Legend of the Golden Coyote

by Max Brand

  “Steady!” called the voice of the grandmother. “There is nothing to be gained by wrenching. It increases the pain and fixes the jaws deeper. Lie still, poor little one.”

  The wife leaped high in the air, shrieking to her remaining son. In a loose semicircle they remained in the distance, looking on.

  “Do something!” she whined to the golden coyote. “You’ve always loved him the best, therefore, do something for him now!”

  He did not move. He could not move.

  “It’s true!” she howled at him. “Oh, I’ve known all along that what they said is true. Half-breed! Son of a yellow dog!”

  That taunt overmastered him. He rushed in blindly, and jerked to a stop as a mouth leaped at him from the ground and bitter teeth of iron were fixed in a hind leg. The ring of the snapping trap sounded in his ears like a death song; the long arm of man had reached to him at last. And, from behind, he heard a loud, clattering outcry that reminded him of the scolding of crows.

  “A clumsy fool … such a thing for a husband,” he heard the wife saying. “White Foot, stay back. Gracious heavens, what can we do for him now, except to be caught in the same teeth. No, no, the lightning was not a warning to us. Oh, he knew, he knew. And now one more of my precious sons gone. I thank heaven that it was not White Foot!”

  The golden coyote turned. He was caught at the hock. The pain was exquisite, and the teeth worked slowly, softly deeper, grinding against the bone. He was lost; vaguely he wished that Tingle-Toes would stop crying like a cowardly puppy. Then he heard a deep, gruff voice, almost as deep as the voice of a bear.

  “Wolves!” cried his wife. “White Foot! White Foot! Do you hear me? Run for your life! He knew so much, let him care for his own life now. Run … follow me…. Yellow dog … half-breed, you….”

  She fled with her tail between her legs; White Foot streaked behind her. This was her love.

  And yonder, out of the shadows among the trees, appeared the great head and the lofty shoulders of lop-ear, the timber wolf. Tingle-Toes, with a new yell of fear, climbed over the mule deer, and dragged his chain to the side of his father.

  “Good,” said lop-ear. “I was waiting to see how fast a quick runner could come to trouble. The lighter the foot, the shorter the way. But man shall not have the trouble of killing you, yellow dog. I, lop-ear, will talk to you a little closer. Swallow, swallow, my friend, and see if you can learn the taste of your own blood.”

  The golden coyote looked at the puppy. It was whimpering with terror, and helpless. There would be no help from him, but now, stealing softly, trembling with fear of the ground, came the whitened mother. She reached him safely, and crouched at his side.

  “I am here, little one,” she said. “I for his legs, and you for his throat. The old hold and the strong hold, and the God of the coyotes is seeing it all.”

  The golden coyote laughed with lolling red tongue, and the lightning flickered into his eyes from far off.

  “Come, cousin,” he said to the stalking wolf. “Your weight is that of all three of us. And one of us has only half a tooth. But come in, and welcome. Mind the teeth that man has planted in the ground. Come and taste us. There is blood here, lop-ear.”

  The timber wolf circled them. There was strength in his jaws to break their necks. There was weight in his shoulders to beat them, all three, to the earth at a single stroke. But the fear of man lay on the ground where he stepped, and made him shudder. He circled, and the three turned with him, showing three sets of bared teeth.

  “Why should I waste myself?” asked lop-ear. “I shall wait here until man comes and gives you a bullet apiece. I shall wait here and listen when you pray. Pray now to the God of the coyotes, and listen as the God of the wolves laughs at you. Do you hear?”

  The thunder pealed on the southern hills, and lop-ear sat down on his haunches.

  “I am dying,” moaned the puppy. “My blood runs down my leg. The bone is breaking. I am dying, Father. Teach me what to do.”

  “Listen to me as I pray,” said the golden coyote, “and say amen at the end. There is nothing more that we can do, for man has taken us, and his teeth of iron never fail, and his iron jaws never relent.”

  “Yes, pray,” mocked the wolf. “I am here to listen.”

