Killing The Tricksters

He had a lot of swagger for a man not much taller than a parking meter. As he climbed the bar stool, it was apparent that Bob cherished what separated him from most folks who come to a bar by themselves, hoping to seem interesting:

Bob was an expert coyote hunter.

Bob was in town to give a lecture about killing coyotes. I had seen the event plugged on my bank’s marquis. The small valley where I was living was a patchwork of private farms, mostly sheep and chicken houses, contract growers for the poultry corporation two valleys over.

I was the man behind the bar, serving him light beer and keeping the conversation moving, which is what bartenders are supposed to do. Seem pleasant, interested, engage the conversation. I plied Bob with questions and learned what I could about coyote hunting.

“I’ve never seen many coyotes around here,” I said.

“Oh sure you have, you just thought you were looking at someone’s dog off in a field.”

I drive the road that follows the valley floor twice daily and often scan the floodplain that flanks the road. I could not recall ever spotting anyone’s dog off in a field.

But there are coyotes in the area. And Bob was going to tell a standing-room-only crowd how to kill them.

Bob travels the country, coast to coast, despite an aversion to airplanes, giving seminars and private classes on how to deal with the pestilence of coyotes. He was also a gun for hire with 842 kills under his belt.

“I’d say I know a thing or two about killing coyotes,” he told me after quoting his tally.

Bob had pictures. One showed a man holding aloft the largest coyote Bob had ever known. “That man is six foot, one inch tall.” At eighty-two pounds, the coyote’s hind paws were even with the rim of the man’s ball cap, and his front paws were touching the ground.

In the photograph, Bob stood alongside the dead coyote, smiling (as big as he did when he told me his sucking-the-chrome-off-a-trailer-hitch joke) and holding out one hand, barely touching the belly of the coyote to show that although he did not pull the trigger, he had something to do with the animal’s demise.

Another photograph showed Bob, boyishly beaming, with an average-sized coyote splayed across his lap, one at his feet, two more on either side of him, and another two on top of those. He was knee-deep in dead canines.

“That’s ten seconds of shooting.”

“Pardon me.”

“With a bolt action rifle. Hit the first one at fifteen yards and after that I pulled the trigger whenever I had fur in the scope. Got all six inside of ten seconds.”

Hot dog, I thought. I asked him about his methods after lamenting that my shift at the bar the following night would keep me from his presentation.

“I only hunt during the day. And I track them. I can tell you what was going on with the pack just by looking at their tracks. Were they hunting, were they moving from point A to point B, or were they bedding down? Say I find a deer carcass. I can tell you what pack did the killing. The mother teaches her pups to hunt and she passed on her style. Some attack the hind quarters, bring ’em down before the kill, others go for the throat, some go for the back of the neck and crack their spine. Every pack has its signature.”

I learned that coyotes can bite. Bob explained that a German Shepherd can bite down with seven hundred and thirty pounds per square inch of pressure. “Ok?” he made sure I followed him. “Now, a Pit Bull can put twelve hundred and fifty pounds on you. You steer clear of Pit Bulls, I imagine.”

“I sure do, Bob.”

“Well, a coyote can bite down on your arm with twenty-four hundred and sixty pounds of pressure. There ain’t a bone in your body he couldn’t crush like a saltine.”

“That’s a strong bite.”

“You ain’t kiddin’.”

“So what’s the trick? What’s your secret?”

“Well, you stink.” I knew Bob well enough at this point to recognize this quip as part of his shtick. I played along.

“Oh?” I said.

Bob chuckled, “Well, to a coyote you do,” and he chuckled some more. He leaned in, about to share one of the secrets of his popularity.

“I always pick the prettiest girl out of the audience, and I tell her she stinks. She gets embarrassed and everybody laughs, but I tell you what,” Bob assumed an earnest and pedantic air, “every one of them people will remember that smell is important. If you just say that smell is important, no one will remember, but when you get ’em laughing, and you embarrass somebody, they’ll remember what you were talking about.”

“That they will.”

