When the roads are too sloppy with snow to be safe or pleasant for bicycling, I hit the trails with snowshoes or Yaktrax, and it doesn’t take long to see that I’m not the only one afoot. Fresh snow is like a fresh sheet of paper on which the tracks of animals are painted. No one’s passage over the fields or forest floor is a secret, and even the movements of birds and animals in the trees can leave signs for the observant hiker to find.

 
The easiest signs to find are tracks in the snow, and after an overnight dusting of fresh, dry snow, I found tracks right outside my door. Cottontails raced laps round the building:

 

 
Down in the pine woods alongside The River, I found that red squirrels had been down from their warm tree nests to find breakfast buried in cone caches.

 

 
After digging up a cone, this red squirrel climbed a tree to a convenient and comfortable branch to fill his belly. The bits and pieces of the eviscerated cone scattered in the snow below:

 

 
And there, at the level of my shoulders, was where the squirrel had perched for his meal:

 

 
Down to the portage trail, the footprints I’d left on earlier hikes mixed with those of dog walkers, all of the sitzmarks covered in fresh snow. I made new tracks. Then there entered the fresh trails of a pair of fishers, elusive, deadly killers of squirrels and porcupines, larger relatives of the weasel and just as determined and agile.

 

 

 
I followed the fisher tracks for a mile. The pair occasionally wandered but usually stayed close and on parallel paths until they reached the hemlock woods growing up the steep flank of a ridge. I turned toward the river and with care crossed snow-covered bedrock until I reached an iced-over channel that created an island. I didn’t risk the channel, but mice had.

 

 
The mice had the island to themselves, and I turned back to the woods, where I found the deep parallel ruts made by a porcupine returning home after a night dining in the hemlock boughs.

 

 
The porcupine walked under tangles of fallen trees and around small saplings growing close:

 

 

 
And then, following the porky, I entered a beech woods where mice owned the night:

 

 
When possible, the mice walked under a fallen branch or tree to hide themselves from the view of aerial or tree-occupying predators. Through the beeches and back into the hemlocks the porcupine walked, not hindered by tangles nor steep slopes. And then I found one of his dens:

 

 
Scat marked where he’d passed some time, but his tracks continued uphill. I followed, and crossed the path of a grouse.

 

 
He’s left scat in his wake…

 

 
…then I came to where he’d climbed a steep hill from a perch in the sun:

 

 
My telephoto brought the view closer:

 

 
Further on, still following the porky, his path was crossed by a fox:

 

 
The fox didn’t seem to want to tangle with a porcupine and went his own way. Not far away was a deer bed:

 

 
I climbed alongside the porcupine’s trail, I saw scratch marks on a sapling, made by the porky or a squirrel:

 

 
Porcupines are adept climbers, but this sapling didn’t hold the interest of the animal whose claws left their mark—there were no gnawings and no signs of a long stay in the low branches.

Onward I followed. Here’s my gloved hand near the ruts for scale

 

 
And then the porcupine went where I couldn’t follow. He descended a very steep slope into a hollow littered with boulders and windfalls.

 

 
A good place for me to break a leg, a place where the roar from the falls over yonder would mask any shout or whistle blow I made, a spot where the cell phone would be useless with a ridge between it and the tower. Porky deserved his privacy, and down there, in the deep caves formed by scree and tree trunks. I turned away and made for home, wishing the porky a warm and restful sleep, safe from the fisher and coyotes.

 
If you like tracking animals, visit our Zenfolio gallery “Tracks~Sign~Scat.”

 

 
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