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58 pages 1 hour read

Cormac McCarthy

The Crossing

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1994

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Part 1, Pages 64-127Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Pages 64-89 Summary

At the last fence line in America, three dogs approach Billy and the wolf. He lets his horse run and fights off the dogs, holding the wolf at his side. Two men approach and call off the dogs. They recognize Billy and are shocked by his decision to return the wolf to the mountains of Mexico, but they offer to feed him and help recover his horse. They put the wolf in a smoke shed while they eat. The landowner interrogates Billy about his plan and says Billy has no sense.

After dinner, they return to the smoke shed, and the landowner’s wife insists on treating the wolf’s leg. She gets an old Mexican man to help, and the four of them stitch and bandage the wound, with the landowner protesting “People hear about me giving first aid to a damn wolf I wont be able to live in this county” (71). Nevertheless, they provide Billy with food and supplies and see him off, watching as he and the wolf fade away into the night.

Billy rides south with the wolf for several days and tends to her, at one point feeling her pregnant belly. When Billy shoots a rabbit on the trail for supper, the wolf panics and hides. After cooking the rabbit, he sees that the wolf has loosened her muzzle and chewed off her bandages. Carefully, Billy loops her rope over a tree branch and pulls it taut so the wolf can’t move without choking herself. He pours her water and slackens the rope so she can reach it, and they regard each other warily before she drinks. He offers her some rabbit, which she refuses, and returns to his campfire, where he fashions a new muzzle out of leather from his saddle. In a complicated series of dangerous steps, Billy muzzles the wolf and ties her legs. He brings her over to the fire and sleeps with the rope under him; in the morning, he feeds her rabbit meat through the muzzle.

On the road the next day, the wolf’s scent scares off some burros, and the accompanying men chase after them, leaving behind an old woman and a young girl who don’t believe the wolf is a wolf. The young girl is pregnant and tells Billy that she isn’t married because “Los sacerdotes son ladrones” (priests are thieves, 86). The older woman says that young people haven’t seen priests killed like her generation has and therefore don’t understand religion; she further says that the land they live on is cursed. The women tell Billy that the wolf will give birth soon and that she must lick her young, urging him not to leave her muzzled.

Part 1, Pages 90-127 Summary

The next day, Billy runs across a group of men who want to buy the wolf; he lies and says it belongs to a powerful man. Over several days, he rides into the passes of the Sierra de la Caballera, encountering Mennonites and a group of Indigenous Sonorans carrying a body home from the mines of Chihuahua. While trying to cross Rio Bavispe, the wolf struggles to swim, and Billy dismounts his horse to carry her to shore. He is met on shore by two deputies who question him about his documents or passport, neither of which he has. The men take him to a nearby town, then lead him into an adobe building with the wolf tied up outside. An alguacil (bailiff or constable) questions Billy, then he and the men take the wolf—who is being harried by street dogs—and lock it in an adobe hut.

Billy waits outside until a servant asks what he wants. He tells them plainly “he wanted his wolf” (98), but is ignored. That afternoon, a mule cart arrives, and people gather to watch the deputies struggle to load the wolf onto the cart, which drives off at speed. The townspeople follow, saying they are going to the fair. Billy camps with them as they feast and drink. The next night, he rides ahead to a Mormon settlement where many different communities are gathered for the fair.

Billy learns that someone is charging people to see the wolf. He pays and enters a tent to find the wolf in chains and being prodded by a boy. She recognizes him, and he speaks to her in English, making “promises that he swore to keep in the making” (105). Suddenly, the carretero (cart driver) hurries the boy to pull up the tent and move along. Billy watches as they leave and the constables he’d met enter town, now drunk and finely dressed. They ride after the wolf, and Billy rides after them.

Billy confronts the alguacil and his deputies in the stables of a hacienda near the Batopito River, where the wolf is chained. The alguacil tosses a coin into the dirt, which Billy refuses. Billy tells the alguacil that “the wolf had been put in his care” (110). The alguacil gives the coin to the carretero instead and enters the hacienda. Billy asks to see the wolf, but a servant guards it. Billy finds an empty stall in the stable and sleeps there while a celebration goes on at the house. He has an apocalyptic dream of his father.

