Coyote

by Allen Steele

  “Not trying to prove anything. And I know I’m a man. I couldn’t have survived for long if I wasn’t, could I?”

  Animals survive, son. A coyote caught in a trap gnaws its own leg off to escape. A man doesn’t run away. He accepts responsibility for his own actions, even when he doesn’t want to…

  “Not running away from anything.” Carlos pulled the spit from the fire, closely examined his dinner. Nicely charred on one side, but still a little pink on the other. He turned the filet over and held it above the coals. “I’m exploring the world. Finding out what this place looks like. Someone has to be the first. Might as well be me.”

  That’s what you tell yourself, but you’re a liar.

  “Go away. Leave me alone.” Closing his eyes, he let his head fall on his folded arms. After a while, he no longer felt the presence of his father.

  He heard a soft crackling sound. Looking up again, he saw that the spit had dropped from his hands, and the fish he was cooking for dinner lay among the burning driftwood, its flesh curling up and turning black.

  Dinner was ruined, but it didn’t matter. He was no longer hungry.

  A week later, Carlos reached the southeastern tip of Midland, and found he had to make a crucial decision.

  A new channel opened before him, leading to the north. He was now above the equator again, and able to use his sails. According to his map, if he sailed all the way up the channel, he’d eventually reach the northeastern end of Midland, where it would connect with a major river running east and west across the thirty-fifth line of parallel. If he followed the river west across the northern coast of Midland and past the confluence of East Channel, eventually it would become the West Channel; all he had to do then was locate Sand Creek’s northern inlet and make his way across New Florida until he reached Liberty.

  The trip home would take at least four or five weeks, maybe longer. If the prevailing winds in the northern latitudes weren’t in his favor, though, he would have to paddle the entire distance. In that case, he might not reach Liberty until the end of summer, perhaps even later, and Carlos was all too aware that he was ill equipped to face the cold nights of Coyote’s autumn.

  His second choice was to cross the channel to a large island lying just above the equator, then sail along its southern coast as he continued east along the Great Equatorial River. In doing so, he’d cross the meridian into Coyote’s eastern hemisphere; just off the island’s southeastern coast, below the equator, lay a long string of tiny isles that stretched out into the Meridian Sea. If he could make it to the distant archipelago, he could then turn around and catch the easterlies in the southern hemisphere, which would eventually carry him home.

  The first option was a relatively safe bet; if the winds were in his favor, he could be home before the end of summer. The second option meant that he’d be gone much longer; the risks would be greater, yet he would see things no one else had ever seen before. Tough choice, and not one to be made lightly.

  Perhaps he should talk it over with someone.

  He made camp that night on a rocky point overlooking Midland Channel; once he was through with dinner, he pulled out the satphone. Its memory retained the number of the last satphone that had been used to call him; he pushed the RETURN button and waited impatiently while it buzzed. Since the sun had gone down about an hour ago, Carlos figured it was probably late afternoon or early evening back in Liberty. Wendy would probably be home, helping Kuniko make dinner. If Dr. Okada picked up, he’d have a short chat with her, then ask to speak with Wendy. Shouldn’t be a problem if…

  He heard a click. “Hello?”

  The voice was male; familiar, but not one he immediately recognized. Yet this had to be Kuniko’s satphone; the call-back feature guaranteed that.

  “Is Wendy there?”

  A pause. “Figured you’d call eventually. My luck I’d be the one to talk to you.”

  “Who’s…?” Then he recognized the voice. “Chris? Is that you?”

  “Uh-huh. Been a long time. Not since you ditched us and ran away.”

  Carlos winced. The last time he’d seen Chris, it was the night they made their way back to New Florida after the catwhale attack. Chris had lost his brother that afternoon; if his left arm hadn’t been broken, Carlos had little doubt that he would have tried to kill him. There hadn’t been a fight that evening, though, nor even any words that Carlos could remember; the last thing he remembered of his former best friend was the dark look in his eyes before he crawled into their remaining tent. Carlos didn’t sleep that night; after he used the satphone, which until then he’d kept hidden in his pack, to call back to Liberty and request rescue for the rest of the expedition, he had gathered up the remaining supplies and set out on his own. When he left at dawn, the only person to see him go was Wendy.

