

Knight drops his backpack of stolen food and offers no resistance. Hughes apprehends Knight as he’s coming out of Pine Tree. As he gathers his gear to capture Knight, he alerts Diane Vance, a Maine State Trooper who has also been aware of the hermit for two decades. He’s woken by the alarm in the middle of the night. Terry Hughes, a Maine Game Warden who has known about Knight’s presence for nearly two decades, has had the alarm installed at Pine Tree Camp. When he opens the freezer at Pine Tree Camp, a recently installed alarm is triggered. He moves through the woods with incredible precision and skill, managing to leave no footprints and to dodge security lights. This is how he has survived for the past 27 years. He is near starvation after surviving the winter with what he stole the previous fall. The book opens with Knight, approximately 47 years old, leaving his campsite near the end of winter in 2013 to steal food from nearby cabins. He ranges from third person point of view to first person point of view to a third person omniscient point of view. Finkel shifts point of view depending on the perspective of the narrative. The book reads like an extended feature in simple yet compelling language. The book details the experience of Christopher Knight’s capture, how he survived and lived in the woods, and his life after his arrest.

In all that time, Knight had one verbal interaction with other people. He survived for 27 years through his ingenuity, discipline and material goods he has stolen from nearby cabins in over 1,000 burglaries. It describes the life of Christopher Knight who disappeared into the woods of Maine in 1986 at the age of 20. Michael Finkel’s non-fiction book is divided into 28 chapters.

The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit. The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Finkel, Michael.
