The woman in the story is never named, so she takes on the quality of an anonymous stand-in for women everywhere. She leaves her home because she longs for more than it has turned out to be. When she married, she was sure that she was going to live an adventurous life with her husband, but that adventure has eluded her. She has settled into being a wife who never leaves her home without supervision, privy only to the company her husband allows and invites. Her life begins to feel dead and meaningless:

The great, sundried dead church, the dead portales, the hopeless covered market-place, where, the first time she went, she saw a dead dog lying between the meat stalls and the vegetable array, stretched out as if for ever, nobody troubling to throw it away. Deadness within deadness.

The woman leaves in a quest for the adventure she never received in her marriage. She isn’t quite sure what she’s looking for when she leaves, but she leaves nonetheless, without even turning to wave goodbye to her ten-year-old son.

The Chilchui people are dissatisfied, as well. They feel that white men and women have upset the natural order of their universe, and they look to the woman as a sacrifice to right this imbalance. In their dissatisfaction, they fail to even recognize the humanity of the woman:

They never saw her as a personal woman: she could tell that. She was some mystic object to them, some vehicle of passions too remote for her to grasp.

All of this dissatisfaction ultimately culminates in the woman’s death.

In the beginning, the woman exerts free will in her escape from her monotonous life with her husband. There is at first a sense of the grand adventure she has always longed for as she camps beneath the stars and finds her own way along remote paths. She seems strong and confident in early passages:

Curiously she was not afraid, although it was a frightening country, the silent, fatal-seeming mountain-slopes, the occasional distant, suspicious, elusive natives among the trees, the great carrion birds occasionally hovering, like great flies, in the distance.

When the Chilchui people show up on her path, the woman’s characterization changes. It is repeated over and over in the story that she knows that she is going to die. Interestingly, she never fights against this idea: she freely submits to it. She knows that this meeting will end in her death, and she never once tries to escape. Even as they are preparing her for sacrifice, she makes a conscious decision to allow it to be done:

She knew she was a victim; that all this elaborate work upon her was the work of victimising her. But she did not mind. She wanted it.

Although the choices the woman makes are startling and chilling, they nonetheless reflect a free will in her ongoing conscious decisions to allow it all to happen, evident in the third-person limited narration provided throughout the story.

It is unclear exactly why the woman never fights or argues with the men who seek to take her life. Perhaps she sees her sacrifice as a redemptive offering for the life she intended to live. Perhaps she seeks to redeem the broken relationships between these Indigenous people and the white culture with which they clash. Either way, she is aware that she will die, and it becomes increasingly clear over time that she will be a sacrifice to the Chilchui gods. She is emotionless about the end of her life, about the children she...