by Max Brand
The solitaire crooned forth a musical laughter. “Is it possible,” he said, “that you are a worshiper of the old, outworn fashions? Tell me your favorite music, although I could almost guess the names beforehand.”
“Like any sober-minded person,” she said, “I prefer the grave, Doric chorus of the frogs.”
“Let me see,” said the solitaire. “I have heard it many times, and, yet, it is so long since I have allowed it to fade into the background of my mind that I scarcely remember the words. It runs like this, doesn’t it … ‘God is great, and in God alone is greatness. We proclaim Him, dwellers between air and water, watchers of the stars, how great is God, and near us the dark maiden, death.’ Yes, I think those are the words, and I don’t deny that they have a certain rhythm.”
“Thank you,” said the coyote. “As a matter of fact, it is blank verse, as anyone with half an ear can tell.”
“I won’t argue,” said the solitaire. “However, you may as well notice that the frogs never sing new words.”
“There is nothing better than the best,” answered the mother coyote. “Besides, repetition may rub off gilding, but it only polishes gold.”
“You have a patient disposition,” said the solitaire. “At this rate, I suppose you will be admiring the songs and stories of the grasshoppers?”
“I like them very well, indeed,” she said. “Their stories always have a tragic ending, which is the only proper kind.”
“Well,” replied the songster, “they always end with the first frost. For my part, I believe in cheerfulness, in love….”
“Then why don’t you sing a dignified love song, like the doves?”
“Ah, you mean that mournful chant of theirs … ‘Oh, love, oh, love, sweet love and gentle death.’ Repeated over and over.”
“I have spoken of repetitions once before,” said the mother coyote sharply, “and I trust that one good answer is enough for you. Unless you are one of these chatterers. The dove song is exquisite, satisfying, and easily remembered … three good points in a row.”
“It is too grave … and there is so much death in it.”
“Death is the one general fact in life,” said the she-wolf. “The most beautiful day brings one a step closer to the eternal darkness. These themes should be accepted by true poets. As for mere lyrical babbling like yours, without depth, truth, or profound beauty, it really chills me to the stomach.”
“Nonsense, Mother,” murmured her son.
“Will you tell me why?” asked the courteous solitaire.
“Because it presents youth as the only good. Since I reached middle age, I’ve never listened to a solitaire without losing my appetite for at least three days. To put this in better language, when I listen to you, I almost forget that life is development and progress, and feel that the only good age is the age of a fool, and not that which wisely knows folly. But life is, in truth, a great and still river that runs down from the hills and at last joins a shadowy but eternal sea. You speak with the lightness of youth, but, if you ever attain to my age, you will understand what I mean when I speak of standing upon an infinite shore.”
“I don’t doubt you,” said the solitaire. “But I can’t argue. I can only be. My dear friends, I admire and am interested by the introvert, but I myself have an extraverted mind that pours itself out on many subjects. The whole world … I would that I could see it at a glance, so that I could love it all in one instant. But I am not what I will, but what I must be. My own conviction is that at my birth the God of the thrushes gave me for a soul a little of His own breath, and, therefore, all my life I must be returning the loan. I beg your pardon, but I simply cannot talk another instant. I must sing!”
With that word, he fairly exploded upward into the air, and uttered a note of such piercing joy that the golden coyote sat down on quivering haunches. So it was that, looking upward, he saw the dropping line of darkness, and barked a quick warning. But the solitaire was drowned and blinded by his own sweet music. There was a hiss of wings, and a peregrine falcon, with sharp talons, struck the poor minstrel from ecstasy to death. She descended almost to the ground with the force of her stroke, but, rebounding, she lighted upon the very treetop that had been the pulpit of the thrush, plumed her quarry, and made a mouthful of the limp, delicate, little body.
“You observe what comes to these blind rejoicers,” said the mother coyote. “To me, I can’t help saying, such an ending is fitting. It restores my appetite.” She stepped forward and licked from the dewy grass a drop or two of red. Then she raised her head and said with a grin: “What is your song, stranger? For my part, I never have seen your like before, and, therefore, I haven’t the slightest idea what your voice is like.”
