by Bobbie Pyron
“Nothing for it but to watch and wait.”
Thunder cracked. The rain came down harder.
Suddenly, the rubber boot moved just the tiniest bit. Mischief cocked his head to one side. He pecked the boot. It moved again. He poked his head inside and sniffed: opossum.
“Rosebud?” he called.
The boot shifted from one side to the other. A pair of shining black eyes looked out at the crow.
“Mischief?”
“Yeah,” the crow answered, “it’s me. Where’s Trouble?”
Rosebud crawled out and frowned. “Why do you want to know?”
“I have something I need to give him, something from his family.”
Her frown deepened. “His family? You expect me to believe you’ve somehow miraculously seen his family?”
Mischief looked down at a strip of deer hide he clutched in his claw. Trouble’s older brother, Twist, had given it to him to remind Trouble of home. Mischief would forever remember how each member of the Singing Creek Pack had solemnly rubbed their scent on the strip of hide. “Yes,” he said. “I have.”
Rosebud swiveled her dappled ears. “I’m listening.”
And so it was that the crow and the opossum passed that rainy summer morning, one weaving an improbable (but true) story and the other listening with growing wonder.
Mischief told her about all the things he had seen beneath his wings: the tidy pastures dotted with cows and horses, the white clapboard house where the fresh-produce truck finally—finally!—stopped, the cornfields and gardens and the wild forest beyond. He told her about the cliffs and old apple orchards, the sound of Singing Creek, and the meadow, just as Trouble had described it.
And the pack, howling the loneliest, saddest song he’d ever heard.
“I’ve never been big on family myself,” Mischief said, “but you can’t believe how much they love him and miss him. They need him too,” he added.
Rosebud nodded. “Trouble needs his home, and home is not here.”
“He’s been away from the wild too long,” Mischief said. “He’s getting careless.”
“He thinks he can live here among humans and still be Wildborn,” Rosebud agreed.
“He’s not like us,” Mischief said. “Once they know he’s here, humans will never allow something that wild to just be.”
Rosebud had to trust the crow. “He’s most likely at that boathouse. He likes to go there when it rains like this.”
“I’ll find him,” Mischief promised. “I’ll bring him back here. Then we have to figure out how to get him home.”
Trouble watched the rainfall. He raised his face to the sky and felt the cool, wet drops pepper his muzzle and ears. For a moment he was back in the woods with his family, who loved the rain too. He and Twist had had many wild games of chase and keep-away in the rain. Here, no one except the ducks came out during a storm, not even the squirrels.
He wondered what the animals in the Place of the Once Wild were doing on this rainy morning. His heart trembled as he remembered the dullness in the wolf’s eyes. There had been no spirit in him. No wild smell.
Still, he thought as he nosed the lid off a garbage can, what were the chances he’d get caught?
“Oh well,” he consoled himself, “at least here no one tells me to shake the mud from my coat before I come into the den.”
Trouble had just pulled a tasty bone from the trash bin outside the boathouse when he heard, “Hey! Trouble!”
The pup looked up and saw Mischief perched under the eaves of the boathouse. Something brown and limp dangled from his beak.
He narrowed his eyes. “What do you want?”
Mischief set down the strip of deer hide. “I brought you something.”
Trouble snorted. “Yeah, and what’s it going to do? Set my mouth on fire?” He picked up the bone, turned his back on the crow, and trotted down the wet slope to a rowboat propped on its side. He crawled under and curled up with the particularly delicious treasure.
Mischief picked up the hide, flew over to the boat, and hopped inside.
Trouble glared at the crow.
Mischief dropped the hide. “Look,” he said. “I know I got a little carried away playing jokes and all.”
“You got that right,” Trouble growled.
“I’m sorry, Trouble, I really am,” Mischief said, and he really and truly was.
Trouble eyed the deer hide. “So what’s that?”
“I found your family,” Mischief said. “And they sent this to you.”
