Around Them Slow
Dick set out on a Sunday morning with his favorite coyote hunting companions: his dog Lefty, his horse Saratoga, and his Remington .223. He brought a bottle of Wild Turkey in the saddlebag, to go with the autumn wind and the High Plains solitude.
The ranch house was quiet when Dick and his dog stepped into the dry Wyoming morning. The missus was drinking coffee, reading Time magazine while the suds sibilated over the grease-clotted plates in the sink. Outside the wind sighed over the prairie and into the dusty yard as the pair walked to the stables. The wind was all.
The stables were quiet. Dick bridled and saddled his horse. Sara' made smacking sounds accented by a faint chomping as he fed the bit over her front teeth. Bridle leather whispered over her ears. Saddle leather creaked and the tongue jingled in the cinch ring as he heaved the saddle over the blanket. It landed with a soft thud on 'Toga's withers. The cinch hissed across her coat as he fed the latigo through the ring and tightened it around her girth. Leading her out of the stall, hooves clomped softly on the packed dirt. Iron shoes clacked across the concrete threshold leaving the stables. Exiting the perimeter, the metal gate moaned on its hinges before it clanged shut behind them, signaling the end of the departure rites. The stirrup leather groaned a complaint as Dick pulled himself onto his horse.
There were a thousand issuances in this hushed ritual, but they were all subsumed into one noise, ancient and omnipresent, like the spirit of the earth itself. Every lesser sound was slowly consumed by it, quietly and whole, like a serpent swallowing an egg. The wind was all. It made a sound too. It went:
"Sssssssssssssssssiouxarapacrowshone".
Above them the sky was the kind of intense, electric blue that only occurs on mutable fall days. Dark grey cloud masses congealed in the corners of the heavens like scrimmaging ghosts in the huddle, with bright white edges near the cerulean spark of the sky. The wind produced a static charge as it snaked its way over the earth and nudged the trio of man, horse, and dog out onto the plains.
Dick didn't have to do anything but let his sixty-year-old body ease into the reassuring sway of the mare climbing the high prairie. It felt good, letting the horse do all the work, his heavyset frame and square, bespectacled cranium going along for the ride. It was a familiar feeling, like lifting off in a helicopter, or cresting the top of a hill in a pickup - his will, linked to another body doing the exerting. Holding the reins over the pommel in his right hand, he let the other rest on his thigh, clad in dark blue, thick-denim Wranglers. He stretched his legs and sat up in the saddle, shifting his weight forward into the stirrups where his goose-bumped ostrich skin ropers were lodged. That felt good too.
Lefty trotted beside the horse and rider, stimulated by the prairie smells wafting through his nostrils and brain - sagebrush, saltgrass, prairie dogs. The smells had a visceral effect on him. Somewhere in his genes he recognized the wild scent of undomesticated nature primeval. He was tethered to fifteen feet of braided polypropylene tied to Dick's saddle horn, off Saratoga's left shoulder. Aside from this, he was nearly indistinguishable from the canine his master was hunting for sport, and ostensibly to protect his chickens.
Dick relaxed back into the seat, and swiveled around to fish the pint of Wild Turkey from the saddlebag on 'Toga's left hip, wrapping the reins around the saddle horn where the end of Lefty's rope was tied as he did so. Saratoga walked on, oblivious. She could walk for miles like this, even if he were dead on her back. Sara' knew the way. The way was all. Her rider moved his bottle to the interior breast pocket inside the flannel lining of his jacket and took the reins again. Not yet.
A thousand yards across the range, a coyote hidden behind the sagebrush was eyeing his pursuers. He watched as the crossbreed pranced alongside his master's steed. He observed the spotted mare's steady gait and disinterested Appaloosa eyes. He saw Dick move the pint of whisky from the saddlebag to his coat. He saw the Remington in its scabbard. He remained still, and waited. Only the wind and the fur it rustled on his ears moved.
Here the High Plains leveled out and Saratoga relaxed her gait subtly to a slow walk. Dick did not compel her. They all recognized the flat stretch and settled into it. The human scanned the landscape for signs of life, quarry - anything to shoot. He considered taking the binoculars from the other saddlebag, but left them alone. All in good time. Save it. Now they rode into the wind. He felt it blow his coat tighter against his torso. He felt the whisky bottle on his chest.
