Read Elpel’s "Participating in Nature" recently, and in it he talks about trust stalking. This is stalking where the animal already knows you’re there, so you’re not trying to hide. You move slowly, think calmly, get interested in nearby vegetation as if you were an herbivore. I tried it last Saturday with a doe on the blackberry trail. I heard her coming up the coyote trail and kneeled down behind some blackberry brambles.

As soon as she came out on the blackberry trail, she saw me, but wasn’t sure what to make of me. After a few moments, I was quite flattered that she thought I deserved a closer look. She walked to within 10 feet or so before a gust of wind swirled towards here, and–no doubt getting a whiff of the sausage I had for breakfast–she bounded away snorting. A few moments later, she was followed by some lighter crashing in the bushes which I assume were made by an unseen fawn.

Later that evening, a doe and two fawns walked up the driveway and we watched them from the kitchen window.

Tags: trust stalking, naturalist, deer, fawn

I’ve also been learning about basket making recently. We have wisteria totally taking over our porch (I assume this was planted at some point, but it’s totally feral now…given one good growing season with no one to prune it, it would easily bury our house, and only another season or two before it would complete it’s prime objective to TAKE OVER THE WORLD). I hear that the vines make great basket material, so I just collected a bunch of it and hung it to dry. Someone on a gardening list I’m on suggested that I make the basket first, and then let the vines dry, but I’ve read in some books that this make for a very loose basket, since the vines shrink as they dry and open up spaces in the basket. I was thinking i would dry it and then soak it for working. But now that I think about it, it’s just as likely to shrink after I re-soak it. Hmmm.

I’ve also been pondering uses for blackberries. Here in the Pacific Northwest, you’ll never run out of blackberry. Seems to me that the blackberry vines would make fine basket material also, with the thorns removed. Of our 17 acres, about 3 of it is solid blackberry thickets, so I could make baskets until my ears fell off if I wanted to.

I also took a walk down the road yesterday, to a spot where I saw some mullien growing. Mullien is like the Aloe Vera of the west. Antihistamine, antiseptic, anti-inflammatory, growth promoter, good for sunburns, and lots of other stuff. Anyway, as I was walking back, I walked past a neighbors unused pasture and noticed that it was full of ox-eye daisies, which are really tasty, and I though I would ask if they minded me harvesting some of the leaves for our salad last night. So you should know that I totally don’t fit in, in the part of the country where I live. I have a mohawk, and I wear a funky cowboy hat with a leopard print bandanna around it, and am always covered in dirt and spiderwebs from crawling around in the bushes (I just can’t resist following deer trails). I live in a *very* conservative part of the country, outside of an active logging town. So there I am carrying this big old stalks of mullien with the dirty roots still attached, kinda sweaty from walking down the road in the sun, wearing my hat, and I saunter up the long driveway to this very fancy house and knock on the door. The woman who answered was totally freaked out, and told me that I could help myself to the daisies just to get rid of me. I had to laugh, but it was also kind of sad to me. If some girl showed up on your doorstep carrying strange plants and wearing strange clothes, wouldn’t that make you want to know more about her? It’s sad that so many people allow their first reaction to something new be fear instead of curiousity. But anyway, the daisy leaves were fabulous in the thai noodle dish I made, and I’m working on peeling the mullein leaves off the stalks to dry them for storage. I’ll also dry the stalks, since I hear that mullien is one of the really good stalks for making friction fire with, once it’s dried.

Tags: basketry, baskets, vines, blackberry, wisteria, mullein, daisy, wild edible plants, medicinal plants

Here are some optical illusion tracks for you. Which track came first? (You can click on the image for a bigger picture.)

