"Alive with terror, charm, and mystery." -- Madeleine Blais, author of Uphill Walkers

When Catherine Reid returned to the Berkshires to live after decades away, she became fascinated by another recent arrival: the eastern coyote. This tenacious species, which shares some lineage with the wolf, exhibits remarkable adaptability and awe-inspiring survival skills. Coyotes have been spotted in nearly every habitable area available, including urban streets, Central Park, and suburban backyards.

Settling into an old farmhouse with her partner, Reid felt compelled to learn more about this outlaw animal. Her beautifully grounded memoir interweaves personal and natural history to comment on one of the most dramatic wildlife stories of our time. With great appreciation for this scrappy outsider and the ecological concerns its presence brings to light, Reid suggests that we all need to forge a new relationship with this uncannily intelligent species in our midst.

"A captivating read, worthy of joining the pantheon of literary ecological writing." -- Booklist

"Enlightening . . . a heartfelt, often poetic case for coexistence between humans and the wild." -- Publishers Weekly

"Graceful, intimate, and vibrant prose . . . an important, beautiful book." -- Jane Brox, author of Clearing Land

Catherine Reid is a naturalist, teacher, editor, and poet. She lives in an old farmhouse in western Massachusetts.

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Traces the ever-increasing presence of the coyote in suburbs east of the Mississippi, describing the characteristics and behavior of this highly adaptable, intelligent predator, the differences between it and its western cousin--including the incorporation of wolf DNA into its genetic mix, its increased size, and its acquisition of such behavior as pack allegiance. Reprint.

Coyote

Seeking the Hunter in Our Midst

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By Catherine Reid

Mariner Books

Copyright © 2005 Catherine Reid
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780618619290

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1

After two months in this old house, I think I know the night noises at last —
the knock and scramble of mice in the walls, the huff of wind across the
chimney, the bristle of windows within their loose frames. Yet tonight comes
a cry that I wasn"t expecting, that hauls me out of sleep, a chorus of wailing
above a percussion of yips, excited and eerie and twitching my heart.
Coyotes. Their very existence makes this place seem risky and
wild. I hadn"t reckoned on their presence when we made an offer on the
place. Carpenter ants and powder-post beetles, flying squirrels and foraging
deer, gray squirrels fattened on acorns and birdseed, plenty of roaming
bear — these were the known parts of the package, along with what we could
see for rot in the sills, what we hoped was solid framing behind the new
siding, and what we couldn"t quite follow in the network of old knob-and-tube
wiring.
But at the thought of a pack of coyotes — a gang, a family —
another sensation crawls across my skin, like knowing someone is behind a
door before a hand can slam it shut.
I want to see them.
I want to find their outlines when I scan the edges of the meadow.
I want to know if I"m being watched while I work in the garden or mow the
field. I want to know where they sleep and spend their days, where they go
when the neighboring dogs race through or when November arrives after the
leaves have blown free and hunters slip into the newly naked woods.
Mostly I want to know how they"re managing here in
Massachusetts, in this place I"ve returned to twenty-.ve years after leaving.
Coyotes were just sliding into the landscape back then, rarely seen and
seldom heard, and only starting to appear in northern Vermont, where I first
lived as a young adult. I saw them sometimes from a distance. I heard them
now and again at night, that same rupture of my sleep, something separate
from the weave of other sounds. And once I met a coyote in a field, each of
us too distracted by the hot August buzzing to notice the other until we were
both in full view. Without taking its eyes from me, it did a slow turn, lowered
itself into the grass, and disappeared. I backed up to the field"s edge, to the
shadow of a big rock maple, and waited for an hour. It didn"t return; its shape
never reformed inside that dense weave of grass.
I want to know how they disappear like that.

