by Max Brand
She licked his face tenderly. “I shall den up and sleep till moon set,” she said. “And then between our wits we’ll see what we can manage … our two wits, and your four legs, my son.”
Into a soft drift of new-fallen snow they burrowed, and side-by-side they slept. It was she who waked the golden coyote, and they struggled out into the open.
The moon was on the edge of the western horizon, pale as a tuft of cloud, and a small sun, hardly more brilliant than the moon, was up to the eastward. In the door of their snow tunnel they lay and discussed their plans, while the son disclosed what he had learned the day before. On that, the mother decided to act. They should go back to the spot where he had left the white owl. She admitted that it might be difficult to find the reported elk and calf. “But any clue is a good clue,” she said, “when the stomach is empty.”
So they went down the valley. Her foreleg was inflamed and swollen, but she paid no attention to it and ran with wonderful ease on only three supports, while the golden coyote looked at her with a smaller sense of having assumed a crushing burden. Her wisdom and his teeth might win the battle. He could guess at his added inches by the fact that she appeared so small to him now.
The day turned dark. The sun disappeared. Flurries of snow dropped from the sky like dusky birds. Then a pale form slid out from the trees beside the river and swept around above them.
“Liar! Mangy coyote, son of a farmyard dog, weak wit, and grass eater,” hooted the angry owl. “There were no mice!”
The two coyotes sat down to enjoy this moment. “I told you where I had eaten mice,” said the golden coyote, with satisfaction, “and where I shall eat them again in the spring of the year. Besides, I have eaten as many wapiti as you have mice.”
The owl, with a whoop of rage, beat his great wings and shot away into the opposite covert to sleep for the day, perhaps.
The two coyotes laughed with red tongues at one another and ran on down the valley until a shrill, barking voice called to them from a hillside. They swung aside to come closer to red fox, a veteran of the Red Hills. He did not budge from them and their winter appetites, because he was standing at the entrance of a burrow that would be too small for them to follow him down to safety.
“He looks as fat as October,” said the mother bitterly, “and he was born under a lucky star with that pinched muzzle of his, made to bite off the necks of fat geese in barnyards. Shall we talk to him?”
“He will make us angry,” said the golden coyote, “but we may as well sharpen ourselves against his wit, if you please.”
They stopped at a distance so close that the fox already was turning toward the entrance of the burrow. Now he faced them again, laughing.
“Good hunting, cousin,” he said. “I see that you’ve made a good choice of company, for wisdom on three legs is better than a fool on four. Are you hunting for the mountain of meat, by any chance?”
“Have you seen it?” asked the golden coyote.
“Yes,” said the fox.
“Brother,” said the coyote politely, “such huge piles of flesh and bones are nothing to a delicate palate like yours, so you throw nothing away in telling us where the scent will be found.”
The fox could not speak for an instant, since the wind, rising to almost hurricane force, staggered him, and parted the fur on his shoulder to the very skin. Then he said: “I tell you gladly that I saw the two elk between the Black Desert and the Kendal Woods. Hurry, my friends, before the gray wolves find and kill. I hear that you feed weasels to the owls to make them your friends, cousin?”
The golden coyote, overmastered with rage, had edged forward a little and now sprang like a cat, but his teeth clicked an inch from reynard’s tail. Thrusting in head and shoulders, he was stopped from further progress, though he scratched frantically to push himself on.
The rankness of the fox’s smell came up to him, and the ranker words of the wise hunter.
“You cannot grow a new leg, but you can at least grow new wits. Go back and sit in the snow and listen to the owls till you freeze. Go back! You will get nothing from me. Fools! Dog food!”
The golden coyote backed from the burrow and hurried off to join his mother, for he knew that he would gain nothing more from that poisonous tongue.
The mother stood up from a hummock on the lee of which she had been enjoying a comparative calm, but now she yelped through the howl of the gale: “We must go north of the Musquash and trust to our eyes. Scents are frozen and fall to the ground, in such a gale.”
