81 pages • 2 hours read
Gary PaulsenWoods Runner
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-4
Chapter 1 Summary
Samuel is introduced as a 13-year-old frontier boy who is comfortable and skilled at hunting in the woods around his settlement in eastern Pennsylvania. He thinks about his life and imagines it as split by an invisible line that runs through the center of his family’s cabin: To the west is the wild expanse of the forest, to the east is the “civilization” he has come to understand through his parents’ books and stories. For Samuel, the forest is small sounds and smells, animals hunting and surviving. Civilization is a land of fashion and culture. He sights and aims but does not shoot the deer that wanders upon him, though he often kills deer both for food and to control the population that raids and ruins the cornfields. His attention is occupied by the previous night’s arrival of a man who brought with him news of a war.
The informational passage following this chapter, “Communication,” relates the difficulty in traveling distances in the late 18th century and provides statistics on how quickly different forms of travel could be accomplished. This meant the slow delivery of both supplies and news.
Chapter 2 Summary
Samuel reflects on the previous night’s events. Isaac, a regular visitor to their cabin, brought a paper with news of a fight between American militia and British soldiers in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. Everyone is surprised by this news, and Samuel thinks, “Everything in my world just got bigger” (14). The settlers, gathered in their cabin, worry over the meaning and potential consequences of this war. They resolve to wait and see rather than taking any action. The chapter ends with a foreboding foreshadowing: “Not a single person in that cabin could have seen what was coming. And even if they had seen the future, they would not have been able to imagine the horror” (16).
The informational passage, “Frontier,” illuminates the difficulty of frontier life, where “the only thing that came easy to people of the frontier was land” (17), though even that land had to be laboriously and painstakingly cleared to be suitable for building and farming.
Chapter 3 Summary
Samuel explores in the woods, traveling seven or eight miles to find a place he hadn’t seen before. He finds a “graceful chain of round meadows and lush grass” that was “already perfect farmland” (18). He declares it to be “Perfect […] Like it was made to be used” (18). He is quickly distracted by a sound that reveals a bear. As Samuel lifts his rifle to aim, he sees clouds of smoke rising from an area to the east that could be the settlement. He determines that the smoke is too thick and wide to be a bonfire or a fire set to clear land. He wonders anxiously what would “make such a dark, wide smoke that it could be seen from…how far? Maybe eight miles?” (20). Because he fears there’s been an attack on the settlement, he sets off to run the eight miles home in near and then full darkness. Anxiously, he imagines an attack on his home, one that he had not been there to help defend against.
Chapter 4 Summary
The informational passage that precedes this chapter, “Weapons,” explains the necessity and limitations of a rifle for those on the frontier.
Samuel smells blood and death before he reaches the settlement. Horrified, he detours into the woods to the side of the settlement so that he won’t be seen by any remaining attackers. He listens and waits but hears nothing. When he emerges, he sees that his cabin is burned to the ground along with those of their neighbors. He steels himself and searches for bodies; he can’t find his parents’ bodies anywhere, but he finds those of many of the other settlers, including three small children. He finds an abandoned shovel and digs graves, crying over each body that he buries. Thinking that he should say something, he bows his head and says, “Please, Lord, take them with you. Please” (31). After praying, Samuel sleeps.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
These early chapters introduce Samuel and his parents—educated, cultured people who have moved away from the city in pursuit of honest, physical work. In his musing on the differences between the wilderness in which he is so comfortable and the civilized world of which he has only read, Samuel begins to establish that contrast as one of the main themes of the novel. The attack on the settlement begins the primary action of the plot; in doing so, it also introduces the theme of justified versus gratuitous violence. Samuel’s experience of these events reveals the things he values: reason, courage, and gentleness.
These chapters also provide the framing of the novel as a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story. At 13, Samuel is still many years from our modern concept of adulthood, but in his time, he’s well into the transition period from childhood into manhood. Paulsen is careful to tell us Samuel’s current age and the age at which he began to become a part of the woods. Samuel can sustain himself through hunting, tracking, and woods survival knowledge, and he sustains his parents and the rest of the settlement by hunting for fresh meat. The novel’s discussion of innocence also begins in these early chapters. Samuel’s initial bewilderment at even the idea of the war is quickly replaced with his horror at the human capacity for rage and destruction. The innocence of the settlers at the end of Chapter 2 is replaced by the new and painful knowledge of the horrors of war.
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