Foxes and Fireworks

The dogs were down, and all was warm and toasty. It was a few hours after dusk and all was well. We were tucked in, reading in bed after a nice dinner and a long day. I was enjoying the luxurious, relaxed feeling of being in a good book, slowly sliding down the pleasant glide path into dreamland. Then we heard something.

The sound was faint at first, then came closer, filling the room faintly like evil smoke coming in the corners of the windows. It was a complex, wild howling that sent shivers through us and made us flip down the books and stare at the wall to concentrate.

The yawling wails sounds rose and fell, like death screams for disembodied spirits, or a special effects sound machine being dismantled with a vicious pair of pliers. Yet these were no electronic sound effects. These eerie, scary, wrawling yips and screams were being made by live creatures, unseen, prowling, surrounding us in the darkness.

Even though we were inside our stone fortress, the primeval fear lit up like a mortar shell – it felt like these things could come flying through the doors and windows into our cozy bed. Daisy went on full alert, black fur raised along her spine, watching the entrance. She was dead quiet, eyes and head darting towards any change in the sound. When she doesn’t even growl it’s serious.

It sounded like this:


Being The Man, I got up bravely leapt out of bed and marched out the bedroom door to the hall and over to the door that goes outside. Yanked it open decisively. Wanted to hear better. Find out what this was all about. Instantly the space was filled with loud howling and screaming, wild yips like demonic spirits on holiday. Holy Crap. I’d never heard anything like it before.

Except that I had. Several days before, I’d been out in the field and heard a similar wild sound erupt from the forest just up the hill. Right in broad daylight and chillingly close. It was an exceedingly strange experience, and it stilled me.

Later that day I’d spied Dale, our neighbor farmer who looks like a wizened pirate straight from Central Casting, driving his tractor through a nearby field. I went over to ask if he knew what the hell that was all about. His dull green, 14 foot tall 1,200 horsepower tractor shuddered to a dieselly halt (well I exaggerate –it’s actually only 56 HP – but the wheels are as tall as I am and it’s a damn big machine). Dale shook out a smoke and lit it, looking up the hillside through a squinting eye weathered by thousands of hours in the sun, and drawled, “Coyotes feeding their pups. They get real excited, when Mom and Pop come home with fresh meat. There’s a den of them over t’other side of George’s farm.”

“But it sounded so damn LOUD, Dale!” I was still a little shaken. Just a tad. “Like they were right up there beyond those trees!”

“Prob’ly an echo,” he opined in his typically imperturbable manner. Nothing much gets Dale going unless it’s someone interfering with his farming, and then watch out. We jawed about it for a bit then he said he’d be getting on with his farming. He flashed his brilliant boyish grin, which is always kind of pleasantly jarring on a face that looks like one of those three-toothed gnome dolls made of dried apples topped with wild white hair, and rumbled off.

I recalled this conversation as a fresh crop of fluttering yips penetrated my eardrums. I muttered to myself, “that’s no echo.” These night-prowling hairy scary beings were right there in the yard, invading our space, and scaring the hell out of us.

I pulled on a robe, shoved my feet into my Frogman all-weather neoprene slip-on boots ($44.50 from Duluth Trading Co.), grabbed my Remington 22, fumbled in a clip, and marched out to the wide front porch, every inch the stalwart defender of life, wife and property.

I stood there shaking a little (from the cold), and peered around. They were still out there, yelling and howling and trading insults. To the left about 40 yards away, over by the telephone pole in George’s field, one of the grey ghosts started a devilish doxology. He’d let out a rippling phrase and the others would yip and howl back from all their positions. Night spirits worshipping who knows what goblins.

The ringleader stayed put and the others seemed to be moving around, sounding for all I knew as if they were in the yard and around the barn. Angling for a good layout for an attack, maybe. Couldn’t tell how close they were but they sounded as if they were just yards away.

I could imagine them bounding up the stairs, wild black wraiths, intent on biting into my throat, taking me down. There was nothing between me and those over-sized canine teeth but my gun. I imagined them swirling around in the invisible inky dark like predatory wolves, setting up the kill. And the kill was going to be me.

I lifted the rifle, pointed it at the phone pole. I could almost see that coyote, could almost aim right at him. My finger wrapped stealthily around the trigger, ready for action.

Now this was profoundly stupid. First of all I couldn’t actually see the telephone pole, much less the animal. You never, ever shoot into the darkness, especially where you can’t even see a target. Second, even a really skilled hunter has trouble getting close enough to a coyote to shoot. Third, pointing that gun was plain pointless. It was just a primeval defensive motion, a gesture.

They weren’t about to attack me. In fact they could have cared less.