This track came from a muddy spot in the trail near a spring right down the hill from my house. I’m having a hard time identifying them because I can’t tell if the inner toe on the lower track is the inner toe, or if that depression is the pad of the higher foot. Do you see what I mean? So it appears that the lower track has a distinctly H-shaped negative space between the toes and pads, which would make this a huge fox. But of that inner toe is actually the pad from the other foot, then the lower pad is deformed and, therefore, so is the negative space. I can see that the right wall of the lower pad is much steeper and somewhat higher than the edge of the rest of the pad, but I’m not good enough to be able to tell if that’s because of some motion of the foot. I couldn’t see any previous or subsequent tracks, as the muddy spot is pretty small and surrounded by rocks and blackberries.

Tags: tracking, naturalist, mystery

You can read all about the ongoing kitten saga over at Aunti Amis. While I was staying there last week, I got a chance to help out a little bit.

Yesterday, I went to the Fiber Arts meeting at the Salkum Library. I’m really glad I went. I met some really nice women, got to do show-n-tell with all my different fibers (soysilk, lhama, bamboo, cat, and samples of wool at every different stage of the process from rolags to completely untreated). I was the only weaver who happened to be there, although there are other weavers who come from time to time. Here’s my first weaving so far. I’m using yarn left over from an ill-fated crochet blanket a few years ago. On my next one, I’ll start trying to incorporate yarn that I’ve spun myself. I also have a really great idea for next year’s SEAF.

The group meets in the middle of the day on Tuesdays, and it seems that there are a lot of people in the area who would love to come but can’t make it during the day. I mentioned to Elizabeth, the facilitator, that I had been thinking about starting a group of primitive skills in general, so it would including weaving and spinning, and also woodcrafting, leatherworking, basketry, anything that people wanted to bring to share and work on. She was really encouraging about the idea, and it turns out that the library is a great resource. If you give them 6 weeks of lead time, they will do all sorts of publicity for you if you have the meetings in their community room.

This all ties in with my plan to create my own community here.

Tags: weaving, spinning, community, library

If I could have planned my perfect summer day camp day, today woul dhave been exactly what I came up with. We started with a blindfold walk into the woods from the big field where we meet. I love the look on kids faces when they take off their blindfolds and find themselves in the midst of the cedar trees. Then we headed out to see if we could find the Eagle Nest.

There are bald eagles nesting in Seward. I took the kids over to the big grassy field at the base of the huge old fir tree where the nest is. I tried to get a game of Eagle Eye going, but there were ripe blackberries around and it’s impossible to do anything but eat berries when they’re around. so I told them that the first person to bring me 6 ripe berries would get a reward. I didn’t really have a plan for what the reward would be, figuring I would hope for something good to occur to me. As kid after kid brought me the 6 ripe berries, pretty soon I couldn’t hold them all inmy hands, and I grabbed a leaf off a nearby big-leaf maple to make a little basket. Everyone wanted to know how to make the little basket, so we took some time to do that, and then went back to berry collecting. We ended up with enough berries in the collective (after everyone ate at least half the ones they picked right off the bush, and stashed away a bunch more to take home to their families) that we had a leaf basket full. Then we took turns passing it around and squishing it with our fingers, and the reward that everyone enjoyed was blackberry jam on a piece of bread or cracker. Then with the bit of leftover juice, we painted our faces, and a couple of the blondes dyed pink streaks in their hair.

From there, we walked over to where we could see the eagle nest, and one of the juveniles was hanging out near the nest. Some of the kids spontaneously pulled out their field journals and started drawing a picture of the eagle. When I pointed that out to the others, everyone pulled out ther journals and started drawing. One of those magic moments when everyone deos something that I wanted, and I don’t have to expend any energy to make it happen, it just does it on its own. From there, we had just a few minutes left, which we used to go past the Dirt Factory.

The Dirt Factory is this fallen log with a big root system hanging up in the air. It’s been there for long enough that a lot of the dirt has washed away and you can get into the root system and crawl around, but there’s still a lot of dirt. I haven’t really kept track of how this happened, but the kids have created this whole complex system of "jobs" at the Dirt Factory, and everyone seems to have a defined role that fits in with the rest of the kids. I never hear any serious arguing from the Dirt Factory, and it seems like a really great community-building game that they have set up. Of course, there are always a couple kids who don’t want to play the big group game, whatever it is. So I spent the time teaching those few how to make cordage.

