Were in the City

The distant sound of a siren woke Jessie briefly in the early morning. Almost immediately the yips and wails of the pack answered back. It only took a couple of minutes for the ambulance to rush by on the highway below the hill and then everything settled down again, the soft background hum of a sleeping city soothing her back to sleep.

As she showered in the morning she thought back on the number of voices she'd heard from the pack. It was growing again. There had to have been at least 8, maybe 10, individuals sounding off in the darkness. She'd spent most of her life in the area, the pack had grown and shrunk many times, occasionally even seemed to disappear for a while, but the urban coyotes always returned.

It was a perfect spot for them within the private golf course situated right next to the city cemetery. An oasis of many large evergreen trees, year-round water features and sheltered hiding spots surrounded by all the buildings and activities of a major west-coast metropolitan area. There was a high chain-linked fence that ran all the way around the property but it was old and suffering from neglect. Covered by overgrown bushes, bent and twisted from years of falling trees, there were various spots where wildlife could move in and out of the golf course into the cemetery and the neighbourhoods beyond.

The front of her house faced the golf course across the street; the cemetery was at the end of her block. The whole area was home to multitudes of birds, squirrels, skunks, raccoons, voles, moles, an occasional bobcat, and one year even a bear wandered through. Plenty of wild prey for coyotes. Jessie just wished more of her neighbours would stop letting their house cats wander outside alone - the large number of "missing cat" posters plastered around the area a testament to the hunting skills of the pack.

Jessie had had face-to-face encounters with coyotes a number of times each year since she and her parents had moved into the neighbourhood 25 years ago. They were active during the day as well as the night and not particularly shy about being seen, but smart enough to be fearful of people and would run when she made loud noises or threw small stones at them. When she was younger the coyotes she'd seen were scrawny and rather mangy looking. Lately though, they'd looked bigger, healthier, stronger - but still backed off when she asserted herself.

Last July, while she was placing some flowers on her parents' graves in the cemetery, she'd looked up to see an unusually large coyote sitting on its haunches watching her from the trees. As she stared at it, a second equally large one rose up from where it was lying on its side to sit beside the first. That was something new. Jessie had rarely seen two together, and when she had it was usually an older one with a younger one, and always on the move, never two mature adults just sitting there watching. She'd walked home, watching over her shoulder the entire time to make sure she wasn't being followed, and decided to set up her wildlife camera again, this time in the front yard, to see what might be going on around her property.

Jessie left the camera up into October, checking the content of its memory card at least once a week. During the day the camera caught all the usual things - lots of squirrels and raccoons, cars going by, people walking & jogging, dog walkers, her butt while she gardened or cut the grass. It was the thermal images taken at night that were the most fascinating. Still lots of raccoons and skunks, more owls than she'd expected, and wow ... a lot more coyote activity than she'd ever seen before.

Every night, a number of individuals ran past the camera, mostly going down the road away from the cemetery. Every few nights, one or two would stop in her front yard to scent the grass following an invisible trail, and even sit or lie down for a while. Comparing the images, it seemed to be the biggest ones who hung around her yard at night. It took a few weeks until it occurred to her that they were lying in spots where she'd been kneeling to weed the flower beds. They were scenting and following her. Was that normal? She didn't know.

Things changed in the weeks around Halloween. The neighbourhood kids started shooting off fireworks, especially the ones with the big BANG explosion, which made everyone, humans and wild critters alike, horribly on edge. The camera picked up nothing but a few cars at night. About 2:00am Halloween night Jessie's garbage cans, put out for morning pickup, exploded with a series of big BANGs. Jumping out of bed she heard peals of laughter and the sound of running feet. Her garbage bins were shredded and there was a mess all over the road. She'd had a long day at work and really needed some sleep, so she reset her alarm to rise an hour earlier than normal to clean it up and went back to bed. The little shits would be caught on the camera and she'd find a way to make them regret what they'd done!

Her alarm went off at 5:00am. Groaning, she pulled herself out of bed and looked out the window. The mess was completely cleaned up and there were two new garbage cans sitting at the curb. Had they come back and cleaned up themselves? Someone had been so very kind to deal with it. She looked for a note but found nothing, so she pulled the camera's memory card to find out what had happened.

The camera had recorded the kids, four of them in their late teens, and she recognized two of them. Ha! But then things got weird. One of the big coyotes appeared. In a series of images, it walked right up to the camera and smeared its face against the lens. All images after that were useless. The motion sensitive camera kept taking pictures every 15 seconds for about half an hour, so Jessie knew something was moving around, but no way to know who or what was going on. About 4am, there was another set of useless pictures for 5 minutes, then nothing more. She asked various neighbours if they'd helped her out, and asked the kids when she'd confronted them, but nobody could tell her who had done so.

For the next month, something kept attacking the camera. Jessie moved it various times, attaching it to different trees at different heights but it made no difference - something would come up from behind it unseen and thus unrecorded, its lens would get messed up, the strap holding it up would get pulled or chewed apart and she'd find it face down on the ground. Finally it disappeared altogether. WTF??!!

It was now late December, New Year's Eve. It was a hard time of year emotionally for Jessie. Her father had died suddenly of a stroke December 21 five years ago. Her mother had passed 10 years ago in early January. An only child, the holidays were not jolly for her and she kept mostly to herself. She had inherited the house, and decided to keep it because it was so close to work and she loved the garden, but it was lonely to be the only one living in it. Jessie opened up a bottle of sparkling wine to toast the new year, as she and her parents had always done, and over the next few hours unfortunately drank the whole thing herself.

She listened to the fireworks and the calls of "Happy New Year" echoing through the neighbourhood at midnight, then sat down in a chair by the living room window and drifted off to sleep. She awoke a few hours later, stiff and cold, and got up to go to bed. For a few minutes she stood in the dark looking through the curtains at the front yard. She had bought herself one present this year - a new wildlife camera - and had mounted it within a padlocked box carefully attached with long heavy screws on a post in the yard. She was about to turn away when movement on the road caught her eye. It was a coyote, a large one.

It moved into the yard and sat for a moment, moving its head around, then got up and continued down the road. Jessie took a breath and then froze. The coyote was coming back, this time slinking along the side of the house below the window, out of sight of the camera. It walked up behind the post.

The next morning Jessie wasn't sure if it was because she'd been incredibly drunk for the first time in her life, or almost asleep on her feet, or both - but she seemed to think she'd seen a large coyote change into tall, very fit, well-endowed naked man who with his bare hands ripped the locked camera box off the pole and threw it deep into the bushes across the road. Yeah, right ... OMG, her hangover was awful, she could hardly focus through eyes that would barely open. No way did she see such a thing. And no way did he turn and look right at her as she stared at him, looking startled for a second before shaking his head, putting a finger to his lips, folding himself back into a coyote and running off down the road.