(no subject)

[stitchwhich]

I just finished reading Gordon Dickenson's Wolf and Iron. It is probably a fine book but the knowledge brought to me by scouting and playing in historical reenactment makes me very grumpy with most post-holocaust novels. (Just as it did with M. Night Shyamalan's movie The Village). Dickenson made an interesting study of man & wolf as independent partners in his tale, but the world he described, while possible, contained far too many errors in 'supply' if you will. Everyone has guns with sufficient bullets - or so they seem to believe, using them as easily as urban gangsters did in the prohibition times. The protagonist, while an educated man who'd been in the Boy Scouts, apparently never had to worry about the proper way to dress out small game, for he never meets a rabbit or squirrel that might end up poisoning him. (In some small game, there are glands one must avoid nicking while dressing them out. I don't know what they are or where they would be found. It isn't common knowledge, even to a scout.) The protagonist's wife manages to 'be sewing clothes' for their child near the end of the book without there being any mention of how the heck they found scissors, thread, needles - or cloth since their only product source is a burned and gutted farmstead nearby which had been stripped out by raiders. And while they are planning their home, they do not make any plans for fabric production, even in terms of 'our family will need this'. No spinning, no weaving, no area set aside for curing leather, which they do seem to be able to produce, judging by glancing comments. But yet in a hidden steading set up to cohabitate with a male wolf, there are no sentences about the difficulty of actually process and tanning hides around a wolf who likes to chew and destroy the protagonist's possessions. But they do set up a forge. And in an area riddled with raiding parties (remember that most of his supplies for home-building came from scavenging a nearby ranch that he witnessed being raided and burned to the ground) he manages to make sufficient charcoal (from pine trees) to use in his forge without tipping anyone off that he is there. They have two horses - one a mare but the other gelded. No worries about that. No chickens, no poultry at all, scavenged flour and seed for rust-proof oats but no plans for processing the harvested oats to make flour later on. He relocates the farmstead's haybarn to his place, and the hay, but makes no move the following summer to provide replacement hay. His lady 'puts up vegetables in glass jars' - without replacement lids or rings, or a source of wax for sealing.

It makes me roll my eyes.