The impact staggered him, eighty or ninety pounds of lupine fury. He almost fell facedown onto the trail, with Nina under him, except that the weight of the coyote, hanging on him, acted as a counterbalance, and he stayed erect.
The jacket ripped, and the coyote let go, fell away.
Joe skidded to a halt, put Nina down, spun toward the predator, drawing the pistol from his waistband, thankful that he had not pitched it away earlier.
Back lighted by the ridgeline fire, the coyote confronted Joe. It was so like a wolf but leaner, rangier, with bigger ears and a narrower muzzle, black lips skinned back from bared fangs, scarier than a wolf might have been, especially because of the spirit of the vicious boy curled like a serpent in its skull. Its glowering eyes were luminous and yellow.
Joe pulled the trigger, but the gun didn’t fire. He remembered the safety.
The coyote skittered toward him, staying low, quick but wary, snapping at his ankles, and Joe danced frantically backward to avoid being bitten, thumbing off the safety as he went.
The animal snaked around him, snarling, snapping, foam flying from its jaws. Its teeth sank into his right calf.
He cried out in pain, and twisted around, trying to get a shot at the damn thing, but it turned as he did, ferociously worrying the flesh of his calf until he thought he was going to pass out from the crackling pain that flashed like a series of electrical shocks all the way up his leg into his hip.
Abruptly the coyote let go and shrank away from Joe as if in fear and confusion.
Joe swung toward the animal, cursing it and tracking it with the pistol. The beast was no longer in an attack mode. It whined and surveyed the surrounding night in evident perplexity.
With his finger on the trigger, Joe hesitated.
Tilting its head back, regarding the lambent moon, the coyote whined again. Then it looked toward the top of the ridge.
The fire was no more than a hundred yards away. The scorching wind suddenly accelerated, and the flames climbed gusts higher into the night.
The coyote stiffened and pricked its ears. When the fire surged once more, the coyote bolted past Joe and Nina, oblivious of them, and disappeared at a lope into the canyon below.
At last defeated by the draining vastness of these open spaces, the boy had lost his grip on the animal and Joe sensed that nothing spectral hovered any longer in the woods.
The firestorm rolled at them again, blinding waves of flames, a cataclysmic tide breaking through the forest.
With his bitten leg, limping badly, Joe wasn’t able to carry Nina any longer, but she took his hand, and they hurried as best they could toward the primeval darkness that seemed to well out of the ground and drown the ranks of conifers in the lower depths of the canyon.
He hoped they could find a road. Paved or gravelled or dirt—it didn’t matter. Just a way out, any sort of road at all, as long as it led away from the fire and would take them into a future where Nina would be safe.
They had gone no more than two hundred yards when a thunder rose behind them, and when he turned, fearful of another attack, Joe saw only a herd of deer galloping toward them, fleeing the flames. Ten, twenty, thirty deer, graceful and swift, parted around him and Nina with a thudding of hooves, ears pricked and alert, oil-black eyes as shiny as mirrors, spotted flanks quivering, kicking up clouds of pale dust, whickering and snorting, and then they were gone.
Heart pounding, caught up in a riot of emotions that he could not easily sort out, still holding the girl’s hand, Joe started down the trail in the hoof prints of the deer. He took half a dozen steps before he realized there was no pain in his bitten calf. No pain, either, in his hawk-pecked hand or in his beak-torn face. He was no longer bleeding
Along the way and in the tumult of the deers’ passing, Nina had healed him.