Death in the Woods

The dogs follow the old woman around the farm and when she heads into town. Even though Jake Grimes is abusive to them and they aren’t fed enough, they stay around, confined to being semi-domesticated objects who have lost their primal instincts as a species once they joined the human world. While she dies, the dogs begin circling around in a form of ritual, and to the narrator, they are remembering their wild, wolf-like selves. Her death, for the dogs, is very much like a release from their servitude as man’s best friend, as they embrace their inner wolf and resort to pack behavior.

Once the old woman has passed, her body transitions to something different for the men that encounter it. She is no longer the anonymous creature that everyone is familiar with as she treks to town, but instead her body is something of interest to the various men who show up to the scene of her death at the clearing in the woods. They are unaware of who the body belongs to at first, but the younger men, the narrator, and his brother, along with the hunter, have reasoned that the body is that of a young woman, due to the pale white skin and gaunt features.