As this jefe tries to deprive Billy and Boyd of three of their horses for the second time during a street altercation, Billy spooks his horse, which tumbles to the ground, breaking the jefe’s back. The boys suffer fluctuating fortunes in their ongoing attempts to regain their horses until the original quest is doomed by their second hostile confrontation with a one-armed ranch chief. Part III chronicles the growing romantic relationship of Boyd and the girl, and it narrates the story of Boyd’s transformation into a hero of the people. Part II of the novel ends with Boyd’s and Billy’s daring rescue of this girl from two men who apparently intended to rape her. After “stealing” back their horse Keno, the Parham brothers encounter a young Mexican girl who is crying. After Billy goes to see the sheriff and picks up Boyd from a neighbor’s house, the two boys set out for Mexico to recover their horses.

The killers have also cut the family dog’s throat, though it survived, and stolen the family’s six horses. He eventually crosses back into New Mexico, finds his home abandoned, and learns that his parents have been murdered, allegedly by two Indians. A tense intervention attempt fails, so Billy decides to finish off the battle-battered wolf with a shot from his rifle, and then he trades his rifle for the rights to the wolf’s carcass.Īs the novel’s second section begins, we learn that Billy has buried the wolf in the mountains and has grown leaner and more ragged. When Billy is released, he searches until he finds the wolf ignominiously caged in a sideshow and then follows it when it is moved to a circus to be sacrificed in a lengthy bout of wolf-baiting. Billy’s plans and good intentions go awry when Mexican authorities stop him and confiscate the creature in his charge. He repeatedly refuses to sell the wolf to men who see it only in monetary terms as a commodity, while for Billy the wolf is a mysterious symbol, djinn-like. He must defend the wolf against both dogs and men. But Billy seemingly gets more than he bargained for when he answers the call of the wild. He may simply desire more independence and an escape from domesticity. At this point, Billy, seemingly on impulse, decides to leave home without any farewell or explanation in order to return the wolf to Mexico.īilly’s motives for separating from his family so unceremoniously are not spelled out, though he has experienced some tension in his relationship with his father. After many failed attempts, Billy finally traps the pregnant she-wolf, elaborately strings it out, and eventually succeeds in tying its muzzle closed, no easy task. This section also may put readers in mind of Moby-Dick, for as the white whale surfaces out of the primal depths, McCarthy’s she-wolf comes up into the United States from the primitiveness of the mountains of Mexico. Like Ike McCaslin in William Faulkner’s “The Bear,” Billy becomes increasingly expert about the wild so that eventually he is able to corner the beast that is the object of his obsessive search. The first section of The Crossing is the story of Billy Parham’s learning the ways of wolves as well as the ways of men. This novel explores such issues as guilt, the acquisition of wisdom, heroism, and the crucial importance of stories. On both his first and last quest he is reduced (or perhaps exalted) to some symbolic futile gesture in his attempt, against all obstacles, to maintain his integrity and to be true to his moral obligations. Each trip tests Billy as he must try to salvage something once he fails in his original goal. The novel, set just before and during World War II, is structured around three round-trip crossings that Billy makes from New Mexico into Mexico. The Crossing, publicized as the second installment of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, is the initiation story of Billy Parham and his younger brother Boyd (who are 16 and 14 respectively when the novel opens).

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