What Walks This Way

Sharman Apt Russell teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles and is a professor emeritus at Western New Mexico University. She is the author of a dozen books and winner of the 2016 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing.Kim A. Cabrera is a master tracker and well-known wildlife tracking educator.

• 1. Ribbon of Life2. Turn Your Dog’s Paw Upside Down3. Coyotes Are the Original Aikido4. Let’s Just Enjoy Foxes5. It Almost Seems Wolves Should Be Allowed to Vote6. We’ll Lift That Lion Right Off That Limb7. Bobcat and Lynx8. A Black-and-White Aesthetic9. The Entangled World of Humans and Raccoons10. Three Bears11. The Sudden Beating of Brains12. You Think You Know What the IUCN Is Going to Say13. The Little Guys14. Hooves15. Skulls and Bones16. A New Vision of Wildlife Management17. The EvaluationEpilogueAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

What a satisfying book—it makes me want to grab a pack and head out the door. Sharman Apt Russell brings a tracker’s eye to the lives of wild animals, illuminating signs she finds with a curated wealth of natural history. With language as clear as fresh deer tracks in snow, she answers the important questions: why skunks are striped, how to tell a coyote's prints from a dog’s, and what drives a species toward or away from extinction. Readers who rarely look at the ground will have a hard time looking back up, and those familiar with tracking will be surprised by what they learn.