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Vol 1, No. 3, May 1982
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The Tracker
Magazine - Vol 1 No. 3, May 1982
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Tracking
By Tom Brown, Jr.
A good tracker is not a person who can follow
the trail of an animal and find that animal. A good tracker is not a person who
follows one footprint after another with the only goal in mind to find that
animal. Instead, a good tracker is a person who can read the minor nuances in
each track and learn as much as he can from the track in front of him. As I have
said in my lectures, you should not move on to the next track until you have
read all the little things that the track you have in front of you is trying to
tell you. If you keep doing this you will find that you automatically know where
the next track is going to be. Every push, scrape, depression, and pressure
release found in that track is going to tell you something about that animal -
the way he moved, whether he dipped his head, or jerked his head in a motion
looking for danger; whether he was in the process of a turn, and why; and what
sex the animal was and how much it weighed - all these things can be found in a
track. Don't be so quick in trying to follow a long string of tracks. Instead,
look deeply into those tracks and try to read all the things that the tracks are
telling you so that you truly know what that animal has been doing before you
even came to see it.
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| I suggest as an exercise that students take one
track that they can see - one good track - and try to read all the things that
the track is telling. Try to read all the little nuances, spending almost a half
an hour to an hour watching the track, studying it, looking at it from all
different angles. Look at how it sits in relationship to everything else about
it, and eventually how it looks in relationship to the other tracks in the line.
Also, try to understand what animals or forces of nature influence that track.
Try to understand why the animal was walking that way, going that way, how fast
he was going, what he was going to or what he was coming from. Try to understand
the whole relation of life that is found in each and every track. |
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