A FORGOTTEN SKILL

Before the advent of supermarkets and mass food production, being able to spot or hide tracks was a fairly common skill among pre-industrial civilization families because their survival depended on it. People tracked some of the animals they hunted and sometimes tracked other people for various reasons. People also learned how to cover their traces and keep from being followed, or to simply remain unseen to others who could pose a threat.

Nowadays, these skills have been contained to a small number of people because of all the conveniences that surround us. We don’t hunt for animals to survive anymore, and if we feel unsafe we usually count on the local police or EMS.

In the near future this skill will be very important!

In a disaster or survival situation, the scarcity of resources makes people desperate, and desperate people can be very dangerous. If there’s no one else that you can trust, the ability to be invisible can be vital. Covering your tracks lets you leave unwanted people at bay and provides you some room until you can make it to safety.

DEFYING LOGIC

Successfully tracking someone is a product of logical reasoning and common sense (and, in part, the carelessness of the prey). When a person passes by an area, they often leave tell-tale signs of their presence behind. This can be a shoe imprint, a discarded item, or upturned pebbles or stones— things that will be out of place but detectable only to a trained eye.

These signs can be interpreted by a tracker and provides them with information that they can use to get their prey. Just by looking at tracks left behind, it’s possible to know the number of people in a group, how far ahead they are, and even their capability to defend themselves from an attack.

While it’s going to be hard and time-consuming to eliminate your tracks, there are still some basic and easy-to-follow measures that you can take to make it more difficult for a pursuer to catch up to you.

WATCH YOUR STEP

The prints on the ground left by a person’s feet are one of the most noticeable and useful traces for a tracker.

Through details like the size of the sole imprint, the tread pattern, or the number of different marks left on the soil, your pursuer can immediately identify specifics about your group even if he’s miles behind you.

Even if the people following you are not expert trackers, continued sightings of your prints on the ground are enough to tell them that they’re on the right path.

• If you can, travel on hard-packed soil, rocks or gravel. You won’t be leaving too much of a trace on these compared to soft or sandy soil.

You can travel over rocks and pebbles without leaving visible tracks.

• Aside from leaving detailed marks, moving through soft and wet soil will also let mud stick to your shoes and make you leave obvious signs elsewhere.

 

• The tread patterns on your sole is a signature that your follower can use. If you have the means and the opportunity to do so, change your shoes while travelling to confuse your tracker.

 

• Wrap the bottom of your shoe with layers of cloth to mask its treads and keep it from digging too deeply into the soil. In a pinch, you can also tie leaves to your soles.

  

  Overshoes made of carpet used by drug smugglers crossing the desert border. Thick cloth wrapped over your shoe, covering the soles, can mask the prints that you make

• When in a group, walking in a single file can be an effective way to mask your actual numbers from your pursuer (But this can also make your tracks deeper and more obvious).

 

• Avoid thick brush as much as you can. No matter how careful you are, it’s almost impossible not to alter the plants that you’ll be going through, leaving your pursuer evidence that you’ve been in the area.

 

• If it can’t be helped and your group needs to travel through bushes or a field with tall grass, it’s better to walk side by side, a couple of feet apart, instead of a single file. Multiple people using the same path and walking through tall grass will make a trail that will be very easy to spot.

  

  When in a group, spreading out when passing through tall grass minimizes the chances of creating a visible artificial trail

• Weeds and other small plants get crushed easily underneath your feet. Make deliberate steps and avoid stepping on clumps of weed or grass.

 

• Be careful not to scrape the bark off trees or break branches. If the person following you can’t find anything on the ground, they’ll start looking up for signs of your presence.

It is a lifelong journey to truly master invisibility in the wilderness.  It requires intense knowledge of place, local flora and fauna, an intuitive knowledge of bird and animal behavior and much physical training.  It is wise to follow the behavior of the most elusive animals such as the mountain lion.  They do most of their activity at night or around dawn and dusk.  They move slowly, sitting and listening for long periods of time before they move.  Each foot is lifted and placed with care so as to not break any sticks or make any more noise than necessary. 

Use shadows and camouflage.  With simple natural materials, one can camouflage themselves better than even the most expensive camo clothing from Cabela’s.  Start with a dusting of ash to dull the skin, then apply a dappling of mud, clay and charcoal.  Lastly sprinkle on forest duff, leaves and pine needles.  Essentially turning your self into the forest floor.  It is important to focus on breaking up your outline and the recognizable structure of your face and shoulders. 

OTHER POINTS TO CONSIDER

Aside from leaving footprints, you will also need to consider these things to hide your presence from other people.

• Keep It Clean

The easiest way to know if people have been in the area is to look for things that are out of place. Plastic bags, food wrappers, cigarette butts and other discarded man-made items can only come from humans, and even if a wild animal managed to drag it from you, it won’t be carrying it too far away and will still alert other people of your presence. Don’t throw your trash willy-nilly and keep it in your pockets or your bag. Larger items and human waste should be buried in an isolated area.

Items, like trash, will tell your pursuer that you’ve been in the area. Keep your trash with you, or bury it in the ground.

