THE SMOKE CREATURE

To be alone is a blessing, sometimes. To have the world to oneself, reposing on an isolated mountain summit when the full moon is rising, is all the wealth one will ever need to pocket.

I had every reason to believe I was alone sitting on the floor boards of Baldhead lean-to shelter as the moon breached the Mahoosuc Range peaks on the Maine border thirty-five miles distant. Fifteen

years ago nobody came here in early autumn, so far was the little three-sided structure from the eastern megalopolis that it was on not any soul’s to-do list anywhere. But I was shivering with delight to be there a year after the shelter was erected by hard-working volunteers atop an unsung peak on the new 170-mile Cohos Trail in northern New Hampshire. I had a front row seat for a September full moon rise.

Several miles to the southeast on the sloping western flank of Kelsey Mountain, hovering above the U-shaped glacier carved Philips Brook Valley, an eastern coyote yipped. From where I was perched, I heard that utterance perfectly. The coyote’s troop mates followed suit in a few seconds and soon the yips turned to howls, howls of delight, probably. They had hunted down something, was my guess. There would be dinner for all that full moon night.

Across the way a similar 3,600-foot wooded peak filled the western margins of the valley: Mt. Muise. From that direction came another yip that swelled into a chorus. A second troop joined in a sing-along with the first. Within a heartbeat the valley was overrun with the calls from two dozen wild throats.

Hair stands on end when one is cold or sensing danger. The hair on my cranium and arms strained to attention as I listed to the canine calls a seven-hundred vertical feet below and well away to the south. Oh, that was a shuttering pleasure, not a fear response. What human in all the living world could have listened in on this? No one. Just me. Such good fortune. A wild benediction, surely.

The first eastern coyote I ever saw was crammed into a chest freezer. It had been shot by a farmer in Columba township, New Hampshire. He showed me the kill proudly. I had expected a creature I was familiar with, having lived in Los Angeles for a year. What I saw was something altogether different. It was big, almost as big as a shepherd. It was stout, its chest broad and filled out. Its coat was luxurious, silvery with black tips in places, dense and built for the cold. Had it been alive, the temperature of the freezer would have not phased it in the least.

Here was an evolutionary marvel, proof positive that, given time, many living things can change form and adapt to new circumstances. In just one hundred years of evolution, this common southwest predator had morphed from a scrawny rangy denizen of the deserts into something that could shrug off a minus 40 degree night and take off on a sprint in two feet of snow to run down a rabbit come morning. I was taken aback by the existence of this marvelous beast.

This moonless evening, as I write this, a coyote troop is singing from a ridge on the Hinsdale-Chesterfield town boundary. Their joyous music touches off the resident dogs in the valley into barking fits. The domestics sound is positively pedestrian compared to the wild volumes.

The last time I cast eyes on an eastern coyote in the wild was at a remote grassy old logging road junction behind Dixville Peak in Dixville township. I was on foot hoofing toward the junction when I lifted my head to see a well assembled coyote, its eyes locked onto the approaching human. The second I returned the gaze the creature turned to smoke. I don’t recall it moving, I just recall it disappearing instantaneously. Magic! No other way to explain it.

Let me tell you, this creature will inherit the earth. It really is the largest wild beast that has made a home for itself in urban and wild environments from the Canadian Maritimes to coastal British Columbia, from Winnipeg to Waco. It can and does live in your backyard. It will eat your cat, your dog, your chickens and your cute pet potbelly pig. It will rid your neighborhood of rabbit and rat and keep deer populations in check. Coyotes hunt in packs and they hunt alone. They hunt by day and will hunt at night, too. Coyotes are exceptional scavengers, as well. They’ll tug road kill off roads and into the woods. In that sense, we are actually feeding them all the time.

This animal is an opportunist at breeding time. DNA analysis of eastern coyote reveals that there are wolf and domestic dog genes in their lineage. Their lack of fussiness in a mate seems to have sped up the transition from a desert dweller to a beast that can hold its own in Buffalo, Burlington, and Boston.

Give it enough hours, coyotes will actually learn to avoid our cars and commuter rail trains. It will den in subway tunnels, in abandoned buildings, and under the barn, and you won’t know it. It will care for and protect its young better than many a human being.

And here is the kicker. Coyote troops can learn what humans in your community are a danger to their existence. A local cracker in good standing told me recently that coyote will learn to avoid areas where their kin have been shot or poisoned. They will set up outposts to monitor human movements, and they will be sure to slink about so as not to wake the family dog.

The autumnal equinox is approaching. Long nights lay ahead, the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia constellations revolving around Polaris, the North Star, all winter. In the cold darkness, coyotes occasionally strike up their chorus to chase the winter blues away for a time. Because they are nearly as adaptable as we humans are, they find niches to hunker down in to wait out the weather and the sheer shenanigans of us humans.

They are here for the long run, having replaced wolves in the eastern ecosystem. You know, they’ll likely have a far longer run of the planet than we will.

#coyote #survival #predator #NewHampshire