Scarily Competent Tracker: Difference between revisions

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== Comic Books ==

* Laughed at in the Scrooge McDuck story "The Vigilante of Pizen Bluff" (a part of ''[[The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck]]'' entirety), where Scrooge's uncle Angus tries to act like one of these by trying to hunt down the villains by broken tree branches. Young Scrooge and Goklayeh point out that the villains would have to be fairly incompetent to hit the only tree in miles' reach, and set out to mock him by 'tracking' the villains by noticing a single bent cactus spine and ''a disturbed grain of sand''.

{{quote| '''Scrooge:''' This clinches it! This '''shadow''' has been '''bruised''' on the north edge!}}

{{quote|'''Scrooge:''' This clinches it! This '''shadow''' has been '''bruised''' on the north edge!}}

** Donald's nephews demonstrate this skill often, though they can be tricked.

* In [[The DCU]], Tomahawk has this ability, unerringly following a trail invisible to everyone else across a dinosaur-infested jungle in ''[[The War That Time Forgot]]'' mini-series.

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* [[Secret Six|Thomas "Catman" Blake]] claims to be [[Informed Ability|the greatest tracker on Earth.]]

** Turns out to be true in a later storyline.

{{quote| '''Catman''':"You'll run. You'll hide. And in the dark... I will find you."{{spoiler|(and he does find them)}}}}

{{quote|'''Catman''':"You'll run. You'll hide. And in the dark... I will find you."{{spoiler|(and he does find them)}}}}

* The original roster of the third incarnation of ''[[X-Force]]'' consisted of [[Wolverine]], [[Opposite Sex Clone|X-23]], Wolfsbane, and Warpath. The first 3 have heightened senses, the 4th is an Apache Indian (see [[Real Life]] below).

* Sabretooth and Wolverine are both considered to be excellent trackers, even without their heightened senses.

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** After the girls are captured, the Mohicans track them up the side of a solid granite hill after spotting a deliberately-turned leaf. (see the Aragorn example [[Older Than They Think|above]]).

** [[Mark Twain]] had a lot of fun lampooning the [[Adaptation Distillation|original book]] for this. See [http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_fenimore.html On The Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper], possibly the world's first blog entry. It's troperrific.

{{quote| "A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of the moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick. Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently was his broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn’t step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred handier things to step on, but that wouldn’t satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can’t do it, go and borrow one."}}

{{quote|"A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of the moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick. Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently was his broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn’t step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred handier things to step on, but that wouldn’t satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can’t do it, go and borrow one."}}

* In ''[[Without a Paddle]]'' one of the hillbillies figures out not only what they did and what direction they went with perfect accuracy, he knows what they were talking about when they stopped there.

* In ''[[Mulan]]'', the Huns are able to identify the movement of the Imperial army simply by analyzing a lost doll (although it's a joint effort of four or five commanders, and makes a reasonable amount of sense given the setting.)

* They don't get any scarier than Anton Chigurh from ''[[No Country for Old Men]]''.

** Less scary, but just as competent is [[Deadpan Snarker|Colonel Carson Wells, Ret.]] from [[No Country for Old Men|the same]].

{{quote| Llewelyn Moss: He won't find me again.~~ ~~

{{quote|Llewelyn Moss: He won't find me again.

Carson Wells: Took me all of three hours. }}

* In an ordinary movie, either [[Big Bad|Angel Eyes]] or [[Designated Hero|Blondie]] would be one. But in ''[[The Good, the Bad and the Ugly]]'', everyone can track anyone like this.

* Subverted in ''[[Night at the Museum]]''. Just by looking at a van's tire tracks in the snow, Sacagawea is able to tell that the man driving van lost control of his vehicle and crashed. When the impressed onlookers ask how she did it, Sacagawea merely points to the wrecked van farther down the alley.

* Parodied in ''[[The Aristocats]]''. Napoleon the dog is able to tell his sidekick Lafayette the size, type, and condition of the pair of squeaky shoes he hears, and then:

{{quote| Lafayette: What color are they?~~ ~~

{{quote|Lafayette: What color are they?

