How Pecos Bill Was Raised by Coyotes (Campfire Story)

Way back when Texas was mostly cactus and rattlesnakes, a family set out west in a covered WAGON. And what a family it was. There were eighteen kids in that WAGON, all of them hollering, and the littlest was a baby named Bill.

Baby Bill was no ordinary baby. He cut his teeth on a bowie knife. His favorite toy was a live rattlesnake. And when he cried, the cows in the next county stopped giving milk.

One day the WAGON came to the Pecos River. The father whipped up the horses, and down the bank they went, and the WAGON hit a rock and jumped clear up in the air. And out the back bounced Baby Bill.

He landed in the soft sand by the river. The WAGON rattled on across the water and up the other side. With eighteen kids hollering, nobody noticed there were only seventeen. By the time they did, they were halfway to New Mexico.

Baby Bill sat in the sand. He wasn't scared. He looked around for somebody to play with. And out of the sagebrush crept a mother coyote, with her ears up and her nose twitching. She sniffed him. He sniffed her. Then he grabbed her tail and laughed.

That old coyote decided right then that this was the funniest-looking pup she'd ever seen, and she took him home to the den. And that's how Bill grew up with the COYOTES.

The COYOTES taught him everything they knew. He learned to run so fast he could catch a jackrabbit from behind. He learned to sniff out water in the driest desert. He learned to talk to every critter on the range, from the prairie dogs to the buzzards. And every night, he sat up on the hill with the rest of the COYOTES and howled at the moon.

He also picked up a whole lot of FLEAS.

Years went by. Bill grew tall and lean and tough as rawhide. One day a cowboy named Chuck came riding along the Pecos River and saw a young man crouched on a rock, scratching his FLEAS with his foot and howling with the COYOTES.

'Well, I'll be,' said Chuck. 'What are you doing out here, son?'

Bill looked at him funny. 'I'm a coyote,' he said. 'Same as my brothers.'

'You're no coyote,' said Chuck. 'You're a human being, same as me. A Texan, by the look of you.'

'I am too a coyote,' said Bill. 'I've got FLEAS, don't I?'

'Son, every Texan has FLEAS,' said Chuck.

'Well, I howl at the moon,' said Bill.

'So does every cowboy on the trail,' said Chuck. 'We call it singing. Tell you what. Turn around and look at your backside. You see a tail back there?'

Bill turned around. And around. And around, faster and faster, like a dog chasing its own tail. And there was no tail there at all.

Bill sat down hard on his rock. 'Well, I'll be,' he said. 'I'm a human.'

So Chuck took him to the ranch and taught him to be a cowboy. Bill learned fast. He could rope a steer before it knew it was being roped, and ride anything with four legs. Since he'd been found by the Pecos River, the cowboys called him PECOS BILL. And before long, everybody in the West knew the name of PECOS BILL, the greatest cowboy who ever lived.

But he never forgot where he came from. Every full moon, PECOS BILL rode up to the top of the highest hill and howled, and from all across the prairie his family howled right back.

point to the crowd for the last howl

Storyteller tips: teach the four sounds first. The scratching FLEAS get the biggest laughs, so pause before every one. Act out Bill chasing his own tail. Ending on the full-moon howl is the perfect way to close a campfire, so let the whole crowd howl as loud as they want.

Pecos Bill first appeared in stories by Edward O'Reilly in The Century Magazine in 1923. Cowboys and storytellers have been adding to his legend ever since. For more of his adventures, see Pecos Bill Rides a Tornado.