16

The moon’s greatest admirers are the coyotes, and, Boulder House being the last outpost on Coyote Road, we had inherited a goodly number of packs or ‘troops’ of the animals.

Most of ‘our’ coyotes live in what we came to call The Hilton — a range of rock, studded with large pinyon pine, oak, deep gamma grass, juniper, and buckwheat that separates the Hidden Valley from the vast sweep of Pipes Canyon. It’s the wildest part of the land, furthest on all sides from human habitation. Here, nestled in caves against rocks under some of the biggest trees in the region, where the grass grows tall and brown, they have made their dens. The only beast that threatens is man — white man. The Indians, to whom the coyote is sacred, would not consider killing the animal that they view with fear and with the sort of sympathy they have for all living things. Nature, as Stephen Powers, California’s first anthropologist, says, ‘was the Indian’s God. The only God he knew; the coyote was his only minister.’ Tonight, its song — ‘the saddest and most beautiful and most triumphant music in nature’ — haunted the skies above Boulder House as they met to forage or socialise, or just to have a good old howl-in to the full moon.

Our coyotes live well. Deeper in the desert, where the land is hard, they have a more wretched appearance, and to the north, where snow covers the ground far more than here, they are more magnificently coated. Locally, they are the colour of the land at twilight: grey-brown and reddish, with a little white.

I watched one evening as they took up positions around Sailor, who wandered down into their main drag a few hundred feet below on the desert floor. They were particularly organised, one fleeting shadow after another moving out of a canyon with what appeared to be precision, taking positions around the young dog. Sailor might not have been their planned dinner, but he stood between their pack (perhaps pack is the wrong word, as the coyotes live in small family groups) and the food that The Blade Runner leaves out some nights. They stood silent sentinels, five or six of them visible in the fading light only if you knew they were there. Sailor seemed not to. They were all around him, but Sailor was young and stupid. He would probably have fought, and, as he was on the way to their food, would have lost.

The cliché that most wild animals will only attack if cornered is not accurate. If their food is threatened, they will fight. Sailor didn’t know he was in their way, so I clambered and slid down the ridge, and, as boldly as I could, walked past their points, calling to him. They watched, knowing exactly what I was doing, but I shivered in the evening air when I saw one flick behind me, potentially cutting off my retreat. There are stories of coyotes attacking man, but I couldn’t see them attacking a large male. As a rule, they will not mess with domestic dogs either. They know that an injury can mean a slow and painful death. Instead, they will watch and wait — wait until they have identified an easy target. Then they will send a female in heat out to lure a healthy young dog into an ambush.

It was darker on the desert floor, and I lost sight of them. They were all around me, only yards away, watching, maybe just interested. Sailor came to me, and we returned through their ring.

Inspection of their droppings suggests a good life. There are few seeds, indicating a good deal of meat in their diet. They rely on meat, mostly from rabbits, vegetables and fruit, and berries and roots if necessary. The white man put bounties on them, ignorant of their capacity to control rabbits. So the rabbits came in plagues, ate the grass, and starved the cattle. The Navajo, who lose thousands of sheep to the coyote each year, generally accept their deprivations in what has been described as a ‘spirit of religious tolerance’. An analysis of the contents of the stomachs of fifteen thousand coyotes has shown that rabbit amounts to 33.2 per cent of their diet.

Rabbits were most evidently in abundance around Boulder House through late spring and early summer, but there are fewer about now in the winter. The coyotes, their friends the eagles, the hawks, and the snakes have consumed almost an entire generation. But the rabbits are in their holes making new families, more fodder for the food chain.

Our coyotes are strategically positioned for the good life. There is food at Pioneertown, leftovers from the trash. The Palace is only a mile on the other side of the wash, and Sean, when he was the bar-b-q chef, would take great trays of leftovers out to the animals when the restaurant closed for the night. They came to await that treat, and would form around him in the dark. That was their Saturday-night outing — across the butte, through the wash, and into town.

The mind of the coyote must be like a map. Every rock, stream, clump of grass, every bend in every stream, every waterhole, every hideout and cliff, is exactly mapped. The map’s dimensions include smells, sounds, the direction of winds, and even the whereabouts of the moon and the stars — all the information from long before man came here. It is said that the coyote came first and made man, gave him fire, taught him how to hunt, and introduced him to death.

‘The Apache say that in pre-human times coyote created “a path” in which man is doomed to follow — a path of gluttony, lying theft, adultery, and other wrongdoings,’ says J. Frank Dobie, who set out early this century to write a tract on the animal and who, over twenty years, wrote a large book. Powers, the anthropologist, noticed an element of ‘practical humor and slyness’ in the Pacific Indians that he had not observed in those of the Atlantic. He believed the Indians had acquired this from interaction with the coyote.

