McCarthy's story is organized around a disruption that renders a nonhuman entity temporarily visible as a thing unmoored from its comfortable anthropocentric encoding in The Crossing. This kind of literary animal agency must look for it in the interstices of narratives, in places where human characters can no longer comfortably view the animal through its initial anthropocentric value but also cannot understand it through its subsequent, equally anthropocentric function. The binary system introduces what might be called a posthumanist transition state at the site of the wolf's trans-signification: the brief moments between the animal put to one human use and the animal put to another offers an indicator of the wolf's hidden, non-anthropocentric agency. On the level of theme, the narrative's tension depends on Billy's idea that the wolf retains her absolute alterity despite her capture: he believes that he can dictate the animal's agency for it.