Andrews’s identity crisis

Andrews’s identity crisis begins in his longing to escape the constraints of settled life, but the wilderness he seeks does not confirm a stable, liberated self. The hunt brings him face to face with the destruction of an animal’s identity and with an inner rupture he cannot yet name; as the valley becomes his whole world, the boundaries between self and landscape blur.

Origins in the Wilderness Ideal

The crisis takes shape against Andrews’s earlier belief that nature might offer a freedom and spiritual belonging unavailable in institutions. At Harvard University, he had felt hemmed in by college life and by the daily religious observances at King’s Chapel. Recalling solitary walks through meadows and woods near Cambridge, he remembers a sense of release in which the self seemed to fall away while perception widened, an experience associated with Emerson’s image of the transparent eye. By contrast, in the prairie country around Butcher’s Crossing, he feels unexpectedly at home and imagines the wilderness as a place where he might become free and part of something larger.

At the river outside Butcher’s Crossing, that ideal becomes a decision about his life. Looking across the flat country, Andrews understands that the hunting expedition arranged with Miller is not, at its deepest level, a business venture but a pretext that makes departure possible. He imagines himself moving west, away from towns and cities, and reads his childhood and youth as having led unknowingly to this moment. The river becomes a symbolic boundary between the town and the wilderness he desires; even a future return to town, he thinks, could be another step in leaving it behind.

The Slaughter and the Loss of Self

The killing of a bison forces Andrews to confront a rupture that he cannot reduce to squeamishness. Before its death, the animal had seemed proud, vigorous, and possessed of the dignity of life; afterward it hung exposed and helpless, reduced to inert flesh. What unsettles him is the sense that the creature has been stripped not only of life but of its very identity, made no longer itself—or no longer what it might have imagined itself to be. Seeing that transformation, Andrews feels that something within him has also been destroyed, though he cannot yet face what it is.

The landscape around the carcass makes this loss collective as well as intimate. Miller kicks a rib loose from a skeleton and recalls the Kansas hunts, when heaps of bones stretched from Pawnee Fork to the end of Smoky Hill. The remains testify to a transformation already carried out on a vast scale: once abundant herds have become scattered traces, and even the bones may soon be hauled away for fertilizer. Miller lists the many uses people made of bison bone, from tools and arrow points to jewelry and toys, before throwing a leg bone into the grass. The animal’s remains pass from living presence to hunted resource and then to residue, while Andrews struggles to imagine the living creature from what is left.

Later, lying awake, Andrews connects his flight from the butchered bison in the Colorado mountains with his earlier flight from Francine in Butcher’s Crossing. He recalls the sequence of intense desire, nausea, and repulsion that had driven him from her room, where she had approached him naked. The parallel is not a simple equation between a woman and a slain animal: it is the recurrence of his inability to stay before an encounter that overwhelms his sense of himself. In both cases, attraction or vitality gives way to an experience he cannot bear, and escape postpones rather than resolves its meaning.

In the darkness, his hand moves across his own face as if trying to find its features: the cold rough prominence of his forehead, the line of his nose, his cracked lips, and his thick beard. He falls asleep with his face still in his hand. The gesture makes his crisis physical: after witnessing an animal made unrecognizable to itself, he searches by touch for the boundaries of his own identity, but the scene offers no assurance that he has recovered them.

The Valley as a Vanishing World

As the slaughter continues, Andrews’s sense of self becomes bound to the valley and to the diminishing herd. The work leaves him and Schneider struggling to skin the animals Miller kills: they labor past sunset and rise before dawn to cut into carcasses stiffened by the night. Miller’s rifle keeps pounding through the day, an obsessive sound that wears on their nerves. At night he sits by the fire, blackened with gunpowder dust, nearly motionless except for his eyes. Around them the dead bison lie exposed, their rancid smell so familiar to Andrews that he scarcely notices it; the remaining animals graze among the bodies over blood-brown grass.

Andrews does not measure the expedition as Schneider does, by the days passing one after another. He has, without knowing when or how, begun to measure it by the number of bison left. He understands that Miller will not leave while a single animal survives. On the twenty-fifth day, the herd that had numbered five thousand has fallen below three hundred. It has broken into small groups, and Miller now rarely kills more than twelve or fourteen at a time; he circles the survivors slowly and inexorably. The change in pace makes the slaughter feel less like a brief hunt than an end without a boundary, while Andrews’s own expectation of departure becomes inseparable from the herd’s approaching extinction.

The valley’s hold on him is sharpened by the disappearance of everywhere else from memory. He cannot clearly recall the mountain pass, the thirsty plains they crossed, or Butcher’s Crossing, though he reached and left the town only weeks earlier. Those places return as fragments, almost dreamlike, while the valley’s yellow-green floor, steep mountain walls, dark pines, and red-and-gold poplars seem to possess the whole field of his awareness. Looking across it, Andrews feels as if his gaze draws the place’s contours and his existence receives its own shape and location in return. The wilderness that once promised freedom from the settled world has become a world so complete that he cannot imagine himself outside it.

The Collapse of the Promise

The railroad and the hide market expose a material history beneath Andrews’s vision of open country. McDonald had once imagined the railway would make the land valuable; now he tells Miller that its tracks are being laid fifty miles north, while hunters sell bison meat to the railway company and leave the hides to rot where they were stripped from the animals. The scene echoes the bones scattered across the Kansas plains: the bison’s body is repeatedly converted into a commodity, and what has no immediate price is abandoned. The wilderness Andrews had imagined as an escape from the settled world is already being reorganized by transport, trade, and exhaustion.

McDonald turns that failure into a bleak argument about self-knowledge. He maintains that people are raised on successive layers of lies, and that only near death might someone recognize there was nothing beyond the self and what remained undone. He applies the same logic to the expedition: thousands of bison killed, hides packed for a market that has failed, a ruined wagon, and little left beyond labor, calluses, and the memory of a dead man. Andrews resists the conclusion, answering that it is not so, but McDonald insists he has not yet learned. The exchange brings the crisis into direct conflict with the idea that departure itself can disclose a hidden truth. Andrews’s wilderness longing had given the expedition the shape of a liberating choice; McDonald recasts its outcome as wasted time and irreversible loss. The novel leaves that contradiction unresolved: Andrews has experienced the valley as the place that gives his existence form, yet the slaughter and its aftermath make any simple equation of wilderness with freedom impossible.