Letter to an Old Friend

Letter to an Old Friend

Page Type Page Type: Article

Not Forgotten

Coyote, Lamar Valley

There you were, bold against the snow in the Lamar Valley, ears erect, snout down, ready to pounce, listening for the self-betraying movement of your prey in its dug-out tunnels a few inches below.

You paid not a bit of attention to me. In one sense, I was glad; it's not worth getting the perfect picture of an animal if doing so means disrupting it, and such disruptions can be harmful or even fatal to the animal. But in another sense, I was a little saddened not to be acknowledged; some part of me, the part that thrives on feeling like a part of the pulse of the wilderness, craved your notice and subsequent acceptance-- not friendship but not fear, either-- just acceptance.

Payson Peak

Other places I have seen or heard you...

The moments we shared stay with me more than any other wildlife encounter that stands out in my memory. More than the time I watched mountain goats dance down the sheer cliffs of Mount Timpanogos as I plodded along the ridge trail. More than the time I saw a cougar in the Absaroka Range. More than the time I thought a bull moose in rutting season in the Wasatch Range was about to charge me. More than the time a black bear in the Sierra Nevada made a bluff charge at my brother and me. More than the time I surprised a young grizzly and found myself within spitting distance of it in the Great Bear Wilderness of Montana's Flathead Range.
 
I like to think you were the same coyote featured in a National Geographic video I’d seen a year or two before. The location was the same. The movements I saw were dead ringers. But maybe that was owing to the remarkable way your brethren have adapted and evolved; it only makes sense that what works would be adopted and repeated by all struggling to survive in the white hell and sublime wonder that is the Yellowstone winter.
 
Cardiac Ridge
 
In all likelihood, you are no longer alive. Your lifespan in the wild is up to 15 years, and you were no pup when I saw you nine years ago. Age could have taken you. The wheels beneath a rushing tourist could have. Maybe you strayed from the protection of your home to find yourself targeted by the poisons, traps, or rifles of your human neighbors. Furthermore, the numbers of your kind have dropped in the Lamar Valley since the reintroduction of the gray wolf became such a success. Your larger cousins, in establishing their dominance, have driven off or killed so many of you. You had become the largest of your kind, much larger than the average coyote; in fact, you and your regional brethren were often mistaken for wolves. 
 
On balance, I am glad the wolves are back, but I still find it sad that their success also comes at your expense when it is you, despite the romantic image of the wolf, who truly embodies the strength and the resilience of the natural order perhaps more than any other animal in the great American West does. And you do. The bison, who shook the earth when they ran and sustained an entire culture that practiced the now-forgotten ethic of taking just what one needs and honoring its lifeblood, were nearly slaughtered and needed the hand of the federal government to save them. It was the same with the grizzlies. And so it was with the wolves. But you have endured and even thrived.
 
Clearing Storm from Cape Royal
 
You have been chased, trapped, poisoned, and shot, but you endure. You can outrun, outwit, or outmaneuver dogs; avoid traps; get through or over fences; and change your habits. Mixed into you are the craftiness of the fox and the endurance of the wolf. You lack the purity of the former’s cunning and the chase-ending lethality of the latter's strength, but you have enough of both to do, on the whole, better than both, for you know how to do what survival demands and have always eluded the best efforts of those trying to exterminate you, no small feat in this age when entire species vanish forever each year solely or primarily because of my kind's activities.
 
 
Badlands National Park, SD
 
Despite the campaigns against you, despite attaining the shoot-at-will label of “varmint” in so many states, you are reputed to live in every U.S. state except Hawaii. You have been sighted and photographed in New York’s Central Park and Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Park, hardly bastions of wilderness.
 
Governments of suburbanized areas such as my own hometown, where all is supposed to be middle-class bliss and the worst that ever happens to most of us is a traffic jam making us late for the nightly joy of trying to get our kids to eat what they don’t want to eat, issue warnings to pet owners, saying that coyotes pose a particular risk to cats and small dogs. When I found a mutilated fox on a neighborhood basketball court recently, I did not suspect a shotgun-wielding yuppie, an abnormally aggressive dog, or one seriously rough racoon; I thought of you.
 
I have seen you, as I have already said, in Yellowstone, America’s wilderness heart. I have also listened to you at night there while I shivered in my mummy bag as winter kept its grip on March, and if there is any sound in the American wilderness that can be more haunting and inspiring at once, it can only be the howl of the wolf, the bugling of the bull elk, the scream of the cougar, or maybe the sound of ice crashing from a glacier. I have watched you stalk, slink, and prance in Death Valley, the Grand Canyon, the Wasatch Mountains, and in other places I have probably forgotten. Your songs have kept me awake-- and kept me from wanting to sleep lest I missed a moment of the magic-- in the badlands of South Dakota and deep in the Wind River Range of Wyoming, there in the shadow of the Continental Divide, America’s great backbone in both a geographic and a wilderness sense.
 
Sunflower, Sage Creek Wilderness
 
Many of the Native Americans saw you and the raven as gods or god-like characters for your intelligence and your trickery, and you fill their lore (fitting, perhaps, that when I saw you that day a raven was just a few feet away from you). You play a vital role in the creation myths of the Navajo. Whoever dreamt up Pecos Bill had you raising him from childhood. Even Looney Tunes paid you a tribute of sorts by making your name a play on the word wily; in those cartoons, you never caught Road Runner, but you never quit, and it wasn’t long before I found myself in your corner. Although you are not solely or even principally of the mountains, in many ways you demonstrate the spirit of the mountains, who, as Aldo Leopold once said, are the only ones who have lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf (and maybe the call of the coyote-- my addition), and the mountains would not be the same without you.
 
