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.

Ghost Supper

We started this week off with a wander in a new area, with the goal of familiarizing ourselves with the landscape and resident organisms. Voles were present in plenty, their little feet already having worn long, deep runways in the grass.

Coyote scat greeted us at the road in, but above the entrance road bobcats seemed to reign as the common small predator. We named the owner of this scat and scrape Pointy Butt Paul, to go with his feline neighbor on the Blue House Farm side, Big Butt Bob. Every scat of his contained quite a bit of rabbit fur and bone shards, and was long, ropy and pointy like a coyote scat. But each sat firmly in the V of a bobcat-like scrape, each was coated in a slimy shellac-like layer, and each emanated noxious rotten meat and sour milk stink.


On the plateu of the high lands, we encountered more vole sign and wondered aloud where the badgers were to take advantage of this vole proliferation. We found this big dig quite soon after.


Note the deep scrape marks on the inside walls of the tunnel.


Continuing over the plateu, we found this small, chunky scat composed of what looked like Jerusalem Cricket parts.


Further along, nearer the fire road, we found many little circular digs in the grass. Nearby we found a Jerusalem cricket, and later another.


On our way back we found a downed Monterey Pine and experimented with peeling the bark to make containers. We tried the bark on the trunk first, using our knives to cut down and peel the bark, but found that the craggy parts cracked and the knife kept slipping to pierce the inner bark. We decided that that slab would be food, rather than craft material. We revised our strategy, and tried with the smaller, younger, less craggy branches. We used a lopped-off branchlet with a wedge-shaped end to separate the bark from the limb. It worked beautifully, and we returned to camp with our bark slabs in hand.




That evening we celebrated our first night of Ghost Supper. Like many traditional holidays celebrated at this time of year (Samhain, Dia de los Muertos, and others), Ghost Supper is an ancestor honoring ceremony that invites one's dead relatives to mingle and socialize for one night. Based on an Ottawa tradition, this ceremony employs an all-night sacred fire and copious amounts of food. The fire represents a portal to the ancestors, and is intended to be opened (lit) at dusk, and closed (cooled and out completely) by dawn. The hosts make food for all comers, serving their ancestor's favorite dishes and greeting guests as if the guests were the host's departed relatives. All food must be given away, eaten, or burned as an offering to the fire and the ancestors, and the fire must be cold and out entirely by sunrise the next day.

The instructors feasted us and hosted us at their fire in fine form on Tuesday night. We ate and drank and told stories of our ancestors, of ghosts, and of the season. The fire burned long into the night, and was just cold as the sun crested the Eastern ridge.

After our morning bird sit, we devoted the entire next day to preparing for our turn at hosting a Ghost Supper. We had much organizing to do, and just enough time to do it.

Traditionally, men gather the firewood, light the fire, and tend it. Women carry the water, cook the food, serve food and drink, and beautify the site. I had my own conflicts with this system, but I was willing to give it a try to see what hidden teachings might be passed on in this way of doing things.

I wore my Firekeeper tee shirt as a sort of consolation prize, and to symbolically show my dead grandparents, who I'd be serving their favorite apple pie and cheddar cheese, what I'd been up to lately. Our clan discussed the fire, and determined that at least some of us wanted to keep it going all night. Then when we called for fire tenders, only three people raised their hands. I thought that this couldn't possibly be enough to get us through the night, so I raised my hand and said that I'd be willing to tend fire if we needed another hand.

When the sun dipped low and it was time to light our fire, all others with fire kits were absent. I had my elderberry and cedar hand drill on hand, so another woman, myself, and a man all cooperated to spin up a coal and light the teepee that the men hand made.

The final flurry of preparation came, and I was the only fire tender without final prep to do. I tended fire until we all gathered again to greet our first guests. I asked the other fire tenders if any of them would like to take over, but none of them felt called. They said they would like to take over when I tired. We launched into our serving and stories, and I tended fire while the guests sat and ate and talked.

Others took over while I visited other fires, but late into the night most people wanted to snooze or chill, and I was enjoying tending fire. Orion rose in the East, announcing the early hours of the morning. The half moon set in the West, and in the deepening darkness Orion's bow shone in a sparkling arc. I tended and waited for my clan member who had wanted to tend fire into dawn. As I waited I stared at the coals and began to see a vortex spiraling down into the earth. I fed the ancestor's food to the fire, and saw it go up in spirals of smoke to Orion and the shooting stars that peppered the night.

Finally, I decided that I'd stayed up long enough. My clan member wasn't coming back. I let the fire die down to a coal bed, got up to fetch my sleeping gear, and nearly stepped in my pie. I'd forgotten to burn all the food.

