Listen!

Twelve-year-old Charley Morgan lives with her father, Paul Morgan, and their housekeeper, Sarita, in a house on Eagle Lake. Two years earlier, Charley's mother, Colleen Morgan, an award-winning nature photographer, died in a plane crash in the Brazilian rainforest. In March, Charley's friend Amy's brother Travis crashed his car into a tree, leaving Charley with an injured right leg and a concussion that erased her memory of the accident. She has missed the rest of sixth grade, and now her father orders her to walk daily to rebuild her strength before fall.

Charley sets off around the lake with a handmade walking stick, bitter that Amy has left to spend the summer at Lake George with another friend. Halfway through, she spots a wild, red-gold dog sitting still by a sweet gum tree. Something passes between them like an electric shock. Then the dog vanishes without a sound.

A neighbor, Mrs. Davis, explains that the dog appeared a month ago and follows the Davis family's golden retriever, Sadie, everywhere. He is starving, terrified of people, and too clever for Animal Control's traps. Charley impulsively offers to take him in. She walks Sadie home along the woods trail, a path she has avoided since her mother's death. Coyote, as Charley names the dog, follows through the trees. She sets food at the end of the driveway and retreats inside. That night, she persuades her father to let her keep the dog, arguing Coyote will die without help. Paul agrees on the condition the dog shows no sign of being dangerous.

Charley marks Day 2 on her calendar and titles her project "The Taming," hoping to finish by month's end, nineteen days away. She walks the woods trail daily, using Sadie to lure Coyote along. But after a week, Coyote still refuses to eat unless Charley is inside with the door shut. A vivid mental image comes to her of men using food to trap Coyote and lock him in a shed. She realizes that feeding him only reinforces his fear, since food once meant capture.

Sarita asks what dogs like people for. The answer is playing. Charley begins throwing sticks for Sadie, and Coyote joins the game, playing closer and closer until the dogs swerve around Charley as they run. Then Sadie grabs Charley's walking stick and drops it in a pond. Charley discovers that without the stick she can walk nearly as well, and Coyote, who feared the stick, now moves freely around her.

Drawing on Jane Goodall's methods with chimpanzees, Charley begins spending evenings in Coyote's territory, laying trails of cooked liver to draw him closer. Progress is slow. Mr. Heyward, a skeptical neighbor, warns that a feral dog not socialized early will be wild forever and threatens to shoot Coyote. Charley refuses to believe him.

On Day 19, heavy rain breaks the drought. Charley walks the trail, falls into poison ivy, and begins crying for reasons she cannot name. As she lies on the ground, something touches her neck. She turns expecting Sadie but finds Coyote's nose an inch from her face. It is the first time he has touched her. Her mother's voice sounds in her mind: "Listen. Listen." Charley listens to the rain, the wind, the birds, and the breathing of the woods.

That same day, Charley opens the door to her mother's studio for the first time in two years. She discovers copies of her mother's posthumous book, Trees and Stones Will Teach You, a collection of Eagle Lake photographs paired with quotations. One line beside a beaver photograph strikes her: "To understand any living thing you must creep within and feel the beating of its heart" (94). She recognizes this as what she wants to do with Coyote.

The weeks that follow bring steady progress. When Sadie swims home one afternoon, Coyote stands at the water's edge but does not follow. He lies down, choosing Charley over Sadie. That evening, he takes liver from Charley's fingers for the first time. Each morning he begins waiting at the driveway. Charley discovers the Pine Grove, a hillock covered in pines and cedars, and sits in deep stillness. Letting her mind drift, she visualizes Coyote chasing deer and sees one kick him across the nose. When he finds her afterward, the exact cut is there. She is certain this was more than imagination.

Every attempt to collar Coyote fails; he seems to sense her intention. Charley decides to explain honestly why a collar matters, and after this conversation, Coyote lets her buckle the green collar around his neck. A mobile vet, Dr. Frazier, sedates him with a tranquilizer pill and provides a checkup and shots. Dr. Frazier identifies Coyote as a healthy, approximately two-year-old Chow-shepherd mix, but bloodwork reveals heartworms. The vet assures Charley that treatment is possible and calls Coyote "a survivor."

During an August thunderstorm, Charley lures Coyote inside the studio, leaving the screen door open so he will not feel trapped. This becomes their nightly arrangement: Charley sleeps surrounded by her mother's photographs, and Coyote comes and goes freely. By Day 60, he stays until morning, waking beside Charley and letting her rub his chest. The connection she feels is "like a steady vibration up through her arm and into her heart" (162). An apologetic email from Amy makes Charley laugh and realize she is no longer angry. She begins swimming in Eagle Lake again, and Coyote grows comfortable enough to greet Paul's car each evening with a wagging tail.

Then one morning Coyote is gone. For four days Charley searches, driving roads with Sarita, posting notices, walking every trail they have shared. On the fourth day, she reaches the Pine Grove and is consumed by grief for everything: her mother's death, the accident, Amy's departure, and the lost years. She sobs until she is empty, then becomes aware of the woods around her, her heartbeat blending with cicadas and birdsong. A fox steps into view, sits before her, then vanishes like a ghost. In that moment, Charley knows Coyote is alive. She feels "the steady pulse of his heart as surely as she feels her own" (183).

The explanation arrives: A neighbor's friend has a female dog in heat, and a gold dog with a green collar has been among the males gathered nearby. At dusk, Coyote limps down the road, muddy but jaunty, as if returning from a routine outing.

Charley finds her mother's digital camera in the studio and resolves to photograph Coyote for school. She carries copies of Trees and Stones Will Teach You upstairs and imagines a future day when she will rehang the fairy castle photo in her room. When she asks Sarita about her jigsaw puzzles, Sarita reveals that her son had a motorcycle accident, spent four years in a coma, and died. She worked puzzles at his bedside and never stopped.

On the last day of summer, Paul comes home early with a doghouse kit and a gold name tag engraved "Coyote." Charley paddles her mother's canoe, the Dragonfly, to Tree, the ancient sweet gum her mother loved, and rests her hand on its bark. Paddling home, she watches Coyote swim after her, a glittering V of ripples trailing behind, and thinks he is lucky, "but not so very wild" (197). She has prepared her photos, planned her schedule, and spoken to Amy on the phone. The summer that began in isolation ends with Charley reconnected to her mother's legacy, the natural world, and the people around her.