[Jeff Higgins]

I actually have a lot of respect for the damn things, even though I endeavor to shoot every one I see. One day, however, I did break that long-standing policy...

I was out grouse hunting with my old Labrador Deceiver (Lab / Golden Retriever mix) Rocky, when the skies just opened up. My god was it ever raining... So we sought shelter under a fir tree with really low hanging branches, like all the way to the ground. It was nice and dry once we crawled in all the way to the trunk.

We had been sitting there about ten minutes, waiting out the rain, when a coyote apparently had exactly the same idea - it crawled in under the branches with us. It stopped when it saw us, I grabbed Rocky's collar, and there we all sat, staring at each other. It finally laid down, not five feet away from us. The poor thing was absolutely drenched. It was the weirdest thing - Rocky quit pulling on his collar and laid down. We had a temporary, universally understood "truce" between man and his dog and the coyote. We all hunkered under that tree for probably an hour together. Weird... it's like he knew that for that moment, in that place, he was in no danger. Never seen anything like it.