I’ve walked through many a woods through my life. Try as I might, I have never achieved the fabled stealthiness of Native American hunters & warriors. No matter how carefully I place my feet, twigs and leaves will always break under my boots.
So could they really walk through woods without making a sound? If so, how did they do it?
Speculation from a physics grad student:
Work equals force times distance. In order to produce sound, some of the energy that you put into moving your feet goes into compressing stuff on the ground. Air is displaced in this process. Compress it quickly enough, and the displacement of air will have a pulse-wave shape of an audibly high frequency. So if it is possible to walk over leaves and twigs without making any noise, it involves extending the distance over which your feet contact the ground (more distance means you can apply less force to do the same work), and doing it very very slowly. No, slower than that. Even slower. There you go.
After reading some of Tom Brown’s stuff on tracking, I’ve tried a bit of this. I don’t think it’s possible to move absolutely silently, but with care you can keep your noise below the background noise, so it isn’t detected by your quarry. It helps if there’s a bit of wind, which creates some noise and allows you to not be scented (by moving upwind).
It helps to be barefoot, or wearing thin moccasins. This allows you to feel the nature of what you’re stepping on, without having to inspect it visually. That’s necessary, because you must keep your eyes on the quarry and move only during the times when it isn’t alert (e.g. when a deer is grazing).
Another key (as SpatialRift notes) is moving extremely slowly - like a few feet per minute. If you apply weight very gradually to a breakable twig, it will make almost no noise. You can to some extent choose the ground across which you track, avoiding the really noisy routes. A thick carpet of dry leaves on a windless day is going to be near hopeless.
I’ve actually been impressed with how easy this is. I’m just a duffer, but I’ve several times snuck from 100 to within 20 yards of deer. (Takes about 20 minutes.) Mostly this was over favorable ground (e.g. grass) where the big issue was being seen, not heard.
Like Xema said, the trick is not to be silent - you just have to be quieter than the normal background noise in the woods. And not make any noise that animals are attuned to as dangerous.
I couldn’t help but wonder if the people who spread the fable were themselves loud, making the Native American’s stealthiness seem that much more quiet.
Frontiersman <clomping along, coughing, spitting, humming a show tune, suddenly notices a Native American just in front of him>: “You guys always just appear. You must be able to walk through woods without making a sound!”
Native American: :rolleyes:
Not to be a jerk, but this question is logically equivalent to asking “So, can Asians really do amazing kung fu stuff”?
Well, except for the fact that it’s in the past tense, asking about historical properties of Natives. It’s more akin to asking “Could the Chinese warriors really do amazing wushu?”
As a hunter I’ve heard the “Native Americans of yesteryear can walk through the woods without making a sound” bit my whole life. It’s a fair question (albeit not PC) and am just wondering if there’s any validity to it.
And except for the fact that it’s asking about a particular subset of Native Americans, hunters and warriors, who would have had a professional interest in developing stealth skills, not about the entire population as “Asians” is (yes, the title didn’t specify that, but titles have limited space).
A more modern equivalent would be Viet Cong sappers making their way through all that wire and minefields to attack American firebases. I was only in the National Guard, but once on patrol, we came within 25 feet of a moose, undetected. Another time, an ‘alert’ guard didn’t know I was there until I jumped on him. Both of these incidences were at night. The key is moving very slowly and paying attention to your target.
I’ve read various accounts written by members of the British SAS and US Special Forces in their interactions with indigenous people that they trained and worked with. It seems that most of the stealthiness attributed to the hunter gatherers was simply a matter of living in the area their whole lives and knowing where everything(especially the animal tracks and deer trails and such) was, so that to an outsider crashing through the unfamiliar woods, they seem to be able to pop up everywhere without being detected. That’s not to say they were not extremely competent at moving through the woods silently - they sure were, but not really more so than their western counterparts who were similarly experienced and/or well trained outdoorsmen.
A “particular subset of Native Americans” is like saying “A particular subset of Europeans.” It’s an utterly meaningless phrase. Which Native Americans? Aztec? Cherokee? Haida? These people were as different from each other as Greeks and Scots.
American aboriginals were not all hunter-gatherers living in the woods, and even those that were did not all share the same abilities or cultures. I’m sorry, it’s just a really silly question.
I grew up in a house surrounded by national forest. As a kid I could nearly walk up to deer in the woods.
No training. Not a Native American. It’s just a matter of paying attention to where your feet are going and moving slowly. In a sense it’s really not all that hard, but most people go out into the forest with those stupid polyester/nylon/synthetic jackets that rustle louder than a rock concert if you barely move.
Normal rubber soled shoes are just fine though, or even army boots. You want to set your foot down on a point and roll it around to the toe, or walk tippy-toe on roots and rocks and such. You want a good sense of balance and and to consciously control the angle of your ankle, but what you’re doing in terms of movement is going to be pretty well the same regardless of whether you’re wearing shoes or not. It’s only if you’re running on a hard surface that your shoe choice makes a difference in terms of volume output.
If there’s no tree to hear it, yes.
I would imagine that a good part of silently walking through woods in order to close in on your prey with your bow, is to pay attention to where you step.
Xema, I’ve also read most of Tom Brown’s books. I seem to remember his saying something about putting the toe or the ball of the foot down first and then the rest of the foot.
I sometimes walk like this when I wear work boots, slippers (at night you could hear my family, but never me, walk to the kitchen) or the rare occassion I’m in the woods and have be said to have “Indian walk,” by several people.
I think that’s right. I do about what SageRat says - I tend to put the forward outside part of my foot down first and then slowly roll it inward until my weight comes on the ball of the foot. It’s a bit awkward, as there’s a substantial time when the foot bears very little weight - nearly all your weight is back on the other foot.
If we’re talking about those white frontiersman who were trapping I suspect that many of them were just as adept at sneaking around and surviving in the wilderness as the Native Americans themselves.