Cattails as Construction Material

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.