"Don't Drink the Water"

“Don’t Drink the Water,” a song by the Dave Matthews Band always reminds me of survival techniques.  The song doesn’t have anything to do with wilderness survival, but when you’re a hunter, terms like this are something to think about.  Most of us don’t hunt in areas that are extremely secluded but understanding survival techniques could save your life someday. 

Drinking water from a pond or a steam, even when it looks safe, can contain bacteria that will kill.  It is never advisable drink untreated water without boiling it first.  According to a Human Development Report by the United Nations in 2006, more people are killed by unsanitary water than by guns in war.  Botulism, Dysentery, and Cholera are just some of the bacteria that can come from drinking unsanitary water.  If you have no choice but to drink water in the wild, find a way to boil it first for your own safety.

I learned to not “drink the water” at fifteen years old on my first hunting trip with my brother and dad.  It was the first shotgun season and we were hunting a 1200 acre farm in Pope County, Illinois.  We had all settled in the main bottoms where the tributaries came together to form a wide bottoms area.  I was situated on the downstream side of the bottoms where all of the creeks came together.  As the afternoon dragged on, I started getting extremely thirsty.  I radioed my dad and asked him if it’d be okay to walk down to the stream and get some water.  He replied, “No don’t do it.  You’ll have to tough it out.  You have no idea what’s in that water.”  Being fifteen years old, I was pretty upset by this answer, but I knew that he knew better than I did.  So I toughed it out and made it through the evening without going against my father’s word.

The following day, I was walking with one of the other hunters near where I had sat the night before.  We were walking a stream that fed into the larger creek that I wanted to drink from and came across something unusual.  Not long into the walk, we smelled a foul stench that seemed to get worse as we walked further upstream.  We soon discovered the cause; two mature bucks were lying dead in the creek.  A ten point buck and an eleven buck were joined together by the tines.  It appeared that they became tangled and were unable to free themselves. Under only speculative circumstances for cause of death, they both had become little more than rotting flesh in the silent creek. 

The sight of them was appalling though I couldn’t help but be drawn in by the situation.  A rare chance to see two deer locked in the battle for continuing life, only to die in the bed of a creek.  While I watched the other hunter cutting away the heads to two deer to claim as a trophy, I remembered being thirsty the day before.  I looked down the creek in the direction of the flowing water.  It was then I could picture in my mind where this stream led into the creek I nearly drank from.  I felt a knot growing in my stomach.