Legend of the Golden Coyote

by Max Brand

  “He is dead,” said the golden coyote.

  “He is merely beaten,” said the mother, as the falling eagle exploded its wings not a hundred yards from the ground and shot down the valley of the Musquash. The conqueror, wheeling once or twice to exult, then sailed away for Mount Hope. “He has won again,” said the older coyote. “But one of these springs….”

  “Do they always fight in the spring? And why?” asked the golden coyote.

  “Oh, some idiotic love affair, I suppose,” she answered.

  “Love?” said he gently. “What is love, Mother?”

  “Love is stuff and nonsense!” she exclaimed with a start, and still as she spoke the skin twitched along her back. “And it’s high time for you to go to bed.”

  “I’m not sleepy,” he said. “The grass is cool here, and the air has a fresh taste.”

  “A damp bed gives rheumatism,” she declared.

  The son paid no attention, but went on with his thoughts. “Love …,” he said. “Is it love that is driving the world mad?”

  “Love is madness,” she said, “and of the most driveling sort. But what makes you say the world is topsy-turvy?”

  “This morning,” he said, “I saw a strange timber wolf come up the valley with the big gray monster from down the valley at her heels. She was young. She did not know the range, and kept turning her head from side to side. I stood close to the trail in some bushes, ready for the game when they should scent me and jump to get at me….”

  “Someday one of those games will cost you your throat,” said the mother.

  He continued slowly: “You would not have known the big wolf. He was thin. His tail was as high as mine, and his head was lifted. His eye was red. He had a foolish high trot, almost as stupid as that of a sheep dog. And both of them went by me as though I had not been there. That was madness, I thought. Then I went up the river, and saw the fox of the Red Hills fighting like fire with a stranger to this valley. The new fox won, and the old one went off, staggering, while a bitch fox came out of the brush and licked the wounds of this new chicken thief. That was madness, I thought.

  “I went on into the woods. Everything was fighting, struggling, insane. I saw two squirrels fighting so hard that they fell off their branch and gave me a breakfast for nothing. I saw two badgers on the edge of the woods, holding one another, and tearing out fur and grunting like pigs. I saw the birds fighting in the trees, wrangling, scolding, and even the blue jay was serious for once and was trying to sing a song, which was so funny that I sat down and laughed at him. He usually has a sense of humor and nothing else but bad tricks, but, this morning, he went into a towering rage. He dropped to a lower branch and screamed insults at me and said my own song gave him colic pains and that I was the son of a yellow dog.”

  “The scoundrel!” exclaimed the mother loudly, jumping up, and then slowly lying down again. “The contemptible, gossiping … lying, I mean … rascal. I’ll have his wicked head, for that.”

  “Oh, well, he can’t help using his tongue. But I tell you, Mother, that it seems to me as though the world were on fire, for the mountains are smoking with water vapor … and the snow water is seeping through the forest mold … and the rivers are roaring like mad, shouting almost words, so that I found myself stopping, now and then, to listen. I swam the creek that runs down to the frog pond. I tell you that the current gripped me like the claws of a puma and pulled my head under. I came staggering up the bank, and a little weasel hissed under my nose, and then darted along after another of his kind. I am dizzy with this strangeness.”

  “It’s the change of seasons,” said the mother. “I’ll take you to some excellent young watercress that I found today. There’s nothing more cooling to the blood than a salad. Your father, who was really a connoisseur, always said so.”

  “I want to get out into the excitement,” said the golden coyote, with a great sigh. “Listen! Everyone is out. The old grizzly is tearing out a bee’s nest … do you hear the wood ripping under his claws? And there’s the gray wolf howling … he’s always off key.”

  “That comes from singing to an audience that’s too large for him,” said the mother. “Besides, he never had a sense of pitch. He strains to make effects, and that is the sign of the born fool.”

  “Hush,” said the son. “Do you hear? Do you hear? Even the mice … they are scampering … they are rushing about in the grass … do you hear them? I am going for a walk, Mother.”

