On Wednesday morning, I was up a touch late...around 6:30 a.m....it was already light outside as I went about kick starting my family life. Well, I don't actually kick them...I flick the fireplace on and make tea and hot chocolate. While waiting for my wife and daughter to stomp down the stairs grumbling, I enjoyed the pleasant combination of peace and coffee while gazing out upon the winter wonderland from my living room window. Our house is surrounded by cedar bush: ruggedly pastoral view. I didn't have my glasses on so, when I noticed a red blur at the tree line, I didn't have a great deal of faith in what I was looking at. I was thinking the red was related to my driveway markers and I was wondering how one managed to find it's way down to the tree line. I asked my daughter if she saw red too and she exclaimed "It's a dead deer!" Once she said it, the blurry form took shape and I realized that what I thought was dead fall was in fact a deer and the red was blood stains.
Of course I quickly grabbed my Elmer Fudd cap with ear flaps and boots and made my way to the crime scene in my pajamas. Living in the country is great. The deep snow held my weight and I was able to walk atop the snow. The scene itself yielded tufts of deer hair, a bloody perfect arc and a large blood stain at the end of the arc. And of course, the body: a young fawn from past June with lifeless eyes and tongue lolling languid and dead outside of it's mouth. The abdomen had been expertly excised and the intestines trailed outside. Internal organs had been removed. The problem was, other than deer tracks, there were no other signs. I had a hard time believing this poor creature met it's end at the hooves of another deer. Or that it just dropped dead at the tree line, with it's abdomen popping open. Being trained as both, a scientist and a lawyer, I fell back onto my instinctual sense of logic. I looked for signs of a UFO landing or branches scorched by alien death beams. Finding no signs of alien presence , and having no other logical explanations, I had to admit I was stumped. I called a local friend and farmer. We'll call him....Old MacDonald...to come and take a look. At first Old MacDonald was stumped too. He couldn't find any tracks other than the deer tracks. Being a hunting enthusiast of deer, turkey and coyotes, he too couldn't believe the deer just dropped spontaneously. But he thought that was more likely than my murderous hungry alien theory.
Finally after some searching that led us into the bush, we finally found a single coyote track. The track was near an area where the snow had been crunched down as if a group of deer had bedded down. From there the picture unfolded. The coyote had snuck upon the deer and had managed to jump atop one of the fleeing deer. The coyote had a grip on the neck of the deer while riding it.The victim ran out of the bush to the edge of our lawn where it had collapsed but not before trying to shake the attacking coyote loose: the arc of blood was likely the spray as it tried to swing the coyote free from it's throat. There were no coyote tracks because it rode the deer to the end and then it's tracks were lost in the young deer's dying kicks.
Old MacDonald set up a trail cam on a nearby tree so we could catch images of coyotes feeding on the deer. On Thursday morning I collected the trail cam, noting that a single coyote had come back to feed -- there were tracks from a single large coyote (3 inch tracks). The trail cam yielded...to my surprise...only pix of me going out to the scene later on Wednesday afternoon, to take pix of the crime scene. Sigh.
On another note, Old MacDonald told me that he and his cronies have taken 50 coyotes this year. They get a bounty on the coyotes. It pays for the beer they drink and the gas they use in their pickups while they wait for their GPS units to tell them the dogs have cornered a coyote.
