Love and Coyote Bait

     We get to a certain age and realize we are the old-timers.  Some of our stories seem like chronicles from another century.  They are.  My friend JoAnn Messerly Osorio recently sent me the following e-mail about an incident when she was a child living in a sod and rock cabin in a remote valley in northeastern Nevada.  Her father was running mustangs and supplementing their income by killing coyotes and collecting the bounty:

          “About the coyote poison remember they used to put a bounty on each coyote pelt, dressed out                or not.  I have pictures with dead coyotes covering a horse from neck to tail.  They mixed lard with arsenic and snake oil.  Then they rolled it into little balls then rolled the little balls in sugar.  The snake oil would attract the coyote; the sugar would make it tasty.  Then they would put it out on the range and come back the next day to pick up the dead coyotes.  I will never forget when I was about 3 or 4 years old, I found the sack in back of the car, and was licking the sugar off of the coyote poison ...he'll, what did I know.  I came into house with sugar all over my lips, and my Dad asked me where I got it.  I showed him the sack...you talk about one terrified cowboy...he talked to me very softly and walked me around very softly talking to me. Nice and easy ...which he never did before.  He never left my side. For hours, just walking and talking very gently.  My mom was terrified but did not panic,

.          Finally they decided that I had not eaten the little balls of coyote poison.

          But only licked the sugar off!!!”

     There are a lot of ways to think about her story, which took place in the mid-1940’s, not the 1840’s. While my friend was living a rugged version of Little House on the Prairie, the most powerful poison the world has known was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  DDT had become available as an agricultural insecticide, and we, on the ranches, considered it a godsend for keeping down the flies.

  

     It was a time in the West when we needed to push back nature, in some areas to keep rattlers out of our houses and yards; in nearly all places to keep coyotes from killing our calves or lambs.  The herds of wild horses were culled to keep a delicate balance in the management of open range.

    This is my friend’s vivid and loving memory of a father who was a rough and careless parent, and a sanguine account of a harsh time in her life.  We get to a certain age and we are inclined to sugar-coat bitter realities of the past.  It’s neither right nor wrong.  It is what we do.

     Here's what others do to us:  pass judgement.