Saratoga trudged on, burdened beast, of incomprehensible stamina and servitude to a creature of lesser size and busier mind. How did they do it, these horses, to go on conveying a fat human for miles without complaint or resistance, or even basic consciousness of their subjugation? There was nothing of the unbroken mustang in her, that the coyote could see. No wild eyes, no fiery nostrils panting or hoof a-stomp in the dust. No animal spirit; only fear, submission, and complacency. What would it take? Coyote remained still. He waited. The hunting party ambled steadily on, farther out on the plains.
Lefty was doing his best to romp within the limits of his leash. Here, he ran ahead and stopped to sniff the earth for a beat while the rider and horse caught up - two, three, four - and passed - six, seven. Then the rope began to tighten and he lifted his nose, inhaling shallowly, carrying the scent with him in the back of his nostrils. He savored it as long as he could until it began to dissipate and he snorted deeply, drinking it down into his lungs. There, he ran ahead again, jumping over junegrass and sagewort, frolicking against the free-flowing airstream, stooping again to catch the scent primordial. He executed a spin out of pure exhilaration, before the leash compelled him. And so he went, never too far ahead, not too far behind. Always on the left.
Dick had become thoroughly immersed in the ride. The beautiful, slowly evolving sameness of the landscape and the continuous, infinite variations of the wind lulled him into a pleasant trance. After time, he became cognizant of his reverie. He enjoyed the source of it a while longer, now conscious of it and one step removed from total immersion in it. Finally he began to grow restless amidst the perfection of his surroundings. The sun had reached and exceeded its zenith. He stood forward into the stirrups again, this time not so much for the pleasure of stretching the leather and feeling his weight in the balls of his feet, but to allow the blood to flow back into to his numbing hocks.
The monotony and anticipation had mounted to the appropriate level. He sat back in the saddle and shifted the reins to his left hand, wrapping the leather straps once around the saddle horn. He swiveled around, to the right this time, and reached into the saddlebag on that side for his field glasses. He spread the lens tubes open like he was breasting a dove. Forgetting the glasses he wore for farsightedness, he brought the rubber eyepieces of the binoculars to bump against his prescription lenses. Out of laziness he tried to look through them anyway. He adjusted the focus wheel and brought the distance into view. But, because of the interference from his spectacles, the two spheres of vision in the binoculars never quite coalesced into one, and he was left with a double visual, a Venn diagram of the world in which the overlapping portion was a slender, vertical eye-shaped patch of gray obscurity. Relenting, he put the binoculars down, removed his prescription lenses and returned the binoculars to his eyes, readjusting the focus. The parallel worlds inside gelled into one, no gray area. A distant scrub bush sprang up before his beady, hyperopic eyes.
With a steadying hand on the saddle horn, he lost himself in the world inside the field glasses -- the same plains-world of brush and grasses, hill and gully, only slightly ahead of him in time and space. Or slightly behind him, were he to look that way, or slightly beside him...
As he surveyed the land in the distance, searching closely for the predatory diversion that eluded his naked eyes -- a coyote, a jack rabbit, a bobcat, or maybe even just something interesting to look at, an eagle, perhaps -- he forgot himself, and began to list slightly in the saddle, enough that he had to right himself with his one true keel in the present world beneath him, the saddle horn. He put the glasses down. Seeing no compelling fauna on any horizon, not even the coyote, creeping alongside the prairie armada at about a thousand yards off the port stern, Dick slipped the binoculars around his neck and let them hang there for the time being. He leaned forward into the pommel and gave Saratoga's shoulder a reassuring pat. "Good giiiirl," he said. When he leaned back, he replaced his spectacles with the hand that had been gripping the saddle horn. At last, he reached inside his breast pocket for the Wild Turkey.