I was later told that those coyotes were just out having a good time. Tom Elliot, now a state wildlife biologist, spent seven years as a full-time coyote hunter in a neighboring county. “Fact is, I lived closer to them than my own family” he told me, then chuckled softly, “which is why I don’t hunt them any more.” I detected a bit of wistfulness in the comment. It’s a funny thing about real hunters and their attitude towards game. There is a deep respect, almost a kind of love, between the hunter and the prey.

He went on, “Let me tell you one thing about those sounds you heard. If you could hear them, they were letting you hear them. They live all around you, but you’ll never know it unless they are just out socializing. They don’t howl when they’re hunting.”

Oh. We’d eavesdroppped on a coyote social event.

This information left me feeling pretty silly, flat and unsatisfied. I also felt ticked off that they partied through our pleasant sleep and across our property, got our dogs riled and no doubt had the chickens terrified. I decided to look further into coyotes.

Coyotes don’t attack humans. According to Eastern Coyote Research, there has only been one coyote-caused fatality in all the recorded history of North America. In contrast, there are 4.7 million dog bites each year in the US, with over 1,000 people a day going to emergency rooms, leading to 15-20 deaths a year. You can tell this info came from a coyote advocate site.

Coyotes do eat cats and dogs. Pets aren’t their normal food, but they’ll have a beagle for lunch if one comes into range and they’re hungry. Normally nocturnal hunters, coyotes rarely come out in the daytime (except in suburban areas but that’s another place and story).

But at the time, I didn’t know all this. Out there on the porch, gripping that gun, I stood guard until the marauders had moved on down the way, across Raymond’s fields and away into the dark blue night and silence. Then I went back to bed.

Three weeks later it happened again. Nancy was petrified. Once again I went out, this time freshly informed, more out of curiosity than fear. That night I just listened. Them there wily coyotes seemed to be moving down the hill, as if on patrol through part of their range.

Considering the fact that Nancy threatens to leave the house each time she hears those scary howls, and the 10 chickens, 3 cats and 2 dogs we have living here on the edge of the forest, it was time to Do Something. I called Darrin.

Darrin and I conferred, and conceived a Plan. In the first stage, he’d come up very early one morning with a special calling device and a buddy who like him is an experienced hunter and a crack shot. They’d set up the calling device and take up positions, “up there on the hill, upwind,” explained our intrepid hunt director, “Coyotes always circle around downwind so they can come up on their prey undetected.”

The FoxPro caller is pretty high tech. It’s got a powerful speaker and hundreds of pre-recorded animal cries, howls, yips, barks, chirps, gobbles, cheeps, rustlings, moans, and other animal intonations. Pick the animal, pick the attractive tones of the female in heat or the probing sounds of the intruding male, press the button, and “they come a-runnin’, or they’re s’posed to, anyways,” as Darrin put it. It’s controlled by radio so the hunters can be well away, out of olfactory range. “It even has a furry tail that flips around and looks like a coyote tail,” said Darrin.

They were to arrive pre-dawn, set up and see if they could call in a male in the barely visible morning light. The idea was to kill the male, the purpose of which to remove a key player and warn off the others.

Did I say kill? As in kill the poor coyote? Yes, I did. I emphatically do not want to have my chickens, cats or especially my dogs killed for a coyote luncheon. It is clearly not possible to sit down and talk reason with these hunters. I figure that if they won’t leave we will evict them by any means necessary, the sooner the better. It’s us agin’ them.

Darrin, not one to cause unnecessary cruelty to the wild animals he works with daily, concurs. He won’t use foot traps, but he will shoot coyotes and he’ll use snares. He’s had success with both.

Dawn came early and went. No sign of Darrin, no yips or yells, no shots. No hits, no runs, no score. He and buddy were out there alright but nothing worked. No coyotes came. Contacted later, he ruefully reported only one result, “We did call in a fox, though.” Typical result when coyote hunting in field and woods. Just too many hiding places and the opponent is too wily. “Those damn foxes really get in the way,” he said disgustedly.

A few weeks later, we heard the coyote chorus again, and again Darrin responded. Phase Two. This time, he’d come up alone, at night. He’d go away’s up in George’s cornfield, up near the treeline, set up the caller, move upwind and try again. I quickly spotted the obvious flaw. It was in the waning moon phase and there would be no moonlight. Feeling pretty savvy, like a real country boy, I rather cockily asked, “OK, but how are you going to see? It’s pitch black out there this time of the month!”

“Red light beam,” grinned the ever savvy Darrin. “Coyotes can’t see in the red spectrum. I point my red light, spot the animal, then flip on my high power hunting light and shoot before they can react.”

