Where Trails End: Ecologies of the Dead & Crypto-animism in the Balkans

This essay was written in 2017 with the support of the Elsewhere Artist’s Residency in Paonia, CO

There was that bull elk carcass that lay exposed in the middle of a meadow, which my spouse and I discovered while tracking wolves in the Pacific Northwest. There were the holes in the snow that appeared every winter in the fields behind my parents’ house—left by red foxes that dive in face-first to pin down burrowing rodents. Then there was the time I trailed a fisher (martes pennanti) in Vermont’s northern hardwood forests and was led to a small, pink stomach the size of an olive lying neatly on top of the snow. The organ was not yet frozen. I was in a dense spruce stand with pinecones strewn about, and the forest all but whispered that the elusive weasel of the North Country had outsmarted a red squirrel. When I recall my most memorable wildlife tracking experiences—the ones that seared images into my mind—more often than not death was involved.

Crouching before these mysteries, I often felt the need to cross myself or take my shoes off. That’s saying a lot for someone who wasn’t raised religious. Nearby trees and bushes didn’t go out of their way to inform me that I was standing on holy ground, but they held vigil alongside me, speaking their own cryptic language of blessing. Attentive, yet unfazed, like wizened grandmothers. Seeing death through the eyes of an amateur tracker worked on my psyche in ways my culture didn’t prepare me for.

When encountering these green relics, a trail is transformed into a destination; a wander in the woods becomes an encounter. Colors become more vivid, ever-smaller details of texture and shadow emerge on surfaces as if they’d been submerged underground, only revealing themselves in response to my scrutiny. Rocks, bark, snow, and soil break open at the touch of this sharpened awareness, offering up individual strands of fur, an oddly shaped shadow, a ripped patch of moss, and other miniscule details that might have little to do with the event in question.

The encounters with these ‘death tracks’ began to line up in my memory, like glowing beads accumulating on a string. They appeal to be considered together, as a curated exhibit. Like religious effigies inside a sanctuary, they feel important and numinous without explanation, their potency emanating from a hidden logic beyond my understanding. What I do know, though, is that it’s not just me who is allured by such things. Sure, I have my own reasons for wanting to forge a personal relationship with death. We all have reasons for doing that—or for avoiding it. But something about our world today makes us hungry for these stories. The most recently dead are also the most recent to become ancestors. One longing that cuts across many worlds seems to be the hunger for ancestors—the desire to find them, to know them, to atone for them, and by extension, perhaps, to know who we are, and what legacy we might leave for future generations—not just future humans, but all species alive today.

In the habitats of us contemporary Westerners—especially those of us who are insulated by the privileges of whiteness and middle or upper class status—death is often confined to hospitals and morgues. Bodies are hidden in coffins and whisked away to cremation ovens or buried underground. Meanwhile in the extra-human world, death happens in the ‘wild public.’ Then, a flurry of activity ensues. Bodies become hubs for ephemeral communities of scavengers, crossroads for creaturely pilgrims of many kinds who pause there and attend to their survival. Ravens, opossums, bears, countless insects, and others are counted among the devotees.

Carcasses are vital parts of ecosystems, and some species rely on them. In contemporary times this has been highlighted through the story of the California condor, a critically endangered large vulture that had previously been adapted to scavenge the carcasses of extinct megafauna as well as beached marine mammals. In oceanic ecology, the phenomenon of ‘whale fall’ occurs when a whale dies and sinks to the deep-sea floor. Because of the very cold temperatures, large whale carcasses can take decades to decompose, and can spawn entire ecosystems around them in the process. Because these carcasses become home to many generations of organisms, they have the ability to guide evolution—scientists have discovered benthic species that are whale fall specialists.

Mountain lions—critically misunderstood obligate carnivores who range across the Western U.S.—have been shown by biologists to be truly responsible for feeding the wild masses, and returning untold amounts of carbon to the land. Expert hunters who occupy almost 9 million square miles of range, they return over 3 million pounds of meat—in the form of carcasses—to their home ecosystems every day.[1] Biologist and tracker Mark Elbroch explains in his new book on the subject that when lions make a kill, they make large prey like deer or guanacos—staples of their diet—available as food to multitudes of mesopredators and scavengers of many species, a trophic feat which would be nearly impossible without them.

