Dan Flores

Gliding past the house as if he's on skates, his golden eyes suddenly narrow as he spots our brawny Alaskan Malamute, Cody, sleepily lounging on the front porch.

Never breaking stride, but with a quick lip curl and grimace.

No time to hang out.

The new male bears a row of lovely white teeth.

Cody has been around coyotes all his life and seeing them in the yard isn't all that novel, so he merely sits up and watches as the parade goes by.

So do we.

It's a wild, canid show to match the dawn, and we haven't had to go to Yellowstone or Alaska to see it.

Our coffee cups steaming the air, we've just stood in the kitchen and looked outside.

In one of the most intriguing wildlife stories of our time, not just Westerners, but everyone in America is now getting to see small Western wolves out the kitchen windows.

The coyote has turned out to be the dude, and the dude absolutely abides.

Difficult as it is to expel politics from our minds these days, a coyote in the yard can manage it.

Whether those golden eyes, that slender snout, or the insolent swish of a tail charm you or outrage you, the sight of a coyote is never boring.

Materializing magically into familiar surroundings we long ago assumed were bled of anything wild, a single coyote can evaporate all illusions of our successful transplant of civilization to the continent.

No world that has a jackal-like wolf glancing at you as it trots by with houses and highways in the background can ever be said to have banished the wild.

I've never had so much fun writing a book as I had writing one I called Coyote America.

And one of the reasons was that its narrative arc inverted everything we're used to in environmental stories.

In Coyote America, nature wins.

Coyotes have taken everything we humans can throw at them, then calmly occupied the very ground we're standing on.

And they've done it repeatedly.

Dire wolves, mammoths, and saber-toothed cats may not have been able to survive the Pleistocene, but coyotes did.