Coyote, of course, noticed this from afar. He could smell the Turkey vapors in the wind when Dick popped the seal and took a whiff of the bottle before having a snort. He detected the scent of broken horse and domestic dog, of aftershave, polypropylene synthetic rope fiber, gun oil and tanned leather conveyed downwind to him. Still carefully hidden, though not quite so cautious as he had been while Dick assessed the land through his specs, Coyote rose up off his haunches slowly, imperceptibly, such that one could only be certain he had moved at all in that one moment he was standing where several earlier he had been crouching. He watched as horse, rider and canine inched ahead of him. Coyote's lips retracted and his jaws parted, briefly flashing his teeth up to the corners of his mouth. A single pant issued from his throat. He closed his lips, and crept stealthily ahead to play catch-up.
Lefty, meanwhile, was going berserk. The scent of the wild had gotten right on top of him. He was spinning multiple circles as he ran ahead of Dick and Saratoga, shoving his nose down prairie dog holes, barking at ravens, and generally cavorting like a wolf pup with his littermates on the first day of spring. At one point Dick had to give a yank on the rope to stop him from soiling himself in some carrion the buzzards had forsaken. Too late, the stench of death was upon him. He reveled in it. He was baptized in filth. But for one tenuous, plastic connection to man, he had broken the surly bonds of domesticity. He floated around the saddle horn like a kite on a string.
Dick was beginning to float a little himself. The whisky, which he had so ascetically denied himself in order to relish the anticipation and sweeten the indulgence, warmed first his throat and belly and then spread outward slowly, like sun-warmed moss on the limbs of a tree. The spirits began to take hold. His horse plodded on faithfully beneath him. Always reliable, he thought, the truck taking the wheel, the ship taking the helm.
As far as Saratoga was concerned, the wheel was always hers. She let Dick take the reins like a mother lets her son take the wheel in her lap. The course she felt it in her to follow was as much a part of her as the wind was the range. Like the wind, her spirit was mild enough most times that Dick could tread against it, but sometimes... well, sometimes you just can't walk against the wind. You can harness a horse like you can harness the wind. They'll both take you where you want to go, so long as where you want to go is where they're aiming to take you. Otherwise, you pull a wayward horse in one direction, but her legs will just keep pumping in the other as long as she pleases. The reins might bow her neck to starboard, but she'll keep drifting to port. When it came down to it, bridle or not, you could no more steer a horse against its will than you could steer a ship straight into the wind. Tack across it and she'll take you somewhere, but you're really just altering your course in order to fight against hers, expending your own energy to harness a fraction of hers. It might seem like you were bending her will to yours, but really, you were bending to hers, and she would just go on drifting where she pleased.
With Saratoga, it so happened she was on the same heading as Dick was most of the time, and it was fine by her if Dick went along for the ride. Heavy as he was, he was nothing to her. She was oblivious to any notions Dick had about leading her, let alone to any of Dick's secret, drunken musings about centaurs and the human-animal bond. She let him lead her, like a tugboat leads the freighter out of the harbor. She ported in the stable while Dick slept in the house, she fed in the pasture while Dick ate at the table, and they rode the prairie in the same direction. So long as that was the way they were both going, they would both be content. Sara' knew the way. The way was all. She could give two giant horseshits if Dick was getting sauced in the saddle.
Sara' stooped to crop some wheatgrass. Dick always allowed her enough rein to eat and drink when he wrapped the ends around the saddle horn, lest she get ornery and pull them from the horn herself. Better to give her plenty of slack.
A song swam into Dick's head, and he sang it to himself and the prairie, an offering to the wind:
I ride an old Paint, I lead an ol' Dan
I'm off to Montan', for to throw the hoolihan
Saratoga's footfalls kept up the rhythm. Dick carried on:
They feed in the coulees, they water in the draw
Their tails are all matted, their backs are all raw
And louder, the refrain:
Ride around, little dogie, ride around them slow
For the fiery and snuffy are raring to go
Then, just the melody, he hummed:
Doo da doo dee-doo dee doo doo , doo dee-doo dee-doo,
Da da doo doo, da-doo doo, da da doo, dee-doo dee-doo
And then the wind. Always the wind.
