FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Rain in February

By the Nine Headed Fox

Tum-tum-tum-tum

A coyote was sitting in the bus stop at Hobsonway and 9th, perched up on one of the benches with its hind legs hanging off, like a human. She stared bleary-eyed across the pergola, out across the hellishly hot parking lot to the craggy highway, where the traffic had taken on that uniquely miserable character of noisy intermittency you can only find one block off from an interstate. She knew that sooner or later the traffic would vomit out the late bus to Flagstaff and she'd be done with that place–but until then she just had to hold on through the steady drone and the stultifying heat and the highway stank. It'd been a lousy way to spend her last hour in California, but that was life.

Tum-tum-tum-tum

The coyote didn't look like most coyotes. Her fur was thinner than the others; her ears were rounder; she walked on two legs. Most of the people who saw her mistook her for a human, at first. She didn't have a tail either, and that was the thing that ached the worst. There were other animals with people-skins like her, and they *all* missed their tails, with a silent disconsolate yearning that they had all learned to live with but could never learn to accept.

Tum-tum-tum-tum

They all thought about it every day. She was thinking about it right then, actually. How it'd feel if she just had it back somehow–not forever, she wouldn't beg forever; but if she could be complete just for a day, an hour, a few fleeting wags. She thought about the weight of the brush as it trailed behind her; the way it'd whip across her ankles and fluff up and tamp down; how it would smother and toss her scent. If she was sitting just as she was sitting then, and started wagging her tail, it would thump against the bench, until it came to gently ache between the eighth and ninth bones–at which point she would become *aware* that she was tailstimming, but probably wouldn't stop.

And it would go tum-tum-tum-tum. A muted, woody sound.

From off to the side, someone came engine-roaring into the parking lot like a bat out of hell, and all four doors slammed open-shut so loud she halfway figured they'd be driving a paddy wagon. She perked her phantom ears and listened – felt the way they would swivel, if they really could. And they were talking with their voices up to the edge of shouting, though they weren't saying anything that demanded that kind of urgency.

"Wow, it looks dead out here!" Said one very loud man.

"Are you sure this is the right place?!" Exclaimed his equally overloud wife.

"Yeah! It says right there, bus stop!"

"Oh yeah, how about–eugh, what's that stink?"

The coyote's ears pressed down flat against her head. It wasn't just their voices up too high; everything about these people was loud. Their footsteps were leaden heavy clomps–even the kids' footsteps, light enough to tell apart from their parents', was like somebody chucking rocks.

The coyote had a lonely second to realize that it was odd for her to pick out four sets of footsteps and be able to guess the size of the people they belonged to, from across a parking lot, next to a highway. Then the four people came into view and as soon as he saw her the eldest son leapt back like he'd been slapped–ah Jesus! The whole family looked at the coyote and she looked back at them, a sinking feeling in her stomach: these people weren't wearing the shithead hats but shitheads came in all shapes.

"Relax, Jared." The mother said, giggling softly. "Look, it's stuffed, see? It's wearing clothing."

"It?" The coyote snapped, anger flashing in her eyes. The whole family startled now–ramrod-still and wide-eyed, and that's what she wanted: she was *not* going to let anyone make her an outsider in her hometown, even if she was about to leave it for a decade.

"Shh, shhh...we're friendly..." The mother said. Then she squatted low to the ground and held out her hands palm up–the nerve of these fucking people.

The coyote couldn't even move she was so angry. A vomitously hot anger–fear, yes, but so much more anger–bubbling up inside of her at the fucking gall of the bitch to come here and just start insulting her this way, at the way the way their little brat wrinkled up his nose at her, how the older kid–Jared–said "mom, it's scared, someone just hurt it, look -"

"Okay, just–step back slowly, you three, it could be rabid." Said the father, holding his arms out across the others–and through her rising anger, the coyote realized abruptly that he wasn't looking at her. He kept her in the corner of her eyes with his attention on the pillar. No insults. No implied threats. No shitty slogans.

"What the *hell* is going on?" The coyote demanded. The family didn't *stare* anymore–they were keeping their attentions focused on the things around her, and when she spoke there wasn't even the faintest flash of recognition. Almost like...

"Hey, answer me!" She yapped, and listened to the sound as it left her mouth. It was a single high-pitched whiny ululation, a sharp exhalation without consonants or vowels, which to the ears of the terrified family sounded like the barks of a possibly rabid beast and to her sounded a lot like thirty or forty glass panes breaking at the same time, all on top of her head.