Bob was from Erie, Pennsylvania, still bitter from a divorce eight years passed. He lost his home, his eighty-two thousand dollar home. When it sold, and the proceeds were divvied up, Bob walked away with thirty-six dollars and little else.

“She said I was screwing around,” Bob said. “This is my life. I travel around. How could I have been cheatin’?”

How, indeed. Bob was five-foot-four, pudgy, and thus far void of stories outside of his divorce, killing coyotes and fabricated tales of humor from his local watering hole, The Iron Horse Tavern, where, if Bob was to be believed, women line up to show him their fake breasts.

Bob’s stories felt rehearsed, sequenced. He told me that the only requisite of his perfect woman was that she could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch, said he hadn’t found one yet but told me if I went out and looked at his trailer hitch, I’d find it pretty well grooved.

“Tryouts?” I asked, wanting more for my record books. Bob’s little eyes squinted into little up-turned smiles as he chuckled at his own tired wit.

Over the course of Bob’s five light beers, as I tended to other patrons, I heard him sharing the same jokes and anecdotes with whatever patron happened onto the bar stool next to his. One of the neighborhood drunks, a man of forty-two who ran a bulldozer over his two cars to keep himself from driving under the influence, lit up like he was meeting Elvis Presley when he learned that Bob was the man giving the coyote talk.

Bob lived for his celebrity. Sterling, the drunk, told Bob that he had been baiting coyotes on his farm for weeks with dead chickens.

“And they smart,” Sterling said, tapping the side of his sweat-stained and loftily perched baseball cap. “We sit an’ wait for ’em to come down and eat them chickens, but they never do. Sure enough, though, when we come out the next mornin’, them chickens is gone. Ever last one of ’em. Dang, I can’t believe you the coyote man.”

Coyotes were not just a hobby for Bob. They were his entire life. Bob spends most of his time among strangers and considering the inaugural question that is the hallmark of our leapfrog rituals of social interaction:

What do you do?

Bob kills coyotes, and talks about killing coyotes, for a living. Were it not for his expertise, he would have only crass jokes and the details of a pallid, miserable divorce to share with the people he meets.

As common as it is for a man to be consumed by his day job, I wondered what twist of fate brought Bob to be a leading authority on the eradication of canine predators.

I wondered it aloud, in fact, and Bob told me.

Bob’s epiphany happened eight hundred and forty-two kills ago, in a tree stand in coastal South Carolina. “I watched two coyotes take down a doe. They came up and tore out the tendons on her hind legs, brought her down so she couldn’t barely move, and I watched them eat away her hind quarters, chewed down to the ball joint in her hips. And when they’d had their fill, they just wandered off, left her there to die. I climbed out of my tree stand and let the guides know that a couple of coyotes had left a deer for dead, and they told me they’d take care of it. But I come back two days later and do you know that deer was still there and she was still alive, just like the coyotes left her. And I’ve hated them ever since.”

Bob took a sip of his beer, steadied himself against the gravity of his story, then continued. “That’s wrong. I mean, that might be nature, but it’s wrong.”

I thought to ask Bob why, considering his over-arching sense of humanity and his eye for the clean kill shot, he had not put the doe out of her misery when he climbed out of his tree stand. Why had he left her there to suffer for hours with no meat left on her hind legs until his guides could return and put her down? But I didn’t. I let it go. Bob’s fantasy was paper thin, and far be it from me to poke holes in it just to prove a point. Besides, that was Bob’s life, and for better or worse, he had to go on living it. I got the melancholy sense that it was all he had.

Bob woke up this morning alone in a seven-room brick motel in rural West Virginia. He stood, walked to the bathroom, relieved himself, and brushed his teeth, looking in the mirror as he dug deep to get the chewing surface of his molars. He grinned a death grin as he scoured the front of his incisors, eye teeth, and canines. He showered, dressed, and walked to the adjacent restaurant, sat, and ordered his breakfast, one man in a booth for four. He scanned the floodplain for signs of glory, ate his pancakes when the waitress brought them, sipped his coffee, and waited for the ride that would take him to his big radio interview.

But most of all, Bob sat among people, both familiar and vague, and wished for something more.