Coyote

Coyote walked up the arroyo, his moccasins making no sound in the soft sand. He stopped to sniff the night breeze coming down from the mountains beyond. He could smell mesquite smoke. That would be Raven’s hogan, just around the next bend. There was also the musk and dung scent of sheep. But there was another odor on the air, and he paused to identify it before announcing himself. The impeccable warrior does not go into a situation without knowing all the players. In a moment he recognized the warm, familiar scent of dog. That would be One-blue-eye, Raven’s bitch. Coyote knew her well. She was an excellent sheep dog, but getting old like her master. She would not be a problem. He strode forward, clearing his throat loudly to announce his presence. A man who walked up to a man’s hogan unannounced could get a face full of shot before he could speak. Blue, embarrassed to find she had neither smelled nor heard the intruder, rushed forward, barking furiously.

A rectangle of yellow light spilled onto the hard-packed dirt. Raven appeared quickly at the low door of his hogan, peering out into the dark.

"Who is there?" he called, his voice hoarse from long disuse. Coyote could hear the fear in his voice. The People did not go visiting at night. Coyote remained where he was, knowing the old man could not see him out there in the dark. He ignored the bitch snarling at his feet.

"It is I, apprentice," Coyote said quietly. He heard Raven’s breath catch in surprise. He did not answer for a long moment.

"I did not expect to see you again, master," he said at last.

"Be at peace, sister," Coyote said to the bitch in her own tongue. The barking stopped instantly and she slunk back crouching and cowering, sensing she was out of her depth. He turned again to the old man in the doorway.

"You thought me in the hogan of my ancestors by now, no doubt."

"I am pleased to find you so well, master."

"Have the People so forgotten the old ways that an old friend is left standing out in the cold?"

"No, master," Raven replied hurriedly. "Please forgive my surprise. Please, come into my home." He stepped aside, and Coyote walked forward into the light. He was aware of Raven studying his face, his stride, clearly unnerved to find him so little changed after all these years. Coyote stooped under the low lintel and entered the hogan. Raven pulled the door closed and drew an old sheepskin over it against the chill of the night. He wore faded blue jeans and a ragged old Mexican serape over a denim shirt. His horny callused feet were bare. His hair was white and hung loose down his back. His face bore the lines of many winters that had passed since they had last met.

Raven went through the rituals of hospitality, offering strong black coffee, tortillas, and some cold mutton. Coyote said little, watching Raven move about his hogan, touching his familiar things as if to reassure himself. He was surprised and frightened; Coyote could sense the sweat on him. His suspicions were confirmed.

"I have heard stories about you," Coyote said at last, when he had eaten a few bites of food and started on his coffee. Raven started nervously, though it was revealed only by a flicker in his eyes.

"People are always telling stories," he said, not meeting Coyote’s eyes.

"Disturbing stories," Coyote continued as if he had not heard him. "Tales of a sorcerer who is not keeping to the old ways. Of a sorcerer using his abilities for trivial purposes. They say you are doing the ghost dance for the tourists down at the visitor center. You sing the songs of power for them, shake your rattle for them like a whore shaking her ass."

Raven’s shoulders sagged. He knew better than to lie. "Master, I am an old man. The skills you taught me have brought me neither wealth nor happiness. No woman would have me. I have no son to sing my death song. I am poor and hungry much of the time. I kept to the paths of power for all these years, and all I have is twenty-three sheep, one bitch too old to chase the lambs, and this hogan that my father built."

"The paths of power do not exist for your benefit," said Coyote. "They were here before the People and will be here after the People are gone. I set your feet on the paths that you might help the People, teach them to keep the ways of their ancestors, to resist the seductions of the white man’s way. Did you learn nothing of what I worked so long to teach you?"

Raven’s eyes flashed up at that, and Coyote saw that fire he remembered in his young apprentice so long ago. "I labored long and faithfully, master. But now I am old and lonely and tired. The young people no longer come to me for advice or instruction. Some of them laugh at me, at my old-fashioned beliefs. They say the People no longer need sorcerers."

