by Robert Moor
From these elitist roots—predicated as much on aesthetics as conservation—arose the so-called sportsman’s code, which frowned on the killing of female and young deer, discouraged hunting for profit, and banned year-round hunting. During the late nineteenth century, these values were enshrined in law by hunter-conservationists like Theodore Roosevelt and Madison Grant, who were instrumental in the formation of many of the earliest national parks and national forests. At the same time, the American sport hunters, in response to the princely diversions of Europe, fashioned themselves as rough and rustic outdoorsmen.
Walker often told me he hunted with a bow and arrow because he was “a strong traditionalist,” a man who enjoyed carrying on the rites of his ancestors. As he sat in that tree—in a national forest, in a region where white-tailed deer had been hunted to a vanishing point and then “reintroduced” on two separate occasions over the last century, once a hillbilly boy of Irish and Indian heritage, now a middle-class man bound both by law and honor, staying his arrow because a buck was too young to kill—he was the inheritor and embodiment of more traditions than perhaps even he knew.
After our last morning of hunting, when Walker had spared the young buck, he gave me a ride back to the airport. He seemed a bit chagrined that we hadn’t shot anything, but overall he was surprisingly equanimous about it. “You aren’t guaranteed anything,” he said. “That’s the reason it’s called hunting, not killing.”
On the long drive to the airport, to pass the time, he tried to list all the animals he had observed making trails. The list was extensive. “Of course, deer make trails like crazy,” he said. “Hogs, that’s another one makes bad trails. When they get in a row, they trot, going from place to place, like a line of ducks. I’ve had trails of them wore out a foot deep. . . . Snakes leave a trail when they cross a cotton patch. Especially rattlesnakes. We’d track them down and kill them bastards . . .”
This was not the first time I’d heard Walker mention an animal making “bad trails,” but it jarred me nevertheless. Some environmental preservationists I’ve met frown upon human trails, which they view as blemishes on the land, but they tend to regard animal trails as natural and good. As a lifelong hunter, Walker sees things differently. He seems to make no differentiation between the trails of humans or any other animal—a rut is a rut. And as the last three days had shown, for the hunter or for the hunted, a rut can be one’s downfall.
He went on to list various other trail-makers: raccoons, skunks, turtles, muskrats, minks, armadillos . . .
“I reckon nearly every kind of animal will follow a trail, because it’s just easier to navigate,” he remarked. “Like the buffalo trails. Most of the time, it’s easier walking.”
“But,” he added after a lengthy pause, his voice brightening to a new thought, “I guess people leave the most obvious trails. Like this damn interstate highway here. Shit, if people cease to exist, somebody could come back here ten thousand years later and probably find remnants of this concrete bridge. So we leave the most destructive trails, I think, of any group of animals.”
* * *
I. Kelly noted that when formerly captive elephants come to the sanctuary and are reconnected with other female elephants, for some reason they never re-form large herds with a distinct matriarch. Some paired off like Misty and Dulary; others remained solitary. One elephant named Tarra famously befriended a golden retriever named Bella.
II. Fortunately for everyone involved, in the years since I last visited the sanctuary, the caregivers have devised a way to mix the medication into the elephants’ food.
III. I have read that Inuit hunters do something similar; they routinely spare the leaders of caribou herds so as to avoid disrupting their migration routes the following year.
IV. Like many indigenous tribal names, Diné means simply “the people.” “Navajo” is a Spanish bastardization of the Tewa Pueblo word navahu’u, which means “farm fields in the valley.”
V. The rule of thumb I devised was that any group of seven or more sheep were capable of forming a quorum and wandering off. However, this rule-of-seven was far from ironclad; I once lost a group of five for an entire afternoon.
