Organizing Fire

We started as usual at the beach, marveling at the high surf and puzzling over some mystery tracks. This four-legged creature apparently went from a diagonal lope to a direct register walk, heading from the dunes up the trail to the road. Please help us identify this apparent newcomer to the beach! Here are the measurements:

Lope group length: 11-13"
Intergroup length: 6-10" getting shorter toward the walk.
Stride length in a walk: 7"
Straddle in a walk: 4"
Front track compression in loose sand: 2 1/4" long X 1 3/4" wide
Hind track compressions were considerably smaller.

After exploring this mystery, we moved up to the Bonny Doon Ecological Preserve for some trailing games in the sand. We regrouped out in Jon's yard for fire, food, and a good night's sleep.


The next morning after a bird sit and debrief, we gathered with Cultural Mentoring and RDNA Essentials for a special presentation. Jon's family was hosting some natural builders from Portland who brought some in-depth fire knowledge. Their interactive presentation articulated the properties of fire as a fluid, and gave us new tools to organize the flow of fire as a tool in our daily lives.


The centerpiece of the presentation was one example of a highly organized fire system: the rocket stove. They built this simple dry-stacked brick burn chamber, and lit the fire. It burned kind of smoky and, predictably enough, straight up.


Then they took an insulated stovepipe and "organized the flow" of the hot gasses coming out of the burning wood. One good blow on the little blaze and the fire turned upside down! They explained how the stack effect helped to organize the flow of air around the fire.


The fire now burned down and horizontally through the burn chamber, and a little flame even made it up the heat riser. Extremely hot exhaust fountained out of the stovepipe.



They finished the thing by building a second box of bricks around the rear of the burn chamber, and putting a metal barrel over the heat riser to redirect the flow of hot gasses downward. Now the vaporized wood completely combusted in the heat riser and no smoky smell escaped. The chinks in the brickwork, where the exhaust was escaping, began to bead with water -- the product of complete combustion.



The presenters also built a simple, free-standing Rumford fireplace to reflect the heat of a little campfire and better organize it's flow. I'm eager to see if of some of the Rumford ideas could make for efficient fire-heated lean-tos and other primitive shelters.

Deer Days of Autumn

We began at the beach with measurement exercises, meant to calibrate our measurement techniques. Then, the wind and sun too fierce for tracking the flats, we wandered the dunes in search of stories in the sand. One group got within eight or so feet of some bedded deer before jumping them up.


We changed locations, hoping to find the remains of cougar-killed deer in some known cache spots in Cloverdale. One car parked at the gate, the others at a pullout down the road. We wandered the willows, finding scat and urine of a local bobcat, but not a trace of deer kills.


As we all gathered in a tarweed stand to pick hand drills, someone noticed a sketchy-looking character up at the car by the gate. Binocs up, we watched as the guy crouched by the car, then the car alarm went off. The would-be thief took off running and we took off too, toward him. By the time we reached the car he was long gone. We drove to the other cars and some of us took the van to go looking for the guy. I looked at my car, and found that I had two flat tires.

As I dealt with the flats using a borrowed bike pump, the trio in the van had found the thief pedaling down the street. Our eldest, gruffest character stopped the thief and watched him until the cops arrived. Then the sheriff rolled up to my car to ask us to join the whole group to give statements.

"So you're naturists, huh?" he said.

"Naturists are the naked people," I replied. "We're naturalists."

Another time, the cops asked, "So how long did it take you to get your clothes back on before you pursued the suspect?" Everyone laughed, except the guy locked in the back of the police car.

Everyone's stories matched up, and the police began loading the thief's bike into their car. He'd probably go to prison for a month, they said. I couldn't help but feel bad for the guy. Prison won't solve the problems that he was trying to fix by burgling my car. I wish him health and happiness.


The next day after a big communal bird sit, we went out on the land. RDNA Essentials, Cultural Mentoring, and Native Eyes broke into clans each with at least one representative of each program. Our mission was to track the deer activity on the land. We could then track the habits of cougars by noting the absence of deer.


