The forest
This story is an accidental journey into the forest. When she gets lost by her family during a family camping trip, she suddenly realizes that she is truly lost. She has to survive in the wild, without education about what to eat or how to find shelter, without an adequate way to defend herself against predators. She even encounters a bear during her journey. The imagery of the forest is a kind of free space in which she is trapped. It is both a free terrain and a cage of danger that she cannot escape.
The starving girl
The imagery of Trisha's character is of a small girl, defenseless, and alone, stranded and lost in the woods. Throughout the course of days, she begins to starve, and her horror and panic start to drive her a little crazy. She begins hallucinating from food deprivation, sleep deprivation, and shock, and eventually, she encounters the bear, just before her salvation. The imagery of a young, innocent girl is suggestive. The question seems to be the suffering of life.
Survival and rescue
For Trisha, death began to seem more and more real throughout her time in the forest. Then, eventually, she realizes that she is saved. Someone finds her. This revelation is layered in terms of its imagery. There is the concrete discovery, the man who finds her, but then there is the emotional and spiritual relief of having survived. Her bravery is witnessed; her suffering doesn't have to be in vane, she realizes. She is ready to be back in community.
Chaos and life
The story can be seen as a concrete depiction of an abstract imagery: the chaos of adult life. The nine-year-old girl doesn't know anything about how chaotic and fragile life really is, because she is protected from that in her innocence. This story removes innocence from the young girl by allowing her to suffer the grips of fear and pain. She nearly starves to death in the middle of nowhere, all alone. She is now fully educated about life's chaos.
