[I don’t even remember when I wrote this. 1994, maybe. I’ve cleaned it up a little. ]

There’ve been some young folks coming out here lately trying to talk me out of doing my job, trying to convince me to give up killing varmints. You see that pile over there by the machine shed? One week’s run of the pests within ten miles of the spot we’re standing in right now. I’m a stock breeder, which means I have to hunt them, but the kids’d like for me to just accept the constant depredations on my herds and smile, I guess. Well, to tell you the truth, the herds aren’t really mine, but working with them over the years, seeing the calves grow up and breed themselves, or even if they just become someone’s dinner, I’ve come to feel proprietary.

But these kids are telling me now that our Varmint Control policies are misguided, that the lousy scavenging things that have driven me to distraction the better part of my life might even have a place in the bigger scheme of things, in “nature’s plan.”

I hate the damn things. If they’re part of nature’s plan, then nature made herself one big mistake.

Oh, I thought they were attractive animals when I saw my first pair. They were loping along on the range, I guess it was about forty, forty two years ago, just this side of the Surprise Valley, by the Alkali Lakes, a male and female, just mated it looked like. They looked almost like they belonged there, out in the lava rock and juniper. They didn’t see me, which was fine by me as I’d never seen their kind before, as I said, and I knew they’d find their way out of there fast if they caught wind of me. I just sat behind a big red outcrop, in the sun, getting thirsty, watching them.

This pair was well mated. The way they courted one another, you could almost swear there was some quantity of intelligence lurking behind those brows. They showed real affection, real tenderness toward each other. They’d sniff the violets that were blooming right out of the lava, nuzzle each other, and kinda murmur to one another. Felt almost indecent watching them mate, like I was invading their privacy, but I watched anyway. I can show you the pictures if you want.

Times change. A few years went by, I got promoted to overseer of all the stock the outfit runs in the northern part of this desert, and I started to see what they can do to your animals. The first few I was able to shrug off, figuring well, hey, they gotta kill something too, right? Share and share alike. I’m not an unreasonable guy.

But spend a few years finding just-dropped calves lying there, wasted, or their dams, or the bulls even, lying there with just a piece taken out of them, and your attitude’ll change. They dig the hell out of the land, I’ve like to broke my legs a few times in the holes they dig. They steal things from us, things they couldn’t have any possible use for. It’s like they do it just to show they can. I’d kill every last one of them, now, if I could. Save a few for the zoos, to show the kids what we used to be up against out here, and scour the countryside clean of the rest of them.

Turns out they’re not even as smart as I thought they were, at least that’s what one of the experts from Varmint Damage Control told me last year. They seem smart, but most of that is just what they call rote learning. Their parents show them a few things, over and over, and they pick them up by seeing them repeated. That kind of learning mostly stops when they’re real young. The older ones get set in their ways, I guess, and stop learning. That pair I saw mating seemed intelligent, to be sure, but that smart boy from Varmint Damage Control seemed pretty amused when I brought that up. Oh, he didn’t say anything directly, but I got the strong impression he thought I was just being sentimental. He did like the pictures I took though, and he had them blown up for one o’ them Damage Control books. He said that even the story that the things mate for life, which I’d always thought to be true, was just, how’d he say it? Romantic wish-fulfillment. Turns out they run out on each other just about as often as we do.

Seems a shame. At least if they were true to each other, there’d be something you could point to that would seem, well, honorable about the bastards. As it is, there’s no redeeming features to them at all. They’re cowardly, hunting by hiding behind bushes and rocks, instead of taking an animal on, face to face, the way a griz would. They’re sneaky, skulking around after dark, rubbing dirt on their bodies to hide themselves. They waste animals, they take what isn’t theirs to take. And when you get to know them the way I do, they just start to look ugly, especially around the eyes, full of malevolence and stupidity both. There isn’t room for a single one of them, not on my range. I kill them every chance I get.

And I was ready to kill a few dozen of them when I got out into the Smoke Creek Valley last month, to check on the stock we’re running there. Devastation like I hadn’t seen in a while. My poor animals. Every few hundred yards there was a pile of bones and meat and flies, skin stretched out over busted rib cages turning to jerky. Just horrible. Ten, twenty, thirty dozen head; when I got that high I stopped counting. We looked them over, checking the wounds on the flanks, on the chests. It’d been a couple of weeks, and the carcasses were pretty ripe.

