by Max Brand
His fur grew long; the under wool multiplied; but still he was cold from dark to dawn and from dawn to dark of the short winter days, for continual, bitter starvation made him thin. It tucked up his belly; it arched his back; it reddened his eyes, and the robe that should have fitted with a tailored snugness over a layer of winter fat was far looser than the shaggy hide of a buffalo wolf. It moved in ripples along his back and over his shoulders as he ceaselessly tracked across his range. Like the heat of summer drought, so this cold burned him to the core and left him a mere framework of bones strung with tough muscle.
At least this winter made him learn his range from the South Kendal Mountains across the Musquash Valley to the North Kendal range beyond, and from the Black Desert to the dark, frozen shadows of the Kendal Woods in the northeast. He traveled and retraveled it, only avoiding the vicinity of the house and the barns of the man, which had been terrible to him since the dogs hunted him into the very den of the monster.
His hunger was a flame that burned without choice. He gnawed frozen moss; he chewed the lichens of wind-swept rocks; he wore his teeth on hard roots, and once he found a low-hung bat, sleeping its winter sleep. So he kept life in his body. He became all brain, all hate, all hunger. Since he had left his mother, he had not eaten once to his fill.
On this evening, as he came out of his den shivering, his breath smoking white about him, his tail curled between his legs, he saw the moon roll like a wheel over the gleaming edges of the eastern peaks, a broad-faced moon as warm and yellow as summer. The sight of it made him shudder more profoundly and lift his nose with a vain hope to study the air. There was no story of food upon it, but a disagreeable pungency, faint yet distinguishable, which told him that the great puma was already roving. He had seen the beast only the week before, with all its hair alert, its yellow eyes bent upon him with a dreadful affection.
This scent made the golden coyote tuck his tail still farther between his legs, and he trotted down from the hills toward the Musquash until he saw its glassy face shining, inhospitably hard. It was a treasure trove that the ice had rocked; it was a great storehouse of fish and frogs. On this alone an intelligent coyote, well-schooled as he had been, could live bountifully, but the key of winter had been turned and he was walled out.
By the first broad bend of the river he paused. Of the rock on which he and his mother had lain, fishing, only the glassy head appeared, slick with ice. When he came to the pool, he stopped again, and pushed hopelessly through the tangle of yellow reeds that bent above the snow. There was not a sound, there was not a sight. Here, where the frogs sang all the summer night, morsels of music more delicious to the tongue than to the ear.
He withdrew from the pool, and the changing wind blew clearly to him the scent of wood smoke and the odor of food poisoned with the smell of iron that meant man. The hair bristled along his back, yet, after a moment of thought, he knew that he would make the desperate adventure again, for he could remember mice, warmly burrowing in the hay of the barn, and chickens, sitting fat and stupid, wing to wing, along the perches of the hen house, and soft-throated swine in the pens, and cows in the shed, breathing out sweetness, with young veal somewhere nearby. All these memories suddenly maddened him. He went down the valley as though on wings, and still no sound or sign of life glinted to his eye from either hand. He went down the valley until he came to the hummock that overlooked the house of man.
What a change!
The barns, the sheds, the tangled fencing of the corrals, all were gone, and in their places remained only a black jungle of wreckage sticking its ends up through the snow. The house remained, with two windows watching him like great, yellow eyes. But the domain in which he was interested was gone completely.
He wandered through it. The gilding of ice had killed all scent except that of a fox, here, and a wolf, there. He was not the first hunter to prowl through the familiar place that had now been made so strange.
The courage of an empty belly, and curiosity, almost as strong in the golden coyote as hunger, sent him slipping and sneaking to the house. It was a riot of scents—of gunpowder, of iron and grease, which meant death; there was a rank scent of dogs, too, and of the man, and the child who had kept him from the dog on that unforgettable night when he had been hunted.
He reared, and, dropping his forepaws on the window’s ledge, he looked inside.
