If you go down to the woods today

For most of us, myself included, it was a tough week. I like to think of myself as something of an outdoorsy type – I spend as much time as I can walking in the mountains, camping wild, and generally pitting my wits against the British weather – but the truth is that I was awful. I spent as much time hurling my bow-drill fire-starter set into the bushes and shouting expletives at it, as I did making fire with it. My hand-carved fish hook would struggle to land me a goldfish and the cording I made from nettles looked like...well, like mashed nettles. Most of my fellow students were much better at bush craft than me (bush craft, it transpires, requires patience; something I didn’t spot on the kit list) but for one bloke the whole thing was a walk in the park. Or the woods, at any rate. Sure, I’d probably be quicker than him to spot honeysuckle bark (great tinder) at 50 paces, but he’d have made you a fire, roasted you a wild-boar and be putting the finishing touches to your juniper-berry jus by the time my wheezing ember had so much as warmed your sodden knees.

The whole week through I marvelled, sweat-stained and bleeding, at the relative ease with which he seemed to achieve everything. My admiration reached a peak when we went walkabout for two days. I’ve never been very good at travelling light and have always admired those who can. The man with a small pack on his back is the pro; he’s the one who knows his kit and knows himself. Who carries precisely what he needs and nothing more. I’m not sure my friend needed a pack at all. He could have fitted everything he carried into a ladies fashion clutch or a couple of large pockets.

I fell in beside him at one point to see if I could find out more about his technique. His secret, to put it simply, was his attention to detail. Everything was thought about, everything fought for its place in his bag. Even his toothbrush falls victim to his scrutiny: half of it, he reasons quite correctly, is essential; the other half is just useful. So he cuts it in half.

He was an affable sort of a guy: competitive, to the point of being slightly irritating, but the kind of bloke you’d want on your team, if only to keep him from being on anyone else’s team. But he didn’t tolerate other people’s inadequacies. Another of the students was the gentlest, mildest-mannered, most thoughtful and intelligent 17-year old I’ve ever met. He paid attention to everything, and worked diligently at every task he was given. He might not have been round the block as many times as many of the people on the course, but in most respects he was streets ahead. He was one of the first of us to make fire and spent the rest of the time that I spent swearing, perfecting the art. But on the final day, when we were all tested on what we had learned, he came up short. He had spent so much time practicing that his bow-drill set had worn out and he had to make another one (no small feat) before he could continue. Which meant he didn’t have time to do everything else. He was heartbroken and most of us who realised what had happened were heartbroken for him. Not my man with half a toothbrush though. His verdict? Poor time management.

At the end of the course some of us caught a train together and I once again took the chance to try to learn what I could from my considerably more capable companion. I quizzed him again about his kit and it soon transpired that his approach was even more methodical than I had first realised. He has a spreadsheet, into which he enters the precise weight of every single item that goes in his pack. Formulae have been created so that he can assess the weight saving a new, lighter piece of kit might give him, against any increase in weight that a loss of functionality would lead to elsewhere. 

My suspicions aroused at this point, I asked him what he did when he wasn’t weighing sleeping bags to the nearest atom.

“I’m a consultant” he said.

“Who do you work for?” I asked.

“McKinsey”.

I should have known.