Those of us who decide to return home run certain risks. We lose the luster
of the one who got away, the status that accrued when no one really knew
what we did with our time. We no longer feel free to move on whenever plans
change, a relationship doesn"t work out, another job beckons from
somewhere farther afield. We become accessible and known and have to
face tomorrow the mistakes we make today.
For me, being home again means having to bridge the gaps
between the kid I was when I left and the adult I"ve become. That seems
most obvious when my tender-hearted father calls and leaves a message on
the machine. "It"s your daddy," he says, his voice as it was when I was five
and six and seven, not that of a man in his seventies addressing his forty-
something daughter. Later, when our paths cross in town, the joy on his face
feels equal to my own at the unexpected chance to catch up on more of what
we missed during all those years we spent so far apart.
It"s the same with my five siblings when we jostle and tease each
other as we did when we were teens; then we step back and wonder when
the gray crept in and the wrinkles inched across our faces. All of them have
kids now, ranging in age from one to eighteen, children amiable and curious,
though I can"t tell yet if any have a name for the aunt who came back with her
companion, a woman with a past that is full and unknown to them. It"s partly
Yankee reticence, this reluctance to talk about the less visible part of our
lives; it"s partly a wish not to be misunderstood. But it might also indicate
how much has changed since that day I left in order to become my whole self.
"You"ll never be able to move back home," a former partner once
told me, and I believed her. She was older, and I thought she was wiser; she
studied family relationships as part of her job. Years passed before I
understood that by saying I"d be smothered by the traditions that abound
here, she meant she was afraid of what they might do to her.
For me, fear that I couldn"t be myself was a natural consequence
of years bounded by tradition, centuries of Puritan-tight belts and stiff upper
lips defining our options like lines of barbed wire inscribing old woods. As a
teenager, however, I was oblivious to history"s impact. Everything was new
and possible, and I"d felt free to come and go as I wanted, to slip back and
forth between adulthood and adolescence. Yet I was caught unawares by the
arrival of a love I knew to be unlike any other I had experienced. I was even
more startled by the reactions from those who had always encouraged me.
They had never said No, they had never said Don"t, so when they pulled back
in anguish — You can"t love her! — I was unmoored. The rope connecting me
with the familiar had been cut, and a part of me folded up, a part that has
often felt stranded in despair.

The property we found is in the hills of Franklin County, with the summits of
the Berkshires a few miles to the west and the taller mountains of Vermont
just to the north. To the east a short downward slope separates us from the
flat expanse of the Connecticut River valley. As a child growing up near the
river, I was sure that the hill people had far sturdier and more inventive lives
than those of us stuck on flatter land. But after high school I never spent
much time here, except for the year I hiked north with spring, from Georgia to
Maine along the Appalachian Trail. By the time I reached New England, I had
been out for about three months and loved being back within reach of familiar-
sounding towns — Stockbridge, Dalton, Pittsfield, North Adams — enjoying
the resonance of known accents and idioms, the way words like "the
Berkshires" felt in my mouth. But I never thought I would live here, that the
pull of home would be so strong, hauling me back from a thousand miles
away.
A selling point of the property was that it had not one but three
structures: an old farmhouse, a barn, and a much smaller building, about
seventy-five feet across the lawn. We designated it the studio, and I won the
coin toss for its use. A previous owner had run a small-engine repair shop out
of it; another had sold used books. The latter must have been the one who
had it wired and insulated, had a phone line brought in, had the walls covered
with Sheetrock and painted. No one ever dealt with the concrete floor,
however, which sloped toward a drain at its center.
Another benefit of moving back was that my siblings had most of
the necessary skills for building or repairing whatever we wanted to fix. My
youngest brother, Doug, spent much of his vacation time showing me how to
erect jacks in the cellar under overly long joists and how to refinish the
banged-up wood floors. We also spent hours in the studio leveling sleepers
across the concrete floor and securing them with a gunpowder-driven
hammer, each slam like a pistol going off in the small building. We fitted
tongue-and-groove birch plywood on top, and immediately the room felt
warmer and tighter. When his vacation ended and we were on our own, I
continued to borrow Doug"s tools and seek advice over the phone.
My brother Arthur helped as well, mostly by explaining how things
worked. He reassured me about the knob-and-tube wiring, the gas heater in
the studio, the buckling wall at the bottom of the barn. "And that"s probably
an old well cover," he said of the large, .at fieldstone in the barn floor. He
offered to help lift it when I was finally curious enough. Then my oldest
brother, Bob, brought two of his sons and a high-sided truck to the place we
rented while readying the property, and their energy and hustle (sparked by
the promise of a swim in the river) made the move to Shelburne Falls seem
easy.
I like knowing that they are all close and would help in any way
they could. But I need to sort out the rest of this on my own; it"s how I learn.
It"s how I figure out what it will take to support my life. With the paint dry and
the boxes emptied, I don"t need to be inside the house any longer. It"s time
to learn the lay of this land.
I wander through the field to the narrow trail I found when first
walking the property lines, which are defined mostly by old stone walls and a
seasonal, moss-lined trickle. Two neighboring dogs use the path most often,
but one morning last week I saw a young buck on it about to step into the
field. We stopped at the same time to watch each other, but I relented first
and slipped into the studio. From a shadow by the window I kept track of the
deer"s indecision — forward, back, forward, back — until a door slammed
behind me and it disappeared in a flash of white tail.
Today I follow the path over a hill of white pine. To the north is a
gentle slope of mountain laurel and princess pine, partridge berry and
rattlesnake plantain; a steady brook churns in the small valley below. The
railroad tracks run along the woods to the east; beyond them lies the
Deerfield River, the Massamet Ridge rising steeply just beyond it.
Most of this I recognize and take comfort in, despite the years I"ve
been away. I like to think that my return here is fresh enough that familiarity
won"t lead me to have blind spots, that my powers of observation won"t relax
among smells and rhythms that soothe like nursery rhymes. Keeping watch
for something as elusive as a coyote should keep me alert to nuance and
able to locate signs different from the ones I once expected.
It"s tricky — I know this; do I know this? — like trying to walk toe-
heel down the trail, something I practiced for weeks as a kid when I wanted
to walk as silently as the Indians I had read about. I can do it now if I
concentrate, but my heel hits first when I look anywhere but at the trail ahead
of me, which I keep doing until I"m almost home. It"s when the house and the
barn are within sight that I find the first sign in my search — coyote scat in
the clearing under a large white pine.
It"s easy to distinguish from that of a dog, which looks like
reprocessed Alpo, or that of a fox, which is narrower and has less heft. This
mass is stringy and long and full of apple seeds and cherry pits, tiny bones
and maple seeds, and a piece of waxed paper, wrinkled and wedged between
clumps of matted hair.