Instead of being characterized by absence, as death seems to be in the contemporary human world, in the wild it is a distinct presence—a feature of the landscape that facilitates encounters with Others. In the wild, death is a place.

Sometimes tracks and traces are all that remain. Some friends and I stumbled upon one such treasure while on a walk in the Colorado Rockies. Early winter weather the night before had laid down two inches of fine, powdery snow. The fresh snow combined with the intense wind at elevation had us doubtful that we would find any good tracks. As we entered a meadow, our dog bounded ahead and startled a red-tailed hawk, which flew to the forest edge and perched in a ragged lodgepole pine. Later, while crossing the same meadow we spotted a slender tunnel plowing through the hillside. The trail, probably made by a mouse, came to an end at a much larger mark that appeared to be the body print of a raptor. We examined the tracks for a long time. As our eyes calibrated to the brightness of the snow, further details were revealed: the messy disturbance created by grasping talons, the slight sideways smear that the tail feathers made on the snow, and a single bright red drop of blood where the mouse’s trail appeared to end. The tracks were probably less than an hour old, possibly made by the same hawk we’d seen earlier. Save for the drop of blood, no physical remains were found; yet these primordial glyphs, graven by living bodies, seemed to hold just as much presence as remains would have. This place had become storied for us.

Tracking often reminds me of something Mary Oliver wrote about the soul; that it is “built entirely out of attentiveness." When I think of the soul on these terms, it's not hard to understand why many traditional hunting cultures around the globe have held that it is possible, through tracking, to get a sense of the soul of a being, a notion which some find fanciful. But is this concept really so far-fetched? In the wild, vital resources like food, shelter, safety, and companionship are not entirely predictable and fixed. Their promise is often in a dynamic state of flux, and must be sought out—and in turn protected—with the senses. Attentiveness is required to earn a living. If the soul is at least partially defined by what we pay attention to, perhaps understanding the soul of another animal is not so incomprehensible or paranormal, but rather more like a language or a skill that can be learned.

***

Growing up in bucolic “New England,” I learned to think of dying in hospital beds or at home, surrounded by loved ones. Nearly a lifetime and a few thousand miles had separated me from a different reality. My mom was born in a small village during the Greek civil war, when the cold fingers of the West were beginning their infamous tradition of meddling in the destinies of other nations. Mom was still a toddler when her own mother was shot to death while walking home through the Arcadian countryside one evening. There was a curfew in place because of the guerrilla activity in those mountains, but my grandmother had no choice at the time—she was returning from visiting my grandfather, who was jailed in a nearby village as a political prisoner. She had traveled on foot to bring him clothes for an upcoming trial, and when she asked neighbors if they would put her up the following night, they cowered, fearing the same fate as her husband. That was what led to her persevering quietly through the woods that night. That was what led to her final track, made less than a mile from her home where her ten children waited. Where Efstathia’s trail ended, the rest of history began, a history that included unspeakable loss, and eventually, me. Maybe this is part of why I’m so fascinated by the trails of my other-than-human kin, and where they might end. The final trail of the mouse taken by the hawk made a lot more sense than my grandmother’s final trail ever would. Her death seemed the very definition of senseless; in the wild, the taking of life seems calculated, part of an algorithm where nothing is wasted.

***

I would wander in the First Cemetery of Athens when my family was living abroad there. It was a miniature marble city—a necropolis frozen in time, gradually encroached upon by the modern world. This gilded city of the dead, however, was very much alive. Vendors set up booths at the gates where they sold flowers and candles. Locals visited frequently to tidy family graves and maintain little altars. The mausoleums—small buildings that house tombs—captured my young imagination as ghostly playhouses of the spirit world. One might consist of a tiny shrine the size of a telephone booth; another might house a stone staircase leading to an underground crypt. Many were fitted with little doors of iron and glass that seemed to always be about 2/3rds the size of regular doors, as if patronized by elves. Some had glittering mosaics locked inside that could only be glimpsed through a barred window. More modest graveyards certainly existed in Greece, but the First Cemetery of Athens performed a devotion to the dead that was unlike anything I’d ever seen before in the States. 

