J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists

Tracking the Fox: Thoreau's Sympathy with Intelligence

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Fox prints reproduced from the Journal, vol. 6: December 1853–August 1854, chapter 3 (February 1854), 97. Image courtesy of The Walden Woods Project digital collection.

To begin tracking the relationship between the elusive Katahdin moose and Thoreau's thinking, we must first look to an animal he tracked year-round and across the body of his work: the fox. Whether they are barking "a vulpine curse" at him or fleeing from hunters and hounds in Walden (296),²⁶ running "a small arc of [their] course" across the cape in Cape Cod,²⁷ "stepping about over dead leaves, and brushing the dewy grass" outside his tent in A Week,²⁸ or laying paths before him "along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the woodside" in "Walking" (100), foxes' and Thoreau's paths intersect frequently. One of Thoreau's earliest published works, "Natural History of Massachusetts," which appears in the Dial on July 2, 1842, establishes his initial insight into sympathetic tracking and elucidates how his thoughts grow "foxy"—or animalistic—as he walks in the animals' tracks (J, 6:101). In "Natural History" Thoreau practices syncing his movements and thinking with the animal's by tracking the fox's "graceful curvatures" ("NH," 25) that seem not only "coincident with the fluctuations of some mind" but in "visible sympathy" with the sun (15):

Perhaps of all our untamed quadrupeds, the fox has obtained the wildest and most familiar reputation, from the time of Pilpay and Æsop to the present day. His recent tracks still give variety to a winter's walk. I tread in the steps of the fox that has gone before [End Page 125] me by some hours, or which perhaps I have started, with such a tiptoe of expectation, as if I were on the trail of the Spirit itself which resides in the wood, and expected soon to catch it in its lair. I am curious to know what has determined its graceful curvatures, and how surely they were coincident with the fluctuations of some mind. I know which way a mind wended, what horizon it faced, by the setting of these tracks, and whether it moved slowly or rapidly, by their greater or less intervals and distinctness; for the swiftest step leaves yet a lasting trace. Sometimes you will see the trails of many together, and where they have gambolled and gone through a hundred evolutions, which testify to a singular listlessness and leisure in nature.

When I see a fox run across the pond on the snow, with the carelessness of freedom, or at intervals trace his course in the sunshine along the ridge of a hill, I give up to him sun and earth as to their true proprietor. He does not go in the sun, but it seems to follow him, and there is a visible sympathy between him and it. Sometimes, when the snow lies light, and but five or six inches deep, you may give chase and come up with one on foot. In such a case he will show a remarkable presence of mind, choosing only the safest direction, though he may lose ground by it. Notwithstanding his fright, he will take no step which is not beautiful. His pace is a sort of leopard canter, as if he were in no wise impeded by the snow, but were husbanding his strength all the while. When the ground is uneven, the course is a series of graceful curves, conforming to the shape of the surface.

(15-16)

Thoreau's fox encounter emphasizes how the fox's "recent tracks still give variety to a winter's walk," which he ascertains as he follows or "tread[s] in the steps of the fox that has gone before me" (15). Not only does the tracks' variety denote the pleasure of fox tracking, but it also implicates the range Thoreau attributes to the most sympathetic thoughts that intersect with the fox's fluctuating mind in the tracks each body leaves behind.

While the relationship he establishes between the fox and the "trail of the Spirit" initially suggests transcendental reflection, Thoreau mentions the "Spirit" only in passing as he reaches the more poignant elocution of the moving fox—the "true proprietor" of the "sun and earth" ("NH," 15). We might take this shift as indicative of Thoreau's "passion [End Page 126] for the nonhuman" that is not "unrelated to some conceptions of the divine."²⁹ But, more in keeping with sympathetic tracking dependent on animals' movements, Thoreau's fox tracking shows how "animals not only exceed, they perhaps anticipate the human" because the fox "has gone before" Thoreau.³⁰ Though Thoreau seems to follow the "Spirit itself," he almost immediately transitions his thinking to the literal animal, demonstrating that the fox anticipates the Spirit and Thoreau's approach as well as Thoreau's animalistic thoughts moving with his body down the fox's path.

