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?

New Crew

Our Native Eyes journey has begun for another year. We're starting off separate from the RDNA village, so we gathered with just our Native Eyes group on the coast for intros and stories from Jon. Then we headed to last year's bird sit meadow for an introductory wander.


Our evening cookfire finally blazed to life after we cranked out three coals, using some of the above kits and tinder. Everything was damp and drippy in the redwoods. The unexpected chill of soaked-through sleeping bags and soggy sweatshirts set us a little on edge. Soon Jon Young, Paul Raphael, and Gerry Brady joined our fire and brightened up the evening with stories, jokes and songs.

The next morning we had our first bird sit. With camp so soggy, we decided to drive to a new location to debrief the sit under the shelter of some thick-canopied cypress trees. Some of our group saw an accipiter in the distance as we got out of the car, but didn't mention the sighting. The landscape, mostly Hypericum and stands of old Cypress, was quiet except for a few sparrow chips in the shrubs and Northern Flicker calls. We headed toward the same stand of woods that the accipiter was working, thinking more of dry ground than of birds.

As we finished our debrief, a Cooper's Hawk flew in under the canopy of trees to perch on a limb above us in the shadows, her dark back blending with the dark under the canopy. We watched in silence until she flew again. "Who heard her concentric rings?" someone asked when the hawk had gone. We talked about the Northern Flicker's "Clear!" call of alarm that still rang out, and the overall silence and distinct lack of song. With a flurry of wings, the Flicker that had been calling lit in the treetop above us, sunlight picking out the red in his feathers. A few calls of "Clear!" and he fluttered away, too, in the opposite direction as the hawk.


After lunch Molly and Greg led us in a trailing exercise. Two participants trailed Molly over the beach and dunes, and two others trailed Greg. We followed the trails into the ocean and out again. One group stayed together and took turns leading, while the other group divided and tracked separately. Only one group found their missing person in the allotted time.


Molly and Greg's trail led right by a tantalizing mystery. Three clumps of feathers lay near each other in the sand, and near them, the former owner of the feathers.





We puzzled over the pockmarks in the sand that accompany each clump of feathers, looked for tracks, found raven prints but nothing else discernible. We noticed that each clump was composed of a different type of feather. We discussed and came up with stories to narrate the sequence. But the question remains: Who killed this gull?

Trailing Test

This week we set out to meet Molly and Greg at Gazos Beach. As we set out, a torrential rain came down, beating the landscape into sogginess. When we got there the rain had mostly stopped, but Molly and Greg were nowhere to be found. We did have a message from them, though -- they had laid down two trails for us, and our job was to track them to their hiding places. We broke up into two teams and began.

One team got an immediate feeling, a tug in the gut, that pulled them down to the beach at a sprint. The other group, of which I was a part, watched them run down the trail, West toward the water, and hook North to disappear around a dune. We walked along the same trail, searching for a spot where either Greg or Molly might have turned off and away from the main trail.

One recent trail, rained on but with steep sidewalls on the tracks, cut very obviously off the main trail and up a clear dune. My group agreed on a tracking formation with one lead on the main trail, two flanks assisting the lead and looking for side trails, and a rear guard keeping awareness of the landscape as a whole. We progressed slowly along the trail, trading off our positions as we felt like it.

We crested the high dunes and dropped to low ground, following the trail all the while. Up ahead we saw the other group scattered over the landscape. The trail lead right through their group, and when we came along side them, they explained that they'd felt a strong tug toward this spot, ran here, found the trail, and followed it until they couldn't follow anymore. Both teams, it turned out, were on the same trail, only the other team had approached from the other side. Now we became uncertain about whose tracks were whose -- it had still been raining when the other team got to the trail, so aging was a challenge.

We spread out and spiraled from our last known track as one big, scattered group. Some ranged far afield hoping to pick up a clear trail again. Others stuck with the known trail, creeping along. Some just got bored and went wandering. One picked up a different trail and, thinking it might be Molly's, followed to within 20 feet of our instructor's hiding place but never saw them. One wandered and found a kite, and promptly lost all interest in trailing.


