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“Sylvia stood still and waited, letting her bare feet cool themselves in the shoal water, while the great twilight moths struck softly against her.”

The narrator contrasts Sylvia’s complaints about driving home the cow with positive descriptions of her time in nature. As Sylvia moves through the woods barefoot, she herself becomes a part of the scene, wading through the same water the cow drinks and becoming no different from the trees that the bugs bounce against unafraid. As Sylvia says several times, she seems to belong in nature, merging easily into the area.

“She hung her head as if the stem of it were broken . . .”

The author describes Sylvia’s reaction on her first meeting of the hunter by comparing her to a tiny flower that has been carelessly broken. She worries that her grandmother will be angry with her for meeting the hunter in the woods so Sylvia keeps her head down facing the ground. Sylvia is often described through a comparison to something in nature.

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