In the Company of Coyotes

On a sunny spring morning in central Utah, Peter Stamatakis sits astride his roan gelding and fumes. "Did you get that cat yet?" the rancher shouts at Don McNulty, who has four-wheeled to the top of this mountain range to find and kill a mountain lion. "I lost another two last night."

That brings to 31 the number of lambs Stamatakis has lost in two weeks. McNulty, the government's hired gun, is waiting with a walkie-talkie while a friend and his four hounds track the predator over ridges, across bottoms and up thickly wooded slopes. Stamatakis wants all wildlife off his land. He's trying to make a living here, he barks, and the government, the coyotes and the environmentalists are trying to ruin him. "How would you like it if we let loose lions in New York City?" he roars in my direction, emotion contorting his face.

McNulty, like everyone else hereabouts, has had his differences with Stamatakis. To the rancher, predator control is a black-and-white issue: Anyone who admits shades of gray is plain wrong. But McNulty, who works for the Animal Damage Control program of the Department of Agriculture, views predators with a mix of reverence and realism. He has no problem with predators that prey only on other wild animals. It's when predators invade man's turf, when they leave their natural order to prey on domesticated animals, that he becomes far less civil. Then he turns predator himself.

A voice crackles over the walkie-talkie: "We're on a hot track down in Fork Canyon," it says, and five minutes later, "We got her." McNulty grabs his rifle and we start down the steep mountainside, tumbling over sagebrush, rocks, through prickly oakbrush and down to the shady bottom. Two hours and several mountain ridges ago, the furiously sniffing strike dogs, Maggie and Jake, had picked up the scent. Then Lefty and Rowdy, faster animals, were unleashed. As the scent became hotter, they lifted their noses and ran, lined out, till the lion was spotted and treed.

McNulty and I arrive to find the hounds circled around a pine and baying loudly. Twenty feet up, a tawnybrown cat stretches languidly between two branches. She seems unconcerned; after all, her stealth and speed have served her well in every situation before this one. McNulty, too, is calm. He kneels on the hillside, aims and fires. The cat springs from the tree, bounds ten feet and drops to the ground, dead. A lithe-looking six-footer, she weighs about 90 pounds.

McNulty spends all of a minute contemplating the mountain lion's splendor, then gets to work with his knife. He finds sheep wool in her stomach and intestines. He makes long slices down each of her limbs and down her stomach, snaps each leg bone near the ankle and pulls the entire pelt neatly over the animal's head, as if it were a turtleneck. With his rifle slung over his arm and the bloody fur draped over his shoulders, he gives the muscled carcass one final glance. "That won't be here for long," he says and starts uphill. It's an hour's steep hike in the sun to carry the heavy, blood-soaked load back to the truck.

•

McNulty's life is nomadic, his work all-consuming. His pick-up truck reveals more about his life than any job description ever could. The rig contains a stall for his horse, boxes for his hunting dogs, penicillin for when they get bitten by coyotes, hemostats for when they run into porcupines, lockers containing 30 offset leg-hold traps, a dozen cyanide capsules, wire snares and bottles of potions he hopes will attract varmints to his sets. Inside the cab, a 6mm high-powered Ackley improved rifle, with a 6x24 target scope and a custom-built walnut stock, hangs in a sling over his head. A Ruger .22/250 is stowed behind the seat and a Browning Auto Five 12-gauge shotgun rides under the seat. A pair of spurs dangles from the gear shift. Within reach are a two-way radio, a coyote-howling siren, binoculars, a large thermos of coffee, two storage cases filled with rimfire cartridges, several open reed calling devices, one Patsy Cline tape and the usual mess of chewing gum that accompanies long-distance travel.

McNulty spends long days on the road and short nights in a portable trailer, which he calls a camp. Viewed from its flat back, the trailer's rounded dome and squarish platform resemble a cross section of a muffin. It contains a small propane heater, two burners, a few cupboards and a shelf. A four-foot-tall calendar with a pinup girl is stuck to the curved ceiling over McNulty's bed. He uses the camp when he has several days' work far from a town or during the summer season in the mountains. Otherwise, McNulty is a fixture at such truck-stop palaces as the Rodeway Inn in Green River, Utah.

