Coyote: Seeking the Hunter in Our Midst [Hardcover]

Catherine Reid (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2004

One of the most dramatic wildlife stories of our times -- the ever-increasing presence of a wholly new species, literally part wolf, in every suburb, city, and backyard east of the Mississippi

Catherine Reid left her hometown in western Massachusetts in the 1970s, when people were just beginning to talk about a new creature sliding from the southwest into New England via Ontario, a canid bigger than a coyote, not quite large enough to be a wolf. Back home after decades away and settling into an old farmhouse with her female partner, Reid writes, "A mixture of fear and fascination compel me to take up the hunt. I want to see a coyote, I want to know its story, I want to unravel the way it intersects my own." Her search for this outlaw species leads her to rich and remarkably controversial fieldwork; to a session with a coyote litter in captivity; and, eventually, to spine-tingling sightings in the wild.
Reid alerts us to the extraordinary story of evolution in action unfolding under our very noses, the story of an animal that is a "mix of wolf and coyote, old and new, necessary and fierce and wily." As Reid's beautifully grounded writing shows, the eastern coyote in its hundred-year migration from the western plains to New England has picked up wolf DNA and a little-understood combination of coyote and wolf behaviors. The eastern coyote typically weighs considerably more than its western cousin, many well over fifty pounds. The size of the eastern coyote and its ability to take such prey as deer, as well as domestic dogs and cats, have left some ecologists to wonder whether we'll call this animal living among us "coyote" or "wolf" in another twenty years.
Coyote rekindles our age-old fascination with coyote as trickster, coyote (as Mark Twain put it) as "living, breathing allegory of Want." And it suggests, through a wealth of astonishing evidence, that we will all need to forge a brand-new relationship to this large, until recently unknown, and uncannily intelligent hunter in our midst.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In popular eco-consciousness, the coyote is sometimes seen as the new roadrunner—nature's consummate survivor, impudently sidestepping every ponderous, overtechnologized scheme humanity concocts to exterminate it while expanding its range into exurbs the continent over. In this engaging, if sometimes slightly overwrought, homage, poet and naturalist Reid is beguiled by the indomitable coyotes howling around her Massachusetts farmstead. She pores over their droppings, bones up on their biology, falls into Darwinian reveries over their interbreeding with wolves and gleans sociocultural insights and life lessons from them. In their existence on the margins, she sees parallels with her experience as a lesbian. Their predations prompt musings on the human capacity for violence; their openness to change and the blurring of species boundaries offers an unsettling paradigm of postmodern adaptability; while the example of their perseverance helps the author cope with her lover's hip-replacement surgery. The animals occasionally whimper under the weight of metaphor and anthropomorphizing, as when Reid imagines the first coyote-wolf coupling as a tender, unlikely romance. But Reid also offers enlightening passages about coyote communication, transformations in her local landscape and the concept of interspecies "mutualism," while making a heartfelt, often poetic case for coexistence between humans and the wild, however red in tooth and claw.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Coyotes were originally western inhabitants, smaller "prairie wolves" not found in the eastern stronghold of the larger grey wolf. But starting early in the twentieth century, coyotes began to be sighted in the eastern part of North America--and these were big coyotes, substantially larger than their southwestern progenitors. What were they? Wolf/coyote crosses, or coyote/dog crosses? Reid moved back to her homeland of Massachusetts and became fascinated with these eastern coyotes, and she went in search of both their story and of the animals themselves. In a narrative that intertwines her own return to the forests of the east with the coyote's integration into the same landscape, the author weaves the changes wrought by the arrival of the coyote with the changes she undergoes internally and causes externally. Written in a lyrical style that reveals her background in poetry, and concluding with a large bibliography, this is a captivating read and worthy of joining the pantheon of literary ecological writing. Nancy Bent
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First edition. edition (October 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618329641
• ISBN-13: 978-0618329649
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #713,487 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A gem, January 9, 2007

By 

Ojrb (Colorado, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Coyote: Seeking the Hunter in Our Midst (Hardcover)

Written with a style that reminds one of silk, this book blends emotion with obsession and was plain riveting. I share the author's fascination for that animal, (along with foxes, owls, and just about any wildlife), so I am biased. Yet Reid's beautiful prose transcends her subject, adds a unique depth to the world she describes, and plunges the reader into her world painted with a keen photographic eye, a world that is closer to a coyote's than any city dweller's or the world of someone not familiar with wildlife.

