How Native Americans Read A Track — The Signs Most People Walk Right Past

Most folks find a print in the mud, stand over it, and tell you three things about it. What made it, which way it went, and how old it is. And that third one, near everybody is guessing at, including the ones who sound the surest. Because the thing that tells you a track's age isn't in the print at all, and it isn't in the ground around it either. It's something you have to do, it takes about four seconds, and once somebody shows it to you, you'll never read a track any other way again. I hold that one back until the end of this video, and it's worth waiting for. The way I was taught it, a print is one letter and the sign is the sentence. So in this one I cover where to look in the first place, the ground that actually keeps records; the four things that tell you which way an animal was traveling, and almost none of them are in the outline of the print — the spray, the wall, the drag and the pressure ridge; how spacing tells you whether that animal was calm or leaving in a hurry, and what it means when the prints bunch up; the honest way to read age, from the dark turned soil to the dew to a spider's web strung across a trail; and the sign you read on hard ground where no print will ever form — bent grass, a rolled pebble, a bright wet break in a twig, hair caught on bark. I say the hard parts plain too. The failure mode of tracking is confident storytelling, and the best trackers I ever knew were the ones most willing to say I don't know. Following an animal is not the same as approaching one — leave the big ones, the mothers and the hurt ones alone. And know your local law on where you're allowed to walk. Tell me down in the comments what the first track you ever learned to name was, and who showed it to you.