WHAT HAPPENED TO
The Coyote
The night of June seventeenth was a time of hollow luck for predators. The wildness of the wind had made the mice, hares, flying squirrels, and other prey unusually cautious. The same wind put a fever into the hunting of coyotes, weasels, cougars, owls, even the shrews. They were searching recklessly and catching little.
The Coyote on Beetle Rock paused towards midnight to recover strength and to wait for the moon, due to rise from behind the eastern peaks. As he stood upon an angular boulder, thrust into the canyon from the cliff, the wind parted his fur. The wind was pouring over Glacier Pass and Mineral King, builder of thunderheads. It was flowing down and past the Coyote like a movement of the night itself. Beyond the mountains it had swept across the southeast deserts and Mexico’s high plains, home of the small wolf breed. The smell of the mesquite flowers still was in it.
The Coyote shivered. His tail was tight along his right flank, not blown there, but pressed forward as was the Coyote’s way, part of the impulse that made him stand with feet close, throat pulled into his ruff, and brows lowered to the pupils of his eyes. He was a creature that would draw his body around him in utmost concealment. But he was too sensitive to escape thus from the impact of scents, sights, and sounds. His trembling was not alone from cold.
Now the moon was up. Small clouds were blowing across it. Their shadows upon the earth were dark shapes flying over the wooded canyon slopes. The oak leaves in the thicket below the Coyote sharply cut the air, like a myriad of bats’ wings. The Coyote turned. He would climb to the Rock’s rim, there throw back his head and cry out his own wildness, send into the wind and the moonlight streaming between the clouds the breath of his inaccessible spirit.
He turned, but as he started away he heard through a moss-grown crevice of the Rock, a muffled yelping. Below, in a hollow formed by the tilted corner of a granite block, was the den of the Coyote’s mate and pups. One had wakened. He was arousing the others. The Coyote listened, a forefoot raised, ears down towards the crevice. The sounds he heard were not good. In the yapping was a whimper which told the Coyote, what he knew already, that the pups were close to starving.
Instead of climbing the Rock, the Coyote trotted towards the meadow where he had foraged earlier in the night. During several hours of hunting there, he had caught but one new-born field mouse. The other mice of the litter had escaped clinging to their mother’s teats as she fled through the grass. The Coyote had cached the tiny prey while he continued searching, but finally had taken the one pup’s mouthful back to the den. Perhaps now in the moon’s light fewer of the mice would escape him.
The Coyote’s den was near the west edge of Beetle Rock; the meadow was at the other end. He rounded the cliff on a wooded ledge, along a bears’ trail, warily glancing from side to side without a break in his light-footed lope. In the angle between the cliff and the forest of the mountainside, on a small bench, lay the meadow. To enter it the Coyote must cross a sugar pine log. He could have jumped it, but for caution’s sake climbed over, gripping into the bark as deftly with hind feet as with forefeet, swinging down his ears when his head came level with the top. On the other side he circled right so that the wind would carry his scent into the canyon.
The meadow was bright enough to promise better hunting. The moon, shining white on the granite wall, reflected a sheen down over the grasses, broken where the bears had waded through. This was the bears’ meadow. None was here now, but their scent almost covered the scent of the mice. The Coyote’s nose moved quivering in the air, as if tracing a web. He could distinguish the odors of meadow mice and deer mice. Only luck would give him a deer mouse, for the routes by which they sped from nook to nook were unpredictable. But the meadow mice had little roads trimmed through the grass roots, leading direct to the home nest, or to an enemy’s mouth.
The Coyote walked, one slow step at a time, out into the grasses. He brushed down into the stems with his nose. Soon he found a mouse’s runway. He sniffed along it, putting each foot down gradually before he rested his weight upon it. Now he had reached the end of the runway, where the small path entered the ground. He waited, tail slightly lifted, nose pointed, eyes sharp on the hole where he hoped soon to see a softer shadow.
Few coyotes bred in the mountains would have tried to stalk in grass so tall and thick. Instead they usually pursued their prey over open ground, or dug it out. The creature now desperately hunting food for his young had spent most of his life in the foothills. Since he was inexperienced here, he sought the mice where their scent was strongest, in the meadow.
