Legend of the Golden Coyote

by Max Brand

  “Ah, yes,” he said. “Females always give one chances for war and for work.”

  “Work,” she said. “Work!”

  The young ones began to make little blind noises of complaint and yelps of chilly loneliness, so that he guessed she was coming out to him. He did not turn his head, though a faint tremor passed twitching through the loose hide along his back.

  “Work,” she repeated from the very mouth of the cave. “A great deal you know about it!”

  “If I haven’t the profile of a greyhound … may they all go blind and lame with a curse … from hunting all day and house-moving all night, then I haven’t looked at myself in a pool. I have no more stomach than a puma in February,” he retorted.

  “There’s nothing more unhealthy than fat,” she answered, “and a lean belly makes a sharp tooth. Besides, no one can trust the images in a pool … they’re so distorted with ripples, and what not.”

  “I’m talking about facts, not pictures,” he said. “I feel the bones of my chest every time I lie down … working all day,” he repeated, “and house-moving all night.”

  “You know as well as I do,” said the helpmate, “that I found the track of man within fifty yards of our front door.”

  “Men have hardly any eyes, and no nose whatever,” he answered.

  “ ‘What a beautiful evening,’ said the grouse, as the horned owl swooped on it,” she murmured mockingly. “Well, no one can teach wisdom to a lazy coyote.”

  “Lazy?” he said, his gorge rising again.

  “You know perfectly well,” she replied tersely, “that even if there wasn’t the slightest danger in the old home, the little ones need a change of air.” She went on, in a changed tone: “It’s so delicious here. Do you smell the fat little ground squirrels in the low ground? But what’s that scent of wood smoke in the air?”

  “You can see for yourself,” he answered.

  “Is it coming this way?”

  “How can I tell? Fire is the only other thing that has a mind that can’t be read and that changes with the wind.”

  She pretended not to understand, but harped on the subject that she had just been avoiding.

  “As for work, I don’t know what you’re talking about. What am I doing all day long, and all night? Feeding, and washing … washing and feeding. No end. No stop. And no gratitude, either. And all you have to do is to walk through the beautiful forest, eating three mice for every one you bring home to me, where I lie in the damp darkness, working, working, working, never complaining, giving myself for the sake of five beautiful young lives….”

  “Oh, rot,” said the golden coyote. “They look like five foolish rabbits to me … all foot and no head. They’ll be half-wits, if they ever grow up to be called aright….”

  He jumped as he spoke, but he jumped a little too late. The keen teeth of his mate nipped him in the flank, not once, but three times. She even ran a little beside him, still biting, and whining in utter fury. “Cannibal! Cannibal!” she cried.

  The golden coyote almost ran his hind legs up to the front ones, he worked so hard, but, when he got to a safe distance, he turned and gasped: “You can’t take a joke, my dear. Of course, I didn’t mean it.”

  She paced up and down before the cave, still frantic. “Cannibal, cannibal!” she howled. “Oh, yellow dog!”

  This insult made him tip up on his hind legs, and he yipped with fury. “I’m going away!” he cried.

  “I hope you do! I hope you do!”

  “Do you? You ingrate … you … you … I’ll never come back, either!”

  “I don’t want you. I hope you don’t. You half-breed! You son of a three-legged beggar and a yellow dog … dog … dog!” She screamed the last.

  The golden coyote was sick with rage. He wanted to rush back and thrash her into a gentler vocabulary, but he knew that not even a mountain lion cares to trouble a mother and her young. What increased his fury to the bursting point was that he could not think of a single strong response but had to keep hopping about in his ecstasy. At last he whirled and shot away over smooth and rough through the forest, at such a rate and so blindly that he almost ran into man and man’s daughter, as the two walked happily through the cool of the morning woods. All in a flash there rushed upon him the odor of oil and steel, and powder, and of man himself, and then, as he swerved, he had a sight of them, and he heard the shrill voice of the little girl crying: “Look, look! It’s the golden coyote again! Look!”

