Tag: mule deer

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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.

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Dreaming of Tularemia

Last night I had a dream about killing rabbits. Trails of coyote scat loaded with desiccated mesquite beans and the small bones of rabbits. Now that I try to recall the dream’s details, maybe we were hunting coyotes. The mood of the dream—you know how dreams have moods even when you don’t know what the dream was about? When dreams like that arrive I often wake up with the mood on my back like a western saddle, all day, maybe into the next night for a repetition of the dream, or some sequel that drifts off to some other surreal moment. Often it’s war dreams that come like that, but this isn’t a blog about war dreams, or maybe it is; all my dreams could be version of war dreams.

Anyway, my dream last night owned the mood of something a la Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing or Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men. Harsh stories about wolf murder and freedom and the angel of death and the angel of retribution. Last night’s dream was populated with companions who I don’t think I even know, all chambering rounds in weapons; rifles, shotguns, pistolas. We dug around in stringy coyote scat with big-bladed knives we pulled out of leather scabbards that hung off cowboy belts with our names etched in the back of them, but right now I don’t recall any names.

And I don’t recall how the dream ended, or maybe it didn’t, maybe it just segued into another dream, something about my mother and her long-gone-ness or about my father spitting verbal rebukes and fireworks at anyone who crossed him. He and I used to hunt a lot when I was a kid but he wouldn’t let me shoot the rabbits. Not that he was averse to killing, we hammered dove—back in those days, the early 60’s, I recall you could kill ten mourning dove and fifteen white winged dove—twice a day over the Labor Day weekend and we shot quail and once or twice we chased desert mule deer through the stab-spined thorns of ocotillo cacti that guarded the slopes that led to the scrub oak groves below the caprock where the big bucks with the nice sets of horns liked to hide.

But we never killed rabbits. He claimed, as a kid, that dove and quail kept all sixteen of them alive in the thirties, the sixteen who lived in the little board and battened, tarpapered shack my grandfather called a home. I wonder if they tried to eat rabbits, too, but couldn’t overcome fears of tularemia, a bacteriological disease one can get from uncooked or undercooked rabbit meat in the months that have no “r” in their name. May. June. July. August. That was the rule of thumb for my friends who did shoot and eat rabbits. No May, June, July, August.

They wouldn’t hunt in the months with no “r” in the name, but come fall winter and spring, they’d stuff their pockets with boxes of .22 longs and holster their .22 rifles in makeshift holsters and ride their bikes, and take me with my BB gun out into the flats north and west of town where big chunks of desert still allowed plenty of jackrabbits (which are really hares) and cottontails (which are really rabbits) for us to shoot at. I say shoot at, not kill, because when they moved it was fast, and when we shot (I don’t believe I could have killed a rabbit with a BB gun, I needed a .22, too, but had none; father didn’t like them), we were bad, standing, firing offhand, as rapid-fire as we could while the jackrabbits bounded and veered and the cottontails darted and veered. We could see the dust fly above and below them as we followed them along, stitching up the desert with our poor aim. Rarely did we kill anything and if we did, one of the others who was not afraid to eat them, would gut them and skin them and oftentimes we could spot the places where the flesh looked sick and malignant and those rabbits and hares got left for the carrion eaters.

Sometimes we went into town lucky enough to have a hare or rabbit or two tied to the handlebars of a Schwinn or a Huffy. Whoever it was who did the killing usually liked to find someone, usually a crowd of girls, and show off the kill. It was never me and I went home while they tried to style the gals about how cool they were because they killed and gutted a rabbit or two. Only a few of the girls showed any interest. Usually they turned up their noses and shooed the hunters off.

Over the years, I hunted and occasionally someone would shoot a cottontail and it would end up in the pot with dove or quail and lots of jalapeños. It was a leap of faith for me to eat it though, I guess because I could hear my father back in the recesses of my memory rebuking me for taking the risk. While I was masticating the meat, everyone would ooh and aah over the sharp flavor of wild cottontail, but to be honest with you, I never thought it that good. It may have been damned good, but the onus of taking the risk with tularemia probably made it taste like it needed to be upchucked out in the pink eye weeds.

