Wilderness Awareness School, or WAS, as we called it, was designed for kids who did not fit in with the average teenager; it was for outcasts of the contemporary school system. By that point I certainly fit that description. I had retained my style from the road: my new fat dreadlocks on my head, secondhand clothing, and hair on my legs. My classmates at this new school ranged from high-school dropouts to highly motivated unschoolers that had an intense drive to learn every plant, animal, and tracking and survival skill, pushing themselves to their limits in extreme conditions within the elements of nature. We formed the first cohort of a maverick pack of teenagers, each as individual and strong-willed as the next, but brought together by one common thread: nature.
The curriculum was a grand experiment to take kids raised with modern amenities and immerse them in the wilderness, mentor them by asking a lot of questions to invoke passions, and teach them self-awareness and leadership. At WAS, students learned to survive in the wilderness, how to extract medicine and food from wild plants, how to track animals, and how to understand the language of nature. We were allowed to be free from authority and commands, the reason most of us stayed for years. We worked things out as they came up.
Most days, we wandered in the forest with no destination or agenda. When we arrived at a spot that felt right in the forest, we gathered wood. Even on the wettest days—most days in Western Washington—we all knew where to find the fine, dry twigs hanging dead under the boughs of a hemlock, cedar, or fir tree. We peeled the soft bark of the red cedar and broke it apart to form a nest, just like the squirrels did to line their nests. We worked together to spin a hand drill on a flat board to form a coal, and then we moved the coal into our nest, which would go up in flames as we softly blew on the ember.
Once the fire was lit, we sat around it and talked, which seemed like the most natural thing to do. The group of us—Justin, Rikki, Terry, Michael, Essa, Greg, and I—gathered and talked about what we wanted to do, what excited us. The fire was our unifying force and has continued to warm our friendships throughout the full circle of our lives together.
We had our routines. We each had a spot that we called our secret spot, where we went to sit and observe. We had our favorite tracking areas, where the predators frequented watering holes. Climbing trees, taking a nap on top of moss as soft as goose down, and jumping into lakes were all common activities for a day at school.
On one occasion, a few months after I started at the school, I became very perturbed by one of my classmates, Michael. He had brown hair down to his shoulders that he pulled back into a low ponytail. He wore loose-fitting clothes and small stubbles of hair were just starting to emerge for the first time from his face. I could never figure out his voice—was it going to come out high or low? He started stepping on my heels that day, tripping me, walking into my personal space and generally being annoying.
There was a bank to the side of the old logging road we were walking on. I let him get close, and without notice, I pushed him down the hill. When he stood at the base of the hill, his clothes covered in moist dirt and decomposing maple leaves, he had no words, but looked at me with respect, like a wolf that’s just established a boundary with another member of the pack. From then on Michael and I were good friends, and he was clear on the boundaries of our friendship.
We learned to immerse ourselves in our senses and the natural world by delving deep into connecting with nature and ourselves. The only thing we were instructed to do was to follow our passion—and each of my classmates had one. Michael, for example, eventually grew out of his awkward teenage years and became a master bow maker and archer. He went on to become a luthier, making beautiful instruments prized by musicians. His cellos and violins are used at venues like Carnegie Hall. We all found and engaged with our passions by directly communicating with the natural elements of the Pacific Northwest forests we immersed ourselves in.
There were a couple of adults with us, Anne and Chris, but they never paid much attention and were typically out of sight or observing quietly. Anne was sweet, like a favorite aunt, with a warm smile and a gentle voice. Chris was usually working on his own skills of survival or tracking, often being goofy and cracking jokes, hoping that we would just see him as one of us. Once in a while they would ask us questions. But in general, the seven of us were free to do anything. We were hanging out along a river, exploring ponds, and finding new mysteries in the forest each day.
