Charles Gullung

Tom Brown

I'm only half right. Brown, while blessed with deadpan comic timing and a Chautauqua preacher's instinct for the performative flourish, also exhibits a disquieting and ever-present bass note of dwindling patience. This weird duality is an acknowledged fact. Kevin has warned us that Brown is "part mother hen, part drill sergeant." For the uninitiated, it can make for a fairly bizarre ride, sometimes in the same sentence. He begins with a little flattery, praising our very presence.

"The terms 'family' and 'brother- and sisterhood' do not fall flippantly from our lips."

That's nice, we think, prematurely warmed to our cores.

He continues. "Even my parents—when they call, the calls are screened. I talk to them when I want to. But you," he indicates us, snapping back to sweetness, "you speak my language. When I say to one of you, 'Hey, I heard a tree call your name,' you'll know what I mean. You're more than eight-to-five. I'm an alien out there," he says, meaning society. "But not with you. You're the warriors."

Happily, the Standard Class is not boot camp. We are not hiked miles and miles, made to gather firewood for hours on end, or required to test our physical mettle in any appreciable way. It's more intellectually rigorous. The days are long, from six in the morning to past 11 at night, largely spent in lecture, with hands-on experience making up only about 20 percent of our time. During breaks—primarily the time set aside for meals—we practice our skills. The yard outside the barn buzzes with pre-industrial activity: people making cordage, lobbing their throwing sticks at a shooting gallery of plush-toy prey, fox-walking and stalking slowly across the grass, and trying to start fires with bowdrills.

This last one is our primary milestone. The squeak of turning spindles and the sweet smell of smoldering cedar, occasionally followed by the applause of whatever small group might be standing nearby, is a constant. I make three attempts before success—but when it comes! The thrill of sawing the drill back and forth, watching the accumulation of heated sawdust, now brown turning to black, the thin plume that rises, the gentle coaxing of the tiny coal into fragile, orange life, the parental swaddling of that ember into a downy tinder bundle, the ardent, almost amorous gentle blowing of air into same, the curling smoke, and the final, brilliant burst into flames in one's fingers—its atavistic high simply cannot be overstated.

Recapturing and maintaining a sense of wonder is at the very heart of the Tracker School philosophy, which is in part "to see the world through Grandfather's eyes." In other words, in a state of complete awareness, living in perfect harmony with nature, attuned to what is known in the Apache tradition as The Spirit That Moves Through All Things. This awareness will provide the key to tracking animals, both human and otherwise. "Grandfather didn't have two separate words for 'awareness' and 'tracking,'" Brown tells us one morning.

No doubt. But Brown's subsequent description of a brief, hundred-yard morning walk from his house to the barn is so strange and omniscient, he calls to mind Luther and Johnny Htoo, the chain-smoking 12-year-old identical twin leaders of the Karen people's insurgency movement in Burma, with their claims of invisibility and imperviousness to bullets: "There had been a fox. The hunting had not gone well. She emerged at 2:22 a.m. Her left ear twitches. Another step, now fear, and suddenly the feral cat appears. She's gone!" We won't be able to reach this level by week's end, but apparently, we are told frequently by both Brown and the instructors, we will be able to "track a mouse across a gravel driveway."