Coyote Day

Today was Coyote Day.

I had already gotten what I needed from my hike in the Fells. Time on the trail, time exploring the pine-needly hills off the trail, and a quiet granite shelf to sit upon over the reservoir as I journaled.

Along the way, I wanted to know more about sassafras, which I found everywhere I looked. It seems it's been so long I had seen it that I thought it might now be rare. I associate sassafras with childhood walks along the sidewalks of Popponessett, where I'd try to distinguish it from poison ivy before picking a leaf, mashing it up, and smelling its sweety mintiness. But no, maybe it's been there all along, and I hadn't stopped to notice it (and smell it) in awhile.

So when I had received all those things, I dusted off the pine needles and red mites and continued along the reservoir in search of the trail back. Up and over knolls of granite, pine, and canada mayflower, I glimpsed an orange trail blaze, and hurried up the scree slope toward it. Feeling a sense of pride in my navigation skills, I hiked on with relative thoughtlessness, compared with the slow, quiet, observational way I had hiked in.

Then I saw it. 

A dog off its leash, like countless ones I had seen already.

Its fur was sandy brown, and it was large, heavy, straight-backed and straight-eared. There was something about how it trotted along the trail, so light on its feet, and then dashed up into the woods at the sound of my footsteps. It wasn't a dog of the domesticated variety, but a wild coyote.

Coyote.

Coyote is my namesake, back when I taught environmental education at IslandWood on an island in the Puget Sound. We saw them sometimes there, and once someone found a family of mother and cubs hidden beside Mac's Pond. At night, and not joking, usually around the full moon, I'd sometimes hear their yip-yapping chorus eerily pierce the quiet. I heard them when I lived in the canvas tent in Yosemite, again around the full moon, an even fuller, crazier sounding pack would do the same out to in the meadow below Half Done. 

I have a hard time thinking that the sighting is a coincidence. So I choose to believe that it's not. Coyote is back.