Tag: birds

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Maybe It Still Is

In the beginning, I only craved birds I could shoot and eat. But over the years, I’ve morphed into a watcher.

This last month, Betty and I have been driving around the West and observing a trove of avian critters.

Red-tailed hawks perched on every high point around the marshy fens near Klamath Falls, Oregon.

On the Sonoma coast, we spotted marbled godwits and willets nudging sand as the ebbing tide left prey for them.

In New Mexico, we sought cranes, the sandhill variety, thousands of them to delight all the photographers with the long, long lenses. And then the frantic eruptions of huge flocks of snow geese.

In Arizona where the Sonoran and the Chihuahuan Desert meet, we sought the elegant trogon, which to me is a holy grail of birds. Why? Maybe it’s the word. Elegant. That’s nomenclature not often common in the milieu in which I’ve existed.

In my early years it was mourning dove, Gambel’s quail, chukar, ring-necked pheasant and wild turkey.

My father loved to go fowling and I think it was something that his brothers and he did all the time during the depression. They lived in a house with fourteen or fifteen relatives and siblings. There was never enough to eat.

I’ve chased quail of multiple species across sorghum fields and desert flats, the undulations of sagebrush country. I’ve hidden in the woods as my hunting partner tried to gobble up a big tom, and I’ve scaled frozen hillsides chasing chukar through ten-degree dawns.

When I was young, I loved the chase and the thrill when what you shot plopped in a miniature cloud of dust.

I always considered myself someone who respected nature and especially the things I hunted. There were rules and requirements and there was proper behavior, a respect for the quarry, the law, and your fellow hunter, and for the landowner, too.

But I think the best of us often fall off the wagon as we wend our way through life. I recall northwest Kansas, the early 80s. Blue-knuckle cold and raspy wind and a gaggle of hunting partners with Springer Spaniels.

Back then I was sulled up like an old black bull that’s wandered off into a quicksand bog, and no matter how hard he struggles, can’t get out.

A man from Colorado Springs and I broke off from the hunting group and hiked around a big marsh, cracking sick and dirty jokes, laughing about stuff that the rest of the world wouldn’t see as particularly funny. At that moment, I felt the two of us were kindred and cynical, somehow bonded.

I noticed a flock of small birds fly into a bush growing next to the rough trail where we stalked. As we drew close, the sounds of their chirps and singing reached out and circled me like hymns you’d hear in the Christmas season and the red and blacks, mixed with the varying shades of russet in the surrounding soil and vegetation created a color palette that thrummed.

I stopped. Something boiled my guts like big heartburn. I lifted my twelve-gauge and hulled away, one, two, three times.

Gunpowder stench drilled into my nose as a slow smoke coiled from the end of my weapon’s barrel. I stomped to the bush but the only thing I found were tattered leaves on the ground.

I spewed a string of vulgarisms and something about not being able to hit a bull in the ass with a fiddle when I noticed my companion looking at me askance.

Our camaraderie hightailed like a flock of starlings that just figured out that a northern goshawk is swooping in for the kill.

For decades, the memory of all those pretty, scattering black and red birds has fluttered into my mind, me feeling like a creep who keeps bugging the head cheerleader at the high school prom.

I am not sure why but I perpetually ponder the need for killing. When I was a kid with a BB gun, we shot at doves and sparrows and anything else that moved, including each other.

One day I rode my bike past the J home and the three J brothers were out in the vacant lot next door. I lifted my BB gun and shot F, the oldest brother, in the ass. The report of that BB hitting its target rushes at me across the dusty decades.

Later, I learned to kill doves and quail with a shotgun and mule deer and pronghorns with a rifle, and then I joined the Marines Corps and the tenor of the killing changed. In Vietnam I tried like hell to kill communists, but I’m not sure I was successful.

