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Chapter Summaries & Analyses
When Crabbe wakes up, his rescuer feeds him and asks him for his name and where he is from. He refuses to tell her, which she responds to by saying “you, too, eh?”, a puzzling remark he thinks about later (76). She explains to him that she's checking him for hypothermia. She has splinted his arm, which may be broken, and dressed a wound on his arm as well. She also tells him that he has several broken ribs.
He falls back asleep, and has a dream of a “great, blood-colored bird descending” on him but realizes it's just the top of the tent in which he is sleeping (78). Sleeping beside him is his rescuer, whose wilderness craft amazes him but who seems out of place because she has a face so beautiful that it would seem more at home “in a classy drawing room or on the screen” (79). He wakes the next morning to find her cooking over a fire, a “beautiful scene, peaceful, with no traffic honks and screeches, no mother screaming at you to get out of bed” (79) and notices that the campsite is virtually invisible.
His rescuer is shocked to discover that he can't read a map or use a compass, and she laughs at him when he recounts his experience with the bear.