The Rodeway and its female support staff are to McNulty what a steady drinking buddy is to the rest of us. In Donna and Fay and Claire, McNulty has found a constituency for his half-assed jokes, his self-deprecating macho swagger. Although they've seen him do it a dozen times before, they pretend disgust when he dumps salt and Tabasco into his Budweiser. On a typical night, Donna, a sweet-voiced woman with long, permed hair, invites him over to her place after her shift. "My husband and the boys are pouring cement tonight," she tells him, hopefully. "We could get some beers and watch."

McNulty is something of a hero to any rancher within 30,000 square miles who's ever had a problem with a coyote--in other words, to just about all of them. Ranchers are notorious for poor-mouthing the state of their operations, but to hear them tell it, Don McNulty is just about the only thing that stands between them and the unemployment line. The cowboys wave to McNulty on the highway and make room for him in their booths at the greasy spoon, where they shovel eggs with catsup and talk about tight-bagged cows, stillborn lambs and trucks that get stuck in the mud.

The ranchers trust McNulty. They give him the combinations to their gates, the keys to Quonset huts. The trapper tells me, with evident pride, that Donna's mother, Fay, who works at the Rodeway's front desk, offered to lend him $20 his first week on the job. She trusted him, he says, because he works for the government and, like a rainmaker in a drought or a lawman in a wild town, he came to help the people.

•

At a few minutes past five on a still-black morning, McNulty exits the Rodeway Inn, throws his coat in the truck and samples the 38-degree air. He has it in mind to shoot coyotes today and things don't look good: There's too much wind. If the varmints catch his scent, he doesn't have a chance.

McNulty is an affable mustachioed man with forearms the size of hams. He looks considerably younger than his 41 years, most of them spent in the trapping and hunting business.

He grew up on a cattle ranch in Nebraska, dreaming of becoming a state trooper, of the day he could "drive fast and carry a gun." As a teenager, he began setting his grandfather's steel traps around the ranch, not to stop predation or to sell pelts as he would in later years, but simply for the challenge. He mostly caught birds. At the age of 15, he set six traps around a dead hog and caught one magpie. He left five of the traps set and placed the magpie on top of the hog. When he returned the next day, he found a coyote hopping in one trap, the magpie reduced to a pile of feathers. "That was my first coyote," McNulty says, grinning at the memory. "I thought this was primo. I really started going crazy then, setting traps everywhere."

After high school, McNulty pulled a stint in the Marines, enrolled in college and worked as a ranch foreman. Seven years ago, he applied for a position with ADC in Utah and beat out 47 applicants. He believes it was his coyote howl, which echoed through the Agriculture building and startled secretaries, that clinched the job.

On this morning, he sets off across the flat highways of eastern Utah's Book Cliffs region. Yesterday, a rancher named Butch Jensen discovered two calves with chewed-up tails--a possible sign of coyote predation--and a third one is missing and presumed dead. In response, McNulty rose before dawn and pointed his truck east.

As the sun rises behind the La Sal Mountains, the desert slowly takes on depth and color. Rocky benches rise like craggy sand castles, reddish and dusty. On either side of the highway, the desert floor rolls endlessly away to the horizon, broken only by grease-wood, sage and innumerable dry washes. Eighty miles of this and we arrive at Jensen's calving pasture, where McNulty switches his white cowboy hat for a camouflage cap and takes the Ackley from its sling. As we walk along, McNulty examines the red soil, dried into hexagonal shapes like terra-cotta (continued on page 155) Coyotes(continued from page 68) tiles. "These tracks are too old for us," he says, examining several sets. He points out the best places to leave traps, usually in travel ways, and breaks coyote scats with his hands. Their gray color, he notes, indicates a meaty diet.

After a mile or so with no sign of the calf, we head back to the truck. McNulty won't hunt for a predator whose handiwork he hasn't witnessed. But suddenly he stops. "Bingo," he whispers, pointing to a disturbed patch of ground. Obviously, something of considerable size has been dragged through here. We follow the fresh prints back through the sagebrush and discover 12 inches of gnawed backbone. McNulty wants to see more; we keep looking but find only a few clumps of muddied red hair. "Hereford," he says.