From a technical point of view, I found the book quite informative on its subject, namely the "new" coyote of the East. There are few general books on the animal, with most written by or for hunters. While readers looking for an encyclopedic study of the animal may feel the book falls short, they should revisit the extensive bibliography the author provides, quotes from, and aptly introduces within her story. And be reminded that no matter what, the coyote remains one of the most secretive and elusive animals ever, with very little known about it.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Singer of Scat, February 8, 2005

By 

Geoffrey Brock (Fayetteville AR USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Coyote: Seeking the Hunter in Our Midst (Hardcover)

Reid is a brilliant naturalist, and her detailed descriptions and analyses of the natural world (which includes us, as it turns out) are always illuminating, often beautiful, and sometimes quite funny. In this book, you will learn more than you knew there was to know about the fascinating eastern coyote--its expanding territory, its secretive habits, its adaptability, and its murky relationship to the western coyote and to wolves. Reid's scholarship is impressive; her extensive personal experience as a naturalist and her intimate first-hand knowledge of the environment she writes about is extraordinary--as is the prose itself. (I've never found passages about animal scat so riveting.) This is a book to place alongside your Barry Lopez and your Rebecca Solnit, on the same shelf with Abbey and Thoreau.

The book, as the title makes clear, is about coyotes. It is also about the way coyotes are understood by humans in general and by Reid herself in particular, and about the ways in which coyotes confound our efforts to understand them. As a result, Reid's own story (about returning to the area of western Massachusetts where she grew up and finding it now inhabited by coyotes) becomes a valuable and compelling part of the book. It is, however, a small part--perhaps 10%. The other reviewers here who have suggested otherwise illustrate in an amusing way, it seems to me, one of Reid's observations about the relationship of vision to fear: the more scared we are of something, Reid notes, the bigger and more dangerous it looks to us. This is how a two-foot water snake often becomes, in the eye of the beholder, a four-foot "moccasin," how a bobcat becomes a panther, how a coyote becomes a big, bad wolf. (How else explain how some readers can describe the autobiographical element of this book--which is, objectively speaking, only a single strand of it--as the "central theme"?)

Reid gives just enough of her own story (if anything, there ought to be more of it, not less) to give the reader a sense of the way her life intersects, both literally and imaginatively, with what's often called "the natural world." We cannot, as this book makes clear, separate that world from the human world--at least not if we are observant, or have a guide as good as Reid.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, December 13, 2005

By 

Michael Pearce (Los Angeles, California.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Coyote: Seeking the Hunter in Our Midst (Hardcover)

Catherine Reid has done a sterling job writing a book that weaves a narrative of the rise of a new species in the American East with her personal account of resettling amongst her family with her partner. Reid is deceptively subtle in her treatment of human and animal inhabitants of her narrative, bringing her descriptions of outdoor life in the snow-covered landscape to life with delightfully vivid details. I remain haunted by her remarkable account of a party of trackers following the trail of a group of Eastern Coyotes, only to find their own tracks in the snow because the coyotes have lead them in a circle in the woods and the trackers are now themselves being tracked by their quarry.

I suspect that the harsh words written in earlier reviews have more to do with homophobia than with their writers' appreciation of this book. It is tempting to draw conclusions about Reid's fear of isolation due to her sexuality as the source of her fascination with the wolf-coyotes she describes, but to do so over-simplifies her exploration of her childhood landscape. While she is frank about her partnership with a woman, I did not find that she particularly over-emphasized this aspect of her life, and I enjoyed the contrast offered by the dual narratives. I'm more satisfied with Reid's eponymous "hunter in our midst" representing both the coyote in her back yard and her awareness of ageing.