Primitive Camouflage

Indigenous hunter-gatherers around the world have employed their environments for thousands of years for concealment and stealth - to hide from their prey, and to recon neighboring clans.

The principles of primitive camouflage enable the practitioner to dwell within layers of invisibility by becoming cryptic and mimicking his or her surroundings by matching shapes, colors, textures, and patterns, and thus vanishing into the landscape. You want to create and become Baseline by changing your physical appearance with materials found in your area, coupled with concealing your energy waves - essentially preventing yourself from casting any alarmwaves, and finally, moving slowly and carefully enough to avoid detection.

"Deadspace" is the key, the gateway to Invisibility, conforming to and moving in shadow, with the landscape. It's important to know that Understanding Baseline is Awareness, Blending with Baseline is Camouflage, and finally Manipulating Baseline is Invisibility.
The four aspects of Invisibility to be mindful of are: Scent, Sight, Sound and Speed. De-scenting is accomplished first by masking any body odor by washing with a tea made with native plants (non-toxic, of course), then smudging with smoke from a campfire, then rubbing down with the crushed leaves from the tea. Chewing fir or pine needles will cover breath-scent. Also, paleo diet will mask your scent from the inside-out. Then, the next step is to strip down and cover any areas of the body that may reflect light and cause shine, such as your forehead, the bridge of your nose, etc. with crushed charcoal from your fire, before covering your entire body with a thick layer of mud! Everything gets covered! Apply mud even to the edge of your eyelids, around your mouth, in your ears...everything gets covered with mud! Then, throw debris from the ground all over you allowing it to stick to the mud, close to the body. Fir needles, moss, lichens, grass. Whatever you can find that would be found in the spot that you have chosen to camo into. You will want to recon the area from a distance beforehand.

In the colder climates and seasons, you can make custom camo clothing of your own by taking an old set of clothes and working some magic with camouflage spray-paint (air out for a time so they don't hold the smell), or clothing paints from any decent craft shop. Be artistic and use dappling and highlights on top of drab earthtones.
Then, sink and fade into the landscape. Be "aggressively" patient. Breathe deep and steady. When you need to move...blend and flow - allow the landscape to dictate your route and pace. Once on the ground, rather than moving with elbows and knees up and down, you can crawl with a rectilinear motion like an inchworm, keeping your profile low, hugging the ground, infinitely slow. Slow enough, that in time, with practice, you'll be able to stalk wildlife close enough to touch!!
Be safe and have fun!

Kids' Intro Classes

      

My daughter, Kamara, tracking critters at dusk.

The Youth course is an introduction to the art of becoming a "forest-ninja". It's designed for children ages 6 to 17, and will be a two-hour adventure (with a lunch break in between) consisting of forest exploration, learning how to panther walk, animal movement exercises, participating in ancient native scout games, animal tracking, learning about useful and dangerous plants, the fundamentals and importance of building a proper shelter and other survival skills, invisibility, creative play and storytelling, and more. 

My son, Killian, age six, naturally camo'd.

Children are free to attend.
There is a fee of $20 for parents or accompanying adults.
*Remember to bring towels and an extra set of clothes, as you will be getting dirty and muddy as you have fun reconnecting with Nature!!

Read the School Introduction post for details.

The Tao of Tracking

A dimly-lit rainforest.... The voices of a dozen birds cascading to the forest floor where the tiny landscape of a coyote track offers its subtle clues... telling a story of the maker's passing as she ran her nightly hunt, through cricketsong, along this hidden trail. Raindrops ever-so-slowly wearing the peaks and ridges of the muddy impression back into the earth. A dance between land and animal. A record of which is, for a time, held in the soil - a story, revealing the "pulse" of the woods. 

An animal's trail is a narrative holding the animal's energy in the very flesh of the Earth. A string of compressions imprinted upon every surface like the letters and words on the pages of an open book. 
The world's first science - tracking is an artform unto itself, a philosophy that encompasses a vast realm of knowledge reaching back to the dawn of time. Early humans needed to understand their surroundings in order to survive its inherent dangers, which included staying fed. From these needs came the ability to read the ground - to ask the Earth questions about the movements of others. Of the movements of animals, both predator and prey.

Modern intellect evolved alongside tracking. Tracking has played a major role in the evolution of our modern model of perception. The art of tracking develops a cohesive bond, a combination of logic and intuition - a restructuring in the human brain, using an advanced pattern recognition based on sensory awareness immersion combined with natural history training. Tracking enables its practitioners to uncover the secrets of Mother Nature - through the eyes and ears of the animals themselves. The tracker becomes the animal that he or she is tracking, reaching with highly-attuned awareness out across the landscape, deep into the animal's soul. 

