“But I agreed to see her next week.”
“You can’t.”
“I have to.” She’d had no choice but to cut Fiona off. But they had so much more to discuss.
“Riley, I’m not comfortable with this.”
She didn’t know what it was, but Peggy always came across as the voice of authority. Sure, Peggy was older, but they were colleagues, friends, equals, weren’t they? They ran a joint practice. Fifty-fifty. Yet Riley always found herself deferring to her, like their relationship was one of parent and adult child. Which in a way it was, considering Peggy had picked up where Amelia, her adoptive mother, had left off. “Just once more. And then I’ll transfer her to you. I promise.”
“Look, just take it easy tonight, okay? Get some rest. We’ll put things in perspective tomorrow.”
“Fine,” Riley said. Anything to get her off the phone. Her pack was scratching at the door, and the wolf inside her was scratching to get out. She had a busy night ahead and wasn’t about to discuss her plans. Peggy would have an absolute fit if she knew what Riley was up to. Only the coyotes needed to know for now. They were the best at keeping secrets.
She hung up and heard a commotion coming from below—yips and howls and the thumping of feet on the basement steps. A few years ago, Barbara had helped her install two doggy doors: one in the garage door itself, and a second in an entry door that led from the garage into the finished basement. Normally, coyotes preferred to live and rest and sleep out in the open. Dens were mostly nurseries used for whelping pups. But this family, three of which she’d helped raise, had quickly learned that the garage and basement were a refuge from spring rains, blizzards in the dead of winter; a welcome reprieve from the heat and mosquitoes that tormented them in summer, and their safe space come October, when hunting season opened and the sound of distant gunfire struck them with fear.
Riley walked down the hallway that ran along the staircase toward the first-floor master bedroom and opened the basement door at the back of the stairs. By the time she got back to the kitchen she heard them plodding up the steps. Then came the frenzied clicking of nails on the wood-planked floor as they all rushed in to find her. There were Gadget, Fidget, and Widget, named in honor of her first canid friends in Central Park. Gadget and Widget were the alpha male and female. Fidget, a helper-coyote, was their two-year-old daughter who remained with her parents and took care of Midget, the four-month-old pup born in March. The little one was the last to climb the steps and race into the kitchen.
They all flanked Riley, almost knocking her over, tails wagging as they yipped and yodeled their greetings. “Who’s hungry?” Riley asked.
At the word hungry they grew still, four expectant faces shifting between Riley and the refrigerator as she promptly retrieved a plump bag of chicken thighs she’d boiled and deboned last night. She divvied up the meat on paper plates and set the first one in front of Gadget. As soon as she took her hand away, he stood over it and showed his teeth. Being possessive and protecting food was instinctive, a natural and acceptable behavior that Riley allowed. “I know, I know. That’s all yours.”
She put down the other plates, leaving them to gobble their portions while she got out of this god-awful linen suit and into shorts and a T-shirt. Once she did, she whistled, ran into the living room, and flopped down on the carpet by the hearth, counting the seconds it took for the marauding canines to tackle her. They piled on top of her torso, licking her face, and she began to laugh, doggy-style. Getting a canid to laugh was easy. She inhaled and exhaled in short bursts, like an excited panting in Morse Code. It worked with Black Jack and Peanut all the time. The chihuahuas could be sound asleep but would jump up at the sound and start laughing with her—just like people who hear a stranger laughing hysterically and can’t help but join them, even though they have no idea what’s so funny.
They laughed back and began playfully nipping at her arms and legs as they stood over her, ready to wrestle. The pup rolled onto her back, wriggling in delight. It was funny how Riley was part of the pack yet separate, not quite figuring into the hierarchy. Or maybe she did. She’d known them all since they were young. And it was quite possible that they saw her as the grand matriarch, the all-knowing and doting grandmother who came and went. It was hard to tell. Coyote families were as varied as human families, not nearly as structured as wolf packs. Because they usually hunted alone or in pairs and fed mostly on small mammals—mice, frogs, fruits, and bugs—their survival didn’t depend on the rigid roles and efficiency of a large, highly organized pack required to take down large prey.
