Chapter 3 Summary

The father, the town's doctor, flashes back to an incident when the girls were small. They are out in a storm, and he goes looking for them. When he finds them, they are stranded in an arroyo because they are trying to rescue seven coyote pups. He calls Uda Dell, on the other side of the arroyo, who sends her husband on a mule to retrieve the girls. They cannot save the pups. The children cry when their father gets them home and want to know if the baby coyotes have died and if animals go to heaven.

Chapter 3 Analysis

Although Chapter 3 is very short, this incident will be remembered and referred to several times during the novel, so it is an important one. Readers are again inside the doctor's mind as he remembers this event, and this technique is called a flashback...