Native Eyes

Of Mice and, um, Frogs?

2011-01-31T13:00:00.000-08:00

We arrived at Gazos Beach and found a completely different, and much smaller, pattern in the sand. The mice and other small beach denizens were out in force. But was this a mouse?

And here is a lovely bipedal hopper, with a distinct tail drag down the middle. The trail was longer than I can show with photos, too. The space between each set of two tracks was about one-half to five inches.

We spent most of the morning with our noses about a foot away from the sand.

For the afternoon, we had to get up and stretch. We walked inland, up an old dirt road, following coyote trails. We came to a spot where the texture of the road was nothing but coyote prints atop more coyote prints, but the confluence of canid trails soon dispersed again. We scouted around for more evidence of the main coyote highway, and instead found a stunningly glassy little irrigation pond just uphill.

Next to the pond, a dismembered and well-gnawed deer carcass. We wondered if it had been killed by a mountain lion or by coyotes, or was it a roadkill? And what had fed on it?

Look at that slice through the spinal column, and the chomp marks on the rib! Cats will shear the ribcage open wide to get at the choicest internal organs. But is this a neat shear or rough gnawing?

We also found this little pile of poo. It was old, and didn't hold much scent. When I poked it with a stick, it seemed fluffy, not dense, and the hair was twisted around and ropy in places. Some folks say that felid poo is dense and shaped more like tootsie rolls, while canid poo is loose and ropy and comes to a sharp point at the ends.

The two hind legs were strewn around away from the carcass and most of the meat -- and some skin and fur -- eaten. The head, neck and forequarters were still unaccounted for. The bones, too, were chewed. Would a lone mountain lion dismember a carcass? Would a pack of coyotes? Could smaller scavengers manage to drag the quarters so far?

But on closer inspection, this right hind leg shows that the femur was cleanly snapped in two, rather than crushed. That might imply a very strong blunt force, rather than the crushing bite of a predator.

We found a pretty big, goopy looking pile of short plant fibers near the pond. Next to the pile, we found stringy, membranous scraps. We thought that these were the remains of the gut contents, stomach and intestines. Popular wisdom says that cats generally eviscerate their prey and then drag the carcass away from the gut pile.

When we were done examining the carcass, we concluded that the deer had been hit by a car on the road. With at least one leg broken, it either died or was killed by coyotes and then brought up to the pond for the pack to consume. What do you think?

Before the Break

2011-01-22T11:50:00.000-08:00

I missed a post! Before this nice month-long break, we had one other week of program. My camera malfunctioned and I couln't document the days visually, so I forgot to document at all. My apologies. In any case:

This week of December 13th, we tracked coyotes, listened to bird language, built fires, and generally horsed around. Then on Wednesday we got word that Essentials and Cultural Mentoring were going to come down to Gazos Beach, our habitual haunts, for some tracking. We agreed to host our fellow RDNA-ers at tracking stations. We got out to the beach early and wandered, finding some interesting examples of track and sign. Then we got ready for the arrival f the rest of RDNA. Two of our members placed bandanas over their faces, took hollow lengths of bamboo for breathing tubes, and were buried in shallow graves under 6 inches of sand in the middle of the beach. We smoothed the sand over our companions, set up our backpacks to hide the breathing tubes, and circled up around the burial sites as if innocently waiting. Some of us departed for the dunes to sit and watch, hoping to divert attention with somewhat obvious hiding places. When all of RDNA was assembled around our buried companions, we led a sense meditation to bring everyone into the moment. At the end of the meditation, at a code word, our buried companions burst out and clambered to standing. All around wore shocked, but pleased, expressions. Our tracking stations followed and all concerned, especially Native Eyes, learned a lot.

A Coyote Blessing

2010-12-13T15:07:00.000-08:00

A prospective new addition to NE this week: another participant, spending the week with us to see how NE might work for and with her. We met at Gazos beach again, our mission to get to know individual coyotes using the five measurements: length and width of the front foot in a walk, length and width of the hind foot in a walk, and length of the stride in a direct register trot. We greeted the coyote tracks as we entered the beach, and got down to business. But before we'd gone along the coyote trails, we found this mystery:

The head was missing, and it had been long since eaten by it's killer and by insects. The shears on the wing feathers, though, looked fresher, with the inner part of the feather less weathered.

The foot, also, had been sheared clean through, as if by garden clippers. The inside of the bone was still red, while the rest of the soft tissues of the carcass had been weathered to brown or gray.

We found this creature along a coyote trail, where the canid had deviated from it's trot into a walk to approach the carcass, then resumed it's previous path and gait past the bird.

We found that and more mysteries on the dunes. We took measurements and sketched individual tracks. We worked past lunch, then the brain burn got to us. One by one we dropped our journals, our measuring tapes, and our pencils. One of our number stripped to his shorts and took a swim in the surf. Another lay down and considered the sand and the sky. Two others had already wandered off in pursuit of a raccoon trail. I sat down and ate my lunch.

After our interlude, we came back together to play the cluster tracking game. Once we finished and were about to start up the beach, someone shouted "look!" We all looked up at the trailhead in time to see the coyote bouncing down the trail in a neat side trot. He zigged and zagged, looked nervously over his shoulder, and showed off many of the other behaviors we had been tracking! When he disappeared into the dunes we rushed over to find his tracks, shouting our thanks to the coyote.

Later around the fire, we talked with our prospective new member about the Native Eyes experience, and about the day. I was in conversation with the new person about how our group has tracked together for ten weeks now. We've seen eachother hit walls already. But it probably wouldn't take long for her to mesh with us-- we were crying in front of eachother on the first day.

Jon joined us at the fire and also took up conversation with our newcomer. I'll try to summarize the conversation.

In Native Eyes, we cry easy and we laugh easy too. Our journeys into connection with nature bring us into contact with powerful experiences that are our birthright. These powerful experiences make us quick to laugh, celebrate, give thanks, and make fun. For most of us, these experiences were stripped from our cultures in violent conquests generations ago. So this understanding also brings us into generations-old grief over what we have lost. For many of us that grief is close to the surface and can easily spill over in tears.

People may expect this program to work within the conqueror model of education that prevails through most of our culture. Compromise with the conqueror model helps those of us who grew up conquered stave off the grief of realizing what we've missed. But it also keeps us from the powerful nature connection experiences that give us back what we've been missing. Native Eyes is one program where they won't compromise. They notice that grief comes up, and keep up the coyote mentoring anyway.

Creeks and coyotes

2010-12-05T12:00:00.000-08:00

The sun sported a halo on Tuesday as we started tracking on the beach. One group stayed by the trailhead to map the copious coyote trails there, and my group journeyed north, hoping to find another coyote hot spot.

Past the center of coyote action, not even a lone canid trail traveled the beach. Another critter was out, though, traveling oddly like a coyote in a straight line across the sand. The critter seemed to be moving in an overstep two-by-two pace.

For a while, the most prevalent tracks were tiny, three-toed blips in the sand. This little dude flew in and paced around at about the same cadence as the tracks, bobbing his head and scouting for invertebrate prey.

When he flew on to find more food, we found these tracks in his wake. The same tracks!

Just south of Gazos Creek we went inland toward Gazos Grill, checking for trails toward the grill's dumpster. A wide, low trail cut through the poison oak and was covered with little five-fingered handprints -- a raccoon's run. On the beach side of the road, the only larder we could find was a wild rose decked with fruit. A few coyote trails crisscrossed, but we found no scent marking or interaction.

The only scent post we found was this old bobcat latrine.

We crossed Gazos Creek flowing fast and cold over the beach sand, and found a raven party on the flat expanse.

Following the ravens, we found logs with interesting little burrows beneath them, full of little caches of sea rocket seed pods.

We continued for a long way up the beach. The high tide had wiped away all tracks.

As we moved further north, the cliffs to the east began dripping, dribbling and leaking water down to the sand. We wondered if that water would be safe to drink.

We began to notice coyote trails traveling north or south just under the high tide mark.

We found a bird kill and then another, with coyote trails veering through the scattered feathers but not pausing in their cadence.

The bird below had a fascinating bill.

Finally we came to another creek flowing from a low place in the cliffs and disappearing into the beach sand. Coyote trails upon coyote trails converged from the washed-out surf zone up toward and along the creek.

We followed up the creek, clambering over driftwood and mini waterfalls on a carpet of watercress.

Around a corner in the waterway, there was a shelf of mudstone. On the shelf were the remains of a seabird, the feathers gnawed and sheared at the base.

With some measurements of the coyote trails and a general mental map of the area, we returned south to meet up with our companions.

We spent the evening mapping our wander, building a fire, cooking and debriefing the day with Jon.

On the Hunt

2010-11-25T13:30:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-15T10:08:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-06T15:41:00.000-07:00

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

2010-11-01T12:16:00.000-07:00

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.

Dogs and Cats

2010-10-25T09:10:00.000-07:00

Native Eyes met at Gazos Beach, where the coyotes treated us to a tangle of trails. We found multiple trails braiding together and lots of urine marking sites concentrated at the mouth of a small dry creek. The urine spots became fewer and further between, the further we went up or down the beach. What does that pattern say about the coyote's territory and borders?

Our heads full of questions and our journals full of sketches, we returned to camp. We rock-boiled a big pot of vegetable soup for dinner. We heated some large round stones (not from a creek within the last year) to glowing by building a fire on top of them, pulled them out with some sticks, and plopped them in the soup. I wanted to dip them in water before putting them in soup, just to rinse off the ash, but we decided that was more effort than it was worth. The soup cooked faster than it ever would have on a stovetop.

The next morning we went south to a coastal meadow for our bird sit. When we got there the little birds were huddled in their bushes, twittering to one another. They grew quieter as we sat, and a flicker made it's rounds on the tallest trees, calling "clear!" Robins sat high and alarmed, and a mob of crows called raucously. Scrub-jays called in clumps, "jay? Jay? Jay?" The meadow went quiet a few times as well. Right before we ended, the little brown birds decided to come out and feed, and the meadow was full of little flutters. Then they all ditched it again, and one of our group saw a hawk with short wings and a long tail glide low over the meadow.

When we mapped out the sit, many of us could recognize the patterns. Our story went like this: The birds were tense and huddled in hiding because a hunting cooper's hawk was in the area. The flicker and robin called as it came nearer, and then all went silent. When that hawk left, the little birds jumped on the chance to feed, just before a second hawk (or perhaps the same hawk, having doubled back) made an entrance.

After we mapped and debriefed, we went out to an old burn site, where the land was sand and many tracks crisscrossed through the brush. Our goal was to trail deer, but quite soon into our expedition this track reached out and grabbed our attention. There were lots of deer tracks, as well as lots of human and dog tracks. This one, though, struck us as a classic cougar print.

We trailed the cougar, finding tracks here and there where they had been spared by hiker's feet, and came upon the above. There were plenty of dog tracks around to confuse matters. What was this animal doing when it made this track? Is it a dog, or a cougar moving at high speed? We drew many of the cougar tracks, took measurements, and played with different styles of sketching. Have you ever tried drawing a track life-sized?

The trail eventually led us to this scrape. The scat under the debris was bobcat sized and shaped, but the scrape was far larger. We had not seen any bobcat tracks, either. And the scat was fresh, soft, dark red-brown, smelling of meat and cat turd, and had very little, but still some, deer hair content. Why did the cat mark this area? Why does the scat have so little hair in it? Why is the scat so small?

We took our photos and our sketches and returned to camp for the night. We fleshed some rabbit hides in preparation for a future activity, then shared food and stories around the fire.

skip two weeks

2010-10-14T14:18:00.001-07:00

I took the previous week off of Native Eyes because I was supporting a campout with the Riekes Center Nature Awareness department, and there is no Native Eyes this week! See you all again next week.

Getting Permission

2010-10-02T11:44:00.000-07:00

Native Eyes met at Commonweal this time, and we were greeted by constellations of fox scat. The little canids accented every firepit, larder, crossroads, and just about everything else with their spoor. After giving our greetings and thanksgiving to the land and eachother, we requested permission from the foxes to track and photograph them. Then we divided into hunting parties to get the lay of the land and find likely places to set our new camera traps.

My hunting party went up the dry, goat-nibbled ridge. Along the trail we found a chain of these latrines, all with both the big and small scats. We don't know when the scats were left, and we suspect the small came after the big. We think the big is bobcat and the small is fox. What does this say about the predators in the area? What are they saying to each other?

Others were more successful than we in finding likely bottleneck spots to photograph foxes. We laid our traps and left to make our fire.

That evening, we met the RDNA crew. There are a lot of them. Everyone, RDNA, Native Eyes, and Cultural Mentors got a chance to intro themselves around the campfire. I left feeling impressed with the breadth of backgrounds and resources that people bring to the program, and with the strong desire to get to know the other participants better.

The next morning Native Eyes went out early to the bird sit. Dark faded to dawn, the birds gave full throat to the morning, and waves of alarm spread over the land as hawks and other predators moved. Then the rest of RDNA arrived and sat, too.

Mapping with such a big group turned out to be a pleasure, after having only eight sets of eyes on the land. Jon was able to draw out lots of patterns and stories when we debriefed the maps later.

