On the Hunt

This past week, we began with one simple mission: to get as close as possible to an elk (possibly the largest land animal currently living in the Bay Area), snap it's picture, and escape, all without betraying our presence. Here is our instructor, taunting us with some antlers of his own. (Actually, he was signaling an elk sighting.)


We broke into hunting parties and set out. Our second objective was to create a "songline," a story or narrative that we could relate to others. The others (Essentials and Cultural Mentors) would follow our songlines the next day, so our narratives had to be accurate, detailed, and memorable. My group found many things -- whose old burrow is this? It was as tall as it was wide, with a big throw mound. Loose soil seemed to have filled it in so that the bottom was shallow and level. Greg's head and shoulder fit in easily.


With only an hour left before we had agreed to meet up again, we found our herd of elk. A big male stood in a group of females, bugling. I snuck as close as I could in a few minutes, snapped this photo, and snuck back. I chose a route back to the trail that I thought would skirt the herd, but as I crested the rise, I saw elk ears over the grass. I ducked a bit, keeping out of direct sight of the elk, and kept heading toward the trail. Finally, I could see that a larger herd had moved on to the trail. Well, I wasn't going to get back to the cars without being noticed. I stood up and walked alongside the herd, watching their body language to gauge their comfort zone, getting close but not too close. Sometimes I got tense, thinking about their reactions to my presence, and all the elk near me lifted their heads, looking right at me. I breathed the tension away, used my peripheral vision to watch the elk and my surroundings, and let go of self-consciousness. The elk went back to grazing. I walked within 15 feet of the elk herd.


Others had amazing experiences as well. One person almost tripped over an elk calf bedded down behind coyote brush. Another stalked a bachelor herd for three hours and became so focus-locked that he never noticed the coyote that was trailing close behind him. We regrouped at the cars and returned to camp to make our fire, cook our food, and share stories.



The rest of these photos come from Abbott's Lagoon, where we went the next day in search of good clear prints in the sand. We tried to follow these trails that came out of the water and cavorted at the crest of a dune, but lost the pattern in all the frenetic movement. Who might have loped and rolled and slid down these dunes by the lagoon?



We finished up the day with a cluster tracking game of our own. A group of people acted out a scenario in the sand, then the rest of the participants came over to survey the tracks and piece together the events. This game is consistently one of my favorites. Playing the game can also help one develop an eye for understanding the previous chaotic clusters of tracks in the sand.

Shadow Scouting

A former Native Eyes student returned for this week. Nobody noticed him, even though he was with us the whole time. The above photo is from his cellphone (no zoom, sorry) and is centered on two Native Eyes participants.


We went down to Gazos Beach and examined some new mystery tracks. While we huddled around the print discussing the presence of nails, number of digits, and toepad shape, our shadow watched from the dunes.


We spread over the beach to take stock of the coyote activity and our shadow followed one group from the dunes. One coyote at the beach where we entered trotted cautiously in a straddle, then a direct register. Someone suggested that it may have felt opperessed. Further down the beach, coyote trails checked scentmarks and loped comfortably near the surf.


We met up with Cultural Mentoring to wander near the Moonrocks again, looking for deer browse, cougar sign, and fire kit materials. The deer were eating a slender green plant that seemed composed entirely of stem, no leaves, and sprouted from rhizomes near the surface of the soil. We also found the above scat, composed of deer hair. Is it big enough to be cougar?

Meanwhile our scout, having ridden along in an accomplice's truck, shadowed one of the wandering groups. He trailed them quite easily in the sand and brush when they got out of sight, following broken twigs and fresh shoe prints. He hid in plain sight using brush to break up his outline, and followed all day without anyone seeing him. At our evening meal, the rest of Native Eyes were so incredulous that they thought we made up the shadow scout story.



That evening the the staff fed the participants Ghost Supper, a ceremony brought to us by the Ottawa people of Michigan. The staff served a feast of ancestral foods, told stories, and hosted visitors at a sacred fire.

The next day, Native Eyes, Cultural Mentors, and Essentials all combined into clans to host eachother and the staff at their own Ghost Supper sacred fires. The Tule Elk Clan, who I hung out with, chose a sheltered site and creatively beautified the space. When darkness fell, the feasting was on. Stories and deliciousness abounded, as did freezing temperatures and whipping wind. A rotation of fireboys stayed up all night to tend fire, and many others kept watch with them.

I've outlined the sacred fire experiences very briefly, and haven't included much subjective experience. I'd like to invite anyone who was part of either event to share their experiences, positive, negative, challenging and regenerative, in the comments section. Thanks!

Organizing Fire

We started as usual at the beach, marveling at the high surf and puzzling over some mystery tracks. This four-legged creature apparently went from a diagonal lope to a direct register walk, heading from the dunes up the trail to the road. Please help us identify this apparent newcomer to the beach! Here are the measurements:

Lope group length: 11-13"
Intergroup length: 6-10" getting shorter toward the walk.
Stride length in a walk: 7"
Straddle in a walk: 4"
Front track compression in loose sand: 2 1/4" long X 1 3/4" wide
Hind track compressions were considerably smaller.

After exploring this mystery, we moved up to the Bonny Doon Ecological Preserve for some trailing games in the sand. We regrouped out in Jon's yard for fire, food, and a good night's sleep.


The next morning after a bird sit and debrief, we gathered with Cultural Mentoring and RDNA Essentials for a special presentation. Jon's family was hosting some natural builders from Portland who brought some in-depth fire knowledge. Their interactive presentation articulated the properties of fire as a fluid, and gave us new tools to organize the flow of fire as a tool in our daily lives.


