Coyotes are very bottom-line animals

Yesterday, I woke up with the thought or the sense that it was odd there was no number in-between 7 and 8.  A whole number, I mean.  This is the immense value of sleep. You get to consider the in-between of seven and eight which deserves, really, to be considered.  It just rarely is.   

I brought my potted plants into the house for winter.  My lemon tree and my red Mandevilla were happily reunited after a summer apart during which they longed to be together but were cruelly separated by my callousness and indifference.  

We had a very late frost in Spring (June 1)  and a very early frost this fall (can’t remember the day) which made it very difficult to have a successful tomato season.  I figure if you can eat cherry tomatoes every day for 6 weeks, that’s probably success enough.  It was discouraging however, not gonna lie.  Just as these huge juicy San Marzano tomatoes were coming on, the temperature dropped low enough that even a layer of plastic over them did not save them.  

Gardening in Vermont is not easy, even if you’re focused (which I am not).  It’s very cold and there’s a miserable and measly layer of topsoil.  Which is why only lunatics from the old country settled here before the advent of gasoline and and electricity and internet.   No reasonable European would attempt such a thing — piling up one stone at a time for years on end to make enough of a clearing to plant a few carrots?  Only to spend the next 7 months losing fingers and toes in the snow?  I mean I understand why the British and the Scottish did it — that is their nature.  But I’m talking about reasonable people who like to enjoy life.  (Relax, I’m joking.)

It was also very dry this summer.  We had an official drought.  Water dropped so low that those on well-water (most Vermonters) in a few cases ran out of water.  And towns put restrictions on usage.  This does not help a person’s garden either, especially when Bram keeps running over the hose with the steel studded tractor tires.  The soil I purchased did not have quite enough water retention — I should have amended it with more peat or some such — so that worked against me as well.  I had a dumb garden this summer guys.  It was a just a stupid garden.  Not gonna lie.  

And we barely left the farm.  Our gold chickens (5 hens and a rooster) and our black chickens (5 young hens, not yet laying) were recently introduced to each other and though we feared a slaughter, it went OK.  It was tense, but so far so good.   Our disabled goat continues to decline however, and while he’s not in any pain — he has a spinal injury — it’s painful for me to see him.  I avoid going out into the field to prevent him from getting into my line of sight.  He’s still wanders around and eats happily at will and makes a lot of noise as he always has, but to see him struggling is to be reminded that his end is nigh.  The realm we in habit is dense and heavy and is governed by laws that usually cannot be breached, like cause and its apparent effect, like the seeming linearity of time.  There are just no other numbers between 7 and 8.  Not here.

And we lost five sheep this summer to coyotes.  FIVE.  We’ve never lost that many in such a short time.  The ravening beasts come so close to the house now, and in such great numbers that I swear to you if you stayed here over the course of a summer night, even with the doors locked, you would wake in a wild panic.  You would call the police and the ambulance and an exorcist.  The carcasses you run into the next morning after a savage night are not usually picked clean either.  A furry leg here, a jaw bone there.  

We once invited someone over and discovered a mere 15 minutes before they arrived, a dead sheep floating in our shallow pond, having been chased there the previous night by the roving demons.  We expended a good deal of energy and effort for the next 4 hours trying to strategically avoid any view of the pond as we walked around.  Can you imagine making an outing to what you assume to be sylvan Vermont, and what you assume to be minimally responsible animal keepers, only to stumble on a horribly maimed sheep body floating, bloated in a pond?  

It was a very beautiful summer, though at times, hot in a way that made it difficult to even think. And there was nowhere to escape.  No restaurant or library or movie theater as we would have had in the “before times.” We’ve suffered long enough without any A/C and have officially ordered one for the bedroom.  We ordered it in July.  It’s now October.  Still no sign of it.  Supply chain issues.  A marker of living in the new era which we should call the Dark Mountain time after the art collective who saw all of this coming.

Next year I’ll try a garden again.  Time will come back around as it always does [we all intuitively know the truth about time].  The chickens will lay their near-daily eggs and I will continue to insist — because I am, in limited ways, a sensible person — that this DOES. NOT. MAKE. SENSE.  A hen weighs about 3.5 pounds.  An egg weighs about 2.5 ounces.  So every 22 days they produce enough high quality protein, in an aesthetically perfect package, to equal their own body weight.  I want this investigated. Something is going on. And not just with chickens.  

My garden journal wasn’t very helpful this summer was it? 

My apologies.  I’ll leave you with the video of a relentless scoundrel we caught on the trail cam who was plundering our chicken feed and, truth be known, massacred a number of young chicks we had acquired earlier in the summer.  He’s a murderer too you know, not just the coyote.  I wonder why I don’t assign demonic characteristics to him the way I do to the coyote?   He’s cute, that’s why.  He’s cute.