Coyote Summer
"...the danger and vividness of a truly wild thing."
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Yesterday morning my wife and I were halfway through our third cups of coffee on the covered back porch when a commotion kicked up in the neighbors’ chicken coop. Our street runs down a gradual slope from the top of a hill, our house near the bottom, and from our morning haunt you can see a decent swath of each back yard. Near the top of the hill is a chicken coop of long standing and we’re often woken by their cluckings and bickerings, an obscurely comforting and out-of-place sound in colonial suburbia.
But this was no common hen squabble. Anyone, no matter how urbanized, can tell the difference between an animal going about its business and the sound it makes in danger. The fluttering commotion we heard up the hill was definitely the latter and, looking that direction, we gaped to see one, two, three, eventually five tawny-red coyote pups scramble through the grass not far from the gate to the chicken run. No sign of mother, but for the residents of the henhouse, a gang of pups is more than enough to spread alarm.
We remembered being half-woken before dawn by a sort of electric, yipping babble somewhere not far off: it was evidently the arrival of this tumbling and dangerous family. I texted my neighbor--no answer. Then I saw that two of the pups were actually inside the run, sniffing and pawing around the edges of the coop. In a minute I’d clamped a baseball hat over my unbrushed hair and was headed up the hill.
Animal siblings can have as different personalities as those in human families. Snatching up a stick and opening the gate of the run, I found that these two stranded brothers--because stranded they were, unable to remember how they’d entered and not pleased at all to see this unshaved human lumbering in--reacted with very different strategies. One of them, the smarter one, yipped and capered and cased the whole perimeter of the run until he found the forgotten weak slat in the rear fence, and slipped scrambling out. As I watched him go, I heard a window slap open and a voice behind me:
“Who are you and what are you doing in my yard?”
It was, of course, my neighbor: a fine woman of about seventy I’ve known for years, woken by the commotion and not wearing her glasses. I was nothing but a hostile blur in her yard on a Sunday morning.
Once I’d explained that it was me and what was going on, she thanked me and asked if I would get the other pup out of the run. I reclaimed my stick and went back in.
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The less gifted of the brothers had backed himself into the far corner of the fence and was trying to act invisible, his face a mask of dejected misery. I hissed. I clapped. I prodded him gently with the stick. Nothing but a flash of canines—small, but certainly capable of doing damage. It went on like that for a while; he seemed committed to paralysis and no amount of stick or talking was going to make him change his mind.
We had reached an impasse, and I don’t know how long it would have gone on if another neighbor hadn’t appeared, Brian, a good Irish Bostonian who paints houses for a living, still in a thick black bathrobe, and handed me a pair of elbow-length grilling gloves. The scent of hickory smoke often dwells over our street in the summer like a delicious spirit, and these were the heat-proof monsters he wears to reach into the smoker and move burning logs around during all-night vigils with a brisket.
“Do you want to do it, or do you want me to?” he asked.
“I’ll do it,” I blurted, suddenly unwilling to give up my role in all this. I slipped on the big black gloves and shuffled toward my quarry.
Still the arched back, the miserable helplessness, the wet nose and the faint quiver in his fox-red hackles. And under or perhaps over all that, the danger and vividness of a truly wild thing. We see plenty of animals in this tree-crowded coastal neighborhood, but here was a brother to the wolf, a creature that unexpectedly thrilled me with a musky sniff of all the trackless places in the world. There was a big part of me that wanted to scratch it behind the ear. The rest of me knew that doing that would cost me a finger.
Unless, of course, I was wearing Kevlar grilling gloves. I reached out one hand and, with a flash of teeth, the little brother clamped viciously and painlessly onto my right index. With the other hand I grabbed him by the scruff. Brian sipped his coffee, clearly enjoying himself. Little Brother gnawed and gnawed for a while, but sensing no reaction, finally gave up and dangled, eyeing me with the loathing of abject defeat. I shut the gate behind me and tossed him into the bushes. Numbly, shakily, he squared his limited wits to the reality that he was not about to be killed, and disappeared into the raspberries.
“I’ll bet they’re living under that canoe in my back yard,” said Brian watching him go. “It would make a great den. I’ll put on some shorts and go out there in an hour and turn it over.”
I handed him back his gloves. Both of us were smiling, like two night-hikers who looked up at the same time and chanced to see something, an aurora or a falling star.
The mother never came back, so far as my wife and I could spy from the porch, and Brian never undertook the proposed adventure with the canoe. I suspect he didn’t want to—that he wanted them to stick around, wanted the chance to stumble on them again. But we haven’t, except that near nightfall that same evening, Brian’s wife Vicki told us she looked out the window and saw a single pup standing still in the grass with its ears to the wind, like it was listening for a voice just out of earshot.
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No way! That'll snap your eyes open, no caffeine needed.