Coyotes and Pelicans: What Nature Can Teach Us About Business Success and Survival

By Dr. Robert W. Stewart

Natural leaders possess inherent skills, but it's how they react to situations that determines how successful they'll be. Coyotes and Pelicans: What Nature Can Teach Us About Business Success and Survival is a fable about two animal families trying to survive an exceptionally dry summer in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The leaders of the families have very different approaches toward ensuring survival, and the book explores how different ideas can yield successful results.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543946406

Book preview

Together

It was an unusually dry and hot summer in Northern California. In Modoc County, rain was last sighted a week before Arbor Day and the needles of the Ponderosa, Jeffrey pines, and White Firs were curling and browning in the sun. The heat slowly burned the purple grasslands of the sage-steppe a corn yellow, and the little water that remained in Clear Lake retreated to the middle of the pool. The juniper and white-barked aspens had no shore on which to admire their own reflections. The sky was an unbroken blue, troubled only occasionally by the thinnest of clouds, and the mountain elk, mule deer, and pronghorn antelopes had long left the South Warner Wilderness in search of shade and better pasture in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

A pack of coyotes wandered along the Pit River. The last time they traveled this way, the banks ran next to a wide stream where a flick of a sharp claw was enough to hook a black bass or pull-out of the water a struggling catfish. Now the river was no more than a trickle, barely enough to dampen a parched throat. It had been four days since their last meal and the memory of a small flock of geese, little more than feathers and beaks, was all the pack had to nourish.

Natas walked at the back of the line. His fur now hung loosely from his haunches. He always imagined his fur was grayer and thicker than anyone else’s, even Old Tom’s, the pack leader, but now flies buzzed at the areas of bare skin exposed to the sun. His tongue lolled from the side of his mouth, although there was no moisture in the air to catch and little wind to cool him. His stomach grumbled.

He did well days ago when the pack found the geese by the creek in Jess Valley. There was little meat left on all of them but he spotted one bird at the edge of the flock that was just a little fatter and juicier than the others, and by standing with his still-bushy tail blocking the view of his find, he managed to keep it for himself. Despite the days that passed, the taste lingered and he was long overdue another.

The rest of the pack was at least fifty yards ahead of him but Natas was in no rush. It was clear to him—even if it wasn’t clear yet to the other coyotes—that Old Tom was well past his prime. They should have never gone this direction. Old Tom’s promise that the rains would return soon was untrue. The rains would never fall again. He was sure of it. And if they did… the pack would be a pile of bones and skin by then, fit only for feeding the buzzards. They were going the wrong