Legend of the Golden Coyote
Page 9
And yonder at the end of the branch was Jimmy Clarges, doing such work as never was done before. He was keeping the weight of that branch; all that was killing Soapy was the settling of the branch itself. But Jimmy couldn’t stand that strain any longer.
I seen his head thrusting up, and then sinking back and back, and the great cords of his throat, they stood out like so many arms.
“We’ll save you, Soapy!” I screamed at him, slamming at the wood.
“You’re doing fine, kid,” he said, deep and quiet. “Don’t you be afraid. I’m comin’ out of this all OK.”
“This here axe ain’t … got … no weight!” I shouted, driving it into the tree with every word.
And then I heard a terrible cry from Jimmy Clarges: “Heaven, gimme strength!”
Seemed to me, when I glanced sidewise at him, that the bough was eating through his shoulder and into his vitals, and I’ll never forget the look on the face that he had turned up to the sky, nor the look of his hands as he gripped that branch with ‘em, and used their strength to push upward, too. And as I looked, I seen the shirt split away over the swelling muscles of his upper arm and shoulder, and leave the arm naked. I seen that with one glance.
Then I heard a faint groan from Almayer, and I knew that nothing but death could have nudged that sound out of him. God put power into my arm, then. I turned and straddled the branch and give the back side of the limb two tremendous whacks. And the next instant there was a ripping and a splitting sound, and the branch busted off where I’d been cutting, and the whole trunk, relieved of that weight, rolled in a little mite.
But Almayer was saved, unless he had been crushed to death, already.
I looked out and saw Jimmy Clarges throw the branch away like it had been a toothpick, and him and me got to Soapy at the same time, and found him lying with his face swollen something awful, and his eyes fairly starting out of his head, and an awful grimace on his face.
I thought that it was the grin with which he had met death, but Jimmy had his ear already over Almayer’s heart, and now he yelled: “It’s beating, kid! It’s beating! And he’s living!”
He lived, right enough.
Soapy said, one day: “How could I have helped living, when so much had been done for the sake of me?”
He lived. I run all the way back to camp and got the big boss, who was quite a doctor, and he come back with me, and put the splints on Soapy’s poor broken leg. And then a lot of us made a litter and carried Soapy back to the camp. And one end of the litter, the head end, was carried by Jimmy Clarges. And it was a wonderful thing to hear him and Soapy.
“How are you takin’ it, Soapy?”
“I’m doing fine, Jimmy. Let somebody else pack that, will you?”
“Not me! Not me! I’m gonna leave nothin’ concernin’ you to anybody else, I tell you. We’ll have you fixed like a king in a lot of down, old boy. Don’t you do no doubting.”
We did, too. We fixed up old Soapy fine. And he lay there in state while he was getting well, and lived on the cream of the land.
Somehow, the beating that Jimmy Clarges had got didn’t seem to bother him none, after Soapy was brought in. But what we all thought was strange was that he would even talk about the fight. And he always underrated what he done, and how near he came to killing Almayer.
I heard him tell about the whole fight to a kid that was new to the camp.
“I managed to get him down with a grip on his throat,” Jimmy said, “but he chucked me off him and through the cook house door, and, when I got up, he finished me with one punch. He ain’t a man. He’s a devil. Kid, he’s the strongest man that ever lived.”
Jimmy had stopped being proud of himself. He had just settled down to worshiping Almayer, and a good thing for Almayer that it was that way, for, though the leg healed, it left him lame, and, when the early spring weather come, we seen the last of Soapy and Jimmy walking away down the trail toward town, Soapy with a cane in one hand, and the other resting on the huge shoulder of Jimmy Clarges.
They was never heard of again, at least in these mountains. Thunder and Lightning turned into a legend. But I suppose that somewhere they settled down together in a quiet town, and by this day I suppose that Soapy is maybe doing some kind of office work. And Jimmy Clarges maybe is keeping the door. But together they have got to be till they die. Fate made them that way. They needed one another.
* * * * *
LEGEND OF THE GOLDEN COYOTE
* * * * *
While Faust often developed memorable relationships between humans and animals in his stories, he never wrote what one would call animal stories. “Legend of the Golden Coyote” is an exception in which the reader is introduced to the “golden coyote,” members of his family, and a wide variety of animals living in the wild, all of whom commune with one another on a wide variety of subjects. The six parts of the story originally appeared as separate stories in Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine under the following titles: “Golden Coyote” (4/12/30), “White Hunger” (4/26/30), “Mother” (5/17/30), “Shiver-nose” (5/24/30), “Yellow Dog” (5/31/30), and “Back to His Own” (6/7/30). This is the first time they have been collected since their original publication.
I
When the light of the sun was yellow, and the sky turned blue, when the cañons filled with shadows like deep, translucent water, and the mesas drew away in violet mist, the mother coyote came out from the rocks with her tall son beside her. He was the color of the sun’s light, so that she looked from the world about her to him and could not decide which was the more beautiful.
