Across the valley, a little way up the mountain, coyotes yelp. The room I’m in has the only bug screen in the house. Thousands of moths, mosquitoes and strange long-antennaed grey bugs slam into the mesh net which allows me to have a light on inside and still enjoy the freshness and sounds of the night. Humming, buzzing, droning, a booming sub-woofer, perforated only by the whine of mosquitoes and yipping coyotes. An owl was calling earlier, but now he’s quiet, listening perhaps to the mice run by before swooping down in the dark, sound as his only hunting guide in this black night. In the distance, the river’s constant white noise rushes on.
A shifting sequence of dog barks moves down Sand Creek, down to the Granby River and along the banks of the valley southward. The neighboring farms’ guard dogs track the coyotes’ hunt. I step outside my bedroom and lean to the sounds. A hundred meters away, a slight splashing interrupts the river’s gentle and predictable flow over the shallow rapids. Two little yelps indicate the pups are out with the pack tonight. A new pattern of dog barks, coming from the north, escorts another small pack joining the hunt. They merge at the bottom of the field, about a kilometer away. I only hear them but I imagine them circling around a great coyote, awaiting instructions. The howling grows as the moon crests over the mountain.
Baco, the lazy guard dog, crawls out from under the deck on the east wing of the house and stretches his massive black and white body. I can see him sniffing the air in the moonlight, looking towards the yelping sounds that grow quiet. His hackles rise slightly and he sits down.
There is complete, deafening silence now. The river’s babble is gone. The bugs’ droning is gone. Only the void of the yelping coyotes remains. The hunt is on. They run together, chasing a scent, chasing a life. They will circle a deer or a dog or a rabbit and they will kill and feast, without mercy. I shift my weight from one leg to the other. Deck planks creak slightly. Baco’s ears twitch at the sound but he keeps his ears on the coyotes. I decide to walk towards him across the grass so that we can share in the eerie hunt.
The dog hadn’t heard me approaching and charges, barking wildly. The house shades the moon and we can’t see — only hear — each other. “Baco! It’s me. It’s OK. It’s just me. Good dog!” I shout to disarm the attack. The fierce barking ends too close to my body and the dog rubs up against my legs, an apology, panting like a frightened pup. Adrenaline pumps through my body and I go back inside to the safety of my room and rub my bare feet on the shiny wood floor.
I could have been blind and understood the world around me just as well. Nature, through its vibrations, speaks to me with sound. We live through all our senses but most of us rely on one or two senses more than others. I treasure my hearing most.
Sound is only vibrations or molecules banging against each other. It is a wave or disturbance that travels through air, objects and water, transporting energy from place to place. It can be as dangerous as sonic booms, that can make large objects explode, and gentle enough to entrance us, pulsing through our bodies like the powerful yet soothing waves of the ocean.
Each sound produces a different dance in the tiny stereocilia of our inner ears. The hair-like stereocilia sway to the rumblings of drums, they bow and recoil to the blasts of rock music and they quiver to the sound of a violin. If the sound is too loud, the quiver intensifies until the tiny hair cells break. After that they will never dance again. Sound becomes the cause of deafness.
When I was 14, I went to an MC Hammer concert. It was the first time I went to a concert without my parents’ protective counsel (“stay far back, not too close to the loud-speakers, don’t talk to strangers…”), so naturally, my friend and I stood at the very front of the stage next to speakers the size of minivans. We danced and met boys and had to shout to hear each other. For an hour after the concert, we felt deaf and laughed about it. When the normal noises came back into our ears, they were accompanied by a vague ringing that lulled us to sleep. We didn’t know that we had broken a little piece of our hearing.
Hearing loss caused by acoustic trauma often occurs over several years and is painless so it isn’t usually noticed. The first sign can be a ringing noise in the ears. If a sound hurts one’s ears or causes slight deafness for hours after exposure (like a concert), the noise has damaged one’s hearing. There is no cure, no treatment, no medicine, no surgery that can repair hearing lost to noise. The only thing one can do is to protect what is left and use hearing aids, if necessary. Forever, sound lost. Adventures lost.
I have followed the coyotes through a hunt without ever seeing them. Once I saw a coyote up close. A scrawny little one stood in my way as I biked down a long driveway through the fields on my way to school. He looked at me slyly, ears twitching and turning toward me. I threw the apple I was eating at him. He yelped and ran away like an injured coward. I have never seen the beauty, agility and intuitive wit of a hunt, the synchronized movements of a pack gliding through the valleys. But I know it happens almost every night. I know because I have been there with them, traveling through the darkness, alive to the sounds of their passage.