From there, we headed back to the big field where everyone got together in a big group (all the other instructors’ groups also) and everyone had a spokesperson to tell the story of their day. After that we sang a few songs, and then parents arrived, and that was the end of our day. Almost.

The one kid who was a real problem the first day really had a turn-around today. He was a pleasure to have around most of the time. His nanny came to pick him up at the end of the day, and they drove off. A few minutes later, they came back and he came running over to tell me that they had driven by the eagle nest and had seen the mom feeding the babies something. He had made the nanny drive all the way back over to the parking lot in order to tell me that. I suspect that he made up the story, since in his story the babies were brand new, while I think the actual juveniles are fully fledged. But even the fact that he was excited enough about the eagles to make up a story about them was cool to me, after the first day when he insisted that the only thing he wanted to do was play with his xbox, and the only way he would have fun in the woods was if there was a way to plug in his xbox.

And that really was the end of the day at Seward.

Tags: eagles, blackberry jam, kids, summer camp

When people say "I think that kid has something going on at home" when what they really mean is "Someone is abusing the hell out of that kid at home, but I can’t prove it, so I can’t suggest that that’s the case for fear of legal reprisal".

Tags: abuse, kids

I suppose it would be more accurate to call this a tawing project, but I’m not totally sure how that word is defined. Anyway, this skin isn’t actually tanned, because if it gets wet, it will revert to rawhide. I basically did a brain tan, only I used eggs instead of brains. It’s the emulsified oils in the brains that do the work, and the eggs have them also. I wasn’t quite ready to deal with brains, so this was a good starter version. To truly tan it, I would need to smoke it over a campfire for a few hours, which actually changes the chemical composition of the fibers.

It’s a Pacific Jumping Mouse, and its skin is so fine that it is completely transparent when it dries. In fact, it’s so fine that I have a hard time telling if I’ve done it right. If you do it wrong, the skin turns into rawhide, but little mouse rawhide is still pretty soft. So I’m actually doing an experiment and letting the rainwater wash off the treatment today. We’ll see if it dries differently without the eggs.

Tags: Pacific Jumping Mouse, tanning, rawhide, tawing

Man oh man, did I ever need a break. From Friday night to Sunday morning, I slept 23 hours. I wasn’t keeping track of calories, but I probably ate several thousand more than I normally do. Seems that I haven’t been taking care of some basic needs while I’m working during the week.

It’s so good to be back on the property and out of the city. I was so torn between spending time outside versus napping that I decided to combine the two. Quite nice.

I have this week off, so I’m working on baking bread, and organizing the house, and generally being so useful that Preston can’t help but want me to stay home and play housewife for the next 9 months while I finish Kamana 3. I’m baking banana/orange bread right now, and getting ready to put together dinner so it will be ready when he gets here. Ya, so I’m manipulative. You got a problem with that?

Tags: nap, sleep, outdoors

Here’s where I stayed for the second part of last week. This is Lake Margaret, and it’s right around the corner from Mosswood Hollow. Dave’s apartment is on the lake, and it’s quite beautiful. On Thursday night, Darcy was home and she was all motivated to swim across the lake and back, so I went along. It’s been a couple years since I swam in a lake, and I think the last time was actually in the old quarry pond in Boise where The Girls and I used to go swimming. I didn’t freak out even once, and had a really good swim. I did discover though that I can’t do the crawl stroke without goggles. Darcy agreed that it’s that way for her also. It’s hard to breath out underwater when you can’t see. Dave, being a smartass, said, "Why? Do you put the goggles over your mouth?" But Darcy backed me up that it’s too disorienting. Anyway, it was a good swim, took us about 40 minutes there and back, and felt good.