In doing research on coyotes for an interview for On Wildlife, I came across an astonishing story. So astonishing that I researched the source to be sure it was legitimate because the implications are staggering. I would love to have your thoughts and any coyote stories you have to share.
In The Coyote: Defiant Songdog of the West, author Francois Leydet recounts the following:
“According to [anthropologist] Ruth Simpson* there was [historically] a widespread Indian belief in the coyote’s curative power and in his benevolence. She writes: ‘In at least some degree [this belief] may spring from the fact that coyotes do frequently stay with a person whom they find sick or injured. The coyote will stand guard against enemies or animals threatening the victim and will lie by him, licking the wound. [Frank Dobie in The Voice of the Coyote gives an instance of this, and many others.] Many times coyotes have come to men (Indians and white) and led them to some injured person or lost child. Most important is the fact that the presence of the coyote gives the lonely man in trouble new courage, new heart to fight for his life until help comes.… The Kiowa held a public thanksgiving for a coyote who had saved in this manner one of their hunters wounded far from camp.’”
According to the Calendar History of the tribe, that thanksgiving was held in 1839.
There are numerous historical anthropological accounts of friendship between humans and coyotes. The Native Americans had an attitude of live and let live, taking the view that coyotes (and all animals) had the same right to hunt and kill for food as humans and felt no animosity towards them. And yet,100 years later we vilified them and did everything in our power to exterminate them, often in the cruelest way possible—as we continue to do. We have profoundly changed the nature of our relationship to coyotes–not just on our part, but on theirs. There are few accounts now of coyotes offering friendship or healing.
I share an experience of coyote friendship in a story about Faerytale the coyote available in my book, Whispers from the Wild: An Invitation.
* Ruth DeEtte Simpson in “The Masterkey,” a publication of the Southwest Museum, Los Angeles, 1958