Act One: The Tall One Who Talks to Trees

My name, if humans had any right to name things that do not use names, would be something like Grayear, because my fur went gray around the edges sooner than most of my kind and because the winters I had survived had left their marks on me in the form of a notch in my left ear and a stiffness in my hind legs that I pretend not to notice. I am a coyote. This means I am smaller than a dog and smarter than most of them, which is not a compliment to dogs. It means I eat things that other animals throw away. It means I live in the margins, in the spaces between the streets and the parks and the places where the humans build things and pretend the earth underneath does not remember.

I had a territory. It was not large, but it was sufficient. It ran from the edge of a place the humans call Riverside Park along the Harlem River, past a row of buildings that the humans had painted in colors that were not quite alive but were trying, to a stretch of concrete where the water runs brown and smells of old rain and new mistakes. In this territory, I knew where the trash bins are emptied and when, which humans leave doors open and for how long, which cats are friendly and which are not, and which patch of weeds by the abandoned lot produces berries in the summer that are sweet and worth the effort of finding.

Then there was the tall one.

The tall one was a human male, old by human standards, with a face that had been lined by sun and wind and whatever the human equivalent of thinking too much is. He walked the edges of my territory every morning at the same time, which in human time was about seven in the morning, which in coyote time was after the early birds had stopped singing and before the midday heat made the concrete radiate enough warmth to be almost pleasant. He walked slowly, with the shuffle of someone who had decided that walking was not exercise but was simply what one did between waking and not waking anymore.

He talked to the trees.

This was the first thing I noticed about him. Not the walking, not the shuffling, not the way he carried a small bag that I later learned contained pieces of bread and sometimes pieces of cheese, which were acceptable offerings. The talking. He would stand in front of a tree, any tree, usually an old one with bark that had grown rough and interesting, and he would speak in a voice that was not loud and was not soft and was exactly the volume of a man who believes he is being heard but is not sure by whom. I watched him do this several times before I understood that this was a habit, a daily ritual, and that the trees were not responding but the tall one did not seem to mind.

Humans talking to trees is not unusual in my experience. Some of them pee on them. Some of them carve their names into them. Some of them tie ribbons to their branches on days that matter to them. Talking to them is simply another form of the same impulse: the need to put your voice somewhere and pretend it lands.

But the tall one was different. Not because of the talking. Because of the bag.

He brought food. Not trash food, which is abundant and easy, but real food, the kind that smells of ovens and kitchens and the humans who cook for themselves because they have decided that the food in the places with lights and menus is not what they want. Bread. Cheese. Sometimes fruit. He would leave it on a flat stone by the edge of the path, and after a while, which was about three days, he would leave it and walk away and I would approach and take it, and the pattern was established.

I began to expect him. He began to leave more. He began to speak to the trees while leaving the food, and I began to understand that the speech was not for the trees. It was for himself, or for whatever he was speaking to, which might have been the trees but might have been the air, or the past, or a memory of a person who had once sat beside one of those trees and listened to him talk and not find it strange.

I took his food. I did not trust him. Coyotes do not trust. We tolerate. There is a difference. Tolerance is a transaction. Trust is a risk. I am old. I have gray fur and a notched ear and stiff legs. I do not take risks. I tolerate.

Act Two: The Small One Who Breathes Wrong

The small one appeared in the autumn. He was a human young, perhaps eight or nine by human measures, with the round face and the curious eyes of someone who has not yet learned to look at the ground and keep his head down, which is the first thing humans teach their young and the last thing they forget. He walked with the tall one. He did not talk to the trees. He watched them, with an expression I recognized as the one young humans give to things they do not understand and are trying not to admit they find interesting.

The tall one spoke to the small one sometimes, in a voice that was different from the voice he used on the trees. This voice had warmth in it, which is hard to describe for a coyote but I will try: it was a frequency of sound that carried less information and more feeling, like a low note that vibrates in the chest rather than a word that carries meaning in the brain. The small one listened. He did not say much. He held the tall one's hand, which is what young humans do.

They came every morning. The pattern was steady. The tall one talked to a tree or two, left food, took the small one's hand, and they walked back toward the buildings, and the small one's breathing, which I had not noticed at first because I am a coyote and I listen for the sounds of food and danger and mating and the other sounds that matter to coyotes, was wrong.

It is not a word humans would use. They would say wheezy, or rattly, or difficult. For a coyote, breathing wrong sounds like the opposite of breathing right. Breathing right is a smooth, rhythmic thing, a intake and an outtake that moves through the nose and the throat and the lungs with no resistance. Breathing wrong has catches and pauses and a high sound on the inhaled air that means something in the chest is narrowed or filled or inflamed or broken. The small one's breathing right sounded like breathing wrong. It was a small sound, easily missed by a human who is not listening for it, but by a coyote whose life depends on hearing the sounds other creatures make from a distance, it was as clear as a bell.

