It’s true there are only sheep, sheepdogs, and wolves. Which one are you?

The land of free speech, the ‘Murica part of California, blooms with roadside bon mots. An American flag flutters over one of them, in the warm wind blowing from the heated desert ahead. I stop my bike to expand my photographic record of the howling West.

“What about wolfdogs?” I ask the empty road. “Those rare dogs that make sure wolves don’t get lost, that protect wolves from hunters, that herd wolves into their lairs?”

I clip in and continue chasing the setting sun.

Which one am I?

Night finds me with that question fluttering in the warm ionic flows in my skull.

I immerse myself in the tar of the new-moon desert. I let the maze of rocks and Joshua trees swallow me. Deep in its shrubby guts, I am surrounded by a large pack of coyotes. Their yips and howls swirl around me.

My mind transubstantiates the sound into a rotating crown of thorns, and I place myself at its center. Even I, familiar with what my brain can serve me, am surprised by this vision. I sit down on the desert floor inside a floating, auditory crown made of coyote yips. Is it a lonely man in the desert, that summons the Jesus association?

Now the coyotes seem to orbit me like a star. I wonder whether the moon, dark somewhere above, also yips silently at the Earth.

I scold my mind and re-center myself in the moment as it is: a human surrounded by coyotes.

I am not anxious, though the moment is eerie. I imagine the coyotes started the clamor because I entered their territory, because I am an intruder. And yet I feel there is no better place for me to be right now. In their yipping I find a confirmation of my existence. The crown turns midair into sand and drops with a delicate rustle. For a few deep breaths, I glimpse the solution to the insoluble many-body problem.

We imagine ourselves to be wolfdogs, Messiahs, the stars inside our own solar systems, but it is all rustling sand. There are no coyotes orbiting me, because there is no center. There is no me breathing deeply. There is only one breath, a superposition of breaths at different frequencies.

(The plants around me should be performing a long nocturnal exhale now. But this is the desert, where water is scarce and plant physiology becomes complicated.)

My lips are dry. How long have I been sitting in the dark? The coyotes are quiet. I walk back toward camp, trying not to make noise. I don’t want to wake my companions, or the coyotes. Aren’t they one? I notice a friend shivering in her sleeping bag and cover her with mine. I put on my puffy jacket. It’s enough. Despite the desert chill, the universe feels cozy and warm tonight. One. Singular. Enveloped. Cuddled with itself.

I wake before everyone else. A coyote stands nearby, looking at me, its head hanging low.

“Which one are you?” it asks.

“One,” I answer

It smiles and walks away, unhurried.