Changer (Athanor) (2 page)

Waiting, he weeps within, chides himself for not relocating the den, for not keeping a tighter watch on where the young female roamed.  With little reason, ranchers hate and fear coyotes; there are few places coyotes can live that do not infringe on human territories.  Once again, the coyotes have lost and with them so has the Changer.

Then he hears a faint sound, a whimper and a scrabbling.  In two bounds he is at the entry to the den.  The smell of blood and urine almost covers another scent.

Aware of his danger should the two humans return, he forces head and shoulders into the den.  The entryway is tight, dug for his mate’s slimmer build, but he can make his way.  In the dim light from the second entry, he sees a chubby form blindly trying to dig its way into the dirt at the back of the burrow.

It is his daughter, the runt, the smallest and weakest of the litter.  Small to begin with, unable to compete fairly with the others, she had not grown as quickly; now her littleness has been the saving of her life.

With his teeth he drags her from the hollow in which she had taken refuge from the searching gig.  Mother and siblings dead, she would have died of starvation or fallen prey to owl, fox, or hawk if he had not found her.

Quickly now, the dog coyote hauls his daughter into the sunlight.  Her whimpering increases when she sees the skinned bodies of the others.  First he must get away and wait for darkness.  Then he will consider what to do next.

As he is ascending the hill into safer ground, he freezes at a flicker of motion down where the pasture meets the highway.  Thinking it might be more humans, perhaps the same two returning, he sets down his daughter and watches.

The two ranchers have ridden to meet someone in a car, someone who hands them money in exchange for the raw pelts and the bloody, dripping sack.  Their bodies keep him from seeing who is in the car, but here the smell of death does not so dominate.

Through the clear air, the dog coyote catches a new scent, one that registers with the dormant portion of his mind, a smell that recalls flowers and musk, seductive and artificial.

A growl rumbles in his throat, a growl so furious that his daughter rolls on her back, pissing in submission and fear.  He ignores her, his entire attention focused in a very uncoyote-like fashion on gathering information.  When the car pulls away, he memorizes the license number.  Then he watches until the two horsemen stop at a ranch where they clearly reside.

Now is not the time, but soon he will have some calls to make, some questions to ask, and, quite possibly, some deaths of his own to arrange.

Elsewhere, in a clean but cheap motel room, a whippet-thin, sharp-featured, red-haired man punches an unlisted number into a telephone.  That the number is not only unlisted but the connection impossible delights him.  He has a fondness for amulets and charms, for tools of all sorts that permit him to expand his own eclectic but not terribly powerful talents.

After a series of chimes, soft and high, like a crystal goblet tapped with a silver filament, a voice speaks, deep and resonant, in cadences pedantic: “Greetings to you, fire-born, fire’s self, flickering fastness, impossible imp.”

The red-haired man sighs.  “Can’t you just say ‘Hi, Sven’?”

“Without body, with naught but mind, I make shape, shapeless one, from words, from fancy.”

“We’re working on fixing that, buddy,” Sven says.  “I’ve pinpointed where the Changer is hiding.  He’s definitely in New Mexico, out in the Salinas District.  All the portents indicate that he’s living as a coyote.”

“Salinas?  So salt calls sea-born master of shapes, such said I when searching started.”

“You said you thought he was near an
ocean
,” Sven retorts sarcastically.  “New Mexico is about as different from an ocean as you can get: hot and dry, cold and dry, mountainous and dry.  I don’t think anyone could mistake it for an ocean.”

Sven’s auditor maintains a dignified—or perhaps offended— silence and, after a moment, Sven continues: “When I get him— and that’s not going to be easy, let me remind you—I’ll try to get you your pound of flesh.”

An indignant hrumph precedes the inevitable alliteration: “Embodied blood, not flaccid flesh is what sorcery seeks to build bodies.  Ocular oracles so ordain.”

“I know,” Sven says.  “I’ll try not to harm the Changer.  I have plans to use him against another of my targets.  When they’ve worn each other out, then I’ll catch him for you.”

“Seize swiftly, this one, oldest of us all.”

“I’ve promised, haven’t I?” Sven retorts.  “In any case, I have a lot going on right now.  Revolution isn’t easy to manage.”

“Easier,” his cohort reminds him, “when alongside I stand.”

Sven nods as if the creature on the other end of the phone could see him—as perhaps he can.

“I haven’t forgotten.  I’ll check back in a few days.”

“Farewell, fire’s friend.”

“Bye.”

Hanging up, Sven considers what to do next.  He needs to make a bunch more calls tonight, uplink to his website, then continue scouting for the Changer.  Quickly he punches the extension for the motel restaurant and orders a snack.  No rest for the wicked, his mother might have said—if he’d ever had a mother.  To be perfectly honest, he doesn’t remember.

The gap in his memory doesn’t bother him a great deal.

The night following the deaths of his mate and pups, the dog coyote sits on a rough, rocky hilltop about five miles from where his former den had been.  Superficially, the area is exposed, but given his current situation, it is far preferable to where he had denned before.  

