by Cathy Barber
“Here’s something, Mike.” He spoke in a normal voice, not a yell. He was crouched down, with his back to me.
I continued to walk toward him, up the sparsely wooded hill. “What?”
He answered matter of fact. “A skull. A squirrel. Dead maybe three weeks.”
I came up behind him and looked over his shoulder. He held the skull in front of him. It was crushed and he put several fingers in it, splayed so that the skull filled out in an approximation of its original shape.
“Yeah, a squirrel,” he repeated. He dropped the skull and picked up a small stick. He used it to root around in the wet, matted layers of leaves and the humus of their decay. “Anyway, it’s not a fresh kill, and something this size could have been killed by just about anything, even a hawk.”
His explanation annoyed me. He was the senior naturalist and nearly the age of my dad. He had this way of explaining everything and always being right that got under my skin. I was just out of college; John had been working in the field in one way or another for fifteen years. He did know a lot, I’ll give him that, but he didn’t give me credit for knowing much. We were tracking the wolves in the park, much like the Yellowstone project, looking for evidence that the wolves don’t pose a threat to domesticated animals.
He went on, “Could have been the coyotes. That pair we spotted last week was only about two miles from here.”
Jeez! The way he went on! “I know it could have been the coyotes or a hawk, John! Could have been the wolves, too, for that matter.”
John smiled over his shoulder at me. “Then let’s look for some data. Anything at all helps us when the kill is a small animal, shows the wolves are eating acceptable prey, not sheep or cattle or it shows the wolves weren’t involved at all. We can’t lose here.”
I kicked at the grass. “I don’t see anything.” The wind picked up. I looked back across the open expanse we’d just covered and to the sky above. It was threatening a big rain. “Let’s get a move on, okay?” John didn’t budge.
“Let’s finish our explore and get back to the Jeep before this storm moves in, okay?” I continued. “I don’t relish driving back to the Center in a squall and we’ve got three miles to cover before we head back to do the write-up.”
He rose from his squat slowly; he was forty-five and was getting a little creaky in the joints in spite of all the walking we did. He looked tired when he said, “More like four. Okay, Mikey, let’s get that move on,” He turned and continued walking up the hill, into the woods at the crest. He called me Mikey only when he was annoyed.
I followed him as he made his way up the hill, avoiding the small rocks and dips that were muddy or held a bit of rainwater. As the ascent became a little steeper, he started to crisscross in a mild version of a cutback. I walked about five feet behind. Today was my day to carry the pack. It didn’t hold much, just our water bottles, lunch, the topographical map, our journal and a couple of pencils, a camera, extra film, gloves, a snake bite kit and the gun. It was John’s gun. We were supposed to be smart enough to stay out of trouble, to track the animals and never let them track us, but John said we were in their territory and we were small and flimsy and needed the protection. For the first six weeks I was partnered with John, he always carried the pack. He wouldn’t let me carry it or open it. I thought it was some macho thing. Then one day, it was early summer, I sprinted down a steep hill into a meadow and found myself a couple hundred feet from a brown bear and her cub. That mother fixed her eyes on me and reared up to roar. I was glued to my spot. John must have come up beside me, he yanked the pack off his back and pulled the gun out roughly, tossing the pack aside. The cub suddenly bolted and the mama came down on all fours, gave another roar and backed out of the clearing after her cub.
When I could speak, I started yelling. “A gun, John? A gun? You’re not supposed to…that’s why you’re always taking the pack?”
“Yeah, a gun. You never know, Mike. I wouldn’t be without a gun out here.” And that’s when he said we were flimsy ,etc. I wasn’t sure about our need for the gun, the bear had scared me to death but it had left on its own volition. I thought John had a need to be in charge. But after I was in on his secret, we alternated days carrying the pack.
When we reached the top of the hill, I told John I wanted to stop for a drink of water. I pulled the pack off my back, set it down on the ground and got out our water bottles, handing one automatically to John. We gulped some water in silence and then he looked around, spotted a fallen tree and hoisted himself onto it. I smoothed out the pack flap and sat.
“Chilly,” I said. Now that we weren’t walking, the cold set in.
“Yeah,” he answered. We both zipped our jackets. “We haven’t been in this area for what, five months? No, it must have been May. We had a lot of rain. Weren’t the trees pretty full already?” I could hear myself asking questions, always questions, even when I knew the answers.
“Yeah, it was pretty up here, late spring.” Just then a huge woodpecker swept into our field of vision, lighting on the far side of a birch, out of sight again. John’s eyes grew big and he got an excited grin. “Pileated!” he whispered. John was a birder, pretty well known. He’d had articles in Audubon and Nature. Birds were a subject he used to go on and on about until I snapped at him one day that I knew something about birds, too. My mom had been a birder and she took me with her a few times on counts starting when I was old enough to keep my mouth shut and not scare the birds. She’d have me hold a list she kept and make little tick marks by each bird as she whispered her sightings, robin. another robin, scarlet tanager, chat. The types of birds depended on the time of year and where we counted, woods, fields, wetlands. And of course, the birds were all so much more numerous back then. Birding was probably what got me on the path to being a naturalist.
