by Max Brand
He moved, and there was a jingling of iron, so that the golden coyote slipped nearer and saw that about the foreleg of his uncle was fastened that same unbodied jaw of which his mother had spoken. To it hung a narrow chain.
“I shall bite the narrow thing in two,” he said.
“Taste it, and try,” said the other.
The golden coyote set his teeth on it until his jaws cracked, but he could not leave the dent of a tooth in it.
“You see,” said the uncle, “that nothing is to be done. Unless, like a friend of mine, I chew off the imprisoned leg. However, the winters have been growing longer and hungrier for me of late years, and I do not care to limp through them on three legs. Moreover, this life is not all, unless the wisest of coyotes have lied to us, and I wish to stand on four feet before my Maker.”
The golden coyote listened, dizzy with awe and fear, to the calm reasoning of the other.
“Is it fearful pain?” he asked. “Because the terrible teeth … they seem to sink right in.”
“They are sinking in very slowly,” replied the older coyote. “At first, it was difficult to endure it without howling. However, death will be still more difficult to bear, and that is soon coming upon me.”
Pity overcame the golden coyote. “You say this because you do not know me,” he said, “but I, the golden coyote, shall go hunting for you, and find the tenderest rabbits, the field mice, the squirrels, the frogs, and the ducks to bring up to you. After a time, perhaps, the pain will cease. You will live here pleasantly enough, and we shall come to keep you company and listen to your wise words.”
The mother whined with sorrow and pleasure as she listened.
“What is the taste in your mouth?” asked the uncle.
“Something that I cannot describe.”
“It is the taste of iron, and the hand of man has therefore been in your mouth. He has placed this trap in the ground. I, running downwind like a reckless fool, was caught here by my blindness and my speed.”
“Alas, Brother,” said the mother, “it is true that the swiftest foot is not always the first home.”
The captive grunted. “You would moralize if you yourself were about to die. You will see, my son, that this trap was not placed here in vain. As you hunt for ground squirrels and rabbits, so man hunts for us. He will come soon with his fire-stick, and, when that speaks, we die. Go home. Keep the smell and the taste of iron in your mind, also the terrible fragrance of the trap. As for me, I am not sorry to die. I have lived a long life and a full life. Friends and enemies, I have given an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. If I have been lean, sometimes, yet I have often been asleep with a full belly. If man kills me at last, yet he cannot take from me the memory of many a chicken, and goose, and colt, and calf, and sheep, and tender lamb with which I have comforted myself in winter and summer. I have lived a good life … I die without regrets. Farewell! Man is coming down the wind at this moment.”
The golden coyote shrank back among the rocks and presently a black silhouette came over the hill’s edge through the twilight and stood for a moment. Down the wind came the smell of iron, with a reeking new pungency about it. Then fire spat, the very ground seemed to shake beneath the young coyote, and he saw his uncle fall limply on his side. The red tongue lolled out. It was death.
Furtively, from rock to rock, mother and son scurried together down the slope into the valley, the golden coyote running ahead, unurged. When they saw lights before them, he would have stopped.
“It is the cave of man,” he said.
“My brother is dead, and the hand of man has killed him,” said the mother, “but for that very reason we should not shrink away from the vicinity of man. Rather, we should keep close, and see how we may steal from him. It is as great a glory to steal from man as to eat behind a cougar. He has dull eyes and ears, moreover, only there are the iron teeth that he leaves in the ground, and the fire-stick in his hand that makes us fear him.”
“If God is just, why should He give such power to man?” asked the youngster.
“Because God is too merciful, and, when He saw the wretched, naked creature, without speed of foot, power of eye, strength of wit, cunning of nose, perhaps He was ashamed, and, therefore, He sent down iron to be man’s servant.”
