Dancing Dogs (7 page)

Now, it took him and Kipper but a half hour to walk the pasture, and then they were done for the day. And the only sounds were the lonely cries of the sheep, the wind, and the distant sounds of trucks whining along faraway highways.

A
BOUT TWENTY-FIVE YARDS AHEAD
of him, he saw what Kipper had seen, and he froze. It was a beautiful, awful thing—a huge coyote caught in the barbed wire and woodpile that James had dumped there. This coyote was different than some of the scrawny ones he had seen over the years. He was enormous, his ruff thick. His eyes were large, intense, almost fluorescent. Those piercing gray eyes stared coolly right into his.

James saw the animal had struggled—he was bloody all over. But he was no longer fighting now. He was either resigned to his fate or else completely exhausted. He showed no fear, no desire to run. He didn’t bare his teeth or growl.

As he looked closer, James saw a trickle of blood coming from one of his nostrils. He had been in the wire a long time. This, James thought, might be the one picking off his sheep. He had seen those tracks, and they were large.

James could tell the coyote was old. He could see it in his eyes and in his white muzzle. He had a quiet dignity about him—James had seen so many animals panic, but this one seemed poised, ready for whatever might come.

James couldn’t leave this creature to die like that in the wire. He couldn’t let him walk away or escape, either, to kill
his sheep, or the animals of some other farmer. The rules were clear.

“Let’s go back, Kipper. We have to get the rifle.”

Kipper would be no match for this coyote if things went wrong and the animal got loose. Border collies were workers, not fighters. The fact that Kip had only three legs didn’t seem to slow him down at all. He had worked every day of his life, including the day when he mistook Peter Elmer’s tractor coming down the hill for a sheep and tried to herd it into the pasture, where he thought it belonged. It was his first failure as a working dog, and it cost him a leg, chewed up in the mower blades. After that, there had been some awkward moments with the sheep, when Kipper couldn’t quite pivot and turn like he used to, but he quickly recovered, and he was still smarter and faster than any of the dozen or so Tunis sheep that James still kept on the farm. But James had seen Kipper nearly get killed countless times—kicked by donkeys and cows, tangled in barbed wire, chasing after trucks and tractors, butted by rams and sheep. He had no doubt the dog would throw himself into the coyote’s jaws if it went after James or threatened the farm or the sheep.

James called sharply to the dog and began to head back to the farmhouse. Kipper kept turning around, then moving reluctantly down the hill, keeping himself between the coyote and James at all times.

B
EFORE THE FARM WOUND DOWN
, James had lost a lot of sheep to coyotes, and he was always trying to figure out what to do about it. He never quite had.

He could electrify the fence, which was expensive. But
James was no longer making any money from the farm. The old farmhouse was in urgent need of repairs to the roof and the plumbing, and the big barn was about to fall over into the road.

James hated coming out of the farmhouse in the morning and finding eviscerated carcasses scattered by the barn. In the old days, he would have sat out with a rifle and a big electric torch and picked off a couple of the coyotes. Or Kipper would have heard them coming and run them off. But Kipper, like James, didn’t hear as well anymore and didn’t move as fast. Nor did James want to put him at risk. The last carcass he wanted to find out on the hillside one morning was Kipper’s.

James wanted to tell Helen about the coyote trapped up in the wire. She had been dead nearly three years, but he still expected to find her standing in the kitchen somehow, his coffee and toast hot and ready, after his morning walk with Kipper.

He knew Helen would feel sympathy for the coyote—she didn’t take to hunters much—and say, “He’s just doing his work like you’re doing yours.” He knew she wouldn’t like the idea of his going up there to shoot him. She was nervous around guns.

But he was a farmer, and if something was threatening the farm, the farm came first.

James walked into the kitchen, Kipper alongside, and looked at Helen’s apron, still hanging on its hook. He couldn’t bear to take it down. Kipper jumped up onto the sofa and looked out the window, up into the pasture, where the coyote lay.

James touched Helen’s apron, remembering her last days, her last words, as she gripped his arm. “Oh, Luke,” she
said, calling out to their lost son, his life given for his country in a war James didn’t understand. “Oh, Luke.”

