The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (37 page)

 

After Petit Bois, we'd sailed to the west end of Dauphin Island, anchoring near Katrina Cut, a rift in the island opened up by the hurricane. These barrier islands, which are a mere 3,000 years old—"not two generations of cypress," said Bill—get regularly knocked about by storms. Two rigs near our anchorage had beeped annoyingly through the night, and the next morning, when Jimbo and I looked to marinate, a strange black slick of congealed matter was drifting past the boat. We raised anchor and headed for Grand Bay.

If we were still hoping to find the old gulf, we met it sooner than expected. Looming beyond Grand Bay, a black bank of cloud sucked the color out of the western sky and rose imperiously into the troposphere, flicking snake tongues of lightning at the sea. The water turned a psychotic green. A mitt of wind came across the surface and swatted
Dolphin's Waltz
like a toy. "Better put the sugar to bed!" said Jimbo. We could see the Alabama shrimp fleet hauling ass for the shelter of Bayou la Batre, their hulls glowing white against the charcoal sky.

If Josh had said to me at that moment that the time had come to stop playing this eighteenth-century game, to crank up and play it safe, I would have bowed to his experience. But we instead came about and raised the biggest sail we had, a green spinnaker that billowed in front of us like a parachute and caught the storm's 30-knot gusts, headed toward Mobile Bay.

Our speed and direction had been decided for us: we were going home. I stood in the bow, handrail held tight, and let the cool rain needle my skin as waves hissed against the hull and splashed me. Horsepower had easily beaten wind power, leaving this part of Mississippi Sound deserted save for us. Frothing waves obscured the horizon, and I could see nothing but sails and water and cloud.

We sailed for hours on that course. The difference between powerboating and sailing is profound, but it's a feeling that sneaks up only after you've been at it for a while. It's a cool, crisp serenity caused, paradoxically, by a lack of control over your fate. You can't choose your weather. You can't bend the world to your will.

Entering Mobile Bay, we jibed to pick up the shipping channel, and the full brunt of the wind came across our deck. Josh's eyes flicked from the wind to the spinnaker to our course. "Harden up on that sheet a bit!" he called. Bill winched in the sheet, the spinnaker snapped into place, and
Dolphin's Waltz
heeled over and locked into a groove. She surged forward, 35,000 pounds of wood and fiberglass and lead cleaving the water into two foamy curls.

"She got a bone in her mouth now!" Jimbo shouted from the wheel.

The channel from Mobile Bay into the Mobile Yacht Club harbor is six and a half feet deep, more or less, quickly dropping to five if you go astray.
Dolphin's Waltz
draws six feet of water. Of course, when she's heeled over, flying across a strong wind, she draws a little less. Keep her at full speed, hard into the wind, and she can sneak through five or so feet of water. But when a boat with that much mass runs aground at that speed, very bad things happen.

The bridge loomed. "Jimbo," Josh said, "you just keep her pointed exactly at that top span." I asked Josh when he wanted to drop the sails. He waggled his head: "It's all about the braggin' rights, dawg."

I stationed myself in the bowsprit in classic "king of the world" position, the bay sluicing beneath, the bridge towering above. We had twenty feet of clearance above our mast and about ten on either side of the channel. "We comin' in hot!" yelled Josh.

Suddenly, a powerboat came out of the harbor straight at us. "Boat!" I shouted, gripping the handrail even tighter.

"We got right of way!" Josh yelled back. "We got rights over everybody right now!"

Sure enough, the powerboat scrambled sideways like a pedestrian dodging a runaway truck, and we blew into the harbor, past the dock and a handful of frozen onlookers. One of them snapped out of it, pointed, and shouted, "Josh, that's the coolest thing you have
ever
done!" Josh grinned.

Then we doused the sails, fired up the diesel, and motored back into our parking spot.

FROM
Orion

W
ILD COYOTES HAVE SETTLED
in or around every major city in the United States, thriving as never before, and in New York they have taken to golf. I'm told that the New Yorker coyotes spend a good deal of time near the tenth hole on the Van Cortlandt Park Golf Course in the Bronx. They apparently like to watch the players tee off among the Canada geese. They hunt squirrels and rabbits and wild turkeys along the edge of the forest surrounding the course, where there are big old hardwoods and ivy that looks like it could strangle a man—good habitat in which to den, skulk, plan. Sometimes in summer the coyotes emerge from the steam of the woods to chew golf balls and spit them onto the grass in disgust.

