A Country Year

by Hubbell, Liddy; Hubbell, Sue;

  The coyotes are singing almost every night now down in the hollow, the creek bed that runs below my southern boundary. Their song is a chorus of yips, yelps and barks that increases in intensity and number as more and more join in, until it climaxes in a series of howled wails. I hear them year round occasionally down there or over by the river, but it is their breeding season now and they are singing more often.

  When I first moved here, their song was rarer. The pair of male Irish setters Paul and I had then would cock their heads and listen when they heard coyotes, and then look at us as if for an explanation of this sound so near and yet not quite of their kind.

  The dogs I have now, Tazzie and Andy Beagle, are accustomed to the coyotes, however, for here as elsewhere coyotes have increased in number. They are one of the few wild animals who have spread their range, even as humans have tried to eliminate them. They are shrewd and wily and can eat almost anything. Here in Missouri their diet is chiefly rabbits, rats, mice and small birds, but they will eat insects, plants, fruits and seeds when they have to. They bring back their prey to their den and bury what they don’t eat to dig up later when they need it. They are fond of carrion wherever they find it; they will polish off the kill of another animal and clean up after inexpert human hunters who only maim. Though studies of the stomach contents of killed coyotes show that only 10 to 20 percent of what they eat are animals man would prefer they didn’t—calves, sheep or chickens—ranchers and farmers consider them enemies. Bounties have been placed on their heads, traps and poison put out for them. Still they spread. Back here on the river I am the only human who likes to hear their song.

  A neighbor told me that in some circles a coyote-dog cross is held to be a superior hunter. He knew a man who had trapped a female coyote in season and held her, snapping and furious, while his prize hound covered her. He kept the coyote caged until she whelped, but she killed her pups as soon as they were born. I am not surprised after such a mating and imprisonment. I am also not sure that the story is true, but it could be. Canis familiaris, our pet dogs, and Canis latrans, the dog who barks, the coyote, are close enough biologically to interbreed. They sometimes do, and produce fertile offspring.

  I suspect that Andy Beagle knows more about this than he should. In his younger days he would go quite wild for a week or so in late January and spend his nights courting, limping back home in the morning, mauled and bloody. He would stay some hours by the wood stove whimpering for my sympathy and licking his wounds. By afternoon he would be restless again, looking out the windows and whining. He would sit in the middle of the living-room floor, point his nose to the ceiling and howl his randiness, and by evening was ready to hobble out of the cabin and away, only to return again the next morning, his old wounds reopened and new ones bleeding.

  I always asked around to see if any of my neighbors had a bitch in heat, but none of them ever did, and several of them suggested that he was courting coyotes. It is possible; if so, he carries the scars of his chutzpah: one long floppy ear in three parts, rather like a split-leafed philodendron, the badge of a night when he returned covered from nose to tail with blood that was streaming from the ripped ear. It was the last time he ever went wild in January. He is older now; he spends the month as close to the wood stove as he can get.

  Perhaps Andy learned something in his final wooing. I did see one encounter of his with a pair of coyotes in which he showed himself discreet if not valorous—prudent behavior, which indicated to me that he was well acquainted with coyotes and their capabilities. Coyotes are not as sociable as their near cousins, wolves, but they do often hunt in pairs and are sometimes seen in daylight in the summer after their pups have become active. Our meeting with them was on a summer day when I was stacking logs on the woodpile out beyond the barn. Andy had joined me and had discovered the trail of some small animal that had taken refuge there. Nose to the ground, intent on whatever the scent was telling him, he followed the trail out across the field. I straightened up from behind the stacked wood and looked in his direction as two coyotes emerged silently from the woods at the edge of the field above the hollow. Bellies to the ground, they were stalking him but he was following a scent and was unaware of them until they began to circle. Then he sensed their presence, and looked up and yelped in fear. They circled closer. He turned his head to show that he was not aggressive, and would have backed off if they had given him room. The coyotes tightened their circle. Andy lay down, rolled over and exposed his belly to show his submission. The coyotes surely understood these gestures, for like dogs, they use them among themselves to sort out dominance, but social niceties were not on their minds; they were hunting. They closed in on him, snarling, showing their teeth, snapping. When I yelled, they looked up, momentarily startled, and in that moment Andy jumped up and streaked back to the cabin with his tail between his legs. I chased the coyotes, and although they did lope away toward the hollow, they stopped often to look insolently over their shoulders at me. I had won this round, their behavior said, but they were not frightened of me.

