Hunters in the Snow

“Hunters in the Snow”

• Genre: Fiction; realistic short story   
• Originally Published: 1981
• Reading Level/Interest: Grades 9–12; college/adult
• Structure/Length: Approx. 10 pages; approx. 30 minutes on audio
• Protagonist and Central Conflict: Three men—Tub, Kenny, and Frank—meet to go hunting in a rural area outside Spokane, Washington. Kenny and Frank mock Tub for being overweight and leave him behind a few times as they search for deer tracks. After a farmer grants them permission to hunt on his property, Kenny shoots the farmer’s dog and then turns his gun on Tub, who shoots Kenny in apparent self-defense. Frank and Tub make multiple stops while driving Kenny to the hospital and are headed in the opposite direction when the story closes.
• Potential Sensitivity Issues: Gun violence (one character and a dog are shot); language

Tobias Wolff, Author

• Bio: Born in 1945 in Birmingham, Alabama; moved multiple times with his mother before she remarried, then settled in a small town in western Washington state; struggled with delinquency and truancy as a youth; had a troubled relationship with his stepfather that he wrote about in the memoir This Boy’s Life, winner of The Whiting Writers’ Award; later attended a private high school, then served in Vietnam before completing his studies at Oxford University in England; started his fiction writing career while working as a reporter for The Washington Post; body of unpublished fiction earned Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing
• Other Works: In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981); The Barracks Thief (1984); This Boy’s Life (1989); Old School (2004)
• Awards: St.