Skywater offers the reader some unsettlingly bad news and then some even worse news: The least of humanity is the best of us, and even that isn't much. On the other hand, there are coyotes, and insofar as we have within us some spark of the coyotes, we are redeemable. But Skywater is not a Walt Disney anthropomorphizing of the animal world, in which noble human beings come to the aid of unfortunates in the animal world, or (in the ones I really hate) where animals briefly act with the nobility of man.
The nobility in these two hundred tightly composed pages rests within the animal world. So does most of the intelligence and sensitivity. The human actors of Melinda Worth Popham's story who show signs of civilization are those who behave most like coyotes, those from whom we least expect culture - two scruffy hermits (Popham demonstrates remarkable skill by subtly transforming these two thorny derelicts from society, initially objects of our suspicion and even contempt, into objects of affection and admiration) and, of all things, the military crew on a gunnery range.
Popham's villains are more predictable: mining companies, trappers, police, tourists. Whatever souls there are in these pages belong to the animals and the few human beings who are closest to them.
Skywater's story is wonderfully simple: A bunch of desert coyotes depend on a watering hole provided by two old, disreputable retirees. Mine tailings eventually pollute the water so the couple must bring in their drinking water by the bottleful, which means that there is no more water in the horse tank, and the coyotes must move on, seeking Skywater, a primal idea that exists in their collective and historic mentality. Albert and Hallie, the recluses who know the coyotes as individuals and gave them names during the years they came to drink at the oasis, provide the reader with something of an introduction to the character and role of the various members of the small coyote band, but it is Popham who helps us come to know the animals as distinctive, interesting, even compelling beings - like Albert and Hallie. In that process, she helps us understand that all coyotes (and perhaps all creatures) are not only members of a species with specific behavioral patterns but individuals with character.
Under the leadership of a mystically wise leader labeled “Brand X” by Albert and Hallie, the coyote band travels across an unfamiliar landscape. To my mind, the most haunting passage of the book describes the feelings the coyotes have as they leave their territory. Just as they know a landscape better than we humans can ever know, new landscapes are more foreign to them than any landscape can ever be for us: As time went by, each coyote came to a certain place in the dry water-trail he had never gone beyond before, the invisible, personal boundary of his home ground. Wherever it fell, a prickle of awareness passed along his spine as he crossed it and became an outsider. No matter that the mountains looked the same, that the gritty wash felt the same underfoot, and that the cacti, bushes, and trees - taken one by one - looked like the ones just back across the border. On the far side of a boundary, nothing at all was the same. It was not home ground. It lacked meaning.
A saguaro looked just the same, but it was not a meaningful saguaro. It was not a saguaro to get one's bearings by. It stirred no memories of a squirrel eaten beside it, of a chase that had ended at
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