# I wonder how the tracker orc would have fared...



## grendel (May 16, 2020)

I was reading the chapter "The Ring Goes South" this evening, and a very strange thought occurred to me. (Don't ask me where it came from, maybe the quarantine is getting to me.). After literally laughing out loud, I thought "I have to post this in TTF!"

So the Company sets out on the Quest of Mount Doom; their hope is in secrecy not in battle. They travel by night to avoid being detected. They do not dare risk lighting a fire to avoid being detected. But what about... um, well, excrement? Especially Bill the pony; horses don't care, they let loose whenever the mood strikes them, and they tend to poop a lot. That would leave quite a trail to follow. Or is this just a subject not talked about in polite company?


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## TrackerOrc (May 17, 2020)

grendel said:


> I was reading the chapter "The Ring Goes South" this evening, and a very strange thought occurred to me. (Don't ask me where it came from, maybe the quarantine is getting to me.). After literally laughing out loud, I thought "I have to post this in TTF!"
> 
> So the Company sets out on the Quest of Mount Doom; their hope is in secrecy not in battle. They travel by night to avoid being detected. They do not dare risk lighting a fire to avoid being detected. But what about... um, well, excrement? Especially Bill the pony; horses don't care, they let loose whenever the mood strikes them, and they tend to poop a lot. That would leave quite a trail to follow. Or is this just a subject not talked about in polite company?


Would have been an easy job for good old T.O. !


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## Sir Eowyn (May 17, 2020)

I don't imagine excrement exists in Middle-earth, except Shelob's. The Elves' food must evaporate into daffodils...


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## Olorgando (May 17, 2020)

TrackerOrc said:


> grendel said:
> 
> 
> > I was reading the chapter "The Ring Goes South" this evening, and a very strange thought occurred to me. (Don't ask me where it came from, maybe the quarantine is getting to me.). After literally laughing out loud, I thought "I have to post this in TTF!"
> ...





Sir Eowyn said:


> I don't imagine excrement exists in Middle-earth, except Shelob's. The Elves' food must evaporate into daffodils...


T.O., that would assume that any Orcs were active west of the Misty mountains. Impossible north, getting past Rivendell, and implausible south, with the west gate of Moria being closed (and that octo - or whatever - pus thing guarding the west gate of Moria in that pool. Munches anything). And besides. how would any tracker distinguish horse poo from, say, deer poo?

Add to that the fact that the Nazgûl, all nine of them including the former Witch-king of Angmar, had had their (no longer poo-producing) behinds wiped at the Fords of Bruinen. Not a place that the, relative to that, chicken droppings among Sauron's (semi-) controlled subjects would be overly motivated to investigate (except for those crebain - but they may have been sent by Saruman ...


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## Elthir (May 17, 2020)

Olorgando said:


> And besides. how would any tracker distinguish horse poo from, say, deer poo?




Even I can tell pony poo from deer poo.

Now "scat"!


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## Olorgando (May 17, 2020)

Elthir said:


> Even I can tell pony poo from deer poo.


About the only thing I ever noticed on our meadow was rabbit (not hare?) poo.
So I am at a disadvantage in that respect ...


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## Elthir (May 17, 2020)

Wabbit poo left . . . hare to the wight.


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## Olorgando (May 17, 2020)

Well, QED as to how rabbit poo looks.
"Our" hares (hares normally being field and not forest inhabitants, but we mess up the ecology of so many critters ...) seem to not use the meadow as a toilet.
On the other hand, I have not seen "wabbits" for perhaps two years or more … they do seem to occasionally get decimated by some "plague" or the other that they are prone to. Add to that human annoyance at their habits - they're the ones that dig burrows that can upset the structural soundness of at least smaller buildings, while hares are surface dwellers - and we've gone from several adults and several "pups" (or whatever young rodents are called) to zero.

Edit: with the rabbits, that is ...