The group that stayed close to the original trail kept creeping along, following the feint, rained-on trail. We came to the high dunes bordering the beach, and a clear trail scrambling up them. The tracks had been rained on to the same degree as the trail we were following, and were about the same size. One of the other team who had run here ahead of us was there investigating the trail with us. She stated, though, that when she and her team had come there earlier there had been no tracks up these dunes. Despite being the right age, size and stride, we accepted that statement and concluded that we were on the trail of one of our own, not Molly or Greg. We kept on the trail and kept discussing whose it was but the idea that we'd lost the trail and were on the wrong one drained our enthusiasm.

We looked briefly but without real intention for more tracks down the dunes and onto the beach, but couldn't immediately see them. We floundered, sat in the sand, watched the kite flutter, and spaced out.

Finally Molly and Greg appeared over the dunes to the south. They told their story, laying out their trails in our mind's eyes, and we told of our experiences trailing them. We talked about our different approaches and modes of organization, what worked, and what didn't.


When we got back to Venture, we lit a fire in the tipi and were joined by Jon Young. He told stories of the Bushmen, of how they use spirit tracking and that pull in the gut as a last resort, and work to hone their physical skills to the utmost, first. He also told stories of search and rescue missions, of how one of the biggest problems in tracking lost people is sorting out the lost person's trail from those left by well-meaning but confused rescue personnel. He stressed the need for one leader on the trail to preserve the integrity of the trail and keep the rescue team from trampling the tracks. One of the final questions he posed was in reference to that "pull" in the gut that some of us felt, that pulled them in the exact opposite direction from our hiding instructors, and right over the trail that my group was following. What was that pull?

Bird Language Intensive

We met for a solid week to do nothing but learn bird language!

The week was so fully packed with bird connection, people connection, good music, good food and good learning that I cannot do it justice in a blog post. Here, then, is an average day in the life of the Bird Language Intensive, and if you want to know what it's like to live this pattern, come to one of the intensives.

A word on camp organization: Dan Gardoqui headed up the "acorn" (facilitation team), along with some of our NE regulars and special guests from the WAS and OTS community. The whole camp was organized into four clans, each of which had an acorn member as a facilitator. We sat near our other clan members in our sit area, drew our maps of the bird activity with our clans, worked in the kitchen and cleaned house with our clans. The camp was also broken up into eight cardinal and sub-cardinal directional societies, and the clans included members of each society. The Grey Fox clan, for example, had members of the East, Southeast, South, and etc. societies. We often organized wandering and tracking activities along society lines.

We got up before dawn and carpooled out to our sit area, a south-facing slope near Gazos Creek. We sat quiet and still through the dawn chorus and into full daylight, making notes on the bird activity in each of four 10-minute periods defined by raven calls from our clan leaders. After sitting, we gathered by the cars to map our findings for the morning.



We played energized, immitative games that electrified our bodies and helped us feel what the little birds felt as they foraged and fled from predators. I know the shot below looks like a massive toddler's game of Airplane with adults. In fact,it was a fast-paced, challenging and competitive game that had us all moving intuitively like little brown birds hopping from cover to feed before the hawks swooped in.



At some point in the day we debriefed the sit. An experienced bird language mentor (or two) would sit at the front of the group with all the maps and ask questions of the group. They looked at the maps, noted patterns or inconsistencies, and drew a story of the morning out of the crowd of information.





Back at the lodge after lunch, we took a break in mid afternoon for siesta time. Spontaneous guitarchestras tended to form.


The guitarchestras followed us into the kitchen when it was our clan's turn to help with meal prep. Never has a so-called chore been so celebratory.


After lunch and before dinner we usually went out on the land again. We tracked and wandered to find more information about the stories we brought back in our bird maps.



