Pecos Bill

by James Cloyd Bowman

  By the time Cropear had become a man, he could run with the fleetest of the Coyotes. At night, he squatted on his haunches in the circle and barked and yipped and howled sadly, according to the best tradition of the pack.

  The Loyal and Approved Packs were proud, indeed, that they had made a man-child into a noble Coyote, the equal of the best both in the hunt and in the inner circle where the laws and customs of the pack were unfolded. They were prouder still that they had taught him to believe that the Human Race, to a greater extent than any other race of animals, was inhuman. Just what the Human Race was, Cropear never knew, however. For Grandy kept him far away even from the cowboys’ trails.

  As the years passed, the fame of Cropear spread widely, for the proud Coyotes could not help bragging about him to everybody they met, and the other animals began to envy the clever pack that had made the man-child into a Coyote. Naturally enough, Cropear became the chief surgeon of the pack. When a cactus thorn or a porcupine quill lodged in the foot or embedded itself in the muzzle of any of his brethren, Cropear, with his supple human hand, pulled it out.

  Thus the years ran through their ceaseless glass, and the shadow of time lengthened among the pack. Grandy, for all his wisdom, grew too feeble to follow the trail; too heavy and slow to pull down the alert, bounding Pronghorn; or to nip the heels of the fleeting Buffalo Calf. His teeth loosened so that he could no longer tear the savory meat from the bone, or crunch out the juicy marrow.

  Then one day Grandy went out alone to hunt and did not return, and everyone knew that he had gone down the long, long trail that has no turning.

  But there was no longer need for anyone to help Cropear. He was sturdy and supple, swift as a bird in flight. Often he got the better of the pack in the hunt and outwitted his brother Coyotes every day. Many of them began to wonder if they had done such a wise thing after all in making Cropear a member of their pack.

  CHAPTER 2

  PECOS BILL DISCOVERS HE IS A HUMAN

  Not long after Grandy’s disappearance, a remarkable adventure befell Cropear. He was, at the time, hunting across the rolling mesa. He had just stopped to examine a stretch of grassy plain where the prairie dogs had built themselves a city. The prairie dogs were making merry as if playing at hide-and-seek in and out of their hidden doorways.

  Cropear was lying on the ground, stretched out on his stomach and resting on his elbows, his chin in his palms. He suddenly became aware of the dull tlot, tlot of an approaching bronco. This was not strange, for he had often met ponies. But now he became conscious of a strange odor. Cropear prided himself on knowing every scent of every animal in his part of the world. This, however, was different; it tickled his nose and was like fire in the wild grasses. It was, in fact, the first whiff of tobacco he had smelled since he was a child, and it awakened in him a vague memory of a world of long lost dreams.

  Immediately Cropear became curious and forgot for the moment the first and most universal law of the pack—the law of staying put, of sitting so still that he could not be seen. He sat up suddenly and threw his head about to see what this strange smell might be. There, but a few yards distant, the buckskin cow pony and his rider, Chuck, came to a sudden, slithering halt.

  Cropear suddenly let out three scared yelps and turned on his heels to run away. Chuck—himself a perfect mimic—repeated the scared yelps. This aroused Cropear’s curiosity further. He stopped and let out another series of yelps. These Chuck again repeated. In the Coyote language, Cropear was asking, “Who are you? Who are you?” Chuck was repeating this question without in the least knowing what the yips meant.

  Thus began the most amusing dialogue in all the history of talk. Cropear would bark a question over and over, and in reply Chuck would mimic him perfectly.

  Cropear kept galloping in circles, curiously sniffing, and wondering when and where it was he had smelled man and tobacco. Chuck kept his hand on his gun and his eyes on the strange wild creature. He couldn’t help admiring the sheer physical beauty of this perfect, healthy wild man. Every muscle was so fully developed that he looked like another Hercules.

  Cropear was, in fact, as straight as a wagon tongue. His skin, from living all his life in the open sunlight and wind, was a lustrous brown, covered with a fine silken fell of burnished red hair. Over his shoulders lay the bristling mane of his unshorn locks.

  After an hour or two of galloping about, Cropear lost much of his fear, approached nearer, and squatted down on his haunches to see what would happen.

