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“Many a time I had lain in bed in the old stone house and listened to what sounded like a pack of coyotes in full chase, envisioning them sweeping down across meadows and over ridges as, by sheer numbers they swarmed over and engulfed much larger prey. It was an eerie, chilling sound, one that had struck many a rancher before me with sickening apprehension. At the first light of dawn I was always relieved to see cattle grazing peacefully on the meadows, mares nursing their foals, with nary a sign that the terror of the night had ever been.
It took Jack and Viola to set me straight. One morning as I lay abed, watching the first light of dawn make sense of the patterns on the curtains, transforming weird shapes and nighttime dinosaurs into commonplace household furnishings, I heard a wild outcry from the direction of the coyote run. It was the same frightening sound I’d heard so many times before– a huge pack of coyotes rapt in a hysterical orgy of killing.
Hoping to save whatever it was the pack was pursuing, I leapt from bed and ran naked across the meadow. Near the spring house I stopped short in amazement. Every bit of that savage chorus was emanating from Jack and Viola. Instead of a pack in full chase, there were only two coyotes, sitting under their big pine tree, noses tilted to the sky, having a whale of a good time.
It made me wonder how many coyotes in the past had been blamed for what sounded as though they were doing, and how man ranchers had taken the time to track down that wild chorus to see what the coyotes were actually up to. In the future I will listen to that music for what it is, just one more movement in the rich and varied coyotes symphony.”
–Dayton O. Hyde, Don Coyote (Available from our
web site: www.daytonohyde.com)