One evening during the Siege of Khe Sanh, I snuck down the trench as incoming roared, exploded and shook the red ground beneath my feet. On top of the platoon’s command bunker lay one of my Marine buddies. He gripped an M-14 rifle with a starlight scope. I asked him what he was up to.

“Killing gooks.”

Right then I wanted to “kill gooks,” too. They’d surrounded us, pounded us, killed our mates. They had scared us into realms where fear was so powerful, multilayered and pervasive that, if we lived, we would never escape its ability to reduce us to skittering, paranoid animals for the rest of our lives.

I climbed up there and demanded to be part of the action, and he complied. He wasn’t excited about it, but in the spirit, I suppose, of brotherhood and Semper Fi, he handed me the rifle. Its cold stock felt like manna in my hands. As I placed my eye to the scope, I witnessed blurry images of heads and shoulders popping up and down across a long distance and those are what I shot. I don’t know if I hit anyone, but damn it, at the moment, I needed to. And maybe I did kill someone and maybe there’s a picture of him, or her, on a shelf somewhere in Hanoi, a remnant of a person.

And at the time, shooting at those North Vietnamese soldiers didn’t feel any more momentous than shooting at white-winged dove the first day of hunting season.

And now, as I recall the sneer of the man out there in the cold Kansas wind, I suspect that something was wrong with me when I shot at those innocent little birds in Kansas, and my need to go around shooting them was the tip of an iceberg of another order.

Maybe it still is.

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Murmuration and Monet

The whacking at the corner of my home office sent me to my feet and the window. I opened the blinds and shadows of birds darted through the naked branches of the nine bark bushes growing against the northeast wall.

An ornamental pear stands close and the birds— a murmuration of starlings, speckled black birds that first arrived in North America over a hundred years ago–attacked the bare branches and devoured the marble sized fruit still attached to the tree.

The ornamental pears fall on the ground in late autumn and make a mess. So even though the notion of an exotic bird—or exotic species of any kind wreaking havoc on local environments—leads me to cringe, in theory, as the yellow-beaked creatures dove into the pear tree’s branches, landed, and ripped fruit from moorings, for a moment I felt…what was it, relief that one more chore was now rendered moot? Or was it something more…joyful? I wasn’t sure.

Back and forth the murmuration swarmed, banging branches against the house, the combined whoosh of their spread wings barging into the confines of my office.

Once Betty and I spent several nights in the French city of Rouen, in Normandy. We lodged in a small hotel with a balcony that allowed us to sit in comfortable chairs and see the old cathedral that the Impressionist artist Claude Monet painted many times. The cathedral—as either a church or something more grand– had been built, destroyed and rebuilt a number of times since the fifth century AD.

Its stately and angular Gothic architecture make a visual feast and I understood Monet’s fascination with it on an aesthetic level. Yet for me, the history it embodied, the Vikings who became the Normans of the region who went on to invade England and add their culture to the Norse, Anglo –Saxon, Roman, Celtic milieu that stewed in England prior to 1066 AD when the Norman Duke William the Bastard became King William the First of England invaded my senses and for a moment, ignited a buzz in my guts that I recognized as something strangely tied to the history of the human race.

In the cathedral, when Betty and I made our tour, we found a sarcophagus where William the First’s great-great-grandson, Richard the Lion Heart’s heart was entombed. Yes, his heart. Not the rest of him. His entrails are buried at Challus, where he died of gangrene from an arrow wound and the rest of him is buried near Chinon, in Anjou, close to his parents, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

In the evenings, after our trips to the cathedral and discovering a smidgeon of its history, or dining on crepes in a local café, or heading off to the Normandy beaches, we’d come back to our room just before sundown and listen to the starlings jammed in the foliage of the trees that surrounded the square between the cathedral and us. We found it enchanting, the singing, like it was happy talk between good friends. In the US starlings are considered by the ag industry as pests and according to a number of articles I read, they can destroy a vineyard or a cherry orchard or a blueberry field in less than a week.