He showed me his rifle. Looking vaguely like a lightweight field version of something the Terminator would carry, this was a business-like gun with camouflage patterns covering the stock and barrel, a long sighting scope, another tube for the red beam emitter, and a squat, compact halogen light for lighting up the target. With optics, reticles, batteries, sighting adjustments, light sources, and various tubes and stealth graphics, this was a far cry from Daniel Boone’s musket.

On the evening of the appointed day, we shut the chickens in their coop, blockaded the cats in the barn and got the dogs in. Had some dinners, I guess. I forget. Long about 9 PM we went out onto the porch. Just to get some air. Of course I was curious to know if we could hear the caller, or hear any shots, etc. Nothing much happened.

Then we sensed more than saw a little flash of red light, a long ways away, high up on the hill over in George’s cornfield. Then silence.

Then a faint yip. And again. Then silence. Hunting involves a lot of silence, I guess. There was a fair amount of it that evening.

We sat there, breath not exactly bated but feeling like vicarious partners on the hunt.

A Yip! “I bet that’s one of them, come to investigate!” I whispered excitedly. “Hope so,” muttered Nancy, shivering a bit. More flashes of red. Darrin moving his red light around. I could just imagine him getting one of the critters in sight. We didn’t move a muscle.

All of a sudden the sky exploded into brilliant flashes of light. It was like the Fourth of July on the Capitol Mall in Washington, D.C. Skyrockets, flares, exploding shells. Cascades of straw-colored streamers in the sky. Crimson explosions and magenta dots of light floating down. Kaboom!

We looked at each other, dumbfound. “What the hell is that!” we said, almost simultaneously. It wasn’t Darrin, that’s for sure.

About 20 degrees off to the right, over the far ridge and down the valley, someone was lighting off tons of fireworks. Right in the middle of the night, for no apparent reason. We could see flares of colored light edging the outline of the ridge then from behind would stream up a rocket and then we’d see another massive explosion. These were serious fireworks! Not like you buy in a box for the 4th. Professional grade. Huge.

It went on for a long time. Boom! Boom! Flashes and flares. Had to admit it was a pretty nice display but our enjoyment was marred both by the inexplicability of it, and concern for Darrin, up there in the dark.

I could just imagine poor Darrin high on the hill, cold and hunkered down, stealthily having set up his caller and hidden in the bushes, now gnashing his teeth as the coyotes ran miles away. I felt for him, just imagining his frustration and fury at having the hunt spoiled by this extremely odd, bizarrely untimely aerial display.

About 15 minutes after it was over, we heard a knock on the door. Darrin, come to report.

I asked him, with a hint of mano-a-mano compassion in my voice if he wasn’t ticked off about the fireworks, and wasn’t it really WEIRD?

He just looked at me.

I looked back. “The fireworks,” I said, “wasn’t that strange? I bet it drove all the coyotes into the next county.”

He gazed back at me, with an odd tilt to his head, as if thinking, what are you talking about, and said, “What fireworks?”

Dumbfounded for the second time that night, I bugged my eyes out, and then realized he was serious. I explained what we’d seen. Told him about the way the sky was lit up for miles around. The sounds of exploding fireworks and the far-away whistle of rockets going up. The cascades of brilliant showering colors filling the night sky.

He shook his head slowly with that down-gazing attitude that out here indicates deep commiseration about the many unsolvable mysteries of life. Then he glanced up and said, “Never saw ëem. Never heard a thing!”

It was my turn to stare. A mystery indeed. My mind rocketed around trying to resolve it – but he was closer, he couldn’t possibly have missed – but the noise – how could he not... Then I realized I’d never solve this one.

I let it go, gathered up and asked the obvious question, “How’d you do?”

He gazed out, gathering his memories of the night and said, “No coyotes. But I did call in a couple of foxes, a little red fox and bigger grey. Those damn foxes. Always getting in the way.”

And with that he grinned, picked up his rifle, and drove away home.

We never did find out what those fireworks were all about. Nobody else we asked knew anything, either.

Back After a Busy Summer

It’s the chickens again.

Actually, it’s the winter coming again. After an extremely busy summer and fall, it's time to record the many thoughts and feelings which have passed, and which are present now. First among them: cold weather approaches.

Everything changes when the weather gets cold. Elementals like water, equipment, clothing, materials, and yes, chicken care all shift when the weather gets cold. When I lived in the city, the only significant change that winter imposed on me was having to wear a jacket and sometimes footgear that could get wet.

