by Dan Flores
In the eastern half of North America, where having coyotes—let alone “coywolves”—loping down city streets still appears to some like a scene from a sci-fi movie, life with a midsize predator was on a lot of minds with the death of Taylor Mitchell in 2009. That brought big-time media attention to coyotes, hybridization, and urban predators. For that matter, so have brand-new terms like “coywolf” and “canis soup,” the latter coined by Scientific American when it noted that across the past century, the last 75 to 140 generations of coyotes have thoroughly mixed with the East’s remnant wolves, plus a few dogs along the way.
One result is that the creation of what some are now calling the “eastern coyote” and others the “coywolf” bears an uncanny resemblance to the legendary melting-pot process that continues to birth Americans out of our multicultural immigrant population. In his famous book The Passing of the Great Race, Madison Grant lamented and feared the melting pot. Are we being hypocritical to find sentiments like Grant’s about multiculturalism to be old-fashioned and very distasteful now, while at the same time we fear the results of similar mixing among the wild canids around us?
Americans are not even merely a wild mélange of ethnicities. What we are witnessing with wild canids in the eastern United States looks very similar to what took place in Europe 40,000 years ago when two or three kinds of humans encountered one another and saw commonality rather than difference. Those of us from a European background, we’ve recently discovered, are hybrids of another, far more ancient sort. When our species, Homo sapiens, left Africa and finally made it through the Middle East and into Europe some 43,000 years ago, we found the country to the north already inhabited by two distinctive human species, Neanderthals and Denisovans. Especially in the first 5,000 years of initial encounters, it seems, we seduced one another a sufficient number of times that, for us out of European lines, 2 to 3 percent of our genetic heritage today comes from these now extinct hominin types.
Just as coyote genes are lending canid hybrids the ability to thrive amid human density, while their wolf genes are helping them live in forests, hunt deer, and (according to eastern coyote biologist Roland Kays) expand their range in the East five times faster than pure coyotes could have, we’ve preserved a hybrid genetic legacy ourselves. There is a good chance that the genes for light eyes and the mutations that produced fairer skin tones originated with ancient Neanderthal adaptations to life in cold, gray places. Those genes and others acquired from Neanderthals had a selective advantage in northern latitudes, where vitamin D from sunshine was in short supply, because they helped us survive without succumbing to diseases like rickets.
So hybridization is not so bad a thing, especially for species migrating to new places or dealing with rapidly evolving conditions like climate change. It speeds up adaptations dramatically, producing new creatures well fitted to their environments. Just as coyote-wolf hybrids are preserving the genetics of nearly vanished wolves, we have ourselves preserved 20 percent of the genome of the extinct Neanderthals, dispersed in small snippets throughout global humanity.
In modern Coyote America, coexistence with coyotes is an essential lesson, something we need to make second nature as quickly as we can. Coyotes have been in North America far longer than we, they are not going anywhere, and history demonstrates all too graphically that eradicating them is an impossibility. This is truly an instance in which any desire on our part to control nature is perfectly countered by a profound inability to do so. It’s a misunderstanding that is a short road to madness in the classic fashion of Moby-Dick. Because with coyotes, as with the great whale, resistance is futile.
I’ve lived in the urban-wildlands zone—in West Texas, Montana, and now New Mexico—for much of my adult life, surrounded by coyotes in each location. Living among them, I have never felt them a threat of any kind. They’ve functioned for me more as part of the occasional magic show of life, like whales breaching an ocean surface or the Galilean moons, glimpsed through a telescope, swinging around Jupiter over the course of a starry winter night. The coyote’s remarkable resilience doesn’t just put me in mind of us; it operates as shorthand for the greatest story ever told, the miracle of ongoing evolutionary adaptation to an endlessly changing world. Coyotes are the perfect expression of how life finds a way. They are also one of the iconic life-forms birthed in our part of the globe, an American original that makes us more American the more we know them. We and they are similar success stories in our shared moment on Earth. That’s how I, at least, see the coyotes around me. How they see me, I can’t know. But I do know this: when I make eye contact with a coyote, I can see the wheels turning inside her head. If I have a theory of mind, so does she.
It is the high summer of 2014 in the High Desert of the American Southwest, the area that spawned coyotes a half million or more years ago, and like tens of thousands of other Americans in our present age, I’m having a coyote experience. My two-year-old malamute, Kodi, and I have set out on this summer morning on a ramble into the canyon below our house in the urban-wildlands countryside where we live, seventeen miles outside Santa Fe. Half a mile from the back patio, on our way to a spot where the streambed long ago sliced a narrow defile through a soaring lava-flow dike, the quiet July morning has suddenly turned tumultuous.
It begins with excited, alarmed yelps and barks, then unmistakable coyote howls from very close by and from both sides of the canyon. To our right, perhaps twenty-five yards away, a skinny year-old coyote emerges from the junipers, barking and howling her head off. It only takes me seconds to spot her companion on our left, a sleek young male probably from the same litter, who’s taken up a sentry position about the same distance from us. In another minute, I spot a fully grown adult, from the looks of her a female. She hasn’t joined the yapping and howling but is standing still and silent, thirty-five yards away. Her unblinking yellow eyes are locked on Kodi.
