The Bough-Breaker’s Howl

In the summer of 1999, my husband and I inherited a parcel of land from my grandfather, a jagged swath of forest and field at the edge of the Berkshires. It wasn’t the whole farm, just the wild part he’d kept for hunting, and we loved it with a fierce, possessive love. We spent every warm month in our rusted camper, a bright orange speck against the endless green, and every fall we hauled it back to our house in town, leaving the land to its true owners. I always felt them watching us from the treeline—the moose with their ancient, patient eyes, the black bears that left overturned logs and torn bark like signatures, the deer that vanished at the first crack of a twig. But it was the coyotes—and their strange cousins—that owned the night.

By the late 2000s, the woods had grown thick with them. We’d see their tracks everywhere: the neat, compact coyote prints, and the larger, clumsier ones of the coydogs, those hybrids that came from strays breeding with wild stock. The coydogs were a mongrel lot, some with floppy ears, some with curled tails, their colors ranging from gray to mottled brown. Their barks were nothing like the clean yelp of a pure coyote; they were harsh, broken, almost like choked laughter. At dusk, they’d start their chorus, a wave of yips and howls that swelled from the hollows and echoed off the hills. My husband Tom said they were just reclaiming their territory, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were singing a warning.

One evening in early August, when the light lingered bitter and green, we decided to take a walk to the top of the property. The view from that ridge was our pride: a clear line to the peaks of Vermont and Massachusetts, the kind of panorama that made you feel like a tiny speck in a vast, ancient world. Tom had been working all day, clearing brush from the old logging trail, and I’d been reading in the camper. We set out after supper, the mosquitoes buzzing in our ears, the ground soft from a week of rain. About halfway up, we came across a tree that had been torn apart. Not struck by lightning or felled by wind—this was deliberate. The bark was shredded in long, parallel strips, and the wood beneath was gouged with deep, claw-like marks. Tom ran his fingers along the furrows. ‘Bear,’ he said, but his voice was uncertain. I pointed to the ground. There were tracks, but they weren’t right. Instead of the familiar paw prints, there were these—almost like handprints, with a broad palm and narrow fingers, pressed deep into the mud, with a dragging line behind them.

We continued, uneasy but too stubborn to turn back. The ridge was beautiful as ever, the distant mountains hazed with purple, the valleys swallowed in shadow. We stood there, holding hands, until the last glow faded. Then we heard it—not a howl, but a sound like the cracking of immense boughs, a slow, rhythmic breaking that seemed to come from the slope below. It was followed by a long, guttural moan, something that wasn’t quite animal, and not quite human. Tom grabbed my arm. ‘We need to go,’ he said, and we stumbled back down the trail, branches whipping our faces, the sound of breaking wood growing closer. By the time we reached the camper, our throats were raw from gasping, and the noise had stopped.

That night, we tried to sleep, but the silence was worse. The usual coyote chorus never came. Instead, at around 3 a.m., we were roused by a scratching on the camper’s metal skin. It was meticulous, like a rake being dragged deliberately across the surface. Then, a series of knocks, three in quick succession, followed by a pause, and then a different rhythm—four slow thuds. I looked out the small window, but all I saw was the black of the forest. Tom switched on the external floodlight. The beam swept across the clearing, and for a second, we saw it: a tall, gaunt shape standing at the treeline, its head slightly tilted, its eyes reflecting light like amber glass. It was hairless, with long, spindly limbs, and it seemed to be holding something—a branch, maybe, or a bone. Then the light flickered, and it was gone.

We didn’t sleep for the rest of the week. We’d see its tracks near the camper each morning: those strange, hand-like prints with the dragging line. Tom eventually decided we had to leave early. ‘It’s not worth it,’ he said, but I knew he was scared. We packed the camper on a Thursday, the sky a dull, overcast gray. As we drove down the gravel road, we both saw it in the rearview mirror—the shape emerging from the trees, standing at the edge of the property, watching us leave. It made no sound, but I could have sworn I saw its mouth move, forming a word.

We returned only once more, the following spring, determined to reclaim our land. The camper was still there, but the clearing looked wrong. The grass was flattened in a large circle, and in the center, a pile of bones—moose, deer, and smaller animals—stacked in a deliberate pyramid. In the topmost bone, a coyote skull, was wedged a piece of paper, yellowed and torn. It had writing, but it wasn’t English. The characters were sharp, angular, and looked freshly carved into the paper. Tom took it to a professor at the college, who said it resembled an old Native American dialect, but it was untranslatable, a language that no longer existed. The professor added, with a shiver, ‘But the symbols… they’re a warning. About what happens to those who leave a land too long, and then take it back without asking.’

We never went back to the land. We sold it to a conservation group, but I often think about the coydogs, the ones with the laughter in their barks. I think they were never coyotes at all. They were something older, something that had been waiting for us to leave so it could take the land for itself. And every night, in the distance, I hear its howl—a sound that is not quite a howl, but the breaking of branches, the cracking of bones, and a long, accusing moan that seems to say, ‘You were never meant to be here.’