From the Empirical Archives: Coyote Dreams by Louise Young

Coyote Dreams

Louise Young

PHOTO: Larry Lamsa

Originally published in the September 2012 issue of Empirical

Her memory of that night was in the language that she’d learned from the man who was not her father: slurred syllables punctuated by glottal stops as if words were silver-bodied fish that muscled into the current of her breath. Anna had no idea of what language it was. In her twenty-seven years, she’d crossed the continent maybe a dozen times but she’d never met anyone who spoke with the words that she’d learned from Ambrosio. In Texas once she’d recognized a phrase–or maybe it was an entire sentence–in the wind stuttered chatter of flocking robins, and farther north the bare white branches of sycamore trees sometimes muttered a few familiar, shushing words as she hurried past. When she’d hear these voices, Anna wondered if what she recalled was an actual event, or an in-drawn breath that held meaning only in her mind.

On the remembered night, she’d woken slick with fever or maybe it was the wind: it blew through the tent from the south, inflating the thin canvas walls and then contracting them like a lung. The breath was as warm as a living thing, and inside of the tent she smelled life: the restless shudder of her mother, the heavy sigh of the man who was not her father. The muskiness of their breath, the rumbles of their sleep, were familiar but on this night without comfort.

Beyond the walls of the tent, she could hear the harlequin leaves laughing at the wind, the soft slurp of the river as it swept between trees like an endless gray ghost. The child-Anna knew this spot: the family often camped here on their way to someplace else. In the spring, the river ran milky and cold, in the fall the air was so clear that it gave color to the night. She knew that the laughing leaves outside were yellow, the ashy bark of the trees furrowed like ripples on the river. Other things–known and unknown–lurked outside the tent: deer with their sharp-pointed hearts of tracks, the swift scent of sage, unblinking owls that questioned the darkness. In her memory, Anna could be certain of only this one night, her wakefulness a passport to the unexplored world of the future.

Fingers of wind played at the door of the tent, offering tantalizing glimpses of a moon-bright landscape. One of the adults farted softly in sleep. Not daring to risk the commotion of dressing the child crawled under the flap of the tent, and escaped into the night.

The first thing that demanded her attention was the moon. Directly overhead and oblong like the face of an old person, it tripped through the leaves and branches overhead, reining a stream of broken silver light onto the uneven duff at her feet. The moonlight rendered every sound, every detail, every inhale as clear as day clearer actually because the confusion of noises and color and movement was now breath-solemn and hushed. It was as if the world had been stripped of everything nonessential: a world more real than reality.

Anna looked down at her body, aglow in the naked moonlight. She’d hoped that this enchanted night might have made her beautiful, like the yellow leaves that applauded overhead or the sinewy fish that twisted and flowed, invisible, through the silty gray river. Ambrosio often told her that she was beautiful, that inside of her child’s body was a soul stronger than the Virgin or any of the saints. He had a word for it–something with a harsh, throaty rasp that Anna couldn’t imitate–but when she’d ask him what that word meant he’d tell her that she wouldn’t understand it, that she wasn’t old enough. And if she argued that she wasn’t young at all, Ambrosio would agree in the language that only they shared:

“Of course you’re not young–you’ve been in this world forever, just like the clouds and the river have always been here. But the water that’s flowing in the river now is different from the water that went past yesterday–it’s new, just like now your soul is new. You’re not like other people. Every day you are born again, like the river and the clouds are. And because you share so much with the river and the clouds and all of the world that surrounds you, you’ll never have an age, just like a cloud is never young or old.”

PHOTO: Larry Lamsa

Anna wasn’t sure that she wanted to remain like she was now for the rest of her life: she longed to be tall and graceful and fluid like her mother. But in her heart she knew that Ambrosio was right: she was different from other children. Those others couldn’t hear the sighing of the northern lights or recognize weather in the wind.

