Charles Gullung

Tom Brown's school days: class in the barn.

Being in the woods, we are told, will become an experience akin to being locked in the Safeway overnight. "The main danger in full survival is gaining weight," Kevin avers. Nature is a bounteous paradise for those who play by the rules. That would be nature's rules, not the government's. Since much of the nation's remaining wilderness falls under the protective jurisdiction of the National Park Service—whose rangers don't look kindly on the wanton building of debris huts, and killing and eating the animals—much of what we learn turns out to be illegal in what remains of wild nature.

Case in point: animal skinning. Even picking up roadkill requires a permit. On Tuesday evening, for the lecture on skinning and brain-tanning, Ruth Ann comes in wearing a fringed buckskin dress that she made herself. She tells us the story of coming upon a roadkill buck while taking a much-needed break from writing college papers. My immediate reaction the entire week to anything Ruth Ann tells me is eagerness and a wish to try whatever it is she is proposing. When she tells us how to slit the animal down the middle, and then to cut around the anus and genitals, and then to pull them through from inside the body cavity, I think, regretfully, "I wish I had a dead animal's anus and genitals to cut around and pull through its body cavity."

I almost get my wish. She dons a pair of rubber gloves, leaves the barn, and comes back bearing a very dead road-killed groundhog. It has already been gutted and the fur pulled down from the hind legs to just below the rib cage. She hangs it on a nail by its Achilles tendons. Grabbing hold of the pelt, instructor Tom McElroy—the Kid—pulls, using his entire body weight. Groundhogs, as it turns out, have a great deal of connective tissue. There is a ripping, Velcro-like sound as the fur comes down. McElroy briefly loses his grip and the wet animal jerks on its nail, spraying students in the front row with droplets of groundhoggy fluid. The bat flutters around the barn throughout.

Next comes the tanning. Almost nothing is better at turning rawhide into supple leather than the lipids in an animal's own brain, worked into the skin like finger paint. A further, utterly beautiful economy of nature is the fact that every single animal has just enough brains to tan its own hide. Ruth Ann made her own wedding dress from unsmoked buckskin, as well as her husband's wedding shirt. She has brought them to the lecture to show us. I expect her to look rough-hewn, disinhibited, and slightly tacky—like Cher—but when she takes the dress out of the box and holds it up against herself, it is lovely: soft, ivory, and impeccably constructed. My crush is total.

But there will be time for infatuation tomorrow. It is getting late, and as happens every night, my ragestarts to set in around 10:45 when people refuse to stop asking questions. I'm desperate to get to bed, having concluded my approximately two and a half hours' worth of obsessively running to the can during breaks—prophylaxis against a groggy stumble through Tent City to the Porta-Johns in the middle of the freezing-cold night. A small cadre of exhausted fugitives has already disappeared, heading back to their tents slowly and silently, without flashlights. I join them.