Of Coyotes And Conversations

My conversation with coyotes began on a cold day in 1994. Several times over the previous months, coyotes had come out of the small patch of rocky forest to the east of my home, caught a few of my chickens, and taken them away to eat. Once in a while, I saw a coyote dash out, or heard a squawk and turned to see a quick glimpse of gray that simply disappeared when my two dogs tried to run it down. A few times, the dogs did catch up to the coyote, and I saw a flurry of fur and dust, followed by the dogs running home to sit quietly, chastened, for a day or two in the barn. Twice I saw one coyote make an abortive rush at the chickens, and when the dogs gave chase, another coyote trotted in from the other direction to snatch up a bird before I, the dogs, or the poultry could react.

But most often I merely saw one less duck or chicken or goose return to the coop from a day spent foraging in the tall grass or among the maze of trails beneath the thicket of wild roses to the west of my house. Then I would walk in the forest to the east and discover somewhere a roundish scattering of feathers — white, black, and sometimes red, or even iridescent green — where the coyote had stopped to eat the bird.

The day the conversation began, I was kneeling in front of the wood stove, trying to start a fire, when suddenly I felt that if I looked outside, I would see a coyote. Perhaps the feeling came simply because on each of the previous four days, a chicken had disappeared. Never before had the coyotes been so present. I went to the window and looked out; a coyote was stalking a bird. By the time I made it to the front door, the coyote had disappeared.

Over the next two days, I happened to be outside when one or another coyote came by: no intuitions these times; just luck. The coyotes had come now for seven days straight. On the eighth day, I was seated on the couch looking out the window — lucky again — when I saw a coyote approach. Frustrated, knowing I couldn’t be there each day to protect the birds, and unsure what else to do, I opened the window and called out, “Please don’t eat the chickens. If you don’t, I will give you the head, feet, and guts whenever I kill one. And please don’t forget my work in defense of the wild.” The coyote turned and trotted away, now and again slowing to look back over its slender shoulder.

When the coyotes failed to show up the next day, I didn’t even notice. When a week passed, however, and then two, I began to wonder at the coincidence, and after a month, I began to consider that their absence might not be coincidental after all.

Except at night, to sing, the coyotes didn’t come back for many months, and when at last they did, it was seemingly only to remind me to keep my end of the bargain. I hadn’t yet killed any birds, and I looked out one day to see a coyote sitting on a knoll about a hundred yards to the north. He sat and stared in my direction, not moving when I opened the window and leaned out. Finally, I said, fairly softly, “OK, I’ll bring you some food.” As soon as I said this, the coyote stood and began to pad away. Another coyote appeared, and they touched noses. The first one continued on, and the second now sat and stared. I repeated my promise, and this coyote went off in the direction of the other.

at about this same time, my dogs commenced eating the chickens’ eggs. Since I don’t pen the birds, the hens lay wherever they want, which means I’ve often found eggs in an old barrel, atop stored stacks of bee boxes, on a folded tarp nestled on a shelf between cloth softball bases and an icebox, and especially at a particular corner of the barn. Only occasionally — and even then, I think, by accident — does a hen lay in one of the nesting boxes I’ve set up for them.

Lately, I’d sometimes see only an empty spot where I’d expected an egg, and if it had been raining or snowing, I would see large paw prints heading into the thick bushes. It seemed the dogs were finding the eggs before I did. I suspected that the larger of the dogs was also taking eggs from the waist-high shelf — books or beekeeping equipment I’d placed in front of the tarp would be strangely disarranged — but I could never pin anything on him.

Still, I had the paw prints, which seemed enough to convict them — or, at least, to convince me that they were doing it. At first, I tried being authoritarian: whenever I picked up an egg and the dogs happened to be around, I’d hold it at arm’s length, between thumb and forefinger, and say in a deep, stentorian voice, “No eggs! No!” This quickly taught the dogs to roll on their backs and wag their tails whenever I picked up an egg. As soon as I went back inside, they continued to do as they pleased.

Finally, it occurred to me that if simply asking had worked with the coyotes, perhaps it would work with the dogs, as well. So I sat down with them and, as they jumped all over me, said, “I give you guys plenty of treats. When I pull food from the dumpster for the chickens, you get the first shot at it. I think that’s a pretty good deal. Please don’t eat the eggs.”