  He tried to dissolve himself with utter speed and turn into a yellow-copper streak, but, as he looked back, he saw that man was not pointing the rifle.

  He almost forgot his anger, in the overmastering greatness of his fear, but then, as he reached secure distance, he slowed to a stealthy walk—he never was quite at home in the sun-splashed gloom of the woods—and began to blame all of his recent alarm on his wife. She was, he felt, the mere beginning and starting point of misfortune.

  He heard running water before him and started for it to take a needed drink—fear dries the throat like the loss of blood— when the odor of the king of the forest crossed him. It made his hair bristle along his back; it numbed his brain, for the scent was rank with nearness. Then he forced himself to remember that all the brains of a grizzly cannot quite equal the fleet foot of a coyote.

  He heard a splashing sound, and the noise of a wet fall, followed by flopping. Fish? He dropped to his belly and went forward like a cat to explore. So he came through a thicket and saw a little stream, on the edge of which a big stone jutted, and on the stone lay the king himself—seven hundred pounds of loosely robed wisdom and might. His ambidextrous forepaws drooped over the side of the rock, and, even as the golden coyote arrived, his majesty flicked a good-size fish out of the water. It sailed back like a ray of silver light and landed solidly on the ready fangs of the thief. Five more fat fellows already lay on the bank, and the coyote was wishing the king good hunting with all his heart—the tail of the last fish, in fact, was just going down his throat—when something made the bruin turn.

  He did not seem angry. He merely smiled at the coyote, and, coming to the five fish, he disposed of each as a single mouthful.

  “Your majesty,” said the golden coyote, choking a little on the first few words, “your majesty is in perfect health, we trust?”

  “We?” said the grizzly, and lifted his head, and moved his pig nose to read the air beyond the other.

  “All of your subjects,” said the golden coyote, “speak for one another … all of your faithful subjects … I say nothing of the gray wolf, the slandering thief … or of the bobcat, or the lion on Mount Hope. I hope you will discipline that loud-mouthed boaster, someday.”

  The king itched a ponderous shoulder against a spruce, and the tree trembled from its roots. “I’m not interested in fighting,” he said. “It spoils the teeth and ruins the claws.” He raised a forepaw and looked down at it with judicious eyes. “In short, I am a philosopher, my son, and I never trouble my head about loud talk or, here and there, a lost fish.”

  The point of this remark was not lost on the golden coyote, but he pretended to take it seriously. “I have followed you before,” he said, “and always have admired your liberality. Many a rabbit has run from you into my teeth, and many a mouse has slipped from your paw under mine. In fact, the waste from your table is a banquet on mine, your majesty. That is why I have spent so much time in your company, although I never before felt like pressing myself forward too much.”

  The bear wrinkled his nose again. “Yes,” he said, “I think you’re the one that one day scared a fat young deer within reach of my paw.”

  The coyote half closed his eyes and sighed. “My duty and my pleasure,” he said, his mouth watering enviously at the memory, “and I still remember the sound of his ribs, crunching under your stroke.”

  “No wasted effort, no wasted effort,” grunted the bear, who was not above being touched by flattery, it appeared. “The blow that kills the game should carve it, als
o. You are married, I see.”

  “You see?” exclaimed the golden coyote, looking apprehensively over his shoulder. When he glanced back again, he found on the face of the bear a wider and redder smile than ever.

  “I can tell,” said the bruin, “by a vacant look in your eye, which some people call the second thought, and also by the line of your stomach, and the wretched state of your coat. A glossy coat means a single mind.” Then he added: “I may say that is original.”

  “How profound you are,” said the coyote. “May I ask if you believe in matrimony?”

  “If you wish for an answer,” said the grizzly, “come along with me. I think best at table, and, therefore, I always like to eat when I talk. Though the conversation, as you may guess, is my first aim.”

  “I haven’t a doubt,” said the golden coyote, and, looking at the large barrel of the king, he added politely: “I imagine that you could keep talking for a very long time.”

  The bear was now leading the way and the coyote followed at a respectful distance.