Squinting into the sun, his back against a rocky butte, McNulty places his hands to his mouth and begins to howl. "Rrr-awwww-err," he calls. The sound starts with a low growl and rises to a thin, hair-raising cry. "Coyotes are territorial," he explains, "and there's always a resident pair in a given area. If you howl, they'll think there's a new coyote around here and they'll come out to investigate the new kid on the block." He howls again and sits back to wait.

•

The Animal Damage Control program began in 1931 when Congress passed legislation authorizing the Department of the Interior to control wildlife deemed injurious to agriculture, forests, range and other wildlife. ADC has a national budget of just over $29,000,000, half of which comes from you and me in the form of federal monies, the rest from counties and individual ranchers. In the 17 Western states in 1990, McNulty and his colleagues killed 91,219 coyotes, 207 mountain lions and 247 bears--an obscene number of animals, one would think. Unless one made a living raising sheep or cattle.

McNulty isn't the only one killing coyotes hereabouts. Utah officially classifies coyotes as varmints, and as such they can be killed at any time, in unlimited numbers, by anyone. And they are. "Everybody and his dog kills coyotes," McNulty says. "That's just how people grow up around here. Coyotes kill livestock." In Utah, where sheep ranching brings in $15,600,000 annually, coyotes killed 26,000 sheep and lambs worth about $2,180,000 in 1990. That same year, ADC's Utah branch spent 80 percent of its $1,700,000 budget on poisoning, trapping, snaring, gassing and shooting some 4600 coyotes, lions and bears. The figure pleases sheep ranchers--though they'd prefer the number were even higher. But it horrifies an increasingly vocal contingent of conservationists, environmentalists and advocates of animal rights, who sum up the agency's misdeeds as follows: Not only does ADC kill too many animals, it kills the wrong ones, brutally, too expensively, with taxpayer money, on public land and to little real effect.

Fifty years ago, another dead coyote, mountain lion or bear wouldn't set off any alarms. But in the last half century, attitudes about predators have changed as scientists learn more about their role in ecosystems. At the same time, large numbers of people have moved from rural areas--where predators are an evil of agricultural life--to cities and suburbs, where wolves and mountain lions are poster stars for burgeoning nature groups. These days, it could be said, predators not only play a recognized biological role but also a cultural role, embodying the values of wilderness and wide-open spaces.

It's no surprise, then, that McNulty and ADC itself share a tarnished image. According to the agency's 1990 figures, ADC killed more than 142,000 mammals (to coyotes, mountain lions and black bears, add foxes, bobcats, lynx, skunks, badgers, porcupines and deer) and almost a million birds. The figures are probably low, considering the number of nontarget animals the agency takes by mistake and doesn't record. One former ADC trapper estimates that the number of nontarget kills may be as high as two thirds of all animals taken.

As high as those numbers are, they used to be much worse. Mindful of the agency's public image, ADC officials are quick to proclaim the old days of reckless killing, the so-called numbers game that gave the agency its poor reputation, over. But if the numbers game is truly over, one wonders, why were 91,000 coyotes taken in 1990, compared with 86,000 in 1989 and 76,000 in 1988?

•

Vern Wilson's family has been in the sheep business for more than 100 years, rotating thousands of animals in a timeless pattern between the desert, his lambing grounds and high mountain pastures in the Manti-La Sal National Forest in central Utah. On the range on a snowy spring day, Wilson bemoans the state of the sheep industry while his son tries to warm a couple of lambs just two hours outside the womb. The shivering lambs are pitifully small, the size of toy poodles. They rest in a wooden crate atop a wood-burning stove. "If they don't warm up soon, they're going to die," says the younger man.