The next day, the dogs stopped eating eggs.

i called my friend Jeannette Armstrong, a traditional Okanagan Indian who travels extensively working on indigenous sovereignty and land-rights issues and helping to rebuild native communities damaged by the dominant culture. I told her about my interactions with the coyotes. “I don’t know what to make of this,” I said.

She laughed and said, “Yes, you do.”

A few weeks later, Jeannette and I took a walk and sat on the steep bank of a river. I leaned against the reddish dirt and played with the tendril of a tree root that trailed from the soil. In front of us whirled an eddy large enough to carry whole water-soaked trees in lazy circles. Each time around, the logs almost broke free, only to fall back toward the bank and slide again upstream.

Jeannette said, “Attitudes about interspecies communication are the primary difference between Western and indigenous philosophies. Even the most progressive Western philosophers still generally believe that listening to the land is a metaphor.” She paused, then said emphatically, “It’s not a metaphor. It’s how the world is.”

I looked at the river. It would be easy, I thought, to observe the eddy and come up with a half dozen lessons I could learn from it — for example, the obvious metaphor of the logs traveling in circles, like people trapped in a confining mind-set that doesn’t allow them to reenter the free flow of life. There’s certainly nothing wrong with finding metaphors in the things around us, or in the experience of others — human or otherwise — but in both situations, the other remains a case study onto which we project whatever we need to learn. That’s an entirely different circumstance than listening while the other has its say, reveals its intents, expresses its experience, and does all this on its own terms.

Certainly, it would be a step in the right direction if our culture as a whole could accept the notion of listening to the natural world — or listening at all, for that matter — even if we took “listening” to be merely a metaphor. I once heard a Diné man say that uranium gives people radiation poisoning because the uranium does not like to be aboveground; it wants to remain far beneath the surface. Whether we view his statement as literal truth or as metaphor, the lesson is the same: digging up uranium makes you sick.

But to view this metaphorically is still to perceive the world anthropocentrically. In this case, the metaphorical view expresses concern for the people poisoned by uranium. The Diné man’s observation, on the other hand, is a comment on the importance of maintaining the natural order of things.

As I sat with Jeannette, I remembered two related conversations I’d had — one a couple of years before, and the other much more recently. In the first, I was sitting on the floor of my living room, speaking with a scientist friend of mine about the way we learn. My friend insisted that the scientific method — wherein an observer develops a hypothesis, then gathers data to rigorously test its feasibility is the only way we truly learn anything. All other knowledge, she said, even common sense, is merely unproven supposition.

Just then, one of my cats walked into the room, and my friend said, “Hypothesis: Cats purr when you pet them.” Then she ran her hand along the cat’s back. The cat purred. “Hypothesis supported,” she said. “Sample size: one. Where’s another cat?”

I knew I disagreed, but it took me a while to articulate my reason. Finally, I said that, even though the cat enjoys being petted, if our purpose is specifically to collect data, then we’re treating the cat as an object, rather than as another being with whom we have a relationship. “What if,” I said, “I pet her because I like to and because I know she likes it? I can still pay attention, and I can still learn from the relationship. That’s what happens with my other friends. Why not with the cat, too? But the point of the petting is to pursue a relationship, not to gather information.”

My friend hesitated, looping strands of hair around her index finger, as she often does when contemplating something. While she was thinking, the cat reached up to push her head against my friend’s arm. Absent-mindedly, my friend stroked the cat’s back.

The other conversation I recalled was shorter, but then, trees can be rather taciturn. Walking down the dirt road that leads to my mailbox, I noticed the old pine tree on the corner, just as I had many times before, and I thought, That tree is doing very well. Immediately, I heard a response that did not pass through my ears but went directly to the part of my brain that receives sounds. The response was a completion of my sentence that changed its meaning altogether: For not being in a community.

I looked around and saw that, though there were other trees nearby, this was not a full tree community. The pine tree’s nearest neighbors included the cluster of mailboxes and a telephone pole coated with faded creosote. I began to think about this lack of community, and from there began to think of all the times I had moved: from Nebraska to Maine and back again; then to Colorado, Nevada, California; months spent living in my truck; back to Nevada, Idaho, Washington. I thought about the people I had left behind: my grandmother, my brother, one sister and then another, friends. I thought about the irrigation ditch behind my old house, the aspen trees outside the front window, the Russian olives, the immense anthills in the pasture. These, of course, were my associations, not what I’d heard the tree “say.” The tree had merely expressed a single idea. Everything else had come afterward. But these were not normal thoughts. I was still listening. That’s the crucial difference. (Try it yourself. Listen to someone and then pay attention to where your thoughts take you. It actually feels different to listen than to think.)

