When coyotes attack
Who’s afraid of the big bad coyote?
Not many of us.
But we should be.
For our sake and theirs.
It was getting late in the season when Taylor Mitchell decided to go for a hike in Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Highlands National Park last October 27. But the 19-year-old musician was determined to explore some classic East Coast wilderness. Two nights earlier, when she’d played a concert in Lucasville, near Halifax, she’d mentioned to the host how happy she was to have two days off to do some hiking.
Perhaps the songwriter in Mitchell thought a trip to the highlands would provide some musical inspiration. The Torontonian had released her debut album last spring, and, as she excitedly told the crowd in Lucasville, she had just been nominated as Canadian folk music’s Young Performer of the Year.
Mitchell chose the Skyline Trail, a 9.2-kilometre route that starts at the Cabot Trail and leads to a dramatic viewpoint over the Gulf of St. Lawrence before returning to the road. She was hiking alone, and—it being a Tuesday—there were few other people on the trail.
That night Mitchell would be heading to Sydney, where she had a concert scheduled for the next day, but she was apparently not in any rush. On her way back to her car, she was overtaken on the trail by a pair of middle-aged hikers from the United States.
Not long afterwards, shortly past 3 p.m., the Americans were about 800 metres from the trailhead when two coyotes trotted down the path toward them. To the surprise of the two Americans, the coyotes didn’t shy away but walked boldy past them as the hikers stepped to the side of the three-metre-wide trail. The hikers snapped a few pictures of the animals as they passed before resuming their hike.
A few minutes later, the two Americans heard the first screams.
Aware that there was a phone at the trailhead, they hurried out to the end of the trail to call 911. On their way they passed an incoming group of four hikers, from Europe and Australia, who ran in to investigate.
When the four hikers were almost a kilometre in, they passed some keys and a small knife on the trail. A little farther along, almost 20 minutes after the screams had started, they came to a clearing where a toilet building stood. There they found Taylor Mitchell on the ground, being attacked by two coyotes. (Apparently Mitchell had first attempted to defend herself with her keys and knife and had then retreated to this spot, hoping to get into the building.)
Shouting and hurling rocks, the four hikers scared the coyotes away from Mitchell, but the animals, probably sensing how close they had come to their objective, wouldn’t leave the scene. They were highly agitated, and the larger of the two—a 42-pound male—continued to circle the group, growling.
Mitchell was in bad shape, barely conscious, lying just a few feet away from the unlocked building where she had sought refuge. When RCMP constable Pierre Rompré drove into the clearing five minutes later, he thought she was already dead.
“Her wounds were very, very serious,” said Rompré.
It took a round of buckshot to convince the larger coyote to slink into the woods, and Mitchell was bundled into an ambulance and eventually airlifted to Halifax.
She died of blood loss early the next morning with her mother at her side.
For Mitchell’s family, friends and musical community, the challenge of understanding her death would be enormous, but they weren’t the only ones at a loss. As headline writers across the continent tried to marry some unfamiliar words—fatal, coyote, mauling—most people who spend time outdoors found it hard to believe that coyotes had actually killed a human.
There’s one group of individuals, though, who were less inclined toward total disbelief: wildlife biologists. Their expert opinions didn’t figure in many of the news stories that week—possibly because they weren’t inclined to try to sum up the issue of whether coyotes were dangerous to humans in daily-news-sized pieces. But if they’d had the chance, they would have explained that the tale of the coyote’s relationship to man is a tricky narrative, and it’s one that is still being written.
