Dispatch from a Distance - Animal Tracking [by Cara Benson]

Rare glimpse

It’s easy to feel like a Magoo in the woods, walking my developing foot paths to repeatedly visited spots among the veritable highways and busy intersections of animal tracks crisscrossing all around me. Of course I notice them, the tracks, but the creatures themselves have typically skidaddled. I imagine far off sets of eyes up in branches, peeking out from burrows, shining in dark dens, all trained on me as I whistle away, largely oblivious to their precise locations. I am learning, though, that their movements are legible and that I can become better versed in deciphering them. There’s a wildlife tracker I’ve been able to walk with a few times who talks about it that way, that it’s a matter of reading the story in the landscape. These stories are more prominent in winter as their trails show in the snow like pictographs on a blank page, so the season just past fell perfectly open for me to put in the “time on the ground.”

In my previous post, I’d written that I was going to explore snowshoeing next. My loose idea was to ruminate on how the snow reveals desire lines. That’s the term planners use to describe foot paths that form regardless of design (think of those bare brown walkways in the green of parks that show the cut-throughs and ways that people actually travel). In the woods hikers often call them herd paths. I was thinking about my own desire as revealed by the path I tread through the landscape out my door. More than a few writers have taken this topic on of late. Robert Moor in his On Trails and Torbjørn Ekelund’s In Praise of Paths both consider how desire lines are a result of how the individual and the collective meet on the road. This idea was appealing to me, but whose trails I was meeting and overlapping with were not of human origin. My snowshoes packed and connected with paths that, from what I could tell, were deer, coyote, and would that have been mink? Or were they fisher? Are pine martens in the area? And then porcupines! That’s a yes (I think) to all of them. So my writing, like my walking, has followed this line.

I quickly became obsessed with reading prints. First I was drawn in to looking at each individual mark. Counting toe pads. Seeing the imprints of nails. The gentle drag of a paw across the powder. All such intimate evidence of the actual creature left behind. I wanted to touch everything. To get as close as possible to the impressions that demonstrated an incredibly diverse taxonomy of fauna in this corner of the world. Deer, sure. Okay, voles, even turkeys. But bobcat? Out my back door? How cool is that! (Very.) (Until one attacks you.) (I’ve never been attacked.) (It could happen.) (Probably won’t.) (Right?)*

Trying to identify the animal by looking only at an individual print, though, is like naming that song in one note and that note might be muffled. Or played off-key and through a paper cup and you’ve got wax in your eyes. What I mean is that prints are not always clean impressions. Even when they are, some of them are similar enough to each other that more information is needed. That’s why trackers look at the gait of the animal as revealed in the series of prints. Are they body scissoring or leg scissoring? Bounders, leapers, waddlers, walkers, or trotters? Do they step back foot into front print? Land with hind feet first?

I try to picture the animal moving and get too mechanical about it. After a while, I can’t even remember how my cats walk. My mind loaded with data struggled to incorporate it into my sensing self. For a while, everything I saw was either deer or coyote (even if it wasn’t coyote). One of the pieces of information that stayed with me is that canine prints typically show the nails. As do weasels and mink and otter and fisher and probably others, but I didn’t know any of that yet. So I’d see prints with prominent front points and feel fairly satisfied with myself that I’d nailed it. But over the course of time and walking with those who’d been at it longer, I found that some of tracks I thought were coyote were actually fox. Of course then I went through a period of thinking everything I saw was fox, but I’m past that now (porcupine). For the record, I’m not always wrong. In fact, I’m getting less wrong.

If you can’t peg it from a small swath of the trail, the scope of the investigation must expand to follow the tracks for more information. That often means looking to see if there’s scat. Most animals in the wild, with the possible exception of porcupines who will sleep in their poop, don’t shit any old place. They do it to communicate. Fox, for example, will leave scat on little branches. Or up on logs. They want to elevate its presence. The message: “I’m here.” As I started looking, I saw them everywhere. It wasn't long before I began to wonder if they were also talking to me. Something else to consider: what was I saying to them with my repeated trips through their range? What is it I might have wanted to say? I’m here, too.

I did notice over the course of winter more and more scat was being left right in the middle of my snowshoe paths. There was a particular corridor that seemed to be an information hotspot. At the bottom of one of the first hills I descend from the back of my home I enter a rich swath of hemlock forest that holds multiple rocky beds collecting runoff and rain in spring and summer that are blissfully easier to cross in snow. Just past the first of these temporal streams, in one afternoon I came across two fresh calling cards. Coyote (hair filled, rope-like) and fox (somewhat similar, but smaller).

