Fraud (17 page)

Happily, the Standard class is not boot camp. We are not hiked miles and miles, made to gather fire wood for hours on end, or really called upon to test our physical mettle in any appreciable way. The course is not without its arduous qualities, but its rigor is an intellectual one. The days are long, from six
A
.
M
. to past eleven at night, spent largely in lecture, with actual hands-on experience making up about
20
percent of our time. During our breaks—primarily the hour set aside for meals—we practice our skills.

The main yard outside the barn buzzes with preindustrial activity: there are people making cordage, lobbing their throwing sticks at a shooting gallery of plush toy prey—an assortment of stuffed animals perched on top of logs, their foreshortened limbs, furry bellies, permanent smiles, and cuddly expressions simply begging to be taken out by a lethal piece of spinning lumber. The top prize, the object of the most murderous and blood-hungry violence, is the purple demon himself, Barney. Other students are silently fox-walking and stalking slowly across the grass, while the majority of us are trying to start fires with our bow drills.

This last endeavor is our primary milestone, survival skill-wise. The squeak of turning spindles and the sweet smell of the smoldering cedar, occasionally followed by the applause of whatever small group might be standing nearby, is a constant. I make three attempts before success, but when it comes! The thrill of sawing the drill back and forth, watching the accumulation of the heated sawdust, now brown turning to black, the small plume of smoke that rises, the gentle coaxing of the tiny coal into fragile, orange life, the parental swaddling of that ember into a downy tinder bundle, the ardent, almost amorous gentle blowing of air into same, the increasing smoke, and the final, brilliant burst into flames in one’s fingers—it simply cannot be overstated how fucking cool it is. The charge is pre-verbal and atavistic. If, as Fitzgerald writes on the last page of
The Great Gatsby,
the Dutch sailors’ view of the New World was the last time in history when man must have held his breath in the presence of something commensurate with his capacity for wonder, then this overwhelming awe at having finally harnessed the power of conflagration was surely among the first.

Recapturing and maintaining that sense of wonder is at the very heart of the Tracker School philosophy, which is “to see the world through Grandfather’s eyes,” in a state of complete awareness, living in perfect harmony with nature, attuned to what is known in the Apache tradition as the Spirit That Moves Through All Things. This awareness will provide the key to tracking animals, both human and otherwise. “Grandfather didn’t have two separate words for ‘awareness’ and ‘tracking,’ ” Brown says. Tracking is Brown’s claim to fame. He has helped solve hundreds of forensic cases. He is undoubtedly a master at gleaning the progress over the landscape of both humans and animals, but his description of the brief, hundred-yard walk from his house to the barn is so strange and omniscient, he calls to mind Luther and Johnny Htoo, the delusional chain-smoking twelve-year-old identical twin leaders of Burma’s Karen people’s insurgency movement, with their claims of invisibility and imperviousness to bullets. “There had been a fox. The hunting had not gone well. She emerged at
2
:
22
A
.
M
. Her left ear twitches. Another step, now fear, and suddenly the feral cat appears, she’s gone!”

We won’t be able to reach this level by week’s end, but apparently we will be able to “track a mouse across a gravel driveway.” Just one of the many skills that will save us should we ever find ourselves in a full survival situation.

“Full survival” has nothing to do with the amassing of alarming quantities of canned food, a belief that the government is controlled by Hollywood’s Jewish power elite, reality-based TV programming, home schooling, or Ted Kaczynski. Full survival means naked in the wilderness: no clothes, no tools, no matches. Full survival is both worst-case scenario and ultimate fantasy. Worst case being that the End Days have come upon us, the skies bleed red, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have torn up the flower beds, and we must fend for ourselves and our loved ones. (The more prosaic version of that might be a bear eating your food or your matches getting wet.) Alternately, the ultimate fantasy is we’ve gotten so sick and tired of taking crap from “the man” that we just park our cars by the side of the highway and step into the woods and disappear. An oft repeated joke throughout the week is “Next Monday when you go in to work and quit your jobs . . .”

