Where It All Goes Down
The scrub forest of Florida in the 1800s, right after the Civil War
The Yearling is one of those books where the setting is kind of a big deal. It's not like Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was sitting at her desk, thinking, "Hmm, where and when should this story take place? Antarctica in the 40th century? No. New York City today? Nah. Oh, I don't know, how about the scrub forest of Florida in the 1800s, right after the Civil War? Yeah, sure, why not?" The Yearling couldn't be The Yearling if it had a different setting—the story and its characters are completely a product of its location and time period. Let's look at them piece by piece:
Florida, Where the Sawgrass Meets the Sky
Everything in the book, from the detailed descriptions of nature, to the dialect spoken by the characters, is unique to the scrub forest of Florida at that time. And because it's so specifically placed there, it's that more realistic to us as readers and helps bring us into the hard lives of the Baxter family.
An Island Paradise
So that's the deal with the macro setting. The micro setting is where things get really interesting. The Baxters live in a little clearing in the forest, called Baxter's Island. Jody is constantly contrasting its safety with the dangers of the rest of the forest: "Out in the scrub, the war waged ceaselessly. The bears and wolves and panthers and wild-cats all preyed on the deer. […] But the clearing was safe. Penny kept it so. […] It was a fortress in the scrub" (14.43-44).
What this description tells us is (1) Jody loves and trusts his father, and (2) the world is scary, and eventually Jody is going to have to confront the big, scary world and take on the responsibility of keeping his island safe. As Jody matures from one April to the next, though, he sees this safety violated time and again, and must venture out into the wild scrub to face the dangers there. The more he grows, the more his view of nature changes, from a lush, gorgeous wonderland to play in, to a harsh, frightening, even murderous force to be reckoned with.