Field Guide to Animal Tracks and Scat of California. Lawrence Mark Elbroch

Чтение книги онлайн.

      It's not for everyone, this world of little scats and tiny tracks. But for those who are bold, I'd say get some gloves and a jacket and a hat and go out and explore California.

      GARY SNYDER IN “THE POROUS WORLD,” A PLACE IN SPACE, 1995

       I arrived at Nettle Springs in the afternoon, a perennial water flow many miles up a dry desert canyon, surrounded by steep, unforgiving slopes of pinyon pine, oak, and juniper. I parked in some shade, filled a water bottle, and strolled up the dry, sandy wash above the springs, where tracks were easy to see. I was looking for an animal to follow. A few deer had crossed the wash early in the morning, but I was hoping for a soft-footed animal, which provided a greater challenge.

       Suddenly fresh Cougar tracks were beneath me. The tracks belonged to a mature female cat, and she crossed the wash and traveled northeast into the manzanita, pines, and juniper. After a deep breath to focus and quiet my mind, I began to pursue. The afternoon was fast slipping away, so time was short, and I followed as quickly as my skills allowed. Yet within an hour of starting on the trail, I found myself confused. I looked down at the fresh tracks of a male Cougar—had she really been a he? No, for just around the corner I found her trail again; there were two cats, one following the other. But I was wrong again, for I then noticed the trails of at least three different Cougars converging among the dense manzanita bushes and winding up and over the folds of the desert canyon. I paused to reassess, kneeling down and feeling the large pad of a Cougar's track—that which shows more clearly in difficult tracking terrain.

       The mess of tracks could have been a family group. Or perhaps a kill was nearby. That's what I hoped for—a fresh kill—something I could photograph. At the time I knew it didn't really make sense—a mature male and female at the site of a kill, unless one were stealing from the other or they were closely related—but the sun was too low in the sky to give anything much thought, and the trailing demanded all of my attention. I began to jog along the Cougars' trails, circling in on myself and jumping from trail to trail, all the while peering into every shadowy bush and dense growth for the dark telltale mound of a Cougar's cache. Several times I was fooled by the large nests of woodrats. As fast as I tracked, the sun moved quicker, and soon it was turning orange above the mountains to the west.

       I followed numerous trails, looped in on myself countless times, and had turned up nothing. I'd not even revealed where any of the cougars had departed the confusion of converging trails. But with sunlight at a premium, I decided to backtrack the female up the wash to see if a piece of the larger story lay behind her. It did. A male lion had been following her down the wash and had cut into the bush farther up the drainage, where I hadn't initially seen his tracks.

       I continued to follow her back trail. As the sun moved below the mountain range to the west and the entire canyon was bathed in rosy shadows, I jogged on, reluctant to leave such a beautiful trail. Higher and higher I climbed out of the canyon, but the light was fading fast. Eventually the light was so low, I moved at a crawl and walked in a bent crouch so that my eyes were closer to the ground. I kept losing the trail and having to circle back to find where she had turned. Finally I stood on a steep slope and appraised the areas that I had covered in the valley below and to the north where the cats had spiraled in on themselves. The temperatures were dropping as I began my trip back to camp.