He had been in the mountains only three months. He and his mate had been born on a ranch beyond the western spur of the canyon. Beside the wild prey, easy to catch there, they could kill a sheep whenever their hunger became acute. They had raised one litter of pups successfully on the ranch; the next year two of their young had been poisoned. The following year they lost the entire litter by gunfire, traps, and strychnine placed in carcasses. The Coyote pair, then, had migrated to the east, where they found no signs that men attacked wild animals.
They travelled over the crusted snow on an old road to the crest of the Ash Peaks Ridge. Beyond they saw a country unfamiliar to foothill creatures, of deeper canyons and loftier mountains. They went on. When the road joined a highway cleared of snow, the Coyotes struck away from the human trails, straight up the steep, forested mountain. They climbed higher and higher, trying to find more level ground. They reached it only at the top of Beetle Rock’s perpendicular cliff. The tumbled taluses of the cliff itself provided many a hiding place for hunted animals. In a morning’s search the Coyotes had found a den for their spring brood.
That decision made, they had set about catching unknown kinds of prey in this world of trees and rocks. Few wild animals ever survived in a country so unlike their birthplace. Some other coyotes had done it, but even by June eighteenth this pair had not yet proved that they could. The Coyote’s hunting had a hint of panic in it, for he was driven by the hunger of all, the pups, his mate, and himself. Since March they had been approaching starvation, and for three days now there had been nothing in his stomach but a little grass. The cavern of his ribs seemed to hold only a craving. Pain stabbed in his joints. His eye sockets burned.
The grass in which he waited for the mouse was taller than he. It brushed the sides of his face and bent under his belly. In the foothills, sheep had cropped the grass close; the Coyote could speed over it easily, and anywhere see to the roots. His method of stalking was adapted to that shorter grass. Here he was fairly drowned in the limber fibres, and his stalking motions, decisive and fine, so effective on the lowland range, repeatedly failed to capture the prey. But now a freshening of the mouse scent speeded the Coyote’s heartbeat. There was the lighter cast of fur in the mouse’s burrow entrance. Backward swayed the Coyote’s body, down a little went his haunches, ready for a spring. At a movement in the hole he was in the air, forefeet descending stiff, with all his weight behind them. But even in the instant of his pounce the grass had swung together and warned the mouse. No chunky bite of food was under the paws that struck. The paws flew right and left among the grass stems. The Coyote leapt forward, then his angry jaws raked back along the runway. Once more — how many times that night! — he had lost the mouse.
Down the center of the meadow flowed a brook. After stalking and missing several other mice, the Coyote caught one at the edge of the water. At once he perceived an advantage there and waded up the icy stream, his nose in its borders of wet roots. Three more mice had been added to his catch by the time the birds awoke and began their tinkling chorus of chirps. The Coyote carried all but one of the mice back to the den and left them beside a stone where his mate was accustomed to look for his offerings. More tired even than hungry, the Coyote then went to his own den at the base of a snag, and slept.
Although he had eaten far too little food during the spring, similar amounts probably would have kept him alive a long tim
e if the food had been captured for him. But now starvation had slowed his speed. Unless he learned more tricks of mountain foraging soon, he might be unable to catch any prey at all. Hunting required that one’s powers be keen, even in country that was familiar.
When the Coyote awoke he started a tour of the Rock’s borders. Many squirrels and chipmunks had dug their burrows there where the forest broke away into thickets, brush, and the gray-leaved, bright-flowered gravel plants. The Coyote seldom had caught a chipmunk, whose agility the swiftest predator must respect, but occasionally his pounce had captured a digger squirrel. The Coyote crept along the lee side of the brush, scenting, watching, listening.
He was moving down the draw north of Beetle Rock. Across the dry stream-bed he saw a squirrel-sized hole. The hole was plainly visible to any animal passing along the draw. The mound of earth beside it drew attention to it, an animal home very different from a coyote’s burrow, which always had an entrance hidden by brush or rocks, and the excavated earth so scattered that even another coyote could not detect it. The hunter crouched on his belly behind a weathered log. Through a gap in the wood, broken by bears’ feet, his gaze searched into the hole.
