Fish Tails (66 page)

The voices from below got louder. The men were looking at what they were doing, they didn't look up. Coyote eased himself forward so he could put his long nose over the edge and use both eyes. The stone was as dark as his fur. If he didn't move, if he kept perfectly still, chances were they could look right at him and not see him.

They were working around a . . . built thing. How would he tell Abasio about it? He had to find words in his “compatible vocabulary.” First, it was lying flat on the floor. It looked like a . . . kind of gate made out of metal. Bars very close together going one way, another set going the other way like . . . like Xulai's grill over the fire!
Grill!
The grill thing was lying flat, and under it was a curved shininess. It looked like a bowl, like Xulai's big bowl she made green food in. He yawned and closed his eyes. Just for a minute.

Coyote had never figured out why men ate green food all the time. Coyotes ate green food only when they had pain in the middle. Abasio said dogs did, too. Horses, sheep, and goats and other creatures like them ate green food all the time, but why did men eat green food? The thing down below looked like Xulai's bowl for green food, only this one was metal. Xulai's bowl was made of clay baked in an oven, and he, Coyote, was not to stick his nose into it. Said Xulai.

He was dozing off again! Hunger could do that. Make you sleepy. His head jerked up. The two stinkers with the bows were being let out of the pen, and they came over to the inside edge of the bubble, the part Coyote couldn't see. After a little while there was a splash! There was water back there! Then he saw others with bows, more like the first ones. He counted them on his feet, one double front foot, two double front feet, that was two eyes, then one double back foot, two double back . . . no. Almost two double back feet but one was missing. That was one face of double feet. Abasio would help him figure it out. All his feet one face around except one missing, and THAT was the dead one, for sure. All of the hunters got to go wherever the splash was.

At one of the pens, the man with the pack was pushing at the stinkers with the long rod thing that had something like two fingers on the end of it. No. Finger and thumb. Like pinching. The human said something loud. The creature in the pen took its clothes off. Each one had a shirt-­jacket top that wrapped around and fastened, trousers that tied in front, and boots. That was all. The man took each thing and laid it next to the pen. The clothes were black inside. Like the cloth Abasio used to cover the chicken coops to keep them from getting wet.

Coyote felt his nose wrinkling again, felt his ears flatten, the way they always did when he saw something nasty or dangerous. Without their clothes the stinkers were . . . were just . . . nasty! The naked one howled: a foot-­in-­the-­mouth-­complain-­roar. Not pain. Like he had his head in a hole. The human pushed at him with the long rod, making him move out onto the grill. The thing's feet didn't go through! So there had to be something else on top of the grill, something he couldn't see from up here. The grill thing was holding up something else. Maybe mesh. “Mesh” was the word for the stuff on the chicken coops. With its clothes off, the stinker looked like a ball of white fat with darker worms in it. Dirty white with squirmies. Nasty!

Some things were nasty for Coyotes, even though Xulai said she'd never seen anything nasty enough that a Coyote wouldn't eat it. Abasio had told her that was an insult, so she apologized. It was not a proper apology. She didn't lie down, belly up, and whine while he sniffed her, so it was NOT a proper apology. It was only a human apology, just saying “sorry.” Coyote would rather Xulai had lain down belly up so he could give her a good sniff, but female humans were funny about being sniffed.

His head jerked. He'd been dozing again! Sniff dreaming. He wondered if other creatures dreamed in smells. He did not want to sniff that thing on the grill. Water came out of the end of the rod the man was holding. Steam billowed out, so it could be hot water. That was why they wore those long coats! The human was washing the white stuff off the stinker. The white stuff was falling on the grill in thick chunks; then it got soft and dripped down into the bowl while the stinker turned around and around, making a kind of wolf-­owl-­eagle noise, like two pieces of metal rubbed together howl-­screech-­scream on and on while the stuff on it came off and dripped down. Off its head, too. It didn't have any of the stuff on its face or feet or hands. Everywhere else, though.

