Canyons

“Sancta was a scarred old man who could not be touched by arrows or bullets who had led all the raids since Coyote Runs knew there were raids; Sancta decided who would go and who would stay.”

In this passage, Paulsen establishes the dependence that Coyote Runs has on Sancta as a leader of his community; additionally, he’s also introducing the belief system that is so important to the ultimate success of the raid and of Coyote Runs’s mission to be interred with respect.

“Brennan Cole lived in El Paso, Texas, and each afternoon after school he ran. He did not run from anything and did not run to anything, did not run for track nor did he run to stay in shape and lose weight.”

As with Coyote Runs, Brennan is introduced by statements of his values and desires. Brennan’s desires are clearly stated in the negative here, as he does not want to run for any specific reason, but rather because it’s a method of escape from his life.

“He did not know his father. He lived alone with his mother and when he was home—which was less and less as he approached fifteen and his mother spent more and more time working to live, working to be, working to feed and clothe her only son—the two of them existed in a kind of quiet tolerance.”

Brennan’s relationship with his mother goes through a transformation in Canyons. Initially, Brennan acts rather dismissive of her, skeptical of her desire for a good romantic match. However, later on, once he starts to investigate the history of the skull, he begins to understand the difficulties his mother went through and to treat her with more respect.

“How anything so big could come from something so small and simple.

‘Hi.’

‘Hi.’

And it changed his whole life.”

Brennan traces the beginning of his story to his introduction to Bill Halverson, who brings Brennan along on the camping trip, during which Brennan discovers the skull. However, the story started much earlier, but Brennan does not yet know how his story will intersect with that of Coyote Runs’s.

“The afternoon before they left on the ride south to Mexico he had gone to the ancient medicine place, the secret place, and had spoken to his spirits to ask for guidance and bravery to have a thick neck and be a man.”

Coyote Runs’s ride to Mexico is a very important event in his life, representing a sort of coming of age. By praying to the spirits, Coyote Runs is ensuring success for his mission; this passage also foreshadows Brennan’s eventual involvement in discovering the ancient medicine place.

“Each arrow he placed tobacco on, using tobacco from a round metal tin that Magpie had found in an old shed at the Quaker school when the two of them had gone to the school to learn how it was to be white. They learned nothing except some symbols on a black stone written with a piece of white dirt; symbols that meant their names in white man’s words that the Quaker lady taught them which did them no good because nobody else could read them.”

In this passage, Paulsen is showing how symbolism is culturally dependent. Where to Coyote Runs the symbol and meaning of the tobacco is clear and rational, so too are the symbols of words and writing to the teachers at the Quaker school. The irony, then, is that neither culture recognizes the legitimacy of the symbols of the other.

“Stoney Romero gave him instructions the way he did all his other talking—his voice like gravel rattling around in a garbage can. He smoked cigarettes which he rolled from tobacco in a small plastic bag he carried because ‘tailormades’ cost too much and he spent most of his time coughing and hacking.”

Stoney’s smoking comes just a chapter after Coyote Runs’s relationship with tobacco is described, creating a natural comparison. Unlike the tobacco of Coyote Runs, which helps his arrows fly straight, Stoney’s smoking of tobacco causes him numerous health issues noticed by Brennan. As with other actions, the colonizers’ versions of using local plants differ, in a negative way, from the practices of the Indigenous.

“Instead they rode straight south over the tops of the wild canyons that fed out into the great desert and the place with the white sand the Mexicans called Jornada del Muerto—the journey of death. It was said that a Spanish warrior in a time long ago before there were even horses except for those he brought rode through that place and lost many men and had to eat some horses but Coyote Runs did not believe all of that.”

In this passage, Coyote Runs is demonstrating cultural knowledge of a time hundreds of years before his own, before horses even existed in the Americas, as they were brought over the Atlantic by Europeans. By contrast, the colonizers and authorities took measures to erase their history of the conquest of the Indigenous population, resulting in the difficulties that Brennan encounters later on.

“He almost smiled now, thinking back on it, would have smiled except that it had turned out so awful. The kids—there were seven of them, all boys, all about eight years old—were monsters. They were all over the van like gremlins, wouldn’t let themselves be buckled in, and with Bill and Brennan’s mother in the front seat and Brennan in the back with the kids—he thought of them as the pack—the main load of work with the children dropped on Brennan.”

Before Brennan encounters the skull, he is characterized as being exceptionally solitary and a little grumpy. Here, he is intolerant of the behavior of the children, even though he’s being taken on a vacation, just as before he tries to escape his own life through obsessive running. After Brennan finds the skull, part of his arc consists of his own recognition of the need for empathy.