I told Jeannette about these two conversations. We talked some more: about the river, about her activism and my own, about what it will take for humans to survive. As we talked, a mosquito buzzed around her face, then stopped to perch on her arm. She waved it away.

I told her about the dogs and how they had stopped eating eggs as soon as I’d asked. “I can’t believe how easy this is,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jeannette said, “that’s what we’ve been trying to tell you for five hundred years now.”

a true story: On November 29, 1864, approximately seven hundred soldiers, under the command of Colonel John Chivington, approached a Cheyenne encampment near Sand Creek, in Colorado. The dawn’s early light revealed to the soldiers about a hundred lodges scattered below.

Chivington knew that, in an attempt to demonstrate that they were no threat, the Indians of this village had voluntarily turned in all but their hunting weapons to the federal government. He knew that the Indians were considered by the military to be prisoners of war. He knew, further, that nearly all of the Cheyenne men were away hunting buffalo. His response to all of this: “I long to be wading in gore.”

Chivington was no lone lunatic, but had an entire culture for company. This highly respected man — a former Methodist minister, still an elder in good standing at his church, recently a candidate for Congress — had already stated in a speech that his policy toward Indians was that we should “kill and scalp them all, little and big.” It would be comforting to think that such a murderous impulse stamped the man an outcast, but we would be wrong. The Rocky Mountain News, the paper of record for the region, had ten times during the previous year used its editorial page to urge “extermination against the red devils,” stating that the Indians “are a dissolute, vagabondish, brutal, and ungrateful race, and ought to be wiped from the face of the earth.” The paper worked closely with the governor, who proclaimed it the right and obligation of the citizens and the military of the region to “pursue, kill, and destroy” all Indians. Chivington and his troops did not act alone.

Two white men who happened to be visiting the camp spied the approaching soldiers and tied a tanned buffalo hide to a pole, then waved it above their heads as a signal that this was a friendly village. Black Kettle, the Cheyenne’s principal leader, raised first a white flag and then, fearing the worst, a United States flag (given to him by Abraham Lincoln) in a desperate attempt to convince the soldiers not to attack.

There is an awful inevitability to what happened next. The soldiers opened fire. The Indians fled. Chivington ordered his artillery to shoot into the panicked mass of women and children. Troops charged, cutting down every nonwhite in their path. Women scratched at the creek’s sandy bank, trying to scoop out shelters for themselves and their children. One soldier later reported,

There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection; they sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick; she had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed. All the squaws in that hole were afterwards killed, and four or five bucks outside. The squaws offered no resistance. Every one I saw dead was scalped. I saw one squaw cut open with an unborn child, as I thought, lying by her side.

Picture the scene: A happy Chivington wades in gore. Mutilated Indians lie still in the cold November morning. In the distance, you can see a group of Cheyenne women and children trying to escape on foot. Far behind them, a group of soldiers charges on horseback. A movement in the dry creek bed to your left catches your eye. In the middle distance, you see a child. A soldier later recalled,

There was one child, probably three years old, just big enough to walk through the sand. The Indians had gone ahead, and this little child was behind, following after them. The little fellow was perfectly naked, traveling on the sand. I saw one man get off his horse, at a distance of about seventy-five yards, and draw up his rifle and fire — he missed the child. Another man came up and said, “Let me try the son of a bitch; I can hit him.” He got down off his horse, kneeled down, and fired at the little child, but he missed him. A third man came up and made a similar remark, and fired, and the little fellow dropped.

Now picture another scene, this of the soldiers riding home victorious. You know that they scalped every dead body they could find, even digging up those that, by accident, had been buried with their heads full of hair. You see so many scalps that, as the Rocky Mountain News will soon report, “Cheyenne scalps are getting as thick here now as toads in Egypt. Everybody has got one and is anxious to get another to send east.” You know also that the soldiers cut off fingers and ears to get at the jewelry of the dead. But now you look closer still, and you see that the soldiers “cut out the private parts of females and stretched them over the saddlebows, and wore them over their hats while riding in the ranks.”

