Coyotes!

The morning was fresh and cool after a day and night of rain; everything was washed clean. The air smelled medicinal, like hospital visits when I was a kid. It wasn’t a pine smell. Was it the red-barked manzanita bushes? They were everywhere.

I rubbed a tiny leaf between my fingers and smelled them but couldn’t detect any odor.

“I need to learn the names of all these plants and what they can do,” I told myself for the millionth time.

I could see the clouds settling on the mountains around us and surprised myself by actually looking forward to our morning walk. Scout, hooked to the van with the long, cable tie-out, whined in excitement when she saw me lace up my hiking boots. She knew what that meant.

“Okay,” I said to her, unhooking her collar and letting her loose. “Let’s go.”

I love walking with her free of the lead, running ahead and smelling every bush and pine cone, stopping to wait for me and then running ahead again. The light in her eyes is unmistakable then: she is in her element, pure happiness.

Suddenly Scout lunged forward, barking like a much bigger dog, ferocious. What did she see?

I looked up and saw it loping casually away, inviting Scout to follow:

Credit: Wikipedia

A coyote!

“SHIT!” I yelled, scrambling to unloose the long tie-out from the van’s rear-view mirror. “SCOUT! COME HERE!”

She stopped and looked back at me. Thank God!

I knew that coyotes lured dogs away by sending one of them out and then, when the dog was too far for its human to save it, attacking with the whole pack. Even big dogs don’t stand a chance.

A twin coyote, grey and beautiful like a small wolf, emerged from the bushes in our campsite, not thirty feet away..

“FUCK,” I screamed. A pack! “SCOUT!!!”

I ran toward her with the tangled tie-out, hooking her collar and breathing a huge sigh of relief as the two wild animals sauntered casually up the gravel road in the direction we normally  walked.

We’ll be back, they seemed to say.

Scout growled deep, hackles raised, and woofed triumphantly after them. She pulled at the lead, proud of herself, clearly thinking she had chased the coyotes away.

Get the hell out of here!

“Holy shit!” I tried to catch my breath for several minutes, until my racing heart calmed down.

We were ready for our walk but the coyotes had taken our usual route, turning left, uphill. Who knew what waited for us that way? We turned right.

“Sorry, Scout,” I told her, “but you are never going off-leash again.”

We were both on high alert as we explored the downhill road, scanning the hill on both sides for movement. Were they stalking us? Only the occasional raven or woodpecker drew our gaze.

Later, we drove down to the campground where my friends, Linda and Silvianne are camp hosts. I told them what happened. They weren’t surprised.

“The maintenance man lost his dog a few days ago,” said Linda. “Coyotes grabbed it right in camp.”

Silvianne joined in.

“A whole pack of them came through this campground last week. They’re not like they used to be. Humans don’t scare them any more.”

“I know a woman in Arizona who had nine dogs,” said Linda. “Now she has three.”

I returned to my camp, properly warned. The thought of my baby girl being torn apart for lunch chilled me to the bone. What I needed was a way to defend Scout if — when — they came back.

“Yell real loud,” Linda had advised. “Wave your arms. Make yourself big.”

But I wanted to be armed with something more impressive than my voice and body. Then I remembered the air horn. I had bought it in Cottonwood last year after hiking alone and realizing a mountain lion could be lurking nearby. After stealth camping in the city for the past few months, I’d forgotten all about it.

I dug the small aerosol can out of my ‘junk’ drawer and tried a quick blast to make sure it still worked. Scout, on her front-seat bed, jerked up and stared at it in alarm. My ears rang.

“No worries,” I told her. “You’ve got protection now.”