We had checked our camera traps before the debrief, and so were able to present evidence to the group of predators in our midst. One of the possible causes of alarm sequences:

That evening a gray fox came through the fence again at the camera site, walked to our Native Eyes fire ring right in front of one of the NE participants, and laid a scat. We had asked, received permission, and now we might have been told "you're welcome."

Ask Permission

2010-09-27T13:39:00.000-07:00

We started the week out on the beach, following coyote trails as they came together, dug, scented, and parted. We examined their patterns at length and wondered why their gaits, trajectories, and points of interest varied so widely. With few answers, we headed back to our sit meadow for more tracking of the landscape.

At the meadow, we dove past the poison oak periphery and into the wooded ravine. we found a wide trail, fluffed up like a freshly used deer trail but not cut into the earth, with very large compressions. Human boot prints? Wild pig?

That evening around the fire we told the stories of the beach and the ravine, and received a challenge. Could we see the coyotes that cavorted on the beach? We decided to rise at 3:00 AM and find out. Toting sleeping bags, blankets, coffee and binocs, we paused at the trailhead down to the beach to admire the moon on the water, to give thanks for the coming day and the animals we were tracking, and to become present to our senses and to the moment. We settled into our spots and waited.

When the sun crested the Coast Ranges and spilled light onto the sand, we still had not seen another mammalian visitor on the beach. We climbed out of dune and bluff to investigate the trails anyway. We only found one coyote trail that morning, it's patterns very different from the cavorting we'd seen the day before. Was he nervously looking over his shoulder? What kept stopping him in his crisp direct register trot and drawing his gaze away from the direction of travel?

This coyote trail had already been laid down when we arrived. The tracks lead down to the beach, where they're washed away near the high tide mark. Our arrival was considerably later than high tide.

But up the beach, the cavorting had continued. They simply avoided our stakeout, and kept up their digging and romping further north. When we related the story to Jon Young, he laughed and said simply "You got served! Did you remember to ask permission?" We had not remembered.

The Amazing Shape-changing Slitherer

2010-09-19T13:46:00.000-07:00

We encountered a mystery this week on the beach. While two groups trailed animals and eachother, a third group found a truly strange trail in the sand. The limb-imprints were large, and showed what we thought to be fingerbones. We couldn't tell the whole shape and size of the feet, though, because the central drag mark obliterated most of the tracks. The above photo is of the clearest track in the trail. It's much clearer in the photo, thanks to Photoshop, than it was in the sand.

When we came up on the trail, one of our first ideas was, "turtle." As we trailed it up the bluffs, looping around and crossing itself back down and charging more or less straight over the flat sand to the dunes, our mental images of the animal ranged through sea lion, seal, sea otter, large escaped lizard, or cormorant with too big a fish. None of those stories explained its trail fully, though, or why it had moved so far up and down the beach. We trailed this thing all the way to the north end of the beach, where we found it (or one like it) coming out of the creek onto the beach sand. Along the original trail, we intersected more trails of the same type -- some coming out of the dunes, some paralleling the beach, some coming out of the creek. Lots of other trails, all similar.

After morning hours filled with brain-stretching trailing exercises, we headed inland. We chilled out and made cordage, cut firewood for the night, and gathered nettles for fiber. We also set ash traps, little piles of fine ash placed strategically in trails or near beds, in our sit meadow. Our goal was to catch deer and other animals in their habitual patterns, or to catch them quartering away from us when we next entered our meadow.

The next day we returned to the beach with hopes of finding the slithering shape-shifter again. We did, and the marks were a little bit more eloquent about his identity. The drag mark was absent. The mysteries remain: what was dragging yesterday, and not today? Why did this creature, and more like it, walk up and down the whole beach, into and out of the bluffs, partway into the dunes and back to the flat sand, and along and into the creek? This new trail also has marks next to it where some part of the left side of the creature's body pressed into the sand next to each right-foot track. What was pressed into the sand?

We also returned to our ash traps. An advance party went and pronounced them all empty, as far as they could tell. When my group got there, the trails by the traps had been disturbed, and it took us a while to puzzle out what had happened. The surface of the ash was actually roughed up, though it held no clear mark.

Then we noticed prints leading away from the bottleneck of blackberry and willow near the creek where we'd laid the traps -- little ashy prints. Altogether we could pick out about two sets of more-or-less deer shaped prints. We'd successfully predicted the deer's pattern after all! Following the tracks, we came out of the bottleneck at an intensively-browsed section of meadow. Why were the deer hanging so close to the little creek corridor and mowing everything there, including less-valuable foods like poison oak?

New Crew

2010-09-09T14:11:00.000-07:00

Our Native Eyes journey has begun for another year. We're starting off separate from the RDNA village, so we gathered with just our Native Eyes group on the coast for intros and stories from Jon. Then we headed to last year's bird sit meadow for an introductory wander.

Our evening cookfire finally blazed to life after we cranked out three coals, using some of the above kits and tinder. Everything was damp and drippy in the redwoods. The unexpected chill of soaked-through sleeping bags and soggy sweatshirts set us a little on edge. Soon Jon Young, Paul Raphael, and Gerry Brady joined our fire and brightened up the evening with stories, jokes and songs.

The next morning we had our first bird sit. With camp so soggy, we decided to drive to a new location to debrief the sit under the shelter of some thick-canopied cypress trees. Some of our group saw an accipiter in the distance as we got out of the car, but didn't mention the sighting. The landscape, mostly Hypericum and stands of old Cypress, was quiet except for a few sparrow chips in the shrubs and Northern Flicker calls. We headed toward the same stand of woods that the accipiter was working, thinking more of dry ground than of birds.

As we finished our debrief, a Cooper's Hawk flew in under the canopy of trees to perch on a limb above us in the shadows, her dark back blending with the dark under the canopy. We watched in silence until she flew again. "Who heard her concentric rings?" someone asked when the hawk had gone. We talked about the Northern Flicker's "Clear!" call of alarm that still rang out, and the overall silence and distinct lack of song. With a flurry of wings, the Flicker that had been calling lit in the treetop above us, sunlight picking out the red in his feathers. A few calls of "Clear!" and he fluttered away, too, in the opposite direction as the hawk.

After lunch Molly and Greg led us in a trailing exercise. Two participants trailed Molly over the beach and dunes, and two others trailed Greg. We followed the trails into the ocean and out again. One group stayed together and took turns leading, while the other group divided and tracked separately. Only one group found their missing person in the allotted time.

Molly and Greg's trail led right by a tantalizing mystery. Three clumps of feathers lay near each other in the sand, and near them, the former owner of the feathers.

We puzzled over the pockmarks in the sand that accompany each clump of feathers, looked for tracks, found raven prints but nothing else discernible. We noticed that each clump was composed of a different type of feather. We discussed and came up with stories to narrate the sequence. But the question remains: Who killed this gull?

Trailing Test

2010-05-16T12:39:00.001-07:00

This week we set out to meet Molly and Greg at Gazos Beach. As we set out, a torrential rain came down, beating the landscape into sogginess. When we got there the rain had mostly stopped, but Molly and Greg were nowhere to be found. We did have a message from them, though -- they had laid down two trails for us, and our job was to track them to their hiding places. We broke up into two teams and began.

One team got an immediate feeling, a tug in the gut, that pulled them down to the beach at a sprint. The other group, of which I was a part, watched them run down the trail, West toward the water, and hook North to disappear around a dune. We walked along the same trail, searching for a spot where either Greg or Molly might have turned off and away from the main trail.

One recent trail, rained on but with steep sidewalls on the tracks, cut very obviously off the main trail and up a clear dune. My group agreed on a tracking formation with one lead on the main trail, two flanks assisting the lead and looking for side trails, and a rear guard keeping awareness of the landscape as a whole. We progressed slowly along the trail, trading off our positions as we felt like it.

We crested the high dunes and dropped to low ground, following the trail all the while. Up ahead we saw the other group scattered over the landscape. The trail lead right through their group, and when we came along side them, they explained that they'd felt a strong tug toward this spot, ran here, found the trail, and followed it until they couldn't follow anymore. Both teams, it turned out, were on the same trail, only the other team had approached from the other side. Now we became uncertain about whose tracks were whose -- it had still been raining when the other team got to the trail, so aging was a challenge.

We spread out and spiraled from our last known track as one big, scattered group. Some ranged far afield hoping to pick up a clear trail again. Others stuck with the known trail, creeping along. Some just got bored and went wandering. One picked up a different trail and, thinking it might be Molly's, followed to within 20 feet of our instructor's hiding place but never saw them. One wandered and found a kite, and promptly lost all interest in trailing.

The group that stayed close to the original trail kept creeping along, following the feint, rained-on trail. We came to the high dunes bordering the beach, and a clear trail scrambling up them. The tracks had been rained on to the same degree as the trail we were following, and were about the same size. One of the other team who had run here ahead of us was there investigating the trail with us. She stated, though, that when she and her team had come there earlier there had been no tracks up these dunes. Despite being the right age, size and stride, we accepted that statement and concluded that we were on the trail of one of our own, not Molly or Greg. We kept on the trail and kept discussing whose it was but the idea that we'd lost the trail and were on the wrong one drained our enthusiasm.

We looked briefly but without real intention for more tracks down the dunes and onto the beach, but couldn't immediately see them. We floundered, sat in the sand, watched the kite flutter, and spaced out.

Finally Molly and Greg appeared over the dunes to the south. They told their story, laying out their trails in our mind's eyes, and we told of our experiences trailing them. We talked about our different approaches and modes of organization, what worked, and what didn't.

When we got back to Venture, we lit a fire in the tipi and were joined by Jon Young. He told stories of the Bushmen, of how they use spirit tracking and that pull in the gut as a last resort, and work to hone their physical skills to the utmost, first. He also told stories of search and rescue missions, of how one of the biggest problems in tracking lost people is sorting out the lost person's trail from those left by well-meaning but confused rescue personnel. He stressed the need for one leader on the trail to preserve the integrity of the trail and keep the rescue team from trampling the tracks. One of the final questions he posed was in reference to that "pull" in the gut that some of us felt, that pulled them in the exact opposite direction from our hiding instructors, and right over the trail that my group was following. What was that pull?

Bird Language Intensive

2010-05-16T10:23:00.001-07:00

We met for a solid week to do nothing but learn bird language!

The week was so fully packed with bird connection, people connection, good music, good food and good learning that I cannot do it justice in a blog post. Here, then, is an average day in the life of the Bird Language Intensive, and if you want to know what it's like to live this pattern, come to one of the intensives.

A word on camp organization: Dan Gardoqui headed up the "acorn" (facilitation team), along with some of our NE regulars and special guests from the WAS and OTS community. The whole camp was organized into four clans, each of which had an acorn member as a facilitator. We sat near our other clan members in our sit area, drew our maps of the bird activity with our clans, worked in the kitchen and cleaned house with our clans. The camp was also broken up into eight cardinal and sub-cardinal directional societies, and the clans included members of each society. The Grey Fox clan, for example, had members of the East, Southeast, South, and etc. societies. We often organized wandering and tracking activities along society lines.

We got up before dawn and carpooled out to our sit area, a south-facing slope near Gazos Creek. We sat quiet and still through the dawn chorus and into full daylight, making notes on the bird activity in each of four 10-minute periods defined by raven calls from our clan leaders. After sitting, we gathered by the cars to map our findings for the morning.

We played energized, immitative games that electrified our bodies and helped us feel what the little birds felt as they foraged and fled from predators. I know the shot below looks like a massive toddler's game of Airplane with adults. In fact,it was a fast-paced, challenging and competitive game that had us all moving intuitively like little brown birds hopping from cover to feed before the hawks swooped in.

At some point in the day we debriefed the sit. An experienced bird language mentor (or two) would sit at the front of the group with all the maps and ask questions of the group. They looked at the maps, noted patterns or inconsistencies, and drew a story of the morning out of the crowd of information.

Back at the lodge after lunch, we took a break in mid afternoon for siesta time. Spontaneous guitarchestras tended to form.

The guitarchestras followed us into the kitchen when it was our clan's turn to help with meal prep. Never has a so-called chore been so celebratory.

After lunch and before dinner we usually went out on the land again. We tracked and wandered to find more information about the stories we brought back in our bird maps.

After the evening meal we gathered in the main room for lecture, stories, or music making.

The week unfolded, progressed, and wrapped up smoothly. Transitions and group logistics, though often consisting of plan B's and unplanned adjustment to outside forces, knit the day together seamlessly. With skillful facilitation and plentiful information, I found the Bird Language Intensive to be the week I'd been waiting for all year.

Hunt by Stillness

2010-05-16T09:39:00.000-07:00

Native Eyes next met at a new location: Sky Camp, at the Point Reyes National Seashore. The area deserved its name. The trail there led through canopied forest and out again on the side of a west-facing slope, open to the ocean and the sunset.

My camera was not working so I only got one photo, on the way in.

We spent the week trailing deer and sitting by their trails in hopes of getting close enough to touch a wild blacktail. We rose at four AM with stars still overhead and owls calling. Each of us made our way to a special spot we'd found the day before, tucked ourselves into brush by the side of a deer trail, and waited.