“It is well known in the upper air, however,” replied the peregrine, in a tone that reminded the golden coyote of the mourning of a distant storm. “As for singing, I disdain it. I may say that I have eaten several hundred songs in my time, but, though they digested easily, they have left me with no more than an anatomical interest in music, as you might say.”
“Exactly,” she said. “I understand and delight in your point of view. What are your interests, madam?”
“I am a warrior, a wanderer, and an Amazon of the upper air,” said the peregrine. “My home is on mountains, tall trees, or the edge of cliffs where the sea thunders … but my real dwelling is among the pinnacles of the highest clouds, where the goddess of the falcons, the maker and ruler of all things, spreads her wings close above me. My love is battle. My duty is to bring down from the blue, death to the weak as well as to the inept.”
A gust of wind made the treetop nod, and the hawk spread her long, narrow wings to maintain a balance.
“Death, do you see,” said the mother, “is the proper business of life, as I was saying a moment ago to that foolish vaudevillian, that cheap song-and-dance artist. This, now, is a person of importance. I never saw a finer pair of wings.”
“And you never will,” said the peregrine. “The more closely you examine me, the more perfectly you will find me made for speed. If you look closely at my tail and my wing feathers and talons, you will see that all is ideal about me, and, when I leave you, I advise you to watch me ringing and waiting on above the next lake, where I intend to rob a fish hawk, the moment that the fool rises with food.”
“A good many of those words I don’t understand,” said the golden coyote.
“I never trouble to explain myself,” she said. “It is doubtless the first time you have spoken with a haggard, and probably will be the last. As for my vocabulary, it includes many words that among lesser birds have become obsolete and that the poor earth crawlers who never have known the joy of walking the air would not understand without a long lecture. There soars the fish hawk and I am off.”
She dipped off the top of the tree as she spoke, disappearing above the woods, while immediately afterward the coyotes saw an osprey rising in labored circles before it headed away to its nest, with the glitter of a fish hanging from its talons. At this, the coyotes could not help licking their lips, for they were fond of that diet and rarely enjoyed it. They had lain for hours on the bank of a lake and through the bushes studied the maneuvers of the osprey with admiration and consuming envy. Sitting on a branch of a tall tree, perhaps where the bluff gave an added elevation, the fish hawk was ready to drop like a stone into the water. There was a loud sound, a silver dashing of spray, and up mounted the osprey with a good fish gripped by the back and pointed straight ahead to lessen wind resistance. Before the noise of its plunge had done echoing, it was out of sight, swiftly winging across the dark heads of the forest. That brightly remembered picture returned on the minds of the watchers as they saw the osprey flying now. Presently the falcon rose into view, not driving directly after the other hawk, but swimming in circles within the great horizon like a fish around a blue pool.
She mounted rapidly, narrowed her circle, towered to the insignificance of a drifting leaf. The osprey had taken alarm, at las
t, and redoubled its pace, but the falcon glanced down from the middle sky. The loaded fish hawk dodged, and that other graceful pirate of the air, shooting a hundred yards below her mark, glanced up again with widespread wings to a great height above the quarry.
“The first was a warning. This time she means business,” said the old mother. “See … there she tips. I saw the sun glance on her wings. Hai, my son! Suppose we could drop at rabbits and deer in this manner, and run from mountaintop to mountaintop like a trout swimming through the mirror of his lake.”
In her second stoop, the hawk fairly dissolved in air to a thin pencil stroke. The osprey shifted, but could not foot fast enough, burdened as she was. The falcon struck so hard that she glanced off at an angle, leaving a puff of feathers to blow on the wind. This was quite enough for the fisher, for she released the prize. It fell like a glistening drop of water, and the falcon, tipping over, scooped it up at the very edge of the treetops. After all this, a small sound came down the breeze, and the coyotes knew that it was the screech of the stricken osprey, now staggering drunkenly down for shelter.