This wind, warm as a cow’s tongue, would bring rain in a few hours, probably around dawn. Right at the moment when the grown-ups would be trying to take down the tent and pack, to move forward, onward, through. They were always heading toward something but the child couldn’t figure out what that thing was. All that Anna wanted to do was stay in one place long enough to understand the language of those who lived there. Every place had its own words, too often muffled by a rumble of traffic or the swoop of busyness. In the stillness and darkness of night, the voices became especially compelling. She’d wake to a cacophony of mumbles and mutters that the wind would snatch away before she could isolate a single thought. She wondered where the wind carried those conversations, if it stored them somewhere far to the east, in the rumbling caves of the ocean or the brightness of the rising sun. 

That same wind now guided her, pushing at her back with the steadiness of a hand. Her footsteps rumpled through leaves already shed from branches overhead. The dripping silver darkness was alive with voices: the fecund river full of fish and clams and slime, the earth with its roots and worms, the trees, the wind veining words from somewhere far away–maybe as far as the western sea–to mingle with sighs of camphor and fir. Beneath all of those vague, half-heard voices, the child thought that she could sense the presence of another listener, its restrained energy and youth somewhere very near her own.

Anna breathed through her mouth, hoping that the taste of the night air might clue the identity of her companion. For every one of her footsteps, a handful of others whispered around her. Feet smaller than hers–paws maybe–stepped as lightly as rain. Anna willed her body to be still: the wan footsteps also paused. The child twisted her head to the left and to the right but in the broken shadows under the trees she saw nothing except silver slivers of refracted moonlight.

The wind continued to tug at her, impatient for movement, and when her steps resumed so did those of the unseen creature beside her. Anna panicked and ran, breaking away from the trees and into the full moonlight of the bank along the river. In the open, she realized that she had been followed not by a single shadow but by four or five, pouncing and prancing and tumbling at her feet. Dun-colored forms in the moonlight, pointed ears, pointed snouts, and tails streaming behind their flanks like the current off a rudder: puppies. Coyotes? She’d never seen a coyote up close before, only heard their keening, yapping, effusive song that sometimes gave dreams to her sleep.

The pack of pups at her feet was never still: their tightly-wound bodies twisted, feigned, and attacked. But no matter how closely they braided around her legs, the puppies never touched her: it was as if an invisible field held their lives apart. The child imagined the soft slide of their fur against her bare calf, young muscles sprung with tension and alive with motion. After their ghostly escort through the woods, the pups now seemed completely oblivious to her presence. They tumbled and played in the grasses and yellowing ferns, breath chuffing and chuckles or growls rumbling inside of their shivering chests.

At the child’s feet: a spring, a snap, and a grunt were followed by an instant of stillness as one of the puppies chewed and then swallowed. A breath away, another pup leaped vertically like a trout but in vain: the intended prey–a scrap of fluttering moonlight–escaped the snapping jaws to hover above the coyote’s head, just beyond the reach of those straining, leaping lips.

Eye level to the child, though. In a flash, Anna pinched her fingers together until she held the moth imprisoned in her hand. Cool, silky wings fluttered helplessly against her palm. The thick stub of a body crushed easily. She offered the disabled moth to the upraised snout of the frustrated pup. A pink tongue darted out, first to accept the morsel, then to lap at the child’s hand.

As the night advanced, the children–human and coyote–hunted. The wind stilled. When the rain began, the drops fell so lightly that none of them noticed: the child assumed that the barely audible hiss at her feet was a chorus of earth-bound insects, scolding her for aiding the coyote pups in the slaughter of their sisters.

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From the Empirical Archives: The One Who Carries The Sun On His Back

The One Who Carries The Sun On His Back

Louise Young

PHOTO: Jairo BD

Originally Published in the August 2012 Issue of Empirical

Sendero Las Brujas–the Witches’ Trail–climbs steeply through coffee fincas and sugar cane plantations toward the scraggly forest that crowns the Continental Divide. Veils of clouds swirl, alternately concealing and revealing the sensuous curves of the surrounding mountains. At the forest’s edge, the path takes a right angle turn and follows the sweeping crest of a ridge toward the volcano–Cerro Tutu–that gave birth to this landscape in the time before time.

