I'd like to relate an ordeal my wife and I went through in the wilds of Canada. While this was not a true survival situation (we could have left at any time) it was an unpredicted, difficult ordeal in the wilderness.
We were invited to be part of the leadership for a mixed group of 26 people, mostly teens and college students, on a canoe trip in Algonquin Park Ontario. The ages ranged from 12 to 55. None of the kids had any wilderness experience, but several of the adults, self-included did. (FYI - I was not the organizer of this trip and had no direct dealings with the outfitter.)
Plan A was to arrive at the outfitters at night, give the group some orientation and leave in the morning. Due to some delays along the way (picking up part of the group) we arrived on the morning we were due to set off in the canoes. The outfitter pointed out our gear and food, gave some brief instruction in canoeing, and we loaded up and left. Our leader had done this trip before with the same outfitter. He and I handled the navigation, keeping the boats together, camp selection, organization, etc. We made great time and ended up camping at the far end of our first day's permit area.
That night the camp cook called for all food packages marked "Dinner #1". The result was a half-full, medium sized pan of macaroni and cheese for 26 people. It came to a measured HALF CUP of Mac n Cheese per person! Leadership conference out of earshot of the kids. Conclusion, someone must have a pack full of sacks marked Dinner #1, we'll check it out in the morning.
That night we also had a girl in absolute agony with a seriously infected tooth. She looked like she had a baseball in her cheek! She had felt this starting the day before and hadn't mentioned it because she really wanted to go on the trip. We gave her Motrin and by morning the infection had found a way out, she felt much better and decided to continue.
The next day we called for all outfitter supplied food packages to be brought to the cook. Murphy had come along for the ride! One pack had fallen into the water and the food therein had become waterlogged. A girl had opened an aluminum fuel bottle to determine what she was carrying and had not closed the lid totally. Thus, her food was soaked with white gasoline. The outfitter had failed to supply us with beef jerky as promised, the total amount of food looked to be less than half of what you would expect, and a good third of that had been destroyed.
Some of the kids had brought a few edibles, others had not. I had packed in one MRE entrée a day for my wife and I just because I refuse to live on trail mix for lunch. We let the group have our share of the outfitter-supplied food and decided to live on what we brought. The cook took control of the food supply and made sure it was secured properly from that point on and we continued with the trip.
The kids dealt with it amazingly well. We just told them, "You will now experience hunger for the first time. You will forget what you did during many weeks of your lives but this won't be one of them." No kidding, their entire daily ration would not have filled a Campbell's soup can. Nobody even considered turning back.
After a few days, three of the college-age guys started killing and grilling every chipmunk they could get their hands on (Lord of the Flies?). A slingshot would have bagged a sack full of them and red squirrels as well, but we had no slingshot. As it was they just smashed them with rocks form the beaches. (My humble apologies to any Canadians or animal lovers reading this, the hunger had driven us mad, MAD I tell you!)
We also foraged for crayfish (crawdads) and ate several dozen large ones. We had three fishing licenses (and some regular fishing tackle) in the group and every day the guys caught eight walleye and every day they got bigger. On the second to last day of this ordeal I was handed a fat, double sided, four-inch slab of steamed walleye. No salt, no seasoning, but man did that go down easy! Hunger is the best sauce.
Thinking back on it we should have assembled a trotline or two from the fishing gear and left them in the water overnight. In PA trotlines are illegal, but one could have provided more fish for the group.
Back at the outfitter we found out that a group of 13 had gone out before us and taken our food and all of the beef jerky by mistake. The outfitter mistakenly had given our group of 26 the partial load of food for 13 people and a large portion of that had been destroyed due to the inexperience/ negligence of our group. Believe me there was a lot learned the hard way here.
The only real effect was that it is hard to make a large group of very hungry people paddle long distances. Our food supply was not a survival consideration but it was on everyone's minds all of the time. After two days you stop feeling hungry, the headache goes away and you just feel tired. In eight days of paddling and portaging living on one MRE entrée a day I had lost 17 pounds. Much of that weight loss was due to empty intestines. A week later I was still eight pounds under my normal weight. Mac
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