So they went north over the Musquash River, and the golden coyote, ranging a little ahead so as to cover depressions and likely scenting spots to right and left, suddenly braced himself so sharply that he skidded across the polished crust of the snow. Luck at last had come. Bursting straight through the upper crust and driving down to the deepest layer of snow and ice above the surface of the ground, he saw the trail of the mountain of flesh!
Two had made the marks. The mother must have forged ahead, and the calf followed on the broken trail. So deep they sank and so sharp was the rim of the snow that it had sliced their legs, and the thin rims of red stain appeared every moment. The coyotes looked to one another. They neither howled nor whined. They asked not what strange fortune had driven the pair from their yarding grounds, but they fled down the trail in silence.
The wind was behind them, which would bring their scent before them to the elk, but that hardly mattered, since the big animals could never make successful speed across such going.
A mountain of flesh! Two mountains, but they would hardly be able to take the grown animal, with its dauntless courage and expert use of hoofs that could slash deeper than the bite of a bear or the rip of its claws.
The trail crossed the clear ice of a creek, and on that surface they could judge the size of the prints in spite of their sliding. A big cow and at least a well-grown calf.
The mother trailed behind, laboring with a pitching motion as her single foreleg grew exhausted by the strain, but, although she lagged, she kept doggedly at her task, while the golden coyote flew down the wind with hope making him light as a feather.
The gale fell away as swiftly as it had risen. It left the air wonderfully cold, but so still that the coyote grew hot with the labor of running. Down the valley, past the lower frog pond, skirting the arch of the river—what a fool was that mother elk not to take to the slippery ice!—and then, just above the house of man, turning sharply to the right, as though she smelled or saw the place for the first time.
That moment, also, the golden coyote saw the quarry, and for some reason out of his throat burst not the hunting yell but the morning song, smooth and musical as the cry of the loon. There was relief from famine with a vengeance, and salvation for all the worst of the winter that could remain. The cow was four or five hundred pounds of meat and bone on the hoofs; the calf was a great shambling creature, evidently late born, but all the more toothsome for that. Why ask for a mountain, when a hillock would be enough?
The golden coyote slavered with joy. Weariness left him. He could have ran all day, he felt, for such a glorious sight as this. But as he started forward again, the door of the house opened, and out came man, the hunter, with the gleam of a rifle in his hands.
The wapiti saw him, too, and started off at a run, throwing up clouds of snow dust. It was a close shot, however. And the coyote, seeing the man sink on one knee, for his own part guessed that the end was there. Had not his mother schooled him in the knowledge that even the swift and shifty coyote dare not give more than a running glimpse of himself to a marksman at three hundred yards? And this was a third of that distance.
The gun rang out. The golden coyote, stiff with despair and grief, looked sadly on, but the wapiti did not fall.
He could not believe what he beheld. Once more the gun steadied, yet not with the rock-like firmness that the golden coyote had seen in it before. Instead, the muzzle tipped and wavered. No wonder, when it spoke again, that the elk went on un
touched over the rim of the next hill, and disappeared into the hollow beyond.
The man stood up, and, striking a hand against his face, he followed at a run. But what a run. So go the newly born, or the dying, with sagging legs. He tripped and fell full length. Slowly, slowly he gathered himself to his hands, to his knees, but the golden coyote waited to see no more. This great hunter would never come in gunshot of the wapiti again.
So he skirted to the right swiftly, and over his shoulder saw that his wise mother, traveling across the chord of the arc, was very close behind him. They rounded the hillside almost together, and could hear the crashing progress of the elk before they were seen striding up the farther slope.
The mother wapiti saw, also. She put on her best speed, but in the second little valley beyond she halted. The wind had kept the snow scoured thin here, so she began to trample swiftly in a circle that constantly enlarged, beating down the upper crust, making for herself a little pond, as it were, of loose snow and crusty fragment in which she and the calf could move with greater ease than even the light-footed coyotes.
