45 pages • 1-hour read
Sees Behind Trees
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Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of ableism and death.
Chapter 7 Summary
Sees Behind Trees wakes Gray Fire and tells him about the sound of the beautiful place. Gray Fire is excited, gives some walnuts to Karna and Pitew, and urges Sees Behind Trees to lead him. They walk into the forest, following the sound that Sees Behind Trees hears, but Gray Fire eventually notices that they are going in circles. He gets frustrated with Sees Behind Trees, who notes that Gray Fire should already know how to get somewhere he has been before. Gray Fire apologizes, and Sees Behind Trees realizes that the rhythm of the sound matches Gray Fire’s limp. He tells Gray Fire to stop walking, and the sound becomes clear. They find a path through some trees, and Gray Fire exclaims that they have found the beautiful place. Sees Behind Trees opens his eyes and can see clearly, spotting details far away from him in the trees and water.
Gray Fire runs forward down a ledge, and Sees Behind Trees notices a stone man down below in the water. Gray Fire sprints to it and disappears. Sees Behind Trees calls out for him, but Gray Fire does not respond. For a moment, Sees Behind Trees considers staying in place, enjoying his clear vision and the vibrancy of the place, but he recalls his mother, his father, and Brings the Deer, which shocks him back to reality. Sees Behind Trees’ vision returns to normal, and he starts the arduous process of climbing down the ledge, calling after Gray Fire. When Sees Behind Trees gets down to the water, he finds Gray Fire’s moccasins and wades to the statue of a man. He feels the statue’s smiling face and counts five toes on each of the statue’s feet.
Chapter 8 Summary
Sees Behind Trees laments that he is lost without Gray Fire, having trusted him to lead them to and from the beautiful place. Nevertheless, Sees Behind Trees wades back to the ledge and climbs it, trusting his body to navigate it. At the top, he throws Gray Fire’s moccasins, choosing to go in the direction that sounds like forest. He wanders the forest, stopping periodically to listen for changes or signs of home. Hearing a cry, Sees Behind Trees follows the sound, calling out for Karna and Pitew. There is a smell like smoke, and Sees Behind Trees finds Karna and Pitew’s camp burned. Listening with an ear to the ground, Sees Behind Trees finds Checha behind the camp, takes him, and feeds him jerky.
With Checha in hand, Sees Behind Trees trusts his body to navigate the forest. At night, Sees Behind Trees makes a fire and promises Checha that they will find his parents. The next day, he remembers how Gray Fire used the moss on trees to tell his direction, and they sleep by a river. Sees Behind Trees dreams of the beautiful place and knows that he is not bound to it the way Gray Fire was. Eventually, they reach the pond where Diver lost her needle.
Chapter 9 Summary
When Sees Behind Trees returns, he encounters the weroance, who is crying. Sees Behind Trees explains how he and Gray Fire found the beautiful place and recounts how Gray Fire ran past him. The weroance tells Sees Behind Trees the truth of what happened to Gray Fire’s foot. As children, she and Gray Fire were close, and they understood each other perfectly. They were never alone because they had each other. The weroance excelled in hunting, while Gray Fire excelled in painting and thinking. When Gray Fire became the fastest runner, the weroance was suddenly alone. She found the beautiful place first and set a trap for Gray Fire in the water. She knew that Gray Fire would fall for the trap; she expected that she would save him and that he would stay with her out of gratitude. She did not anticipate that Gray Fire would cut off his toes to escape her trap, and she says that the best parts of him were left in the beautiful place.
