Ivory and the Horn

by Charles de Lint

  “Cousin, make that hole bigger.”

  The young woman has to laugh. “That’s no bear,” she tells her husband. “That’s Barking Dog, got himself stuck in a tree.”

  So she chops some more and soon Barking Dog crawls out of that tree and he shakes the dust and the dirt from himself.

  “We thought you were a bear,” the young woman says.

  Her husband nods. “We could’ve used that meat.”

  Barking Dog turns back to the tree and gives it a kick. “Get out of there, you old lazy bear,” he cries and when a bear comes out, he kills it and gives the meat to the young woman and her husband. Then he goes off, and you know what he’s thinking? He’s thinking, I wonder what ever happened to Buzzard.

  14

  “Was I supposed to get something out of that story,” I ask “or were you just letting out some hot air?”

  “Coffee’s ready,” he says. “You want some?”

  He offers me a blue enameled mug filled with a thick, dark brown liquid. The only resemblance it bears to the coffee I’d make for myself is that it has the same smell. I take the mug from him. Gingerly, I lift it up to my lips and give it a sniff. The steam rising from it makes my eyes water.

  “You didn’t answer me,” I say as I set the mug in the dirt down by my knee, its contents untouched.

  Coyote takes a long swallow, then shrugs. “I don’t know the answer to everything,” he says.

  “But you told me you could find him for me.”

  “I told you I would try.”

  “This is trying?” I ask. “Sitting around a campfire, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and telling stories that don’t make any sense?”

  He gives me a hurt look. “I thought you liked my company.”

  “I do. It’s just—”

  “I thought we were friends. What were you planning to do? Dump me as soon as we found the flute player?”

  “No. Of course not. It’s just that I want… I need to have some control over my dreams.”

  “But you do have control over your dreams.”

  “Then what am I doing here? How come every time I fall asleep, I end up here?”

  “When you figure that out,” Coyote says, “everything else will fall into place.”

  “What do you think I’ve been trying to do all this time?”

  Coyote takes another long swallow from his mug. “The people of your world,” he says, “you live two lives—an outer life that everyone can see, and another secret life inside your head. In one of those lives you can start out on a journey and reach your destination, but when you take a trip in the other, there’s no end.”

  “What do you mean there’s no end?”

  Coyote shrugs. “It’s the way you think. One thing leads to another and before you know it you’re a thousand miles from where you thought you’d be, and you can’t even remember where it was you thought you were going in the first place.”

  “Not everybody dreams the way I do,” I tell him.

  “No. But everybody’s got a secret life inside their head. The difference is, you’ve got a stage to act yours out on.”

  “So none of this is real.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  Coyote lights another cigarette, then finishes his coffee. “Good coffee, this,” he tells me.

  15

  “And these stories of his,” Sophie said. “They just drive me crazy.”

  Jilly looked up from her canvas to where Sophie was slouching in the window seat of her studio. “I kind of like them. They’re so zen.”

  “Oh please. You can keep zen. I just want something to make sense.”

  “Okay,” Jilly said. She set her brush aside and joined Sophie in the window seat. “To start with, Barking Dog is just another one of Coyote’s names.”

  “Really?”

  Jilly nodded. “It’s a literal translation of Canis latrans, which is Coyote’s scientific name. That last story was his way of telling you that the two of you are much the same.”

  “I said sense,” Sophie said. “You know, the way the rest of the world defines the term?”

  “But it does make sense. In the story, Coyote’s looking for arrow paints, but after he gets sidetracked, all he can do is wonder what happened to Buzzard.”

  “And?”

  “You were following this flute music, but all you can think of now is finding Kokopelli.”

  “But he’s the one playing the flute.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Nokomis told me it was either Coyote or Kokopelli who tricked me into this desert dream. And she told me that it was Kokopelli’s flute that I heard.”

  Jilly nodded. “But then think of what Max told you about how out of context she is.. You’ve got a dream filled with desert imagery, so what’s a moon deity from the eastern woodlands doing there?”

  “Maybe she just got sidetracked.”

  “And maybe she really was Coyote in another guise. And if that’s true, can you trust anything she told you?”

  Sophie banged the back of her head against the window frame and let out a long sigh. “Great,” she said. “That’s just what I needed—to be even more confused about all of this than I already am.”

  “If you ask me,” Jilly said, “I think it’s time you left Coyote behind and struck out on your own to find your own answers.”

  “You don’t know how good he is at sulking.”

  Jilly laughed. “So let him tag along. Just take the lead for a change.”

  So that night Sophie put on the tape she’d bought around the time Geordie was messing around with his medicine flute. Coyote Love Medicine by Jessita Reyes. She lay down on her bed and concentrated on the sound of Reyes’s flute, letting its breathy sound fill her until its music and the music that drew her into the desert dream became one.

