Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Elatsoe, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Family and Friendship
Justice
Cultural Identity and Coming of Age
Colonialism and Monsters
Death, Grief, and Healing
Storytelling
Summary
Analysis
Ellie is in the rental car with Vivian and Dad, headed back to Lenore’s. Vivian assures Ellie that Kirby will come back, but Ellie isn’t so sure. She dozes as dawn arrives and jerks awake when the car’s GPS system tells Dad to turn. Disturbed, Ellie realizes that they’re passing the place where Trevor actually died. A minute later, a scruffy woman appears on the side of the road and sticks out her thumb. Dad passes her, but when Ellie turns around to look again, there’s a coyote. Ellie shouts for Dad to stop and reverse to pick up the coyote woman.
Recall that earlier in the novel, Vivian told Ellie that coyote and bat people were in hiding—something has changed now, if a coyote woman is showing her true form. This suggests that Ellie and Kirby did something extremely positive by abandoning Dr. Allerton in the underworld: they rid the world of one of the most dangerous colonial forces, making it safe for indigenous beings like animal people to move freely.
Themes
Reverting to her human form, the coyote woman approaches the car and says she just wants a ride for kicks—it feels safer now. She gets into the backseat with Ellie and places a takeout bag from a waffle house on the seat. The bag reeks of breakfast sausages, which makes Ellie think of Kirby and tear up. Back in her coyote form, the woman offers Ellie a sausage and asks why she’s sad. Ellie explains that her friend is gone, “Below.” The coyote woman sighs in understanding. Then, she asks Ellie if they’ve met; something about her seems familiar. Ascertaining that the coyote woman is very old, Ellie suggests she might have known Six-Great.
The coyote woman’s request for a ride in the car mirrors her request to Six-Great in one of Vivian’s stories; she asked to ride a horse, just for the experience. This draws more similarities between Ellie and her ancestral namesake—especially when the coyote woman identifies the relationship between Ellie and Six-Great without being told.
Themes
Just then, Vivian tells Ellie that while she always thought Six-Great’s biggest character flaw was being too stubborn in the face of danger, she now thinks she was wrong. Six-Great, Vivian says, knew herself and what she could do, and that’s an admirable quality. She even suggests that Six-Great didn’t actually make a mistake in the end: taking a “risk for love” is a good choice. The coyote woman agrees, and then she asks what happened last night. Ellie starts her story from the beginning—the day she adopted Kirby from the pound—and hopes that if she tells his story, he’ll find his way back.
Ellie isn’t the only one who’s grown and changed over the course of the novel. Vivian is now willing to admit that she misinterpreted the implication behind Six-Great’s death: it’s possible to see her choice to go to her husband in the underworld as a choice she made knowingly, one that would bring her back to her one true love and give her some much-needed peace. Ellie shows that she’s internalized her mom’s wisdom about stories and their power as she begins to tell Kirby’s story, hoping that in honoring him, she will draw him home.
Themes