A ground squirrel’s gray furred head appeared. The Coyote pulled his legs farther under him, ready for the spring. But the ball of the squirrel’s nose started an alarmed quivering. The breeze had swirled and brought him the Coyote’s scent. Now the squirrel was sending forth a piercing whistle, a warning repeated at precise intervals, loud enough to reach every animal near the Rock.
The Coyote’s chin went down onto the gravel and he closed his eyes. But quickly he lifted his head again. His wits had pricked through his discouragement with a plan. Warily he backed along the log, then circled down through the shaded hollow behind the draw. He was going for his mate’s help.
At all seasons except when the mother was guarding young, the Coyotes hunted together. They had worked out strategies that captured many creatures neither could have caught alone — jack-rabbits, whose single bounds were six times a coyote’s length, and deer, and other prey. One of the Coyote’s difficulties in getting established in the mountains had been the mother’s absorption in the care of the pups. Were they not old enough now to be left alone while she assisted with the hunting?
The Coyote trotted out onto the boulder above the den. On the granite shelf in front of the den were his mate and the six young coyotes. Normally they would have been tumbling and scuffling in the sun, developing in play the sharpness of mind and body that they would need when grown. The mother would have been wrestling with them, giving them affectionate nips to teach a coyote’s flashing attack and guarded defense. But the father looked down and found his mate and four of the young ones stretched on their sides or curled with noses in their tails, motionless. One pup was licking a sore on a foot. The sixth stood at the shelf’s edge looking into the sky that filled the canyon, taking his hunger with the lean stamina of an adult wolf.
The Coyote made his way down a cleft in the boulder, his sides shrinking narrow below his hip-bones as his shoulders dropped at each descending step. The pup at the edge bounded to him hopefully; two others raised their heads. The Coyote went to his mate and pawed her tail away from her face. Sensing that he had brought no food, she growled annoyance at being wakened. The Coyote took the long fur of her shoulders in his mouth and pulled. Not understanding his plan, she let herself be dragged across the shelf, still showing no intention of getting up. The Coyote barked. Then she knew that he wanted her to follow him.
The two loped off the end of the shelf, up through a thicket and the wooded hollow to the draw. The squirrel, lying half in its burrow, piped its shrill warning still. The Coyote’s intention was as clear in his partner’s mind now as in his own. The pair, keeping out of sight, came into the draw above the squirrel. Now the Coyote’s mate bounded towards the squirrel, openly and apparently with confidence that she could catch him. When he shrank back into the hole, she continued down the draw slowly, letting her tail hang limp, her ears droop, and her shoulders sag. She went on to the den while the Coyote waited, concealed behind the log. The squirrel did exactly what the Coyotes had expected — peered out, saw a discouraged wolf leaving the draw, felt safe, and came out of its hole.
The watching Coyote was so excited that his breath fluttered. He slid forward to make his bound through the break in the log more sure. Now! He tensed his muscles, but suddenly a dizziness blurred his eyes. He shook his head cautiously and his vision cleared. The squirrel was beginning to dust in the gravel. Again the Coyote gathered his strength. He hurled himself over the log. But he had misjudged the distance. He landed a paw’s length short of the squirrel. It dodged — and vanished, perhaps down another entrance to its burrow.
At the den his mate would not be sleeping now. She would be waiting, watching feverish-eyed to see the Coyote come loping in with the fat squirrel, meat for all of them. He did not return to the family. With a blind homing impulse, a tormenting urge to be again in the brushlands, he loped down the surface of the Rock, past its upper and lower fringes of manzanita, into the oak thickets below, through dark groves of cedars and open stands of pines and firs rising obliquely from the steep slope. On down he went, down in the direction, at least, of the ranch. There would be prey that he could catch even though he was weak. There were the short grass and the low shrubs, the smooth, wide range with its long visibility. Lower and lower trotted the hungry Coyote.
