Kesh Read online

  Jesse’s dad sighed, his body and face tightened and his eyes glistened with tears. “Michael is right. It’s time Jesse finds his family again and understands who his mother was, because that’s how he will know who he is.” He cleared his throat and said, “Thank you, Michael.”

  Jesse said, “Can Kesh be there too? I mean, when I drum?”

  The big man laughed. “Kesh can be there when you drum and when you dance. In fact, he can dance too. You know Kesh, although everyone is welcome to Powwow with our people, I think, in fact, there just might be a little Ojibwe in this Jones family too.”

  Kesh felt as if his whole body smiled, his heart felt strong, and his ears filled with the movement of hundreds of creatures, some gnawing, some searching and reporting, others looking out for dangerous conditions and substances. He glanced at Jesse. His friend’s face was transformed. He looked strong, proud and happy. He smiled back the way coyotes do, and a clock chimed somewhere. It was Christmas day.

  Chapter Eighteen

  An Epilogue

  Except for the soft padding of tiny feet in the hidden places, the house was quiet and warm. The clinking of pots and pans came from the kitchen, and a pile of red, green, silver, and gold wrapped gifts overflowed beneath the Christmas tree. There were more than usual this year. Outside, the scrape, scrape, scrape of a metal shovel on concrete meant his dad was clearing the front steps and driveway for the guests who would be arriving shortly. Kesh climbed the staircase to his room, switched on the light, and sat down at his desk. He flipped open the notebook, wrinkled in places by rain, and he began to write.

  So, that was the end of Garou’s Chemical Company—at least the beginning of the end. By daylight, everybody was home, normal children again, excited to open Christmas presents and call their friends, excited to celebrate the holiday. The end had been set in motion. The wires, and tubes and everything else that made a factory run were well on the way to being dismantled and stripped clean. The dangerous chemicals were still dangerous, but they had been isolated, and the evidence left little doubt about Louis Garou’s crimes. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I suppose other companies will try to replace the plant with their own factories, and that might not be such a bad thing, but we won’t be fooled again. More and more children, and even some grownups, are finding their inner selves, their animal spirits, and their connection to the earth. In time, maybe not in my time, but eventually the Garou chemical factory will disappear, and if we’re lucky, most people will never know it even existed in that place. The river will recover, and the land will heal. The earth has a way of reclaiming what is taken.

  I’m afraid this won’t be a happy time for everybody. Good people have lost jobs, and Jesse and his dad lost their home and their beloved Daisy. Earlier today, Christmas day, as the sun rose on a new age, Mr. Madosh built a funeral pyre on top of the ashes of his house and we cried as we sent Daisy’s sweet, gentle soul into the sky on a ribbon of soft cedar smoke.

  Jesse and his dad will be over soon. They’ll stay with us over Christmas and for as long as they need after. His dad says he’ll have cleared out the charred remains of the house by spring, and he’ll begin to build again. They plan to visit Jesse’s mom’s home, a reservation a few hours north of here, and Jesse has already heard from an aunt he didn’t know he had. He’s got cousins too. I guess that’s a different kind of building.

  The dismantling of the factory will continue, probably for years, and the rest of the world will settle back into its strangely normal routine. Muskrat says most of the cats, moles, badgers, snakes, fish and the rest will just become kids again, forgetting what they had done and who they were inside, but not all of them. In moments, often as they dream, they will become spirit creatures, soldiers in the fight to regain the human spirit and its place in the natural world.

  Some of us will never forget. Muskrat says coyotes are more than teachers and tricksters. He says they are restless creature and Jesse, Kiran, and I have been changed forever. We all know that the factory man is still out there, and our job has just begun. If one Louis Garou exists, it seems pretty likely that a lot of others just like him are out there too. We will never be able to rest, not because anyone or anything force will force us to push on, but because—well, because we’re coyotes. I’m glad about that. I don’t ever want to lose this.

  Others will also remain steadfast and awake. Some will take their animal forms for the pure joy of it, to burrow or fly or, like little Morgan Kuhn, will rocket the river and leap into the air then disappear again beneath the surface. I wonder how the adults will change. And I think about Garou a lot. I don’t understand much about what happened to him, but I know he isn’t all bad. Part of him, the loup-garou, the wolf who runs in the night, wants to make up for the evil the man creates in the daylight. I feel sorry for him, and I hope he finds some kind of peace. It must be terrible to be so tormented. Even so, I will never let my guard down.