What Katniss Never Saw on the Tape of Haymitch’s Hunger Games
How Haymitch Survived
Haymitch Abernathy won the 50th Hunger Games when the last tribute facing him, Silka from District 1, threw an axe at his head. Haymitch collapsed, the axe sailed over a cliff, and the arena’s invisible force field sent it hurtling back into Silka. He was sixteen years old, badly wounded and now entitled to the one thing the Capitol had promised the winner. He could go home.
What awaited him there was President Snow’s answer to something the television audience had scarcely seen. During the Second Quarter Quell, Haymitch had joined an attempt to wreck the arena. Even after Silka died, when the safest thing he could possibly do was lie still and wait for rescue, he chose to set off one last explosive. Snow let the boy keep his crown. Within weeks, Haymitch had lost his mother, his little brother and the girl he loved.
Readers first saw the axe fly in Catching Fire, looking over the shoulders of Katniss and Peeta as they watched an old recording. Sunrise on the Reaping puts us on the ground beside the boy who lived it. Between those two accounts lies one of Suzanne Collins’s cruellest ideas. The Capitol can show you exactly how someone died and still leave you with a false account of what happened.
Why Were There 48 Tributes in Haymitch’s Games?
Every twenty-five years, the Capitol marks the anniversary of its victory over the districts with a Quarter Quell. For the fiftieth Games, each district must send twice the usual number of children. Two boys and two girls from each of the twelve districts make a field of forty-eight. The official justification is that two rebels died for every Capitol citizen killed in the uprising. Half a century later, children who had no part in that war must make the arithmetic come out right.
The reaping falls on Haymitch’s sixteenth birthday. Even his place in the competition is the result of a cover-up. When Woodbine Chance, one of the boys originally selected, tries to escape and is shot, officials need another boy to send to the Capitol. Haymitch gets caught up in the aftermath and becomes the replacement. At home, people have witnessed how he was chosen. Elsewhere in Panem, people will see whatever version of the ceremony the authorities decide to put on television.
It is an especially ugly introduction to the work of a Gamemaker. Before anyone has stepped inside an arena, somebody already has to decide which child belongs in the picture, which death would spoil the occasion and what the audience needs to see for the programme to continue. Haymitch will spend much of the book discovering just how far that power reaches.
The Girl the Capitol Replaced
One of the four children sent from District 12 is Louella McCoy, whom Haymitch has known since childhood. When Louella dies during the chariot parade, the Capitol produces another girl who resembles her. Haymitch and the others call her Lou Lou. Anyone tuning in from another district might reasonably suppose they were watching the same frightened child they had seen earlier. For the people beside her, playing along means participating in the erasure of a friend.
It also means living with the knowledge that the substitute is somebody’s child. She had a life before officials decided her face was close enough to another girl’s. Haymitch has to grieve for Louella in the presence of a stranger who needs kindness herself. There is no room for either girl’s story in the seamless procession the Capitol wants viewers to remember.
That episode gives the later recording in Catching Fire a particular sting. Katniss is a sceptical viewer. She knows what it feels like to be dressed, interviewed and sold to an audience. Yet how could even she spot a missing girl whose face she had never known? No amount of careful viewing can restore a person who was removed before the footage reached you.
What Haymitch and His Allies Tried to Do
The arena is beautiful enough to make a convincing holiday advertisement. Flowers brighten a meadow, a mountain rises in the distance, and almost everything that looks inviting deserves a second look. Poison makes the scenery dangerous to touch or eat. The mountain is a volcano. For the television audience, the landscape offers a succession of surprises. For Haymitch and his allies, it poses a more practical question. What does it take to keep a place like this running?
Ampert, the District 3 boy and son of former victor Beetee, is part of a plan to attack the machinery beneath the spectacle. The target is an underground water tank. If explosives can breach it, the escaping water could flood the systems that operate the arena. Children who are supposed to spend their ingenuity finding ways to kill one another are discussing what would happen if they broke the equipment instead.
This is where the familiar description of Haymitch as a clever loner falls apart. The plan depends on knowledge passed between people, materials carried into the arena and children willing to trust someone from another district. Each has an obvious reason to betray the others. A quiet word to the right person might buy food, favour or another night alive. Their decision to cooperate gives Snow far more to fear than a boy with quick reflexes.
The attempt fails to bring down the Games. Ampert dies in an attack by engineered squirrel mutts. The audience can absorb a terrifying animal attack into the usual rhythm of the show. Haymitch has to carry the memory of the boy who knew enough about the arena to imagine disabling it, and who never got to go home and tell his father what he had done.
What Maysilee Donner Helped Haymitch Discover
Maysilee Donner, the other District 12 girl originally reaped, becomes one of Haymitch’s closest allies. Her blowgun and poisoned darts make her a formidable tribute. They also save Haymitch’s life. It matters that one of the people responsible for his victory is a girl whose death the audience has been invited to treat as the necessary price of it.