The coyote took a very deep breath, and looked down at her forepaws.

They did not reach out to her sides, the way they used to. They went straight down between her legs and that was the only way they were meant to go. They didn't have five bony articulate fingers, with manicured pink nails. They had four stubby, muscular toes, that were covered in sandy grey fur and crowned with thorny nails.

"...Oh."

She tried to stand up. Her forepaws stayed right where they were–straight down, braced against the bench; and her hind legs–those big ungainly things that'd been hanging off onto the floor, she was pretty sure–they were up on the bench with her. In standing, she did not slide forward onto her feet: instead, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she brought her butt up into the air.

Her pants slid down over her slender, bony hindquarters and fell into a heap on the dusty ground, on top of the empty shoes and socks–smell of wrongbad–next to the sportsbag that was half her size. She sucked in the air and felt it running through three inches of nose, then back out again over sharp teeth–killsharp–she felt them pressing up against the underside of her tongue as she...

She was panting. Her tongue was lolling out over her jaw and she was panting short, gaspy breaths that felt so completely ordinary she hadn't even–how long had she been–"Okay. Nobody move..."

The ears. She became instantly, blisteringly aware of them: the matefetch pointy ears that rooted on the side of her head and perched on the scalp, muscles–muscles, in her ears!–stretched cadawompus to turn them towards the humans and their boomy dumbloud words and the pitter-patter of their giant hearts–and, and the wind rushing down the offramp and the hardcatch birds –there were so many sounds, and she could hear them all, and–

She started laughing–of course she was laughing–a warbly yap-yap-yap that ululated up into an oiiiiiiiir and then back down into an aow-aow-aow and no matter how long she laughed it never became a ha-ha or fnrrk, and she felt something so intense that in the same instant she stumbled forward and tried to jump and just ended going over her skis and landed flat on her back in a pile of all the badwrong twoleg clothes she'd never have to wear again and couldn't even if she wanted to, and the fall didn't hurt because her body was–she wasn't even as big as a six-year-old, she realized! The band tee came down on top of her head, wide and heavy as quilt, and when she tried to kick it off her forelegs which went up-and-down-and-up-and-down got stuck in the sleeves and when she tried to reach out to steady herself against the bench–

It didn't work. No fingers. She was ready to weep tears of joy. But coyotes didn't cry.

Instead her matefetch plumetail wagged back and forth-and-back-and-forth thuppathuppa through the air, tossing the coyote goodstink. In that state of blissful realization she rolled against the warm dusty concrete: getting sand up between the on her hidegood brown fur; sinking her killgood teeth into the badwrong twoleg shirt and letting the fibers soak with coyote slobber. She could have stayed there for eternity, caught between blissful sensations and smells, until-

"Back in the car, while it's stuck! I'm calling animal control!" Yelled Jared, and the world came crashing in. Animal control–that would be a catchpole, euthenasia. She had not regained her life just to lose it again. She twisted, rolled over onto her four legs, pulled herself out of the shirt–she stood and felt the craggy earth press into her pawpads, the heat more distinct in her mind than the sharpness. Barefoot for the rest of her life, she had just enough time to think –

Twoleg runfast blindspot–the human was running behind her, shouting something, and an instinct grabbed her by the spine and rode her whole body: escape. She bolted: forelegs up–jump–up–jump–a -her whole body rocking back and forth, shoulders and thighs burning like bottled lightning. She tore across the burnbad tarmac, parallel to the I-10, leaving all her human possessions behind without one further thought. The wind was beneath her breast and it kissed her on the questing wet nose and on the matefetch pointy ears, as she fearlessly ran east, into the womb of the desert vast.

In her euphoria, she waylaid herself. The I10 repulsed her with its stank and noise so she kept it at the periphery–beating feet through the shallow desert where the loamy sand kicked up between her toes and crumbled down to grains. The sandtrot was an easy thing for her: even under the gaze of the noonday sun, the world seemed cooler to her than it had before. The heat stayed at the edge of her fur coat; the need for water stayed at the back of her mind. She imbibed the sweet new sensations of racing through a desert that had welcomed her as its own: rocks she couldn't help but to climb, things she couldn't help but to sniff.

