How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.[Part].Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"I done taught you all there is of this settled country," Sam said. "You can hunt it good as I can now. You are ready for the Big Bottom now, for bear and deer. Hunter's meat," he said. "Next year you will be ten. You will write your age in two numbers and you will be ready to become a man. Your pa [...] promised you can go with us then." (4.1.24)
Becoming a man requires venturing out of the settled country into unsettled wilderness (and eating bear and deer meat, of course). Isaac has learned how to hunt on settled land, but only in the wilderness can you become a man.
Quote #2
It was only the boy who returned, returning solitary and alone to the settled familiar land, to follow for eleven months the childish business of rabbits and such while he waited to go back, having brought with him, even from his brief sojourn, an unforgettable sense of the big woods--not a quality dangerous or particularly inimical, but profound, sentient, gigantic and brooding, amid which he had been permitted to go to and fro at will, unscathed, why he knew not, but dwarfed and, until he had drawn honorably blood worthy of being drawn, alien. (4.1.29)
This is our first glimpse of Isaac's awe for the wilderness and the sense that he wants to be part of something bigger than himself. We can see that this boy's gonna grow up to have some pretty big ideas.
Quote #3
He had already relinquished, of his will, because of his need, in humility and peace and without regret yet apparently that had not been enough, the leaving of the gun was not enough. He stood for a moment--a child, alien and lost in the green and soaring gloom of the markless wilderness. Then he relinquished completely to it. It was the watch and the compass. He was still tainted. He removed the linked chain of the one and the looped thong of the other from his overalls and hung them on a bush and leaned the stick beside them and entered it. (5.1.39)
Isaac realizes in this scene that any man-made tool (even a stick) "taints" him. If he is to have a real encounter with wilderness, which the bear symbolizes, he must let go of everything that marks him as being civilized and therefore not a part of the wilderness. The watch and compass foreshadow the later, more destructive, technologies that drive a wedge between man and nature.