That an animal could be responsible for an entire human attribute is a remarkable suggestion. Only a man like Powers would have made it, as he wasn’t the Smithsonian style of anthropologist. He was much attacked when his Tribes of California was published in 1877, but remarked he had ‘waded too many rivers and climbed too many mountains to abate one jot of my opinions for a carpet-knight who wields a compiling pen in the office’.

All the human attributes lend the coyote characteristics that appeal to cartoon creators. Added to this is his ability to imitate. This may be the base of the common Indian belief that the coyote can talk. Ernie and Carole recently heard a dog yapping in the night. Skylar, their small dog, apparently recognising a friend, leapt up and ran out into the dark to meet it. It was a bunch of coyotes, and Skylar escaped to make a trip to the vet.

Another night, they heard a loud meowing. At first they thought it was their cat, but White Kitty was draped over the sofa. Ernie went out to investigate. The meowing was coming straight out of the mouth of a coyote half hidden behind a Joshua Tree.

The coyote legends of the Indians mould the creator with Coyote Man. Coyote is God the Father and God the Spirit plus the Devil in one. Each tribe has an Old Man Coyote, Old Man, First Creator, Chief Coyote, Coyote, and Coyote Man who came first and procreated earth and man.

From the day of the arrival of the white man, the coyote has endured a bad press. So significant was he to the denizens of the Old World that the Spanish found it necessary to remove him as a religious symbol. In their zeal to erase pagan strivings from the souls of the conquered, they burnt and destroyed almost all depictions of the animal. Their records leave only enough to show that coyote worship was rife.

Mexico City was once Coyoacan (meaning Place-of-Coyote Cult), and nagualism — the belief some humans could transform themselves into animals — was at the heart of its citizens’ beliefs. J. Frank Dobie speculates that this was a form of the werewolf belief. In the Aztec pantheon, three gods were represented by or represented the coyote. The Spanish suppression of pagan histories such as those pertaining to the coyote lasted nearly three hundred years, and reflected the church’s belief in the ‘diabolical’ nature of the coyote. This lasted until 1830, the very time when English-speaking people were moving into the southwest and coming into contact with him. The Anglo-Celts named him ‘Prairie Dog’ at first, but the Aztecs’ name continued to dog the animal like no other. Indeed, no animal name from all of North America has so penetrated both English and Spanish as the coyote.

Even before the advent of television and the cartoon characters, the word had become so widely used as to include the following: a thief, a broker, a fixer, a mix of beer and brandy, a smuggler of people, an exploitative lawyer, a half-breed Caucasian, a bastard child, the woman’s last child, and a man with a skill in attracting women. This is merely the downside, the bad press from the Spanish.

Before the Spanish, the word referred to a wise leader, a horse that never gives up (‘the bayo coyote’), a tireless trot, hidden water (coyote wells or holes), to drift around, to sing well, and the sense of understanding direction through stars, winds, and landmarks (coyote sense). Thus the saying ‘El Indio y el coyote nunca se pierden.’ (‘No Indian or coyote ever gets lost.’)

Perhaps the sound of men, of the screams of saws and the crashing of the truck over the rocks, perhaps the mere presence of Tony, had quieted these desert spirits. Until Boo’s first night at Boulder House, I had heard them only from far away. Tonight they put on a right welcome for the woman of the house, yipping and howling from one ‘troop’ to another.

On the first night of Boo’s presence at Boulder House, as we swished about in the waterbed, Boo vowing never to sleep in the thing again, Sailor pattered up to attempt, unsuccessfully, to sleep at the end of the bed. He settled for a rug on the cold floor, seemingly unconcerned by the coyote cacophony. Above us, the skylight delivered the stars into the room, and as the water warmed (I had discovered that it lay on an electrically heated pad that, if pushed high enough, would bring the water almost to the boil), the plagues that attended Boo’s arrival seemed trivial. For who else was lying in a bed the size and scope of a swimming pool, the Milky Way brilliant above, while the souls of the desert sung?

By the time we woke, the coyotes had long retired to their dens, and we lay for a while listening to the silence.

True, deep, complete silence is something few who live in the civilised world ever get to hear. Pipes Canyon Road was too far away to hear a car pass, and the area is pretty much off limits to aeroplanes. This is due to a heat vortex that had caused those who charted flight paths so many years before to direct them away from the area. The only source of sound is the wind, and the fire down below must have lasted throughout the night, as the rock room was still warm. But it was the silence, the complete absence of noise, the silence of the deaf, that reminded one that all modern life involves constant eternal noise. Not since I had left the Australian bush had I heard such silence. Boo and I listened to it until it was time to rouse.