Coyotes

Coyotes are a recurring but briefly glimpsed presence in the novel’s landscapes. Their plaintive howls mark the canyons north of Los Angeles, while later they appear among the animals suffering in the desert during nuclear testing. Across these settings, they register an environment undergoing pressures that human characters may experience as atmosphere or policy but that animals endure as lived conditions.

Presence in the canyons

During a dry early-summer night above El Canyon Drive, coyotes howl from the canyons north of Los Angeles. Their calls enter a landscape described through heat, dust, fire, and weeks without rain. Nearby, relentless construction drives rats from the city; the coyotes, by contrast, remain audible in the canyons beyond it. They are not presented as companions or as symbols with a single fixed meaning. Their cries make the surrounding terrain perceptible as habitat, not merely as scenery for a human encounter.

Animals in the testing desert

In the account of a season of secret nuclear explosions, coyotes are among the animals described as agonizing in the deserts of western Utah. The passage places them alongside birds struck from the air, antelopes, cougars, rabbits, oxen, horses, and sheep, including livestock on ranches adjoining government testing grounds in the Great Salt Lake Desert. The coyotes belong to a wider field of animal suffering: their presence enlarges the human language of nuclear danger into a record of nonhuman exposure.

Narrative significance

The contrast between the canyon howls and the testing-ground casualties gives coyotes two distinct narrative functions. In Los Angeles, they make the city’s surrounding wildness audible against the advance of construction. In the desert, they are part of a damaged animal world set beside the era’s rhetoric of defense and fear. The novel grants them little individual characterization, but their recurrence resists treating the environment as a passive backdrop: the landscape has inhabitants, and the costs of human activity reach beyond the people at the center of the story.