Owl Kill

Last weekend while doing some cottontail hunting in the Champlain Valley I witnessed an amazing tracking scene. It was a perfect day for tracking, a hard crust of snow with about a half inch of powder on top. As we moved through the forest we stopped to check out the tracks of various animals taking advantage of the new found mobility the crust afforded. Story after story unfolding.

After moving through a densely wooded hillside we came across something of unusual. The first thing that caught my eye was the amount of disturbance, marks and push downs, and drags... and the lack of tracks. Then two tracks flared out at me...Owl....and just on the top of the inside toe on the right foot....is that hair....

It all became clear. The landing, the scuffle and kill...and the tracks to show the story. I have seen substrate carry over in tracks, but never hair...a story of hunting and feeding unfolded. And as each piece of the story came together and I asked questions far outside of my ability to answer. I realized once again, I love tracking.

Bow Building

Roots has been holding Bow building classes for a number of years now, and as I look towards the upcoming class and talk to those who are interested, I find myself thinking about all those who have already built one, some who have come back to build two, even three. They have taken the time out of their lives to sit with a single piece of wood, working it for days o as to leave with a beautiful, functional, and effective bow. There is no defining reason as to why people have come. There have been students that have hunted their whole lives, there have been students who have never hunted before, and a number of vegetarians who are looking to explore a new approach to meat in their diet, or are just looking for the dynamic mediation of building and shooting their own bow. No bow comes out the same, and it affects the individual as much as he or she does working the wood. Here are some pictures of previous students working hard and loving it.

Perception, Intuition, and Instinct

Last weekend we held the first Perception, Intuition, and Instinct course. I must say that I had a blast putting the class together and watching students learn and push their awareness skills. The first day of the course was a full battery of sensory exercises including vision acuity looking for hidden partners and objects in the forest, hearing tests which required you to dodge moving objects based on sound, scent identifying trees, tasting traces of alkaloids, salts, sugars, acids, and lipids in water, and transmuting touch into vision. We ended the day by hunting each other with blowguns, blindfolded, and using our senses to reach out. Sunday was filled with using awareness and visualization to learn and build new skills, more of the dart game but with hearing protection to up the stakes, and finished with some mind blowing intuition exercises that shocked the whole Roots staff when we witness a 100 percent student success rate in sensing someone while blindfolded!

Looking forward to running this course again and trying to plot more awareness courses for 2009...