Learning to hate is both easy and hard. It is easy in that once felt, hatred takes close to no effort to maintain. It persists through all kinds of weather. Learning to hate is hard in that you need to get hurt to begin. And then it hurts to keep hating. And then when you’re finally tired of hating, when you finally want to stop, the stopping hurts too.

I’ll tell you about how I learned. I learned when the door closed behind me, and I saw red on the front walkway. Big nested arcs, like a rainbow, but a rainbow with just one color. A single red color that was white where wetness flashed and rust-purple where the sun parched it dry. I learned again when blades of red-tipped grass pricked my eyes and continued to prick when my eyelids dropped. I learned when I leaned in closer, and a shiny bruise-colored stone was something other than a stone. And when a green strap was no longer a collar because it was broken and had no neck to fasten around. And when the only thing summoned by my whistle was my whistle’s echo.

That’s where the learning started. But like any good student, I built up the foundation. I learned about cause and effect. The red rainbow and the not-stone and the echo were effects, which drew out my hurt like a fish flopping on a line. I learned that where hate comes from, and then where it festers and feasts, is the cause.

They walk alone, or in twos, sometimes in threes, haunches rippling with lithe muscle, their fur the same dun as drought-dry lawns. Their plumed tails catch your eye by the corner; you might think you’ve seen a dog let off its leash. An engine rev or a rubber footfall can quicken their pace, but not always. Sometimes when you drive by, they go on unfazed. Mostly you don’t bother them enough to make them scatter—not really. If they scamper from the beam of your headlights, they only crouch in the shadows. They’ll reemerge as soon as you’ve dipped around the bend in the road.

They do that: reemerge. Even—especially—when you squeeze your eyes shut so hard that it should be impossible for anything to materialize out of such blistering darkness.

Before I learned to hate, I had a cat named Louis. He was a too-big storm cloud-gray thing. White fur crept up his legs like socks and swept from his belly to the point between his eyes. A divot in his nose made him Jewish like my family and me. I knew he loved me because he would pad into the nest of my legs and curl into sleep for long, soft hours; his purrs vibrated like something from the earth’s core. It was wonderful that he loved me, because when my parents swapped a fifty-dollar bill for a box with a kitten, all the love I’d believed I could harbor came swirling out. I poured it over my cat with strokes and kisses.

Louis’s life was full of learning. He could go up but not always down. We retrieved him once from the soaring redwood tree and twice from the slippery slant of our roof. After that, when he’d poke up at higher ground, we’d go ch! and clap at him like thunder cracks to remind him what altitude felt like. He would dart away. Anxiety sliced me when one day he crossed the street, and from the doorstep I watched cars whiz in front of him. Another time, pink cuts striped his face when he emerged from the hedge. I couldn’t see what shadowy things slinked behind the leaves, and my heart thumped. But he was exploring; he would learn that it was dangerous out there.

You can only protect him so much, my dad would reason at my knotted face. You can’t teach him with words.

Watch me, I said, and smirked when Louis trotted up at the sound of his name.

After the day that I stopped having a cat named Louis, I would pierce the inside of my lip with my teeth when I stepped outside. I would balance my sight above a tripwire; there was a stain on the pavement. Straight ahead, the dust-purple mountains walled off the lower part of the sky and walled in the huddle of houses whose flat lawns opened into the road. Slipping through the mountains’ folds were furred haunches and paws that treaded soundlessly. Ears that twitched at a twig or a sniff. Hot strings of saliva, stretched between needle-sharp teeth. I could not look at the mountains.

People say trite things like cats have nine lives; I learned not to say coyote. I learned that hate works best when it’s sheltered behind your closed lips, simmering in your throat and shielded from placations. 

I learned that when other people said coyote, it was an incantation. It wrapped around my heart and squeezed it into a rock.

Back when Louis was around to nudge his nose under my palm, I held an unequivocal respect for living things, and that meant I understood that some things killed, and that others just died, and that was that. Life was beautiful; life was simple. Things were alive until they weren’t. Rats drowned in the pool, and roadkill, though I gagged at it, happened, and people’s grandparents passed. Neighborhood pets stared out from papers taped to lamp posts. Their owners must not have trained their pets like we trained Louis, I reflected.