My partner on that run was a greenhorn, and tenderhearted as I once was, back before I learned. Suggested some sort of natural catastrophe, and their tracks around the carcasses just a coincidence, or maybe the bastards came to scavenge. But I thought, if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then duck season just opened but good.

I was back the next week, with a few dozen head that had been slated for culling from one of the Beowawe herds, as bait. We gotta take the sick and old ones out, sometimes, especially if the range gets thin or if one of those epizoötics goes through, or we could lose a lot more than the few we cull. So these were dead anyway, just still walking around. I put them out by the spring toward the north end of the playa, then stretched out to take a nap. If any of the stock got bothered, sure enough the bellowing would wake me up, and I’d nail the bastard responsible.

Look, I know it sounds like I’m taking this real personal. I suppose I am. It’s hard as hell to keep the herds healthy out here, what with things the way they are on the range. It isn’t like the old days, with the big herds and no fences between the Yukon and the Sierra Madre. It’s a smaller world, a smaller range, and there just aren’t enough animals out there for them to waste the way they do. Maybe a hundred years ago or so a stockrunner could have written off these losses, but everyone’s margin is smaller now. Let the sneaks take a few too many, and yours truly is out of business for good.

Maybe it was the pressure of it all that got to me, or maybe it was sitting out alone there all evening when I really wanted to be at home with my wife, I don’t know. But my usual pre-nap shot became two, then three, then I found myself moaning in the first rays of morning sunlight, a two-thirds empty bottle next to the bedroll I was sprawled on top of. My head hurt, my leg was asleep, and the stock I’d brought down from the geysers was gone. I tried to get to my feet, making it after only three attempts. As my eyes slowly unfogged I saw carcasses way out on the playa, and on beyond them a few of the cows, still walking. I followed, cursing my luck, my timing, and my low birth.

Just as I caught up to one that was trailing behind, she fell to the surface of the playa and kicked a couple of times. Standing over the cooling body I knew how they’d gotten the others without waking me up. She was untouched, except for a nick in her throat. Hit the throat, and they can’t bellow to wake up the herder. This one had been the lucky recipient of a near miss, the wound just big enough to let her bleed to death running across the playa. Well, at least I knew what was for dinner for the next few nights.

I wondered how many they’d actually gotten, and how many had just scattered for the hills to the east. I had to admit to myself that I was getting too old for this. The hoof beats alone should have woken me, even from my alcoholic drowse. They would have back when I was just a young pup. My life was getting away from me already, like those animals, now just black specks across the playa, winking out of sight. “Good forage, good water to you, my friends,” I said to myself, out loud. “I have work to do, now and for the rest of my life, I guess. Wonder how long that’ll be.”

An unseasonable rain hit that evening, and I got stuck out in the middle of the valley when the playa floor turned to soup. I got soaked through to the bone and dirty as hell after slipping in the salt mud a couple of times. It took me two days to get back to my place in Vya. I was pretty sick when I got back. Coughing and retching something fierce. My revenge had to wait. Two weeks of sitting around, drinking the wife’s sagebrush tea and breathing in the smoke from the stove, and I was ready to get out again. But every time I’d stand up, the cabin would start to whirling around my head and I’d find myself face down on the floor. Or worse, she’d find me.

The dreams were worse. Just like they were deliberately trying to torment me, those varmints started singing real close up to our house every night, just as the sun would go down. And though I usually don’t mind their singing, somehow, it had changed. Or more likely I had. The howling just cut through me like a sharp wind. The notes would get inside my head; I’d try to shut them out, but there was just no way, and I’d fall out the door of the cabin, dragged by those songs as they pulled me up into the night sky, and the stars would become their yellow, stupid eyes staring back at me, and the wind smelled sour like their breath, and when I’d look down at myself, I was one of my own stock, out of breath on a lonely bajada, sun baking me alive, with them closing in for the finish, and I’d find myself suddenly awake, sweating into the sheets.

Another two weeks, another pay period missed, and I was back in the truck, feeling like death on a soda cracker and heading to the Buffalo Range to check on a small herd. I pulled the truck into a dry canyon about 5000 feet up and headed out toward the salt lick I’d dropped three months ago. The sound of the door slamming echoed off among the junipers, and then all I heard was my feet against the red lava rock. It was a nice day, I had to admit, and I found myself feeling pretty good by the time I got to the little wash where I’d dropped the lick, which wasn’t there. Maybe it had been longer than I’d thought since I’d been up that way.

