Surviving a Coyote Ambush | Something Bit Me!
Ambushed on a desolate road at night, Andrew repels a coyote attack, but the coyote isn't alone. As soon as I hit the initial coyote on the head with the flashlight, that's when the other two, you know, saw the aggression from me and started to attack. It was overwhelming. I figured that hitting the first one would have been done, but it wasn't. All it did was make it worse.
Andrew is now under attack by three coyotes—a pack. This is a species that has evolved this kind of pattern, this behavioral pattern of increased hunting success when you're in a pack. If coyotes are in a pack, they have the ability to bring down quite large prey, including hooved animals like white-tailed deer and even humans. But overall, given the number of humans and given the number of coyotes, it's still a very rare phenomenon. Why would a group of coyotes attack a human is a bit of a mystery.
At that point, it was just mayhem in my mind. It's three, four o'clock in the morning, and the only thing I can really see is a general outline of the animal and just the shimmer of the light of the eyes. Humans, we are not as well equipped as coyotes are at night. They can see better; they have eye shine—this reflective, iridescent set of cells in the back of the retina that serve to capture light and then bounce that light back out, so that then the optic nerve ultimately is picking up on the light information. So they see a lot better.
All I could think about was I needed both hands. I couldn't do anything with the flashlight. Imagine having three or four people just in your face. So I dropped the flashlight and I just put my hands up. At first, I wasn't even actually trying to hurt them because I know that wildlife is territorial. I'm just trying to get away from where it started, and they're essentially just kicking up off of my waistline trying to get up and higher.
By far and away, the most vulnerable aspect of any vertebrate is the neck and the head. That's where the brain is; that's where the eyes are; that's where the very anatomy of respiration is taking place. So ultimately, in bringing down a prey species, they want to go for that region of the body. The only thing I really could do was keep myself from falling down and making sure that they didn't get behind me.
After a while, it really started to hurt. There were gashes on my arms; they were essentially just opening up the wounds. One tactic that coyotes used was just to get lots of little bites, and the prey starts bleeding out. Really, all I could process at that moment was to keep one foot in the dirt and one foot on the pavement. I didn't want to lose any kind of advantage that I had in this situation. But when the adrenaline started to wear off, I did start to get tired, and the pain started to set in. It was starting to get to the point where I felt like I had no control of the situation and that they were starting to get the upper hand.