Taking Elk Lines to the Elk Lines

Under the Beltane full moon, under the milk moon, I took the nearly completed manuscript of Elk Lines out to a little cabin on the Inverness Ridge, in Point Reyes, to walk it among the real elk lines of the land. It has been a wonderful and enlightening and sometimes challenging experience to send a novel out in parts every six weeks; it's the way Dickens and other Victorian novelists first wrote some of their own stories, and they too learned, long before me, that a novel written thus needs a good tighten once it's done. 

I edited with red pen on the shores of ocean and bay, hoping that I was leaving space, by carrying the manuscript out thus, for the land to have its say. To make sure my words do as much justice as they can to this place. 

There were flowers to be gathered on roadsides to honor the big old moon, and little clamshells to be treasured, for their humble history of nourishment.

The fog was in thick, so thick out on Tomales Point that it did indeed walk with elk hooves, holding everything in a damp palm.

I left bits of juniper from the Sierras in the pawprints of a gray fox I sat beside for an afternoon, pen scribbling away, tightening and cutting and smoothing the story into a new whole. It is a precious place, where a gray fox paw has touched the earth. 

The irises are still a riot of bloom. I don't know how they sustain their delicate purple petals under as much a sun as we've been having. They are so hardy.

I contemplated the three mile, ten foot tall elk fence which bisects the southern portion of Tomales Point, keeping the tule elk in. This fence was erected due to the fact that there are dairy ranches right on the other side, and a tenuous relationship between park land and dairy land, environmental interests and ranching interests... and elk, roaming totally free, eat the grass meant for cows! But something very sad has happened in the last three years, something I only learned in the past week. Over half the 500 tule elk on Tomales Point have died. That's 250 dead elk, in a span of three years. The reason is the drought, but it is a manmade reason-- since the elk can't leave to find year round streams, they're stuck with old cattle ponds that have since gone dry. So over three years, half the elk have slowly parched to death. This is really quiet cruel.  (Note also that the elk that roam free in the southern portions of Point Reyes, near Muddy Hollow and Limantour, have survived the drought in a more regular fashion, since they can travel to find water. In those areas, however, they come into frequent conflict with dairy farms, because they're good at jumping fences! It seems to me that the cows have more than enough room... I'm sure you can guess whose side I'm on here!)

People will argue-- oh, they don't have enough predators out there, some are bound to die in a drought, etc, etc. This may be true. But there's a deeper point--one of relationship, and of responsibility. We make the elk our responsibility by unnaturally fencing them in. And yet a cow, or a dog, would never be left to die of thirst. What does this say about the family of things, and attitude toward it? What is the "value" of an elk, and what is the "value" of a cow?

There is of course the even deeper issue-- who has the right to this land? Yikes. A big topic, a controversial topic. There is a lot of pride around the heritage of dairy farms throughout Point Reyes, and I respect and support this heritage, and all the families it has supported. However, cows may have been here for 200 years, but elk-- thousands, thousands, thousands. Who has the right to this land? It is a question that hurts in me; I love this place deeply, but I don't feel I have a right to it. If I could, I'd give it all back to the native people who cared for it best, people who are almost gone. But then, what would I love? Where would I settle down? It's an unanswerable riddle, but just airing it sometimes feels helpful. And it seems we can only earn our place somewhere if we love and respect all of the beings to whom it belongs, human interests only an equal slice in the pinwheel of needs and niches.

Anyway. I had a startling thought as I studied the elk fence from afar, noting the stark line of shorn grass on the cow side. I wondered if, a year ago when I visited this place with Asia Suler, the first stirrings of Elk Lines just beginning in me, when I first asked the place to guide my writing hand with whatever new project needed to come through-- I wondered if the elk, already dying of drought, had in some way spoken. Tell our story. Tell our story. Asia and I buried a quartz crystal in a patch of iris where we watched a herd of female elk and their calves graze. I knew with certainty on that day that my next story would be about elk. It became very clear. I thought of that quartz often as I wrote, hoping I was writing true. In my story, the elk are dying of disease, spread from the cows. I had no idea the elk of Point Reyes were truly dying in any unnatural way at all, until now. I wonder if this is partly why this story came.

