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8. Out to Sea
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Civilization vs. Nature
Coming of Age
Loss and Grief
Belonging and Exile
The Supernatural
Desire and Obsession
Summary
Analysis
The night before the annual Avalanche Concert, Tek gets into a fight with Mr. Oamaru, his strict, religious, and conservative stepfather. Mr. Oamaru wants Tek to befriend and encourage Ragni Gibson, another boy in the Waitiki Valley Boys’ Choir. Tek doesn’t like the idea. Ragni is “creepy,” and he’s Moa (the Indigenous people of the Waitiki Valley). Besides, Tek continues, he doesn’t want to sing “shitty untrue […] pirate” songs in the choir anymore himself. Mr. Oamaru bristles, both at the crude language and at Tek’s rejection of tradition. He wonders aloud where Tek could have learned such language, not-so-subtly suggesting that he blames Tek’s father.
The story packs a lot of information into the first conversation between Tek and Mr. Oamaru—both about Tek’s personal history and the history of the Waitiki Valley. In addition to considering some of the book’s major themes like coming of age and exile, this story also makes a sharp critique of the violence of colonial conquest. The power dynamics of a colonial society are immediately apparent from Mr. Oamaru’s patronizing attitude toward the Indigenous Ragni Gibson to the reinforcement of the dominant culture through mythmaking and ritual, like the Boys’ Choir’s annual performance of a song which celebrates those who conquered the Moa. Even the way the story draws attention to the Oamaru family’s religiosity evokes the history of European settler colonialism, which was invariably connected to the Christian religion. This opening scene draws a parallel between Ragni’s evident alienation and the alienation Tek feels in his own home. Note his subtle dislike and disrespect for Mr. Oamaru and his emphasis on how different the two of them are. From the very beginning, then, Tek locates himself, if not entirely outside of his society, at the very least on its periphery. Readers never learn about Tek’s father, but there’s a clear suggestion that Tek might be at least part Moa.
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The Waitiki Valley is surrounded on four sides by glaciated mountains. Each spring, the Boys’ Choir flies up to the Aokeora Glacier to “sing down the snows.” They perform “The Pirates’ Conquest,” a ballad celebrating the glorious Inland Pirates who arrived in the valley generations earlier and conquered the peaceful Moa people with superior weapons and deadly diseases. At the end of the song, there’s a high C note which is supposed to trigger an avalanche by resonance. But really the choir’s director, Franz Josef, goes up to the glacier a few days ahead of the concert with an axe to cut an encouraging line in the snow.
The dominant society, to which Mr. Oamaru and his family belong and from which Tek wishes to distance himself, descends from settler colonialists who conquered and displaced the Indigenous Moa people generations earlier. By explicitly naming them “pirates,” the story deprives them of any glory and works to puncture the self-righteous mythos that colonizers use to excuse violence and exploitation. The Moa, the story implies, lived in harmony with nature, unlike the Pirates’ descendants, who strive to dominate nature through artificial means (like staging the avalanche).
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Tek hates the song, with its breezy glorification of the pirates who killed the Moa’s sacred penguins, stole their treasures, destroyed their gods, and raped their women. The worst verse is the one lamenting the loss of their stolen treasure, which they buried on the glacier, unaware that glaciers are always in motion. When their descendants went back to dig it up later, it wasn’t where the maps said it should be.
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As he’s gotten older, Tek has realized that his own past is as unstable as the glacier. His life is divided into the time before his father left and after Mr. Oamaru married Leila (his mother), restoring her beauty and sense of safety with his “piratical, body-soul conquest,” but also changing her in disconcerting ways, like her conversion to Christianity. Once, she used to say that his father left because he was “in a bad way.” Now she—and the rest of the family—agree it was because he was a bad person—a heathen.
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On their drive to the airstrip the next morning, Tek impatiently longs for his voice to change so he can quit the choir. He wonders if Ragni’s voice has already changed. No one would know, because Ragni has been selectively mute for years, notwithstanding the efforts of choir director Franz Josef to encourage a song from his mouth. Digger Gibson (the perpetually drunk cemetery warden) claims that Ragni used to mutter all the time to the cinnamon bear he kept as a pet when he lived in the Moa orphanage. Digger likes to brag that the first thing he and Ragni did “as father and son” was to bury the bear, which orphanage workers shot on the day of Ragni’s adoption. Digger never marked the spot and now, years later, Ragni can still regularly be found in the woods, digging as if in a frantic search for his lost friend.
