Fauna (33 page)

Having smelled the whole story, Billy sits down heavily, whining through his nose. Lily takes a step closer to the coyote. Even she can smell it now, the pungent presence of the newly dead. No torn-open throat or belly, no obvious signs of disease—nothing save a raw, swollen look about the nose and eyes. It’s rangy, the way they are, though not overly thin. A little moult along the back, but the coat is still fine. Lovely, in fact. Unmarked.

Except there, where the slender foreleg comes to a sudden end.

She sees it now, the patch of darkened earth, probably still wet with blood. She’d like to believe a trap did it; as in so many stories, the wild creature chewed its own foot off to be free. Except a chewed-off paw would leave a raggedy stump, and this one’s neat and clean.

Fear rolls like a raindrop down her back. She meets Billy’s glistening eye. “Let’s get out of here.” He looks willing enough, but when she stands, he stays planted, making that crying sound. She drops her voice half an octave. “Billy, come.”

He obeys. Thank Christ, he rises and obeys.

Coyote Cop’s Blog

Saturday, May 31, 2008

Well apologies to the vermin-loving coyote huggers among you but its time to talk turkey as they say. Its all very well knowing theres a problem but if you keep on turning a blind eye or the other cheek your not just ignoring the situation your making it worse. Leave it alone people say it will go away. Only thats not the way problems work. Not the big ones. The big ones keep on growing until sooner or later they get bigger than you.

So how do I do it you ask. How do I kill a coyote? Lots of ways. Poison is easy to get hold of but tricky to use in town. Dogs are too good at nosing
out baits and once you kill a dog or two accidentally or otherwise you will have all kinds of crap to deal with. Of course certain breeds can be an ally in the cause but there again you run into trouble in the city. A pack of coyote hounds can tear the legs off a coyote in under a minute but it just takes one concerned citizen to hear the baying and your shut right down. Same thing with traps. You might think you can find a trail or two in the Don Valley where people don’t go but there’s people and then theres people. Nobody gives a rats ass about drunks and junkies most of the time but you can bet there would be all kinds of hell to pay if they started tripping leg-hold traps and losing their stinky feet.

So what can you do? Ever hear of a little something called a go-getter? Its pretty simple. Just a cyanide canister with a detonator attached. You bury it near one of their trails with a rag or a bit of wool tied to the detonator and left sticking up out of the ground. Rub a mixture of meat and musk into the rag and then all you have to do is take up your position and wait. Not too close or you will give away the game. You have to stick around or else you can bet a dog will mess with your set up and it will be the poison story all over again. Besides believe me you will want to be there.

You might be waiting for hours. You might feel your ass go numb or you might even drop off and have to
pinch yourself awake but sooner or later he comes trotting along that trail. When he does theres no way he’s going to pass up that smelly tuft of rag. He sniffs. Pretty soon he gets his teeth into it and tugs. Bang. Cyanide in his eyes and nose and mouth. Its like he’s trying to take his own face off. And after not so very long he’s gone.

Maybe some of you think I’m all talk and no action. Well maybe you ought to take a look at this.

POSTED BY Coyote Cop at 7:23 AM

It takes Darius several tries to post the photo. He smiles when it finally appears. It’s true what they say about a thousand words.

He quits the browser, rises to close the blinds against the brightening day.
Trying to take his own face off
. Lying down on the thin green foamy, Darius finds he can see it, clear as a YouTube clip—the coyote pawing furiously at its eyes, grinding its snout along the ground. It’s there whether he shuts his eyes tight or opens them to stare at the ceiling’s stippled dark.

He sits up, blinking. Better. Rolls up onto his feet. Better still.

He could turn on the TV, but it never seems to soothe him the way it did when he was small. There’s nowhere to go in the cramped bachelor apartment he calls home. The bathroom scarcely counts; it’s little more than a closet with plumbing. Still, it offers a threshold to cross.

The linoleum is sticky beneath his bare soles. His bladder is far from full, but he manages to squeeze out a stream and a couple of follow-up squirts. Shake it and tuck it away. Now what?

Maybe he needs something to eat. He had the last of the bread last night before heading out, but there should still be a little ham, maybe even a can of beer. He doesn’t bother turning on the light—the handle of the fridge door gleams.

There is a beer, and a single pink slice in the package marked
Old-Fashioned Honey-Baked
. Plus one item more. It can’t be an hour since he placed it carefully on the middle rack; how can he have forgotten it was there?