This fox functions as a precursor to Thoreau's thinking loon, who, in anticipating Thoreau's movements, "maneuvered so cunningly" as he swiftly "made up his mind" and "chose his course" ahead of Thoreau's boat. The loon is so quick and "so long-winded" and "unweariable" that "no wit could divine where in the deep pond, beneath the smooth surface, he might be speeding his way like a fish" (W, 256). The fox of Natural History possesses a similar "remarkable presence of mind, choosing only the safest direction" as if the snow is no impediment but a source that enables him to be "husbanding his strength all the while" ("NH," 15). The fox—equally "unweariable" as the loon (W, 256)—"curves, conforming to the shape of the surface" ("NH," 16) just as the loon dives beneath the pond's "smooth surface" (W, 256). In coming before human and Spirit, the fox, like the loon, models for the human and even the Spirit that animalistic thinking moves, embodied, in "graceful curvatures" and "fluctuations" along a surface to which the body is uniquely adapted ("NH," 15).

Thoreau finds himself so "curious to know" how the fox's mind moves in these curves that he begins to follow the mind's tracks with his own feet, wishing to adapt his thoughts held within his moving body to the same surface. Thoreau imagines the precision of the fox's thinking and movements just as he does in his journal where he reproduces track dimensions: "I know which way a mind wended, what horizon it faced, by the setting of these tracks, and whether it moved slowly or rapidly, by their greater or less intervals and distinctness; for the swiftest step leaves yet a lasting trace" ("NH," 15). A mind that "wended" is a mind that possesses internal movement, so as the fox's body moves "slowly or rapidly," so too does its thinking. Thoreau implies that these traces of movement last in his own thinking, too. By tracing the fox's course, he tracks his own thoughts' "evolutions," taking from the fox's "remarkable presence of mind" a method for "conforming" his thinking "to the shape of the surface" the earth presents, so that he may, too, "go [End Page 127] in the sun" in "visible sympathy," or coordination, with the fox's thoughts.

Lineologist³¹ Tim Ingold helps explain what could be happening between Thoreau and the fox. He suggests that life casts out mental and physical lines as it moves: "lifelines fan out into the milieu of earth and air, where they tangle with the lines of all the other living things that, in their habitation of the earth, deposit their own trails in the form of roots and runners, paths and tracks."³² These lifelines are not merely straight, rigid "components" in a system but independent and always interacting "movements"³³ on the ground.³⁴ And, as these lifelines move, they "tangle,"³⁵ "joint," "knot," and "establish relations … of sympathy."³⁶

With this in mind, Thoreau's sympathetic tracking allows his own footprints or tracks to "register emplaced movement" in "a surface that is soft, pliable or absorbent,"³⁷ and as a path-maker, like the fox, he "weaves another strand of movement into the ground."³⁸ So, as Thoreau "paces a line with his feet"³⁹ over the tracks that the fox has already established with his own paws, he engages his body in animalistic thinking, a kind of "motional thought."⁴⁰ The walking body that inscribes its own tracks in the snow thus "conspires"⁴¹ with the mind's thoughts—both function in sympathy as they cross the paths already inscribed by the fox's tracks, and his thinking expresses its embodied, animalistic mobility.⁴²

But how do we know this fox is thinking and isn't just a metaphor for Thoreau's human thinking? The short answer is, when it comes to Thoreau and animal minds more broadly, we often don't know, and critical interpretations for the past thirty years reflect that uncertainty. Thoreau's animals frequently lead to debates over whom he prioritizes—human or nonhuman—and what we should read as mere motif, literal subject, or applicable practice. His animals undeniably can symbolize the movement of Thoreau's animalistic thinking. For example, the hen-hawks of Walden are "the embodiment of my own thoughts" (W, 173), the well-prepared thoughts in conversation are like "the fishes of thought" who do not scatter (293), and the dying pigeons in "Walking" are like "the wings of some thought" that used to "flit across the landscape of the mind."⁴³ William Rossi claims these examples demonstrate Thoreau's "near complete lack of interest in animals unhitched to the emblematic."⁴⁴ Laura Dassow Walls also posits that Thoreau "sees a flower or other object, and it is beautiful or affecting to him because it is a symbol of his thought."⁴⁵ Yet to interpret Thoreau's animals as only symbolic strips his dedicated naturalist tendencies of their broader [End Page 128] value and diminishes the richness he attributes to animalhood and ultimately to the intellectual vivacity he finds in animal tracks.

