In the "life in the woods" department . . . there is a fascinating account on the
Smithsonian magazine web site of
a Russian family that lived in a remote part of Siberia with no contact with other people for 40 years : they lived alone in the wilderness from the mid-1930s until they were "discovere"d in 1978:
The Lykov children knew there were places called cities
where humans lived crammed together in tall buildings. They had heard
there were countries other than Russia. But such concepts were no more
than abstractions to them. Their only reading matter was prayer books
and an ancient family Bible. Akulina had used the gospels to teach her
children to read and write, using sharpened birch sticks dipped into
honeysuckle juice as pen and ink. When Agafia was shown a picture of a
horse, she recognized it from her mother’s Bible stories. “Look, papa,”
she exclaimed. “A steed!”
But if the family’s isolation was hard to grasp, the unmitigated
harshness of their lives was not. Traveling to the Lykov homestead on
foot was astonishingly arduous, even with the help of a boat along the
Abakan. On his first visit to the Lykovs, Peskov—who would appoint
himself the family’s chief chronicler—noted that “we traversed 250
kilometres [155 miles] without seeing a single human dwelling!”
Isolation made survival in the wilderness close to impossible.
Dependent solely on their own resources, the Lykovs struggled to replace
the few things they had brought into the taiga with them. They
fashioned birch-bark galoshes in place of shoes. Clothes were patched
and repatched until they fell apart, then replaced with hemp cloth grown
from seed.
The Lykovs had carried a crude spinning wheel and, incredibly, the
components of a loom into the taiga with them—moving these from place to
place as they gradually went further into the wilderness must have
required many long and arduous journeys—but they had no technology for
replacing metal. A couple of kettles served them well for many years,
but when rust finally overcame them, the only replacements they could
fashion came from birch bark. Since these could not be placed in a fire,
it became far harder to cook. By the time the Lykovs were discovered,
their staple diet was potato patties mixed with ground rye and hemp
seeds.
You can read more
here.
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