by Sylvia Linsteadt
In the darkest part of the night, I woke up smiling because of the coyote tracks. I had seen them earlier that day: a side trot, crisp in the sand at Abbott’s Lagoon. Now at 3 a.m. in a dream-haze, they became magic to me. Something about that darkest part of night, my mind tangled, unfiltered by sleep, made those tracks come to life. I was full of desire to run my fingertips along the indents her paws had left. I fell asleep again thinking of her, that single coyote and her paw-prints, as unique to her as the soles of my feet are to me. The mystery of her life—her days, the sounds of her howls—captivated me.
That first day of an animal tracking course through the Regenerative Design Institute, based in Bolinas, California, rustled up an ache in me. It rose up through my dreams. The story of the coyote’s world hooked me like the first page of a novel, only out there, the sea-salt wind damp in my hair and the dunes curving around me green with tough grasses, this story was alive. The teacher said our human minds developed while following the stories of tracks. We had to read animal tracks and imagine animal lives in order to hunt. Our minds were made for stories.
At the edge of the lagoon, our class of twelve found otter tracks: five splayed toes with sharp claws. Slide marks on the steep dune where they had played and rolled. Signs and symbols—the language of the non-human other, written right there in the sand. I tried to imagine them, what the blue water felt like on their fur, how to catch a fish with sharp teeth. The part of me that, as a child, flared with wonder at photographs in books or National Geographic films of mammals, particularly big cats, burst right up into my heart again. It was the part of me obsessed, from ages eight to ten, with the thirteen-book Redwall series, by Brian Jacques, which centered on the lives, loves and battles of woodland animals; the part of me that had yearned to be like Daine in Tamora Pierce’s The Immortals series—she could talk to animals, mind to mind, she could transform her body into a wolf, a stoat, a hawk. She could feel the world through their skins. Through the narratives of novels, I touched the storied movements of animals. I remember library books about cheetahs. I marveled at their spots, the wild beauty of their dark-rimmed eyes. I felt something close to physical pain, knowing that I would never be able to actually become a cheetah. All I wanted was to experience the savannah at a sixty-five mile per hour lope.
The coyote and the otters, the great blue heron, mule deer and seagull prints that we bent down on hands and knees to examine—our bodies folding, unconsciously, into a form of prayer—brought back that childhood ache, that wonder. After lunch, we were sent off into the dunes for twenty minutes alone. Between dune grass and low-growing lupine bushes, I saw, for what felt like the first time, the land around me full with stories. All around, all the time, the field mice and deer and egrets are hiding. For a moment, the dunes pulsed and writhed with life. As the Apache tracker Stalking Wolf told Tom Brown Jr. (the father, so to speak, of contemporary tracking schools in the U.S.), “Nature is a being larger than the sum of all creatures, and can be seen best in the flow of its interactions. In the movement of each animal, all animals move.” 1 Sitting in the dunes, the movements of all animals washed over me, and then dissipated. I spotted a deer trail through the lupine. I saw traces of mice, their runs between bushes that they use at night like mini highways. The deer hoof prints, the tiny mouse paws, looked oddly like letters. Is this where they came from, those early written signs? I felt like a little girl again, still almost convinced that at any instant, we might speak to each other, the deer and I, the otter and I, the coyote and I. Still uncertain whether or not the backyard with its rose bushes, apple tree, nasturtiums and muddy edges of lawn might contain a secret language of thorns, Monarch butterfly wing-ink (left over from the emergence from the chrysalis), splits in bark, bird chirps, that I was just on the verge of figuring out.
What I am suggesting, for the poet and storyteller in each of us, is renewed awe. A renewed sense of the magic of animals. Retrieving that childhood wonder, that sense of uncertainty as to where, exactly, your edges end and theirs begin. This is what tracking teaches me—that all around us, the lives of animals flap, ripple, hiss. Their tracks are everywhere, the places they scratch, and sleep, and shit: all of these are runes, to be pieced together into a story. Under our feet, the tunnels and burrows of moles, gophers, rabbits, voles, badgers, twine in massive labyrinths. The birds, the mice, bobcats and deer have become adept at avoiding us; at hiding. But their lives brush at the edges, and right in the midst, of ours. Learning to read their signs on the land holds all the wonder of learning to read letters, and words, and then stories, for the first time. Let’s work backwards, from books to animal tracks, from the world of human languages into the world of animal signs. In the words of one of my favorite writers and thinkers, David Abram:
These letters I print across the page, the scratches and scrawls you now focus upon, trailing off across the white surface, are hardly different from the footprints of prey left in snow. We read these traces with organs honed over millennia by our tribal ancestors, moving instinctively from one track to the next, picking up the trail afresh whenever it leaves off, hunting the meaning, which would be the meeting with the [animal] Other. 2
Even a set of three paired coyote tracks can tell you a story, if you know the words. She is in a side-trot, which means she is traveling comfortably over the dunes. She is relaxed, heading east toward the lagoon. She is medium-sized, and was here recently. Maybe she is watching us. Through the study of the rune-like traces she leaves in the sand, we can come closer to the narrative of her life.
I believe it is incumbent upon us as writers to start telling again the stories of the animals who live all around us. Our lives are enmeshed, eternally, with theirs. Our letters, pictographs, earliest artworks, are drawn from their etchings on the land. Our human stories and woes and loves exist between theirs. By valuing their lives below ours, at the outskirts of ours, what kind of world have we created?
It is vital, as writers, that our words begin again to refer to more than just our human worlds: “the images in early writing systems draw their significance not just from ourselves but from sun, moon, vulture, jaguar, lightning—from all those sensorial, never strictly human powers, of which the written images were a kind of track or tracing.”3 May our words attempt to track the unruly tangle of lives, human and non-human, that entwine, inextricably, all around us. May they seek to track that flow of interactions which comprises all of Nature—including, but not limited to, our cities, our suburbs, our freeways, our very human loves and despairs.
What creatures live in your midst? Have they left you any tracks, the first letters you will learn in a wild new language? Or perhaps the first letters in the oldest language of all? What are the stories of their lives and how do they touch yours?
Just the other day, I was walking in Tilden Park with a friend from my tracking class. As we ambled down the wide fire-road to Jewel Lake, we got caught up in conversation about gray foxes. We told each other stories of our encounters—how their delicate, black-streaked faces struck us with an almost otherworldly beauty. She was in Colorado when she encountered a gray fox. I was six or seven, staring out the back door of my childhood home in Mill Valley at a silver form darting through the dewy grass. Both of us never forgot. A little later, crawling under a wooden bridge, we found a series of small tracks in the mud. The toe pads pointed gracefully at the tips, and we spotted the telltale claw marks, which distinguished the prints from a cat’s. About an inch and a half long. Emerging from tangled brambles and willows. Gray fox territory. He had emerged from our stories, or perhaps he had called up our stories. His graceful paw prints each a word that led us into his world, and into ourselves.
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1 Brown Jr., Tom and Watkins, William Jon, The Tracker: the True Story of Tom Brown Jr., as told to William Jon Watkins (New York: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1978), 14.
2 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Random House, Inc., 1996), 96.
3 Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 132.
