Title: Coyote Author: Peter Gadol Published by: Crown, 1990 ISBN: 0-517-57549-3 [hardcover, 311 pages]
The hero of Coyote is a young man named Coyote Gato, a loner who has spent his life wandering the desert of the America Southwest. Coyote believes he was mystically conceived beneath the desert's Great Tree; he also believes he can turn himself into a cat. Now, at age twenty-one, he makes his living by removing all the street signs near the dying desert town of Frescura so he can guide potential pilgrims to a mysterious local ashram.One hot summer day, Coyote hitches a ride with Madeleine Nash, a veteran journalist on a mission to investigate the ever more powerful and secretive cult that runs the ashram. Madeleine, too, is a loner. Her own tragic secret has led her back to the harshly beautiful desert she once knew well.
In an atmosphere of free love, cosmic longings, a little magic, and occasional folly, Coyote and Madeleine explore an ashram that has become an oasis for disoriented people dressed in mauve jumpsuits and looking for salvation. It's presided over by one Guru B -- no one know what the B stands for -- who wears eight wristwatches at a time, owns more than seventy sports cars, and smiles spiritually and frequently, but who never speaks. The ashram's secrets include the whereabouts of the giant, glistening meteorite that was stolen from Coyote's mentor, the renegade physicist and astronomer Frog Reading.
Coyote is determined to help recover the meteorite for Frog. In the process, he assists an archaeologist named Amy as she surreptitiously excavates a long-lost Indian city -- and he starts to fall in love with her sculptor-brother, Matthew. But Coyote also uncovers the ashram's nefarious designs on the desert. At last, Coyote and Matthew, Frog and Madeleine must unite to try to rescue their landscape, their meteorite, and their haphazardly improvised family. The fiery climax involves banana mint ice cream, love lost and found, the Great Tree, and the lost city itself.
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