Field & ForestYear round
Tracking Walks
Reading last night in the snow
Fresh snow turns a forest into a written record of the previous night, and the whole skill is reading it. Fox trots in a near-perfect straight line. Hare leaves the big feet in front. A lynx puts its back foot exactly into the print of the front one, so a lynx trail is a single line of round prints with no claw marks.
Wolverine is the prize and you will almost certainly not see one. Its track is enormous, five toes, and it goes uphill in a straight line because it can.
You are tracking, not stalking. The animal passed hours ago. What you are doing is reconstructing what happened here at three in the morning, which is a slower and more absorbing thing than it sounds.