This part of the novel is told using the first person plural voice to represent the population of a small, unnamed town.

In April 1908, two trains collide on a railway. The survivors are a pair of young boys whose parents are surmised to have died in the crash, though the boys are believed to be unrelated. They are kept together while waiting for family members to collect them. The boys, suffering from memory loss, are given new names: Harris and Everett. The boys frequently escape to the vacant woodlot of a woman named Fiona Craig. The town asks Mrs. Craig to let the boys stay on her lot.

Fiona Craig’s husband, James, is a physician who contracts consumption (now called tuberculosis) during his studies of its spread among the poor. He suggests migrating from Scotland to Canada to relieve his symptoms amid the country’s abundant forestry.

Fiona and James build a home in the Canadian countryside, though James dies of his illness soon after. Fiona is so stricken with grief that she becomes reclusive, causing the local children to become frightened of her. When Everett and Harris are brought to her, she bars them from ever entering her house.