Wilson, a fast-talking septuagenarian with wavy gray hair and weather-beaten features, speaks with the forcefulness of one under siege. "The sheep industry is being threatened by environmentalists," he says, eyes flashing. "They want to cut the numbers of sheep we can put on the range. They think we're damaging it. Our fixed overhead is way up. We have a tremendous elk problem--they're eating our forage. And we're not getting enough for our finished product." Wilson gets 48 cents a pound for his lambs where he once got upwards of 60. "And then you've got people eating less lamb these days, down from four pounds per capita to a pound and a half."

Because of this small margin of profit, Wilson worries even more about predator control. "Coyotes could put us out of business," he says. "The only thing left by the time we pay our herders, our grazing fees and fees to the ADC is what's in the bottom line, and the coyotes are taking it." So are lions and bears. Wilson lost 21 sheep to one bear in a killing spree last summer. Each year, he loses between five percent and 25 percent of his sheep to predation.

Wilson relies heavily on ADC's most controversial method of control: aerial gunning. Each winter, when snow blankets the mountains, Wilson and other ranchers rent a helicopter, at $260 an hour, and call McNulty. Strapped into an inertial reel harness, he leans out the Plexiglas window of a Bell 47, follows fresh tracks and fires his shotgun at targets 60 to 70 yards away. The work is cold, noisy and, with the chopper's frequent dips and climbs off mountain faces, sickening. It's also highly successful: McNulty has killed as many as 38 coyotes in three hours, though lately he's down to about ten a day.

McNulty flies each mountain area in his district three times a winter. Although it will be months before sheep arrive on these ranges, and many of these upland coyotes are, so far, innocent, the law states any animal "about to do damage" is fair game. "Without control in the winter," says Wilson, "we couldn't live in the summer."

Wilson bristles at the charge that without ADC help he couldn't make a living at all. "You have to consider that we're harvesting a renewable natural resource, the forage," he says. "We have a right to protect our private property from public wildlife. The recreational person can protect his mobile trailer when he goes up into the forest, and we have a right to protect our sheep."

The figures may tell the story. When McNulty first started in his district, "which had been neglected since 1976," he averaged between 200 and 300 coyote kills a year. The numbers gradually decreased as the district came back "under control." McNulty believed then, as he does now, that without his assistance, many ranches would fail.

•

McNulty visits a rancher named Randy Campbell who has had some trouble. We easily find the evidence. Ravens have made a meal of the dead lamb's eyes and part of its rectum, but otherwise the woolly creature shows little damage, just a small round hole under the neck, indicating a fox or coyote attack. A bite mark on the top of the head would point to a bobcat. From its tiny hoofs, slightly worn, we can tell the animal had walked, and so was born alive. With his knife, McNulty makes an incision in the lamb's scalp. Deftly, he pulls back the gray skin to reveal a matching tooth puncture on the skull's other side. "A rule of thumb with little lambs," he says as he cuts, "is that for every one you find killed, there are three you don't find."

McNulty may sound a little casual, prone to guesswork that justifies his efforts, but a couple days with the trapper reveal he's as much a forensic investigator as he is an expert marksman. He walks carefully, noting animal tracks and picking up scats. Their shape and size tell him what animals produced them and what they ate. Ranchers are quick to blame coyotes for depredation among their herds, but if McNulty sees a lot of bitten and hamstrung lambs, he might ask a rancher if he's seen his dog lately. "Domestic dogs start out playing and chasing," he says. "Coyotes go right for the kill."

When McNulty kills a coyote, he checks its digestive track for lamb's wool and its teeth to determine its age. If the animal's bladder is full, he might carefully cut out the organ and pour its urine into a jar for later use around traps.

Sometimes McNulty finds buried kills. Bears kill sloppily, he explains. They tear off the hide and bury the carcass in the sun to eat later. They're interested in rotting flesh, in maggots. Lions kill more neatly. If the heart and lungs have been eaten, the lion probably won't return for more meat; if it does plan to return, it will bury the carcass in the shade.

