Coyote's Daughter Read online

  Coyote's Daughter

  Corie J. Weaver

  Copyright 2011 Corie J. Weaver

  Kindle Edition

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter One

  Mom and Dad broke the news to me over eggs and bacon.

  "The date is set with the movers," Dad announced while pouring his juice. "We leave at the end of next month."

  I put down my fork, no longer hungry.

  My dad looked at me. Really slowly. He does that, as if he’s seeing through me, into my head. I don’t like it; it feels like I’m one of the skeletons in the Anthropology Department where he works. But I guess it’s nice to have parents who pay attention.

  Not sure why he spent so much time staring; I’m not terribly exciting to look at. Rain-straight brown hair brushes my shoulders, and I chew on the ends when I’m nervous. Brown eyes my mom calls hazel. I’m too tall. I don’t like being taller than all the other kids in my class. The boys don’t like it either. I’m not fat, but I’m not skinny. I’m never going to be one of those golden-haired cheerleaders everyone loves.

  "Maggie, you’ve known for months about the move, why are you acting surprised?"

  Yeah. I knew. But it didn’t seem real until then. I wished they’d yell out "April Fool’s!" and the move would turn out to be some sort of crazy joke. I didn’t want to move to New Mexico, to the desert, land of the coyote and roadrunner cartoons; empty, barren and ugly.

  Why would we want to move there? I wouldn’t, but Mom and Dad couldn’t wait. Mom found a dream job working with rockets at a lab. For Dad, getting close to different tribes of Native Americans couldn’t be beat.

  After school I went to the beach. Biting cold water kept me from swimming, so I just sat on the sand and watched the waves, throwing sticks for Jack until someone yelled at me about not having him on a leash. He’s a border collie mixed up with something else pretty big, and sometimes that makes people nervous. The ocean is beautiful, big and open, and always helps me get my head in order. I thought about the move, leaving all of my friends and starting over.

  The timing couldn’t be worse: the summer between grades six and seven. By now everyone’s groups of friends and enemies would be set. I knew already I wouldn’t fit in, and wondered if they even had a swim team in the desert.

  * * *

  "So, have you met anyone in the neighborhood yet?"

  Mom’s head was buried in a box, her voice muffled and funny. She straightened up and handed yet another stack of dishes to Dad.

  I stopped texting Jenna, my best friend from home. My real home. "The old lady next door says there’s a brother and sister, twins, that live down the street." I pointed out the window, through the little courtyard that we had instead of a patio. "They’re at their father’s right now. She doesn’t know when they’ll be back."

  I slid off of the chair and scratched Jack’s ears. Jack’s a good dog, and always stays nearby when I need him. I loved him, but didn’t much care for the idea of a summer with just him for company.

  After lunch my folks sent Jack and me out. "You’re driving me crazy," Mom said. "Just stay out of traffic, and be nice to our new neighbors."

  I stood on the sidewalk and looked around; no one riding bikes in the street, nothing. But then I saw something that looked interesting

  Mom and Dad had already started to tackle another pile of boxes when I ran back inside. "Can I go hiking on the trail?"

  "What?"

  "At the end of our street there’s a little hill, and then a path on either side of a ditch. Can I go on that?"

  My father figured it out first. "The acequia? Sure. It may not look like it now, but a hundred years ago when people farmed all of this area, that ditch brought water to the fields from the river, the Rio Grande. It’s a common walking path now." He glanced at Mom, made sure they agreed. "Go north, to your right, and the furthest you can go is the river. All right, Miss Maggie? And try to keep Jack out of the water; I don’t know how clean it is." With that final piece of advice they returned to battle with the boxes.

  Great. Jack loves playing in water, but I don’t want him to drag me in behind him. Duly warned, I went searching through the boxes in my room for our hiking stuff. All of the boxes were labeled, so it didn’t take too long. I had my purple-and-black backpack and Jack wore his hiking harness with the little saddlebags. Mom thinks I’m a packrat, but I like to be prepared for anything.

  In my backpack I always carry an extra bottle of water, sunscreen, a long-sleeved shirt with pockets in the front, a couple granola bars, my journal, a flashlight, a magnifying glass, a compass, and five pens, because you never know when you’ll run out of ink, and odd stuff I hadn’t cleaned out from last semester. Jack’s saddlebags are always packed with a neat collapsible dish, and flat water bags. I know it’s a lot of stuff, but we’ve needed funny bits and pieces of things even out walking the beach at home. And I don’t like going anywhere without Jack having water that’s safe to drink.

  I read an awful article online last year about how sick animals can get when they don’t have access to clean water. I bought the collapsible bowl and water bags with my next allowance. I’ve been looking at a set of hiking boots for Jack too, to protect his paws from sharp rocks and the broken glass left by stupid people, but I’m not sure if he’d put up with them. He’s pretty good about his harness, so you never know.

  We scrambled up a little hill to get to the trail, and headed north. The trees looked old, with gnarled limbs as big as my waist stretched over the water and gray and craggy trunks. Sometimes I’d see one that looked like it had been split by lighting when young and had since grown up in two or three parts.