  “Well, well, well, well!” said a voice from a tree above them. “This is a touching picture. I have seen it before, but what is so dear to us as the familiar scene?”

  The golden coyote looked up and saw first the naked, raw neck of a buzzard, then the heavy-winged shoulders, and all of the gruesome bird, which half melted into the shadowy branches of the fir.

  “Are you there, undertaker?” said the golden coyote, and shuddered at his own words.

  “Here at last,” wheezed the buzzard. “I have been watching for days and days. I am as empty as a draw in August. I am as light as hollow bones and feathers can make me, but the God of the buzzards watches over his own.”

  “What is it?” asked the puppy, whining.

  “I, my child,” said the buzzard, “am the ultimate. Others begin, but I am the end of all things. All that fly and all that run at last come home to me. Beauty, and speed, and courage, and strength, are all put on the earth and flung into the air for my sake.”

  “And what are you?” said the puppy.

  “I am that which burns over the desert and freezes above the snows of the mountains,” said the buzzard. “I am the eternal eye, and the eternal hunger. Or, in another sense,” he went on, ruffling his hard, strong feathers like dead leaves, “in another sense I am the remover of unessentials who reduces things to the necessary skeleton of facts. If you would understand me, in one word I am the enemy of pretense, the searcher after truth, the hater of fleshly shams and shows, whether in the blue sky, or on the green earth. I am too much of a philosopher to enjoy repeating myself, but I may state again for a youthful mind that I am the end.”

  “Tell him,” said the timber wolf, “where you begin.”

  “I begin,” said the buzzard, “on those shallow deceivers, those impudent spies and falsifiers, those fickle windows to the eternal brain….”

  “You’ll have to get down to words of one syllable,” declared the wolf.

  “Very well. I begin on the eyes,” said the buzzard, and stretched his neck, and gaped in a horrible fashion. Then he settled back and clicked his beak.

  “All of you … all three of you,” said the timber wolf. “He and his friends will have you all.”

  “Heaven bless my empty maw,” said the buzzard. “And you, too, my big friend.”

  The timber wolf jumped aside, with a snarl. “You ugly ghost!” he cried.

  “Beauty,” said the buzzard, “I don’t pretend to, being merely a poor lover and seeker after truth. The outsides of things are of little interest to me, including my own. But the inner light is what I strive to find….”

  “God of the coyotes,” said the golden coyote.

  “The weak coward is going to pray,” said the timber wolf.

  “Hush,” said the buzzard. “Faith is always beautiful. How often has nothing but faith sustained me.”

  “God of the coyotes,” said the father, “if my life has been displeasing to you, take it then, and do with it as you will. But this is my son. He is young. He is innocent. My blood is his blood. His blood is my blood. Let the bullet of man find me, and the maw of the buzzard receive me. As for my spirit, let it wander as you will through eternal snows where not even crickets are living, or let it run again among the good, fat smells of heaven. But permit the little one to live. Weaken the jaws of the trap. Let him go. Amen.”

  “Amen,” moaned the grandmother.

  “Do you hear?” asked the golden coyote.

  But Tingle-Toes looked him in the face. Then he stood up and shook himself, and his chain rattled.

  “I, also,” he said, “am a coyote.”

  It seemed as though Providence had been waiting for this, as for a signal. A rifle clanged from the thicket. The
golden coyote heard the bullet strike with a thud, as of a heavy rock falling a distance into mud, and Tingle-Toes dropped lifeless, with a bullet through his brain. At that report, the buzzard rose slowly, with heavily flapping wings, squawking in terror, and the timber wolf fled with a great howl.

  Man in person stood lofty in the clearing, with the metal death glimmering in his hand.

  At this, the mother flattened herself against the ground and bared her teeth.

  “I shall die with you, my son,” she said. “I shall not run. Oh, God of the coyotes, that I could give my hollow old life for your beautiful, strong, and young one.”

