Coyote Wild

It was while traveling with my friend Jim along a highway outside of Taos, New Mexico, that I first caught a glimpse of him out the passenger side window. “Stop!” I yelled. “Turn around. Go back. There’s something I want to see.”

“What is it?” Jim asked, easing back on the gas, the car slowing. Jim, ten years older than I and in good physical shape, did most of the driving on our annual hiking adventure trips. I was grateful for the chance to sit back and take in all the scenery.

“I’m not sure…but it’s worth turning around. I promise.”

Jim circled around and drove back to a fence line along the east side of the two-lane road. The car stopped. I got out and sidestepped my way down into a five-foot ditch, up the other side, and through knee-high brush for a closer look. I heard Jim get out and follow behind me. The body shape-shifted, first into a deer, then into a wolf, then into itself. Coyote. He was big for his breed, thick-furred and healthy looking. There he hung, folded in two, his back haunch draped over one side of the barbed wire, the rest of his body—gut, chest, and head—folded down over the other side, hanging free, his nose six inches from the ground, tongue lopped over his lower lip in a caricature death scene. I bent down and looked into his golden-brown eyes. I saw only a lifeless, blank stare. It was quiet carnage with no sign of a struggle. A bloody pool beneath his nose had soaked into the dirt and left a red oxide stain. Dried crimson splotches dotted over yellow blooms of rabbit brush. His lush fur lay in rich waves of color over his back and down onto his tail, paws clean, black toe pads round and plump. It was like a taxidermy scene replicated to illustrate the dangerous life of a coyote.

I reached out and touched him. I felt like I was touching something sacred, but it also felt blasphemous, like reaching for something holy and wild that shouldn’t be disturbed. My finger met with furry rigor. Solid. He had been dead for a while. No bullet holes, no sign of any struggle. He was just hanging there, lifeless. I imagined how it had gone. At dusk he had left his den and trotted along through bristled thicket, stirring up sage, nose hovering low, picking up scent. He had not eaten for days. On the other side of the ravine, he caught sight of the hare. He crouched down and eased in for the kill. In a burst of dust, the rabbit leaped up, shot across the dirt, and zigzagged through the sagebrush. The coyote launched into full pursuit and the chase was on, first north through the thick sage, then west toward the highway. He’d seen the fence at the last minute, made a leap to clear it, but the barbed wire had done its job, and he was caught at the hip—the underside of vital organs, the back of his long strong body snapped to a stop, hind legs pawing with no purchase to free himself. The more he struggled, the deeper the wire pierced his tender parts. He must have died quickly, his spine snapping in two from trajectory force.

“Ready to get going?” Jim asked.

I jumped at the sound of his voice. I’d forgotten he was behind me. “No, wait a second,” I said. “I want to check him out some more.”

“It’s a dead coyote, GG,” he said, “there’s nothing you can do.”

“No, it’s more than that. I don’t know…”

Jim started walking back to the car, but I couldn’t turn away. I inspected the hairy fur, light tawny brown with deep brown tips. Behind the ears and over the forearms, the color changed to the red brown of the New Mexico landscape. The underside of his body was creamy white, the tip of the tail carbon black, all designed for camouflage to disappear into the variegated terrain. It was the paws that got to me. One crossed over the other in a peaceful gesture, anthropomorphic in a dead man’s pose. For a moment I wanted to cut off his tail, turn it into artwork as a keepsake of the find, but I couldn’t bring myself to disturb the beauty. He was too perfect, so Christ-like in his hip belt of thorns. Christ on the cross. Coyote on the fence.

This was his territory to run free and mark with scat on downed barbed wire fences. How could he have known a landowner had set a trap to thwart his rabbit chase, a barrier barely visible in the dim evening light? Doing what comes naturally, he got caught in a gut snare. The whole scene was horrific, tragic, captivating, and exhilarating—exquisite wildness stopped in midstride and hung up on the fence to die. It felt good to revere something, love something, hurt for it. It was the same love and hurt I felt for my own wild spirit. My life had become tame and conventional, and so predictable. Retirement had brought welcomed free time, but what had I filled it with? Routine. Gym workouts on Monday and Thursday. Laundry on Tuesday. Grocery shopping on Friday. Planning and teaching art classes most weekends. And way too much time in front of my laptop. Even the annual hiking trips with Jim were carefully planned out. I craved out of control, impulsive spontaneity. Where was that little girl who named herself “Warrior Princess” and smeared mud on her face and arms in the ravine across the street; the one who spent hours catching frogs and peering into their shiny, protruding, globular eyes? Was my wildness dead, too?

Over the next few nights, the coyote came to me in my dreams three times. In the first dream, I floated toward him, my feet not touching the ground. I poked at him, and he came to life, finished his jump over the fence, and ran away free. It felt exhilarating. In the second, I stood perplexed in front of a painting of a dead coyote on the fence that hung at an art gallery, wondering how someone had painted the exact same scene. In the third, I stood at the fence, and this time he turned his head, eyes riveted on me, and spoke in a low, haunting whisper: “Do you get it?”

Weeks later, back home in Oregon after the New Mexico vacation, the memory of the coyote had stayed with me. I sat in a dining room chair at breakfast, closed my eyes and felt emotions rise like an ocean wave. I wanted to shake things up and coax the animal inside me out into the meadow before it got sacrificed in a barbed wire trap of conventional limitation. The summer before, I could have worn feathers in my hair and joined ecstatic dance in the drum tower at the Oregon Country Fair. The rhythm filled my body, but I held back, reined it in, afraid I’d look like a silly old woman, afraid I would embarrass my kids, myself. Could have. But didn’t. Once, while painting on a giant canvas in an art class, I wanted to take off my clothes, cover my body in paint, then lie down and roll around on the canvas. I could have been that eccentric old lady who stripped down and used her body as a paintbrush in art class. Could have. But wasn’t. Not yet anyway.

A few months later, on a warm August day, I went down to my local art store and purchased a giant roll of canvas and six jars of tempera paint: blue, green, red, yellow, purple, and orange. I invited two artist friends to my studio, spread the canvas out on the floor, wall to wall. I opened the paints, placed a fat brush in each jar, then we slipped off our clothes and started in.