  “A walk indeed,” she said. “A walk where? A walk to what?”

  “Well, a frog, perhaps,” he said.

  “You’ve had enough to eat,” she said. “ ‘Greed chokes puppy’ … remember? … as your uncle loved to say … bless him. His conversation was a joy to me, my dear.”

  Overhead, a swallow dipped in the wind, and the faint cry came to the young coyote: “Love … oh, love.” The bird sailed on to a twinkle in the dusk, and the word came faintly back: “Love….”

  The mother had not heard, but now settling herself in the most comfortable fashion, with her head up and her chin pointing high at the north star, she went on: “ ‘A glutton young, a beggar old’ … your uncle used to say. ‘Your eye is bigger than your belly,’ he once said to your father….”

  The golden coyote recognized this mood, which was capable of pouring out proverbial wisdom by the hour. He slid to the side, putting down every foot with trembling care, and so melted into the darkness, while the voice of his mother continued blandly: “You’ve eaten enough for one day, my boy, unless you want to eat for the dog that will catch you. ‘Are you fattening yourself for the market?’ your uncle used to say when you were only a cub, too young to remember. Suppers killed more than all the doctors have cured, and temperance is the best medicine, my son. ‘Light suppers make long days,’ your uncle used to say to me, many a time, ‘and a spare diet makes a sharp nose’ … ‘spare living and keen smelling,’ he was fond of saying, for he was full of beautiful maxims, my dear. ‘Go to bed without supper and you’ll rise without debt.’”

  Here her voice pitched upward in a scream: “My son, my son! Where have you …?” She stopped.

  The golden coyote was almost on the verge of running back to see what enemy had struck her, but he was still close enough to hear a light pulse of sound that he guessed to be her panting. He wondered, since she was so concerned, why she did not hurry after him—his scent lay plain to read upon the ground, but she did not stir, and presently he heard her whimper: “Oh, God of the coyotes, let him find happiness!”

  He went on with excessive caution until he had reached the lower stretch of the slope, and then he ran on toward the frog pond, not that he particularly cared to go there, but because his own words to his mother had placed the pond in his mind. On the verge of the aspen grove, he heard a faint sound in the wet marshland, and with his paw he laid open the surface. It was a mole working rapidly; the prairie wolf took it by the soft scruff of his neck.

  “Listen to me, worm-eater,” he said.

  “If you’re going to kill me, kill me,” snarled the mole in a tired voice, “but I haven’t eaten a thing for five minutes, and another five will practically mean death by starvation. What do you want? You clumsy fool, stepping through the roof of a gentleman’s house.”

  “After all,” said the golden coyote, “you know the secrets under the ground. Or you ought to, because you live there. That was why I dug you up, because I wanted to know the opinion of such a great scholar as you. What is love, if you please?”

  “My heaven,” said the mole. “I am a delver into mysteries, and I have fallen into the hands of a gossip. Let me go. Unless you have a few good worms at hand. I cannot think without eating…”

  “Your answer,” said the coyote, “or I’ll break your neck.”

  “It turns my stomach to merely think of it,” said the mole. “I hope that’s answer enough. It’s a subject that well-bred people have avoided for centuries. If it has to be, well, let us at least put it in a silent po
cket or leave it for the doves and poets and fools to talk about.”

  The golden coyote was so annoyed that he could not help giving the mole’s neck a pinch. Then he tossed the flabby creature aside, saying merely—“I hope your next grub chokes you.”—and went on. “The doves,” he said, “I must find them. I hope it is not too late.”

  The coyote ran with all his might. The small runlets flashed beneath his paws, gilded or red with the last of the day’s light, and he came to the stream where the doves were dipping out of the dying sunset to drink, and to sit on a bough, to croon, and to fly again. He could hear them in the distance, like the humming of a great hive of bees, and, when he came closer, there were so many voices thronging the still air that he was amazed. He could hear no words, at first, but only the music of a hundred swelling throats that, as he studied it, seemed to change into one word alone: “Love, love, love….”

