Dispatches from two lineages.

Stalking Wolf was an infant when his great-great grandfather, Coyote Thunder, rescued the two of them from an attack on the family group that killed Stalking Wolf's parents. Coyote Thunder brought Stalking Wolf to live and grow up with his clan. At five years old, Stalking Wolf received his name when, within view of clan members, he stalked and touched a full grown, male wolf sleeping near the edge of camp. This act of stalking skill, and the ability to maintain his composure during the stalking of the wolf, marked Grandfather as someone to be taught the physical and spiritual ways of his people, and by the age of twenty, he was told by the elders and scouts of the clan that he had learned and mastered all that they could teach him. They directed him to enter the desert and discover his life Vision. When Stalking Wolf returned from his quest, the village had been returned to the earth and his people gone.

The story of Grandfather Stalking Wolf's vision quest and his sixty years of wandering North and South America is described in Tom Brown's book, Grandfather. The Vision Stalking Wolf received had two parts: for him to wander, seeking to learn the physical and spiritual skills other peoples had developed, to master these skills and then take them into the purity of the wilderness to test them, retaining those he found to be effective. The second part of his Vision was to then pass on these skills so they would be preserved for future generations. During Stalking Wolf's vision quest, the symbol of a white coyote represented the person he would eventually pass these skills and teachings to.

Deep in the jungles of Central America, Stalking Wolf received a powerful inner-vision direction to return to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey and find the White Coyote of his Vision. He returned to New Jersey and, on the bank of a cedar creek, met a young boy turning over pebbles, seeking to find fossils in the stones. For the next ten years, Grandfather taught and mentored this young boy, Tom Brown, in the physical and spiritual ways of his people and those he had collected during his years of wandering.

From Tom's journal, 1959: "Grandfather stressed that we always live in a State of the Sacred Question — always searching, watching, discovering and experimenting, pushing beyond our Threshold of Intense Observation, seeking the minute and extreme detail in all things of Earth and Spirit."

Stalking Wolf never wrote a book of his own. He left no interviews, no institution bearing his name. Everything that survives of his teaching survives because a young boy in the Pine Barrens chose to carry it forward, and because, decades later, two more students are doing the same.

Grandfather Stalking Wolf mentored Tom Brown Jr. for roughly ten years in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, a stretch of woods most people drive past without a second look. That apprenticeship ended when Tom was seventeen, after Stalking Wolf returned to his homeland. What Tom did with what he'd been given is the reason this book exists at all.

In 1978, Tom founded the Tracker School on the same land where Grandfather had taught him, and the school became the thing Stalking Wolf's own teaching never had the chance to become, an institution. Over the following decades Tom authored eighteen books, among them The Tracker, Grandfather, and The Way of the Scout, and quietly built a second reputation few people knew about at first, law enforcement agencies called on him in more than six hundred cases to help track fleeing suspects, missing persons, and lost children, using the same skills Grandfather had once taught a boy for entirely different reasons.

Tommy Lee Jones's character in the 2003 film The Hunted was based directly on him — Brown served as the film's technical advisor.

Randy Walker Jr. and Rien de Rooij, co-authors of this book, were both students who came through that door, Randy for three decades, and Rien alongside him for the same three decades, on top of his own four decades inside Japan's Bujinkan. Two very different lineages, carried forward by the same two hands.

Dirt time, hours of direct, unmediated time outdoors, was in Tom's own teaching the only way to actually learn any of it. No book could substitute for it.

Tom Brown Jr. passed away on August 16, 2024, at seventy-four. The Tracker School he built continues to run the courses he designed, and dirt time is still, by his own design, where the real learning happens.

For most of his life, almost no one knew Toshitsugu Takamatsu came from a family of ninja. It was a secret his family kept for generations, one that only became public after his death in 1972.

Takamatsu was born in 1889 in Akashi, Japan, and began training as a child under Toda Shinryuken Masamitsu, a martial arts teacher who also happened to be his own grandfather. By thirteen, Takamatsu had mastered Shinden Fudo-ryū. Over the following years he absorbed a remarkable number of traditions from Toda and a second teacher, Ishitani Matsutarō: Togakure-ryū, Kotō-ryū, Gyokko-ryū, Gyokushin-ryū, Kumogakure-ryū, Takagi Yōshin-ryū, Kukishinden-ryū. Nine schools in total, each one a thread of a much older lineage.

