I sit on my front steps on a late July morning, high in the hills of eastern Vermont. It is 80 degrees at 8:00 am on what will become the hottest day recorded so far on the planet. My knees poke through worn jeans, milky coffee bites my tongue, granite warms my bare feet. Cicadas buzz. Leaves rust from a month of heavy rains. Gray haze rolls in from wildfires 2,500 miles to the west. My neighbor, who traps coyotes on land where I walk with my dogs, calls to say I planted the bait. As if it’s flowers. As if I didn’t wake to screams from the coyote lured to step into the steel leg trap before dawn. As if I, a woman, do not know what it means to be baited and hunted, to be feral and feared.

I am grateful he called to warn me.

*

While weeding gardens, I fight the urge to check my phone. Again. In the wake of an attempted assassination, a president resigning, a genocidal leader addressing Congress, more deaths added to the nearly 40,000 in Gaza, 10 million people displaced in Sudan, deadly heat waves in Europe and China, and devastating floods in my own state, I want to know. Instead, I resist the sea of information, open a wooden gate, and enter the hardwood and hemlock forest on the land where I live. Maple leaves flutter, silvery green, in spangled light. Rainwater floods the path where lush ferns bow their silken fronds. In rubber boots, I sink to my ankles, sploshing and gurgling along. I am trying to learn to leave things alone, to love what is. To have no expectations of seasons and people. But I can’t get the coyote out of my mind. In a leg trap, it may take this intelligent animal with thick sable fur days to die, as she waits for the hunter to come by and shoot her. In the meantime, the coyote, wild with pain and fear, will likely try to chew off her leg to escape.

My neighbor scares me a little – his six-foot-tall bulk, the pistol in the leather holster at his waist, concealed sometimes, other times not, the tracks his thick-treaded work boots make in snow and mud, twice the size of my own. He keeps no livestock, does not use the coyotes’ pelts. But he does hunt deer. When I asked him why he kills coyotes, he told me they decimate the deer population, they are vicious, and he hates their high-pitched whines, cries, and yelps. The first two reasons are myths. But the coyote is a vocal trickster and is aptly called the song dog. Humans can be fooled by the cries of a few coyotes echoing off the hillsides that sound as if a crowd raves close by. Eerie, mournful, or joyous, I find their singing beautiful. Their wildness, adaptability, and deep knowledge of how to live on the land connects me to my own wild human nature. Their songs remind me to acknowledge the untamed creature that I am, inseparable from the earth.

Another truth? My neighbor will hop on his tractor, tie a winch to the back bumper of my little pick-up, and haul me out when I’m stuck in mud on our road in springtime. In his capacity as a volunteer fireman, he will be the first to arrive at my house if it is in flames. I brought him groceries when he was sick during the pandemic. He calls me neighbor. I call him the same.

And this: Coyotes are monogamous. Their pair bonds may last several years. In the woods, someone has lost a mate.

*

After the walk, I enter the garden, pick a half bushel of ground cherries that have never ripened this early, slip gold globes from papery sheaths, pop one in my mouth, and burst into sweet flesh with my teeth. I lie beneath the apple tree, search for blue in the fire-smoke sky, try to ask for nothing. And always, this desire: To place my whole body on the ground, to say here, yes, yours is the touch I want. A yearning soft not urgent. Open, not spent.

I feel so wild sometimes, so in love with sky, clouds, trees, grass, wind, stars, moon, that I walk into the woods and howl. I slip off my jeans and t-shirt and lie naked on the forest floor. I wrap my body around the thick steady trunk of the sentinel white pine and stay there for a long time. In these blissful moments, I understand who I am and where I belong. But I never fully release the tendril of fear in my belly that keeps one part of me alert for footsteps.

I ache for the trapped coyote, as I ache for myself and all women. Those who create federal and state laws fear my wild nature for the joy I find in expressing my sexuality and love. My ovaries, my uterus, my agency to decide if and when I will reproduce threatens people who have been taught for centuries to feel shame about sexual freedom in women, to fear our cries of joy and rage. A heavy-treaded law stalks my body with a gun. Those who point it at me wish to kill the curious, sable-furred animal in themselves.

*

I place myself on you, open my mouth, lick and taste your green, silken skin – how easy, you’re so delicious. Apples, soft-spotted, rotting, fall to the ground early, seduce honeybees who rarely survive winter. They alight all around me. Sticky, laden, insatiable, they fly off to trumpets of sky- blue morning glories, who unfasten for just a few hours in this heat. Even as the flowers’ tender edges begin to shrivel, their cups open to bees, to me, to you. They welcome the little time we get to bloom.

Will I protect my wildness – the untamed, unbroken parts of me? Will you defend yours? Can we see that this is the work that will bring us to our knees, closer and closer to the ground? That our feral natures can teach us to forgive ourselves, then to rise up? That all lives, human and non-human, depend on this right now?

Tonight I will walk into the forest and lie down in sweet, fertile duff, entangled with roots, insects and dirt. I will make a bed of clubmoss and creeping cedar, soft as cake. I will listen to the cicadas, who buzz and buzz and buzz. I will await the cries of coyotes who mark their territory, announce their kill, and call out in joy to their kin and to me.

In whatever Winter is coming, still, still, they sing.