The locals in Rouen who frequented the cathedral district seemed to hate the birds, too and from the looks of the ash gray tinted sidewalk and street gutters beneath the outer branches street side, I understood. Starling scat is probably hard on Peugeot paint jobs.

And now, as the starlings in my little murmuration zipped back and forth like short shafted arrows stripping my pear tree of fruit, I recognized that they were driven by some motivation that reminded me not only of hunger, but more; need, and maybe even the human desire called “greed.” I felt it standing at my window, the ferocious craving they had to eat and eat and eat as fast as possible, before all the fruit disappeared. And that led me to ponder King William the First and Richard, too, how history has portrayed them as men who needed more and more and more.

Yes, I felt it, like a jolt from the business end of a fletched crossbow bolt it hummed through me and for just a second, it felt primal, like knowledge in my DNA passed to me from humans alive way before I was born. I suspected it was kin to our need to survive, something that William the First and his great-great-grandson Richard surely understood as did Monet, I suspect, and if not consciously then down in the bones and the sinew and the soul.

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Notes on Terlingua and Memory

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
William Faulkner

Memory may be the only thing of value that we carry out of this world when we exit. Memory revealed its strength to me the last few weeks as Betty and I peregrinated around the southwest. After screening our documentary film BRAVO! in my old home town of Casa Grande, we took a drive up around the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson towards San Manuel on our way to Benson, Arizona.

A range of mountains to our north came into view and even though it had been over thirty years since I had last seen those mountains, my memories of journeys into and along that range sprang right into the forefront of my attention. Galiuros…that was the name of the mountains, the Galiuros.

Stand of Saguaro on the Reddington-Cascabel Road, Arizona. © Ken Rodgers 2014

I remembered camping trips in the fifties when we hiked up the rough run of Aravaipa Canyon, and hunting trips into the deep cut flanks of the Santa Catalina foothills in the seventies and eighties. These memories were gratifying on some level that I am not sure I understand. Was it memory itself that made me satisfied, or was it the memories of those moments?

Those thoughts simmered inside me as we drove off the main highway between Tucson and Superior and took on the corduroy washboard they call the San Pedro-Reddington-Cascabel Road around the back side of the Santa Catalinas and the Rincon Mountains. This road is carved by arroyos exposing the geology of the country, the aggregate and white rock that glares when the sun beats on it. What surprised me, besides the pilgrims who had moved into the country over the thirty years since my last visit, were the forests of saguaro, the forests of cholla and ocotillo and prickly pear. The country in southern Arizona has become so developed that the large groupings of desert flora have been diminished to one or two examples of each species so that the developers can show their customers they are maintaining the integrity of the land as it was before the rush of folks from back east or California.

But what I was seeing out on that washboard road was straight out of my recollection of what the Sonoran Desert around Tucson used to be, before Del Webb and Pulte and all the other big-name builders showed up to mow down what got in the way of golf courses and club houses and streets and homes.

Chiricahua National Monument, Chiricahua Mountains, Arizona. ©Ken Rodgers 2014

We arrived in Benson and spent a day and a half chasing birds around the San Pedro Riparian Wildlife Conservation Area outside Sierra Vista and in Portal Canyon in the Chiricahua Mountains on the New Mexico/Arizona border. My previous excursions in the region had only been pass-throughs, but memories of them floated up as we watched redtail hawks, white-breasted nuthatches, pyrrhuloxias and loggerhead shrikes. The southeast area of Arizona was home to some of my ancestors and even though I have little evidence of what happened to them there, the knowledge that their graves are in the old St. David cemetery and neighboring locations conjured up images of draft horses and Apache raids, and I wondered if those were manufactured in my own mind or remnants of a racial memory.

We journeyed on to Fort Davis, Texas, and two days of listening to cowboy poets and musicians ply their tunes and poems. Fort Davis and Alpine (where they had the cowboy poetry event) sit in wild country with cliffs and valleys and peaks that rear up like volcanoes we see in movies, like anvils and great monuments built in some kind of fantasy land where what is constructed is beyond the hand of man, created by a greater race of beings, now long gone with no signature but the rugged country that sings to our remembrance.

