the dire
lesson--man is our worst enemy; shun him at any price. And the
simplest way to do this is to come out only at night. Man is a daytime
creature; he is blind in the soft half-light that most beasts prefer.

While many animals have always limited their activity to the hours of
twilight and gloom, there are not a few that moved about in daytime,
but have given up that portion of their working day in order to avoid
the arch enemy.

Thus they can flourish under our noses and eat at our tables, without
our knowledge or consent. They come and go at will, and the world
knows nothing of them; their presence might long go unsuspected but
for one thing, well known to the hunter, the trapper, and the
naturalist: wherever the wild four-foot goes, it leaves behind a
record of its visit, its name, the direction whence it came, the time,
the thing it did or tried to do, with the time and direction of
departure. These it puts down in the ancient script. Each of these
dotted lines, called the trail, is a wonderful, unfinished record of
the creature's life during the time it made the same, and it needs
only the patient work of the naturalist to decipher that record and
from it learn much about the animal that made it, without that animal
ever having been seen.

Savages are more skilful at it than civilized folk, because tracking
is their serious life-long pursuit and they do not injure their eyes
with books. Intelligence is important here as elsewhere, yet it is a
remarkable fact that the lowest race of mankind, the Australian
blacks, are reputed to be by far the best trackers; not only are their
eyes and attention developed and disciplined, but they have retained
much of the scent power that civilized man has lost, and can follow a
fresh track, partly at least by smell.

It is hard to over-value the powers of the clever tracker. To him the
trail of each animal is not a mere series of similar footprints; it is
an accurate account of the creature's life, habit, changing whims, and
emotions during the portion of life whose record is in view. These are
indeed autobiographical chapters, {190} and differ from other
autobiographies in this--they cannot tell a lie. We may get wrong
information from them, but it is our fault if we do; we misread the
document that cannot falsify.

{189}

[Illustration: Animal tracks; Deer, Sheep, Mink, Cottontail, Hawk,
Owl, Meadow Mouse.]

{190 continued}

When to Learn Tracking

The id