Dance Of The Dog Walkers

Barley, a dog, inspects a snowfield now thoroughly criss-crossed by dog an human footprints.

If walking a dog in freshly-fallen morning snow is an illuminating experience vis-a-vis the trace evidence that dogs are sensitive to, walking a dog later that day makes for a disorienting mess. As a rule, normal pedestrians with sensible destinations don’t wander out onto patches of grass, so most of the tracks here seems to be dog-walkers letting their pooches stretch their legs and do their business. However, once 15 to 20 hours have passed since the last snow fall, everyone in the neighborhood has had at least one chance to walk their dog as part of a daily routine, and deconstructing whose footprints are whose becomes a forensic nightmare. No doubt the rich world of scent provides a much less confusing portrait of recent events, so we see here the point where the tracks-to-smells metaphor breaks down and Barley’s world of smells remains beyond my conceptual grasp.