Anake

We began this week with a 30-minute figure four trap challenge. We were to find appropriate sticks, whittle them to the right shapes, set the trap with appropriate deadfalls, and trigger the trap within 30 minutes. One person met the 30 minute challenge! The rest of us took more time adjusting the cuts to the three sticks and fiddling with our weights.

For any who have never interacted with primitive traps, here is a diagram of an idealized figure 4 deadfall and it's component sticks, to offer some clarity (illustration from Wikimedia Commons):


I missed the previous lesson on traps, and had to watch others and pick up what I could. I did not have the luxury of a diagram or explicit instructions. Still, with everyone around me carving their sticks in the same way, and a little observation on my part, I was able to make a serviceable deadfall. My trap only took 45 minutes from setting out to search for sticks, to triggering the final deadfall with a nudge to the bait stick.


Pictured below is the winner for quickest, most primitive, and most easily triggered trap. The trap's maker found and carved the sticks in under 15 minutes, and used no knife. Instead, a rough rock served to rasp away wood in the right places. The trap stood for just over two minutes on it's own. A gust of wind blew it down right after I snapped this picture, and the falling weight crushed one of the sticks.


Next, we switched our focus to another important survival skill: finding potable water. We went questing up Wish Creek looking for a source of water coming straight out of rock or soil. One group took pots and jars and experienced the extreme frustration of finding the source on high ground and having to negotiate challenging terrain with full vessels. They brought back most of the water in their clothing.


We also experimented with surface wells. We found a place in the creekbed, much closer to camp, where the water flowed down and disappeared into the soil. We dug next to the flow. The holes we dug sank well below the bottom of the creekbed and struck soupy chocolate-colored mud. As we watched, clear water swirled in from the upstream side of the well. Would this water be sufficiently filtered by the few inches of earth through which it flowed? Our next step is to get some water test kits and find out.

...

After an evening of stories from JY and a failed attempt at rock-boiling a large quantity of our collected water, it was time to greet the Anakes.

The Anake Outdoor School (formerly known as the Wilderness Awareness School Residential Program) had been traveling for the better part of a week, come all the way from Duvall, Washington. We had prepared a song to welcome them to our land, and we circled our fire and practiced our welcome. With night settled heavy and nearly moonless, the stars blazed their greetings all the brighter.

Outside the gate, the Anakes had gathered and howled now like wolves, a wild sound from the dark. We gathered at the gate and gave our coyote yips and wails in response. Silence, some argument over who was to start ("1-2-3-not-it!"). The Anakes launched into their song of greeting, still unseen across the gate but felt in the body-resonance of pulsing drums and stomping feet. When the last beat and whoop echoed off the ridges, we paused, replied with our song, and opened the gate.

In darkness and firelight we gathered both groups, circled, greeted, and went to bed.


We started the next morning with a bird sit. The Anakes, looking with eyes new to the landscape, brought fresh perspectives to our sit. We came back in, breakfasted and wrote out bird maps together. The greenhouse was exceptionally lively.


After the sit we divided into groups by Society for our all-day wander. The Anake's East Society paired with our RDNA East people, the RDNA Souths went with the Anake Souths, and so on.


We didn't get reports from each Society afterward, but some patterns emerged anyway. The Norths, for example, focused on trees. The Southwests made sure to take a nap in the afternoon. And the Souths, of which I was a member, found a mammal.


We hunkered down, poking and prodding our find. What exactly was it? Not a rodent, considering the sharp, burgundy-pointed teeth and long pointy snout. We settled on Sorex spp, but still had many questions. What brought him out onto the hillside? The patchy chaparral and grass stretched up and down the ridge, open and dry. How long was he dead? He was limp, not stiff. Fly eggs on the carcass had not yet hatched. How had he been killed? some blood spots flecked the carcass, we saw no punctures or wounds.

As we examined the minute mammal, robin and kinglet alarms began erupting on the opposite ridge. Some of our number began scanning the horizon. Minutes passed, and silence settled. We all looked up from our mammal in time to see a large accipiter with a long rounded tail and short blunt wings flap it's way across the valley and then disappear to the north. Moments after the hawk's passage, song began to fill in the valley from the south, and we went back to our mammal mystery.


With no answers to many of our questions, we made what seemed at the time to be a logical decision. We skinned and dissected the little carcass.


The next day, Native Eyes departed. We left with more inspiration to tap into our wild, quiet mind, to dance and drum and sing the hearbeat of our land, to know our places as natives and draw our sustenance from our land. And it seemed to me that our Anake comrades came away with more bird language questions, more love for the land, and enriched by one shrew-pelt nosewarmer.

Bedding Down

As soon as we arrived we began trailing deer at Commonweal, searching for the freshest trails, hunting for them in their day beds. We spread out in ones, twos and fours over the landscape. Some took the ridges where, before the rains, the bucks were most often bedded down.

