The Animal Dialogues, page 4
I look across the distance before me and think, Good luck to you, traveler. May your legs carry you all the way.
I return to the shade of the alcove and I sleep where the bear slept. When the sun goes down I rise again. I kiss the wet rock. I turn north and then I walk back.
Ursus americanus
Ursus arctos
COYOTE
I
Ragged and tired. We reached the Aermotor USA windmill after two weeks of crossing the Sonoran Desert. Water cranks out of the desert here like ice from the center of the sun. At the windmill was the first of our two food caches, hidden 112 degrees and a few hundred yards southeast of the well, under a paloverde tree. Our next cache was another week away. Backpacks were dropped as if we were shedding skin, a snakelike move that made sense now. We sat and waited for evening, then got about the small tasks of preparing a meal.
Behind us a single coyote barked a few times. The voice searched the area and found no other coyotes. We looked up, then returned to work. Again the bark came, closer. When it came a third time, we both stood and scanned the crosshatched shadows of paloverdes and creosote bushes. My traveling companion, Irvin Fernandez, grabbed his binoculars and loped in one direction, hunched to the height of the creosote. I saw motion through the spaces, parts of a coyote on the move up a nearby wash. Irvin was fixed on it from another vantage, signaling that he could see it.
The coyote obeys something internal that requires it to sing even when solitary. The singing brings them together. It creates a detailed map of coyotes across a landscape. About a third of all coyotes will be in packs, another third traveling in pairs, and the remaining third going solo.
The coyote barked again, and I was surprised there was no answer. I slipped my flute—long, wooden, and Japanese—from my pack and started playing to see what would happen. Irvin ducked, holding the binoculars to his eyes. I could not see the animal. Thinking it had moved on, I stopped playing. Without losing sight of the coyote, Irvin signaled with a hand to keep going. I played, and as I did he gestured more, winding his hand in the air, saying Play, play. I played high and furious. I felt the queer sensation of my brain grasping for air. My embouchure muscles began to ache. Irvin climbed the windmill tower and fused with the fading western sky. Calm evening air kept the blades inert. I walked toward him, covering the sound of my footsteps with flute notes. I was lost in the music as sight became hazy. Finally I stopped and inhaled deeply, my vision dazzling with an oxygen-starved brain.
“It sat down,” he whispered to me. “It’s just sitting out there, listening.”
Slowly I climbed the metal tower, and when I reached Irvin, I turned and held up my binoculars. The coyote was sitting in the open. Truly in the open. The nearest plant was a chuparosa in full, red bloom, twenty feet away. The coyote, perhaps accustomed to strange motions and noises from the windmill, ignored us. Its ears were perked, and after it turned its head in all directions, it ducked nose to tail and closed its eyes. When it did this, it turned to stone. If I stumbled across it, I would see nothing. The bushy tail made one rock, set against a hind leg that made another, set against the body, which was the third and largest rock. This posture took the coyote’s surface area and wadded it into a ball, holding warmth and creating an instant home.
They are omnivores, the coyotes. Watermelons, beetles, deer, kangaroo rats, and flowers, all on the menu. The best way to survive for a long time on this planet, and thus become a highly successful species, is not to specialize. Like the shark and the cockroach, who have leisurely waltzed from one global extinction to the next, the coyote is a generalist. Specialists, eating only one type of prey or depending on specific tools to survive, are usually flash-in-the-pan species. They are impressive but generally short-lived. As with most omnivore generalists who must create a matrix of tactics for attaining foods, a peculiar open-ended intelligence has arisen in the coyote. Social orders have formed. Knowing looks have come to their eyes.
The government agency claiming such heroics as regional extermination of wolves and grizzlies was known at the end of the 1800s as the Bureau of Biological Survey, sporting the slogan “Bring Them In, Regardless of How.” In a marvel of name juggling, it has since become Animal Damage Control and is now Wildlife Services. The agency eradicates any animal Congress and its assorted lobbyists find to be “noxious,” from foxes to crows to jackrabbits. The one animal that has gotten under the program’s skin, the way a trickster will steal melons from your garden and hurl rinds at you, is the coyote. The more coyotes one kills, they discovered, the more live coyotes one must contend with. It is a spit-in-your-face species because of the very point that the coyote is an industrious and unparalleled generalist.
