Where the Crawdads Sing

Kya knows that Chase may only be interested in her as a sexual conquest, but her own desire for connection and physical contact overwhelms these reservations. When they meet for the picnic, Chase is a little thrown off that Kya, whom he thinks of as the illiterate Marsh Girl, knows the Latin names of wildlife they encounter. He finds her beautiful and plays his harmonica for her.

Chase aggressively moves on her later, pulling down her top and pushing between her legs. Kya doesn’t know about human sex rituals, but she has seen animals mate and read biology books about reproduction. As she considers the elaborate rituals of male birds wooing the females, she concludes that Chase’s approach is crude and too fast. She reminds herself that the “[o]nly time male mammals hover is when they’re in the rut” (161). She runs away regretting that her fantasy of connecting with someone devolved into the semi-violent reality of “a taking, not a sharing or giving” (162).

Ten days later, Kya runs into Chase. He apologizes and convinces her to meet with him in an abandoned fire tower in the swamp; he tells her they can look down and see the marsh for miles around from there. She gives him a shell necklace and readily agrees to take him back to her shack, which no one else has entered since Tate.

Chase is impressed by her ability to live in such primitive conditions. He apologizes again. When she asks what his aims are, he explains that he just wants to be around her because she is so wild and attractive. Despite himself, he is “intrigued by her self-reliance as well as her beauty” (169). He asks her permission to come again, and with hope in her heart, she agrees to let him.

During her interview with the sheriff and deputy, Patti Love tells the men that a shell necklace that Chase wore all the time is missing. It was not on his body and is not in their house. She reluctantly tells the sheriff that Chase was dating the Marsh Girl but broke it off when he married Pearl. Patti Love’s theory is that Kya was so angry that she killed him out of revenge and then took the necklace.

After talking about the implausibility of a woman being strong enough to push a man down the fire tower, the two lawmen conclude that they will have to follow up the story because it is their only lead. They see the marsh as a lawless place and marsh people as being capable of covering their tracks, so they do see Kya as a possible suspect. They don’t find the shell necklace after re-searching the crime scene. When they go to Kya’s shack to question her, she is gone, but they suspect she is nearby. They plan to come back with a warrant.

As his relationship with Kya progresses, Chase enjoys Kya’s deep knowledge of the marsh but dismisses how careful she is of the wildlife there. He laughs at her when she tells him that she is creating color drawings of grass flowers. That same afternoon, Kya runs into Tate collecting water samples in the lagoon and thinks of him as her first love. She feels a little wistful.

A few days later, Tate finally gets up the courage to go see Kya. He has been away for four years, and has planned out his whole life: He will finish his doctorate, work in a research lab that is being built in Sea Oaks ten miles away, and marry Kya. His plans crumble when he sees Kya holding hands and picnicking with Chase, a man he knows dates many women. He feels a deep sense of regret and decides not to see her.

Chases disappears for a few days, so Kya goes to Sea Oaks, where no one knows her as the Marsh Girl, and gets a library card. She checks out the college- and professional-level texts Tate recommended to further her education. In them, she discovers important biological concepts. The most interesting one she learns about is the strategy of the “sneaky fuckers” (183). These are low-status, biologically inferior males who use “pretense and false signals” (183) to mate with females while more superior males are distracted. Kya connects this idea to Ma’s advice to ignore “[u]nworthy boys” in old pickup trucks with loud radios, especially when they “make a lot of noise” (183). As she reads, Kya realizes that nature uses every kind of strategy to ensure that life continues, a depressing fact that Kya hopes doesn’t apply to humans.

It is starting to become clear that Chase may well be unworthy. He refuses to introduce Kya to his friends and begins to pressure her for sex. They have conversations that show that Kya is much smarter than Chase, who seems mostly concerned with mundane things. Even worse, Chase’s parents snub Kya when they bump into her in town. She asks Chase later that night when she will be able to meet them and if they know the couple is dating. He blows off her concerns by saying it will all work out. They still don’t have sex, but boatmen around town begin to gossip as they see the couple making out in the marshlands.

Kya and Chase have now been dating for a year, and when he offhandedly implies the two of them will be married, she takes this as a proposal even though Chase still has not told his parents about Kya. Everything changes when Kya agrees to go on a trip to Asheville with Chase. They stay in a cheap motel on Hog Mountain Road where they have unpleasant sex. It is over quickly because Chase in not a particularly skilled lover, and he does nothing to reassure Kya about the experience other than to tell her that it will hurt her less in the future.

When they get back, Chase tells her he won’t be around much since Christmas is coming. He also refuses to invite Kya to visit his family for Christmas, supposedly because he thinks she will be uncomfortable around people in town. Chase completely disappears for many days, devastating Kya, who feels that she has been abandoned again.

Tate shows up four days after Christmas, finally having worked up the courage to talk to Kya. He gives her a heart-felt apology, which she accepts out of a sense of obligation. Although Tate’s reunion with Kya goes poorly, he notices the detailed drawings of marsh life she has created. The drawings are publication-quality and would be a contribution to science because they detail the marsh in an unprecedented way. Tate takes some samples with him to show to a publisher. Chase finally shows up a week after Christmas, and Kya takes him back.

The deputy and the sheriff learn from Hal, a man who works on a local shrimping boat, that he and another man saw Kya leaving the bay on the night Chase was likely killed. Using this information, the sheriff decides to get a warrant so he can search her place for fabric matching the red fibers they found at the crime scene.

Chase and Kya continue to see each other over the winter. She goes into town one day and bumps into Chase and his group of friends. He introduces Kya to the women, but they are very cold toward her. Chase leaves with them, and Kya continues to the grocery store where she buys a newspaper. In it later that evening, she finds an engagement announcement for Chase and the woman she knows as “Alwayswearspearls,” Pearl Stone.

Kya is so angry that she heads out to the ocean where she nearly capsizes after being caught in a riptide. Although she is so hurt over Chase’s betrayal that she welcomes the possibility of the waves overwhelming her, she grows fearful. She finally makes it to a sandbar, where she reflects on how Chase manipulated her. He is a “sneaky fucker” just like the ones she read about in her textbooks. She uses the disposition of the seashells to figure out how to get to shore safely off the reef. When she makes it back home, she recites an Amanda Hamilton poem about the loneliness of the moon. Nature, she concludes, is “the only stone that would not slip midstream” (215).