Billy wakes to men with torches prodding the wolf out of the stable as dogs howl. They lead the wolf into a building where men from many adjacent towns are gathered and drag the wolf into a cockfighting pit. They stake her by a chain and begin to bring in dogs. The first pair won’t fight, but the second group charges at her, and she gets one by the throat, nearly killing it before the men intervene. Billy leaves as the next dogs are brought in. Outside, several dozen dogs wait to fight.

Billy goes back inside, walks into the pit, and separates the dogs from the wolf while the crowd watches, stunned. He unchains the wolf and holds her by the collar, saying “Es mía” (it’s mine, 117). The son of the hacendado (the owner of the hacienda) tells the crowd that Billy caught the wolf in Mexico and was intending to sell it for bounty in New Mexico. Billy tells the crowd the truth, which offends the hacendado’s son, who asks if Billy was passing through or trespassing: “Pasar o traspasar?” (119). Billy un-collars the wolf and urges her to fight, but she doesn’t. Several men draw guns, and the hacendado’s son tells Billy to chain the wolf again, which he does. They make a path for him as he leaves.

Billy rides to the house, eats, and nearly leaves, but returns to the dogfight. The wolf is “a sorry thing to see” after two hours of fighting (123), and the men are readying the two largest, most vicious dogs to fight her. Billy steps into the ring with his rifle and shoots her in the head.

A deputy demands Billy’s rifle, which he refuses to surrender. The man draws his pistol, but he’s stopped by the alguacil, who say the matter is settled. The wolf’s hide was promised to a local, and Billy trades his rifle, which is worth far more, for her body. He rides out into the Pilares so he can bury her at dawn. He holds her body and imagines her running “where the grass was wet and the sun’s coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her […] and all was fear and marvel” (127).

Part 1, Pages 64-127 Analysis

The opening of Part 2 will refer to the events of Part 1 as a “doomed enterprise,” which is an apt description of Billy’s quest to restore the wolf to its home. McCarthy presents Billy with a kind of blank stoicism by using third-person narration; rather than presenting the story in the more intimate first-person perspective, McCarthy creates psychological and emotional distance between Billy and the reader to craft a more objective point of view. This allows McCarthy to emphasize that Billy’s actions are deeply naïve and rooted in the logic of a boy’s adventure story, and each of his encounters on the journey reveal that he is out of his depth in the wider world and committed to an understanding of justice that aligns with neither nature nor man.

This is doubly true when Billy crosses into Mexico. Throughout the novel, McCarthy sets up a distinct difference in tone and character whenever Billy is in Mexico: The writing becomes more dreamlike, with longer passages of description and fewer scene breaks, and Billy’s encounters with characters are rendered in untranslated Spanish full of philosophical rumination. The effect is deliberately alienating to an English-speaking reader, aligning the narrative with Billy as he struggles to grapple with the new philosophies and mysticism he encounters. By contrast, the Americans in the story largely deal in practical matters and view Billy’s quest with bemusement. McCarthy sets up the Mexican people as an Other for Billy: They are opaque and elliptical in their speech, and he is an outsider to them. They remain external to his quest until he meets the alguacil and his men, who treat Billy with casual cruelty and expose Mexico as a place ruled by powerful men whose word is law, not the wilderness Billy imagined.

The confrontation with the hacendado’s son in the dogfighting pit further emphasizes The Tension Between Cultures on the Borderlands, and reveals that the novel’s Othering of Mexican characters is intentional and illustrative: The hacendado’s son rightly accuses Billy of trespassing and of disrespecting their culture and way of life. Billy sees Mexico as the place the wolf belongs, and the hacendado’s son points out that Billy’s philosophy about the fate of the wolf requires imposing his views on Mexicans, repeating centuries of colonialist attitudes. Billy was misapprehending the people around him and the situation: Mexican society shares many of the same concerns as American society, the laws of man still apply, and “a wolf is a wolf” to them (150).

Billy’s tragic naïveté has dire consequences for the she-wolf, furthering the idea that Billy is on a romantic quest that is irreconcilable with the world as it actually exists. When Billy realizes that he has led the wolf to a fate much worse than the humane death his father intended, he feels he has no ethical choice but to commit a mercy killing. As he holds the wolf’s body in the mountains, he imagines her running in an idealized form of nature in which she is a force “which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it” (127). This is the reality Billy wanted for the she-wolf, but ironically and tragically, his attempt to intervene and make it real is what kept it from happening. Billy learns Don Arnulfo’s lesson too late—to catch a wolf is to lose it—and his innocence about the world is shattered.

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