The Tom Brown School

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Transfixed, I slither further into the underbrush.

Some minutes later, a sonorous voice breaks the spell. "OK, people, gather round." I stand up, blinking in the sunlight, in time to see my fellow students emerge, heads popping up through the vegetation one by one, like surfacing scuba divers. We assemble around our mentor, Tom Brown, Jr., himself.

At 37, Brown is a teacher, author and living legend. He looks the part. Over six feet tall, he stands ramrod straight, a blue T-shirt stretched across a broad chest and powerful biceps. His hair, showing streaks of silvergray, is cut short, military style—a far cry from the flowing tresses he has worn until only a few months ago. His eyes are steel blue, piercing, always darting, never focusing for long on any one person or thing.

Brown became a national figure in 1976, when his first book, The Tracker, was published. The Tracker tells the extraordinary story of Brown's childhood, spent in the New Jersey Pine Barrens under the tutelage of an elderly displaced Apache scout named Stalking Wolf. From the time he was seven years old, he was trained by Stalking Wolf in the old ways, the traditional skills and philosophies of Native Americans. Brown believes, in retrospect, that he was chosen by Stalking Wolf to pass along the ancient teachings and skills.

In 1977 he started this school, today probably the best-known and largest wilderness survival and tracking school in the country. He has also written a set of field guides, a second autobiographical book, The Search (a third is in the works), and countless magazine articles, including a popular series, "At Home in the Wilderness," for MOTHER.

But even before he started the school or wrote his first book, Brown was known among law enforcement and government agencies as "The Tracker." His exploits in finding criminals and lost children, sometimes staying on the trail without provisions for days, are epic. He is widely acknowledged as the best tracker in the country, period.

This week, though, he is our teacher, our medicine man, our Stalking Wolf.

Brown gestures with a sweep of his arm to the field and meadows adjoining. "People travel hundreds of miles to crowd into places like Yosemite or Yellowstone to see the wildlife," he says, "when there's so much to see and appreciate right in their own back yards. A field like this contains every bit as much wildlife, every bit as much natural diversity and variety, as any park anywhere in the country. And all you have to do is learn how to look for it. That's all. Just learn how to look and see."

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print