Kino's Pursuit by the Trackers

Kino's pursuit by the trackers represents the terminal crisis of his attempt to escape the consequences of possessing the great pearl. After killing a man during the second night attack and finding his canoe destroyed and his house burned, Kino, Juana, and their infant son Coyotito flee La Paz. The trackers—two on foot and one on horseback, the latter carrying a rifle—are sent after them, and their pursuit transforms Kino from a hopeful father into a hunted animal, driving the family into the waterless stone mountains where the chase reaches its lethal conclusion.

The Trackers' Method and Kino's Response

The three trackers who pursue Kino are inland hunters, experts at reading the desert floor. As Kino watches from cover beside the road, he sees them moving slowly, bent low to the ground, pausing to study the earth, and then hurrying on—"as sensitive as hounds," he thinks, capable of following a bighorn sheep through stone mountains. The horseman rides behind them, his nose covered with a blanket, a rifle gleaming across his saddle. Kino knows that even his attempt to sweep away his footprints might serve as a message to these men. He lies rigid as a tree limb, barely breathing, and slowly draws his big knife, preparing to leap for the horseman and kill him to take the rifle—his only chance. But the trackers pass the swept place and move on, and Kino slides backward into panic flight, knowing they will circle back.

Flight into the Mountains

Kino leads his family westward toward the high granite mountains, abandoning any attempt to conceal his passage. He kicks stones, knocks leaves from trees, and runs for the high place "as nearly all animals do when they are pursued." The land is waterless, furred with cacti and great-rooted brush, the ground broken rock. Juana follows, her ankles cut and scratched, carrying Coyotito on her back. When Kino proposes that he go on alone to lead the trackers away while she hides and later goes north to Loreto or Santa Rosalia, Juana refuses flatly: "No," she says, and when he insists, she repeats the word. Her refusal gives him strength, and the flight ceases to be panic; he begins to move in zigzags across bare stone, cutting back to the south to leave false signs, forcing the trackers to circle and lose time.

The Confrontation at the Mountain Spring

At dusk, Kino and Juana reach a series of small pools fed by a spring in a deep cleft of the stone mountains. Kino spots a shallow erosion cave thirty feet up on the gray stone shoulder and helps Juana and Coyotito into it. He then climbs the brush cliff beside the water, clawing at ferns and wild grape to create a false trail, and returns to the cave. The trackers arrive at the pool as darkness falls; two curl up to sleep while the third squats on watch with the rifle between his knees. Kino decides he must attack before the moon rises. He strips off his white clothes, hooks his amulet neck-string about the horn handle of his great knife so it hangs down his back, and creeps down the smooth rock face "like a slow lizard," his spread fingers gripping the stone, his bare toes finding support through contact. The moon rises before he can strike, and he crouches behind a dwarf palm, twenty feet from the watcher.

The Killing and Its Cost

A cry from the cave—Coyotito's cry—draws the watcher's attention. He cocks the rifle, saying, "If it's a coyote, this will stop it." Kino is in mid-leap when the gun crashes. The great knife swings and crunches hollowly through the watcher's neck and deep into his chest. Kino seizes the rifle, whirls, and strikes the head of a second man "like a melon." The third man scrambles into the pool and tries to climb the cliff, but Kino deliberately throws the rifle lever, aims, and fires, hitting him between the eyes. Then Kino's brain clears from its red concentration and he hears the sound: "the keening, moaning, rising hysterical cry from the little cave in the side of the stone mountain, the cry of death." The bullet meant for Kino has struck Coyotito.

The Return and the Pearl's Fate

Kino and Juana return to La Paz walking side by side, not in single file as before. Kino carries the rifle across his arm; Juana carries her shawl like a sack over her shoulder, and in it is a small limp heavy bundle, the shawl crusted with dried blood. They walk through the city as though it were not there, their eyes staring straight ahead, and the people crowd back and let them pass without speaking. At the water's edge, Kino holds the great pearl in his hand and sees in its surface Coyotito lying in the little cave with the top of his head shot away. The pearl is gray and ulcerous, like a malignant growth. He offers it to Juana; she says, "No, you." Kino draws back his arm and flings the pearl with all his might into the Gulf. It settles to the sand bottom among fern-like plants, and a crab scampering over the bottom raises a little cloud of sand, and when it settles the pearl is gone.