(Continued from Part 3. This concludes the article.)
Tracking
As I alluded to earlier, becoming an expert tracker requires a lifetime of practice and experience, but there are a number of things that you can do to begin developing and improving your ability to track people:
- Improved Endurance – The further away your target gets, the harder it will become to track them, and if they’re in better shape than you they’ll be able to quickly increase the gap between you. You need to be able to move long distances at a reasonable pace if you want to be able to successfully track people.
- Observation Skills – Since tracking is all about observing the environment around you to identify signs left by your target, enhancing your ability to spot signs can significantly improve your tracking ability. There are many good exercises [1] that you can perform that will help you improve your powers of observation, but you need to get in the habit of practicing observation on a daily basis. The ability to quickly detect, identify and understand what’s going on around you is not only critical to tracking, it’s also the foundation of good situational awareness. One note on observations in tracking – it’s important that you not only pay attention to individual signs, but be able to recognize patterns made of up signs. You may not be able to determine if that slight depression in the bed of pine needles was made by a person, but if you stand back and see a series of those depressions 2’-3’ apart in an offset pattern you can more likely conclude that someone walked that way.
- Training – There are a lot of folks that have spent a lifetime learning how to track, and many of them offer some excellent training courses to pass that knowledge on. OnPoint Tactical (a SurvivalBlog sponsor) provides some excellent Scout training courses [2], and smaller local organizations [3] may also provide useful training.
- Study – There are a number of good books and videos on tracking to help you develop your skills. I particularly like the book ‘Tracking Humans [4]’ by David Diaz, but there are a lot of other good ones available. I also recommend the 2-part video series ‘Pro’s Guide to Tactical Tracking [5]’ by UF PRO, and there are dozens of others available on the various video web sites.
- Practice – No matter how much you study, read or train, the only way to become a good tracker is to practice. Have a companion walk normally in front of you, stopping every 50’ or so to wait for you to follow along behind and identify signs of their passage. Try this in all different types of terrain, weather and lighting conditions to expand your knowledge of different types of sign. You can eventually turn it into a game where one person gets a head start and the others need to track that person before they reach an agreed upon destination. You can also practice by yourself by marking a starting point, walking for some distance, then looping back around to your starting point and identifying the types of sign you left behind.
- Recording – Unless you have an eidetic memory, keeping track of dozens or hundreds of different signs when tracking someone can be difficult, especially if you’re just learning. Is that the same shoe tread pattern that you saw an hour ago, or is it something else? Being able to answer that can make the difference between successfully tracking and losing someone. When tracking or even just practicing you should record information about each sign or pattern you identify, along with metadata such as date, time, conditions, etc. This can be done with a simple paper notebook or a note taking app on your cell phone like Microsoft OneNote or Joplin, but my favorite way of recording tracking info is using the ability to add location-specific notes, voice recordings and photos in the OSMAnd+ Android mapping application.
When learning to track you should not just focus on identifying signs, but interpreting those signs to gain more information about your target. Some example of the things you can learn from sign include:
- Sign Aging – Worn edges on a footprint might indicate the target left the sign a while ago, while sharp edges usually indicate fresh sign. Food remaining on trash that’s not covered with ants yet indicate it was dropped recently.
- Physical Characteristics – A really rough estimate for a person’s height is 6 times the length of their footprint, with a lot of obvious other factors that come into play. Deeper footprints usually indicate a heavier person.
- Numbers – The number of distinct signs can indicate the number of people you’re tracking.
- Pace – Deeper footprints far apart usually indicate a fast pace, shallower footprints with scuffs between the may indicate the person is tiring out and slowing down and dragging their feet.
- Injuries – Drops of blood, holes parallel to footprints (makeshift crutch), or two sets of prints, one heavier than the other (one person supporting another) can indicate that one of the targets is injured.
- Discards – Lot’s of obvious signs like trash thrown on the trail, walking on soft ground when there’s a harder surface available, etc. can all indicate the target isn’t aware they’re being followed.
- Direction – A trail of sign that continues in a single direction for a long time can indicate where the target is headed.
- Context – Don’t become so narrowly focused on what you think the sign is telling you that you fail to consider other options. A good story I read years ago was about a group tracking a man on a horse. The experienced tracker in the group noticed a minuscule nick in one of the target horse’s shoe prints that he knew he’d be able to recognize to easily track the target. The target headed towards a large town, so the tracker circled around the town and located the track where the target continued on his way out the other side. Following the nicked shoe print, the trackers caught up two days later, only to discover that the target had sold his horse to someone else.