Naturally he saw the dogs first, and at the first glimpse he stopped fearing them, and his mouth filled with a hot slaver. They were not dangerous; they were food for him now. However the winter had treated him, it was killing the dogs. Their temples were sunken. They lay on the floor in a stupor, and, when they breathed, he could count the great outthrusting of the ribs. A touch of his bright teeth would finish them now.
The child lay in a bed beside the stove with round, open eyes that looked at the ceiling—eyes as stupid as those of the porcupine, which is too well armored to have either strong fear or strong wits. And the man, the great, strong hunter—he crossed the floor with sagging knees and leaned above the bed. His face was bones, breaking through the skin; the furrows in his cheeks had pulled back his lips into a horrible grin. He moved like a moose dying in the snow.
So the lips of the coyote curled in high fury and disdain. However, there was still the smell of the iron.
He would not waste time here. He only paused at the kitchen door to sniff softly, once. But the thousand odors of food all were old; there was no keen, living scent to inspire him so much as to wish to steal.
Up the valley he went again. Out of a clump of frozen brush arose a sharp-tailed grouse with a whir of rapidly beating wings. It passed him like a breath from heaven, just half an inch above the stroke of his teeth as he leaped. Its wings fanned warmth of fat blood into his face, and, as the coyote dropped, he saw beneath him something white as the snow and moving like a snake. It was tipped with black at the end of the tail. A weasel, and a bitter morsel in any case, but the golden coyote was desperate.
Down he dropped and struck for the back of the little destroyer’s neck. He missed his mark and hit behind the shoulders, instead. The ribs crushed with the weight of his jaws, but the weasel had time to twist his head about and bury his snaky fangs in the cheek of the coyote.
The latter bounded back, tasting his own blood and that of the little white creature at once. He sat down to wait for the weasel to die. The stench was terrible. It poisoned the air. It was more horrible than the blinding medicine of the skunk, and no summer appetite could have made the golden coyote consider this thing as food. However, now this was a different matter, and he merely moved around to the windward side.
The weasel twisted in convulsions, but it talked as it died. “If I had found your throat, your throat,” it said. “I could have drunk, and drunk, and drunk. Your soft throat through the wool, coyote! I would have locked my teeth under your jaws and tasted you living, and tasted you dead.”
Sheer agony made the dying weasel chirp like a bird. He lay stretched out on his side, and the coyote moved a little closer, putting his head to one side to study his victim, but when he came too near, there was still a tremor of life in the ermine, and the golden coyote backed off in dread of another outburst of that putrid, that incandescent awfulness of stench. The ermine was dying fast, but it retained its malice to the last instant of its breath, gasping: “I have seen a mountain of meat! A mountain of meat!”
“Where?” asked the coyote, grinning with joy at the thought.
“A mountain of meat! A wapiti and a weak calf! A mountain of meat!”
“Where have you seen it?” asked the coyote. “Brave ermine, beautiful and white as the snow, where have you seen it?”
“A mountain of meat, a river of good, red, hot blood. A mountain of meat!” gasped the ermine.
Whether or not its information could have been wheedled from it, there was now a sudden hushing sound in the air overhead. The coyote flattened itself on its belly and threw up its teeth, only to see a pale ghost
slide down on a sharp slant and strike a death scream from the ermine. Off it sailed on wide wings, a great white owl that had been driven so far south by what storms, or what freakish force of instinct?
It lighted on the top of a twelve-foot tree stump that had been broken off by a hurricane of the year before. The mother of the golden coyote herself had seen it fall. Now he slipped to the foot of the tree and looked up with fury and envy as the robber tore at his rightful prey. His belly worked with the very acid of hunger, as he saw the great owl consume the limp body in huge mouthfuls, swallowing hair and snapping bones in its powerful beak. The weasel was gone in an amazingly short time, and the owl mantled, then spun his head about to either side. At last it settled down with a ruffling of feathers and shrank in its head against its broad shoulders and blinked contentedly down at the golden coyote.
