Coyote by Catherine Reid

Author:Catherine Reid [Reid, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

"NOTHING IS SO MUCH to be feared as fear," Thoreau wrote in his journal, though he wasn't describing his own angst in that passage; he was chastising a young writer for not being more forthright in her work. The impetus doesn't matter; I know what he means. For me, fear takes root first in my hands, which shake all the time anyway as the result of a benign tremor; but that trembling accelerates when I'm afraid, and I have to jam my hands in my pockets or hang on to my wrists to control it. I can't trust them to keep hold of whatever I've grasped.

But of the several fears I might add to the lone one that Thoreau names, the worst, I think, are the fear of a pain that doesn't cease, the kind that has Holly now, and the fear of despair, the consequence of being unable to do anything about it.

No wonder I want to see the carnivore that lives in dens and dark thickets, the one that thrives despite the myriad assaults against it. Impose fifty-dollar bounties, and its population grows. Increase the number of hunters, and it has larger litters. Send in more sharpshooters, taking aim from helicopters, and the animal begins breeding in its first year of life, rather than waiting until it is closer to two. Coyotes have even figured out how to avoid cyanide bombs, though it's hard to imagine how they sorted that out—the poison is dispersed so fast that death is almost instantaneous.

Yet somehow the survivors—the ones who witnessed the detonation or pieced together the evidence afterward—have figured out the process and learned to avoid the triggers. They store the information, they pass it on, and they just keep traveling, despite the tough odds.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.