The Daily Coyote - Shreve Stockton

The Daily Coyote is about the author, to her surprise, falling in love with the Wyoming countryside and moving there from New York. Once there, she meets a guy who works on predator control for a state agency, and she ends up with a coyote pup he couldn't bring himself to kill.

And so Stockton details her life with Charlie, the coyote. Feeding him, training him, trying to get her cat acclimated to the new housemate. This plus the ups and downs of her relationship with Mike, the challenges of maintaining the cabin she lives in, paying the bills, and whatnot.

Stockton presents it that Charlie often acts as a mirror to her. That the way he responds to her or others reflects something he's picking up in her. When that results in Charlie occasionally behaving aggressively towards her, she figures out he's trying to become the leader because he's picked up on how stressed she is, and that she's not up to being in charge. So he's got to do it. And Stockton conveys her own fear, dismay, and confusion at what's happening, enough so I was worried the story was going to have a bad ending if Charlie kept getting aggressive. You want things to go back to how they were between them as well.

(She mentions using the book the Dog Whisperer guy wrote for guidance, which was interesting to me, not so much because she's using it on a coyote, but because some of the dog rescue people I know through my dad don't think much of that guy's methods. Maybe it's different for a canine not coming out of a traumatic experience?)

I don't get the sense he picks up on her initial fear of the other people around learning she has a coyote as a pet, even though that makes her wary of contacting veterinarians when Charlie contracts parvo, or heavily influences where she lets him be when she puts him outside (for fear someone will see him from the road and just shoot the coyote). But maybe he was young enough at that stage it didn't register as abnormal.

Stockton had a blog in the early 2000s where she posted photos of Charlie every day (and is where the book title comes from), and a lot of photos are in the book. Which is nice. Watching the change in Charlie's size relative to Eli the cat via the photos is neat. The part I probably enjoyed the most was when Stockton would right about how Charlie interacts with other animals. The shifting relationship between he and Eli, or how he got along with one of Mike's dogs, but the others mostly wanted nothing to do with him. There's a part where he makes friends with some new calves, where both parties seem equally curious about each other that was kind of adorable.

'Charlie and I often wandered around the corrals on our walks, and a few days later, after Charlie sniffed around the corn and deemed it nonthreatening, he sprang into the air and dove headfirst into the pile. With ears laid back and a fanatical grin across his face, Charlie dug to the bottom of the pile, the loose corn filling around his legs as fast as he could dig.'