The Unreal and the Real, Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin Volume 1: Where on Earth

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Along near noon the child said, “I didn’t bring anything to eat.”

  “Something will turn up,” Coyote said, “sure to.” And pretty soon she turned aside, going straight to a tiny grey shack hidden by a couple of half-dead junipers and a stand of rabbit-brush. The place smelled terrible. A sign on the door said: fox. private. no trespassing!—but Coyote pushed it open, and trotted right back out with half a small smoked salmon. “Nobody home but us chickens,” she said, grinning sweetly.

  “Isn’t that stealing?” the child asked, worried.

  “Yes,” Coyote answered, trotting on.

  They ate the fox-scented salmon by a dried-up creek, slept a while, and went on.

  Before long the child smelled the sour burning smell, and stopped. It was as if a huge, heavy hand had begun pushing her chest, pushing her away, and yet at the same time as if she had stepped into a strong current that drew her forward, helpless.

  “Hey, getting close!” Coyote said, and stopped to piss by a juniper stump.

  “Close to what?”

  “Their town. See?” She pointed to a pair of sage-spotted hills. Between them was an area of greyish blank.

  “I don’t want to go there.”

  “We won’t go all the way in. No way! We’ll just get a little closer and look. It’s fun,” Coyote said, putting her head on one side, coaxing. “They do all these weird things in the air.”

  The child hung back.

  Coyote became business-like, responsible. “We’re going to be very careful,” she announced. “And look out for big dogs, OK? Little dogs I can handle. Make a good lunch. Big dogs, it goes the other way. Right? Let’s go, then.”

  Seemingly as casual and lounging as ever, but with a tense alertness in the carriage of her head and the yellow glance of her eyes, Coyote led off again, not looking back; and the child followed.

  All around them the pressures increased. It was if the air itself was pressing on them, as if time was going too fast, too hard, not flowing but pounding, pounding, pounding faster and harder till it buzzed like Rattler’s rattle. Hurry, you have to hurry! everything said, there isn’t time! everything said. Things rushed past screaming and shuddering. Things turned, flashed, roared, stank, vanished. There was a boy—he came into focus all at once, but not on the ground: he was going along a couple of inches above the ground, moving very fast, bending his legs from side to side in a kind of frenzied swaying dance, and was gone. Twenty children sat in rows in the air all singing shrilly and then the walls closed over them. A basket no a pot no a can, a garbage can, full of salmon smelling wonderful no full of stinking deerhides and rotten cabbage stalks, keep out of it, Coyote! Where was she?

  “Mom!” the child called. “Mother!”—standing a moment at the end of an ordinary small-town street near the gas station, and the next moment in a terror of blanknesses, invisible walls, terrible smells and pressures and the overwhelming rush of Time straight forward rolling her helpless as a twig in the race above a waterfall. She clung, held on trying not to fall—“Mother!”

  Coyote was over by the big basket of salmon, approaching it, wary, but out in the open, in the full sunlight, in the full current. And a boy and a man borne by the same current were coming down the long, sage-spotted hill behind the gas station, each with a gun, red hats, hunters, it was killing season. “Hell, will you look at that damn coyote in broad daylight big as my wife’s ass,” the man said, and cocked aimed shot all as Myra screamed and ran against the enormous drowning torrent. Coyote fled past her yelling “Get out of here!” She turned and was borne away.

  Far out of sight of that place, in a little draw among low hills, they sat and breathed air in searing gasps until after a long time it came easy again.

  “Mom, that was stupid,” the child said furiously.

  “Sure was,” Coyote said. “But did you see all that food!”

  “I’m not hungry,” the child said sullenly. “Not till we get all the way away from here.”

  “But they’re your folks,” Coyote said. “All yours. Your kith and kin and cousins and kind. Bang! Pow! There’s Coyote! Bang! There’s my wife’s ass! Pow! There’s anything—BOOOOM! Blow it away, man! BOOOOOOM!”

  “I want to go home,” the child said.

  “Not yet,” said Coyote. “I got to take a shit.” She did so, then turned to the fresh turd, leaning over it. “It says I have to stay,” she reported, smiling.