An alternative reading of Thoreau's animals emerges if we consider his evidence for an animal thinker who might inspire metaphor and human/animal "boundary confusion"⁴⁶ because they think. Thoreau's ambiguous boundaries occur in Walden when he sees himself as "the human insect" who, like the "insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor," "hide[s] its head" and its "humble thoughts" (W, 360). Or he's a human animal whose "head is hands and feet" and "an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws" (105). In these scenarios, he is both posthuman insect and animal but also a material body intimately connected to the bodies of others. Present in these examples, too, is his emphasis on animal movement—"crawling," "hiding," and "burrowing"—as well as thinking: "humble thoughts" and the burrowing, thinking organ in the head. Michelle Neely repeats the boundary-bending features of Thoreau's thinking animals when she explains that he has "a sense of curiosity about non-human cognition" and a desire to recognize "the animal within the human."⁴⁷

Thoreau's interests in animal cognition and human/animal hybridity are clearly evident when he tracks the Massachusetts fox's wending mind and when he proclaims in his journal that his thoughts grow "foxy." These interests are also apparent more than a decade after Thoreau's Natural History fox encounter, in an 1858 journal entry, when he rejoices in discovering a new fish in the town pond. His excitement at having a new "contemporary and neighbor" who is similar "yet so different from me!" leads him to conclude, "I can only poise my thought there by its side and try to think like a bream for a moment" (J, 358-59). Here his use of "like" does not suggest the bream represents his thought, but that he must think like the bream to imagine how it arrived in the pond. Just as his thoughts grow "foxy" as he walks in fox tracks, his thoughts here must become breamy so he can sympathize with the animal's intelligence and retrace—or track—the bream's path to this pond.

In short, Thoreau's animal minds negate the anthropocentric, hierarchical standard of thought.⁴⁸ This revision of animalhood and intelligence generates a kind of "multispecies alliance"⁴⁹ in which sympathetic tracking underscores human thinking's embodied animalistic movement. Thoreau's work in animal tracking and thinking even anticipates contemporary animal philosophers and evolutionary biologists who have both persuasively argued for the sophisticated animal mind, saying, "we share the planet with thinking animals,"⁵⁰ and we are not "nature's [End Page 129] only minded creatures."⁵¹ Extending far beyond metaphor, Thoreau's sympathetic tracking shows the prescience of his thinking as it moves with profound and ever-shifting animality as it sympathetically tracks the brilliant complexity of animal thinkers along the tracks they leave behind in the water and the earth.

Tracking the Moose: The Bounding Thoughts of "Ktaadn"

If intersecting with the fox's wending tracks in snow assists Thoreau in practicing his sympathetic tracking, then the moose in "Ktaadn" embodies an intriguing example of how his tracking method can lead to epiphany. Unlike the fox Thoreau tracks in his familiar Concord, the moose is an unfamiliar animal in completely unfamiliar territory, and being summer, the area lacks snow to highlight the animal's course. Therefore, as Thoreau moves his body through the Maine woods—walking, "climbing, stooping, and, winding" (MW, 635), his tracking maneuvers must adapt a keener awareness of his and the moose's constant contact with the earth's surface.

Such contact prompts him to repeatedly toy with various forms of the word "bound": "bounded," "boundaries," and "boundless." It is likely no coincidence that "bound" can also describe the way a moose moves its large body through its environment. Leaving tracks together on the earth's surface, moose and Thoreau enact animalistic thinking that bounds through the landscape and remains bound to the earth as "common sense" or kindred animalistic thinking (MW, 646). The moose thus aids Thoreau in refining the earth's role in his sympathetic tracking, an animalistic thinking method inscribed in the earth through bodily contact.

Thoreau's adventure begins on September 1, which, according to movement ecologists Navinder J. Singh and colleagues, who track moose for conservation and management, is the beginning of the moose's autumn migration "when they are in their summer range (August to November)."⁵² As moose migrate, they make "decisions about visiting a new location … based on expected environmental conditions through perception or memory,"⁵³ which implies that moose possess a form of spatial intelligence for navigating and selecting a particular environment. Though Thoreau never encounters a moose in the narrative, he continuously tracks his own course in the moose's tracks of perception and memory it leaves behind.

Like the fox who leaves tracks before him, the moose anticipates Thoreau because he first detects a moose's presence when he finds [End Page 130] "flattened places in the grass" where "moose had laid down the night before." One of his guides, Tom Fowler, explains that "there were thousands in these meadows." From this point onward, Thoreau seems to feel and detect the moose everywhere as if they were "silently watching" him (MW, 613). While the watching is one sided, the tracking is not, and Thoreau begins to understand a moose's intelligent perception embodied by its tracks through the woods, allowing him to gain a sense of how a being's bodily contact with the earth expresses and inscribes its animalistic thinking.

