Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island Read Online Free PDF Page B

because women’s smaller size makes them more efficient, and over long distances and durations, more fat is burned, giving women a metabolic edge.
    The claim that women are the weaker sex doesn’t hold up—not even in prehistoric times. Our far-roaming hunter-gatherer ancestors were long-distance travelers. Even as primitive women bore, nursed, and reared children, they gathered wild foods and trekked long distances, often with multiple kids on their backs. They were just as hardy and adroit as the males, and they required a deep, intimate knowledge of the natural world for their own survival and the sustenance of their kin.
    Nature, then, has never been solely the domain of men. If social norms and pressures were stripped away, nearly all girls would climb trees and scrape their knees. Nature requires a thick-skinned toughness for survival in both genders. But in the stiff, stereotyped suburbia of the 1950s, it was tougher than ever to be a tomboy.
    Carol drifted through high school. She occasionally met up with a gaggle of gossipy girls to drink beer at the river bluff, but even that seemed juvenile to Carol, who had been drinking hard liquor every night with her parents since she was twelve.
    She knew more than many of her teachers, and they didn’t like being shown up by a scruffy slacker. “Biology was easy for me. It was like breathing,” Carol recalled. “The teachers knew what the book said, but they didn’t know biology. I could learn more at the river than in the classroom.”
    Carol skipped homework and headed for the woods, where she could learn from her favorite teacher. She recorded her observations in journals filled with exhaustive notes and exquisitely intricate sketches. She dissected birds, bats, and beavers to teach herself animal anatomy and physiology. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life, but she knew for certain what she didn’t want to do.
    “I am not going to work at a job that I don’t like until I can retire,” she told her father. “I want a life outdoors.”
    “When are you gonna grow up? You can’t make a living playing with turtles and snakes,” he replied.
    “I refuse to squander my life breathing stale air in an office cubicle. I need contact with the real world.”
    “How are you gonna put a roof over your head without income? What are you gonna do for food? Eat out of the dumpster?”
    Carol felt trapped. She wanted to immerse herself in the wild, but she couldn’t afford a house or land in the woods. The only way she could stay close to nature was to pare down her needs and live simply and frugally. There were two sides to every balance sheet, Carol realized.
    “I knew I had to structure my life around not wanting much, so that I wouldn’t require resources to support myself financially,” she said. “I would have to find the resources inside myself.”
    Or along the road.
    While hiking to the river one afternoon when she was seventeen, Carol stepped over a freshly killed squirrel carcass along the shoulder of the road. Suddenly, it occurred to her: free food! She pulled out her steel knife and sliced open the squirrel. The dark, moist tenderloin was better than anything she could buy. Instead of prepackaged, chemical-injected meat from the store, Carol could harvest all the wild meat she wanted from the side of the road.
    She began collecting and tasting every animal carcass she came across: raccoon, possum, snake, bird, rabbit, turtle, even fox. Her criteria were simple: if it had a decent amount of unsmashed meat and it didn’t smell completely rancid, it was good enough to eat.
    With free food along the road and shelter in her cave beside the river, Carol began plotting her escape from stale, suffocating suburban life. Her exodus became even more urgent a few years later.
    One night, Earl was in the basement showing off his World War II gun collection at a party. A neighbor’s teenage son went over to examine a revolver that Earl had been