Midnight Musing After the Song-Dogs Sing

Midnight Musing After the Song-Dogs Sing

When I go to bed at 6:30 PM, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to wake up at 12:30 AM wide awake, especially when our local coyote chorus has just completed an acappella serenade with enthusiastic accompaniment of all ten of the dogs in my daughter’s and my households. All this canine cacophony upsets my cats, and they run for cover, with four or five of them coming to me for safety.

About the songs of coyotes, I’d like to say that the movies never get it right! No coyotes, or at least not many that I have heard, give long mournful howls. They sound to me more like a pack of crazed pups that have all had their tails shut in car doors simultaneously. They do a lot of frantic yipping, leading up to a joyful crescendo before they stop all together. The movie coyotes sound like real wolves giving long eerie howls. Of course coyotes are real wolves, too, but a smaller variety with different characteristics.

In regard to cats; I bring all my cats in at night because of that same pack of coyotes I just heard. I’m not sure my cats realize that coyotes are not dogs. They know their dogs, Smoky and Rocky, protect them, or at least, Smoky does and Rocky tolerates them.  Smoky knows that driving off coyotes is his main job in life, and he works hard at it. But no matter how clever a cat is, it is no match for a wiley coyote. Other very real dangers to cats out here are owls, and bob cats at night, and hawks in the daytime. Coyotes also kill small dogs, and have been reported to gang up on big dogs. So far they have always run away from my big, black, 125-pound Smoky. He doesn’t chase them far, and if I heard him cry for help, I would turn Rocky loose and she would tear into those coyotes! She is 75 pounds of muscle, energy, and fighting spirit, and can outrun a rabbit.

Incidentally, while giving my dog, Rocky, a run up the mountain road yesterday, I saw the biggest bobcat I have ever seen in my life! A local author from the 1950s told of being chased by a lynx when she was a child. That's an animal native to our northern border and Canada, not way down here on the Mexican border. I was sure she was mistaken. But the animal I saw clearly yesterday looked more like a lynx than a bobcat. It was as big as Rocky but smaller than Smoky. It definitely did not have a tail, so it wasn’t a mountain lion.

 More than 25 of my rescued cats have gone missing in the 14 years I have lived in this area, many of them already spayed and neutered. Only once have I had a secure fence around my yard to keep the dogs in, but it didn’t work for cats. There was a gopher town just outside the yard across a narrow dirt road. It was easy for the cats to scramble up the large wooden fence posts, sit there for a few minutes surveying their prospective hunting ground, and then jump down on into the danger zone. Six of my beloved cats went missing there.

 Another time, at another place, I had a good-sized hand-made pen for my cats, but there were raccoons at night that easily dug under the pen to get at the dry cat food.  The cats were terrified of them. Raccoons are omnivores and could make short work of a cat, and the cats instinctively knew it.

 A 30-foot  travel trailer is much too small a space to realistically expect a dozen or more cats to all live entirely inside. Were the cats and I willing, the logistics of keeping all their beds and two litter boxes clean are prohibitive for more than a dozen cats.  In my earlier time as caretaker and docent at the Gaskill Brothers Stone Store Museum, many of my rescued cats were too wild even to be forced inside the trailer or a pen. I had no choice but to let them run free and take their chances.  There was no dog to protect my cats until after my second husband died. He hated dogs and wouldn’t let me have one. I told him if he died before I did, I was going to get a dog. He did die, and within a month I did get two dogs, big ones!

In the three years I have lived at this horse camp, two cats have disappeared. Both times I feel partly to blame for not taking accurate muster after shutting them inside the trailer, tieing up the dogs, and leaving to go out to eat in late afternoon when predators begin to hunt. Each of the two cats sneaked out when I wasn’t looking, and now they are history.