Wild Animal Tales Told In Tracks, Spoor, Life And Death

In English the word “sign” refers to animal tracks, or to other evidence of an animal’s passage or presence. 

Having spent several years in the wilder parts of Southwest Africa, (my Yellowstone doppelganger, my “mirrored self”), the Afrikaans word “spoor” evokes a wider spectrum of meanings.

Spoor is an artifact, a trace, a hint, or evidence that tells a story, usually of animals, birds, or insects … day beds, rubbings, horn or claw marks, tracks, scat, an odor, a sound, a feather, strands of hair, bent grass, a dust wallow, or a displaced pebble on an animal trail. Each is an example of spoor. 

Early one spring before sunrise while walking a frozen stony “game” trail on which there was no discernable spoor I noticed a single small pebble knocked loose from the frozen matrix of the trail. Nothing else.

Something ambulatory had recently proceeded me and the knowledge heightened my alertness. I wondered about that pebble, until a mile or so later, where the trail crossed some impressionable hydrothermally- warmed earth, I saw the fresh faint spoor of a bear.

In the absence of any other sign I thought it likely the bear was the prime mover of the dislodged stone.

For at least a hundred thousand years our hunter and gatherer ancestors everywhere in the world, both men and women, were sophisticated readers of any trace of disturbance, any useful bit of information, in their environment. Their livelihood and survival depended upon it. They enjoyed the accumulated wisdom of countless previous generations and there was no separation between themselves and the natural world of which they were integral.

The ancient art of reading spoor is nearly extinct.  The corpus of knowledge, the experiential and intuitive ability to interpret spoor by the surviving, mostly elderly practitioners, the last of their kind, is astonishing to us urbanized aliens.

Until we began to coalesce into agricultural cities 10,000 years ago our ancestors for a hundred times longer lived immersed in nature.  Our modern ignorance of who we were for 99 percent of our existence, and just under the skin still are, is at the root of our malice.  This disconnect is the genesis of the deep discontents with ourselves and the civilization into which we have shoe-horned our spirits.

My ability to read or even to be aware of the presence of spoor is infantile compared to that of our forebears.  But, I enjoy noticing the obvious and speculating about the frequent riddles I find in my rambles. 

The distant alarm call of a squirrel or of chickadees is not to be ignored.  A flock of ravens may indicate a carcass and perhaps a day-bedded bear. Or a nearby pack of wolves.

Where grasses have inscribed crescent arcs in the snow testifies to the wind that woke me last night. The varied properties of buff pies generally reveal the approximate age of the animal that made it, their sex, the season in which the pie was made, and how recently it was plopped.

And there are pseudo-morphs, those shapes, forms, structures that suggest a track or sign but prove on close examination to be the artifact of wind or frost or some other inorganic agency. This is the reason that a single ambiguous track doesn’t count, always there must be two or more as proof of the read.

Whenever we cut the scent trail of a bear my horse companion of 20 years, Ishiwah, would pause, lower his head to the ground and take-in a deep draught of the odor. He was not alarmed by the spoor, he never showed fear of grizzlies in any of our encounters, but his body language made it clear to me that a bear had recently passed this way. His nose enabled me to be aware of visually invisible spoor.

It might also take the form of a mushroom nibbled by a squirrel, and cached on a limb at my horseman’s eye level, or one on the ground partially eaten by a deer. The feather of a swan, and then more feathers, blood on the snow and drag marks lead to where a coyote had taken the bird into some timber to eat. The belly trough down a snow slope to the river leads up to where an otter has eaten several fish leaving only shards of skin and the coarser bones and nearby a midden of urine and scat.

Early one spring, my friend, Joe, and I squatted on a game trail debating whether the grizz tracks vivid in the mud were made last night or this morning when another friend, Amy, came crab walking back down the trail where she had gone ahead silently mouthing “grizz!” and gesturing over her shoulder to where a sow and two yearlings were audibly breaking the bones of a winter-killed bison.

Having been here for a long while I am aware of my own spoor both on foot and on skis. I am a peasant skier, not into performance in any sense of the word.  In Hayden Valley I like to ballroom dance with the topography as my partner—she leads, I follow.

I contour in what I like to think of as compatible curves that reflect and respect the flow of the landscape. No straight lines, no herring-bone vertical climbs, no zig-sag cut backs while ascending a slope. I try to practice skier’s calligraphy and avoid skier’s graffiti. My ski spoor is calligraphy writ on the body of the snow world.

I intend no pretentions, but I would like to paraphrase a description of Japanese calligraphy as it applies to ski tracks. The skier has but one chance to create with the brush (skis). The track cannot be corrected, and even a lack of confidence shows up in the work which is best practiced in a state of “no mind”, no self-consciousness, no intent.  The skier must be fluid in execution, the track is a statement about the skier in a moment of time. Clear your mind and let the ski ink flow, no need to look back, enjoy the flow of your previous poem on your return home.

Sometimes I cut the spoor of a couple of skiers, I see where they stopped to pee, then the tracks reveal where one was talking over the shoulder about wife, husband or boss. Here is where they stopped to smoke a joint. They leave a spoor of inattention that scars the perfection of the snowscape.

We all make tracks and scat and so we all leave spoor in our travel through life. But, all to varying degrees are ephemeral, even those writ in stone. No more permanent than our shadow, all sign of our winter passage melts with the snow and blows away in the wind.