Late Night Encounters

Last night, at just after midnight, I was driving home. I had left my car in a shopping center parking lot and by the time I left there I was the only car on the road. The night had that eery dreamlike feeling that comes with the after-midnight hours and being all alone on a normally busy road. And I was tired, which added to the dreamlike quality of it all.

As I pulled onto the road, I saw a fuzzy little rabbit sitting in the middle of the street in front of me. So I ran him over.

No, I'm joking. I didn't run over the rabbit. I slowed down and watched him. He turned and ran to the side of the road. And then he began running down the sidewalk for as far as I could see him. I was surprised. I had expected him to zig and zag and then disappear into some bushes, but apparently he liked the sidewalk and just stuck to it.

I'm thinking he must have been a very young rabbit, because he was very small, and also an older rabbit would have said "to hell with this concrete hurting my feet. I'm running on the grass and maybe just ducking into some bushes." Only a young rabbit would view a hard concrete sidewalk like a personal dragstrip and use it to see how fast he could go.

zero to gone in 3.2 seconds

After the rabbit disappeared, I drove on towards home. I cut through a neighborhood that has damn stupid speed 'humps' installed, which makes me drive about 2 mph and throws all the crap inside my car around each time I go over one, not to mention the destruction of my suspension.

Once I made it through the neighborhood, I turned right onto a winding 2-lane road that divides 2 large subdivisions and began heading west towards my neighborhood. I drove over a short, steep hill and and down the other side. As I reached the bottom and continued on, I noticed something in the shadows out of the corner of my eye, over to my right.

I slowed and looked to see what it was.

There, as big as life, and showing no fear of me whatever, was a giant damn coyote, calmly eyeing me as he jogged through the front yard of the family who lives at that house while they were soundly sleeping inside, likely with no idea that a wild predator was patting across their lawn just outside their bedroom windows.

I jog through this neighborhood, and right past this house, often late at night when the temperatures are cooler.

This is the middle of the city. This isn't the countryside. And this neighborhood is older than I am by a good bit, built sometime in the early 1960s, I believe. So it isn't as if the coyote's territory was recently developed and he hadn't moved on yet. He, apparently, was a city-slicker coyote and was probably looking for that rabbit I had just seen.

I went home to bed, but I dreamed of late night coyotes and rabbits and being alone in the dark all night long. And it was creepy.


Nice doggy, don't eat the joggers



Here is some video footage of a smaller, Canadian coyote demonstrating why it's a bad idea to harass them. They will come after you if you bother them, and sometimes even if you don't.