Coyote

by Allen Steele

  And then, almost all at once, it ended.

  Suddenly, there was no more violence, no more waves battering the canoe…just a sensation of slow, steady movement. Feeling warm sunlight against my face, I carefully raised my head.

  The bluffs had disappeared. Now there was only a great expanse of blue water, still as a mirror beneath under the sun. Upon the horizon, I could make out a thin dark line: a distant shore many miles away.

  Unnerved by the abrupt silence, I pushed wet hair from my eyes, turned to gaze back. The Eastern Divide towered above us, a bleak limestone fortress from which we had managed to escape, broken only by the narrow crevice of the Shapiro Pass.

  The Pleiades drifted a few dozen yards away. Kuniko and Chris were slumped in their seats, staring up at the rock wall. Barry groaned softly, then fell back against the pack behind him. I turned to look at Carlos; soaking wet, his chest rising and falling with every breath he took, he regarded the rugged escarpment through exhausted eyes.

  Somehow, against all odds, we’d made it. We were now in the East Channel.

  Crossing the Eastern Divide should have been the tough part, but it wasn’t. We didn’t know it then, but our troubles had just begun.

  We didn’t travel much farther down the channel that day. The rapids had drained us, and after an hour or so everyone agreed that it was probably best to pull over for the night. So we paddled along the bluffs until we found a narrow strip of sand where we could beach the canoes and set up camp. David gathered enough driftwood to build a small fire, then we fried some pork and beans and had an early dinner. We were tired and sore, and once the sun went down a stiff breeze moved through the channel, making everyone feel cold and miserable. It wasn’t a good time to have a serious discussion, for under such circumstances even an innocuous question can spark a quarrel. Which was exactly what happened.

  We were talking about the boid when Barry nudged my elbow. “Hey, nice shooting back there. I thought that thing was about to jump in the boat. Where’d you learn to use a gun?”

  I swallowed a mouthful of beans. “Camp Schaefly, in Missouri. They required us to undergo paramilitary training…prepping us for the Service, that sort of thing. I was pretty good on the firing range.”

  Barry nodded knowingly—his parents were Party members, so he knew something about government youth hostels—but the other guys gave me a blank look. They were from well-off families; even though they were D.I.s, no one had ever seriously suggested shipping them off to a hostel. That was something for vagrant kids like me: one parent dead, the other in the Service. And what little they did know came from Govnet propaganda: well-scrubbed teens in clean uniforms, happily marching through the Colorado Rockies. They’d never spent a night in an overcrowded dorm, or been beaten up by a counselor, or nearly gang-raped in a shower stall.

  “Good thing you grabbed the gun when you did,” he said. “We had our hands full.”

  “I could have gotten it.” From the other side of the fire, Carlos gave him a sharp look. “I was trying to get the gun, but she…”

  “I know. That’s when you lost control.” Barry shrugged. “I guess I was supposed to steer while you were shooting.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. I’m just glad your girlfriend was with us.”

  Carlos put his plate down, started to rise. “Whoa, take it easy,” Kuniko said. “Cool off. No one meant anything.” She glanced at Barry. “Right?”

  Neither of them said anything, but Barry was the first to look away. After a moment Carlos picked up his plate and continued eating. A long silence. My beans had gone cold, but I ate anyway; no sense in letting food go to waste. But, man, did I have a craving for something with more salt in it…

  “Y’know,” David said, “there’s one thing that bugs me.” He gazed across the fire at Carlos. “If you’re so good with a gun, then why didn’t you shoot the boid that killed my dad?”

  Carlos’s eyes slowly rose. “What are you saying?”

  “Just something I’ve always wondered about.” David’s tone remained nonchalant, almost conversational; he could have been discussing the weather. “It’s just that…y’know, here you are, saying that you could have taken down the boid we saw today even though you were busy steering a canoe, but when you had a chance to kill the one that murdered my dad, you couldn’t even though you were on dry land.” A shrug. “It’s just a question. Take your time with it.”

