Photo by Anton Strogonoff on Unsplash
The howling of the coyotes wakes me up.
Beaumont the Sheepadoodle hears them too. He leaps up from the floor at the end of our bed where he has been sleeping. Races down the stairs to the patio doors. He stands. Barking, body tensed, eyes fixed at what he cannot see, somewhere out there on the top of the hill beyond.
It is 3am.
I try to calm him. To get him to stop barking. He wants to get out there.
I close the blinds.
Finally, the howling stops and Beaumont lies down by the glass doors. He does not want to come back upstairs.
And I am reminded, no matter how much concrete surrounds us, we are not far from the wild.
It is in our roots, our DNA, our genetic history.
We have seen a coyote a couple of times since moving into this place in December. I don’t know if it’s the same one, or a different one each time. We see him, or her, loping silently across the hillside in the early evening. We know there’s a den, somewhere at the top. We’ve heard their howling before. They are the wild things.
I wonder if they howl to entice unsuspecting prey into their space. Beaumont always wants to take off after the sound. He wants to investigate.
I don’t let him. I keep him on the leash now whenever I let him out.
He is not wild. Though I wonder if the howling awakens deeply-buried wild memories of life before domestication.
Deer live somewhere on the hillside too.
We see them often. Four or five. Every day they traverse the slope. Walking elegantly through the snow, scrubbing through the bushes and trees for fodder.
They too make Beaumont bark. Whenever we’re outside and they see us, they take off, their long legs leaping through the snow with ease. Beaumont strains at the leash, barking. Inevitably, one of the deer will stand at the edge of the trees, staring. Unmoved by Beaumont’s barks, he seems to be enticing him to play, ‘catch me if you can’.
In those moments, it takes all my strength to get Beaumont to quieten down, to not pull and strain at the leash.
The wild stirs within him, calling him to run after it. To be part of it.
We are not that far from the wild here. The city limits stretch further into the rolling hills at the edge of that liminal space where wild meets tamed and man keeps pushing the wild further and further away. Yet, still the wild things roam. They have adapted to the citylife. They have formed their trails from the wild spaces to cityscapes.
The howling of coyotes woke me at 3am.
I feel the wild calling me. Let go it calls. Come. Outside. Run. Barefoot in the night. Dance beneath the belly of the fullness of the pregnant moon. Throw your head back and howl in the pure delight of being alive.
I calm the urge and go back to bed.
Beaumont is on guard. He will keep the wild things at bay.
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The howling of wild things in the night reminded me of a song my brother used to play long ago on his record player when we were teenagers and not yet tamed by life.
Perhaps it is fitting I am reminded of my brother this first day of March. It was this month, 19 years ago, that his journey on this earth abruptly ended.
My brother loved music. He’d play a few bars of a song, stop it and ask me to “Name that Tune”. I wasn’t very good at that game. He’d laugh and tease me and play another song. “Wild,” he’d exclaim as some drum roll or guitar riff caught his fancy.
My brother was a wild thing. He loved life.
