Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

God's Dogs

2008; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 116; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sew.0.0096

1934-421X

Mitch Wieland,

American and British Literature Analysis

God's Dogs Mitch Wieland (bio) After seven winters of drought in southwest Idaho, Ferrell Swan wakes to a holy blizzard coming down, great ragged flakes swarming the dawn sky. Ferrell bundles his old bones in his Carhartt and wool cap, wakes Rilla with news of what the night has brought. From the cabin porch his high desert looks absolutely pristine, the tumbleweeds downright pretty haloed in white. Rilla joins him with her steaming coffee mug. His ex-wife is slow to wake in these months of short cold days and long bitter nights. "Damn, Ferrell," she says. "Your scrubland looks almost worth something." "Could be Ohio." "I guess, but for the distinct lack of people and trees and most everything else." Today Ferrell ignores the daily needling about his desolate land. He and Rilla grew up rural in the Ohio hinterland, spent their married years in a quaint brick house in town, where Ferrell taught history at Dover High and Rilla counseled Akron's troubled youth. Of late, most of her thoughts seem in orbit around Ferrell's decision to retire early to the West, to indeed buy one hundred acres of nearly nothing. Ferrell tries his best to shoulder the responsibility for their divorce, but some days the load surely makes him tremble. "We'll hike the high ground when she lets up," he says. "Look for coyote tracks in the snow." "You do know excitement, honey, that's for sure." Ferrell puts an arm over Rilla's slender shoulders. Despite her remark, his love of coyotes is something she keenly shares, a fierce desire to see and hear the beasts as often as they can. It's something that strikes Ferrell as altogether inexplicable, this deep affection for an animal most of Idaho shoots on sight. Near dusk the snow abruptly stops, a blurry sun breaking beneath the swirling clouds, spotlighting the ridge where he and Rilla trek. To Ferrell's surprise coyote tracks run in all possible [End Page 509] directions—crisscrossing the top of the ridge, meandering into the ravine, angling down the steep slope to the sanctuary of his fenced pastures. He's never dreamed the little devils wander his property so at will; nothing short of elusive have they been. Yet here lies the proof, a perfect record of each step newly taken, a photograph of every gleeful route of this animal the Navajo call God's dog. It's almost as if Ferrell can see the loping beasts themselves in the tracks left behind. Rilla kneels in the snow like some modern day Sacagawea. "Lordy, Ferrell, this place is coyote central." "I wouldn't have believed it. It somehow makes things right, at least for the here and now." In the waning light he and Rilla follow a set of tracks into the ravine, stopping where the coyote stopped, investigating each tangled sage as it surely did. Ferrell finds deep holes the coyotes have dug through the snow, comes across icy blood sprinkled about, the swift end of a vole or pocket gopher, most likely. Up ahead Ferrell's property line cuts sharply north, and just beyond this secluded boundary lives Din Winters, his underground neighbor. A former EMT from San Francisco, Winters bought the first parcel when the old cattle ranch was split up, and promptly buried three gasoline storage tanks he'd welded together, equipping these odd spacious rooms with an elaborate ventilation system. Ferrell has visited Winters only a handful of times over the years, figuring any man who lives below ground is none too big on socializing. "Think Winters is okay?" Rilla asks. "Snug as a bug, I'd bet." "It's like being buried alive." "Din claims he's alive because he is buried. He says the world's a bit too far gone." "Poor sap." Back on the ridge Ferrell peers through the dim light, checks to see the home fires still burning at his only other neighbor's, a retired forest ranger named Harrison Cole and his much too young wife. A year some back Melody Cole and Rilla's grown son, Levon, got intimate in the desert dark, the child of their commingling now...