Listen! (9780062213358) (6 page)

Coyote is lying under a rhododendron bush only a few feet from the tree Sadie is chained to. His ears are up, and he is watching Charley. Mrs. Davis has given her permission to unchain Sadie if she wants to. But Charley decides to leave Sadie chained and try to lure Coyote around the lake on his own. She throws Sadie a biscuit to make up for leaving her. “Come on,” she calls to Coyote. “Let's walk!”

At the word, Coyote comes out from under the rhododendron, his tail wagging. Charley drops a biscuit on the driveway. “That's yours,” she tells him, and walks away from it toward the road. With her mirror, she checks to see if he is coming to get the biscuit. He does. “Let's go get lunch!” she says, and keeps walking.

But he doesn't follow her. In the mirror she sees that he has stopped in the driveway, ears and tail down. He turns and looks back at Sadie, who is barking now and straining at the leash. Charley can almost feel the bungee cord pulling him back. The books would call this a training opportunity. She should just go on, whether he follows or not. If he doesn't come around to get his lunch today, he'll learn a lesson. He'll know to walk with her tomorrow. “Lunch!” she calls again. She puts the mirror away and starts walking again.

Every living thing is a spirit
. This time Charley doesn't try to push her mother's voice out of her mind. That was what her mother believed. Charley does, too. The books are about training, controlling—human to dog. Charley wants to work with Coyote spirit to spirit. She doesn't have a book for that.

Coyote needs Sadie with him to feel safe, Charley thinks. She understands. It's like the way she needed Amy with her on the first day of middle school. She goes back, takes Sadie off her chain, and watches the two dogs run a huge circle around the yard, bumping into each other, grabbing at each other's ears. “Let's walk!” she tells them, and they begin the walk in the way that has come to be their pattern, Sadie dashing ahead of her, Coyote following.

Near the bottom of the hill, Coyote is far behind and Sadie comes bounding back, as she always does, as if to see what is taking Charley so long. But this time she makes a lunge for Charley's walking stick and pulls it out of her hand. Charley has to grab a kudzu vine to keep from falling.

Sadie drags the stick a few feet off the trail and drops it. Then she stands by it, looking up at Charley, her tongue hanging out, her tail wagging.

“This isn't a game,” Charley says. “I need that stick. Bring it back!”

Sadie gives herself a shake and trots off down the hill and across the embankment. Charley lets go of the kudzu vine and goes to get the stick, moving carefully over uneven ground through the leaf cover. Throwing sticks was a mistake yesterday. Now Sadie thinks the walking stick is a toy. She picks it up and starts back toward the trail.

Sadie comes flying back, grabs the stick, and tugs, nearly pulling Charley off her feet. Charley has to let go of it to keep from falling. Sadie trots off with the stick, carrying it back through the poison ivy, down to the edge of the pond. Then she wades out until the water is up to her chest and drops the stick into the water.

To get the stick this time, Charley will have to plough through the poison ivy, maybe wade into the pond. She looks to see where Coyote is and sees that he has stopped at the base of the hill. When she turns toward him, he watches instead of skittering off into the trees. Sadie, still standing in the water, barks. Then she splashes along the edge of the pond, bounds across the spillway, shakes herself, and starts up the hill on the other side.

Charley, furious, stands awhile longer, trying to figure out if she can get her stick back, and then gives up. She'll just have to find a replacement in the woods as she goes. When she gets to the spillway, she realizes that walking without her stick doesn't hurt much more than walking with it. At least on level ground.

Charley steps carefully, gingerly, across the spillway, balancing with her arms out on both sides as she steps from one broken chunk of concrete to the next. When she has made it to the other side, she uses the dangling root to pull herself up to the fallen tree and climbs onto it. Coyote, a few feet back on the trail, stops, waits until she's settled, then runs across the spillway and up the trail to catch up with Sadie. He passes no more than a foot from where Charley is sitting. She listens to the dogs, tussling with each other somewhere up the hill.