The tall one did not seem to notice. He talked to the trees and held the small one's hand and walked at his slow pace and did not seem to hear the sound that meant to me that the small one was in trouble. Or perhaps he heard it and did not understand what it meant, which in human terms is the same thing.

The autumn passed. The small one's breathing grew more wrong. The tall one began to talk to the trees less, which I noticed because I notice everything that changes in my territory, and I wondered what the trees had done to deserve losing his voice. Then the small one did not come at all.

The tall one came alone. He still talked to the trees. He still left the food. But he did not leave it on the stone. He left it in his hand and held it out toward the trees and then brought it back and ate it himself, which I found strange, because bread is good and cheese is better and a human eating his own offerings to the trees is either a very polite human or a very sad one, and from the set of his shoulders and the flatness of his eyes, I determined that he was the latter.

Act Three: The Information from the Other Side

He did not come for two weeks. I began to think he had left the territory, which happens to humans often enough. They move, they die, they go to places with different names on the maps. My territory remained. The trash bins were still emptied at the same time. The cats were still unfriendly. The berries were gone, having been eaten by the birds and the humans and the other coyotes who are less careful than I am about risks.

Then he came back. He was thinner. His face had grown deeper in its lines, which is something I can read on a human face the way a human reads a book. The bag was gone. He carried nothing. He walked to the stone where he used to leave the food, sat down on the ground beside it, and put his face in his hands.

This was unprecedented. The tall one had never sat on the ground in my territory. Humans do not sit on the ground unless they are playing with the young or tying their shoes or fallen, and the tall one had not fallen. He sat, and he made a sound that was not quite a sound but was close to it, the human equivalent of a low whine, which I recognize because I make it myself sometimes, late at night, when the territory is very quiet and the memory of other territories and other times when the earth was bigger and the humans were fewer and the food was easier and the winters were cold but not cruel.

I approached him. This was also unusual. I do not approach humans who are sitting on the ground. They are unpredictable. They might reach out. They might cry, which releases a salt water from the eyes that is frightening in its quantity. They might do something I cannot anticipate. But he did not move. He sat with his face in his hands and made the small sound and the wind moved through the trees and the city moved around us, which is what the city does, it moves around everything.

I sat down. I did not come closer. I sat at a distance that is close enough to smell the human's feelings and far enough to run if they decided to become something other than still and sad.

He sat like that for a long time. Then he stood up, and he looked at me, and his eyes were wet, and I have seen wet eyes before and I know what they mean. He said, in a voice that was rough from the salt water, I do not know what to do.

This is not a question. It is a statement disguised as one, which humans are fond of doing. I did not answer, which is the only correct answer to a statement disguised as a question from a human. He stood there, looking at me, looking at the trees, looking at the sky, which is something humans do when they are trying to find a direction and have run out of internal ones.

Then he did something that changed the pattern. He walked to the edge of the territory, beyond the concrete and the river and the bridge, into the place where the humans have built a new thing that is not quite a building and not quite a park and not quite anything I can classify, and he came back with something in his hand. It was not bread. It was not cheese. It was a thing wrapped in paper, and when he unwrapped it, it smelled of meat and herbs and something that made my ears perk up, which is what perking up means: attention focused on a smell that might be food.

He broke off a piece and held it out. I approached, cautiously, and took it, and it was meat, cooked, and it was good, and it was the best thing I had eaten in a long time, which is not saying much, but it was the best thing anyway. He broke off another piece and held it out, and I took that too, and the pattern was re-established, but different. Before, he had given food and spoken to trees. Now he was giving food and speaking to me, or at least in my direction, in a voice that was no longer rough with salt water but was soft with something that I will call gratitude, though I am not sure the human means it in the way I am using the word.

He came back the next morning. He came back the morning after that. He brought food every day, and he spoke sometimes, to me, or near me, or to the trees near me, and I listened, which is what I do, and I learned, which is what I am good at, and I learned that the small one was in a place with white walls and machines that made sounds and humans in clothes that covered them from neck to wrist and the small one was very sick and the tall one did not know how to help.

I did not know how to help either. I am a coyote. I eat food and I avoid cars and I survive winters. I do not solve human problems. But I am also a creature of this territory, and the territory includes the tall one and the small one and the trees and the river and the buildings and the trash bins and the cats and the berries and the other coyotes and the birds and the things that grow in the cracks of the concrete and the humans who walk through it all every day, and when one part of the territory is in trouble, it affects the whole, and the whole is what I am part of, and the whole is what I am trying, in my coyote way, to keep alive.

