NOTE: A few paragraphs from today's freewriting...
I remember one night when I was camped on a cliff high above Canyonlands National Park, a campsite I had been to many times with many different people, I built a small fire of juniper twigs in an elevated and established ring, shielded from the desert wind that always sweeps in at sundown. Peeling the dead outer bark from a nearby wind-wizened tree, I knelt above my firelay and rubbed the bark gently back and forth between my hand showering the bed of twigs with tiny fibers. Twisting the remaining bark in to a nest for the coal, I pulled out my flint striker and began to shower sparks into the nest with my knife.
A momentary red glow signaled to me that one of the sparks had caught and I began to blow on the coal. Gently at first, but constantly, I breathed oxygen into the nest and the fire-ring began to fill with thick smoke. But soon, with a tiny wooshing sound, the bark caught and within minutes the air was filled with the heat and light of a campfire and the aroma of juniper smoke floated on the breeze that carried with it the mournful yipping of a distant coyote, alone on the endless mesa-top.
~
Coyote is a fascinating figure to me, he is saint and sinner, trickster and sage, God and Demon. Much of Native American mythos revolves around him from sea to sea, but to me he best represents the spirit of the Southwest and the red-deserts of the Colorado Plateau. Small and elusive, like a grey whisper on the desert wind, Coyote is nonetheless seen often by men, many of whom view him as a pest or “varmint”. I have seen him many times myself, trotting nonchalantly across an open field, or sitting on his haunches in an oak opening watching me pass; occasionally I will only see his tail as he disappears into the brush along a road or trail. When he is not seen, he is heard, along with a small group of his fellows. In the cold watches of the starry desert night, they hurl their shrill voices skyward, sounding like an army rather than a band.
When he is killed, another steps forward to take his place, indeed in many of the ancient stories coyote is easily killed but staying dead is another matter entirely. Coyote has flourished while their big brother the Wolf, and cousin the Grizzly Bear have been hunted and driven far into the dark, cold forests of the north, into only a sliver of their former range.
No, coyote continues trot along the deer trails on the sage plateau, and to laugh at the moon as it crests the rim of his deep canyon. Indeed “God’s dog”, to borrow from Mary Austin, shows no sign of going anywhere despite all our efforts to the contrary. So when I hear his wild chorus, sung unseen off in the silver sagelands, as the moon rides high in a sea of stars, I smile to myself knowing that my world is still wild and that no one can take that away.
-Charlie Kolb, Atlas Mountains, Morocco