When first she sat down to rest she caught aloe on the wind; and for simple curiosity, followed her nose to a fat blue succulent with a busted-open leaf. Her mind sparked, coyote instinct and twoleg logic pointing to the same place: rabbit. Her tail went stiff. Her mouth watered. Imagining the snap of a juicy sweet bunny's neck in her mouth, she knew she wanted nothing else. She put her nose to the ground and followed the trail, until the I10 vanished from sight and memory.

So she had to go Sunbirthways until Flagstaff. (Bunny went left, coyote kept going straight.) Then she'd skrunkledog through the suburbs to the hotel, that wouldn't be hard if she did it at night and stayed quiet. (Rabbit slid under brush, coyote leapt over–ears tucked up to her breast, knuckles kissing the muhly. Six inches between them.) Once she was at the hotel she'd be able to have one of the others take her home, to their real home they were making for themselves. The hotel would be easy: She still remembered the roads and the routes and where the building stood. Whatever was changing in her thoughts, places seemed even sharper in relief. (She dives. Snaps. Hunt is over.) And if she was quick to the hotel, most likely her twolegs would even be waiting up for her-

Cold fear crashed through her and she went flat like a scruffed pup, crashing stiff-legged into the dust where she slid over the dirt like a biker eating shit and the rabbit ran she-didn't-care-how-far away.

She'd heard for so long that there was nothing in this life that came for free, and dreams did not come true. Was...this the cost? It couldn't be real. It was too cruel, why would a universe where something so right could happen do something so wrong? Ears pinned, the emotion overcame her; and because coyotes did not cry, she could not help but to toss back her head, in a lugubrious wailing howl.

She couldn't remember their names. Their faces were blurs on top of muted-colored bodies with shapes and ideas she could remember, but...to the coyote, the bodies of her people, her pack, had become hazy and indistinct, mixed up in the world of the twolegs. The last time she'd seen her people she had studied them with different senses, and held space for them in parts of her brain that no longer existed. Even if they'd recognize her, she'd never recognize them. More than that, she didn't know the way to their new house.

And, to top it off, she was completely fucking lost.

The heat got to her a little bit. Then the transformation got to her a little bit. Okay, maybe everything got to her. She was a quarter-way through gnawing off her hindleg when she got a grip again. It really fucking hurt, what she'd just done, but that wasn't why she snapped out of it. She finally got out of the picture and back into herself when, in the middle of keening and rolling around and gnawing off her own leg in a one-of-kind panic attack, a sprinkle of rain dusted her belly. She sat straight up.

"Wait, isn't it fucking February?" The coyote said out loud, which came out like yip-yip-oooir.

It was a week after Valentine's day. So far out of the rainy season that the lightest sprinkle landed like solid gold. The coyote ought've been drowned in her panic, dead on the roadside, and forgotten by world long before she'd ever seen the rain. Yet she raised her nose sunbirthways–and out there in that banner of sky, where there were only five rivers and no ocean, she saw the roil of inky-dark stormclouds.

"Oir...?" The coyote cocked her head, instincts old and new compelling her to stand and give notice. She rose from despair, all four legs unsteady beneath her, and she walked–with each step knowing less and less why she was going, becoming more a wild animal. There was not the ache of intentionality and thought that came with being a twoleg; she felt almost a ghost in her own skin. Coyote sandtrotted tongue out ears flat towards the phantom cloud, until she came to the sunsleepway foothills of a greenback mountain. The sun was low in the sky and it met her two ways as the rolling hills: going up the sunsleep slopes it kissed her back, and the sand was still warm underfoot; going down the sunbirth ones it silked the tips of her ears and she felt the heat wicking out of her pawpads into the greedy soil below.

The desert's other people were waking up. Peccaries running in a grunting squeaking herd. She crossed a trail where the coyote goodstink wafted melodically off the path and she stopped–put her nose to the ground and clocked them going North. In the Sunbirthways sky the cloud was swollen up into a towering cumulonimbus where its towering dark reaches crashed against the golden rays of the setting sun like a castle on fire.

And when the sun at last set and night gained the world, Coyote found herself at the edge of a puppy-mesa on the slope of a jagged red peak, at a greater height than she knew she'd gained, having traveled further than she thought possible: looking down into the valley, she saw the jumbled-together squares of Phoenix city.