I hope desperately I can do them justice in whatever humble way I can manage. Even if it is "all in the balance," and the "natural order of things," half the population here is dead. Brother elk, sister elk, son elk, mother elk.  Dead too fast. Don't think they do not mourn one another. It is dangerous, when we forget this. When we trick ourselves into thinking animals have no emotions, and therefore death by thirst is no big deal. I read once that when Bernie Krause, a soundscape ecologist, heard a father beaver discover that his dam with mate and babies inside had been destroyed, the keening sound he made long into the night, circling and circling, was the most heart breaking noise Krause had ever heard. It reduced him to tears. He instantly recognized, in the part of him that was no different than the beaver, the sound of animal grieving.

The Smell of Buckskin & the Lay of the Elk Lined Land

Please forgive my absence here. It has proved harder than I imagined to keep up a 3 post a week regiment (why I did not think this would be difficult I cannot tell you, except that I have a large writing appetite and always bite off more than I can quite chew, out of sheer excitement, love for words, and for the magic of this world!) My Juniper Way is perhaps, I realize, better served in a fluid and un-regimented fashion, in the daily practice of my life but not always here. I'm sure many of you walk (while juggling, it sometimes feels) this strange path with the internet—how to use it as a tool, as a resource, as a rich web of interconnection, sharing, exchange, without letting it seep too far into your daily life. I do not like the feeling that the experiences I have are lived with a blog post in mind. This does not sit well with me, however successful a model it may be for others. I realize I need these sharings to be spontaneous, to be fluid. So while you will be reading about Hearth and Hands, my notes from the Wild Folk, my patchworks of inspiration, and scraps about Elk Lines and other projects, it will be in my more usual ambling rambling fashion, a few threads taken from here and there. Wily bird's nests, these posts often turn out to be, lined with elk fur but made of spiderweb and lichen and dryer lint all. This works better for me I think, and perhaps for all you dear readers too. It's more like ecology, less like a path of stepping stones.

*****

So, that said, I want to write here about the smell of buckskin, all smoke and animal in one. I want to write about how it is the same color as the summergold land, and the fur of the tule elk out in the hills, and how under my hands, the awl and the buckskin feel like a homecoming. This past weekend, I learned to make simple sandals (above!) and to work with leather, specifically buckskin (deer hide tanned front and back with brains and then cured over a woodfire)*, with a group of women out in the hills of Sonoma County. We gather once a month, learning wild skills, rolling fire with handdrills of elderberry wood to cook our food, talking around the fire into the dark about what it means to be a woman today, what it means to be empowered by our monthly cycles, what it means to feel rooted and competent and connected out on the land. It is good and challenging and nourishing on many levels.

This time, we did not tan the buckskin (it takes longer than two days), but I was fortunate to get to use a beautiful little piece, tanned by our teacher's son when he was six (!) to sew a small bag. And I was seduced, utterly and completely. The smoked smell, sweet and resinous both, the buttery feeling of the skin under my fingers, the precision and strength of the piercing awl, the tightening stitches. Two moons ago, we processed a goat and tanned rabbit skins, and a longing as old as these bones, as old, I would wager, as the human spirit, filled me this time as I stitched, to learn the process of tanning buckskin. We've danced a dance as old as time with the deer and the elk of this planet, the dance of the hunt, but also a dance of great reverence, and it feels to me that the processing of a skin (which at this point in my life I would only ever procure from an animal killed on the roadside) can be an act of worship and gratitude. For we should not forget that our very first clothing items as a species came from the bodies of animals, and that like it or not, we are tied to them in a dance of life-death-life. I would go so far as to argue, as Paul Shepard does, that animals have shaped who we are in every possible way, that they are our elders and our guides, and should be worshipped as we now worship God, or the Machine, or the Economy, or Technology. But that is a story for another day.

