I used to put myself into the animal world. We used to imagine we were animals, because we could be in a different world. We got tired of being people, tired of using hair dryers and shoes and clothes. We pretended we were something else for hours. For some reason, the idea of being in the animal world was intriguing to us—being able to create lives in our imaginations that weren’t human. Then we would return to our human lives, to the televisions and microwaves and bath tubs. LeGuin lets me remember the life that animals have that we might not know about. Terrible as it sounds, animals are so unknown to us. Although they aren’t as needy, developed or “civilized” as humans, they have lives, like us. When people say “pets take sooo much work to take care of” we forget they are alive. She helped put back into perspective the way I remember saying “people” as we pretended we were unicorns, or mermaids at the pool. We were young girls, we did that. LeGuin’s story also captured me in the way the “animals” spoke. Coyote used the word fuck multiple times, and it caught me by surprise when I read it in the dialogue. It also intrigued me how the girl fell from the sky, like she fell out of her world and into the world of the animal kingdom, only the animals were more like people living in a dream. It reminded me of what we used to imagine. I got caught up on wondering what they ate, like the dream salmon mush, but there were so many different kinds of animals, they couldn’t all eat salmon that weren’t really salmon. It also got me how they all had the names of the animals they portrayed, but in their “human” form, and how they resembled the animals they were, like Horse, who had the body and spirit of a stallion, or Coyote, who was wild and unruly—like a coyote. I’ve read LeGuin’s Buffalo Gals before in a class where my teacher worshipped her, but not this story, and it kept my attention until the end, when things got difficult and the story wrapped itself up. I really liked the personas she gave the characters, including the girl who fell from the sky. I also liked how in the very beginning we learn about Coyote throwing her eyes into the tree, like the story of Coyote throwing his eyes into the sky. The way she related the eyes of the Coyote to the missing eye of the girl was well done but there are things that weren’t resolved, like the rocks in the mush pot and why her eye fell out. But we do learn that now the girl has obtained eyes that can see both into the animal world and back into the real world. When she sees the cattle and the ranchers and when Coyote is poisoned are key points to the story I feel. After Coyote’s death, when the girl is discussing the death with the other animals, and Grandmother says “Oh, don’t worry about Coyote! She gets killed all the time.” The story takes on a different tone. The last page is where the story really takes a turn. I liked the way Chickadee tells her to build gardens for her, and Spider tells her not to kill her “or I’ll make it rain…” but it’s sad that she may never see Coyote again. All in all, the story sort of brought back the child in me. It helped me to remember another world, and the story was a good read with a past built into its present.