I Looked

One winter, years ago, long before I studied tracking, Jed and I were walking through a beautiful patch of forest near Ithaca. I just love winter, and I was reveling in the feeling of the cold air on my face, the crunch of snow under my boots, and the sight of the great leafless trees in their January slumber.

As we walked, Jed casually pointed to a smooth depression in the snow and said, “Hey, look at that deer bed.” I clicked from nature-loving me to skeptical-scientist me. In the universe of possibilities for all the ways that a depression in the snow could be made, how could Jed be so sure that this was a deer bed? In philosophical self-righteousness, I declared that there were just too many possible causes for this observation and therefore we should just say we don’t know the true origin of that depression. Jed looked at me quizzically in his locally famous Jed-like manner for a moment. He went over to the depression and after a minute of kneeling down in the snow came up with a few white deer hairs and handed them to me. I was dumbstruck. It seemed like a magic trick. Jed had just walked over to a “random” oval depression in the snow and with seemingly no effort fished out white deer hair from a pure white substrate! In my amazement, I blurted out, “How did you do that!?” Jed pondered for a few seconds and with that Jed-like half-smile said, “I looked.”

This turned out to be a great life-learning experience. Another tracker friend, Sue Morse, summarized it to me this way: “Half of tracking is knowing where to look, and the other half is looking.”

Now, years later, I discover myself subconsciously repeating this experience with my tracking students. A few weeks ago, I was in the woods with a class, the topic of the day being how to see animals. At two o’clock in the afternoon, with fifteen people crunching through dry fallen leaves and making no attempt at stealth, I had no particular expectation that we would actually see any animals. But I wanted to model the process rather than just talk about it.

Stopping on a forested slope, I gathered the students around and showed them how to really look at a landscape. We imagined line of sight, angle of slope, and microtopography. We considered wind direction, the resources available in this area, and the needs of deer. We concluded that if there were deer anywhere near us, they ought to be just up the hill where the slope leveled out after a small rise. We went over to the spot, and there were the deer looking at us with a mixture of surprise and curiosity—just the same way that the students were looking at them. The students were amazed and looked at me like I had mystical powers. They asked me, “How did you do that!?” A bit surprised myself, I pondered for a few seconds, probably with a quizzical expression on my face, and said, “I looked.”

Try: There really is no big magical trick here. Just as in a novel, where one event organically follows the next, in the book of nature that we are reading when we go outside one event organically follows the next. The deer hairs aren’t randomly sprinkled on the landscape; the deer aren’t randomly sprinkled on the landscape. When we start to actually read whole pages and chapters instead of just flipping pages and reading random words, we can connect to the flow of the story around us.

Next time you go outside, try to mentally step back and watch the flow. Everything you see, hear, and feel in this second was affected by what happened a few seconds ago. Ask yourself where you might direct your senses to see this “before” and “during.” Remember half of tracking is knowing where to look. Now, go and look.