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?

Food and Medicine

This week we were at Venture again, and spent the day with the RDNA crew. Our focus for the day was herbs, herbal medicines, and local and wild foods. The day was so creative and varied that I think this’ll have to be one of my longest posts ever. Apologies for the unbalanced text-to-photos ratio.

(We found the snake while wandering the grounds. He doesn’t have much to do with the day’s activities, but I thought he was beautiful enough to share anyway. I think his Latin name translates to “fierce bush snake from Hell.”)

We started the day with a blindfolded string walk. The Cultural Mentoring group strung a string down paths, around obstacles, and ended at a group meeting point. We were blindfolded and allowed to guide ourselves along the string using touch.



I found that I was far more comfortable going without shoes than with, and given the extra tactile connection to my environment, along with the string guide and the other sensory information from scent and sound, I felt totally comfortable, safe, and happy walking the landscape blind. With sight deprived, textures and temperatures, rather than sights, furnished the beauty in my landscape. Even the clammy grass and sharp gravel felt good on my feet, as it gave me that much more information about the world.

The one source of frustration I found was with negotiating my path in the presence other people. I found it easy to tell when the person in front of me had stopped, but harder to tell when they started up again. I didn’t want to bother the person in front of me by touching them if they were still there, but sometimes there was so much shuffling going on that I couldn’t tell if the person in front of me was walking or just fidgeting, or if an instructor was moving in front of me instead. I found myself worrying and fretting about holding up the line by waiting too long, and anxious about annoying the person ahead of me by poking her too often. This social worry was so strong that by the time I got to the end of the string, I was fuming about the bad design of this exercise, and how the presence of other people ruined the sensory immersion experience.

When we debriefed the exercise, an often-repeated point about nature connection practices came to the fore again: the stuff that comes up in these exercises is the stuff that participants bring to them. Likely, the blockages one comes up against in nature connection are the same blockages that one repeatedly engages in life. Like so many other personal practices, nature connection brings one’s blockages out of their familiar context and into a new and different light. I went into the next exercise musing on these thoughts and hoping to erode my anger with new understanding.

(Unlike other personal practices like martial arts or meditation, practicing nature connection allows for more feedback than that provided by one’s individual point of view and that of the mentor. Nature connection brings one’s blockages into an environment where not only mentors and students can reflect them to you, but where birds can shout at you about them, fox and mink can honor you for your progress, and trees can offer comfort and grounding in a crisis. And practicing nature connection with others on the same journey offers that many more eyes and ears and hearts and minds to perceive that feedback, push you when you’re unwilling to push yourself, and help you incorporate the feedback into your development.)


(Photo from CalPhotos)

The next exercise was a simple plant sit. We were told to find a plant, sit down with it, and talk with it, aiming to get to know some of the plant’s “spirit medicine”. We were advised to begin with a question, such as “what’s your name?” or “what story do you have to tell?”

I wandered away from most of the group and sat down by a big, beautiful Scrophularia plant. My question was, “what’s your role here,” a variation on the get-to-know-the-stranger line of, “so what do you do?” After sitting with it for a time, spacing out and being distracted by very cool looking hoverflies, I was feeling a little unfocused and ineffective at my task. I reconsidered my question, and sent a wordless request for communication with the plant, opening this “conversation” to let it say whatever it needed to say. Quietly, I watched bugs crawl over it, saw the discarded skins and honeydew excretions of now-absent aphids on a young stem, inspected leafminer tracks in the newer leaves, and noted that most of the mature stalks and leaves were free of insects. I inspected the flowers and wondered about their pollination.

Holding the plant stalk between my thumb and forefinger, I realized that physically, the plant’s body and my body were part of a continuum of matter, that the divisions of individuality between human and plant were arbitrary and that in fact one body merged into another and into the air and the earth, and more, in a continuum of matter and energy. I thought that perhaps spirit might be similar, and wondered, with silence rather than words, about participation in plant spirits and the continuity of spirit between apparent individuals.

Then the coyote howl came to gather us back, and we moved on to another project.






After a fun communal journaling session and a lunchbreak that included more journaling, (I got to learn about the medicinal and toxic properties of Bleeding Heart wildflowers) we launched into the afternoon activity, a lesson on intuitive cooking from one of the Cultural Mentors.