James always imagined that Helen had never quite forgiven him for Luke. James and the boy had never really connected. Luke grew up angry, resenting the farm, as if it had taken something from him. He never wanted a farming life, wanted to get away as soon as possible. Helen always said James was more patient with the animals than with his own son.

Luke had had a rough time as a teenager—drinking, fights, trouble in school. When he was arrested for shoplifting at a local department store, James told him he needed to go into the Army, because he thought it would be good for him. In James’s time, the Army was thought to build character. Somehow he missed that the world had changed. He didn’t see it until it was too late. Luke was killed in a helicopter crash in Vietnam, and Helen was never really the same. When she talked about the old men who sent the young ones off to die, he always felt she was talking about him.

James had never mentioned Luke after the funeral, not to Helen, not to anybody. Once a year, they went to the cemetery together, and he held her hand while she cried.

Then they found those lumps in her chest, and she was dead six months later.

Kipper was his only consolation, the only creature in the world, he thought, that he had never disappointed, and who always—always—would rather be with him than with anyone else.

J
AMES SHOOK OFF HIS MELANCHOLY
. He had a job to do. He went into the back closet and took out his old .30-06, his deer gun.
One quick round in the head ought to do it. Then the old bastard would not bother anybody’s sheep anymore. Though he was a beautiful animal, he had to admit that. He told Kipper to stay in the house—the dog was whining and rushing at the door, but he pulled it shut.

James checked the cartridges, slid one in, pulled the breech, checked the safety. He would get as close as he could, try to put one between the eyes, as he had done for rabid raccoons, wounded deer hit by cars, even a sick stray dog or two. Up here on the farm, this is what you did.

James’s legs throbbed, and he was sweating through his chamois shirt. The morning had started out cool, but the sun was strong now. Kipper, outraged to be left behind, was barking and protesting loudly from the house.

James opened the pasture gate and made his way up the hill, about a thousand yards on a gentle slope. He held the rifle safely, pointed down to the ground, but he had the safety off. He needed to be ready to shoot. He hoped he could shoot straight. It had been a few years since he had used the rifle, and his hands were not so steady.

At the top, behind a stand of pine trees, was the pile of wire and posts where the coyote had gotten himself snagged. James turned the corner and was startled to see that the coyote was closer to him than he expected, maybe five feet. Somehow, he’d thought he was farther back in the woods.

The coyote turned to him, looked calmly in his eyes, then looked down the hill. God, thought James, he was a sight, a regal thing. Especially up close. He had the most powerful eyes.

He knew what the coyote was looking at even before he heard the barking. Kipper was tearing up the hill, head down, ears back. James hadn’t checked the front windows,
he’d probably left one open. For that matter, he wouldn’t be surprised if the damned dog had gotten hold of some tools and unscrewed the hinges on the back door.

“Foolish dog,” said James as Kipper hopped up and stood beside him, giving the coyote a cold stare.

Kipper positioned himself between James and the coyote and lay down. The coyote met the dog’s stare, and James marveled again at how cool this creature was, how dignified, as if he were waiting for this, expecting it, not surprised at all to be confronted with an old farmer and his old dog. The dog, too, surprised him. He was calm, almost quiet, not frantic, or barking loudly, or even growling.

The three old dogs looked at one another.

The coyote raised his head, and James could see more blood caked on his neck. How he must have suffered, lying in that tangle. It reminded him of all those awful pictures of Jesus coming down off the cross.

Kipper was as still as James had ever seen him. By his position the dog seemed to say to the coyote,
As long as you stay away from him, I have no quarrel with you. But I will not move away from him, and you will have to go through me to get him
.

The coyote was lying on his side, his legs tangled in wire and his back and side resting on some bushes and posts. His stomach was moving up and down slowly. He lowered his head to rest on the top of a cracked old fence post, but he never took his eyes off James.

James held up the rifle, and the wind whistled up the hill and blew leaves among the three of them. He hoisted the gun up under his right arm, the butt on his shoulder, and took a step forward. He had the coyote’s forehead right in his sights. He could hardly miss.

