“Nothing can exist without leaving traces.” This phrase that the French philosopher and writer Baptiste Morizot (Draguignan, 1983) strategically places as a decoy for the reader explains well his passion for deciphering the signs that animals leave in their daily movements: a footprint, a broken branch, an excrement that the author dissects and analyzes with forensic precision. This desire to better understand the forces of nature, and to make peace with everything that is not human, is the driving force behind ‘The Tracker’ (Errata Naturae), a book in which this professor of Contemporary Thought in the Aix-Marseille University tells of his adventures chasing bears in Yellowstone (USA), packs of wolves in Haut-Var (France) and a solitary snow leopard in Kyrgyzstan.
The Morizot method, also author of ‘Ways of Being Alive’, consists of total immersion in the wild territory and includes a philosophical reflection that improves your understanding of the animal world. This careful observation of the environment leads him to discover, for example, that a pack of wolves hunts crayfish in the absence of other, easier prey. Mystery solved after facing the trail of dead-end entries in the channel. And, no less important, the evidence of a complex intelligence, of the custom of a family clan, of an exclusive cultural tradition that manifests itself before this hunter and interpreter of signals.
THE BOOK
So the writer becomes a amazed spectator of a hidden world that is revealed at night and that provides him with more information while he acquires more skill as a tracker: «By dint of following another’s trail, we end up seeing through his eyes. If we look closely, it is something almost magical, like those metamorphoses that take place in shamanic rituals, in which the shaman manages to transpose his mind into the body of an animal,” writes Baptiste Morizot, who literally puts himself in the shoes of the beasts he tracks.
It is difficult not to share his emotion when he contemplates a group of wolves in the darkness from a distance:
‘I recently spent several nights stalking the south of France to observe the nocturnal life of a pack of wolves as part of an action research project. Silently stationed on a promontory in the middle of the plain, I point towards the night with a thermal camera that captures the difference in heat between bodies in the landscape and reconstructs it in the viewer in the form of contrasts. And, then, wolfish silhouettes of light appear in the clearings, they play, they repeat the rituals that make up their existence, they go out to hunt or patrol their territory,” he says (with translation by Silvia Moreno Parrado).
And, of course, reading ‘The Tracker’ (originally published in France in 2018) we learn to distinguish the tracks of a black bear from those of a grizzly: «With a twig, draw a straight line from under the big toe that passes through the upper edge of the palm. If the little finger is on top, it is a grizzly. If it is below, it is a black bear. The author points out a more illuminating trick: “The American black bear climbs the tree in which you have taken refuge to eat you, while the grizzly uproots the tree to devour you.”
This last option seems infallible.
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