Listen! (9780062213358) (5 page)

At the bottom of the hill, she looks back to see if he is following, and barely catches a glimpse of him as he scoots off the trail. She's forgotten about the mirror. When she is through the poison ivy and nearly to the spillway, she pulls out the mirror and holds it up to her left eye. Coyote, ears and tail up, is trotting down the middle of the trail.

I
t has been a week. Charley, at the dining room window, chews her lip and scratches the poison ivy rash on the inside of her elbow as she watches Coyote sneak up to the bowl of food at the end of the driveway. He still refuses to eat unless she is all the way inside the house with the door closed. A whole week she's been feeding him, and there's been no change at all. No, she thinks. There's been a change, all right. In the wrong dog.

Sadie doesn't go home anymore as soon as they get to Charley's house. Charley can't put Coyote's food out while Sadie's there, or Sadie will eat it, so she has to tie her to the railing by the side door till Coyote is finished.

The first time she tied her, Charley took Sadie a couple of biscuits after she put Coyote's food out for him, so Sadie wouldn't feel left out. The dog books are right about patterns and routine. Sadie expects the tying now, and the biscuits. Every day when Coyote has eaten, Charley unties Sadie and Sadie hangs around for a while before she goes home. Hoping, Charley thinks, for more biscuits.

Coyote, still standing as far from the food bowl as he can, stretches his head down and snatches a few mouthfuls before backing away and checking for danger. It's almost as if he's two different creatures—the regular dog that trots along the trail or frolics with Sadie, and the wild one, the wary and terrified one Charley is watching now. He looks exactly the way he did the very first day. His tail is down, his ears back, every muscle in his body tense and ready to run.

She doesn't understand why he is so frightened. It can't be just that he's wild. Wild animals come to food. When they used to have bird feeders, the birds came right away to get the seed. And squirrels! They used to raid the feeders and wouldn't back off even if you pounded on the windows. Her mother would—

Charley stops the thought and pushes the memory away. The point is that even with a person a few feet away stomping and yelling at them, squirrels—fully wild creatures—are more interested in food than afraid of people.

For Coyote it is different. Why? What could his life have been like before he came to Eagle Lake? Without Charley's intending it, an image forms in her mind. A man is putting food at the edge of a mowed yard where the woods begin. She closes her eyes and gives herself over to the images, like watching a movie in her mind. Setting the bowl down, the man slips behind a bush a few feet away. There is a car parked on a gravel drive nearby. Another man is crouched behind the car, waiting. Coyote, nose up, materializes out of the woods. As he approaches the food, the men pounce. He is picked up and carried, struggling, to a small shed and locked inside.

Charley shivers and opens her eyes. This really happened, she thinks. She feels it the way she felt the dog's terror as he struggled to get free of the men holding him. No wonder Coyote's so wary about being fed.

All this time she's been counting on food to win him over. The books say that dogs bond readily to the person who feeds them. Feeding Coyote is supposed to show him that she's a friend, someone he can trust. But it's doing the opposite. Putting that bowl out every day only proves to him that she's dangerous, a threat. Like the Animal Control people Mrs. Davis called. No wonder the can of tuna they said would lure any dog into a trap didn't work. Coyote understands about food and humans. Food and traps.

Charley pulls a chair away from the dining room table and sits down by the window. There's nothing in the dog training books that will help her solve this problem, nothing about working with a wild and terrified dog you can't touch or even get close to, a dog you can't collar or cage or corral.

She feels like crying. She'll have to rethink her whole plan. Plan! As if she's really had one. All there was to it was the idea that walking him around the lake and feeding him every day would get him to trust her. The Taming was supposed to happen all by itself.
Food good. Charley gives food. Charley good
. Like that.

Everyone at Eagle Lake knows, now, what Charley is trying to do. Mrs. Jensen, the retired librarian who used to babysit her when she was little, is the editor of
Tail Feathers
, the newsletter that went into everybody's boxes over the weekend. She wrote a story about Charley and Coyote and asked anyone who might have been feeding him to stop so that Charley would be the only one he could go to for food.

