Chapter Ten: Aged Mutton

Must have been a couple of days later that I was sitting on the edge of the caprock, sunning myself and looking off in the distance. I’d been there most of the day, thinking about things and enjoying the quiet.

The coyote village was awful noisy. Seemed that somebody was always in the midst of a squabble. When a husband and wife had a difference of opinion, they just by George had a knock-down drag-out fight, right there in front of everybody. Nobody ever seemed to get hurt in these brawls, and I guess they managed to solve their problems, but I could never get used to the noise of it.

And the hair. After one of them family fights, the air was full of fur. A guy could hardly breathe for the hair.

And then there was the kids. There must have been ten or twelve pups in the village, and let me tell you about coyote pups.

Now, a dog pup is kind of cute. I’m not real fond of babies, understand, but even I have to admit that a little old cowdog pup is pretty cute. He’ll be fat as a butterball and covered with silky hair, and when he looks up at you with those big soft eyes, you can’t help but smile and say, “How’s it going, kid?”

Coyote pups ain’t cute. They look mean, they sound mean, they act mean, and fellers, they are mean. They’ve got two jaws full of teeth that are as sharp as needles, and their idea of good clean fun is to slip up behind some unsuspecting somebody (me, for instance) and just bite the heck out of his tail.

As a rule, I’m a pretty good sport. I was a kid once myself and I got into my share of mischief, but I can’t get used to people biting my tail. I mean, there’s something kind of special and private about a guy’s tail. If he’s got any pride at all, he tries to keep it nice, and he’s a little fussy about scabs and bald spots and tooth marks and slobber and all that stuff.

What I’m saying is that my tail ain’t a play toy.

But these kids, they’d sneak up behind me and sink their little needle teeth into my tail. First few times, I just growled at ’em: “Here! Y’all go on, get out of here!” Didn’t work. Coyotes are a little slow about taking a hint.

They came back and did it again, so I took sterner measures—cuffed one of ’em. Know what he did then? He bit me on the paw. Well, I wasn’t going to take that off a dern kid, so I bit him on the scruff of the neck, and he somehow worked his way around and got hold of my left ear.

That got me all inflamed, don’t you see, and I put the boy on the ground and was spanking some manners into him when his momma walked up.

“You brute, leave my junior alone!”

“Huh?”

I looked around just in time to get slapped across the mouth. “There, bully!”

I suppose I shouldn’t have slapped her back. But I did. Whop, right across the nose. “Maybe you can teach that boy some manners.”

Whop! “Chicken dog!”

Whop! “Wild hag!”

She burst into tears and went bawling to her husband saying I was just an animal and had beat up her danged kid and called her a wild hag. Turned out she was Scraunch’s woman, and here he came, all humped up and hair raised and yellow eyes aflaming.

I had taken about all I wanted off Scraunch and his family, and I was ready to go into combat, but Missy and her father jumped in between us and averted a civil war.

But the incident didn’t do much to improve relations between me and Missy’s brother. I had a feeling that sooner or later we were going to have a showdown.

Funny thing about all this. Them coyotes didn’t mind chewing on each other. I mean, they were fighting all the time. But when I tried it, they didn’t like it. Made me think that no matter how long I stayed there, they would always think of me as an outsider.

Anyway, I was sitting on the ledge, off to my­self and away from the noise, when Missy came up behind me. She nuzzled me with her nose and ran her claws down my backbone. She knew I liked that.

“Something wrong? Hunk look sad.”

“Oh, it’s nothing. Just wanted to be alone, I guess.”

“Not enjoy other coyote?”

“Well . . . do you ever get tired of all the noise, all that fighting and yelling?”

She shook her head. “That happy sound. When coyote happy, make bunch noise. When we married, we happy, make bunch noise too.”

“I see, yes, well, I guess we have that to look forward to, don’t we?”

“When pup come, even more noise, oh boy.”

“Oh boy.”

“Hunk not be sad. Missy have something make Hunk feel good. We have feast, special food just for Hunk.”

I followed her into the village. We went to her parents’ den. They were sitting out in front and the old lady was pulling cockleburs out of the chief’s tail. Missy asked her mother if she would prepare a special meal, just for me. She said she would. She left and was gone for ten, fifteen minutes.

I tried to make conversation with the old man but it wasn’t easy. He started talking about the old days, about a time when he went a couple of rounds with a skunk. He seemed to think this story was hilarious. I thought it was moderately funny.

The chief was still cackling at his own wonderful story when the old lady returned, dragging in some horrible stinking something or other.

I turned to Missy. “What’s that?”

“Aged mutton.”

“Aged mutton?”

She nodded and smiled. “Special feast make Hunk forget sadness.”

Aged mutton. No doubt it had been buried for a while. It was green, dotted here and there with white spots which turned out to be maggots. The smell alone could have taken the paint off a corral fence. The taste of such rot was too horrible to imagine.

The old lady dragged it up and dropped it right at my feet. When she smiled at me, she looked an awful lot like her daughter, except she had several teeth missing and some of that green stuff hanging from her lower lip.

“Meat age for many month, just right for Hunk now.”

The old man threw back his head, let out a howl, and dived into it. The old lady did the same. Missy did the same. I took a deep breath, said a little prayer, and dove in too.

Let’s don’t go into any details. It was bad. It was so bad that there are no words to describe it. I’ll say no more.

An hour later, I was lying down, with my head over a cliff. I had emptied my body of everything but blood and a few bones. Missy stood over me, stroking my brow. She had been very nice about it. They all had been, even my future mother-in-law. She had decided that I had drunk some brackish water and that’s what had made me sick.

“Hunk feel better now?”

“Feel better, sort of.”

“Hunk like coyote feast, oh boy?”

“Oh boy.”

“Now Hunk make ready for big raid?”

I raised up my head. “Huh?”

That was the first I had heard about the raid. This was going to be my big chance to prove to Missy’s ma and pa that I was worthy of their daughter.

Scraunch was putting the deal together, a raid on the ranch.