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[/FONT] He lined up his shot, looking through his Millett Tactical Long Range scope. His breath visible in the sub-freezing weather coming out in little flumes as he alternately held his breath and exhaled. The crosshairs lined up perfectly with the left shoulder. He watched as the magnificent buck raised his head, looked around and then lowered it, expelling smoke from its mouth as well.
“Take the shot.” Ralph whispered.
Doug twisted his head popping his neck with an audible crack. He settled back in ensuring the crosshairs were still lined up. He gently applied pressure to the trigger of his Remmington Model 700 CDL Bolt Action 30-06. The Rifle had been the only thing he inherited from his dad. Well, the rifle and the Whitetail Skinner Knife.
“What are you waiting for?”
Doug looked over at his future father-in-law. “I can’t do it.”
“Why not? You can easily make a 100 yard shot, you outshot me at the range last week.”
“If I couldn’t buy meat at the grocery store, if I had to for survival, I could do it. If it made the difference between putting food on the table and starving, I could easily take it down.”
Doug looked back through the scope showing the eight pointer. “Isn’t it magnificent?”
Doug startled when the shot rang out from beside him and the trophy buck crumbled to the ground.
“We are putting food on the table.” Ralph said gruffly.
They walked over to the animal carrying their rifles. Their feet made crunching noises in the sparse snowfall on the ground. The snow, normal for this time of year just north of Albuquerque was starting to melt. The buck lay in a heap, no more vapors coming out of its mouth but steam rising from the rapidly cooling body.
“How are you going to protect my daughter if you can’t provide for her?” Ralph asked.
“I am providing for her, I work full time for you so you know that as well as I do.” Doug said.
“Working as a manager in my sporting goods store is not the same as being able to provide when the infrastructure goes away.”
Doug rolled his eyes. He knew what was coming. Ralph believed that America and the rest of the world would soon reach a tipping point that would cause chaos and anarchy and you had to prepare for it.
Instead of the lecture they reached the fallen buck.
“Bout 300 pounds I reckon.” Ralph said.
Doug looked at the big round black eyes and inwardly thought “I’m sorry big fella.”
“Go ahead and field dress him.” Ralph said.
As much as Doug didn’t want to kill the animal, in fact, had a thing about killing one of GODs creatures in general, he also didn’t want to disappoint Ralph. Ralph showed him how to field dress a deer the last time they went out and this was supposed to be his deer, his trophy. He slid the Whitetail Skinner Knife from its scabbard and bent down to the deer. He saw Ralphs’ shadow in the early morning sun crossing over him and the buck. He inserted the knife at the bottom of the sternum and made the initial incision keeping the blade positioned toward the hide so he wouldn’t cut through the organs. He inserted his fingers in a “V” like Ralph showed him the weekend before and gently pulled up on the hide. He continued the cut going around both sides of the udder and cut the penis and testicles out. “Sucks to be you.” Doug thought, then amended with “Sucks to be me.” He finished rolling the internal organs out of the abdominal cavity and cleaning the cavity out.
They hung the deer from a tree branch with the head down and the tail up to drain the carcass and cool down the meat.
They went to get the ATV for transporting the buck mostly in silence. Doug was sure Ralph was disappointed in him, at least for not shooting, even though he complimented him on the field dressing.
They loaded up the buck in the trailer and started the long trip from New Mexico to Clay’s Processing and Smoke House in Dublin Texas. Even though they lived in Paradise Texas, Ralph swore by the processor and agreed with their motto “The Best Deer Processor in Texas”.
“Why are we going to Dublin again, isn’t there a processor closer to Paradise?” Doug asked.
“Clay’s is the best. Besides, that is where my father always processed his deer.”
“Okay.” Doug said feeling a little nervous about extending the time spent in Ralph’s blue Ford F250. He feared a lecture was coming and he didn’t have to wait very long. They left the lease in Rio Honda and traveled south through Albuquerque to Interstate 40.
Heading East Ralph grunted a compliment. “Good job on the dressing.”
“Thanks.” Doug said wincing at the thought of the almost 600 miles to Dublin and the almost 100 miles to Paradise.
“You know..” Ralph started. “You need to make your first kill.”
“Why Ralph? I can buy food from Marin’s” Marin’s Most Extraordinary Market as they advertised was an independent grocery store in Paradise.
“You can’t get Venison there.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve got you for that, don’t I?”
Ralph chuckled “I guess so.”
Doug rubbed his chin and finally said “Why do you think we will be in a position where we would have to hunt our own food?”
“I’m not saying anything is going to happen. I’m just sayin’ it could. Have you ever hear of playing the ‘What if’ game?”
“Okay, let’s play Ralph. What could happen?”
Ralph nodded. “There are lots of things that could happen. There could be an attack from Russia or China sparking a nuclear confrontation leading to World War III. There could be an asteroid collide with the world, hell, one could hit my ranch in Paradise.”
“We’ve had the threat of a cold war for decades and nothing has happened.”
“Yes, but we are not evaluating the chances, we are just playing the ‘What If’ game. It could happen.”
“Not likely but I guess it could.”
“If it did, pretty much all infrastructure would be wiped out and at least for a period of time, people would be on their own.”
“But you are living in fear, that’s not a way to live your life and if that happened you probably wouldn’t want to be around anyway.”
Ralph looked over sharply. “But let’s say an ELE happens and you are one of the ones to survive, along with your loved ones, like my daughter.”
