The Skeleton Tree

“I’ve learned my way through all the things that scare me.”

Chris runs through the thick forest toward the sea, expecting to find rescue boats. He’s scared of the forest despite all the time he has survived in it, and yet he has found a way to overcome his fear as well as the world that makes him afraid. He begins the story as a boy with many fears. As the story progresses, Chris must face his fears one by one, gaining confidence and skills as he conquers each one. By the novel’s end, he has learned how to cope with his fears, how to confront and conquer them, and how to live with them.

“I couldn’t believe how I’d tumbled so quickly from an ordinary life into my very worst nightmare.”

After Puff sinks, taking Uncle Jack down with her, Chris paddles the life boat toward land. In the break, they’re tossed into the waves and tumbled until they reach the beach. Chris thinks of how he has been tumbled not only physically but also mentally. He clearly sees the difference between the ordinary life he had before and the difficult life he’ll have after losing the boat. In a moment of foreshadowing, on the airplane ride into Kodiak, Chris imagines himself stranded down among the trees, waving frantically at the plane for help. He envisions how small and helpless he’d feel, and he feels pity for the boy he imagined down in the forest. Later, when he becomes that boy looking up at the plane, he recalls the nightmare and knows he’s trapped in it.

“Frank glared at me. ‘The day I need your help, that’s the day I kill myself.’”

As Puff sinks below turbulent waves, Frank can do nothing but sit in shock, gripping the sides of the meager life boat. His shock lasts through the night and into the next day, leaving Chris to paddle toward land alone. Frank nearly drowns in the breakwater and is nearly sucked out to sea again, but Chris saves him a third time. The spell breaks only when he’s washed onto land. This exemplifies Frank’s character throughout the novel. Although he has a tough exterior, he proves weak in moments of turmoil. When he gets deathly ill later in the novel, he admits to Chris that he’s scared. He needs help and is willing to accept it. Frank’s character arc peaks during his illness, which seemingly dissolves all his carefully constructed armor.

“If I let him push me around once, it would never stop. He would just push harder the next time.”

Chris is only 12 years old, yet he understands that a power struggle is at play between himself and 14-year-old Frank. Western views about masculinity and its grip on young boys is on display as they both desperately want to avoid being alone yet do everything in their power to demonstrate to the other that they don’t care about their companion. They bicker, fight, and vie for power in the early days, and Frank comes out on top. When Chris emerges as ultimately stronger, braver, and better equipped, the fighting stops because Chris doesn’t wield his power with anger. Together, they tear down the expectations placed on them and form a relationship that exists outside expectations, outside social norms, and on their own terms.

“‘We’re all of us castaways,’ she told me once. ‘We get thrown ashore on the rocks of life, but somehow we survive.’”

Chris recalls that his mother’s favorite movie is Robinson Crusoe, a film that makes her cry every time she watches it. With this line, she suggested to Chris that survival happens naturally. She has removed intention from the act of survival and has applied it to everyone. In remembering this, Chris realizes that his friend Alan is just as much a castaway in school without him as Chris is a castaway in the woods. His mother, a widow, is a castaway as well. This observation demonstrates how Chris may have learned to live a life of empathy.

“For a little while we were just two kids having fun on a sandy beach. But then the things became depressing—the endless number of them, the stories they whispered. It was strange to think that all the junk had been important once to people who were probably dead.”

Exploring a trash-scattered beach, the boys find items they can use, like shoes, buckets, and containers. Although these items prove crucial to their survival, how the items ended up on shore and what they say about their former owners takes over. A tsunami years earlier left its mark on the coast, and the ghosts of that natural disaster linger. Tsunamis are extreme examples of nature’s power to destroy. Still, the items washed ashore help give Chris and Frank a chance at life. Nature gives and takes away, indifferent all the while. For Chris, sadness permeates the items because he can’t disassociate them from the lives lost in the tsunami. He’s overcome by the awful power of nature in the face of humanity’s relative vulnerability.

“I remembered standing over my father’s grave at the huge cemetery on a hillside, hearing my mother cry beside me. The way I’d felt then, that was the sound the raven was making.”

As Chris attempts to move the dead raven’s corpse, its living companion moans and howls. Chris, who recently lost his father, understands grief. He shows empathy and character when he makes the parallel between his emotional suffering and that of the raven. Chris didn’t cry at his father’s funeral and never processed the loss. Instead, he processes it now in laying the dead raven to rest. Later in the novel, Chris reveals that he wanted to stay with his father’s coffin and see it buried, to see the dirt placed atop the coffin so that he knew his father was resting. Instead, he was ushered away. As a result, he finds a sense of closure in laying the dead raven to rest in the presence of its companion.

“It was a beautiful thing to see, sad and brave at the same time.”

