IN MEMORY OF TOM BROWN, JR.

A New York Times reporter recently called me with questions toward writing an obituary of Tom Brown, one of them “In a couple of words, what was Tom’s basic teaching?” – a tough assignment yet so simple. He connected people with the Earth through mastery of the skills. Not through listening to lectures or recording demonstrations, but by investing effort in every detail of a subject. To questions that students asked him, typically he would respond, “do your dirt time” and I heard this statement, oh say hundreds of times.

Tom would never give you the easy answer, he pushed you to work for it. In an advanced tracking class with maybe 50 people, we were learning ‘indicator pressure releases’ that revealed the inner workings of a person’s or animal’s body. After some lectures we asked him to show us the pressure release that shows gender. He said you have to discover it yourself. We begged. Just show us this one thing, we said. We’re veteran students, we’ve put our time in. So, OK he said. We filled a cardboard box with wet sand, an instructor stepped into it making a track and we were about to see that pressure release. Somehow though, the box buckled from the weight of the sand and the track crumbled. It was gone. Oh well, I guess you’ll have to find it yourself.

At times you’d wonder whether the thing he pushed you to find even existed. In the Expert Tracking class I took in 1989 there were only nine of us. During a break I walked up to him with a question fully expecting a do-your-dirt-time answer. It was about the difference between short-tailed and long-tailed weasel tracks. I knew that they overlapped in size, the male short-tailed being the same size as the female long-tailed. But in rare disclosure Tom said directly, “The long-tailed weasel track shows, in the back of the heel pad area, a tiny scrape or avulsion smaller than a pinhead that’s created because there is a slightly greater push-off in the bounding gait than the short-tailed weasel’s, due to the extra length and therefore weight of the tail."

Knowing Tom’s own training by Stalking Wolf, I knew there was no way Tom had been given this information so my brain reeled imagining how many weasel tracks Tom must have studied in miniscule detail to learn this – multiplied by all the other species whose tracks he knew. Point made.

So the focus, commitment and surrender required to master any of the skills became apparent: striving for the perfectly tillered bow, the tightest woven basket, the most precise envisioning during a meditation. In the beginning, for many of Tom’s students, the goal was to emulate him, to become the expert he seemed to personify. But eventually that ego-driven and impossible aim melted away to become just about you and the skill. Then it was about honor, really. Honoring the skill, honoring the tree that became the bow, honoring the person to whom the basket is given. It’s about how you walk and carry yourself. Behind your efforts, whether during a class with Tom or long afterwards, there he stood reminding us that no matter how our skills have progressed, more is possible. In this process the earth connection has been made concretely and irreversibly, mission accomplished.

After his passing, many of Tom’s students wrote “Rest in peace Tom”, and I say amen to that. But I think that his driven spirit now exists beautifully on the Other Side, so may we all continue our journey of learning open to it and Grandfather’s teaching.