• In the prologue the narrator talks of an image he remembers of his mother holding his father's twelve gauge shotgun. Something a woman does not typically do.

" Mother holds my father's Ithaca twelve-gauge shotgun, and since she is a small, slender woman, she has trouble finding the balance point of it's heavy length" ( Watson 11).

*David ( The Narrator) tells the readers what he did when he was younger. " A reference to what boys really did in Montana in 1948

" I did what boys usually did and exulted in the doing: I rode horseback ( I had my own horse at the ranch, an unnaturally shaggy little sorrel named nutty); I swam: I fished: I hunted (I still have, deep in a closet somewhere, my first guns from those years- a single-shot bolt action Winchester .22 and a single-shot Montgomery Ward .410 shotgun); my friends and I killed more beer cans, soda bottles, road signs, and telephone pole insulators than the rabbits, squirrels, grouse, or pheasants we said we were hunting" ( Watson 23).

*In the Hayden household the mother is the speaker and what she says goes pretty much. She seems like a powerful woman especially if her word can go against the sheriff's own brother. "Frank looked at my father. If my mother said it, it was so, yet my father's confirmation was still necessary" (Watson 43).

*David often talks about having a gun of his own. In one passage his grandfather gives him a gun to shoot coyotes. His mother had always been against guns but in Montana every boy has one. " I looked eagerly at my parents for their permission. My mother didn't care for guns of any kind but she had long ago seen the futility of trying to keep them out of the hands of a Montana Boy" (Watson 80)

• After David's dad get's done talking to his grandparents ( after Frank is accused of murder) David sees his father crying in the kitchen with his head on his mother's lap. Everyone has typically heard phrases like "boys don't cry." David suddenly realizes his fathers age.

" My father lifted his head and I could tell by his red-rimmed eyes that he had been crying. But that was not what concerned me" ( Watson 123).

*After the family decides to let uncle Frank free David's father goes downstairs and comes back up with a changed mind. He realizes the pain Frank has caused other people and will not continue letting him do that. David explains how his parents outlook on the issue has completely flip-flopped.

"As long as my mother stayed, I felts I had to as well. I Wasn't protecting her-I no longer had any illutions that i could play that role- but I stayed out of loyalty. "(Watson 149)

* Men or boys feel the obligation to take care or pretect the women in the house. This is not the only insidence in this book when this occurs.

" My parents' usual roles had neatly reversed themselves. My mother now represented practicality and expediency; my father stood for moral absolutism" ( Watson 150).

In this book it seems like the men are a lot less intelligent than the women. Women in this book seem like they know what is going on better and know how to respond to an incident by thinking about it before acting on it. Gail is a good woman because she knows what is right from wrong as opposed to Wes locking Frank in the basement. "Well, as I see it, women are almost ideally suited to the overcrowded, communication intensive environment that we call modern society. Men, on the other hand, are like people with no arms playing handball"(Hass) A random comment from an outside source.

 Gail is almost the only woman in this book but i think that she sybolizes the good in the Hayden house. The jars that Frank kills himself with could sybolize the Indian women that he violated. Women have a hold on men in this book for sure. However, in the case of Julian and and Enid Julian the male has a strong hold on his wife. This has a lot to do with the the age these people have grown up in. The males use to always dominate over everything. They use to be the only ones to work and the only ones to make decisions. As time went on woman started to evolve and grow from this domestic view that people had made upon them. The change is very different between Wesley and his parents. Wesley lets his wife have a say in things and voice her opinon. He listens to her when she askes to let Frank go. However when Julian says anything it is like Enid has to follow what he says or make excuses for him.

"I THINK that women are superior to men in the modern world because evolution is lagging society."(Szakonyi) This comment is trying to say that the human race a long time ago needed the aggressiveness and the muscle of a man for hunting and fighting but now a days we don't need men to hunt as much to make a living. So in result women are becoming the dominant figure of society.