Notes from the Wild Folk: Coyote, Her Fur, and the Flowers of the Dunes

Out at Abbott's Lagoon, where the summer fogs hang thick and a family of river otters splashes through the fresh blue water, there is a narrow path at the base of a great sand dune, flanked on the other side by cattails and lagoon, where not so long ago a bobcat patrolled up and down on the regular, presumably from a resting place in the willows, catching marsh birds, the mice who run the dunes, the rabbits out in the scrub.

Recently, I heard tell from other trackers that there seemed to have been a change of guard—the bobcat seemed to have gone elsewhere. Yesterday, a tracking friend and I went rambling along the lagoon edge and through the dunes. We followed the trail where once the bobcat(s) walked. The tracks in the sand were loose and indistinct, and we could not determine whether they were bobcat or coyote. The tiny footprints of deer mice skittered everywhere. 

Then, we began to find small clumps of fur. 

Above is the largest clump we found. All of them contained some combination of coarse, sturdy, long guard hairs banded black, white, golden or rust, and a rough, wavier undercoat. Guard hairs are generally the hairs that lend an animal's coat its characteristic color, while also wicking away moisture and retaining body heat.

Whoever was scratching herself, snagging on bushes, or shedding, she left an excellent trail! I've never tracked by bits of fur before, but when we crawled into a thicket of willows that comprised the entrance to some sort of resting place, or den, or hideaway, we found several more matching guard hairs caught on the bark or in the humus below our hands and knees.



Guardian oak (or poison oak) characteristically guarded the thicket about seven feet in, so we didn't make it very far, but the stiff guard hairs in our fingers were like little treasures, with the story of a recent creature's passage in them.

We didn't want to linger long, because we felt we were trespassing on someone's secret and guarded front doorstep. (And what a doorstep! You can see the willows below to the left, and the beginning of the lagoon to the far right.)

While it is always a good idea to keep the mind and heart full of questions and myriad possibilities when tracking, and while I am no expert in the identification of small scraps of fur, we were very much reminded of the pelage of the coyote as we examined the hairs, and felt their coarseness. That banded black-cream-rust color very much matches the general coloration of these clever, quick beings. 

Coyote portrait, by Christopher Bruno

Out on the great sand-dune above the willow-den, where the coyotes sidetrot, the bobcats prowl, the deer wander, the deer mice skitter, the raccoons amble, all leaving the stories of their passage in lettered trails, we sat for a time amidst this netted skein of wild lives. At our feet, the dune strawberries made their own constellated nets, somehow surviving on sand, in salty air.

Tiny dune primroses (a fraction of the size (probably 1/10th!) of the evening primroses so similar in appearance that are flourishing in the garden) reached out through the sand and bloomed their bright primrose yellow. They must be drinking the salty fog alone, for there is no other water here at this time of year. 

Together, it seems to me that the dune strawberries and dune primroses must know the secret stories and lives of the animals who pass through the sand at dusk and dawn and the middle of the night; they probably know if it is a coyote or a bobcat who, for a little while, rules over the willow patch with its magnificent front porch. 

And we wondered, all along—was there a coyote watching us from just beyond, in the thick scrub of the hills, bemused that we would crawl on all fours into her hideaway, and take a few of her hairs like pieces of an old enchantment?

For Coyote is a wise old Creator, and knows well the ways of humans...

There is an old story says the world was made by Coyote, who got stranded at the top of Mt. Diablo when the ocean waters were high and right up around its craggy neck. He threw down mats of tule. These became land. He blew feathers from his paws, different kinds, and these became people. His wife, little Frog Woman, helped him, swimming. The world, born right out of Mt. Diablo, a womb of schist and granite, silica, sandstone and coal. The world, held up in the paws of Coyote, nudged gently by Frog.

There is an old story says once there was no death in the world, but Coyote brought it, saying yes you will hate me for this, but how else will there be renewal? How else can we all fit?

There is an old story says Coyote lost his daughter, and went to the Land of the Dead to bring her home again, alive, but in the last moment, carrying her up a mountain, he slipped, he looked back at her, he lost her truly, forever. Then, he cursed the laws he had made, but it was too late to change them, and so he howled long, knowing now the sorrow of humans.

