One day this Coyote decides he wants to have a powwow, so he clears the trash from this empty lot, makes the circle, makes the fire. The people come but no one knows the songs anymore, no one knows the drumming that the dancers need, no one knows the steps. Everybody they’re just standing around, looking at each other, feeling sort of stupid, until Coyote he starts singing, ya-ha-hey, ya-ha-hey, and he’s stomping around the circle, kicking up dirt and dust.
People they start to laugh, then, seeing Coyote playing the fool. “You are one crazy skin!” Angie Crow calls to him and people laugh some more, nodding in agreement, pointing at Coyote as he dances round and round the circle.
But Jimmy Coldwater he picks up a stick and he walks over to the drum Coyote made. It’s this big metal tub, salvaged from a junkyard, that Coyote’s covered with a skin and who knows where he got that skin, nobody’s asking. Jimmy he hits the skin of the drum and everybody they stop laughing and look at him, so Jimmy he hits the skin again. Pretty soon he’s got the rhythm to Coyote’s dance and then Dan Whiteduck he picks up a stick, too, and joins Jimmy at the drum.
Billy Yazhie he starts up to singing then, takes Coyote’s song and turns it around so that he’s singing about Spider Rock and turquoise skies, except everybody hears it their own way, hears the stories they want to hear in it. There’s more people drumming and there’s people dancing and before anyone knows it, the night’s over and there’s the dawn poking over the roof of an abandoned factory, thinking, these are some crazy skins. People they’re lying around and sitting around, eating the flatbread and drinking the tea that Coyote provided, and they’re all tired, but there’s something in their hearts that feels very full.
“This was one fine powwow,” Coyote he says.
Angie she nods her head. She’s sitting beside Coyote all sweaty and hot and she’s never looked quite so good before.
“Yeah,” she says. “We got to do it again.”
* * *
We start having regular powwows after that night, once, sometimes twice a month. Some of the skins they start to making dancing outfits, going back up to the reserve for visits and asking about steps and songs from the old folks. Gets to be we feel like a community, a small skin nation living here in exile with the ruins of broken-down tenements and abandoned buildings all around us. Gets to be we start remembering some of our stories and sharing them with each other instead of sharing bottles. Gets to be we have something to feel proud about.
Some of us we find jobs. Some of us we try to climb up the side of the wagon but we keep falling off. Some of us we go back to homes we can hardly remember. Some of us we come from homes where we can’t live, can’t even breathe, and drift here and there until we join this tribe that Albert he helped us find.
And even if Albert he’s not here anymore, the stories go on. They have to go on, I know that much. I tell them every chance I get.
* * *
See, this Coyote he got in trouble again, this Coyote he’s always getting in trouble, you know that by now, same as me. And when he’s in jail this time he sees that it’s all tribes inside, the same as it is outside. White tribes, black tribes, yellow tribes, skin tribes. He finally understands, finally realizes that maybe there can’t ever be just one tribe, but that doesn’t mean we should stop trying.
But even in jail this Coyote he can’t stay out of trouble and one day he gets into another fight and he gets cut again, but this time he thinks maybe he’s going to die.
“Albert,” Coyote he says, “I am one crazy skin. I am never going to learn, am I?”
“Maybe not this time,” Albert says, and he’s holding Coyote’s head and he’s wiping the dribble of blood that comes out of the side of Coyote’s mouth and is trickling down his chin. “But that’s why you’re Coyote. The wheel goes round and you’ll get another chance.”
Coyote he’s trying to be brave, but he’s feeling weaker and it hurts, it hurts, this wound in his chest that cuts to the bone, that cuts the thread that binds him to this story.
“There’s a thing I have to remember,” Coyote he says, “but I can’t find it. I can’t find its story….”
“Doesn’t matter how small they try to make you,” Albert he reminds Coyote. “You’re still Coyote.”
“Ya-ha-hey,” Coyote he says. “Now I remember.”
Then Coyote he grins and he lets the pain take him away into another story.
