After the Coyotes Stopped Howling

There’s a moment sometimes when you’re trying to make a choice, the safe choice, you think, the right choice. But what you do instead is somehow put yourself—and your sleeping baby—in some crazy, unlikely danger. You don’t even realize this until the danger is upon you, sneaking up on fleet little feet and then announcing its presence. After, you think, if you can still think about it, “But it was so obvious. How did I not see that coming?”

This was that day for me. There was a point where I thought the two of us wouldn’t make it. That I would die. That he would die. That I wouldn’t be able to save either of us. And you know the worst part about it? Our demise would be the kind of death where someone would later read about it in our local paper and maybe laugh and wince and then laugh again. And then they’d call out to their partner, “Honey, you’re never going to believe how this woman bit the big one!”

 So it is a gray and drizzling winter day. By the afternoon, all the roads have just enough black ice on them to be Vaseline-slick. Ambulances are cruising around town, helping out after drivers skid slowly into telephone poles and other cars and such.

 I am watching the roadways as the slow storm takes the neighborhood. I see an abandoned SUV with both airbags deployed after hitting a tree. A neighbor kid slides his Ford Fiesta sideways off his driveway and ends up vertically in a ditch. Vertically! He is walking back and forth in a tee shirt and shorts in the freezing rain, just staring at the thing. I guess he’s waiting for his parents to come home and tell him what to do.

 My toddler, my youngest, a happy chunk of a guy who has just turned one, is home from daycare with a cough. It is around 3 p.m. or so and we are staring down the last few hours until his brother returns from school. Until my husband brings them both home and we have dinner, the four of us together. I think, “The baby and I need to get outside.” I think, “It’s time for some fresh air for him and me!” And why not? The rain has mostly stopped.

I want to go, I am dying to go. But I keep delaying and delaying. I call up my sister on the phone.

 “I have three options,” I tell her. “Option one: Put Ben in his carry pack and walk through the woods. Option two: Put Ben in his carry pack and walk down the road. Option three: Stay warm and inside.”

 “Option three,” she says. “Definitely.”

 Am I one to listen to good advice when it’s given? No, I am not. Telling me to stay inside is what finally prods me into going out. So I stuff Ben into his bright blue snowsuit, with him protesting the whole time, and then prop him in the carry pack that I can wear like a backpack. “Don’t fall over,” I tell him, reaching for my big gray coat with one arm and trying to steady him with the other. He starts a slow topple, almost immediately. The playroom floor is padded over with foam for just this sort of thing, and I catch him right away, but he is bawling and here I am awkwardly hugging a backpack and saying, “Shhh, shhh, everything’s all right.”

 As he quiets down, he gives me one of his classic looks, his face all squished up and mad at me and red and wet. I slap a neon orange hat on my head for hunter awareness (not that anyone will be out today but us) and I pull a silly knit animal hat down around Ben’s ears. I haul his backpack up and then we’re out the door and on our way, squishing down the field behind our house and into the woods.

At the end of our property, I have to climb over the New England-style stone wall, built from small boulders dug out of the hillside. There are some little animal prints around on the ground, even here where it’s wet and crusted with ice. I make my way under the dark arms of the winter trees.

 The neighbor has done some logging across the way, to clear out the undergrowth a little bit, so I head into the cut the loggers made, stepping over random logs and branches and other bits. I’ve brought a ski pole as a walking stick since Ben is a very heavy, chunky baby and the ground is mud-soft in places.

 We keep moseying down this woodsy hill until I find a stream and the place where it narrows. I jump over and then we work our way up into the more dense growth on the other side. I’ve lost the logging trail now, so I’m following a little path through the woods that I assume has been made by a small herd of deer as they pass through. Or maybe some other animals? Probably deer, I think. What else would it be? Deer often come through these woods, stopping in our yard to lip crabapples under our trees in the fall.

 As I’m trekking along these little paths, bushes and branches plucking at my knees and my jacket making everything damp, Ben leans back in his bobbly raccoon hat and watches the gray sky. “A bit of forest bathing!” I tell him. I don’t know what he says back because I’ve popped earphones in and have started listening to a podcast. Podcasts are also where I learned the term “forest bathing” one time, in a story about traveling in Japan.

 I skirt around a giant fallen pine. I can see the lights of the neighbor’s houses distantly through the trees. Ben is annoyed that his raccoon hat is over his eyes, so I pause to adjust. He goes back to forest bathing, leaning back with his head back and his arms out, looking up at the sky. I pop an earphone out, briefly, to hear him sighing little baby sighs.

 Now deep in these woods, I spot a lone concrete wall. Maybe a foundation? A basement? An old garage? There are soda cans lined up on one crumbly bit, but they’re the old kind, with a teardrop shape where you pull the pop top off. They’re also rusty. I leave them alone. No one has been here for a while.

 Our way takes us across a swamp and past a car graveyard. It’s full of old Buick grills, one mighty forlorn snowmobile track, and a tangle of black metal car frames. I continue on until I reach a field, which I know connects to the road. I am hoping to cross the field and come out onto solid ground, a shortcut home that I’ve been counting on. The rain has foiled these plans and blocked my path. There’s only a giant pond where dry ground usually is.

