Ursula K. LeGuin - Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences

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  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.

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  Won't You Come Out TonightA 31

  "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.

  Doe pushed the door farther open and peered in. "She's out hunting, I guess. I better be getting back to the fawns. You going to be OK? Anybody else here will give you something to eat -- you know... OK?"

  "Yeah. I'm fine. Thank you," the child said.

  She watched Doe walk away through the clear twilight, a severely elegant walk, small steps; like a woman in high heels, quick, precise, very light

  Inside Bide-A-Wee it was too dark to see anything and so cluttered that she fell over something at every step. She could not figure out where or how to light a fire. There was something that felt like a bed, but when she lay down on it, it felt more like a dirty-clothes pile, and smelt like one. Things bit her legs, arms, neck, and back. She was terribly hungry. By smell she found her way to what had to be a dead fish hanging from the ceiling in one corner. By feel she broke off a greasy flake and tasted it. It was smoked dried salmon. She ate one succulent piece after another until she was satisfied, and licked her fingers clean. Near the open door starlight shone on water in a pot of some kind; the child smelled it cautiously, tasted it cautiously, and drank just enough to quench her thirst, for it tasted of mud and was warm and stale. Then she went back to the bed of dirty clothes and fleas, and lay down. She could have gone to Chipmunk's house, or other friendly households; she thought of that as she lay forlorn in Coyote's dirty bed. But she did not go. She slapped at fleas until she fell asleep.

  Along in the deep night somebody said, "Move over, pup," and was warm beside her.

  Ifc

  Breakfast, eaten sitting in the sun in the doorway, was dried-salmon-powder mush. Coyote hunted, mornings and evenings, but what they ate was not fresh game but salmon, and dried stuff, and any berries in season. The child did not ask about this. It made sense to her. She was going to ask Coyote why she slept at night and waked in the day like humans, instead of the other way round like coyotes, but when she framed the question in her mind she saw at once that night is when you sleep and day when you're awake; that made sense too. But one question she did ask, one hot day when they were lying around slapping fleas.

  "I don't understand why you all look like people," she said.

  "We are people."

  "I mean, people like me, humans."

  "Resemblance is in the eye," Coyote said. "How is that lousy eye, by the way?"

  "It's fine. But -- like you wear clothes -- and live in houses -- with fires and stuff -- "

  "That's what you think... If that loudmouth Jay hadn't horned in, I could have done a really good job."

  The child was quite used to Coyote's disinclination to stick to any one subject, and to her boasting. Coyote was like a lot of kids she knew, in some respects. Not in others.

  "You mean what I'm seeing isn't true? Isn't real -- like on TV, or something?"

  "No," Coyote said. "Hey, that's a tick on your collar." She reached over, flicked the tick off, picked it up on one finger, bit it, and spat out the bits.

  "Yecch!" the child said. "So?"

  "So, to me you're basically greyish yellow and run on four legs. To that lot -- " she waved disdainfully at the warren of little houses next down the hill -- "you hop around twitching your nose all the time. To Hawk, you're

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  an egg, or maybe getting pinfeathers. See? It just depends on how you look at things. There are only two kinds of people."

  "Humans and animals?"

  "No. The kind of people who say, There are two kinds of people' and the kind of people who don't" Coyote cracked up, pounding her thigh and yelling with delight at her joke. The child didn't get it, and waited.

  "OK," Coyote said. "There's the first people, and then the others. That's the two kinds."

  "The first people are — ?" "Us, the animals... and things. All the old ones. You know. And you pups, kids, fledglings. All first people."

  "And the -- others?"

  "Them," Coyote said. "You know. The others. The new people. The ones who came." Her fine, hard face had gone serious, rather formidable. She glanced directly, as she seldom did, at the child, a brief gold sharpness. "We were here," she said. "We were always here. We are always here. Where we are is here. But it's their country now. They're running it... Shit, even I did better!"

  The child pondered and offered a word she had used to hear a good deal: "They're illegal immigrants."

  "Illegal!" Coyote said, mocking, sneering. "Illegal is a sick bird.

  What the fuck's illegal mean? You want a code of justice from a coyote? Grow up, kid!"

  "I don't want to."

  "You don't want to grow up?"

  "IH be the other kind if I do."

  "Yeah. So," Coyote said, and shrugged. "That's life." She got up and went around the house, and the child heard her pissing in the back yard.

  A lot of things were hard to take about Coyote as a mother. When her boyfriends came to visit, the child learned to go stay with Chipmunk or the Rabbits for the

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  night, because Coyote and her friend wouldn't even wait to get on the bed but would start doing that right on the floor or even out in the yard. A couple of times Coyote came back late from hunting with a friend, and the child had to lie up against the wall in the same bed and hear and feel them doing that right next to her. It was something like fighting and something like dancing, with a beat to it, and she didn't mind too much except that it made it hard to stay asleep.

