The Trouble With Coyotes

Hunting among Suburban sprawl.

- Jason Brooks

Patches of snow revealed a set of fresh coyote tracks leading through the tall sage on a knoll overlooking a golf course; the short, manicured grass and sand traps were now dormant and blanketed with snow until spring arrived. Half-million-dollar homes sat all dark with the exception of a few lights in the early morning. Residents were about to start their day – some already angry over the loss of a family pet, either a house cat or a small designer dog. Others still couldn’t understand why people were so mad during a community meeting a month earlier, when the outrage over the loss of pets revealed that this group of homeowners had a coyote problem.

Word spread throughout my small hometown, a resort area that caters to tourists in the summer and produces some of the largest apple crops in the Pacific Northwest each fall. But in winter the town drifts into a cold slumber, quiet and safe – until the coyote “problem” came about. I had just finished working for the Forest Service fighting fires all summer and now was enjoying the early winter as a time to sit back and reflect. Less than a year out of the Air Force, where I was primarily stationed at Mt. Home AFB in southern Idaho, this was my first winter back home, away from the scablands where I learned to hunt coyotes for Bennet Mountain Fur Company.