COYOTE WINDS
A Novel by Helen Sedwick

When thirteen-year old Myles brings home a coyote pup half-blinded by a dust storm, his father warns him a coyote can’t be trusted. His neighbor loads his rifle and takes aim. Yet Myles is determined to tame the pup just as his father is taming the land. The time is 1930. Tractors and fertilizers are transforming the prairie into the world’s bread basket. The American dream is within every man’s reach. But when drought turns these dreams into paint-stripping, crop-killing dust, Myles wonders if they have made a mistake taming the untamable.

Seventy years later, when Andy remembers his Grandpa Myles’s tales about growing up on the prairie, he wonders what stories he will tell when he has grandchildren. Algebra, soccer practice, computer games, the mall? Determined to keep his grandfather’s memories alive and have some adventures of his own, Andy heads out to discover what’s left of the wild prairie.

COYOTE WINDS tells of the times leading up to the Dust Bowl, a time of optimism and confidence, a time when a man was measured by what he produced, not what he could buy. It explores that American can-do spirit that drew people to the last frontier and the consequences of that spirit. And it asks whether that spirit survives today.