coyote

The coyote in Ben Givens’s desert journey is at once a real voice in the landscape and an uncertain explanation for violence. Ben jokingly blames one for his injured face, later recalls the animal’s lonely-sounding call across the Frenchman Hills, and fears that coyotes may be stalking his dogs. Yet the text does not confirm a coyote attack. This gap between the animal’s actual presence and the threat Ben imagines gives the coyote a distinctive narrative role: it connects bodily vulnerability, remembered local knowledge, and the desert’s capacity to unsettle human certainty.

The Coyote as an Explanation

When a girl asks Ben what happened to his eye, he says, "I had a fight with a coyote." She immediately rejects the account, telling him, "You didn't fight with any coyote." Ben invites her disbelief, and she recognizes that he is teasing. His story turns an injury into a comic exchange, borrowing the coyote as an implausible opponent rather than offering a serious explanation.

The joke also points toward the truth without disclosing it at once. Ben tells a boy that there were things he should have done but that he did not think straight. Asked what happened, he describes an exchange of blows: he was punched, and he punched back. He then says that the coyote looks worse. The coyote is thus not the established cause of the injury; Ben’s own account makes a human fight the relevant circumstance. His comparison lets him acknowledge the violence obliquely while keeping the conversation playful, and the girl’s refusal to believe him shows that the coyote story is understood as teasing, not testimony.

A Voice Rooted in Place

Later, alone in the night, Ben hears a coyote calling somewhere toward the Frenchman Hills. The sound is high, extended, and difficult to locate as the voice of one animal or several. Its ambiguity is part of the scene: the call seems to rise from the country itself, and Ben understands it as native to the place where he was born. The landscape is not merely a backdrop to his journey; its nocturnal sound has an expressive force of its own, seeming to mourn.

The call also brings a human memory into the scene. Ben recalls a Wanapum man with whom he boxed apples sixty years earlier, who had explained that the cry of a single coyote can sound like the cry of many. The recollection offers a practical way to understand what Ben hears without resolving the sound into a visible animal. It ties the present desert night to an earlier life of work in the region and to knowledge passed through experience. The coyote’s voice therefore carries both immediate uncertainty and the depth of Ben’s long connection to this country.

Fear for the Dogs

The coyote becomes a more immediate danger in Ben’s imagination when his dogs grow agitated in the desert. He sees Rex ranging ahead and whining, while Tristan presses close to him. Unable to identify what has unsettled them, Ben recalls hearing that coyotes sometimes work in packs to lure dogs to their deaths. For a moment, he is certain coyotes are nearby and searches the sage for a shape. But he also recognizes that the shadows may be no more than forms produced by his marijuana-addled mind.

That self-awareness does not make the fear disappear. Ben is tired, cold, and reluctant to rise; he hopes the dogs will settle and that he will not have to act. When he hears distant hounds to the north, he calls Rex back and orders the dogs to stay while the sounds seem to approach. The episode does not establish that coyotes are present or connected to the hounds. Rather, it shows how the possibility of a pack has already shaped Ben’s reading of the darkness and his concern for his dogs. Their agitation is real to him, while its cause remains uncertain.

Narrative Significance

Across these scenes, the coyote shifts from the target of a joke to a remembered sound and then to a possible predator. Those appearances distinguish what Ben knows from what he fears: he can recognize an actual call, recall an explanation of its misleading multiplicity, and still mistake uncertain signs for imminent danger when weakened and impaired. The animal is neither reduced to a symbol nor made into a confirmed antagonist. Its call belongs to the living desert; the threat of a pack belongs, at least in this episode, to Ben’s anxious interpretation of that desert.

That uncertainty also sharpens the contrast between coyotes and the hounds Ben hears. He fears coyotes because he has heard they can endanger dogs, but the approaching baying is identified as hounds, not coyotes. The distinction matters: the landscape supplies genuine sounds and animal movement, while Ben’s exhaustion makes their meaning harder to judge. The coyote’s narrative importance lies in this unsettled boundary between animal presence, remembered knowledge, humor, and fear.