Napoleon: Why they're bla- now how would I know that? }}

** Later, he correctly identifies the sound of a one-wheeled haystack.

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== Jokes ==

* This trope is parodied in the following joke:

{{quote| A small group of hikers are walking along a narrow mountain road in the Rocky Mountains. Along the way they come across a man lying on the side of the road with one ear pressed to the ground. "What is it?" one of the hikers asks him. The stranger replies, "A horse-drawn wagon, traveling east. One of the horses is chestnut, the other black with a white spot on its forehead. The driver is a young man in a blue flannel shirt, and he has a passenger, a blond woman in a yellow cotton dress." "Wow, you can tell all of that just by listening to the vibrations in the ground?" the hiker asks. The stranger answers: " {{spoiler|No, they just ran me over half an hour ago.}}"}}

{{quote|A small group of hikers are walking along a narrow mountain road in the Rocky Mountains. Along the way they come across a man lying on the side of the road with one ear pressed to the ground. "What is it?" one of the hikers asks him. The stranger replies, "A horse-drawn wagon, traveling east. One of the horses is chestnut, the other black with a white spot on its forehead. The driver is a young man in a blue flannel shirt, and he has a passenger, a blond woman in a yellow cotton dress." "Wow, you can tell all of that just by listening to the vibrations in the ground?" the hiker asks. The stranger answers: " {{spoiler|No, they just ran me over half an hour ago.}}"}}

** In a variation on the joke, an Indian presses his ear to the ground and says "Buffalo come." The non-Indian members of the party, impressed, ask him if he can hear the vibrations. " {{spoiler|No. Ground sticky}}."

* In another joke a group of hunters come across tracks in the woods. They argue about the details of the animal that left them until one mans leans down and claims he's determined the animal's age and zodiac sign. When the others join him {{spoiler|they're all hit by the train}}.

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* [[Sherlock Holmes]] did this ''a lot''.

** In the very first story, ''A Study In Scarlet'', he provides this description of the murderer:

{{quote| "There has been murder done, and the murderer was a man. He was more than six feet high, was in the prime of life, had small feet for his height, wore coarse, square-toed boots and smoked a Trichinopoly cigar. He came here with his victim in a four-wheeled cab, which was drawn by a horse with three old shoes and one new one on his off fore leg. In all probability the murderer had a florid face, and the finger-nails of his right hand were remarkably long."}}

{{quote|"There has been murder done, and the murderer was a man. He was more than six feet high, was in the prime of life, had small feet for his height, wore coarse, square-toed boots and smoked a Trichinopoly cigar. He came here with his victim in a four-wheeled cab, which was drawn by a horse with three old shoes and one new one on his off fore leg. In all probability the murderer had a florid face, and the finger-nails of his right hand were remarkably long."}}

::: His explanation to Watson follows shortly:

{{quote| {{smallcaps| Holmes:}}"The very first thing which I observed on arriving there was that a cab had made two ruts with its wheels close to the curb. Now, up to last night, we have had no rain for a week, so that those wheels which left such a deep impression must have been there during the night. There were the marks of the horse's hoofs, too, the outline of one of which was far more clearly cut than that of the other three, showing that that was a new shoe. Since the cab was there after the rain began, and was not there at any time during the morning—I have Gregson's word for that—it follows that it must have been there during the night, and, therefore, that it brought those two individuals to the house. ...~~ ~~

{{quote|{{smallcaps| Holmes:}}"The very first thing which I observed on arriving there was that a cab had made two ruts with its wheels close to the curb. Now, up to last night, we have had no rain for a week, so that those wheels which left such a deep impression must have been there during the night. There were the marks of the horse's hoofs, too, the outline of one of which was far more clearly cut than that of the other three, showing that that was a new shoe. Since the cab was there after the rain began, and was not there at any time during the morning—I have Gregson's word for that—it follows that it must have been there during the night, and, therefore, that it brought those two individuals to the house. ...

{{smallcaps| Holmes:}} "Why, the height of a man, in nine cases out of ten, can be told from the length of his stride. ... I had this fellow's stride both on the clay outside and on the dust within. Then I had a way of checking my calculation. When a man writes on a wall, his instinct leads him to write about the level of his own eyes. Now that writing was just over six feet from the ground. It was child's play."~~ ~~

{{smallcaps| Holmes:}} "Why, the height of a man, in nine cases out of ten, can be told from the length of his stride. ... I had this fellow's stride both on the clay outside and on the dust within. Then I had a way of checking my calculation. When a man writes on a wall, his instinct leads him to write about the level of his own eyes. Now that writing was just over six feet from the ground. It was child's play."

{{smallcaps| Watson:}} "And his age?" I asked.~~ ~~

{{smallcaps| Watson:}} "And his age?" I asked.

{{smallcaps| Holmes:}} "Well, if a man can stride four and a-half feet without the smallest effort, he can't be quite in the sere and yellow. That was the breadth of a puddle on the garden walk which he had evidently walked across. Patent-leather boots had gone round, and Square-toes had hopped over.~~ ~~

{{smallcaps| Holmes:}} "Well, if a man can stride four and a-half feet without the smallest effort, he can't be quite in the sere and yellow. That was the breadth of a puddle on the garden walk which he had evidently walked across. Patent-leather boots had gone round, and Square-toes had hopped over.

{{smallcaps| Watson:}} "The finger nails and the Trichinopoly," I suggested.~~ ~~

{{smallcaps| Watson:}} "The finger nails and the Trichinopoly," I suggested.

