Conscious Choice: Scent Tracking

September 2000

Scent Tracking

You Ain't Nothin' But a Hound Dog

by Tamarack Song

Recently a friend showed me a chisel for which he had just made a new wooden handle. "Ah, box elder," I commented as I smelled it. Memories from my childhood flooded back — the fun I had with bows and arrows and fishing poles made of box elder saplings! I would carefully strip the bark, filling the air around me with the essence of bittersweet sap.

My earliest warm memories are associated with smells — homemade soap and geraniums in my grandmother’s basement, my grandfather’s pungent wine, the rich earth I planted. Why is it that familiar smells often evoke deeper and more lucid feelings than familiar sights and sounds? We’ve all no doubt noticed how a particular odor can very powerfully bring back the memories or emotions associated with it. In fact, were it not for the odor, we may not have remembered the experience. It may be that our smell (and related taste) memory is so strong and deeply felt because, from an evolutionary perspective, the sense of smell has been with us much longer than our senses of sight or hearing. Smell memory is rooted in the mid-brain, which is little changed from that of our fish, amphibian, and reptilian ancestors.

My blessing of a meal includes bringing my bowl to my nose to commune with the story contained in the lush and varied smells of its contents. My investigation of many things outdoors includes checking their smells. The aromas in the air can help me forecast the weather, determine what kind of land is on the other side of the next hill, and lead me to ripe fruit or a patch of good mint. I’ve observed the same skill, enhanced, in animals such as dogs and rabbits.

Like other hunting mammals, humans can use scent to help find and track their prey. Indigenous people regularly sniff the air to detect anything that lies beyond sight or hearing. Their children — in fact, all children — routinely use scent in conjunction with their other senses to discover the world — except when they are discouraged from bringing strange objects up to their faces. Smell is intrinsically important to our children, at least until adolescence. My stepdaughter, for example, found comfort in sleeping with her mother’s shirt because it smelled like her.

Being naturally musky beings, we humans have evolved to incorporate body scent as a primary component of communication, and thus an important contributor to our personal and social well being. Our scent changes with our emotional state; we are sexually aroused by body scents, and women can tell the sex of a person by the smell of that person’s breath. Some indigenous people feel comfortable talking with others only when close enough to smell them.

In contemporary life, however, we receive a very small percentage of our sensory input from smell. We have come to treat the smells of our physical environment similarly to those of our body, which has contributed to our isolation from our surroundings. As a result, our communication has become less dimensional, and our stress level and frustration have risen. Scent tracking can restore some of the dimension to life.

I rediscovered my own sense of smell about thirty years ago on a hot afternoon’s hike across a shortgrass prairie. A sharp breeze drenched me in the smell of rotting skunk. I stopped, full of questions the scent didn’t answer for me, like Where is the skunk? If she was female, did she have kittens? What did she die from...? An image came to me of a fox crossing back and forth over a scent trail to get a bearing, and so I did that. I began awkwardly, but within a minute or two I had evolved a pattern, swinging arbitrarily to the right or left to pick up the scent when I lost it. Once I established a general direction, I felt confident going for longer periods without hitting the scent, knowing I was traveling parallel to it and could pick it up at any time. The skunk turned out to be a juvenile killed by an owl, but not eaten.

That experience inspired me to study and practice the skill so I could become proficient at it. I watched wolves and mink hunt for scent cues, and I learned more in my study of native hunting methods. As well as contributing to my foraging and hunting skills, this new skill has enriched my life in general by expanding my sensory awareness and bringing me more in attunement with my surroundings. And beyond that, it is just plain fun!

Scent tracking is actually quite easy to learn. The following exercises can help reactivate your sense of smell and return it to a balanced place with our other senses. Practice these exercises in the order presented, incorporating one into your living ritual before progressing to the next. The cumulative effect of these exercises done in sequence can bring a depth of olfactory attunement that is harder to reach when selecting the exercises randomly. Be mindful that our goal is not the completion of these exercises, but the expansion of your sensory awareness.

Smell Exercises

• Lift your bowl/plate to your nose and take time to lavish on the various smells before beginning to eat. The sense of smell is ten thousand times more acute than that of taste.

• Open your house/car windows as much as possible, taking note of the changing smells you encounter and what they say to you. When I begin such an exercise, I hang a note in a conspicuous place to remind me to practice it.

• Part the ground cover and smell the earth in a variety of areas. Account for what may be causing the differences in smell. To enliven the smell of something that is dry, first breathe on/through it. Odors carry better on moist air, and breath adds moisture.