In the city and suburb we go from weatherproof, heated spaces to other similarly shielded spaces in mobile weather-protected capsules that are equally well heated. We are so well insulated from the elements that we come to ignore forces of nature. For most of us devastating fire or flood is something we experience as images on television.

In our overly insulated lives we have lost touch with basics of life that have driven culture and inventions for centuries. We forget (or worse, never learn) that cold can be dangerous, uncomfortable and terribly inconvenient. Not here.

It’s time to cut or buy firewood. The old-timers know what’s coming so they cut firewood in the summer and stack it so it’s dry and easy to burn when it’s needed. New-timers like us, until we learned, figure that like going to the supermarket where you can get anything at any time, firewood is equally easy to come by, so we never prepared. This error can be costly in several ways, not just monetary.

Observing the way people here dance with the seasons is a lesson in fables. Or perhaps schoolhouse fables come to life when you live close to nature, as we do here in an old stone house that’s been through more than 200 winters. There’s ancient wisdom here to be understood.

Fables were developed to convey wisdom and life knowhow from one generation to another. The format was one in which no one was preaching down to another but the point got across, at least to those who were listening.

As our unusually warm fall suddenly reverts to normal frigidity, a fable that comes to mind would be that of the grasshopper who didn’t prepare for the winter, and had to be saved by the wiser ants who set aside food.

Same thing here. If you didn’t think ahead, and now need firewood as the cold winds blow, you’ll pay a price for it. High BTU wood like oak or elm goes for a premium as cold weather approaches. And well-dried wood is even more expensive, if you can find it. The newbies compete for a scarce supply. One person I know counts on the careless grasshoppers for much of his annual income. He does this merely by cutting green wood in Spring, and selling it as dry premium firewood in the middle of winter.

Sure, you can get wood at any time. Most of it is fresh cut. Until you’ve tried it, you can’t imagine what a hassle it is to use green wood in a fireplace. It is difficult to ignite and then when it burns it uses much of the released heat just driving off the remaining water in the rest of the log. As a result you get much less heat from the wood. Which means that you use a lot more wood for the same amount of heat gained. This is not merely a financial impact – it’s a lot more wood to handle.

Our home uses about 3 cords of dry wood in an average winter. That’s a full dumptruck full of wood, weighing 10,000 pounds or five tons. It takes a long day of repetitious bending, lifting and handling just to stack it. Then as the wood is used, it is unstacked and brought inside. which converts into many trips outside and back. It means extra deliveries when the outside grass is mushy, and the large truck leaves deep ruts in the lawn. This converts into further work in the Spring to correct. And that’s if you get dry seasoned wood. If you get green wood you’ll handle an additional 2 1/2 tons. Twice – once when stacking and again when you move it inside. Once you’ve gone through this, it makes you think ahead the second year,

If you have a few old trees and a chain saw, you can get fuel for free. If you cut it early and let it dry, you have much less wood to stack , much more efficient heat, and fewer trips outside to reload the fireplace.

Before living here, I doubt if I would have believed that firewood would involved so much forethought and planning.

Coping with winter heating is a complex subject out here. When your house is surrounded with frigid cold, you want a reliable, cheap solution. Emphasis on reliable. Emphasis in many cases, on cheap.

A big fad here at the moment is the corn furnace, which burns dried corn kernels. Feed corn is in abundance here, which makes for a cheap solution. Other people have outdoor wood-burning furnaces, clean gas fired heating, oil furnaces, LPG heaters, a whole range of technologies.

In all cases, it’s about coping with cold.

People here are in most cases of modest means, in some cases quite wealthy, and in surprisingly many cases, prosperous and comfortable. There isn’t much poverty here, but there is very little exposed wealth, either.

The culture is modest, interconnective, and almost always genial. There are many vectors that form the cultural matrix here, but at least one strong component comes from a shared experience of past hardships and a resulting attitude of tolerance:

Everyone got cold in the old days, and a lot of people still get cold.

Cold is, when you face it for real, frightening on a profoundly primeval level. This fear goes basic very fast. Just walking outside in a still, very cold night when you know there is no help for miles around, and coyotes are on the prowl, is enough to force shivers and fears into your deepest being.

To go from that feeling of exposure and fear, into a warm house, smelling rich aromas of good food, seeing the welcoming flames of a well-stoked fire, and being welcomed by strong dogs who express every feeling from unreserved love to total fearlessness is to know an equally primeval and deep sense of protection from cold.

Such experience is available to very few people these days, which is a shame. To know such feelings is to be in touch with earth, nature, life and reality in ways that are richly intense and connected to elemental sources of our instincts.

