64 pages • 2 hours read
Watt KeyTerror at Bottle Creek
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 27-32Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 27 Summary
Cort joins the girls in the tree, around 10 feet from the ground. He inspects his leg and finds a three-inch gash and worries about it getting infected. However, he prioritizes getting the girls comfortable, building a platform from branches, and padding it with his life vest. He tells Liza to chew up juniper berries to make a paste to smear on themselves to repel ants and thinks, “If it were any other girl but Liza with me, we’d be dead” (120).
Cort notices that the bear that passed them earlier is now up in the tree next to them. As he gathers more branches, a cottonmouth crawls over his arm and he slings it away in terror. He breaks the compass and uses the glass to sharpen the end of a stick to repel snakes. Down below, Rusty is joined by five smaller hogs, guarding the base of their tree. He gets a sense that his father is guiding him and reflects that he is “no more than the things he’d taught me” (122) before reflecting that he still feels abandoned.
Chapter 28 Summary
Cort uses his body to shelter the girls from the storm but eventually the weather clears and the stars are visible ahead. However, this is only the eye of the hurricane and it will become bad again. Francie names the bear in the neighboring tree Elmo and insists that Cort does something to make sure there are no snakes on that tree either. He edges along a branch and leans over with his sharpened stick, flicking away two snakes. However, as he does so he notices that the bear is sick and has probably already been bitten. He begins to realize that “there [are] snakes everywhere. And more [are] going to keep coming” (126).
Chapter 29 Summary
It is four o’clock in the morning, and the weather is getting worse. Cort tells them that, in two hours, the sun will come up and his father will come looking for them, although he can tell that Liza does not believe this white lie. Suddenly, she screams and kicks out her leg and Cort sees a cottonmouth hanging from her ankle. He hits it with the stick before using the broken glass to cut open the bite wounds and suck the poison from them. Anxiously, Liza asks what will happen to her, and Cort tries to tell her that he does not know, but she points out that he does.
Chapter 30 Summary
Cort saw a man bitten by a snake before. The man was a birdwatcher Cort and his father took out. The man ignored their advice and went off on foot, before running back screaming, complaining that he was bitten. Cort’s father got out a snakebite kit and offered to cut open the wound with a razor and suck out the venom, but the man rudely refused. Cort’s father called the sheriff to organize getting him to the hospital. The man survived, but his arm was amputated at the elbow.
Chapter 31 Summary
Cort reassures Liza that she will not die, but she will get sick and her leg will swell up badly. He flicks away several more snakes but knows there are more on the tree and more coming all the time. He also knows that if Francie gets bitten, or if Liza receives a second bite, they will die. He maintains a watch, keeping the snakes away as best he can. The sun comes up, and Cort can see deer and hogs through the rain. He looks at Liza’s foot and sees it is swollen and discolored. He thinks about cutting into her foot to relieve the pressure but realizes that would leave her even more vulnerable to infection. He then looks at his own wound; realizing that it is already infected, he wonders, “Just how many ways can there be to die in this place?” (139).
Chapter 32 Summary
Cort realizes that, even if they survive, Liza might have to have her leg amputated. He knows that this will affect her deeply but reflects that “it won’t change the way I feel about her. She’s the bravest person I know” (140). Down below, Rusty the hog starts charging around, killing snakes. He then charges the tree they are sitting in before sawing at it with his teeth. He appears to be rabid, and Cort suspects the hog has been bitten by a snake. He charges the tree in which Elmo the bear is sitting and kills one of the other hogs before running off into the bushes. Cort suspects it is a trap and drops a stick which Rusty immediately charges out and attacks. This convinces Cort that, some way or another, the animals on the mound are going to kill them and he has to go for help. He straps Liza and Francie to the tree with buckles from the life vests and prepares to leave the tree.
Chapters 27-32 Analysis
The escape into the tree serves as a moment for Cort and the girls to pause, creating space for Key to go deeper into the characters and their relationships. There is still a great deal of danger, from the hogs down below, the bear in the neighboring tree, and the advancing snakes, but it is slower-paced, allowing the characters to reflect. Here, we see added depths to Cort and Liza’s relationship. We learn that he likes her because she is strong and capable and at least used to this world, if not at home there. The depths of his feelings are even more obvious after Liza is bitten by a snake, and he decides that if she must have her leg amputated, he would still feel the same about her. In the harsh reality of their situation, and confronted with the real risk of losing her, Cort is forced to accept how much he loves Liza, something he was previously too shy to acknowledge.
We also gain insight into Cort’s awareness of himself and into his relationship with his father. As he draws on more and more of the knowledge, skills, and resourcefulness he learned from his father, Cort starts to think that his father is still guiding him despite being absent. This supports the theme of belonging because Cort is thinking of himself as only being made up of knowledge of the swamp that his father taught him, grounding and almost trapping him in that place and lifestyle. It also brings up the increased responsibility thrust upon Cort and the role of growing up to take on that responsibility. He is, after all, managing to rise to the challenge and keep the girls safe, taking a selfless responsibility for them that sees him risking himself and even using his own frozen, barely-dressed body to shelter them from the storm. However, he should still have the opportunity to rely on his father, and he feels understandably abandoned by his father’s failure to prioritize his responsibility to look after Cort.
The storm symbolically dies down while the children are in the tree, but it is only the eye of the hurricane: a brief moment of respite before things become even worse. The tension and pace begin to pick back up, reaching a peak when Liza is bitten and Cort is again forced to use the knowledge he has learned from his father, this time cutting open the wound and sucking out the poison. When Cort looks at Liza’s swollen foot and at his own infected cut, the reality becomes more and more undeniable, increasing the urgency of the situation along with the pacing of the story. Key adds to this by making the threat of Rusty more severe and immediate as the boar starts to act rabid and frenzied in response to a snake bite, attacking the tree and trying to trick them into coming down to the ground. Cort realizes that the tree, which seemed like a place of safety, an escape from the perils of the swamp, is actually just as dangerous. Cort finally accepts that he must go for help, beginning the final climax of the adventure.
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