Pests by Bethany Brookshire

Author:Bethany Brookshire
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

Part IV

The Power of Pest

7

A Band of Coyotes

The door to the converted shed opens, and Niamh Quinn, last seen trying to put a collar on a rat, strides in, hauling a dripping trash bag. “It’s a wet one,” she says, trailing blood as she plunks the bag on the scale. After weighing, Quinn heaves it up onto the necropsy table and pulls it open, revealing the brown paws, rough coat, and battered face of a long-dead coyote (Canis latrans). The coyote, now known as 632, became roadkill on February 23, 2021, only a few blocks from the research station where it is now going to be cut open for science. It got picked up, bagged, and placed in a freezer, where it remained for nearly six months, until it was taken out to thaw in a wheelbarrow in the sun for about four days before my visit.

At first, the smell is faint, but as more of the coyote is revealed, the stench of death—sickly sweet, gag-inducing rot—quickly threatens to become overpowering. A student excuses herself. I keep having to remind myself to breathe through my mouth as Quinn cheerfully inspects the body.

Before she met the front end of a car, 632 had been a healthy adult female. Her fur is thick and luxuriant, her muscles strong. If I didn’t know better, I might think I was looking at someone’s well-loved dog, with alert ears and a fluffy tail. But she’s just slightly off from dogdom. The fur is slightly too thick, the face slightly too narrow. Something about her whispers “undomesticated.”

Quinn seizes a pair of clippers and begins to shave, taking fistfuls of fur and shoving it into various prelabeled bags. Another team of scientists is studying the hair, trying to see if they can detect rat poison the coyote may have ingested. Once the bags are loaded, Quinn picks up a scalpel and deftly slices off one ear for genetic analysis. Then, she grabs an old chunk of wood and places it beneath the coyote’s neck. I’m reminded suddenly of the chopping blocks used when tyrannical kings send their wives to meet the ax.

I was right. It is a chopping block. Quinn slices through the muscle to the spine and grabs a machete and a mallet. A few well-placed thwacks and the head is off. It fits neatly into another plastic bag.

Quinn moves down the body, and warns me and two students that she’s about to go in. We all take a respectful step back. As bodies decay, the digestion of microbes can build up gases inside an animal’s torso, leading to a potential explosion if the torso is pierced in the wrong place. Quinn moves carefully, and the result is a speedy deflation and no additional spatter. The smell gets even worse, with added notes of bile, and I remind myself forcefully that I have never thrown up in a necropsy. Yet.

Quinn removes the liver, which will also be checked for evidence that 632 dined on potentially poisoned rats.

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