I have always speculated that animal tracking was the origin of human reading and writing and that the interpretation of an animal's path is a storyline. But I

I have always speculated that animal tracking was the origin of human reading and writing and that the interpretation of an animal's path is a storyline. But I am not alone in this: the idea was put much better by the Kickapoo tracker Famous Shoes in the Larry McMurtry novel "Streets of Laredo" (part of the "Lonesome Dove" series): "Famous Shoes was given a Bible, in lieu of the little white girl. He would have rather had the girl but he took the Bible and he pored over it for years, in his spare time. He had never seen tracks as strange as the tracks in his Bible. After much study he could see that the tracks were individual, as were the tracks of all animals. Even worms and snails made tracks that were unlike those of other creatures." Famous Shoes strong desire to learn to follow the tracks in books surfaces a number of times in McMurtry's novels. There is no Wikipedia link for Famous Shoes, my favorite character from the "Lonesome Dove" series.