Coyote Gold

by Amy Reece

Coyotes emerged along the edge of the old pasture as I drove the tractor in ever tightening circles. Surrounded by dense woods, the neglected ten acres lay on the farthest corner of our two-hundred-acre Ozark farm. The field consisted of weeds and small saplings with some native grasses and fescue. I towed the bush hog with our rusting but still functional tractor, clipping the weeds and grass before they were able to go to seed. 

“That’ll discourage the weeds and encourage the grass to keep growing,” Old Man Jonah, who lived down the road, had told us earlier in the week. My husband and I had purchased our farm two years earlier but were still learning about farming. We always listened to old Jonah. “You see,” he’d said, spitting some tobacco in a stained coffee cup, “the grass’ll stop growing once it goes to seed ’cuz it thinks it’s done its job. You can trick it into growing more by cutting it down before that happens.” Pulling off his ball cap, Jonah rubbed the gray stubble that grew on top of his head like the sparse grass we’d been discussing. Then he reached for the handkerchief sprouting from the back pocket of his overalls and wiped the sweat from his neck and face. “Y’all get religious about keeping it mowed, and you’ll have another fine pasture one day.”

I loved bush hogging. My husband wasn’t sure I should be on the tractor now that I was early in the third trimester of my pregnancy, but I’d insisted that morning as I pulled on a pair of his overalls. After attempting to button the sides over my now huge belly, I’d given up and grabbed a floppy straw hat from a hook by the kitchen door and walked out, determined. 

Now, ignoring the hard metal seat and the jolts of the uneven terrain, I enjoyed the way the bush hog sliced an unruly mess of rough weeds into a momentary carpet of green, more like a golf course fairway than Ozark scrub. The mixed scents of grass, wild mint, and baby pines churned and thrown into the steamy summer air smelled like real farming to me. 

The coyotes took their posts along the edge of the field. Yawning as they settled in and then licking their muzzles closed, they narrowed their eyes, following my progress. I felt the same prickle of dread I used to get walking down a dark street late at night in the city. 

Earlier when I’d mentioned the coyotes, old Jonah had explained my fears away. “They’re just sitting there waiting for you to chase them bunnies to ’em.” His summer blue eyes, the remaining feature of his youth, had squinted up and smiled at me. “You’re too big a bite for them to tackle.” I was sensitive about my growing belly, but I’d smiled back.

Even as I recalled Jonah’s assurances, those coyotes added a sense of danger to my mowing. As I watched first one coyote and then another and another take its place at the perimeter of the field, I felt a trace of fear skitter down my spine. Resting between forest and meadow. Sitting still and proud on their haunches. Their gazes fixed unflinching on the progress of my tractor. Ears pricked forward. Necks extended. Shoulders ready. 

My pulse quickened. My breath shortened. I could feel my long braid melting into the sweat between my shoulder blades. Coyotes were the gangsters of the forest. Predators on the prowl. Morals dictated by hunger. 

These coyotes seemed bigger than they should be, bigger than the ones back east for sure. Missouri coyotes were more like proud lions in their stance and attitude. Jonah’s wife, Ruth, had told me why, one day when I was in their kitchen learning how to make sourdough bread.

I remember the sun-warmed room smelled of lavender and yeast. “Well, dear,” Ruth said. “Those coyotes aren’t all coyote, you know.” 

“No, I’m not sure what you mean. Are they part wolf?”

“Oh, no. No wolves around these parts.” Ruth laughed quietly to herself while kneading dough on a flour-dusted Formica counter. Her hands were delicate, competent, and scattered with the large brown freckles of age. She seemed not to be making fun of me, but to be amused by my naivete. “Where did you say you were raised again, dear?”

“In a little town called Avon outside of Hartford, Connecticut.” Working next to her, I attempted to imitate the way she pounded and folded the yeasty dough into itself.

“Oh, well, then how would you know?” This wasn’t a question. More of an explanation murmured to herself. “So, those coyotes, they tempt farm dogs away from their homes and invite them to join their packs.” She turned to pour us each a cup of tea from her mother’s China teapot. The slight tremor in her hands belied the strength I’d just witnessed as she’d pounded the bread dough.

I stopped kneading and turned toward Ruth. “Then those coyotes are half dog?” Before accepting a cup, I wiped my hands on the apron that was having a hard time covering my bulge.

“That’s right. Some are part collie or shepherd or coon dog. That’s why they’re so big.” Ruth shaped her dough into the size of a small loaf and gently placed it in the bread pan, covering it like an infant with a soft dish towel and leaving it to rise. Morning light filtered softly through lace curtains. 