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## Elthir (May 17, 2020)

Fun fact: it took me years to train these beasties to poo right next to each other -- just for this photo


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## Olorgando (May 17, 2020)

Elthir said:


> Fun fact: it took me years to train these beasties to poo right next to each other -- just for this photo


Uh-huh.
At the same time, or serially? 🤪


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## Deleted member 12094 (May 17, 2020)

grendel said:


> I was reading the chapter "The Ring Goes South" this evening, and a very strange thought occurred to me. (Don't ask me where it came from, maybe the quarantine is getting to me.). After literally laughing out loud, I thought "I have to post this in TTF!"
> 
> So the Company sets out on the Quest of Mount Doom; their hope is in secrecy not in battle. They travel by night to avoid being detected. They do not dare risk lighting a fire to avoid being detected. But what about... um, well, excrement? Especially Bill the pony; horses don't care, they let loose whenever the mood strikes them, and they tend to poop a lot. That would leave quite a trail to follow. Or is this just a subject not talked about in polite company?



Apart from your (unappetizing, yet not wrong) concerns about Bill's undisciplined excrement, there are other things as well, which the Fellowship left behind in its trail. There were other left-behinds such as urine (leaving a long-after smell), food leftovers (think of chicken bones or other things, even if skillfully buried), but also visible traces like footprints (before rain set in) or just plain scent (if passed recently).

Your reflection about the Fellowship leaving behind some traces seems quite reasonable to me.

That begs another question though: who would start seeking such traces in lands described as being terribly desolate by the time the Fellowship passed them? No one knew of their itinerary, not at least until they had departed from Rivendell quite a while in great stealth.

Then these wolves turn up. It is the greatest irrationality I found in LotR: kill them and find the arrows back later without any slain bodies! I always had problems reading that. I suppose they were sent into that area to sniff out the Fellowship's track and attack them by Sauron rather than by Saruman, since they were so "unworldly".

So yes, I think the track was followed after a long delay when Sauron understood how/why/when/where they were moving, after his Nazgûl had so badly failed. However, any forces coming from Mordor would have been sent over the Redhorn Pass.

Something does not fit rightly, about that assumption. A piece of information from Haldir (at the early moments when the Fellowship entered Lorien) is this:

_We have been keeping watch on the rivers, ever since we saw a great troop of Orcs going north towards Moria, along the skirts of the mountains, many days ago. Wolves are howling on the wood’s borders._​
If that was the group that attacked the Fellowship before entering Moria, then it seems that those troops were Orcs rather than wolves. Or else, maybe the Orcs entered Moria and the wolves passed the mountains to attack. Or … there is no relation between both events … !?


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## Alcuin (May 17, 2020)

It seems we have discussed toiletry remains recently, but in the context of how more “modern” authors with their emphasis on brutalism readily describe matters left unsaid by more cultured authors. (Mario Puzo’s description of Michael Corleone’s bathroom break before his execution of Sollozzo and McCluskey comes to mind.) As a tracker himself, I expect Aragorn required the Company of the Ring to bury their leavings, though as Merroe points out, that would not have prevented wolves or dogs from following and finding them, nor presumably tracker orcs had any been in the neighborhood. 

The Wargs that attacked the Company in Eregion in a ring of stones (which I presume, without evidence, to have been the remains of the House of the Mírdain amongst the ruins of Ost-in-Edhil) surely had no problems finding them! But these were not _natural_ wolves, not even the Wargs that Orcs rode as Wolfriders: they were something else, a necromantic _goeteia_ (black magic) of Sauron’s, as the Nine Walkers discovered the next morning:
When the full light of the morning came no signs of the wolves were to be found, and they looked in vain for the bodies of the dead. No trace of the fight remained but the charred trees and the arrows of Legolas lying on the hill-top. All were undamaged save one of which only the point was left.

“It is as I feared,” said Gandalf. “These were no ordinary wolves hunting for food in the wilderness. …”​The arrow from which only the point remained was the last Legolas loosed, the one that caught fire as it flew before it struck and killed its target. These were werewolves of Sauron’s invention. One of Sauron’s monikers in the First Age was “Lord of Werewolves”, and Tol Sirion where stood Finrod’s Minas Tirith (the original, First Age Tower of Guard) was renamed Tol-in-Gaurhoth, Isle of Werewolves, after Sauron seized it two years after Dagor Bragollach, the Fourth Battle of Beleriand. 

