Animal Quills

 

Homologies

In predawn glow alone, I take off at a brisk trot, floating in diagonal symmetry.

It’s about the closest I can come to peace in my body.  Homologies are apparent – and there are many. Vertebrates are all built off the same body plan, the sum of modifications to the same blueprint.  Natural selection guides our forms purposefully toward better survival and reproduction, crafting multitudes of shapes.  But look closely and it’s recognizable we’re all cut from the same cloth, running on variations of the same foot.

Padded metatarsals.  Digitigrade, at least for now. 

Bipedalism, still half-baked evolutionarily, feels dissociated from the physical.  I want to drop, feel the ground push back, engage my back.  Dorso-ventral flattening of the rib cage is all wrong. I’m scrunched and stretched into a size and shape that can feel bizarre. But I’ve done the best I could with it.  When the body discomfort peaked, I knew things might never be perfect, but they could be better. So I got fit, as close to the human equivalent of a coyote’s lean-muscled form as possible. 

Latissimus dorsi, serratus, obliques, the sleek torso definition of a canid or hominid.  Functional strength. 

I hit the transition from pavement to packed dirt.  Dawn warms the horizon with rosy glow. Liminal space, liminal time, somewhere human and animal. The pond will be frozen soon. My legs power on.

Soleus, gastrocnemius.  Achilles tendons springing.  Calcaneus, that hammer of civilization that beats ungracefully, ungratefully, on soil dense with death. 

My breath floats to frost my hair and neck warmer, that makeshift ruff. I let my jaw open to pull in more air, smelling frost and decay.

Temporalis.  But what are they without a sagittal crest as anchor?  Rostrum nearly absent, nasals truncated. Canines a bit ironic. Pinnae pitiful.

But the pieces are mostly there. And it’s possible, even with limited hardware, to catch a vole, a whiff of old cottonwood, a rustle of magpies. As I crest the highest ridge, the sun strikes just the treetops. I take it in with eyes lacking the tapetum lucidum, that eye-mirror that would catch more dusky pre-dawn light, but with the cones to appreciate red and orange and peach hues of daybreak. My breath ragged from climb, I pause to savor the instant before treading on.

The path forks and I take the overgrown one littered with detritus.  Here the tall grasses ripple along ribcage, and the vegetation is thick even when barren.  It’s here we cross paths.

A flash of motion. Slipping through the brush, a wraith in every shade of dust and senescent grass.  A pause.  Molten gold gaze. Just that moment, and then he’s gone, winding between the blades to become invisible again. 

I pad along, striding over familiar roots and ducking overgrown branches.  Muscle memory.  I know he’s still in the field somewhere, also running, sharing this cursorial lifestyle molded by evolution.  But I keep moving.  People will be awake soon, and here with their dogs, and we both would like to be gone by then.  The sun spreads across the tips of the grass just as I turn back into the neighborhood, back into shadows. 

By the time I return, the morning is in full swing.  Slowing to a walk, I take a few deep breaths.  

I shed down to skin and step inside, civilized enough for now.

gracile (/ˈɡrasəl,ˈɡraˌsīl/): adj. slender, thin in build.


Wolf seemed the obvious answer, as it does for many people. As a preteen, my journal entries started referring to the animal – replacing felines in my mind as the pre-eminent beast. In short, I was a wolfaboo before the phenomenon, let alone the word, existed.

So when I first came across the term “therianthrope” and began to understand that there was a word for the way I felt about myself, that persistent animal self-perception, I didn’t initially think to look any further than the wolf.

It wasn’t too long before I started having doubts. I’d felt more animal than human all my life, playing as and seeing myself in a broad variety of creatures, including wolves. But wolf wasn’t something that had been consistent or really matched my typical “baseline” in some ways. For one, the hulking size and robustness of the wolf didn’t align with my feeling that my body should be lithe and relatively slight. I’d also started to realize that while I’d originally thought group-hunting and sociality were central to my experience of animal, that may have been another idealization. The truth was that I often wanted to be alone, and the animal in my head seemed social but mostly self-reliant.

So I started to consider the red fox. There were certainly some improvements! The sleek, light body, so much smaller. Some climbing ability – almost catlike. That was really appealing to me, since I’d spent so much of my earlier childhood feeling distinctly more cat than dog. I could even remember times embracing fox feelings as a kid. It seemed a proper marriage of feelings old and new, canine and feline. And foxes were not as driven by social structure.

Yet, though I also admired foxes, there was something a bit foreign about them. The body language doesn’t ring true. Their sounds, from the vixen’s woman-like scream to the bizarre fight-sound known as “gekkering”, don’t match up. Foxes don’t even have the facial muscles to lift their lips into a snarl. The deeply omnivorous habits of the fox and its tendency to hunt bite-size critters didn’t really resonate with my hungry desires for anything up to and including bison. And foxes were maybe too solitary.

I was stymied. Here were two animals I’d felt strongly about throughout my life, animals that matched how I felt myself in some ways, animals I’d like to be, that somehow weren’t quite a fit. Most of the animals I’d felt closest to as a kid were even farther from my current self.


I’d never given much thought to coyotes. I liked them, surely, and I remember touching the pelt at the local nature center with a particular appreciation. But I’d not had any personal experience with them, and besides thinking of them as one of the more appealing of the local fauna, I had no special connection to them. Coyotes seemed kind of mundane, common, with little reverence paid to them - vermin to the locals of my hometown. “Smoke a pack a day,” as the bumper sticker says next to the outline of a coyote. My own mother talked about the ones she saw in California as mangy and scrawny.

