wily coyote

8:45 a.m.
My life changes when the weather warms up. The outdoors calls, and I drop everything and go. After a two-mile walk yesterday morning, I sat at this desk working for several hours before taking a shorter stroll, just out to the garden behind the house, in the afternoon. When I returned I stood against the west wall to bask in the sun, and after a few moments there was a movement in the bush about 30 feet away from me. It was a coyote; had it remained still, I wouldn't have known it was there. I pulled the camera out of my jacket pocket as quickly as I could and snapped the photo above, which because of the distance didn’t turn out worth a hoot. When I took a step closer, the coyote dashed out toward the garden.

Indoors again, I glanced out the kitchen window in the direction I’d seen the coyote, and my eye caught on a crescent of fluffy golden yellow on the ground below the bare trees. I opened the window, and up popped a furry head and two pointy ears. The coyote was having a snooze in the afternoon warmth. After looking around and not seeing the cause of the noise, it tucked its head back down into its curled-up body. I could almost hear it sigh with contentment. I opened and closed the window several times to see if it would get up and move, but each time it simply raised its head for a quick inspection of the area and laid it down again.

Between the coyote and me was Ralph, Grandma’s big black cat; he sat on a boulder at the edge of the lawn, watching the long dry grass around it. It occurred to me that the coyote was a predator and Ralph wasn’t safe; I opened the window again, and called him. He ignored me. I perched up on the countertop near the sink and watched the coyote and the cat, until a noise from the other yard startled the coyote and it darted silently away. Not far— only a few feet— then it turned its head toward the house. Ralph hadn’t seen the coyote, but he chose this moment to pounce on something moving in the grass. That’s when the coyote spotted Ralph and began to close in on him. I hollered out the window, called “Kitty kitty,” but Ralph stayed where he was and the coyote kept coming. I ran for the porch, out the door and down the step, and met Ralph coming around the corner of the house. I scooped the cat up and stalked toward the bush, where the coyote had stopped in its tracks and stood staring at me.
“You get out of here!” I yelled, pointing, as if chasing a bad boy out of my garden. “Go on!”
And it turned and disappeared in the trees.

I hated to see it go, to make it think I was unfriendly. Perhaps it wasn’t hunting the barn cats, which in their turn have been hunting the plentiful mice all around the farmyard. Perhaps it’s been hunting rodents itself, or the “chickens” that have been seen in the bush. The coyotes have been bold this spring; they’ve been in the corrals and early one morning Scott's dad saw one right in the farmyard chewing on a piece of hide after a steer had been butchered. The worry, aside from the safety of the barn cats, is that the coyotes will go after a newborn calf. If they come as a small group, Scott says, they can distract a mother cow enough to get at her baby.

When I came upstairs this morning, the coyote was there again, its fluffy golden tail visible through the kitchen window as it wove back and forth in the dead brown undergrowth of last summer. Scott mentioned borrowing a .22; perhaps Devon, the archer who is visiting the family with Scott’s sister Laurel this week, will try to shoot an arrow into it. Devon’s been devastating the population of gophers on the home quarter, killing an average of 40 a day—  and he says that isn’t even making a dent in the multitudes he’s seeing out there.

It rained during the night and Scott has been out, trying to move newborn calves under a roof where they can dry off. One cow did come after him, so he had to let her calf go. It’s grey out there, less tempting for me. Perhaps I won’t walk so far this morning.