As his party⁵⁴ lands "on a small isle" to "consult about [their] further course," he discovers "the recent track of a moose, a large, roundish hole, in the soft wet ground, evincing the great size and weight of the animal that made it."⁵⁵ He also explains that moose are "fond of the water, and visit all the island-meadows, swimming as easily from island to island as they make their way through the thickets on land" (MW, 630). Later in the narrative he describes moose tracks in more detail:

The track of a full-grown moose is like that of a cow, or larger, and of the young, like that of a calf. Sometimes we found ourselves traveling in faint paths, which they had made, like cow-paths in the woods, only far more indistinct, being rather openings, affording imperfect vistas through the dense underwood, than trodden paths; and everywhere the twigs had been browsed by them, clipped as smoothly as if by a knife. The bark of trees was stripped up by them to the height of eight or nine feet, in long, narrow strips, an inch wide, still showing the distinct marks of their teeth. We expected nothing less than to meet a herd of them every moment … The largest are nearly as large as a horse, and weigh sometimes one thousand pounds; and it is said that they can step over a five-foot gate in their ordinary walk. They are described as exceedingly awkward-looking animals, with their long legs and short bodies, making a ludicrous figure when in full run, but making great headway, nevertheless. It seemed a mystery to us how they could thread these woods, which it required all our suppleness to accomplish,—climbing, stooping, and winding, alternately. They are said to drop their long and branching horns, which usually spread five or six feet, on their backs, and make their way easily by the weight of their bodies.

(635-36) [End Page 131]

Again, like the fox whose thoughts Thoreau could interpret through "the setting of these tracks" ("NH," 15), moose model animalistic thinking visible in the earth through their perfect adaptation to the environment. The moose leave "flattened grass," "large roundish hole[s]," "trodden paths," "clipped" twigs, and "stripped" bark in their wake, while Thoreau has to climb, stoop, and wind through the woods as if he, not they, were the "exceedingly awkward-looking" animal. What Thoreau encounters in these tracks are not boundaries between him and the moose that, like Katahdin, seems encased by a "blue barrier" of "naked rock rising abruptly from the forest," but prints "anciently bounded" to the earth (MW, 635). Though he is "the oldest mountain-climber" in his party—one who presumably is also "anciently bounded" to the earth—he must stand "scanning the woody side of the mountain" for a "course that would lead [them] parallel to a dark seam in the forest," which marks water to seek (634). The moose, in this way, models animalistic thinking where the ground or earth itself, not just snow, becomes the medium on which thinking is inscribed and embodied.

To see Thoreau inscribe his animalistic thinking through contact with the earth in real time, we must make our own deliberate way through the paragraphs leading up to the "Contact!" scene. Beginning as Thoreau does, with his upward climb of Katahdin, the closest he will get to its summit, we find a poignant articulation of his sympathetic tracking. Here he adapts his body and his thinking—or his embodied, animalistic thought—to the earth as a bear might: "in a deep and narrow ravine, sloping up to the clouds … and hemmed in by walls of rock," Thoreau moves up and into the bare portion of the mountain "almost continuously draped in clouds" by "walking a level rod or two in the thin stream" as if he were ascending "a giant's stairway" (MW, 637). At times he finds himself "scrambling on all fours over the tops of ancient black spruce-trees" that fan out into a flat surface on the top until he can stand and walk "some good rods erect upon the tops of these trees."⁵⁶ Other times, from the vantage point of a spruce top, he "slumping through" can look down "into a dark and cavernous region" or holes that appear to be "bears' dens" in a "garden" that he "made his way over." He sees no "path through" the garden as it is "certainly the most treacherous and porous country I ever travelled" (638, emphases in the original). Therefore, he must make his own path through the earth as a bear would; he must think how the bear thinks in order to leave his tracks. [End Page 132]

Thorson, in his argument for Thoreau's obsession with "rock reality," claims these bear dens are merely "jagged blocks with interstices resembling 'bear's dens,'" not actual bears' dens, because this dangerous place is "not yet claimed by life."⁵⁷ Phillips adds that Thoreau portrays "Ktaadn" as a record of "absences" rather than the presence of life.⁵⁸ Whether or not the actual bear is in a den beneath Thoreau, he acknowledges just one paragraph later that "even at this height we met with frequent traces of moose, as well as of bears," indicating that bears are still leaving trackable signs all around the mountain (MW, 639). While Richard W. Judd claims that Thoreau feels "separation and isolation" in the "driving mist atop the mountain," he also acknowledges that "the corrective for alienation was not confrontation with primitive nature"—like the rock reality that Thorson invokes—but "a deeper sense of immersion in it."⁵⁹

