Norm Kidder is a supervising naturalist at Sunol Regional Wilderness in Fremont and doubles as a top man in the Society of Primitive Technology, a U.S.-Canada group devoted to keeping alive the skills men and women used when the world was absolutely untamed.

He has a horned-lizard tattoo on his ankle inked with the spine of a barrel cactus. He can drill a hole in a seashell with a seal whisker and a pinch of sand. He hews flutes from elderberry sticks. He knows an herbal remedy for bad dreams. If civilization should end today, follow him because he can gather food and make fire.

Kidder, 61, is considered one of the ablest technologists of the Stone Age, the time before metal, farming and towns. Tools and weapons were made only of stone, bone and antler for most of human history, from 2.5 million to 1600 B.C. Modern Western society, which emerged a few hundred years ago, is a flicker in time.

To curators of primitive ways, it's a wonder what moderns have forgotten about teamwork, adaptation to the landscape, pride in craft, not having a heart attack by working too hard and eating too much, and having a good time singing and playing games. Reviving how Stone Age people got the job done puts Kidder in touch with these experiences, which are timeless even though the methods are ancient.

"One of the attributes of modern Western thought is the firm conviction that whatever it is doing now must be better than what it was doing before -- that all change is progress," Kidder, who knows his history as well as his craft, writes in an article he published in the Bulletin of Primitive Technology.

To spend a day with Kidder on one of his Stone Age educational outings is to learn how that idea can be challenged. On a summer Saturday in the crackling dry Sunol valley, 16 people did just that. Some sporting hand-woven strings of dogbane weed beaded with pine nuts, they went home with information one doesn't learn every weekend: knowledge of deer-stalking and spear fishing, knowledge of plant medicine, knowledge that together they had made fire by rubbing two sticks together -- or at least tried to with their soft modern hands.

No hunting took place, but by the end of the day the students were in the spirit. Sheela Shankar, a young instructor at Kids for the Bay in Berkeley, said matter-of-factly: "I want to use the bow."

All women but one, the students were East Bay teachers, docents and naturalists picking up ideas about how native Californians lived before contact with Europeans some 250 years ago. They came from Walnut Creek, San Jose, Oakland, San Ramon, Berkeley and Antioch.

Kidder offered coffee and doughnuts, blandly announced that this would be his last major primitive outing before his planned retirement this fall, after 32 years as a naturalist, and gathered the students in front of a map of native groups in the East Bay.

There were 20,000 natives in the Bay Area, a few thousand of whom lived in the East Bay. This was crowded for pre-European America, but there were only three souls per square mile. "The first thing to think about is how peaceful and quiet it would be," said Kidder, who is working on a book called "Old Ways: A User's Guide to the Stone Age."

The average life span of 35 to 40 years was the best in the world at the time. And if people kept their teeth intact, they could double it. But the arrival of the Spanish brought catastrophe. "Eighty percent of these people died in the missions of disease," Kidder said. "A quarter of the men, half the women and all the children. Most families were broken up."

Kidder's inductees would form a neolithic family for the day.

Nobody took a Stone Age name, like Ayla or Oga from "The Clan of the Cave Bear," but each was assigned a neolithic community role: net-maker, gambler, basket-weaver, seed-gatherer, hide-tanner, root collector, fire- and music- maker. Men did the hunting in those days, so the only male in the group, Anthony DeCicco of Berkeley, also a teacher at Kids for the Bay, got to wear the antlered deer head.

Kidder, who is married and lives in a Fremont ranch house on the edge of Silicon Valley, passed out the appropriate tools and garb, including spears, bow and arrows, dice sets, a billed cap and conical hat made of tule reeds, a tule duck decoy, baskets and a skunk hide. When every student had an assignment, he cued them to exit civilization: "Are you ready to go out and become Stone Age people? Take your last Krispy Kreme."

Field lesson No. 1 concerned clothing.

If the experience were historically accurate, the men would have entered the woods naked and the women would have worn just skirts, Kidder said. The natives lived without barriers between them and the outdoors. They couldn't afford any; unlike moderns, they needed sensitive skin and eyes and a light tread to gather information about their varied environment.

"The Western approach to life is to make every place the same," Kidder said. "We want every place to have this idealistic mixture."

Lesson 2: relearning how to walk.

In the sands along Alameda Creek, Kidder demonstrated how natives would have walked in the wild -- lightly and falling slightly forward. Moderns, in contrast, clomp. "You're never out of balance," he said. "You can feel the ground. You don't have to look at it. ...When I'm barefoot, I know where I am."

Lesson 3: the art of not moving.

Stone Age hunters had to be expert at keeping still. As long as the jay in the tree squawked at them, the deer wouldn't come. "It takes about 20 minutes so the animals don't notice you any more," Kidder said.

Kidder moved on to an old sycamore in the cleft of which he'd stored some stones. He pecked one of these hammer stones against softer stream rocks, spitting on one resulting chip to create a red paste and on another to make a yellow pigment. He blazed his cheeks with the red and his nose with the yellow.

The painted man then demonstrated stone tool-making, knocking a hard stone against a soft one to hollow out a mortar for grinding seed. It takes about 200,000 such pecks of stone on stone, at the rate of about one a second for 50 hours, to fashion a full-size mortar.

Kidder turned to a sandbar willow, the source of canes for basketry. When he makes baskets on his own, he breaks the canes at the joints and ties them with sedge root or redbud. "With these," he said, "we can catch fish, catch birds. We can carry all our stuff around."

