Coyotes, like wolves, live in family groups of a dominant breeding pair, their pups, and several nonbreeding males and females. The family makes a den and claims a territory of up to ten miles around it, defending their hunting ground from other mating pairs who might try to settle. In an area like this valley, where domestic livestock provide a ready source of food, each coyote clan might defend a smaller territory. Though they are omnivores and survive primarily on small rodents, grubs, and fruit, coyotes will occasionally hunt larger animals such as deer, calves, and sheep, especially when they have a litter of pups to feed in spring and summer.
Article continues after advertisement
Coyotes are newcomers to the Northeast, newer than European colonists, newer even than domestic sheep. Given the dominance of their major predator, the wolf, in mountainous and forested regions of the north, the coyote found its niche in the grasslands and deserts of North America east of the Mississippi to the Pacific and extending south into Mexico. And there Coyote reigned. To dozens of Indigenous cultures across the Americas, the coyote—whose name comes from the Aztec coyotl—is a hero, a thunder-bringer and dream-maker as well as mad trickster, lusty buffoon, and moral guide.
Farming, I had learned, is a giant game of Jenga: everything that can happen in each move balances on everything we have built before.
By the late 1800s, in one of their many acts of unsettling America’s natural balance, white men had hunted wolves and mountain lions to extinction in the East. They had never seen a coyote. Vermont’s early farmers were able to trash their landscape with millions of sheep in part because they had wiped out most of the predators that might check their excess. Coyotes arrived east in the 1940s. There is genetic evidence that for several hundred years coyotes had interbred with wolves in the upper Midwest and Canada, and it is these larger migrant hybrids, with thicker fur and feet adapted to the snow, that we now call the eastern coyote.
Eastern coyotes live in our valley year-round. We hear them yipping and howling from the fields on bright moonlit nights, see their tracks across snow or mud, note their twisted rags of scat on warm rocks, and sometimes find a fragment of brindled fur on a wire. And yet they are so secretive that I’ve seen coyotes only three times: once when I tracked their singing at night and caught a glimpse of blurred shapes flowing across the road, once when I found a female dead with a bullet wound in the woods, and once while waiting to unload a ram for a neighbor—a magnificent gray-and-red coyote the size of a German shepherd watched me boldly from the field’s edge. From watching coyotes on game cameras, I know they are incredibly playful and social—rolling over each other, wagging their tails, and licking in greeting—in nearly every way like the dogs we love.
*
I have come to lie in this field at night not only to see a coyote but to kill one. The ribcage, spine, and head covered in a blood-soaked rag of white fleece—feet dangling like a marionette’s—that now lies near the spring is what remains of a valuable yearling ram I had promised to a buyer. It is the latest sheep we have lost this summer, and now our bait. My eyes accustomed to the dark, I stamp down a small area so our blanket will lie flat over the rough ground and tall weeds, space enough to lie and wait. I leave a fringe of goldenrod between us and the spring, parting the plants just enough to see through. I lick my finger and hold it up but detect no wind. We’ll be lying about forty paces from the carcass, close enough for a coyote to smell us, wind or no wind. Their noses are as keen as a whale’s sonar. But maybe the stink of rotting carcass will overpower our human stink. Or maybe the coyote will be hungry enough to risk it. This is the season when the pups are big and growing fast but still don’t hunt for themselves, so the adults are driven by necessity.
More than half of the coyote pups in each birth litter typically don’t survive past the first four months due to starvation and disease. The adults in the pack bring meat back to the den, either in pieces (a leg, a rib) or as offerings carried home in the belly that can be regurgitated. To take down a large animal, coyotes might work as a pack, but more often they travel and hunt singly, stalking small rodents and grasshoppers and raiding bird nests for eggs. When it comes to feeding on a carcass, the alpha pair will often police who in the pack gets to eat and how much.
I don’t know why, exactly, but I anticipate the alpha female coming back to this carcass. She would still be lactating but free to leave her pups behind with yearling coyotes as caregivers at the den. Her mother’s hunger would be insatiable.
Peter appears behind a pool of light, the Remington .22 that his father gave him under his arm, his hands fingering ammo in the pockets of his jeans. He peels off his cut-off rubber boots, unbuckles his belt and pants, and tosses them onto the blanket for a pillow, then stretches out his long, lean frame. Peter doesn’t hunt now, but he grew up in the woods of Connecticut shooting squirrels and birds as a young feral child and was state pistol champion at the age of twelve. I’ve seen him take pigeons out of the air.
“It’s still there. What’s left of it. But they seem to have gotten a taste for lamb, so I bet they’ll be back tonight,” he says.
I take the flashlight and sweep its beam across the sheep enclosure near the barn below us. A hundred pairs of shining eyes turn toward me like tin lanterns flickering in the grass.
