The Tom Brown School

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We have spent countless hours this week doing just that, and a great deal more. In five days of almost nonstop lectures and workshops—beginning at 8:00 each morning and continuing into the night, sometimes past midnight—we've covered an astonishing variety of skills, each in depth: making fires, building shelters, finding water, building traps and snares, skinning and tanning, making natural cordage, cooking, arrow and bow making, flint knapping, Eolithic rockwork, stalking, foraging, hunting and—of course—tracking.

"I pack this course with information, and then I pack it further," Brown told us the first night. "Time is critical here. I use every minute. When you're done on Sunday and you look at how much we've gone over, your head will reel."

My head's been reeling since the second day. I've filled two notebooks with lecture notes and I'm working on another. My hands are scratched and calloused from workshops: from carving traps, twisting plant fiber to make cord, chipping rock into cutting tools.

After lunch, each student uses the time remaining before the next class to practice skills or complete projects started earlier. An options trader from Brooklyn pulls a nearly completed bone arrowhead from his pocket and begins scraping it across a piece of rock to give it a keen edge. In the field beyond the cooking area, three students—a real estate salesman, a machinist and a physical therapist—set chunks of firewood on end in a line as targets, move back 30 feet and practice throwing a rabbit stick, an arm-length, wrist-thick piece of tree limb that, when hurled correctly, is a deadly accurate survival weapon for hunting small game.

Over by an outbuilding another student stands staring straight ahead, arms outstretched to either side, wiggling his fingers slightly. It's an exercise in stimulating peripheral vision, an element, Brown says, essential to increasing your awareness of the world. He has taught us to widen our vision and avoid fixing our eyes in any one direction for long—a technique he calls "splatter vision." "Always be a tourist," he says. "Look at the room you're in, the street you're on, the trail you're walking, as if you were seeing it for the first time—no matter how many times you've seen it before. Your mind always seeks the familiar, but you miss so much. Vary your vision. Refuse to let your eyes focus on the same things you always look at. Force yourself to look in different places. Wherever your vision goes, your senses go."

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