Upon a rock,
or in the bare middle
of the trail or asphalt,
I make one more claim
on everything I see.
I need no deed
when you’re asleep
or awake, I own
your dreams, always
skulking at the edge
of the picture frame
in your living room—
or just outside
marking your doorstep
as part of the circle
I keep clean. I go where I want
and damn-sure don’t need
a permit to sing.
Subject of several posts and some discussion last September (see: ‘coyote’ tagged below) while we were calving our first-calf heifers, we believe this skull is that of the big male coyote that killed at least one Wagyu-cross calf and ripped the ham of another.
Spencer Jensen (seen below flanking a calf, ‘Paregien 2011’) dispatched the coyote 10 days later, ending our calf losses to coyotes to date. Note the size of the canine teeth—over a ½ inch longer than the female coyote he shot on his way up the hill to help us brand. Thanks, Spencer, for all your help!
This Wagyu-cross calf, pictured on September 5th after a close call with a coyote, is healing well. Big Dog Gone.
Quarter ‘til eight before the sun shines
within the thin wedge of ridge and eave
across my desk, black ladies-in-waiting
on blond feed in the shadow of the hillside,
grazing a cool Sabbath higher, mothers
with babies close along the creek—like
last week, Spencer’s track in the canyon’s
cow trail dust after calling the big dog in.
I imagine the eerie squeals of distress,
forty-five minutes of edging closer
to the decoy, suspicious and curious
just before changing his taste for veal.
Gray and purple dawn, broken clouds,
thin edges lit ash-white press heavily
from the outside—beyond the bear
and coyote collecting tax along the creek,
cleaning-up and taking shares of new life,
feeding on the hapless and innocent
lying flat in the grass. This air is thick
with fear, fetid breath held too long
circling the planet, creating its own
climate of thunder and fire. No perfect
world without predators and casualties—
without the friction of nature’s humans.
Since my early a.m.post, I’ve fed the 1st-calf heifers, finding the lucky calf above. Coyotes go for the hamstring. The calf must have bawled and the young cows ran him off. The girls were understandably nervous this morning. My coyote with a ‘taste for veal’ is obviously still around.
I try to leave the coyotes alone except for calving time, not liking the killing of anything anymore, believing that too much pressure on the local population will only produce bigger litters and more fertile females in the future. Though inconsistent, I think my process becomes more seasonal and individually selective.
Since posting ‘A Taste for Veal’, I haven’t seen a coyote. Somehow, the word is out. I do see a few tracks padded overnight, over the Kubota’s on my rounds, but none of the inquisitiveness of pups drawn to the scent of afterbirth. Assuming the rifle shots have been associated with the sound of the Kubota, they’ve kept their distance the past three days. Even nighttime serenades have decreased from choruses to duets and trios.
With some perspective, perhaps the coyote’s boldness or its lack of respect for humans spawned my lasting anger. I am these heifers’ provider, protector and midwife, if need be. Perhaps with better timing I might have saved the calf. But it is what it is: a less than attentive mother who’ll not make the cowherd—pretty as she is. But she’s not alone, some didn’t breed, a few aborted or produced stillborn calves. Around the first of December when we brand, we’ll make a sort for town, not wanting to perpetuate these genetics. It’s why we keep so many heifers, knowing we’ll always have some to help pay the pasture rent.
My attitude and behavior towards coyotes evolves a little each fall during calving time, when they’re all fair game in my crosshairs. Some die and some understand to move on to less risky places. With plenty of ground squirrels, rodents and crippled game from hunters and poachers, they are not starving, not forced to kill calves. I want the ones that have a taste for veal.
Nostrils full of Hoppes #9, I am surprised when Robbin closes me into the office. I can’t smell anything else, not its combined scent with WD 40 and 3-in-1 Oil wafting throughout the house. Too long postponed, I’m cleaning rifles, still angry over the Wagyu calf we lost yesterday.
Zach & I fed the heifers about 8:30, short in a suspect count on the east side of the creek. We fed the bulls and replacement heifers down the road, then got back to the house about 11:00. I left in the Kubota to get another count and to check on the heifer with new calf at the north end of the pasture, having spotted a young coyote nearby when we fed. Though open to the hillsides, the heifers are calving along a mile and a half stretch of the creek.
There were four pairs nursing across from the house when I left the driveway to check on the heifer and calf. Getting a count on my way back, I approached where the pairs had been, when a big coyote jumped up from the creek ahead of me, running across the flat towards the steep slope. I rationalized that my two misses from dirty barrel and dusty scope, long shots half-way up the hillside, were at the least, fair-warning and educational. I finished my count and was driving home when I spotted the motionless form of a calf on the green bank, head downhill, across the creek. I whistled twice. Nothing.
Within the thirty minutes I was up the road, the 1st calf heifers had finished nursing and left to clean-up the last stems of alfalfa hay, about a 100 yards away. Without a babysitter, without a sound, the coyote killed a week-old calf. I inspected it, a hole for a hindquarter as the meat bees swarmed. No mother around.
A few hours later on my way back from errands in Exeter, I identified the heifer standing vigil over the carcass. I recorded her tag number and went to the house, angrier. Certainly not our first calf lost to coyotes, I could picture the thick-bodied male in the scope, broadside, head high, cocky and aloof on the hillside. I began imagining, piecing together what went down, giving him human attributes—I hated the SOB and wanted retribution. No clever trickster, just a bold thief stealing what might have been an $850-calf next May.
Initially, I was going to haul the carcass up the canyon, but as she continued to bawl beside the calf into evening, I left it, hoping all the new mothers on both sides of the road might hear her complaint all night and pay closer attention to their calves. But I thought it strange when shortly after dark, her bawling was moving farther away.
This morning the carcass was gone. After several circles, I found no drag marks in the dry grass within a hundred yards, no bones, no hide. Whatever packed it off, picked it up. Even the feral hogs would have left something. The second suspect in this grizzly caper: a small bear that has been working up and down the creek these past few weeks.
He falls out of canyons cut between the steep
hills to the dry-grass shadows of sycamores
to watch the new calves nurse and play
themselves to sleep on short-cropped green
along the creek, waiting until first-time mothers
leave to graze. All the world is good to fresh
pastoral dreams, as the big dog meanders
among them, touches noses, tears a hamstring
holds and muffles a short cry in its throat.
Half-way up the hill, he looks back, full
of himself and the heavy half-a-hip in his belly
as the dirt flies, as a swarm of yellow meat bees
takeover before the heifer returns. She stands
vigil, trying to bawl her baby back to life
and follows as he drags it off into the night.
Rifle asleep in its case under the seat,
he reads me through the windshield –
winter coat at dawn alone, calves
too big to bring him down – now,
squirrel towns busy cleaning burrows
after rain. Free in February to fill
the seams, he reinvents our deserted
homesteads as we move closer to more
comfort and speed – front door jam
his scent post, our rusty bucket, home
for mice. He lopes the other way,
laughs over his shoulder, going back.
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