One morning, I heard something. I was on the edge of the territory, near the bridge, where the wind carries sounds from places I cannot see, and I heard two humans speaking, and their voice was one of the women who works in the place with white walls, and she was speaking to another human, and she said, in words that carried clearly on the wind, there is a plant, it grows in the old garden behind the community center, the roots, they have something in them, my grandmother used them, for the chest, and I caught the words because I am good at catching words, the way I am good at catching trash lids and cat food and the edges of sandwiches and any other things that humans drop and pretend they did not.

Roots. Plant. Grandmother. Chest. I carried the words back to the territory, not in my mouth but in my head, which is how coyotes carry things that are not food but might become food under the right circumstances.

Act Four: The Trail of Herbs

I found the old garden behind the community center. It was overgrown, which is the coyote word for abundant. It had been planted by humans who had wanted flowers or vegetables or both and had given up, which is what humans do when their intention expires and their maintenance does not follow. What remained was a tangle of things that had escaped their intention and were doing their own thing, which is what all plants do, really. The humans just pretend they are in charge for a while.

I found the roots. They were underground, as roots are, and I found them by digging, which is what I do, and they were small and white and smelled of earth and something medicinal, which is a smell I have encountered before in the trash behind the places where humans who believe in natural remedies buy things that I cannot identify but recognize as not quite food and not quite medicine and somewhere in between, which is a category I have learned to respect.

I did not eat them. I am not foolish. I carried one in my mouth back to the territory, which is not a long distance but is long enough that it required a certain commitment, and when the tall one saw me, he saw the root in my mouth, and he saw my face, and he understood, which is what tall ones are good at: understanding things that are not words but mean something anyway.

He took the root from my mouth gently, which was a human gesture I did not expect and did not know what to do with, and he looked at it, and he looked at me, and he said, in a voice that was soft and uncertain and grateful in a way that was not about the root, where did you find this?

I did not answer, because I am a coyote and I do not answer questions from humans. But I looked at him, and I looked toward the garden, and I understood, from the way his face changed, that he understood what I was doing, which was not magic and not spirit and not any of the things the humans call supernatural. It was simply a coyote, doing what coyotes do, moving through the territory, hearing sounds, carrying roots, and a tall one, doing what tall ones do, listening to trees and holding small ones and learning that the world is larger and stranger and more connected than he had thought.

He dug up more roots. He took them to the place with white walls. He spoke to humans in clothes who nodded and made notes and spoke into devices and looked at the roots with eyes that were not skeptical and were not certain and were exactly what you would expect from humans who have spent their lives studying things and are always surprised by things they thought they understood.

The small one got better. It took time, which is what getting better takes, and the tall one came to the edge of the territory every day and brought food and spoke to me and sometimes spoke to the trees and sometimes spoke to the air, and the small one came too, walking slowly, breathing right, and the pattern was restored, though it was different now, because the territory had changed and so had the tall one and so had the small one and so had I, in the small ways that coyotes change when something in their territory shifts and settles into a new shape that is not what it was and is not broken and is not fixed and is simply what it is.

I still sit on the stone sometimes. The tall one still brings food. The small one still walks with him and watches me with the same curious eyes, though now they are the eyes of a young human who has learned that the world is bigger than walls and machines and white rooms and that it includes coyotes and roots and trees and the wind that carries words across a bridge and the old garden behind the community center where things grow even when nobody tends them, which is the most important lesson of all, though the tall one would probably express it differently and the small one would probably forget it and the humans in the place with white walls would probably write it down in a book and call it something scientific and miss the point entirely.

I am Grayear. I have gray fur and a notched ear and stiff legs. I do not take risks. I tolerate. But sometimes, late at night, when the territory is quiet and the city is quiet and the trees are quiet and the tall one is inside and the small one is sleeping and the wind moves through the leaves in a way that sounds almost like words, I sit on the stone where the food used to be and I listen, and I think about the roots, and the garden, and the way the tall one looked at me when I brought him something that was not food but was something, and I think about the small one, breathing right, and I think about the territory, which is smaller than it used to be and larger than it looks and full of things that are not supernatural but are no less mysterious for it, because the mystery of a coyote carrying a root across a bridge to a tall one who talks to trees is not less than any magic I have ever heard humans tell each other at night. It is more. It is real. It is here. It is now. It is mine. --- OTMES-v2 Code: OTMES-v2-002103C064-037-M5-018-2R070050A M_Vector: [3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 5.0, 2.0, 6.0, 1.0, 0.0, 4.0, 3.0] N_Vector: [0.6, 0.4] K_Vector: [0.55, 0.45] E_total: 3.75 Dominant_Mode: M5 Dominance_Ratio: 0.18 Direction_Angle: 100 degrees Irreversibility (I): 0.2 Tragedy_Index (TI): 28.0 Rank: 5 ---