Early on, we learned how to weave baskets, and the thrill of creating something from natural materials immediately engaged me. I spent much of my time weaving by the river. It helped me calm my inner turmoil when I still had a great deal of it. It helped me to focus my hands on a task and my intentions into the future, let me release the past and put my brain in the present moment when I still struggled to do so. I would sit and weave the pliable willow, smelling the earthy, pungent scent of the bark. I held the wefts in my fingers, those branches that I wove over and under, as I cradled the basket between my legs and shaped the warps, the branches that supported the structure. Once the basket was finished I put straps on it so I could carry it on my back. The baskets I wove were useful both to my mind and to our other pursuits; I’d often fill them with the food I was learning to forage to take back to our simple huts to cook over a fire.
We called one place in the forest the Nasties. To be clear, the environment there was anything but nasty. There were large western red cedar trees with moss-covered logs lying at their bases. We nibbled at the leaves of wild ginger where it grew in patches of light that filtered through the canopy overhead like strings of golden thread. We called that place the Nasties because it was a party spot, and often we found trash that was just plain nasty left by the previous weekenders. We cleaned it up, sometimes filling our handwoven baskets with the disgusting garbage left by revelers in a jarring juxtaposition, and hoped the place would be treated better by the next weekend’s revelers.
We loved to hike out to a place we called Osprey Swamp. There was an osprey nest at the top of one of the dead standing alders, and often when we arrived we caught a glimpse of the bird fishing in the waters below. We would walk out to the middle of the swamp by balancing on the logs floating throughout. Then began the game of trying to make each other fall into the water below. We ran from log to log, sparring with each other, waiting for the first to go down. Most would eventually fall in, then trudge out of the water dripping wet while bellows of laughter erupted from everyone else.
We would play epic games of capture the flag in the middle of the wet forest. During the game we would jump over logs, belly crawl, and sneak through the wet leaves of the understory. I can still recall the smell of the decomposing duff. As my face touched the forest floor I would notice all the white hyphae of fungi as it spread from one spot on a leaf and formed white finger-like filaments to eventually consume the leaf entirely. The slime mold, the grubs, the spiders, and the earthworms were all working to make food from the waste of the forest. The smell of the rot was sweet, not stagnant, as the leaves and debris worked their way down the layers, forming into humus and eventually ending up as dirt to feed the cycle of growth. The moisture on the forest floor allowed the plants and animals to each perform their role in decomposition.
I made new discoveries like the generative decay of the forest floor every single day, and I made them through direct observation. I was engaging my senses in such a complete way that those discoveries would embed into my very being. This was so much closer to the feeling of freedom I’d been seeking, because it wasn’t a selfish, I-do-what-I-want freedom, the freedom that had felt so hollow after my months on the road. This was the freedom of knowing that all life is interconnected, and that my choices and actions affected the beautiful wild world around me, the freedom that came with knowing I was a wild creature connected with all other wild creatures. I was learning firsthand about ecology, not as an external human observer but as a strand in the web of life. This was school—or more accurately, unschool. What a distance I had come from my days in the concrete box.
Still, it took me a long time to learn to shake off the constructs of our culture and uncover my own wildness, to be able to blend into the forest so I could truly see what was around me in its natural state. Learning to track was essential to this development. When I first started at WAS I had never really discovered tracks or tracking. I might have seen some marks in the ground or animals in the distance, and I knew what to do if I got in a dangerous situation with a bear or a mountain lion. What I did not know was how to detect if the animals were around by the signs they left behind.
One of my classmates, Greg, was really into tracking. He always wore beige shorts and an earth-tone brown shirt and he mostly went barefoot, even if it was cold or wet. As he walked he rolled his feet down on the ground so carefully that he barely made a sound. He was quiet and either had a serious look on his face or a sideways smile. He was always drawing plants or trees or animal tracks in his journal. I had never known anyone who drew or even followed tracks. I didn’t initially see what the big deal was.
One day I followed Greg upriver, along the bank paralleling the Snoqualmie. He kept pausing to look at tracks. I paused too, looked around, and threw rocks into the river. I got impatient with how slowly he was traveling up the river, and I went on ahead. I saw some marks in the sand and decided to take a closer look. Greg was so interested in even the smallest pinprick of a mark; I wanted to know what he found so fascinating. Each of the marks I found had five toes and an indent under the toes that was curved in a C shape. The toes were connected with a line, like they were attached toward the tip of the toe. There were sharp points at the tip of each toe, like someone had stuck a pin in the sand.