  There was a coldness on Carlos’s face I’d never seen before. The silence around the campfire became menacing. “Bro,” Chris said, very quietly, “I’d leave that alone, if I were…”

  David ignored his brother. “No reason to get upset. I’m curious, that’s all, because the way I’ve heard it, you lowered your rifle when…”

  The plate fell from Carlos’s lap as he flung himself at David. Chris was sitting between them; he leaped to his feet and tried to stop Carlos, but Carlos knocked him aside as he charged David. The younger boy squawked and tried to run, but Carlos tackled him like a linebacker; the next instant, David was on the ground, his arms wrapped around his face, as Carlos pummeled at him with his fists.

  It wasn’t much of a fight, nor did it last long. Barry grabbed Carlos from behind and pulled him off David. Tears mixing with the blood streaming from his nose, David tried to retaliate, but Kuniko forced herself between them, pushing them apart. Seeing the blood on his brother’s face, Chris turned toward Carlos, but I interceded before another squabble could break out.

  It took a lot of words, but eventually everyone calmed down. Kuniko made the boys shake hands, which they did with great reluctance, then she led David to our tent to clean him up. Chris gave Carlos a long, hard look, then he stalked away. At a loss for anything else to do, Barry began gathering the cookware; it wasn’t his turn to do the dishes, but David clearly wasn’t up to it.

  That left me with Carlos. Truth was, I really didn’t want to be around him just then; David might have picked the fight, but it was Carlos who’d thrown the first punch. Yet even though I was having second thoughts about our relationship, I was still his girlfriend; it was my job to take care of him when he needed me. So I took him by the arm and we walked down the beach.

  Once we were away from camp, we sat down on a rock next to the water. We watched Bear rise above the channel, listened to the tide lapping against the shore. I stroked his hair, tried to calm him down, and after a while he put an arm around me. His breath shuddered out of him, and at last he spoke.

  “He’s right,” he said, very softly. “About the boid hunt, I mean.”

  “What…? No, he’s not.” I peered at him through the darkness. “I was at the meeting, remember? I heard what Dr. Johnson said. It killed Dr. Levin before anyone could fire, and when it went after the rest of you…”

  “Henry didn’t tell the whole truth.” He swallowed, looked away from me. “Jim Levin was dead before anyone could do anything about it, sure, and I opened fire as soon as it started to attack, but…”

  A long pause. “Go on,” I whispered.

  “When it went after Gill Reese, I lowered my rifle. I could have saved him, but…”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because…” Carlos hesitated. “I don’t know. Maybe because he didn’t save my folks when they were under his protection. Maybe because he was a loudmouth and he’d bullied everyone into making that trip with him. Maybe just because I wanted to see what he’d do when it was just between him and the boid, with no one to back him up.” He put his head down. “That’s why I wanted you to give me the gun. It was a second chance to…”

  His voice trailed off, and that’s when I realized why we were there. Through his own inaction, Carlos had let a man die. Perhaps it was Gill Reese and not Jim Levin, and David had heard the story wrong, and perhaps one could rationalize things by believing that Reese had it coming. Yet that wasn’t the issue. Carlos had come face-to-face not only with the forces of nature, but also his own soul; he’
d lost, and now he wanted a rematch. Only this time, he wanted someone to back him up: all his friends, including his girl. And if she was a better shot than he was, or if anyone reminded him why he was doing this…

  “Carlos…” I said, and waited until he turned to me. His eyelids were half-lowered; I think he was expecting a kiss. And that made me even more mad.

  “You and I are through,” I finished.

  “What…?” Astonished, he stared at me. “Wendy, what…?”

  “You heard me. We’re over. Done.” I pulled away from him.

  “Wendy, jeez…” He grinned, took me by the hand. “C’mon, I’m sorry. If you’re pissed about the thing with the gun…”

  “The thing with the gun, yeah. And the thing with the satphone, the thing with the way you’ve treated Kuni, and…a lot of other things.” I was tempted to tell him the rest; instead, I stood up. “But you’re not the guy I thought you were, and I don’t think I’m the girl you think I am.”

  “Wendy! What the hell…?”

  “Just leave me alone. I don’t want to talk anymore.” Then I turned and marched back to camp.

