That evening, as darkness fell and we waited for the medical examiner to arrive, I thought about a dead woman named Taylor Mitchell.
On a late October afternoon in 2009, the nineteen-year-old folksinger was hiking alone on a trail in Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Nova Scotia, Canada. She had come to the Maritimes to promote her new album and had decided to take time between performances to explore the forested plateau above the Cabot Trail scenic highway.
The last people to see Mitchell before the attack were a man and woman who passed her as she was heading up the Skyline Trail. The young woman went a short ways into the forest, then doubled back on an access road to the parking lot, possibly with a coyote already in pursuit.
Just seven minutes after they’d crossed paths with Mitchell, the couple encountered two coyotes on the park access road. The animals trotted toward them along the road, forcing them to step aside, but the hikers managed to take photographs. (A specialist in canine behavior who examined the pictures later testified that the coyotes had displayed an extraordinary lack of fear toward the humans.) These same coyotes are believed to have met the oncoming Mitchell several minutes later. When the couple heard what could have been either animal noises or screams in the distance, they rushed to a telephone to call for help.
A group of four other hikers then arrived in the lot. The man and woman told them about having seen Mitchell earlier and mentioned possible screams they had heard. The group headed out along the access road and soon came across a set of keys and a small knife (possibly used by Mitchell in a futile attempt to defend herself as she was chased back onto the Skyline Trail). In the clearing at the head of the trail, the rescuers discovered shreds of bloodied clothing and pools of blood on the ground. A washroom in the clearing had bloody handprints smeared on the door.
Half an hour after she had last been seen, Mitchell was spotted lying in the trees, with a coyote standing over her body. It took repeated charges by three of the young men to chase the coyote even a short distance away from the injured hiker. Mitchell was conscious and able to speak, but the coyote remained close by, growling. Eventually, a responding officer from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police appeared and fired a shotgun at the animal, and it took off. The rescuers found that Mitchell had been bitten over most of her body, with serious wounds to her leg and head, and she had lost a great deal of blood. She died just after midnight.
That same day, while the trail was still closed to the public, a warden keeping watch at the washroom location shot and killed a female coyote that was acting aggressively. In the weeks that followed, three other animals were dispatched within a kilometer of the Skyline Trail. Scientists determined that three of the coyotes, including the first and last, were linked to the attack on Mitchell by her blood on their coats and other forensic evidence. One of them, a large male, was identified as the dominant lead coyote photographed by the couple. Its carcass also contained pellets from the shotgun of the responding Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, indicating it was the animal that had refused to move off Taylor Mitchell’s helpless body.
The story whipped the Canadian media into a frenzy, with so-called wildlife experts speculating that the young singer might have provoked the coyotes by trying to feed them or by disturbing a den with pups. None of the other proposed explanations for the assault—that the coyotes were rabid, wolf-dog crosses, starving, immature, or protecting a kill—was substantiated by autopsies of the dead animals. In the end, no one could explain why a pack of coyotes had attacked and killed a healthy woman for the first time on record.
I had heard the tragic story of Taylor Mitchell even before I entered the Maine Warden Service, but it was at the Advanced Warden Academy that I learned the details. Like many Maine deer hunters, my instructor at the academy had a visceral hatred for coyotes—which he called “brush wolves.” He said he’d seen deeryards in winter that were as red as battlefields from the predators massacring the helpless bucks and does, which were unable to escape through the thick snow. “The only good coyote is a dead coyote,” he’d said. And he’d fumed at the know-nothing flatlanders who failed to see the mounting danger these increasingly aggressive animals posed. To him, the sad story of Taylor Mitchell was merely the first chapter in what was destined to become a very long and bloody book.
Listening to Stacey describe the carnage she’d seen—the gnawed bones, still pink with bits of flesh, the hunks of bloody hair stuck to leaves, the clothing torn to ribbons—I remembered my instructor’s red-faced warnings. At the time they had seemed irrational. Now they seemed prescient.
I had killed more than a few coyotes in the line of duty, either because they seemed to be rabid or because they were snatching chickens from henhouses. Once, I’d had to put down a hundred-pound Hampshire pig after a coyote leaped over a fence and took a baseball-size bite out of its haunch. I’d also killed a coyote for sport one night when a warden friend named Cody Devoe invited me to hide with him inside a freezing blind, watching a bait pile through a night-vision scope, until the animal came within range of my rifle. The experience hadn’t done much for me (the dead coyote, when seen up close, bore a disturbing resemblance to Rin Tin Tin), but I didn’t begrudge Cody his fun.
