Coyote Mornings

It was a summer filled with coyotes.  Walking the low hills early, I would see them pretty regularly, usually in groups of four or five, though sometimes in pairs or alone.  Given the amount of fur-laced shit on the trails, it was pretty clear that the coyote population was healthy and strong.  One day I saw something I had never seen before.  Coming over a rise, I was startled by a huge racket.  It sounded like someone was driving a golf cart through the brush.  Instead, it was a group of four hard-charging coyotes, running right through the densest thicket of brush imaginable. It was so thick that they kept losing their footing as they jumped from bush to bush.  I always thought coyotes were stealthy, but these four were doing their best to let every living thing in the area know that they were on a hunting rampage.  Then I saw some movement on the ridge above, and there he was.  A smaller, presumably faster member of the pack, running the ridge, ten feet ahead of the birddoggers, waiting for some unsuspecting rabbit or squirrel to run out in front of the approaching phalanx in the thicket.  Didn’t seem to work this time -- I didn’t see anything run out -- but the strategy was solid.   A week later I saw another unusual thing.  I was standing at the cabana that looks out over Sweetwater Reservoir when I saw some movement down near the shore.


















Looking through the binoculars, I saw that it was a whole pack or family of coyotes -- playing in the water.  I watched for a while.  I think they might have been half heartedly fishing, as some of the larger coyotes would sometimes splash the water with great purpose.  After a while, though, they were all thrashing about, running around like little kids in a splash pool.  At one point, one of the jokesters pulled something out of the water and ran off, as if he had some great prize.  I thought it was a fish or a crayfish or something, and apparently so did his buddies because they chased him down the beach in full sprint.  It turned out that it was some long, wet piece of cloth, maybe part of a jacket or a scarf.  Still, they all wanted it.  Six of the eight coyotes engaged in a great game of tug of war, while two juveniles watched from a distance.  They pulled with great ferocity for maybe 30 seconds, until all at once everyone lost interest and dropped the cloth onto the sand.  The whole group then walked along the beach to the west, back toward the cover of the hills.  I went back to the same spot the other day -- looked down toward the reservoir and saw the cloth sitting in the same spot on the beach.