The house (symbol)
“The house” is a symbol of stability in this unsure and unpredictable world. The protagonist thinks of her little cottage “by a creek” in “a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge” as “an anchor-hold.” It holds her “at the anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself” and keeps her “steadied in the current,” as “a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down.” It is a “good place to live,” and what it is more it is safe. There is “a lot to think about” in this beautiful and mysterious valley, so it is good to have a place where you can hide from the rest of the world.
Camera (allegory)
A camera is an allegory of artificiality. According to the protagonist, there are two ways of seeing. The first one includes analysis and prying,b ut there is “another kind of seeing” that “involves a letting go.” When she sees this way the woman is “transfixed and emptied.” The difference between “two ways of seeing” is “the difference between walking with and without camera.” When she walks with the camera, she walks “from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter.” When she walks without the camera, the woman is “above an unscrupulous observes.” The protagonist not only sees but also notices, feels, observes, and contemplates.
Stalking (motif)
Stalking is one of the main motifs of the story. The protagonist calls herself “an explorer,” “a stalker,” or even “the instrument of the hunt.” “Certain Indians” used “to carve long grooves along the wooden shafts of their arrows.” They called them “lightning marks,” because they “resembled the curved fissure lightning slices down the trunk of the trees.” The main function of those “lightning marks” is this: if the arrow doesn’t kill the game, “blood from a deep wound will channel along the lightning mark,” and “spatter to the ground, laying a trail.” The author is “the arrow shaft,” and “this book is the straying trail of blood.”
