“You need a puffier coat,” I was told at the end of three hours of poking around the southeast corner of High Park in minus five degree weather. I had to concede the wisdom of that advice. My ski shell didn’t quite measure up. Our motley crew of nature explorers included two moms in full-length hooded coats drawn tight to their chins; two 8-year-old girls in pink snow suits; a two-foot-nothin’ little kid so bundled up I could see only his eyes behind a pair of tiny, foggy glasses; three 20-somethings in faux-fur trimmed down jackets; and Andrew, our chill-less leader, wearing a pair of deer skin mitts up to the elbow, trimmed in ‘found’ raccoon fur (interpret that for a moment).
We didn’t travel too far on our feet, but our knowledge and awareness of the natural places found in the middle of the biggest city in the country grew perceptibly. We tracked raccoons to a den in the base of an oak tree, imagined the story behind a feather tangled in a bare shrub, dissected coyote scat, and hunkered down like miniature dinosaurs in order to interact with the two-foot-nothin’ named Ashton who spent the entire afternoon in his imagination and spoke almost solely in T-Rex roars.
Andrew was especially good at connecting on a physical level with our little dinosaur, who despite his uncoordinated hurtling through bush and branch was successfully prevented from falling head first into the den of a now-fitfully slumbering mammal, whose warm breath had condensed to form a tell-tale ring of hoar frost around the mouth of its hole.
Three hours passed quickly, frozen toes be darned, in child-led socratic discussions about animal prints frozen into the mud, tree species, and what our coyote might have had for lunch.
Perhaps my favourite moment was turning from an involved discussion with one of the pink-clad girls about a snail shell to see Andrew shimmying up a tree, channeling his primate ancestry. He broke off a couple of dead twigs, dropped from the tree and cracked them afresh, handing the halves to us to smell. The aroma was sweet and perfume-y — a bit like Eucalyptus — but it was in fact the secretions of the rare carolinian sassafras tree, for which High Park is only one of a handful of habitable enclaves in the GTA.
It was a satisfying way to spend a Sunday afternoon. I kept a twig of sassafras in my coat pocket to take out and smell the next morning when I was back in my cubicle at work, and daydreamed of foxes curled in their dens awaking to the roar of a T-Rex in a blue snow suit.
Tracking Club Participant