Despite a Congressional investigation into what Chivington called “one of the most bloody Indian battles ever fought,” and what Theodore Roosevelt later called “as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier,” Chivington was neither reprimanded nor otherwise punished, and parlayed his fame into a fortune as an after-dinner speaker. The University of Colorado named a dormitory after his second-in-command.

That these Indians were killed was in no way surprising. They were never considered human. The women were “squaws” and the men “bucks.” The children? They counted even less. They were to be killed because, as Chivington was fond of saying, “Nits make lice.”

But there’s a coda to the story: During the massacre, two women and their children were able to escape. They soon realized that they were lost and took refuge in a cave too shallow to hold off the cold. Late at night, a large wolf entered the cave and lay down next to them. At first, they were frightened, but at least they were warm. The next day, the wolf walked with them, resting when they rested. Finally, one of the women said, “O Wolf, try to do something for us. We and our children are nearly starved.” The wolf led them to a freshly killed buffalo. They ate. Walking with them for the next few weeks, the wolf found food for them when they were hungry and protected them from both humans and nonhumans. At last, he led them to their people, the Cheyenne, and after receiving food, he disappeared.

This coda is merely an anecdote told by irrational, nonscientific people. If we decide the story is a metaphor, we need not call them liars, but we also need not reconsider our own worldview. Our perception of physical reality must be based on solid scientific evidence. Otherwise, we’re forced to consider the possibility that things could be different.

“Even the most progressive Western philosophers still generally believe that listening to the land is a metaphor.” She paused, then said emphatically, “It’s not a metaphor. It’s how the world is.

by now, you’ve probably spotted a contradiction in the story of my conversations with animals. I suppose there’s a chance you can accept the possibility of deals made with coyotes and dogs, but what about the chickens and ducks whose lives were bartered away in my bargain with the coyotes? Carried away by coyotes, or carried by me to a chopping block: how could it have made a difference to them? Either way, they seem to have been getting shafted.

I do not know how the birds felt about dying, but I know what I have experienced. I know that there have been times when killing a bird has been traumatic and messy — much more so for him or her than for me. Some birds have fought me, and to this day I am haunted by the screams of one rooster who had been silent until the moment I placed his head on the chopping block.

But there have been times when the death — the killing — has not seemed so awful. I have had brief glimpses of death, and killing, as something that is not always frightening; as something that can be accepted and even celebrated, with respect and in full cognizance of the loss, as a requisite part of a beautiful dance that necessarily ends in death for all of us. It is the bird’s death now, and my death later, that allows the dance to continue.

I remember one death in particular. It was the first after I’d made the deal with the coyotes. I had about a dozen ducks and one too many drakes among them. At a ratio of one male to a half dozen females, the hens often approach the drakes, then plop down and raise their tails to be mounted. But at a ratio closer to one-to-one, the sex is neither willing nor gentle. Drakes fight each other, but the hens get the worst of it. Hens are frequently chased by drakes until they are cornered, mounted, and then mounted again. Favored hens have no feathers on the backs of their necks from having been grasped so often in the drakes’ bills. At that ratio, no one seems happy. I had to do something.

At the same time, I was running out of food. Because I eat meat, I feel it’s my responsibility to acknowledge the death it requires. Besides, I don’t want to support the practice of factory farming. So I raise birds, I buy part of a cow from a local rancher, and I fish.

I was splitting wood early one afternoon when I noticed that the drakes were being especially aggressive. Having gained confidence from my two previous successes with interspecies communication, I said aloud, “If one of you is rough with a female again in the next thirty seconds, I’m going to kill you and eat you.” I was not chastising the birds. There were simply too many drakes, and one had to die. I was fully aware that I was displacing responsibility for my own choice to kill a duck onto the next “offender.”

About fifteen seconds later, a drake tore into a female. He was one of my favorites. There were other ducks who were normally rougher — some male Muscovies, especially — and a part of me had hoped that one of them would be the odd duck out. Of course, another part had hoped that none of them would be aggressive, which would have allowed me once again to displace responsibility — this time, for not killing any of them. This reluctance to kill was the reason I had not kept my end of the bargain with the coyotes.

