‘The word wood rat takes on a new meaning.’

The docents of Cold Creek introduced some potential recruits to the pastoral delights and some of the perils of docenting Saturday afternoon on a two-hour escape into a semi-wild area of the Santa Monica Mountains.

The docents are men and women who lead school children, community groups and families on tours of the Cold Creek Preserve and nearby Stunt Ranch, both deep in the mountains south of Calabasas.

The preserve is a quiet, nearly hidden canyon where a year-round stream runs. It is owned by the Mountains Restoration Trust, a nonprofit corporation that protects wild areas.

Stunt Ranch, owned by the State of California, is about 500 acres of tall grass, chaparral and oak trees. The docents have built a small nature center there and use the property with the state’s permission.

On walks, they point out the native flora and fauna and tell bits of the history of the region from the Chumash Indian days to the arrival of the Stunt brothers, four Englishmen who homesteaded the ranch in 1890.

Saturday’s tour was meant to interest people in signing up for a six-session docent training program that starts Sept. 28.

Half a dozen prospects parked their cars on a small turnout off Stunt Road and walked a third of a mile down a potholed driveway past the original Stunt ranch house, which still stands in reasonably good repair.

Several docents were there to show what docents do.

Nancy Helsley taught the initiates how to recreate the Chumash rock painting found on the sandstone walls of the Santa Monica Mountains and the Channel Islands. The Indians used natural dyes such as iron oxide and hematite to paint on the walls. Today, school children imitate the drawings by gluing red sand to sand paper. The idea is to tell a story in pictures.

One of the prospective docents, a middle-aged woman, drew a bear, then a fertility symbol, then a river, another bear and finally lots of little bears.

A little bit later, three young women gathered around docent Marsha Harris to learn an Indian game.

Harris held up six elderberry sticks that were split down the middle. She chanted an Indian chant and threw the sticks on the ground. The goal, she said, is to get all of the sticks to fall either flat-side up or round-side up.

“This is primarily a woman’s game,” she said. “I understand they played for days at a time. What do you think they would gamble for?”

“Who had to cook and clean,” one of the young women said.

“Husbands,” another guessed.

The right answer, Harris said, was beads and baskets.

Then all of the women chanted together as each one took a turn throwing the sticks down. Defying the odds, they all won.

“Let’s get a bus and head for Vegas,” one of them suggested.

Instead, they headed down the trail on a hike. An older couple walked back to their cars at that point, saying they were concerned about poison oak.

Helsley led the remaining party. She stopped frequently.

“Do you see any animal home?” she asked at one stop.

“Oh, what is that?” one of the young women asked, spotting a large pile of twigs beside the trail.

“When you talk to children, they think a lizard could make that,” Helsley said. “When you ask a few questions, it comes out that a lizard couldn’t possibly make something that big.”

“A fox?” someone guessed.

Actually, it was a wood rat’s home, Harris said. Specifically, a female wood rat.

“The female lives on the inside, alone, and the male lives outside servicing several females,” she said.

“Oh,” one of the young women scowled. “He deserves to live outside. The word wood rat takes on a new meaning.”

A few paces down the trail, Helsley stopped again and bent down, exclaiming, “You can actually see the bones in this one.”

“Oh, a good one,” said docent Paul Rathje, who was bringing up the rear where the hikers couldn’t see yet what Helsley had found. “We can tell by carefully examining the scat what they have been eating.”

The subject of the inquiry, in this case, was a coyote.

In the next half hour, the hikers poked into a scrub oak gall for wasp larvae, tasted protein-rich seeds shaken from a sage plant and examined the reproductive organs of a wild red fuchsia.

Along the way, Helsley found more scat. This time it suggested that a coyote had eaten a rabbit whole.

“Oh, pass that one around,” Rathje urged. She did.

“I always tell the kids it’s sterilized because of the ultraviolet rays,” she said.

Knowing how to talk to children can be a problem for a docent.

Docent Robyn Jonas said she is always hard-pressed to keep the children on the trail so they won’t get into the poison oak.

“Tell them there are bears,” Rathje suggested with a grin.

When the hikers returned to the nature center, the young women said they would have to think about becoming docents.

The older woman had made up her mind already.

“Absolutely,” she said. “I love kids.”

But that isn’t a requirement. Rathje said he relates better to adults.

To prove it, as the group walked back up the driveway to their cars, he offered another idea for keeping the kiddies out of the poison oak.

“I’d tell them, ‘When you see the blisters, children, just remember I told you so. Neeny, neeny, neeny,’ ” he said.