Return, p.14
Return, page 14
We stand beside the blaze cooking in clay pots as the rain begins again. We steam and turn and steam and turn again, trying in vain to dry our damp buckskins and warm first our bare toes, then our faces. With a pot full of hot water I retire to my nook to eat and rest and sing some more.
Here is the madness of mind. Mind, grasping for distraction. Every rumble is horse hooves, thunder, rockfall, or airplane. Every slow drip in the shelter in which I have lain all day is a source of mounting angst. And it’s only been one day of rain. Oh, where is my presence? The mist covers everything, and even when it is not actually raining it is dripping. Now is when I want to flee but we can’t, not without leaving everything here. Oh sun, come shine on us.
Again the rain ceases, and my clan lifts my spirits beside the glowing hearth. Jenny says the hearth is the heart of the camp. Hearth, Heart, Earth. I never thought about the profound connection of these words before but suddenly it seems obvious.
We sing of storms and thunder. The night sky clears to brilliant stars and a late waning moon. Karma, the spotted horse, a specter moving softly past my shelter door.
A new day dawns cloudy again. The fire is revived from a mound of coals. I air my bedding then quickly pile it back into the shelter with the first spit of errant rain. I sit and watch the mountain. From the east the clouds come on their solemn march.
Rick and I seek cover in the boulder fields where we make arrow tips with bone and stone, sheltered by a great rock fallen from the cliff above. All day the mist rolls in and out, obscuring and revealing the peaks by which we’re flanked.
The next day I awaken slowly from the warm embrace of a forbidden lover that in dreamtime does no harm. Bright sunshine on my eyelids. Blue!
The entire clan lays out their treasures of wild foods, skins, and baskets to let the magnificent sun do its work. We lounge and craft and eat with little or no clothing on.
I jump on Karma bareback and ride her up to the pass.
Smokeless hills and valleys.
Big relief.
I meet Falcon at the drinking hole by chance. We are drawn there simply by thirst. We sit by the water for a long time, sipping periodically, talking and watching the travesty of a hapless ant that gets shipwrecked on a rocky island in the middle of the stream. I think about how rarely I would take the time in my “normal” world to watch such a scene for so long, being always driven by doing. Here I feel like I am writing a script for my life. I can make anything I choose happen, introduce any character I wish, and create whatever relationship I desire.
The story is never dull. It is as rich and vibrant as Earth itself.
Like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, wings damp and fragile, I am transformed with each new moment wondering who I will become next.
After a fine dinner of reconstituted buffalo jerky, wild onions, bitterroot, and Bryoria lichen, I string my bow once again, make a few practice shots, and wander up to the ridge. On the way a ground squirrel meets the tip of my blunt arrow with force. A rock finishes the job. I feel saddened. But life cannot exist without death and here in these high wild valleys there is little to eat except greens and animals. Thank you.
As a last snack before retiring, we roast and share the squirrel body, crunching the small, cooked bones to extract as much nourishment as possible. I work the skin until dark then wander up to my shelter.
In the predawn I am awoken with great thirst and heat. I drink again at the stream, barefoot on the dew in cool moonlight.
These simple things . . .
Tomorrow we plan to leave this basin. I repair the horse panniers with rawhide lacing and make a couple of simple halters from strong tanned moose skin, then ride down to take a bath at the lake.
Impossibly blue and icy water races up to meet me as I dive from a pointed rock. The fish scatter and I am reminded what it means to be right here in this absolute moment. The sun warms my tingling skin and a delicious sense of well-earned fatigue envelops me as I lie upon the larch needles.
The energy of the sun turns to grass. The grass feeds the horses. We spare our own energy by riding the horses to and from the lake. Energy is so direct and transparent out here.
The clan is ready to move.
After my swim, I eat a pancake for breakfast. Not the usual kind you might think of with butter and syrup but another flattened mouse caught under the deadfall rock. Gutted and cooked, bones, skin and all, the fur singed off in the bright coals.
Clouds again form in the southeast, a slight patter of rain then the sun in a sucker hole. All afternoon the clouds swirl from every direction and cluster in marvelous shapes.