Mitre Peak, Alpine, Texas. ©Ken Rodgers 2014

Then on to Big Bend and the wild jumble of Rio Grande country, the mix of Mexican and American heritage a permanent stamp on the culture. A culture still lodged in the memory of my youth.

The mountains at Big Bend look like they were shoved into mounds and blocks and pyramids and the land changes from grassy terrain to conifer heights. Bear, cougar and elk inhabit rugged topography not far from surroundings inhabited by desert denizens like diamondbacks and peccaries.

We spent a night in Terlingua, Texas, or more specifically, Terlingua Ghost Town which sits about five miles west of modern Terlingua. Terlingua Ghost Town is what remains of a once prosperous community whose citizens mostly worked in the mercury mines that were so important to the munitions industry in the first half of the twentieth century. Most of what remains of the ghost town’s glory is kept in the memories written down in books and portrayed in old photography.

Terlingua Ghost Town Cemetery. ©Ken Rodgers 2014

Upon our arrival we were delivered a big surprise. We needed to go to the Terlingua Trading Company to check into our lodgings for the night in the ghost town and instead of goblins, ghosts and zombies, we found one of the most lively places we’d been in since arriving in the southwest part of Texas. The Trading Company is located in an old building with high and wide Texan porches. Gangs of people sat along walls and the edges of the porch, playing guitars, singing, palavering, drinking beer. They were a wild array of folks, old hippies, young hippies, Marines, cowboys, turistas, and then there were the dogs, mostly pit bulls and occasionally a mongrel of indefinable lineage.

Contrary to their reputations, these pit bulls were mellow, and it reminded me of my notion that dogs’ personalities reflect the personas of their masters. There were big signs along the wall of the Trading Company that read, “No Dogs on Porch,” but the dogs didn’t seem to mind the warnings and it was apparent they had yet to learn to read.

Terlingua, Texas. ©Ken Rodgers 2014

Terlingua Ghost Town has a “durn good” restaurant named The Starlight Theater and is housed in the same location as an old movie theater that showed films back in Terlingua’s mercury mining heyday. Now it serves margaritas, beer and some mighty fine green chile.

The next morning we discovered our biggest treat in the ghost town…the cemetery. Most of the folks buried in this cemetery died during the influenza epidemic of 1919-1920, but there are markers for earlier deaths and surprising to us, folks are still being buried there. The graveyard is on the National Register of Historic Places and is the site of an apparently well-attended Day of the Dead celebration held in early November.

The graveyard is a work of art, in its own way, with simple wooden-cross grave markers next to complex adobe monuments. The individual graves are crammed up against each other with lots of ornaments lying around on particular gravesites. Jars for money, beer cans, flowers, and other mementoes make this the most interesting cemetery I’ve been in, and that is quite a few.

The funny thing about my impressions of Terlingua Ghost Town is the memories the experience evokes: When I was a kid, of barbeques down on the washes that ran through the Arizona of my youth; a cow carcass, butchered and marinated in salts and peppers and oils, then buried with searing mesquite coals; and friends of my parents with cans of Coors and plates piled with spicy potato salad and garlic bread. Or later, when I was a young man, frying chicken in Dutch ovens out west of Casa Grande, or if not chickens, then calf fries. Playing softball and volleyball. Drinking wine and whiskey watching the kids play, hoping they didn’t find a rattlesnake. Listening to Neil Young and Jimi Hendrix.

Besides the cemetery, the images around Terlingua are ghostly, the hard white and sun-faded hues of the peaks, the arroyos that have chopped the land in their haste to make a meeting with the Rio Grande. These images as they filter back into my mind are like goblins dressed in long white gossamer gowns that remind me of Halloween or the times when I was a child when my grandmother (who lived with us) used to cry out to her long dead mother. Memories.

