A Coyote Stalker
BY JUDY ERON
We love the sound of the coyotes down in
the arroyo. Their yip yips, their long
howls. It’s such a call of the desert, such a
reminder of the remoteness and wildness
of where we live.
When I hear this chorus, I first check to
make sure our cat is inside. Then I relax
into the beautiful song of the coyotes.
Perhaps howling at the moon, perhaps
communicating with one another. It’s a
strangely peaceful sound.
This changed a bit last week when I called my
friend Beck to see if she’d like to take a quad ride.
She said she couldn’t, that she and Rick were
preoccupied with a danger around their house.
Coyotes.
No, actually that’s not correct. A coyote, singular.
A coyote, quite large. A coyote had been circling
their house for the past couple of days. Way too
close. They could not safely let their cat out, and
their dog had to be on a leash now on their walks.
It had begun a few days earlier, when the
weather was foggy and chilly. Beck had just filled
her birdfeeders. As she returned to her house, she
noticed a large doglike animal sniffing around,
about 30 feet away. She went inside and she and
Rick watched from the window. At first they were
not completely sure it was not a dog, it was so tall.
But it clearly was a coyote, alone. They didn’t think
too much about it, and the weather was keeping
them indoors anyway.
The next morning was sunny, and Beck and Rick
were sitting outside with their cat Sophie and their
dog Slammer. Both animals were on the alert,
behaving in an uncharacteristic way. Sophie
usually likes to roam, but this day she was sticking
close by Beck, and mostly just wanted to go
indoors. Slammer was doing her best to leave her
own scent all around by peeing on the patio and by
scraping her paws on the ground (dogs have scent
glands in their paws and scrape as a way to mark
territory.) Clearly the coyote was close by.
This was not feeling comfortable. Beck consulted
her computer to gather some information about the
coyote’s behavior and to try to find out why the
coyote was coming around so close and so often.
Being squeamish, Beck had to maneuver her way
through the internet to avoid the gruesome “killing
coyotes for fun” sites, to get to sites that described
habits, habitat, food sources and of course,
dangers. She learned that in January, male coyotes
often run solo, looking for a mate. This made her
concerned that this very male, very big coyote
might mistake Slammer, who is female, for a mate.
The next day showed more signs of the coyote’s
close presence. His circling of their house became
easier to detect. Although Beck and Rick had taken
down all their birdfeeders, the cedar posts that
held the feeders were getting scratched up, the
bark peeling off. There were piles of fresh scat,
again way too close to the house. Sophie would no
longer go outside. Later that day, Beck and Rick
saw the coyote pacing at the bottom of their
driveway, down by the garage, looking up the hill
at them. Their house is perched on a promontory,
so they had a clear view of the coyote’s prowling
behavior down below. His staring up at them felt
creepy.
Before sunrise on the following day, Beck took
her regular walk with Slammer down the
driveway, Slammer on her leash. Now, looking
back, Beck sees that this was a dangerous thing to
do. But at the time, she reasoned that she had her
gun with her, just in case, and was simply curious
to see what the coyote was doing and to assess the
boundaries of the coyote’s fear of her and Slammer.
There was the coyote. Dog and coyote stood and
stared at one another, not 20 feet apart. The coyote
did not approach, and Beck walked backwards up
the hill, Slammer beside her, watching the coyote
watching them. Creepier still.
The coyote’s presence began to feel terribly
menacing. By the evening of the fourth day, it was
clear that the coyote was there to stay. He was
lying around in the brush and grasses down by the
garage and then at times he would come up the
driveway to the house. There he would pace and
pant as he anxiously watched them. They felt he
was stalking them.
Living out here on Terlingua Ranch, as remotely
as we all do, Beck and Rick have always been
respectful of wildlife, believing that the animals
have more right to be on the desert than we do,
that we humans are the intruders. A noble value
to hold, but irrelevant when you believe a coyote
may be stalking your pets. This was going to have
to end.
The only solution seemed to be to shoot him.
Their research convinced them that shooting a
coyote is tricky, as it’s difficult to get close enough
for a clean shot. Though they have guns, Beck and
Rick are not hunters—the guns are to defend
against threats to their pets. They decided that
Rick, being the better shot, would be the shooter.
So now they needed to find a way for Rick to get
close to the coyote and yet be safe himself. From
inside their car made sense. Rick would prop his
gun on the window and shoot from the car.
For two days they left the car parked down below
by the garage where the coyote was spending a
good deal of time. Each day they put fresh dog food
around the car. They also scattered Rick’s dirty
sweatshirt and sweat pants near the car so the
coyote would be familiar with that scent once Rick
was inside the car. Indeed, over those two days,
the coyote did grow more comfortable, coming near
the car. For reasons unknown, the coyote’s internal
clock would bring him closest to the car about 4 pm
each day. So the plan was for Rick to sit in the car
in the middle of the afternoon and wait with his
.22.
On the “kill day,” there sat Rick in the car. Dog
food, enhanced by some of Sophie’s fragrant tuna
treats, was spread out around the car. They had
fashioned a curtain over the half-opened car
window so the coyote would not see Rick. However,
probably sensing Rick in the car, the coyote began
running full-gait around the car, not stopping to
eat the food. Then suddenly he ran away from the
car, but unable to resist the food, began a new
approach, creeping back through the bushes and
brush.
Rick shot the coyote. It jumped and yelped and
ran across the road into the nearby canyon. They
could not tell if the coyote had actually been shot,
and they certainly did not want him to suffer. So
Beck tracked him and found a pile of vomit, mostly
blood, with dog food and the cat treats in it. This
was reassuring and later, a hunter friend told them
that this indicated it had been a lung shot, and
that the coyote could not have survived that. Beck
spent hours searching for the coyote’s body, but
never found it. She thought she should look up
lung shots on her computer to find out how quickly
the coyote would have died, but she could not bear
to search through pictures of wounded animals.
And so. . . no celebration. Relief, yes. No more
threatening, prowling, stalking coyote. Slammer
and Sophie were safe once again.
But these days, the chorus of the coyotes in the
arroyo just doesn’t sound the same anymore. n
Cenizo
Spring 2020
29