The riverbank dropped off into a steep bank and I could see drag marks in the ground that looked as though something had slid down and landed in the river below. I kept following the marks. They would disappear into the river and reappear further down. It looked as though whatever animal had left tracks had been using the bank like a waterslide into the water, then coming out and doing it again.
Greg sidled up with that funny walk he had. He approached the marks, kneeled down, looked close, and scratched his chin. I pretended I was not that interested, but really I was exuberant inside, so excited that I had possibly found tracks Greg was interested in. He started asking me questions.
“Where did the animal come from?”
I cocked my head to look at him. He was the tracker—why was he asking me? When I did not answer, he continued to ask questions.
“Where did it go? What was it doing? How was it moving? Why was it coming out of the water?”
I got frustrated with him.
“It came out of the river, went up the hill, and slid down the bank,” I said.
He rubbed his chin and said, “Hmmm.” After a pause, he asked, “What kind of animals that live around here spend time in the water?”
“Beaver, muskrat…” I trailed off. Suddenly I remembered sitting by the bank of the river when I was a little girl, seeing an animal come out of the water. “River otter!” I said.
He looked at me and said, “Hmm, river otter?”
I was not sure if I was right, and frustratingly, Greg wouldn’t tell me. But I had to admit, my interest in tracking, which had previously seemed a bit dull to me, was piqued.
The curriculum at WAS, like everything there, was optional; our activities had to come from our own desire to learn and engage. The curriculum was developed by the founder of the school, Jon Young, and was called the Kamana Naturalist Training Program (Young 1996).
The program was an independent study that included journaling every species of mammal, bird, tree, and plant within my bioregion, followed by studying how it was all interconnected and the big picture of the ecology of the area. It was very different from how I had learned the sciences in school, where everything was separated into its own subject and not seen as part of the whole. I was given exercises to do on a daily basis to train my brain to the natural patterns I was immersing myself in, exercises like meticulously recording the weather four times during the day, along with other observations about the birds, trees, animals, and plants. We learned how to give thanks by naming each group of life forms on the earth and out into the sky. This was called the Thanksgiving Address. Chief Jake Swamp, sub-chief of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation, visited us during our time at WAS, and he wrote that section of the study guide. He believed that if every child learned to say thank you to all of creation when the sun rises each day, then there would be peace on earth. When I ran away from home I had longed to live close to the earth, but I did not know how to achieve that. Now I was training in methods that would bring me toward a deep nature connection like that of hunter-gatherer children who depended on those skills for survival.
After receiving the curriculum binder, which seemed to weigh as much as a baby, I sat down and opened the first book of Kamana. I sat in my bedroom and read through the exercise of finding a secret spot. It had to be a place close to home that I could visit every day. Right away a spot came to my mind. I had fond memories of going down to my neighbor Mark’s pond when I was growing up, of watching the Great Blue Herons voling in the nearby field. The heron walked quietly in the meadow, lifting its legs high, stalking silently. It would find a place in the meadow and stop before it stabbed at a vole, catching the small rodent between its beak. The heron’s long neck would bulge as the vole made its way down. I touched my hand to my own throat, imagining what it would feel like to have a rodent nearly the size of a rat work its way into my belly.
I had stopped going to Mark’s pond many years before. I was busy with horse shows and pony club. I remembered now all the time I had spent catching frogs there, scaring my sisters by setting one on their shoulder, and sitting on the pond’s bank with a fishing pole in hand. As I continued to read through the exercise, I knew this was an opportunity to connect with the pond again and relive my childhood memories.
I was instructed to go and sit and journal my observations. My journals included the weather and the birds, tracks, plants, and trees around me. Journaling was a way to demark the changes in the season and the rhythms of the life I was experiencing.
The first time I walked down to the pond to begin my exercise, three raccoons looked up at me curiously. One of the smaller ones walked closer for a better view while the other two kept pushing on toward the grove of cottonwood trees. I took that as a good sign. I found a place to sit. That lasted about five minutes before I got bored and started walking around, climbing trees, trying to occupy my restless mind.