My father never was a risk taker, so of course, I tended to take risks. Early on I wanted to get into the sheep business. It was pretty high risk and I hung around with all my sheepherder friends and built fence, and moved sheep on foot, and tore down fence and vaccinated and drenched sheep. One of my friends managed some of his family’s herds down in the desert between Phoenix and Yuma, at a place called Welton. Once he called me to come help him kill rabbits.

I said, “Why?”

He said, “They are eating all my alfalfa and I need it for the sheep.”

I said, “You have hundreds of acres of alfalfa.”

He said, “I got thousands and thousands of rabbits.

Visions of rabbit herds like sheep herds came into mind. Like a dream, I saw myself shooting them as they ran by me, as if I was plinking targets at the carnival. I told him I was in. We loaded two Dodge Chargers full of beer and boys and shotguns and rifles. He made us put the weapons in the trunk as he chuckled and mumbled things about overkill.

We got to the fields at night and parked. Instead of lush green, the pastures were buff colored like rabbits. We piled out of the cars with their head lights left on and our host handed us bats and clubs and laughing said, “These are all you will need.”

There was no sport in it, at least for me. But he had bought us beer and hamburgers and said he’d give us each twenty dollars, so I waded in. The hares and rabbits didn’t even run, just looked at us with alarm as we dispatched them….thunk, bonk, whack, thump, thunk; further into the fields we charged, the rabbit carcasses, tularemia or not, left to spoil in the desert heat. The great horned owls who showed up flapped over our heads as if they were chagrined. And why not? They’d had easy pickings. And so did we.

I am not sure we saved any pasturage for my friend. We did get drunk and we crowned a lot of rabbits and hares. Maybe there is a reason they keep showing up in my dreams. Like war dreams.

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Weather

Last Sunday, hoarfrost painted the tips of the sagebrush on the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Reservation for about one hundred yards on each side of Highway 95. Mist rose off the macadam in wispy breaths that wavered like ghosts from the Greek tragedies. The hoarfrost only lasted for a short space but was a chorus in the morning that sang of the sleet, scant snow and rain that smattered our windshields. Remnants of a late winter storm, wet enough to make the golden eagles on the telephone poles hunch their shoulders. The clouds obscured the Santa Rosa Mountains, whose jagged ridges usually hack up the bright blue sky of northern Nevada. Dry creeks ran muddy and the way the ripples in the water caught the wan light made the surfaces seem like scaly patterns on the sides of sunfishes.

Later in the day, the contrast between the high desert and the low coastal plain hung between Nevada and California, in my mind, like comedy and tragedy penned by Euripides  and Aristophanes. Not that I wept as if I’d just read Medea, or cackled after watching a production of Frogs. Nothing so distinct as sad versus happy, but emotions that were similarly divided and evoked by the harsh and violent beauty that surrounded us. What separates the high dry of Nevada from the low and verdant damp of California are the Sierra, which this year flaunted a mantle of deep snow, and though at this late date looked like soiled white togas, still spoke of the weather that crashed face-first into the coastal headlands and barreled across the Sacramento and San Joaquin river valleys and into the mountains. Outside Reno the snow strangling the sagebrush on the cold slopes owned mule deer and coyote trails stitched into the icy white.  The long cold Washoe valley wore a hopeful look that someday spring would march into view and sing its verdant tunes of crocus buds and passerine birds that love to sit in the tops of conifers and warble their mating messages.

Monday, a stiff breeze changed the weather in northern California, from wet to sunny and dry, back to wet. The yellow blossoms of acacia trees lit up the freeways and the colors of plum and cherry and peach tree blossoms stood out like lost Greek gods calling from a bleak wilderness. The long winter rains made the country green green green and the air clean.

And for some reason it made me laugh and yet it made me sad and I don’t know why but I swelled up inside. Maybe it was nostalgia for something lost, or an appreciation of all that verve, the yellow of mustard blossoms like a billion candles burning in the green after my cold winter of dry bitterbrush and winter fat. Maybe.

