The Unreal and the Real - Vol 1 - Where On Earth

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “OK,” the coyote said, “let’s go!” And set off without a backward glance. The child scrambled to her feet and followed. “Where are we going?” she said, and the coyote, trotting on down along the creek, answered, “On down along the creek…”

  There must have been a while she was asleep while she walked, because she felt like she was waking up, but she was walking along, only in a different place. She didn’t know how she knew it was different. They were still following the creek, though the gully was flattened out to nothing much, and there was still sagebrush range as far as the eye could see. The eye—the good one—felt rested. The other one still ached, but not so sharply, and there was no use thinking about it. But where was the coyote?

  She stopped. The pit of cold into which the plane had fallen reopened and she fell. She stood falling, a thin whimper making itself in her throat.

  “Over here!”

  The child turned. She saw a coyote gnawing at the half-dried-up carcass of a crow, black feathers sticking to the black lips and narrow jaw.

  She saw a tawny-skinned woman kneeling by a campfire, sprinkling something into a conical pot. She heard the water boiling in the pot, though it was propped between rocks, off the fire. The woman’s hair was yellow and grey, bound back with a string. Her feet were bare. The upturned soles looked as dark and hard as shoe soles, but the arch of the foot was high, and the toes made two neat curving rows. She wore bluejeans and an old white shirt. She looked over at the girl. “Come on, eat crow!” she said. The child slowly came toward the woman and the fire, and squatted down. She had stopped falling and felt very light and empty; and her tongue was like a piece of wood stuck in her mouth.

  Coyote was now blowing into the pot or basket or whatever it was. She reached into it with two fingers, and pulled her hand away shaking it and shouting, “Ow! Shit! Why don’t I ever have any spoons?” She broke off a dead twig of sagebrush, dipped it into the pot, and licked it. “Oh, boy,” she said. “Come on!”

  The child moved a little closer, broke off a twig, dipped. Lumpy pinkish mush clung to the twig. She licked. The taste was rich and delicate.

  “What is it?” she asked after a long time of dipping and licking.

  “Food. Dried salmon mush,” Coyote said. “It’s cooling down.” She stuck two fingers into the mush again, this time getting a good load, which she ate very neatly. The child, when she tried, got mush all over her chin. It was like chopsticks, it took practice. She practiced. They ate turn and turn until nothing was left in the pot but three rocks. The child did not ask why there were rocks in the mush-pot. They licked the rocks clean. Coyote licked out the inside of the pot-basket, rinsed it once in the creek, and put it onto her head. It fit nicely, making a conical hat. She pulled off her bluejeans. “Piss on the fire!” she cried, and did so, standing straddling it. “Ah, steam between the legs!” she said. The child, embarrassed, thought she was supposed to do the same thing, but did not want to, and did not. Bareassed, Coyote danced around the dampened fire, kicking her long thin legs out and singing,

  “Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight,

  Come out tonight, come out tonight,

  Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight,

  And dance by the light of the moon?”

  She pulled her jeans back on. The child was burying the remains of the fire in creek-sand, heaping it over, seriously, wanting to do right. Coyote watched her.

  “Is that you?” she said. “A Buffalo Gal? What happened to the rest of you?”

  “The rest of me?” The child looked at herself, alarmed.

  “All your people.”

  “Oh. Well, Mom took Bobbie, he’s my little brother, away with Uncle Norm. He isn’t really my uncle, or anything. So Mr. Michaels was going there anyway so he was going to fly me over to my real father, in Canyonville. Linda, my stepmother, you know, she said it was OK for the summer anyhow if I was there, and then we could see. But the plane.”

  In the silence the girl’s face became dark red, then greyish white. Coyote watched, fascinated. “Oh,” the girl said, “Oh—Oh—Mr. Michaels—he must be—Did the—”

  “Come on!” said Coyote, and set off walking.

  The child cried, “I ought to go back—”

  “What for?” said Coyote. She stopped to look round at the child, then went on faster. “Come on, Gal!” She said it as a name; maybe it was the child’s name, Myra, as spoken by Coyote. The child, confused and despairing, protested again, but followed her. “Where are we going? Where are we?”

