Charles Gullung

Creating heat with a bow drill.

By the time I meet him, though, my disenchantment has become fairly entrenched. It doesn't help that Kevin escorts me into the modest house that Brown shares with his second wife, Debbie, 33, and their two young children—and doesn't leave, joining Tom McElroy, who is sitting in a chair, weaving a jute bag on a small circular loom. They crack jokes, weigh in with opinions, engage in quiet conversations with one another; the phone rings; they pour themselves coffee. Pretty soon I realize I've come to the teacher's lounge.

Or is it a convocation of disciples? I ask Brown about the cult of personality that seems to be part of the Standard Class.

"Oh, I try to get rid of that real quick," he says. "I tell people right off, 'Don't thank me, thank Grandfather.' I'm a poor example. I am nobody's guru." Brown talks about how he, Kevin, Ruth Ann, and the crew have to make sure to keep "Tracker groupies"—those over-enthusiastic few who try to volunteer just a little too often—at a healthy distance. "Boy, this would be very easy to turn into a cult, big-time," he admits, "and I just will not allow it to happen. That's the last thing I want to happen."

Noted. And yet, in almost every lecture, there is the requisite prefatory story from Brown's life: "When Tom was 12 years old, Grandfather told him, 'This is the year you will provide me with meat...'" The accrual of personal detail forms a gospel of sorts, and anecdotes are delivered in a hortatory, liturgical style. Granted, the stories are told to show the wisdom of Stalking Wolf, not Tom Brown, but the reflected glory of playing Boswell to Grandfather's Johnson (a term straight out of a traveling salesman joke) clearly has its attractions.

Attractions not callously exploited, it seems. There is no line of Tom Brown sportswear, no exhortation from Brown that I buy anything while I am there, that I "Think Different." At a very manageable 600 bucks for a week of food and instruction, the Tracker School is not the enterprise of the career opportunist. In person, Brown is not only not power-mad, but he comes across as almost as nice as one of his instructors.

I leave the house fairly won over. I return to Tent City and walk out into the field to gaze at the sun, now lowering in the late afternoon sky. I find one of my classmates standing in the grass in the honeyed light, enjoying a water bottle full of herbal tea. We stand there amiably and peacefully, mutually imbued with the soy milk of human kindness. He holds out the bottle of amber liquid, offering it to me, and says, "Rum?"