The centerpiece of the presentation was one example of a highly organized fire system: the rocket stove. They built this simple dry-stacked brick burn chamber, and lit the fire. It burned kind of smoky and, predictably enough, straight up.


Then they took an insulated stovepipe and "organized the flow" of the hot gasses coming out of the burning wood. One good blow on the little blaze and the fire turned upside down! They explained how the stack effect helped to organize the flow of air around the fire.


The fire now burned down and horizontally through the burn chamber, and a little flame even made it up the heat riser. Extremely hot exhaust fountained out of the stovepipe.



They finished the thing by building a second box of bricks around the rear of the burn chamber, and putting a metal barrel over the heat riser to redirect the flow of hot gasses downward. Now the vaporized wood completely combusted in the heat riser and no smoky smell escaped. The chinks in the brickwork, where the exhaust was escaping, began to bead with water -- the product of complete combustion.



The presenters also built a simple, free-standing Rumford fireplace to reflect the heat of a little campfire and better organize it's flow. I'm eager to see if of some of the Rumford ideas could make for efficient fire-heated lean-tos and other primitive shelters.

Deer Days of Autumn

We began at the beach with measurement exercises, meant to calibrate our measurement techniques. Then, the wind and sun too fierce for tracking the flats, we wandered the dunes in search of stories in the sand. One group got within eight or so feet of some bedded deer before jumping them up.


We changed locations, hoping to find the remains of cougar-killed deer in some known cache spots in Cloverdale. One car parked at the gate, the others at a pullout down the road. We wandered the willows, finding scat and urine of a local bobcat, but not a trace of deer kills.


As we all gathered in a tarweed stand to pick hand drills, someone noticed a sketchy-looking character up at the car by the gate. Binocs up, we watched as the guy crouched by the car, then the car alarm went off. The would-be thief took off running and we took off too, toward him. By the time we reached the car he was long gone. We drove to the other cars and some of us took the van to go looking for the guy. I looked at my car, and found that I had two flat tires.

As I dealt with the flats using a borrowed bike pump, the trio in the van had found the thief pedaling down the street. Our eldest, gruffest character stopped the thief and watched him until the cops arrived. Then the sheriff rolled up to my car to ask us to join the whole group to give statements.

"So you're naturists, huh?" he said.

"Naturists are the naked people," I replied. "We're naturalists."

Another time, the cops asked, "So how long did it take you to get your clothes back on before you pursued the suspect?" Everyone laughed, except the guy locked in the back of the police car.

Everyone's stories matched up, and the police began loading the thief's bike into their car. He'd probably go to prison for a month, they said. I couldn't help but feel bad for the guy. Prison won't solve the problems that he was trying to fix by burgling my car. I wish him health and happiness.


The next day after a big communal bird sit, we went out on the land. RDNA Essentials, Cultural Mentoring, and Native Eyes broke into clans each with at least one representative of each program. Our mission was to track the deer activity on the land. We could then track the habits of cougars by noting the absence of deer.


My group was charged with tracking Eagle Hill and we quickly fractured further to better cover the large area. One group rambled over the open hills and gullies, finding a clan of does and bucks and following them for a bit. Another group stuck to the edge between meadow and wooded slope. My group dove into the deer trails that spiderwebbed through the woods and into the edge of the meadow. We found fresh beds and lots of browse. No cougar sign.

As usual, Native Eyes took our leave from the main group that evening. As my companion and I got into the car I pasted a piece of paper of the car's clock. We didn't want to know how late it was. As we drove I felt relieved, ignorance of the time allowing me the space to be in the moment, driving, rather than concerned about getting a good night's sleep. We zoomed past a large lump by the road, and both of us shouted "That was a deer!" We pulled over and checked it out.


He was beautiful, huge, very clean, and still warm. We put him in the back of the car and tried to call anyone who might want a deer. No one picked up.

"Want to come over to my house and help gut this guy tonight?" I asked my companion. He said sure.

After we'd gone a way, I realized that some thanksgiving might be in order. We pulled off the road again, took some tobacco, and I opened the hatchback to let the deer be in the night air. I told the deer we were taking his body from his land to my home, thanked him for the gift of his meat and hide and bones, and offered tobacco to the land in thanks.

Just as I returned to the car and closed the hatchback, hiding the deer again, a sheriff stopped and shone a light toward us. "Everything OK?"

"Yep, just a pee break," I said. The sheriff laughed and drove off. We pulled onto the road again and another sheriff's car drove past. As we got up to speed, still another sheriff's car zoomed up and passed us on the left. "We've been blessed by the sheriff spirit," my friend joked.

Further down the road, we found another deer. She was a yearling, also still warm but in worse condition. As our hands touched her body, both my companion and I had the same thought -- that she would feed a lot of other critters out here. We gave thanks for her life also, and chucked her in the bushes so the scavengers would not themselves become roadkill.

At home, we hung the buck by his hind legs, took the guts out, and went to sleep.


In the light of morning we found that he had been killed when a small section of his ribs were broken and pierced his heart. Everthing else was whole and in beautiful condition. He must have died very quickly.




I worked most of the day to quarter him up and save the parts I know how to use, which is most of him. I couldn't save the guts because it was too late at night and I didn't have the fridge space to keep them. I'll tan the hide, save the sinew for bows or bowstrings, make the hide scraps on the legs into glue, use the bones for tools, make soup and musical instruments from the hooves, and I'll use the meat in a Wopila, a thanksgiving feast for my friends and family.