The body lay at the very limit of daylight, the last clear place on the stones before the wood framing in the ancient adit began to peel away from the walls and pile up in moldy heaps.
The coyote studied the cold, pale thing even though the air here was very bad, the rusty water in the bottom of the tunnel giving off sour vapors that burned her nose and would have irritated her lungs if her lungs were still a normal coyote’s. The coyote had not been normal in a very long time, though. She stood in ankle-deep water and took in the details of the trouble someone had brought into the Strangeness’s territory.
The body’s head—it was a human head, the coyote knew— rested sideways in the iron-sick water, the chin pointing beyond the limit of its shoulder as the figure lay on its belly. Eyelids still curved over the full spheres of eyes. Whoever this was, they had not been lying here long. Even deep within the earth, eyeballs quickly caught the attention of anything hungry.
Compelled by the threads of the Strangeness twitching beneath her skin, the coyote trotted closer to the body. Risked a sniff at the backside, the traces of blood here and down the legs. More blood at the head, as well, hidden within the long dark hair. The human’s fingers brushed against the plume of the coyote’s tail like the points of some kind of mushroom springing up from the forest floor. Something secured the hands behind the corpse’s back, a strong artificial scent on the stuff. The coyote had smelled it on many human things in the woods, a bitter substance both flat and flexible. Once, long ago, the coyote had curiously bitten into some and found its gray surface tough but its underside tacky. The stickiness had clung to the coyote’s lips for most of a day, no matter how she had licked at it.
Now she sniffed at the body’s mouth, which still smelled faintly of food and, yes, breath. Barely a breath. The body would give up soon. The coyote felt sure of it, and her own mouth moistened at the thought.
The Strangeness sent a surge of discouragement, a mother snapping at her pup’s nose when it nuzzled for milk at an unwanted time. The coyote felt her limbs tighten, the corners of her mouth pull backward. Colors flitted behind her eyes, colors she knew without seeing, shades skewing outside the canine blue-yellow scale and into a sunset spectrum. A ribbon of saliva dripped from the coyote’s lips.
Outside, the Strangeness urged, goading the coyote with a sense of light and clean air. A burst of energy in her limbs. The coyote took hold of the body’s filthy ankle and pulled hard. Her jaws were strong, but the Strangeness lent her more strength, toughening her neck, bracing her legs. This had happened a few times in the past, and she knew she would sleep for many hours after this, afterward awakening very hungry and sore in every muscle.
Rocks shifted and splashed beneath the body and the coyote’s paws. The bad smell of the water grew stronger, but the coyote kept pulling. The Strangeness tickled inside her mouth, keeping her grip on the leg even as the flesh shredded beneath her teeth. She could already smell the Strangeness entering the human body through the abrasions in the ankle. The smell comforted her. Better Strange than human, after all.
Outside the adit, the land plunged into a narrow creek funneling water down the steep flanks of the mountain. A recent, unusually warm rain had raised the water level, and dampness continued to settle out of the trees and bushes. Any minute the rain would begin again, harder this time.
Another mind tugged at the Strangeness’s awareness, directing it away from the coyote, and for a moment the coyote was very nearly herself again, almost ordinary. Almost. She was still changed enough that her goal remained in the forefront of her mind even when the breath stopped coming from the dying human’s body. The coyote whined to herself, knowing the Strangeness could not bond with a dead animal.
But further thoughts on the matter lay far beyond the coyote’s understanding of the world. Her mind circled back to the prompt the Strangeness had given her and fixed on that duty.
The coyote gave one last fierce tug and the now-dead body slid over a hummock of sword ferns, gravity urging it toward the creek. It hung up for a second on a thorny salmonberry, and the coyote had to nudge it along.
When the body splashed into the creek, the coyote broke into a steady run, eager to leave the bad smells of the adit and find a place to shelter out of the rain. But even a mile away and resting inside a hollow log, part of her watched the body in the creek, slowly floating higher and higher in the rising water. Any unease she retained melted at the sense of the Strange emanating from the dead thing.
The coyote put her tail over her nose and let the Strangeness comfort her with its gentle thrum beneath her skin. Deep within the log, the ancient rotting wood hummed along, a sound that carried through the soil and into the trees, one soft hum stretching for miles in every direction. The coyote listened to her fellow Strange throughout the forest, frogs and trees and all kinds of beings, even the male who had fathered the pups growing in her belly. His mind ran in soft blue circuits much like her own, flickering at the edge of their territory.
Suddenly, a sharp pain ripped through his blue humming. An image of two humans floated across the network of plants and creatures, the humans barking with laughter as the biggest of the pair picked up the coyote by his neck. Something sharp pierced the male’s side again and again as he shrieked in pain.
Within her log, the female coyote whimpered, and the pain spread from her to the fern growing nearby. To the pair of vine maples sheltering her den. Onward and outward, the unpleasant sensation rippled throughout the Strangeness, and then the male coyote’s voice went quiet completely.
The human body began to float away from the creek’s bank and drift downstream.
Excerpted from Girl in the Creek, copyright © 2025 by Wendy N. Wagner.
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