  Now that Tazzie has joined the household, she and Andy always go out on their rambles together, and the two of them may be a match for coyotes. I do not know, although I have seen them chase a lone coyote. I am sure, however, that they know more about them than I do. When they hear coyotes singing at night they do not bark like they do when they hear dogs, but they do not act puzzled the way the setters did, either. They listen attentively, file away whatever information they get from the song and go back to sleep: Coyotes. Nothing special.

  But for me, perhaps because I know them less well, coyotes are still special. I like lying in bed as I did last night, with moonlight streaming in the window, listening to their song. Coyote. That name comes from the Aztecs’ word for them, coyotl, and should, to my way of thinking, always be pronounced ki-o-tee, not ki-oat, the way it sometimes is. Coy-o-tee, that word handed down from long ago, a clumsy approximation of their song, the song of wild things in the moonlight.

  Every winter I promise myself that I will label an entire year’s supply of honey jars, and every winter I don’t; the job is a boring one, and I am clever about finding other work more important.

  I sell most of my honey in one-pound jars. There are twenty-four of these to a case, and each one needs a label. I set up my label-pasting machine on a table near the wood stove. The machine is so noisy that I can’t listen to the radio, and although I don’t mind because my public radio station has recently come down with a bad case of Dvorak, the labeling machine doesn’t have much interesting to say either—just thwip-thwip-thwip as the labels run through its rollers. Sitting there by the warm fire pasting label after label neatly and precisely makes me sleepy and dull.

  But I did get enough jars labeled for the February sales trips, and now I am processing honey to fill them.

  When I extract the honey at summer’s end I store it all in five-gallon, sixty-pound buckets and stack them four high in the barn. This honey has never been heated, and so it has crystallized. I wish I could sell it that way because the flavor is at its best, and the thick crystallized honey spreads nicely on warm toast without running down the elbow the way liquefied honey does. But the buyers at stores tell me that their customers think something is wrong with honey when it has crystallized, so I must melt it down and heat it before I can sell it.

  I put ten of those sixty-pound buckets into a hot box, which melts the honey so that it can flow out of the buckets and into a pump, which pumps it up into an overhead controlled heating unit. This heats it enough to break down the honey crystals but does not hurt the flavor. The honey flows from the heater down into a storage tank, where I let it stand to allow the air bubbles to rise out before I bottle it. Processing each batch of six hundred pounds of honey takes one day.

  The bees made the honey from flower nectar. Bees forage as far as two miles from their hives, and find many different flowers, but in the Ozarks their best sources are blackberries, wild sweet clover, persimmons, wa
ter willow, wild mint and wild fruit trees—plum, cherry and peach.

  The nectar of the flowers is 80 percent or more water, and the sugars in the nectar are complex. To make honey, the bees have to evaporate the water and break down the sugars from complex to simple. When they gather the nectar, they suck it up through their long tongues and store it in a sac called a honey stomach. When this is full, they fly back to their hives and transfer the nectar to young house bees, who spread it, drop by drop, throughout the hive in the honeycombs. In the process of collecting the nectar, storing it in their bodies and transferring it to the house bees, the bees have added enzymes to the nectar which break down the complex sugars into simple ones, chiefly dextrose, levulose and sucrose.

  The water in the nectar evaporates slowly from the droplets spread out through the hive, but the bees speed up the process by fanning with their wings, setting up currents of air from the hive entrance at the bottom to ventilation holes at the top.