“What is an ELE?” Doug asked.
“Extinction Level Event. This means a global event that could potentially wipe out everything living on earth or it could mean wiping out everything in a given region. For example a super volcano could erupt causing the sun to be blocked making everything die within a short period of time. A CME could be severe enough to disrupt communications and possibly all things electric throwing mankind back to the 19th century.”
“A CME?”
“Coronal mass ejection.”
Doug looked confused.
“A magnetic pulse from the sun where the force pushes the magnetic field of the Earth aside.”
Doug said “I thought those happened everyday.”
“They do, just as volcanos do, but super volcanoes don’t erupt daily just as the most powerful class of CMEs don’t go off daily. There was a solar superstorm in 1859 which came to be known as the Carrington Event. This was the most powerful solar storm ever recorded and the largest flare. You can imagine, 1859 was technologically primitive but telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases even shocking telegraph operators. Telegraph terminals sparked and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire in some cases. Now fast forward, what do you think would happen if it went off today.”
“Uh, telegraph paper would catch fire but it wouldn’t be a big deal since we don’t use telegraphs anymore?”
“No, smartass, it would fry almost all electronics everywhere. Think of living like the Amish.”
“All electronics?”
“Unless they were EMP protected like with a Faraday cage.”
“Jeez, what is with all the acronyms, what the heck is EMP and what is a Farawhatever cage?”
“EMP or Electromagnetic Pulse. The Faraday cage has to have all metal sides connected to each other without any large gaps with the components inside not touching the sides.”
“Good grief Ralph, how do you even know all this stuff and more importantly why?”
“Oh there is a lot more we could ‘What If’ about.”
“I’m not sure I want to know anymore. Like 1001 ways to kill somebody. Wouldn’t the first ten or twenty do?”
They were silent for the next half hour.
Ralph finally spoke. “EMP’s are just from the sun, like the Carrington Event. They could be manmade and used by a foreign country to devastate a region or potentially the entire United States.”
“Who would do that Ralph?”
“North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, and any of a host of other countries that hate the good ole USA.”
“Okay, Russia and China I see might have the ability but those others? How could they deliver such a blow, their missiles won’t even reach the continental US?”
“They wouldn’t have to, they could detonate a relatively small device say on Wall Street and render most of New York electronically impotent. Look at what they did on a small scale on 9-11.”
“You call 9-11 a small scale?”
“Comparatively, yes.”
“Okay, so this EMP thing goes off and we are living like the Amish, would that be so bad, they seem pretty idyllic, living off the land in peace and harmony and singing Kumbaya?”
“You know that grocery stores on the average only have three days of food right?”
Doug hesitated then answered “Um, yeah.”
“What happens when those three days runs out? Have you ever seen an area about to be dealt a blow by mother nature, a hurricane coming, a severe snowstorm, a flood, an electricity outage? People swarm the stores like locusts. They buy more than they need because of the fear of not being able to get those goods when they really need them. They hoard. When the food and goods run out and people need them what do you think they will do?”
“Wait for the government to restore the infrastructure and the supplies resume? Maybe they borrow from neighbors, friends and family until the emergency is over.”
“What if the government is so overwhelmed it can’t do anything, especially say in a small town like Paradise Texas? What then?”
“People can hunt like we just did.”
“Really? You think people that have never been hunting can just locate a weapon, cleanly shoot a deer, field dress it, process it and go on about their lives. Hell, you couldn’t even shoot one when you had it lined up in your sights.”
“I could have, I just didn’t want to.”
They stopped for gas in Amarillo and ate at IHOP. The tarp covering the buck blew open a bit much to the chagrin of the family getting into a car next to where they parked. Their son who looked to be about ten pointed and said “Look, they killed Bambi.” After eating in silence they proceeded on Interstate 287.
Ralph broke the serenity again. “What do you think happens after the food runs out?”
“People get hungry?”
“Again with the wisecracks. Some will have some extra provisions, many will not. You will have friends, relatives, and strangers coming to your door all asking for a handout because they didn’t prepare.”
“So you give them a cup of Top Ramien noodles and send them on their way?”
“No, you turn them away. It’s cold and hard but you have to do it.”
“I don’t think I could.”
“There was a study done a while back, I don’t remember who did it but the gest of it studied a family of four that played the ‘What If’ game and had stashed a source of food enough for all four for one year. They analyzed the amount of food and the average neighborhood and determined that the family with the food turned away everyone they could survive for a year, if they shared with their immediate neighborhood the food would last from two to three weeks.”
“Wow. I never thought of it like that.”
“Would you refuse Susan and/or any kids you might have the opportunity to live through a crisis, maybe it would take a year or longer for things to get reestablished, so would you take her survival time down to three weeks from one year.”
“I don’t guess so.”
“Then you would be turning people away. And they would be angry. And that is family and friends. Wait until roving bands of people that already ravaged their immediate area come through your area. You are not only going to have to turn them down but you are going to have to protect what you do have. Anything that they want that someone else has they will try to take by force. Remember, if there is a local law enforcement at all, they will be overwhelmed and/or trying to survive with their own families. They might try to use their positions of power to coerce you into giving them what they need to survive. You have to forcibly protect what is yours against all foes, both known and unknown.”
“You’ve given me a lot to think about Ralph.”
“I hope so.”
