Anake

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

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


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


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


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


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

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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.

Drums

This Native Eyes we had the darndest time making a fire. We broke some bowstrings, a bow, and wore down a few spindles before finally getting a coal well after sunset, and only after we'd all decided to cooperate on one kit.

The next day we had a mobile bird sit with the ducks on the Bolinas lagoon. They are highly sensitive meters of one's concentric rings.

A sideshow for the day, but my personal favorite part, was working with traps and snares. One of the Cultural Mentors set up a deadfall and caught some atypically large prey. We should have known that baiting it with field guides was a bad idea in a crowd of naturalists.




I also learned how to set up one type of rabbit snare. In a real trap, one would of course use fine, non-orange cord or wire.

For the rest of the day we worked on making drums. The method we learned from Matt Berry uses no nails or pegs, just the tension of the drum head and lacings and frame, like a mortarless stone arch standing with it's concerted but opposing pressures.

The process starts with skin.

We'd soaked it in lye.

And removed the hair, leaving the grain layer on.

Then we rinsed them clean, and cut out drum skin forms.


The remainder of the skin we cut into 1/4 inch lacing to bind the skins to the frames.


We made the frame with wood: three feet or more of wrist-width straight-grained even-width tree limb. I used a redwood bough.

We cut them into even lengths, then split them lengthwise as evenly as possible.

Then we mitered them to 22.5 degree angles on the ends to form a trapezoid.

Most brave folks used the chop saw. I used a miter box and hand saw.

Next we glued the frames together and chinked the gaps with swdust and glue, then bound them with electrical tape to keep the pieces in tension as they dry overnight.

We started a pot of hide glue by boiling old rabbit skins, fur and all, over a nifty portable wood stove. The glue wasn't ready by the time we needed to glue our frames, though, so we used storebought wood glue.

And there the process stopped for us. RDNA continued the process and completed their drums, but Native Eyes had to leave the next day. We'll revisit drum making later on, with the addition of the skin to our drum frames.

Lots of Buckskins and a Food Fight

This past class was the day for animal connection. We had big plans for Wednesday evening involving forty freshly-caught Dungeness crabs, courtesy of our resident fisherman, so we arrived by car to carry all our supplies.

Tuesday night we gathered in the yurt to share stories of the week, and heard some tales of the many felines that had come to feed on a nearby deer carcass. After the stories we returned to our camp, rekindled the fire, and discussed the next day’s activities. Though RDNA was skipping their usual bird sit, Native Eyes decided to have one anyway, and to investigate the deer carcass.

Tuesday morning’s bird sit was once again dominated by accipiter signatures. I have to admit that I’m getting somewhat impatient with these avian predators, and I’d really like to see some other bird patterns.

We gathered in Tent City next to the garden gate to poke around the kill site, and though the carcass was supposedly only two weeks old, little enough was left. Skin was a leathery tent over rough-gnawed bones, but maggots still squirmed in the dark places. It was a small deer, probably a yearling, with the bones mostly intact through gnawed at some of the ends. The ribcage was whole, but the limbs were disembodied and strewn widely. The ears had been removed and were lying lonely in the leafmold. Clipped fur was everywhere. Some speculation had been that this was a cougar kill, but I’m reluctant to draw that conclusion, as the bones were whole and the site so exposed. My opinion leans toward a smaller feline.

After the investigation we gathered again in the yurt for an unanticipated fashion show starring the Buckskin Brothers (Jay, Matt, and Ned), kicking off our animal-intensive day.



I became an annoying shutterbug for this class, and as a result I’ve got a pretty complete photographic hide tanning class for this blog. So what follows is my parroting of Jay Sliwa’s, Matt Berry’s, and Ned Conwell’s lesson in wet-scrape braintanned buckskin, based on this book:



First, skin the animal. The Buckskin Brothers said they prefer to do this while hanging it by the neck. Start by cutting up the midline of the belly from the anus to the throat, being careful not to puncture the gut cavity or it’ll get really really messy. Then cut across the body from ankle to ankle, forelimb across to forelimb and hindlimb across to hindlimb. Here’s a little photo of the cuts sketched out. Please note that it is not in fact a drawing of an alien.



Then set your knife down (well out of reach lest you be tempted to pick it up again) and use your hands to work the hide free. Knife nicks, even small shallow ones, will become a weak spot and then a hole over the course of the tanning process, so don’t give yourself the opportunity to make that mistake.

Then flesh the hide. Use a stout beam supported so that it stands up at an angle, like so:



Place the hide fur-side down, draped over the end of the beam. Lean against the butt of your beam to hold the skin in place as you scrape away from you down the beam. Begin scraping with a flat, dull impliment. Don’t worry about scraping too much. As long as you use something dull, rather than a knife, you shouldn’t damage the hide. The goal here is to remove the meat, fat, membrane, blood vessels, and such that still adhere to the hide after skinning.



Then, soak the hide in an alkaline solution, a process also known as bucking. This phase is what gives buckskin it’s name, not the sex of the deer killed for the hide. Buckskin can, in fact, be made from doe skins too. You can use either wood ashes or lye to make the alkaline solution, and unfortunately I don’t remember the proportion of lye to water. For wood ashes, you use the floating-egg-test: If a fresh egg sinks, you’ve got too little wood ash. If it floats on it’s side, you’ve got too much. If it floats end-up, with a circle about the size of a quarter poking out of the water, you’ve got the balance right.

