Standing on four legs

I saw the coyotes before I ever heard them. Two summers ago, when we were just visitors on this land, a mother and her young pup twice skulked away from a stone outcropping at the east side of this 50 acres. I avoided that spot—out of commonsense rather than any knowledge of coyotes and their behavior. No mother wants to feel threatened where she lives. My human presence was sure to distress her if I came too close or too often.

Last summer two young-looking coyotes crossed the road behind our barns to the north as I approached in my car. It was daylight. It seemed bold on their part. But so few people live on the several hundred acres that surround and include us, it makes sense that they were roving in the afternoon. I saw lots of animals while living in town five miles away, but rarely any large mammals during the day.

In late December, we moved in to our house here on this land. The first night I woke up at 3:25 a.m. to the sound of them. The long howls, accompanied by many yips. My dog woke and my husband slept. I went to the window, thinking the moonlight would reveal the coyotes’ location. Goosebumps lifted the hairs on my arms. Excitement and alarm accelerated my heart. No sign of them in the lunar glow, but still the howls. It’s been almost two months and I hear them often—sometimes at twilight, or at midnight, in the deep of the night, and yesterday, at daybreak.

It is wild here. More wild than in town. I knew that. I wanted to be here because of the wild. But sometimes I wonder if it was poor judgment. Nights when it is pitch black, not a car on the icy county road, and only the coyotes, telling me they’re here, too. I wonder, can I handle this?

I think practically, about the chickens and ducks I want to raise on this spot. And the fact they’d be potential prey—not just for the eagles and the hawks around—but for the coyotes, too. Be Golden Farms just had four ducks killed by coyotes. Not these coyotes, but the coyotes on their hilltop about seven miles away. I don’t even have domestic fowl yet, and I’m lamenting their deaths to predators, including the coyotes.

I ask myself again: can I handle this? Yes, comes the answer. You can.

It starts to make sense that my friend Allison handed me a copy of Women Who Run With the Wolves back in November, and told me I should read it. Someone had given it to her in hopes of helping her navigate a difficult time, but she hadn’t touched the book. “It must be for you,” she said. I had never read it during its nearly three years on the New York Times bestseller list in the 1990s. I was studying critical theory then and scoffed at the “biological determinism” I thought was inherent in the title. I was too smart for that book.

I read it over the holidays this year, at first with some of my old eye roll, then, increasingly, with interest. The book is filled with stories—some familiar, some remote. The premise is that women are habitually cut off from a part of themselves that is deep and instinctual and that stories—old myths and fairy tales kept largely in the oral tradition, and by women—contain instructions useful for our psychic development, or repair. Estes is a psychotherapist, an educator and a writer. Women Who Run With the Wolves describes how she works with women to “de-pathologize the integral, instinctual nature, and to demonstrate its…essential psychic ties to the natural world.”

I also recently tracked down Coyote America, A Natural and Supernatural History, by Dan Flores. I wanted more than cursory details I found on the Internet about coyotes, interesting as they were. I was piqued by the fact that some Native Americans revere coyotes as shapeshifters, important messengers of personal transformation through self-reflection. Flores’ book examines the way that native people thought of coyotes, not just practically, but psychically and spiritually. He delves deeper, too.

What interested me in Flores book, ultimately, is the idea that he drove his analysis toward: “Americans are really craving to be re-wilded. They’re craving to be reconnected to nature.” Knowing coyotes better gets us closer to wild again.

Using the wolf, in Estes’ case, or the coyote, in Flores’, to show us something about ourselves, our potential selves, is a part of both books’ DNA.

For Estes: “A healthy woman is like a wolf: robust, chock-full, strong life force, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving.”

For Flores, coyotes are a perfect avatar for humans; their example of adaptability and survival—both of two great climate shifts (during the million years they’ve roamed the earth) and our 100-year all out war against them—shine a light on our own potential “problem-solving intelligence for success.” Given our situation here on earth now, any great examples of adaptability and survival seem worth examining. (Flores points to the evidence that coyotes are much more successful at surviving human settlement than wolves have been!)

Our psyches are propped up by thinking and feeling—we spend an inordinate amount of labor getting this balance right. Then comes sensation—literally using our senses in tandem with our thinking and feeling to know things and do things. But instinct, that “fourth leg” of our psyche, is often overlooked as we grapple with the quality, purpose and meaning of our lives. So many of Estes stories resonate with me—in the sense that they offer ways to do wolfish, (or coyote-ish!) things, to our benefit. Things that are arguably instinctual: “establish territory,” “know our pack,” “be in one’s body with certainty and pride,” “act in one’s behalf,” “be aware, alert,” “rise with dignity.” I’m willing to stand with greater awareness on all four legs of my own psyche and see what happens.

Maybe there will come a day—or a night—when hearing coyotes seems ordinary. Right now, the experience of hearing them is magical, primal, wakes me up from dreaming, and raises the hair on my arms and the back of my neck.

The coyotes remind me that I’m alert, ready to adapt and survive in ways that I haven’t before. I’m standing on all fours. Maybe I’ll even run.