Fox and Coyote

"We have to go." Coyote coughed violently and wheezed as the black smoke rapidly rose around the two of them. "Come on, Fox!"

"Just a minute longer, please," Fox begged. Coyote knew Fox was the mastermind behind all of this. He understood that it was not nearly as simple for Fox to walk away from what was rapidly becoming ash, but was once a flourishing land. Coyote relinquished his grasp on Fox's hand, letting his dear friend say goodbye. Fox's eyes widened as he stared at the flames consuming his once glorious and flourishing plot of land. "I can't just leave it all behind." But he knew that really, there was nothing left to leave behind anymore.

As Fox gazed into the ever-growing bursts of heat and embers, he saw the world he so delicately and purposefully created crumbling before his eyes. This was no ordinary land that was now fraught with flames. This was home. This was home that Fox and Coyote built, even when Coyote protested at times. At the beginning of the decade, this land was nothing but a vast expanse of ocean, black and deep. Fox had seen this and known that he could mold it to be something beautiful. He had taken his arrow and bored two holes, one for sky and one for land. He had painstakingly taken his paws, each of his now charred and burnt paws, and stretched the land for days on end, lovingly and tenderly pushing it to the north, the south, the east, and the west to create space for Coyote to run free.

"Fox," Coyote half-yelled to snap Fox out of it, for he knew the time they had to escape unscathed was rapidly declining. "We have to leave, now!"

Fox could feel his whiskers start to singe, but he could not part with his beloved creation just yet. He squinted his eyes and searched the wall of flames for any remnants of the home he and Coyote had lived in. He remembered so vividly the day he instructed Coyote to build it out of strong logs and pad the floor with plush grasses. How quickly that grass had burned up in the flames that now grew hotter with each passing second.

Whoosh. Fox snapped his head downward and saw the white flash of a rabbit sprinting by him. He remembered then the way he so carefully and intentionally dreamt up each animal, each soul. He had chosen how many hairs were on little rabbit's head. The color of the shells of each tortoise. A singular tear dropped from Fox's eye then, and he knew the time had come.

"Are you ready?"

"I'll never be ready, but we can go."

Coyote took Fox's hand once again and gently pried him from his spot before turning to run.

As the pair turned from the blaze and started sprinting into the cool night air, Fox looked into the sky. With tears now streaming down both of their faces, he looked upward to howl at the moons in anguish. For the first time in his life, four moons didn't seem like quite enough. How desperately he wished he had listened to Coyote when he suggested ten.

Author's Note:

Hello! Well, it is safe to say this story turned out infinitely sadder and more depressing than I had originally intended, but it's where my writing brain was telling me to go with it. This re-write is based off the creation myth of the Atsugewi tribe of the Pacific Northwest, and is originally titled How Silver-Fox Created the World. I did not want to use this same title for my own story, so I decided to shorten it to the title you see above, which is simply Fox and Coyote. After consideration and re-writing my re-write, I felt this title was more fitting with the tone of the tale. The original story outlines the process of Fox and Coyote creating the world from nothingness in a traditional ex-nihilo creation myth template. Fox does the bulk of the work and sends Coyote away while he is creating the world. There is a lot of description of the process of the creation, like the way Fox uses his four paws to stretch the land, which I wanted to acknowledge in my re-telling. Initially, I wrote this story with the simply the twist ending of the burning of the world, somewhat like the overused stories where the character wakes up and it was all a dream. After reading through that version, I did not feel right about the lack of context for world burning. In addition to the twist ending, I wanted to change what the story was focused on. Instead of focusing on the actual period where Fox was creating the world, I wanted to shift it to the future and incorporate different elements, such as their deep friendship and the tragedy of the fire. Eventually, the story evolved into the dialogue between the characters, the imagery of the flames growing and growing as the story draws to a close, and the shift in the overall tone of the story from relatively bland and straightforward to sad and mournful. I ended up having a lot of fun writing this I am very pleased with how it turned out. I hope you enjoy!

Bibliography:

Background image located here.

How Silver-Fox Created the World from Myths and Legends of the Pacific Northwest, especially of Washington and Oregon, by Katharine Berry Judson (1910).