After this, she led her son down to the farm. His heart was trembling with fear, with desire, with excitement, as they passed from place to place. She took him to the pig pens and showed him the beasts grunting in their sleep, bursting with fat. She showed him the long, white chicken house; he could remember the taste of the flesh that she had brought him in the days of his puppyhood, tender beyond belief, edible to the last bone! They glided through a hole in the barn, and the wings of pigeons fluttered in the loft. Sweet-breathing cattle munched the hay, and almost underfoot the little warm mice were scurrying. He pounced in the dark and found one with his teeth.
They went out again past the duck pond. They also had furnished tribute in the hungry days of his youth. In the sheep pens they saw the huddled fleeces, and the mother paused with lolling, dripping tongue, but went on again, for they heard a dog growl and turned themselves into furtive shadows that slunk away behind a shed.
Then the wise mother said: “The range is wide, but the range is hard. Your pads must become flint before you can run over it successfully. Here, after all, is the treasure house. It belongs to man, and everything that man has should be ours, for he has nothing except what he holds by the power of iron and not with the strength of tooth and paw. There is danger here, but there is also a rich mine of food. Many a strong coyote starves in the hills, but I, your mother, have never starved. Now come with me, and I shall show you the trap line that man keeps for us, and for the bobcat, the lynx, the wolf, and even the little rabbit.”
They left the farm, and, drifting from the rich bottomlands, where the stars glittered deep in the breast of the river, they climbed the slope of the rocks. She picked the traps out, one by one, always with the same enchanting fragrance about them. Sometimes they lay in the open sand, where trails crossed; sometimes they were among the rocks, sometimes beneath a bush.
And the golden coyote studied with the most sensitive nose in the wide world the scent of the bait and the scent of the iron until he knew that his senses were attuned to them to the end of his days.
It was the intentness with which they mutually studied the trap line that almost brought them to disaster. But the mother heard a slight grinding of stones underfoot, on the slope above them, and her low yelp made her son look up in time.
Then the golden coyote saw two lofty silhouettes plunging toward him, two gaunt, long-legged forms of the hunting dogs of man. One was the shaggy-haired deerhound that his mother had pointed out to him on a day long before. The other was slighter, swifter of foot, bounding with a longer stride, and with a slick pelt, smooth as that of a wildcat in the spring of the year.
He fled at his mother’s heels, his hindquarters doubling under him in the frantic effort of his gallop.
He would have turned down the slope, but his wise mother turned up against it, though that maneuver brought the dogs perilously close, so close that his pricked ears heard the hideous breathing of the monsters behind him.
Over the hilltop they fled into the face of the rising moon—a flaming torch held up to light the enemy’s way. The golden coyote whimpered with dread, and shot down the slope beyond.
He saw the meaning of his mother’s maneuver, then, for on the downgrade, the long legs of the hounds brought them up rapidly, though they lost ground again on the next hillside. Here the two fugitives ran well into the lead, but the effort almost cost the youngster the last of his wind.
His gallop broke as they passed the crest. “I am lost!” he sobbed, and turned down the valley beyond, keeping headlong to the downward slope, and sure as fate the two monsters swerved and followed him. They knew the weaker quarry!
A wise creature the golden coyote knew his mother to be, and a loving one, but h
e was amazed now to see her swerve back from her own course and, running as he had not dreamed even the arrow-swift rabbit could go, she crossed under the very noses of the dogs.
The teeth of the greyhound flashed as he leaped for her, but she doubled back under his very throat and he almost fell as he turned to follow. He had been played with, and maddened by that, even the youngster knew that the big dog would never leave that trail.
But the deerhound remained behind him, running with the same mighty stroke, its lolling tongue flashing in the moonlight. Twice the golden coyote tried to double back into the rough of the rocks, and twice it was headed and driven back downhill.
Numb from fetlock joint to shoulder and hip, half blind with labor and exhaustion, only the heart of the youngster kept strength. Behind him, he felt the shadow coming up, yet he dared not turn his head for fear of losing his stride. He dodged. Over him the great teeth flashed in a saber stroke and the big dog clumsily stopped and turned, for it expected the quarry to double straight back as a rabbit does. That was not the purpose in the desperate mind of the golden coyote. He merely had swerved, and now ran fairly past the nose of the standing hound, gaining wonderful distance in a moment.
