When my husband and I drove west 18 years ago to work summer jobs in the Rockies, we came into the mountains after dark, and the first place we found to spread our sleeping bags was inside a barn near the river in Howard, Colo. Even though we’d been driving due west for two days, the terrain still felt like Anywhere, USA, as we drove past strip malls, fast food empires, and other conveniences associated with urban sprawl. While sleeping in that barn, however, something awakened me which changed all that and convinced me, instantly, that I was finally in the West, the still wild West.

What awakened me, and what led me to know that I was in a different place, both geographically and mentally, was the yipping and howling of a nearby pack of coyotes. I would say that coyotes are a symbol of all that is untamed in the West, but the facts about coyotes and geography do not bear that out. Though the massive shooting, trapping and poisoning campaigns have occurred mainly in the West, coyotes are pretty much ubiquitous in the United States. Some wildlife biologists now believe they are more common than red foxes. When I drove west with my husband 18 years ago, I’m not sure how much of the United States they covered, but I knew I’d never heard of or seen them in the East. Since that night when I slept in the barn next to the Arkansas River, I have seldom come into contact with living, wild coyotes, although I know several people who have encountered them here in Western North Carolina - from Caney Fork to Waynesville to Cherokee to the Nantahala Gorge. These people have generally seen them in places where there are small domestic animals, plentiful game, or young livestock. Their assumption, perhaps correct, is that the coyotes are looking for an easy meal.

Waking in that barn all those years ago with the hair rising on my neck, I had no idea that I need not remain in the West to enjoy the idea of coyotes in the night. The coyotes, as they spread and adapted, had already come east to me. In a 1952 edition of Peterson’s Field Guide to Mammals, the map of coyote population in the U.S. showed their existence in most of the country except for the mid-Atlantic and Southeast. However, in a mere 49 years, coyotes have moved into and multiplied in those areas as well. Based on DNA testing and wildlife studies, it is theorized by some that coyotes may have ranged from the Southwest, up through the Plains and into Canada (where they bred with wolves-hence the larger size and more secretive ways of the Eastern coyote), and then across and down through the Northeast, all the way to and beyond the damp ridges and hollows of Appalachia, my home.

The kind of adaptability coyotes possess is the kind which most people find disturbing. Animals which can learn to live in any environment, and particularly those which thrive in environments we create, are animals which we quickly perceive as competition, designate as pests, and equally quickly attempt to eradicate. That they manage to proliferate not only in wild places, but also on farm and ranch lands, and even in suburbia, is, by and large, not a quality we find attractive. In any species except our own, the talent for taking advantage of one’s environment is not acceptable. The success of the coyote, (or, for that matter, the less romantic cockroach and rat), which manage nicely along with and in spite of us, has an unsettling effect. Among the descendants of Europeans and those who have assimilated to our traditions, seeing our own wiliness mirrored in these creatures is a reminder of the capacity for wildness and mystery that still exists in us, and that many of us would like to deny. This is the same wildness and mystery that has both fascinated and repulsed us since Beowulf slew Grendel.

I’m in the West again as I write this - this time in Abiquiu, New Mexico, the high desert, the coyote’s place of origin. A few mornings ago I ran on a dirt road at first light. I hoped to see some animals on my run, maybe even a coyote pack, finished with the night’s hunting and settling down in some spot that would remain shady throughout the heat of the day. A rustling in an arroyo to my right gave me a moment of hope, but I never saw anything except jackrabbits. Another day, this time at dusk, I camped with a group of people on a mesa. We slept without shelter under a sky in which both Venus and Mars were clearly visible, and during the night, I heard once again the shrill yips and barks, the howls in chorus of the animal that the Aztecs called “coyotl.” This one sounded like a large pack, with the pups’ voices distinguishable from the adults. The midnight choral there in the desert gave me hope, once again, that a predatory animal can survive among us. Perhaps, I thought, even a culture that thrives on reality television and the bedroom habits of celebrities can tolerate a little mystery, a little of the unknowable.

In the East, however, the coyote is quieter than the packs in the West. The only one I’ve come across here was one that had been hit by a car on N.C. 107 in Cullowhee. I slowed down to see what it was, because there was something undoglike about it. What I saw was the rust-tan coat, the thin body, and the long tail, not as bushy as that of the fox, and which the coyote tucks under when it runs, unlike the dog or the fox. The coyote’s eyes were open, and the last thing it saw was probably an automobile, without a doubt America’s newest and most successful predator.

