They watched me from the desert wallpaper above my crib, caricatured like fluffy white bunnies, with soft edges and inquiring yellow eyes. When I walked home from friends’ houses at night, my parents warned me to be careful of them on the prowl. When our indoor cat went missing for more than a week, we knew they must have eaten her. At night, I heard them howling, yipping, even cackling incessantly to each other from the rolling grasslands beyond our backyard. Not at all like the silent Looney Tunes version I saw on TV.

It wasn’t until well into my teens that I finally glimpsed one in person. Caught wide-eyed in the headlights of my mother’s van, the mottled gray canine sunk its head low and trotted almost weightlessly toward the safety of an irrigated planter. It was something of a disappointment, neither as cuddly nor as fearsome as the wallpaper or warnings had led me tobelieve…