It is relatively quiet here, traffic on the road drops off almost completely late at night, leaving the background hum of the odd, distant car, airplane and mechanicals either in our house or the neighboring vineyard’s cooler.  Quiet enough to be able to track a motorcycle, say, coming up or down the hill for an easy two miles.  Sound carries.

However, there is still plenty of noise at night.  Squirrels or mice in the walls, the shifting of the house, trees in the wind.  In the spring, frogs in the nearby ponds.  Nearer to dusk and dawn there will be birds, a turkey looking for a mate in the grey light of a warm morning, perhaps.  The middle of the night is reserved for the predators: the rare times the owls or coyotes call to each other.  While weird, the coyotes are hardly spooky.  They don’t instinctively unsettle one; I listen, of course, and wonder what they are doing, but nothing more.  

On the other hand, sometimes the predator is revealed through its success.  Something the other night took a very long time to kill what sounded like a rabbit.  It was interesting to observe the deep-seated response to such a distress call.  You have to pay attention to such a noise, ignoring it is entirely impossible.  Somehow, that sort of sound makes one immediately aware that right outside the window is a very large, very alive nocturnal world for which humans are astonishingly ill-equipped.  We harnessed fire for a reason.  We also domesticated animals partly as a way of extending our senses into that world.  Dogs come to mind first.  But actually, I have found that the most effective early warning system is a horse.  Useless for people, of course, but for weird night noises excellent.  Coyotes far away, rabbits being hunted outside the window, no reaction from him at all.  A bear in the yard, dogs or coyotes in the yard, a definite reaction.  Unlike a dog, which will react to the rabbit, a confident horse only reacts to things that might be real threats to it.  In other words, an untrained dog will falsely raise the alarm at times, an alarmed horse is always reason for concern.  Now, if I could just get him to react to strange human activity…