The sendero is different from trails that I’ve hiked in the US, footways that wander through wilderness set aside purely for recreation. The Witches’ Trail is a community path. On any given day, its dust might hold the imprints of the bare feet of native Buglé children trudging to school; the rubber boots of campesinos–cane cutters or coffee pickers–with machetes in hand and lunches slung in string bags over their shoulders; and the slim sandals of women, their otoe and yucca and tomatoes bundled in voluminous rebozos together with one or two sleepy-eyed infants. A mile out of town, I was passed by two unshod horses barely as tall as I am, their panniers balancing paired milk cans. Behind them a young Buglé man wearing bright purple pants and the ubiquitous knee-high rubber boots answered my greeting with a slow smile and an even slower “Bue-e-e-e-nos.”

But that was half an hour ago: I haven’t seen a soul since the trail was swallowed by forest and clouds. This mountain isn’t high enough–or pristine enough–to support a true cloud forest, although today the dripping drizzle and thick mist provide a passable imitation of jungle. What surrounds me, though, is all young growth, disturbed and patchy. On the Caribbean side of the divide, the rainforest is unbroken except by small communities of Buglé people, isolated by hours of mountain walking from the nearest settlement, itself an island in the jungle of green that extends all the way to the Mosquito Coast. A true wilderness: yesterday, when I hiked through that jungle, I encountered a woman who hid her face in fear of my sunglasses.

Today I am without sunglasses. The mist that sits on top of this mountain and saturates the cotton of my t shirt is even more confining than yesterday’s constricted jungle terrain: in the milky atmosphere I can see an arm’s length in any direction, no farther. Instead of softening contours, the overarching clouds sharpen sensory impressions, rendering every sound abrupt and incongruous: the fall of an unripe mango is as startling as a gunshot; the whisper of water in a creek becomes a witch’s song.

Panama
PHOTO: Ken Mayer

And that’s why I almost jump out of my skin when I hear rustling in the leaves at the edge of the trail. I immediately look to the undergrowth for a clue to the origin of the sound. The scraggly leaves of the low bushes tremble and wobble not two feet from my two feet. Something is moving down there, something big: something amorphous, something that I can’t identify. It seems composed entirely of mist, of smoke and fog and–a smile.

That’s the first feature that I make out: a smiling face turned up to me. Calm, composed, at peace: it’s impossible not to smile back in return. But the smiling gray face displays no acknowledgement, no change in response to my greeting. The smile–now seeming more imbecilic than cheerful–remains rigid on the fog-gray face.

The rest of the animal’s body materializes behind the head: it’s a three-toed sloth. About the size of the cur dog that you played with as a kid, the creature is covered from head to toe with long, coarse gray fur that makes it seem more a part of the clouds than a living, sensate being. Perhaps this ghostly creature is the witch for whom this trail has been named: its frozen, non-responsive grin has begun to assume an almost spooky appearance.

The sloth’s attention seems to be focused entirely on me–or at least that’s how I interpret the blank stare in its heavily browed eyes. One lanky arm extends forward as if the animal is reaching out to me. But there’s no hand that I can see, only three scythe-like yellow claws that plant themselves in the dirt at my feet, anchoring the tip of the arm. In painfully slow increments, the rest of the sloth’s body is dragged toward me by the winch-like strength of that one arm. The charge–if indeed that is what the creature intends–is so deliberate that in order to escape all that I need to do is step out of its way.

Which is what I do. My flight seems to confuse the sloth: it pauses for a deliberate moment and then changes direction. Although “changing direction” implies an abrupt turn: the sloth’s reversal is much less defined. When its entire body has pulled up even with its first clawed anchor, the animal extends the opposite arm this time it’s the left one–ahead again. But the line of advance now points toward the other side of the trail: the trajectory of the movement has altered slightly. The sloth is no longer charging me: it now seems intent on crossing the trail.