Yesterday when Charley got around to the Davises' house, Mrs. Davis and Sadie were out on the road with Mr. and Mrs. Sutcliff and their Labrador retriever, Boone, and Mrs. Hobbes with her little white dog, Pandy. They'd all told her what a good thing she was doing.

All the time they were standing in the road, talking, the dogs, including Coyote, had played in the Davises' yard. But when the Sutcliffs and Mrs. Hobbes went on with their walk and Mrs. Davis went inside, Coyote disappeared into the woods.

What, besides food, does she have to offer this dog? A place to live. But he has that. It isn't very comfortable—just a bare spot under a tree. If he were really wild—a fox or a coyote—he wouldn't have any more than that. A den, maybe. Coyote could probably dig himself a den if he wanted one, if he needed one.

She can offer him companionship. But he has Sadie. And the other dogs. Why would he want companionship with a human? Mrs. Hobbes told her yesterday that Coyote used to follow anyone who walked a dog around the lake, staying mostly out of sight in the woods, but still following. “It wasn't just the other dogs he was following. He wants a family. You can see it in his eyes.” Charley wonders if that could be true. She thinks of the connection she felt with him the first time she saw him. It wasn't just from her to him, it was from him to her, too. He
does
want a family. He's just too afraid to know how to make it happen!

She looks out at him now, finishing the last of the food, backing away toward the woods. He needs me, she thinks. Coyotes and foxes and wolves know how to live in the wild. Dogs don't. What about winter? Every year on really cold nights, they tell people on the evening news to bring their dogs inside or make sure they have a warm, insulated shelter to go to. Coyote won't have that. He needs me. He does.

She has to come up with a way to make herself more to him than the person who puts food out for him.

“Stop that scratching!” Sarita has left her jigsaw puzzle and come into the dining room. “Don't you know the hot water trick?”

Charley hasn't realized she is scratching her arm again. “What trick?”

“Run water as hot as you can stand it on that rash until it doesn't itch anymore. That'll stop the itching all day. Eight hours, anyway. Do it again before you go to bed, and it won't itch in the night, either.”

Stupid old wives' tale, Charley thinks. If that worked, why wouldn't everybody know to do it? “How do you know?”

Sarita's eyes flash. “Because I know everything!”

“Yeah, right.”

“You can do it or you can go on itching. It's up to you.”

Charley decides to try it. Sarita follows her into the kitchen. “So!” she says. “Not much change in that wild dog.”

Charley tests the water to see how hot it is, then puts her arm under the faucet. “How long do I have to do this?”

“Like I said, till it stops itching.”

“People caught him with food before,” Charley says. She doesn't mention how she knows this. “Feeding scares him. I need to do something that'll give him a reason to like me. If you know everything, tell me what to do.”

“What do other dogs like people for?”

Charley realizes the poison ivy really has stopped itching. She turns off the water. “Playing, I guess. Fetch. Catch. But he isn't a regular dog. He doesn't do that stuff.”

“Sadie does,” Sarita says.

When Charley goes out to untie Sadie, Sadie frisks around her, front paws splayed, head down, her back end in the air, tail wagging. She is begging Charley to play. Sarita's certainly right about Sadie. Charley leans down to get a dead branch that has fallen off one of the trees by the carport. As soon as she picks it up, Sadie leaps for it, trying to snatch it away. “Down!” Charley says, holding it as high in the air as she can. She throws the stick up the slope of the driveway toward where Coyote is watching from the safety of the trees. “Go get it, Sadie!”

The dog doesn't need the words. Of course not, Charley thinks, watching her tear off after the stick. Golden
retriever
.

Charley calls to Sadie to bring back the stick. She isn't as good at letting go as she is at retrieving, but Charley manages to get it away from her and throw it again. Ears flying, Sadie runs after the stick, and Charley moves up the drive, keeping an eye on Coyote, who is sitting in a tangle of honeysuckle on the other side of the road.
This is what dogs and people do together
, she thinks at him.

