I found myself sitting in a thick tangle of salmonberries. It was spring and all of the plants were so vibrant and lush that I felt intoxicated by the flush of new growth and the smells of buds bursting into a million shades of green. I had been learning tracking, and so far, I considered tracks to be prints on the ground, scat, or other signs such as territorial markings. In the two months since I’d shared breath with the deer, I’d learned to identify most of the tracks I came across and started to interpret the movement pattern and behavior based on what I was seeing on the ground. But here I was in the middle of a thicket, not sure exactly why—it just felt right. I reached my hand down and gently touched the depression in the ground with my fingertips. One, two, three, four, five toes in an arch and a large heel pad the size of my palm. I was still on the trail.
I had been tracking on Tiger Mountain, the tallest mountain in the highlands of Issaquah, with the group from WAS. The founder of the school, Jon, and I were walking along in silence. I smelled the flowers that had just emerged from the red-flowering currant, the first sign of spring. The clusters bowed with the weight of the flowers, such a vibrant shade of pink and with a smell equally stimulating as the sight. The flowers were like a splash of paint in the wall of green that lay before me. Jon had signaled for me to look where he was looking. I did not recognize what I was seeing, a low tunnel in the thicket off to the side of the trail. He motioned for me to kneel down to the ground and peer in. I saw an arched tunnel just big enough for my body to move through. As I looked, my hand instinctively reached down to a depression in the ground. I felt an energy surge up through my arms and hands. The depression was big but I could not see the detail. He whispered “bear,” and motioned for me to follow its path.
I found myself moving carefully down the tunnel, observing the tender spring shoots that surrounded me. I was hidden from the human trail in that bear tunnel and the branches were parting as my skin touched them, as if they had bent out of the way of a large body many times before. I moved on my hands and feet, rocking my head from side to side, lifting my nose to the air to smell the scents. My feet and hands rolled forward in an effortless, flowing stride. I continued through the tunnel, not always seeing the tracks, but continuing to feel electricity flowing up my limbs, a kind of numbness. Then I was there, in a thicket of salmonberry, with a smile from ear to ear. I was following something that had felt natural, instinctual, similar to when I encountered the deer.
From that moment on, I could not pass an animal trail without longing to follow that animal, to put myself in the body of the animal and attempt to see what it saw, move like it moved, and sense what it sensed. Tracks became alive to me, a strand that the animal left behind that would lead me to it and, I found, to a truer, wilder version of myself.
Learning the language of nature, learning what the birds and the snapped twigs and the whacking tails and the paw prints were communicating, reminded me of those words Macki Ruka spoke to me when I first learned of WAS. I was on the journey from my mind to my heart. When I trailed the bear I had followed my instincts, as if my body became the bear. As I continued to practice my tracking and wilderness survival, my mind would at times be the adversary to my instinct, losing the trail or worse yet, making mistakes because I did not follow my instincts. I wish I could say that my path to finding union with nature was a straight one, but it certainly wasn’t.
The group of us at WAS often stayed overnight in shelters we built so we could be out in nature for as many hours of the day as possible. One day Rikki and I were determined to map the travel routes of all the wildlife we tracked on the sandbar of the Skykomish River. Rikki was a student of WAS, a couple years younger than I. She was a highly motivated homeschooler who moved more like a wild animal than a person. Her brown hair was tied back in a ponytail and she wore the typical WAS outfit: khaki shorts and a fleece earth-tone shirt she made herself. Our plan was to stay overnight in the river valley so we could track on the sandbar from dawn to dusk.
The Skykomish River was a spot we frequented. When we went with WAS, we would show up in Chris’s Suburban, track all day, and leave before all the mysteries were solved. We wouldn’t come back until rain had washed the tracks away, and we had to start over with fresh mysteries. I had been looking forward to our trip, as I always enjoyed tracking with Rikki. She had a deep desire to engage in every moment playfully. I admired her lightness of spirit; she didn’t seem bogged down with emotions. She had a youthfulness in her step and was always smiling. She had a knack for noticing the detail in everything we came across in nature, making her the perfect tracking companion.
