Tracking Coyote

I look out at an inch of new snow. It makes for great tracking. "I am here," I tell myself as I strap on my snowshoes. "I am here to track Coyote."
I was captured by Coyote in the spring some thirty years ago when I first wandered these hills with my old dog Gabe. We were following a logging road when we came upon a litter of coyote pups frolicking. Gabe didn't see them, but I stopped dead in my tracks and my hackles went up. The coyotes stopped, too. We stared at each other. I imagine I was the first two-legged they'd ever seen. Slowly I turned, not wanting Gabe to pick up their scent and become interested. I began to sing as I retraced my steps and the coyotes fanned out around us and escorted us all the way home.
My imagination was captured. The eastern coyote began speaking to me and I have been on its trail ever since. It has sung below my bedroom window and answered my calls from the summit of a mountain. I have watched a pack in the dunes of Provincelands and I have carried a bloody coyote out of the stream where it died. I have read about all the coyote extermination efforts and how Coyote just keeps on going on, producing more offspring as she becomes more threatened. I have delved into the mythology of Coyote--the trickster, the shape shifter, the grey ghost--and I have gained a great respect for this creature that is so much more than just a wily scavenger. Coyote is a sacred force that speaks from a world that is endangered and Coyote refuses to die.
As Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz write: "Coyote and his kin represent the sheerly spontaneous in life, the pure creative spark that is our birthright as human beings and that defies fixed roles and behavior. He not only represents some primordial creativity of our earlier days, but he reminds us that such celebration of life goes on today, and he calls us to join him in the frenzy. In an ordered world of objects and labels, he represents the potency of nothingness, of chaos, of freedom--a nothingness that makes something of itself. There is great power in such a being..."
I spot a coyote track in the snow. It is a direct register. The hind foot falls directly into the front footprint and it looks like a one-legged creature trotting through the woods. The prints are good. There is a visible X in the middle of the paw. Her path is straight. She is not curious, but headed somewhere. I follow her up to the top of a knoll. She stops and surveys the landscape. This is her world. This is my world. We are both here today in the new snow. I take a deep breath and head home.