Introduction

My life had changed radically after a divorce and a re-location from Montana to New Mexico. Again I found myself in breathtakingly beautiful mountains, the Sangre de Cristos.

The program was different this time. Instead of several months of preparation followed by several weeks of ‘Stone Age project’ I made a three month program that had a one week adventure at the end of each month gradually giving up more and more of our modern gear. By the final trip my students were virtually in Stone Age mode minus all the buckskin clothes that take so long to manufacture.

We bought a buffalo again and it just so happened to be 4th of July weekend.  We were butchering it out by the creek near a trailhead.

Imagine a warm sunny day, a huge bloody carcass with a cloud of flies hovering above six dirty people, blood smeared and almost naked cutting strips for jerky and popping an occasional morsel of raw flesh into our mouths. A holiday hiker wanders up and taking in the scene asks uncertainly if we know where the trailhead is.

We point him in the right direction and half an hour later the Fish and wildlife warden shows up saying that there had been a report of cattle rustling. He laughed and went away when we showed him the buffalo skull!

I didn’t write a journal that year. I remember the love that poured forth for those mountains and how one could harvest the desert and then walk into an entirely different bioregion in just one day and harvest in the high country.

Excerpt - Return: A New Look at Ancient an unpublished manuscript by Lynx Vilden