Coyote : Seeking the Hunter in Our Midst

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Summary: Less a natural history than a personal history
Review: Only a relatively brief portion of this book was devoted to informing about coyotes in the Northeast. The author's personal history and life is more than woven into this narrative, it is central. Based on the jacket cover, this is not what I expected.

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Summary: Singer of Scat
Review: 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.

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Summary: This book is miscategeorized
Review: The probelm with Katherine Reid's "Coyote: Seeking the Hunter in Our Midst" is that it is only sparringly about the wild eastern canid. Mostly, it is about her.

Personally, I believe strongly in using one's writing for cathartic purposes, and so applaud her efforts to sort out her life on paper.

However, the fly leaf of this book suggests something much different than what one finds inside. Instead of an informative, cover-to-cover work on Coyotes, or at least a collection of essays on that same topic, her own journey to rediscover family, roots, and to be accepted as a lesbian is the central theme. That would all be fine were that more clearly stated (or at least mentioned) on the inside cover.

A more apt title might be, "I, Coyote: My Search for Acceptance and Understanding", or, cutting straight to it, "Lesbians and Coyotes: Common Ground".

Yes, she does supply information and background on the history and evolution of the misunderstood howlers, but, they are too often merely a segue to her own story. Metaphors and allegories are fine, if you aren't lying to your reader up front. Believe me - you are not getting what you pay for if you just read the flyleaf and trot to the register, so be prepared.

My problem with such marketing slight-of-hand is that essentially, the publisher is lying to me. This may not be Reid's fault - maybe she pitched it for what it actually is, then wound up just having to accept what she wound up with to get published.

The unfortunate result is that speaking for myself, I started flipping through whole chapters just to get to the information I paid to get. Her life story may be interesting, as may be her take on society, two women living as rural lovers, and the reconnection of family. But it's not what I paid for. Ultimately, I tired of excavating the information I wanted, and tossed the book in the trash can under my nightstand, and that's something I almost never, ever do. I was mad at being deceived, but, perhaps Reid and/or her publisher will somehow find that comforting: the coyote's reputation as trickster was well-mimicked by Reid and her publisher.

If you want to learn about Coyotes, do a search on the internet, and save yourself a few bucks.

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Summary: Who is it that howls at night ?
Review: Who is it that howls at night down on the frozen river behind our house? There are wolves in Michigan's Lower Peninsula now, but I heard wolves howling up in Canada's Northwest Territories, and these are not the howls of wolves. When I lived and worked in the city, I heard just about every breed of dog there is yap, bark, bay, and yowl, but these creatures of the woods and frozen river are not dogs.

Time to buy Catherine Reid's "Coyote: Seeking the Hunter in our Midst" and find out whether coyotes have made their way this far East. Surprise! Coyotes are to be found in all of the lower 48 states and Michigan, according to this author, has reached its saturation point for these canid predators. Humans are even allowed to hunt coyotes at night, which might explain the after-dark gunshots that I sometimes hear.

"Coyote" is a fascinating collection of riffs or nature essays rather in the style of "Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek." Reid moves to an old farmhouse in Connecticut with her partner Holly, back to the land that she knew as a child, back to the bosom of her family.

Will she and her partner be treated as outcasts--as human coyotes? I think Reid might have been fearing a less-than-warm welcome, which is why she identifies so fiercely with the pariah canids. However, her family welcomes the two women. She writes about her brother, who lends a helping hand with repairs on the farmhouse. There are warm riffs on family gatherings. Reid takes her niece out into the woods and shows her the landmarks she remembered from her own childhood. Although "Coyote" is primarily a book about wildlife and the land gone wild since it was farmed a century ago, it is also about family rhythms, as soothing as nursery songs to the ear.

Catherine Reid is naturalist, teacher, editor, and poet. She is at her most luminous when poking about in the woods, dissecting coyote scats (which contain a distressing number of cat claws), searching for dens, or wandering on her snowshoes through the new, soft snow. I think I've learned enough from her to do some den- and scat-hunting of my own (and to keep our cats locked firmly behind closed doors).