CHAPTER 4
ONE FROST-LACED fall morning, I went trail hunting with a historian named Lamar Marshall. He was slowly piecing together a map of all the major footpaths of the ancient Cherokee homeland, and he had a new route he wanted to inspect. Wrapped in layers of warm clothing, which we would gradually peel off as the day wore on, we walked down a gravel road through the forests of the North Carolina foothills. The sky was pale, cool, and distant. Down the hill from us ran Fires Creek, which slid southward to meet the fat, muddy tail of the Hiwassee River.
Few Americans can say with any certainty that they have seen an old Native American trail. But almost everyone has seen the ghost of one and even traveled along it. For example, Marshall told me, the highway we’d taken to get to reach these mountains had once been a noted Cherokee trail, stretching hundreds of miles from present-day Asheville to Georgia. The next road we turned onto had been a trail once, too. As had dozens of other roads in the surrounding hills.
Marshall estimated that eighty-five percent of the total length of the old Native American trails in North Carolina had been paved over. This phenomenon generally holds true across the continent, but more so in the densely forested east. As Seymour Dunbar wrote in A History of Travel in America: “Practically the whole present-day system of travel and transportation in America east of the Mississippi River, including many turnpikes, is based upon, or follows, the system of forest paths established by the Indians hundreds of years ago.”
That system of paths is arguably the grandest buried cultural artifact in the world. For many indigenous people, trails were not just a means of travel; they were the veins and arteries of culture. For societies relying on oral tradition, the land served as a library of botanical, zoological, geographical, etymological, ethical, genealogical, spiritual, cosmological, and esoteric knowledge. In guiding people through that wondrous archive, trails became a rich cultural creation and a source of knowledge in themselves. Although that system of knowledge has largely been subsumed by empire and entombed in asphalt, threads of it can still be found running through the forest, if one only knows where to look.
Marshall did not look like any historian I had ever met. He had leathery skin, gray stubble, and two wide-set, sun-narrowed dashes for eyes. From crown to cuff, he wore mismatched camouflage: a camo trucker cap, a camo backpack, and a camo karate gi over a pair of camo cargo pants. Any time I wanted to hear about a new chapter of his life, I needed only point to a garment and ask if there was a story behind it. His trucker’s cap read “Alabama Fur Takers Association,” an organization for which he, a former trapper, used to serve as the vice president. Around his neck, he wore a beaver skin pouch he’d bought while stocking the trading post he used to run. Beside the pouch hung a sterling silver medallion, which depicted a flattened musk turtle. The turtle—an endangered species, long sacred to the Cherokee—was the symbol for an activist organization he founded in 1996 called Wild Alabama. That outfit later expanded into an influential conservation group called Wild South, whose efforts currently cover eight southeastern states.
The karate gi was an item he had designed for himself many years ago. He’d since quit practicing karate, having finally decided that “if some three-hundred-fifty-pound guy was going to beat me to death, I’d rather just shoot him.” In his former life as a firebrand environmentalist in Alabama, for self-protection he had taken to carrying two powerful handguns everywhere he went. On our hike, to cut down on weight, he only carried a pocket-sized .22 Magnum. “I feel kinda naked with just this,” he said at one point, holding it in his palm.
In an orange waist-pack, Marshall carried a GPS device, a few maps, a black notebook, a pen, and firest
arter for emergencies. As we walked, from time to time he pulled out the GPS, consulted his map, and took a few notes in his pocket notebook, which was full of hand-drawn maps. He still wrote in the cribbed, cryptic shorthand he’d learned while working as a plat technician for surveyor crews. On the first page, in a gesture reminiscent of the old explorer’s journals, he had written his name, and beneath it, his Cherokee nickname, Nvnohi Diwatisgi, which means “the Road Finder.” (The word for path and road is the same in Cherokee: nvnohi, “the rocky place,” a place where the soil and vegetation have already been worn away.)
“Everything gets mapped, everything gets drawn, all the waypoints, contours,” he explained. He flipped through the pages. “Every trip since I’ve been up here: Little Frog, Big Snowbird, Devil’s Den Ridge . . .”