After the evening meal we gathered in the main room for lecture, stories, or music making.

The week unfolded, progressed, and wrapped up smoothly. Transitions and group logistics, though often consisting of plan B's and unplanned adjustment to outside forces, knit the day together seamlessly. With skillful facilitation and plentiful information, I found the Bird Language Intensive to be the week I'd been waiting for all year.

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.

Ceremony, survival day 4

We all woke up seperately, one at a time, before first light. Upon waking each wandered up, looking for a vantage before dawn. The East became pale, and the mockingbirds and robins sang in the valley. One by one each of us scrambled up the rock face and found the others at the high promontory, looking toward the dawn.





The dawn broke cold. When the dawn chorus wound to a close we finally rose and set about the work of breaking camp. We poured water on our fires, stirred the coal beds, and poured more water. We gathered up our bundles of dogbane and seep willow, bundled up our clothes and water filter, and walked out.

We had stashed some snacks at the cars -- coconut juice, and fruit, and even some nuts. Many of us chose to forgo the food, however. We were feeling light and and alive with the energy of the acorns and the food plants, the waters of the land, the dawn light and the birdsong. The thought of eating commercial food so soon actually made some of us sad.

We piled into cars and drove the hours-long way back to the place that the elders would receive us. We were greeted with song, offered water and cleansing herbs to wash of our road dust, and gathered around a fire. We told our story and we were questioned about our journeys. We feasted with elders and friends and families in our nature connection community.

Our gathering lasted into twilight with us circled around a little blaze under great old trees. Just as the last word was said, the first drops of rain began to fall. As we picked up our fire circle, blankets and personal items, the rain came light and soft. Once everything was moved and all were indoors, the rain came as a torrent. Finally it hailed, and the drencher settled in for the night.

Group Mind, Survival Day 3

We awoke at dawn of course, but few stirred from their fires. I curled by my coal bed, now white with ash, and listened to song sparrows and other greeters of the dawn.

Some of us were still up and moving, though -- notably the man who'd tended all our fires. He looked the most pleased of any of us to be sitting in that campsite that morning.



Then a stream of cursing jolted me fully awake - one of our German cohorts, a fellow with a fondness for foul language, was sitting bolt upright and patting out imaginary flames on his jacket sleeve. As he woke fully from his dream of burning cloth, he looked across the fire to another Native Eyes student. She had been awakened by his blue streak of curses, and now sat upright as well, staring at the charring, glowing hole, a hand's breadth wide, that her fire had opened in her sweater sleeve.

Later we realized that, though we remembered to bring our minds together in thanksgiving at every oportunity, we forgot to separate them.


We lazed and dawdled until someone went down to the creek to taste the acorn. When they came back, bag dripping and full of what we could finally call food, everyone began to move. We revived two of the night's fires, found some good flat-ish rocks, and began stoking.


One fire had lots of coals. On this we heated rocks that were about a quarter of an inch thick. We tested the heat of the rock by licking a finger and touching the surface -- if it sizzled, it was ready. We squeezed most of the water out of the acorn and plastered in on to the hot rocks. Soon the acorn turned dark and the edges of the acorn cracker peeled up. Then we flipped the crackers to cook out the water from the other side. This method was fast, but required constant fire to make more coals. The rocks didn't hold much heat.


At the other fire, we had found some bigger, bulkier rocks. We set up a sort of tripod of tall rocks around the center of the fire and placed our fairly bulky flat rock on top, over the center of the fire. Then we stoked the fire high to heat the mass of the rock. This setup took much more time to get started, but held heat for much longer than the small flat rock setup.

Both fires cranked out acorn crackers for the whole morning. The crackers themselves tasted bland at first -- which is saying a lot, since we were three days hungry by now. But chewing them for a while brought out a lovely nutty sweetness.

As we cooked, stoked the fire, and munched, we also talked. We discussed the year so far, and asked the question, "how can we make the rest of this year of Native Eyes as amazing as we need it to be?"