Coyote has always stayed behind her, ready to leap off the trail if she turns toward him. He could have gone around her, could have caught up with Sadie anytime. Has it been her walking stick keeping him back? Has he been afraid to be out ahead, where he can't keep an eye on the human with the stick? Charley laughs. It's almost as if Sadie knew that.

Charley wonders if she can manage the rest of the walk without the stick. “Till you don't need it anymore” was all Tony said when she asked how long she had to use it. Maybe, just maybe, she is done with the stick. It isn't only Coyote who'll be glad if she is. Progress. Her father will be thrilled.

W
hen Charley tells Mrs. Davis about how Sadie seems to have known that Coyote was afraid of her walking stick, Mrs. Davis laughs. “Don't give her too much credit, Charley. Much as we love her, she's not the brightest bulb in the pack. She's always finding sticks to play with. Your walking stick was just another toy.”

Except that she didn't play with it, Charley thinks. She just took it away. What Mrs. Davis says makes sense, of course. But still—it feels as if Sadie knew what she was doing. Spirit to spirit. It's possible. Just possible.

The day Charley stopped using her stick, Sarita made a special dinner—with peach cobbler—to celebrate, and her father actually came home in time to eat it. “It's the dogs,” she told them when her father said how pleased he was at her progress. “They didn't want me using the stick anymore.”

“Good for them,” her father said. Charley figures he doesn't believe her, but it doesn't matter. He is so glad to see her making progress, he's willing to accept anything she says.

Walking without the stick, Charley discovers that there are plenty of saplings or branches or roots to grab if she needs help over a rough bit of the trail. And without the stick, the walk with Coyote becomes very different. Sometimes he stays with Sadie, running ahead, doubling back. Though he's careful never to come close to Charley, passing her only by going through the trees off the side of the trail, it no longer seems to matter whether she is ahead of him or behind him.

Sometimes he disappears for long stretches, and she thinks they have lost him. Once in a while he vanishes almost as soon as they start the walk, and she doesn't see him again the whole way around the lake. That's when Charley worries. As many acres of woods as there are around Eagle Lake, beyond them are housing developments. Streets. Cars. And county roads where the cars go very, very fast. The images of trees, squirrels, creek that she gets when she closes her eyes don't help—she could be just imagining what she wants to believe. But always Coyote appears again by the time she and Sadie get as far as the chain across Eagle Lake Drive. It feels almost magical sometimes, the way he turns up, as if she and Sadie are wearing tracking collars that let him find them.

Little by little, he is changing. Most of the time he is his dog self now, hardly ever the wild thing. She has discovered that he can smile. It isn't just that his mouth turns up naturally—his smile, like a wagging tail, shows her how he is feeling. Even his color is changing. Some of the red in his coat turns out to have been Carolina red clay. Swimming back to Sadie's every day, his fur has gotten lighter and lighter. His tail, the ruff around his neck, and what she calls his skirts—the long hair on the backs of his legs—are a pale beige now, a real contrast to the honey gold of the rest of his coat. The toes of his front feet turn out to be white. Charley longs to pull the mats and tangles out of his tail and his skirts, to brush him and make his coat shine. She thinks he is the most beautiful dog she has ever seen. His dark chocolate eyes are lined with black all the way around, a line that slants up in the corners like the eye makeup on an Egyptian princess. “Elegant,” Sarita has called him.

It is deep into the sticky North Carolina summer now, the air so thick Charley feels sometimes as if she's breathing underwater. She walks a little bit earlier every day, changing the routine gradually, in order to avoid the worst of the heat. She is still soaked with sweat by the time she gets to the Davises' house, but the walk itself is better the earlier she does it.

Now that she is sure Coyote won't run off if she doesn't bring his food to him the minute she gets home, she changes her clothes before feeding him, getting rid of the hiking boots and socks, the sweat-drenched jeans and T-shirt, putting on shorts, a tank top, and sandals. She still goes inside while he eats, and he still checks for danger every few bites, but she puts the bowl closer and closer to the house every day.