Humans and their creatures do not care for these places.  The bristly foliage of piñon, juniper, and four-wing saltbush do not offer grazing, only shade.  The mica-flecked sand slips under boots or all but the cleverest hooves.  Nor do the creatures who often reside in such copses invite visitors: biting ants, rattlesnakes, millipedes, scorpions.  Not that a coyote is particularly fond of such crawlers and biters, but he knows how to scent them, to avoid them.

Here he takes his motherless daughter for protection.  An old ground-squirrel burrow can be enlarged enough to hide a scrawny whelp such as she, and, regardless of what other ways in which she may be a poor excuse of a coyote, she is a survivor.  She is the last of his family, the last except for the scattered litters of other years, most of whom are most probably dead already.  There are reasons that coyotes litter six pups a year.

Scratching behind his right ear with a rear leg, the dog coyote contemplates the moon, considers what he must do.  That teasing scent on the wind has given to him to believe that the deaths of his family were not merely vermin extermination, but were murder.  The humans who did the kills might or might not have known what they did.  This is something he must resolve.

But before he can do this, he must do other things, things that are tangled in with yet other things.  His mind is not a coyote’s mind, for all that it resides in a coyote’s brain, but even his other-than-coyote mind rebels from the complexities he must resolve before he can do the simple thing of asking the two ranchers why they slew his family.

First there is his daughter.  At least she is no longer so dependent on nursing.  He can take many shapes, but they are all male.  Mother’s milk is the one thing he cannot give her.  Although she is just reaching the age where she would be learning to hunt, she cannot be expected to do so for herself.  

Scrawny as she is, she is still vulnerable to numerous predators.  Accident could also claim her: a fall, a chance encounter with a rattler, poison, or bad water.  No, whatever he does, he must make provisions for her.

Abandoning her does not even occur to him.  She may have been the runt of this litter, but she is his daughter and has claim on his protection for at least her first year.  And, in all honesty, he no longer thinks of her as the poorest example of this year’s pups.  Her attempt to avoid the wire gig rather than giving in to terror has won his admiration.

So he must provide for her.  For several days, she should be safe enough on this scrubby hilltop.  He will regurgitate food for her and warn her to stay near the ground squirrel’s burrow.  Having learned the practical uses of caution, she should obey.

Next, he must consider how to confront the humans.  Unlike other of the Earth’s inhabitants, humans only know how to converse as equals with other humans.  He tries to remember how long it has been since he lived as a human for any extended period of time and decides that it has been about fifty years.  During that time there have been many changes, changes he has observed but not taken part in.  Still, if he does not claim too much, he should be able to pass himself off as a human.

Now things become difficult.  He can take human form, but human society demands things that he cannot shape from his own body: clothing, money, transportation, personal history.  His exasperated growl sends his daughter, who had been battling a twig, scuttling into the ground squirrel’s burrow.  

A moment later, her little black nose peeks up over the edge, sniffing vigorously for sign of whatever had annoyed her father.  Turning his mind back to his problems, he lets her decide for herself when it is safe to come forth.  It is a lesson she will need to learn.

Bright and laughing, the moon stares down at him, offering him a partial solution.  Her face shines over more than this hilltop; her gaze encompasses the ranch house and the pastures.  Although the Changer has no form that can fly as high as the moon, he can take other forms, something he has been resisting until he knows better what he needs.  

Now he admits that what he needs will not be found on this hilltop.  Nor will he find what he desires in coyote form.  Reluctantly, for he has loved being coyote as he has loved only a handful of other forms, he reaches for a new shape.

“WHAT HAS THE KING EVER DONE FOR YOU?” ask words printed in red on a sheet of canary yellow paper.

The envelope containing this flyer had been delivered to a rural mailbox at the edge of a large tract of forested land in Oregon, bordering on Umatilla National Forest.  No one ever saw the person or persons to whom this mailbox belonged.  Much of the mail was simply addressed to “Box Holder” but some was sent to “Mr. and Mrs. Trapper” or to “J.Q. Fuzzy.”

The letter carrier knew that a week or more could pass before the box was emptied.  Then the junk mail would be sorted into a bag neatly labeled “Please Recycle.”  Sometimes a stack of boxes waited for pickup.  Often a small envelope containing five or ten dollars “For Your Troubles” would be attached.

Today the sheet of canary yellow paper is almost dropped into the recycling bag without a careful reading, but a hairy hand reaches out and intercepts it before it can fall.

“Wait,” says a voice, distinctly female for all its guttural inflection.  “I want to read that.”

The creature that takes the letter cannot be called a woman.  She is too hairy—furry might be a better word—and as muscular as a professional football player.  She is also at least six feet tall.  Next to her husband, who towers over seven feet in height and is covered with thick, coarse reddish brown fur,  she is a dainty thing.  With her silky black coat and delicately pointed head, she knows herself a young and beautiful representative of her kind.