* * *
Two bright stars appear on the eastern horizon. Like eyes they pierce the predawn, and in the last shred of moonlight the deer grazes quietly in front of my shelter door. I watch her shadowy form barely two bow lengths from my bed, but any slight rustle will send her bounding off. I wish her a wonderful day, roll over, and invite more dreams.
I shall miss my nest beneath the spruces. Thank you.
We circle at breakfast and lay out an offering to the land that has held us. Each of us places a morsel of food on a flat rock: a few red berries, green edible leaves, a sprinkle of fatty pemmican. It is beautiful. We circle on the knoll and we sing our thanks. We cry our gratitude. We touch the edges of wholeness, of who we are, who we long to be.
Before we leave our camp, we burn the coals to ashes, douse the firepit carefully and then disperse the rocks and leftover piles of firewood. Finally we fill in the pit to soften the impact that our presence has caused. The last of my unpacked gear lies strewn around me. Our presence here has been erased except for a short piece of buckskin thong, a shard of broken pottery, a flake of foreign stone. Flattened grass and softly worn trails remain but these, too, will soon be scarcely more than a quick breath in the memory of the earth.
Part 3
Transformation
14
Smoky Mountain Absorption
When everyone is packed, we begin our climb at a painfully slow pace to the ridge. The horses are antsy to move too, but with the steep trail and a lively wind, the rawhide pack boxes strapped to Chaco keep slipping. We adjust and retie them a dozen times. It frustrates and exhausts me, but I am grateful that his steady temperament keeps him calm when the packs slide all the way around his ample girth.
We make a few miles with the heavy loads and camp not far away from the trail. We wear our moccasins that give more grip and stability than the rawhide sandals while we are hiking. The feeling of Earth beneath moccasined feet is reassuring. One can sense the terrain and yet be protected, so different from the separation that occurs when a foot is clad in stiff leather and soled in rubber. The connection is literally lost by the insulation of the rubber, no magnetic energy can be exchanged. If there was only one thing that I was able to tell my fellow humans, it would be, Take off your shoes and feel the earth. Our feet are designed for this connection.
Three drops of rain keep me awake during the first night. Camping so completely in and with nature, we are forced to become aware of every change and nuance in the weather. With no tarps or matches, stoves or plastic food containers, we must be constantly alert to opportunity in the form of immediate shelter and dry firewood for fuel. Setting camp takes several hours instead of a few minutes with modern gear; campsites must be carefully selected, firewood gathered, fire made with bow drill, food cooked carefully on coals in clay pots.
Fortune offers us another dry day to move; we slowly hike up and over the final pass, and arrival at the new camp goes smoothly. I have passed through here and camped before, too, and know that it offers grazing and access to some other lakes. I call it Ancestor Basin. We are farther from the well-marked trails and the signs of hikers are scarce. Once we have walked for more than two days from the trailheads, signs of human influence fade.
In spite of our fatigue, two new shelters are erected. It is necessary if we plan to be here for at least a week or more. Jenny, Marcus, and I make a lean-to under a particularly sheltering spruce. They are the quieter members of the clan and we are comfortable sharing time together often in silence. The others create something similar not far away but bigger to accommodate them all. Our bedding, being our primary concern to keep dry, is only laid out when we are ready to sleep.
Before we all retire to our respective shelters, we eat together and speak of diminishing food supplies that are scantily supplemented from the land. Some of the clan—Falcon, Jenny, Marcus, and myself—had prepared more dried food than the others. Since we take turns making our daily meals with our own food supplies, we cannot go on long this way. Ben, Ali, Louis, and Rick will run out of food. Now we come to a unanimous decision: the pre-prepared wild foods that we have all brought with us are no longer to be considered personal. Those of us who have more are eager to share with our kin who have less. We agree that it is more important to stay together even if it means an earlier return. Rick’s eyes moisten; he’s deeply touched by the small sacrifice. We are together, we stay together, we share. We leave when we must and we realize we do not yet have to rely on nature alone; our society will catch us when we have to return. We all recognize the privilege that gives us choices, and once more touch the edges of reality.
