Writer’s Note: This the fifth chapter of Elizabeth Cady Coyote. You can find the first chapter (FREE) by going to alanstark1@substack.com and scrolling down to January 1.
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Elizabeth Cady Coyote sits in front of her den in the early morning. The cool air drops down through Left Hand Canyon, flows over the hogback in north Boulder, and ruffles her brown-buff summer coat.
The kids are out hunting with their dad, and will be gone most of the day and possibly into the evening. She and her family used to hunt right here in the neighborhood until the city of Boulder captured most of the prairie dogs and murdered the holdouts.
She sniffed the cool breeze and caught a whiff of smoke. She was startled by the smell but remembered that some drifters from Alabama who were camping on private property up near Nederland didn’t put out their campfire, and 2,000 people had to evacuate their homes. Ned is 15 miles from her den as the crow flies, but fire is one of the many threats coyotes live with.
She settled down again and thinks more about the prairie dog species cleansing and diaspora. “So bears knock over garbage cans and break into houses. Is the city going to ban bears? God knows how many bears are killed every year because they are repeat offenders. When are they going to ban coyotes? We tend to harass and even bite people during mating season. We don’t do much damage, maybe hunt and eat a cat or two, but who really cares about cats? And we’re doing the birds a favor because cats kill birds for sport. And the occasional dachshund? Let’s be honest, you really have to be hungry to eat a dachshund. Where does it all stop?”
Cady is getting fired up and starts to pace. “Hell, all the critters have been up here since the beginning of time. Well, maybe that’s a little extreme, but we were certainly here before the Ute and Arapaho came up here to loll around during the summer, hunting, fishing, and making babies.”
Now she rants the way she does when she’s had enough roughhousing and noise and wants My Old Man and the kids out of the den. “So if the city can toss out critters as being undesirable, can they toss out people too? Look where they put the homeless shelter, right on the north edge of town. Like maybe homeless people will get the hint and leave town?
“And when the Google-heads take over the town are they going to remove all the old people like my chubby friend Writer?”
Cady is in a real snit now thinking about her friends. Coyotes take friendship seriously. They mate for life; they keep their friends for life. Loyalty is high up in the Coyote Creed.
She stands, shakes, and then swings her body in a circle looking at the sky for raptors. Raptors can’t kill an adult coyote, but they are murder on pups. She is always careful, but seeing no feathered threats, she trot downhill from the den. She starts her run slowly over open terrain, carefully watching for critter holes, rocks, and the occasional rattlesnake.
“Fucking rattlesnakes,” she mumbles, “You’d think they’d have something better to do than try to bite a coyote. I mean look at all the clueless runners and walkers and particularly mountain bikers on the trail. Bite one of them. Bite a mountain biker, they are often dumb and always particularly useless.”
It is mid-morning on the Wonderland Trail below the hogback. Being a Saturday, the trail is moderately busy with walkers checking out the wildflowers or talking on their phones, annoying to everyone around them. The runners are fighting fat and other demons with exercise, and the mountain bikers are out to conclusively prove that common sense and some sports are antithetical.
Cady uses established trails on night hunts but during the day she mostly bushwhacks, thinking that she controls what goes on when she is off trail. On an established trail, a dog with no common sense or a mountain biker with less common sense can come out of nowhere.
Near the dogleg pitch that comes up out of Wonderland Lake she stops a hundred yards off the trail and sits to watch people go by. She does her National Geographic