As a young man, Takamatsu traveled through Manchuria and China, where, by his own and his students' accounts, he found himself in real, life-or-death fights. He earned the nickname Mōko no Tora, "the Mongolian Tiger." Later in life, he became a Tendai Buddhist priest and a painter, spending his mornings at the easel and his evenings turning in early, living by a quiet, disciplined rhythm that seems at odds with the fighter he'd once been.

The scholar Kacem Zoughari, who later translated and annotated a rare 1963 newspaper interview with Takamatsu for his book on the man, frames him as the last living bridge between a centuries-old, secretive tradition and the modern world that was only beginning to learn of it.

In his late twenties, a young man named Masaaki Hatsumi sought him out. For the next fifteen years, Hatsumi made the trip from Noda to Takamatsu's home in Nara almost every week, often overnight, often for a single day of training before turning back. A year before he died, Takamatsu told Hatsumi that he had taught him everything, and that his own debt to his teachers was repaid. He was 83 when he passed away in 1972, and it was only then that Hatsumi, and the wider world, began to understand the full weight of what had quietly been carried forward.

We think about Takamatsu often while writing this book, because his life is, in miniature, the whole argument we're making: a tradition of trained awareness, kept alive not through institutions or publicity, but through one person choosing to hand it to one other person, in person, over years. It's the same shape as Stalking Wolf teaching a young Tom Brown Jr. in the Pine Barrens, around that same era. Different continent, same century, same act of transmission.

If Takamatsu Toshitsugu was the last keeper of a secret, Masaaki Hatsumi is the reason that secret didn't stay one.

Born in Noda, Japan, in 1931, Hatsumi started martial arts at seven years old, training with his father's wooden sword. By twenty he'd already earned a fourth-degree black belt in judo, rare for someone his age at the time, and had also studied karate, aikido, kendo, and Western boxing. He graduated from Meiji University, later studied medicine, and opened his own bonesetting clinic. By every account, he was restless, searching for something the sport-oriented martial arts of postwar Japan weren't giving him.

He found it in Takamatsu. Hatsumi was in his mid-twenties when he first sought him out, and has since said that meeting was the first time in his life he ever genuinely felt fear facing another person, despite years of training and street fights by that point. He trained under Takamatsu for the last fifteen years of the old master's life, absorbing all nine of his traditions. When Takamatsu died in 1972, he left Hatsumi the scrolls, the transmission, and the responsibility of continuing it.

Hatsumi could have kept it as quiet as his teacher had. Instead, he built a dojo in Noda and named it Bujinkan, "hall of the divine warrior," in Takamatsu's honor, and then, in his fifties, started taking the training abroad. His first trip to the United States was in 1982. Over the next twenty-five years he traveled to more than fifty countries, teaching what had once survived through a single line of secret, person-to-person transmission.

In 1999, Masaaki Hatsumi received the International Cultural Honor Award (国際文化栄誉賞) and was subsequently recognized with the Social/Cultural Distinguished Service Award (社会文化功労賞) by the Japan Cultural Promoting Association for his international contribution to Japanese martial culture.

A tradition kept secret is a tradition that eventually dies with its keeper. Hatsumi chose otherwise.

It's because of that choice that any of this book exists at all. Rien's own training traces directly back to Hatsumi, the same man, still by every account a working artist and calligrapher as much as a martial artist. Decades of letters, decades of training, all made possible because one man decided to open a door his own teacher had kept closed.

One aspect of these traditions is laid out clearly in the philosophy classes at the Tracker School, but stays more hidden behind a door in the Bujinkan: the concept of good versus evil.

The Scout and the Ninja are protectors of their community and the Earth. There are those who use power and control strategies to abuse others physically and sexually. They deny others their freedom. Greed, lust, and slavery are forms of evil. Warlords today use food and water as weapons on their populations as a means of control. These kinds of darkness need to be identified, avoided when necessary, and met head on when the need is there. The Scout would always learn the tools of their enemy in order to use those tools against them.

When you apply the concepts and techniques in this book to your daily life, you won't just be struck by the utter beauty of life, you'll also see how darkness abounds. The more sensitive you become to your surroundings, and to the sensations in your own body, the more you'll experience this. To deny the existence of evil is to give it more power.

