Legend of the Golden Coyote

by Max Brand

  “What do you mean by the sharp tooth of remorse?” asked the coyote.

  “Well,” said the bear, “many that are brave by day are lonely by night, and you can work out that for yourself, or else ask the wasps, if you understand their language. For my part, I never hear them buzz without wanting to sneeze.”

  He started off at once, and in his great bad humor he strode through a thicket of berry bushes whose thorns made the golden coyote recoil. He was about to take a longer way around to rejoin this wise companion, but, as he turned, the south wind struck him fairly in the face, and he saw above the heads of the trees an uprushing of smoke, colored gray-green. It rose as if from a hundred funnels, with a forced draft behind it, and it presented a wide front. The coyote could see no flame, but now and then there was an upbursting of sparks, and the wind was heavy with the smell of the smoke.

  What the bear had last said stuck in the mind of the coyote more than all of the wisdom about a solitary life that had preceded it. He thought of the cold, dark night, and the lonely gleam of the stars overhead, and an empty cave for company. At this moment, he recalled the five little ones not as gaping maws, but as ridiculous little clowns that one day would be wise coyotes. He thought of his wife, also, divorced from her temper as a mother, and as he first had seen her, young, slender, and soft and gray as a mouse.

  With this, he struck a good pace down the valley.

  As he went, it seemed to him that all of the life in the lower valley was streaming up toward him, blown by the still rising wind. Above him a blue jay flashed like a bright jewel, flying very low, rising and dipping over the tops of the trees. A magpie flitted past, and then came a doe, followed by two young ones.

  One of them surely should have made food for him, on another day, but now he was occupied by another thing. He regarded their fear more than their fat sides.

  And he heard the mother panting in a voice meant only for her own ears: “Oh, where shall we go? Oh, where shall we go?”

  Actually she turned around the next stump and with her exhausted young ones bolted straight back toward the fire.

  “Fools have a short life,” gasped the golden coyote to himself, and fled onward with a redoubled pace.

  When he broke from the last screen of the forest, his heart swelled with gratitude to see before him the obscure entrance of the cave on the side of the little hill, but once again it seemed to him, as on the night before, that his wife had chosen foolishly, because the forest trees were so near. And those bearers of fire were to his eyes now twice as lofty and as dense as ever before.

  He came to the entrance of the cave with a rush, and almost got the teeth of his wife in his throat, as a result. She jumped back, stiff-legged, when she realized that this was no stranger.

  “Why are you here?” asked the golden coyote. “The fire is coming as if it ran on legs, and straight for us.”

  “We are in our home,” she replied, and added, panting: “Thank the God of the coyotes that you have come at last!”

  “No thanks to your conduct, though,” he reproved her.

  “Oh,” she said, “you always will be jumping at me in my nervous moment.”

  “How can I tell when that will come?” he demanded.

  “If you had five children!” she whimpered.

  “I have six,” answered the golden coyote. “Now, get them out of the den while I think what we are to do.”

  He went to the door of the cave again, while his wife rapidly hustled the little ones out. The change in the scene was amazing. The fire, galloping like a horse, was charging toward them on an ever-widening front, and now he could see the red glow of the flames, cast upward on the thick sheeting of the smoke above them, That smoke blew in dense sheets, covering the sun’s face, so that it shrank to a small thing, no bigger or brighter than a red harvest moon. Through that canopy of smoke the light fell with a brown stain upon trees and rocks that turned to sepia. The green of the upward-jutting fountains of the smoke was stronger than ever. The ghosts of trees seemed to be rising with it, wavering and trembling. But now and again the fires broke loose as they struck some tree covered with a more inflammable foliage, and then a pyramiding leap of red gold followed, high into the dusky heavens.

  “What will become of us!” whined the mother.

  “Trust to me,” the golden coyote answered, though he was as appalled as she. “We must cross the valley and get back to the old cave. Take one, and I shall take another. Back through the hole in the wall.”