Laughter in the Leaves
…but the wind was always
laughter in the leaves to me.
—Wendelessen,
from “An Fear Glas”
“Listen,” Meran said.
By the hearth, her husband laid his hand across the strings of his harp to still them and cocked his head. “I don’t hear a thing,” he said. “Only the wind.”
“That’s just it,” Meran replied. “It’s on the wind. Laughter. Giggles. I tell you, he’s out there again.”
Cerin laid his instrument aside. “I’ll go see,” he said.
Outside, the long grey skies of autumn were draining into night. The wind that came down from the heaths was gusting through the forest, rattling the leaves, gathering them up in eddying whirls and rushing them between the trees in a swirling dance. The moon was just starting to tip the eastern horizon, but there was no one out there. Only Old Badger, lying in his special spot between the cottage and the rose bushes, who lifted his striped head and made a questioning sort of noise at the harper standing in the doorway.
“Did you see him?” Cerin asked.
The badger regarded him for a few moments, then laid his head back down on his crossed forepaws.
“I’ve only seen him once myself,” Meran said, joining Cerin at the door. “But I know he’s out there. He knows you’re going tomorrow and is letting me know that he means to pull a trick or two while you’re gone.”
“Then I won’t go.”
“Don’t be silly. You have to go. You promised.”
“Then you must come. You were invited.”
“I think I’d prefer to put up with our bodach’s tricks to listening to the dry talk of harpers for two whole nights and the day in between too, I’ll wager.”
Cerin sighed. “It won’t be all talk…”
“Oh, no,” Meran replied with a smile. “There’ll be fifteen versions of the same tune, all played in a row, and then a discussion as to which of twenty titles is the oldest for this particular tune. Wonderfully interesting stuff, I don’t doubt, but it’s not for me. And besides,” she added, after stooping down to give Old Badger a quick pat and then closing the door, “I mean to have a trick or two ready for our little bodach myself this time.”
Cerin sighed again. He believed there was a bodach, even though neither he nor anyone but Meran had ever seen it—and even then only in passing from the corner of her eye. But sometimes he had to wonder if every bit of mischief that took place around the cottage could all be blamed on it. Whether it was a broken mug or a misplaced needle, it was always the bodach this and the bodach that.
“I don’t know if it’s such a wise idea to go playing tricks on a bodach,” he said as he made his way back to the hearth. “They’re quick to anger and—”
“So am I!” Meran interrupted. “No, Cerin. You go to your Harper’s Meet and don’t worry about me. One way or another, we’ll have come to an agreement while you’re gone. Now play me a tune before we go to bed. He’s gone now—I can tell. Do you hear the wind?”
Cerin nodded. But it sounded no different to him now than it had before. “The smile’s gone from it,” Meran explained. “That’s how you can tell that he’s gone.”
“I don’t know why you don’t just let me catch him with a harpspell.”
Meran shook her head. “Oh, no. I’ll best this little fellow with my wits, or not at all. I made that bargain with myself the first time he tripped me in the woods. Now come. Where’s that tune you promised me?”
Cerin brought Telynros up onto his lap and soon the cottage ran
g with the music that spilled from the roseharp’s strings. Outside, Old Badger listened and the wind continued to make a dance of the leaves between the trees and only Meran could have said if the smile returned to its voice or not, but she would speak no more of bodachs that night.
* * *
The morning Cerin left, Meran’s favourite mug fell from the shelf where it was perched and shattered on the stone floor, her hair when she woke was a tangle of elfknots that she didn’t even bother to comb out, and the porridge boiled over for all that she stood over it and stirred and watched and took the best of care. She stamped her foot, but neither she nor Cerin made any comment. She saw him to the road with a smile, gave him a kiss and a jaunty wave along his way, and watched him go. Not until he was lost from sight, up the track and over the hill, with the sun in his eyes and the wind at his back, did she turn
and face the woods, arms akimbo, to give the trees a long considering look.
“Now we’ll see,” she said.
