When I was in school, like many kids I loved a snow day. I rarely got sick, but it wasn’t time off from reading and learning that I looked forward to. No, after I shoveled the driveway, I would scamper off to the woods. I was fortunate that my parent’s property backed up to Patapsco State Park. There the web of life was constantly writing for those willing to read from the pages of the Earth. While an animal will leave tracks behind regardless of if there is snow or not, a fresh layer of fluffy white snow made it easy for even a lightly trained eye to easily go out and pick up on the story.
Red foxes were one of my favorite animals to follow. Unlike deer who wandered in herds along the same trails, flowing like so many suburban commuters on their way home from the office, a fox usually was travelling solo and cut a clear trail that I could easily follow through the woods. Along this trail you could see what he had been doing fairly easily. In your mind’s eye you could play a little movie of the fox’s morning. You could see when the tracks were in a nice evenly spaced line like stitches in a piece of cloth and know the fox was flowing smoothly across the landscape, its copper colored coat puffed out against the cold keeping him warm. If it came to a stop you would see the even stitches stop and the two front paws standing side by side. You could look around and try and imagine why the fox stopped. What did it hear? What did it see. Sometimes the reason was fairly obvious, you could read from the prints that the fox had spotted prey and there would be signs of it pouncing on its meal. Sometimes you could see it had been successful and there would be a little blood stain on the snow. Sometimes there would be clues as to what the fox had caught, some feathers from a songbird, a bit of fur or the foot of a vole or a mouse.
As I followed the trails, the snow muffled my footsteps across the normally noisy fallen leaves of the forest. If I kept my eyes peeled and didn’t just fall into tunnel vision staring at the tracks, more than once I would catch up to the fox, curled up in a ball, like a last live ember in the white ashes of a campfire. The fox glowed against the white snow and gray winter tree trunks. Here the game shifted, how close could I get before he would bust me? Writing this, and knowing what I know now, I know part of it was dumb luck on my part. The winds on the backside of a winter snow storm usually would have me down wind of the sleeping foxes. These factors, the quieting of my footsteps by the snow, and the wind in my favor muted the effectiveness of the fox’s keen hearing and sense of smell, and I more than once stalked within 20 feet of the sleeping fox. The looks on their faces when they finally noticed me always tickled me; it was a mixture of shock and surprise and I like to think a hint of embarrassment that they had let a silly human catch them unawares.
Hopefully we get a few more snow days this winter. Who knows how many more years we will have them, even from my not terribly long ago youth, they have become less frequent. If we do, I hope you get to spend a morning diving into whatever little chunk of the natural world you have in your neighborhood and read a page from the lives of the animals who live there.
Happy Tracking,
Kyle