A related funerary tradition was the tiny roadside shrines called kandylakia, which were common along windy roads in the countryside. They were little shadow boxes on stilts, sometimes fashioned to look like miniature churches. They often were quite weathered, with creaky little doors that housed melted candles and chipped icons of the Virgin Mary. They marked places where loved ones had died (or narrowly escaped death), and also testified to the age-old traditions animating the Mediterranean landscape by which the living interacted with the dead. They were enchanting to me as a child, because they were mysterious—seeming to both contain and conceal worlds. Here were monuments that grew out of the power and terror of the land, where they stood unashamedly in acts of devotion that traversed worlds.

Here in America, cemeteries are not so much places of encounter as they are memorials—not widely considered alive—which is understandable, considering the suppression of animism that is a legacy of empire on this continent. Still, a few people are drawn there, nourished by those places (as I was as a teenager). I was compelled by more than casual morbidity, but out of an intuitive need to understand where I came from. A similar curiosity fixed my gaze on photos of my mom in our family album, when she was pregnant with my twin brother and me. Death begged to be recognized as a creative event that worked collaboratively with birth as a twin force, a dark womb that gave birth to ancestors instead of babies. Birth is how we get here, but death helps us track the trail of our ancestors as it recedes back into the harsh landscape of history.

There is little mainstream space today for our desire to encounter death as a presence in and of itself. In many other cultures, however, including those of my Balkan ancestors, places of death seem to be—in various ways—at the center of life. The practice of venerating relics, which are often bones or other physical remains of holy people, is a widespread part of devotional culture in both ancient and contemporary forms of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. The word ‘relic’ is related to the Latin verb relinquere, which means to abandon or leave behind and is the source of the English verb “to relinquish.” The Latin word reliquiae from which relic is derived essentially means “things left behind.” In Catholic and Orthodox Europe, the whole business of housing, adorning, and visiting the relics of saints is a chief organizing factor for a sort of spiritual cartography of those lands. Skulls, finger bones, and teeth of saints are placed in gilded boxes and encrusted with jewels, sometimes so much that the original remains can hardly be recognized anymore. They are not simply memorial items, but are understood to contain a sort of divine life force that is connected to the soul of the deceased holy person and can act on the living. They are also one of the most obvious ways that ancient Greek magic—which was very closely tied to communication with the dead—survived Christianity in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Many Christian saints—especially the most popular ones—were martyrs who are said to have suffered bizarre forms of torture and died horrible deaths at the hands of the Roman government or other persecutors. Some were said to have been eaten by wolves and bears in the gladiatorial arena, or shot with hundreds of arrows as if hunted, giving their remains extraordinary histories. Like many other beings on earth, they were not guaranteed peaceful or easy deaths. Whether or not one subscribes to the theology imposed on the cult of saints, there is clearly a sort of numinous power in these remains—and in the act of treasuring them—that has profound effects on the social world and is simply not present in the same way in colonial North America. Admittedly, I was raised agnostic and have a strained relationship with Christianity because of my queer identity, but I’ve always been drawn to the ritual language of the Mediterranean. A broad fascination with how people relate to landscapes and map their spirituality onto land has guided me to examine these ancestral funerary traditions in spite of the fact that I may not agree with the theology or politics these practices have picked up along the way.

Even if they are physically situated at the ‘periphery’ of human habitation, places like tombs, crypts, and famous reliquaries of saints, or even churches housing miraculous icons (seen as pictorial relics of saints) light up with activity every day of the year. Even though hagiographical traditions highlight the physical suffering many saints went through, these places do not have a gloomy aura—rather, they are places of hope. They remind people where they came from and they help people see death as a transformation not to be feared—echoing the ancient Greek notion of death as marriage to the underworld. The more flamboyant and excessive the death of a martyr, the greater the spiritual and social power their remains seem to have.

