Dogs and Cats

Native Eyes met at Gazos Beach, where the coyotes treated us to a tangle of trails. We found multiple trails braiding together and lots of urine marking sites concentrated at the mouth of a small dry creek. The urine spots became fewer and further between, the further we went up or down the beach. What does that pattern say about the coyote's territory and borders?


Our heads full of questions and our journals full of sketches, we returned to camp. We rock-boiled a big pot of vegetable soup for dinner. We heated some large round stones (not from a creek within the last year) to glowing by building a fire on top of them, pulled them out with some sticks, and plopped them in the soup. I wanted to dip them in water before putting them in soup, just to rinse off the ash, but we decided that was more effort than it was worth. The soup cooked faster than it ever would have on a stovetop.


The next morning we went south to a coastal meadow for our bird sit. When we got there the little birds were huddled in their bushes, twittering to one another. They grew quieter as we sat, and a flicker made it's rounds on the tallest trees, calling "clear!" Robins sat high and alarmed, and a mob of crows called raucously. Scrub-jays called in clumps, "jay? Jay? Jay?" The meadow went quiet a few times as well. Right before we ended, the little brown birds decided to come out and feed, and the meadow was full of little flutters. Then they all ditched it again, and one of our group saw a hawk with short wings and a long tail glide low over the meadow.


When we mapped out the sit, many of us could recognize the patterns. Our story went like this: The birds were tense and huddled in hiding because a hunting cooper's hawk was in the area. The flicker and robin called as it came nearer, and then all went silent. When that hawk left, the little birds jumped on the chance to feed, just before a second hawk (or perhaps the same hawk, having doubled back) made an entrance.


After we mapped and debriefed, we went out to an old burn site, where the land was sand and many tracks crisscrossed through the brush. Our goal was to trail deer, but quite soon into our expedition this track reached out and grabbed our attention. There were lots of deer tracks, as well as lots of human and dog tracks. This one, though, struck us as a classic cougar print.


We trailed the cougar, finding tracks here and there where they had been spared by hiker's feet, and came upon the above. There were plenty of dog tracks around to confuse matters. What was this animal doing when it made this track? Is it a dog, or a cougar moving at high speed? We drew many of the cougar tracks, took measurements, and played with different styles of sketching. Have you ever tried drawing a track life-sized?


The trail eventually led us to this scrape. The scat under the debris was bobcat sized and shaped, but the scrape was far larger. We had not seen any bobcat tracks, either. And the scat was fresh, soft, dark red-brown, smelling of meat and cat turd, and had very little, but still some, deer hair content. Why did the cat mark this area? Why does the scat have so little hair in it? Why is the scat so small?



We took our photos and our sketches and returned to camp for the night. We fleshed some rabbit hides in preparation for a future activity, then shared food and stories around the fire.

Spindles, Sparrows and Drum Skins

For this Tuesday’s fire, we decided to try for a hand-drill coal using a California Mugwort stalk spindle harvested from Cloverdale Ranch. The sun was setting, the sky was dimming, the temperature dropping, humidity was climbing and it had been raining for days. In this challenging environment, we discovered that cooperative work and doug fir pitch on one’s hands can make even the most unlikely hand-drill scenario yield a coal. It was a lot of work, and by the end we all sported blisters on our palms, but we had our first ever native materials hand-drill fire.

We started the next day with a bird sit, and since I knew the day would be fairly easy, centered on crafting our drum heads, I decided to get up early. I got to my sit spot well before the dawn chorus of birds or people, with the first light just touching the eastern sky with indigo. Coyotes yammered in the distance, and a Saw-Whet Owl called nearby, but otherwise the meadow was silent.

As the east lightened, a wave of bird alarm chips moved from north to south over the slope, and then silenced. Seconds later human voices rose from Commonweal Gardens in a dawn wake-up song. Then the same sparrows that woke up chipping in alarm, voicing concentric rings of the waking camp, burst into their own dawn song. Song sparrow and human voices together filled the meadow, and then fell silent again.

For the rest of the day Native Eyes worked on our drums while RDNA worked on basketry.






We started by cutting out rawhide drum skins, using our own drums frames as the patterns and leaving a half- to one-inch margin around the outside.



Then we cut more lacing. We figured out an easy, fast, two-person method.



We cut slits in the drum skin margins, four per side. Then we started lacing the drum skins onto the frames, weaving a single long strip of hide through one hole, then across the drum to another, and then back across again, bouncing back and forth in an hourglass pattern.



When the lacing was all in place, I stretched the skin as much as I could by hand. Then I began tightening the lacings, going around one by one and pulling each tight. I did this three times, until it seemed like the straps might break if I tightened them any more.



I still had a long length of lacing, so I started binding the lacings into a central, cross-shaped handle. I started by grouping eight lacings together and binding them from the center outward, creating a flared handle of rawhide, then winding the lacing back on itself toward the center. I did the same for each group of eight lacings, finishing with a cross of rawhide bindings around the drum lacings.



I let the whole thing dry slowly, sitting on my naturalist shelf in my room. The finished drum has a resonant and pleasing voice.

Drums

This Native Eyes we had the darndest time making a fire. We broke some bowstrings, a bow, and wore down a few spindles before finally getting a coal well after sunset, and only after we'd all decided to cooperate on one kit.

The next day we had a mobile bird sit with the ducks on the Bolinas lagoon. They are highly sensitive meters of one's concentric rings.

A sideshow for the day, but my personal favorite part, was working with traps and snares. One of the Cultural Mentors set up a deadfall and caught some atypically large prey. We should have known that baiting it with field guides was a bad idea in a crowd of naturalists.




I also learned how to set up one type of rabbit snare. In a real trap, one would of course use fine, non-orange cord or wire.

For the rest of the day we worked on making drums. The method we learned from Matt Berry uses no nails or pegs, just the tension of the drum head and lacings and frame, like a mortarless stone arch standing with it's concerted but opposing pressures.

The process starts with skin.

We'd soaked it in lye.

And removed the hair, leaving the grain layer on.

Then we rinsed them clean, and cut out drum skin forms.


The remainder of the skin we cut into 1/4 inch lacing to bind the skins to the frames.


We made the frame with wood: three feet or more of wrist-width straight-grained even-width tree limb. I used a redwood bough.

We cut them into even lengths, then split them lengthwise as evenly as possible.

Then we mitered them to 22.5 degree angles on the ends to form a trapezoid.

Most brave folks used the chop saw. I used a miter box and hand saw.

Next we glued the frames together and chinked the gaps with swdust and glue, then bound them with electrical tape to keep the pieces in tension as they dry overnight.

We started a pot of hide glue by boiling old rabbit skins, fur and all, over a nifty portable wood stove. The glue wasn't ready by the time we needed to glue our frames, though, so we used storebought wood glue.

And there the process stopped for us. RDNA continued the process and completed their drums, but Native Eyes had to leave the next day. We'll revisit drum making later on, with the addition of the skin to our drum frames.