A VERY EXCELLENT BAND NAME: COYOTE
Great River Review is proud to nominate Nicole Walker’s essay, "A Very Excellent Band Name: Coyote," for The 2021 Best American Science and Nature Writing series.
A cross between a cat-pulled by its tail, a poodle and a yodeler. That’s the sound of the coyote yelping at me and my dogs in the forest. It’s Friday, the day I run with the dogs on a four-mile trail in the forest behind the house.
We’re on the border of Walnut Canyon National Monument but not in it. We’re on State Trust land. Men with rifles come through here. Women too. It’s elk hunting season.
The coyote is worried. So many yips. Wild pleas from the underworld.
“Don't worry, we’re not coming over there,” I say to the coyote.
I put my dogs on leash and run them the opposite direction of the yips. I can see the little guy, ten feet from the trees in an open meadow. He probably has baby coyotes in his den.
He yips again. Stay away, he tells us.
I say back, “Oh coyote. Hush. Don’t tell anyone you’re here. The dogs and I are moving on. I know you’re worried about your pups. But it is not safe to be so loud.”
He needs to be quiet. He needs to hide in the den himself. It may be elk season right now but it’s always coyote season in Arizona.
Pre-colonization, Pará, Brazil used to smell like water. It used to smell like oxygen but now it smells like fire and cows. The Amazon Rainforest is as big as the United States west of the Mississippi. The American West never was as wholly canopied in green as the rainforest but it once had vast ranges of forest. Now it too smells like cows and fire. It’s a common metaphor to say the Amazon rainforest is the lungs of the planet. This is still true but where they once inhaled now they exhale carbon dioxide and methane—smoke and cows. The fires clear the land for the former. The cows. Unlike the trees, they don’t want to be there. They’re scheduled for slaughter. They wouldn’t mind if the Rainforest grew back over their cowpies and hoofprints. They’ll take their chances in the jungle over the guaranteed story-ending written by the slaughterhouse.
For more than thirty years, José ‘Zé Cláudio’ Ribeiro da Silva and Maria do Espírito Santo took their chances in the jungle. Although fighting for the rain forest in the jungle is a bit like being a cow in a slaughterhouse. As easy as it is to fall in love with cows writ meat, it’s even easier to fall in love with rain forest. José and Maria loved the smell of water. The smell of photosynthesis. The way the nematodes and toucans breathed out and the way leaves crinkled their inhalation then smoothed the waxy skin of their exhalation. Castanha and andiroba trees, fat and smooth barks, thickly matted, made a better forest border than the electric fences that lined the cattle pastures. Lianas climbed up and down the trees, poking their heads above the thick broad climax forest just to get a little sunlight—they made a strong, nearly impenetrable blanket. Unless, of course, you are fire. And then, you’re as combustible as the next dry fabric.
The forest behind my house also smells of fire and cows—the Purina factory vents its exhaust easterly. And before Monsoon season hits, the forest crackles in pre-burn readiness. I see the same group of women walking through the forest nearly every day. My dogs and I pass by the three or four of them usually at 8:22 a.m. on the steep hill where monsoon rain has washed away the topsoil, exposing rocks. If I’m running, I walk or I’ll trip and fall and almost break my nose and the women will ask if I’m OK and I’ll say yes, even if I broke my nose because there is a reason I run alone. Less talking. I’m trying to learn to set a fast pace. I want to keep up with the dogs. The women’s dogs don’t like my dogs but they know each other well enough that my dogs run up to the women for cuddles while their dogs take a wide berth. Two women warned me about the coyote. “We could hear him. He chased our dogs off.”
This worries me because my dogs don’t like to get chased off. They like to say hello to each and every dog—at least at first, until they come to understand that certain dogs, like these women’s dogs, don’t really need them to lick their ears or smell their butts. But they are going to want to smell the coyotes. That wild breath, tinged with jackrabbit blood, no Milkbones here. My dogs are going to want to lick the inside of coyote mouth. As much as I want to, I cannot revise their wild desires.
For over thirty years Jose and Maria campaigned against the fires and the cows. They worked for years with cattle ranchers and local rubber tappers who tap tap tap on the native trees to pull sap that turns into rubber. Brazil used to be the only place where rubber trees grew. Before petroleum products took over the plasticization of the planet, Brazil’s forests were safe. The industrial revolution needed them. But then a British man stole the seeds of the rubber and planted them in Asia so now rubber grows on trees the world around and people who love cows, or love to eat them, started looking for places to grow alfalfa and places where it wouldn’t look too dumb to wear cowboy hats and the trees started falling, and then burning, and then turning into charcoal what once used to be a factory of tire-making trees.
