They’ve been singing me the song of their people fairly close to the cabin for the past few nights. I’ve got tinnitus real bad and am pretty much deaf to high-pitched sounds so I can’t hear them when I’m indoors. But Tobie sure can, and he reacts by rushing around and barking at all the windows no matter the hour of night it happens to be. I put up with it because, well, if he has a job that’s pretty much it and I can’t complain that he does it.
But this morning during the morning walkie the whole chorus cut loose with a big crescendo just as we got to the top of the ridge, and Tobie’s reaction was … well, we’ll politely leave it out of the scrapbook. It’ll just be between him and me and everybody who reads this that, unprotected by the Lair’s walls, he immediately wanted to take his morning dump and then ditch the rest of the walkie to get back inside the Lair’s walls. As soon as possible if you please, Uncle Joel.
This has the makings of a Jack London story….
Btw, are coyote pelts worth tanning?
Don’t know. Probably.
He knew when he was outnumbered. Can’t blame him for that.
A few dead ones around the property will tell them they are not welcome.
Pelts – not anymore. Tough to process correctly with fur on. Commercial processing folks had it down though. Before they banned trapping in AZ a good (winter) coat was $50 to $100 pre-processing, depending on vagaries of fur buyer that day. Fox were less than $30 (they are more common than coyote in all parts of AZ, you just don’t see them), Bobcats were well over $100 to $300 or so, again depending. Good day circa 1985 was 10 fox, 2 or 3 coyote, and a bobcat.
That’s interesting. We do have small nocturnal predators here like badgers but I would have thought that if we had foxes they’d have visited the chickens at some point. Of course I didn’t know we had porcupines until one killed a local dog.
Another way of looking at this is that Tobie unselfishly gave up his cherished morning walkie in order to lead his human to safety.
I like that interpretation, Ben.
;D Riiight.
They were acting up around here after it was below zero for a week, got my dogs all riled up. So I shot one, and they’ve been leaving us alone.
Glad the wolves aren’t very vocal around here, there’s plenty of them casing the joint as well. Have to put pn the night sight of they start getting frisky.
I had a friend up in the Yukon and he said when there were wolves around, the dogs would cry like crazy to get inside the house.
“Let me in! Now Now Now!
Coyotes they pretty much ignored. But wolves, nope. Even the natives say that is the one animal they are really afraid of. I pulled up all my traps in 2017 and sold them a few years later. The Govt declared our largest buyer (Russia) persona non gratis and they in turn stopped buy furs from us.
Several years ago now we had either a mexican wolf or maybe a coywolf hang around for a while and all the neighborhood dogs went on strike until it went away. Ghost and Little Bear weren’t afraid of no coyotes-Little Bear wanted one of his own for a chew toy-but nobody wanted anything to do with this thing, whatever it was. Then it seemed to wander away and everything went back to normal.