A Zip Code of Their Own

During the day they floated everywhere, or maybe my imagination sees it like that. Into the Kellogg’s Special K and the all purpose flour and my cooling cup of coffee. They lit on the counter, the couch with the bed hidden inside, the fireplace hearth, and the green bedspread.

After the sun set beyond White Sands, they mobbed every source of light in town. It looked like the bowels of a blizzard.

In the house they’d batter their wings on the inside of the lightshades and when one approached my head, the wing flutter reminded me of choppers in Nam which was something I did not want to remember. I swatted them and smothered them and crushed them, caught them and threw them out the door.

Miller Moth

But it was after the lights went out that things turned weird. At first they attacked the lampshade, beating it with their wings and I’d wonder, without the lights, why they still made that racket. They harassed me like they knew I was guilty of turning out the lights. As if they wanted to get even, they were at my noggin. Maybe my skin, my bone radiated warmth, too, like the lamp, and they bored inside the lobes of my ears and the flutter magnified like a drill bit grinding into my brain.

Reinforcements showed up if I managed to swat the offenders. Next it was my nose, and then my eyelids as if they needed to pry them open and if I wasn’t careful, they invaded my mouth, bitter and powdery and wild with wing beats against my tongue.

It was annual. They came out in early summer about the time the yellow jackets started to flit around my face as if I was something to eat. Some years proved worse than others.

I once met a woman who’d been raised out on the Bell Ranch—which was so big it had its own zip code, 88441—outside of Tucumcari and the miller bugs must have been horrendous when she was a kid because she possessed a mortal fear of them. She wore a battered black John B. Stetson and her big, callused hands clenched and unclenched like she wanted to box. I bet myself she could waddy up with the best of buckaroos but when the miller bugs buzzed her she cringed and shrieked like a frightened three-year-old.

It may have been 1986 when they seemed the worst, the year after the state sprayed the woods to kill the spruce budworms. Although 1985, 1987, 1988 were also nasty.

The old-timers wondered—even they thought the damned miller bugs were bad—if spraying the woods for spruce budworms made the miller bugs worse.

These pests have come to mind because an acquaintance of mine is doing some research on miller bug larvae. She’s a scientist who works with ranch folks to solve problems on the ranges of the West.

According to the available information the miller bug larvae, called Army cutworms, like to eat cheat grass which is a noxious exotic plant that causes difficulties for range management folks. And from that point of view, maybe they are good for something—the miller bugs—consuming cheat grass.

Army Cutworm

Reading some of her posts on Facebook lead me to ponder my memories of miller bugs, actually called miller moths, but in the high Sacramento Mountains of southern New Mexico we called them miller bugs.

They came at you anytime and anywhere and a fine powder painted their wings that powder sluffed off when touched and that’s how they got their name, miller moths, after the flour dust that coated the clothing of grain millers.

The moths go to the mountains of the West in the summer, not unlike a lot of folks used to do when they came from the flats of Texas to enjoy the cool breezes and daily downpours of the southern Sacramento Mountains where Betty and I lived.

Evidently bears like to eat the moths because a lot of fat sits—maybe half a calorie per critter—in those little flitting bodies. According to some researchers, a grizzly bear can eat up to 40,000 of the moths per day…40,000…per day.

We didn’t have grizzlies in our New Mexico environs. They’d probably lived there before they were all killed. The last grizzly in New Mexico was slain in 1931, not in the Sacramentos, but in the Gila, over in the western part of the state.

When I think about a bear that can eat 40,000 moths in a day I think of people who run a thousand miles in ten straight days or someone who swims the English Channel.

Black bears—which come in many colors besides black: cinnamon, brown, I even heard tell of a white one—aren’t as big as grizzlies, but they are big enough and like their bigger cousins, they are omnivorous so I reckon they can put away a passel of moths in a day, too.

But no matter how many miller bugs the bears found hiding beneath limestone rocks and piles of dead pine needles in our New Mexico mountains, they never munched enough to suit me.

Now, standing here at my computer, I think of that young woman raised on the Bell Ranch in her big black sombrero and fancy ostrich skin boots, whose hands were rough like big grit sandpaper. I wonder if she wouldn’t have rather run on a grizzly than mess with those miller bugs.

Blogger Ken Rodgers, photo courtesy of Betty Rodgers

I didn’t know the moths were here in Idaho, too, but evidently they’ve been gnawing on cheat grass in our locale. And that must be a good thing for the land.

Sometimes outside, on the walls of our house, I spy a moth that reminds me of a miller bug—maybe it is a miller bug—and then I think they aren’t because they fail to assault me. Or if they are, they must be some kind of weak-kneed cousin of those nasty attackers we battled in the Sacramentos.

Yep, down yonder in New Mexico they owned a reputation. And they backed it up with action. They were notorious and were expected every summer with a mountain’s worth of apprehension. They existed wide and tall and grotesquely handsome in the way folks imagined them. They were broad and historic like that old Bell Ranch out there with its very own zip code.

Maybe those miller bugs warrant a zip code of their own, too.

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.