One of our companions who was not part of the entire Native Eyes year and would be leaving after the survival trip, had wandered off around dawn to find a sit spot. All through breakfast and lunch (the two kind of blended into each other) we were involved with our Native Eyes conversation. The topic didn't concern our absent companion, so we weren't concerned that he was missing the discussion. We saved his portion and kept talking into midday. Then, as the energy wound down around our topic, we realized that he had been gone for many hours. One of us said he would go holler for the wanderer, but got involved again in the last words on the Native Eyes subject, so no one sent out a call.

After we said the final words in our discussion, and all were ready to move on, we looked up to see our wandering friend walking into our camp.


With the bag of acorn empty of even the finest crumbs, our conversation played out, and our companion returned, we needed something to do with all the acorn-energy. We decided to finally do some exploring and move camp. We had our bowless fire drill kit still assembled, but we didn't want to have to spin up another coal that evening. So we gathered punky chunks of wood from the downed pines. Some, about as long as my arm, we used whole. We pushed one end of the punk sticks into the fire to catch a coal, then walked with that end up and out of the wind. It smoldered well until the wind came up and set the punk sticks flaming.

The smaller chunks of punky wood I ground to powder on our acorn grinding stones. I found some long concave chunks of bark and lined them with cattail fluff. Then I poured the punky wood powder over the cattail fluff, taco'd the powder in fluff, and surrounded the whole thing with a layer of bark. I stuffed a live coal in one end and tied the bark tight to restrict air flow. We carried our fire with us.


Our wander spread us out over the land. With no trail and only springy grass to take a track (actually the grass took a track pretty well, but didn't hold it for long), we kept in contact with raven calls.

Finally, we found it. The place. THE place to spend the night. A minute, narrow valley between the two masses of sandstone that sat in the grass like giant rounded loaves of dough. It was sheltered from the night winds and within an easy walk of two downed valley oaks for firewood. Dead manzanitas, too, were scattered on the sandstone. It even had water, though not the fast-flowing crystalline creek that we'd slept by previously.


After resting at the new site for some time, Team Ground Squirrel decided that we'd like to go check our traps. We took a circuitous route to admire the scenery and look for more food on the way.


When we found this beautiful pond turtle neither of us could even consider taking him back to camp for dinner. For all that his kind are our native testudine, I'd never seen one this close, and rarely seen them at all. I've only gotten this close to the pet shop kind of turtle, red-eared sliders. We admired the gold glint and patterning on his skin, and in his eyes, before leaving him in peace.


More spectacular landscape brought us back to the ground squirrel meadow, where we found trap after trap disturbed but unoccupied. Perhaps the nooses were too large, or too noticeable?


With the light taking on the gold of afternoon, both my companion and I felt the magnetism of the sun-warmed earth. We lay in the grass to rest, and my companion began to snore. I relaxed into the ground and dreamed.

When I awoke, I awoke fully and completely. I sat up, feeling refreshed, and said something to my companion. He replied that he had just woken up too and was ready to move on. We stood up and saw another Native Eyes student approaching from the direction of camp. We joined him on his walk to the creek.

Why did we both feel the overwhelming, bone-deep need for a nap at that time? Why did we both snap awake in such synchrony? If we had been asleep when the other Native Eyes person came down, would he have been able to notice us, flat out in the grass?


We returned to camp with our empty nooses and set to gathering firewood. We had two gargantuan piles by dusk, one of manzanita and one of oak. We would sleep warm.

We gathered around our fire after the last light had gone. We gave thanks for the journey we were on, and checked in with everyone. Then we settled ourselves around two fires for the night.


Before we slept we also experimented with a self-feeding fire technique from YouTube. We found that manzanita and weathered oak burn too thoroughly and too quickly. The tower of wood that, according to the video, should have taken hours to burn down took about thirty minutes. But it was spectacular.

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.