Initiation and fear of death "Indian Camp" is an initiation story. Nick's father (Dr. Adams) exposes his young son to childbirth and, unintentionally, to violent death—an experience that causes Nick to equate childbirth with death. Hemingway critic Wendolyn Tetlow maintains that in "Indian Camp," sexuality culminates in "butchery-style" birth and bloody death, and that Nick's anxiety is obvious when he turns away from the butchery. The story reaches a climax when Nick's "heightened awareness" of evil causes him to turn away from the experience. Although Nick may not want to watch the caesarian, his father insists he watch - he does not want his son to be initiated into an adult world without toughness, writes Thomas Strychacz. Hemingway biographer Philip Young writes that Hemingway's emphasis in "Indian Camp" was not primarily on the woman who gives birth or the father who kills himself, but on young Nick Adams, who witnesses these events and becomes a "badly scarred and nervous young man". In "Indian Camp," Hemingway begins the events that shape the Adams persona. Young considers this single Hemingway story to hold the "master key" to "what its author was up to for some thirty-five years of his writing career". Critic Howard Hannum agrees. He believes the trauma of birth and suicide Hemingway paints in "Indian Camp" rendered a leitmotif that gave Hemingway a unified framework for the Nick Adams stories. "Indian Camp" is also about the fear of death. The section cut from the story highlights Nick's fear; the published version underscores it in a less obvious manner. In the cut section, later published as "Three Shots," the night before being taken to the Indian camp Nick is left alone in the forest, where he is "overwhelmed by thoughts of death." Critic Paul Strong speculates that Hemingway may have intended the narrative to be structured so that Nick's father chose to take his fearful son to the Indian camp where Nick faced the grisly reality of death, which can have done "little to assuage Nick's fears." Hannum believes Hemingway is intentionally vague about the details of the birth but not the death; he speculates that Nick would have likely "blocked out much of the caesarian but he had clearly seen the father's head tilted back." Critics have questioned why the woman's husband kills himself. Strong finds the arguments that the husband is driven to suicide by the wife's screaming to