The path is made by walking
During our final tracking walk here at the Saari Residence in Finland, I was asked if I ever think about my own tracks. The question made me laugh - how strange to spend so much time looking for signs of animals and plants and yet not give much thought to my own trail. It’s easy to forget that we are always being beheld by an observant world. Deer expert Richard Pryor makes a good point when he states that wild animals ‘know more about us than we know about them, that’s why we so rarely see them.’
An important aspect of tracking is thinking and moving like the creature you seek. Four-legged creatures do not walk as we do, and in order to understand their tracks you have to re-imagine the world from a different point of view. One of the first tracking techniques I was taught is known as the fox-walk. A simple adjustment, it asks you to move very slowly with toe rather than heel first. Used as a stalking method that allows you to get closer to wary animals, it gives more control to the body and helps avoid stepping on noisy sticks or leaves. Imagine comically creeping up to scare someone from behind and you get the picture.
Some animals move in such a way that their tracks appear as a single line of footsteps. Foxes do this, as do cats and wolves - economical hunters that move through their environment with fluid grace. These prints are known as a ‘direct register’ - the back paw fitting neatly into the front. Picture a model on a catwalk and the sinuous trail they leave in their wake.
Unless we are in danger, humans rarely think about how we move through, and are witnessed, by the animal world. You can get a sense of how heavy and loud we are by putting your hands over your ears and walking with your normal tread. What might seem a light-footed stroll takes a vibratory toll when we walk or run. On a city street or paved road, there is little cause to think about our weight and gait. But when we move onto earth, and adopt a tracking mode of attention, the way we are received by the ground, and perceived by animals, becomes more significant.
Many cultures have found extraordinary ways to embody the animals they hunt, such as the Yukaghirs of the Russian Far East, who cover their skis in fur so they slide through the snow in a way that sounds like a horny female elk. The human-following-the-animal-who-leads brings us into dynamic relationship and there is a curious irony that hunters often surrender their human identity and think, and move, like their prey. What might seem like a form of play is, for many hunting cultures, integral to survival.
Moving like an animal softens the borders of self, expanding our understanding of life and with it, our ability to enter into worlds beyond the human. As anthropologist Rane Willerslev, who lived with the Yukaghirs for many years, notes. It ‘is not just some outward mimicry, simulation, or aping, but instead something deeper and more intense, that is, the ability to put oneself in the place of another, reproducing in one’s own imagination the other’s perspective.’
And this empathic imagining doesn’t have to extend only to animals. We can also think about it from the ground’s point of view, or a plant’s. What is it like to be walked and laid upon, or cut and ploughed? How might frost feel, drought or the coming of rain? This isn’t just cerebral imagining, but one borne of thinking with our bodies. I recently read about an old farming practice where the spring planting of seeds was decided by pulling down trousers and sitting with bare buttocks on the soil. If it was warm enough to sit comfortably for ten minutes, then the earth was ready to receive the seeds.
This somatic engagement with our environment can also give us deeper insight into the human spaces we inhabit. At a recent tracking walk, someone spoke about a video game that gives the gamer the experience of being a feral animal in the city. ‘Doing these walks and playing this game, has got me thinking for the first time about how I move” I was told, “I realise that our cities are laid out entirely for humans, and now when I think about navigating as a fox or cat, I notice unforeseen blocks but also new pathways and interesting opportunities. It’s changed the way I see the city and think about my body.’
What would happen, I wonder, if we spent some more time thinking about our human challenges from a wilder point of view. Might we see the world we’ve created from a different perspective? What could a more sensitive engagement with the ground and those who leave their mark upon it, offer us? Perhaps by losing contact with the practices of tracking we are missing a mimetic trick.
As I reflect on the marks I leave behind me this month, I’ll try and remember that the earth and its creatures are watching and listening.