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On Mustangs, Mountain Bluebirds, Ruddy Ducks and Buckaroos

It seems like whenever I think it may be time to move on from Idaho and experience some other part of the world that moment of indecision coincides with a trip to the one-hundred-five-year-old Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and surrounding environs in southeastern Oregon. The country there is a mix of high sage and bitterbrush flats, juniper dotted ridges, and to the north and east, mountains. And in the spring, the Malheur country, or Harney County, is a place full of birds. Great Horned Owls and Burrowing Owls and Short-eared Owls.

Every year, Betty and I hit our personal high spots, the roads and fields around Crane and the Pete French Round Barn, Diamond and the Diamond Loop, the P Ranch, the Central Patrol Road that meanders parallel to the Blitzen River. Yellow Warblers and American Bitterns and Northern Shovelers and Yellow-rumped Warblers and Cinnamon Teal.

Interior of Pete French Round Barn By Ken Rodgers 2013

We go south of Frenchglen and check out the road into the Steens Mountain Cooperative Management and Protection Area and look for the herd of mustangs that rove there. Cassin’s Finches and Vesper Sparrows and Warbling Vireos.

We go along The Narrows and into the refuge headquarters where the cottonwood trees tower over the old masonry buildings and Coots graze on the grass and the Lewis’s Woodpeckers haunt the treetops. Cassin’s Vireo and Northern Goshawk and Dunlins and Forster’s Terns and American White Pelicans.

American White Pelicans at The Narrows by Ken Rodgers 2013

This year we did something different, as we do every year. For instance, last year we went around on the east side of Steens Mountain and checked out the arid Alvord Desert and then climbed up into Crane passing numerous small lakes, seeing lots of mule deer and pronghorn (or antelope as the locals call them). And of course, birds; Canada Geese and Sandhill Cranes and Cormorants. Osprey and Bald Eagles and Northern Harriers.

This year we asked around to see if anyone was working cattle since it was time for branding calves, and lo and behold, we were invited to a branding which we stood and photographed, shooting picture after picture after picture. Shooting something like a branding is different from landscape or portrait or still life photography…it’s kind of wild, the buckaroos building loops to head and heel the calves, the cows on the prod (folks are messing with their babies), the vaccinating, the branding, the tagging, the cutting. It goes on with the smoke and the dust boiling up and the scent of burned hide from the branding and the loops of lassos that float on the horizon just before they snake in and capture a calf. The shouting and laughing, the bellowing of the animals, the cutting horses twisting and turning, digging in their heel bulbs when necessary, and this is all going on at rat-a-tat machine gun speed, and if you wish to photograph this you are on your toes, so to speak, with the zoom going in and out and in and out, finding those moments when the action gets caught, like a packaged explosion just about to ignite. Vavoom! Wow!

At the Branding, Diamond Loop By Ken Rodgers 2013

What a comedown, but not a sorry one, after that experience. Then on to the tiny burg of Diamond where the poplar limbs still stood naked as if they didn’t trust the warm breaths of the breezes. We photographed old buildings and big trees and hunted for sign of White-faced Ibis and saw Sandhill Cranes and Great Egrets.

Then on to the Buena Vista ponds in search of signs of Black-throated Sparrows and Sage Sparrows. Instead, it was the haunting mating call of a male Sora from the marshes below, and Western Kingbirds darting from sage to sage catching the little creatures whose short, flitting lives come and go in the course of a few days.

Buena Vista Ponds by Ken Rodgers 2013

From there it was back to Burns, and the following day we took that drive south of Frenchglen and located over forty mustangs. A lot of the Harney County ranchers hate these creatures and I understand that, for the mayhem they create on the range, but still, there is something that gets up inside my throat when I see them out there lazily grazing on the new grass down in the swales. Something primitive speaks to me about freedom and all that stuff that often gets stuffed when we start thinking in terms of dollars and cents.

