Early Fall

A litany of firsts. Trees giving it up for the year, the poplars already going a sickly yellow; immature acorns falling, leaves fluttering in windfall on Mackletree. My driveway puddles are completely dry for the first time in 11 years and the drying mud is a fossil record of tracks. There are springs, here and there, in the State Forest, mostly in the bottoms; all the wildlife will have to move down to them. I remember reading about Ishi, the last 'wild' Indian in North America. He knew all the trails the animals would use, moving, at a time like this. 1913, same year as the Armory Show, his adoptive family, UCLA?, wanted to go camping with him, see how he had lived in the wild. The foothills all along the west coast are an easy area to forage and the hundred-plus tribes that lived there had no reason to fight because life was easy. Ishi also ate meat, he trapped and snared, and occasional he'd get a deer, he had bow and arrow; but his method of hunting deer didn't involve them. He would sense the deer needed to move off the ridges and would be using those trails, and there were certain trees that overhung them. He'd de-scent himself, rolling in mud, then perch on a branch over the trail, sometimes stay there for 24 hours (a lot of protein, and worth the wait) simply drop on them and cut their throat. He used his bow and arrows mostly for ducks. Found that if they were feeding, he could get within twenty-five feet, which pretty much guaranteed dinner, so he'd spread something for them to feed on. Is that the Rolling Stones, "You can feed on me. Maybe it was 'bleed'. I find almost everyone else hard to understand. May just be a product of aging.