She returned to the cottage, Old Badger at her heels.
The morning passed with her pretending to ignore the presence she knew was watching her from the forest. She combed out her hair, unravelling each knot that the little gnarled fingers of an elfman had tied in it last night. She picked up the shards of her mug, cleaned the burnt porridge from the stove, then straightened the kindling pile that had toppled over with a clatter and spill while she was busy inside the cottage. The smile on her lips was a little thin, but it never faltered.
She hummed to herself and it seemed that the wind in the trees put words to the tune:
Catch me, snatch me,
Catch me if you can!
You’ll never put the fetters
On a little kowrie man!
“That’s as may be,” Meran said as she got the last of the kindling stacked once more. She tied it in place with knots that only an oakmaid would know, for she was the daughter of the Oak King of Ogwen Wood and knew a spell or two of her own. “But still we’ll see.”
When she went back inside, she could hear the kindling sticks rattle about a bit, but her knots held firm. And so it went through the day. She rearranged everything in the cottage, laying tiny holding spells here, there and everywhere. She hung fetishes over each window—tiny bundles made up of dried oak leaves and acorns to represent herself, wren’s feathers for Cerin, a lock of bristly badger hair for Old Badger, and rowan sprigs for their magic to seal the spell. Only the door she left untouched. By then twilight was at hand, stealing softfooted across the wood, so she pulled up a chair to face the door and sat down to wait.
And the night went by.
The wind made its teasing sounds around the cottage, Old Badger slept under her chair. She stayed awake, watching the door, firmly resolved to stay up the whole night if that was what it took. But as the hours crept by after midnight, she began to nod, blinked awake, nodded again, and finally slept. When she woke in the morning, the door stood ajar, her hair was a crow’s nest of tangles, and there was a small mocking stick figure drawn with charcoal on the floor at her feet, one arm lifted and a wide grin almost making two halves of the head.
The wind gusted in through the door as soon as she was awake, sending a great spill of leaves that rattled like laughter across the floor. Stiff from an uncomfortable night spent in a chair, Meran made herself some tea and went outside to sit on the stoop. She refused to show even a tad of the frustration she felt. Instead she calmly drank her tea, pulled loose the new night’s worth of tangles, then went inside to sweep the leaves and other debris from the cottage. The stick figure she left where it had been drawn to remind her of last night’s failure.
“Well,” she said to Old Badger as she went to set down a bowl of food for him. “And what did you see?”
The striped head lifted, eyes mournful, until the bowl was on the floor. And then he was too busy to reply—even if he’d had a voice with which to do so. Meran knew she should get some rest for the next night, but she was too busy trying to think up a new way to stay awake to be able to sleep. It was self-contradictory, and she knew it, but it couldn’t be helped. A half year of the bodach’s tricks was too long. Five minutes worth would be too long. As it drew near the supper hour, she finally gave up trying to rest and went to the well for water. A footfall on the road startled her as she was drawing the bucket up. She turned, losing her grip on the well’s rope. The bucket went rattling down the well until it hit the bottom with a heavy splash. But she didn’t hear it. Her attention was on the figure that stood on the track.
It was an old man that was standing there, an old travelling man in a tattered blue coat and yellow breeches, with his tinker’s pack on his back and his face brown as a nut and lined with age. He regarded her with a smile, blue eyes twinkling.
“Evening, ma’am,” he said. “It’s been an awfully dry road I’ve been wending, no doubt about that. Could you see yourself clear to sparing me a drink from that well of yours?”
It’s the bodach, Meran thought. Oh, you mischief-maker, I have you now.
“Of course,” she replied, smiling sweetly. “And you’ll stay for supper, won’t you?”
“Oh, no, ma’am. I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble.”
“It’s no trouble at all.”
“That’s kind of you.”
Meran drew the bucket up once more. “Come along to the house and we’ll brew up some tea—it’ll do more for your thirst than just water.”
