Nat is the protagonist and point-of-view character, yet the narrator offers only brief exposition of Nat’s situation and personality in the story’s opening: Nat’s disposition is “solitary,” and therefore he enjoys working alone on the farm; he has a disability, but the narrator identifies neither its nature nor its origin beyond describing it as a “war-time” disability; and Nat enjoys watching the birds while he eats his lunch alone. This sparse collection of characteristics constitutes the only description of Nat before the narrator adopts his perspective, leaving readers to glean any further details from what Nat sees, hears, and thinks. Nat gradually grows into a round character whose strengths and weaknesses emerge as the story progresses, and whose reliability in the narrative grows stronger with every incident.

Readers know little of Nat’s wartime experience since details about it flit into his thoughts and out again without further explanation from the narrator. One passage, though, holds a few clues: When Nat boards the windows of the cottage for the first time, he remembers “the old days, at the beginning of the war” (72).