Either way, she loved these animals. God, did she love them. They were her only means of indulging herself in the physical contact and affection she craved. She had, of course, occasional interludes with women—those intimate hours shared with transient lovers that provided a release of sexual tension. But this? This petting, laughing, kissing, hugging? This was pure joy. Pure love. As pure as the love she’d felt rolling around with Fiona on those long-ago summer days—lost days never to be retrieved. But at least Fiona was back in her life, a fact that should have magnified, amplified the joy she felt. But it didn’t.
Over the next few days she’d sort through her feelings. Right now her emotions were jumbled, a tangle of incongruous emotions that knotted in her chest. At one loose end of that jumble was jubilation, and at the other end a melancholy that threatened to send her into a deep funk.
As if sensing her sudden sadness, the coyotes settled down, surrounding her quietly and seeming content to cool off from the heat outside. Midget relaxed on her back like Riley, her little feet in the air. Riley rubbed her belly, turned her head, and buried her face in the pup’s neck. “Yuck. You guys stink!” Riley whispered. Tails wagged as if they’d received a compliment. One night this week she would get them in the lake for a swim and remember to bring along a bottle of biodegradable shampoo. They’d need their monthly dose of flea and tick prevention as well.
Riley’s eyes started growing heavy, and through half-closed lids she noticed Widget and Gadget’s attentive stare. Many coyotes had inhabited this property over the years, but none had ever completely trusted her; not enough to let her handle them in human form, and certainly not enough to ever come inside the house. This pack had started with Widget, whom Riley had rescued one spring, over five years ago. She’d been out hiking on state land when she heard the distressed whine of a puppy and followed the sound to the entrance of a den dug between an outcrop of boulders on a steep hillside. There she came upon a hideous sight that made her shudder.
Four dead pups were laid out in a perfect line. They couldn’t have been more than seven or eight weeks old, for Christ’s sake. And stuck in the middle was the head of a fawn. The parents had likely taken it down to feed their pups, and some psychopathic hunter, in an act of revenge, had left a clear message for them: you kill a deer, I kill your babies. Not that the bastard was avenging the fawn’s death; he was angry that the fawn wouldn’t grow into a deer that he himself could bag come fall. Wasn’t that the real reason hunters shot predators—to remove the competition?
Riley couldn’t say for sure who it had been, but she’d bet money on that mean old man from the farm, Jim Barrett’s Uncle Dennis, although she hadn’t known his name until today.
Riley had stayed for hours, watching from a distance. Coyotes always had a plan B, always had backup dens, and Riley was sure they’d return to take the surviving pup to a safer one. Night came, but the parents never did. Riley took the puppy home, trying not to think of how the parents had met their demise.
When Widget was two, Gadget showed up. He was a dispersal coyote, a young adult who had left his natal area to find a mate and establish his own territory. He bonded with Widget right away, and although he could have done without Riley, he quickly learned that if you want the girl, it’s in your best interest to win over her mother. Riley thought of him as her son-in-law.
Compared with resident and transient coyotes, dispersals
had the highest rate of mortality. They were usually young males who typically left their families between October and January. With more hormones than brains, they were brazen but inexperienced. And without the safety of a pack, or the guidance of wiser parents, they were the first to fall prey to the calls of hunters who lured them into open fields at night—like Dennis Barrett. And now his nephew, Jim, had moved in to claim his new territory. Didn’t that make Jim sort of like a dispersal coyote, leaving his territory up in Lenox to establish a new one here? Too bad he wasn’t as good a mate as Gadget. An alpha coyote would never harm his alpha female. Never ever would he abuse his own puppies. Jim would do well to take a lesson from her coyotes.
“Just remember this, Jim…dispersals have the highest rate of mortality…so you better watch your ass,” Riley whispered as she lay there, fighting this sudden wave of forlornness.
Sensing her change in mood, Widget crawled between Riley’s outstretched legs and gave her knees a few consolatory licks. Riley looked down at her tender face. “Do coyotes get the blues?”
Widget whined.
