Bill Caraher |

There’s something about coyotes and the American imagination. I’ve not seen a coyote in the wild, but I’ve seen signs of coyotes (or maybe signs of foxes… it’s hard for a nonspecialist to tell. I’ve decided that what I see must be from coyotes). I’ve heard coyotes. I know about the kinds of coyotes who take advantage of desperate migrants. I also know about the more benign coyote that played a role in the 1980s TV show Hardcastle and McCormick:

Of course, most of us know the hapless Wile E. Coyote:

One of my favorite passages in literature is Twain’s description of the coyote from Roughing It (1872) where he describes how a coyote taunts a dog:

“But if you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy it ever so much—especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of himself, and has been brought up to think he knows something about speed. The coyote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his, and every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder that will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and worldly ambition, and make him lay his head still lower to the ground, and stretch his neck further to the front, and pant more fiercely, and stick his tail out straighter behind, and move his furious legs with a yet wilder frenzy, and leave a broader and broader, and higher and higher and denser cloud of desert sand smoking behind, and marking his long wake across the level plain! And all this time the dog is only a short twenty feet behind the coyote, and to save the soul of him he cannot understand why it is that he cannot get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get aggravated, and it makes him madder and madder to see how gently “the coyote glides along and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he grows still more and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by an entire stranger, and what an ignoble swindle that long, calm, soft-footed trot is; and next he notices that he is getting fagged, and that the coyote actually has to slacken speed a little to keep from running away from him—and then that town dog is mad in earnest, and he begins to strain and weep and swear, and paw the sand higher than ever, and reach for the coyote with concentrated and desperate energy. This “spurt” finds him six feet behind the gliding enemy, and two miles from his friends And then, in the instant that a wild new hope is lighting up his face, the coyote turns and smiles blandly upon him once more, and with a something about it which seems to say: “Well, I shall have to tear myself away from you, bub—business is business, and it will not do for me to be fooling along this way all day”—and forthwith there is a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of a long crack through the atmosphere, and behold that dog is solitary and alone in the midst of a vast solitude!”

This weekend, I was typesetting a book of poems by Clell Gannon. Gannon, in 1924, describes a coyote as a marker of the beginning of the west:

The Coyote

You will hear his voice complaining from the dim
 dew-haunted hill,
You will hear him in the evening when the plains
  are gray and still,
You will hear him in the badlands when the weird
  shadows fall,
And the moon lifts in the ether, and the night
  winds softly call.
You will hear him from the bunchgrass when
  the sun is crawling low,
And the banjo in the ranch-house signs a-lee-a-lo-
  a-oe.
You will hear him from the desert if you listen
  hard and long,
Or along the voiceless canyon just before the
  noise of dawn.

You may see him in the sage-brush if your eyes
  are sharp and keen,
You may chase him from his hiding in the brushy-
  low ravine.
You may watch him from your cover when the
  wind is in the grass,
And the sun is hanging lowly up above the moun-
  tain pass.
You may see him on the mesa, (and you’ll like
  the bracing air),
Or along the dim arroyo, you are sure to find
  him there.
You will see him on the prairie, in the valley,
  on the crest,
And most anywhere you venture in the vistas
  of the West.

You can see him in the springtime when the
  prairie flowers bloom,
And along the grassy coulee almost any after-
  noon.
You can see him in the summer when the plains
  are scorched and dry,
Out among the thirsty cacti on some reach
  of alkali.
You can see him in the autumn when the Indian
  summer comes,
You will find his wary footprint where the dried-
  up river runs.
You will hear his voice resounding from the mes-
  quite o’er the hill
And a-fading into silence, when the winter night
  is still.

He’s a brother of the mesa, he’s a comrade of
  the wind,
He’s a lover of the twilight when the light of
  day is dimmed.
He has chummed up with the open, he has trailed
  the ranges through.
By the glimmer of your campfire he has tried to
  speak to you.
In the reach of endless spaces when you feel the
  wind go by
And you smell the tang of sagebrush and you
  hear his hunting cry
Then you won’t need signs to tell you in their
  meager whisperings
For the Western Voice will signal, “This is where
  the West begins.”

I also appreciate William Least Heat-Moon’s description of the coyote in his PrairyEarth: A Deep Map:

“Now, coyote: yipping, ululating, singing, freely, freely, night-flute coyote, long leggedness through blackness, (moonless), silent, pausing, yipping, far responding, quick legs, freely, padded feet, coyote feet, pausing, silent padding, pissing, running, swinging head, pausing, back-looking, (tallgrasses frozen, frosted), cold fur erected, coyote singing, sings-long-dog, coyote, coyote, golden-eyes-coyote, canine, climbing, singing, sweetness, song dog, breathing darkness, (hiding darkness), yip-yipping, nose-to-sky-coyote, singing, sweet-throat-beast, coyote jaw, coyote teeth, looking-always-coyote, running, singing the darkness, long-song-dog call, coyote, coyote belly, waiting, watching, wanting, coyote eyes, eye this, that, this scent, scenting, sending, sensing, pausing, pissing, breathing, smelling, sniffing, snooping, nosing, silent-feet-coyote, earth-feel-under-foot-coyote, nose to wind, canid, canid, coming something, belly, belly, belly, passing, pausing, halting, creeping, softly, soft, tricking, thumping, coyote heart, pushing, pumping, pulsing, coyote blood, beating-beating, pouncing! snapping! Rodent!—belly, belly—trots-along-coyote, and: (going night, going cover, going, sky rising), ridge-line-coyote, runs-far-song-dog, thin, thin, muscle-bone, (and this, coyote, this: now, they come):”

Finally, eight years ago or so, I discovered a small dog had stowed away in my baggage on my return home from Greece. This dog was a kind of urchin, but we just assumed that he was the product of local shepherd dogs after a night on the town. The more we got to know him, though, the more we realized that he was probably a good third coyote especially since he can both bark (after all they’re canid latrans), but also ululate, yip, growl, groan, and sing with the best of that breed.

Ironically, his name is Argos (in part because he was born in the Argolid, but more specifically because Homer, Odyssey, 17.290-327). Argie, as we call him, possesses an altogether for feral kind of nobility:

~

Bill Caraher is the editor of NDQ.