January 27

January Wolf Moon

This night feels like one in which wolves may come silently across the fields, pausing only to gaze skyward and cry out. We have no wolves here, but coyotes visit us from time to time, and their strident calls in the dead of night are as familiar and similar to those of their lupine cousins.

We particularly hear the coyotes in the early fall, when the nights are just starting to cool enough, yet our windows may still be open to let in the evening fresh air. On these nights, the sounds of the waning crickets and evening flying squirrels are the usual chorus, which is a pleasant background for falling asleep. This makes it all the more jolting to be interrupted by the eerie barks and pitched calls of the coyote packs, ranging somewhere in the fields across the road.

Tonight is a night suited for wolf calls, like some beast made living in a Jack London story, sitting on the knoll in the Cournoyer field and howling upward to the clear moon.