Coyote had described a semicircle as far upwind of the hunting party as he could venture without running the risk of Lefty catching his scent. His profile, however, was brazen. About half a mile out, it was possible to discern the silhouette of pointy ears and sitting hindquarters. They were the same color as the clouds behind them, which were beginning to seep into the sky overhead and taint the cobalt with shades of gray. He waited. He watched Dick sway in the saddle and listened to him sing. He even joined in on the chorus, quietly.
There was the distant report of thunder echoing behind the mountain range on the horizon. The hair on Saratoga's mane bristled slightly. Then the wind. It was changing directions. The horse and rider were not. Coyote rose off his hind legs and cantered further ahead, crooning to himself under his breath.
Dick sang on too, pausing to pull a sliver off a piece of dried jerky he had forgotten about in his front pocket. He washed it down with a pull of Turkey, and resumed:
When I die, take my saddle off the wall
Strap it on my pony, lead'm out of the stall
Tie my bones to his back, point our faces to the west
And we'll ride the prairie... that we love the best
Ride around little doggie, ride around 'em slow...
He pulled another strand of beef jerky off with his teeth and offered it down to Lefty, who was too distracted to notice at first. Dick whistled to him. Still Lefty was preoccupied with the fragrance of the prairie. Finally, Dick made a kissing sound with his lips and the dog looked up from his business, eyed the meat, and came prancing over. Dick tossed it into his waiting jaws.
Oh Lefty, Sweet Friend of Man, incapable of resisting the outstretched hand, like his ancestors who had followed the nomadic tribespeople across the land, eating their waste, their droppings, their leavings, sometimes the coveted animal bone or strand of muscle sinew that went unutilized. Eventually his wild forefathers grew bolder in their yen for food, and approached closer to the camps, and the humans took notice. It was only a matter of time before the hunter-gatherers were deliberately tempting the dogs closer with their offerings. And the canines approached, cautiously at first. Then routinely. Then comfortably and complacently. The specter of famine was vanquished.
The dogs entered a covenant with man, bartering absolute freedom for freedom from hunger. And the covenant-makers were inextricably linked with man. While their feral kin stalked the plains and forests with unconditional sovereignty, often with empty bellies, it was incumbent on the covenanters to help the humans, to compete with their untamed brethren for food, and to protect man from the wild in times of confrontation. For it was now their food they were helping him hunt, and their food source they were protecting.
But there was something more. Something... unspoken -- what? The dogs could hunt for their own food, and cut out the middleman, literally, could they not? There was man's intellect, his cunning, which, coupled with the canine's instincts, led them both to more food. Two species were somehow better than one. Yes, but this was natural, symbiosis. It was necessary, unavoidable, inexorable. No, there was something else that held them together, something unnecessary, that had nevertheless evolved.
Man seemed to like his dogs. He seemed to enjoy them for something beyond the mutually beneficial biological imperative to find, hunt, and retrieve food. He seemed... grateful. This was not at all surprising, for humans to become all... emotional about things. To appreciate, exalt, to anthropomorphize, to imbue objects in their environment with enhanced significance, to poeticize, rhapsodize, and mythologize, even deify and worship. No, what was truly exceptional about this relationship was that the dogs somehow came to appreciate man's company in return, and for something beyond the food.
Yes, there was something unspoken between them, for how can two species speak to one another? It is like crossing between worlds. How indeed. The men called it "friendship", "loyalty", and "companionship". The dogs called it "woof".
So, dogs all over the North American continent consented to human interaction - often revered, always respected by the people indigenous to their homeland. They bent to man's will, but man ultimately treated him kindly with food and admiration, so they didn't mind so much, say, pulling a man-sled across the Yukon for miles on ice-bitten paws, or occasionally sacrificing one of their lives guarding the two-legged's camp from a band of marauding wolves during the night. The covenant held, and was reciprocal. Man gave a piece of food for a helper-companion. The dogs gave a piece of their freedom for a piece of his food.