“Ho! There was madness there. In the bluebellies. The same as they wore dark wool clothes in the summer, buttoned tight to the collar so the heat could not get away and heavy hats to keep the heat in their heads and rode their horses through the heat of the day—all crazy.”

Between this passage and the earlier passage regarding the Quaker school, the actions of the white people are shown to be rather incomprehensible to Coyote Runs. This also could have had the effect of making it more difficult for Coyote Runs to escape, as he cannot anticipate the motivations and actions of the bluebellies.

“Something was there, some strange thing that bothered him. He had felt it before when they first came into the end of the canyon and it was still there, the feeling. He couldn’t shake it.

An unease, a restlessness that wouldn’t go away. He closed his eyes and thought of things to make him sleep, boring things, but even that didn’t work. In the end he sat up again, staring out across the canyons over the sleepers below him, a strange uneasiness in his heart that would not go away.”

This passage represents the first moments in which Brennan has shown a supernatural connection to the skull. At this point in the story, Brennan is not even aware of the skull’s existence or the full history of the canyon in which he is camping. However, the skull is still able to reach out to him and rattle his consciousness, showing the power of Coyote Runs’s desires even after death.

His medicine place—he had to reach it. It was all he could think of now, pulling himself along, and he scrabbled on his one good leg and his hands up a narrow trail, kept going though the pain came now in waves, covered him in red waves, kept pulling and fighting until he was in a grassy area.

They would not come, he thought. The soldiers would not come after him up in the canyon. He would keep going but they would not come for him. They would turn away.

He was wrong.”

Coyote Runs’s failure to anticipate the actions of the white soldiers directly leads to his death. This concept is developed later in the text, as Brennan’s anticipations about his own pursuers proves correct, leading to his own escape.

“He pushed and pulled at it and after some effort it began to wiggle slightly and he at last broke it loose and put it over to the side. He scraped some sand into the hole left by the rock and lay back again but in all this effort the fear, the sweat, the chills had not left him.

Take me, spirit…

Again it was there, or still. Who are you? he thought. Then whispered it. ‘Who are you?’”

When Brennan discovers Coyote Runs’s skull, he at first thinks that it is just a regular rock buried in the sand. However, Coyote Runs’s desires lead Brennan toward what turns out to be his destiny, as encountering the skull allows him to directly hear the thoughts and intentions of the Apache boy.

“The dream that night made no sense. He sat cross-legged on a high ridge overlooking the desert and the canyons below, apparently near where they had camped, and watched an eagle flying. It moved in huge circles, taking the light wind, climbing and falling, and he just sat and watched it fly and didn’t think or say anything, didn’t do anything.

He could sometimes see the eagle very closely, see the feathers, the clear golden eye, then it would swing away and go higher and higher and finally become a small speck against the blue sky and then, in the end, nothing, and he just sat all the time on the ridge watching.”

In Brennan’s dream, the eagle seemingly represents the new spirit who is now a part of his life, Coyote Runs. Coyote Runs is observing Brennan at this point, and in the dream, he is connected to the medicine place, circling above it and indicating where Brennan should ultimately go to return the skull to its rightful resting place.

“From the side he could see the damage done by the bullet. The entry hole in the forehead was a little over a half inch in diameter, and almost perfectly round. But a piece of bone as big as the palm of his hand was missing at the back, broken out in a rough oval.

God. How must that have been, he thought. How could that be? To have an explosion and then a bullet slam through your head that way and carry away the back of your skull and all the things you are, all the things you were or are or ever will be are gone then, blown away.”

For the first time in the book, Brennan is demonstrating direct empathy, imagining what Coyote Runs must have felt in his final moments. This empathy and understanding increases throughout the book, to the point where Coyote Runs’s desires even overtake Brennan’s own. Brennan’s arc throughout demonstrates an ever increasing empathy and understanding as Brennan begins to connect with someone he feels a deep connection to.

“‘Which means we can logically assume that there were probably fights in some of the other canyons—say where you found the skull.’

‘And that it’s an Indian skull…’ Brennan cut in.

Homesley held up his hand. ‘Not necessarily. We can guess that, surmise that, assume that, speculate that, but we cannot know that—not without examining the skull. Correction, without having an expert examine the skull. I’m not an expert at pathology but…’”

Though the connection between Brennan and Coyote Runs is explicitly spiritual, the way in which Brennan and Homesley figure out Coyote Runs’s identity is scientific. Science, here, becomes the method to access spirituality, as Brennan uses what he learns from his scientific investigation to return the skull to where it belongs.

