Tracks are an afterimage of life’s passage. Walk out into the woods after a fresh snow and you will see, recorded in paw and hoofprints, the movement of animals through the landscape. All the furtive passages that take place in the night or in the first gray light of morning are frozen in place, waiting for someone to wander along and appreciate them.
Lately this has been one of my son’s chief interests. On a recent afternoon there had been some snow and we both had time, so we put on our winter gear and headed out to see what we could find. We started in the gorge, where the stream that bisects the farm has carved a gentle canyon through the hemlock woods. At its mouth there was a long used deer trail, but deer tracks are so ubiquitous that only rabbit prints are less notable. The really interesting stuff lay deeper in the woods.
There are two reasons for this. First, the way the land rises up around the stream coupled with the dense overstory means the snow falls evenly and does not blow around everywhere, which often turns interesting prints into vague concavities. Second, with the steady cold a thick layer of ice has formed atop the stream, transforming it into a sort of road for wildlife.
We followed coyote tracks for a couple hundred yards as they made their way up this frozen course, wandering a little from side to side but always moving forward. Other tracks overlapped and separated. We saw clear evidence of a squirrel and a fox, and a few older, more obscure imprints that I think were made by another coyote but which my son optimistically decided suggested the presence of a bobcat. I understood the impulse to round up. To find evidence of something rare is to share in its strange, secret life.
But even the commonplace can be infused with a bit of wonder when seen from a radically different perspective. Out in the field a pigeon’s tracks told a perfect little story. They appeared as if from nowhere, strutted to a protruding clump of grass and then in circles where a burdock plant had strewn its hard, black seeds across the snow. Another few steps followed, and then a faint tracery of wings where the full-bellied bird took flight.
Up above the old wood pile we found a grimmer tale. A large mole had plowed a crazed, spiraling furrow through the snow. I couldn’t guess why it emerged or what it was looking for, but the fox tracks that intersected its panicked course made the ending clear.
Just this morning I spotted what I guess was the same fox. It seems to have made a den in the wood pile where, five or six years ago, a vixen raised her kits. Given the lifespan of wild foxes it’s unlikely this is the same one, but perhaps it’s a daughter, returned home to raise her own children.
I don’t think we have to lose our interest in the everyday sublime as we grow older, but it certainly becomes easier to ignore. While I find all of this interesting without prompting, more than anything else I am thankful to view it through my son’s eyes. Even deer tracks entrance him, and his enthusiasm for each new discovery is infectious. There are some things children should not see and other things they simply can’t, but when it comes to appreciating the world as it really is on a snowy, January afternoon, their sight could not be keener.