Riley smiled. “Of course they do,” she said, as that feeling of nostalgic regret washed over her again. “All animals do.” The only difference between them and people was that a person could sing the blues, set sorrow to music, turn grief into poetry. They could talk to whoever might listen, join a bereavement group like the ones Riley led, or post their woes on social media in hopes that the world would validate and weep along with them. All an animal could do was crawl away, curl up with a broken heart, and mourn in silence. Riley sighed and felt herself drift.
Maybe it was melancholy that put her to sleep, or more likely the Ativan in her bloodstream, but the next thing she knew she was opening her eyes to a darkened room. She stared up at the cathedral ceiling, barely able to see the wood planks. Only the white stucco of the chimney was visible. Everything else sat in shadows. The coyotes had gone, leaving her to sleep. Riley got up and staggered around the room, turning on lights, putting on music, all the while using one foot to scratch at the itchy goose bumps on the other leg. The change was coming.
She shuffled into the kitchen and decided on a quick cup of coffee. She had a lot of land to cover tonight and figured it would perk her up. A werewolf on caffeine…a formidable combination. Little did Jim Barrett know that he’d made an anonymous enemy today—a caffeinated enemy capable of chewing him to bits. At one hundred and thirty pounds in fur, she was double the weight of an eastern coyote, twice as strong, and decidedly in a quite fractious state of mind.
* * *
Riley had spent so many years loathing this lycanthropic affliction that denied her a normal life—ideally, a life with Fiona Bell—that she often failed to appreciate the glory of it. But Tom was right. It was exhilarating, this raw strength and power, this incongruous state of being elevated to a lower life form, if that made any sense. There was an exaltation in the lessening—a paradox best understood, perhaps, by only another shape-shifter. Not that Riley knew any. But it would have been nice to exchange notes with someone who understood what it was like to transcend the wrappings of humanity.
Riley stood in the driveway and gave herself a good shake, shedding those wrappings like a dog shaking off the rain. In the early days, the transmutation often left her on two legs, but now the changes were complete. Anyone seeing her sprint across the road would have taken her for an exceptionally large coyote. Her fur retained the blond and golden-brown hues of her human hair, and her eyes were still their usual shade of amber, but they saw differently. There was a lucidity to life now, a clarity of thought, a crystal-clear wisdom that eluded her in human form.
She threw her head back, howling a request for the pack’s location. A moment later Gadget answered from the distance, his long, deep wail joined by Widget’s shorter howls that rose and fell in pitch with a raucous chorus of barks and yips and yaps. Over here! We’re over here!
Anyone hearing the frenzied ululations of three to five coyotes would swear the pack numbered ten to twenty. That was the beau geste effect, an auditory illusion created by the wide variety of symphonic sounds distorting as they passed through the air. Riley likened it to the tactics of a small group of warriors making a lot of noise in order to fool the opposition into thinking they were many and that it was best not to trespass on enemy territory.
She listened, mentally mapping their coordinates. They were on state land, in the fields that bordered Fox Creek and led up to the old farm. The forests and woodlands were easily negotiated, but desolate roads, trails, and open fields were always a coyote’s preferred means of travel.
She took off on all fours, probably reaching thirty miles per hour along the shoulder of the road. It was incredible moving at this speed, the ultimate runner’s high, and she might have maintained it for a bit if an automobile hadn’t approached. She heard it before she saw the glare of the headlights and ducked into the brushwood, panting to catch her breath and cool down.
Her ears flickered to ward off the swarm of mosquitoes trying to land. They were vicious this time of year, and Riley felt sorry for all the animals they tormented. Living in the wild wasn’t exactly a comfortable affair. While you were busy keeping an eye out for larger dangers, the little ones were sneaking up—mosquitoes, ticks, and other bloodsuckers intent on making a meal of you. Sometimes to the point of anemia.
No matter the season, it was a cruel, no-nonsense life out here in the wild, and when the first frost brought a reprieve from parasites, the threat of starvation took its place. It was one thing to wake up hungry and rustle up breakfast in your kitchen; quite another to have to hunt for it. And if the hunt was unsuccessful, often the case in the dead of winter, you’d go back to sleep that night with the same hunger pangs that awoke you the previous morning. Riley’s canines were most fortunate to have carte blanche to the Dawson Bed and Breakfast.
