A Cloverdale Whodunnit?

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This week was the Mentoring Nature Connection intensive at Venture. I could only stay for three days of it, but in those three days we discovered a murder mystery.

We were wandering Cloverdale Ranch with RDNA Essentials and Cultural Mentoring people. Many of us found ourselves drawn to the large willow thicket just south of Gate 1 and across the thistle-filled flats (ouch!). Two of the Native Eyes crew were the first there, and led the rest of us to their finds. They scared up a day-snoozing barn owl from the thicket. The owl flashed it's ghostly facial disk at the trackers, scaring them in return before taking wing.

We circle the thicket and enter from the south. Upon entering the thicket, the atmosphere changes. The willows and blackberry vines hold the air still, moist and cool. The ceiling of willow leaves filters the light to a dim green. The hair on the back of everyone's neck stands up as we enter, feeling watched. Is the owl still eyeing us, or is there another creature still in residence?

Our first find is a flattened spot covered with deer hair, with a pile of dried black goo in the middle. Our immediate thought is: blood.



Drawn further into the thicket along a well-packed animal run, we next come to the skeletal remains of dismembered deer parts. A set of hindquarters lies spread-eagled in the first clear area. It would look painfully vulnerable if it weren't already dead. Directly west is part of a ribcage, well-gnawed and picked free of meat. Just southwest of the ribs is a shoulderblade and foreleg.





Continuing along the well-traveled run, we duck through a tunnel in the blackberry undergrowth and come to another chamber. The ground is packed flat and vegetation is worn away. A cave of vegetation shelters the most worn spot, about deer sized or a little larger. We recover some hair from the trailing blackberries. It's short, tawny, fine, and tough to break. It does not kink when bent.



The northerly breeze carries the scent of rotten meat. We leave the willow cave and circle the thicket again to the east, and then north. At the edge of the trees lies more deer parts, these fresh enough to stink. A head, complete with polished antlers. The neck may still have ample meat on it. Spinal column still intact. Ribs all accounted for, but well chewed. Forelegs tenuously attached, one flung over the eyes. Hindquarters flipped and tugged a few feet away. The little bits of meat that remain are dry, feeding mites more than maggots. Just northwest, a small pile of fibrous stuff contained within a thin, dry membrane. Guts?







Following the eastern edge of the thicket north, we come to still more deer parts. This one has antlers in velvet, an attached neck and part of the ribcage. Legs are not in evidence. The face and ears have been chewed and eaten, and ribs are present but well-gnawed. This one is old and dry enough to have a much milder scent.



We explore the willow thicket and surrounding thistle flats for some time more, looking for clues. One person finds what he calls a drag trail leading from an animal run by the road, straight up to the polished-antlered buck. We try but cannot find any cougar or coyote scat near the carnage. Finally we settle down on some soft grass at the edge of the thicket for lunch, and tell stories until it's time to return to camp.

I've put together a map of the thicket's most interestingly morbid spots. I've placed each area of interest using memory only, so they may be inaccurate. But it'll give the general idea.



In addition to dead deer and ghostly owls, there was abundant sign of other animals in and around the thicket. All the blackberry, especially the tender new growth, was browsed by deer. There was lots of deer hair caught on many blackberry tendrils.



A woodrat left scat near the willow cave, and nipped some twigs. Just outside in the thistle brush, the land was thick with vole runs, tunnels, and dry scats. Rabbit runs, browse and scat lay everywhere. Deer runs, rubs, browse, and scat, too, was littered thickly all around.

natural events log

Some interesting things have happened recently, that I thought worthy of a little post.

First, we had the first rain of the season, a very early, bombastic and drenching thunderstorm on the night of my birthday. It may have even been thundering and flashing lightning at the very hour I was born. Kinda cool. I think this is the earliest and biggest fall storm I can remember. Here's to hoping for an early and quenching rainy season.

Second, the Live Oak acorns in the East Bay cities started dropping last week! Huddart Park on the Peninsula is also starting their Live Oak and Blue Oak acorn drop. And I found a single, fat, fuzzy Tan Oak acorn. It was whole, and unmarred, without even a wevil hole. Yay acorns!

Orientation

We opened this week of Native Eyes with a wander. Breaking into groups of two, we set out for some hours to see what there was to see, get the lay of the land, orient ourselves, and collect firewood.