As time went on, I found myself going to my secret spot more and more. Each time, I sat longer. When I was away, my thoughts wandered to the pond. I wondered what the animals were doing throughout their day as I went about mine. After my initial experience with the curious raccoons, I assumed I’d be able to watch all the animals that lived there going about their daily activities. I pictured the coyote lying in its daybed, licking itself, and the deer calmly grazing in the meadow, unperturbed by my presence. But it wasn’t working that way. Every once in a while I would see deer run in the distance. I tracked the deer and the coyote, but no matter what time of day I came down, I just couldn’t catch sight of the animals up close.
At WAS they would tell us stories of trackers so skilled they could get close enough to the animals to reach out and touch them. That level of ability, to connect that way with the wild creatures, was inspiring, and I found passion growing inside me to become a tracker.
I practiced my awareness and journaled my observations in minute detail, writing it all down and drawing maps. The topography of the landscape started to emerge from those maps. I would draw a new map each day with an X in the middle where I sat. I put landmarks in each of the four directions and would note observations correlated with their location. If a bird called or sang while I was there, I wrote that down. If a flower came into bloom, I drew it out. The hawks flying overhead, the deer bounding away, the first buds of spring, and the raccoon tracks along the bank all made their way onto my map. I added the grove of cottonwood trees to the southwest of where I sat, and then the red-winged blackbirds that I heard calling beyond the trees with their chi-cho-reeee song. When I returned home I would pore over field guides, studying the natural history and identification of all the life I was discovering around me.
One day, I walked over to the grove of cottonwood trees, wondering why there was always so much bird life coming from that direction. I climbed up a dirt bank, looked down, and discovered another pond in the middle of the grove of trees, secluded from the rest of the valley. There was a stream leading into the pond that seemed much too small to fill the body of water. There were piles of sticks from the wood of red alder, willow, and cottonwood trees forming a dam at the downstream side. Near the edge there was a large mound of sticks and logs. The discovery made my heart race. I had been merely four hundred yards away from this place for months with no idea.
On the edge of the pond there were stumps. It looked like a hatchet had felled the tree from all sides, the bits of wood falling to the ground below to form a carpet of woodchips. Next to the stumps was a channel leading out into the open water. It was a masterfully engineered paradise with birds singing, frogs jumping, damselflies swooping along the surface, and lush plants and trees of all kinds thriving. There were no signs of human trails leading in as I worked my way through the thicket of blackberries that surrounded the area like a thorny barricade.
I found a spot carpeted with soft mosses and grass. With my back against a cottonwood tree, I sat and marveled. That smell of the cottonwood buds came over me, reminding me of my childhood play spot at recess time, and I smiled joyfully. I felt like naturalist John Muir discovering the Yosemite Valley for the first time, reveling in the sheer beauty of this new place. After some time I saw a brown animal swimming in the water. With my back against the furrowed bark of the cottonwood, I practiced the sense meditation I’d been learning in order to blend in with my new secret place.
I listened with deer ears, imagining that my ears were large like those of the mule deer, whose name came from the sheer size of their ears. I listened for the quietest sound off in the distance, the far-off river flowing and the sweet quiet chirp of a dark-eyed junco. I smelled with a coyote nose. I pictured in my mind the long nose of the coyote that extends out in front of the face, leading the way through the hunt or alerting of a scent that could bring danger. I breathed deep, in through my nose, inhaling the scents in the air. Some were subtle, like the smell of the pond water; others, like the cottonwood buds, permeated my olfactory system. I tasted with a cat’s tongue, imagining my taste buds were enlarged like a cat’s. I felt with a raccoon’s touch, using my body to feel my surroundings, like a raccoon as she navigates the bank of the pond with incredibly sensitive fingers. I watched with owl eyes, not moving my gaze but instead expanding my peripheral vision until the sides of my vision blurred.
