“I immediately regret this decision,” said the coyote…

I’ll be damned. Quarter to five in the morning and I just took my first shot at a coyote in something like 11 years.

In all the time I’ve been here I have only ever killed – or at least wounded, I never recovered a body – one coyote, a female that came into the yard when the dogs were elsewhere and the chicken yard was new. That abruptly ended coyote incursions into the vicinity of the Lair for a really long time. But beginning last Fall I started getting scat in my driveway closer and closer to the cabin, until at last in December I got a picture of the evildoer in action. I resumed my old practice of dumping bottles of pee on bushes at all the likely entrances to my yard and that seemed to close the issue for a while.

Lately poor Tobie has been getting serenaded just before daybreak, day after day. This morning was no exception and he really didn’t appreciate it. Seemed very close, too. I leashed him up to go out for a pee as soon as I was vertical, not expecting to see any coyotes. Mind you, I almost never see coyotes when I’m afoot: It’s very rare.

But there was a small ‘yote in the wash, sauntering to the north like it owned the place. And while I watched it stopped and stared at me – I must assume insolently.

Okay, I’m loath to actually kill things without a very good reason. By far the majority of the times I fire my pistol for realsies I’m really just trying to make something rethink its decisions without bloodshed. But this thing was crossing a pretty serious line. If it’s not afraid of me, and if its packmates aren’t afraid of me, they could conceivably become a threat to me or Tobie. And this sort of thing, rare as it is, is why I have a strict policy of never leaving my porch unless I’m ready to go to war.

I missed high, either because the zero’s off on the new pistol (see previous post) or because I was ambivalent about killing the coyote and really wasn’t aiming carefully. Pretty long shot at a small target anyway. But I missed close, and the ‘yote got the message. Wiped that insolence off its face in any case, and saw how fast a coyote can run.