Cute Coyote by Ernest Thompson Seton
Earlier this month I posted a Seton essay about the metaphoric Coyote as the Spirit of the West. His admiration for the species is evident from the concluding paragraphs of “Tito, The Story of the Coyote that Learned How.” In this long concluding chapter of Lives of the Hunted (1901), the heroic Tito overcomes overcomes every impossible challenge to her life to prevail in the end. Here is how Seton ends her biography:
The Coyote Teacher
“The Buffalo herds have gone; they have succumbed to the rifles of the hunters. The Antelope droves are nearly gone; Hound and lead are too much for them. The Blacktail bands have dwindled before axe and fence. The ancient dwellers of the Badlands have faded like snow under the new conditions, but the Coyotes are no more in fear of extinction. Their morning and evening song still stands from the level buttes, as it did long years ago when every plain was a teeming land of game.
They have learned the deadly secrets of traps and poisons, they know how to baffle the gunner and Hound, they have matched their wits with the hunter’s wits. They have learned how to prosper in a land of man-made plenty, in spite of the worst that man can do, and it was Tito that taught them how.”
Coyotes remain at risk and are at the same time surprisingly resilient.
Wild Horses of the West
Another symbol of the West, the wild horse, was the subject of “The Pacing Mustang” in Wild Animals I Have Known (1898). Included in the same book as the Lobo story it was also set in the New Mexico of 1893-1894. It was that time when Seton explored the Hi-Lo Country in the northeastern part of the state. As with Tito, this is a story about freedom—live free or die! You can read the story in any of several printings of this famous book. (I wrote the introduction to the Gibbs Smith 2020 edition.) Or you can listen to a storyteller recounting it, spoken with just the right accent. It is both inspiring and sad.