Tracking is picking up a piece of a puzzle, which is itself a piece of a larger puzzle, and so on..., fitting them together to gain a grand view of the world around us, affording the tracker a new perception vocabulary. The Tracker moves within the tracks, and the tracks move within the Tracker. Tracking opens one's senses to the song of the cosmos.... 

coyote tracks

                                         
                                                       copyright kellan scath 2016

Sit Spot

The sit spot is a personal place where one can go to reconnect with the natural world. It's a "secret sacred area" for the purpose of nature study and research/tracking, aceticism, meditation, connection to place, sensory and physical exercises, and so on. A place to go to be alone with the Earth....
Ideally, a sit spot should be a diverse location bearing a good amount of animal activity - at least 1/4 acre in size, and be near your home, if possible, to provide a convenient level of access to ensure frequent visits. Preferably a private location beside a stream where many critters congregate for the purpose of what I call deep observation. This is known as the "invisible advantage". The sit spot teaches one commitment and how to confront challenges encountered during a survival situation such as getting cold, wet and dirty, as well as the fear of the dark, in much smaller and more tolerable doses. 

Once you've established your sit spot, adopt the caretaker mindset by being mindful of entering and leaving your sit spot area quietly, and not wearing ruts into the landscape by varying your route in and out to protect the secrecy of your location, and removing any trash and refuse that you may find there.
Make attempts to visit your sit spot as often and as long as practical. And when doing so, practicing gratitude (in whatever form that takes for you), and later, journaling, in detail, every aspect of your visit, once you've returned home. 

Shelter

The art of survival contains a set of priorities, the first of which is exposure-prevention. In order for it to function at peak performance, the average adult human body must maintain a body core temperature of 98.6 degrees fahrenheit. This process is known as thermoregulation and is key in surviving any venture in the wild, be it for three hours, three days, or three months... and the importance of proper clothing is paramount! The main reason people die in wilderness settings is due to "exposure" to the elements. It takes no time at all for someone to become hypothermic. We lose heat a number of ways -  it occurs through conduction, convection, and radiation. Conduction, is losing heat to the ground. The Earth is a huge mass compared to our tiny bodies in comparison, and is always drawing heat away from the heat's source. Convection is losing heat to wind and water (water pulls heat away 25x's faster than air!) And the third, radiation, is where our heat is simply radiated away. 

Insulation (clothing/shelter) is the most significant factor in wilderness survival. The goal being to create a micro-climate that will enable you to maintain your body core temp. This is accomplished by choosing proper clothing that will prevent any body heat from escaping by creating a dead-air-space chamber within your clothing by capturing and containing a "bubble" of body heat. One of the most effective ways of trapping your body heat is to properly layer your clothes by wearing a base layer, an insulative layer, and an environmental layer. The goal is stay as dry and comfortably cool as possible. Becoming sweaty will result in you becoming hypothermic. It's wise to run at a 60% energy-output level. And that's slightly different for each person... it will be that point when you just feel your skin beginning to tingle with the onset of perspiration.

The base layer should ideally be a tight, "hydrophobic" under-layer, such as underarmour, that has a wicking effect. The second layer is your "dead-air-space layer", which, I feel - hands-down, should be wool!! Wool is an excellent insulator - it retains about 80% of its insulative properties even when wet! Also, it's durable, easy to repair, is naturally fire-resistant, quiet, self-extinquishing; and fuzzy, so it breaks up your outline and therefore is camouflaging; (I'll speak more on the reasons for so much camouflaging in later blogs). The third and final layer, your "shell", should be gore-tex or rain gear, etc., Or another wool shirt, parka, and pants with a tighter weave to prevent soaking of outside moisture. Waterproof shoes or boots, such as rubber/neoprene muck boots, and wool socks are excellent footwear. Wool or gore-tex-type gloves and cap will finish your protection from the elements.

If you're caught out and don't have these layers on you already, you have another option, called, "scarecrowing". Scarecrowing is simply the act of stuffing your clothes with debris from your surrounding area, such as leaves, mosses, grasses, etc. to effectively create that dead-air-space that's so crucial for maintaining your body core temperature. Even if the debris is wet - it will soon warm up from the trapped body heat.

Primitive shelters can be constructed in a fairly short amount of time based on this same concept: thick layers of insulative materials. The most effective being natural huts made of deep debris. A natural survival hut can be made by building a skeleton-like frame by propping up a large ridge beam to serve as a spine, then tightly ribbed with sticks for walls, and finally covered and stuffed with as much debris as possible. A primitive hut with walls two-feet thick will keep the occupant warm at twenty below!! I will go into more detail regarding this process in my classes.

interior of primitive survival hut 

                                               
                                                       copyright kellan scath 2016
                                                   

Kellan's Artshelf

Practice!

compression mark analysis on sauvie island

Tracking takes time and effort to learn...raw time spent out in the bush practicing - on a constant basis. Time spent getting muddy and calloused tracking snakes through swamps, tracking coyotes through thickets, climbing trees to examine squirrel nests', or sitting and meditating beside babbling streams in forests somewhere far off the beaten path.
Always tracking through your neighborhood and out in the woods, always visually searching for materials to build a primitive camp with, always listening to the bird language around you...what the birds are saying, and why? Always asking the sacred question: What has happened here? What is this teaching me? And why? Always studying the wear marks all around you in your environment. Always asking yourself questions like, "where is the nearest deer to me right now?"
Envisioning people, dogs, etc., as if you're actually witnessing them making their tracks before you, by "fleshing" them out with your mind's eye, based upon what the shapes of the tracks are telling you. Always looking deeper.... This is called tracker vision. 

emerging from beaver tunnel