Kindred: The River

Summary: 
The story starts on June 9, 1976, Dana's 26th birthday. Her husband, Kevin, and she are unpacking in their new home in Altadena. While she unpacks, Kevin becomes disheartened because he lost all of his ideas for a Christmas story while moving. As Dana pushes a box towards him, she becomes dizzy and nauseated. The room blurs before her eyes, changing from her little room to a huge forest.
Dana looks around to see that a small child is drowning in a river beside her. Instinctively, Dana dives into the water and drags the red headed boy to shore. A woman waiting near by is screaming beside her that he wasn't breathing. Dana remains calm and starts to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while the woman starts beating her. Eventually, Dana gets the woman under control and the boy breathing again. She learns that the boy's name is Rufus, which she considers ugly. However, she has no time to rest, a man is pointing a shot gun at her face.
Dana starts to feel dizzy again and finds herself kneeling in her own house again. Kevin is shocked to find her on the other side of the room. Once both he and Dana calm down, she tells Kevin about what happened to her. Kevin thinks she is insane because to him, she was gone for only a few seconds, while to Dana it was a few minutes. Dana is so freaked out, she is worried it will happen again.
Analysis:
This chapter introduces Dana to her first experience to time travel and familiarizes the readers with some of the major characters like Rufus and his mother and father.
Reaction:
I thought that it was interesting to note that Butler didn't use the words 'time travel' when talking about Dana's journey into the past. Usually when writers talk about time travel, it would usually do something like this:
Person 1: "I think I was just in the 1800's! I think I saw Napoleon!"
Person 2 (acting very astonished and unbelieving): "You mean like time travel? There is no way that happened. I'm going to come up with a reasonable explanation about why it can't happen: you were hallucinating."
Person 1: "I don't know it was very believable. I'm still going to be a skeptica-- whoa I'm time traveling again! This is the perfect opportunity to move away from the explanation and back to the story!"
That is just a summary of what goes on in my head whenever people use the word 'time travel.' Also, Dana doesn't immediately time travel again which is also great. It always seems like authors do that.