  “You’re a funny baby!” Chuck laughed.

  “Funny baby,” Cropear lisped like a child of four.

  The cowpuncher talked in a low, musical accent, and slowly and brokenly at first, Cropear began to prattle. He was taking up the thread of his speech where he had dropped it years before when he was lost by his family.

  For nearly a month Chuck wandered around on the mesa and continued his dialogue with Cropear. Chuck would patiently repeat words and sentences many times. He was forced to use his hands and arms and his face and voice to illustrate all that he said. But Cropear proved such an apt pupil that soon he was saying and understanding everything. What’s more, Cropear’s speech became far more grammatical than Chuck’s own, for only the finest language had ever been permitted among the Coyotes. And Cropear had evolved a combination of the two. The worst he ever said from then on, in cowboy lingo, was just an “ain’t” or two.

  Chuck was astonished at the speed with which he learned. “He’s brighter’n a new minted dollar!” Chuck declared to his bronco.

  Over and over Chuck asked Cropear, “Who in the name of common sense are you, anyhow?” Cropear tried his best to remember, yet all he knew was that he was a Coyote. “But who are you?” Cropear asked in turn.

  “My real name is Bob Hunt,” Chuck laughed, “but the boys all call me Chuck Wagon because I’m always hungry—Chuck for short.” He drawled his words musically as he swung into an easy position across his saddle. “What are you doin’, runnin’ around here naked like a wild Coyote? That’s what I want to know.”

  “I am a Coyote,” Cropear snapped back.

  “Coyote, nothin’! You’re a human!”

  “An accursed human! I guess not! I wouldn’t belong to that degraded inhuman race for anything in the world. Haven’t I got fleas? Don’t I hunt with the pack and run the fleet Pronghorn Antelope and the spry Jackrabbit off their legs? And don’t I sit on my haunches, and don’t I have my place in the circle, and don’t I howl at night in accordance with the ancient approved custom of all thoroughbred Coyotes? Don’t you suppose I know who I am as well as you?” Cropear answered, quite out of patience.

  “You’ve just been eatin’ of the locoweed and are a little out of your head,” laughed Chuck. “Besides, every human in Texas has got fleas, so that’s got nothin’ at all to do with it.”

  “I haven’t been eating of the locoweed! Only silly cattle and mustangs do a thing like that. I am in my right mind—and what’s more, I am a Coyote!”

  “You’re loco, or else I am,” insisted the smiling Chuck. “Why, you’re a human just the same as I am. Don’t you know that every Coyote’s got a long bushy tail? Now, you ain’t got no tail at all and you know it.”

  Strange as it may seem, this was the first time that Cropear had really looked himself over, and sure enough, he saw at once that he had no tail.

  “But no one has ever before said that to me. Perhaps—no, I won’t believe it. I don’t want to be a depraved inhuman…I know, for all you say, that I’m a full-blooded noble Coyote!”

  Because of his sudden fears, Cropear was fighting to hold to his belief.

  “If you wasn’t so perfectly serious about it all, you’d be a downright scream,” Chuck cackled. “As it is, I almost pity you.”

  “You’re the one who needs to be pitied,” snarled Cropear. “Anyone that’s got to be an inhuman needs pity. Here you sit with a piece of cowhide over your head, the wool of the sheep over your shoulders and legs, and calfskin
over your feet. Why, you can’t even use your own legs. You’ve got to have a bronco to carry you around fast. Me, an inhuman human, no!” Cropear fairly spat his words, he was so disgusted.

  “Human!” Chuck continued. “Human! Why, say, you’re the only perfect human critter I’ve ever laid eyes on. If I had the muscles you’ve got, I’d turn in some mornin’ before breakfast and beat up every prize fighter in all creation, and that within an inch of his life.”

  “But you haven’t yet proved I’m not a noble Coyote,” Cropear added with stubborn courage.

  “It’s proof you want, is it? Well, then, come with me and I’ll give you all the proof you’ll ever need, and that in a hurry.”