So, when Thoreau encounters these bear's dens because he is moving, walking, and climbing over them like a bear, he literally immerses his body in nature by transgressing the earth's physical and species boundaries for bipedal humans. He, walking, as he says, "over" trees, evokes the traveler of Milton's Paradise Lost who "fares" on, "treading the crude consistence, half on foot, / Half flying" (MW, 638). That is to say, he moves forward and across the boundary between ground and sky—half on the ground and half in the air—and across the assumed boundary between human and bear. The "holes" he sees recall, perhaps, a rock but also a much earlier passage about the moose's tracks: "Sometimes we found ourselves traveling in faint paths, which … being rather openings, affording imperfect vistas through the dense underwood, than trodden paths" (635, emphasis mine). These "openings"—bear dens and moose vistas—are perfect mediums for making contact and inscribing animalistic thinking.⁶⁰

The next morning Thoreau climbs up the mountain's waterfall side, and his thinking's contact with earth begins to move toward the animal "common sense" in which he will participate in the "Contact!" passage. On this climb, he notes the "vast aggregation of loose rocks" as if they were the "raw materials of planet earth" that are always "in the process of formation" (MW, 639-40). Jane Bennett highlights this phrasing as exemplary of how Mount Katahdin "bears no trace of the human" or even the "familiar ground below."⁶¹ Of course, Thoreau is the human here, and he is living the process of making a "trace," but Bennett is correct in one sense—the rocks are not humanlike. [End Page 133]

The day before, Thoreau notes that the rocks are akin to "gray" and "silent" animals or "flocks and herds that pastured" here, "chewing a rocky cud at sunset. They looked at me with hard gray eyes, without a bleat or a low" (MW, 638). These rocks might be animallike creatures indifferent to Thoreau because this is no place for the human. But their silence recalls the moose at the outset of Thoreau's venture whom he feels "silently watching" him (620). And he compares the sounds the silent rocks do not make to the "bleat" and "low" of, presumably, herding, pasturing animals—cows, goats, and sheep.

His early comparison of moose and cow movements should not be lost on a careful reader. Nor should his description of moose sounds in "Chesuncook": "It was a loud sort of bellowing sound, clearer and more sonorous than the lowing of cattle, the caribou's a sort of snort, and the small deer's like that of a lamb" (MW, 670). Though the moose is solitary throughout most of the year, the female moves in family units—"flocks and herds" (638)—until "natal dispersal"⁶² in the summer, which indicates that the rock herd's "low" and "bleat" might also be the moose sounds Thoreau hears in the summer woods. The fact that Thoreau imparts these rock herds with moose-like animality suggests the progress his notion of contact makes as he ascends and descends the mountain in the moose's path. As he sympathetically tracks the moose, he everywhere sees signs of animality that is bound to the earth or is the earth, in the rocks' case.

As with the previous day, Thoreau also discovers more holes or "crag[s]," and they remind him of "the creations of the old epic and dramatic poets," such as Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound,⁶³ where Prometheus is bound to a rock in the Caucasus; the rock being an animated life force as Thoreau implies with his rock herd (640). Though bound, or imprisoned, Prometheus is bound to a piece of the earth in much the same way that Thoreau finds his animalistic thinking bound to the earth. But Judd finds this shift from rocks to "mythology's prehumans" a failure on Thoreau's part to discover "higher truths" because the mountain neglects to produce the "rich human metaphors and associations that animated his Concord woods."⁶⁴ Instead, Judd believes Thoreau simply "felt empty" on his second journey up the mountainside.⁶⁵

Quite the opposite, Branka Arsić's reading of Thoreau's Prometheus stipulates that the mythical figure functions as "a vital force that restores life,"⁶⁶ and that Thoreau the "mythologist" believes "beings and minds … fuse and switch, substances mix, and everything is on the move, in becoming."⁶⁷ In other words, Prometheus marks not emptiness [End Page 134] but transformation, especially of beings and minds, or bodies and thoughts. In this vein, sure that Aeschylus visited a site similar to Mount Katahdin, Thoreau links his animalistic thinking to a poetic tradition inspired by the earth's natural contact with beings, such as Prometheus bound to a rock or animated rock herds, not by philosophical reason or "higher truths"⁶⁸ that perceive creatures to be permanently bound to their original form or to standard, human notions of thinking.⁶⁹ Thoreau's reference to mythology thus suggests he is full of the sympathetic tracker's understanding that animalistic thinking allows him to inscribe his mind and body in the earth just as Prometheus is bound to the rock.⁷⁰

We have now made our way as high up Mount Katahdin as Thoreau will take us, and during his descent he walks, first, through facts that detail the forest's limitlessness, and then through his own tracks again, and finally to the moose tracks that lead him to his epiphany about thinking's contact with the earth. Immediately following his mention of Prometheus, Thoreau shifts to facts and guidebook descriptions—now a common track of thinking in the narrative—that tell of the mountain's altitude and his panoramic view of Maine (MW, 641-42).