  Once she woke up and one of Coyote's friends was stroking her stomach in a creepy way. She didn't know what to do, but Coyote woke up and realized what he was doing bit him hard, and kicked him out of bed. He spent the night on the floor, and apologized next morning -- "Aw, hell, Ki, I forgot the kid was there, I thought it was you -- "

  Coyote, unappeased, yelled, "You think I don't got any standards? You think I'd let some coyote rape a kid in my bed?" She kicked him out of the house, and grumbled about him all day. But a while later he spent the night again, and he and Coyote did that three or four times.

  Another thing that was embarrassing was the way Coyote peed anywhere, taking her pants down in public. But most people here didn't seem to care. The thing that worried the child most, maybe, was when Coyote did number two anywhere and then turned around and talked to it That seemed so awful. As if Coyote was -- the way she often seemed, but really wasn't -- crazy.

  The child gathered up all the old dry turds from around the house one day while Coyote was having a nap, and buried them in a sandy place near where she and Bobcat and some of the other people generally went and did and buried their number twos.

  Coyote woke up, came lounging out of Bide-A-Wee, rubbing her hands through her thick, fair, greyish hair and yawning, looked all around once with those narrow eyes,

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  and
said, "Hey! Where are they?" Then she shouted, "Where are you?

  Where are you?"

  And a faint, muffled chorus came from over in the sandy draw, "Mommy! Mommy! We're here!"

  Coyote trotted over, squatted down, raked out every turd, and talked with them for a long time. When she came back she said nothing, but the child, redfaced and heart pounding, said, "I'm sorry I did that"

  "It's just easier when they're all around close by," Coyote said, washing her hands (despite the filth of her house, she kept herself quite clean, in her own fashion.)

  "I kept stepping on them," the child said, trying to justify her deed.

  "Poor little shits," said Coyote, practicing dance-steps.

  "Coyote," the child said timidly. "Did you ever have any children? I mean real pups?"

  "Did I? Did I have children? Litters! That one that tried feeling you up, you know? that was my son. Pick of the litter... Listen, Gal. Have daughters. When you have anything, have daughters. At least they clear out"

  111

  The child thought of herself as Gal, but also sometimes as Myra. So far as she knew, she was the only person in town who had two names. She had to think about that, and about what Coyote had said about the two kinds of people; she had to think about where she belonged. Some persons in town made it clear that as far as they were concerned she didn't and never would belong there. Hawk's furious stare burned through her; the Skunk children made audible remarks about what she smelled like. And though White-foot and Chipmunk and their families were kind, it was the generosity of big families, where one more or less simply

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  doesn't count If one of them, or Cottontail, or Jackrabbit, had come upon her in the desert lying lost and half-blind, would they have stayed with her, like Coyote? That was Coyote's craziness, what they called her craziness. She wasn't afraid. She went between the two kinds of people, she crossed over. Buck and Doe and their beautiful children weren't really afraid, because they lived so constantly in danger. The Rattler wasn't afraid, because he was so dangerous. And yet maybe he was afraid of her, for he never spoke, and never came close to her.

  None of them treated her the way Coyote did. Even among the children, her only constant playmate was one younger than herself, a preposterous and fearless little boy called Horned Toad Child. They dug and built together, out among the sagebrush, and played at hunting and gathering and keeping house and holding dances, all the great games. A pale, squatty child with fringed eyebrows, he was a self-contained but loyal friend; and he knew a good deal for his age.

  "There isn't anybody else like me here," she said, as they sat by the pool in the morning sunlight

  "There isn't anybody much like me anywhere," said Horned Toad Child. "Well, you know what I mean."

  "Yeah... There used to be people like you around, I guess."

  "What were they called?"

  "Oh -- people. Like everybody..."

  "But where do my people live? They have towns. I used to live in one. I don't know where they are, is all. I ought to find out I don't know where my mother is now, but my daddy's in Canyonville. I was going there when."

  "Ask Horse," said Horned Toad Child, sagaciously. He had moved away from the water, which he did not like and never drank, and was plaiting rushes.

  "I don't know Horse."

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  "He hangs around the butte down there a lot of the time. He's waiting till his uncle gets old and he can kick him out and be the big honcho. The old man and the women don't want him around till then. Horses are weird. Anyway, he's the one to ask He gets around a lot And his people came here with the new people, that's what they say, anyhow."

  Illegal immigrants, the girl thought She took Horned Toad's advice, and one long day when Coyote was gone on one of her unannounced and unexplained trips, she took a pouchful of dried salmon and salmonberries and went off alone to the flat-topped butte miles away in the southwest

  There was a beautiful spring at the foot of the butte, and a trail to it with a lot of footprints on it She waited there under willows by the clear pool, and after a while Horse came running, splendid, with copper-red skin and long strong legs, deep chest, dark eyes, his black hair whipping his back as he ran. He stopped, not at all winded, and

  gave a snort as he looked at her. "Who are you?"

  Nobody in town asked that -- ever. She saw it was true: Horse had come here with her people, people who had to ask each other who they were.

  "I live with Coyote," she said, cautiously.

