The Sound of Coyotes
I live in the city, but I’m quite an accomplished outdoorsman when I can get away. A few years ago, I loaded a bunch of camping gear onto my bicycle and spent the better part of the next seven months riding 5,300 miles around the US.
At night, I most often preferred to wild camp, simply finding somewhere to disappear into the woods. Usually, it was a spot where people were unlikely to find me and even less likely to care that I was there.
It ended up being one of my favorite parts of the whole trip; just finding some secluded spot in the woods to get some much-needed rest. But the forest, I quickly learned, is not a quiet place at night. There’s always some form of noise.
The chirping of thousands of crickets becomes a constant drone throughout the night, accompanied by many toads. There would always be at least a slight breeze through the trees or the babbling of a nearby creek.
It was always a highlight of my nights—though not particularly uncommon— to hear the distant yips and howls of coyotes, and I fondly look back on the one night where two owls, one on either end of my tent, called back and forth through much of the night.
After a month or so of this, I became quite accustomed to the nighttime sounds of the forest, and it became very comforting. So it was quite a shock to my system when one night in rural Montana, I realized I was struggling to sleep because of the exact opposite of what keeps most people up.
That night, it wasn’t the noise that was keeping me awake but rather the complete lack of any noise. It was dead silent, and that was an incredibly unnerving experience. I can only describe it as the loudest silence I’ve ever heard.
It almost felt as if the entire forest was hiding from an equally silent predator. Suddenly, the occasional snapping of a twig—a common sound that would normally get lost in the cacophony of the forest— sounded like a pistol going off.
I slept terribly that night, and morning could not come soon enough.
Story credit: Reddit / MasteringTheFlames