The same family? It seemed to be. Dar Oakley sailed that way and caught up with them as they reached the broken slabs in the middle. He’d watch from one of the high pillars that stood at regular intervals surmounted by stone eagles and unlit lamps, then fly to the next. The gray beasts never looked up: nothing for them upward. But as they reached the bridge’s end and the young ones crept under the fence there, the big one turned its face to where Dar Oakley looked down. And held his regard for a long moment.
The places across the bridge were largely empty; factories and warehouses and garages, some burned to nothing, but others standing and occupied by People with nowhere else to go. Lights flickered in broken windows. Water gushed from a broken main and People—females, mostly—stood to fill cans and basins. Shouts and talk from here and there. The gray ones avoided these People. Dar Oakley watched them enter a patch of weeds and stunted city trees by a brick wall and disappear. He took a perch on a post and waited. Night was coming and he shouldn’t be here in the open alone, but something made him stay and watch the place where the gray ones had gone down—though he also kept a nervous watch upward. Hawks nested on high rooftops like these, hunted Rabbits in the grass. Hunted Pigeons and Crows, too.
A face came out from a hole that ran under the building, hidden by the weeds. That older one. He regarded the Crow, and the Crow him.
Looking for something? said the beast.
Crows and others don’t speak the same way, much less the same language—but even before he registered the impossibility of it, Dar Oakley had answered, No, nothing.
We’ve got no scraps to spare, the beast said.
No, no, Dar Oakley said.
Then why have you followed us? Poor beasts that we are.
Dar Oakley, who had no idea why he had followed them, said nothing. The beast’s eyes were the yellow of a Falcon’s, but warm and wary. He asked, How is it that you can speak to me, and me to you?
Are we speaking? the beast said. He drew his body out from the den and shook himself from throat to tail in a complicated shudder; he lifted one hind foot, threw it as though casting something from it, then the other, and began to trot off.
Follow me if you like, he said. I’ve got some traveling to do. We can introduce ourselves. If we don’t already know us.
Coyote, I told Dar Oakley. It wasn’t a word he was able to say, though he tried it out a few times; it defeated his mimicry. And anyway it wasn’t the name the creature called himself, a name that Dar Oakley couldn’t say either: his standard imitation of a Dog’s low, questioning, unperturbed huff was as close as he could get.
Night should have fallen by then but somehow hadn’t, as though the sun hovered just below the horizon and sank no farther. Dar Oakley followed the beast through the wilderness of the riverbank ruins; they passed among People unnoticed, the People seeming dim and hardly present. It was light enough to fly, and sometimes he flew, unable otherwise to keep up with Coyote’s ceaseless trotting.
He wasn’t from these places, he told Dar Oakley; not city-bred, no: he was unwelcome in the city, and if he was caught by the People, he’d be got rid of without hesitation.
Of course they have to catch me before the trial can start, he said, if there’s a trial, which there wouldn’t be, because they don’t catch me, so on we go.
Dar Oakley tried to learn of his travels, where he’d gone, but mammals don’t seem to have any sense of the four directions, never know where they are in the large world, though some of them can trace by odors the winding ways they’ve taken, and return to anywhere from anywhere. And in the dark, too.
So it was far away, Dar Oakley said, where you started from.
Can’t tell you, Coyote said.
A long time to travel from there to here?
Coyote didn’t answer.
You’ve known People all that time?
Known them? the mammal said. I made them.
You made People?
Well, so they say.
The dark ways were lit here and there by fires that People had started in tall cans, or from windows where People had got city light somehow for themselves. The hunting Coyote slipped around the pools of light, and stopped for a moment to bite at something. He chewed it as though it tasted bad, black lips curled back in what seemed disgust, and swallowed. Always his eyes turning toward threats.
There’s a story, he said then, and set off again.
I’m listening, Dar Oakley said.
It seems, Coyote said, that there was a gigantic bird. There were no People then. And this bird was catching all the animals, taking them up to the sky and eating them. He caught a Toad, for one, to have for a mate, a wife, you know? And this Toad was the aunt of an Eagle who was an uncle of mine.
A Toad? An Eagle?
That’s what they say, he said, and made an odd snickering noise that Dar Oakley was pretty sure was laughter.
So, Dar Oakley said.
So I, I myself, climbed up to the sky. And the Toad told me how to kill this monster bird, and it’s said that I did that. And Uncle Eagle taught me what to do then. I had to cut off the bird’s wings and pull out the big wing feathers one by one. . . .
At that Dar Oakley, who’d perched on a post for a rest, tightened his wings around him, drew down his tail.
That’s right, Coyote said, and I planted them in the ground to make trees. These were the first trees. You still listening?
Tell me, Dar Oakley said. What color was this bird?
This bird was black.
Oh.
I planted the smaller feathers, and they became People. People, to replace all those animals who’d been hunted and eaten all up.
You made People, Dar Oakley said. And now People hunt you.
How it goes, said Coyote.
I, Dar Oakley said, was once married to a Beaver.
Is that so.
So People said.
Coyote stopped his walking, looked around and behind, squatted down and wiggled his backside into a hole in a vast pile of rusted trash, a place he had obviously long known was there; he put his head on his crossed forelegs, licked a sore. He was hard to see there, or maybe just hard to believe in. Dar Oakley took a perch on a length of pipe.
So you, he said to Dar Oakley. Come from someplace else?
Across the sea, Dar Oakley said.
Across the what?
Never mind, said the Crow. Far away.
For a long while then the two regarded one another, the same thought within each, neither knowing how to ask the question. Dar Oakley thought of saying, Mostly we don’t live so long, we animals. But instead he said, That was your family I saw?
Them? Oh yes. The wife and pups.
Had many?
You tell me, Crow, the Coyote said, amused. You tell me about all your bird-chicks and all the mates you’ve had back to the beginning, and I’ll tell you where we are and why we’re talking here.
So Dar Oakley did.
The light, neither dawn nor day, didn’t change. They neither ate nor hungered. Dar Oakley didn’t need to be told where he was. It was where they were while they were what they are: where the stories he told and that Coyote told could be told, and be heard. Coyote listened with care, big ears pricking now and then, gaze drifting away across the surroundings. When he reached the beginning and was done the Coyote said, So you stole this thing. The precious thing.
Yes.
And you’ve had it ever since.
Yes.
Can’t die unless you touch it again, but who knows how or when that would be.
Yes.
If ever.
Yes.
And they hated you for stealing it.
Yes, Dar Oakley said. In hearing the Coyote say that—they hated you for stealing it—Dar Oakley thought it himself for the first time, and thought that it was true.