  It was a narrow cleft in the wall of the ravine just opposite to their cave, and though it was no wider than six feet at the top, fifty feet lower it still afforded a fairly clear passage through the barrier.

  “Take Shiver-Nose,” said the father. “You’re never done talking about his wit and wisdom.”

  “Tush,” she said. “He is the strongest, leave him for the last.”

  The golden coyote was amazed, but he did not argue. The way of a female had been beyond his understanding before this, but never more than now. So he picked up the little one that lovingly she touched with her nose, while she said: “Gently, gently. Use the pressure of your tongue, too, and don’t trot hard. All will be well. Courage, my darlings. We’ll soon come back.”

  They left the mouth of the cave with the wailing of the deserted three shrill and high behind them. Overhead, the birds flew in a straight line, obviously bound away from trouble.

  “Oh, for wings!” gasped the mother.

  They fled across the valley. It was now a green forest through which they passed. The flying cloud masses of low-driven smoke so deeply tinged the sun’s light that the very trees were brown.

  They reached the gap. They passed through it, and found the air strangely sweet, here, with a little cross-current drawn into their faces. They sped across the level. They reached the familiar hill, and how delightful was the well-trodden entrance of the old cave!

  They went back. Behind them, the heavens were blue. Beyond the other ridge, it seemed as though giants were crushing earth and rocks to dry dust and flinging it into the zenith. But when they crossed the ridge again, it was almost impossible to realize the change.

  All was brown fumes. The water in the runlets steamed. Breathing grew hard. One step cost the labor of ten. And through the deadly mist the golden coyote heard the frightened voices of young deer, and the mother crying: “What shall we do? What shall we do?”

  He had to find his way by sense of direction rather than by the use of his half-blinded eyes. Scent was gone even from his mate, far keener of scent than he. So they came through inferno to the new cave.

  “Take Shiver-Nose,” he said.

  “He is the strongest,” she wheezed. “Save the weaker ones first.”

  And again they departed and left Shiver-Nose by himself.

  The golden coyote could remember that he did not cry out, but stood silently at the door of the cave wagging his tail, a thing which no true-blooded coyote could be expected to do. So they journeyed the second time through the furious heat and the lung-eating smoke, and came to the blessing of the little gap in the cañon wall, and so on to their old home.

  Four little coyotes now stood together, shivering, wailing, as though they were afraid of their deliverance, and the mother stood over them, licking them frantically, her eyes going here and there.

  “Stay here,” coughed the golden coyote, “and I’ll go back alone.”

  “Oh, my brave …,” she said. “Go back. I shall go, also, as soon as I have taken breath for an instant.”

  He waited for no more, but dashed off. Duty led him. He was more afraid of it than of the fire. He had thought, when he started back, that nothing could be worse than the last visit, but this was all new, for the whole inner valley boiled with smoke, and, as he came out of the cut, he stopped, and flattened himself against the ground. The fire had struck a great tangle of trees, barren and dead since burning, long ago, and now, uprooted by the storms of the last fifty years and flung crossw
ise, an ideal heap of tinder with occasional lodgepoles standing tall and straight among the ruins.

  The wall of fire struck this with a distinctly new voice, like a roar of many guns, or the thunder of a hurricane through a mountain pass. The flame rolled out like burning oil across the fallen trunks; when it struck the lodgepole pines, the enormous heat turned them incandescent. The golden coyote could see, through this terrible gloom, little purple balls of fire running up the trunks like frightened squirrels, and then the whole tree exploded into shooting flames and spark showers that dazzled his eyes more than the naked sun in the desert. This place of fallen trees became an inexhaustible torch that threw up mountains and perishing monuments of flame. The heat singed his coat. The smoke, bursting outward as from an explosion of gunpowder, curled along the ground. All around him the air was too black and thick for breathing, yet still he breathed, and still the fire shone terribly through this dense screen.

  He reached a run of water and stood in it up to the nose, gasping. There was one more short burst to reach the new cave.

