Coyote sighting

[altivo]

Last night on the road from Elgin to West Dundee, where it passes through a forest preserve, we saw a coyote. I think it's the first time I've ever seen one outside a zoo that wasn't dead.

It was dark and misty. He/she was scavenging alongside the road, and my headlights picked out the form, the ears, the fact that it was not a dog quite clearly. I've been told many times that coyotes are becoming more common in our area despite increasing human population, and apparently this is true. They adapt well under pressure.

No sign of them on our farm, our sheep have not been bothered. But several times this last fall and winter I have seen deer carcasses along the roads, invariably picked clean to the bones. The deer have undoubtedly been hit and killed or at least seriously injured by vehicles, and the coyotes are cleaning up the remains.

Comments

[animist.livejournal.com]

I remember seeing three coyotes around daybreak in the spring of 1995, crossing the interstate. This was on a stretch of I-64 between New Albany and Corydon Indiana, in the country. It was a very profound experience for me. That was when I was still an Atheist and a Humanist. I did not know anything about animals then, having disconnected myself emotionally and intellectually from the animism of my youth.

I thought they were wolves. I knew intuitively they were NOT dogs. They did not move like dogs. They moved liked ghosts from the past! They moved as a military patrol would move in enemy territory, which is right, because we humans are the enemy. They watched the cars and timed their crossing around them. They also walked in a military style with excellent posture and gait, not lopping along haphazardly like a dog. And they appeared to uniform for dogs, the same height and coloration. In seeing them for me there was this immediate sense of identification. They were in the right place, there in nature; I was in the wrong place in the car. They were sacred warriors, on a mission to find food for their pack. I was a wheel in the technology machine, on the way to a battery factory filled with toxic chemicals. I suddenly knew something was very wrong with my life as it was at that moment. They were wild and free, I was domesticated and I was not free.

The coyotes scouted out my heart, and found barren territory. It would be another six months before the wolves came spontaneously to me in lucid dreams. Ten years since I saw the coyotes, and like ghosts, they still haunt me.

Thanks for reminding me of them! I didn't mean to write a book! shall post this essay on my own live journal, too.