But here both watchers lost all interest in this aerial tragedy, for on the same wind that carried the cry of the fish hawk they heard the dogs giving tongue close by, like two deep-throated bells. The white mother arched her back like a cat.
“They have turned from Beaver Creek into the valley of the Musquash,” said her son, “and it’s plain to hear them calling … ‘Coyote! Coyote!’ Run for the cave. Even if they like your trail better than mine, I haven’t a doubt that they will stop to play, if I remain here and ask them.”
Her hair bristled. “Oh, my son, he who puts his head in the wolfs mouth …,” she began.
“They are not wolves,” he answered. “They’re fat-bellied, slow-footed, ignorant mouse killers. They run a pound to catch an ounce, and, if they put so much as a tooth on me, let the whole valley laugh at me, from the Black Desert to the Kendal Woods. Run, now, and take the longer way home, for your three legs make slow work of climbing over steep rocks.”
She panted with eagerness to be off, but, somehow, her fear for him made her linger. “To despise danger is to invite death,” she told him.
“According to your own story, that is the proper end of life,” he reminded her. “But don’t fear for me. I shall play such tag with them that the story of it shall be written in red on their hides. Trust me … and now be off.”
“I go,” said the mother. “Only, be no braver than your size. Wise, and brave, and beautiful.” She murmured this over her shoulder, and then labored away, whining with effort.
Her son at once shifted to a higher piece of ground from which he commanded a wide view of the woods. In one place they thinned, and he looked through the dusky colonnade to the flash of the Musquash beyond.
The noise of the dogs now rang at his ear; it slid along the ground and rose up with a deep vibration immediately beneath him, but he could follow their progress by a sure guide. For above the trees flew a blue jay with harsh laughter, now and again broken by the distress cry that birds utter when they wish for help against the owl or the intrusive hawk. Those cries of the jay had gathered a number of birds that fluttered and hovered over the treetops like a gust of scattered leaves, and, although when they came nearer, the strident and mocking laughter of the jay told them that they had come in vain and that they might as well be about their business. Yet in spite of their better senses, they had to linger to see this supreme actor, this cruel comedian and clown of the air, who never seems to have anything to do except perform for the entertainment of others—and then rob the homes of his audience, if he can. This jay was an old acquaintance of the coyote who he had followed on hundreds of hunting expeditions for the sake of a few shreds of fresh meat, here and there. His very flight was now full of antics, for sometimes he darted in a straight line, a flash of bright blue, and sometimes he tumbled down like a young bird that has lost balance, though after each pretended fall, which made the little birds in the distance lift in air to watch, his laughter was sure to break out more harshly than ever. In the meantime, he kept up an ironic conversation at the expense of the dogs, saying: “Well jumped, Rusty … well run, Gray Tom! Come closer, little ones, and see them working. Their eyes are as red as their tongues. They are running so fast that the wind has carried away their brains, for they are hunting a dinner of coyote meat today!”
Here the two dogs broke out into the open. They were a mongrel pair, half greyhound and half mastiff, armed with the jaw power of wolves but usually too slow to be dangerous unless the rifle of man was behind them. Gray Tom was richly dappled, but Rusty was a solid black who got his name through the sun-fading of the hair along his back. They ran nose down on the trail that the coyotes had followed, but, coming to a big fallen tree trunk, the golden coyote noted that they did not leap the obstruction as he had done, but turned and ran around it on the course of the time-stiffened mother, so that it was plain that she was their selected prize. Of what value that age-starved body could be to them he could not imagine; the vagaries of dogs were beneath his contempt.
Nose down still, they were rushing by, always calling out the same words in unison, or, one getting a bit behind in that eternal chorus, making a round of it.
“It is on the ground … it is in my brain … run, run! It is fresher and nearer, run!”
“Brothers, how beautifully you sing,” said the golden coyote, stepping out from the brush that had concealed him.
