Cabin Notes: tracking
Overlapping lives.
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This week I asked The Rewilding Winter Cohort, “What usually feels like it’s trying to connect to you on walks? And then, more curiously, why do you think it’s that and not something else?”
I love that second question because it shifts the ground a little. It assumes there is something reaching, yes—but it also assumes we are choosing what to notice. Attention is, after all, a habit as much as it is a gift.
What I typically tune into, at least here, is tracks.
The slothy, wide drag of a badger. The delicate etch of hooves stitching the snowfield together. The arrival, violence, and exit of an owl. The rodent who cannot seem to commit to a single direction. Bedding sites and remnants and game trails that reveal themselves only after you’ve walked the same slope enough times to realize you are not the only one who prefers that contour, that angle of ascent, that narrow passage between spruce.
My brain is always trying to map this valley—not just in how I travel it, but in how others travel it: where they pause, where they gather, where they slip under barbed wire and where they don’t bother.
Why tracks? Why evidence of passage?