We had each brought at least one food local to our homes, meaning harvested less than 100 miles away from where we live. I brought snow peas and fava beans from my former garden (I had to negotiate with the landlord to get in an pick them), winter squash from the last fall harvest in my garden, and duck eggs from the Eco House nearby. Others brought many citruses, greens, peas and other vegetables. One person brought some ground beef, another some kefir, a jar of dried huckleberries (yum), and the star of the show was fresh abalone from Bolinas.

Our challenge was to create an appetizer dish for the rest of the class using only these ingredients. We grouped into teams and selected our ingredients. My group wound up with the kefir, the huckleberries, and lots of veggies. We were frustrated at first with our luck, getting such an odd collection of ingredients, but we came up with a plan and created a dish. Vibrant, energetic chaos ensued in the kitchen.

Our dish, a sweet stirfry using greens, sugar snap peas, celery, and apple with a sauce of huckleberry kefir flavored with lemon zest, nettle, and lemon balm herbs turned out to be an improbable success. Others made equally delectable dishes: herb meatballs with dipping sauces made from fava beans, tomato soup, or mustard; toasted kale chips (delicious and simple creations that result from tossing kale with oil and salt and toasting the leaves in the oven); stuffed beet leaves; carrot and greens salad alongside abalone that was breaded (with locally dumpstered bread), seasoned, and fried in olive oil; squash, herb and dandelion flower fritters; and squash stuffed with an herbed duck egg scramble.







With dinner over, three rounds of dishes done, and the sun setting low, we gathered in the main room for more herb work. Some of our musicians jammed with drums, guitar and mandolin while we milled about and waited for everyone to settle. Only settling never quite happened, and finally the energy of the music took over the room with dance and improvised song. Rather than fight the energy, our instructors began to sing their instructions for the next activity. Demonstration flowed into dance, questions came out sung in time to the beat, and spontaneous poetry erupted. We learned and processed herbs for the next hour with music fueling our motions. This was by far the most fun herbal class I’ve ever attended. My grandmother would be overjoyed to see this kind of learning going on.







Finally, we finished out the evening with a council circle, discussing sex and gender issues. The men asked the women’s circle questions, and vice versa. It raised many more questions, and opened new avenues of communication that I think will continue to be explored for these last five weeks of class.

Lots of Buckskins and a Food Fight

This past class was the day for animal connection. We had big plans for Wednesday evening involving forty freshly-caught Dungeness crabs, courtesy of our resident fisherman, so we arrived by car to carry all our supplies.

Tuesday night we gathered in the yurt to share stories of the week, and heard some tales of the many felines that had come to feed on a nearby deer carcass. After the stories we returned to our camp, rekindled the fire, and discussed the next day’s activities. Though RDNA was skipping their usual bird sit, Native Eyes decided to have one anyway, and to investigate the deer carcass.

Tuesday morning’s bird sit was once again dominated by accipiter signatures. I have to admit that I’m getting somewhat impatient with these avian predators, and I’d really like to see some other bird patterns.

We gathered in Tent City next to the garden gate to poke around the kill site, and though the carcass was supposedly only two weeks old, little enough was left. Skin was a leathery tent over rough-gnawed bones, but maggots still squirmed in the dark places. It was a small deer, probably a yearling, with the bones mostly intact through gnawed at some of the ends. The ribcage was whole, but the limbs were disembodied and strewn widely. The ears had been removed and were lying lonely in the leafmold. Clipped fur was everywhere. Some speculation had been that this was a cougar kill, but I’m reluctant to draw that conclusion, as the bones were whole and the site so exposed. My opinion leans toward a smaller feline.

After the investigation we gathered again in the yurt for an unanticipated fashion show starring the Buckskin Brothers (Jay, Matt, and Ned), kicking off our animal-intensive day.



I became an annoying shutterbug for this class, and as a result I’ve got a pretty complete photographic hide tanning class for this blog. So what follows is my parroting of Jay Sliwa’s, Matt Berry’s, and Ned Conwell’s lesson in wet-scrape braintanned buckskin, based on this book:



First, skin the animal. The Buckskin Brothers said they prefer to do this while hanging it by the neck. Start by cutting up the midline of the belly from the anus to the throat, being careful not to puncture the gut cavity or it’ll get really really messy. Then cut across the body from ankle to ankle, forelimb across to forelimb and hindlimb across to hindlimb. Here’s a little photo of the cuts sketched out. Please note that it is not in fact a drawing of an alien.