But I remember contemplating coyote one night, laying in my bed and trying to envision my body in that form. There was an odd sort of comfort; maybe something clicked. Here was something I hadn’t considered before, something that contained elements of the wolf that still felt so close to a match, as well as the fox that contained some of the other, more delicate features and generalist traits that mirrored my experiences.

“Molded by nature into the perfect combination of fox and wolf, the coyote’s long muzzle and perky ears have enabled it to be a highly efficient mouser, while sharp canid teeth and exceptional speed strike fear in ungulates.” – Todd Wilkinson, “Track of the Coyote”

I didn’t embrace it early on. Wolf had a strong pull, a whole mythology. Foxes and even cats were more appealing. Frankly, I didn’t want to be a coyote. I even remember an older wolf-person on a forum calling them “wannabe wolves.”

I guess the persistence of the coyote pays off. And after all, the coyote is a type of wolf itself.
So what does coyote actually feel like, then? Mark Twain called the coyote “a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolfskin stretched over it,” and that’s the most flattering part of his description!
But, in fairness, there’s a sort of scrappiness. The coyote possesses neither the hefty paws nor the deep keel of the wolf’s chest. The paws are light and long, narrow compared to a dog of the same size. There’s a buoyancy, a lightness that is tangible. Deft and nimble. Without the need for marathon-running ungulates regularly, a coyote doesn’t need the deep chest and huge lungs of the wolf. No, the coyote is streamlined, shallow-chested, narrow through the ribs, so that a coyote resting in the sun can appear to have deflated.
The sleekness follows from tip to tail. A slender muzzle, less square and bulky than a wolf’s. Proportionately long teeth and large eyes, tall, expressive, pointed ears. Thin and leggy, a coyote is often mistaken for underfed.

The energy of a coyote seems to be constantly in tension. When I worked with captive canids, it was always the coyotes I saw up and about during any hours of the day. They’d get up and move around at any time, brightly alert and seeking anything there could be to perceive. I feel that restlessness and alertness like a tightly-wound spring in me. Sprightly, busy, almost frenetic at times – coyote is motion. I joke that my 5-kilometer runs at dawn are what I need to take the edge off and be a less insane person to have to live with. But it’s true that coyote is the antithesis of stagnation.

That high-voltage intensity and comes through in the way the coyote moves, too, not just the amount of motion. A captive coyote requires more extensive fencing than a wolf; in addition to their anti-gravity pogo-stick jumps, they have another bizarre and satisfyingly catlike habit: climbing. Much like the occasional escape artist husky, a coyote can learn to hook its feet in a chain link fence and ladder-climb out. They’re also known to climb trees – maybe not with the dexterity of a red fox, and certainly not with the semi-retractable claws and flexible wrists of the grey fox, but coyotes will still hop and climb, paw over paw, limb by limb, 20 feet or more into a tree for apples or pears.

On the ground, the coyote is a swirl of silver-tawny-cream wind. Coyotes at play are almost ribbonlike, lithe bodies bending and twirling, banner tail-brushes waving. A coyote is light on its feet, the fleet rogue class to the wolf’s sturdy fighter.
As in body, the coyote is flexible in behavior. This plasticity is part of what has made them so successful, even in circumstances where larger and more aggressive predators have failed. Coyote deftly adapts to the situation at hand.
One way that is apparent is socially. The sociality of the wolf is basically compulsory; they are large enough that coordinated hunting of large ungulates is a regular and essentially required part of their schedule. As a result of that, the social group is more rigid, more necessary.

That’s not to say that the coyote isn’t a social creature. In fact, they more or less follow the basic family-group pattern of wolves. But the coyote is socially flexible, and that resonates. Coyote embraces interaction with gesticulation, enthusiasm, exaggerated facial expressions. Reading the room. Code-switching. But when it’s time to go, solitude suits the coyote as well. Loneliness can hurt, but you can flip the narrative and savor it, too.

The coyote is also a mesopredator – that is, a mid-sized carnivore, not the apex, not the all-consuming corner of the food web to which all arrows eventually point. I think ego can get in the way of people seeing mesopredators in themselves – everyone seems to want to think of themselves as top dog. But this evolutionary history as underdogs might be part of the secret to the coyote’s success. Coyote knows how to kill and how to avoid being killed. There’s a tension between threat and opportunity, fear and curiosity, boldness and caution. I often feel my senses are like an exposed nerve in the universe, with narrow thresholds before the input overwhelms. And the startle reflex - hair-trigger, but with quick recovery. It’s important to a coyote to be ready to instantly seize an opportunity or dodge a threat.

That moderate size means a flexible prey base, too. Insects through ungulates all trigger that kind of bunching-muscle predatory eagerness. I remember feeling that way even as a kid, though there’s always been a strange conflict between the desire to chase, even to kill, and the (probably uniquely human) empathy that makes that prospect difficult to consider.

Insect catching and “herping,” the reptile and amphibian enthusiast’s more hands-on equivalent to birding, are useful outlets for those chase impulses. Hunting and fishing are thankfully accessible as well, and the ability to be humane alleviates some of the internal conflict.
While I still continue to have that shapeshifter feeling of experiencing a broad variety of animal feelings – including fox and wolf among many others – coyote continues to be a good representation of the baseline around which my sense of self balances. I feel coyote in all the flexibility and opportunity-seeking in my life. Learning to adapt and be comfortable being uncomfortable for a time is a coyote’s road to success. Coyote is burning curiosity, immune to morbidity or squeamishness, the desire to perceive and experience all there is and to learn from it, good or bad. It is a lot of the things wolf is: gregarious, playful, predatory, intelligent. But coyote is a different sort of wolf – the small, streamlined generalist, the ultimate survivor, the curious and adaptable seeker. Recognition of my inner coyote was a valuable development in knowing myself, and it continues to help me live better.