  When I returned to our tent, I gathered up his bedroll and put it outside. Kuniko watched me, then she went over to where Barry was washing dishes and quietly invited him to spend the night with us. He moved his bedroll into our tent, and had enough sense not to ask why we were changing our sleeping arrangements.

  It was a long time before I fell asleep. Nonetheless, I didn’t cry. Or at least not then.

  The next morning, we continued our journey down the East Channel.

  Before we left shore, we hoisted the masts, and once we’d paddled the canoes into the channel we unfurled the sails and stowed our oars. There was a steady breeze from the east that day; the wind caught the canvas sheets and billowed them outward. Soon we were cruising at about five knots. The bow of the Orion sliced through the dark blue water; I lay back against the gear and gazed up at the high bluffs of the Eastern Divide.

  Carlos and I said little to each other, and although the canoes traveled close together, there wasn’t much conversation among their crews. The events of the previous evening weighed heavily on everyone; we all had a lot to think about. David pulled out a fishing rod, put a piece of leftover pork on the hook, and cast it over the starboard side of the Pleiades, then he propped the pole between his knees, pulled his cap low over his eyes, and dozed off. Barry pulled out his guitar and pensively strummed it as he sat in the bow of the Orion.

  Shortly before noon, David’s line went taut. The bail-arm of his reel snapped over, bringing him wide-awake; grabbing the rod with both hands, he began to haul in whatever he’d caught. David might have been a smart aleck, but he was a well-practiced angler; his prey fought for a while before he exhausted it, but what he pulled out of water didn’t look particularly appetizing: a flat, ugly creature with gaping jaws, like a cross between a stingray and a miniature shark. David managed to free his hook without being bitten; he gave the weirdling—his name for it, which stuck—a close inspection before he pronounced it inedible and tossed it overboard. Yet the incident broke the ice; David’s catch was the main subject of discussion when we went ashore for lunch, and by the time the day was done we were all speaking to one another once more.

  That set the pattern of the next five days. We camped on the narrow shoreline running beneath the bluffs, being careful to set up our tents beyond the high-water mark. We’d get up early, break camp, and continue sailing down the channel, always making sure that we never lost sight of the Eastern Divide. We’d sail all day, then beach the canoes as the sun was beginning to go down and set up camp once more. A quick dinner, some small talk around the fire, then off to bed.

  After a couple of days I let Carlos back into my tent. He’d resigned himself to the fact that Kuniko was sleeping between him and me. Yet I remained cool toward him, and his relationship with Kuni never really thawed. We were simply sharing quarters, and that was all there was to it.

  Near the end of the sixth day, after hauling aboard countless weirdlings, David finally landed something that resembled a wide-mouth bass. All it took was switching bait; the first time he tried using bread instead of meat, he landed a channelmouth: a big, fleshy fish that faintly resembled a bass. David cleaned and cooked it that evening; we all tried a little bit, and found that it was delicious. Which was just as well, for our supplies were beginning to run low; after that, both he and Chris always had their lines in the water, with Barry or Kuniko sometimes taking a turn, and after a while I tried my hand at it as well. Hooking a channelmouth wasn’t all that difficult; you had to cast your lure to the port side, into deep water away from the bluffs, and slowly reel it back in. The real trick was getting it out of the water before a weirdling homed in; now and then someone would pull up a half-eaten channelmouth a weirdling had devoured while it was on the line.

  Getting fresh fish was a blessing in more ways than one; my craving for seafood was becoming almost obsessive. I still wasn’t showing any obvious signs of pregnancy, yet I noticed that my breasts were becoming more full, a little more tender. And morning sickness had come back to haunt me; almost as soon as I got up, I’d have to make an excuse to slip away quickly and throw up everything in my stomach. Kuniko knew what was going on, so she’d cover for me; the guys just thought I was going to use the pit. Or at least Carlos and the Levin brothers were fooled; more than once, I noticed a curious look on Barry’s face. If he figured out what was going on, though, he kept it to himself.

