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When you start getting close to animals, close enough that they begin to ignore you, things become apparent that you don’t notice unless you’re in a blind or watching them from a distance through glasses. Little mannerisms appear, like how they cock their heads before they pounce, or the way their ears can droop when they realize they may be in trouble but don’t know where that trouble may be coming from. The personal characteristics that make that animal unique, a coyote acts like a coyote because of the very characteristics that make him one. If that sounds like a simple statement it is, some of this stuff isn’t that hard.

Sometimes those characteristics aren’t seen because you haven’t gotten close enough to them yet. Not close as in distance, close as in understanding. You have to put your time in and absorb everything he’s showing you. I had spent several hours or so with this guy as he wandered around near a campground in Yellowstone, sniffing the ground around the tables, watching for scraps, half-heartedly trying to catch a vole in the high grass and slowly using up the afternoon. The setting sun began turning everything gold and shimmery, the air got still and the shadows darkened preparing for twilight when something off in the distance made him suddenly aware. The easy-going behavior was suddenly gone. It could have been a grizzly, or worse, wolves, because wolves kill coyotes just because they’re coyotes, or perhaps just another coyote checking out his territory. Whatever it was it changed things.  He wasn’t just hanging out spending an afternoon anymore. Now things became different, more dangerous, as they do when night approaches and that brought out the serious side of being a coyote. It’s all about staying alive and getting to tomorrow so you can hunt again, feed the kids, spend time with the mate, the usual stuff.

This is one of those stories that doesn’t have an end, I never found out what was out of frame, or what the rest of the story was. But that happens a lot in life, you don’t always know the answers. I was just happy to be a small part of his day and I wasn’t really concerned with what was out there. Coyotes have been around for a long time and when things go wrong they have a habit of nearly always landing jam side up. It would be cool if we could mind-read though, wouldn’t it? I might have been a little untruthful there a moment ago when I said I didn’t care what was out there, I do, I would really, really like to know the rest of the story.