The following post is taken from Peter Bowen's blog. Peter Bowen is the author of the Yellowstone Kelly novels, historical westerns that take place in the Wild West, and the contemporary Montana Mysteries, which feature Gabriel Du Pre, a cattle investigator and part-time sheriff in small town Montana.
I just returned from a time on the East Coast, in Boston, and it has taken me a few days to recover from it. Boston is a fine city, thick with culture and loud with wonderful music, but it is also crowded and noisy and most of the streets are paved cowpaths one car wide, down which traffic speeds. It is tangled and hard to navigate for a hick like me and I grew frantic with time, and not much time at that. Life is very fast-paced now, and it still seems impossible to me that I can reach the information I want so easily with the computer and the Internet. Change accelerates daily, it seems. I don’t much like it. I never did. Every extended stay in a city has proved disastrous for me, and that is all that I have to say about that. It is a big world and billions of people seem to like living together in close and intimate proximity but I prefer places I might see a coyote.
They come through the property I live on, rather regularly, looking for that favorite coyote snack, a nice fat house cat. They eat small dogs as well, and drift back out to their dens. I like coyotes. They are rascals and thieves and engagingly clever. Long ago I saw one robbing a bumblebee nest. The coyote backed up to the nest, waving its tail which the bees attacked, and then the coyote turned slowly, and the bees went on attacking its tail, and the coyote gobbled up the larva and honey and then trotted away, leaving the poor bees utterly robbed. All attempts to exterminate them have failed. Coyotes den in New York’s Central Park. They like suburbs. They adapt very well and very quickly. All very well and good and I salute their strong character and cleverness, and so far as I go, they may eat Boston and everything in it. Me, I do not adapt very well. At all, not to put too fine a point on it. Folks these days make too much a virtue of adaptability, which seems to mean tolerating outrageous invasions of their privacy and lives.
Out here, in the little town I live in, things move more slowly. I won’t get run over by a bread truck. I can get up and go down with my dog to see what the neighbors, like the coyotes, were up to last night. They use the same paths every night and leave paw prints. But very quietly. I like the coyotes, who are excellent neighbors….
It is cool and rainy today, and about this time each year the curlews come, and glow rich caramel and yellow in the misting rain….
Learn more about this cowboy author and his ebooks here, and watch videos of the author in his hometown of Livingstone, Montana.