i was woken in the middle of the night last night by what was probably three or four coyotes, but sounded like a truckload of bathtub duckies being squeezed in a car compactor right outside my bedroom window. they yipped and howled and squeaked and barked until they got the minpin going, then faded away. this seems to be their game. i imagine them standing around in the woods:
“what do you guys want to do?”
“i don’t know.”
“hey, want to go over to that place where the little dog goes nuts when we sing?”
“YEAH!”
the goats are fairly secure, so even though they’re great fodder for a pack of coyotes (short, fat, stumpy-legged), i don’t really worry about them. their pen is made of tubular round pen panels and they have a little shed they can hide in and defend. they’re also too evil to die. the goats are about 25 feet from my window, so i assumed that the coyotes were probably pestering them. the racket seemed to be coming from that general area.
the funny thing is, when i went out this morning to do chores, there were no tracks anywhere near the house or the goat pen. there were no tracks near the compost pile. there were no tracks near the shed where there’s a bag of kitchen trash waiting to go to the dump. there were no tracks at all.
was it coyotes screaming in the night? or something else less corporeal?
the gumboot gumshoe 