As Chris watches salmon leap up the river toward their ancestral spawning area, he understands that the brave, arduous journey on display is admirable yet depressing. Those that survive will reproduce, and their memory will live on in the next generation; they will have sacrificed for the future. Others will die trying to reach the spawning area. Although Chris doesn’t make a parallel to Uncle Jack’s sacrifice so that he and Frank can survive, he’s deeply moved by the brave, sacrificial act of the salmon. Throughout the novel he returns to watch the salmons’ journey up the river. Many, many die along the way, their corpses filling the river and overflowing onto the shore. This moves Chris deeply, and he’s reverent around their bodies.

“How we hated each other! I couldn’t stand Frank’s hair flicking, his pouting, his little laugh that made me feel so small. He tried to make me angry, refusing to talk about his life in the city or my Uncle Jack.”

Frank is quick to anger, violent, and cruel. Chris, still young and in pain, needs comfort and companionship but finds neither in Frank. As the novel progresses and Chris learns all Frank’s secrets, he begins to understand the extreme pain that haunts Frank and makes him incapable of honesty and connection. When he finally breaks through Frank’s defenses, he finds a boy very similar to himself. They have the same wounds, after all.

“He had never sounded so small. He was, for a moment, a little boy convinced that everything would be all right if only his dad could appear.”

In a rare moment of emotion, Chris hears Frank crying throughout the night. Chris pities him, and after a long time without moving or making a sound out of respect for Frank’s right to privacy, he asks if Frank is okay. Chris, who sleeps on the cold floor, could have used this moment of Frank’s emotional outpouring as leverage, but Chris chooses kindness. He chooses to comfort the boy who is unfair and unkind to him. He understands that Frank is still suffering from the loss of his father and gives him space and comfort. In this moment, Chris shows strength of character, empathy, and relatability. Frank, meanwhile, reveals that he’s capable of deep feeling, so much so that it overwhelms him.

“Maybe a boat had gone by, or a helicopter had landed, and Frank was on his way home. I could imagine him sitting with his rescuers, not saying a thing about me, just watching with that smug look as the land faded in the distance.”

When Frank goes away and doesn’t return, Chris initially worries that he’s been hurt. When he considers Frank’s nature, his raw hatred and cruelty, a different image takes shape, and he imagines Frank abandoning him to die alone in the woods. Being abandoned isn’t new to Chris, who recalls a time when his father and Uncle Jack left him behind on a mountain hike. He felt abandoned then, and he knows the crushing sensation. He has no doubt that Frank would abandon him to die in the woods. Chris’s fear of being alone is extreme, and throughout the novel it remains his biggest fear and the one anxiety he doesn’t conquer.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about the hugeness of Alaska, of the mountains and snow, of the forests full of bears and wolves. I thought of the cabin guy. The skeletons. I wanted to cry, to scream for help, just as I imagined on the airplane.”

As Chris flew into Alaska, looking down from the plane he’d imagined what it would be like to be alone and lost in the woods, crying out for help. Weeks later, he lives in this nightmare, looking up instead of down. His capacity for empathy, on display early in the novel, is now twisted to seem prophetic. However, Chris knows how much space exists between him and rescue. The land is vast and seemingly endless, with trees so numerous they could never be counted. It isn’t a landscape that they can hike out of; their only hope is for someone to find them.

“My mother had given me three worry dolls after my father’s funeral. ‘Whisper to them,’ she told me. ‘Tell them what scares you, then put them away. They’ll take on your fears and your worries so you won’t have to think about them anymore.’”

Chris holds a funeral for the Japanese girl who owned the purse Frank found on the beach. Empathetic and kindhearted, he sees her purse full of trinkets as a window into her world. The worry dolls remind him of his mother’s gift, and how fears could be transferred into objects. In burying the objects, Chris lays the girl’s worst fears come true to rest.

“I carried him down the river on my shoulder. I liked the press of his talons. I remembered my father reaching down to steady me when I was a little kid, his fingers squeezing in that same way.”

As Chris cares for the raven, the raven cares for him; they have a symbiotic relationship. Throughout the novel, Thursday symbolizes a healthy relationship, and although Chris has flashes of comparison with his father, Thursday’s love is pure and honest, and Chris doesn’t abandon him. Thursday is what Chris needed in a father: someone to aid him, to guide him, to teach him, and to save him.

“As I buried the shoe nearby, I felt as though I was starting a cemetery for children who would always be lost.”

First, Chris buries the purse full of a young girl’s treasures, putting her to rest in this symbolic gesture of thoughtfulness. When he finds the baby’s shoe, he buries it in the same place. What he needs to put to rest is his own grief of losing his father and, in a second tragic accident, his uncle. Later in the novel, he buries a girl’s diary and then a plank from Puff to lay Uncle Jack to rest. Eventually, he puts Thursday to rest in a symbolic funeral meant to put his father to rest in peace.

