The person walking turns around and sees her footprints, they are bear tracks. She realizes unity with nature and she is home. Linda Hogan writes about man's constant need to conquer both women and nature, reminiscent of many writings we have read over the course of the semester. Her style incorporates historical facts to show how similar things are today compared to decades and centuries ago. Humans colonizing and conquering others have a propensity for this, for burning behind them what they cannot possess or control, as if their conflicts are not with themselves and their own way of being, but with the land itself.
Men see every living thing as something that can be used for their consumption.
Nothing has a simple aesthetic or healing value. They destroy what they cannot understand or what they cannot have. Even wilderness is seen as having value only as it enhances and serves our human lives, our human world. Although everything on this earth can be used to benefit us as human beings, we have to use these things responsibly, not to the point where we devastate ecosytems and cause the extinction of hundreds of animal populations. Hogan also points out that mother earth provides these things as gifts and we should be thankful instead of greedy.