Dying of thirst however is another matter. It can occur within the short space of 36 hours. The symptoms are intense. A raging thirst, swollen tongue, cracked lips, headache, hallucinations, and coma. To be lost in the wilds of Africa – especially in dry areas or during the dry months of the year can be a terrifying experience compounded by a lack of or absence of water. There are many who have succumbed to thirst and are now part of the dust of Africa. When entering the African bush always make sure you are well hydrated to begin with and take enough water with you. But as we all know things can and often do go wrong.

If you are a hunter armed with a firearm or bow and you find yourself in a desperate situation of being lost, not being able to find water and are succumbing to the consequences of dehydration there is one recourse of action which may save your life as it has of hunters in the past.

There is one source of water which is often overlooked which may just make the difference between dying or surviving to tell the tale. This water source is found in one of the large stomachs of ruminants such as kudu, wildebeest, impala, eland, cows and so on. This large sac known as the rumen is one of four stomachs possessed by animals which "chew the cud" the other three being the reticulum, omasum and abomasum.

Armed with a rifle or bow you should be able to shoot a ruminant. The rumen is most easily accessible from the left side. When normally field dressing a carcass the rumen tends to balloon out when the abdominal cavity is opened  see Figure 1). If you are desperate for water, need it urgently and do not have the strength, time or inclination to field dress the carcass to remove the internal organs, lay the dead animal on its right side and make a cut through the skin behind the ribs. The rumen will lie immediately below the skin. Cutting through the wall of the rumen will reveal a mass of green, wet vegetable matter comprised of chewed grass, forbs and leaves (depending on the diet of the particular animal- see Figure 2).

Here is your life saving water source. Place this vegetable matter in some cloth material (shirt, towel, handkerchief) and squeeze it out over a container (see Figure 3 and 4) or directly into your mouth (Figure 5). Yes the liquid emerging will be olive green in colour and will smell rather offensive but it is water – life sustaining water and we are talking here of extreme survival.

You can easily extract 5 litres of fluid from the stomach of an impala sized animal – perhaps even more. In larger animals such as gemsbok, and kudu you should be able to get as much as 15 litres of life saving liquid from the rumen.

The hardest part is to get your mind around drinking the stuff (Figure 5) but if you are desperate enough and thirsty enough you will drink it and save your life in the process. If you do have the time you can further filter and / or boil the water to render it safer to drink or pass it through some filtering system (e.g. sand) to make it more palatable.

You can contrive some sort of condensing apparatus to get pure water from it but the wherewithal may not always be available. Obviously if you have water purification tablets (all good outdoorsmen should have some in a survival kit) you can add these to the "water" to purify it.

Cleve Cheney is a wilderness trail leader, rated field guide instructor and the author of many leading articles on the subjects of tracking, guiding, bowhunting and survival. Cleve has unrivalled experience in wildlife management, game capture and hunting, both with bow and rifle. Click here to visit his site

Rumen water can save your life. When you emerge from the ordeal take a course of antibiotics and a course of de-worming medication. You may pick up some parasites from the rumen fluid but this can be sorted out and successfully treated at a later stage. The important thing is you will have survived and found a source of water when you needed it most.