SIX SENTENCE SATURDAY: A Smidgen More on Tracking by Marc Cameron

        They call it Biting the Bone.
     
        On a manhunt for a particularly bad outlaw in the Lower 48 several years ago, we flew over a deserted camp a couple of miles off the road. The pilot set down nearby so we could search for any sign that might connect the spot to our fugitive and provide us direction of travel. Among other things, we found that the camp's previous occupants had eaten a can of peaches and a roasted sage hen. What was left of the bird’s drumsticks showed that the campers had not only eaten every last shred of meat off the bones, but gnawed the little round nubbins of cartilage off both ends, crunching through bone to get at the marrow.
     
         I dated a girl in high school who ate chicken this way. In fact, I do believe she preferred chicken bone to chicken meat. But, apart from her, I’ve not met many well-fed Americans who can get past all the chewy tendons and connective tissue on a chicken leg, let alone go to the trouble of biting the bone. I have, however, known many people from Mexico and South America who were raised doing just that.
     
        Again, I’m drawing generalities here, but we’re giving it our best guess when we track. In this particular case the guess that this camp didn’t belong to our fugitive, but to a couple of possibly undocumented visitors from south-of-the-border, was bolstered when we found remnants of red chili peppers in some poop.

        I know, ‘again with the poop’. I warned you that would be part of this tracking business.

As we saw in my last post, there is a heck of a lot more to cutting sign than looking at footprints. Good trackers are good naturalists. I enjoyed Chuck Tyrell’s post on survival skills. Knowing what plants are and are not native to an area is stuff every good tracker puts in his or her medicine bag for later use.

In the pucker brush. I'm working rear guard on the right.

Remember, the sign tells us a story.

We have a saying in Alaska: Step out of the RV and into the food chain.
Up here, wilderness work with the US Marshals carried the added wrinkle of not being at the top of that food chain—whether we happened to be tracking a felon or looking for a hunter who had lost his way. The knowledge that what started as the search for a missing hiker might well turn into the scene of a bear mauling—and at worst, a grizzly guarding a fresh kill—made us pay special attention to the story on the ground as it unfolded before us.

Here’s a sample scenario that happened to us more than once:

--Pucker brush lines either side of the trail. (Pucker brush is named from the reaction of a certain muscle group in the body, caused by the high probability big grizzly bears are hiding in that brush.)
--On the trail we find the distinct impression of a Danner boot left by the person we are tracking--with lots of 'kick' debris forward of the toe.
--Over the front half of the boot track, driven deep into the mud, is the hind print of a large grizzly bear. --It measures eleven inches from heel to toe with another two inch span to the claw marks.
--The ground is saturated from nearby streams and water seeps into the track while we stand there.

Note the "kicked" debris in front of each track. This is also an indicator the quarry is moving forward (not walking backward to confuse us)

So, from this we learned:

Our quarry had passed this way, walking at a good pace.
A large grizzly was somewhere in between us and our quarry.
Said grizzly had stepped in the boot print recently enough that muddy water was still draining into its track. 

A simple story but it’s irreplaceable training at reading sign—and keeping our eyes peeled for big toothy critters.

Moose track over a boot print, water slowly seeping in. Note the 'kick' debris in front.

As I’ve said before, my publisher has me on hiatus from Westerns for a bit--writing Adventure/Thrillers. I figured I’d choose a Western flavored scene (though I’m following others that have gone before me, putting in a few more than six sentences.)

So, from NATIONAL SECURITY, the first book in the Jericho Quinn series (Nov 2011), here’s Air Force OSI Agent Quinn and his new friend, Marine Gunny and Cajun, Jacques Thibodaux, on the night they are drawn into their new assignment.