  Chuck swung his idle foot into the stirrup, spun his pony around like a top, and struck out in the direction of the Pecos River. At first he walked his bronco, but Cropear trotting along in front of him, set a faster stride. Next he paced his pony, but still Cropear ran far ahead and beckoned him to follow. Soon he was galloping at full tilt. The bronco was doing its best, but Cropear idled along at a graceful lope that seemed easier than walking. Chuck rubbed his eyes and could not believe that Cropear could run so far and so fast.

  When they arrived at the river, Chuck led Cropear down to the water’s edge. Here he found a quiet pool beside the racing current, where the reflection made a perfect mirror.

  “Wade in a bit. There, stand still, lean over and look at yourself,” Chuck commanded.

  While Cropear was leaning over the water without an idea in the world that he was looking at himself, Chuck began to kick off his clothes. “Look at what you see down below there,” he called. “Ain’t we as alike as two mustangs from the same herd?”

  Cropear obeyed. There, in the water, he saw a creature who looked like Chuck—but didn’t. What was it? Cropear moved his head to the left, and the creature’s head moved in the same direction. He moved to the right. The creature moved the other way.

  Was Chuck right, then? It was an appalling thought. That he was an inhuman, after all, was so terrible to Cropear, he was without words for reply. For a long moment, he stood silent and motionless. Then he looked down at his reflection again. Surely this was all a bad dream!

  Now Chuck waded in and threw his arm around the sorrowful boy’s shoulder. “Come on down,” he said, pulling Cropear in beside him. “Now look. Here I am and there you are.”

  Without a doubt, there was Chuck’s reflection. And there, beside him, must be Cropear, the Coyote. An inhuman! Nothing could possibly be worse.

  Just at this instant, Chuck caught sight of a strange mark on Cropear’s upper right arm—a tattooed star, showing plainly through the red fell of hair.

  “I’ll be locoed if I ain’t got one of them too,” he cried, pointing to a similar mark on his own arm.

  Cropear looked first at his arm, then at Chuck’s. “What does it mean?” he asked slowly.

  “It means you’re found. You’re my little lost brother Bill. You ain’t Cropear and you ain’t never been.”

  Cropear stood stone still. “Your brother?”

  “Surest thing you know. Listen. This is how I know. When Dad was travelin’ around once with a Patent Medicine Man, he learned how to do this here tattooin’. So when us kids arrived, Mother got the idea it’d be a good thing to have a big star on the arm of each and every one of us. She said she didn’t intend any of us ever to forget the Lone Star State we belonged to. And what’s more, if any one of us happened to get lost, this star would help find us. So, as usual, Mother was right! You got lost but you’re found again. See?”

  “Now you sound as if you’re the one that’s been eating of the locoweed and gone crazy,” Cropear replied.

  “It’s the honest truth, I’m tellin’ you. I’d be willin’ to stand on a stack of Bibles as high as the moon and repeat every word of it out in public, if you’d but quit your foolish notion that you’re a varmint.”

  “Varmint, indeed!” Cropear snarled. “You’re completely locoed. It’s the pale-faced inhumans that are low-down varmints! Coyotes are the noblest of all the earth’s creatures!”

  Fortunately Chuck was so interested in the story he was just beginning that he did not take time to answer this last insult.

  “Honestly, Cropear—Bill, I mean. This is what happened. Our family was goin’ along from the Brazos River valley down to the Rio Grande. Dad was drivin’ a little East Texas spotted cow and a little walleyed spavined roan horse. They was hitched to an old covered wagon with wooden wheels made from cross sections of a sycamore tree. Mother’d insisted it was gettin’ too crowded up there in Texas, and she wanted to be where there was at least elbow room.”

  “Your mother must have had a wide sweep of elbows,” Cropear commented.

  “Yes, we lived a hundred miles from the nearest town and seventy-five miles from the nearest tradin’ post. But a homesteader settled down thirty-five miles away, and Mother said we’d got to move. She couldn’t have any stranger settlin’ in her backyard, she said.”

  “What kind of woman was she, anyway?” Cropear asked curiously.

  “Well, judge for yourself. She swept forty-five homesteaders out of her backyard with her broomstick one mornin’ before breakfast. You see, she found them prowlin’ around, and she sent them flyin’ with one swoop and never give it more never mind than as if they was a bunch of sage chickens or meddlesome porcupines.