We decided to each build our own survival shelter so we could stay there for a few days, waking up early and tracking all day until dark. We arrived at the sandbar in the morning and crossed over the railroad tracks to the forest on the edge of the vast riverbank. The enormous river valley led to the snow-peaked Cascade Range. After a day of tracking adventures, we started on our shelters. A hollowed-out cedar stump provided me a cocoon to fill with forest debris. I wove a door using the techniques I had learned from a basket weaver trained in the intricate art of Haida weaving, a simple over-and-under pattern originating from the center of crisscrossed saplings. I plugged the entrance with the woven insulated door and used moss and forest litter to fill in gaps. I tested it out; it was warm inside, with no drafts and very little room to move.
I went to check on Rikki’s shelter. She was busily building her stick frame, which looked like a spine with ribs angled down toward the ground. The ridge pole was set in a notch of a tree and angled to the ground, leaving room under the pole for her to lie. I helped her gather up debris to pile on the outside. Dropping to my knees, I scraped up all the debris within arms’ reach. Bigleaf maple, cottonwood, and alder leaves mixed with sticks and dirt piled up in front of me as I reached my arms around the stack, holding the pile against my body to carry over to the shelter. The sticks that angled from the top ridgepole to the ground stopped the debris from falling off.
Without hesitation, we started running to gather the debris, creating a game of speed and endurance. We each ran to a spot thick with debris and dropped to our knees to gather the largest pile we could carry. After running back, we plopped the debris on the outside, glancing at each other, rosy-cheeked and panting. Conjuring up the energy of the wolverine, whose power and tenacity overshadow their size, we persisted until the mound of debris stood as tall as us, stretching as wide around as it was high. After many trips collecting the material, I could reach my hand into the debris, working my fingers all the way to the spine, with the moist leaves reaching to my armpit. The thick insulation would keep Rikki warm, and if any rain were to fall it would shed off the outside layers before reaching the center where she would lie.
Exhausted from the day of tracking combined with the exertion of building our shelters, we put out the fire we had built to cook our food and headed to our respective homes for the night to dream of the tracking adventures of the day.
The ringing sound of metal on metal was gaining on me. I heard the train horn, a loud forlorn howl in the night. The clanking of the couplings and the low rumble of the engine were so close. I needed to break free from the shackles. I felt the cold train tracks below me. I had no time to ponder how I had gotten into this predicament. I only knew I must get out of it, off the tracks to safety before being flattened like the pennies I had set on the tracks as a child. I conjured up all of the strength I had inside of me as the ripple of the vibration from the train came at me like an earthquake. I was wrapped up tight and weighted down. I could not move my arms or my legs. I screamed, pushed and kicked, wriggled and jolted. My eyes could not pierce the darkness. As my adrenaline surged, my heart raced. I found a spot that gave way to my force. Leaves flying, moss and sticks covering my body and the ground around me, I sat outside my log with the distant sound of the train echoing through the valley.
I sat up all night shivering because I’d destroyed my shelter due to fears conjured up in my dreamtime. Rikki emerged at dawn fully rested from the night, and I lay in a ball with heaps of debris loosely piled on my cold skin in an attempt to blanket myself with the earth. I knew I had a long way to go before all parts of me were comfortable in the wild.
As my time went on at WAS, my fellow students and I continued to develop our understanding of nature language as well as our own group communication, which often happened nonverbally because we were paying attention to the sounds of nature. We all had specific roles to play within the group. One role was to make sure everyone was paying attention at all times. Our classmate Justin typically took on this role, and he would sneak around, hide on the path in front of us, and scare us as we walked past.
The group of us would go out and sit around a pond the school had named Linne Doran, Gaelic for Pond of the Otter. We each had our own spot, our territory. The pond was large, with a beaver dam slowing the water as it exited downstream.
We learned every square inch of that pond. From where we sat we drew a circle on a map with each of us in the center of our own circle. Each circle touched the ones on either side. This was our territory. This was to ensure that no place was overlooked when we went and sat to record all of the bird language and other observations surrounding the pond.
We students developed a series of calls that we used to signify certain things as we were out at our territorial spots. The great horned owl call—a low rhythmic muffled whoo-who-who-whodo-who—meant to leave the area unnoticed. The loud flicker’s clear! would signify to run back to our meeting spot. A third call, the chickadee’s chickadee-dee-dee, meant to walk back at our baseline, or natural relaxed pace, not disturbing any birds or wildlife as we moved. Wolf howls, raven calls, and jay alarms were all part of our code.