I am always saddened to see animals killed by cars, primarily because it is a waste. “There is nothing lost in the universe” is an adage that has comforted me, just as I am comforted when crows and buzzards play the role of roadside cleanup crew. (The coyote I saw had probably been attempting to do the same thing, since much of their diet in populated areas is carrion.) It’s when the animal lies there by the road until it’s no more than shreds of flesh hanging on a broken skeleton above a dark spot, when it appears that neither its life nor death have had significance, that I feel there is no consolation. And this is why I hope that my family’s cat, which disappeared about two months ago, might have been eaten by a coyote.

The disappearance of our cat was remarkably sudden. I looked out on our porch one moment to see her rubbing against our ancient deaf and blind Labrador, marking the dog with her scent, letting the other cats know that this dog belonged to her, and then I looked out again a few moments later to find the cat gone. I called her, rattled her food bag, asked the neighbors, and, as the day wore on, called the animal shelter, vet’s offices, and two animal organizations. There was no sign of her. My family placed an ad in the newspaper, left another at the local post office and another at the animal shelter. There has never been any response. Of course, there is always the chance that the cat was stolen, but I live at the end of a road, my driveway is so steep it has a horizon line, and this was a sedentary, fat 10-year-old cat which never wandered far from her food bowl. Given all of these facts, and discounting aliens, I can only assume something caught her, took her away, and ate her, and I’d rather it had been something wild if it had to be anything at all.

The way that domestic cats live, at least the lucky ones, is a fascinating kind of double life. Their clearly domesticated half eats store bought catfood, sleeps on people’s beds or on their laps (if the people are lucky), purrs, and cavorts with little cloth toys sewn up with bells and catnip. Their undomesticated half, untamable and enigmatic, has decimated America’s bluebird population, and regularly kills moles, voles, mice, squirrels, rats, chipmunks, snakes, and baby rabbits. As often as not, cats leave their kill to rot, or bring it to the door or bed or sofa as a suitable gift for an equally cruel species. It is, then, their savagery, their inexplicable cruelty even in the midst of seeming domesticity that reminds us of something in ourselves.

Our cat was typical. She came across as slow and sleepy, but had been known to catch birds on a full belly. She liked lying in our laps and absorbing our heat, but she clawed us moderately if we moved in a way she disliked. We were fond of her - I think we loved her. It may be because of the dual personality that some people love cats. It is certainly because of that personality that some people hate them.

Terry Tempest Williams, in An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field, says “I have felt the pain that arises from a recognition of beauty, pain we hold when we remember what we are connected to and the delicacy of our relations.” When humans connect to animals in a domestic setting, much of the complexity and delicacy are lost, even with an animal as unfathomable as the cat. We provide the cat with food and shelter, and, in return, the cat allows us to pet it, observe its ways and continue to provide it with food and shelter. The symbiosis is the pleasure we receive in living with an animal that is beautiful and tame, but also instinctive and mysterious.

Our relationship to a wild animal like the coyote, however, continues to hold many complexities, and concerning this relationship, there are a number of questions that have not been answered. Can we allow an animal that the Southwestern tribes call “Trickster” to live among us, always watching us from the forest’s edge, darting across our roads and culling our cat population? Can we recognize and accept in an animal something resembling our own toughness, adaptability and tenacity? Or do we recognize it, but still attempt to control it, placing a higher value on domestic animals than on a wild creature that sometimes survives at our expense? Finally, how much do we like our increasingly lonely spot at the top of the food chain? Are we capable of the grace and gratitude required to share that spot, in all its beauty and brutality, with other animals? The answers to these questions are determined by how we see our connection with animals like the coyote. If we accept the wildness that still exists in us, then we admit in our connection a mixture of admiration and grief, for the cat as well as the coyote. The cat, a remnant of the uncivilized, settled comfortably on our living room sofa, reminds us of the instincts we are in danger of losing. The coyote, a lonely anachronism surviving by its wits on strips with Burger Kings and Wal-Marts, reminds us of the independence and mystery we have already lost.

(Dawn Gilchrist-Young teaches in the public school system and can be reached at youngericyoung@cs.com)

 

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