THE COYOTES were there to kill me. That’s what I believed at 12 years old, as I waited in the dark in a wooden treestand, alone and armed only with a sluggish compound bow that I couldn’t shoot all that well. I had no flashlight, no phone, no radio—nothing to depend on other than my dad’s word that he would come back to get me after legal light, once he’d climbed down from his own stand.
But legal light had been over for a while, and the maniacal howls and yips of coyotes were all around me. They’d emerged