On the Hunt

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


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


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


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



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



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

Ghosting Trails

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.

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.

Finals

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.