“Oh, my son,” she said, “my golden boy, there are some who pray at the end of their work, but that is either to thank their God or to blame Him, whereas it is right that we should praise Him before He has rewarded us. Speak in this manner … Oh, God of the great and the small, who put under my paw the duck, the dove, and the snake, the frog, the mouse, and the rabbit, the sage hen, the calf, the colt, and the sheep, and made the coyote the lord of the world to read the wind and harvest the mountains and the plains, give to me this night not so much as I would have, but only what Your wisdom vouchsafes to me.”
The golden coyote lifted his nose and wrinkled his eyes. “If I do not find wolf in the wind, my nose is blind,” he said.
At this the hair lifted along the mother’s back and she crouched a little. “Is it that mangy, big-footed fool from the river?” she asked.
The golden one thrust out his red tongue with laughter. “Perhaps it was only a fancy of mine,” he admitted.
The mother shook her loose pelt until dust rose from it. “You are your father’s son, entirely,” she declared angrily. “If your heart were half as big as your great, lumbering body, or your spirit half as beautiful as your complexion, you would be a poet to whom every coyote would listen at moonrise, singing from the hills. But like him, you are a cynic, although I have told you a thousand times since your puppyhood that satire does not become you. What put that horrible thought of the wolf in your mind and on the long tip of your tongue?”
“You had just finished calling us the lords of the world,” he said, “and I could not help wondering how long it would take me to make you shrink until your belly rubbed the dust.”
At this, she stood tiptoe on stiffened legs. “ ‘They are wise who never hunted,’ ” she said.
“That is a maxim,” he said, “but hardly a thought.”
“Who are you,” she demanded, “to talk of thoughts and of maxims? Have you ever killed so much as a stupid mountain grouse, or tasted a lamb of your own killing? You have broken the back of a one-legged frog that was asleep on the edge of the lake, and now you talk as loud as a grown dog.”
“I am sorry,” said the golden one, “but I really was wondering what made us the lords of the world.”
“Very well,” said the mother. “What is there under the sky that is greater than a coyote?”
“This same wolf that I spoke of,” the son suggested.
“There are the lynx and the mountain lion,” said the golden coyote. “One of them could scratch our eyes out, and the other could break my back with a stroke of his paw.”
“As for the lynx,” she said, “I’ll never deny that he has sharp teeth and a strong paw … but the poor starveling is like every other cat, a creeper and crawler that cannot range, and he trembles with joy if he can stalk a linnet and crush it under his big paw. As for the cougar, as our northern brothers call him … though he is rightly named the puma, as your uncle will tell you if you have wit enough to ask and patience enough to stop for an answer … he is still another cat and, therefore, really beneath contempt no matter how big he may grow. However, there is fat eating on the trail of a hunting mountain lion, and that I will not deny … but who would bless a spendthrift for the amount he throws away? Let me tell you, my child, that heaven is pleased by a thrifty spirit, and hates the wastrels like that same cougar of whom you asked. Besides, as everyone knows, the idiot thinks that he’s a musician, and curdles the very wind and the rivers with his night concerts.”
“At least,” said the young coyote, “you’ll admit that there is something to be said on behalf of the grizzly bear? I have never seen you cross one of those trails without turning about twice to ask the wind about him. He can tear down trees. And you have said that he is wise.”
“The filthy thing wallows in mud,” she answered, “and eats roots. Disgusting! I have seen him swallow a whole hive, bees, stings and all, so that my throat burned for a month merely to think of it. Concerning his wisdom, I don’t deny that he is deep … but, for my part, I’m a practical person and never had any use for philosophers. What good is there in meat that flies over your head? In addition, he is so surly that one never can get him to speak out like a gentleman and a scholar, and, finally, he spends half his life asleep in a hole in the ground. Even the mole is more of a king than he at the time of his winter sleep. So I say again, the coyote is the lord of the world.”
“There is that long-legged dog …,” began the son.
“Bah!” the mother cried, wrinkling her nose and sneezing. “You are disgusting. Every fool can talk, particularly young fools. Every dog is kicked by some man master and crawls back on his belly to be kicked again.”
“This thing you call man,” said the youngster, “I’ve never seen, but he must be a great thing, indeed.”
At this, the mother yawned. “You are so young,” she said, “that when I merely think of your ignorance, and of the distance you must travel in life, and of the burden of knowledge that I have to teach you, it wearies me beyond endurance. Particularly because, no matter what your natural talents, it is plain that you are no student. You are my son, and you may thank heaven for it … but, as I have told you before and now tell you again, a diligent fool may outlive the cleverest coyote in the world.
“As for this thing called man, you will laugh when you see him. He has only two legs like a bird, but, unlike a bird, he cannot fly. The poor wretch is born naked and has to cover himself with pelts that he steals from other creatures. He is so slow that even a squirrel can run away from him, and he is so dull that he could not smell a coyote at ten steps, or hear a fox at three. No, my son, there is nothing to compare with the coyote, and the older you grow the more you will be convinced of this truth, if you are spared from the trap. There is nothing in the world so fleet as the coyote except the jack rabbit, which we easily catch with a little patience, and the poor grass-eating antelope, on whose young you already have dined. We have sharp teeth to kill everything that we wish to eat, and whatever is too big for us to conquer we can easily escape. As for brains, we are a proverb for them both on the mountains and the plains!”