They also frequent the eighth and the ninth and the twelfth holes, where golfers have found raccoons with broken necks, the cadavers mauled. At the tenth hole, a coyote ran alongside a golf cart last summer, keeping pace with the vehicle as the golfers shook their heads in wonder. "I stop the cart, he stops," one golfer who was there told me. "I start it up, he follows. I jump out, he jumps back. I sit down in the cart, he comes forward. We hit for a while—we're swinging, and he's watching." Here the golfer, an animated southerner named Chris, mimes the animal, following with his head the coyote-tracked ball's trajectory up and up, along the fair way, then its long arc down. It was pleasing to Chris that coyotes like golf.

Until recently, I couldn't quite believe that coyotes were established New Yorkers. Among neophyte naturalists it's an anomaly, a bizarrerie, something like a miracle. Coyotes, after all, are natives of the high plains and deserts two thousand miles to the west. But for anyone who takes the time to get to know coyotes, their coming to the city is a development as natural as water finding a way downhill. It is also a lesson in evolution that has gone largely unher-alded. Not in pristine wilderness, but here, amid the splendor of garbage cans filthy with food, the golf carts crawling on the fairway like alien bugs, in a park full of rats and feral cats and dullard chipmunks and thin rabbits and used condoms and bums camping out and drunks pissing in the brush, a park ringed by arguably the most urbanized ingathering of
Homo sapiens
in America—here the coyote thrives. It seemed to me good news.

 

The coyote, unlike its closest cousin, the wolf, is a true American. The coyote's earliest relatives began evolving in the Southwest 10 million years ago, with
Canis latrans
arriving roughly at the dawn of the Pleistocene Epoch, when huge predators roamed the continent. I imagine the coyote in its prehistoric form as a thing small and weak and quiet, slinking in the shadows alongside the megafauna of American prehistory. The little dog had to deal with the appetites of cave lions, which weighed upward of six hundred pounds; the predations of the saber-toothed cat; the fury of the short-faced bear, which, at a height of fourteen feet and a weight of up to nineteen hundred pounds, was the largest bear that ever lived. It tried not to get stomped by the mastodon and the mammoth and the stag-moose and the elephant-sized ground sloth and the armored glyptodon, a turtle as big as a Volkswagen.

Then, beginning some 12,000 years ago, the coyote got a break. In one of the great extinction events of prehistory, North America's megafauna, these giants of the continent, disappeared. What precipitated the mass extinction is unknown and is today the stuff of much speculation. The cause might have been climate change—the retreat of the glaciers, the warming of the planet—or perhaps it was a change in weather combined with overkill from newly arrived human predators who crossed the Bering Strait, armed with the technology of spears that the megafauna were not adapted to fend off. The coyote, fighting for so long in this hard world of giants, was among the few prehistoric American mammals to survive in the new environment. Other sizable fauna soon filled the extinction vacuum. But they were foreigners. Like the spear-chucking humans, the new mammals were descendants of Asia. They are the creatures that we know now as bison, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, grizzly bear—invasives that we generally find ghettoized in our national parks.

Another invasive species that crossed from Asia was the gray wolf. Fast-forward several thousand years, and the coyote and the wolf have become mortal enemies. They have fought for space over the millennia, with the wolf claiming most of the American continent because the wolf is bigger, more aggressive, works in packs, and operates well in dense forest. Enter the white man, whose technology and avarice allowed for sweeping control over established predators. By 1900 white settlers had decimated the wolf population, which threatened their livestock and their children. This was accomplished not simply by unleashing gunpowder; the white man felled forests everywhere he went, which opened up the terrain and left no hiding place for wolves. The coyote, on the other hand, thrived in open spaces. It was as adaptable as the wolf was not; it had been adapting to predation in America for 10 million years. So the coyote took over the wolf's niche as top dog.

