The coyote is a long, slim, sick, and sorry-looking skeleton, with a
gray wolfskin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever
sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a
furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip
and exposed teeth.
[Illustration: MARK TWAIN]
He has a general slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living,
breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out
of luck, and friendless. He is so spiritless and cowardly that even
while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is
apologizing for it. And he is _so_ homely!--so scrawny, and ribby, and
coarse-haired, and pitiful.
When he sees you, he lifts his lip and lets a flash of his teeth out,
and then turns a little out of the course he was pursuing, depresses his
head a bit, and strikes a long, soft-footed trot through the brush,
glancing over his shoulder at you, from time to time, till he is about
out of easy pistol range, and then he stops and takes a deliberate
survey of you; he will trot fifty yards and stop again--another fifty
and stop again; and, finally, the gray of his gliding body blends with
the gray of the brush, and he disappears.
All this is when you make no demonstration against him; but if you do,
he develops a livelier interest in his journey, and instantly
electrifies his heels and puts such a deal of real estate between
himself and your weapon, that by the time you have raised the hammer you
see that you need a rifle, and by the time you have got him in line you
need a cannon, and by the time you have drawn a bead on him you see well
enough that nothing but an unusually long-winded streak of lightning
could reach him where he is now.
But if you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy it ever so
much--especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of himself, and
has been brought up to think that he knows something about speed. The
coyote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his, and
every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder that
will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and worldly ambition,
and make him lay his head still lower to the ground, and stretch his
neck farther to the front, and pant more fiercely, and stick his tail
out straighter behind, and move his furious legs with a yet wilder
frenzy, and leave a broader and broader, and higher and denser cloud of
dust behind, marking his long wake across the level plain!
And all this time the dog is only a short twenty feet behind the coyote,
and to save the life of him he cannot understand why it is that he
cannot get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get aggravated, and it
makes him more and more angry to see how gently the coyote glides along
and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he grows still more
and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by an
entire stranger, and what an ignoble swindle that long, calm,
soft-footed trot is; and next he notices that he is getting fagged, and
that the coyote actually has to slacken speed a little to keep from
running away from him--and then that town dog is angry in earnest, and
he begins to strain, and weep, and paw the sand higher than ever, and
reach for the coyote with concentrated and desperate energy.
This spurt finds him six feet behind the gliding enemy, and two miles
from his friends. And then, in the instant that a wild new hope is
lighting up his face, the coyote turns and smiles blandly upon him once
more, and with a something about it which seems to say: “Well, I shall
have to tear myself away from you,--business is business, and it will
not do for me to be fooling along this way all day,”--and forthwith
there is a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of a long crack
through the atmosphere, and behold that dog is solitary and alone in
the midst of a vast solitude!
It makes his head swim. He stops, and looks all around; climbs the
nearest mound, and gazes into the distance; shakes his head
reflectively, and then, without a word, he turns and jogs along back to
his train, and takes up a humble position under the hindmost wagon, and
feels unspeakably mean, and looks ashamed, and hangs his tail at
half-mast for a week. And for as much as a year after that, whenever
there is a great hue and cry after a coyote, that dog will merely glance
in that direction without emotion, and apparently observe to himself, “I
believe I do not wish any of the pie.”
--SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS [MARK TWAIN].