(cont’d from previous page)

I can’t pretend to be entirely indifferent. Having a wild dog sit beside me nearly fulfills a youthful dream of mine to experience something out of Dances With Wolves. My brothers and I even owned a hamster named Two Socks. But coyotes are much smaller than wolves (though noticeably larger than hamsters), and my coyote doesn’t care to dance so much.

Sure enough, once she’s back at her station a woman pulls over to take pictures. Both are quickly interrupted by the blaring car horn of a patrolling ranger. The noise sends the woman back a couple steps and the coyote, I imagine, a good three feet into the roadside bushes. This is probably a mile or two short of the effect the ranger has intended, but the coyote is just as familiar with the local rangers as she is with the tourists. “Gotta take the bad with the good,” I bet she mutters to herself as she lays still beneath the thicket.

The woman is given a stern lecture on how the park service is forced to kill desensitized coyotes because of the threat they pose to nearby residents. Once coyotes stop fearing people, they start visiting the yards people own, where one might find pets and small children.

The woman and ranger both drive off, and the coyote reemerges. I can almost see the wink in her eye. But she doesn’t know that she’s living on borrowed time. Just like these old bases and her neighbor, the supply shack, with its piles of dirt and stacks of hay.

Pages: 1 2