Jeremiah visits his burned cabin

The cabin sits in a natural pass location that migratory animals would have to use between seasons (its location and benefits are described in the movie); migratory humans following the animals would find themselves revisiting locations they had hunted and trapped seasons before. Johnson's return to his cabin is thus more natural consequence than personal choice. It appears he gazes at what might be the charred remains of his loved ones, but we are denied the dubious pleasure of seeing what he sees; as one young Japanese girl bitterly observes in her own thread, it just isn't that kind of movie.

As for the rest, boinking, butchering, and hollering aside, the film establishes that Johnson decides to be a mountain man to escape the bustle and noise of his angry, restless society... and immediately has his life saved, first by a corpse with a high-caliber rifle, then by a half-crazy bear-killing senior citizen. In Chris Lapp's words, Johnson is attempting to 'cheat the mountain'. The point made by the film is that he finds himself in a new society, whose rules and interactions he must learn if he is to survive, and a potent, though often missed, message of this film is that we all need each other to survive, no matter what color we may be, what language we may speak, or whose altars before which we bleat and dance. So much for action films, which for the most part offer none of this.