coyotes and ravens

I've just been watching the video of the female coyote running around the schoolyard at Marlborough Elementary in Burnaby, trying to find a way back under a portable where she had denned up with her four pups (Jennifer Moreau's blog at blogscanada.com/2012/05/30/coyote-pups-trapped-under-portable-at -burnaby-school/). The place had been boarded up earlier that day, on the mistaken belief the pups and mother were out. It took her a long time, until after dark, to work up the nerve to go back under, where someone had peeled back a board to give her access. Then the pups came out (or she brought them out) and started to play, before she hurried them all off to a safer place. But you sort of have to wonder how on earth she ever picked that spot in the first place--with kids stomping around overhead all day, and yelling and running about in the schoolyard. Maybe the strange indifference of the people walking by the coyote all day as she prowled about, waiting for the pups or trying to find a way back to them, has something to do with it.

We see and hear a lot of coyotes in our neighborhood, a block away from the research farm at the U of A South Campus. Not as many as a few years go, when we could sometimes watch six or more come out in the evening from a dense thicket of poplar and other scrubby bush at the corner of 115 St. and 51 Ave, now largely turned into a deep dug-out park that doubles as a dry pond. But, still, most nights in summer, when we have the windows open, we hear them in the middle of the night. We see them on our street, too, once even sitting under the streetlamp outside our bedroom window. We have seen them in the Community Centre park area in  broad daylight, and in winter trotting along by the community hall. Sometimes we hear puppies squabbling.

Last October, in Terwillegar off-leash park, we heard and then saw one disconsolate young coyote sitting across one of the borrow ponds, on the bank, in mid-afternoon, barking and howling and otherwise protesting being alone. It is that time of year that the mothers leave their pups to fend for themselves, and this one was pretty disappointed or disgusted with the whole process. We kept George, our German Wired-haired pointer, away from that area that day, though it is a lovely area to walk in.

Next day, it was quiet and empty, so we went back along that trail. George wears a bell, since he likes to explore, and we like to keep tabs on his exploration. He went along behind a thick growth of shrubs, and his bell started a bouncy rhythm, like he was trotting, so I went around to see what was going on, and there he was, jogging along behind the young coyote, who seemed to enjoy having another canine to play with. Of course, the coyote was also jogging along over the crest of a hump, into some more shrubs. I hollered "George! Come here now!" And for a change he did. The coyote kept on going. It might have been alone. It might also have been bait for a pack over the hump.

Coyote, of course, is one of the creative/re-creative force figures of many First Nations cultural stories. With Raven, Crow, Hare, Iktomi the Spider, and others, Coyote falls into that misnamed category of "trickster." And, in the words of a song by Ian Tyson, "Coyote is a survivor." Our department Chair is not so enamored of Coyote these days, however. Her family dog, or what was left of it, and its collar, was found at the mouth of a coyote den along the edge of Mill Creek Ravine a month or so ago.

Ravens, technically the largest  songbird in North America as well as the prototype for another important trick-playing force figure, are also very common in our neighborhood, and on the U. of A. main campus. Noisy, large, gregarious ravens. Not so obviously threatening as coyotes, and more entertaining. Mostly to themselves.

Leanna from my writing class a few years ago spent five years in the north, and gathered a number of raven stories, first hand. Her favorite, for a while, was of the day she tricked a raven. She told us how she had been walking home one evening from Arctic College, and a large clump of snow shook loose from an overhead branch, down her neck. She looked up and saw a raven on the limb over the sidewalk. The raven casually flew off down the street to the next tree, and landed gently on another snow-laden limb over the sidewalk. "Couldn't be deliberate" Leanna told herself, but kept a lookout, and sure enough, just as she got under the limb, the raven shook it, and down came a clump of snow, just missing her. And off to the next tree went the raven. Leanna got to just before the tree, then took a detour, into the ditch beside the sidewalk. It meant going up to her thigh tops in snow, but she avoided the avalanche. She bragged about how she had fooled the raven.

 I kind of spoiled the moment: "Let me get this straight. You're up to your thighs in a snow-filled ditch. And you fooled the raven?"  Leanna got this look. And then she groaned and then she laughed. That was a game the bird could not lose.