One sunny day this week, I went to one of our public golf courses to look for animal tracks—I’ve seen some good ones there over the years. My husband was a little concerned about the isolated location. He didn’t voice the concern, but it was clear on his face, and he admitted to it later when I got back home.
Isolated, hah! The golf course that day was so full of people rejoicing in the sun that you practically had to take a number to get in.
What I mostly saw were the tracks of many, many cross-country skis, a significant number of them with people still attached to the skis. Folks were in fine fettle, smiling and chatty. Cheerful as they slid along. Cheerful even as they herring-boned up the hills. Sunshine has that effect on Michiganders, plus, midwesterners are friendly anyway—it’s only polite.
In summary, I saw tracks from skis, people, dogs, and deer. Dog and deer tracks I can see in our yard, and our yard is a lot less crowded than the back nine, so after a transit of the golf course I came home.
Looking down at the back yard from an upstairs window—this was, after all, a crisp winter day, and warming up was called for—I saw the tracks of a tail-dragger coming from under our deck. It was either a Going-Right-Back-to-Hibernating Woodchuckumus or a Drowsy Opossumus. Neither one is good news to find living under a deck, and I did not take a closer look at that time.
In fact, I decided to continue examining the tracks in our snow from my really-quite-comfortable distance. There were plenty of Cottontailus Eat-Your-Garden-Upumus tracks. This has been a banner year for rabbits. (And hence for the local plant nurseries, which leave tracks in wallets rather than in snow.) Our Wyoming daughter says that a banner year for rabbits means a banner year for coyotes. Go, coyotes!
We know without even looking that, if there is snow on the ground, our yard will be covered with the tracks of Squirrelus Annoyingus. We don’t even have to see their tracks to verify their presence, as nearly every time we glance at the yard, we see squirrels on the hoof. We’ve had a lot of trouble with fox squirrels over the years, and I don’t want to talk about it.
Rounding out the signs of our rodent population will be the tracks of Squirrelus Even-More-Annoyingus, known in the vernacular as Squirrelus Lickety-Splitumus. Red squirrels have fluffy tails and look cute as they dash about their business, but we have a beef with them. They chew a ring of bark around the branches on our big linden and our maples. Girdling the branches kills them, and then they fall off. The branches, not the squirrels. (Although I did see a squirrel fall, once. From a utility wire into a deep snowdrift. The squirrel shot up out of that drift like a rocket, looking left and right while still in the air, as if embarrassed that someone might have witnessed his faux pas.)
What I don’t see in the yard are any tracks from the good friend who lives behind us. This is winter in the time of CoVid, so we haven’t been sitting outside together talking. She’s not up for long walks right now, and I miss her. We miss each other. One of us may have to invest in a fire pit.
Tracks I also don’t see, and haven’t seen in a long time, are for Fox-and-Geese and other snow games that kids mostly don’t play anymore. Families are smaller now than they used to be, and kids mostly have play dates instead of group games. When we were kids, whole herds of us got together all the time for pickup games of Capture the Flag in the park or Cat-and-Mouse games that surged around the neighborhood. Cat-and-Mouse is a lot easier in the winter than in the summer—tracks in the snow make it easy to find people.
In any case, even if children still played those games, they wouldn’t play them in the time of CoVid. Maybe when the vaccine gives us herd immunity and the authorities give us the all-clear, children will be so filled with joy that they, like us, will learn the pleasure of playing in herds.
I look forward to seeing their tracks.
29 January 2021