All of these senses working together kept my mind from distraction and kept me from getting so excited that the animal coming toward me would notice me. As the animal swam closer, I continued to blend with my surroundings. I pictured the cottonwood tree I was leaning on wrapping its bark around me until I disappeared into its embrace. The creature crawled up the pond bank. I stayed stone still, continuing to view this animal only with my peripheral vision, never straight on. At that point it was four feet from me, along the bank to my left. It came closer and then froze. I could not help but shift my gaze to get a better look at the slick, wet, lustrous animal. I looked into the small black beady eyes toward the top of its head. In between its eyes, protruding out, was a shiny black nose. Small ears protruded out slightly on the sides of the head.
This animal had built its place. It was the master designer of this ecotopia. The beaver now standing on webbed feet before me was shaping this land in a way that not only sustained the life of its own family, but also supported the rejuvenation of so many other forms of life. I could not contain the thrill of having a wild animal go about its daily life and swim up to me as if I were not there.
Then, in an instant, the beaver scented me. It spun around, took two bounds, and dove into the water. With its giant tail it whacked the surface of the pond. I jumped up at the sound. After it made its warning smack, it dove down and disappeared from sight.
I’d spent months going to my secret spot and had only observed animals from a distance. Now euphoria came over me and I collapsed on the ground, my cheek to the moist soil. I had experienced an unfathomable explosion of my senses. As I lay there on the ground and felt the earth wrapping her arms around me, I was flooded with gratitude. This moment had shown me that my life was going in the right direction. I felt energized, rejuvenated by the life-force of the earth.
But I had more to achieve. I resolved that I would see every single animal that lived in the area surrounding my secret spot, not just from a distance but so close that I could reach out and touch them.
After the beaver, all the wildlife in my secret spot started to accept me, one by one. I figured out where all the birds fed, nested, and roosted. As I approached each bird’s territory, I would walk far enough away so as not to alarm them. I always knew that I had succeeded when I got to the secluded pond and the beaver was still swimming around or the American robin did not pause in his song as I walked under the branch he was singing on.
But there was a group of deer living in the meadow that I still hadn’t been able to get close to. Usually my presence set off their natural trepidation and they would flee. Maybe they could predict which way I would come from, and when (typically right at dawn or dusk). Those deer started to permeate my thoughts throughout the day and as I would go to sleep at night.
I realized I had to find new ways to get to my secret sit spot. If I always headed off the road, down the driveway, to the edge of the meadow, and over to my cottonwood tree, surely the deer could anticipate my arrival. Could they possibly be ducking into the shadows to await my departure, at which time they would all go back to feeding? Every time I went to my secret spot I found deer tracks. I followed the tracks the deer had left when they walked slowly through the meadow on their trail.
I began to form a picture in my mind of the patterns of the deer, as if I was watching them from above. When I was off from WAS for a weekend, I headed to the meadow to take a look around. Doe tracks in the soft silt drew me in to follow them. I pictured the doe walking slowly, lifting her feet up high over the grasses and brush. She had placed her hind feet directly into the tracks of the front, leaving two tracks, joining together as if they were one, in the shape of an elongated heart. I was gaining enough tracking skill now to be able to imagine her motions from the tracks and signs she’d left.
I glanced to the side of the deer trail to see where she had browsed the willow and maple saplings. She left rough cuts when she pulled on the plants, her bottom incisors pushed up against the rough hard palate of skin and bone on the top jaw, where she lacked teeth in the front. Slowly chewing, she’d stopped and reached up for the new shoots of the willow. She pulled the branches away, ripping them, resulting in a straight but rough break. As she came across a young hemlock tree, she used those lower incisors to scrape the bark, eating the sweet cambium layer. I pictured her stopping there, head motionless, absorbing the landscape around her with her soft eyes. Her tracks showed me each time she had turned her head. There was a slight pressure to the side of the track where she turned her head and the front track was angled towards the direction she looked. She paused roughly every ten paces or whenever she heard a sound or caught a scent on the breeze. She used a worn trail that branched out into less-used trails, where she could find forage on the diverse plants. There were signs of deer everywhere at my secret spot, tracks that showed them calmly walking and feeding, an indication that they were not stressed.