  The sound of it fascinated him; he grew a little dizzy, as he had been when he looked up at the two eagles fighting so far above him. For all of these voices sang alone, and yet all blended into one gentle harmony. He paused beneath a tree, and now he could hear the singer above him chanting in the most mournful fashion: “Oh, pain! Oh, sweet, sweet love!”

  “Pardon me,” said the golden coyote in his gentlest voice, “but can you tell me what this love is of which you speak?”

  The dove paid not the slightest attention, but in exactly the same accent repeated: “Oh, pain! Oh, sweet, sweet love!”

  The golden coyote went on to another tree, and there he heard two voices answering one another in a dialogue that was all song, intermingling, interrupting, blending together always.

  “I came through the desert, for love carried me. Love was in the desert.”

  “I came from the north, following love. The birch trees stand like white spirits, in trembling clouds of green.”

  “Love is in the desert. There I found the little mimulus looking up at me with yellow eyes, and the baby blue eyes, sprinkled with black, even on the desert. In the dusk there are stars on the desert, the evening primrose opening.”

  “Love flew with me out of the north. The world is dissolving in the fire of love. The soft maples are smoking with green, and the red maples are clustered with bronze. The dust of love is falling from the willows.”

  “Love is crossing the desert like a sea, for I saw a lark and a bobolink, and a mocking bird and a linnet. They all flew north, but I alone have found you, oh, my love.”

  Then the golden coyote spoke, but they would not answer. He heard the whisper of their wings, and the two voices faded in the air.

  “Love has come from the desert … love … from the … north….”

  The golden coyote sighed, and the sigh made him sneeze, which silenced every songster near at hand, but still, from high up the stream and below, the cooing continued and closed again over his head with music.

  “I love, and I die for it. Pity me, mourn for me! Ah, loveliness and sorrow….”

  The golden coyote felt that he could stand it no longer. He was dizzier than ever, and, since not a one of these rhapsodists would answer him, he turned back and hurried toward the frog pond in desperate haste, for somehow he felt that he must be answered before the gray of the evening closed its hands over the central sky.

  He pushed through the reeds. He stood fetlock-deep in the slime and water at the edge of the pool. The frogs were silent. Only the rose and gold of the heavens lay on the water, and one dusky shadow. He had to study this in the face of the pool before he was able to see a great blue heron standing almost knee-deep on the other side of the narrow water, so deftly did its coloring blend with the twilight haze.

  “Hush,” said the heron, as soon as it saw that it was noticed.

  “I beg your pardon,” said the golden coyote, “but I must speak.”

  “Softly, then, if you please,” said the heron. “The frogs are about to come out to sing, and I love their chorus in this valley. The echoes are so soft, so appetizingly delicate. What is it that you wish to ask me?”

  “About love,” said the coyote.

  The heron was continually smiling, or had the look of it, with sardonic wrinkles around the top of its beak, but at this question it seemed about to laugh. It closed and reopened its bill several times, stretching its neck.

  “I would have laughed, I confess,” she said, “except that the last fish caught in my throat. Love, is it? My dear young fellow, what have you to do with love?”

  “Why, the whole world is talking of nothing else!” exclaimed the coyote.

  “I hope that I am a part of the world,” said the heron, “and I assure you that I’m only talking about love to answer a question. I don’t deny that I have a husband or two, but I hope to the wise God of the herons that I have outgrown the folly of that. Are you in love?”

  “I don’t know,” said the coyote.

  “How does your stomach feel?”

  “Empty, and my heart aches. Yet I have had a good meal of venison.”

  “Your stomach aches, you mean,” said the heron. “The stomach is the seat of love, I have discovered.”

  “The doves speak of nothing but the heart and the soul,” said the coyote.

  “The doves, as the world knows, are fools,” said the heron. “I will prove to you that the heart, emotionally speaking, is merely a poetic name for the stomach.”