I know scatology is serious business, but it is a particular type of feeling one gets when leaning in to another creature’s excrement, then zooming in for close-ups. I can’t tell you how many angles of pellets, tubes, segments, and other shapes of feces I have on my phone now. Due to pandemic distancing, it’s not that often that I’m in face to face conversation with someone and scroll my pictures to show them something, but even going through them for my own self, it does give one pause. Not kidding, I have passed more than a few Saturday nights this season comparing my pictures with what’s on the internet (I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise, there’s a lot of shit online).

Though they were leaving evidence right under my feet, trailing animal tracks also leads the walking off my usual paths. To follow where the animal treads rather than what I might have intended put me into a more deeply attentive state. “As the crow flies” became as the woodchuck waddles. My walking evolved into stalking. Slow. Methodical. I want to run into the creatures, and, also, I very much don’t. Everyone wants to see a bear until they actually do. I have run into black bears a few times. It’s exciting! And scary. And I want to be their friends and feel badly yelling at them, as you’re supposed to do. But jeezum, they’re big.

Walking with the expert tracker we did follow right to the source – twice. Both times, benignly, porcupine. One down in a smelly den. The other up way up in a hemlock tree. Porcupines apparently are less skittish as they’re their bodies are supremely well defended. They get down in a den and curl up with their quilled backs to the opening. You can get your face in the hole for a peek and deep whiff (I did); they don’t actually shoot quills as one myth would have it. It might be safer doing that than standing under one up in the trees as they are known to fall out of the limbs, sometimes fatally.

Initially, though, I didn’t want to follow tracks too far as to not disturb whoever I might be on the tail of. Someone had said on one of my other walks that you can follow the trail in reverse to read some of the story. But it’s all moot, really, as it is ridiculous to think that a coyote is anywhere in the vicinity of me tromping along in my snowshoes. Over time I became more comfortable letting the trail take me wherever it went. Over downed trees, up rock ledges, frozen wetlands and bogs, some terrain I’d never tread without the protection of a hefty snow pack covering what’s frozen or asleep under it.

Now the snow is gone and mud season upon us. My tracker friend does walks year round, also in urban areas. The clues might be harder to discern, but I’m sure that they’re there to be read if I am looking. I was thinking about that while doing spring clean up last weekend, raking out the flower beds and cutting away last year’s dead growth. I saved the most unruly bushes for last, the catnip. I started snipping and pulling the stalks from the bottom, working my way up to the apex of the bush, when on top there was, elevated for sure detection, a small pile of dried fox shit, not far from my front walkway. Well played, red. Well played.

*I wrote this before that video went viral. I'm just being goofy here. Healthy bobcats don't typically attack humans, especially unprovoked. Don't believe the internet hype.

***

Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Hobart, and elsewhere. Kevin Young chose her poem Banking for the Best American Poetry 2011. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, she lives in ancestral Mohican territory in upstate New York. www.carabensonwriter.com.

Read previous posts in this series: Hello From A Distance, Enter Geese, Whose Woods, Roads And Seeds, A Trace, and Hunting Season.

Comments

[Julie Owsik Ackerman]

I’m laughing out loud at the end. Delightful.

[Michele Marie Beiter]

The answer is - Yes. I want to think, consider, dream & laugh. Thanks for delivering all of that! Am I a Magoo in the woods? (surely). What is the animals gait? (hopping? heel, toe?). I too have seen a black bear in the woods - I was incredibly brave! (or maybe not)

[Lisa Hoyt]

Tracking can definitely become an obsession. Enjoyed hearing of your time reading the stories in the snow. what a great way to connect to our furry neighbors right outside our doors.

[Marissa Despain]

I love this meandering meditation, so skillfully and beautifully written. The timing is perfect (who knew at the outset where you were going with this particular walk). These essays keep getting better and better.

[Kathrin Schaeppi]

I'm loving walking with you to wherever, but here particularly. Thank-you for the view. The tracks I find in my city are those of a tiny furry animal from the zoo (a meerkat (?) that I have never seen that must slip out through a crack at night) and who then chooses to sit on my car roof (I imagine because it is a safe and warm place) and then scrapes the sides with its nails as it slides down to race back to the zoo after hanging out there. One of my experiences of city tracking. Take care and write on.

[Moosegazete]

Thanks for sharing the great content here.

[Iconfair]

The Best Ever. Why limit it to one year at a time?

[Jack Levi]

Great post, I find it really useful to know how to get some. Thanks for sharing!
Regards