On the morning of the reaping, Katniss Everdeen wakes in her home in the Seam of District 12 and immediately thinks about Prim, her younger sister, and the danger of the day. After noting her family’s poverty, her father’s death in a mine explosion, and her strained feelings toward her emotionally damaged mother, Katniss dresses for hunting and slips through a weak spot in the fence into the woods. Hunting is illegal, but it is how Katniss keeps her family fed.

In the woods, Katniss meets Gale, the one person around whom she can relax completely. They share bread and Prim’s goat cheese, joke bitterly about the Hunger Games, and briefly imagine escaping District 12 together. The idea collapses because both Katniss and Gale are bound to the families who depend on them. As they hunt and gather food, the chapter shows how both teenagers have become providers because their households would not survive without them.

Later, Katniss and Gale trade their catch at the Hob and sell strawberries to the mayor’s household, where they meet Madge Undersee. Gale’s resentment flares because Madge, as the mayor’s daughter, faces far fewer entries in the reaping than poor children from the Seam. Katniss explains the tesserae system, under which starving families can take extra grain and oil only by adding more chances for their children to be chosen, making the Hunger Games especially cruel to the poor.

Back at home, Katniss washes and lets her mother dress her in one of her old blue dresses. Katniss comforts Prim, who is attending her first reaping and has only one entry, while Katniss herself has twenty because she repeatedly took tesserae to feed the household. The family eats lightly, then walks to the square, where attendance is mandatory and the entire district gathers under Capitol surveillance.

At the ceremony, Katniss describes the official history of Panem, the districts’ failed rebellion, and the Hunger Games as the Capitol’s annual punishment and warning. Mayor Undersee reads the formal script, Haymitch Abernathy appears drunk as District 12’s only living victor, and Effie Trinket cheerfully begins the drawing. When Effie reaches into the girls’ glass ball and reads the name, Katniss first feels relief that it is not her, then shock as she hears the selected tribute is Primrose Everdeen.