  On hot summer nights I like to walk out to the beehives back by the woodlot. At night all 60,000 bees are at home in each hive; most of them are fanning, and I can hear the hum of their wings long before I get near them. The air currents from the fanning of all those wings are so strong that when I stand in front of the hives in the dark I can feel a draft swirling around my ankles.

  When most of the water is removed from the nectar, the bees cap each cell of finished honey with snowy white wax secreted in flakes from their own bodies. This finished honey has a very low moisture content, 16 percent or so, dryer than air. This makes honey hygroscopic; it can pull moisture from the atmosphere. That is why I have to store it in tightly sealed containers once it is extracted; it is also the reason why baked goods made with honey stay moist and do not dry out the way they do when sugar is used.

  When I harvest the honey and extract it at summer’s end, I only take honey from combs that have been completely sealed with beeswax, honey that I know is ripe and will be flavorful. The uncapped honey, green and unfinished, will be thin and off-flavored, and I give it back to the bees. Last year, when I harvested 33,000 pounds of honey, at least 3,000 pounds of it was too green to extract, and I returned it to the bees. I am fussier about this than some bigger commercial beekeepers, but since I can’t compete with them in price I try to produce very good honey instead.

  In another week I’ll have 6,000 pounds of honey processed and bottled; then I’ll load up the truck with part of it and head out on the Interstates again to peddle honey and sleep in truck stops.

  Paul is skilled and competent, and likes to do things well and neatly. During our life together, he assembled a large collection of tools, and when he left, he passed them on to me.

  I set up a workshop for myself in the barn with the tools that I learned to use, and from time to time would try to sort through the others and the things that went with them. He had left coffee cans full of hardware labeled in his precise, draftsman’s hand, “Three-Eighths Inch Bolts,” “Springs of Assorted Sizes,” “Insulated Staples,” and the like. I would move the hardware from place to place and would pick up the tools, the purposes of which were unknown to me, and put them down again, depressed and defeated by my own ignorance, wondering yet again what I was doing trying to live out here by myself when I didn’t even know how to use what might possibly be called a ratchet wrench.

  After a long time, I piled all the tools that I did not understand on the upper two shelves of the tool cabinet, boldly scrawled below them “Mysterious Tools” and felt the better for it. Occasionally one or another of them loses its mystery and, comfortably useful, takes its place on my workbench. I had already sorted through the unlabeled boxes of hardware and filled coffee cans of my own, and marked them “Round Things,” “Things That Fasten Other Things Together in Unusual Ways” and other categories that served me, if no one else.

  Ermon came over and helped me sort through all the old Chevy parts in the barn, telling me which to save for repairs and which to scrap. He is a dark and moody man, a skilled mechanic who works on my truck and those of others when he has a mind to. He is brilliant and easily bored and turns down routine repair jobs. He is said to have a bad temper, but he has always been gentle and patient with me. He is said to be undependable, but I know better. Time after time he has come to rescue me when the Chevy has inexplicably ceased to run at an inconvenient time and in inconvenient places. He can always be counted on in a real emergency.

  The day that he helped me sort through the Chevy parts we talked about the tractor sitting out in the shed. It was an old one, basically sound, but with many idiosyncracies and minor mechanical problems. When Paul lived here, he had used it to plow and disc the field where he tried to grow sweet clover for the bees. The thin, poor soil and drought defeated his efforts, and afterward he kept the field clear and the grass around the barn trimmed by brush-hogging several times a year. A brush hog is a heavy mowing machine pulled by a tractor.

