A couple of days ago, I was sitting in the house listening to our little dogs’ barking incessantly from the back yard. I wasn’t too surprised if I am honest about it, as our dogs bark at anything in the vicinity, including squirrels. I figured it was another deer in our yard that they could see and we couldn’t.

After this barking went on for a significant amount of time, I finally stepped outside to see if I could see what all the fuss was. What I saw was rather surreal. So much so, that I constantly question what I was looking at.

Instead of the traditional white-tailed deer, I looked into the woods and saw tails, not white, but gray, and fanning out behind them, as they romped back and forth. Gray and black blurs bounding quickly over trees and stumps. The minute my eyes fixated on one it would stop and another would begin, carrying my eyes from one to the others.

Too small for deer, but too big for dogs, I could only assume they were coyotes. We have occasionally seen, and by that I mean spotted two coyotes in the grand scheme of thirty years, and they were always loners just running through the yard.

This was not one coyote. It was in fact, anywhere from 4 – 6 dog-like animals. Not only were they not fearful of me, but they seemed to be toying with our dogs, trying to entice them as they shifted ever so slightly closer to our yard.

Thankfully, the dogs came in to the house without an issue, maybe sensing there was something not right about these creatures in the woods.

The playful prancing over stumps and logs, dodging trees, back and forth, was like watching a nature movie. Something I have never seen before, and probably never will again in person.

Since then I have thought about what I saw many times, enraptured with their wildness, their curiousity, and their intelligence – all made clear through their movements around me. Never quite giving me a full glimpse of them, and yet the dance they performed meant to keep me entertained, as I believe they crept closer to my dogs.

These large animals were beauty in motion. Their gray and back bodies rustling the wet leaves around them. Captured as I was by their movements, I caught my breath, were these wolves? Could they be?

I don’t know much about coyotes, or wolves, for that matter, but I think wolves are less likely to be in West Michigan than coyotes, but coyotes are also not pack animals.

A couple of my family members did a little research into it, and coyotes can travel in family ‘packs’ and I was told it is also breeding season for them. So I am more inclined to think they were coyotes.

My dad thinks they had to be dogs, but I’ve never seen that many dogs in a pack together, roaming and playing and making barely any noise as they so quickly run back and forth in the forest. No, I do not think they were dogs. Their size diminished our dogs greatly (not that are dogs are big – they aren’t), so it seems unlikely that they were dogs.

I have since let it dissolve into the part of my mind that can’t tell the difference between what is real and what isn’t real, as the moment was truly once in a lifetime for me. I am grateful to have witnessed natures beauty that evening as the sun was going down around us. I suspect, I will never see such a thing again.

Do you know much about coyotes and their behaviour? I am curious what you think I might have seen that evening a few nights ago.