COYOTE: Seeking the Hunter in Our Midst

In popular eco-consciousness, the coyote is sometimes seen as the new roadrunner—nature's consummate survivor, impudently sidestepping every ponderous, overtechnologized scheme humanity concocts to exterminate it while expanding its range into exurbs the continent over. In this engaging, if sometimes slightly overwrought, homage, poet and naturalist Reid is beguiled by the indomitable coyotes howling around her Massachusetts farmstead. She pores over their droppings, bones up on their biology, falls into Darwinian reveries over their interbreeding with wolves and gleans sociocultural insights and life lessons from them. In their existence on the margins, she sees parallels with her experience as a lesbian. Their predations prompt musings on the human capacity for violence; their openness to change and the blurring of species boundaries offers an unsettling paradigm of postmodern adaptability; while the example of their perseverance helps the author cope with her lover's hip-replacement surgery. The animals occasionally whimper under the weight of metaphor and anthropomorphizing, as when Reid imagines the first coyote-wolf coupling as a tender, unlikely romance. But Reid also offers enlightening passages about coyote communication, transformations in her local landscape and the concept of interspecies "mutualism," while making a heartfelt, often poetic case for coexistence between humans and the wild, however red in tooth and claw. Agent, Kit Ward. (Oct. 20)