  “I didn’t ditch you,” Carlos said. “It was something I had to do…”

  “Oh, yeah, I believe that. Couldn’t bear to face me again in the morning, could you?”

  “Chris, I didn’t…” He sighed, shook his head. “Look, forget it. Just put Wendy on, will you?” What was Chris doing with the satphone, anyway?

  “Not until you and I are done. You know, I’m actually glad you’re gone. It’s better you die out there by yourself. This way, none of us have to put up with your shit anymore.”

  “Chris, I…” He closed his eyes. “What do you want from me? I’m not going to die, if that’s what you really want, and I’m not going to let you…”

  He stopped himself, but not soon enough; Chris knew him all too well. “You’re not going to let me do what?” he demanded. “Take your girl? Hey, man…why do you think I’m at her place?”

  Something cold and malignant uncoiled deep within his chest, wrapped itself around his heart. “You really think she’s been pining for you all this time?” Now there was malicious glee in Chris’s voice. “The only reason why she called before is because you wouldn’t talk to the captain, and so he had her talk to you instead. She doesn’t care about you any more than I do.”

  “That’s not true…” Almost a whisper.

  “What’d you say?” Chris didn’t wait for him to repeat himself. “She’s going to have a baby soon, and the kid’s going to need a father who won’t run off when things get tough. You’ve had your shot, and you blew it. I proposed to her last night…”

  “You what?” Carlos was instantly on his feet.

  “Oh-ho! Got your attention, didn’t it? Yeah, man, I asked her to marry me. And you know what else? She…”

  A loud noise from somewhere in the background. Muffled voices, indistinct yet angry. A slight scuffling sound as if someone’s hand was being clasped over the unit. A minute went by. Then he heard Wendy.

  “Carlos? Are you there?”

  “I’m here. Look, I…”

  “No, wait. I’m sorry. That shouldn’t have happened. Chris got to the phone while we were out in the garden. Whatever he said, it’s…I don’t know, but…”

  There was too much going through his mind; he could barely think straight. “Look, just tell me two things,” he said, pacing back and forth before the fire. “Just two things, and be honest with me.”

  Hesitation. “Okay. What do you want to know?”

  “Are you going to marry Chris?”

  Silence. “He’s asked me, yes.” Lower voice. “I don’t know if I’m going to take him up on it. I’m thinking about it.”

  He nodded as if she could see him. Fair enough; a truthful answer, if not complete. “Okay. Second question…is the baby mine or his?”

  Another pause, a little longer this time. “It’s yours. Kuniko thinks it’s going to be a girl.”

  He let out his breath, sat down heavily. It was a warm night, but he was glad to be near the fire; he felt himself beginning to tremble. “Do you want me to come home?” he asked.

  “I thought you said…”

  “I’m giving myself a bonus question. Do you want me to come home? To be there when the baby’s b
orn?”

  Another minute went by before she spoke again. He heard crackles and static fuzz as Alabama began to slip over the horizon. “You can do whatever you want,” she said at last. “That’s what you always do anyway, don’t you?”

  Then the satphone went dead.

  The next morning, Carlos packed up his gear, stowed it in his canoe, and set sail once again. It wasn’t until he was a hundred yards away from shore, though, that he finally made up his mind which way he’d go. Tacking the sail to the catch the westerly winds, he turned Orion to the southeast and set out to cross the Midland Channel, heading for the island and, beyond it, the Meridian Sea.

  The wind was strong that day, the water choppy but the current with him; the journey across the channel took only eleven hours. When he came upon the island shortly before sundown, he had no problem finding a place to go ashore. A sun-baked expanse of sand and high grass shaded now and then by parasol trees, it was as flat as New Florida. River-swoops circled the beach as he pulled out the canoe; he had been seeing them all day, sometimes dozens at a time. He wondered if this was the place where they nested, yet as the sun went they soared away to the east. They had to be sleeping on the river, he concluded, but that couldn’t be where they nested. There was a mystery there, one whose solution continued to elude him.

