Telling Fresh Tracks
A reflection on curiosity
There’s more to telling a fresh track than its appearance. How often it is that I notice not first the sight of them, but a presence and a tug, a hint of a feeling to glance ‘just there,’ and at once the presence is confirmed with a knowing—this animal was here. Maybe moments ago, maybe longer. But still here in this moment enough to show this part of its secret life to me.
These tracks do not have the look of freshness on them. But the day is warm, and windy, and it is possible to know that when the snow does just this, we’ve only closely missed one another, this fox and I. It’s not certainly a fox, but intuition says probably. The individual traveling alone, hunting around the bases of trees and bushes—our coyotes tend to travel in pairs and have slightly larger prints. This time of year the foxes are known to hunt the snowshoes and cottontails that live in the sage hills around our home.
One learns much about an animal, observing its track. Even if that observing only leaves questions posed—did it pause just here? Did it see prey and dart off, or was it the sound of my opening front door? No, the route meanders, not in a hurry.
I have followed the fresh tracks of animals for many miles, before. A bobcat that, once it knew I was there, hopped off the trail and silently circled back around, onto the trail and back the way it came, behind me. Bobcats are perhaps the most undisturbed to be followed, and clever enough to slip away without fuss.
Cougars go where they are going, until they notice they’ve been trailed, and change course suddenly and with grater speed—at a right angle straight up a hill, and there’s no hope of catching a glimpse, after that.
The farthest I’ve followed a track was 5 miles. Three elk, up and down treed ridges of dirt and needle-litter and snow, across a stream bed where the sign was reduced to bent grass, and then up a rocky sagebrush hill, until the direction of travel was no longer perceptible—lost in a sea of sign from many other animals grazing the hillside. Always, though, traveling into the wind.
Observation becomes instinct. Awareness feeds knowing—to look, just there—to follow, or not. But always to learn.