‘Everything I’ve showed you today is illegal’

Half a dozen young couples, several children, a nun and the maven of a Woodland Hills Cub Scout troop went on a hike into the mountains Tuesday night to learn the ancient and now forbidden ways of survival.

Survival, as once practiced by Chumash Indians in the San Fernando Valley, involves hunting and foraging for food and tools. Those activities are prohibited in the chain of state and federal parks covering thousands of acres in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Even so, there are those who want to preserve that knowledge as a form of living anthropology.

Among them is Dennis Hamm, a young and squarely built ranger with the National Park Service. Hamm, originally from Philadelphia, is assigned to semi-urban duty in the Rancho Sierra Vista / Satwiwa section of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

Like all rangers, he wears the smart gray and green uniform and Smokey the Bear hat of the National Park Service. He leads interpretive hikes along Satwiwa Loop Trail south of Newbury Park. The trail takes in a willow and bull-rush pond, a stream and wooded area and, finally, Boney Mountain, the characteristic rock formation that the Chumash called Satwiwa.

On the hikes, Hamm points out area wildlife, which includes quail, rabbits, deer and coyotes. From time to time, he takes a group on a hike and lecture devoted to his specialty--the Indians’ methods of tracking and killing game. Before coming to California, Hamm said, he trained with an Apache medicine man and scout at the Tom Brown Wilderness Survival School in New Jersey.

Tuesday’s expedition left shortly before dusk from the parking lot just off Potrero Road. Hamm led the group to a small pond where they found a small bow and some pieces of wood. It was the tool Indians used in starting fires. By looping the bowstring around a stick and pulling back and forth, Hamm started a fire in a few seconds.

The group soon found more implements scattered near the trail--several bows, arrows and spears. Hamm had made each one by hand, tying feathers onto the arrow shanks and chipping stone into arrowheads, just as the Indians had done.

Hamm had intended to shoot arrows at a bail of hay beside the trail, but he decided it was too dark.

He demonstrated a mortal trap for small game. A member of the group held a flashlight while Hamm built a small-game trap in the dirt by balancing one side of a boulder on three twigs, arranged in a figure “4”.

Using his fist, he showed how the rock would be tripped and fall on the head of an animal going for the bait.

For a “clean, effective kill,” Hamm said, the rock and twigs had to be balanced carefully to suit the type of animal being hunted.

“You don’t want to do a lousy job on a trap,” Hamm said. “Otherwise, an animal may suffer because of your carelessness. The other thing is, if you do a lousy job, your food is running away from you.”

It was time for the message.

“Everything revolving around hunting was done in a very serious manner,” Hamm said. “Twofold: one was respect for the animals, the other was simple survival.”

Then he kind of smiled.

“Everything I’ve showed you today is illegal,” he said.

He asked the children if they remembered the four essentials of survival.

“Fire, wood, shelter and water,” they all replied.

“Yeah, that’s it exactly,” he said.

One of the boys asked if he could eat wild mustard.

“Mustard is a non-native,” Hamm said, implying that it was not as precious to the park as an oak. “But, generally, in the National Parks you’re not allowed to collect anything.”

“Except for educational purposes,” one of them said.

“Yeah, exactly,” Hamm said. For educational purposes, Hamm peeled the fruit of a prickly pear cactus and cut it into pieces with a pocketknife. A slippery, scarlet syrup dripped over his palms.

All of the children ate.

“It’s not that sour,” one pronounced.

One of the adults jumped in then and said he’d like to try.

He said he was Howard Rosenberg, the “maven” of his Woodland Hills Cub Scout troop.

“That’s Jewish for all-encompassing know-it-all,” he said.

One of the things the maven knew was never to get ahead of the ranger.

“I’ve learned that, when the rangers say, ‘Try this,’ I always wait to see if they try it too. I’ve learned that.”

Rosenberg tried the cactus fruit. It wasn’t that sour.