Having reached the crisis point in Part 4, the narrative’s falling action focuses on the alternative story of events that the three surviving friends attempt to keep straight. The return to civilization introduces a different kind of justice than that of the wilds, where the struggle to survive is paramount. The men return to face questions from the local sheriffs and state troopers, who embody the human judicial system, and Ed must find “deliverance” from civilization rather than nature. He fears the technology that is part of the “unfathomable apparatus of crime detection, from which no one is entirely free” (231). Although the idea of escaping civilization is not new—the characters previously sought escape from the tedium of urban life—the language he now uses to describe human society has shifted; in its depiction of the law as vast, powerful, and indifferent, this passage echoes many of the novel’s descriptions of nature.

This indicates the changes that have taken place in Ed as a result of his time in the wilderness. It is not that Ed no longer wants to return to human society. During his final night at the hotel, Ed dreams of the owl on Martha’s windchime and the safety of home—the very place he wanted to escape at the novel’s outset. Moreover, when he reunites with Martha, Ed realizes how he “undervalued” her abilities and personality, which suggests that the trip has changed his perspective on the domestic life he once wanted to escape. However, Ed cannot wholly leave the wilderness behind. On the drive home, despite the increasing signs of human settlement along the road, all Ed sees is the river, suggesting that his experience in nature has forever changed him and that he will not forget the crisis of having killed a man. Nor is it clear that he would want to: In a symbolic gesture of taking some of nature’s wildness with him back to civilization, Ed stoops to drink from the river. Bullard further underscores the idea that the wilderness has become part of Ed when he emphasizes the primal skills that allowed Ed to save his companions, calling him “ape.”

At the same time, Ed continues to rely on images to distance himself from the raw reality of what he has experienced. In coaching Bobby on how to conduct himself with law enforcement, Ed emphasizes that he should think about the depictions of police interrogation in film: “Remember your movies; police like to question separate suspects and try to get them to contradict each other. So we’ve just got to sit here right now and become contradict-proof” (225). Later, Lewis is shown reading a local paper that gives an account of Drew’s disappearance. The scene emphasizes The Relationship Between Images and Reality because the image depicts Deputy Queen with his fist raised in Ed’s face, while Ed looks tolerant. In reality, Ed had provoked Queen, but the image suggests otherwise, which Ed knows is helpful for their case. Whereas the gap between images and reality can be deadly in the wilderness, the novel suggests that it is less important in human society, where the appearance of things may in fact be all that matters.

This has ramifications for the question of who or what is to blame for Drew’s death. The novel provides no definitive answer to this, implying that characters’ impressions may be more important than the reality. Drew’s wife, for instance, tells Ed to find Lewis and “shoot him,” suggesting her knowledge of and hatred for Lewis’s hubris. By contrast, Ed consistently emphasizes The Conflict Between Humanity and Nature. He tells Queen that “the river did all the killing we saw” and later tells Drew’s wife that her husband’s death was the “river’s fault” and then further resists any offer of help from Martha (242). His response also reflects his new understanding of the laws of nature itself; in reflecting on the justice that Drew’s wife might demand, he concludes that “civilized” justice such as the “electric chair” would be less appropriate to the situation than the wilderness justice Ed has already meted out.

The final scene of the novel depicts Ed returning to his old life as a changed man, underscoring that the river is part of him and that he has in some way fused with nature. So has Lewis, who is the only friend from the trip Ed keeps in touch with. Lewis now accepts life and death as the natural way of things; the river has cured him of his hubris. In the end, Ed realizes he is part of civilization but also more real than he was before the trip. In the final lines of the novel, Ed references Lake Cahula, the name for the body of water that has been created by damming the Cahulawassee. He realizes that “civilization’s” progress is causing an area that was once wild to be lost, covering the primal violence of their own river trip in the process.