by Jonathan Shipley
It finally happened. Since I started walking the marsh most mornings, I vowed one day to see one. I told my wife repeatedly. “One day I’ll see one.”
I didn’t ever see one in autumn twilight, in a spring’s dawn, in the warm-spun daze of summer. “One day,” I promised myself, and then, on a frigid winter’s day, it did happen. I saw a coyote on the trail.
It wasn’t but ten yards from me. It bounded out of the desiccated grasses onto the path. I startled it as much as it startled me. I looked at the coyote. The coyote looked at me. I had thoughts of digging out my phone to take a picture before it vanished but decided against that. The moment here should be a moment. That’s all. Cherish it. It’s ephemeral. The path here connected us, and the path will be empty of us, both in just a few breaths.
Indeed, we took each other in and, just as quickly, the coyote took off. I laughed, burbling with joy. “It actually happened,” I said to myself. I kept walking, hoping it would make another appearance. It didn’t. I am greedy.
During early European colonization of our area, some of the first written descriptions of coyotes mistook them for wolves. A priest in Kaskaskia, Illinois, wrote in 1850 about smaller wolves encountered on the prairies.
The Lewis and Clark Expedition ran into coyotes several times on their journey. Meriwether Lewis wrote in his journal on May 5, 1805, “The small wolf or burrowing dog of the prairies are the inhabitants almost invariably of the open plains. … When a person approaches them they frequently bark, their note being precisely that of the small dog.”
The “prairie wolf,” as coyotes are sometimes called, spoke to me not at all. Just its footfalls were heard.
In Mark Twain’s Roughing It, he described the coyote as “a long, slim and sorry-looking skeleton” that is “a living breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry.”
The coyote at the Marsh undoubtedly hunts the area’s rodents, squirrels, rabbits, and the like. It does eat. The scat I’ve seen is proof.
My favorite cartoon character is Wile E. Coyote. Chuck Jones, the famed animation director, based the wily canine on Twain’s description. Wile E., and the Road Runner, from the Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies cartoons, first appeared in 1949 with the seven-minute short “Fast and Furryous.”
The cartoon made me laugh and laugh as a kid. The eternal loveable loser, Wile E. Coyote frequently falls off a cliff and splatters on the desert floor. Beep! Beep! The Road Runner runs off, leaving the coyote once again disappointed. I’d ask my mom for another bowl of Cheerios as I kept watching.
Coyotes and Wisconsin’s badgers can be friends and have been observed hunting together! Their relationship, it seems, has formed over millennia. Jars made in Mexico around 1250–1300 CE, pre–European conquest, depict the two species together.
I don’t know if the marsh coyote and I can be friends. I can hope. It’s out there somewhere living a life. Perhaps our paths will cross again on a Cherokee Marsh path.
In the meantime, I’ll be home, smiling in front of the TV as Wile E. gets another contraption from the Acme Corporation in hopes of catching the Road Runner. I’ll be laughing with another bowl of Cheerios in my lap.
To learn more about coyotes (and foxes) in Madison, visit the UW–Madison Urban Canid Project.
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