Of equal importance with our clothing were our weapons and tools. I had taken great care that they should be good. I had a B.S.A. single shot .22 with Martini action which had often killed a hare at nearly two hundred yards. It had leaf sights for fifty, a hundred, and two hundred yards. I made sure that I got non-fouling rust-preventing ammunition for the .22. The barrel would never rust, nor would it require cleaning. Only too late, when I lifted the.303 from the heap of our stuff, did I realize that I had not brought oil or a ramrod to clean it.

The .303 was an old long Lee-Enfield. I had 500 rounds for it, and I had filed away the noses of the steel-jacketed bullets to make sure that they would spread and kill.

I had a good telescope in a leather case and a pair of cheap binoculars.

I brought also a good sheath-knife for bleeding and skinning deer, and a small oil-stone to sharpen it.

We had fifty rabbit snares all ready made up, and a roll of wire to make more snares.

A hundred yards of flax line for catching pike in Loch Coulter. Treble hooks for pike. Fly and bait hooks for trout; fifty yards of silk line for trout, a gaff, and a net. A spool of artificial gut.

We had a seven-pound axe with a spare handle, a small axe with a hammer head in reverse; files to sharpen them.

A small saw. Cotton rope from Woolworth’s. A spade and a kitchen shovel.

Our food was mostly packed in biscuit-tins which we had sealed with brown paper and paste against the damp. We had half a hundredweight of salt in tins. We were worried about salt; it was essential, it was difficult to keep dry, and when it was gone we had no way of getting more. We therefore brought what seemed to ourselves a ridiculously large quantity. It did not appear so large when we began to reflect how useful salted meat would prove.

The same quantity of flour. Two stones of sugar, to be used grudgingly. Two stones of oatmeal for oatcakes. Without fresh milk we did not relish porridge.

We knew we could get plenty of fat from the deer we killed; we brought only two pounds of roast fat and a pound of lard.

Two pounds of baking-powder, a pound of baking-soda, two dozen tins of unsweetened condensed milk and two dozen tins of sweetened. Ten two-pound jars of home-made jam, the remainder of what Terry made on the previous year.