Then set your knife down (well out of reach lest you be tempted to pick it up again) and use your hands to work the hide free. Knife nicks, even small shallow ones, will become a weak spot and then a hole over the course of the tanning process, so don’t give yourself the opportunity to make that mistake.

Then flesh the hide. Use a stout beam supported so that it stands up at an angle, like so:



Place the hide fur-side down, draped over the end of the beam. Lean against the butt of your beam to hold the skin in place as you scrape away from you down the beam. Begin scraping with a flat, dull impliment. Don’t worry about scraping too much. As long as you use something dull, rather than a knife, you shouldn’t damage the hide. The goal here is to remove the meat, fat, membrane, blood vessels, and such that still adhere to the hide after skinning.



Then, soak the hide in an alkaline solution, a process also known as bucking. This phase is what gives buckskin it’s name, not the sex of the deer killed for the hide. Buckskin can, in fact, be made from doe skins too. You can use either wood ashes or lye to make the alkaline solution, and unfortunately I don’t remember the proportion of lye to water. For wood ashes, you use the floating-egg-test: If a fresh egg sinks, you’ve got too little wood ash. If it floats on it’s side, you’ve got too much. If it floats end-up, with a circle about the size of a quarter poking out of the water, you’ve got the balance right.

I didn’t catch the length of time necessary for bucking, but braintan.com says that the soaking continues until the hair at the neck is easily pulled out.



After bucking you’re ready to scrape. Take the skin back to your fleshing beam, this time placing it hair-side-up, and again leaning on it to hold it in place. Begin scraping off the fur with your dull fleshing implement, starting near the rump where it’s easier. You’ll notice that a layer of the skin tends to scrape off with the hair – that’s what you’re going for, anyway. The fleshing took off the innermost layer of skin, the loose fibers, membrane and blood vessels and such, and the scraping will take off the outermost epidermis and grain layer of skin. You’ll be left with the middle fiber layer, the part that will become the finished buckskin.



Skin has multiple layers. Tanners identify (more or less) four layers. The epidermis and grain layers are the outer two where the hair is anchored. These two layers consist of loose fibers held in a mucous matrix. The third layer down is the fiber layer, a strong, interconnected matrix of fibers. The bottom is a thin layer of loose fiber. You want the strong fiber matrix for your hide, not the mucous matrix. Scrape it all off!



You may also notice that the epidermis and grain layers have become somewhat blue-gray, translucent and very slimy from the bucking. I used that difference in appearance and texture to know when I’d finished scraping an area, since often the fur comes off more easily than the grain. The underlying fiber layer is cream colored and more opaque, sticky-rubbery rather than snotty-slimy. Once again, scrape away – you won’t damage the hide with too much scraping, as long as your implement is dull.

Once your hide is cleaned of fur and grain, rinse it with fresh water. Now it’s time to wring it out. Here’s a fun method taught by Jay Sliwa:



Hang up the hide, with just the very end flopped over a pole to keep it in place.

Take the dangling end and loop it over your pole.

Roll in the edges of the hide, so that you have a wet hide donut hanging from your pole. Insert a strong stick into the donut hole.









Begin twisting and wringing out your hide.



Twist till it seems you can’t twist anymore.



Get a friend to help if you need to, or if you just want to have more fun with it. Twist it up some more. Blot with a towel.



Untwist, and twist it up again in the oposite direction. Once you’ve gotten as much water out of the hide as you can possibly get it'll look white and opaque, rather than translucent. Then stretch it out again.



And now it’s time for the brains. According to the Buckskin Brothers, every animal has enough brains to tan it’s own hide, but if you don’t have the brain from your animal you can use pig brains sold in butcher shops instead. I’ve also heard of using egg yolk. In any case, what you're looking for is an emulsified oil, one that will stay in solution and penetrate the skin rather than separating out and floating to the top. Brain is, according to many, the best for the job.



Make a brain shake by blending (or squishing by hand, yum) the brains and warm water. No one seems to have a solid proportion of brains to water online, though I probably have this info in my notes (when I find them I’ll know). Since animals have enough brain to tan their own hides, take more or less as much brain as would be present in the living animal and mix it with enough warm water to make a thin gooshy milkshake consistency.

Make sure it’s well squooshed and without lumps, and mix it with enough water to cover your hide.