I didn’t catch the length of time necessary for bucking, but braintan.com says that the soaking continues until the hair at the neck is easily pulled out.



After bucking you’re ready to scrape. Take the skin back to your fleshing beam, this time placing it hair-side-up, and again leaning on it to hold it in place. Begin scraping off the fur with your dull fleshing implement, starting near the rump where it’s easier. You’ll notice that a layer of the skin tends to scrape off with the hair – that’s what you’re going for, anyway. The fleshing took off the innermost layer of skin, the loose fibers, membrane and blood vessels and such, and the scraping will take off the outermost epidermis and grain layer of skin. You’ll be left with the middle fiber layer, the part that will become the finished buckskin.



Skin has multiple layers. Tanners identify (more or less) four layers. The epidermis and grain layers are the outer two where the hair is anchored. These two layers consist of loose fibers held in a mucous matrix. The third layer down is the fiber layer, a strong, interconnected matrix of fibers. The bottom is a thin layer of loose fiber. You want the strong fiber matrix for your hide, not the mucous matrix. Scrape it all off!



You may also notice that the epidermis and grain layers have become somewhat blue-gray, translucent and very slimy from the bucking. I used that difference in appearance and texture to know when I’d finished scraping an area, since often the fur comes off more easily than the grain. The underlying fiber layer is cream colored and more opaque, sticky-rubbery rather than snotty-slimy. Once again, scrape away – you won’t damage the hide with too much scraping, as long as your implement is dull.

Once your hide is cleaned of fur and grain, rinse it with fresh water. Now it’s time to wring it out. Here’s a fun method taught by Jay Sliwa:



Hang up the hide, with just the very end flopped over a pole to keep it in place.

Take the dangling end and loop it over your pole.

Roll in the edges of the hide, so that you have a wet hide donut hanging from your pole. Insert a strong stick into the donut hole.









Begin twisting and wringing out your hide.



Twist till it seems you can’t twist anymore.



Get a friend to help if you need to, or if you just want to have more fun with it. Twist it up some more. Blot with a towel.



Untwist, and twist it up again in the oposite direction. Once you’ve gotten as much water out of the hide as you can possibly get it'll look white and opaque, rather than translucent. Then stretch it out again.



And now it’s time for the brains. According to the Buckskin Brothers, every animal has enough brains to tan it’s own hide, but if you don’t have the brain from your animal you can use pig brains sold in butcher shops instead. I’ve also heard of using egg yolk. In any case, what you're looking for is an emulsified oil, one that will stay in solution and penetrate the skin rather than separating out and floating to the top. Brain is, according to many, the best for the job.



Make a brain shake by blending (or squishing by hand, yum) the brains and warm water. No one seems to have a solid proportion of brains to water online, though I probably have this info in my notes (when I find them I’ll know). Since animals have enough brain to tan their own hides, take more or less as much brain as would be present in the living animal and mix it with enough warm water to make a thin gooshy milkshake consistency.

Make sure it’s well squooshed and without lumps, and mix it with enough water to cover your hide.



Then put the hide in a bucket with the brain water and let it sit. According to the Buckskin Brothers, it only needs to sit for about 20 minutes, but longer is OK.



After braining, it’s time to work the hide dry. This is probably the most energy-intensive step of the whole process. Working the hide until it’s completely dry will help keep it from stiffening up. Apparently, one of the most common issues for beginning tanners is that their hides turn stiff after braining, a problem that crops up when you let a wet or damp hide sit without being worked. A possible solution is to rebrain the hide and work it dry again. So choose a sunny, dry day, or sit by a fire, and work that hide until it feels completely dry.



A vertical cable stretched from a tree limb to the trunk, or from an overhead beam to the floor, helps. Stretch the skin against the cable, formerly-furry-side out, so that the innermost side of the skin touches the cable. Work it back and forth, pulling on either end so that the whole hide slides over the cable with each tug.

The final step, smoking, is not strictly necessary and indeed fancy white buckskins are not smoked. However, if these white buckskins get wet they will revert to the cardboard-like state that all that work over the cable was intended to avert. So smoking waterproofs the hide, while creosote and other resinous substances in the smoke help to preserve it.



For our class, Jay put together a sweet smoking setup. He dug a U-shaped hole, rocket-stove-style. He attached a roughly 3 foot length of stovepipe to one branch of the U, and put a pot lid over the other. We had a fire going close by to furnish coals, and a bag of punky brown-rotted wood to toss on the coals to make smoke.

Jay attached a canvas skirt to the top of the stovepipe. Then he took two otherwise finished but unsmoked hides and glued the edges together with Elmer’s glue to form a bag, and attached the neck portions of the hides to the canvas skirt, then hung from a treebranch. Here’s the finished setup:



Jay then took coals from the fire, dumped them down the hole under the pot lid, and tossed in some punky wood after. Smoke began leaking through holes in the glued edges of the hides, permeating the area with a sweet, sharp scent. After a few hours Jay turned the hide bag inside out to smoke the other side, revealing beautifully tanned buckskins:



That evening Native Eyes organized a crab feed for the 40 students and staff of RDI, with fresh crab caught off the Bolinas coast by our very own Native Eyes fisherman, along with copious salad and a ridiculous amount of dumpstered bread and pastries.





It was exhausting and chaotic and glorious. Anything that ends in a spontaneous lemon-wedge fight is worth the time and effort.