Animals, throughout the short story, are the vehicles by which Munro communicates family and gender dynamics. They are the means by which the family survives, and the natural life cycles that they enable are a system that the family must keep going. For example, procuring and killing horses for meat is necessary to keep foxes alive so that their pelts can be sold for the family. This life cycle neutralizes the animal pelt, or its flesh, as another element of the seasons. The smell of death is, to the narrator, “reassuringly seasonal” (Paragraph 2).

At the same time, the storytelling narrator starts, perhaps unconsciously, to give the animal bodies a greater meaning. Although she does not circle back to the fox pelts, she zeroes in on one part of this life cycle and disrupts it, thus questioning the overarching process by which her family lives. In working to free Flora—whose entrapment shows her own as well as her family’s entrapment in the perhaps-problematic life cycle in which they live—the narrator points out a flaw in this life cycle.

The animal’s dead body becomes a motif through which the story operates. It also comes to separate men from women. Thus, the animal pelts that at first seem harmless are the narrator’s lifeblood in a different way.