  He built a fire, then cleaned and cooked a channelmouth he had caught that afternoon. The night sky was cloudless, the stars brilliant; looking up, he saw the Alabama glide across the zenith, briefly appearing as a tiny black dash as it moved past Bear. It was a warm evening; there was little chance of rain, so he decided to sleep out in the open. He moved his bedroll from beneath the tarp he’d pitched and laid it out next to the fire, and once he’d put his rifle and bow where he could reach them quickly, he lay down and went to sleep.

  Sometime during the night, he was awakened by scurrying noises, as if an animal was prowling through the campsite. Opening his eyes but being careful not to move, he looked first one way, then the next. The fire had died down, but Bearlight illuminated the beach. At first he saw nothing, and for a moment he thought he might have only been dreaming. Then, from the direction of his canoe, he caught a ragged scraping sound, as if something was gnawing at the mooring line.

  He counted to three, then quickly sat up, grabbing his rifle and pointing it toward the canoe. As he flicked on the infrared range finder, for a brief instant he caught a glimpse of a couple of diminutive figures crouched near the canoe’s bow. Yet the moment the invisible beam touched them, they emitted a tinny, high-pitched chaawp! and vanished before he got a chance to fire.

  In the same instant, he heard something move behind him, near the tarp. Swinging the rifle in that direction, he spotted through the scope a small, dark-furred form that stood upright on pair of forward-jointed legs. He had an impression of oversize eyes above a tiny mouth, with a pair of tendrils spouting from a low forehead. Then it made a startled cheeep! as it dropped something and bolted into the darkness.

  Carlos yelled and leaped to his feet, then fired a couple of rounds into the air. From all around him, a half dozen more of the creatures fled for their lives. He heard the clatter of cookware, the static buzz of his satphone, the rustle of a shirt he’d washed and laid out to dry. He fired another round to chase the tiny thieves away, but they were already gone. From somewhere out in the high grass, he heard them chawp and cheep and coo-coo, like fairy children giggling about the mean prank they’d just played on the giant found slumbering in their midst.

  He gathered what he could find lying in the sand—fortunately, they hadn’t gone very far with the satphone—then stayed awake the rest of the night, the gun propped in his lap. When morning came, he walked up and down the beach, picking up the stuff they had dropped: a spoon, his flashlight, the cook pot, a shirt. Yet when he took inventory of his belongings, there were also several things missing: a fork, a pen, an extra spool of fishing line and some hooks. Nothing very large; everything that had been either ignored or abandoned weighed more than an ounce or so. His packs remained where they were, although he noticed that their drawstrings had been untied instead of being ripped apart.

  Their footprints were small, paw-shaped impressions, with smaller clawlike prints where they had dropped to all fours to escape. Judging from their size and distance from one another, Carlos estimated that the creatures couldn’t have stood more than two feet tall. And he couldn’t shake the impression that they were much like the swampers that infested New Florida, yet more highly evolved, their actions more…deliberate.

  Yet the biggest shock came when he inspected his canoe. The boid skull lay next to the bow. The fact that they’d tried to steal it didn’t surprise him; indeed, it was their attempt to do so that awakened him in the first place. When he knelt to tie the skull back in place, though, he saw that the lines that had held it place had been severed clean.

  Something jabbed against his knee. He reached down to toss it away, then did a double take. It was a long piece of flint, no larger than the first two knuckles of his index finger, its edges scraped and honed to razor-sharpness. Dried grass was carefully woven around its haft, forming a handle that could be easily grasped by a tiny hand.

  Carlos gazed in wonder at the miniature knife. It hadn’t been made by an animal. There was intelligence behind the tool; it was the product of a sapient mind.

  There was someone else on Coyote.

  For the next week, he sailed along the southern coast of the island. He would have liked to give himself more time to study the sandthieves, as he named them, yet their larcenous nature made that difficult.

