Two Pines and Two Questions

I'm reading The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlene.   He writes, "Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk: signs of passage made in snow, sand, mud, grass, dew, earth or moss.  The language of hunting has a luminous word for such mark-making: 'foil'.  A creature's 'foil' is its track.  We easily forget that we are track-makers, though, because most of our journeys now occur on asphalt and concrete -- and these are substances not easily impressed."

I would like to leave good and characteristic marks on paper and canvas, though sometimes they are not easily impressed.

Macfarlene also writes, "For some time now it has seemed to me that the two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that i can know nowhere else?  And then, vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?"