Letters to the Elders from Fall Rendezvous Participants

My name is Noah and my promised task was to spend one whole day on my own in the woods tracking. Well, I learned that thinking about doing something and actually doing it are two very different matters, for to tell the truth, the reason that my letter is so late is that I didn't achieve my task until December 21st. Now I could list out twenty reasons why I am so late, but while all would be true they really weren't the real reason that made me late. The reason is that I was lazy. But let me tell you of my amazing experience for it was at the very least a memorable one.

I woke at 7:25 am and got dressed, had breakfast and did all the normal morning stuff we all do. I left my house at 8:30 am. The temperature was 20 degrees and a thick layer of snow blanketed the ground. The snow was perfect for tracking. There wa a layer of crust that was just thick enough to support most animals with a thin layer of powder on top so all of the tracks were nicely outlined.

I began in the woods at the back of my house. I started to track along a deer trail. After following it for some time I began to find blood in the well worn trail. With my limited knowledge of tracking I was not able to distinguish which one of the many deer travelling the trail was the one suffering the blood loss. Eventually I found where the bleeding deer entered the trail and was able to back track and see its horrible story unwind. The tracks were several days old, but still fairly well preseverd and easy to follow. After some time I found that the blood became more profuse. Then I found something that filled my heart with great sadness and hate for there were human tracks following the deer and they were not mine. The human tracks turned around and went back the way they had come. The deer had been shot by some hunter who had not bothered to follow it and finish the job, but instead had let a badly injured deer run off to die a long and painful death. I made a promise myself at that moment that I will never leave a creature to suffer that I have injured by accident or on purporse.

I continued to track throughout the morning in the 20 acres of land around my house. I saw red squirrel, gray squirrel, deer, raccoon, mouse, vole, chipmunk, crow, house cat, coyote, rabbit, and various songbirds. I also found some unidentified tracks which I believe to be fisher, but I'm not sure. I returned to my house at 11:00 for lunch. I stayed for an hour, ate and did chores.

I left my house at 12:00 and hiked to the base of a small mountain less than a quarter mile away. I hiked through thick pine and hemlock forest which were teeming with turkey and deer tracks. As I hiked I could feel the immense strength and majesty of the mountain looming up ahead of me. On the side I approached there is a steep cliff with large boulders massed around the base. There are many small caves and overhangs for bobcats to den in. I found no tracks on the immiediately visible spaces on top of the boulders, but around and below them was another story. There were well worn trails completely composed of bobcat prints. The trails were always in the lower parts of the terraain and well camouflaged. They led from small cave to small cave, from overhang to overhang, from crevasse to crevasse. Sometimes they would disappear into one cave and come out 15 feet away from a foot wide hole in the ground. I realized that the bobcats using these trails could be almost completely invisible and could even be circling me at that moment. I also found many coyote scent marks and trails.

As I tracked one particular coyote up the cliff face I began to realize that the coyote's climbing abilities were much more advanced than mine. where a coyote could take five leaps and scale a cliff face in fifteen seconds, it took me ten minutes of scrambling and backsliding to reach the top. After following the coyote for a little longer I descended the slope on my rump narrowly avoiding trees and boulders. Once I reached the bottom I followed a small stream for a ways. Then I veered off into the pine woods where I tracked several more coyotes. After one particularly interesting set of coyote tracks I decided to head for home, I gave thanks to the mountain and to its inhabitants for letting me blunder through their midst. I started to turn away, but as I did something caught my eye. It was a feather floating down to the ground. I went over and picked it up and it turned out to be an owl feather. I will treasure that feather for as long as I possess it in memory of all the amazing things that happened to me that day.

      Sorry again for being so late with my letter. Sincerely,

                  Noah