Many of us waited motionless in the cold dawn, until the sun crested the easterly ridge. We tried not to move until the sun was high enough to warm our own shoulders. At this point, we conjectured, the deer were probably bedded down already and still hunting would prove fruitless. Some of us had close encounters with deer, others waited and saw only birds.

Next time I'd like to put more effort in finding a bottleneck site, where the deer trails all squeeze together into one large trail. Other adjustments to deer finding techniques: build a blind near the trail, to break up my outline; smoke myself thoroughly in the campfire and then find some aromatic herbs like sagebrush to rub on myself, to mask my scent.

Ceremony, survival day 4

2010-04-29T20:51:00.001-07:00

We all woke up seperately, one at a time, before first light. Upon waking each wandered up, looking for a vantage before dawn. The East became pale, and the mockingbirds and robins sang in the valley. One by one each of us scrambled up the rock face and found the others at the high promontory, looking toward the dawn.

The dawn broke cold. When the dawn chorus wound to a close we finally rose and set about the work of breaking camp. We poured water on our fires, stirred the coal beds, and poured more water. We gathered up our bundles of dogbane and seep willow, bundled up our clothes and water filter, and walked out.

We had stashed some snacks at the cars -- coconut juice, and fruit, and even some nuts. Many of us chose to forgo the food, however. We were feeling light and and alive with the energy of the acorns and the food plants, the waters of the land, the dawn light and the birdsong. The thought of eating commercial food so soon actually made some of us sad.

We piled into cars and drove the hours-long way back to the place that the elders would receive us. We were greeted with song, offered water and cleansing herbs to wash of our road dust, and gathered around a fire. We told our story and we were questioned about our journeys. We feasted with elders and friends and families in our nature connection community.

Our gathering lasted into twilight with us circled around a little blaze under great old trees. Just as the last word was said, the first drops of rain began to fall. As we picked up our fire circle, blankets and personal items, the rain came light and soft. Once everything was moved and all were indoors, the rain came as a torrent. Finally it hailed, and the drencher settled in for the night.

Group Mind, Survival Day 3

2010-04-12T19:45:00.000-07:00

We awoke at dawn of course, but few stirred from their fires. I curled by my coal bed, now white with ash, and listened to song sparrows and other greeters of the dawn.

Some of us were still up and moving, though -- notably the man who'd tended all our fires. He looked the most pleased of any of us to be sitting in that campsite that morning.

Then a stream of cursing jolted me fully awake - one of our German cohorts, a fellow with a fondness for foul language, was sitting bolt upright and patting out imaginary flames on his jacket sleeve. As he woke fully from his dream of burning cloth, he looked across the fire to another Native Eyes student. She had been awakened by his blue streak of curses, and now sat upright as well, staring at the charring, glowing hole, a hand's breadth wide, that her fire had opened in her sweater sleeve.

Later we realized that, though we remembered to bring our minds together in thanksgiving at every oportunity, we forgot to separate them.

We lazed and dawdled until someone went down to the creek to taste the acorn. When they came back, bag dripping and full of what we could finally call food, everyone began to move. We revived two of the night's fires, found some good flat-ish rocks, and began stoking.

One fire had lots of coals. On this we heated rocks that were about a quarter of an inch thick. We tested the heat of the rock by licking a finger and touching the surface -- if it sizzled, it was ready. We squeezed most of the water out of the acorn and plastered in on to the hot rocks. Soon the acorn turned dark and the edges of the acorn cracker peeled up. Then we flipped the crackers to cook out the water from the other side. This method was fast, but required constant fire to make more coals. The rocks didn't hold much heat.

At the other fire, we had found some bigger, bulkier rocks. We set up a sort of tripod of tall rocks around the center of the fire and placed our fairly bulky flat rock on top, over the center of the fire. Then we stoked the fire high to heat the mass of the rock. This setup took much more time to get started, but held heat for much longer than the small flat rock setup.

Both fires cranked out acorn crackers for the whole morning. The crackers themselves tasted bland at first -- which is saying a lot, since we were three days hungry by now. But chewing them for a while brought out a lovely nutty sweetness.

As we cooked, stoked the fire, and munched, we also talked. We discussed the year so far, and asked the question, "how can we make the rest of this year of Native Eyes as amazing as we need it to be?"

One of our companions who was not part of the entire Native Eyes year and would be leaving after the survival trip, had wandered off around dawn to find a sit spot. All through breakfast and lunch (the two kind of blended into each other) we were involved with our Native Eyes conversation. The topic didn't concern our absent companion, so we weren't concerned that he was missing the discussion. We saved his portion and kept talking into midday. Then, as the energy wound down around our topic, we realized that he had been gone for many hours. One of us said he would go holler for the wanderer, but got involved again in the last words on the Native Eyes subject, so no one sent out a call.

After we said the final words in our discussion, and all were ready to move on, we looked up to see our wandering friend walking into our camp.

With the bag of acorn empty of even the finest crumbs, our conversation played out, and our companion returned, we needed something to do with all the acorn-energy. We decided to finally do some exploring and move camp. We had our bowless fire drill kit still assembled, but we didn't want to have to spin up another coal that evening. So we gathered punky chunks of wood from the downed pines. Some, about as long as my arm, we used whole. We pushed one end of the punk sticks into the fire to catch a coal, then walked with that end up and out of the wind. It smoldered well until the wind came up and set the punk sticks flaming.

The smaller chunks of punky wood I ground to powder on our acorn grinding stones. I found some long concave chunks of bark and lined them with cattail fluff. Then I poured the punky wood powder over the cattail fluff, taco'd the powder in fluff, and surrounded the whole thing with a layer of bark. I stuffed a live coal in one end and tied the bark tight to restrict air flow. We carried our fire with us.

Our wander spread us out over the land. With no trail and only springy grass to take a track (actually the grass took a track pretty well, but didn't hold it for long), we kept in contact with raven calls.

Finally, we found it. The place. THE place to spend the night. A minute, narrow valley between the two masses of sandstone that sat in the grass like giant rounded loaves of dough. It was sheltered from the night winds and within an easy walk of two downed valley oaks for firewood. Dead manzanitas, too, were scattered on the sandstone. It even had water, though not the fast-flowing crystalline creek that we'd slept by previously.

After resting at the new site for some time, Team Ground Squirrel decided that we'd like to go check our traps. We took a circuitous route to admire the scenery and look for more food on the way.

When we found this beautiful pond turtle neither of us could even consider taking him back to camp for dinner. For all that his kind are our native testudine, I'd never seen one this close, and rarely seen them at all. I've only gotten this close to the pet shop kind of turtle, red-eared sliders. We admired the gold glint and patterning on his skin, and in his eyes, before leaving him in peace.

More spectacular landscape brought us back to the ground squirrel meadow, where we found trap after trap disturbed but unoccupied. Perhaps the nooses were too large, or too noticeable?

With the light taking on the gold of afternoon, both my companion and I felt the magnetism of the sun-warmed earth. We lay in the grass to rest, and my companion began to snore. I relaxed into the ground and dreamed.

When I awoke, I awoke fully and completely. I sat up, feeling refreshed, and said something to my companion. He replied that he had just woken up too and was ready to move on. We stood up and saw another Native Eyes student approaching from the direction of camp. We joined him on his walk to the creek.

Why did we both feel the overwhelming, bone-deep need for a nap at that time? Why did we both snap awake in such synchrony? If we had been asleep when the other Native Eyes person came down, would he have been able to notice us, flat out in the grass?

We returned to camp with our empty nooses and set to gathering firewood. We had two gargantuan piles by dusk, one of manzanita and one of oak. We would sleep warm.

We gathered around our fire after the last light had gone. We gave thanks for the journey we were on, and checked in with everyone. Then we settled ourselves around two fires for the night.

Before we slept we also experimented with a self-feeding fire technique from YouTube. We found that manzanita and weathered oak burn too thoroughly and too quickly. The tower of wood that, according to the video, should have taken hours to burn down took about thirty minutes. But it was spectacular.

Msafiri Time, Survival Day 2

2010-04-10T14:41:00.001-07:00

At dawn I found myself soggy from the steam. I stripped off my warm clothes, laid them where the sun would soon warm them, curled myself by the fire and fell asleep again. We awoke in fits and starts that morning and the sun was high before all of us were on our feet.

I'd had a nauseating and head-splitting migraine in the night. A salt packet in my water and some aspirin from the first aid kit finally cut through the most acute pain, but I still felt sluggish and ill from mild hyponatremia (a good reason to pack salt in your first aid kit on multi-day wilderness trips, especially if fasting is involved). Still, I wanted to find a new campsite for the night.

One of the other participants kept talking about his adventures walking up a similar creek and finding trout in the shadows and backwaters of undercut banks. The day was warm and I wanted to go upstream anyway, so I decided that my willow walking stick would become a fish spear instead. I split the end, sharpened the tines, wedged in two small sticks, and made some dogbane cordage to keep the splits from opening too wide. The whole process took about thirty minutes. And then, with spear in hand and sun warm on my shoulders -- I took a nap on the sandbar. I was exhausted by the work of making a simple fish spear.

As I snoozed others were cracking acorns and grinding them to a coarse, bitter flour. The rhythm of pounding stones and cracking shells drifted me to deeper sleep.

We found that some of the acorns from a particular Valley Oak tree on the Peninsula had exceptionally little tannin and had been dried in a too-hot oven. They turned out to be slow-roasted, sweet, and only very slightly tannic. We roasted them further in the fire to soften them and turn more starches to sugars, and ate them out of hand as we pounded the bitter acorns to flour.

I slept into the afternoon. After drinking small amounts of lightly-salted water all day I at least felt ambulatory, and had some appetite for the roasted acorns. My stomach told me in no uncertain terms, though that only a few of the roasted un-leached acorns would be acceptable.

By afternoon, my eagerness to explore finally outweighed my sluggishness. Another participant was just leaving to set some snares for ground squirrels, and I decided to come along. He had brought some lengths of wire twisted into nooses.

We knew we'd arrived at a good ground squirrel meadow for a number of reasons. The grass was crisscrossed with runs to and from large round holes, some holes dipping diagonally into bare earth mounds and some straight down into the grassy meadow. The squirrels themselves scattered and dropped into these burrows when we approached. And now and then a beeping alarm would sound from an unseen sentry at a burrow.

We scanned the horizon for golden eagles as we worked, wondering if the more distant flicker and squirrel alarms together meant that an eagle was approaching. We set something like eight or ten traps in all, dangling a loop over a run or over a burrow. We staked the wires in the ground, and hoped that the headlong rush of squirrels bolting for their holes would cinch the snares.

I was still so dazed and low energy from fasting that halfway through the snare expedition I forgot where we'd already set the snares. I had trouble pounding in stakes. I started to get angry at the world for letting me get so hungry, tired and ill. I wanted to just stop and lie in the grass until someone took care of me.

Then I remembered something one of my mentors liked to say about the "sacred order of survival." Everyone has a different order to these four necessities, depending on season and environment: shelter, water, fire, food. Sometimes, as in our case, fire can be your shelter. Or it can be your source of clean water. Sometimes a debris hut will save your life. But in all cases, my mentor listed a fifth necessity for survival: attitude. The will to what you need to do, to survive or thrive. And my mentor put this requirement before all else.

Before this trip I thought that fifth, really first, requirement, was a no-brainer. What living being could be so out of the flow of life that it lacks the will to live? It turned out that I might. I wanted to give up all efforts to find firewood, filter water, find food, and make camp. I wanted to lie on the ground until someone else took care of me, made me warm, fed me good hot food.

I took stock of myself: almost to the point of tears with anger at not being taken care of, not having my needs met. And I understood that if my friends weren't there, or were not as skilled as they are, that attitude could possibly have me dying of chronic hypothermia in another few days. And others in the group were also relying on me to keep myself together and support them if they were to break down as I just did.

This whole thought process took no more time than a pause in pounding in the stake. I sat up again and kept pounding.

After our afternoon nap, we began the walk back to camp. On the way we found some Blue Dicks flowers, and my companion showed me how to ID the flower (a tight cluster of blue six-petaled tubular flowers at the top of a long stalk with two long narrow leaves, folded acutely along the midrib, attached at the base), dig deep with a digging stick, and follow the long, delicate, subterranean stem of the flower to the corm. The corm turned out to be about half the size of a marble, with little cormlets clinging to the side. We broke off the baby corms and the root crown (a part at the bottom of the corm that resembles the root end of an onion, and breaks easily from the main corm) and replanted them in the turned earth. Then I ate the corm whole and raw.

Important note: If anyone is planning to eat Blue Dicks, please first consult an expert in plant ID and make sure your specimen is flowering. There are deadly bulb- and corm-bearing wildflowers in California. Please also know the laws concerning gathering wild plants in your area.

The little mouthful of living carbohydrate energy transformed my worldview. Where before, maintaining a positive attitude was a Herculean feat, now my energy buoyed up on its own. Though there weren't any more diggable Blue Dicks, I dug nine more thistles for our evening meal, and walked back with more energy and enthusiasm than I'd felt since before the first morning.

