Read Listen! (9780062213358) for Free Online

dirt in the midst of the leaf litter and honeysuckle.
    Sadie is back already, begging for another biscuit. So much for the idea of luring Coyote around the lake with biscuits, Charley thinks. She’ll just have to count on his following Sadie. “Come on, dogs!” she calls. “Let’s go for a walk!”
    At the sound of the word, Sadie rushes ahead toward the beginning of the trail, the brush of her tail waving. Charley follows, willing Coyote to come along.
    At the bottom of the hill, she looks back to see if he is following, and barely catches a glimpse of him as he scoots off the trail. She’s forgotten about the mirror. When she is through the poison ivy and nearly to the spillway, she pulls out the mirror and holds it up to her left eye. Coyote, ears and tail up, is trotting down the middle of the trail.

7
One Week
    I t has been a week. Charley, at the dining room window, chews her lip and scratches the poison ivy rash on the inside of her elbow as she watches Coyote sneak up to the bowl of food at the end of the driveway. He still refuses to eat unless she is all the way inside the house with the door closed. A whole week she’s been feeding him, and there’s been no change at all. No, she thinks. There’s been a change, all right. In the wrong dog.
    Sadie doesn’t go home anymore as soon as they get to Charley’s house. Charley can’t put Coyote’s food out while Sadie’s there, or Sadie will eat it, so she has to tie her to the railing by the side door till Coyote is finished.
    The first time she tied her, Charley took Sadie a couple of biscuits after she put Coyote’s food out for him, so Sadie wouldn’t feel left out. The dog books are right about patterns and routine. Sadie expects the tying now, and the biscuits. Every day when Coyote has eaten, Charley unties Sadie and Sadie hangs around for a while before she goes home. Hoping, Charley thinks, for more biscuits.
    Coyote, still standing as far from the food bowl as he can, stretches his head down and snatches a few mouthfuls before backing away and checking for danger. It’s almost as if he’s two different creatures—the regular dog that trots along the trail or frolics with Sadie, and the wild one, the wary and terrified one Charley is watching now. He looks exactly the way he did the very first day. His tail is down, his ears back, every muscle in his body tense and ready to run.
    She doesn’t understand why he is so frightened. It can’t be just that he’s wild. Wild animals come to food. When they used to have bird feeders, the birds came right away to get the seed. And squirrels! They used to raid the feeders and wouldn’t back off even if you pounded on the windows. Her mother would—
    Charley stops the thought and pushes the memory away. The point is that even with a person a few feet away stomping and yelling at them, squirrels—fully wild creatures—are more interested in food than afraid of people.
    For Coyote it is different. Why? What could his life have been like before he came to Eagle Lake? Without Charley’s intending it, an image forms in her mind. A man is putting food at the edge of a mowed yard where the woods begin. She closes her eyes and gives herself over to the images, like watching a movie in her mind. Setting the bowl down, the man slips behind a bush a few feet away. There is a car parked on a gravel drive nearby. Another man is crouched behind the car, waiting. Coyote, nose up, materializes out of the woods. As he approaches the food, the men pounce. He is picked up and carried, struggling, to a small shed and locked inside.
    Charley shivers and opens her eyes. This really happened, she thinks. She feels it the way she felt the dog’s terror as he struggled to get free of the men holding him. No wonder Coyote’s so wary about being fed.
    All this time she’s been counting on food to win him over. The books say that