The Underneath

The unnamed calico cat begins the story as a neglected soul; her human owners have left her on the side of the road. Lost and devastated, she wanders through the woods. She hears the baying of a hound; it’s a sound of loneliness and sadness that resonates with her because she understands it. She follows its sound and finds Ranger, chained to the shack in the woods. She joins him in the Underneath, and they become family to one another.

The cat gives birth to kittens, Sabine and Puck. When Gar Face is out or sleeping, the cat sneaks out from the Underneath to hunt for small animals and insects to feed her kittens and to supplement Ranger’s food since Gar Face often neglects to feed him. Tragically, the cat is grabbed by Gar Face when she tries to save Puck from Gar Face. He ties both cats in a sack and throws it into the creek; the cat manages to scratch the sack open to free Puck, but she becomes tangled in the string and drowns.

Both the cat and Ranger speak to the terrible treatment of animals at the hands of some humans; they illustrate humans’ responsibilities to animals and to the natural world.

The calico cat’s kittens are Sabine and Puck. Sabine, a girl kitten, is named for a beautiful river that Ranger saw as a puppy, while Puck, a boy kitten, is named for his cheeky and puckish ways. The kittens have a joyful life in the Underneath as young kittens, despite their proximity to the terrifying and cruel Gar Face. They play among the detritus under the house, like old boots and crates, and Ranger and their mother love the kittens fiercely.

Tragically, the kittens are separated when Gar Face grabs Puck, who ventures out into the Open despite being warned not to. Puck survives Gar Face’s attempt to drown him with his mother’s help but becomes trapped on the far side of the creek. Meanwhile, Sabine learns to hunt to feed herself and to supplement Ranger’s food. Puck, too, must learn to fend for himself. Sabine bravely and lovingly curls up with Ranger when Gar Face ties him up at the edge of the bayou as bait for the Alligator King.

The kittens are reunited at the novel’s climax; Puck is able to cross the creek when a tree falls across it. He follows a trail of blood from the shack in the woods to find Ranger and Sabine curled up by the bayou. Heroically, Puck jumps onto Gar Face’s face and scratches him when Gar Face tries to shoot Sabine. This saves Sabine’s life and attracts the attention of the Alligator King, who eats Gar Face when he goes to wash his bloody face in the river. Like Ranger, the kittens—who epitomize love and loyalty to one another and to Ranger—find poetic justice: As the novel closes, the three live happily together as a family in the woods, far from the dangers of humans and the bayous.

The cruel man named Gar Face lives in a run-down shack in the forest by the Tartine Bayou. As a young boy, he delighted in tortuously killing animals; he watched a rat starve in a crab pot and poisoned his mother’s bird bath, laughing as she held her beloved bird after it died. He was further immersed in violence and hatred when his father savagely beat him, after which he was known as Gar Face; his deformed face looks like a Gar Fish.

As an adult, Gar Face drinks all night by himself at a tavern in the woods. He sleeps most of the day and then goes out to hunt. He sells the pelts of the animals that he kills at the tavern. One evening, while poling in his boat on the Tartine Bayou, Gar Face sees a hundred-foot alligator—the Alligator King—which he longs to capture and kill. He imagines that the men in the tavern, who malign him for his deformed features, would respect a man who produced a 100-foot alligator skin; he yearns to be known as the best hunter and trapper in the forest.

Gar Face’s cruelty and arrogance is his downfall. He beats Ranger and tries to shoot Sabine, causing Puck to leap onto his face. Gar Face’s bloody wounds attract the alligator, who knew that the human trying to hunt him would eventually make a stupid mistake. His death at the hands of an animal seems just in light of his constant and hyperbolic cruelty to them; his being pulled into the bayou by the Alligator King is poetic justice.

A lamia, an ancient, mythological being that is imbued with the blood of both a woman and a serpent, Grandmother Moccasin once had a human lover and assumed her human form, but this lover betrayed her. She spent centuries in the ocean until she arrived in the bayou, where the other snakes—especially the moccasin snakes, the most dangerous snakes in the forest—welcomed her as their sister, or grandmother.

Grandmother is lonely until another lamia, a younger serpent called Night Song for the beautiful tune she sings each night, finds her. These are the happiest days of Grandmother’s life, spent with her beloved daughter, hunting and napping and swimming in the bayous of the forest. However, Night Song falls in love with Hawk Man; each takes their human form, and Night Song leaves her life with Grandmother. Night Song and Hawk Man live with the Caddo, an Indigenous group of people who live by the creek. They have a daughter together, whom they love dearly. Ten years later, Grandmother, feeling wrathful and devastated, tricks Night Song into assuming her serpent form again by not telling Night Song that she can’t return to her human form again until it’s too late. Night Song fades away and dies of grief. Hawk Man captures Grandmother and buries her in a jar in the earth, above which an immense pine tree grows. Grandmother is trapped there for 1,000 years, until the pine tree is hit by lightning and finally gives way 25 years later.

Grandmother dies after a rogue bullet from Gar Face’s gun hits her, but before her death, she considers eating Puck. However, she then sees the love of the family of Ranger, Sabine, and Puck. She reflects that sorrow was the price she, Night Song, Hawk Man, and their daughter paid for her own scheming, and she decides instead to break Ranger’s chain with her sharp jaws, freeing him.

This decision—to choose love over hate—demonstrates Grandmother’s evolution as a character. For most of the story she’s characterized as a bitter and vengeful antagonist, but at the end of the story she proves herself a dynamic character, opting to reform from wickedness and to prioritize and celebrate love. Her reward is to be reunited in her death with her granddaughter (Night Song and Hawk Man’s daughter), who has become a hummingbird and helps her transition to the world of the dead.