After being so long in the city, living in the woods is the experience of a lifetime for us. Each and every day we are surrounded by the pure essence of life, that “force that through the green fuse drives the flower”. The fundamental rules of survival are played out all around us in their most basic form, and we are reminded of what it truly means to have life…and of its transitory nature.
One particular instance several nights ago really brought this concept home to us. In the deep stillness of a moonless night, in the wee hours of darkness that precede the dawn, we were awakened from our dreams by a sound we at first couldn’t identify.
The first screams had us dragging ourselves up from the deep, and by the time we were fully awake, the night was filled with screams, barks, howls, shrieks and wails. It was an unholy racket, like nothing we’d ever heard before—enough to make a person believe in banshees—and it was coming from right behind the house.
And then it dawned on us. The coyotes were hunting, and they had cornered their quarry in the woods not fifty feet away from us.
Sitting there in the dark with the predator/prey drama unfolding so close by, the eerie sounds of life and death loud in the night, was one of the most extraordinary experiences. I thought about the power of these night hunters and of the terror of the hunted. I thought about the cycle of life and death all around us and of our own place in the order of things. And I thought about how I wished my children could hear this and be as amazed as I at all that was contained in this moment.
The howls and shrieks and screams stopped as abruptly as they had started, and in the silence there was a loss. Once identified, the horrible sounds had become a thing of beauty and wonder. How true is this for so many things in life?