One afternoon when Sarita brings in the mail, there is a letter from Amy. Charley takes it and thinks for a moment how impressed Amy would be at the changes in Coyote, before she remembers that Amy doesn't even know about him. Incredible, she thinks, and drops the letter in the trash. She has better things to do with her time than read about how Amy is doing with her tennis.

At least she has better things to do until Sadie and Coyote swim back across the lake. After that the days have been stretching out blankly, hour after hour. She usually spends a while on the computer, answering instant messages from kids who check in to see how she's doing. Sometimes one of them asks if she wants to go to the mall or the movies, and Sarita has said she'll take her, but Charley doesn't feel like being in a car if she doesn't have to. Besides, she has discovered that she doesn't really want to leave Eagle Lake and the dogs, no matter where they are.

This time when she sits down to her laptop, Charley is thinking about the difference between working with an animal you can touch or leash or cage somehow, and a wild thing you can't control. Somebody must know how to do it. Jane Goodall. She remembers the movie they saw in science class last year about Goodall and her chimpanzees. Charley Googles Jane Goodall. An hour later she has come up with a plan. What she needs to do is spend some time in Coyote's territory.

She enlists Sarita's help, then calls Mrs. Davis to explain. Her father is working late that night, so after dinner Sarita drives Charley around the lake and drops her off in front of Crazy Sherman's.

“You can come get me when it starts to get dark.”

“I'll be back before then,” Sarita says.

There is a plastic bag full of freshly cooked liver chunks in Charley's waist pack. Mrs. Davis has agreed to keep Sadie inside the house every evening until dark. There's no way for this plan to work with Sadie around.

Charley whistles a couple of times to let Coyote know she's there, and walks back toward the Davises' house. Coyote is in his usual place, lying on the smooth-packed dirt by the tree across the road. “Liver!” Charley calls to him. He sits up, poised to bolt into the woods, so she stops. She takes a piece of liver out and holds it up, hoping he can smell it. “You're gonna love this.”

She sets it down on the side of the road and walks away from it, back toward Sherman's. A few feet farther she puts down another piece. She keeps this up, putting a piece of liver every three feet or so, until she reaches the boulder at the end of the Heywards' driveway, one house down from the Davises'. Then she sits on the boulder, facing away from Coyote, and gets out the mirror to watch what he does. She can't see his patch of bare ground from where she is, but she can see if he comes out to get the liver.

For a long time nothing happens. She is just wondering whether she has to go even farther away when Coyote creeps out of the woods and across the road to the first piece of liver. He sniffs at it, then snatches it and gulps it down. He stands looking at the next piece, his nose quivering, and then goes just far enough to get it, walking the way he used to walk, all hunched and careful. After another moment he moves forward again and takes the next piece. And the next. Then he stops.

He knows the others are there. He can see them and smell them, and he wants them. But he won't come close enough to her to get them. Not even with her back turned. Finally he heads back across the road. He doesn't go all the way to his tree, though. He flops down under a bush, puts his nose on his paws, and watches her.

Mr. Heyward comes out to fill his bird feeder. The minute he opens the screen door, Coyote is gone into the woods. Charley explains to the man what she is doing, why she is sitting on his boulder.

“That dog's wild,” he says. “If Animal Control can't catch him, nobody can.”

“I don't want to
catch
him,” Charley says. “I want to tame him.”

“I don't know what your father's thinking of, letting you mess with that dog. That isn't some pet that got abandoned, you know. I know dogs. The way it's acting, it's never been anything
but
wild. You don't get a dog used to humans by the time it's three months old, it'll be wild forever. Wild and dangerous. That's a known fact! Can't any more tame a full-grown feral dog than you can tame a five-point buck. If it was up to me, I'd get my gun and put him down.”