Eyes of the Wild

Daily Photo

Coyotes, dogs’ trickier cousins, stay out of sight normally.  On calm dark nights.  sometimes they are so loud they keep me awake.  Seldom seen, I hear them a couple times aweek and in the warm summer nights sometimes they bracket our house and call across it for hours.

This morning,  an older female wandered into our front yard.  With rabies being a concern in the northern part of our county right now, I  cautiously followed with my camera and snapped a few photos before she disappeared over the ridge.  She seemed healthy though not as shy as usual today.  The Native Americans  thought of coyotes more as sly than shy, however.

The Aztecs called them coyotl which translates as trickster.  The coyote appears in many Native American tales— fooling, and occasionally being fooled, by others.

One tale told by an Eel River Wailaki has Coyote getting killed and dismembered.  Raven picks out his eyes and Coyote protests.

“How can you talk when you don’t have a body?” asks the bird.

“Any part of me can talk,” answers Coyote.

And, it does seem as if this coyote is letting me know with her eyes how exasperated she is that I’ve followed. “Leave me alone,” she says pretty clearly.

So I did.

Here is a woman who is raising an orphan Coyote and blogging about it.  Beautiful Photos.