Last weekend, venturing back to the bog on a rare sunny day, I noticed my dog seemed to be absent for a good half of the walk. When I saw him at the far corner of the bog, on a crest behind the small mountain of sand they use to spread on the bog, I thought it best to investigate. Surely I owe Tucker some sort of commission here, for he IS the reason I get to see what I see.
Here on the backside of the knoll was the unmistakable evidence of a “crime scene”. An area of shorn fur, cut as if with scissors, which generally points to the shearing ability of coyotes. The fur was unmistakably from a White Tail deer for they lack the thick undercoat so many animals have. I noticed more white fur than I would have thought, and for one sick minute thought, oh no, that piebald fawn I saw in the fall.
I had wondered at the time, if that pinto marking would be a curse or a blessing. Would it break up its outline making it harder to see, or would the white stand out against the gray trees? But I can be one to jump to conclusions, and now I have told myself, they have white bellies, perhaps the fur came from there.
This was not the entire deer. I don’t think the kill happened where I was standing either. There were no deer tracks, nor sign of a chase, no drag marks either. What I THINK I was seeing is an animal that had been killed recently and then perhaps cached somewhere near and taken out piecemeal to eat. Think of the times you buy the whole chicken but make several meals out of it. This seemed corroborated when I went back the next day and found, this time, a portion of backbone that had just recently been dined on. So now, the mystery is, where are they caching it?
Again my dog was my clue. He had followed the tracks that went down to the pond, over the ice and up the steep railroad grade to the frozen marshy area on the other side.
Lets interject here that the tracks were a tricky thing, surely they were coyote, even a scat there to further seal the deal, but there were also large boot prints that went down to the pond too. Hmmm, most likely it was someone like myself, trying to figure out what happened. I followed Tuck and the tracks and we found ourselves again ducking briars, trying to crawl under bent and frozen shrubs. But on this side, I came across more shards of bone, so some of the deer had been dined on here. As is often the case, the briars win out and I decided I had seen enough.
But the mystery that remains is where did they hide the body? In the winter caching is a great boon to any animal that captured a meal to large to eat at once. They will dig a hole in the snow and keep it as we would in a freezer. Whether other animals find it and help themselves I can’t say. What the condition of the deer was when they caught it is unknown too. It has been a hard winter, and winter is the time that coyotes have an easier time catching deer.
Was it the piebald fawn of the fall? I sentimentally hope not, but as I have said here before, don’t begrudge the predator his prey. No one is standing over us at each meal accusing us of your dastardly habit of eating. Let’s show them the same grace.
I returned to the area today, but between when I was last there and now it has snowed again, iced over, rained torrentially and then snowed a bit more. Everything was covered up for the moment. So, let the mystery lie. Maybe it was cached, maybe it wasn’t. In winter coyotes are more likely to be together, not in huge packs but perhaps 3 or 4. After all, warmer to sleep with a pack (3 dog night) and we are coming up to Valentines day for coyotes so they would be travelling in pairs soon. Perhaps everyone just got their share, whatever they could and ate it at their own favorite spots.
It shall remain therefore, another “Unsolved Mystery”. But playing the sleuth brings a tad of entertainment to these wintry walks. No high tech equipment for us, but just a mind that can conjure up possibilities. See what mysteries you can unravel. Sleuth on.
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