|  I haven’t seen a mountain lion since that evening, but the experience remains shining in my memory. I want my children to have the opportunity for that kind of experience. I want my friends to have it. I want even our enemies to have it – they need it most. And someday, possibly, one of our childern’s children will discover how to get close enough to that mountain lion to shake paws with it, to embrace and caress it, maybe even teach it something, and to learn what the lion has to teach us.
— Edward Abbey Tracking animals is an important – sometimes even critical – wilderness skill. If you are hunting, you need to follow and find your animal, or know where to wait for your animal to come to you; if you are trapping, you need to set your traps where the animals actually go. But to many people, tracking is more than that. It is a way of developing awareness of the environment, awareness of onself, and, ultimately, a spiritual contact with the wilderness. Most such programs ultimately derive from the tracking school and the teachings of the sometimes controversial Tom Brown, Jr., who claims to pass on to his students both the tracking techniques and the nature spirituality of an Apache scout named Stalking Wolf. Other trackers, such as Paul Rezendes, make similar claims for the relationship between tracking and the ability “to move away from the tiny perspective of thought and self into all-encompassing awareness.”
 Tom Brown, Jr., Tom Brown's Field Guide to Nature Observation and Tracking (New York NY: Berkley Publishing, 1989), ISBN 0-42509-966-0. The most remarkable stories have been circulated about Tom Brown's tracking abilities, which he claims to have learned from an elderly Apache named Stalking Wolf in New Jersey, purportedly a member of a secret society of trackers who had refined tracking to a disciplined science and art form, were highly attuned to nature, and therefore had achieved enhanced perception and true enlightenment. ”Tracking was their doorway to the universe,” he writes, ”where they could know all things through the tracks.” Putting all that to one side, this is, in fact, an excellent book on the practice of tracking. The illustrations are mediocre at best; you should turn to other books for better drawings or photographs. But the discussions of stillness, approach, seeing, movement, and camouflage are all first-rate, as are the nature awareness exercises, and the discussions of empathy and humility and the vision quest. There are excellent discussion of animal highways and signs, reading pressure releases, observing how animal tracks age with time and weather, and the practical process of tracking.
 Tom Brown, Jr., The Science and Art of Tracking: Nature's Path to Spiritual Discovery (New York NY: Penguin Putnam, 1999), ISBN 0-42515-772-5. After many years of teaching, Tom Brown has released a book that claims to fully explain the sometimes mysterious pressure releases that are the basis of his advanced tracking classes. Once again, the author ties his tracking skills to the ancient teachings of the mysterious Stalking Wolf. More important, to me, are the detailed explanations of reading the hundreds of pressure releases he describes, by which, the book claims, you can tell the direction changes of an animal or human, slowing or stopping, and major shifts in body weight; define the exact speed of a human or animal with incredible accuracy, and define the secondary efforts needed to maintain that speed; tell exactly what way the head is being held and in what direction the animal or human was looking when the track was made; tell how full the animal's stomach was; and determine what the animal was thinking and feeling at the time. That is pretty heady stuff, and beyond my abilities, so I asked an experienced mantracker about it – someone who teaches tracking to military and law enforcement agencies. He said, modestly, that the author was clearly able to see things that he could not. Putting such controversy aside, the book remains fascinating. Some of the pressure releases are clear, and even I can see them in a sandbox, however hard they may be to see on an actual trail; others are mysterious. The value of the book lies in its detailed descriptions of what you can see if you try and practice hard enough; and that is worth learning.
 Louise Richardson Forrest, Field Guide to Tracking Animals in Snow (Harrisburg PA: Stackpole Books, 1988), ISBN 0-8117-2240-6. (Mechanicsburg PA: Stackpole Books, 1988), ISBN 0-81172-240-6. Despite its title, this is more of a general handbook for tracking than a specialized treatise, although there is a brief section on preserving tracks that have been made in snow. The book is organized by animal orders – rodents , carnivores, even-toed ungulates; and then by animal family – weasels, bears, and so on. The illustrations are excellent: each animal has a two-page spread, with a range map, picture of the animal, drawing of the scat, picture of a typical trail, often with the den or nest, and pictures of the footprint and typical gait. The text sets out a description of the animal, and its habits, track patterns, and associated signs. There is little on animal behavior. If you like the drawings and the layout, this makes an excellent handy identification guide, but not much more.
 James Halfpenny, A Field Guide to Mammal Tracking in North America (Boulder CO: Johnson Books, 1986), ISBN 0-93347-298-6. After an excellent brief introduction on the basics of tracking, the book sets out basic track information by animal order and family, with illustrations of the animal, tracks, and gait patterns, and often – and this is very helpful – drawings of the bottoms of the animal’s feet. This book discusses what the author considers the three main areas of tracking – footprints and identification, gaits and trails, and reading stories. It explains how gait trail patterns are made, and how they change with speed and body position. Most important, the book emphasizes reading the stories contained in trails. As the author says, ”Hidden in the trails of mammals are the stories of their lives.” There is a lengthy section on reading trails, and the book provides pictorial practice stories, with clues, for the reader to decipher what the animal has been doing. This is a practical, thorough, well-organized, and fully illustrated book.
