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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Hunting And Gathering Participants Treasure The Simplicity, Self-Sufficiency And

In beards, buckskin and dreadlocks, they sat in a circle like a tribe of wannabe aborigines.

Pots hung from trees. A child played with the shaft of an arrow. One man wore a sun visor he’d woven from cattails.

“Tomorrow is Fire Day,” said the leader, a slim 26-year-old with long hair and a beard. “No commercial fires. You can borrow fire, you can steal fire, you can create fire from sticks.” In the back, a few cigarette smokers fidgeted at the thought.

More than 75 Canadians and Americans camped this week near Grangeville to practice survival skills dating back tens of thousands of years. They scraped fur from deer hides. They chipped stone arrowheads. They stitched clothing and gathered wild plants.

Most of the people are college-educated, many with advanced degrees. Some will stay the winter, hunting and foraging for wild food. Others will go back to their cats and neighbors and regular jobs.

“This is real. A lot of the stuff in suburbia is not real,” said Jane Lynn, a 60-year-old West Virginia mental health counselor. “There are artificial time constraints and artificial positions of power. Modern society has made a lot of unbalanced people.”

The “ancient skills gathering” was held by Earth Circle Wilderness Survival, led by Chris Morasky.

“I teach people how to disappear,” he said.

Morasky, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, lives in a canvas tepee on the 300-acre site. He hunts with a bow, gets his water from a spring and harvests wild roots, nettles and berries. He buys staples - rice, flour, potatoes - in Grangeville. He bathes in a castiron bathtub heated by fire.

Morasky straddles modern and primitive life. He uses tree lichen for toilet paper, but brushes his teeth with a store-bought toothbrush. He carries his handmade pipe in a bag made out of a whole tanned mink - but he lights the mild-tasting smoking mixture with a Bic lighter.

“I’m not a purist, I’m practical,” he said. The key, he said, lies in “a psychological sense of freedom,” in knowing that he could make a toothbrush or fire if he had to.

Morasky is appalled by the cycle of debt and work that drives most people’s lives. As he sees it, he’s traded some comforts for a simpler, more contemplative life. He said he spends two to four hours a day gathering food and firewood, or making clothing or hunting weapons.

“The way I see people living today doesn’t make a lot of sense to me,” he said. “You’ll graduate from high school or college, take out loans for a house and car, and be locked into having to work. I’ve chosen to have free time.”

Nearby, Canadian park ranger Kirk Shave, 39, was painstakingly carving a bow from a block of wood. A vegetarian for 15 years, Shave will use the bow for hunting deer or elk.

“I can use the sinews, the hide, everything,” he said. “I’d rather do that than buy a Saran-wrapped package.”

A few yards away, Thumbs Heath was teaching a student how to load llamas for backcountry travel.

Heath, 34, lives arguably the most primitive lifestyle of anyone at the gathering. He lives in the Gospel Hump Wilderness, spending weeks at a time clearing trails, solo. He sleeps under a tarpaulin, his bed a wool blanket and a bearskin.

“She (the bear) got in my cabin, so we had to draw a line,” chuckled Heath.

Sitting in the shade, Katherine Slaughter was stitching a blanket coat. The night before, she and others had blindfolded themselves to practice walking in the dark, relying on smell and touch to feel their way along.

Part of what drew her to the event, she said, was the tribal feeling of the group, with its shared knowledge and food.

“It’s a feeling of community,” she said. “A city of a million people is not a community. You feel really alone. Here, you don’t - everyone helps everyone else.”

Montanan Bob Perkins, 39, demonstrated atlatls - sticks used to hurl spearlike darts.

“Compared to these, bows are a recent development in projectile technology,” he said, pouring another can of Schmidt’s beer into his stein. Perkins was an engineering student who drifted into archaeology. He wrote a paper on the physics of atlatls, and now sells 500 to 1,000 of the weapons a year.

The weeklong school ends today. But some students, like 29-year-old West Virginian Brad Hash, will stay on.

“I took a break from grad school, and may not go back,” he said.

He’ll help the others build an earth lodge, gather firewood, hunt and preserve elk. In preparation, Hash paid his student loans and car payments a year in advance.

“I don’t like knowing you have to rely on utilities and the man who drives the truck to get groceries,” he said. “What if those things weren’t there any longer?”

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