“You said something about a trap,” said the golden coyote. “What may that be?”
“Great heavens,” said the mother. “How green and young you are. This very minute we’ll go to visit a trap, though I do wish that we had your uncle with us to teach you what he knows. And why do you sniff like that?”
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings,” said the golden coyote, “but it always has seemed to me that your brother is a mangy old bore. He has lost half his teeth, his eyes are continually watering, and he can hardly talk for scratching himself.”
“Alas,” said the mother, “you speak of the signs of age, and in the eyes of youth, to be old is to be sinful. Heaven forgive you, and make you remember that what your uncle is now, your own mother will be tomorrow. Now, come with me at once. If I talked to you until the stars came out, you would forget every word that I had said by the time the moon rose. No matter how long coyotes have lived in this world, each must learn again for himself with eye, and ear, and nose, and as for the wisdom of the ages, it never comes except with stiff joints.”
After she had spoken in this manner, whining a little, she led the way from the rocks among which they slept in a small cave with three entrances, and, cutting across the hillsides, she dropped gradually into the heart of the valley.
It was now the rose of the evening, and, coming to a pool where the green images of poplars fell into a heaven of crimson and blue, she caught a frog and ate it on the shore, scrupulously leaving a half for her son.
“You see,” she said as he swallowed his share, “that the Lord provides for the coyote even out of the waters, as from the dry land.”
“Our cousin the wolf despises frog meat,” observed the son, licking his lips as he finished a leg, having left the best for the last.
She smiled as she listened to the crunching of the slender bones.
“The wolf,” she said, “is, in fact, a relative, but he is also a barbarian. No matter what airs he puts on, he never has been a true cosmopolite, and this is proved by nothing so much as his limited diet. There was a time when the whole wolf tribe ate nothing but buffalo, though how they could endure the boredom and monotony of that food I never could guess. Your truly cultivated person, my dear, is sure to have an educated palate. And what is education except the knowledge of many things?”
“That may all be very true,” he said, “but, in the meantime, we are talking ourselves hungry faster than we are eating. Suppose we have a glance at the trap you were speaking of, although I would rather eat a good fat rabbit than do all the looking in the world, at the present moment.”
“ ‘He who eats today may starve tomorrow,’ ” said the mother, who bristled with maxims more than a cactus with thorns, “ ‘and an empty stomach makes a sharp wit.’ Now, let me see how you run uphill with no more than half a frog in your belly.”
She set off at such a pace that he was gasping before they had gained the top of the next ridge.
“We’re neither hunting nor hunted,” he said, “and therefore why should we hurry?”
The mother did not speak, but one white gleam of her fangs made the youngster drop among the rocks at her side, his rear legs well parted so that his body could be pressed more tightly against the ground, his head glued to the rocks, also. She was in the same posture, and they restrained even their panting.
“What is it?” he gasped when he dared.
A shadow passed over them with a whisper, whereat he shrank yet closer, but it was only a great-winged owl that had floated down to look at these motionless forms, and sheered away when it discovered what they were. Yet the golden coyote stared after that form as it dipped into the hollow and out of sight beyond the next range of the hills, for it seemed to him a foreboder of ill.
By degrees, his mother raised her head. He imitated her, lagging a little behind, but as she did, half closing his eyes and working his nostrils, the better to judge of the wind.
“No
w, little son,” she said, “you have talked very bravely of many things, therefore, tell me what it is that comes to us here?”
Now that his opinion was asked, nine-tenths of his fear left him at once. He rose, sniffing.
“I have never smelled it before,” he said, “but it is something that I would sooner see than anything I ever laid eyes on in my life.”
“Would you follow it?”
“Whether it has claws or great teeth,” he replied, “you have said that there is nothing from which we cannot escape. So I would go closer until I found it.”
“You never would find it,” she answered. “But, ah, that your uncle were here to tell you what it is. For that is a trap, my son. It has neither a body, nor hide, nor bone, but only teeth that bite out of the ground.”
“Come closer,” he said, stealing toward a bush from which the nameless fragrance seemed to issue. “Come closer, so that we can make sure that it has no face.”
She flashed in front of him with bared teeth. “Ah, that I should have been cursed by bringing a fool into this beautiful and wonderful world,” she said. “Go back, go back!”
He leaped sidewise, whirling to bolt, all his hair on end. It was not because of what she said, but because he saw a form arise from the bush before him.
Then a voice spoke, saying: “Which of my people are you?”
The mother had shrunk back, also, but, when she made out that this was merely another coyote, she regathered her courage and answered: “I keep a burrow among the Chantry Rocks. Who are you? I have heard your voice before.”
“It is a wise coyote,” he answered dryly, “that knows her brother’s voice.”
“Ah,” she said, “I have been wishing that I could have you here. My son is trap-mad … if only you would show him a lesson.”
“I shall teach him with eye and nose,” said the old coyote.