The Prologue takes place outside the timeline of the story. The narrator describes the hotness of early August and how such days lead people to act differently than they normally do. The narrator explains three unrelated events: Mae Tuck meeting her sons, Winnie Foster thinking about running away from home, and a strange man standing outside Winnie’s house. The narrator compares these events to a wheel with a central hub, adding that “things can come together in strange ways” and that people sometimes don’t realize these connections until it is too late (5).

Chapter 1 begins by describing a winding road that passes around a forbidding wood and the village of Treegap, where Winnie Foster lives with her family. Though the wood belongs to the Fosters, Winnie has never been there or even been curious about it. The only creatures of consequence who’ve gone near the wood are cows, who, with some otherworldly wisdom, passed around it instead of through it. They avoided the ash tree in the wood’s center and the partially concealed spring at the tree’s roots, which the narrator says is a very good thing. If people discovered