He'd been running for a long time.
I read for about fifteen minutes, then the sound of something scuffing the ground jerked me out of the story. I looked up, but there was nothing but birds and insects within my sight.
I looked back down at the page I'd stopped on, and I heard it again. It sounded as if someone was rubbing the bottom of soft-soled shoes on pavement about ten feet in front of me, but there was no one on the road. I took a deep breath, testing for scent--my hearing is good, but my nose is better.
I expected to scent a mole or ground squirrel, something that could be making noise out of sight. Instead, the air carried old-fashioned tanned leather, campfire smoke, a whiff of tobacco, and the unmistakable smell of an unfamiliar man. I set the book down and stood up.
As I turned in a full circle, seeing nothing, the hair on the back of my neck began to shiver in a familiar way.
I am a walker. That means, basically, that I can shift into a coyote whenever I want to. It gives me sharper ears and nose than the rest of the human population. It gives me an edge of speed--and I can sense ghosts that other people can't.
There was a ghost here. I couldn't see it, but I could feel it--and smell it.
The scuffing sound started up again and, with the sun high in the sky, I walked over to the asphalt road, where the sound seemed to originate.
A hawk cried out, though the sky was clear of any predatory birds. I wasn't the only one who heard it, because all the birdsong that had been keeping me company while I read ceased. Maybe it was a real hawk, but my instincts were convinced it wasn't, though most of the ghosts I've seen have all been human.
The scuffs were rhythmic now, almost like a very slow polka. Scuff-scuff, pause, scuff-scuff, pause. The scent grew stronger--and I could pick out one more. Coyote.
I must have stood there for three or four minutes as the sound of dancing grew more solid before I saw him. I saw his leathers first; the rest of him was shadowy and dreamlike. But the fringe and the quill patterns on his sleeves and the outsides of his leggings were clean and distinct.
The leathers weren't the kind you see at powwows. Those are well-tended, best-dress kinds of costumes, mostly. Beautiful, brilliantly colored, handcrafted clothing brought out for special occasions.
These leathers looked as though he'd worn them long enough that they fit him like a second skin. Thin patches were rubbed on the insides of his legs, as if he'd ridden on horseback a lot. The hide was darker under his arms and in the small of his back, where sweat from his dance would have gathered. He wore a porcupine quill-worked belt from which a coyote tail swung freely at his hip. The colors on the quillwork were faded, and the coyote tail was a little ragged.
I started to hear the music he danced to, no mystical drummers or flute players. He was the musician, accompanying himself with his own song, a nasal, wordless tune that resonated in my bones. About the same time, I could see his hands. They were a workingman's hands, rancher's hands, callused and scarred. A man's hands, but not an old man. One finger had been broken and reset crooked.
His hair hung in two thick braids that were finished with a red leather tie and stopped just below his shoulder blades. I recognized some of the dancing moves from the two or three powwows I'd attended in college, when I was still trying to hunt down my heritage. As he danced, he became more and more real to my eyes and to the rest of my senses. Until, at last, if it had not been that I'd seen him slowly materialize, I would have sworn he was a living person though he kept his head turned from me so I just got glimpses of his features.
The rhythm of his dance changed from furious to achingly slow and back. At all times, his weight was evenly distributed on the balls of his feet-- this was a warrior's dance, full of power and magic and the promise of violence. The warrior was who he was, though, and the dancer's nature didn't stop it from being a joyous celebration.
The ghost stopped dancing with his back to me, his whole body working to regain the oxygen he'd spent in his dance. I wondered how long ago he had performed his dance in the flesh and why he'd done it here.
"Hey," I said softly.
There are ghosts that just repeat important moments of their lives. I was pretty sure that this was one of those because self-aware ghosts who can act independently are rarer--and they tend to interact right off. This had all the hallmarks of a repeater; that dance, full of passion and emotion, had looked as though it had been done at a pivotal moment in someone's life.
But my voice made his shoulders stiffen. Then he turned slowly toward me until I stared into the face of a man I'd never met, whose face was as familiar as the one I looked at in my own mirror, even though I only had one black-and-white photograph of it from a newspaper report of his death.
My father.
I couldn't speak, couldn't breathe. It felt just like someone had belted me in the diaphragm, so my lungs couldn't work.
He stared at me, unsmiling. Slowly, almost ceremonially, he bowed his head to me. Then he slid into a coyote shape as easily, as quickly, as I can. The coyote appeared, oddly, more solid than the man had been. He looked at me with the same bold stare he'd had when he appeared human. Then, without warning, he bolted across the grounds and into the bushes a dozen yards away.
In the photograph, my father had been wearing the uniform of a rodeo cowboy--jeans, long- sleeved Western-cut shirt, and a cowboy hat. My mother, a teenager fighting free of strict parents, had met him in a rodeo where she was winning prize money barrel racing her best friend's horse when she was younger than Jesse. She hadn't had a chance to tell him she was pregnant before he'd been killed in a car accident. The name he'd given her was Joe Old Coyote.