to a place of personal transformation, and then returns them to civilization afterwards. Does the truck perhaps represent civilization? It is artificial, and enables the men to transcend their physical limitations by carrying them great distances. However, the truck is old and in poor repair, with a broken window and a busted heater, which let the freezing cold of the outside into the cabin where the passengers sit. As the men leave the city behind, driving out of Spokane, the truck cannot protect them from the hostile environment outside. If the truck is a delivery method, then its broken-down state indicates the discomfort people risk when traveling outside the bounds of society, into wild places where bad things can happen. If the truck represents civilization itself, then that civilization is shown to be a thin veneer which only barely contains its passengers, and is penetrated by indifferent nature through every crack.

The dog is the first animal the men interact with in their hunt, and due to their frustrations, it becomes the object of the hunt—or at least, its sacrificial victim. The men have come out to the wilderness to kill something, to exercise (or exorcise) their primitive passions. When they fail to kill a deer after a full day searching for one, Kenny, in a blaze of adolescent rage, shoots an old farm-dog instead. This senseless act leads Tub to shoot Kenny shortly thereafter, fearing that Kenny intends to kill him as well. The dog is the catalyst for the change in the men's power-dynamic, for the dog represents social values. It belongs to a family, it guards a home, it is evidently loved by someone. For Kenny to shoot it is to willfully disregard the importance of family, home, and love, to effectively declare that these things have no worth. Once Kenny has crossed that line, he automatically loses his place in the three-person hierarchy of characters. Frank and Tub align themselves against him on the other side of the dog-boundary as "moral" characters who still value family, home, and love. This is false, of course—they are both venal, despicable men—but they have not so blatantly transgressed society's norms.

The pancakes are the final symbol I'd invite you to consider, because they appear at the end of the story in the guise of a bribe to keep Tub silent about Frank's affair with his children's babysitter. Frank's affair with an underage girl is just as transgressive as Kenny's murder of the dog, for the girl herself represents childhood and innocence, which Frank is preying upon. Tub is disturbed to learn of Frank's affair, but Frank manages to uncover Tub's secret, which is that he binge-eats, and to use that secret against Tub. Tub is disgusted by his binge-eating. Frank, ingeniously, absolves Tub of his disgust by ordering him four plates of pancakes and inviting Tub to binge in public, without shame. By manipulating Tub into indulging his hidden appetites, Frank is forcing Tub to acknowledge that everyone has these appetites. He uses the pancakes, and Tub's deep shame about his binging, to coerce Tub into believing that Frank's appetite for this underage girl is equivalent to Tub's appetite for food. The pancakes are payment to buy Tub's silence, a kind of "I'll scratch your back and you scratch mine" arrangement. But they are also, crucially, symbolic of Tub's shame. His shame about his appetite, his shame about shooting Kenny, his shame about keeping Frank's nasty little secret—all of this shame is offered to Tub on a plate and covered in syrup for him to literally consume. As he eats the pancakes, Tub swallows that shame, and leaves the roadhouse with Frank a harder, crueler man.

The first symbol is the snow; Tub is introduced while standing in the snow, waiting for the others. Throughout the story, the snow is both an obstacle to the hunters and a representation of their minds; it is both hostile and uncaring, and entirely too large to deal with alone.

The second symbol is the "No Hunting" sign.

They followed the tracks into the woods. The deer had gone over a fence half buried in drifting snow. A no hunting sign was nailed to the top of one of the posts.
(Wolff, "Hunters in the Snow," classicshorts.com)

This sign is the boundary where the story takes its darker turn. Had the men given up, Kenny wouldn't have played the joke that resulting in his shooting; the sign warns them back and is ignored.

The third symbol is the dog. It serves the purpose of a dog, running and barking, and apparently it is infirm enough for the farmer to want it put down. It represents the innocence that is lost by the men on the hunting trip; the dog expected love or playing from humans, not death, and so too does the hunting trip remove any vestiges of innocence that Tub and Frank have built for themselves.