My group was charged with tracking Eagle Hill and we quickly fractured further to better cover the large area. One group rambled over the open hills and gullies, finding a clan of does and bucks and following them for a bit. Another group stuck to the edge between meadow and wooded slope. My group dove into the deer trails that spiderwebbed through the woods and into the edge of the meadow. We found fresh beds and lots of browse. No cougar sign.

As usual, Native Eyes took our leave from the main group that evening. As my companion and I got into the car I pasted a piece of paper of the car's clock. We didn't want to know how late it was. As we drove I felt relieved, ignorance of the time allowing me the space to be in the moment, driving, rather than concerned about getting a good night's sleep. We zoomed past a large lump by the road, and both of us shouted "That was a deer!" We pulled over and checked it out.


He was beautiful, huge, very clean, and still warm. We put him in the back of the car and tried to call anyone who might want a deer. No one picked up.

"Want to come over to my house and help gut this guy tonight?" I asked my companion. He said sure.

After we'd gone a way, I realized that some thanksgiving might be in order. We pulled off the road again, took some tobacco, and I opened the hatchback to let the deer be in the night air. I told the deer we were taking his body from his land to my home, thanked him for the gift of his meat and hide and bones, and offered tobacco to the land in thanks.

Just as I returned to the car and closed the hatchback, hiding the deer again, a sheriff stopped and shone a light toward us. "Everything OK?"

"Yep, just a pee break," I said. The sheriff laughed and drove off. We pulled onto the road again and another sheriff's car drove past. As we got up to speed, still another sheriff's car zoomed up and passed us on the left. "We've been blessed by the sheriff spirit," my friend joked.

Further down the road, we found another deer. She was a yearling, also still warm but in worse condition. As our hands touched her body, both my companion and I had the same thought -- that she would feed a lot of other critters out here. We gave thanks for her life also, and chucked her in the bushes so the scavengers would not themselves become roadkill.

At home, we hung the buck by his hind legs, took the guts out, and went to sleep.


In the light of morning we found that he had been killed when a small section of his ribs were broken and pierced his heart. Everthing else was whole and in beautiful condition. He must have died very quickly.




I worked most of the day to quarter him up and save the parts I know how to use, which is most of him. I couldn't save the guts because it was too late at night and I didn't have the fridge space to keep them. I'll tan the hide, save the sinew for bows or bowstrings, make the hide scraps on the legs into glue, use the bones for tools, make soup and musical instruments from the hooves, and I'll use the meat in a Wopila, a thanksgiving feast for my friends and family.

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.

skip two weeks

I took the previous week off of Native Eyes because I was supporting a campout with the Riekes Center Nature Awareness department, and there is no Native Eyes this week! See you all again next week.

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."

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.

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?

New Crew

Our Native Eyes journey has begun for another year. We're starting off separate from the RDNA village, so we gathered with just our Native Eyes group on the coast for intros and stories from Jon. Then we headed to last year's bird sit meadow for an introductory wander.


Our evening cookfire finally blazed to life after we cranked out three coals, using some of the above kits and tinder. Everything was damp and drippy in the redwoods. The unexpected chill of soaked-through sleeping bags and soggy sweatshirts set us a little on edge. Soon Jon Young, Paul Raphael, and Gerry Brady joined our fire and brightened up the evening with stories, jokes and songs.

The next morning we had our first bird sit. With camp so soggy, we decided to drive to a new location to debrief the sit under the shelter of some thick-canopied cypress trees. Some of our group saw an accipiter in the distance as we got out of the car, but didn't mention the sighting. The landscape, mostly Hypericum and stands of old Cypress, was quiet except for a few sparrow chips in the shrubs and Northern Flicker calls. We headed toward the same stand of woods that the accipiter was working, thinking more of dry ground than of birds.

As we finished our debrief, a Cooper's Hawk flew in under the canopy of trees to perch on a limb above us in the shadows, her dark back blending with the dark under the canopy. We watched in silence until she flew again. "Who heard her concentric rings?" someone asked when the hawk had gone. We talked about the Northern Flicker's "Clear!" call of alarm that still rang out, and the overall silence and distinct lack of song. With a flurry of wings, the Flicker that had been calling lit in the treetop above us, sunlight picking out the red in his feathers. A few calls of "Clear!" and he fluttered away, too, in the opposite direction as the hawk.