I sat down, pulled the canteen and a sandwich out of the pack, and rested against an old juniper while I ate. I was getting too old for this. Not the work, just the aggravation. I loved the country, been working and living in it my whole life. But I just had to admit to myself that I couldn’t take the pressure anymore. Next week, when I showed up at the line bosses meeting, I’d hand in my resignation. They’d been pressuring me to do it for a while, saying I should take it easy for a few years, enjoy my life. Maybe I could travel a little with the wife, go down to the Gulf of California like we’d talked about. Maybe I could run an guide outfit up through these hills, herding turkeys as they say. There’d been a lot more tourists around, looked like some of them had some cash to drop, and I sure knew the land as good as anybody alive.

I got up, thinking to myself, picturing the happy look on my wife’s face when I told her the news, and headed down the north slope in the general direction of a stream which I remembered to be full of planted Paiute Cutthroat. Sure enough, right away, I found a beaut, fourteen inches long, … lying on its side in the shallows. I sniffed it and smelled salt. I didn’t get it. Headed upstream through the low sedges.

About half a mile up I spotted a strange white shape in the creek. I raised my field glasses. The salt lick. It was sitting right in the middle of the creek, in a spot where the canyon walls got especially steep on either side. I cursed to myself at the stupid hand that had dropped the lick there, where our stock would be especially likely to get eaten. Nowhere for them to run to except down towards where I was. I saw a couple head from the herd I’d been looking for step tentatively into the creek. At least I’d found them.

Seems like just about every time I get out in the backcountry, I make a mistake. Sometimes it’s dumping too much pepper in the stew, more rarely it’s more serious, like spinning my tires into foot-deep ruts seventy miles from the nearest outhouse. This day in particular, my mistake was walking in the creekbed as I looked at my stock through the binoculars. Wouldn’t have been a problem, except for the log. The one, that is, that I tripped over, barking my shins, and dropping my binoculars in the water. When I fished them out they’d cracked along the side. Water had seeped in just enough to fog things up pretty good. Which meant that when I heard the bawl, and the commotion upstream, and I raised my glasses to see what was going on, I couldn’t see who was responsible. All I could see was that one of the animals … my animals … had been dropped. Hard. I started running.

I came over a low rise to find two of those bastards over their kill, not four feet away. One of them ran off spooked. But the nearer one, the bigger one, turned to face me, cornered, snarling, glaring threateningly at me with those yellow eyes.

I’m a little ashamed of what I did next. I’ve thought about it since then. I like to think that we’ve come far beyond our animal origins, that we can react rationally under pressure, but those eyes brought me back to the sickbed dreams I’d suffered through. I’m not sure I wouldn’t do it again if the opportunity presented itself.

I went for its throat. No gun, no knife, just my anger and my hatred. It screamed in rage, clawing at my face, kicking hard enough to disembowel. I held on. I got my face up under its jaw and sank my teeth into his throat, biting and grinding as hard as I could. The strong tendon by its jugular slowly gave way. Its struggles became more frantic. The tendon snapped, I pressed harder, found the windpipe, crushed it, held on. His torso heaved once or twice, then he sobbed heavily and lay still.

I was pretty badly hurt, and thirsty. I tried crawling for my pack, got as far as the creek, let my head fall in the water, and went away for a while.

The next day, or at least I think it was the next day, the sun woke me up. My stomach hurt something awful, but thinking about it for awhile, I realized it was because I was hungry. In fact, I felt pretty damn good. I struggled to my feet and shook off the dust.

My adversary looked pretty pitiful, laying there with his throat gone, his pink skin burning after hours in the desert sun. His friend was nowhere in sight. I went to the pronghorn they’d killed, stuck my nose in the wound and tore out a strip of muscle for breakfast. It tasted pretty good. After I rested a bit, I pulled the salt lick back down about a hundred yards from the canyon’s mouth. Then I went to the creek to wash the blood and dirt out of my fur, thinking about how foolish I’d been to think of quitting this job. Two days later I was home. My wife and I spent two weeks in Baja eating our fill of clams, then I came back to work.

And it’s work I love. You can go right ahead and talk all you want about how I should do my job, but unless you’re willing to go without eating meat you’d best let the experts alone. We’ve been harvesting meat off these ranges for a long time. We know what we’re doing. They ruin our range. They take our livestock. They’ll put us out of business, if we’re not careful. As long as humans run unchecked across the range, coyotes like me have our jobs cut out for us. Just let us do them.