Trouble’s heart stopped. The hair along his spine rose. “You did what? How?”
Mischief relayed the story once again of his curiosity, his long flight, and his encounter with the Singing Creek Pack. “Curiosity can take you a long way,” the crow concluded.
Trouble bent his nose to the deer hide.
A symphony of smells rose up from the hide. He inhaled and, on that breath, the scent of home raced into his nostrils and into his coyote mind.
He smelled the damp earth of the den where he had lived with his brother and sisters safe in the warmth of their mother’s side. He smelled the meadow where he and Twist played and his brother Pounce hunted. Where he raced his sister Swift, and where he listened to his sister Star sing to the moon and beyond.
The rain stopped. The sun broke through the clouds, and birds sang their thanks.
Trouble crawled from beneath the overturned boat and gazed out across the lake. Tiny ponds of rain lay cupped in lily pads; steam rose from the sidewalk above, creating a peculiar beauty Trouble never tired of. Soon, he knew, the humans would appear in great numbers with their loud voices, sour-salty smell, and never-ending fascinations. Later, from his boulder above the willow-ringed cove, he’d watch turtles bask in the sun.
Somewhere, a door slammed. Voices drifted across the lake, not so far away. Mischief noted that the coyote did not startle and slink away at the sounds like he used to. Instead, the pup threw his ears forward with curiosity.
The crow’s heart sank.
“It’s time for you to go home, Trouble,” he said.
“Maybe I like it here,” said Trouble, sniffing the bone. “Finding food is easier than back in the wild. I can do whatever I want, and I have friends—real friends—like you and Rosebud and the Professor and the fox and—”
“And that dog,” Mischief interrupted.
If a coyote could blush, Trouble’s face would have been as red as a ripe berry. Instead, he looked away. “Her name is Minette.”
It took all the crow’s self-control not to make a smart-aleck remark; instead, he said, “But she’s not a coyote, Trouble. She’s not wild like you.”
“You’re wild, aren’t you?” Trouble snapped. “And Rosebud, and the fox too. You live here just fine, so why can’t I?”
“It’s not the same!” Mischief cawed in frustration. “We’re not the same as you!”
But Trouble didn’t listen. Instead, he turned his back on the crow and slipped into the mist rising from the lake.
26
The Plan
That night, the friends gathered as they always did in the moonlit glen. For the third (and he truly hoped the last) time, Mischief told the story of finding Trouble’s family.
“Trouble must go back to his family,” Rosebud said. “And the sooner the better.”
All eyes turned to the coyote pup.
Trouble studied the night sky. When he’d first come to the city, the moon had been a thin crescent. By his reckoning, the moon had risen twelve nights since then. The full moon was just days away.
“I’m not sure I want to go back,” Trouble confessed.
“Trouble.” Rosebud sighed in exasperation.
“Did you learn nothing from our visit to the zoo?” the Professor asked.
Mischief picked up the deer hide, hopped over to the coyote, and dropped it at Trouble’s feet. “They miss you, Trouble.”
Trouble sniffed the hide again. Yes, he smelled the safety of the d
en beneath the roots of an old oak tree and the comforting scent of his brother and sisters. He smelled the lessons he’d learned from his father, lessons in patience and respect—and family.
And then he smelled his mother, a grief-yearning scent, thick with heartbreak and hope. It was home. It was him. Everything he was and would become.
Trouble blinked and shook his head as if waking from a long dream. “How could I have forgotten?” he asked.
“I’ve been gone too long,” he said. “I need to go home.”
The fox’s dark eyes glittered in the moonlight. “Of course you do, my friend,” she said.
“How?” the owl hooted from above.
“I have a plan all figured out,” Mischief said.
Mischief had had a lot of time to think about how to return Trouble to his family during his flight back to the city. And, except for a hole here and there, he thought it was a pretty good plan.
“Like you said, Professor,” Mischief said, “the only way for Trouble to get back home is the way he came: in the fresh-produce truck.”
