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It wasn’t the city that was wrong, the inquisitors in the schoolyard, we weren’t better than they were; we just had different victims. To become like a little child again, a barbarian, a vandal: it was in us too, it was innate. A thing closed in my head, hand, synapse, cutting off my escape . . .

In Chapter 15, the narrator compares the cruelty she exhibited toward animals on the island with the cruelty that school children inflicted upon her in the city. Her rumination on cruelty occurs after she sees the hanged heron at the portage. The narrator recalls throwing leeches into fires and also claims responsibility for killing the animals that her brother had kept in jars in his laboratory. She also recounts how she killed a doll, remembering how she pretended to be a swarm of bees and had ripped up the doll and thrown it into the lake. She calls the instance a killing because, as a child, the doll had been alive to her. By weighing her own cruelty against that of the schoolchildren who used to torment her, the narrator concludes that all children have an innate capacity for violence. For a while, she had entertained the hope that the island would be a haven for her. This passage disavows the narrator of that notion, because violence seems to follow humans regardless of environment.

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