After lunch Molly and Greg led us in a trailing exercise. Two participants trailed Molly over the beach and dunes, and two others trailed Greg. We followed the trails into the ocean and out again. One group stayed together and took turns leading, while the other group divided and tracked separately. Only one group found their missing person in the allotted time.


Molly and Greg's trail led right by a tantalizing mystery. Three clumps of feathers lay near each other in the sand, and near them, the former owner of the feathers.





We puzzled over the pockmarks in the sand that accompany each clump of feathers, looked for tracks, found raven prints but nothing else discernible. We noticed that each clump was composed of a different type of feather. We discussed and came up with stories to narrate the sequence. But the question remains: Who killed this gull?

Trailing Test

This week we set out to meet Molly and Greg at Gazos Beach. As we set out, a torrential rain came down, beating the landscape into sogginess. When we got there the rain had mostly stopped, but Molly and Greg were nowhere to be found. We did have a message from them, though -- they had laid down two trails for us, and our job was to track them to their hiding places. We broke up into two teams and began.

One team got an immediate feeling, a tug in the gut, that pulled them down to the beach at a sprint. The other group, of which I was a part, watched them run down the trail, West toward the water, and hook North to disappear around a dune. We walked along the same trail, searching for a spot where either Greg or Molly might have turned off and away from the main trail.

One recent trail, rained on but with steep sidewalls on the tracks, cut very obviously off the main trail and up a clear dune. My group agreed on a tracking formation with one lead on the main trail, two flanks assisting the lead and looking for side trails, and a rear guard keeping awareness of the landscape as a whole. We progressed slowly along the trail, trading off our positions as we felt like it.

We crested the high dunes and dropped to low ground, following the trail all the while. Up ahead we saw the other group scattered over the landscape. The trail lead right through their group, and when we came along side them, they explained that they'd felt a strong tug toward this spot, ran here, found the trail, and followed it until they couldn't follow anymore. Both teams, it turned out, were on the same trail, only the other team had approached from the other side. Now we became uncertain about whose tracks were whose -- it had still been raining when the other team got to the trail, so aging was a challenge.

We spread out and spiraled from our last known track as one big, scattered group. Some ranged far afield hoping to pick up a clear trail again. Others stuck with the known trail, creeping along. Some just got bored and went wandering. One picked up a different trail and, thinking it might be Molly's, followed to within 20 feet of our instructor's hiding place but never saw them. One wandered and found a kite, and promptly lost all interest in trailing.


The group that stayed close to the original trail kept creeping along, following the feint, rained-on trail. We came to the high dunes bordering the beach, and a clear trail scrambling up them. The tracks had been rained on to the same degree as the trail we were following, and were about the same size. One of the other team who had run here ahead of us was there investigating the trail with us. She stated, though, that when she and her team had come there earlier there had been no tracks up these dunes. Despite being the right age, size and stride, we accepted that statement and concluded that we were on the trail of one of our own, not Molly or Greg. We kept on the trail and kept discussing whose it was but the idea that we'd lost the trail and were on the wrong one drained our enthusiasm.

We looked briefly but without real intention for more tracks down the dunes and onto the beach, but couldn't immediately see them. We floundered, sat in the sand, watched the kite flutter, and spaced out.

Finally Molly and Greg appeared over the dunes to the south. They told their story, laying out their trails in our mind's eyes, and we told of our experiences trailing them. We talked about our different approaches and modes of organization, what worked, and what didn't.


When we got back to Venture, we lit a fire in the tipi and were joined by Jon Young. He told stories of the Bushmen, of how they use spirit tracking and that pull in the gut as a last resort, and work to hone their physical skills to the utmost, first. He also told stories of search and rescue missions, of how one of the biggest problems in tracking lost people is sorting out the lost person's trail from those left by well-meaning but confused rescue personnel. He stressed the need for one leader on the trail to preserve the integrity of the trail and keep the rescue team from trampling the tracks. One of the final questions he posed was in reference to that "pull" in the gut that some of us felt, that pulled them in the exact opposite direction from our hiding instructors, and right over the trail that my group was following. What was that pull?