The Beast Within (Part II)

I just love happy endings, don't you? Unfortunately, Tobias Wolff's "Hunters in the Snow" provides an ending that is anything but happy. Wolff tells a rather peculiar story of three friends as they seem to lose part of their humanity. The setting of hunting in the woods accurately reflects the friends' individual descents into animalistic tendencies. There is Tub, the overindulgent glutton who addictively eats himself into a greedy stupor. There is Frank, the morally-loose "hippie" who indulges in pedophilia and encourages Tub's gluttony. There is Kenny, the sadistic beast who maliciously taunts his friends until his violent streak dooms him in the end. All three are not totally demented or animalistic; yet they all possess these savage desires and features which come to raging manifestation in the woods. Even when Kenny is shot, bleeding, and probably dying the freezing cold, his friends coolly stop at two taverns to keep warm and indulge themselves, reflecting a Darwinian "survival of the fittest" demeanor. The last sentence of the story provides a rather chilling conclusion to the tale. As Wolff writes, the three friends can not escape their descent into animalism; "they had taken a different turn a long way back," and now there is no escape from themselves.