  An open field, if not cut frequently, is soon taken over by weeds, blackberries and multiflora roses. Years ago the multiflora rose, an exotic, was touted as a Miracle Plant. Its fruits are eaten by birds and its habit of thick, rapid, tangled and thorny growth could turn it into what the nursery catalogs used to call a Living Fence, one that even cattle will not go through. In the early 1940s the Missouri Conservation Department grew the plants and encouraged landowners to set them out. Birds did indeed like the fruit, but the seeds passed through their digestive systems fully fertile, and so birds planted new multiflora roses with their droppings. Instead of staying in tidy fence rows the multiflora rose spread rapidly over pastures where it was not wanted. It could not be dug out because the broken roots, hydralike, sprouted new plants. Recently strong herbicides have been developed that kill the rose, but they may contaminate water supplies and ponds. Brush-hogging multiflora roses at least keeps them from spreading.

  I knew that I could not keep the tractor in good enough repair to do the brush-hogging; Ermon wanted it badly, but he could not afford to pay for it. So we made a deal. He could have the tractor if he would keep it in good working order and once a year bring it over and do the brush-hogging.

  This worked well enough for several years. The tractor served him and he brush-hogged for me. But then he grew bored with the routine, and I had to nag to get the job done. Last year I nagged in vain.

  I noticed that from an aesthetic standpoint I really preferred a field full of daisies, black-eyed Susans, chicory, Queen Anne’s lace, wild pinks and scattered blossoms of sweet clover and alfalfa. Around and below the barn a lush stand of orchard grass and clover grew up untidily, but my eye became accustomed to it. I did fret about the multiflora roses, however. They had just been put on the official state noxious weed list, and most farmers were pouring on the herbicides and were paid for doing so by the Conservation Department, which was trying to make up for its past sins. I wondered if I should do the same.

  Then I noticed something unusual. The growing tips of some of the roses were stunted, blighted-looking, twisted and unnaturally red. I did not know why until the extension agronomist explained that a new rose disease had showed up in our part of Missouri. Not much was known about it, but this was what was killing back the growing tips on the roses in my field. State pathologists were studying it, but for now all they could tell us was that the disease was believed to be caused by a virus spread by mites. They suspected it would only affect weaker plants, but they had no idea what would really happen.

  That the balance of nature should be restored right then and there while I was having trouble persuading balky Ermon to brush-hog seemed just a trifle too neat and pat, my own personal miracle for the control of the Miracle Plant. But although the timing may have been remarkable, what was happening was not. Multiflora roses are introduced exotics, and like other exotics such as English sparrows, kudzu and gypsy moths, they have spread aggressively, for they had no competition or checks to stop them. Now their very success has made them a dense and attractive habita
t for the virus that has turned up.

  I kept watching the multiflora roses in my field, and found that almost all of them were affected. None of them died of the disease, but they did not thrive either. I shall see what happens this coming year. Meanwhile I have stopped nagging Ermon. When he gets ready to brush-hog he will, and I will not ruin our friendship by harassing him. He tolerates my failings; I shall tolerate his.

  Another pleasant thing has happened, a benefit from living in an untrimmed state. One night at the end of autumn I had been out to dinner with friends and returned home late. When I drove up in front of the barn the night was full of eyes. Eyes floating in the night, almond-shaped eyes everywhere, looking toward me, golden, gleaming eyes, eyes reflected in the headlights with no other body parts visible. Eyes surrounding me. Eyes. I turned off the headlights and quietly got out of the pickup. I was in the middle of a herd of deer. The night was moonless, but in the starlight their shapes were clear enough, and I could see them, no longer blinded by the headlights, relax and return to browsing in the thick, still-green orchard grass and clover that had grown up around and below the barn.

  This winter is a harsh one. Ice, snow and bitter cold have made it hard for wild animals to find enough to eat. Each evening the deer have returned to feed. They have grown easy now, and feed close to the cabin. In the mornings I find their hoof prints and the bare patches of lawn where they have scraped away the snow to crop the grass.

  I still do not know the use of the ratchet wrench. Paul was out here for a wary visit a few years ago and kindly explained its purpose to me, but what he told me has slipped my mind. I have concluded that I have been living a full and adequate life for fifty years without using a ratchet wrench, and so, no matter what its importance is to others, it is probably not important to me.