Coyotes on Euclid

So I'm here at Bristol Faith in Action, as it's Wednesday, and it's another weird day. Our building is on Euclid Avenue, just down from the new Food City and across from the ball fields where our sub-A baseball team plays. We've got two big picture windows from the main office fronting the street. For the past half hour, we've been watching a large shaggy dog, collarless, skitter back and forth across Euclid, which is a busy four-lane road. The animal kept barely not getting hit, loping back and forth.

Eventually we in the office grew concerned. We are all friends of dogs in general. I went out to see if I couldn't grab the dog and bring him in to safety--we could at least shut him up in the storeroom, and then one of us (to my husband: probably not me) would take him home.

I went outside and for a moment didn't see the dog. A car was parked in front of our building windows down, with a dad and a small girl inside it. An older boy was standing on the sidewalk.

"Did you see where that dog went?" I asked the boy.

"Wasn't a dog," the boy said. "That's a coyote."

Just then the dog coyote trotted back across the street. The boy was right: it was a coyote. A pair of coyotes used to den two fields over from where I kept my horse in Indiana, and I saw them all the time. Now, I've never known coyotes to be aggressive, but I wasn't about to grab one by the neck and haul him into the office. I took myself back inside and called city animal control.

"There's a coyote--" I began.

"The one on Euclid?" the officer asked, sounding bored.

There are moments when my lesser angel tries to take over. I was this close to saying, "No, this is the one on State Street." But I didn't. I said, "Yep," and the animal control promised that someone was on the way.

I don't know what happened after that. It was a fine-looking coyote, as coyotes go. That's all I've got today.