Our meeting spot, Malalo Ya Chui, which is Akamba for Lair of the Leopard, was named by one of the elder advisors of the school, Ingwe. As a young boy from British ancestry, Ingwe was attended to by an Akamba tribesman and spent time by his village fires in Kenya. Our meeting spot had eight sides, a dirt floor and a roof to keep the rain off. Inside this structure we mapped out in detail each of our observations from our time at the pond. Our notes read like this: Winter wren bullet alarm, joined by another four or five feet off the ground with beak facing down. Single kinglet alarm as Terry enters his territory. Steller’s jay sneak call. Blue heron moved—doing mating dance. Ruby-crowned kinglet moving east from Greg’s spot. Female hooded mergansers swimming in middle of pond. Raven calling. Kinglets getting louder cee-cee-cee call. Winter wren song above Rikki. Tree frog chorus begins—pileated woodpecker flew overhead calling. We assigned each of these observations a number and letter and placed them on the map in sequential order according to the time frame and location during which they occurred.
If there was something out of the ordinary, like an alarm or a sudden flight from a group of birds, we would go investigate. In the case of the two winter wrens alarming with their beaks facing down, for example, we visited the exact spot we’d heard them and found the small imprints of a long-tailed weasel. We then developed extensive acronyms for each of the observations we started to experience on a regular basis: OAF, owl approaches forest. WWA, winter wren alarm. GBHL, great blue heron lands. BCLPP, bobcat licking private parts. (Actually, that last code was one we were always hoping to observe, but we never did. It was nevertheless included in all of our map keys.)
It was easy to tell if one of the students was distracted or if there was a human intruder in our vicinity by how the birds responded. We sat one afternoon at each of our designated territories. The birds were used to our presence now, and continued with their typical behavior of feeding, interjecting an occasional lazy afternoon song or call. Suddenly, there began a wave of bird alarms from the east that came closer and closer. The birds were fleeing as if for their lives. I could see the other students looking in the direction of the alarms. I stood up as the birds around me started to fly away. I wondered if there was something I should be running from. Just then a man in tall waders with a fishing pole slung over his shoulder crossed the dam at the outlet of the pond. His head faced the ground and he was walking swiftly, without so much as pausing to look at the beauty of his surroundings. The man was oblivious to the birds flushing out of their core territory, fleeing from the danger as if a giant monster that had the power to kill them and their families was approaching. I recognized this as a sign of a human not belonging. The bird language gave us a glimpse into the effect of all of our actions.
Once I realized I too was causing alarms, I started to do something about it. When I first came to WAS and learned about bird language, I began by just walking slowly, paying attention to every sound and movement around me. In the beginning of the heightened observation I noticed that the birds still stopped singing and flew off to safety. Then it got to the point where I could catch the birds off guard, like the time I saw the song sparrow feeding on the ground on the trail in front of me just before she fled to safety, alarming to the rest of the species. With the intentional practice of awareness and many attempts to walk through the forest without setting off the warning signs of wildlife, I eventually got to the point where I could consistently walk under a singing bird without that bird so much as pausing in song, and only then was I able to get close to wildlife like I had at my secret spot. I sensed the language of nature going on all around me. I sensed the freedom from the confines of form, structure, and law, like the clouds moving into an area and moving out—part of the unfolding of all life. This awareness came from the silence.
I learned to listen for the silence between the notes of a great horned owl’s call or the pause of a ruby-crowned kinglet as it landed on the ground to feed. When in the silence, I transcended fears and doubt and felt only happiness and connection to nature. Nothing but that moment in time existed.
It was this inner quietness that we brought into our scout game, the culmination of our training at the end of the school year and a test of how well we had learned the language of nature. Our group started attending the scout camp my second year at WAS. After two years of wilderness immersion, this was the first time I brought my skills to a competition outside our little group of teenagers. In the northeastern corner of Washington, we were to compete amongst the world’s greatest trainees in stealth and survival in a scout game put on by Coyote Path Wilderness School.
My classmates and I were nervous; we were going into a region we didn’t know. We were intimately familiar with every bird, every animal trail, in our own territory. We were worried about whether our skills would even apply in a new region, especially since some of our adversaries knew the region well. We thought for sure they would be able to evade the birds by knowing all of their territories like we were able to do back at our pond.
