Mclouth ? The menu at Safari’s in McLouth isn’t much different than at any other small-town Kansas deli.

For a couple bucks, Dennis and Nancy Merriman will feed you well. You might even try what Dennis calls “the best Reuben in the country” — one of his wife’s specialties.

But 30 years ago, Dennis wasn’t so interested in making sandwiches. Laid off from his job as an electronic technician, he was more concerned with just getting by.

With no income, Merriman knew he’d have to find a way to survive. The solution, he reasoned, was to live off the land.

As a child, Merriman said, he had learned about the woods from his grandfather and spent his free time reading books about American Indian lore, mountain men and the frontier. Later, he spent eight years researching Blackfoot Indian legends.

Armed with that knowledge and little else, Merriman moved into the woods outside Compton, Ill., in the winter of 1971. The weather, he said, was anything but accommodating.

In a lodge he designed and built, Merriman roughed it in unmerciful conditions.

“There was probably three feet of snow on the sides, and I had to dig down into the snow to get in through the opening,” he said. “It would pile up because it didn’t have a chance to blow like it would across a field.”

“It looked like a Japanese lantern out there,” he said of his lodge.

Dennis Merriman of rural McLouth keeps the ways of the early 1800s mountain man alive through educational speaking engagements, survival skill demonstrations and nature walks. Merriman is shown wearing his handmade Blackfoot Indian style buckskin clothing and mink hat.

But despite the weather, Merriman thrived in the backwoods, trapping small animals and drying their hides over a fire inside the lodge before selling the pelts to get money for food.

Three decades later, Merriman has carried the memories of that winter with him and offers to share his modern mountain man story with whoever will listen. He has buckskin clothing and a fur hat. And with his full beard, he could be a rendezvous mate of famed frontiersmen Jim Bridger and Kit Carson.

Community clubs and other organizations routinely invite him to speak. Merriman, who now lives in Winchester with his wife, Nancy, even teaches weekend wilderness survival courses to Boy Scout troops.

He’s shown them basic survival skills, such as how to make flour from seeds, pies from wild fruit and rope from grass, among other things.

“I tell the kids they can bring anything they want,” he said, “as long as they can fit it into a Band-Aid box. A lot of the survival skills are nothing more than using practical experiences and what’s out there.”

Merriman wears a skinning knife made of steel and the jawbone of a deer.

But not everyone has embraced Merriman’s stories.

“There’s people that don’t understand,” he said. “They say it’s stupid and put it down. They’re just looking toward tomorrow and don’t really care how they got here, I guess.”

Nevertheless, Merriman said he learned how to respect the environment during his time in the winter.

Though he enjoys his life with Nancy at the deli in McLouth, Merriman said it was never too late to make a return trip to test himself again.

“I’m 56 years old now, and I wouldn’t hesitate to go back for a moment,” he said. “I know I could do it again.”