Coyote song
Limits on speed
Today’s accompanying tune: “Furr” by Blitzen Trapper
No one is sure when exactly he arrived. Posts on Nextdoor and the local Facebook group mentioned a young coyote pup, primarily as a warning to pet owners who left their animals out at night. Beware, they said. Surely the pup would turn into a bloodthirsty killer, and then no one would be safe, they said.
Oliver and I met him a few days after the posts started. We were on our morning walk around the neighborhood, a routine we established early on in our city-dwelling days to ensure we saw the open sky at least once a day but carried over into our new life, the one with a backyard but without sidewalks. We walked the same route every day; we both love a good routine. Oliver to catch up on what the other dogs in the neighborhood were doing, me to learn the nuances of the cacti that dotted our new neighbors’ lawns and keep an eye on the birds. We’d met coyotes before — our last apartment in San Francisco backed up to one of the largest, wildest parks in the city whose coyote population exploded when the city shut down in 2020. We had been followed, sniffed at, run off. The urban predator opportunistic, cut-throat. Harder, edgier than its wilder companions. Barely related to its domesticated cousin sniffing a bush at the end of his leash.
The desert was a better setting in which to meet the scrappy, scruffy predator. We’d heard their songs fill the hills, the sky, the empty spaces that fill the desert. The great wide open, alive with the stillness and mourning that hovers through coyote song. The playfulness of the pack, singing in unison, as the sun dips over the hill, the harshness of its glare only starting to soften. Some nights, I swore they were celebrating, the yip, yip, yooray! reverberating through my bones, a cosmically contagious joy without a source.
When we met this pup, this little youngster, he was alone. Small. Impossibly thin. He followed us not with malicious intent nor with hunger — he was curious, maybe hopeful. Hopeful we could lead him to food, perhaps, or water. It was spring, but temperatures were starting to touch the upper bounds of paws on asphalt. The desert is funny like that — seasons never transition, only arrive abruptly after finding themselves caught up with something or other, fashionably late but with a grand entrance. He kept back, never inching towards us the way other coyotes had, taking the opportunity to take us in, size us up. He didn’t, even as Oliver lost himself in the smells of his new favorite bush, instead opting to stand and watch. When Oliver failed to pull himself out of his scent exploration, the coyote bent his head down and sniffed the bush in front of him, a smaller specimen that was not favored among the neighborhood dogs. He kept his eyes on us as his nose twitched. When Oliver was satisfied, he added his contribution to the scentscape. As he did, the coyote watched. He squatted down, adding his own contribution. Coyote see, coyote do.
He followed us to the house, but dared not leave the street to amble down the driveway. He’d learned sometime in his short life that homes were to be avoided, the people in them to be feared. Somehow, people outside of the home posed less of a threat, it seemed. He watched us disappear inside, to the shade and air conditioning and soft blankets. A life of luxury lived through windows.
He started howling shortly after, piercing through the night with a yelp that carried centuries’ worth of mourning. No celebration, no chorus line. Just him, a lonely creature looking for his kind, for safety, for something. Trying to find his voice as it wafted through the night sky, the stars absorbing his earthly pain. He returned every morning, following us on our walk and watching us disappear into the house. Sniffing when Oliver sniffed, peeing when Oliver peed. The two canines never acknowledged each other, but knew the other was there. A bit of a territorial détente, though the stand-off was entirely one-sided. As spring wore into summer, he opted to end his mornings with a nap under our mesquite tree, the minimal shade giving enough of a respite from the heat to warrant the habit. He tucked his front paws under his legs and sprawled out, trying to offset as much of his body heat as he could. He’d pant, eyes closed, head only slightly defying gravity as he dozed. Once, long past his midmorning curfew, he curled into a ball so tight it seemed we would need a loom to set him straight again. He sometimes picked the bigger, grander trees of the home across the street, so much shadier with their lush, deciduous leaves. But most often he laid against the brick pavers in our yard, the contours of the landscaping meant to support his growingly healthy body. He wasn’t so scrawny anymore, and the population of squirrels and rabbits in the neighborhood was shrinking with understandable regularity. The Nextdoor and Facebook posts continued, the neighborhood paparazzi catching him loping along a side street, waiting to cross at a busy intersection, sniffing a bird bath. Surely, he would kill something, the posts said. Someone should notify animal control, have him removed. But like his cartoon namesake, he evaded capture, evaded extinction. He’s a wily guy, after all.