But something held him there.

He lowered his rifle and he looked down at the farm that he loved so much, and that his father had loved so much, and his grandfather, and great-grandfather before him. At the handful of grazing sheep still there—soon to leave—and the rotting old barn and fading farmhouse and busted engines and cannibalized old trucks.

Then he raised the rifle again and sighted it on the coyote.

“What is it that happens to life?” he said out loud, to Kipper, “that it slips by so fast, and that we don’t see it go? What happened to my boy and my Helen? It was only yesterday that the three of us picnicked right here up on this hill, brought cheese sandwiches and fresh cider and we ate it right here.”

The wind came up again, and he heard Kipper whine and stir.

And through the gun sights, he swore he saw tears running from the beautiful creature’s big yellow-gray eyes, streaming down the side of his long gray pointed nose. He saw shadows on the ground, and he heard the leaves and grass rolling and rustling in the wind, and he looked back up at the big birds, already waiting to pick the wounded animal apart. They could smell blood a long ways off.

Then James felt hot tears running down his own face too. He raised his arm and wiped his eyes on his old flannel sleeve.

He pulled the trigger, and a cloud of birds lifted up right over his head; the sheep bolted and ran toward the shelter of the pole barn, and Kipper shivered.

James heard the sound of the shot reverberate and bounce off trees all through the valley, and he wondered if somebody would look up and come see. But he knew they
wouldn’t. It wasn’t an unusual thing around here, to hear a shot like that.

He lowered the rifle. He was done.

H
E WONDERED LATER
if he had moved his arm deliberately, or if he just wasn’t used to the gun anymore. He had shot high, tearing a huge chunk of bark off a nearby maple tree.

The coyote never flinched. His eyes were still locked on James. James felt light-headed, almost dizzy. The coyote’s eyes seemed to blaze, then blur. He heard the whispers:
Oh, Luke. Oh, Luke
.

James heard himself sobbing, short, deep gutteral cries, more animal-like than human. He hadn’t cried when Luke died. He hadn’t cried when Helen died. But he cried now, as if his grief were rising from a new well that had been dug up inside him, great piercing sobs that rolled across the pasture.

James dropped the gun. Kipper stepped ahead of him, and then James, all of the fear and hesitation gone, walked right up to where the coyote lay. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the cutter he always carried for the fences and began clipping the barbed wire away.

The coyote lay quietly panting, watching as, bit by bit, the cutters snipped until he was finally free. He rolled backward and down to the ground.

Kipper growled, and leaned forward. The coyote turned and locked his eyes on to Kipper, and for a second James thought his heart would explode right out of his chest.

He started to look for the gun where he’d dropped it, and then he stopped. James stepped back and called Kipper. Kipper sat down and waited, a few feet alongside of him, refusing the command to get back.

After a moment, the coyote struggled to his feet, shook his head as if to clear it. Then he turned, and looked at James, right in the eye. The strangest thing, he thought. He felt a shiver down his spine.

And the coyote was gone.

J
AMES HAD A LONG DREAM
about the coyote that night. He saw him looking up at the sky, rolling over, and lying still. He saw his eyes, still blazing in the moonlight. There was something powerful about them, almost radiant.

The next morning, James and Kipper came out for their morning chores. Up near the pasture, they saw the crows and buzzards circling at the top near the gate. James grabbed a shovel, and he and Kipper took a long walk up. It was a warmer day, less windy. The shovel was heavy by the time they got up to the mound of wire and fence posts.

They saw the birds under a pine tree fifty yards away, on the edge of the deep woods. The buzzards took off, complaining as Kipper and James came near. There, curled up under the tree, was the body of the coyote.

James took a swig from the thermos he had filled with ice water, and then he started to dig. He had to rest two or three times, and his blue work shirt became soaked with sweat. His hands blistered until they turned bloody. His boots chafed his feet, rubbing the skin raw. His knees and elbows throbbed in agony. But he kept digging, the mounds of soil growing along the sides of the trench. By noon, he had a hole dug deep enough to keep other predators out.