Back at camp the acorn-pounders, after submerging the bag of acorn meal in the creek for the night, had become wood gatherers. Team Ground Squirrel lent a hand gathering dead wood, and soon we had a veritable beaver dam of dry wood on our sandbar. After long discussion, we arrived at a plan for the night: four fires, one for every two people, arranged in a square on the sand. Everyone would lie in a radial pattern with feet to the center and fires between pairs of people. Space constraints kept the plan from working quite as it was sketched, so we wound up with five fires for the night. Our intention was to tend each fire individually, with people waking as their fires went cold and adding more wood as needed. We snuggled up to our little blazes and went to sleep.

But almost no one woke up that night. One person, his fire awareness honed by years of solo camping with no sleeping bag, woke up to add wood to his fire. As he reached behind him into the wood pile, a hand came down in front of him, holding the very piece of wood he had reached for, and placed it in the exact spot he intended. Our eldest Native Eyes student had decided to stay up all night and tend all five fires for us as we slept.

We slept sound and warm through that night.

Msafiri time

2010-04-04T17:50:00.000-07:00

Survival Trip Day 1:

We gathered the previous evening at the Pie Ranch Barn Dance to feast, celebrate our community, and embark on our survival trip with intention and support. We spent the night under the spreading branches of a Coast Live Oak on the property of one of our Native Eyes fellows, rose in the morning with no food, and set out in two cars to Los Padres National Forest. Eight of us, almost the whole of Native Eyes, had elected to go into survival mode -- or as one of our mentors calls it, sustainability mode -- for three nights. We had discussed at length, in a series of meetings throughout the year, why we wanted to go on a survival trip, what we hoped to get out of it, and what we wanted to bring. Our collective intention was never recorded in writing, but was something akin to, "full immersion of body, mind, heart, soul, and spirit in the natural world, with health, happiness, and safety within reason."

Our initial intention had been to make a toolkit of primitive technology and bring that with us -- to coal-burn containers, craft some figure-four traps, make stone cutting tools, and gather and preserve wild foods. We wanted to try sustaining ourselves as a village, using long-term relationships with the land, living off previous season's bounties and learning to harvest this season's riches. But as our timeline accelerated, we found ourselves without handmade items and wanting containers, knives, and other technologies. Most of us brought water bottles and knives. We packed in water filters, because we knew the water to be unsafe. We all wore warm things. Some of us brought backpacks with warm clothes. One brought a blanket. We made sure to bring a first aid kit with a light for emergency use. And we had gathered acorns, some from the same centuries-old Valley Oaks that populate the low places of Los Padres. So we brought unprocessed acorns in the shell. And nothing else.

Even before reaching a parking lot, we had pulled over and grabbed some buckeye wood. There was also a vivacious patch of miner's lettuce under the buckeye. With no other food yet that day, we tore into the greens ravenously.

We reached the parking lot, left the cars, and started walking. We simply walked away from the cars, along a trail that many other hikers probably took -- we didn't have any destination in mind to walk toward. Sometimes we passed Grey Pines and one or a lot of us would stop, pick up some fallen cones, and start bashing them with rocks in search of pine seeds. Not finding any, the foragers would soon catch up with the rest. In the end we found four pine seeds. Shared among eight people, none of whom had eaten anything but miner's lettuce, they were still a delight. We also dug thistles for later, tucking the spiny burdens here and there in our clothes.

We came to a creek. Along the edges, tall willow-like canes grew from the sand, with a few flowers and bark that looked oddly familiar. Coyotebrush? We started cutting dead sticks as soon as we recognized it: Baccaris salicifolia! Mulefat! As good as a Bic lighter, some say. And right alongside, an opposite-leaved herb remeniscent of milkweed. We gathered this, too. Dogbane is a rare treat in the Bay Area primitive technologist's toolkit.

We decided to cross the creek. We never discussed it, but I think we all thought it would be a good idea, though I'm not sure why. We rock-hopped and then waded, one by one, with our shoes and warm clothes fastidiously held away from the water. Then on the last crossing, someone slipped. Into the icy water went the warm clothes and shoes.

We laid the clothes out in the sun, which was by now past it's zenith and into afternoon. We sat down on the sandbar and got to work on mulefat-on-buckeye hand drills. Everyone spun and sweated. I got a blister. We even tried to use the sunglasses we'd found by the creek as a fetish to bring fire. None of it worked. The buckeye that we'd been so happy for this morning turned out to be weathered grey and spongy, and the mulefat had, though dead and sun-baked, still been rooted by the creek. With the sun lowering steadily, I set off to find a handhold for a bow drill.

I wound up following a deer trail on a whim. It went into some soft, sandy ground, and as I ducked around the poison oak that grew so enthusiastically by the run, I looked down. In front of me, on top of all the deer tracks, was a round print as big as my palm. Asymmetrical, big heel pad. But not totally clear. I trailed it for a while, wondering if it could in fact be the dog I'd seen earlier. But the characteristics were consistent. I returned to camp.

Back at camp they were still working away at the hand drills. Most were, anyway. Into the hubbub, I said, "Hey, I think I may have found cougar tracks. Do you guys want to go trail a cougar?" With the sun low, perhaps two hours away from setting, clothes still damp, no shelter and an expected 34 degree night coming on, what else could we do? Everyone jumped up (well, more like staggered, as we were all quite hungry by this time) and went to see the cat sign.

We followed until the trail went to packed earth, and kept following the worn-in deer trail. At the next muddy spot, there the tracks were again, fresher than all the deer tracks. We guessed it was a male, possibly a large one.

Then we found, further along the trail, a big scrape in the earth made by the cat's two hind paws. We sniffed the mound. Half of it smelled sharply of cat pee and the other half absolutely reeked of fresh, meaty cougar scat. We did not dig through the mound, but left it for others in our party to see. If he was pooping meaty scats, it might mean that there was a kill nearby. Now we had another reason to follow: we hoped to steal the cougar's meat.

As soon as we decided that we wanted his meat, we lost the cat's trail. But our search brought us into a wet meadow, bordered by a kind of tree we hadn't seen since driving in: buckeyes. Woodrats in the the buckeyes had stripped some limbs, and the wood seasoned well up off the ground in the dappled shade. When we cut into the limbs, the wood was a smooth, buttery yellow-white. With offerings to the tree and big grins, we selected our pieces and set off back to camp. We had good wood for our fire kit.

On the way back I stopped to rest by another sandy wash. Slanting light picked out skunk tracks, and ground squirrel, deer, lizard, beetle and grey fox tracks. My own tracks trailed among these, larger but really no different. All passing through the sand in search of a living, all leaving our traces. All lit gold in the sun of the afternoon.

At the sandbar we whittled out a board and spindle, and made a long cord of dogbane. Wrapping the cord three times around the spindle, one of the more indefatigable participants took the ends of the cord and began spinning the spindle. In minutes, our bowless bow drill yielded a coal. Others had been working hard gathering pine, and importantly, downed valley oak, as firewood. We had big piles beside the sandbar to fuel us through the night.

Meanwhile, we had been discussing the lack of plush accommodation on the landscape. The sky told of dry weather for that night at least, so we only had cold to consider. We would spend the night at the sandbar to make use of the sand and fire as our shelter. We dug a trench about six inches deep, with the idea of spreading oak coals along the trench, covering them with sand, and sleeping all eight of us side-by-side on heated sand. Then someone piled in stones they'd gathered from higher land away from the water, and we made our fire on the stones.

The fire took a long time to burn down. We roasted cattail shoots, all eight that we were able to find that day, and tried various ways of eating thistle. My favorite is to bake the whole plant near coals, then to eat it from the root end up. The heart of the basal rosette and the leaf bases become sweet and succulent with heat.

We snoozed, curled in our warm clothes, nestled in soft (if a bit damp) sand, by our bonfire. Time passed. Some talked. Some watched the stars. Some dreamed.

When the blaze finally settled we had the stones glowing like coals. We hadn't dug the trench with stones in mind, and now we only had a little flame left to light our work. We built up a second fire for light, spread the stones and coals as best we could (some were too heavy to move with sticks), and piled on sand. Where smoke had wisped before, now steam billowed into the night. The sand was wet. We curled around the little fire as we waited for the sand to dry. And waited. And waited.

Finally the steam seemed to lessen, and some of us braved the heated stretch of sand. We quickly found where rock poked through, and piled on more sand. And waited again for the sand to steam off. When we finally lay down, the Big Dipper had revolved quite a way around Polaris, and all were very ready to sleep. Still, the heat and steam came up. We could only lie for so long before the heat became unbearable, and we'd have to move.

Eventually some of us slept, steam or no. The rest lay by the smaller fire, alternately tending and napping, and keeping mostly warm through the frosty night.

Shelter

2010-03-16T21:45:00.000-07:00

We started this week with a discussion about the year so far. We have done some fun, challenging and rewarding things this year, and lately we seem to have lost some steam. Our conduct on the land has become lax, and our focus is lacking. We took the morning to check in with this pattern. We all had recognized a laxness in ourselves and others, and we discussed its origins and possible resolution. We took the morning discussion time to renew our focus on nature connection and the Native Eyes community.

When our discussion came to a close, we received a challenge: mock survival! We had the afternoon to find a shelter site, get fire from the land, find drinkable water, and feed ourselves, all off the Venture Retreat land. We stated with a stroll down to the redwood circle.

Our first work on the shelter was to design the space and figure our dimensions. Hard work! The sky said it would rain later that night, and rain usually comes in on south winds. So we chose a more or less northerly side of the redwood circle for our structure.

We settled on a fire-heated design in two sections: the tall guys on the right of these photos, and the short people on the left. We framed it with sticks and brought some gravel from the pile nearby to protect the roots of the trees from our fire.

A downed redwood branch provided green boughs to line the shelter.

A palm tree up by the main house gave us fronds, and the redwoods gave us much duff to pile over the fronds.

We layered as much duff as we could find on top of our construction. It was still pretty thin, so we knew we'd have to invest work in heating the space with fire. We made a heat reflector out of stones right behind our fire area, and then wove a larger windbreak and heat reflector out of boughs and firewood.

While the shelter progressed, some of us took time out to wander the creek for food plants, scout for fresh water, and find friction fire materials.

We worked for a long time on our red elderberry hand drill, but to no avail. I was feeling hungry and tired, and in need of a break, but we had no coal yet. While we still worked on our hand drill, the instructors reminded us that we were still part of the RDNA village, that we were in dinner time, and that we would be joining the Essentials and Cultural Mentors in the main house after dinner. I took this as a chance to go tend to some of my physical needs.

When I returned, I found that some of our scouts had located a cache of buckeye wood down the road, and we put together some bow drill kits. We were still in survival mode, though somewhat adulterated by the break to drink water and nibble food. We discussed the break in continuity of our survival scenario with the instructors and eachother, somewhat heatedly, bringing up past patterns that have gotten in the way of our learning journeys this year. In the midst of the discussion, one of our number was bowing steadily on his fire kit. When our discussion resolved and all had clarity, with dusk wrapping close and the need for warmth punctuated by the chill, we had our coal.

Because we hadn't had much warning, we chose to still eat some of the food we brought with us that evening. We walked our tinder bundle from our shelter back to the Native Eyes fire circle (a process that caused one of us to be newly renamed Running Flame) and lit our cookfire. After much discussion we chose to stay at our fire, eat and tell stories, and to rejoin the village the next day. As our meal ended, the first drops of the nights downpour sizzled into our cookfire coals.

We brought burning sticks from the fire circle to our shelter and kindled our fire there. All crawled in and snuggled close, most forgoing sleeping bags and and we started the firewatch for the night. For the first part of the night, rain rolled of our shelter. All inside stayed quite dry, if not warm. I took firewatch in the middle of the night, woke and tended fire for my sleeping compatriots. By then the rain had stopped, and the whole landscape was black clouded night, save for the gold of our fire on the faces of my friends.

The design left much to be desired: smoke swirled in under the low roof and choked sleeping people at times, so the fire tender had to keep handfuls of small twigs ready to kick up flame and burn off smoke. Our feet were universally freezing by morning. And the tall folk hadn't slept with faces to the fire, so some of them stayed very cold.

Still, the night of fire-tending and sleeping rough in a shelter of our own making seemed to kick loose the stagnant energy of the last few weeks, to tighten up that slack that we'd started our day discussing. At the end of my mostly wakeful stint as fire tender and my fitful and chilly sleep, I woke feeling rejuvenated in spirit, if not in body. The winter wrens woke us before the sun and we greeted the day with an awe and reverence that I hadn't even known had been lacking.

Trailing

2010-03-07T17:58:00.000-08:00

One of our mentors told us that "the only way to learn trailing is to trail." So, we shall trail. We started out this week at Cloverdale with a twist on our trailing theme: we mapped vole trails. Parting the thistle sea (in places), digging up tunnels, and probing grass thatch for well-worn runs, we set all our discoveries to paper.

Then we put the papers together to form a nine-piece map of the vole zone.

