Trickster Country: The Coyote in Native Story and American History
By Marion Ellsworth Coleridge
Length4h 49m
About this audiobook
Four toes, a pad, a small pointed heel, and between them an X of empty space where the fur touched the mud and the skin did not. Ten thousand years ago a coyote of about twenty-five pounds left a print like that beside a meltwater pond in what is now the San Pedro Valley of southern Arizona. Its descendants leave the same print today in the arroyo behind the elementary school in Benson.
In between, the mammoths went, and the camels, the dire wolves, the short-faced bears and the first horses. The coyote stayed, because it never specialized: small enough to hide, willing to eat almost anything, content with any patch of shade and a place to dig a den. The chapters trace it through bones in ancient middens and the stories of the nations who named it first, where Coyote is Old Man Coyote, trickster and culture hero; through the arrival of the horse and the rifle; and into the long war of bounties, traps and strychnine waged on behalf of the sheep economy.
The war failed. As the frontier closed, coyotes spread east and north until they were living at the edges of cities, and the science of the later chapters explains why killing them has so often produced more of them. Then Old Man Coyote takes the last look back, from a ridge above it all.
Audiobook details
GenreScience and Nature
Length4 hrs 49 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 18, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: The Animal That Was Already Here
2Chapter 2: Old Man Coyote and the First Names
3Chapter 3: Bones in the Midden
4Chapter 4: The Horse, the Rifle, and the Changed Country
5Chapter 5: Coyote in the Ledger
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6Chapter 6: The War of Extermination Begins
7Chapter 7: Strychnine and the Sheep Economy
8Chapter 8: The Frontier Closes; the Coyote Opens
9Chapter 9: The Trickster Reads the Manuscript
10Chapter 10: Coyote at the City Limits
11Chapter 11: The Nations Still Speak
12Chapter 12: The Science of Not Going Away
13Chapter 13: Killing Coyotes, Making Coyotes
14Chapter 14: Old Man Coyote Looks Back from the Ridge
15About the Author
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