The wilderness of The Orchard Keeper is chaotic and untamable. Caught out alone among this wilderness, the people of Red Branch develop ways of rationalizing and comprehending the world around them. The legend of “wampus cats,” for example, transmutes a fearsome natural predator (mountain lions) into a supernatural one while also holding out the possibility that such violent forces can be controlled: According to the woman who told Arthur the story, some people have mystical “vision” that allows them to see the cats. Other assertions of human control are more straightforward; hunting and trapping are acts of dominance that prove humans can bend nature to their will.

However, the wilderness continually thwarts human attempts to contain and control it. Modern human impositions on the natural world eventually succumb to it. The Green Fly Inn, for example, teeters precariously over a gorge in defiance of gravity. For all the memories and stories associated with the bar, its existence cannot be supported. Eventually, it falls and burns, and the human-made remnants become fossils—an “archeological phenomenon”—absorbed into the natural world. Nature thwarts humans through destruction, slowly rotting Kenneth’s body in the pit or turning the orchard fruits inedible.