Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck.

Today's topic you have seen is tracking your spirit because it's tracking leather in Pennsylvania,

which means I spent a couple of hours outside with our two-year-old in what they

call gumboots in Australia, in galoshes, splashing through muddy puddles and seeing the tracks

that were left on the edges of the muddy puddles in the mud by the animules. So we had raccoon, we had a possum, we had, I think, a porcupine, a skunk.

Skunks have the weirdest little feet. I got to tell you, no offense, but their feet are bizarre.

I love tracking. And if all of y'all have not tried tracking animals, I know you probably have a more than ordinary

interest in the natural world because you're here. Hello. And tracking animals is, I believe,

the origin of reading because you follow a line of marks that tells a story. And it's absolutely

gripping when you get out there and you find,

you have your little guide and you find a footprint and you see these tiny toes and this little

foot and you can see where it dipped something in the water, whatever it was. And you can see where

it rolled over. I remember I used to track bears when I lived in California.

And at one point we had three wild Mustangs that had been herded into trucks and then shipped

out of an area because that was better than killing them.

It was ranchland and they needed, they didn't want wild horses.

So we had them and we had to build a special

high wall paddock and everything because they jump, really wild. And they, so they put these two

Mustangs into their new paddock. And there they got used to it for a while and before they could get trained to be with people, which they ultimately were.

But the reason I'm telling you this is that I went out one day and I found the tracks of a mother bear and her cub, which were so cute because it's a brown black bear.

Brown bears are very dangerous. Don't get close to them.

Don't get close to a bear. Just don't. It's not good for you. But black bears are shy and smaller and

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