Snow tracks

It’s been a real old-fashioned winter with plenty of frigid days and nights, and enough snow to satisfy the needs of every outdoor enthusiast. We’ve snowshoed in every direction, across partially snow-covered potato fields, through acres of naked unharvested soybeans, between icy glistening rocks of the Cove shoreline, and everywhere we venture we see tracks. 

I recognize crow, bluejay and bunny footprints, but with other tracks it’s the question: “Is it a dog, a fox or a coyote?” I’m no expert, but big doggy-like tracks in an open field are probably from a coyote. Toenails are sometimes a clue. Coyotes wear their nails down through running, so their toenail prints might not be as evident as a domestic dog’s. Also, if you find scat (poop) containing fur and bones, it’s probably from a coyote—although many well-fed dogs have been seen to merrily snack on a tasty rodent or two.

As for foxes, their footprints are small and delicate, and their hind feet step into their front foot tracks leaving a very tidy trail. They also eat rodents. Our friend Bev says that fox tracks smell like foxes and I’ll take her word for it. My mother had a very dead, dusty and odourless fox stole, complete with glass eyes and a mouth that clamped shut to hold it in place around your neck. Fox stoles must have outgrown fashion for we children were allowed to play with it, totally oblivious to the limp boneless legs that would never make footprints again.

I was always obsessed with patterns and footprints. Some of you, of a certain generation, remember those brown rubber overshoes (yes, you pulled them on over your shoes) that closed with a buckle, and featured a little strip of fake fur around the top that sort of kept the snow out but didn’t keep your feet from freezing. Whenever I got a new pair—I suppose I got new ones every year, they didn’t last—I’d walk backwards in the snow and admire the crisp zigzaggy patterns they made. 

Even today if there’s a fresh snowfall I walk backwards and look at my tracks. And there have been plenty of fresh snowfalls this winter. Most mornings before daylight we see the lights of a snowplough hurtling up our road, flinging snow to left and right, possibly wiping out a mailbox or tipping over a garbage bin. 

Snowplough drivers do an amazing job of missing most objects and staying on the road, so I was shocked the other day to see a snowplough tipped gently off the highway past the point of no return. When you see such a behemoth in the ditch, lights flashing, unable to move, you lose your annoyance over the unplowed drifted-in section of road between the Cove and the next community, and start remembering how much we love our snow-clearing people. 

Well, the plough is gone now. Who pulled it out? Another snowplough?  No idea. All I know is they left plenty of tracks.