When I am walking along a road or path, I generally do a little tracking every day, because it is only by constant practice that a fellow can learn tracking or can keep his eye in when he has learnt it. It is quite easy and simple to do, only Scouts often do not think of doing it.
Here, for instance, is what I did one morning. There is nothing wonderful in it, but Scouts will understand all the better that such practice should be an everyday matter, and not merely attempted on some great occasion. It is bound to be a failure then if it has not been regularly gone in for before.
My practice was on an ordinary country road, dry and hard, with a slight layer of dust in most places, up and down hill; between high hedges; no wind (wind, you know, soon flattens out tracks in dust and makes them look much older than they really are).
At about eight o'clock in the morning, as I passed from one field to another, I crossed the main road at the point where it reached the top of a hill.
I read some news on the ground, and this is what it said
"Mrs. Sharp is ill this morning; and Johnny Milne has been to the railway station to fetch some newspapers."
This was how I got at it.
There were only two fresh tracks. One was of a boy walking and the other of a bicycle.
The boy's footmarks showed a nailed boot, not big enough for a man, walking along the road which led to the school and to the railway station. It was Saturday, a whole holiday, so he could not be going to school; he would therefore be going to the station.
Why to the station? Because at 7.33 the train came with the newspapers, and there were his tracks going back again, (They occasionally overtrod the outgoing footprints.)