 Len McDougall, The Complete Tracker (New York NY: Fine Communications, 1999), ISBN 1-56731-326-4. The words are a lot better than the pictures in this handbook. The sketches of tracks, trails, and scat are unclear, and the photographs are a murky black and white. Where the book succeeds is in its lucid discussions of the animals and their behavior, including their habitat and range, foods, mating habits, and seasonal habits. The book also thoroughly discusses the tracks, scat, and sign of each animal, and – uniquely – their vocalizations. This is an excellent book to read before you go out tracking, and I recommend doing so; there are other manuals, with better illustrations, that you can take with you.
 Olaus Johan Murie, Animal Tracks (New York NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), ISBN 0-39591-093-5. This is a standard text, part of the excellent Peterson Field Guides series, with black-and-white sketches of animals, tracks, and scat, and brief descriptions of every North American mammal you ever heard of, including shrews and bats. It is clear that the book, in order to keep at field guide size, has decided to sacrifice detail for comprehensiveness. Like most books of this type, too, there is an initial key to tracks that then points to the animal description later in the book; this means, of course, that if you are having trouble identifying the track in the first place, you are doing a lot of flipping back and forth in the book. Thus the book is an excellent resource for a relatively experienced tracker, who is trying to distinguish, say, a red squirrel track from a gray squirrel track, rather than for a beginner. Along these lines, too, a virtue of the book is that it occasionally – and certainly not often enough – illustrates tracks made in different media, such as firm wet mud, dust, and wet snow, and illustrates tracks made by the same animal moving at different speeds.
 Paul Rezendes, Tracking and the Art of Seeing: How to Read Animal Tracks and Sign (New York NY: HarperCollins, 1999), ISBN 0-06273-524-1. This is a beautiful book. The author claims a colorful background – a leader of two motorcycle gangs, a devout Catholic and a spiritual ascetic, teaching hatha yoga and founding a Jain ashram. More important, he is an internationally recognized wildlife photographer, and his remarkable photographs, in color and black and white, set this book apart from other tracking books. The book provides information on each animal and its behavior, often with illustrative anecdotes from the author's field experience, its tracks, trail patterns, scat, and signs. In fact, the discussion of animal signs is probably the most extensive of any of the tracking books. There are photographs of the animal, its tracks and trails, its scat, the bottoms of its feet, its burrow or lodge, and other signs. There are also long and often fascinating discussions on the animal itself, often relating the animal to what Rezendes call the “wild within” – the meaning of love illustrated by a pair of loons, or of spiritual connection by a moose. There is a brief and unobtrusive introductory section on tracking as the “art of seeing,” in which the author expresses his philosophy of tracking. ”The tracker in the forest,” he says, ”is in love with his surroundings. In nature, we are open to a larger perspective of self. We learn to walk carefully on this planet.”
 Richard P. Smith, Animal Tracks and Signs of North America (Harrisburg PA: 1982), ISBN 0-81172-124-8. The author of this book is an outdoor writer and photographer who has written for such publications as The American Hunter, Gun World, and Trout Fisherman's Digest. The virtue of this book is supposed to be the black-and-white photographs of the animals, tracks, and sign taken by the author, instead of the pencil sketches found in other books. Unfortunately, the photographs are sabotaged by poor production, and they are dark and difficult to read. The book has an idiosyncratic arrangement of animals, sometimes by family (”Cats”), sometimes by habitat (”Aquatic Mammals,” ”More Tree Dwellers”), sometimes by size (”Small Mammals”), and sometimes by morphology (”Other Hooved Animals”). There is no key, so you cannot look up an animal by its track; you have to know what the track is before you can find a photograph of it. There are brief discussions on animal and bird sounds, tracking techniques, aging tracks, and making photographs and plaster casts of tracks.
 Donald Stokes, Stokes Guide to Animal Tracking and Behavior (New York NY: Little, Brown & Company, 1987), ISBN 0-31681-734-1. This book is difficult to categorize. It is really two books – a relatively brief book on tracking and a lengthier book on natural history. More than three-quarters of the book is taken up by eight- or nine-page essays on the lives and behavior of twenty-eight different North American mammals – the black bear (but not the grizzly), the fisher and mink (but not the wolverine), the raccoon (but not the ringtail). Despite the limited coverage, the brief essays are excellent, covering range and distribution, method of locomotion, food and feeding habits, and family life. The shorter tracking section contains chapters on tracks, scat, and signs, which are themselves excellent brief essays, especially the comprehensive and well-illustrated guide to animal sign, which groups signs under such heading as injury to trees and shrubs, digging and tunneling in the ground, constructed nests, disturbed vegetation, and food remains and caches. In fact, the discussion is even more detailed, distinguishing scratched or peeled bark from bark that has been scraped off or chewed off, and twigs on the ground from twigs with their ends chewed off.
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