Each western state throws several hundred thousand dollars annually into the coyote-killing pot. A typical year will see the federally mandated death of ninety-eight thousand coyotes in the United States. In return, coyote populations have risen off the charts. Coyote numbers, by nature of female biology, are designed for rebound. Coyotes are the first species to occupy a devastated area in the way evening primroses grow in the turned sand of roadways. Female coyotes living in areas under light predator control have three to four uterine swellings in a year, each leading to litters of three to four pups. Where the killing of coyotes is more popular, females have around nine uterine swellings. Start shooting coyotes, and they start having more pups.
The response of coyotes to predator control is not just in litter size but in the numbers of females giving birth. When the population is stable, half of the female coyotes in an area will ovulate. When the pack is drastically pared down, all available females will ovulate, including the yearlings, who would normally not ovulate for another year. In a closely related pack where the lead female is usually the only one to bring a litter, the second and third females will mate and dig dens. Field biologists have estimated that if three-quarters of the world’s coyote population were destroyed at once, within a year or two their numbers would return unfazed.
They fill spaces like water or darkness. When I have taken students down the lower Colorado, I have checked between their silent dome tents at dawn and found crossword puzzles of coyote prints from the night before. I have woken from my sleeping bag and glanced up to see the darkness of a coyote against the stars, five feet away, stopped in the middle of a group of guides sleeping on the ground. Two hundred years ago they lived only in the Great Basin region, and now they span most of North America, from Costa Rica to Alaska and from the West Coast to the East. It was not until 1938 that a trap in Mississippi caught its first coyote, marking the animal’s eastward expansion. Now they are natives to that part of the continent, already genetically altered for their new habitats, with eastern coyotes weighing thirty-five pounds more than their western counterparts. Every now and then a coyote appears in Central Park in Manhattan. They have kept going and are now on Newfoundland, crossing a hundred miles of open water. Some suggest that they hitched on ice floes of the Northeast coast, and I imagine all the ice floes that missed land, coyotes going out to sea, never heard from again.
They have even surpassed geographic extension and have moved into genetic frontiers. DNA analysis has shown that 50 percent of sampled gray wolves from northern Minnesota, southern Ontario, and Quebec now carry coyote DNA. They have been hybridized by the coyote. Wolf genes have yet to be found in the coyotes. They are tough animals, gnarled and ingenious, getting into everything.
Their expansion since the industrial revolution has proved more successful than even human expansion. We built civilization, and they are doing a better job of using it than we are. The naturalist Loren Eiseley once observed that “man’s greatest creation...was not really his at all,” and he was talking about New York City being used as a flight path for pigeons. I am talking about coyotes on the North American continent. They have populated cities, fitting particularly well into the motherboard grid of Los Angeles. Again, something to be said for being a generalist.
If anything, it is we who are innocent, and not the animals. Naïveté comes with believing that the world is built of words and numerals. Coyotes, which have no use for pronunciations of superiority, are intent on survival, reproduction, and life. There is no naïveté in knowing how to survive this well. Coyotes move within a landscape of attentiveness. I have seen their eyes in the creosote bushes and among mesquite trees. They have watched me. And all the times that I saw no eyes, that I kept walking and never knew, there were still coyotes. When I have seen them trot away, when I have stepped from the floorboard of my truck, leaned on the door, and watched them as they watched me over their shoulders, I have been aware for that moment of how much more there is. Of how I have seen only an instant of a broad and rich life.