Marshall shuffled between copies of historical maps and hand-written historical accounts. On one large modern map, he showed me the trail we would be hiking that day. It ran beside Fires Creek and up over Carvers Gap, connecting the old Cherokee settlements of Tusquittee Town and Tomatly Town. Our walk was only the iceberg’s tip of the trail-finding process: the bulk of the work consisted of archival research. He regularly drove to libraries across the country, including the National Archives in Washington, DC, where he and an assistant would spend days paging through old records and snapping digital photographs by the thousands. Once he had confirmed the location of a trail in the historical record, he would use a digital mapping program to plot a tentative route. Then he would hike through the woods searching for it. If he found a trail on the ground that followed his hypothetical line, it was a good indication that it was the old Cherokee trail, but he would still have to perform a transect, walking in a straight line from ridge to ridge, to see if the area contained other potential candidates. “If there’s ten trails in there, you say all right, which one was the real trail?” Marshall said. “But if there’s one trail in there, then you’re pretty sure that’s it.”
He also paid close attention to the surrounding area, to discern if it was an untouched Native American path, or whether it had been converted into a wagon road, a fire line, or a logging road. (You can identify wagon roads, for example, because they are wider and deeply rutted; you also tend to find piles of rock lying beside them, marking where the road builders tried to flatten the road surface.) Sometimes, he would find three iterations of a trail—the original trail, a wagon road, and then a modern road—laid out side-by-side, like afterimages.
Though his research was best known for helping reveal the startling degree to which our road network was inherited (or more accurately, purloined) from Native Americans, Marshall’s top priority was to find those few remaining ancient Cherokee trails that had remained undisturbed. His motivations were (at least, in part) environmentalist: if he could locate a historical Cherokee footpath, federal legislation mandates that the Forest Service must protect a quarter of a mile of land on either side of the trail until it has undergone a proper archaeological survey (which, in certain cases, can take decades). And if the site is ultimately found to be historically significant, then the state can take steps to ensure that the trail’s historical context—which just so happens to be old-growth forest—remains intact. By locating and mapping old Cherokee trails, Marshall had so far been able to protect more than forty-nine thousand acres of public land from logging and mining operations.
Marshall’s work shook up certain fundamental assumptions about the nature of conservation work. Conservationists generally fight to protect blocks of land, whereas Marshall fought to conserve geographic lines. Since Cherokee paths often followed game trails, they provide ideal corridors for wildlife to move between ecosystems. The paths also tend to travel along dividing ridgelines, which provide scenic overlooks for future visitors. Even more radically, by showing that human artifacts can serve as the linchpin of wilderness areas, Marshall was bridging an old divide between culture and environment. That dichotomy is familiar to Americans today, but it would have been wholly foreign to precolonial Native Americans. Mile by mile, Marshall was incorporating the human landscape back into the natural one.
We walked down the dirt road, looking for openings in the trees. Soon we discovered a trail branching off to the right. It was lovely—open, airy, carpeted with the duff of the overhanging cherry trees, oaks, and pines—but to Marshall it felt not quite right. For one thing, it was too wide. The Cherokee trained themselves to walk heel-to-toe, like tightrope walkers. As one Cherokee man explained to me, “There’s no need for a big wide road. All you’re going to do is go there, and the things that are there”—plants, medicine, game animals—“won’t be there if you make the road wide.”
Marshall ventured a guess that this trail was once widened by loggers, and that it would narrow as we neared the top of the ridge. Five minutes later, though, we ran across a blue plastic rectangle nailed to a tree—a blaze. Marshall’s confusion deepened; the trail wasn’t supposed to be designated as a hiking trail. And yet, when he consulted his map and the GPS, it appeared we were on course.
