If you think you’re having a bad day, you should get yourself along to a screening of Leonardo DiCaprio’s new film, The Revenant. Not because it will cheer you up – it’s relentlessly miserable – but because it might just put your problems in perspective. However disappointing your supermarket sandwich was, it wasn’t a slab of throbbing, raw bison liver, was it?  Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, The Revenant is loosely based on the true story of 19th-century fur trapper Hugh Glass, who was left for dead by a fellow frontiersman (played by Tom Hardy) in the American wilderness following a bear attack.  Just like winning an Oscar, surviving for weeks on end in the wild isn’t easy. But in the film, Glass withstands everything that nature can throw at him.  So, how much of it should we believe? Can a man really sleep inside a dead horse? Or catch fish, armed only with a pile of rocks?  We asked Ray Mears, bush craft and survival expert, for his opinion.  Ray, what do you know about this new film The Revenant?  Ray Mears: It’s a story that really interests me. In fact, I even quoted a little bit from an account of Hugh Glass’s ordeal in my first book.  The film, however, is based on Michael Punke’s 2002 novel and I know that there are events in there that were not ever attributed to the original Hugh Glass story.  I think he sleeps in a horse at one point but that comes from a different story altogether. That is based on the story of a boy who was taken prisoner by the Omaha Indians as an infant and raised as an Omaha Indian. He slept in a buffalo with another guy in a blizzard in the Prairies.  Ah yes, about that horse. Is it even possible to sleep inside a dead horse?  RM: That is possible and people have done it. But he’d freeze to death after one night.  I’m not sure whether the horse would provide enough insulation, it depends on the temperature.  A buffalo would be fine. A buffalo’s fur is very, very thick and the fat is very thick, so it would take a long while to freeze.  And what about the fact that Glass rides the horse off the edge of a cliff but miraculously survives after landing in a pine tree?  RM: It’s unlikely. He’d much more likely have plummeted and died in a heap, along with the horse.  Everyone has been talking about the fact that DiCaprio (a vegetarian, lest we forget) ate a raw bison liver during filming. Should we be impressed?  RM: Raw bison liver is fine to eat. In fact, it would be very important. If you eat raw liver, you get complete amino acids, so it will prevent starvation.  It’s very good to eat it raw because the liver contains a lot of blood and blood contains carbohydrates, which will help keep you warm. It acts as a wick that enables you to burn the wax, which is the fat in your body. So it actually enables you to utilise the resources your body already has.  Have you eaten raw bison liver?  RM: I have, yes. We teach people to do these things on the courses that we run but they tend to be hungry before we give it to them. They eat it and they enjoy it and can feel the energy coming through.  Glass also eats plenty of fish, which he catches using a bizarre technique using stones laid out in the shape of a horseshoe. What’s going on there?  RM: That technique is a type of fish weir and was used by native people in that part of the world. It’s not easy, though, and it wouldn’t necessarily have been the best way to catch fish under those circumstances. In those shallow rivers, there are other ways that could be used.  Glass would probably have had the ability to “tickle” the fish, which is where you put your hands under the fish and then you grab them.  There’s another way where you use sticks and logs to make a shallow and force the fish onto it, thereby beaching it. That technique was also used by native people in America.  We can’t forget the bear attack, of course. Could anyone survive such a thing?  RM: I’ve interviewed a woman who was mauled by a grizzly bear. She was out hunting elk with her husband when she saw a female grizzly bear with two cubs running towards her. She went for her rifle but fumbled and the next thing, she looked up and the bear was in front of her.  The bear stood up, put both of its paws on the rifle and then she stared at it in the eye. And that’s where she went wrong. The bear then bit her in the face, the breast and the hip and she pretended to be dead. It then left her alone.  The bear was just warning her off. She wasn’t thrown around like a rag doll, which you’ll see in the movie. The bear doesn’t need to do that because the bear is used to fighting other bears, which have thick skin, whereas ours is tissue paper by comparison. She was horrifically injured and it took a lot of plastic surgery for her to recover.  Ray Mears will be embarking on a live tour, Tales of Endurance, in March. For more information, visit raymears.com
But being attacked attacked by a bear really is as terrible as it looks, says the survival expert