Free Prairie Evers by Ellen Airgood

chicken I named Smoke in particular had taken a shine to Ivy and followed her around like a puppy.
    After a while we’d go play with the cats, or swing on the tire swing, or build forts out of hay bales up in the mow and pretend we were Wild West cowboys or Cherokee Indians. Sometimes we pretended we were orphan princesses running a great kingdom together. Other times we just hiked back along the lane to the woods to see what we could see. Every afternoon we fedFiddle and the hens, gathered the eggs, and set out food for the coyote who showed up sometimes way at the edge of the woods, so he’d leave the chickens alone. We put out fruit and vegetables that had gotten old, and mice Mama had caught in traps in the house.
    “A coyote loves a mouse to eat. I believe it’s like a chocolate bar to you or me,” I told Ivy one day as we hiked toward the woods. I had two of them in a plastic sack. It was sad for them, but they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they were going to make quite a treat for some lucky coyote.
    Ivy said, “Yuck,” but she kept tromping along with me. “That’s just hard to believe.”
    “They’ll eat all kinds of things. Fruit and fish and vegetables and grass, and sometimes something big, like a deer.”
    “And people’s animals. You hear about that.”
    “Not very often. They know it’s dangerous, going near people.”
    “How do you know so much about it?”
    “I don’t know.” Even with Ivy I didn’t admit how much learning I’d always done on my own out of sheer curiosity. I’d found out in school that it was safer to keep quiet about some things. Probably Ivy wouldn’t have minded, but I didn’t like to take the chance. Besides, it seemed to me like knowing about coyotes was just natural, like breathing. “I learned a lot of it from my grammy, and from Daddy too, I guess.”
    “Oh.”
    I cut my eyes sideways at her. Sometimes it struck me how Ivy didn’t have any family that I knew of besides her mama. Her mama didn’t seem worth the powder to blow her up to me, and every time I thought about it, I got worried.
    It wasn’t something we talked about, though. In truth, the thought of talking about it made me nervous. It was easier to go on talking about coyotes. “It’s a desperate coyote who’ll eat a man’s stock, Daddy says. He says a coyote has got to eat, same as you and me. I reckon he’s in the minority in his way of thinking on that. Daddy admits coyotes will devour chickens if they get a chance and there’s not something else about for them to eat. But he says they’re as good as a cat for pest control, they do love a mouse so. And he says they’re a good family-values animal, the government ought to promote them as a model for folks to look up to instead of encouraging people to hunt them down.”
    Ivy nodded, and there was something lonesome about it. Maybe I had said
Daddy
too many times in a row. Sometimes I trod on Ivy’s feelings without meaning to. I decided to hold my tongue for a while, which was not the easiest thing in the world, but I did it for Ivy’s sake.
    That night, after she went home, I sat at the kitchen table and thought about everything I knew about coyotes.
    Coyotes marry for life. They have their babies in the spring, and the babies don’t leave the den their mama has made until they are three weeks of age. Then they do go outside of it, butjust a little ways. When they’re older, the mama and daddy and aunts and uncles teach the pups to hunt. They are handing over the things the pups will need to know as they go on in life. Coyotes move away from their home place when they are grown, but they don’t go too far.
    A person will hear a coyote more often than she sees him. When they howl, they might seem to be in one place when really they’re somewhere else. It’s something to do with the way their voice carries through the air. I’ve practiced throwing my own voice, but so far I haven’t been able to do it. In the