While in search of mustangs we found Warbling Vireos and Cassin’s Finches and an ambiguity of sparrows that left us perplexed as we thumbed through our Sibley…is it this kind of sparrow or that? We think we saw Lark Sparrows and Vesper Sparrows and Savannah Sparrows. We know we saw White-crowned Sparrows.

Mustang at Malheur By Ken Rodgers 2013

Then we traveled down to the P Ranch and hiked along the Blitzen River. Two Caspian Terns circled us like fighter jets, squawking as if berating us. One showed up with a fish as it swept by and then abruptly veered overhead as if to show off the latest morsel of piscine paradise. At The Narrows again, Ruddy Ducks, Ruddy Ducks, Ruddy Ducks.

The next day, on the road home, we cut off the macadam and bumped down some dirt roads. Pickup trucks pulling trailers loaded with saddled horses sped up behind us, and we pulled over multiple times to let these earnest travelers get on their way and soon we found out where they were hurrying. A branding, but not so formal in terms of corral and pens and headquarters structures as those we encountered earlier in the week. Here, the corral was makeshift, mostly trucks pulled up end-to-end and some portable panels wired together.

A hot fire crackled in a fifty-five gallon drum turned into a fireplace. Branding iron handles stood out from the sizzling orange-red and the smell of burning calf hair filled the air, along with the dust, and the voices talking local cowpoke gossip, or the boss-man barking orders about where to drag a calf, or comments on the quality of the calf crop or who was going to be the header and who was going to be the heeler. Wild action, back and forth, and loops built and caroming off the sky and onto the dusty ground, caught on the camera screen like something you might see in a Charlie Russell painting. Yeehaw! And Mountain Bluebirds…so bluebird blue.

Betty and I drove away and headed home and she commented to me, “Pretty darned western.” And it was, and it was more, and just a part of why we stick around.

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Coyotes

Several weeks ago, Betty and I camped in Malheur National Wildlife Refuge enjoying the buoyant high desert weather and all the bounty of life that accrues to two wet years in succession. Malheur is a moniker for many things in southeastern Oregon; a county, a river, a region. Not too far from Boise, we go most every year during the month of May to see the monster mule deer, beaver, shorebirds, pronghorns, water birds, the Kiger tribe of wild horses, cranes, and a lot of other kinds of life. Oh, and it’s worth mentioning, lots of coyotes.

On our first balmy evening, within a half-mile walk along the Donner und Blitzen River, we encountered three separate coyotes. One was lying in the grass, only his (or her) head and ears visible. Another was hunting something small, maybe a white-crowned sparrow or yellow-bellied marmot. It was fun watching that curious coyote leap, or is it a jump, or is it a hop?…as it hunted. A third canis latrans (that’s the scientific name for coyotes) trotted along the fence at the P Ranch headquarters where some of the rangers who manage the refuge work. All these canines showed almost no fear of us as we swatted the evening mosquitoes and tried to take photographs of coyote antics.

Later that evening, the night sounds of American robins and sandhill cranes and Wilson’s snipes and frogs and other peepers whose names I don’t know were drowned beneath the wild coyote howls that echoed back and forth between the hills that encircle the upper reaches of Malheur.

I smiled when I heard that wild singing; something about the howling of coyotes speaks to me of the tenacity of life. This is a species that in the last century-and-one-half have not been popular with the rural folk of the American west, and yet they seem to thrive in almost every environment.

The next night I was awakened by sounds more sinister. A pack of coyotes was right outside our RV, yapping and, dare I say, laughing? I am of course anthropomorphizing here, but the sounds felt ecstatic, almost dangerous, and I had a notion that outside, they were deciding who would get the first bite of the jack rabbit they had just killed.

The name Malheur is French and, among other things, means trouble, misfortune, grief, misadventure, curse, and as I lay in the rack listening to the gleeful racket (here again, I humanize the vocalizations to fit my interpretations) I thought about those notions: grief, misadventure, trouble.