Back at camp, we made our fire, cooked dinner (yummy little bread buns filled with wild onions and chanterelle mushrooms and baked in the coals), and joined RDNA essentials and Cultural Mentors. We spent the evening forming new clans and societies. Everyone will get to try on new roles in the RDNA village.

The next morning Native Eyes set out for a rainy bird sit all by ourselves on the same vole hill. Intermittent periods of song, rain and silence marked the sit. Afterward, we got back on our trailing kick. We broke up into two groups and one group walked single file, not making an effort to hide their tracks, and hid. The other group trailed the first, keeping their heads up and eyes toward the horizon, trying to see the hiders before walking into their midst. We had so much fun that we played the game four more times before heading back to camp.

At camp, we got down to the business of helping to stoke the Essientials and Cultural Mentor people on tracking. Our first step was to set up a model of some particularly pertinent sign, helpfully placed at a focal point of the main house. We gathered the duff, sculpted the dummy turd, and arranged it painstakingly on the front porch. The first person out the door walked right past it without so much as a glance down. Actually, people noticed it pretty soon and began questioning us about it. Success!

To follow up, we sketched out posters and stuck them up on walls. Apologies for the poor quality of the photos.

The above showcase of scats is by yours truly. And no, the scats are not launching, levitating, flying or exploding. Those action lines are intended to represent scrapes in the ground.

That evening, the Essentials and Cultural Mentors folks watched the great dance, and we chatted with Jon Young about his upcoming trip to the Kalahari. We retired with many questions bouncing around our heads regarding bushmen, tracking, and mentoring.

Anake

2010-02-21T11:58:00.001-08:00

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

2010-02-14T16:08:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-07T17:04:00.000-08:00

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.

Cattails as Construction Material

2010-01-29T19:48:00.000-08:00

We started this week out with a nice dip in the pond. It was raining and the rest of the landscape was already drenched and slick with water. So we figured we'd finish the job and go jump in the lake. Actually, we were after cattails.

When we arrived at camp we found our firepit flooded. Everything was awash and the local gopher holes had turned to artesian wells gushing with water. Our little camp was transformed from meadow to a crisscrossing of clear creeks and treacherous mud. You can see the puddle in the firepit below.

To protect our Tuesday night tradition of cooking over the fire, we determined this week that we'd have to construct a shelter. We started by collecting cattails from the local spring-fed ponds and carting them back to camp, then arranged them radially around the firepit to see how much we'd gathered. Our cattail supply circled the firepit entirely.

We came to consensus quite quickly on our design and construction strategy, then broke into teams. One team gathered poles while the other tied the cattails together at the thick ends (base of the stalk) to form skirt-like arched mats.

When the mats were done and the poles retrieved, it was time to dig postholes. About eight inches down the postholes turned into wells. Every chop of the posthole digger sent sprays of mud. We set the posts in, wedged in place with sticks and stones, and called it a night.

...

The next morning we had an inspiring bird sit and spectacular debrief. The sit was marked by pockets and huge blankets of silence over the land, and at the end the Cooper's Hawk winged high straight over the meadow.

While we debriefed the bird language patterns around the hawk, a Redtail began circling and posturing territorially up the valley to the northeast. Jays yelled the "hawk on the wing" call,shack shack shack shack shack! The jays began standing sentinel looking south, flickers were on the move, and robins plowed in a wave out of the lower valley going northwest. Silence settled on. Soon, flying low up the valley from the south, swooping from behind the yurt to try his talons on the quail (no kill), came the Cooper's himself. As we stared disbelievingly at the hawk's wake, another large bird flew fast and high over our heads, coming from the Redtail's territory up the valley northeast of us. It sped over the still silent meadow with strong, regular beats of it's pointed wings and someone shouted "Peregrine!"

After some moments of exuberant exultation and staring wide-eyed into the sky, we had had enough of these distractions. So we moved the rest of the debrief into the yurt. (Really, though, the cold, clouds and wind came back so we went in to sit by the fire.)

In the afternoon, we got to work further on the shelter. We assembled the frame by lashing poles together with whatever string or twine we could find, and began setting up the skirt-mats on the frame. We tied them in place too.

We found that the rough thatch, though lying well and smoothly on the outside, hung through shaggily inside and dangled in faces and eyes. We wove switches and long twigs into the inner wall to hold back the danglies.

Finally, with dusk settled on, our frame was done. We'd finished the first layer of our south, east, and north walls. Our firepit had drained, and we used excess twigs and tules to make a raised mat to keep our butts off the still gooshy mud. The space was, if not complete, then still ready and useful.

With the extra poles chopped into firewood and laid as a raft to protect our little fire from the damp, we lit a hand-drill coal. Cattail down from the cut cattails, kept inside shirts against warm bodies all day, came out dry and ready to nurture the coal. We nursed the fire to life in a quickly-gathered tinder bundle, lit a teepee of dead twigs harvested from trees that had stood in the sun all day, and had our first ever cattail-sheltered Native Eyes fire. The fire, though made with some rotten and green wood, sent just a wisp of smoke straight up into the darkening sky.

The nearly full moon rose in the East over our shelter. The chill wind that snaked up the valley from the southwest did not make our fire waver. The fire still sent its column of smoke straight up and out the half-moon hole in our partial roof. There is something deeply, instinctively satisfying about sitting by a central fire and telling stories of natural mystery, with firelight dancing in our eyes, our shadows playing across round cattail walls.

sick day

2010-01-29T19:46:00.000-08:00

This post is a placeholder for a future entry. I spent last week of Native Eyes getting well from a nasty cold, and I'm waiting for those who attended the class to send me photos and stories. When I receive them, I'll post them here.

Why Connect Community to Nature?

2010-01-11T11:51:00.000-08:00

I recently had an opportunity to be part of a group of trainees that will take nature-connection mentoring to a new level of public availability. When I found myself unable to join due to important prior commitments, such as TrackersBAY, Riekes Center, and Native Eyes programs, I was severely disappointed. Considering my emotional response, one of the mentors involved with the program asked, "what need would this strategy have met?" In other words, why so powerful a reaction? I didn't have a ready answer.

The training, like the Native Eyes program, would provide immeasurable personal growth. And last year of Native Eyes was, for me, all about personal growth. Self-actualization, or being fully alive in one's self, is a powerful draw to many on this nature connection trail. With the tools I received last year in Native Eyes, the help of Kamana Student Services, and my community network, I could keep up personal growth for a long time. So personal growth isn't the pressing need.

The training would also provide a definite role, a place in this community that would make use of my gifts and my learned skills. Public-schooled kids like myself, having been shunted from room to room all our lives, get barfed out of our institutions and into the world with glazed eyes. We wander, never having had the opportunity to develop our visions for life and our gifts that may manifest those visions. Understandably, I want to find my place, find my gifts and use them to bring my community and humanity as a whole back into connection with nature. But why do I want to bring others into connection with nature?

I've heard many reasons why people "should" connect to nature. They range from reasoning like "people will be more motivated to stop climate change" to "people will stop trying to kill eachother" and many utopian scenarios in between. True or not, these seem abstract and sometimes fear-based, using nature connection to avoid violence rather than move toward a future full of possibility. Reasons like that fall heavy on my shoulders, draining rather than energizing. So why am I still motivated to connect myself and my community to nature?

I remember my early journey through life in the city, my landscape of concrete and cars, and my gut-level need for nature. I see that need in the eyes of many others around me. I hear it in their words and voices. Remembering my journey, perceiving others' yearning for the same, I want as many people as possible to satisfy that need through a deep connection to place. But why do I need to be part of their journeys? Why isn't it enough that other more powerful mentors than I offer nature connection mentoring to the world?

At the end of all this wondering and reasoning, I've come to one conclusion. Nature connected people generally display certain traits, called the "symptoms of awareness" in Coyote's Guide. They tend to have peaceful minds, to be fully alive in who they are, to love people and nature deeply, to know how to be of help to others and the world, to have strong connections to each other as well as nature, to be energized and at play. I need to be around people who display at least some of these characteristics. I want my immediate associates, my family, my community, and the leaders of the world to display these characteristics. And I'm fascinated with the growth and discoveries that people make on this journey toward expressing the symptoms of awareness. I want to be part of that.

This, then, is the need that the training might have filled: the self-interested need to grow a community around me, for myself and my family, my friends and future generations, that consciously brings out these symptoms of awareness in people. That is the possibility that has drawn me back to Native Eyes for this second year.

Renewal of the Creative Path

2010-01-11T11:21:00.000-08:00

Though Native Eyes is on a break, we're still tracking. In keeping with this inward-turning season, we've been tasked with inner tracking of ourselves and our lives. So last week I worked on the Renewal of Creative Path exercise.

The staff of the Regenerative Design Institute has a practice that they use every midwinter to renew their focus and revitalize their energy. They call it the Renewal of Creative Path (ROCP). This powerful tool for realigning one's life trajectory and sparking positive change is one of the many tools I've been fortunate to find through RDNA.

It includes 7 parts. The first reviews times when we have been especially able to connect with the Earth. Part 2 focuses on the constant themes in our lives, the things that continually come up that help us feel creative and energized. The third deals with synchronicities around the natural world that form a pattern through our lives. The fourth helps to outline our special gifts, and the fifth part delves into blockages and obstacles in our paths. The sixth provides a framework for releasing false hopes and expectations, and asking forgiveness from anyone we may have harmed. The seventh step brings all the previous ones together in the formulation of an ideal scene for the coming year.

What follows is my story of how I came to Native Eyes, a story that became more fully articulated as a result of Part 3 of ROCP. I hope it might serve as inspiration for anyone who may feel drawn to this study, and who may think that it's out of their reach.

While finishing my degree at New College, I went to a talk by Jon Young at IONS. I was blown away by the depth of the 8 shields mentoring model. But I soon gave up on learning what I wanted because of the price of classes. Still I kept an eye out for further offerings.

After college I travelled to Burkina Faso in Africa. I met many amazing people, and was impressed with the Burkinabe’s generosity, human decency, emotional even keel and groundedness, and with their intensive and lively knowledge of place. I resolved that I would learn the same groundedness and knowledge of my place, and find a way to bring out the same generosity and human decency in my own culture.

Back in the Bay Area, I found out about the Kamana program, and was invited by a friend to begin studies with Kamana 1 together. I received a gift, then, out of the blue: Kamana III arrived in the mail, from my parents, before I'd even opened Kamana 1.

The same friend who brought me into Kamana invited me down to Blue House Farm as part of a Regenerative Design class. Farmer Ned found out that I was studying Kamana, and after a talk over the fire, planted the seed of the East Bay Tracking Club in my brain. I found the Integral Awareness Training Series (IATS) class online, but was again discouraged by the price tag and the timing. I gave up again and nearly forgot about the class. I continued working on Kamana, wandering the hills alone and learning about the land.

That winter, my employers decided to give me a bonus and a week of paid vacation – as long as I took my week sometime in January. I decided that I’d like to go bike touring around the Bay for a week – never mind that I’d never camped alone before, or gone bike touring, or that it was the darkest, coldest and wettest time of year. Then I remembered that Blue House Farm was in the area that I’d pass through on my way back up north, and I remembered IATS. The next class would be held exactly on the days I'd be near Blue House. And my Christmas bonus was just enough to pay for my tuition for one class. I registered immediately.

I got to IATS and met amazing people there. I found someone who lived in the East Bay and who wanted to help organize an East Bay Tracking Club, and many others who helped spark interesting and beautiful changes in my life. Through those friends and allies I found out about RDNA and Native Eyes. At the RDNA open house, I decided at once that despite the odd schedule, despite the cost, I would some day attend Native Eyes. Again I felt blocked by the price tag, and again I nearly forgot about it for half a year, while I worked on Kamana II and on organizing the EBTC.

The next year, thanks to the connections made in IATS, I found myself invited to the Native Eyes program on a partial scholarship funded by a work-trade internship with the Riekes Center. I quit one of my jobs, begged my parents for some cash to live on, and restructured my life over the course of one month to fit all my new schedules. And then I launched into Native Eyes.

I don’t have much time for Kamana II practice or solo wanders lately, but I have so much more direct experience, community connection, and mentoring than Kamana alone ever provided. And when I consider my eventual departure from the Native Eyes course, I can look at the binders for Kamana II and III and look forward to the studies that have been waiting on my shelf, drawing me along this naturalist’s path.

Flying Blind

2009-12-21T15:43:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-13T15:42:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-05T19:27:00.000-08:00

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.

Finding Bones with Riekes

2009-11-28T17:06:00.000-08:00

Native Eyes was off this week for the Thanksgiving holiday, so I'm again posting a Story of the Day from the Riekes Nature Awareness group that I lead in Huddart Park. Once again, no photos for this one.

This Friday we scouted the woods near our Super Secret Hideout.

We started the day with games and work on our primitive shelter, and then welcomed the afternoon hours with scout sit spots. We went quietly and stealthily to our sit spots, to find out what cool things were around and bring news of them back to the group. After sitting, we gathered up in our primitive shelter for a repotback from each scout location. One of our number had found some beautifully articulating animal leg bones at her sit spot that hadn't been there last week, so we decided to check out that location further.