  “It didn’t say anything! I was listening!”

  “You know how to understand? You hear everything Miss Big Ears? Hears all—Sees all with her crummy gummy eye—”

  “You have pine-pitch eyes too! You told me so!”

  “That’s a story,” Coyote snarled. “You don’t even know a story when you hear one! Look, do what you like, it’s a free country. I’m hanging around here tonight. I like the action.” She sat down and began patting her hands on the dirt in a soft four-four rhythm and singing under her breath, one of the endless tuneless songs that kept time from running too fast, that wove the roots of trees and bushes and ferns and grass in the web that held the stream in the streambed and the rock in the rock’s place and the earth together. And the child lay listening.

  “I love you,” she said.

  Coyote went on singing.

  Sun went down the last slope of the west and left a pale green clarity over the desert hills.

  Coyote had stopped singing. She sniffed. “Hey,” she said. “Dinner.” She got up and moseyed along the little draw. “Yeah,” she called back softly. “Come on!”

  Stiffly, for the fear-crystals had not yet melted out of her joints, the child got up and went to Coyote. Off to one side along the hill was one of the lines, a fence. She didn’t look at it. It was OK. They were outside it.

  “Look at that!”

  A smoked salmon, a whole chinook, lay on a little cedar-bark mat. “An offering! Well, I’ll be darned!” Coyote was so impressed she didn’t even swear. “I haven’t seen one of these for years! I thought they’d forgotten!”

  “Offering to who?”

  “Me! Who else? Boy, look at that!”

  The child looked dubiously at the salmon.

  “It smells funny.”

  “How funny?”

  “Like burned.”

  “It’s smoked, stupid! Come on.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “OK. It’s not your salmon anyhow. It’s mine. My offering, for me. Hey, you people! You people over there! Coyote thanks you! Keep it up like this and maybe I’ll do some good things for you too!”

  “Don’t, don’t yell, Mom! They’re not that far away—”

  “They’re all my people,” said Coyote with a great gesture, and then sat down crosslegged, broke off a big piece of salmon, and ate.

  Evening Star burned like a deep, bright pool of water in the clear sky. Down over the twin hills was a dim suffusion of light, like a fog. The child looked away from it, back at the star.

  “Oh,” Coyote said. “Oh, shit.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “That wasn’t so smart, eating that,” Coyote said, and then held herself and began to shiver, to scream, to choke—her eyes rolled up, her long arms and legs flew out jerking and dancing, foam spurted out between her clenched teeth. Her body arched tremendously backwards, and the child, trying to hold her, was thrown violently off by the spasms of her limbs. The child scrambled back and held the body as it spasmed again, twitched, quivered, went still.

  By moonrise Coyote was cold. Till then there had been so much warmth under the tawny coat that the child kept thinking maybe she was alive, maybe if she just kept holding her, keeping her warm, she would recover, she would be all right. She held her close, not looking at the black lips drawn back from the teeth, the white balls of the eyes. But when t
he cold came through the fur as the presence of death, the child let the slight, stiff corpse lie down on the dirt.

  She went nearby and dug a hole in the stony sand of the draw, a shallow pit. Coyote’s people did not bury their dead, she knew that. But her people did. She carried the small corpse to the pit, laid it down, and covered it with her blue and white bandanna. It was not large enough; the four stiff paws stuck out. The child heaped the body over with sand and rocks and a scurf of sagebrush and tumbleweed held down with more rocks. She also went to where the salmon had lain on the cedar mat, and finding the carcass of a lamb heaped dirt and rocks over the poisoned thing. Then she stood up and walked away without looking back.

  At the top of the hill she stood and looked across the draw toward the misty glow of the lights of the town lying in the pass between the twin hills.

  “I hope you all die in pain,” she said aloud. She turned away and walked down into the desert.

  v

  It was Chickadee who met her, on the second evening north of Horse Butte.

  “I didn’t cry,” the child said.

  “None of us do,” said Chickadee. “Come with me this way now. Come into Grandmother’s house.”

