Finding Freedom in the Parting of the Ways

Haoot

I couldn’t get Shaw’s answer about the trails out of my mind. Of course, animals made the first trails-it makes so much sense once you hear someone else say it. He mentioned that these trails may have been here for thousands of years, and it got me wondering how long animals had been making trails. Robert Moor says in his essay "The First Organisms to Blaze Trails" that the first animal trails were established 565 million years ago. The new species was a ghastly looking thing, a webbed, cupped hand reaching up from a slender stalk, as if waiting to trap a passing foot. Picture a jellyfish the size and shape of a small wineglass. "It has a stem, which is similar to the stem of a glass, and then a bowl at the top. And that bowl is a sheet of muscle," Matthews explains. Liu named it Haootia quadriformis, drawing from the language of the island’s indigenous inhabitants, the Beothuk. Haoot means, simply, “demon.” (It's now called Haootia quadriformis: “Haoot” is a word used by the Beothuk, the aboriginal people of Newfoundland, for demon.)



This map of overland trails across the North American continent is based on an 1846 map published by the United States Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Public Roads.

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