Chapter 1: The Coyote Trail

Dear Reader, this chapter is a part of a novel being developed in real time. Thank you for joining Elyse and I on this journey. I hope you enjoy the story. ~CC

Elyse feels the morning before meeting the day with open eyes. The softness of her bed envelops her and for a few minutes, she relaxes deeper into her pillow. As though the bed has increased in softness, she savors the sensation. ‘Why can’t every morning feel like this?’ she wonders.

After a few minutes, Elyse allows her eyes to open. The sun shines through the window and casts a ray over the shaggy beige carpet and white wall. She can feel the warmth of the light and hear the birds chirping their excitement for the day outside her window. Summer is very much in full tilt and this day is beckoning her to enjoy it.

She rolls over swinging her legs off the bed, her right foot searching for the pink bunny slippers on the floor. She shuffles out of her room to the bathroom and then heads to the kitchen where her mother is fussing around. Her mother has been up for awhile, Elyse can tell by the cold toast sitting on the cutting board. The sugar and cinnamon have married into a dark gel on top and Elyse reaches for it, anticipating the sweetness of the bread and the savory butter holding it all together.

Her mother starts chatting away, as Elyse climbs up on the oak stool to sit at the counter across from her mother. Elyse is so small, she can sit with her legs crossed over each other, leaning against the backrest as her mother offers her orange juice in a little Tupperware cup.

Elyse’s mom buzzes around the kitchen, talking about all the things she needs to do, but Elyse is paying little attention. She looks out the window to see the sun’s reflection shimmering off the pond, her favorite morning view. The moving glitter of sunlight holding so much beauty and promise.

After she finishes her toast and juice and her mother heads out to tend to the chickens, Elyse heads back to her room. This day is full of wonder and she starts to think about what adventure she will go on. Will she play house in the garden shed? Or get lost in the woods? Will she climb into the mountains with nothing but a pocket knife and a wedge of bread?

Elyse pulls on her long floral dress and pinafore, ties a ribbon around her hair that will surely fall out and heads out the back door toward the orchard. She cuts through the garden, passing the gooseberries and then the red raspberries, plucking a few off the vine eating them. Sun warm red raspberries are too perfect a fruit, she thinks. No thorns, sweet and such a vibrant red…they’re too perfect.

Past the red raspberries, nestled between a pear tree and a sycamore is her play house. It’s not really her playhouse, but a small garden shed. Her mother put her play kitchen inside and while she shares space with pots and hanging onions, there are also plastic cups and dolls and an old purple phone Elyse uses for her play. She even fashioned a little cot from an old folding lawn lounger and brings a pillow and blanket out sometimes as she pretends to sleep for the story of it all.

This dingy little shed on the edge of the garden quickly transforms into anything Elyse can imagine it to be.

As she opens the door and peers in, she surveys the scene in front of her. Sometimes Elyse forgets the mess of yesterday’s adventure. And sometimes in the night, the raccoons have their own adventure in the shed as they are looking for good things left behind. That’s how Elyse has lost some toys and blankets. The raccoons made a mess of them and Elyse’s mom was none-too-pleased indoor items had made their way to the shed. But some things are ok to leave in the shed and Elyse has gotten better at cleaning up at night.

This morning, it seems the raccoons did their bidding somewhere else. The fragrance of hanging onions on the wall greet Elyse when she opens the door and other than some leaves that wandered in under the door, the shed looks as it did when she left it yesterday.

Elyse begins to straighten up the kitchen and make the bed. She grabs the little green broom and sweeps the floor. Her bare feet moving quietly across the wood floor. She straightens the ‘bed’ and looks around. What next? she wonders.

She looks out the door of the shed facing the house. The garden in between. The pond off to the right and on the other side she sees her mom moving in and out of the chicken coop, cleaning it out. Elyse reaches for her satchel she got as a diaper bag for her Cabbage Patch Kid. It was empty except for a navy handkerchief, a sweater and a little pocket knife. She headed into the house.

In the kitchen on the stove was an aluminum pan with a lid. During the summer this pan was always on the stove holding homemade granola, pie bars or other little things to snack on. They never lasted long as everyone would walk by and cut a little piece off all day long.

