How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.[Part].Section.Paragraph)
Quote #7
[…] the elevation of the [snake's] head did not change as it began to glide away from him, moving erect yet off the perpendicular as if the head and that elevated third were complete and all: […] he put the other foot down at last and didn't know it, standing with one hand raised as Sam had stood that afternoon six years ago when Sam led him into the wilderness and showed him and he ceased to be a child, speaking the old tongue which Sam had spoken that day without premeditation either: "Chief," he said: "Grandfather." (5.5.26)
Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes? Isaac might or might not have seen: a snake, the spirit of Sam, or the same spirit that Sam had shown him in the shape of a buck. The narrator doesn't clarify this for us. What's clear, though, is that Isaac's internalized Sam's belief that animals can be spirits of the ancients.
Quote #8
"He put them both here: man, and the game he would follow and kill, foreknowing it. I believe he said, 'So be it.' He even foreknew the end. But He said, 'I will give him his chance. I will give him forewarning and knowledge too, along with the desire to follow and the power to slay.'" (6.61)
Here's the question of "free will" vs. predestination: Even though God knew what would happen, he put animals in the world and left it up to man to decide whether to hunt and kill them. But he also gave him the knowledge that there might be consequences. Man will decide on his own whether it's right to kill animals.
Quote #9
He seemed to see the two of them--himself and the wilderness--as coevals [...] the two spans running out together, not toward oblivion, nothingness, but into a dimension free of both time and space where once more the untreed land warped and wrung to mathematical squares of rank cotton for the frantic old-world people to turn into shells to shoot at one another, would find ample room for both--the names, the faces of the old men he had known and loved and for a little while outlived, moving again among the shades of tall unaxed trees and sightless brakes where the wild strong immortal game ran forever before the tireless belling immortal hounds, falling and rising phoenix-like to the soundless guns. (6.66)
As an old man contemplating death and the afterlife, Isaac expresses another Native American belief: that heaven is a place of natural beauty where men can hunt and game is plentiful.