Bedding Down

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

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

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


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


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

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

...

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


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

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


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



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


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


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


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


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

Story Tracking

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

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



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


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


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


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



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


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


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


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

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

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

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

Tracks & Trails

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.

Some Stalking Conduct, and What Not To Do While Stalking

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.