*
After ten years of tending a flock, this spring i started to feel like I knew what I was doing. I had started with eight sheep, and now I have close to ninety. The lambs are even-sized, growing fast, with luminous silky fleeces that crown their bright faces and ripple in the wind. There are lambs that stand out by their distinct beauty, glowing with health, their movements quick and confident. These are the animals I sell to people wanting to start a flock. A purebred Icelandic ram can fetch as much as $800, a ewe lamb $600, which seems like a whole lot of money for a sheep—close to prices Merino sheep farmers charged a hundred years ago, but not since—but even with these prices, buyers are contacting me from around the country.
Some of the fields clearly show the benefit of the sheep’s rotational grazing and fertilizing. The white and red clover have come in without seeding, and the perennial grasses grow thicker and darker green. I look at the fields now and think, There’s a nice sward. I relish the word but never felt privileged to use it to describe our thin mangy fields. Sward is from fourteenth-century English meaning skin or hide, the “greensward” of the earth being its sod, its sheepskin.
It’s always a folly in farming to think you know what you’re doing. Everything Peter and I were doing on the land took enormous energy and will. It was stressful and all-consuming. Each winter was a marathon of planning for the social justice projects and programs we would manifest through our nonprofit, which now had a board, a faculty of two dozen incredible people from around the country, and a sizable budget we needed to raise to continue to bring people to our programs tuition-free.
Each year, we were also expanding the crops and animals on the farm. The summer, short and intense, was our reckoning—a lush, gorgeous, manic manifestation of all our plans, a season of celebration. But summer can also be a killer of dreams. Farming, I had learned, is a giant game of Jenga: everything that can happen in each move balances on everything we have built before and yet is made precarious by all the things we can’t control, like the amount of rainfall or heat, new pests and diseases, parasite lifecycles in the soil, the strength and health of our own bodies, or the pack dynamics of coyotes.
Coyotes are so widely adapted that now one does not start a sheep flock anywhere in rural America without thinking about how to protect them from coyotes. Fences are not enough. And for most of us, bringing sheep into a barn each night is not practical. Also, in the hot summer months, sheep get most of their nutrition in the night, choosing to rest in the shade in the heat of the day, so it’s important to keep them in the pasture. Bringing them back to a barn also exposes them to parasites and diseases that build up in concentrated areas. The beauty of having a grazing system is that the animals and the land are always working together, enhancing each other’s health. But coyotes can disrupt all those plans.
*
We lie on our mound of tussocked grass above the hollow where water springs from the earth, our bait in front of us in the darkness, waiting.
There may be no animal that has been more revered and reviled, romanticized and persecuted, adopted and murdered than the coyote.
We are on our bellies, arms crossed, cheeks resting on our hands so we can whisper, facing each other and pressed into the hot grass, dew drenching our bare legs and the seed heads of timothy and orchard grass dropping low to tickle our necks like the dance of a persistent and annoying fly. I feel something animate and stirring rise up from the hide of the earth to merge and mingle with my body, drawing me down and nestling me under the drenching silver of the sky.
We are like fishermen on the beach, baited lines running out into the waves to lure something wild and unseen, a hungry mouth from the deep. There is nothing to do but wait and watch, heart strained with hope for a sign, hands ready to act swiftly with any motion. We are watchers, we are hunters, we are snipers.
I notice that my excitement is tinged with something else, not fear or doubt…more like remorse. To hunt a predator feels like an act of malice, of dominance, of ego. We see ourselves in the predators of the wild; to eat a coyote would feel like an act of cannibalism. There may be no animal that has been more revered and reviled, romanticized and persecuted, adopted and murdered than the coyote.
I want so badly to put my head down, but I don’t want to cover my ears, so I prop my chin on my hands, my nose pressed close to the bitter goldenrod crushed beneath the wool blanket, which has its own smell—like old books and sun, musty and comforting, drawing me into sleep.
The only part of me still alert is my ears, my listening muscles crouched and thrumming. I will my ears to stand watch even as I feel my brain’s gears slip, thoughts mixing with the images of dreams. The electric throb of cicadas enters my veins like an ether. Beside me Peter is already gone, his body drained of all tension, his left hand on his rifle and his right touching my thigh, fingers twitching as he drifts away.
Time passes, an hour or four I have no idea. Then, my ears pick up the faintest rustle in the grass from the hollow. I’m instantly alert. A pair of emerald eyes stare at me from what seems like a few yards away.
Later, I will remember the look in those eyes as sad, recusing: “You tricked me,” they say. I will think of Aldo Leopold, who wrote of killing a mother wolf, and how watching “a fierce green fire” die in her eyes was the awakening of his ecological consciousness: “I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”
I touch Peter’s arm, and in less than a second, he has his rifle to his shoulder, aims at those steady green points of light, and fires. Between the pull of the trigger and the sharp crack of the gun, she has vanished.
__________________________________
From The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life by Helen Whybrow. Copyright © 2025. Available from Milkweed Editions.