  “This is my country,” Coyote answered, with dignity, making a long, slow gesture all round the vast horizon. “I made it. Every goddam sage bush.”

  And they went on. Coyote’s gait was easy, even a little shambling, but she covered the ground; the child struggled not to drop behind. Shadows were beginning to pull themselves out again from under the rocks and shrubs. Leaving the creek, they went up a long, low, uneven slope that ended away off against the sky in rimrock. Dark trees stood one here, another way over there; what people called a juniper forest, a desert forest, one with a lot more between the trees than trees. Each juniper they passed smelled sharply, cat-pee smell the kids at school called it, but the child liked it; it seemed to go into her mind and wake her up. She picked off a juniper berry and held it in her mouth, but after a while spat it out. The aching was coming back in huge black waves, and she kept stumbling. She found that she was sitting down on the ground. When she tried to get up her legs shook and would not go under her. She felt foolish and frightened, and began to cry.

  “We’re home!” Coyote called from way on up the hill.

  The child looked with her one weeping eye, and saw sagebrush, juniper, cheatgrass, rimrock. She heard a coyote yip far off in the dry twilight

  She saw a little town up under the rimrock, board houses, shacks, all unpainted. She heard Coyote call again, “Come on, pup! Come on, Gal, we’re home!” She could not get up, so she tried to go on all fours, the long way up the slope to the houses under the rimrock. Long before she got there, several people came to meet her. They were all children, she thought at first, and then began to understand that most of them were grown people, but all were very short; they were broad-bodied, fat, with fine, delicate hands and feet. Their eyes were bright. Some of the women helped her stand up and walk, coaxing her, “It isn’t much farther, you’re doing fine.” In the late dusk lights shone yellow-bright through doorways and through unchinked cracks between boards. Woodsmoke hung sweet in the quiet air. The short people talked and laughed all the time, softly. “Where’s she going to stay?”—“Put her in with Robin, they’re all asleep already!”—“Oh, she can stay with us.”

  The child asked hoarsely, “Where’s Coyote?”

  “Out hunting,” the short people said.

  A deeper voice spoke: “Somebody new has come into town?”

  “Yes, a new person,” one of the short men answered. Among these people the deep-voiced man bulked impressive; he was broad and tall, with powerful hands, a big head, a short neck. They made way for him respectfully. He moved very quietly, respectful of them also. His eyes when he stared down at the child were amazing. When he blinked, it was like the passing of a hand before a candleflame.

  “It’s only an owlet,” he said. “What have you let happen to your eye, new person?”

  “I was—We were flying—”

  “You’re too young to fly,” the big man said in his deep, soft voice. “Who brought you here?”

  “Coyote.”

  And one of the short people confirmed: “She came here with Coyote, Young Owl.”

  “Then maybe she should stay in Coyote’s house tonight,” the big man said.

  “It’s all bones and lonely in there,” said a short woman with fat cheeks and a striped shirt. “She can come with us.”

  That seemed to decide it. The fat-cheeked woman patted the child’s arm and took her past several shacks and shanties to a low, windowless house. The doorway
was so low even the child had to duck down to enter. There were a lot of people inside, some already there and some crowding in after the fat-cheeked woman. Several babies were fast asleep in cradle-boxes in corners. There was a good fire, and a good smell, like toasted sesame seeds. The child was given food, and ate a little, but her head swam and the blackness in her right eye kept coming across her left eye so she could not see at all for a while. Nobody asked her name or told her what to call them. She heard the children call the fat-cheeked woman Chipmunk. She got up courage finally to say, “Is there somewhere I can go to sleep, Mrs. Chipmunk?”

  “Sure, come on,” one of the daughters said, “in here,” and took the child into a back room, not completely partitioned off from the crowded front room, but dark and uncrowded. Big shelves with mattresses and blankets lined the walls. “Crawl in!” said Chipmunk’s daughter, patting the child’s arm in the comforting way they had. The child climbed onto a shelf, under a blanket. She laid down her head. She thought, “I didn’t brush my teeth.”

  ii

  She woke; she slept again. In Chipmunk’s sleeping room it was always stuffy, warm, and half-dark, day and night. People came in and slept and got up and left, night and day. She dozed and slept, got down to drink from the bucket and dipper in the front room, and went back to sleep and doze.

