source http://www.missourigameandfish.com
A band of coyotes paused in their night of hunting on a far-off ridge to yip and howl; perhaps they’d been successful. A cold shiver ran up my spine, and a primordial sense of the wild — that old relationship between hunter and hunted — raised my hackles, summoning a stab of unalloyed fear. In the long history of humankind, we, too, have been the quarry of hungry animals.
Woven as it is into the fabric of our biological and cultural ancestry, the fear of being preyed upon is still very much present in humans. Too, the unbridled desire for the hunt, a basic, predatory instinct, still clings to our chromosomes.
I stopped to listen to the continued serenade of the coyote pack. More than an hour had passed since I’d left the parking lot on Bell Mountain, and a couple of miles of rugged Ozark terrain had passed under my boot soles since I’d left civilization behind me.
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