One by One

The claw marks that visually populate the narrative of One by One are a symbol of Lindsay’s ongoing deception and the resulting terror in the wilderness. Claire is the first to notice the claw marks on the bark of a tree, early in the group’s time in the woods. At first, Claire believes that the claw marks are a sign of a dangerous animal lurking nearby, as she notes, “The claws that broke the bark were obviously extremely sharp. And there’s a second set of claw marks above the first. Was something climbing the tree?” (89). When Claire’s fear rises, she either sees the claw marks or thinks of them. She thinks she sees an animal while searching for Michelle, and her thoughts immediately drift back to the claw marks: “Was it the same animal I saw in that bush? The one that made the horrifying claw marks in the bark?” (156).

Claire’s fear begins rising in intensity in tandem with the rising intensity of Lindsay’s plot. When she first sees the claw marks, she’s afraid, but she is afraid of an animal—a rational fear to have while lost in the wilderness. However, after Michelle goes missing, the animal is now “horrifying,” taking on a nearly mythic, beast-like quality. It is no longer a simple bear or coyote; it is something more dangerous than Claire thought, as Lindsay is more dangerous than Claire knows. Lindsay is the architect of Claire’s fear; like much of the other horrors of the forest, the claw marks are an artifice designed to distract the others from the real danger.

The slain coyote with claw marks in its abdomen is symbolic of Michelle’s death. The group finds the killed animal after Michelle goes missing, and Claire notices, “There are angry claw marks on its belly, and there’s fresh blood all over the ground around the animal” (179). While Claire does not know for certain that Michelle is dead, the slaughtered coyote is an omen that hints at the truth, an omen that Lindsay has crafted by killing the coyote with the same knife she utilized to form the claw marks. The claw marks hint at Lindsay’s continuing presence in the woods, a presence that lingers wherever Claire goes. When she arrives at the cabin, she sees on the outside walls that “there are five claw marks gouging the desiccated wood” (227). Wherever the claw marks are, so too is Lindsay, a danger lurking in the shadows waiting to be revealed.