Pinkham and DeFord kept most of the wardens who arrived away from the scene, except for a handful of veteran officers whom they trusted to secure the area. Standing in the clearing, with the construction lights stretching our shadows across the sawdust like pulled rubber, we engaged in the very activity for which I’d rebuked Nissen. We speculated wildly, and without evidence, about how Samantha Boggs and Missy Montgomery had died.
“Hey, Bowditch,” said Warden Tommy Volk. “What’s this I heard about coyotes stalking the girls all the way from Cloud Pond to Chairback?”
“I’m not sure that really happened,” I said. “It might have been two different family units.”
“Family units! Listen to you.”
“I knew this day was going to come,” said gray-haired veteran Garland Tibbetts, who was a good man in the woods but no one’s idea of an intellectual. “I wonder if they was menstruating.”
“The girls or the coyotes?” asked Volk with a smirk.
We all glared at him. It was too soon for jokes, let alone tasteless ones.
“If you run from a canine, you trigger a DNA attack response,” said Pierre “Pete” Brochu, a warden sergeant who came from a long line of wardens and considered himself more knowledgeable about animals and their behavior than the department biologists. “The girls should have stood their ground. Same as with an ursine.”
“An ursine?” said Volk.
“A bear.”
“I know what it means, professor.”
“Chad McDonough told me they both had capsicum spray with them,” I said.
“McDonough? Is he the one they’re calling McDonut?” asked Volk.
“Does anyone know if he’s been located?” I asked. “I spent my day chasing him.”
But no one was interested in my fugitive hiker now that the picked-over bones of the women had been found.
“You see that escarp up there?” asked Warden Garland Tibbetts, jutting his chin at the darkness. “I bet them coyotes chased those poor girlies right off the edge and then fell upon their bodies down at the bottom. Jeezum, I hope those kids was already dead by the time they was eaten.”
“Will you please shut up?” Stacey had been sitting quietly on an open truck gate, swinging her feet, not seeming to listen. I’d been trying to give her space since she’d returned from looking at the corpses. “For all we know, Samantha and Missy were murdered.”
“I thought you said there were chew marks on the bones,” Garland Tibbetts said.
“Their bodies could have been scavenged by the coyotes,” she said. “We won’t know for sure until the remains are autopsied. You all want to believe the coyotes did it because you already hate them.”
The stares of the wardens turned toward the lone female among them.
Pete Brochu said, “Stacey, you haven’t seen some of the depravities these animals have committed out in the woods.”
“Don’t give me that crap. I’m a fucking wildlife biologist.”
“Didn’t mean to offend.”
She gave Brochu the finger and walked out of the light.
The wardens flicked their eyes at one another. They all knew Stacey was my girlfriend—cops can be the worst gossips when the subject is sex or money—and so they refrained from commentary. But Tommy Volk couldn’t stop himself from cracking up. The man had impulse-control problems.
When I caught up with her, she had her arms braced against the medical examiner’s Dodge camper van, as if she were trying to flip the vehicle onto its side. Her head was down, her arms tensed.
“Somebody murdered them, Bowditch.” After briefly using my first name, she was back to her old ways. “It wasn’t coyotes.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Coyotes don’t attack adult women.”
“What about Taylor Mitchell, that singer in Canada?”
She let go of the van and straightened up. Her face was hidden behind a veil of shadows. “Those were park coyotes. They were acclimated to people. Wild animals are shy of human beings. You know that.”
In my imagination I saw again the bold animal sitting, unafraid, in my headlights.
“What?” she asked.
“I didn’t tell you this, but when Nissen and I were driving out of the wilderness last night, we came upon a coyote in the road. It wouldn’t move out of the way of my truck. It was like it was taunting me to shoot it.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“You know I’m right about someone murdering Samantha and Missy.”
“Why don’t we wait until the medical examiner studies the remains before making up our minds.”
“It could take days or weeks for him to finish his report.”
“Pinkham isn’t going to shitcan his own criminal investigation,” I said. “He’s going to keep exploring leads that point to this as a homicide. He won’t just wait around for the forensic tests to come back.”
“It’s still going to take time,” she countered. “And meanwhile, everyone in the state of Maine is going to start panicking about ‘killer coyotes’ on the loose. Even after the medical examiner releases his findings, you know it won’t stop the rumors.” She shook her head, as if she felt sorry for me. “Two attractive young Christian girls get stalked and eaten by wild dogs in Vacationland. That’s a story no one can resist. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. People want to believe in big bad wolves. But only humans can be truly evil.”