Huck Out West(66)

While Eeteh crawled towards the back of the cave with the bottle, I took my rifle and went out and set on a rock. When Oren seen me, he ducked behind a tree. “Hey, Oren!” I shot a branch off over his head. He made a little squeak like a mouse does when an owl grabs it. “You come to shoot me?”

“NO!” He peeked out with his hands in the air, his rifle pointed up to the sky. “I only come t’say hello.”

“Well, hello, Oren,” I says. “’Bye.”

“Tom sent me to pertect you!”

“From what?”

“Injuns. Bears. Coyotes. Whatever. Kin I come up?”

“I reckon. If you’re careful.” I kept my rifle pointed at him. He set his over his shoulder and clumb on up. He tried to keep his eye on me, but whenever he looked up, he slipped in the mud. His bib overalls was a mess. I wiped the rain out a my face and says, “A body’d have to be pretty stupid to be out in this weather, hey, Oren? Without they got something big to do, like tromping up a mountain to say hello to a sick old trail bum.”

“So what brung YOU up here?” he grunted, pulling up onto the flat space a-front the cave. His muddy overalls was full of heavy breathing.

“Reckon I must be one a the stupid ones.” He stood there, gripping his rifle, studying the cave mouth. Eeteh was right. He was come to kill.

“There’s somebody in there,” he says. “I kin hear ’em!”

“You scared a bats, Oren?”

“Ain’t scared a nuthin!” He gritted his teeth and busted on in, blasting away into the darkness. And busted right back out again, chased by the furisome black flutter of a million squeaking bats. He dropped his gun and went shinning down through the gulch considerable faster’n he clumb it, swarmed about by distressid bats. You could hear him screaming clear to Jericho. There was a yowl and a crash through branches and then it was quiet. He must a struck where the gulch dropped away of a sudden.

Eeteh come out with the whisky bottle and done a wobbly little dance like he drunk too much. I asked him what he’s doing and he says it’s a rain dance. “It’s already raining,” I says, and he says he knowed that, but he don’t trust his luck enough to dance a rain dance when it ain’t.

He squatted by the rock I was setting on and tipped up the bottle. “I thought you was gone,” I says. The bats was wheeling around overhead again, finding their way back to bed. Eeteh wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and says he was thinking about Coyote, how him and Snake was such good friends, had been since they was little tykes, but how a problem was growed up between them. Coyote made the world and all the creturs in it and he judged that give him the right to lay with any woman he wanted to. He could change his shape, so he could try on cougars and beetles, sandhill cranes and porkypines, and he laid with them all and always had a good time doing it. But when he took a turn on Snake Woman, Snake warn’t happy about it, and he come to have a considerable less friendly altitude towards Coyote.

I says that I thought Coyote killed both Snake and Snake Woman and et them, and Eeteh says that he did, but that was a different story. I seen right off I was going to have some trouble with this one. I was also wondering, if Coyote made the world, how was him and Snake both tykes at the same time, but I knowed better’n to ask. I warn’t made to understand everything in this world, and maybe not none of it where Coyote was concerned.

Snake, Eeteh says, had took a particular fancy to Lark’s eggs and stole them whenever he got a chance. Lark suspicioned Snake was the thief, and says so to everybody, but he was a slithery fellow and she never catched him doing it. Snake felt Lark was being unfair in blaming him alone because he reckoned everybody in the nation was stealing her eggs. And that give him an idea. He told Coyote about how much fun it was to lay with Lark, and got him excited, and off he went, using the new wings he’d just put on. Snake called his pals together, specially those he knowed to be secret egg-smouchers, and says he was going to prove to Lark that it was Coyote who was thieving all her eggs, but he needed their help and he told them what to do and say, no matter what he done and said. They was more’n glad to find someone else to blame their crimes on. Meantimes, Coyote was having a most splendid time and so was Lark, who never had such a vigrous lover. They rubbed together in all the hundreds of ways that birds do, till they was both about wore out, and they fell off sound asleep. Snake come then and et Lark’s eggs and dropped the broke shells on Coyote. Lark waked up screaming, and directly all the other birds was screaming, too. For them, stealing eggs and eating them was murder. All Snake’s pals grabbed Coyote and netted him before he could fly away. The net was too fine even if he changed into a gnat, and too strong if he turned into an elephant or a buffalo bull. Some wanted to kill him straight off, but Snake says Coyote should have a trial fair and square and he invited any testimony. Most didn’t know what to think, but Snake’s pals say they seen him hiving the eggs and eating them, and accused him of also being too full of himself and of corrumpting the young braves with his ridiculous notions. Lark herself says how she was seducted by Coyote against her will, though she warn’t widely credited, and Muskrat accused Coyote of making fun of the Great Spirits and not taking them serious. Muskrat was mostly right, and Coyote ain’t got nothing to say about that. Snake defended his old pard by saying it warn’t fair to charge a natural-born egg-sucker with thieving his own vittles, but Mountain Goat spoke up and says he warn’t only guilty a collaring the eggs, he also was a liar and had a sick comical view of life. Life ain’t comical like that, Mountain Goat says. It’s an insult to the Great Spirits and to the nation. Everybody seemed agreed to that. Snake looked sad and done a little shrug, best a snake can shrug, like to say he was awful disappointed but he done all he could for his pard. Spider Woman crept up to Lark on her tiny toes and whispers she seen Snake steal the eggs and scatter the shells on Coyote whilst he was sleeping. Wait a minute, Lark says. I don’t think Coyote done it! I think it was—Snake’s tongue shot out from nowheres like magic and snapped her up. This lightning show of power scared some folks and convinced others that Snake was the boss they was looking for. Spider Woman skittered away not to get stomped on. Whilst they was all debating how to kill him once and forever, Snake Woman slid up to the net and whispered to Coyote to change into a snake, and she’d make a little hole he could wriggle out of and they could run off together. But the hole she made was too small and he got stuck. Snake’s assassin pals was all waiting for him with knives and tomahawks and they chopped him into bits, then chopped the bits into bits, and thronged the pieces far out in the sky so’s he couldn’t noway be put back together again. And that’s how all the other worlds out there got made.