Mesquite Flat
 
You are more than a symbol. You are a survivor. You are an icon. You are an indelible part of the heart of the wilderness. You were here before we were and will probably be here after. There are many who hate you, and some of them may have fair reasons for it, but I still feel a thrill every time I see you.
 
And I miss you. After all these years, I still look at your picture and think about you, wondering what ever became of you. I hope it was noble. Good night, sweet prince.* The rest is silence.**
 
* Horatio to Hamlet just after the latter's death.
 
** Hamlet's final words.
 
 


Comments

Post a Comment
Viewing: 41-50 of 50
reboyles

reboyles - Mar 14, 2013 7:36 am - Voted 10/10

Out here in the West

I've seen these "varmints" poisoned, trapped, run over by vehicles, gunned down by helicopters, "plinked" year-round by hunters and somehow they have endured everything that humans have thrown at them so far. When 1080 (cyanide) was banned you wouldn't have believed the howling (and it wasn't the coyotes). I can't help but respect and admire one of the few animals that has managed to thrive regardless of the long campaign to eradicate these wily creatures.

Great article!

Bob Sihler

Bob Sihler - Mar 15, 2013 10:02 am - Hasn't voted

Re: Out here in the West

Thanks! I feel about them the way you do. They're survivors.

colinr

colinr - Mar 16, 2013 4:21 am - Voted 10/10

I miss seeing them

I'm bound to cross paths with a coyote again near home sometime, but it has been awhile. Nearly a decade ago, when my neighborhood was new, I saw one around sunset while jogging along a creek. Prior to that, I would often ride by one while cycling out in the rural hills east of town. We'd hear them howling at night when we were living out at the base of the hills and still do sometimes in suburbia. My most vivid encounter was in nearby Henry Coe State Park while mountain biking in a remote area. I crested a hill at a T-junction and stopped. I usually paused at this spot to catch my breath and to admire the views of oaks, wildflowers and rolling grassland, but this time was unique. I watched a pack of seven coyotes meander up canyon, some passing within five yards of me. I remember the silence and their indifference to a lone mountain biker. I was glad I was heading the other way so I wouldn't need to test their reaction to me riding by. I won't forget that sighting.

Might the red wolves back east that some folks were commenting about be coywolves? Maybe coyotes are filling in former territory of something that was largely coyote anyway. Out here, California's lone confirmed wolf is back in Oregon for now. He drifted back north last March, too. Maybe he caught wind of the recent organized coyote hunt.

Bob, your piece on the coyote was a pleasure to read!

Bob Sihler

Bob Sihler - Mar 18, 2013 9:37 am - Hasn't voted

Re: I miss seeing them

Thanks, Sean, and thanks for sharing your own stories. To the best of my knowledge, the red wolves in NC are not hybrids. I'm glad to hear the CA wolf is still alive even if it has gone back to OR. I long for the day that wolves and grizzlies return to CA and live free but suspect it won't happen because of population density and fear and politics.

colinr

colinr - Mar 19, 2013 1:35 am - Voted 10/10

Re: I miss seeing them

I guess I had forgotten about the ones I've seen while driving through Furnace Creek...someone had an exciting encounter near there recently with a coyote following him for a long time and distance: http://www.death-valley.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22151

Bob Sihler

Bob Sihler - Mar 19, 2013 3:09 pm - Hasn't voted

Re: I miss seeing them

Interesting account-- thanks for sharing!

CheesySciFi

CheesySciFi - Mar 17, 2013 12:02 am - Voted 10/10

Your best yet

Bob,

This is a really moving tribute to an enduring symbol of the West. I think that you've surpassed your already impressive work on Summitpost with this article. Hearing the howl of the coyotes in New Mexico is something that I will remember for the rest of my life.

Bob Sihler

Bob Sihler - Mar 18, 2013 9:38 am - Hasn't voted

Re: Your best yet

Thanks! I have heard the coyotes howling in Shenandoah just after moonrise, so you should have some good chances after moving to Front Royal!

TimmyC

TimmyC - Mar 17, 2013 12:28 am - Voted 10/10

I'm glad this made it (back) to the front page

This is a very good read; excellent thoughts, very well expressed. I'm not sure you need to worry about igniting a debate about predator/nuisance. Your nostalgic tone, I feel, outweighs any political overtones or sentiments. Well put, sir. Nicely done.

(Also, Éowyn is just about the best name for a fierce cat ever. Just saying.)

Bob Sihler

Bob Sihler - Mar 18, 2013 9:40 am - Hasn't voted

Re: I'm glad this made it (back) to the front page

Thanks, Timmy, and thanks for reading. Sadly, Éowyn left us last fall, but our little mini-cougar will not be forgotten!

Viewing: 41-50 of 50


Parents 

Parents

Parents refers to a larger category under which an object falls. For example, theAconcagua mountain page has the 'Aconcagua Group' and the 'Seven Summits' asparents and is a parent itself to many routes, photos, and Trip Reports.