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When Tek climbs out of Mr. Oamaru’s car, Franz Josef is pressing on Ragni’s diaphragm and trying to encourage him to sing a scale. Franz Josef stops when Brauser—a terrible bully with a beautiful voice—starts lobbing snowballs at him and at the choirboys. Freed of Franz Josef’s attention, Ragni wanders off. Tek follows and although his attempt to make friendly conversation trails off awkwardly in the face of Ragni’s uncompromising silence, he senses an affinity between himself and the other boy.
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Franz Josef has arranged for four ice planes—piloted by three men named Steve and one called Hone Te Kaurii-himi (who goes by Steve)—to ferry the choir to the glacier. As the Steves hand out emergency transponders (in case the boys accidentally get buried by an avalanche), Franz Josef realizes they’re one plane short. He asks Tek, Ragni, and Brauser to wait for a backup pilot to arrive. When he does, he’s forgotten the dark-colored contact lenses that will keep him from going snow-blind, and he chooses to fly without them, asking if the boys can keep a secret. Ragni can, Brauser laughs.
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A little while later, the plane crashes. Tek crawls from the wreckage after the backup pilot. Brauser, seriously injured, lies motionless on the snow, his shocked eyes turned toward the sky. Ragni looks on in silence. Tek doesn’t know where they are. They’re nowhere near the choir or the other planes. They might not even be on the same glacier, he realizes. As he turns to ask the pilot, he watches the plane slide off the side of the mountain. Tek struggles to maintain his own composure in the face of the pilot’s panic. When the pilot announces his plan to descend and call for help on his walkie-talkie—then subsequently slides into an ice cave and out of sight—Tek falls to his knees and vomits.
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Tek turns back toward Brauser, who’s clearly in shock, and Ragni, who sits silently on the snow. Their transponders beep at five-second intervals. Tek brushes snow off of Brauser’s face and looks for signs of life. He doesn’t know what else to do. It’s so quiet on the glacier that he thinks he can hear everything, down to the sound of his shadow falling on the snow. Inside his head, a voice is screaming: “YOU ARE GOING TO DIE UP HERE.”
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Ragni wanders off and Tek follows him. Only Brauser is at the crash site when the rescue helicopter arrives. Tek screams and tries to get the rescuers’ attention. He thinks he hears Ragni say, “run,” and then Ragni knocks him to the ground and drags him into a nearby ice cave. For reasons he can’t fully understand, Tek stays there, unable to make himself move or make a sound as the helicopter makes three passes of the area, then heads down the mountain. After it leaves, he rediscovers his voice and demands to know what Ragni was thinking. Ragni remains silent. But he does snatch the transponders from Tek’s and his necks, switches them off, and casually tosses them down a deep crevasse in the cave floor.
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Tek desperately reaches into the crevasse. He doesn’t find his transponder, but his hand closes around a fistful of stolen Moa treasure. He and Ragni have found the Inland Pirates’ trove. Tek hands Ragni some shiny coins. If they ever make it home, they’ll both be indescribably rich. Ragni drops the coins into the snow. Tek understands that he doesn’t want them. He wants his bear, just like Tek wants his father. He finds he can no longer remember the words to “The Pirates’ Conquest.” With growing desperation, he realizes that he doesn’t want to die and be buried in this frozen wasteland. Right now, he would give anything for all the things he hated that morning: Mr. Oamaru, the lies about his father, the Avalanche concert.
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Tek is determined to survive, even as Ragni seems ready to give himself over to death—he’s now lying quietly in the snow. Tek wonders if he could sing that high C loud enough to cause an avalanche here, on this glacier—one that the crowd of concertgoers would notice and investigate. But his voice cracks, and even if he could hold the note, he realizes that his one voice isn’t enough. But Ragni is staring into the distance as if looking for his ghostly bear. Tek is alone in his efforts. Down below, his family doesn’t even realize yet that he’s lost. But he can’t give up hope. Maybe his transponder turned back on as it fell. Maybe, down at the foot of the mountain, his family will somehow hear his absence from the song.
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