  Every evening when he came ashore, he had to take special precautions to ensure that the rest of his belongings wouldn’t vanish during the night. Although they shied away from him, the sandthieves obviously weren’t afraid of his fire, and as soon as they were sure he was asleep they would emerge from the darkness to raid his camp. When he tried hanging his gear from a parasol tree, they soon demonstrated that they were willing and able to climb up to get to it. Burying his stuff didn’t work, nor did hiding it beneath the canoe or even placing everything next to him while he slept. Carlos finally had to resort to leaving everything aboard the Orion, then anchoring the craft in the water six feet away from shore, making camp with little more than his bedroll; either the sandthieves weren’t able to swim, or piracy wasn’t something they’d learned yet.

  The few times he saw them, the more he became convinced they were intelligent. Their high-pitched vocal sounds were evidently a form of language, not simply animal noises; on a couple of occasions, he noted that some of them wore breechcloths woven from parasol leaves, even necklaces of tiny pebbles held together by braided grass. From time to time, while paddling close to shore, he spotted tall, cone-shaped dwellings made of mud and sand, rising nine feet or taller above the nearby grasslands, their packed-dirt walls honeycombed with holes large enough for them to enter. Twice he saw slender trails of smoke rising from their tops, indicating the presence of interior fireplaces.

  He was tempted to make a satphone call back to Liberty and tell someone of his discovery. Yet he knew that if he did so, within a couple of hours a shuttle would descend upon the island, carrying teams of overeager scientists ready to document, record, perhaps even capture a specimen or two. The more he considered that mental picture, the less he liked it; the last thing a primitive civilization needed was an alien invasion.

  No. The sandthieves would remain unknown to everyone else. Once he returned to Liberty, he’d tell everyone this particular island was little more than a large sandbar, uninteresting and worthless. He decided to name it Barren Isle; he would have marked it as such on his map, were it not for the fact that his pen was among the items the sandthieves had stolen.

  On the morning of his last day on the island, he left Barren Isle for the last time. As he raised his sail and set out toward the nearby archipelago, he looked over his shoulder to take a long, final look at his secret place. For the first time
in many days, he found himself smiling.

  Since he had long since lost track of the days, Carlos was unaware that it was Uriel 48, halfway through last month of Coyote summer. Had he been able to compare this the date to a Gregorian calendar, he would have discovered, by Earth reckoning, he was 247 years old.

  It was his seventeenth birthday, and he didn’t even know it.

  He sailed southeast, crossing the equator once again as he entered the Meridian Sea, the point at which the Great Equatorial River became so broad that nearly twelve hundred miles lay between the southeastern tip of Barren Isle and the nearest subcontinent in the southern hemisphere. Between them lay the Meridian Archipelago.

  Carlos spent three days and two nights at sea. He subsisted upon the dried fish and fresh water he had stockpiled in anticipation of the journey. The sun became his enemy; he covered himself with his tarp during the day to avoid heatstroke and sipped water to keep from becoming dehydrated. A brief rainstorm on the second day came as blessed relief; he stripped off his clothes and took a shower while standing naked in the stern of his canoe, scrubbing furiously at his matted hair and beard, then quickly refilled his water flasks.

  He slept little, and only after he furled the sail and locked the rudder in place. He sang to himself to keep himself amused, and carried on imaginary conversations with the boid skull; for some reason, he was no longer visited by anyone he knew. On three different occasions he spotted catwhales, and on the second occasion he saw one as it breached the surface only a few hundred feet from his boat, hurling itself high into the air. He was unafraid of these giants, though, having long since realized that the only reason why one of them attacked his party was because David opened fire on it. He left the rifle alone—which was just as well, for there were only four rounds left in its clip anyway—and the catwhales spared him from anything more than a curious glance.

  He navigated by following the flight of the river-swoops. There were dozens of them, great flocks of broad-winged birds that soared across the sky, sometimes hurling themselves headfirst into the sea to snatch up fish. By morning, they flew northwest, heading in the direction from which he had come; during midday he saw but a few, but by evening they would return, riding the twilight thermals as they made their way to the east. So long as he trailed them, Carlos knew he couldn’t get lost. Or at least that was what he believed.