Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Sign of the Beaver, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Survival and Indigenous Knowledge
Colonialism, Land Rights, and Entitlement
Nature
Friendship and Respect
Coming of Age and Manhood
Summary
Analysis
Matt spends his days working hard. He chinks the cracks in the cabin, stacks wood, and grinds the dried corn kernels into flour. He hangs pumpkin from the ceiling to dry and fills flour sacks with nuts. Birch baskets hold tart berries that, with his mother’s sugar, will be delicious. Matt tries to eat as little of his meager corn harvest as possible, as he knows the corn is supposed to feed his family through winter with enough left over to plant next year’s crop. So, Matt and the dog spend hours tramping through the snow, checking Matt’s snares and shooting at ducks or muskrats. They mostly eat fish, and Matt is constantly making more lines and fishhooks. He has to shatter ice to fish now—soon, he’ll have to cut holes with his axe to fish.
Thanks to everything Matt learned from Attean and from the women he observed in Attean’s village, Matt knows how to preserve everything he has. Now, he’s able to independently and safely navigate the woods and ensure his own survival. However, Matt also recognizes that he hasn’t, strictly speaking, done enough to feed his family—they planned to rely on the corn, but Matt wasn’t able to cultivate and then harvest enough for a family of five. Still, Matt persists in doing what he can in the hope that he can make up for the subpar harvest in other ways.
Themes
The cold is the worst part for Matt. He’s still in the same breeches and shirt he wore when he and his father arrived; they’re now threadbare and too small. Since he didn’t wear his coat all summer, it’s still in good condition, though it’s not very warm. Matt knows he can’t bring down a deer to make leggings, but he eventually makes himself a pair of pants out of one of his wool blankets. He uses two rabbit skins to make mittens and stuffs his now-thin moccasins with dried moss, a trick Attean showed him to soak up rain. Matt is especially proud of his hat. Attean once showed him a deadfall—a trap of balanced, heavy logs designed to fall on an animal—and Matt manages to create one and catch an otter-like creature. He copies the Native women’s method of working slowly and creates a warm hat.
Once again, Matt continues to draw on skills that Attean taught him in order to survive. And he also shows that he still doesn’t actually care much about observing strict gender roles—being a man, he seems to decide, means doing what needs to be done whether that’s stereotypically considered women’s work or not. When Matt is able to craft a deadfall after not being explicitly shown how to do so, it illustrates how skilled Matt has become at gleaning whatever he can from a teacher and applying it in his own circumstances.
Themes
Matt does all his work by firelight; he desperately wants candles. As he does the women’s work that Attean scorned, Matt thinks often of his mother. He tries to come up with ways to make her happy, so he whittles her a set of wooden dishes and a brush to clean them. He makes a broom and spends days working on a cradle for the baby that rocks smoothly. Matt then makes Sarah a cornhusk doll and realizes he’s looking forward to seeing her. He used to think of her just as a pest, but he’s certain she’ll be curious and unafraid out here in the wilderness. She would’ve liked Marie.
Now that Matt has done as much work as possible to prepare the cabin for winter, he turns to doing nice things for his family members. This represents his hope that they’ll come, even as it looks increasingly less likely that they will. It also demonstrates Matt’s understanding, now that he can make whatever he needs from supplies gathered from the forest. He doesn’t have to rely at all on manufactured tools to accomplish these tasks.
Themes
