The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Trails and tribulations
Robert Moor’s book on animal, insect and man-made tracks is the fruit of years of hiking and research, says Michael Kerr
mile Appalachian Trail between Georgia and Maine, a trail dreamed up in the Twenties by Benton MacKaye, a forester and utopian, as “a sanctuary and a refuge from the scramble of everyday worldly commercial life”.
The book is “on” trails in two senses: it’s the fruit of miles of walking and years of research. He starts with the trails left by organisms of the Ediacaran biota, which became extinct about 541 million years ago, and ends with the longest hiking trail in the world, a global footpath, a collective effort, that’s very much the offspring of the internet. (It’s the International Appalachian Trail.)
In between, he considers the trails made by insects, animals and man, and the purposes to which they have been put, from finding food to building empires. While the Appalachian Trail, which prompted his inquiry, provides a main line, he branches off it, hiking everywhere from Canada to Morocco and considering the trail as everything from a means of recreation to a metaphor for life.
As hikers do, he takes a while to settle into a rhythm. His vocabulary in the prologue (perfused, heliated, myrmecine) is a little offputting, as is his declaration, after an opening chapter on the Ediacaran, that what they left behind were not really trails but traces (the distinction being that a trace becomes a trail only when it has been followed).
Then he gets into his stride with a chapter on ants, “the world’s greatest trail-makers”, revealing that ant-colony algorithms – “in which myriad initial routes are explored, the best ones being amplified while the others fade” – have been used to improve everything from Britain’s telecommunications networks to the delivery of disaster relief.
He considers, too, the trails of four-legged animals, how they navigate vast territories and how our efforts to hunt, herd and study them have shaped our development. He spent three weeks as a shepherd with a Navajo family in Arizona, and before 10am on the first day managed to lose all their sheep. He spent hours up a tree with an expert tracker and hunter without seeing a kill.
He may be an incompetent shepherd and a bit of a jinx, but he’s a companionable and dependable guide on the trail. His book is bighearted and ambitious.
Until he began looking into trails, Moor says, he had viewed our planet as a stable, serene place whose delicate balance humans had upset. “I now see the Earth as the collaborative artwork of millions of sculptors, large and small. Sheep, humans, elephants, ants: each of us alters the world in our passage.
Sciences and claimed to have been instrumental in founding Sequoia National Park. That is disputed but he’s buried there, below a mountain named after him. “After his death,” Sjöberg writes, “others inflated their own rather more modest contributions at the expense of his, and I, for one, find that maddening.”
Reading Sjöberg ought to be maddening, for he proceeds by diversion, digression and detour, but he’s worth following just for what he uncovers in passing. In The Raisin King, he reveals that a German entomologist in Slovenia, in 1933, named a beetle after Adolf Hitler. Today, Anophthalmus hitleri is threatened with extinction. Why? Because a specimen can sell for €1,000 to the sort of fetishists who collect SS badges and bayonets.
Of his way of working, Sjöberg says: “You wander here and there, muddle about, try one thing and then another, and suddenly you’ve hooked something.” In this case, it was a reader.
The Art of Flight is available from Telegraph Books (0844 871 1514; books. telegraph.co.uk) for £12.99 plus p&p history and travel, conjuring vividly what McMillan would have seen, setting it against today’s Australia. Here and there the language could be fresher but this is certainly a moving and impressive debut.
Thicker Than Water is available from Telegraph Books (0844 871 1514; books. telegraph.co.uk) for £14.99 plus p&p
‘Well! Better be getting walking after all this talking,” Alastair McIntosh declares 40 pages into this book. Its frame is a journey in the Outer Hebrides, from the most southerly tip of Harris to the northern Butt of Lewis. McIntosh walks by way of pagan sites and pre-Reformation chapels, musing on how the idea of “the ‘just war’ locks religion into an endless identification with violence”. It’s a stimulating journey, if not described in the liveliest manner.
Poacher’s Pilgrimage is available from Telegraph Books (0844 871 1514; books. telegraph.co.uk) for £15 plus p&p.