- excerpt from my The Seven Dwarves of Mt. Diablo

The Rabbit that Sat, the Coyotes that Courted, the Deer that Danced

On the early dunes of Limantour, in this window of winter warmth we have been enjoying just around the corner from Imbolc, that old seasonal celebration of the return of lactation in ewes, the stirring of buds and sap, the animals are out. I can imagine them in the waning moonlight and early dawn, busy. Here are a few traces...

The place where a rabbit-- I believe a black-tailed jackrabbit, judging by the size of this mark, though I may be mistaken— paused, lowered her haunches perhaps to sniff the air, before bounding off into the pale green dune grass.

 The tiny leaping feet of a deermouse, skittering in wild veering highways up and down the dunes.

The grasses and the hills soft with early light, like the body of some hare, some mouse, some coyote, some rumbling tender beast. 

A deer leapt in wild, sand-spraying curved lines up and down the beach, eventually circling back on his own trail. It was quite a sight-- unlike anything I've ever seen, and no sign of anyone chasing him. For the life of me, it looked like he was dancing in the moonlight, bounding for the joy of his legs. Is this just my fancy? Someone will correct me and say that animals never waste energy in this way... Perhaps not, but perhaps they become full of moon-joy too.

Two coyotes trotted side by side in a courtship dance, their prints almost perfectly in sync, sometimes so close their bodies must have been touching. Here and there, you could see a mid-air switch of paws, like they were kicking up their heels. It was the sweetest spiral-dance I've ever seen, I could almost smell and hear them under the moon, in the salt air, the sea crashing, their paws and noses all focused in on each other. I left a little braid of dune grass in a circle around their four paws, to honor their love this winter season.

Their trail went on for miles down the beach, like perfect runes of coyote-devotion. What a story. I wonder where they are now. 

And the little shore birds, snowy plovers maybe, made their own constellations by a salty pool. A whole Milky Way of them.

Meanwhile, the dune grass moved in the wind like a thick pelt, the willows and dogwoods still bare and red-orange as fox-fur, the animals left their footprint stories on the skin of the beach, and bending down to see and touch them was like some sort of devotion. 

Turtles on the Lake in the Morning

This familiar path, down the hill a little ways from our home, smells of coast live oak leaves, dust, bay laurel, that spice almost like cinnamon in the dry mild air. I am always amazed how quickly the mind quiets once I'm off the paved road where cars pass and houses line the way.

A thistle-head, going to seed. Still some strands of purple flower hanging on, silken and shining. The goldfinches wait to build their nests until the thistles look like this, so they can use all that down for bedding. Wise creatures.

It was still early enough that human shoes hadn't yet covered up the deer prints from the night. Like two hearts, pressed into the dust, quite small. At dawn, perhaps, a young doe made her way slowly up this same path, foraging calmly. I like to put my fingers in the tracks, imagine the creature they belong to, say hello. When you look hard and long at the shapes made by human shoes, they start to look like strange arcane patterns, carved like spells into the dirt, not anything so mundane as the soles of sneakers.

Down below the oak and bay laurel forest, the thickets begin. The hedgerows, though these were never planted by humans. A path was just carved right through the brambles and vines. Currants, blackberries, thimbleberries, elderberries. To the right, the willow bushes begin, a great labyrinth of warrens and tangles, home to great numbers of woodrats, gray foxes, badgers, weasels, brush rabbits and no doubt a bobcat or two, not to mention songbirds. I am enchanted by it, by the mystery of all the tunnels and passageways.

Who lives in there? Many, many beings, some of them watching me at this moment no doubt.

I passed an old antler rub from last autumn or before. Stags seem to enjoy rubbing their antlers on willow in particular during the rut. Maybe it has antiseptic or soothing properties when absorbed through antler-velvet!

Two turtles sat quietly in the sun on Jewel Lake. The ripples on the surface reflected against the alder leaves and branches. They seemed to be pulsing, like you could see the tree-blood moving through.