He’s had trouble thinking clearly about the thing in general—including why he felt the need to take it with him in the first place. He hadn’t planned that part; he had the hunting knife on him only because he always does. You have to be ready for close combat when the enemy walks on soundless feet.

The coyote hadn’t been dead a minute when Darius heard voices coming through the trees. Teenagers, it sounded like, young love. They were laughing too hard for him to make sense of what they were saying, the boy making drowning sounds, the girl screeching like a hungry gull. They never got close enough for Darius to consider running, but he played it safe all the same, waiting until they moved off before taking the body by its front paws and dragging it into the scrub.

Maybe that was what put the idea into his head—the long bones springy in his grasp, the claws tickling bluntly at his wrists. It was darker than dark inside the maze of brush. He drew the knife from its sheath and did what he had to by feel.

It’s the first time Coyote Cop has included a picture. For a moment Stephen can’t make sense of the image, his mind rejecting the input of his eyes. It’s like one of those bare-bones shots they have in old recipe books—only instead of a sweating sausage roll or a wedge of devil’s food cake, the plate holds a bloodied paw.

His heart’s already racing when Lily bursts in through the office door.

The whole way here, he’s been hoping she somehow got it wrong. Billy leads him into the bushes while Lily stands guard with the bike. No mistake. It’s definitely a coyote, definitely vital-signs-absent.

Billy worries over the carcass, concluding his mute appraisal at the tip of the truncated leg. Stephen sways a little, hands braced on his knees. There are flies, some sticking close to the wound, others buzzing in Stephen’s ears. The coyote is what it is, a dead, four-legged thing—at least until he stoops to pick it up.

They’d been on patrol for three long, scorching days when the village came into view: another mud-walled maze surrounded by bizarrely verdant fields—acres of grapes, a whiskery tract of what might have been wheat. The place seemed deserted. Definitely emptied of women and children, but as always the question of fighting-age males remained.

The answer came in the crackle of small-arms fire, followed by the shriek of an RPG. Contact was hot and brief,
the bird gunners in the LAV laying down cover while the troops on the ground moved in. Stephen scarcely had time to fire his weapon before the enemy was in retreat, a handful of thin, turban-topped backs glimpsed weaving between walls, plunging away into green.

In keeping with his training, Stephen followed a blood trail into the field of vines.
Fighting-age
. The one he found curled up in a furrow might have been anywhere from sixteen to twenty-five; the life there aged them strangely. Whatever his age, he was hugging himself like a kid with a gut-ache—only the ache was the actual red mass of his guts. Again, Stephen did what he’d been trained to do. The enemy weighed nothing—no body armour, no weapon, no boots.

The child in the recruitment poster had lain quiet, gazing up at his saviour with adoring eyes, but the man in Stephen’s arms struggled like a goat going to slaughter. Stephen stumbled back through the grapes and the whispering sway of grain, unsure of his balance, his strength—unsure of anything but a need to reach the casualty collection point. The Talib was starting to settle, shock or blood loss or both. Soon he would be co-operating to the full.

“Stephen,” said the medic. “Hey, Stephen.” Only the medic was holding a bicycle. The medic was a skinny, pink-haired girl.

Stephen stands blinking in the light.

“You found him,” Lily says.

“Yeah,” he says numbly.

“Come on, put him in the basket. Hurry up.”

Kate feels like a fraud. She should be toasting and grinding her own spices—or at least making the trip to Little India to buy fresh. It’s not her fault she never learned. On the rare occasion when she ate curry as a child, the food came in Styrofoam containers, and Daddy never finished what was on his plate.

Lou-Lou was the one who introduced her to India in a jar. It soon became tradition: Kate’s one night a week to make dinner was curry night.
Mmm, smells good. What are we having, Ms. Patak?

Opening the cupboard beside the stove, Kate surveys a line of purple labels. The fiery Vindaloo Paste was Lou-Lou’s favourite, but Kate will stick with something milder for tonight. Better to play it safe with Lily and her friends.

Lily can’t believe what she’s reading. “Jesus,” she says, coming to the end of the most recent post, “this guy’s fucking cracked.”

“I know.” Stephen leans in over her shoulder. “Scroll down, there’s more.”

“How long has he been posting this shit?”

“Since Monday. I should’ve told you sooner.”

“You think I don’t know there’s creeps down there?”

“Well, no, but—”

“You know someplace there aren’t any?”

That shuts him up. She reads on until he says quietly, “I’ve been commenting.”