He finally concluded that the Forest Service must have appropriated the Cherokee trail. This was unusual. Native American trails normally don’t grow into hiking trails, because their objectives differ. Native trails reach their destinations as quickly as possible, sticking to ridgelines while avoiding peaks and gullies. In contrast, recreational trails, which are a relatively modern European invention, dawdle along, gravitating to sites of maximal scenic beauty—mountaintops, waterfalls, overlooks, and vast bodies of water. Modern hiking trails are also meticulously designed to resist the erosive power of hikers wearing rubber-soled boots; so, for example, on a steep hillside, they will cut long switchbacks to lessen the incline. Native trails almost never do this. They tend to charge up slopes in a straight line, following the “fall line”—the path water would take while flowing downhill.
Though Native trails prized speed over ease (and erosion resistance), they also often detoured from the most mechanistically efficient route, for reasons specific to each culture. Gerald Oetelaar, an archeologist who studied the Plains Indians of Canada, told me he became frustrated whenever colleagues relied on computer programs to map “least cost pathways” across ancient indigenous landscapes, because they were laboring under the false assumption that Native people traveled like the Mars Rover, rolling across an unpeopled and unstoried landscape. “I keep pointing out to them: All landscapes have histories!”
Among all living things on Earth, humans are, as far as we know, uniquely rich in what we call culture—art, stories, rites, religion, communal identities, moral wisdom—and our trails have grown to reflect this. “There are reasons why we don’t do things the ‘logical’ way,” observed James Snead, an archaeologist who studies “landscapes of movement” in the American Southwest. Another way of framing this point would be to say the logic of human behavior is fantastically multiform, as are the trails it creates. A trail might go to great lengths to avoid enemy territory or detour to visit kinfolk; it might gravitate to sacred sites, or bend around haunted ones. Marshall had located a precolonial trail leading up to the crest of Clingmans Dome, where ceremonies were apparently held. If the Cherokee had been following the path of least resistance from one village to another, they would have avoided the mountaintop altogether. Elsewhere in North America, archaeologists have discovered that Native paths often veer to pass close by ritually significant sites, allowing walkers to stop and pray on their way to their destination.
Sometimes the trails themselves became cultural artifacts, much like pieces of art or religious relics. Out west, many tribes used tools to carve trails into the dry soil or stone, like giant petroglyphs. In Pajarito Mesa in New Mexico, Snead found trails running parallel to one another, redundantly, like the tines of a comb; he theorized that the construction of the trails, distinct from the walking of them, held some special significance. The Tewa people built paths, called “rain roads,”
from mountaintop shrines down to their villages to direct the rain to their crops. The Numic and Yuman cultures constructed paths leading to certain mountaintops (sites of power, or puha), which they believed were traveled not only by the living, but also by the dead, dreaming people, animals, water babies, and the wind. These trails existed both in the physical world and in the world of spirits and stories—two different landscapes that, among many Native American cultures, are inseparably entwined.
As the trail began to ascend the ridge, Marshall became more certain that it was an old Cherokee trail and not a modern addition. For one thing, it followed the ridgeline, which is a telltale feature of Cherokee trails. He explained that once a walker was high atop a ridge, it was possible to walk for “miles and miles and miles” without encountering serious obstacles. In wintertime, the ridges saved a walker from having to cross through frigid waters, and in summer, they stayed high above the low-lying thickets of ivy, laurel, and rhododendron, which the locals call “laurel hells.”
The trail tilted upward, slowing our progress. Marshall calculated that for every mile we hiked, we climbed a thousand feet. He said, between huffing breaths, that this was another good indication that the trail had been made by Cherokees and not Europeans. The English hated Cherokee trails, because they were too steep to follow on horseback.
Though we often speak of the “path of least resistance,” a single landscape contains countless paths of least resistance, depending on the mode of transportation. The Plains Indians carted goods using a sled-like device called the dog travois, so their trails gravitated to areas of slick grass, like prairie wool, and avoided steep inclines, because the travois would lift the dog’s hind legs off the ground. After Europeans introduced horses to the Americas, some tribes also began using a horse travois, which can climb steeper inclines than the dog travois. However, horses cannot climb as steeply as llamas, which meant that farther south in Peru, Spanish conquistadors could not follow many of the Inca trails.