A bear hunt, seemingly a grand affair, holds little appeal for McNulty. "The first one of the year, you're excited, but after that it's no fun." On bear days, McNulty rises by three A.M., loads up his dogs and prepares himself for a ten- to 15-mile run through rough country. Once he shoots the bear, he has to skin it and hike out the pelt, a rifle over one shoulder, 40 pounds of ripe-smelling fur strapped to his back. If he has his horse along, there's an additional problem. After a bear hunt a couple seasons ago, McNulty says, "I tied that son of a bitch in a bundle and dragged him back to the horse. The horse must have brought his hind leg up to his ear before he let go, because all that was left of me in that spot was my hat. I couldn't walk straight for a month." It's no wonder that McNulty sometimes opts to destroy the animal's pelt, bury its gall bladder--a lucrative item on the Asian black markets--and leave the entire mess in the forest.

Walking up a wide wash, we discover another dead lamb, this one without any gore. Finding a body excites little emotion, for the bleached skeletons of cows, lambs, deer, birds, rabbits, lizards and coyotes litter these rangelands. The bones add perspective to McNulty's work, not validating it, but somehow placing man himself in nature's scheme in the struggle for survival in the wild.

Moving through bands of sheep, we are chased by Great Pyrenees and Akbash guard dogs. "The dogs are great," says McNulty, "but I can't use traps, snares or poisoned bait if they're around." Some operators see guard dogs as the great barking hope of the industry, but their success depends on the type of terrain they patrol, the size of the coyote population and the amount of land they guard. On many ranches, guard dogs are next to useless.

McNulty climbs a high, rocky bench and proceeds to call for coyotes. This afternoon's performance is a repeat of yesterday's: The coyotes are ignoring us. "You see?" he says. "It's not like I'm out here every day gunning down coyotes."

When we get back to the truck, McNulty sips coffee, eats a Snickers and plows through three-foot ditches with one hand on the wheel while I look through his log book. Yesterday he killed no animals and today is shaping up similarly. I see days where he took three coyotes and days where he took 20.

"In a helicopter?" I ask, unable to imagine that much successful calling.

"Yew betcher," he answers. Then he explains, "You have to keep predators at a manageable level. The coyote has no natural predator." He pauses, then adds, as if the thought had just occurred to him, "In forty years of hunting and trapping, I have never come across a dead coyote. Never." What he means, of course, is that he's never come across a dead coyote that wasn't killed by the coyote's number-one predator: man.

•

Later in the day, McNulty revisits the Jensen calving pasture and successfully calls up a coyote. But there's a problem: The sun is rapidly setting, the wind is picking up, the coyote is 700 yards away and, as I am quick to point out, the cattle were moved from the area this morning, not to return for an entire year.

McNulty looks through his scope. "That beggar's got blood on his face all the way back to his shoulder," he says. If the coyote were a bitch, he would be less inclined to shoot it. He says males, being larger, are more aggressive about killing livestock. Females eat more rodents, more pocket gophers and rabbits.

I still don't understand why he'd want to take a coyote that won't see livestock for a full year, even if it has just been chowing down on a calf. One doesn't often ask if killing a coyote is right or wrong in this business: Most ranchers believe any coyote is a bad coyote. Whether or not it has killed livestock, the potential to do so is there. In fact, not all coyotes prey on sheep, and removing a resident coyote that's never tasted lamb opens up territory for coyotes that could potentially make lamb a regular meal.

Sitting out here in the vast Utah desert, as the stars begin to appear and the craggy rocks assume ominous shapes in the fading light, McNulty and I play out a new chapter in a story with ancient roots. From the beginning of Western man's contact with coyotes, that animal has played a part in legend. To Native Americans, the coyote was the Trickster, a con artist, an amusing clown-devil figure. In other myths, the coyote was God's Dog, sent by its master into the world to observe and report back. McNulty, while no scholar of history, admires coyotes purely on their own merit. He respects them for their beauty and cunning. "I don't get excitement from killing them but from luring them," he says. "There is something about outsmarting a coyote that still gets my heart thumping."

•

It's been estimated that more than 20,000,000 coyotes have been killed in this century--by ADC, by private citizens and by local agencies. But the slaughter seems hardly to have made a dent in coyote populations, which have swelled and spread across the country. Today, nearly 1,500,000 coyotes live in the 17 Western states alone. Hundreds of years ago, Canis latrans lived only between central Mexico and southern Canada, west of the Mississippi. At the beginning of this century, however, they began to migrate--as far south as Costa Rica, north through Alaska, and to the east. Coyotes can now be found in every continental state except Delaware; they are expected there soon.