Riley took a shortcut from there, sprinting from one copse of trees to the next until coming out beneath an open sky. About fifty yards out in the moonlit field, the heads of five silhouetted coyotes popped up at her approach. One snapped a bark of warning before they caught her scent and charged with yelps of greeting. Endlessly amazed and often amused to see her in fur, they frisked with her, gathering around for body rubs, cheek licks, and snout hugs. Fidget grabbed her neck, then dodged her, initiating a game of play-chase, but Riley was in too serious a mood. She shrugged her off, trotted away to stare up at the stars and get a good whiff of the world. Her nose twitched, pinpointing the source of all scents with amazing accuracy. She loved having this nose. And these slits on the sides of her nostrils were the best. They enabled her to inhale and exhale simultaneously and even pocket unfamiliar smells for further processing—like the faint odor of diesel fuel coming from the northwest.
At the back of the field was a dirt trail, the vegetation worn away by the treading of wildlife. A quick trek down the path brought them to the creek. During early spring the heavy rains and meltwater would have made this rivulet impassable without getting soaked, but by midsummer the water level was low enough that the flat tops of river rocks protruded like stepping-stones. They all stopped to lap cold water from the stream, and then Riley flashed them the stern look of a mother telling her pups to stay put. Coyotes hadn’t survived extinction by trusting people, and the fresh scent of human activity on the other side was enough to dampen their curiosity.
Riley took a leap, jumping from rock to rock across the wide channel like a dog playing hopscotch, then climbed up the bank and pushed her way through the brush. She emerged in what had long ago been a cow pasture. Rye and prairie grasses grew up around crooked fence posts, rusted barbed wire hanging loosely or having completely fallen away. The homestead lay ahead, and Riley paused to orient herself, her ears collecting sounds in the night. She listened to the steady murmur of the creek behind her, the hooting of owls, the croaks and bellows of assorted frogs. The sharp bark of a fox rang out, the grass whistling as a warm summer night breeze
swept across the great expanse of pasture. Beyond that came the faint drone of a television.
The farmhouse, with its softly glowing windows, looked picture-perfect from the distance. A waning moon outlined the weathered-gray barns, gave the white house a satiny shine, and behind it all the peaks of distant hills rose up like the darkened mezzanine of a theater. Something large gleamed to the left of the house, and it wasn’t until Riley was halfway across the pasture that she realized it was the chrome grill of a big-rig truck. That explained the smell of diesel fuel. Daddy’s home, she thought. A deep growl rumbled in her chest, her eyes blinking against the switches of tall grass that blew and brushed her face as she trotted.
By the time she emerged from the overgrown pasture, the homestead had lost its charm. White paint peeled from the clapboard, and the outbuildings to the right were ramshackle. In front of one was a stack of old tires, and here and there sat rusted barrels and heaps of undetermined junk. Riley suspected the Barretts were in the process of clearing out the shed and barns that stood to her right. Her curiosity tugged her in the other direction, though, and she ran to inspect the big rig first. The driveway was down to the dirt, looking like it could use a few tons of fresh gravel, and she was careful to avoid the muddy ruts that still held remnants of the morning rain.
The truck was massive, frighteningly so, its tires higher than Riley was on all fours. It scared her to think how easily it could splatter an animal crossing a highway. She stood up, paws on the running board, to get a good whiff of this Jim-guy. His scent was strong and sour. Instantly she hated the very fact of his existence. Before she continued, she backed herself up against the tire beneath the cab, extending a rear leg as she squatted, and peed on the spiked lug nuts. If she had her way, she would have marked the entire place, covering Jim’s foul scent with her own until every trace of him was obliterated, including the angry stench of testosterone coming from behind the rig. Two cars were parked in the weedy gravel space, one small and white, the sweet odors of Fiona and Edy clinging to the door handles. The other was some sort of vintage sports car, a Dodge Charger, maybe. It reeked of him. In the night shadows, Riley couldn’t tell if the car was black or blue, but the driver’s side door was primed, as if waiting for a paint job, and the rims and tires looked brand-new.
Coyote Blues Page 13