• Keep It Down

Human noises can only come from, obviously, humans. Keep quiet during your travel and learn how to use signals to pass information to your other party members without signaling your pursuers. Also, be aware of items you have with you that could make unwanted noise like jingling keys or canisters banging against each other. When possible, wrap such items in a layer of cloth (like a handkerchief) or anything that muffles the sound. If you’re carrying any electronics, especially phones and radios, make sure they’re off or muted and all audible alarms have been disabled.

 

• Lights Out

Travelling in the dark provides some advantages when it comes to losing people who are tailing you, especially if you’re familiar with the area and they’re not. The darkness can provide the perfect cover, but if you’re travelling with flashlights lit, it will be easy to spot you from a mile, or more, If you must use a flashlight to read a map, use one with a red output. It won’t be as bright as an ordinary flashlight and it keeps your eyes used to the dark. Fire will be easy to see at night, even from long distances. If it can’t be helped, it’s still possible to create a fire at night without being easily seen by making a Dakota fire hole.

If a fire is absolutely needed, a fire pit near the base of a tree can be a good choice- it produces less smoke, and the tree can diffuse the smoke that manages to rise above the pit. It can also be easily covered up

Also, be mindful of items that could reflect light, especially when the moon is out—this includes your own skin. Cover them up.

When learning wilderness evasion, remember that one of the easiest ways to be discovered while your camping is from your fire.  At night the light from a fire can be seen from miles away and during the day the smoke from a fire may be just as conspicuous.  Consider the type of landscape you are in.

If it is a dry, arid landscape then you should have your fire during the day.  If your wood is dry and you remove the bark it is possible to have a fire that produces very little smoke.  Also, in open, arid landscapes there is very little cover from trees to hide the firelight so having a fire at night would be difficult to conceal.

If you are in a forested landscape then having your fire at night is the best option.  You can use the trees to hide the light of the fire and at night, smoke is not very visible. 

In the image below you can see a technique for concealing your fire from view.  It is important to dig an air hole from the side to allow the fire to burn well.

• Lose the Dog

If you suspect a dog is also being used to track you, there’s little you can do but increase the distance as quickly as you can, or use the terrain to slow them down. Climbing rocky outcrops and other obstacles that could hamper a dog’s movements will buy you some time, as well as surrounding yourself with scents that could distract the canine for a while, such as passing through a crowded city or using game trails whenever possible.

A trained hound is very difficult, if not impossible, to shake off your scent. Your best bet is to increase the distance between you and the dog as soon as possible

If you’re traveling a great distance over the span of days, it’s almost impossible not to leave a single trace behind and the possibility that you’ll get caught will depend on the skill of your hunter. But with some discipline and common sense, you can slow down your pursuer and be in your safe house before they can catch up.

Evading dogs is extremely challenging once they have your scent.  Dogs track best in cool moist environments.  In hot, dry, windy environments dogs tire quickly and lose the scent frequently.  Here are some tricks that may help:

• Cross obstacles that are hard for the dogs to follow like fallen logs or steep rock faces.
• Make several sharp direction changes.  This serves to make the handler doubt the dog which may cause him to call off the search.
• Move with the wind.  Hunters are well aware that smells float downwind.  If you have the option to move upwind or downwind, moving downwind (with the wind) will greatly improve your chances of evading scent dogs.

Evading Trackers

The best way to learn how to evade a tracker is to learn tracking.  Practice following the tracks of a friend in snow or sand and pay attention to when you lose the trail.  Evading a tracker is more about slowing down the tracker and creating distance than making the tracker permanently loose the trail.  Here are some ways you can use wilderness evasion and slow down a tracker:

Changing shoe tread – trackers will key in on a certain shoe tread so if you have the ability to change shoes at different points along the trail it may help to confuse the tracker.  Shoes with indistinct tread is also a plus.

90 degree turn with a hidden view – find a place along the side of the trail where the view is blocked by a tree or boulder, cut a sharp turn behind that obstacle. 

Use Roads – Before you reach a road, start angling your tracks to indicate that you are travelling one way up the road, then, once you are on the road where your tracks are undetectable, reverse your direction and go back the other way.  If you can cover several hundred yards on the road before hopping back into the woods you may buy yourself several hours. 

Invisible Shelters

If you need to build a semi-permanent shelter and you have the means to do it, a pit shelter is a great option and can be concealed so well that a person can walk over it without knowing its there. 

The pit shelter is a very simple but effective form of wilderness evasion.  What is not shown in the image below is a door plug.  This may look like a “raft” of sticks lashed together that can be pulled down after you enter the shelter.  This shelter requires a lot of digging and may not be practical without a shovel.  To construct the shelter, dig a pit that is comfortable to lie down in, three feet deep.  Leave a shelf, eight inches deep and eight inches wide surrounding the whole pit.  Cover the pit with sturdy logs.  It is important to choose solid logs so that if a person walks over the pit, they don’t feel the ground bounce.  Cover the logs with leaves and soil.  The final step is to re-vegetate the soil so that it looks like nothing happened there.  In time, the plants will grow and the pit will be completely concealed.  Don’t forget to fill the inside of the pit with leaves for insulation.