I turned to the duck and said, “You’re the one.” I set aside my ax and went to fetch the hatchet. Normally, when I pick up the hatchet, the birds will run toward me, because I use it mainly to split nuts for them, break open melons, and pulverize huge globs of dough from the pasta factory. But this time the duck I was going to kill, a beautiful, large white Pekin, ran past me and into the coop. Because I locked the birds in at night, they were generally loath to enter the coop during the day. I waited for him to come out. He didn’t. I considered going in after him, but I knew that the fact that I had readied myself to kill him did not mean that he had readied himself to die.

Retreating to my library, I thought about all that had happened, and I remembered something I’d read in Barry Lopez’s Of Wolves and Men. I picked up the book and found the passage:

One of the central questions about predators and their prey is why one animal is killed and not another. Why is one chosen and another, seemingly in every way as suitable, ignored? No one knows. . . . The most beguiling moment in the hunt is the first moment of encounter. Wolves and prey may remain absolutely still while staring at each other. Immediately afterward, a moose may simply turn and walk away . . . or the wolves may turn and run; or the wolves may charge and kill the animal in less than a minute. . . . I think what transpires in those moments of staring is an exchange of information between predator and prey that either triggers a chase or defuses the hunt right there. I call this the conversation of death.

Lopez refers to this conversation as “a ceremonial exchange, the flesh of the hunted in exchange for respect for its spirit. In this way, both animals, not the predator alone, choose for the encounter to end in death. There is, at least, a sacred order in this. There is nobility.”

I checked outside: the duck was still hiding out in the coop. I would wait until he was ready.

He didn’t come out that afternoon, and I didn’t shut him or any of the others in that night. The next morning, I arose late. The duck was out and about. When he saw me, he waddled back to the coop. I decided to go back inside the house.

While I ate breakfast, I thought about death and the conversation of death and the different kinds of violence. There is the necessary violence of survival, the killing of one’s food, whether that food be lettuce, onion, duck, or deer. Then there are the senseless forms of violence so often perpetrated by our culture: child abuse, rape, military or economic genocide, factory farms, industrial forestry, commercial fishing. But violence can also be a sacramental, bittersweet, and sometimes beautiful interaction.

Death is, and must be, deeply emotional. To cause death intentionally is to engender a form of intimacy, one that we’re not used to considering. I would say that the predator-prey relationship is, in a sense, even more intimate than a sexual relationship. To kill without emotion and without respect, or to ignore the intimacy inherent in the act, is to rob it of its dignity, and to rob the life that you are ending of its significance. By robbing both death and life of significance, we deny our own significance.

I went outside again, and this time, though the chickens pecked and scratched busily at the driveway’s gravel, all the ducks and geese were back in the coop and silent. I waited a few moments, and they came out. I walked over to the duck and picked him up easily. He rode smoothly, cradled between my right arm and my chest. On the way to the chopping block, I picked up the hatchet. I laid him down, and he stretched out his neck. I swung the hatchet, but alas, not hard enough. He was wounded. His eyes caught mine, and I will never forget that look. They were soft, like a lover’s, and they said, “This hurts. Get it over with.” I swung again, and he was dead.

As often happens when you kill a bird, the duck’s nervous system caught fire. His wings flapped explosively, as if he were flying. I carried him to a post and hung him by his feet so that he would bleed while I heated water. I scalded him and removed his feathers, then eviscerated him. As promised, I carried his head, feet, and guts, along with his feathers, into the forest to the east and placed it all at the base of a tall, shapely pine I now call “the coyote tree.”

I returned to the tree a couple of days later. The remains of the duck who had taught me about violence, intimacy, and the acceptance of death were gone. In their place was the bare mound of feathers I had found in the woods every other time the coyotes had eaten a bird — only this time, atop the feathers was a pile of coyote shit.

I smiled, because I could think of no better way for the coyotes to “sign” our agreement. There was the poop; they had closed the deal.

To cause death intentionally is to engender a form of intimacy, one that we’re not used to considering. I would say that the predator-prey relationship is, in a sense, even more intimate than a sexual relationship.

i once asked my scientist friend what it would take to convince her that interspecies communication is real. She said, “If an animal were to act against its nature after you asked it to, I’d reconsider.”

Leaving aside the question of just what defines any given animal’s nature, I asked, “Like a pack of coyotes not eating chickens?”

“Not good enough,” she said.

