Coyotes, Keepers of the Keys

Yesterday I walked down to the Pacific Grove Natural History Museum; I was going to listen to an expert talk about coyotes. 

The lecture was to be free (donations welcomed of course), it was at 2 PM, the middle of a glorious sunny day, a Saturday.  The room filled fast, but all the attendees were middle-aged folk, some even elderly; none were younger than, say, 40 or so.  Granted, Pacific Grove is a town of citizens who are mostly enjoying their Golden Years, but I still wondered why they were the only attendees in evidence.  I had heard about it by reading the local daily.  Nonreaders would have missed the notice if they were foregoing the morning paper and simply relying on Tweeting or Facebook.  I began to think of hikes, walks, camping trips, rides and river trips - occasions when I was in the middle of natural wilderness areas for extended periods of time.  It looked like the audience had, in their day, been held willing captive in the same sorts of areas as I had - wildnerness - and looked deep into the eyes of creatures there.  Creatures like coyotes. 

It was abundantly clear that the room was filled with animal-adoring, passionate, heart-warmed people who were committed to heroic rescue of any and all species.  I overheard conversations about Animal Friends Rescue Project, SPCA, Marine Sanctuary rescue programs and more.  They looked wizened and unconcerned with the likes of Brittney Spears or any other tragicomic starlet fed upon by consumers of "media."  Mostly, they appeared to be there to recapture memories of wilderness encounters with wild things. 

My mind wandered off to a trail I'd been walking along when I was in my 20s.  It was early morning, and there was still dew on the meadow grasses.  Red-winged blackbirds were waking up as the sun began its arch overhead from the distant horizon; they made a dry "shhhhharrrr-ick" back and forth.  It was summer and I was at Garland Regional Park in Carmel Valley, a few miles west of the village.  The Carmel River that runs along its northeastern boundary was at a trickle, but the willows and riparian brush smelled very fragrant and sweet, soaked in sage and sycamore. 

My eye caught a little movement off to my right in the distance, but when making a determined scan of the scene, I missed the thing that had moved.  So, I stood still and waited for awhile.  Then, seeing what had been there all along in the trail ahead of me, I felt a smile creep across my face, and what I always experience as a shock of recognition of something familiar but distant and exotic.  A coyote was standing at a three-quarter angle to the trail, looking at me intently, its large ears cocked like twin peaked cups.  The eyes of the animal were tan and clear, intelligent, and its fur was brushy, tinged with black, free flowing, thick with finely shaded tans and browns. 

The coyote trotted away, slipping into the thicket of brush that darkened the river bank with a graceful lift of its tail.  But before it turned and disappeared, away from me and my human-ness, it gave me a steady look, sizing me up and judging me unsafe, cause for alarm.  What I saw in its eyes and then felt in my being as I watched it watching me was its nearness to its origin, its mysterious wild life.  It conveyed a lightness of being to me in its gaze, its carriage, its assumption of power in the moment.  Truly unfettered by the constructs of regulated society, this small dog-like animal seemed both to beckon to me and dismiss me as unworthy of its presence.  "Wait!" was all I could think. 

I felt separated from the coyote world and dulled by the disconnection from it, frustrated to be so.  The coyote, in all its rufous furryness, its trotting solitude, ear-perked keen alertness, was looking at me from the distant edge of a wide chasm, across which we have stepped and not returned.  Choosing frozen dinners and plastic wrap, we reek of them.  We have, to our detriment, given up the keys to the kingdom that the coyote still holds, and now - except for the devoted few who strive to reclaim those keys - we plod clumsily and with near blindness across the landscape.  Occasionally we blunder into an encounter with a song-dog coyote and a glimmer of recognition of what we used to be - alive on the earth.  Now we are agnostic; we have no knowledge anymore as people; we are not wild; we are not free. 

Look for coyotes, bobcats, deer, and watch them watching us, but keep them wild because they are far more important when they are wild, not human, untamed and free.  We once were as they are still; if they are ensnared and brought to ruin, we will be more so than ever before.