Flying Blind

This week Native Eyes met at Abbott's Lagoon, where the Marin County Tracking Club usually meets. The wind was howling and singing over the sand, so strongly in places that the tracks there would age to nothing in a matter of minutes. We spent the day playing with trailing and interpretation on these shifting dunelands.



Two fresh deer trails greeted us on the flat. We started trailing easily, but slowed to a crawl in more difficult substrates. We could see no tracks in the springy rushes, though our instructors pointed them out at times.



We wound up dividing, and each following our own ideas about trailing deer. One group felt compelled to run up the dunes. They looked down at the sand somewhere near the crest, and found fresh deer tracks galloping away from them. The crisp sidewalls of the tracks crumbled down as they watched. Keeping on the trail, they found it converging with those of other deer in the dunegrass, and followed until we were called back.

We took a brief intermission to eat lunch and look at the copious local otter sign. Here they've rolled in the grass and left lots of little snotty splats all around.



After our lunch and otter wander, we came back to a fascinatingly fun game on the sand flats. As we all turned our backs, three instructors walked around and did something, interacting with each other, in a pre-designated area. They retreated to one side of the outlined area and called us back. It was our job, then, to tell the story of what went on. After successfully interpreting the first simple turn-around in the sand, I felt effectively blind to the rest of the hidden story in the tracks. But after careful study and then relaxing into Owl Eyes (also known as wide-angle vision), I could start to put the story together. With all of us students helping each other out, the blind leading the blind, we found many (but not all) of the answers.



The next morning our dark-to-dawn bird sit attracted only the hardiest participants. We fox-walked through the steady drizzle, the feintest indigo of predawn and sensitive feet guiding us through the dark to our sit spots. The birds chorused with chips when it was still too dark to see them and then went about their business of feeding in the soggy brush with only a few notes of song. We were called in by a coyote howl after what seemed to be an uncharacteristically short time. Perhaps I'm starting to like going out before my morning tea, sitting in the dark and cold, and trying to listen for sparrow alarms? In any case, we gathered in the greenhouse to map what we heard and eat our well-earned breakfast. As always, some interesting patterns of alarm and silence emerged.

Earlier in the week, in our evening talk, Jon Young had introduced a practice called "Renewal of the Creative Path," inspired by the Haudenosaunee midwinter festival in which the Iroquois people renew their understanding of themselves, their connection to nature, their path in life, and their lineages. The Renewal process seems kind of like journaling and new years resolutions on steroids. I'm excited to begin. In preparation for the first part of Renewal, in which one reviews moments in one's life that exemplify connection to the Earth and nature, we launched into an exercise intended to get us out of our analytical minds and into our senses: a blindfolded Drum Stalk.

We had to find the drum, which beat from a far-off meadow. And we had to somehow keep our clans together as we walked blindly through brush and bramble. Many toes picked up many thorns on the way, some unfortunates became tangled in willow thickets, and some stepped off streambanks into thin air. We walked blind across two meadows, through brush, and over a creek. We scrambled up the creekbank to the drum, bruised, scratched, bumped and muddy, and electrically alive with sensory awareness. All clans had all members accounted for in the end.

Story Tracking

This week we were greeted by a grisly character as we arrived at Venture. He'd been found dead on the road, and retrieved by a fellow NE-er for our edification. Take a closer look at those incredible feet! We considered skinning him and tanning his fur, but our mentor's stories of these animals burrowing into carcasses and carrying botulism bacteria on their fur deterred us.

Our mission this week was to return to Running Pig Ravine and fill in some more data on the pig's whereabouts and habits. We broke into hunting parties again, and I found myself in the company of Josh Lane of the Shikari Tracking Guild and Carl Keller of the Ozark Tracker Society. We trailed and dawdled and were generally the slowest, most distracted party on the landscape.



We wandered across open bunchgrass prairie dotted with pines and came to the edge of one of the ravines. This one needs a different name, since Running Pig Ravine, to the south, has most of the pig sign. As we tested the edge of the ravine for ways down through the brush, three barn owls ghosted out of the pines, one after the other. They swooped low over the ravine and landed, invisible again, in the willows. Under the trees, the earth (and some limbs) were speckled with pellets. Splat! Might this ravine be christened Owl Pellet Palace?


