The most important lessons that the author learns about the wilderness are painted in blood. He learns that blood and death are essential parts of an otherwise beautiful world, bleeding is sometimes a part of everyday life in the wild, and death itself is sometimes welcomed in the animal kingdom.

Until he was 40, the author believed in the Disney version of nature, where death is neat and tidy. One day, while dogsledding, he witnesses for the first time a kill committed by a non-human predator. It’s horrifically gruesome, with blood everywhere, the victim still alive even as it’s consumed. This terrible event convinces the author that the natural world isn’t an orderly place where death is quiet and quick but a ruthlessly messy and gory one. The pain animals feel is real; he no longer wants to inflict pain on them through hunting.

At the same time, he realizes that the animals involved don’t see themselves as vicious: “Wolves don’t know they are wolves” (8). The beauty of nature is silent; so, too, is the ugliness. Predators don’t think of themselves in human terms, and it doesn’t occur to them that they’re in any sense wicked; they’re simply doing what they’re born to do.