  Dynamical friction can be a valuable tool for inferring dark matter
properties that are difficult to constrain by other methods. Most applications
of dynamical friction calculations are concerned with the long-term angular
momentum loss and orbital decay of the perturber within its host. This,
however, assumes knowledge of the unknown initial conditions of the system. We
advance an alternative methodology to infer the host properties from the
perturber's shape distortions induced by the tides of the wake of dynamical
friction, which we refer to as the tidal dynamical friction. As the shape
distortions rely on the tidal field that has a predominantly local origin, we
present a strategy to find the local wake by integrating the stellar orbits
back in time along with the perturber, then removing the perturber's potential
and re-integrating them back to the present. This provides perturbed and
unperturbed coordinates and hence a change in coordinates, density, and
acceleration fields, which yields the back-reaction experienced by the
perturber. The method successfully recovers the tidal field of the wake based
on a comparison with N-body simulations. We show that similar to the tidal
field itself, the noise and randomness of the dynamical friction force due to
the finite number of stars is also dominated by regions close to the perturber.
Stars near the perturber influence it more but are smaller in number, causing a
high variance in the acceleration field. These fluctuations are intrinsic to
dynamical friction. We show that a stellar density of $0.0014 {\rm M_\odot\,
kpc^{-3}}$ yields an inherent variance of 10% to the dynamical friction. The
current method extends the family of dynamical friction methods that allow for
the inference of host properties from tidal forces of the wake. It can be
applied to specific galaxies, such as Magellanic Clouds, with Gaia data.
