She refuses to say how many, if any, kills she has notched.
Neither will she say whether she still packs a gun as she did in those early days. She does note she stopped for a while after it began scaring people walking the canal.
And no, Linda Whitebread insists, she will not stop her all-night forays into the streets, fields and assorted byways of Centennial to track down, scare and, if need be, kill those who killed her beloved Sebastian.
Not even a visit from three Centennial police officers at her South Monroe Drive home, during which they threatened arrest and jail time if she fired a weapon in the city, has deterred her.
“I don’t want to go to jail,” said White bread, 50. “But I will if I have to.”
I first heard from her a little more than a month ago. She was beside herself, telling me I was her “last hope.”
It was the night of June 14. Sebastian, her 10-ish-year-old Turkish Angora cat had not come home.
A pair of coyotes had grabbed him, neighbors later reported. It was quite vicious.
Coyotes have been a much chronicled problem across the metro area for the past several years. I thought I had heard most of the stories.
Whitebread called everyone — police, assorted animal groups and wildlife officials — to learn what was being done to arrest the problem. Not much, was the answer, she said.
After four sleepless nights, she donned dark clothes, borrowed a pair of night-vision goggles, tucked her gun in her back pocket and went “hunting.”
“I stay out all night most nights and just about everyday,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to have the heartbreak I suffered.”
She sets out in the evening when she first hears the “yipping and yapping” of coyotes.
“I wait for people to leave the canal now. I’ve scared some, carrying the gun the way I did in my back pocket. It’s a large gun, and even though I’ve got a big butt, people could see it.”
She studies coyotes now, has learned to identify their feces, most of which she scoops up in plastic bags and sends to her sister to scan for microchips.
“That’s pathetic, I know,” she said. “But if I can find one microchip and it identifies someone’s lost pet . . .”
Most days, a new lost pet sign goes up, she said. So the hunt must continue.
She knows what people will think of her. The mere thought of it used to shame her.
And then about a week or so into it, she began running into other heartbroken pet owners doing the same thing.
“It made me feel — what is the word? — happy to know I wasn’t the only one out there,” she said.
Friends bring coffee and meals to her and her fellow hunters, a small group that has bonded, she said, over their mutual heartbreak.
Some are short-timers, she knows, who will quit when the guilt and pain eases.
She said she has no plans to quit any time soon. Her guilt over allowing Sebastian outside that night is too great. She cries as she tells me this.
So she won’t stop, she said, until she stops seeing new signs and hearing stories of still more pets being taken.
“Not until the sorrow stops,” she said.
“I love wildlife,” Whitebread said, weeping yet again. “But not when they are breaking hearts all over town.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