So many tunnels and caverns and dens. I love the feeling of walking upon the narrow ribbon of the path that cuts between, knowing that all around me a wild maze of homes tangles and shivers with small particular lives.

Like this fellow, who left wet footprints all along a small wooden walkway by the stream. A striped skunk I think, emerging from the willows after having a drink.

It is good for the mind and for the soul, to leave the human-full streets a while, in the morning, before your thoughts have taken over, and remember all the other lives that happen around you every day— skunk, spotted towhee, doe, big old oak.

Golden Hills Like the Bodies of Mountain Lions

This weekend I went looking for the signs of cougars and bobcats in the summer-dry hills of Mount Tamalpais, that Sleeping Lady coastal mountain of sea fogs, redwood forests and ancient Douglas firs, where I found my own feet as a teenager and fell in love too, deeply, kissing under the branches of manzanitas that looked like skin and drooped with red berries. With fellow animal tracking enthusiasts, in our Catscapes class, we mapped a steep golden gulch with our explorations of deer trails, vole tunnels, scats, the places forest ended and meadow began. We came back and told our stories and drew them on a map, and the whole place came alive. Here a bobcat pooped, and there, a badger dug a den, and there I heard a wild scratching noise, up in the rocks under the Douglas firs, and there, in the forest humus, was a wild rose. The land and its parts were the subjects and characters of stories, not objects, not a stage set backdrop or a set field upon which human dramas occurred. It is a special place, where mountain lions still hunt down deer and crunch their bones and leave that story in the fir needles, keeping those hoofed families just plentiful enough so the plants under their teeth and the earth under their feet can thrive. Keeping us humble, when we walk alone in the golden hills so perfectly like their bodies, tawny and graceful, and hear a sudden noise.

A jackrabbit ate calmly from the path. She twitched her ears at us and didn't run away. Her body was the color of this golden land, dancing with fog.

In the evening, as the sun begins to set, this dry gold grass smells like dry earth and the tenderness of summer dusk.

These golden hills face the Pacific ocean, and the fog rolls against them, full of salt and strange shapes. Sometimes it is a thick veil, sometimes it sweeps in and clears. Sometimes it rushes up fast like a herd of elk. Just beyond, to the east, the forests begin. The shape of the land here is otherworldly, folded sharp by the hands of the San Andreas Fault below, smoothed out by the sea winds that stroke like a sculptor. I feel like I'm moving along the body of a great creature, in these ocean-facing hills, through veins, against bones and hips. The world a great body, paw and belly and tooth, with golden flanks. In the spring, the grass is so green it aches to look at. You want to roll in it, become a deer and feast.

Bay Area Puma Project photo. She's standing on the branch of a manzanita tree, bark like skin. Up close, her fur looks like the hills above. 

The mountain lion has many names in the languages of California Indian peoples: Tukumumuuntsi in Chemehuevi. Betá´muL in Salinian. Yamót in Pomo. In Chemehuevi stories (a tribe down south, along the Colorado River), Mountain Lion was one of the first four beings made by Ocean Woman to set the way of things for the creatures who were to come next. In Pomo myth (a tribe just north of Mount Tamalpais), Mountain Lion was born from the feathers of a falcon. He was alternately the perfect hunter, a demanding father, the chief of the animals, constantly hungry and seeking food. [See News from Native California, volume 4, Number 3, for more information]

This is the gulch we mapped. Signs of bobcats and a mountain lion moving through those trees to the right, leaving behind scats. I always try to say thank you, and sorry, for tromping around their territory, when we have already taken so much of it away, when wild places like this are a treasure, a fog-wrapped haven.

Our teachers thought this was from a mountain lion. Placed right in the center of a well worn, probably ancestral, deer run, through the Douglas fir and bay tree forest. It is longer than it seems from this photo-- about 10 to 12 inches, dense with hair and large bone fragments. I know it seems unappetizing, maybe disgusting, to examine another animal's shit on the ground. But I'm reminded of Gary Snyder's poem, "Song of the Taste," which begins like this:

"Eating the living germs of grasses
Eating the ova of large birds

the fleshy sweetness packed
around the sperm of swaying trees

The muscles of the flanks and thighs of
soft-voiced cows
the bounce in the lamb's leap
the swish in the ox's tail."