At the windmill, the coyote on the ground hadn’t moved for a half hour. It still did not seem like a coyote at all. If I looked away for a time, then looked back, I had trouble finding it again. It was part of an extended family whose voices I heard often along this open stretch of desert between one mountain range and the next. It was also a solitary creature, sleeping lightly, and maybe it was not my flute that prompted it to stop. Maybe it was just time for a rest, and like all things, when it is time, it should happen.
Occasionally it glanced up to a shift in the wind or the sound of a quail covey. My hands grew sore, gripped to the steel of the windmill. The stone turned back to a coyote. It rose from the ground and stood facing west. It barked. Its tone suggested that it was feeling the terrain with its voice. The coyote allowed enough time for each sound to drift away before introducing the next. Each bark prompted a tug on the tail that turned it under the coyote’s belly. The tip of its tail is black because, I have heard, it was the coyote who stole fire and brought it to humans, and he stole it by thrusting his own tail into the first fire, turning the end black. It was the coyote who brought us fire’s light and warmth, the beginning of civilization, which we then divvied into all the bits and pieces, the cars and paper clips and budget department stores and backpacks, that make up our lives. Coyote, the trickster. You gave us the stuff for civilization, and now look at us, dangling off a windmill when you can still slip nose to tail and be instantly under cover.
The barks continued into the world, not finding anything. The coyote faced west, expecting an answer and not yielding to silence. The barking was like foreplay, softening air that was then taken up by solitary howling, the coyote’s head lifted to send the song upward, tail tucked far under.
The song echoed. The coyote waited. There is a loneliness about a coyote not answered. The spaces are much more open, devoid of the social pleasures of the pack animals. At other times there would be the feeling of the coyotes’ having eaten rabbits or mice, unfolding themselves on warm rocks in the day, several of them with lazy eyes, a family.
Now we were all very far away. Alone. Now the land was so huge. It went on as far as a coyote’s voice will carry, and there was nothing to impede the sound. The only home the coyote had was that bushy tail, and if I had it, I would curl beneath it and remain very still.
The coyote did not grow anxious. It did not scratch disappointment into the dirt. It howled again. One bark returned from the west, so far away it could have been only a strand of hair slipping over my left ear. Coyote ears stood erect, registering the sound, telling me it was real. Two barks. Then howling. The distant howling kicked a group even farther west into howling. The entire desert, in a few seconds, was a cacophony of coyotes shouting back and forth. The desert changed instantly. It turned from stones to coyotes. Whining went high, with shouts and yelps hurled from all directions. They were everywhere, although from the top of the windmill I could not see them at all.
The first coyote wasted no time in trotting west into the sound. As soon as it was beyond the arroyo, we lost it. Irvin and I climbed down and walked wordlessly to camp. There we returned to our small tasks. Soon we ate hot posole with rice. Isolated coyote packs released songs into the night sky. Their frenetic tones took the desert and pushed it even farther than the loneliness could take it, connecting far points with strings of sound. The two of us with our warm pots of food were no more than objects dangling in a web, witnesses to the lives of coyotes.
II
I wake to the yip-yap howl of coyotes. Under heavy blankets, under a roof corniced with five feet of snow, I open my eyes and listen to rowdy voices in the frozen, hollow wilderness outside. I listen closely, trying to tell where they are, imagining coyotes at the edge of a forest a mile away, calling from windswept clearings. The sun must be coming.
It is still dark, and after the coyotes fade I lie unmoving, listening to my then girlfriend breathe beside me. Our loft is right up against the ceiling, our cabin a mere ten feet by ten feet, a two-hour ski from the nearest plowed road in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. We are alone but for the coyotes and what few other creatures are still awake and alive in February. I muster all the willpower I can and crawl out from under the blankets, my body flashing into a sheath of frozen air as I climb down a wooden ladder. I grab clothes off a shelf and layer them on, wool socks and long johns followed by pants, button-down shirt, wool sweater, heavy coat. Every layer is alarmingly cold and it takes a while for me to feel my own heat slowly recycling back into my body. While I wait I rattle a wooden match from a box, strike it, and bring a burst of sulfur light to the inside of the cabin. I touch the match to the wick of an oil lamp and seat a glass globe over a single narrow flame, softly revealing a room around me, a space for cooking, reading, talking, and waiting out the deep womb of winter. Cans of food sit on shelves. Books are stacked on one another. A dog-eared copy of Vogue magazine is left out, which we both read in the long evenings to remind ourselves that human civilization, with its svelte women and dour young men, is still out there, somewhere far away.