Her heart skipped. If you were at Phoenix you knew how to get to Flagstaff. It was clear, now: she'd never been lost. For even an instant. She felt the way home, even though it was a place she'd never been, in her gut. Lost was a thing humans did; Coyotes wandered.

That was the death knell of doubt. She couldn't be standing there on the edge of Phoenix and not trust herself anymore. Her eyes followed the narrow strand of I17 past glittering Lake Pleasant and fable-shrouded Agua Fria, until it passed between the mountain peaks and out of sight. She wouldn't follow it, but she knew she'd meet it again in Flagstaff, under the shadow of the phantom cloud.

The sprinkle of rain kissed her ears. Rain in February. Coyote turned to Phoenix, at the warm glows rising from the towers and the bright lights crawling like ants across the 101. Man had changed the desert as much as the desert had changed her. Rain in February, coyotes born on two legs and switching to four. That, she supposed, was going to be the way of things. It was too beautiful to comprehend and too loud to deny. The first showers now.

Droplets coming down in spritzes, then buckets, with sheets on the horizon. The wind growled in her ear and swore that soon it would howl. The desert held its arms open to her. Everything of her that was not meant for that place had been tempered in the sun: cracked, sunbaked, made into freestanding cakes of dust. Coyote leaned into the storm, and let herself blow away.

Names could go; scents would stay. States could go, packs could stay. Coyote had learned a lot of things about being human; but now those times were gone, and those things were finally over. She was onto the next thing now: when the change coming for all of them, came for Phoenix and for Flagstaff and all the desert's children on two and four legs both, Coyote would be there.

Coyote saw the way ahead. She–no, It–descended the trail, following its lucky cloud away from the dust of its old self, into the epoch-tossed hills where the rain was coming down as curtains. It trotted–ran–galloped, flying over the desert with speed impossible for any human and passion unlike any other animal, leaving a wake across the sand. When the desert people saw it, they saw a thing like-but-apart: the gristlecrunch bunnies who heard its coming did not flee and the goodstink coyotes placidly watched it course through their territories–they raised their voices in triumphant howls, and but for the grace of Gaia would have joined it on that journey.

The world was a drumline: its heart hammered madly against its chest and beneath its pawpads it felt the th-thump-th-thump of the desert underneath its driving steps, and all around her the sky peppered the earth with kisses. Again there was that feeling of ethereality, of gliding through more than walking over, but now Coyote felt like anything except a ghost: it was finally, after years of Hell, so in tune with the body that it couldn't feel the friction anymore.

It stopped twice for a drink–once from a brackish puddle where the water hit like lukewarm soup, and once in a rocky basin where the rain and moonlight made the water into a rippling mirror. Looking down at its reflection, Coyote grinned–tail dancing ceaselessly across its hocks. One day it was going to get a good look, in a finished glass, at its wicked yellow eyes and its buncha-triangles-head–but for the time being it drank its snout and kept on running.

Next Sunbirth found Coyote coming down over Mingus Mountain–Sedona off its right shoulder, Flagstaff on the horizon. It was otherworldly, recognizable as Arizona only by inference: the stormcloud crowned the valley, bathing all creation in a queer evening cast. The shadows of the ponderosa forest stretched and threaded into a penumbral quilt and the sun seemed ill at ease in his own home. The skyfingers came down on Coyote's ears in short cold pinches and dragged the fur down in to make the thing look soggy and indignant, though in truth it had never felt more free.

What a thing it was to feel mother nature's lash against your own animal flesh, naked and unable to change it. What a thing it was to trudge doggedly on four legs through the driving rain because you had nowhere else to go. It was as high an honor as it could ever be given, to be left on its own in the wilderness. And there was one more loving lash to fall: the gnawing ache of a wild animal's hunger. It hadn't stopped walking the whole night, but even with the wind at its back there was only so far it could go on an empty stomach.

Its thoughts turned again to the hunt, when the wind came in with an irrefutable offer: bacon and beef tossed with onions and guacamole, mouth-watering to anything with the taste for meat. It was maybe two-some miles away–admittedly a detour, it didn't know if she'd ever come that way again. While she was in Jerome there was one thing it _had_to do, or it'd never be able to live with herself.