Paul Shepard writes (from his book The Others: How Animals Made Us Human): 

Death is a tender subject, with its imagined pain and terror, vistas of roaring carnivores killing beautiful deer and lions raging among themselves over bloody bones. images of predation as the power of the strongest confuse our monkey politics and its endless skirmishing for power with food chains in ecology, making the false analogy of nature to violence and war. [...] The grass eaten by the buffalo and the flesh of the buffalo eaten by the wolf we imagine as taken by force. But the milk, grass, [...] buffalo [...] and wolf, transmit something more important than themselves. In the ethos of the ancient conjunction of "to prey on" and "to pray to," the hunt is not a seizure but a voluntary immolation. Hunters preserve the lore of wild things who oversee the ethics of their own transformation into food, observe atonements, and return again and again (37). 

Out on the buckskin colored hills of Tomales Point, the bull tule elk are gathering great lekking groups (or harems) of females that they will keep at their sides until winter. Here: the sun, the fog, the grass, the bodies of elk, the mountain lions who (very occasionally!) pick off a young calf. The antlers that fall and provide minerals to the mice and rabbits. The bodies that decompose again into the earth, buckskin gold through the summertime drought. Sun-grass-elk-mountain lion: the great wheel, turning, and somehow the act of sitting, watching, pressing fingerprints to an elk hoof print, reading their movements through track and sign, feels like a way back in again, back into the wheel. As does the working of buckskin between finger and palm, and what it means to hold the life of an animal in your hands—what an ancient responsibility, and worship.  You must not forget to sing and to dance in return. 

The bull elk in the centers of the lekking groups are the very strongest of all, the ones who've fought off all the other bulls (for the time being). They bugle often into the fog, perhaps asserting their territory. The sound is haunting and high, like a child's cry or a hunting bird. For the autumn season, they control and protect these great herds of females, and make love to all of them. This can be very exhausting work, apparently, because the strong elk surrounded by lekking groups are often the first dead come winter—the act of courting so many women and constantly fighting off other males totally drains their strength! 

I sat for a while one day a few weeks ago, in the midst of writing the most recent Elk Lines chapter, watching the male and female elk interact. For the rest of the year, the females live in big groups together, led by the oldest and wisest among them. I wonder how they feel about these young bulls who chase them around and herd them up and down hills, often with displays of aggression. Some seemed perfectly pleased with the situation while others, I noted, often ignored the bull until the very last minute, when the rest of the herd was halfway up the hill. I know that elk minds work differently than human minds, and that the inner workings of a herd, and an elk, are very mysterious indeed, but I also believe that it is important to remember that all animals are individuals, following at once the ways of their species and their own predilections, as we do; and so it made me smile to see how each female responded a little differently to their temporary liege lord & lover, and how wonderful a thing it is, to remember that each animal is its own unique being, with its own set of stories and tastes and (dare I say it? Yes I do dare) loves.

The land felt very dry, as it always is at this time of year to one degree or another. But this summer, it feels like bone.

 The way the green drains from this landscape is always astonishing. The sun crisps it away. 

 At the beginning of May, the same path looked like this. The herbalist Asia Suler and I wandered here then, when the idea for Elk Lines was just a bright seed, a glinting stone, in my heart. (She recently interviewed me on her website, Woolgathering and Wildcrafting--do go have a read! I am very honored indeed.)

We sat amidst the Douglas irises (whose purple my camera did not properly capture-- they are much darker!) and watched the elk cows move together in groups with young calves at their heels. 

Now, the irises are going rust-orange at the tips, and making twisted, strange seedpods.



The only thing blooming, as far as I can see, is the coyotebrush. These are the male flowers. The female flowers are in bloom too; they more resemble dandelion propellors, tiny and furred, like a coyote's pelt. Coyotebrush is an incredibly drought-resistant plant, with tiny resinous leaves that deflect sun and conserve water, deep taproots, and the ability to regenerate from fire. It also, in my opinion, smells like sun and dry stones and the spice of this coastal land.

White Gulch, a favorite spot among the tule elk, has lost all of its green. The elk are now harder to spot, their bodies the same color as the hills.

And the lines they make with their travel up and down the combes and valleys—how they resemble the creases in buckskin!



