On broken creatures

As the year begins to die

There is a baby coyote with a broken leg living on my block.

We’re pretty used to coyotes in my neighborhood. Sandwiched between the two large packs that live in the Golden Gate Park and on the Land’s End trail, we regularly encounter them. I’ve seen them trotting alongside us while biking my kiddo to school. I’ve shouted at them to get off the elementary school sidewalk so we could walk in the front door.

A very healthy coyote giving zero fucks about blocking the sidewalk at school drop off.

I’ve had long, angry standoffs screaming at them with our tiny brown puppy in my arms. I’ve turned around and ceded my trail path more times than I can count to a pup or even a pack. Once, walking down the path with my children on either side, my son started tugging at my arm— “Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom!” until finally we stopped in our tracks, a massive coyote lying directly across our path just steps ahead, nonchalantly cooling itself in a little stream of water, clearly about to make absolutely zero allowance for us to pass. (“Mom, why didn’t you listen to me, I was telling you!")

In some of these encounters, I’ve felt actually threatened. I’ve had a coyote stand in my path and look more amused and curious than anything else, while I frantically waved huge sticks above my head with my “coyote alarm” lighting up the woods with flashing lights and technological shrieking. I’ve been so steadily stalked for such long sections of trail—carrying that small and delicious puppy in my arms—that I started to anxiously wish for a large human to appear on the path, telling myself don’t run, just ignore it, you’re bigger (truthfully, though, not that much??). The worst encounter of all lasted several agonizing minutes, where I ran repeatedly down and then back up a huge flight of trail steps, screaming like a madwoman to scare off the pack of three bating my idiotic dog, who couldn’t decide if it was better to chase them off or come running back to his mama clearly having some kind of psychotic meltdown. It’s really some thing to have your dog about-face and come running back to you with a pack of animals that look more wolf than dog come running at you behind him. Nothing but animal instincts tearing through all of us in those long three minutes.

For the most part, now, I’ve gotten over the weird (as a non-native Californian) shock of seeing these feral creatures woven into city life. I don’t like them, and they don’t like me, and we both don’t agree with our rights to be here, but we just… give each other space. These casual detentes make daily life feel vaguely gothic and a little bit Grimm. As if I am now one of the lesser adult characters inhabiting the world of Little Red Riding Hood. The woodsman. The grandmother. The baker. The oddly absent mother. I’m even a little bit proud of them when out of towners come to visit. Yes, I encounter wolves on my walks in the woods, and for the most part we accept each other. The kind of acceptance that would not make me averse to wearing that gorgeous fur as a trophy if I could. And maybe, come to to think of it, that antagonistic acceptance is how it’s always felt in the spaces we have both occupied?

But this week, there’s a new inhabitant on our block. It’s a baby coyote with a broken front leg. He’s clearly abandoned, and confused—the neighborhood email thread has been lit up with countless messages about him curled up on front lawns, laying on the sidewalk in the sunshine, limping up and down our little four blocks of sidewalk. Looking at each of us. We’re seeing him so often—every day, multiple times a day, walking to the store or kid lessons or out for a bike ride—that it’s starting to feel like he lives here, too. As if perhaps he has hopefully adopted us. And now, that casual detente feels suddenly brutal.

There’s a pretty acute softening of the heart that happens when you see any helpless young creature of any kind ostracized from their pack, abandoned and left, well, to die. And to have long extended moments with to that creature making a kind of eye contact that you know is a plea. To be able to track his progress every day: his double eye infection seem to have cleared up. He’s getting skinnier and skinner. His front leg is still unusable and misshapen. It’s enough to make our coyote-hardened neighborhood light up animal control with calls to help. We’re told: if it were a pet we would help, but it’s a wild creature, so nothing can or will be done. Don’t touch or engage in any way. Call them back for removal when it dies on the front lawn.

Our children are heartbroken and worrying about him. Asking all the parents: why can’t we help? And the answers feel so pathetic. You can’t make him reliant on us, you can’t make it so he thinks it’s safe to interact with humans, you can’t help, it isn’t right. Nature red in tooth and claw, etc. My son, whose school mascot is the coyote, is spilling over with facts he’s learned about them in school—did you know, mama, that coyotes can even count numbers up to five? You try to explain and stop when you hear yourself because nothing you say makes sense to the purity of a kid’s heart. It all feels so mealy, like cartoon sawdust flies coming out of your mouth when you’re literally facing this little injured helpless creature asking you with its eyes for help. Because really… why can’t we help, again?

The same anger I had at animal control for not doing anything when I felt threatened as an animal myself means something very different now. I am the same woman who railed at animal control that something has to be done because it isn’t normal for a coyote pack to live side by side with humans in an urban environment—we’ve created this situation—we should have a heavier hand in managing it. This isn’t nature’s plan, it’s man’s fuck up, and that means we need to play a part in separating the habitats again. And a big part of me still believes this.

But this moment of acute softening has been an ego check. Ah, there you are ego, embarrassingly oblivious, full of authority, standing there pompously with your opinions hanging out like visible underwear. How obvious it suddenly is how much our perspectives can be so strongly shaped by Things That Happen to Us, can give us this strong sense that therefore We Know Something, and yet still be totally meaningless. How certain that can feel, how authoritative, how…. resoundingly sure because yes! based on actual evidence! things that you actually experienced directly that taught you something. How quickly that can feel like wet tissue falling apart in your hands, turning to nothing in one heart-opening moment. How stupidly small and egregiously human. The universe—nature—is so much more profoundly simple, and so much more profoundly complex, and all it takes to smack you right back into a deep humility (humiliation, even) is the tiniest flick of the larger reality. It’s all ego; we don’t really know shit. And certainly nothing at all about what’s right.

Everything is right, and everything is heartbreaking, and everything is wrong, and the reality just is that there is a baby who can count to five dying on my block this week.