Last weekend, Paul and I attended a weekend-long tracking workshop at Rowe Conference Center. We spent Friday evening through Monday lunchtime with a group of 15 amazing folks, led by 3 incredibly skilled and incredibly generous trackers, and came home feeling both grounded and fired up, and full of wonder for the world.

Tuesday morning after the workshop, I was walking down the road to the farm, and just where the red maple/alder swamp meets the schoolhouse pasture (just to the west of the main barn), I saw a set of tracks heading south from the edge of Forget Road. Just about jumping out of my skin with eagerness to try out my newly sharpened tracking skills, I moved into observation mode. The tracks were huge! - each print was 5” across and 6” long. The stride was 66” long - this was a big animal! I followed the tracks along the alder edge, and found a perfectly clear print. Clearly a giant cloven hoof. The tracks were alternating, and direct register, meaning the hind feet landed directly in the print left by the front foot, making a four-footed animal look like it walks upright on two feet. Wind direction - light breeze from the NW. Crusty snow, several days old. Tracks had appeared sometime between dusk the evening before, and 6:30 in the morning. Clear skies overnight, but no moon. No obvious scat or sign of feeding.

Clearly, we’d had a moose visitor overnight! I was vibrating with excitement, and just about ready to run to the office to send an email to my fellow workshop participants, when I noticed that the tracks did not come from across the road. Strange! We’ve had moose cross the farm before, but they always come from the woods on the north of the farm, cross the road, and continue south. This moose had not come from across the road. I scratched my head, and tried to channel both the animal, and the wisdom of our instructors. I walked up Forget Road towards the barn, and directly across the road from the barn with the sheep and horses, there was a second set of giant tracks. The moose had come up from the pond - of course! But why had it walked down the road and then turned south again? And why were the bales of hay for the sheep all tossed around in a big mess?

And the stride length is not quite long enough for a moose. And the trail width is really too wide...

As I was pondering all of this, Gus came walking quickly down the road, looking very perturbed. And the light dawned. I said “Any chance you are missing a cow this morning?” His eyes got really big, and he said “How did you know?”

Apparently Robin had not shown up for morning milking, and the search was on.

In the end, Robin was very happy to be shown the way home from the swamp. We have no idea what inspired her to go there. The mind of a cow is a mysterious thing. And I got to send my email to the group anyway, setting my fellow trackers a challenge that morning that no one but the instructors were able to solve!