Shane Mowery has been strapping his kids to his back and hauling them into the timber since they were toddlers. By the time his oldest son Odin was eight, he was dry tracking hounds through Arizona canyon country alongside grown men, and holding his own.
The guys running hounds looked at Shane and asked why he brought a kid along. Shane's answer was simple: worry about keeping up with him. By the end of that week, Odin had gone everywhere the hounds went, everywhere the grown men went. What Shane teaches his kids on the ground is a tracking and woodsmanship curriculum any hunter can borrow, whether they're raising the next generation or just trying to get sharper themselves.
Respect for the Timber Comes First
Before any specific tracking skill, Shane says the foundation he teaches is respect. Everything else the tracking, the trapping, the reading of sign gets built on top of that base. Odin has been on Shane's back since he was barely old enough to walk, and the exposure never let up. Running hounds, learning how to track, trapping, and proper woodsmanship. All of it starts with respect for the country you're walking into.
Don't Ease Into It. Drop Them In.
Shane doesn't ease into difficult terrain with his kids the way some parents might. He drops them straight into real hunts with real stakes and real grown men who assume a kid will slow the group down. The Arizona hound hunt is his go-to example of how that plays out. Guides and hunting partners questioned why an eight-year-old was even along for a week of dry tracking in canyon country. Shane's answer wasn't to explain or justify it. It was to let the results speak. By the end of the week, nobody was asking that question anymore.
Teach the Why, Not Just the Where
Shane's central rule for tracking and reading sign is that nothing happens by accident. Every trail, every game trail, every stand of trees exists for a reason, and understanding that reason is what separates someone who can find an animal from someone who's just walking around hoping to bump into one. Understanding the track, understanding the animal, understanding why this tree grows here that's the curriculum. He treats these small ecological facts as the building blocks of real tracking ability, not trivia.
Why That Tree Grows There and What It's Telling You
He gives an example: a species of lichen called Usnea only grows on the north-facing side of certain trees, and only where the air is clean. Lion sign consistently shows up on the same cliff faces, almost always on the northwest exposure. Instead of just pointing these things out and moving on, Shane explains the mechanism behind them to his kids. What's here? What is holding these animals here, and why? That's the question he wants them asking on their own, without him prompting it every time.
He compares it to asking a kid to change a tire without any explanation. Tell them to take the lug nuts off with no context and they'll balk. Explain that the brakes are failing and suddenly the task makes complete sense. Tracking works the same way. Sign only becomes useful information once a hunter understands what produced it. A print, a rub, a game trail worn into a hillside none of it means anything on its own until a hunter understands the why behind it. That's the layer Shane insists on teaching instead of skipping.
Animals Repeat Themselves. Use That.
Shane's tracking method leans hard on the fact that most predators are creatures of habit. Bears and lions in particular run the same terrain over and over, which means a hunter who understands the topography can predict movement instead of just following stale sign. Knowing the topography of how a lion's gonna run, or where the bears are at they're gonna do the exact same thing over and over. A hunter who figures that out stops reacting and starts anticipating.
The One Animal That Still Has His Attention
Wolves are the exception, and Shane treats them almost as a category of their own. Rather than being discouraged by an animal smart enough to break its own patterns, he's turned wolves into an ongoing personal study one he doesn't claim to have finished even after decades in the field. Each year he gets a little better. Each year the wolf teaches him something the timber hasn't shown him before.
That admission matters as much as anything else in his teaching philosophy. Shane isn't presenting himself to his kids as someone who has it all figured out. He's modeling what it looks like to keep studying an animal that refuses to be predictable, year after year, and treating that ongoing process as part of the lesson itself.
Match the Push to the Kid
Not every young hunter should be pushed the same way, and Shane treats that as a tracking-adjacent skill in its own right reading people the same way you'd read terrain. His oldest son thrives on being pushed hard. His youngest doesn't respond the same way, and Shane has learned to back off with him to protect his long-term interest in hunting. Understanding what they like and what they dislike, and adjusting the pace accordingly, is its own kind of skill. Not a compromise. A read.
He applies the same approach to his oldest daughter, who shares Odin's drive and appetite for the work. The lesson underneath all of it stays consistent even as the pace changes: understand the track, understand the animal, understand the terrain that's holding it there. What changes is how hard Shane pushes to get there.
Knowledge Beyond the Track
Shane doesn't limit this teaching to tracking animals specifically. He wants his kids well-rounded across every skill that supports being self-sufficient in the timber mechanics, building, gardening, picking berries, whatever the country calls for. Homeschooling gives the family the flexibility to fold that education into daily life instead of treating it as a separate activity squeezed in around a normal school schedule.
The Skill Set Worth Handing Down
Shane isn't training his kids to chase a record book entry. He's handing off a skill set tracking, terrain reading, patience with an animal's habits that he sees disappearing as fewer hunters spend real time in the timber. He wants to leave the world knowing he gave them everything he had.
For Shane, that's the actual point of teaching tracking: not the kill at the end, but a kid who can walk into unfamiliar country, read exactly what it's telling him, and understand why. That's a skill set that outlasts any single hunt, and it's the one thing he's certain is worth handing down.
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