In my training, this is me at a 90 foot, 5 minute, decomp in a K dive at 130 feet.  The water current was not possible to swim against, so letting go of the buoy cable was guaranteed ejection to open sea.  At this decomp, my left ear locked up, and I was met by a school of barracuda.  Who, persistently focused on my face, waiting . . . to let go of the cable? After the decomp time was done, I tried to rise and felt my left eardrum want to rupture. I tried again and again to rise, but the eardrum stayed locked, as I stared into the faces of the barracuda, waiting. Unwillingly, this song roared through my head. I finally heard a loud screech in my left ear, and it cleared. I think the closest barracuda to me named was Stan.

Ooowee, this a tough one. It begins with raptors are curious and social. In the 114,000 acres of the Devil's Backbone Wilderness Area, i punched about 8,000 miles over 10 years.  I didn't realize I was being watched by buzzards.  I began to notice them.  And since sound travels upward very clearly, I began to acknowledge them with 'vocal' "Hello, how are you" and the like. They came to recognize me and approach from the horizon and circle three times when I was in their realm. One time, they repeatedly bent their wings three times as they circled. I didn't know what that meant. I learned the hard way this first time. They could see a storm. The second time I got wise to it and pushed to extraction. It was absolute devastation, It was 4:00 in the afternoon and it got immediately so dark I couldn't see the ground at my feet, with violent wind and lightning.  Trust the buzzards and say, "Hello".

This is Malachi, a black and white Borzoi. He taught me how to move.  He said the rugged terrain is actually a 'dance floor'.  Every step is a 3/8 second musical decision.  He showed me how to listen to that music, not to focus on foot placement.   Focus on where I'm spending time 'in the air', and let the contact with the ground be a slave to 'who I am' and 'where I am'.  Malachi was good, very good. This is his advice. . .

This is a true experience in a tough area of the woods in the Missouri Ozarks Devil's Backbone wilderness area. A local man, Jesse, said, "Hell boy! Nobody goes in there! What the hell were you thinkin'. I went in there once, just once. It took me 6 hours to get out!" I said,"Thanks Jesse, why didn't you tell me." He said, "Listen boy, noboby likes you. You ain't from around here. You shouldn't be here!" A couple of years later, I met up with Jesse again at the local store, he grinned and said, "You're a tough som-bitch."

This is a tough one. My first Afghan hound, Sampson, started doing a strange type of dance when we were out in the North Georgia mountains. I asked him, "What are you doing?". Sampson said, "A bear dance." I asked him, "What's a bear dance?". He said, "You'll find out". Later, I got the situation of face-to-face with another bear. The next Afghan I had years later, Saber, did the exact same dance and I noticed very fresh bear tracks in the snow. We were right behind it.

This is a touching ballad of the power of communication outside of words. With the focus on 'tonality', This came in very handy when I met a cougar at night and it launched a deafening scream staight at me, that rippled my chest and blew my hair back.