AT HOME IN THE WILDERNESS: ANIMAL TRACKING

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The canines include dogs, foxes, coyotes, and wolves. These animals' front and rear feet also have four toes each, but the claw marks are typically visible in canine prints. The fox is the one member of the dog family that directly registers when it walks. All other canines show indirect register. . . meaning that the back foot's mark falls slightly behind and to one side of the front print.

The weasel family consists of martens, fishers, minks, ferrets, skunks, otters, badgers, wolverines, and (of course) weasels. Prints made by these mammals show five toes up front and in the rear, and usually reveal sharp claws. Many members of the weasel family also have very pungent scent glands and leave an acrid smell wherever they go (the skunk is merely the most famous example). So use your nose when you investigate unknown tracks or animal signs.

Raccoons, opossums, andbears are not in the weasel family, but they do have similar clawed five-and-five tracks. All three of these animals, though, have very flat, humanlike feet . . . and the opossum has distinctively opposing thumbs that are used for climbing.

The rodents include such gnawing mammals as voles, mice, rats, squirrels, chipmunks, gophers, porcupines, muskrats, and beavers. Their tracks show four toes on each front foot and five on the rear, with three exceptions: Beaver and muskrat leave five-and-five prints some of the time (often the fifth toes don't make visible impressions), while aplodont — or mountain beaver — marks show five and five all the time.

Pika,hare, and rabbit family members are not rodents, in spite of their chisellike gnawing teeth and often similar size. Their tracks show four toes up front and in the rear, and generally (except for those of the marsh rabbit and the pika) the back feet leave impressions that are at least twice the size of those made by the front paws.

The hoofed animals are easily recognized by their one- or two-part heart-shaped prints. This group includes pronghorns, goats, sheep, deer, caribou, musk ox, moose, reindeer, and elk.

TRACK PATTERNS

Once you've learned the tracking alphabet, you'll be ready to start reading the "words" . . . that is, the simple statements made by animals as they pass over the landscape. As you'll soon discover, tracking involves more than merely following an animal from one place to another. When done well, it's a process of answering a continuing series of questions about a beast and its interactions with the environment. It's important, then, to familiarize yourself with the various track patterns of animals, in order to read the thoughts and intentions that might have inspired the movements recorded on the ground.

Animals are no more eager to wear themselves out needlessly than humans are, so they usually walk or shuffle from one place to another. Therefore, the vast majority of the tracks you find will indicate an animal moving at or near its slowest gait. And there are four distinctive walking patterns that you'll have to learn to recognize and to link up with specific families of creatures. Once you're familiar with them, you'll be able to see how these same gaits are used by different animals at different speeds.

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