The Coyotes of San Francisco

Instead of sexy groupies, Coyote had a wife who didn’t believe in abortion.

Even though the hunters had been doing their work for twenty-five years, since the turn of the millennium, not every poor, dead thing in the world had been snuffed out the way some thought ghosts should be.

Bulls and lone cows often hang back, deferring risk to the gangly youngsters and their travel-weary mothers.

In the rest of America, hunting was dying. Rates of participation had been declining for decades—only 6 percent of Americans still hunted. But in the Northern Rockies, it remained integral to the culture—Montana had the highest number of hunters per capita, and Wyoming wasn’t far behind. Women hunted, kids hunted, even wildlife biologists hunted. F

The males wanted to come with her, but they couldn’t conquer their fear of the mysterious surface and its inherent strangeness, oddly elevated and flat, with no cover, smelling like nothing they’d ever known. And, of course, the road was where the cars were, and the people. It seemed that whatever pack the brothers had been born into had seldom enc