“Pennsylvania” may be literally “Penn’s Woods”, but a better choice would have been “Pennsmontana”, for a great deal of it, especially in the north, is an endless series of mountains running locally east/west (and regionally northeast/southwest), culminating in the rise we call the Allegheny plateau (note 1 below). The pioneers were faced with serious migratory barriers to wagons, and not until the ascension of the railroads was there any serious relief. (I live 30 miles from the famous “Horseshoe Curve” which allowed for the penetration of the western half of the state by railroad by creating a route up the Allegheny Front onto the plateau from the lowlands.)
You are never far from these endless mountains in this part of the state. Whenever possible the main arteries run roughly east-west along the valley floors, following rivers where they can, but the physiography is inescapable. Sportsmen are grateful — the valley floors host some of America’s finest fishing, and the wooded slopes (and adjacent farmers’ fields) support enthusiastic deer hunters.
Our settler’s cabin is just below the top of one of the hollows, about halfway up (900 feet) the ascent to the local top of the plateau. It is sheltered in the woods of the hollow (no mountain view upward, only below) with a clear feel of “nothing much higher at our back”, and pretty much every day I drive the 3 miles of road down to the valley floor and the outcrops of civilization, and the barriers of rivers and more ranges to our south (like the Blue Ridge). The view down the hollow from the settler’s cabin porch is what made me buy the place, not because it had dramatic vistas (too wooded for that), but because it had this strong sense of elevated geologic place in the landscape, and the woods fell away downward to the sky, with great views of stormy weather.
As a bonus, we get critters. We are on local intimate terms with wild turkey, grouse, woodcock, whitetail deer, black bear, groundhogs, redtailed hawks, barn owls, foxes, various snakes, and so forth. Once in a while, you hear about a mountain lion locally. There are elk, not far away. Birds stop by during the migrations.
And, in recent years, the coyotes have made a comeback. There’s just a little bit of rough land behind the cabin, and some years it hosts a pack. There are den spaces in that rising ground, plenty of deer, water, folks raising chickens, sheep, — what’s not to like, for a predator? The local farmers that despise them mostly farm on the flatlands below, and the hunters who enjoy the challenge are limited by sporting restrictions from having much impact. So, some years we get coyotes, and some years they’ve gone somewhere else. It’s been a couple of years since they’ve been around our place.
And last night… I drove home in the dark and parked next to the cabin. When I opened the door, a glorious and deafening outcry greeted me. They were close enough to pinpoint by the sound, not far upslope, hidden from view by the woods and the darkness, near the dens they use in that last bit of rising ground in the hollow, behind the cabin. And they were enthusiastically accompanied by my two outraged hunting dogs inside the cabin, threatening mayhem.
All your senses come alive at the sound. Coyotes don’t target people in general (though they may perhaps treat humans in California bent over their bike in parks like deer-sized targets), but they’re no joke and they come in a pack. (I’ve seen them in urban settings in California where a pack challenges raccoons, snarling their way through nighttime residential traffic.) My head shunted into “predator incoming” mode as I checked the distance between my car door and the cabin and the possibility of canine impediment delay as I wrestled with the cabin door and packages, before leaving the shelter of the vehicle. (This was overkill of course — they were just showing off and claiming territory — but the sound in the dark concentrates the mind on possibilities before wasting time sorting out probabilities.)
And then came the practical considerations. I still had to let the dogs out before bedtime, and they were howling for blood. We don’t have a wire-fenced area for that (big ground) and their underground-wire shock collars would never restrain them from crossing under these circumstances.
One big experienced hunting dog can take down one smaller coyote (with damage), but not a pack — they’d be lucky to survive. Regardless of what you see on TV with hunters “encouraging” predator coyotes to settle elsewhere, using a pack of hounds, that doesn’t work as a spur-of-the-moment solution. That’s how you lose your dogs, one at a time.
Coyotes are intelligent. I’ve watched them at work from my cabin windows, where one walks along the underground fence line out in the open and taunts one of my dogs, while the rest of the pack lingers out of sight just behind him, waiting for the dog to take the bait and chase it right into their teeth. They’ve sussed out the existence of the barrier they can’t experience for themselves by watching the behavior of the dog, and prepped an ambush. To see that much intelligence threatening one of yours sends chills up your spine.
So, as I walked each dog individually on a leash while wondering if any of the hidden-by-darkness predators would challenge my accompanying and armed presence, I used my heightened alert and adrenaline to analyze the fictional uses of the whole scene.
