Robin Giles did not quite believe the rumors that passed among his neighbors. He couldn’t yet picture the carnage: pastures bloodied by the carcasses of sheep and goats with highly distinctive wounds—bite marks at the throat, abdominal cavities emptied of lungs and liver, entrails left to rot in the Hill Country sun. Coyotes.

It was the late 1960s, and Giles was in his 20s, a big man with dark, curly hair and cool blue eyes. His family had been raising livestock on their ranch in Kendall County, about 50 miles north of San Antonio, for nearly a century. In bygone times, Texas ranchers had waged a war of extirpation against coyotes, and Giles believed the war had been won. A coyote had scarcely been seen in that landscape for more than 40 years.

The Hill Country makes up part of a vast region known as the Edwards Plateau. As a matter of both geography and legend, there is no place closer to the heart of Texas. Occupying tens of thousands of square miles—an area more than twice the size of Massachusetts—­the plateau encompasses the intersection of Central, South and West Texas. It is bordered by Austin and San Antonio to the east, and to the west by the Pecos River and the Chihuahuan Desert. Its history is exceptionally violent. By the 1700s, the Tonkawa people were driven out by the Apache, who were in turn nearly exterminated by the Comanche. For much of the 19th century, the plateau was a site of the Texas-Indian wars, which resulted in the destruction and displacement of numerous Indigenous nations and became fodder for countless Westerns, including John Ford’s The Searchers. Until the Civil War, white settlers primarily raised cattle; as overgrazing depleted the once-rich grasslands, they brought in increasingly large herds of sheep and goats, whose diets were well suited to manage brush.