On the way, we found and followed animal runs that had been worn-in to the forest floor so well that there wasn't a crumb of leaf litter left on the packed, almost shiny earth. Following the run, we accidentally uncovered a Pacific Giant Salamander hiding in a damp gully, and everyone went utterly hyper on Pacific Giant Salamander energy. Yelling, dancing, silly faces and general tomfoolery ensued.

After many, many minutes of loud and gleeful celebration of the salamander find, the raucous atmosphere began wearing thin and people started yelling at eachother rather than with eachother. We broke that feedback loop with a spontaneous game of camouflage, put the salamander back where we found it, and continued on the trail of the bones.

We finally arrived at the small clearing where the bones lay. Everyone's energy was still scattered and loud. We circled around the bones on our knees and brought the energy down to Earth with a sense meditation.

Everyone in the circle placed a finger on the bones. Using guided visualization, we consciously checked in with our senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing, and finally sight.

In our meditation we related our senses to that of the animal, a deer, that had passed and left it's bones for us to find. We recognized that this animal had sensed the world much like we now do, had eaten, breathed, and had a family. We considered the animal that had eaten the deer, where it could be in the woods at present, how it had felt when it ate the deer, and the energy that was added to it's life from the deer's own life. Everyone was quiet, still, and focused on the present moment.

"How do you feel when you think about this deer?" I finally asked.

"Sad," came the reply.

"How do you feel when you think about the animal that ate the deer?" I
next asked.

"Happy! ... Um, that's confusing," was the unanimous conclusion.

"Isn't it?" I said.

Ghosting Trails

2009-11-24T21:57:00.000-08:00

After our morning bird sit this week, we gathered in the yurt at Commonweal to debrief and pull out the stories from our morning sit. Before we even considered our markings on the maps, we got into a discussion about a deer seen near the bird sit meadow, and it's interesting behavior. It had pronked away from a downslope observer and stopped at a fence. Out of sight of it's first observer, though unknowingly observed by another person upslope, the deer crouched low and proceeded to trot with a gliding motion, keeping it's body low and even with the ground, along the fence line until it came to a low point, leapt over the fence, and glided away up a ravine. This behavior in the deer ("ghosting") dominated our conversation for two hours straight. We talked about deer gaits, beta-to-delta brain states, predation and hunting, blind spots and ruts in awareness, the wisdom of very old animals, and much more besides. Through it all the bird maps lay unused on the floor. We were all engrossed in our deer trailing conversation.

After our intensive ghosting dowload in the yurt, we got the chance to go out on the land again, in small hunting parties of Essentials, Native Eyes, and Cultural Mentoring students. My group began by following the morning's ghosting deer up it's ravine runs.

We followed easy and open trails until they became choked with brambles and poison oak, and then we crawled through on hands and knees. We found a cavern of willow, blackberry, and juncus that held fresh deer beds, buck rubs from this season, and a large woodrat nest. Which of those creatures left the above marks on the willow limb?

A short belly-crawl later, we found this deer-sized hidey hole under a coyotebrush, the surrounding juncus formed into a perfect deer body mold. Through the backdoor of the hidey hole, we squeezed and inched on our bellies through a tunnel of poison oak and up the steep slope. I wondered for a split second if we were in fact following mountain goats, not deer. But deer pellets and dainty, pointed tracks led the way through the dry coyotebrush and broom-clothed cliff.

The view from halfway up the deer trail was spectacular. We inched on, and as the path began to level out, I heard a rhythmic crashing in the brush ahead. I froze, and the crashing subsided into the distance, one burst at a time. A pronking deer?

Belly-crawling through the broom toward the origin of the sounds, I began to make out a small clearing inthe brush ahead. On my feet now at the edge of the clearing, pushing the brush back, my hand came back wet. I inspected the wet branch and found freshly nipped ends. Was the wetness saliva? Or plant sap? The browse was about two and a half feet off the ground. Could it be deer browse? Or what about rabbit, or mouse? Mice could climb the broom, and we've seen rodents browsing stranger things. I was excited by the possibility that it could be fresh browse from the deer I'd just pushed off of it's daybed.

We followed the trail in the direction of the pronking deer, but quickly lost our fresh trail. We came to a stand of live oaks. There my group was thoroughly distracted by the oaks' climbability.

We spent the rest of the day tracking the other groups over the landscape by the patterns of bird alarms around them, and trying to stay unnoticed ourselves. We tracked four seperate groups by their concentric rings, and got visual confirmation of three of them. We ended the day by racing down the hill at high speed, following deer trails into the backdoor of Commonweal Garden.

Tracks & Trails

2009-11-12T17:16:00.000-08:00

We began this week with a wander for deer sign, with a focus on holding eight approaches to tracking all at once. We broke up into two groups of four and each person took a directional axis. One person in each group held East-West, another Southeast-Northwest, and the others South-North and Southwest-Northeast. Then we reviewed the tracking questions that our 8-shields model associates with those directions.

East held the question "who," considering the identity of each deer around commonweal, its sex, age, and other identifying features. Paired with that was West, the community-ecology questions about why the deer came to particular places on the landscape. Southeast brought the learnings that come from experiential, body-based immitation of the deer, acting out their gaits and behaviors. And paired with Southeast, Northwest tracked ancestral patterns in the deer. Our Northwest questions helped us notice the worn-in spots from generations of deer patterns across the land and sought to understand the inborn deer energy that channels all deer through those patterns. South was concerned with trailing the deer, finding the freshest trails and following them. Together with South, North asked, "where are the deer now" and sought not only to track the living trail straight to the deer's hooves, but to be able to predict the deer's location in the present moment. Southwest asked, "what are the deer eating," and challenged us to find deer saliva still wet on fresh browse. Paired with Southwest, Northeast asked, "with what energy are the deer moving on the land?" Northeast questioning sought the bird language signatures that would speak of the intensity or mildness of the deer's personal presence, attitude, or state of mind, asking "how does it feel to be this deer, right now?".

Armed with these questions, we began our hunt.

We circumambulated Commonweal using the deer trails, finding tree graveyards, mushroom gardens, deer bones, scats, browses, raccoon and fox latrines, woodrat homes, mysterious burrows, a live yearling doe (with her saliva still on her freshest browse, according to one of the Native Eyes kids), and much more. We were also searching for entry points on the fence, hoping to be of service to the garden as well as to our own education. We found an interesting spot just above some check dams in a gully, next to the deer fence. A scuffed, smooshed patch of ground, holding oddly scraped-looking hoof tracks and deer, raccoon, and other belly fur stuck in the mud. We surmised that this might be an entry point.

Of course, we had to see for ourselves if it was possible to squeeze under the fence here.

Back at camp, we started our fire with help from the Native Eyes kids. We would need heat for our next project: Pitch sticks!

We had pitch from stone pine and gray pine, collected old, dry rabbit, deer, and goat scat, and saved some charcoal from the fire. We selected out the cleanest looking, white pitch for another purpose. The rest we popped in a pot and melted down, combining it with roughly equal parts (just looking for the right consistency, not a prescribed ratio) of powdered herbivore scat and charcoal. Then we took green willow sticks (though any stick would do) and dipped them in our bubbling black brew. We rolled the dollops of tarry goo over cool rocks to mold the goo to the ends of the sticks, and built up good chunks of the stuff on our sticks. It cooled to a very hard glassy consistency. We now have pitch to use as sealant, glue, fuel, or modeling compound when we need it!

The nicer raw pitch we melted down with equal parts beeswax and honey to make chewing gum. The Native Eyes kids couldn't get enough of the tooth-sticking mixture.

We also used chunks of pitch, set aflame, to turn a polypore fungus and forked stick into a torch. The kids enjoyed that one too.

The next day we had our morning bird sit with just Native Eyes, sitting through periods of intense alarm, tension, and oppression. We never saw a Coopers Hawk, and the Kestrel, though on the wing, kept silent. But the general sense was of a bird killer stalking the sky, causing anxiety in the birds who had to speculate on their potential killer's whereabouts. It seems like last year's pattern of oppression, particularly surrounding the Wednesday morning garbage truck on the nearby road, has continued. Were we too raucous in our wake-ups, and called in the Cooper's? Does the hawk now follow the garbage truck to exploit engine-roar-addled songbirds? Or is there something else to this pattern?

With the bird sit over and mapped, we mobilized to Abbott's Lagoon for a day of tracking the "wet weasel."

After some speculation and prediction about otter habits and habitats, we headed to the lagoon. At the edge between the freshwater and brackish pools we found fresh fluffed up sand, a sinuous, furry drag mark, and lots of tracks.

Among the frenetic confusion of tracks there was also a blob. It was slightly bigger than a quarter, shiny and wet, and emanated an odor of rancid fish. It jiggled when poked. We found other sites of rolls in the sand, and many had similar rancid blobs to one side.

We also found nice tracks of another creature, impressed in the algae at the little rocky waterfall between fresh and brackish pools.

We spent some time questing for the owner of the other tracks among the cattails and mud of the freshwater bank. We were called back too soon, but upon returning, we were sent on yet another errand. Our instructors showed us a set of cute little tracks, travelling over the sand in a consistent lope. We were told to follow it.

It tangled among the tracks and stories of many other species.

It went it's own way as often as not.

To aid in our trailing, we gave our subject a name, "Diggy Iggy Zig Zag," for obvious reasons.

We ran alongside the trail while the sun was on it and the sand was clear and fine. The trail began climbing the dunes, dipping in and out of shadow, weaving between grass clumps and brush. Where before we ran, now we crawled. As the sun dipped low, we could barely see the tracks even at a crawl. If we wanted to find the animal itself, we would have to move faster than it was moving, and it was still at it's consistent lope.

We switched to prediction, looking at the landscape and the general direction of travel, considering the temperament and prefferences of our animal, and guessed where the trail would go. We set a marker (a cattail stalk) in the sand at the last certain track, and forayed out on possible routes that Mr. Zig Zag could have gone. We sometimes took routes that held tracks of many animals, but sometimes these routes felt lacking. On closer inspection, the tracks resolved into a jackrabbit or a cluster of mouse prints, not Mr. Zig Zag, and we would return to our marker and ask again for a likely route. The next one we tried would hold a surprise of clear Diggy Iggy tracks in a wind-protected hollow, following more or less Diggy Iggy's direction and habits of travel. This way, following gut feeling and prediction, we wound our way all the way to the ocean and our final clear straight trail of Diggy Iggy Zig Zag prints.

As we charged down to follow them, a small stone came flying at us from behind a dune. We had been stalked by our fellow students, and had been too focused on the trail to notice.

We returned as the sun settled into the western ocean, the trail still dancing in our bodies and our mind's eyes.

Moving the Tracks

2009-11-05T21:18:00.000-08:00

We started the day at Venture, gathering scat. We collected as many examples of animal (not domestic or human) scat as we could find and brought them back to the group, assembling them together into a Poo-seum. We shared field guides and got down to the task of journaling the scats. We listed all the information we knew about the scat, sketched it with measurements, and listed possible species. Then for each possible species, we listed three reasons why is could be that animal, and three reasons why not. Here's an example:

Our Poo-seum was the center of much bustle and activity.

We had to end our scat study earlier than anyone wanted, because we were going out on the land again, this time to journal tracks. We piled into cars and drove to the nearby lagoon. Its outlet to the ocean had been blocked by sand, and it was filling up with fast with fresh water. Most of our favorite spots were unerwater, but the dunes still held beautiful soft sand, and the sun was slanting at the perfect angle.

Here's an attempt at reproducing these tracks in a life-sized sketch of the track itself and the gait pattern:

The next day we moved out early to Gazos Beach for a morning of tracking stations. Groups of 2-3, with some Native Eyes people and some staff, chose spots on the landscape to focus on. The Cultural Mentors and Essentials people would break up into groups, too, and rotate through each of our stations. Every station had a different story to tell, but many told them in similar ways. The rhythm of bobcat paws rang from the dunes as people tapped in time to the trails. People transformed into coyotes and raccoons as we tracked. We ran along on all fours and imitated the patterns in the sand.

This was a new trail to me. It was about two feet wide, to the west (oceanside) of the dunes. No people had been over there making strange tracks, so what was it?

One group followed a long, consistent canid trail, letting the rhythm of the trail move in their bodies, bouncing along the line like a pack of coyotes in step. But the rhythm broke and lead coyote-person stopped, crouched down, and studied the ground. Everyone clustered around, finding their consistent trail all tangled up in a cluster of tracks. Someone said they saw a stop there, with all four of the canid's feet on the ground. Others wondered where the animal had gone, as the long orderly trail simply seemed to disappear. Then we noticed a chunk of stuff, framed by two of the canid's forepaws:

This Mystery Chunk consisted of short plant fibers, all packed tightly together. It weathered to orange-brown, but inside it was still green, and smelled of aromatic herbs. There was a clump of soft grey rabbitty looking fur stuck to the outside, and when we picked up the chunk, some round rabbit scat pellets rolled out. What was it? Why had the canid changed its pattern so sharply near it? Where had the canid gone afterward?

After our tracking morning, we ended the day at the nearby tidepools, catching crabs, poking sea anemones, tasting seaweed, and gathering mussels for dinner. We ended the day bone-tired and well nourished.