  "Oh, sure, I heard about you," Horse said. He knelt to drink from the pool, long deep drafts, his hands plunged in the cool water. When he had drunk he wiped his mouth, sat back on his heels, and announced,

  "I'm going to be king."

  "King of the Horses?"

  "Right! Pretty soon now. I could lick the old man already, but I can wait Let him have his day," said Horse, vainglorious, magnanimous. The child gazed at him, in love already, forever.

  "I can comb your hair, if you like," she said.

  "Great!" said Horse, and sat still while she stood behind him, tugging her pocket comb through his coarse, black, shining yard-long hair. It took a long time to get it smooth.

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  She tied it in a massive ponytail with willowbark whera she was done. Horse bent over the pool to admire himself. "That's great," he said. "That's really beautiful!"

  "Do you ever, go... where the other people are?" she asked in a low voice.

  He did not reply for long enough that she thought he wasn't going to; then he said, "You mean the metal places, the glass places? The holes?

  I go around them. There are all the walls now. There didn't used to be so many. Grandmother said there didn't used to be any walls. Do you know Grandmother?" he asked naively, looking at her with his great, dark eyes.

  'Your grandmother?"

  "Well, yes -- Grandmother -- You know. Who makes the web. Well, anyhow. I know there's some of my people, horses, there. I've seen them across the walls. They act really crazy. You know, we brought the new people here. They couldn't have got here without us, they only have two legs, and they have those metal shells. I can tell you that whole story. The King has to know the stories."

  "I like stories a lot"

  "It takes three nights to tell it What do you want to know about them?"

  "I was thinking that maybe I ought to go there. Where they are."

  "It's dangerous. Really dangerous. You can't go through -- they'd catch you."

  "I'd just like to know the way."

  "I know the way," Horse said, sounding for the first time entirely adult and reliable; she knew he did know the way. "It's a long run for a colt" He looked at her again. "I Ve got a cousin with different-color eyes," he said, looking from her right to her left eye. "One brown and one blue. But she's an Appaloosa."

  "Bluejay made the yellow one," the child explained. "I 38 JT BUFFALO GALS

  lost my own one. In the...when...You don't think l| could get to those places?"

  "Why do you want to?"

  "I sort of feel like I have to."

  Horse nodded. He got up. She stood still.

  "I could take you, I guess," he said.

  "Would you? When?"

  "Oh, now, I guess. Once I'm King I won't be able to leave, you know. Have to protect the women. And I sure wouldn't let my people get anywhere near those places!" A shudder ran right down his magnificent body, yet he said, with a toss of his head, "They couldn't catch me, of course, but the others can't run like I do... "

  "How long would it take us?"

  Horse thought a while. "Well, the nearest place like that is over by the red rocks. If we left now we'd be back here around tomorrow noon. It's just a little hole."

  She did not know what he meant by "a hole," but did not ask.

  "You want to go?" Horse said, flipping back his ponytail.

  "OK," the girl said, feeling the ground
go out from under her.

  "Can you run?"

  She shook her head. "I walked here, though."

  Horse laughed, a large, cheerful laugh. "Come on," he said, and knelt and held his hands backturned like stirrups for her to mount to his shoulders. "What do they call you?" he teased, rising easily, setting right off at a jogtrot. "Gnat? Fly? Flea?"

  "Tick, because I stick!" the child cried, gripping the wil-lowbark tie of the black mane, laughing with delight at being suddenly eight feet tall and traveling across the desert without even trying, like the tumbleweed, as fast as the wind.

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  Moon, a night past full, rose to light the plains for them. Horse jogged easily on and on. Somewhere deep in the night they stopped at a Pygmy Owl camp, ate a little, and rested. Most of the owls were out hunting but an old lady entertained them at her campfire, telling them tales abbut the ghost of a cricket, about the great invisible people, tales that the child heard interwoven with her own dreams as she dozed and half-woke and dozed again. Then Horse put her up on his shoulders and on they went at a tireless slow lope. Moon went down behind them, and before them the sky paled into rose and gold. The soft nightwind was gone; the air was sharp, cold, still. On it, in it, there was a faint, sour smell of burning. The child felt Horse's gait change, grow tighter, uneasy.

  "Hey, Prince!"

  A small, slightly scolding voice: the child knew it, and placed it as soon as she saw the person sitting by a juniper tree, neatly dressed, wearing an old black cap.

  "Hey, Chickadee!" Horse said, coming round and stopping. The child had observed, back in Coyote's town, that everybody treated Chickadee with respect She didn't see why. Chickadee seemed an ordinary person, busy and talkative like most of the small birds, nothing like so endearing as Quail or so impressive as Hawk or Great Owl.

  "You're going on that way?" Chickadee asked Horse.

  "The little one wants to see if her people are livingthere," Horse said, surprising the child. Was that what she wanted?

  Chickadee looked disapproving, as she often did. She whistled a few notes thoughtfully, another of her habits, and then got up. "I'll come along."