I was a kid when the Disney story of “Old Yeller” came out. You may remember that before Old Yeller died, he had an offspring. That offspring was named “Savage Sam” and there is a story about him that Disney also tells. We had our own “Savage Sam” and I will tell you about him.
One day Ted brought home a pup and asked Mom if we could keep it. I think to fool her and to get her to give her OK, he called it an “Australian Shepherd” or something like that. It didn’t have its eyes open yet and it didn’t look like any breed of dog we knew about. It turned out to be a coyote pup that we named “Savage Sam.”
Marion Despain had a ranch at Dry Lake. He had shot the mother coyote down on his range just as she was going into her burrow. Marion dug out the pups and took them to Heber and gave Ted one of them. Ted brought it home because he knew Vard wanted to have a wild animal for a pet in the worst way. Anyway, we took care of the pup. I can remember feeding it with a little baby bottle used for dolls. The pup could drink and drink and drink. One time I remember that I left it sucking on the bottle and had to go and do something else and when I got back, it had drunk the whole bottle. It was swelled up like a balloon. I wasn’t sure what to do so I just started squeezing it like you would a water balloon. It didn’t pop, but it didn’t go down very much either. It finally burped and that made me feel better. I learned it didn’t have good judgment about how much to eat at one time.
The coyote grew to be a good sized pup, probably twelve to fourteen inches tall. We treated it as if it were a dog. It followed us around about like a dog would. We didn’t have a dog at the time so it sort of became our “dog.”
We learned that if we howled like a coyote, it would join in and howl with us. Because it was small, its voice was high and shrill. We howled with it and laughed and laughed. We also discovered that if someone played a horn (trumpet or trombone) it would also cause it to howl. I suppose we provided quite a bit of entertainment for Heber with our howling and playing horns to the accompaniment of our coyote.
Everything was going pretty good until Sam got a little larger and people began to be afraid of him. He would go into our friends’ houses and go to sleep on their beds. We’d get a call to come and get our coyote off the bed. They were afraid to move him. About the same time Ted came home one day and told us to get rid of Sam. It seems the game warden had heard rumors that someone in town had a wild animal as a pet and that was against the law. He was trying to find out who it was.
Mom and Vard took Sam in the car and went up to the “Old Ranger Station” up Black Canyon and turned him loose. That evening after work we went back up there and called Sam and he came running to us. There wasn’t any water around there so we took him out of town toward Snowflake and turned him loose where there was a “trick tank” that had water in it all the time. We figured he could manage on his own.
I don’t know whatever happened to Sam. Whenever we saw a coyote in the wild after that, we always thought it must be “Savage Sam” but we never knew for sure. Vard got to have a “wild animal” for a pet. We didn’t have to go to jail for breaking the law. The whole town of Heber got free entertainment. Our friends’ parents got scared to death. Sam got to experience what it was like to be a pet and we learned to love him. I guess it turned out OK in the end for everyone. When you hear a coyote singing in the evening, just remember “Savage Sam” and realize that his earliest singing lessons were given by us boys in Heber.