Feb 25, 2022: Tracking

(May the people of Ukraine be safe, be healthy, be not alone, and live in peace. Namaste.)

As a kid, I got into exploring the area around our home on Lee’s Hill Road in New Vernon, NJ. If I wasn’t being a wild horse, I was a detective/spy: Nancy Drew or, later, Ilya Kuryakin from The Man from Uncle. Our place backed onto a wonderful Bridle Trail (www.BridlePath.org) that went for many miles with numerous forks and side trails. In those years (we’re talking 1961-1967), no one cared for the trails, and I rarely saw anyone else on them, but some of those trails had been there since the Revolutionary War days, maybe longer, and were in amazingly good shape.

I spent thousands of hours on them, and got to know dozens of miles. One trail wound to the Great Swamp (https://www.fws.gov/refuge/great_swamp/). Another took me past our neighbor’s dairy barns (where the farmer sometimes let me help milk), and yet another led me to someone’s huge back pasture filled with miniature Shetland ponies. I would often climb on one and gallop across the meadow, my feet nearly dragging on the ground. I followed the wild animals who called the trail their home, and began learning to track them: raccoons, skunks, deer, feral cats, woodchucks, opossums, fox, and once a bear.

But this is the story that relates to today’s hike:

Back then I read everything I could about tracking, and started my lifelong “hobby” of following things in the woods. The mystery of how wild animals lived never failed to fascinate me. One day, however, maybe in 1967, I came across the footprints of 2 men, something I’d never seen, both sets large and smooth-soled, sliding around in the 1″ of snow covering the ground. I followed the prints backwards, and they ended at a sedan parked in the woods behind the school down the hill from our house. Strange place to park a car, hidden away. I decided to see where the tracks led, and followed them back into the woods. It took over an hour, but they eventually led to an abandoned and dilapidated old farmhouse that sat on a hillock just inside the Great Swamp. The land around it was wet and smelly, dense and dark. Any road that led to it was long eaten up by the marsh. I knew of the house but had never gone close to the place as it looked dangerous. The Great Swamp was notoriously scary, with stories of quicksand and monsters hidden deep within. Not even Freddie, who was older and lived across the road, would go there. Today, there was smoke curling from the chimney and 2 sets of shoe prints that went straight into the half-hanging door. I could hear men arguing. I was totally spooked, and turned and ran home.

Once home, I told my parents what I’d seen, and they called the police. I remember my mom thinking they might be thieves she’d heard about on the news who had recently robbed several stores. 2 cops came by the house, and I told them what I’d seen. They asked if I could show them the trail and tracks, so I did. The trail was a couple hundred feet away from our house, and the footprints joined it while still adjacent to our property. I ended up leading several officers all the way to the abandoned house in the Great Swamp because they couldn’t figure out where it was on their maps, or find any road leading to it. It was getting dark. Once we got there and the police announced themselves, the 2 men surrendered right away. I was walked home by one of the officers with a flashlight and didn’t really see the arrest. (In my mind, though, it was a big shoot-out, like Bonnie & Clyde. I can even hear the guns blazing.) They indeed WERE burglars on the run; cold, tired, hungry and ready to give it up. My mom had nailed it.

I went to the station later and got a medal from the cops for helping them out, and my love of the mysteries of tracking became cemented in my psyche forever. I had that medal until it burned up in our house fire in 1979.

All of that is to say: today, I followed the tracks of 2 mountain lions. I saw them at the top of our driveway, and followed them down canyon on the road for a mile. It was the same mother and cub tracks we’ve been seeing all winter, but this time they were on the trail of several deer. Their tracks covered the deer prints. Neither set had drifted, melted, or collapsed, so they were from early this morning, after the wind stopped, but before our neighbor left for work at 4:30am. Interestingly, off to the side were the even more recent tracks of a lone coyote. (A couple of places his tracks covered theirs, that’s how I knew it was later). He was following them, they were following the deer. Was the coyote hoping for some leftovers? The smaller cat headed off-road several times, probably to check out possible rabbit or squirrel hideaways, but the big one never wavered and neither did Wily Coyote. After a mile, deer, cats, and coyote moved into the woods and steeper slopes of the valley, and Clair and I turned around. She had carefully and seriously sniffed each and every track. I wonder how the story played out for the deer. Where do those cats sleep? Did they at least catch a mouse or two? How about the coyote, did he evade them? The mystery never fails to astonish, just like it did when I was a kid.