A mouse scampers through my hair in the night and even sandwiched between my two companions I am slightly cold. The intolerable mosquitoes begin their plaguing whine about my face, repeatedly violating the breathing hole through the hair of my buffalo robe. With vengeance I crush their tiny bodies.
* * *
I wake up earlier than Jenny and Marcus. I don’t really want to get up, but I do anyway. After crawling over them, I string and flex my bow. I pat and whisper good morning to the little mare Christy and walk.
The ground is cold and wet with dew that dampens my moccasins. I head down the valley with every living tree squirrel sounding their forest alarm at my approach like beacons. A grouse takes wing, and quite probably every creature in the connective sensory web becomes aware that a predator is at large and on the stalk. Would that my own senses were that keen. Every little bird yells, “Hunter, hunter, hunter!”
I am so lost in my thoughts and my words. I can see the beauty of the web. How can I become part of it? The shift happens subtly.
I track deer along the ridge, startle a hare. I take no shots.
Returning to camp, I am physically depleted and spend the remainder of the day eating and resting.
We light a ceremonial fire at sunset and make prayers and offerings to the spirit of the deer, asking for a successful hunt. There are only four of us who have our bows and are actively hunting: Rick, Ben, Marcus, and myself. Louis, Jenny, Ali, and Falcon choose to focus their attention on fishing and gathering the wild plants instead.
From this high vantage point at the ceremonial firepit we can see for many miles across the Cascade range. Looming in the far distance is Mount Baker, one of the venerable active volcanoes in the Ring of Fire. Tonight it glows in the sunset. We beseech the night to bring us dreams, to give us a clue to where we should go to hunt.
* * *
Next morning, slightly appalled by my civilized mind, I recall a dream, indeed not of the hunt with wooden bow and stone-tipped arrows but of shopping for meat at the local butcher.
When I get up, I feel dizzy, light-headed, ethereal. I’m drinking water, ate plenty yesterday, and, today, had a good bowel movement, slept well, was warm . . . Body, what do you need to feel grounded, vibrant, energetic? I can’t understand what my body needs except for fat. I envision thick juicy steaks cooked rare with a layer of dripping braised fat.
* * *
It was just last year, during our Stone Age excursion, that I had been camping in this very basin with my clansmen and we had planned a side expedition, down to a large, deep lake eleven miles away. Though it’s a remote area only accessible by trail or water, it does have a daily ferry that brings visitors from the recreational town of Chelan some sixty miles south who spill onto the dock at the head of the lake to take pictures, hike the trails, and swim in the cool clear water. Most of them hop back on the ferry to return a couple of hours later after a snack at the little café. For us, though, coming from our base camp, this involved an arduous nine-hour hike with a steep drop in elevation. There were four of us—myself and three clan members: Stephane, a solid man from Switzerland; Miles, a youngster from the East Coast; and Danielle, from a dairy farming family in Wisconsin and the only other woman of that year’s Stone Age clan. We packed food for three days and headed down the valley with minimal traveling gear. This lake and its surroundings was for me a very special destination.
I spent the summers of my early twenties in Chelan with my “hike-till-you-drop” boyfriend. It was in the Northern Cascades that I had my first multiday wilderness hiking experiences. And it was then that I first armed myself with plant identification guides to learn about wild edibles. Twenty-five years later, my three companions were as excited as I was to explore the different, drier environment of a lower elevation and we set off on a trail marked on the map as unmaintained.
The first few miles went easily on the old, abandoned trail, the tracks and scat of deer, moose, and bear accompanying us. No sign of humans having passed here in many moons. Following another trail we suddenly found ourselves in a tortuous obstacle course of burned and blown-down forest. We entered the burn. Sick forest cleansed by wildfire. Needles covered the ground; buckskin colored, we blended in. Charred moonscape, blackened towers loomed above and around us. There, among the ashes, the brittle bones of a casualty of flames and smoke.
Two and a half miles became an arduous six-hour hike; sometimes we were crawling, clambering under and over giant ponderosa and lodgepole pine scattered like pickup sticks. We were blackened by charred wood and streaked with sweaty grime as we continued on even though we couldn’t be sure what awaited us.
