WASHINGTON -- In the long tradition of American self-reliance -- that urge to eschew social conventions for a simpler life -- most refugees have headed for wilderness. Henry David Thoreau went to Walden Pond. John Muir to Yosemite. Then there is Paula Smith, who came to Washington about 20 years ago and has been pretty much living off the land ever since.

Not that Smith farms, hunts or freeloads. She is a forager and a scavenger. And among the assorted characters who roam the forests and streams of the Washington region and the Potomac River valley north of Georgetown -- a wilder place than many realize -- there might be no keener two-legged creature in the woods.

Smith knows when to look for fruit on the papaw trees, where the best oyster mushrooms hide and when the wild raspberries and wineberries are ripest. Also the easiest way to get free venison.

"I've eaten my quota of dead roadkill, trust me honey," she said. "As long as it's clean" and not too beat up, "I'll cut it up and eat it."

In a town known for backslapping bonhomie and double talk, Smith, 57, is brutally direct and totally unconcerned with appearance. Short, wiry and ill-mannered, she wears thick glasses and heavy boots and is rarely seen without her tattered bucket hat and a cigarette. Her salty language is as legendary on the river as her knack for finding deer antlers. Local outdoorsman Bill Heavey, a columnist for Field & Stream, once described her as "gruff and gravel-voiced," with "all the charm of a sawmill foreman." To many, she is the Potomac's unofficial riverkeeper.

"There's a lot of (stuff) that goes on in these woods that people don't know about," she said recently, at work on the docks at Fletcher's Cove in Washington.

Cleaning up garbage and litter along the river has been Smith's obsession for a long time. But lately she has been consumed by a new concern: Deer shot illegally along the river on National Park Service land.

"Poachers are going wild up there," she said, referring to the area south of Chain Bridge.

Poachers? In Washington, D.C.?

"I'll show you," she said.

To fishermen on the Potomac, and just about any weekend recreationist who has taken out a rowboat at Fletcher's, Smith is "the dock lady," running the boat rental program from a wooden shack stuffed with oars and life jackets. There, she works the angler crowd like a canny waitress at a truck stop, bantering with fishermen she calls "baby" and "honey" -- when she's not cursing at them -- and serving up shad and perch advice in turn for a little extra in her coffee can tip jar.

"We call her the empress of the docks," said Dan Ward, who has worked at Fletcher's Boat House since 1969. "Occasionally we get someone who complains because she has a bad habit of cussing in front of children, but she's worth the price of admission."

The boats are Smith's part-time job, an occupation reduced to a few days a week during the spring fishing season. But her full-time profession is in the forest. She spends most of her days alone on long peregrinations she describes as "just me (messing) around in the woods."

Deer antlers, old bottles, wild edibles and animal skulls are her pursuit on these outings, which can last all day and take her through Park Service land, private property and city parks. Because male deer shed their antlers at different times after rutting season, she keeps detailed notes to track their whereabouts. Over the years, she said, she has found magnificent antlers worth hundreds, even thousands of dollars, along with 19th-century whiskey bottles and rare coins. Twice, she said, she has called the police after finding human remains: once a missing kayaker, and another time the body of a drowned little girl.

Smith has no family nearby but lives in Arlington, Va., with Gordon Leisch, her friend and a well-known outdoorsman. Leisch, who is retired from the Interior Department, said he asked Smith to move in about 10 years ago to help him care for his dying father. Today their living room is kept like a large tackle box, overflowing with fishing poles, nets and other outdoor equipment. Wild game abounds in the freezer: hunks of deer meat, perch and turkey. Smith said she also likes squirrel and raccoon.

"Young raccoon," she specified.

"She's like no other you've ever met," Leisch said.

Washington may seem an odd place for this type of frontier lifestyle, but since Smith doesn't have a car and never learned to drive, she's pretty much stuck here. Most days, she catches a bus at 5 a.m. and transfers to other routes until she gets close enough to the woods to start walking.

"People think you're weird if you wander around in the woods," she said. "But that's OK if some people think I'm crazy. Most river rats are crazy."

Smith grew up in and around Chicago, and her hard-drinking father managed a trailer park for a time, she said. As a kid, her grandfather took her on walks in the woods. "He knew every bird, every plant," she said.

Smith said she left home for New York City before finishing high school, and for almost 25 years she worked in a printing shop before eventually running one of her own. But when she fell into tax problems and the business failed, Smith lost everything and came to stay with a friend in Washington. She has no children and never married -- "The one mistake I haven't made," Smith said. She showed up on the docks at Fletcher's one day like a castaway washed downstream in a storm.

"She asked for work, and originally I had my doubts she could handle it physically," said Ward, her co-worker at Fletcher's. Smith quickly proved him wrong. "She's the only employee I can remember who I have to get to work less hard. She'll get down on her hands and knees to get every little bit of sand out of the boats. She takes these things so personally," he said.

Smith quit drinking years ago, she said, but still smokes two packs of cigarettes a day. Just as there are certain fishermen on the river she doesn't care for, there are a few species she's not a fan of: Cormorants, which eat too many herring in her judgment; catfish, which she deems "nasty"; along with darn "yuppies" and their dogs, which harass the forest animals, she said.

Then there are her favorites: deer, of course, but also snakes, turtles and vultures, since she is just as interested in what's living in the forest as what has died there.

"Don't ever get too close to a vulture's nest," she cautioned this reporter, following her along the Potomac through muck and underbrush on the search for dead deer. "They'll vomit on you. And you don't want nothing to do with what they've been eating."

Washington's riverbanks may not be far from human settlement, but they can be wild and dangerous, Smith said. When the weather warms, homeless men set up camps in the woods. A few are dangerous, Smith said, and she is careful to avoid those she considers most unstable.

As she cut a roundabout path through the forest, Smith followed a pack of circling vultures to a rocky outcropping near Chain Bridge on the Washington side of the river. There, a pregnant doe had been butchered so recently that its discarded remains had no odor.

"You see this (mess)?" she said angrily, poking at a pile of entrails. "Since October I've probably found 20 dead deer out here. Most years I find one to six. I think they're taking them out and selling the meat."

Smith said that while there's an overpopulation of deer in the region, the animals are supposed to be protected on parkland. "I don't want no commercial venture wiping them out in here," she fumed.

Two wild turkeys appeared on the way back toward Fletcher's, and Smith followed them for a little while through the bushes, seeing how close she could get. She said the poachers would probably hunt them out by the end of the summer.

Of course, she didn't exactly use that language.