  It was underground, but very large, dark and large, and the Grandmother was there at the center, at her loom. She was making a rug or blanket of the hills and the black rain and the white rain, weaving in the lightning. As they spoke she wove.

  “Hello, Chickadee. Hello, New Person.”

  “Grandmother,” Chickadee greeted her.

  The child said, “I’m not one of them.”

  Grandmother’s eyes were small and dim. She smiled and wove. The shuttle thrummed through the warp.

  “Old Person, then,” said Grandmother. “You’d better go back there now, Granddaughter. That’s where you live.”

  “I lived with Coyote. She’s dead. They killed her.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about Coyote!” Grandmother said, with a little huff of laughter. “She gets killed all the time.”

  The child stood still. She saw the endless weaving.

  “Then I—Could I go back home—to her house—?”

  “I don’t think it would work,” Grandmother said. “Do you, Chickadee?”

  Chickadee shook her head once, silent.

  “It would be dark there now, and empty, and fleas . . . You got outside your people’s time, into our place; but I think that Coyote was taking you back, see. Her way. If you go back now, you can still live with them. Isn’t your father there?”

  The child nodded.

  “They’ve been looking for you.”

  “They have?”

  “Oh, yes, ever since you fell out of the sky. The man was dead, but you weren’t there—they kept looking.”

  “Serves him right. Serves them all right,” the child said. She put her hands up over her face and began to cry terribly, without tears.

  “Go on, little one, Granddaughter,” Spider said. “Don’t be afraid. You can live well there. I’ll be there too, you know. In your dreams, in your ideas, in dark corners in the basement. Don’t kill me, or I’ll make it rain . . .”

  “I’ll come around,” Chickadee said. “Make gardens for me.”

  The child held her breath and clenched her hands until her sobs stopped and let her speak.

  “Will I ever see Coyote?”

  “I don’t know,” the Grandmother replied.

  The child accepted this. She said, after another silence, “Can I keep my eye?”

  “Yes. You can keep your eye.”

  “Thank you, Grandmother,” the child said. She turned away then and started up the night slope towards the next day. Ahead of her in the air of dawn for a long way a little bird flew, black-capped, light-winged.

  Horse Camp

  All the other seniors were over at the street side of the parking lot, but Sal stayed with Norah while they waited for the bus drivers. “Maybe you’ll be in the creek cabin,” Sal said, quiet and serious. “I had it second year. It’s the best one. Number Five.”

  “How do they, when do you, like find out, what cabin?”

  “They better remember we’re in the same cabin,” Ev said, sounding shrill. Norah did not look at her. She and Ev had planned for months and known for weeks that they were to be cabin-mates, but what good was that if they never found their cabin, and also Sal was not looking at Ev, only at Norah. Sal was cool, a tower of ivory. “They show you around, as soon as you get there,” she said, her quiet voice speaking directly to Norah’s lastnight dream of never finding the room where she had to take a test she was late for and looking among endless thatched barracks in a forest of thin black trees growing very close together like hair under a hand-lens. Norah had told no one the dream and now remembered and forgot it. “Then you have dinner, and First Campfire,” Sal said. “Kimmy’s going to be a counselor again. She’s really neat. Listen, you tell old Meredy . . .”

  Norah drew breath. In all the histories of Horse Camp which she had asked for and heard over and over for three years—the thunderstorm story, the horsethief story, the wonderful Stevens Mountain stories—in all of them Meredy the handler had been, Meredy said, Meredy did, Meredy knew.

  “Tell him I said hi,” Sal said, with a shadowy smile, looking across the parking lot at the far, insubstantial towers of downtown. Behind them the doors of the Junior Girls bus gasped open. One after another the engines of the four busses roared and spewed. Across the asphalt in the hot morning light small figures were lining up and climbing into the Junior Boys bus. High, rough, faint voices bawled. “OK, hey, have fun,” Sal said. She hugged Norah and then, keeping a hand on her arm, looked down at her intently for a moment from the tower of ivory. She turned away. Norah watched her walk lightfoot and buxom across the black gap to the others of her kind who enclosed her, greeting her, “Sal! Hey, Sal!”