It is four arm extensions before the sloth attains the vegetation on the other side of the trail, four drags of the limp, apparently muscle-less torso through the bare dust. I’m less than a foot away the whole time, so I can observe in minute detail the dynamics of the animal’s locomotion. The back legs, less than half the length of the forearms, act as levers that help to propel the stumpy body forward. The head remains raised, eyes focused on a tree at the other side of the trail–the goal: the place where the sloth can regain balance and footing and equilibrium. The animal is vulnerable on land, slow and awkward and defenseless.

But you’d never know it to look at its face. The features register no fear, no hope, none of the strain of moving in an unfamiliar terrain, no anger, no aggression: just the sad clown’s smile with which it will greet each dawn and noon and midnight from birth until the moment an eagle or a jaguar or a campesino’s bullet puts an end to its life.

I’ve seen sloths before, hanging pendant from the branches of cecropia trees, or curled asleep like a gray bee’s nest in a convenient crotch. But I’ve never had the opportunity to observe a sloth from this angle, and as I study the animal I am stunned by what I see on its back. Between the sloth’s shoulder blades, the jungle of lank gray fur thins. Like a parting of the clouds, the hair shortens and lightens to a rich cream color. A ridge of black defines the spine, flanked by half a hand of similarly dark dots. But most remarkably, in the center of the sloth’s back is a circle of yellow-orange fur, about the size of a Crusader’s cross, that stands out as bright and colorful and beautiful as the sun. I’ve never seen anything so incongruous, so unexpectedly colored, so incredibly beautiful on any animal in the wild. And seeing this, I now understand the sloth’s slow, deliberate movements, its inability to stand upright on four legs. Carrying the weight of the sun on your back–all of the world’s light and energy and hope, all of the dreams of this generation and of all generations for years to come–is a lot of responsibility for one small, hairy, perpetually smiling creature.

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From the Empirical Archives: Beside Blue Horse Creek by Louise Young

Beside Blue Horse Creek

Louise Young

PHOTO: Simon Davison

Originally Published in the July 2012 issue of Empirical

She went to the women’s tent at the new moon although she wasn’t bleeding: it was her usual time and the woman didn’t want to give rumor to the gossips in camp. When she ducked under the tent’s flap, she saw that the only people inside were the two sisters–girls still, their breasts barely budding. They did everything together, those two, and even though one was a year older they’d both begun to bleed on exactly the same day. Everyone in camp had remarked on that–most thought that it was some kind of sign–and the girls now enjoyed notoriety every month with their synchronization. The woman knew that the sisters wouldn’t question her.

She was glad to be here, where no man could know or touch her. She knew that the man was watching the entrance to the women’s tent. He would see her when she left: she would have to leave to gather wood, to bathe, and to answer her body’s functions. But he would never approach her now: he wouldn’t dare. No man would talk to a woman while she was bleeding. She had that protection for three, four days at the most.

The girls chattered together, their voices like chickadees: soft and musical but incessant. The woman banked the fire. It was too warm in the tent: a springtime warmth that swelled up from the open country in the south until it spilled over the ridge of the mountains and into the big river valley. The change of seasons had been abrupt: a week ago the entire camp had evacuated to high ground when an ice dam on the river broke. A dog had been killed in the commotion–the story was that the current had taken it but the woman knew that one of the men shot it: the dog was an ugly little mongrel that in life had annoyed everyone with its constant yapping. Back in camp a day later, the woman had watched the river run muddy and high but free of ice. The last two nights had passed without frost.

