These are dry days in the mid-Atlantic. Though we finally received rain on Sunday, there was precious little of it and it arrived after a record-breaking 38-day drought.

A funny time to be thinking of footprints, then, because I can’t imagine the hard-packed ground would yield to a pickaxe let alone a hiking boot. But I was just skimming a book called Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot by Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst, who discuss the importance of footprints.

Footprints are clues to the presence of natural resources, the authors say. They embed us in a landscape. If we pay attention, the impression of a boot or a paw tells us who has come before.

Here’s how Ralph Waldo Emerson puts it: “All things are engaged in writing their history … Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. The ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal.”

(Dinosaur footprints from the Algarve region of Portugal.)