It was coming down the ridge, as if it were walking out of the very sound of the horn which related its death. It was not running, it was walking, tremendous, unhurried, slanting and tilting its head to pass the antlers through the undergrowth, and the boy standing with Sam beside him now instead of behind him as Sam always stood, and the gun still partly aimed and one of the hammers still cocked.
Then it saw them. And still it did not begin to run. It just stopped for an instant, taller than any man, looking at them; then its muscles suppled, gathered. It did not even alter its course, not fleeing, not even running, just moving with that winged and effortless ease with which deer move, passing within twenty feet of them, its head high and the eye not proud and not haughty but just full and wild and unafraid, and Sam standing beside the boy now, his right arm raised at full length, palm outward, speaking in that tongue which the boy had learned from listening to him and Joe Baker in the blacksmith’s shop, while up the ridge Walter Ewell’s horn was still blowing them in to a dead buck.
“Oleh, Chief,” Sam said. “Grandfather.”
When they reached Walter, he was standing with his back toward them, quite still, bemused almost, looking down at his feet. He didn’t look up at all.
“Come here, Sam,” he said quietly. When they reached him he still did not look up, standing above a little spike buck which had still been a fawn last spring. “He was so little I pretty near let him go,” Walter said. “But just look at the track he was making. It’s pretty near big as a cow’s. If there were any more tracks here besides the ones he is laying in, I would swear there was another buck here that I never even saw.”
III
It was dark when they reached the road where the surrey waited. It was turning cold, the rain had stopped, and the sky was beginning to blow clear. His cousin and Major de Spain and General Compson had a fire going. “Did you get him?” Major de Spain said.
“Got a good-sized swamp-rabbit with spike horns,” Walter said. He slid the little buck down from his mule. The boy’s cousin McCaslin looked at it.
“Nobody saw the big one?” he said.
“I dont even believe Boon saw it,” Walter said. “He probably jumped somebody’s straw cow in that thicket.” Boon started cursing, swearing at Walter and at Sam for not getting the dogs in the first place and at the buck and all.
“Never mind,” Major de Spain said. “He’ll be here for us next fall. Let’s get started home.”
It was after midnight when they let Walter out at his gate two miles from Jefferson and later still when they took General Compson to his house and then returned to Major de Spain’s, where he and McCaslin would spend the rest of the night, since it was still seventeen miles home.
It was cold, the sky was clear now; there would be a heavy frost by sunup and the ground was already frozen beneath the horses’ feet and the wheels and beneath their own feet as they crossed Major de Spain’s yard and entered the house, the warm dark house, feeling their way up the dark stairs until Major de Spain found a candle and lit it, and into the strange room and the big deep bed, the still cold sheets until they began to warm to their bodies and at last the shaking stopped and suddenly he was telling McCaslin about it while McCaslin listened, quietly until he had finished. “You dont believe it,” the boy said. “I know you dont — —”
“Why not?” McCaslin said. “Think of all that has happened here, on this earth. All the blood hot and strong for living, pleasuring, that has soaked back into it. For grieving and suffering too, of course, but still getting something out of it for all that, getting a lot out of it, because after all you dont have to continue to bear what you believe is suffering; you can always choose to stop that, put an end to that. And even suffering and grieving is better than nothing; there is only one thing worse than not being alive, and that’s shame.
But you cant be alive for ever, and you always wear out life long before you have exhausted the possibilities of living. And all that must be somewhere; all that could not have been invented and created just to be thrown away.
And the earth is shallow; there is not a great deal of it before you come to the rock. And the earth dont want to just keep things, hoard them; it want to use them again. Look at the seed, the acorns, at what happens even to carrion when you try to bury it: it refuses too, seethes and struggles too until it reaches light and air again, hunting the sun still.
And they—” the boy saw his hand in silhouette for a moment against the window beyond which, accustomed to the darkness now, he could see sky where the scoured and icy stars glittered “ — they dont want it, need it.
Besides, what would it want, itself, knocking around out there, when it never had enough time about the earth as it was, when there is plenty of room about the earth, plenty of places still unchanged from what they were when the blood used and pleasured in them while it was still blood?”
“But we want them,” the boy said. “We want them too. There is plenty of room for us and them too.”
“That’s right,” McCaslin said. “Suppose they dont have substance, cant cast a shadow — —”
“But I saw it!” the boy cried. “I saw him!”
“Steady,” McCaslin said. For an instant his hand touched the boy’s flank beneath the covers. “Steady. I know you did. So did I. Sam took me in there once after I killed my first deer.”
THE BEAR
I
THERE WAS A man and a dog too this time. Two beasts, counting Old Ben, the bear, and two men, counting Boon Hogganbeck, in whom some of the same blood ran which ran in Sam Fathers, even though Boon’s was a plebeian strain of it and only Sam and Old Ben and the mongrel Lion were taintless and incorruptible.
He was sixteen. For six years now he had been a man’s hunter. For six years now he had heard the best of all talking. It was of the wilderness, the big woods, bigger and older than any recorded document: — of white man fatuous enough to believe he had bought any fragment of it, of Indian ruthless enough to pretend that any fragment of it had been his to convey; bigger than Major de Spain and the scrap he pretended to, knowing better; older than old Thomas Sutpen of whom Major de Spain had had it and who knew better; older even than old Ikkemotubbe, the Chickasaw chief, of whom old Sutpen had had it and who knew better in his turn.
It was of the men, not white nor black nor red but men, hunters, with the will and hardihood to endure and the humility and skill to survive, and the dogs and the bear and deer juxtaposed and reliefed against it, ordered and compelled by and within the wilderness in the ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immitigable rules which voided all regrets and brooked no quarter; — the best game of all, the best of all breathing and for ever the best of all listening, the voices quiet and weighty and deliberate for retrospection and recollection and exactitude among the concrete trophies — the racked guns and the heads and skins — in the libraries of town houses or the offices of plantation houses or (and best of all) in the camps themselves where the intact and still-warm meat yet hung, the men who had slain it sitting before the burning logs on hearths when there were houses and hearths or about the smoky blazing of piled wood in front of stretched tarpaulins when there were not.
There was always a bottle present, so that it would seem to him that those fine fierce instants of heart and brain and courage and wiliness and speed were concentrated and distilled into that brown liquor which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank, drinking not of the blood they spilled but some condensation of the wild immortal spirit, drinking it moderately, humbly even, not with the pagan’s base and baseless hope of acquiring thereby the virtues of cunning and strength and speed but in salute to them. Thus it seemed to him on this December morning not only natural but actually fitting that this should have begun with whisky.
He realised later that it had begun long before that. It had already begun on that day when he first wrote his age in two ciphers and his cousin McCaslin brought him for the first time to the camp, the big woods, to earn for himself from the wilderness the name and state of hunter provided he in his turn were humble and enduring enough.
He had already inherited then, without ever having seen it, the big old bear with one trap-ruined foot that in an area almost a hundred miles square had earned for himself a name, a definite designation like a living man: — the long legend of corn-cribs broken