I decided to start taking a different path to my secret spot each time—I thought I would trick the deer by not being predictable. I jogged down the road in the opposite direction of Mark’s pond, along the bank of the river early one morning, before the sun. As I paused at the river, I saw something off in the distance. I was thinking that it looked like a beaver crossing over the bank of the river. I looked closer. Off in the distance, the creature came up on the bank. I did not see a huge beaver tail dragging behind it. The light was still dim in the dawn, but I started to make out the animal’s features. It had a sleek tail and resembled a dog but low to the ground. It had a long pointed snout and looked like it had a destination and would attack anything that got in its way. A river otter. I sat there quietly, willing myself not to make any noise. Another river otter came out of the water. I watched them up on the bank as they started playing. They wrestled and then slid down the bank and into the water.
I had figured it out! It had been a river otter sliding down the bank. That was the track I’d seen on the riverbank months ago with Greg! I imagined them swimming under the water, bubbles rising up on their silvery and brown sleek fur. Once they went underwater where I could not see them, I imagined those otters swimming, catching fish, and loving life so much they had to celebrate by coming out of the water to play and slide down the muddy riverbank.
That was my first tracking experience where I saw the mystery tracks first and kept a question in my mind, not knowing who had left the tracks, but hoping I would someday find out. It had taken me months to figure out the answer, but the process was so much more valuable than if Greg had just told me.
I continued toward my secret spot, immensely aware that the journey was just as, if not more, rewarding than the destination. When I approached the neighboring golf course on the south side of my secret spot, I ran across the green so I wouldn’t get caught trespassing. I was breathless when I reached the outer edge of the pond, and I slowly approached my spot, which was still far across the large meadow, over a football field away from the place where the deer would graze. Often I would see the group of deer when I came from below the meadow through the thicket of trees. Every time I got a little closer. It was typically a group of four does who would place themselves strategically in the grazing area like spokes on a wheel, facing out in the four directions.
I had come to the point with my daily visits where I could be on the edge of the meadow in the shadows, watching the deer in their relaxed habits, and they would behave as if no intruder or predator was present. But that day, after my victorious identification of the otters, I moved into the open and they quickly pronked away, all four feet leaving the ground and landing at once, putting a long distance between us before they slowed to a trot and glanced back to see that I wasn’t chasing them. This had been happening every time I tried to get close. I wanted to exchange breath with the deer. I thought that maybe I needed to live with them if I wanted them to accept and not fear me.
So I brought my sleeping bag and slept out under the stars next to the meadow every day for a week. Maybe if I lived there, went about my daily business, the deer would get used to me. But I couldn’t really start squatting on my neighbor’s property full-time. Then I thought, what if I left something of mine there all the time? I brought down a smelly old shirt that I would often wear. It was a flannel button-up. I rubbed it on my underarms to make sure I got a good scent on it. (At that time in my life, I was not bathing often outside of jumping into a cold river or lake.) I left the shirt hanging from the willow grove above the place where the deer bedded. I put it where it was very visible; the deer would stumble across it frequently. I continued to go to the edge of the meadow, with each visit getting a bit closer to the deer.
Fox walking and owl eyes were the two things I practiced when I was approaching the deer. One of my mentors at WAS had taught me those were the two most important things to practice in nature. It was like a walking meditation. The red fox has fine hairs growing in between the toes and heel pad of its feet, helping to buffer the sound of the footstep. These hairs are visible when the track is in fine substrate like moist silt. The red fox also moves with a steady gate, head on a level plane, not bouncing up and down, allowing it to see subtle movements of mice as they scurry on the side of the trail. I set my feet down softly, the ball of my foot reaching forward to touch the earth, then slowly the rest of my foot comes down. Then, pulling my weight forward onto the ball as if I were feeling in the dark barefoot to avoid sharp protruding objects, I move silently.
Owls can see with their peripheral vision without moving their eyes around—their eyes are fixed in their skull and can’t move. The owl’s eye is so large that it accounts for 1 to 5 percent of its body weight, depending on the species (Lewis 2015). So I practiced reaching my vision out as far as I could while keeping my eyes still in their sockets, the way I had the day the beaver approached me. I made sure I could see what was to the left and right of me as well as what was on the ground and in the sky while keeping my eyes straight. I could not focus on any one thing in owl eyes and my vision got slightly blurred, but every movement jumped out at me like someone waving a flag.
