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.

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.

Lions & Trackers & Boars

Oh my! This was an awesomely epic Native Eyes class.

Here, before I launch into my account, is a beautiful example of a deer lay. Can you see the two forelegs in the front, and the arch of the back behind them? Scroll down to the end of this post to have a look at my interpretation of this sign.


On this first week back from winter break, we met down south at Venture. We gathered, built our fire, heard stories of the break, received our assignment for the next day, and ate good food.

We rose early the next morning for a tracking day at Cloverdale Ranch, and piled into cars and vans. Finally we gathered in our clans near the reservoir at Cloverdale, ready to fulfill our Native Eyes assignment of looking for and encouraging curiosity about scat!

Let me take a minute to explain the clan system. The clans are the Tule Elk, the Grizzlies, and the Bald Eagles. These clans include students from each of our school’s three main programs: the RDNA fundamentals program, the Cultural Mentoring program, and the Native Eyes program. Each clan is also made up of representatives from each of our school’s eight directional societies, starting with the East Society and continuing sunwise around the compass to the Northeast Society. (Native Eyes, appropriately enough, is also the school’s Northeast Society, responsible for encouraging full sensory awareness, the questioning process, and thankfulness among other things.) We use these various groupings (program, clan, and society) to organize ourselves in various activities. The three programs each have different learning focuses, and the eight societies each have different jobs and roles in our larger groups. When we have school-wide activities, such as our epic wandering tracking day in Cloverdale, we usually organize into Clans in order to have people from each program and each society working together in one group throughout the activity.

Yes it sounds complicated, and yes it was originally very confusing, but now we’ve all lived this organizational system long enough to work with it fairly smoothly. Regardless of the coherence (or lack thereof) of my explanation, we spent the day in our Clans.

My group, the Bald Eagles, couldn’t decide where to go. After much finagling and negotiation, we finally agreed to drive out to the second gate and explore some of the southern part of the reserve.

We climbed up to the ridge and the first thing we noticed were numerous spots covered with little furry scats, sometimes including little bones or bone shards, each less than an inch in diameter and probably an average of six or seven inches long in total, shaped like slightly larger versions of the contents of a well-used cat litter box. They were all dense and many were weathered to a chalky white. The entire landscape was littered with these scat piles, bespeaking the incredible density of the bobcat population in these coastal prairie lands.

Over the ridge crest on the bank of a vernal pool, we found a wide churned-up and soupy section of mud. Preserved in the muck were these (and many other) impressively-sized marks. I've adjusted the levels and contrast on these photos so that fine details pop out better.



From round rear to cloven toe, the hair-imprinted smoosh was a little less than three feet long. A series of blunt, dewclawed trotter tracks led away from the body print in a short-striding trail. The trail was crossed by deer tracks, which you can also see in the photo and which serve as size comparison. The sharpness of the tracks and fine detail of hair and hoof texture melted away as we watched, flowing back into the pond under the days’ steady drizzle.









We discussed and argued the story of this spot for a long time before moving on. When we were ready we continued along the ridgetop, walking game trails at the edges of brushy ravines. Up on the plateu, near a worn-in deer run, I nearly stepped on our second major find of the day.



A clump of fur lay in the grass. I bent down and looked closer, and the clump resolved into a 1.5-inch diameter log, composed almost entirely of coarse hollow-shafted dark-and-light ticked hairs. In all the scat was more than 7 inches long, and probably closer to 9. The shape was blocky and clumpy overall, and very dense, though it was old enough to have a green bloom of algae on some edges.



After logging the big scat in Cybertracker, we continued on the game trail. We found a series of large piles of dead grass near another thick furry scat. One of the piles still reeked of cat urine. We also found miniature variations on the furry-scat-near-dead-grass-pile theme, possibly territorial markings by bobcats. The big piles and scats were so much larger than these smaller, commoner examples, that we were fairly convinced that the culprit had to be a much larger cat.



I’d started the day with a personal wish to find and learn about boar and cougar sign. These are two large and important animals of California wildlands that I’ve never before had the opportunity to track. We finished the day wet and tired from the long rainy walk, but though my limbs felt leaden I returned to camp energized.

And here again is that deer lay: