zan wrote:I admit I have not read any of his books.
He is consistently meticulous about tagging
Fiction/Myth vs. fact.
And says so, within the context of each of his books.
To give the reader an informative view does he "tag" the myth/fact in the book or at the end?
If at the end there is chance for the reader to lose perspective as to the content: reading myth as facts.
Zan -
Might as well let the man speak for himself........
This is the preface to "The Voice of the Coyote"
And, in my opinion, stands alone
As a gem of an essay.
"Originally I intended to make this book only a modest collection of coyote tales which their tellers had delighted me in telling, and which I delight in telling my own way. Treatment of the animal's characteristics was to serve as a kind of preface. Gradually natural history took dominance over tale. In the year 1921 I began setting down some things I heard about Senor Coyote and making notes on his record in print, but a full quarter of a century before that, while I was listening to the crickets behinds the baseboards against the rock walls of our ranch home in Live Oak County, Texas, and to my mother's sweet voice, the coyote was talking to me. I did not at the time know he was talking to me, but he was. As I have gone along with the tales and the natural history, I have come to the conclusion that nobody can understand either without some knowledge of the other. Sympathy is equally requisite. Not even the most scientific mammalogist can comprehend the whole animal without hospitality towards the stuff of dreams that this more than mere mammal has influenced human minds to weave around him. Hospitality is not to be expected from those individuals who hear in the rhythms of nature only what Tennyson's Northern Farmer heard in the hoofbeats of his horse:
Proputty, proputty, proputty - that's what I 'ears 'em saay.
Sympathy for wild animals, sympathy that is intellectual as much as emotional, has not been a strong element in the traditional American way of life. "I was wrathy to kill a bear," David Crockett said, and that is essentially all one learns about bears from the mightiest of frontier bear-hunters - except that he killed a hundred and five in one season and immediately thereafter got elected to the Tennessee legislature on his reputation. How familiar the iterated remark: "I thought I might see something and so took (or taken) along my gun" - as if no enjoyment or other good could come from seeing a wild animal without killing it. Buffalo Bill derived his name from the fact that he excelled in killing buffaloes, not from knowing anything about them except as targets or from conveying any interest in them as part of nature. While Zebulon Pike and two of his explorers were lying in the grass on the plains of Kansas, November 1, 1806, a band of "cabrie" (antelopes), he records, "came up among our horses to satisfy their curiosity. We could not resist the temptation of killing two, although we had plenty of meat." Any restraint put upon killing was from motives other than sympathy. On one occasion Pike prevented his men from shooting at game "not merely because of the scarcity of ammunition but, as I conceived, the law of morality forbade it also." During the whole of a rainy day shortly after this moral act, "we employed ourselves," Pike says, "in reading the Bible, Pope's Essays, and in pricking on our arms with India ink some characters." In The Texan Ranger, published in London, 1866, Captain Flack, fresh from the sporting fields of the Southwest, describes the game of slaughtering thus: The men of one community lined up against those of another to see which group could kill the most game during a day's shooting. A squirrel and a rabbit counted one point each, a wild turkey five points, a deer ten points. The number of points scored in the particular contest described by Captain Flack totaled 3470. These are not instances of eccentricity but of the representative American way, until only yesterday, of looking at wild animals. Often while reading the chronicles of frontiersmen one does come upon an interesting observation concerning wildlife, but it is likely to prefaced by some statement as, "I didn't have a gun, and so thought I might as well see what happened." The majority of country-dwellers in western America today would consider it necessary to apologize for not killing a coyote they happened to see doing something unusual. The traditional killer attitude is a part of the traditional exploitation of the land. A few early farmers conserved the soil - George Washington was one - but they were stray oddities. A few pioneers had naturalistic interests, but any revelation of such interests branded the holder of them as being peculiar or even undemocratic. The mass rule then, as now, was:
Conform and be dull. In 1846 a young Englishman named George Frederick Ruxton landed at Vera Cruz, equipped himself with pack mules, rode to Mexico City, then up through "the Republic" to El Paso, across New Mexico into Colorado, where he spent the winter, and thence back to "civilization," which seemed to him "flat and stale," on the Missouri River. He carried home a chronicle that remains one of the most delightful and illuminating books of travel that North America has occasioned - Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains. In Colorado, as Ruxton tells in the book, he made acquaintance with a large gray wolf. He had just shot two antelopes. Why more than one was necessary for a meal for him and his half-breed guide, he does not say. Anyway, the bounty left for the wolf attached him to the provider. For days he followed Ruxton. At camp every evening, he would "squat down quietly at a little distance." Sometimes Ruxton saw his eyes gleaming in the light of the campfire. After the men had rolled up in their blankets, the lobo would "help himself to anything lying about." In the morning, as soon as the men broke camp, the lobo, in Ruxton's words, "took possession and quickly ate up the remnants of supper and some little extras I always took care to leave him. Then he would trot after us, and if we halted for a short time to adjust the mule-packs or water the animals, he sat down quietly until we resumed our march. But when I killed an antelope and was in the act of butchering it, he gravely looked on, or loped round and round, licking his jaws in a state of self-gratulation. I had him twenty times a day within reach of my rifle, but we became such old friends that I never dreamed of molesting him." No American contemporary of Ruxton's on the frontier would have resisted killing that wolf. He would have said that he was killing it because the wolf killed; he would have said that the wolf was cruel, sneaking, cowardly. Actually, he would have hilled it because he was "wrathy to kill." It did not strike Ruxton that the wolf was cruel - at least not more cruel than man. It struck Ruxton that the wolf was interesting; he had towards it the sympathy that comes from civilized perspective. This sympathy is found in the two extremes of society - savages and people with cultivated minds and sensibilities. A subsequent chapter treats of Indian harmony with nature, the feeling of brotherhood towards the coyote and other animals. "We be of one blood, ye and I," is the call of the jungle folk. "And what is man that he should not run with his brothers?" asked Mowgli of The Jungle Book. "Surely the wolves are my brothers." The American Indian's sympathy for fellow animals was not sentiment or superstition; nor was it an expression of intellectual curiosity; it was part of his harmony with nature. Mary Austin, who perhaps more than any other interpreter of the Southwest has sensed the spiritual values in nature, said: "No man has ever really entered into the heart of a country until he has adopted or made up myths about its familiar objects." A reading of The Land of Little Rain, The Land of Journeys' Ending and other books of hers leads one to conclude that by "myths" she meant sympathy derived from knowledge and understanding. "The best thing we get out of any study of animal life is the feel of it." This feel, this sympathy, reaches its climax among the civilized in such diverse natures as tart Thoreau of Walden, sweet Saint Francis of Assisi, patrician Grey of Fallodon, penetrating Hudson of Far Away and Long Ago, scientific Jefferson, and plain William Wright of the bears, who, watching a great grizzly looking out for long whiles from the top of a snowy mountain, concluded that "he was enjoying the scenery." Among the wise, this civilized sympathy infuses knowledge. It is a kind of cultivated gentleness. It is foreign to harsh and boisterous frontiers and comes after many of the wold creatures to which it has been directed have been destroyed. I confess to a sympathy for the coyote that has grown until it lives in the deepest part of my nature. Yet sympathy is not good enough for any study of natural history, any more than good intentions are enough for the executive of a powerful nation. I am not a naturalist or a biologist, but I have, I think, examined about all the scientific knowledge in print concerning the coyote. Seeking to make the observations of out-of-doors men my own, I have found a few such men who seem to me to know more about coyotes than most scientific writers. The garnered experiences, always freely given, of many men in the field have, in a way, offset the limitations of my own experiences. On of my minuses is not having met coyote men in Canada and Alaska, as I have met and gained from them in Mexico and through the Western States - but the coyote is a coyote anywhere you find him. Some parts of what I have written may not be respectfully received by academic biologists who leave out the most real of all realities - imagination. History, it has been said, is the prolonged shadows of a few individuals. Tales and other lore that make up whole chapters towards the end of the book are the shadows that the slight creature called coyote has projected through the imaginations of people living with him for centuries. I write of a species; many coyotes over long periods of time, scattered over continental vastness, play their parts in the record. They and the species of which they are "specimens" have somehow amalgamated for me into a single character of protean characteristics, living without aging through dateless generations - a character neither moral nor immoral; utterly devoid of a Karamazov conscience abridging the tragedy of the whole human race, though capable of voicing poignant tragedy; never noble, though often as fantastical as noble Cyrano de Bergerac. I do not suppose that Brother