Much of what I learned at WAS was an unlearning of what I had learned in public school. In public school we were taught to focus on the teacher, the textbook, or the computer screen. Movement and awareness were never a study, or even mentioned by a teacher except in the negative (“Stop moving around; eyes off your neighbor’s page!”). Now I was practicing fox walking and owl eyes everywhere I went. As I moved and paused along the deer trail, I went into a sense meditation until I got to the point where I could get so deep into my senses that all thought drifted away into an undifferentiated nothingness. In those instantaneous moments, when I had no judgment of the past or future, my body became buoyant. Edges started to soften as the air and earth no longer felt separate from my physical body.
About six months into my daily routine of traveling to my sit spot, studying the deer and hoping they would accept me, I woke up before my alarm went off. It was still dark. Not only did I leave a shirt behind at my secret spot, but I felt like part of me was always there, even dreaming of my secret spot and the deer. I told myself this was the morning that something spectacular would happen at my secret spot. It was a cold morning, and I put my clothes on and rubbed my eyes open. I loved those early mornings when I awoke in the darkness and witnessed the transformation from dark to light. It’s the time when the silence of night is only broken by the call of the great horned owl or the song of the tree frog. As the light started to emerge along the horizon, the robins awoke and soon the song sparrows and towhees erupted. Within a short period of time, the cacophony overwhelmed me as distinctions became less apparent and the edges of sound softened into one another.
The lights were still out in the houses I walked by on the neighborhood street. I had the beauty of birdsong on a spring morning and the dew on the blades of grass all to myself. I felt sorry for everyone asleep in their beds with their shades drawn. They had no idea what they were missing. Ahead, I saw a raccoon rambling across the road and into a culvert. Maybe it was the same raccoon that had greeted me curiously six months before, all grown up and on his own now.
I knew it was going to be a good morning as my feet moved quietly down the paved road, which held a sheen of frost. I was headed to do the big loop to my secret spot, all the way around by the river and golf course. But something made me shift my route: I went directly off the road, down the driveway, along the edge of the Douglas fir and hemlock forest, and over to the meadow. I could not be out in the open because someone had just built a new house alongside the meadow. I didn’t want to get caught trespassing and not be able to visit my spot in the meadow anymore. I had come so far with the animals there, and I couldn’t risk it.
I walked softly, picturing the fox, picking up on any slight motion from the blurred edge of my vision like the owl. I sat next to the willow tree where I often saw the deer resting during the day. Sometimes I would find their tracks and the imprints they made when they lay in a bean shape in their daybed. As I sat down in their bed I smelled the grass, the trees, and the faint smell that the deer left behind when they last rested in that same place.
The sun came out and still I sat.
Just as I was getting restless and my stomach was starting to rumble with hunger, the first doe emerged from the shadows on the edge of the forest. There were four does walking gracefully. Calmly stopping mid-stride to look around for danger, they came out into the opening and continued into the meadow. They began to graze, pulling the grass with their mouths, reaching down, chewing their food as they walked. Very quietly, I got up from my spot next to the willow and started walking, lifting my legs high. My arms hung loose in front of me. I lifted and dropped my right hand as my left leg rose and fell, then did the same with my left hand and right leg, diagonally walking like the deer. I reached down with my mouth and bit a mouthful of grass and started chewing. My mind was not thinking of what my body was doing. It felt like the most natural thing in the world to be grazing there in the meadow with those does.
They started getting closer to me. I was making a conscious effort to slow my racing heart and frequently needed to close my eyes to calm the excitement building up inside. I made my way at an angle toward the trail they were moving along as I grazed, still walking through the grass like a doe. When I came to their trail a little way ahead of them, I paused beside it and hunched down in the tall grass, my body facing at a non-threatening angle away from the approaching does. One doe walked on the trail toward me, not noticing me. As she walked past, I slowly reached out my hand and she brushed against my fingertip. She flinched slightly and then continued on her way. She was so close I could hear her breath.