We crossed the ravine and came to the next, our Pig place. Walking toward the edge, one of our party felt his attention drawn repeatedly to a lone pine. "Think someone could be hiding on us in there?" he wondered. I supposed that it was possible, so we approached.


We found no watchers, only a squeaky branch. I stood pondering what could have drawn us over, when the others pointed at something near my feet. A mound of pine needles sat at the point of an eight-or-more-inch-on-a-side triangle of scraped-up pine duff. Further under the tree we saw similar patterns of scrapes. We crawled around under the pine and sniffed the mounds until we found one that still held a sharp urine odor. I'm left wondering if our Shikari Trackers have cougar radar. Or was it just the squeaky branch that drew his attention?


With a mental note to return with a trail camera to that spot, we continued down into Running Pig Ravine, hoping for more pig stories. At the bottom, we found deep troughs in the ground with pig bristles stuck in the mud.



We picked out the tracks to finally reveal some decently clear pig tracks. Look closely to see the dewclaw impressions behind and out to the sides of the heels.


Back at the top, on the northern lip of the ravine, we were treated to a profusion of pig poo. How could we have just walked past this much scat on our way down?


The sky and sea lit up silver as we headed home.


We brought back so many stories from the land that our debrief session with our mentors ran late, and for the first time we willingly skipped our routine of cooking on a primitive-made fire that night. I was happy to have had such a good series of questions from our mentors, and I also felt the loss of fire as one of my best teachers for that night. The next day, in conversation with one of our mentors, I committed to keeping the routine of fire-by-friction alive for the rest of the year.

The next day was devoted to story, with Native Eyes, RDNA Essentials, and Cultural Mentoring all staying at Venture to learn from Ane Carla Rovetta. Ane Carla told us stories from indigenous cultures around the world, and stories of her own storytelling adventures. She shared an outlining technique that helped us take written stories from her vast collection of books and turn them into performable pieces of oral story. The key, as far as I can remember, is to outline the story so that it becomes a series of images and other sensations in one's mind's eye. The more vivid the sensations, the more the story tells itself.

Ane Carla even told us a story about stories, given to her by an indigenous storyteller from the storytellers grandmother. She said that there is a net of stories that surrounds the world and connects all people. Storytellers can reach up and grab a piece of the net of story, and the story itself comes through the storyteller. The story net surrounds the teller and listeners, and brings all of us together into the world of the story for a time. It may sound far-out and inaccessible, but according to Ane Carla, the start of the practice is simple: outlining the core images and sensations of a story and committing them to memory.

Each student selected one story to learn and tell to the rest through the afternoon and evening. Some of us were already practiced storytellers, and performed entertaining and elucidating stories. Some of us started shakily, and then we might have felt the net take hold and the story began flowing of its own accord, spellbinding as effectively as the well-practiced stores. We told stories long into the night.

A Visit to Running Pig Ravine, and Other Tracking Stories

This week Native Eyes visited Venture, Gazos Beach, and our new stomping grounds just west of Cloverdale. We practiced observing and sketching animals at the retreat center, and learned more about reading the stories in the sand at Gazos. At the land west of Cloverdale, we discovered Running Pig Ravine.

We found many cool tracks in the beach sand at Gazos. Ravens in numbers were evident by their tracks, but conspicuously absent in person. Their short trails described their society of thieves and luminaries in sometimes baffling sentences. Raven phrases were punctuated by hard two-footed landings and wing impressions in the sand. At one point we found a surf-rounded rock that had been partly dug out of the sand, the surrounding beach positively boiling with raven tracks. Another look at the rock revealed that many pointed bills had dug out the sand around it -- or perhaps just one very determined bill. Why?

Coyotes also wrote their crisscrossings in the sand. Some of our instructors have been visiting Gazos regularly, and have been keeping tabs on "Lopsy," the coyote with lop-sided feet. Most canids seem to have pretty symmetrical feet, but Lopsy shows strikingly asymmetrical tracks with the heel pad squooshed to one side and the toes almost as asymmetrical as a cat's. Lopsy had been one of the more recent canid visitors to the beach, and we spent much time journaling the tracks. I also found these nifty bird tracks crossing one of Lopsy's trails. I love the arrangement of toes.

