'Hunting'

maybe hunting down black people is just as normal as waking up in the morning for gary. gary could think of it as "going out with a new friend and have a little bit of his own kind of fun together", just as you would take a new friend to watch a movie in the cinema.
it also could have been a test for katie.
another thing is, katie probably wouldn't tell anybody of it, since she is the only living witness who is no racist and gary may have some racist friends in local police or in the court...if she actually went to court and accused gary and his friends of homicide, they would deny it and the court (which could also be - at least partially - racist) may come to the conclusion that katie herself killed the black man
i agree, it was very careless that gary took her to the hunt, but it's not completely unlogical in my eyes

<<Why would anyone take a woman, who has just arrived in the area, on a homicide without even giving her a hint about it beforehand, and without knowing how she would react? Doesn't seem likely at all>>

No, it doesn't really make sense. That scene was written to be a "shocker" for the audience, but there's no real logic to it.

Was that Gary and Katie's first date?

My friends and I watched this movie last night (June 9, '06). First time I've seen it in about 10 years.

Here's some info that might interest some of you.

I graduated from high school in Crawford, Nebraska (extreme NW corner of the state) in 1977. Nearby to the east is Chadron, Nebraska. To the west is Fort Robinson State Park. Fort Rob is where Chief Crazy Horse was killed on 9/5/1877 and where the Cheyenne Outbreak occurred in January 1879 (made into a John Ford movie called "Cheyenne Autumn," after the famous book of the same name by Mari Sandoz). In the 1970s and 1980s Fort Rob was THE state park of Nebraska. When Bob Kerry (later a U.S. Senator) was governor of Nebraska he used to come to Fort Rob a lot. He was dating Debra Winger (they met in Lincoln, Nebraska when he was the Governor and she was filming "Terms of Endearment" there), so the two of them would be in Crawford frequently having dinner.

Chadron was a hot-bed of Posse Comitatus activity. The Posse Comitatus is a group much like the one that Tom Berenguer's character is in here in this movie. The Posse Comitatus got kind of famous nationally in 1983 (or thereabouts)when North Dakota farmer/rancher and Posse Comitatus member Gordon Kaul killed a sheriff's deputy and went on the run. He eventually got ambushed in Arkansas, ala Ruby Ridge or Waco. The Posse Comitatus believes that commies are everywhere, the world is run by a Jewish banking conspiracy in cahoots with the Trilateral Commission, the Rockefellers, the Vatican, etc. The local Chadron Posse Comitatus leader in the '70s and '80s was a guy named Kenny Hutson, who died in the mid-'90s. He was such a looney that the '70s TV show "Real People" featured him on their very first episode. He was sitting in his living room recliner with a Winchester Rifle, going on and on about commies and feminists. He had a fake graveyard in his front lawn which he called the "IRS graveyard." It had a a sign saying "IRS Agents, FBI Agents, Communists, and other government stooges should ride on by." Hutson once went before the Chadron City Council to argue against the new street signs that had gone up---the kind where instead of "No U Turn" it was a "U" in a circle with a slash through it. Hutson said these signs were part of the communists' desire to establish a "one world government," because this way even if they couldn't read or speak English the Russian army could nevertheless read the street signs as they rolled down Chadron's main street in their tanks. I am NOT making this up.

When I was the editor of the Chadron State College newspaper, Hutson used to call in to the local radio station's "open forum call-in" show and characterize me as a "known communist" because of my editorials. The Posse Comitatus had an actual file on me, and used to follow me around. Later, when my brother married a Black woman and they had two boys, Hutson used to comment disparagingly about "race-mixing."

Anyway, back to Crawford, Nebraska. Crawford has an annual July 4th parade (and professional rodeo) that is THE July 4th event for NW Nebraska. On July 4, 1987 who do we see in Crawford hanging around town but the actor, Tom Berenguer. At that time we didn't know that a movie called "Betrayed" was in the works. Well, the reason Berenguer was in Crawford was because Debra Winger told him about Crawford and Fort Rob, and so he could do personal research on the Posse Comitatus. In fact, in the early bar scene in the movie, when Berenguer's character first meets Winger's character, the guys had been sitting together talking. One of them mentions an event that happened "in Crawford." So, when I saw the movie, Berenguer's presence in Crawford finally made sense. It also made me realize how dangerous these Posse Comitatus kooks really were. When I think back to how I used to publicly go after them in "Letters to the Editor" to the Chadron and Crawford newspapers, and otherwise deride them publicly, I now wonder how I survived it! Maybe I was too visible for them to retaliate physically against me.

Oh, and even though Debra Winger has a terrible reputation for being a jerk on movie sets, she was always nice in Crawford.