The land has always felt to me like a great animal with skin and fur, her bones the granite rocks. Sometimes, when I walk barefoot especially (or in sandals such as the ones I just made, which keep me very close to the texture of the earth just below the sole), the ground feels very alive, like it has its own blood and heat and the ability to reach up through all of my bones as I go. Surely, it does. All the ancient people of this world believed it—the land a great dreaming animal—and now science tells us that walking barefoot is "good" for us because of the earth's electric charge (but please don't get me going about the absurdness of "Earthing" or I will never stop). While I'm sure it's true in those terms, I prefer the idea that she is a great creature, and your bare feet to her skin are like the tender touch between two animals. Both, to me, are the same story, just told with different words.

This time on the land with the elk, my feet in the buckskin hills, always feeds my own story-making in the truest of ways. Last week, I carried a heavy box of the latest Elk Lines back from the printers. How good it felt (though my arms did ache!) to walk with such bounty in my arms, fueled by the elk, the wild hills, and every reader whose eyes and hearts touch these words.

I hope very much that these Elk Lines can somehow let the voice of the land (whatever tiny humble scrap I've managed to approximate) sing through into each of you. As I wrote to Asia in our interview:

"Above all things I hope that through my work a renewed sense of the tenets of deep ecology and animistic thought can be re-infused into the world of contemporary human literature. The stories we tell shape the world we see, and the world we see is one of terrible environmental and humanitarian catastrophe, degradation, and extinction, both of animals and plants, and of human cultures and languages. I hope for my writing to convey a sense of the animism of all beings; that elk and alder and lichen and stone, bear and lizard and fog and oatgrass, are all subjects, characters, integral players in the stories of our lives and this world, not the objects we have made them into with our cultural narratives. For when a deer or a tree is a subject and not an object, it is not as easy to destroy it without a care. I also hope to keep the old human magics and beliefs surrounding this wise old world of ours alive in my writing—the ways of weedwife and hunter, wandering jester and gypsy and shaman and witch. And if my tales can be wild woodrat nests which lead to the other worlds inside this world, all the better. If they can somehow gesture at the weedier, wilder, dustier footpath which leads us back into what it really means to be human (and not the big tar roads)—well, that would be grand indeed."

* I want to add a quick note about buckskin, cultural appropriation, etc. We tend to associate buckskin (especially that particular term) with the Wild West, and of course with the native people of this country. A few things to note—first of all, in California, traditional garb varied widely, but especially along the coast, buckskin wasn't really a big clothing item, except in the winter, along with other furs. The climate is so mild that plant fiber clothing (such as tule skirts) or no clothing at all was preferable. (In the early 20th century, at horribly racist "museums" or "demonstration sites," such as those in Yosemite National Park, native California people were made to dress in buckskins with fringe and beading, like the Plains Indians who the American public seemed to think represent the "best" kind of Indian.) In addition, the process of tanning hides, and making buckskin (which is just deer skin tanned on both sides, as I mentioned above, so that all the hair is gone), is about as old as we are as a species. (Read an interesting little history here.) It is an ancient human inheritance, and craft, so when I write about it here I am not trying to appropriate a Native American tradition, but rather I am trying to reconnect with the roots we all share. The Native people of this (and many other) continent(s) just happen to have held onto that tradition (and the deep old wisdom of what it means to be human and connected) longer than anybody else, before we white Europeans showed up here and nigh on ruined everything. 

Elklines

"Going in search of the heart, I found

a huge rose, and roses under all our feet!

How to say this to someone who denies it?

The robe we wear is the sky's cloth.

Everything is soul and flowering."

-Rumi

Sometimes it feels to me that looking into the pollen-dusted center of a flower is just that--looking into its soul, which is not hidden away but boldly there for all the bees and hummingbirds and wandering humans to see.

In the past week, the season passed on light, poppy-pollen gold feet from the tender new flush of spring into the full bloom and coming dryness of our summer. I always feel that here, the beginning of summer is Beltane, May 1st, the old pagan holiday of fertility and bloom, and not June 21st. The hills are already tinged gold. The nettles are going to seed. The buckeye is in full intoxicating bloom.

In our own rambling yard, the kiwi is flowering, a perfect, moon-made flower for that furred and strange and delectable green-fleshed fruit that is to come.