  Ev was twitching and nickering, “Come on, Nor, come on, we’ll have to sit way at the back, come on!” Side by side they pressed into the line below the gaping doorway of the bus.

  In Number Five cabin four iron cots, thin-mattressed, grey-blanketed, stood strewn with bottles of insect repellent and styling mousse, T-shirts lettered UCSD and I ♥ Teddy Bears, a flashlight, an apple, a comb with hair caught in it, a paperback book open face down: The Black Colt of Pirate Island. Over the shingle roof huge second-growth redwoods cast deep shade, and a few feet below the porch the creek ran out into sunlight over brown stones streaming bright green weed. Behind the cabin Jim Meredith the horse-handler, a short man of fifty who had ridden as a jockey in his teens, walked along the well-beaten path, quick and a bit bowlegged. Meredith’s lips were pressed firmly together. His eyes, narrow and darting, glanced from cabin to cabin, from side to side. Far through the trees high voices cried.

  The Counselors know what is to be known. Red Ginger, blonde Kimmy, and beautiful black Sue: they know the vices of Pal, and how to keep Trigger from putting her head down and drinking for ten minutes from every creek. They strike the great shoulders smartly, “Aw, get over, you big lunk!” They know how to swim underwater, how to sing in harmony, how to get seconds, and when a shoe is loose. They know where they are. They know where the rest of Horse Camp is. “Home Creek runs into Little River here,” Kimmy says, drawing lines in the soft dust with a redwood twig that breaks. “Senior Girls here, Senior Boys across there, Junior Birdmen about here.”—“Who needs ’em?” says Sue, yawning. “Come on, who’s going to help me walk the mares?”

  They were all around the campfire on Quartz Meadow after the long first day of the First Overnight. The counselors were still singing, but very soft, so soft you almost couldn’t hear them, lying in the sleeping bag listening to One Spot stamp and Trigger snort and the shifting at the pickets, standing in the fine, cool alpine grass listening to the soft voices and the sleepers shift
ing and later one coyote down the mountain singing all alone.

  “Nothing wrong with you. Get up!” said Meredy, and slapped her hip. Turning her long, delicate head to him with a deprecating gaze, Philly got to her feet. She stood a moment, shuddering the reddish silk of her flank as if to dislodge flies, tested her left foreleg with caution, and then walked on, step by step. Step by step, watching, Norah went with her. Inside her body there was still a deep trembling. As she passed him, the handler just nodded. “You’re all right,” he meant. She was all right.

  Freedom, the freedom to run, freedom is to run. Freedom is galloping. What else can it be? Only other ways to run, imitations of galloping across great highlands with the wind. Oh Philly sweet Philly my love! If Ev and Trigger couldn’t keep up she’d slow down and come round in a while, after a while, over there, across the long, long field of grass, once she had learned this by heart and knew it forever, the purity, the pure joy.

  “Right leg, Nor,” said Meredy. And passed on to Cass and Tammy.

  You have to start with the right fore. Everything else is all right. Freedom depends on this, that you start with the right fore, that long leg well balanced on its elegant pastern, that you set down that tiptoe middle-fingernail so hard and round, and spurn the dirt. Highstepping, trot past old Meredy, who always hides his smile.

  Shoulder to shoulder, she and Ev, in the long heat of afternoon, in a trance of light, across the home creek in the dry wild oats and cow parsley of the Long Pasture. “I was afraid before I came here,” thinks Norah, incredulous, remembering childhood. She leans her head against Ev’s firm and silken side. The sting of small flies awakens, the swish of long tails sends to sleep. Down by the creek in a patch of coarse grass Philly grazes and dozes. Sue comes striding by, winks wordless, beautiful as a burning coal, lazy and purposeful, bound for the shade of the willows. Is it worth getting up to go down to get your feet in the cool water? Next year Sal will be too old for a camper, but can come back as a counselor, come back here. Norah will come back a second-year camper, Sal a counselor. They will be here. This is what freedom is, what goes on, the sun in summer, the wild grass, coming back each year.