Now I watched a coyote that must have been half German Shepherd take its place on the edge of the field closest to me. Its oversized reddish-gray body flecked with coyote gold. As I gazed at it, the beast turned its head and looked at me. I stared into those hungry yellow eyes, pupils narrowed by the sun, until I had to look away. “Just hunting for rabbits,” I said out loud to the pasture in an attempt to boost my courage. The baby turned inside me as if in agreement. A cloud darkened the sun. I refocused on mowing. There was rain in the pressing heaviness of the dark clouds approaching, and I wanted to get the mowing done.

The repetitive whirl of the bush hog encouraged my mind to wander. My brow furrowed and I wiped dust from my face while thinking back on the past two years. 

Thank God for Jonah and Ruth. When my husband and I had seen the advertisement for a small house and farmland in the Ozark Mountains, we believed our dreams had come true. It was the 1980s, and the two hundred acres had come out to about seventy five dollars an acre, with the house and shed thrown in for free. 

My reminiscing was interrupted when I noticed a coyote changing position with the grace and sinister slink of a ballet dancer turned KGB. Then he settled, and I went back to remembering.

We’d brought nothing but a downpayment and enthusiasm to the farm. Oh, and a golden retriever named Tequila and my pregnant mare, Windy. We thought we might farm trout using the spring that came with the property, until the man from the conservation department told us that it would flood at least once a year and that the fish would all end up downstream. 

So I got a job at a local high school teaching English. My husband took over the previous owner’s root business, buying herbs like ginseng and witch hazel leaves from the locals then selling them to the big drug companies in St. Louis. We made enough to cover the mortgage. We bought baby pigs and some chickens. We planted a garden. I learned how to wean a foal and paint a house and drive a tractor. I almost overcame my fear of power tools. We made a lot of mistakes, including a chainsaw accident that resulted in a trip to the emergency room. But, thanks to Jonah and Ruth, we were beginning to understand what it took to live on a farm. They were our mentors, our Ozark family. 

Now there were nine coyotes perched, waiting, on the edges of the field. Nine, wasn’t that an unlucky number? But the farm had made us feel lucky. I took a deep breath and let go of the wheel of the tractor for a moment to reach up and stretch out the muscles of my back. These days my back felt constantly sore from carrying the pregnancy, and now it was sore from three hours of riding on this machine. The tractor lurched to the right when it hit a hole in the ground. I grabbed it, reset my mowing course, and returned to my memories.

Ruth and Jonah taught us how to keep the chickens safe from coons and foxes. They helped us build the barn we needed for my mare and her new foal. Jonah showed my husband how to dig and pound a fencepost into the rocky Ozark soil and how to straighten and reuse old nails. Ruth showed me how to can tomatoes and make preserves from the wild strawberries and raspberries that grew on our land. Jonah drove his tractor through a snowstorm with a huge round bale of hay speared behind it and explained how the hay would act as feed, protection, and bedding for our mare and foal when they were out of the barn and  in the weather that first winter.

The farm was lucky because after a year and a half, after every doctor we saw said we couldn’t, we discovered we were pregnant. It felt like a miracle. Like everything around us was growing and fertile and full of promise.

The warmth of the sun slipped away as thick clouds claimed the sky. Still the coyotes waited. 

“I’m planning on bush hogging myself tomorrow,” Jonah had told me the night before. It had become a ritual for my husband and me to take the walk down our dirt road to Jonah and Ruth’s house after dinner most evenings. There we would find the old couple sitting in their twin cane rocking chairs on the front porch of their neatly kept farmhouse. Their collie, Rufus, lying between them. Their hands clasped over him. 

Ruth and Jonah were getting on in years. Sometimes Ruth used a cane and had to “rest a spell,” and every once in a while Jonah referred to his arthritis, but they were so damned capable. They were ageless to us. 

Still, Jonah had looked worried that evening. He watched Ruth’s slow progress into the kitchen and back to the porch with lemonade. Standing, he took the pitcher from her to help her pour. 

“Everything okay?” I asked. 

“Oh sure, sure,” Ruth assured me. “Just worked a little overtime in the garden today and feeling my years.” 

“Well, you know, if you ever need anything, and I mean anything, we’re right here,” I said.

“That goes for you too. Or should I say three?” Ruth looked down shyly at my stomach. “And dear, not that it’s any of my business, but should you be driving a tractor in your condition?”

My husband piped in. “Exactly what I was saying the other day. But she’s a stubborn one, my wife is. Thoroughly liberated woman. Says she’d rather bush hog than weed the garden.” Then he shrugged and gave me an apologetic hug.