Phillips notes that this tendency toward facts "has been seen as grounds for complaint" by readers who find "Ktaadn" too "bottom-heavy, and much too stolid a text."⁷¹ But these factual accounts are equally important to the ways Thoreau tracks his animalistic thinking in "Ktaadn"; the facts he generates as he walks also give literal rise to his more eloquent epiphany. Just as he is "compelled to descend" the mountain before reaching its summit, he is compelled to provide facts before reaching the summit, or articulation, of his epiphany. Thus, he shifts fluidly from striking descriptions of silently staring rock herds, to evoking mythology and Penobscot⁷² lore, to referencing "the Gazetteer" on the "boundary question" of Maine. And, following his Gazetteer reference, he explains that "we are concerned now, however, about natural, not political limits" (MW, 642), reminding us that his true concern with boundaries is the nature of animalistic thinking that the sympathetic tracker leaves bound to the earth.

So we move on to the next paragraph where we find him again on the move, challenging his own natural, physical limits as he tracks [End Page 135]

continually crossing and recrossing [the torrent], leaping from rock to rock, and jumping with the stream down falls of seven or eight feet, or sometimes sliding down on our backs in a thin sheet of water … We travelled thus very rapidly with a downward impetus, and grew remarkably expert at leaping from rock to rock, for leap we must, and leap we did, whether there was any rock at the right distance or not.

(MW, 643)

Amid all this jumping and leaping, Thoreau encounters "the fresh print of a man's foot" which "startled" him (MW, 643) just as it will startle him in his 1851 journal entry when he describes the "track of a bare human foot" that is "so rare" that it shocks him and brings him "much nearer to the tracker" (J, 2:328). Thoreau realizes the footprint is in "a little sandy shelf by the side of the stream" and was actually impressed, or inscribed, by one of the men in his party, maybe even himself, on their way up the mountain (MW, 643).

His shock at seeing the print emerges from his recognition that he, like the moose, and the wolves, and the deer, and the bear, and Maine's other creatures, leaves his own tracks in these woods, too. He is now one who moves among them. As Ingold posits, "footprints register emplaced movement,"⁷³ and the tracker who walks across the ground casts out their thinking into pathways already trekked by other human and nonhuman inhabitants.⁷⁴ Upon discovering the print, Thoreau moves closer and closer to his realization that the sympathetic tracker's bodily contact with the earth is contact with animalistic thinking—his own and the animals'. But he and his party soon discover they are lost, and they send Tom up a tree to try to see "the burnt lands" so they can orient themselves (MW, 644).

All Thoreau can see is a "little meadow and pond," which they decide to "steer for" (MW, 644), and in forging their way they make contact with moose tracks, leading Thoreau to his ultimate epiphany:

On reaching this secluded meadow, we found fresh tracks of moose on the shore of the pond, and the water was still unsettled as if they had fled before us. A little farther, in a dense thicket, we seemed to be still on their trail. It was a small meadow, of a few acres, on the mountain-side, concealed by the forest, and perhaps never seen by a white man before, where one would think that the moose might browse and bathe, and rest in peace. Pursuing this [End Page 136] course, we soon reached the open land, which went sloping down some miles toward the Penobscot.

Perhaps I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untamable Nature, or whatever else men call it, while coming down this part of the mountain. We were passing over "Burnt Lands," burnt by lightning, perchance, though they showed no recent marks of fire, hardly so much as a charred stump, but looked rather like a natural pasture for the moose and deer, exceedingly wild and desolate, with occasional strips of timber crossing them, and low poplars springing up, and patches of blueberries here and there. I found myself traversing them familiarly, like some pasture run to waste, or partially reclaimed by man; but when I reflected what man, what brother or sister or kinsman of our race made it and claimed it, I expected the proprietor to rise up and dispute my passage. It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. We habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and drear and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandseled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever,—to be the dwelling of man, we say,—so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific,—not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in,—no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there,—the home, this, of Necessity and Fate. There was clearly felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites,—to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we. We walked over it with a certain awe, stopping, from time to time, to pick the blueberries which grew there, and had a smart and spicy taste. Perchance where our wild pines stand, and leaves lie on their forest floor, in Concord, there were once reapers, and husbandmen [End Page 137] planted grain; but here not even the surface had been scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world. What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star's surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,—that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

Erelong we recognized some rocks and other features in the landscape which we had purposely impressed on our memories, and, quickening our pace, by two o'clock we reached the batteau.