Together they reach the outer edge of the arena. Near a cliff, Haymitch discovers that objects sent over the edge can come back. The drop looks like an ordinary geographical boundary from above. Somewhere below is a force field that repels what strikes it. For an injured boy who will shortly have to face a stronger opponent, that is an extraordinarily valuable piece of local knowledge.
Knowing how the field works cannot protect Maysilee. After the pair separate, bird mutts attack her, and Haymitch reaches her in time to hold her as she dies. Years later, Katniss sees that moment on the recording. It also carries a connection she can recognise. Maysilee once owned the mockingjay pin that Katniss wore into her own arena. Long before the bird became a public emblem of rebellion, the pin belonged to a girl from home with a twin sister who would have to watch those Games.
Did Haymitch Plan the Axe Trick?
By the closing stages, Haymitch has also tried to care for Wellie, a desperately hungry young tribute from District 6. He shares food with her. Silka kills her. When Silka and Haymitch finally face each other, the simple language of a sporting final feels particularly obscene. Only hours earlier, one of the pressing questions facing the eventual champion was how to get a hungry child to eat.
Silka has an axe and knows how to use it. She opens a terrible wound in Haymitch’s abdomen. He makes for the cliff, where he knows something about the ground that she does not. When she throws, he drops beneath the weapon. It clears him, strikes the field and returns hard enough to kill her. Silka’s cannon sounds. Of the forty-eight tributes who entered the arena, Haymitch is the last alive.
So how much credit should he get for the famous shot? He earns credit for paying attention early and for reaching the one place where an opponent’s throw might work in his favour. The novel also makes room for blood loss, exhaustion and luck. Haymitch cannot dictate the height of Silka’s throw or guarantee where she will stand when the axe comes back. A few inches either way and District 1 might have had another victor. The polished anecdote about the boy who outsmarted the Capitol leaves out how close he was to dying on the ground.
Why Snow Punished Haymitch After He Had Already Won
The telling decision comes after the axe has fallen. Haymitch still has the means to make an explosive. Using what his allies have left him, including a fuse from Maysilee, and the flint striker that connects him to Lenore Dove, he puts it together. The Gamemakers order him to stop. He lights it and throws it towards the force field. The explosion knocks him unconscious. The arena survives.
Consider the problem that moment presents to the people editing the highlights. Until Silka’s cannon fires, almost anything Haymitch does can be explained as an effort to stay alive. Afterwards, what competitive advantage could he possibly gain? Let viewers see the winner spend what he believes may be his last breath trying to destroy their arena, and some of them are bound to wonder what he knows about the place. Others might start rooting for the explosion.
Snow can bury that moment in the broadcast. He still has to deal with the person who remembers it. A victor returns every year to public life, meets the next generation of tributes and has opportunities to speak to people across district lines. Haymitch has already demonstrated what can happen when a handful of those people trust each other. Snow’s retaliation teaches him what it might cost to let anyone get close again.
What Happened to Haymitch’s Family and Lenore Dove?
Haymitch returns to District 12 to find his home burned and his mother and younger brother, Sid, dead. The house was the destination that made surviving the arena worth the effort. He had spent his sixteenth birthday expecting that, whatever else the day brought, these were the people he would come back to. Snow’s parting words about enjoying his homecoming acquire their meaning only once Haymitch gets there.
Lenore Dove, his girlfriend, dies after Haymitch unknowingly feeds her a poisoned gumdrop. There is an awful intimacy to Snow’s choice of weapon. In the arena, Haymitch had shared food with Wellie because she was starving. Back in the meadow with someone he loves, he has every reason to believe that offering her a sweet is an ordinary kindness again. Snow has arranged for that small gesture to be the one Haymitch will spend years wishing he could take back.
Lenore Dove’s dying wish is that he should stop another reaping. For a sixteen-year-old whose attempt to wreck a single arena has just failed, it is almost impossibly large. His immediate future consists of an empty house in the Victors’ Village and an annual obligation to send other people’s children towards the place he barely survived. When we meet him years later, drunk and difficult to reach, that is the life he has been living between appearances on our page.
What Katniss Finally Gives Back to Haymitch
Twenty-four years after his victory, Haymitch watches Katniss and Peeta reach for poisonous berries. He knows better than most what Snow might do to the families waiting for them. His urgent advice that Katniss convince people she acted out of love carries the weight of experience. He understands precisely how much can depend on which explanation reaches the audience and which one the president chooses to believe.
There is a quieter answer to Snow in the epilogue of Sunrise on the Reaping. Long after the Games have ended, Haymitch tells Katniss and Peeta about the people he loved. Katniss gives him goose eggs, a small gift that recalls Lenore Dove and the geese she cared for. It is the sort of detail no Capitol highlights reel would have had any reason to preserve. To Haymitch, it means that somebody listened closely enough to remember what made her happy.
Katniss once sat down to watch a recording because she wanted to know how her mentor had won. Years later, she can sit with the man himself and hear about a girl who raised geese. It took the fall of Snow’s government for Haymitch to have that ordinary privilege. At last, he gets to choose what the people he loves will know about the year he turned sixteen.
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