The narration notes that the sky becomes very clear as the Company moves south, as soon as they reach the old borders of Eregion. There were also, as Aragorn noticed, no birds, and a brooding silence. As they climbed to the Redhorn Gate, Gimli remarked that Sauron’s “arm has grown long if he can draw snow down from the North to trouble us here three hundred leagues away,” to which Gandalf answered, “His arm has grown long.” 

As for the Orcs reported marching north past Lórien toward Moria, these were likely sent either by Sauron to reinforce the garrison in Moria, or by Saruman to learn what befell there. In their chapter on “Departure of Boromir” (for _Two Towers_), Hammond and Scull in _Reader’s Companion_ cite Tolkien’s notes that Orc runners reached Isengard in four days carrying news of the downfall of Gandalf and the Balrog, while “evil birds” carried the news to Barad-dûr in only three days. 

I argued for years that Moria was not a “trap,” but Tolkien says otherwise. In the remainder of his long _Letter_ 131 to Milton Waldman published in _Reader’s Companion_, Tolkien writes,
There is a sense throughout of a hidden watch on their movements, a constant hostility of beasts and even inanimate things. The Company is driven to attempt the passage of the ominous Mines of Moria, and there Gandalf falls into an abyss in the act of saving them from a trap.​In “The Hunt for the Ring” part (ii), “Other Versions of the Story” from _Unfinished Tales_, Tolkien’s notes on Gollum indicate that the Orcs in Moria were servants of Sauron, presumably put there by him to reinforce (and to spy on, I suppose) the Balrog there, of which in a footnote (number 11) he says,
“These [Orcs] were in fact not very numerous, it would seem; but sufficient to keep any intruders out, if not better armed or prepared than Balin's company, and not in great numbers.”​


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## Olorgando (May 18, 2020)

Alcuin said:


> ... These were werewolves of Sauron’s invention. One of Sauron’s monikers in the First Age was “Lord of Werewolves”, and Tol Sirion where stood Finrod’s Minas Tirith (the original, First Age Tower of Guard) was renamed Tol-in-Gaurhoth, Isle of Werewolves, after Sauron seized it two years after Dagor Bragollach, the Fourth Battle of Beleriand. ...


Umm, umm, umm … Draugluin is called "the chief of the werewolves (or 'wargs') of Angband" by Tyler, "greatest of the were-wolves of Morgoth and Sauron" by Foster. But there is no mention of his "dissolving into thin air" after, mortally wounded by Huan, he manages to crawl back to Sauron in Tol-in-Gaurhoth and warn him that Huan was there. Whereupon Sauron remembered that Huan had been fated to fall only to the greatest wolf that ever was, tried in (were-) wolf form to be the one to fulfil that doom and got his behind handed to him by Huan (I've occasionally fantasized about Huan goin along on the Ring Quest; as he had thrashed Sauron, he probably would have snacked on the Moria Balrog … 😝).
So what were these critters? Even Saruman, after being killed by Wormtongue, left a sort of skeleton. Possibly something to do with the fact that this was still volume 1 (if Book Two) when JRRT was still using themes from fairy-tales and myths that were less than consistent with his own legendarium, but kept the descriptions because he liked them for their atmosphere. Something tending towards the "Tom-Bombadil-class".


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## Alcuin (May 18, 2020)

Olorgando said:


> So what were these critters?


Whatever they were, they “were no ordinary wolves”. Like the blade of the Morgul knife, they vanished with the rising sun.


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## Olorgando (May 18, 2020)

Alcuin said:


> Whatever they were, they “were no ordinary wolves”. Like the blade of the Morgul knife, they vanished with the rising sun.