When visiting a monastery in Greece, I saw a relic that consisted of the skull of a saint inside a gold box. A fellow tracker who is particularly passionate about osteology once described skulls as ‘one of the last tracks an animal leaves on earth,’ since this complex mass of bone is often one of the last things to break down. Shrines where relics are housed strike me as a sort of cultural equivalent to wild animal remains. They are terrain features in a sacred geography, springs of spiritual nourishment that draw people toward them and animate living networks of movement and connection. Relics became so popular with laypeople in the early Christian tradition that the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 CE decreed that every church altar should house a relic, which remains the rule to this day. Even the church of the Byzantine Empire, with all its political power, could not deny the otherworldly—and perhaps wholly natural—power of physical remains.

The religious veneration of the human footprint is a practice that seems to represent a thorough fusion of that primal portent, the animal track, with the religious phenomenon of holy remains. As it turns out, footprints of holy people or god-men are a common type of ‘contact relic’ in Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism. Alleged footprints of the Buddha, Muhammad, and Vishnu can be found casted or replicated in various media as cult objects or, if they remain in-situ, holy places of pilgrimage. In the Middle East, venerating the Qadam Rasul or “Footprint of the Prophet” is a widespread folk custom.[2] A tradition of holy footprints actually existed in the early Christian tradition too, which held that a mark on a stone on the Mount of Olives was the final footprint left by Jesus before he ascended to heaven. The “Ascension Rock,” housed inside the Church of the Ascension, has become a sacrosanct site because it is seen as the last place where Jesus’ body touched the earth—his final track. When I learned of this phenomenon of ‘holy tracks,’ I wondered if the differences between tracks and relics were perhaps ones of degree and not of kind. Little rogue trails—desire lines—appeared in my imagination between the realms of animism and ‘monotheism,’ cosmologies that are often treated as totally different ways of looking at the world. There is something incredibly intuitive, too, about honoring the final mark made by a beloved messiah, spiritual hero, or famed ancestor. My grandmother’s last track disappeared seventy years ago. But if it had been somehow preserved, if I could see it, it would be more precious to me than any other relic or icon ever could be.

The footprints of the Buddha are called buddhapadas, and they were fixtures of Buddhist devotionalism long before the cultural trend of creating artistic representations of the Buddha became widespread. They are typically understood by devotees as talismans that ward off evil, but as one scholar explains, “[p]hilosophically, the footprints were meant to suggest the boundary between the Buddha’s visibility and invisibility.”[3] The concept of a footprint as representing the boundary between the seen and the unseen (and therefore also a place where the two can mystically merge) is found with even greater clarity in animistic cultures. One First Nations tracker explained that “[a] track is where the spirit of the tracked, and the…tracker, meet.”[4] In Search and Rescue tracking, the “last known track” of a lost person is your best guarantee for saving that person’s life. Indeed, the wisdom traditions associated with wildlife tracking among hunting peoples could have provided the schema for how agricultural peoples, who no longer solely relied on hunting for their survival (but certainly still engaged in it), spiritually related to the tracks of holy people. After all, you can learn something by following an animal’s tracks, so it seems to follow that the buddhapadas might help a Buddhist know the Buddha. 

In Eastern Orthodox cosmology, relics and icons of saints are considered a type of symbol, a sacred interface joining the human and divine realms. This is quite a different understanding of ‘symbol’ than the one we have in the West, where a symbol is commonly conceived as a sign that is arbitrarily assigned to represent something. Theologian Paul Tillich gets closer to the old mystical understanding when he calls a symbol something that points beyond itself to something else that is otherwise unquantifiable.[5] Animal tracks, signs, and remains can be thought of as symbols in a raw form, indexing a reality beyond our own and satisfying the vital spiritual imperative of re-orienting us to mystery so that we may continue to seek and learn. Perhaps tracking even helped us form our basic sensibility for the sacred, because tracks are proof of the ability of matter to retain meaning.

