Canyons

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1990

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-6

Chapters 7-12

Chapters 13-19

Chapters 20-24

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 7-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary: “Visions”

During the evening, the raiding party passes a camp of bluebellies, which is their term for white men, but the leader of the raiding party, Sancta, tells them not to attack. Following this, they ride all night, with Coyote Runs feeling proud of himself for his involvement. When the sun comes up in the morning, Coyote Runs recognizes the mountains called El Paso del Norte “where the town lay, the white town and more, the fort where the bluebellies lived, Fort Bliss” (44). Sancta leads the party to a gully in the desert and asks that his men sleep, since they cannot be seen here by the bluebelly patrols.

Chapter 8 Summary

Brennan had assumed that the children would calm down at nightfall, but they actually become more hyper and irritating. To get away from them, Brennan decides to move his sleeping bag farther away from the fire. His mother comes to ask why he moved and commiserates with Brennan about the annoying children. Feeling guilty, Brennan moves back to the campfire. Bill tells a campfire story about the canyons they’re camping in, saying that the canyons were once used as hiding places by Apache people during raids on the fort.

The night winds down, and it’s finally time for bed. Brennan heads back to his sleeping bag, feeling better about the vacation overall. However, when he tries to sleep, he feels strangely restless.

Chapter 9 Summary: “The Raid”

The raiding party heads out of their temporary camp, and Sancta tells Coyote Runs to stay back and watch the extra horses. Though Coyote Runs finds it upsetting that he is not allowed to ride with the others, he obeys Sancta’s orders. Watching at the crest of a nearby ridge, Coyote Runs sees Sancta and the others “cut the smaller herd [of horses] away from the main body and… [bring] them north” (58). Coyote Runs brings the extra horses to meet Sancta but gets confused and heads the wrong direction, running into the guards, who take some potshots at him.

Coyote Runs wheels around and joins Sancta’s party at the rear with the extra horses. He runs into Magpie, who helps him catch up with the rest of the party. They rejoin the group at a dry lake, and Coyote Runs admires the horses they have captured, which number more than a hundred. Coyote Runs finds out that nobody had been injured and killed in the raid, reinforcing his notion of a “medicine” that had protected him. Coyote Runs takes one of the guard’s horses, since it is not as tired as the others, as his mount to ride back home. They ride all night and day, until Coyote Runs is so tired he is worried about falling off his mount.

However, in the morning, they are greeted with the sounds of gunfire. The raiding party flees for the canyons away from the bluebellies who had pursued them. Coyote Runs drives his horse to a gallop, bullets whizzing by him. Turning around, he sees the soldiers have fallen slightly behind, as their horses are tired.

Ahead, Magpie jerks on his horse and falls off the saddle, blood coming out of his chest. Coyote Runs feels his horse grunt and begin to fall, as the soldiers had managed to shoot it in the leg. Looking down, he sees that his own foot is also injured; the soldiers had shot him, and the bullet had passed through and into his horse. The horse collapses at the mouth of the canyon, and Coyote Runs flees on foot, limping through the pain, toward the sacred medicine place. After a while of running, he finds that the soldiers sound fainter behind him but have also cut off his path to the medicine place, and he will need to hide until they leave.

Coyote Runs hides behind a giant boulder. The soldiers pursue him and seemingly lose his trail until one soldier notices a blood trail leading to his hiding spot. The soldiers discover him behind the rock, and Coyote Runs expects to be immediately shot, but instead all the men look at him, and some of them laugh. A soldier then leans down and puts the muzzle of his rifle against Coyote Runs’s forehead. Then there is a bright white flash, followed by nothingness.

Chapter 10 Summary

In the morning, Brennan awakes from a nightmare, shaking and sweating. He thinks the words “take me, spirit,” which were the same words Coyote Runs had said when captured. Brennan looks at his watch and discovers that it’s 3:00 am , and nobody else is awake. Tossing and turning, he finds that there’s a stone underneath his sleeping bag. Brennan removes the stone and rolls over but is cold and still unable to sleep. Feeling the stone he’d just removed, Brennan discovers that it’s not a stone, but rather a human skull.

At first shocked, Brennan then inspects the skull, discovering that it is very old and also has a giant bullet wound in the forehead. Brennan considers reporting his find, but then, based on the strange words that keep popping in his head, he decides to take the skull from this place secretly. Brennan wraps the skull in a sweatshirt and hides it at the bottom of his bag.

