How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.[Part].Section.Paragraph)
Quote #4
[…] and not Sam: not held fast in earth but free in earth and not in earth but of earth, myriad yet undiffused of every myriad part, leaf and twig and particle, air and sun and rain and dew and night, acorn oak and leaf and acorn again, dark and dawn and dawn again in their immutable progression, and, being myriad, one […] (5.5.30)
This is the ultimate relationship of man and nature. Isaac visits the place where Sam's buried and realizes that Sam's body and spirit are part of nature now. It's all one thing. This is one of those "aha!" moments for Isaac.
Quote #5
But that time was gone now. Now they went in cars, driving faster and faster each year because the roads were better and they had farther and farther to drive, the territory in which game still existed drawing yearly inward as his life was drawing inward, until now he was the last of those who had once made the journey in wagons without feeling it and now those who accompanied him were the sons and even grandsons of the men who had ridden for twenty four hours in the sleet behind the steaming mules. (6.2)
This, as it turns out, is what Sam was trying to avert when teaching Isaac to hunt in a manner that respects nature. Over-hunting, logging, large-scale agriculture and industrialization have decimated the old wilderness in the South. They now have to drive far, and even then, the game is scarce.
Quote #6
The old man relaxed again. He watched, as he did each recurrent November while more than sixty of them passed, the land which he had seen change. At first there had been only the old towns along the River and the old towns along the hills, from each of which the planters with their gangs of slaves and then of hired laborers had wrested from the impenetrable jungle of water-standing cane and cypress, gum and holly and oak and ash, cotton patches which as the years passed became fields and then plantations. The paths made by deer and bear became roads and then highways, with towns in turn springing up along them... (6.22)
So the decimation of the wilderness has happened all within Isaac's lifetime, over just sixty years. Also, the idea that farmland had to be carved out of the wilderness is a strange notion for the younger generation who have inherited the settled land and have no conception of what it took for that land to be settled.