  16

  Coyote’s stretched out on a rock, the brim of his hat pulled down low to shade his eyes. Today he’s got human ears, a human face. He’s also got a bushy tail of which he seems inordinately proud. He keeps grooming it with his long brown fingers, combing out knots that aren’t there, fluffing out parts that just won’t fluff out any further. He lifts the brim of his hat with a finger when he sees me start off.

  “Where are you going?” he asks.

  “I’ve got an appointment.”

  From lying there all languid in the sun, with only enough energy to roll himself a cigarette and groom that fine tail of his, suddenly he bounds to his feet and falls into step beside me.

  “Who’re you going to see?” he wants to know.

  “Kokopelli.”

  “You know where he is?”

  I shake my head. “I thought I’d let him find me.”

  I hold the music of the medicine flute in my mind and let it draw me through the cacti and scrub. We top one hill, scramble down the dusty slope of an arroyo, make our way up the next steep incline. We finally pull ourselves up to the top of a butte, and there he is, sitting crosslegged on the red stone, a slim, handsome man, dark hair cut in a shaggy pageboy, wearing white trousers and a white tunic, a plain wooden medicine flute lying across his knees. A worn cloth backpack lies on the stone beside him.

  For the first time since I stepped into this desert dream all those weeks ago, I don’t hear the flute anymore. There’s just the memory of it lying there in my mind—fueled by the cassette that’s playing back in that world where another part of me is sleeping.

  Kokopelli looks from Coyote to me.

  “Hey, Ihu,” he says. “Hey, Sophie.”

  I shoot Coyote a dirty look, but he doesn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed at how easy it was for me to track Kokopelli down.

  “How do you know my name?” I ask the flute-player.

  He gives me a little shrug. “The whole desert’s been talking about you, walking here, walking there, looking everywhere for what’s sitting right there inside you all the time.”

>   I’m really tired of opaque conversations, and I tell him as much.

  “Your problem,” he says, “is that you can’t seem to take anything at face value. Everything you’re told doesn’t necessarily have to have a hidden meaning.”

  “Okay,” I say. “If everything’s going to be so straightforward now, tell me: Which one are you? Peter or Max?”

  Kokopelli smiles. “That would make everything so easy, wouldn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For me to be one or the other.”

  “You said this was going to be a straightforward conversation,” I say.

  I turn to Coyote, though why I expect him to back me up on this, I’ve no idea. Doesn’t matter anyway. Coyote’s not there anymore. It’s just me and the flute-player, sitting up on the red stone of this butte.

  “I didn’t say it would be straightforward,” Kokopelli tells me. “I said that sometimes you should try to take what you’re told at face value.”

  I sigh and look away. It’s some view we have. From this height, the whole desert is lain out before us.

  “This isn’t about Peter or Max, is it?” I say.

  Kokopelli shakes his head. “It’s about you. It’s about what you want out of your life.”

  “So Coyote was telling me the truth all along.”

  “Ihu was telling you a piece of the truth.”

  “But I followed your flute to get here.”

  Kokopelli shakes his head again. “You were following a need that you dressed up as my music.”

  “So all of this—” I wave my hand to encompass everything, the butte, the desert, Kokopelli, my being here. “—Where does it fit in?”

  “It’s different for everyone who comes. When you travel in a dream, you can bring nothing across with you; you can bring nothing back. Only what is in your head.”

  And that’s my real problem. I know my dream worlds are real, but it’s a different kind of real from what I can find in the waking world. I work out all of my problems in my dreams—from my mother abandoning me to my never seeming to be able to maintain a good relationship. But the solutions don’t have any real holding power. They don’t ever seem to resonate with the same truth in the waking world as they do in my dreams. And that’s because I can’t bring anything tangible back with me. I have to take it all on faith and for some things, faith isn’t enough.

  “Perhaps you expect too much,” Kokopelli says when I try to explain this to him. “We are shaped by our experiences, and no matter where those experiences occur, they are still valid. The things you have seen and done don’t lose their resonance because you can only hold them in your memory. In that sense there is little difference between what you experience when you are awake or when you dream. Keepsakes, mementos, tokens … their real potency lies in the memories they call up, rather than what they are in and of themselves. “

  “But I don’t always understand the things I experience.”

  Kokopelli smiles. “Without mysteries, life would be very dull indeed. What would be left to strive for if everything were known?”

  He picks up his flute and begins to play. His music carries us through the afternoon until the shadows deepen and twilight mutes the details of the desert around us. Although I don’t hear a pause in the music, at some point he’s put on his pack and I look up to see him silhouetted against the sunset. For a moment I don’t see a man, but a hunchbacked flute-playing kachina.

  “Tell Max,” he says, “to remember me as loving him.”

  And then he steps away, into the night, into the desert, into the sky—I don’t know where. I just know he’s gone, the sound of his flute is a dying echo, and I’m left with another mystery that has no answer:

  If he was Peter, how did he know so much about me?

  And if he wasn’t, then who was he?

  17

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about the desert lately,” Max said.

  He and Sophie were having a late dinner in The Rusty Lion after taking in a show, They had a table by the window and could watch the bustling crowds go by on Lee Street from where they sat.

