Fox Hunt, William Faulkner

Fox Hunt

AN HOUR BEFORE daylight three Negro stable-boys approached the stable, carrying a lantern. While one of them unlocked and slid back the door, the bearer of the lantern lifted it and turned the beam into the darkness where a clump of pines shouldered into the paddock fence.

Out of this darkness three sets of big, spaced eyes glared mildly for a moment, then vanished. “Heyo,” the Negro called. “Yawl cole?” No reply, no sound came from the darkness; the mule-eyes did not show again. The Negroes entered the barn, murmuring among themselves; a burst of laughter floated back out of the stable, mellow and meaningless and idiotic.

“How many of um you see?” the second Negro said.

“Just three mules,” the lantern-bearer said. “It’s more than that, though. Unc Mose he come in about two o’clock, where he been up with that Jup’ter horse; he say it was already two of um waiting there then. Clay-eaters. Hoo.”

Inside the stalls horses began to whinny and stamp; over the white-washed doors the high, long muzzles moved with tossing, eager shadows; the atmosphere was rich, warm, ammoniac, and clean. The Negroes began to put feed into the patent troughs, moving from stall to stall with the clever agility of monkeys, with short, mellow, meaningless cries, “Hoo. Stand over dar. Ghy ketch dat fox to-day.”

In the darkness where the clump of pines shouldered the paddock fence, eleven men squatted, surrounded by eleven tethered mules. It was November, and the morning was chill, and the men squatted shapeless and motionless, not talking. From the stable came the sound of the eating horses; just before day broke a twelfth man came up on a mule and dismounted and squatted among the others without a word. When day came and the first saddled horse was led out of the stable, the grass was rimed with frost, and the roof of the stable looked like silver in the silver light.

It could be seen then that the squatting men were all white men and all in overalls, and that all of the mules save two were saddleless. They had gathered from one-room, clay-floored cabins about the pine land, and they squatted, decorous, grave, and patient among their gaunt and mud-caked and burr-starred mules, watching the saddled horses, the fine horses with pedigrees longer than Harrison Blair’s, who owned them, being led one by one from a steam-heated stable and up the gravel path to the house, before which a pack of hounds already moiled and yapped, and on the veranda of which men and women in boots and red coats were beginning to gather.

Sloven, unhurried, outwardly scarcely attentive, the men in overalls watched Harrison Blair, who owned the house and the dogs and some of the guests too, perhaps, mount a big, vicious-looking black horse, and they watched another man lift Harrison Blair’s wife onto a chestnut mare and then mount a bay horse in his turn.

One of the men in overalls was chewing tobacco slowly. Beside him stood a youth, in overalls too, gangling, with a soft stubble of beard. They spoke without moving their heads, hardly moving their lips.

“That the one?” the youth said.
The older man spat deliberately, without moving. “The one what?”
“His wife’s one.”
“Whose wife’s one?”
“Blair’s wife’s one.”

The other contemplated the group before the house. He appeared to, that is. His gaze was inscrutable, blank, without haste; none could have said if he were watching the man and woman or not. “Don’t believe anything you hear, and not more than half you see,” he said.

“What do you think about it?” the youth said.

The other spat deliberately and carefully. “Nothing,” he said. “It ain’t none of my wife.” Then he said, without raising his voice and without any change in inflection, though he was now speaking to the head groom who had come up beside him. “That fellow don’t own no horse.”

“Which fellow don’t?” the groom said. The white man indicated the man who was holding the bay horse against the chestnut mare’s flank. “Oh,” the groom said. “Mr. Gawtrey. Pity the horse, if he did.”

“Pity the horse that he owns, too,” the white man said. “Pity anything he owns.”
“You mean Mr. Harrison?” the groom said. “Does these here horses look like they needs your pity?”
“Sho,” the white man said. “That’s right. I reckon that black horse does like to be rode like he rides it.”

“Don’t you be pitying no Blair horses,” the groom said.