• Stick your nose in every blossom you encounter, noting the differences in scents as they relate to each type of flower and as they change in relation to temperature, humidity, age, and time of day.

• Smell your hair, and/or the hair and scalp of another.

• Note how the smell of your underarms changes when you are fearful or angry as opposed to during physical exertion.

• Note how the smell of your scat changes with your diet and general health.

• Smell the genitals of your sexual partner and note if/how their scent affects you differently than before you began these exercises.

After you feel you have gained from these exercises, you are ready to give your newly refurbished sniffer some in-the-field training. If you don’t have a dead skunk laying around, take a bottle of old perfume or something similar and saturate a rag with it. Then, while your back is turned, have someone set the rag a hundred paces or so out in an open grassy field. Be sure to choose a day with a steady moderate breeze. Now walk the downwind perimeter of the field until you pick up the scent. Extended rapid, short canine-style sniffs or repeated large inhales to test the air, dull our olfactory sensors. Take sporadic long, slow sniffs, which give our less acute sniffer time to analyze the subtleties of the scent. What works best for me is to catch the scent as I breathe normally. If I need to just keep connected with the scent trail, I take in just enough air to catch the scent.

Continue walking until you lose the scent. You now know the boundaries and width of your scent trail. Face upwind and walk back into the scent trail and progress upwind, occasionally veering to the right and left to keep tabs on the trail boundaries. If you lose the trail and you are angling to the right, turn left until you pick it back up, and vice versa.

To determine the distance to the source, consider these modifying factors:

• The wider the track, the farther away the source.

• The stronger the wind, the narrower the scent trail; the weaker the wind, the wider the scent trail.

• Vegetation, rocks, and landforms in or near the scent trail can modify it, either spreading, narrowing, or diffusing it.

• Scent is carried by moisture in the air, so the greater the humidity, the stronger the scent. Air temperature is next in importance, as warmer air holds more moisture. The gradation in the scent-carrying capacity of air is as follows, from strongest to weakest — warm moist, cool moist, warm dry, cool dry.

• Heat increases the scent released by some plants and animals, and hastens decomposition, which causes dead animals (skunks included) to smell stronger.

Extra Dimensions

When learning the skill (and now for practice) I tracked down all manner of oddities — an outhouse, somebody’s illegal garbage dump, a rare mint growing in a bog. I enjoy following practically any scent trail I come across, just for the experience. I remember one particular time when a visiting friend asked if I would demonstrate scent tracking. We had no trouble finding a scent, as the conditions were near ideal — a humid, winter day with a faint breeze and the temperature hovering at around freezing. A porcupine’s scent was strong, but we couldn’t follow it for more than twenty paces without losing it, and it didn’t seem to be coming from any clear direction.

Rather than become frustrated, I got excited, realizing I was being gifted another dimension of scent tracking. And I felt humbled and mystified: The more I learn the more I’m shown how little I know — and how much I have to look forward to learning. I radiated out in all directions to define the perimeter of the scent trail. But there was no perimeter, just an ill-defined oval which seemed to hover around a large white pine.

As I stood under the pine in contemplation, I felt a cool draft down the back of my neck. At that instant I felt the way a deer must feel who becomes suddenly aware of a cougar above. (In this region deer have scant arboreal predators, so seldom look upward). Knowing what I’d see, I looked up a large limb about thirty feet overhead — at a porcupine looking down at me. I’m sure she got as good a laugh out of it as we did!

Why was this scent trail so elusive? Around the trunk, the big pine had funneled a downdraft of cool shaded air to compensate for the warm air rising off of its sun-drenched outer needles. The downdraft laced itself with the bark eater’s vinegar-musk scent, then slid onto the snow and spread out like an inverted mushroom.

Downdrafts, updrafts, backwinds, and eddies are subtle, less easily observed factors that affect the scent trail. One can study their influences by building smoky fires in various locations and observing the flow pattern of the smoke. Small, cool smudgy fires are best, as their smoke hangs low to the ground and they create little updraft, downwind, or other effect, of their own. However well you study these phenomena, there will always be more to learn.

Even with this tutorial as your guide, I don’t imagine you’ll develop the nose of a hound dog. And that may be a blessing, because it probably wouldn’t look good on your face. But you will gain a life-enriching olfactory aptitude and a unique skill, not to mention the great stories you’ll have to tell!

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