“We had beaten the darkness, holding back with our torches the wild animals, the ghosts and the skeletons. We were the most powerful things in our little part of the planet. But in the larger world, we were also nothing.”

While Chris is empowered by his growing wilderness survival skills, Frank feels small in the face of the vastness of nature. Chris begins the novel in a position of weakness and has limited skills but by the novel’s end hikes mountains alone at night, fights off a bear, and befriends wildlife. Gone is the scared, unprepared boy. In his place, a young man who doesn’t compromise his values has emerged from the trial.

“Well of course he was scared. But I could hardly imagine the courage it took Frank to say he was scared. It was probably the first time in his life he had told anyone that. I felt that I had seen inside him.”

As Frank lays dying in the cabin, he bravely admits to Chris that he’s scared. In doing so, he begins to repair his relationship with Chris, which was badly damaged by Frank’s desire to appear strong, capable, and self-reliant. Frank worked hard to make Chris believe that he was strong, yet only when he’s honest about his vulnerability does Chris actually see Frank as a strong young man. He’s facing his biggest fear in admitting he’s scared, and Chris admires and respects this, recognizing it as growth.

“I had found the loneliest place in the world.”

As a younger boy, Chris went on a mountain hike with Uncle Jack and his father. The hike was a failure. He lingered to help Alan, an out-of-shape friend who struggled on the mountain. His father and uncle were ashamed of him. In climbing the mountain without witnesses in a bid to save Frank, he’s repeating the incident. He climbs to help a friend, and receives no reward or recognition from his father or anyone else. He has no audience. In doing the right thing when no one is there to see it, Chris finds the loneliest place on Earth. Integrity is lonely. Integrity is hard-won and vital but without witnesses or applause.

“He was no longer a wild animal. His only companions were people. He loved to be held, to have his feather preened and tickled. All he wanted was to be loved.”

As Thursday grows reliant on Chris, the boy realizes that the animal is no longer wild. Thursday has lost his only avian companion, whom Chris buried in the skeleton tree, and he’s speaking to humans while living within their world. Interestingly, this is Chris’s perception of Thursday, which is one in which he has increased his importance in the bird’s life. At the conclusion of the novel, Thursday leads a pack of wolves on a battle charge against a grizzly bear in a bid to save Chris and his brother. This suggests that Thursday is deeply connected to the other animals, so much so that he becomes the leader of the wolves and convinces them to fight on his behalf. Thursday is neither tame nor wild but a mixture of both.

“My dad had lived two lives, but he wasn’t happy with either one.”

After the bombshell revelation that Frank is Chris’s brother, the boys must grapple with what it means to have a shared father, and what his very different relationships with his two sons imply about the boys and their relationship with one another. Toward the conclusion of the novel, Frank admits that he lied about his father teaching him things and spending time with him, but Chris believes that his father was one man with Frank and another with him. Although he could feel embittered by this, he instead chooses to let his father stand for himself, without imposing meaning or intent onto his actions. In this mature response, Chris avoids feeling sorry for himself or falling prey to jealousy.

“I don’t know if I should be angry or sad at the way things worked out. I guess I could wonder forever how things were meant to be. But in the end I turned out stronger than Frank.”

Because Chris can reconcile the reality of his father’s actions, he can address the loss of his father and heal. As a healed young man, he can survive in the wild. The most important aspect of wilderness survival is a positive mindset, and the novel’s two main characters demonstrate this principle: Frank nearly dies because of his negative outlook, while Chris lives deeply, befriending wildlife and finding a home in the woods. Chris turns out stronger than Frank, though it’s by no means attributable to his father.

“I felt the same way—that I was better because I’d gone sailing, and for all that happened. I’d lost an uncle but found a brother, and I thought Uncle Jack would be happy with that.”

Despite the nightly terrors, animal attacks, near-starvation, cold, and loneliness, both brothers agree that they’re better young men because of their ordeal. Not only did they find each other, but they grappled with deep, core-defining emotions and emerged as young men prepared to face the world. Frank is no longer jealous and angry at Chris, and Chris isn’t angry at his father. They’ll step into the next phase of their life having addressed the trauma that brought them to the wilderness in the first place. They’ve put their father to rest.

“But nobody comes to save us. Today is not, after all, the day we’ll be rescued. Our dreams were only dreams.”

In a rare moment of pessimism, Chris believes that his vision of his father may have been wrong. This moment of doubt stings because of the contrasting highs that Chris and Frank experienced in the euphoria surrounding their impending rescue. In his darkest hour, Chris goes back to the cabin, and the grizzly attacks and nearly kills him. Chris went from wholeheartedly believing in his and Frank’s redemption to nearly dying in a scene that had played out in his nightmares from the beginning.