(MW 644-46, emphasis in the original)

Critical interpretation of this passage contains almost as many twists and turns and leaps as Thoreau makes on his descent. Joseph J. Moldenhauer, often beginning from the belief that the Maine woods represent a vast nature wholly indifferent to humans, describes the region as "physically the most primitive and uninhabited"⁷⁵ place Thoreau ever confronted, generating the "alienating effect of primeval nature" (MW, 136).⁷⁶ Judd agrees with Moldenhauer and identifies the area as Thoreau's "only encounter with a truly wild place"—even "casual" readers would notice that the locale strikes Thoreau as "vast and dreary."⁷⁷ From this perspective of the region's emotional register, some theorize that the mountain itself provoked terror in Thoreau. Greg Garrard, for example, interprets Thoreau's fears from his proclamation "I fear bodies,"⁷⁸ indicating that Thoreau believes the human body to be anxiety producing as "that other wildness" that he cannot comprehend in the ways he seeks to understand the natural world.⁷⁹

Similarly, during the twentieth century, on the one hand, many interpreted the work as a record of Thoreau's psychological, even traumatic, experience at Katahdin, portraying said trauma as a result of Thoreau's discovery that the human spirit is actually incompatible with, not analogous to, organic nature.⁸⁰ On the other hand, some saw the essay, especially the "Contact!" experience, as indicative of a transcendental vision of the sublime⁸¹ where "the mountain is the preeminent [End Page 138] sacred space."⁸² Twenty-first-century readings, particularly those concerned with Thoreau's materialism, largely drop the transcendental angle, agreeing with Phillips that readers too often "revealed a preference for the transcendental much more decided than was Thoreau's own."⁸³ Indeed, Thorson explains that Thoreau's portrayal of wild nature is "stripped of all romanticism," but he also extends Thoreau's fears to his failure to summit the peak in "Ktaadn" due to a "recurrent nightmare" in which he died once he reached the top.⁸⁴

Material concerns have not completely forgotten an interpretation from the perspective of Thoreau's fear, either. Bennett notes that the matter Thoreau confronts in "Ktaadn" is "frighteningly inexplicable" because it represents nature at its "Wildest."⁸⁵ Neely adds that the climb leads Thoreau "into an experience of materiality so intense that it produces a kind of non-identity" in which his own body becomes strange and foreign.⁸⁶ With the exception of Walls's position that Thoreau pushes his knowledge into "the material realm" by "fusing language and things, thoughts and facts, into a mythology of the material"⁸⁷ and Arsić's claims for contemplative matter,⁸⁸ almost no one considers Thoreau's explorations in the Maine woods as exemplary of the kind of thinking that embraces, rather than fears, bodies.⁸⁹

Also absent from almost every reading of the "Contact!" passage is Thoreau's moose, as if the moose's evasiveness makes it nonessential in the preeminent portion of the narrative, a mere motif that stands adjacent to the supposedly more powerful image of the mountain. But Thoreau finds his way to the other side of the meadow and "dense thicket" to the torrent they have been searching for—the exact location where "Contact!" occurs—because the party pursued the moose's course. Once they reached the meadow, they "found fresh tracks of moose" around a rippling pond still moving as if the moose had just retreated, and Thoreau notes, "We seemed to be still on their trail." Following these tracks, they find another meadow "perhaps never seen by a white man before, where one would think that the moose might browse and bathe, and rest in peace" (emphasis mine). Though a small comment, Thoreau is imagining exactly how the moose might be thinking as he follows its path—he thinks this is a place it would enjoy because he is literally walking in its tracks that are bound to the earth and present everywhere. Here Thoreau "most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untamable Nature"—this is untouched ground on which the sympathetic tracker can think animalistically by making bodily contact with the earth, too. [End Page 139]

Unlike previous descriptions of Thoreau's struggles to move about the woods, he now finds himself "traversing" the area with "familiarity" because he has learned how to walk and leave tracks here. Though he declares that "Nature was here something savage and awful"—a phrase many repeat without attention to the closing phrase, "though beautiful"—he gives nature its due credit for being awe-inspiringly magnificent. That beauty and awe are especially evident for Thoreau in "the ground I trod on" (emphasis mine). This ground is a surface unscarred by humans—the loggers, the hunters, and even the Indigenous people whom Thoreau believes are losing touch with their old ways—it is a "star's surface" and "hard matter." But materials, for Thoreau, are not hard in the sense that they are impenetrable; to believe that they are here is to ignore everything in the narrative up until this point. Hard matter consists of rock herds always in the process of transformation, and moose track holes in the earth, and bear dens in the trees, and porous treetops on which Thoreau walks. And his body is not terrifying, not matter to which he is bound in the sense of confinement, but a piece of the earth's surface through which he inscribes his animalistic thinking.

