Tracker

“Once he was out of the house in the dark of the morning he could use his mind to make things all right. It was still a cold clear morning, he was still going to milk the cows and clean the barn and feed and water the stock, still going to smell and feel the heat of the barn.”

The barn and his chores offer something constant and comfortable to John, and he uses these daily habits as a shield against painful, uncomfortable things he doesn’t want to deal with. Paulsen uses multiple sensory details in this description to show how strongly John uses his surroundings to protect himself.

“During the week, the school bus came before chores were finished and John had to leave the farm then. He always felt as if he were missing something. Now that it was Sunday he did not have to leave and so he could work morning chores all the way to done. That’s how his grandfather always talked about work—you didn’t just work so many hours or days. You worked a job to done. All the way to done. No matter how long it took.”

This passage is one of many where John recalls a lesson his grandfather has instilled in him. John prefers the farm to school because it fits with his idea of working a task until it is complete. School, unlike farm work, requires only a certain number of hours per day, whether a lesson was finished or not. The farm offers freedom from the constraints of time and offers a sense of closure with a project. These lines are also a metaphor for life as something unbounded by certainties of time.

“Don’t watch the milk, he thought. After you’d been milking for a while you learned to not watch the milk, because it came in a small stream and never seemed to fill the bucket if you watched it. But if you looked away for a time and then looked back, the level in the bucket would have come up, and he wondered while he milked how many other things were like that. Wondered if there were many parts of living that only changed when you looked away and looked back.”

These lines recall the adage “a watched pot never boils.” One never recognizes change when it occurs slowly and is constantly observed; rather, recognizing change requires that one periodically look away. The chore of milking, which is supposed to distract John from his grief, becomes a metaphor for the way cancer affects his grandfather. John cannot see, and therefore cannot believe, that his grandfather is dying, but this is because he is looking for the change in the moment rather than over time.

“The work went on. After school there was a small amount of homework and then the work of the farm. John fixed the stoneboat traces, put new boards in the workhorse stalls where the team had cribbed the old ones, drained the tractor for winter, sealed the granary to hold the harvest. The work went on. It fed on itself so that work made more work.”

This passage symbolizes the passing of time and how time doesn’t stop whenever something changes. These lines also speak to the nature of work and how it is never complete because the culmination of one project is the beginning of another. Work is then a cycle that mimics that of life and death. According to this notion, life and death are not separate things but rather part of a continual process.

“The best joy and beauty are the kinds that are unplanned, and the same is true of painting or poetry. Don’t chew at it too much. It’s beautiful, and it makes you remember a beautiful part of your life and that’s enough.”

Here, John’s grandfather offers a response to John’s poem about seeing the doe for the first time and the uncertainty that comes from the experience. He speaks to the notion that not everything must have a purpose, and some things simply exist to be beautiful and/or bring joy. These lines are also a caution against overthinking in order to find meaning, which foreshadows John’s eventual acceptance of his grandfather’s death.

“‘We take meat,’ he told John, watching the man drive away. ‘That’s all we do—we take meat with a gun. It doesn’t make you a man. It doesn’t make you anything to kill. We make meat, that’s all.’”

John remembers an encounter with another hunter who said he hunted to kill, which made him a man, and John’s grandfather responds. John’s grandfather’s opposition to the man’s position about killing points to the debates around hunting, especially in relation to American masculinity. At 13, John is maturing into adulthood and must navigate the cultural expectation for men to be violent. Yet, John’s grandfather offers him a more temperate view of hunting as a necessity for meeting basic needs, not a practice of displaying power.

“‘Too much grease is bad.’ The old man smiled. ‘Well. Yes. I suppose it is—but I’m not too sure it matters anymore. I think if I want to get a little greasy with my food it should be all right.’”

This exchange between John’s grandfather and grandmother comes while the family discusses the deer meat John will return with. John’s grandfather looks forward to a meal of deer meat, but John’s grandmother says he shouldn’t eat it because it’s greasy and grease is bad. This passage comments on the idea of enjoying one’s final time. A bit of grease won’t make the difference between John’s grandfather surviving and dying, something he acknowledges by saying he shouldn’t eat grease but that it’s probably fine if he does so.

“‘You go ahead and milk and separate. I’ll take it after that so you can hit the woods.’

John hesitated. ‘Are you sure? There’s plenty of time and I can just as easily do it all.’

‘No. It’ll gray up in the east pretty soon and you want to be out by the swamp when it comes into light.’”

