the gravel road before grinding to a halt. A second later he was out the door, plucking up a .22 rifle he kept behind the seat. Dust from the road rained down around him. The coyote heard all this and yawned, displaying rows of little razor teeth. It looked indolent and dreamy with the mist rising all around it.
He took his time, balancing the rifle on the truck bed. If the coyote had not cast one backward glance as it trotted away, it might have escaped into the tallgrass. But the rifle made a small barking cough, and the animal went down. He reloaded while the boy stepped out of the passenger side and followed him into the meadow.
The coyote was a handsome creature with shimmering bronzed fur and round dark eyes and breathed as though in its mind it was still running. It lay on its side in the tallgrass, and the air around them smelled of musk and blood and its terror. The coyote’s breathing shallowed. “Aren’t you going to finish it off?” Seth asked. He held himself and shivered even though it was a strangely warm spring day.
“It’ll be dead soon enough.”
“Why’d you have to shoot it? I was only showing you where it was.”
“Because,” he said. At first the words didn’t come right. Why? Because, that was the way of things. No farmer going back to the beginning of time could allow such animals to threaten his living. So he told Seth about summer nights when the ranch house windows were open to allow in a breeze. How his mother couldn’t sleep for the sound they made. It stirred her up, that eerie howling. He told him about the calves being born in spring and how the coyotes were always there in the morning licking the birthing fluids from the blood-streaked ground, ghost shapes that were gone again before he could raise a gun. While he told him, he could see it in his mind’s eye, a primal scene: cattle tonguing the afterbirth from their calves while coyotes slunk nearby, waiting to drink the rich placental blood from the grass. “Parasites,” he said. “Little ravenous wolves. At least now there is one less of them.”
Seth’s face had gone pale. His features weren’t set yet, the bones shifting in his face as if what he would become was still being written. Seth knelt in the grass next to the coyote. It was a female, the heavy dugs showing on her stomach. “Why do you think she didn’t run?” he said, and when Grizz had no answer he asked her softly, “Why didn’t you run?”
He reached out one hand to stroke her fur.
“Don’t touch it,” Grizz warned, but she was too wounded to do more than growl with what menace remained in her, her black gums peeling back to reveal long incisors pink with froth. One filmy eye fixed him, and then she went still.
Grizz put his hand on Seth’s shoulder and started to say something when a noise caught his attention. A sound on the hill above where there should have been only silence. Seth jumped up and went ahead of him. She had died not far from a granite boulder ringed by a thicket of sumac. Seth pushed through the branches and reached in. From the dark hole where the coyote had made her den mewling cries echoed. Her kit, probably born just a few weeks before.
“Stop,” he commanded Seth. “Don’t you go any nearer.”
Seth’s back went rigid, but he didn’t turn around at the sound of his voice.
“You go on back down to the truck and wait for me there.”
He gave just the faintest shake of his head.
“You don’t want to see this kind of work, but it has to be done. It’s the only thing we can do.”
When Seth did turn around his eyes were hard and glittering. “No,” he said. “I won’t let you.” He clenched his fist, the wind rustling his baggy jacket. In the distance a red-winged blackbird sang out in warning, hearing them on the hill above. From this vantage point Grizz could see the farm and the stretch of black fields. They would need to take out the spreader now that the manure was no longer frozen, clean out a winter’s worth of mess from the barns and fertilize the fields. A long day’s work, but the boy would get to pilot the Bobcat in and out of the barn, and he loved driving it. Grizz was anxious to