Kodi is not leashed, but he is trained to my voice. I bring him to my side, noticing in the cacophony of sound how calmly he obeys. At twenty-two months he weighs nearly 130 pounds, and as malamutes do, he resembles a wolf. The coyotes never take their eyes off him and scarcely even glance my way as I unlimber the camera and snap a few shots. After a few minutes of everyone watching everyone else, Kodi and I decide to forego our further progress down-canyon and turn and start for home. We are escorted for a couple of minutes by the little female, who walks along perhaps twenty-five to thirty feet away, incessantly yapping the whole time.
So here’s the thing. Coyotes are a fresh enough presence across much of America that someone new to coyotes or who hasn’t yet made an effort to understand them could find this scene alarming. The coyotes did not run away! They were close! They followed! Someone might have gone for a rifle or called a local wildlife officer to report “aggressive, problem animals.” Coyotes are feared—and removed—all the time for reasons like these.
Yearling coyote guardian at its pack’s den. Courtesy Dan Flores.
But these coyotes, which we saw many more times through the summer, were neither dangerous nor problematic. They were reacting entirely properly. They had established a territory in my canyon, and we—especially Kodi, a competitor canine—had violated their boundaries. At another time of year, they would have loped away over the rimrock, but in high summer the female probably had pups a few months old hidden away in the canyon’s crevices, with her yearlings from a prior litter serving as sentries. I never saw the pups or the alpha male. But we enjoyed hearing this pack sing and occasionally spotting them hunting mice all the rest of the summer.
They were not a threat, some unmanageable wildness near home to fear and destroy in a battle for civilization. They were, rather, an addition to modern life and a beautiful benefit to living in today’s Coyote America.
EPILOGUE
Coyote Consciousness
Since almost everyone in America is now living out modern life in a sea of coyotes and coywolves, coyote stories continue accumulating at a dizzying pace. Cha
sed away from the runways at the Portland airport, a coyote dashes aboard a mass-transit bus, which it apparently intends to take downtown, as an airport employee snaps photos of it curled up across the aisle like a normal seatmate. In Chicago, coyotes take to hanging out around the ticket office at Wrigley Field, “scalping game tickets,” one sportswriter speculates. At the Predator Research Facility in Utah, an experiment to test boldness finds that some coyotes will approach and take a treat in less than an hour even with massive “deflection stimuli” in place. The monthlong test ends with several other coyotes never having approached the treat once. In another incident there, a graduate student raising a coyote in a state of domestication has to end the experiment suddenly when the coyote reaches an age where it decides the student is an unworthy alpha and the situation almost overnight becomes too dangerous to continue.
No twenty-first-century coyote story, though, quite matches the head-scratching spectacle of a bit of performance art done in New York in 1974. Over a period of three days at the Rene Block Gallery, an unlikely pair of performers—German artist Joseph Beuys and a wild coyote said to represent America—enacted what Beuys called “I Like America and America Likes Me.” Surviving video of the performance shows that Beuys’s assistants transported him on a stretcher from the John F. Kennedy Airport to the gallery via ambulance. Once there, entirely covered by a shapeless felt blanket, proffering the hooked end of a cane, and tossing his gloves into the air in an invitation to catch, he and “America” interact. The coyote, for its part, seems pretty much all-in—active, unafraid, a full participant. At the performance’s end, with the United States symbolically healed by this shamanic act, Beuys takes his stretcher and ambulance back to the airport and flies home to West Germany, having never actually placed a foot on US soil or seen anything of the country except the gallery and his winning coartist, “America.”
Beuys and “America” may not have cured a wobbling United States of its Vietnam era blues in 1974. But unintentionally, I think, “I like America and America Likes Me” reset on the East Coast an earlier, western artistic tradition featuring a self-aware twentieth-century kind of “coyote consciousness.” The original version dated to the West Coast literary scene’s discovery in the 1950s of the Old Man Coyote stories, which became a homegrown influence that affected both writers and visual artists in the West for the next half century. Now that coyotes are a national phenomenon, with newspaper cartoons and art featuring urban coyotes on the rise in eastern cities, deity/avatar Coyote has emerged from the West to conquer the East. Coyote consciousness seems poised for a second act.
In the West, coyote consciousness happened this way. Federal Indian policy marginalized American Indians on reservations in the late nineteenth century, but Indian storytellers—increasingly stripped of ceremonies and even their languages—never gave up their Coyote tales. The stories would have remained known only to the country’s native population, perhaps destined eventually to die out and be lost, but for the work of ethnographers and folklorists who were working to salvage whatever they could of Indian cultures. George Dorsey of the federal Bureau of Ethnology and writer-folklorists Charles Lummis and Frank Bird Linderman among them, these reservation visitors assisted in making a literary genre out of the Coyote canon by transcribing the oral stories into written texts during the country’s early-twentieth-century fascination with American folklore. As Barry Lopez wrote of this period in his own book of Coyote stories, Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter, by the 1930s the Coyote genre had turned out to be so vast it came close to swamping the American Folklore Association with a bottomless well of Coyote adventures from scores of tribes.
