Creeks and coyotes

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.

Ask Permission

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

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?

Hunt by Stillness

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.

Msafiri Time, Survival Day 2

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.

Trailing

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.