Relative Something

I came up empty this morning. Not for lack of trying. I trudged our woods and beyond, into the neighbor’s section of forest adjacent to us. I found no obvious evidence that revealed what all the coyotes were howling about last night.

Just about the time we were turning in for the night, the racket of coyotes in a tizzy, which we are now familiar with, after our initial exposure last October, filled the darkness from down the hill below our house. I cracked the window to better hear the chorus, and Pequenita leaped to the window sill to join me, her interest piqued.

Grabbing the spotlight that we now keep handy in our bedroom, I scanned the distance. It didn’t do much. Since the land drops away so quickly, the only view I get is of the open space near the house, across the top of the hill. I am including a daytime shot of the area we are able to see from the bedroom window.

From the sound of things, and from the fact the howling continued on and off for some time, we expected the coyotes had captured a meal.

My search this morning was for tracks that might lead to the remains of their prize. Last fall I hadn’t put two and two together to realize that what we had heard might mean there would be a carcass. It was mere coincidence that I was exploring our woods, days later, bushwhacking off trail, and came upon the fresh skeleton of the 8-point buck.

That was before there was any snow cover, and the scene hardly stood out at all. This time, I figured such a kill would be much easier to spot, since there is still so much snow on the ground. What I discovered was that the woods still obscure the sight-lines quite a bit, and it wasn’t easy to positively identify which tracks were fresh from the night before.

The coyote tracks I did find seemed meandering, certainly not racing after prey. I was also looking for evidence of more than one set of paws, because we definitely heard more than one animal yipping. There are plenty of tracks from rabbits, squirrels, deer, and one very definite and obvious trail of a single turkey. None of them looked to be on the run. Eventually I did come upon a pair of coyote tracks, side by side.

Maybe there wasn’t a chase. It could have been a surprise attack from a stealthy hunter. Whatever it was, I didn’t find the results. They were heard and not seen.

There remains the outside chance that it wasn’t a new kill at all. During my trek, I wandered past the spot of that kill from last fall. Enough snow has receded to expose the old carcass, and the legs and hooves that were left as undesirable last fall, had been pulled up and freshly gnawed.

It is quite possible that the reason my search was futile is because there was no fresh kill. Maybe they were just excited to have found the remains of that old kill. But, I’ll be keeping an eye out for a new carcass, because I’m not quite convinced.