open range, are more often seized and savaged and dragged away, but
these incidents are also rare, especially considering the vast expanses
of territory that human beings and coyotes inhabit together throughout
the West.
I was most worried not by what coyotes might usually do, but by the
perception that these were not ordinary animals. They could not be
expected to behave as usual for their kind, the danger was in their
difference.
Although all their heads were turned in our direction, I didn’t feel we
were the primary focus of their attention. They seemed to be raptly
gazing past us, toward something in the distance, though for its eight
or ten-block length, the alley was quiet and deserted.
Abruptly, the pack moved.
Although living in families, coyotes are nonetheless fierce
individualists, driven by personal needs, insights, moods. Their
independence is evident even when they hunt together, but this pack
moved with uncanny coordination, with the instinctive synchronization of
a cruising school of piranhas, as though they shared one mind, one
purpose.
Ears laid back flat against their skulls, jaws cracked wide as if to
bite, heads lowered, hackles raised, shoulders hunched, tails tucked in
and held low, the coyotes raced in our direction but not directly toward
us. They kept to the east half of the alley, most of them on the
blacktop but some on the dusty verge, gazing past us and straight ahead,
as if focused intently on prey that was invisible to human eyes.
Neither Bobby nor I came close to firing on the pack, because we were at
once reminded of the behavior of the flock of nighthawks in Wyvern.
At first the birds seemed to have gathered with malicious intent, then
for the purpose of celebration, and in the end their only violent
impulse was to self-destruction. With these coyotes, I didn’t sense the
bleak aura of sorrow and despair that had radiated from the nighthawks,
I didn’t feel they were searching for their own final solution to
whatever fever gripped them. They appeared to be a danger to someone or
something, but not to us.
Sasha held her revolver in a two-hand grip as the pack streamed toward
us. But as they began to pass without turning a single yellow eye in our
direction and without issuing one bark or snarl, she slowly lowered the
weapon until the muzzle was aimed at the pavement near her feet.
These predators, breath steaming from their mouths, appeared ectoplasmic
here on the cusp of dawn. If not for the slap of paws on blacktop and a
musky odor, they might have been only ghosts of coyotes, engaged in one
last haunt during the final minutes of this spirit-friendly night,
before making their way back to the rough fields and vales in which
their moldering bones awaited them.
As the final ranks of the pack poured past us, we turned to stare after
the swift procession. They dwindled into the distance, chased by the
gray light from the east, as though following the night toward the
western horizon.
Quoting Paul Mccartneyafter all, she was a songwriter as well as a
deejay sasha said, “Baby, I’m amazed.”
“I’ve got a lot to tell you, ” I said. “We’ve seen way more than this
tonight, stranger stuff.”
“A catalog of the mondo weird, ” Bobby assured her.
In the darker distance, the coyotes seemed to shimmer out of existence,
though I suspect that they slipped from the alleyway, over the canyon
crest, returning to the deeper realms from which they had ascended.
“We haven’t seen the last of them, ” Sasha predicted, and her voice was
shaded by a disquieting note of precognition.
“Maybe, ” I said.
“Definitely, ” she insisted with quiet conviction. “And the next time
they come around, they’ll be in an uglier mood.” Breaking open the
shotgun and shaking the shell from the chamber into the palm of his
hand, Bobby said, “Here comes the sun.” He was not to be taken
literally, the day was overcast. The relentless morning slowly stripped
off the black hood of the night and turned its dead, gray face upon us.
A solid cloud cover affords me no substantial protection against the