The Author Who Cried Wolf... Well, Coyote
A quick story this week.
Hi all.
I’ve had a few productive weeks in a row working on the next Sean Coleman Thriller. The book is coming along well, and I’m enjoying getting back into the mix of fiction writing (following several months of important family issues taking precedence). That’s why this week’s newsletter is a little late, and also why I’m in a bit of a storytelling mood today. Only, this story happens to be true.
I hope you enjoy it.
My teenage daughter has been on an exercise kick lately, which includes some trail-walking that I’ve been accompanying her on (because hey, I could use the exercise too). On Monday, she mentioned needing something from the grocery store for school the next day, so I suggested that we kill two birds with one stone by walking to the store to get her stuff. It was a cold but very sunny day following Greeley’s largest snowstorm in almost 20 years.
It’s not a terribly far walk (about a mile and a half), and most of it is along an open-area path behind our neighborhood. I was having a good writing day, but figured the entire trip wouldn’t take more than an hour or so.
Not far into the walk, I spotted what I thought was a fox in the distance, trotting across the snow. The longer I watched it, however, the clearer it became that the animal was too large to be a fox. It was a coyote.
Before long I noticed a second coyote off to its left, and boy were they both raggedy looking. Skinny. Matted fur. One of them kind of walked funny too.
My family and I occasionally hear coyotes howling at nighttime, and sometimes they sound like they’re literally in our backyard. But only once before had I seen a coyote in the area. Now there were two, and they seemed awfully at ease with a couple of humans walking by.
I wasn’t at all worried. Just fascinated, as I often am with wildlife. We took the trail as far as we could, then followed a highway to the store. We picked up what my daughter needed, returned to the trail, and before long we saw the coyotes again. They were a little closer this time.
As you can see, they skedaddled off. But just about a minute after I took that video, we heard some barking and whimpering off to the west, across a small creek that runs along the area. We thought for a second that the sounds belonged to a third coyote. The noise certainly caught the attention of the other two, who changed directions toward it.
But it wasn’t a coyote. It was a small, black dog. The dog was running around in the snow at the bottom of a brick retaining wall that separated the open area from a raised subdivision. It had likely gotten loose from a nearby yard, and the coyotes were becoming increasingly interested. We figured it wasn’t because they wanted to pay the dog a social call.
My daughter and I picked up our pace, intent on stopping a Trials of Life moment from coming to fruition. We got close enough between them, and were big enough in stature, to spook them off… at least for the time-being. The coyotees disappeared behind some trees and bushes to the north.
The dog, which looked like an undersized husky, didn’t have a collar or tags and was jogging around pretty aimlessly. My daughter thought she may have recognized it from one of the above yards when we were walking to the store earlier. But there were dogs in a number of those yards along the distant hill, and I wasn’t confident she was right. Regardless, due to the steepness of the retaining wall, it was unlikely the dog could get back up to any of the homes, at least from where it was at.
I called Animal Control on my cell, and filled them in on the situation. The dispatcher was having a little trouble understanding where we were, since the closest cross-street was a ways away. They said they’d send someone out, but they couldn’t promise how long it would take. Based on a past experience, I knew it could take some time. And we weren’t going to just leave the dog there to fend for itself, especially with the coyotes still lurking.
We trotted down a ravine toward the creek, and tried to call the dog over to us. To our surprise, it actually came, happily leaping through the deep snow and just barely slowing when it reached the creek. It then leapt forward… and fell straight into the water below, behind a snowbank and entirely out of our view. I bolted toward the creek (as best I could without falling), not seeing the dog at all for several seconds. I was starting to fear the worst, but just as I reached the edge, the dog popped back out of the water, soaking wet from the shoulders down, to the side of the creek it had come from. Phew.
Unfortunately, the situation hadn’t improved. And it wasn’t going to unless we were on the same side of the creek as the dog (who showed no interest in a second jump). The creek was about six feed wide, and looked about three feet deep, which brought on dueling personal thoughts of “maybe I can make it” and “yeah, I’m probably not going to make it.” It didn’t help that because there was so much snow along the bank, it was difficult to tell where there was solid ground beneath it, and where there wasn’t.
We followed the edge of the creek for a while, the dog watching us as we did. After a while, the dog ran back to the retaining wall, scouting it out some more. I finally found a little narrower opening — maybe five feet in width. After some deliberation, I gave it a go, and just barely made it across without ending up in the drink. My daughter, however, is quite a bit shorter, so neither of us were predicting the same outcome for her. She was also still carrying her items from the store.
The dog ran back and forth from me a couple of times, and let me pet her. She seemed friendly enough, but without a collar to grab onto, I wasn’t going to be able to control her. My daughter and I decided that she (my daughter) would walk the rest of the way home, grab one our own dog’s collars (along with a leash and some dog-treats), drive back to the closest street, and meet us down in the ravine. Hopefully the dog would stay close to me in the interim.
Thankfully, that’s what the dog did. Once I lowered myself to a knee in the snow, she warmed up beside me, and let me pet her the entire time until my daughter returned (about 20 minutes later).
We got a collar and leash on her, and since I didn’t want to needlessly spook her, I walked her back to our house instead of trying to get her into the car. To my surprise, she did much better on a leash than any of our own dogs. Lol.
We brought her home, and into the backyard. I then called back Animal Control with the new location.
The driver must have already been on route to the trail, because he showed up within ten minutes. He took the dog (who readily left with him) to the Humane Society, and we posted pictures of her on NextDoor (one of the few productive uses of that website), along with information on where we found her, and where she is now.
But my daughter wasn’t content we’d done enough. She’d convinced herself that she had indeed seen that same dog, on our walk to the store, in one of the backyards facing the open-area. And she wanted to search for the owner. So, we did.
There was no one home where my daughter believed she’d first seen the dog, and the only action going on in the neighborhood was some construction crews (it’s a relatively new subdivision).
But after we pulled forward and turned around, another car pulled up in the driveway of the home we’d just left. A mom and her young daughter got out. We drove up, rolled down the window, and asked if they owned a black husky. To my shock, they answered yes. My daughter had been right.
We let them know what had happened, and where their dog was. They were very thankful, and told us she’d gotten out once before, and that they thought they’d fixed the problem. I’m guessing the happy reunion took place about 30 minutes later.
By the time the father-daughter experience was over, so was the day… along with any time I had left for more writing. But I’d say it was worth it. And like that walk to the store, I figured I’d kill another two birds with one stone by sharing the story in this week’s newsletter.
I hope you all enjoyed it.
Random Thought
Obligatory Dog Shot
Heck of a find.
Catch Up on the Sean Coleman Thrillers
All of my Sean Coleman Thriller novels can be purchased through Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Books-A-Million, and wherever else books are sold.
Featured Vinyl
Foreigner is one of my favorite 70’s bands, and I was fortunate enough to catch them on tour years ago, at a country-swing bar (believe it or not), back when Lou Gramm was still their front man. It sticks out as one of my favorite concerns for a few reasons, but today, in the interest of time, I’ll stick to the band’s 1979 album, Head Games.
Head Games was a huge hit, going 5× Platinum and producing multiple singles that still enjoy regular rotation on Classic Rock stations (including “Dirty White Boy” and the title track, “Head Games”). The young woman on the cover is actress Lisanne Falk, who some may remember from the movie, “Heathers.”
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading today’s Daly Grind.
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Take care. And I’ll talk to you soon!
Great read with an even better ending!