill” from Texas, for example, is “Open a Beer With a Dollar.”

And there are several that, well, hey, you never know, maybe they would be helpful sometime. Examples here include “Skin and Cook a Snake” (Arizona), “Kill a Wild Pig with a Knife” (Hawaii), and “Scale Fish with Bottle Caps” (New Hampshire).

One of the most intriguing, to me, was Iowa’s entry, “Bleach a Deer Skull.” What I like about that one is that, I presume, once you’ve mastered the deer skull skill, you could carry it over to other skulls. Maybe you find an old cattle skull, for example, or even a possum skull on the road to the trailhead. These could all be bleached and added to your collection. Even human skulls, presumably, would bleach out just as cleanly as any other mammals’. These might be harder to obtain and transport, especially with Homeland Security being so tight these days. I would not, for example, recommend bringing back a human skull from Canada, even if was well bleached. But certainly, a nicely bleached skull from an upright biped would be a handsome addition to any outdoor lover’s rumpus room. I’m just saying, you might as well have the skill in case the opportunity ever arises.

But my absolute favorite, the one that almost had me running out my psychiatrist’s office door to try it immediately, was from the great state of Georgia. “Chum Bream with a Dead Raccoon” was the name of this one. It seems that chumming bream (sunfish, I think) is an old tradition in the Peach State. Dead cows were once used. But nowadays, “a roadkill raccoon is more common.”  And you don’t even have to actually throw it into the water. Just “find an expired mammal of medium size, hang it over a pond, and come back in a few days.”  By then the bream will have come around to feed on the fly larvae that has fallen into the water.  And they will “smack anything you cast.”

Jim Glover is a former WEA Course Instructor at Southern Illinois University. Though retired, he still likes to constantly update his outdoor skills.

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