Out Stealing Horses

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses Nazi persecution of Jewish people and the accidental death of a child.

Birds appear as a motif throughout the novel and connect with all of its key themes. They also represent the power of memory and the fragility of life. In the novel’s first paragraph, Trond sits at his window watching small titmice bang against the glass and thinking, “I don’t know what they want that I have” (5). Often Finding a Sense of Place in Nature, Trond has even put a bird table out so that he can observe them each morning. However, he often puts barriers around himself. As with the titmice on this morning, he has memories that are trying to break through those barriers.

Birds are present in his memory of the pivotal scene the morning after Odd’s death, when Trond and Jon go “out stealing horses” and then climb a large birch, where Jon shows him a nest of goldcrests. Trond is awed that “something so little can come alive and just fly away” (32), and his inability to comprehend Jon’s actions when he grinds the entire nest into dust suggests a kind of innocence; readers later learn that Jon no longer has the luxury of such innocence, having discovered the fragility of life through the accident that killed Odd.