Dan Flores

Coyote America has been, was, still is, because I'm doing a new version of it that's coming out soon, the most fun book to write I've ever written.

And that's really the reason.

We're dealing with the coyote, with an animal that has a biography that

not only as a roller coaster ride up and down and around swerving curves, it's also an animal that, as Native people recognize, is very much like us.

It's an animal that lives by its wits and is successful as a result of that.

And it's also...

the rare irrepressible animal.

So many of our grand species in the past, all the way back to the Pleistocene.

I mean, we lose our mammoths.

We lose our saber-toothed cats.

We lose our lions.

And then in the more modern historic period, I mean, we lose passenger pigeons, the most numerous bird on earth.

We lose Carolina parakeets and ivory bill woodpeckers.

I mean, just on and on.

And yet here is this creature that, in fact, we do everything we can possibly think of to wipe them out, and the result is exactly the opposite of what our intentions are.

We end up not only do their numbers remain viable, even in the West where we're launching such a war against them,

But in fact, our efforts spread them out across the rest of the country and into cities and towns.

And it's this kind of remarkable story to me.

And one of the things I wanted to say here, because I think it is a remarkable thing, is that we can't

we can't delude ourselves that we have created a completely tamed, as it were, emasculated country when you can look out the window of your house in a suburb anywhere in America and see a jackal-sized wolf trotting down the street, glancing at you with highways and houses behind it as it goes by.