Glenn Villeneuve Nearly Starved to Death

Tell me about how you got injured. Um, I've had problems with tendons a few times. Um, I've had some weird medical issues at different times, like things that most people wouldn't have down here. Like what? Um, it's okay if we diverge from injury to illness. Sure, sure, sure. Well, one time I was starving. The time I ate the weasels. This was a protracted starvation. Like I literally was having a famine for a couple months where I was always getting a little bit of food but not enough. How much weight did you lose? A lot. I didn't have a scale. Right. But I got real skinny. Real skinny. Like first I lost all my fat, then I literally lost my muscles, and I got really weak. I was still going out looking for food every day, but I couldn't go as far. I couldn't climb up to 5,000 foot mountains anymore. I got that weak. And this is over months? Wow. Didn't have enough food for a couple of months. And you couldn't fish? This was in the winter. Ice. The ice is very thick. Back then the ice used to get thicker back then. It was usually about 4 feet of ice on the lake by late winter. Now some winters have only had 2.5 feet. But anyway, I would try fishing, but there's not that many fish there. This is a little lake a mile across isolated in the mountains. The fish that are in the lake stay there. Like they're also smaller. They don't grow as fast. You can expend a lot of effort chiseling through. Remember, I don't have a power auger or anything. Chiseling through 3, 4 feet of ice trying to catch fish that are this long and this big around. Right. So, I was trying to be as efficient as possible. I had out a lot of snares for snowshoe hares. There are not many snowshoe hares. There's not much small game. But I was catching a little bit every day. Like I'd get a grouse, I'd get a ptarmigan, I'd get a rabbit. But I was gradually getting weaker and thinner and weaker and thinner. So what happened to me health wise though was that eventually when I got food, I just ate as much as I could eat. For 3 or 4 days, all I did was eat, sleep and shit literally. And I got refeed edema. Whoa. Which at the time I didn't recognize, I didn't even know what it was. But you can actually die if you refeed yourself too fast. Like World War II when they were liberating concentration camps. Soldiers didn't notice they were giving prisoners all the food they wanted to eat. And some people got this refeed edema to get pulmonary edema and literally die. Whoa. Disaster really. People that go into famine areas and what not, they know about this now. You can't give people unlimited food. I didn't know about that. So I got edema and it was weird. I just thought I was getting fat or something. But it was actually retaining fluids. And I didn't find out for months later. I was talking to a doctor about what had happened to me. He said, you got refeed edema. So you were just living with it. Yeah, it didn't last that long. How long did it last? I don't remember exactly how long it lasted. But within two weeks of when I got food, I was like all puffy. And I'm like, what the hell's going on? I couldn't put on weight this fast. But it was actually just fluid that my body was retaining. My chest was, I remember Sylvia pushing out and saying, you're all like spongy. And I was like, yeah, isn't that weird? Because I had been like, you know. How'd you feel? Skin and bones. I just felt hungry. Still. Well, not for two weeks. But man, for days, all I did was eat. I'd eaten until my stomach just couldn't take anymore. Wow. What had you gotten? Is that when you had gotten the caribou from the moose? No. That's when I got store-bought food. A friend of mine flew in. The thing that had happened was we had this arrangement where somebody was supposed to come partway through the winter that we knew that was going to bring in food and some supplies. And I kept thinking, like, I just want to survive. I want to get through it. Like, my goal is to live off the land as much as I can. And we got this arrangement anyway. Tim's going to bring us some supplies later in the winter. I'm just going to see the best I can do, you know. And I just kept going out and getting small game. Then what happened was even when you got a plane coming, it's hard sometimes to get in up there. And also, you know, my friend was working during the week. He could only come on weekends. The weather was bad this weekend. And then he couldn't come. And maybe there was some other issue with the plane or something. He just kept getting delayed. And it got to be a real problem. Finally, I was like, I sent him a message on that Saffron. I was like, hey, Tim, you know, like, I'm starving up here. I'm living on muskrats and snowshoe hares and not enough of them. You got to come next weekend or make sure somebody else gets in here. Because I was really worried about my health at that point. So then he did get in there and he dropped off all this food and I just pigged out. Wow. And I got refeeding edema.