Tracks are testaments to the existence of dynamic, living forces that often go unseen by modern humans. Yet it is the absence of a being—or the absence of its life force—that allows these impressions and remnants to exist as they are, as things that point to and eulogize something beyond themselves. Because of this strange semiotic interplay of presence and absence, such tracks have an eerie quality.[6] They highlight the thin, moving edge between the known and the unknown, between fact and possibility, or even between the tracker and the tracked. The carcass of a deer in the woods—animated by scavengers with a new kind of life—and the relic of a dead saint both emphatically mark the death process, but yet something lives, and perhaps even proceeds from or is continuously born from these remains. 

Recently, I traveled to Greece with my mother where we commemorated the 70th anniversary of my grandmother’s death. My spouse, Mom, a cousin, Mom’s childhood best friend, and I all packed into a rental car and drove three hours from Athens to our village in Arcadia. We intended to walk the part of the trail where Efstathia had died and begin a shrine there. One of our cousins had described the location to us—it was near a small hut, about an hour’s walk from the village, and there was a large rock by the path that had been split by the bullets. The section we hiked only took a couple of hours, and since it was the first time any of us had walked this path, we struggled to orient ourselves based on the descriptions our relatives had given. At one point, the trail broke out from the mossy fir and spruce forest and passed an ancestral walnut grove. It was November and rainy, and the naked walnut trees stuck out against the grey sky like dark cracks in glass. Right after the grove, the trail crossed an open hillside. A sedan was parked haphazardly in a field below us. “We should hurry through this part,” my mom urged. “There could be hunters here.” I had to admit it did feel like an unusually exposed location, and so we picked up our pace—following the torrents of silty sheep tracks magnified by puddles on the ground. Later, when we discussed the journey with friends and family, we realized that had been the spot where she died—right where the trail began to cross the field.

I sometimes encounter a haunting phenomenon while following a clear fox trail in snow. Red foxes have remarkably large feet for their size that act as ‘snowshoes’ in the winter. The trail will suddenly disappear, as if the fox had been spirited away in her tracks. Usually this effect occurs because the animal ceased sinking into the snow as much—perhaps a crust had formed on the surface—and what faint impressions did exist soon melted away under the winter sun. Trails are often there; they are just not always visible to the human eye. Our canine companions with their remarkable sense of smell are always reminding us that there are other ways to sense the past presence of others. I wonder then at the ability of our hearts to pick up the trails of the deceased. Maybe our trails don’t end at death after all, they just slip into another landscape—the hearts of the living who would endeavor to follow them.

Bibliography

Elbroch, Mark. The Cougar Conundrum: Sharing the World with a Successful Predator. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2020.

Hasan, Perween. “The Footprint of the Prophet.” Muqarnas X: An Annual on Islamic Art 

      and Architecture, ed. Margaret B. Sevcenko. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993: 335-43.

Kowalewski, David. “Metaphysical Tracking: The Oldest Ecopsychology.” The   

    International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 23, no. 1 (2004): 65-74.

Miller, Patricia Cox. The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient   

Christianity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2009.

Tillich, Paul. Dynamics of Faith. New York: Harper and Row, 1957.

[1] Mark Elbroch, The Cougar Conundrum: Sharing the World with a Successful Predator (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2020), 157.

[2]  Perween Hasan. “The Footprint of the Prophet.” Muqarnas X: An Annual on Islamic Art 

      and Architecture, ed. Margaret B. Sevcenko (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993): 335-43.

[3] Hasan, “The Footprint of the Prophet.”

[4] David Kowalewski. “Metaphysical Tracking: The Oldest Ecopsychology.” The   

    International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 23, no. 1 (2004): 65-74.

[5] Paul Tillich. Dynamics of Faith. (New York: Harper and Row, 1957.)

[6] The alchemy of presence and absence is also central to the metaphysics of holy objects in the ancient Mediterranean; see Patricia Cox Miller, The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient   

Christianity. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2009.)