It’s getting darker. Cool air filters into the truck. Clouds change from orange to pink. The sunset spreads quickly, infusing the pale sky with a sudden stain of colour like an anaemic receiving an emergency blood transfusion. I flick on the headlamps and something catches my eye. It’s far off, no bigger than a dark thumbprint in the centre of the windscreen, and as I draw closer I see it’s a dead animal.

Sue, Jack’s teacher, told me this part of Arizona had, once upon a time, been overrun with an extraordinary variety of wildlife: ‘I mean, before we hunted them to death there were jaguars, turkeys, armadillos, even little monkeys.’ But this particular road kill is nothing more exotic than a dog – still, as I pass it, then glance at it again in the mirror, there’s something about the way it’s lying there, silhouetted against the burning sky, that induces me to brake the truck to a stop.

The dog is a big domestic animal with a smooth brown coat and the snub forehead of a boxer. Its lips have been pulled back as though it died with a snarl on its face and its top teeth have settled over the lower jaw in a clenched grimace. Its eyeballs have rolled back in its head and they stare up at the sky, opaque and pupil-less. I focus my camera, but as the shutter clicks there’s a faint noise. It’s no more than a rustle, a slight break in the current of air, but with a start I realize I am not alone.

I hear them most nights, of course, but I’ve seen only two since we arrived; one high up in the hills to the back of the house, the other at dusk, far, far away and crossing my eye line so furtively it might have been the shadow of a ghost. This is the first time I’ve seen one close up. The coyote stands motionless in the scrub, a mere four feet away, but it’s not quite the ferocious beast of my imagination. It’s a leaner, longer-legged version of Taco with a pointed face and a black tip to its tail. It eyes me insolently, as though issuing a silent order to relinquish my claim to the dinner which by all the laws of nature is rightly his.

‘If you look into the eyes of a coyote, you go crazy,’ Winfred had warned. ‘You should never look into the eyes of a coyote. It’s a bad omen.’