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Leap of Faith

 
Ruby Mountains at Dawn

Betty and I just got back from the 27th Annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada not too long ago. As always, the event was a moving, powerful experience that I learned long ago to not try and describe to people. The only way you will know the power of the event and your reactions to it is to make a leap of faith and go. 

Most years when we travel to Elko, we try to go through the country with the least amount of traffic and the best scenery.  If the road conditions and the weather permit, we travel the truest route, south from Mountain Home, Idaho, which is not in the mountains, to Duck Valley, where a Shoshone and Paiute tribal community resides and then through Mountain City, Nevada, the Owyhee River Canyon, Wild Horse Crossing, Wild Horse Reservoir and then down the long, wide valley bordered on each side by north-south running mountain ranges, that, depending on the weather, might be draped in white, or partially snow-covered with their naked aspen ghosting the cold spots. Finally we drop into the Humboldt River valley and the town of Elko. And even if the weather and the road conditions aren’t optimal we take a different kind of leap of faith and travel the byways regardless of snow pack and ice. 

I could talk about the excellent Basque cuisine we eat, and the wild “Cowboy Halloween” characters we meet, about the music old and new, and the poetry old and new, but I’m not going to. 

I am going to talk about the Honda CRV rides we take. While everyone else is jammed into tight auditorium seats listening to Don Edwards or Wylie and the Wild West sing cowboy songs, or Paul Zarzyski and Vess Quinlan and Henry Real Bird read and recite poems, we often climb into the Honda and venture out on one of the roadways out of town. Hinterland is just as close as the last subdivision in this part of Nevada; very little transition country exists. Up north you can find the Independence Mountains, the old mining town of Tuscarora, and the famous Spanish ranch, which all the locals and the cowpokes-in-the-know call “The Span.” To the southeast lies the Ruby Valley, a long wide expanse of snow when we’ve been down there, with a surprising population of bald eagles sitting in the naked willows and  cottonwood trees along the banks of Franklin Creek—and that’s pronounced, “crik” in this part of the world. At the foot of the valley lies the Ruby Valley National Wlldlife Refuge where we sat one evening several seasons back and watched coyotes hunt trumpeter swans on the channels carved in the swampy, red-willow-infested breaks catching the late light of the gloaming. 

Last year we went down there again with a carload of friends, hitting the trail just before sun-up. The light trapped in the ground fog and on the tips of the frosty sage made for great pictures, and the sun on the peaks when the lower ground was still dark created a stark idea of what the difference between life and death might be—or good and evil—in a metaphorical way. The A M light on the east side of the craggy and majestic Ruby Mountains glared back at us and one would think the glare might be too stark, but instead it was like somebody slugged you in the solar plexus with its immensity. 

This year, Betty and I dared ourselves again and went down the west side of the Rubies for an evening run to see if we could find out if the Rubies really were like rubies. The quality of evening light that time of the year is like the gold they still chase around in the rough hinterlands of Nevada. It comes in low, and streams parallel to the surface of the earth, its shine tinted a bit crimson, a bit silver, a bit bronze as it caroms off the juniper trees, sage and mountains like x-rays from outer space. 

 

Ruby Mountain Muley

We stopped where the road from Spring Creek to Jiggs intersects the south fork of the Humboldt River and watched water ouzels bicker over prey beneath the flashing surface of the river. They called and crashed, then dove below the water, then emerged to dance along the surface, as an immature bald eagle floated overhead. The willows and the water, the rugged trunks of the cottonwood trees, all caught the last brash bang of sunlight just before Old Sol’s setting. 

There are a lot of deer out along the east side of the Ruby Mountains. Big mule deer that browse alongside the roads in great gangs that warily watch approaching Hondas, then leisurely leap barbed wire right-of-way fences, then stop and curiously spy as we drive by. The bucks still had their horns and were running with the females which indicated to me they were still in the rut. 

West Side of the Ruby Mountains

At the hint of last light we got the Ruby Mountains on camera, and we now know exactly why they are named that. They were ruby. 

Then we climbed back in the Honda and drove back to the G Three Bar for a sarsaparilla and a visit with our cowboy poetry friends.