Elyse reached for a bit of foil and opened the lid. Perfect, she thought. Granola.

It wasn’t really granola, but it’s what Elyse thought granola was. Her mother made rice Krispie treats with peanut butter and coconut and other things from the pantry and called it granola. Elyse cut off a large slice, wrapped it in the foil, replaced the lid and slips back outside so her mother didn’t detect her. She wasn’t allowed in the house on a nice day, and if she was caught, her mom would make her do chores instead of playing.

As Elyse makes her way out the door facing the shed and not facing the chicken coop, she veers to the right toward the line of evergreens to the west. She follows the treeline to the far side of the garden, past the gooseberries again, and passes the sycamore and the garden shed. Now she makes her way through the orchard.

The orchard is an acre of lined fruit trees that can be great fun to climb! This time of year, they create a nice shade, but the orchard gets more fun for Elyse when she can grab an apple or a pear off the tree and eat it. Pears are safer, some of the apple trees are so sour and Elyse hasn’t quite figured out how to tell the sweet apples from the sour ones yet.

Beyond the orchard are the blackberry bushes that are already taller than her. Elyse steers clear of their thorns because her dress and pinafore are too thin against the thorns. Only her mom and grandpa seem unfazed by them when they put on overalls and long sleeve shirts to pick berries.

To the left of the blackberries is a little cluster of trees with long rough vines growing down. Elyse and her brother used to swing from them until Luke broke out in poison ivy and oak so bad he almost has to go to the hospital. Now this little clump of trees gets to live as it stands like a natural snow globe uninhabited by anyone. There is a path that wraps behind this cluster and Elyse makes her way back there.

The shade in this area is so thick with tree cover, the air changes. Elyse breaths in deeply the cool smell of the wooded area, the gentle breeze cooling her on the inside and out. Even in June, Elyse wishes she had grabbed a sweater. But she continues on down the path that flows out to the dam.

Instead of going over the dam, Elyse follows the decline down the bank opposite the pond. The grass gets taller as the path doesn’t continue down this way, but Elyse has been here many times and knows where shes going. At the very bottom, she stops just shy of the little stream, the water gurgles and trickles along and a disgruntled frog jumps away from her.

The stream flows to the south, heading toward the larger Pike River a ways away. When the river floods, it reaches all the way to the dam, sometimes getting almost to the top. But it hasn’t rained like that in a long time and there isn’t a cloud in the sky today. Elyse follows the stream to the south making her way through the tall grass. She can feel little sticks and things under her feet and occasionally her toes find a spot of mud. She’s headed toward the timberline that feeds into the woods. The woods ripe with life and curious things for her to find.

There are man-made paths in these woods, but those are not the ones Elyse likes to follow. She likes to find the well-worn paths of the coyotes. Their paths snake around the trees and low branches making them harder to follow for most people. Luke doesn’t like to use them ever since his growth spurt, but Elyse is little, even for her age, and she can duck the limbs without much effort.

She sees a place in the grass where the coyotes have cut through and veers to the right towards the woods to pick up the trail. The wind picks up a stronger breeze, like a warning to her to not go that direction, but Elyse doesn’t heed it’s warning and continues to follow the trail as the ground begins to ascend.

The path is dry and broken up by tree roots and rocks. Sometimes the path disappears into the reeds of grass moving, but her keen eye picks up where it is in the distance. Elyse has never met a coyote by doing this before and sometimes she wonders if she has the bravery or skill to know what to do if that happens. The pocket knife in her bag wouldn’t hold a candle to a pack of coyotes on a mission. Especially if they thought she stood in the way of their dinner.

This path took Elyse to a spot in the woods she loved to visit. A large tree fell years ago, before she began these little hikes, and was caught by two other trees making a bridge to nowhere as it jutted out over the decline. The roots still partially in the ground holding the tree to the hill, the long trunk forming a bridge over the ground. Elyse would climb on top and walk out as far as she could. For her little frame a fall would be problematic, but she has the balance liked to pretend the tree was a balancing beam or a treehouse or other various tales. At one point she carved her initials on the old tree with her friend Alex as they explored and played. Alex was the only one she ever brought out this far, mostly because he was the only one who wanted to go. Little girls rarely wanted to venture into the woods for fear they will actually happen upon some wildlife.