  He leaped from the water, and lightened his coat with one shake, but, as he started onward for the cave, he saw man and the child of man close before him. Man stood no longer upright, but crawled upon all fours, with one leg trailing behind him and the foot turned awkwardly inward, so that even the golden coyote knew that the bone was broken. Now he lurched flat on the ground. Now he raised himself on trembling arms and waved the child ahead. She even went a running step or two, but returned at once, and threw up her arms in a gesture that made the heart of the coyote leap.

  In the stress of the fire, he had pitied the deer, though they were food; now he pitied man, though he was fear itself, and he felt, moreover, an impulsion toward service such as no purebred coyote ever could have known.

  He stood for a choking instant with a foreleg raised and his nose pointed toward the cave, which was in such easy reach. Then he ran straight to the fallen man and barked in his face.

  “Look!” screamed the child. “The golden coyote!”

  Man raised his fallen head. “He’s luck,” he said.

  The coyote retreated, still barking, and choking, and barking again. And the man followed, though this new course was at right angles to the one he had been taking.

  Then water dammed by falling trees burst onto the molten rocks in the fire pit and exploded again and again, until the ground shook beneath the golden coyote, and he saw in the black firmament clouds of sparks, like star streams.

  The air grew more dense with smoke. To breathe was only to choke, yet, somehow, he kept life in, and, running back toward man, he barked again in his very face. And man followed him like a light through that darkness.

  Firebrands from the explosion fell on the base of Mount Goodwin’s slope. Five thousand feet long were those slopes, bearded with ancient forest, wrinkled with great ravines, tree-choked, also. In five seconds the fire front strode to the crest and there, uniting pressure of flames from all sides, cast high up into the rioting sky treetops.

  The coat of the golden coyote smoked. His eyes bleared. But the pressure of forgotten centuries kept him with man until they entered the safe gate. The sweetness of the pure air, entering here in a gale like a draft to a fire, set him choking more than ever, but suddenly he could breathe and he remembered that man, also, was no longer helpless but once again was fear incarnate to all the world of beasts.

  The golden coyote looked back. Through the end of the gap as through a window he saw the face of the fire front pass down the valley and over the hill where the new cave was burrowed.

  Then he went home.

  As he came near, he heard four small voices complaining, which made him cold with alarm, but when he rushed up the slope, he saw his wife lying at the entrance.

  She was black with fire and with soot. One half of her head was blistered to the skin, and the opposite eye was closed so that she looked like a cartoon of her beautiful self, but to the golden coyote she looked as terrible and as imposing as some great statue of the God of the coyotes. For he knew she had gone to the new cave a third time.

  She held herself stiffly, with her head high and her regard upon the distance, and across her forepaws lay Shiver-Nose, limp and dead.

  V

  Noise, for the golden coyote, never benumbed the brain or drowned all the senses, for the book of Nature in which he read was printed in capitals or small type for the nose. Therefore, he lay among the rocks by Poplar Creek while the earth trembled with the strength of the current rushing down in space and the waves of sound kept the delicate leaves of the trees quivering and turning bright and dark like a sunset breeze. He pointed his nose upward and studied the air with half-closed eyes of intense concentration and of hope, for this tumult of the creek was a voice calling to all the curious ears in the wilderness. The other waters ran placidly, with the autumn forest pouring gold and crimson and purple into them; the fallen leaves cruised calmly on, like little boats. But Poplar Creek had been suddenly recruited from the northern hills and now it ran madly down to join the Musquash, shouting, leaping, throwing up white arms.

  This oddity delighted the coyote, but, being a father, a husband, and a son, with five stomachs to think of instead of one, there was no interest in the world to override his preoccupation with the next meal, and that was why he came to the edge of Poplar Creek. The perusal of the air told him that the king of the Musquash, the big grizzly himself, had come down to look over the stream and its noise, digging up and eating some grubs while he watched. Then he had fled suddenly for his delicate ears must have been overcome. The mountain lion, also, had lain out on some high branch, for the scent he cast was high along the air. But other things stirred nearer to the tooth of the golden coyote, and every moment he was reading tender items of mouse and rabbit and beautiful young deer.