Man has only himself to blame for the coyote's proliferation. Biologists call the species "invigorated" because of the way it has prospered at the hands of humans. Man has not only increased the coyote's range and prey base by clearing forest land, he's also virtually eliminated the coyote's natural competitor, the wolf, and increased its numbers through constant control. When threatened with extermination, coyotes, like most animals, respond by breeding at an earlier age and raising larger litters. In coyote populations not undergoing control, says research ecologist Robert Crabtree of Montana State University, between one and two pups per litter survive. In controlled populations, the coyote's social system falls apart and natural limiting factors are overruled. In these areas, as many as six pups per litter survive.

Control has also made coyotes harder to catch: By killing so many and upping reproduction rates, says Crabtree, "natural selection is probably happening at a faster rate. We're creating more younger coyotes, coyotes who are warier, more nocturnal, who kill sheep and avoid traps, snares and dead meat that may be poisoned. We've created a coyote nightmare, a super predator."

McNulty knows the type, and catching a super predator only fuels his ego. "There's a real challenge factor to killing the older ones because they're so smart," he says. "You've got recreational hunters out there calling coyotes and so they've wised up by the time I get there. I take a lot of pride in getting one that's already been to grad school."

•

The fact that reports of losses to predators remain consistently high, regardless of how many coyotes are taken, begs the question: Is ADC effective?

Economically, ADC's cost-benefit ratio is a bust. In some areas of the West, ADC spends more than $100 per predator killed. A lamb, if it outlives disease, harsh weather, abandonment or predation, will bring about $60 at market. Nationally, ADC spends nearly $30,000,000 a year while losses to the sheep industry average about $18,000,000.

The inequity has prompted consideration of nonlethal control methods or of dropping ADC in favor of a compensation program, where livestock operators would simply be paid for their losses. (Utah's Division of Wildlife Resources already pays ranchers 50 percent of an animal's market value for kills attributed to mountain lions and bears.) But ranchers aren't interested. "A compensation program wouldn't work because eventually there would be no more sheep left," Utah rancher Paul Frischknecht says. "We'd go out of business."

Harsh though it may sound, the loss of some public-lands ranchers would not plunge the economy into despair nor would it significantly pinch the nation's food supply. Public-lands ranchers contribute only two percent to the nation's red-meat production. "Studies show that very few Western towns derive more than five percent of their income from ranching," says Lynn Jacobs of the conservation group Free Our Public Lands. "They produce the lowest-quality wool in the world, and we wind up paying between eight and ten dollars a pound for meat once the grazing and predator-control subsidies are figured in."

Other critics suggest that ranchers ought to handle and pay for their own predator-control work, with an agency such as Fish and Wildlife enforcing the laws. McNulty, for one, believes ranchers left to their own devices would kill more predators and more nontarget animals, with crueler and probably illegal methods, than ADC ever has. The trade in homemade toxicants would boom.

From his small corner of the West, McNulty looks out on an ADC program that, to his way of thinking, works well. "I was at one ranch where there had never been any control," he says. "They lost thirteen hundred out of four thousand sheep in one summer. I took twenty-six coyotes over the season, and the next year there were only thirty kills." To McNulty, this story spells success. To others, 26 coyotes is a lot of animals to kill and still have 30 losses.

McNulty finds himself wedged uncomfortably between hardheaded environmentalists and hardheaded ranchers. "No one sees the total picture," he says defensively, "but I do. You can't tell a livestock operator that not all coyotes eat lamb. And you can't tell an environmentalist that coyotes don't eat just the lame and the sick."

For McNulty, the situation is clear: There's no way to protect flocks without killing predators. He rarely kills an innocent bear or lion, and if he takes out innocent coyotes in the course of eliminating the guilty, he can live with it. "There's no way to sugarcoat what I do," he says. "The bullet, the steel trap, that's the real world. This is not National Geographic. My job is to stop depredation and I do."

