Eerie Yelps

We finally saw the Sopranos finale last night, and I'll write more about it in another post, though I may need to see it again to successfully parse it all out. When it was over, Mrs. Agricola and I headed up to bed. As we did we heard one of the creepiest sounds either of us has ever heard. It sounded slightly human, but for a couple of yelps I thought it might be a turkey. After hearing the eerie, sharp noise a couple more times I knew that it was definitely mammalian.

I looked out the window and saw a small, pale yellow colored animal that looked like a neighbor dog -- but it was too late for that animal to be outside -- or a large cat (but not big enough to be a lynx or something like that and the noise, which was continuing was not feline at all). It was half in the shadows and half in the light of the arc-lamps so it was not entirely clear what I was looking at until it moved and started to walk like a dog.

My wife ran over to look too but the animal had moved into full shadows. We grabbed some binoculars and though the animal was in shadow I could distinctly see its pointy head, skinny waist and a long bushy tail -- it could have been a fox, but it's light color is what makes me think it was a coyote. It had stopped yelping, and was sitting at the end of a neighbor's driveway. Lights were coming on up and down the street because of the commotion but the coyote sat there very calmly before slinking off between two houses, returning to his home, no doubt, in the marshes along the Charles River.