An hour before daybreak she pulls on her jeans, a fleece jacket, a sturdy pair of hiking boots that she laces up to her ankles. She grabs a full bottle of tea from the refrigerator, then unlocks a drawer and takes out her husband's .38 revolver. She runs her fingers along the white handle of polished ivory. Made from the tusks of African elephants. Harvested by poachers of unimaginable cruelty. A gun of devastating political incorrectness.
With flashlight in hand and cigarette clamped between her teeth, she stumbles along the narrow trail that she and her husband cleared with hatchet, rake, and hoe two summers ago. The path, now overgrown with giant hogsweed and big clumps of bluestem flowers, winds along a slope that leads to the valley floor. Along the way she traverses a narrow ledge of soft gray shale and walks beneath a precipitous wall of bog iron and jagged siltstone bejeweled with sea lilies and brachiopods and mysterious things yet to be named by the scientists who come here to excavate the great armored fish and razor-toothed leviathans, monsters imprisoned in these rocks for eons, all but erased from the memory of the planet and the imagination of man.
After hacking through the brush with her walking stick, Batya finds the partially uprooted stump of a sycamore where her husband carved their initials in Gothic script, the B and P of her name beginning to fade now, the letters almost indistinguishable from the whorls of wood. The massive tree that once stood here was an ancient one. The rings indicate that it was already two hundred years old when the Whittelsey Indians briefly settled in this valley in the seventeenth century. After walking around the stump three times, the magic number, she sits down, crushes out her cigarette and uncorks the bottle of tea. Through the creaking limbs of oaks and elms she can make out Venus and Mars, distant worlds that rise just before the dawn this Halloween day.
Across the river, peering through the rough grass at the edge of a meadow, a dozen eyes stare at her with curiosity and desperate hunger. Batya turns the alien lance of light on them, but the coyotes do not scare easily. They stand their ground and paw at the earth. She recognizes them for what they really are, medicine men and shape shifters still reeling from their magic potions. After many centuries of exile they have returned to this place to perform their sacred ghost dance.
When they lived in this river valley, the shamans would emerge from their wigwams to the accompaniment of drums, rattles, and flutes. Whirling before the evening fires, they chanted tales about the trickster Coyote. Obsessed by his painfully engorged penis, Coyote devised clever schemes to penetrate the nubile and slick skinned maidens who bathed in the clear waters along the riverbank. But in the forest there lived an old woman who watched for Coyote, and whenever she caught him violating these maidens she rushed to the river and clubbed him repeatedly over the head with her cane of polished hickory. Letting out a sharp yap of pain, Coyote dashed away but was determined to have his revenge.
On a moonless evening, amidst the flutter of bats and the buzz of insects, he sidled into the old woman's tent while she slept, and with a howl of unbridled merriment slid between her withered legs. The next morning, the old woman awoke with a vaguely familiar sense of fulfillment, and for many nights after this encounter, she left strangled hens and geese outside her tent, hoping these prizes might lure Coyote back to her bed. But he never returned, and in the months and years that followed, the woman faded away into the austerity and solitude of old age without ever again experiencing the pleasures of youth.
Batya knows the tale well. It's a cherished fragment of a much larger storytelling tradition that by some miracle survived the expurgation of the Jesuit missionaries who conquered this land for Christendom. Legend has it that the pope's foot soldiers, bearing shields of silver emblazoned with gold crosses, battled their way through the wilderness to this very spot, but the Indian holy men were able to evade capture and conversion by drinking magic tea and transforming themselves into coyotes, black rat snakes, and red tailed hawks.
Listening to the river rush toward the city, Batya daydreams of such liberation. Above the rim of the valley, a thin band of steely October light stretches across the eastern horizon and turns the leaden clouds into hazy pink ribbons that look like chalk gently smeared on a blackboard or blood seeping slowly through loosely wrapped gauze.
She finishes the last of her tea, but before making the journey back to the house, she draws the .38 from her pocket. She unlatches the safety, lifts the gun above her head and fires once into the air. Across the river, still watching her from the meadow, the coyotes cry out in alarm and bolt into the woods.