We also received a visit from one of last year's instructors, Will Scott. He's much missed this year, because he's taken his nature connection know-how on the road with a project called Beyond Boundaries. The Beyond Boundaries blog chronicles their journey. While he was back in the Bay Area, Will took some time to sit with us and listen to bird language, track the beach, and take a tour of the land west of Cloverdale.



When we arrived at the land west of Cloverdale, we broke up into hunting parties to search for pig sign. We started by considering wild pigs and their habits, and profiling the type of habitat that we were most likely to find pig sign. We divided those spots on the landscape up between our three parties, and were off.

Another woman and I first set off together, deciding to have an all-female group. One other man from a group of four ran after us, wanting to join up. "Alright, you're an honorary woman for the day," we shouted back as he ran to catch up.

We set off over the bunchgrassed mesa, walking over land uneven as a cobbled river bottom. Vole runways, bobcat latrines, bird kills, and badger digs abounded, and we did our best to stay focused on our porcine quarry. Our first find was still in sight of the driveway: a huge turd, easily two inches in diameter, composed of mostly brown shells and some grass seeds. We grinned at eachother. Our first pig sign?



We tried to beeline for an irrigation pond that we knew to be at the bottom of a big ravine. Beelining is never really possible in land cut repeatedly by east-west gullies, full of tangled coyotebrush and poison oak. We finally reached our ravine and began testing the edge of the tangled chaparral that guarded the way down.


We were about to give up finding a way, when we heard a snort and the snap of a thick branch. We sent one of our party down through the tangle, while the rest circled the lip and looked for a way further downstream. As our scout scrambled down, we heard the whip and snap of brush up the other bank, and long pampas grass waved at the passage of something large. The animal charged uphill and revealed itself on the opposite lip of the ravine: a massive, round-rumped swine. She (I think it was female, because it wasn't as large in the forequarters as the boars I know) was much larger, rounder, and generally fatter than the pigs pictured here. I pulled these photos from Wikipedia to illustrate the general look of wild pigs: big triangular ears, shovel-shaped head, and burly build. She ran so fast, and so far, that I could not get a serviceable photograph.



We eventually did find our way down to the pond, and what should be waiting for us, but a skull? It was big, shovel-shaped, and burly. We were stoked.



The skull lay under a tree by the pond, in a bed of dead pampas grass curls. We searched for a while to find the tusks, but were unsuccessful.





We clambered over the tule fringe of the pond, through blackberry vine tunnels, and over a raccoon-latrine log to finally make our way into the willows uphill of the pond. Once inside, the willows opened up into rooms full of deer sign and raptor whitewash. Where were the pig wallows? We'd found scat, a live animal, and a skull, but we'd been tasked with finding wallows as well. And we wanted at least one clear track.

Our party divided up in the willows, each pursuing their own curiosity. A rustling in the brush, and one of our members called, "Hey where are you all?" We each answered. "You're not where I thought you were! I just heard something over there. I saw something black move behind the willows there." The image of a wild boar in the thicket flashed across my mind's eye, and the world snapped into crystal clarity around me. For that moment I thought, in a sub-verbal part of my brain, that a boar was still present and could charge us. My senses took control of my awareness and I froze, scented the air, and listened. The gold-tinted willow leaves rustled in the breeze.

After that frozen moment we converged to check out the siting, and found something putrid.



A tunnel ran through the blackberry, its walls and floor exuding a stench of urine and musk. We poked around a bit, but the smell was so bad that none of us wanted to stay. We snapped a photo of our honorary member, though, wearing a wig (thus showing more femininity) and expressing the putrescence of the tunnel.



Backtracking out of the willow, poison oak and coyotebrush tangle uphill of the pond, we paralleled the water and found many now-dry mudholes. This one was full of deer tracks, but the next held some incomplete pig tracks and lots of bristles.



We headed back to Venture with our day's trophy and lots of stories to tell.