The group we were up against were masters in martial arts and stealth and experts in camouflage and hunting. Some of them were former members of Special Operations Forces. Then there was the group of us, barefoot, at least ten years younger than anyone there. Glenn Morris, a legendary ninja master, was leading part of the pre-game training. We practiced mind control by walking on hot coals. We studied camouflage patterns that fit into the surrounding plants and trees. Then we had a chance to study the plants themselves and which ones were good for food or fire. When the game was about to begin, each person was given five marbles, a bag of potatoes, and a tin can. We were then divided into four teams with distinguished territories around a large pond. My team consisted of other students from WAS. The other teams assembled themselves based on varying strengths so the teams would be well rounded. At least we had one advantage over these experts—we all knew each other and were used to communicating silently in the wilderness. To say we were intimidated would be an understatement. As we looked at the other teams, professionals in this type of stealth, we felt we had bitten off more than we could chew. We were to make fire by friction to boil and purify our water, harvest wild edibles, and live like traditional Indigenous scouts. We had to stay out of sight to everyone outside our team. If we caught someone, we would take a marble from them. The person with the most marbles won the game. If someone had all of their marbles taken, they were out of the game.
Each team also had a flag within their territory. We had to find the location of the other teams’ flags without being seen, and on the last night we planned to raid the other teams’ camps. The teams that got their flag stolen would lose the game. No one knew which team would be planning an ambush on which flag.
On the second day out, Rikki and I went to find the location of the other teams’ flags while Justin and Greg stayed at camp guarding ours. They lay in wait, camouflaged amongst leaf litter to catch any intruding teams, while Rikki and I tried to find the exact location of all the other flags so we could make a plan for their capture in the darkness. We traveled silently, using the base of a hill for cover, going from tree to tree. Up the hill a spotted towhee came out from the grass and sounded an alarm, then a dark-eyed junco joined in. A song sparrow alarmed. The birds were like popcorn popping up out of the grass and pine scrub. Rikki and I looked at each other, nodded, then each found a spot to hide. I crouched down behind a mound of dirt and pine needles. She stood behind a tree. The alarms continued, getting louder and closer. We stayed silent, knowing that there was someone approaching our hiding places. I had already seized five marbles from unsuspecting opposing team members and Rikki had close to that amount. We spent a full two minutes in hiding, listening to the popping of bird alarms rolling down the hill, grateful that the birds alarmed for so long before the arrival of an intruder. Out of the brush, in full camouflage, face painted to match the bronze earth, he finally appeared. He was quiet in the woods, did not make a sound as he crouched low in the brush. I could tell he had trained in stealth; he was possibly one of the Special Operations Forces that we were up against. When he arrived within earshot of me, I whispered, “I see you.” He jumped with a look of shock and begrudgingly reached into his pocket to pull out a marble and hand it over. The perturbed look of a middle-aged man getting outsmarted by a teenager was priceless. Rikki continued to lie hidden, out of sight. The man never knew there were two of us. The birds had come through, and all the alarms we had learned from our forest transferred to the scout camp. Different birds, different territories, but the same patterns.
We survived. We cooked our potatoes and cattails on a smokeless fire we made by using very small dry sticks and keeping the fire hot. Justin captured the other teams’ flags in the silence of night while the rest of us perched around the pond, keeping guard. On the final morning, when the howl of the wolf called us in, marking the end of the game, we counted all our marbles. I had the most, with Rikki close behind. The legendary Glenn Morris, who had traveled the world training with Japanese ninja warriors, commented that our group was made up of the most peaceful and quiet-minded individuals he had ever met. He was amazed at how we could move through the forest so quietly, like animals. What truly set us apart that week from others just as comfortable in the wilderness was our ability to listen and use our senses to interpret the animals around us.
After scout camp we went back to our routine of gathering at Malalo Ya Chui, where we learned to internalize the language of nature. Bonded from the scout camp as a team, we stayed overnight in the hut in the cedar forest, and we danced in celebration. Around a fire we moved as animals. Rikki, Terry, Michael, Justin, Greg, and I all moved as our own individual animal. We each had our own dance in the darkness with only the flicker of the flame as light, the sound of raindrops on the roof, and the beat of a rawhide drum. Wild, brave Justin danced the mountain lion and stalked Rikki, who danced the deer. Greg moved as the wolverine and Terry as the weasel. The flames moved as we moved and we all entered into a place where the flame rises and disappears into the invisible. I danced the wolf. I pictured the animal so undiluted that my body became the wolf. I realized that like the wolf, we leave a mark on the great tapestry of life with each step we take. Those marks may be washed away by time, but the language of nature is never forgotten.