-From Regarding Wave (New Directions, 1970)

I'm also reminded of a beautiful passage in Catherynne M. Valente's magical novella, Yume No Hon: The Book of Dreams, from the section titled "River Otters Sacrifice Fish."

Metamorphosis. It is a long line of bellies, chained together flesh-wise, circling each other in a blood-black smear. The sparrows pick cold red berries from the mud, the hawks pluck the sparrows from the sky. The fish swallow grasshoppers, the otters gulp down fish. The world eats and eats and eats, and stomach to stomach it embraces itself. Hawk is Berry, Otter is Grasshopper, Woman is Fish and Sparrow. (Page 169 of Myths of Origin).

The world is a great stomach. To consume, to absorb, to digest, to excrete, to decay, this is the cycle of things, the great alchemy of life. We eat the ripeness of the world, then turn it into mulch to make more things ripe (though as humans we've gone a bit astray in this regard...). In any case, what a single mountain lion eats for breakfast, where it leaves the remains, how crunched the bones, how dark, how much fur, these are stories, this is the world embracing itself, stomach to stomach. It's beautiful, when you think about it.

This one may be mountain lion too, though slightly smaller, or a large bobcat. There were several pieces this size.

A badger den, far away on a hillside so steep it was almost vertical. I wonder what it's like, inside that sheer gold hill, riddled with mole holes and vole runes, badger dens and gopher mazes. A labyrinth of rodent homes, ancient tillers of the soil, their ancestral dens and thoroughfares, dark as night, with chips of mica for stars.

The long path home, on the Bolinas-Fairfax road, driving into the summer fog. The air smelled of sea and pine and home.

The Bobcat Tree

The bobcat wrote on the trunk of the alder tree as she climbed, a quick exuberant shimmy up and down, claws in soft bark, at dusk. Getting out that almost boundless red energy cats sometimes fill up with. The neater scratch-marks, four alongside each other, are from her back feet pushing her up the tree. The longer slashes, almost desperate, are her front claws, hugging the tree, pulling her upward as she danced along that slightly curved trunk, just the right size to get her arms around. Then she scooted down again, backwards, and carried along her way.

Cats like to play, said one of my tracking teachers (of the Marin Tracking Club). They have quick metabolisms. Sometimes they just need to let off steam at the end or beginning of the day. In the crepuscular hours.

 I put my hands in the places she had etched. They looked a little bit like Ogham letters, those ancient runic marks used to write out the Old Irish alphabet, often on small sticks, in wood. The letters are shaped like branches, but also like a cat’s paw, evenly scraping bark. Maybe early inspiration for the shapes of letters, and the medium for writing them on, grew from the sight of wildcat scrapes and climbs up trees. Their marks of passage, play and hiding.

I put my fingers in the grooves. The alder was starting to heal up the edges, callous them over with silvery bark. I tried to imagine where the bobcat was now, like a teacher told me to do— put your hand in the track, feel it with your fingers, read it with your fingers. Imagine yourself into that mind. Humans have been doing this for hundreds of millions of years. It feels like magic, to let your mind fold and expand in this way.
Maybe she went along her way and fished a chestnut-coated gopher out of his hole. Maybe she cleaned the points of her tapered ears. Maybe listened for the great-horned owl, sniffed at the messy marks left by people, crept through the nettles, keeping to the shadows, staying out of the moonlight, listening for voles in their tunnels of grass. 

Nearby lush patch of nettles. Maybe she hid under these, assuming cats don't get stung like people do.

Adjacent meadow, Bear Valley, full of vole runs. 

Deer-Mouse Tracks

These are the paw-prints of a bounding deer-mouse on the dunes at Kehoe Beach, in the Point Reyes National Seashore. Each print a rune, a story of a life in sand, the darting bounds between clumps of sea-heather and dune grass. The shadows of passing ravens and hawks, the soft prowling of bobcats. I love to remember that each set of tracks, like this specific set, belongs to one individual, a single, unique deermouse, maybe a female heavy with babies in this springtime season, maybe a lone young male with a blind blue eye. This is not a general, anonymous "mouse." These are someone's footprints in the sand, like yours or mine. What was she seeking? Her leaps look like gentle letters, ink marks. Words, come alive, become embodied.