You don’t analyze unexpected existential threats when they occur — you react to them. (Yes, I know that professional training, etc., can mitigate that, but bear with me for the general case.) You can feel the adrenaline pumping. You can watch your brain spinning out various possibilities (“what if…, what if…”). You can feel the paralysis that may need to be overcome, or the impulse toward perhaps unwise action. The morally neutral threat of natural forces may be overlaid by bargaining (“let me survive and I won’t do X again”). All of this creates confusion instead of trained reaction. You may be the product of successful survivors, evolutionarily speaking, but that doesn’t mean that you as individual specimen are destined to survive. And your hindbrain knows that.
And what’s true for you is true for your characters. The skills we use to show our characters planning, with their try/fail maps, fall by the wayside, and their fundamental characters rise instead. Cocky, overconfident, calm and controlled, shocked and frozen, panicked, bargaining, sardonic, belligerent, determined — it reveals who they are.
Don Edwards – Coyotes
(Introduced to many of us by Werner Herzog’s excellent movie Grizzly Man.)
Note 1.
(The Appalachian Mountains (of which the Alleghenies are a part) are extremely ancient, formed in the collisions with (eventual) Africa, etc., that made the supercontinent of Rodinia. (This included, before the opening of the Iapetus Ocean (eventual Atlantic Ocean), the Caledonian Mountains in Scandinavia and the Scottish Highlands.)
Note 2. (Pictures)
Overview
Simple version-1.
Simple version-2.
Complicated-1.
Complicated-2.
Mad Genius Club 
30 responses to “Existential Threats”
Don’t forget, the Eastern coyote (which is we have in Pennsylvania) is a relatively recent addition to the local fauna. It was created in the 19th century, in Pennsylvania, by a hunt club that wanted something not quite as challenging to hunt as a wolf, so they bred Western coyotes with wolves and -POOF- that’s what we got! Also, in Pennsylvania, there’s no hunting season for coyotes. They’re legal to hunt all year round.
And, although I live in a deveoped area of Chester County, a mere 30 miles west of William Penn’s statue in Philadelphia, I regularly see coyotes in my neighborhood. I wish they would bother the deer more than they currently do, because a coyote may eat an outdoor pet (which I DON’T have) but deer eat any plant you have (and I like my gardens, both flower and vegetable)/
Say as you will about coyotes, I’d rather deal with them than half a dozen or so feral razorback hogs. Those things are Satan himself; I know people from rural areas who had the grisly duty of identifying what was left of various neighbors after the razorbacks got through with them.
Hogs can be fearsome. You can’t be too careful around them, cute as piglets may be.
That’s why the (re-)introduction of wild boar in the south is such a controversial action.
They didn’t have to re-introduce anything; Feral hogs have been eating people since just after pioneers brought them in.
Well, yes. but the existence of a sizable population of wild hogs didn’t really survive opportunistic hunting. But now they’re back, the population is unfamiliar with the danger, and the state is imposing limits.
Not in Texas, other than the general hunting laws.
I’ve heard the 19th c origin story before, but actually the whole eastern edge of the Appalachians has been sprouting coyote/dog/wolf hybrids for several decades. Melanism (black coloration) is claimed to originate with (domestic) canine bloodlines, and the size of the “eastern coyote”, significantly larger than the western version, is supposed to reflect lupine origins. The whole area is fraught with arguments and I can’t say it’s settled yet. (At least, I haven’t yet read a “definitive” article).
This sort of argument use to come up all the time in Connecticut and Virginia, where “authorities” would dispute sightings of coyotes in trail cameras as dogs. But I have witnessed Virginia foxhunts pick up coyote and hunt them, and I have the pictures to show it. The color incarnations there are reminiscent of German Shepherds. I suspect they are crossbred with dogs, but they are still coyotes.
They also supposedly have a population of black panthers that have been seen for decades if not centuries. But the Fish & Game people refuse to admit they exist, even as they threaten anyone who shoots one of the nonexistent black panthers with a very hefty fine and some jail time.
Maps!
Your place sounds wonderful, and I hope your dogs wise up and don’t try to do something that will get them eaten.
Talking about the Appalachians, they are indeed old mountains. I’ve read that they’re older than the dinosaurs, older than trees, older than the rings of Saturn.
You’d think that with all that there would be more stories about something from the depths of time being unearthed in an old Pennsylvania coal mine or found where it was washed out along the Susquehanna.
And the Susquehanna River is even older than the Appalachians.
There’s a reason Manley Wade Wellman set his Silver John books in the Appalachians.
One of Alma’s characters (in her Familiar stories) was told that the Silver John books/stories were based in fact.
That book of folklore/spells mentioned in the Silver John books, “The Long-Lost Friend”? I actually have a copy; it’s apparently real.
So do I.
But the idea was that the creatures that Silver John encountered in the Wellman stories were Real Critters.
It is. I have a history of it in one of my research books, um, [rummages through literal stacks] the compilation of hex lore and braucherai.