  “Long thoughts are the best thoughts,” said the bear.

  He flicked out a great forepaw, and with it smothered in the grass the squeak of a mouse. That morsel he transferred dexterously to his great red tongue and continued: “But little words fill in the corners, as you may say.”

  The golden coyote licked his chops and said nothing.

  They came out into a meadow where a great ant heap stood in the center like the small swarming capital of a fertile plain.

  The grizzly woofed with pleasure. “Sit down, sit down,” he grunted, “for there is nothing like eating at one’s ease.”

  He set the example by taking his place beside the ant hill. First he sniffed it, then he knocked off the top dexterously and laid his paw beside it. Out bubbled the big ants; the sight of them set the golden coyote itching up to his very eyelids, but when the paw of the bear had been thickly covered, he raised it and licked it clean on both sides, then gave a touch or two of his tongue to his forearm, where some of the most rapid brigades of the ants were clambered.

  “Don’t they bite holes in your tongue?” gasped the coyote.

  The king simply overlooked this question, as though it were too childish to deserve an answer.

  “A little acid,” he said, “will always stimulate the stomach.” Then he laid his paw on the nest, to have it instantly blackened with a fresh myriad. “But as for marriage, I should say that a deaf husband and a blind wife make the only happy couple, and the married bear is seven years older the first day.”

  “Then you’re not married?” asked the coyote with interest equally divided between watching this acrid diet and his own home problem.

  “Married?” said the bear, licking the second supply thoughtfully from his wet paw. “That depends on the way you look at it. If you mean living in the same house, no, I am not. If you mean keeping the same wife from year to year … no again. But to go more deeply into the matter”—here he opened the ant nest to its roots with delicate precision—“I do believe that one owes to the world a physical duty. Thought is not all that should be preserved of one.”

  He lowered his head, and the coyote saw with a shudder of the stomach that the king was eating little white things together with the brave ants that flocked to defend them. From the depths of the ground, as it were, the voice of the king continued: “But I find the chief difficulty is the lack of conversation. They can’t discuss. They must be taught. And yet the first step toward wisdom is to learn never to lecture wife nor cub … puppy, I believe you call your young?”

  “Yes,” said the coyote.

  The bear rose. “So ends that point,” he said with a sigh, looking down at the ravished nest. “But let us go on. The world is filled with good ideas, if one will only hunt for them with a careful nose, and, upon my soul…. No, is it possible? It is! It is! Yes, it is true!” He sat up fully, wabbling his nose almost like a rabbit, and his mouth drooled with expectant pleasure. “Almost directly up the wind,” said the grizzly, and started forward with such rapidity that the golden coyote had to gallop to keep up.

  “What is it?” he asked. “A nest of mice?”

  “Bees,” said the bear.

  “Good heavens,” said the coyote. “They’ll sting your eyes out … they’ll sting….”

  “Stings for relish, honey for sweet. Bees, bees! Wise little workers! Delicious thought!” said the bruin.

  He splashed through a little creek. Beyond it he came to a great old tree, half of whose branches were dead. The singing of bees reached the coyote and made him flatten his ears. That, and the deep rumble of workers inside the cave, myriads of wings.

  The grizzly stood up with dripping mouth. “No climbing to do,” he said. “Not a whit, but all in easy reach. Now, we were speaking of marriage … my status.” Here he inserted the claws of both forepaws inside a comparatively small hole. “For my part, I believe that beauty, the rainbow, and the echo soon pass. I am, in one word, a worshiper of the practical.”

  As he spoke, with the might of his great forearms, with the chisel edges of his claws, he ripped the half-rotten outer shell of the trunk away. There was an explosion, a roar of wings, an upward burst of shining smoke that surrounded the head of the bear, and then showered down over head, and neck, and shoulders, a thick powdering of golden dust.

  The king had buried his muzzle in masses of waxy comb whose bursting cells gave out a torrent of honey. The coyote shrank in terror to the ground as he heard the death-drumming of the furious bees, but his mouth watered as the perfume floated out in an expanding cloud and drenched the place.