With the white stuff off, he looked like a human man, more or less. If the flabby, dangly part in front worked the way it did in humans, this stinker was a male. That part was not tidy. Coyote liked that word. “Tidy.” Neat. Coyotes had neat ones. Dogs did, too. Horses, sometimes, except when they got all excited and then they were just disgusting. Like puppy poop dangling all the way to the ground! Humans' parts were no better, at least men's parts weren't. That's why they had to wear clothes. It would be very painful crawling over rocks or through thornbushes with that dangly thing hanging there. And women's baby-­milk parts! Why didn't they shrink back neatly when the puppies . . . babies were weaned? No, they stayed dangly, just like men's parts, and they had to wear clothes. They didn't have fur. Naked skin with no fur made no sense at all. Except for frogs. And fish.

Coyote stayed where he was while the next one was washed off. This one had no dangly part. Maybe it had breasts, he couldn't tell with the general flabbiness. And it was round! Like it had pups inside! Coyote gagged. More of them? The whole world needed none of them, not more of them! And here came the stink! Coyote saw it rising up toward him. A kind of gray cloud in the air. All the ­people down there had masks over their faces, masks with tubes and things over their noses. Coyote had only his paws to put over his. It wasn't bearable! He turned and trotted back down the tunnel. The air was flowing up the tunnel toward the cavern! Abasio said hot air went up, so the air in the cavern was warmer, right, and the hot water made it warm, too, and it went up and out that hole at the top. That's why they had the fire! To make the air go up! And the air from the tunnel would flow up behind it! It was going past him, now, on its way out. It would be unbearable only if he put his nose over the edge. He sometimes wished he had a face like Abasio's. Abasio would be able to put his eyes over without putting his nose over!

On the other hand, Abasio couldn't smell anything. Coyote didn't know why human ­people even bothered with noses. They weren't designed very well. The man said men were made in the image of their deity. Whoever made the deity ought to be ashamed! “Ashamed” was what pups felt when they soiled the den and got nipped for it. Humans ought to be ashamed with noses like that.

He lay quietly, head on paws, facing away from the opening as he dozed, the sounds from below telling him the washing was going on, variations in howls telling him different ones were being . . . washed. Some voices were more howl-­y—­female maybe? If the round one was having . . . young ones, it meant the things mated. Coyote gagged. The idea make him feel like he'd eaten grass.

Eventually, the howling stopped. A very loud metal clang brought him back to the hole. The stink cloud had gone out through the top, and something was sliding out under the grill. It went out until it covered the bowl and dropped with a
whoosh-­clang
sound. The wagon door went
whoosh
. The kettle lid went
clang
. So this was a big lid! With the bowl covered, the smell was . . . not so bad, and after a bit it was almost gone, but there was a noise . . . Howling? Screaming? Very high and shrill, like the tiniest birds, only lots of them: maybe like a bunch of bugs yelling, many, many little tiny voices. Yes, like a . . . a huge swarm of those sting-­y ones: gnats! The pens were full of naked, washed stinkers covered with dark worms that sounded like gnats. Well, maybe not worms. Squirmy things. Skinnier than worms. Not as thin as hair, though. All over their bodies, these things that squirmed and wriggled and lashed about, screaming. Worm fur. That's what they were, worm fur! The men pushed the clothes through the bars. The stinkers smelled the clothes! They could identify their own clothes by smell! Coyote didn't believe anything that smelled that bad could smell anything else. He would ask Abasio for a word for that! When they all had clothes on, the noise stopped. The worms didn't like the light! That was why they screamed!

It was getting to be more than Coyote could remember. Everything he had seen had to go into words, and he had to remember the words. When animals like Bear and Coyote were given speech, their brains had to be changed to hold words, too, and learning words was sometimes hard. He took a deep breath and looked hard at the naked shapes. They were probably males and females. All of them were covered with that wormy stuff. It wasn't fur. It wasn't hair. It was something else. He didn't know what. He didn't want to know what!

The two hunters came back from the part of the bubble he couldn't see. They had their boots and trousers on and were putting on their jackets. They had worms, too, but not very many. One of them had a patch of the white goo on his back, and the man yelled at him to go back and wash it off. It wasn't very thick. Not nearly as thick as on the other stinkers. It might even be a different kind, since they hadn't collected it in the bowl with the other stuff.

