The howl of the coyote is America’s “original national anthem,” says Dan Flores, author of Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History. A totemic animal in Native American mythology, the coyote has lived in North America for more than a million years. But since the early 19th-century, when Lewis and Clark first encountered them, coyotes have been subject to a pitiless war of extermination by ranchers and government agencies alike.

Even today, some 500,000 coyotes are killed each year, many shot to death from small planes and helicopters. Yet the coyote has survived all attempts to eradicate it, spreading from its original territory west of the Rockies to the East Coast, where it has now found a safe,