“Oh, it does that,” the old man agreed as he followed her back to the cottage. Meran watched him with many a sidelong glance as they entered the cottage. He gave the chair facing the door an odd look, and the charcoal drawing an even odder one, but said nothing. Playing the part of an old tinker man, she supposed the bodach meant to stay in character. A tinker would know better than to make remarks about whatever oddities his hostess might have in her house. He laid his pack by the door and Meran put the kettle on.
“Have you been travelling far?” she asked.
“Oh, far enough for these old bones. I’m bound for Matchtem—by the sea, you know. My son has a wagon there and we winter a little farther down the coast near Applewater.”
Meran nodded. “Do have a seat,” she said.
The old man looked around. She was busy at the table where the other chair was, so he sat down gingerly in the one facing the door. No sooner was he sitting, than Meran slipped up behind him and tossed a chain with tiny iron links over him, tying it quickly to the chair. Oh, the links were small and a boy could have easily broken free of them, but anything with iron in it bound a bodach or one of the kowrie folk. Everyone knew that.
Meran danced around in front of the chair.
“Now I have you!” she cried. “Oh, you wicked bodach! I’ll teach you to play your tricks on me.”
“I am an old man,” the tinker said, eyeing her carefully, “but I’ve played no tricks on you, ma’am—or at least none that I know of. My name’s Yocky John, and I’m just a plain travelling man.”
Meran smiled at the name, for she knew a word or two in the old tinker language. Clever John, the bodach might call himself, but he wasn’t clever enough for her.
“Oh?” she asked. “You didn’t tangle my hair, nor break my crockery, nor play a hundred other little mischiefs and tricks on me? And who was it then?”
“Is it trouble with the little folk you’re having?” Yocky John asked.
“Just one. You. And I have you now.”
“But you don’t. All you’ve caught is an old tinker, too tired to even get up out of this chair now that he’s sitting. But I can help you with your bodach, I surely can. Yocky John’s got a trick or two for them.”
Outside the wind made the leaves laugh as they rushed in a rattling spray against the walls of the cottage. Meran listened, then looked uncertainly at the tinker. Had she made a mistake, or was this just another of the bodach’s mischiefs?
“What sort of tricks?” she asked.
“Well, first I mu
st know how you’ve gained the little fellow’s ill will.”
“I don’t know. There’s no reason for it—save his nature.”
“Oh, no,” Yocky John said. “They always have a reason.” He looked slowly around the room. “It’s a snug place you have here—but it’s not so old, is it?”
Meran shook her head. It was just a year now since she’d lost her tree—the tree that a wooderl needs to survive. It was only through Cerin and the spells of his roseharp that she was able to live without it and in this cottage that they’d built where her tree had once stood.
“A very snug place,” the old man said. “Magicked, too, I’d say.”
“My husband’s a harper.”
“Ah. That explains it. Harp magic’s heady stuff. A bodach can’t live in a harper’s home—not without an invitation.”
“Still he comes and goes as he pleases,” Meran said. “He breaks things and disrupts things and generally causes no end of mischief. Who’d want to have a bodach living with them?”
“Well, it’s cold in the winter,” Yocky John said. “Out in the woods, with no shelter but a cloak of leaves, maybe, or a rickety lean-to that the wind howls through. The winds of winter aren’t a bodach’s friends—not like the winds of summer are. And I know cold, too. Why do you think I winter with my son? Only a fool tries to sleep in the snow.”
Meran sighed. She pictured a little kowrie man, huddled in a bare-limbed winter tree, shivering in the cold, denied the warmth of a cottage because of a harper’s magics.
“Well, if he felt that way,” she said, “why didn’t he come to us? Surely he’d have seen that we never turn a guest away. Are we ogres?”
“Well, you know bodachs,” Yocky John said. “He’d be too proud and too shy. They like to creep into a place, all secret like, and hide out in the rafters or wherever, paying for their way with the odd good turn or two. It’s the winter that’s hard on them—even magical kowrie folk like they are. The summer’s not so bad—for then even an old man like myself can sleep out-of-doors. But in the winter…”