Vanished with the rising sun? So they were not were-, rather vampire-wolves?
At least in 20th-century media, having issues with sunlight is a mark of a vampire.
Werewolves were more associated with full moons (not mentioned in JRRT's writings).
So more Thuringwethil than Draugluin? Things get confusing … 🤔


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## Deleted member 12094 (May 19, 2020)

Less relevant to Grendel's original question, yet staying to the subject of the Fellowship being tracked while still traveling West of the Misty Mountains: consider also the spying eyes of the "crebain". I always thought that these were dispatched by Saruman and not by Sauron. But then the "no ordinary wolves" dispatched for the Fellowship's attack cannot have been the result of their observations I think: it is not logical that Saruman would have shared anything he learnt from them with Sauron.

All said - I don't think, dear Grendel, that the story line would falter on Bill's occasional productions here.


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## grendel (May 19, 2020)

When I stop laughing at your replies and the turn this thread has taken, I will thank you all for your input.

IRL, I am sure there are ways that Special Forces and the like deal with this kind of... stuff. When you bring a Ranger with you, he will do his best to hide ALL traces, especially if that Ranger is Aragorn. ☺


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## Deleted member 12094 (May 20, 2020)

Bill the pony


grendel said:


> When I stop laughing at your replies and the turn this thread has taken, I will thank you all for your input.



... meanwhile Grendel: do not forget that even a nice animal like Bill the pony has a pride of his own:

_[...] the ruffian [...]. As he passed the ponies one of them let fly with his heels and just caught him as he ran. He went off with a yelp into the night and was never heard of again._​_‘Neat work, Bill,’ said Sam, meaning the pony._​
So if Bill could see your original accusation, I'm confident he would have dropped something over it. 😆


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## Elthir (May 20, 2020)

Merroe said:


> ( . . . ) So if Bill could see your original accusation, I'm confident he would have dropped something over it. 😆




😄
___
My theory is based on a very brief note from the very, very brief HOME Volume XV The Poopers of Middle-Earth: _"Bill = pony-formed Maia" _[never published by Tolkien himself of course. Or anyone.]

🐎


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## Olorgando (May 20, 2020)

grendel said:


> ...
> IRL, I am sure there are ways that Special Forces and the like deal with this kind of... stuff. When you bring a Ranger with you, he will do his best to hide ALL traces, especially if that Ranger is Aragorn. ☺


As long as those looking for these rangers were not using scent-trackers ...
But then, remember that the Fellowship were travelling along the *western* slopes of the Misty Mountains after leaving Rivendell, the ones facing the sea. Which one should suppose got a serious amount of rain, feeding innumerable streams ...
(does make one wonder how such a huge forest like Green- / Mirkwood could spring up on the lee, eastern side …)
And running water is one of the best methods of putting off scent trackers.
So putting all "leavings" in such natural "flush systems" would have been most effective (I leave details to your own imaginations …)


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## Alcuin (May 20, 2020)

grendel said:


> I am sure there are ways that Special Forces and the like deal with this kind of... stuff.


I have it on reasonably good authority that special forces and snipers (who must sometimes remain in place for days) use cat litter. Astronauts use diapers: that was documented when one went off the deep end and wore a diaper to drive several hundred miles.


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## grendel (May 20, 2020)

Alcuin said:


> I have it on reasonably good authority that special forces and snipers (who must sometimes remain in place for days) use cat litter. Astronauts use diapers: that was documented when one went off the deep end and wore a diaper to drive several hundred miles.



Alcuin, I remember that. She was definitely off the deep end; they do have rest stops all along every major highway here in the US. Diapers are needed only if you're being overly dramatic...



Merroe said:


> Bill the pony
> 
> 
> ... meanwhile Grendel: do not forget that even a nice animal like Bill the pony has a pride of his own:
> ...



Ah well, I meant no offense to ol' Bill; he is what he is, as Eru made him. But I have marched in numerous parades in my day, often behind the horses, so I know of what I speak.


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## Alcuin (May 21, 2020)

Yeah. I’ve marched behind horses and mules, too. As the saying goes, I follow you – and hope no one slips!


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