My wife, my dog, and I had come around a bend in the mouth of Pugh Canyon, and there she was, frozen scared inside a wash that seeped down the side of Vermillion Cliffs. The coyote was much smaller than our hound McGarr. She dashed up the talus slope, hopping and leaping with the ease and dexterity of jackrabbit. In a matter of about a minute, she had gained about 500 feet in elevation before disappearing behind the fallen boulders.
In the two and a half years I’ve lived in Kanab, this was only the second time I’d seen a coyote in the area. The first time occurred the year before in the same Pugh Canyon, which is located on the edge of Kanab, six or so miles south of Angel Canyon. That first encounter played out similarly, with the coyote fleeing into hiding soon after spotting us.
Both times I was struck by how small the animals were, and how handsome. Both had bushy tails, and a coat that spanned a color spectrum, from yellow to brown to red to black. Not at all did they fit the acculturated image I’d previously had of them, of being mangy, gaunt, menacing. If anything, they seemed terrified of our presence.
Beyond their pleasing aesthetics and their plaintive cries at night, I appreciate coyotes for their ability to thwart a multi-generational, state and federally sponsored effort by livestock producers, gun fanatics and USDA’s Wildlife Services to control, if not decimate their populations. In spite of those efforts, the species is today North America’s most ubiquitous natural predator, living in every continental American state and every Canadian province, as adaptable to Manhattan as Montana. Around southern Utah, there are coyotes galore, but they generally remain elusive, their nighttime howling discourses one of few indications we are in their midst.
Last spring, my wife and I could no longer hike the length of Pugh Canyon anymore. It wasn’t our decision — it was our dog’s. At some point, McGarr refused to go any farther than a quarter of a mile or so up the canyon (with still another mile to go before we usually turned around). No cajoling or leash pulling could change his mind. I could think of no explanation for it, not until learning of the attacks.
This fall, in two separate instances and two different locations on the outskirts of Kanab, a coyote attacked a dog, both times while their people were walking them. One dog barely survived. The other, sadly, didn’t.
The dog who survived was a terrier mix named Ziggy. As reported in The Salt Lake Tribune, Ziggy was out for a walk in Pugh Canyon with her person Ruthie Itow. Ziggy ran ahead and out of sight. After an unsuccessful search, Itow returned to her car, where she ran into a couple she knew who were on their way up the canyon. Itow asked them to keep a look out for Ziggy.
They did find Ziggy, and it was almost too late. The couple tried to scare the coyote off, but he wouldn’t let the dog go. So the woman grabbed the coyote by his scruff, kicked and fought him, and finally sent him fleeing, but not without getting bitten (thankfully, she was wearing a thick coat and was spared from any wounds). Itow rushed Ziggy to Best Friends’ clinic, where a team led by Dr. Mike Dix managed to save him.
I was surprised, but not shocked when I heard the news. Coyotes are opportunistic hunters — and lone ones often desperate, taking what they can, when they can. What surprised me was that they had attacked in such close proximity to people.
But as I learned from Best Friends’ wildlife rehabilitator Carmen Smith, it’s not so unusual for coyotes to act abnormally in the fall, the time of year when juvenile coyotes disperse from their pack in search of their own territory.
“They’re young, they’re bold, and they’re not yet wise,” Smith says. In other words, they have yet to learn a healthy fear of people.
After the attacks, there was, understandably, some measure of panic around town, with insinuation that if we continued to walk our dogs in the desert around Kanab, we would be subjecting not just our pets to peril, but ourselves as well.
Calm, I think, has prevailed, but the incidents have left us with a healthy reminder to keep our dogs on a leash or at least within eyesight while walking them in the wild. It’s also left us with an even healthier respect for the unpredictability of the wild, which the coyote so provocatively embodies and represents.
“Coyotes are no reason you can’t be out enjoying nature,” Smith says. I agree. The coyote are one of the reasons we should be out enjoying nature.
Click here to download a guide to coexisting with coyotes, with some important tips on what to do should you encounter one.
Written by Ted Brewer
Photos by Gary Kalpakoff
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