Evading
Evading requires many of the same foundational skills and abilities as tracking – endurance to extend your lead over a tracker, observation to select the best path to minimize signs of your passage and determine you’re being followed, and training, study and practice to learn to minimize your impact on your environment. One technique that can reduce your footprint impact is call fox walking [6], which involves placing your foot down on the outside ball of your foot, rolling down along the rest of the ball, then bringing your heel down (it’s easier than it sounds) – this minimizes scuffing and heel strike, which reduces the amount of sign you leave on the ground.
There are a number of other options available when you’re traveling in situations where there’s a risk of being followed:
- Check your back-trail frequently to determine if you are actually being followed (‘checking your six’ in military parlance). Stop occasionally in a place that provide a good long-distance view of your back trail and use optics, thermal vision or a drone to see if anyone is behind you.
- If you think you’re being followed but aren’t sure someone is behind you, set up a personal alarm signal by attaching it to a tree, attaching a thin line to the pull pin and stringing it across your back trail. Use this approach with caution, as these alarms are really loud and may actually attract more people in your direction that weren’t originally following you.
- As much as possible, leverage terrain that minimizes the sign you leave behind – hard-pack dirt, rock, roads, water, etc.
- Leverage difficult terrain to make a tracker’s job harder – climb steep embankments, rappel down a short cliff, float down a river for a few miles, etc.
- Get in the habit of moving as quickly as you comfortably and safely can when traveling or moving around to extend your lead over anyone that might be tracking you.
- Change direction occasionally to avoid leaving a direct trail to your destination. If available, use low-impact surfaces when changing direction to make it harder to track you.
- Change shoes or use shoe/boot covers regularly to obfuscate your footprints.
- Make sure everything everyone’s wearing on their outside is secure – losing a simple zipper pull can provide a tracker with a solid sign.
- Before taking a break, find a place along a minimal-impact part of your trail (like a road), make a 90-degree turn and find a location that provides concealment from your back-trail but also provides a view to watch to see if anyone’s following you. If you’re stopping for the night, move far enough from your back trail to minimize the risk of noise or light being detected.
- Dragging a branch behind you will usually provide a lot more sign than it covers up; however, doing so may be a viable method to hide information like the number of people in your group.
- Make sure everyone polices up all of their trash and doesn’t leave anything behind. If you have a group, someone should be assigned to follow along behind at a short distance from the rest of the group to look for obvious signs they might leave behind.
- Bodily waste should be buried 8”-10” deep to minimize the risk of odors escaping.
- Make sure everyone in the group practices good noise discipline at all times.
- If you have to start a fire to cook food, don’t do so near any location you’ll be using for an extended break, and use the smallest Dakota Fire Pit and the least amount of the driest wood necessary to cook, then put it out immediately. As soon as you finish eating move away from the location as quickly as possible.
- If you’re with a group, consider splitting up the group and having each team head in a different direction, then meet up at a predefined rally point later.
- Don’t try walking backwards to throw your pursuer off – even a moderately experienced tracker can easily tell the difference in the types of footprints you leave.
- Use clothing that blends into the terrain you’re traveling in whenever possible.
- Minimize the use of lights as much as possible – use the lowest possible light setting once your eyes have adapted to the dark, use green or blue lights to preserve your night vision, and carry your light low on your body to reduce it’s visibility.
- Pay attention to the weather and try to plan your movement when conditions like heavy rain or snow will cover or eliminate your tracks.
- When scheduling trips, don’t just plan for the most direct route to your destination – include extra hours or days to allow for a more convoluted trail in case you’re followed.
- Avoid taking repetitive paths for trips you make regularly to prevent creating a permanent track.
- Avoid washing your clothing in any detergent that has ‘brighteners’ – they make your clothing much more visible to people using infrared or night vision devices.
- When possible, avoid obvious trails and paths.
One additional option to consider when evading trackers is to interdict them – setting up booby traps (lethal and non-lethal), confronting or ambushing them, etc. are obvious methods for dealing with someone tracking you, but I’ll leave those — including legalities — as an exercise for the reader to research further.
Additional Resources
Here are some additional sources of information that can be useful when developing your tracking and evading skills:
- Sign and the Art of Tracking (free download) – https://mantracking.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/trackingmanual_2013.pdf [7]
- Selous Scouts – https://selousscouts.tripod.com/combat_tracking.htm [8]
- Various material on tracking – https://thewayoftracking.com/mantracking-sources/ [9]
- Article on tracking/evading – https://www.wildernessarena.com/skills/tracking-and-signs/how-to-track-person-in-wild-avoid-being-tracked-by-human-being [10]
- How to Track a Human – https://www.artofmanliness.com/skills/manly-know-how/how-to-track-a-human/ [11]