This conversation between John and his grandfather comes right before John heads out to hunt. His grandfather knows how important and symbolic deer-hunting season is to John, and his familiarity with the process means he knows how John should proceed. He wants John to have as normal of an experience as possible under the circumstances, including getting out before it starts to get light, so he volunteers to do John’s work. John fears his grandfather will overtax himself, and his grandfather’s response calls forth the idea of not coddling people who are sick. If John’s grandfather didn’t feel he could do the work, he wouldn’t have offered, and with the whole day ahead of him, he can work at his own pace.

“She’d gone on to tell John about his parents. Facts about them—how they looked, how they acted under certain conditions. And when she was done, John knew his parents in one way, her way, but he knew that it was honest knowledge.”

Here, John remembers his grandmother telling him about his parents after they died. This passage represents the difference between knowing something and understanding it. The information his grandmother gives him allows John to know what his parents were like in general terms, such as appearance. It also offers insight into who they were, but that insight is biased by his grandmother’s emotions and opinions. As a result, John knows about his parents, but he doesn’t understand who they were in a way that’s meaningful to him, something that could only be accomplished by John knowing them and developing an idea of who they are on his own terms.

“‘You have to think deer,’ Clay had told him. ‘You have to think deer, you have to be deer inside your head. Be quiet, move quiet, and be deer.’”

John’s grandfather offered this wisdom about hunting, saying the best way to understand deer was to think like they do as much as possible. This passage foreshadows how the boundary between John and the doe seems to disappear. John thinks about the doe as part of himself and as an extension of his grandfather. As a result, he is able to flawlessly track her, partly due to his skills and partly due to the link that’s forged between them when John gives himself over to the connection.

“It came to him suddenly that he hadn’t thought about his grandfather for nearly an hour and he didn’t know if that was good or if that was bad.”

John realizes he’s been so focused on tracking the doe and covering ground that he has had little room for other thoughts, showing how well John uses complete concentration to deal with his grief. John doesn’t know if forgetting about his grandfather is good or bad. He considers that it’s good because it means he’s paying attention to what he’s doing and possibly starting to come to terms with his grandfather’s cancer. At the same time, he thinks he’s forgetting something critical, and he feels guilty for not thinking about his grandfather in this troublesome time.

“She had been in back of a spruce, all covered with snow and looking like a picture on a Christmas card and when he looked up she stepped out and saw him and was gone, that fast, but she left an image in his mind the way the snow had. When she jumped out from back of the spruce the snow showered out and around and caught the fire from the sun and took the light to make her something other than what she was.”

This is the second time John sees the doe and is the moment that starts his transformation, in which he merges with the doe, and eventually accepts his grandfather’s cancer. It is unclear at the end of the book whether John imagined tracking the doe, which is highlighted by how quickly she appears and disappears from his sight here. At this point, the doe becomes a symbol to John and her importance is no longer just about feeding his family. This passage is indicative of Paulsen’s writing, which depicts the beauty and magic of nature. 

“But something nagged at him, something he didn’t understand. There was a mixing of things in his mind, or the start of a mixing that he couldn’t quite pin down. As he walked the doe’s tracks he started thinking of other things again; of his grandfather, of the way they lived, of what was coming for his grandfather. And the lines between the thoughts got blurred; the doe mixed with his grandfather and they both mixed with him.”

Here, John has recently had a clear shot of the doe that he was unable to take. Following that moment, he tracks the doe and starts to make a connection between hunting and cancer, as well as between the doe and his grandfather. This marks the moment where John’s ideas about hunting and death begin to change. He can no longer take life like he used to because it feels too much like ending his grandfather’s life. Given how dreamlike John’s thoughts and actions become in the following chapters, this may also mark the moment when his mind starts to play tricks on him.

“In nature, John knew, danger came with great suddenness. A mouse could be feeding peacefully on a stem of grass one second and be in a fox’s belly the next instant. Two grouse could be performing the mating ritual and within a heartbeat come under an owl’s silent slashing attack.”

This passage comes during the hunt and represents the book’s major theme of The Unpredictability of Nature. The situations John describes here reflect how cutthroat nature can be. It suggests that peace and violence, like life and death, are a continuum, rather than two separate things.

“Just pull the trigger, he thought. Pull it and let the sear drop and that will let the hammer fall and set off the primer which will ignite the powder and send the bullet out to take her life.”

John has another shot at the doe that he can’t manage to take. His thoughts show how he returns to the basics—breaking a process down into parts—in order to follow through on a task that has suddenly become difficult. Because he can’t simply pull the trigger to shoot and kill the doe, John thinks of every action and reaction that occurs when a gun is fired. Ironically, this slowing down of thought leads John to fully appreciate the destructive power he wields over the deer.

