So the whole of the regiment was paraded without shoes on for the tracker to examine. And at the end when he had seen every man walk, he said, "No the thief is not there." Just then the Colonel's native servant came up to him with a message, and the tracker who was standing by said to the Colonel "That is the man who buried the stolen things."
The servant, surprised at being found out, then confessed that it was he who had stolen his master's property, thinking that he would be the last man to be suspected.
Mr. Deakin, the Premier of Australia, told me how he travelled on board ship with a number of natives of Australia who were on the sea for the first time in their lives.
When the ship got out to sea he noticed all these natives had got into the bows and were lying flat on the deck with their heads over the side staring intently into the water ahead of the ship. So interested were they in the water that for some time he could not get any reply to his question as to what they were looking at, till at length one of them said: "We cannot understand how the ship is finding its way across the sea; we cannot see the trail that it is following; we know that our eyes are sharp enough on shore and often when we are guiding white men along a trail they say they cannot see the tracks which to us are clear enough—their eyes are different to ours. But here at sea the English sailors evidently can see tracks ahead of them, otherwise they would not know which way to send the ship, and yet we, who are so good at seeing on shore, cannot see any sign of a track or mark on the water."
When getting on to very fresh spoor of man or beast, the old scout will generally avoid following it closely because the hunted animal will frequently look back to see if it is being followed. The tracker therefore makes a circle, and comes back on to where he would expect to find the spoor again. If he finds it, he makes another circle further ahead till he finds no spoor. Then he knows he is ahead of his game, so he gradually circles nearer and nearer till he finds it. See diagram.
HINTS TO SPOORING.
Some trackers of Scinde followed up a stolen camel from Karachi to Sehwan, 150 miles over sand and bare rock. The thieves, to escape detection, drove the camel up and down a crowded street, in order to get the trail mixed up with others—but the trackers foresaw this and made a "cast" round the town, and hit on the outgoing spoor on the far side, which they successfully followed up.
Tracking.
In tracking where the spoor is difficult to see, such as on hard ground, or in grass, note the direction of the last foot-print that you can see, then look on in the same direction, but well ahead of you, say 20 or 30 yards, and in grass you will generally see the blades bent or trodden, and on hard ground, possibly stones displaced or scratched, and so on, small signs which, seen in a line one behind the other, give a kind of track that otherwise would not be noticed. I once tracked a bicycle on a hard macadam road where it really made no impression at all, but by looking along the surface of the road for a long distance ahead of me, under the rising sun as it happened, the line it had taken was quite visible through the almost invisible coating of dew upon the ground. Standing on the track and looking upon it close to my feet I could not see the slightest sign of it. The great thing is to look for a difficult track against the sun, so that the slightest dent in the ground throws a shadow.