Eastbound
A few weeks before I moved to the east side of the city, I saw a coyote in High Park. A streak of chalk against the salted asphalt rise of Colborne Lodge Drive, the animal glides low over the road trailing a fat and weathered tail, before merging with a thicket of trees. I stand at the bottom of the hill in the pastel silence of early morning, looking up, exhilarated at being so close, which is not close at all but in sight. The coyote has allowed itself to be seen by me.
In the past, I’d caught glimpses of coyotes from the safe carriage of a bus or car, skulking along the park’s edge at night. On weekend trips to the country, I’d hear them howl at dusk. I’m such a city person that I don’t even know if they’re supposed to be out in the daylight.
A person emerges from around the bend swaddled in a mauve parka, breaking the pause left gleaming, in the coyote’s wake. Looking for a shared moment, I walk up the hill towards them.
“Excuse me!” I call. “Did you see the coyote?”
The woman has glassy blue eyes and looks stunned by my approach. She blurts out quickly. “No English!”
I’m undeterred and use enthusiasm to bridge the language gap, smiling and pointing at the road just there. “Dog?”
She shakes her head, but says “Da.” I wish her a nice day.
The other day before it snowed, I found hoof tracks in the wet sand.
The moment threatens to become an illusion as I realize I’m alone in my witnessing. Just ten minutes earlier, I had been walking along the lakeshore, stepping in the paw prints of a dog that had trodden through the snow before me. I’ve walked in the tracks of other humans, playing the game of pressing my foot delicately into the impression of another’s—but not an animal’s, not until now. The other day before it snowed, I found hoof tracks in the wet sand and gave the cloven hollows a wide berth, trying to avoid sullying them, so everyone else could know that a horse had been here, among us.
The City of Toronto’s coyote fact sheet is four pages long and filled with useful information such as: “coyotes are naturally timid;” “coyotes are very curious;” and “coyotes in Toronto are the same coyotes that have always been here. They act like coyotes, not wolves.”
Like people, coyotes are outside at all times of the day and year. But also, they like people, to the extent that coyotes will continue to live near humans because there is good access to food, shelter, and fewer natural predators. They have been domesticated through proximity.
With warmer weather come more rabbits than I’ve ever seen. I notice them everywhere as we move east, escaping one predatory landlord for another. Little, brown, and loping, with fluffy white tails, they scurry under fences and hop along trails in Parkdale, Scarborough, and Pickering. One night, as the moon is growing full and bright, I catch sight of the furred silhouette of a rabbit on the lawn of a house that we will leave in less than six months.
It is so quiet here—the kind of quiet I wished for when I lived on a busy road in the west end. I hold my breath. For a moment, the rabbit and I stand still together, making shadows on the earth, until a car’s headlights come into view.
On a walk together, Krish points out a white squirrel vaulting up a tree. I’d heard of them—there’s a coffee shop back on the other side of town named after some that lived in the park. But I’d never seen one myself.
The White Squirrel Institute is run by someone in Brevard, North Carolina, where there is a subspecies of white squirrels that I learn are leucistic but not albino, although albino white squirrels do exist. The Institute extensively documents sightings of white squirrels across North America. The comment sections on these posts are lively missives from avid wildlife watchers and regular folks, like me, who have been dazed by an encounter with something new.
One woman writes that she is “grateful for the experience” of having spotted a white squirrel. Another person shares childhood memories of seeing white squirrels in a McDonald’s parking lot. I did not expect a message board to feel like hallowed space and am amazed to discover, again and again, that I am not alone.
We are looking for a new place to live again. It is fall. The road outside is patterned with the flattened remnants of snakes the size of my palm.
Up and away from waves that rush against secret beaches, a fox runs across a walking path tucked against the feet of the Scarborough Bluffs. It’s the red shock of autumn, lengthened by a floating tail that moves on its own wind. I find myself in the valley between breaths.
“A fox!” I say to Krish, whose Mmmhmm indicates that he’s followed the animal into the forest of his own thoughts. For the rest of the morning, I feel magical.
Unlike coyotes, the City is more prescriptive when it comes to foxes. Its website offers instructions on “how to prevent conflict with foxes” and “evicting a den of foxes.” Unsatisfied with the description of these creatures as mere tenants —somehow more unknowable than coyotes— I keep searching for more information. Finally, on the Toronto Wildlife Centre’s website, I find a note of wonder: “How lucky to have the chance to glimpse into the private lives of red foxes! Overall, fox families do not remain at their natal den site for long, pose no threat to humans, and offer a delightful sight to behold. Tolerance is always preferable when a wild animal chooses to den in a backyard.” All beloved spaces are shared, I realize, and then my phone buzzes with a new e-mail from the landlord, dimming the glow of the day.
City life often involves encounters with raccoons, but I don’t recognize the critter shuffling under the crude glare of streetlights on a navy blue Halloween morning. Unlike the nervy insurgents that clamber onto garbage bins and along fences with purpose, this raccoon has a strange gait — almost as if it is drunk and lost. It’s in the middle of the road. The moment fills me with a primordial alarm, an instinct that something isn’t right. I call 311 to inform animal services.
Later, I see the raccoon lying on its back on a nearby lawn, clawing the air slowly like a caricature of a person tripping out. A dog comes running out of the house, barking, and I realize its curiosity could create a problem so I try distraction, speaking sweetly while it barks in my face. The owner appears, calling it back.
“He’s harmless,” she says, by way of an apology. I point at the raccoon with exaggerated calm. The dog has picked up the creature’s scent, and she swoops in with a leash. We stand on the sidewalk watching this sick being succumb.
Eventually I learn about distemper, an airborne viral disease that spreads between domestic and wild animals. A news article describes sustained outbreaks in the local raccoon population due to a mild winter, and the fact that the animals live in large, close groups. Once sickened with distemper, raccoons will wander aimlessly away from home. “Think of the cold within your family,” a Toronto Animal Services worker is quoted as saying. It turns out that everyone gets infected.
“Dog owners in Liberty Village are sounding the alarm about what they call an unprecedented number of coyote attacks in their downtown Toronto neighbourhood,” a local news site reports. “At least five dogs have been killed, and on Thursday night, the community will hold a memorial to honour the pets that have been lost. The city says it is taking steps to address the problem, but dog owners say it doesn't get how serious the issue is.”
Well before the dogs that materialized on the streets during the plague, arriving from out-of-town breeders and on planes from Mexico and Jordan and Barbados, the coyotes were here.
The city writhes with the contradictions of human rapacity.
They are hungry, displaced by the demolition of their remaining urban wilds, hardy and resilient, moving from one ravine to another. A coyote looked me straight in the eyes and I obsessed over its stare for months, while trying to fall asleep in new bedrooms, and maintain some sense of coherence. A different kind of life terraformed in those few seconds between us — time turned feral, well-suited to these so-called times, already-suited to their adaptative nature. We are both tenants, stained by risk and separated from the land.
The city writhes with the contradictions of human rapacity. Dogs as property and euthanized coyotes, coerced panics, isolation within the grid system, omnipotent developers wringing metres of sky out of solipsism.
Home is a hallucination. Still, seeking stability, I project companionship into the space between myself and wilder creatures, eliding the fleeting intimacy offered by the shadows. I forget that animals are not impatient for the stories of our world.