  It was a strange morning. Even the coming of the great forest fire had not been so weird and awful as the lights that now played mysteriously on the North Kendal Mountains. It was well before sunrise, otherwise he would have sworn that this was all some freak of golden sunshine, for sometimes yellow streams fell like water down the slopes, or huge balls rolled like flaming tumbleweed across the heights. Again he might have called it lightning, for the quiver and the spring of lightning were in its movements, but the great bright orders of the stars marched continually westward without passing through the stain of a single cloud. Only the approaching dawn made the eastern ranks dim.

  This double mystery of the flooding creek and the mountain lights was enough to make the coyote expectant, and the howl of a timber wolf blown off the nearer hills exactly rounded the picture. It was a hunting cry that said as clearly as any word: “Venison!” Poetic joy filled the very soul of the golden coyote and made him rise a little among the rocks. He squatted again, at once. Through a cleft in the rocks he saw a black-tailed buck running from the valley for the hills, with a big timber wolf behind. He knew that lop-eared ruffian very well, the pattern of his waistcoat, the light in his eyes, the wicked red lolling of his tongue, and his speech that was all of blood and bones. Since the mule deer was not running in his direction, the coyote heartily wished that it might escape, but there seemed only the smallest chance of this, for though lop-ear was notoriously slow of foot, yet the blacktail must have been at the point of utter exhaustion, for its bounds were short and the wolf gained at every stride. He was on the verge of striking distance when he gained the rough ground. There at once the chase altered. The blacktail smote the ridges with all fours and soared from point to point, living in air, merely touching the earth, while the timber wolf dipped laboriously up and down through the hollows. So that bounding deer, like a miraculous ship sailing only on the crests of the waves, drew easily away, and lop-ear stopped his foolish chase.

  That hunt was not ended, however. The deer had gained the crest of the first ridge and now ran in the very heart of the rosy sky, a flying black silhouette, when another wolfs cry rang dolefully from the height a
nd the stag swerved into the first ravine. It was lop-ear’s mate. The golden coyote knew her shrill voice instantly, and licked his lips with envious excitement as he saw lop-ear cut across to take up the hunt again. Ten seconds of breathing had restored him for the chase, and now he shot down the ravine at the heels of the mule deer. They came full on at the coyote, and he was so interested in the stagger in the buck’s stride that he forgot to wonder at the poor deer’s direction, for it was straight at Poplar Creek with its white torrent and all its gullet lined with sharp teeth. Yet the blacktail came on.

  The coyote could see the foam that choked it, now, and the gloss of its large eyes, then it straightened for the riverbank. Lop-ear, realizing that even though the leap failed, it would mean a meal for the cold stomach of the creek rather than for himself, sprang at the hocks and missed by an inch. The mule deer reached the bank, smote it, and floated upward with trailing legs as though taking effortless flight. It was a mighty jump. Just clear of the threatening rocks it landed, sprawling. Lop-ear also leaped, but he went straight up into the air with a howl as though the unseen tooth of the rifle of man had bitten through him from flank to flank. The coyote heard that yell in the background of his mind, for his interest was in nearer work.

  Just as the buck gathered himself for the next leap, when the legs were bunched and the muscles taut, the golden coyote sprang in and with all the weight of his body and the force of his wrenching neck he struck the hamstring of a rear leg. It parted with a shudder and a snap beneath his fang, and the deer fell struggling upon its side, straining up its head as it fought to recover footing.

  As well have bent up its chin for the huntsman’s knife. The coyote, running forward, flashed his sharp teeth across that tender throat, then leaped backward from the deadly sway of the horns, and stood there, licking his lips and regretting the fatal gush of red that followed, for he loved to be economical in his butchering. It was a big kill, a glorious day for him, and he smiled into the agonized eyes of the stag.