Pax, Journey Home

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and animal death.

“Lately he’d felt strangely guilty, as if she wanted something from him and he’d been failing her.”

Throughout the book, Peter searches for closure over the deaths of his parents. While he feels like he failed his father at being “a man,” how he feels he failed his mother is harder to articulate. Only at the end of the novel, when he puts down the gun and does the right thing for himself, not for anyone else, does he feel like she would have been proud.

“That’s right. But also so that you would know your home. In your hands, in your back and heart. You are in this cabin and this cabin is in you.”

Unlike foxes, who move from home to home, humans build homes and lives around them. In this case, Vola praises Peter for his craftsmanship on the cabin, encouraging him to take pride in building the place where he will hopefully spend the next several years of his life. The repetition of “in your hands, in your back […] in this cabin […] in you” emphasizes the power of the concept of home and how Vola understands how deeply Peter needs one.

“Secretly, Peter had named her Echo. Not just because she copied everything her brother said or did, and not just because she was a smaller version of him […] but because she was also fainter. As if she weren’t quite there. As if this whole life thing was a toss-up for her, except for how much she adored Ben.”

The relationship that Ben’s younger sister, Astrid, has with him foreshadows a parallel relationship between Pax and his daughter. Astrid looks up to Ben and follows him around the same way that the little vixen does with Pax, and both Ben and Pax fear losing their family members.