Finally, all of them had their clothes back on and were being herded out of the cavern. Back out into the world. To do what?

Maybe they were going to feed them. Maybe that's why they came here. To be fed. Coyote blinked, yawned, put his paws over the edge of the hole, and forced himself to stay awake because the bowl was being lifted up from underneath, some kind of metal legs pushing it up. One side of it had a nose on it, sticking out; there was a word for that nose. A spout!
Spout pours out!
A hole opened up in the floor. The opposite side of the bowl pushed higher, and higher. The lid slid back a little, and whatever was inside it poured out of the spout into the hole. It was pale-­colored. That's all he could tell. Pale-­colored and runny. Had it been cooked, maybe? It didn't smell as bad as it had smelled before. It hardly smelled at all. As he moved, his foot touched a pebble he hadn't noticed. It rolled off the edge.

Then noise. A screaming noise, not voice, not human, machine noise. All the men turned around, started looking up at the walls, up through the top hole. Other men came in, yelling. Coyote pulled away from the hole and went back around the first corner of the tunnel, turning to put only his head around the corner, flat on the floor, tight against the corner, watching. A fluttering noise.
Bametty whacketa, whacketa, whacketa,
on and on. Something came toward the tunnel hole, something spinning. A light came into the tunnel. Coyote pulled back. The light went to the corner, played around over the rock, over the floor, didn't come around the corner. Abasio said light couldn't turn corners unless ­people put mirrors up to bounce the light on. The
whacketa, whacketa
noise went away. Coyote waited a bit before going back toward the hole. The flying thing was outside another hole, shooting the light inside. The big noise had stopped.

Someone down below yelled. “Fahs awarm . . . ak a wrrrk.”

“Fahs awarm,” Coyote repeated to himself. Oh, yes. Abasio said that sometimes. “False alarm.” “Alarm” was when you saw a forest fire coming. “Alarm” was when you heard a wolf pack in your territory or the nearest spring got fouled by something. Humans made really loud noises when there was an
alarm,
to let everyone know. A pack of coyotes did, too. Coyote breathed deeply, wondering if the falling pebble had created the
alarm
. The spinning machine flew around a bit longer before it settled onto the floor of the cavern, against the wall in the space he couldn't see. They must keep it down there, next to the water the hunters had washed in, out of the way.

Below him, in the cavern, the white lights went out, one by one. The rushing sound got softer each time a light went out. The lights had been making the noise. A kind of loud hissing. Like . . . when Xulai cooked things in a pot over the fire and put rocks on the lid. She said the rocks held the steam in. They made the water hotter, and it hissed and whistled. Finally all of the lights went out. The creatures were gone. All the men were gone. Nothing there but the grill thing and the pens, and the lanterns, and fading light coming in from the sky. It was almost night. He needed food. He needed to sleep. But first, he needed to get out of this place.

Following his own smell, noting that nothing had come in behind him to change the scent trail, he went back the way he had come, stopping only to drink again and to pick up the piece of metal he'd found, carrying it in his mouth. As he stuck his head out into the clearing, a gopher stuck his head out of a hole, not a coyote length away. It started moving away . . . not fast enough! He ate it skin and all, cracking the bones up small and being careful not to nick the bitter round piece in the middle of it. He pushed that piece away, next to his metal thing he'd dropped when he saw the gopher. When he'd licked the blood from his face, he picked the metal thing up and went farther along the edge of the cliff, sniffing other holes until he found one he liked. It smelled of fox-­a-­long-­while-­ago, but it still had a warm bed of dead leaves and grasses. He had never met a talking fox, and he wondered vaguely for a few moments if there were any. If the bed's owner came home, he'd find out. Foxes and coyotes weren't friends, but they weren't food either. Tomorrow he'd go back to Bear; someone would come to take them to Artemisia and they'd give him real food . . .

I
N
A
RTEMISIA,
P
RECIOUS
W
IND WAS
suffering from fulminating frustration. “Oh, I wish we could jump the ocean,” she said for the hundredth time. “We just don't have the equipment here!”