The first volume of Urban Coyote, which appeared last year (Lost Moose), was subtitled A Yukon Anthology; the second volume, just released, is subtitled New Territory and only in the cover blurb do we understand it to be a “second Yukon anthology.” One can feel in these minor confusions a book wishing to become a magazine; certainly something of a periodical nature is emerging. Both volumes indicate a writerly presence in the North that may surprise southern readers whose sense of a literary north extends to the poems of Robert Service and retellings of John Franklin’s icy fate. The North in these volumes is half wilderness, half city; its settings are more often the boreal forest than the high Arctic; its stories are of the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth. These books throw light on that part of the collective imagination that lies in semi-darkness, somewhere between rural fantasy and urban unconcern: they illuminate a place that we suspect to be “out there” but that we glimpse only rarely. The second volume contains a story by the wily Ivan Coyote, who hails from Whitehorse, and whose nom de plume adds just the right goofy resonance to the title of the book.