The Tactics of Mantracker Part 2

Mantracker is a guy on a horse.  He tracks people for a living and he tracks prey for TV.  He has 36 hours to find you while you run like a scared chicken.  That is unless you know what you are doing.

Here is the reality:  you cannot move without leaving tracks.  No matter what you do: wrong footwear, double back, wiping tracks, and all the other tactics, he will eventually find your tracks.  So what?  So there should be a simple limit to how much effort you spend in trying to confuse the tracker.  Eventually, he will catch up.  So what?  You need to prepare for an ambush or for mantracker to just luck out and stumble on where you are.  Often times prey run through the bush only to see mantracker 50 yards down the trail. Walking in thick bush may make it hard to track but you need to leave that cover eventually.

   Another realization is that sometimes you want to let him find your tracks.  More about this later on.

If he finds your tracks from time to time he will eventually figure out your direction of travel.  This is important, and often overlooked. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.  If you were to follow a trail of bread crumbs, and then none, and then bread crumbs again soon you don't need anymore bread crumbs.  You can extrapolate from the line where the line is going.  If you miss it at one point, then you have a line to follow based on history.  If a horse moves at twice the speed of a man then the mantracker can catch up over and over.  The best way to avoid getting caught is to consider a path that doesn't give away your true direction of travel.  A longer path may mean more running but it also means less predictability and that may mean less mantracker.

There are a lot of simple obstacles that stop the horses: fences, steep terrain, cliffs, thick trees, bushes, and soft sand.   Very few mantracker episodes happen in complete prairies with no cover.  So you need to know what the local obstacles are as you move over the terrain.