  Clotted and indistinct, the voice of the bear issued from the midst of the treasure: “Not that I despise beauty, pure and ethereal as snow flowers, white-tipped buckwheat, the monkshood, the pink, the purple aster, daisies, buttercups, trembling harebells, and the forget-me-not … ah, the forget-me-not! All the cool-breathing spring in delicate fragrance. Not that I despise love, rich as the summer of the yellow pond lily, the wealth of the black-eyed Susans, columbine and larkspur, lupine and yarrow … gathered and golden … warm summer … golden love … delicious….”

  From the crushed comb masses an amber stream dripped over the lip of the opening and ran slowly down the outer bark.

  The grizzly tore the hole still wider and disappeared to the shoulders. “But speaking profoundly,” he said dimly, from the depths of the tree—from the very ground, as it were—“speaking profoundly, love is a sweet moment, which for the instant seems rich and maturely ripened to the very bottom hive, but which”— here he backed away from the tree and banished the robbed bees with a wave of his royal paw—“but which is soon ended, soon ended … and then away, my young friend, and put love behind us….”

  He advanced into the stream and drank liberally, then clambered the farther bank with a sound of water and honey swishing and rumbling in his great belly.

  “For who,” said the grizzly, “would fail to realize that half the beauty of love is its strangeness, and familiarity does nothing but show us the callus on the nose, and the broken foreclaw, and other defects … other defects. Leave love for the spring, and be a philosopher the rest of the year, with a long sleep to round off the seasons.”

  “Oh, most kingly of bears and wisest of kings,” said the golden coyote, “tell me which way the fire is coming.”

  “Fire?” said the grizzly, shutting his eyes and standing erect to the full of his height. “Is there a fire? Yes, yes, upon my word, there is a fire in the south.”

  “Of course there is,” said the coyote rather impatiently, for now a great dark column was rising, and the scent on the southern wind was both of smoke and of heat. “But will it come this way?”

  The grizzly dropped down on all fours and shook his head. “Fire is a matter that I never look into,” he said. “It is the one mind which I never wish to fathom. It may give me roast venison tomorrow, and a dead range for a month afterward. I have known such things to happen.”


  “Who could have started that fire?” asked the coyote. “What man …?”

  “Man? Stuff!” said the grizzly. “Man has nothing to do with it. It is true that he is fool enough to play with it, trying to show that he is not afraid of it … but, as a matter of fact, fire lives all the year underground.”

  “Good heavens,” said the coyote, lifting his forepaws quickly, in turn. “Underground?”

  “Dining on deep roots, quietly eating the lower, moist masses of the pine needles and the forest humus. There it lives, sleeping, breathing gently, until it is tired of resting, and then the giant stirs. Sometimes he thrusts up only one red hand. Sometimes he stands up and puts his head into the sky. And at that time … well, well! … I never look in his face.”

  The little exclamation that interrupted his last sentence came as he turned over a dead log and saw its moist underside littered with grubs, white and fat. He began to eat them leisurely.

  “Can you devour those?” asked the coyote, between amazement and disgust. “Can you eat everything?”

  “Like the fire … yes,” said the grizzly. “My cousin, the fire….”

  “Is he your cousin?”

  “He is the only thing in the world as strong as I am,” answered the grizzly contentedly, “and, therefore, of course, he must be a member of my family.”

  “One thing at least is sure,” said the golden coyote. “I am going to lead an independent life.”

  “You mean one without a wife?” The bear looked up as he spoke and wriggled his nose, which with him was the usual sign of reflection.

  “I mean that,” said the golden coyote. “No more hunting for seven stomachs. One will do.”

  “Now, that is all very well,” answered the grizzly, dropping his head toward the grubs again. “But, after all, there is nothing that has such a sharp tooth as remorse. Don’t let it get a throat hold.”

  This feast of grubs, newly exposed, attracted a number of wasps, and, when he saw them, the grizzly backed away, with a grunt.