Thanks, Northern Piper. I love that Twain passage. 
I did a LOT of walking through the woods in my youth. It seemed to me I could walk quieter if I stepped down with my heel first and then let the rest of the foot sort of roll forward as I moved.
Moccasins couldn’t hurt any either. And if you’re out West, you could very well be walking on moss or pine needles rather than dried leaves like we have here in Virginia.
An anecdote:
I had Canadian friends who owned a farm in the countryside in Brazil. Locals used to constantly go on their land and steal stuff, because they could reliably hear the noisy Canadian landowners approaching through the woods. After my Canadian friends learned to walk quietly, people stopped stealing their stuff.
This tells me that it’s a skill and it can be learned.
I was particularly impressed that most of this silent woods walking was done by people wearing rubber flip-flops.
I independently (i.e. without hearing it described elsewhere) developed a manner of walking like this when I was living in the local homeless shelter. The building was cheaply built, and I have a naturally heavy tread, so my normal stride resulted in BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM. But I was working a job that had me getting up every day at 3:00AM, and so I came up with this way of walking that was nearly silent, even on those boomy floors, so that I didn’t wake up the whole house.
It actually saved me from a painful injury once. I was barefoot in the dark and stepped with the ball of my foot first, and as I slowly lowered my heel I felt a slight prick and stopped… there was a tack on the floor right under my heel.
I read a book about the SAS during the Malaya Incident. The patrol members were constantly being told off by their native guides for being too noisy, despite walking as quietly as they could.