For three years, we watched each other’s lives. I watched as he grew, his voice confident, his routes widen. He no longer joined us every morning, though he paid us visits now and then. We’d see him in our headlights some evenings, a quick glance before darting into the nearest bush. Cars, too. He’d learned cars were to be avoided, at all costs. In the mornings, as his curfew neared, he’d saunter over to the mesquite. Some days he was powered by an urgency only known to those that live to live. Others, he was leisurely, accompanied by a confidence and poise only possible from a full belly and successful evening. Eventually, other voices joined his, the haunting cries evolving into an echo of family, of chosenness. Of his pack, the one he had lost and replaced, the one made in his home in the hills behind my house. Their voices impossibly close, as eerie as an apparition but as comforting as a friend. I’d sit in the yard at dusk, waiting for the show. He was never late, the first notes still impossibly full of grief while undeniably alive. But then another joined, filling out his cry with a harmony. Then another, and another, and another. Yip, yip, yooray!
The third spring, he was accompanied by another coyote on his morning rounds. A few weeks later, they were joined by a pup. I stared out the window, mouth hanging open, the prescience of life so tangible as to overtake whatever chore I’d been working through. Here he was, years later, choosing to show his offspring his favorite nap spot. Showing them where to sniff, where Oliver’s favorite spots to pee were, how they could leave their own messages back to him. Which houses let him sleep peacefully and which chased him off. Where the rabbits lived, how to avoid the neighborhood cat that was more vicious than any wild animal around. The urban coyotes and their antics so far from my mind as to have come from an entirely different life, one full of the same grit and determination but without the same magic that only comes from the gold-painted hills of the desert at dusk. No longer a pest, he’d made this his home as much as we had.
The online posts continued. People kept small dogs inside, dressed them up in spiky vests that promised to deter any airborne or earthbound predators. The pack became well known, as familiar as the bends in the asphalt as we turned into our driveways. Their calls unique, distinctive. Their coats likewise, so much so that we could identify the different animals in headlights. His scraggly, scruffy fur had matured into a deep, dark brown along his back, darker than the others and rich enough to be featured in a shampoo commercial. We’d lived with him for years, we’d know that face anywhere.
One morning, on the way to a dentist appointment, I saw his face. Someone had tried to cover him with a towel, something bright and colorful that belied the tragedy underneath. His tongue sprawled onto the pavement, blood pooling. His eyes closed, not in rest, but in darkness. He’d been hit by a car in the night.
My breath caught in my throat as soon as I saw the blanket nearly a block away, though I wasn’t sure yet what it held. Anything under a blanket, especially in a rural neighborhood, is not something I want to see, not something I want seared into my mind, pain I don’t want to absorb. As my car crept forward, I knew who was under the towel, who we’d lost. My eyes burned, my mouth tasted copper. Our patriarch, our keystone, gone.
Cars are often predators’ biggest predator. People drive distracted, drive impaired, drive callously. Drive without regard for others. All while behind the wheel of two tons of machinery, so far off the ground as to miss seeing most children, let alone wildlife. They roll through stop signs and speed through wildlife corridors and high-tail it through neighborhoods. Local organizations post warnings, hang signs, remind folks that we share this one wild and crazy life with millions of other wild and crazy lives, all of which deserve a fighting chance of survival. And that involves slowing down, driving carefully, paying attention. Most humans, the so-called pinnacle of evolution, just can’t bother with the inconvenience. Authorities have tried everything save for reinforcing speed limits — in some areas they’ve built wildlife bridges that remove the need for wildlife to cross roads at all. But big policy interventions can’t happen everywhere — a rural neighborhood with a beloved coyote doesn’t make the list of priorities when there are major interstates and endangered species at risk.
A few years earlier, a mountain lion wandered onto someone’s property nearby, laying in the shade as she succumbed to her injuries from being hit by a car. She’d been trying to cross a minor state highway where people drive incredibly recklessly, in search of food amid an ongoing drought at higher elevations. She had the same chances the coyote did, but they both lost the game of chance. Their survival cut short by an insatiable need for speed.
It’s been several months since the coyote was hit, was killed by one of my neighbors. The sky’s been empty of song, our mourning filling the silence. The stars absorbing our silent grief, the eeriness of the empty hillside haunting our nights, the perpetual reminder that something, someone, is missing. I don’t know what happened to his pack, whether they disbanded or dispersed or simply relocated away from their heartache. Whether they are safe, at home in the hills miles from any road. Whether his offspring remember how to sniff, how to find a shady spot, how to make a family. How to survive, even when the odds are invariably stacked against them.
Oliver sniffs the same bush on our walks, though it’s less interesting than before. The scents are fewer, the contributors fading with each day. He looks out the window, waiting for the coyote to drop by the mesquite, to take a quick respite while we watch over him. But he hasn’t come, isn’t coming. All that is left of him is the archive of online posts, and a small tuft of fur wedged between the brick pavers in the shade.
Slow down. So many lives depend on it.
- Megan