When I was a child in the 1970s, I lived in a newly built neighborhood in Los Angeles that bordered land still undeveloped. The city thinned out behind my house and gave way to open hills. Wild horses thundered past, roadrunners darted through the chaparral and tumbleweeds, and at night, the coyotes sang. Some of my earliest memories are of lying awake and listening to their voices rise and fall in the distance, a wild and communal music that became a comfort to me.

At pivotal moments in my life — initiatory moments — I would encounter coyotes crossing my path. These sightings were never casual. They appeared briefly and decisively, always coinciding with periods when something in my life was shifting or about to transform.Coyotes are among the animals closest to my heart, not simply for their presence in my early life but for what they represent. They are creatures of the in-between, thriving at the margins, adapting where others cannot. 

(Or will not?)

Across cultures and throughout history, the coyote has been revered as a sacred being: Trickster and Creator, a deity of dance, song, storytelling, and celebration. Coyote is the bringer of change and chaos and a figure who embodies duality itself, at once helpful and harmful, wise and reckless. In myth, Coyote carries the wisdom of foolishness, acts as a benign prankster who has the singular power to defy and reverse fate, and becomes the unlikely bearer of gifts to humankind. Through disruption and mischief, Coyote teaches that survival depends on adaptability and that transformation often arrives disguised as disorder. 

Coyotes inhabit liminal space, and to embrace them is to embrace uncertainty as a companion. A spirit of defiance, resistance, and persistence, they should be venerated as an icon of our times.

A scent for the coyotes of my childhood, sun-bright, resilient, and quietly feral: amber fur, white sage, chaparral, smoked palo santo, California sagebrush, clever sparks of white pepper, and sweet tonka bean.

(Featured photo: the author with her first coydog, Chico. No, we didn’t know he was a coyote mix when we adopted him. A neighbor’s standard poodle magically gave birth to a litter of electric-amber puppies and I fell in love. Chico was beautiful to me: lava-orange fur that was shaggy like his coyote sire, but curled sweetly at the ends like his mother’s. He was strange, ridiculous, and delightfully clownish. I loved him so very, very much. In true Southern California form, Chico was not my only coyote mix. Arthur, my second coydog, was a shepherd/coyote, and I miss him equally. RIP, my wild boys. I love you forever.)

Art by Drew Rausch!