Part 4 begins with the novel’s climax: Ed’s hunt for the man who Lewis alleges shot Drew and who Ed suspects may have attempted to assault him. The hunt sets Ed on a new narrative path and suggests that the masculinity that Ed perceives Lewis as exuding has been transferred to Ed, who takes the leadership role as the group tries to return to civilization.

The motif of sexuality develops themes of Conflicting Ideals of Masculinity and The Conflict Between Humanity and Nature during the hunting scene. Just as when Ed made love with his wife Martha, his “union” with the rock occurs before dawn. He moves up the rock with “intimate” movements of his body—movements he thinks he has never used with any “human woman.” The moment pulls Ed in various conflicting directions. Ed re-asserts his heterosexuality—threatened by both the assault and the homosocial bonding of the trip itself—by identifying the rock with a woman, but he also experiences a primal form of sexuality unlike anything in the “civilized” world. The desire to connect with this side of himself is part of why he undertook the trip, but in this moment, he also tries to separate himself from the natural world into which he feels himself slipping; he clings, in his own words, to “the human.”

Similar ideas and images animate Ed’s actual stalking and killing of the man. Ed makes a partial transformation into a predatory animal, becoming part of the natural world himself. He imagines the man he is hunting in terms that are manifestly sexual—i.e., wondering what might have happened had Lewis not come upon the scene when the younger man attempted to attack him in the woods. However, the fact that he also wonders whether the man is an “escaped convict,” a “dirt farmer out hunting,” or a “bootlegger” highlights that the episode is at least as much about power as it about sex (164). More specifically, Ed seeks to reassert middle-class power over nature and the rural lower classes after being at the mercy of both. “If he lay down with his back to me, I would shoot,” Ed thinks (172). However, the fantasy does not hold up; it begins to collapse when the hunted man, who is armed with a gun, fails to take up the prone (and sexualized) position. When the man sees him, Ed is forced Ed to make his shot then and there, injuring himself in the process. The arrow pierces the mountaineer’s throat and not his back, symbolically silencing but not yet killing the man. Ed then cuts the arrow from his side using his knife in a scene whose action suggests the use of a knife to threaten Ed during the assault, further blurring the lines between hunter and hunted. That scene is further recalled when the injured and bleeding Ed begins to hunt for the man: He becomes the “dog” that the woodsman referred to him as, crawling on his hands and knees and seeing, smelling, and feeling the other man’s blood. Even his final “victory” is incomplete, as he remains unsure of the man’s identity after finding his body.

The discovery of Drew’s body only heightens the ambiguity. Lewis’s pronouncement that Drew was “grazed” is not a final confirmation of anything. Ed, realizing that he may not only have killed an innocent man for assaulting him but also for Drew’s death, says to Bobby, “[W]e can’t have anyone examining him” (201). The morality of the situation remains murky and takes a backseat to survival.

Following the climax, the natural world itself becomes less menacing, anticipating the men’s return to civilization. The men float on the now calm river into rural farmland, a stepping stone on the way back to urban life. An ambulance arrives, Lewis is taken in to the hospital, and Ed’s injuries are treated, emphasizing the return to civilization and the apparent triumph of man and medicine over nature and death.