Teagan arrived in Hailey, Idaho, quickly finding work in a café where elk meatloaf and venison stew was a local standard. She had read obscure news stories about a coyote killing derby in Blaine County, Idaho since first learning about it in high school. She wondered with all the mountains and rivers and beauty about, people found themselves with the urge to shoot so many of these animals. She’d seen hunters weighing dead coyotes on her walk home from school back in Kentucky, heard them exchanging tips on tanning the hides and the best way remove their ears. But before learning about Idaho, she had, somewhat naïvely, thought it a southern ritual—to kill what could not be eaten.

The weigh station, really just a bloodied scale sitting out front of a gas station, seemed the one place where class mattered less than in the rest of the world. Hunting was hunting. Everyone who did it saw a kindred spirit in the other, no matter if you drove a beat-up farm truck or a brand new model that cost half of what most people in their area paid for their homes. It was this hunting of coyotes that invoked in Teagan the desire to learn about them, and in so doing, hoped to make sense of why they were so hated enough to be killed without so much as a thought for the bullet that ended their lives. She learned that coyote pups fight each other before they play, it’s their way of establishing rank in the litter. Wolves, she would learn, do the opposite—play first, then, when grown a bit, establish rank. Teagan understood coyotes because they had to start life fighting and in this she felt a kind of kinship with the animal. When she saw their dead bodies, it stirred resentment in her chest, but still she wanted to understand why so many people thought them unfit to die.

In Kentucky, Teagan only entered the gas station when there were no men gathered out front at the weigh station, even when she had enough collected change to buy herself something sweet, she wouldn’t walk past the hunters to get into the gas station. Something about the men and the blood and the piled carcasses stole her appetite. So she’d save her change instead, giving it to her younger foster sister, Carson, who had grown up knowing how to wield a hunting knife and had found occasion to use it on an uncle come into her room after beers were gone and darkness had fallen. Carson was removed from her home at nine, and now, at fourteen, no longer slept with a knife under her pillow—it was forbidden and she had decided to respect the rule after discovering her third knife had been confiscated by her foster mother. So she left her fourth and final knife, each having been acquired through theft, inside a fallen and hollowed oak tree on the woods’ edge a few hundred yards from the house. She went nowhere without the knife, showed no fear, and was the kind of person that, if money was in her pocket alongside the knife, could walk by a group of men and their mess of animal blood if sweet treats were waiting on the other side of them. Teagan was a little jealous of the girl’s ability to get what she wanted no matter the inconvenience of acquiring it.

When Teagan first moved into her current foster home she had not wanted to show how she ached for tenderness and cooking that came from loving hands. She wouldn’t take any of the cookies her new foster mother made in welcome. They had smelled so good and her mouth watered to taste them, but she would not—instead ignoring the outstretched platter in her new mother’s hands and asked where she should put her bag. The mother, well versed in the ways of children with wounded hearts, took Teagan to her room where she could get comfortable. The girl sat on the twin bed, not surprised to see another just a few feet away. She had never had her own space, though she’d found ways to keep her life private all the same. Her new sister though, who watched Teagan reject the warm cookies, had grabbed a handful when no one was watching. Once her mother had left Teagan alone, Carson came into their shared bedroom and looked at her with an expressionless face. Finally, she pulled the cookies from behind her back and set two next to Teagan. Then she sat on her own bed and munched on the cookies she’d kept for herself, waiting for Teagan to do the same. Teagan reached for a cookie, bit into it more eagerly than she’d meant to. She chewed and
stared at her new sister, knowing she should say something, to extend some kind of acknowledgement of being “in it” together, but didn’t. Carson hadn’t expected Teagan to say much of anything and her silence came as no surprise, she herself having no real interest in making talk for the sake of it.

