What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs

What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs falls in the growing genre of books that aim to reintroduce us to nature. But this is no dry field guide! What Walks This Way is packed with personal stories about each species’ life and habits, plus photos and illustrations of their tracks, and best of all, is imbued with Russell’s wry sense of humor, voracious curiosity, and passion for this animate planet.

Here she gives us insight into bobcats, wild cats most of us will never see, but one we know, as she reminds us, through our domestic felines:

“If you have watched house cats, you have seen bobcats. Obviously, they are not the same species. … But bobcat kittens, with their round blue eyes, have the same manic innocence as domestic kittens. Young bobcats play together like your cats, ballerina movements, chest and paws raised in slow-motion—and then the race begins. Next time you look, they’re grooming each other. Tongues licking into ears, a kinetic hypnosis. Bobcats also purr with that grumbling seduction, drilling into your maternal instinct, filing down any species mistrust. … Like your cat, a sleeping bobcat becomes the Buddha.”

When I interviewed Russell for a magazine on arts and culture, I asked her why, when she has written on subjects ranging from archeology and pantheism to the natural history of hunger and the politics of ranching, she turned to animal tracks for this book.

“I got involved in a program of tracking skills and immediately gained a better understanding of who was walking around my backyard at night. Skunks, raccoons, gray foxes, javelina, deer, the occasional bobcat and mountain lion. The wildlife winding secretly through our lives is impressively diverse.

“I began to appreciate the aesthetics of a track, the tiny print of a pocket mouse or the long curved toes and palm pads of a ground squirrel. The pebbly weirdness of a porcupine. There’s the real sense that you’ve crossed paths with this animal in some way. I felt enlarged. When something big like this happens to me, I am going to write about it.”

What kept me reading What Walks This Way is Russell’s sense of humor. She’s no righteous environmentalist or know-it-all scientist. Russell enjoys the subject, literally, taking joy from it, and she also laughs at herself as she learns.

I asked Russell if she was deliberate about introducing humor into a book she describes as a “celebration” of the wild still thriving on this earth.

“You can’t be too deliberate about humor. Fortunately, all the possibilities of being wrong about identifying a track makes the experience inherently humorous. You are entering into lives so different from your own. You have to be humorous, imaginative, maybe a little playful. And humble!”

In the introduction, Russell describes What Walks This Way as a “love letter.” She goes on to say,

“I am always trying to love the world more, slow down, bend down, look, and really see. I am not very good at this. Perhaps you share that feeling of incompetence, a kind of learning disability in the natural world. Perhaps this is a modern problem or a cultural one. In any case, identifying the track of a spotted skunk helps. It’s a cure for all kinds of inadequacy or despair. That may be an overstatement. But I don’t think so.”

Get yourself a copy of What Walks This Way. It’ll connect to you to something larger than the human world, make you laugh, and also bring you joy—all invaluable in these times.