{{smallcaps| Holmes:}} "The writing on the wall was done with a man's forefinger dipped in blood. My glass allowed me to observe that the plaster was slightly scratched in doing it, which would not have been the case if the man's nail had been trimmed. I gathered up some scattered ash from the floor. It was dark in colour and flakey -- such an ash as is only made by a Trichinopoly. I have made a special study of cigar ashes }}

* William of Baskerville does it too, at the beginning of ''[[The Name of the Rose]]'' (the book), in what combined with his name is an obvious [[Shout-Out]] to good ol' Sherlock.

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* ''[[The Adventures of Brisco County Jr]]'' has Lord Bowler. "Dirt talks to me, Brisco."

** And Brisco himself.

{{quote| '''Brisco studies tracks from the saddle''': Hmmmm...~~ ~~

{{quote|'''Brisco studies tracks from the saddle''': Hmmmm...

''Comet whinnies''~~ ~~

''Comet whinnies''

'''Brisco''': No, I don't know why they left the road. }}

** And there was the episode where they were being tracked by a U.S. army Black OPS team. Bowler knew the tracker and said that he was able to track anything over land, no matter what.

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* [[Chuck Norris]] does this in ''[[Walker, Texas Ranger]]''. He is traveling through the forest, gets on the ground, sniffs some dirt, takes a lick, and then states in a matter of fact voice that, "A plane crashed here."

* Lampooned during the ''[[Top Gear]]'' Small Japanese Car Hunting episode when Richard Hammond proudly uses his "tracking skills" to follow Jeremy's 4x4 through a forest.

{{quote| '''Hammond:''' *spotting the tire impressions in the mud* I can see tracks! I'm using my tracking skills; I'm not even using the hounds. *walks into a low branch* Ow, a tree!}}

{{quote|'''Hammond:''' *spotting the tire impressions in the mud* I can see tracks! I'm using my tracking skills; I'm not even using the hounds. *walks into a low branch* Ow, a tree!}}

* Ian Edgerton, from ''[[Numb3rs]].''

* The black tracker Fuller uses to pursue the bushrangers in the second episode of the ''[[Wild Boys]]''. Despite the bushrangers uses every trick they know to lose him (riding along a creek, etc), he stays right on their tail. And he isn't fooled by the pig caracass they blow up in an attempt to fake their deaths either.

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* Subverted by Belkar in ''[[Order of the Stick]]'', who as a ranger is supposed to be a scary-accurate tracker (and was hired as one) but actually has no skill at all at tracking, and has on more than one occasion forgotten it's what he was supposed to be doing.

** Well, actually Belkar seems to have some tracking ability, but he is too stupid and uncaring to use it....until Roy points out (falsely) that the person Roy wants him to track has insulted Belkar.

{{quote| '''Belkar:''' "Oh, that's it! I'm gonna track them down and kill their whole family!"}}

{{quote|'''Belkar:''' "Oh, that's it! I'm gonna track them down and kill their whole family!"}}

*** The next strip, however, Belkar forgets that he was tracking anybody.

** Belkar is a parody of a combat twink who chooses to be ranger not for their class specialties, but for whatever perks they can exploit in combat.

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*** Well ''Zuko'' tracks the airborne Gaang up one side of the world and down the other throughout season 1. From sea. And then there's Jun and her Shirshu, Nyla, who is the living embodiment of this trope, capable of tracking ''anything, anywhere'' on the planet by ''scent'' alone.

* ''[[Darkwing Duck]]'', being a mix of Batman and Sherlock Holmes, knows how to locate villains with one seemingly inconsequential clue. His [[Dangerously Genre Savvy]] [[Evil Counterpart]] Negaduck lampshades this when he overtakes the city and moves into the tallest skyscraper:

{{quote| '''Negaduck''': I see you found the breadcrumb I left at the bridge. I knew you wouldn't notice the giant flag.~~ ~~

{{quote|'''Negaduck''': I see you found the breadcrumb I left at the bridge. I knew you wouldn't notice the giant flag.

'''Darkwing Duck''': Giant...flag?~~ ~~

'''Darkwing Duck''': Giant...flag?

(Flag with Negaduck's face is outside the window, at least 5 stories high, easily visible from the bridge) }}

* [[Subverted Trope|Subverted]] in the ''[[Ace Ventura]]'' animated series: Ace finds a footprint and gives a detailed description of the owner's age, size, health, and appearance. Turns out the guy dropped a drivers' license next to the footprint.

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[[Category:Characters As Device]]

[[Category:Characterization Tropes]]

[[Category:Scarily Competent Tracker~~]][[Category:Big Trope Hunting~~]]

[[Category:Scarily Competent Tracker]]

[[Category:Big Trope Hunting]]