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The Long WalkExcerpt: "The snow on the winter wind is thin and powdery and dusts Coyote's coat as he scurries along the riverbank. His yellow eyes cut through it like lighted windows. Above him, in the dwellings that the cliff people have built into living rock, Old Grandmother watches him. She is bundled in three blankets, and her eyes are as cloudy as the snow, but she can see him anyway because she knows he is there. He looks up at her, teeth grinning, and she smiles back, toothless. They understand each other. Coyote is part of the storm in the way that he is part of every wild thing. He is unreliable and untidy, his jokes are crude, and his sexual appetite is insatiable. He is like an uncle, fascinating in his sheer awfulness, who you wish would not visit you. He is Life, which, of course, contains Death. The old woman knows all this because she is aged and ageless, the repository of her people's knowledge, old enough to remember things that happened before she was born, and perhaps things that have not happened yet." Avon, 1996 ISBN 0-380-77650-2 |