Sadie drops the stick and backs away from it, wagging. Charley picks it up and Sadie begins to bark, urging her to throw it. Coyote is standing now, ears and tail up, following every movement. His tail has begun to wag.

When Charley throws the stick, Sadie gets it, and Coyote comes out of the woods to join the game, chasing Sadie. After a few minutes Sadie drops the stick, and the game becomes their usual chase and grab. So focused is Coyote that he doesn't notice when Charley moves into the middle of the yard so that the dogs have to swerve around her as they run, the way they swerve around the azaleas.

At last Sadie, tongue hanging out, flops onto the grass a few feet from where Charley is standing. Coyote circles, barking a high-pitched bark, snapping at Sadie's ears, her feet, urging her up again. When she doesn't respond, he gives up and sinks to the ground next to her. It's the closest Charley has ever been to him.

Over Sadie's shoulder, Coyote looks directly at Charley, his tongue, too, hanging out as he pants. There are big splotches of blue on his long, pink tongue. Charley has never seen anything like it.

“Blue spots on his tongue?” Sarita says later. “That's Chow. Mama or daddy or grandma maybe—that dog's got Chow in him somewhere.” She is leaning over her jigsaw puzzle, squinting at a piece in her hand.

“So?” Charley says. “What does that mean?”

“It means you don't tell your father yet. Chows have a bad rep in the dog world. Blue tongue's likely to scare Paul Morgan off, end you up with some little beagle pup. Some Chihuahua.”

“What's the bad rep?”

Sarita makes a little satisfied “huh” as she puts the puzzle piece into place. “Aggressive. Protective. One-man dogs, they say. One family, anyway.”

“Coyote's not aggressive. Not even with dogs. And he doesn't have a family.”

Sarita shrugs and takes another piece from a cookie sheet full of bits of the sky. “Not now, anyway. You itching, by the way?”

Charley looks at the rash on her arm, surprised. “No!”

“Don't mess with me, girl!”

Charley sees a cloud piece and the place in the puzzle where it will fit, and puts it in.

“You go rest that leg,” Sarita says, slapping at Charley's hand. “You been outside too long today.”

Sarita is right, Charley realizes when she settles into the recliner. Her leg, her whole body, has been getting stronger this week, the walk leaving her with more energy and less pain. But after nearly two hours with the dogs, throwing a stick for Sadie sometimes, or just sitting on the fender of Sarita's car in the shade of the carport, watching them, she is worn out.

When Sadie finally swam home, her tail wagging as she went, throwing drops of water that glittered in the sun, Coyote followed her to the waterline and stood with his front feet in the water, whining. “Come back!” he seemed to be calling to her. It was as if a bungee cord stretched between the two dogs, pulling harder and harder as Sadie swam away. When she reached the other side and pulled herself out of the water next to the Davises' dock, Coyote gave one last, exasperated whine and launched himself into the water, swimming with his ears back, his tail completely underwater. The contrast between the way Sadie swam, splashing and wagging, and Coyote's grim determination made Charley laugh. This was clearly a dog who hated to swim. When he got to the other side, he dragged himself out of the water exactly where Sadie had, shook himself, and followed her up into the trees.

Charley flips the lever on the recliner and leans back, her legs stretched out in front of her. She needs to break the bungee cord that links the dogs, she thinks as she picks up the remote and turns on the television. Better yet, she needs to find a way to transfer the bungee from Sadie to herself.

T
he next day when Charley gets to the top of the hill by Crazy Sherman's, Sadie doesn't come to her whistle. Charley doesn't see either dog, and she is all the way to the Davises' driveway before she realizes why. The SUV is gone, and Sadie is chained to a tree down near the house. Straining at the end of her chain, she barks and jumps toward Charley, her front feet pawing the air.