Then put the hide in a bucket with the brain water and let it sit. According to the Buckskin Brothers, it only needs to sit for about 20 minutes, but longer is OK.



After braining, it’s time to work the hide dry. This is probably the most energy-intensive step of the whole process. Working the hide until it’s completely dry will help keep it from stiffening up. Apparently, one of the most common issues for beginning tanners is that their hides turn stiff after braining, a problem that crops up when you let a wet or damp hide sit without being worked. A possible solution is to rebrain the hide and work it dry again. So choose a sunny, dry day, or sit by a fire, and work that hide until it feels completely dry.



A vertical cable stretched from a tree limb to the trunk, or from an overhead beam to the floor, helps. Stretch the skin against the cable, formerly-furry-side out, so that the innermost side of the skin touches the cable. Work it back and forth, pulling on either end so that the whole hide slides over the cable with each tug.

The final step, smoking, is not strictly necessary and indeed fancy white buckskins are not smoked. However, if these white buckskins get wet they will revert to the cardboard-like state that all that work over the cable was intended to avert. So smoking waterproofs the hide, while creosote and other resinous substances in the smoke help to preserve it.



For our class, Jay put together a sweet smoking setup. He dug a U-shaped hole, rocket-stove-style. He attached a roughly 3 foot length of stovepipe to one branch of the U, and put a pot lid over the other. We had a fire going close by to furnish coals, and a bag of punky brown-rotted wood to toss on the coals to make smoke.

Jay attached a canvas skirt to the top of the stovepipe. Then he took two otherwise finished but unsmoked hides and glued the edges together with Elmer’s glue to form a bag, and attached the neck portions of the hides to the canvas skirt, then hung from a treebranch. Here’s the finished setup:



Jay then took coals from the fire, dumped them down the hole under the pot lid, and tossed in some punky wood after. Smoke began leaking through holes in the glued edges of the hides, permeating the area with a sweet, sharp scent. After a few hours Jay turned the hide bag inside out to smoke the other side, revealing beautifully tanned buckskins:



That evening Native Eyes organized a crab feed for the 40 students and staff of RDI, with fresh crab caught off the Bolinas coast by our very own Native Eyes fisherman, along with copious salad and a ridiculous amount of dumpstered bread and pastries.





It was exhausting and chaotic and glorious. Anything that ends in a spontaneous lemon-wedge fight is worth the time and effort.

Feast of the Ancestors

For this class we journeyed down south to Tunitas Creek Ranch. I was sick with a cold, gummed up sinuses and the sore throat from Hell, but I came along anyway – this would be our celebration of the Feast of the Ancestors (an Odawa or Ottawa tradition whose real name I can’t pronounce, much less spell, brought to us by Peacemaker Paul Raphael from the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians), and I didn’t want to miss it. The Feast of the Ancestors had never really been explained, just mentioned briefly, along with the phrase “I ate soooooo much” and similar comments. We arrived, as always, in the evening, just ahead of the oncoming fog.

We lit a sacred fire, made and tended by the men only, and made a circle for the celebrants around it. The Cultural Mentors had set a special section for “moon women,” women who are menstruating, to stay out of the circle but still participate. I’ve heard that the theory behind such separation in other ceremonies is that menstruating women’s energy is too powerful, and will drive away the spirits that the ceremony is intended to propitiate. I don’t know the significance of separation here, but I suspect it has to do, at the very least, with respect for the Odawa origins of the ceremony and their traditions. Men tend the sacred fire for a similar reason.

Tonight it was the staff’s turn to feast us, the students. They had all come with their ancestor’s favorite foods, and greeted us and feasted us like family. As the tradition goes, any one of the guests may truly be the host’s ancestor, returned to feast with the family for the night, so all who come are welcomed as relatives. By the end of the night everyone’s sides were aching with laughter. Coyote yips and wails echoed the human revelry longer into the night – they probably smelled all our good food. Or perhaps our teachers really are part Coyote, and their ancestors had returned to join the feasting.

