The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion (36 page)

In the second book,
Catching Fire,
decent drinking water is more difficult to obtain. In fact, it’s a major problem. This time, the Games are held in a saltwater-centric arena, where the sun is hot and the air is moist. Not having any water makes Katniss extremely thirsty, particularly given that she must hike through a jungle in such intense humidity (
Catching Fire,
278). Still seeking drinking water, Katniss and Peeta later try to hike left and break through the force field and far away from the Cornucopia and saltwater. Peeta thinks they might find drinking water “between the force field and the wheel” (
Catching Fire,
287). An intelligent thought, but as with all good plans, things don’t quite work out the way Katniss and Peeta hope.

When the two of them come across a large rodent with a wet muzzle, they know that water must be somewhere nearby. As in a video game, just in the nick of time, a sponsor sends a gift spile in a parachute, and again using her experience in survival techniques, Katniss remembers seeing her father insert spiles into maple trees to get sap. So this is how Katniss obtains a few drops of precious water in the second book (
Catching Fire,
294). Had she not been incredibly skilled in wilderness survival, Katniss never would have survived the first day of
The Hunger Games,
much less the subsequent death matches in
Catching Fire
and
Mockingjay
.

As a side note, many plants other than maple trees contain water. In deserts, barrel cacti will quench your thirst, and indeed, a 3.5 foot tall cactus will supply a quart of liquid. You can also drink from the roots of plants such as the desert oak and bloodwood. In other area, you can drink water from vines, from the stalks of palms, and obviously from coconuts. In addition, all of these plants contain water that you can drink: bamboo stems, which have water in their joints; umbrella tree of tropical Africa; baobab tree of Africa and Australia; and many others.

By the time Katniss reaches
Mockingjay
and by the time she descends down the elevators into the labyrinth of living spaces, her water is purified mechanically, as is her air (
Mockingjay,
80).

It’s ironic that, when chosen for the Games, Katniss has the luxury of as much pure, clean water as she wants. Not only does the tribute train include private quarters for each child, it also provides private bathrooms with hot and cold running water. Katniss marvels at the luxury because to have any warm water at home, her family must boil it (
The Hunger Games,
42). Later, while preparing for the Games in the Capitol, she’s even more amazed by the water luxuries of her bathroom. The shower panel has “more than a hundred options you can choose regulating water temperature, pressure, soaps, shampoos, scents, oils, and massaging sponges” (
The Hunger Games,
75). The futuristic shower reminds me of the old Hanna–Barbera
Jetsons
cartoon. If you don’t know what I mean, find some old
Jetsons
clips on YouTube, and you’ll see the personalized bathrooms and showers. These are so futuristic they even brush George Jetson’s teeth. However, rather than using water, they’re ultrasonic and don’t require that people remove clothing before showering.

Water Checklist: Katniss versus Reality

FOOD

Next to water, food might be the most critical aspect of surviving in the wilderness. Shelter is important, as is protection from the elements. But without food, you will definitely die.

Food, as all readers of The Hunger Games series know, is the one thing that everyone in District 12 never has enough of. Food is the key thing that Katniss has learned to cull from the woods to keep her family alive.

Not only is it important for someone who is stranded without food to find sustenance, it’s also essential that he or she eat a variety of items. Katniss scrubs the forest at home for meat, grains, berries, and vegetables. There are approximately 120,000 edible plants on Earth, and Katniss can clearly identify enough of them to survive. When she’s in the Games, she’s still trying to hunt and gather food as she did in District 12.

In general, when without modern methods of storing, preparing, and eating food, it’ll help if you have various fundamental items.

Salt is important because it preserves many foods and can often attract wild animals, which can then be hunted. Rice would be useful, as would wheat and grains. Corn, oats, powdered milk, canned fruits and vegetables, oils: these are all staples of the “we’re all going to die” bunkers that we hear about from time to time. A lot of families during the Cold War kept these items stocked in their basements, which served as bomb shelters.

But for someone like Katniss (or someone who has to leave town in a hurry and hide in the woods), this type of list is impractical. Not only is she going to have a hard, albeit impossible, time trying to find powdered milk and canned fruits, she’s not going to find a lot of other common bunker foods, either; foods like peanut butter, coffee, vitamin C tablets, trail mix, or energy bars.

We learn very quickly in
The Hunger Games
that Katniss’s father taught her how to find food in the wilderness before he died in a mine explosion. She was only eleven when she became responsible for feeding both her sister Prim and her mother, who sank into a deep lethargic depression.

Good foods to eat from the wild include berries, nuts, freshwater fish, birds, eggs, mammal flesh, insects, crustaceans, seaweed, and soft pine needles. Katniss kills, catches, and harvests most of these foods during The Hunger Games books.

Early in the series, Katniss explains that she learned to survive by harvesting dandelions (a memory intimately connected to Peeta), pine needles, wild onions, and pokeweeds, and that she swiped eggs from birds’ nests and fished using a net. Luckily, her survival skills come in handy during the first Games, which is held in a forest of pine trees. Katniss eats the soft bark that’s inside the branches (
The Hunger Games,
50–52 and 155).

During Catching Fire,
the second book, she returns to the house in the woods where she hung out as a child, and she knows something’s amiss when she smells “steaming pine needles.” It’s a clear indicator that she’s not alone, that somebody else who knows how to survive in the woods is there with her (
Catching Fire,
134). There are other clues, of course, but how many of us would recognize the odor of “steaming pine needles” and realize that somebody’s cooking pine needle stew?

While survival skills include knowledge of foods that are
safe
, they also include knowledge about foods to
avoid
. In general, thanks to her father’s forest skills and her mother’s medicinal-herb skills, Katniss has learned what not to eat in the wilderness. Any survival handbook, such as the one published by the U.S. Army, spells out which foods to avoid, such as: toads, ticks, flies; insects that sting, bite, or have hairy bodies; saltwater fish with parrotlike beaks or spines; and mushrooms and other fungi that might be poisonous.

When younger, Katniss learned to creep out and slide under the fence when the electricity went down for a few hours in the evenings. She learned to keep her bows and arrows in a hollow tree, and unlike most people, she was lucky to have these weapons because her father crafted them and taught her how to use them. She and Gale learned to trade hunted meat for other foods their families needed.

In fact, securing food has always been so central to Katniss that she thinks that, without hunting, fishing, and gathering, there might be absolutely nothing left of her (
The Hunger Games,
311).

Contrast Katniss’s food-related survival skills to Peeta, who does well—don’t get me wrong—but who offers her deadly nightlock berries without realizing that they’re poisonous.

Providing for his family is also important to Gale Hawthorne, and in
Catching Fire,
he goes into the coal mines while Katniss hunts for his family. She does receive food from the Capitol in
Catching Fire,
but for matters of personal pride, she still hunts and gathers, and for matters of personal pride, Gale is extremely reluctant to take food from her. While it makes sense that Katniss would keep hunting, it makes little sense that Gale would not gladly receive her overabundance of Capitol-provided food to help his starving family. After all, they have been best friends for a very long time. And when your family’s starving, you do what it takes.

Alas, male pride is a strange thing, so when Katniss becomes “engaged” to Peeta, Gale is furious and refuses all of her gifts, including a leather bag of food (
Catching Fire,
93).

ENVIRONMENT AND SHELTER

The environment in which you’re lost—or find yourself fighting to the death in the Games—is key to your survival. If you’ve grown up in a northeastern forest, will you know how to survive in the jungle, in the desert, in the ocean? Or like Katniss, will you have to figure out how to cope on the fly, using general survival skills you’ve acquired over the years in your home environment?