Coyote: Seeking the Hunter in Our Midst

by Catherine Reid

Book Overview

Alive with terror, charm, and mystery. -- Madeleine Blais, author of Uphill Walkers When Catherine Reid returned to the Berkshires to live after decades away, she became fascinated by another recent... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618329641
• ISBN13: 9780618329649
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 179 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

A gem

Written with a style that reminds one of silk, this book blends emotion with obsession and was plain riveting. I share the author's fascination for that animal, (along with foxes, owls, and just about any wildlife), so I am biased. Yet Reid's beautiful prose transcends her subject, adds a unique depth to the world she describes, and plunges the reader into her world painted with a keen photographic eye, a world that is closer to a coyote's than any city dweller's or the world of someone not familiar with wildlife. From a technical point of view, I found the book quite informative on its subject, namely the "new" coyote of the East. There are few general books on the animal, with most written by or for hunters. While readers looking for an encyclopedic study of the animal may feel the book falls short, they should revisit the extensive bibliography the author provides, quotes from, and aptly introduces within her story. And be reminded that no matter what, the coyote remains one of the most secretive and elusive animals ever, with very little known about it.

Beautiful

Catherine Reid has done a sterling job writing a book that weaves a narrative of the rise of a new species in the American East with her personal account of resettling amongst her family with her partner. Reid is deceptively subtle in her treatment of human and animal inhabitants of her narrative, bringing her descriptions of outdoor life in the snow-covered landscape to life with delightfully vivid details. I remain haunted by her remarkable account of a party of trackers following the trail of a group of Eastern Coyotes, only to find their own tracks in the snow because the coyotes have lead them in a circle in the woods and the trackers are now themselves being tracked by their quarry. I suspect that the harsh words written in earlier reviews have more to do with homophobia than with their writers' appreciation of this book. It is tempting to draw conclusions about Reid's fear of isolation due to her sexuality as the source of her fascination with the wolf-coyotes she describes, but to do so over-simplifies her exploration of her childhood landscape. While she is frank about her partnership with a woman, I did not find that she particularly over-emphasized this aspect of her life, and I enjoyed the contrast offered by the dual narratives. I'm more satisfied with Reid's eponymous "hunter in our midst" representing both the coyote in her back yard and her awareness of ageing.

Singer of Scat

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.

Who is it that howls at night ?

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).