In "The Third Remove," Mary Rowlandson thinks of all the time she used to waste before her capture, and concludes that it would be a righteous act for God to end her life and cast her out of his sight forever:

Yet the Lord still showed mercy to me, and upheld me; and as He wounded me with one hand, so he healed me with the other.

In fact, the order of events in "The Third Remove" is the reverse of this: it begins with hope and healing, and ends with tragedy. First, she meets Robert Pepper, a man who has been with the Indians for some time. He comforts her and shows her how to dress her wounds with oak leaves, which helps them to heal.

Nine days after she was first wounded, however, on February 18, 1685, Mary Rowlandson's baby died. Both of them had been starved for days, having had nothing but a little cold water, and it had been clear to her some time that the child was near death. This bereavement changed the author permanently in various ways. She records that she had never before been able to endure being in the same room as a dead person, but that she lay down side by side with her dead child all that night. The Indians buried the child, whom Rowlandson was forced to leave there "in the wilderness."