I should know it was made by a Leopard. If I found a Leopard trail in Colorado, I should be sure I had found the mark of a Cougar or Mountain Lion. A Wolf track on Broadway would doubtless be the work of a very large Dog; and a Saint Bernard’s footmark in the Rockies, twenty miles from anywhere, would most likely turn out to be the happen-so imprint of a Gray Wolf’s foot. To be sure of the marks, then, one should know all the animals that belong to the neighborhood.
The last letter I had from good old Dan Beard contained the photo of a track in the snow that he recently found under his bedroom window at Suffern, New York. He asked me to identify it for him.
The track was catlike in type, but too big for a House Cat. Therefore, it was either a Lynx or a Bobcat sign. It was not clear enough to show the exact style of the creature’s foot; but locality settled it. Bobcats are the usual kind of Lynx in southern New York; the Canada Lynx is now unknown in the region. So we concluded that the geographical placement definitely decided it to be a Bobcat or Bay Lynx that had peered by night into Uncle Dan’s window as he lay calmly asleep.
There is yet another feature of trail study that gives it exceptional value: it is an account of the creature pursuing its everyday life. If you succeed in getting a glimpse of a Fox or a Hare in the woods, the chances are a hundred to one that it was aware of your presence first. Animals are much cleverer than are we at this sort of thing; and if they do not actually sight or scent you, they observe, and are warned by, the actions of some other creatures that did sense you, and so cease their occupations to steal away or hide.
Mountain Lion tracks
But the snow story will tell of the life that the animal ordinarily leads—its method of searching for food, its kinds of food, the help it gets from its friends, or sometimes from its rivals; and thus offers an insight into its home life that is scarcely to be attained in any other way. The trailer has the key to a new storehouse of nature’s secrets, another of the Sibylline Books is opened to his view; his fairy godmother has, indeed, conferred on him a wonderful gift in opening his eyes to the footwriting of the trail. It is like giving sight to the blind man, like the rolling away of fogs from a mountain view; and the trailer comes closer than do others to the heart of the ancient woods.
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