Coyote snorted. "In all my lessons, did I ever say it would be easy? Did I say that the paths would lead you to wealth or power? The People have never loved their sorcerers. They fear us, they respect us, but they will never love us. Do you know of one of us who was ever happily married? Do the young women smile at us? Do the men ask you to go with them when they go drinking and dancing? No one wants a sorcerer around, until they are ill or in trouble, or have lost their way. Then they rediscover their faith, and they come back to us."

"But what about us, master?" Raven asked, pacing uneasily around the fire. "We are men, too. To whom do we go when our faith fails?"

Coyote leaned forward, his eyes intense. "To me, apprentice. As you always did, you come to me."

Raven hung his head. "I thought you long dead, master. I thought I was all alone."

"One who walks the paths of power is never alone. There are beings of power all around you. Have you forgotten them as well?"

Raven slumped to the blanket-covered floor. "I have not spoken with them in so long. I have ceased to believe in them."

"Believe in them?" roared Coyote, suddenly furious. "They do not need your belief. They are real whether you believe in them or not. Did I not show them to you? Did they not speak to you?"

Raven looked at him sadly. He was intimidated by his old master, but Coyote could feel that he was no longer frightened. Perhaps he was too old and discouraged to feel afraid.

"Master," he said at last, "when I was a young man you and I fasted and took the flesh of the holy peyote and spent hours in the sweat lodge. I saw visions, yes, but how do I know they were real? Last week I went into town and saw poor old Carlos sitting in the parking lot by the liquor store. He was gabbling at people who were not there, waving away demons I could not see. Were they real? Why do you think the beings we spoke to are more than the visions of men intoxicated with fasting and drugs?"

Something changed in Coyote then. He had come to reprimand Raven, to bring him back to the paths of power. But now he saw he was too late. There was nothing left of the eager, idealistic apprentice he had once known; so open to knowledge; so willing to endure hardships to achieve the paths. He felt a great sadness, the sense of an injury that could never be healed. He was silent for long moments.

"What you are doing is wrong," he said at last. "Even if you have forgotten what you once knew to be true, you have no right to debase the powers. You sell yourself to the tourists like one of those Japanese kachina dolls. They laugh and snap pictures of the foolish old man who thinks he’s a ‘real Injun witch doctor.’ Is that what the People have become after five hundred generations of warriors? Carnival entertainers?"

Raven’s anger and bitterness flashed out. "What does it matter? We are a beaten people. Their warriors defeated ours a century ago, and now their mythology is overthrowing ours. The young people no longer give a damn for the old ways, the old beliefs. You are trying to make them eat acorn meal when they want cheeseburgers. Some of them are half-assed Christians, but most have no beliefs whatever. They just don’t care anymore."

"It’s you that doesn’t care anymore, old man. Our mission, and its difficulty, has not changed since that day you came to my hogan and begged me to teach you. It is you who have wandered from the paths of power. You have lost your way."

Raven waved his words away with an angry brush of his hand. "It was all foolishness. I was young and impressionable and wished to become someone that people looked up to. I saw you perform your conjurer’s tricks and saw how the people feared and respected you, and I wanted to be like you. It was no great religious conversion, not for me. It never was."

"That is not true," Coyote replied quietly. "Initially your motives were shallow, it is true. But eventually you learned that my ‘conjurer’s tricks’ were no tricks. Make no mistake. The beings with whom you spoke are real. As real as you or I. You are treading a dangerous path. It is not too late to find your way back."

Raven shook his head, his snowy hair flying around his face. "It is too late. It has been years since I really believed in any of it. Beings of power, mystic visions, transforming yourself into animals, flying - it is all tricks and illusions. It is the peyote that flies, not you."

Coyote sat watching him, his black eyes as piercing as ever. Raven shifted uneasily under his gaze. "Perhaps you are right," Coyote said at last. "Perhaps it is all mummery. Generation after generation for ten thousand years, tricksters fooling the gullible people." He paused again. "So you think I am just an old fool?"