Morning is about fire. I start a pan of water heating on a propane stove, its ring of blue flame hauntingly beautiful. Then I crouch and open the woodstove’s small black door, and I take a stick and stir a bed of coals inside. Embers wake, their bright eyes looking up at me. Kindling and rumpled newspaper bring flame, which I blow with long, focused exhalations, warming my lips, my nose, my cheeks. I add sturdy wood that my girlfriend and I cut with a two-person saw the previous summer, every piece of wood prized. I close the door to the sound of crackling and snapping, ingenuity ascending the black flue.
I thrust my feet into a pair of old Sorel boots, then strap the boots into a set of webbed snowshoes. It is the only way out of the cabin. Every morning is a mantra of motions, and at times I feel as if the coyotes and I are constructing the day, keeping the sun moving, preventing winter from settling in for good. Without us, no one else would understand what happened, why the world suddenly came to an end. I open the front door, the only door, onto the thin, icy light of dawn. The sky is clear. The thermometer outside reads twenty below zero. It does not mean much to me, a deep well of numbers that could spin ever downward without my feeling any colder than this. I crunch across the snow on a trail. Everything is smooth and soft with snow but for the bony white trunks of aspen trees surrounding the cabin, and spindles of mountains in the south jetting up to thirteen and fourteen thousand feet.
A crescent moon rests in the east, part of the clock I live in, one of the slowly spinning gears. I peer at it through bare, antlered aspens as I urinate, letting out a steaming arc.
After hot tea and breakfast, we each go our own way. On cross-country skis, my girlfriend heads east into the first strokes of sunlight showing through the aspen grove where we live. I take my skis and head west. There is nothing we are looking for. We go out like riders sent to the horizons, eyes open for whatever trinkets or charms winter has set out.
Everywhere I go I leave a swath of myself, my labor set deeply into elegant folds of snow, my skis buried in my own trough, poles plunging beside me. The snow is a truth-sayer. A bird cannot land without making delicate script where its wings touch down, where its hard toes hop along. Anybody alive out here sets a trail, and so I have become a tracker coming out for my daily read, like opening the newspaper in the morning, seeing what has happened in the world. I pause at lumbering sinks where elk have come through belly-deep, and a bloodstained skirmish where an ermine breakfasted on a flicker that flew too close.
Skiing in and out of meadows on my morning rounds, I stop where a coyote, curled into a ball, slept for about half an hour at the edge of a spruce thicket. A weak shell of ice remains from its body heat. I look up from the coyote’s bed and watch its tracks continue along the thicket’s edge, the animal woken and getting about its business. What business would that be? I wonder.
I follow the coyote’s tracks, its C-shaped gallop skirting trees and meadow. Here it burrowed for a rodent and came up with nothing. Here it walked across a barren white plain. Here it stopped in the middle of the plain and stood for several minutes, gazing north.
I halt on my skis on the plain, tuck my poles under one arm, and bend down. I pull off a mitten and place my finger inside one of the prints, wondering why the coyote paused here. I feel a faint crust in its lobes. It had stayed long enough to sink a little, no more than two hours ahead of me. Why did it stop? I hold my eyes exactly where it held its, looking at the same summit-filled horizon, the sun blazing over a featureless spread of snow. Maybe it heard something or saw an animal far away. A shrill and sudden wind skates against my back, kicking up flecks of ice. I pull a wool scarf over my mouth, stuff my free, reddened hand into a mitten, and keep going. My skis set long twin tracks across the plain, poles sweeping at my sides, gliding me farther into the day.
