Tom Brown Jr's Tracker School

One week in the woods with Children of the Earth

Making and keeping friends as an adult can be difficult; we’ve talked about it before. We’re all so busy, and more likely to focus on our differences and use them to keep us apart, than what we have in common.

I am still in touch with three of the people I made friends with at the Standard class of Tom Brown’s Tracker School.

Visiting the Pine Barrens and camping in the woods for a week might be a tough way to make friends in your fifties, but it worked. Maybe it was the back to school mindset. After you are shuttled in from the office—which sits in a strip mall between a brewery and a tattoo shop, near a once-seedy bar named Breakers, as it’s less than an hour to Long Beach Island—to the primitive camp, a half hour jounce down washed out sandy roads in the Forked River section of the Pinelands, you spend a lot of time attending lectures on survival skills and tracking.

The students came from all over the world, but by pure luck I sat in the back, beside three people from Pennsylvania, two from Philly and one from the Ohio border, and we talked during breaks, and practiced our woodcraft skills together. At meals, we huddled on logs before the fire, but we all spent a lot of time alone in our campsites or in the woods, and our phones were drained of power with weak or no signal, so we couldn’t scroll our lives away.

I don’t want to give away too much of their strategy, but Tom Brown, Jr and the Tracker School family have been running this class for 45 years, and their experience shows. They do not give you expectations, but they certainly know what the average person thinks they will be getting, and they play off of that and surprise you, in a good way, at every step. I mentioned in my First Thoughts post that it isn’t a macho tactical kind of class at all, and they pride themselves that anyone can work their way to Scout class (which can be taken after Standard, and then Advanced Tracking/Advanced Survival, and optional Philosophy) and I was introduced to Scouts who were older and bigger and of varying physical ability, so if this speaks to you, do not let your preconceptions keep you away.

That being said, they start you off with the most physically challenging of the skills, so you can work on it all week: using a bow drill to make fire. Here is Carmen Corradino (who runs Mount Victory Camp with her spouse Matt) demonstrating how to use one:

Carmen is an excellent teacher in a group of great ones. They are aware that teaching itself is a skill, and the instructors—who all have different styles—have learned to teach, and not just recite. Some, like Matt, are charismatic showmen who are born to speak to a crowd; others like Travis (who taught camouflage) and Bill (advanced tracking) were more soft-spoken and demonstrated as they went. Travis was sort of the Bob Ross of camo. At the right angle, his subject’s arm disappeared into the pine bark, but I’m not sure I captured it:

The camouflage was done with local pine mud, and charcoal and ash from our campfires. The structure of the classes is well thought-out, with plenty of breaks for hitting the rest rooms and stretching your legs, and longer breaks to practice your skills with instructors nearby to help. Meredith helped me a lot with the bow drill, and I finally created a coal and got my jute tinder to crackle and burn. Admittedly, I had a flint and steel on my Leatherman Signal multitool and I used that to start a campfire later, because my fireboard was completely drilled through by the time I learned the correct form.

We were given bows made with paracord, but the next day’s class was creating cordage from wild plants, and we were welcome to make our own drills using rootlets we foraged. My recommendation? Carry some paracord with you, preferably wrapped around a stout fixed blade knife for carving your spindle, fireboard, and handhold. I have a compass in a watertight container holding fluff for starting a fire. The bow drill accessories that I used are in the picture below, along with some cordage I made from rappia leaves, and sticks used for a figure-four deadfall trap.

Another example of how they fit a lot of knowledge into a week, and yet make it usable and not overwhelming, is how camouflage came after stalking, which came after learning to walk softly. This came with ample time to practice, and learning by doing. Kyle Moes of Wild Edge Nature School taught the stalking, walking, and exercises to strengthen one’s legs to make it easier. If you’re into pistol squats, you can become a great stalker. Crane pose will also be helpful here. The “fox walk” as it is called, because you walk in a direct register (stepping into the print you made with the front foot) is easy to learn but as they say, difficult to master, but you can quickly soften your step and learn to feel the ground before you, and stop stomping around in the woods scaring animals away.

According to the mud turtles at Timber Creek, I am still working on this. They are quite adept at sensing vibration through their shells. The walk ties into Awareness, because how much can you see, hear, feel, smell, experience if you city-stride, using tunnel vision? Not much. And this ties into tracking, which was the main reason I took the class. I see a lot of deer tracks, but I find them easy to follow. I wanted to learn more. This class gives you the foundation for learning to track, but nothing but “dirt time” can improve your skills. Tom Brown, Jr doesn’t keep secrets for later; I was very impressed that he used a powerful visual lesson to quickly show us how, as he says, you can “track mice across gravel.” I won’t divulge it here, and I’m sure it is in his books on tracking.

There is a fine layer of dust on everything, in every environment outside of a clean room in a pressure-controlled lab. Seeing it takes practice, the best angle—sometimes getting your ear to the ground—and getting the track between you and the best source of light. That can be the difference between merely seeing a “compression shape” of a print in the substrate, and seeing the details that can tell you everything about the subject who made the print. Finding tracks can be difficult in itself, and we were told that finding a good print is a blessing and you should make use of it. Identification is a matter of memorizing some shapes, toe numbers, and sizes; there are only so many animals in North America! Cats like to keep their claws sheathed, and have a round print and walk in a direct register.

