The View From a Coyote’s Eyes : SKYWATER <i> by Melinda Worth Popham (Graywolf Press: $17.95; 208 pp.)</i>

The coyote’s weird yodel will never become California’s state song. It will never be yelped by schoolchildren after the Pledge of Allegiance. Too unsettling. Too sad. Too exuberant. Too defiant.

But anyone who doesn’t have that wail echoing somewhere in the deepest canyons of his or her cerebral cortex doesn’t really belong in Southern California or the Southwest.

Some desert and foothill Indians at once revere and revile the coyote as the trickster--the clever court jester of their Earth-oriented legends. Howling poets and fringe environmentalists also claim Canis latrans as the mascot of their mythology. Even cattlemen and sheep ranchers, whose most inspiring image of the coyote is in the cross hairs of a rifle scope, probably find this dogged survivalist trotting through their dreams.

So it makes some sense that the “brush wolf” is finding a fairly prominent place in the literature of the West. “Skywater” is a brief, taut story that illuminates the bond of empathy between a certain breed of human and the coyote.

When their only son is killed in World War II, Albert and Hallie Ryder leave their roots in Kansas and head for the Pacific Ocean to seek solace. They stop instead in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, deciding that “sea and desert were two versions of the same fundamental.”

Settling into a simple, day-by-day existence, they find inspiration in the rugged adaptability of desert flora and fauna. Hallie makes mead from honey, and on special occasions, a particularly brilliant sunset, maybe, Albert--who was a merchant marine--drinks the brew and sings sea chanties out across the desert.

For a while, Albert earns his living as a coyote killer, collecting a bounty from the government for each carcass he delivers. He quits when he reads some Fish and Wildlife Service figures: In three decades, the federal government’s predator-control program eliminated 1,884,897 coyotes.

Living “as close to the center of the middle of nowhere as folks can get,” the Ryders observe the wildlife with which they share the desert, and gradually come to see the creatures as neighbors. They even name each of the coyotes that pass, generation after generation, under their benevolent gaze.

After 40 years of harmony with the environment, though, the old couple learn that tailings from a copper mine have poisoned the spring they shared with the animals. They intentionally foul it to keep the animals from drinking from it.

From there on, the story slips from a human perspective to that of the coyotes--one named Brand X in particular--who, like desperate Southern Californians, begin to search for new water supplies.

As the coyotes set out on their quest, the author steps onto a dangerous narrative trail. Anthropomorphic sentimentality sits coiled behind every cactus. But it never strikes. At least its fangs never penetrate.

Cyclical and rich with poetic resonance, the tale maintains the hard edge of honest nature reportage. Were Bambi and Thumper to wander into this painted desert, they’d learn quickly of a nature “red in tooth and claw.”

As a pup, the coyote Brand X saw his father shot by a varmint hunter. He watched as the hunter sliced the animal in two, mounting its head on the grill and tail on the rear bumper of his pickup. He watched as the trapper extracted his litter mates from their den by impaling them on a twisted strand of barbed wire.

When told from the old couple’s point of view, the yarn unravels in the spare prose style of folks who live close to the land--whose thoughts have been bleached to essences by a pounding desert sun.

When Brand X and the other animals are looking at the world, the author is similarly restrained. The coyotes do not, thank god, converse.

But we do go into the animals’ brains. Except for a very few lapses into romanticism, the coyotes’ streams-of-consciousness are convincing, depicted as instincts-- fear, hunger, horniness--and impressions--”hawk soaring” rather than thoughts.

It is easy to believe in Brand X, for instance, as he sits under a Paloverde tree through the heat of the day, thoroughly absorbed with the small movements of the ants and beetles under his snout. At the same time, it is easy to care about the coyotes as “characters,” involved in an adventurous trek that forces them to confront their wild world that increasingly intersects with human civilization.

On the other hand, anyone who has stood on a moonlit, sage-scented ridge and heard that lunatic yip yap yahoooo! may wonder.

Across Southern California, water sources shrink and become polluted as bulldozers continue to rip out chaparral for more housing tracts. Each day, dozens of species lose habitat. People lose something too.

Is it stupidly sentimental to imagine that those scraggly dogs are laughing at us, or crying for us, as we allow our own world to become so diminished and our own wild nature so thoroughly tamed?