“‘You are trying to capture the fog, and no one can do that.’”

The “fog” Toby refers to represents everything he and Sol have lost during their lifetimes, including the wilderness that Sol himself destroyed and the countless loved ones who died. The wilderness of Sol’s youth cannot be rebuilt any more than his departed mother and father can be brought back to life.

“‘When I was about your age I followed some men on a hunt, and they come on some of these birds in a swamp. They shot one, and when it fell to the ground, the others flew off into the trees. In a few seconds one of them came back to the dead one, and then they all started coming back, one by one. They are the only birds I have ever known to do this. They kept coming back to the dead till the men just sat there and killed every one of them. Maybe they were coming back to grieve over the dead. I don’t rightly know. But when them men found out that if you kill one Carolina, then the others will keep coming back to the dead, they hunted them and shot every one in the county. Wiped them out clean.’”

Tobias’s horrifying anecdote about the Carolina parakeets is an early example of the lengths to which man will go in his destruction of nature. If man is willing to disrupt something as poignant and beautiful as the parakeet grieving ritual simply because he can, there’s no telling how far he will go in the pursuit of profit.

“In an instant the spectators were in the water, pulling the bulls ashore and up the bank. Men and women unsheathed knives and swarmed over the carcasses like ants, and in a matter of minutes there was no trace left of meat, hides, hooves or horns.”

The scene of the men and women at the Confederate camp behaving like animals as they tear apart the dead cows is a chilling reminder of the extreme starvation the Confederate Army experienced during the Civil War. It also puts the MacIveys’ own lingering starvation in perspective, suggesting that conditions are just as bad on the frontlines as they are on the frontier.