Summary

Chapter 9: In these chapters, the narrator’s mood shifts considerably from previous chapters to that of a more frightening or menacing one. She begins to feel the island is wild, that her father had become part of that wildness, and that she is trapped on the island. She perceives herself very differently from her friends, and she thinks of them now as “the others” as they play cards and begin to enjoy a vacation. After lunch, the narrator takes the tray of breadcrumbs and other food scraps out to the jays’ birdfeeder as her mother had done before her. She remembers how a bear came upon the family’s campsite, and the children heard a bear and then saw it; she especially remembers how her mother reacted to the bear. She and Anna discuss being on the Pill and how it was such a dangerous...