Regardless of the circumstances that catalyze our move back to a State of Nature, we will survive. And survive “lavishly.” Being in the woods, we are told, will become an experience akin to being locked in the Safeway overnight. “The main danger in full survival is gaining weight,” Kevin avers. Nature is a bounteous paradise for those who play by the rules. That would be nature’s rules, not the government’s. Since much of the nation’s remaining wilderness falls under the protective jurisdiction of the National Parks Service—whose rangers don’t look kindly upon the wanton building of debris huts and the killing and eating of local animal populations—much of what we learn turns out to be illegal.

Case in point: animal skinning. Even picking up roadkill apparently requires a permit. For the lecture on skinning and brain tanning, Ruth Ann comes in wearing a fringed buckskin dress of her own devising—it must be said, a fringed buckskin dress with a Peter Pan collar. She tells us the story of coming upon her first roadkill buck, while taking a much needed break from writing college papers. She is, as always, adorable, sympathetic, funny, and extraordinary in both her competence and introspection. My immediate reaction the entire week to anything Ruth Ann tells me is eagerness and a wish to try whatever it is she is proposing. When she tells us to first cut around the anus and genitals of the animal and then pull them through from inside the body cavity, I think regretfully, I wish
I
had a dead animal’s anus and genitals to cut around and pull through its body cavity.

I almost get my wish. After donning a pair of rubber gloves, she leaves the barn and comes back in bearing a very dead groundhog. It has already been gutted and the fur pulled down partway. It looks like a bloody baby in a nutria car coat. It hangs from a nail by the Achilles’ tendons of its hind legs. The lifeless face points down, the small clawed hands sway back and forth. Grabbing hold of the pelt, Tom McElroy—the Kid—pulls, using his entire body weight. Groundhogs have a great deal of connective tissue. There is a ripping, Velcro-like sound as the fur comes down. Tom briefly loses his grip, and the wet animal jerks once on its nail, spraying the front row with droplets of groundhog-y fluid. The bat flutters around the barn throughout.

Next comes the tanning. Amazingly, almost nothing is better at turning rawhide into supple leather than the lipids in the animal’s own brain, worked into the skin like fingerpaint. A further, beautiful economy of nature is that every single animal has just enough brains to tan its own hide.

Ruth Ann made her own wedding dress from unsmoked buckskin, as well as her husband’s wedding shirt. I expected her to look rough-hewn, disinhibited, and slightly tacky—like Cher—but when she takes it out of the box and holds it up against herself, we see that it is actually lovely: soft, ivory, and beautifully constructed. My crush is official.

But there will be time for infatuation tomorrow. It is getting late, and, as happens every evening, a kind of rage starts to set in around ten forty-five when people still keep asking stupid questions. I’m desperate to get to bed, having concluded the obsessive urination during breaks that starts just after supper—safeguarding against a cold, confusing pitch-dark walk through Tent City across the yard to the Porta-Johns. A small cadre of exhausted fugitives has already disappeared, making their ways back to their tents slowly and silently, without flashlights—how I envy them.

The man beside me, apropos of nothing, raises his hand and says that there is “a story” that man started society because he was “cast out of a garden because of a sin.” He doesn’t attribute this anecdote, leaving it a blind item from a source we might not know. He seems nice enough but potentially dangerous.

Ruth Ann’s face is a placid mask of patience as she listens. “And did this bring up those associations for you?”

“Yup.”

“Cool,” she says.

(By week’s end the instructors are pretending not to see his raised hand. He opts for making his comments under his breath. In the wild edibles lecture, when we are told to keep our grains dry to protect them from ergot, the moldy blight that causes hallucinations, he mutters, “That was before the Dark Forces turned it into LSD.”

“Oh, you don’t have to call them the Dark Forces with
me,
” I want to josh him. “You can just call them the Jews.”)

Perhaps it’s the country air, but I rise early the next morning at five
A
.
M
., completely refreshed. Without making a conscious decision, I head out to the surrounding fields and woods. There is a Tracker School tradition known as “the Twenty-Eight Club,” referring to those twenty-eight individuals who managed to approach and touch a live deer during their Standard week. It has been at twenty-eight for six years. In my heart I know I will be the one to make it twenty-nine.

