The view of the New York City skyline from Westchester County ought to be enough to convince any wild animal that the city is a land quite foreign to its natural habitat, a place where food is hard to catch and a grassy sward is hard to come by.

This week, one coyote couldn’t quite quell his curiosity about those looming buildings and the pigeons that swept between them toward parks and breadcrumbs. No coyote makes his way haphazardly through miles of suburbs and industrial parks to the center of an island’s booming metropolis.

As he loped toward Central Park, he noticed pedestrians paid him little or no attention. They probably thought he was just another lost dog, looking for his owner.

He was first sighted near the Hallett Nature Sanctuary, prompting a group of policemen and parks employees who finally noticed he was no ordinary canine to name him “Hal.” For days, armed with tranquilizer guns and flak jackets, they combed the park, following up on leads and finding only the feather-strewn remnants of his meals. Pigeons and ducks living in New York are used to being in close proximity to other animals – so their ends were probably vicious and quick.

By yesterday, the search had reached fever pitch. News helicopters hovered over the park, beaming images of Hal’s every move to viewers around the country. Reporters and photographers comically joined the search, chasing after Hal along with the armed hunters.

In the early morning, just as they closed in and thought they had him cornered, Hal proved more resourceful than anyone expected and scaled a fence. He proceeded to dodge in between outcroppings of rock, past an ice-skating rink, by the Boathouse restaurant, under a bridge – surmounting every obstacle with an ease born of instinct.

At 10 a.m., Hal was finally trapped in an area near a Fire Department building’s air conditioners not far from Belvedere Castle. Officer Phillip Tropp, a member of NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit, fired the shot that took down the wily coyote, hitting him square in the rump. The ESU is New York’s equivalent to Los Angeles’s SWAT team – a highly-trained unit that is prepared to fight terrorists should the need arise. It was strange, then, that Hal, a curious coyote who walked down the wrong path, had proved to be one of the group’s more labor-intensive “perps.”

According to wire reports, the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, saluted Hal as “unusual,” “adventurous,” “a very curious kind of coyote” – but in New York, this kind of celebrity is fleeting, and poor Hal didn’t get the special treatment the city’s last wild coyote was given in 1999. Instead of getting an extended stay in the Queens Zoo, all expenses paid, he was bundled, unconscious, into a cage, and unceremoniously packed off to a wildlife rehabilitation center upstate, ending the city’s brief encounter with that strange and puzzling thing called “nature.”

At least for now.