From there, talk turned to the best way to keep weeds off of the potato mounds. Straw seemed to be the consensus.

The fact that Jonah had decided to bush hog on the same day somehow made me feel like a real farmer. I’d picked the right time to attack my weeds, and I was doing the same job as my farmer neighbor. 

Now, as I began to mow my last circle in the field, I could hardly wait to take our evening stroll down the road after dinner to Ruth and Jonah’s house and share my fears about the coyotes. I knew it would make them laugh.

Thunder rumbled over the sound of the bush hog and jolted me back to the present. A rabbit skittered out of the weeds from in front of the tractor and broke into the cleared pasture toward the woods. From the corner of my eye, I saw the large reddish-gray coyote make a dash, grab the rabbit by the neck, and give it one swift shake to end its life. Then he lifted it proudly, as if it were a prize won from effort rather than patience, and carried the rag-doll body into the woods for dinner. Clouds were rolling in darker, and the breeze was quickening.

Just ten more minutes, I thought to myself. Ten more minutes and I’ll be done. 

A Z-shaped bolt of lightning snaked across the sky, and moments later a low rumble followed. The breeze became a force, whipping my straw hat off of my head and sending it sailing into the woods. Leaves on the oaks and maples flipped over in submission. The air smelled of earth and green and something slightly burnt as I finished the last swath of grass and weeds, told my hat I’d find it later, and turned the tractor toward home. 

The remaining coyotes also turned, tails tucked, ears flattened by the impending storm. Silently, they and their coyote gold melted back into the forest. I remember hoping that they weren’t headed in the same direction I was.

Bowing my head and hunching my shoulders into the wind, I felt the first cold bullets of rain hit my shoulders and back. Puffs of dust rose from the dry track with the force of those first drops. I knew it wouldn’t be long before the deluge began and turned the path to mud. Determined, I pointed the tractor into the woods and down the steep logging trail that led me home.  

It took all of my strength and concentration to keep the old tractor on the path. Rocks and stumps bumped the front tires off their course. The rattling of the raised bush hog competed with the wind and thunder. Heading down the hill, the tractor slid toward the gully at the edge of the path. A trace of cold anxiety laced my chest and throat at the thought of getting stranded in these woods with the coyotes in the approaching dark. I turned the wheel hard and felt the powerful back tires grip the ground to push us back on track. 

An explosion of light was followed by a loud crack as lightning hit an ancient cedar tree in the woods to my right. Pierced by a flaming sword of light, the tree cracked in half and collapsed onto the forest floor below, tearing limbs off the trees surrounding it. It was so close, I could feel the vibration of the collapse through my seat on the tractor and the force of the burnt air on my face and shoulders. My heart jumped. I felt the muscles in my abdomen tighten around our unborn child. A sharp contraction bent me over the steering wheel of the tractor. I braked, felt the machine slide to a stop, and hugged my unborn baby with both arms and a sob. 

A great sadness welled up within me. The grayness of the sky, the threat of the coyotes, and the danger of the storm somehow seemed overwhelming. A feeling of impending doom gripped me. I asked myself, Was I losing the baby? Were the coyotes stalking me? Would we make it home alive? We? Suddenly I had become we. The baby and I were two, not one. I needed to take care of both of us. I needed to get home. 

Gathering strength, the storm pummeled me as I again headed the tractor down the rough path. With a toughness I didn’t know I possessed, I fought the steering wheel and kept the tires headed toward home. Rain stung my face. I squinted to see the track. Cold penetrated my soaked clothes and body. 

Then, as I left the woods behind and topped the meadow above the farmhouse, my heart sang at the sight of my husband on the porch looking for us. Waiting, with a dry towel and warm cup of tea, for me and our baby to come home. I felt my face, drenched and no doubt filthy, beam at the sight of him. Everything was okay. The storm was letting up, the coyotes had their rabbits, I’d completed my task, and our child was gently sleeping in my womb.  

Venison stew bubbled on the stove when I walked into our kitchen. Rich with potatoes and onions and green beans from our garden, it smelled like warmth and love. 

“Thanks,” I said to my husband as he handed me the towel and some dry clothes. “How was your day?”

“Long, sweaty, productive. How does the back field look?”

“Awesome. Got it done just before the rain hit.” I rubbed the towel over my wet head and tried to shake my lingering feeling of things-not-right. “Can we walk down to Jonah and Ruth’s after dinner? I want to tell them about the coyotes.”

“Not sure. Let me check my social calendar. Oh yeah, I’ve got time.” He smiled and pulled me to him, making room for our child between us.