Ruth Ann has taught us the Stalk, a walk of such slow, silent, and fluid progress that one’s movements are in perfect accord with nature. One step of Stalking, properly executed, should take a full minute of achingly precise placement of the outer ball of the foot, followed by the inner ball, the heel, the toes, and then a deliberate and bomb-squad-careful shifting of the weight. We further have to squint our eyes and close our mouths (the whites of both will give us away) and keep our arms folded across our middles. “Otherwise you show the human silhouette and you’ll stick out like a turd in a punch bowl,” she tells us. Key to attaining the grace and calm necessary for the Stalk is going into wide-angle vision, a relaxing of focus that not only increases one’s sensitivity to one’s periphery, but has the added benefit of clearing the mind: a moving meditation.

I am alone among the trees and the low brush, the dawn mist diaphanous. I stand stock-still and serene as I watch the cadmium red streak of a cardinal flying by. I think of nothing. Even the glory I will surely taste when I touch my deer seems far off and unimportant, mired in hierarchical, tunnel-vision thinking. I sense the branches moving to my left before I see them. Ah! I think. An animal approaches. Welcome, fellow creature. Come, commune with me. My breathing shallow, my eyes at half-mast, I wait.

My conscious mind awakens, the part of my brain where my general terror of animals resides—my incapacity to grasp why it is animals don’t simply decide to go for the jugular. I flail in alarm like Martha Graham, snapping twigs and kicking up debris. As I flee the woods for the relative safety of the farm, I look back to see a small weasel emerge from the underbrush, watch my contortions for a moment, and scamper away.

I am a tunnel visionary after all. Not at home in nature, a fact apparent to weasel and human alike, because not one hour later one of the female volunteers asks me over breakfast, “Where are you from?”

“New York.”

“Huh. Thought so.”

“Does it show?” I ask.

“A little.” She leans in conspiratorially and whispers, “The shoes.”

Apparently here at the Tracker School, just as on Monadnock, people are not featuring the black plastic boot from Payless.

Awareness starts small. Only when we understand the many mysteries that lie within the earth’s tiniest, seemingly mundane details will we be able to track animals or people. “Awareness is the doorway to the spirit, but survival is the doorway to the earth. If you can’t survive out there naked and alone, then you’re an alien,” Brown tells us. “YOU THINK THE EARTH IS GOING TO TALK TO SOMEONE WHO IS NOT ONE OF HER CHILDREN?” he yells.

My guess is no. To that end, we are taken out to a meadow overgrown with heavy grasses, garlic mustard, and wild burdock, known as Vole City for its large population of the small rodents who make their homes there. We each lie down in this tick heaven and examine an area no larger than a square foot, digging down, exploring.

My classmates look very idyllic and French impressionist, scattered about here and there, supine in the sunlight, lost in contemplative investigation. Me, I sit up, terrified at the prospect of finding anything, especially a vole (which, my editor will laughingly explain to me, is nothing more than a harmless field mouse, as if that mitigates anything). The instructor shows me how to root around just underneath the grass to find the ruts worn through the vegetation by the voles as they make their runs. I define gingerly as I use a stick to push aside the stalks and turn over the debris, picking out the dull sheen of a slug here, the progress of a tiny worm there.

Warming to my task, I suddenly spy, dark, wet gray against the fresh green of a blade of grass, the unmistakable articulation of reptilian digits, a hand span no bigger than this semicolon; as expected, it is connected to a tiny reptilian arm, connected to a tapered reptilian head the size of a peppercorn. The gleaming, now dead eye catches the sunlight. My heart in my mouth, and trying to keep the panic from my voice, I call the instructor back over and show him. He picks up the tiny twig with the half-eaten salamander still perched on it and holds it some four inches from his mouth, enumerating the various classifications of the creature: the coloring, the reticulations, the patterns, the species. The instructor tries, God bless him, to draw me into a Socratic dialogue, asking me questions about what I observed. He points to the chewed-out underside of the demi-lizard. “What kind of teeth made those cuts? Are the edges scalloped? Look at the gnaw marks. That’s a great find,” he says, patting me on the back.