In 1997, Jose and Maria helped succeed in petitioning the federal government to create the Praia Alta-Piranheira agro-forestry settlement, 84 square miles of public land so this portion of the Amazon didn’t fall the way the rest of Pará was falling—trees burning, activists getting shot. This was a kind of compromise. Some growing of cow-based-meat in the fertile soil to the left. Some rubber tapping, regular old tree growing to the right.
But Jose and Maria can’t police 84 square miles by themselves and if the Brazilian Government isn’t going to back them up, then the agro-forestry settlement is less of a settlement and more of a settling. Land speculation and the illegal selling of parcels reduced the 84 miles from 80% forest to 20%. McDonalds and Walmart are too big an influence. No one wants to spend the money to figure out whether their cow meat comes from legal or illegal, once-forested lands sources. So Jose and Maria start making noise. If I had been there, would I have hushed them? I don’t know if I would have known the sound José and Maria were making in the forest or into whose ears their pleading yips funneled. But Jose knew. “You can smell a slaughterhouse from a mile away,” Jose said just weeks before he died, “They are coming for me.”
Four coyotes dead on Interstate 17 between here and Phoenix on October 28th, 2017. Five hundred thousand coyotes are killed every year in the United States.
In 2011, two gunmen killed Jose and Maria as Jose drove his motorcycle and Maria held on tight around his waste. His leather jacket turning warming against her skin. They sped down a dirt road toward what remained of the rainforest: Glass frogs and Brazil nuts from the Castanha trees, Jesus Lizards and Capybaras, Peanut Head Bugs and the death smelling rafflesia and a the giant lilypads, Victoria Amazonica. If only Jose and Maria’s motorcycle carried them beyond the dirt road, into the forest. They could have wrapped themselves in the huge banana leaves, the lily pads, the leaves of the Castanba tree to hide from the hired gunmen who themselves hid in the smaller, less banana-y leave. But as they drove along a non-forested road, Jose and Maria’s motorbike took the corner. The gunmen heard the motorbike coming. Ready for them to turn the bend, the men shot José and Maria with a number of bullets befitting an American cowboy.
A student of mine, Zara, who lived in Prescott, wrote an essay about a coyote who played gently with her dog. This was a story full of fairy tale like the kind where children get easily lost in forests and there is candy waiting for them with oven-repercussions or neglectful, over-working dwarves who don’t guard against Snow White’s witch-percussions of poisoned apples or Rapunzel like princes waiting for them with thorn-in-the-eye-percussions. So as I read, I wondered if this were a fairy tale that didn’t end well. Maybe the coyote led the dog off into the woods where a pack of coyotes awaits to eat the dog for lunch. But no, it turned out to be a fairy tale with no drama. Everyone lived happily ever after. The coyotes yipped and played. The dogs barked and played.
Like the witch and her oven, they fairy tale of coyotes attacking in packs is mainly unfounded. Coyotes form groups but that group usually consists of a pair of breeding adults and last year’s undispersed pups.[i] My kid’s martial arts coach warned me to that if a coyote comes by, your dogs will chase it. The coyote will lead your dogs to a pack that will tear their flesh limb from limb. But that’s not likely. Coyotes might eat a small dog, but it would be a one on one fight. Not ganging up. If aggression manifests, it usually does so to ward off predators not as predators. Coyotes yip loudly and cause a fuss but they’re unlikely to trick your dog into the Hansel’s cage where they’ll fatten him up until it’s time to roast him for dinner. Coyote’s culinary skills are as limited as his hunting ones.
Still, the ladies warn me. “The coyote. He followed us for a mile.”
“The dogs are nervous.”
I resist pointing out that the women’s dogs are always nervous. But maybe they should be. The forest, with its proximity to the city and the Purina factory and the cars and guns and neglected campfires, is a wild place.
In April, 2013, a big time rancher named José Rodrigues Moreira was acquitted of the charges that he commissioned the death of Jose and Maria. In 2011, Moreira allegedly hired Lindonjonson Silva Rocha and Alberto Lopes do Nascimento to kill the husband-and-wife activists after the pair opposed Moreira’s efforts to evict three families from his land.[ii] For 30 years, Jose and Maria had been saying no to the landowners. Noisy Noisy Noisy nuisance. Moriera had Jose and Maria killed like a pair of dogs, Moreira also essentially had their killers killed, since Silva Rocha and Naxcimento were sentenced to 43 and 45 years in jail respectively. The Amazon Rainforest gives and gives: there are ever more activists but also more and more capitalists. Even if the gunman goes to jail, Moriera knows where to hire more gunmen to kill more activists. Landowners like Moriera know that Walmart and McDonald’s pay better than rubber dripping slowly from trees that have already been transplanted to super-productive Asia. And landowners know landowners. They keep tabs on the decibel levels of bleeding heart activists.