But she had to stop the creation of that defense when the two prairie wolves came up and sat down on opposite sides of the circle, lolling their red tongues, waiting. Then she dropped her head over the back of the calf and glared from one side to the other, twitching her short stump of a tail, snorting, and stamping. The calf seemed quite unaware that mortal danger was near. It flopped its mulish long ears forward and extended its soft, bright nose to sniff at the coyotes. And the golden coyote laughed at his mother, and she, with red mouth, laughed back.
“I feint at the big one’s haunch,” she said. “You hamstring the calf, my son.”
The whine scarcely had left her when she jumped straight into the soft pulp of snow and broken crust and snapped toward the flank of the big mother. The elk half whirled, and the drive of the accurate forehoof barely skimmed the back of the prairie wolf as she squatted. Then back she jumped, wonderfully agile on her three legs. It was, altogether, not more than a second of play given to the golden coyote, but he used it to fling in behind the calf and slash with all the power of jaw, and wrenching head, and hard-tautened body, and the fear of death. Back he whirled as the calf bawled out in almost a human cry, and the big wapiti, kicking hard, skimmed her hoof along the flank of the young wolf.
Yet he was safe, now, on the rim of the snow.
“Did you reach the tendon?” asked the mother coyote.
“I reached it. I felt it jar and give under my teeth,” said the son, “but I did not cut its whole breadth. However, see for yourself that it will not travel far.”
Both the wapiti began to mill in a circle, the calf floundering and placing very little weight on the injured back leg. The crimson ran from it, a red promise of victory to the coyotes. The mother was frantic, yet she dared not charge the one coyote for fear the other would flick in at the calf. She could only shake her head and give her booming cry.
“We feast tonight,” said the mother. “We feast, my son! Praise the God of all good coyotes! Sharpen your tooth for the next stroke!”
The big wapiti astonished them both, at this moment, by wheeling and, with a call to the calf, floundering away up the hillside. The youngling would have followed, but the golden coyote had missed once and he would not miss again. Under his flashing teeth he felt the tendon part with an audible jar above the hock, and the calf went down behind with a wild cry of terror and of pain.
Yet still the mother fled!
They had their explanation, then. For down the hillside behind them came a sound of crunching ice and to the nostrils of the coyotes the deadly odor of oil and iron. The man was there! Aye, running frantically, and now calling out, staggering, laughing like madness.
The coyotes ran for their lives!
And in the shelter of the frozen brush on the hilltop beyond, they saw the mother elk far away beneath them, on the open ice of the Champion River; they heard the clacking of her big, sharp-edged hoofs. She was far away, but more than that, she was off their range, and even starvation would hardly draw them over the mysterious borderline where traps might lie, who knew where? And where the air might drop, or the ground give forth what unknown dangers?
So they let her go, and lay panting, exhausted with disappointment, though they had been ready to run all day, not long before, with hope strengthening their legs.
“Heaven, who loves good coyotes,” said the mother, much later in that day, “has left us our lives, at the least. Let us go back up the river. We may find mice.”
They started back, but as they went a milder wind, a wind from the desert south, brought to them news of red meat. It came from the house of man, and, though they went without hope, yet still they went, until from the nearest brush they saw, cast out into the white arms of the snow, the spoils of the dead wapiti. Other creatures were there in the brush, crouching and starving—the same red fox from the Red Hills, panting with hunger, edging nervously away from the prairie wolves, and little crisp rustlings told of the flesh eaters nearby. They were watching the spoils, the great red blur of them from which man had taken what he wished. But above the house of man out rolled great volumes of smoke, and out of the house came laughter, hysterically loud, and now and then a white face was pressed to a window and looked out.
“Stay here, my son,” said the mother. “Let me die if I must. But it is better to die with the taste of luscious blood in my mouth than with an empty throat.”
