Trickster Country: The Coyote in Native Story and American History

Four toes, a pad, a small pointed heel, and between them an X of empty space where the fur touched the mud and the skin did not. Ten thousand years ago a coyote of about twenty-five pounds left a print like that beside a meltwater pond in what is now the San Pedro Valley of southern Arizona. Its descendants leave the same print today in the arroyo behind the elementary school in Benson.

In between, the mammoths went, and the camels, the dire wolves, the short-faced bears and the first horses. The coyote stayed, because it never specialized: small enough to hide, willing to eat almost anything, content with any patch of shade and a place to dig a den. The chapters trace it through bones in ancient middens and the stories of the nations who named it first, where Coyote is Old Man Coyote, trickster and culture hero; through the arrival of the horse and the rifle; and into the long war of bounties, traps and strychnine waged on behalf of the sheep economy.

The war failed. As the frontier closed, coyotes spread east and north until they were living at the edges of cities, and the science of the later chapters explains why killing them has so often produced more of them. Then Old Man Coyote takes the last look back, from a ridge above it all.