Coyotes

Coyotes enter the story through their howls, sounds that give the vast landscape a presence of its own while gathering meaning around Mama’s illness and death. Their calls do not cause either event; instead, they become part of how Lizzy Enders and Mama experience a country that feels immense, unsettling, and indifferent to human scale.

Presence in the Landscape

As the wagon train crosses open country, Mama is troubled by its starkness and by the sense that it has no end. At night, Lizzy Enders hears her whimper when a coyote howls. The animal remains unseen, but its call makes the surrounding darkness audible and sharpens Mama’s distress. The passage places that fear within a landscape that seems to extend beyond human comfort or comprehension.

Fear and Foreboding

During the same journey, Mama clutches Lizzy Enders’s hand when they pass an old Indigenous man sitting motionless before a pueblo. Mama believes he is waiting for her. She dies the following day of a putrid fever. The account does not make the coyotes an omen or assign them responsibility for her death; their earlier howling belongs to the sequence of sounds and sights through which Mama confronts her own mortality.

The Burial

At Mama’s burial, the coyotes return as a distant wail. Mr. French has finished digging the grave, and Mr. Enders and Mr. French lower Mama, wrapped in a buffalo robe, into it. Elinora reads from her Bible, but Lizzy Enders finds the animal’s howling more fitting. Her preference sets the wild sound against the religious words spoken over the grave, conveying her estrangement from the ceremony and her conviction that Mama is already gone from that place. The coyotes’ calls thus recur at two thresholds of the story: during Mama’s fearful passage toward death and at the burial that confirms her absence.