The coyote hated the very soul of the great bird, but he was not such a fool as to overlook a chance of gaining information from such an extensive and wise traveler.
“Father,” he said, “you are welcome to my kill. I thank heaven that I have learned respect for my elders.”
“And betters,” snapped the owl. “If you’re going to talk like a dove … how I wish I had one! … you might as well leave nothing out.”
The coyote grinned with fury, but he controlled himself. “Of course,” he said, “you know all the wisdom of the woods.”
“And mountains,” said the owl. “You kill like a fool,” he went on. “But then, all you fellows who do your butchering by tooth are a clumsy lot. You have been so infernally slow with this white rat of an ermine that he’s had time to douse himself with his musk, and I suppose I shall have a sour stomach for a week. My way, young man, is much better. They never hear me, and by the time they see the shadow of my wings sliding over them, I have them by the nape of the neck.” He stretched forth one leg slowly, and expanded and contracted his great, wrinkled toes, shod with admirable talons. “They are dead before they have time to think,” concluded the owl. “Accuracy, my lad, is what one needs in this harsh world. A good eye and an accurate claw will keep your belly full. But what is the use of revealing the truth to a born fool? I have seen a bear, now, do some very neat things in the way of fishing, and so forth. But you have no hands at all.”
The coyote swallowed his gorge, though it nearly choked him to do so.
“Reverend Father,” he said, “the sleekness of your feathers reveals like a clear pool the wisdom of your mind. And if I am not mistaken,” he continued, eying a stain on the broad breast of the night hunter, “this is not your first meal tonight.”
“I do not limit myself,” said the owl, “to a meal of one course, like the poor, starved, four-footed beggars who run on the ground.”
With this, he gaped and blinked rapidly. He could not have expressed his disdain more perfectly.
“You are, of course, the lord of the air,” said the golden coyote, his mouth watering, his heart freezing with envy, “and your magnificent wings take you instantly to any food that you see with your beautiful yellow eyes.”
“This light,” answered the owl in its usual tart manner, “is much too full for you to appreciate the true beauty and brilliance of my eyes. They have been called,” he went on complacently, “the twin moons of the dark forest, the golden moons, the moons of wisdom. Just to give you an idea.”
“Father,” said the coyote, “I hear you with wonder and admiration. To be beautiful is one thing. But to be both beautiful and a philosopher, and a poet as well….”
“You haven’t heard me sing,” said the owl. “I have a range of more than four octaves. In my part of the world, where they know, the woods are silent when I sing.”
“I have no doubt,” said the coyote. “Your speaking voice gives me a slight hint, for, in a very modest way, I’m a musician myself.”
“At least,” said the owl, “I can see that you have a tongue in your head, though from the hollow look of your stomach, I have no doubt that your speech is wiser than your wit. Do you know where I can find me a few fat mice?”
“I shall put my mind on it,” said the starving coyote, “and no doubt I shall be able to think of a good place. Of course, there is meat abroad. That ermine … the one you have just transferred to a warmer world … was telling me about a mountain of flesh … a wapiti and a certain stumbling calf. Perhaps your great eye has seen them, father, this very night?”
“Of course I have,” said the owl. “I see everything. But it disgusts me to see great heaps of bones and flesh like that. What use are they, to creatures of any discrimination? I left them with hardly a glance and flew down the line of traps, yonder. There was nothing but one rabbit in them, however. But I thank heaven that it was not dead more than a minute and there was still some warmth in its blood. Delightful weather, isn’t it?” he concluded, stretching out one wing, which was like a great soft white blanket, except at the transparent tips.
“Delightful,” said the coyote, his teeth chattering. “The wapiti, father … you were saying that you saw them and….”
“I didn’t say where,” said the owl. “I detest gossip. But at least I can let you know that I’m not facing them now.”
“Ah?” said the coyote. And he looked away toward the tangle of the northern hills, a labyrinth at the owl’s back in which the wisest of coyotes might hunt a month without finding the true trail.
