Letter From the Desert: Coyotes in the Yard

Jack hates coyotes. Might as well just come out and say it. He is a handful at the best of times. He tries his best to be good and follow instructions, and yet he is extremely smart, super curious and in excess of 100 pounds in mass. Which means that if he sees a coyote while he’s on a walk, he puts the person at the other end of the leash through a bit of a test. He has dragged La Mujer que Amo off her feet and then a few feet down the blacktop in pursuit of coyotes. I weigh considerably more than she does, and so despite a few close calls Jack has not yet been able to knock me off balance to the point where I fall. That’s good, because my ego is far more delicate than that of my beloved.

One night we were just getting back to the front gate after a walk of a little more than a mile. La Mujer Que Amo’s moving his leash to one hand to open the gate with the other created a small amount of slack for a fraction of a second, just as a coyote appeared out of the night and loped down the road a good hundred yards away. Leash came out of hand, and Jack covered that hundred yards in what seemed a millisecond. I watched as each canid, dog and coyote, raised a 30-miles-per-hour dust cloud like a comet chasing another comet across the night sky, fortunately in the opposite direction from the busy road a half block away.

Before he came to us Jack lived in an RV on the local dry lake with his previous human, who had far fewer rules than we do. We are close to certain that he regularly augmented his diet with the locally grown free-range cottontails abundant hereabouts. He may well have added coyote to the menu on occasion. Or maybe he came to his current position that coyotes shall not be suffered to live by non-culinary means. It doesn’t matter much. He sees them, he freaks out and wants to chase them, presumably with intent to do harm.

So when we pulled into our driveway an hour after sunset on Saturday night to see at least two and possibly three coyotes in our front yard, Jack predictably lost it.

I should explain, by the way, that Jack and Heart don’t always get along as swimmingly as in the photo just above. That’s relevant to this story because we don’t trust Heart not to start trouble if they’re confined together for more than a few minutes. Which means that when the four of us drive somewhere together, we arrange ourselves so that Heart rides shotgun and Jack sits in the back, with one human driving and the other human sitting with Jack in the back seat. Sometimes La Mujer Que Amo and I sneak out to drive somewhere dog-free so that we can sit next to each other.

That was not the case on Saturday night, so as I pulled into the driveway with Heart by my side, La Mujer was sitting next to a very large, strong dog in full-on mortal combat mode. She suggested I try to haze whatever coyotes I might find away from the vicinity before she tried to get Jack into the house.

That made sense to me, so I tried to oblige. There was a coyote in the headlights, refusing to move and staring off to its left, likely watching additional coyotes doing something crafty just out of my field of vision. A couple honks of the car’s horn had no effect. I opened the driver’s side door, which prompted an ear flick.

I got out of the car.

You know, if it was entirely up to me, which it never is, I would be perfectly happy to have coyotes just move into the yard. I love them. I’m not so deluded that I imagine a Disneyfied harmony growing among us as we shared the same bit of real estate. There would be no happy singing of coyote songs as they brought me my boots and hat like bluebirds dressing Cinderella in that movie whose title escapes me at the moment. But I can easily imagine months of growing accustomed to one another, endless hours of cocked heads wondering “what the hell is he up to now,” and not just from the coyotes. Eventually, I like to imagine, they might leave fresh rabbits on the doormat for my lunch, and I would return the favor with watermelons or beef jerky or something, and within a few years I would be described sidelong by coyotes within 50 miles of here as “not too bright, but very friendly and possibly not dangerous.”

Photo by Joshua Wilking on Unsplash

This is, of course, a very bad idea. Coyotes who learn that humans can be friendly and offer handouts don’t last long. The best gift we can give coyotes, aside from leaving them alone, abolishing the Wildlife Services unit of the Agriculture Department, and doxxing varmint hunters for gentle public shaming, is to haze coyotes away from places overrun by humans. Sometimes “get outta here” is the best way to say “I love you.”

As the largest mammal in the entire front yard, I figured, the task of hazing fell to me. I ran at the coyote, yelling the obligatory “Get outta here!”, arms waving ineptly and long hair flying.

The coyote leapt over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. I turned and walked back toward the gate, swung each side of the thing shut, tested the latch, and was brought up short by a sudden, even louder commotion. Jack was barking mad. A coyote¹ came tearing down the driveway toward me. This is not the direction they usually run in, I thought to myself. And then I saw why: I had left the driver’s side door open. Heart had slipped out of the car that way, but instead of padding unsteadily toward the kitchen door, as per usual, she apparently decided to show her sweet but clueless human the proper way to haze coyotes. The coyote was barrelling in my direction trying like hell to get away from Heart.

Oh, what a complicated set of emotions to feel all at once. It surprises me to realize, as I write this a day later, that apprehension regarding the coyote running toward me at top speed wasn’t one of those emotions. There was concern for Heart’s safety, of course: given her age and health, the chances of her getting hurt badly were higher than I liked. Right next to that concern, there was delight at seeing Heart acting like she did when she was a quarter her current age, usually with me at the other end of the leash wondering what the fuck I’d gotten myself into. There was concern that the coyote might injure itself in the fracas. It was such a beautiful thing, sleek and limber, if slightly scrawny. There was delight at being closer than ever before in my life to a coyote in the wild. For certain definitions of wild.

Anticlimactically, the coyote found a spot to jump over the front fence before it got within booping distance. Heart turned on her heel and went back to roust yet another coyote from its hiding place in the bougainvillea.

For the next 15 minutes, she was a young dog again. Then she slept most of the next day.

1. I think a different one