“I know!” I whispered loudly and the Pileated startled, swooped into the woods and was out of sight.
John sighed, capped his water bottle and came over toward me. I shifted my butt to one side and he stuck the bottle back in the pack. “You wanta get going?”
I said, “Sure,” and I wondered why it felt like I should be apologizing to him for something, I don’t know what, when he was the one who’d been an arrogant son of a bitch again, going on about the squirrel’s skull like I was a know-nothing. If he hadn’t pointed out that the bird was a Pileated, I wouldn’t have felt I had to respond.
We started down the other side of the hill, continuing on the path we had set for ourselves that morning. I could see that at the bottom was a ravine and there was thick undergrowth along most of the length of it. All I could think about was the squirrel skull and the woodpecker, not our explore.
John turned his head slightly and said over his shoulder, “Let’s stay along the ridge until we see the end of that mess and then cut down, okay Mikey?”
I said we ought to get as close to the thicket as we could, because we hadn’t been out here in so long we should walk along the perimeter and see what’s down there and I was surprised when John motioned formally for me to take the lead. I took a few awkward steps down the grade. It was steeper than I’d realized at first and I started to slip, then caught myself and gained surer footing. When we got within four feet of the ravine, which was actually a fairly dry creek bed, I started following the flat area alongside the drop-off. John was a few feet behind and we walked like that, pausing once for John to fashion a walking stick he used to poke into the undergrowth. As we walked I could hear the crunch of his boots, loud on the leaves and stones.
Suddenly I saw a head pop up from the ravine ahead of us a ways, not far. A gray head of mangy fur, foreboding eyes. A coyote! Way too close for my liking. The head disappeared again almost immediately.
I gasped. “John, coyote ahead,” I sort of squeaked. Another head popped up. “Make that two.”
John shouted from behind me, “Hee yah! Hee yah!” making me jump, then I joined in, trying to scare the coyotes off. Instead of leaving, both climbed out of the ravine, faced us and stared.
A saw a rock land near the closest coyote and realized John had thrown it. The coyotes barely flinched. I heard myself ask, “John, what do we do?” but I knew and I started looking for rocks to throw, too. A third animal came out of the ravine, in line with the others and focused on us. Another rock, larger, came over my left shoulder and hit just in front of the coyotes. The three startled but didn’t go far. They regrouped quickly and crept toward us. At this distance I could see variations in their fur color and the slant of their stomachs. I picked up a rock and heaved it. It landed hard near the closest coyote and the coyote sidestepped. Another rock thrown by John came over my head and hit the smallest of the coyotes on its rump. He squealed, retreated about three feet and got right back into his place in the pack.
Then the closest started toward us more quickly, lips back, and the others followed just on either side. They broke into a run, coming at us and snarling. My heart leapt. I felt a sharp pull as John grabbed the pack off my shoulder and the motion knocked me over. I knew instantly that he was going for the gun but my thoughts were a garbled mess of annoyance at his knocking me over, regret that I hadn’t thought of the gun myself and gratitude that John, who knew how to use it, had the gun. Three coyotes at this distance were nothing to mess with. I heard the gun go off so close to me my ears hurt like they were bleeding.
I scrambled, pushing myself up, aware of the small pains of the twigs and pebbles poking my palms, and I thought briefly of how silly it was to be aware of tiny pricks when so much was at stake.
“They’re fanning out to surround us,” John warned and I saw where he was looking and that yes, there were two coyotes I hadn’t even noticed before but John had and the gun went off again, just as he finished his sentence, hurting my ears again but this time I didn’t mind, and I saw the closest coyote fall, hit in the chest. The other four paused, and John fired again, hitting the leftmost coyote, the thinnest, in the shoulder. It yelped loud and they backed up, then dove into the ravine and came up the other side, running. John aimed and hit the thin one again, taking it down. The rest cleared the rise and were gone.
John put his hand on my shoulder, “You okay?”
I realized I was shaking but I didn’t care if he felt it too. “Yeah, you?”
“I am now.”
We descended into the ravine until we reached what they’d been after, a deer carcass, a doe about two years old. She was mostly gone. The hide was pulled back and there were claw marks down the inside of the hide where the coyotes had worked at getting as much meat as they could. John kicked at the dead animal, along the center of its spine and the deer rocked along its curved side. “Two days max,” he said. He got down closer to inspect the animal then moved to the other side and kicked it clean over.
We squatted there by the animal for several minutes and let our breath return to normal as we checked out the doe. Then I said, “I think you’re right, John, two days max. What else do you see?” and he told me several things I hadn’t noticed and I listened to them all.
Author's Biogrpahy
Cathy Barber’s work has been published widely, most recently in the Haight Ashbury Literary Review, Tattoo Highway and Two Review. Her poetry appears in the anthologies An Eye For An Eye Makes The Whole World Blind: Poets on 9/11 and nth position’s Times New Roman. She has an MA in English from California State University, Hayward, where she won awards for her poetry, fiction and non-fiction. She is president of and a teacher with California Poets in the Schools.
Email: cbarber2004@sbcglobal.net