  “You cannot give it to me,” said the golden coyote. He licked the face of the dead puppy, and then stood above him, confronting man, who is death. “You cannot save me, Mother,” he said. “Save yourself, but only tell me first the truth. Am I true of my kind, pure in blood, honest in my line? Am I a coyote, or am I crossed with the blood … of a yellow dog?”

  He listened. But she only whimpered, and would not reply.

  “It is true,” said the golden coyote, and his heart stood still.

  Man came nearer, strangely balancing upon two legs, awkward, crushing the leaves and the soil with his odd tread. And his voice sounded close, as before the coyote had heard it.

  “By the eternal …,” he said. “The golden coyote again … aye, and the three-legged mother. And his puppy, is it, that he’s guarding? My luck in a trap? No, no, lad, I’ll never take you until you come freely home to me.” He strode closer.

  The golden coyote stiffened himself to receive a shock. Spring he could not, though he knew by a voice within him where life lay softly covered in the throat of man, but a sense of old time, and a ghostly message out of another life, overwhelmed him. He could not leap.

  The foot of man came forward and stepped on the spring; the golden coyote drew his wounded leg from the teeth.

  “Now, git,” said man, and waved his hand.

  The golden coyote crouched by the body of his son and waited, not even baring his teeth. From the edge of the brush he heard the gasping whine of his mother.

  “Come, come quickly before his eye is on you. Quickly, my son, for the God of the coyotes has heard one part of your prayer.”

  Still he did not move. It was man who drew back.

  “Coyote be danged,” he said. “There’s not so much heart in the whole sneakin’ race. Go your own way, my boy, but the time’ll come when you lick my hand, like your father before you.”

  He was gone. The dead lay near. The cold of the ground was in it, and stealing into the body of the golden coyote, also, but he listened to the retreating footfall of man as it crunched on a dead, fallen branch, and squashed with a sucking sound in mud, then went muffled over the soft grass beyond. He listened, and thought of the shining windows of the house, the soul-appeasing warmth within it, and the sound of voices.

  VI

  He was not hungry, and, therefore, he did not walk in covert but took the open way, partly because it was the shortest and easiest route, and partly because there would be voices in the air speaking about him, which was his continual delight. Nothing pleased his mother so much as this hymn of praise, or of recognition, at least, as she hobbled along with humped back and age-stiffened loins behind her lordly son. It was the very finest moment of the day, when the smoky dawn is freshening with rose and the black trees turn green. The cold dew upon the ground was enriched by many scents, but mostly he lifted his head to listen to the murmurs of the swiftly flowing river of bird life that passed through the air.

  A flight of sparrows, dipping up and down, dropped a pattering fall of chirrupings about his head, like musical rain. A low-skimming owl swayed up into the air, hovered, and slanted off again with a long, deep note. A red-shouldered hawk dropped out of the sky and spoke harshly above him. So it was every moment, to say nothing of the blue jays and the magpies, his constant attendants, those wise followers of the most successful hunters, and what he heard from them all, and what the ground squirrel yipped from the distance, and the tree squirrel grumbled above him, and the whisper in the grass that withdrew on either side of him like softly retiring waves was always: “The golden coyote! The golden coyote!”

  He lolled his red tongue and blinked. There was no food like the taste of his own majesty.

  Said his mother behind him, panting and grunting rather from the habit of weariness than because she was weary now: “Even these fools in this foolish world … they begin to know you, my son.”

  “Tush,” he said. “Mere chatter, I should say.”

  His mother accepted this challenge, as mothers usually do. “Well,” she said, “there was a time when the grizzly was called the king of the Musquash Valley … now they speak of the golden coyote.”

  He was flattered almost to blindness, but he said lightly: “Compared with the grizzly, what am I? A mere wisp of bones and a puff of fur. There is lop-ear, too, who is more than twice my size. He could break my back with one bite. And then the skunk-bear….”

