“Instead, there was a silence as still as the plains.”

David Grann uses simile (a comparison using “like” or “as”) to emphasize the silence Mollie feels without Anna. She is used to Anna filling her life with sound; without her, it is empty and silent. This excerpt also highlights the Indigenous peoples’ connection to their environment by evoking visual imagery of the landscape.

“In 1912, at nineteen, he’d packed a bag, like Huck Finn lighting out for the Territory, and gone to live with his uncle, a domineering cattleman named William K. Hale, in Fairfax.”

Grann alludes to Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by comparing Ernest Burkhart to Huck Finn. The comparison implies that Ernest had an innocent, youthful thirst for adventure as a teenager until he came under the influence of his domineering uncle.

“Mollie eventually retreated from the creek with Ernest, leaving behind the first hint of the darkness that threatened to destroy not only her family but her tribe.”

Mollie has identified Anna’s body on the edge of Three Mile Creek, and the darkness, foreshadowing the violence yet to come, creates an atmosphere of fear and dread. The scene contains dramatic irony because the reader may be aware of Ernest’s role, but Mollie is not.