By Chad Love

For a number of years following the end of World War II, Japanese soldiers would occasionally emerge from the jungles in the Pacific theater, either unwilling to believe or unaware that the war was over. The last verified Japanese holdout came out of hiding in the Philippines and officially surrendered back in 1974. It's an incredible story, but a piece in this month's Smithsonian magazine tops it, in both longevity and in the sheer harshness of the landscape in which it occurs. In 1978, Soviet geologists discovered a family of six eking out a desperate existence in the depths of the vast Siberian taiga. They had been living there, completely cut off from all human contact, completely unaware of events like WWII, since 1936.

By David Maccar

Do pride yourself on your timbercraft skills and your aptitude with an axe? Maybe you do...but can you split wood as fast as the guy in the video below?

It’s a heck of a technique and doesn’t require any more than a fairly short length of chain, a small, sturdy rubber belt, a fastener and a hefty-headed maul. Has anyone ever tried this or seen it done before? Thanks to Sports Illustrated, who turned us on to this clip.

After you check out the vid, click here and test the rest of you timbercraft knowledge with our “Could You Chop Down a Tree With An Axe?” quiz and see how you stack up against other F&S readers.

By Dave Hurteau

From the Billings Gazette:
Lost in the Big Horn Mountains, presumed dead by family and friends and hallucinating because of too much wind and too little food, Travis McMahan, stumbling up a creek, found a dead fish.

“It looked all rotten,” he said. . . . “I cut its head off and skinned its back,” he said of the fish. “And there was good meat in there, so I ate it.”

By Dave Hurteau

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson’s request for a massive hunt of an estimated 100,000 pythons roaming the Everglades in Florida has been approved by Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist.

Crist has asked wildlife officials to start trapping pythons immediately. This comes a couple of weeks after a 2-year-old girl was strangled by a pet Burmese python in central Florida.