Chapter 11 Summary

After the camping trip, Brennan is riding his mower for work, feeling distracted by his thoughts about the mysterious skull. He’d hidden the skull in his closet to keep it safe, though Brennan has no idea who he’s keeping it safe from. Brennan feels deep anxiety, worried he’s committing a crime by hiding the skull instead of reporting it.

The night before, Brennan had examined the skull and concluded it belonged to a boy about the same age as him. That night, he’d dreamed a strange and intense dream about a flying eagle, another about a snake, and a third about a horse. Worried about his mental state, Brennan concludes that the skull is what’s doing this to him.

Chapter 12 Summary

Brennan inspects the skull, hoping he can figure out more about it, but he finds it difficult to understand why he’s coming to the conclusions he is. To calm down, Brennan goes on a run up the mountain that looms over El Paso. As he runs, he thinks of the word “Homesley,” and he understands that Homesley is a person who’ll know what to do.

Chapters 7-12 Analysis

Chapter 9 of Canyons contains the death of one of the two protagonists, Coyote Runs. While the point of view—a close third-person—remains the same between chapters until this point, the demise of Coyote Runs leaves Brennan as the only remaining narrator. The pattern of storytelling up until the death of Coyote Runs equates his and Brennan’s perspectives, as each is given equal narrative weight in the novel. This naturally leads to each character being compared to the other, which the novel encourages through its equivocation of the characters’ mutual status as intelligent, sensitive outsiders. Secondly, switching perspectives creates a natural tension between both of the stories, as the reader tries to determine how the stories are interlinked and how the narrative decisions in one story might cause consequences in another.

Breaking this so-far consistent structure by killing off one protagonist and switching entirely to the other creates a distinct tone of sadness and loss, as the singular voice of Coyote Runs becomes absent from the novel. Instead, his voice and perspective becomes consumed entirely by Brennan, as now his only way of expressing himself and his wants and desires is through how Brennan interprets the voices from the skull. The structure of the novel—two intertwined voices, until one cuts out, leaving only the other—is reminiscent of the genocide of the Indigenous population of the United States, as is memorably recounted in this novel by how the “bluebellies” treat the raiding party, highlighting Violence as a Part of Colonization. Just as the voice and perspective of Coyote Runs vanishes, only to exist through the interpretations of Brennan, a white boy from a century later, the Indigenous population of the United States was systematically murdered to the extent that their voices now are often unheard or not given space and empathy.

These final chapters featuring Coyote Runs’s narrative highlight Human Behavior Transcending Time and Culture as the boys continue to feature similarities. So far, the journey of Brennan and Coyote Runs has been similar in location, though not in intention. While Brennan is reluctantly accompanying his mother, her new boyfriend, and his youth group children on a camping trip, Coyote Runs is approaching the same area in order to help his raiding party steal some horses from Fort Bliss. However, both boys end up in comparable emotional circumstances once they end up in the canyon, though Coyote Runs faces a situation that is far more dire. Coyote Runs is pursued up the canyon by the white soldiers, whose language he does not speak and who view him as less than human; Brennan, on the other hand, feels like an outsider in this group of rowdy children, to the point where he risks sleeping in the cold by moving away from the warm fire to get away from them.

There are, also, stark differences between Brennan and Coyote Runs from an emotional perspective. While Coyote Runs is shown to have a firm purpose in his life—to become a fully fledged adult member of his tribe, participating in their raiding activities—Brennan is rather purposeless and unsure of himself, going on endless solitary runs as a way to distract himself from his sadness. Finding Coyote Runs’s skull, however, seems to give Brennan a purpose—such a distinct one that his search for Coyote Runs’s resting place takes on a spiritual significance and becomes more important than anything else in his life. With his death in the narrative, Coyote Runs’s desires almost become Brennan’s, just as he’s also able to communicate with Brennan through the medium of the skull. Though Coyote Runs is positioned as doomed within the narrative, he actually is shown to have the most purposeful life out of the characters, his ongoing thoughts contributing to Brennan’s eventual character arc. Both boys desire to gain acceptance and independence, and while only one of them achieves it, nothing would have happened without the contributions of both.