  “I listen, madam,” said the coyote, “with breathless interest.”

  “Go fasting for three days,” said the heron. “If you find yourself in love on an empty stomach, then come back and talk to me about the heart. Otherwise, I don’t wish to hear another word about it.” She added: “Is she young?”

  “She?” said the coyote. “Do you mean my mother?”

  “I mean your lady, your beautiful one.”

  “There is no lady in the case,” said the coyote.

  The heron opened her great bill again in a fit of laughter so hearty that she spread her wings and shook all her graceful, drooping plumes.

  “In love with love! Excuse me a moment …,” she interrupted herself hastily. “There is a clever young frog about to come out and sing for his lady. He’s been popping his head up to the surface every moment, and I yearn to hear his voice.”

  With that, she drew back her head, and curved her neck until it almost disappeared against her shoulders and along her back. It looked like a harpoon mounted on a handful of flexible cable, with this difference, that a brain lived in the spearhead and the strands of the rope were exquisitely tapered muscle.

  Weeds obscured the coyote’s view of the frog, but a moment later its voice rose. Its very first quiver was cut off by the javelin stroke of the heron, which lifted its head with the frog kicking violently in its beak.

  “Delicious … music,” said the heron, and swallowed. She dropped back her head again and closed her eyes, murmuring: “Exquisite song. So young, and so poetic, too.” Then, with a fanning stroke of her wings, she turned her attention to the coyote.

  “You’re a lover of music, I see,” said the coyote, grinning sympathetically.

  “But I love the musicians more than their song,” she replied. “I’ve never had enough of them, really. But I go on day after day studying them … taking the subject into me, as you might say.”

  “And very well said, too,” said the coyote. “But how about love?”

  “Laughter makes a good digestion,” said the heron, “but you’ll have me frightening all of these tender little artists to death, in a short time. My dear boy, what shall I tell you about love?”

  “Tell me what it is,” he begged.

  The heron continued her sardonic smile and fixed her glittering eye on him. Yet he knew that the same eye was viewing every item of the water and the reeds.

  “Tell me what the sky is,” said the heron.

  “I don’t know,” said the coyote, “except that my mother said that it is the floor of heaven.”

  “A ridiculous definition,�
� said the heron. “Or rather, not a definition at all. If we are to talk, let us be precise.”

  “I can’t give you a clearer idea,” said the golden coyote.

  “I don’t think you can,” she said. “You can’t tell how far away it is, either. It is as blue as water, but, though I have flown so high that the Kendal Mountains looked like a fog beneath me and the clouds were under my feet, yet I can assure you that I never came close enough to that water to drink. I hope you follow me?”

  “Not quite so high,” said the golden coyote.

  The heron continued her smile. “You seem to have some wit,” she said. “I mean to point out that the sky is a mystery, and so is love. There is a difference between them, however.”

  “And what is that?” he asked.

  “The sky is pleasant, and love is damned unpleasant. Excuse me, but I can’t help swearing when I think of it.”

  “Is it so disagreeable?”

  “Worse,” she told him, “than chills and fever. And very similar, in a way. You never know when the attack will return. I, who can stand in water while the ice is forming around my legs and yet never have known cold feet … I, who have killed two hawks in my time … even I, my dear youngster, grow cold to the pit of my stomach at the mention of love, and more frightened than by the stoop of an eagle. The clumsy brutes. I must say they are all thumbs in their flying.”

  “You laugh at it, however … love, I mean to say,” said the coyote.

  “Creatures of any spirit always should laugh at things that cannot be understood,” she said. “It is always done in the best circles. You ask me about love, but I can only answer you with a few epigrams.”

  “I shall be glad to hear them,” he said, “if they will tell me the truth about love.”

  “An epigram is to truth,” she said, “as a duck pond to the ocean, for both contain the blue of heaven. And let me tell you, in the beginning, that love does much, but mice do everything.”