The world had a way of doing such things to children who came from the underbellies of dirt—trailers on lots with other trailers, the makeshift structures, musty smelling in a thick humid air of southern summers, bone chilling in the winter, wet in the spring. Teagan’s new foster sister, before she’d been a foster child, lived with an unwashed face and knotted hair, neither of which had
meant a thing to her until another child at school loudly let her know it should. The kindergarten teacher hushed the mouthy child as she took Carson to the nurse’s office and cleaned her face and hands, brushed her matted hair, and offered her a doughnut from the teachers’ lounge. But the girl, as hungry as she was, refused the food before her, her pride winning out over her body, and though she had failed to hide the dirt until this moment, now vowed no one would ever have reason to call her dirty again. From that day on when she couldn’t get to the wash room of her family’s overfull trailer, she took herself in the creek to tend her body. Though she had to allow for the cleaning that day at school, she would never let on that she was hungry. Imagining the teacher’s doughnut melting on her tongue was all the satisfaction she’d let herself have. It would take years to break this habit, if
indeed it was every completely broken. But it was this knowledge, this desire to protect one’s dignity despite the hunger that would have her do otherwise, that made her swipe the cookies for this new weird sister who, she knew without so much as a doubt, would not be around for long.

Teagan was glad not to be a small person, and though working in the Hailey café kept her on her feet longer than she was used to, it wasn’t difficult. It gave her the opportunity to learn how people in this small town interacted with one another—a friendly, shit-giving, interaction that stayed surface level. There were times, a few weeks in, where she almost found herself wanting to join in a joke, to be warm, to not mind if other heard her southern twang and direct way of speaking—to be seen if only a little. But she could not, still unsure if she really was finally on her own—though she was an adult now, illegal for anyone to try to lay claim to, she had a hard time getting used to it. No more state homes, social workers, foster parents—both the good and bad. She was on her own and it felt good, but like most good she’s known, Teagan feared it would be short lived. So she kept to herself, careful not to do anything that might fuck up all the right in her life. So she served plates of cheap food to people wearing Carhartt’s and camouflage. And when hunting season was upon Idaho, she quickly learned that the language of show hunters was the same there as it was in the south. As much as Teagan had hated the show hunters in Kentucky, she hated the ones in Idaho even more. These men and women who travelled across the state, and more than plenty driving from outside of the state, did not surprise her—their greed for blood so clear beneath their pretense for wanting to rid the farmers and urban areas of predators who went after livestock and pets. Teagan figured right when she thought most didn’t even have their own farms to worry after, and whatever pets they had the probably kept on chains, unloved and unfixed, cats going wild and making litters so often the mama never could finish growing up herself. She really did hate the Coyote Festival people, but they were also what brought her to Idaho, it was they who’d given her something to wonder about. And it was this new kind of violence that would, within a few months’ time, take her back on the road.

◆

A few weeks later on a cold Saturday morning in Idaho, Teagan made coffee in the darkness. The smell of it made her stomach turn, burning for food she so often forgot to eat. She made coffee to go, munched an apple on the road to calm her insides as she walked from her small rented room in a house full of unrented rooms, to the town square. Today she did not work, she had
asked for the day off so she could observe the festival, wondering what, if anything, she might do about it.

Her ninth grade biology teacher was from the west and was always talking about the it, about Idaho. He’d talked of his small town as a mountainous paradise, he even brought it up on the projector—Google Maps and town photos. They had been dissecting frogs that day and it didn’t make Teagan sad or anything—she knew science needed to be in the world. But mostly it felt wasteful—could they have done something good with the remains? Her teacher had been so excited to show the photos that he scrolled to quickly—that’s when the image of dozens up dozens of coyotes were laid in in the street, blood running down the curbside. Her desk mate gasped at the gore and her teacher quickly moved on, but Teagan asked him to explain.

“It’s not like the hunts we see here,” she said without thinking. It’s not a game hunt?

Before her teacher could answer the boy in front of her turned around—he wore a ballcap low, cowboy boots and blue jeans: “No they aren’t game but can be a nuisance to farmers and urban dwellers alike. Too many of them. Just like that frog there in front of you. It’s part of life. Besides, it’s sport hunting! What the fuck else are they gonna do in Idaho except hunt and do weird Mormon
shit?”

Teagan frowned at him and looked towards her teacher, who was more fixated on the boy’s foul language than answering her question. She decided to look it up later.