Sees Behind Trees hands Checha to the weroance, despite her protests, and calls her Otter. Everyone in the community wants to know what happened on Sees Behind Trees’s journey with Gray Fire, but Sees Behind Trees will not even tell Three Chances or Brings the Deer. Eventually, he will tell them about the parts of the journey that he understood, like encountering Karna and Pitew, finding the beautiful place, and rescuing Cecha, but Sees Behind Trees plans to tell the full story only to Checha. Sees Behind Trees’s parents adopt Checha and rename him Acorn, and Sees Behind Trees plans to one day search for Karna and Pitew with Acorn.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
Chapters 7, 8, and 9 form distinct sections of Sees Behind Trees’ journey, each with its own message. Chapter 7 is the narrative climax but also stands out as the most ambiguous part of the novel since the magic of the beautiful place and Gray Fire’s disappearance depart from the novel’s otherwise realistic setting and tone. When Sees Behind Trees enters the place, he suddenly experiences perfect eyesight, noting, “There was so much to know, to drink in! Trees had tops! The water had a far bank! Clouds! That’s how they were shaped: white with edges!” (79). The moment is not explained, but it highlights the temptation of the beautiful place as a symbol of ultimate desire. Sees Behind Trees once claimed that his one wish was to see like everyone else, and the place offers this ability to him. However, Sees Behind Trees accomplishes what Gray Fire could not by resisting the temptation to remain in the same place forever. This marks not only his acceptance of his disability (developing the theme of The Importance of Embracing People with Disabilities) but also his broader maturation. Unlike Gray Fire, he does not remain “stuck” in childhood dreams but instead returns to the real world, a world that is based on his relationships with other people. In the quest-like structure of the book’s later chapters, the episode thus functions as a trial of Sees Behind Trees’s Maturity Achieved Through Responsibility and Empathy.
Gray Fire’s ultimate end is another mystery associated with the beautiful place. Sees Behind Trees describes his disappearance as follows: “He flew, he matched the water with his speed, he passed over it like a skipping stone. He got closer to the dark shape and the two of them blurred together, the white with the black” (81). This description implies that Gray Fire merges with the statue, returning to the state of bliss he experienced when he first encountered the beautiful place. Sees Behind Trees’s discovery that the statue is smiling and has all 10 toes lends further support to this interpretation. The statue’s appearance implies that Gray Fire, in returning to the beautiful place, recovered his past energy and contentment, magically passing beyond the physical realm to live forever in the place of his greatest experience.
Chapter 8 contrasts Chapter 7 starkly, returning Sees Behind Trees to the reality of being lost in the forest far from home and demanding that he draw on all that he has learned across the novel to survive. He is alone but has a final gift from Gray Fire: the moccasins that Sees Behind Trees uses to navigate out of the beautiful place. Sees Behind Trees thus uses an object symbolic of journeys (shoes) to complete his own, but not in the way one would expect (i.e., by wearing them); he thus reaffirms his ability to think in ways that others do not. Nevertheless, the journey is still a difficult one. Sees Behind Trees stumbles frequently, getting scratched and bruised by the forest as he struggles to navigate using Gray Fire’s method of letting his body guide him. When Sees Behind Trees finds Karna and Pitew’s camp, it is a “black smudge” that “turned into a charred mass of birch poles” (88). The destruction of the camp reminds Sees Behind Trees, and the reader, of the dangers of wandering into the wilderness. Sees Behind Trees suspects the unidentified threat from the south, and he no longer has Gray Fire, Karna, or Pitew to help him. The lack of adult supervision emphasizes that Sees Behind Trees is the adult in this situation, which is further highlighted when he finds Checha.
Demonstrating maturity as well as a commitment to Mentorship and Intergenerational Learning, Sees Behind Trees resolves to bring Checha home with him. He uses the method of feeding Checha that he saw Karna do, consoling Checha by saying, “What a smart boy […] What a brave big boy you are” (91). Though Sees Behind Trees is talking to Checha, he is also talking to himself, comforting himself in a trying situation by emphasizing his bravery and intelligence. Most importantly, Sees Behind Trees holds on to Gray Fire’s teaching, noting, “[W]hen I lost hope, his words echoed in my memory” (91). Even though Sees Behind Trees struggled to understand Gray Fire’s lesson in the moment, he pulls from Gray Fire’s words and actions, and he manages to return to his community with Checha, completing his journey into adulthood.
The novel’s denouement and conclusion in Chapter 9 involve the revelation that Otter tricked Gray Fire, ultimately highlighting that the past is not something to dwell on. Because Gray Fire could not overcome his obsession with the beautiful place, he could not grow and develop as a person. Similarly, Otter has been frozen in time because of the guilt she feels for hurting her brother, and knowing that he is finally at rest in the beautiful place allows her to start moving forward in her life. The ending is ambiguous in that it lets the reader predict what will happen to Sees Behind Trees and Checha, now Acorn, but Dorris ends the novel with their plan to one day search for Karna and Pitew. This conclusion sets up the continued pattern of intergenerational learning, now with Sees Behind Trees as the adult and mentor and Acorn as his mentee.
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