Training in Tracking

1. What they did

This is a training handbook for Scout leaders, written under the pen name Gilcraft at the request of Lord Baden-Powell (B.-P.), the Chief Scout, who wrote the foreword. B.-P. argues that tracking is one of the best ways to develop observation and deduction in young people.

The author defines tracking as the study of the marks left by any living thing, human, animal or bird, that lead to identifying it, knowing where it has gone, and understanding its peculiarities. They note it is called trailing in North America, spooring in Africa and pugging in India.

The book builds up the skill step by step, in 24 chapters and an appendix:

• Training the senses and memory (chapters II to V): games such as Kim’s Game, describing shop windows, observing people.
• Stalking (chapters VI to VIII): moving unseen and unheard, by day and by night.
• Following trails (chapters IX and X): trails of paper, wool, Scout signs, tracking irons and natural markers, getting harder at each stage.
• Human tracks (chapters XI to XVI): footprints, booted tracks, gaits, what tracks can tell about a person, and detective work.
• Vehicle tracks (chapter XVII).
• Animal and bird tracks (chapters XVIII to XX), including snow as a tracking medium.
• Plaster casts, tracking rules, and ground, time and weather (chapters XXI to XXIII).
• Training Scouts and Cubs (chapter XXIV), and the requirements of the Tracker Badge (appendix).

2. What they found

How trackers are trained

The book quotes G. W. Gayer’s account of how Khoji trackers in Rajputana, India, are trained. A teacher has someone leave a clear bare footprint and covers it with a box. The pupil studies it, covers it, and searches for another print of the same foot, then checks against the original. The tests get harder until the pupil can memorise a print, find a match days later and track the person home. It can take years. A finished Khoji can tell from a track whether the person was a man or a woman, old or young, fat or lean, carrying a load or not, running, walking or loitering.

Human footprints

• The author describes twelve features of a bare footprint, using a map comparison: the five toe pads (“islands”), the line behind the toes (called zanjeri by Indian trackers), the outer and inner edges, the heel, the instep, the ball of the foot and the narrow strip joining heel and ball. Length, breadth, creases, cracks and scars add more.
• Two prints from the same foot agree in all essential points. Any difference not caused by the ground means a different foot.
• A person can change their footprints on purpose, so prints for comparison should be made unconsciously.
• From a series of tracks a trained tracker can estimate sex, height (from stride and foot length), weight (from depth), build and physical condition. The author is very doubtful about guessing a person’s class from their shoes.

Animal tracks

• Feet fall into three types: sole-walkers (such as bears, badgers, hedgehogs and humans), toe-walkers (dogs and cats) and nail-walkers with hooves.
• By build, animals fall into four classes, each with typical gaits: animals with legs in proportion to the body (horses, cattle, deer, dogs, cats), animals with long hind legs (hares, rabbits, squirrels, kangaroos), long-bodied animals with short legs (otters, weasels, stoats, martens), and short-legged heavy animals (badgers, beavers, hedgehogs, porcupines). The author admits the classes are not exactly scientific.
• The dog leaves a zig-zag track with claw marks in two lines; the cat leaves a straighter single line with no claws, placing the hind feet in the fore prints. The fox’s trail is more like a cat’s, with a narrower, furry-edged print.
• In deer, a buck’s tracks change with condition: in early spring the hind feet overstep the fore prints, during the rut they register, and when the buck is worn out they fall behind.
• Caribou travel in single file, each stepping in the leader’s prints, so many animals can look like one.

Birds and snow

Tree-perching birds usually hop, ground birds walk and water birds waddle with toes turned in. Locality matters most when identifying a track. Snow shows wing and tail marks as well, but deep soft snow makes tracks look much larger.

Tracking rules

The book’s seven rules: look into the eye of the sun (when studying a print, so shadows show detail); sketch and memorise one single print; get a view of the whole track; think with the mind of the hunted; when a track is lost, mark the spot and cast round in a wide circle; keep downwind of your quarry; and take your landmarks when you start and look back as you go.

Ground, time and weather

• On grass, a trail looks lighter when it leads away from you and darker when it comes towards you, because bent grass reflects light.
• Displaced stones show lighter or darker soil underneath. Bent grass springs back in a few hours; broken grass withers.
• Sun and wind dry kicked-up soil and round off the edges of a track, so ageing a track depends on recent weather. Rain spots, blown debris, insect and worm trails across a track, and crossings with other tracks all help to tell its age.

Training Scouts and Cubs

Tracking works best in pairs, each taking one side of the track, and in small groups; a crowd is a hindrance. Cubs should learn the observation side first, as the author believes they are not yet ready for deduction.

3. What they concluded

• Tracking rests on habits of observation, understanding what is observed and reasoning to a correct deduction. These habits must be built first, or Scouts will only ever reach a low standard.
• It is fine to start with real animal tracks to spark interest, but the earlier stages should then be built up properly.
• Only practice makes a tracker. The author says plainly that reading the book will not make anyone a tracker, and that years of experience in the field cannot be replaced by books.

4. How tracking was or was not used

The whole book is about tracking. It covers tracks and signs identification (bare and booted human footprints, vehicle tracks, mammal and bird tracks, hair, droppings, broken twigs, displaced stones, feeding places and dust-bath feathers of birds) and trailing (following a track step by step, casting round a lost track, and following on hard ground by matching the stride, as in the Sudan tracker example from Baden-Powell). It includes stories of trackers at work, such as the Australian police tracker Tiger following an escaped man for about one hundred miles over rock and water, and a Queensland boy who knew from the tracks that a horse was not in a large paddock.

5. Tracker or observer certification

The appendix gives the Scout Tracker Badge test. It includes Kim’s Game (25 of 30 articles, three times running); recognising 8 of 10 things by smell and 8 of 10 sounds; 12 of 15 articles by touch; explaining two characteristics in each of five types of simple human tracks; solving three tracking stories in sand, snow or other media within 25 per cent error; making six casts of animal or bird tracks (at least two of wild animals); and following a nature trail of at least one mile with at least 40 signs, noting at least 35. The Second Class Scout test is “Follow a track half a mile in twenty-five minutes”. The book also describes the long apprenticeship of Khoji trackers in India and the Lone Scouts of America test of following a trail for at least a mile without being noticed. No evaluation of any tracker’s skill is reported.

6. Other technologies, skills or innovations

• Tracking irons and track dies (from a roedeer’s foot, for example) for laying practice trails. The author warns that these copy one print, not the way an animal places its feet.
• Indoor sand trays and prepared tracking ground for “sand stories”, where a scene is acted out on sand and the Scouts work out what happened.
• Footprint records with printer’s ink, and the rubber-sheet foot charts used by bootmakers.
• Plaster of Paris casts of tracks, with step-by-step instructions, and the police method using two parts resin to one part paraffin wax.
• Photographing tracks in snow, mud and sand, with suggested distances (three to five feet for a single print, ten to twelve feet for a trail) and low sun for shadow.
• Setting out food on smoothed ground overnight to collect tracks of local animals and birds.