Thursday, October 29th 2009

By Corrigan Hammond

Terry Grant explains why you can run but you can’t hide

Mantracker is the cult-hit television program where a pair of ordinary Canadians must outwit and hide from the “matracker,” real-life cowboy Terry Grant, in a brutal two-day race across some of this country’s most beautiful and rugged terrain. Before attaining his current celebrity status as our country’s foremost tracker, Grant spent over forty years riding horses and working for Search and Rescue teams. “We [were] always looking for tracks and tracking cows and stuff, and then I got into guiding,” he explained to me.

“I was wrangling at one point, where you’ve got to learn to track the horses. When you’re guiding you need to know all the different animals, so everything led to another thing and then we got into Search and Rescue and I actually learned to track people,” he continued.

Grant began tracking in his home province of Alberta, although he also found plenty of work in the Yukon, North West Territories and British Columbia. “With my guiding I did lots of grizzly bear, black bear, moose, elk, sheep, goats all that stuff,” Grant explained.

“Animals tend to have a bit of a pattern — they’re going to feed, or they’re going to water, or they’re going to bed, or they’re going to do stuff. They don’t just wander around willy-nilly,” Grant continued.

The people that he tracks on television are different than wildlife though — “they’ve done a lot of things [to evade capture]” he explained. “You know, walking backwards and swimming lakes and puddles and stuff like that, putting their soles on backwards stuff like that. There’s a whole gamut of things they’ve done.”

Although, putting the sole of your shoes on backwards might make a difference to an untrained eyed, Grant is unfazed by the popular strategy. “It does make a difference [at first], because the whole tread pattern gets going backwards. But as soon as you look at about the third track you can tell pretty quick that they’ve got the sole on backwards because the toe kicks going the wrong direction.”

Grant explained to me how he uses what he learned while working Search and Rescue back in his home province of Alberta on the television program. He even uses his horseback riding experience, one of the program’s trademarks, a leftover from his days in Search and Rescue: “The horse is just my mode of travel instead of walking or something like that. I use the horse. And as far as tracking people, you’re still looking for the same things. People are still gonna go [to] the same places.”

“Different terrains affect how much I can use the horse,” Grant explained. “Like in southern Alberta,” he continued, “I can ride just about anywhere. In Newfoundland for instance, I’m pretty much stuck to the road. Northern BC I’m very limited on the trails, in the bush and that stuff. So the horse is a limiting factor in that it gives me speed in the open but it does tend to pin me down because I have to go around a lot of stuff.”

“You have to be able to understand horses, because I get two hours to get on my horse the day before the chase and in that two hours I’ve got to figure out what makes them work, what is he scared of, is he going to run when I want him to, do I need spurs, is he a little bit grumpy? You know, I’ve got to figure out all that stuff in a couple hours and away we go.”

“That’s the one good thing about spending twenty five years on the back of a horse. I’ve [broke in] a lot of horses and I’ve rod a lot of country so, there’s more than one way to get every horse to do something. So I can get on there and I can figure out fairly quick, I’ll try three different things to make him turn left and figure out which one makes him turn left and make him turn right the same way. Being a cowboy and breaking horses has defiantly helped.”

Grant isn’t alone out there in the terrain tracking the program’s prey though. Along with his horse, an experienced local guide and a team of veteran Outdoor Life Network cameramen accompany Grant. “Everybody thinks there’s a whole crew, but there’s actually two guys with the prey and one with me. And that’s it,” he explained. “They’ve been doing this thing for four and a half years. We’ve had the same three cameramen. They wear full cameo and when they prey run into the bush; they run in with them, when the prey hide, they hide. [It’s] no advantage whatsoever.”

The guides who accompany him are often Grant’s biggest challenge on the program. “Every guide knows the area, but he doesn’t know me [and] I don’t know him. We don’t know the horses. So yeah, it’s a new challenge to meet him and to get him to do the things I need him to do and stuff.”

“I’ve never had any that were hard to work with. I’ve had some that just thought it was a whole lot of Hollywood and then realised that its twelve, fourteen hour days and that it’s a lot of hard work and they weren’t really prepared for that. Trying to get their head around that’s a little tough.”

Mantracker airs on the Outdoor Life Network weeknights at 6:00 p.m.