Dan Flores

Like many of the Indian coyote stories folklorists were just beginning to collect, Tito took a widely observable truth and offered an explanation for it.

That truth was a widespread puzzlement about coyotes.

Why weren't these wild dogs doing the proper thing and dying off?

At the turn of the 20th century, the United States was waist deep in the largest destruction and die off of wildlife discoverable anywhere in modern world history.

30 million bison were down to fewer than 1,000.

15 million pronghorns were all but gone.

We had so devastated elk, bighorn sheep, and grizzly bears that they were surviving only as tiny remnants hiding in the deepest mountains.

Five million wild horses were about to end up in pet food cans.

And by 1920, we would have poisoned to death a million gray wolves.

When Seton wrote Tito, the most numerous bird species on Earth, American passenger pigeons had 14 years of existence left.

Yet, as the Scribner's article put it, despite the fierce war that had for a long time been waged against the coyote kind, for some inexplicable reason, coyotes were not following suit.

Indeed, the more we shot them, poisoned them, trapped them, ran them with dogs, blew up their dens, the more of them there seemed to be.

By way of an explanation, Seton invented the Tito of his story.

She is a little female coyote who is captured as a pup and chained in a ranch yard as a curiosity, where she shrewdly observes how her human captors use guns, traps, dogs, and poisons against her kin.

Ultimately, she escapes, finds a mate, has pups of her own, and then proceeds to teach her pups and their children's children, as Satan phrased it, all the tricks of coyote extermination.

Satan's human analog?

Moses, of course, an Israelite who, by growing up among the Egyptians, was able to learn their plans, which enabled him to save his people from destruction.

Tito is a charming story belonging to a genre the literati among us would call allegory.

If you weren't a sheepman or a predator hunter paid by one of the livestock associations, no doubt it was fun to imagine it might be true.

And in any case, it fit well with the kind of Darwinian animals are our kin stories writers like Seton and Jack London were writing then.