  She was sitting up on the shelf, her feet dangling, not feeling bad any more, but dreamy, weak. She felt in her jeans pockets. In the left front one was a pocket comb and a bubblegum wrapper, in the right front, two dollar bills and a quarter and a dime.

  Chipmunk and another woman, a very pretty dark-eyed plump one, came in. “So you woke up for your dance!” Chipmunk greeted her, laughing, and sat down by her with an arm around her.

  “Jay’s giving you a dance,” the dark woman said. “He’s going to make you all right. Let’s get you all ready!”

  There was a spring up under the rimrock, that flattened out into a pool with slimy, reedy shores. A flock of noisy children splashing in it ran off and left the child and the two women to bathe. The water was warm on the surface, cold down on the feet and legs. All naked, the two soft-voiced laughing women, their round bellies and breasts, broad hips and buttocks gleaming warm in the late afternoon light, sluiced the child down, washed and stroked her limbs and hands and hair, cleaned around the cheekbone and eyebrow of her right eye with infinite softness, admired her, sudsed her, rinsed her, splashed her out of the water, dried her off, dried each other off, got dressed, dressed her, braided her hair, braided each other’s hair, tied feathers on the braid-ends, admired her and each other again, and brought her back down into the little straggling town and to a kind of playing field or dirt parking lot in among the houses. There were no streets, just paths and dirt, no lawns and gardens, just sagebrush and dirt. Quite a few people were gathering or wandering around the open place, looking dressed up, wearing colorful shirts, print dresses, strings of beads, earrings. “Hey there, Chipmunk, Whitefoot!” they greeted the women.

  A man in new jeans, with a bright blue velveteen vest over a clean, faded blue workshirt, came forward to meet them, very handsome, tense, and important. “All right, Gal!” he said in a harsh, loud voice, which startled among all these soft-speaking people. “We’re going to get that eye fixed right up tonight! You just sit down here and don’t worry about a thing.” He took her wrist, gently despite his bossy, brassy manner, and led her to a woven mat that lay on the dirt near the middle of the open place. There, feeling very foolish, she had to sit down, and was told to stay still. She soon got over feeling that everybody was looking at her, since nobody paid her more attention than a checking glance or, from Chipmunk or Whitefoot and their families, a reassuring wink. Every now and then Jay rushed over to her and said something like, “Going to be as good as new!” and went off again to organize people, waving his long blue arms and shouting.

  Coming up the hill to the open place, a lean, loose, tawny figure—and the child started to jump up, remembered she was to sit still, and sat still, calling out softly, “Coyote! Coyote!”

  Coyote came lounging by. She grinned. She stood looking down at the child. “Don’t let that Bluejay fuck you up, Gal,” she said, and lounged on.

  The child’s gaze followed her, yearning.

  People were sitting down now over on one side of the open place, making an uneven half-circle that kept getting added to at the ends until there was nearly a circle of people sitting on the dirt around the child, ten or fifteen paces from her. All the people wore the kind of clothes the child was used to, jeans and jeans-jackets, shirts, vests, cotton dresses, but they were all barefoot; and she thought they were more beautiful than the people she knew, each in a different way, as if each one had invented beauty. Yet some of them were also very strange: thin black shining people with whispery voices, a long-legged woman with eyes like jewels. The big man called Young Owl was there, sleepy-looking and dignified, like Judge McCown who owned a sixty-thousand acre ranch; and beside him was a woman the child thought might be his sister, for like him she had a hook nose and big, strong hands; but she was lean and dark, and there was a crazy look in her fierce eyes. Yellow eyes, but round, not long and slanted like Coyote’s. There was Coyote sitting yawning, scratching her armpit, bored. Now somebody was entering the circle: a man, wearing only a kind of kilt and a cloak painted or beaded with diamond shapes, dancing to the rhythm of the rattle he carried and shook with a buzzing fast beat. His limbs and body were thick yet supple, his movements smooth and pouring. The child kept her gaze on him as he danced past her, around her, past again. The rattle in his hand shook almost too fast to see, in the other hand was something thin and sharp. People were singing around the circle now, a few notes repeated in time to the rattle, soft and tuneless. It was exciting and boring, strange and familiar. The Rattler wove his dancing closer and closer to her, darting at her. The first time she flinched away, frightened by the lunging movement and by his flat, cold face with narrow eyes, but after that she sat still, knowing her part. The dancing went on, the singing went on, till they carried her past boredom into a floating that could go on forever.