Some of the sound deflated when Moreira was acquitted. “Activists had hoped the case would prove to be a watershed moment in Brazil, where dozens of activists are murdered each year, after President Dilma Rousseff ordered a Federal Police investigation. Instead, friends and fellow activists left the courtroom in tears. Outside, around 100 campaigners waved wooden crosses and chanted while others defaced the court building with red hand prints.”[iii] Red Hand Prints became the universal sign to say to the landowner that he will get his comeuppance one day. The people made their mark. They made their voices heard. Those hundred people have not been shot. At least not today.
On Monday, the dogs and I ran rhe trail again. I kept the dogs close—not to keep them safe but to keep the coyote from noticing us. I didn’t want him to start his yipping. No need for him to call attention to himself. I ran faster. I’m in training to be not the slowest runner on the planet. One day, I’ll conquer the fifteen-minute mile. But today, I may have beaten my record. I ran fast. I didn’t hear the coyote. He didn’t hear me.
On Wednesday, during my next run, a white truck with three large camouflaged men and one camouflaged woman drove by me on my running trail. A trail is not a road unless you’re looking for something—hunting deer, hunting mushrooms. The driver gave me the hello sign, lifting two fingers off the steering wheel. I’m running in spandex, dude. The rural sign for ‘hello’ is not going to cut it. Plus, now I’m smelling your exhaust and inhaling your dust and I have to call the dogs over so they don’t try to friend you as they would try to friend the coyotes and stick their dumb noses into your car door or under your wheel. What’s more dangerous? Four humans with guns and big truck or a coyote?
The deforestation battle starts like this: the valuable trees like mahogany and Brazilian Walnut. And then they come in for the slightly less valuable trees for regular timber uses. And then they come in for the slight trees to make paper. And then they burn the rest down. Since Maria and Jose’s death, the number of murdered activists keeps climbing—but so does the number of active activists. The self-named Guardians of the Forest spend their days tapping rubber trees and their nights. They burn the camps of these illegal loggers.[iv] They chase them down as they ride away on motorbikes. They don’t often kill them but unlike the landowners and the timber companies, that’s not what they want. They just want them to stop taking trees and killing people like Jose and Maria.
People love to kill coyotes. They are classified as vermin. Coyotes live in cities. In suburbs. In exurbs. In what we might even still be able to call the wilderness. Coyotes live and even if you kill them, they come back. Coyotes can withstand a 70 percent cull rate. If you kill one coyote, another coyote senses that coyote’s absence and moves into the territory. Perhaps two move in. Maybe even three. Female coyotes respond to depressions in coyote numbers by mating earlier and bearing larger litters of pups. You can try to silence the one coyote but they coyotes plural cannot be hushed.
In 2107, the Brazilian government, after years of successfully curtailing some of the deforestation, opened up a new 860,000 acres to logging and mining. People need jobs, they say. It’s a compromise, they say. We have so much to offer—our minerals, our trees, our newly born cattle. The government opens up roads, leading to more logging which leads to illegal logging which leads to illegal land stealing which leads to illegal killing of those trying to stop the logging and the stealing. But José and Maria, at least their voices, are coming back. Word got out. Protesters, relying on satellite imagery that shows logging is happening east of the highway where no logging should be allowed have stopped trucks from unloading grain at the riverside location of Miritituba, where barges carrying crops are transported en route to the export markets.” The protests resulted in 47 million dollar losses for the company.”[v] Red hand prints mark the barges.
More hand prints. More red. Just as the coyote produces more pups per litter when the coyote population is decimated, so too do activists proliferate. And like the coyotes, each activist acts alone, plays their own instrument. But like the reciprocal howling you hear at night on a wide open mesa, that sound couples with another sound until the harmony is undeniable. The activists will get louder, in the American West, in the Amazon Rainforest. It will get so loud you might actually think they were working together, in concert. Pretty soon, you will be able to hear the sound of yipping, louder than the buzzing of saws, that sings about and from the lungs about how the killers should stay the hell away.
[i] https://urbancoyoteresearch.com/about-coyotes
[ii] https://news.mongabay.com/2013/04/landowner-who-allegedly-ordered-amazon-murders-acquitted/
[iii] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/protests-erupt-in-brazil-after-landowner-jose-rodrigues-moreira-is-acquitted-in-amazon-activists-8562428.html
[iv] https://www.npr.org/2015/11/04/452555878/deep-in-the-amazon-an-unseen-battle-over-the-most-valuable-trees
[v] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/illegal-logging-national-forest-of-jamanxim-brazil-amazon-br-163-protests-deforestation-gisele-a7842796.html
Nicole Walker is the author of the nonfiction collections The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet, Sustainability: A Love Story, Where the Tiny Things Are, Egg, Micrograms, & Quench Your Thirst with Salt.