The woman checked the supply of wood for the fire: plenty for tonight. She wondered who had gathered it–certainly not the sisters. They hadn’t acknowledged her since she’d come in. Not that she would have spoken to them anyway. The woman sometimes felt as if her tongue had been cut out. She’d heard that up north the Blackfoot–those wild, cruel, ugly people–she’d heard that a Blackfoot warrior might cut the tongue out of a woman’s mouth to punish her, or to silence her. A squaw’s story perhaps or a Coyote tale, but the thought made her shiver just the same.

She sighed and shook her tunic away from her skin. She was sweating. The woman had been too hot recently; her skin like fire, burning in every place his eyes had touched or probed. She hadn’t bathed for a few days either. She’d been queasy in the mornings and the thought of the thick gray water in the big river made her nauseous. No telling what might be lurking under the surface: that yappy little mongrel, a winterkilled buffalo, or Coyote himself, clawing at her ankles. Had anyone seen her at dawn this morning vomiting in the middens?

She wished it were cooler, winter maybe or autumn: early last autumn before the cottonwoods had turned, before all of this had started. Back then, she could have wound a bear skin robe around her body so tightly that the hide would attach itself to her own flesh. She would become a bear-woman then–hairy, rank, reeking of dung and dust and smoke–impossible for any man to want her in that condition. The others in camp would circle her instead of walking past, wary of the contagion or power that she might carry. She would smile when she’d meet other eyes–an inward, inscrutable smile–and even the bravest of warriors would shy from the woman-who-had-become-a-bear.

PHOTO: TH Morris/Library of Congress

A shaft from the late afternoon sun pierced the dusk inside the women’s tent. The woman shot a quick, nervous glance toward the entryway. Awkward on her hands and knees, the old woman crawled under the flap and into the tent. Around camp, there were stories about the old woman, stories that perhaps the old woman had herself created. The old woman claimed that she remembered the days before horses, the days before buffalo, the days when the people lived in a thick woodland on the shore of a deep, cold lake, a lake so wide that the sharpest-eyed child couldn’t trace the line of the opposite shore, a lake that held fish as big as a grown man. They say that the old woman had seen over a hundred winters, but who in camp had counted them?

This much the woman knew: the old woman’s monthly bleedings had ended years ago. She hadn’t come to the women’s tent for the normal reason. Perhaps she was here because of the sisters, seeking or offering some portent or spell or charm. The woman watched the old woman watch the sisters, eyes like sparks of obsidian in the pale wreck of her face. When the old woman had been young–or younger–a horse had kicked her face, flattening her nose and causing her to wheeze so badly that at night her snores could be heard from the farthest tent in camp. Her husband, dead now almost ten years, had offered his wife openly to any man who would take her. None had, and he’d been forced to accept her back into his tent. They say that from that day on, the old woman’s husband had never smiled again.

There was a chance that the old woman has come to the woman’s tent for another reason: it was rumored that her practiced nose could scent a pregnancy a handful of hours from the moment that the act had been committed. When the woman had left her father’s tent this morning, she’d brought a blade with her in case she would be forced to prove up. Trying to appear casual, she busied herself among the robes, spreading a softly tanned elk hide over her legs. Through the white of her eye, she watched the old woman squat next to the fire, her gray hands spidering toward the warmth of the coals, wrinkled face aimed at the sisters. The girls chattered on.

In the shadows along the margin of the tent, the woman’s hands groped beneath the elk hide and her dress until they closed on the blade in its soft skin bag. Working quickly, the woman slid the hand that clutched the blade between her legs, up her thigh until the sharpened stone touched the fold of flesh between her leg and genitals. There was an artery there, she knew: once she had seen a man bleed to death after being wounded in the groin during a fight. The blood had pulsed from the cut, rich and red, in spurts that no one had been able to staunch, only stopping when the man’s life had drained from him. He’d been a warrior, a strong man, but as the blood had leaped from his body he’d whimpered like a kicked dog.

The old woman could tell, perhaps, that the woman was not bleeding. She would not bleed again until the child appeared. She clenched her teeth against the pain as the blade penetrated skin. The blood flowed sticky and slick from the wound between her legs.

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