Carrying Coals

We started the day by constructing experimental “long matches,” containers in which one can, in theory at least, keep a coal smoldering indefinitely. We hollowed out big oak galls, drilled additional holes for airflow, lined them with redwood bark to keep the gall container from scorching, filled them with tight-packed tinder, dropped in a coal, and packed more tinder on top. The goal was to carry coals with us for our whole day of tracking out on the land. Most folks had far too much airflow, and their coals flared and died quickly. Only myself and one other person made long matches that sustained coals for a larger amount of time.


Our first stop was a deer kill. A ranger had tipped off one of our instructors that a cougar had gotten a deer on the side of Cloverdale road. We piled into cars to check out the kill site.


My first thought was, “Cougar kill on the side of the road? What kind of cat eats it’s kill in public like that?” Roadside munching doesn’t sound like a very feline trait to me. When we got there, the site spoke its stories eloquently and brought us further mysteries. There were tree primary foci of activity, and tracks in blood crisscrossing the road.




The deer, a big buck, had died on the side of the road, a place marked by a black pool of dried blood in the rough shape of a deer body, with gut contents at one end of it.

At some point vultures arrived on the scene, leaving telltale whitewash and downy feathers stuck in the blood. The vulture sign centered on the site of the deer’s death, the first small blood pool.

It had been dragged a short distance from the site of it’s death and eviscerated, the place marked by a large swath of dried red blood, gut contents, internal organs off to one side, pushed-down and trampled vegetation on the bank by the road, and many tracks in the blood. The tracks were oval, symmetrical, longer than wide, with four large toes and a smallish triangular heel pad, plus sometimes some claw marks showing. They were roughly two inches wide and two and three quarters inches long, if my memory serves. The tracks crossed the road and continued into a neighboring field along well-worn game trails.


The deer had then been dragged even further down the road and finished off, some of it’s limbs disarticulated and carried off, ribs and bone ends chewed down, and all of the meat eaten. The pelvis, spinal column and head were still intact, connected, and laid out as straight as in life.

This is a string of snapshots I pieced together in Photoshop, showing the kill site, feeding site (where the carcass was opened) and the carcass itself. Click on the image below to see the larger version.


I pieced together the story, while periodically packing more tinder (I used a blend of cattail down, dry California mugwort leaves, and dry bracken fern that I’d gathered ahead of time) and blowing into one of the holes of my long match. It was still sending out little wisps of smoke as we finished up at the deer kill site, piled into cars again, and continued on to our main attraction of the day.

We stopped on Old Woman Road to explore a site of intensive cougar activity that Caitlin and Josh had found earlier. On the way we encountered many more tracks, and a higher variety of them, than we had on our previous visit.

I nearly stepped on a beautiful example of a Pseudacris frog, one of our natives. I felt compelled to take as many photos as I could, so I could share her amazing coloration and fascinating anatomy with everyone. I loved her bright yellow-green skin and the contrast of her chocolate brown mask, wrist, and knee stripes. Her white throat shone beautifully, too, when she let it. The athleticism and robust construction of these little guys always amazes me. They can catapult themselves many feet through the air and land on hard rock without injury. Imagine if a human were thrown an equivalent distance -- ick.






Finally, we entered the cougar area. A trail led up through the grassy clearing. It was soft and wide to my eyes that are used to following sharp, narrow deer trails, more like a trail made by bare human feet. The predominant trees were pines, which covered the ground with soft, muffling pine duff. Big old snags, fallen punky branches, and rotted stumps dotted the clearing, interspersed with small, young trees. Larger pines sheltered the edges of the area.




This little rise in the landscape, covered with pines and dotted with punky stumps, held countless cougar scrapes and scats. We spread out through the clearing, moving over the grass and between pines quietly as we poked at the massive scats and took photographs, listening all the while for bird language. We communicated mostly with whistles and hand signs, once in a while speaking in just-above-a-whisper, but generally keeping quiet out of respect for the cougar’s privacy. We were all extremely aware that this was the mountain lion’s personal space, an important area much used and valued by the big cat, and we were (probably unwanted) visitors.





While we poked around, we continuously heard a junco calling alarm in the middle distance. It stayed put in the brush just out of sight, beyond the edge of the clearing, chipping urgently all the while.

At one point a series of alarms moved from northeast to southwest across the ridge, again just out of sight in the brush. The alarms seemed to come from fairly high up as well, possibly ten or more feet off the ground.

On the way back down to the road we noticed an overhung, sheltered area. Would this be useful as a bed for an animal? I would have liked to go closer and take a look, but we had other activities to get to for the day, and people to meet up with.

We headed back to Venture with more questions than when we started. My long match still exhaled its white wisps of smoke, hours after we began the coal-carrying project. When it finally died that evening (just a few minutes before we needed to make a fire) it was like the death of a small pet. I felt real sorrow when it went cold in my hands. I’ll pay better attention next time.