In the final lines of the story, the narrator uses imagery to capture the child’s distress upon finding his mother’s dead body:
The child moved his little hands, making wild, uncertain gestures. He uttered a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries — something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey — a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil. The child was a deaf mute.
Then he stood motionless, with quivering lips, looking down upon the wreck.
The imagery here brings readers more closely into the scene, helping them visualize the child’s hands “making wild, uncertain gestures,” hear the child’s “inarticulate and indescribable cries,” and feel the child’s “quivering lips” and motionless body.
The narrator stresses the auditory element in particular, describing the child’s cries as “startling, soulless, unholy” and sounding like “something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey.” All of these descriptions pique readers’ curiosity—forcing them to wonder why the child would make sounds like this—leading to the narrator's revelation of an unexpected plot twist: the child is deaf and mute and has therefore been unable to hear anything this entire time.
It is notable that the narrator compares the child’s cries to the sounds of animals. While the narrator has been comparing the wounded soldiers to different animals throughout the story, they have never described the child as such. When, at the end of the story, the child finally feels the effects of war for himself, he becomes wounded and animal-like just like the soldiers he saw crawling through the woods. He is no longer able to hold on to his fantasies of war but must face the grief and loss, experiencing the dehumanization of war for himself.
After the child falls asleep in the woods, the narrator describes the scene using imagery and personification, as seen in the following passage:
The wood birds sang merrily above his head; the squirrels, whisking their bravery of tail, ran barking from tree to tree, unconscious of the pity of it, and somewhere far away was a strange, muffled thunder, as if the partridges were drumming in celebration of nature’s victory over the son of her immemorial enslavers.
The imagery here engages readers’ different senses—they can picture all of the animals moving about the forest while also hearing the birds singing “merrily,” the squirrels “barking,” and the “muffled thunder” similar to the "drumming" sounds of partridges. Since this is one of the moments in which the narrator moves away from the deaf child’s perspective, the narrative is able to tune into the sounds around the boy.
The personification here—in which the narrator personifies nature as a “she”—is particularly notable. In the narrator’s imagination, as the child sleeps, nature is celebrating her “victory over the son of her immemorial enslavers.” This is Bierce’s way of implying that the child getting lost in the woods is a form of retribution for all of the harm that humans have caused nature over the generations. By using the word “enslavers,” Bierce is drawing a connection between how white Americans enslaved Black Americans and how white people used and abused the land itself. In this way, he also nods to the fight over slavery happening in the Civil War.
