Daisies in the Canyon(72)

“Are you all right?” Abby yelled when she was in the house.

“A damned rotten old coyote,” Shiloh shouted.

“Where?” Bonnie had just set the bucket of milk on the cabinet and reached for the straining cloth.

“In my henhouse,” Shiloh hollered.

“Want me to kill it?” Abby asked.

“It’s my henhouse. I’ll take care of it.”

Abby didn’t know just how Shiloh intended to kill the coyote. Maybe she was going to asphyxiate him with nail polish remover. But her doubts in Shiloh’s ability to take care of matters disappeared completely when she came back through the kitchen holding a purple Ruger pistol.

“This I’ve got to see,” Abby mumbled.

“Me, too,” Bonnie said.

They followed Shiloh out of the house, across the yard, and through the gate. When he saw people, the coyote dropped a dead chicken and started pacing around the pen, trying to find his way back out. Feathers floated on the morning breeze and chickens huddled together in the corners. The rooster, minus most of his tail feathers, was on top of the henhouse, but he wasn’t crowing about anything that morning. He looked downright pitiful sitting up there with fear written all over his cocky little face.

“Rotten coyotes. Noah should have forgotten to take the miserable things on that big gopher-wood boat, if you ask me,” Shiloh fussed.

“Where’d you get that gun?” Abby asked.

“I bought it, along with a pump shotgun, a twenty-two rifle for hunting squirrel, and several others I left in my gun safe in Arkansas.”

“Ownin’ firepower doesn’t mean much if you can’t shoot straight,” Bonnie told her.

Shiloh muttered something, popped a hand on her hip, brought the gun up from hip level, and fired. The coyote dropped on the spot and the rooster let out a squawk that was louder than the blast.

“Mama doesn’t like it when I waste ammo,” Shiloh said. “Hold this for me.” She handed the gun to Abby.

“Sweet little gun,” Abby said.

“It caught my eye at a gun show. I wanted it so I bought it. It doesn’t have as much recoil as some of the other nine mils and I liked the color,” Shiloh threw over her shoulder on the way to the henhouse.

She picked up the coyote by the tail, dragged him outside the pen, and the three dogs circled the carcass, growling and biting at it as if they’d killed the critter. “Okay, ladies, that’s enough. The whole bunch of you shouldn’t be sleeping inside the house. If you’d been out here doing your job, you could have run him off and I wouldn’t have lost two of my best layin’ hens and the rest of my chickens wouldn’t be scared out of their minds. I bet we don’t get an egg for a week.”

“What are you going to do with him?” Bonnie asked.

“Take him to the back of the ranch and hang him on a fence as a warning to the rest of the coyotes,” Shiloh said. “When we go to feed this morning, I’ll toss him in the back of the truck.”

“That’s what we’d do with him in Kentucky.” Bonnie’s head bobbed up and down.

“If they had coyotes in Kuwait, we probably would have eaten it,” Abby said.

“Yuck!” Shiloh’s nose snarled. “I don’t mind squirrel, especially made with dumplings, or venison or elk, but I’m not eating coyote or possum.”

“Rabbit?” Bonnie asked as they started back toward the house.

The dogs wouldn’t leave the coyote alone, so Shiloh picked it up by the tail and dragged it along behind her. “Fried rabbit with sawmill gravy is almost as good as frog legs,” she answered.

Shiloh threw the carcass into the back of the work truck just as Rusty’s truck came to a stop outside the yard fence. He bailed out and yelled, “What is that and why are you putting it in the truck?”

“It’s a dead coyote. The dogs won’t leave it alone and we’re taking it out to the back of the property for the buzzards,” Shiloh said.

“It wreaked havoc in the henhouse,” Bonnie told him.

Rusty stopped and ran his fingers through his hair. “Abby kill it?”

“She did not! I did. It’s my chickens and my gun,” Shiloh told him.

Rusty’s eyes widened when he glanced over into the bed of the truck. “Right between the eyes.”

“With one shot,” Bonnie said proudly.

“Remind me not to ever mess with her chickens.” Rusty laughed.




Abby filled two buckets with hog pellets and started toward the pens when she noticed the hole in the fence and three of the biggest hogs rooting around outside their pen. This was a day for disaster for sure.

The hogs recognized the feed buckets and ambled toward her, grunting and squealing the whole way. She felt like the Pied Piper as she led them into the pen without a problem and watched them belly up to the feed trough like cowboys up to a bar.

“Thank God Bonnie programmed her number into my phone,” she said as she hit the button to call her.

“What?” Bonnie answered.

“Are you finished milking?”

“Yes, and I’m in the kitchen. It’s my day to make dinner.”

“I need help.” Abby told her about the pigs.

“Be right there. I swear this is the day for it,” Bonnie said.