Sleepy Fox Hollow spaziergang

The question made Dusty stare blankly at Mahler for a moment, but then he seemed to grasp the question, and he answered: "Two. One we call Dad, and one we call the flower eater. There were nine of us, see? So we needed more'n one dad."

Dusty Rose didn't actually know what a crab was, and he'd only heard stories about the ocean. Neither of his fathers had ever seen it, and Dusty had been half convinced it was just another story — like Germany. Did all those fantastic places really exist?

"käfer," he repeated, clumsily the first time, but a little more respectably the second. "In Spanish, you say escarabajo, or bicho or sabandija, one. But you can call a coyote sabandija, too." He began digging up the beetle. "They don't like it much, but you can."

The beetle crunched nicely between his molars, and he wheeled about in a fancy pirouette to announce, "I can dance, too." These were important talents, back home! But he wouldn't have called himself talented among the rest of his siblings.

"I just like to," he said to Mahler. "If you could see where I come from, you might, too. There ain't anything out there to look at or sniff at. Not like out here, anyway. I grew up hearin' stories about mountains and oceans and Germany, 'cause you gotta build your own world out there. 'Else you're just lookin' at sand all day."


The coywolf scratched at something in the dirt and announced, "Tejón." Badger. One of them had been digging up worms in this patch of detritus. Dusty guessed it'd been sometime the night before.