I suppose that was a polite way of saying she didn’t believe me. I told her how the Chipewyan Indians frequently found wolf dens in order to play with the pups, and mentioned that we don’t even have to take the Indians’ word for it; the eighteenth-century explorer Samual Hearne, the first white man to explore northern Canada, described it: “I never knew a Northern Indian [to] hurt one of them; on the contrary, they always put them carefully into the den again; and I have sometimes seen them paint the faces of the young wolves with vermilion, or red ochre.”

She didn’t say anything, so I pulled a book off the shelf and told her about an incident at a wildlife refuge in New Jersey. A population explosion of white-tailed deer prompted managers to allow hunting there. Many people opposed the hunt, so some areas of the refuge remained off-limits. “A funny thing happened,” said a manager, “and I would not have believed it had I not seen it happen. For a couple of days prior to the hunt, we spotted numerous deer leaving the area to be hunted, swimming the Passaic River into the area that was closed to hunting. It was as though someone had tipped them off. And hunting season hadn’t even begun.” I told my friend that every experienced hunter I know often witnesses the same phenomenon: bucks feed openly in fields a few days before the season begins, then disappear before the shooting starts.

“Nice story,” my friend said. “What’s your point?”

I closed my eyes and thought, then told her the story of the wolf who took care of the Indians after Sand Creek.

Exasperated, she said, “This is not evidence. These are just stories. They don’t mean anything. Give me hard science. Give me something reproducible.”

A long silence ensued between us. She crossed her arms, looked down, and stroked her chin. Finally, she said, “You know, there is nothing you can say that would convince me.”

I was exasperated, too. I was angered by her dogmatic faith masquerading as skepticism. I thought about saying a lot of things, but instead I grabbed some more sources and said, “OK, I’ll give you the only sort of reproducibility our culture can create with regard to human-wolf relations. 1630: ‘It is ordered [in the Colony of Massachusetts Bay] that there should be ten shillings a piece allowed for such wolves as are killed.’ 1645 : ‘Mr. Bartholomew, John Johnson, Mr. Sprauge, Mr. Winsley, & Mr. Hubbard are chosen [to form] a committee to consider the best ways and means to destroy the wolves which are such ravenous cruel creatures, & daily vexations to all the inhabitants of the colony.’ 1854: ‘All hands were preparing meat in pieces about two inches square, cutting a slit in the middle and opening it and putting a quantity of strychnine in the center and closing the parts upon it. . . . One morning after putting out the poison, they picked up sixty-four wolves. . . . The proceeds from that winter’s hunt [sic] were over four thousand dollars.’ 1871: ‘Not far above this [temporary village built by wolf and buffalo hunters] was a road going through the swampy creek valley, about seventy-five yards wide, and this had been artistically and scientifically paved with gray wolf carcasses.’ 1872: ‘Before proceeding to skin the dead wolves, the Mexicans [hired by an outfit in Kansas] captured this old fellow [a wolf “who was exceedingly sick”] and haltered him, by carbine straps, to the horns of the buffalo carcasses, near which he sat on his haunches, with eyes yellow from rage and fright. . . . Man never appreciates the wonderful command that God gave him over the other animals until surrounded by the wild beasts of the solitudes, in all their native fierceness.’ 1900: ‘I can not believe that Providence intended these rich lands, broad, well watered, fertile and waving with abundant pasturage, close by mountains and valleys, filled with gold, and every metal and mineral, should forever be monopolized by wild beasts and savage men. I believe in the survival of the fittest, and hence I have “fit” for it all my life. . . . The wolf is the enemy of civilization, and I want to exterminate him.’ ”

My friend and I stared at each other for a long moment, and then she looked away. I should have stopped, but I didn’t. I told her that, after killing all but one of the pups in a den, government officers would chain the last one to a tree and then shoot all the adults who tried to rescue the frightened pup. After being trapped, wolves would be collared with a leather belt, tied to a stake, and — jaws wired shut — left either to die of dehydration or to be dismembered by the hunters’ dogs. Wolves were lassoed and then dragged to their death. I told her that even today, wolves are shot from airplanes and poisoned with strychnine and cyanide. Killed.

Is it any wonder, I asked my friend, that we do not observe them coming to us in the dark; that they do not feed us, care for us, and lead us home? Is it any wonder that they run frightened from us?

She shifted uncomfortably in her chair. I wondered if I had said too much.