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High and lonesome and steady, it's the smell of sheep down in the valley that has done it to them. Here all afternoon in the rain I've been listening to the sound of the coyotes up on Salt Creek.
The smell of the sheep grazing in the valley has done it to them. Their voices water and come down the canyon, past the summer homes. Their voices are a creek, running down the mountain, over the bones of sheep, living and dead.
O, THERE ARE COYOTES UP ON SALT CREEK so the sign on the trail says, and it also says, WATCH OUT FOR CYANIDE CAPSULES PUT ALONG THE CREEK TO KILL COYOTES. DON'T PICK THEM UP AND EAT THEM. NOT UNLESS YOU'RE A COYOTE. THEY'LL KILL YOU. LEAVE THEM ALONE.
Then the sign says this all over again in Spanish. ¡AH! HAY COYOTES EN SALT CREEK, TAMBIEN. CUIDADO CON LAS CAPSULAS DE CIANURO: MATAN. NO LAS COMA; A MENOS QUE SEA VD. UN COYOTR. MATAN. NO LAS TOQUE.
It does not say it in Russian.
I asked an old guy in a bar about those cyanide capsules up on Salt Creek and he told me that they were a kind of pistol. They put a pleasing coyote scent on the trigger (probably the smell of a coyote snatch) and then a coyote comes along and gives it a good sniff, a fast feel and BLAM! That's all, brother.
I went fishing up on Salt Creek and caught a nice little Dolly Varden trout, spotted and slender as a snake you'd expect to find in a jewelry store, but after a while I could think only of the gas chamber at San Quentin.
O Caryl Chessman and Alexander Robillard Vistas! as if they were names for tracts of three-bedroom houses with wall-to-wall carpets and plumbing that defies the imagination.
Then it came to me up there on Salt Creek, capital punishment being what it is, an act of state business with no song down the railroad track after the train has gone and no vibration on the rails, that they should take the head of a coyote killed by one of those God-damn cyanide things up on Salt Creek and hollow it out and dry it in the sun and then make it into a crown with the teeth running in a circle around the top of it and a nice green light coming off the teeth.
Then the witnesses and newspapermen and gas chamber flunkies would have to watch a king wearing a coyote crown die there in front of them, the gas rising in the chamber like a rain mist drifting down the mountain from Salt Creek. It has been raining here now for two days, and through the trees, the heart stops beating.
Richard Brautigan
Trout Fishing in America
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