We walked down the road together hand in hand after dinner. The sky had cleared and there was the promise of a stunning sunset. Full of stew and toast, my husband and I chatted about our plans for buying a beef calf to raise for next year’s meat.

As we turned the corner toward Ruth and Jonah’s place, we were stunned to see the local sheriff’s cruiser joined by two other police cars parked in front of the house. Their lights flashing. “Oh my God! Oh my God!” I began to run toward the house. Catching up to me and grabbing my elbow, my husband held me back. I bent over with a cry as another cramp squeezed my body, this time with iron fists. 

My husband sat me down on a still-damp log near the fence and begged me to stay there and rest while he found out what was wrong. 

I sat and rocked and cooed to our unborn child, “Not yet, shhhhhh, not yet,” as tears of fear dripped down the front of my faded blue sundress. What could be wrong? Why the police? Who was hurt?

It felt like a season passed before my husband returned. The cramps had calmed. The baby was resting. 

When I did finally see him leave the porch and head toward me, he looked older, somehow having aged during his conversation with the police. His head and shoulders sagged. His boots barely cleared the ground, scuffing with every step. His eyes refused to meet mine. 

I stood. “Well? What is it? What’s wrong?”

“It’s bad,” he said. 

“How bad?”

“Worse than you can imagine.” Then he shook his head, hunkered down to the ground, and began to weep.

“What? Tell me.” I cupped my hands beneath our baby and felt it stir.

Still bowing his head, he lifted one arm and placed a hand, fingers splayed, on my belly. On our child.

Haltingly, he told me what he had found out. “Remember how Jonah said he was going to bush hog his field today?”

“Yes, we were both doing that today.”

“Well, something happened out there. He had a heart attack, a stroke, or just hit a rock and lost his balance. He fell off the tractor and got caught under the bush hog.”

I covered my face with my hands and moaned, lowering myself to the ground next to my husband. He wrapped his arms around me and held on. 

“Oh, no. Oh, no. Poor Ruth. Did you see her?”

“Well, that’s the thing. She’s not there.” He still wouldn’t look at me. 

“What do you mean she’s not there? Is she at the hospital?” 

“No, she’s not there because when Jonah didn’t come home for lunch they figured she went looking for him. She left soup on the stove to heat and took Rufus with her.” Now the story came pouring out of him like water from a broken pipe. He had to finish it. To get it out of him.

“Their niece stopped in to see if Jonah or Ruth needed anything in town. She found the soup on and the stove scorched dry in the pan. Then she heard Rufus barking up in the field behind the house.” The last came out more as a sob than words. “There they were. Him chopped to pieces by the bush hog and her lying across the top of it, dead from a heart attack.”

“No. No. No. That can’t be true. We just saw them last night. They’re fine. You're wrong.” I started to pound on his bowed shoulders, repeating the words “you’re wrong, they’re fine” over and over again. That’s when he lifted his head. That’s when he looked in my eyes.

“I wish you were right. I wish I was wrong. But, it’s true and it’s awful and it’s true.”

And then the cramps began to come hard and fast, ratcheting their way through my body. Begging me to push. With a gush our child’s protective water left my body. I cried out in pain so mixed with fear that I couldn’t distinguish the emotional from the physical. “Help me!” I cried out to the world. “Help me, please,” I whispered to Ruth and Jonah.

I remember the siren of the police car. I remember my husband’s arms around me as I sprawled out on the backseat of the cruiser. I remember pushing. And then I don’t remember anything. 

I woke up in the hospital and groggily looked around. The room was silent. No nurse. No cradle. No baby.

How can I live through this? I thought to myself. How does one survive?

*****

We did survive that day. Our daughter survived her early birth and shows no signs of being anything but perfect. And as I gently lay these memories down on paper, I feel blessed to have my beautiful toddler playing on the bedroom floor next to my desk. 

I pause to watch and remember. Out of habit, I reach down to stroke the silky head of Rufus, who lies patiently by my chair. 

We sold the farm that year and moved back to our college town back east. I got a job as an English professor and my husband became the director of the community garden. Our hearts just weren’t in the farm anymore once Ruth and Jonah were gone. How could we make it work without their mentorship and help? How could we continue without their friendship? 

As I pause from my writing, I watch our daughter knead and pat orange clay into a ball and lay it gently in the pan she uses for pretending to bake in her little wooden kitchen. Streaks of coyote gold highlight her curly brown hair. 

Suddenly, I miss her, even though she’s only a few feet away. “Come give your mama a hug, Ruthie,” I say, holding my arms out toward her. I feel the wagging thump of Rufus’s tail against my foot as Ruthie stands, then runs toward me with laughter and love in her summer blue eyes.