Ghost Supper

2009-11-01T18:24:00.000-08:00

We started this week off with a wander in a new area, with the goal of familiarizing ourselves with the landscape and resident organisms. Voles were present in plenty, their little feet already having worn long, deep runways in the grass.

Coyote scat greeted us at the road in, but above the entrance road bobcats seemed to reign as the common small predator. We named the owner of this scat and scrape Pointy Butt Paul, to go with his feline neighbor on the Blue House Farm side, Big Butt Bob. Every scat of his contained quite a bit of rabbit fur and bone shards, and was long, ropy and pointy like a coyote scat. But each sat firmly in the V of a bobcat-like scrape, each was coated in a slimy shellac-like layer, and each emanated noxious rotten meat and sour milk stink.

On the plateu of the high lands, we encountered more vole sign and wondered aloud where the badgers were to take advantage of this vole proliferation. We found this big dig quite soon after.

Note the deep scrape marks on the inside walls of the tunnel.

Continuing over the plateu, we found this small, chunky scat composed of what looked like Jerusalem Cricket parts.

Further along, nearer the fire road, we found many little circular digs in the grass. Nearby we found a Jerusalem cricket, and later another.

On our way back we found a downed Monterey Pine and experimented with peeling the bark to make containers. We tried the bark on the trunk first, using our knives to cut down and peel the bark, but found that the craggy parts cracked and the knife kept slipping to pierce the inner bark. We decided that that slab would be food, rather than craft material. We revised our strategy, and tried with the smaller, younger, less craggy branches. We used a lopped-off branchlet with a wedge-shaped end to separate the bark from the limb. It worked beautifully, and we returned to camp with our bark slabs in hand.

That evening we celebrated our first night of Ghost Supper. Like many traditional holidays celebrated at this time of year (Samhain, Dia de los Muertos, and others), Ghost Supper is an ancestor honoring ceremony that invites one's dead relatives to mingle and socialize for one night. Based on an Ottawa tradition, this ceremony employs an all-night sacred fire and copious amounts of food. The fire represents a portal to the ancestors, and is intended to be opened (lit) at dusk, and closed (cooled and out completely) by dawn. The hosts make food for all comers, serving their ancestor's favorite dishes and greeting guests as if the guests were the host's departed relatives. All food must be given away, eaten, or burned as an offering to the fire and the ancestors, and the fire must be cold and out entirely by sunrise the next day.

The instructors feasted us and hosted us at their fire in fine form on Tuesday night. We ate and drank and told stories of our ancestors, of ghosts, and of the season. The fire burned long into the night, and was just cold as the sun crested the Eastern ridge.

After our morning bird sit, we devoted the entire next day to preparing for our turn at hosting a Ghost Supper. We had much organizing to do, and just enough time to do it.

Traditionally, men gather the firewood, light the fire, and tend it. Women carry the water, cook the food, serve food and drink, and beautify the site. I had my own conflicts with this system, but I was willing to give it a try to see what hidden teachings might be passed on in this way of doing things.

I wore my Firekeeper tee shirt as a sort of consolation prize, and to symbolically show my dead grandparents, who I'd be serving their favorite apple pie and cheddar cheese, what I'd been up to lately. Our clan discussed the fire, and determined that at least some of us wanted to keep it going all night. Then when we called for fire tenders, only three people raised their hands. I thought that this couldn't possibly be enough to get us through the night, so I raised my hand and said that I'd be willing to tend fire if we needed another hand.

When the sun dipped low and it was time to light our fire, all others with fire kits were absent. I had my elderberry and cedar hand drill on hand, so another woman, myself, and a man all cooperated to spin up a coal and light the teepee that the men hand made.

The final flurry of preparation came, and I was the only fire tender without final prep to do. I tended fire until we all gathered again to greet our first guests. I asked the other fire tenders if any of them would like to take over, but none of them felt called. They said they would like to take over when I tired. We launched into our serving and stories, and I tended fire while the guests sat and ate and talked.

Others took over while I visited other fires, but late into the night most people wanted to snooze or chill, and I was enjoying tending fire. Orion rose in the East, announcing the early hours of the morning. The half moon set in the West, and in the deepening darkness Orion's bow shone in a sparkling arc. I tended and waited for my clan member who had wanted to tend fire into dawn. As I waited I stared at the coals and began to see a vortex spiraling down into the earth. I fed the ancestor's food to the fire, and saw it go up in spirals of smoke to Orion and the shooting stars that peppered the night.

Finally, I decided that I'd stayed up long enough. My clan member wasn't coming back. I let the fire die down to a coal bed, got up to fetch my sleeping gear, and nearly stepped in my pie. I'd forgotten to burn all the food.

Another clan member woke up to help me stoke the fire again and burn the food. We finally managed to burn it all, but the fire was now big and blazing, and my stamina had run out. I passed the fire stick to my clanmate and fell into heavy sleep.

I woke up well after dawn, next to a still red-hot and smoldering pile of mostly-burnt wood, and felt pretty disappointed in myself for not fulfilling the tradition. But I figure that for most of the night the ancestors got a first-rate comedic performance, so it wasn't all bad.

The experience has left me with many questions, and put a sharper edge on one of my sacred questions that RDNA has thus far been honing to keenness. My question, though not entirely articulated in words, has to do with novel practices and traditions, and when one is appropriate over the other. In this ceremony, we chose to alter the tradition and bring in the novel practice of fluidity in roles. Would it have gone more smoothly, with more labor shared more equally, if we had abided by the Ottawa traditional gender roles? Would the fire tenders have been more organized, and would the fire have been put to bed at the right time? Would I have been able to see the twin spirals in the fire? Would I have experienced the on-point in-the-moment awareness brought about by seriving others with vital light and heat that I experienced as a fire tender, had I kept myself to the traditional female role?

Kitchen Wisdom

2009-10-26T19:22:00.000-07:00

We began the session with the usual wander for cougar sign. None found, as far as we could tell. We tracked eachother, the returning winter birds, the warm pools of Indian Summer sun, and the new wild radish sprouts that follow the early rain.

Back at camp, we met Matt Berry and his collection of pots made from wild-harvested clay. We were going to do the same, to have some communal kitchenware appropriate to our rustic open-fire setting. We began by digging the clay from the ground just twenty feet from our fire, and mixed it with sand (grog).

We mixed the clay by foot and by hand.

The pots were big communal affairs, with some people pinch-pot molding the pointed bottoms, some people rolling "snakes" to make coils, and some people building up the coils into pots. All were absorbed in the work, even the junior contingent. We grudgingly set asid our creations when dinnertime rolled around, to be finished at a later date.

A highlight from the next day was Matt's wild foods walk. All plant uses listed here are my off-the-top-of-my-head recollections. If you're looking to use wild plants, take one of Matt's or another experienced instructor's classes yourself, and start studying some reputable books. One not listed at that link, that might be a good starting point, is the Peterson guide to Venomous Animals and Poisonous Plants. Learn what'll kill you before (or at the same time as) learning what'll nourish you.

One of the first and most nutritious gifts of the season that we encountered were new green Stinging Nettles (Urtica dioica) sprouting by the creek. These are even edible raw if you roll the leaf so that the hairs (on the underside) face in.

Cow Parsnip (Heracleum maximum) is a common, moisture-loving native. The skin can have phytotoxins that can cause severe sunburn, but peeled stalks have been called "Indian celery."

Dock (Rumex crispus) was present as a dry stalk and seedhead, and as fresh young growth at the base of the dead stalk. The seeds are edible and are like miniature buckwheat kernels. Toasting (also known as "parching") or soaking them may utilize the seeds to best effect.

Dock leaves are rediculously high in oxalic acid, but can be boild in a change or two of water to make them more tasty. A relative, Sheep Sorrel (Rumex acetosella) makes delicious sour accents in salads. The deep, hardy, woody and yellow root is a traditional and powerful remedy for liver deficiencies and related skin problems.

Radish (Raphanus sativus) was not only springing up as new succulent sprouts. In dry places, the old woody ones still dispersed the peppery seed or stood skeletal and moldering. In some shady spots the plants were in flower (my personal favorite way to eat wild radish is to bite the flowers straight off the plant), while in others the freshly immature, spicy seed pods hung. Still other wet spots had young plants yet to flower. Radish seems to be the master of the microclimate.

Broadleaf Plantain (Plantago major) was in seed near the veggie garden. It's leaves and seeds are edible. It's also good soothing medicine for bee stings. Its cousin, Narrowleaf Plantain (P. lanceolata) is even more medicinal than edible, being very good at drawing out toxins when poulticed on a sting or insect bite.

Beaked Hazelnuts (Corylus cornuta) are not really in season now, having ripened and largely been devoured by squirrels back in mid- to late-summer. But they get a pass because they photographed so nicely.

Manzanita (Arctostaphylos spp.) berries are ending their season, but some bushes still carry the tangy, dry, powdery fruits. Crush lots of the berries in cold or hot water, strain it, and impress your friends with one of the most delicious wild ciders around.

Madrone (Arbutus menziesii) trees have started to drop their bright red berries, shown here with the big, broad, leathery leaves as well. The berries are edible and tasty raw -- I usually just nibble the flesh off the stony core. The tall trees are most noticeable from the forest floor not by their leaves or berries, but by their bark. The big ones have blocky, chunky, craggy bark on the main trunk, papery peeling wine-colored outer bark on the limbs, and sunset-gold inner bark that shines beautifully in the light. They also feel cold to the touch.

Toyons (Heteromeles arbutifolia) also have fruit lately, but I haven't seen it ripe yet. It's a shrub, represented here by it's green oblong berries and smaller toothed leaves. I've never eaten the berries, though multiple friends and teachers have said they're edible. I've heard they're good if wilted over a fire first.

And here we have Bay (Umbellularia californica) nuts, the second biggest mast crop of the season. They're shown here both fresh and roasted. They're inedible raw, and must be roasted to volatilize off some of the more noxious bay oils. Even roasted, they're strong stuff. The nuts have a chocolate-like flavor, are very high in fat, and can be ground up in a mortar and mixed with sugar for a very chocolate-like effect. But this stuff is far more of a digestive and vascular stimulant than is chocolate. Overconsumption has been known to cause effects as diversely unpleasant as trembling muscles, migraine headaches or explosive diarrhea. I've also accidentally absorbed the stimulant through my skin while cooking with the ground-up nuts, giving myself a much higher dose than I'd planned and getting none of the lovely bay flavor to justify my jitters. Though delicious, bay commands respect, patience, and careful self-observation in it's use.

The biggest and most important wild crop is of course acorns. Lots of the oaks near me have already passed their buggy first drop and are in full swing of their mind-bogglingly plentiful second drop. Acorns everywhere! I wish I had more oven racks to dry more acorns on. These here are Valley Oak (Quercus lobata), a low-tannic-acid starchy acorn in the white oak lineage. The jar in the background holds Black Oak (Quercus kelloggii), a high-tannic-acid oily acorn in the red oak lineage. One must of course wash out the tannic acid before eating acorns, as tannin can be toxic in high doses.

Finally, an early crop of Miner's Lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata)! The young leaves look much more like grass blades or chickweed (Stellaria media) leaves (and taste a lot like chickweed, too) than like the commonly recognized round leaves of the mature plant. Yum!

Youth Nature Awareness

2009-10-15T13:06:00.000-07:00

Native Eyes was off this week, so I'm updating with a Story of the Day from the Riekes Center Nature Awareness group of youth that I lead every Friday in Huddart Park. No photos for this one.

We began the day by each randomly choosing one of eight Guardian roles and making a statement to the group about how we'd fulfill those roles: Our Hydration Guardian would ask people if they'd drunk water at lunchtime, the Poison Oak Guardian would point out poison oak when she noticed it, the Ranger Watch Guardian would announce when she heard a ranger's truck, etc. Our Bird Language Guardian committed to watching and listening for junco alarm calls throughout the day.

We started off on a wander to find friction fire materials and tan oak acorns. Everyone was loud and boisterous, and speaking at eachother in city-volume voices. We played some rowdy games to burn off energy. Then we settled down for a snack and I told a story of one of my first bird language experiences, in which birds told me that a predator was near but I didn't listen, and then I scared a fawn into the waiting jaws of a bobcat (the predator that the birds had been shouting about) because I forgot to be attentive, quiet and respectful in the woods.

As we finished the story, all the juncos that had been feeding to the west of us started chipping excitedly, and moved in a wave overhead toward the east. They disappeared into the woods and were silent. Our Bird Language Guardian excitedly pointed out the junco's activities to the rest of the group. A minute or two later, the NEWTS appeared from the west. After the NEWTS moved through, the juncos returned. The whole group, with huge grins on all faces, discussed this newly-noticed pattern that the birds had shown us and speculated about how we might use it to sneak up on the NEWTS in the future.

We continued on our wander, finding few fire materials and no acorns anywhere we went. We did go through some tall and healthy manzanita bushes, though, and picked a good supply of the berries to make cider.

