This book "is both an environmental and a deep natural history of the coyote. It traces both the five-million-year-long biological story of an animal that has become the wolf in our backyards, as well as its cultural evolution from a preeminent spot in Native American religions to the hapless foil of the Road Runner. A deeply American tale, the story of the coyote in the American West and beyond is a sort of Manifest Destiny in reverse, with a pioneering...

Only when he meets a professional hunter does Micah LaVeck learn the most precious lessons about living. His town on Aquidneck Island is beset with a flourishing coyote population. Residents are divided on how to cope. The mayor of Middletown offers a compromise: a lone professional hunter acting humanely and discreetly in concert with the Conservation Department's Division of Fish and Wildlife. Micah isn't the only one surprised when the hunter turns...