Cold affects ordinary things, which imposes pre-emptive activity. Like water-based paint. It’s no good if it freezes, so if you want to preserve your touch-up paint, you bring it in. Elmer’s glue goes bad if frozen, and if you don’t have that magical stuff for a minor repair, it’s a 22 mile round trip to get some new. Expensive power packs for power tools go dead. Letting a drill battery freeze is an expensive mistake – my Panasonic drill battery pack retails for $96. Ruined if frozen, fine if kept inside.

Or more important, water lines. One of the rituals of on-coming cold weather here is the draining and purging of water lines. You have not lived until you have walked into a basement full of waist-high freezing water in the middle of the night to shut off the water going into a busted pipe, as I once had to do. Such experiences teach the wisdom of not being a grasshopper.

We’re not yet at the point of purging the water lines that reach out to the barn and garden, but the decision will have to be made soon. It’s a royal disaster if one of the lines going through the barn and out to the chicken coop (them again!) or to the garden bursts. However, after the water is shut off, it becomes a royal pain in the ass to have to hand-carry water from the house to the chicken coop in cold weather. So we delay and hope to not be caught by a pipe-breaker freeze. In the depths of really cold weather, we often think about getting rid of “them damn chickens. “

The bright and wise observer, perhaps not used to caring for chickens in winter will ask, why not simply use a heater for the chicken’s water? This is an astute observation, and the flaw could only be known if you realize that chickens must have water at all times. Even with a heater, you still have to replenish the supply and without the convenient outlet next to the coop, life becomes charmingly ancient and zen-like, as in, chop wood, carry water. Only in our case, it’s stack wood, carry water.

A cynic might ask, why not just get rid of the pesky poultry and buy eggs at the grocery store? Indeed.

Ah. Well, this goes to the heart question of whether a rural life is worthwhile. Such an investigation it touches many important values about life. We really enjoy feeding and caring for these pea-brained idiots. It’s also a prime part of the fabric of our life, to wake up and hear the roosters crowing, or to see the chicken antics as they dig for worms or fluff wings, or in the case of the cocks, posture and crow.

If we got rid of the chickens, they would be eaten. Not that I’m really against eating chickens but when it comes to our chickens it’s a different thing. In the end, if I have to get rid of one of our chickens, I want to be the ender. Which means, ulp, learning how to kill, bleed, eviscerate, de-feather, dress, and butcher a chicken.

I can avoid this difficulty by saying (truthfully) more importantly, it’s about the eggs.

Once, at a Denny’s restaurant in Emeryville, CA., I had a egg and bacon breakfast which made me swear off eggs for two years. The eggs had so many hormones I could taste them. It was an off-putting, slightly frightening chemical oral assault. I felt betrayed and conceivably endangered by the assembly-line hidden egg production source that produced eggs with such an overlay of synthetic chemistry.

Here, our chickens give us wholesome, clean and richly flavored eggs, free of any off tastes. They taste great and make wonderful ingredients in all kinds of delicious foods, from simple fried eggs to complex desserts. You can see the difference if you fry one our eggs next to a store-bought egg. One is pale, pallid, soft and without much substance, the other is richly yellow, firm and full of life and color.


As I said, it’s the chickens again.

With the change in season, we have to prepare them for the coming cold. That means setting up the water heater, adding much more straw to the bedding, shutting off vents that could bring in cold air to their tiny bodies, and …

Adding light.

Despite the unusual warmth of this season, one thing didn’t change: the progression of dawn and dusk times. Unless we think mankind’s arrogance in ignoring global warming extends to denial of the orbit of the planet itself, it’s necessary to see that the sun rises and sets at different times as winter approaches.

And now we come to the wisdom of chickens. If you were a chicken, wouldn’t you want to make it so that your eggs hatched in warm times, so they could grow up with the best possible chance of becoming handsome roosters or winsome hens by the time winter arrived?

You win the chicken survival quiz. I won’t try to stretch your imagination further into how a chicken thinks, if in fact they do. Suffice it to say that as the season gets closer to winter, the amount of daylight shortens, and egg production drops off correspondingly to a dead halt.

In the combined and incredibly massive lore of chicken husbandry, someone cottoned to the link between light and egg production, and a great truth was learned: a hen’s egg-production system is governed by the amount of light in a day. She will lay more or fewer eggs depending on the way light levels seem to indicate the season.

From which we gain an important egg production maxim: if you want more eggs in winter, increase the hours of daylight! How? Put a light in the coop and time it so that the chickens get at least 15 hours of light a day.

It’s rather amazing how effective this is. By programming the light in the coop to go on from 3AM to 8 AM, egg production goes from a chancy 2-3 a week to 8 a day!

It’s the chickens again.



And a whole lot more…