We wandered around back toward the parking lot making sure to take a different way, and on the way found a very fresh trail of coyote tracks, along with a fresh addition to the coyote's latrine where the trail joined the road. The scats were of many different ages, and we realized that we could read a little of the shifting life of the coyote in their differences. We decided to check back often for more coyote news.

As we approached the parking lot, motion caught my eye off the road -- a grey squirrel. But he had something in his mouth. We all stopped to watch, wondering what the oblong white object was. We watched him sit there, looking at us, gnawing on his white object like it was a corncob. When he was done he sidled a little ways off, turned his back to us, dug a shallow hole in the duff, and buried the object. When he was well up his tree we clambered up the hill to find out what the object was. A bone! It was aged and dry, and covered with short grooves gnawed into the surface by the squirrel. We wondered where it came from, and why the squirrel wanted to chew on it. We put the bone back and thanked the squirrel for sharing his secrets with us.

Back at our fort in the woods, we took some time to go to our sit spots. After everyone had gone to sit I rustled through my bag for a snack, crackling wrappers and muttering to myself until I realized that I was the only one making any noise. Everyone else was completely silent at their spot. In place of the usual sounds of fidgety people and quiet chit-chat between neighbors, all I heard was the wind in the treetops and the soft calls of feeding juncos. I sat very still and listened.

When we gathered again, I found out that some of the youth, in particular our Bird Language Guardian, had been surrounded by feeding juncos at their sit spots. They wanted to stay quiet and still out of respect for the birds. Others had been sitting still, making cordage and listening to the quiet sounds of the birds feeding by their classmates. None of them wanted to come back in when I called.

In the past, I've tried to get groups to pay attention to junco alarms by calling the birds Ninja Birds, doing skits about them, and otherwise building up their roles as the stealthy guardians of the forest. But never have I seen such successful bird language awareness in a whole youth group as today, when just one person in the group was asked to pay attention to just one kind of call from just one kind of common bird. The whole group ended the day with new respect and understanding of the role of birds as the communication network of the woods.

Some Stalking Conduct, and What Not To Do While Stalking

2009-10-12T20:32:00.000-07:00

This week we began with a hunt. We were to stalk a large mammal close enough to get a full-frame photo (preferably without the use of zoom) and then stalk away, all without being seen.

We partnered up, and began by making offerings to the land. We asked permission to bother the animals for the sake of building connections and understanding, and waited for an answer. Everyone seemed to feel good about the reply they received, so each pair began moving out.

My partner and I decided to use "body radar" to find a large mammal. We started with a sense meditation and then, closing our eyes, we each pointed in the direction we felt drawn toward. Opening our eyes, we found ourselves both pointing dead East. We followed our pointing fingers.

On the way, we decided to take Gilbert Walking Bull's advice on how to move on the land, walking well apart and abreast of each other. Each kept the other in our peripheral vision, so that if one stopped, ducked, or hid, the other would know to do so without either of us having to vocalize. If we had to, we could catch each other's attention with bird calls, and communicate with hand signals.

We walked using Akamba tracker form. To begin, we Fox-walked a few steps while looking ahead and using Owl Eyes. To Fox-walk, relax and walk evenly, keeping your feet light on the earth, keeping your weight back until your foot is placed, then rolling forward. To practice Owl Eyes, blur your eyes or look at the distant horizon, and pay attention to the edges of your vision without moving your eyes in their sockets. We Fox-walked some steps forward, then when our Owl Eyes revealed something of interest we stopped, and only then would we turn our heads to look left, right, behind, above, and finally down at any tracks. Then we would resume Owl Eyes and continue walking on our path.

We kept a special watch out for birds on the way. Song sparrows, wrentits, and white crowned sparrows occupied every bush lupine and coyotebrush. We were careful to see them before they became alarmed, and to walk around their personal space. Most of them simply eyed us and went about their business. At one point, a sparrow seemed to scream, his high thin seet-seet-seet! streaking across the sky as he dove for cover in brushy shadows. The nearby wrentits stopped calling and dove into their bushes too. All the little brown birds were gone from their bushtop perches. I looked up in the silence that followed, and a falcon's silhouette swooped over the ridgetop and past the face of the sun. (This image is my artist's rendition of the event, using cobbled-together images from Wikimedia. I'm not that fast with the camera.)

As we travelled, we became acutely aware that this land belonged to the large mammals we stalked. Their tracks, scat, and scent were everywhere. We hoped that by moving in these ways we could find them before they knew about us, despite their superior senses and knowledge of the land. We hoped that we could show our respect to these animals by finding them without disturbing them.

What we found, we had no trouble leaving in peace. It rested the way it had died. An elk carcass, whole, a drum of hide stretched over bones. Nothing had disturbed it, even though coyotes, bobcats, weasels, skunks, ravens, vultures, and other carnivores were well-known to live here. Why had the coyotes left it whole?

We continued on, and cresting the ridge we found an entire herd of elk in the distance. Closer, unseen until now, were a group of mothers and calves feeding in a sheltered valley. The elk were everywhere.

Further down the hill we finally spied our targets. I stalked our quarry, hunched double and fox walking in fits and starts, resting behind brush and tall grass, freezing midstep and moving only with the wind. I remembered a heron stalking gophers in a field, and felt the focus of that hunting bird. Through it all my quarry lay in the sun, relaxed and oblivious. I stalked closer and closer, only to break my internal silence with a glance at my watch. We had 15 minutes left to get back to the cars. As soon as I remembered the time, my quarry raised his head and looked straight at me. I retreated, no photo to show for my hours-long stalk.

Tending the Village Fires

2009-10-03T10:40:00.000-07:00

This Tuesday we went questing up the Candelabra Trail in Butano Park for mountain lion sign. We found it, and much more stuff besides. The Candelabra tree is a destination worthy of anyone who's ever dreamed of living in a treehouse. The scrapes we found were of varrying ages, with one quite recently-refreshed mound.

We also collected huge amounts of tinder materials of all sorts, as well as lots of bow drill materials, mostly from the buckeye trees. As if to help, the buckeyes shone out from the greens and browns of the woods with their bright silver bark.

Back at camp, over our cookfire, we considered our conduct on the land. What does it mean to be scouts? What is the conduct of the scout? What conduct do we owe the animal and plant residents of the environments we explore? What ways of being on the land, what mindsets and behaviors, will best form strong ropes to the land and to our human communities?

The next day, we stayed at Venture for an exploration of our firemaking abilities. The whole village, Essentials, Cultural Mentors, and Native Eyes, gathered at the Native Eyes fire circle for the intro. Then we all picked up our materials and started practicing.

Native eyes had a special challenge: to help those among us and the larger group who were inexperienced in friction fire, and to push our own edges. We were challenged to make fire using natural cordage from the land, and to do so without using knives or sharp rocks.

We started by binding two fairly thick (inch and a half wide) alder sticks together for the hearthboard, and made a spindle of a similar stick. The idea was that mounds of char dust would settle on either side of the spindle, between the two sticks of the hearthborard, and be heated sufficiently to form two coals. It did not work as advertised. Quite a few of us worked up a good sweat, and nearly drilled through the board, with only smoke and black dust to show for it.

Then something told me to try my blue elderberry hand drill spindle. With the help of another Native Eyes person, we spun the spindle until piles of dust formed and smoke billowed. Still no coal that we could see. I picked up the spindle to inspect the hole it had made. The end of the spindle continued to smoke -- and glow. We had a coal.

One of the more experienced firemakers made a bow using a fresh pine root string. Inspired, we raced down to the creek. We found a huge Monterey pine standing at the top of the bank, more than fifteen feet above the creek level. It's roots had been exposed by the creek and dangled above our heads. Asking for one of the trees roots, offering a pinch of tobacco, we clambered up and dug out a living root from the creekbank. The root in the photo is already frayed.

Back at the fire circle, we rubbed the rootbark off and worked the root to loosen it's fibers. Then we looped it twice around a buckeye spindle in a buckeye board, and tried out a bowless bow drill.

I held the handhold, stepped on the board and pressed the spindle down. My companion held the ends of the pine root and pulled back and forth, back and forth, until, as sweat began dripping down his forhead, a small red coal sat smoking in the notch. The pine root held together for two coals, before it had frayed beyond usefulness.

Many people got coals that day, and many people experienced the frustration of friction fire. I think everyone experienced renewed respect for our ancestors, who used these methods every day to live.

A Cloverdale Whodunnit?

2009-09-27T09:56:00.000-07:00

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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

2009-09-20T15:25:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-20T10:04:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-20T08:28:00.000-07:00

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.

Finals

2009-05-16T18:16:00.000-07:00

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.

Bird Language Intensive

2009-05-16T18:11:00.000-07:00

The Bird Language Intensive was held over the week of April 21 to May 2, and yes I know I'm two weeks late in blogging it. I'm actually later than that since this isn't a Bird Language Intensive blog, but an excuse.

Since it was a solid week long, I didn't have my usual evening or weekend moment to write and post. So I haven't written anything yet. I will, but for now it's all I can do to keep up with regular class posts. So look for a Bird Language Intensive post after the end of Native Eyes. Hey, that's only two weeks away...

Update 9/12/2009:
The Bird Language Intensive was just that: intense. A solid week of bird sits, debrief, and lecture on bird language. I learned many new things about birds and tracking the landscape through the eyes of the birds, and I relearned more. If you have never heard of bird language, this is a good intensive to take. If you have heard of it and would like to know more, this is a great instensive to take. If you have been studying bird language for a year, have listended to the Advanced Bird Language CDs repeatedly, and do regular bird sits on your own (like the Native Eyes crew does, for example), then I found this intensive to be an essential part of that education. Community and group cooperation opens up so many more possibilities for tracking and learning.

Cat Trails

2009-05-10T17:59:00.000-07:00

This was the last class of the year that we visited the south location, and we arrived to drama. A cougar had killed a calf, the rancher received a depredation permit, and the rancher killed a cougar. The cat was a large male, very much like the one we’d been tracking at Old Woman Creek.

So one of our goals was to visit the cougar scrape area on Old Woman Creek and look for fresh sign, in the hope that the killed cat was not the big male resident of Old Woman Creek. Another goal for the morning was to determine what route the cougars were taking to get from Butano park to Cloverdale.

We split into three groups: Old Woman Creek investigators, ridgewalkers, and creekwalkers. The Old Woman Creek group took a trail camera and headed for the well-known cougar zone. The ridgewalkers took a high route from the road at Cloverdale’s Gate 2 up toward the ridgetops of Butano. And the creekwalkers, consisting of myself and one other Native Eyeser, Will, looked for a low route through the riparian zone up to the Butano ridgetops.

The creek we found to be impenetrable right off the road, so we paralleled it up the grassy hillside. We walked through hip-high wild oats, pressed down everywhere with deer lays, thick with deer scat and ticks. Along the way we passed the old schoolhouse, now sunk into the earth. We saw many snakes and birds, and countless signs of deer, but nothing catlike.

We tried repeatedly to push into the riparian zone but were blocked everywhere by poison oak and walls of brambles. The sounds of sharp footfalls in the brush, the odd snapped twigs, and intermittent breathy snorts moved up the creek a little ahead: the sounds of deer watching our progress. They, evidently, had a way through.

Finally we came to an open area, a light green willow cavern by the creek. The ground was entirely covered in short blackberry vines. Deer droppings and tracks were scattered everywhere. The peace of the place, a feeling of a shelter and haven, crept from the earth into our bones and we paused silent for a while, letting ourselves settle into the space. Will commented that he would like to make this place his sit spot, and I agreed. Then I said, “No cat energy here.” “None whatsoever,” he agreed. We continued up the hillside looking for the cougar’s path.

Over the sun-beaten ridge, through coyotebrush and wildflowers, and we came to the edge of a stand of Douglas fir trees. There was a low passage through the brambles and poison oak, and we could see clear duff and tree trunks on the other side. We ditched our stuff and dove through.

On the other side, the world was dark, still and cool. I crouched under the low branches and took a minute to let my eyes adjust. This space was entirely different from the deer haven. As I sat and stared into the twilit understory, I felt a tense crackle of energy up my spine. This place definitely had cat energy. And when we moved past the edge, we immediately found a large and old scrape in the duff. And another. And another.

We were briefly distracted by a rubber boa, lying fat and docile over the duff.

We moved upslope to more mature trees, and found more sign. This area allowed for more air movement, and for us to walk upright, but it was still dark and surrounded by shadows.

We continued along the edge of mature trees and soon found a subtle, soft trail. The trail looked different from any deer trail I’ve seen – deer used it from time to time, but I don’t think they were it’s primary creators. The trail seemed to be the result of years of soft, round, padded feed pacing along it. As we set foot on the trail, the hairs on my neck stood up. I felt the presence of a predator, even if only in the trail he left behind.

The further we went on the trail, the more scrapes we found. Many had scats in them, smallish furry lacquered looking tubes, less than 3/4 inch in diameter. We followed the trail through the young trees again, stooping low and winding through the thick shadow. I kept wondering if a soft-padded carnivore was watching us from the shadows beyond our vision.

We finally popped out of the young firs and into the grasses again, dazzled by the sun and immediately parched by the heat. We were thirty minutes late, and had to race back to our meeting point.