You can find copies still, here in hexerei country.
I’ve got a copy myself. My parents were both born around 1930 in Pennsylvania Dutch Country and they were both treated by and knew brauchers.
Though neither of them said as much I suspect that people preferred brauchers because unlike modern, up to date trained in eugenics medical professionals of the 20’s-40’s, the powwow doctor was a lot less likely to have your kid lobotomized and sterilized because he scored too low on an IQ test.
I’ve also seen and read copies of The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, AKA the knowledge Moses and Aaron supposedly received from Pharaoh’s magicians after defeating them in the duel of sorcery. In reality it’s just a standard 18th-19th century ritual magic grimoire, mostly full of ways to summon this or that demon to get rich, get even, or get a woman. Still I knew a lot of old Dutch who wouldn’t even look at it and called it the Devil’s Bible.
My husband grew up in Shenanoah PA (Schuylkyll County – Eastern Anthracite Region) and the immigrant communities were full of stories (his roots are Lithuanian). It was a tough bunch, and they even managed to run off the Molly MaGuires, hooligans, well-despised by all the other ethnic groups.
(Fun story…. there was a murder investigation pre WW2, and the coroner was placed on the stand to testify in court and asked “If you wanted to stab someone to death, where would you place him?” To which the coroner replied, “In Schuylkyll County”.)
And then there was the famous “witchcraft murder” Mrs. Mummy case, which was all the over the news. https://www.republicanherald.com/2024/06/01/in-the-day-of-trouble-details-grisly-end-to-the-witch-of-ringtown-valley/
I’ve got a book from the History Press about Witchcraft in Pennsylvania, which mentions the Mummy case. The main ‘Hex murder’ case I always heard about was the Rehmeyer murder. There were apparently also some murders which were passed off as ‘Hex killings by those stupid superstitious Dutch’ simply because they looked “weird” at first glance and tales of ‘Hex murders’ sold more newspapers.
I’ve also read about the Philadelphia Poison Ring case involving Italian-American immigrants being preyed on by crooks and poisoners from their own community, which for some reason is always forgotten even though far more people died.
And the local “plain folk” flatlanders still have bits of platt-deutsch local dialect/reference even if they all speak English. One still hears talk of people reputed to be healers who can “take off”, that is, remove curses and thus heal.
I would kill for more of the existing Silver John books — why doesn’t someone bring them back into print?
I have been able to buy several of them via Amazon. Look for his author page.
I also scored a complete set of Wellman short stories at a con charity auction.
I do check periodically…. We have a complete Manly Wade Wellman in print in storage (big bucks) somewhere in several hundred boxes, but it’s the Silver John stories I pine for. Your suggestion prompted me to check again, and actually turned up a reasonable kindle version, new since I last checked, so thanks for the reminder. (https://www.amazon.com/John-Balladeer-Manly-Wade-Wellman-ebook/dp/B0CL7LGB31/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=1-1-catcorr
I did like the ‘fearsome critters’ Wellman used, though I would like to see someone use the ones from local Pennsylvania folklore. Like the Broad Top Mountain snake (supposedly older than the Civil War and over 30 feet long), the various dragon legends, the thunderbirds, or weirdies like the Pottstown Screamer and the Conewago Phantom. Pennsylvania’s got quite a crop of monsters.
Johnny-come-latelies. Why, the Appalachians towered like the Himalayas do now when the first bones and shells were evolving.
Now the Adirondacks, they towered like that when the first multicellular life was evolving.
Years ago I had a friend with a small ranch in central Texas. He had an AR-15, which he said he had gotten for hunting. Puzzled, I asked what would you hunt with an AR-15.
Turned out the answer was coyotes. If you missed with the first shot, you had 14 more. He explained it wasn’t very sporting, but you didn’t hunt coyotes for sport. He would have hunted them with fragmentation grenades if that was legal.
Back when I was flying full time, I had a night pick-up at a small airport in eastern Colorado. It was me, the plane, and the night phone (for closing and filing flight plans). As I waited for the crew to return, coyotes began a chorus on the sandhills south of the airstrip. I stayed very close to the plane, enjoying the sound. As long as it stayed Out There, that was.
“They’ve sussed out the existence of the barrier they can’t experience for themselves by watching the behavior of the dog, and prepped an ambush. To see that much intelligence threatening one of yours sends chills up your spine.”
Wonder if going after them would count as “hunting over bait”? Because teaching them that ambushes get them shot would seem to be worth it.
As far as I know they’re classed as vermin. Or, y’know, “Varmints”
No season, no limit, no different from shooting ground squirrels in your pasture or rats in your barn.
But I’m west of the Mississippi, so that may change things.