There’s a wash that runs behind the clinic, dry most of the year, and most nights sometime between three and five you can hear the coyotes working their way along it, that specific yipping chorus that rises and then just stops all at once, like someone cut the sound. I used to find it unsettling, genuinely, my first year here I’d tense up every time it started, some leftover instinct from growing up somewhere the wildest thing outside at night was a raccoon in the trash. Now it’s become one of the small, dependable pieces of a shift, the thing I actually listen for on a break, and I’d notice its absence faster than I notice its presence at this point.

I’ve never actually seen them clearly, just shapes moving low along the wash edge if I catch it at the right angle under the security light, and I’ve made a kind of peace with never getting a better look, since the sound alone does the job it needs to do for me, marks the night as still moving forward, still normal, out there past whatever’s happening in the exam room. There’s a strange comfort in a piece of the world that’s completely indifferent to how the shift is actually going. The coyotes don’t care whether we lost one or saved one three hours ago. They’re just doing their own thing along the wash, same as every night, and some nights that indifference is exactly what I need to hear.

Javelinas move through the lot too, in loose little groups, mostly ignoring the cars and the building and us, and there’s a specific stretch of early morning, maybe twenty minutes wide, where you’ll catch both, the coyotes further off and a javelina family closer in, completely unbothered by each other, going about entirely separate business in the same fifty yards of desert. I’ve stood out there in scrubs more times than I could count, coffee gone cold, just watching that overlap happen, and it’s become something close to a ritual, even though I’d never have called it that before writing it down just now.

I don’t know exactly why this specific small thing has stuck with me the way it has, out of everything an overnight shift actually contains. Maybe it’s just that most of what happens inside the clinic asks something of me, attention, decisions, hands that need to be steady, and the wash outside asks nothing at all. It’s just there, doing what it does regardless of whether I’m watching, and some nights that’s the most restful five minutes I get.

I still don’t sleep great after a run of these shifts. But I’d miss the coyotes if we ever moved, more than I expected to admit out loud.