“I guess it’s the end of the line, buddy,” I tell Ben. He’s fallen asleep with his bobble pointing at the ground. “Let’s head back.”

We cross back through the swamp, pausing to backtrack for Ben’s hat when it falls off, and I realize with a little jolt that the sky is now much darker than I realized. Should I go through the neighbor’s yard? That seems too intrusive. I continue moving back along the little trail.

 Darkness is settling in faster now. I’m struggling around the giant fallen pine again, pushing through dense undergrowth I don’t remember being there and trying not to decapitate Ben in the process. The trees press in and the bushes are low and dark. I am suddenly aware, with every fiber of my being, how vulnerable a thing I am. All at once I’m not this mum in a gray down coat having a pleasant little forest adventure, but a very exposed, baby-burdened creature in the woods, where she’s not supposed to be right now and where she can’t see anything coming.

 A bit of mist is rolling in, which doesn’t help matters very much. I’m swinging left and right, trying to keep eyes all around me, all the while muttering to myself about how the woods in my backyard are perfectly safe and no animals are going to eat me and how I’m being very silly.

The podcast voices are chatting cheerfully. I’m talking out loud to myself. No houses are visible now. I stare very hard at the humped, dark shapes until they turn back into logs. Is that white flash a rock? I’m mostly sure it is. We are in rough logging terrain now, Ben and me, with stumbly and rain-slick bits of trees and branches.

 In the distance, a dog begins to bark.

 Part of me is relieved. Dogs! Oh, that means civilization and that’s good! I let out a shaky breath. Then the next dog begins and the next and the next. Until there’s a whole chorus of them yipping and howling and singing and I realize, “Holy baby Jesus. Those aren’t dogs, those are COYOTES.” And boy does it sound like they’re all around me in a wild, joyous pack.

I’ve heard these coyotes before. How have I forgotten? There are many summer nights when I’ll be home, warm in bed and cuddling with my sweetie, with the windows open. The local pack will be in the nearby woods and will start up and begin howl—at the moon, at their dinner, at each other—and my sweet husband and I will pick our heads up and listen. Maybe we smile. How wild and wonderful they sound! Has the pack caught something and are celebrating the kill? We’ll spend a few pleasant, idle minutes listening along and then, as they trail off, we’ll fall blissfully to sleep.

 That is my summer experience. That is also 180 degrees, emotionally, from being in the full dark, in the winter woods and having them speak and bark and howl so very, very close. Because do I know what delicious meat they might be after now? It ain’t no fleet-footed deer, let me tell you.

 I’d like to say that I this is when I keep my total cool and march myself out of the woods, no problem. I think we both know that would be a big fat lie, though, right? My heart is thumping near out of my chest and I’m thinking, “Could I fend off a pack of coyotes with a ski pole?” I’m trying to beat feet right out of those woods, but there is so much more woods to go. Where is my house? Where is the road? And why didn’t I wear a headlamp for the love of god.

How unlikely is it to be eaten by coyotes? I wonder to myself. Didn’t I once hear that you can scare individual coyotes off by rattling something as terrifying as a can of dry beans? I am trying argue with myself that I’m more likely to be beaned by a champagne cork than bitten by a coyote. That’s the small, sensible part of me. The other parts are gibbering hysterically.

You should not be here, in the woods, in the dark, says my loud, loud primate brain. You should run! You should hide! You should climb something tall! Then the howling stops, and I start looking around, completely alarmed, left and right, right and left.

This is about the moment that I reach the tiny stream we had jumped over in previous, much calmer times.

I take one look at this section in front of me, with its wide, deep water. I have a brief thought about finding a better place to ford the thing. Then panic takes the wheel and I jump toward the far bank, ending up right in the middle, of course. I promptly fall over.

Because the only thing better than the easy prey of a Mom hiking through the woods with a baby on her back is a Mom who has trapped herself in mud and fallen over with a baby on her back.

Never has a person shot out of a muddy stream as fast as I do then. I don’t even think Ben realizes we have hit the ground. I can see the house lights far off. But we are still at the bottom of a hill in the woods, so I cross my fingers that my husband has made it home by then with our older son. As I break into as fast a jog as I can manage without tripping, I text “WALK OUTSIDE WITH A BIG LIGHT I’M ABOUT TO GET EATEN BY COYOTES.”

Helpfully, I don’t give him any more specifics than that. What the message does, though, is make me realize that I’ve been holding my phone and that my phone is also a flashlight. This Whole Time. So I turn that on. Then I switch my phone from earbuds to speakers and begin blasting my podcast into the woods.

So that’s how my son and I emerge from the field, in the dark, covered in mud, at a slow and terrified speed. I’m holding my phone above my head and waving it and shouting. This all happens just in time to meet my four-year-old and husband bursting from the basement with flashlights. They’re having a lively discussion about how Mommy and Benny are potentially getting eaten in the woods by wild animals.

I will later realize I Iost a glove somewhere along the way. It lives with the coyotes now.

-Rachael Hagerstrom

Rachael Hagerstrom, social media manager for Smith College, has produced multiple award-winning social media campaigns for colleges and independent schools. With a background in journalism and travel writing, she keeps her writing skills sharp by producing features and profiles for the Smith Quarterly magazine.