“That seems easy enough,” the owl said.
“Except it’s on the other side of the city and,” he said, “we didn’t exactly take the most direct route here.”
“Do you remember the way back to where you arrived in the city?” Rosebud asked Trouble.
Trouble frowned. It was all a jumble of screeching, angry humans, blaring car horns, elevators, twisting side streets, subway trains, and, worst of all, Officer Vetch.
“Not really,” he said, “and I can’t find the North Star in this city sky.”
“If he could fly, it would be much easier,” the owl muttered. Which just proved, he thought not for the first time, the superiority of the Winged Clan.
“Yes but,” Mischief said with excitement, “he can ride a subway train.”
“But we didn’t ride the train very far,” Trouble pointed out. “At least I don’t think we did.”
“Right, but there has to be a train that goes across the city, from here to there,” Mischief said.
“So we just need to figure out which train will take us across the city, get Trouble back on the truck on the day it comes into the city, and on his way home,” Mischief said.
“Without getting caught,” Rosebud added.
“That doesn’t sound too hard,” Trouble said.
“It won’t be if the Professor will help me,” Mischief said.
“If you’re such a clever bird, why do you need me?” The owl sniffed.
“Because you’re a raptor,” Mischief said with a humbleness unfamiliar to him. “Your hearing and sight are a million times better than mine.
“I can plan, I can scheme, but you can calculate. We not only have to know which trains go where, but exactly how far it is and how long it will take. Timing,” he said, “will be everything. And,” Mischief added, “we have to do this at night when there are fewer humans.”
When he finished, the animals looked up at the owl. “Well?” Rosebud asked, twisting the deer hide in her hands. “What do you think?”
Finally, the owl twitched his feathered, horned tufts. “Although it lacks a certain elegance in design and is most assuredly the work of a less-than-sophisticated mind—”
Everyone held their breath.
“It could work,” the Professor concluded.
“And you’ll help?” Trouble asked.
“It certainly has no hope of success without me,” the owl answered.
A cheer and a whoop and a yip, yip, yip rose up through the trees.
“Then we need to fly across the city to the train station,” Mischief said to the owl. “The sooner we get your calculations going, the sooner we can get Trouble out of danger.”
27
News
The next morning, Amelia sat at the small kitchen table eating her buttered toast and thinking again about her brush with the coyote pup. He had run right past her. She could have bent down and touched him, if she’d had her wits about her. She wanted more than anything to go to Central Park and look for him. Would he still be there after almost two weeks? she wondered.
If she hurried, she could go back, search for the coyote, then be home before her mother returned from teaching dance class.
She took one last gulp of orange juice. She stood and glanced at the newspaper sitting on her father’s chair. She gasped. There, at the very bottom corner of the paper, was the headline: POSSIBLE COYOTE SIGHTINGS IN CENTRAL PARK.
Amelia bent over the paper. Aloud she read:
“Has a wild coyote taken up residence in Central Park? Several park regulars have reported seeing a smallish, long-legged, big-eared doglike animal with piercing yellow eyes in the area of The Ramble.
“‘It’s a menace!’ one woman told this reporter. ‘It actually walked toward my dog!’ ‘I’ve seen it here before, hanging out with a poodle,’ another park regular commented. ‘It just seemed curious,’ another had said.
“When asked to comment on the likelihood of a coyote living in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the world, Officer Ambrose Vetch of New York City Animal Control and Welfare said, ‘It’s not beyond the realm of possibility. Coyotes have turned up in Chicago, Seattle, and, of course, Los Angeles.’ And what should be done about this coyote in New York City? ‘Central Park is no place for a dangerous wild animal,’ he said, ‘but Central Park Zoo is. And that’s exactly where we’ll take that coyote once we catch him.’”
Amelia’s heart pounded. “They can’t take him to the zoo,” she whispered in horror. Didn’t they know the young coyote wasn’t dangerous? Didn’t they appreciate just how astonishing and wonderful it was to have a coyote living in their midst?
