Member-only story
Poetry
A Good Summer for Coyotes
It’s a good summer for coyotes, with six weeks of unexpected rain.
Plenty of forage for cottontails means plenty of food for coyote pups.
But the rains dried up completely, just when the pups outgrew the den and Began to join their parents in the hours just after sunset, or just before dawn, Padding silently across the bone-dry river, a football-field’s width of sand Stained with rivulets of mud running red, tracks of herons, egrets, racoon.
The well-fed coyotes come out in force as they hear the barks of our dogs,
And the sounds of human voices — ready to challenge us, silently, never Breaking contact with their odd yellow eyes. The sand is littered with half-Eaten crayfish, river clams, and fish heads, yet the river does not confine Them. They balance nimbly atop cement walls, leap down into urban Backyards, a paradise, this year, of decaying fruit — apricots, peaches, plums.
I keep my defenseless fur-babies inside my four walls and listen quietly to the Laughing of the coyotes, high-pitched and eerie, in the late-summer night. Desert music. The song before the kill. My pup Birdie sits up, ears alert. Message received. By the light of the moon, I read the concern in her eyes, Reach out with a sleep-heavy hand, smooth the raised hairs along the narrow Ridge of her spine. She curls like a cat in the half circle of my knees, safe.