Enter Dick's ancestors. "Civilized man". "Agrarian society". "Stationary". "Settlers". If only. They migrated across the seas from their plundered world, some spoiled Eden. They brought with them their own domestic canines. They brought with them the horse, the ox, and the ass as well, the four-legged steak and the dairy cow, and of course, Coyote's favorite, the chicken. But the Europeans' relationship with their animals was different. They were often little more than furry feathered tools to him. Breeds to be crossed and manipulated to suit his needs. Beasts of burden. Herders. Fetchers. Producers of milk and eggs. The dog and the horse stood out to this race of man as exceptionally loyal and intelligent tools, but on the whole they were never revered like the native dogs of America. At best they were appreciated and coddled, patted and stroked. At worst they were brutalized and beaten, often worked to death. But they had all, the dogs of both worlds, submitted to the human under the same initial gesture: the outstretched palm.
Lefty remembered the outstretched hand, unlike many of his kind, who were simply born into the human covenant. He had first seen it when he was a pup, starving in the north wind. His mother's body had grown stiff and frozen on the side of the highway, thrown from the pickup bed when their keeper's truck slid off the road just outside the Wind River Reservation, killing one dog and one man.
In its recent history, Lefty's lineage had vacillated between ferine and domestic tendencies. His mother was a Coydog - half coyote, domesticated. One of his father's littermates was the offspring of a male wolf. Lefty could have gone either way in his state of abandonment after the death of his mother. He also could have frozen. As fate would have it, the blizzard winds brought him salvation in the form of a man, one who happened upon the overturned truck. A gloved palm reached into the cab of the pickup, scooped the pup out from under the dashboard, thrust him inside a coat breast, and took him to the cab of another pickup. The next time Lefty saw the outstretched hand it was in Dick's kitchen, coaxing him across the linoleum with a piece of cooked chicken.
The clouds were cumulus now, looming overhead like spectral linebackers, and Dick was beginning to consider turning back. They were nearing the point that turning tail any later meant arriving home well after nightfall, a prospect Dick didn't relish. The cold palm of the wind pressed against the back of his jacket as he considered this. Dick's pint bottle was nearly empty. He screwed the cap on, looked at it, thought twice, and drained the last of the firewater. He pulled back on the reins briefly, and invited Sara' to rest. She accepted his offer. Then he picked up his binoculars, remembering to remove his glasses first this time.
The two orbs inside the binoculars coalesced into one, but only when he settled on one object and concentrated. Otherwise he was too drunk to see straight. Before he turned his party back into the wind for the journey home, he scanned the range one last time for good measure. When he trained the specs directly in front of him, straight over Saratoga's neck, he made out two pairs of pointy ears and four resting haunches. As the two globular images pooled into focus, it nearly startled him off his horse. He could've sworn he saw Coyote flash a devilish grin.
Dick dropped the glasses and scrambled for his rifle in the scabbard, fumbled with the zipper, and cursed the skies under his breath. He caught himself panicking, and tried to calm down. Slowly, he unzipped the scabbard and carefully withdrew the rifle, butt-first. When he raised it slowly to his cheekbone and peered through the scope, he saw Coyote again, staring directly back at him through the telescopic sight. His head was cocked slightly to one side, his snout pointed up at the clouds, where his eyes darted briefly before fixing themselves on Dick again, like two yellow-and-brown agates. There was still something like a smile on his black lips, which seemed to be mouthing something at him.
While Dick and Coyote were engaged in their long-range Mexican standoff, Lefty began to sense something was afoot. Though Coyote was still downwind, invisible to Lefty's nose, Dick's behavior and the fact that Saratoga had come to a halt were beginning to agitate him. He wanted to gambol ahead, in the direction of whatever was captivating their attention. He pulled at the rope ahead of Sara', and sniffed after the wind. He began to whimper. He whined. He yelped. He was dying to move on. He resented his limitations and wished the horse could match his enthusiasm for progress. She would not.
Dick, meanwhile, was completely flummoxed. It wasn't just that he was having trouble steadying the crosshairs between the coyote's pectorals, or the creeping paranoia that he was becoming subject to hallucinations. Here was this varmint, the professed excuse for his entire Sunday excursion, the scourge of the henhouse, finally in his sights, taunting him with eyes and mouth, and he couldn't pull the trigger. He felt like Elmer Fudd flustered by the cross-dressing rabbit. Something wasn't quite right. He was simultaneously attracted and hesitant. Compelled yet suspicious, like wild game at the feeder. And all the while that song, that earworm that wouldn't stop gnawing, he kept incanting, beyond his will:
Ride around little dogie, ride around them slow
The Fiery and Snuffy...