Coyote will mount into such an identity for my readers, but for me the record has developed into kind of a biography. The biography of any individual, unless of an absolute recluse, is full of the interplay between him and other persons. The coyote was never a recluse. The impact upon him by wandering tribes, by civilizations that built pyramids in the Valley of Teotihuacan and perished, and then by inheritors of European cultures exploiting and adapting themselves to pristine lands, has been marked. The life history of the coyote consists not only of objective facts about the animal as an animal but of the picturesque and emphatic reality of his own impact on human beings. It has been my purpose to realize a being of nature with all of that being's meanings to associated humanity. Like the dog, the horse, and the fox of Europe, the coyote cannot be disassociated from man and remain whole. "A naturalist cannot exaggerate consciously," W.H. Hudson wrote; " if he is capable of unconscious exaggeration, then he is no naturalist." If in reading this life of a species, some adult confuses proven coyote cunning with impossible ruses attributed to the coyote tribe, I shall question his perspective abilities; even though not a naturalist, I have tried to make the distinctions clear at all times. The important debates are not concerning animal behavior but concerning the animal's proper ecological and economic place in man's world. Most of the land in which the coyote is most at home will never be thickly settled or intensively cultivated. Nature has said so. One can drive fifteen hundred miles from Brownsville at the mouth of the Rio Grande to San Diego, California, and be out of sight of range country for only short distances. One can drive two thousand miles from Oklahoma City to Seattle and with only minor skips be in grazing lands and mountains all the way. All these spaces of plains, brush, hills, mountains and woods are favorable to and favored by native wildlife. To what extent should the coyote be allowed to continue here, also in Canada, Alaska, and on south into Central America? Biologists within the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (formerly the Biological Survey) and biologists outside are generally not in agreement. On one hand, there is the relentless indictment by the late E.A. Goldman, Senior Biologist in the United States Department of Agriculture, of the coyote as "the archpredator of our times," deserving no quarter. On the other hand, there are moderators exemplified by E. Raymond Hall, whose Mammals of Nevada, published in 1947, summarizes arguments for the coyote's place in his own country. The American Society of Mammalogists is on record opposing wholesale poisoning of coyotes. State game departments, ranch men and farmers have generally co-operated with federal "control", though their opinions vary on how severe or how limited this control should be. Nobody is against protecting human interests from brute destruction. Many people are against wholesale destruction. The interrelations between one form of life and multitudinous other forms of life are so complex that annihilation of the coyote will not settle matters for the rest of us any more than annihilating the people of one nation will bring peace, plenty and freedom to the peoples of the other nations. In the chapter on "Adaptation" I have gone more specifically into coyote ecology. Human values, intellectual and spiritual, are not invariably coincident with economic values. Every national park, zoological garden and natural history museum in the land attests to this truth as respects wildlife. Tourists do not go west primarily to lodge in hotels and tourist courts. If chambers of commerce in Western states that strive for tourist money had imagination, they would arrange hearing places for those who would like to hear coyote voices, just as the national parks provide visible bears; and they would both lure and educate tourists by publishing a truth thus finely expressed by H.E. Anthony of the American Museum of Natural History:
"To many who have heard the ecstatic little prairie wolf greet their camp-fire from out of the dusk, or have arisen at break of dawn and heard his frenzied hymn to the sun, a West without the coyote seems colorless and flat."
As Tolstoy said, there are questions "put only in order that they may remain forever questions." Putting on the spectacles of science in expectation of finding the answer to everything looked at signifies inner blindness. All of the ecological, biological and other logical studies that public bureaus and private enterprise may forward still will not bring those "authentic tidings of invisible things" that the lifted voice of the coyote brings in the early evening while lightning bugs soften the darkness under the trees, or the voice of some other belonger to the rhythms of the earth brings in a simple tale of brother coyote."
So, judge the man yourself.
hoka hey
john
