I look up and she’s looking back. I know this is a female because I just watched her pee, squatting, then kicking up moss when she was finished.
This is not the coyote who came the day before yesterday, the one with the really big ears and a grey-ish coat, a slight limp.
I don’t know if they’re this year’s pups, now grown, the ones sent away to fend for themselves. But they like the moss, sniffing around for mouse remains we sweep off the upper deck after a good night’s hunting for the cat. (He leaves us morsels: stomachs, kidneys, sometimes a perfect whole mouse.) And the cat is wary, stirring from his sleep to listen.
I look up. Last week it was a bear at the top of the steps, peering in the sliding doors.
I could see the white blaze on its chest and wondered if it was somehow related to a bear that visited years ago, maybe 15, or even if it might be that bear (they can live for 20-30 years). That one came for crabapples, as this one did (I saw it swaying in high branches the other evening), sitting like a dog by the little pool under the tree after feasting.
I think of Gary Snyder’s “this poem is for bear”:
honey-eater
forest apple
light-foot
Old man in the fur coat, Bear! come out!
I think of this bear in its heavy coat, the coyotes shaggy and wild, the deer we surprised on the drive the other day, the one ambling up as if she had all the time in the world, the grouse in the salal, the otter swimming towards me in the lake the other morning, the single merganser fishing along the shore, the chickadees waiting at the door for seeds, so eager they perch on my outstretched palm. I look up, I think of them, and I look at Gary’s poem again.
“As for me I am a child of the god of the mountains.”
...Theresa Kishkan 