The Coyote's Song

Back cover blurb

Some truths were never meant to be known and some secrets were never meant to be shared.

Montana Thomas goes in search of a father he never knew and finds the reasons behind his mother's years of silence. With his mother recently dead and not even a name to start with, Montana and his brother Dakota begin a journey to find not only their unknown father, but their culture. The Indian heritage denied to them from the moment of their births.

Will Montana be able to accept his father and the truth behind his disappearance? Will he be able to accept the truths about himself once his past is revealed? Or will he wish he’d left those secrets buried.

The Coyote's Song

Excerpt - Chapter One

Cal Tremont found me. I'd escaped to the desert again. The one place that soothed the ragged edges and raw nerves. A sanctuary that let me breathe and gave me the peace that so often eluded me. The only place I still felt belonged to me. Cal knew it's where I'd run to for solitude. After five years in Denver, trapped in a well-paying, but much-hated job, I needed to get away or I'd go insane, so I hiked into the desert to disappear, but Cal found me. He always found me. As the only law in the small Nevada town I grew up in, he felt an obligation to look for me when I took off as a child. An obligation to my mother I thought I'd long outgrown.

I heard him coming long before I saw him, but he'd made it this far, so I figured I owed it to him to stay put and find out why he'd tracked me through thirty miles of heat-seared canyons and dried river beds.

Leaving the shade of my tent, I waited for him on a boulder overlooking a spectacular view of the valley below.

"I'm getting too God damn old to be following your ass out here, Montana," Cal bellowed. He was panting and sweating heavily as he came to stand next to me.

"I'm a little old for you to be dragging home to my mother, don't you think, Cal?" I asked, finally looking at him. It was late afternoon, and the heat made sweat bead and trickle down my back after minutes exposed to it.

Cal sighed and wiped his face with both hands. Taking a canteen from over his shoulder, he took a long swallow, and then poured some over his face.

"Lilly didn't send me this time, Montana. Your brother did."

That got my attention. Dakota had often taken it upon himself to come and bring me home when we were kids, but he had never elicited Cal's help before. Dakota should have been deep in the middle of his last semester of med school. I'd spoken to him on the phone a few weeks earlier about our mother but couldn't figure out what this was all about. Then it hit me.

Cal must have seen the realization on my face. He simply nodded and leaned against the boulder. "He's been trying to contact you for days."

"I didn't want to be found," I said, trying to delay what I knew came next.

"Yeah, I figured as much. Montana, your mother's dying, boy. She could already be gone. It took me longer to find you this time."

I closed my eyes, trying to shut the words out, but it didn't work. Opening them, I searched the desert for some small measure of comfort, and found none.

"Where is she?" I asked.

"Carson City. Dakota's with her. He told me there wasn't a lot of time, that was two days ago. I have a car waiting once we get back to town."

I nodded and, leaving my tent and all my belongings, followed Cal out of the desert and hoped I was in time.

My mother and I always had a tenuous relationship, in part because of her refusal to tell me anything about my father. I was three the first time I asked her about him, four when I took off to try and find him by myself. She told me that I was a spirit child, a story even then I didn't buy. My mother was a pureblood Lakota Indian, and stories were her history. They were also how she explained things she'd rather not discuss, although I learned that lesson much later in life. My mother never married, and whenever I asked about my father, stories were all I received.

Lilly Thomas wore the hardships life threw at her like armor, dented and chipped, but still functional as long as she never confronted the ugly things head-on. Deceiving herself and the ones she loved was a way of life for her. It was also a matter of self-preservation, the only way she knew how to survive. That little piece of knowledge took me most of my life to understand, and it came too late in the knowing. I tried my best where my mother was concerned, but somewhere along the way, I got caught up in looking for answers. I never once considered my mother might have been protecting me, instead of herself, as I'd always assumed.

I picked and worried the wound that was my family's secret until it opened and bled. I believed if I could find my answers, the past could be undone. I was wrong. I discovered what my mother knew all along. You can't change who you are, you can only make peace with it.

• • •

By the time I arrived, she was nearly gone. Dakota met me outside her hospital room. His face told me what words could not. I had made it in time, but just barely. He stepped aside to let me through. I thought I knew what to expect, I knew she was sick but I couldn't have been prepared for this.

The frail, skeletal woman lying in the bed before me could not possibly be my mother, my beautiful mother, not my mother.

I held her hand and she smiled knowing, somehow, that it was me.

"Montana." Her voice was so tired, and I could feel her powerful spirit slipping away.

"I'm here, Mama."

She opened her eyes and tried to focus on me, and suddenly I saw my mother there, for just a moment.

"You've forgotten how to listen," she whispered. A tear welled and tracked slowly down her still beautiful face. "Listen to the coyotes. They need someone to hear their song." She closed her eyes, and her hand gripped mine just a little tighter.

"I promise," I said, and I meant it.

Her hand went slack, and I watched as she took her last breath. She died without ever telling me my father's name. She took that secret with her. The only clue I ever had was somewhere in the Nevada desert hidden in the song of the coyote.

The Coyote's Song

Reviews

Family and love cover each page in this novel. The reader is reminded and touched with their own life and family as they are drawn into this story. Two brothers, one in search of his past, the other wanting to move on. Their love for each other pulls them into an adventure, one that could take a life, all to find their past. The struggle, the fear, the pain, bring them to a point of giving up, and death becomes a friend.

They both realize living is better…as the Death Angel hovers above…Montana and Dakota draw strength from their newfound family…they venture and appreciate the new realm left by their parents.

This novel will draw you to your senses about family, love, and others…in such a way you will turn the pages and bow your head, and pray to do better.

Ann has far exceeded her beginning desires to tell a story. This novel will cause every reader to look at their own life and family and draw them into the heart and soul of what family means. Thank you, Ann.

Lee Carey, Virginia