The Dogs of Winter

"Keep it pointed at that pine tree on the hillside." Instructions given, Dad hopped out of the pickup as it idled along in first gear, the transfer case locked in low. He knew his job, I knew mine. Kneeling on the front seat, I tugged mightily at the wheel of the chugging three-quarter-ton to maintain my bearing on the landmark evergreen. Back on the bed, my father cut twine from flaky green bales of alfalfa, then kicked them off to a bellowing herd of black cattle.

It was February. Already the first fuzzy calves were tottering after their mothers, although on this cold day they snuggled on a mat of bedding straw we'd strewn on the snow the previous morning.

Suddenly, without warning, a gloved hand shot in the window and twisted off the ignition. Before the pickup ground to a sputtering halt, Dad wrestled open the door. As I watched spellbound, he slid a rifle from the gun rack on the back window. With the hood for a rest, he aimed the long-barreled .220 Swift at something in a brushy draw that seemed an impossibly distant range to a five-year-old boy.

The crisp morning air reverberated with the sound of the rifle. "Got it," exclaimed the shooter as he ejected a glinting brass casing from the bolt-action. I still hadn't identified the target.

We walked together through the snow toward the ravine. I wanted to ask what he shot but couldn't bear to display my ignorance. Some 200 paces from the pickup, Dad stooped over a sagebrush. Tentatively at first, then with enthusiasm, I stroked the long guard hairs of a silky Montana coyote.

Over the next decade my knowledge of the stockman versus predator conflict deepened. One desperately cold morning we came upon a newborn calf with a hindquarter grotesquely slashed by the fangs of a coyote. I could easily identify the white, bulbous tissue surrounding the hip joint. The calf survived, but others didn't. Although our actual livestock losses to coyotes were quite small, every dollar counted in a depressed agricultural economy. If killing a dozen coyotes saved a calf and brought a hundred dollars for the pelts, what rancher wouldn't pull the trigger?

I'm no longer at war with coyotes, perhaps because my bread and board is no longer tied to the welfare of a herd of cows. My perspective on the clever canines, and their killing, has changed as well. In any reasonable analysis, a coyote is not a devilish, gratuitous killer of livestock and wildlife. This intelligent, agile canis species is actually a fascinating and miraculously endowed creature. Their sometimes eerie, sometimes euphonic, howls lend music to the midnight air.

Their nearly supernatural sense of smell is perhaps unequaled in the animal kingdom--I once saw a coyote turn purposefully from its trail, trot the distance of a city block, then scratch a weathered bone from frozen soil. "Quick as a striking snake" is an oft-quoted description of explosive speed, yet a coyote can dart in to sever the vertebrae of a prairie rattler in midstrike. Like other fur-covered wonders of the natural world, the coyote has an ordained role to fill in the great drama of nature, a principle that would-be exterminators of canine predators would do well to remember.

Nonetheless, the humane hunting of foxes and coyotes is an ethically and biologically sound practice. In a world indelibly altered by humans, our kind is left to "manage" all species of wildlife, predator and prey alike. Left unchecked, exploding predator bases can inflict considerable destruction to populations of elk, deer, pheasants and grouse.