Autumn, Beartooth Front Country. The sky and landscape are buckskin and blue. I am driving my Ford pickup down the roads that encircle the ranch I am living on, caretaking, though little work other than keeping a fire going and feeding the owner’s horses is required of me. I am an hour from the nearest town of mention. From almost anywhere on the ranch, I see no neighbors. I am out driving just to be out, to be looking across the vast distances that have always filled me. This is a land devoid of structures. Of obvious human intervention. Here, I can imagine. I can dream without intrusion of even a fence line. And those dreams are never lonesome things. They are filled with stories. Memory. The call of meadowlark. The huff of a doe muley. The song of coyotes. All my insides find home here and resonate back to me in the enormity of a southern Montana prairie.

I come up over a small rise, and, in the distance, I see something jump. Once, then again. An awkward jump. Almost sideways. Almost a pounce. At first, I think I am seeing a rabbit. Perhaps a fox. But the color is wrong. The size. I press down the brake and reach for my binoculars, bring them to my eyes. As I turn the thumbwheel, a brown coyote comes into focus. It throws its head back as if tugging. Pulling against some force that holds it in place, yet I cannot see what. I lift my foot from the brake and roll forward.

I don’t know when I realize the coyote’s left ankle is caught between two horseshoe-shaped jaws of a dull silver trap. I walk from the truck to the coyote. Each step in the reddish-brown soil raises puffs of dirt around my feet. As I grow near, I see how fragile the coyote is, thin; how like my dog Katie’s are its amber eyes. Then I see the blood in the soil. The swelling and rawness of an ankle chewed. The coyote had dug at the trap with its free paw. Its mouth a mud of blood and froth. As I draw closer, the coyote begins to growl, to bear its front teeth.

I walk a circle around the animal. I look for ways to spring the trap, but traps such as these are not something with which I am familiar. My breath and words stick when I talk to the coyote. Only platitudes escape. I look toward the passenger window of my blue truck. From inside, my dog Katie is looking out at me, her eyes begging the question: What are you going to do? One dog in my truck who needs my protection and one at my feet who inherently knows I am not to be trusted.