Coyotes

Coyotes are recurring desert animals in 2666, but their appearances do not settle into a single symbolic meaning. A coyote killed on a highway becomes the focus of a police chief’s exacting correction, Epifanio’s uneasy speculation, and a dream that transforms the animal into the center of a disturbing sequence. Elsewhere, coyotes belong to the imagined desert death of a migrant who disappeared while trying to cross the border. Together, these moments connect animal life to human uncertainty without making the coyote merely a fixed emblem.

The Roadside Encounter

While driving from Villaviciosa toward Santa Teresa with police chief Pedro Negrete and the newly recruited boy Olegario Cura Exposito, Epifanio brakes after the car shudders. He walks down the highway with a flashlight; a gunshot follows. Epifanio returns saying he has killed a wolf, but Negrete examines the animal and rejects the identification. He distinguishes the coyote by its coat and by its size, estimating a length of twenty-eight to thirty-six inches and a weight of twenty-two to thirty-five pounds. Epifanio’s estimates fit those ranges, and Negrete concludes that the animal is a coyote, not a wolf.

The exchange is practical and teasing: Negrete turns the dead animal into an occasion to display his knowledge and mock Epifanio’s mistake. But the encounter does not end with classification. The men leave the coyote beside the highway and resume the drive, while Epifanio continues thinking about it. The animal is identified, yet the circumstances of its appearance remain unexplained.

Epifanio’s Speculation and Dream

As the car approaches the first lights of Santa Teresa, the radio yields only static. Epifanio imagines that the coyote was female and had been looking for a safe place to give birth; perhaps that was why it had not seen the car. He is not satisfied with this explanation. His conjecture gives the animal a possible purpose and a vulnerable condition, but it cannot undo the collision or establish what the coyote had actually been doing.

That night, Epifanio dreams of the female coyote left by the roadside. In the dream, he sits apart on a piece of basalt and hears her whimpering; he thinks she may already know she has lost her pup. He does not approach or act. The dream then shifts: Epifanio drives Negrete’s car alone along a straight track toward a mountain, hearing a strange noise beneath the chassis. When he stops to investigate, he finds a living, bound person in the trunk, whose identity he does not discover. He closes the trunk and drives on toward mountains that appear to burn or crumble. The coyote’s death thus returns not as a resolved memory but as the opening image of a dream that moves from animal vulnerability to concealed human danger.

Coyotes and the Desert’s Unknowns

A separate passage describes the family of Penelope Mendez Becerra, whose father left to cross the border after concluding that his maquiladora earnings could not improve their living conditions. He promised to write from California and intended to bring his family after him, but they never heard from him again. Penelope’s mother sometimes imagined that he had died alone in the desert, listening to coyotes howl or thinking of his children. The account presents this as one of her fears, not as a confirmed explanation for his disappearance; she eventually tries not to dwell on it.

The roadside animal, Epifanio’s imagined mother coyote, and the howling in Penelope’s mother’s thoughts are distinct moments, not evidence of one continuous incident. Their recurrence nevertheless gives coyotes a place in the book’s geography of uncertain loss. In one scene, the animal itself lies dead beside a deserted highway; in another, its call belongs to a survivor’s unresolved account of someone who may have died crossing the desert. The coyote does not explain what happened. Its presence marks how little can be known about lives exposed to the desert’s dangers.