One small but influential group of people—the poets and hipsters of the emerging California counterculture of the 1950s—read and were enthralled by the transcribed Coyote texts. Two decades after serving as one of Jack Kerouac’s slightly fictionalized protagonists in The Dharma Bums, famed California poet Gary Snyder preserved in his 1977 book The Old Ways some of the history of how Coyote captured the West Coast literary scene.
A man named Jaime de Angulo, Snyder tells us, became the rootstock of Coyotism in West Coast literary circles. Angulo, a Spanish MD and linguistic anthropologist who had worked among the Indians in the Southwest and California, went on to become what Snyder intriguingly calls “a San Francisco and Big Sur post–World War II anarchist-bohemian culture hero.”
Deflected from an academic career by a lifestyle that apparently was too bohemian even for California tastes, Angulo moved to a hilltop on the Big Sur coast and spent his time collecting California Indian folk tales, most of them about Coyote, finally publishing a 1950s best seller called Indian Tales. The book exposed many of the Bay Area and Central Coast writers—Robinson Jeffers and Henry Miller were two of them—to the deity character Coyote for the first time. Angulo must have been a force of nature. He appears in several of Jeffers’s poems as “the Spanish Cowboy,” as well as becoming a character in some of Kerouac’s books. Psychologist Carl Jung considered Angulo the very personification of West Coast Coyotism.
One result of this Pacific Coast flowering of coyote consciousness was a poetry magazine called Coyote’s Journal. Founded by James Koller, a Beat poet and novelist originally from Illinois, Coyote’s Journal (and later a book-publishing imprint called Coyote Books) initially printed the works of the writers and poets associated with City Lights Bookstore. The story is murky, but Koller seems later to have moved the magazine to Albuquerque and eventually to Maine. Coyote’s Journal appeared in eight issues between 1964 and 1967, one more in 1971, and a last in 1982. It published West Coast writers like Snyder, Koller himself, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Ed Dorn, Richard Brautigan, Peter Coyote, and a host of other poets of what was then called the New American Poetry, a literary renaissance that grew out of the Beat and 1960s counterculture movements. Riffs on Coyote were a favorite theme of the body of work.
What about Coyote so appealed to the counterculture? As Snyder put it, “The first thing that excited me about Coyote tales was the delightful, Dadaistic energy, leaping somehow into a modern frame of reference.” Like wild coyotes, Coyote also belonged to these writers’ home place, North America, and many of them were thinking of themselves as writing from a coastal vantage about the continent stretching eastward. And in a nonconformist age, Coyote was nonjudgmental. Coyote stories were about human nature; they said virtually nothing about good and evil in the abstract. As Snyder put it, Coyote “presents himself to us as an anti-hero.” His character seemed to offer all kinds of creative and nonconforming stimulation for rethinking American exceptionalism and the country’s heroic sense of itself, both of which came in for so much reappraisal in the 1960s and afterward. Snyder continued to feature Coyote in his poetry and stories for decades, riffing on modern American foreign policy maybe most outrageously and relevantly in his 1986 prose poem “Coyote Man, Mr. President, & The Gunfighters.”
Indian writers especially have never stopped invoking Coyote. Leslie Marmon Silko, N. Scott Momaday, Simon Ortiz, and many other native writers have forged ahead in infusing their novels, short stories, and verse with the spirit of Coyote in every possible form—as a rebellious and hilarious raconteur who is at once cosmopolitan, disarming, persuasive, and seductive, but also whimsical, opinionated, irrational, chaotic, and self-destructive. He is simultaneously both a hero to someone and an antihero to someone else. Ultimately, naturally, Coyote is as elusive as the meaning of life.
As Acoma Pueblo writer Simon Ortiz said in his book of Coyote poems, A Good Journey, Coyote after all is “the existential Man, Dostoevsky Coyote.” As avatar of both coyotes and humans, the Coyote of literature and art is free of cultural conventions of every kind. Coyote is true only to human-coyote nature. But he is very useful, because Coyote somehow manages to get a free pass to speak truth about humanity. And about America.
One coyote who has been speaking truth for more than a half century has been not only a self-described
“supergenius” but also an international ambassador of American culture. For much of the period from 1950 to the end of the century, he effortlessly hijacked coyote consciousness. The world’s most famous coyote first appeared on broadcast television in September 1949. Beginning in that year, Wile E., known in the early films simply as “the Coyote,” made his entrance in full coyote avatar guise—standing upright, making eye contact with the audience—to become the primary protagonist in a quarter century of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons produced for Warner Brothers Studio in Los Angeles.
The compelling TV character that Wile E. became was a collaborative effort between writer Michael Maltese and animator Chuck Jones. Maltese was a New Yorker who had moved to Los Angeles and become the go-to story man for animator-director Jones. Jones was a native westerner who had grown up in the coyote country of Spokane, Washington, then joined a talented group of animators in LA in 1933. The two began fleshing out their endlessly fallible and gullible hero late in 1948.