  “Are you thinking of moving back to Arizona?” Sophie asked.

  Max shook his head. “I probably will one day, but not yet. No, I was thinking more of the desert as a metaphor for how my life has turned out.”

  Sophie had often tried to imagine what it would be like to live with a terminal disease, and she thought Max was probably right. It would be very much like the desert: the barrenness, the vast empty reaches. Everything honed to its purest essence, just struggling to survive. There wouldn’t be time for anything more. She wondered if she’d resent the rich forests of other people’s lives, if she knew her own future could be cut short at any time.

  “I think I know what you mean,” she said.

  Max laughed. “I can tell by the way you look that you’ve completely misunderstood me. You’re thinking of the desert as a hopeless place, right?”

  “Well, not exactly hopeless, but…”

  “It’s just the opposite,” Max said. “The desert brings home how precious life is and how much we should appreciate it while we have it. That life can still flourish under such severe conditions is a miracle. It’s an inspiration to me.”

  “You’re amazing, you know that?”

  “Not really. We all know we’re going to die someday, but we like to pretend we won’t. Given the hand I’ve been dealt I don’t have the luxury of that pretense. I have to live with the reality of my mortality every day of my life. Now I could just give up—and I won’t pretend to you that I don’t have my bad days. But when I tested positive, I made myself a promise that I was going to dedicate whatever time I have left to two things: to fight the stigmas attached to this dis ease, and to squeeze everything I can out of life.”

  The waitress came by with their orders then and for a while they were kept busy with their meals.

  “You look a little gloomy,” Max said later, when they were waiting for their coffees. “I hope I didn’t bring you down.”

  “No, it’s not that.”

  “So tell Uncle Max what’s bothering you.”

  “My problems seem so petty compared to what you have to put up with.”

  “Doesn’t make them any less real for you, though. So ‘fess up. Are you having man trouble again? We can be such bitches, can’t we?”

  “I suppose,” Sophie said with a smile, then her features grew serious. “I just get tired of arguing. Everything starts out fine, but it always ends up with me having to adjust my life to theirs and I’m just not ready to do that anymore. I mean, I know there’s going to be compromise in a relationship, but why does it always have to be on my side?”

  “Compromise is necessary,” Max agreed, “so long as you never give up who you are. That isn’t compromise; that’s spiritual death. You have to remain true to yourself.”

  “That’s what I keep telling myself, but it doesn’t make it any easier.”

  “Somewhere there is someone who’ll love you for who are, not what they think you should be.”

  “And if there isn’t?” Sophie said. “If I never connect with that person?”

  “Then you’ll be alone.”

  “Alone.”

  Sophie sighed. She was too familiar with what it meant to be alone.

  “It’s hard to be alone, isn’t it?” Max said.

  Sophie nodded.

  “But better to be alone than to settle for less than what you need… less than what you deserve.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Here,” Max said. He reached down under his chair for the package he’d carried into the restaurant when he’d arrived. “Maybe this’ll cheer you up.”

  He put the package on the table between them. Sophie looked at him.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Open it up and find out.”

  Inside was one of Max’s sculptures—a new one. Sophie recognized herself in one small figurine that mad
e up the tableau, only she was decked out in a leather cap from which sprang a deer’s antlers giving her a very mythic air. She stood in front of a saguaro on which was perched a tiny owl with a woman’s face. Lounging on a rock beside her was a familiar figure in jeans, shirt and vest, coyote features under the cowboy hat. On the ground between them lay a medicine flute.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, looking up at Max.

  “It’s for you.”

  “I just—”

  “Don’t you even dare say you can’t accept it.”

  “I just love it,” Sophie said.

  “Like I said,” Max told her. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the desert lately.”

  “Me, too.”

  18

  Sometimes when I’m in Mabon, walking its streets while my body’s sleeping a world away, I’ll get a whiff of smoke that smells like pifion and then somewhere in the crowd I’ll spot a lean man who I swear has coyote ears poking up out of his hair, but he’s always gone before I can get close enough to be sure.

  Coyote was right about one thing: The journeys we take inside our heads never end.

  I never thought I’d say this, but I miss him.

  DREAM HARDER, DREAM TRUE

  Man is a genius when he dreams. Dream

  what you’re capable of. The harder you

  dream it, the sooner it will come true.

  —attributed to Akira Kurosawa

  1

  The best artists know what to leave out. They know how much of the support should show through as the pigment is applied, what details aren’t necessary. They suggest, and let the viewer fill in whatever else is needed to make the communication complete. They aren’t afraid to work with a smaller palette, to delete excess verbiage or place rests on the musical staff, for they know that almost every creative endeavor can be improved with a certain measure of understatement. For isn’t it the silence between the notes that often gives music its resonance? What lies between the lines of the poem or story, the dialogue the actor doesn’t speak, the pauses between the dancer’s steps? The ^spaces can be just as important as what’s distinctly portrayed.