Coyote Mentoring Core Routines: Questioning and Tracking
What It Is—and Why It Matters
In Coyote Mentoring, Questioning and Tracking are deeply entwined. Tracking is more than following animal prints—it’s the art of paying attention to patterns, stories, and mystery. Questioning is the parallel human practice: following the trail of curiosity. Together, they form a routine that invites learners to engage with the landscape as a living field of clues and unfolding stories.
Tracking in this tradition is not primarily about identification. It’s about awareness, movement, behavior, and relationship. Learners begin to ask: Who passed here? When? What were they doing? These questions pull the observer into a different mode of perception—alert, humble, and full of wonder. Similarly, mentors model “Coyote questions”: open-ended, provocative, and timed to stir deeper inquiry rather than provide answers.
This routine matters because it activates both the senses and the imagination. It builds “inquisitive focus,” one of the Attributes of Connection. Tracking teaches humility—we can never know everything. But it also builds confidence—learners begin to trust their observations, their guesses, their inner sense of story. As they follow tracks on the land or follow the thread of a question, they’re practicing the core movement of nature connection: to notice, to wonder, and to follow.
What It Might Look Like
The learner crouches beside a single print.
It’s faint, maybe just a partial toe pad in soft mud. A mentor arrives, kneels, and asks gently, “Who do you think it was? What were they doing?” There’s no rush to answer. Just quiet observation. Maybe a tape measure comes out. Maybe not. The questions are the main tools here.
They begin to see the invisible.
The learner notices more: crushed grass, broken twigs, bird alarm patterns nearby. The story deepens. They’re not just looking at a print anymore—they’re imagining the animal’s moment. Was it running? Foraging? Was it aware of them? Tracking becomes storytelling.
Questions ripple beyond the trail.
The mentor might ask, “What do you think was happening in this part of the forest today?” or “Why do you think the jays were so loud near the stream?” These questions aren’t about getting it right. They’re about opening awareness. One question leads to another. A trail of thought mirrors the trail on the ground.
Tracking becomes a way of seeing.
Even when there are no visible prints, the learner is tracking—watching bird behavior, noting the stillness of the trees, sensing tension or ease in the forest. Questioning and tracking together become a habit of attention. Noticing what others miss. Asking what others forget to ask. It’s not just a skill set—it’s a way of being.