That was over three years ago but Teagan still remembered the photographs vividly. Now, in the dawn of a cold Idaho morning, she leaned against the brick wall of the courthouse and waited to see how the festival would unfold. She thought about that day back in high school, how it had drove her to learn about the west. She knew it showed that she was not born to it, and it would be clear to those who she would eventually be surrounded by in the male dominated fields where she’d land work—the Colorado boys, the Arizona boys, the Utah boys. It would show on her skin how, for her first eighteen years of life, she had felt the weight of humidity. The hills she knew—the woods of shrub oaks and flame flowers, moss on granite. She’d seen water drained for the winter, the mud thick and wet tossed in clumps or spraying a clay rain behind spinning truck tires of men who took six-packs and boredom to lake bottoms. In the spring, the dams holding back water up river would see their spillways opened and the water rush back to the drained lakes, covering up what the men had left behind—tracks and divots, cigarette butts, and emptied beer cans.

That time of the year when winter was slowly giving over to spring, Teagan would walk to the lake bottoms after school and sit hidden from view near a cut-bank. She was eager for the water to return beneath the old bridge used for what became the “old road” when the highway was built adjacent. Often she would see men in trucks mudding in the lake bottom. When one truck would get stuck, another would come along to try pulling it loose. It happened so often that Teagan came to recognize truck models over color, since inevitably they all became coated in mud, wipers smudging streaks across the glass. Once a minivan came down and pulled off next to the bridge and parked there. The woman at the driver’s seat honked— pressed the horn twice then crawled onto the back seat. Within minutes one of the mud-covered trucks came over, climbing the bank out of the river bottom to park next to the van. The driver got out of the truck, his head a buzz cut, arm muscles bulging against his flannel shirt though his swollen belly also protruded, and climbed in the van. Soon after the vehicle began to rock. Teagan took out her books then, tried to look busy, though she was sure she would go unnoticed. When the man emerged pants not all the way done up, unrolling the condom and tossing it to the ground, Teagan had not looked up. She already knew what she needed to about men, the part of them that took without asking. The way she knew to hide her flinch when her neighbor ran his hands through her hair, to leave his house calm with the stick of butter her foster mother had sent her over to borrow, was the same way she knew to make herself small sitting there on the bank, keep quiet in the hallways at school, her smiles few. She’d seen enough girls at school, the ones with growing bellies, to know that no good came of touch in this part of the world. It’s what made her dream of the west with its vast plateaus and thin air.

As Teagan leaned against the cold brick of the Hailey courthouse, one leg propped on wall behind her, her auburn hair untethered and moving with the morning breeze, she sipped her coffee gone lukewarm. High school and Kentucky river bottoms already felt like another life, a past she was ready to let go hazy, though it was only a few months behind her. She took the last sip of her coffee, not liking to waste, having counted every penny she made and spent. Coffee, like everything, cost. So she drank it rather than pour it on the ground, the smooth chill on her tongue and in her throat going rough and bitter—her last sip one of coffee grounds. She did spit that last sip out, rubbing her sleeve across her mouth, feeling for rebellious grounds sticking in the corner of her mouth. It was in this moment that the first shot rang out across the valley and into the town square. Then there was another, and another, and so many that eventually Teagan gave up counting. These shots initially had made her nervous—how could the hunters so easily find so many to kill. But then she reasoned with herself, they couldn’t all be good shots. Every pulled trigger could not equal a death. By the time the sun was high and the heat of it warmed her toes through her worn canvas sneakers, she’d convinced herself that the photos of the past coyote killing festivals had been overwrought, embellished for show—certain angles making things worse than they actually were.

She was wrong of course, as she learned, as a truck roared into the square, the driver and his hunting buddy hopping out of the cab and chucking dead coyotes to the ground. Then, only then, did they skin their skulls for ears, making a show, cheering each other and themselves along. Teagan was stiff, feeling her body tighten and clench to a cramp with each new carcass tossed on the ground. Blood was running in the street now, sticking to the gutters and making them shine a deep red in the sunlight. By lunch time the flames of a town bonfire in the middle of the tiny city park were far licking high into the sky. There were massive pots of chili, women in Carhartt’s dishing up food, young children keeping close to their mothers. Older sons keeping nearer their fathers, smiling when the friendly thwack of a fatherly hand found their backs. Here, their fathers would say, they were teaching their sons how to be men, ignoring the flinching of the sensitive boys who tried to avert their eyes as ears after ears were ripped from creatures that looked an awful lot like their pet dogs at home.