That’s how they know this is a coyote print in the moss. It’s too big to be a fox; the only dog in camp had paws like a small bear. And it wasn’t in a direct register, as foxes stalk much like cats do, as they hunt similar prey. The right front paw above is a compression shape in the moss at the point of the popsicle stick; if you look to the left of the stick, the left front print left claw marks in the moss as it climbed into a short run that left the main trail. That’s how they began spotting these; there are “runs,” or re-used paths off the main trail, where we can see the undergrowth parted or eaten. And the best place to look for prints is at the entrances to these runs, in the dirt or sand or moss that hasn’t been trod upon by everyone using the main trail.

I’ve been avoiding stepping on moss, and checking it for prints, every day since I left the camp. I’ve found some shapes, but no good prints yet. But I did find the claw marks of what I think is a beaver or woodchuck on the banks of Timber Creek. There is plenty of beaver sign there, mainly gnawed trees; I think there’s only one in the area, because I haven’t seen any mounds where beavers mark their territory using the waxy castoreum from their anal glands. (These look like little mudpiles, usually at a run coming from a stream). The print doesn’t look like a beaver’s; it might be a woodchuck. It is more square than a rodent print, not egg-shaped like a dog print, and doesn’t show the fingers of a raccoon. Perhaps a skunk?

I would never have thought to walk down to the water and look for tracks until the class took the mystique out of tracking and taught the basics. It can sound like magic; the school has a very spiritual aspect, but the skill and experience are the focus. Pressure releases are the advanced level of tracking, and described as “how the earth feels about your walk.” It is still quite scientific and once Bill demonstrated some of the basics using a sandbox leveled for tracking, I understood. You can make the teachings as spiritual as you wish. I like to say I’m an atheist whose church is the Earth. I know what it means, and it’s nobody else’s business.

No matter how much I worship nature, I wanted to murder one specific bird at 3:00 AM:

We learned a lot about plant identification from Carmen. One rule was don’t eat anything unless you’re absolute sure of identification and have used at least two field guides to identify it. So I’ve ordered three. We ate some greenbriar salad that was delish and the Piney staple, “poor man’s pepper,” as well as the expected dandelion greens. And she related a story where two students defied their lessons and ate manzanilla fruit, which are also known as LITTLE APPLES OF DEATH. Seriously, that tree can burn your skin if you shelter beneath it in the rain. (It is everything that a tree is usually not. Read up on it, and shiver.)

Matt taught us to make fire with a hand drill, Carmen taught us to make a debris shelter, Chef Jorge taught us cooking with campfire, and Coty Brown, who also happens to be the banquet chef at the Chart House in Weehawken New Jersey, taught us how to clean, scale, season, and cook our own porgy fish that they procured for us. Apparently we missed out, this class—Coty and Jorge usually can source some wild foods from their restaurant suppliers, including insects and items less appealing to the western palate, but not this time around. But we ate quite well, once our fish were cooked.

I’m sort of obsessed with food, being Italian-American, but I won’t talk much about the camp food because it’s kind of a surprise. You’ll learn what Tracker Stew is, and to appreciate salt, and as Jorge taught, that “in every survival story they somehow land with a magic spice box.” Some spices can be sourced wild, depending on your location; I made tea out of fresh-picked pine needles for the Vitamin C, and because a warm drink lifts your spirits on a rainy day. But if you’re worried about eating, they provided for us quite well, and there was a vegan option for nearly every meal. The Primitive Camp is still a camp, and they had a hand-pumped well that provided spring water. I took some home in my water bottle and measured it with my ZeroWater tester. It had 14ppm of particulates, when local tap water has around 90. There’s a reason they protect the trillion gallons of water beneath the Pinelands.

We learned the basics of skinning, gutting, and brain-tanning hides from Carmen; River taught us how to make a throwing stick to hunt with, and we practiced. (It’s a lot different than throwing hatchets, lemme tell ya.) They manage to pack a lot into a week, and it ends up costing just a bit more per day than renting a campground in a national park.

And you make bonds. I had a good time chatting with a retired airman named Dave, from Wyoming, who competed in BJJ; we had chores to sign up for, and I took pot cleaning because I worked as a dishwasher for a company cafeteria and it’s still muscle memory. I chatted with Jude, a young woman from Australia, and we traded obscenities. (I learned that “fair enough” can be the Aussie version of “bless your heart.”)

I never went to summer camp, or was a Boy Scout. The closest I got was going to a few outings at what was then called “Indian Guides” and is now the YMCA Adventure Guide program. The ‘70s was big on appropriating Native American culture, from Iron Eyes Cody weeping at the trash-strewn riverbank and on. We made necklaces with leather medallions we decorated with our guide name. Mine was “Little Bird Fly.” I went cabin-camping with my father, caught a yellow perch, and we ate it cooked over the campfire, with a stick through its gills. I can still taste it. The porgy I cooked at Tracker School brought me back to that moment. I regret not becoming a Boy Scout, sometimes. But there’s still time to learn from nature. I’ve got a stack of plant books by Samuel Thayer and Linda Runyon, some of Tom Brown Jr’s sadly out of print tracking guides, and I finally identified the tree in my front yard as a tulip poplar.¹

I reached out to three of the people I met at class—Alexandra, Jeff, and Martha—who are nearby and similar in age, and we’ve got vague plans for dirt time in Pennsylvania or the Pine Barrens. We’ll see if we stay in touch or not, but whether we become friends or drift apart, Tracker School will not be forgotten. For me it’s the beginning of a journey I started when I was six, with that perch.

You can learn more about Tom Brown Jr’s Tracker School and its programs at their website.

1. I thought it was some kind of maple. But I think that about most trees that aren’t birch, pine, sycamore, or oaks.