A coyote encounters the tracks of raccoon, which passed earlier in the morning, as the tide went out. He paused, putting weight in his front paws, then carried on through the mist and crash of waves in a regular side trot, maybe nosing for crabs in the tideline, maybe chasing after a pretty female coyote as the spring sun rose. His prints, the signs he etched to tell his story. 

Coyote again, this time at McClure's Beach, the sand a little darker. Those are my footprints alongside, following, wanting to read the runes in the sand, wishing I knew who she was, touching that dip where the metacarpal pads press their bulk into the ground, sending my warm thoughts, wherever she is now. 

Making Indigo Dye Out of Words

Welcome to The Indigo Vat, where words and tales and dreams are fermented and transformed into sturdy creations that are green as they emerge and turn blue as they hit the air. 

A colorfast blue dye made from plant matter has always been very rare and therefore very precious. Indigo cakes, wrapped up in string and cloth, a condensed and processed form of the plant genus indigofera were traded along the Silk Road. There’s a reason blue was considered royal, for pharaohs, for kings.

The most mysterious and unfathomable things in the world to us are blue: the sea and the sky. These are places of magic, of power, or of something terrifying: the home of Rilke’s Angels, perched between beauty and terror.

The process of making and writing a story, a poem, a novel, an essay, is like dyeing with indigo. You start with a seed.  You tend it like your own blood. You harvest leaves in the heat of summer. You ferment them in a big vat, mixed up with such things as wheat bran, madder root and wood ash. The lid is on, so nothing else can get in or out. The magic of yeast takes over. The whole mass bubbles and rots and melds, letting the blue pigment out. This is the only way to let out the blue. It starts to stink. That’s when you open it up, stir in your skeins of yarn, your silks, your old white pillowcases. You leave them in as long as you want, letting them get bluer and bluer. Then you lift them out with a stick. When they hit the air, they are green. Then the oxygen begins to act. Breathe. The green turns to blue in front of your eyes. Blue for magic, for the deep mystery of the world, for the source of all creation, for stories told in the dark of night. For our blood, before it hits air.

Stories ferment, oxidize and come alive like this.

I’m growing nine starts from seed of polygonum tinctorium, Japanese Indigo. They began by the heater, then moved to the window, and finally outside, where the sun filled them up and they grew sturdy stems and big leaves. They are still young, only in one-gallon pots. I tend them like babies. The first tiny seedling popped its head above the soil on my birthday. I was taken by surprise at the depth of my excitement. It felt like a holy experience. I’d never tended seeds so closely, with such purpose. The sudden miracle of life itself was upon me, how a seed might become a perfect green leaf and a neck pushing up through dirt, completely and utterly new. The only constant on earth is creation.

So, this is a long way of saying that here on The Indigo Vat I will post my newly “dyed“ stories, as it were, for others to read. They need air to turn from green to blue. Stories and poems need eyes and hearts to consume them before they come alive, before they turn rich and blue as indigo robes.

You may also find here, from time to time, forays into the literal fiber arts— my adventures with natural dyeing, felting and spinning. I believe in a deep and creative reclamation of these traditionally female crafts. So, expect both literal and figurative yarns being spun, cloth woven and dyed with local materials.

Finally, I believe that all writing is rooted in place, like indigo roots in soil. Like the indigo plants growing in my Berkeley backyard, I am not native to this land, but it is my home, and has been since I was born (save a few years on the east coast for college). I think that as writers, as creators, we have a duty to the land we live on, its wild creatures, its redwoods, oak trees, thistles. We have a duty to their stories and languages as well as our own—after all, our earliest letters were based up the tracks made by animals in sand and snow.

These are the Indigo-Seedlings, my magical and mysterious charges. I'll show you more photos as they grow and are processed into dye.