As she breathed out, I breathed in the same air.
My training as a wildlife tracker has helped me track wolves through the wilds of Alaska, mountain lions in California, and painted dogs through Botswana. These have all been life-changing experiences—but so is the time I spend on my own land using the same skills I use when tracking. You can approach any space, from a city street to a suburban yard to an old-growth forest, like a tracker—and your life will be full of awe and wonder. Spending time becoming aware of the nature around you is a great gift that brings you peace, contentment, and a sense of perspective about your connection to the world. Now it is time to lose your mind and come to your senses.
If you want to get the most out of your nature observation, use these tips:
CHOOSE A SPECIAL SPOT 
Find a place near you where you feel closest to nature, and commit to going there every day for a week (at least). This will allow you to start understanding the patterns of the animals around you—and the wildlife there will start getting used to you, too. Choose a spot that is easy to walk to. It could be in your own backyard, on a balcony with a container garden, or in a nearby park. At first you may not notice any wildlife, but as you begin to quiet your mind and body, you may begin to hear birdsong, notice feeding signs from a squirrel, or watch a bee land on a flower. When you are sitting, if you get restless focus on all of your five senses. Feel the ground beneath you, smell the air, listen to the quietest sound, taste the cool breeze, and look with the eyes of an owl.
WATCH WITH OWL EYES
Wild animals from songbirds to apex predators are acutely aware of the tiniest movement, including of your eyes, which means you need to stay as still as possible and use your peripheral vision if you don’t want to alarm them. Watching with owl eyes means not moving your gaze at all—your eyes will stay in the same position. But you intentionally move your mind’s focus to your peripheral vision. You won’t see great detail with your peripheral vision, but you’ll be able to pick up on even the subtlest movement, which will alert you to the presence of animals without scaring off the creatures you’re trying to see. Try to see the ground, the sky, and as far to the left and right as you can without moving your eyes around. This will make your gaze non-threatening. Have you ever felt something and turned to see someone staring at you? You can practice this with a friend. Focus intently on the back of their head and see if they get uncomfortable. Then do it again, but this time instead of staring, go into your peripheral vision or owl eyes. When you go into owl eyes, your gaze is not threatening and your friend won’t feel it the same way. You will find that nature will begin to accept you.
LISTEN WITH DEER EARS
Our ears are so overcome with human-made sounds that sometimes we don’t hear the other sounds around us. There’s a way to tune into the sounds of nature even when we think we’re as far from nature as possible. Imagine that your ears are large like those of a mule deer, and listen for the very quietest sound you can hear. Listen for water flowing far away or the quiet chirp of a neighborhood songbird. Maybe there is a cicada buzzing in the distance, or snow landing on crinkled leaves. This is a way of tuning your ears to the sounds we normally ignore entirely. Eventually you may hear the soft swish of a beaver through the water, or the buzz of a hummingbird as it visits your balcony feeder.
WALK LIKE A FOX
Whether you’re traveling to and from your special spot or just going for a stroll, practice your fox walk. The red fox has fine hairs growing in between the toes and heel pad of its feet, helping to buffer the sound of the footstep. The red fox also moves with a steady gait, head on a level plane, not bouncing up and down. This allows it to see subtle movements of mice as they scurry on the side of the trail. Set your feet down softly, the ball of your foot reaching forward to touch the earth, then slowly allow the rest of your foot to come down. Then, pulling your weight forward onto the ball as if you were feeling in the dark barefoot to avoid sharp, protruding objects, move silently.
USE YOUR INTUITION
You know that feeling when you come home expecting an empty house, but as soon as you walk inside you can sense someone else is there? Whether it’s a “sixth sense” or just our subconscious picking up on signals our conscious mind ignores, we can tell when we’re not the only human around. The more time you spend moving carefully through whatever nature is available to you, the more your intuition will expand to include non-human animals. Check in with yourself regularly to see whether you have a sense that you’re not alone, and then use your owl eyes and deer ears to confirm your suspicion.
The more often you deliberately check in and immerse in your senses, the stronger those muscles will be, and the greater your understanding of the immense and magical web of life you live in.