Dear Old One and Coyote

 

 
            Dear Old One was always talking. Sometimes she told the old stories everyone knew, but sometimes, she muttered things no one had ever heard before.
            To the children, she seemed as old as the world itself. She was short and bent. Her clothes were so old that she had shortened them to match her stature, dresses almost as old as she. Her hair was white, worn up in a twist, so that it looked like a shiny candy. Her eyes were sharp, blue, always looking. Her tongue was sharp too.
            If a village child didn’t know her they may have thought she looked frightening.  So old, bent, and slow, with a stick to help her walk.
            But Spring Peeper did know Dear Old One. She knew that the old lady was kind, harsh, but protective like a good medicine. Spring Peeper trusted her absolutely.
            Of course Spring Peeper was not her real name. Her true name was a secret kept from the Little People. Naturally, no one wanted them knowing their true name.
            One day Spring Peeper was following Dear Old One around her house and outside in the garden, making a pest of herself and getting underfoot of the old lady. So, the old lady sat on the bench outside, under the locust tree and the small girl sat beside her, swinging her feet and humming a tuneless little girl tune. Dear Old One turned her head and looked down on the child with her sharp blue eyes, and she began to speak.
            “You may be assured that Coyote, who is neither good nor evil in himself, comes to every man and asks him a question. The answer to the question will determine whether he is to be tied to the returning wheel, or shall be free,” she said. Then she closed her eyes and rested her hands on the head of her walking stick propped between her knees.
            This didn’t mean a lot to Spring Peeper, but she listened anyhow and tried to puzzle it out. She also thought that since she was not a man, and would never be a man, that the question really had nothing to do with herself. She figured that it was one of those rhetorical pronouncements her great grandmother was given to speaking from time to time.
            She did not expect to be put to the test by Coyote.
            Of course, no one ever does, do they?
            Another day, Spring Peeper was at home with She Is There and the other children. There were three of them, all younger, with one still at the breast. She Is There had been baking bread all morning. Her traditional breads were flat like pitas, and extremely good.
            Like in all such tales, the mother, She Is There, thought to send Spring Peeper with a basket of these good breads to her own grandmother, Dear Old One, at her small old house further down the river road by something like half a mile. Spring Peeper knew the way for she had walked that way many times on the same sort of errand.
            She Is There wrapped a good  half dozen flat breads in a nice clean cotton towel and put them in the usual withy basket, which moved between their houses on various missions. She told Spring Peeper to go straight to Dear Old One’s cottage and come right back home immediately.
            Spring Peeper agreed and set out in a businesslike manner down the path beside the river in the shade of the trees that always seem to grow beside rivers.
            As she walked along in the pleasant shade, looking at this and that, flowers and bees, and birds, and all, she thought she heard a voice coming up behind her on the path. She listened and was surprised to hear what the voice was saying: “Not a fox, not a wolf. Not a fox, not a wolf!” It was repeated over and over again as if this were a very fine thing.
            Spring Peeper forgot her mother’s directions. She turned in the path to see who was following her. To her surprise she saw a beautiful doglike creature who was not a dog, nevertheless. He shone yellowish where the dappled sunlight spotted his fur. He smiled a friendly smile, and said, “Not a fox, not a wolf!
            “Hello, Child! Fancy meeting you here today!” said the shining creature. “What, may I ask, is your name?”
            Completely blindsided and charmed, Spring Peeper said, “Rosina!”
            “Ah, Rosina! Tell me which is best, will you?” said Coyote, for such he was, as you know well.
            “I can’t tell you which is best until you put the question to me,” said poor little Rosina.
            “Very well,” said Coyote, sitting on his haunches there in the path and wrapping his tail around his feet.
            “Which do you desire? Shall you be the most beautiful girl in the village, and the country, and have great fame for your beautiful face?
            “Or will you serve long years, baking bread, and tending babies, and all of that?” said Coyote, with shining yellow eyes, and with his tongue lolling from his open jaws. He waited there to see what the child would tell him.
            “When I am old, I shall be wise, like my Dear Old One! And if I am to be beautiful, I shall be beautiful in the village, like She Is There!” said Spring Peeper.
            “And so you shall be both wise and beautiful!” said Coyote, secretly quite pleased with her answer.
            “Farewell, Rosina, wise child. I won’t tell your name to the Little People, no fear,”  and he passed her up on the path and walked out into the field until she saw him no more.
            She carried the withy basket of still quite fresh bread to Dear Old One. She kissed the old lady, then went right back home, as she had promised to do.

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