Crabbe

Crabbe spends the next several weeks recuperating from his injuries and learning wilderness craft. His sense of Mary as a mystery woman deepens when she yells at him for accidentally opening a backpack of hers. She tells him not to touch the pack again. When he asks her why she's gathering so much food, she explains that she is saving up food for the winter, a fact that surprises Crabbe. Crabbe himself will eventually have to go home, she says, although she enjoys his company. The woman finally tells him her name, Mary Pallas, and he shares his name with her as well. Mary has been in the wilderness for a year and tells him how important it is that no one finds out where she is.

Crabbe eventually decides that he trusts Mary, so he opens up further by explaining why he ran away, a confession that ends with his tears. She tells him he is a very bitter person. He admits to Mary that he finds it difficult to live without drinking alcohol because of his anxiety and that he is “almost an alcoholic” (93), which makes him feel useless. She chides him by saying that feeling sorry for yourself is useless and that guilt is “just another form of escape” (92). Although this advice makes him angry, he accepts that what she says is true. Crabbe closes the chapter by recognizing that all his experiences up until that point have stripped away layers of the person he thought he was. He wonders who he will be “when the last layer [is] peeled off” (93).

Crabbe opens the chapter by observing that he is learning much more useful information from Mary than he learned in all his previous years of schooling. He also changes his attitude toward nature. Nature should be neither idealized nor viewed as monstrous because it is merely indifferent. That realization is a comforting one to him. He begins to take on Mary's attitude toward living in the natural world, which is that a person must exercise care so that he or she doesn’t hurt him- or herself; to survive, a person must work with the environment, instead of against it—a marked contrast to life in the city. Crabbe thinks back over his life in the city, where “nothing [he] did mattered (95)” because of the privileged life he led and sees that his survival in the bush is dependent on realizing that everything matters. He feels satisfaction in his increasing competence in the wilderness.

One of the useful things Mary teaches Crabbe is how to use a compass to navigate. She tests him on what she has taught him by leading him away from their campsite with his eyes blindfolded and then leaving him with just a compass and minor directions to lead him back to the campsite. He spends a night out thinking back on his loneliness in Toronto, symbolized for him by an image of “a teenager alone in his room staring into the TV screen, sipping on vodka, waiting for sleep” (100). He then recognizes that his loneliness was entirely his own fault. He completes his task the next morning and is proud until Mary explains that the trail she set for him was one designed to put him in reach of rescue if he messed up. She tells him he should still feel proud of himself. He accepts her perspective and regains his pride in what he has done.

Crabbe’s first month in the wilderness is difficult because he frequently misses drinking vodka. Although Mary tries to distract him, he isn't always able to master the irritability that comes with these cravings. One night, she decides to give him a small wooden pipe, in the hope that maybe he can replace the bad habit of drinking with smoking a pipe, which she thinks might be easier to quit later. Although Crabbe associates smoking a pipe with his father, who never seems to be able to keep his pipe lit, this pipe is a small, beautiful one covered in intricate carvings. Mary tells him that the pipe was handcrafted out of briar wood in China and that the yin-yang on the pipe is a symbol for the “unity of life and harmony of inner peace (105).

As she explains the significance of the carvings on the pipe, Crabbe realizes that Mary speaks like an educated person who is accustomed to talking to other people about important topics. The second thing he realizes, based on the way she handles and talks about the pipe, is that it must have belonged to someone who was very important to her. He is surprised and flattered that she would give him such an important thing. When she gives him some tobacco to smoke in the pipe he asks why she has so much of it, a question that causes her to shut down. Crabbe smokes the pipe when he craves alcohol and finds that it does soothe him.

As time goes by, Crabbe’s life with Mary settles into a rhythm. Crabbe gets in much better physical shape and gains more respect for himself. He also begins to think that he would be able to survive in the bush without Mary because of the things she has taught him. He observes that he has fewer and fewer cravings for alcohol. One of the things that puzzles him, however, is the contents of the backpack that Mary asked him not to touch. He realizes that he wants Mary to respect him and that he has fallen in love with her.