I left Dusty with Cricket and made my way toward the Hopi corn. I hardly had an idea what I was supposed to be doing. The breeze stirring my whiskers seemed to carry a warning, but I couldn’t tell what was wrong. My heart was beating out of control. Without Dusty I was an easy target for all the night hunters. I paused, thinking I could hear the slightest bit of movement.
Then I saw it—the tail end of one of our enormous gopher snakes disappearing down a hole.
In a moment, the snake had vanished. I held my breath and kept on moving. Up ahead, I could hear something the likes of which I’d never heard before. Using the cover, I crept toward the sound and found it was coming from a small patch of Hopi blue corn—the ears were not only ripe, they were bursting from their husks! Hopi corn grows in squat bunches, never getting very tall at all, but these plants were reaching the height of a grown man right before my eyes!
The sound of the corn had attracted someone else. I saw the eyes first, intelligent and mischievous, glowing in the dark. They were the yellow eyes of Coyote, and they were locked on me. His tall ears were perked forward—I knew he’d make a dash for me at any moment.
Running couldn’t help me; it was too late for that. I had to do something to throw him off, something strange. Somehow a tip beetle’s antics came to mind, and I did exactly what the tip beetle does: I stuck my head under the dirt and kicked my hind feet up in the air.
I could see nothing now, but I held that position for it seemed like forever, until I heard Coyote’s voice above me. “Ho, Rat, I’m going to bite you.”
“Hold on there,” I said.
“What’s that you said? Speak clearly!”
I was madly trying to think, to think of anything. “Hold on!” I hollered. “I hear something strange down here!”
“Oh, yeah? What is it?”
“Quiet, I’m listening to the people down here. They’re saying something about you.”
I heard Coyote digging, and I counted to twenty. Then I pulled my head out of the ground and saw, just as I’d hoped, that his head was under the soil. I started to run away but he was too quick for me. With a glance over my shoulder, I saw him sailing through the air with an arching leap. Now he had me in his jaws.
I knew that he would want to play with me a little, as coyotes do, before he shook me hard and broke my neck. And that’s what he did. He stood on two legs and tossed me high in the air. I was still in the air when something else caught his attention—the sound of bursting ears of corn, louder than before. “Listen to that corn!” Coyote marveled as I hit the ground.
My mind was racing. Only with more strangeness, I thought, could I keep Coyote distracted. All I could think of was to say, “What is corn?” as innocently as if I was born yesterday.
Coyote tossed his long snout into the air and laughed. “‘What is corn?’ ” he howled. “‘What is corn?’ Ha-ha-ho, hee-ha-ho-hee! ‘What is corn?’ ”
Even as we spoke, the husks were opening and enticing Coyote with rows of blue corn.
“‘What is corn?’ ” Coyote asked with a smirk, as he took an ear and made short work of it. “This is corn, O Rat!”
The juicy kernels made foam around Coyote’s mouth as he ate one ear after the next. In between gulps, he said, “You have got to be the stupidest rat I’ve ever met! Ever even heard of! Why, corn is plump and corn is delicious, corn is blue and corn is golden, corn is red and corn is sweet and corn is practically better than … meat!”
Coyote tore into every ear from that little patch, eating only a mouthful from each and dropping it on the ground before he greedily started in on the next.
I told him, “I used to eat that stuff you call corn. But it just doesn’t compare….”
Coyote’s ears stood up sharply, and his huge tail switched back and forth. “Compare to what?”
“Follow me,” I said. “I’ll show you something that will make your taste buds forget all about this stuff.”
When I led him to the gourds, Coyote’s yellow eyes flashed angrily. “You are definitely the stupidest rat I’ve ever laid eyes on! You think you can fool me with one of these?”
With a backward glance, I saw Coyote’s teeth clicking, and there was murder in his eye. I kept moving through the gourds, looking for the one I was supposed to eat. How was I supposed to tell? Cricket, I thought, I’m in big trouble now. “Look for a sign,” you said. I don’t see any sign!