The house Holly and I occupy was built in 1894, the year the last passenger
pigeon was shot in Massachusetts and about fifty years after the state"s last
wolf was killed. I don"t know when the barn that used to stand on this
foundation was built, but in the years between the gray wolf"s death and the
raising of this house, a series of animals was driven out of the state: the last
wild turkey, shot in 1851 and only recently reintroduced; the last mountain
lion, killed in 1858; the last lynx, in 1860; the last marten, in 1880.
I think about little of this history when I check mouse traps in the
cellar. Holes riddle the foundation, small, dingy tunnels that stretch out of
sight, some of them large enough to accommodate weasels. It seems terribly
fragile, stone on stone, a little mortar or whitewash in between, and above it a
two-story house delicately placed on notched and pitted sills.
Two of the traps contain bodies, and I walk outside to toss them
into the thicket behind the barn. Then, curious, I force a path through the
brush to see where the carcasses landed. Stiff blackberry thorns catch at my
sweater, and I have to stop several times to unpin them. But when I reach the
tall elderberry, I don"t find any of the mice I"ve flung these last two months —
two or three dozen total. Instead, I find one bedraggled, inedible mole and the
telltale scat of coyotes.
They"ve been scarfing up small mouse bodies at night.
They"ve been within twenty-five feet of the house, maybe even
closer, and I haven"t seen or heard them. I"ve simply been the unwitting
purveyor, rewarding their approach.
I feel the same mix of awe and caution that I did when I fed a fox
from my hand during one of the springs I lived on Deer Isle, off the coast of
Maine. A mother fox, her fur matted, her teats swollen, had barked me out of
the house in her hunger. Curious as to what she would do, I set half my
sandwich on a rock and walked away. She took it and ran. For the next
several weeks I tossed her more chunks of sandwich or muffin whenever she
appeared in the clearing. Then I bought her Milk-Bones, which she liked, and
both of us began taking more time with the exchange (I didn"t let myself think
for long about the cost to her of such an association, about whether the next
person she approached would hold food or a gun; I simply used her ragged
belly as an excuse for the transactions). At last, instead of dropping the food
in front of her, I kept it in my hand, and she scarcely hesitated before lifting it
from my palm with her teeth.
My body didn"t know whether to scream or laugh when she darted
away. I could see only how she took it — sharp, white fox teeth, a breath
away from my skin.

Copyright © 2004 by Catherine Reid. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.



Continues...

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Excerpted from Coyote by Catherine Reid Copyright © 2005 by Catherine Reid. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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CATHERINE REID is a naturalist, teacher, and poet. She lives in an old farmhouse in western Massachusetts.