Another clan member woke up to help me stoke the fire again and burn the food. We finally managed to burn it all, but the fire was now big and blazing, and my stamina had run out. I passed the fire stick to my clanmate and fell into heavy sleep.

I woke up well after dawn, next to a still red-hot and smoldering pile of mostly-burnt wood, and felt pretty disappointed in myself for not fulfilling the tradition. But I figure that for most of the night the ancestors got a first-rate comedic performance, so it wasn't all bad.

The experience has left me with many questions, and put a sharper edge on one of my sacred questions that RDNA has thus far been honing to keenness. My question, though not entirely articulated in words, has to do with novel practices and traditions, and when one is appropriate over the other. In this ceremony, we chose to alter the tradition and bring in the novel practice of fluidity in roles. Would it have gone more smoothly, with more labor shared more equally, if we had abided by the Ottawa traditional gender roles? Would the fire tenders have been more organized, and would the fire have been put to bed at the right time? Would I have been able to see the twin spirals in the fire? Would I have experienced the on-point in-the-moment awareness brought about by seriving others with vital light and heat that I experienced as a fire tender, had I kept myself to the traditional female role?

Tracking Day

We’ve been on a three-week break, during which I’ve been, if anything, busier than while class is in session. So it’s taken me this long to blog our last class. But here, at long last, it is!

We met at Venture this week. After romping with Mojo the dog and playing a morning round of T-Rex Frisbee (which is the most awesome game in the Universe) we set off for the lagoon near Pescadero.



We ambled down to the beach to check out the morning’s stories. These marks were all over the sand, crisscrossing each other in little trails and sometimes funneling into a big communal run. I love sand tracking.






We continued on, tried to stick our heads into an old beaver den but found it blocked by a botanical guard. Though many of us are nonreactive to poison oak, we still didn’t push our luck. We consoled ourselves by investigating this interesting mark and fairly fresh scat near the den area.



When we stopped for lunch we found these beautiful prints in the mud of the channel bank, still fairly close to the den area.



As we moved on, we kept on the look out for beavers or beaver sign. They continued to prove elusive, despite the fact that I’d brought my beaver-cut walking stick with me that day. We did get close to a wary, plain-looking turtle. He looked like he was enjoying the sun so we did our best to go quiet and slow and respect his space.



Finally we found our way up the hill to an open area full of grasses and wildflowers. The ground there was peppered with big holes and massive throw mounds. We spread out, looking for the freshest mounds.

On the way, I encountered this butterfly. I’ve never seen this type near my home, or in any other urban area.



Finally we found a fresh looking mound that lolled from the mouth of a very big (perhaps 9 inches across) hole. The mound showed deep lumbering tracks across its length. I took these photos while standing uphill from the hole, with the hole in the lower left corner and the mound extending up the photo, downhill from me.






These tracks raise a lot of questions: Are all of these from the same animal? How was the animal moving, to leave such a jumbled pattern? When was the animal last here? Was this a one-time or repeat use? Why was the animal in the area? Is it still here?

We still had further investigations to carry on elsewhere, so we dragged ourselves away from the tracks and the wildflowers, and moved on to the hypericum zone further south on the coast.

Once at the hypericum area, we all took Cybertrackers and dove in. Our last many attempts have been aborted for one reason or another, and as of this afternoon we hadn’t yet placed any hyperucum data points on our map. Our mission for the last hour or two of the afternoon was to catalogue whatever biodiversity we could. For reference, this is what the interior of the hypericum growth looks like:



Not very diverse. The hypericum is especially strange because one will push through and through the unending monotony of hypericum stalks, and then find, engulfed in the center, the skeleton of a long-dead tree or shrub, shaded out under the thick canopy. After such a find the hypericum seed capsule rattling that follows all of one’s movements often takes on an eerie sound.

But we did find some interesting things. I followed the edge and found a stand of poison hemlock, a plant that I’ve never seen wildlife use very extensively. In the middle of the stand were clipped stalks of hemlock, smoothly cut at an angle very much like a rodent’s or rabbit’s work.



I continued on into the hypericum, and found a woodrat nest uphill from a dead elderberry tree. The net was constructed almost entirely or elderberry sticks, with little hyperucum material. I wondered if the woodrat had such an aversion to hypericum that it would try to use hemlock in the absence of good elderberry or other more commonly used material. When I heard the rat skittering and rattling through the hemlock stand, it sounded to me like he moved with energy and health. But my ears are not well trained in woodrat skitters, so I could be wrong.

We returned, our cybertrackers finally full of good data for our maps.