Excerpt from Badlands
20
From the low outcropping in the rock that serves as its den, the coyote pack fans out across the early spring prairie to forage meat for the fledgling pups. Alone with the father coyote, Caro smells carrion, first flesh, then blood, then marrow. Near the eddy of the creek where Mother Magpie played as a child, in the shade of the dense branching of a weeping willow, on a bed of woven wheatgrass and moistened clay, she sees the bodies—a mother and child offered up by a snowdrift that melts around them. At their feet, creek waters gasp under tender ice floes, which teethe on the frozen mudbanks and break into small sheathes that dance and drift on the whims of the reviving current. Caro pauses to pray over the bodies, almost perfectly preserved by the cold in a posture of protection.
But what the coyote sees is meat and bone, blood and liver and heart, the soft tissue of the brain. He prefers this easy mark to killing because predation consumes energy. One body shielding another means only one thing to him: more food for the pups, his mate, their helpers.
The coyote noses the bodies. They do not strike back. Less timid, he noses the flesh again. They do not strike back. He rips the smaller body from the larger one . . . no death . . . tears away the woman’s legs from her pelvis with his powerful jaws . . . no death song . . . consumes the flesh to carry back in his stomach to the pups . . . no death song rises . . . burrows a small hole in the soft earth to cache the bones. No death song rises across the valley.
Flies, roused by the smell of blood, hover, alight on the exposed flesh.
When he is finished, he buries all but the mother’s two femurs, grips them in his mouth, and carries them the short distance to the sheltered outcropping where his mate and their four pups wait.
Caro follows him, the coyote unaware of her presence. He drops the long-bones near the bed of grass and fur, regurgitates the flesh to feed the newly weaning pups. With his teeth, he rips the bones into large pieces and offers one to his mate. Then he howls, calling the rest of the pack home.
Soon the pack scavenges among the remains by the nameless creek, near the eddy where Caro first found the bones. Two of the younger males fight over the child’s arm bone; one nips at the fingers, one tears at the head. A shard of the thumb bone drops to the earth near the mother’s pelvic bone and a piece of the child’s skull; the three bones are ground into the mud by the scuffling of coyote feet. The animals are sated, ready to play, and three bones more or less make no difference to them.