Coyote watched them all inside the riflescope, and waited.
...Are raring to go
Lefty strained against the leash with all he had. He pawed the dirt with all fours, and when that proved futile, he leaned against the rope on his hind legs with all the weight in his front half hovering parallel to the ground. Saratoga stood rooted like an oak stump. The saddle horn gave slightly in deference to Lefty's strain, but she did not. And then, as they say, something strange happened.
Flash-Boom! Lefty was suddenly free. The leash was still knotted around his collar, but he found himself rushing forward, unencumbered, towards Coyote, the wind at his back. After the first twenty yards of dead sprint, he could actually see Coyote, and he yelped like a raider. At the same moment he also saw Saratoga, with wild eyes and flaring nostrils, overtaking him. He kept up with her for a few breathtaking strides, exhilarating in the chase. He had never raced an Appaloosa after a coyote before, after all. And then, the wind. It was taken from him.
Coyote saw it all. He saw it from before, 'hind, after, and above. What the three plains trespassers witnessed only in broken fragments shattered by fear, excitement, and disbelief, the prairie dweller had seen coming from miles away. He saw it unfold absolutely, and from a distance.
Dick had finally fixed a bead on Coyote. He leveled his Remington straight down Sara's neck and between her ears where Coyote stood expectantly, completely exposed. He took a deep breath and began to let it out slowly, the wind carrying it away from him like leaves on a stream. He squeezed the trigger as he did so. The earworm burrowed deeper.
The Fiery and Snuffy...
Coyote's eyes bored straight down the barrel.
...Are raring to go
Over the prairie, a finger of lightning alit on the plains. Peals of thunder reverberated like the wings of some giant bird beating over the earth. When the filament sparked, Coyote could see its reflection dilate in Saratoga's pupil. Her mane bristled and she jostled her legs. A split second later, with the first clap of thunder, she reared her head.
The breath was halfway out of Dick's lungs, the trigger tight. He let the hammer surprise him. It did. There was an eternal moment between the pin-click and detonation. By the time the firearm discharged, he was reeling sideways off his mount, and Saratoga was rearing her head towards the muzzle.
The powder-thunder was deafening, closer than anything Sara had ever experienced on the range. It was inside her head. It whipped her ears. A crop of fear lashed her flanks and she took off with a start.
Dick fell, and fell. He fell some more. Slow motion. Cinematic. Submarine. It was eight feet from the top of his head when he was still in the saddle to the ground where the prairie slapped his cheek. When he did finally land, there was another eternal moment where he craned his neck around and stared at his roper wedged in the stirrup. Then time resumed, this time in overdrive, and he was being dragged across the plains at an accelerated rate. He tasted dirt as the rangeland behind him receded into a cloud of dust. He clawed the earth, straining to get free.
By the time Saratoga overtook Lefty, Dick's foot had pulled loose from his boot in the stirrup. Jettisoning the weight of man, she flew like a hysterical Pegasus on startled wings, one ostrich skin roper still lodged in the stirrup, flapping against her flank. Lefty just could not keep up. For a glorious second, the two beasts galloped together, and Lefty ran as free as he had ever run on the open range. Then, the horse pulled ahead without saying goodbye, the rope pulled taut, and this time he could not frolic ahead of her and reclaim the slack. The collar constricted around his windpipe, his legs churned, stumbled, and dragged, and his nose hit the prairie. He imagined himself being charioted away to some happy chasing ground in the sky as his senses went black and finally, his lifeless body was spirited off with the wind. It shuddered as the horse dragged it over tufts of saltgrass and sage, and left a trail of dust.
Saratoga pumped her legs furiously. Lightning still flashed in her eyes. She felt something nipping at her heels, something light and barely perceptible, but something nonetheless, threatening to anchor her down. She thundered right past Coyote unawares, a one-horse stampede, inches from his shoulder. Coyote didn't flinch. He did not shudder. He stared straight ahead at Dick, moaning in the brush, one stockinged foot twitching in the wind. The wind was all.