  By the morning of the ninth day, we could no longer see Midland; the far shore of the channel had disappeared beyond the horizon. Dense clouds were forming when we went to bed the night before, and we awoke to a rippled grey sky. We put out to water, but the wind was harsh and the water choppy. It wasn’t long before a hard rain began to fall, and soon whitecaps began to appear. Chris and Carlos wanted to tough it out, but distant thunder settled the issue; we folded the sails and dropped the masts, then scurried back to shore just as the storm was beginning to hit.

  As luck would have it, the place we found to ride out the weather was another gap in the Eastern Divide, similar to Shapiro Pass yet a little more broad, its bluffs less steep. When Carlos checked the map against his compass bearings, he discovered that it was the mouth of the Lee River, another inland stream. Although rapids surged through the gap, we discovered a place within the shelter of the bluffs where we could ride out the storm.

  Once we beached the canoes and overturned them, we pitched our tents below the limestone escarpment and hunkered down for a long wait. The rain lashed at our tents and soaked everything we’d left outside, yet the storm blew itself out within a few hours. No one was in any hurry to leave; Carlos cocooned himself within his sleeping bag and took a long nap, and when I went over to the next tent to check on the others I discovered Chris doing the same while Barry and David played blackjack, with crackers as their stakes. Maybe we needed a rain day. We’d been traveling for a full Coyote week: time to take a break.

  We also needed fresh water, so Kuniko and I gathered a few empty flasks, pulled the rifles across our shoulders, and set forth into the unnamed pass. After clambering across slippery rocks for an hour or so, we came upon a rugged trail leading up the side of the bluffs. Perhaps it had been formed by natural erosion, or maybe by swamp cats; either way, it seemed easy to climb. With nothing better to do and several hours left before sundown, we decided to go exploring.

  The trail was more difficult than it first appeared; we skinned our hands and knees on bare limestone, and halfway up we considered giving up and turning back. Yet there was an unspoken agreement that we wouldn’t quit, and about an hour later we finally reached the end of the trail.

  It was worth the effort, for we found ourselves on top of the Eastern Divide. Faux birch had managed to sink their roots into the rocky ground; far below us, the vast and wild marshlands of New Florida stretched away to the western horizon, an endless sea of grass threaded by narr
ow waterways, the Lee River meandering through the prairie like a blue serpent. The clouds were beginning to part, and golden shafts of late-afternoon sunlight fell upon the island; through the haze, an iridescent rainbow had formed above isolated stands of blackwood. A whole world seemed to have been painted just for us, so heartachingly beautiful that all we could do was sit on a boulder and gaze upon it all, not daring to say a word lest we break the spell.

  After a time I turned to look the other way. Grey clouds hung heavy above the East Channel, casting bleak shadows upon its cold waters. Then I saw something new: in the far distance to the south a dark expanse met the sky as a razor-thin line. The Great Equatorial River, still another two days away by boat.

  “There it is.” Kuniko’s voice was quiet; she was gazing in the same direction. “That’s what we’ve come all this way to find.” She paused. “Think you’re ready for it?”

  It might or might not have been a rhetorical question, all the same I found myself more afraid than anytime before in my life. Nothing else came close: not the day my father said goodbye, not the first night I spent in Schaefly, not even my last moments on Earth before I boarded the shuttle to the Alabama. In that instant, the Equatorial was more forbidding than the forty-six light-years I had crossed to get to this place, for at least then I was asleep; had I perished in biostasis, my passage from life to death would have been effortless and without pain. I couldn’t say the same for the uncertain fate that lay before me.

  “No,” I whispered, “I’m not.” I looked at Kuniko. “We…I mean, we don’t have to do this, y’know.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I mean, we can get off here.” Standing up, I desperately scanned the top of the escarpment until I spotted what appeared to be a downward slope. “Look,” I said, my voice quavering as I pointed to it. “We go that way, down the other side.” I gestured to the Lee River. “Then all we have to do is follow the river. I’ve seen the map…it leads north to the Alabama River, and that takes us to Boid Creek. Follow that for a while, and it meets the junction of North Creek. Once we’re there, all we have to do is hike due east, and we’re back in Liberty…”