Straightway she left the covert and slid out into the open, cunningly taking advantage of every depression until none was left. And behold! She stood at the food, and she ate, unharmed! Aye, though the white face of man gathered at the window and looked out.
The golden coyote sprang up, then flattened himself to his belly again, for he saw the great silhouette of the timber wolf skulking out toward the prey. There would be no room, surely, at the side of such a master.
A rifle clanged like two hammer faces meeting. The wolf, with a howl, wheeled and ran for the covert in such haste that the loose pelt heaved in waves above his shoulders. Mother coyote flattened herself in the snow.
Yet she did not flee, but with courage unprecedented she rose again, and she ate, and she was unharmed. Then famine turned the brain of the golden coyote. He, too, left the brush and dragged himself forward. He heard the dreadful voices of humans, but still he did not stop; death seemed a small thing to him, if it was not already lodged in his belly.
“Look! Look!” cried the voice of the girl. “It’s the golden coyote himself! He’s come. Daddy, don’t shoot!”
“No,” said the voice of the man. “Heaven bless him, tooth and claw. He could have my blood, if he wanted it. He’s hunted for us all three, today.”
The golden coyote heard. He did not understand, but he went on; he ate at his mother’s side; he ate, and the wounded wolf howled to the sky from the dusky covert on the hillside.
Long after, they lay gorged in the den of the mother coyote.
“Listen, my son,” said the mother. “It is evening. It is time for you to sing your song and give thanks. You can hear the puma in the valley, singing also to the God of the pumas. But our God is stronger. Praise Him and thank Him. For the God of the coyote stretches out His hand, and the earth is green, and mice squeak in the grass. He stretches out his hand, and the earth is white and hard as the iron of man. He stretches forth His hand, and man himself dares not strike. Man cuts the wolf with an invisible tooth and sends him howling, but when he aims at us, the strong God of the coyotes blinds him darker than night. Therefore, sing a beautiful hymn in his praise!”
The golden coyote yawned and showed every tooth in his long head.
“My belly is too full for music,” he said. “But our God is good, and I shall thank Him in my dreams.”
III
At the entrance to the cave, the golden coyote paused and looked back across the valley of the Musquash. Twice he canted his head to listen, and hushed his mother, who
was panting up the hill behind him on her three legs. Most of the sound that welled across the slopes he could dissolve and trace to its sources—as the tremor and boom of the waterfall above Otter Lake, and the rapid chattering like human voices in dispute came from the cascade on the creek, while that rushing as of a wind through nearby trees was made by all the little rivulets that hurried down the hill to join the river. But he could not understand that which he heard only now and again from beyond the edge of the sky, sonorous but dim, like the calling of a moose. Sometimes it walked to him on the windless air from the north, and sometimes it seemed floating in the east.
“What is it?” he asked softly, at last.
“My son,” said the mother, “it comes from beyond the Kendal Woods. It is the thunder of the Upper Musquash, rolling and shouting in its cañon. Once before I have heard it … it was the day of your father’s death.” She dropped to her stomach and began to lick the red from the white of her forelegs tenderly, with half-closed eyes, for they had killed young venison that evening. At last she looked up, panting, still lolling her red tongue. “It is an ominous sign,” she said. “On that day I warned your father, but he would not listen. He went off, and he never returned. It was just such an evening, and the bald eagle of Mount Hope was fighting with a young stranger exactly as he is now.”
The golden coyote had not seen. His look had been downward to the blue dusk of the evening in the valleys, and to the scent of young grass growing, and the taint of mossy trees. But now he glanced up to the heights of the mountains, still fingered with gold, and in the rosy upper air he saw the eagles fighting. Their dark forms seemed far too heavy to be supported by thin atmosphere, so that the golden coyote had a dizzy sense of looking not up, but down into water where two shadows were struggling. Soaring and stooping to strike, the great birds fought on the cold bosom of the sky straight overhead until their eerie screaming drifted to the ground. At last one of them dropped like a stone.
