Yesterday evening our Bishops Mills neighbour Lou Jerolli stopped his truck out front. Marigold, who was down in the lab, barked so insistently that I got up from supper and rushed down to see what was the matter. There was Lou, outside the front door. When I unlocked and opened, he invited me out to see the “present” he’d brought. There was a fresh road-killed Coyote in the back of his truck, and I thought, “Oh, no – I have no time to do anything with it!” Lou was sure I’d do a nice painting of it, as he was the proud owner of a print of my watercolour Fisher portrait. I explained that we were rushing to prepare for a meeting in Roebuck about Limerick Forest Advisory Committee, so he asked where he could leave it. I gave in, and said the back porch. I went back up to finish eating supper while Fred was down attending to the printing-out of documents to take. I didn’t think about the Coyote again until we left for the meeting. There was the Coyote, stretched out on the full length of the old washtub stand on the back porch, its eye still gleaming, and its ears and legs still supple – the body still warm. I ran back up for my camera – couldn’t find it. Came back down. It was in the car. I turned it on, surprised that it still worked fine entirely below freezing!
Took a few photos of the head, with details of the eye, in the porch light, and by flash, and then we left for the meeting, the Coyote still on the porch. This morning when Matt came to work, he asked where the “Coyote-sicle” came from… We were careful all day to keep Marigold from making contact with it, and in the late afternoon I went down to sketch it in pencil on a journal page, standing hunched over to look down upon its head. The ear was stiff, and the eye a tiny bit sunken, and in the pupil that had been clear and black last night, a hazy blue moon. But I sketched the eye as I’d remembered it.
Eastern Ontario Coyotes are large, possibly crossed with Canis lycaon, the “old North American” Algonquin Park Wolf, which is much closer to Coyotes than the Eurasian Timber Wolf Canis lupus of the north and west. This one measures 129 cm. from nose to tail tip, and weighs 17.7 kg. Fred and I both noticed how the nose turns up. We will put it in a freezer now – I may yet paint that portrait. In any case, we will eventually have the skeleton. Lou said it was killed in Ottawa, on Albion Road, 1 km south of the racetrack. There has recently been a furor about urban Coyotes in Greely, not far from where this one was killed. Ours looks in far better shape than the one in the article’s photo – no wonder it was eating people’s pets!
I took photos of all this, so I really should post the followup. On 4 January we had more snow, drifted again from the back of the main roof to the garage roof, obscuring my studio light again…. but even if we pushed a hole in the drift from the window again, the weather forecast worried us.
The weather was warming, and by 5 January, we were sure the morrow would bring rain, and temperatures over 10C – that’s ten degrees above freezing! I imagined all that snow on the garage roof filling with rain like a gigantic, soppy, heavy, sponge. Even if the garage roof did not cave under that weight, I didn’t like the thought of all that waterlogged snow freezing into a giant block of ice, and stay that way until it one day slips off onto the hood of the car. I was really feeling gloomy about this when Judy came to work on the 5th. When I explained my foreboding to her, she offered to go out the window and shovel off the roof, with the enthusiasm of a rock climber with cabin fever! So she and Fred tied a rope around her waist, with the other end wrapped around the handle of a dipnet braced inside the window, and out she went -
our garage roof hero!
On 18 December 2007 I found my “north light” almost entirely blocked by a wall of snow. All night long it had snowed, drifting off the main roof onto the garage roof just below the north-facing Gallery windows. The Gallery was in gloom, as if curtains were drawn. Before I resumed my Sparrow watercolours, which I’d set up on the glass counter just under the best north light window in the building, I had to remove some snow.
After poking at it with a sponge mop until about half the window’s view was cleared, I noticed that the remaining snow bank reflected more light into my “studio” than I was getting from the heavily overcast sky, so I left it like that and resumed painting.
Purple Finch compared with House Finch, for the online bird identification quiz on The Green Bird Network Note the study skins on the left of the tray – borrowed from the research collection of the Canadian Museum of Nature. I prefer to paint from a fresh bird, but such cannot be found on demand, so I am referring to study skins and photos on the web, and drawing from my experience of having birds in the hand to paint, both dead and alive. Comic relief: Fred realises that after shutting his computer down for the night and letting the dog out for her pre-bedtime tour of duty, that he’d forgotten to record this evening’s Mudpuppy observations. He says “What’s freedom from worry for, anyway, if not to work yourself down to a state of total exhaustion!”