Parched from the difficult descent, we heard the illusionary trickle of water at every turn on the trail. When finally the real stream appeared, glistening on rock and moss, we quenched our thirst greedily. Mountain water: sweetness, loveliness, life.
With much relief we rejoined a repaired trail and moved swiftly again, but the sun was sinking and we were losing daylight. We killed a rattlesnake lying across our path and tossed it in a basket to add to the evening meal. Though cut, bruised, and aching, we finally arrived down at the lakeshore trail many hours later. Desperate to find a camp spot to sleep, we found ourselves on bluff after rocky bluff. Step after weary step. The sun set and the crickets started to sing. The moon rose, then was gradually obscured by clouds as we moved on.
In a strange way, despite the fatigue, we were loving it. How often does one get to move through such an inspiring, beautiful landscape into the night on an epic journey? It is the punctuation of these powerful moments that give life flavor.
When we finally laid out our robes and collapsed beside the lapping water at our feet, too tired to make a fire or cook, we slept deeply. In the low elevation and warm night, funny dreams woke me up laughing, sad dreams woke me up crying. The richness of my experience filled my being. Memories flooded back from half my lifetime ago when I first loved these torn and craggy peaks.
The following morning I woke beside the glittering water with a mission.
I decided to head toward the top of the lake, despite the day-trippers who would be flocking there, with an empty gathering basket and hopes of blackberries. But the berry patch I remembered had now been posted with No Trespassing signs so I continued on grasping the little pouch around my neck that contained my intention rock and prayed. For meat. It felt absurd but I prayed not for just any animal, but for elk steak. Then I modified my search power to include deer and moose just to play it safe and hiked into the dock area just as the ferry boat, having discharged its passengers, pulled away. My appearance drew stares from both locals and gaping tourists. Worn and weary, covered in grubby buckskins sullied by the burned forest, I felt like I had stepped into a glaring cartoon filled with characters charading with absurd mannerisms, chemical scents, and sparklingly clean clothes.
I was dizzy and depleted. I sat with a group of day hikers and nibbled dry salmon and berries while they drank cold, fizzy beverages that held no appeal. I fantasized of juicy, bloody elk steak, I couldn’t help it.
Walking farther up the valley, I was driven by the vision of elk steak. I was insatiable. My mind had no limits, my conscience, no boundaries. There is a small settlement near the lake of around sixty year-round inhabitants and I knocked on the door of a secluded ranch and explained to the surprised woman who opened the door how I longed for a piece of elk steak. Unbelievably, or perhaps not, given the altruistic nature of the Universe when coupled with positive intention, she went to her brother-in-law’s freezer and as I stumbled back to camp in the moonlight many hours later, I had in my pack two pounds of elk meat, blackberries, purslane greens, and four fat feral apples. I had covered fourteen miles barefoot and, at times, in rawhide sandals and the cost was happy utter exhaustion.
I anointed my feet with fat that they gratefully absorbed. That night, belly sated on lean elk steak, I laid my weary body down on a bed of prickly sticks, covered my head with my jacket, and fell instantly asleep.
Thanks again, Universe.
A few drops of rain sent us scurrying under sheltering trees in the middle of the night. I slept very badly, restless dreams and discomfort. Awakening in the morning I did not want to move, but we motivated ourselves with our gifts of sustenance and ate more succulent, blood-dripping elk. My companions were rested and ready to hike, but I lay around procrastinating. The hike that lay ahead was straight up, no shelter, through another old burn. It wasn’t the same trail we had come down on but I was still dreading it.
Finally we set out. I tottered along uncertainly. I asked Stephane to walk behind me in case I should pass out and roll off the trail. It became evident that I couldn’t hike as planned and needed a rest day. So we all stayed another night in a new camp by the lake. I fell upon the pale, dry grass on my buffalo robe. The wind whipped up big waves on the water, trees swaying wildly like my thoughts. I was gripped by an irrational irritation with my male companions. I wanted to blame my miserable exhaustion on them for snoring and keeping me awake at night. I watched the thoughts come and go: they are dear men but I hated them anyway.
