I was tracking behind my house in New Hampshire a couple months ago at the sand pit I would go to nearly every day. In all of the times I had gone there I had never seen bear tracks or heard of bears being in the area. On this particular day I decided to go check out a road that bordered the sand pit that I had never been to. On the road I found fox tracks and as I bent down to see if they were from a red or gray fox I noticed right next to them a faint but clear line of toes and a big heel pad. It was a fresh track of a small black bear. I felt a buzz in my body which I have felt many times before when I was about to have a spiritual experience. I took out my camera to get a picture of the tracks. Being in the sand pit all the time takes a toll on my camera and often when I turn it on it will read "lense error" and turn itself off. That was the case this time so as I searched up and down the road for more tracks I repeatedly turned my camera on and off over and over again praying that it would work and I would have proof that there really was a black bear in our backyard.
Miraculously the bear left no other tracks besides two or three clear ones in a line. The road was surrounded by sand which I searched with painful scrutiny for tracks but I couldn't find anything. There were deer tracks, turkey tracks, fox tracks but no bear. I slowly became obsessed with finding and following the trail of this bear so I started combing larger circles around the original set of tracks on the road. Hours passed and my circles grew to be miles. I was tracking the entire landscape in my head thinking of the most likely route for the bear to follow. I found a river that would definitely funnel the bear one way and I gained more inspiration. I found many other exciting things like the kill site where coyotes took down a deer and the feather of a red-shouldered hawk. I had never found a hawk feather before so that was really cool for me.
Eventually it started to get dark and I reached the end of the sand pit two or three miles from the road where the tracks were. My camera still refused to turn on and I finally admitted defeat. I took the lesson from this experience to be that even huge things are going on right under my nose that I don't know about. Big animals can sneak by without me ever knowing because I wouldn't even have seen those tracks if I wasn't bent over looking at fox tracks on a road that I never go to. As I turned to make the long walk back to my car I looked down and saw them. A long string of beautiful clear tracks from my bear. I had walked right over these tracks a few minutes before without seeing them. It was almost dark now but deep down I knew that if I gave it one more try, my camera would turn on. And it did- just long enough for one picture before going back to the lense error.
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