Finals

Up in Bolinas this week, we had our Native Eyes final exam.

We started with the standard cooking fire. I began thinking about making a fire at around 4:15, and worked on it slowly and rather lazily. I gathered dead twigs from the alders near the creek, found bigger sticks of standing dead wood on the trees and cut wood in the brush piles, and then broke out the hand drills. We had a communal coal very soon, from a mugwort stalk and buckeye board, and our cooking fire was blazing by 5:30. I think the hot weather and long daylight helps hugely. I'm still working on my hand drill calluses, but right now I’ve just got blisters.

Our assignment the next day was to find elk cows, new calves, and cougar sign on the land. We divided up the landscape, each of us taking a patch, and we set out solo for the day, harvesting stories for the RDNA village.



I saw many things out there, but the most striking was the elk.

I started by getting tangled up in a coyote brush maze, and then I found a coyote trail at the edge, on the ridgetop, and followed it down the ridge to the bay. From the ridgetop I could see a lone bull elk, nubby antlers still in velvet, and I wondered how close I could get to him.



As I followed the coyote trail (also a well-used elk trail) I found California mugwort plants trampled by elk hooves. I took the broken tops and rubbed them all over me, masking my scent. I continued down the coyote trail, which was marked with twisty furry ropes of old coyote scat. The trail dipped over the lip of the southern drainage and ambled down to the bottomland.





The wind took my scent east by southeast. I was walking with my back to the wind, but the elk browsed southwest of me, well out of range of my scent. I walked softly and carefully and the elk never paused in his browsing. Arriving at the edge of the elk’s willow thicket, I looked at the short wind-flagged trees and the giant deer. I remembered my mission to find elk calves, not bother lone bulls, and wondered if I could make my way around the elk without alerting him. I sat down to consider my route.

(I don't have any better photo than this. I wish I'd been focusing on the elk, and not the grass.)

As I sat, the elk raised his head and focused southeast, across the drainage. Something there alarmed him, and he began walking quickly upslope, zigzagging more or less toward me! I realized that I’d sat down right on his trail. He closed in to thirty feet, and noticed me sitting there, a nondescript lump in the trail that had never been there before. He stopped and sniffed but couldn’t catch my scent. He lowered his head and nodded up and down, trying to find a better view of me. Acting intrigued rather than alarmed, he walked closer, head low and nodding. And he sped up. Finally hundreds of pounds of bull elk was trotting straight toward me, antler nubs lowered, soft dark eyes fixed on me. At fifteen feet I realized he wasn’t stopping, and I stood up to give him his space.

When he saw me stand and recognized me as human, he turned tail and ran. Though my spine and palms tingled with adrenaline and my knees trembled, I wished I’d let him get closer.

I found lots of other cool stuff that day:


the bull elk's bed which was worn in to the dirt and full of elk hair and shaped like a deer bed but huge,


wildflowers of all colors,


cicadas like intricate bronze jewelry,

a spotted towhee nest with one egg and one new-hatched chick, an osprey with a fish in it’s talons,and many more elk. But I never found a cow with a calf, and the sheltered zone I walked in was well devoid of cougar sign.