Which is how Coyote ended up strangling on the end of a catchpole behind the Haunted Hamburger, snarling and baring its teeth and threateningly snapping its jaws like that was going to do anything (it couldn't stop itself) at a hirsuit oaf with a gentle face and armored gauntlets. It was covered from snooter to tooter in half-masticated entrees and room-temp sauces, which flicked off its writhing body in sticky foul-smelling sprays. Coyote had been clever enough to leap up onto the rim of the trash can and pick through the goods–not clever enough to keep the can from flipping over on it.

But it was clever enough not to bite anyone, even when it really, really wanted to. And to be clear, when the heavyset oaf firmly-but-politely pushed her into a transport cage, it really, really wanted to bite him. It was caught between two dueling poles of instinct, the wild dog yelling show your teeth and the clever dog yelling show your belly. What ended up happening was that Coyote meekly shuffled into the two-by-two-by-four wireframe. The cage door clanged shut behind it and the the heavyset stranger hurked it forward–Coyote squatted low and held its balance, looking up through the bar at the catcher with perked ears and nervous eyes.

When they left the place behind, the stranger brought Coyote up to the passenger-side seat of a white panel van and placed its cage on the seat, which it still had enough grasp of the twolegs' infernal machines to know was unusual. There was something unusual too in the catcher's bouncy, lighthearted step–in his baby face and his twinkling eyes. When he took the driver's seat Coyote watched him with the sense that he wasn't right.

It was raining still–tinny drums on the roof like a TV turned up. Slow going with lots of starts and stops, which rocked Coyote every time–it tensed its legs and shifted weight, riding it more like a surfboard than a van. And the fourth time Coyote rode a deacceleration like a champion, the catcher turned to face it–he clicked his tongue disapprovingly, blue eyes twinkling in that chocolate mop of a face.

"You speak English, stray dog?" Coyote nodded yes out of instinct and then realizes abruptly what it just did.

It pursed its lips and folds its ears–smiling apologetically, like it probably should've tried back at the dumpster.

"Figg'rd.

"You wanna try and change b-"

Coyote snarled flew forward, pressing her teeth and snout up against the bars of her cage and biting down until the wire rolled over her gums; the stranger bit his tongue.

"Right."

The road was familiar, Coyote thought–it was hard to feel the way in her paws and in her bones when she was inside a cage-that-moves, but there was something in the rhythm of the turns that she recognized. A jagged right, a few wide, lazy arcs–a switchback. Her heart jumped in her chest–breath quickened in her lungs. In the cage she couldn't raise her head up over the dash: all she could see was the trees and the rocks and then the dark rainy sky above; and even in this strange new world, another more miracle seemed one range too far to cross.

"Well...don' get caugh'gain, ar-right? Had to bust my ass to get here in time. What if they got your ass in the zoo, you think of that?"

It keened and buried its face in its paws. Coyote had not thought of that. It was thinking of the burger. And, now that the burger was back in mind, Coyote realized it had some unfinished business: hiking one leg over its head it tucked its nose into its thigh, and began licking itself clean–ketchup and bacon grease splashed over its spade, their flavors crossed with its own inimitable coyote goodstink. She ate herself like a cheese burger the whole way up the mountainside–the stranger rolled down his window and leaned out the window; because for all his kindness, he was unlucky enough to be a human, who could smell Coyote and wish intently that he could not.

When the stranger stopped the car they were in a place almost-tamed, where vast sprawls of twoleg houses entwine like the contours of the desert itself. That place was not long for the world in that state, nor was the way of men: before man's current shape the desert had endured, and it would endure in this new strange way, where it rained buckets in February and people became coyotes. And man would change or he would, like all his greatest works, succumb to the desert.

"There's gon be more." The stranger murmured. "Be here fer em."

He opened the door and popped the cage. Coyote leapt out onto a familiar street.

The torrent was in its tail end now; and where the water dwindled petrichor rose like a second sea to Coyote's waiting nose. It knew the shape of this street but never imagined it could smell so sweet. As the stranger pulled away, Coyote slunk through the morning half-light, across the motel parking lot; where, gathered around with coffee and feelgood pens, a group of fourlegs who only had two legs were consoling each other after a long night of fear.

"We'll find her, okay?" Said one to the other. "She's not–nothing happened to her. I would feel it."

"You think so?" Said another–and the first was about to answer, when they heard the click-clack of coyote nails across the blacktop and turned around to see a soaked, stinky desert dog sandtrotting towards him.

"...Huh. A coyote." He said. "Shame she's not here to see...it.

"...Holy shit...!"