“However, the mice, the mice!” snapped the owl impatiently, rising on tiptoes, its appetite apparently as fresh as ever. “Where are the mice, my young friend?”
“Just fly up the river to the second pond,” said the coyote. “Among the grasses at its margin, I know of some of the most delicious mice in the world.”
“I never despise information, no matter what the source,” replied the owl, and, dipping off the tree stump, it sailed soundlessly off up the line of the river, never turning its great round head to one side or to the other.
The coyote looked after the marauder with a snarl. He had gained no useful information from that famous traveler, unless the suggestion about the trap line could be considered one. For his own part, not even famine had been able to draw him to the trap line, for in his youth he had learned enough about traps and their ways to last him the rest of his life. And sometimes at night he wakened, whining, from a dream of his wise uncle as he had seen that experienced coyote standing imprisoned by the trap. However, the taste of the ermine’s blood was in his throat—the taste and not the comfort of eating; his bitten cheek stung him, and in a desperate mood he swung to the side and went up the wind with the smell of oil and iron momently stronger to lead him as with a light.
He found the traps one by one, stealing along, testing the ground lightly with each foot before he let down his weight, ready like a coiled spring to leap from danger. He came, at last, to a blur of red on the snow and a few trembling tufts of rabbit’s fur. The coyote ate the blood-soaked snow gratefully. There was no substance in it, but at least it put a thought of comfort into his aching belly.
He went on, and came at length upon another trap that had been jerked from its hiding place. Its closed jaws were besmeared with clotted blood, and the forepaw of a coyote still hung in them.
Wolf, or mountain lion, or hideous wolverine, had come this way, perhaps. No, for a trail of red led swiftly from the trap, and away through the brush. He followed it. It was the trail of his own kind, but it is sad to state that the golden coyote looked upon cannibalism, at that moment, without horror. He did not so much as think of it, in fact. He simply knew that he was on the trail of blood, fresh blood!
The wind cut behind him. The fugitive had wit to travel down it. The telltale drops grew fewer and fewer, as though the cold were stanching the flow from the wound, but those few that the golden coyote found were ever fresher. He began to go blind with the rage of hunger, and wildly leaped a big log that crossed the trail.
A snarl sounded on the farther side. He whirled with greedy fury and saw the wounded coyote, with t
he footless leg drawn up and the hair bristling along its back. One leap and blow of his shoulder would knock it sprawling—and then the throat! Fear, however, seemed suddenly to have left the hurt one. Its humped back straightened; its hair smoothed; the glittering fangs were no longer bared.
“Oh, my son,” said the voice of his mother. “I heard you on my trail. I thought … but the God of good coyotes brought you back to me.”
The golden coyote crawled to her on his belly in shame and in pity. He sniffed the wound that her own cruel teeth had made. He rose and stood before her, shivering with cold and with fear of man. Even his wise mother had felt the iron teeth, in the end.
She seemed to forget her pain. “How tall you have grown,” she said. “What a coat, what shoulders, and what a head. Except for your father’s … may he rest in peace … I never saw a finer one!”
“I’m only a bag of bones,” he told her, “and you seem to be little better. Have you no husband this winter?”
“I have had one husband, and that was enough,” she snapped rather sourly. “Besides, is this a winter to raise a family? No, I thank you. A fine thing, I must say, if I had little ones new and had to watch them die while I hobble, too lame to catch even a mouse. But as for me, I am old enough to die without mourning. I would have laid in the trap and waited for death to come, but I thought of man. And the smell of iron was horrible. So I set myself free.”
He sniffed the clean cut that her teeth had made. Horror made him tremble. He thought of his own empty belly that all his wits and industry could not fill. But a great instinct rose in him.
“Come,” he said. “You’re a good deal more likely to die of mange and old age than of a missing foot. In the new of this very moon I saw a three-legged timber wolf as fat as butter and active as a marten. If such a slow-footed fool as a wolf can live on three legs, so can you. Yes, and even through such a winter. Besides, I shall hunt with you, and this moment we begin.”