In the wake of white settlement, the coyote was reviled for its success. That we could not appreciate the elasticity of the native dog was fitting irony for the European species of human, so terribly successful at invading the continent and adapting to it ourselves (or, rather, forcing the continent to adapt to our new and increasingly invasive presence). Along with the Indian and the bison, the coyote was—remains—the pest par excellence of the American West, to this day classified in the law books of many western states as "vermin" or "nuisance" species. Tens of millions of coyotes have been slaughtered in the United States since 1900; federal and state governments over the last two decades have killed an estimated two million of them. This figure doesn't incorporate the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of coyotes each year hunted, baited, trapped, snared, and poisoned by livestock ranchers and sport hunters who kill coyotes for recreation in contests and bounty hunts. The attempt at control has cost in the range of billions of dollars—no firm number is known—and it has failed spectacularly. Biologists note that the success of the coyote amid this carnage is largely due to a survival mechanism that renders the species impervious to the gun and the trap: when large numbers of coyotes are killed in any single ecosystem, the coyotes that remain produce bigger litters. The animal compensates for slaughter, in other words, by becoming more numerous, more problematic. I can only imagine this as a kind of Darwinian laughter:
Kill more of us, and more of us will come. Perhaps to be killed. So that there will be more of us. Ha ha!

 

I first heard the sound of the eastern coyote in the sprawling Catskill Mountain range, a hundred miles north of New York City. The creatures screamed and shouted and yipped; I thought I was hallucinating. That was eight years ago. Only once did I get close, in October 2002, when a pack in fog yelled in my ear on a mountaintop. No sighting of the creatures that cold night, nothing to lay my eyes on. Just the high keening song, the crackle and whisper of my feet and theirs on the forest floor. Thereafter I made it a point to walk in the forest and climb the mountains at night, to listen for them, find their sign, their scat, their kills. Eight years later I've found a lot of scat, many prints in mud, and no coyotes.

But the song—it hung in my head. I'd listened to coyotes in the American West, and the song in the East was different. In the red rock of the desert, it's lone and sorrowful and begins with a bark (
Canis latrans,
after all, means "barking dog"). The pack sometimes—only sometimes—answers the loner, the voices clear and vibrant, like a Greek chorus. In the East, vocalizations never seem to open with the loner. The song instead begins with a scream upon a scream, followed by screeches, squeaks, eeks, heeing and hawing and ululations, dystonal and weird, that the western cousin can't match. I could say I hear the gamelan music of Indonesia, the off-time rhythms of Turkic Bosnia, girls screaming rape, men losing testicles.

A few years ago, late on a summer night in 2004, I thought I heard a lone coyote singing in the Bronx. This was not long after the first reported New York sightings, which already had begun to increase in frequency. If coyotes were on the move in the city, marking terrain, naturally, I thought, there should be communication among them. What I heard, wandering Van Cortlandt Park on that summer night, was a short spindrift cry, like something heard underwater, distant and muffled and indistinct, and later I assumed it was the work of a dog pretending at wildness while slobbering over an owner come home. Or perhaps it didn't happen at all and I imagined it because I'd been reading too many reports about coyotes. In the moment, though, I believed what I wanted, and I started howling. And waited. And howled. There was the hush of the city, the hoodoo silence of the buildings that surround the park, and in the silence I could hear the murmurs of men and women speaking in a thousand ways out of tune with each other, and finally, when I howled one last time, someone leaned out a window and cried, "Shut the fuck up."

 

From California to Maine, there are more coyotes than at any time since records have been kept, their territorial expansion unprecedented in speed and scope. "The coyote is the most successful colonizing mammal in recent his tory," Justina Ray, an ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, tells me. They pressed eastward across the Plains and the Midwest. They went south into Alabama, Georgia, Florida. By the 1920s they had arrived in New York State, where they advanced at a mind-boggling rate of 116 miles per month. By 1942 they were in Vermont; by 1944 they were in New Hampshire; and by 1958 they were in western Massachusetts. I recently found their tracks like a palimpsest in the tidal flats at Cape Cod National Seashore—the messages of their movements chasing crabs—and one homeowner on the Cape described a den in his wooded backyard, thirty feet from his deck, where the pups stared out from inside a tree trunk. I talked with a Connecticut woman who welcomed a wounded coyote into her car, thinking it was a bashed-up dog, and took it into her house only to discover the creature going wild in her living room as it matured—wanting to get out. By the 1970s, coyotes were arriving in the cold sea-country of the Canadian Atlantic Provinces, having become fully established in New Brunswick by 1975, reaching southwestern Nova Scotia by 1980, Prince Edward Island by 1983, and floating on sea ice across the Cabot Strait to the island of Newfoundland by 1987.