When I was young, I worked in the sheep business for a while in Arizona, and in that milieu the coyote was the most dangerous, heinous, worthless creature on the face of the earth. We trapped them, shot them, poisoned them.

I toted an old World War I Mauser 98 in the cab of my fencing truck always looking for a chance to plug a coyote or stray dog. Once while traveling from Casa Blanca to Sacaton on the Gila River Indian Reservation, while the early winter sun spread its low hanging light across old alfalfa fields cut by the shadows spun by strands of barbed wire, a lone coyote, about a hundred yards out, sat on his haunches looking at me. I had a pair of binoculars in the truck cab so I stopped to get a better gander, but old coyote leaped up and began to trot east at a handsome pace. If I wanted to kill that coyote, I’d need to get closer. Yet once I started driving, the coyote stopped. This time I grabbed the binoculars as I kept moving. I could see the coyote’s yellow eyes and its tongue lolling out the side of its mouth. Something about the way the pointed ears stood up, alert, the subtle turn of the head as I got closer made me wonder about that critter, its habits, its needs, its intelligence.

I stopped to shoot it. It got up and ran. I followed it, this time with the Mauser barrel riding out the window and the rifle butt in my lap so I could get a shot before the coyote escaped. Driving, I admired the easy lope. Again, it stopped and watched me. I stopped, too and jammed the Mauser butt into my shoulder, but the coyote was already gone.

Intelligence, I thought. Intelligence. I didn’t shoot another coyote that year. Around the lunch table at the sheep camp I took a lot of ribbing from the herders about my poor aim. I dared not reveal that I’d decided not to shoot any coyotes unless I found them in the field with the sheep.

Several years ago Betty and I spent time with our late friend Trisha Pedroia at her vineyard in the Sonoma Coast hills. Just as we got ready for bed, right outside our bedroom window, a pack of coyotes churned up a litany of trills, yaps, barks, yips and short howls. Not loud, but more like a conversation…between themselves or with us, I cannot say. I remember the moment being sublime in some ways, and a little frightening that they could sneak like that, beneath our window, as if they could do anything they wanted to.

The mixture of elation and I will say it right here…trepidation, not severe, but trepidation still, made me feel very human and very exposed. Like for just a moment, instead of constantly being a predator of some kind, I had become prey. It wasn’t the first time I’ve been prey…or if not prey, having felt as if I was dinner for some creature. As if I was being hunted.

My good friend and old hunting buddy, Robert Moser, used to wax eloquently about the feeling one must have when he becomes aware that he is being stalked by something intent on eating him. The dimming of one’s brassy confidence with the realization something might be stalking him who believes he is the ultimate stalker.

Once, in the deer shooting season of 1988, Robert dropped me off at the head of a canyon on James Ridge, in southern New Mexico’s Sacramento Mountains. He drove down and got on a stand at a place called Spud Patch. I was to saunter down the draw driving any bucks down so that one of us could get a shot and hopefully a kill.

It was evening-time in mid-November and the sun was waning fast. Slants of light cut through the fir trees and oak brush, reminding me of shattered glass. In the middle of my path I found a massive mound of bear scat…steaming, still steaming. The cold of approaching night invaded the metal on my weapon and a soft breeze got up and whistled in the tops of the trees. Huge bear tracks dented the snow. Fresh, big. Chills scampered up and down my spine. My mind ratcheted high speed images of a black bear bursting from an alder thicket, or hiding around the next bend in the trail. As I walked down, rifle safety off, finger on the trigger, I turned around and around and around. Imagining where I’d better shoot him, or her, when she exploded towards me.

Not that coyotes will kill me like a bear would, but they might. It’s not unheard of. It’s not my fear of that…I think it’s more the realization that we are not bullet-proof in our existence here. There are things that can and will kill us. For dinner. We are mortal; we are in some ways the same as those yodeling coyotes we like to shoot.