Amelia grabbed her pack and slung it over her shoulders. She had to come up with a plan to protect the coyote.
Minette lay on her belly, her body half in, half out of Trouble and Rosebud’s den. That morning, the poet had read to her the article about the Trouble sighting. “I have rarely seen Madame so upset,” the poodle said.
Rosebud’s whiskers trembled. “This is terrible news, just terrible.”
“Are you sure it said possible coyote sightings?” Trouble asked for the second time. “Maybe your human misread it. Her eyes are very small, after all.”
Mischief clicked his bill. “We have to get you out of here before that Vetch finds you.”
Trouble felt sick at the sound of the human’s name. “Did you and the Professor figure out the trains and the timing?”
“About that,” Mischief said, with a cough, “I have good news and bad news.”
“What’s the good news?” Trouble, ever the optimist, asked.
“You can’t believe how good that owl’s hearing and sight are, and how he puts that all together,” Mischief said. “We had no problem finding the place where the truck comes. There’s even a train stop right there.”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming,” Rosebud said.
Mischief looked away. “Yes, well the bad news is, we couldn’t exactly find the train station that brought us here, the one we rode with you,” he said to the opossum.
Trouble leaped to his feet. “I could find it—I know I could!”
“No!” they all cried.
“You’re not going anywhere,” the poodle growled.
Minette heard her madame’s voice calling.
“I have to go,” she said. She looked pointedly at Trouble. “Don’t let anyone see you!”
Trouble watched miserably as Minette trotted up the hill, away from him. He knew he had to leave the city, and soon, or he’d end up like the wolf. But the thought of never seeing the poodle again made him want to howl with heartbreak.
Mischief gave him a sharp peck on his leg.
“Ow!” Trouble yipped.
“Don’t even think about it,” Mischief warned.
Trouble pulled his head back into the den and plopped down with a huff. He rubbed the side of his face on the deer hide.
“I�
��m going to look for the Professor,” Mischief said, “see if he’s come up with an idea for finding that train station.”
“Don’t let him out of your sight,” he said to Rosebud. And with a hop, hop, and flutter, the crow was gone.
Trouble sighed. “What do we do now?”
Rosebud yawned again. “I find a nap passes the time quite nicely.”
Trouble circled once, then twice, and plopped down inside the den with a grunt.
Rosebud settled into the curve of the coyote’s side. It was hard for her to imagine she’d ever found his rich, musky smell anything but comforting.
“Boring, boring,” he muttered.
“Just sleep, Trouble, and dream of your home in the woods,” the little opossum said as her eyes drooped, then closed.
Trouble lay his chin across his paws and tried his very best to ignore all the interesting sounds and smells outside their den. The clamorous barking of a dog playing with its human; the scent of humans eating something delicious down by the pond. He wondered what they’d leave behind.
He tried telling himself the stories Twist used to tell the pups to get them to sleep. The remembering made him homesick.
He tried breathing in rhythm with Rosebud, but that made him dizzy.
He tried counting squirrels, but that just made him hungry, which made him try to recall the last time he’d eaten a nice, juicy squirrel. Which made him wonder, not for the first time, how so many squirrels could live in one place.
It was no use. The den, which had always seemed so spacious, so comforting, now suffocated him.
He listened as Rosebud’s breathing deepened to snuffly snores. Nothing could wake her once she started snoring.
Carefully, he stood and stretched. He’d just take a quick look outside, he thought. Find something to eat and then go back into the den before Mischief returned with the owl. No one would be the wiser.
Trouble crept out from beneath the cover of the den and blinked in the sunlight. He raised his nose and took in a deep, searching sniff. He could smell humans and hear their endless chatter in the grassy field below. The scent of the field between him and the willow cove, where he could get a nice cool drink of water and possibly a duck egg or a fat squirrel.