To illustrate my earlier points, I just made a trip to find the components to not one, but two fire bow sets. I was gone for about 45 minutes. The walk was about 1 1/2 miles through the gate, down the hill to the creek, across my double log bridge, through the lower pasture to the cedar stand in the upper pasture. OK, I cheated because I was already familiar with my environment and knew where to find the river cane along the creek, and where both dead standing and downed cedars were. I also shortcut climbing into the creek bed to find just the right stone to use for a socket, and instead picked up a footbone from one of my cows that died a few years back. I could have made the socket from hickory as well, but again, I am getting lazy in my old age. This year's deer bonepile still had too much flesh on the vertabrae to use them, but I could have used one if I had not taken the easier to get footbone.
The live cane for a fire bow was easily cut with one effortless pass of my knife. The dead cane for the spindle and fireboard was harder to find in good, dry condition, but I did also find it. One set down, one to go.
Along the way I kept my eyes open for catkins and fluffy grassy plants to use for tender. I also found some relatively dry hollow stalks from last year's Poke plants that would do for hand drill spindles once dried a bit more. Our cedar bark is shaggy and stringy, and so dries pretty quickly in the sun and wind we are having today. I've recorded a bit over six inches of rain here since the holiday season approached, so it was a tad more difficult to find dries components and tender than is normally the case.
Reaching the cedar stand, I poked around a root ball looking for some fatwood, but no joy there. Trying to conserve time and energy, I didn't waste time traveling another 1/4 mile uphill thru the hickories to the old stumps for fatwood. It isn't a prerequesite for fire making, just a handy accelerant. The best firebow prospects in the downed cedars were along the bottoms of the trees where the small limbs were bowed between the tree and the ground when still green and cured that way. If there had been no downed trees, I would have trimmed a green branch with a bow from the lower part of a younger tree. Spindle materials were everywhere, so like the cedar firebow, getting one was just a matter of selecting the right shape and sixe, and giving it a few whacks with my knife. The cedar fireboard I took from a trunk where it had been broken and laid over in a windstorm, twisting as it fell. It was already relatively flat on one side, so it will only require flattening on the rounded opposite side to make it the right shape and thickness. The trimmings will give me shavings for tender and splints for small kindling. Most of the bark on the upper side of the downed trees was gone, but sufficient bark was left on the sides, drier than that on the bottoms. I gathered a nice coat pocketfull as I poked around for the components, so I wasted very little effort searching for it. On the way back, more was taken from standing live trees where it hung shaggy and dry. With a bit of working between the hands, it will become a fiberous nest ready for cedar shavings, grass fluff, and to receive the coal for my fire.
So there is how easy material gathering can be if you know what to look for and where to find it.
Codger