One pair, youth and adult, wandered the east ridge seemingly aimlessly. They would stop, close their eyes, point in a direction, walk that way, and then stop again and do the whole thing over. They zigzagged without pattern over the landscape as they tried to feel the location of the deer's beds. After a long time of wandering and thinking about deer the youth stopped. "I was feeling it in my brain," he said, "but now I feel it right here." He pointed to his gut, and to the direction from which the feeling came. Walking that way, the pair found themselves walking right up to a single worn-in deer bed. It was full of deer hair.

Others went low into the valley. Those on the ridges found little, only a few beds. They came back to stories from the others of the low places filled with deer, more than 20 in the bird sit meadow alone. We'll know where to go next time.


After sharing stories of our wanders we took the last few hours of sunlight to attempt individual fires off the land, with no prep and in the wake of much rain, within the hour. Smoke billowed from bowdrills rigged with shoelaces or pine roots, but no coals came. We finally used a previously harvested elderberry and cedar hand drill kit to make the evening's fire before the sun set and the fog came up .


That evening Jon Young joined us in the shelter for stories around the fire. He talked about tracking and body radar, told stories about trailing tigers, and related his experiences with the hazards of learning tracking too quickly. Unraveling, he called it -- specifically, the unraveling of one's "truths" about the world, false hopes, baseless beliefs, and dearly-held identities. Just like that Weezer song: "if you want to destroy my sweater, hold this thread as I walk away..."

Jon went on to mention a practice he called anchoring, in which two women and two men 10 years older, and one woman and one man 20 years older, commit to supporting a young tracker on their learning journey. He said that anchors can help ease this unraveling process that tracking and nature connection precipitates.

...

The next day, we launched into tracking at Abbott's Lagoon. Some of us were practicing the Honoring Routine on the way and as if to test our patience the way was well guarded by little brown birds. We walked slow, stopped where they were feeding, and went around them. This little one stayed feeding at the edge of the path as our whole group detoured in a four-foot-radius arc around him.


We arrived at the first tracking station. Barefoot human, bobcat, deer, skunk, sparrow, and worm tracks were all crisply evident, and older coyote and human shoe prints lay under a patina of rain and weather. Skunk and cat tracks fell over the otherwise crisp-looking barefoot human tracks. Some of the tracks had been washed away, or filled in with sediment, by water flowing over the land after the rain. But none of the crisp-looking ones had any raindrops in them.

We asked many questions at first, and came up with many more by the end. Who had been hopping, or running in step with a partner behind them, up the path a day ago? What would prompt a human to do either of those odd things? We tried many ways to reproduce the barefoot gait, but still had more questions. Was it a small man or a woman? When were they here? Could we tell the sexes of the other animals? When had they passed? What mood had they been in?


After a short midday lunchbreak and wander to shake of any residual focus-lock, we went trailing again. Our assignment: to trail (or backtrail) the freshest deer trail across the dunes to it's most recent bed.



We started on a clear trail but lost it in windswept flats. We then tried the youth's body radar technique. We wandered for a bit, found a worn deer trail into dunegrass, and found some beds that had not been slept in since the last rain a few days ago (until we got there). Though the beds were at the tops of dunes and were windswept from a human perspective, the grass sheltered and sun warmed beds were lovely at the level of sleeping deer.


We pointed and followed our brain-borne ideas some more, then something seemed to shift. Two of our party had strong unity on their direction, and seemed to feel differently about that direction than before.


We beelined to a brush-covered hillside where the bare ovals between the brush were full of chocolate-chip deer turds. We examined them for hairs, and found quite a few. We also found that quite a few ticks began creeping up our legs whenever we stopped, and that what looked like coyotebrush was actually a clever disguise for tendrils of poison oak popping out everywhere. Ticks and profusely budding (and browsed) poison oak were enough evidence for us of recent deer habitation. Without taking the time to find fresh tracks we hightailed it out of there, picking ticks as we clambered down the dune.


The evening sun stretched over the land and told us it was time to come in.


After sharing stories of our hunts, we departed Abbott's Lagoon. We gathered up again at PINC for an evening watching the Great Dance. Avatar has nothing on this movie. Nothing I can say here would be fair to the movie, it's makers, or the people and land it portrays. See it. That's all I can say. These two saw it. Look how happy they are!

Native Creativity

We began this week with a visit to a pond. We waded the muck and cut cattails again, with a boat crew and the youth contingent all helping out to harvest more than we had the previous week.

We hauled the thatching material back on big garden carts and on our backs, and got about the project of finishing our shelter.


I was having a hard time being social and productive, owing to a perfect storm of challenges in my life. I needed time away from the thoughts of the human world so I took off and went wandering while the construction continued. I trailed renegade deer tracks out of the garden and up Wish Creek, squeezed through a deer-sized hole in the fence (I wanted to avoid the gates where I might encounter other people), and followed the creek up between the ridgelines.