He came again to cliffs of sheer granite, polished by ancient glaciers. In the clefts a few trees and grasses had taken rootholds. The Coyote wound down from ledge to ledge. But when a pocket of fallen needles on which he stepped slid off the smooth rock, and he nearly plunged into the canyon, he took his way along horizontally to a more gradual, wooded strip of the mountainside.
He followed a deer trail used by the herd on their yearly migration. Few other tracks marked the slope; the dense animal populations were lower and higher. Many logs and dead branches, hurtled down the mountain during floods, lay, white, among the tree trunks. They all pointed downward and the Coyote continued in their direction. But in crossing one log he paused on top. He had sensed a change in the air.
Clouds were massing over Mineral King. Colors in the trees and earth were changing, becoming darkly vivid. Many sounds had ceased; others were unusually clear and meaningful — the chirping water of a spring, wind approaching in the trees, cones falling through branches and striking the ground heavily, with an answering deep, muffled ring from the mountain. The air smelled of damp dust and the charred wood of snags burned in a forest fire many years before.
The Coyote’s mind began to link up memories of other storms, images of the rain’s end, of animals coming out of their holes at the return of the sun. That would be a time of good hunting, probably in the very draw where he had lost the squirrel. The Coyote dropped from the log and started up the slope.
He had climbed half way back to Beetle Rock by the time the first drops fell. Gradually the rain soaked through to the skin of his muzzle, legs, and haunches, and he began to shiver. But he continued up the mountain. When he came to the base of the Rock he turned west, and continued to the gorge at the Rock’s corner. The stream, already swelling from the rain, roared out of the gorge and down the side of the canyon with a sound of great vitality. The Coyote followed the stream back up into its dim ravine. At one place a sequoia had fallen across the water, forming a bridge. The Coyote crept under it where the bank was dry.
Around him was a thicket more dense than any he had seen in the brushlands. If he had been well he might have felt too covered in it, but now there was comfort in the sheltering of the great tree trunks, and the leaves of hazel brush, ferns, lupines, and grasses, darkly glistening with moisture. The wet evergreen needles had an odor clean and pungent to a feverish nose. The stream’s white foam looked cool.
The rain falling on the leaves, and the churning of the water, were the only sounds. Bird songs and the squirrels’ calls a
ll were silenced … unless that was a bird’s peep. The Coyote sat up and peered among the sedges below him. Soon he had discovered a fledgling, a bird he did not know. It was a mountain dipper, wren-shaped, gray, matching the water. On the edge of a stone, with its feet in the current, it continually squatted, down and up, to imitate the ripples and thereby escape notice. Yet it kept reminding its parents in a shrill voice that it wanted food. Except for its piping and the opening and closing of its orange mouth, the Coyote probably would not have seen it.
Wings broke out of the foam. The dipper’s mother, who had been foraging on the bottom of the stream, flew up, put a caddis fly larva from her beak into the young one’s, and dived again. The fledgling resumed its piping and squatting. The catch looked easy. A single leap brought the Coyote to the dipper’s rock, yet he did not get the bird. It escaped him by plunging into the water. The Coyote never had known a land bird who could do that. Once more the mountain world had tricked him.
When he went back beneath the sequoia he climbed farther into the angle between the log and the bank. He pushed in as deep as he could, curling himself with his tail across his right foot and his nose hidden. Usually when he lay thus he kept his eyes as high as the guard hairs of his tail, so that he could see about him. Now his entire face went into the deeper fur.
No creature would find him here under the great log, probably not even a bird or mouse to make him try once more to force new strength into his muscles. A nook like this, remote yet airy, was the best possible place for a sick coyote to hide, perhaps to stay for a very long time.
The Coyote slept — only briefly, but when he awoke nothing remained of the rain but a bright mist. The clouds above the trees were a fresher, softer gray; the air felt as if some wariness had been abandoned. This was hunters’ weather. The earth itself seemed lazy, pleased, warm, overconfident. Some new arrangement of natural forces, of tensions and pressures, would make the pursuing kind of nerves and muscles more effective than the fleeing kind.
One Day On Beetle Rock Page 10