In that instant of ecstasy, he told himself that the race was won, but almost immediately behind him he heard the dog coming with a whimpering grunt for every stride—coming up like the wind, with all its reserve strength flung into the effort. This was the run to make the kill, and the fugitive knew it well. He, too, found some meager remnant of nerve power to give to a last effort. His head wavered with his labor, and before him the lights of the house of the man appeared, blurred and jumbled by the movement of his head.
He made toward them blindly, not because it was the dwelling of man, but because it was an objective when nothing else loomed before him.
Dazzling bright those lights showed before him, presently, and he made for the open door as he would have made for any refuge. The very breath of the deerhound was at his rump as he bolted through into the scent of man, of steaming food that filled the air, of the heat of fire that throbbed in a massive thing of iron. There in the kitchen corner he whirled and heard the claws of the big dog scrape and grind on the floor as it strove to halt. A vast and shaggy monster, it stood before the coyote with red mouth agape and great fangs prepared for the final stroke.
Now the coyote heard a shrill voice that was man, yet smaller and sweeter than the voice of man, that ran in upon him. Even to his eye there was no danger in the girl who slipped to her knees beside him. Yet her hand struck the thrusting muzzle of the deerhound, and it recoiled. It came again from the side, and again the small hand threatened it away, so that now, in despair at this robbery, the monster backed away, and barked a protest.
“Look!” cried the girl. “Look at the dog that’s come in, Daddy! Call Jerry away! Come look! He’s all gold!”
The man came at that, striding huge and dark through the doorway, the smell of the iron about him, and the pungent death that had killed the uncle of the golden coyote.
“Dog, my foot!” he announced. “It’s a sneakin’ yaller coyote. Git away from it, Nelly, before it takes your hand off!”
He reached for her, and the golden coyote knew it was death that came near him. Death in the hand of the man, and salvation in the hand of the child. Around his neck she curled one arm, while the other hand gently stroked his face, covering his eyes with softness.
“He’s not a coyote,” she declared, “or if he is, he’s as gentle as any dog. Call Jerry away. And look … he’s all as golden as can be!”
The rough voice of the man answered: “The sneakin’, treacherous, chicken-murderin’ varmint! Git away from him, Nelly! He’d cut your throat as quick as a wink!”
The coyote heard. He did not need to know words in order to understand where the danger lay, and where the protector. From the fierce face of the man his glance was beaten away, but he looked up to the child and there for the first time met the eye of man and could endure it.
Voice, and hand, and eye had all one touch. The terror abated in him a little, and he licked the small hand beside his muzzle covertly, yet the man saw, and wondered.
“It’s a coyote pup,” he said, “growed into its size but not into its meanness. Look at old Jerry, there. Don’t he know the breed, though? I’m gonna do this much for it. I’m gonna give it a start … it’s surely got a second wind by now.”
He called off the big hound and held it powerfully by the scruff of the neck in the door of the dining room.
“But I want it!” cried the child. “It’s mine, because it came to me!”
“A pretty chance you’d have of keepin’ it,” declared her father. “And wouldn’t it give your ma a turn to find a dirty coyote under the roof? Stand up, now, and watch it scoot.”
She stood up obediently. The coyote rose with her, and pressed against her legs.
“Dog-gone me,” said the father, “if I ever seen the like of that. Go to the door, Nelly, and see what it does.”
She crossed to the door, the golden coyote sliding along beside her. There he saw the open face of the night, star-sprinkled, and bright with the moon; the wind blew all the familiar scent of the open world to his nostrils, and behind him was the terror of iron, of the dog, and of man.
But he looked up to the face of the child again. Her hand lay on his head softly, yet he felt the touch of a gentle mastery that was strange to him and strange to all his race.
Here the deerhound lunged furiously forward, and the coyote sprang unleashed into the dark.