I understood enough about predators. They consumed small lives to sustain their own, bigger ones. Hawks made lazy smiles in the sky—a flick of movement below and they would jackknife down. Predation was rich. When coyotes streaked down dark sidewalks, I tingled at the whisper of the wind in their wake, the buzz of untamed life. And Louis, lively and precious, gnashed mice into pulp, deposited dismembered paws on doormats, flung lolling birds into the air to watch them fly by his command. He was a predator; he took lives. I loved my little predator.

But then I no longer understood a thing about predators.

After the day I stopped having a cat named Louis, the word I couldn’t say began to glow from two points in the dark all the time. It really did. Its wails would peal through my window. Clean sliding notes that pitched over into screeches. I wanted to snuff out the sound. I wanted to know where it came from and snuff it right out. 

Out there in eucalyptus copses, they were pinning furred things onto cool dirt and tearing up strips of wet meat. They were huffing and swinging their heads left and right. Little ones bumped each other away from glistening morsels and then wobbled back into the fray. Their mother macerated more meat and let it fall from her tongue. She pushed her snout between her young: Take your turn, she said. 

When Louis inched out from beneath the bed the evening our home became his home, he entrusted us with certain essential things. His sustenance. His territory. His health, his play, his safety. He had not known wildness before, crouched in the cold and gray of the shelter, but the house on Lynnhaven Lane brought him to the wild’s frontier.

So it was proof of his faith in his new wardens that he stayed with them—with us. We let him outside to roam our backyard, whose fence’s gaps let him into our front yard, and neighbors’ yards, and yards and roads and mountains beyond, should he please. And he tested exploration—that was how he found himself 40 feet above our upturned heads and stuffed into a pillowcase by a fireman. He tasted adventure and risk. Sometimes, he’d be gone for a full day, and I’d think the brisk air and terrain rich with prey and play had won him over.

But we provided, and that was enough. The bowl of food, refilled always to excess, anchored him to us and our radius. We supplied him with the ingredients for dependency, and they were sweet and constant. With Louis, we had a contract. 

We violated our end of the contract. My parents seemed unshaken by this breach. Or unsurprised, at least. Contractors had ripped them off before; they’d lost money and time and sustained cortisol spikes. But I wasn’t jaded by the system yet. I had a pure, crystal view of it. It was like this: we had promised him safety, then we’d stripped him of his defenses when we fattened him and buckled a jangling, clanging necklace around his throat. So people would find him if he got lost, we said. How ironic. He never got lost except for when the collar ratted him out, and then he was lost forever.

I heard some stories in high school about little white dogs with crusty eyes whose yips faded into the distance. Carried off by coyotes—that was the speculation. I didn’t feel much sympathy. What do you expect? Your pet was bred to be docile. Stick it at the crook of the San Gabriel Mountains, and you’ve made a sacrificial lamb of a toy poodle. I had not applied the same logic to Louis, but he was domesticated all the same. I, his protectress, had cultivated his reliance with a tender, unrelenting hand, and then proffered him to the mountains’ silent lurkers. 

So I learned that I was the predator, by proxy.

The fog around the incantation began to dissipate—around what it invoked. Coyote had done as coyotes do.

And Louis had done as cats do, when they get the chance. He gamboled in the grass. He batted flies and chirped at squirrels on the telephone line and ran circles under flitting finches. He melted into a puddle under the sun. He lapped water from the pool and rubbed himself hard against the lemon tree’s trunk; the scratches were good and rough. He sprang from behind the cover of the lilac bush at rabbits that sprinted away.

It’s just that the wilderness, even within the square footage of the house on Lynnhaven Lane, never only belonged to Louis. No matter how badly I wanted or needed that to be true.

Coyotes and people are not all that different. We both like community, but we’ll make do on our own. We both nuzzle our heads into others’ necks to show affection. Humans proliferated across North America with speed and resilience, unflappable in the face of steep mountain ranges and disease. Coyotes did the same. We both have preferred climes, but are willing to acclimate to less desirable landscapes if, for one reason or another, that’s where we end up. We both get hit by cars. We both relish summer berries.

One day, I forgot to make my eyes unseeing when I stepped out the door. I saw the stretch of pavement, and there was only the faintest shadow of a stain. The sun was a gold medallion in the sky. A squirrel darted up into a flutter of jacaranda blooms. I thought about how Louis, if he were there, would have swished his tail and followed the squirrel’s path through the branches with perfect focus.

Eventually, I wanted to forgive. I wanted to say coyote. They were my neighbors, after all.