“Bears Ears” by Dan Grossman
Unsplash Photo by Emily Campbell @elou
The sky was bright and cloudless as Coyote rode his Harley Davidson over the San Juan River bridge. He was headed north. He sped up Mexican Hat’s main drag while the town’s retirees watched from their respective rocking chairs.
Fifteen hundred feet above the town, on the edge of Cedar Mesa, Ted Danson was reading copy for the Utah Tourism Board. Bobby Grayson stood behind the camera. Bobby was a runt of a man according to his father, a Mormon Bishop, who stood behind his son. Bishop Grayson’s jaw dropped as Danson spoke of the Holy Land the Mormon pilgrims populated with their seed. The Bishop balked at the sacrilege he saw, left the film scene without a word, and drove his Ford Bronco toward the steep gravel weave of the Moki Dugway.
Five miles south of the mesa, State Road 261’s northbound lane was blocked by a blue ’97 Mazda Navajo truck. A small army of Mexican laborers surrounded it; they were painting a segment of asphalt black in order to bring out the contrast between the road and its desert surroundings. Two ad agency photographers, cups of coffee and cigarettes in-hand, casually directed traffic around the obstruction.
In the meantime Coyote sped toward Cedar Mesa at one hundred and thirty miles per hour. Changing Bear Maiden, his one true love, had been murdered on the mesa thousands of years ago. Her brother had cut the body into the little bits at the base of two prominent redrock buttes rising from the mesatop. This, after finding her coupled with Coyote, who escaped the brothers’ wrath by disguising himself as a pinyon pine (the buttes, from that time onwards, would be known as the Bear’s Ears). Now Coyote was heading back, one final time, to resurrect Changing Bear Maiden through chant and ceremony. The ad agency people and the Mexican laborers scattered when they realized that this motorcyclist had no intention of slowing down. As Coyote sped past these people the wheels lost their grip on the wet paint, the motorcycle flipped, and Coyote crashed head first into the Navajo windshield.
The Bishop arrived on the scene soon afterwards. He pushed the ad-agency photographers out of the way with his big hands and walked up to where Coyote lay spread-eagle against the shattered windshield. A shatterproof shard of glass had severed Coyote’s jugular.
Bishop Grayson knew of Coyote because he’d tried, without much success, to convert the Navajo of Lukachukai when he served at the Latter Day Saints ward there in the mid-fifties. He was familiar with the Coyote stories old Navajo women told their grandchildren. The Bishop had dismissed them as silly heathen legends but now, as he took Coyote’s bloody, fur-covered body in his arms, he could see otherwise.
“He’s dead. There’s no need for an ambulance,” he called out the advertising men and a growing number of tourists who were pulling off the highway to see the carnage.
“Who the fuck are you?” asked a balding ad agency photographer.
“Don’t swear,” said the Bishop, placing Coyote’s body in the trunk of his Bronco. “Go back to your ways. Go back to New York.”
The bishop got back behind the wheel. He turned the ignition key and spun wheels as he turned the truck around.
He drove back up the Moki Dugway, past the turnoff, towards the site where his son was filming. He drove fifty miles across the plateau until he reached the National Forest boundary. He turned off the highway onto a four wheel drive road leading up to the twin nine-thousand foot high sandstone buttes known as the Bears Ears. The road took him through Aspen groves and pine forest. He parked his truck at the edge of the forest. He removed Coyote’s body from the back of his truck and tied the front paws together with cord. The bishop lifted the body, lowered the bound paws around his neck, and started to climb the highest butte. The talus slope leading up to the sandstone cliff face was very steep and he had to circle around to the east face in order to find a manageable route up the sandstone. With the weight of Coyote on his back it was a difficult climb. The bishop wasn’t in the greatest physical shape in the world but he pretty much made up for that deficiency in determination. It took him two hours to climb to the top. On the summit a glimmer of reflected sunlight to the west caught his eye. It was Bobby Grayson’s film crew. His son was a fool in a world of fools, and always would be.
Thoughts of penance and disbelief raced through his mind as he piled rocks on Coyote’s body (there was no loam to dig a grave in). The work took about an hour. And as he placed the last rock on the grave he knew there could be no finer place for burial under the Utah sky.