     “Somethin’s eatin’ you, ain’t it, Chair Force?”
     “I was just thinking,” Quinn said. “You know I grew up in Alaska, right?”
     “I always did want to see that place…in the summer, mind you.”
     “The year before I left for the Academy,” Quinn said. “I went on this big deer hunt with my brother and dad out on Kodiak.”
     Thibodaux raised an eyebrow. “There’s some mighty big bears on that island, beb.” 
     Quinn put his hands in his pockets against the chill. “It was dark and cool…just like tonight. We took three Sitka blacktail deer about dusk and were covered with blood by the time we headed back to camp with the meat in our packs.”
     Thibodaux gave a low whistle. “Not a good way to be in bear country.”
    “You’re telling me,” Quinn said, remembering the event as if it had just happened. “On the way back, we came around a corner in the alder brush next to a little mountain stream and there was this live salmon lying in the middle of the trail. Its skin had been peeled off right before we happened along and it was still flopping around in the mud--with some pretty serious teeth marks in its tail. The bear was nearby and pissed, thrashing in the alders, close enough we could smell him. No doubt he wanted to get back to his meal of freshly skinned salmon…”
     “You feel that way now?” Thibodaux asked. “Like a hunter covered with blood in the middle of bear country?”
    “Nope.” Quinn sighed, walking toward the darkened brick house. “I feel like the fish.” 

Marc Cameron is a retired Chief Deputy US Marshal and 29-year law enforcement veteran. His short stories have appeared in BOYS’ LIFE Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post. He has published nine novels, six of them Westerns (several as a ghost writer and two under his pen name, Mark Henry).  His present Jericho Quinn series—NATIONAL SECURITY, ACT OF TERROR and STATE OF EMERGENCY (available in April 2013)— features an adventure motorcyclist, Air Force OSI agent and renaissance man who spends his days sorting out his life and kicking terrorist butt.   Marc lives in Alaska with his beautiful bride and BMW motorcycle.
Visit him at:

www.marccameronbooks.com

http://www.facebook.com/MarcCameronAuthor

SIGNS OF LIFE: THE ART OF TRACKING by Marc Cameron

When my bride puts a dab of Dioressence on her neck, it's a sure bet that she feels amorous. Not that she has to wear it to feel that way, but when she does…she does. It’s a little sign that I’ve learned to notice after thirty years of marriage. 

But we’re not here to discuss perfumes.

I’m supposed to talk writing—Western writing.

So, I thought I’d touch a bit on the art and science of recognizing sign—or tracking.

As a deputy marshal, one of my primary duties was man-hunting. Even in the age of iPhones and satellites, we law enforcement types still resort to tracking in one way or another nearly every day. Crime Scene Investigators are doing little more than looking for and analyzing sign. A patrol officer walking up on a car in the middle of the dark night has his or her eyes peeled for anything out of the ordinary. One of my best friends followed tiny nicks and scratches across nearly two miles of glaze ice to locate our fugitive—and the largest marijuana grow on record in Alaska.  I once helped to find a missing sheep hunter by backtracking from where the Troopers had last seen him (where he had shot his sheep) in order to find his high-mountain camp and give the other searchers a place to start.

Me with some of my team around 2001

Good trackers make it a habit to observe and study their surroundings. They see, hear, feel or smell the things left behind by the person or animal they want to follow.  I can tell from his blogs that Jim Griffin knows horses. I’ve seen photos of him riding on the beach and I’ll bet he could look at a line of tracks in the sand and know whether the horse that left it was walking, trotting or at the lope.  I worked as a horseshoer for quite a few of my younger years and got up-close and personal with many a hoof. I believe that learning how the shape and health of a foot translates into an animal’s gait made me a better tracker. The body mechanics are different, but much of the science translates to man-tracking as well as horses.

With my friend, Ty Cunningham, tracking along the Virgin River in Arizona

Knowing the weather can help determine the age of sign. Humidity and temperature make the ground and greenery react in a given way over a given time—and trackers use that knowledge to figure out how long it’s been since our quarry has passed before us.  When my kids were growing up, they had to endure many a walk where I broke various shrubs and branches, stepped on leaves and grass—and then checked the damage over a period of days to see how it aged in the rain or sun or snow.

