The coyote is one of the great trickster figures of Native North American storytelling, appearing across the traditions of the Southwest, California, the Great Basin and the Plains as a being who is at once creator and fool, benefactor and appetite. In many story-cycles Coyote helps to shape the world, to bring fire or light or death into being, and to teach; in the same breath he is greedy, lecherous, boastful and forever undone by his own schemes, a figure whose disasters are told to entertain and to instruct. He is neither simply good nor simply evil but ambivalent, embodying the disorderly, creative and unpredictable in the world.
Something genuinely unusual happened to the coyote in the twentieth century: rather than retreating before human settlement as most large North American predators did, it expanded, moving east and north across the continent as wolves were exterminated from most of their range and removed a major competitor and predator of coyotes themselves; coyotes are now established in every American state except Hawaii and throughout Mexico and Canada, including within major cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles, an ecological success story that sits oddly beside the animal's long reputation as an outwitted fool in its own stories.