Inside the Bujinkan the 5th Dan test, also called the Godan test, has a reputation that precedes it, even among people who've never set foot in a dojo. The short version people repeat is that a student kneels, closes their eyes, and has to dodge a strike aimed at their head without being able to see it coming.

That description is accurate but it misses the point of what's actually being tested. The test isn't measuring reaction speed, and a blindfolded guess timed to the sound of movement would fail about as often as it would succeed. What the test is actually built to reveal is something closer to what Stalking Wolf was teaching Tom Brown Jr. in the New Jersey Pine Barrens around that same era, a kind of awareness that operates before conscious thought catches up.

Hatsumi has described the state a student needs to pass the test as Mushin, no mind, no thinking, just pure awareness. It isn't a state of hyper-alertness, it's closer to the opposite, a stillness where reaction doesn't need to be manufactured because attention was never fully gone in the first place.

Sensing a strike before it can be seen isn't a metaphor here, it's the literal design of the test.

It's this same territory, awareness that precedes conscious perception, that shows up on the other side of this book too, in the Apache scout's Critical Edge and the practice of Sensing Presence. Two traditions, developed continents apart, converging on the same doorway.

Both Grandfather and Tom Brown Jr. were what Tom called Coyote teachers. A Coyote teacher asks questions that evoke curiosity and light a passion to discover the answers. The student isn't given all the pieces of the puzzle, it's left to them to discover the missing elements through trial, error, and experience. A true Coyote teaching keeps teaching the student throughout their life.

Tom said that the second greatest Coyote teaching Grandfather used throughout his time with Tom first occurred when Tom asked Grandfather what type of bird was calling in the cedar swamp. Instead of answering him, Grandfather said, "I go back to my people in two weeks." Grandfather was implying that if Tom didn't have the passion to find out on his own, he wasn't a suitable student. That was the kind of passion Grandfather demanded from Tom.

Tom spent the next two weeks trying to learn everything he could from Grandfather, his passion ignited, determined to integrate every lesson. Grandfather did pack up camp and leave, but returned two weeks later. Whenever Tom's focus relaxed, whenever he became complacent, Grandfather would again, out of the blue, say, "In two weeks, I go back to my people."

Hatsumi Masaaki practiced something remarkably similar, even though it was never named the same way. He would often just give a hint, then not discuss the topic any further, whether it came up during a technique or a philosophical discussion. Years later, a student would suddenly understand: aha, that's what he meant back then.

The Tracker School is centered on nature immersion, and at first glance it might seem a stretch to say the same about the Bujinkan. But during Bujinkan seminars in the 1980s, clinics were held on survival skills and the use of nature to one's advantage in combat. Anyone who has read the works of Hatsumi Masaaki will know that his teacher, Takamatsu Toshitsugu, spent a year living in nature to hone his skills. He was twenty-one at the time, and lived near Kame no Taki, the Turtle Waterfall, on Mount Mina, close to Kobe. During that year, his diet reportedly consisted solely of raw rice.

Where the two traditions truly meet is in their reverence for nature, something Hatsumi expressed on numerous occasions. One example can be found in the 1989 Bujin newsletter, Vol. 1, No. 7:

"Self-awareness is the starting point of oneness with Nature," and "Today, more than ever, man has to love the beauty of Nature, to know the love of Nature, to know the truth of Nature, and be truly thankful for Nature."

He further states:

"We must respect Nature through Bufu, the martial wind, of Bujinkan, otherwise our lives will be over."

And:

"When we attempt to interpret one of the scrolls of Shinden Fudo Ryu, one of the nine schools of the Bujinkan, we understand that it means one has to become Nature, immobilized, steadfast Nature, which God has given to human beings."

In the next issue, Bujin Vol. 1, No. 6, there is an article entitled "Japan: The Land of the Tree (Sanshin no Kata), Spirit Forms of the Three Hearts." In it, Hatsumi describes a conversation he had with a large tree, during which he demonstrates the Sanshin no Kata forms and discusses several Bujinkan principles, including Kishin Kigan, God's Heart and God's Eyes. It bears a striking resemblance to the Tree Preaching exercise practiced at the Tracker School, in which one pours one's heart out to a tree in order to gain clarity or work through a problem.