What interests him is the training itself. And now it’s what interests Ann. She watches this training as if she is learning something about their marriage. When she sees him teach a lesson to a dog, pushing its snout down hard into the feathers and blood of a hen it killed, and then into the freshly dug soil under the chicken fence, she sees that he does it with love. Love and disappointment and a sense of duty to teach it something for its own good, as if the only way the dog will remember its mistakes is if those mistakes have a texture and a smell and taste. It isn’t punishment, exactly; it’s a way to remember. It’s as if he now acts upon what he’s always felt, that there is a language barrier between him and Ann that can be broken only with...
-- Narrator (Ann's thoughts) (chapter 2004)