Changing Dog and Corn Hair

One night, not so long ago, Changing Dog and Corn Hair met up in Sedona, Arizona, to have a talk about an old bargain they’d made with Coyote Woman. It’s funny, thinking of the two of them together like that; I can imagine them doing pretty much anything except getting along. Most times they’ll argue the color of the moon, or the taste of water, if they can’t find something better to disagree on. There’s nothing much they ever seem to settle on, except that the other’s wrong.

But this night, Corn Hair wasn’t aiming for an argument. She had herself a camp there by Oak Creek, on the south bank where the water runs below Cathedral Rock. It wasn’t much, just her bedroll laid out in the sand under the sycamores, with her pack doubling as a pillow. Close by, she’d built a small fire on which she was boiling water in a tin coffeepot, the bottom blackened from all its years of use. She ground some coffee beans using a flat rock and another the size of her fist for a mortar and pestle, scooping them into the now-boiling water when they were ground to her satisfaction. By the time Changing Dog came ambling down from the red rock scars skirting the solitary butte that towered above the creek, the coffee was thick and black, ready to drink.

Changing Dog nodded hello and sat cross-legged near the fire. He was a rangy, copper-skinned man with a narrow face and long, chestnut hair that streaked to a dark tan at his temples and was kept tied back with a thin strip of leather. You hardly ever saw him dressing up. That night he was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, dusty tooled-leather cowboy boots and an old brown leather jacket going thin at the elbows. He wasn’t a homely man and he wasn’t particularly handsome, but he had these eyes that would grab anybody’s attention, especially a woman’s.

They were a vivid cornflower blue that looked violet in the right light, and there was always a promise in them — not that he’d necessarily deliver, but that whatever might come, it would at least be interesting.

He accepted the tin coffee mug that Corn Hair handed him and took an appreciative sip. Setting the mug in the sand, he pulled a tobacco pouch from his pocket and rolled them each a cigarette, lighting them with a twig from the fire. He left one hanging from his lips, offering the other to Corn Hair.

“So one of the crows found you,” she said as she took the cigarette.

Changing Dog nodded. “I was surprised to get the message.”

“Are you telling me you’ve lost track of the days?”

“Oh, I know what day it is coming up. I’ve been counting them off for a hundred years, same as you.”

Corn Hair had a couple of puffs from the cigarette he’d given her, just to be polite, then dropped the butt into the fire. She wasn’t a smoker herself and that was about the only easy definition you could apply to her. Never wholly a part of this world before the night the two of them met Coyote Woman, she still wasn’t much a part of it now either, though at least she looked closer to belonging.

She was maybe a head shorter than Changing Dog, which made her closer to five-two than five-three, and she dressed for comfort in the high desert country: thick cotton khaki cargo pants, tan jersey, fringed-leather vest with beadwork below either shoulder, and a pair of good leather walking shoes. Her jacket hung from a nearby tree at the moment, a three-quarter length wool coat that, with all its colored patterns, might have been made from a Navajo blanket.

In the firelight her shoulder-length hair looked blonde, but in the sun you noticed all the different streaks from dark corn yellow to almost white. She wasn’t skinny, but she wasn’t close to overweight. Her features always reminded me of a hare or a deer: long, but still slightly rounded, with a pair of sleepy brown eyes that mesmerize you. Her skin held a pattern like the bark of the sycamores, ranging from dark brown patches to those almost white — it was her only real holdover after the change, carrying the pattern of her fur on her skin when she became a woman.

“So what are you saying?” she asked. “Have you gone and got yourself tired of these five-fingered shapes we’re using?”

Changing Dog took a long drag and blew it out. “And lose having the best of two worlds? Not likely.”

“I don’t see you doing much to help.”

“True love’s not like you looking for a certain rock in the desert, or chasing down just the right word you need for one of those songs of yours.”

Corn Hair nodded. “Don’t you think I know that? But at least I’ve got someone.”

“And you made that happen?”

“No, but at least I was available. At least I was meeting people. If you screw this up —”

“I know. I screw it up for both of us.” Changing Dog regarded her from across the fire, that promise in his eyes working their magic. “I still say we should be together.”

Corn Hair didn’t bother to protest. She just smiled and said, “Like that’s ever going to happen.”