We stared at each other in mutual surprise, unmoving, unblinking. I almost said, “Do you wanna dance?” in the way of two people trying to maneuver around each other in close quarters.

We were 20 feet apart, but it suddenly seemed like a very small space. Her stare unnerved me. I took a step back into the doorway I had just exited she took a corresponding step back the reluctant choreography of unwilling dance partners.

In her bold stare I saw many faces: menacing hunter, consumer of small pets and carrion, scavenger of trash bins, popular cartoon character, trickster god. Her head came up, the yellow eyes blinked, a sideways glance and she melted back into the woods. I resumed breathing.

I had seen coyotes up close before, many times in fact during the 20 years I lived in southern California. Most of that sprawling metropolis has been so recently carved out of the wilderness that many of its original inhabitants are still there: bobcats, mountain lions, wild boar, and coyotes still prowl their home territories, wondering what happened to their hunting grounds and denning sites. As in New Hampshire, the number of human/wildlife interactions is on the increase, sometimes with unfortunate results for both parties.

Even in midsummer when it has finished shedding, the Eastern coyote that calls New Hampshire home is larger and fuller coated than its western cousin. Those I saw in California were a faded tawny-gray, a body that appeared half-starved on top of too long legs nothing like my sleek visitor with her vibrant reddish fur and confident stance, muscley-lean with a calm but feral look.

Coyotes invariably evoke an emotional response fear, excitement, wonder, disdain. In my New England childhood, they were the stuff of Indian legends and stories of the Wild West. There may be no other animal the subject of as many legends, from Abenaki to Navajo, from Miwok to the Crow nation. Coyotes are portrayed as cunning and subversive, tricksters, sometimes thieves or clowns, sometimes Promethean, bringing the gift of fire to mankind.

They are opportunistic and adaptive, learning to live in Central Park as well as the north woods and in our own backyards. They don’t fear our presence in their territory as much as they exploit it. The state of New Hampshire has declared year round open season on coyotes, but biologists say that will probably have little effect on their numbers.

Early this summer, as I took a break from long hours of weeding, a flurry of movement in the field across the road caught my attention. A flock of turkeys was executing a series of frantic evasion maneuvers, running first this way then that, in perfect formation, a large coyote close on their heels (or claws as it were). They ran as a unit with that queer bird communication that enables a flock of doves to dip and swirl in faultless symmetry in the perfect blue sky over a summer wedding.  “Scatter, you fools,” I hissed. Not that I'm any particular fan of turkeys who frequently visit my blueberry bushes. “Scatter!”

Suddenly, as if a grenade had been launched in their midst, they did exactly that each bird becoming clumsily airborne in a different direction , leaving the coyote to spin a quick circle of indecision before trotting off to the pasture edge. They will live to gorge themselves on more blueberries, I thought.

On a cold February night, when the temperature is so frigid you can barely stand to open your back door, you will hear the howling of coyotes courting off in the woods. Or on a quiet summer evening, when the moon is just beginning to glow on the horizon and adult coyotes are teaching their young to hunt, the tranquility will be shattered by a chorus of yips and howls that seem to come from a hundred snarling mouths the primal sound of a pack on the hunt.

You briefly speculate on which tiny creature is about to meet its demise, and even if you have never spent a single night in the open, you wonder how it would feel at that moment to be sleeping by a dying campfire deep in the forest. You wonder if the coyotes are gathering in some moonlit hollow, just out of sight, dancing.

By Lynne Lawrence, Master Gardener