Want to see a little dog’s ears stand straight on end? Here’s what you do. Get yourself a coyote, install him in the back yard, and set him to singing.
In the darkest wee hours of the morning, one of the neighborhood’s coyotes caught a stray cat, just outside the back door. We could hear the cat screech, and then in the same cosmic breath we could hear the coyote call, a joyous, bizarre, and convoluted call, to her mate to come share the midnight snack.
Did Cassie the Corgi know this was the cry of something that would like to eat her as much as it relished the neighbor’s cat? I have no idea. All I can say is that in the dark her little head popped up and her ears stood erect like radar antennae searching out a signal.
Coyote, hallucinatory mariachi in the desert, Coyote the Trickster. There’s something weird, eerie about Coyote’s song that reminds you of a devil’s claw: a melody that curves back upon itself, barbed Satanic hilarity: yip-yip-wooWOO-ah! wooHOOwahaha! Coyote does not bay, he does not bark. He laughs. And oh, my friend, he laughs at us.
Straining through the black night for echoes of Coyote, I thought of the time I was a little girl in Saudi Arabia, alone in my room in the middle of the night when a jackal came calling. It must have been right outside the bedroom window. In the dark, in the quiet, the howl of a jackal is very loud, very loud indeed. In my childish fright, I imagined the beast was under my bed.
As much as he looks like Coyote, even is called by people in India a Trickster, the jackal does not sing like Coyote or behave like Coyote. Jackal bays, and he bays long, mournful, and clear. It’s not a belly-deep sound like a hound’s. It’s a high-pitched, endless howl taken to soprano register and held longer than you would think possible for any breathing creature: roo-roo-ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooo-ra-ra-rah. It’s a sound that seems to fill all of existence and seep into the nooks and crannies of the cosmos, mesmerizing in the depths of its terror.
And yes, like Coyote he would like to eat your poodle, your chihuahua, your cat, your corgi. But Jackal is not so easily satisfied. This is a dog that will chase down a rider on a horse. Two of our friends were riding their horses outside of camp late one afternoon when a pack of jackals materialized out of the white sand dunes. After stalking them briefly, the jackals gave full chase. Our friends spurred their mares and took off on a dead run. They barely made it through the main gate, where the Arab guards drove off the jackals with gunfire.
Speaking of barely making it through the main gate, one of my students occupied half the period trying to persuade me that instead of addressing the assignment he should write about the latest drama in his life.
I try to distance myself from students’ personal stories. Freshman comp positions one in the English Teacher as Mom role. And I do not want to be their mother. They break my heart too often.
This one was with a bunch of young people who crashed a party. When the resident partiers tried to drive them off, a free-for-all broke out, in which our young pup’s best buddy brained one of the opposition with a vodka bottle. Our pup’s vodka bottle.
The result: Best Buddy is in jail, charged with attempted homicide and assault with a deadly weapon. Pup is on his way to court, thereat to be deposed and then put on the witness stand.
I. do. not. want. to. know.
Where, I asked him, where were your parents???? Where were the parents of the young people whose family’s home was trashed when your buddy ran his truck through the block back fence and then through a wall of the house? Where, where, WHERE were the adults?
He gave me a blank look.
Where were they? Presumably off somewhere else behaving like children themselves. Damn their eyes.
But the nice thing about freelance teaching is that it doesn’t entail too much work. This afternoon is drop-down dead gorgeous, one of the most beautiful days I have ever seen in this land of beautiful days. Reasonably confident that Coyote had gone on his way well-fed and content, the Cassowary and I spent a fair amount of it loafing in the leafy bower outside the dining room.
The tea roses, like these much-revived climbers, are bursting forth in plant joy after all the rain we’ve had. They’re already beginning to make extravagant blossoms, along with the bougainvillea and the various potted plants that decorate the yard.
We are, unmistakably, . . .
Images:
Coyote by Arizona Roadside, Marya
Devil’s Claw. JerryFriedman. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported