probably hoped that she was making the right choices.

In the first paragraph, the narrator's reference that 'She has never lost her balance or bumped into a closet door left carelessly open' foreshadows the exactness of Anna's technique when she dramatically rescued the narrator.

Further examples are found in the earlier paragraphs, such as in the following quote from paragraph two:

...I hear the crackle, catch a whiff of smoke from the stove downstairs and suddenly the room goes dark, the stitches burn beneath my fingers, and I am sewing with a needle of hot silver, a thread of fire.

In this sentence, the narrator foreshadows not only the fire in the tent but also Anna clutching onto a heavily braided wire which was still hot from the lightning strike. The reference to Anna and her husband's kiss foreshadows the kiss that she gives her daughter after she saves her. More pertinent, though, is the fact that a newspaper article reported that the two artists' lips were 'destined never again to meet.' This clearly foreshadows Harry Avalon's untimely demise.

The repeated references to the capricious weather also foreshadow future negative events such as the conflagration in the tent, Harry Avalon's death, Anna's injury and the loss of her baby, and the fire at the end of the story. Bad weather is, more often than not, used as an omen for some future ill.

One could add that the blindfold used in the trapeze act also suggests Anna's eventual blindness. Finally, the narrator's statement that, 'Her palms were burned so terribly that once healed they bore no lines, only the blank scar tissue of a quieter future' is clearly suggestive of the quiet life that Anna would later lead in that 'she shows so little of the drama or flair one might expect from a performer.'

Some elements of foreshadowing in "The Leap" by Louise Erdrich are as follows. The Avalon trapeze act foreshadows the later window rescue of the narrator as a little girl by her mother. The Avalon's blindfolded act foreshadows the mother's eventual blindness from cataracts. The dramatic weather changes in New England foreshadows the several sudden and dramatic changes that occur: the lightning strike, the second marriage, the fire and rescue.

When extremes of temperature collide, a hot and cold front, winds generate instantaneously behind a hill and crash upon you without warning. That, I think, was the likely situation on that day in June. People probably commented on the pleasant air....

The kiss in midair foreshadows the midair window rescue from the fire. The trapeze act foreshadows the leap to the roof's edge during the fire rescue. Finally, the title foreshadows the mother's choice at the lightning strike, the second marriage, and of course the fire rescue.

When her hands did not meet her husband's, my mother tore her blindfold away. As he swept past her on the wrong side, she could have grasped his ankle, ... she changed direction. Her body twisted toward a heavy wire and she managed to hang on....

The foreshadowing in "The Leap" starts early. Erdrich specifies that the mother is "the surviving half of a blindfold trapeze act," letting the reader know that the mother survives. It also implies that the trapeze background will be used in the story, which indeed it is. A page or so later, the narrator mentions smelling "smoke from the stove downstairs" and then moves into a flashback. That lets us know that fire is associated with an essential part of her past. This fact is clarified by the following line: "I owe her my existence three times," implying that the narrator was saved somehow. As far as the foreshadowing clues allowing a predication, no, actually. I noticed the foreshadowing but thought the clues were leading someplace stranger, not someplace directly tied to them.

Foreshadowing is a difficult thing to do well, because it should provide us with clues as to what will happen but forshadowing should be something that we are only aware of when the ending actually comes and we can see what has been foreshadowed and predicted. The mark of an excellent author then is one who is able to use foreshadowing but only make us aware of it at the end of the story, causing us to read back and look at these predictions again.

I must admit, when I first read this excellent story, this happened to me, and I was blind to how the author was using foreshadowing to indicate what was going to happen. Looking back at the story, my favourite piece of foreshadowing is the following:

My mother once said that I'd be amazed at how many things a person can do within the act of falling.

This of course foreshadows the narrator's own act of falling as she is saved by her mother at the end of the story. Therefore, I wasn't aware of these examples of foreshadowing until I had finished the story and so it didn't help me make any predictions.

In Paragraph 9, the narrator makes this statement: "My mother once said that I'd be amazed at how many things a person can do within the act of falling."

At that point, we already know that the mother survived the circus disaster that claimed the life of her then-husband, who fell to the ground from his trapeze. We know that the mother survived and didn’t fall.

So we wonder why she says that, as if she did have a great fall at some point.

We find out a little bit later. Check out the start of Paragraph 18, where the narrator begins to tell us about the time her house caught fire. She’s trapped upstairs where the firefighters can’t get to her, and it’s her mother who rescues her.

The mother climbs a ladder, and using a tree, makes a leap onto the roof next to her daughter’s window. With her daughter in tow, the mother then leaps off that roof onto the firefighters’ net. Both of those leaps gave her a chance to realize, as she says, that you can do (and think) a lot when you’re falling.

So, the narrator's statement foreshadows the part of the plot where the mother really does take a dangerous leap, even though it was her husband, not her, who took that first dangerous fall during the circus incident.

Foreshadowing is a literary device used to plant hints about events that will occur later in the plot. There are a number of excellent examples of foreshadowing in this story. The first comes at the end of the second paragraph, when the narrator tells us about how she imagines hearing a fire, that we later find out is a major part of her story:

I hear the crackle, catch a whiff of smoke from the stove downstairs, and suddenly the room goes dark, the stitches burn beneath my fingers, and I am sewing with a needle of hot silver, a thread of fire.

Such events clearly hint at a future revelation in the story of the narrator and her mother. Equally, the description of her agility and "catlike precision" and her skill also foreshadow the rescue of her daughter that she enacts during the fire. Note how the jump is described before the narrator's mother makes the leap:

From below, it looked as though even a squirrel would have had trouble jumping from the tree onto the house, for the breadth of that small branch was no bigger than my mother's wrist.

Of course, it is only someone with the skill and precision of the narrator's mother who is actually able to perform the leap, and what is more, do it in such a "matter-of-fact" manner.

In Louise Eldrich's "The Leap," the narrator describes how her now-blind mother so gracefully gets around in her home,

It has occurred to me that the catlike precision of her movements in old age might be the result of her early training, but she shows so little of the drama or flair one might expect from a performer.

Shortly, the narrator states, "I owe her my existence three times," and, of course, the reader wonders what might these three times be. Of course, in the exposition the narrator rather lengthily describes the trapeze act of The Flying Avalons, as her mother. Anna, and father, Harry Avalon were called.

Since the narrator, then, goes on to describe the first incident in which her life was saved as the strike of lightning which sent her father to his death while her mother hung desperately onto the fiery wires from the circus tent's pole that allowed Anna to survive and eventually give birth to the narrator, the reader anticipates the other two times of rescue that have been foreshadowed. As suggested by the first event, there is some sort of acrobatic act involved.

Anna performs in a blindfolded trapeze act with her husband Harry.  Part of this act requires her to take a "leap of faith" that her husband will be there to catch her and not let her fall in the act.  This leap of faith she must take with her husband (and a latter scene depicting a midair kiss) foreshadows a leap she has to take later on in the short story in order to save her daughter's life.  Their home catches on fire and Anna's daughter becomes trapped inside with seemingly no hope of rescue.  Anna, being the person that she is, finds a way and rescues her daughter from a window.