Pemmican is dried meat pounded into powder, combined with rendered fat in equal proportions by weight, and pressed into bars with dried berries. That is the entire recipe. Three ingredients. No refrigeration. No cooking required to eat it. A shelf life measured in months to years under the right conditions. One pound of pemmican delivers approximately 3,000 to 3,500 calories, a full day of sustenance for an active adult, in a package you can carry in your coat pocket.
The Cree, Lakota, Blackfeet and dozens of other Plains nations had been making it for generations before the fur trade era, and when European explorers and traders encountered it they immediately understood what they were looking at. The Hudson's Bay Company built an entire industrial supply chain around it. Robert Falcon Scott took it to Antarctica. Ernest Shackleton's men ate it on the ice after the Endurance was crushed.
William Clark wrote in his journal near what is now Great Falls Montana in 1805: the Hunters killed 3 buffaloe, the most of all the meat I had dried for to make Pemitigon. The spelling is characteristically Clark, creative and phonetic, but the reference is unambiguous. The Corps of Discovery made pemmican from bison on the trail and first encountered it as a prepared food at the formal feast hosted by the Lakota Sioux early in the journey.
The journals of Lewis and Clark, edited by Gary Moulton and published by the University of Nebraska Press, are the most thoroughly documented food record in American exploration history and pemmican appears in them as a staple of survival rather than a curiosity. These men were eating nine pounds of fresh meat per man per day on good days and boiling candles to eat on bad ones. When they made pemmican they were thinking about the bad days.
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Protagonist Ivan spends his entire life doing what society told him was "proper": Get a good career, model wife, follow aristocratic social practices. To an outsider, he looks successful, but a closer look reveals that Ivan's soul is rotting from the inside out. He grows ill, and on his deathbed, becomes haunted by a horrifying realization: "What if my entire life was a lie?"
Ivan's life of vanity and decadence led to emptiness and loneliness. Even his friends and family don't care for the dying man. Tolstoy's insight is that the greatest human tragedy is not death itself, but reaching death only to discover that you never truly lived at all.
Modern people tend to think of death as a distant abstraction that applies to humanity in general, but somehow not to themselves personally. Tolstoy shatters this illusion. He shows that most know intellectually they will die, yet they live as though they are immortal. They distract themselves with status, entertainment, careerism, and social approval, such that they never have to confront what mortality actually means. But the terrifying power of death is that it destroys one's illusions. And in that moment, all the things society told you mattered suddenly reveal themselves to be hollow.
However, Tolstoy does not present this realization as nihilistic, in fact, quite the opposite. He suggests that only by fully confronting death can man begin to live authentically. Only when you realize your time is finite do cowardice and conformity lose their grip over you. The fear of death, then, is not something to suppress, but something capable of awakening the soul. A man who learns how to die is finally capable of learning how to live.