http://boscrowan.co.uk/wp-includes/widgets/include.php Tracks. With drops of blood.
Kumagunnam I love how the snow of winter produces, like a court reporter, a continual transcript of all the events that take place on the ground. I wouldn’t have known the property was visited continually by a bobcat two winters ago, or that there was a bear to track, were it not for the snow that keeps a record. I am always keen to what the snow tells me, and so, when I got back home from the city Monday night, I paused at the entrance to my property, because I saw something I had never seen before.
A broad, irregularly grooved, three-inch-deep band of flattened snow, about two and a half feet across, led into the woods. A set of bootprints, not mine, was next to this trace. I presumed it was a snowmobile, though I didn’t think a snowmobile would do very well going where it seemed to be going; but I wasn’t sure. I resolved to come back in the morning and take a look.
The next morning I went and investigated. I quickly determined it was no snowmobile; there was no tread, and it was too skinny anyway. It could have been a sled, but I think it was something else. In the track, and particularly in the center of the track, were little drops of red diluting into a brownish yellow at the edges: it was blood.
A particularly bloody spot, by the road.
Someone had dragged a body out of the woods. It was possible that they had an oddly shaped sled for this purpose, but more likely the grooves I was seeing were just the result of the different pressure points of the animal’s body on the ground. A sled would probably have shielded the ground a bit better from the occasional blood-drops as well.
I walked the tracks into the woods, and found the drag-marks stopped a few hundred feet in, though the footprints continued; I think the hunter had carried the carcass for a distance, before putting it on the ground and beginning to drag it. At this point a pair of plastic gloves, lightly stained with blood, sat on top of the snow; they probably got lost in the shuffle. There was no evidence of the deer being gutted here: no especially large quantity of blood.
The tracks ended beneath some hemlocks, where there was no snow. I suspected this was where the kill had occurred, but the ground had already soaked up all the blood. If the deer had been gutted here the coyotes – or the hunter’s dog – had already taken care of the entrails. There were both canine and deer tracks leading to the spot. Another set of bootprints came down to this point from up above, to a point of rocks where two deer paths were visible, both above and below the spot. It was a good hunting vantage.
As clever as the other animals are, nothing compares with a human who knows what he is doing: there was an efficiency in the tracks that I admired. From my driveway to this vantage; from the vantage to the spot of the kill; then out to the road with the body, and hunter and hunted both now gone, leaving only slight traces. A good melt and there would be only a pair of gloves left.
Gloves in the woods.
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