Alex was a kind boy, but they were at that age where playing with girls wasn’t as fashionable. Alex truly didn’t care that Elyse was a little girl. She liked to play outside and had a creative mind, making their adventures fun. And because she was outside so much, she wasn’t scared of much. Even Alex was more hesitant than Elyse in some cases. Alex was a country boy in the way many midwestern kids were, a small plot in the middle of a field. Not very many kids in the area who lived on a farm had the natural space of timber and fishing that Elyse’s family had.

Elyse climbed up on the tree and began to walk out over the timber floor peering over the sides and seeing the limbs and jack-in-a-pulpits littering the ground. At the furthest point, she sat down straddling the tree looking over the ravine that lead down towards the river.

“What now?” She thought.

The day was still new and bright even with some cool gusts of wind dotting the hike. She looks around, up at the trees seeing brief movement of the birds and hearing the the distance the movement of smaller animals, squirrels chattering and others going about their day.

Elyse looks back to the path, her eyes follow it down as far as she can before it disappears into the reeds. She begins to make her way down the tree towards the rootball, to see if she can get an idea how far into the distance this trail leads. Sometimes they lead to a den, and sometimes they disappear. The trail that disappears are always such a disappointment. If she tries to keep going she might lose the original path and risk getting lost. So then Elyse is forced to backtrack all the way. This actually happens more than it doesn’t and Elyse is always tempted to see what’s beyond the trails or why they’ve stopped.

As her eyes follow the trail she sees it goes a well distance into the deeper part of the woods. But out of nowhere a cool gust of wind comes right up to her causing her to avert her eyes. She looks back in the distance again and loses the trail.

Hmmm, she wonders. Elyse jumps down off the tree and sees a good stick on the ground. Too short for Luke, but perfect for her. She peels some of the bark off and snaps back a few little branches that she wont need. She taps it on the ground a few times to test its strength. Reaching into her bag, Elyse pulls the sweater she packed and pulls it on. If that wind keeps up, she will need to have an extra layer in the deeper part of the woods.

Situating her bag across her body and with stick in hand, Elyse begins to follow the trail. This will likely lead her to a dead end, but maybe she will find another fallen tree to carve her name in and create a new spot to bring Alex. That is, if he ever plays with girls again.

She makes her way to the trail, careful to step around the tiny twigs with her bare feet and once she’s on it, her feet feel the smooth dirt floor. Looking ahead the path weaves between the trees and Elyse feels kin to the coyotes as she makes her way. The more she follows their trail, the more she feels like she understands them. They travel in the line, they stay close to the shadows of the trees. They lurk in the darkness. Their advantage is the element of surprise or the power in numbers. She has neither of these advantages for herself.

Walking along, even the most gentle wind activated the trees creating a constant sound all around. The tree tops canopied and everything felt protected by the trees. They stoic and watching. As she walked, damper parts of the floor developed mushrooms-their soft tops like little pillows on the ground. Elyse knew better than to eat them, but their presence always made her think of Alice in Wonderland or other tales. Her family did go foraging for morels in the spring, but that time has passed and now it’s too warm for them to grow.

Occasionally the path with have little paths veering off to one side or the other. Heading left or right, maybe to a den to looking for a meal. These paths were always smaller and can be tempting to take, but usually ended quickly and led to very little Elyse wanted to see.

Fortunately, this path was still very clear marked in the grass allowing Elyse to get lost inside her own imagination as she walked. The markers for her family’s property she had passed a ways back without notice. She was now on someone else’s property without knowing it. Her parents always asked her to stay within the property lines. With hunters and trackers about, you never knew who you might run into and god forbid she accidentally get shot by someone hunting rabbit for dinner.

But Elyse had been paying attention to the lily of the valley and trillium that decorated the floor. Until something caught her eye to the left. It was as though the ground dropped out of sight and then picked up again in the distance. ‘What could be over there?” She wondered.