And in the spirit of flowering, and the pathways of the seasons, this May Day, I had a very special visitor, a woman whose heart is full of blossom and seed and root, Asia Suler, the magic-maker and herbalist behind One Willow Apothecaries.



Asia is a medicine maker of great power and old, storied magic. I now have a little collection going of her seasonal medicines, each timed with the cycles of the plants and stones and our human hearts too, full with such ancient wonders as turmeric and tulsi, sassafras and moonstone, hawthorn berry and rose blossom, maple sap and crocus essence. I can attest first-hand that these are magnificent and powerful medicines; that they twine up from your soles to your crown like the blooming of May's flowers, clearing and opening and brightening all the shadowed or stiff or cobwebbed places that need it, just when they do.

We wandered the fog-held valleys and windy trails of Tomales Point, where the tule elk roam. It is a place of ancient and quiet strength, the matriarchal wisdom of elk-cows in their birthing herds, and the great, queenly bulb-patches of purple iris.


It was an honor and great fun to wander together through a thickness of pastel-sweet wild radish and cow parsnip, our soles tracing out some yet-unmade, yet-undreamed medicines across the paths, some yet untold stories made of mineralled stone and coiled root and purple iris petal.

For after all, it seems to me that stories are medicine, and medicine is made of story.

And the paths we walk, the act of walking, can bring us right back into that flowering, storied soul-- our own, and the world's, wearing the sky's robe, our feet gentle as rosebuds. 

I have been reading Robert MacFarlane's The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, and it has caught my heart deeply; be sure you will see more of it here later this week. For now I want to share the following passage, which clicked open a little lock in my mind, as good writing often does-- an idea heard and known before, presented anew, that finally comes fully alive. 

"The best known connection between footfall, knowledge and memory is the Aboriginal Australian vision of the Songlines. According to this cosmogony, the world was created in an epoch known as the Dreamtime, when the Ancestors emerged to find the earth a black, flat, featureless terrain. They began to walk out across this non-place, and as they walked they broke through the crust of the earth and released the sleeping life beneath it, so that the landscape sprang up into being with each pace. As Bruce Chatwin explained in his flawed but influential account, 'each totemic ancestor while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints.' Depending on where they fell, these foot-notes became linked with particular features of the landscape. thus the world was covered by 'Dreaming-tracks' that 'lay over the land as ways of communication,' each track having its corresponding Song." (page 30).

My Earth Constellation sketches for the week are also Songlines, Tracklines, Dreamlines. The red alder tree is also a great old wayfaring path, the bare human footprints have eyes in their soles, and each being is hitched to a set of lines... the traces of their literal tracks, coming and going; the lines they make through their own ecosystems, each being a thread in a great web; the lines they make with their hearts and their animal and plant dreams; the stories that unfold from all of these things.



Elklines, nettlelines, otterlines, ospreylines, hedge nettlelines. And also: the elk are calving, the osprey are here and hunting and maybe breeding, the stinging nettles are seeding, the hedgenettle is growing big, the buckeye spires are blooming, the river otters are pupping.

I imagine these "lines" unfurling before and after each being like narrow paths amidst the coastal scrub, amidst so many other stories, each utterly wild and its own. 

We can't forget all the lines made by the beings just under the skin-surface of the earth, like this magnificent, fresh, new moon entrance to an American badger dig. 

And then there are the histories of human places that leave their own pinwheel of storylines, like the old hay barn of Tomales Point's Pierce Point Ranch,  rising up through the fog and the drying fields of radish and cowparsnip like a ghost or a memory. In part of my imagination, it now holds within its peaked ceiling caverns the tallow-makers in last June's Epistle, Amelia and the Elk Tallow Moon.  But that is only one of many stories held in its lined beams, in its dust motes, beneath its foundation. I often wonder if it is lonely now, without people and cows to be its heart and its dreams, but maybe it prefers the fog, the ocean wind, the mice and foxes, the coyotes and barn swallows, the passing elk. Maybe that is more peaceful, as they leave their own tracklines through and under and over and around it.

It seems to me that animals and plants and stones and clouds always reside in that space of timeless creation that Aboriginal peoples have beautifully called Dreamtime. I wonder what it is like, Elktime. I wonder what it is like, walking the Elklines.

