The Tracker
A free online text adventure in five acts. Lochaber, July 1746, and one man behind you who reads the ground.
You are Màiri Ros of Achnacoil, thirty-four, and there has been no Achnacoil since the twelfth of May. You have been living in a corrie under Sgurr Dubh for nine weeks with a plaid and a knife.
What you have that nobody else alive has is the knowledge of where sixty head of black cattle are standing, because you drove them there in April with three men, and two of those men are dead and the third is in the gaol at Inverness.
Everything you do writes on the country
Walking on peat leaves a print that will keep for a week. Walking on scree leaves a turned stone that dries in an hour. Water holds nothing at all — and carries silt down, so a man a mile below you sees a brown thread in his water and knows within the hour. A fire leaves ash for a month and smoke that is seen from twenty miles, and smoke is the one sign in these hills that does not have to be found.
ground tells you what you are standing on. sign lists what you have left
and how old it is. wipe takes an hour and takes out prints and nothing else. And
spy, from high ground, shows you where he is and what he is doing.
He is not fast and he is not clever
Alasdair Bàn Macrae, fifty-one, a deer-stalker off the Ardgour ground who was given the choosing of it in June and whose other offer was a ship to the Indies. He has read ground for a living since he was nine.
He is never told anything by the game. He goes to the freshest sign he can find; when he has none he casts along the line of the country, which costs him hours, and hours are the only thing you are ever going to win. He never teleports and he is never omniscient, and when he finds you it is always traceable to something you left.
He also taught you to read ground, in a peat hag, when you were eleven. Which means the rules are legible to you, and it means he knows what you know.
And he is not trying to take you
There is a rental at the fort that says sixty head and a return that says none, and the difference of sixty is a thing that has to have an answer in writing. They do not want you taken up. They want you walked after.
So every sign you leave is not a risk of being caught. It is a risk of arriving. The four endings turn on that, and one of them is not running.
Stuck?
The hint page gives you one nudge at a time, act by act, without spoiling anything you have not asked about. The full walkthrough is there if you would rather just be told.