“Brennan followed him out but stopped in the parking lot near the car. He held the box with the skull in front of him. Not like a skull, a bone fragment, but as a person. He felt a sense of urgency that he could not understand any more than he understood anything else that was happening to him.”

Frequently throughout the text, the skull is talked about as if it is a simple object, divorced from the person whose head it had previously been. Brennan, here, is continuing along his path of increasing empathy, understanding that the skull used to be a person with all of the thoughts, desires, and pain of himself.

“Some prospectors had been attacked at their mine and one had died of wounds received in the battle—while four Indians were killed in the same fight.

So violent, Brennan thought, leaning back. He saw the cookies and milk and took some. Everything was so violent—white, red, color didn’t seem to matter. Violence was the way of it—the engine that seemed to drive the West was violence.”

Here, the theme of Violence as a Part of Colonization becomes explicit as Brennan connects the American westward expansion to the genocide of the Indigenous peoples already living on that land. Instead of the way in which violence is popularly conceived, as an aberration, Brennan understands that violence was the method by which America came to exist, and one cannot be disconnected from the other.

“Names. He knew the names of the men. All Irish. Probably big men, soldiers, blue uniforms, hot, stinking of sweat, chasing him, chasing me into the canyon up beneath the rock…

He shook his head, rubbed his eyes. Not me, him—not me. The two kept mixing in his thinking. The soldiers chased him, not me. I am sitting here reading about it—not running into the canyon away from them, trying to hide.”

The distinction between Brennan and Coyote Runs begins to collapse toward the end of the book, as Brennan loses his own motivation in his desire to complete Coyote Runs’s quest. Coyote Runs’s thoughts eventually become Brennan’s, and in doing so, Brennan begins to see himself as the same person as Coyote Runs, demonstrating how his increasing understanding can collapse firm boundaries.

“To the commanding officers of Fort Bliss.

Hoping to find you in good health I take up my pen in a matter most urgent.

Here at the Quaker school and home we meet often with both young and old Apaches. As you know we are in God’s work to help these people and bring them to grace.

These are violent times and require more open methods than in more civilized eras and so I shall come to the point.”

For the first time, the name of the boy whose skull Brennan had found in the canyon is revealed to Brennan. However, this passage also demonstrates the dehumanizing language used by the colonizers toward the Indigenous, including even the children they were tasked with teaching. The teachers are not shown to be any better than the soldiers in terms of treating Coyote Runs and his fellows as people, rather than animals.

“And he could see it all then—everything. He could see the police coming in and the questions they would ask and what they would have to do—take the skull. They would have to confiscate the skull and it would go back to the National Forest, back to the government and they would put it on display in a museum somewhere, stick it in a glass case with a little plaque saying what it was and he could see it.

See it all.

And as he saw that he also knew what he had to do; what he had to do immediately.

He must take Coyote Runs back. He must follow the dreams, the instructions in the dreams. Now it was all there, all clear; he knew what would happen and knew what he must do.

He must take Coyote Runs home.”

Brennan’s flight to avoid the skull being taken from him is not portrayed as being a choice that he makes, but rather as a function of his destiny. Before finding the skull, Brennan is shown to be a rationalist, interested in a scientific understanding of the world. However, his encounter with the spiritual in the form of Coyote Runs’s spirit changes these beliefs, forcing him into his own version of destiny.

“Brennan moved easily a step to the right as it struck at the stick and kept moving. This, he thought, from a boy who was afraid of spiders and snakes.

He had changed in some basic way. He was still Brennan but more, much more, so that he was part of the night and part of the desert and part of the sky and part of the snake and knew these things, knew all about them and did not fear them.”

As the novel nears its end, the distinctions between Brennan and Coyote Runs continue to collapse. Here, Brennan knows that Coyote Runs has become a part of him simply through changing the way that he thinks, a change that will not disappear with Coyote Runs’s spirit once the skull is returned to where it belongs.

“He thought that perhaps the skull wanted only that—to return to the place by the boulder to be with the rest of the skeleton, which must still be there.

But he knew he was wrong—something felt wrong about it.

What?

Not the boulder…

It was here—just so it was here. I ran, even with one leg I ran to reach the sky, reach the blue sky and freedom; ran to reach the medicine place but it was here, here that I ended…

Brennan drew closer to the boulder. He had not known how it had been, and did not know it now. But he could feel something of it.”

Brennan’s spiritual and emotional connection to Coyote Runs is demonstrated in these passages to not simply be a quirk of the way that Brennan thinks, but a real physical presence in his world, allowing him to understand where to go and how to get there. Brennan understands how his pursuers think, unlike Coyote Runs with his fleeing into the canyon, which, combined with his newfound knowledge of how to navigate the desert, allows him to escape unimpeded.