◆

Some parentless children have different dreams—dreams of finding family, of making a family of their own, of home, of finally finding an understanding of what had happened to them in their childhood that had made their parents leave them. Teagan didn’t have this longing, though she had once. But when she was twelve she knew what so many spend a life time trying to understand her parents had been incapable, worse than that, indifferent. She had snuck her file off her social worker’s desk and into her backpack when he’d turned his back to take a phone call. In the group home she’d poured over the details and learned she’d been left in her crib too long too often, her skin had been raw from lying in her own filth, her lips dry and cracked, and she’d stopped crying by the time child protective services took her away. She’d imagined something different for her life with those who brought her into the world, had figured maybe they were too young, had given her up because they themselves were children, hadn’t had anyone to look after them either. Maybe they had intended to make a good life so they could eagerly bring her back to them. But that day in the group home she’d learned they were old enough to know better, to do better, and they would have left her in that crib to die had it not been for the neighbor’s phoned in noise complaints about her parent’s fighting. She didn’t even try to understand, had no interest in learning anything more of her parents—it was as if some unknown force reached inside her chest and pulled out that place where an ache for her parents had been thriving. Something new was growing there now,
something that led her to long for a place so different from Kentucky, that she’d wake in the night
with her heart racing, her fingertips pulsing with readiness to leave.

It wasn’t that Teagan had actually believed there was no pain in the west, but she was hopeful that it might be a different kind, one that didn’t feel so weighted in the air, so thick and pressing on her chest. She didn’t walk for graduation, had made plans well before the date to leave.

Her foster mother of the last two years, a well enough intentioned woman, didn’t offer up any reasons for her to stay. She seemed almost wistful when Teagan produced the Grey Hound ticket she’d bought herself for Christmas, dated for the day after classes ended in June. The desert would be hot then and she warmed herself with the thought of it. By the time spring arrived, knowing she was leaving behind southern lands for good, had made Teagan, perhaps for the first time in years, take extra notice of the magnolia blossoms—how the white petals turned pink at their tips. The lilacs, too, stood out more now, their blooms so fragrant she plucked a small bunch of them and pressed them between her book on southwestern lands and the people it housed. It wasn’t a very good book, clunky lines and clichés, but the stories made her think it was possible for orphans to find a home amongst other orphans out in the wild.

The night after her senior year of high school was officially complete, Teagan’s foster mother produced a new pair of jeans smelling of the feed from the farm supply store they came from. Teagan loved the smell, held the pants to her nose while her foster mother produced three new long-sleeve cotton shirts, the kind the tobacco farmers wore in the fields to keep the sticky residue from their skin and protect them from the sun. Two shirts had buttons, but the prettiest one, blue and white, had pearl snaps that she touched gingerly. Her foster mother also packed a tote bag full of snacks—Teagan’s favorites, along with a pre-paid cellphone with her number programmed in it: “In case you ever find yourself in need,” her foster mother said. Teagan was unsure of what to do with the kindness of the exchange, a graduation and going away present all in one. Her foster mother had never been unkind or withholding of affection, but Teagan had never warmed to it, had endured brief hugs when she left for school with a tense body, fists clenching at her sides. She wanted to trust the love this woman was offering her and the three other children in the house, but she could not figure out, even after a year of calm and consistency, how to find it inside herself to trust it wouldn’t change at a drop of a hat. She never stopped sleeping in her clothes, never let the cool sheets comfort her body in summer, or the down blankets warm her directly in the winter. Her clothes were not impenetrable, she understood that, but she couldn’t let go the need of feeling them pressed against her body, expanding across her ribs with every breath.

◆

Teagan’s breath now was quickened, her heart racing at the sight of the coyote blood running in the gutters. The site of the animals hurt her more than she’d expected them to. She turned back for her room, walking quickly. This was not a place she could bear now. The blood in the gray slush on the dirty streets, the winter salt and coyote blood revealed to her that it Hanson 11 of 11 was one thing to see such things in photographs, but another to see it in person. She no longer cared to try and understand why this way of killing was deemed necessary by so many people. It was barbaric and she was glad to have kept her distance from the people of Hailey. She packed her few belongings into a duffle, pocketed all her tip money in her jeans, and walked to the bus station.