Elk create their own spidery footpaths through the land, as you can see here on the far hillside, while a small female herd rests among the cowparsnip, and is very difficult to discern from those big white umbels. They rest their bellies on the ground, and their growing calves, floating in that dreaming wombtime, can perhaps hear the songlines of the old earth of Point Reyes herself, moving north.

"Footfall as a way of seeing the landscape; touch as sight—these are notions to which I can hold." (Robert MacFarlane, The Old Ways, page 29). 

Here's to the footpaths of new friendship, of the new deepening summer season, of the old elk and all the beings their own elklines are hitched too, from oatgrass to vole to mountain lion to faraway hunter's star. 

The Elk Mamas in the Wild Iris on Beltane Morn

Today, I rose early, made a thermos of tea, and drove north to sit among the tule elk cows on Beltane morning. I'm not sure why this need washed over me so fully, but I wanted to be near them, wise ladies with their growing calves. 

I found the world out there warm and languid, the irises a deep and luscious purple, the elk cows napping amidst them, chewing their cud. Not a wind, and the ocean thundering.

I wanted to heap blessings on these elk mamas in the growing spring. If you look closely on the right hand side of the photo, you will see two fuzzy lighter ears sticking up from the grass-- a very young calf! One of the cows watched me very closely as I sat down among the irises. I wanted to cry at the beauty of their tawny bodies, their dark eyes, their grazing big-eared grace. I remembered something David Abram wrote in his Becoming Animal, about easing the nervousness of wild ones with singing, or humming-- you can communicate so much more to another creature that way. Your intentions, the state of your body, they can all be detected in the vibrations of your voice. So I whistled as I sat by the side of the road at 8:00 am with the elk ladies, and then I sang a song, and they watched me very intently, very alert, ears big and pointed, but they did not move, though I was but 15 feet away. It felt so good, so natural, so enlivening, though it is not something I do often—to sit and sing to elk.

When I turned, I found more behind me, on the other side of the road, peering at my strange whistling. What an odd creature I must have been to them! 

Eventually I tried to sneak out my thermos of tea and my cup, but they would have none of my fiddling around, silly human, and the one who had been watching me most closely led the way, off to quieter dreaming-ground.

I can only say that the grace of their gazes upon me felt ancient, and holy. It went right into my bones. It went right into my womb. It felt like medicine: the gaze of the sacred elk (or deer, reindeer, moose, camel)—sustenance, wild god, source of life—when it rests gently upon you, stirs up some kind of ancient sacramental bond. We do not need to hunt elk or deer here now, for our survival. But maybe we still need, for the survival of our wild souls, to shimmy close to them, to eye each other, to remember one another's faces. To exchange a song.

Just up the road, I climbed a hill near an old watertank by the historic structures of Pierce Point Ranch (now home to barn swallows). I had my tea, I looked out at Tomales Bay (a big blue ribbon-scar marking the San Andreas Fault), I lay in the sun and I wondered at the dreams of Point Reyes, this land moving and moving along the North American plate, never truly at rest.

Everything felt dreamy, bursting, like these little lupine pods, with potential magic; Beltane, day of honoring the growth of plants, the good health of herds, the fertility of land and people & love, day when the veils are thin and wild ones wander in, translucent and horned—this day was a warm wind upon the land, a heady hot silence and stillness across hills normally blustering with ocean winds or fog. Together, we dreamed a little while.

May the irises, the cow parsnips and wild radishes of your dreams grow beautifully toward the sun and flower with all of their essential richness. May your wild elk soul wander truly, finding just the right grasses and sweet tubers, the perfect places to lay, to chew the cud, to dream whatever the land dreams beneath its hooves. 

Here's a poem, which I read this morning out on the back steps, to honor all the little nest-builders flying about us as the spring grows. It seems to suit the day....

may my heart always be open to little

birds who are the secrets of living

whatever they sing is better than to know

and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry

and fearless and thirsty and supple

and even if it’s sunday may i be wrong

for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully

and love yourself so more than truly

there’s never been quite such a fool who could fail

pulling all the sky over him with one smile

- e.e. cummings