Thoreau's body is a Titan just as Prometheus is a Titan, a being that is not entirely human because there is something else innate in that form—an animal, a Pamola.⁹⁰ His own hybridity as a reasoning human and an animal thinker in motion constitutes why he, and we, must "think of our life in nature" (emphasis mine). Through the sympathetic tracking he enacts during the narrative, he has already "come in contact" with matter—"rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth" (emphasis in the original)—and his body binds him, and his thinking, and his animals, always to those very pieces of matter on which he walks.

Both Thoreau and moose are so bound that they leave traces of themselves almost simultaneously in the landscape: the moose who just fled have left trackable signs of "strips of timber, and low poplars springing up, and patches of blueberries here and there." This could be interpreted as Thoreau's simple observations of what appears to be "a natural pasture for the moose and deer" because it has new poplar growth and berries. But, recalling an earlier passage in which Thoreau notes how moose strip "the bark of trees … to the height of eight or nine feet, in long, narrow strips, an inch wide" and their teeth marks still show (MW, 636), the "occasional strips of timber," the "springing" or rebounding saplings trod over by heavy moose, and the blueberries [End Page 140] are all signs the moose have quite literally just left. In their wake and in this place that was "to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals," Thoreau partakes of the exact same resources by "stopping, from time to time, to pick the blueberries which grew there, and had a spicey taste." As he walks in the path of the moose and sympathetically tracks them, he is the closest he's ever been to animalistic thinking. He moves as they move, sees what they see, eats what they eat.

Then, "Talk of mysteries!" he cries, and speak of bodies he trembles to meet; those same bodies that "seemed a mystery" because they so adroitly "thread these woods" are moose (MW, 635-36). He tracked them here to this very spot in nature, this very surface of matter; and here he makes contact with "the common sense," the thoughts that he commands us to experience when he says, "think of our life in nature." The common sense is animalistic thinking because it is what has "possession of me." In the force of that possession, he exclaims "talk of mysteries" and the very next word is "think"—bracketed around the word "mysteries" and "talk," our human imaginings and vocal functions, is "bodies" and "think." Bodies and thoughts that make "contact" are those in sympathy with one another and with the animal thinkers there bound to "the solid earth" and "the actual world" (emphasis in the original). "Who are we? and "where are we?" in this moment? We are animal thinkers in contact with the actual world and in sync with "the rocks" and the "wild animals" who have dominated the preceding paragraphs.

In this moment and in this location, Thoreau's body or "matter to which I am bound" is "strange" because it has tracked so long and so far that it is now animalistic and "bound" to the earth. This is true "Sympathy with Intelligence"⁹¹ as Thoreau has successfully inscribed his animalistic thinking in the earth just as the moose who came before him. Thus, "erelong we recognized some rocks and other features in the landscape which we had purposely impressed on our memories": Thoreau, in finding the batteau post-epiphany, becomes the moose, an animal who chooses to move based on "perception or memory" of the impressions made by previous thinking animals' tracks.⁹²

Thoreau's sympathetic tracking began in Massachusetts with the fox, but it does not end in "Ktaadn" with the moose. He continues to track, and that tracking evolves, for many years and through many texts, as his later claim for "Sympathy with Intelligence" reveals.⁹³ He tracks with his body during all seasons, weather conditions, and times of day: at dawn, midday, dusk, and the dead of night and through snow, [End Page 141] rain, heat, and mild conditions. In Walden, he even tracks owls through sound as he walks through the night woods. He becomes increasingly an "animal man" (W, 158) throughout his career, yet the moose is the animal whose tracks seem most impressed upon him, most memorably inscribed in the earth. On his deathbed, the animal's name lingers on his lips as if its tracks have never left his thoughts. With his body beyond its ability to physically track, his mind's thoughts continue to move animalistically in those dense woods, leaving tracks in their wake and sympathizing with the thinkers who beckon him to follow.