Crouching to deer height, the group tramped through the brush to a small pool. Kidder climbed a rock and raised a spear and a harpoon over the minnows and squaw fish swimming below. He held his fire, expounding on the ways fish would have been crucial to Stone Age people, as food, currency and fellow beings. "You had relationships with animals, fish, family groups," he said. "What made your life rich were all your personal relationships."

The Stone Age turns out to have been surprisingly subtle. Makers had to know the laws of physics and the properties of materials at least as well as modern technologists. "People needed to know as many things as they know today, " Kidder said.

Kidder describes the skills he teaches as information that must be passed down the generations or be lost. When there is a break, the community can face a crisis. Perhaps it's the feeling that modern society is suffering such a break that draws people to learn about old ways.

"It was specialized at first but I think it's growing exponentially," said Cody Lundin, director and co-founder of the Aboriginal Living Skills School in Prescott, Ariz. "The main reason is not just so we can grow our own turnips and live off the land, but it's a sense of self-reliance and a connection to where you came from."

"America has become such a melting pot that it's damn near melted away on some level," he said. "But the cool thing about primitive living skills is it's a common denominator for everyone.''

A Scout and biology major who grew up in rural Indiana and New Jersey, Kidder went to work for the East Bay Regional Park District in 1972 and became a student of native California culture. Urged on by his wife, fellow park district naturalist Jan Southworth, he started making primitive tools and structures and teaching visitors and schoolchildren. In 1979, he helped Southworth build a tule boat as the native Ohlone would have done.

As the outing ventured on, Kidder led his group over the creek and into a rye field, swiping the seed heads with a woven beater to show how the grain was gathered. Seeds were a key part of what's now known as the caveman diet. Rich in protein and moderate in fat, it's faddish these days to eat them but was just normal in the Stone Age.

Stone Age people practiced energy management, eating moderately and burning off excess calories in their daily work, and they were fitter than moderns. "The idea of working out would have been ludicrous," Kidder said.

Kidder turned next to the most primal of ancient ways: hunting. One does not hunt deer by climbing trees with bow and arrow and waiting for the prey to come, as Kidder said some friends of his recently tried to do and nearly starved. "Anthony," he said, turning to DeCicco, the hunter character in the group, "would become the deer."

One approach used by native hunters was to wear a big set of antlers and challenge the male herd boss. The buck would charge and the hunter would strike at close range. The average arrow range in pre-European California was six feet. "The ability to control their body movements and have patience was what allowed them to live," Kidder said, "whereas my friends were up in the trees starving."

Kidder pressed on, crushing between his fingertips the spines of a stinging nettle and chewing the leaf. It's the most nutritious plant in the wild, he said. "If you cook it, it tastes like spinach, only better," he said. "And I can make string from the dried stems."

He uprooted an onion-like bulb of soap root. "When you bake them, they taste kind of like sweet potato crossed with asparagus," he said. What's more, soap root paste serves as a shampoo and basket sealant and contains a chemical that stuns fish.

"Here's a plant called mugwort," he said. "The question is, what is your mug? It's a medicine for worms in your large intestine. In a few weeks, the cramps and pain will go away and you won't have the parasite. It's also a medicine for bad dreams."

Kidder showed his students how to make string from the inner fibers of the dogbane plant. He said he has a friend in Mariposa County who is fashioning 180 yards of the stuff to make a rabbit net. That requires a truck bed full of stems. "She wants to catch rabbits the old-fashioned way," he said, coughing from a nettle spine caught in his throat.

The initiates were hot, tired and quiet, but Kidder wasn't through. "I want to show you how to cut a tree down with an oak stick," he said, hefting a saw made of a sharp rock in a split branch. The followers dragged the sapling off to Kidder's hidden shade shelter near park headquarters, scene of the day's culminating ritual.

Kidder took off his jacket and set up the base of his fire apparatus with a bit of sawdust in a notched shingle. He placed a spindle in the notch and whirled it between his palms. Within five seconds, the contact point was 700 degrees and smoking. He transferred the ember to a batch of soap root fiber and ignited a pit prepared with mesquite and store-bought trout. "That is the ultimate challenge," he said, "to be able to go out and find two sticks and make fire."

Making fire with a drill coordinates speed, strength and leverage. It's another primitive skill that takes years to perfect. Only the young students DeCicco and Shankar got a spark, and at the cost of blistered palms. But in a real neolithic community, one ember would have been enough to ensure that the group would be warm and fed. All shared the blackened trout.

Kidder had made his point, the very point behind his Bulletin of Primitive Technology article, in which he poses the question: "Was Agriculture a Good Idea, or an Act of Desperation?" The paper argues that the onset of farming marked humankind's shift from positively adapting to the environment to reacting to it self-destructively.

"A smallish population, which is family- or clan-based, seems to be the most suitable for long-term survival," he writes. "At present, civilization is carrying on the experiment started by all the failed civilizations before to see if we can keep endlessly finding new resources to replace those we use up.

"If this current experiment should also fail, perhaps we can start over and do things on a smaller, more personal scale."

Norm Kidder and other members of the Society for Primitive Technology will demonstrate tool-making, spear-throwing, fire-making and other primitive skills at the Coyote Hills Knap-In on Oct. 2-3 and the Gathering of Ohlone Peoples on Oct. 3, both at Coyote Hills Regional Park in Fremont. Both events are free and open to the public. For information on the gathering and other Ohlone cultural events in the Bay Area, call the park at (510) 795-9385 and ask for the Ohlone programs brochure.

Kidder and five other Bay Area primitive skills experts maintain an extensive Web site, www.primitiveways.com. Kidder plans to publish a schedule of coming events on the site in late 2004 or early 2005.

- MYSTERIOUS CREATURES OF NORTH AMERICA DEPARTMENT -

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