As the stock of ranchers, environmentalists, federal trappers and predators rises and falls with political debate, the only clear winner may be the coyote itself. Ranchers continue to lose animals, perhaps in sustainable numbers, perhaps not. Environmentalists deplore the loss of wildlife. Trappers play catch-up--with state regulations, an increasingly critical public, continuing depredation. Lions, bears and other wildlife continue to fall to guns, traps and poisons. But the coyote, wily beast, carries on--in greater numbers, to farther reaches, stronger, smarter and better at what it already does best.

•

In the springtime, McNulty is busier than ever, working seven days a week to keep up with coyotes now intent on feeding their pups. Usually, he can dispatch the male of a resident pair and stop predation, but recently this technique failed him and lambs continued to disappear from a ranch near the town of Wattis. McNulty returns on an overcast morning to call for the bitch and gets no response. But luck visits him in the form of a sudden rainstorm and he begins to walk a large circle through a muddy canyon, steadily cutting in until he locates a set of tracks that leads him to the animal's den. Inside, he discovers three lamb legs, with hooves intact, and eight small pups.

Of all the killing McNulty does--whether shooting, poisoning, trapping, snaring or running lions up trees--the only dirty job, he says, is denning, the practice of dropping CO2 canisters into dens to suffocate the pups within. "The pups are innocent, they're not the cause of predation but the reason the parents kill, to bring them food," he says. "I'm saddened by killing pups, but I'm also saddened that little lambs are being killed." Does he ever get used to it? "You don't get hardened, you just learn to turn your head. I don't feel guilt. If there was another way, I'd try it."

Working quickly, McNulty punches a hole in one end of a CO2 canister and lights the fuse. He drops it inside the den, blocks the opening with shovelfuls of dirt and within three minutes, counts his morning a success.

He ends his day at the Allred ranch. Coyote tracks wander all over this place, and just this morning Jim Allred had watched as one hungry specimen, bold as brass, sprinted across his front yard. McNulty and I set out with the gun; as we walk, he points out the tracks of deer, coyote and rabbit, the trees that porcupines have rubbed up against.

After several miles, we climb a bench and McNulty calls into the canyon below. A herd of deer trots by, a hawk circles. Another five minutes and McNulty gets an answer from the opposite direction. The howling, a chilling sound, never quits as we crawl on our stomachs to the cliff's edge. "Boy, is he pissed off," McNulty whispers, impressed.

Raising the rifle, he scans the deep, sandy bowl. Then I take a turn at the scope. The dog is large, white-chested and he pivots his head neatly to the side as he howls. I am awed by his beauty and thrilled by the fact of his presence--this top predator in his natural habitat, doing what he has evolved over the millenia to do. But at the same time, strangely enough, I can easily imagine shooting the coyote, not so much out of atavism as out of a desire to play a role in this classic Western confrontation. We had stalked the animal, lured him toward us and will now finish him off. McNulty invites me to pull the trigger, testing me. Although it isn't absolute, I no longer hold a blanket prejudice against killing coyotes that prey on sheep. It helps that there's no shortage of coyotes, but I'd have fewer qualms if we needed to eat this animal. I hand the rifle back.

McNulty wants the coyote to move in and begins his imitation of an injured rabbit. Next he fits an elk diaphragm, a latex-and-rubber half-circle, into the roof of his mouth and makes the sound of a distressed fawn. But the coyote doesn't move. It just sits atop its knoll.

"Adios, big stud," McNulty then whispers, his finger near the trigger. But he doesn't fire, perhaps giving the animal one final chance to advance. A moment passes and the coyote backs off. Now he is gone and will not return. Our disappointment is acute, though disappointment for what is difficult to say. McNulty wanted the coyote for a multitude of reasons; I was aching for some sort of denouement after several hours' work and several days' imagining the finality of this moment.

In a while, snow starts to fall and we begin our long hike back to the ranch. We take a different route now, looking for several coyotes McNulty had killed about this time last year, but the carcasses are nowhere to be found.

"'Rrr-awwww-err,' he calls. The sound starts with a low growl and rises to a thin, hair-raising cry."