Australian aborigines even today retain an ability to read tracks that seem to us fantastic. A recently reported case concerned a lost four-year-old child in New South Wales. Forty men from the settlement searched in impenetrable underbrush for a whole day, both afoot and on horseback, without finding a single recognizable "footprint." Then a native tracker was sent for, although there seemed to be no discoverable trace on the sun-dried ground. The aborigine circled the house at continually increasing distances. Finally he stopped, and then struck out on a straight path along which he followed mysterious "tracks" which no one else saw: a crushed leaf here, a bent branch there, a little pebble almost unnoticeably moved to one side. He frequently dropped to all fours, and twice he lost the traces on stony ground. But at dusk he led the anxious searchers to the lost child, who lay sleeping propped against a tree trunk.

The keen perceptions of these people can only be explained by their hard battle for existence. Stalking game with stone-age hunting weapons in the Australian wastelands may well have kept their senses awake and sharp, and it probably also enables them to make deductions with such presence of mind. The aborigine does not infer from the tracks merely what animal made them; the traces also reveal to him how large or how old the animal is and whether it is healthy, fresh and in good condition, or sick and tired. While you may never achieve this skill, handed down through generations, there is much you can learn.

Human Tracks

The human footprint lets you draw conclusions about many things. Frequently you can decide at first glance whether you are dealing with the print of a man's shoe or a woman's, especially if a woman was wearing high heels. From the size of the shoe you can make a rough guess about the person's height, and his weight may be revealed by the depth of the print in the ground. From the distance between the steps you can tell whether he was walking or running, still another clue to the energy of the person. Short steps and a deep imprint of the front part of the foot indicate that the person in question was carrying a load. The distance between the right and left foot tells you something about the person's width.

Every shoeprint has its characteristic features: the pattern of a rubber sole, missing nails, repairs or heel plates. A footprint rarely appears in isolation. Nearby impressions show if the person was using a cane or an umbrella. Matches, cigar or cigarette butts, the contents of an emptied pipe, or chewing gum wrappers characterize the person more closely. Pebbles and bits of earth, or water and mud in rainy weather are thrown to the rear, supplying evidence of the direction in which a vehicle went. Similarly, a furrow or ridge of earth is pressed out broadly in the direction a bicycle is going. If a bicycle makes a curve, then the wheel tracks form a narrow angle to each other in the direction the bicycle turns.

Things which are unnoticeable can be a guideline during the track. Even something as impersonal as a bicycle track can reveal all sorts of things.