so I dig the problem. Still, what can I do about it?"
"Perhaps you can interview the survivors."
With that he steps back, braces his long legs, and lifts his head until his snout points at the moon. An unearthly howl punctuated by a series of yips emerges from between those awesome teeth.
So it is that in a few moments I am making house calls on a series of coyote families. While my guide has not stuck around for the painstaking interviews, soon an unsavory picture is emerging: the victims were indeed primo survivors, too savvy to be silently slain in the current manner.
I speak to Sings-with-Soul, the winsome widow of Yellow Foot-Feathers, the first to be found dead.
I no more advocate cross-species hanky-panky than I do bug-biting, but I must admit that Sings-with-Soul has particularly luminous amber eyes and a dainty turn of foreleg, from what I can tell in the dark.
After several interviews, I remain in the dark myself. Unfortunately, although they sometimes run in impressive packs, coyotes mostly hunt alone. The stories are depressingly similar.
Yellow Foot-Feathers did not return to the den after a night's prowl. When Sings-with-Soul left her kits with a friend to go searching, she followed his scent to find him dead, unmarked by any weapon, beside a stunted Joshua tree.
Sand Stalker was out rounding up a delicacy or two for his mate, Moonfinder, and their two helpless kits. In the morning, his body was found a three-minute trot toward the setting sun from Yellow Foot-Feathers'.
Windswift, a two-year-old female, died a four-minute trot away two days later. The same distance further on lay Weatherworn, an elder of the tribe and by far its wiliest member.
"We are used to the high death toll of our kind," Sings-with-Soul tells me with mournful anger, "but these deaths are systematic beyond the bounty hunters' traps and poison, or the so-called sportsmen with guns, or even the angry ranchers who accuse us of raiding their livestock."
I nod. It is not a pretty picture, and I am used to the statistics of my own kind who share the supposed shelter of civilization. Four out of five cuddly kittens born die within a year, often within the environs of a death compound. Still, there is something demonic about these serial slayings. Even in the dark I sense a pattern.
By the wee hours I have settled beside a Prickly Poppy, counting on my choice of plant companion to keep away such night-roving characters as skunks, large furry spiders who are older than Whistler's mother, lizards and snakes, although I would not mind meeting a passing mouse or two, for it has been some time since my last snack.
The coyotes have vanished back into the brush. From time to time they break into heartbroken howls that some might take for the usual coyote chorus, but which I know express rage and sorrow at their helplessness to stop the slaughter.
I wait for daylight, eager to begin investigating for real. My curiosity has been roused, despite myself. As long as I am all the way out here in this desolate wilderness, I might as well earn my tempting coyote cache and maybe keep the young Foot-Feathers kits from the same fate as their father.
Despite the desert chill and forbidding terrain, I manage to doze off. I awake to feel the sun pouring down on me like hot, melted butter, softening my night-stiff bones.
I hear an odd tapping sound, as of someone gently rapping, rapping on a door to rouse me. Confused, I force my eyelids open, preparing for an onslaught of bright light.
In the sudden slit of my pupils I see a sight to curl the hair on a bronze cat—a whole city, a settlement, of buildings against the blatant blue morning sky. I sniff sawdust and stucco. I see pale pine skeletons rising into the sky.
I turn so fast I snag my rear member on a Prickly Poppy. Behind me extends the endless desert I imagined in the dark of last night when I interviewed the coyote crew. Did not their lost ones fall near where we stood, where I stand now?
I turn back to the hub of activity. A banshee saw whines while men with bandannas around their foreheads and sleeveless t-shirts or bare muscled chests as tan as a Doberman move their blue-jeaned legs hither and yon, climbing, pounding, clamoring.
Stunned, I stick to basics. A three-minute trot toward the setting sun. I turn westward and start trotting, allowing for a difference in speed and