  “Faugh! That carrion eater!” said the mother in disgust. Then she went on—loving this debate because she knew that she would win it. “As for the timber wolves, the whole valley laughs at the way you made them hunt for you … as for the grizzly, with his man’s foot and pig’s nose, what of the day when he ran from the rattler and you killed it? But the whole valley talks, and I know what it says. I have ears as well as a nose, I thank heaven, and I know that they are still hunting and murmuring about your voyage down the river when it was in flood … and how you entered the forest fire … and how you trapped the dogs … and how you climbed the tree … and of the great antelope run in the Black Desert … and how you crossed the North Kendal Mountains through the bitter snow … and of how….”

  “Well,” said the golden coyote, “I suppose they don’t forget to gossip about my divorce, either?”

  “The fool!” she answered. “I never yet saw a pretty face that had a brain behind it. She was too busy thinking of her bright eyes and her charming silver-gray complexion to make either a good mother or a good wife. But time,” she added bitterly, “will turn silver and russet, and gold, also, to the same dirty shade of white that I now wear. If ever she lives to such a dignity of years.”

  “Hush,” said the golden coyote. “You were speaking of dogs, a moment ago.”

  The wind, puffing gently from the southeast, carried to them the far-off baying of dogs that seemed the conversing of a whole hunting pack at first, but, when the echoes were sorted away, there remained only two voices on the trail.

  “Man is hunting,” said the mother, the hair rising along her back.

  “No,” answered her son critically. “They are running too fast and steadily for man to be with them, hobbling along on only two of his wretched legs.”

  “The pitiful creature!” snarled the mother.

  “The bully and unseen murderer,” replied the golden coyote.

  “Heaven be praised,” she said, “that man no longer exercises his strange fascination over you … it was like the snake and the bird, say I, and….”

  “You say too much,” he replied tartly. “Is that a chipmunk on the wind?”

  “Yes. But I’m tired of that meat.”

  Close by, a solitaire began to sing from the top of a tree.

  “Where are those dogs running?” asked the mother.

  “Down Beaver Creek … may they break their legs among the rocks … but now be quiet and listen to this bird.”

  “I have heard better,” she muttered.

  As though he had heard this comment, the solitaire commenced one of his lyrical outbursts, the power of his song lifting him again and again into the air, from which he dropped softly back to his treetop with outspread wings. Apart from the jeweled setting of his music, his words had little meaning, and, like the rich, tumultuous music itself, they were jumbled, full of repetitions, but they ran somewhat as follows:

  “Greatest of all gods, God of the
thrushes, the hermit thrush, the veery, the robin, the blackbird, the solitaire, all-strong and all-wise lover of melodies … berries and ripe fruits on the autumn trees are all of Your giving … the spring ground is filled with soft worms and with grubs … each mouthful is a life matured and ripened by Thee for my sake. Oh, good world, young, young, young … never aging. My music masters the falling waters and the singing wind in the cañons. Chorusing frogs and crickets keep the undersong. Love, undying, undying, I sing in your honor, also. And the golden warm midday, and the sweet chill of the morning, and the soft-winged twilight … the valley shadows, and the bright, cold mountain heads … the pale, clear, dangerous sky, and the comfort of gray mist. Listen to me, oh, God of the thrushes! My song is the most beautiful, oh, world. I, the solitaire, on the bending treetop.”

  “Silence!” snarled the mother coyote.

  Her son whirled, with instinctively bared teeth, and growled at her. But he controlled himself.

  “How do you do, my poor, dear earthbound friends?” said the solitaire. “Did you speak?”

  “I beg your pardon,” said the golden coyote, “for this interruption in the midst of your composition, but my mother had a twinge of rheumatism, I think.”

  “I never mind interruptions,” said the solitaire. “Every new beginning is a better one, and my delight is in continually surpassing myself.”

  “I never heard such rot,” said the mother coyote.

  “Hush, Mother,” said the golden coyote, ashamed.

  “Oh, let us have opinions by all means,” said the solitaire. “He who is beyond criticism is beyond learning. What do you object to in my poetry and music, madam?”

  “The formlessness,” she answered, “the freeness of the verse … the head-over-heels tumbling of your thoughts.”