The next morning, we rose before the sun for a bird sit. As we found our spots, Robins and Flickers called continuously in mild alarm, high in the trees and mostly toward the North and East. Flocks of small birds moved West, or South, but never toward the Flickers and Robins. Lone birds also moved in a general Southwesterly migration. The birds sang very little – only Black Phoebes, the most agile flyers, and Bushtits, well hidden in their thickets, sang unheeding of the “Tseep!” and “Clear!” of the Robins and Flickers to the Northeast. Partway through the sit, Robins and some Flickers moved further up slope, south, toward us and continued their alarming. In the thicket behind me, Juncos, Golden Crowned Sparrows, Bewick’s Wrens, and Wrentits started up an alarm as well, perhaps 10 or 12 feet high in general, and continued for at least 15 minutes. Then the Robins and Flickers moved on a little ways South, and the smaller birds quieted, giving companion calls or feeding.


After breakfasting and bird-mapping, we set off to do some Cybertracking along the creek. We had no particular objective, but we knew that cougar sign had recently been found in the creek, and were excited to search for more. The first thing we came upon was an unmistakable cat sign – a scratching post. However, it was tiny for cougar, so our major suspects were bobcat or housecat. The slivers of the outer claw sheath that I found embedded in the shredded bark could have been the right size for either. The urine spot near the scratches was equally inconclusive.






Our next find was on a log stretched across the creekbed. It had been scoured clean of bark by the passage of water and animals, and on it’s smooth face, though there was no visible mark to show it, was a smudge of odoriferous deer musk. Apparently Blacktail and Mule bucks have scent glands on the insides of their hind legs that exude musk when the deer is in rut, and at this time of year the smell gets on everything the buck passes. A good sign to look – or scent – for.

We also came upon a very old carcass of a deer, mostly melted away into the creek bank. The skull was gone and the limbs twisted and haphazard, and no hide remained to show the method of the kill or the scavenging. One sign that was still present, though, was the ribcage with one side sheared clean off, like with a giant pair of scissors. Perhaps our cougar sign?

Under an overhanging clay embankment, we also found some unidentified rodent tracks. We discussed the gait, and length of the toes, the straddle and size, and the placement in the landscape. It was a toss-up between Norway rat (for the splay and shape of the toes and footpads) and chipmunk (for the size of the print and straddle, and the gait) What do you think? (Apologies for the blurry photos, it was an awkward spot.)

We continued up the mostly dry creek, until we came to a flock of Juncos fluttering and bathing in a still pool, and decided that instead of disturbing their afternoon bath we would stop for lunch and let the Juncos finish. As I ate, I watched a male dunk himself up to his neck in water and flutter wildly, spraying his flockmates and everything else in a two-foot radius, then hop out, his spiked feathers the envy of punkrockers everywhere, and with rapid wingbeats rise to the canopy to sun himself.

After the Juncos had all gone up to dry their feathers in the sun, and we had finished our lunches, we continued walking up the creek. Our next find was a small diameter tree covered with fairly fresh, long scratches, some on one side more vertical and some on the other side tending toward the horizontal, in sets of four or five that were about two and a half inches wide. Conversation ensued about whether the animal was climbing up or lowering itself down, and why such a large critter had gone up into such a small tree in the first place.

We came to a culvert, and climbed out of the creekbed. We headed upslope, to find the area where the coyotes had been calling the previous night, but got waylaid on the path discussing a track. Some thought it was more likely a cat (with somewhat long toes) some said it was the track of a “long-toed coyote” and others had other ideas. Eventually we found another track in the set, a far more obscure, but obviously five-fingered, left front track exactly next to the right hind track that we’d been discussing. The feint heel impression in the right hind track became clear, showing a five-toed plantigrade print with long fingers and short sharp nails. We also recognized this animal’s signature 2x2 gait, with right-hind foot placed next to left-front foot and left-hind foot placed next to right-front foot, and we had to revise our suspect list. With most of our group convinced finally of the animal’s identity, one still has to wonder… was it actually a long-toed coyote?



Jon was at the fire circle when we returned, ready to debrief our bird sit from that morning.
We discussed the patterns and various predator signatures. From now on, when we hear intense bird language like the junco-sparrow-wren cluster in the thicket that morning, we’ll get to go into thicket and find the creature that the birds were talking about.

Wednesday night was the second night of the Feast of the Ancestors. Each RDNA clan had a separate fire, where they were serving the favorite foods of the ancestors to all visitors. We were invited to join the instructor’s group walking from fire to fire, and were greeted and feasted, again, as family. The food provided was delicious, made most nourishing and flavorful by the family stories that seasoned each dish. By the end I couldn’t eat anything more, but I still went to the last fire to hear my classmates share their roots.