The landscape was a riot of edibility, usefulness, beauty and of course toxicity. In four square feet of stream bank I found something like nine edible and useful species. I remember noticing miner's lettuce (yummy leaves), chickweed (leaves), cleavers (leaves), cow parsnip (stalk), Oxalis (leaves), stinging nettle (leaves), yerba buena (leaves), strawberry (leaves), and bracken fern (young fiddleheads). They were mixed liberally with highly medicinal and poisonous species such as hedge nettle, figwort, wild cucumber, and poison oak. Nearby the milkmaids and pink flowering currant were in full bloom and Anna's hummingbirds sang at each other across their flower patches. I was interested in the edibles since I brought no vegetables with me for dinner, but I walked on.


Following the creek I came to a fern-draped ravine. When I was 13 I dreamed of a ravine almost exactly like this one. In that dream I became a buck deer and followed a red fox into the creek canyon. In that dream, which I still remember with perfect clarity, I became lost and transformed in the maze of caves behind the watercourse. In this canyon I found my feet on a deer trail, and there in the churned earth was evidence of the trickster that had passed here before me.



I followed deer trails up and around ridgelines, along steep banks that threatened to crumble and avalanche from under me, and after a time began searching for tinder and food for the evening's fire and meal. I continued upward toward the pink-fringed, darkening sky. I carried no timepiece but something internal told me that my friends at camp had finished and would now be starting both fire and food for the evening.



Now with purpose behind my wandering, I crawled from the oak woods, through a blackberry patch that fringed a clearing, and into the light of the setting sun atop the west ridge. I was greeted by an old friend, Yerba Santa, waving in the evening breeze. All around me were dead bracken fern fronds, crisp with the day's sun. And under the cover of last years dieback, sprouting from the live rhizome, were fiddleheads. I had both my tinder and my dinner.

The photo to the left shows the three-part structure of bracken. It does show a fiddlehead, but one that has unfurled to a point at which I question it's edibility. The photo below is of a fiddlehead in it's most delectable stage. I collected a modest amount. I eat them sparingly, and only once or twice a year, since consumption of large quantities has been correlated with certain cancers. I have not yet found a report that identifies any constituent of the fern as carcinogenic, however, and they are a prized edible in many cultures.


The rest of Native Eyes had completed our shelter while I was away. I brought the small bounty of my wander back to camp, helped to light the fire, and shared the new taste of spring ferns with everyone.


I found deep satisfaction at returning from my solo time and bringing home what resources I found. I was satisfied in spinning up a coal from sticks harvested by my own hand and blowing into flame the tinder I carried from the ridgetop. And I was satisfied in sheltering under grass and the soft lines of tree limbs that may, in life, have served as a nursery to the hawks that circle over this valley.




The next morning, after a rainy and predator-oppressed bird sit, Ane Carla Rovetta joined us for art and taxonomy.


We started with a look at taxonomic divisions: domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species (if you're an animal). Following the Chordata phylum, we made simple sketches of frogs and discussed the changes that occurred in chordate evolution from aquatic to terrestrial forms. We sketched an egg and discussed the revolution of "enclosing the pond." And finally we sketched a bird.

As we began drawing the main units of bird motion, I heard an urgent squawk from outside. A scrub jay swooped in and said, with phrases in Jay-speak I haven't heard before but an unmistakable tone of voice, "something really intense just happened!" The jay kept squawking. Ane Carla kept sketching and talking about birds. Everyone else kept chalk to paper and sketched away, trying to keep up with Ane Carla's presentation. But with the jay's voice louder in my mind than Ane Carla's, I simply couldn't pay attention. I got up and snuck out the door to see what the fuss was all about.

White-crowned and song sparrows popcorned around the garden veggies, alarming consistently. The jay perched on a spindly shoot from a pear tree and stared down at a spot among the brassica patch, silent now, and intent. On the slope just feet from the garden, a remarkable sound: every wrentit alarming at once, the brush on the hillside seeming to purr and click with their agitation. A Bewick's wren added his alarm from higher up the slope, and a spotted towhee as well. Above us two redtailed hawks circled, one with a forked stick in it's talons. Could they be causing such a disturbance? But that didn't make sense. These redtails were over this valley all the time, and I have never seen them take birds. I have never seen the birds respond to the redtails this way, either. I waited. The jay got bored and flew off, and the sparrows calmed and dispersed like rubberneckers deprived of street drama. I was about to give up and go back to sketching when the sound of wings burst out of the brassicas. A tiny hawk no bigger than a robin, clutching round, brown feathery prey in it's talons, flew up and away to the shelter of a pine.

I went back inside and sketched a sharp shinned hawk.


We finished out the day with natural inks, paints, and chalks with Ane Carla. We cut our own turkey quills (dyed festive colors by Michael's Craft Supply) and made pens, sketched with acorn and iron, black tea, and black walnut. We ground pigment, made plant-based paintbrushes, and mixed paints with vegetable gum, or egg yolk, or milk binders. Finally we took the excess earth pigments, added a dribble of soap and water, and rolled them into sticks of pastel chalk. We rounded out the colorful, crafty, art-filled evening with stories told and performed by our own RDNA-ers.