  Tall grasses and purple wildflowers overgrew the steep banks of the ditch. I tried to pick one, but sharp spines on the stem pricked my thumb and changed my mind. Cattails rose from the water, and after a while we saw ducks swimming along. A path ran on each side of the ditch, but I couldn’t see how to get to the other bank without crossing through the water.

  The trees spread over us to form a green tunnel with flashes of bright blue, so much more vivid than the hazy sky over San Diego, peeking between the branches. Occasionally we saw someone on the other side of the ditch, but they passed on by with a little wave, jogging or walking, sometimes pushing one of those off-road strollers.

  From the raised path I could look down into people’s backyards. You think of your backyard as private, but we could look right in. Building projects left abandoned, patio furniture still covered up, gardens that hadn’t been replanted, a little bit of everything.

  And all the dogs. If Jack hadn’t been convinced before that this walk was only for his benefit, the sheer numbers of his four-legged brothers would have done it. I think everyone in Albuquerque must have dogs. Not just one dog, either, but entire packs. As we walked behin
d houses, they would race up to their back fence, mad as all get-out because they couldn’t reach us, barking as hard as they could. Jack strained at the leash, but I’m not sure how many of those dogs felt friendly.

  A few of the yards didn’t have dogs. They were huge, and had horses or hens; one place had a little orchard. One house had peacocks, another had sheep. It’s hard to believe we’re in the largest city in this state when people are keeping sheep and chickens in their backyards.

  I ran my hand down the trunk of one of the cottonwoods. The bark split in little up-and-down slits over and over again, almost like a woven pattern. I put my arms out as if hugging the tree, but couldn’t reach all the way around it. Standing there with my face tilted up toward the leaves, Jack pulling on my wrist, I wondered how long this tree had been here. Dad had said the ditch had been used for a hundred years. Was the tree that old? Older even?

  After about an hour of walking we stopped for a break. Jack waited for me to pour his water and drank it in big noisy slurps. He curled up next to a tree stump, and I spread the long-sleeved shirt over the bark so it wouldn’t be scratchy against my legs. Jack gazed at the world with half-closed eyes, the way dogs do, while I wrote a little in my journal, and thought a little, and then stood up and repacked everything.

  "Another hour, boy. If we don’t find that river by then, we’ll try again tomorrow."

  It took closer to half an hour to get there. The narrow path opened out onto a broad grassy area, with small trees dotting the ground. Nothing lush, nothing that looked like photos I’ve seen of rivers. Muted greens and grays painted this landscape. We followed the ditch as it led to the river, and I looked behind me every few steps to make sure I could find the way back.

  Trees thickly lined the river, and small twisted bushes sprang up around them, trailing off the farther they grew away from the water.

  We walked to the water. It flowed sluggishly, muddy, low. You could see across the river to the other side; in places the water looked shallow enough to wade across. I stooped to rest my hand on the bank, then looked closer. The black mud sparkled in the light. I put my fingers in it and drew them across the back of my hand. It shone deep and rich. Jack came over to see what I had, and I put a streak of mud down his muzzle. Jack looked very handsome, gleaming in the sun, and I laughed watching him cross his eyes to see what I had done to him. I got my other hand muddy, then drew a mask around his eyes.

  "There. You’re now the Masked Dog of the River, mysterious and dashing."

  Jack is the most patient dog in the world. I think if I had younger brothers or sisters, I wouldn’t torment him like this. But I don’t and, for the most part, he puts up with it.

  Something nearby tickled my nose, triggering my allergies, and I had a sneezing fit. Reflexively, I went to cover my mouth like a good girl, and felt the mud from my hands smear on my face.

  "Happy? Now we’ll match."

  Jack looked up at me with his tongue spilling out of his open mouth and eyes rolling, and I decided not to worry about my mud mask either.

  With jumps and wags, Jack let me know he thought it would be much more fun to walk for a while right next to the river, and I decided to let him have his way. No one was around, so I let him off the leash, free to snuffle and explore as he wanted.

  The time to return home came sooner than we wanted. About where I figured we needed to cut through the trees and get back to our path, I saw a boy, crouched on the bank, almost in the water. He wore loose pants, and no shirt, and I couldn’t help but think about him getting sunburned; it happens to me so easily. Maybe his dark-gold skin and jet-black hair meant he didn’t need to worry about it so much. He looked thin and wiry, and the way he knelt I couldn’t tell his height. I saw him scoop up a great handful of black mud and put it into a little woven basket by his side.

  I stood still for a minute. What do you do in a situation like that? Say something stupid like, "Hi, I’m Maggie, what on earth are you doing?" I’m never sure how to talk to new people, but I couldn’t let the opportunity to talk to the first person I had seen close to my own age slip away. I needed a few moments to figure out how to approach him.

  Jack had no such worries. He bounded toward the boy, stuck his broad head into the boy’s side and knocked him off balance back into the dirt.