  “You probably don’t remember it, but you cut your teeth on a bowie knife that Davy Crockett sent our mother as a present when he heard what a brave, wise woman she was.”

  “Well, that’s the kind of mother I have always dreamed I would like. Perhaps I am partly human, after all,” Cropear now conceded. This mother sounded very fine indeed!

  Because a homesteader settles thirty-five miles away, Pecos Bill’s mother decides to move.

  “Well, as we was migratin’ in the covered wagon,” Chuck continued without noticing the remark, “I guess you jumped overboard right along about here. Half a day passed before the rest of us discovered that you was missin’, and then when we come back, we couldn’t find you.”

  “My mother must have loved me dearly!” Cropear snarled, bitterly resentful that he could have meant as little to so splendid a person. “Not missing me for half a day! Nothing like that ever happened between me and Grandy. Why, he loved me so he never allowed me out of his sight for a single minute, day or night!”

  “You don’t get the idea at all,” Chuck continued. “You see, it was like this. You had eighteen brothers and sisters, more or less. Well, after you was lost overboard, there was still seventeen of us flounderin’ around in the covered wagon. One more or less didn’t make no difference. Besides, there was one younger than you was—Henrietta—and she was mewlin’ and droolin’ in your dear mother’s arms up on the front seat beside your father, the whole of the way. Your older sister, Sophrina, was supposed to look after you, but she got to quarrelin’ with brother Hoke. He was teasin’ her about her best beau, that had been left behind on the Brazos, at the edge of our thirty-five-mile backyard. So it was perfectly natural for you to jump overboard when no one was lookin’, and then not be missed for a long time.”

  “So that was it,” Cropear said as in a dream. “But when my mother discovered that I was gone, what then?”

  “Well, it was the old story of the ‘Ninety and Nine’ all over again each day, ever after. Your mother had the whole seventeen of us to feed and look after, but she was often talkin’ about her Little Lost Bill. Sometimes she put in the Pecos part, for the last sight she had of you was when she inspected things just before the wagon started to ford this river. She used to wake up in the middle of the night and get to thinkin’ the Coyotes and Grizzly Bears was crunchin’ your tender bones. And I can hear her yet, at table, sighin’ as she looked at your vacant chair. Her last words when she died were, ‘Now I’ll be seein’ Little Bill!’”

  “The dear good woman,” Cropear sighed, in genuine relief, “but I can never love her
as I love Grandy. And what about my father?”

  Chuck laughed loud and long. “He was a regular copperas breeches and one-gallus kind of man. He had seven dogs, a cob pipe and a roll of homespun tobacco stuck down his pocket. He would spend more time pokin’ a rabbit out of a hollow tree than he would to secure shelter for his family in a storm. He could easily afford to have one or two of his children blow away, but rabbits was too scarce to take the chance of losin’ one! You see, he didn’t count for much with Mother. A woman who could sweep out forty-five homesteaders with a single broom handle couldn’t be expected to show much mercy for a mere husband.

  “Besides, she’d never have been able to scare the nesters so easily if she hadn’t been practicin’ up on her own old man! Fact is, she was the cock of the walk at our ranch. Dad merely took orders. We nicknamed him Moses. But Mother was the God of the Mountain! She wrote her commands on tables of stone and the poor man who received them from her hands was meek. I’m tellin’ you, he was meek!”

  “Your story begins to sound reasonable, and I do agree that I now see a faint likeness between us…But I don’t want to be an inhuman! I don’t want to have to wear clothes and ride horses. I want to be free! I want to continue to be strong. I want to be healthy like my brothers, the Bears, the Wolves, and the Coyotes, who are wild and natural and vigorous! I want to live where I can lay me down on a sheet of mist and roll up in a blanket of fog. I want to sleep where I can breathe the clean air and see the countless eyes of all my brother animals peeping down at me as they race across the sky!”

  “Don’t be a fool, brother. It’s high time for you to forget that you was ever called Cropear. It’s right and proper for you now to become Pecos Bill. Come with me and I’ll take you to the ranch house, where you’ll be happier than you’ve ever been yet.”