Driving through chest-high sagebrush, gleaming and gray in the sunlight, and a coyote ran out in front of me and forty feet up the road. A gleaming gray herself, her fur thick and shining as if it had been brushed for hours, she leapt across the road. A glance my way, a quickening of step on seeing my unexpected truck, and then but a tail-tip disappearing into sagebrush, and left nothng but small footfall clouds of tawny dust to settle back onto the washboard. My heart bounded along with her, and I grinned as the desert swallowed her up, no ripples in the sea of wormwood sage and juniper, tan granite shining back at the Mojave sun.
And then I woke, unsure of where I was for a moment, and then a leaden gray descended. It was more memory than dream, an event replayed that took place some years back and altered only a little in the dreaming of it, and in the interim the fire swept over all of it.
The fire swept over all of it, a tidal wave of flame, far too fast for the fleetest feet to outrun it. The junipers, the sagebrush dark and ashes. The coyotes roasted bones under a scathing sun.
I was babysitting a ranch one summer some years back, while the owner was away tending to other business interests. There were a couple of hundred cows and calves in several pastures, and I went out with my dog Ranger several times a day to walk the pastures and check on them.
The farthest pasture was separated from the ranch by a wire fence overgrown with vines, so that it formed a solid wall of opaque green about four feet high. Approaching it one day I noticed the 50-or-so cows on its other side standing in concentric circles, all facing inward and peering in absolute fascination at ... something.
I bent low and crept up on the fence, rising slowly to peek over it and see ... magic. In the middle of the herd, like stars before a slack-jawed audience, two coyotes danced.
They nipped and pawed playfully, bounced into the air, took turns one leaping over the other, bowed and spun in place — supple, bright-eyed canine slam-dancers unselfconsciously enjoying themselves on a delicious summer day.
I stood and watched them for three or four minutes until my legs grew tired of the half-crouched position. I shifted my weight to relieve the strain, and they saw me instantly. Without a pause, they stopped what they were doing, cut through the bovine audience and vanished in different directions.
When the Hayman fires began in Colorado in 2004, I was at my parents’ house in suburban Denver (down from the high country where I was working that summer). Around 11 p.m., smoke drifted into the house. I was still awake, and I wandered around the house sniffing everything, including the electric outlets…but it wasn’t our house on fire. Since the neighbors all appeared okay and there were no sirens, I finally went to bed, puzzled but unalarmed. In the morning: pictures of the fire, large and spreading, all over the morning news. And the people watered their lawns that day, shook their heads over the soot, sat in their air conditioning, a silent anti-witness to the flames.
The great secret in all trickster myths is the trickster’s own abject determination of self-destruction that always leads to rebirth, re-creation, and renewal. Fire, lightening, tornados, etc. are the tools of the tricksters’ kraftwerks