Raven looked at him with anguished eyes. "I could never think that, master. You are a great and good man. But I have come to believe that you are deluding yourself. You find comfort in the old ways, a connection to our ancestors, a link to the days when the People ruled this land. You are not alone. The People are hungry for some meaning to their lives. It is a proven fact that belief in the supernatural gives people remarkable strength and courage. People can endure much if they think the gods are with them. So when you tell them it is so, they feel comforted and powerful. But it is only an illusion. The gods are not real."

"Perhaps you are right," said Coyote again, so softly Raven could barely hear him. He got to his feet and took his coffee cup to the sink. He ladled water from the bucket that stood there, rinsed out the battered old tin cup, and set it upside down to dry on a threadbare towel. He turned back to his old apprentice, still slumped on the rug.

"May you find peace at the end, old friend," he said. He took his hat from the nail on the wall and went out into the night. Blue peered cautiously at him around the side of the hogan. He crouched down and held out his hand, and she sidled carefully over to him. She moved stiffly, her hips knobbed and arthritic. He rubbed her ears and whispered to her. "Stay with him. May you find peace as well."

He stood and walked away into the dark. When he was far enough away, he stopped and looked up at the stars blazing overhead. He gave a deep sigh, then closed his eyes and turned his mind inward. He reached deep down into the center of his mind, below his daily thoughts, below his sense of himself as a man, as a sorcerer, as one of the People. He shrank himself down until he was only a white-hot ember of consciousness, free of all form. Then slowly he blew on that glowing coal, letting it flare up again. But this time he let it flow out along his arms, further and further, stretching them, thinning them. His legs shrank beneath him, his long hooked nose grew longer and curled down into a razor hook. He lifted his spirit and hurled it up into the night, and a red-tail hawk lifted off into the night sky. The air whispered in his feathers and rushed through his open nostrils, filling him with the scents of the desert night. He could smell mice and kangaroo rats in the chaparral beneath his wings. He could imagine the shrill cry, the brief struggle, the taste of warm blood in his mouth. His talons closed reflexively, but he had something to do before he ate.

The night air was cool and thin and gave but little support for his wings. He had to work hard to climb above the canyon where Raven lived. At last he circled out over the badlands to the east, then back in close to the rocky crags near the top of the peak. His eyes, a hundred times sharper than a man’s, scanned the rocks sweeping below. At last he found what he was looking for. With a shrill cry of satisfaction, he angled his wings back and swooped down toward a jagged outcrop of weathered granite. He came in fast and low, then at the last second flared his wings and tail and brought his feet forward. His talons closed on a bare mesquite branch and he folded his wings and waited for the branch to stop swaying.

He looked into the pinyon scrub before him. There was a faint motion in the shadows there. Then a large male puma stepped out of the darkness and looked at him, his eyes yellow in the starlight.

"Greetings, great one," said Coyote in the tongue of the puma.

"Ah, so it is you, Lord Coyote," said the puma. "I knew you were no ordinary hawk."

"I have a task for you, great one."

"Speak and it is done, Lord," replied the lion, using the respectful language one uses to a stronger male.

"There is a man living in the canyon below."

"I know him," said the lion. "Sometimes I take one of his lambs in the spring. But not often, for he walks in power."

"He no longer walks in power, great one. He is lonely and old and unhappy and has lost his faith. He wishes now only that death will come swiftly and bring him peace." He paused, remembering. "I pray that his wish is granted, for he is a good man and was once a friend of mine."

The lion’s ears rose up in interest, but he waited politely for Coyote to speak again.

The hawk sat a moment longer, lost in thought. Then he cocked his head and looked at the lion with his bright black eye. "The man has a sheepdog," said Coyote after a moment. "She is also old and loves her master dearly. It would be a kindness if you took her as well." Then he was gone in a flutter of wings, soaring out over the black desert. The puma watched until he was out of sight. He sat down and groomed himself thoroughly, then stretched languorously. He sniffed the night air for any scents, then padded quietly down the canyon.