We saw many birds, a possible peregrine falcon, heard lots of bird language, practiced tracking, and got a little lost. We found a good view of the whole of Commonweal from the East ridge but couldn't find a good way down, so we were a bit late to our fire.








We gathered at the fire circle, newly excavated to make a pit large enough for the 9-15 of us. This year there are about 9 Native Eyes students, a new kid's group, a mentor who'll hang out with the kids all day, and more Native Eyes mentors. Our little group is multiplying!



We lit the fire with a mullein stalk hand drill I'd picked up in Michigan (it's so far outperformed any Californian mullein) and a cedar board that another of us picked up in Washington. Not exactly native, but harvested wild and handmade by us. Three of us started off helping to warm up the kit. I tried to finish and get a coal myself, but I lost stamina before the coal formed. There's still something I'm not getting right with hand drill.



Cooking dinner on the fire with so many people was a challenge. We'll need to strategize further to get this process more efficient. We also made Tuareg-style ash bread on the coals. Basic bread dough was mixed up, allowed to rise, and tasty things like sauteed onions were mixed in. Then balls of the dough were dropped straight onto the coals, where the coals had turned a little white with a covering of ash. We kept moving the bread around in the ashes with a stick to heat them evenly. They turned out delicious.



The next morning we left Commonweal early to set up our beginning of the year Tourist Test, renamed as an Awareness Adventure to take the sting off the test format. Here are a few of our stations.

We started with a denuded Ceanothus branch, sticking out into the trail. The question: What happened here, and in what season?





Next we stopped at a mud puddle. Our question here was, "how many species are represented in this puddle, and who are they?"







Further down the path, an apparently unmanned station. Backpacks and sandals lay abandoned by the trail. Finally, a bush spoke.



The stationmaster, having revealed his hiding place, introduced us to this turd on a rock. The turd on a rock was greeted with extreme interest and fascination.





After a long trail of tracking stations, we gathered at the lake for lunch, swimming, and general downtime, in which the Native Eyes crew finally got to meet and socialize with the Essentials people. We finished the day out with a game of Nutty Squirrels, which is essentially an exercise in competitive, blindfolded, gleeful buffoonery. The game is a great test of scout, ninja and/or jedi powers.

Mind of Mentoring and Village Builders Training

The new year of Native Eyes kicked off with a Tweeker – a two-week training retreat, the intensity of which may tweak participants out by the final day. The first week, entitled Mind of Mentoring and Nature Connection, was awash in flip charts and lecture. The second week, entitled Village Builder’s Training, was much less structured.

The first week appealed greatly to my analytical, logistics-preoccupied mind. We sat in lecture most of the day, watching various people draw various versions of a circle with eight radiating lines, and writing various words about these diagrams. We hung the charts together on the wall. Toward the end of the week a visitor remarked that it looked like we were designing the Death Star. The name stuck – I still can’t help but think of Darth Vader when I look at those diagrams. But I did learn a great deal about the ideas and structure behind this 8-Shields approach to mentoring and culture building.

We had a free weekend between the two weeks, in which some of the other Native Eyes crew, some Cultural Mentors, and some other attendees got some unstructured time together. We went to the beach and skinny-dipped in the chill ocean at sunset, played tag, sang songs and told stories. We hiked around the woods near Santa Cruz, found beautiful manzanita and huckleberries to eat, climbed trees, and goaded complete strangers into running around like kids with us. Though the people we met on the trail started out intimidated by the mere thought of eating wild berries, they finished the day with tongues nearly and purple as ours, grinning, climbing trees, throwing stones, hiding, seeking, and chasing each other like 8-year olds.

We launched into the second week still exhausted from the previous one, and it showed. The Acorn (our support team who managed and executed the event) still had bags under their eyes. This week had been planned as an exercise in village culture, rather than an educational program with lectures and flip charts. I think that varying interpretations of what that meant, along with the evident fatigue in the leadership group, and the ambitious project we had set for ourselves, made this week much rockier than the previous one.

Essentially, we took 60 or so humans from Western urbanized, individualistic, capitalist and technologically-dependant cultures and attempted to create a communal earth-based village culture using consensus, peaceful action, and positive words, within one week. We fell into many pitfalls. We also built beautiful, supportive, and regenerative relationships among our temporary village, which will continue to build independent of that retreat. On this week, we lit the embers of many future village fires.