Alright. This touches on one thing that most/all the primitivists I meet seem to not have worked on.
You have to rewild your movement, not just for hunting, but the simple fact that wilderness travel EXHAUSTS the modern human body. The ground in the woods has holes and bumps in it, working your ankles in bizarre new ways, trees/logs/brush make certain areas seem impassable, sitting on the ground can kill your back, you need to climb trees without low limbs to get views of an area at times, crossing rivers by jumping from unstable rock to unstable rock, etc. If you track animals, going where they go requires movement on all fours at times, which can work your knees all to hell. All this without even starting to talk about “stalking” for the hunt. So how the hell do you resolves this shit?
You can either join us here in Portland for SHIFT (we’d love to have you), or get Tom Brown Jr’s guide to Nature Observation and Tracking and flip right to the stalking and movement section. Also look up “parkour” (street/outdoor gymnastics) on youtube and google to see if you have a group near you. Take a Tai Chi class if you have limited options - actually, an 8 week Tai Chi class that I took at a community college 12 years ago (I got an F. Whoops.) started me on a track of personal experimentation that vastly improved my basic skills.
So don’t snub the Tai Chi…it works. Any other slow-moving art that works your core/thighs/calves/ankles will make a difference. Capoeira could work. Which reminds me.
Get some drums and get a hippie circle going and move in the middle of it. We started doing this for SHIFT, inspired by Capoeira, and it fucking rocks!! Old cultures obviously figured this shit out first.
Check out “the New World” DVD (that pocahontas movie) , and watch all the special features till you get to the part where they have footage of a native american dancer and movement specialist who came in and put the native actors/warriors through several weeks of training. It looks remarkably like what we do at SHIFT, which makes me think we’ve gotten on the right track here.
You can also go to Tom Brown’s school, who in his Awareness and Scout classes drills lots of wilderness movement exercises.
To sum up: screw fire making, shelter buildling, edible plants, etc. Just standing in the woods takes an enormous amount of focus. Consider making it one of your primary focus areas. Getting good at that will revolutionalize your fire making, shelter building, and plant harvesting skills.
