out in the open, will often escape being noticed. This is called by scouts "Freezing."
Tracking
"Sign" is the word used by Scouts to mean any little details, such as footprints, broken twigs, trampled grass, scraps of food, old matches, etc.
Any one of you might win the reward of $100 for tracing the writer of a typewritten paper which nearly caused the ruin of a large bank. It was noticed by signs that the writer must have used a Remington machine No. 7, because of the shape of the letters. The type was much worn, therefore it is supposed the machine was four or five years old. Now, who bought one at that time? Then you could see that the letter "o" had a bent bar, the letter "r" had a faulty spring, and the top of the capital letter "C" was worn away. So you see that if you found a machine with all these faults you could trace the person who used it, from even such very small signs.
Some native Indian trackers were following up the footprints of a panther that had killed and carried off a young kid. He had crossed a wide bare slab of rock, which, of course, gave no mark of his soft feet. The tracker went at once to the far side of the rock where it came to a sharp edge; he wetted his finger, and just passed it along the edge till he found a few kid's hairs sticking to it. This showed him where the panther had passed down off the rock, dragging the kid with him. Those few hairs were what Scouts call "sign."
This tracker also found bears by noticing small "sign."
