I took a cautious step towards him. I didn’t know whether I should look him in the eyes or not. I didn’t want him to think I was menacing him, so I fixed my gaze somewhere just below his, like Kyle had done to me when I entered Howard and Jo’s living room for the first time. I crouched down and slowly stretched out my hand. It was trembling. What was it to touch something so wild? Had I ever touched a truly wild animal before? No, I didn’t think I had, which struck me as remarkable, in four decades. Maybe once, when I held an injured sparrow as it died, after smacking into our patio door. But an injured wildness, a compromised wildness, didn’t count. I looked up and met the coyote’s eyes again. Only four or five metres separated us. He held my gaze, unblinking. He lowered and extended his head ever so slightly towards me, as if bowing, flattening his ears as he did. Did this signal a greeting, or a pending attack? With knees bent, I made to take another step forward, but he startled and darted off into a nearby yard. I stayed crouched in the street, heart beating, until a car beeped its horn behind me.

The other wildness I attempted to reach out and touch during that time was Ashley. I gradually got closer, day by day. A text message returned here. A thirty-second conversation in the kitchen there. I started calling her Boo Radley, for her spectral presence in the house, or sometimes the more hip-hop-inflected My Boo, or even Boo-urns, a reference from The Simpsons that cracked a smile on her face. There was still a strict moratorium on my attending her games, not that I could bear being seen by former colleagues and students and their parents anyway. The unspoken reason why I would never again be invited was that she blamed me for her fall from grace. She had been one of the strongest on her team at the start of the season, but by May her coach more or less had her benched.