Tracks

Two days of rain, and then a Thursday that nobody saw coming.

I am on the trail above the seep, and the mud in the low place is still holding everything.

It has been holding a trail all week.

It starts up by the sycamores. It comes down through the mud in a line, one print after another, then it goes on up the rut and off the top of the ridge, out of sight.

Half a mile of it, more or less. I read about three hundred yards of it before the sun was on the trail at all.

Bo stood over the best one for a while, and then he put his nose in it. That’s the whole of his reading.

I got the direction, and that was the easy part. I’m not going to be humble about it.

I got the night. These were made after the rain stopped. Water stands in a print that is still wet through, and not one of these had any water in it.

I got that it came down to the water. The front prints are on hard ground and the back ones are not, and that only works one way.

And then I got to the end of what the mud says, and the mud has nothing else.

Here’s the thing that went wrong. I had a plan, and the plan was to read the whole half mile and come back knowing what it was.

Forty minutes on the low trail, and I came back knowing it was something with four legs that wasn’t us and wasn’t Bo.

That is not a great return for forty minutes.

Bo is sitting in the one dry spot up on the bank, which is a place I didn’t find and didn’t earn.

So here is the question for today.

How much can you know about something from what it leaves behind?

I want to be careful with that one. It sounds like a question about a person, and it is not. It’s a question about mud, and about every other thing out here that isn’t trying to tell me anything at all.

Here’s the honest answer, and it’s more than I expected. You can know most of it. A good deal more than I expected to get out of a Thursday.

And here’s the part that didn’t work. Knowing that something came through in the dark is not the same as knowing what it was doing when it came through.

The second one is the one I wanted. I wanted the animal’s evening.

I’ve never once had an animal’s evening. Nobody does. We all make ours up.

So I went and got a book out of the truck.

Here’s where I am borrowing from. I’m standing outside that whole way of thinking, and I’m taking one thing out of it. That’s the polite way of saying I’m borrowing.

The name is Muir, Scottish born, and American for the rest of it. Eighteen thirty-eight to nineteen fourteen.

He’s remembered for two things, and I want both of them. He loved wild places, and he walked into them, kept walking, and wrote down what it was like.

I’ve read some of him in English, which is the language he wrote in. So at least the voice in my head is his own, and not somebody’s idea of his.

Here’s the idea I took. He wrote about mountains as though they were places with something to say.

Not scenery, and not a window with the good part in it. A place that goes on doing whatever it is doing whether or not anybody turns up to look.

I’m not going to say his line. I haven’t got it, and I’m not going to guess at a dead man’s phrasing. I’m going to say mine.

A hill is not a backdrop. It has an opinion about where the water goes, and a trail that doesn’t share that opinion washes out every spring.

And the second thing is the walking. Not the miles. I don’t care how many miles. The going itself, and the idea that you don’t get to pick what the day shows you.

The day is going where it is going, and you are along for the ride.

I needed that one this morning. Because if the hill has an opinion, then the reason I found those prints isn’t that I was clever. It rained for two days, and I happened to be out here on the one morning when the mud was still holding.

Now the price of it, because there’s always a price.

If the hill has an opinion, then I can be wrong about the hill, and there’s no way for me to find out today.

Nobody corrects me. The mud doesn’t correct me, and the prints stay exactly as wrong as I left them.

That’s worse than being corrected, and I’d rather say so than skip it.

It’s also slow. Reading a thing that isn’t talking to you means sitting down in the middle of it, and sitting down in the middle of it is not what this ridge is set up for.

There’s a slope on both sides of me, and a dog who doesn’t hold still.

So, here is the whole of the half mile, and this is all of it. Something came off the ridge above the seep in the dark. It came down to the water and stood at it. It went up the rut instead of across it, because up the rut is the easier way.

I don’t know whether it was in a hurry. I wanted the hurry one, and the hurry one is a better story, and it isn’t one I can stand behind.

That’s the whole cost, right there. The mud can’t tell a story. It can only tell a fact. And it won’t tell me whether this was a good morning or a bad one for whoever made those prints.

The sun is properly on the trail now. Bo has gone back and stood in the last puddle that’s left, on purpose. He’ll be wet for the rest of the day.

And here’s where it lands.

The mud wasn’t giving me an animal. It was giving me the ground.

Where it was soft. Where it held a foot. Where it took a print at all. That’s a report on the hill, and the animal is only the reason the report got written.

The prints are old and the mud is drying out. I stepped in two of them myself, which is the part I don’t get to put in the story afterwards.

Somewhere out there, you’ve got one too. Not mud. A thing with a mark in it that somebody made a long time before you got there.

The worn place on a step. The bare patch under the gate. The place in the gravel where a hundred wheels have all agreed to go the same way.

And you already know the whole story about that spot. You know why it’s like that. You know which one of you it was, and what he was in a hurry for.

You’ve got a perfectly good reason for that one, because somebody stood there and told you.

The mud is the one where nobody stands there.

Here’s the shape of it, and I’ve been wrong about shapes before. A mark is a fact about the ground. The story is a fact about the animal, or about whoever it was. Only one of them came off the mud.

Here’s the thing to try, and it takes one walk out of a door.

On the next walk, before you look at anything alive, look at the ground. Find one mark that a thing made. A rut with a wheel in it, a boot print in the wet, a gate post leaning the same way it has leaned for a long time.

Look at the edges of it, not the middle. The edges are where it was made, and the middle is where it got walked over.

Then say, out loud, one thing it says about the ground. Soft here. Hard there. Water goes that way.

And then say, out loud, one thing you would like to know about whoever made it. And do not go and look.

That’s the whole assignment. One walk, one mark, two sentences, and the second one is the one that costs you.

You have to know which of the two is the evidence, and which one is you.

It works on the way to the mailbox. Nothing in it needs a ridge, and nothing in it needs two days of rain.

And if you skip it, you’ve got ten minutes of a wet man kneeling in a mudhole with a dog, which is a thing I have done for nothing.

He is still in the puddle. The light is going. I am going with it.