1.

In a winter cantonment near Council Bluff, on the west bank of the Missouri River in the fall of 1819, scientist and explorer Thomas Say tried to collect specimens of the species of “prairie wolves” that he would name Canis latrans, Latin for “The Barking Dog.” He and Mr. Peale, his assistant, tried many kinds of traps, with many kinds of baiting, but failed over and over. They said that this animal had “wonderful intelligence.”

The coyote is clever and cunning. To get to know him, go to Oklahoma. Lie on the ground along those red banks the Cimarron cut in days when it was an energetic youth of a river, then make a sound like a dying rabbit. It is best on a cold October night when Orion’s belt is tracing his path through the sky and his hunting dogs frolic and course around him, and the dog star, Sirius, binary eye of the Hunter’s big hound, glows and glitters.

2.

Live traps and cage traps and steel traps were no good. In the end Say caught his specimen in a log trap baited with the body of a wild cat. The coyote was three feet and nine and a half inches long, and a foot of that was tail. The dead animal’s pelt was “Cinerous or gray, varied with black above, and dull fulvous, or cinnamon” in color.

I remember climbing down into a cut bank cave above a bend of the river and finding the perfect skull of a coyote pup, so long on the dry ground that it was as white and clean as a dead, dry cottonwood branch. The moon was rising out of the gully and a family of coyotes had just begun yipping and howling, and I felt as if I had disturbed a shrine to missing coyote children.

3.

Say’s dead coyote had hair that was at its “base dusky plumbeous, in the middle of its length dull cinnamon, and at the tip gray or black.” Its ears were four inches long and “...erect, rounded at tip, cinnamon behind ... inside lined with gray hair; eyelids edged with black, superior eyelashes black ... iris yellow; pupil black-blue....”

Once, on a breeding-bird-survey, I was scanning a pasture for territorial Dickcissels with my binoculars, and a female coyote came into my field of view. As I watched she looked up at me from a meadowlark nest she had scavenged, ears and stance all at attention, yolk dripping from her muzzle, her fur ruffling in the morning wind, her yellow eyes unblinking, as if she was Canis major come to earth, her bright eyes reinvented to flavescence.

4.

“The prairie wolves roam over the plains in considerable numbers, and during the night, the principal season of their hunts, they venture very near to the encampment of the traveler.”

I recall a night, you’ll know the kind, when I suddenly came awake in my tent to the midnight chortling of a chorus of coyotes. I pulled my sleeping bag up around me, as their plangent call and response set the hairs on my neck to bristling. My dog was sitting at attention, and I reached out my hand to stroke his quivering neck. Together we listened to the prairie wolves declare their ownership of the night, their principal season, while overhead, Orion retained his stewardship of the sky by silently ascending the ecliptic, stalking the swollen, wheat-straw moon as it arced across the star-strewn heavens of Oklahoma.

Author’s Note

I have worked on this piece for nearly ten years now, settling finally on this format of alternating accounts from the historical records of Thomas Say (the American naturalist who described and named the coyote as a species new to science) with prose-poem memories of my personal experiences with the animal.

The non-fiction paragraphs that begin each section are based on and include quotations from the Long Expedition Journals and Thomas Say’s Notes from Early Western Travels 1748-1846; Volume XIV: Part 1 of James’s Account of S. H. Long’s Expedition, 1819-1820, by Rueben Gold Thwaites (The Arthur H. Clark Company; Cleveland, Ohio, 1905).

The prose-poem memoirs are vignettes based on some specific encounters I have had with coyotes on various hiking and camping excursions in Oklahoma over the past 50 years, evolved, revised and expanded from the originally lineated poem forms.

Roy J. Beckemeyer’s

latest poetry collections include The Currency of His Light (Turning Plow Press, 2023) and Mouth Brimming Over (Blue Cedar Press, 2019). Stage Whispers (Meadowlark Books, 2018) won the 2019 Nelson Poetry Book Award. Amanuensis Angel (Spartan Press, 2018) comprises ekphrastic poems inspired by modern artists’ depictions of angels. His first book, Music I Once Could Dance To (Coal City Press, 2014), was a 2015 Kansas Notable Book. With Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, he co-edited Kansas Time+Place: An Anthology of Heartland Poetry (Little Balkans Press, 2017). His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize (2015, 2020, and 2024) and for Best of the Net (2018), and was selected for The Best Small Fictions 2019.

Beckemeyer has served on the editorial boards of Konza Journal and River City Poetry. A retired engineer and scientific journal editor, he is also a nature photographer who, in his spare time, researches the mechanics of insect flight and the Paleozoic insect fauna of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Alabama. He lives in Wichita, Kansas, where he and his wife recently celebrated their 62nd anniversary.

Please visit author’s website for more information about his books, as well as links to selected works, and to interviews and readings (scroll down his About page for the latter link-list).

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Megarhyssa, ekphrastic poem by Beckemeyer in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 14, August 2022), nominated by MacQ for the Pushcart Prize

⚡ The Color of Blessings in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 5, October 2020), nominated by MacQ for the Pushcart

⚡ Featured Artist in KYSO Flash (Issue 12, Summer 2019); showcasing Beckemeyer’s poetry, prose poetry, and insect photography

⚡ Words for Snow, a prose poem in KYSO Flash (Issue 9, Spring 2018), which was selected for reprinting in The Best Small Fictions 2019