The Tom Brown School

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The Wilderness Skills Schools, Part III

A short course in tracking, nature
and wilderness survival

By Terry Krautwurst
Photographed by William Waldron

I'm standing at the upper edge of an overgrown hillside, a few sloping acres of knee-high grasses and brush in rural western New Jersey. Above, half a dozen raucous crows play in a blue sky—the definitive blue sky, cloudless, crystal clear. Along the lower edge of the field huge oaks and willows rise above lesser foliage, their boughs arcing over a wide river, dappling the water in leafy shadow.

A typical countryside scene—unless you include the 40 or so human posteriors and pairs of legs grazing in groups scattered across the field. The bodies to which they're connected are thrust out of sight into bushes and briars and grasses, heads hidden like—well, no, not a bit like ostrich heads hidden in the sand. Hardly evading the world, these people are deep in discovering it.

This is the next-to-last day of a six-day Standard (introductory) course at the Tom Brown School of Tracking, Nature and Wilderness Survival.

An excited voice emerges from somewhere in a clump of sedge. "Tom! I found something! I think it's a weasel hair!" A hand pops up, then a head. "Wow, look at this!" another voice, belonging to a bluejeaned backside, shouts. "Hey, I think I found a sleeping chamber!" someone else hollers. "Look at all these trails!" an awed voice exclaims, its legs snaking deeper into the vegetation.

The excitement of discovery is contagious, and, dropping to my knees, I gladly shed my role as observer/journalist, part a layer of matted grass, poke my head downward and join my fellow students in a heretofore unseen world. "I'll be damned," I whisper to myself as I immediately uncover a tiny, wellworn path—too small for rabbits, probably a vole run—winding around a sapling and meandering downhill. "Would you look at that."

Belly down, nose inches from the ground, I study the two-inch-wide trail, a Lilliputian highway paved with grass pummeled smooth by countless wee footsteps. The closer I look, the more I am drawn into life in this grass forest, and the more I see: some droppings here, a hair there, some tiny scratch marks, a rounded, nestlike chamber. Carefully replacing the thatch above one section before parting the vegetation over the next—as our instructors have repeatedly reminded us to do—I trace the tunnel downhill. Every few feet it intersects other paths, some hidden, some exposed, some larger, some smaller—roads traveled by mice, deer, foxes, ground hogs, raccoons. Together, I realize, they form an amazing network, a sort of macrovascular system pulsing with animal movement, that must cover the entire field, and—good Lord, think of it—all the fields adjoining this one, and all those adjoining them.