Charles Gullung

Not a pampering school: The conscientious author took 150 pages of notes during lectures.

My guess is no. To that end, we are taken out to a meadow overgrown with heavy grasses, garlic mustard, and wild burdock, a place known as Vole City for its large population of small rodents. We each lie down and examine an area no larger than a square foot, digging down, exploring.

My classmates look very idyllic and French Impressionist, scattered about here and there, supine in the sunlight, lost in contemplative investigation. Myself, I sit up, terrified at the prospect of finding anything, especially a vole. The instructorshows me how to root around just underneath the grass to find their ruts. I use a stick to gingerly push aside the stalks and turn over the debris, picking out the dull sheen of a slug here, the progress of a tiny worm there. Thankfully, no voles. Warming to my task, I suddenly spy—dark, wet, and gray against the fresh green of a blade of grass—the unmistakable articulation of amphibian digits, a hand span no bigger than this semicolon; it is connected to a tiny amphibian arm, connected to a tapered amphibian head the size of a peppercorn. The gleaming, dead eye catches the sunlight. My heart in my mouth, I call the instructor back over and show him. He picks up the tiny sprig with the half-eaten salamander still perched on it and holds it four inches from his mouth, enumerating the various classifications of the creature: the coloring, the reticulations, the patterns, the species. The instructor tries, God bless him, to draw me into a Socratic dialogue, asking me questions about what I've observed. He points to the chewed-out underside of the demi-lizard. "What kind of teeth marks made those cuts? Are the edges scalloped? Look at the gnaw marks. That's a great find," he concludes, patting me on the back.

I show my salamander to those working near me in the field, and they show me what they've uncovered. I feign interest in one woman's small mound of unidentifiable animal scat. But we both know the truth: My corpse makes her find look like, well, a pile of shit. For a brief moment, I am Big Man in Vole City.

The instructor's matter-of-fact treatment of the dead salamander, the complete lack of any "poor little guy" moral component to its demise, speaks to what makes the Tracker philosophy unique. There is none of that falsely benign conception of nature as friendly, inherently good, tame, and prettified. Aldous Huxley, in his essay "Wordsworth in the Tropics," assails what he calls the Anglicanization of nature, the cozy revisionism of a force that is intrinsically alien and inhospitable: "It is fear of the labyrinthine flux and complexity of phenomena...fear of the complex reality driving [us] to invent a simpler, more manageable, and, therefore, consoling fiction."

At Tom Brown's Tracker School, there is a clear-eyed acknowledgment that things eat and get eaten. Ruth Ann, in telling us of the year she lived in the Pine Barrens in a house she made entirely by hand with cedar walls and a debris roof, gets straight to the point. "Whatever came into my house, I ate," she says. "Mice? We just threw 'em in the fire, burned the hair off, and ate them whole. They just taste like meat, and there's something to be said for that added crunch."

She's not being heartless; in fact, she's the very opposite. For every skill we are taught, whether it's harvesting plants, using our bowdrills, skinning an animal, or gathering forest debris, the first step in our instruction is always a moment of thanksgiving for the trees, the spirit of fire, the groundhog, the water. It's a strange adjustment to have to make, at first. I am not proud to admit that there was a moment at 5:30 a.m. on the fourth day of class when, serving on cook crew, I stood bleary-eyed with exhaustion—having only gotten to bed some five hours earlier because of a late-night lecture on wild edibles—and seriously considered killing the guy who led us in a 15-minute thanksgiving that included complimenting the rising sun for being "just the perfect distance away from us."There are worse things than acknowledging a continuum and connection between all things and staying mindful and grateful of our place therein, but it can be a hard concept to swallow before the coffee hits the system.

Even wide awake there are moments of fuzzy logic in this theory of interconnectivity. Kevin, our elder statesman, explains that the Apache tradition of being thankful to the prey will also result in a willing acquiescence on the part of the hunted. "Something that gives its life for your benefit does so with gladness, if you are humble," he intones. Isn't it pretty to think so. Ascribing complicit suicidal motives to the rabbit who licks the peanut butter from a deadfall bait stick—no matter how self-effacingly daubed on—seems a tad Wordsworthian to me.

But such doubts become ever fewer as the week progresses. From about Thursday on, the home stretch of the course, spirits are high. Most of us have gotten fire, and in a brilliant bit of Pavlovian pedagogy, the food improved markedly after the outdoor cooking demonstration. Despite the staff's urging us not to take what we are told at face value, to go home and prove them right or prove them wrong, we're all pretty jazzed and itching to head out into nature. That said, among the people I talk to there is also a growing skepticism about Brown himself. It has nothing to do with his credibility, the veracity of his life story, or even the purity of purpose of the Tracker School. Unfortunately, it's personal: Brown's drill sergeant persona thoroughly throttles his mother hen. As pleasant as he may be just after breakfast—and he frequently is sunny, sprightly, and very funny—if he addresses us after sunset, there is a darkness in him and a potential for ire that is frankly terrifying.

In one evening lecture, he talks about the necessity for us to "take bigger pictures," to see more of the world through our wide-angle vision, to sense things before actually seeing them. "Instead of going click, click, click," he minces, "go CLICK! CLICK! CLICK!" he suddenly roars. A few people actually flinch. Later on, in a moment meant to chide us for the persistence of our citified tunnel vision, he tells us that he has been observing us unseen from a perch on top of the tool shed. As we make our way to bed, we watch our backs, scanning our surroundings for heretofore unnoticed surveillance. One young man asks the group softly, "You guys ever see Apocalypse Now?"