They checked themselves so stiffly that they tore the soft turf. Lumberingly they came about, their red eyes blazing, their jaws a-drip, but he minded them so little that he could afford to listen to the delighted screech of the blue jay above him and to mark the little choristers in the distance blown upward in a whirl of excitement.
“Shoulder to shoulder,” he heard Rusty pant to his brother. “And beware of tricky dodging.”
He smiled at them out of half-closed eyes. He stood at ease until they were half the length of his own body away, opening their jaws for the stroke, then he leaped to the side, and, as Rusty went by, he sliced the flank of that monster as if with a razor.
They whirled with howls of rage. They charged in blind fury. But as a beating hand drives the leaf before it, so the very wind of their assaults appeared to waft the coyote here and there before them, while more than once he had a chance to give a good tug with his teeth, or a side rip, after true coyote style.
At last, they drew back, bleeding, insane with fury, and the golden coyote listened to the twittering applause of the songsters, and looked up to where the blue jay tottered with drunken excess of joy in mid-air.
“Save the bones for me to pick!” shouted the jay. “Fight, Rusty! Fight, Gray Tom! In at him with a will! You almost had him then! Down with the little yellow streak of insult.” And then he squawked and choked and almost burst with hideous laughter.
The coyote stretched himself on the grass and sniffed with elaborate casualness at a twig that had been overturned in the trampling.
“This is a very good game for those who know it,” he said to the panting dogs. “What a pity that you come out so seldom to play with me.” He pricked his ears. More birds were coming; he heard their voices in a sweetly pattering rain of applause and curiosity.
“Leave him,” said Gray Tom. “As well chase a cloud of mosquitoes. And the half-bred cur is laughing at us.”
The golden coyote stood up, his back humped with wrath. “Half-breed?” he said, with curling lips.
The blue jay danced above them, his wings translucent with sunlight. “Slander! Slander!” he cried.
At this, Rusty looked up. “They know. The whole forest knows,” he said. “And why shouldn’t we, who saw your father every day of his life except when he went out maundering through the woods and grew sentimental about the wild things that were the death of him, in the finish.”
“No doubt you knew him,” said the coyote, “and no doubt he wrote his name in your skin as I have don
e today.”
“Tell him,” said Rusty. “I’m out of breath.”
“I have driven him,” answered Gray Tom, “both from hidden bones, and from his own portion of raw meat.”
“You lie!” cried the coyote.
“He lies, lies!” laughed the blue jay overhead. “Come closer and everyone listen!”
In fact, the little chirruping cloud of songsters floated nearer with a purring of many wings.
“Your father,” said Gray Tom, panting and grinning at the same time, “was a poor, skinny, unconsidered, sentimental sheep dog, forever whining about the wilderness and wanting to hear stories about wolves. A contemptible creature, always hanging about the house and licking the hand of man, and being kicked out of the way. A frightful bore in the kennel, so that we were glad when he went away and tried his hand at being a coyote.”
“All lies,” said the golden coyote. But the very marrow of his bones ached with cold apprehension.
“Be off, now,” said Gray Tom to his companion. “There’s the old one still before us.”
They galloped away side-by-side, heads down, and, as the rocks and brush closed behind them, they threw up a loud and musical confusion of baying once more.
The coyote stood, bewildered and sick at heart. Many a time, in rage or in derision, the birds and the beasts had called him “yellow dog.” Even his wife, when she left him, had cast that final insult in his teeth, and it was a question that his mother never would answer directly.
A sheep dog, then, one of those caretakers of the white-wooled fools whose throats were as easily slit as naked fat. A poor slave, half starved, working for no reward but an opportunity to kiss the hand of the master. And what was he, the golden coyote, in that case, no more than a runaway servant that one day might be reclaimed by man? The hair prickled and bristled along his back, but he recalled himself to his duty.
“Brother,” he said to the blue jay, “rise over the shoulder of that hill and tell me where the pair are hunting, and where my mother runs.”
