Coyotes

Coyotes take on a recurring role in the novel’s account of a human world abruptly emptied of its usual traffic, caretakers, and protections. Ish first encounters one moving freely along a deserted highway; later, he sees evidence of predators among sheep and considers how Coyotes are using the abandoned spaces of Los Angeles. Their appearances mark a change in who can move through human-built landscapes and who can survive there. The sheep episodes sharpen that change: animals long sheltered by people face a new danger, while a pair of dogs briefly continues the work of a vanished shepherd.

First Appearance on the Empty Highway

As Ish drives through the aftermath of the disaster, the absence of ordinary traffic makes the highway feel altered before he sees any animal. A Coyote is loping along the inner lane in broad daylight. Ish distinguishes it from a farm dog by its sharp ears and lean, light-colored legs. When he draws near and honks, the animal quickens its pace, crosses into the other lane, and heads out across the fields without appearing greatly alarmed.

The encounter is brief, but its setting gives it weight. A road designed for streams of cars has become open passage for an animal moving through it on its own terms. Ish reads the Coyote’s apparent ease as evidence that it has already adapted to the changed world and its new freedoms. The animal does not need to understand the human catastrophe as Ish does; its movement is enough to make the highway’s former purpose seem provisional. The scene establishes Coyotes as active presences in the landscape, not merely a remembered feature of the countryside.

Sheep, Predation, and Uncertainty

Farther along Ish’s journey, the relationship between Coyotes and domestic animals becomes more troubling. Near Flagstaff, he finds sheep dead along the highway and counts twenty-six bodies scattered near the road and across the surrounding ground. The scene suggests an attack, but Ish cannot identify its authors with certainty. He reconstructs how a flock might have been harried and how animals at its edges could have been separated from those that stayed close together; the possible attackers are dogs or Coyotes.

The uncertainty matters. Ish can infer what happened from the sheep’s positions, but he cannot witness or verify the hunt itself. On the following day, while crossing the broad high plains of the continental divide, he sees more sheep bodies in country where Coyotes have harried flocks. The repeated losses show the danger extending beyond one roadside scene. Yet the narrative does not turn the predator into a simple emblem of evil: the dead sheep are evidence of a changed balance, in which animals no longer receive the protection that human herding once provided.

Ish also comes upon a flock grazing peacefully in a rich meadow beside a stream. He looks for a wagon and shepherd, but sees only two dogs. The dogs keep the sheep together, round up stragglers, and hold their distance from Ish’s car. Ish supposes that they are maintaining the flock in good pasture and fighting off marauders that approach at night. Coyotes are among the danger he has in mind, but he does not see them attack this flock. The distinction between what he observes and what he infers keeps the scene measured: the dogs’ work is visible, while the continuing threat is anticipated.

Human Landscapes Reoccupied

The novel connects Coyotes with places whose human names and routes remain legible even as their former life has disappeared. Looking at a map and tracing routes toward Los Angeles, Ish remembers Burbank, Hollywood, and Pasadena as once-living towns. He imagines Coyotes hunting jackrabbits through their drought-stricken parks and back lots. The image joins an intact map to a radically altered landscape: place-names persist, but the activity Ish associates with them has given way to animal life.

Coyotes also appear in scenes where human structures outlast human care. Their presence is part of the wider transformation Ish notices as he crosses the continent: roads, towns, and other remnants remain, but they no longer guarantee human command of the spaces around them. The novel gives Coyotes no human speech or declared purpose. Instead, their routes, the traces of their predation, and Ish’s projections onto the abandoned cities make them indicators of ecological change that is happening beyond human plans.

The Limits of Protection

The sheep episodes place Coyotes within a larger contrast between animals adapted to human management and animals able to exploit its disappearance. Ish reflects that sheep had accepted a shepherd’s protection over generations and had lost some independence; without that protection, their survival is at risk. The peaceful flock is not evidence that the danger has passed. Its immediate order depends on two dogs continuing a task that belonged to a human herder, while Coyotes and other marauders remain a threat the dogs may be holding at bay.

Coyotes recur, finally, as both actual predators and a measure of human absence. Ish’s account of the sheep is grounded in visible bodies and flocks, but his vision of Coyotes in Los Angeles projects a future he cannot directly observe. Together, the witnessed encounter and the inferred scenes show an animal using the openings created by collapse: an empty traffic lane becomes a route, and abandoned parks become imagined hunting ground. The novel’s emphasis is not that nature simply replaces civilization, but that familiar arrangements of protection and control weaken unevenly, leaving different animals with sharply different prospects.