Deanna, the daughter of Zebulon farmer Ray Dean Wolfe, was born and raised in Zebulon before marrying her college professor and teaching middle school in the city. Finding herself unsuited for either marriage or city life, she attended graduate school in wildlife biology and returned to Zebulon to work as a forest ranger. When the novel begins, 48-year-old Deanna has lived alone on Zebulon Mountain for two years.

Kingsolver paints Deanna as a wild, predator-like woman who’s spent so long alone, she’s developed “a blind person’s indifference to the look on her own face” (2). Strong and muscular, Deanna has a “long-legged gait too fast for companionship” (2) and a “wild mane” (54) of hair she’s never learned to tame. Her mother died when she was very young, and Deanna, lacking traditional female guidance, considers femininity as “some witch trial she was preordained to fail” (14). Deanna’s strength and lack of traditional femininity has scared many men away, including her former husband, but young hunter Eddie Bondo is actually drawn to Deanna’s fierce nature. Kingsolver frames Deanna as a predator and Eddie her prey, a role Deanna herself embraces: “‘My last name [is] Wolfe,’” she tells Eddie, and as a kid, Deanna “sure as heck wanted Wile E.