Part of the Life

THE VOICE OF THE COYOTE (386 pp.)--J. Frank Dobie--Little, Brown ($4).

Some people of the Southwest believe that the coyote never dies, some that the yowling beasts can talk, in Indian languages and Mexican-Spanish. Nobody is better qualified to round up all such legends, and more factual reports on the canny coyote, than Texas' shock-haired Professor Dobie, who knows as much about the Southwest as any man (Coro-nado's Children, Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver), and who has, moreover, lectured about it at Britain's Cambridge University (TIME, May 7, 1945).

Coyotes, says Author Dobie, know how to play dead, disguise themselves, hunt in groups; they are said to climb to the same hilltop every evening to sing; they play jokes, trick other animals, imitate the sounds they hear, and they learn man's ways with incredible rapidity. Fences cannot keep these sly relations of the dog and the wolf out of a sheep range or a chicken yard: some Southwest natives believe that they talk to the fences and the fences open up and let them through. Barbed-wire fences had some trouble understanding them at first but are now responsive.

Hidden Teammates. The sound of the coyote's cry at night is the common denominator of Southwest experience. It is one of the things that adults remember of a ranch house childhood; when heard again in age it summons up the whole complex of dry weather, sun-baked corrals, rock ranch houses, Mexicans, road runners, cattle, rattlesnakes, water tanks, windmills and lonely country. Says Dobie: it is an integral part of the life of the Southwest, which a New Mexico cowboy called the "land that seemed to be grieving over something--a kind of sadness, loneliness in a deathly quiet . . . It produced a heartache and a sense of exile." Every country child in the old days saw coyotes, heard them, hunted them, listened to stories about them, perhaps tried the improbable or near-impossible job of taming one. "Drink your milk," said mothers to their children, "or the old coyote will get it."

Dobie, who loves coyotes, reports at length on their highly organized methods of hunting. When the game is antelope, they run in relays, tiring the quarry until it can be overtaken. On the trail of jack rabbits, they surround a group, driving them in an ever-narrowing circle, just as men do. Hunting ducks, a coyote once drove the feeding ducks across a lake, and when the ducks ventured close to the farther shore, they were pounced upon by a teammate hidden in the underbrush. Coyotes will hide in a herd of cattle to destroy their scent, or even take refuge in a wagon or a moving flatcar.

Hidden Cyanide. Following man, coyotes have enormously extended their range, which now reaches from Central America to Alaska. They kill so many sheep that since 1915 the Federal Government has been systematically destroying them, a fact which Author Dobie deplores. Their new enemies are the cyanide-gun devices now used with coyote traps, and a deadly chemical developed during the war, known as Compound 1080. Brilliant as they are, coyotes especially cannot fathom the trap-gun, which shoots cyanide directly into their jaws.

Some cattlemen are attacking coyotes too; they claim that coyotes are killing calves at a rate that has become serious. The highly bred modern cow cannot defend her calf as the thin, stringy and wild range cows once did.

Author Dobie's book is saturated with the lore of the range, the brush and the border country. It is the final word on its subject, and very nearly one of those classic studies that seem to sum up everything that has been written before it. A lack of focus weakens it, a discursiveness, and an argumentative mood about the anti-coyote policy in Washington. But at its best, it reads the way oldtimers talk, with a fine earthy mixture of courtesy and superstition, wisdom and independence.

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