Getting Permission

Native Eyes met at Commonweal this time, and we were greeted by constellations of fox scat. The little canids accented every firepit, larder, crossroads, and just about everything else with their spoor. After giving our greetings and thanksgiving to the land and eachother, we requested permission from the foxes to track and photograph them. Then we divided into hunting parties to get the lay of the land and find likely places to set our new camera traps.


My hunting party went up the dry, goat-nibbled ridge. Along the trail we found a chain of these latrines, all with both the big and small scats. We don't know when the scats were left, and we suspect the small came after the big. We think the big is bobcat and the small is fox. What does this say about the predators in the area? What are they saying to each other?

Others were more successful than we in finding likely bottleneck spots to photograph foxes. We laid our traps and left to make our fire.

That evening, we met the RDNA crew. There are a lot of them. Everyone, RDNA, Native Eyes, and Cultural Mentors got a chance to intro themselves around the campfire. I left feeling impressed with the breadth of backgrounds and resources that people bring to the program, and with the strong desire to get to know the other participants better.


The next morning Native Eyes went out early to the bird sit. Dark faded to dawn, the birds gave full throat to the morning, and waves of alarm spread over the land as hawks and other predators moved. Then the rest of RDNA arrived and sat, too.

Mapping with such a big group turned out to be a pleasure, after having only eight sets of eyes on the land. Jon was able to draw out lots of patterns and stories when we debriefed the maps later.


We had checked our camera traps before the debrief, and so were able to present evidence to the group of predators in our midst. One of the possible causes of alarm sequences:



That evening a gray fox came through the fence again at the camera site, walked to our Native Eyes fire ring right in front of one of the NE participants, and laid a scat. We had asked, received permission, and now we might have been told "you're welcome."

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?

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.

Anake

We began this week with a 30-minute figure four trap challenge. We were to find appropriate sticks, whittle them to the right shapes, set the trap with appropriate deadfalls, and trigger the trap within 30 minutes. One person met the 30 minute challenge! The rest of us took more time adjusting the cuts to the three sticks and fiddling with our weights.

For any who have never interacted with primitive traps, here is a diagram of an idealized figure 4 deadfall and it's component sticks, to offer some clarity (illustration from Wikimedia Commons):


I missed the previous lesson on traps, and had to watch others and pick up what I could. I did not have the luxury of a diagram or explicit instructions. Still, with everyone around me carving their sticks in the same way, and a little observation on my part, I was able to make a serviceable deadfall. My trap only took 45 minutes from setting out to search for sticks, to triggering the final deadfall with a nudge to the bait stick.


Pictured below is the winner for quickest, most primitive, and most easily triggered trap. The trap's maker found and carved the sticks in under 15 minutes, and used no knife. Instead, a rough rock served to rasp away wood in the right places. The trap stood for just over two minutes on it's own. A gust of wind blew it down right after I snapped this picture, and the falling weight crushed one of the sticks.


Next, we switched our focus to another important survival skill: finding potable water. We went questing up Wish Creek looking for a source of water coming straight out of rock or soil. One group took pots and jars and experienced the extreme frustration of finding the source on high ground and having to negotiate challenging terrain with full vessels. They brought back most of the water in their clothing.


We also experimented with surface wells. We found a place in the creekbed, much closer to camp, where the water flowed down and disappeared into the soil. We dug next to the flow. The holes we dug sank well below the bottom of the creekbed and struck soupy chocolate-colored mud. As we watched, clear water swirled in from the upstream side of the well. Would this water be sufficiently filtered by the few inches of earth through which it flowed? Our next step is to get some water test kits and find out.

...

After an evening of stories from JY and a failed attempt at rock-boiling a large quantity of our collected water, it was time to greet the Anakes.

The Anake Outdoor School (formerly known as the Wilderness Awareness School Residential Program) had been traveling for the better part of a week, come all the way from Duvall, Washington. We had prepared a song to welcome them to our land, and we circled our fire and practiced our welcome. With night settled heavy and nearly moonless, the stars blazed their greetings all the brighter.

Outside the gate, the Anakes had gathered and howled now like wolves, a wild sound from the dark. We gathered at the gate and gave our coyote yips and wails in response. Silence, some argument over who was to start ("1-2-3-not-it!"). The Anakes launched into their song of greeting, still unseen across the gate but felt in the body-resonance of pulsing drums and stomping feet. When the last beat and whoop echoed off the ridges, we paused, replied with our song, and opened the gate.

In darkness and firelight we gathered both groups, circled, greeted, and went to bed.


We started the next morning with a bird sit. The Anakes, looking with eyes new to the landscape, brought fresh perspectives to our sit. We came back in, breakfasted and wrote out bird maps together. The greenhouse was exceptionally lively.


After the sit we divided into groups by Society for our all-day wander. The Anake's East Society paired with our RDNA East people, the RDNA Souths went with the Anake Souths, and so on.


We didn't get reports from each Society afterward, but some patterns emerged anyway. The Norths, for example, focused on trees. The Southwests made sure to take a nap in the afternoon. And the Souths, of which I was a member, found a mammal.


We hunkered down, poking and prodding our find. What exactly was it? Not a rodent, considering the sharp, burgundy-pointed teeth and long pointy snout. We settled on Sorex spp, but still had many questions. What brought him out onto the hillside? The patchy chaparral and grass stretched up and down the ridge, open and dry. How long was he dead? He was limp, not stiff. Fly eggs on the carcass had not yet hatched. How had he been killed? some blood spots flecked the carcass, we saw no punctures or wounds.

As we examined the minute mammal, robin and kinglet alarms began erupting on the opposite ridge. Some of our number began scanning the horizon. Minutes passed, and silence settled. We all looked up from our mammal in time to see a large accipiter with a long rounded tail and short blunt wings flap it's way across the valley and then disappear to the north. Moments after the hawk's passage, song began to fill in the valley from the south, and we went back to our mammal mystery.


With no answers to many of our questions, we made what seemed at the time to be a logical decision. We skinned and dissected the little carcass.


The next day, Native Eyes departed. We left with more inspiration to tap into our wild, quiet mind, to dance and drum and sing the hearbeat of our land, to know our places as natives and draw our sustenance from our land. And it seemed to me that our Anake comrades came away with more bird language questions, more love for the land, and enriched by one shrew-pelt nosewarmer.

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.