A coyote ran down the centre of the street yesterday at noon. It loped quickly, streaking fawn brown gray past the three oblivious sets of fannies bent over flower beds across the street from me. There is a ravine on the curve of my crescent, a deep dark green wet and steep buffer to the trestle for the commuter trains blasting through to the eastern suburbs. That is where a pair of coyotes live, in a den burrowed into the hill under a deck jutting out into the high cover of tall trees. Small cats go missing around here all the time. The Neville coyote down by the beach has been known to hop a fence, and jump back just as quickly, mouth stuffed with a squealing miniature dog. Scat. What mourning pet owners go looking for in the ravines, when Percy or Tims doesn't come back the next morning or the next week. Poking pooh with sticks. Clive used to take hector, our big bad black cat, to the ravine where he could be a panther, slick shiny black and stealthy through the ferns. I stopped walking Edgar through the ravine when we came upon the body of a newly dead raccoon, not begun to fall back to rot with fluttering crawlies. Just asleep on a bed of fall leaves. I didn't want to see him disintegrate. This morning when we were walking back to the car, up a wide avenue running from the beach flanked with taupe arts&crafts verandas, a posse of three dogs raced up the street. A vaguely coyote-Akita mix chased two Australian sheep dogs in sweeping curves over lawns sidewalk and street all the way to queen street. Follow the mummies and daddies cooing their precocious charges back to their leashes.