A heavy snow blew into town on the Tuesday, February 8th, dropping 4-6 inches. A soft blanket of powdery snow covered the ground. By the time Saturday's Wilderness Awareness and Tracking Club came around, it had mostly melted. We still had patches of snow on the trail between the Wakarusa river and wetlands. Two new people joined us in our exploration, bringing with them some knowledge of plants and herbs to share. We covered some basics, some routines of awareness. Mostly we wandered asking each other questions about the stories we found written in the snow.

The tracks in the snow had deteriorated quickly in the warmth of the morning. Still, we identified dozens of rabbit trails and saw many dear tracks. Another set of tracks stumped us for a bit. A five fingered critter went meandering along a trail, inderectly registering in the snow. With a little help from a Petersen's quick guide we came to the conclusion that a smelly member of the weasel family left them. Can you guess who?

Some animal walked along the trail leaving some large, wide spaced tracks. Between the tracks something dragged through the snow. Possibly a tail. The tracks had lost most definition so we couldn't make out toes, just the holes where the feet fell. We couldn't recognize the gait. We believe two trails overlapped here, but we couldn't really separate the trail of one from the other.

Though some tracks baffled us. We felt thankful for the snow. The wetlands provides some good opportunities to track in mud, but we often lose trails in the woods or to the dry land between puddles. Often we can only clearly trail an animal a few steps. Sometimes only one step. In a puddle near the slough that runs through the wetlands I found one very perfect cat print. Beautiful. But just one. We couldn't find the others. Where did that cat go? What did it do just then? Run across the path? Walk? Did it look to the side? Did it look straight ahead. Did it hunt? Did it seek shelter?

One print can seem like one word alone on a page, without context. Tracks provide so much more information than one word, every step hints at the step before and the step after. If you track daily, invest hours in tracking, you can answer that question from the one print. I have more dirt-time to invest before I can do that.

Getting to that level takes dirt-time, practice. It helps to track where you can find much more than the one print. When you see the print within the string of prints, the whole paragraph of context, you can understand it better. You have something to which you can compare the single print in the mud. I love snow because it gives me a chance to track further, to deepen my understanding of the one track by studying each print in the context of the whole