“Sho,” the white man said. He appeared to contemplate the blooded horses that lived in a steam-heated house, the people in boots and pink coats, and Blair himself sitting the plunging black. “He’s been trying to catch that vixen for three years now,” he said. “Whyn’t he let one of you boys shoot it or pizen it?”

“Shoot it or pizen it?” the groom said. “Don’t you know that ain’t no way to catch a fox?”
“Why ain’t it?”
“It ain’t spo’tin,” the groom said. “You ought to been hanging around um long enough by now to know how gempmuns hunts.”

“Sho,” the white man said. He was not looking at the groom. “Wonder how a man rich as folks says he is” — again he spat, in the action something meager but without intended insult, as if he might have been indicating Blair with a jerked finger— “is got time to hate one little old fox bitch like that. Don’t even want the dogs to catch it.

Trying to outride the dogs so he can kill it with a stick like it was a snake. Coming all the way down here every year, bringing all them folks and boarding and sleeping them, to run one little old mangy fox that I could catch in one night with a axe and a possum dog.”

“That’s something else about gempmuns you won’t never know,” the groom said.
“Sho,” the white man said.

The ridge was a long shoal of pine and sand, broken along one flank into gaps through which could be seen a fallow rice field almost a mile wide which ended against a brier-choked dyke.

The two men in overalls, the older man and the youth, sat their mules in one of these gaps, looking down into the field. Farther on down the ridge, about a half mile away, the dogs were at fault; the yapping cries came back up the ridge, baffled, ringing, profoundly urgent.

“You’d think he would learn in three years that he ain’t going to catch ere Cal-lina fox with them Yankee city dogs,” the youth said.
“He knows it,” the other said. “He don’t want them dogs to catch it. He can’t even bear for a blooded dog to go in front of him.”

“They’re in front of him now though.”
“You think so?”
“Where is he, then?”

“I don’t know. But I know that he ain’t no closer to them fool dogs right now than that fox is. Wherever that fox is squatting right now, laughing at them dogs, that’s where he is heading for.”

“You mean to tell me that ere a man in the world can smell out a fox where even a city dog can’t untangle it?”

“Them dogs yonder can’t smell out a straight track because they don’t hate that fox. A good fox- or coon- or possum-dog is a good dog because he hates a fox or a coon or a possum, not because he’s got a extra good nose. It ain’t his nose that leads him; it’s his hating. And that’s why when I see which-a-way that fellow’s riding, I’ll tell you which-a-way that fox has run.”

The youth made a sound in his throat and nostrils. “A growed-up man. Hating a durn little old mangy fox. I be durn if it don’t take a lot of trouble to be rich. I be durn if it don’t.”
They looked down into the field. From farther on down the ridge the eager, baffled yapping of the dogs came.

The last rider in boots and pink had ridden up and passed them and gone on, and the two men sat their mules in the profound and winy and sunny silence, listening, with expressions identical and bleak and sardonic on their gaunt, yellow faces. Then the youth turned on his mule and looked back up the ridge in the direction from which the race had come.

At that moment the older man turned also and, motionless, making no sound, they watched two more riders come up and pass. They were the woman on the chestnut mare and the man on the bay horse. They passed like one beast, like a double or hermaphroditic centaur with two heads and eight legs.

The woman carried her hat in her hand; in the slanting sun the fine, soft cloud of her unbobbed hair gleamed like the chestnut’s flank, like soft fire, the mass of it appearing to be too heavy for her slender neck. She was sitting the mare with a kind of delicate awkwardness, leaning forward as though she were trying to outpace it, with a quality about her of flight within flight, separate and distinct from the speed of the mare.

The man was holding the bay horse against the mare’s flank at full gallop. His hand lay on the woman’s hand which held the reins, and he was slowly but steadily drawing both horses back, slowing them.

He was leaning toward the woman; the two men on the mules could see his profile stoop past with a cold and ruthless quality like that of a stooping hawk; they could see that he was talking to the woman. They passed so, with that semblance of a thrush and a