The Sign of the Beaver

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1983

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-15

Chapters 16-20

Chapters 21-25

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary

Twelve-year-old Matt Hallowell’s father leaves him alone in the Maine wilderness in order to fetch the rest of the family. Matt observes the log cabin he helped build: It’s not quite finished, but he knows his mother will be pleased. Still, the lonely silence all around “reached into his stomach to settle there in a hard knot” (2).

Matt and his father traveled to Maine from Massachusetts earlier in 1768. They located the land they bought, built a cabin, and planted corn. Now, Matt must guard the place for six to seven weeks until his family arrives. Before he left, Matt’s father gave him his pocket watch and rifle. Deeply moved, Matt promised to care for both. Matt’s father took the boy’s blunderbuss and reminded him not to shoot at everything he sees.

Matt retrieves his rifle, adds powder, rams a ball into the barrel, and steps outside. He sees a squirrel on a branch, aims carefully, and fires. He misses and realizes the new gun will take practice.

Matt carves notches, one for each passing day, into sticks—one stick per week. By the time Matt has notched seven sticks, his family will return, and he will have reached age 13. He will have to celebrate his birthday alone.

Chapter 2 Summary

As the days pass, Matt finds he likes being by himself. He enjoys making his own schedule, even if the chores do take up all his time: He must cut down trees that block the corn’s sunlight, tend the corn, fill the spaces in the cabin walls, remove underbrush, stack wood for the fireplace, and keep the fire going. For food, he bakes bread and hunts with his rifle or fishing pole.

Matt harbors one fear: The Penobscot people have been at peace with colonists for some time, but tales of earlier battles make him nervous. He also gets the odd feeling that he’s being watched. His father told him that the Indigenous people value courtesy: “Should you meet one, speak to him just the same as to the minister back home” (9).

The forest is never completely quiet: Bugs buzz, birds chirp, squirrels chatter. Matt enjoys the solitude, but soon he misses company. Then, one day, someone shows up.

Chapter 3 Summary

Near sunset, a heavyset man with a thick red beard and a ratty blue army jacket appears in the clearing. He greets an uncertain Matt. The man asks if he can have some food; Matt brings him inside, where he feeds him.

The man, Ben, says he ran into some trouble back at the nearby town, and now he plans to hunt for beaver pelts and possibly live with an Indigenous clan. War, disease, and colonists have driven out most of the clans along with most of the beavers, so Ben doesn’t expect much for his efforts. He sits against a cabin wall and rambles about his part in the French and Indian War, where he fought French soldiers. Soon, he falls asleep.

Matt tries to sleep but can’t: He worries that Ben will figure out that he lives alone and claim the cabin as his own, eat all the food, and use Matt as a servant. He considers keeping his rifle on him but chides himself for being suspicious of a guest.

Matt finally sleeps. He awakens at dawn, and finds Ben gone and his rifle missing. Angry and scared, Matt no longer has a way to hunt until his family’s arrival.

Chapter 4 Summary

Matt learns to feed himself, largely on fish. One day, while carrying four trout on a pole, Matt returns to the cabin to find it ransacked. He’d neglected to bar the door properly, and a bear got inside. All he can salvage is two handfuls of flour; the molasses and salt are mostly gone.

Chapter 5 Summary

After days of eating nothing but fish, Matt approaches a beehive high in a tree near a swampy pond. He climbs the tree to the hive, where the bees ignore him until he tugs at the hive entrance. The bees swarm and sting him. Matt scurries down the tree, wades into the pond, and loses a boot in the muck. He hides underwater, but each time he comes up for air, the swarm continues to sting him.

Strong hands lift Matt from the pond and set him on the bank. Through swollen eyes, Matt sees two Indigenous people: an elderly man and a young boy. The old man gently probes Matt’s skin, removing stingers. Matt tries to jerk away, but the man calms him; he fades in and out of consciousness. The old man carries Matt to the cabin, then returns with medicine that he spoons into the boy’s mouth. Matt sleeps.

Chapters 1-5 Analysis

The opening chapters introduce 12-year-old Matt Hallowell, a boy who must live alone in a cabin in the woods while his family makes their way to him. These chapters are filled with early successes and failures as he begins to learn how to survive in the wilderness.

The Sign of the Beaver was written in the early 1980s, when the word “Indian” was still used as a general term for Indigenous people. The word, employed since Colonial times, is completely incorrect. The first European explorers of the Western Hemisphere thought they’d reached Asia when settling in America; they called Indigenous people “Indians” in deference to the land of the Hindus, called Hind, and today, India. (In many European languages, the letter “H” goes unpronounced, and over time, fell out of use in the spelling of “India.”) A number of Indigenous peoples still call themselves “Indians,” but the word is largely no longer considered acceptable in this context.

Matt’s unexpected guest, Ben, refers to a “war” and a “sickness” that killed off many of the local Indigenous people. The war in question was the French and Indian War, an offshoot of the Seven Years’ War between England and France that included battles in the American colonies between 1754 and 1763. Indigenous groups, who struggled with constant incursions by European colonists, fought on both sides; some succumbed to diseases imported by settlers.

Ben mentions the Penobscot people as those who cling to the nearby forests despite the advance of colonists and the retreat of other tribes: “The Penobscots stick like burrs, won’t give up” (15). He frames their refusal to abandon ancestral hunting grounds as a foolish endeavor, as if they aren’t smart enough to realize that he and other colonists have staked their claim. However, he says this while enjoying a free meal from Matt and later stealing his rifle.

The loss of the rifle isn’t merely an embarrassing inconvenience for Matt; it is a life-threatening crisis. Without it, Matt can neither hunt game nor defend himself against intruders (due to rifles being built for accuracy and longer range in comparison to Matt’s blunderbuss). Matt also loses most of his flour and all of his molasses and salt to a bear. He begins to suffer from nutritional deficiency and foolishly climbs a tree in search of honey. The bees nearly kill him, but he’s saved by two Indigenous people. They’ve been watching Matt and end up watching out for him.

The elderly man and young boy who rescue Matt, Saknis and Attean, are members of the Penobscot Nation—part of an Algonquian-speaking group of tribes called the Wabanaki. Their language group is familiar to the colonists of eastern Massachusetts, who had extensive dealings with the Algonquian-speaking Wampanoag Nation and the Massachusetts people (the colony’s namesake), among others. Their rescue will teach Matt important lessons about the woods and the people who have lived there for thousands of years.