Amanda Cockrell

Excerpt:

"The stars looked as if they were spinning slowly, spiraling across the sky...
Something fell out of them. It had a brush of a tail still spangled with their lights, and the same yellow eyes Out of Breath had seen looking at him out of the afternoon. He held his breath, his heart hammering with fear.
Out of Breath closed his eyes, squeezing them tight. You didn't want Coyote in your campsite. Coyote was always hungry, and what he ate was people who had got lost -- one way or the other. Out of Breath opened one eye. A gray, hairy shape was sitting across the fire from him, blotting out the stars and the moon. His tongue lolled out beneath rows of white teeth, and he lifted his back leg and scratched behind his ear.
'I brought you something,' he said. It was the growly voice that Out of Breath had heard in his head. Then he was gone, leaping back among the stars. Where he had been, a tall bony figure loomed above the dying glow of the fire. It put its long hairy nose in Out of Breath's face and breathed on him.
Out of Breath screamed..."

***

"Imagine an entirely new animal...
See Grandmother Spider, her great gray backside moving across the pattern, her eight arms shifting warp and weft. The new animal moves, shakes its head, startled to find itself here. Grandmother sees a pair of yellow eyes in the corner of the pattern. She didn't weave them there, but she beckons gracefully anyway, and a coyote trots across the world. The new animal sees Coyote and dances on its strange, uncloven hooves. Grandmother Spider nods. When Grandmother weaves something into the People's world, it is Coyote who sets it moving.
Coyote grins, tongue lolling out. Listen and he will tell you how it all came about. His own version, anyway..."

Avon Books, 1999
ISBN 0-380-79549-3

Excerpt:

"You don't always know it's Coyote right off the bat. Once he was two women selling a book on how to engage the Flow, and he brings the people in Sedona a lot of things. This time he had on a three-piece gray suit and expensive boots and he was drinking espresso in Starbuck's.
It was one of those days when the worlds cross. Most people live in at least two worlds anyway. That day the people were watching the Fourth of July parade outside the window. They could see his BMW parked next to the dusty pickups that lined the street, and beyond that, riders going by on horses with big silver-mounted saddles. The riders wore sombreros and serapes, and the women were got up like Spanish senoritas in flounced skirts. Some art gallery had a flatbed truck with big sculpture on it, metal things like Hopi kachinas. Behind them was another truck carrying Washington crossing the Delaware. The Boy Scouts had a color guard, and the paramedics had brought their new ambulance. On a day like that anything might sit down next to you."

Avon, 2000
ISBN 0-380-79550-7

Excerpt:

"Flute Dog had been married for the space of one warm spring night when the Horse Searchers came home. No one had really thought they would come back.
Spotted Colt and Mud Turtle looked different now, Flute Dog thought, while she stood on the edge of the crowd that gathered around them. They looked like people who had been to the edge of the world, and she wondered what they had seen.
It came to her very suddenly that there could be anything in the world...things she had never seen, things so far away and strange that they didn't have names.
Pale men. Horses with ears like rabbits. Stone that could be melted and sticks that shot flame and small stones.
If all those things could be, then any other things was possible, too."

***

"Coyote watched the moon come up in Rain Child's pot. The Holy Clowns had painted themselves white and danced around it, while the moon lifted over the eastern horizon and her spirit coalesced in the pot.
From his spot on the ridge above the Dry River camp Coyote could see her climbing over the hills. She was round-bottomed and ample-breasted tonight, and he grinned at her out of the stars, making himself an attractive young man, such as a girl like herself might want.
'Good evening, Beautiful,' he said, dangling his paws over the edge of the Star Road.
'Oho, it's you.' The Moon paused to survey him.
He leaned back, swinging his legs, noticed the paws and changed them into a pair of russet feet. His hair was long and unbraided, and it blew around his face."


Avon, 2001
ISBN 0-380-79551-5