The art of tracking

One of the reasons I enjoy teaching bushcraft/ survival techniques, is that it encompasses so many different skills sets. There are innumerable ways of starting a fire, we can use animals to find water, we can use nature to navigate, we have a host of ways to improvise shelters, and the bush is a veritable supermarket if we know how to identify the edible plants. And, of course, another skill we use is tracking.

There is always something new to learn when it comes to tracking, no matter how long you’ve been doing it. I’m still learning after all these years. If we know what to look for, and how to interpret what we see, it is possible to track everything from a millipede to an elephant. We can see that from the level of skill reached by the San Bushmen, who