  The boy yelled at Jack and I called him back. I ran forward to apologize and felt my face heat. The boy’s wrist had gotten caught in something when he fell over. He tugged at it with his free hand, but it didn’t look like he could untangle himself with only one.

  "Here, let me." I knelt down and reached for his hand, but he snatched it away. "Please, it’s the least I can do after my dog startled you." I held my hands out and waited. He looked at me with wide golden eyes, and then slowly put his trapped hand back into mine. His eyes mirrored his skin; they made me think of hawks I’d seen caged at the zoo. I started working on the contraption. A frame of wood and bone held loops of string woven in complicated knots. I couldn’t imagine its purpose, but it must have gotten knocked over when Jack struck the boy. The string had tangled and tightened over his wrist. It had to hurt a lot, but the boy never said anything.

  I chattered while I struggled with the lines to fill up the silence. "Hi, I’m Maggie, and you’ve met Jack, and we just moved here. I’m sorry about this, I’ll be careful to just untangle it and not break it." He still didn’t say anything. Maybe he didn’t understand me. I knew a lot of people in New Mexico spoke Spanish, but I thought they would understand a little English.

  I tried to think back to the phrase or two of Spanish I had picked up in California.

  "Hola. Me llama Maggie?"

  I didn’t think that was quite right, but it should have been close enough. No reaction.

  Jack curled next to me while I worked, as if to make up for his bad behavior. The knotted strings made an elaborate pattern, like cat’s cradle but a million times worse. Untangling it, I saw that somehow all of the strings had pulled tight, snaring his wrist in a tangle of line.

  "Almost, hold still for a little longer." The strings went back over the framework, one by one, pulling the frame together, relaxing the rest of the lines. "There." I slipped the contraption off his wrist. Throughout the whole ordeal he’d stayed silent, even though I could see the angry red marks where the lines had cut into his wrist. My own wrist hurt just to see them.

  I stood up, brushed off my jeans and held out my hand. "What’s your name? Do you live around here?" Maybe this could be someone to spend the summer with. But once freed, he only stared at me for a few moments with his odd golden eyes, shoved the contraption into a bag at his side, grabbed the woven basket filled with mud, and ran for the trees.

  Stupid boy. Not my fault he got stuck in that thing. He probably shouldn’t have been carrying it. And he shouldn’t have been so caught up in getting mud to not notice a big black-and-white dog galloping down on him. He could have said thank you. Even in another language.

  As we turned for home I saw something under one of the bushes and spun back. For a moment I had seen something like a dog, but gray and tan, and somehow different, curled up, watching us with eyes way too smart to be in a dog’s head. But I saw nothing now, only a light-dappled shadow.

  The way home didn’t take as long. Tired out, Jack didn’t stop to investigate every smell. We paused for a while because I wanted to see the sheep a little closer. Sheep are not the white fluffy creatures you see in paintings. They looked dingy and yellow, and they smelled. Jack fought for a bit to stay when I tugged him to keep walking. Only the promise of cookies got him moving again.

  Looking at the house as we scrambled back down the ditch was another reminder of how far we were from home. The new house sat low and long and didn’t seem to have any straight angles. Plain, smooth walls confronted me instead of the detailed woodwork of our Victorian house back in San Diego.

  A light-brown wall curved over the top of a wooden door, enclosing a courtyard, where bricks fit together in patt
erns to make the floor. A few trees stood in the back, huge, with rough trunks, and thick branches sprouting light green leaves curved into sharp points.

  The same thick, brown stuff formed the walls of the house, softly curved, like the half-melted battlements of a sandcastle. The bright-blue doorframe around the carved wooden double door provided the one bit of color on the entire house.

  Our late arrival home surprised Mom and Dad, still unpacking.

  "Good grief! How far did you go? And what is wrong with your face?"

  "Just up to the river. Not any farther. Just like you said." Jack flopped down on the cool brick floor the instant I took his harness off.

  I ran into the bathroom and burst out laughing. Smears of dried black mud covered my face. The pattern of my handprints wrapped up the side of my cheeks and up around my eyes. I scrubbed it off, and went back to the living room.

  They looked at each other, with that parental glance that never means well. I cut in again, before they could get started.

  "I did just like you said. It’s a perfectly safe path. And there were other people around, jogging and bicycling and stuff, so it’s not like we explored the middle of nowhere. Besides, I had Jack with me."

  We looked down at him, sprawled flat, tongue lolling out of his mouth.

  "And I’ve got lots of questions." Questions are always the best way to deflect my folks, so I poured them out in a rush, in the hope that at least a couple would catch their attention.

  "How old is the irrigation canal, anyway? Did you know people have sheep and chickens and horses around here? Isn’t there some sort of rule about farm animals in a city? And what’s the big wooded area by the river? Can we get Jack a sheep for Christmas? I think he’d really like one."

  "The area by the river is called the Bosque, the Spanish word for woods, and most of it in Albuquerque and around the city is a nature reserve."

  Mom cut Dad off before he got going. "A sheep? You want to get Jack a sheep for Christmas? Why?"