All around the gourd patch I scurried, concentrating as best I might, looking for a sign, but I couldn’t think with my heart in my throat. Closer and closer behind me came the sound of Coyote’s snapping jaws. I was about to run for my life when something moving caught my eye: the katydid’s long green antennas, seeming to wave me toward him. The insect was perched on top of a striped gourd. That must be the one I needed! As soon as I got there, the insect was suddenly gone. Quickly I bit through the stem fastening that gourd to its vine, and turned with the gourd in both hands to face Coyote. “Much sweeter than corn,” I said confidently.
Coyote was grinning. “Sure it is, Rat. Go ahead and eat it. Prove how sweet it is. You eat one, and then I’ll eat one.”
“Gladly,” I said. “But let’s make it interesting. If I eat mine, every bit, but you don’t eat yours, every bit, then this whole field is mine and you can never come back.”
“Yes, of course,” Coyote said. “I want to see this.”
It was my moment of truth. Cricket said I could eat this gourd. It was crazy, but I trusted him, that old man, that bug, Cricket, Mr. K., Kokopelli.
Boldly, I bit into the gourd. It was sweet like a sweet squash, almost like a melon. From a vine he’d found in Mexico, Cricket had said, one of a kind. I chewed noisily and happily, smiling all the while. My father would be amazed! A wild gourd in Mexico, from its treasure house of hidden genes, had thrown a sweet mutant, just like its ancestor that had started the squashes! This gourd tasted sweet as a peach! Smacking my lips, I finished it off, enjoying Coyote’s astonishment.
Fortunately, with all the vines crisscrossing each other, Coyote didn’t happen to pick a gourd from the same plant. He bit into his as enthusiastically as I had mine, but his mouth suddenly puckered and he was spitting out the pieces. “Ugh! Ah! Ooh—awful! Disgusting!”
“Remember,” I admonished him, “you have to eat the whole thing, or give up this field.”
“I’ll gladly give up this field, O Rat!” With that, Coyote trotted off, his tail hanging even lower than usual.
When he got to the edge of the field, Coyote paused and looked back at me. “Some other time, Rat,” he said. “Some other place.” He shook his head back and forth, back and forth, and he coughed and spit. At that he turned and ran briskly into the night. Just then I heard the laughing of ravens.
When I hurried back to report my success to Cricket, I found Dusty in the squashes, right where I left her, but Cricket was gone. Dusty whined and tapped her old tail, grateful to see me. She looked up to see the headlights of a truck that was slowing along the road.
Dusty had to go investigate. Trucks hardly ever came through the valley in the middle of the night, and why was this one slowing, stopping?
I was right behind her, in the panic grass, when the spotlight fell on her. Poachers trying to spotlight deer? Dusty walked a little closer, blinded by the light.
A shot was fired. It sounded strange, not like a pistol or a rifle—more like a pellet gun. Dusty stood still at first, as if nothing had happened. Then she wobbled, and then she collapsed.
There was a tranquilizer dart sticking out of her side.
The spotlight went out. Two men jumped from the pickup and ran over to Dusty and grabbed her up. I was right there, in the panic grass, but they didn’t see me. One had a beard, the other a drooping mustache.
The pothunters!
“Nothing like the right tool for the job,” snickered the squat man with the beard. “A pot-sniffing dog!”
The pothunters threw some blankets around Dusty and placed her in the back of the pickup. Then they got in the front and fired up the motor. There was no way I was going to watch them drive away. I leaped onto the back bumper, but I couldn’t claw my way up and over the tailgate.
The truck was starting to move. I jumped free and ran forward underneath it, looking for a place to stow away.
I was running at full speed under the engine compartment, with the truck accelerating fast, when I jumped onto the frame, then climbed up the side of the motor and clung to the ignition wires feeding into the distributor cap.
It was a long and bumpy ride, and I suffered from the heat of the motor. We were climbing, I could tell that from the sound of the gears. I had time to begin to add up what had happened. Someone must have talked about Dusty.
I could make a pretty good guess. Our college students would have talked about Dusty in town, at the laundromat or at the café, about her finding the pot in front of Big Pink. Probably they’d passed on the history of her glorious archeological career that I should have kept to myself. Talking wouldn’t have hurt a thing, if the pothunters hadn’t still been around to hear about it.