It’s almost December and the weather has been really crummy lately, cold and wet. It’s not warm enough to ride bikes or do much of anything outside, and until yesterday, it hadn’t been cold enough for snow. It’s just been wet, sloppy and sleety. I’ve started to get used to the weirdness at school. Well, kind of. Every time I turn around, I think I’m going to run into some kind of critter, and I have to admit it’s a little hard to get used to seeing mice, skunks, porcupines, and everything else when I’m expecting Carl Hodge, Katy Balbierz, and Bobby Nystrom. But at least most of them are kind of normal animals. Some of the others are pretty hard to swallow. Like the other day, I walked into the cafeteria and discovered Becky Kuhn flopping around on the floor gasping for oxygen.
I almost panicked and gave myself away, not that anyone would have believed me anyway. But I caught myself and stayed as cool as could be, at least on the outside. I had to remind myself that no matter how messed up Becky the trout seemed, the human Becky would be just fine. I also finally figured out that when we talk about somebody as being a fish out of water, there was a good chance that deep down the person really is a fish out of water. Becky was one of those kids who never seemed to fit in, no matter how hard she tried.
Kesh was starting to see the way things worked, and it was almost making sense. One morning he rounded a corner on the way to the boy’s room, and he ran smack into a gigantic golden grizzly bear. This time he was too surprised to stay cool, and he let out a shriek. Luckily, the only one who witnessed his reaction was Mister Carrelli, the gym teacher, who also happened to be the bear in question, and he wasn’t surprised. Everybody knew Carrelli was scary. He growled, “Sorry, son. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
At least things were back to normal at home. But even that wasn’t enough to settle his nerves when the surprises popped up here and there. He wasn’t feeling very sure of himself just now, and he was beginning to rethink his dream theory. Something had happened on the night he ran away, and chances were more than good that he wasn’t crazy. At least, he knew he felt perfectly normal, and the note from school was definitely not a hallucination. The more he let himself think about it, the more he began to slip back into doubt and confusion. That whole night was still impossible, starting with the animals in the living room and getting weirder from there.
Now, he could add the menagerie at school. His inability to believe felt like a big problem to him, but there were others. He still didn’t know who had slipped the note into his book. Somebody knew who he was, or more exactly, what he was, and that made him nervous. Muskrat had led him to understand in the most ominous of terms that not everybody was a friend, and he still wasn’t sure if the bad guys also had animal spirits.
He remembered the man he and Muskrat had met on the trail, the only one that night who did not appear in animal form. He wondered if the man could ever come to him as an animal, or if he was always human. The problem was he didn’t know, and he didn’t know what that meant. He also wondered where the other coyotes were. Grandmother Spider had said there were a lot of other kids like him, yet he hadn’t seen even one coyote at school. It worried him. He could not do this – whatever this was – alone. Finally, he was worried half to death about the role he seemed to have been given, or maybe forced into. He wasn’t a hero. He was just a kid, and he was scared. Who wouldn’t be?
Autumn quickly fell behind them and November turned into December. Kesh began thinking about the coming Christmas holidays and all the freedom, celebration, and presents they would bring. He may have been twelve, but in a lot of ways he was still happy to be a kid, and he was just as charged up by the excitement of the holidays as everybody else, so much so that he nearly forgot all about his problems. Almost. With vacation just a week away, Kesh went to bed as a soft, deep snowfall muffled the outside world, but he did not dream of dancing fairies, presents, and sugar plums.