When tracking a human, I’m not only looking at the footprint, but stride (length), straddle (width), and pitch (angle) of the prints against a line in the direction of travel.  A dragging foot can indicate injury or fatigue. When someone is becoming hypothermic, they tend to slap their feet flat against the ground instead of landing heel to toe—we call it clown-walking.

The tracks themselves can tell us a lot, but we don’t just depend on footprints. We look at any sign the quarry leaves behind: litter, scat (IE poop) and other impressions in the ground and vegetation—anything and everything that can add to the story that leads us down the trail.
I once found a band-aid wrapper than let me know the two lost girls I was tracking still had the mental wherewithal to take care of themselves.
Dark urine in the snow means the person we're tracking is likely running low on water, or at least not drinking enough.

In one of my Mark Henry Westerns, O’Shannon points out that men, when doing their business in the woods, tend to leave said business in a rounded mound. A woman, however, generally shy and uncomfortable at being so exposed, tends to look back and forth over her shoulders many times during the process, forming a sort of half moon of ‘leavings’.  A generality to be sure, and likely more than you wanted to know, but it’s that sort of tidbit I think readers enjoy.

With a team in Southeast, Alaska, tracking a guy who chopped off another man's head with a splitting maul.  We'd just found him and those are his tracks left when the local authorities took him off the skiff.

When I teach tracking basics here in Alaska, I like to start students out in the snow. The tracks themselves are easy to find and all they have to worry about is the story. I might lie flat on my belly on a high point, and watch them for a while with binoculars. This leaves a much different impression in the snow than where I’m watching them through the scope of a rifle. Try it. You’ll see what I mean by the placement of your elbows on the ground.  When you (or one of your characters) is tracking a bad guy, it’s nice to know if he’s watching his back trail through the sights of a rifle.

Speaking of rifles—try this: Walk empty-handed, checking behind you now and then to see if someone might be following you.  Next, try the same thing but with a long gun (or even a long stick held like a gun) in your hand. Empty-handed folks tend to check their back trail by looking over their shoulder, leaving little more than a slight angling of their tracks. Those carrying a rifle in their hands tend to turn all the way around, walking backward a step or two before turning to continue on their way. All this leaves a story in their tracks.

Many Western authors write about tracking, most seem to keep it to the basics—footprints or broken-twig stuff—but there’s so much more to it.

A couple of common mistakes I see in literature:
—Walking backwards to confuse the tracker. I can tell, pretty easily. 

—Putting sacks or some such thing over the horse’s hooves to hide the tracks. While this might work to cover the sharp outlines and details of a hoof or shoe, the sacks themselves will more than likely leave a track, and would wear out within a short distance, making the time spent putting them on not worth the effort.

—Scratching out the back trail with a piece of a branch. This just gives me something else to track, generally even more visible. It also lets me know you don’t want to be found. What this does do is take valuable intelligence information from me like how many of you there are, your stride and condition, etc. So there is some value in it, just not to keep me from following the trail.

So, there you go, a little primer to whet your appetite. There are many good books on the subject of tracking—and you are welcome to contact me if you have a question.

And with that, I need to go. My bride read this over my shoulder and just made tracks down the hall. Think I’ll go check for any sign of Dioressence on the air…

Marc Cameron is a retired Chief Deputy US Marshal and 29-year law enforcement veteran. His short stories have appeared in BOYS’ LIFE Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post. He has published nine novels, six of them Westerns (several as a ghost writer and two under his pen name, Mark Henry).  His present Jericho Quinn series—NATIONAL SECURITY, ACT OF TERROR and STATE OF EMERGENCY (available in April 2013)— features an adventure motorcyclist, Air Force OSI agent and renaissance man who spends his days sorting out his life and kicking terrorist butt.   Marc lives in Alaska with his beautiful bride and BMW motorcycle.
Visit him at:

www.marccameronbooks.com

http://www.facebook.com/MarcCameronAuthor