He heard the tingling cry of the child’s sorrow behind him, and then over his shoulder saw the hound streaking. All the peril was there behind him as before, but he had breathed; the fire no longer burned his lungs; his legs no longer sank beneath him.
He could not distance this enemy, he knew. In his young body there was no power to endure the long strain of the race, however, there were teeth of man’s own planting in the ground, if only they would strike at the great enemy that sped behind.
Straight up the line of the traps he fled. A bobcat leaped up, with a jingle of the chain that hung from one imprisoned foot. It spat at him as he scurried by. And the deerhound went by with an anxious snarl, as though eager to take both quarries into its teeth at the same moment. Yet it clung steadfastly to the trail it was hunting under that bright moon.
Past a squat bush went the coyote, the smell of the bait whisking into its face, and the cold scent of the iron, then down into the hollow where the trap lay buried at the crossing of the trails. Right up to it he ran, until the tempting odor flared in his very face, then leaped forward as far as he could fling, landed, and rushed on untouched by the iron jaws.
Instantly, behind him, he heard the sound of a metal spring released, and then a dull champ as of teeth, and the rattling of the chain, and the shock of a heavy fall.
When he looked back, there lay the big deerhound with all four legs in the air. It stumbled to its feet, yet stood hobbled, with one imprisoned forepaw raised.
And the golden coyote sat down to watch.
Man and his works were mysterious indeed, but somehow it came into the mind of the young coyote that not all the servants of man obeyed his will implicitly. Some were friendly enemies, like the child in the house whose hand, as it were, still lay on his head. And yonder the dog was gripped by the bodiless jaws that man planted in the earth.
There was a frantic rattling of the chain, then a loud howl of pain, but the golden coyote arose, laughing, and trotted over the crest of the next hill. There he paused, and, scanning the plain beneath him, he sent his long, wavering cry into the moonshine, then waited with canted head.
He heard the mouse-colored coyote cry from the river bottom; he heard that old veteran of the Caspar Draw send up his pulsing wail, and last of all came the call of his mother around the very corner of the hill.
She met him as one rescued from the grave. She licked his muzzle; she whined her joy, and, whe
n he took her back to the crest, she looked down on the prisoner and laughed a long, red laughter underneath the moon.
They killed a rabbit in the next hollow; they caught a sage hen only two hillsides away; they drank of the water that tumbles down the Caspar Rocks, and at last they lay before their own lair once more and looked across the valley, half drowned in the moon mist, but with the white mountain drawn wonderfully close.
“God has given us good hunting,” said the mother, “and, more than that, He has taught you in a single night more than many a gray elder learns in a long life. For now I know what I guessed from the moment I watched your puppy days … you are destined to great things.”
The golden coyote licked the blood from his paws and made no answer.
She continued, therefore: “We, who are both wise and brave, have watched man go by, close at hand, and studied his strange ways … but of all our race, you are the only one that has gone into his lair and come out with your life. Oh, my son, learn wisdom out of peril! And keep far from man till your pads are hard and your legs are strong. How else was I able to lose the greyhound in the rocks? The lumbering fool! Give me your promise now that you will never go back until I say the word.”
But the golden coyote, his paws crossed at ease, had raised his head and was looking through the moon haze far off down the valley. Still he did not answer, and the mother murmured to herself: “How quickly they grow beyond us. How soon we ask, and they have the knowledge.”
She dropped her head on her paws, and watched him askance, but the golden coyote lay like a statue and watched the moon slide down a western mountain like a great yellow wheel.
II
The oldest eagle that flew from the South Kendal Mountains could not remember a winter so long, so white, so iron-hard with cold. By November, Otter and Beaver Lakes could bear the weight of a walking man on their ice, and the Musquash creamed along its edges with freezing water. In December, all was ice except the cascade; the big trees of the Kendal Woods began to crack and boom like guns, and the Black Desert, to the south and west, disappeared under a gray mist of the snow that whirled in its continual winds. In January, even the cascade froze to a miracle of stalactites, and the golden coyote could run in the open or under the trees on the hard upper crust of the snow.