“Speed was everything to her, to all deer. When mortal danger threatened the only recourse was speed, burning speed, speed that tore energy from the center of the deer and used her up.”

This passage comes as John examines the tracks left by the doe’s bounding, fearful leaps, and it illustrates how fragile prey can be in the wild. Where John has a weapon, knowledge, and experience on his side, all the doe has is her instinct, which lasts only as long as she has energy. For the first time, John sees the unfair advantage he has over the doe. If he finds her when she hesitates or has grown tired, her chances of evading him or a bullet are much less.

“It was of steel and heavy and meant death and he didn’t want to carry it any further. It did not fit with the doe any longer, or with him, and when he put it in the tree he felt a weight lifting from him that was out of proportion to the four pounds the rifle weighed.”

These lines come when John decides to leave his rifle behind during his pursuit of the deer. This marks the moment John decides he cannot kill, even if it means his family won’t have food. John has come to see the doe and his grandfather as interchangeable, and so the rifle takes on the weight of cancer. Unlike cancer, however, John has control over the gun and can choose to leave it behind. This is an emotional and spiritual moment for John as the responsibility for death that the gun represents leaves his mind and body.

“He did not come to see how the deer was his grandfather, or the spirit of his grandfather’s life, until later in the night, almost daylight the next morning.

And by then nothing was the same as it had started out to be. The deer wasn’t a deer anymore and he wasn’t John Borne anymore, either. Everything was changed.”

This passage makes the connection between John’s grandfather and the doe explicit. By addressing the metaphorical connection directly, Paulsen emphasizes the unity of humans with nature and facilitates the reader’s understanding of John’s simultaneously literal and spiritual journey in the woods, a message that has been building over the course of the novel.

“John came upon the pile and it was still hot, still giving off airs and he knelt to smell it. He could taste the smell, acid on the sides of his tongue, and he looked up and he knew her from the smell and the taste, knew that no other deer would have that smell or taste and even if he lost the trail now he could go by smell and that wasn’t the same. That made him different.”

During the hunt, John comes upon a pile of the deer’s dung, and this passage shows him stopping to sniff it. John’s ability to track the doe by scent likens him to a wild predator. Though he no longer wishes to kill the doe, it may be that his connection to her has awakened senses he didn’t know he had that allow him to use animal tactics to track her. He thinks that this makes him different somehow, though he doesn’t specify how.

“Once in the morning light he watched the doe ahead of him and saw her turn and swore there was a light around her head. The light moved with her neck movements, was not a halo so much as a glow that came from within the doe and it was still there even when he wiped his eyes. The light stayed for five or six minutes and did not disappear until the doe staggered into some willows and was lost from sight.”

This moment comes late in the hunt. The light John sees around the doe’s head calls back to when he first saw her in the forest. If that first moment symbolized some kind of ethereal connection forming between John and the doe, then the light here is a manifestation of that connection. The light may also be a hallucination brought on by exhaustion and hunger, or it might represent his grandfather’s spirit and how the doe is connected to him.

“By noon she could not run but seemed to fall forward, fall away from him and just keep falling, with her legs catching up only to fall again for miles and miles.

And he came the same way. John was falling and making his legs catch up—he did not feel tired anymore, didn’t feel anything.”

This passage comes during the final moments of John’s tracking of the doe. Both the doe and John are exhausted at this point, and the dreamlike quality of this passage is reflected in the writing style. Whether this moment is “real” or not, it is climatic as John’s journey reaches a peak—the end of his hunt, the final merging of man and animal, and the release of giving into exhaustion. The symmetry between the movements of John and the doe represents the link between them.

“The doe had taught him much, not about death but about life. And yet it was not something he could share with anybody—it was not something he was sure he really understood himself. It was just a thing that was—a way for something to be. She made him see a new way, but he could not make others do the same. They had to have their own deer.”

Here, John realizes he has learned something, but he is unable to put it into words. His loss of words represents the idea that knowledge and understanding sometimes are beyond language. The latter half of this quotation speaks to how people learn things in their own time. People learn when they are ready, from their unique experiences, and people respond differently to the same circumstances.

“His grandfather was going to die. He would die and there was nothing John could do about it—nothing touching the doe could do about it. Death would come.”

This is the first of two things John realizes upon returning to the farm and telling his grandparents about his experience with the doe. John still doesn’t like the idea of his grandfather’s death, but he recognizes that he’s powerless to stop it. Whether John’s experience with the doe really occurred, this moment marks the completion of his character arc as he acknowledges this powerful lesson.