  Jay had come strutting into the circle, and was standing beside her. He couldn’t sing, but he called out, “Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!” in his big, harsh voice, and everybody answered from all round, and the echo came down from the rimrock on the second beat. Jay was holding up a stick with a ball on it in one hand, and something like a marble in the other. The stick was a pipe: he got smoke into his mouth from it and blew it in four directions and up and down and then over the marble, a puff each time. Then the rattle stopped suddenly, and everything was silent for several breaths. Jay squatted down and looked intently into the child’s face, his head cocked to one side. He reached forward, muttering something in time to the rattle and the singing that had started up again louder than before; he touched the child’s right eye in the black center of the pain. She flinched and endured. His touch was not gentle. She saw the marble, a dull yellow ball like beeswax, in his hand; then she shut her seeing eye and set her teeth.

  “There!” Jay shouted. “Open up. Come on! Let’s see!”

  Her jaw clenched like a vise, she opened both eyes. The lid of the right one stuck and dragged with such a searing white pain that she nearly threw up as she sat there in the middle of everybody watching

  “Hey, can you see? How’s it work? It looks great!” Jay was shaking her arm, railing at her. “How’s it feel? Is it working?”

  What she saw was confused, hazy, yellowish. She began to discover, as everybody came crowding around peering at her, smiling, stroking and patting her arms and shoulders, that if she shut the hurting eye and looked with the other, everything was clear and flat; if she used them both, things were blurry and yellowish, but deep.

  There, right close, was Coyote’s long nose and narrow eyes and grin. “What is it, Jay?” she was asking, peering at the new eye. “One of mine you stole that time?”

  “It’s pine pitch,” Jay shouted
furiously. “You think I’d use some stupid secondhand coyote eye? I’m a doctor.”

  “Ooooh, Ooooh, a doctor,” Coyote said. “Boy, that is one ugly eye. Why didn’t you ask Rabbit for a rabbit-dropping? That eye looks like shit.” She put her lean face yet closer, till the child thought she was going to kiss her; instead, the thin, firm tongue once more licked accurate across the pain, cooling, clearing. When the child opened both eyes again the world looked pretty good.

  “It works fine,” she said.

  “Hey!” Jay yelled. “She says it works fine! It works fine, she says so! I told you! What’d I tell you?” He went off waving his arms and yelling. Coyote had disappeared. Everybody was wandering off.

  The child stood up, stiff from long sitting. It was nearly dark; only the long west held a great depth of pale radiance. Eastward the plains ran down into night.

  Lights were on in some of the shanties. Off at the edge of town somebody was playing a creaky fiddle, a lonesome chirping tune.

  A person came beside her and spoke quietly: “Where will you stay?”

  “I don’t know,” the child said. She was feeling extremely hungry. “Can I stay with Coyote?”

  “She isn’t home much,” the soft-voiced woman said. “You were staying with Chipmunk, weren’t you? Or there’s Rabbit, or Jackrabbit, they have families…”

  “Do you have a family?” the girl asked, looking at the delicate, soft-eyed woman.

  “Two fawns,” the woman answered, smiling. “But I just came into town for the dance.”

  “I’d really like to stay with Coyote,” the child said after a little pause, timid, but obstinate.

  “OK, that’s fine. Her house is over here.” Doe walked along beside the child to a ramshackle cabin on the high edge of town. No light shone from inside. A lot of junk was scattered around the front. There was no step up to the half-open door. Over the door a battered pine board, nailed up crooked, said bide-a-wee.

  “Hey, Coyote? Visitors,” Doe said. Nothing happened.